Coding Blocks - Tackling Tough Developer Questions

Episode Date: February 18, 2019

We gather around the water cooler to celebrate our 100th episode with our friend John Stone for some random developer discussions as Michael goes off script, Joe needs his techno while coding, and Allen sings some sweet sounds.

In a world where you can podcast about anything, three men set out to podcast about all the things they forgot. And after more than five years of recordings, they still let this guy introduce the show. You're listening to Coding Box, episode 100. Subscribe to us and leave us a review on iTunes, Stitcher, and more using your favorite podcast app. I wasn't ready for that, man. Hold on. Let me get my bearings. Those unscripted, yo.

Visit us at codingblocks.net where you can find show notes, examples, discussion, and a lot 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. With that, I'm Alan Underwood. I'm Joe Zach. And I'm Michael Outlaw. And we have a special guest in the studio. I'm John Stone.

Everybody wave to John. Hey! Hello, John! It's crazy that we've got him on. So John enjoys long walks on the beach, demo data creation, and what else? Yeah, machine learning algorithms. Right. Yeah, it is shocking.

John's one of our friends. He's been friends with Joe's accent since they were like two or something. I don't know. They go back a long, long ways. So, yeah. And we probably should have gotten a little intro there. Sorry, we probably should have described you. But you know what? We've actually referenced you on the show many, many, many times.

And those are all the episodes I listen to. I hear my name. Don't listen to him. He's listened to all of them. But yes, welcome to the show. He's going to be a guest on this one. And join in on the fun. We're going to do some nice little water cooler talks. So super excited to have him. Yeah, I have no idea what's about to happen.

That's awesome. Neither do we. You can probably guess how well we kind of prepare and organize stuff that we try to interact with the community on. So you can just imagine how this is going so everyone uh just you know give john some slack tonight because we did not we invited him and also because i'm a programmer and i don't really get out much as well so i need some slack there as well that's awesome well you know that kind of reminds me i had some jokes that I wanted to do this evening, too. Oh, we need those.

Yeah. Are you ready for, like, programmer dad jokes? Let's do one. Let's start off. Alright, well, since John just reminded me of one, why don't programmers like to go outside and into nature? They don't see something. Sharp.

C-sharp. It has too many bugs. That's pretty good. That was written into us from Joshua a long ago, old contest. We need to do another contest where we have to get jokes submitted to us. I like those. That is good. All right.

And as we always do, we want to take some time real quick to thank those that have taken the time to write us and leave us a review yeah thanks guys that's it moving on uh yeah i get all the names where people just banged on the keyboard randomly except there's like one name in here that looks like it's legit okay so i'm gonna say this one is i summer uh then this one i'm gonna i just assume that this can't possibly be a thing but i'll say it is should it hide and you know who you are. Yeah, it looks right. Yeah.

And then this one, I will totally murder this name and I apologize, but I'll say it is Mukuljan. What's going on with that? I guess the other letters are just – I don't think that's part of the name, right? I don't know. DC. Well, I'll just say it as DC then.

How's that? You guys did this to me on purpose. Uh, and then cohort 1997. That wasn't, that wasn't terrible. That was painful. That,

that wasn't terrible. It was terrible. That was totally terrible. Yeah. Awesome. and on stitcher i've got josh jb lowly qc guy zersini maybe i am your daddy michael's just so so hey wait what what uh alan's the smartest all right now i see why you got this one and then joe's so fancy sharp what whoa that one wasn't real by the way i just i thought like maybe if i just like put something on the line that one of you would read it and now that i know that's true we're gonna be having some some additional names here in the future. That's awesome. So thank you for taking the time to write in and share those with us.

We, we super do appreciate it. All right. And so real quick, I'm going to blast through some news here. Got a lot of bullet points. I'm just going to fly on through. So just want to mention,

we've been back at it, you know, new year, new you. So we've been back to releasing a couple of YouTube videos. So if you're interested in taking a look at some clean code kind of naming conventions i'll make a great video i made a little video comparing two dev workstation builds because i'm working on a new computer which i'm going to be telling you more about um some you know sometime later on youtube so stay tuned there

also i just wanted to say i had a great time at dev fest fl it was really heavily based on google and google's cloud platform and like flutter and a few other things, which is an ecosystem I'm not really a big part of. So it was really interesting and fun to go to a conference I knew nothing about. So I just wanted to throw that out there. It's kind of like a point of interest. And of course

when we're talking about conferences, I have to mention Orlando Code coming up because we're all going to be there at Orlando Code and we'll have hats. You can't do that again. I thought it was like a guitar solo, man. You mess up, just do it again, and then everyone thinks you meant to. No, we'll be at the Orlando CodeComp.

The CodeCamp is going to be something else. We weren't allowed to go to that one. Right. And we're going to have hats. So if we still have hats when you get up there, because I'm sure we're going to get bum-rushed, right, then we'll give you a hat. I like your optimism. Right.

Yeah. And we're also going to have a ticket to React Amsterdam coming up. So if you think you can make that, so especially if you're over in that area, or if you just want to take a trip, then let us know or join the mailing list, because we're going to be sending that really soon here. It's in April.

It's the biggest React conference. It's going to be amazing. And last thing I wanted to mention real quick was Spoonwrecker made a really good point in the Slack. So a couple episodes we talked about kind of how to abstract around a technology like a database and whether you should kind of dumb things down to the lowest denominator. And one thing he pointed out that we didn't really mention there, didn't touch on, was that the abstraction should really be around the requirements, not the technology. So you don't typically abstract away the database,

but you would abstract away the features that interact with that database. And so that was just something that we didn't mention. He had actually a really great point of view in the Slack, which I'm not going to try and reproduce here, but I just want to mention big thanks there, and also just wanted to kind of throw that point of view out there because great kind of point of view in the slack which i'm not going to try and reproduce here but i just want to mention you know big thanks there and also just wanted to kind of throw that point of view out there because we kind of missed it very cool and so being that this is as outlaw pointed out at the very front this is our 100th episode which is absolutely nuts like we started this crazy thing five plus years ago now, and it just sort of snuck up on us.

So in lieu of doing shots. Who would have thought the 100th episode was coming? Right? Like, I mean, it's just, I don't know, man. At any rate, yeah. If only we had like a counting system or some way that we could like keep track to know that that 100th episode was on its way. Oh, it's just nuts. But yeah, so in lieu of doing shots every time somebody said the word the or um, we decided that if you leave a comment on this particular episode, which will be codingblocks.net slash episode 100, you'll be entered

for a chance to win one of two $100 Amazon gift cards. That's US dollars. So anybody that's overseas, I don't know how that's going to translate. But, again, leave a comment on this particular episode, and we'll throw you in a hat for the chance to win one of those. So that's just a super big thank you for all those that do hang out with us. And, you know, one's for this 100th episode, and then the other one's for the next 100, right? So super excited about that.

Or looking forward to the next 100. Looking forward to the next 100. There we go. So, yeah, that's all we got for the news here. All right. So let's dive in. We got some really good feedback recently kind of talking about the water cooler episodes that we assume we haven't done in a while. So we thought it might be kind of fun to bring John in and kind of just have some opinion-y type stuff.

We've got a couple of topics here so uh i guess i'll go ahead and start since i said i'm like three times it kind of implies that i have something to say next so uh or that we should all take a shot yes yeah you're drunk already so it doesn't really matter and the first thing i wanted to bring up was just the laptop versus desktop decision for devs. And I figured, John, you probably own more computers than all of us combined in this room. So I thought maybe you might have some extra insight on what kind of computer you would rather have for a developer machine. Yeah. I mean, I kind of keep around three usually. I keep one little Apple Air for conferences and just kind of traveling around.

And then I kind of have like a beast at home for gaming and running virtual machines and stuff like that and doing my homework for school. And then I guess I have a third one for work and it's pretty much whatever they provide. But laptops are great. So you can travel and go to the office. I mean, that's pretty much what I do. But if you had to pick one, if you only had one, would you rather have – No, I need all three.

I need one for work, one for conferences, and then one for everything else. Well, okay. Let's change the narrative here a little bit, though, because you keep saying the one for work as being like you're working for somebody else and they're supplying it for you let's pretend that in this situation this hypothetical uh you work for yourself yeah so you're providing your own hardware right so you can only provide one yeah i'm always going to lean towards a laptop and then just have a really big monitor that plugs into it and that way i can travel and then have a big screen at home. I'm on board with that. Yeah.

That's almost identical to what I would do. As a matter of fact, I'm sort of in the market for a laptop right now. And really my two main drivers for it are I want discrete graphics because I don't know with VR and stuff. Like I might actually try and do some virtual reality programming because it just looks really cool. And then the other thing, too, is I want to be able to put at least 32 gigs of RAM in it. Those are the two things that I care about a lot right now on a laptop. And I want the portability. And I'm with you.

Give me a huge monitor and a banging laptop and I'm good to go. Wait a minute. But you didn't say anything about like being able to replace like the hard drive or whatever the storage is. So in fairness, like, man, this is I don't know how deep we want to go here. But like we've talked about in the past, the whole, and we think those are fantastic laptops, right? And you and I are sort of on the same page in that we feel like the last great Mac or MacBook Pro was made around 2012 when you could replace the hard drives, the memory, all that kind of stuff, right? Now, if you go buy a MacBook Pro, you better get what you want up front because you're not cracking that thing open, right? right like you're not changing the ssd you're not changing the ram you're not changing any of that stuff so for me that's a hard pill to swallow for three grand right like more than that yeah i

mean three grand gets you the 16 gig one with a 512 ssd and a discrete graphics card that kind of sucks, right? So that's $3,000. The equivalent, actually, let's talk about what you can get for $2,000 on the PC side of the world. You're talking about, especially now with the new RTX graphics cards coming out, you can get a beast of a machine with a, uh, an RTX 2060 graphics card, 16, maybe 32 gigs of Ram and a 512 gig SSD that would just walk laps around that Mac. Is it going to be as felt, you know, sweet and beautiful as the other? Maybe not,

but at the end of the day, you want the usability. So I'm definitely looking at the upgradability of it as well. Hey, by the way, I would not get an Apple with my next developer laptop. You wouldn't? And a big part of that is just because I've been doing a lot of deep learning type stuff and machine learning. And NVIDIA is doing a lot of stuff around on this kind of stuff. And Apple just doesn't have that anymore. So it's like I don't really have a choice if I want to use GPUs for doing deep learning and machine learning.

So, yeah. Yeah. I got a chip chip in there too. Cause I'm really, um, there's two big things that have happened kind of in the last couple of years.

That's really, uh, made me feel even better about going windows for a laptop, you know, aside from the crappy hardware on the latest MacBook pros, or, I mean, it's not crappy hardware,

it's just, um, no, it's good. The smart bar and the smart thing, the smart bar, and I don't like what they did to the keyboard. I don't like the size. I don't like the dust.

Can we summarize it up as they're not developer-friendly like they used to be? The company isn't developer-friendly. You mentioned the keyboard with the butterfly switches and the touch bar. John mentioned the lack of a you know gpu support for uh like you know if you wanted to do any kind of um machine learning that would require like an nvidia gpu like it's just not the developer friendly platform that it used to be yeah yeah and you know who is developer friendly and loves developers developers developers windows in the last couple of years, of course,

has been pushing Docker really hard, which makes it so easy for me to run Linux containers on there. So that's kind of taking away some of the pain, but also the Linux subsystem for Windows. The Windows subsystem for Linux, yeah. It's amazing. It's so great. Yeah, the reason I wanted a MacBook for so long with so many users,

I would go to a website and be following a getting started guide and be like, okay, here's the curl command to install this thing. And I was like, oh, well, gross. So that wasn't really easy to do. So it was great to do on a Mac because I could spin up anything and just everything kind of worked and was developer-y, but it still had a nice UI compared to some distros of Linux. But now Windows is really kind of taking those things away. So I don't really have an argument for not going Windows now. I mean, it's really crazy because just 12 hours ago today, Forbes released an article titled The End of Apple, right? And it's been really sad

because especially if you looked at the, if you follow the Apple stock at all, you know, fourth quarter of last year, they took a beating and they're still taking a beating right and i know that that's all that has more to do with like the phone than it has to do with the mac but it just like the whole thing just kind of goes to the point where it's it almost feels like they kind of lost their way right like there used to be it you maybe maybe i'm just being nostalgic about it, but, you know, Apple used to be like the creative type, you know, computer, right? And then somehow that transformed into creative, wasn't just artistically creative, but also developer friendly because like developers loved it.

It was like everywhere you would go, you know, every conference you would go to, you would just see a sea of white apples staring back at you from throughout the conference rooms and whatnot. Right? And it's just not the case anymore. You mentioned that laptop, Alan. I assume you'd want a 15-inch screen, right? You wouldn't want a 13. No, I won't. I will not do 13.

It would be 15 or 17. So, well, okay. So the Apple got rid of the 17. They don't offer that anymore. So that laptop that you're talking about, your requirements, you're looking at $3,200 minimum because that 32 gigs of RAM bumped you up. Oh, it's crazy. And here's the thing. I don't want it to be like I'm bashing on Apple in this regard, but there's really only two things that would make me – and understand, we're talking about from a developer's perspective now. Right.

And then let me back up. There are two reasons why I would get an Apple laptop over a PC. One is if you need to program for iOS or the Apple ecosystem, right? That's one. That's probably the only one right now that would tip me in favor of going to the Apple is I know I got some iOS development to do.

Gotta have it, right? The only other reason I would personally go with Apple is I do video editing and their video editing software is amazing. Final Cut Pro 10. I love that software. I bought it one time and it's been updated for four years. Right. Every single time they come with an update, they don't ask for more money.

Can you say the same thing about Adobe? Right. update they don't ask for more money can you say the same thing about adobe right can you say the same thing about about sony vegas or any of the other big name ones out there that are windows counterparts to it no so it hurts it hurts your soul because you're like oh butter i paid 3200 for butterflies which is and that's the touch bar that's the thing like literally you could justify the price of an apple laptop if you say hey i going to make that up on not having to pay for an upgrade to Adobe Premiere every year or an update to Sony Vegas every year. You can make that up. But, man, I have a really hard time paying for an AMD 560 discrete graphics processor chip that is half as powerful as the weakest Nvidia thing out there right now and dropping three grand on it.

Right? So, so from a developer's perspective, I can do, except for iOS, I can do everything that you used to not be able to do in windows that I can do on a Mac. Now I can do on windows.

Well, now to John's point though, here's the one thing that maybe would make you want to reconsider your Mac there. Uh, John is that you could go with the EGPU. They have good support for that. What's,

what's the EGPU, the external GPU. Oh, so you could have that way, you know, and, and like, I remember,

um, at, uh, there was a, there was a, here in the Atlanta area, there was a data science conference just recently back in November. And one of the speakers there, he actually made a really interesting point because he was talking about – he got this really nice System76 laptop, which if you've seen those – right and he he went out and he bought like the most baddest one that they had right uh dual gpus in it and everything all for the purpose of machine learning and traveling and whatnot and then what he didn't take into consideration was that it was like 21 pounds. It was ridiculous. So he was like, oh yeah, I guess I can't really travel with this thing.

But at least with the Mac Pro, the MacBook Pro, he could get the eGPU and then when he's at home, he could do the serious machine learning, crunch the model while he's connected to that. But then when he needs to take it out and about, he has this nice little Svelte machine. So you just changed my mind again. crunch the model while he's connected to that. But then when he needs to take it out and about,

you know, he has this nice little felt machine. So you just changed my mind again. I think I want a Mac book. I think I want a Mac book for my next one. And part of it is because I'm really not going to be doing deep learning on the road. I mean, I'm just not going to do that.

And some of that stuff, just like you want to run overnight anyways. So you would want it on a desktop that doesn't go to sleep and stuff like that. That EGPU is still going to cost you the same price as another laptop though. Those things are like a grand. No, it's like

$500 for the case. For the case, not with the graphics card. Now you're going to go buy the graphics card and you're getting another grand. But this whole conversation started as desktop versus laptop. So if you were going to build a desktop, you'd have to buy that gpu either way but if i was going that route i would just build a desktop and i'll tell you the main reason why and this is where i'm probably more in joe's

camp with a desktop like so one thing i'll give macbook pros that i think they do a really good job of is for the most part they run really quiet until you start taxing them. And then they sound like a jetliner taking off. I've got a desktop that I can absolutely just pound and you can't hear that thing. Right. And that's really nice. Like I don't necessarily want my, my laptop cooking all the time at a hundred degrees, plus sounding like it's about to lift off, right? Whereas with a desktop, I have tons of space, right? I can cool that thing and I don't have to worry about it. So if I was going to go that route with the machine learning, I would probably just build a desktop where I can be done with it. Yeah. I just want a MacBook because it's

built out of a single piece of aluminum. I think that's why. Because it's just really nice. Everybody's copied them now though, John. Everybody's copied them now, though, John. Everybody's copied them now. It's not the same. It just feels nice. It feels nice, guys. Well, everyone else uses aluminum, and Apple uses aluminum. Aluminum, yes.

Awesome. So I'm not – like everyone I think probably knows where I'm at. I definitely just built a big, beefy computer, a desktop, and I think that's obviously the right answer, of course. I want a laptop that's like a daily driver. Something that's going to be comfortable for the couch. But if I'm coding, I'm not a Toyota Camry programmer, right? I'm like a drag racer space shuttle kind of programmer. So I need the lights off, the techno on.

I need a machine that's going to be able to keep up with my brainwaves. So, battle stations it is. I'm looking at the MacBook Pros, the ones that are $3,200, and it's like 2 gigahertz. 2 gigahertz. Make it gigahertz, son. Maybe my RAM speed. Not my processor. Come on now.

Well, I mean, in fairness, that's that's a laptop though you're comparing your like monster you know you could run google on your desktop that's right yeah i mean when when joe gets around to it and he shares the specs of what he's got it's ridiculous right like he could probably run the country with this thing so and so although i will say i didn't like that kind of the point of the video i made was that you can actually make a super good desktop with a ryzen 5 chip the new mds and you know like even 32 gigabytes of ram and you can do that for under a thousand bucks right and it'll be an amazing developer build and you're not going to get an amazing developer laptop plus the laptops laptop for a thousand bucks. Plus the laptops,

like those chips aren't designed for like super heavy crunching. They're designed for like power savings and battery life. And, uh, you know, that's what you're going after. Video editing on a laptop is not so great. It's not,

it's not terrible, but I will say like, that's one thing that comes into play for me on a laptop. And this is where, so let's, let's ask the question here. Would you go gaming laptop for a developer machine or would you go more productivity based laptop?

Because with the gaming laptops, you're going to get the discrete graphics cards and all that. Whereas if you go with the productivity ones, they're going to be more, uh, standard components for a laptop, right? Like actually probably closer to what you're gonna get in the MacBook pro.

So wait, so when I can play games on and when I can't, right. Uh, well my, the best developer machine is definitely the gaming laptop. Then I got needs. I mean,

I just look at it and, and the gaming laptops are built around the idea of speed. Here's the, here's the part that bugs me though, is typically with those gaming laptops, especially nowadays, they're putting in the 144 hertz screens or megahertz screens, which is for gaming, right? But they're 1080p displays for that purpose, right? Because that's what their their goal is. And me, I'm more interested in the 4K UHD prettier, you know, screen, sharper screen, all that kind of stuff. And they just don't typically cram those into the gaming machines because you're not going to game at 4K. You lose too many frames. Right. So, yeah, a gaming laptop is just a desktop in disguise. I wouldn't actually ever take it anywhere like it it it's hooked up and then it's there forever like i wouldn't want to bring it anywhere i feel like

there would just be too many pieces inside rattling or something yeah that's true well they're also like gigantic and heavy though but but i mean you could get an MSI gaming laptop with a, you know, NVIDIA or a GeForce, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080. I mean, that's like, yeah, that's amazing. So check this out. So I've got my eyeballs on one right now. Both of them, both of them on this one right now. It's an MSI.

It's the GS75. This is a 17 inch gaming laptop. Wait, an MSI. It's the GS75. This is a 17-inch gaming laptop. Wait, which one did you say? The GS75. The GS, okay. I'm looking at a GT75 Titan right now. That's why I asked. The Titan's the big one.

The GS is the slim one. It's the 17-inch. It comes in under five pounds, guys. And the 17-inch form factor of it is the same size as all previous generation 15 inch laptops so you get a 17 inch screen and the same build and form factor is what 15 inch builds have been coming in for years so that's what i've kind of got my eyeballs on right now it's the gs75 stealth gs75 stealthalth, man. That's super duper exciting. Up to an i9 processor, GeForce RTX 2080, 17-inch screen.

But it's going to do that at 1080. I guess that would be good enough. That's the downside. Now, here's the cool part. That one has three M.2 slots in it. So you can put three SSDs in this thing. Nice. Nice. 3 up to 32 gigs of RAM.

Ultra thin, less than 5 pounds. It's about 3 quarters of an inch tall. Tell me that's not sick. 144 megahertz. I'm sorry. 144 hertz screen IPS level gaming display. There's a bunch of optional things on it. What was the price on that?

They're thinking it's going to start right around $2,500. Well, let's see. If I look at the configurations for this thing. Yeah, that would be $2,500 to build that as a desktop. That's what I'm saying. This starts getting into the realm of this is why that. Now, your desktop is going to be quiet. This thing probably won't be, right, is my guess.

But that's a machine that like literally that's one of those types of machines that I think if you buy, you're still using in five years, right? Like it's not going to be one of those things that you're like, okay, it's showing its age after two years. I can't get the pricing information on it. It says if I try to go buy it, then I have to go to Spain apparently in order to buy it. Well, that's fine. We can make it. Oh, this is cool. You'll love this though, Alan. This will be right up your alley.

Per key RGB gaming keyboard. Yep. So you could have every letter could be a different color. I know you'll be. No, I'm not customizing that that i'll do it as soon as you like get up and go to the bathroom i mean these gaming laptops are weird it feels like you're taking like a v10 engine like from a truck or something and then you're like shoving it into a little tiny car and i'm just like no put it in a huge desktop you know like let it spread out and breathe like inside of my desktop i've got like drives just hanging by cables you can't do that

in a laptop yeah like you know just let it breathe i'm pretty sure there's like a subreddit for like bad wiring or something like that you should probably submit a picture it's not bad wiring it's bad mounting like i just don't have anything mounted they're just kind of living in there happily hopefully nobody from samsung's listening when he calls for his support yeah there's no moving parts in there no there's not yeah now out of curiosity did you check out razor because they've got a similar rtx i did set up so the razors are sweet so the whole aluminum thing the single you know piece of aluminum razor is known for that like they make really good machines but you're gonna pay through the nose for it right so you're gonna pay an extra seven or eight hundred bucks for that build

which may or may not be worth it but yeah it's on my radar basically any rtx machine right now is not written off so the thing is i have a 2011 macbook pro and that thing like i start any zoom application on it now and it's like breathing hard yeah it's like uh it's kind of like me being out of shape trying to go up a hill and i'm breathing hard before i even start well i can go ahead and tell you why you should get that pick that MSI over the Razor though, because the Razor is going to be a little bit thinner. All right. But you only get the single SSD storage on the Razor compared to the three that you have on that MSI. But probably maybe most importantly is that it's 15 inch versus a 17.

Yeah. And that's the other thing I've been considering too, is I really like the touchscreen. Like you guys know, I like the two and ones, but they just don't make those things with the horsepower. And I say that that's maybe most important because like you only need three storage slots if the drives are small.

Right. But as capacities grow over time, then you'll be like, Oh, well just, I can get it all on one drive and that's all I need. But dude, you can get a one terabyte SSD now for $140, right? So

if you run out of space at all, pop it in there and then you still got room for another one. But you hit on a key point there. The minimum size for programming, like screen-wise, is 30-inch. Like, there's no way you can program on a little tiny screen. It's just impossible. The minimum size is 30-inch, guys. That's just impossible. Minimum size is 30 inch. Slip that in there.

Yeah. That's minimum screen for programming. You can fit all your windows. You know, you can sit back. He's got a point though. Like it is, I do find it. I've been challenging myself here recently on a, I have a Dell desktop or a laptop for work

that has a 4K display on it, but it's a 15 inch. And I've been challenging myself to just stick to that. And I can't use the native resolutions that Windows wants to use. I have to crank it down, not quite all the way to its 4K glory because that's impossible to read at that point. But just in order to have enough real estate to be able to see everything that I need to be able to see. Well,

speaking of which I'm about to take a 55 inch 4k and make that my daily driver for my laptop screen. I really am because here's the thing I've got. I seriously figured this out. We've talked about our setups before. I am curious, John, what you've got.

Um, but I've got a 27 inch apple thunderbolt monitor right and that resolution is 2560 by 1440 then i have the ultra wide lg that we've talked about multiple times in the past that's a 3440 by 1440 so pour one out the same pixel height on each but you're talking about a 27 inch right next to a 34 inch. Guess what? A 55 inch 4k is actually less horizontal real estate than those two monitors side by side. And it's 4k. So I literally have four quadrants of 10 80 P's that I can have crazy directly in front

of me. So to me, and I've been looking at, there's actually a site that this should have been my tip. Doggone it. Um, R T I N G S.com. They have like, uh, TV tools that you can go in there and you can say, like, if you go, as a matter of fact, R T I N G S.com. If you go there up at the top, they've got televisions. Click that. And then on the second page, up towards the top, they have a tools link. If you click that and then go down to the section where it says recommendation tool,

you can click that thing and you can choose the features that are important to you. So you can say the room brightness. Do I need to tame that? Is the viewing angle important to me? What am I doing with it? And one of the choices is if you click add usage, you can say PC. And if you're interested at all into what that actually means, what they rate really highly for PC is it needs to be able to do four by four by four, um, res or resolving of pixels because that's what PCs need to do. So some TVs can't resolve that properly. But the other thing is input lag because you don't want

to be moving your mouse and it'd be trailing across the screen way behind what you did, right? So you need a really fast input or, or a very low input lag. So you can actually come in here and see what TVs work really well as a PC monitor. And I actually have one that is listed towards the top of this list. So it's like, well, dang, how about I just swap that thing out and get these other two monitors off my desk and use that as my daily driver. So for those that were trying to like, remember that site, it's basically ratings.com, but remove the a. Remove the A. Yep. Yeah. Hey, real quick, before we go off of this topic, though, I wanted to just quiz you guys.

Uh-oh. So if you were to take our beloved MacBook Pro that we seriously hope Apple will listen to feedback from. Make great again. It can't be just us, right? And they will go back to, uh, the developer world and be developer friendly. What do you think a fully maxed out MacBook pro current, current model would, would cost you?

No, and I'm not, when I say maxed out, I'm not adding like, uh, Apple care or extra software. Like we're just talking about hardware. I'm talking about if you maxed out all the hardware.

No, no, no, no. No extra hardware like keyboards or external monitor. Internal guts only. If you maxed it out, what would it cost you? We're talking SSDs, processors, memory, right, basically. Oh, yeah. You could add a terabyte drive or double terabyte. I'm going to go with $6,000. $6,000. You could add a terabyte drive or double terabyte. I'm going to go with

$6,000. $6,000. Price is right rules? Yes. Let's do price is right rules. Maybe we should have let John go first. He's a guest. Actually, you can do it last because you can always do a dollar, right? Yeah.

Say $5,400 for me then. $6,000 from Alan, $5,400 for me then. $6,000 from Alan, $5,400 from Joe and John. One plus the highest number. $6,001 he wins. $6,001. That's dirty. Let's kick him off the show.

No more of this. You know, it was just a couple episodes ago that I was saying how proud I was of you guys have never doing that. All right. Well, John wins. Golly, really? What's the price on this thing? The maxed out price is

$7,049. Good. Seven? Wow. $7,000. And that is, let me read off these specs here. That is the 15-inch MacBook Pro, a 2.96 core, 8th Gen Core i9 processor, 32 gigs of RAM, the Radeon Pro Vega 20 with 4 gigs of memory, 4 terabytes of SSD storage. Oh, that's where you got your...

There's your bulk of your expense, if i if i take that four terabyte ssd storage off that takes off 3200 lord but you're still at over four grand uh well i would be at 38 49 without the if you only had the 512 that's a lot of cheese man so yeah really really crazy stuff a lot of cheese i want to know like who buys that thing and then like does apple like have a white glove delivery service where they're like we just wanted to shake the hand of somebody that actually bought this like tim cook personally delivers it all right what we got up next? Yep. So one thing I was curious about, if you're a new developer coming straight out of college boot camp or free code camp, this is kind of a two-parter. We'll start with John again. If you're fresh out of school, then what kind of tech area or topic would you recommend someone coming right into the workforce focus on?

And then the second part of the question is, what would you recommend for a senior dev who's interested in maybe doing a pivot? What kind of topic or area would you think they should look into? The answer for both of those is getting something working for the user. Whatever gets something working adds value to the company. Talk to people, figure out how to help people.

So it's not even like a technology. I get it. But that seems like always the most important thing to matter your role. Okay. So like focus on the soft skills and make sure you can communicate well and then the rest will follow? I mean just go around and try to help people. Help the customer. Help the departments.

You know, pretty much just trying to – because then you'll figure out figure out like you know the use cases and they'll get behind you and they'll they'll you know support you and learning new technologies you know if that's what ends up being but yeah okay yeah i like that um but but i mean to really answer the question probably probably JavaScript, right? Some server side language and SQL, right? Oh yeah. And server side would be Java or C sharp. But yeah, you think SQL still probably, I mean,

if you want a job, I mean, you're going to have to know those at a minimum, right? Um, for an entry level person, you're going to need to know how to build a web app, right?

Cause that's, everything is a web app, a business app. Um, but yeah. And then for the advanced person, I would assume more architecture type stuff, like how do all the pieces fit together? So that might get into your next thing, like maybe some, you know, Kafka or something like that. Some kind of like horizontally scaled stuff, you know, elastic search, more, more expanded out tech that can scale up, you know, like, cause that's kind of your job usually is like, Hey, the site's really slow.

How do we make it faster? You know? But yeah. How do we be more agile? How do we store more data? You know, you know, it's funny. Those, what you just said. And I agree with all agree with all of them. We've all got a lot of experience between all of us. It's almost always that way, right? Like you see an application, an application grows, and it does its job. And then over time, it doesn't do its job as well anymore.

And then you spend a lot of time iterating back over that application, trying to speed it up and make it better and make it more fault tolerant. Right? Like I would say I've seen that pattern rinse and repeat so many times throughout my career with stuff that I've built or with stuff that other people have built that I've inherited. Right? Like that, that there's a lot of cycles spent on that,

that part that you just talked about. Well, you're never going to get it perfect. A hundred percent the first time. Right. Okay. So you're always going to be iterating on it to like, you know, improve. What's the next most critical improvement? You know, what's the next improvement that I could make that would be the biggest bang for buck, right? It's an asymptote too, right? You can always improve it. So what's your feeling on the rip and replace thing? We've all seen that, right?

The system's not fast enough. The system's not good enough. We need to replace it. What are you guys' thoughts on that? Never do it. Never, ever, ever. Always iterate. make it better i don't know i mean the rewrite thing i've been in those situations and it's just really depressing

because people will spend eight months and they'll end up with something that's worse than the original product so it's just like you got to figure out how to take old stuff and iterate to make it new even if it means like breaking it up and taking little chunks out. But yeah. Yeah, I like that. I'll go ahead and just give my answer real quick. That's JavaScript. Oh, that's right. Yeah.

Yeah. And maybe for the advanced, you know, maybe some TypeScript, but really I think having like, it's just such a hot field right now. And I think it's going to continue to be for the next couple of years. And there's so much innovation still coming from that community

that I think it's just a great commitment. So even if Deno takes over WebAssembly and Go or whatever kind of takes over in the next couple of years, I think you're still going to have a really good foundation for both front end and back end. And I don't think there's any other real languages right now that you can get that kind of bang for buck and hotness of activity right now than JavaScript, unfortunately unfortunately what about you uh i definitely yeah i i agree with the javascript i i like that i mean i was thinking about this um you know just earlier today that the beauty of like we we have historically joked and

will probably always joke about the javas where it's the framework du jour. Everything's iterating so fast. But the beauty of that, though, is that the community has made it so that you could swap things in and out not easily. I'm not going to say that it's easy. But you could find what's going to work for you,, not easily. I'm not going to say that it's easy, but, um, you know, you could find like what's going to work for you, for your needs. And, you know, if somebody comes up with a better pattern or a better way of doing it, you know, then, you know, at some point you might be able to like move over to that.

So, you know, you can get experiences of, uh, like cobbling together things and build tools and things like that, that I think would be a value, you know? But I also had this thought too, similar to that line, which is that with the.NET Core platform and going forward, it's kind of gotten into that same kind of thing now where, you know, you could pick which NuGet packages you want and which versions of those packages you want and then deal with the dependency chains on your own. But yeah, I think that the JavaScript you're definitely not going to go wrong with because any shop that you go to is going to need JavaScript, whereas you can't say that about a C sharp. You know, if you walk into a Java world now to your other question though, uh, which was super interesting. Um, and I'm trying to

remember exactly how you worded it though, about the, the, uh, swap or iterate lift and shift or iterate basically. So, I mean, I kind of have a different experience on that. And I'm not necessarily, I agree with what you're saying with the iterate. Totally right. If you are in a dev shop that, you know, you're working on your line of business application, for example, definitely don't rip and replace, iterate, iterate, iterate, and get to where you want to be. I agree with that. However, there are definitely major companies out there where their whole premise is they're going to rip and replace for you. They're going to do that for you. You take an Accenture or an IBM, a big consultancy kind of enterprise-y

company, right? They're making the sales on like, hey, you want a website for your company? Oh, that's cool. You got one. But here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to sell you this tech stack and we're going to, we'll take care of migrating all your data into it. And, you know, we're going to give you a new website. And, you know, I mean, for years, that's what we did. We did rip and replace. So I think it really depends on your point of view, you know? Yeah. Or what your product is, I guess. Like you said, if you're having to own it and support the business, then you're going to want to iterate. But if your job is to sell these technologies to other companies then you're right

i mean it's literally depending on what your job is are you building and selling software for people to switch to or are you yeah yeah well what if your front end was like the result of some sort of code or generation process and so you were able to kind of deliver that front end and wasn't coupled to the the technologies that built it. Jamstack 2020. I was about to say, is this where he's going? We got to edit this out. So WordPress then?

Yeah, headless WordPress. So real quick on the same question, I also agree with the JavaScript for newbies, for sure. And the reason is not just because it's JavaScript, but because it now cross-compiles to everything, right? You can have it be your website front-end. You can have it be your website back-end. You can have it be an iOS app. You can have it be a Mac app. You can have it be a Windows app.

Is this a Dr. Seuss book? Right? It's seriously crazy, right? But if you take your JavaScript skills that you learn and you take the various frameworks out there that are built around it, PhoneGap used to be the big one. I don't even know what the big ones are anymore, but there was something NodeScript or something. I don't even remember now. But there was Native React or React Native, all these things, right? something NodeScript or something. I don't even remember now, but there was a native react or react native, all these things, right? Like you can take that one skillset and turn it into nearly

everything that you want to try in a fairly low, I don't want to say effort, but without, without having to learn Java to do Android, without having to learn Swift to do iOS, without having to learn C sharp to do windows, you know, you can take that one language skill set and it translates to so many things. So that's huge, right? And you also get to learn about why having such a diverse tooling set can be really frustrating. That might lead you to help in making a more unified tool set. Well, I mean, kind of to your point too, though, is that, you know, this might be like a sore, this might bring up some pain for you, Alan. So I apologize in advance.

But if you recall, there was a meetup that we all went to and you were a speaker at it. But unfortunately, you had the misfortune of going after an extremely well-polished presentation that that guy has been iterating on it for a while. And I believe the title of it was JavaScript Everywhere. And he literally took an application and he was like, look, we're going to write this same application. We're going to compile it to everything. And it started out as just like a simple web application, your normal kind of JavaScript web application that, you know, you would think of. And he took it everywhere.

Yeah. And I'm trying to remember some of the things it was like it was on your phone as a it was on your phone as just a web page, as a progressive web app, as a native application, to Alexa, to Google Home, to some drone. I don't even remember all the things that he had this thing running on. One of the best presentations I've ever actually seen. It was so good. And it really was that. It was literally, hey, I've got the same code.

Watch this. And it was ridiculous. So was literally, Hey, I've got the same code. Watch this. Right. And it was ridiculous. So I, I highly agree with that. If you are somebody new in programming, regardless of what your, your desired direction is, whether it's business or line of business apps, or whether it's gaming or whether it's whatever, it's a great starting point. And then the other thing, I tend to agree very much with what John said on the senior level people. Once you get to a point to where you've sort of locked down your programming and your abilities, understanding how the pieces fit together and maybe not just looking at things like Elastic or Kafka or all the new scaling technologies, just understanding how you can make applications that are easier to maintain over time, right? And starting to see patterns in the applications and what can you do to enable these patterns

and make things easier for people to work with? Because as applications grow, they typically grow organically and they're a pain to manage over time, right? Because things just got rushed. And then taking that step back and saying, hey, how can I pull these apart a little bit and make pieces that are a little bit easier to plug in? And I think that's one thing is not looking at particular languages, but how do I leverage these pieces? How do I turn these into things that are easier to use? So I don't know. Those

are kind of where I'm at. It's kind of like if you have a dirty house, right? Like, you're just not going to, like, sell the house and get a new house because it's dirty. You know, like, you're going to try to clean it up. And you might start with one room at a time and push everything to one corner and go through it and, you know, just clean up your house.

Yeah. In a world where JavaScript rules the world. It does. It kind of sucks, but you just clean up your house. Yeah. In a world where JavaScript rules the world. It does. It kind of sucks, but you just have to learn JavaScript. Yeah. Hey, but I might throw out Python as well because in a lot of the classes I've been taking, it's a lot of Python stuff. It's gotten a lot of, you know, momentum in certain areas, you know, like machine learning and stuff. Like some people might say, oh, you're doing machine learning.

You better know Python, you know, but that kind of thing. And the classes that John's taking are not 101 level classes. We're talking some pretty hefty, heavy hitting classes for like master's level type stuff. Yeah, and half the classes are in C and the other classes are in Python. And it's generally at what level of abstraction are you dealing with? Are you doing Pepe Python? So the 80 character limits like the real strict kind of the 80 character thing man every class has a different requirements on

tabs versus spaces and all kinds of weird stuff but yeah those are the important topics yeah so who's got this over uh wait go ahead well. Well, I was just going to say, kind of going along the lines of this, though, if we had to say what we thought the most popular languages might be, right? Because we're all saying, like, I think that would be kind of relevant, right? Like, what we're saying we think that you should learn. I mean, we've obviously joked before in the past that we have to change our name to codingblocks.js. Right. But, you know, I think it joked before in the past that we have to change our name to codingblocks.js. Right. But I think it was pretty much around the room we all said JavaScript.

So what do you think the most popular languages are at the moment? Like are we guessing what real or are we just like – Yeah. JavaScript. JavaScript, Python. Swift. Java. Yeah.

JavaScript, Python, Swift, Java. JavaScript, Python, Java. And SQL is going to be in there even though it's not really a language. That's definitely in there somewhere. Okay, so we're going to go by the Tyobi index. Okay. Right? So yours was which, Alan? JavaScript, Python.

Just give me number one. JavaScript. JavaScript is number one. Joe? JavaScript, Python. Just give me number one. JavaScript. JavaScript is number one. Joe? JavaScript. JavaScript. John? I'm going to say C.

C? Well, I will tell you right now, John's closer than you guys are. Really? C++? Python. Java, forever and a day now, is still number one. Okay. On Tyobi.

Yes. Yeah. On the Tyobi programming index. C is number one. Okay. On Tyobi. Yes. Yeah. On the Tyobi programming index. C is number two. Okay. You want to take a shot at number three? Python. All right.

Alan, Python, Joe? Well, based on these crappy results, I'm going to say Java. No, it's number one. It can't be number three also. Wait, what are we talking about? Do you have like an overflow there? Wait, what are we talking about? We don't know. Do you have like an overflow there? Well, okay.

Off by one. So if we're taking this quiz 20 years ago, what would I say? I don't know. OCaml? Ooh. I like that you're throwing that out. Okay. John? I don't know.

Python or JavaScript. One of the scripting ones. Or SQL. Python moved up to number three. Nice. JavaScript was at number six. See, I don't believe that. This is wrong.

It's biased. Yeah, this is all wrong. It doesn't confirm what I think, so it's biased. Yeah, I agree. I agree with that. Wait, is that how bias works? You find the evidence that supports your uh your hypothesis it's exactly how confirmation bias that's why we're gonna write we're gonna write a blog post and we're gonna post the most popular ones i mean the reality is you

can't get away from c because most operating systems are written in it like you have no choice it's like the the lowest level thing And then when it comes to Java, most horizontally scaled systems, you know, Kafka or whatever are built on some kind of JVM type language, right? Like Hadoop and that whole infrastructure. Right. And then Python,

like it's just academia. Like the past decade has been Python, Python, Python. I was going to add to the Java mix though. You know, a lot of large enterprisey companies are very heavy into the Java world. Okay.

Let me tell you why this particular list of things in the Tyobe index are garbage. Oh, okay. Tyobe? You don't think it's Tyobe? Yeah, I don't know what it is. I'm just saying it because now I'm mad at it. I'm just disrespecting it by mispronouncing it. Exactly.

Number five is Visual Basic.net. Number five is visualbasic.net. That's complete and utter trash. I don't believe that. Wait, is that true? It is. It moved up number seven. It swapped places with C Sharp

actually. It's higher than JavaScript. Visualbasic.net swapped places with C sharp from seven to five and C sharp went from five to seven. They're totally invalid. No, I can't, I can't look at these results, but it was one of the first programming languages I had a great time with. I will say that I would agree. Like I can't insult it. I mean, it has a special place in my heart. I made a little, but is it number five of the most popular programming languages right now? It would be hard for me to believe that.

Exactly. Same. All right. Moving on. Unless it's government contracts or something. Well, I mean, yeah. I specifically pointed out this reference, though, because the Tybee Index has been one that we have used many times in the past. So I'm staying consistent with our source here.

It's dead to us. Oh, it's dead to us now. I'm sorry. It's dead to us. We will pour one out for it along with our MacBook Pro and our LG widescreen monitor. Wow, this is a depressing episode, isn't it? Yeah, this is sad. All right, let's move it on.

All right. All right. This episode is sponsored by Clubhouse. Clubhouse is the first project management platform for software development that brings everyone together so that teams can focus on what matters, creating products their customers love. While designed to be developer first, the UI is simple and intuitive enough for all teams to enjoy using. And it's really nice that it's developer focused. For example, I really like that they offer Git

tips around like branching and even give you the commands to run, which is really nice as a developer, but it's still really nice to use for other people too. But it's us first. Yeah, you can log in and immediately see your work queue, your active tasks, upcoming due dates, and activity feed. And when I say immediately see, if you've missed a deadline, let me tell you, it's called out right there in red. You see that date that you missed, making you aware that, hey, you need to focus on that. And it's easy for people on any team to focus in on their work for a specific task or project while also being able to zoom out to see how that work contributes to the bigger picture using the fast interface.

With a simple API and robust set of integrations, Clubhouse also seamlessly integrates with the tools you already use every day, like Slack or GitHub, for example, getting out of your way so you can focus on delivering quality software on time. And you can sign up for two free months of Clubhouse by visiting clubhouse.io slash coding blocks. Again, that's clubhouse.io slash coding blocks, and you get your two free months, and you can see what companies like Elastic, Full Story, Launch Darkly. You can see why those companies love Clubhouse.io slash coding blocks and you get your two free months and you can see what companies like elastic full story launched darkly. You can see why those companies love clubhouse. All right. And with that, as always, it's that time of the show where we basically beg for you guys to take the time out of your day. If you remember, and if you haven't already go leave us a review, we super appreciate it. We don't really ask for much at all.

That's the one thing that we do ask is that, you know, if you've enjoyed the show, if you're getting something out of it, put a smile on your face, you learn something. You know, please do go up there. We have a link set up that makes it easy. Go to codingblocks.net slash review, and you can either leave the review on iTunes or if Stitcher is your preferred place so you don't have to have an account or anything, you just go up there and log in and do it. That would be amazing. And as Michael always says, you know, please share us with a friend. If you know any other people that are interested in getting better at coding and would like to take their skills to the next level, you know, please do share. All right. So with that,

we can head into my favorite portion first, or I could give you another joke. We'd rather have the joke now or the joke later. Let's do the joke. All right. Keep in mind, developer friendly dad jokes. You've been warned.

An SEO expert walks into a bar bars, pub in tavern, public house, Irish pub, drink, drinks, beer, alcohol. I like it. And that one is sent to us from Morton. Thank you. That was good. All right. So now it's time for my favorite portion of the show. Survey says. All right. So now it's time for my favorite portion of the show.

Survey says. All right. So back in episode 97, we asked, how good were the holidays to you? So there's been some time now. So how good were the holidays to you? You guys want to say? Yay? Nay?

I mean, Joe was bah humbug. He doesn't count. Yeah,'t like the holidays yeah mom we're good yeah john good holidays uh so so i got the flu but i got a vr thing so i guess it all evens out okay yeah yeah i'm not using your vr thing it's probably still got ruminants on it oh yeah oh wait what well this is oh yeah so are we gonna well i wasn't sure if you were gonna say but you know well by holidays yeah there's only one holiday i care about oh what was your birthday new year's no no new year's is the only one i care about i know lots of people hate it but that's the only one that's worth anything. That's crazy talk.

Oh, I was joking when I thought you seriously wanted Valentine's Day. Okay. I thought it was Thanksgiving. Yeah. No. St. Patrick's Day. No. All right.

So, how good were the holidays to you and your choices were awesome. I got everything I hoped for. Or I got things I didn't even ask for. Or it was good. I got everything I hoped for, or I got things I didn't even ask for, or it was good. I got everything I purchased or glad to be back at work. Or lastly, I didn't get squat. All right.

So, uh, we'll go around the room starting with Alan. What is your choice? I'm going to say everybody said it was good. I got everything I purchased. Everything I purchased. Let's go with 32%.

32. All right. And remember, for John's benefit, these are Price is Right rules. So you have to make your pick and give me a percentage. And if your percentage goes over, you lose. All right, Joe? Glad to be back at work with 11%. You're in the moon, aren't you?

Even though I know you can't win with 11%. Whatevs. John? So I have to pick the winning one and also the percentage of it? Yeah, we make it doubly hard. I kind of like Alan's one that he chose. It was good. I got everything I purchased.

And he said 32, and this is Price is Right. I kind of like winning that last one, so I'm going to say 33%. That's dirty, man. Okay. So Alan's at 32%. It was good. I got everything I purchased. John's at 33% with it.

It was good. I got everything I purchased. And Joe is at 11% with, I'm glad to be back at work. Well, okay. So, this is totally awkward then. I't know how to like declare a winner i guess i have to say that joe is the winner because he didn't bust yeah oh did was our answer was it i didn't get squat the most popular answer was it was good i got everything I purchased. Okay. Oh. At 31%. Oh, wow.

Oh, I was so hoping that John was going to like one under it. Alan. You should have gone lower so I could have won. Wow. Man. Yeah. That's awesome. Joe was the only one that didn't go over.

I won. I feel like a winner. More importantly, you look like one. Hey, what was second? What was second all day? Awesome. I got everything I hoped for. That's very nice.

Wow, very positive. How many people didn't get squat? Surprisingly, that was 12% of the vote. That's by people. Yeah. Was it 0% for glad to be back at work? Did people actually vote for that one? No, that was actually the third most popular vote at 16%.

Wow. Oh, yeah. There you go, peoples. Whatever. Yeah, that one was also really surprising, too. Curmudgeons. Word. I mean, work is in the name.

Like, you're not supposed to like that. Right. Agreed. Well, you know, they say to find a job that you enjoy and then it won't be work, right? It won't ever be work. Yep. All right. So, with this episode, we ask, hey, what interests you the most?

And your choices are learning the low-level nuts and bolts of how computers and operating systems work, the lowest possible level. Can I build my own computer? Can I build my own OS? Or the highest level possible, subjects like formal algorithms, formal methods, machine learning, artificial intelligence. And lastly, those other options are nice, but I enjoy prototyping and experimenting with all the things broadening my horizons. So we want to get some

we want to pick here? No, not yet. No, we're not supposed to do that. You can't do that. Alright. You can't lead the witness. But I want to know what John's going to say. What am I going to say? I don't know. i don't know where's the olive olive above i mean i like that but yeah i mean i think uh here we go dangerous territory yeah we gotta like we gotta escort the jury out of the out of the courthouse

out of the courtroom but to uh retranslate this it's do you want to deal with the high-level stuff? Do you want to deal with the low-level stuff? Or do you just want to do the wide stuff, like lots of random stuff, lots of technology? But that's the survey. Yeah. It's a nice survey. I like that survey.

I vote for this survey. I like it. This survey brought to you by John Stone. Yeah. I may have influenced a little bit. Touch. May have whined and been like, I'm not doing your podcast unless you do my survey. Yeah.

We would never succumb to such things anyway. You can see the results of any survey by going to that episode and clicking view results on the survey, I think. Yeah, I think it's there. Outlaw said I'm not allowed to do that, so I don't actually know. Oh, man. Well, you mean like without voting? Yeah. Well, I don't vote because you say I'm not allowed to vote.

Oh, yeah. I didn't. Yeah, I know. We can't vote. I don't want you we're not allowed to vote. Oh, yeah. I know. We can't vote. I don't want you guys voting because then that would be cheating. Well, unless you vote right after the thing gets put up. Yes. I don't know.

I don't even know if the results you deliver are actually true because our vote's not counted. Yeah. Trust but verify. That's right. This episode is sponsored by Datadog, a monitoring platform for cloud-scale infrastructure and applications. Now, Datadog provides dashboarding, alerting, application performance monitoring, and log management in one tightly integrated platform so you can get end-to-end visibility quickly. Yeah, and you can visualize key metrics, set alerts to identify anomalies, and collaborate with your team to troubleshoot and fix issues fast. Try it yourself today by starting a free 14-day trial and also receive a free Datadog t-shirt. Head to www.datadog.com slash codingblocks to see how Datadog can provide real-time visibility into your application. Again, visit www.datadog.com slash codingblocks to sign up today.

Well, this time I wanted to play a little variant of a game that we've played before. This time I'm going to call it Up-Down. So I'm going to throw out a thing, and we'll go in order. The order that I specify is john outlaw alan me and we're gonna say i'll say a thing and you say whether you think that's going up or down and you can just leave it at that or you can explain if you want to whatever yes so and this what i wanted to do or what it's going what you're going to do yeah what you think it's going to do yeah so like you with this episode 100,

we've been doing this for like going on six years now. So, you know, think about like five, six years down the road. Do you think this technology is going to be up from where it is now or down? And I have to base this on, you know, going to meetups and talking to people, I guess. Yeah, your biases. Yeah, your biases. Yeah, we love making decisions on bias around here. I know you're a big fan of that.

It's all about feelings, John. This is going to be very hard. For anyone who doesn't know John, John is not a feelings guy, and this question is all about feelings. So this is going to be interesting to see how John responds. I think I'm secretly going to make this be about if I want it to go up or down.

That's fine. That's fine. you just can't tell us that yeah this the subtitle for this episode should be trolling john sorry all right now first one microservices john um you know with the graph ql stuff i mean they're trying to unify all that in a single API. It seems like it's going up, but I've also seen some blogs where they're like, hey, yeah, no, it just kind of sucks in these situations. I still think it's going to go up, though. I mean, if you want to use the cloud or any of that kind of stuff, you're going to have a lot of services behind the scenes, a lot of managed stuff, and a lot of serverless stuff. So I say up. All right. Outlaw.

And what's the timeframe again? Five years, you said? Going on six years. No, no, no, no, no. What's the prediction? Up or down? No, no, no. Five years from now.

Five years from now. Five years from now. Thank you. Okay. So if we're talking about microservices that you're going to implement on your own, I'm definitely saying down. John kind of swayed me, though, with the cloud point of view. I don't want to do microservices, by the way. In my life, it's going down.

But everybody else, they can do it. But I don't want to do it. But your point, though, about using the cloud services, though, if you were to – we've talked in the past about using – like if you were going to move your infrastructure to an AWS, you don't just like spin up a virtual machine and run everything there in AWS. That would cost you a fortune. Instead, you have to use the services that they're providing. So I mean, technically those

could count as microservices. You're just not managing and building them yourself. Up for managed microservices, down for services I have to manage. That's not what he asked. You can't be doing that. That's not what he asked.

I guess, though, I'm going to – man, because the cloud isn't going anywhere. I can't say down. That's what I want to say is down. Should I add another column here for once to say and is actually saying? No, we can't do that. That's crazy. Crazy talk. I guess because of cloud, it's going to be up

yeah it's got to be up it's kind of like new get packages it's like i don't want new get packages in my source but i don't mind using other people's new get okay so i'm going to make this short and sweet you have aws lambdas you have azure functions these things are not going away they're going up yep i'm up as well. Next question. Implementing your own microservices and managing your own microservices. I don't recommend it. That's down. I don't recommend it. Unless you have a team of DevOps,

right? I mean, that's the only way that works. Yep. Yeah. And I just realized, John, by going first,

like you kind of like, you're like, it sucks for you. Like you don't get to hear what everyone else would say. Like you don't get to like, think about it. That stinks. He's the leader. Yeah. You're the the leader so you're at a disadvantage uh sorry

uh monorepo though is the next one what do you think about well some of you guys might know when i think of ron or repos yeah no i mean make it easy on yourself you know and and we've seen microsoft be able to scale these things out google as well make it easy on yourself when you do a release you know just have it all in the same repository so you can have the same version so you know what's running in production but yeah I can see how that's opposite the microservices stuff right

so I'm very much oh but is it up or down yeah up or down I think people are getting wise to this whole like you know too many repos thing and too much to manage, you know. So I think it's going to go down. Yeah, I think so. Yeah.

You think there'll be less mono repos? Oh, no, no. Sorry. I think. That's what I thought you were saying. I think people are going to go back to mono repos. And same with microservices. I think there's going to be a lot less unmanaged microservices, more managed.

But that means you're not managing the source code, right? Yeah. So I'm going to say up on the monorepo too because kind of where you're going on there at the end is that because you're not going to have unmanaged microservices, there's not that code that you have to maintain for those microservices. So, you know, that problem goes away. I am going to say this is going down. And the reason I think it's going down is because I think things like if you've messed around in something like VSTS online, or it's not even VSTS anymore, Azure DevOps, they've made the build chain a whole lot more accessible for your average Joe. And I think that that will, as things improve and as things get better over time,

the monorepo won't be as important because your build tools will all be hooked up together. And so it should allow it to be easier. I think that's my opinion. Managing versions. Version management is an absolute pain. And that's where that's, yeah, that's where I'm thinking that the build tools will help solve some of that stuff, right? Because they'll, they'll make it more obvious because the big pain right now is when things are hidden. And I think as the build tool, the build chains get, get a little bit easier to see and work with, it'll make that less painful. I little bit easier to see and work with it'll

make that less painful i so badly want to argue with that with you on this but i want to hear joe's first uh unfortunately i am also going to say down oh but i i agree with john about everything he said about keeping the versions and keeping everything together i think it absolutely makes sense yep but i do think that things are getting more complicated i keep seeing more and more distributed services that are all focused around kind of like watching the GitHub repo or whatever. And I think that's going to keep getting more complicated. And as apps get more complicated, I think they're going to need more complicated deployment strategies. And I think that kind of aligns nice-ishly with multiple repos.

And I keep going to microservice talks and stuff like meetups. I always ask them like, hey, are your customers doing monorepos or not? And they keep saying, no, they're doing it independently and kind of treating them like silos. So I don't like it, but I'm going to stay down. Yeah, I say it's highly connected to microservices. So if you believe people are going to be creating a lot more microservices, and obviously they're not going to put it in the same repo because, like you just said, the way your DevOps is going to work is it's going to say, hey, give me a repo and deploy all that.

So there's no way you could do monorepo, really. I guess you could, but it would be if you're using Git, it's going to check out the whole thing. And that's just kind of silly. Well, you can with the build pipelines. You can tell it to look at a particular SLM file or a project or whatever. So you can set those things up, but it's not as natural, right? Like it's not like it wants you to pick a repo and deploy it that way. I would say that if it depends on how your things are deployed, like what the product is,

the things that are bundled together as a product that have those dependencies, that source that you own, then they should be in the same repo so that you can handle the versioning. But if they aren't together, right? Like if you were some part of a company where you have some service to other people in your company, maybe it's a microservice, but I'm not sure's a microservice, but, you know, like, I'm not sure of a good example, but the only one that comes to mind would be a bad one idea, which would be like a search engine. But, you know, like whatever that thing is that you provide,

if that's all you provide, then yeah, sure, you can version it independently. But if they have to version together, man, I think you're in for a world of hurt if you're not keeping it together. I'm not disagreeing with some of the things. Things that version together should stay together. Let's put it that way. Yeah, they're tightly coupled and you've already got a monorepo. You just don't know it. Yeah.

I always vote for less and then try to convince me to do more. Yeah, that's a good pivot to something else. Do another priority. Yagni. Yeah. Kiss. All right. Well, John, how do you feel about WebAssembly?

Oh, God. I love WebAssembly or at least the idea behind it where there's like this architecture that you could target like you would, you know, Intel or something like that. But it all can run in the browser. And it just like opens the door to so much stuff. You know, even talking about, you know, choosing your favorite language. I mean, we're all saying JavaScript, but that's because, you know,

it's really hard for JavaScript to work with other stuff. But with WebAssembly, it opens the door where you could write some stuff in Rust and it compiles down to this, right? And they could all work together. They could be on the same packaging system, you know? And there's all these examples where you can have WebAssembly running on the edge or even in like an Ethereum blockchain network where it can just run fully decentralized. So WebAssembly is amazing to me because it's coming from like the user experience to design the architecture. Then, you know, so I say that's going up.

And the faster that goes up, the better our lives will be. But yeah. What do you think, Alon? Yeah, I'm all for it. I think maybe not as quite as enthusiastic as John is with my answer, but I'm definitely in the up category only because I think it's like going to just like open up development way, you know, ways for you to develop.

I am also going to say up and it's primarily because of the fact that you get native running type code, like at hardware speeds, it's really close to the hardware. And I think what you're going to see is similar to JavaScript, where there's these transpilers to various different things. There's going to be transpilers for a lot of things into web assembly to get that,

that low level hardware performance. Right. I think that's just going to get bigger and bigger over time. Yeah. And I'm with you on up here. I think I've heard some really good stories about like companies like AutoCAD moving some of the products and stuff to websites, which is amazing. And, you know, video editing, the things that you still need a desktop for a laptop for are, you know, slowly are suddenly able to move there. And so I think the sky's the limit there.

All in agreement. Yeah, it's like a universal architecture. Yeah. And it's funny because, like, you know, we talk about how JavaScript is kind of ruling the world and it's going to keep ruling the world. But assembly, WebAssembly really opens the door. And so the next one I got here is native programming. So I guess that kind of covers what I was thinking. What do you think about native programming, John?

Are people going to be doing more of it or less of it, right? Oh, so I guess these are kind of playing into each other, maybe. You know, I've always seen this as like a life cycle kind of thing. Like when you first start a project, you're not going to do native programming. You're going to prototype the heck out of things, try to get something working. And then the parts that you need to secure more, do non-functionals performance, you know,

it kind of moves in the native stuff because then your abstraction just doesn't work, you know? So I, I see as part of evolution of a project, I guess. So do you think that's going to be more or less, or I guess you could say the same.

I mean, I'm going to say down because the abstractions might get better over time. Yeah. I imagine we'll get better at these higher level abstractions and you won't have to get native as much. But yeah. I'm lost again. I think the question needs more clarification, though. Are we talking about like native programming for web development? No, no. Native to the OS, native to whatever the device is swift versus some javascript

are you going to program for ios you're going to program for android you're going to program for windows yeah but then okay that's why i'm saying that because i was thinking specifically about like mobile development right like if you're doing ios development for example it are does swift count as native programming to you yes or are you saying unless it was like an assembly? No, Swift. Swift would be native. It's only iOS. Whatever the recommended approach is for programming.

And it feels like it's very targeted, the mobile conversation, right? Should you do it in JavaScript or should you do it in... I would say as a whole, I would say it's going to keep going up. You think native, you're going to be programming more native than... Maybe not me personally, but across the industry in five years yeah because you're going to have more uh you know self-driving cars you know autonomous cars right that's not going to be done in javascript you hope well what do you think that would be done in like uh well i mean i guess according to your what we're defining here though is like you think that would be done in? Well, I mean, I guess according to what we're defining here, though, is like C, for example, would be considered a native programming, right? For Linux, right?

So I guess the thing is, if you were talking about iOS, you're talking about Swift and what's it called? The C version? Objective C. Objective C. That would be your iOS, right? Or your Mac world. If you're doing Windows, you might be doing either, you could be doing C Sharp, you could be doing one of those type things. And if you're doing Android, you're going to be doing Java. I guess it's more about the,

what's the standard language for any particular OS? Are you going to write it individually? If you had an app, are you going to write it individually for every platform type thing? Yeah, and that's where I'm really struggling. What does this question mean? Because if you think about this question as native meaning that it's not – when I hear native, it almost sounds like it's not portable to something else. Yeah, it's supposed to be specific to the architecture. So Swift definitely fits that definition of it being specific to an iPhone. For example, you can't take it and run it on your Android device. You can't take it and run it on your S9, right?

But then by that definition, well, then Java is out because you can write Java code and run it on multiple platforms. So it's not native. No, but JavaScript is any of the scripting languages would by that same definition be out because they're not native. So Python, JavaScript, right? No, but in fairness, if you took Java and you wrote it, if you use the Android SDK, that's not portable, right? So, yeah, Java is portable, but writing to the Android SDK is not. I think the key to this question was if you had to create a mobile app, would you do one in Java and one in Swift? Or would you do one in JavaScript and get it to compile for both?

I think that's the core of this one. Yeah. But those other things are interesting. Yeah. Like someone had to write WebAssembly and somebody has to still be writing drivers. Well, then in that case, you would just write it in JavaScript and prototype it. So you're saying native's going down if under the the framework that you just laid out with the phone example where you wanted to create something there you know yeah yeah so i'm in that same ballpark because i think while there are going to be people that write native because they need the performance i think that a vast majority of work is going to be going into

writing native platforms that support the cross-platform coding you know the the zamorins of the world the cordovas and that kind of thing i think there'll be a lot of effort in that so that you can write a single app that only needs to be tweaked a little bit for each platform so i too think native programming is going down yeah because the opposite is like are you going to be programming things that are more cross platform, right? Higher level of abstractions get more bang for your bus than that. Like I would hope that we're learning something,

right. The in tuning are these, these abstractions. Right. And, uh, to, yeah,

I'm, I'm also down. And I think it's pretty low already. And I think it's super important. It just seems like the tools just keep getting better and better, so you can do more stuff high level. And even things like hardware like Raspberry Pis and Arduinos are kind of more general purpose, and you're using software more and more.

Yep. So, yeah, that's what I'm thinking. What about the PC Master Race, PC gaming? Is that going up or down? Are we comparing it to consoles, or are we just saying PC gaming in general? Or even mobile. Oh, interesting. Okay.

So are we saying is PC gaming still going to be a big thing five years from now, basically? Is it going up or down? Can I go first? I want to go first. I want to go first. That's your call, John. Can he jump you in line? Can I go first?

You may, sir. I want to go first. That's your call, John. Can he jump you in line? Can I go first? You may, sir. I want to go first. Definitely. This is either up or at least remains the same. But definitely, I'm going to say up. There was even just recently an article where Microsoft was asking how they could make the Windows gaming environment better. Right? So they're working to make to improve on that platform that's not going anywhere all right so up john so i'm gonna for other

reasons so i haven't really been a pc gamer for many years like i'm all about the uh sitting at a couch with a controller but then recently right i got this uh vr uh setup and i've been buying more games more frequently now so it's just now that vr is you know usable setup it's just amazing and i just i keep buying every game i see and keep playing it so i'm back to being a pc gamer because of this whole new way of playing games all right so he's an up i'm also going with up and i think mine's for a slightly different reason i don't think i don't think that the gaming market maybe and i may be completely wrong here but i don't know that it's as strong on pcs it is on consoles in general, but I think almost all the innovation happens on the PC first because they have to get that stuff out there. So, and it then

trickles down to the consoles, right? Like this RTX thing, right? Like anybody that doesn't know anything about the new RTX graphics cards from Nvidia, it's ray tracing. And if you don't know what ray tracing is, you should go watch a YouTube video on it, on what this does, right? It's stuff that you don't realize how immersive it makes an environment feel because you didn't know you were missing it until you see this stuff in action, right? Like what's going on with these RTX cards is the ray tracing. So that's light shading and development it's going to happen in the pc market because they can charge more for that stuff there because the people that want the latest and greatest they're willing to go out and spend 600 for that video card to play the next 60 video game

that doesn't happen on a console right somebody's going to spend three four hundred dollars on a console they just want it to work so that's my. So it's going up or it will continue to go up. Well, Fortnite says down to me. And WebAssembly, I think, also means down. I think that things keep leaning more and more towards platform independent and tools like Unity, which are really good or make it really easy to write games that are going to run on multiple devices. So that's why I think PC gaming is going to be down.

I think people are going to be able to play the way they want to play on the device they want to play. And hopefully, if PlayStation particularly ever gets their stuff together, they'll be able to play on whatever console, whatever PC, whatever you want together. Money's involved in that. Yeah. Nothing's happening. Yeah, we'll see. And last one is Silicon Valley, by which I mean just kind of like the physical location of San Francisco being a major tech hub.

Do we think that San Francisco and even other cities like that, major tech hub cities like other ones? Seattle. Yeah, are those going to keep becoming, or I should say, are they going to stay like those major sources of innovation? Like if you want to be a, you know, working on the cool stuff, you've got to be moved to like a New York or San Francisco, or you think they're going to be heading down and it's going more

distributed. My vote is that it goes down because I don't want to move over there because it costs too much money. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, that's my vote. I can't really say if it's going up or down. I don too much money. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah.

I mean, that's my vote. I can't really say if it's going up or down. I don't really know. Yeah. I heard they're going to build some houses, you know, and try to bring the real estate prices down. I don't know. I'm fine with that. Yeah.

I mean, I'm with you on, you know, in spirit, John, but I don't see it changing in the next five years. So, I guess that means it's up. Now, I am saddened that TJ Miller had to leave the show. So, no, I'm just kidding. Oh. The other Silicon Valley. I got a reference for once. I, too, am also going to say up.

I think it's just the problem is the innovation. It's a snowball effect, right? Like all the people are there, so more people want to go there to be a part of it. So I think it's going to continue to go up until there's just like a crazy thing where people are like, this is stupid. Nobody can afford to live here anymore. Right. So, I mean, the same thing happened in Seattle. Like, it's one of the most expensive places to live in the U.S. now because all the tech companies are up there.

I don't see that trend changing. So, I have another comment I want to make. So, there's this big, like, you know, blockchain movement, like, decentralized kind of companies and stuff like that. Yeah. And, you know, a lot of people work remote now. Like, you can do that now. It's, it's a lot easier. You can work anywhere around the world. Oh, it totally is. It totally gets easier every day. So, but if you're, if you're doing a startup and you want to get noticed,

are you going to do it from, you know, Jackson, Mississippi, or are you going to fly out to, to San Francisco and try and get in front of the people that are leading the tech revolution over there? I'm going to get it on the top of Hacker News. I'm going to do some other form of marketing. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, I think it's a legit thing that things are becoming more distributed. But I don't think that trend is going down anytime soon. So I do think it's going down.

And I think a lot of it actually does have to do with hardware. So I think about when Bill Gates and Steve Jobs came to power, you kind of had to have access to these machines. In the 80s and 90s, that was really uncommon. So your geographic location and the opportunities available to you were really important. Of course, opportunities are still really important. But I do think that because most people have a cell phone, at least in the US, and computers have gotten cheaper to where you can get a machine that can do really good coding for less money than ever before. And every year, I think that's getting lower and getting easier. I think that it's just kind of leading to a more distributed future.

And I know some of the most passionate and intelligent and some of the best coders I know live in Northwest Georgia or Louisiana or Wyoming or whatever. And so I hate the thought that these really passionate, driven, smart people are kind of being left out in the cold by these large communities like San Francisco or New York or whatever. And I think because of the tools and because of just kind of the way like, you know, crazy capitalism and new companies kind of spin up, think that that's going to be changing so i i'm going to say that uh it's going down and that things are going to get quote-unquote better i think that depends though partly on like the line of work though right yeah

like with what you're saying like in your example of uh you know the early days of computers right and you made the steve jobs and Wozniak reference there. I mean, you could say that would be something similar to if you were working in self-driving cars, right? Then you have to have access to the physical vehicle and to the test track or area that you're using to even try out know, try out ideas before you take it out on the real, the real roads. Right. If you are interested in, you know,

doing things for space exploration, right. Hey, guess what? You're, you're moving and where NASA is or, you know, JPL is,

you're not doing that from your home. Yeah. I mean like, you know, in the eight're not doing that from your home yeah i mean like you know in the 80s like your college probably had computers but your house didn't and then eventually the house did and now like all our pockets have computers well my point though is it's it's the analogy though is that's the type of work it's the type of job so the type of development yeah if the type of development that you're doing is uh distributed in nature, like, you know, if you're, for example, just doing website development, then yeah, sure. Fine. Yeah. You could, you could totally, I could, I could totally see you having a job for like a stack exchange, for example,

you know, working remotely for them. Right. But if you wanted to work on the space shuttle, you know, and write the code for the spatial like that, you might have need to have a little bit more hands on to the actual physical pieces of that puzzle. Yeah. So I've even worked with like hardware, hardware people, like people working on the Kindle and stuff like that. And I was like, Oh yeah, you're probably getting to play with all this hardware. They're like, no, look, I just pull up the simulation and here it is, you know, dropping on the floor. And like, so they're running all these different software simulations because it's way cheaper to like simulate it. Than having hardware.

Play with the hardware. Right. And they can run way more simulations because that's how a lot of this stuff works. Yeah. And even past the hardware nowadays, though, I think really what it boils down to is high-speed internet. The ability to have high-speed communications makes it to where you can be more available. Things are just easier. We can have live video conferences all the way across the world, right?

It's that kind of right-now ability that I think is changing everything. But I still don't think the trend is going down. I guarantee you in five years, San Francisco is still going to be the hotbed. Seattle is still going to be a hotbed. I don't see that changing. I agree. Yeah, and just to be clear, I want to just make sure – I still think that there's a huge horrible gap and disparity of opportunities for people, especially around the world.

I was mostly focused on U.S. cities just because my geography is terrible. But I don't think that that's good. And I just think that it's going to get better. I'm hopeful that it's going to get better. We'll see. So do we get to tally up our scores here? Or is that later? Or is that now?

Or do the scores matter? We'll move on to the next thing while he tallies that stuff up. Oh, okay. So who had the next topic? Well, yeah, this one was mine. I just wanted to share, like, you know, we've talked throughout the show that my love of the dark themes in IDEs and whatnot, and now within the latest version of macOS, Mojave,

they've added in support for light and dark theme. And then Joe had to go and share this tweet with me from that, hey, you might enjoy your dark theme, but light themes are more accessible. And actually has some numbers here and links to a Stack Exchange question and answer about why it's actually better on your eyes to use light themes. So I guess now I've got to switch. I can't have nice things, and I wanted to thank you, Joe. Yeah, and just to be honest, too, if you have a website that has a black background and white text, I will immediately close it. It like burns into my eyes. It's like I have this ghosting effect. I'm like, all right, you got to go. It's really weird. I prefer the dark theme to program in. But I agree. Like if I hit content that is that that monochromatic inverse, it bugs me. I can't do it.

Yeah. I guess I'm going to – I'm definitely going to switch to the light theme for a while and see how it goes and see what happens. But it was really curious to me because when I was reading the answer here – because the thing for me is like when i look at these you know the white screen it's like so much light that immediately my eyes are just like i can't even focus it's just you're i'm blinding i'm being blinded right now but um you know the one of the things that was in this article and consistent with something that my doctor said is like you know obviously you can see that i'm

wearing glasses right and my doctor said that you, you know, obviously you can see that I'm wearing glasses, right? And my doctor said that, you know, there's this problem with like the muscle in your eye trying to focus, right? Like it just kind of being lazy and not wanting to focus, right? And, you know, there was something similar to that that was actually in the answer. And I was like, oh, so maybe it would be better if I did use a light theme and then it's kind of like exercising your eye muscle, you know, in that regard. But it's easier for it to focus as well, right? I think that's the key part. They're saying light themes are clearer for people with an astigmatism, which is 50% of

people. A lot of people have that. So yeah, so I'm going to give it a try, but I'm going to include a link to that in the show notes. And, you know, if you've ever questioned, you know, like, hey, are my eyes, you know, obviously our eyes get worse as we age, right? But, you know, if you're questioning like,

hey, maybe this is going a little bit too fast because I've been definitely a fan of the dark themes on everything that would ever let me use it for as long as I can remember now. And now I'm beginning to wonder like, hey, maybe this is going a little bit too fast because I've been definitely a fan of the dark themes on everything that would ever let me use it for as long as I can remember now. And now I'm beginning to wonder like, oh, are these two things related? Right. So I blame Joe. Do you guys do that thing where like at 7 p.m. it'll like remove all the blues from all your devices and stuff like that?

I have it do it on my cell phone, but it actually kind of drives me crazy. It doesn't look right. My desktop, my laptops, it does it on everything. Yeah, I have it do it on my cell phone, but it actually kind of drives me crazy because it doesn't look right. My desktop, my laptops, it does it on everything. Yeah, I don't do it on those. Yeah, I have it turned on on every device that I do it. Like in Mojave, it's called Night Shift. I think it's called Night Shift on iOS as well. Gonna be some sweet

times. It wouldn't be episode 100 without that person. That is so hilarious. What is going on right now? Yeah, baby. The Commodores. We're going to have to isolate that.

We need a link. Wait, you guys don't remember that song? Oh, no. No. Are you kidding me? I remember. Okay. I didn't want to, but I remember.

That's Lionel Richie, man. Are you kidding me? All right. So you have the tall's Lionel Richie, man. Are you kidding me? All right. So you have the tallies, sir? Oh, yeah, I do. I scrolled too far. Okay. So here's the tallies by the numbers.

Oh, crap. I scrolled down again. Okay. So John ended up with a score of positive two. So you think more things are going up than are going down? I'm a very positive person. Not as much as outlaw. Oh,

ha. Outlaw had five ups and one down. Very nice. Yeah. Nice. So the only down there was a native programming and we all sit down for that one. So,

you know, well, I got talked into it down. Yeah. Alan is tied with john for uh for the optimism uh they were different so it was positive too and uh you guys did differ on the mono repos and you did differ on uh silicon valley so the physical location and uh so debbie downer uh yeah i'm I'm the negative Ned. So I have negative two.

The only two that I said were up were microservices and WebAssembly. We all, by the way, agreed that WebAssembly was all up. Very cool. Was that the only one that we all agreed on? No. So that we all agreed that WebAssembly was on its way up and native programming was on its way down. Yeah, that makes sense. And that doesn't mean if you're a native programmer or anything that

you're going to have to get a new job or anything. It just means that you might be getting more. Your paycheck might be going up because it's just not as common. I still say that we all agreed on native programming is with an asterisk

because we all agreed on it with that particular circumstance that you laid out. Otherwise, I was in the up. And we can all agree too. I think that we all think native programming is way cooler and those are the real programmers, right? Are you kidding me?

What if I design a chip that runs WebAssembly? Now it's native programming again, right? Which could happen Now it's native programming again, right? Yep, that's right. Which could happen. It's real programming. Wait, but wouldn't that just be... I think I just confused outlaw here.

Yeah, because I was like, wait a minute. That would just be any chip that already exists, right? Because WebAssembly is the native... Yeah, it all goes down to C. Am I wrong? No, WebAssembly is C code. I feel like he's trying to trick me. Alright, so we will have links to some of the topics that we've discussed here in our Resources We Like section.

And with that, we will head into Alan's favorite portion of the show. It's the tip of the week. Yep, and we're going to let John lead with his tip this time yeah so my tip is you know one of the we've been talking about um how you can be remote nowadays and work well you can also be remote and do your master's degree and a lot of you know big names in education are you know are doing this thing where you get your master's online in computer science. And I've been doing that for the past, maybe a year or two, maybe a little longer. And I've been learning a ton, you know, just all kinds of random stuff, you know, that you might not learn on the day job and then you can kind of dive deeper. So like last week,

I was doing distributed spanning trees and I got some experience doing FinTech and machine learning algorithms and stuff that they didn't really teach me in my undergraduate, but are now popular now. So you get to stay up to date. So that's kind of my tip of the week. Check out some of the master's programs that they have out there. It's really hardcore stuff. It's really hard too. And it forces you to stay up to 3am every once in a while and do some homework. That's the way to 3 a.m. every once in a while and do some homework. That's the way to sell it. Yeah. All right.

So for mine, being that I'm going to be speaking down at – well, I assume I'm going to be speaking at Orlando Code Camp at the end of this month, my particular tip is around the topic that I'm going to have, which is Kafka Connect. So my talk is going to be on Apache Kafka and how you can sort of tame data pipelines and all that. And one of the ways that you do it is they have all these connectors that allow you to, instead of writing custom code to move data in and out of Kafka, you can basically just set up declarative configurations to say, I want data to come into Kafka from this other source and just set up the connection information. And I want it to go out to another destination setting up these configurations. And so there is a hub similar to Docker Hub.

Everybody seems to have a hub nowadays. So there's one at confluent.io slash hub, and they have a ton of different connectors that allow you to move data in and out of Kafka. So if you're interested in, in, you know, easing your data pipelines, I highly recommend checking this thing out. Very cool. All right. Well, with that, uh, you know, thank you again, John, for joining us. And, uh, yeah, if you haven't already, uh, you'll be sure to subscribe to us on iTunes, Stitcher and more using your favorite podcast app. Um, if you will haven't left us a review, you can head to www.codingblocks.net slash

review where you can find some helpful links. Yep. And while you're up there, definitely check out our show notes, which Mike does an amazing job of putting those together for every episode, our examples, discussions, and more.

And send your feedback, questions, and rants to all the people much smarter than me in the Slack channel, codingblocks.slack.com. And make sure to follow us on Twitter at codingblocks or head over to codingblocks.net. You can find all of our social links at the top of the page

gonna be some sweet yeah