Coding Blocks - We

Episode Date: December 7, 2020

We discuss the things we're excited about for 2021 as Michael prepared for a different show, Joe can't stop looking at himself, and Allen gets paid by the tip of the week.

You're listening to Coding Blocks, episode 147. Subscribe to us on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, wherever you like to find your podcasts. And hey, if you can, leave us a review, but I guess it's only iTunes that allows that anymore. I don't get it. Well, yeah, that's true. That's true. I'm all thrown off my game now.

Sorry. I'm so bummed about that. Derailed. If you go to codingblocks.net, you can find show notes, example discussion, and a bunch of other links. And you can also send your feedback questions and rants to comments at codingblocks.net. Yep. And you can follow us on Twitter at Coding Blocks, Facebook also, facebook.com slash

codingblocks, or head to www.codingblocks.net and find all our social links at the top of the page. With that, I'm Alan Underwood. I'm Joe Zach. And I'm Miguel Bendito. I forgot that I've been wanting to share that one for a while. That's pretty excellent. Yeah. This episode is sponsored by Command Line Heroes, a podcast that tells the epic true tales of developers, programmers, hackers, geeks, and open source rebels who are revolutionizing the technology landscape.

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everyone needs speed, automation, and reliability when things go wrong. So, Joseph Underwood, you're supposed to bring us in here, Joseph Underwood. Oh, man, I'm going to put Jay-Z there. Yeah, but you didn't. And guess what? No, no, no, no. You can't do that.

Okay, whatever. All right, so here we go. We're going to talk about in this episode what we're excited about in this coming year. All right. And with that miserable failure, let's move on to the news section here. Yeah. So like we said last time, pour one out for Stitcher reviews. I guess that's no longer a thing anymore.

And I'm wondering like how much longer is Apple going to do it you think real same thing yeah i wonder like if that's going to be on the chopping block um but hey while we can uh share the the uh you know reviews with everybody uh you know we will continue to do so. And so from iTunes, we have 8-Bit Toaster not response and master role. That was well done. Thank you. Yeah, like I really thought you cut out there. That was awesome.

I think that's how that one's supposed to be. That's how, like, in my mind, how I read it. For those that didn't catch it, it almost looks like it's supposed to be, like, no response, but it's not. And then, I guess, like, the beginning of response. It's cut off. That's cool.

All right. Well, hey, I got to say, too, we did an episode about Game Jams last episode. And now we're actually doing a Game Jam. And we have dates and we have a sign-up form. So you can go and sign up for our first-ever jam it's january 21st to the 24th if you go to cooking box.net slash events and we've got a big link there and you can go and sign up it's going to be on itch.io and it's going to be super awesome yeah and we've got double digit subscribers or people that are planning on doing this already and And I think the three of us were even talking about taking that time off.

So yeah, this should be a good time. And, and I've never done any game development whatsoever. So don't let that hinder you. If you're like, yo, I'm not,

I haven't done any video game development. I haven't, I don't think outlaw have you video game development. I mean, other than the, the one thing that we talked about last episode, you know, for a class in school, and that was it. So Jay-Z's the only one. And I wouldn't even consider that, like, you know, quote, game development. It was just, like, you know, the premise of it was something of a game, but it was really more just learning to, you know, draw on the screen.

Totally. So, Jay-Z, you're the only one with any sort of real-world development with games because I know you've done the Rogue stuff. You've done some YouTube videos and that kind of stuff. So, don't let that deter anybody. If you have any bit of interest in this, definitely come join us. It should be fun. Yeah, I mean, if you're a Joe Hack or a John Carmack, either way, come on in and have some fun.

Excellent. Alright, so I guess we're talking about stuff that we're excited about getting into next year. We tend to do episodes like this. We've done it a few times and you know, I'm just done with 2020. I don't even care about it anymore. I'm not even thinking about it anymore. So I'm thinking about what's next.

And, you know, that's what we're doing today. So here are the things that I am excited about, uh, coming up next year. And I want to do more of, and the first is, uh, I've got this kind of set up in categories. So my first category is interactive events. And one thing that, uh, the year that should not be named has taught me is that, uh, online meetups just kind of aren't enough in my opinion. So, you know, there were a lot of people staying home. There were a lot of events that moved online. There were a lot of conferences that did that. And the thing is, if there's no interactivity with the audience, then you might as well be watching YouTube, right? And I can

watch YouTube on my own time. There's no incentive for me to go and join your minute but if I don't get something out of being there alive so if I can ask questions if I can interact with the people or discussion group or something like that and that's fine but if I'm just watching a video I'm gonna do it while I'm walking the dogs I'm not gonna sit there so I'm very interested in that kind of thing and I think a lot of people got that memo and so I think we're gonna see a lot of events getting better. I've already seen some of the events that happened this year. I had a lot more interactivity and not just chat rooms, but also ways to kind of interact either by voting or I forget.

Confluent did a lot of really cool stuff at the Kafka conference. And it was just really cool. And so I'm hoping to see more of that kind of stuff and also kind of along that vein i'm really interested in streaming so i've been doing some stuff on twitch learning in public game jams of course we mentioned at the top of the show we talked about it last episode and then yeah i just kind of talked about where the direction i think things are going to go and so i think it's going to be really interesting. And I think that this year has shown us that we can do really cool, interactive, better experiences for people all around the world, not just limited to our individual areas.

Because meetups are great, but I do really think that the whole big benefit of going to meetups in your area is about the networking, not so much about the content. So it sounds like we need to, like like host some sort of webinar or something. Like I know we do some of these virtual meetups, but like that's one thing I always liked about webinars is you might be talking about and teaching on a particular subject, but it does encourage some interactivity, right? Like, Hey, if you have a question, raise your hand, pop in here, whatever. So yeah, I like that. Well, there's a couple things

that come to mind. One, we haven't done one in a long time. So, I guess I could say we used to do it or maybe we still do it and we just haven't done it in a long time. But where we would have the, I don't even remember what we called them now. The community talks. Yeah. We did those. Those were fun, which I think those are kind of similar maybe a little bit to what you're talking about. But the one that I think is super on par with what you're talking about,

Joe, that we did at the beginning of the year were the, the live streaming that you and I did where we would like get a topic like, um, uh, I think we did Apache drill, right? And we just dove in and started like, okay,

let's figure out like, what can we do with this thing? You know? And, uh, that was a lot of fun. Like it was, you know,

neither of one of us had any like real, you know, uh, production level experience with it. We're just like, okay, I've heard about this thing. I, you know, know a little bit about, you know, surface level, what this thing is. Let's, let's make it do some stuff. And, you know, that was kind of neat.

Yeah, absolutely. I got a lot out of it. There's something about, um, kind of having the interaction that makes you learn more. They kind of, people in the audience will ask questions that maybe you kind of took for granted or maybe haven't thought about. And sometimes they'll lead you in a different direction to make you, it just kind of – people in the audience will ask questions that maybe you kind of took for granted or maybe you haven't thought about. And sometimes they'll lead you in a different direction. It just kind of challenges you. And so I want to figure out how to do that. And obviously, like, you know, we do a podcast. So, like, this is kind of something that's been our domain forever. But I always kind of assume that, like, if you're listening to the podcast, you're probably walking a dog or you're probably, you know, commuting or doing something else.

And so I think that this is the first time that some of those other events and other, you know, meetups and things have kind of had to deal with that and, you know, have, have struggled to kind of come up with ways to interact with people and make those events special. And so, uh, you know, I'm, I'm just interested to see what's, what's coming up and I don't know, maybe one day, one of these days we'll be, uh, twitching the episodes. The six figure developer did, uh, the other day. Oh, really? Oh, that's right. You know what? I actually did that with him when, whenever I did the episodes. The Six Figure Developer did. It happened. The other day. Oh, really? Oh, that's right.

You know what? I actually did that with them whenever I did the episode. It actually wasn't for the Six Figure Developer. It was for their St. Pete meetup group, though, and they did that on Twitch. Yeah. So, yeah, it's interesting.

So you're telling me I get to go buy new hardware for the live Twitch? So, yeah, I'll go ahead. Yeah, exactly. Oh, I'm sure you're heartbroken. Oh, I get to shop for new hardware? Oh, man. All right, so that was my first big bulletin there

was just interactive events, like how to do them, how to participate, how to make them happen. My second one is just kind of pushing more into DevOps and SRE-type realms. And this is not a career goal. This is what I want to be doing on the streams or on the weekends. These are the things I want to be playing with.

And it's kind of hard because with DevOps and SRE stuff, it's like you can't really do that. It doesn't really make sense to do that stuff alone in a bedroom. This is like cloudy-type things or things that require scale or lots of services. It doesn't really make sense to do that in the same way. It's not so personal as, say, a website or something. But there are so many really great tools, especially in Kubernetes. Anywhere that starts with a K, there is a library out there or a tool or a plug-in or a management suite that works with Kubernetes that starts with the letter K.

Hey, by the way, let's back up real quick on this. For people that are not familiar with what SRE is, that's Site Reliability Engineer, yes? Yep. Okay, yeah. So for anybody out there, that's people that are sort of responsible for keeping your application alive. Yeah, and it ties in with a lot of things that we talked about, like telemetry, observability, just being more in touch with the data and operations of your system. I think there's a lot of really cool stuff to do in there.

If I'm going to be playing around with something on a stream, I want it it to be a Grafana or Prometheus or I don't know, something kind of dealing with one of these realms. And like last year, remember I said a big goal, like working more with streaming systems. And I got a lot out of that at the beginning of the year. So I was working with like beam and Kafka and drill. We did the drill stuff.

I guess that's not really streaming, but that was kind of part of that effort. I did some stuff with GraphQL's description. So basically just trying to kind of go after things that were streaming. And so this year, it's like this is kind of the theme I want to go after. And Kubernetes is a huge part of that. And also testing. So performance testing, integration.

And so it's going to be a challenge because it's hard to do that stuff on your own. But I just want to spend some more time playing in the ecosystem of things like Chaos Mesh or you know, just some of the cool tools I hear about with Kubernetes all the time. And that I've kind of got like a a weak, I call it a soft goal of getting the

CCAD, whichever it stands for. Certified Kubernetes Administrator Is it Administrator? Certified Kubernetes administrator. Is it administrator? I can't remember now. Oh, I found it. Certified Kubernetes application developer.

Application developer. Okay. Yeah. And for me, I don't want to be a Kubernetes developer for the next five years. That's not part of my big career path. But I want to be a Kubernetes developer for the next five years. Like that's not like part of my big career path, but I want to be strong in this stuff. I want to be able to sit down and diagnose a problem without thinking about or tripping or stumbling on the technologies. Like I just want to be really fluent and have this just as like a,

something in my pocket for when I need it. You know, not to go too off on a side tangent here, I know that Outlaw, you had mentioned that you would love to do like a series on Kubernetes. And I'm totally down with that because I think in short for me, because I've heard people say that Kubernetes is overkill, right? You don't need Kubernetes or whatever. I don't know about you guys, but one of the reasons why I really, really like Kubernetes is because they have prescribed ways of doing so many things, like log gathering, you know, something that's almost always a mess in applications that people sort of home grow or build over years, right? Like this logs over here, that logs over here.

Where's it going? How's it getting gathered? You know, how do I find this stuff? Like in Kubernetes, there is a way that that's done. And you just kind of get it for free just for using their environment, right? And so like there's so many little, I don't even know if you call them intangibles,

but so many things that you sort of get just by buying into that ecosystem that I don't even know if you call them intangibles, but so many things that you sort of get just by buying into that ecosystem that I don't necessarily buy it that it's overkill. I almost say I buy it because it standardizes the way you have to think about your applications. And so you just kind of do things right because you're sort of forced into that world. Yeah, I agree with that. And I think that Kubernetes is going to mature a lot really fast. It's going to keep going. And I think it's there now.

I think it's production ready. Obviously, lots of companies are doing things with that. And many tens of thousands or 100,000 plus pod environments. And they're doing great with it. And that's all good. But I think that there's still a lot of room in the ecosystem to make things in Kubernetes approachable and easy for people. I know Linode is doing really good things, DigitalOcean,

of course GKE, Amazon, all these different services are making it easier and more accessible and cheaper to get started with Kubernetes. And so I think we're just going to continue to see that trend. So I think we're going to see things like Heroku spin up where you can type these three commands and be running up with Kubernetes. And so I think we're just going to continue to see that trend. So I think we're going to see things like Heroku spin up where you can type these three commands and be running up in Kubernetes. And I want to be kind of closer to the crest that way. I think it's probably accepted.

We're not exactly on the cutting edge of – you don't have to explain what Kubernetes is anymore at this point, I think. But I do think it's still early enough there to do some good stuff. Would you say that Kubernetes is the new Docker? I mean, since Docker is the new Git, maybe. Yeah. There's probably an article coming. I mean, I will tell you, I think I might have mentioned this.

Back when the Microsoft MVP Summit was actually in person, which wasn't this year but the previous, at the time they were talking about high availability SQL Server. And one of the first things the guy said when he was talking was like, how many people in this room knows Kubernetes, right? And it's a room full of SQL Server people. Like it's data engineers and data administrators and that kind of thing. And almost nobody raises their hand and is like, if you don't know it, get with the program and know it because it's the future of everything that everybody's doing. And this was somebody at Microsoft working on Azure platform, go all in on this. So when you have

companies out there like AWS that has their own Kubernetes offering Azure, I'm sure everybody does now because it won. That's, it was basically Docker swarm or that. And I think there were a few other competing technologies, but it's not even close. So yeah. Anyway, didn't want to go too far off on that, but there are more reasons than just, hey, it's the cool new thing. There's a lot of good reasons to even consider it. Yeah, and think about this too. So if you're an application developer,

I think a lot of people still think of Kubernetes as being just the thing that runs your code. But there's really a lot more opportunity here. If you think about operators, and so I'm not equipped to really give a good definition of what an operator is if you've never seen one before. But a basic example is that an operator is an abstraction. It's kind of a custom

object that you can add into your Kubernetes environment. And you can do things like issue custom commands. So if you have a database operator, then you can issue a command to do a backup, for example, or to add a node or do these things and it abstracts away what's happening underneath. And so as an application developer, I just imagine like, wow, if my application had an operator, I could create all these custom hooks to to let the people who use my application do all these really cool big heavy architectural things and control my application from kubernetes like i i want to

know how to do that yeah exactly i just kind of hand the keys over and see you later yeah when you wanted to like kubectl uh backup jay-'s cool app, then it's always going to be backed up the same way, right? Yeah. Right. And I think to paint a little bit more detail there, because he said it's abstracted away. What he means is like, I know that you've looked at the crunchy data operator outlaw.

And typically when you go to backup a database, there might be a whole slew of steps that really happen if you're going to do it manually, right? Like take the database offline, disconnect all the users, you know, move some data files here, do this, do this, do this. That what he's saying, that's abstracted away. Basically, all those steps get run for you programmatically behind the scenes. But the only thing you had to say was backup database, right? And then it's going to go do, you know, steps A through Z and then move back into where it was.

So it gives you that, that freedom to sort of wrap things in a nice pretty way so that you don't have to, you don't have to worry about the details behind it. That's all been worked out for you in a programmatic repeatable way. Well, that's only coming at it from the command line execution of it, though, too, because I was thinking of it from the point of view of like take like a Strimsy operator for Kafka, right? Like go back to go back to, you know, in a world where you have to define a topic, you know, where you had to define your Kafka topic and you didn't have, like, a declarative way to do that, right? Like, you know. Right.

You know, think of the commands that you would use to enter, like, that. If you didn't want to, like, create the topic through your application, right? Like, you wanted to create the topic independent of your application. Then, you know, there's a whole bunch of commands that you ended up doing that and, you know, things to like set like what you want the replication factor to be or, you know, the retention policy and the cleanup policy, things like that. But with something like a Strimsy operator, you could just like say a kind or, you know, specify like declaratively like, hey, here is my – here's the description of what my topic looks like. And then that operator, when you apply it, it's like, oh, I know what to do with this. All of these details, I know how to make that work. And so it's not just about the, oh, hey, I want to back up my database.

Here's the command to back up that database. And it does all the necessary steps like you were describing. It's also like just being able to declaratively define a thing. Yeah. So obviously, Jay-Z hit on a topic that we all kind of like a lot here. And we may have some episodes in the future. But yeah, it's definitely a hot topic. Yeah, for sure.

And so I just want to have that in my pocket. Like, I want to know more about that stuff. And that just seems like a good time in the world to be doing that. So going after that, so that was, so the first one was interactive events. Second one was like kind of DevOps-y type stuff, particularly, you know, Kubernetes. And my third one is Python, which I've gotten to the point that maybe I'll feel differently about it where learning a new language isn't that exciting to me. It's a different syntax, cool. It's got ifs and some cool novelty type stuff, but it's just the types of applications I can build with it.

So I want to build that muscle with Python. I want to spend more time in that ecosystem because I want to know more about the things that are in that ecosystem that make it special so um that particularly you know like machine learning and um even just basic statistics which isn't a python thing that's just a math thing i should be able to say like pull our youtube stats and podcast stats and website stats and mix them together and pull out some insights. Like it's, it's kind of crazy to me that I've never really thought to do that, especially like learn more about Python. I kind of start seeing like, these are the kinds of problems that people are solving with Python. This is what they're doing with it. I have this information. Why aren't I doing this? This is

crazy, but it's because this is an area I'm weak in. So I tend to not even think of problems in this way and I want to fix that. So I want to, I want to build up some of that mathematical, uh, kind of muscle so that when I have a problem in the real world that I want to address, I have the vocabulary to like address it and go after it in the way that makes sense to do it. Yeah. I mean, I definitely, uh, you know, a few years back how I was going through the big kick of machine learning and Python, you guys might recall. And you're right, like there, there are definitely things with Python where like, you know, to your point about like, why don't I think about doing any of this stuff in like C sharp. And part of that is just because like, there are libraries,

for whatever reason, Python became popular for this particular use. And so now there are all these great libraries out there, NumPy, Pandas, Matplotlib, that can just easily do, oh, hey, here's a couple vectors, and just give me all the stats on these two things. Crunch these things together and tell me what's what. Now, off the top of your head, tell me a similar library for C Sharp.

ML.net. Hey, that was good. Well, no, but no, no, no. ML.net would be like comparing like a scikit-learn or something like that, right? Yeah. Yeah, so that's the difference. PyTorch is what I was thinking, yeah. Yeah, or comparing it to like a PyTorch, yeah.

Right. That would be the equivalent of comparing machine learning libraries. But I'm talking about just from like the basic statistics kind of stuff that Joe mentioned. Like that's where, you know, the things that you can do with Pandas and NumPy and Matplotlib that are just, you know, give me an equivalent in another language, right? But you know, in fairness, I think this is kind of what Jay-Z was getting at, though, is like he said that he hasn't developed that muscle there. It may be that those libraries do exist, but because he hasn't gone after looking at solving problems in that particular way, right? Like it reminds me of our interview episode where we talked about interviewing at big companies, right?

Like they attack you with math problems, more or less, right? It's data structure and math problems. And so if you're going to interview at these companies, you're going to study those type of problems. And so you're going to get familiar with a lot of that kind of stuff. But in your day-to-day, like the three of us work at a lot of big data type stuff and we're working in some DevOps type stuff. So those aren't things that we're going after. Right. So it might be outlawed that those libraries exist, but I would have no clue because I don't look for them, you know? Well, I mean, you're probably, you know,

on the right track, right? Where there's like, we as a community probably think of certain, certain tools and languages to solve a specific kind of problem. Right. Right. You know, if, if I, if I talked to you about creating anything with, you know, interaction on a webpage, you're immediately just going to like jump to JavaScript. Right. And even though maybe there's some things that you could do in CSS, but you're going to, you know, the three of us, we're probably going to jump more to JavaScript than we're going to do than anything else first. And then, uh, you know, it's not until somebody says, Oh, Hey, you know what? Uh, we could just do some refactoring here, pull the JavaScript engine out of Chrome, and now we could run JavaScript on the server side.

And then you're like, Whoa, mind blown. Now I can use it for something else. Right. And so it's kind of similar to, you know, what you're talking about with Python and statistics and machine learning type of libraries that are out there where it's like, you know, that that's what a lot of people are using it for. And that's where, you know, it's not the only thing that's used for, but, you know, that's where a lot of people think of it. You know, it's kind of become synonymous.

Yeah. At least among the circle of people that I know, it seems like that's been the trend. Yeah, it's a good avenue for it. I know that so many of the things that I kind of want to solve and want to know, like say, for example, what time of day or what day is it best to release YouTube videos? These are the little things that I care about that I can totally figure out. And the math isn't hard. It feels like maybe there's a standard deviation in there. But for the most part, it's really just kind of getting data, slicing it up, comparing it on a real basic bar chart.

Sounds like a simple statement. And those are all things I know how to do. Yeah, I can totally do that in a database. There's nothing stopping me. However, what Python is going for is like there are a thousand billion articles that would love to show me how to set that up and get it started and do it in five seconds. You know? Yep. And it's good for other stuff too.

The visualizations that you can just so easily do with it related to the statistics type operations that you're talking about are just so awesome. And that, and that's where it's like, okay, even if I did find another library in C sharp where I could like maybe compute those results now, like let me find something else that I can visualize it too.

And there might be some plumbing. I'm not going to say that there's not that, you know, that Microsoft or other developers for C that there's not, that, you know, that Microsoft or other developers for C sharp specifically picking on C sharp, you know, haven't developed, but I mean just the power of just like,

Oh, Hey, I could just spin up a notebook and I can do this. And by the way, like, that's the thing I love. I don't even have to host the notebook. Yep.

Oh, that was so bad. Oh, that reminds me. Oh man, pour so bad. Oh, that reminds me. Oh, man. Poor one out. Sorry, derail for a moment. But we talked about, like this was a tip of mine

a while back, and let me see if I can find it. I think it was like notebooks.azure.com. Microsoft is going to retire it January 15th, 2021. It was such a beautiful thing. Notebooks.azure.com. And what you could do is you go into there, you could sign up and, uh, you know, you could,

you could create a new notebook. And then while you have that notebook, you could get a command line interface to it. If you wanted to do whatever you needed from the command line, you could add and install additional Python packages. Um, plus you could, you could import, uh, notebooks or code from a GitHub repository. Like you could literally sync it to notebooks.azure.com and work with everything there. Such a beautiful thing as well as like commit back to GitHub. I did that a few times. And it was great because, like I said, that was the beauty of the notebook, right? You didn't have to host it. And they're going to retire it January 15th, 2021, and all user data will be

destroyed. Hey, but there is a link on that page that links somewhere else. I'm putting it in our resources, so it'll be in the show notes. So definitely check that out. It'll be codingblocks.net slash episode 147. But they do have alternatives, which is pretty interesting. So they are sunsetting this, but on notebooks.azure.com slash content slash alternatives, there are now notebooks and Visual Studio Code, GitHub Codespaces Beta, Azure Machine Learning, Azure Lab Services, and GitHub.

So they do have alternatives in place for this. So, you know, pour one out for the other, but, you know, spring five new ones it looks like. Well, I guess what I mean, though, is that, like, I already have a bunch of notebooks up there that I just imagined, like, oh, I'm going to keep making notebooks and this will be where I have them forever. Now it's like,

I got to migrate them out. So check it out. They actually said, using VS Code, you can develop and run notebooks against remotes and containers to make the transition easier from Azure Notebooks. We have made the container image available so it can use with VS code too. So it sounds like they're at least trying to make it less painful for anybody

who has taken the time to create them like you have. Yeah. I just haven't taken the time to like read through their process to, to migrate it out. So that's, that's going to be the rub. And it is a shame to see it go like i don't know why they're because it was such a great service i mean it was so awesome but yeah cool all right derailment uh done we're back on track all right so the last item is uh just another one for fun i definitely like having a little bit of variety and so uh i wanted to have something in here that was just like heavy emphasis on creativity.

And I don't think it would be a surprise to anyone. We talked about this last episode, but game development. I think there's something to be said for building that muscle too. And I definitely found with the last game I just completed, which I put game in quotes because it's not very fun to play. But the fact that I was able to get it up and going and having kind of like a full experience with like a start screen and an end screen and, you know, wind conditions and whatnot, it just was much easier to do because I've messed with this so many times. And so I want to keep going down that path.

And so I dream of the one day, you know, being able to sit down for, I don't know, three hours and make something that's kind of a cool prototype that I could actually have some fun with. So I'm wanting to invest in that skill more, I guess. Cool. And you called out two specific ones. Did I mention them here? Oh, yeah. So Pygame goes along with the Python theme.

And I really have enjoyed the time I've spent with Python and Pygame specifically in the last month. But there's a huge problem with it. And it's Python. I was going to say, it's not C Sharp. Well, so it's not even just that. So it's not easy for me to get that into a browser is the real problem. So it looks like there's a couple projects that will kind of help you do that, but you're going off into the woods.

There's dragons there. So there's not an easy way that I can see. There's no point and click or double click or add this config to get your code running in WebAssembly, for example. So if I want to distribute my thing, I've got to compile it down to an executable, upload it somewhere, and then everyone who tries to download it to run it is going to get this big scary Windows error message telling them, absolutely do not run this application from some Yahoo on the internet. And that's totally fair because, you know, I could do all sorts of garbage in there. But it just makes it really hard to distribute games in this kind of era. I don't have a Windows certified developer license. I don't want to pay hundreds of dollars every year to sign my executables.

And so as much as I like Pygame, Unity is just such a dominant player in the landscape. And it's also super good. And it's C-sharp. And it's got an asset store. And it's polished. And there's a super good. And it's C sharp and it's got an asset store and it's polished and there's a million tutorials and it's really amazing. And so I, you know, I don't know that I'm necessarily going to bounce back to unity because I've

got such a hard emphasis on Python, but man, unity is such a good choice for this. I'm not going to lie. Uh, when it comes to this game jam, like I'm, I'm probably going to just unity all the things. And that's as far as I'm going to lie. When it comes to this game jam, I'm probably going to just unity all the things.

And that's as far as I'm going to go. I feel like I would already be starting from such a deficit in regards to creating games and that kind of whole mindset that I'm like, okay, maybe if this thing is if this thing is like, uh, you know, you can kind of like point and click your way around and, and doing, you know, you can kind of get started with it. Cause, cause one thing really specific to the game dev that I was thinking about the other day, it was like, you know, I think that for all of my art, I would prefer just straight up eight bit. Yeah.

Right. Like I want that. But then I then i was like oh but isn't that minecraft and then i was like and then i thought then i thought hey wait a minute because i was looking at like an eight bit uh like uh ghost from pac-man and i'm like that takes too much effort to draw that to actually make it look eight bit too like on you know given the equipment we have today so i'm like oh no programmer art all the way like this is just going to be like you know weird you remember do you remember uh what's the name of it don't kick the baby from south park what's the baby the little brother's name but you know how like his head how his head moves

when he talks like it's like his his head splits in half when he's talking. That's the kind of art that I'm thinking about for mine. Yeah, that sounds like a lot of fun. Playing in the head. Yeah, I would definitely say a fantastic strategy for this upcoming game jam, if you've never done this before, is just pick a Unity tutorial that looks like fun

and start working through it and whenever you feel comfortable jump off the path and add your own custom images in and you know adapt to the theme done and you'll have a great time you'll learn a lot and it's it's legit it's good yeah i mean my my son he was interested in game development, and he played around with Unity over the summer and was using their platform and going through their tutorials and whatnot and building little games. information out there and and they have done a good job of trying to like just simplify the experience for you that you know you can you can get started with you know uh you don't have to like master the unreal game engine in order to be able to create a game yep oh yeah it's totally free so uh you know there's some advanced features that you can pay for if you want to but if this is your first game like you are not going to miss those advanced features.

I promise you. That reminds me. I forgot to give credit to him because in the last episode, you know, I gave you guys the joke about why didn't four ask out five? Do you remember that one? Because he was two squared. And I thought it was like, it was so, you never know. It's like, Alan, you might be able to relate. Like sometimes it's just, you can see like how, like, I guess, sweet or innocent your kids are, you know, with like some of the things they do.

Like he tells me this joke. He gives me this joke, but he's like, Hey, I didn't find it. I didn't make it up though. So, you know, I found that on the internet. I didn't make it up. So, you know, just so the whole internet knows, like, A, he told me that joke and B, he did not make it up. So he was good enough to not try and take credit for it. That's good.

Yeah. Yeah. You've raised a nice moral kid, man. That's, that's what's going on there. At least. Yeah. What? Yeah,

totally. This episode of coding blocks is supported by command line heroes. Command line heroes is a podcast that tells the epic true tales of developers, programmers, hackers, geeks, and open source rebels who are revolutionizing the technology landscape.

We got a sneak preview of season six of Command Line Heroes. And season six focuses on black technologists. And here's what we thought. So do you remember when you first saw Jurassic Park? That was a bit a minute. I'm talking about the first movie came out a number of years ago. Yeah, when you see those dinosaurs for the first time. Exactly.

And the doctor there, who's kind of mirroring the emotions that I felt at the time, at least, sees these dinosaurs for the first time. And the music swells and he's just stunned. And it was a super dramatic scene. And what we may have forgotten about or just not really thought about in a while is this is one of the first movies that really made a lot of use of digital effects, which was still kind of a novelty and new at the time. And that was made possible by Silicon Graphics, which was a huge company at the time and just absolutely changed the landscape

for movies and a bunch of other industries. Well, guess what? Command Line Heroes has an episode all about Dr. Mark Hanna, who was a pioneer of rendering hardware that was a big part of that revolution. He served as the chief scientist and architect for the earliest machines of Silicon Graphics, Inc. And it powered a generation of 3D graphics at NASA and flight simulators and movie effects like Jurassic Park. And it's one of the first major

motion pictures to make use of extensive use of digital effects. And then, of course, you know, the rest is history. We can think there never would have been a Titanic or an Avatar or, I mean, every movie now. None of the new Transformers. It just goes on and on and on. But it was just a great episode. You've got to check it out. You can't take away my Transformers.

Like, now you've gone too far. So, yeah. So, search for Command Line Heroes anywhere where you listen to podcasts. We'll have a link to them in our show notes and our thanks to Command Line Heroes for their support. All right. So on to my list of things that I'm looking forward to, I guess, in 2021. First off, if it would just kick 2020 out, then I'd be happy already. So my first one is.NET 5. So we've talked about our love for C Sharp over the years, right? Anybody that's been with us knows that we all have this bit of true love for.NET. And I really like what they're doing with this. Wait, really?

We did? Like on CodingBox.py? Yeah, right,.py and.js. Yeah, so I think, and I don't really know totally how I feel about the entire thing. So first off,.NET 5 seems like the wrong name to me, but whatever, I'll go with it because they went from.NET Framework 4.7.whatever, right? And then they had.NET Core 2 and 3, and now they're just like, well, let's just make it 5. And it's like, okay, I guess. So the naming doesn't really make much sense to me, but I do like what they're trying to do, right?

Like they have this, we've talked about it before. This isn't the Microsoft that we grew up with, right? Like they're embracing this world where everybody's sort of like on whatever platform they want to be on and they want to be there with you, right? For the developer, hey, you want to write something that'll run on Mac? Cool, do it. You want to write something that runs on Windows? We want that too. You want it on Linux? Sure, cool. And so that's kind of like what this evolution is, right?.NET 5 is this next step in that direction. And they'd already been doing that with.NET Core, right? Now, the next step, though, is Windows applications or visual applications, UIs and that type of stuff.

And so they're trying to make it. It's basically what Java was with swing and swing X and all that kind of stuff. Right. They're trying to take it that way to where you can just write your application. And I think more or less using Xamarin and deploy this out to whatever platform you want. And they're even setting it up to where things like the Telerik components that a lot of people use when doing any kind of application development for a GUI or something. That's going to work everywhere, right? Windows, Mac, Linux, all that kind of stuff.

So I love the vision. I absolutely love the vision. I absolutely love the vision. And honestly, I haven't worked with a lot of C-sharp this year, which sort of saddens me. I'm straight up. I don't know that I've touched a line of C-sharp this year. Yeah. I wanted to cause shenanigans on this pick because I was like, oh, we don't even, we're not even C-sharp developers anymore. I don't know if you've heard. Yeah. I mean, like seriously, if I have messed with much C-Sharp, it hasn't been a ton, but again, I love it. Like I loved what they were doing at.NET Core and I love this next progression of it. Right. I mean, if you look back at the

things that we got excited about, I think even coming into this year, things like Blazor or yeah, Blazor was one of them and just kind of all the stuff that they're doing, right? Like they're coming with these creative things. And the language is so pretty. The only other language that I've ever been that excited about working in is Kotlin that I can remember. And Kotlin is really good, but it doesn't have all those benefits that C Sharp has behind it, like this multi-platform type thing and all that. Even though it compiles down to Java, it's still way more focused than that. So I don't know. I'm really excited about it. I have a link here to the announcement for.NET 5, and it is a long page.

And Michael Tippett from our Slack community, he asked us, hey, are we going to cover this? I don't know. I mean, I'm going to try and talk these two guys into it. I would love to cover the features of.NET 5 because I can't do it any justice here in this little few-minute blob, but there's a ton coming in it, and they've got even more planned for the roadmap for.NET 6, right? They're even looking forward to that. So yeah, man, I'm excited about it. How much time am I going to get

to play with it? I have no idea, but I really do want to try and dig into it a little bit. So my next one, Ed, and I kind of hate this. I'm going to be repeating several of the things that Joe had. Now I wasn't be repeating several of the things that Joe had. Now I wasn't good at categorizing these things. So mine are just completely random buckshot type stuff that I do anyways, because that's how my head works anyhow. So I'm not the inbox zero guy. We've talked about that before. So DevOps-y type stuff. I'm totally digging it. And part of that, I think honestly, it is just the people I work with, right? Like both of you guys, you know, both of you have done a really good job in setting up the DevOps frameworks and things that we've been working in.

And when you see how powerful that is, I think Outlaw had said this a couple of years ago, like when he was working in TeamCity, like he loved enabling our team to be able to do things quicker, right? Like when you participate in this world of DevOps stuff, you're enabling people to do things faster and see results quicker and get that feedback loop. I mean, we talked about it with the DevOps Handbook. And honestly, that series was a big eye-opener for me personally. Just when you start approaching problems from the perspective of, I need that feedback quick. I need to be able to see it. I need it on a dashboard. I need this. I need that.

I want this. I want that. When you put all that stuff together, it really enables you to do two things. One, move quicker on your features and your deployments and all that kind of stuff. But the other thing, too, is it allows you to start taking the worry out of things to me is just really appealing. And I've seen it work. And I'd really like to see that go further. And I want to be more involved in it. So that's one of the things I'm interested in. And it really opened up your eyes to DevOps being more of a cultural thing and not a job title.

Oh, no, totally not. I mean, Bobby, this one's for you. I tried to sneak one in there. I was hoping you weren't going to pay attention. And you'd be like, oh yeah, no, totally. I'd be like, yes, I got it on. I got it recorded. I mean, my title at the end of the year will be senior DevOps engineer, right? Something like that. I don't know. So, but. But no, I mean, in all honesty, when you see it work and you see how it enables people, it's really a thing of beauty. And I had mentioned during the DevOps handbook episodes that I'd listened to one of the MS Dev show

episodes where they talked to a guy who was doing his stock market pick type stuff. And he said the most important thing he did was set that stuff up early so that all he had to worry about was, okay, I'm gonna just commit, it'll be deployed, right? Like that's, man, that's so beautiful when you think about that. For everybody out there that still gets a call

from their boss, like, hey, I need a bundled up installer. Can you go set this up for me? And then you gotta sidetrack from what you're doing. You don't even know what you're missing. So that's something exciting for me. We already belabored the Kubernetes thing a lot, partially of my fault, partially all of us because we love Kubernetes.

That's another thing I do plan on diving deeper in. I, too, was looking at the CCAD certification earlier this year, and then life and work just got me busy doing other things, so I never followed through with it. But I, too, I think it's hugely important and valuable in today's world. That reminds me. This is a total tangent, and I can do this to myself. So I got to talk to somebody.

So all three of us have worked in this JavaScript technology called EXTJS. Which one of us love it? I mean, back in the day, maybe, I could see how it was lovable. What about you, Outlaw? Oh, there he was. You blipped out for a second on me. I assumed that was my network that blipped. Wow, this is what it feels like when someone else's network goes, huh?

Yeah. All right, look at me over here. All these bits coming in and out of my house and it's working. It got the stable. I got a high roller over here. I'm all comfortable with all these extra bits. So what did you say, Jay-Z? You said something about maybe in the past, but then you kind of went frozen.

Oh, yeah. So back in the day, I think many years ago, it was a fantastic toolkit library. The widgets are fantastic. The way you work is really nice. You know, it's declarative, it's based on JSON. You know, it's really cool, but the state of currently current and modern JavaScript is just very far away from that right now. So it's kind of hard to work with it nowadays. You know, no slight to M. Bar embark on arrow, but just not my thing. Yeah.

So here was my take on it. I actually had a conversation with a friend recently, and I got to thinking about it. For me, it's not so much that something is so cool or it's so not cool. I don't like working on something to where I am 1% of 1% of 1% of the market, right? So it's like cold fusion. I know Jay-Z, you and I have worked in that in the past. And in all honesty, like we poke fun at it. It was truly an elegant language to work in. It was simple. It made sense. It was easy to do. It was easy to reason about. But if you wanted to continue down that path, you were going to have a handful of places that you

would ever be deemed valuable. And to me, that was just unattractive, right? And that's one of the reasons why Kubernetes is so enticing for me is because not only is it something that is interesting and it's huge, but man, it's going to be everywhere for a long time. Yeah, that's nice. It's a good, solid investment. Yeah. I really wanted to, just because I knew it would be like a trigger for you, to tell you that I loved it. But I do have a different takeaway on EXTJS specifically, though. Okay. Because I know that between the two of us, that's an example of a technology that you have more of a hatred towards than I do. And, and while I agree with what Joe said, I think my opinion of it is like, I, I like it. You can get things done. You know, it's rather easy to get some things done. And, uh, you know, it is declarative, like Joe said, like, you know,

the problems that I have with it though, are not so much about like how you do things. Well, um, like for when it comes to code, it's, it's all the tooling around it. And that's where I think that it has suffered and hasn't caught up to the rest of the world because like, you know, unit tests in that framework, they're non-existent. You,

you can't, it, you know, they have like a, a whole very brittle, uh, you know, test suite.

Yeah. An application that can, they can run it, but it has to literally render it and tell you and try to execute it. It's almost like a Selenium driver at that point. We've talked about integration tests. Sure, fine. They're good. Have them. I'm not saying don't. But the whole point, one of the main principles

from the DevOps handbook, right? Was like trying to increase the frequency of that feedback cycle, right? And that's where unit tests are like one of your first, does it compile? Yeah, that's your very first signal. Then does it pass the unit test? That's your next closest signal.

And both of those are supposed to be like really quick signals. And those were both two areas where EXTJS failed on because if you did have to compile it, well, that process was slow when you would compile it. If whatever you were doing required it, which if you were doing any of the theming work, you know, did. It would melt your computer. So that was a hassle, you know, and because the compilation was slow, you know, you're like, oh, no, I meant to move that five pixels to the left. Hold on, let me make this change, recompile, wait 15 minutes, refresh. Oh, it went the wrong direction. You know, it was that kind

of frustration with it that, that, that bothered me. You know, it wasn't, it wasn't as, that's where like the modern frameworks, like what you're talking about, Jay-Z have gotten like more dynamic and loose, like where, you know MPM run and you can have with an Angular or a React app, you can have it just watching the file system and as things change. And ExtJS did add some things for that, but their support

for it was extremely weak in comparison. Yeah, but I mean, even to... Let's even take ExtJS out of the equation. Hammer hammering honey poor extjs yeah no i mean i'm not going to because i don't have a ton of good to say about it so but oh like view view is a perfect example we've seen it we went to a conference where we attended several sessions on it. And honestly, it was really nice looking. But when I look at what its market share is, even after it's been in the market for a few years, and it's down there

around five, 6%, and everybody else is on Angular React, like, do I really want to hook my pony to that? Now, I mean, you know, maybe that's a good way to really niche down. You know, like you can really own that section of a niche if you were to decide that you want to do tutorials and all kinds of. But if that was, I'm sorry to interrupt. I didn't mean to cut you off. No, you're good. If that was the way you made every decision about like how you were programmed, wouldn't you just be a PHP programmer and, you know, use MySQL? I mean, like half the internet or more runs on WordPress, which is PHP backed on MySQL.

So there's like your two most, there's your most popular language in use for web development and your most popular database for web development. So it can't, so my point is, is like, you can't just let market share alone drive you. No, it's not alone. It's not alone. But when I look out there, right, and there's three, four, five players in the market, I look and say, okay, cool. I see that Java, C Sharp, you know, Python, those are all up there. Rust.

Oh, yeah. I mean, people love it, but it's got like, you know, one tenth of one percent of a market share. And it's like, OK, yeah, I'm easy now. So so I guess that's what I'm saying is like I get where people love some of that stuff, but that's, that's sort of like my excitement usually is very low for things that I know that don't have a ton of potential staying power. Well, I guess is, is my thing. Yeah. I mean, here's, here's where I'm saying like, that's me. It's a slippery slope because it is, because the reason why I'm saying that it's like, you can't let market share drive it because otherwise that means you would

never be willing, like you would never be on the cutting edge of, of picking up a new technology and that could become the next thing. Right. Totally. You know, so, so you do have to like experiment like,

uh, and, and see, and like, you'll find like, sometimes you'll find like, Oh, Hey,

this is like super awesome in this other language. And you know, I wish they would have it in my, my daily driver that I use for work, but they don't yet. But then when that feature does come out for your daily driver for work, you already have like an understanding of like, oh, hey, this is like this other thing that I was already doing. Like, oh my God, like there's a C sharp NumPy library. Like, oh, good. Here we go. I totally agree. And I'd say that probably before GraphQL was as popular as it was, that was one of those things that made me go, oh, that is a great way of thinking about this problem, right?

Like it's flipping the problem on its head. And I love that. Unfortunately, I just didn't ever have time to really dig into it deep. And so I'm not saying I don't look at things, but whether or not I get excited about willing to invest a ton of time into it, that's a different story. Right. So but that's me. That's that's totally me. Yeah.

I guess I didn't like you picking on view. Well, that's the thing. It was really nice. But I never outside of that conference, I never spent five minutes on it. So, I mean, heck, you remember I was talking about what was the one years ago that never ended up being anything big, the JS, the polymorphic JS framework, Meteor, Meteor JS. And I spent time on that that I've, you know, as I started looking,

they're like, yeah, we're going a different direction. We're going in another different direction. It's because they didn't have the market share to really drive anything. So, you know, whatever. All right. So the next thing that I am excited about, and this is odd for me because I've never really cared about it, is a little bit of game development. Like this game jam that we're doing actually has me a little bit excited. So I'm looking forward to it.

I will probably go the Unity route. I will look at the other things out there and see what else is available. I don't think I'll do the Python thing because I don't want to inflict that pain on me. Although I have been coding in Python and quite honestly, it's very pleasant. Like I have no problems with it whatsoever.

And I was able to pick it up quick. It reminds me very much of Node.js type development. So I feel like we've gone from codingblocks.net to codingblocks.js. Then we went to codingblocks.kt and now we're at codingblocks.py. So I mean, you know, we evolve. Yeah, we do. It comes over time. So my next thing, so the Game Jam, definitely looking forward to that, excited about it. My next one is more big data. I mean, we've talked about this. I have a fascination and a love for big data.

I just always have. I love the problems it introduces. I love analyzing that data. I like all of it. So I know, at least for my job, I'll be facing a lot of these big data problems anyways. So I'm looking forward to it. Right. Like,

um, and what are the reviews we got for this episode? I don't remember which one it was, but he said he was a little bit salty that we had started covering the, uh, um, Oh, designing data intensive applications.

Yes. That we never finished it, that we started it. Hey, I want to go back. Yeah. We will probably go back to it, but that, that book is so deep.

Have we ever finished any book, though? No, we never have. Like, we've got to leave some kind of teaser out there. Right. So we will probably go back to it because we all love the topic. But, I mean, it was just one of those things where it was like, oh, we need a break, right? Like, we've got to move to something else. And I should clarify, like like we finished reading the book.

We might not finish discussing it like every single chapter. Right, right. So the big data stuff, definitely. I mean, I love Kafka. I love Elasticsearch. I love all the distributed stuff. I like the big tables, the big query. I like all of this stuff, right?

Apache Drill. I mean, Outlaw, you and I dug into that as well as, um, God, what was the Presto DB stuff? Like all that stuff is fascinating to me. I love it. So I'll be back in on that.

I'll send you some, my sequel links. I can make use of this. Oh, uh, more videos. I want to do more videos. I have not had a ton of time.

Uh, I don't, I think because my kids are home and everybody like, More videos. I want to do more videos. I have not had a ton of time. I think because my kids are home and everybody, there's just no break from anything in 2020, right? I know we all feel that. But I haven't eaten at a restaurant since February. I mean, I feel like my life is just this compact, like I've been shoved in this little can and that's where I live. And there's no room to do anything in that can. So I don't know,

but I do plan to do more videos. I don't know. Joe and I plan for you to do more videos. Right. So, I mean, I don't know that we mentioned it on the podcast at all, but we've got some,

a bunch of keyboard reviews coming up, right? Like ergonomic keyboards, like crazy stuff. And so my first one is going to be recorded here pretty soon. Maybe it'll be out by the time this podcast lands. We'll see. Oh, and there's one that's going to be so fun that I can't wait. Oh, man. We're going to figure out.

Alan and I, I'm just going to tease this real quick, okay? If you haven't seen any of the videos that are on our YouTube channel that are done by Alan and Joe, you really should take the opportunity to go up there and look at them. There's some really good quality stuff up there. Alan and I are working on a way to safely get together and to trying to adapt to some of the crazy ergonomic designs you've seen, uh, of keyboards out there on the internet. They should be glorious. Like this should be a lot of fun. So yeah, I want to do more videos. I love doing the gear reviews. It seems like people really enjoy those.

But I also want to do more development type stuff. Just an example of something that popped off the top of my head is, we've been doing transitions from us personally. We've done transitions from Azure to AWS to GCP now. So one of the things that's funny is people talk about wanting to code things agnostic to cloud technologies. That's way harder than it sounds, right? Like way harder.

If you're in Azure, any one of the clouds that you pick, probably the predominant thing that you will use on any one of the given clouds is their blob storage because it's so cheap and it's so easy to use. The problem is they all have different protocols. So Amazon has AWS S3, which, by the way, is a protocol that other places have adopted. You can get S3 stuff running in a container. You can get S3 stuff running on prem, but not all the clouds adopted it. So you have AWS S3, you have Azure Blob Storage, you have GCP, Google Cloud Storage, GCS. They all have different APIs, right? So one of the things I thought about that would be kind of interesting

is, hey, what would a fairly, I don't want to call it simple, but a fairly small project that you could do is, hey, what if you created an abstraction to where you can plug in any one of the three big storage technologies, right? And in that, I don't know, tutorial course, whatever you want to call it, there's all kinds of cool stuff you could do in there. You could do dependency injection because, hey, if you give me a config for Azure blob storage, then load up these libraries. If you give me something for Google cloud storage and load up these libraries, like I think it would be a really good way to show it and then show how you can build in those abstractions. So I don't know. I want to do more videos. That's one of the ones that's kind of off top of my head. I don't know if I'll ever get to it, but you know, these things bounce around there all the time. Um, so that kind of goes with more presentations.

I would love to do more. I wish that there were more in person, but I think 2021 is going to be shut down just like 2020 is. So it's going to be a while before we do any in-person things, which really stinks because I think all three of us enjoy it a lot. And yeah, it kind of sucks not getting to go see people and meet people. All right. And the last two things I'll hit these real quick, maybe some IOT stuff. Like what? So there's something you said that bugged me and it's been sticking to the

back of my head. I say a lot of things that bug you. Which one was it? Outlaw fell by trigger. So these Elgato stream decks, right? You guys have definitely used them more than I have. Part of that is just,

I haven't taken the time to sit down and mess with them, right? Like, after I'm done with work, I'm drained and I just walk away from my computer. So, one of the things you mentioned that really bugged me is you did the if this, then that integration and you click something and it didn't happen for like a minute, right? And I was thinking, that's awful. Like that really, really bothers me. And so I got to thinking about, well, that only is a problem because these things are all hitting cloud services, right? Like if you have Phillips Hue stuff, it's probably going out and talking to the cloud. If you have Kasa stuff, it's going out and talking to the cloud.

Everything you do is going and talking to the cloud. If you have Kasa stuff, it's going out and talking to the cloud. Everything you do is going and talking to a server. Well, what if you had some little internal hub that you could make talk to these different protocols, right? Like that might be kind of fun. So I don't know. I think I kind of want to play with these things just to sort of get an idea, right? Like these are chatty devices, right? Most of them all have built-in web servers, which is ridiculous, right? Your doorbell with your camera in it has a built-in web server. Everything sort of talks that way.

So I don't know. I want to play with it. I'm not exactly sure how far I'll go with it, but it's interesting to me. Yeah. That's one of those things where it's like, sometimes you'll see like things that other people were done and it's like, just sometimes it's just good enough for me to know like, okay, if I ever want to do something like that, then I know that somebody else has already started it. They've already started like, like, like, uh, for example, my, um for example my um my my my what would you call it like spin bike uh you know there are people out there like there's github projects where you can find where people have already like hacked the protocols from it to write their own apps

for it and everything like okay i maybe one day i might get to the point where i i want that but that not yet, but you know, you guys keep maturing it. And I know that like, if I ever do, there's already like a good amount of information out there for it. And, and I appreciate that.

Yeah. I appreciate knowing that it's out there for right now. Yeah. What about you, Jay Z? Oh, I love the, I love the idea of affecting things in the real world.

I kind of, I've been sleeping on the whole IOT thing just because I've had so many bad experiences with the series and the virtual assistants and that sort of thing. So to me, I still associate things not working like I want. But I got those plugs that you recommended. I forget what they are now. Kasa smart plugs. Yeah, Kasa. Yeah, Kasa, exactly.

So I like that I can turn those off and you know on whatever it just kind of flicks on multiple things i can like i can turn my all my guitar stuff on with like one button now and it goes and like flips three different power on things which is which is really great so i like that and i like the idea of being able to do stuff in the real world so i'd love to have like a raspberry pi that i could kind of take somewhere and have a button that does what i want because i am in love with the stream deck so i don't know i keep thinking about it but i'm just scared to have it do anything that matters if that makes sense like i don't want it to turn the coffee pot off because i don't want it to turn

it on and you know melt the house down or something so i'm just kind of scared a lot a lot of that stuff for now yeah well i told you like that was the exact thing that i used my plug for though yeah was so that i set up the geo fence so when I leave the fence, it turns it off. Yeah. Well, turning off is fine. It's just the turning on, it kind of scares me. So I'm still okay with some stuff like that. I just, yeah, I don't know.

I've been kind of hesitant on, so I've been dragging my feet. But with the stream deck, I do love being able to do all sorts of stuff. But still things seem unreliable. Even cost of stuff sometimes i'll hit the button just doesn't go on but it's you know it's one of those things like where i can wait until it it comes on and it it seems to be like if this then that thing kind of thing where it's just slow and doesn't quite do what i want but um yeah i i don't know i just still don't kind of trust it but i do i really want a kubernetes cluster running on multiple pies. And I can't figure out an excuse to do that yet.

But I'm still looking. Okay. So total derailment again here. Sorry. But so specific to the IoT stuff, like number one is I have been – I know, Joe, you've already built one of these. And I've totally been considering it and looking into it, but building a pie hole. And what made me think of that is when you mentioned like running Kubernetes on multiple,

uh, Raspberry pies, but yeah, I've totally been considering building a pie hole. Plus it just sounds like a fun little project, you know, and you get to play with some cool hardware and then like, Oh,

Hey benefit. Like, you know, you, you get to surf the web a little faster. Um, Hey, so if you had hung out in the Gear channel with Micro G, he actually posted something at one point

that was a rack. It was like a Kubernetes rack for pies that you could have this super computing little rig for networked pies. Anyway, um, network pies. Anyway, go ahead. Sorry. Oh, that sounds cool. Um, yeah, I mean, yeah, I, I, I definitely this year have not been on Slack, uh, that

much and it's, I'm feeling it. I don't, I, you know, like I'm sure maybe, you know, I was never like the, the chattiest person on there ever. So, you know, maybe nobody's noticed, but like, I'm definitely feeling like I'm not, uh, not on there and I'm definitely missing it, but, um, I digress. So going back to the IOT things. So we were talking about like the, the Casa smart switches and stuff in smart plugs last time.

Um, like in the, a couple couple episodes back when we had the shopping spree episode. Buddy, have I got one for you. So check this out. Best Buy has the Kasa smart dimmer switches on sale. Normally 26 bucks. Now they're $18. And these are the dimmer switches. So pretty cool. If you want to have a dimmer switch, you know, like anything on a dimmer switch and be a wifi control it. But now here's, here's the beauty that I, that I, I really like about the, um, is that, and I think I might have mentioned this before, maybe not, but like, let's say that you want to have like exterior lights on your house and you want them to come on, right? You might think like, oh, fine, no, I'll just go get it like a, you know, one of the Phillips hue bulbs and it'd be good, right? But then if you kind of think about it,

I mean like A, from a security point of view, like you're technically putting something outside physically on the outside of your house that has network access inside to your house. So that's already kind of weird, but okay, whatever. I mean like I'm totally, you know, that's coming from a paranoid kind of point of view and I get it. But, uh, better is that technically phillips doesn't um you know how to say this like they they they don't certify their bulbs for exterior use so um because of like heat and humidity and whatnot like like they don't. So, so if you put them outside, they will straight up tell you like, A, we're, we don't recommend you do it. And B, you're definitely going to shorten the life of the bulb. And those things are already expensive enough.

And the beauty of the Casa switches is that if you, you know, have the know-how enough to, if you feel inclined enough to install a light switch, then you can easily turn any of your exterior lights into a smart light where it can automatically cut on at sunset or off at sunrise and things like that. I really like them. I think it's pretty fun. That's a really good price for that dimmer switch, too, by the way. I mean, most of these smart dimmer switches are usually $35 or more. Yeah.

Yeah. That's pretty killer. They're awesome. All right. So I'm going to wrap up my last one here, and this will be short. I've always had an interest in this, just haven't really gotten into it that much. And that's machine learning. So, and I added this when Jay-Z had mentioned it up there above, because I was like, oh yeah, kind of like, I don't know that I want to know a ton about it,

but I at least want to be able to speak the language of it, right? And that always drives me crazy when somebody's talking to me about ML stuff. And I'm like, let me Google that. Let me Google this. Let me Google that other five things he just said real quick. You know, so I think that's kind of where I want to be. There was a book, a Manning book that I really liked. It was maybe 230-ish pages called Real World Machine Learning.

I remember you mentioning that. all you want was just like, you know, some use cases, some terminology, kind of like understand like how, how things would fit together. Um, you know,

I, I, I thought that was a good book that like, you know, so that you can like kind of scratch the surface, you know, you can go as, I mean,

you could go as deep as you want. Like they're giving you the code, you know, you're seeing the code in it. But it, but if you just wanted a quick read at 230 pages, the beauty of it is you could burn through that in a weekend if you really wanted to. I fall asleep about every 10 pages. It'll take me a few weekends. What was the name of that one again? It was called Real World Machine Learning.

I'll put a link to it here and we need to check and see if that's on o'reilly because uh yeah jim hummelstein is always telling us about about well it's a manny cm yeah ac oh it's manning so it won't be on there yeah hold the phone and and there there might be like wait let's just hold the phone hold the phone oh what yeah so who cares if it's uh on uh the o'reilly thing um which is a great deal though by the way thank you jim uh it's not audible yeah ah yeah you can get it for free with our audible trial i am uh i'm using one of my credits right now i think i have like four more to use this year i like it and you know like if you were to go look for other other books like

you know you'll find like other machine learning books that might have like uh you know more more reviews or stars or whatever because they go into you know greater detail or whatever but um you know i think if if like it just kind of like came to mind because, uh, you said that you wanted like, you know, it wasn't necessarily that you wanted to go super deep and understand everything about it. But I mean, cause I've got like other books on it that go super deep and you get like, you know, your eyes glaze after like the second page of math symbols and you're like, yeah i'm out yeah yeah that that those are like difficult reads in my opinion and so yeah very cool yeah i'm getting this right

now this episode of coding blocks is sponsored by educative.io educative.io offers hands-on courses with live developer environments all within a browser-based environment with zero setup required. With Educative.io, you can learn faster using their text-based courses instead of videos. Focus on the parts you're interested in and skim through the parts you're not. Now, I went to start a machine learning course a while back, and I ended up going down the path. I think I told you about it last time, Python data analysis and visualization. And at this point, I've gone through all the basic Python stuff. And so I'm feeling actually pretty good about it.

I feel comfortable, thanks to Educative. And now I'm getting into, I don't know if it's NumPy or NumPy. And I don't know because I've been reading through this instead of watching a video. And I'm going through, I'm doing the interactive exercises, I'm doing the quizzes, and I'm reading and I'm scrolling through the things that I don't need to know about because I know from other languages. And so it hasn't been a frustrating experience because I can skip over the things about like programming that I don't need to know about. I can scroll to and focus on the things that I do care about, which is a huge advantage of the way that the course is set up. So it's very easy to

skip around it and really hone in on the things that I care about, which if you've ever tried switching to another language or something like a book, it could be really frustrating if it's a subject that you already know some things about. Wait a minute. Hold on. I'm calling your bluff here, Joe. Like if you're learning a new language, you're telling me you don't spend time going over all of the different data types from start from scratch, like you've never programmed before a day in your life?

Yeah, you would not believe how many books have a section on it to tell you, well, there's an int16, an int32, and an int64. And now on to the ones with decimal points. And, you know, I don't need to read a whole chapter on that. I kind of got that. You know, that's just not the stuff that I need to worry about when I'm first learning a language.

I want to know what's different. And I want to know the things that I'm interested in. And Educative lets me do that. Well, the emphasis there on you, you kind of got that part. So check this out. So both you and Alan talked about, like, you know, you wanted to pick up Kubernetes. That was the thing that you were excited about for 2021. And, you know, I shared this back like an episode or two ago that they have a great course called

A Practical Guide to Kubernetes. But it's so much more than that. If that's not just enough for you, they have learn Kubernetes, a deep dive, the DevOps toolkit, Kubernetes chaos engineering. I think it was the last episode that Alan shared the chaos engineering link with like a whole slew of different resources for chaos engineering. There's a advanced Kubernetes techniques, monitoring, logging, and auto-scaling. We're just talking about like one topic. I just, we're only picking like on Kubernetes for a moment. They have a truckload of courses on each, you know, technology that you are interested in. And each one of those courses, you know, there's like, I mentioned the practical guide to Kubernetes. There's 175 lessons

in that single course, 880 code snippets that you can go with, go through. And the, and the great thing is those code snippets, those live code snippets, you can actually play around, you can edit it, you can see what's what, uh, it's really a great platform. So, you know, we've talked about before, uh, you know, the, uh, the, the know, the grokking the interview prep series and Joe's favorite grokking the system design and grokking the coding interview. Well, now they've added to that grokking series, the grokking the machine learning interview, which actually focuses on system design side of machine learning by helping you design real machine learning systems such as ad prediction system and it's really the only type of system like this out on the or the only type of course like this on the internet today yeah go ahead sorry i gotta throw one more thing in here they actually have a whole path now for scalability and system design that encodes includes the

rocking uh course that you just mentioned of course but it also includes several other courses that are all oriented around that same idea yeah Yeah. So if there's something you want to learn, they probably have it. Visit educative.io slash coding blocks to automatically get the lowest pricing available for subscriptions applied automatically at checkout. Hurry though, because they don't run these deals very often. That's educative.io slash codingblocks to start your subscription today. All right. So it's that time of the show where we ask you, if you haven't had a chance and you're enjoying the show, please do go leave us a review. Go to codingblocks.net slash review. We'll have links up there. Probably need to fix that page too, because I think it's

still links over to Stitcher where it appears that they've gotten rid of reviews. Uh, but if, if you'd love to, you know, just put a smile on her faces and, you know, let us know what you think. That would be amazing. Head up there. Like I said, cutting blocks.net slash review and, you know, leave us some kind words up there. We really appreciate it. And with that, we head into everybody's favorite portion of the show.

It's dad jokes. I think I already said this one, though. I told you about how I lost my job at the Orange Juice Factory, didn't I? I already told you that. What? No. I think so. I didn't. Yeah, they said I couldn't concentrate.

Oh, you did tell us that. See, I thought I did. I thought I. I didn't. Yeah. They said I couldn't concentrate. Oh, you did tell us. See, I thought I did. I thought I did. You did. Okay. And then that means I also told you about why I quit my job at the fire hydrant factory. No. No, I don't remember that one.

I know I told you this already. Definitely never. Yeah, I quit. You couldn't park anywhere near this already. Definitely never. Yeah, I quit. You couldn't park anywhere near the place. All right. I don't think we did do that. I'm positive.

I'm pretty sure. I'm like, I'm 78% sure that I already said. I'm using some Joe math here. I am 13.5% sure, which means that I'm mostly sure that, uh, that I already told you those, but I wasn't sure. So I don't know. But since you're acting like I didn't,

whatever math. All right. I've got more though. Uh, but, but for now survey says, all right. So, uh, a few episodes back, we asked, hey, how often do you change jobs?

And your choices were job. Why would I do that when I can boss myself around? Or I don't want to. Interviewing is awful or every three years, like the Stack Overflow Survey tells me to. And lastly, about every five years after I've built up enough embarrassments. All right, so thanks to Tutco,

I hope I'm pronouncing that right, or that's how that's supposed to be pronounced. We have our new awesome forever way of knowing who should go first. And since this is an odd numbered episode, Alan with the A, first letter of the alphabet goes first. Alan, tell me what you think is the most popular choice and the percentage. By what percentage? I'm going to say I don't want to because interviewing is awful.

I think people get massive anxiety when it comes to that kind of thing. And I'll go with 40% on that. 40% don't want to. Yeah, I'm going to go with 40% I don't want to. I just think that's right. Okay. We're going to rename Joe to Joe Zach, I Make Things Difficult. So just hit him up on Slack.

Joe Zach, I Make Things Difficult. Yep, that's right. So he just hit him up on Slack. Joe Zach, I make things difficult. Yep, that's right. So he just bumped to 41. He just stole my thing. Oh, okay. All right. That sounds fair. That sounds fair.

Yeah, we'll just do that. This is Alan++. So Alan with I don't want to at 40% and Joe with I don't want to at 40% and Joe with, uh, I don't want to at Alan plus plus. Uh, so yeah,

you both lose then. Oh yeah. Good job. This is awkward. Nice. Yeah. It's my fault. Yeah.

It kind of is though. It kind of is. Um, you're on the right track. I don't want to was the top answer just too high but you overshot yeah it was 35 of the vote so we weren't too far off yeah you weren't too far yeah you care to take a uh gander at what number two was? Let's see here. Number two? Every

three years. I was going to say the same thing. Alright, well, we won't find out because it's time for another joke. So, no, I'm just kidding. Yeah, it was every three years.

I figure it's opposite ends of the spectrum, right? You're either somebody that never moves or you're constantly jumping. Well, yeah. Yeah, I guess that would be the never moves or the constantly jumpings every three years. Sure. Yep. All right. So I do have some more jokes though.

So super good Dave gave me another, some more. But okay. So did you hear the one about bread and butter? No, you haven't heard this one. I tell you, but I don't want to spread it around. And then I got to share this one from his daughter. Why doesn't a bear wear socks? God, I don't know.

I'm so bad at this. I got no idea. It has bear feet. Oh, geez. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. That's the thing about dad jokes. They're just awesome, right?

They are good. So for this episode survey, Matthew Watkins gave us this really awesome idea for a survey. And so we ask, how many bits or data type could your annual salary fit in, in whole dollars? And your choices are one bit or a Boolean. Wait, you can make money with this coding stuff? Or eight bits, a byte. I made a webpage for a friend one time. Or 16 bits, or a short. I'm an intern, or at least I get paid like one. Or 16 bits and an unsigned short. I'm just getting started in my career. Or 17 bits, I like my company or 18 bits.

My company likes me or 19 bits. My company really, really likes me or 20 plus bits. I run my company. Well, I definitely fit in 20 plus bits. Well, I guess,

I guess, okay, I should rephrase that. What's the smallest, uh, size that your, your salary could fit in. How about here's some, some alternatives. It's neat. If none of those worked for you, some qubits, my salary is in a state of flux or a string because I only get paid in thank you messages. Or negative numbers. Who needs to pay you for having fun? I pay for everything I use to write my open source project. Or memory addresses because buffer overflow attacks are how hackers like me make money.

I like them. All right. I will correct that to say the smallest. Hey, this episode is sponsored by x matters x matters helps enterprises prevent manage and resolve technology incidents x matters industry-leading digital service availability platform prevents technical issues from becoming big business problems large enterprises agile sres, and innovative DevOps teams rely on its proactive incident response, automation, and management service to maintain operational visibility and control in today's highly fragmented technology environment. Yeah, and the fragmented part is really what they're focusing on, right?

So X Matters, they walked us through their platform and they showed us what goes on there. And the amazing part is instead of you focusing on all the minutia of, hey, there's a production outage. I need to find out a way to communicate with all the team members and I need to gather everybody together and get all the information and share it. Instead of putting that on a person to go do all those same monotonous mundane tasks, they automate that for you, right? So if a production thing happens, you can have that trigger setting up a Slack room. You could have it then create a JIRA automatically. It could automatically ship the logs for the errors that happened to that JIRA incident. So all that stuff is centralized. And that's all things that people typically do and may not do consistently. So their whole platform is built around enabling you to move faster and work faster as a team to resolve issues, to find things quicker and take care

of things as fast as possible. I mean, when things go wrong, there's nothing more important than to get the system back up and running into a good state, right? So stop trying to maintain your on-call list with a spreadsheet or something manual like that. It's error prone. It's going to be forgotten about. It's definitely not automated, but with X Matters, they have automated on-call management. So when things do hit the fan, like Alan said, you could automatically create your JIRA, ship the logs over. But not only that, you could actually have it automatically spin up a call and call all of the people that need to be involved to rectify whatever the problem is. And that's the type of automation that you want.

And from IT to DevOps to emergency notifications, everyone needs speed, automation, and reliability when things go wrong. So keep your digital services up and running today with X Matters. Learn more at xmatters.com. Again, that's xmatters.com. Okay, that's xmatters.com. Okay, so I guess it's my turn.

And, you know, I kind of feel bamboozled here going last with this whole thing. Because, I mean, number one, like, I didn't think that it was, I guess I misunderstood

like the topic. I didn't necessarily think it was like the things that I'm supposed to be excited for for next year. So if I'm talking about the things that I'm excited for, for next year, um, apparently there's a few vaccines in the work. So I'm pretty excited about those. I'm hoping that they're successful and they work. Uh, no. So I, I thought that we were supposed to be taking it like the things that we want to learn, like the, what we were supposed to be taking the things that we want to learn, like what we were going to focus our learning on.

So that's my bad. But also, here's where it sucks going last in this because I guess the three of us are similar-minded. Maybe that's why we're friends because there's a lot of overlap here. So I'm like, oh, well, this sucks. So this is going to be quick. But yeah, I mean, top of the list for me is Kubernetes. I want to go deep on Kubernetes. Now, when I say go deep on that, what I mean is like, I feel pretty comfortable with Git, for example, right? That's a thing. And I'm like, yeah, I got it, right? And I want to start making it a point to get to a level, people might come to you to ask questions, you know, like, like about a particular subject, right? Like you're that you're, you're deep enough on

that subject that like, you know, people come to you with questions. Right. And, and I, I want to like have that kind of understanding about it. I don't necessarily need all the questions, but I want to have that kind of understanding about it. Right. And, but here's the thing, like, if we're just comparing like get, you know, Kubernetes to get, for example, um, get is just like, you know, it's one wrapper around a whole bunch of tools. Right. But Kubernetes is like one technology around like a whole bunch of things, right? So what does it mean to become, you know, really deep in Kubernetes? Well, okay.

First of all, that means that, you know, getting a strong understanding of like kubectl, for example, which by the way, like some of the things that I'm going to say like, I feel like I'm, I'm well already on my way on some of these, but, um, a lot of it is maybe like an imposter syndrome or, uh, you know, just modesty or whatever. Like there's still, there's still some things where I'm like, okay, still so far behind. Right. But, but if you're going to even start with Kubernetes, then, you know, you have to start with kubectl. And there's still like a lot of things with that that I'm like, you know, I'm positive that there are things that I don't yet know, right? So it's that whole like you don't know what you don't know yet kind of thing. But then, I mean, like really Kubernetes by itself is kind of like, I mean, you really, you're really talking helm. I mean, you know, at some point you're like,

you know, if you really want to take the power of Kubernetes, then you're like, really got to like deep dive into helm as well. But if're gonna do a helm then it's like okay why does this one have a dash in front of it and what is why why are these like this like why what does this indention here mean because it's all in yaml so you really got to have a deep understanding of yaml as well so i've only like scratched the surface of like, here's a couple of things that we didn't even talk about, like all the level of, uh, you know, detail that you might have related to like the Docker images that Kubernetes is orchestrating, right? Like there's a whole bunch there that you can talk about, you know, so I'm not even thinking

about, you know, like I want to have like much stronger understandings of like, uh, jobs in Kubernetes, like cron like jobs in Kubernetes services, like, you know, all the, all the, like, not just like pods and nodes. I want, I want to like have the whole umbrella. I want to, I want to, I want to have the whole thing. And, you know, I have been trying to talk, uh, you know, the listeners are going to take my side here. I'm talking to them. I'm not talking to you guys because, um, I've been trying to, you guys can help me. I've been trying to get Alan and Joe on board with this idea of doing a super deep dive series on Kubernetes. And if you love that idea, then I think you should definitely hit them up. You can find Joe on Slack at JoeZach.

I make things – what did I say? Difficult? Difficult, yeah. And then you can find alan there too he just has a boring name like at alan or something yeah yeah um but yeah but no i i do like i i did i did like a little you know behind the scenes uh you know how the sausage is made kind of thing like i did hit hit uh the guys up you know, Joe and Alan up about this, about like this idea of like, hey, what if we did a, you know, not a long series of episodes, but you know, like a couple

where we could like break up Kubernetes into like some of the main core components. Like, you know, you can't start a conversation like that without talking about nodes and pods, but eventually you would get into some of the other aspects, you know, you can't start a conversation like that without talking about nodes and pods, but, but eventually you would get into some of the other aspects, you know, services, jobs or whatever, or stateful sets. Well, I guess you kind of have to do all that before you get to jobs and, and services, but whatever the point is, is like, you know, take, take a handful of, of the different topics and, and get into it. And I think that like selfishly, part of the reason why I want to do that is because it is, you know, the thing that I was already kind of excited before you asked to do

this episode. Then I think that by kind of similar to what you said before, Alan, was that, you know, by doing it for the show, like, I think that it would like help. It would, it gives us an excuse to, to, to dive into things that we might not otherwise have a reason to, you know, that, um, I mean, there's a lot of things about just making this show that like, you know, kind of get us to look at technologies or algorithms or patterns or whatever, whatever it might be that, you know, you could very easily go buy in your career and make good money. May, you know, I'm not saying you could like make good money without caring. Right.

But, but, you know, we kind of get forced, we kind of force it upon ourselves. Right. Uh, you know, the, the show forces us like, learn things and step out of our comfort zone. So, yeah, hit those guys up on Slack and convince them to do the Kubernetes deep dive. I just don't want to talk about something I already know everything about. Oh, yeah. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah. Now, I mean like Joe,

you, you brought an interesting thing to it. Cause I didn't even consider the Kubernetes application developer, um, certification. I mean, that, that's interesting.

Like I'm kind of, I don't know, like I'm, I'm on the fence. Cause, uh, like, well,

we've talked about certifications before in the past. And like, sometimes like some of them are so fluff. This was like, Oh, it's not, you know, that one might not be,

I'm not saying that that one is fluff. Don't, don't, don't take that the wrong way. Um, I just, I don't know. I hadn't considered it,

I guess is the real takeaway until, uh, you mentioned it. Um, and then, and then, you know, it is kind of funny though, because when you talk about the Kubernetes, the certified Kubernetes application developer, and then there was that episode that we did earlier this year where the title

was like, is Kubernetes programming? And I guess their answer is yes. Yeah, so I want to – that's like – and also too in my misunderstanding of this topic, like I thought we were just doing the one thing. So like I am like super not as organized then as what you guys had because I was just like the one thing, like the one and done. Uh, but it did make me think that like, you know, as you were talking, like if I had to pick a number two thing, it would definitely be Kotlin. Um, because I feel like there's a, there'd be a lot of value, especially in my day job. Uh, I think it would, I think it would be beneficial for me to have a strong understanding of Kotlin. So that would be my number two. But, oh, by the way, going back to – there's the knowledge as well and maybe go for that certification too.

One thing on Kotlin. One thing on Kotlin. So as much as I love it, there are some real irritations with it. And I'm sure, Jay-Z, you might have run into this. The major irritations have nothing to do with Kotlin itself. It's when you start trying to mix Kotlin with regular Java because you're forced to, right? So for instance, we've done some Bmaps and the type system between Kotlin and Java don't jive exactly well. And so you run into really weird problems that have you chasing your tail for a while because a string isn't a string or a long isn't a long or whatever the case may be, right?

So the Java type doesn't match the Kotlin type and they don't marshal perfectly across. And you literally can spend hours and days trying to figure out why in the world your number isn't working like the number should be. And it mostly happens due to the fact that like when you're dealing with things like Beam, you're dealing with serialization between different mediums, right? Like you might be serializing into an Avro format back out of it. And those are typically written to your Java types. And again, those don't mesh well or perfectly with the Kotlin ones. And so those kind of irritations really stink.

But Kotlin as a whole is just so pretty. Once you can understand what you're looking at, it's really pretty. Yeah, that's the, that's where like I need to take a redo, a step back with Kotlin because, so, you know, a friend of ours, you know, that we've talked about before, Ryan, um, he created a, a, what was it like a, a beam Kotlin court. I think it was a beam course for Kotlin beginners or something like that.

Like I forget exactly what it was called, but, um, I think that like part of the problem that I had was that, that it was trying to do things specific to, or it might not even been beam. It might've been a, was it beam or was it just a Kafka streams? It was okay but but it was like you're trying to like learn two things at the same

time beam and kotlin and the problem that i had was that like the documentation for beam was not kotlin friendly at all and so they would just give you like here straight up, like, you know, Java examples or whatever, and then try to, I'm trying to translate that to Kotlin and it just wasn't going well at all. And there's supposed to be a, we, I mean, we've actually talked about this, I believe as a tip of the week on, um, on the, on a previous episode where in IntelliJ you can copy and pay, you could copy Java and into your file. And if it's a, if the file is recognized,

if the file is a dot KT file, IntelliJ would recognize it and it would go ahead and, and convert the Java into Kotlin friendly code. But I guess on my environment, you know, even though I was using IntelliJ Ultimate Edition, it wasn't working. So that was where I was getting

super frustrated trying to go through the course that he had created because it was like, I'm getting lost. I'm getting hung up just in the tooling behind it. So that's why I'm kind of thinking like, okay, I think I'm going to go – I'm going to give Kotlin another go, but I'm going to like take Beam out of the equation.

I'm not going to try to confuse. Like let me just focus on the one thing and – because then it's like what Joe was saying earlier with like learning a new language. Then it's like you could just focus on like, okay, I get it now. I understand the syntax. I get it now. It makes sense. But before it was like, I was trying to do, you know, the two things at the same time. And it was like, okay, I don't know if this problem that I'm running into, is that a beam problem? Or is that, is that a Kotlin problem? Or did I like, where, which one did I mess up? Because I messed up one of them. And Beam's complicated enough on its own, right? So, yeah, it's definitely worth taking in a smaller, isolated way to get familiar with Kotlin. And it really is an enjoyable language. Yeah. And JetBrains, they themselves have some great resources out there for it.

So, yeah, that shouldn't be too hard. But Kubernetes is first, the Kotlin second. I will say too, uh, anything problems that you run into in Kotlin are worth it. Ooh. Any.

Blank statement. True. It's so good. So good. I like your confidence. Everything else is a trifle. Yeah. I'm not confident about many things,

but Kotlin, it's pretty good. Yeah, it is good. It is good. Yeah, so those are my boring ones. I think they were boring. They were all really good. I think that's legit.

Yeah, I want all of that. That's good. So yeah, we'll have plenty of links to the internet in the resources we like section. And, yeah, just pretend we are AOL and just search for the keyword episode 147, and then you can find all the links that we've talked about here. You know there's got to be somebody that's listening to this show like, keyword? What is he talking

yeah no i thought you said there's somebody listening to this episode that actually knows what that is oh well there's that too yeah all right and with that vacation we head into alan's favorite portion of the show. It's the tip of the week. Oh, hey, I'm the first tip. Sorry. So Alan convinced me to hook up this beautiful camera. I was just looking at myself. What's up, you beautiful thing?

That's amazing. Which section are we on now? All right, so here are the things i want to learn this year all right so yeah it's the tip of the week we're on the everybody check your camera uh portion of the show yeah we're gonna start publishing these videos again just so you can see no coincidence that we're starting now all right so i actually have two tips one of which came up during the show uh turns out manning has a ton of books on audible uh 42 of them specifically as of the time of this recording uh which is amazing a lot of them look really good and uh you can look at the reviews and um the reviews are kind of suspiciously high for coding type books so i

don't know but you can get that C sharp and death. For example, it's only got two ratings. It's got four stars, which is believable. And actually all the many ones I'm looking at are good. So I went ahead and looked at, uh, other programming books on audible and there's lots of like master machine

learning in four weeks, you know, kind of like, uh, back in the day, you used to see those like learn C plus plus 24 hours. So we're just a terrible joke. And you know,

I'll tell you, the reviews are so obviously fake. There are like 378 of them. They all were written on the same day of the publication. Everyone's first name and last name sounds identical. And basically, the review is the same sentiment, just shuffled. But the Manning books do look good. Like we said earlier, I picked up the one that was Everyday Machine Learning.

So I'll be checking that out and let you know how that turns out as far as it being an audio book. I've never done a book like that on audio. So we'll find out. Looking forward to the review. Yes, I'll let you know. I just want to say that these actionable phrases help me out a lot. Did you see that? The reviews are funny. I just want to say that these actionable phrases help me out a lot. I know. Did you see that?

The reviews are funny. I mean, so the Manning books do not have this. I dropped another link in our chat to one of the books I was looking at. It was just ridiculous. There's something about just looking at the names. You're like, these aren't real people. It's like Stephen Smith. Next one.

Smith, Stephen. Third one. Stephen Abacus. Next one. Abacus Smith. It also looks like a lot of these names were made up by Stan Lee because the first name and the last name start with the same letter. Yeah, for sure. For sure. It looks totally like someone just went one after another,

just not caring and just blasted through writing through hundreds of reviews. Yeah. Octo Octavius. Peter Parker. James Johanna Jameson. That's right. Oh, man. Whatever.

So, yeah. Anyway, check that out if you're Audible and you've got some credits to use up by the end of the year like I do. All right. So, here's the second one. So, I used to say that you should keep a list of the three companies in your area that you would want to work for if you got fired today. And the reason like that is because it gives you something to go after. So, you can look at the kinds of problems that solve the kind of technologies they use, and just start kind of focusing on that stuff. So if the worst thing happens or you just decide it's time to jump,

then you have a good basis to go and explore that. Now, so many companies are hiring remote. You, developer, listening to this podcast, have so many more options than you had a year ago. So I am saying, Hey, why don't, in addition to keeping a list of the three top companies in your area that you would want to work for, if you got fired today,

or if you were looking for a job today, why don't you also go figure out the three top for you remote companies that you would want to work for? And if you don't know any, we've got an article here that we'll link to but um someone's that uh pretty good like github um mozilla uh elastic search confluent uh microsoft facebook i mean like they're that's not the ones listening to the article but there's just some companies i know that are hiring remotely right now and so if those are companies that you're

interested in i highly recommend checking it out and kind of tailing your resume and side projects and things that you're kind of listening to in podcasts and you know youtube videos and whatever in in order to to go get the job you want so i i'd always bug me when people uh you know get look go or start looking for jobs something bad happens at work and they are looking at the jobs that are available. You know, they're, they're basically going to like a monster.com and looking for jobs where if you get ahead of that, get ahead of your need, you know, that's of course, that's a luxury. You know, if you're already in that situation, I feel for you. But if you're at a job right now, there is no better time than to go out and figure out who you want to work for so

that you're not beholden to what's available at the time you're looking. How much does it suck that so much of job transfers happen when you get fed up with your current job and it has little to do with where you want to go next? I would much rather if you have a comfortable position now, you spend the time now when you're comfortable to figure out where you want to go with your career and going at it from that angle. That's good advice. Yeah, yeah.

How much, like, is it cliche of me that like, you know, place number one is GitHub? It is. Yeah, it's very cliche of you outlaw i mean i'm looking at this article you shared and it was like number one github well you know who else uh is fully remote

git lab oh well they didn't make a list here so i blame you. Cool. All right. So mine, I've actually got a few. There should be fairly quick. So the first one is iTerm, which if you're on a Mac and you're using the regular terminal, ditch that thing. Get iTerm 2. I should probably put a link to that up here. It's appreciated.

Yeah, I'll do that. But if you do it, there's all kinds of features you get with it, like tab, split, browsing, all kinds of things. There's just a ton of features that makes it a better terminal to deal with. That said, it also pops up tips every time you open it, kind of like IntelliJ's things or JetBrains tools do, right? Like you open it up, it'll give you the tip of the day or whatever. Well, there was one that came up that was just amazing. So if in an iTerm terminal you do command, shift, and period,

it will bring up a little window where you can paste in your commands and you can edit them before it'll actually execute them. So how many times you've been on a webpage and it'll have like 10 commands in a row and you'll want to copy them, but you might need to edit something in it before you run it. And so it's always a pain because you either have to go open it up in Visual Studio Code or something else so that you can go in and munch it all up there and then bring it over and copy and paste it back into iTerm. That's kind of annoying, but if you just pasted it right into iTerm with the carriage breaks, it's going to execute each line. So it's just really annoying. With this, you could go over there and do the command shift period. It'll bring up that window,

paste in your stuff, edit it right there, then hit run, and it'll execute them for you in line. So it kind of skips that step of having to go into an external editor, which I absolutely love. So I've been using that a little bit lately. And if you followed any of the security-related information regarding just copy and pasting from a web page, then you really don't want to immediately take take it into a, uh, a console where a run, have you, have you heard about some of those tricks where it's like, you gotta be careful, like, no, you trust, no, and trust the source. If you're going to copy and paste something and, and, and to execute it, like if you're going to take it straight off the webpage, copy it,

and then paste it directly into the clipboard or not the clipboard, but your terminal and execute it. There have been some sites where they'll have like text that isn't displayed because it's super easy to do with CSS, right? Just change the color of the font or something and or the size. Or the size, yeah. Yeah, so you would copy and paste a group of text and not realize that you got some malicious commands also. And you paste it in. And depending on that, sometimes there's already a new line that you're pasting in.

So it would execute before you even had a chance to see anything, see what had happened. And you might have like reverse tunnel to shell back, whatever. Jeez, whatever. He's mad. Yeah. Well, so this is a great tip then for that because you'd be able to see it before it ever executed. So yeah,

that's why I was saying like that, that would be awesome. Yeah, that's beautiful. So definitely check that thing out. I will get a link in there to I term too as well. And then the next ones. All right.

So we just did the shopping episode, which we all love. Like that's a lot of fun. Joe always goes off and, alright, so we just did the shopping episode, which we all love. That's a lot of fun. Joe always goes off and does something random that we can't expect and then me and Outlaw go crazy buying stuff, right? Virtually buying things. Wait, virtually? Okay, well maybe we've

made some of these things reality. It's too late to cancel the order in that scorpion chair? Hold on. My Bitcoin are doing fantastic. That uh setup i got man wait bitcoins they're up to 20k again man i'm rolling it how about that how about that bitcoin if you ever wanted something that would give you anxiety in life that's definitely one of those things which one's honestly doing better though the cheese dust or the bitcoin i think the cheese dust yeah i have a lot more fun with the cheese dust it's got to be no it has to

be the bitcoin because the cheese dust is gone oh that's right that's right oh man that stuff sticks around forever it's kind of like uh energy you know it can never be really created or destroyed just like matter yeah It's dark matter. Yeah, it ends up under your fingernails and in the couch for years and years. That's awesome. All right, so on the other one. So this is something that I accidentally stumbled on the other day, and I don't know why I never thought of it.

All right, so you're on Amazon. You're getting ready to buy a product as you do, right? How do you know that's the best product? Like you guys ever remember those days where eBay was just, you knew that was where you're getting the best price. And then one day you realized that you weren't even getting close to the best price. Right. And I'm pretty sure that Amazon is that same world now, right? Like you go there because you got your payment set up. It's really easy to do whatever, right? So Capital One has a Chrome extension that's actually really good. If you install the Chrome extension, you'll have to sign up, put your email or whatever up there.

You can fake an email if you want. I mentioned the Mozilla way of doing that previously. But go in and put that thing in. When you go to a page, and it doesn't just have to be Amazon, it could be any number of sites, Walmart.com, Amazon, Home Depot, right? Pick your place. You go up there and on Amazon, the integration's really nice. You find a product on the page right there next to the price. It'll actually have like a little thing saying, yeah, this is like a really good price for this product. Or it might say you can save $10 right now. Check out where you can do it.

You click a link and it'll show you, hey, if you buy this thing from Walmart.com right now, you'll save $10 including shipping, right? So it will cross shop for you, which is really nice. And then I think on top of it as well, I haven't seen this feature work yet. It will also go out and try and find coupons for you online. So if you're on one of those sites, that's always got a freaking coupon box where you can punch in the coupon code, it will try to find the coupon code that will give you the best discount for what you're trying to buy. So they say, and I don't know how accurate it is, but they say, like, if you buy two products a month, it'll save you like, I don't know, $15 or something.

Right. So if you're somebody that buys a lot of stuff online and especially during COVID this year, I'd venture to say a lot of us are buying a lot of garbage online. Garbage? Yeah, it's garbage. Whatever. But you could probably save a lot. So that's it. That Chrome extension, I have a link to that. That one's really nice. Seriously, I'm impressed by it. There's another one. I was curious. I was like, why have I never thought of this before? Right? Like I've heard of Camel, Camel, Camel, which allows you to sort of track prices of an item, which I think, Joe, you mentioned to me probably, God, it's probably been eight years ago. You were like, hey, dude, check out this extension, right?

Or this thing. So Camel, Camel. Huh? Tractor, right? Tractor is another one. Yeah, they're both. But yeah, you could totally pick an item and say, hey, I'm interested in this hard drive, right? Notify me when it drops $15 or something and you'll get these notifications.

Well, so there's another one. I went to the categories under the Chrome extensions for shopping And the very first one is called Honey. So if you look at that one, it looks to do something similar to Capital One, but I don't think it's as good, which is ironic because it has way more downloads and reviews than what the Capital One one does. But it looks like it's more similar to Camel, Camel, Camel, where it's watching the Amazon price and it's not cross shopping a bunch of different sites. I think it does somewhat, but it didn't seem to be as well integrated as what the Capital One one is. So at any rate, check those out. If you want to save some money during the holidays, this is probably a really good way to find out if you're

getting a good deal and all that kind of stuff. Oh, golly. So, all right. I will give you one more tip. I'm going to throw this one in for free. I put it in the notes. So here's another one. One of the reasons- You don't get paid by the tip of the week, Alan. I apologize. I apologize. I'm trying to save you guys money. And I'm also trying to keep you safe online shopping. So this is something that I actually, I think I might have, I don't know if Outlaw and Jay-Z knew about this or not. So while we might've complained about PayPal in the past, I use PayPal a lot. So we complained about it from a developer standpoint, but I use it a lot because it allows me not put my credit card information in on a bunch of different sites

online, right? I don't want to put my credit card in because eventually it's going to get hacked somewhere and then I'm going to have to go through a whole bunch of garbage to replace my credit card and all that kind of stuff, right? Like I don't like dealing with that. So here is a beautiful tip. If there's a website out there that takes credit cards, which most of them do, right? I don't know how you're going to pay elsewise in most cases. Apple Pay. Apple Pay could be one. But if they don't take PayPal, but you don't want to put your credit card up there, PayPal has a feature called PayPal Key. If you have a PayPal account, you can log into it and you can set up this PayPal Key, which is essentially a virtual credit card. So what it does is it gives you a credit card number

that is a MasterCard number with an expiration and a security code. You can then take that, go back to the site where you wanted to buy something from, put in that virtual credit card number, and that will hit your PayPal account. So again, you're not having to expose your real credit card numbers anywhere. This is one that's tied to your PayPal account. And if that thing ever has a problem, you can go trash that thing, right? So it's a great way to be able to shop on some of these sites that maybe you wouldn't have gone to previously because you didn't want to put your information in there. You can go do that, do it more securely, and not have to bring your real stuff to go. So all those, Joe, you're kind of doing your nose out.

You like it. You hate it. You what? I almost fall asleep. Sorry, what? That's good. Well, I can do you one better on that PayPal thing if you like this idea. Have you heard of privacy.com?

I don't think I have. So imagine, what if you lived in a world where you go to some random website, so you go to joebob.com and you want to buy a new seat for your tractor, and you're like, well, yeah, but I don't know joebob.com very well, and I don't want to give him all my information. Well, with privacy dot com, if you sign up for their service, you can create a credit card specific to them. They can only be used at Joe Bob dot com or whatever I said. And so you can basically create like one time use credit cards. I love it. And they have like a free tier that you could do it,

um, which, you know, might be, might be sufficient enough. But the cool thing about those credit cards is that some of those credit cards can be, you can make them single use,

but you could also like lock them to a specific merchant or you could do things like Spotify payments, right? Like, okay, Spotify, that's a great one. You could say like, what's, what's Spotify payments, right? Like, okay. Spotify. That's a great one. You could say like,

what's, what's a Spotify, uh, uh, like $8 subscription or whatever. Let's say, let's say you want to like limit it to, uh,

no more than, than $10. You're like, okay, if it goes up a buck, I'm fine. Right. You could,

you could, you could say like, Hey, this card is only for good for this merchant at for this amount. And if they ever try to charge you anymore, then they would fail. Or then if you're like, hey, you know what? I don't want to use that service anymore. And I'm too lazy to figure out like how to unsubscribe.

So I'm just going to like shut that card down. And then the problem just goes away on its own. Dude, I love that. You can like obfuscate. You can actually obfuscate your personal information too. If you don't want them to actually know your name, you could hide all that. There's other details. I don't know how you would hide it in the case of an address if you wanted to have something shipped. That probably wouldn't work out as well. But for a lot of online services like your Spotify, for example, they don't need to actually

know your real name and address. And so using privacy.com, you could fake all that as well. So you could be like Billy Bob at 123 Street, anywhere USA, and here's your one-time use credit card that's only good at Spotify and only good for a certain dollar amount. Dude, I think it might be even, so that's amazing. I'm looking at the page now. I pasted the link under your tips of the week here, but it's even better. So you can set spend limits. So I know you talked about your kids, right? Oh, that's cool. Yeah. That's what I was saying.

Like you could say like you could only spend up to $10 a month on spotify yeah yeah that's so so if your kids are in college right you say hey i'm gonna give you you know a hundred dollars a month for you know yeah yeah you're right okay so so another way of saying that is like that that spin limit doesn't have to be specific to a to a given vendor you could just make it like like, hey, you could give your mom a credit card and be like, hey, mom, you can use this as much as you want. It's good for X amount of dollars per month. Yeah, amazing.

Yeah. So cool. Yeah, there's a link in the show notes for that. And you're right, the personal one's free. So that's amazing. Yeah. Okay. So in keeping in the spirit of my dive into Kubernetes, I thought, you know what? I should probably give out kubectl tips for a while.

Oh, that's good. So prepare yourself. So I thought, hey, this one will be – I've given some kubectl ones before, but I don't think I've given this one specifically. So real simple, easy way, I'll have a link to the documentation for it, because there's a bunch of different variations that you could do here. But the idea is, let's say that you have a service spun up to front, like your web web server or, you know, your database server or whatever. And, uh, you want to access that thing and, you know, locally on your, your computer to, um, uh, you know, investigate it or play around with it or whatever, you know,

maybe you don't have like a public facing, um, maybe a web server wasn't such a good idea because you'd probably already have a public facing, uh, uh, IP address for that, but let's say that you didn't. So like go back to your database and you wanted it to be, um, specific to your cloud, to your Kubernetes cluster, but you need to get access into it. Cause maybe you want to run some queries, see some state of what's going on or whatever. So you could easily, uh, gain access to that by forwarding that service to a port locally. And you don't have to, you can take the shortcuts and use the syntax where you take kubectl port dash forward service slash whatever the name of the service is, and then your port colon their port. And like I said, that's just one example. There's other examples on how you could

port forward things like if it wasn't a service, but maybe it was a replica set or deployment or whatever it is, you could specify that. And I actually put the shortcut name in there because with a lot of kubectl commands, you can, instead of typing out service, you can type in SVC or things like that. So you can shortcut some of that part of the commands too. You know, it always bothered me. You cannot port forward by a label. So you can't say like kubectl port forward dash L and give it some sort of filter.

Even if you know there's only one, like that's something I always wish I could do. But it makes sense though. Yeah, it's really not set up for that, you know. Because the assumption is that when you use the label filter on your command, that you're getting back more than the one thing. So how would it know what thing to forward to? If you got back multiple things, then it's like, okay,

if you did dash L app equal web, because you wanted all your web instances to come back, for example, maybe, that had an app equal web label on it, then if you got

back like three of those things and you wanted to pour forward that which one is which one of those three is it going to pour forward to so i mean you can kind of understand where it would be um weird so yeah and if you only have one of what's the point of really putting a label on it but uh yeah i mean so there's different reasons why you might want to use a song goes you could imagine reasons for why you would want to do that. But yeah, I just thought it was always kind of weird. It's like, oh man, I know there's only one. This is like a cute label that I know and I can't get there.

But okay, so you were saying like, hey, why would you put a label on it if you only have the one thing? But maybe this should be like another like best practices kind of hint though. Because like I really think that you should put the label on it, even if you are going to only have the one thing, because you might not have the one thing tomorrow. You might have more than one of it. And so it's just easier to like, you know, do things by label. And plus, you don't have to worry about like, oh, I want to describe this thing. And if let's say you only had the one. If you wanted to go by label name, you don't have to know the specific pod, your random character that got added to the end of it.

Well, even taking it a step further, and this is getting way far in the weeds, though, labels work with selectors, right? Yeah, you might have to have the label in order to even do some of the other things that you need to do. That's a good point. Even outside of the best practices, you've got to have it. In certain situations, yeah. Yes. Yeah.

All right. Well, with that, I will leave you with some closing jokes. I think my son wrote this one. He's the author of this one Because he didn't He did not not take credit for this one So I'm going to tell it to you And you tell me if you think

He's the author or not You ready? Here we go A priest, an atheist And a rabbit walk into a Blood drive The rabbit says, I think, and a rabbit walk into a blood drive. The rabbit says, I think I'm a typo.

That's pretty good. The delay is what always gets me. It took me a second. It took me a second. All right. One last one as your parting wish from Super Good Dave. And I know, Alan, you are especially going to love this one as a, you know, because big data, that was like one of the things you said, right? For your exciting things, which I don't think, by the way, hey, can we call shenanigans on that? Is it too late to call shenanigans on that, Joe? For Alan to claim

that like the thing he's excited about for 2021 is big data when that's the thing he said he's been excited about for like the last i don't know how many years have we known alan that's all he's ever been excited about but whatever i'm still excited about basketball right okay so it's always fine that's true so it's always the same things but but uh you go. A new database query walks into a bar. The server says, sorry, cash only awful. I love it. I like it. All right. So, Hey, if you have some dad jokes and you're like, Oh, I should share these awful things with the world, yeah, hit me up. However you need to find me on Slack, you can find me at Michael or on Twitter or wherever. Find me.

You can find me. That's probably good enough, right? I know who you are. Come on. Do I know? I can find you. Oh, that's what you mean. I? I know who you are. Come on. Do I know? Oh, that's what you mean. I was like, where's this going? This is awkward.

Yeah. So with that, subscribe to us on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, wherever you like to find your podcast apps, find your podcast. And if you can't find us there, let us know, and we will be sure to correct that problem. And, yeah, Alan's going to go and update the link to remove the Stitcher stuff, but you can find the helpful link for reviews at www.codingblocks.net.

Hey, while you're up there at codingblocks.net, review. Hey, and while you're up there at codingblocks.net, you can check out our show notes, which are amazing, our examples, discussions, and more. And make sure you comment on this, right? Leave some thoughts.

I'm sure we threw some questions up here, so throw your thoughts up there. Oh, and send your questions, feedbacks, and rants especially. Rants go to Slack. Very nice. And hey, make sure to follow us on Twitter at Conebox or head over to Conebox.net

and find all our other shows. I feel like we just said that. I give up.