Coding Blocks - Why Attend Developer Conferences and What were the Hot Topics at NDC London 2020?

Episode Date: February 17, 2020

Jamie from https://dotnetcore.show/ and Allen, ya know, from Coding Blocks, sat down together at NDC London to talk about the hot topics from the conference as well as how to get the most out of any conference you attend. If you’re reading this episodes show notes via your podcast player, you can find this episode’s […]

You're listening to Coding Blocks, episode 126. Subscribe to us and leave us a review on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, or more using your favorite podcast app. Visit us at CodingBlocks.net where you can find show notes, examples, discussions, and more. Send your feedbacks, questions, and rants to comments at CodingBlocks.net and follow us on Twitter at CodingBlocks or head to www.CodingBcks.net and find all our social links there at the top of the page. With that, I'm Alan Underwood.

And Joe Zak and Michael Outlaw took a break this week as we were in NDC London. So here's that show coming to you in just a second. This episode is sponsored by Datadog, the monitoring platform for cloud-scale infrastructure and applications allowing you to see inside any stack, any app, at any scale, anywhere. And Educative.io, level up your coding skills quickly and efficiently whether you're just starting, preparing for an interview, or just looking to grow your skillset. And Clubhouse, the fast and enjoyable project management platform that breaks down silos and brings teams together to ship value, not just features. All right, you do what you're going to do. You want me to start? That's when we come into it, right?

See, this is how you start a show, actually. And I've got to remember to talk into the microphone. I'm not used to holding them. That would help, right? They're usually right up in my face. Yeah, you've probably got it on a stand or something, right? I do, yeah. I was going to bring the stands, and then I realized, you know, it's not going to fit. And I'm going to walk around with a couple of stands in my hand.

Yeah, traveling is rough with that kind of stuff. So, yeah, I'm Alan Underwood from Coding Blocks. I'm Jamie Taylor from Donut Call Podcast. Yep. And we're hooking up here in NDC London, right? Yeah, yeah. So I guess like this particular episode, we're just going to talk about the things that we've seen here and why we would even come to it. Yeah, that makes more sense because otherwise it doesn't really fit with either show.

If we sit here and talk about.NET Core, you can't use it for a coding box. I could. Well, okay. I totally could. Let's switch gears. We could do it. But no, yeah, I mean, like coming to this, one of the things that's interesting to me is I've been going to talks that aren't necessarily in my wheelhouse or not typically things that I do. Because to me, coming to a show like this is about going out and getting exposed to things like you. Yeah, sure. you yeah sure uh the the way that i've always like i've said to people if you're going to a

a meetup or a conference or something go to the things that you have no idea about because then you go from that unknown unknowns to known unknowns you know you may not walk out of it an expert but you know enough to start doing some googling or some binging or whatever search engine you use dot go whatever you know the terms to search for to learn more you know right because the i've never talked to learn more, you know? Right. Because I've never talked at a big event like this, but when I've talked at the smaller local ones, it's like I explicitly say I'm going to give you the knowledge you need

so that you can go away from this and learn more. Right. Because people aren't going to be able to grok everything on a commute, right? Exactly. But you tweak that thing to where they get back to their computer and they're like, I got to look this up. Right. Um,

I will say the interesting challenge when you come to, especially a bigger event like this is picking the talks that you actually want to attend. So like Troy Hunt was speaking this morning and I totally wanted to go see what he had to say. Cause I mean, he's probably the security expert in the world, right? Everybody knows his name.

But there was a talk about, you know, 3D printed hands in IoT. And it's like, well, wait a second. Like, that's not the world I live in. But this is really interesting. So I had to make that choice, right? So I ended up going to the one of, of the guy that I don't know. But it was, it was an amazing choice because honestly it might've been one of the best

presentations I've had here because this is somebody that's changing the world because he knows of a, of a child that has a need, right? Yeah. It's stuff like that is why coming to conferences like this are awesome. They're going to post the videos and what a couple of weeks, something like that is why coming to conferences like this are awesome. They're going to post the videos and what a couple of weeks, something like that. Yeah. Something like that. Yeah.

I think there's one talk that Troy Hunt is doing and not recording. Cause I feel like it's some kind of proprietary or zero day information. Maybe not. Maybe so. I don't know, but it explicitly says this is not being recorded, you know, in the,

in the app. So that's absolutely crazy. But yeah, I mean, that's the kind of stuff like you can watch a video online and yeah you're going to see the slides you're going to see the people but but to actually like get to touch the stuff and interact with the people and talk to the people that are doing this kind of stuff right like that these are regular everyday

people that are developers that that are filling a need out there, right? Like it's just, it's killer stuff. It really is. And yeah, the talk by Cliff, it was literally, I mean, we were standing around afterwards and I went, and I do forms over data. I'm not changing the world, but this guy is changing the world or at least that's his goal, you know? I mean, that's honestly one of the big things, right?

Is I'd say most developers are usually solving business problems, right? Like most people don't think about things from a human problem. And it's really interesting. It's nice to see stuff like that because if you don't live in that world, that's not the kind of things that you go look up, right? Exactly, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, he was saying during that, he said, somebody said to me yesterday, you know, it's 9 o'clock Monday morning, put it into school mode. And that's just something that I, spoiler alert, it being one of the episodes this year when I was talking to that, he said, somebody said to me yesterday, you know, it's nine o'clock Monday morning, put into school mode. And that's just something that I, spoiler alert, it's been one of the episodes this year when I was talking to him.

I said, oh yeah, so you're using machine, you want to use machine learning so that it knows what day it is, knows his schedule. It'll just switch between the sets. And he went, I hadn't thought of that. Right. Oh, so he actually mentioned that at the end there. Okay. So beautiful. You're helping build this product without even knowing it.

Yeah, man. I will say the keynote this year, or for this particular conference, was really good. I mean, a lot of the keynotes are usually on soft skills or what people do for a living. This one was more about be careful what you do as a developer, right? Yeah, yeah. Which was really interesting because the whole machine learning thing like i've heard the stories about um misclassification of people and that kind of stuff um but it is really interesting they got into the morality and and the accountability of developers like what do you think about that yeah well i

it but in mind there was a blog post a few years back by this guy who'd said i wish i could remember the name of the author but he'd said essentially you know the we should have a code of ethics because he'd written this software that was i believe for an insulin pump and the software had crashed and someone had died you know whereas for him that's or at least for the company he worked for that's the software has crashed but for him, that's a release for the company he worked for. That's the software has crashed. But for that person, that person's family, a person has died, you know? Right. And we should have that sort of, but then where do you draw the line, right?

As a, as someone who maybe is a contractor or works for an agency or works on really short projects, you've got three months to build those forms over data wrap. Don't worry about it because once it's done, we maybe give the code to the customer and it's their IP. Or maybe you're brought in to do maintenance and then something happens and you think, oh, it's just a null ref. That's nothing. But then the company loses $4 billion overnight, you know? Right.

Shortly before coming here, there was a series of tweets about an older, I believe it was a COBOL system that did mortgage price calculations, the sort of future ones, and they worked 20 years into the future. And then in 2018, the 2038 problem happened. It calculated 2038, and they lost $17 billion overnight. Or rather, they would have done if they'd have sent out these calculations to their customers because the customers wouldn't have paid the $17 million or whatever it was that they were going to pay over those next 20 years so we're creating our own problems right like oh there was there was a talk that i had i had attended not too long ago where somebody had built an app and this was all

based on machine learning and and zones and out, you know, taking data and saying, Hey, if, if you're a visitor in a town, right? Like, like when I came to London, it was really funny. Like everybody that I talked to was like, you need to make sure that you protect your wallet, right? Like take it out of your back pocket, put it in your front pocket because you're going to get robbed. And I'm like, okay, well I live near Atlanta, Georgia. Like it's not that much different. Um, and, and somebody built an application to help people from out of town to avoid bad areas. Well, the problem is, is people started using that. And so businesses were getting hurt because the foot traffic they used to have were now avoiding these type things. Right. So it's amazing, even with good intentions of, hey, I want to help people out so that they know how to navigate this area or whatever, how you're inconsequentially or consequentially hurting other people, right?

You didn't have bad intentions. And like with that insulin pump, how many people did it help? And then there's the one person that obviously didn't, right? It's a hard line to walk as a developer. So, I mean, I guess in the world that we live in, where we're filling out data forms and doing data analytics and all that kind of stuff, it seems pretty mundane and low-key, but there's probably a lot of impact even from that kind of stuff.

Yeah, right. Well, I mean, it's like uh so cliff said earlier on today he said he wants to package it all up put it in a box and take it to another place teach them how to do it but then what if something like in the electronic shorts i mean yeah it's it's made of plastic but what if because you've got that skin contact what if it shorts and somehow rewires and hurts the person who's using it, you know? Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I guess in that term, though, you got to kind of look at it as, all right, so there's a person without a limb that this is helping, right?

The question is, are they going to feel like they didn't get the value out of it if something like that happened? It's impossible to say, right? It is. Putting yourself in those shoes is is not an easy situation but that's why like his talk was absolutely phenomenal like blew my mind i've never i never would have sat down and said hey you know what 3d printers get them for a couple hundred bucks you can make a hand that could change a person's life right like that's that's uh and the amount of effort this guy's put into it right like i mean he walked through all the iterations of it where you know i was looking at this board because it'll do that and this this chip set and all this like he's been through i

don't know how many iterations but the cool part is he's doing it with regular technology that's available to everybody today right he goes by his um what were the uh adafruit um like the regular iot stuff out there yeah he's programming it in xamarin yeah it's killer well like uh he was saying to me that what he'd done with the that one of the first boards that he used is, excuse me, to save space. He'd removed the circuit that informs the device, whether it's running from the battery or from the USB. And then he's forgotten he'd left the battery in and plugged the USB in.

And so it tried to pull power from both and just, he said, became a smoke machine. Oh, that's awesome. Stuff that you don't think about unless you play in that world all the time. Exactly, right, yeah. Man, it's awesome. Stuff that you don't think about unless you play in that world all the time. Exactly. Right. Yeah, man.

It's a, it's pretty cool. As a matter of fact, we should, in the show notes, we should have a link to, so he's got an open source. So he basically said like, he, he will never commercialize it. He's never going to close source it because he was working on the product. He was working on an open source version of the project. And then the company was like, okay, we're closed sourcing this because we make a lot of money yeah right um and he said no my my goal is i want everybody to have the opportunity to to use this right so uh we'll

have a link to the github repo and his twitter and all that kind of stuff because if you're a machine learning expert based off what you told him, he said at the end of the show exactly what you said, which was, hey, learn. Learn what's my habits today, right? Exactly, right? The other thing he wants machine learning experts for is that actuation voltage.

So if you imagine the kid that he's building it for, if he's used that hand all day, he's been doing opening you know, opening and closing and changing and stuff. If you do something constantly, you're going to get fatigued, right? And so your muscles are going to get fatigued. And what happens is the signal that the device picks up

is then it's lower voltage. So what he wants is to be able to use that machine learning to detect, this looks like the user is trying to actuate, but they're tired. So just boost the game or drop the game because they've just woken up. They've had their coffee. They're full of energy. Drop the game.

Now boost it back up again. Like he said in the talk, if you've got this device and you've paid the thousands of dollars for the closed source version, you then have to go to a doctor every couple of days to have them tweak the game you know whereas if you can build some machine like even if it's machine learning in the the companion app that talks to a machine learning brain in the cloud yep that then figures it out because it's in constant communication and if you have a mobile app you've more than likely got data whether it's wi-fi or cellular so back to the cloud and come back and yep that's that needs to come up and you can control that in software you know well totally it will heck now phones have built-in machine learning right like

i want to say android did it about a year ago ios they have their own chipset on there to learn your habits and all that kind of stuff now too so i mean it's probably not unrealistic to think that your phone could even do a lot of that stuff for you right um so yeah definitely you should if if you are into machine learning or if you're getting started and you want a project that makes sense to play with right like this could be a great opportunity to go do that exactly it's a real world project it's not like hello world and machine i don't think there is machine. I don't know that there is some, some regression, um, learning on well world. This episode is sponsored by Datadog, a monitoring platform for cloud scale infrastructure and

applications. Datadog provides dashboarding, alerting, application performance monitoring, and log management in one tightly integrated platform so you can get end-to-end visibility quickly. Visualize key metrics, set alerts to identify anomalies, and collaborate with your team to troubleshoot and fix issues fast. And they have integrations for just about any technology you would want. We've talked about Kubernetes. They have integrations for Kubernetes. Kafka or Kafka, whichever you prefer, they've got your favorite,

whichever one you decide to call it, they've got integrations for that. Name a database platform. They've got it. Whatever you want to do, they've got an integration for you that can help you to monitor that platform and be informed of

what's going on in your environment. And I always like to point out their blog because I think it shows a lot about the product and also the cool things you can do with it that may not necessarily kind of spring to mind when you think about the product. And so I wanted to specifically mention the article on what's it called? Basically extracting metrics from your logs for viewing historical trends and actually tracking against SLOs, surface level objectives, which we talked about before. So go check that blog post out and just see how they wrote it up and the visualizations that they used just pulling from like plain old log files. It's a really cool blog post and it shows you a lot about what they could do for you.

Yeah, and we'll include a link to that in the show notes. And, you know, while you're there, go to Datadog. You can try it yourself today by starting a free 14 day trial and also receive a free Datadog t-shirt when you create your first dashboard. So yeah, again, head over to www.datadog.com slash coding blocks to see how Datadog can provide real-time visibility into your application. Again, that's www.datadog.com slash coding blocks to sign up today. So I've gone to some machine learning talks here. Ed, it's amazing to me. Like the one that I went to was a Lego one.

Did you attend that one? I didn't get to go there. Okay. So it was basically using, I think it's called Lego Mindstorm, I believe is the kit that you could buy. They're not cheap, but they're motorized Legos, right? Like you can hook them up to motors and they've got all kinds of things, right? What was really interesting is this guy, the project was he took his Lego Mindstorm kit and he put a black tape track on the floor in his house. I'm sure his wife loved it.

Mine would. So he put this black track all the way around his room. And then he built this car and he took a cell phone and he used the camera on the cell phone to basically try and track this black line. And so he would straddle the car over the black line and then try and get it to follow the line around the room. Right. So it was really interesting because the first way that he did it is he would he would take a remote control and drive the car and steer it how he thought it needed to steer based on what he was looking at. Right. So a true human driving this thing what was absolutely mind-boggling and this is cool because if you think about the tesla of the world right like you hear about they're trying to do the self-driving right and and all you ever hear about are the times that it makes a mistake let's not even consider the fact that um when most

people at least in the states are driving they're not even looking at the road right like they're still looking at their cell phones or they're distracted it's the same thing here but yeah right so except you guys have public transportation here which is nice we don't really have much in the u.s because nobody wants to get run over by the drivers who are staring at the phone that's why hey fair enough we probably need more of that in the states so um but so here was the really interesting thing right like just doing this simple thing if you think about a car driving on a road like there's if you try and have cameras pointing down the asphalt or the concrete or whatever you're on they all look different right um you're driving

over a nice pristine road it might be beautiful like you could absolutely detect that if you're driving on back roads gravel something like that it's harder to pick up this guy had a nice black piece of tape wound around the room and the number of problems that he ran into trying to build a machine learning model to say, hey, track this thing and keep my wheels on the road, per se. Like, I mean, he had hours worth of him walking around the room, you know, tracking it, going back, tweaking the model, coming back. And guess what?

He did it at super slow speeds. Then one of his friends was like, hey, can we speed it up when it's automated? So it would go off the track and do all kinds of things. And you have to go back and fix the data, remove the data, clean the data, tweak the model, all that, right? Hey, can you speed it up? I don't know. So think about that. In the real world, you set up this thing to be able to look at the road and figure things out. It works great at five miles an hour you double it to 10 it's not great anymore like how much data and how much processing do you actually need and how much of an expert do you have to be in identifying why did that fail there because i have you looked at much machine learning stuff i haven't had the chance

because yeah most of my stuff forms over data. So I can't say, hey, I'm going to go learn machine learning and someone's going to pay me to do it. So I am by no means an expert or even a novice in it. The only thing that I do understand is the whole point is it's constantly creating a mathematical formula to be able to calculate probabilities. More or less in its simplest form. That's really what it is. The crazy part about that entire thing is when he was having to go back and tweak that stuff, like there was a point where the thing would just go completely off the tracks. And it was because the black tape would disappear

from the camera's view because in the real world, right? Like if you're going around a curve, you don't just cut the wheel hard to the left. If it's, you know, a sweeping curve or something, you're going to wait until, you know, you get to a point where you start having to follow the edge of the road. Well, maybe that camera can't see it in the real world on a car. You probably have 10 cameras, right? And 50 sensors and whatever else. But, but the point is there's so many things that he had to identify like why did this fail here oh it's because it looks like the black tape went out of bounds of the camera okay so let me figure out what his solution was delete that data which is

crazy when you think about it what that's bad why is that bad why wouldn't you why wouldn't you have something that says hey i see that that thing's moving off towards the edge of of my view so maybe you need to start turning then i don't know like there's there's different approaches another one was the camera's light the flash on it was too bright at one point and so it no longer looked black and so it blended in with the rest of the the floor and so it lost track of what it was doing dude like this is a toy going half a mile an hour yeah yeah can you even imagine the problems with with trying to do this in the real world and perfecting it i mean it's nuts yeah so i i mean that's why like coming to shows like this are

amazing to me because you get to see the problems and the in the reality because at least most people don't sugarcoat this stuff right yeah like i'm sure when you do presentations like any any of us do presentations it looks like magic like this guy just came up here running an entire application in 30 minutes how did that happen right like that's not real yeah right yeah so i don't know what about you what other kind of talks did have you i mean you've been in you've been in the recording thing for quite a bit so a little bit yeah but um i i think that so there's there's a part of that machine learning making a car drive around that fits again with the ethics right right? There's this famous problem in, in, um, in the sort of computer vision, uh, self-driving cars space where it's like the car is about to

careen off the road. There were four people in the car, but to stay on the road, it has to drive into another, like one person. How do you solve that problem? Is, is the cumulative life of the four people in the car worth more than the one person in the street okay so then you change it it's now a woman pushing a pram with a baby in it does that you know and and these companies are getting together and figuring that out like how are they figuring it out well i mean that's really that's the tough question is now you're having to quantify life, right? Yeah.

Like you said, okay, so maybe there's a 90-year-old person walking down the side of the street, and you're going to have to veer off and hit him to save the people. And these people are all 20 years old. Okay, well, maybe collectively they've got a lot of years to live, and this guy, who knows how long he's going to make it, right? Versus the lady with the child in a stroller you can't make that call as a person it's it's life decisions right like it's a maybe even a person would come up with something else that wouldn't even make sense to a computer because

a computer is not going to be told to, hey, just freaking crash into this, right? Or something like, who knows? Like a computer might do it way better. It might, it might do it worse, but it's not going to make probably a moral decision. What do you do with that? Exactly. How do you get to that decision? But, but the flip side is this. Do we think that the computing like that is making the world better or is it making it

worse because the theory like like seriously you see you drive around anywhere right like a light turns green and nobody's moving you know that the person up there is checking their text messages and whatever right are they a better driver than somebody that might make an amoral decision? Exactly right. The way I see it is it's for much smarter people than I to figure out. And, you know, I was saying to Steve Smith yesterday, I'm an idiot. I'm happy to say that I'm an idiot. But it's for much smarter people to figure out. But then do we elect those people?

Do we choose those people do we choose those people are they you know are they just they are the people for those companies that are representing that company's interest what what happens and i think that's one of the reasons why microsoft has this idea of the ethical ai that they're moving towards you know we have to group together as a group of companies and come up with a number of things that we will agree to to hold dear to to stand by when we make our decisions that i can't remember them all but from the keynote it was things like accountability is there someone who can be blamed if something goes wrong is it one person is it a group of people is it do you blame the data do you blame the engineers do

you blame the ethics committee you know, where does that line get drawn? man, are they vastly different than they've been, you know, in years past. Because, like, they were even talking about, you know, Microsoft's worked hard on their AI stuff, right? Like, and classification and all that kind of stuff for machine learning so that they can detect faces and all that kind of stuff, right? Like, they've put a lot of work and a lot of money into that research. But they turned down, like, a big contract with governments on facial recognition things because they're like, we don't think it's ethical. I'm sure that wasn't a small amount of money. So you got to feel good that the company that is building a lot of the tools that probably a lot of your listeners, I know most of your listeners are. I mean, nobody's going to listen to.NET Core that doesn't care about it, right? And then our listeners too, like you've got to feel good about a company

that even when there's a big price tag that they can have, is still looking at it and saying, okay, no, this isn't in the best interest of the world as a whole. Yeah, yeah. It takes a lot to be able to go to the CEO and say, we're going to turn that one down and here's the reasons why. Right. How many zeros?

Exactly. And I'm not saying that such a Nadella would go, how many zeros was that? But you being able to have that conversation that, that you need that, that connection with that person to say, look, this is the reason why we think we shouldn't

take this. It's on you to decide it now. We've gone and done our ethics stuff. We've done our due diligence. The decision presumably is now yours. And then they have to go to the shareholders and say, yeah, we're not going to make profit on this project. We're not going to do this project because of these reasons. And then being that open and accountable to everyone and imagine it's like a full stack right yeah everyone involved has to then be able to go i have full confidence that we can do this without harming our you know without violating our ethics direction we're going in or harming people around us or something you know it's so hard though. I mean, like it, it's like, like we said a little while ago, the unintended consequences, like you don't know, you truly don't know. Right. It's the whole,

the whole ethical thing between like Apple and Android, where if, if a police comes knocking we want the records, we want to be able to get to that stuff. And wow, that's hard, right? I mean, Apple absolutely could somehow make it happen, but they've pushed back against it forever, right? Yeah. You know, Google's like, okay, you send us a subpoena and we'll make it happen. At what point is it abused?

I mean, did you ever see Minority Report? Yeah. Yeah. what point is abused i mean did you ever see minority report yeah yeah i mean there's a there's a point where somebody's going to cross a line and and nobody's going to have control over it right like there's only going to be a few people with access to the data and and i think we're going more and more towards that way right like i mean in this area you live isn't london like one of the heaviest camera like there's more cameras in london per square foot than anywhere else in the world something like that two days before i set off to get here there's more cameras in london per square foot than anywhere else in the world

something like that two days before i set off to get here there's a big story in the bbc about um the metropolitan police the police force are saying for london we need to roll out facial recognition on all of the cameras wow yeah and that's millions and millions of people being identified and or rather potentially identifiable because obviously, you know, it takes a lot of effort, right. You know,

potentially identifiable as they move around the city, which you can wrap that up. And I, the way I see it, if it keeps everyone safe, I'm okay with it. But then it's like you said, where,

where does it become one person has control? Where does it become four people have control you know there's there are stories of different uh agencies around the world where you know people have done whistleblowing where they said oh yeah well jeff used to be married to this lady over here who doesn't work here but jeff has abused his power and looked into what that lady's doing now because he wants to know what she's doing. And it's like, that's. Yeah.

It's not what it was intended for. Right. It's, it's hard, man. It's, it's really tough to, to figure out where the line should be drawn.

But the thing is, we've got so much technology and so much power right now that it's the opportunities to create things that could be helpful and useful maybe also harmful is like it's limitless right and i mean that's kind of what we're seeing at the conference right like the the machine learnings the the the bionic iot stuff right like this is all stuff that people have access to like i mean he said he spent 500 pounds on on the one hand right like if you think about that go go find a prosthetic limb somewhere and find out how much that costs you right like it's not going to be 500 pounds um which i guess

in the states is probably what about 650 bucks something like that like that. Like it's nuts. It's absolutely nuts, but it's really cool. So question, what's your favorite part of the conference? Like being here, what is it? It's got to be, you see,

somebody had said to me, why go? You can just watch the videos. And that's totally true. But it's cheaper. Yeah. It's a lot cheaper. A lot cheaper a lot cheaper

yeah and it doesn't take for you it doesn't take what eight ten hours flying and two hours either end and then two hours of walking around the city not knowing where you're going that yeah that that happened but like yeah you could totally not come and just watch the videos but then you don't get to interact with the people and say you know oh well tell me about this or like um i was talking to one chap this morning who was uh who's saying yeah i'm here but i also i want to show you this thing that i've made and he's just he just came up to me brought his laptop out and started running this software and i'm like holy cow you know that you wouldn't get that. You wouldn't get that if you stayed at home. Right. You know, this was between the talk, this was, and then

like going up to people, you know, and, and I don't know, maybe I'm weird. Like I went to, um, I went up to Damien Edwards yesterday after one of the talks and I said, look, I don't have a question about what you said. What you showed there was amazing. Really. I really appreciate that. But I also want to thank you for the work that you and your team do because you've made me more productive because you've done these libraries and these controls and all of this.

Makes it easier for me to quickly iterate and provide what my clients want. You went, oh, thanks. I really appreciate that. And regardless of whether he was just saying, thanks, I really appreciate that, to be polite or not, it feels like I've sort of been able to give back to him and say, look, I really appreciate what you've done. Nah, it absolutely matters. There's not a developer.

Look, everybody wants to get paid, right? Like everybody acts like they don't care about anything else. But honestly, there are some times that people do just need to thank you, right? Because I mean, as developers, we probably work harder. The ones that aren't just need to thank you, right? Because I mean, as developers, we probably work harder. The ones that aren't just nine to five developers, they probably work harder than most people in the world because you can't turn your brain off, right? Like you just can't. So if there's a problem that's been truly difficult, chances are you're not going to rest until you've at least got an idea of how you're going to solve the problem. And so those thank yous go a long ways, I think, to people. This episode is sponsored by Educative.io.

So every developer knows that being a developer means constant learning, new frameworks, languages, patterns, and practices. But there's so many resources out there. Where should you go? Meet educative.io. Educative.io is a browser-based learning environment allowing you to jump right in and learn as quickly as possible without needing to set up and configure your own local environment. The courses are full of interactive exercises and playgrounds that are not only super visual, but more importantly, they're engaging. And the text-based courses allow you to easily skim the course back and forth like you would in like a book or blog article. There's no need to scrub through hours of video just to get to the parts you care about. Now, here's the thing. All of their courses have

free trials and a 30-day return policy. So there's no risk to you. You can try any course. You can use our special link. You can get 10% off the course. And if you don't like it, hey, there's the 30-day return policy. But they've also introduced subscriptions. So now, sure, you could go and get that 10% off one course, or you can get an additional 10% off of the subscription, which is basically like getting a discount on every course that they have by going to our special link, educative.io slash coding blocks, where you can learn more about the great subscription options that they have. And I've mentioned several times the course that I took, Grokking the System Design Interview, that lines up really well with this book. But I didn't really talk much about how I used that

course. And I thought it was kind of interesting. I didn't talk to someone about it recently. What I did with those examples, like a pastebin or a Twitter is I, is I would read through the description of the product, which is like a Twitter or pastebin or GitHub or something that I already knew. And I would think for a few minutes about how I would design that system. Then I would read how they approach the problem in this course because they break it down into different sections and different services. And then I would go back through and try to explain the architecture after I knew how it worked in my own words. And I found that to be a really effective tool. And it gave me a lot of perspective on these services and a much bigger appreciation for it. And I know in this particular course, Glocking the System Design Interview, you can actually access some of the chapters just for free, just open.

You don't even have to create an account, I don't think. And so I definitely recommend checking that out if that's something you are even remotely interested in. And check that out and see if that's something you'd be interested in. And they've got Instagram and TinyURL available for free. Very nice. So you can start your learning today by going to educative.io slash coding blocks. That's educative, E-D-U-C-A-T-I-V-E dot I-O slash coding blocks and get 10% off any course or an additional 10% off a subscription. So tell me this though.

So a lot of times you come to a conference like this and I'm here by myself. You're here by yourself. You come to a conference like this and a lot of times people travel in groups, right? You know, a company sends off five people to the conference or two or three or whatever. And so there's a bunch of little circles standing around, right? Talking to each other. Like what's, what's your, cause you said, you told me the other day, which is funny because I haven't seen the side of you at all. You said, I'm a really reserved guy, right? Like I'm kind of quiet. Yeah. And I haven't seen that. And partly because we've been chatting online for probably what, five years, four years. I don't even even know it's been a while yeah um how do you how do you break into these or do you have

some sort of strategy because look honestly like a lot of people that listen to our shows a lot of developers are they're sort of reserved right like that i know a lot of of people that i'm friends with that are developers or in that in that community that that they just they're not uh extroverts right yeah they're more introverted they they like working at their computer they like dealing with that and they they would love to come to a place like this but they feel uncomfortable so like what's your strategy for for breaking into this because this might actually help some people out yeah yeah so one thing i try to work the opposite way around so if i'm standing around in a group of people i'll step slightly to the side i think it's called the pac-man effect you leave a gap that's wide enough for someone to just approach

and stand in that in that gap because then you're saying hey come join us this is a conversation you may be interested in and then there's a gap that you don't it's like a subtle thing right right you don't have to say hey can i join you guys and talk about this or whatever but yeah i am naturally quite reserved like when i'm at home uh i'll sit and i will not say anything for hours and just like people is he comatose yeah exactly right and you know i've had people in my life before say say something what are you thinking like i'm not thinking anything i'm just literally i'm enjoying the tv show or i'm enjoying enjoying your company so the the podcaster over here basically says that he could sit there and be quiet forever

yeah right yeah exactly i mean i could put out an episode that's just that's awesome i like the i like the open spacing that's good uh the way that i do it and it's so in the morning when people are standing around getting their coffee all that kind of stuff i mean if i'm in line to get a coffee i'll strike up a conversation with the person next to you right whatever um but i do find it really awkward when it is a bunch of closed circles all around so i usually i don't even do anything then because it just feels really weird trying to nudge your way in and be like hey what are you guys talking about yeah um but i do find it especially at conferences like this where they have the lunch all in the same spot i will find a table that has an open spot and i'll be like anybody sitting here

that's it yeah and then and then it's like an end right like now you've you've brought yourself into a circle because everybody needs a place to put their food down to eat although here for some reason they didn't think that that many tables were necessary so most people are walking around holding their food which is really frustrating yeah. You get into that position where yesterday I was with one hand. I'm holding the burger I'm eating and the box and holding it to my chest. I'm pinning it to my chest with my thumb and just sort of bending it in the neck to eat. It doesn't work on an audio podcast, but I was doing that. And it just, it's mind boggling that they did.

It's shocking. Yeah. I mean, there's, they saidoggling that they did. It's shocking. Yeah. I mean, they said 800 people here? Yeah. Something like that? There might be 50 tables around that are mostly two-people tables. So it's like, man, come on. Like, 800, 50 times two, doesn't really work that well.

But seriously, like, you you got to find those those opportunities like i think it's one of those things that you just kind of learn over time is the reason why everybody well the reason i'm overweight is i like to socially eat right like i love going out with friends to eat sure or with family to eat or whatever because that's when you sit down and you socialize right right? That's right. Yeah. So it's a great opportunity to talk to people. And also drinking is always a good opportunity to talk to people. If you don't drink alcohol, that's fine.

Go get something and stand around and talk to people, right? Because for whatever reason, that's when everything happens, right? Is after the conference is done and they've got the after parties and all that kind of stuff, go be a part of them. Yeah. Right. Even if you're not a drinker, just go be a part of them because everybody's really just standing around talking, you know, talking about what happened during the day or the cool stuff that they're

working on or problems they have. Like you'll meet people, you'll get emails, you'll get Twitter accounts, you'll do all that. Right. Yeah. Right. Well, it's like we went on the 10 screws thing yesterday, didn't we? Yep. And that was all right so we sat around in a group of four people some people joined us some people left and yeah there were people like you know i kept seeing troy hunt walk past and you know uh dylan uh bt walk past and all these people walk past and they go and sit with and they're just you could follow them as they moved around speaking to different people because they're catching up

with all of the friends from the previous time they'd met up. And I think that's it. Having an empty space that someone can come in and join is you've got to meet people halfway, right? And then, like I say, there's that, you've got to have a little bit of confidence to push yourself out. You don't have to push yourself so far, right?

Just a little bit out of your comfort zone to be able to walk up to a group of people where there's a gap and even just listen right because at some point during the conversation someone's going to turn to you go oh hey yeah i'm jamie yeah what do you think about what we're talking about yeah totally you don't have to push your way in you can just sort of stand there and as long as you're actively listening and taking it all in and then you can say oh yeah well my opinion is this or i've worked on a project where this happens or right you know it helps that i mean it's not on my uh badge but on yours you've got coding blocks on that so people are going to walk up and go what's that all about you know

what's so funny about that is i think you had pointed at it the other day i was like oh i didn't know that was on there um you know you know what else helped a lot at least at this conference is and this is a tip for anybody that's planning to go to any conference like this is me you zach brady um matt a bunch of people were like hey we're gonna be at ndc london let's let's create a little slack group or let's create a what's uh what's that what's that yeah i don't use it. I hate Facebook. Fair enough. But let's create a little group. And then that way we can hook up.

Right. Right. And so it's instead of it being an uncomfortable force thing with people that you don't know. Like, I hadn't met you before. I hadn't met Zach before. But it was like, hey, man, we're going to be in the area. Or who all is going to NDC London? You know, find out. And then that way it's not as uncomfortable about, hey, I'm busting in.

It's like, hey, man, you know, we were chatting online. Nice to see you, right? Yeah. It makes an easier transition, which, by the way, we all hooked up. Look, I don't even know what day it is anymore. I think it was Tuesday. It was. It was Tuesday. It was Tuesday. we all hooked up. Look, I don't even know what day it is anymore. I think it was Tuesday. It was Tuesday. It was Tuesday.

So Zach came up. You came out. Steve Ardallis was there. Like we just had a great time, right? Sitting around talking, you know, and if you prearrange it, not necessarily, hey, let's all meet this day, but hey, I'm going to be at the conference. You know, shout at me when you're there.

Yeah, yeah. Then all of a sudden, chances are somebody's going to try and bump into you. Right. And it helps. It helps a lot. At least I thought it did. Yeah, it really does. And, I mean, you know, the Cunning Block Slack, we showed it up.

Is anybody in London? You know, and there's a couple of people who are based in London. You said, yeah, add me to this little group and I'll see what I can do. Right. A couple of them were like, well, we can't make it or whatever. Cause you know, everybody's got a life, but you shout up to your friends, people, you know, your peers in that area. And then maybe as a group of, rather than just you going up to a small group of people and trying to break you in, if there's two or three of you go up, that becomes easier, right?

Because then, Oh, well these guys want to be, Oh, these folks here want to be involved in our conversation. Come on in. You know, the more the merrier.

Let's talk about this thing. It's like the whole dating thing back in the day, right? Like you always had a wing man, at least if you hear that, because it was just easier, right? It's easier to approach people when,

when there's already a comfort level between a couple others. So, so yeah, I mean, that's one of the most important parts about coming to something like this is actually meeting and talking to people. I mean, yes, the presentations are amazing and you learn things and all that kind of stuff. But the relationships that you'll grow and the people that you'll meet and that kind of stuff, you can't measure it, right? Exactly. It's good stuff. There's people that I've sort of run into here that I've been to their meetups

further north in the UK. And it was like, oh, hey, you're here too. This is awesome. Let's have a chat about this. Or, hey, come meet these people, you know? Right. And it's being that sort of

attempting to be that sort of social connection for people as well. You know, I can meet these people. I hate this people as well you know i could meet these people i hate this but have you do you know this person come and have a chat with this person or whatever you know i'm not particularly good at it but i try you know you've done a really good job of it um i've just been bouncing around all over the place so uh it's it's been it's been a lot of fun and you said you know you've never spoken to anything this big before, right? Yeah. I haven't either.

That's going to happen tomorrow. So I mean, I actually wake up to come do it. But yeah, I mean, I think, I think watching other people do that stuff. If you come to this and you have the inclination that you maybe want to do

that, you'll find out it's just regular people for the most part right like yeah regular people with names that people recognize but it's because they broke out of their shell and they came and did this kind of stuff right like it's you have access to do it if if i submitted a talk i didn't think i was going to get approved. And I did. And then it was like, oh, crap. Well, I guess now I got to do it. So it's one of those things that it really just takes come watching and realize all these people are the same jitters. They have the same bugs, but they get up there and do it and then they make it and then they do it again and then do it again. And then eventually they become a name that everybody knows when they go around.

Right. Like Troy Hunt isn't Troy Hunt because he's done one talk yeah right so you know if you have if you have any kind of desire to do that you have a message you want to share you just like talking and helping people do it heck i would say try and just something that you've done in the past regardless of whether hundreds of other people have done it before or not, your experience of doing that thing, right? It's one of the ways that I say to people back home up north is, see, I'm saying up north and that's not very far. That's like the next town away for you, right? Right.

In the States, up north is more than a couple hours. Exactly. But yeah, so I go back home and people will say to me, how do I get into talking? I'm like, what are you building right now? Oh, well, I'm only building a form of data. Yeah, but how have you gone about that? What's the process you've done?

Oh, you're using this, using Knockout.js. So everybody else is using Angular or React or whatever. Why Knockout.js? And how are you using that in 2020, you know? How does that apply? Does it apply specifically to that problem domain or is it because you just know that okay then take it the other way um go learn angular you know learn angular for a talk i did a i did a talk at an umbraco thing um 20 i think 2018 was that with

paul yeah paul was there yeah um and that, I used blazer 0.30. So like the super early previews, right. And hooked that up to Umbraco headless, which doesn't exist anymore. Like a headless CMS. And I, you know,

and I used it to say, look, you can do this, the entire thing in.net, the whole stack in.net. And then I think I was, I was saying to you and some other people that I then modified that talk because Blazor can run on a static site, right?

You don't actually need a server anymore because all you're doing is serving a bunch of DLLs that are called from the JS that's loaded into the HTML, right? Yep. And the end of this talk, the final, it was originally planned for the final 30 seconds of the talk, ended up being the final 15 minutes was there was no Wi-Fi.

And I was like, all I'm going to do is going to do a git commit and push it, and then the git actions is going to build it and throw it up on Netlify, and I can go to Netlify, and there's the app. Netlify is a static site. You have no control over the server. And that turned into, yeah, so in a couple more minutes, it'll have finished uploading, all right?

Because I was tethered to my phone you know yeah never rely on network connections when you're doing a talk just don't do it never do a live demo it's that simple no no mine tomorrow is probably 75 live demo so it could crash and burn but i've done it a few thousand times now i think so it should be all right. Speaking of, you brought up a buzzword, at least in the.NET world right now, Blazor. Yeah. So we both attended the talk yesterday. Man, it was great. So we've talked about on coding blocks, and I'm sure you have on dot net core as well like blazers killer like they are it started out as like just a skunk works type thing right like somebody's like i have

this idea and then it grew and grew and grew and people were just like this is amazing right web assembly my entire dot net app in the browser really they're taking it a step further now which is kind of doing what what so many uh phone gap and and a bunch of other technologies have done for a long time i think flutter now is actually doing native um mobile applications right sure um but blazer they're now trying to step in that arena now by building on top of xamarin yeah yeah what do you think that's to me that's amazing right and it's it's it's it's because of that conflict the upcoming confluence of mono.net core xamarin all of these different technologies being rebranded as.net 5 and then next year.net 6 so you'll soon be listening to the.NET 5 podcast.

I don't know. Wait, didn't they rename it? I thought they were calling it.NET 1. Did they officially go back to.NET 5? Well, because there's already a.NET Framework 4. Right. And they don't want to say.NET Framework 5 or.NET Core. .NET Core 4 wouldn't work because it's.NET Framework 4,.NET Core 4.

I'm sure there's, again. The confusion. Yeah. There's a lot of very smart marketing going into it, I'm sure. But yeah, if we go with a completely different name, like with, which one was it? What did they jump to when they started doing Blazor? When that became released to manufacturing, it jumped straight to version 3 because for the same reason that Angular, they were at version 2.4, and then somebody went, oh, I'll update a package to Angular 3. Well, now everything's got to be Angular 3, right? Because somebody did a version number conflict,

and you can't really... Because you don't just have to think about semantic versioning anymore. If you're building a huge system, you've got to think about how the version numbers have to align, you know? And so from what I've been told, I don't know how true this is, but yeah,.NET 5, just because it's simpler for everyone to understand. And so, yeah, when everything sort of comes back together and you've got the mono tool chain providing the linker

and the ahead-of-time stuff and all that kind of stuff, so then your binaries, you don't have to do the crazy hacks that, I forgot the guy's name again, Mikhail, I forget the name of the guy. He's one of the guys who works on core CLR. He released a series of blog posts recently where he did snake in.NET core in eight kilobytes. But the way that he did that was he created a bunch of interfaces that implemented things that are in the core CLR that,

well, the implemented dummy interfaces for things in the core CLR. And then at the command line, when he was building saying, don't include reflection, don't include this, don't include that. Use my class instead,

because there's nothing there. Okay. And eventually got it down to eight kilobytes. And then he did another one where he's like, okay, and then I can get it running on windows 3.1. That's crazy. That's absolutely nuts.

I mean, what, what they're doing with the WebAssembly stuff, like it initially was about WebAssembly, right? Like bring the application into the browser through DLLs or whatever, right? And then they're like, oh, well, that's kind of cool. But the problem is you can decompile the DLL or reverse engineer the DLL, and now you have the people source code, right? More or less, at least the IL type level stuff, right? And then they were like, well, some people don't want that business logic to leak down to the browser.

Okay, well, we'll make it to where you can serve it from a server. Okay, well, that's really cool. So they've kind of gone from what their original goal was, where it was like, well, this will work more for businesses that don't want to leak those implementation details out, to where now they're like, oh, yeah, we're just going to go all in on native mobile applications. It's like, wow.

So if this all really comes to fruition pretty well, you'll be able to mostly write your application if you do it properly, right? Like your application or your business layer, that kind of stuff. You build these assemblies out there, you'll be able to reuse 80% of your code everywhere. Yeah. Which is killer. And not just that. You're not just talking client server application.

You're not talking browser talking to a server. You're not just talking mobile phone talking to a server. You're not just talking a watch talking to a mobile phone talking to a server. You're talking all of that and the desktop and then the Samsung Tizen devices. One of the things that Jim Bennett has said to me a few times is I want the budget to buy

a fridge so I can roll it on stage and compile and deploy to the fridge. I don't think that's going to happen. No, it's not. People are like, really? We're going to move around a fridge like this? No. One-time use, right? You use it, you compile it, dump it, take it back to the store.

That's hilarious. I mean, it truly is getting to a point to where everything is just killer now. And the thing to me is, at least because I live in the Microsoft world of tools, and I live across multiple worlds, right, because I do the Kafka stuff and I do Java and all that. Like, besides JetBrains products, which are really good, there's not a set of products out there or tools for developers that are easier to use than most of microsoft stuff right like there are people that will argue with me that visual studio is too clunky because it has too much stuff okay i get it right like it is the biggest swiss army knife of tools that exist however you can get it for free right if if you're just trying to do development on your own or whatever chores yeah right whilst there is the free version it's not like it's one or two things

that the swiss army knife does it's the majority it's almost the entire bundle right like it's not a neutered version of visual studio yeah and and i guess that's the part that's really exciting is you hear about the flutters you hear about hear about the phone gaps and the Android studios of the world and all that kind of stuff. They're very targeted, specific tools for that one use case. Whereas if Blazor comes to fruition the way that they're trying to make it happen, you'll be able to work, it looks like primarily in one ide yeah and you get everything right which is amazing who knows if it's going to happen that way i mean that's a lot of work but it's a it's a pretty cool time to be a developer when you've got tools like that at your disposal for almost nothing um even even in a in the last talk, I wasn't familiar with it. What was the deployment pipeline

that... App Center. App Center. So I guess people that work on mobile platforms use that, right? I'm used to using Azure DevOps. A lot of that stuff's free, right? If you use... It's actually called Azure DevOps. It used to be Visual Studio Online, right? Yeah. VSTS. Yeah, VSTS is what most people know it at, right?

But you put your code up there, you can create all kinds of deployment pipelines, CICD stuff, right? It didn't even have to be hosted there. You can pull it in from GitHub. You can pull it in from Bitbucket. You can pull it in from anywhere, right? Oh, that's right.

I forgot about that. It's got all the hooks for all those other things. So yeah, put your code up on GitHub, and then you could still set up your Azure pipelines, right? So it looked like this one is the same type thing except for dealing with mobile devices. So it builds for Android, builds for iOS, builds for whatever else, not Windows Mobile anymore.

But the other thing with that is that if you want to build for Apple hardware, you've got hardware one of the things cliff was the reason he brought it up was like he doesn't need the apple hardware because he commits to master it builds on the server because presumably there's some apple hardware there and then he gets an email saying hey open your iphone click this link and you've got the latest version of the app which is that's and then and then he talked about the app reload app restarts oh yeah he's building it locally he hits a button it builds it in the cloud brings it back down and sends it over usb to his device which is probably not how it works from his windows machine his windows machine yeah yeah that's what he was saying is i don't have

to carry a mac around with me to do this stuff anymore i can just plug my iphone up to my pc and it works yeah amazing stuff it really is it's it's it's yeah it's it's mind-boggling how all this stuff like when i first talked to uh jim bennett and we were talking about xamarin he says yeah what you do is you have a an apple device on your network and when you install the tools it it installs like remotes over to your Apple, installs all of the build tools there. And then when you hit build, it sends it over, builds it and brings it back. But then you can also do the debug symbols as well. So you're running on your machine, you hit a break point. It, the break point is intercepted by visual studio, sent over to the, over the wire to the Mac, comes back with all the debug data.

And I'm like, that's, that's just, that's mind-blowing to me and now you don't even need that step because presumably there's some apple hardware in the cloud that you can leverage if you're right i'm sure that's what it is as a matter of fact it has to be because if i remember right there's there's some some legalese on the apple stuff to where it's like you can't yeah you can't virtualize our our os right? Which is perfectly, that makes sense. I mean, we won't talk about Hackintosh, but it totally makes sense because that's their bread and butter. That's how they make their money, right? Yep.

They say they're a hardware company, so, you know, whatever. This episode is sponsored by Clubhouse. Clubhouse is a fast and enjoyable project management platform that breaks down silos and brings teams together to ship value, not features. Let's face it, slow, confusing user experiences so last decade. Clubhouse is lightning fast, built for today's software teams with only the features and best practices you need to succeed in nothing more. Yeah, and here's just a few of the highlights about Clubhouse. They have flexible workflows. You can easily customize workflow states for teams of projects of any size. You have advanced

filtering. You can quickly filter by project or team to see how everything is progressing. And you have sprint planning. Set your weekly priorities with iterations and let Clubhouse run the schedule. Clubhouse integrates with the tools you love too. They tie into existing tools, services, and workflows. So you can get notifications or create a story in Slack or update the status of a story with a pull request or preview designs from Figma links, or you can even build your own integration with their APIs and a lot more. And Clubhouse is an enjoyable collaboration tool as well. You can easily drag and drop things in their user interface. It's got a dark mode, which I know you guys love, emoji reactions, which I really love, and a lot more. So when you're done doing your best work

and your team is just clicking and life is good. Clubhouse has recently made all core features completely free for teams with up to 10 users. And they're offering Coding Blocks listeners two additional free months on any paid plan with unlimited users and access to premium features. Give it a try at clubhouse.io slash coding blocks. That's clubhouse.io slash coding box. Hey, you got, so you got something big coming up. Zach Brady was saying that you guys are talking about starting a podcast,

right? So we should probably at least mention that. Yeah. So it's a, you remember, so for the folks that don't know, obviously you guys have a, a kind oflocks Slack group. It's a small one.

One or two people there. Yeah, there's a couple of people. And on there, James, one of the developers, took a photograph of me and Paul Seal and himself and took one of the old CodingBlocks logo and swapped your images for us and changed the text and said CodingBlocks. I have not seen that. Oh, it's amazing i need to see that that's it yeah i know the uh the logo you're talking about the old orange looking that's the one yeah and he even changed it like when you see there's a bunch of binary and he said yeah put it through a text to binary and it says coding books in binary just underneath it which is it doesn't oh doesn't it no no it doesn't there's only bit so

so it kind of makes me sad that that logo is gone because when we were first trying to set up the whole thing it was like we got to get our pictures with us right like people know that we're humans that binary actually said build all right okay we only ever had one person over the entire time we been doing the show for six years that ever wrote and was like oh that's cool it says bill like one person took the time to type in the one zero one one one whatever it was um so anyway go ahead um so yeah and then um i got this message from zach one evening and he said uh i want to try and do an australian accent right i'm gonna do one who cares this is loads of fun, right?

He says, hey, guys, what about if we do a podcast? You know, that would be loads of fun, right? We'd do the counting blocks, guys. It'd be loads of fun, right? I don't sound anything like that, but that's the approximation of it. That's not terrible. That's terrible. And so I was like, yeah, okay, let's get together and discuss it.

And that became the first episode. And it's literally three of us just talking about, it's called tabs and spaces, right? Because whatever you decide, you're always wrong. Absolutely. And that's the idea is that- You can't be right. Yeah, we pick a topic

and we discuss all three of our points on it. And we come at it from, so I'm a contractor, James is a contractor and Zach is, he works for startups now. So it's like, there's three different, but we all came from permanent employment. so it's like there's three different but we all came from permanent employment so it's like you've got that completely diverse not that i don't want to say diverse because that's that's the wrong word to use but there's different backgrounds uh different experiences yeah sorry different add up to it yeah yeah so you've got

yeah you've got the diverse experience that's not that, that's fine. Yeah. Yeah. I've just, I'm very, I don't want to be careful about the word. Yeah. The word is dangerous. It's yeah. And it shouldn't be, but it's scary to use that because someone can take that out of context. And yeah, the implications of it.

No, but you guys have varying backgrounds. That's that. So you bring different experiences to the table, which is amazing. Yeah. Yeah. So I think first episode we talked about,

um, Oh dear. We've got a, we've got a word document with like 14 episodes. You haven't released these yet, right? Yeah. We haven't released anything yet.

We've recorded the first episode. We've had it edited. Zach and James have bought the website and it's, it's up. It's, you can go to the website now, like today now as we're recording. So in the past,

you can go to tabs and spaces.io and there'll be something there. I love it. Yeah. Um, so there's something there and we've been working on that and uh yeah we've got this word document of like 12 or 13 episodes and even then each one of those has become a this point we can talk about it for 25 minutes or that can be an episode by itself you know because it's so easy to just hear our opinions and that's what it is it's just three dudes talking about their opinions on tabs and spaces. Sounds like another podcast I know about. Yeah, right?

That's awesome. That really is cool, man. So what are your plans to release this thing? So we've set ourselves the arbitrary goal of the 8th of March needs to be the first three episodes need to be ready to go and released. So maybe there might be something, I don't know. I'm sure we'll shout up about it. Zach has already started teasing about

it. He's put it on his Twitter, you know, podcast host and just left it or like he's gone, hey, I found this URL. What's this all about? You know, he's teasing. That's awesome. That's really cool. So there was another question I had on that and for whatever reason it's left me now um well doggone it oh well that's gone oh these questions come and go

right yeah they really do unfortunately the the topics that we're covering are things like um when when do you when is it everyone's making fun of each other in the office and when is it it's a toxic atmosphere and how do you go about talking to your management or your leadership about i think someone's being bullied here which is a really hairy horrible spiky topic but it's like how have we dealt with it in the past rather than how do you go and deal with it this is what we've done don't do what we did because we're stupid you know but i'll tell you what happened yeah exactly right yeah this is what happened this is what i did and this is how that whole situation played out if i could have gone back and done it differently it's all each

episode is essentially a talk right right how do you survive in a workplace you know you're arguing about tabs and spaces i don't care i let the id do it for me you know i think i care well i don't know what direction i care in but i care you're just trying to be a contrarian you get to the end of your file you do control k control something or other and it'll format it for you but i i promise you i've had this discussion with so many people because i i care but i don't like i care when when it's just awful but my argument's always been just put it into your into your code pipeline or something right like when you commit it it formats it before it goes in or something like yeah i don't even care that much right yeah as long as it's right consistency yeah consistency is really it

and so actually i remember what i was going to ask you. So are you like creating a podcast network now? Cause I mean, cause you've got, this will be your third, right? Yeah. Fourth, fifth.

So you have waffling, you have.net core, you have tabs and spaces, waffling tailors, .net core, tabs and spaces, devil, otaku,

and ask a Brit, the devil, otaku, ask a Brit. They're kind of on hold at the moment. Okay. All right. So the,

the, the both of those are me and jay miller or how and someone else sometimes it changes sometimes it's the same ask a brit is literally hey jeremy i don't understand this about britain can you explain it to me and then i'll go hey jay this thing about american culture is just really weird what's that all about so it's just literally that it's like a cultural exchange. Let's talk about something. So you're going to have to modify the title, though, because if you can ask questions of other cultures, then it's going to be ask a, hmm, that's interesting.

Yeah, yeah. But it did start as, hey, Jamie, because Jay and I would have weekly a call or whatever where we're catching up and stuff. And he's like, but what the hell is this Brexit thing? What's this I've read about? You know, you guys don't have Barnes & Noble over there. Or, you know, how does this work?

How does that work? And I'm like, well, here it is. Here's what it means. Or this is how it works from my point of view, you know? That's really fun. That's cool. So you are starting basically a podcast network. Like, you're getting there.

Well, James had said to me once, he said, clearly you want to be the number one on iTunes by creating as many podcasts as possible. You're taking the Leo Laporte approach. That's the one. Yeah, that's fair. So I'm trying to think. So one other thing. So Steve, Steve R. Dallas, he's done a ton of Pluralsight courses, right?

Like some really great stuff. Just a heads up for anybody out there that wants to kind of get some information like he was like hey if you guys know anybody that has any tips they want to share on the show you know we reach out to them yeah so totally reach out to them so that that was the other person we said we mentioned zach wanted us to shout that one out is there anything else i don't know if i'm missing anything i'm sure there was. Yeah, I'm sure there is. You haven't slept properly. I haven't slept properly.

And I live in this country. Yeah. The problem is when you get over here and you haven't met people, right? Like we've been talking for years. It's like, okay, well, I don't need sleep. I'll go hang out for a little bit. Someone will text you and say, hey, we're down in the bar. You go down and say you have one drink, and it's four hours later.

You're like, oh, I'm giving a talk in two hours. Yeah, that's a true story. So I'm trying to think. What else, man? I mean, that's like a whole range of topics that we covered right there yeah um i think the point is definitely come out to a conference right like yeah some are more expensive than others like this this is not a cheap one right like this one's this one's not super easy for a lot of people to do but i mean look around your area start small hit meetup

definitely go to meetups Definitely go to meetups. Absolutely go to meetups. That is a great way to break the ice. If you're on Twitter, just shout out, hey, I'm in this city. Or if you're not comfortable saying what city, hey, I'm in the state. I'm in this area. What's going on? What's cooking?

Can I go to a.NET thing? Can I go to a Python thing? I did the same thing when I traveled to Japan last year. I was like, does anybody know of anything? I'm not going to be in these cities, but if there is something and it's not that expensive, I may just travel up there for 24 hours, go to this thing and come back. Right.

Just because there are a bunch of Western developers out there who do all of these things. So it's like I want to see how different it is for developers in a completely different country. Right, right. Do you guys have meetup. developers in a completely different country. Right. Right. Do you guys have meetup.com here? Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So if you, if you're not on there, go do that. But there's, I mean,

there's tons of conferences like I know coming up, we're going to be at Orlando code camp, me outlaw and Joe Zach will be at Orlando code camp. You're going to be there. Oh, excellent. So are you presenting? Yeah. What are you doing to be there? I'll be there. Oh, excellent. So are you presenting? Yeah.

What are you doing? Talking about Blazer. Oh, beautiful. Okay. So, yeah, that's a free conference, like free. And there's what? I think they have 600 people, something like that show up. So, you know, the point is you don't have to spend you don't have

to spend fifteen hundred dollars to come to a conference like when you when you do that you get a lot more amenities right like they have food all day long there's there's things set up whatever but the point is if you look in your area chances are it's free up to like a hundred bucks there's a lot of these things going on and good opportunities to learn stuff meet people do all that kind of you want to get into speaking go to a local one oh absolutely you started a local meetup yeah yeah because they're always look here's the secret usually the organizers of meetups are begging people to come do talks right like hey we don't have anything on the books for this coming month do you know anybody that wants to talk and like you said it's

you might even be talking about the same thing that somebody else did you your experience what you're bringing to the table the struggles you had might be different than what somebody else's were so yeah man like go help meet people if you want to talk not it's not for everybody yeah right you don't have to but but go network, go interact, do that kind of stuff. Because it will probably, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say, who you meet, who you talk to, the interactions you have will probably have a bigger impact on your career than just staying within the company's walls that you're usually at. Yeah.

Typically, right? just staying within the company's walls that you're usually at yeah typically right i mean i think zach had said when he first started doing the reactionary you know he was he was trying to like level up his game right like he was trying to force himself to become a better developer and because of what he did the company that got hired by they saw what he did and he's like, oh man, I want that guy. Like he's going out of his way to do things. Right. So that kind of stuff matters a lot. You don't have to be a person that's, that's contributing to a bunch of open source GitHub projects or anything. Just, you know, just don't,

don't live in a little box is really what it boils down to. Yeah. And like you say, they're all, the majority of them are free to attend. They're probably in your city. And if you drive, it's going to cost you a couple of bucks to get there, a couple of bucks to get back. Right. All right. So it's maybe three hours of your time, but that's three hours of you meeting other people, getting exposed, like you said, exposed to new problems, new situations, making, making friends, you know, and that's, as we mentioned it earlier on, you know, a lot of people in our industry are kind of reserved and closed off and find it hard to make friends. You throw someone into a room full of small people, not room full, but a room of maybe five or six. A huge room of small people or a small room of huge people, either way.

Yeah, either way. But you throw someone into a room of maybe five people who are doing the same thing with the same problems. You could walk in and just start complaining and everyone's like yeah yeah totally i get that but here's how we solved it and then you go oh well that's how you solved it but we solved it this way which is completely different because the great thing about development is there's no right answer there's a bunch of wrong answers yeah that's the problem there's so many wrong answers

very few right ones yeah but it's an iterative process, right? I'm trying to think. It seemed like there was something else along these lines. Just, I don't know. When you take that time, what you were saying about the three hours, don't think of it as, oh, I'm going to lose this night. You're investing. Yeah.

You're investing in yourself by going out and meeting other people and you're investing in your future because like you said somebody might have had that same exact problem that you were really struggling with and you just didn't think about that other angle right i mean that's that's part of it oh heck you might help something you could be an accidental mentor for something you've solved the problem totally someone else is there going i can't figure this out and you go hey just include that using statement or there's this library that does it for you and boom you've just solved their problem for them definitely with no effort and they're like i've been pulling my hair out i've been the phrase i use is smashing my head against

the keyboard i've been smashing my head against the keyboard for this thing for months and i can't figure out and you go pull this new get package do a file thing equals new thing and it's done yeah right so it's beautiful it's worth doing do it i i think that that's that's a pretty good it's a pretty good ending yeah that's the place to leave it right and then we get out of carl's way and we can stop using up all this space and time he's been super quiet over there nobody even knew there was somebody else in the room. Yeah. We have Dr. Fox coming up in about eight minutes. Right, yeah. So we're going to boot.

Yeah, we're going to run out of here. Run away, yeah. So thank you for letting us have you. Yeah, thank you ever so much. I'm out of my room. I'm just sitting here like you. Sharing. Excellent.

Well, thanks, Jamie. This has been a blast. Same to you. Thank you ever so much, Alan, for sitting and chatting. We'll do something. Yeah. Yeah, it's blast. Same to you. Thank you ever so much, Alan, for sitting and chatting. You know, we'll do something. We'll yeah. Yeah.

It's awesome. Yeah. Excellent. All right, everybody. This has been Alan and this is Jamie. We'll see you later. Bye.