The Standup with ThePrimeagen - Worst Onboarding Experience Ever

Episode Date: December 19, 2025

The gang talks about the craziest onboarding ever… and why Tom is a Genius! If you're on Mac or Windows, check out tuple today! And if you're on Linux, let's just say come back and check soon �� Say thanks to our sponsor by checking out https://tuple.app/prime CODE: PRIME

I'm going to tell the greatest story ever to Casey, and he is going to, he is going to be the happiest person after hearing this. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry. Now, this all started because Casey was explaining a build process he made for RAD, right? Am I correct on that? Yeah, it was for RAD game tools, and it was terrible, and it ruined, and they're still using it to this day, and it's still awful. He recreated pre-processer macros, but with a mess, but with a. build system is what it sounded like to me. It's just like, hey, we're going to do imports, but with, with comments.

Whatever you're imagining right now, it was worse, right? Whatever the worst build system is, you can imagine, I made one that was worse. I've experienced some pretty bad build system, so that's something to be said right there. But I've never experienced it in the sea world, so this has to be a new level of magic. Yeah, it was pretty great. Magic? Oh, sorry. All right. All right, yeah.

Garfield, big Garfield. So anyways, this reminded us of the story of Tom. Now, you may not be familiar with this, Casey, but Tom, I'm not. He's a genius. And we're talking about super level, like, protege level, super genius. Okay, this guy is the smartest man in the room in any room he's in. And who is this? How do you know this, Tom?

Oh, we're going to get there, Casey. Okay. Lour has been written about Tom. Okay. All you need to know is that there are stories on stories on stories about Tom being a super genius. All right. But the story I'm really going to tell is actually about a kid named Jake. And he's not a genius.

Like by all accounts, people would not consider Jake a genius. But this is Jake's run-in with Tom, the literal genius. Now, obviously Jake, if you're not familiar, Jake just got a job. And he got a job working on some brand new technologies, and he was very excited. He was young. He was an intern. It's at an unnamed company, so we don't get to know those details. But it's with Node, JSON, the web.

We're talking about some cutting edge stuff back in the early, you know, 2010s, okay? People were excited. I can see TJ over there already doing the Give Me a Deal. Okay, he was excited about this. You got JavaScript running on the server. My venture capital wallets are burning. Exactly. So on his first day, he was talking with one of the non-technical members kind of getting set up.

And at the very end of the conversation, after explaining how excited he is, they made a really odd comment, which was said, well, you know, the good news is everything we do is built on SVN. It's going to be great. You're going to love it. And so he's like, oh, okay. Sure. I don't really know what that means. But whatever, for those, by the way, I know I have a lot of zoomers in chat.

SVN is like a predecessor to get is probably the easiest way to explain it I don't want to go into any more details this is so that's good for super virgin nix users it's super virgin nix users all right well so let's go into part one are you ready for this one jason based domain specific language so he gets thrust into a project and the project uses something called j Diesel. His boss says, don't worry, take the next couple weeks. I want you to just become familiar with the project. And you probably, you can ask for help. But honestly, given your background, you're not even going to need to ask for help. You got this. Now, can I just pause for one second here and point out that I already love everything about this because Jay Diesel is such a good

acronym. I am jealous like, like, I love it. Like, I should have named something that. I will try to name something. There's, there's start, open magic cards. I was muted. I was muted and I unmooted. I forgot. I was muted, okay.

I was going to make the comments. Sorry, there's someone definitely at the Jersey Shore named Jay Diesel right now. Yes, that's exactly what I'm thinking. I'm like, hey, what's up, Jay Diesel? Like, it's so good. Okay. You do one of those, like, like those claps where you hit, you just get a Yeah, and it goes on for like seven years and you're like,

when are you guys going to stop saying hello? Like, yeah, okay. If I had it could be that cool, I could never be that cool. Cool, chain. So obviously, being new at the company, what's the first thing you do? Well, you download tortoise SVN. Okay. Tortoise.

Tortoise. A tale as old as time. It's a tale as, it really is. And you get the project. You check it out. But something happened when he checked out, The project. Estimated time of completion?

Two days. What? Wait, hold on. So, just for the record, like, all of the witness, Jonathan Blow will be on tomorrow. All of that was checked into SVN. That's a giant 3D game.

The whole thing. How did they make it take two days to check out something from TARDIS SVN? Casey, it's called The Weekend. Like, don't you know, like every Friday, get checkout. See you guys on Monday. Okay. All right.

Casey. All right. They didn't call it hair, SBN, okay? You got to make sure you take it time. Slow and steady wins the race, okay? It's not that slow. So what's going on here, Jake? Well, you know, Jake, that's a great question because Jake had the exact same question.

He went to his coworker and was just like, man, this is taking two days. Am I doing something wrong? Yeah. Should I not use tortillas? Like, well, what do I do here? And they said, oh, no, this is actually. this is expected. This is very normal. You should just play

solitaire. So solitaire he did. And solitaire he continued and solitaire all the way to the end. It's pretty nice, right? It's a good first week. That's a good first week is all, you know what I mean? Like that's nice.

He's rolling. He has the project. He's making inroads with coworkers. He's feeling pretty good. And so now's the time for him to shine. He's young. He's impressionable. He's ready to put in the hours, burn the midnight oil. So he's going to open up a random file. Okay?

But when he opens up the random file, he noticed there's no comments. There's nothing with it. He starts looking at a bunch of these weird JSON files trying to figure out what the heck's going on. He doesn't get this. What is this? Casey, what is this? That's looking.

I don't know what that is. You know, push the stack for a second, because I don't want to interrupt this, but I'll just say that functions 899-900-901. I want to talk about that later because I got a mini rant we can talk about after that. So I'm remembering that functions array right there. Okay. Keep going. Keep it going. And then he opened up related files that had the same kind of name like customers JSON versus customer.

dot j s and he would just see it filled with a bunch of stuff but there's no comments anywhere nobody has left any breadcrumbs and there's all these function calls and things that are just making no sense nothing seems to be complete every file is completely just filled with stuff that doesn't seem to exist and it was very very confusing for him so this is jake he has to do something that none of us want to do when we first landed a job and we just opened in the code base. We have to go to our co-worker and we're going to have to ask for help

and just look like an idiot. Right off the bat, like I can't even read the project. Help me read the project. So, of course, he goes to his co-worker and he goes, hey, man, I need some help. I need you to kind of help me with what's happening in this project because I feel genuinely confused.

Hold on. Sorry. I clicked the wrong page. And this is while Jake was working on Batman two or something. I'm just looking at Jake here. It was a while ago. It was a while back.

Yeah. It was a much earlier Marvel film. Yeah. Okay. Oh, sorry, DC. Oh, sorry. So as co-hiker was like, you just don't get it yet.

See, the thing is, is that Jay Diesel, it was written by Tom, and he's a super genius, and he wrote Jay Diesel all by himself. And so basically, that customers. dot JSON file is just metadata

used to put together the customer class and then he waited for Jake to get it. Jake did not get it, in fact. Okay. Jake did not. So then he asked the only, what's the next most logical question?

If you don't understand how code works and you can't just simply read it and understand it, what's the most logical conclusion you can do? Ask it, TBT. Yes. Didn't exist at this time, probably. Didn't exist at this time. It didn't exist.

Began. What do you mean? Ask Jeeves. Yes. Well, of course, you ask, well, how do I run it? I'm just going to debug it. I'm going to figure some things out. Well, Scott laughed.

Okay, his coworker laughed right as his face. He said, you wouldn't want to just run it. It takes a couple days for a new deployment to finish starting up. Jay Diesel can be a little slow, but it's really powerful, like super powerful. Like I said, Tom, he is a genius. What is going on? This is nuts. How do you think Jake?

feels right now, okay? He's confused too. Part 2. Jay Diesel in action. I hope you guys are ready. If this isn't a Jersey Shore scene, I'd be so pissed. This needs to be someone... He's at the beach pumping iron. You know I'm not going to do Jersey Shore being. You know it's against my religion. We already know this. I also feel like

Jay Diesel kind of reminds me of Vin Diesel. So I'm wondering if does this thing have a nickname like Triple X or anything? You know what I'm saying? It would be good. But it's all about family here. Okay, Casey. Okay. It's all about family here. So Jake, in his confusion, he did the next most likely thing you should do. That's Jake.

That's a real Jake. That's a real Jake. So what did you do? Well, he asked his coworker, can you at least walk me through what's going on? Because I am confused. Well, his coworker, he laughed again. These young guys. All right.

So the genius part, this is the genius part. You know where it says class? Can you see that right there in that JSON file? Okay, good. Well, that's the class name. As you can see, that's how this works. And now do you see where it says functions? Yes.

Those are subversion links to all the functions that make up that class. What? That's precisely what Jake said. He said, I don't quite get this, but I fear that I might get this and I don't want it to be true. Yeah. I'm more, I'm less scared about me having gotten that wrong than I am about me having gotten that right. Precisely.

Yeah. So his co-worker seeing Jake remain confused was like, okay, so you see how you have that Customers.json and that Customers.js file. The JSON file is the metadata and the JS file has the code. So the list of functions in the JSON file tells Jay Diesel to look up those revisions of the JS file to find what functions are available. And in that case, the actual code and the revisions are located at SVN revision 568, 899, 900, 901, and the list keeps on going. What? Now, hold on, before you speak, I don't, Jay, stop being confused.

I'm trying to finish this up here. Each revision of the customer JS has one function. So to add all functions you have to check, all you have to do is check in your new code with the updated JSON metadata file with the new revisions. Whenever something makes a function call to the customer object, Jay Diesel uses the list of function revisions to check out all of the actual functions until it finds a match. Do you understand it now?

Yes. do and I'm mildly terrified Can I just ask one quick question? What's the name of my co-worker again? Sorry, I forget. His name is Scott.

Scott. If you're asking those kind of question, Casey, you're really behind. Casey? We're a whole far behind, okay? So Scott, I just want to know, when you say subversion revision

number, do you literally mean that if I were to go fix, say, a bug in revision 902 in this list, for example, and I checked it in and it became revision 3157, I would have to go into this list and replace 902 with 3157, otherwise it would continue to use the old code that I had rechecked in a replacement for already? You know, our manager did tell me that we had a hot new guns in here that could really pick up the project and it sounds like you are really

understanding your stuff. Casey, you were built for this, you were built for this, Casey. I'm confused. This is fine, Casey. Are you committing more than one function at a time? That's bad. Even if I am only committing one function at a time. So now I have to

check in also the other I have to check in both files every time. And of course, multiple people might have to check in this file because they're updating different functions. So first, Casey, you tell us you don't like clean code. And now you're telling us you don't like clean revision. I know, man. I don't know.

Wow. Okay. Well, let's do this. Keep going, Jay Diesel. Let's, let's, uh, this is like the chronicles of ridiculous. Well, anyways, Jake had the same response. He just said, I think so. Yeah.

And his co-worker, of course, just said, like I said, Tom, he's a genius. Okay, you see Tom right here? That man, he's a genius. This lets you track every function that has ever existed. You can add new functions by overriding a JS file and adding a new revision to the JSON. You can remove a function just by removing its revision number from the function list. And it's still there in history, inactive, but never lost. Scott stood.

Let me know if you have any more questions. He left. Jake's death. Part three. Rise and grind. Oh, this is about they started a terminal-based coffee company. That's actually what I was thinking when I made this, DJ. So, for Jake, no obstacle's too big.

he's young, he's virile, he's ready to just go out there and absolutely crush the universe. And so, of course, as soon as he realizes as he starts inspecting the code and really starts combing through it, that this is actually just a simple web portal for customers to be able to update their personal information. But thanks to the complexity of Jay Diesel, what should take minutes now takes days. A true 10x engineer, this Tom fella is. and so of so of course

Jake being a good citizen decides you know what I can fix her I can get in here and I can make real changes that will help everybody so he started going through all the code

familiarizing himself he started checking in a couple code comments letting people know what's going on throughout the code and how they can kind of trace everything

and even upon just looking at the code there was obvious bugs things that just will break So, of course, he started to even fix those, check and new ones, really making some amazing changes. Jake is a good citizen. Common Jake W. Common Jake W. Absolutely amazing.

Part four. Tom. Is Tom still at this fictional company that is definitely not a company that any of you have ever worked at? Casey, he's the only one who knows how this works. We can't buy your job. Jay Diesel Casey I'm saying but is he still there or has he left? This company, we've never received an update from anybody who worked at this company.

At the time of the story. At the time of the story. At the time of the story. Yes, at the time of the story, he was the lead engineer. Okay. All right. That's fine. Jake arrives.

Monday morning, feeling great. Okay. He has made a lot of changes. He's done a lot of good. work, wrapped up the previous week, worked well into the weekend, and now he's arriving Monday morning, but things were amiss. Things were odd. People were running around.

People were freaking out. Scott, as you have recently learned, his co-worker runs by and says, the database got scrambled, and he just keeps on doing. People are freaking out. People are trying to figure out stuff, and all of a sudden, Jake hears you. And he turns around and sees Tom. And Tom says, hey, Jake, you're Jake, right? The new guy?

Yeah. I am. What's going on? You broke Jake Diesel! By the way, my name's Tom. And I'm a genius. What? Jake is confused.

What? I didn't do anything. I, how could I have broken it? You broke Jay Diesel. I'm reporting you to the bosses, and I'm happy. and you fired. And Tom turned around and stormed off, leaving Jake confused. And Jake just sat there in silence.

What has happened? How did I break everything? Part 5. The meeting. This is a really good story, by the way. Thank you. I didn't write it. I'm really invested right now in the story of Jake.

Like, I'm like, I need to know this conclusion. Oh, the conclusion. let's just say everything is just so beautiful. It's so, so beautiful. Okay. Well, they have the grand meeting. Everybody gets there to have the grand meeting and discuss. And one of the VP's turn and look, Jake, right in the ocular nerve and says,

tell us what you did to Jay Diesel. Now, Jake, of course, says, I don't think I did anything. I've only been here for two weeks trying to learn Jay Diesel. How the customer portal works. I don't even know how to deploy it. Tom interjects in there and says, you made few commits to subversion. He was very upset about this, right?

Because some things obviously happened. Jake did make some commits. He made some comments. He made some good stuff. He said, well, yes, I added a few coat comments trying to. Tom just jumps right in and says, you can't use comments in J. Diesel. Tom shouted, that's what broke it.

Jake stayed silent. He's just trying to process. No. No, this cannot be true. Are you? This is true as far as we know. As far as we've done, as far as we can tell, Casey, this is a real thing. Casey, if you write good code, you shouldn't need comments.

All right. Thank you. My code's self-documenting. Thank you. It's kind of a code smell. Yeah, honestly, it's kind of a sign right now, Casey. Kind of telling on yourself right now. now. Okay. He remains silent, just trying to process how comments could wipe out a customer database.

I like, Tom continued after the pause. I haven't added comment support to Jay Diesel. So the runtime executes comments like normal code. You must have had a couple database updates in the comments. He asks. Tom obviously being the genius zeroes in on what could have been the problem. What? Jake, of course, he responds with, well, yeah, I put a couple short syntax examples in a comment to clarify. And then Tom burst up onto his feet and says, I knew it. You broke it.

He turned to the VP and said, I can't deal with coders. who don't understand the system. You either fire Jake or I quit. Drops the microphone, leaves the meeting. VP sitting there, the upper crust of the management, baffled by Jake's decisions

to take down the customer database. So the VP representative and HR start talking right there in front of Jake. They don't even act like he exists. They just start talking about Jake as if he was sitting there. And they say, I think our only course of action here is pretty clear. Tom is a programming virtuoso and our best resource.

And Jake just deleted the database. We have to fire Jake. So Jake went on to Greener Pastures. He left the place. Never to think about Jay Diesel or Tom again. And now Jake lives a much happier life. programming in a regular code base that is not insane. And that is the story of Tom.

The super genius. Tom's a genius. Tom is in fact a genius. Let's see it in chat. Tom's a genius. Tom is a genius. This is going to end with, and Tom's full name is

Tunnel GitHub or something. I don't know. Tom's full name, the primogen. By the way, my name's Tom, if you didn't know that. My real name is Tom. I just don't stream. Tom.

I wanted to read that. I wanted to kind of give you that a story because your build system, it was comments that were executing code, which just, it just reminded me of Tom. And Prime, we said there, I don't remember if we said it, we'll have to pull the footage, or if Casey said it. One of us said that either Casey you said,

I'm a genius when you were making it. That's how you felt. Or we said you were a genius. And that's why we were saying that was like the next level connection to this story. Yes. Well, the only difference is here that like everyone was very embarrassed about it afterwards, which doesn't seem to have happened to Tom. Tom is apparently just fine with it.

That's because Tom's a genius. Tom is apparently a genius, yes. Honestly, case, though, you should adopt some of these coding practices. I would say, get comments out of your code because I did read an announcement. GitHub's going to announce next week. They will be charging more for comments in the code base.

So if you can just get into the good habit of removing them now... They're charging per line of code hosted. Yeah, per line of code hosted. So every piece of documentation... Per line of code hosted per minute, of course. It's a very confusing thing. So I guess if I'm reading

between the lines here, And obviously, since this is a not a story, certainly, that happened to anyone here, you're just recounting an abstract story about two people, one named Tom and one named Jake, who don't have any connection to the real world in any way. Correct. It is kind of hard for me to understand how that code was written. Like, so it, the parser doesn't face it. when it hits a comment.

It just ignores the comment. And the parser is it's actually, like someone re-implemented a JavaScript runtime of their own, because they're not using an existing one or it would have handled comments. So they re-implemented the JavaScript runtime

parse. It's not, you're making it entirely too hard. Yeah, I am. Casey. Casey does Just answer me the simple question Does the line have select on it? Okay

So is what you're saying It basically just searches for the word select Then takes everything to the end of the line And runs it or something like that? That's all I'm saying is hey Okay If it has select on it That sounds like a database query to me

Or multi-line comments And it's doing something line by line That's the other one that I think is pretty possible. Guys, let's be easy on Casey, too. Tom's a genius. Casey's not going to understand. That's going to take a little out right away.

Yeah. Okay, that's a good point. I can't just drop in here and ask, you know, these sort of pedestrian questions of a genius mind that is just way past any of us here on this podcast. I agree with that. I want to know what everyone's thoughts are. What are the chances they had a singular backup at any time?

of production I would assume no just based on the VP and everybody's reaction to the customer data being deleted that was a hard no right there I was going to say so this is one of those ones

where someone's like this system's insane and you just hit him with you want to look up Chesterton's fence all right there's a reason why all right I don't have time to give you

the lore but trust me it's there all right yeah We We use a We use a negative 3, negative 2, negative 1 backup strategy For this And, you know, so that means if anything happens, we just don't have any copies of database anymore

Yeah, see, prime, I see, I would have been the guy that would have kept a backup earlier But then I found in my young junior career, like, security gets really mad when you make a backup of production database on your computer They hated it. I was like, guys, I'm being safe. And they said, so all of the real phone number? I'm like, yeah, the real phone number. So what? It's, what if we accidentally lose the database?

I have it. And they told me to get it off my computer. Yeah, that, Began, that sounds actually really reasonable. So, what are you doing with that on your computer? Try to save the company. I do want to put in some kind of a way that we can do like a hard, here at some point because I want to talk about this is actually somewhat of a more serious topic I wanted to talk about that function array thing we'll do the hard break right here about so I want

to make a way that because because what I'm well met a talk about it first too so can we do a hard break yeah yeah let me just do a really quick very simple hard break hey if you're joining us on YouTube you're gonna have to listen to the full episode on Spotify link in the description thanks for joining us at the stand-up thank you very much for having K. Began and TJ on the stand-up. If you're not familiar with Casey's work, check out Computer Enhance.com. Also, we might post some of the clips on different channels, so check that link in the description, too. True.

So I am going to try and say everything I'm about to say in the same kind of Tom Jake way, because I don't want to create any drama. God. I can't wait for whatever this story is. This will create so much drama. even probably me pseudonyming this because it would be like YouTube drama, right?

Oh, I've seen some. So I'm just gonna... It's a shocking story when you get YouTuber drama. PrimeGen quickly, we need a thumbnail, picture of Tom, he's done, okay? Two text, he's done, shipping. Red arrows on top. Red text on bottom. He's done.

You're fired. So I don't want. watch very much programming YouTube. I just don't, right? Thanks for that now. You're kind of saying that lie. It hurts a little bit. Wow, Casey.

Sorry. And the reason for that's pretty obvious, right? Like, I just don't have time to do that. So when I'm going to go watch YouTube, I watch something like totally unrelated to work, right? I don't go watch programming YouTube. Eddie, you know, I don't know. I'm sure if I was younger, like if, you know, when I was growing up, I would have watched programming YouTube all the time.

Because, oh my God, it's exactly what I missed when I was little. Like, how do you do this or what are the real programmers doing? Like, it's such an amazing resource when you're younger. Thanks, Casey. Thanks, Casey. You don't need the post plays, okay? No, I'm serious. I'm dead serious.

When I was little, this is what I would have loved, right? But when you're older, you're just like, I'm going to go watch freaking beard meets food or something. Like, I'm going to go watch some guy go, like, to a restaurant and eat like 5,000 chicken wings. And just because, like, I don't want to, you know, if you work at the McDonald's, you don't want to come home and eat a box of McNuggets, right?

That's just how that works sometimes. So anyway, I don't watch very much programming YouTube. So I'm not necessarily always aware of all the things that are going on. but a couple months back there was some drama that I will not refer to specifically and one of the people involved with the drama is sort of in game development programming and a second YouTuber who sort of a second YouTuber has hit the story I know I'm trying to I'm dying on the inside.

A second YouTuber decides to sort of capitalize on the drama that's going on with this first YouTuber by doing like a code review of that person's code. Yeah. Right?

Yeah. Okay. And now being the dick that I am, I watched this video because I'm like, all right, like, I'm going to watch this guy do a code review because like I would be very snarky about most people's code reviews, right?

So I watch this code review and one of the things that the person is like, he's like on a very high horse about the fact that this code has numbers like that function array in it to refer to like random things. Like oh, you know, it's got number 328 is some index into a table of dialogue. or something like that. And the person's like, this is just obviously demonstrates that this person has no idea what they're doing and couldn't possibly be a professional programmer and it's just a charlatan and a fraud

and all these sorts of things. And I was wishing I had the button of like I can interject into other people's YouTube stream to just be like, I'm like, actually, actually, right? Hard actually. Hard actually. I'm like,

If you are at the point in your career where you think an uncommented bare table of numbers showing up in the middle of code shows that someone isn't a professional programmer, you're the person who isn't a professional programmer, right? Because every fucking code face has some shit like that in it. And there's always an explanation and it's always bad. but that's what happens. That is what happens. So actually, it's the other way around. Like, you're the novice, and you're the one without the work experience. If you look at something like that and say that it's like evidence that this is unschivable,

I'm like, go to any freaking web cup, go to Google, go to Amazon, go to whatever. We'll find that code for you, my friend. It's in there. It's running the thing you're, it's probably in YouTube's code-based that you use to Upload this has one of those in there, all right? So that's what that reminded me of when you saw that function. I was like, yep, I know that list of numbers, right? Yes.

First off, I do know the video you're talking about, and I knew that I wasn't going to enjoy the video in any regards, because at the beginning, he pulls out books as his evidence for his authority. It's just like one of those clean code, and he's just like, he pulled out clean, no, he did not pull out clean code. No. It's just like, brother. That's like a crazy way to start

anything to be like, I read books. It was nuts. You don't. I get my ready every time I want to have an argument. I don't know. You guys don't have yours ready. The only book I keep ready on my is I just keep that one ready to go at all times. I just keep whatever I need some advice for the family. This is what that helps me out. This is not going on Spotify,

right? Josh, censor that book. Please. Sensor that book. Josh. Yes. I'm getting ready to the next stage of my life. Oh my gosh. It was so funny you actually made the stream chat break.

Sorry, I got to get a new stream chat. This thing breaks constantly. That's amazing. So what is, like, what is chapter one of that book? Like, how to put a pill into a drink? What's the, what's the start of fatherhood? What's the reco on that one? He has a dramatic reading of father.

Chapter one is, at some point, your date will wake back up. The opening chapter is called The Baffling Question. I'll let you guys guess what it's about, okay? Okay, all right. Wait, on the coder you thing, I will say, I love the idea. I kind of want to just join a new company. Just so I can be like my first code review, I'm going to produce a YouTube video instead. And just like, can you do code review?

And right away, it's just like, trash. Look at this trash code. This if statement, what an idiot. And it's like, stop uploading YouTube videos for the GitHub. I'll get fired right away, but it'll be funny. We should, companies should have Prime go in, and we can look at a terrible piece of code, and then they can tell us why it has to be that way. That would actually be funny.

Because there's always bad code, and a lot of it was just like, well, you know, we are under some pressure, and things were this way, and this one service wasn't quite right, so we had to. Or it's like, we've refactored it three times, and we got back to the same code every time. We started, we did a refactor, and then it was the same exact piece of code. So we deleted that branch and moved on. Next year's new recruits, they tried the same thing. They all died right here. Let me give an analogy for any really, like, new programmers out there who are watching this.

If you've ever watched a professional baseball game, right, if you know anything about baseball at all, or you played Little League or whatever. So if you are in Little League and they're teaching you how to hit, they're going to be like, okay, you put your back foot here in the batters box, put your front foot out, and you're going to put your weight like this. You're going to hold the bat like this, right?

You're just step forward and you're going to do this thing and all that they're coaching you on all this stuff and keep your head down on. That's what people tell you about coaching. review or what they do in a code review. You watch an actual major league hitter and the instructions would be like, okay, first you take your batting gloves off like 67 times and put them back on. Then you like, you know, make the sign of the cross and like adjust the gold chain or whatever. Then you like do some crazy thing like like hold the bat way the hell up here and then you like corkscrew

it around and then but finally you sort of get back into a real actual swing and you hit a home run. Right? And you win the freaking game and you're an amazing batter, right? The same exact thing is true of coding. All the crap that they tell you about all this stuff, then you go look at some coder who's like absolutely bonkers crazy amazing and like wrote like the inner loop, like not Tom, like a really good programmer. And it's like you look in this like all the variable names are like one letter. Right? It's just like they have what they got into and the way that they code and they're really good at. at it and it's not the pristine thing that's the best, you know, practices advice.

That's just, that's the reality of it. It's exactly like Major League Baseball, right? It just, it doesn't work the instructional way. So it's okay. Like, those things are always sort of general guidelines that we're trying to push you towards more readable, more maintainable code. But the reality of programming is dirtier than that. That's just how it is.

So it's okay. Well, there's a divide. I see this on the internet all. time. It's a lot of times people who are like haven't had their job yet. That's usually, and they're excited. They love code. They're trying to get smart. Sometimes they're in school. Sometimes they're just YouTube fiends. And they're just like, why wouldn't you just take the extra time to make the code perfect? Why wouldn't you just always make it right? And it's like, okay, they're called deadlines. They're called managers. It's a lot of factors that will never, ever, ever let you do that in a real world.

But you just don't know until you get a job. And then you get a job. And four years later, you're a different person and you laugh at those kids and then the next new crop comes up and it happens again. It's never anything. I'll tell you, I can literally tell you. So like Jeff Roberts, the guy who ran rad game tools, easily

one of the best programmers ever. All the code is basically just like that is like a bunch of like every variable is one letter. It's all just kind of like lined up like it's not that easy to read this code. And you'd be like that's ridiculous. How can anyone work with code

like that. It's insane. Like, how do you maintain it? How do you go back and read it? He wrote the compression algorithms for one of the products that I did basically all the other code for. He gave it to me. Sorry, what? Is it called? No, it was, it was granny, the 3D animation system. It had a compressor built in, and he gave me that code. He gave me that code. When he finished making it, it went into the project, my project. There was never a bug.

ever in the entire not once I never had to even open those files that's just how good it is he just gives you this like here's a complete compressor I wrote for scratch completely for your project and only your project I've only ever done my coding and my testing on it it shipped to customers never broke once in the entire time I made for five years I maintained that project and it never broke once so it's just like the reality is Sometimes people are just very, very good at doing code the way they do it. And if they get the results, that's fine. You know, then at the same time you get J. Diesel or something, right?

The system worked, Casey, if everyone would just follow along. It was fine until Jake came along. Just because at runtime, when a customer wants to change information, you have to do an SVN look up to find out the function, does not mean it wasn't perfect. Tortoise. Oh, we know our code is always matching our actual committed code. Oh, no.

Oh, that's integrity. Yeah, yeah. Anyway. One, TJ, on your story about rewriting it. I know I've told the story once before, but when I was working on Falcor, there was a piece of requesting that really bothered me because I was like, dude, this code's ugly. And this was still during my time where I thought I could just write really great code all the time. And so during this like, hey, this code is ugly phase for requesting. So it was a data fetcher in JavaScript that would try to match what's already on the TV and then what's like the minimum amount of data it needs to request next.

So that way all the things doing like all the components being like, I need to display these 20 titles. It goes, okay, I already have 17 of the titles. So I'm going to make a request for the remaining three, right? So it was a pretty clever piece of array manipulation is all it was. And so I do this whole like rewrite of the requesting because I'm like, and at first I'm like, dude, look at how much better mine is already. The code's way more readable.

It's all these kind of things. And then I'm like, oh, crap, I forgot this one case. And so then I added in the next case. I'm like, okay, it's like a little bit closer, but still it's way more readable. And I'm like, oh, crap, I forgot this one. case. And by the time I all crap, I forgot this one case. At the end, it was almost a line for line rewrite of exactly what you did. And then that's when I realized I'm the problem. No, that's when you realized I was so smart before and I'm still really smart. You got the wrong

conclusion from that prime. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. And then of course, since we're kind of talking about this and people coding, this has been my favorite tweet for the last couple weeks, or the last week, I just keep thinking about it over and over and over again. The inner tweet goes like this. Just found out this. Or just found out that since this, I've become a top 50 user of Devin globally pushing 60 TRs a day. Ask me anything. Now, remember, Devin, if you don't know, it's kind of like, it's like an interesting update.

An interesting update. That's pretty interesting, Hunter. An interesting update. The team is starting to move away from AI coding completely. and Claude because it's so much harder to review the AI code than writing things themselves. It's like my, it's my favorite. It's just so funny to be like, dude, I'm pushing 60 peers a day. Actually, my team kind of got upset. It was like how it started, how it's going. That was the perfect, like, self, self-created one of those.

The funny thing, too, is that's exactly the amount of time they said before software engineering is dead. They're like, oh, six months from now we're not going to have software developers. jobs and they're like, we actually deleted all the stuff we tried when we said that. This definitely ends up like South Park where it's like, they're like, oh my God, he's pushing 60 PRs a day. It's too much. I just have to use AI to review it, but I can't tell him. And then he's over there using AI and both of them are just like, oh, my God, I hate this.

We're both just AIing each other and we're not telling each other. Yeah. All right. Well, there you go. So, Casey, how do you feel? You've learned the story of Tom. How was it? I mean, this is the thing, right?

Like, we've all been there. We've all been J. Diesel. And here's the thing. I just feel fortunate that my J. Diesel phase, the worst thing that was that build utility. Right? I never shipped anything quite so horrible as the entire company's customer database. is now running externally on this disaster thing that I made, right? So I feel like it's definitely, it's there but for the grace of God go I,

I think, is the phrase that people often use for something like this. It's like, you're going to have some phase in your programming career where you just go down a rat hole or rabbit hole, I guess, as people more commonly called, I've always called it a rat hole. Or, you know, I guess I grew up, maybe Massachusetts it's a rat hole. We have more rats there than rabbits I don't know what's going on over there More rats than rabbits

So you know You go down this thing and you get this wild hair And you're like this is going to be awesome I'm so smart But you just don't have the experience to realize That you're really actually being pretty stupid It happens to everybody At some point

Some people like Tom Are too much of a genius to ever pull out of it So they just stay that way and become head of engineering and their companies like engineering is terminally screwed. But yeah, like the rest of us, like it's just you hope you get out of that phase before anyone really does start relying. Like before, you hope you don't end up in a situation where there's nobody smarter

around you to like go, oh, that's nice, Casey. Like, just let's not do that. And then, you know, in a year or two, you've gotten better and you know better, right? So I'm just fortunate I never did anything quite so terrible, I guess is what I would say. but I came close. You know, there's something very funny about that, which is that we all get the chance to do that at some capacity. Yeah.

But having people tell you you're a programming virtuoso would reinforce the cycle of what you're doing is actually the correct thing. Like you could actually go your whole life thinking you're doing the right thing. Exactly. And it's just because programming is such a complicated endeavor without a lot of like hard metrics, like, you know, in one sense, I do think if I can poke Tom's genius balloon with a pin just a little bit, once you're at the point where it takes two days to check out your freaking customer database, that's a good hard metric telling you that you're actually an idiot, not a genius, right? So there was a hard metric here that someone should have actually latched onto at some point.

But a lot of times, you don't actually have a hard metric. Like a lot of times you can get pretty far with something where you're kind of ignoring the red flags. Like, you know, for what? You're like in that relationship where it's like, it's been going on for a while and there's definitely some red flags. But it's not like, you know, it's not obvious enough to you yet because you're still wrapped up in it or whatever. So I do think there is a real danger of that because a lot of times there just isn't an obvious thing you can point to that's the clear sign that you're wrong. and it can go on for very long time. I will say one thing that's,

I really suggest everyone in their life, hopefully they have someone who they only talk to once a year about coding. And so then when you come back, they get to say, okay, what trend are you on now? I just got to experience at Thanksgiving. My uncle is like an old C programmer. So for a decade, he's been hearing me

about what I'm excited about once a year at Christmas. And he started just roasting me throughout the history. He was like, Yeah, remember when you were saying everything's going to be a function? No more microservices? Oh, yeah, how'd that go for you? Hey, remember when you said memory's just going to keep getting cheaper? Ruby's going to scale.

Remember that phase? And he just, like, he roasted me for a decade of everything. And I was like, oh, I forgot about each of those because I'm on to the next one already. I'm a genius. I'm an elixir a stack now. It's going to scale to the moon. OTP. Don't worry about it.

Guys, guys, I have a billion dollar idea. Okay. Here it is. You ready for this? Yeah. Code therapist. It's not a mentor, not a life coach, not a, not programming courses, none of that. It's a therapist.

You go to this person for an hour a week, right? Obviously, we'll drive it by AI. Won't actually have humans involved. Yeah, duh. It's got to be a big VC money. Yeah. And what you do is you talk about the code and they ask you, they're like, so tell me about your build environment. right and they're like you start talking about it and then they kind of ask you those questions and they help you get in touch with like your inner like how you're actually relating to this code and whether you are starting to evince pathologies like tom right like and there could be like a DSM equivalent that basically has like here are the neuroses that you may have and they try to like help you uncover those right tell me tell me about tell me about your code review

Tell me about this. I feel like this could be a thing. I like this, Casey. I like this a lot. I'm in full support of it. I think they called scrub masters, though. Yeah, they're called scrub masters. That's literally...

I think it's called HR. Is that not what HR is? You're in there every week, Began? Well, that's because they love my jokes. Yeah, they always ask you here. Code therapy, though. Code therapy. Code therapy sounds so funny.

Yeah. Oh, my gosh. I want to do it with somebody. Like, how did that, like, how did that variable name make you feel. Okay, call Prime, call Dr. K and say, I want to be a co-therapist. Teach me how to be a co-therapist. And then we can have you just give

therapy to someone on stream, and he can be on stream watching you and giving you advice on how to therapy the person. That's got to be, that's ethical. That's fine. Yeah, that is, that is ethical. That's the word I was going to use. I got another stupid true story for you here. I, just to

show you how much I don't understand anything. I, like, a couple years back, I got an email from somebody who was like, like I knew through, it was like a childhood friend's sister or something like, like, you know, who I know who they are. It wasn't like weird that they would email me, but it's like not someone I ever emailed with. And they were like, hey, I was wondering, like, I have a friend who recently got laid off in the, like, in tech. And I was wondering if like maybe you could help them, like, find a new job somewhere, right? I know you're out there in, uh, in the Seattle area,

right and I know you do like a lot of programming stuff and you're well known and all this stuff so you know in their mind that means that you like I assume that means that they think you like hang out with all of the managerial people or whatever so they're like so I'm like who like what is the what's the thing and they're like well this they're a they're a certified scrum master and I'm like I'm like I don't know what that is like do they know anything Like, do they know anything that does something? Like, I'm like, can they program? They do anything.

Like, no, they're just a certified scrum master. And I'm just like, I was like, I can't help you. Like, I mean, the only people I hang out with program for a living, like, I don't know, I don't even know what a certified scrub master is. I don't even know what, I don't even know how you would certify someone to do that thing because the only thing I know about it is that some people just stand around and talk for like 15 minutes. So do you guys want to tell me what that would mean?

How do you get certified? to be a scrum master. What is a scrum master? So, have you heard of the game? No, I mean, so, Casey, the main way is they have to like and subscribe on this podcast. Okay.

True. Remember, chat, everyone, if you do, someone says they're a scrub master, I do this every time. You can save a lot of hard at this way. Ask for their credentials. They say they're certified. Say, I want to see the certification. What's your badge number? There's a lot of things

out there, all right? And I will not, I will not take a ticket from anyone unless I see their certification. That's just how I operate, okay? Because they could just be impersonating a scrum master. It could be. It's a big problem. We all know that's a felony, but it still happens.

I mean, that is the scary world we live in. So what is the scrum master do? What do they, what is that mean? In just a second, Began, by the way, you don't have any, like, what's it called, like, filter on your microphone. So this whole time I can hear you go. Oh, oh, sorry, chat. It's a SMR. And I can't, someone made a comment about it.

Now I can't stop hearing you breathe into your microphone. It took you an hour to decide to tell them. Yeah, thanks for telling me now. I didn't audio test before this and listen to myself, breathe for a while. And I was like, that's kind of pleasant. Guys, I will not breathe anymore, okay? We were reminding chat. I know they were holding their breath during the story, but it's a subliminal thing to remind them to breathe during the story of Jake and Tom.

Chat, I'm doing the Tazond day from now on. It doesn't work because my mic goes with me, but okay, we'll pick it this out, Chad. I'll mute. All right, so to explain a scrum master, so I've worked with a certified scrum master on many levels, and in fact, it was so scrum mastery that they actually went out and taught other scrum masters how to scrum master. Okay, so I clearly asked the right person, because not only can you tell me the truth straight from a scrum master, but from a scrum master master. Exactly.

Okay. So I'm not going to say any names just so I don't get anybody in trouble. And the rest of this podcast has been that way. Yeah, I know. So, well, except for the part where you were talking about the functions, everybody knew the name. That was just a wall of the name. Guys, I was trying not to create drama. I intentionally didn't talk about this thing.

Casey, you were good. Oh, no, no. There's definitely videos being made right now. I'm sorry. It's already happening, Casey. He doesn't even know what a scrum master is. Okay, so... Yeah, and that's a true story.

So this is... I'm going to tell you my definition of a scrum master. This is not the official definition of a scrum master. This is what I believe one to be after working with one of the pinnacle scrum masters out there. Okay. Which is the following. That a scrum master is closer to a team therapist slash technical manager than anything else.

So, A, they meet with... people to make sure everyone's working together well, make sure things are actually moving, making sure that we're sizing our tasks correctly, kind of keeping up to date that our team is adhering to agile principles in a very like sound way, sound, uh, way. And then B, they also help a lot with a lot of the technical direction. They're not technically technical managers. They're not the ones that's supposed to be making all the tickets and doing things, but they often fall into this role. And that was my experience was just like, yeah, but like, how do you feel? Like I got a lot of And so it truly was this code, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this

therapist actually, you when, when you said they're called scrum masters, you weren't even really joking. Like, you actually, that's kind of what they kind of have to do a little bit. If they're good, if they're good. If you had a manager that was aloof. A scrum manager, like, how I kind of took it is that this, the scrub master is kind of like, it's what the manager should do to all of his employees, which is like check in and make sure everyone's, doing okay and that we're not running off the rails. But instead, the manager that I worked with was,

he would often just like rewrite part of our app over the weekend and was just always on just coding vendors and they were always crazy. And sometimes they caused so much conflict that I, I've had to delete like a week's worth of work. Wow. Just because, and then one time he got super jacked upon promises, but he like inlined his promises.

So I followed his pattern because I didn't know what promises were. This was like 2011. So I was like had like then and next functions that I was doing. It was crazy because he was just like, this is what we're doing, we're doing promises. I was like, all right, we're doing promises, everybody. I looked jacked up on promises. Dude, I got... Jacked up on Mountain Dewan promises.

And said, what the hell were you doing? I was like, I don't know, I'm just following what my boss told me to do. I had kind of a rough childhood. My dad used to come home late at night all jacked up on promises. It's like then and next. He's like, why are my kids never asynchronous? You know, it's just... they're not even true threads

it's just dad you never love both of us it's always one of us in a time why can't also I know we're definitely in the random portion of the podcast right now but I do have to describe something happened yesterday because I spent yesterday serving coffee and telling people about SSHing into a coffee website for Normies for seven hours straight I will say

Can I share the picture? You have to share the picture. Chat. Well, do we have people's permission to share their picture? You can show it on street. They're all content creators. Everyone... Okay, fair enough. Just making sure. They are technically all content creators. I wasn't there. I wasn't there.

So Prime's going to show us, guys, this is an actual photo from yesterday. This is 100% real. You're never going to believe me, but we have multiple witnesses. What message? Or where did we put this? Terminal chat. So basically what you're saying is this was AI generated. Is it not AI generated?

It's what you're basically telling me, whatever. whatever I'm about to see, which I don't actually know what it is yet. It is my favorite picture in the universe. I can't believe. So this is a, guys, this is a real photo of me showing people ordering coffee in a terminal. I swear to... That's what's on the screen. I am holding a laugh and I go, okay, ladies, watch this.

So first, you all have max open terminal. Hit command spacebar type T. You got a terminal. You'll see it right there. Press enter SSH terminal. Dot shop. Boom. There, and I showed him, and that was actually taken from that much.

moment, that is real. I promise you this will never happen again. This is the first one. I have a question. He v. Wild women with SSH skills. Literally. It actually happened. Like, it actually, arched boys, be careful. That was, that was by the end of the day, so I practiced the pitch 40 times, because in the beginning, you're like, so I'd be by the coffee. Oh, you guys can't. Okay, I got to work better on this. I got to get this. This is not working. So by the end, I had a doubt. I was showing him, you can't, but I'll teach you. Also, you all have, also, you all have Max. and holding a Mac was working really well.

They were like, of course, we do. And I said, this app's already on your computer. They go, it really is. I go, it really is right now. Yes, Casey. So, since everyone else got to plug all of their stuff, I kind of want to do an extended plug for terminal.com here because I legitimately have a question about it.

Okay. Which is, at least, I am a lousy business person, so maybe that is the answer to the question that I'm about to ask. But in my mind, when I hear, like, you can just order something from the terminal, I'm like, you guys are going to be rich. I'm just like, that's going to be so freaking cool because two reasons. One, it's super novel, and people would tell each other that. And two, the only people in the world who have any money anymore are people who do use terminals, because they, They freaking stole all the money, and they have all the money now.

So my assumption is that this would be the perfect business thing, but for some reason, I don't get the sense that you guys are now the world's number one coffee spires. So why do you suck at marketing? There's my actual question. What is wrong with you? Crazy, did you just see it? We're on the streets going one at a time with people. Here's the key. We do not want to have losers drinking our coffee.

We're starting with top quality people who are the coolest people in the world. Who run the world? Programmers, obviously start with coolest people, programmers. After we get programmers, then we'll start individually selecting other people in, and then after that we'll go Starbucks. But you've got to have a cool base of people drink. Every program I know drinks this coffee. What is it?

You can't have it. We do that for four or five years. People are like, I want it so bad. And goes, you're too dumb. Then we sell it to them after we sell a big portion to some sort of like private equity. for you know black rock or something like that so i see so basically what you're saying is you're doing like the facebook model it's like oh you wanted to be on this you can't be on it yet like it's invite only invite only for this coffee i see yeah but really like what's going on guys like what's

wrong with i'll give you you the real answer i do i do give the real answer what's the real answer the real answer even though it's going to sound like in another ad is just we'd rather ship like small batch coffee that's really good which is just hard to ship to a lot of people and like do a lot of places. Do you like supply constrained basically? Yes, we're not in any other place but the U.S. Even though I know Europe would go hard. Yep.

You know, we had to be careful about stuff. Right. So that's, I mean, that's the main thing. I mean, maybe over the next year we have, we have started working a lot more on the coffee side of stuff in the past like three months probably and being a bit more, a bit more serious about it. But yeah, I mean, that's like, the major's just like,

I don't know how to, get a roaster in the EU that wants to interface with a custom like SaaS B to B slash B to C coffee experience where we like ship them addresses

and then you know so it's like that's the we're so we're getting there but that's honestly like we figured it's something pretty dark which is apparently taking people's public keys is against GDP so we have a big issue to get around so whatever

I said GLDDPR, whatever. GLP1. We all know this. You can't just throw an hell of that one. GLP one, I like that. But once the legislation's changed, we're going to be rich in Europe, okay? Once just a... Yeah.

We're currently lobbying the EU. And then we're going to sell all of the public keys to BlackRock. Like, that is the ultimate. Dude, dude, chat checkmate. I'm so excited. If you guys didn't see, when the coffee first went live in Hacker News, it was like number one on Hacker News. That was one of the comments with someone's like, why are they collecting the public keys? They're just, you're just giving them your public keys for free everyone.

Idiots. Don't you know the plan? They're harvesting public keys, which we all got together and said, who can we sell these two? Apparently there's a buyer out there. I got in the dark web. I could find no one. We were so confused because we were trying to figure out, is there something you can do with these? I thought for sure there's nothing you can do with the. the public key of an SSH key pair. I'm like, I don't understand. Isn't that kind of why we call it the public key? That's what we were so confused about.

People were just so ready. We called Sam Alden right away and was like, do you want to buy some public keys? And he was like, stop calling this number. We called up Mr. BlackRock and was just like, Mr. BlackRock, we got a deal. You cannot resist. It involves people information. He was like, I'm listening. And we're like, public keys.

hung up on. Hundreds of public keys. Hundreds of them. Hundreds. Yeah. It could cross a thousand. Yeah. All right. Well, this has been the stand- Oh, I had one, I had one last thing. Yeah. Just really quick. Casey's story earlier reminded me of an ancient proverb from Sun Tzu. You guys might have heard of him before. And it goes a little bit something like this,

which is some days you do the J.Diesling and other days you get J. Dieseled. Sun Tzu, Art of War. Yep. So I just wanted to make sure we got that one out there. I really wanted to say that line, and you guys kept interrupting where Akasey was doing that. So thanks. That's all I had to say. That's the end of the stand-up.

See you guys next to it. The name is the stand-up.