Programming Throwdown - Office Spaces

Episode Date: October 30, 2017

Today, we are going to talk about... office space! Not the hilarious 1999 movie directed by Mike Judge, but modern office spaces for engineers and developers. We cover office setups, desk setups, amenities, and more! We won't cover IDEs (check out episode 55 for that) but we do cover how to code comfortably. Show Notes: http://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2017/10/episode-71-office-spaces.html ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

programming throwdown episode 71 office spaces take it away jason hey everyone uh so halloween is approaching and one of the things we gotta do for halloween is get our wi-fi set up sure worst segue ever so i wanted to tell everyone about my wi-fi setup because i think it's pretty cool a lot of people don't um really take the time to kind of set up something, but it can really make your life a lot easier. So yeah, so what I have, I actually have, you know, the modem connected to a wireless router. The wireless router can do the 2.4 gigahertz, but it could also do the five gigahertz it's like the dual band router and then i have an extender which is you know on the other end of the house or about halfway through the house and so the extender allows us to like extend the internet so in other words if we didn't have the extender then it just happens that the cable company put our you know cable

modem on the far side of the house and so we don't have internet on the other side without this extender right so that's pretty standard but the part that's really cool I installed this thing called DDWRT and I highly recommend before you buy your wireless router that you go on the website DDWRT, and I highly recommend before you buy your wireless router that you go on the website, DDWRT, I think,.com, and make sure that your router is compatible with this. Even if you don't plan on doing it right away, it's just good to have that capability, right? And so some of the things that it does, you can actually assign domain names to MAC addresses. So Jason, one second. So the idea of DDWRT is it's a replacement firmware.

So instead of the firmware your router ships with, you install essentially a different operating system for the router. So a different firmware made by different people than what your router came with. And it unlocks extra capabilities. Yeah, exactly. So basically, I think it's a version of Linux or something. what your router came with and it unlocks extra capabilities yeah that yeah exactly so basically it's i think it's a version of linux or something i don't know the details but uh yeah imagine it's

like you know installing you know ubuntu on your desktop instead of windows it's going to change you know basically everything um but one of the things it has, which my router didn't have the capability of, is you can say this MAC address should have this name. So, for example, my desktop has the name GNOME, G-N-O-M-E. And my laptop has a different name. My work laptop has a different name. And so if I want to connect to my desktop and I'm at home, I can just type, you know, SSH gnome. Or because, you know, I have my own domain name, I can type SSH gnome dot, you know, my domain name. And it will connect. And so even if my desktop has a different IP address, it doesn't matter. I can just connect to gnome.

And so even like the Raspberry Pi is called Pi, you know, everything is just on a name basis. The other thing I have is I have what's called a bunch of port forwarding. So I can actually SSH to gnome.mydomainname, even if I'm somewhere else, like even if I'm in another country. And it'll actually go to that domain name, which will send the SSH command to my house, and then my router will send that command to GNOME. So I could do SSH GNOME from my house, I could do it from someone else's house, and it just works. And so that's DNS mask is the part of DWRT that does that. The other thing that's pretty cool, it has per MAC address bandwidth.

So, you know, have you ever had this happen where one of the computers in the house starts updating? Like someone else in your family maybe, you know, or maybe they're watching a really high def video. Or, you know, the computer is downloading some large update. And it kind of slows everybody else down. Like everyone else, the video starts stuttering, or if you're playing a game, it starts jittering or something like that. So I have like per MAC address bandwidth cap. So even if it's downloading some update,

and even if Microsoft on the other end has just unlimited bandwidth, it's not going to download it more than, I don't know what I have it set to, maybe a mega second or something. And so that's going to make sure that one computer isn't starving everybody else. So yeah, that's kind of my setup. I'm really digging it.

I had it issued today and I was able to resolve it using our tool of the show. so a little foreshadowing but in general you know having a DWRT makes life kind of way easier and you know I highly recommend it and it works kind of really well with you know Plex and some of these other things that we've talked about in the past anything where you're kind of using your own network, right? Very cool. I've been using OpenWRT and DDWRT, which I won't get into the political banter. I actually don't know the difference, yeah.

Okay. I think OpenWRT is a little harder to use, but the more open source sort of spirit one. Oh, okay. And they've come a long way. I don't know. I haven't used OpenW wrt in a while so when i used to use it the so dd wrt has a really nice uh user interface a web gui uh and when i

last used it which probably was more than five years ago open wrt didn't um but i probably used some combination of the two for seven eight years maybe even more maybe 10 years um so for a long time and i am by no means a networking person uh so doing the things jason said so you know doing static ips for certain mac addresses naming things doing qos filtering so that you know http traffic is given preference over bit torrent traffic um which i never have on my network um and right of course well you have bit torrent sync right that was one of our tools of the show yes and i think also um not steam but some other stuff uses bit torrent uh for updating stuff. Yeah, Blizzard. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The Blizzard games. Yeah. And then recently, though, I gave up my last DDWRT router and went enterprise grade. And this is going to sound like total shill, but I bought Ubiquiti enterprise grade networking hardware. How much did that cost? It turns out not as expensive as you might think hearing the words enterprise-grade networking hardware. So, you know, sort of mid-range to, like, pretty good consumer router

probably costs, like, $100 to $150. Okay. And so Ubiquiti comes sort of piecemeal so instead of like jason was describing like a router and a wireless access point built into one um the enterprise stuff is more split apart and this isn't true you know enterprise enterprise grade although it can be but this is sort of the lower end like entry level almost like with uh digital slrs that the kind of prosumer so it's both people who are professional enterprise,

but also people who are just want really good hardware for their house. Is it huge? Or like, what does it look like? No, so it's pretty small, but it comes piecemeal. So I have a router

that has no wireless capabilities and then a single wireless access point. But the coverage on it is so much better than i was getting from my normal just sort of like asus router that i had before and part of that is because even with the wrt you could increase the power of your router increasing the power of the router helps for your cell phone for instance to be able to hear the router but it doesn't help the router be able to hear your phone so that makes sense increasing power actually can help in some limited circumstances but not in all of them so having

you know big antennas helps and stuff too um and the some of the nicer things have that but you know sort of boosting power doesn't actually advantage you as much as you, as I naively sort of thought. But the antennas in this Ubiquiti hardware are much better. And there are several other brands that do this sort of enterprise

slash prosumer stuff. But I think it ended up being, I think it's sort of like $50 for the router I got and like $100, $110 for the access point so like 160 so most people probably at all probably don't spend that much money on their you know router but people who pay a lot of attention might um i mean i actually i bought a neck gear and i spent probably close to the same thing and i got i, it was definitely like a high-end NIC year.

That's one thing we should mention, actually. Spend a lot of money on a router. Because a lot of these access points, they're totally starved for memory. You get this access point, it tries to run Linux on a gig of RAM or something. And it's also trying to do all this other stuff, right? So just spend the extra money and get, you know, like a nice router that has four or eight gigs of RAM. It's going to make a huge difference.

Yeah. So this enterprise stuff, though, is super awesome in that, like, it's been rock solid. So since I've installed, I've never had to bounce power on my system. And it's been a couple months now and before you know i got the ddwrt style stuff i got to the point where i'd only have to reset it like once a month before that i guess i have a lot of wireless devices in my house so it was tending to be like once a week or whatever yeah i basically in the same but i mean

i bought uh the netgear one and i have to cycle power on it i actually don't even really have to but you can kind of feel it start to degrade a little bit um but it's it's it's about every maybe three or four months yeah so so far this new style i switched recently but i will say it one thing it made me realize is how little i understand about networking so same here on the consumer hard and i've also heard good things about the new mesh routers that have been starting to roll out apparently they didn't used to be so good but jason like he was saying has a wi-fi extender now i think google ships one some other one erio or something there's a couple oh yeah right um where

one connects to your actual modem, and then you have other devices which connect to that device, doing exactly what Jason said, only they sort of, what Jason has probably is, I don't mean this insult, but kind of a dumb thing. It just acts as a client, but it doesn't sort of cooperatively do anything with the home, the thing that's connected to his modem.

These other ones, these mesh ones are supposed to do sort of more automatic configuration with each other to not interfere yeah like i have to manually take all my mobile devices and put them on the extender which is in the middle of the house and just hope that that's the best situation for them because if you had a mesh network they would actually seamlessly go from one to the other yep so um i've heard good things about those so apparently it's all around just getting better but the consumer stuff hides a lot of choices for you when you go to this other you know i did a bunch of reading kind of configured the scrape the bare surface of the options but apparently i thought i was you know kind of hot stuff by knowing how to explore the advanced settings in my DDWRT router.

It turned out, no, those weren't advanced settings. I mean, they were for it. But when I got this new hardware, the number of things in there that I didn't even understand was astronomically high. So in the Ubiquiti one, I mean, are you in there like modifying IP tables on the command line or does it have a decent interface? So both. You can do everything

sort of from the command line because it's meant for people who need to go install, you know, dozens of these in one building. Oh, I see. And manage it remotely and all sorts of stuff.

But they do actually have they have enough of a web UI and it is intuitive enough to kind of get you through what you need to do. So I was able to get everything I needed to done. But it has all sorts of kind of nice features. Like I had put black electrical tape over the lights on my previous router. Yeah, I have that too. On these ones, they have an option where you just click a button

and it turns all the lights off. Oh, that's nice. Which sounds really stupid, really stupid but it's like oh that's so nice no it is because i mean yeah ours is right next to the tv and it's just constantly blinking right so um anyways i this is not a pitch for ubiquity so i'm really enjoying it myself but do be aware like yeah it i'm sure if something went really bad it it would take you know that much longer for you to figure out how to fix it but the idea is it shouldn't go bad because you're not really supposed to mess around with it yeah yeah it totally makes sense at least and it probably lets you back up the config yeah it does and then i know things like recently there was some problems

and they're really good about pushing updates because they have corporate clients who are very concerned about security and stuff. So a lot of the consumer routers, people just sort of never update their firmware. So they don't really bother pushing updates to firmware that often. But with this Ubiquiti stuff, it's actually fairly frequent in kind of updating this stuff. Oh, that's great. So the support is good. Very cool.

Yeah. And if you use our tool of the show my tool of the show which i'm not going to spoil it yet but uh wow that's he'll actually tell you your your wi-fi status like your signal strength and everything um all right on to news so um this interesting thing it only affects california but uh it was interesting enough i figured i would bring it up there's a law in california now employers are banned from asking your prior salary. So in other words, you go to a job interview, they really like you, they say, hey, we want to make you an offer. They're not allowed to ask you what you made before. And the reason why they passed this law is it's a two-part reason.

The first part is people tend to not know how to negotiate. We did talk about negotiating in the past. So check out Negotiating for Dummies is the book I recommend. But pick up any book on negotiating. It'll teach you a lot. A lot of people don't know how to negotiate. One of the big things is not to really just spill all your guts right away. If you just, you know, let's say they were planning on paying you, you know, $30 an hour. And so that's sort of what they have in their mind. And

they think, well, we're going to lowball this person, we're going to offer them $25 an hour. So maybe that's their strategy you know the potential company strategy going in and you go and say hey you know my last job i made eight dollars an hour doing the same thing well they're going to use that information they say oh well we're going to try we're going to you know uh ask 12 an hour and this person's going to be a stat it's a 50 increase uh and what you don't know as the applicant is, is that, you know, they were willing to offer you, you know, whatever I said the first time, 25 or whatever it was. So a lot of people sort of like self injure themselves by, uh, giving away their prior salary. Um, and, and, uh, uh, particularly from the studies that they did they found that women tend to do

this much more than men um so so in the in the theme of sort of trying to close the uh you know the the gender wage gap and all of that um they pass this law so the idea is it kind of evens a playing field uh you know it prevents everybody from making that mistake. And so it's kind of interesting. I mean, I think it's one of these things that like, you know, on the surface, like the way I just explained it, it sounds very obvious, right? What's not obvious is sort of how that's really going to change the dynamics, right? You know, I don't really know sort of like what the actual implication of that is um in terms of like you know i guess the company will not ask you some people will probably say it anyways um but a lot more people aren't going to say which means there's going to be this sort of

baseline my guess is a lot of companies are going to start really low-balling people, which is basically going to force them to have to decline a really low offer, which is, I think, going to actually hurt women twice as much as they're being hurt already. So I actually think it's going to completely backfire because what companies are going to do is they're going to say, hey, you know, come for $4 an hour and, you know, because they're not going to have any information, is they're going to say hey you know come for four dollars an hour and uh you know because they're not gonna have any information so they're gonna assume really low and uh we'll have to see sort of who takes that and who negotiates and but yeah i found this really interesting because again i'm super into game theory and all of that lately and this fits right in in my wheelhouse so um yeah we'll see what happens i feel like we

should write that down jason claims it'll backfire do you have a date of when it'll backfire by no well it's one of these things we'll never really know because you know so much of this it's also is private yeah that's true it's also very difficult because it's really tough you want to help but it isn't clear how to help and right that if someone makes if someone is sort of consistently low-balled at every job they sort of can fall farther and farther behind what they should be making if you sort of carry their salaries forward but like you said simply not revealing it doesn't prevent them from accidentally getting a low ball offer and not accidentally,

but getting a low ball offer and then accepting without realizing they didn't need to accept one that low. Exactly. Right. I mean, what you want is an English auction where somebody applies to, you know, eight companies and then they pick the highest offer. But, you know, that's not really practical. So, uh, so, you know, in the absence of that, there's always going to be sort of this, this gap, right? This is really tough, but I mean, it's good that it's getting consideration because I feel like culturally we have a far way to go before we get over a lot of the stigmas that hurt employees. Yeah, that's true. Actually. Yeah. Not to like spend too much time

on this but you know a lot of people are afraid of you know negotiating and pushing back um my two cents of this number one a company even if they say they'll take back an offer they'll never actually take back an offer i did no actually i did see that happen just recently what anecdotally this did happen but wait so is it okay i can see it happening if someone else like they have two candidates and the other person but that's usually pretty rare but so you're saying someone made an offer and then the company made an offer and then the person said i want you know x dollars more and then the other company just rejected them no no so the story as i understand it was that basically the i think

what the candidate was trying to do that but it just didn't end up that they were taking they were dragging their feet and so the author was withdrawn okay fair well i mean well that in general like that's you know uh that that doesn't happen very often um like it doesn't happen very often. It doesn't happen often enough to really consider it as part of your strategy. But yeah, I think. Oh, yeah. So I was gonna say, so basically, you know, you're negotiating with this recruiter, the recruiter wants you to take the job, and it's not the recruiter's money. Like, you know, if you get twice as much salary, it's not like the recruiter has to pay that out um the people who want to you know negotiate are actually the finance people at the company who you don't get a chance to really talk to right which is on purpose because if if you know you develop a relationship with the finance person that's like a huge liability for the company, so you purposely aren't exposed to those people. Um, and, uh, uh, yeah, I mean, and so, you know, and even the finance people, it's not their money either. Right. I mean, it is sort of, I guess, an aggregate, but, but for a specific case, it's not really their money either.

So, so people shouldn't be ashamed to say, look, like, I think I'm worth this, or I think I'm worth that. But, but you're right that it is kind of like a stigma. Most people feel like they are sort of telling the person on the other end of the line that that person doesn't know what they're talking about, or something like that. And that mostly applies to what Jason's talking about big companies. At big companies, the people doing the hiring are very far removed from sort of the source of the money. Like they're not really in any meaningful way financially impacted by the decision. I think all bets are probably off at small companies.

Yeah, I've never actually worked at a small company. Have you? No. But I mean, I can imagine that. It's a different story, right? If you're talking to the owner of the company, negotiating a salary is probably a different conversation. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, you'd probably be talking straight to the stakeholder in that case. But either way, you know, I mean, the law has good intentions and we'll see what happens. I mean, just because I'm'm skeptical it doesn't mean i don't appreciate you know the intent uh my article is haskell type classes versus c++ classes and this is a i i guess a sort of highbrow article and i actually don't want to refer to it at all

because of the haskell type classes so um although I'm sure the coverage of Haskell type classes is insightful and great, and I did read the part, not being a day-to-day Haskell programmer, it was sort of, meh, okay. And then there was a bunch of commentary. I actually picked this up from Hacker News, news.ycombinator. And there was conversation on there about sort of the right way to kind of do this in haskell but what i want to recommend this for is the first sort of half of the article covers sort of how classes work in c and c plus plus well how classes work in c plus plus and how you would implement them in c because once you implement them in C, you sort of directly understand kind of how they

would be implemented in assembly. And then you kind of know how classes work. Now, this is something that I think, well, a lot of people who program in C++ never sort of stop to take time to think about this. And most people wouldn't really know what a V table is or how it works or how it's laid out. And so I want to recommend this because I've never gotten looking for that information. So maybe there are better tutorials, but this one I felt that was a pretty good,

clear presentation of that material. So it sort of just starts with some simple examples and walks through. Yeah, that's cool. I didn't realize you could get the compiler to print out that information. I didn't actually. So Jason's saying that they actually show that there's a flag I didn't know about

that will get the compiler to show the V table for a class. Yeah, really cool. Anyways, so check it out because this is probably going to be horrible to try to describe over... Yeah, you have to just read it....over podcasts. But yeah, check it out. probably gonna be horrible to try to sort of describe over you have to just read it over um

podcast but yeah check it out if you're if you write in c++ i am a big fan of understanding what your tool set is doing and so part of that is getting an understanding of how memory is laid out for classes in c++ and this is a great reference for that very cool did you ever get oh well i guess this is leading to the next question Did you ever get, oh, well, I guess this is leading to the next question. Have you ever been, so you've done C++ programming before. Have you ever done an interview

where you did your language, preferred language as C++? No. I mean, I've had people ask me C++ specific questions, but usually I've been given the choice. And is that true i was just gonna take it back sorry one time i did an interview and they specifically asked me to code in c++

okay um but yeah the majority of the time i always pick like python or java or something for just for interviews i'm just curious so i know i've been asked sort of detailed internal workings questions before i never know if it's a good question or a bad question but i will say it's considered fair game so to ask what is a v table how does it work if you're a c++ programmer you should sort of be prepared how to answer that and in java i assume, I'm not a Java expert at that level, but I think Java has a similar thing, understanding kind of how types work and what that sort of equates to for memory management.

Even though you don't have to do it yourself, understanding how it happens, I imagine is probably a fair game. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I mean, I tend to get a lot of like data structure type questions and things like that, which is why I always refer to like using Python or Java.

Actually, most of the time, even Java, depending on the question. But if it's some type of, yeah, like something where you have to build some data structure, it just seems like Java is a pretty easy language to do it in. But yeah, one time someone asked me to do, I can't remember, it was something like build an adder or something in c++ um so yeah thomas asks so this is sorry i should probably preface this so you know we're actually deviating a little bit from news i'm going to cover some some questions here so we'll be getting a lot of really interesting questions and uh you know we were making them kind of intro

topics but uh you know we could we could basically answer more questions if we kind of sprinkled them depending on sort of the the the scope of the question um so so thomas actually wrote in and he asked uh how do i prep for an interview and uh um or actually he specifically asked how do we prep for interviews. So I'll say I basically, you know, people who saw the episode that we did with Simple Programmer with John, you know, I used to do a lot of Topcoder and HackerRank and these things. And so I just go back there. So I go to Topcoder, you know, I solve a bunch of practice problems. And that's pretty much it. You know, now, like, there's some times where I get asked questions

that are kind of very machine learning specific, and so I might just brush up on a couple of things there, but, yeah, that's really all I do is I just go on Topcoder and solve problems, and the nice thing about Topcoder, and I think HackerRank as well, is they give you the answer, not just the code, but they give you the answer, not just the code,

but they give you intuitively how's the way to solve this problem, like a little dossier on each problem. And so if you're just starting out or you encounter some really tough problem and you don't really understand how can this be solved or how can it be solved quickly or something like that, you could always cheat, look at the answer and maybe learn some, some new data structure or some algorithm you didn't know, or some way to reduce the problem or something like that. Um, but yeah, that's, that's what I do. What about you, Patrick? Um, cry? No. Um, that's how you prepare. Psych myself. I stand in the mirror and tell myself if you had one shot one opportunity no i okay so sort of what jason said you know i think it's a day-to-day which okay i i don't i want to avoid getting into discussion about whether or not technical interviews where you have to write code makes sense but oh that's true saying saying that this

is what we deal with in the industry currently and that many companies you should be prepared to answer coding questions then know that it is different than what you do day to day they know that you should know that if you look it up or pay attention um and so practicing what jason's saying those style of questions that are made for programming contests are okay well i'm not going to compete in programming contests yeah except that they're built for you to solve in a constrained time period and exercise some interesting sort of puzzle solving reasoning aspects, aspects, statistics, in a very controlled manner where someone can understand your process.

And that's why they make a really good practice is because you know when you sit down to solve it, it isn't build a distributed data store using raft consensus for data contention resolution. No one's gonna write that in like an hour i mean if you do well like you probably would have a job um yeah and so you can't i mean you can ask about that kind of stuff but you can't really have a person write their code for that it's too complicated and so the programming contests or interview questions are great for getting your mind thinking about string manipulation, about math operations, about, you know, arbitrary precision, you know, numbers, these kinds of things that you may not use day to day.

And just, you know, a refresher for data structures and algorithms. But I also think that a lot of times it is good to practice the soft questions as well like why do you want this job why are you leaving your current job and research your company that you're applying for you know if someone asks you well why do you why do you want to come work at jason's amazing company then you know you say well jason's an amazing? Then, you know, you say, well, Jason's an amazing guy. And I, you know, whatever you're, you know, prepare for that because being caught flat footed,

even if they sort of like, okay, whatever, not a big deal. He didn't answer that question or she didn't answer that question. Great. It throws you for a spin. And if you're, if you're sort of out of sorts, it's that much harder to bounce back. So prepare for the soft questions too and spend some amount of time thinking about how you want to present

yourself so you know you know as much as i think at least here in california and silicon valley like there isn't an expectation to wear a suit you still want to look nice whatever you're going to wear even if you wear jeans and a t-shirt that like i interview people that are like that all the time that's fine i have no issue with that but you know it helps that much if you feel that you're dressed well i think it comes across like as silly as that sounds i think you know it's totally hold yourself better yeah that's a that's a great point um not everybody now i'm sure there's someone will say oh you know you know, I, you know, go in a bathrobe and I feel like I crush it every time. You know, you're probably right. Sure, that's true. But I think for a lot of people myself, I've noticed that if I take the time to prepare sort of what I'm going to wear, you know, if I, you know, make sure that I look presentable, then I sort of feel like I've done my due diligence.

And I think that comes across but yeah it makes sense I mean I think I think that you know the company like wants the company you're applying at sort of they want you to represent them and so you got to think like you know how you do the way you dress and the way you speak and your soft skills and all that is incredibly, incredibly important. And I think, oops, sorry, go ahead.

Oh, go ahead. I think preparing for the interview happens over, it sounds terrible. It happens every, over years. Like, yeah,

that's true. You sort of the, it's not even 80, 20 sort of like the 99% of what will get you a job or not sort of takes a long time period, months, a year, years of sort of takes a long time period months a year years of sort of practicing being involved in this kind of thing you're not going to hack your way to you know one week of practice and you're going to ace the interview if you're really strategic and train yourself you know probably in a couple weeks a month a couple months you can probably do pretty

well get yourself you know close the gap um but the bulk of it is stuff you really have to be ready for over longer periods of time. And so all the things we're discussing is to sort of take you the final distance is to differentiate you from the other people and to help just, you know, assure that you're that much more ready. Yeah, makes sense. So back to a news article i guess we should have changed the order of these uh this is an article i read a little while ago star stacker astrophotography with c++ 11 um so although this is yet another uh c++ based article uh just like the haskell one this is not much about c++ at all uh well the haskell one was about c++ but not about haskell this one's about astrophotography and not so much about c++

um where astrophotography is just taking pictures of stars uh and the i don't even remember if there was any c++ in this example doesn't look like it i think the person was not using open cv was the sort of trick here they were trying to not use open cv to do things where if you take a picture of the night sky your camera is really sensitive but if you take many pictures of the night sky you can sort of get rid of a lot of the noise that is inherent in taking a picture at night with low brightness. And although that sounds simple, that is really all astrophotography is sort of related, either gathering more light or sort of allowing you to what's called like integrate over longer periods of time,

like get more samples. But the problem is it turns out the earth is spinning shocker. It's also not flat. So the earth is a, is a spherical ish object and i yeah i know what i'm gonna get into that uh and we're spinning i don't know where the flat earthers have come from but it seems like that's like another thing again i want to believe it's just like a shtick like a meme like a joke yeah probably um anyways but the earth is spinning and so if you you know

hold the camera on a tripod pointed in a direction for very long past you know sort of i think like 10 or 15 seconds the distance the star will move will show up across you know a couple pixels and you'll get what's called blur um so the the star will be blurred on not in a sort of gauzing way but in a line along the direction. And so if you leave a camera open for like half an hour, you'll start to get star trails, like these little concentric circles of the stars moving. Well, I guess the stars are fixed and the Earth is spinning.

And so as you try to take longer and longer samples of the night sky, you need to sort of track where the stars are so that you can align all the pictures on top of each other and that's what this goes over uh and i knew a lot of this stuff but it was i thought this article did a really good job of sort of a clear explanation from i guess kind of first principles um and what they end up with other there's already software that does this so you don't need to do this on your own um and there's you know more advanced techniques than what's presented here but i thought this was a really good presentation of like if you wanted to approach this really complicated subject on your own

without you know just using open cv for a lot of this stuff here's the principles of it yeah very cool so do they just register the images on top of each other or do they literally calculate, you know, the Earth's rotation and all of that? So I don't actually know of anyone. They might calculate the Earth's rotation. In this one, they more do like figuring out constellations of stars and figuring out how the constellations move between frames. Got it. But I don't think they try to sort of predict where the next one will be. Okay.

Makes sense. But I, you should write that, Jason. All right. That's what I'll do with all the extra time we have. I mean, I guess you probably don't start off with a very fine measurement of where you're pointing. So it probably makes it pretty hard. Yeah.

So you'd have to also sort of figure out the field of view and where you're pointing, and you'd have to build a model of that up you have to do basically slam slam in space space slam space jam space space slam with michael jordan and bugs bunny for reasons that's right uh so now book of the show um so i read i read a couple of kind of interesting books i wouldn't really recommend them um so i'm not really going to i'm actually going to recommend a classic that you know i've read several times which which i which i love called uh the name is 1984 i'm sure everyone's heard of it it's by george orwell um he also wrote our watership down i believe is george orwell um but he's written a bunch of books about society and uh and yeah 1984 is is i would say almost certainly his most uh famous book and uh yeah without kind of spoiling too much basically uh um it just covers sort of like it's it's a

fiction book about this sort of totalitarian regime and uh it's where the term kind of big brother came from and basically the idea is that uh in this book the government uh like literally just has censors everywhere and they're monitoring everything and they've also sort of trained the the people to uh they've brainwashed you know the citizens um and i'm trying not to spoil too much here but basically uh um you know they've brainwashed them to sort of uh you know tell if another person is committing a crime and stuff like that um and then they have something called thought crime where people are just thinking about committing a crime and go to jail um and so 1984 is the basis for you know like the paranoia book series and in a bunch of other

uh you know uh just all sorts of different uh you know books and films and memes and commentary and stuff like that you'll hear 1984 referenced very often and so it's a great book um uh it's super fun to read and uh yeah it's my book of the show oh also you could get it for free it's it's a classic um it has no i don't know uh uh like copyright or anything like that um and so there's a link in the show notes to the actual book you don't have to pay for it i don't think you meant watership down i think it's animal farm oh that's what it is yeah who wrote watership i have no idea all right so the my book of this show is Words of Radiance, which is part of the Stormlight Archive series by Brandon Sanderson.

And I recommended, this is the second book, and I recommended the first one previously, I'm quite sure, The Way of Kings. And so I recently finished the second book. And this is, I guess, on schedule for once because the third book is coming out November 14th. So, um, nice.

If you, now there's a problem though, which is, uh, so I listened to these books on audio because I, they're really long. Um, but the first book was 45 and a half hours.

The second book is, it was 48 hours. Um, and so the good news is if by the time you listen to this you could in theory make it through all the books just in time for the third book to come out but the bad news is that's like or the good news i guess depending is i mean that's like almost 100 hours of uh audio i don't even know how many pages that would be a lot of pages, but 100 hours between now and November 14. If you want to get them all done in time for the release party for the third

night in the series. Yeah, marathon audio book. I don't know if that's been done before. So no, okay, I have to say at least something about the book. so i recommend a lot of brandon sanderson books i guess i i don't know i it is what it is i i enjoy his writing style uh and i i don't think i'm the only one um but basically this continues where the first book left off and that means i can't say anything about it because basically anything i say about the second book is going to be a spoiler for the first book so if you liked the first book this one is also really good if you didn't like the first book you know i never know what to do if i read the first book of a trilogy or a series and i don't like it it's like well i could go on and it's like well what because if i read the second book i'm gonna quit two-thirds of the way through um so i guess start it and plan to make

it all the way through although that's a big commitment it'll probably I guess by the time it's all said and done be close to 150 hours anyways but the Words of Radiance is an endorsement if you finish the first book and if you haven't read the first

book go read it it's really good it's fantasy and I like it and The way of Kings book one words of radiance book two. And the third one I think is going to be called oath bringer, which I can't say why that means something, but I can't say why. Okay, no spoilers. No spoilers. Very cool. So you can read all those books on audible. And if you don't yet have an audible account you can actually uh go to our show notes we have a link um it's audibletrial.com slash programming throwdown if you go to that that url you can actually sign up and get a free book uh with your subscription

by clicking on that link and also that uh helps us keep the show up and running so uh we also for people already have audible or want to support us in another way we have patreon um it's getting pretty close to christmas so at christmas we take you know whatever extra money we have from the show um and we spend it on t-shirts that we give to random people. So, you know, we don't, you could totally, what's the word? You could totally snipe the Patreon. No. By becoming a subscriber this month. I think we're going to come up with, I think we're going to have a more fair way than that.

Okay, maybe we'll do some roulette wheel sampling or something. But yeah, if you're a Patreon subscriber um you know as part of of subscribing we get access to the list of email addresses which we don't share with anybody uh we only use it for giving out free t-shirts and so uh when it gets close to christmas sometime in november early december we'll uh we'll start emailing some some winners of t-shirts so uh check us out uh it's patreon.com slash programming throw down. And I want to say thank you. I mean,

I know a fair number of people. I looked on the page on the other day. I, we've got a, a quite a few people now shipping. And I know also there's, you know, every month,

a number of people who do the audible trial thing. And so I was encouraging, like, I guess, I mean, I don't, it's nice to see that people hopefully are benefiting from this. And,

you know, also I looked at their day, the number of reviews we're getting on iTunes. We haven't really pushed that in a while or talked about it. I don't know if we've ever really pushed it, but, um, it's been years.

Yes. Yeah. I mean, I think I, I want to say, and I think it's you, when you go to iTunes, you see only for your country,

I believe is true. Um, Oh, I didn't know that. I think that's true. Oh, I didn't know that. I think that's true. And I think we have over 300 reviews now on iTunes. Wow. That's amazing.

So thanks to all those people who did it. And if you haven't done it and you're not going to rate us, it's like the app thing. Do you not like us? If you don't like us, don't go rate us. But if you really like it, if you hate us,

send us an email. If you like us, rate us and us send us an email if you like us rate us and then send us an email actually yeah if you hate us send us an email at definitely not our email at gmail.com that's right and we definitely won't we'll reply we definitely will reply yeah that's right eventually oh man um cool so yeah thank you so so much for all the support and for all the emails, too. A lot of the shows recently have been either people that we were connected with from listeners that we've interviewed or show topics that have also come from listeners. So thank you for that. Yeah, and we do try to get back to all of the emails. But I will say as an excuse, I guess I feel bad about it.

Sometimes emails come in during a really busy time, and so they don't always get responded to expediently. So apologize in advance if your emails don't get speedy responses. Yeah, same here. I actually found just a bunch of email that I flagged while I was on vacation about six months ago. I never got to. Some people recently got an email from a reply from a six-month-old email.

So I apologize for that. But yeah, we definitely look at all of them. And we try to reply to as many as possible. Tool of the show. All right. So we've been teased all show. I'm ready for this. That's right.

My tool of the show is Wi-Fi InfoView. So this is just one I happened to. It's just the first thing I found on Google. There's probably others. But basically what it does is it just pulls up this menu with all the Wi-Fi access points you can see, what channel they're on, what your signal strength is to all of them, and what the level of noise and decibels is. It's the RSSI, which is some kind of like log, logarithm of the noise. And so basically, you can look at this and then kind of be strategic. So for example, one time I had this issue where I was playing this video game, and it started kind of stuttering.

This was like a week or so ago. I thought, that's kind of strange because, you know, we have this Wi-Fi setup that I'm pretty proud of, and it's just all of a sudden kind of glitching out. And so I unplugged my modem and did all that, and nothing seemed to fix it. So I went on this tool, and it looked good. What ended up happening is I ended up being connected to the extender by accident because I switched over to the extender to kind of fix something and I never switched back.

But with this tool, I was able to see, you know, my signal quality to the extender is really low, which makes sense because I was using a computer that's on the other side of the house. But my signal quality to, you know, the main router was still really good and everything. Also, you know, you can have channel collisions. So if you and your next door neighbor both have a router on the same channel, you'll sort of interfere with each other. And so you can actually detect that with this tool. So with this tool, it might say, hey, you know, your signal strength is, you know, 80%. And there's three other people with the same channel in your apartment complex. And so then you could just go in your router and change a channel. You can actually play with other things too like if you uh take the

if you have you know a usb um uh you know antenna usb uh uh wi-fi antenna you can actually see oh if i put it up like if i tape it to the wall my signal strength goes up you know if i if i you know point the antenna in the wrong direction it goes goes down. And so, yeah, the tool just makes it very transparent what's going on. And the reason, because there's a couple of things too, while we get nerdy, and we've already talked about networking a little. In 2.4 gigahertz, not all channels are created equal. So most of the channels that are listed on your router, if you bother to go in and configure it, overlap with other channels. So there's actually only, I think, like five? Yeah, that's right.

Five channels that don't overlap. All the others overlap with each other. So it'll let you pick them, but you'll have twice as many collisions. Yeah, it's not ideal. And what happens when you collide is that, I mean, I guess this is what you'll learn about if you ever take like networking or if you've taken networking or any just rf stuff it's like what you

hear a csma ca or whatever clarior sends multiple access uh collision avoidance which is basically the radio senses when two people are sending on the same frequency at the same time, you basically have extra energy. And you go, oh, two people are talking, and you enter into collision avoidance, sort of exponential backoff and your neighbor, then the more chance that you have to enter into this exponential backoff, which slows everything down. So that's why you want to avoid being on the same channel. Yeah, that makes sense. So yeah, not all channels are created equal.

Five gigahertz is better. It has a lot more channels. So the bandwidth, the number of channels is bigger because there's more bandwidth to play with yeah exactly i mean the other thing just to mention real quick if you are on five gigahertz is uh try to avoid the really high channels like 148 149 because you'll actually start to interfere with uh the cell phone wavelength so either that or crank up the power on your router yeah that's right no one in your neighborhood would be able to make calls.

But yeah, it's different in Europe. But in the U.S., our cell bands can interfere with that. So pick a low channel like 40 or 48 or something like that. But you could actually see all of this using Wi-Fi InfoView. You could pick a channel like 148 and you'll see your signal strength will start to go down uh my tool of the show was sent in by oh last week we or last week last episode we talked about two or we talked about uh music making things gadgets uh oh gadget is the name of one of the tools. I think was your tool of the show.

What was that? Korg. Yeah. Gadget. I think it's Korg. Gadget was the name. And we talked about people. Hey, people send us some music. We can change our intro. And we actually had two people send in some music. So we'll probably start, you know, putting some music at least as outros until we, you know, we've had this same intro for a really long time. I guess I've become somewhat nostalgic for it. So we'll see about if we'll switch over the intro. But definitely we're going to have some outro tunes. And so thanks to those two people in advance. And one of them actually sent a tip for a tool, which I had seen before, but I've never played with. So I'm going on their recommendation so we can blame them if it's bad and that is Sun Vox so Sun Vox

is a modular sequencer that runs on like a plethora of platforms so the list says Windows Mac OS Linux Windows te if you have one of those old PDAs iOS Android and it is has a super old school looking interface, but I think it looks kind of cool. And there's all sorts of demos of people making music that's way better than I could ever make. And so, you know, check it out, Sunvox. If you like fiddling around

and making awesome music and sounds, or if you're like me and you like making the worst possible sounding thing that not even a mother could love or if you're like me and you uh have so little musical talent that you make something terrible and you think it sounds good i guess i'm obviously bad that i realize i can't have made anything good even if i made something good because it came from me i would just assume it wasn't that's what i do yeah i mean it's like it sounds like it's i'm like oh it sounds like a techno song i would hear on the radio but i know that it only sounds that way to me because i have no talent

that was michael who recommended sunbox oh yeah sorry i was trying to find it but i was too slow thank you jason yeah thank you michael so yeah thanks michael so on to office spaces so um this is also a request i don't remember who off the top of my head i can i'll look it up later on but uh um yeah there's someone wrote in and said you know can you guys talk about sort of different what your office space is like your desk is like awesome you know all of that yeah that's right it's amazing it's on the moon underground yeah yeah in a bunker on the moon that would be awesome coding in a bunker that'd be like a great hackathon like a hacker space all right um so so yeah so but unfortunately we don't all have bunkers uh most of us work in basically three or i guess let's say four different environments you either work in cubicles

that's probably the most common although office space yeah exactly so you have these like what are they made of like fabric like polyester fabric some particle board or something or I guess also the matrix right Neo

was yeah that's right yeah so you know it's these like walls that don't go all the way to the ceiling and so everyone kind of has some amount of privacy um you can't peek your head over the cubicle wall and all of that um you'll work in an office so there's some companies where each person you know has their own office and you have this sort of labyrinth uh of hallways connecting all the and sometimes you can have as many as four, five, six people sit in a single office as well. Yeah, that's true.

Yeah, it doesn't necessarily mean one person per office. But, you know, it does mean you can close the door. And so other than the people in the office, you're insulated. Yeah. There's also a bullpen where you can have up to a thousand people if you have a big enough room that are there's all in one gigantic room. And the difference between this and cubicles is you don't have the walls. So you'll be just desk to desk to desk. But in this very large environment, typically in a bullpen environment, there'll be sort of spaces reserved, which have, you know, couches and stuff like that.

Just so that if you want to, you know, something more comfortable or you want to stretch your legs or you want to talk to somebody, you know, kind of a more private setting, you can do that. But most people don't call them bullpens. Most people call this open office. Yeah, right. Like that's what most people they say, oh, open office office that really just means everyone crammed in a big room together yeah yeah people kind of misuse that the last one is basically your house a lot of people telecommute um but yeah why don't you tell sorry go ahead do you really find telecommuting that common um speaking and all of this section is going to be sort of skewed to the limited views of jason and

i as far as like having not worked at a ton of variety of different places and mostly working in silicon valley yeah i mean um i mean where i work now everyone telecommutes on wednesdays okay um so that's kind of like a i mean not everyone not everyone, of course, but, but a lot of people. But yeah, in general, it's, it's not really that common. I think there's this idea that, you know, if you're there physically, you're able to sort of have a heightened sense of, you know, collaboration and things like that. So, yeah. So one of the things is like, you know, this came up at work talking about open offices and I did a little bit of reading and one of the things I realized is, Oh, interesting.

I've never been at a place like this, but open office could, could really mean in the, in the, in a very true sense of open, no assigned seats. Like you bring a laptop and there's a bunch of, you know, picnic tables or sort of school cafeteria style tables or whatever it might be. And whatever team you're sort of working with currently, you just sit next to them. And people just sort of mingle around, you get up and move if a group is noisy, whatever, you just sort of flow around and sit wherever you want. I've never been in an office like that. It

sounds kind of cool. Sounds kind of crazy. But you know, I guess some people this works for them, especially I guess, if your teams are really dynamic, and you're growing a lot like i could imagine where this would be useful but for most the team that the company that's famous for this or one of them is valve so valve has an open office and basically you know they have one guy who's like a particle physics expert like i mean in-game particle physics and And so, you know, he just, you know, if a team says, oh, you know, my fireball particle, like, isn't looking the way I want it to look, then he'll sit with that team,

and then he'll sit with some other team. And so they, I guess the way Valve is set up is they have all these specialists, and so it's kind of conducive to that sort of setup that they could be able to move around. And so they figured, why not just have everyone move around? I didn't know that. But I think think in most places most people have assigned seats um and you can you know bring in a picture of your family or you know get your desk just the way you want it um and i

think that's sort of the most common um by far and for me my experience out here in silicon valley has been you move a lot you know your team moves probably you know every six months or more um and so you're moving around you might move within the same building your spaces just might get reconfigured you might move to a different building um but yeah you move pretty often, I've never quite figured out why. But team sizes just grow and shrink so fast that like this team needs more space. In order to give them more space, you have to move a different team. Oh, I see. Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah. Some kind of like defragging type thing. Yeah. And then I think. Yeah. Oh, go ahead. Yeah. And I think, you know, the other common thing to offices is having some area where you can have team meetings or group meetings, conference rooms. They don't, you know, they typically have whiteboards and, you know, sort of like six to 20 people. And sometimes there's bigger ones, but that's pretty typical. And you'd have several of those kind of scattered around your workspace.

So think about, you know, The Office on TV, the TV show The Office, which no longer runs, you know. Everyone kind of, well, most of the group sort of sat in a big common area, all of the, I guess, salespeople. And then they, Michael Scott would call them into the conference room. And yeah, that's actually pretty typical. Yep, that's pretty normal. I mean, a lot of conference rooms will have some way to write. So they might have like a wall that's writable or they'll have a bunch of blackboards or whiteboards or something like that.

And the other thing is conference rooms are typically uh have some way of reserving them so the calendar system or whatever where you sort of book a conference room for a time period and that's where you hold your meetings yep so yeah totally um yeah so so that's basically how the most almost every office is set up um going to like your desk um i personally have always had standing desks. So Patrick and I used to work together a long time ago. And where we worked, we had to deal with kind of a lot of robotics and machinery. And so I was always standing. The desks were always standing there.

And I just kind of got used to it. And I just, yeah, I'm really a big fan of that, actually. I really love standing desks were always standing there and I just kind of got used to it. And, uh, I just, yeah, I'm really a big fan of that. Actually. I really love, uh, standing desks. Um, so what I actually have now, and, and it's just because everyone, it's just now the standard thing is a, is a mechanical desk. So actually like you can hit a button and it'll change from a standing to a sitting desk. Um, they have some really fancy ones where you can have like presets so you can put in your height. And when you hit sitting desk, it'll actually go to a certain setting. I don't really have something that fancy.

Mine just has you in up and a down. And when you hold the down button, it goes down. Eventually it's down so low it becomes a sitting desk. But yeah, I think standing desks are great i feel like i can focus a lot better when i'm standing um what about you do you do standing or sitting so mine actually is one of those fancy ones so i have presets so i have a preset sitting preset standing and you switch or something um yeah but i find that i fidget a lot more when I stand I think so after a little period of time I get I think I start to get

defocused from it but I try to stand but I don't stand as much as I probably should they say sitting kills you I heard that I'm probably dying but I spend most of my day sitting but I try to spend some amount of it standing yeah makes sense

but then a lot of how your desk ends up looking or or being is whether you've chosen to have a desktop a laptop or both so my current setup is i have a laptop that i take with me to meetings but i mostly work on a desktop and i think for me i like having a desktop because it's even faster and it's sort of in a persistent state and everything. I have just tons of things running and tons of things open and I don't have to worry about it because of a very powerful desktop versus on my laptop. I keep it, you know, sort of a minimal working environment so I can do work, but I'm not for me. I don't do a lot of work remotely, so I'm not really set up to work from my laptop. And I feel like power users is the wrong word, but when I sit at my desktop and I just do it just all the way I want it,

you know, and yeah, everything's set up, everything's running, everything's in, I guess, in warm memory, right? Like all the apps just stay running all the time. So I can just click on them and they're there and I just use them. Yeah, makes sense. I'm a big fan of desktop, but I know a lot of people really love laptops so that they can sort of work at their desk and then pick it up and take it home and just keep working.

Yeah, I mean, in my case, all my development is like these massively parallel programs. And so I can't even really build them on one machine. So even the building of the program is distributed. That's a good point. So they give me a laptop and everything I do is through SSH. I guess if you're connecting to the cloud anyways, it doesn't matter if it's from your desktop or your laptop.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think you can request a desktop where I work. But I mean, definitely there's people who are building an app or something like that, and they need a desktop. But for me, yeah, it's just everything's on SSH. And so I plug my laptop into my monitor and keyboard when I'm at my desk. But it's just like another different interface. So the other thing, thing too is external monitors.

So kind of getting a lot of screen real estate. I'm personally just, I'm the worst possible example of this. I literally just have one external monitor and I mirror it. So I'm not even using the screen on my laptop. And I'll tell you the reason why it's because i'm constantly kind of going to meetings and and coming back from meetings and whenever i do something like extending my screen it doesn't really gracefully handle when i'm plugging and unplugging um versus you know when i have it mirrored i plug in and everything stays in exactly the same position

and so then i just you know work on the nice keyboard and mouse but but i have like my mental model hasn't changed at all and then when i unplug the same thing and so i haven't really found like a workflow that is better than that for me but but everyone thinks I'm crazy because I have a screen that's showing the same thing that I'm not looking at. I'm one straw short of the six-monitor day trader. Oh, so you're the opposite. All right, well, this is good. So I have two big monitors,

and then I have a third monitor, but the third monitor is plugged into a different computer. So I actually have two full desktop setups on my desktop one okay one machine with keyboard and mouse and monitor and then a second one with two monitors keyboard and mouse and then sometimes i have stuff running on my laptop and so i have my laptop sitting next to me not plugged into any of those monitors so you know i think if i had a desktop you know where uh you know i wouldn't have to unplug and have all the windows go bizarre then i think i think i would have probably two monitors that make use i i've had three monitors before for me for the my flow three is too many i don't

really need three i have three on my desk now because I have a second desktop for bizarre reasons. But the two monitors are about right because basically I have one monitor in front of me where I sort of have my IDE, my terminal. Yes, I have both. And then in my second monitor, so that one's sort of like straight ahead. So most people put it sort of like the crack in the middle and then the screen symmetric to either side of their head but i actually have one monitor straight ahead and one monitor to the right and and the monitor on the right has like you know my web browser stack overflow uh and uh and then um you know my future source code and my you know my pull requests github stuff whatever you know and then uh split with sort of emailed the you know chat stuff all of that lives on that right screen

and so if i'm doing like email and stuff i'm sort of off facing to the right but if i'm coding and focused i'm like all straight ahead absorbed ah that makes sense yeah i think there was a time i had my laptop, you know, it wasn't mirrored. And that's basically what I did. I had the main screen for like the coding, all of that. And the other screen had the chat and Gmail and all that. Yeah, some people do the second screen

where they rotate the monitor 90 degrees. So it's like tall. Oh yeah, and they can read papers. Yeah, and that's kind of cool. Makes makes sense but it bothers me because it looks weird yeah it looks like an l like a goofy obtuse l so i i have a friend who she um she consults startups for uh recruiting so in other words she she's not a recruiter anymore but she goes to startups and helps them get talent um like an advisor and uh the number one thing she said is she told them to give all their employees the best biggest monitors and uh they say that when candidates come to interview there's just

something it's it's like kind of you know uh conscious kind of subconscious but when people come to interview and they see a bunch of really huge monitors it it massively affects whether they'll take the job or not like they look at it as like oh the company really cares about these people they're giving them huge monitors and i thought it was so bizarre and even you know the lady i was talking to you know it's like an empirical thing you know she didn't really have a you know psychological answer or anything but uh but yeah people are sort of uh uh really valued based on the size of the monitor it becomes like a really important thing so um also at most big companies it's entirely possible to just get whatever sort of keyboard mouse chair setup you want um and when i've been at really big companies they even have like a place you can go to

and they'll sort of measure you and recommend something for you teach you the right way to sit and how that you're going to die because you sit too much um yeah no they don't say that but they do you get scoliosis um and so so you can sort of get whatever setup you want. And some people have really crazy stuff, like really fancy chairs, keyboards with mechanical switches like Cherry MX Blues that just go... You hear it across the room. And it just gives me cramps thinking about pushing on those keys. They're so hard.

But, you know, people... Yeah, some people like it. Yeah, people just have some people have like really old ibm style keyboards yeah right uh and some people have the kinesis dished keyboards for uh reducing rsi repetitive stress injury yeah people will have really really elaborate setups so you have a vertical mouse that's sort of my speciality i guess is i have a vertical mouse that i really enjoy um for people who don't know a vertical mouse is uh uh you don't have to bend your wrist so in other words like like right now like if you're not driving or something put your

hand on the table with your thumb you know the way you'd hold a regular mouse and if you look your your bones are actually crossed over and it doesn't sound like it matters, but instead like hold your arm the way you'd hold like a, you know, a Coke or something, a bottle. And there's actually a mouse that feels like that. It'd be terrible for video games or something like that, but if you don't have to, you know, be that precise or quick quick it actually saves like a ton of stress on your arm so uh yeah so that's that's sort of the only real ergo thing i have um so we can go to like office amenities so what are some of the coolest things you've seen in

offices either that you've worked at visited you know heard about rumored about the moon base so so well okay a lot of offices have some way to get food easily so you know because think about it like you're working sometimes you pull crazy hours especially if you're coding you a lot of coding jobs a lot of software engineering jobs have kind of an ebb and flow. And so when you're really in a grind, you know, you want to be able to get some food, you don't have to go 12, 14 hours. So most places will have like a convenient way for you to eat. Hopefully, it's even just like, it's just like ubiquitous food. I mean, it doesn't have to be anything fancy, it could be just like a stash of granola bars or something but most offices will like hit up a costco or

something every week or two and and there'll be you know kind of a place to eat um some other kind of cool amenities some places will have a gym where you could go and work out especially if you need to uh think about something sometimes it's good to like go for a run or even go for a walk around the building type thing um a lot of places will have a game room so it could be some ping pong or xbox or something like that um as a way to sort of decompress right um some other kind of more esoteric things uh are like nap pods so for people who haven't seen this um it's actually i don't even know how to describe it okay so it's like a chair but the chair is you know tilted back so you're lying down in this chair and then there's this dome and uh the dome just goes over your head

and it's not like playing it's like it's kind of like imax like an imax just for you except it's not playing any video it's just it's just a black dome that goes over your head and so it you know kind of completely takes away you know the outside stimulus and so you can just kind of uh in theory you can sleep i think it's kind of weird to sleep like right there where everyone's you know working um but in theory you could do it but it's really a way to just kind of rest your eyes and and chill for a bit um there's also quiet rooms these also be called prayer rooms um you know a lot of places have that and uh i have to kind of confess so when uh my son was really young um i actually didn't take my paternity leave

there's like a period of time in between when he was born and when't take my paternity leave there's like a period of time in between when he was born and when i started my paternity leave and it's kind of strategic um because i had parents in town that were helping and stuff like that but you know we had a newborn like just born and uh there's definitely a couple of times around that time where I slept in the quiet room for probably like an hour. And so I'm going to tell your boss. Yeah. Yeah. If my boss, uh, uh, is watching the podcast, well, you can't fire me cause I don't work there anymore, but that happened. Um, uh, but yeah, so in general, you know, quiet room is a good place, or if you, if you're really just exhausted, you could take a nap before driving home or something like that um those are the big sort of office amenities that i remember some things people have at their desks like did you ever work somewhere where people had sent on exercise

balls i think standing desks sort of replaced this but yeah that's true i feel like this was a thing a while ago yeah like it's uh i don't know if this has even been parodied because i think it's one of these things that if people saw it they just wouldn't even know what to think but yeah there's people who i'm not insulting these people in any way but it's just like it's an interesting thing to see like there's people who just yeah sit on an exercise ball literally all day and the idea is you you're you're sort of wobbling a little and your core kind of gets an exercise so it's better than just kind of sitting around yeah i did sit on an exercise ball for a while i used to have one at my desk a chair and an

exercise ball um until someone took it i don't know where it went someone took your well so i showed up when i first started working and someone had left one. And so I used it. And then one day mine disappeared. So maybe the person came back and took it. Oh, I see. But anyway, so I had one. It actually, you know, I couldn't do it for long periods of time, but it's kind of nice. If you're just like answering email or doing something that's not super focused, just sort of like bounce around a little. I kind of liked it.

I'm not going to lie. It looked goofy, but it was kind of fun. I'll have to see if I can find one somewhere in the office. They have also the exercise ball chair, which I think is not the same thing. Oh, wait. I don't know what that is. That is where literally it's a chair. So the exercise ball is pinned.

It can't move. But you're just getting the cushion of an exercise ball. But you're not really doing any of the workout. Whoa, I see this. Whoa. Yeah, isn't that crazy? I saw one the other day. I was like, what is this?

This is cool. I kind of want one of these. All right, you check it out. I'm going to contact my ergonomics department and tell them I need one of these. You need a chair. So I don't think I've uh typically in like a communal space although i did one time see a person who had one at their actual desk is a treadmill desk where you have a standing desk and then a treadmill underneath it and so you have to walk while you type now i do not know how this works if you're

doing like video conferencing or doing training videos or watching youtube videos uh twitch i mean not totally working sure but i feel like if i'm programming i get seasick like moving moving my head as i walk and like trying to type i know like i don't get it i mean people do it and i don't knock them it's great i wish i could exercise that much but like you know i have seen this though desks where it's like a tall standing desk and then just basically like a treadmill underneath yeah i know a guy at work and i'll call him mike his name is mike um and so mike if you're if you're listening to this is someone i used to work with and yeah as you said he probably spent three hours a day on the treadmill and he got a lot done so this isn't knocking him at all but yeah like the idea of trying to walk and write code at the same time, it just boggles my mind.

Some other kind of novelty things. Some companies do free massages. Some companies have a valet service, so you don't have to find a place to park in the parking lot. You just get to work and hand over your keys um even crazier there's some valets that'll like uh refuel your car so if an electric car they'll make sure all the cars are charged yeah they'll just uh i guess like a tanker truck drives by a small tanker truck and just fills all i don't know it's bizarre um some other really novelty things uh there's some people who take an airplane to work um I know somebody who uh and you know like this is something you would hear

about like someone takes an airplane to go to the alps to rescue someone or something or goes to Yukon uh or something like that but this is yeah, normal people would just take a small biplane to work. Or a ferry, you know, we live in Silicon Valley. So there's a, I don't know if it's still running. But there was a ferry that was taking people from, you know, East Bay, across the bay, to South Bay to various companies. Well, in New York City, people take the ferry to work like that's pretty common. I think actually, yeah, there isn't that novelty yeah that's true i can think actually a lot of people do that that's okay though yeah but here it is kind of it's different so yeah i mean well we have such a traffic nightmare here that and we didn't even cover all the sort of things about that's okay it's not really part of office spaces but all of the nice things that we as sort of

working in the programming field, you know, I feel like sometimes I take for granted and forget that we get health insurance. And well, I guess it depends on if you're living in the United States or not, but, um, you know, get health insurance, retirement account contributions, like paid internships. There's lots of things that, know are sort of amenities i guess in some way that uh yeah yeah absolutely but yeah i'm not a super big fan i've never been even i have worked at places that have been considered to have really good offices and i've never really been super impressed that like i feel like i can be so much more productive here as far as like at my desk the

peripheral stuff is really nice but i feel like it could be in the building next to me and be just as effective yeah yeah exactly the only thing that uh i think makes a difference is um the food situation and the only reason is because it helps to like build uh the camaraderie like basically fair yeah like i've been like you want to be in a way like i would say you know if i was designing a place for for people to be software engineers i'd want to design in a way where people were forced to like kind of socialize together or not forced obviously but like incentivized and so the like having one place where everyone goes to eat is a kind of really good way to do that um also the the game room so if you have you know one room just like stocked with like xbox and a bunch of other games then it kind of like the first thing

that'll happen when you set that up is people will kind of show up when someone else is playing and then leave and they'll kind of be like contention for the xbox but then you know people pretty quickly realize oh well you should just all play together and then we don't have to have contention like someone could just jump into the game and instead of leaving right and so it kind of forces some like camaraderie and some socialization well that's all you got for this time yeah that's that's uh that's there's been a whole bunch of crazy setups you can go online businessinsider.com is famous for talking about like oh check out you know linkedin's new san francisco office where you can you know paraglide

off the skyscraper, like these crazy things. But in general, I think we covered kind of the basics and sort of why they're important. If you have a crazy office setup, send us an email. We'd love to hear it. If you program while you're flying a supersonic jet or something, that would be amazing. Send us a picture. Programming, flying, and taking a selfie.

There are limits, Jason. Yeah, I don't think, yeah, don't end up in the news for, you know, crashing an airplane or something. That would be bad. But if you could pull off a selfie, do it. Oh, dear. Oh, man. So thanks a lot again for your support. I hope you enjoyed this episode yes this isn't

about a coding language or an interview with a coding language inventor or anything like that um it's kind of an off the wall thing we were asked in an email about it and so we thought it'd make a fun episode uh so yeah send us an email let us know what you think because you know there's a lot of topics like this and uh you know whether you like it or not will really determine what we talked about so all right till next time see you later the intro music is axo by biner pilot programming throwdown is distributed under a creative commons attribution share alike 2.0 license you're'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.