Programming Throwdown - 124 - Holiday Episode 2021!

Episode Date: January 10, 2022

In this holiday episode, Jason and Patrick answer questions from listeners. They also look back at the past year’s challenges and victories.00:15:35 (Kevin)What's been the biggest thing that pushed you to learn more during your career?Was it taking a new job and moving somewhere, doing stuff in your spare time or something like a new hobby or anything else?00:29:38 (Kevin)Favorite city to live in or visit?00:31:29 First Winner (James B.)00:32:21 (Clever Clover/James)Next biggest tech prediction.00:36:28 (Paul) If we could standardize all the code there is out there to one particular language, which language would it be and why would it be Python?00:40:40 Second Winner (Collin G.)00:41:21 (Necrous)If you could redo your career and education path, what would you change?00:47:12 Third Winner (Matt I.)00:47:48 (MQNC)What is the dirtiest hackiest anti-pattern piece of code you ever wrote in full consciousness and even maybe enjoying the thrill and why was it the way to go?00:54:36 (Leedle)Thoughts on server side rendering React and NextJS?00:57:00 Fourth Winner (Glenn S.)00:57:25 (NC Plattipus)The visual programming language, LabVIEW?01:05:02 Fifth Winner (James F.)01:05:53 (Gethan)Future technology or big technologies, what about AR? 01:10:18 (Gethan)On the topic of getting a master's degree or classes, do you see a benefit of getting certifications? 01:18:16 Sixth Winner (Don R.)01:19:38Predictions we made last 2020 and how they held up.01:26:00FarewellsIf you’ve enjoyed this episode, you can listen to more on Programming Throwdown’s website: https://www.programmingthrowdown.com/Reach out to us via email: [e-mail] can also follow Programming Throwdown on Facebook | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Player.FM Join the discussion on our DiscordHelp support Programming Throwdown through our Patreon ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Welcome everyone to this evening of sitting by the fireplace on the bearskin rug and sitting on whatever beverage you want to use your imagination about and thinking about all the wonderful... Oh, wait, this is 2021. Never mind. No, I'm just kidding. So we got a holiday show. It's, I guess it's a tradition as much as we've been doing this way too many years. It's become ingrained. We have some good questions from users in the discord. And so we'll be, we'll be doing those. Some people are here listening live. So shout out to all the people live listening to this later hearing that they were listening live. And in general, yeah, just going to have a little bit of a casual episode where we uh talk about what's been amazing this year uh that'll be short

and uh it's been a tough year man but there's been a lot of good too yeah yeah i actually like i feel bad i mean it's been a really hard year for a lot of people i think we said that last year too which it was last year too uh this year was supposed to be better i went to the party store to pick up some supplies for like christmas which first of all like everything was out of stock that was horrible i noticed that too yeah so so is that related to the you think to the supply chain issue or i wonder what's going on there oh yeah i assume everything gets blamed on covet and supply chain i i'm sure that is true a lot, but I'm not sure to what degree it's true. But I saw all the New Year's stuff was like, you know, screw 2021, 2022 or bust, you know, all this stuff.

And I'm just thinking, it's like, I feel like we've been on this roller coaster before. Yeah, so yeah, I totally agree. I think, I feel like 2021 was better than 2020. I mean, obviously like personally, anything could happen, but I feel like for globally, I feel like 2021 was better, but I'm not totally sure.

I haven't thought about it enough. We also have gifts. We're going to be giving out t-shirts to lucky patrons. I actually took the Excel spreadsheet, did the primitive thing of calling Rand on all the rows and then sorting. I'll salt and pepper some winners' names on the Discord raffle. So thank you all for supporting the show. You know, pretty much all the money goes back into the show, either to cover server costs. We try to get more folks into the show, you know, by advertising and, you know, especially try and look for folks who are, you know,

just starting their career or high school or college and try and get them interested. And I actually, you know, just starting their career or high school or college and try and get them interested. And I actually, you know, I started a new job, which we could talk about at some point later, but it was kind of cool. A couple of people reached out to me and said, hey, you know, I used to listen to your show. You know, I don't anymore because I'm old. No, I'm just kidding. No, they said, like, I got into programming from listening to your show um you know now I work at you know your company and everything

so it was really cool um and so we try and uh you know reach as many folks as possible and you know patrons are a big part of that so I really appreciate that patreon has grown really big like not just ours and thankful to all those people but like i notice it's really like garnered its place in like the internet i think kickstarter was kind of like that thing for a while i don't know i'm not uh hip but i feel like kickstarter might have jumped the shark a bit like but patreon like wow like the number of people i see now like doing patreon subscriptions has like really exploded i think even patreon went or is going to go public and so i mean they've really become a big thing like i was oh i was talking with someone about you know youtubers right because that's always a thing now

like oh this youtuber that youtuber like they got you know how much money they're making all that stuff and uh you know jason and i aren't youtubers but being that we have a podcast i mean i guess we have a bit of knowledge about how that works. And it's like, I know why all those people have Patreons on the side and why they push their merch so hard is because, yeah, I mean, the money to be made from actual viewers is pretty bad. Yep. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You know, I don't really like I saw a bit more inside baseball since it is the holiday episode. We vet our advertisers very, very carefully. You'll never see us saying,

oh, buy gold or here's health insurance. It's always things that we- The best underwear. Yeah, what was the one that everyone was doing? The Dollar Shave Club. Yeah, we're not doing Dollar Shave Club. It's all things that we believe in. But because of that, these are folks that I think they don't have massive, massive multi-billion dollar advertising budgets. So advertising is great. We really appreciate the sponsors of the show, but really Patreon is what we use to really get the word out there. And so I think that's really important. It keeps the show authentic.

And so, yeah, I think you'll see more and more of that, of people moving to that model. So let's see if we can do, this is a bit impromptu, but maybe we can start off here. What is something this year from a programming perspective that you think you've changed your mind on, learned, adopted, that you kind of picked up something for like, not just like speculative, maybe we'll do that later, but like, what is something that you this year feel like you took on programming wise? Yeah, that's a really good question.

Sorry, I should have given it to you in advance. No, no, I think it's fine. This year, it's been a few years since I really got into Visual Studio Code. I mean, that might have been a 2019 thing. But in 2021, one thing I, well, so a couple of things. One thing is I started getting better about taking notes. So I know it's not totally a programming related thing, but I started doing a lot more kind of Google Docs and having a Google Drive that's kind of organized and keeping a lot of notes on different things. That's been really helpful. Anything I can kind of put down

on e-paper is one less thing I have to just keep in active memory in my brain. And so I can kind of put it there and then I only have to remember to check it. And so if I put enough things there, it works out. One thing I really got into more is using Tmux. So, you know, I've used Tmux for a while, but now it's just become the sort of de facto thing. Like right when I log into a machine, I'll jump into Tmux. Because otherwise, like you might get going and then you lose internet or your machine goes to sleep because you, you know, especially with working from home, like you might be into something, you know, and then the doorbell rings. And so, and then you end up doing something in the backyard. And then it only takes maybe at least on my laptop, like 10, 15 minutes for the laptop

to go to sleep and your SSH connection is busted. I've started using Eternal Terminal and Tmux for almost everything. And even like my Visual Studio Code and my Jupyter Notebook and all of that, I have all of those going through Eternal Terminal tunnels. So none of those connections are ever broken. And so that's kind of a workflow change

I've started doing this year. Interesting. I'll give two for myself. So my first one, I need to be better about what you're describing. I guess I do a bit more on local machines. So not kind of SSH-ing around as much. So I guess I get by with not investing in a good solution there.

Yeah. But I think for me, so from like a programming perspective, I think I took on a bit more sort of like math and statistics kind of stuff, which I've worked with a lot of people who are very deep into statistics, or even I think you're a bit into statistics more than me. But like trying to sort of not shy away from, you know, looking at lots of data and trying to come up with ways of understanding that data without just literally looking at all of it um so that's been one thing that i've tackled um and i still been doing most of that in c++ for my for my day job well yeah like stat stuff what do you use that eigen or something uh i mean most i guess i'm doing it at such a simple level it's just mostly like using building it up from like small level calls of you know the base base stuff like nothing oh is this kind of like a map produce

type thing no just like even like before like someone gives you like you were saying oh i have an excel chart of you know names right and then like oh i generated a random number so you know a question would be like oh how do you know without looking through all of those that you've got all the numbers covered or that the numbers are evenly distributed or whatever, or even what are various distributions? And so those kinds of things and trying to take measures of data, not like big data crunching or statistics on that. Just like literally, for me, that was not something that I had previously kind of tried to tackle head on

is, you know, I generally got other people to take on the math or analytics of something. That makes sense. That makes sense. Low bar, low bar. And then the second thing is for the first time that I can remember, I'm trying to remember if I ever did it in person. I don think i rarely did it formally as such but i did pair programming what really i've always heard this and i've always been skeptical so i'd love okay so yeah so you've not done it either okay i was probably like the only one so we had some me and a co-worker a

co-worker and i sorry would, had a problem to work and some image processing related stuff, which I had done before. Actually, you and I did that. That was the first time you and I doing it was the first time I really tackled it. And so I was like, oh, you know, I have some experience here.

Let's like, and this was virtual. So we use CLion, which is like IntelliJ by JetBrains. And they had like rolled out a new feature where you could like do pair programming. It's like a, you know JetBrains and they had like rolled out a new feature where you could like do pair programming it's like a you know live google doc but like your code and I think other people have similar tools as well I think even VS Code has an option for doing this and so um we're like oh let's hop on a session we'll get on like a call with each other and then you know we'll just like you know hash this out together and like literally like I'll type in one

function you're typing in the function below me. And like, we're doing before it like never made sense to me, because like, you have only one keyboard. And I guess I probably was thinking about it wrong. But like, it never made sense that like, two of us would sit there and like work together, but only one person could type. But in this way, he could, you know, scroll up and check what I was writing, I could scroll down and what he was writing, we would like tweak a function together. And we didn't like go all in on it. But it was like this remembering for me, oddly, is like, this is the first time I ever remember doing like peer programming, like actually sitting here working on literally the same piece of code at the same time.

That sounds awesome. So yeah, when I heard pair programming and maybe I misunderstood it or maybe you've done something slightly different and more advanced, but I always interpret it as, you know, one person's typing, the other person's looking over their shoulder and then they switch.

And that never quite made sense to me. What you're saying sounds awesome or basically it's, you're both, you know, at your own desks coding but you're coding on the same project at the same time. Yeah, like in the same file. Like in the same source file. Yeah. That is super cool.

How does that work? I mean, it must use like NFS or something. I mean, how do you both edit the same file at the same time? I don't know. I don't know. But then I was thinking, I wonder how many people... So it's like that test-driven development, agile programming pair programming, like you can name off a whole bunch of paradigms, statements or whatever that I know of, I've read about been around a long time, and I'm not sure I ever did it properly. Like I've never attempted to do like I kind of some

part of it or learn from but never sat down and actually did it. And this was one of them. So I did it this year, I would do it again. Cool. That sounds amazing. I don't think I do it all the time. Some people advocate that like it's something you would do often. I don't know about that, but like I could definitely see certain situations it being really useful. Yeah. So I actually, now that, you know, I've had more time to think about it. You know, one thing that I've really jumped on recently is Next.js. We interviewed Guillermo from Next.js.

It's got to be over a year ago. And at that time, I knew nothing about Next.js. I mean, I knew almost nothing about React.js or any of that. But I wanted to build a... And actually, you can check this out. It's in a very, very alpha stage. But I wanted to build like a Google Photos, but where would be hosting your own photos on your own cloud storage, paying your own storage fees. And your photos are totally safe in the sense of like, you know, like no one could ban you. You can't lose your photos. Like even if the app, even if the app went out of business or I got hit by a bus or something, you'd still have

all your photos. And so I built, it's called Aquinas Photos after Thomas Aquinas, and you can go to Aquinas.photos, or maybe it's Aquinas.photo. I don't remember. I think it's Aquinas.photos with an S, but anyway. And I built the whole thing in Next.js and it's actually amazing. I mean, I'm a really big fan. When I first started, it was very frustrating because I had a bunch of bad design patterns with respect to web programming. And so these, Next.js is very opinionated. And so when you try to do things that in hindsight are not good design, it just won't let you, like there's just no real way to do it. And so you kind of have to follow their their design but when i was done i kind of looked back and i thought oh wow this is like really nice

and and very production worthy and it can scale and it it's like really solid um so yeah i'm a really big fan i mean i think for future web stuff i'm gonna stick with next.js it's been awesome all right well maybe let's uh jump in and take a a listener question uh that i still don't know why i said that with like a high pitch because i was thinking it was more ambiguous than it was uh anyways so the first one is by i'm not even know how you say that. Kevin. Oh yeah, there we go. Fair enough. Okay. Sorry. Okay. Just to clear, the person has a username, but then they put their real name. And so we'll just go with the second one. Thank you. What's been the biggest thing that pushed you to learn more during your career? I should have probably read that before we did our impromptu

one. Was it taking a new job and moving moving somewhere doing stuff in your spare time or something like a new hobby or anything else um and then also something we'll do in a second yep go ahead i was just gonna say this is over all time so your question is still pretty different that's true all right i'll take a shot because i actually have a answer at hand for this so i will say that um for those of you who haven't heard or listened to all the years so jason and i like started out meeting each other by working together at a kind of old school very large company but not a programmer first company and um i would say like the programming i did there was like in my comfort zone. Like I never really felt super pushed. Like I learned stuff, but I never, like I looked around, this is going to sound bad,

but like I looked around and like, I felt like even coming out of college and I think later probably was correct. Like I probably knew how to program as well as a lot of people that were there or maybe even better than most, right? Well, you're, you're kind of like a cs dynasty right i mean your dad uh sure it was uh was that my dad and my grandfather were both programmers oh and your grandfather yeah you're like the kennedys of programming oh gosh maybe a better example but you're like you're like the what's another dynasty isn't that let's move on to a different topic. So anyways, so I showed up and like, you know, this, like the programming there, like I learned a lot, like personal growth and like interpersonal communication. Even to this day, I think I've learned a lot from that experience.

But from a programming standpoint, like I, like, I don't feel like it really pushed me to like really try my hardest. Like I could coast a lot um then i actually i guess like the story jason ended up getting a job in silicon valley he's like patrick dude i'm gonna move like you definitely should interview come interview like i don't know if you said this but we were working together on the same project yes yes yes yeah okay fair enough and then so i you know jason told me like you to come i you. Because like, you know, Jason's much better programmer than me. interview at that time, like I was not comfortable doing the Silicon Valley style interview, Jason crushes them, which is not his comment. That's mine. And so they're very intimidating for most people, including me. So he helped me. I don't know if you remember this. Like when you were were packing up to leave i came to your house and you helped coach me through like solving programming problems no way really yeah that's a fantastic memory i don't remember that yeah yeah yeah i

could go more into detail but it would reveal a bit of personal details i'll tell you later um but but yeah so so we went there anyway so i got a job at the same company jason had gone to probably because he's had a good word for me in Silicon Valley. And when I showed up there, I was drowning. Like it was like I was in over my head. Those people all knew what they were doing. Like I didn't look around and look at anyone that was like, I'm better than that person. Like I was, you know, that whole imposter syndrome just completely kicked in. And, you know, it was hard. Like looking back, if I knew that was going to be that hard, I'm not sure I would have done it. But moving to Silicon Valley, and I don't think it has to be Silicon Valley, especially not now, like it was, you know, 10 years ago.

But I think like moving to Silicon Valley, getting in that culture and being like at the bottom of the stack, like bottom of the ladder, let's say. And like really having to go all in on like distributed computing and map reduces. Well, I think you just hit the nail on the head there because the reason why you, I think, found it so challenging was that you were changing disciplines versus a lot of those people, you know, they got their degree in distributed computing. Yeah, I think it was a bit of all of it, right? Like, I think someone took a chance on me without a background. But I think the caliber of people, no matter what they were doing, were like, I hadn't been pushing myself. I was out of shape. Right. And then I joined, I joined the athletic club and like these people, like, sure, maybe they were tennis stars and I never played tennis

before, but even if they had played basketball, they would have been better than me. And so like that really pushed me to like learn all sorts of technology. And eventually, you know, I got my lung capacity up and I, uh, my cardio wasn't so bad and I was able to keep up and like, you know, but that really pushed me, I would say. So really going in on like taking a job that I knew would be really challenging rather than just finding a job where I thought I could be the best. That is, yeah, that's fantastic. I mean, it's a great story and also really good advice. I think, yeah, I just I'll answer the question. But before I do that, I want to double down on that. You should always interview for the job you want. You know, I was talking to somebody today

who they were waiting to get promoted so that they could interview for another job. And I said, well, why don't you just interview for that job? You know, like at whatever level you want to be, you know, with your promotion or, you know, where I'm going with this. And just, you know, if they like, like at whatever level you want to be, you know, with your promotion or, you know, or where I'm going with this and, and just, you know, if they don't give it to you, then that's fine. But at least you, you should try like interview for the job you want now. And, um, yeah. And it's, it's, it sounds like, you know, you, you kind of did that and then

you were able to get in and push yourself. And so now you, uh, you totally dominate. No, no. But I mean, look, I've seen like, I think my growth has been a lot bigger than it would have been if, you know, I had just dated that spot Jason and I were originally. Yeah, that makes sense. What about you? Well, actually, real quick,

I just want to double click on something. You said that if you had to do it over again, you wouldn't. And why? Is it because it was so difficult that it kind of put a strain on you or no no no i'm not saying i wouldn't do it i'm saying like i think if i would have known how like just how much like under over my head i would be like i guess like i don't know that's i guess that's not a fair so i i like to think i would do it again i mean i feel in hindsight it was a great choice um but i think i didn't realize just how little i knew we make this joke about uh at work we do it about c++ is like you go through that that curve where like

you don't know c++ like this language is weird then like you get to the level where you first wrote like inheritance and maybe a template and you're like i am a freaking c++ expert people saying this is hard and it's like i interview these people i ask them you know kind of i don't actually care what they answer i just care like as a discussion point but like how would you rate your c++ skills on like a scale of one to five anyone who says four or five i instantly know it's like oh yeah you're really early on the curve um yeah because it's just like one of those things like they don't know how much they don't know like yeah and so i think it was i didn't realize how much bigger

the world was and we were going from a company where it was not programmers first just silicon valley company where programmers were like the superstars of the company. And so your expected output and the level of talent and also accordingly, the rewards were much, much higher. Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. I mean, I think it would have been overwhelming if you had realized what you were in for beforehand. If I had gone and like, yeah, spent like a week there with like a trial job or whatever, a trial interview, people always joke about that. I probably would have come out then like, oh, there's no way I'm going to cut it. But because

I was committed, because I moved, because I already accepted the job, like there was no way out. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, that was really inspiring, man. Yeah, biggest thing that pushed me to learn more. I mean, I guess what Patrick said really resonates with me too. I mean, yeah, when I moved to the Valley and I moved to like this research lab where I met a whole bunch of people who knew a whole bunch of other disciplines that I'd barely heard of, that definitely pushed me to really dive deep and do a lot of learning. I took, you know, a bunch of these online courses, or I watched videos from universities all over the world. There was this university in Israel that had some good courses online for free. There was, um, there was the MIT courses.

There was also a university. Oh, I can't remember which one that had an amazing stats class that you could just listen, you know, watch all the courses and they had really good production value. But I think, you know, beyond, uh, just, you know, taking a really challenging job and I would say the biggest thing that pushed me to learn more was, yeah, just I guess taking just really kind of big bets. You know, I think that, you know, there was like, for example, reinforcement learning was this technology that people weren't really using in industry. And so I just decided to take that on as a project and figure out, okay, why does this not work in the real world? It only works on games and, and kind of committed to that and, and put us in a position. I think maybe the story around both, both from both of us here is the same, which is to put yourself in, in positions where

you're really pushing yourself and the risks are real. And so you have to, to put yourself in positions where you're really pushing yourself and the risks are real. And so you have to put yourself in these really tough environments. And, you know, you don't always succeed, but you have to kind of put yourself in those environments. Like I've bombed interviews before. I've failed projects before. I've gotten bad ratings before. You know, that's because, you know, I'm taking risks and they're not always going to succeed. It's not, it's not a risk if, if, if you always win. Right.

So, so yeah, take those big risks. And then when you're in that situation, really push yourself and don't give up, you know, at some point, like, you know, you might fail, but until then, you know, push yourself really hard. You know, I think that's some good advice that will help folks out, especially when they're getting started. You know, there are things that now, you know, push yourself really hard. You know, I think that's some good advice that will help folks out, especially when they're getting started. You know, there are things that now, you know, are just kind of, you know, I don't even really think about. But at the time, you know, I didn't even like understand.

So I guess, you know, there are things that were kind of almost like black magic. Like I have no idea how they worked. And then it got to the point where I could kind of use them. I still didn't really know how they worked, but I could use them enough to get by. And then you understand them and then they just become just part of your routine to where you don't even realize you're doing it. And you're kind of building this scaffold upon scaffold upon scaffold. And so, so yeah, pushing yourself will really help accelerate that process because it's going

to take, it's going to take your whole life, you know, to, to continue on that. So. Yeah. This thing you said, I think I didn't know early on. And like now, like you said, I think I, I realize it and I've tried to ingrain it, but this like, you have to set yourself up to be uncomfortable and potentially fail. Like if you're, if you're not close enough to the edge to fail, then you're probably not growing. Yep. Yep. That's right. Yeah. I mean, I'll give you guys a really concrete example.

Um, I've, I, you know, I bought, I owned a house a long time ago, but it was a very small house. And my parents were really close. And so they actually helped me a lot with, you know, house related things. And I was in college and working full time. So I don't really have a lot of time. So I don't really count that as being a true homeowner. That was, that was cheating. But I bought, you know, a house, you know, about two years ago. And since then I've done a ton of stuff myself. Um, you know, I built a ton of stuff. I've built walls. Um, you know, I've built a fence. Um, you know, I did a ton of, I built a path, you know, I laid down granite, I did all sorts of stuff, all just from trying to look things up on the internet. And there were some things that I

messed up. Like I gave you an example. Um, I took apart the pool valve, and I couldn't put it back together. And I actually put it back together, but it leaked, and I couldn't get it to stop leaking. So we had to call a pool professional to come, and they fixed it for real. And it cost, and actually, you know, if I hadn't done that, it would have been like a $5 fix. But because I did that, it cost $800 to fix. And, you know, that sucked, right? But that was a risk I was willing to take because I, you know, I'm trying to push myself and learn as much as I can about home ownership. And so I've done a whole bunch of other things inside and outside the house, like replace toilets, you know, replaced

outlets, did a whole bunch of, replaced a bunch of the sprinklers and rerouted sprinklers. And like, I learned a lot more and ultimately saved a lot more than, you know, the $800 I had to eat on that, on that pool valve. Right. And so that's really what it's about is, you know, when you take a long-term view, a lot of these risks make sense. I mean, there's, there's folks on, you know, my team who say, what if I do this project and it doesn't work? Well, I still get a good rating. And, and the answers will, you probably will get, you know, an okay rating if it doesn't work. But, you know, taking these risks over a long

enough period of time will eventually work out if you're working hard. I mean, that sense is a little bit similar to the advice you get with the stock market or something like that. Oh, that's a separate topic. Okay. Yeah, okay. Maybe that's not a segue. That's too much surface area. But yeah, take those risks, push yourself hard. And a single risk could easily pass or fail. And don't let that discourage you if it doesn't work out. Yeah. I mean, yeah, it's an iterative thing, not a single one shot measurement. Yeah, I know. Real quick, we'll do the second part and

then we'll jump on to the next question. Favorite city to live in or visit? I venice um you know my my my dad is uh from there originally and i love going back there i mean it's a lot of fun and san antonio which is close to where i live now is actually similar where they have a river walk and they have a it's not quite a gondola ride but it's it's you know there's there's a lot of water around and so i think that kind of aesthetic is really beautiful okay well mine sucks compared to that but But so like living, yeah, we'll try to do each of these faster because we're a bit introspective here at the end of the year. But I mean, as far as living, I've only ever lived in Florida and the Bay Area. So I don't, I've not moved around that much.

I don't know that I can say too much about places to live. But as far as visiting um interestingly for whatever reason like visiting new york city is just like fascinating to me because it's so different than i think like what i normally do and you can go and you don't have to drive which now i don't drive that much anyways but you just like take the subway everywhere walk and i guess specifically like manhattan and there's just like culture with the museums and broadway shows and then they're shopping there's like things to do outside so like we go and we walk so much like we get tons more like steps on our phone recorded as like how far we we traveled so actually for like at least for me and my family like visiting

like manhattan is great every time we go i was like maybe maybe we like move here but i think moving and visiting are two very different uh ways of experiencing a city yeah yeah totally yeah i think uh um it's very hard to know what living there would be like um but yeah it is super fun I've been there a couple of times. I had a blast. All right. Next biggest tech prediction. Real quick before that question. So James B. James B. has been a patron for I don't know how many months, but he's he's pledged a total of one hundred dollars on the dot. So thank you so much, James B., for all of your months of contribution there. And you are our first winner. So we will send you a T-shirt. You actually don't have your address on Patreon.

So I'm going to try and track you down from your email. If you're listening to this and you want to be proactive, shoot me an email with your address. Or any James B.'s that match that query pattern. Well, yeah, actually, that's true. There's probably other James B's. So yeah, maybe just wait for me to email you. But James B, I'm going to email you and we'll get your address and get a t-shirt over to you.

Thanks for sponsoring the show. All right. Speaking of James, Clever Clover, aka James, is wanting to know our next biggest tech prediction. Next biggest. OK, I'll say this. My next biggest tech prediction is I think this decentralized web thing is actually going to take off. I mean, there's been like there's been all these things. Yeah, there's been like peer NFTs, baby. Let's go. Oh, my God. We should talk about nfts we should actually do a whole show on nfts we yeah it's 2021 and we didn't talk about nfts yet

yeah you know it's not because i i've been consuming a lot of content on nfts but part of it was i was looking for a good interviewer and part of it was um you know i just don't really know where it's going to go but but but think that this sort of decentralized, like you have a box in your house that has your personal data, like your vault. Oh, you mean something different, I see. Yes. Yeah. And so you're all kind of, you're kind of bringing your own data, your own infrastructure.

And it's kind of, this is kind of like web 3.0. You know, I really think that that is going to take off. NFTs, you know, could be like ICOs or it's a big fad and people lose a lot of money. I'm not totally committed to NFTs, but I think Web 3.0 as a concept is going to take off. Interesting. I mean, I think I am always saying that, but I believe it's true. I think SpaceX. I mean, I think SpaceX, if they can pull off getting Starship into orbit this year, which is their goal, and we can discuss Elon Musk as a person at some other time, but if they can pull off that goal, which there's a lot of people there besides him. But, you know, I think people just are underestimating how transformative getting that much. Like right now, you care about literally every ounce that goes to space. But you'll move to caring about like vaguely how much something weighs

and the frequency which was so good. I think it'll just change so much right and we're starting to kind of people are starting to realize this with starlink i was having a conversation someone the other day if starlink which is satellite-based internet like gets to where it needs to be i mean you'll no longer be able to have censorship in countries that's effective because people can just get their internet beamed in from space like You won't be able to stop that like you can today That's gonna itself have huge implications to

Like the political landscape in addition to just like being able to get internet everywhere, which would be amazing But like being able to you know Have that same access that we have literally from all oppressed governments in the world that's going to be a big deal and i think that's only like the beginning right like i think being able to we talked about a long long time ago bigelow space and like the inflatable space stations but now like that's that's like small stake stuff considering the payload that Starship could put into orbit, right? Yeah, and actually I think our predictions kind of dovetail really nicely because I feel like you have some, traditionally you've had a lot of monopolies.

And you're seeing, so for example, like crypto kind of breaks, a lot of financial monopolies cryptocurrency. And so yeah web 3.0 is all about kind of breaking some of those monopolies reducing the barrier to entry by kind of making things distributed so you don't need, you know, a YouTube sized budget to compete with YouTube. Um, and so, but then you, but then you get to the hardware issue. And so this, this is a way to sort of democratize that. So kind of, you combine these two, it's like now internet is ubiquitous, you know? Yeah. And you can access the internet from everywhere. No one can really shut it down unless they have space lasers. And, um, um, and then you build the, you know, the, the software infrastructure on top of that. It could be really powerful. All right. It's Paul asks, if we could standardize all the code there is out there to one particular language, which language would it be and why would it be Python? Oh, my gosh.

So it's Paul officially is going to cause our programming throwdown at gmail.com inbox to blow up. So thanks for that, Paul. But yeah, I think, man, if you could. Okay, so that's a good question, Patrick. So if you personally, Patrick, could only pick one language, what language did you pick and why oh i mean this is a huge question right like if i was stuck on a desert island and i can only bring one programming language with me what would it be i mean probably like you know i don't know i don't know this is tough like from a convert standpoint i mean i'm most comfortable in c++ python sucks um and i but i mean i kind of want to say javascript like i feel if i was like all that like if we giant shuffled the world into whatever with javascript i could get my current job done but also get web stuff done so i kind of want to say that this is a tough question i don't know oh man that's a really good point i never thought about that.

Like if I, if like the world turned upside down and like, what is the programming language most likely to like help me build inertia back up? I'm going with 68K assembly. You know, I'm going to go with, I'm going to stick with Python. I was originally thinking Python. And then, you know,'m gonna go with i'm gonna stick with python i was originally thinking python and then you know meredith who we had on the show a while back from anvil has has their whole anvil uh framework where you can um write python and then they transpile it to the web and so i guess if i had to pick one i would go with python like like i think all the stats stuff just you

know all of the the um batteries that are included there okay what about if you could only well actually you already picked an old language right you picked some old assemblies just talking about that but no i mean actually python is good i mean python and javascript would be a pretty good toss up for like chance of being able to communicate with other people and like inertia and breadth the barrier to entry for a lot of other languages is is just high when it comes to the general populace and i think people get elitist like i mean i don't program c++ because that's an elitist thing but i mean i think there are people who would say something like assembly or haskell or whatever not because they truly believed it but in part to be elit. And then not everyone. Some people would generally die before giving up Lisp in their parentheses. But we're definitely getting flamed. I've always enjoyed writing code in C++.

I think there's something really satisfying about it. And I do like the fact that, well, now with Python python it's effectively you're getting that same feeling because the the type system depending on how you have that set up um but now with python you know and especially in a corporate environment you know you write the python i guess the difference is you can run the python when the types are all messed up but you can't actually submit a pull request it won't let you um in c++ like you can't you can't even get that far um and as far as like a legit old language i kind of mentioned it but i you know i don't program in lisp but lisp has been the one that i think

has sort of stuck around the longest like it's old but it continues to be a place where they continue to have enthusiasm and support so other examples it's while we were like pascal fortran cobalt i mean those are used but mostly in sort of uh not active development but more sort of like maintenance aspects or very niche things whereas i think lisp still has like and derivatives there so there must be reasoning to that so even though i'm not a huge list proponent currently like i'll stick up for it from that aspect yep yep totally agree um yeah this is i'm a big fan of lisp i haven't written in it forever but i always have a good time so colin g colin g he um he's been a looks, he's been a,

it looks like he's been a patron for a little over a year. So thanks, Colin. And Colin also doesn't have his address. So I'm going to have to track him down, but, but Colin's going to, you want to come into your house. That's right. Do you want a t-shirt? I just need you to send me your address and your credit card so you can pay for it and your social. No so call and g want a t-shirt i'll track you down call and g and get you your t-shirt so thanks again for supporting the show um so um necrois necrois necrois says asks um if you could redo your career and education path what would you

change um that's an interesting question um well patrick you got your master's online what was your feeling would you change that or were you happy with that so i mean i guess like this is going to be the broken record patrick tonight but i mean for me like you know i didn't you know look this is controversial so i you know i'll say what worked for me which is i went to a state university i know jason you did too but yep but i went to a state university um that left me in Florida. That state university system in Florida was, I think, a very good value, at least when I went. I haven't kept track of what it is anymore. But when I went, that was a really good value. And I even got scholarships and stuff, so it cost even less. But even at in-state full price, that was a good value. I came out with

a very good financial situation, got a good job out of it. That worked really well for me. I don't think I would change my education path there. And the career I get in, no, I mean, I'm super happy that like, we discussed the whole Silicon Valley thing. I think that's worked out well. Now, there's a lot of timing, luck, serendipity, whatever you want to call it. You know, if you're a subscriber to Malcolm Gladwell kind of things, you can go sort of read his take on that. But like, you know, I'm not saying other people could could repeat what I did. But, you know, I think I've been happy.

I will be careful to say how much of it is repeatable versus happenstance. But yeah, I did my master's degree while working. And the broken record part of this is like, if I knew how much work it was going to be when I started doing it, I'm not sure I would like people ask me today, like that I work with, should I do my master's degree? Like you did your master's degree while you were working? Should I? And I have a hard time answering them. I'm thankful I did it. I feel like it's one of those, if you ever don't get a job, you never know if it would have helped or not. But I don't think it

like made me that much of a better programmer, to be honest. So I'm glad I have it. I wouldn't do it now. And I'm kind of proud that it's like on my resume. And I'm glad that I was getting real world experience rather than delaying getting that experience in order to do it. And I'm glad that I was getting real world experience rather than delaying getting that experience in order to do it. And so for me, that worked really well. And I'm thankful I have it. But I'm not 100% sure it's worth it today in at least the field I'm in. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I mean, I think I think that makes a lot of sense. I think it depends on your sort of values. Yeah, I would agree that getting a master's or a higher level degree, you probably, you barely break even if at all. That wouldn't surprise me. But I always wanted to do like really high level math. That's just something I wanted to do.

And I felt like, you know, even if it paid the same. And so I was starting my career later and, you know, there was there was that compounding effect. You know, at the end of the day, it's like I just that's the kind of job I want to do. And so, you know, I just I just felt like I needed to have more sort of, you know, kind of job I want to do. And so, um, um, you know, I just, I just felt like I needed to have more sort of, you know, kind of like training and I wanted to learn, you know, more about, about how to do that. And a lot of the advanced math classes are hard to take and all of that. And so that was my master's. And then for PhD, I got into the PhD because I wanted to have neural networks play go.

And it was at the time a really, really hard problem. And it took years and I made like just a fraction of the progress, but I made something. At some point, like I think after you write like three journal papers, then you can kind of graduate. And so by like the second journal paper, I was pretty done. I mean, I was kind of ready to, you know, to go get a job or be a professor. I didn't know what, but I wanted to finish my PhD. So yeah, I mean, I think that's, that was really the reasoning there. And so, you know, I wouldn't, yeah, I wouldn't really change

anything. I think you have a good point there to interject a bit, like you said, to get to the kind of things you wanted to do and i think that is a good point there are certain parts of certain fields that have different expectations like it's been my experience listening to you and other people for instance like to really hit the ground running in machine learning for instance i think like there is more door, there are more doors open to you if you have a PhD, at least today, then not versus like for me and the kind of work that I'm doing, you know, maybe like a more embedded slant or whatever. This is not a thing like a master's degree, a PhD, years of experience, like they're kind of all interchangeable. You're not going to get like

more benefit of the doubt or more access by having higher level degrees. Yep. I also worked all through grad school, actually through undergrad as well, but not full-time through undergrad. But yeah, I mean, I think working while you're in grad school is a great idea. It helps you kind of stay focused. If it takes an extra year, I think that's fine. You know, I don't know if finishing a year earlier would have really changed anything. So, yeah, I think working for me was actually really important. Helped kind of keep me grounded.

And I learned a lot of software discipline and things like that. That I don't think I would have learned if I just tried to go straight through without having a job. M2N m2nc oh do you want another giveaway or we want to go to the next question uh let's do it all right so so matt uh i almost said matt's last name and we'd have to clip that out matt i matt's letter i um you are a t-shirt winner and we have your address. I'll probably still email you just to confirm that Matt I is in great Britain. Oh, nice. He's been a patron for, it looks like about a year and a half. And so thank you so much, Matt, for your support. And we will get a t-shirt over to you.

Nice. All right. for your support and we will get a t-shirt over to you nice all right mqnc's question is what is the dirtiest hackiest anti-patternist um sp piece of code you ever wrote in full conscious and even maybe enjoying the thrill and why was it the way to go well we both wrote some really ugly code when we worked together i remember actually i'll tell you a really quick story i remember we built this prototype so we were working in a research lab and so we were trying to produce little prototypes they weren't production worthy systems by any stretch and we had this prototype and this and at the time i mean i was still in grad school we were both still in school. And so we didn't have a lot of experience. And I was creating a process. I think it was like every second.

So basically there was a batch of work that needed to get done. And for every batch, instead of having like a pool of processes and using like the multi-processing library in Python and just feeding it all to the pool, I was creating a process for every item in the batch. Now I had like a semaphore, so it wasn't, you know, if there were 10,000 batches, it wasn't creating 10,000 processes all at once, you know, but it was creating, let's say five processes. And when the first one finished, it was creating a sixth process. And so, and so basically we could only do something like

10 000 batches before the machine died because it was just creating processes and it wasn't cleaning them up um so that that happened the thing that kind of comes to my mind here is that you know when you don't really know what the final product is going to look like, that is when I build really hacky things. And so that's when I feel like it's the way to go. Because the design is changing a lot, the structure is changing a lot. And so I'll write something really ugly. It might be like one massive, you know, IPython notebook or something. And then in hindsight, you know, I'll look at it and it'll be terrible and it'll need to be rewritten. But I still feel like that made the most sense. You know, one thing that actually I talked to

the creator of iPython notebook. I'm terrible at names, but he works for Amazon now for AWS. And he's actually a physics professor. A physics professor created iPython Notebook. And he said something really interesting. He said, you know, when I, and this is, I'm using his language here. He said, when I open Visual Studio, the verb that I would call

for what I'm doing in Visual Studio is build. You know, I'm building a library. I'm building a library. I'm building a website. He's like, but when I open IPython, the verb I like to use is tinker. It's like I'm tinkering with something. Or even better is like think. I'm thinking about something. And so I think there's times when you're trying to understand something or trying to think about something. And that's where you'll write some ugly code um and and it'll help you be really agile but then when you're done thinking and it's time to build something then that's that's a struggle because then you have

to convince everyone to rewrite it interesting um i mean look i come from a background of like cnc plus plus i won't tell you the number of times where i needed to do string formatting and look i ain't got no batteries included string formatting library so a number of s printfs and you know some slapdashy iterative pointer with modification like code comes out because i know how to do it and i know it'll be right and everyone else looks at it and is like what it's like no just just go with it it's fine what are you doing here i'm stripping spaces like just just don't even just like keep going and the same thing happens every so often anything that slightly resembles like image processing where like you end up with like two loops, like an outer loop over rows and inner loop over columns.

I end up busting out some amount of pointer math and doing something that people just groan and are just like, what are you doing, Patrick? They're like, no, no, it's fine. And every time, which comes up fairly often, everyone knows like, hey, I need to do some bit manipulation. And they just come to me and then it's like yeah yeah okay i'll do this for you what was one oh we needed to like write a very partial parser for some unicode encoding stuff which of course like c++ probably has a library for somewhere but we just needed a subset so like dropping into the bit math and like deciding when you needed to continue on to like a one byte two byte or three byte or four

byte unicode encoding like you know just like hacking that crap out as like bit shift operations and you know some pointer math uh yeah that i i don know. I'm kind of proud of it because in my head, somehow the bits move and it works, but I've never successfully explained that code to anyone else. You know, there's this IQ test called Raven's matrices. Have you heard of this?

No. So it's basically this really complicated pattern matching, and it's been heralded as, you know, oh my my god i mean we could spend like a whole show or multiple shows talking about iq tests and that whole thing but but um you know one of the nice things about raven's matrices is that you don't have to know any particular language and um it's supposed to be like a pretty pure test of like visuospatial

intelligence i have this feeling from just knowing you for many years that you would like get a high score on raven's matrices i'm gonna look it up and i'm definitely not gonna try it i have a kind of a follow-up it seems like the work you're doing it just surprises me that it's done in c++ is that what was the the reason i mean i know that i don't want to like dive into like your day job but yeah like uh did someone just make the call and say we're going to write all of this in c++ i mean i think it's like we like the stuff i'm doing right now is like a library to other stuff so so we write a bunch of library for moving moving data around and doing really efficient like really tuned stuff because of the scale we work at like to other stuff. So we write a bunch of library for moving data around

and doing really efficient, really tuned stuff because of the scale we work at. Not distributedly, but on a single system. Oh, I see. And so because other people who need to call us are in C++, we kind of have to be in C++. Then when we need to write our own interfacing to our infrastructure, it's most obvious

to just write in C++, or else you have to write some sort of exporter, which we do do occasionally. Exports us out to JSON, or PyBinded, or whatever, right? That makes sense. So Lidl asks, thoughts on server-side rendering React

and Next.js? What's that? You already covered this! Spoiler alert! Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is wow. This is what is the opposite of foreshadowing? This is backshadowing. But I'm obviously a huge fan of Next.js. But I'll talk about server side rendering. I am not really sold on server side rendering. So I'll give a quick backstory here. A while back, Google released this report. And one of the things the report said was that for every so many milliseconds it takes Google's results to show up, they lose that many people. So in other words, they did a

test where they artificially added a little delay. And even just adding a 10 millisecond delay cost Google, you know, and everything is at this extraordinary scale, right? So it cost Google a bazillion dollars. And so they showed how, you know, sites have to be as responsive as possible, even down to the millisecond. And so server side rendering, and there's different ways. I mean, there's pre-rendering, where if you have a website that's never, a site that's never going to change, like imagine your end user license agreement or something, you just render that once and then you never have to render it again client you're just doing it on the server and then sending the result and there's and like maybe you can pre-compute like a tiny bit of it or even a lot of it but not all of it and you know i'm not totally convinced that ssr is as important as people are making it out to be so yeah i have to admit i'm a little skeptical of that. But Next.js is amazing. I think everyone should be using it. And there's probably alternatives. So I'm by no means a front end expert. But I went from, you know, writing in React and then a website in, you know, Flask or one of these things to just doing the whole thing, browser and server in Next. And I found that amazing. And so other things that do similar to Next might be better,

but that paradigm, I think, is awesome. I have no comment, not because it's controversial, but because it's too far from me. All right. So we have Glenn S. Glenn S is our next winner. Also, no address address so i don't know where you're from oh wow but glenn s has been a member for a very long time he's contributed over 300 dollars over the years so yeah thank you so much glenn um for supporting the show we really really

appreciate it and we will get a t-shirt over to you. MC Platypus says, any thoughts on the visual programming language LabVIEW? I don't know anything about it. Do you know anything? Oh, really? Yeah, I do, actually. And I'll segue. So I have done programming in LabVIEW.

Actually, this is one of those things where i guess i sort of take it for granted and then it turns out like you're a bit different than everyone else like this happens to me every so often i think everyone this happens right like you just assume people are kind of like you right um or at least i do um the maybe that's an assumption itself oh this goes deep hang on i'm having an existential crisis um you have uh what is it assumption ception oh gosh uh come back come back come back okay so it is like a broader story specific story so i wrote some code actually some control loop stuff in lab view and um you know it's one of those things where everyone says oh no code you

can do this stuff in lab view and then i look at it and i'm like this is just coding like even with debugging just like without the scary with like pictures and arrows and not the like curly braces or white space that are your you know control, control flows. And so I think like, I don't know, like it's, it's, everyone says it's kind of different, but then it doesn't end up being all that different. At least I don't approach it all that different. Like I end up doing it really similarly, but I think this is held across other things in my experience. Like for an example, that's pertinent to like my background is i wrote some c code but i wrote my c code very much like i write my c++ code but a lot of people who write c code don't write it in

that style they write it in a completely different style so to me i didn't find that much difference but a lot of people do stuff in a very different style, which makes like, for instance, type safety stuff much harder to do. And so they just lean all in on it not being type safe, or less type safe, I should say. And so I think LabVIEW can be a bit more similar than it is different. I don't think it's some great thing. I mean, but I guess what I would say about it is it's an example of the reason why i got into programming it is there was a piece of hardware that needed uh some code written to control it and i could have said you know there were i think c++ bindings for the drivers and

stuff but the person already had been up and fiddling it in LabVIEW. And so using the right tool for the right job, it was my call that the right tool was to just keep doing what they needed in LabVIEW, which was taking some input and controlling some system, some hardware, because they already had the parts that I knew would be most difficult to do like interfacing with drivers and all that stuff already taken care of and so the work at hand was easier for me to adapt to the tool than to bring my own tool set and I think that's something that I take with me a lot of places like a joke of like Jason asked me like why are you using c++ or whatever which slightly different but like you know if it calls for Python i'll use python if it calls for javascript i'll use javascript like i may not be the best at those but like i think a lot of people spend a lot more time adapting the problem to where they're comfortable than to meeting the problem where it is yep that makes sense i've been burned actually by WYSIWYG twice. Although, you know, for doing desktop apps, it's amazing. So if you're using Qt, the Qt creator or Qt designer, I think they rebranded it,

where you basically have this visual thing and then it auto generates a bunch of Python code and you can kind of fill in. Or I think now you extend the class that they auto-generate, but you effectively fill in the functions. I think that's amazing. Works really well. I haven't seen anything like that for the web,

but that could work if it existed. But I use this tool called, Patrick, you might've used this too, called PowerDrill, which was this WYSIWYG thing where you drag and drop boxes with little logic blocks in them. And basically what it would do is build a giant SQL statement for you. And so then you would build this flow in PowerDrill, and then you'd press go, and it would just turn that into a SQL command and run it. And then they deprecated it and then they ended up killing it. And so I ended up having to, and this, of course, like any WYSIWYG tool,

the SQL it generates is totally unreadable and atrocious. So I ended up having to redo all of my work, you know, writing those SQL queries by hand. And then I went to another company much later and made exactly the same mistake where they had a tool called, it was called Data Swarm. So Data Swarm was this tool where you could write a bunch of SQL and you could write it in blocks. So you could write a SQL command and then instead of having all these nested SQL commands, which gets really ugly, you could sort of like pass a SQL to another SQL command. And it was all driven through this Python library. And so that was fine.

But then they have this thing called Data Swarm Studio, which was the same thing, drag and drop. You put little blocks of SQL in these boxes and you connect them with arrows and it knows to chain the commands together. And for both of these, I thought the tools were pretty nice. And so I used them and in both times, they killed them and then I ended up having to redo all the work. And both times, actually,

the reasons were exactly the same. They said that it was just a nightmare for data engineers, other people. So basically it was easy for you to create something it was hard for someone else to you know build state on what you were doing so it's much easier for other people to just look at a page of code than to like look at all these boxes and arrows because you once you start introducing all of that now you have this like spatial model, spatial model. Yes. That like, like this, yeah, this model that has congruency between like your mind and how you think of

things spatially and, and the project. And so I guess like, you know, that is something that's really hard for other people. Like, like different people come in with totally different ways of, you know, laying things out spatially. And so, yeah, I've never used lab view, but, but in general, I try and stay away from WYSIWYG because even though I think it's great, I've just been burned too many times. You're reminding me of this is a toilet side and we should move on, but that is it Zachtronics. So like chem factory or, you know, some of the other games, like even

human resource machine or whatever, where like, it seems really simple and like how I do it. And then if you showed me what you did, like, it would be really hard for me to like sit down and actually parse out like the lack of syntax in the way that we do syntax for like more efficient programming languages. Yeah. It's sort of an impediment to like understanding what someone else did like it made sense when you created it and you can look at it and understand and track and debug it but bringing someone else up to speed is a bit more tricky yep yep that makes sense um so james f you are our next winner. James F is a brand new patron.

He's been on for over one month. So, so James, you are net positive. You can actually cancel your subscription now. I'm just kidding. And kids will suffer, James. They will not be able to hear about the show because of you. No, I'm just kidding. But James is a brand new patron, was lucky and won a shirt.

Congratulations, James. And I'll have to get your address. It's not in the system. But no, seriously, I mean, thanks so much for being a patron. I mean, we're just kidding. And it's really great to see new folks, you know, joining and signing up. And yeah, I will track you down

and get a t-shirt over to you, James. Thanks. So we got through the questions we had before we started, but some people have been interacting with us. I know I can't find the thread, but I think someone commented about

for future technology or big technologies. What about AR? Oh, what about AR? That's interesting. Well, I can say that I really got into VR this year. I know we talked about it on a past show, but I was a super late adopter to most things. Similar to a smartphone, I got a VR headset for free, which is probably the only reason why I have one. But then I really got into it. And actually, I was on it today. I

mean, I'm on it right now. I'm on it multiple times a week. I'm really into doing exercise. I feel like exercise plus VR, for me, it just works really well. It just really clicks for me. But yeah, so AR, I've seen some cool things with AR, but I don't know if I've really seen that killer app. I mean, I remember when Google Glass came out, it was a cool idea, but no one really did anything. One thing I would love to get my hands on actually is the Snapchat spectacles, where it's like those, those sunglasses that have cameras built into the sunglasses. So you don't have to take your phone out to take a picture. You know, I like I miss so many great photos, because by the time you take your phone out, go to the camera, it's like the moment's

gone, you know. So that I think um you know those i think are really cool but i have yet to see an ar you know killer app i mean what do you feel patrick i think ar is i was having this conversation with someone is one of those things that will come we will eventually get it but the question is like do we have the right technology at the right state to do it now i don't know that that's always true because like flying cars never like we're always going to be a thing until we realized yeah they probably won't be a thing um but i feel like ar is just so like in some form is so obvious eventually someone will work out the pattern like what's needed to just do it real slick like adjusting for your what you're perceiving getting the latency low enough like having a killer app like i feel like it's just too useful that like if it were you know super low marginal cost to just add

it to my existing glasses or to sunglasses like why would you not do it? Even if it was low functionality, if the, if the price were low enough. Yeah. There's actually, there's two AR things that I started, uh, that I checked out, which I thought were really cool. One was that, have you seen Brickit? I think we talked about it on the show. Brickit is this thing where you, you take a whole bunch of random Lego pieces, you lay them out on your carpet, you make sure that there's no occlusions. You lay them out on your carpet and then you take a picture with the BrickIt app and it will actually, you know, analyze all the pieces, figure out what they are, and then tell you something cool you can build. And it'll actually give you the instructions step-by-step and everything. Yeah, you did tell, I'm going to have to try this.

Like you told me about it again. Now I'm like excited. I'm like going on my phone right now. I've never tried it. But so that I think is an AR real breakthrough. And then another thing that I found out recently is, and I'm not sure how well this works, but there's a whole collection of apps around

productivity, I guess. So there's one app I saw where you take a picture of a collection of stuff on the ground. And in this app, there actually can be occlusions and stuff. The only rule is that all the things have to be the same. You take a picture of a pile of things and it will tell you approximately how many there are. So, you know, you drop a bunch of things and it will tell you approximately how many there are. So, you know, you drop a bunch of nails on the floor, you take a picture. It's like, oh, 47 nails. And it might be right, like within one or two nails. That's a really cool app.

And there's another app that's effectively like a ruler or like a tape measure. Yeah. It uses AR. Yeah. I think these kind of things are really, really cool. And actually, I think even Google Class, I think it's still used, right, by doctors and there's a couple of other productivity uses that it's kept it alive today. Yeah, so the next one was on the topic of getting a master's degree or classes, do you see a benefit of getting certifications um what's your take patrick so i will say this varies hugely i know i've talked to people that say like at their work like it is a

rubric like you must have x number of you know they they give examples here like aws scrum master titles like these various certificates, or even there's all the IT certificates. So I talked to people who like you must have x amount of training classes and these things to like get a promotion. Or if you don't like if that's the case, like, yeah, sure got to do it. And those places probably would respect it if you came in. But look, I'll tell you honestly, where I am, it doesn't matter a lick. Like if you have it on your resume, and you show up, I'm not going to know what they are. No one else is going to know what they are. We're not going to know which ones are easy or hard to get. So I won't

say like they're meaningless, because you could find someone who knew what they meant. But I know that some certifications are easy, you just put in the time. I know that some are really hard to actually legit, like difficult to get, but I don't know the difference. And so it's a bit hard for me to make an assessment of them. So they don't, they're not something I look for or would encourage people trying to get a job at my workplace to pursue. Yeah, that makes sense. I would say, I would take a little bit more optimistic point of view. I think that if I see a certificate, what it shows to me is that the person has an interest in an area. I can't really know enough to say, is this certificate, you know, did it require, you know, like how challenging it is or how comprehensive it is or how accredited it is. But at least, so for example, someone might have a degree in mechanical engineering.

And you might think right off the bat, like, why is this person joining some AI research lab and they have a degree in mechanical engineering? And so it might not really make sense if they say, oh, but, you know, I got if the resume says, oh, yeah, I got that degree, let's say years ago. But a year ago, I took this Coursera course on, you know, deep learning or something like that. And it shows like, OK, this person, you know, wants to pivot and, you know, they're putting time and effort into learning, you know, a different set of skills. And so that at least like sends a message and that message might be important to, um, to get the interview. Um, now like, you know, you're, you're, I don't think anyone's going to trust any of those certificates. So you're still, you know, you know, the best case is you get the interview and you're

going to get tested on AI theory and you're going to know it or not. I don't think anyone's going to say, oh, well, I don't have to interview this person. They have a certificate, right? But yeah, I would say, you know, it probably is good to get, you know, get past the sourcing and the, you know, early stages of screening of an interview. And yeah, as far as like, will you actually learn the right material and everything that it's just there's too much variance to really know the answer there yeah i guess like that's the thing like anything can be a value add the question is like relative to what like if you're doing that instead of spending time committing to an open source project or doing something else right like that's what you got to ask and for then it's a question of like your style of learning, your motivations, your

skill sets, the job you're going after. Like there's just too many variables. That's a really good point, actually. You know, if I saw, you know, to continue my example, if I saw a resume where someone pointed out some GitHub projects or if they were involved in like some groups on, you know, AI, like maybe some LinkedIn group on AI, if they were involved in like some groups on AI, like maybe some LinkedIn group on AI, if they were moderating that, I think I could get the same signal

and like enough to kick off an interview without the person having to get this whole degree. I think that, so I think there's some other, oh, sorry, one more. And then people commenting about things we already commented on, but this is a never ending loop. So I'll have to probably cut it there. But how hard would it be to get a job developer. I think, you know, I think we, I don't know if I mentioned this on the show or not, but I think, you know, smaller companies are definitely the way to go. You know,

there's this idea of sort of, you know, your resume strength versus your interview strength. And when your interview strength is a lot higher, a lot stronger than your resume strength, then you'll tend to do really well at smaller companies. And because smaller companies will, you know, will screen every, well, maybe not screen every candidate, but they'll at least look at every single resume. And they might even call every single person who applies. And so definitely, that's a good way to build up your resume. Once you, you know, once you have, you you have five, definitely by the time you have 10 years of experience, I don't think anyone's really looking at your college anymore. And so it's really just about how do you get the flywheel turning?

And so I think small companies are a good way to do that. A lot of the bigger companies, they get millions of resumes and they have all sorts of automatic screening. There's that joke from the Google movie, The Internship. There's this joke where the person is trying to find people to join his intern group. And he asks where the person went to college. The person says University of. And then before he can even say it, just because it started with University of the guy's like next, you know, I'm done with you. And so, and so, uh, that part of the movie always annoyed me, but, but anyway, I mean, the point there is, uh, is that, you know,

they go through so many interviews that they are optimizing for, um, um, they're optimizing for a hundred percent for precision, right? And if they lose 99 out of 100 good candidates, that's fine as long as they get enough good candidates to fill up their teams, right? So yeah, start with a smaller company. Yeah, I mean, there's a whole question around should you go back and get a bachelor's degree? I mean, that's a very hard question. I think it depends on many, many factors. But if you have an associates and you want to start working, you know, start with a smaller company, build up that resume and, and don't really ever look back. I think you'll be fine. Yeah. I think that was a pretty comprehensive

answer. Like it, it really depends, but I would say again, like on the scale, if I took it on to take a different tack rather than answering it, absolutely answering it relatively, which is, it is much harder to get that first job with an associates than a bachelor's degree. And, and I would say it's like a pretty, pretty hard, like it's, it's, it's, it would be significantly hard, you'd find a lot fewer people getting in with associates, even with some work experience than people with bachelor's degrees. And I think in part, and that may be like a misunderstanding, but in part, most associates degrees don't cover the like degree specific stuff that you get into in a bachelor's degree.

So at least as far as I'm aware, most of the time when you get an associate's degree, it's not going to cover a ton of computer science courses or higher level, like domain specific stuff, just like you get that refinement at each level, right? You add it in your bachelor's, you refine it in your master's, you even further in your PhD.

And so I guess there would have to be like Jason is saying, there would have to be other evidence or is saying there would have to be other evidence or some narrative that explained like what that was yep yep totally makes sense so we'll do one more and then we'll kind of close it out so don r from pennsylvania who um who's been a member for almost four years so wow what a long What a long time. I mean, it's, uh, that's incredible. I didn't realize we've been on Patreon that long, but, uh, man, time really does fly, doesn't it? Um, so yeah, Don, um, you know, thank you so much for your support. We'll be sending you over a t-shirt. I got your address. So we'll, um,

we'll definitely get you a t-shirt and um yeah thanks all our patreons just a bit of a sort of meta stuff here last time we did this um two people of the five winners um i knew personally and so i kind of felt a little bad it was it was like and it was just random um you know it know, it's, it was very low probability of that happening, but it did. Um, and I'm looking at it right now and almost all of my personal friends are at the bottom. So that's just how the cookie crumbled this year. But in a way it makes me feel good that, uh, you have, uh, uh, some, some brand new folks here getting, uh, getting prizes, which is, which is really, really awesome.

And thank you everybody for your support and all of your contributions. We really appreciate it. So maybe we'll go out on, conclude on a kind of question. Like what is your, I think we talked about tech trends. I think last year you were saying how space is going to be a big deal,

or was that something we did in the middle of the year? I talk about it all the time. Well, I feel like space in 2021 didn't get that much attention, but I think that's because all of the other crazy things that happened in the world really took precedent. I mean, with the pandemic and everything. But I mean, I have video of sitting with my my kids and watching them blow up several starships and then finally land one on my phone as we live streamed it in my living room. Was that this year? Yeah. Oh, man.

OK. Yeah. I'm out of the loop. So actually, 2021 has been long geez yeah so so your prediction was that i think your prediction was that in 2021 they would kind of figure out basically what you just said so i think you got it spot on oh oh wow okay i think my prediction was around education, if I remember correctly. I said that I don't know if we I don't think we made one year predictions, but we were just making predictions about the future. And I was predicting that that there'd be a lot more sort of privatized education and scholarships. And actually, you know, one thing that kind of, you know, is starting to corroborate this is, you know, there was a big push to cancel the student debt, which I think would have really just kept the system going, right? But then now it seems like that's not happening.

And so, yeah, I'm going to stick to that idea. And I think that scholarships and a lesser degree, you know, academia in general is going to become kind of more privatized and maybe more decentralized. So we'll see. It's been such a crazy year. It's hard to really make progress in that kind of area. But I still think I'm still going to hold on to that prediction. I think it's going to happen. What is your prediction for space? I mean, yeah. I was dead air because i was trying to think of something impact was like the vacuum of spit no i'm just kidding um wasn't there there was a probe that like went to the surface of the sun or something just yeah

there was yeah just recently i mean i think my prediction for space and technology is going to be like you're going to see a huge rollout with Starlink because they continue to just push almost 100 satellites. I think it's like 70 satellites or something per launch. And so they're just putting so many satellites up. I think you're going to see a huge rollout of Starlink this year and continue to see all the other companies flap around. I think the James Webb Teles telescope is going to make it up and deploy successfully, finally, this next year.

And that's not SpaceX related. And I think we'll see Starship do at least two orbital tests where they successfully do orbits. Cool. Yeah, actually, you just reminded me that uh yeah william shatner and a bunch of these celebrities went to space origin yeah yeah right actually it's a beer for space we should do you know we should definitely do a space episode i mean you you know you'll do the talking i'll ask a bunch of dumb questions but but we should definitely definitely do a space episode what about you know i've heard about like there's there's too much debris like where the satellites are is that a real thing or is that just fear and um i mean it is a real thing and people say oh if it gets bad

enough like we won't be able to go to space anymore like we'll lose access to space. I think that's a bit of a stretch because we know how we could at great expense, you know, sort of fix the problem, which is basically stuff starts colliding with itself in outer space. And you just form this cloud of debris, this shell of debris that just, you know, hovers around the earth. And so getting in and out of orbit is harder um i think it wouldn't happen right away if we know how to clean it up if we needed to i think it's one of those things that it's just like the first people to land in a new uh unexplored island or whatever can say like oh i'm gonna harvest these giant you know trees for my ship masks and then the next people who come you know like each as it becomes more and more subtle you have to be more and more

conscientious about preserving what's there and you can pillage it but you can also realize hey this is not sustainable and you can you know adapt it which mitigates the situation from spiraling out of control. And then you enact some ability to clean those things up. So I think we'll see as it gets cheaper and cheaper to get to space, you'll get more stuff in space, but you'll also have the ability to go, you know, deorbit things which could otherwise cause more space debris. Makes sense. I guess a couple of facts just to end this on, which I think, you know,

really, you know, it's been a very tough year. We kind of started the show by talking about what a difficult year it is. But a couple of amazing facts I saw. One is the earth has 30% more trees than it did at the start of the Industrial Revolution. And it has something like, I think America has something like 30% more trees than it did 15 years ago. Something like that. It's just unbelievable.

The amount of reforestation is unbelievable. And another really cool fact is global poverty over the past 100 years went from 57% to I think it's just seven or maybe it's 52 to seven. But I mean, it's enormous, like decrease in global poverty. And so, you know, things are actually like, you know, overall, things are amazing. I mean, you put on a long enough horizon, you start looking like 30, 40 years, and there's

been amazing, remarkable progress that, you know, the whole world should be super proud of. So in that sense, it's been pretty awesome. But of course, you need to get the pandemic figured out. Cool. All right. I think we can wrap it up there. You know, it's been a really amazing year. I know Patrick and I both moved, so it's been a very, very busy year. Actually, I moved last year, but I'm still recovering. It's been a very busy year for both of us, but I hope it's been a great year able to have your ears for an hour every month or every two weeks now that we have a producer.

And we want to keep the show going. We will keep the show going. We have a bunch of cool interviews lined up. We have a bunch of cool topics lined up. We have space. We have space topic lined up. I'm ready. All right, cool.

And yeah, thanks everyone again for supporting this show. And we'll see you all next year. See ya. Music by Eric Barndollar. Programming Throwdown is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike 2.0 license. You're free to share, copy, distribute, transmit the work, to remix, adapt the work, but you must provide attribution to Patrick and I and sharealike in kind.