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Paul and Donna are hired by Prince Waldo Charming to find his lost love - his only clue?  A shoe. Cast List Donna Bella - Julie Hoverson Paul Bette - Joel Harvey Goldy Taylor - Rhys Torres-Miller Prince Waldo - Morgan Brown Alexander - Will Watt Rumplestiltskin - Philemon Vanderbeck Miss Barbara - Robert Cudmore (YAP Audio) Espadrille - Reynaud LeBoeuf Music by  Somewhere Off Jazz Street      Kevin MacLeod (Incompetech.com) Editing and Sound:   Julie Hoverson Cover Design:  Julie Hoverson "What kind of a place is it? Why it's a private detective's office in a time sort of like the 1940s, can't you tell?" ******************************************** PUMPS AND SPECTATORS - B&B Investigates, episode 2 Cast: Announcer Donna Bella Paul Bette Goldy Tailor - secretary Prince Waldo Charming Baron Alexander/Cindy Espadrille gruff "stepsister" Barbara, housemother/fairy godmother OLIVIA     Did you have any trouble finding it?  What do you mean, what kind of a place is it?  Why, it's a Detective Agency, can't you tell?  MUSIC Scene 1.    SOUND    PHONE RINGS, PICKS UP GOLDY    B&B Investigations, may I help you?  [beat, then turns belligerent]  Look, it ain't gonna happen.  ... No.  Because the boss don't help no one find tarts.  Nope.  Never. SOUND    HANGS UP DONNA    Another missing good time girl? GOLDY    Nahhh.  Queen of hearts.  Ya know. DONNA    Oh.  Patticakes.  Well, if anything real comes in, I can handle it.  [annoyed] Just 'cause Paul's not back from the enchanted brute convention as early as he was supposed to be doesn't mean the office shuts down.  He may be off doing who knows what with his furred and fanged cronies, but I'm sure he knows he can trust me to take on whatever-- MUSIC FOR VOICEOVER Scene 2.    GOLDY    Man, she had it bad.  A case of sea green envy for what the boss might be getting up to with his old college chums.  So what they were mostly frogs, bears, and the occasional walrus - she'd heard the sort of thing they used to get up to-- DONNA    What are you doing? GOLDY    Filling in.  The boss should be back any minute, and then -- DONNA    Look, I don't need anyone else horning in on my - our voiceovers. GOLDY    I just figured you might not want to be the one pouring your heart out in a narrative conceit.... DONNA    So you thought you'd pour it out for me?  [sarcastic] Thanx. Scene 3.    SOUND    DOOR OPENS, JINGLE OF BELL MUSIC ENDS ALEXANDER    Pardon the interruption, ladies.  May I announce Prince Waldo Charming? SOUND    STRIDES REGALLY IN, FOLLOWED BY AN ENDLESS ENTOURAGE. DONNA     Did you have to bring the whole box of toy soldiers?  The office is only so big. ALEXANDER    [consults with the prince, then]  Atten-hut!  About face!  March. SOUND     ENDLESS FEET LEAVE AGAIN ALEXANDER    The prince apologizes for the intrusion, but he prefers to keep this as informal and ‑ahem- low-profile as possible. DONNA    Sure.  I can see that.  Why don't you step into the office over here? MUSIC FOR VOICEOVER Scene 4.    DONNA    So this was the infamous prince Waldo - the biggest royal catch of the last eight fishing seasons, and far too wily to let himself get hooked.  Every princess, rich society dame, screen siren, and various other lesser gold diggers had set their bait for him, and he swam serenely past them all.  I'm not among the anglers myself, since I already had my own trophy in sight- my own partner, Paul Bette, away now drinking with his cronies and doing whatever they please in the name of "old times". GOLDY    [side of the mouth] You're staring. DONNA    Huh?  GOLDY    [side of the mouth] He's about to get a restraining order. DONNA    Oh, um--  Office, right. MUSIC OUT Scene 5.    SOUND    OFFICE DOOR CLOSES DONNA    Well?  What can I do for you? PRINCE    Coffee? DONNA    Certainly. SOUND    CLICK OF INTERCOM GOLDY     A package just came for you. DONNA    Busy now.  Goldy?  Three coffees, please?  One too hot, and two just right?  Yes. SOUND    INTERCOM OUT DONNA    So, what brings you to a private investigator? PRINCE    I don't think we need to discuss it until he arrives.  DONNA    [barely polite]  What?  [exasperated noise]  He is due back soon, but I can help you just as well.  My name's on the door too.  Well, my initial, anyway. PRINCE    [bland, disinterested] Oh?  Lovely.  I hope you don't mind, but I find this is really a masculine sort of problem. DONNA    There are potions for that, you know. ALEXANDER    [incensed]  Young lady, what are you intimating? DONNA    That maybe he doesn't live up to his name? ALEXANDER    What's wrong with Waldo? DONNA    I meant Charming. PRINCE    I'll have you know-- SOUND    DOOR SLAMS OPEN PAUL    Coffee?  Donna?  Why don't you let me deal with these good gentlemen.  DONNA    What? PAUL    [muttered] Go to voiceover. Scene 6.    MUSIC FOR VOICEOVER DONNA    [spitting words] So I left the boys to it. PAUL    [vo] What Donna didn't know was that I'd been listening on the intercom and knew she'd been about to scratch the eyes out of a very powerful prince-- DONNA    It wasn't his eyes I'd be aiming for-- PAUL    And it wouldn't do us any good to get on his wrong side. DONNA    Does he have a right one? PAUL    So rather than subject her to more of the prince's royaler-than-thou attitude, I decided to step in and let her off the hook. DONNA    [softening] Oh! PAUL    Scoot. DONNA    Leave the intercom on.  [blows him a kiss] VOICEOVER MUSIC FADES Scene 7.    DONNA    I'll just scoot then and go get my nails done or something, shall I? PRINCE    While nothing could possibly enhance your already considerable beauty, I'm certain that's precisely what you need.  [kisses her hand] SOUND    FOOTSTEPS, DOOR Scene 8.    DONNA    Yup.  Definitely need to get my nails sharpened. GOLDY    Come on.  Let's hear what they have to say-- PRINCE    [on intercom]  Bit of a temper, has she, that girl? PAUL    [on intercom, fading to normal voice halfway through]  You don't know the half of it.  She's passionate about everything. PRINCE    Ah.  Well, then.  Let me get down to the problem at hand.  I think you will understand, Mr., um-- PAUL    Bette.  Paul Bette.  Just call me Paul if you like. PRINCE    Paul.  Quite.  And you may call me Prince Charming. PAUL    Charmed.  [waits for a laugh, nothing]  Ah.  Your case? PRINCE    Well, I have a passing acquaintance with an old school chum of yours, Prince Freddie Grenouille, and he says you are top of the line - both for cleverness and for ... ahem... discretion. PAUL    Absolutely.  Anything you say won't leave this room. PRINCE    Good.  I'm sorry to take so long to come to the point here, but this is a very delicate and stressful situation, and I am truly truly desperate. PAUL    Go on. Scene 9.    MUSIC FOR VOICEOVER PAUL    I'd seen it all, from paternity suits to clearing up the occasional "carriage under the influence" charge.  And the royals were often the worst.  They could get away with pretty much anything, as long as they were willing to risk the occasional fairy charm or gypsy curse.  MUSIC CHANGES DONNA    But Charming had never been a "bad boy" - at least not in any way that made it into the scandal rags-- PAUL    Hey, what's with the-- DONNA    My new voiceover music just arrived by special messenger.  I'm trying out a couple of different pieces.  What do you think? PAUL    Um... DONNA    You don't like it.  PAUL    It's a little ... perky. DONNA    Fine.  Go ahead and finish up.  PAUL    Are you ...annoyed? DONNA    [snapping] No.  VOICEOVER MUSIC CHANGES BACK TO NORMAL PAUL    Charming did have a nearly spotless record.  He was an athlete - Greco-roman wrestling, fencing, and polo, a supporter of the arts - even acted in a few charity plays from time to time.  A general bon vivant.  No dark side, or so everyone thought... VOICEOVER MUSIC OUT Scene 10.    PRINCE    [vibrant] So when I danced with her last night, it was like we'd known each other for ever! PAUL    Did you happen to catch her name? PRINCE    Only Cindy.  When I asked her last name, she merely smiled and changed the subject - she was so alluring! PAUL    And you want me to-- PRINCE    [desperate] Find her.  I must see her again.  You can't possibly understand the pressure a thirty-uh-something prince is under to find a bride.  PAUL    I can see that would be awkward. PRINCE    Women are constantly being shoved at me from all sides, and - frankly?  I can't stand most of them.  They're such insipid little birds.  They tell me how fascinating I am, and then proceed to show they know nothing at all about me.  They profess to like all the things I like, then don't even know how to spell jai-alai, let alone play it.  PRINCE    [continued] I've spent years carefully keeping clear of marriage, since it would mean I'd have to spend my entire life with  a silly little twit, and would be obligated to listen to her chirp. PAUL    And this Cindy? PRINCE    [raptured] Completely different.  She dressed marvelously, but didn't feel compelled to give me the names of all her tailors.  She danced like a dream, but didn't demand I take her for one more spin around the floor, or suggest we walk out on the balcony.  And when she said she liked the things I like, she - she actually did! PAUL    Can you give me a description? PRINCE    About my height - in heels - long glossy dark chestnut hair - a few shades darker than your young lady's auburn - rather like Alexander's here - huge luminous eyes, and long artist's fingers on very strong hands. PAUL    Hmm.  Alexander, was it? ALEXANDER    [slightly panicky] Sir? PAUL    Can you add anything? ALEXANDER    I wasn't--  I was with a sick friend last night. PAUL    Ah.  That's awkward.  [to prince] Do you have any other clue to her identity? PRINCE    Oh, yes.  Alexander, the bag. ALEXANDER    Sir. SOUND    BAG PLOPPED ONTO DESK, SOMETHING PULLED OUT PAUL    A... shoe. PRINCE    She ran away at the stroke of midnight, and left it behind. PAUL    Can I keep this? PRINCE    But - she'll need it, when I find her again. PAUL    I mean to go over it for clues.  I'll get it back to you. PRINCE    [sigh of relief] Well, yes, then.  I thought-- nevermind. PAUL    I have my own female troubles - I have no plans to try and horn in on yours. ALEXANDER    You think any woman would throw over [too warm] such a Charming price, for a big brute of a private eye? PAUL    [chastened] No.  [tries to chuckle]  Course not.  But I do have to warn you, sire-- PRINCE    Yes? PAUL    This girl.  If she deliberately made herself such a mystery, there may very well be a good reason. PRINCE    like what? PAUL    She could be anything - a commoner, a ghost, a transformed hedgehog-- ALEXANDER    Nonsense! PAUL    The point is, you need to face reality and understand that there could be something very shady about her. PRINCE    I don't care.  She's the only woman I've ever felt this way about, and I plan to marry her - come what may.  You find her for me.  I shall handle the rest. Scene 11.    MUSIC FOR VOICEOVER PAUL    Chauvinist or not, Charming was determined, in that way that only princes in love can be.  It was that particular brand of love that drives one to climb unclimbable mountains and fight unkillable dragons, and what do they get at the end?  Married. MUSIC CHANGES DONNA    Like Charming said, most princesses were simpering idiots with more hair than brains, and I should know - I may not be one myself, but I went to the same prep school. PAUL    This?  You decided on this? DONNA    Give me a break.  I can't tell how they're gonna sound until I try them out. PAUL    This is awful. DONNA    Fine.  Let me see the shoe, and we'll go on from there. MUSIC OUT Scene 12.    SOUND    SHOE SET ON DESK PAUL    There. DONNA    Nice. SOUND    HE SITS IN CHAIR PAUL    Do you think it's a little... large? DONNA    A bit bigger than mine. PAUL    Really, I guess I never really-- DONNA    Look at my feet? PAUL    [leering a bit] I never make it down that far... SOUND    SHE SITS UP ON DESK DONNA    Really? PAUL    Really.  [slight growl] DONNA    Question.  When I left, did the prince and his friend -uh- make it down that far? PAUL    What do you mean? DONNA    What were they looking at? PAUL    They just watched you leave. DONNA    I didn't hear you growl-- PAUL    Well, of course--  [suddenly worried] Oh-- you actually notice when I do that? DONNA    [dreamy]  Of course I do.  I don't mind when you-- um, get annoyed on my behalf. PAUL    [deep breath]  I think we're getting a bit off track here. DONNA    Right.  Shoe. PAUL    No, left.  Shoe.  Anything? DONNA    It's a Dolce-geppeto.  They're pricey, but not extortionate.  Too bad she didn't mention her dressmaker - that would have been a much better clue.  PAUL    Well, how many places sell these shoes? DONNA    Assuming she's local, maybe six of the big boutiques downtown. PAUL    You wanna take those, then?  Go ask questions? DONNA    Um... No.  PAUL    You don't want to go shopping for shoes?  I mean, [scared] you're going to leave me to hit all these fancy ladies' shoe shops? DONNA    I have some ideas of my own to follow up on, and the shoe isn't going anywhere.  Tell you what, if you don't get a hit on the shoe in 24 hours, I'll take it.  PAUL    But - but how do I even ask? DONNA    Here. SOUND    INTERCOM BEEP DONNA    Goldy, could you come in here? SOUND    DOOR GOLDY    Yeah? DONNA    Take this to Rose & Snow's and ask for the style number.  Then ask them if they have any record of someone buying this shoe in this size in the last two weeks. GOLDY    I don't do legwork.  I ain't as young as I used to be. DONNA    Buy yourself a pair of shoes - on the office - while you're there. GOLDY    Gimme that! SOUND    SNATCH, DOOR SLAMS PAUL    [brightening] So I could just send her round to every store? DONNA    Not at a pair of shoes per trip.  We'd run through our entire commission. PAUL    What? DONNA    I said they weren't cheap.  One pair we can add in as a legitimate expense - past that...  [shrug]  Once you get the style nunmber, you can phone the rest.  Well, I'm heading out. SOUND    JUMPS DOWN OFF DESK DONNA    Need anything? PAUL    [a bit lost, watching her]  Um, no... DONNA    Chow! Scene 13.    MUSIC FOR VOICEOVER PAUL    Wo.  [deep breath]  I thought over the content of our discussion and realized there was something she was keeping back - that secret smile, the strange questions - but while we were talking I couldn't take my eyes off her, sitting on my desk like that, one silk-seamed leg crossed over the other.  [growl]  She doesn't even seem to notice the effect she has on me, and I'm not sure whether that makes it worse or better - if I tell her, she might just stop, and then I won't even get this much of a-- MUSIC CHANGES AGAIN DONNA    What is this, a beer garden?  They sent me the wrong box, I'm sure of it. PAUL    It's not so bad - for a polka. DONNA    Hmph.  You done yet? PAUL    Uh, yeah - I'll talk to a few folks while I'm waiting for Goldy to get back. DONNA    [beat] There are things men just don't see, and which it's probably better they don't.  A picture was painting itself in my head, and while it wasn't a particularly tricky answer to the problem of find the girl, it also wasn't likely to have the happiest of endings.  Why?  I added up a size 11 shoe, a lady who could spell jai alai and a prince who didn't stare at my backside as I left the room, and I got a very queer answer indeed. MUSIC     STARTS TO FADE DONNA    And it was an answer I wasn't sure my wonderful he-man partner would be at all happy about, which is why I went alone to a boarding house we used to rather snottily call Gamma Alpha Ypsilon, back in my own sorority days.  SOUND    FEET ON PORCH, KNOCK ON DOOR Scene 14.    ESPADRILLE    Yes? DONNA    Hi, I'm a P.I. and I'm-- SOUND     DOOR SLAM DONNA    [sigh] SOUND    KNOCK ON DOOR DONNA    I'm not going away.  You can talk to me, or you can talk to my partner, and he ain't gonna understand. SOUND    DOOR FLUNG OPEN BARBARA    What do you want? DONNA    I'm looking for someone, and I think she might be known here. BARBARA    For this you come around annoying my girls?  Scaring poor Espadrille half to death? DONNA    I have no interest in making trouble for anybody.  Please.  I just have some questions and would rather not shout them to the entire world.  Can we talk? BARBARA    [deciding] You tell me what you need, I decide if I'll ask anyone else.  Come on - my parlor's over here. MUSIC FOR VOICEOVER Scene 15.    DONNA    So I outlined the problem, and Miss Barbara was very upset by the whole situation - she said she was sure Cindy wasn't one of her ...boarders, but that she would ask around.  She didn't give me much hope, though. Scene 16.    MUSIC OUT BARBARA    Tell the poor boy it will never work.  Two worlds, all that.  He would have to be willing and able to take her as she is - warts and all, as they say - and the chances of that are - pfft! DONNA    You might be surprised. BARBARA    Honey, I ain't been surprised in years. VOICEOVER MUSIC CUTS IN Scene 17.    PAUL    Were you using the old music again? DONNA    I ...forgot.  Sorry.  But the new stuff is pretty cringe-worthy. PAUL    Keep trying, sweetheart.  You'll find something. DONNA    I hope so.  Did you need the voiceover? PAUL    Only if you're finished.  DONNA    [sigh] Yeah, I guess so.  I need to think. PAUL    So I checked with the photographers from last night's big bash - and found that the mystery just deepened.  This Cindy was a slick sister - seemed to always know where the snappers were and managed to keep her back to them all night.  Only once did they catch half a profile, head and shoulders with just a glimpse of the side of her face - I told him to blow it up and send it over, along with a dozen of the dress, figuring maybe Donna could play name that dressmaker.  Then I decided to catch up with an old friend... MUSIC OUT Scene 18.    SOUND    BANGING ON A DOOR RUMPY    [muffled, hung over] Bugger off! SOUND    CLINKING OF COINS PAUL    One, two, three-- SOUND    DOOR IS FLUNG OPEN RUMPY    If it ain't me old pal, Bette.  Git yourself inside here - that daylight's too damn bright. SOUND    SHUFFLING FEET PAUL    It's dark out. SOUND    A COUPLE OF STEPS RUMPY    Then what am I doing asleep?  SOUND    BONK PAUL    Ow! RUMPY     [amused] Gotta watch them rafters, you old beanstalk you. PAUL    [strained, cause he's bending over]  I need you to find out about someone for me.  A woman. RUMPY    Your sweet partner?  She running around with other ...dicks? PAUL    What?  What do you--? RUMPY    Nothing.  Just wondering maybe she plying her trade - and I do mean detecting, no offense, [sarcastic] my friend - elsewhere. PAUL    Of course she's not.  She wouldn't-- RUMPY     You're probably right.  So who did you want me to check over? SOUND    CORK OUT OF JUG PAUL    [musing] There wouldn't be time, anyway - though she didn't want to take on the shoe-- RUMPY    [gulping, then] Whazzat? PAUL    Nothing.  Um.  Right.  A woman who was spotted at the Prince's June Glam ball last night.  No one seems to know who she was, and she didn't, apparently, have an invite. RUMPY    [way sarcastic] Yeah, one look at me, and you just know I'm up on the society pages.  PAUL    I don't think this dame's "society."  I think she's working an angle on the prince, and I want to know if there's a whisper anywhere.  RUMPY    What's in it for me? PAUL    This, now-- SOUND    CLINK OF TWO COINS PAUL    And twice that if you can deliver. RUMPY    C'mon, Bette, old buddy, old pal - I'm gonna haveta drink around for this, maybe float some people.  Play the game. PAUL    Keep your receipts. SOUND    A COUPLE STEPS, THEN SOUND    BONK! PAUL    Ow! MUSIC FOR VOICEOVER Scene 19.    PAUL    I started the wheels in motion, but nothing would turn up for a couple of days - if ever.  [beat]  Donna?  Are you there?  [beat, then worried]  I figured she just didn't like the case - she certainly didn't seem to take a shine to that prince.  He was handsome, in that tall, cold, blonde princely sort of way, and she always says she hates those guys.  [beat]  Donna? DONNA    Busy now.  I'll fill in my part later. PAUL    Where are you?  Maybe I can come by and help? DONNA    Nope.  Just interviewing the prince's friend.  You go ahead and keep the--  Oops, gotta go! PAUL    The friend?  Dark haired, willowy, handsome, not so tall.  Not a good train of thought to catch, since like any other express, it runs non-stop.  [up]  I'll just go back to the office then, shall I? DONNA    [chuckling breaks off] Hmm?  Oh, sure.  See you in a bit. PAUL    [growls] MUSIC OUT Scene 20.    SOUND    DOOR SLAMS OPEN HARD GOLDY    I see someone's in a bright and shiny mood. PAUL    No calls. SOUND    STOMPING FEET, OFFICE DOOR YANKS OPEN, THEN SLAMS VOICEOVER MUSIC - new tune, not too bad. GOLDY    What did she do? DONNA    What? GOLDY    Oops - I'll get out of-- DONNA    Wait, what did who do? [waits a second]  Goldy?  Chicken.  Fine.  Music hold. SOUND    MUSIC CUTS SUDDENLY SOUND    TELEPHONE RINGS GOLDY    B&B Investigations, how may--  DONNA    [filter] What were you saying? GOLDY    Oh.  Boss is kind of upset is all.  Figured, um... DONNA    [filter, warning] What? GOLDY    Well, when he starts slamming doors, he's usually annoyed... um... with-- you? DONNA    [filter, long breath to get her composure back] I am in the middle of something, but-- Soon as I'm back, we're going to have a-- GOLDY    Oops - call coming in.  buh-Bye! SOUND    PHONE HANGS UP Scene 21.    ALEXANDER    Were you finished with me?  DONNA    Not quite, but I don't think we can talk here.  I need you to come to my suite at the Andersen Arms.  Tonight at 7 p.m.  Alone. ALEXANDER    Really, miss Bella, I don't think-- DONNA    Sweetie, you're not my type.  But we need to talk somewhere a bit more private.  ALEXANDER    [cautious and concerned] Talk? SOUND    SCRIBBLING A NOTE ON PAPER DONNA    It's regarding the welfare of the prince, and you know how people leap on-- SOUND    HANDING PAPER OVER ALEXANDER    Hmm?  [reads, gasps, the a bit frightened] Yes, of course.  I'll-- I'll be there. Scene 22.    NEW MUSIC FOR VOICEOVER - KIND OF ROMANCEY DONNA     Now to figure out how to tell Paul I wanted to handle a denouement on my own.  GOLDY    You want I should tell him? DONNA    Will you stop jumping in on the voiceovers?  We have enough trouble sharing them as it is. GOLDY    Fine.  I was gonna tell you where the boss is.  But since you obviously have everything well in hand-- DONNA    Where is he?  [beat]  Goldy?  Hold. Scene 23.    MUSIC CUTS OUT SOUND    PHONE RINGS DONNA    Come on... PAUL    [on phone] Hello? DONNA    Oh, drat. PAUL    [on phone] What?  Donna? DONNA    Paul, I-- PAUL    [on phone] I've found Cindy. DONNA    You have?  Where? PAUL    [on phone] Well, a good solid lead.  Should have my hands on her by this evening, but she's a tough cookie to nail down.  DONNA    Crumbs! PAUL    [on phone] What? DONNA    If you nailed down a cookie.  Nevermind. PAUL    [on phone] Why are we talking on the phone?  Why don't you just come on into the office? DONNA    I - I've got a terrible headache.  Think I'll go home and lie down.  Be fresh in the morning.  Bye! PAUL    [on phone] Donna?  [normal]  Donna? SOUND    HANGS UP THE PHONE PAUL    Damn.  Headache, my eye. SOUND    PHONE RINGS, keeps ringing PAUL    Goldy?  You wanna get this? GOLDY    [off] Nah - it's probably her again. PAUL    But it's your job to answer the phone... GOLDY    [off] I'm on my break. SOUND    PHONE PICKED UP PAUL    [sighs, then tries to mimic Goldy's voice] B&B Investigations, how can I help you? GOLDY    [off] Oy... RUMPY    [on phone]  You got a cold, Bette?  Or just drinking alum? PAUL    [normal]  Stuff it.  What you got, Rumpy? RUMPY    [on phone]  [chuckles]  What you got for me? PAUL    I'll meet you tomorrow. RUMPY    [on phone]  Nuh-uh.  [sighs]  My expense account musta grown from magic beans - it's just about sky level now. PAUL    We didn't-- RUMPY    [on phone]  Oh, it'll be worth it.  Bring your wallet to the Andersen Arms right away.  I'm in the lobby. SOUND    PHONE HANGS UP Scene 24.    MUSIC FOR VOICEOVER - STILL THE LAST MUSIC DONNA WAS USING, ROMANTIC PAUL    What the--?  This is... Donna's music?  [gulps]  The Andersen Arms was a classic old building on Mermaid street, and Donna had lived there for-- RUMPY    Did you bring the clinkage? PAUL    I'm not there yet.  This is still the voiceover. RUMPY    [chuckles] Nice grooves.  You going soft, pal.  PAUL    It's Donna's new music. RUMPY    So she's going soft? Hmmm... PAUL    Look, I'll be there in a second! RUMPY    No skin off my nose. PAUL    [sigh] Fine.  I arrived.  Done. MUSIC FADES OUT Scene 25.    RUMPY    Took you long enough.  Cross my palm, and I'll tell you all. SOUND    COINS CLINK RUMPY    That's what I'm talking about.  I've got one interesting tidbit-- PAUL    Shh.  Hide! RUMPY    What? PAUL    That fellow, who just skulked in.  I know him. RUMPY    Friend of yours? PAUL    A client.  RUMPY    Hmm.  Is this a consultation? PAUL    Hold that thought.  I'll be back to get my coins' worth. SOUND    STORMS IN THROUGH REVOLVING DOOR RUMPY    [going off] I'll start you an account. ORIGINAL VOICEOVER MUSIC STARTS PAUL    Nope.  [beat]  Go away.  [beat] I'm not saying anything. MUSIC ENDS IN A HUFF Scene 26.    SOUND    ELEVATOR DOORS OPEN SOUND    HEAVY STRIDES, KNOCKING ON A DOOR DONNA    [off]  Huh?  Hello? PAUL    Open up. DONNA    [dramatic gasp] Paul?  SOUND    DOOR OPENS, HE PUSHES IN DONNA    What?  What's wrong with you? PAUL    It's highly unprofessional, you know. DONNA    Well, I should say so! PAUL    To just waltz in here like this-- DONNA    Ye-e-es. PAUL    And--  What? DONNA    Are you apologizing? PAUL    What?  No.  Where is he?  I saw him in the lobby-- DONNA    [gasp]  You came here because--  You thought - [gasp]! PAUL    What am I supposed to think? DONNA    I solved the case, but you're not going to like the answer. PAUL    What makes you think I won't? SOUND    WATER RUNS IN THE BATHROOM PAUL    [growls] DONNA    That's why.  Look, I was about to do the big unveil, but-- PAUL    [plaintive] Without me? DONNA    [softening] You'll understand.  Can you keep quiet? PAUL    Of course I can.  SOUND    BLOWDRYER RUNS PAUL    [growls] DONNA    Hmm? PAUL    [sheepish] O-k. SOUND    KNOCK ON THE DOOR DONNA    That will be the prince. SOUND    FEET, DOOR OPENS Scene 27.    DONNA    Come in, your royal highness. SOUND    HESITANT FOOTSTEPS PAUL    No entourage? DONNA    Ssh.  Thank you for coming alone. PRINCE    [upset] I haven't much choice.  Alexander is nowhere to be found. PAUL    Your pal from the office? PRINCE    We've been chums since childhood.  I feel rather exposed without him along. DONNA    It must have been awkward, then, that he couldn't make it to the ball. PRINCE    It was the first he ever missed.  Too bad,  I think he'll like Cindy. DONNA    They probably have a lot in common. PAUL    [suspicious]  They do...? DONNA    You better have a seat, sire.  This is likely to get a little awkward. PRINCE    But have you found my Cindy? DONNA    Yes. PAUL    [quiet] Yes? PRINCE    Where is she? SOUND    DOOR OPENS, HEAVY FOOTSTEPS BARBARA    Right here.  Come on out, honey. SOUND    SLOW BARE FOOTSTEPS SOUND    CHAIR ALMOST TOPPLES AS PRINCE SPRINGS UP PRINCE    Darling! CINDY    [vexed] Oh, dear!  Why did you bring him here? DONNA    Hold on!  Sorry I didn't warn you, Cindy.  Sit down, your highness. PRINCE    But my darling, don't you want--? I thought we-- we clicked. PAUL    [musing quietly, gets it] Like they'd known each other for years.  [groan, gets it]  Oh. DONNA    Shh.  PRINCE    But you're the only woman I've ever loved. CINDY    And you're about to despise me. PRINCE    That could never happen. CINDY    Yes it can.  [voice lowers to Alexander, then ruefully]  I'm just lucky you're a bit nearsighted, Waldo. PRINCE    What?  Alexander? BARBARA    She prefers Cindy when she's all dolled up. CINDY    [Cindy again] I really do. PRINCE    But... is it a spell? CINDY    No.  It's just-- BARBARA    Go on, hon.  There's no going back now. CINDY    I could probably spin you a grand story about being enchanted, or cursed, but none of it is true.  Unless you count love as some kind of magic. PRINCE    Love? CINDY    I never meant it to be more than one night.  One chance to dance... with you.  But you - you just had to [wistful] go all manly and try and find me!  Barbara convinced me it's better to let you know, rather than leave you searching forever. BARBARA    Trust me, he'd eventually find some clue to who you are.  The higher the hopes, the harder the fall, and all that. CINDY    Don't worry, I've already - I mean Alexander has already - applied for a quest permit, and I plan to absent myself from court for a decade or so. PRINCE    I say - I'm the prince here.  Don't I get any say? CINDY    Yes.  [deep breath, bracing herself]  BARBARA    [comforting] I'm right here. DONNA    Me too. CINDY    Go ahead. PRINCE    I-- I suppose I never thought about you that way, Alexander. CINDY    [wilting] Of course. PRINCE    Until I saw you at the ball. CINDY    [startled, perking up a bit] Oh? PRINCE    Perhaps there is some magic.  To love. CINDY    But you don't want me.  I mean you want this-- the surface-- when underneath, I'm-- PRINCE    My best friend?  What's so wrong?  I've met far too many beautiful girls I can't stand to be near.  You do something to me. CINDY    [gasps ecstatically] [their voices fade for a bit] Scene 28.    DONNA    I wish it could work for them. PAUL    Really?  It seems an odd match.  Really odd. DONNA    What's wrong with an odd match?  Love's all that matters.  Though I do have one concern.  Babs? BARBARA    [sniffling a bit at the romantic moment]  What?  Yes?  Oh, go on - I'm all verklempt. DONNA    I get choked up too.  But, what about when they're supposed to--you know-- have kids? BARBARA    Oh that's a piece of cake.  There's always a baby in a peach pit, or I have this deal with the marsh king.  You'd be surprised how often these kinds of things happen. PRINCE    [fading back in] But how will it ever work? PAUL    [clears throat]  May I? DONNA    What?  Really? PAUL    I'm not one to stand in the way of true love.  You said Alexander applied for a quest permit - no reason he shouldn't go, disappearing from court, about the same time Prince Charming-- PRINCE    Oh, you can call me Waldo. PAUL    Thank you, your highness.  [back to the point] At the same time that Waldo meets Alexander's distant cousin Cindy, who sneaked into town to surprise him and ran into the prince instead.  DONNA    Oh, and, if you can, you should do a little bit of almost being seen together, which will take a little quick change action, but we can help with that, right Barbara? BARBARA    Quick change is practically my middle name. PAUL    Alexander can send a letter now and then, eventually rescue a damsel in distress, and settle down in a kingdom far far away.  PRINCE    There's only one thing left to do! DONNA    Oh? PRINCE    I hope you remembered to bring that shoe.  It will have to do until we can get rings... BARBARA    [choked up] I'll start planning the reception! Scene 29.    OLD VOICEOVER MUSIC PAUL    So, the prince found his true love.  DONNA    Love's funny that way. PAUL    And all Alexander's-- DONNA    --Cindy's-- PAUL    --years of devotion paid off. DONNA    Waldo better appreciate all he's-- she's done. PAUL    There's just not enough pronouns-- DONNA    --Particularly since some of your friends are definitely "it"s. PAUL    Hah. Hah. DONNA    Speaking of those, how was the enchanted beasts reunion? PAUL    [down] Fine.  Every year there's less of us left - too many with their curses broken, or married with better things to do. DONNA    [hopeful]  It's in the air.  Love, I mean. PAUL    [growls, close] Yeah... [backing off] I mean, they make a cute couple... GOLDY    [exasperated] Oh, shut up and kiss her already. PAUL & DONNA    What? GOLDY    You heard me.  Think quick - I'm on double overtime just to be in this voiceover. CLOSING  

Does your app have a database? Does that database play an important role in how the app operations and users perceive its quality? Most of you probably said yes to the first, and definitely to the second. But what if your DB isn't doing as well as it should? How would you know? And once you know, what do you do about it? On this episode, we're joined by Michael Christofides, co-creator of pgMustard, to discuss and explore the EXPLAIN command for Postgres and other databases as well as all the recommendations you might dig into as a result of understanding exactly what's happening with you queries. Links from the show Michael Christofides: @michristofides Datagrip: jetbrains.com pgMustard: pgmustard.com pgMustard example 1: app.pgmustard.com pgMustard example 2: app.pgmustard.com pgMustard example 3: app.pgmustard.com Arctype: arctype.com Postico: eggerapps.at/postico Laetitia Avrot Secrets of 'psql'— Video: youtube.com Beekeeper Studio: beekeeperstudio.io DBeaver: dbeaver.io SQLite Browser: sqlitebrowser.org Michael's new Up and Running with Git course: talkpython.fm/git Watch this episode on YouTube: youtube.com Episode transcripts: talkpython.fm --- Stay in touch with us --- Subscribe to us on YouTube: youtube.com Follow Talk Python on Twitter: @talkpython Follow Michael on Twitter: @mkennedy Sponsors Sentry Error Monitoring, Code TALKPYTHON Talk Python Training AssemblyAI

What is the gear you take to EVERY gig? Matt, Rob & Gabor take you through their top five rig must haves. Some are practical, some are questionable...good times either way!   Rob Rhodes - www.rhodetripent.com Gabor Josika - SuperFunAwesomeHappyTime Pedal Show   This episode is brought to you by Fretboard Biology    Fretboard Biology - the online guitar college created by Joe Elliott, ex Head of Guitar at GIT and McNally Smith Music College. Fretboard Biology Guitar Speak Podcast #146 - Joe Elliott - ex guitar head of GIT - launches Fretboard Biology Guitar Speak Podcast Links PayPal Tip Jar Visit us at guitarspeakpodcast.com Subscribe and find previous episodes at: Apple Podcasts Spotify Stitcher   Follow us on Facebook & Instagram   Contact us at guitarspeakpodcast@gmail.com

Watch the live stream: Watch on YouTube About the show Sponsored by us! Support our work through: Our courses at Talk Python Training Test & Code Podcast Patreon Supporters Brian #1:distinctipy “distinctipy is a lightweight python package providing functions to generate colours that are visually distinct from one another.” Small, focused tool, but really cool. Say you need to plot a dynamic number of lines. Why not let distinctipy pick colors for you that will be distinct? Also can display the color swatches. Some example palettes here: https://github.com/alan-turing-institute/distinctipy/tree/main/examples from distinctipy import distinctipy # number of colours to generate N = 36 # generate N visually distinct colours colors = distinctipy.get_colors(N) # display the colours distinctipy.color_swatch(colors) Michael #2: Soda SQL Soda SQL is a free, open-source command-line tool. It utilizes user-defined input to prepare SQL queries that run tests on dataset in a data source to find invalid, missing, or unexpected data. Looks good for data pipelines and other CI/CD work! Daniel #3: Python in Nature There's a review article from Sept 2020 on array programming with NumPy in the research journal Nature. For reference, in grad school we had a fancy paper on quantum entanglement that got rejected from Nature Communications, a sub-journal to Nature. Nature is hard to get into. List of authors includes Travis Oliphant who started NumPy. Covers NumPy as the foundation, building up to specialized libraries like QuTiP for quantum computing. If you search “Python” on their site, many papers come up. Interesting to see their take on publishing software work. Brian #4: Supercharging GitHub Actions with Job Summaries From a tweet by Simon Willison and an article: GH Actions job summaries Also, Ned Batchelder is using it for Coverage reports “You can now output and group custom Markdown content on the Actions run summary page.” “Custom Markdown content can be used for a variety of creative purposes, such as: Aggregating and displaying test results Generating reports Custom output independent of logs” Coverage.py example: - name: "Create summary" run: | echo '### Total coverage: ${{ env.total }}%' >> $GITHUB_STEP_SUMMARY echo '[${{ env.url }}](${{ env.url }})' >> $GITHUB_STEP_SUMMARY Michael #5:Language Summit is write up out via Itamar, by Alex Waygood Python without the GIL: A talk by Sam Gross Reaching a per-interpreter GIL: A talk by Eric Snow The "Faster CPython" project: 3.12 and beyond: A talk by Mark Shannon WebAssembly: Python in the browser and beyond: A talk by Christian Heimes F-strings in the grammar: A talk by Pablo Galindo Salgado Cinder Async Optimisations: A talk by Itamar Ostricher The issue and PR backlog: A talk by Irit Katriel The path forward for immortal objects: A talk by Eddie Elizondo and Eric Snow Lightning talks, featuring short presentations by Carl Meyer, Thomas Wouters, Kevin Modzelewski, Samuel Colvin and Larry Hastings Daniel #6:AllSpice is Git for EEs Software engineers have Git/SVN/Mercurial/etc None of the other engineering disciplines (mechanical, electrical, optical, etc), have it nearly as good. Altium has their Vault and “365,” but there's nothing with a Git-like UX. Supports version history, diffs, all the things you expect. Even self-hosting and a Gov Cloud version. “Bring your workflow to the 21st century, finally.” Extras Brian: Will McGugan talks about Rich, Textual, and Textualize on Test & Code 188 Also 3 other episodes since last week. (I have a backlog I'm working through.) Michael: Power On-Xbox Documentary | Full Movie The 4 Reasons To Branch with Git - Illustrated Examples with Python A Python spotting - via Jason Pecor 2022 StackOverflow Developer Survey is live, via Brian TextSniper macOS App PandasTutor on webassembly Daniel: I know Adafruit's a household name, shout-out to Sparkfun, Seeed Studio, OpenMV, and other companies in the field. Joke: A little awkward

Chris switched from Trello over to Linear for product management and talks about prioritizing backlogs. Steph shares and discusses a tweet from Curtis Einsmann that super resonated with the work she's doing right now: "In software engineering, rabbit holes are inevitable. You will research libraries and not use them. You'll write code just to delete it. This isn't a waste; sometimes, you need to go down a few wrong paths to get to the right one." This episode is brought to you by BuildPulse (https://buildpulse.io/bikeshed). Start your 14-day free trial of BuildPulse today. Linear (https://linear.app/) Curtis Einsmann Tweet (https://twitter.com/curtiseinsmann/status/1521451508943843329) Louie Bacaj Tweet (https://twitter.com/LBacaj/status/1478241322637033474?s=20) Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of The Bike Shed! Transcript: AD: Flaky tests take the joy out of programming. You push up some code, wait for the tests to run, and the build fails because of a test that has nothing to do with your change. So you click rebuild and you wait. Again. And you hope you're lucky enough to get a passing build this time. Flaky tests slow everyone down, break your flow and make things downright miserable. In a perfect world, tests would only break if there's a legitimate problem that would impact production. They'd fail immediately and consistently, not intermittently. But the world's not perfect, and flaky tests will happen, and you don't have time to fix them all today. So how do you know where to start? BuildPulse automatically detects and tracks your team's flaky tests. Better still, it pinpoints the ones that are disrupting your team the most. With this list of top offenders, you'll know exactly where to focus your effort for maximum impact on making your builds more stable. In fact, the team at Codecademy was able to identify their flakiest tests with BuildPulse in just a few days. By focusing on those tests first, they reduced their flaky builds by more than 68% in less than a month! And you can do the same because BuildPulse integrates with the tools you're already using. It supports all the major CI systems, including CircleCI, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, and others. And it analyzes test results for all popular test frameworks and programming languages, like RSpec, Jest, Go, pytest, PHPUnit, and more. So stop letting flaky tests slow you down. Start your 14-day free trial of BuildPulse today. To learn more, visit buildpulse.io/bikeshed. That's buildpulse.io/bikeshed. CHRIS: Good morning, and welcome to Tech Talk with Steph and Chris. Today at the top of the hour, it's tech traffic hits. STEPH: Ooh, tech traffic. [laughs] I like that statement. CHRIS: Yeah. The Git lanes are clogged up with...I don't know. I got nothing. STEPH: [laughs] Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Steph Viccari. CHRIS: And I'm Chris Toomey. STEPH: And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. So, hey, Chris, what's new in your world? CHRIS: What's new in my world? Actually, I have a specific new thing that I can share, which is, as of the past week, I would say, switched from Trello over to Linear for product management. It's been great. It was a super straightforward transfer. They actually had an importer. We lost some of the comment threads on the Trello cards. But that was easy enough to like each Linear ticket has a link back to Trello. So it's easy enough to keep the continuity. But yeah, we're in a whole new world, a system actually built for maintaining a product backlog, and, man, it shows. Trello was a bunch of lists and cards and stuff that you could link between, which was cool. But Linear is just much more purpose-built and already very, very nice. And we're very happy with the switch. STEPH: I feel like you came in real casual with that news, but that is big news, that you did a switch. [laughter] CHRIS: How are you going to bury the lead like that? You switched project management...[laughter] I actually didn't think it was...I'm excited about it but low-key excited, which is weird because I do like productivity and task management software. So you would think I would be really excited about this. But I've also tried enough of them historically to know that that's never going to be the thing that actually makes or breaks your team's productivity. It can make things worse, but it can't make you great. That's the thing that I believe. And so it's a wonderful piece of software. I'm very excited about it but -- STEPH: Ooh, I like that. It can make you worse, but it doesn't make you great. That's so true, yeah, where it causes pain. Well, and it does make sense. You've been complaining a bit about the whole login with Trello and how that's been frustrating. But I haven't even heard of Linear. That's just...that's, I mean, you're just doing what you do where you bring that new-new. I haven't heard of Linear before. CHRIS: I try to live on the cutting edge. Actually, I deeply try to not live on the cutting edge at this point in my life. That early adopter wave, no, no, no, that's not for me anymore. But I've known a few folks who've moved to Linear. And everyone that I've spoken to who has moved to it has been like, "Yeah, it's been great." I've not heard anything negative. And I've heard or experienced negative things about every other product management tool out there. And so, it seemed like an easy thing. And it was a low-cost enough switch in terms of opportunity costs or the like, it took the effort of someone on our team moving those cards over and setting up the new system and training, but it was relatively straightforward. And yeah, we're super happy with it. And it feels different now. I feel like I can see the work in a different way which is interesting. I think we had brought in a Chrome extension for Trello. I think it's like Hello Epics or something like that that allows...it abuses the card linking functionality in Trello and repurchases that feature as an epic management thing. But it's quarter-baked is how I would describe it, or it's clearly built on top of existing things that were not intended to be used exactly in that way. So it does a great job. Hello Epics does a great job of trying to make something like parent-child list management stuff happen in Trello. But it's always going feel like an afterthought, a secondary feature, something that's bolted on. Whereas in Linear, it's like, no, no, we absolutely have the idea of projects, of course, and you can see burndown charts and things. And the thing that I do want to be careful about is not leaning too much into management. Linear has the idea of cycles or sprints, as many other folks think of them, or iterations or whatever you want to call them. But we've largely not been working in that mode. We've just continued to work through the next up list; that's it. The next up list should be prioritized and well defined at the top and roughly in priority order. So just pick up the next card and work on it. And we just do that every single day. And now we're in a piece of software that has the idea of cycles, and I'm like, oh, this is vaguely interesting. Do we want to do that? Oh, but if you're going to do that, you probably do some estimation, right? And I was like, oh no, now we're into a place that's...okay, I have feelings. I got to decide how to approach that. And so, I am intrigued. And I wonder if we could just say like ten carts that's how many come into a cycle, and that's it. And we use the loosest heuristics possible to define how we structure a cycle so that we don't fall into the trap of, oh, what's our roadmap going to look like six months from now? JK, what's anything going to look like six months from now? That's not a knowable fact. STEPH: I was just thinking where you said that you're moving into sprints or cycles, and then there's that push, well, now you got to estimate. And I just thought, do you? Do you have to estimate? [laughs] CHRIS: We need a burndown chart through 2024, and it must be meticulously accurate down to the hour. STEPH: I think meticulously wrong is how that goes. [laughs] CHRIS: Which is the best kind of wrong. If you're going to be wrong, be meticulous about it. STEPH: Be thorough about it. [laughs] Yeah, the team that I'm on right now, we have our bi-weekly planning, and we go through the board, and we pull stuff in. But there's never a discussion about estimation. And I hadn't really appreciated that until just now. How we don't think about how long is this going to take? We just talked about, well, what's in-flight? And how much work do people still have going on? And then here's the list of things we can pull in. But there's always a list that you can go back to. Like, it's very...we pull in the minimum and knowing that if we run out of work, there's another place to go where there's stuff that's organized. And I just love that cadence, that idea of like, let's not try to make guesses about the future; let's just have it lined up and ready for us to go when we're ready to pull it in. Although I know, that's also coming from a very developer's perspective, and there are product managers who are trying to communicate as to when features are going to get out into the world. So I get that there's a balance, but I still have strong feelings and hesitations around estimating work. CHRIS: Well, I feel like there is a balance there. And so many things in history are like, well, this is an overcorrection against that, and that's an overcorrection against this. And the idea that we can estimate our work that far out into the future that's just obviously false to me based on every project I've ever worked on that has tried to do it. And it has always failed without question. But critically, there is the necessity to sync up work and like, oh, marketing needs to plan the launch of this feature, and it's a critical one. What's it going to look like? When's it going to be ready? You know, we're trying to go for an event, it's not just know...we developers never estimate anything past the immediate moment where like, that's not acceptable. We got to find a middle ground here. But where that middle ground is, is interesting. And so, just operating in the sort of we do work as it comes up is the easiest thing because no one's lying about anything at that point. But sometimes you got to make some guesses and make some estimations. And then it gets into the murky area of I believe with 75% confidence that in three weeks, we will have this feature ready. But to be clear, I said with 75% confidence that means one-quarter of the time; we will not be there at that date. What does that mean? What does that failure mode look like? Let's talk about that. And can you have honest, open, transparent, useful conversations there? That's the space that it becomes more subtle if you need to do that. STEPH: You're reminding me of a conversation that I had with someone where they shared with me some very aggressive team goals. And it was a very friendly conversation. And they're like, "How do you feel about aggressive goals?" And I was like, "Well, it depends. How do you feel about aggressive failure?" Because then once I know where you stand there, then we can talk about aggressive goals. Now, if we're being aggressive, but then we fail to achieve that, and it's one of those, okay, we didn't meet the goal that we'd expected, but everything is fine, and it's not a big deal, then I am okay. Sure, let's shoot for the stars. But if it's one of those, we are communicating these goals to the outside world, and it's going to become incredibly important that we meet these goals, and if we don't, then things are going to go on fire, people are going to be in trouble, and it's just going to be awful, then let's not set aggressive goals. Let's not box ourselves into a space where we are setting ourselves up to fail or feel pain in a meaningful way. I agree that estimations are important, especially in terms of you need to collaborate with other departments, and then also just to provide some sense of where the product is headed and when things may be released. I think estimations then just become problematic when they do become definite, and they're based on so many unknowns, and then when I don't know is not an answer. So if someone asked, "What's your estimate for this?" And the very honest real answer is I don't know, like, we haven't done this type of work before, or these are all the unknowns, and then someone's like, "Well, let's just put an estimation of like two weeks on it," and they just sort of try to force-fit it into being what they want, then that's where it starts to just feel incredibly problematic. CHRIS: Yeah, estimation is a very murky area that we could spend entire episodes talking about, and in fact, I think we have a handful of times. So with that, Linear has been great. We're going to see just how much or how little estimation we actually want to do. But it's been a very nice addition to the toolset. And I'll let you know as we deepen our usage of it what the experience is like, but that's the main thing that's new in my world. What's new in your world? STEPH: Well, before we bounce over to my world, you said something that has intrigued me that has also made me start reflecting on some of the ways that I like to work. And you'd mentioned that you have this prioritized backlog that people are pulling tickets from. And I don't know exactly if there's a planning session or how that looks, but I have recognized that when I am working with a team, and we don't have any planning session, if everybody is just pulling from this backlog, that's being prioritized by someone on the team, that I find that a bit overwhelming. Because the types of work being done can vary so drastically that I find I'm less able to help my colleagues or my teammates because I don't have the context for what they're working on. It surprises me. I'm like, oh, I didn't even know we're working on that feature, or I don't have the context for what's the problem that we're trying to solve here. And it makes it just a lot harder to review and then have conversations with them. And I get overwhelmed in that environment. And I've recognized that about myself based on previous projects that were more similar to that versus if I'm on a project where the team does get together every so often, even if it's high level to be like, hey, here's the theme of the tickets that we're working on, or here's just some of the stuff, then I feel much more prepared for the work that is coming in and to be able to context switch and review. And yeah, so I've kind of learned that about myself. I'm curious, are you similar, or how does that work for you? CHRIS: I'm definitely similar. And I think probably the team is closer to what you're describing. So we do have a planning session every week, just a quick 30-minute scan through the backlog, look at the things that are coming up and also the larger themes. Previously, Epics and Trello now projects and Linear. But talking about what are the bigger pieces of work that we're moving on, and then what are the individual tickets associated with that that we'll be expecting to work on in the next week? And just making sure that everyone has broad clarity around what that feature set is. Also, we're a very small team at this point. Still, we're four people total, but one of the developers is on a break for a couple of weeks this summer. And so there are really only three of us that are driving on the code. And so, with three of us working on the projects, we try very intentionally to have significant overlap between the various...like, we don't want any one person to own any portion of things at this point. And so we're doing a good amount of pairing to cross-pollinate and make sure everyone's...not everyone's aware of everything, but at least one other person is sufficiently aware of everything between the three of us. And I think that's been working well. I don't think we have any major gaps, save for the way that we're doing our mobile architecture that's largely managed by one of the developers on the team and a contractor that we're working with to help do a lot of the implementation. That's a known we chose to silo that thing. We've accepted the cost of that for now. And architecturally, the rest of us are aware of it, but we're not like in the Swift code writing anything because I don't know how to write Swift at this point. I'd love to learn it. I hear good things about the language. [12:26] So yeah, I think conceptually very similar to what you're describing of still want to have people be able to review. Like, I don't want to put up a PR and people be like, I don't know, that looks like code, I guess. I'm not sure what it does. Like, I want it to be very...I want us all to be roughly on the same page, and thus far, we are. As the team grows, that will become trickier to maintain because there are just inherently probably more things that are moving, more different feature areas and surface area that we're tackling in any given week, or there are different ways to approach that. I know you've talked about having a limited number of themes for a given cycle, so that's an idea that can pop up. But that's something that we'll figure out as we get further. I think I'm happy with where we're at right now, so yeah, that's the story there. STEPH: Okay, cool. Yeah, all of that resonates with me, and thinking about it a little more deeply in this moment, I'm realizing I think something you said helped me put this together where when I'm reviewing someone's change, I'm not necessarily just looking to see does your code work? I'm going to trust you that your code works. I may have thoughts about design and other things, but I really want to understand more what's the change to the product that we're making? What's the goal that we're looking to achieve? How are we measuring this? And so if I don't have that context, that's what contributes to that feeling of like, hard context switching of not just context switching, but now I have to level myself up to then understand the problem that's being solved by this. Versus had I known some of the themes going into that particular cycle or sprint, I would have felt far more prepared for that review session versus having to then dig through all the data and/or tickets or talk to someone. Well, switching back to what's going on in my world, I have a particular tweet that I want to share, and it's one that Joël Quenneville brought to my attention. And it just resonates so much with all the type of work that I'm doing right now. So I'm going to read the tweet, and then we'll link to it in the show notes as well. But it's from Curtis Einsmann, and Curtis wrote: "In software engineering, rabbit holes are inevitable. You will research libraries and not use them. You'll write code just to delete it. This isn't a waste; sometimes, you need to go down a few wrong paths to get to the right one." And that describes all the work that I'm doing right now. It's a lot of exploratory, a lot of data-driven work, and finding ways that we can reduce the time that it takes to run RSpec on CI. And it also ties in nicely to one of the things that I think we talked about last week, where we discovered that a number of files have a high runtime variance. And I've really dug into the data there to understand, okay, is it always specific files that have these high runtime variants? Are there any obvious contributions to what's causing this? Are we making real network calls that then could sometimes take a long time to return? And the result is there's nothing obvious. They're giant files. The number of SQL commands that are being run for each file varies drastically. They're all high, but it's still very different. There's no single fact about these files that has really been like, yes, this is what's causing these files to have such a runtime variance. And so while I've been in the data, I'm documenting it, and I'm making a list and putting it all together in a ticket so at least it's there to look at later. But I'm going to move on. It's one of those I would love to know what's causing this. I would love to address it because it would put us in an ideal state for how we're distributing tests, which would have a significant impact on our runtime. But it also feels a little bit like chasing my tail because I'm worried, like with some of the other experiments that we've done in the past where we've addressed tentpoles, that as soon as you address the issue for one or two files, then other files start having the same problem. And you're just going to continue to chase and chase, and I don't want to be in that. So upfront, this was one of those; hey, let's look at the data. If there's something obvious, let's address it; if not, move on. So I'm at that point today where I'm wrapping up all of that data, and then I'm going to move on, move on to the next thing. CHRIS: There's deep truth in that tweet that you shared at the start of this segment. The idea like if we knew the work that we had to do at the front, yeah, we would just do that, but often, we don't. And so, being able to not treat it as a failure when something doesn't work out is, I think, so critical. I think to expand on the idea just a tiny bit, the idea of the scientific method, failure is totally an option and is part of science. I remember watching MythBusters, and Adam Savage is just kind of like, "Failure is always an option," and highlighting that as part of it. Like, it's an outcome. You've learned something. You have a new data point. You can take that and then carry it forward with you. But it's rough in the moment. And so, I do think that this is a worthwhile thing to meditate on. And it's something that I've had to revisit a handful of times in my career of just like, man, I feel like I've just been spinning my tires all week. I'm like, we know what we want to get done, but just each approach I take isn't working for one reason or another. And then, finally, you get to the end. And then you've got this paragraph-long summary of all the things that didn't work in your PR and one-line change sort of thing. And those are painful, but they're part of the game. Like, that is unavoidable. I have not found a way to just know how to do the work upfront always. I would love that. I would sign up for whatever seminar was selling that. I wouldn't. I would know that that seminar is a lie, actually. But broadly, I'm intrigued by the idea if someone were selling that, I'd be like, well, I mean, pitch me on it. Tell me why I should believe you; I don't, just to be clear. But yeah. STEPH: This project has really helped me embrace always setting a goal or a question upfront about what I'm wanting to achieve or what I'm looking to answer because a number of times while Joël and I have been spelunking through data...And then so originally, with the saga, we started out with why doesn't our math match reality? We understand that if these tests are distributed perfectly across the CPUs, then that should cut the runtime in half. But yet, we weren't seeing that even though we had addressed the tentpoles. So we dug into understanding why. And the answer is because they're not perfectly distributed, and it's because of the runtime variance. And that was a critical moment to look back and say, "Did we achieve the goal?" Yes, we identified the problem. But once you see a problem, it's just so easy to dig in and keep going. It's like, well, now I want to know what's causing these files to have a runtime variance. But it's one of those we achieved our goal. We acknowledged upfront that we wanted to at least understand why. Let's make a second decision, do we keep going? And I'm at that point where, frankly, I probably dug in a little more than I should because I'm stubborn. But I'm recognizing that now's the time to back away and then go back and move on to the next high-priority item, which is converting for funsies; I'll share. The next thing is converting Test::Unit test over to RSpec because we have, I think, around 25 tests that are written in Test::Unit. And we want to move them over to RSpec because that particular just step in the build process takes a good three to four minutes. And part of that is just booting up Rails and then running the tests very fast. And we're underutilizing the machine that's running them because it's only 25 tests, but there are 86 CPUs to run it. So we'd really like to combine those 25 tests with the rest of the RSpec suite and drop that step. So then that should add minimal time to the overall build but then should take us down at least a couple of minutes. And then also makes it easier to manage and help folks so that way, there's one consistent testing framework that's in use versus having to manage some of these older tests. CHRIS: It's funny; I think it was just two episodes back where we talked about why RSpec, and I think both of us were just like, well yeah. But I mean, if there are tests and another, like, it's fine, you just leave them with the exception that if there's like 2% of our tests are in Test::Unit, and everything else is in RSpec, yeah, maybe that that conversion efforts seem totally worth it. But again, I think as you're describing that, what I'm hearing is just like the scientific method, just being somewhat structured in the approach to what's the hypothesis? And what's the procedure we're going to use to determine if that hypothesis is true or false? And then what do we do? And then what are the results? And then you just do that on loop. But being not just sort of exploring. Sometimes you have to be on exploratory mode. But I definitely find that that tiny bit of rigor of just like, wait, okay, before I actually do anything, what do I think is going on here? What's my guess? And then, okay, if that guess were true, what would I be able to observe in the world? Okay, here we go. And just that tiny bit of structure is so...it sometimes feels highly formal to go into that mode and be like, no, no, no, let me take a step back. Let me write down my thoughts. I'm going to have a little checklist and do the thing. But I've never regretted doing it. I will say that. I have deeply regretted not doing it. I feel like I should make a list of things that fit that structure. I've never regretted committing in Git ever. That's been great. I've always been able to unwind it, but I've never been able to not unwind it or the opposite. I've regretted not committing. I have not regretted committing. I have regretted not writing out my hypothesis or approach. I have not regretted doing it. And so, yeah, this feels like it falls firmly in that category of like, it's worth just a tiny bit of structure. There's a reason it is the scientific method. STEPH: Yeah, I agree. I've not regretted documenting upfront what it is I look to achieve and how I think I'm going to answer the question. That has been immensely helpful. Because then I also forget, like, two weeks ago, I'll be like, wasn't there a question around why this was happening, and I need to understand? And all of that was so context-heavy that as soon as I'm out of the thick of it, I completely forget it. So if I care about it deeply or if I want to be able to revisit it, then I need to document it for myself. It's given me a lot of empathy for people who do more scientific research around, oh my gosh, like, you have to document everything you do and then still be able to prove it five years from now or however long. I'm just throwing out numbers. And it needs to be organized enough that someone, if they do question your research that, then you have it there. My research documents would not withstand scrutiny at this point because they are still just more personal notes. But yes, it's given me a lot of empathy and respect for people who do run very serious research, experiments, and trials, and then have to be able to prove it to the world. Pivoting just a bit, there's a particular topic that resonated with both you and I; in fact, it's a particular tweet. And, Louie, I do apologize if I mispronounce your last name, but Louie Bacaj. And we'll include a link in the show notes to the tweet, but Louis shared, "I managed multiple engineering teams before quitting tech. Now that I quit, I can speak freely. Here are 12 things your manager may not be telling you, but I know for a fact will help you." So there are a number of interesting discussions and comments that are in this thread. The one thing in particular that really caught my attention is number 10, and it's "Advocate for junior developers." So they said that their friend reminded them that just because you don't have 10-plus years of experience does not mean that they won't be good. Without junior engineers on the team, no one will grow. Help others grow; you'll grow too. And that's the part that I love so much is that without junior engineers on the team, no one will grow because that was very thought-provoking for me. It's something that I find that I agree with deeply, but I hadn't really considered why I agree with that so much. So I'm excited to dive into that topic with you. And then, as a second topic to go along with that is, can juniors start with a remote team? I think that's one of the other questions when you and I were chatting about this. And I'm intrigued to hear your thoughts. CHRIS: A bunch of stuff there. Starting with the tweet, I love elements of this. Some of it feels like it's intentionally somewhat provocative. So like, without junior engineers on the team, no one will grow. That feels maybe a little bit past the bar because I think we can technically grow, and we can build things and whatnot. But I think what feels deeply true to me is truly help others grow; you'll grow too. The act of mentoring, of guiding, of training, of helping someone on their journey will inherently help you grow and, I think, change the way that you think about the work. I think the beginner mind, the earlier in the career folks coming into a codebase, they will see things fundamentally differently in a really useful way. It's possible that along your career, you've just internalized things. You've been like, yeah, no, that was weird. But then I smashed my head against it for a while, and now I understand this thing. And it just makes sense to me. But it's like, that thing actually doesn't make sense. You have warped your mind to match the thing, not, quote, unquote, "come to understand it." This is sounding too judgmental to people who've been in the industry for a while, but I found this of myself. Or I can just take for granted things that took a long time to adapt my head to, and if anything, maybe I should have pushed back a little more. And so, I find that junior engineers can be a really fantastic lens for the complexity of a project. Like, the world is truly a complex place, and that's just true. But our job as software engineers is to tame that complexity and manage it. And so, I love the mindset that can come or the conversations that can come out of that. And it's much like test-driven development is a pressure on the complexity of your code, having junior engineers join the team and needing to explain how all of the different features work, and what the overall architecture is, and the message passing under this and that, it's a really useful conversation to have. And so that "Help others grow; you'll grow too" feels deeply, deeply true to me. STEPH: Yeah, I couldn't agree more in regards to how juniors really help our team and especially, as you mentioned, with complexity and ¬having those conversations. Some of the other things that have come to mind for me as well around the importance of having junior developers on your team...and maybe it's not specifically they're junior developers but that you just have a variety of experience on your team. It's going to help you lean into a culture of learning because you have people that are at different stages of their career. And so you want an environment where people can learn together, that they can fail together, and they can be public about it. And having people that are at different stages of their career will lead, well, at least ideally, it'll lead to more pair programming. It's going to lead to more productive code reviews because then people can ask more questions around why did you choose this, or why are you doing that? Versus if everybody is at the same level, then they may just intuitively have reasons that they think someone did something. But it takes someone that's a bit new to say, "Hey, why did you choose this?" or to bring up some other ideas or ways that they could pursue it. They may bring in new ideas for, like, why has the team always done something this way? Let's think about new ways that we could do this. Or maybe this is really unfriendly, the way that we're doing this, not just for junior people but for people that are new to the team. And then there's typically less knowledge siloing because then you're going to want to pair the newer folks with the more experienced folks. So that way, you don't have this more senior developer who's then off in a corner working by themselves. And it's going to improve your communication skills. There's just...I realized I'm just rambling because I feel like there are so many benefits that go along with having a variety of people on your team, especially in terms of experience. And that just leads to such a better learning environment and, ultimately, better software and better products. And yet, I find that so many companies won't embrace people that are newer to software. They always want the senior developers. They want the 10x-er or whatever those are. They want the people that have many, many years of experience. And there's so much value that comes from mentoring the next group of developers. And it's incredibly frustrating to me that one, companies often aren't open to it. But honestly, more than that, as long as you're upfront and honest about like, hey, this is the team that we need right now to build what we're looking to build, I can get past that; I can understand that. But please don't then mislead people and say that you're a junior-friendly team, and then not be prepared. I feel like some teams will go so far as to say, "Yes, we are junior-friendly," and they may even tweak their interview process to where it is a bit more junior-friendly. But then, by the time that person joins the team, they're really not prepared. They don't have an onboarding plan. They don't have a mentorship plan. And then they fail that person because that person has worked hard to get there. And they've worked hard to bring that person onto the team, but then they don't have a plan from there. And I've seen it too many times. And it just frustrates me so much because it puts that junior person in such a vulnerable state where they really have to be an incredible self-advocate to then overcome those hurdles from a lack of preparation on that company's part. Okay, I think that's my event. I'm sure I could vent about this a lot more, but I will cut it off there. That's the heart of it. CHRIS: I do think, like, with anything else, it's something that we have to be intentional about. And so what you're saying of like, yeah, we're a junior-friendly company, but then you're just hiring folks, trying to find folks that may work at a slightly lower pay grade, and that's what that means to you. So like, no, no, that's not what this is. This needs to be something different. We need to have a structure and an organization that can support folks at different points in their career. But it's interesting to me to think about the sort of why of it. And the earlier part of this conversation, we talked about some of the benefits that can come organizationally from it, and I do sincerely believe in that. But I also believe that it is fundamentally one of the best ways to find really talented people early on in their career and be in a position to hire them where maybe later on in their career, that just wouldn't happen naturally. And I've seen this play out in a number of organizations. I went to Northeastern University for my college, and Northeastern is famous for the co-op program. Northeastern sounds really fancy. Now I learned that they have like a 7% acceptance rate for college applications right now, which is wildly low. When I went to Northeastern, it was not so fancy. So just in case anyone's hearing that and they're like, "Oh, Northeastern, wow." I'm not that fancy. [laughs] But they did have the co-op then, and they still have it now. And the co-op really is a differentiating thing. You do three six-month rotations. And it is this fundamental differentiator in terms of when you're graduating. Particularly, I was in mechanical engineering. I came out, and I actually knew what that meant in the world. And I'd used Outlook, and I knew what a water cooler was and how to talk near one because that's a critical thing to learn in the world. And really transformative experience for me. But also, a thing that I observed was many of my friends ended up working at companies that they had co-opted for. I'm one of those people. I would say more than 50% of my friends ended up with a position at a company that they had done a co-op rotation with. And it really worked out fantastically. That organization and the individual got to try things out, experience. And then, I ended up staying at that company for a number of years, and it was a wonderful experience. But I don't know that I would have ended up there otherwise. That's not necessarily the way that would have played out. And similarly like, thoughtbot has the apprenticeship. And I have seen so many wonderful developers start at that very early point in their career. And there was this wonderful structure around them joining the thoughtbot team, intentional, structured, supported. And then those folks went on to be some of the most talented developers that I've ever worked with at a wonderfully talented organization. And so the story of like, you should do this, organizations. This is a thing that you should invest in for yourself, not just for the individual, like, for both. Everybody wins in this case, in my mind. I will say, though, in terms of transparency, I currently manage a team of three developers. And we hired very intentionally for senior folks this early on in where we're at. And that was an intentional choice because I do believe that if you're going to be hiring more junior developers, that needs to be something that you do very intentionally, that you have a support structure in place, that you're able to invest the time in where they're at and make sure we have sort of... I think a larger team makes more sense to bring juniors into broadly. That's the thing that I'm saying out loud that I'm like, I should push on that a little bit. Is that true? Do I really believe that? But I think so, my actions obviously point to it. But it is an interesting trade-off space of how do you think about that? My hope is that as we grow as an organization, that we would then very intentionally start hiring folks in a more junior, mid-level to junior and be very intentional about how we support them, bring them into the organization, et cetera. I do believe it is a win-win situation for everyone when done with intention and with focus. STEPH: That's such an interesting bit that you just said because I very much appreciate when companies recognize do we have the bandwidth to support someone that's more junior? Because at thoughtbot, we go through periods where we don't have our apprenticeship that's open because we recognize we're not in a place that we can support someone. And we don't want to bring someone in unless we can help them be successful. I very much admire that and appreciate that about companies when they can perform that self-assessment. I am so intrigued. You'd mentioned being a smaller team. So you more intentionally hire senior developers. And I think that also makes sense because then you need to build up who's going to be in that mentorship pool? Because then people could leave, people could take vacations, and so then you need to have that support system in place. But yeah, I don't know what that then perfect balance is. It's like, okay, so then as soon as you have like five people available to mentor or interested in mentorship, it's like, then do you start bringing in the conversation of like, let's bring in someone that we can help build up and help them be successful and join our team? And I don't know what that magical number is. I do think it's important for teams to reflect to say, "Can we take on someone that's junior?" All the benefits of having someone that's junior. And then just being very honest and then having a plan for once that junior person does arrive. What does their career path look like while they've joined that team, and who's going to be that person that's going to help them level up? So not only make that choice upfront of yes, we are bringing someone on but let's also think about like the first six months of their work here at the company and what that's going to look like. It feels like an important step that a lot of companies fail to do. And I think that's why there are so many articles that then are like, hey, if you're a junior dev, here's all the things that you should do to be the best junior dev. That's fabulous. And we're constantly shoring up junior devs to be like, hey, here's all the things that you need to be great at. But we don't have as many conversations around; hey, here's all the things that your manager or the rest of your team should be great at to then support you equally as you are also doing your best to meet them. Like, they need to meet you halfway. And I'm not completely unsympathetic to the plight; I understand. It's often where I've seen with teams the more senior developers that have very strong mentorship communication skills are then also the teammates that get pulled into all the meetings and all the different projects, so then they are less available to be that mentor. And then that's how this often fails. So I don't think anybody is going into this intentionally, but yet, it's what happens for when someone is new and joining a team, and it hasn't been determined the next six months what that person's onboarding and career path looks like. Circling back just a bit, there's the question around, can juniors start with a remote team? I can go first. And I'm going to say unequivocally yes. There's no reason a junior can't start with a remote team. Because all the things that I feel strongly about come down to how is your team going to plan for this person? And how are they going to support this person? And all the benefits that you get from being in an office with a team, I think those do exist. And frankly, for someone like myself, it can be easier to establish a bond with someone that you get to see each day, get to see in person. You can walk up to their desk and can say, "Hey, I've got a question for you." But I think all those benefits just need to be transferred into a remote-friendly way. So I think it does ratchet up how intentional you have to be with your team and then onboarding a junior developer. But I absolutely think it's doable, and we should do it. CHRIS: You went with unequivocally yes as your answer. I'm going to go with a qualified maybe as my answer. I want this to be true, and I think it can be true. But I think it takes all the more intentionality than even what we've been describing. To shift the question around a little bit, what does remote work mean? It doesn't just mean we're doing the work, but we're separate. I think remote work inherently is at its best when we also are largely async first. And so that means more structured writing. The nature of the conversation tends to be more well-formed in each interaction. So it's like I read a big document, and then I pass it over to you. And at your leisure, you respond to it with a bunch of notes, and then it comes back to me. And I think that mode of interaction, while absolutely wonderful and something that I love, I think it fits really well when you're a little bit further on in your career when you understand things a little bit better. And I think the dance of conversation is more useful earlier on and so forth. And so, for someone who's newer to a team, I think having the ability to ask a quick question over and over is really useful to someone who's early on in their career. And remote, again, I think it's at its best when it's async. And those two are sort of at odds. And so it's that mild tension that gives me pause of like, something that I think that makes remote work great I do think is at least a hurdle that you would have to get over in supporting someone who's a little bit newer. Because I want to be deeply present for someone who's newer to their journey so that they can ask a lot of questions so that I am available to be interrupted regularly. I loved at thoughtbot sitting next to someone and being their mentor and being like, yeah, anytime you want, just tap on my desk. If I got my headphones on, that doesn't mean I'm ignoring you; it means I just need to make the sounds go away for a minute because that's the only way my brain will work. But feel free to just tap on my desk or whatever and grab my attention for a moment. And I'm available for that. That's an intentional choice. That's breaking up my continuity of the day, but we're choosing that for a reason. I think that's just a little harder to do in a remote context and all the more so if we're saying, hey, we're going to try this async thing where we write structured documents, and we communicate in these larger, more well-formed, communicates back and forth. But I do believe it can be done. I think it should be done. I just think it's all the harder for all of those reasons. STEPH: I agree that definitely makes it harder. But I'm going to push a little bit and say that when you mentioned being deeply present, I think we can be deeply present with someone and be remote. We can reduce the async requirements. So if you are someone that is more senior or more accustomed to the team, you can fall back to more of those async ways to communicate. But if someone is new, and needs more mentorship, then let's just set up time where we're going to literally hang out for a couple of hours each day or whatever pairing environment works best for them because pairing can also be exhausting. But hey, we're going to have a check-in each day; maybe we close out each day and touchpoint. And feel free to still message me and interrupt me. Like, you're going to just heighten your availability, even though it is remote. And be aware, like, hey, this person could message me at more times, and I'm okay with that. I have opted into this form of communication. So I think we just take that mindset of, hey, there's this person next to me, and I'm their mentor to like, hey, they're not next to me, but I'm still their mentor, and I'm still here for them. So I agree that it's harder. I think it falls on us and the team and the mentors to change ourselves versus saying to juniors, "Hey, sorry, it's remote. That's not going to work for you." It totally works for them. It's us, the mentors, that need to figure out how to make it work. I will say being on that mentor side that then not being able to see someone so if they are next to me, I can pick up on body language and facial expressions, and I can tell when somebody's stuck. And I can see that they're frustrated, or I can see that now's a good time for me to just be like, "Hey, how's it going? What are you working on? Or do you need help with something?" And I don't have that insight when I'm away. So there are real challenges like that that I don't know how to address. I have gone the obnoxious route [laughs] where I just message people, and I'm like, "Hey, how's it going? How's it going? How's it going?" And I try not to do that too much. But I haven't found a better way to manage that other than to constantly check in because I do have less feedback from that person that I'm working with unless they are just incredibly open about sharing when they're stuck. But typically, when you're newer to a team or newer to a career, you're going to be less willing to share when you're stuck. But yeah, there are some real challenges, but I still think it's something for us to figure out. Because otherwise, if we cut off access for remote teams to junior folks, I mean, that's where we're headed. There are so many companies and jobs that are headed remote that not being junior friendly and being remote in my mind is just not an option. It's something that we need to figure out. And it's hard, but we need to figure it out. CHRIS: Yeah, 100% on we need to figure that out and that that's on us as the people managing and structuring and bringing folks into teams. I think my stance would be like, let's just be clear that this is hard. It takes effort to make sure that we've provided a structure in which someone newer to a team can be successful. It takes all the more effort to do so in a remote context, I think. And it's that recognition that I think is critical. Because if we go into this with the wrong mindset, it's like, oh yeah, it's great. We got this new person on the team. And yeah, they should be ready to go in like two weeks, right? It's like, no, no, this is a different thing. We need to be very clear about it. This is going to require that we have someone who is able to work with them and support them in this. And that means that that person's output will likely be a little bit reduced for the period of time that we're talking about. But we're playing a long game here. Let's make sure we're clear on that. This is intentional. And let's be clear, the world of hiring and software right now it's not like super easy. There aren't way more software developers than there are jobs; at least, that's been my experience. So this is something absolutely worth investing in for just core business reasons and also good for people. So hey, it's a win-win. Let's do it. Let's figure it out. But also, let's be clear that it's going to be a little tricky along the way. So, you know, let's be intentional about that. But yeah, obviously do it, got to do it. STEPH: Wait, so I feel like we might have circled back to unequivocally yes. [laughs] Have we gotten there, or are you still on the fence? CHRIS: I was unequivocally yes from the beginning, but I couched it in, but...yeah, I said other things. You're right. I have now come around; let's say to unequivocally yes. STEPH: [laughs] Cool. I don't want to feel like I'm forcing you to agree with me. [laughs] But I mean, we just so rarely disagree. So we've either got to identify this as something that we disagree on, which would be one of those rare occasions like beer and Pop-Tarts. CHRIS: A watershed moment. Beer and Pop-Tarts. STEPH: Yeah, those are the only two so far. [laughter] CHRIS: Not together also. I just want to go on record beer and Pop-Tarts; I don't think would be...anyway. STEPH: Ooh, I don't know. It could work. It could work. CHRIS: Well, there's another thing we disagree on. STEPH: I would not turn it down. If I was eating a Pop-Tart, and you're like, "Hey, you want a beer?" I'd be like, "Sure," vice versa. I'm drinking a beer. "Hey, you want a Pop-Tart?" "Totally." CHRIS: Okay. Well yeah, if I'm making bad decisions, I'm obviously going to chain them together, but that doesn't mean that they're a good decision. It's just a chain of bad decisions. STEPH: I feel like one true thing I know about you is that when you make a decision, you're going to lean into it. So like, this is why you are all about if you're going to have a Pop-Tart, you're going to have the highest sugary junk content Pop-Tart possible. So it makes sense to me. CHRIS: It's the Mountain Dew theorem, yeah. STEPH: I didn't know this had a theorem. The Mountain Dew theorem? CHRIS: No, that's just my name. Well, yeah, if I'm going to drink soda, I'm going to drink Mountain Dew, the nonsense nuclear option of soda. So yeah, I guess you're describing me, although as you say it back to me, I suddenly feel very, like, oh God, is this who I am as a person? [laughs] And I'm not going to say you're wrong. I'm just going to spend a little while thinking about some stuff. STEPH: I mean, you embrace it. I think that's lovely. You know what you want. It's like, all right, let's do this. Let's go all in. CHRIS: Thank you for finding a wonderfully positive way to frame it here at the end. But I think on that note, should we wrap up? STEPH: Let's wrap up. CHRIS: The show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. STEPH: This show is produced and edited by Mandy Moore. CHRIS: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review on iTunes, as it really helps other folks find the show. STEPH: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us at @_bikeshed or reach me on Twitter @SViccari. CHRIS: And I'm @christoomey. STEPH: Or you can reach us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. CHRIS: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. ALL: Byeeeeeeee!!!!!!!! ANNOUNCER: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success.

This week, we cover all of the exciting new releases from Config 2022, and do a deep dive into the new version of Auto Layout.Supported by:Clay — Clay is the beautiful and private home for all your relationships. Populated from the ground up using your calendar and social history, Clay is the most stunning, powerful way to remember who you've met—and what matters to them.Get two months freeEnjoy Clay's beautiful websiteClay is hiring product designersZeplin recently shipped Flows!Flows are a fast/effortless way to create and outline user flows and journeys. Designers can use flows to connect screens in seconds and map complete user journeys, showing not just the happy path but all possible paths and behaviors.Learn more about Zeplin FlowsWatch a demo on YouTubeThe Sidebar:The Sidebar is an exclusive weekly segment for our Patreon supporters. You can subscribe starting at $1 per month for access to bonus content going forward! Sign up at patreon.com/designdetails.Latest VIP Patrons:KarloGiladOscar NilssonMike RileyIsaac TanYeon KimNick TrombleySean LeachKyle TaylorMain Topic:This week, we cover all of the exciting new releases from Config 2022, and do a deeper dive into the new Auto Layout.What's new at Figma Config 2022Job Board:We're curating the best product design roles from the world's most design-forward companies.

Quand on fait de l'infrastructure as code on se demande toujours quoi faire des données sensible !Comment est-ce que l'on gère ces secrets ?Est-ce qu'on les met dans git ?Est-ce que l'on utilise une base de donnée dédié ?Quels outils peut-on utiliser ?00:00 Intro01:28 Pourquoi avons besoin de secrets ?09:30 Partager et garder des secrets dans l'équipeKeepassXC https://keepassxc.org/Bitwarden https://bitwarden.com/20:27 GitOps et les secretsÉviter les secrets en clair avec Git pré-commit https://blog.gitguardian.com/setting-up-a-pre-commit-git-hook-with-gitguardian-shield-to-scan-for-secrets/Vidéo Sécurité de vos secrets dans Git https://youtu.be/8A7S_uO9i9M?t=635Ansible-vault https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/user_guide/vault.htmlSOPS https://github.com/mozilla/sops/git crypt https://www.agwa.name/projects/git-crypt/git secret https://git-secret.io/27:57 Les coffres-forts38:12 Hashicorps Vaulthttps://www.vaultproject.io/https://www.hashicorp.com/products/vaultVault kubernetes operator https://operatorhub.io/operator/vault52:07 Les alternativesles cli des gestionnaires de mots de passe https://twitter.com/c_chaudier/status/1478351885644058624Vaultwarden https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwardenPassbolt https://www.passbolt.com/Psono https://psono.com/1password https://1password.com/secrets/Pass https://www.passwordstore.org/Article de Damyr https://www.damyr.fr/posts/passwordmanager/Python helper pour Vault.io https://github.com/nledez/vault_python_unseal01:10:18 Aide nous en partageant le podcastRetrouver les crédits : https://lydra.fr/comment-gerer-les-secrets-avec-linfrastructure-as-code-24/#DevOps #sécurité #IaCSoutenez ce podcast http://supporter.acast.com/radio-devops. Voir Acast.com/privacy pour les informations sur la vie privée et l'opt-out.

Doug Ford was, well, Git 'er Done Doug, running to stay out of his own way. Andrea Horwath was running to be Leader of the Opposition. Steven Del Duca was running to be Premier. And everyone was wishing Mike Schreiner was the Premier. That pretty much sums up the first provincial Leaders' Debate in North Bay on Tuesday night.

Git some!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The phenomenal Andy Timmons joins us, guitar in hand, to talk about his new album Electric Truth. We get the behind the scenes stories of the production, live tracking, tones, composition and more.  The album was brilliantly produced by fellow guitar master, Josh Smith and features Andy's playing and composition chops at their best. Andy fired up his rig for this conversation and to hear him play throughout the conversation is insightful and 100% inspiring!   This episode is brought to you by Fretboard Biology    Fretboard Biology - the online guitar college created by Joe Elliott, ex Head of Guitar at GIT and McNally Smith Music College. Fretboard Biology Guitar Speak Podcast #146 - Joe Elliott - ex guitar head of GIT - launches Fretboard Biology Guitar Speak Podcast Links PayPal Tip Jar Visit us at guitarspeakpodcast.com Subscribe and find previous episodes at: Apple Podcasts Spotify Stitcher   Follow us on Facebook & Instagram   Contact us at guitarspeakpodcast@gmail.com    

Data scientists usually have to write code to prototype software, be it to preprocess and clean data, engineer features, build a model, or deploy a codebase into a production environment or other use case. The evolution of a codebase is important for a number of reasons which is where version control can help, such as:collaborating with other code developers (due diligence in coordination and delegation)generating backupsrecording versionstracking changesexperimenting and testingand working with agility.In this bite episode of the DataCafé we talk about these motivators for version control and how it can strengthen your code development and teamwork in building a data science model, pipeline or product.Further reading:Version control via Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Version_control git-scm via https://git-scm.com/"Version Control & Git" by Jason Byrne via Slideshare https://www.slideshare.net/JasonByrne6/version-control-git-86928367"Learn git" via codecademy https://www.codecademy.com/learn/learn-git"Become a git guru" via Atlassian https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorialsGitflow workflow via Atlassian https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/comparing-workflows/gitflow-workflow"A successful git branching model" by Vincent Dressian https://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/ Branching strategies via GitVersion https://gitversion.net/docs/learn/branching-strategies/Recording date: 21 April 2022

About MichaelMichael is the creator of IT automation platforms Cobbler and Ansible, the latter allegedly used by ~60% of the Fortune 500, and at one time one of the top 10 contributed to projects on GitHub.Links Referenced: Speaking Tech: https://michaeldehaan.substack.com/ michaeldehaan.net: https://michaeldehaan.net Twitter: https://twitter.com/laserllama TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Revelo. Revelo is the Spanish word of the day, and its spelled R-E-V-E-L-O. It means “I reveal.” Now, have you tried to hire an engineer lately? I assure you it is significantly harder than it sounds. One of the things that Revelo has recognized is something I've been talking about for a while, specifically that while talent is evenly distributed, opportunity is absolutely not. They're exposing a new talent pool to, basically, those of us without a presence in Latin America via their platform. It's the largest tech talent marketplace in Latin America with over a million engineers in their network, which includes—but isn't limited to—talent in Mexico, Costa Rica, Brazil, and Argentina. Now, not only do they wind up spreading all of their talent on English ability, as well as you know, their engineering skills, but they go significantly beyond that. Some of the folks on their platform are hands down the most talented engineers that I've ever spoken to. Let's also not forget that Latin America has high time zone overlap with what we have here in the United States, so you can hire full-time remote engineers who share most of the workday as your team. It's an end-to-end talent service, so you can find and hire engineers in Central and South America without having to worry about, frankly, the colossal pain of cross-border payroll and benefits and compliance because Revelo handles all of it. If you're hiring engineers, check out revelo.io/screaming to get 20% off your first three months. That's R-E-V-E-L-O dot I-O slash screaming.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by LaunchDarkly. Take a look at what it takes to get your code into production. I'm going to just guess that it's awful because it's always awful. No one loves their deployment process. What if launching new features didn't require you to do a full-on code and possibly infrastructure deploy? What if you could test on a small subset of users and then roll it back immediately if results aren't what you expect? LaunchDarkly does exactly this. To learn more, visit launchdarkly.com and tell them Corey sent you, and watch for the wince.Corey: Once upon a time, Docker came out and change an entire industry forever. But believe it or not, for many of you, this predates your involvement in the space. There was a time where we had to manage computer systems ourselves with our hands—kind of—like in the prehistoric days, chiseling bits onto disk and whatnot. It was an area crying out for automation, as we started using more and more computers to run various websites. “Oh, that's a big website. It needs three servers now.” Et cetera.The times have changed rather significantly. One of the formative voices in that era was Michael DeHaan, who's joining me today, originally one of the—or if not the creator of Cobbler, and later—for which you became better known—Ansible. First, thanks for joining me.Michael: Thank you for having me. You're also making me feel very, very old there. So, uh, yes.Corey: I hear you. I keep telling people, I'm in my mid-30s, and my wife gets incensed because I'm turning 40 in July. But still. I go for the idea of yeah, the middle is expanding all the time, but it's always disturbing talking to people who are in our sector, who are younger than some of the code that we're using, which is just bizarre to me. We're all standing on the backs of giants. Like it or not, one of them's you.Michael: Oh, well, thank you. Thank you very much. Yeah, I was, like, talking to some undergrads, I was doing a little bit of stuff helping out my alma mater for a little bit, and teaching somebody the REST lecture. I was like, “In another year, REST is going to be older than everybody in the room.” And then I was just kind of… scared.Corey: Yeah. It's been a wild ride for basically everyone who's been around long enough if you don't fall off the teeter-totter and wind up breaking a limb somewhere. So, back in the bad old days, before cloud, when everything was no longer things back then were constrained by how much room you had on your credit card like they are today with cloud, but instead by things like how much space you had in the data center, what kind of purchase order you could ram through your various accounting departments. And one of the big problems you have is, great. So, finally—never on time—Dell has shipped out a whole bunch of servers—or HP or Supermicro or whoever—and the remote hands—which is always distinct from smart hands, which says something very insulting, but they seem to be good about it—would put them into racks for you.And great, so you'd walk in and see all of these brand new servers with nothing on them. How do we go ahead and configure these things? And by hand was how most of us started, and that means, oh, great, we're going to screw things up and not do them all quite the same, and it's just a treasure and a joy. Cobbler was something that you came up with that revolutionized how provisioning of bare-metal systems worked. Tell me about it.Michael: Yeah, um, so it's basically just glue. So, the story of how I came up with that is I was working for the Emerging Technologies Group at Red Hat, and I just joined. And they were like, “We have to have a solution to install Xen and KVM virtual machines.” So obviously, everybody's familiar with, like, EC2 and things now, but this was about people running non-VMware virtualization themselves. So, that was part of the problem, but in order to make that interesting, we really needed to have some automation around bare-metal installs.And that's PXE boot. So, it's TFTP and DHCP protocol and all that kind of boring stuff. And there was glue that existed, but it was usually humans would have to click on buttons to—like Red Hat had system-config-netboot, but what really happened was sysadmins all wrote their own automation at, like, every single company. And the idea that I had, and it was sort of cemented by the fact that, like, my boss, a really good guy left for another company and I didn't have a boss for, like, a couple years, was like, I'm just going to make IRC my boss, and let's get all these admins together and build a tool we can share, right?So, that was a really good experience, and it's just basically gluing all that stuff together to fully automate an install over a network so that when a system comes on, you can either pick it out from a menu; or maybe you've already got the MAC address and you can just say, “When you see this MAC address, go install this operating system.” And there's a kickstart file, or a preseed in the case of Debian, that says, “When you're booting up through the installer, basically, here's just the answers and go do these things.” And that install processes a lot slower than what we're used to, but for a bare-metal machine, that's a pretty good way to do it.Corey: Yeah, it got to a point where you could walk through and just turn on all the servers in a rack and go out to lunch, come back, they would all be configured and ready to go. And it sounds relatively basic the way we're talking about it now, but there were some gnarly cases. Like, “When I've rebooted the database server, why did it wipe itself and reprovision?” And it's, “Oh, dear.” And you have to make sure that things are—that there's a safety built into these things.And you also don't want to have to wind up plugging in a keyboard and monitor to all of these individual machines one-by-one to hit yes and acknowledge the thing. And it was a colossal pain in the ass. That's one of the things that cloud has freed us from.Michael: Yeah, definitely. And one of the nice things about the whole cloud environment is like, if you want to experiment with those ideas, like, I want to set up some DHCP or DNS, I don't have to have this massive lab and all the electricity and costs. But like, if I want to play with a load balancer, I can just get one. That kind of gives the experience of playing with all these data center technologies to everybody, which is pretty cool.Corey: On some level, you can almost view the history of all these things as speeding things up. With a well-tuned Cobbler install, it still took multiple minutes, in some cases, tens of minutes to go from machine you're powering on to getting it provisioned and ready to go. Virtual machines dropped that down to minutes. And cloud, of course, accelerated that a bit. But then you wind up with things like Docker and it gets down to less than a second. It's the meantime to dopamine.But in between the world of containers and bare-metal, there was another project—again, the one you're best known for—Ansible. Tell me about that because I have opinions on this whole space.Michael: [laugh]. Yeah. So, how Ansible got started—well, I guess configuration management is pretty old, so the people writing their own scripts, CFEngine came out, Puppet was a much better CFEngine. I was working at a company and I kind of wanted another open-source project because I enjoyed the Cobbler experience. So, I started Ansible on the side, kind of based on some frustrations around Puppet but also the desire to unify Capistrano kind of logic, which was like, “How do I push out my apps onto these servers that are already running,” with Puppet-style logic was like, “Is this computer's firewall configured directly? And is the time set correctly?”And you can obviously use that to install apps, but there's some places where that blurred together where a lot of people are using two different tools. And there's some prior art that I worked on called Funk, which I wrote with Seth Vidal and Adrian Likins at Red Hat, which was, like, 50% of the Ansible idea, and we just never built the config management layer on top. So, the idea was make something really, really simple that just uses SSH, which was controversial at the time because people thought it, like, wouldn't scale, because I was having trouble with setting up Puppet security because, like, it had DNS or timing issues or whatever.Corey: Yeah. Let's dive in a bit to what config management is first because it turns out that not everyone was living in the trenches in quite the same way that we were. I was a traveling trainer for Puppet for a summer once, and the best descriptor I found to explain it to people who are not in this space was, “All right, let's say that you go and you buy a new computer. What do you do? Well, you're going to install the applications you'd like to use, you're going to set up your own user account, you're going to set your password correctly, you're going to set up preferences, copy some files over so you have the stuff you care about. Great. Now, imagine you need to do that to a thousand computers and they all need to be the same. How do you do that?” Well, that is the world of configuration management.And there was sort of a bifurcation there, where there was the idea of, first, we're going to have configuration management that just describes what the system should look like, and that's going to run on a schedule or whatnot, and then you're going to have the other side of it, which is the idea of remote execution, of I want to run an arbitrary command on this server, or this set of servers, or all the servers, depending upon what it is. And depending on where you started on the side of that world, you wound up wanting things from the other side of that space. With Puppet, for example, is very oriented configuration management and the question became, well, can you use this for remote execution with arbitrary commands? And they wound up doing some work with Mcollective, which was a very complicated and expensive way to say, “No, not really.” There was a need for things that needed to hang out in that space.The two that really stuck out from that era were Ansible, which had its wild runaway success, and the one that I was smacking around for a bit, SaltStack, which never saw anywhere approaching that level of popularity.Michael: Yeah, sure. I mean, I think that you hit it pretty much exactly right. And it's hard to say what makes certain things take off, but I think, like, the just SSH approach was interesting because, well for one, everybody's running it. But there was this belief that this would not scale. And I tried to optimize the heck out of that because I liked performance, but it turns out that wasn't really a business problem because if you can imagine you just wrote this little bit of automation, and you're going to run it against your entire infrastructure and you've got 30,000 machines, do you want that to—if you were to, like, run an update command on 30,000 machines at once, you're going to DDoS something. Definitely, right?Corey: Yeah. Suddenly you have 30,000 machines all talk to the same things at the same times. And you want to do them in batches or smear it across.Michael: Right, so because that was there, like, you just add batch support in Ansible and things are fine, right? People want to target little small groups of things. So, like, that whole story wasn't true, and I think it was just a matter of testing this belief that everybody thought that we needed to have this whole network of things. And honestly, Salt's idea of using a message bus is great, but we took a little bit different approach with YAML because we have YAML variables in it, but they had something that compiled down to YAML. And I think those are some differences in the dialect and some things other people preferred, but—Corey: And they use Jinja, at one point to wind up making it effectively Turing complete; you could wind up having this ridicu—like, loop flow control and loops and the rest. And it was an interesting exposure to things, but yikes, at some l—at the same time.Michael: If you use all the language features in anything you can make something complicated, and too complicated. And I was like, I wanted automation to look like grocery lists. And when I started out, I said, “Hey, if anybody is doing this all day, for a day job, I will have failed.” And it clearly shows you that I have because there are people that are doing that all day. And the goal was, let me concentrate on dev and ops and my other things and keep this really, really simple.And some people just, like, get really, really into that automation technology, which is—in my opinion—why some of the earlier stuff was really popular because sysadmin were bored, so they see something new and it's kind of like a Java developer finding Perl for the first time. They're like, “I'm going to use all these things.” And they have all their little widgets, and it gets, like, really complicated.Corey: The thing that I always found interesting and terrifying at the same time about Ansible was the fact that you did ride on top of SSH, which is great because every company already had a way of controlling access by SSH to IT systems; everyone uses it, so it has an awful lot of eyes on the security protocol on the rest. The thing that I found terrifying in the early days was that more or less every ops person would wind up checking this out onto their laptop or whatnot, so whenever they wanted to run something, they would just run it from their laptop over a VPN or whatnot from wherever they happen to be, and you wind up with a dueling banjos type of circumstance where people were often not doing it from a centralized place. And in time, best practices emerged where, okay, that is going to be the command and control server where that runs at, and you log into it. And then you start guarding that with CI/CD flows and the rest. And like anything else, it wound up building some operational approaches to it.Michael: Yeah. Like, I kind of think that created a problem that allowed us to sell a product, right, which was good. If you knew what you were doing, you could use Jenkins completely and you'd be fine, right, if you had some level of discipline and access control, and you wanted to wire that up. And if you think about cloud, this whole, like, shadow IT idea of, “I just want to do this thing, therefore I'm going to get an Amazon account,” it's kind of the same thing. It's like, “I want to use this config management, but it's not approved. Who can stop me?” Right?And that kind of probably got us in the door in few accounts that way. But yeah, it did definitely create the problem where multiple people could be running things at the same time. So yeah, I mean, that's true.Corey: And the idea of, “Hey, maybe I should be controlling these things in Git,” or some other form of version control was sort of one of those evolutionary ideas that, oh, we could treat this like code. And the early days of DevOps, that was a controversial thing. These days, you say you're not doing it and people look at you very strangely. And things were going reasonably well in that direction for a while. Then this whole Docker thing showed up, where, well, what if instead of having these long-lived servers where you have to install updates and run patches and maintain a whole user list on them, instead you had this immutable infrastructure that every time there was a change, you would just go ahead and deploy a brand new set of servers?And you could do this in the olden days with virtual machines and whatnot; it just took a long time to push things out, so do I really want to roll the entire fleet for a two-line config change? Probably not, so we're going to batch it up, or maybe do this hybrid model. With Docker, it takes less than a second to wind up provisioning the—switching over to the new container series and you're done; you can keep going with that. That really solved a lot of these problems.But there were companies that, like, the entire configuration management space, who suddenly found themselves in a really weird position. Some of them tried to fight the tide forever and say, “Oh, this is terrible because it means we don't have a business model anymore.” But you can only fight the future for so long. And I think today, we'd be hard-pressed to say that Docker hasn't won, on some level.Michael: I mean, I think it has, like, the technology has won. But I guess the interesting thing is, config management now seems to be trying to pivot towards networking where I think the tool hasn't ever been designed for networking, so it's kind of a round peg, square hole. But it's all people have that unless they're buying something. Or, like, deploying the undercloud because, like, people are still running essentially clouds on top of clouds to get their Kubernetes deployments going and those are monstrous. Or maybe to deploy a data layer; like, I know Kafka has gotten off of ZooKeeper, but the Kafka-ZooKeeper thing—and I don't remember ZooKeeper [unintelligible 00:14:37] require [unintelligible 00:14:38] or not, but managing those sort of long, persistent implications, it still has a little bit of a place where it exists.But I mean, I think the whole immutable systems idea is theoretically completely great. I never was really happy with the whole Docker development workflow, and I think it does create a problem where people don't know what they're deploying and you kind of encourage that to where they could be deploying different versions of libraries, or—and that's kind of just a problem of the whole microservices thing in general where, “Did somebody change this?” And then I was working very briefly at one company where we essentially built a whole dashboard to detect service versions and what version of the base image everybody was on, and all these other things, and it can get out of hand, too. So, it's kind of like trading some problems for other problems, I think to me. But in general, containerization is good. I just wished the management glue around it was easy, right?Corey: I wound up giving a talk at a conference a while back, 2015 or so, called, “Heresy in the Church of Docker,” and it was a throwaway five-minute lightning talk, and someone approached me afterwards with, “Hey, can you give the full version of that at ContainerCon?” “There's a full version? Yes. Yes, I can.” And it talked about a number of problems with the management layer and the rest.Now, Kubernetes absolutely solves virtually every problem that I identified with it, but when you look at the other side of it, getting Kubernetes rolled out is effectively you get to cosplay being a cloud provider yourself. It is incredibly complicated, and of course, we're right back to managing it all with YAML.Michael: Right. And I think that's an interesting point, too, is I don't know who's exactly responsible for, like, the YAML explosion. And I like it as a data format; it's really good for humans. Cobbler originally used it more of an internal storage, which I think was a mistake because, like, even—I was trying to avoid setting up a database at the time, so—because I knew if I had to require setting up a database in 2007 or 2008, I'd get way less users, so it used flat files.A lot of the YAML dialects people are developing now are very, very nested and they requires, like, loading a webpage, for the Docks, like, all the time and reading what's valid here, what's valid there. I think people learn the wrong lesson from Ansible's YAML usage, right? It was supposed to be, like, YAML's good for things that are grocery lists. And there's a lot of places where I didn't do a good job. But when you see methods taking 15 parameters and you have to constantly have the reference up, maybe that's a sign that you should do something else.Corey: At least you saved us, on some level, from having to do this all in XML. But still, there are wrong ways and more wrong ways to do it. I don't think anyone could ever agree on the right way to approach these things.Michael: Yeah. I mean, and YAML, at the time was a good answer because I knew I didn't want to write and maintain a parser as, like, a guy that was running a project. We had a lot of awesome contributors, but if I had to also maintain a DSL, not only does that mean that I have to write the code for this thing—which I, you know, observed slowing down some other projects—but also that I'd have to explain it to people. Looking kind of like Bash was not a bad thing. Not having to know and learn something, so you can kind of feel really effective in about 15 minutes or something like that.Corey: One of the things that I find really interesting about you personally is that you were starting off in a bare-metal world; Ansible was sort of wherever you wanted to run it. Great, as long as there are systems that can receive these things, we're great. And now the world has changed, and for better or worse, configuration management slash remote execution is not the problem it once was and it is not a best practice way of solving a lot of those problems either. But you aren't spending your time basically remembering the glory years. You're actively moving forward doing some fairly interesting stuff. How would you describe what you're into these days?Michael: I tried to create a few projects to, like, kind of build other systems management things for the same audience for a while. I was building a build server and a new—trying to do some next-gen config stuff. And I saw people weren't interested. But I like having conversations with people, right, and I think one of the lessons from Ansible was how to explain highly technical things to technical audiences and cut out a lot of the marketing goo and all that; how to get people excited about an idea and make a community be really authentic. So, I've been writing about that for really, it's—rebooted blog is only a couple of weeks old. But also kind of trying to do some—helping out companies with some, like, basic marketing kind of stuff, right?There's just this pattern that everybody has where every website starts with this little basic slogan and two buttons and then there's a bunch of adjectives, but it doesn't say anything. So, how can you have really good documentation, and how can you explain an idea? Because, like, really, the reason you're in it is not just to sell stuff, but it's to help people and to see them get excited about your ideas. And there's just, like, we're not doing a good job in this, like, world where there's thousands upon thousands of applications, all competing at once to, like—how do you rise above that?Corey: And that's always the hard part is at some point, this does become your identity and you become known for a thing. And when you start branching out from that thing, you bring the expertise from that area that you were in, but you start applying it to new things. I feel like so many companies get focused—and people get focused—on assuming that their audience is just like them, where they're coming in with the exact same biases, the exact same experiences. And given that basically no one was as deep in the weeds as you were when it came to configuration management, that meant that you were spending time in that side of the world, not in other pursuits which aligned in some ways more directly with people developing other things. So, I suspect this might be one of the weird things we have in common when we show up and see something new.And a company is really excited. It's like, it's basically a few people talking [unintelligible 00:20:12] that both founders are technical. And they're super excited about something they can't quite articulate. And it's this, “Slow down. Tell me exactly what it is your product does.” And that's a hard thing to do because my default response was always the if I don't understand that is clearly the way in which I am deficient somehow. But marketing is really about clear communication and there's not that much of it in our space, at least not for early-stage companies.Michael: Yeah, I don't know why that is. I mean, I think there's this belief in that there's, like, this buyer audience where there's some vice president that's going to buy your stuff if you drop the right buzzwords. And 15 years ago, like, you had to say ‘synergy,' and now you say ‘time to value' or ‘total cost of ownership' or something. And I don't think that's true. I mean, I think people use products that they like and that they need to be shown them to try them out.So like, why can't your webpage have a diagram and a screenshot instead of this, like, picture of a couple of people drinking coffee around a computer, right? It's basic stuff. But I agree with you, I kind of feel dumb when I'm looking at all these tech products that I should be excited about, and, like, the way that we get there, as we ask questions. And the way that I've actually figured out what some of these things do is usually having to ask questions from someone who uses them that I randomly find on my diminishing circle of friends, right? And that's kind of busted.So, Ansible definitely had a lot of privilege in the way that it was launched in the sense that I launched it off Cobbler list and Cobbler list started off of [ET Management Tools 00:21:34] which was a company list. But people can do things like meetup groups really easily, they can give talks, they can get their blogs reblogged, and, you know, hope for some Hacker News or Reddit juice or whatever. But in order to get that to happen, you have to be able to talk to engineers that really want to know what you're doing, and they should be excited about it. So, learn to talk to them.Corey: You have to speak their language but without going so deep in the weeds that the only people that understand it are the folks who are never going to use your product because they want to build it themselves. It's a delicate balance to strike.Michael: And it's a difficult thing to do, too, when you know about it. So, when I was, like, developing all the Ansible docs, I've told people many times—and I hope it's true—that I, like, spent, like, 40% of my time just on the website and the docs, and whenever I heard somebody complain, I tried to fix it. But the idea was like, you can lose somebody really fast, but you kind of have to forget what you know about the product. So, the worst person to sometimes look at that as the person that built it. So, you have to forget what you know, and try to see, like, what questions they're asking, what do they need to find out? How do they want to learn something?And for me, I want to see a lot of pictures. A lot of people write a bunch of giant walls of text, or worse for me is when there's just these little pithy expressions and I don't know what they mean, right? And everybody's, like, kind of doing that these days.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at ChaosSearch. You could run Elasticsearch or Elastic Cloud—or OpenSearch as they're calling it now—or a self-hosted ELK stack. But why? ChaosSearch gives you the same API you've come to know and tolerate, along with unlimited data retention and no data movement. Just throw your data into S3 and proceed from there as you would expect. This is great for IT operations folks, for app performance monitoring, cybersecurity. If you're using Elasticsearch, consider not running Elasticsearch. They're also available now in the AWS marketplace if you'd prefer not to go direct and have half of whatever you pay them count towards your EDB commitment. Discover what companies like Equifax, Armor Security, and Blackboard already have. To learn more, visit chaossearch.io and tell them I sent you just so you can see them facepalm, yet again.48]Corey: One thing that I've really found myself enjoying recently has been your substack-based newsletter, Speaking Techis what you call it. And I didn't quite know what to expect when I signed up for it, but it's been a few weeks now, and you are more or less hitting across the board on a bunch of different things, ranging from engineering design patterns, to a teardown of random company's entire website from a marketing and messaging perspective—which I just adore personally; like that is very aligned with how I see the world—Michael: There's more of that coming.Corey: Yeah, [unintelligible 00:23:17] a bunch of other stuff. Let's talk about, for example, the idea of those teardowns. I always found that I have to be somewhat careful in how I talk about it when I'm doing a tweet thread or something like that because you are talking about people's work, let's be clear here, and I tend to be a lot kinder to small, early-stage companies than I am to, you know, $1.6 trillion companies who really should have solved for this by now, on some level. But so much of it misses the mark of great, here's the way that I think about these things. Here's the way that I don't understand what the hell you're telling me.An easy example of this for me, at least I'm curious to get your thoughts on it, I tend to almost always just skim what they're saying, great. Let's look at the pricing page because I find that speaks to people in a way that very often companies forget that they're speaking to customers.Michael: Yeah, for sure. I always tried to find the product page lately, and then, like, the product page now is, like, a regurgitation of the homepage. But it's what you said earlier. I think I try to stay nice to everybody, but it's good to show people how to understand things by counterexample, to some extent, right? Like, oh, I've got some stuff coming out—I don't know when this is actually going to get published—but next week, where I was like just taking random snippets of home pages, and like, “What's everybody doing with the header these days?”And there's just, like, ridiculous amounts of copying going on. But it's not just for, like, people's companies because everybody listening here isn't going to have a company. If you have a project and you wanted to get it noticed, right, I think, like, in the early days, the projects that I paid attention to and got excited about were often the ones that spend time on their website and their messaging and their experience. So, everybody kind of understands you have to write a good readme now but some of, like, the early Ruby crowd, for instance, did awesome, awesome web pages. They know how to pick out fonts, and I still don't know how to pick out fonts. But—Corey: I ask someone good at those things. That's how I pick ‘em.Michael: Yeah, yeah. That's not my job; get somebody that's good at that. But all that matters, right? So, if you do invest a little bit in not promoting yourself, not promoting your company, but trying to help people and communicate to them, you can build that audience around your thing and it makes it a lot more interesting.Corey: There's so many great tools out there that I find on GitHub that other people have to either point me to or I find it when I'm looking at it from a code-first perspective, just trying to find a particular example of the library being used, where they do such a terrible job of describing the problem that they solve, and it doesn't take much; it takes a paragraph or two at most. Or the idea that, “Oh, yeah, here's a way to do this thing. Just go ahead and get your credential file somewhere else.” Great. Could you maybe link to an example of how to do that?It's the basic stuff; assume that someone who isn't you might possibly want to use this. And I'm not even slightly suggesting that you wind up talking your way through how to do all of that. Just link to somewhere that has a good write-up of it and call it good. Just don't get in the way of people's first-time user experiences.Michael: Yeah, for sure. And—Corey: For some reason, that's a radical thought.Michael: Yeah, I think one of the things the industry has—well, not the industry; it's not their problem to solve, but, like, we don't really have a way for people to find what's cool and interesting anymore. So, various people have their own little lists on GitHub or whatever, but there's just so many people posting on the one or two forums people read and it goes by in a day. So, it's really, really hard to get attention. Even your own circle of followers isn't really logging into Twitter or anything, or LinkedIn. Or there's all the congratulations for your five years of Acme Corp kind of posts, and it's really, really hard to get attention.And I feel for everybody, so like, if somebody like GitHub or Microsoft is listening, and you wanted to build, like, a dashboard of here's the cool 15 projects for the week, kind of thing where everybody would see it, and start spotlight some of these really cool new things, that would be awesome, right?Corey: Whenever you see those roundups, that was things like Kubernetes and Docker. And great, I don't think those projects need the help in the same way.Michael: No, no, they don't. It's like maybe somebody's cool data thing, or a cool visualization, or the other thing that's—it's completely random, but I used to write fun graphics programs for fun or games and libraries. And I don't see that anymore, right? Maybe if you find it, you can look for it, but the things that get people excited about programming. Maybe they have no commercial value at all, but the way that people discover stuff is getting so consolidated is about Docker and Kubernetes. And everyone's talking about these three things, and if you're not Google or you're not Facebook, it's really—or Amazon, obviously—it's hard to get attention.Corey: Open-source on some level has changed from a community perspective. And part of it is because once upon a time, you could start with the very low-level stuff and build something, get it up and working. And that's where things like [Cobbler 00:27:44] and Ansible came out of. Now it's, “Click the button and use the thing everyone else is using. And if you're not doing that, what are you doing over there?”So, the idea of getting started tinkering with computers are built on top of so many frameworks and other things. And that's always been the case, but now it's much more apparent in some ways. “Okay, I'm going to go ahead and build out my first HTML file and serve it out using something in Node.” “Great, what is those NPM stuff that's scrolling past?” It's like, “The devil. That is the devil's own language you are seeing scroll past. And you don't need to worry about that; just pretend it's not there.”But back when I was learning all this stuff, we're paying attention to things scrolling past, like, you know, compilation messages and the Linux boot story as it wound up scrolling past. Terrible story; the protagonist was unreliable, but all right. And you start learning how these things work when you start scratching at the things that you're just sort of hand-waving and glossing over. These days, it feels like every time I use a modern project, that's everything.Michael: I mean, it is. And like what, React has, like, 2000 dependencies, right? So, how do you ever feel like you understand it? Or when recruiters are asking for ten years at Amazon. And then—or we find a library that it can only explain itself by being like this other library and requiring these other five.And you read one of those, and it becomes, like, this… tree of knowledge that you have no way of possibly understanding. So, we've just built these stacks upon stacks upon stacks of things. And I tend to think I kind of believe in minimalism. And like, wouldn't it be cool if we just burned this all and start—you know, we burn the forest and let something new regrow. But we tend to not do that. We just—now running a cloud on top of a cloud, and our JavaScript is thousands of miles high.Corey: I really wish that there were better paths for getting started. Like, I used to think that the right way to wind up learning how all this stuff work is to do what I did: Start off as, you know, the grumpy sysadmin type, and then—or help desk—and then work your way up and the rest. Those jobs aren't there anymore, and it doesn't leave people in a productive environment. “Oh, you want to build a computer game. Great. For an iPhone? Terrific.” Where do you go to get started on that? It's a hard thing to do.And people don't care at that scale, nor should they necessarily, on how to run your own servers. Back in the day when you wanted to have a blog on the internet, you were either reduced to using LiveJournal or MySpace, or you were running your own web server and had to learn how to make sure that it didn't become an attack platform. There was a learning curve that was fairly steep. Now, there are so many different paths to go down, you don't really need to know how any of these things even work.Michael: Yeah, I think, like, one of the—I don't know whether DevOps means anything as a topic or not, but one of the original pieces around that movement was systems administrators learning to code things and really starting to enjoy it, whether that was Python or Ruby, and so on. And now it feels like we're gluing all the things together, but that's happening in App Dev as well, right? The number of people that can build a really, really good library from the ground up, like, something that has C bindings, that's a really, really small crowd. And most of it, what we're doing is gluing together other people's libraries and compensating for the flaws and bugs in them, and duct tape and error handling or whatever. And it feels like programming has changed a lot because of this—and it's good if you want to get an idea up quickly, no doubt. But it's a different experience.Corey: The problem I always ran into was the similar problems I had with doing Debian packaging. It was always the, oh, great, there's going to be four or five different guides on how to do it—same story with RPM—and they're all going to be assuming different things, and you can crossover between them without realizing it. And then you just do something monstrous that kind of works until an actual Debian developer shoves you aside like you were a hazard to everyone around you. Let me do it for you. And there we go.It's basically, get people to do work for you by being really bad at it. And I don't love that pattern, but I'm still reminded of that because there are so many different ways to achieve any outcome that, okay, I want to run a ridiculous Hotdog or Not Hotdog style website out there. Great. I can upload things. Well, Docker or serverless? What provider do I want to put it on? And oh, by the way, a lot of those decisions very early on are one-way doors that you don't realize you're crossing through, as well as not knowing what the nuances of all of those things are. And that's dangerous.Michael: I think people are also learning the vendor as well, right? Some people get really engrossed in whether it's Amazon, or Google, or HashiCorp, or somebody's API, and you spend so much of your brain cells just learning how these people's systems work versus, like, general programming practices or whatever.Corey: I make it a point to build something on other cloud providers that aren't Amazon every now and then, just because I don't want to wind up effectively embracing a monoculture.Michael: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think that's kind of the trend I see with people looking just at the Kubernetes stuff, or whatever, it's that I don't think it necessarily existed in web dev; there seems to be a lot of—still a lot of creativity and different frameworks there, but people are kind of… what's popular? What gets me my next job, and that kind of thing. Whereas before it was… I wasn't necessarily a sysadmin; I kind of stumbled into building admin tools. I kind of made hammers not houses or whatever, but basically, everybody was kind of building their own tools and deciding what they wanted. Now, like, people that are wanting to make money or deciding what people want for them. And it's kind of not always the simplest, easiest thing.Corey: So, many open-source projects now are—for example, one that I was dealing with recently was the AWS CLI. Great, like, I'm thrilled to throw in issues and challenges here, but I'm not going to spend significant time writing code against it because, one, it's basically impossible to get these things accepted when all the maintainers work at Amazon, and two, is it really an open-source project in the way that you and I think about community and the rest, but it's basically sole purpose is to funnel money to Amazon faster. Like, that isn't really a community ethos I feel comfortable getting behind to be perfectly honest. They're a big company; they can afford to pay people to build these things out, full time.Michael: Yeah. And GitHub, I mean, we all mostly, I think, appreciate the fact that we can host the Git repo and it's performant and everything, and we don't have blazing unicorns quite as often or whatever they used to have, but it kind of changed the whole open-source culture because we used to talk about things on mailing lists, like, what should this be, and there was like an upfront conversation, or it might happen on IRC. And now people are used to just saying, “I've got a problem. Fix it for me.” Or they're throwing code over the wall and it might not be the code or feature that you wanted because they're not really part of your thing.So before, people would get really engrossed with, like, just a couple of projects, and if they were working on them as kind of like a collective of people working against different organizations, we'd talk about things, and they kind of know what was going on. And now it's very easy to get a patch that you don't want and you're, like, “Oh, can you change all of these things?” And then somebody's, like, now they're offended because now they have to do all this extra work, whereas that conversation didn't happen. And GitHub could absolutely remodel themselves to encourage those kinds of conversations and communities, but part of the death of open-source and the fact that now it's, “Give me free code,” is because of that kind of absence of the—because we're looking at that is, like, the front of a community versus, like, a conversation.Corey: I really want to appreciate your taking so much time out of your day to basically reminisce about some of these things. But on a forward-looking basis, if people want to learn more about how you see things, where's the best place to find you?Michael: Yeah. So, if you're interested in my blog, it's pretty random, but it's michaeldehaan.substack.com. I run a small emerging consultancy thing off of michaeldehaan.net. And that's basically it. My Twitter is laserllama if you want to follow that. Yeah, thank you very much for having me. Great conversation. Definitely making all this technology feel old and busted, but maybe there's still some merit in going back—Corey: Old and busted because it wasn't built this year? Great—Michael: Yes.Corey: —yes, its legacy, which is a condescending engineering term for ‘it makes money.' Yeah, there's an entire universe of stuff out there. There are companies that are still toying with virtualization: “Is this something we get on board with?” There's nothing inherently wrong with that. I find that judging what a bunch of startups are doing or ‘company started today' is a poor frame of reference to look at what you should do with your 200-year-old insurance company.Michael: Yeah, like, [unintelligible 00:35:53] software engineering is just ridiculously new. Like, if you compare it to, like, bridge-building, or even electrical engineering, right? The industry doesn't know what it's doing and it's kind of stumbling around trying to escape local maxima and things like that.Corey: I will, of course, put links to where to find you into the [show notes 00:36:09]. Thanks again for being so generous with your time. It's appreciated.Michael: Yeah, thank you very much.Corey: Michael DeHaan, founder of Cobbler, Ansible, and oh, so much more than that. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice—and/or smash the like and subscribe buttons on the YouTubes—whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, smash the buttons as mentioned, and leave a loud, angry comment explaining what you hated about it that I will then summarily reject because it wasn't properly formatted YAML.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Here we go again... Another couple hours of the good stuff as we do. Not much more to say about that, you know what we do. Git it. The Cramps | Big Beat from Badsville | No Club Lone... Real Punk Radio podcast Network brings you the best in Punk, Rock, Underground Music around! From Classic Oi!, Psychobilly and Hardcore to some Classic Rock n Roll and 90's indie Alt Rock greatness!! With Tons of Live DJ's that like to Talk Music From Garage Rock, to Ska.. We are True MUSIC GEEKS!

The crew has complicated feelings about products like Apple's augmented reality glasses and Google Glass. Ceora put it best: “I'm very cautious about any big tech company having any more access to my perception of reality.” On the other hand, products like Envision smart glasses that help visually-impaired people navigate their environments exemplify how AR technology can enable accessibility and empower users.Speaking of different perceptions of reality, New York mayor Eric Adams dusts off that old chestnut about how remote workers “can't stay home in your pajamas all day.” (Watch us.)Matt recommends Oh My Git!, an open-source game that teaches Git. Ceora recommends Popsy, which allows you to turn your Notion pages into a website for free.And some recommended reading: How to make the most out of a mentoring relationship from the GitHub blog and How to use the STAR method to ace your job interview from The Muse.Today's Lifeboat badge goes to user metadept for their answer to Generate a two-digit positive random number in JavaScript.Find Adam on LinkedIn here.

Video-verzi tohoto podcastu najdete na Youtube kanále PL. V novém Performance podcastu se podíváme pod pokličku toho, jak Zdeňku Čermákovi série zážitků blízkých smrti a zničující nemoc, otevřely dveře ke studiu výživy, zdraví a hlavně vody na planetě i uvnitř nás. Na základě čehož více než dekádu zdokonaloval vlastní technologii na očistu, energizaci a úpravu vody, která ji navrací do její primodiální podoby a obnovuje tak i vodu v nás. Na co se můžete těšit? Zážitky blízké smrti a zničující onemocnění, které přivedlo Zdeňka k zájmu o lidské zdraví, výživu a vodu. Podzemní oceány a nový pohled na zemský koloběh vody. Problematika kohoutkové vody pro pití a sprchování, biofilmů v trubkách, a o nedostatcích filtračních systémů. Výzkumy a vlastnosti strukturované vody, a implikace pro lidské tělo. O Zdeňkově technologii na vytváření "živé vody" z pohledu patogenů, anorganických sloučenin, energie a struktury. Zkušenosti a výzkumy vody upravené jednotkou Stabfor. Využití vody dávnými civilizacemi pro akumulaci energie, a propojení vody a Vědomí. Pohled na negativa přehrad a vodních nádrží (včetně nádrží na dešťovou vodu), a Zdeňkova vize obnovy vod pro lepší budoucnost našich dětí. Další odkazy: Pokročile o obnově a využití vody, ale i dalších elementů ve video-kurzu Bioregenesis. Základní PL: Holistický protokol - www.plstyle.cz/holistic (Pokrývá celkem 12 problémových oblastí moderního životního stylu, v rámci jejichž narušení se snižuje zdraví tělesných systémů - především trávení a GIT). Video o studánkové vodě a ukázka spring huntingu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcBTY... Podcast o vodě trochu jinak - Quintonova mořská plazma: https://risebyperformance.cz/2021/06/...

Cloud Posse holds public "Office Hours" every Wednesday at 11:30am PST to answer questions on all things related to DevOps, Terraform, Kubernetes, CICD. Basically, it's like an interactive "Lunch & Learn" session where we get together for about an hour and talk shop. These are totally free and just an opportunity to ask us (or our community of experts) any questions you may have. You can register here: https://cloudposse.com/office-hoursJoin the conversation: https://slack.cloudposse.com/Find out how we can help your company:https://cloudposse.com/quizhttps://cloudposse.com/accelerate/Learn more about Cloud Posse:https://cloudposse.comhttps://github.com/cloudpossehttps://sweetops.com/https://newsletter.cloudposse.comhttps://podcast.cloudposse.com/[00:00:00] Intro[00:01:29] Git.io shutting down 2022-04-29 (GitHub provides 4 days notice!!!)https://github.blog/changelog/2022-04-25-git-io-deprecation/[00:02:53] Cloud Posse build-harness: update links to cloudposse.tools/build-harnesshttps://github.com/cloudposse/build-harness/issues/314[00:04:34] Google donates the Istio service mesh to the CNCFhttps://techcrunch.com/2022/04/25/google-donates-the-istio-service-mesh-to-the-cloud-native-computing-foundation/[00:05:05] AWS's Log4j patches blew holes in its own securityhttps://www.theregister.com/AMP/2022/04/20/aws_log4j_patches/[00:05:42] Fairwinds Helmfile Alternative: declaratively manage multiple Helm chart releaseshttps://github.com/FairwindsOps/reckoner[00:06:48] [2018] Kubernetes Edge Computing at Chick-fil-Ahttps://medium.com/@cfatechblog/edge-computing-at-chick-fil-a-7d67242675e2[00:08:17] Finally, a terraform-registry-proxy for “airgapped” environmentshttps://github.com/jasonwbarnett/terraform-registry-proxy[00:22:00] Aurora Serverless v1 is GA[00:23:26] Use IAM to control access to a resource based on the account, OU or organization that contains the resourcehttps://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2022/04/iam-access-resource-organization/[00:24:36] Karpenter workload consolidation/defragmentationhttps://github.com/aws/karpenter/issues/1091[00:29:37] How have folks automated AWS IAM Access Key + Secret Key rotation policies [00:34:23] Opinions and thoughts on K8s ingress controllers for high volume deployments. [00:42:25] What advice do you have for how to communicate expectations when people decide to use something brand new that is still super beta/rough, are having problems, and are annoyed that things aren't working?[00:52:30] Are you doomed without a tool like Spacelift? [01:00:23] Outro #officehours,#cloudposse,#sweetops,#devops,#sre,#terraform,#kubernetes,#awsSupport the show (https://cloudposse.com/office-hours/)

Steph has a question for Chris: When you have no idea how you're going to implement a feature, how do you write your first test? Chris has thoughts about hybrid teams (remote/in-person) and masked inputs. This episode is brought to you by ScoutAPM (https://scoutapm.com/bikeshed). Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy. Preemptive Pluralization is (Probably) Not Evil (https://www.swyx.io/preemptive-pluralization) iMask (https://imask.js.org/) Mitch Hedberg - Escalator Joke (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHopAo_Ohy0) This episode is brought to you by Studio 3T (https://studio3t.com/free). Try Studio 3T's full suite of features for 30 days, no payment details needed. Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of The Bike Shed! Transcript: STEPH: I am recording in a new room because we're in Pennsylvania, and so I'm recording at this little vanity desk which is something. [laughs] But there's a mirror right in front of me, so I feel very vain because it's just like, [laughs] I'm just looking at myself while I'm recording with you. It's something. CHRIS: [laughs] That is something. STEPH: [laughs] So, you know. CHRIS: Fun times. STEPH: Pro podcast tip, you know, just stare at yourself while you chat, while you record. CHRIS: I mean, if that works for you, you know, plenty of people in the gym have the mirrors up, so podcasting is like exercising in a way, and I think it makes sense. STEPH: I appreciate the generosity. [laughs] CHRIS: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Chris Toomey. STEPH: And I'm Steph Viccari. CHRIS: And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. So, Steph, what's new in your world? STEPH: Hey, Chris. So I have a funny/emotional story that [laughs] I'm going to share with you first because I feel like it kind of encapsulates how life is going at the moment. So we've officially moved from South Carolina to North Carolina. I feel like I've been talking about that for several episodes now. But this is it: we have finally vacated all of our stuff out of South Carolina house and relocated to North Carolina. And once we got to North Carolina, we immediately had to then leave town for a couple of days. And normally, Utah, our dog, stays with an individual in South Carolina, someone that we found, trust, and love. And he has a great time, and I just know he's happy. But we didn't have that this time. So I had to find just a boarding facility that had really high reviews that I felt like I could trust him with. I didn't even have time to take him for a day to test it out. It was one of those like, I got to show up and just drop him off and hope this goes well, so I did. And everything looks wonderful. Like, the facility is very clean. I had a list of things to look for to make sure it was a good place. But it's the first time leaving him somewhere where he's going to spend significant time in a kennel that has indoor-outdoor access. And as I walked away from him, I started to cry. And I just thought, oh no, this is embarrassing. I'm that dog mom who's going to start crying in this boarding facility as she's leaving her dog for the first time. So I put on my shades, and I managed to make it through the checkout process. But then I went to my truck and just sat there and cried for 15 minutes and called my husband and was like, "I'm doing the right thing, right? Like, tell me this is okay because I'm having a moment." And I finally got through that moment. But then I even called you because you and I were scheduled to chat. And I was like, I am not in a place that I can chat right now. I think I told you when you answered the phone. I was like, "Everything is fine, but I sound like the world's ending, or I sound like a mess." [laughs] And yeah, so I had like two hours of where I just couldn't stop crying. I partially blame pregnancy hormones. I'm going to go with that as my escape rope for now. So I feel like that's been life lately. Life's been a little overwhelming, and that felt like the cherry on top. And that was the moment that I broke. Update: he's doing great. I've gotten pictures of Utah. He's having a wonderful time at camp, it seems. [laughs] It was just me, his mom, who is having trouble. CHRIS: Well, you know, reasonable to worry, and life's dialed up to 11 and all of that. But yeah, I will say even though you lead the conversation with everything's fine, your tone of voice did not imply that everything was fine. So when I eventually came to understand what we were talking about, I hope I was kind in the moment. But I was like, oh, okay, this is fine. We're fine. I'm so sorry you're feeling terrible right now. STEPH: [laughs] CHRIS: But okay, we're fine. For me, there was a palpable moment of like, okay, my stress is now back down a little bit. But I'm glad that things are going well and that Utah is having a fun vacation. STEPH: Yep, he seems to be doing fine. I've calmed down. You know, as you said, life's been dialed up lately. On a less emotional note and something that's a little bit more technical, I had a really great conversation with another thoughtboter where we were talking about testing. And the idea of when you learn testing, it's often very focused on like, you have this object, and it has a method. And so, you're going to write a unit test for this particular method. And it's very isolated, very specific as to the thing that you're looking to test. Versus in reality, when you pick up tickets, you don't have that scope, and like, it is so broad. You have to figure out what feature you're implementing, figure out how to test it. And it feels like this mismatch between how a lot of people learn to test and learn TDD versus then how we actually practice it in the wild. And so we had a phone conversation around when you are presented with a ticket like that, and you have no idea how you're going to implement a feature, how do you get started with testing, and when do you write your first test? Do you TDD? Do you BDD? Or do you PDD? That last one I made up, it stands for Panic-driven development. But it's what's your approach to how do you actually then get to the point where you can write a test? And I have a couple of thoughts. But I'm really curious, how does that flow work for you? What have you learned throughout the years to then help yourself write that first test? Or where do you start? CHRIS: Well, this is an interesting question. I like this one. I think it varies. And I think there's a lot of dogma around TDD as a practice. And I think it is super useful to break that apart and hear different individual stories of it. I know there are plenty of folks who are like, TDD is just not a thing and whatnot, and I'm certainly not in that camp. But I also don't TDD 100% of the time because sometimes I'm not super clear on what I'm doing, or I'm in more of an exploratory phase. That said, I think there's a...I want to answer the question somewhat indirectly, which is I know how to test most of the code that I work on now as a web developer in a Rails application because I've done most of the things a bunch of times. And the specifics may be different, but the like, to integrate with this external system, and I have to build an API client or whatever, I know how to do that. And there is a public API of some class that I will be exercising against and so I can write tests against that. Or I know that the user is going to click a button, and then something needs to happen. And so I can write that test, and it fails, and then it starts to push me towards the implementation. There are also times where it's actually quite hard to get the test to lead you in the right direction, and you have to know what hop to make, and so sometimes I just do that. But yeah, rolling back a little bit, I think there is a certain amount of experience that is necessary. And I think one of the critical things that I want to share with folks that are potentially newer to testing overall is that it is actually quite hard. You have to understand your system and how you're going to approach it, you know, one step removed, or it's like a game of chess where you're thinking a couple of moves ahead. You have to understand it in a deeper way. And so, if testing is difficult, that might just be totally reasonable at this point. And as you come to see the patterns within a Rails application or whatever type of application you're working on over and over, it becomes easier to test. But if testing is hard, that may not mean...like, how do I phrase this? There's like an impostor syndrome story in here of like, if you're struggling with testing, it may not be that something is fundamentally broken. You just may need a couple more chances to see that sort of thing play out. And so, for me, in most cases, I tend to know where to start or when not to. Like, I feel fine not testing when I don't test most of the time. I will eventually get things under test coverage such that I feel confident in that. And whenever I have one of those moments, I will stop and look at it and say, "Why didn't I know how to test this from the front, like, from the start?" But it's rare at this point for things to be truly exploratory. There's always some outer layer that I can wrap around. But like, I know X needs to happen when Y occurs. So how do I instrument the system in that way? But yeah, those are some thoughts. What are your thoughts? Does what I said sound reasonable here? STEPH: Yeah, I really like how you highlighted that pausing for reflection. That was something that I didn't initially think of, but I really liked that, to then go back to be like, okay, revisiting myself a couple of days or however earlier when I first started this. Now I can see where I've ended up. How could I have made that connection sooner as to where I was versus the tests I ended up with? Or perhaps recognizing that I couldn't have gotten there sooner, that I needed that journey to help me get there. So I really like the idea of pausing for reflection because then it helps cement any of those learnings that you have made during that time. Also, the other part where you mentioned the user clicks a button, and something happens, that's where I immediately went with this. I also liked that you highlighted that TDD has that bit of dogma, and I don't always TDD. I do what I can, and it helps me. But it has to be a tool versus something that I just do 100% of the time. But with more of that BDD approach or that very high-level user-level integration test of where if I need to pull data from an API and then show it to the user, okay, I know I can at least start with a high-level test of I want the user to then see some data on a page. And that will lead me down some path of errors. It might help me implement a route and a controller and then a show action, so it will at least help me get started. Or even if it doesn't give me helpful enough errors, it at least serves as my guideline of like, this is my North Star. This is where I'm headed. So then, if I need to revisit, okay, what's the thing that I'm focused on at the moment? I can go back and be like, okay, I'm focused on achieving this. What's the next smallest step I can take to get there? The other thing that I've learned over time is I've given myself the chance to be messy because I got so excited about the idea of unit testing and writing small, fast test that I would often try to start with small objects and then work my way backwards into like, okay, I have this one object that does this thing and one object that like...let's use a concrete example. So one object that knows how to communicate with API and one object that knows how to then parse and format the data I want and then something else that's then going to present that data to the user. But I found when I started with small objects, I would get a little lost, and I wasn't always great at bringing them together. So I've taken the opposite approach of where if I'm really not sure where I'm headed and I'm in that more exploratory phase or even just that first initial parse of a feature, I will just start messy. So if I am pulling data from an API and need to show it to a user on a screen, I'll just dump it in the controller if I need to. I'll put it all there together. And then once I actually have something that is parsing, or I have something appearing on the page, then I will start to say, "Okay, now that I can see what I need and I can see the pieces that I've written, how can I then start to extract this into smaller objects?” And now, I can start writing unit tests for that data. So that is something that has helped me is just start high, keep it high, be messy, and until you start to see some of the smaller objects that you can pull out. CHRIS: Yeah, I think there's something that you were just saying there that clicked for me of we didn't start with the why of TDD. And I don't think we've talked about why we believe in TDD in a while. So this feels like a thing we're saying. It's not good just because it's good, or we don't believe it's good just because that's what we say. For me, it is because it anchors us outside of the code sort of it starts to think of it from the user perspective or some outer layer. So even if you're unit testing some deeply nested class within your application, there's still an outer layer. There's still a user of that class. And so, thinking about the public API, I think is really useful. And then the further out you get, the better that is, and I believe strongly in thinking from the outside in on these sort of things. And then the other thing you said of allowing for refactoring. And if we have tests, then it's so much easier to sort of...I totally 100% agree with like; I start messy. I start very messy. I wanted to pretend that I was going to be like, oh, I'm so...Steph, I can't believe this. But no, of course, I start messy. Why would you start trying to do the hard thing first? No, get something that works. But then having the test coverage around that makes it so much easier to go through those sequential refactoring steps. Versus if you have to write the code correctly upfront and then add test coverage around that, it sort of inverts that whole thing. And so, although it may take a little bit longer to write the tests upfront, I do exactly what you're describing of like, I write the tests that tell some truth about the system and constrain the system to do that thing. And then I can have a messy implementation that I can iteratively refactor over and over, and I can extract things from. And then, I can tell a more concise testing story about those. And so it really is both the higher-level perspective I think is super useful and then the ability to refactor under that test coverage is also very useful. And it makes my job easier because I can start messy. I love starting messy. It's so much better. STEPH: Yeah, and I think former me had the idea that for me to do TDD properly meant that I had these small, encapsulated objects that I wrote unit tests for. And yes, that is the goal. I do want that, but that doesn't mean I have to start there. That is something that then I can work my way towards. That also falls in line with the adage from Sandi Metz that the wrong abstraction is more costly than no abstraction. And so I'd rather start with no abstractions and then start to consider, okay, how can I actually move this out into smaller objects and then test it from there? There's also something that I heard that I haven't done as often, but I really liked the idea; it feels very freeing, is that when you do get started and if you write your first test, if you write a test and it helps you make some progress but then you come back to it later and you're like, you know, the test doesn't really add value, or it's not helping me anymore, just thank it and delete it and move on. Just because you wrote it doesn't mean it needs to stay. So if it provided some benefit to you and helped you through that journey of adding the feature, then that's wonderful. But don't be timid about deleting it or changing it so that it does serve you because otherwise, it's just going to be this toxic test that gets merged into the main branch, and it's going to be untrustworthy. Or maybe it's fussy and hard to please, or it's just really not the supportive test that you're looking for. And so then you can turn it into more of a supportive test and make it fit your goals instead of just clinging to every test that we've written. CHRIS: I like the framing of tests as scaffolding to help you build up the structure. But then, at the end, some of the scaffolding gets ripped away and thrown out. And I do think, again, testing ends up in this weird place. The dogmatic thing that we were talking about earlier feels very true. And I've noticed, particularly on larger teams, folks being very hesitant to delete tests like, that feels like sacrilege. Of course, you can't delete tests; the tests are how we know it's true, which is true, but you can interrogate that. You can see like, how true is it? And every test has a cost and maintenance burden, runtime, et cetera. You probably know well, Steph, about having test suites that take a bunch of time to run and then maybe wanting to spend a little bit of time trying to reduce that overall time. And so there's always going to be a trade-off there. Actually, someone reminded me of an anecdote recently. I joined a project, and most of the test suite or all of the test suite was commented out because it was flaky or intermittent. And I was like, "Oh, I'm going to delete that." And people were like, "You're what?" I'm like; it's commented out. We're not using it. Let's tell the truth. Git will have it. We can go back and get it. But let's tell the truth with what we're like...this commented-out test suite is almost worse in my mind than having nothing there. The nothing feels painful, right? Let's experience that. Whereas the commented out stuff is like, well, we have a test suite; it's just commented out. It's like, no, you don't have a test suite at all. That's not what's going on here. But there were other thoughtboters on the project that poked a good amount of fun at me when they were like, "The first thing you did on this project was delete the test suite?" As I was like, "Yeah, I don't know, I was feeling spicy that day or something." But I think the test suite needs to serve the work that we're doing in the same way that everything else does. And so occasionally, yeah, deleting tests is absolutely the right thing and then probably add back some more. STEPH: It's funny how that reaction exists. And I've done it before myself where like, if you see commented out code and you put up a PR to remove it, I feel like most people are going to be like, yeah, yeah, that's great. Let's get rid of this. It's clearly not news. It's commented out. But then removing a skipped test then has people like, "Well, but that test looks like it could be valuable, and we're going to fix it." And it's like...all I can go back to is that silly example of like, you've got your skinny jeans, one day I'm going to fit into those skinny jeans. And so one day, I'm going to fix this test, and it's going to serve the purpose. And it's going to be the me I want to be. [laughs] And it is funny how we do that. With code, we're like, sure, we can get rid of it. But with tests, we feel this clinginess to them where we want to hold on to it and make it pass. And I think that sometimes has to do with the descriptions. There are test descriptions commented out that I've seen are like, user can log in, or if given a user without permission, they can't access. And it's like, oh, that sounds important. I'm now nervous to delete you versus fix you, but you're still not actually running and providing value. And so then I have to negotiate with myself as to where do we actually go from here? But I do love the idea of deleting tests that are skipped because we should just let them go. We either have to dedicate time to fix them or let them go and make that hard decision. CHRIS: The critical idea of future me will have more time, future me will be calm and will work through all the other bugs and future discounting; as far as I understand it as a formalization of the term, yeah, it's never true. I've only gotten busier over time, just broadly speaking. And that seems to be a truism in software projects as well. It's like, oh, we just have to write a bunch of features, and then it'll be calm. I don't even think I'd want that. But future me will not have more time. And so choosing the things that we do invest in versus not is tricky, but the idea of that future me will have a lot of time or future us probably not true. STEPH: Well, I think the story that I just shared at the beginning of our chat highlights that future me won't always be calm. [laughs] So let's work with what I've got. Let's not bank on that. Future Stephanie might be very emotional about dropping her dog off at boarding for a couple of days. [laughs] Future me might be very emotional about fixing this test. All right, well, thanks for going on that journey with me. That's really helpful. I knew you'd have some great insights there. Mid-roll Ad: Hi, friends, and now a quick break to hear from today's sponsor, Scout APM. Scout APM is an application performance monitoring tool that's designed to help developers find and fix performance issues quickly. With an intuitive user interface, Scout will tie bottlenecks to source code so you can quickly pinpoint and resolve performance abnormalities like N+1 queries, slow database queries, and memory bloat. Scout also recently implemented external service monitoring, adding even more granularity when it comes to HTTP requests and API calls. So give Scout a try today with a free 14-day trial and experience first-hand why developers worldwide call Scout their best friend. And as an added bonus for Bike Shed listeners, Scout will donate $5 to the open-source project of your choice when you deploy. To learn more, visit scoutapm.com/bikeshed. That's scoutapm.com/bikeshed. CHRIS: What's going on in my world? Last week we had our first ever Sagewell all-hands get-together in person. Many of us have met in person before, but not everyone. And so this was a combination celebration for our seed fundraising round, which had happened actually sometime right at the end of last year. But due to COVID in the world and complexity, it was difficult to get everybody together. So that finally happened. And then we sort of grafted on to that celebration, that party that we were having. Like, let's just extend a day in either direction and do some in-person working and all of that. And that was really great. I'm trying to find that ideal middle ground between we are a remote team, but there is definitely value in occasionally being in person, particularly getting to know people but also just having some higher bandwidth conversations, planning, things like that. They just feel different in person. And so, how do we balance that? And how do we be most productive and all that? But it was really great to meet the team more so than I had on the internet and get to spend some time in person and do some whiteboarding. I drew on a whiteboard with a team. We were all looking at the same whiteboard. We're in the same room. And I drew on a whiteboard some entity relationship diagrams. It was awesome. [laughs] It was super fun. It was one of those cases where we had built an assumption deeply into our codebase, and suddenly instead of having one of a thing, we may now have multiple of a thing. There's a wonderful blog post by Shawn Wang called Preemptive Pluralization which I think is based on an episode of Ben Orenstein's podcast, The Art of Product, where Ben basically framed the idea of like, I've never regretted pluralizing something earlier. A user has one account; they have multiple accounts. They just happen to have one at this time, et cetera. So we're in one of those. And it was a great thing to be able to be in a room and whiteboard. I knew at the time when I did it way back when that I was making the wrong decision. But I didn't know exactly how and the shape. And so now we have to do that fun refactoring so glad that we have a giant test suite that will help us with said refactoring. But yeah, so that was really great to be able to do in person. STEPH: I think there can be so much value in getting together and getting to see your team and, like you said, have those high-level conversations and then just also getting to hang out. So it's really nice to hear that reinforced since you experienced that same positivity from that experience. Do you think that's something that y'all will have going forward? Do you think you're going to try to get together like once a year, once a quarter? Maybe it hasn't even been talked about. But I'm hearing that it was great and that maybe there will be some repeats. CHRIS: Yes, yeah. I think I'm inclined to quarterly at a minimum and maybe even slightly more than that. Some of us are centered around Boston, and so it's a little bit easier for us to pop in and work at a WeWork, that sort of thing. But I think broadly, getting the team together and having that be intentional. And personally, I'm inclined to that being more social time than productive time because I think that's the thing that is most useful in person is building relationship and rapport and understanding folks better. I remember so pointedly when thoughtbot would have the annual Summer Summit, and leading up to that; there was a certain amount of conversation. But there were also location-specific rooms, and a lot of the conversation happened like in the Boston channel or whatnot. And then, without fail, every year after the Summer Summit, suddenly, there was a spike in cross-team chatter. Like, the Ruby room now had a bunch of people from San Francisco talking to Boston, talking to New York, et cetera. And it was just this incredibly clear...I think we could actually, like, I think at one point someone plotted the data, and there's just this stepwise jump that would happen every time. And so that sort of connecting folks is really what I believe in there. And the more we're leaning into the remote thing, then the more I think this is important. So I think quarterly is probably the lowest end that I would think of, but it might be more. And it's also a question of like, what shape does this take? Is it just us going and hanging out somewhere? Or are we productively trying to get together with a whiteboard? I think we'll figure that out as we go on. But it's definitely something that I'm glad we've done now, set the precedent for, and we'll hopefully do more of moving on. STEPH: Yeah, I always really love the thoughtbot Summits. In fact, we have one coming up. It's coming up in May, and this one's taking place in UK. But there have been some interesting conversations around Summit because before, it was the idea that everybody traveled. But typically, they were in Boston, so for me, it was particularly easy because it was already where I lived. So then showing up for Summit was no biggie. But with this one happening in UK and COVID and travel still being a concern, there's been more conversations around; okay, this is awesome. People who want to get together can. There are these events going on. But there are people who don't want to travel, don't feel up to travel. They have family obligations that then make it very difficult for them to leave one partner at home with the kids. And I myself I'm in that space where I thought really hard about whether I was going to travel or not. And I've decided not to just for personal reasons. But then it brings up the question of okay, well, if we have a number of people that are going to be in person together, then what about the people who are remote? And the idea of running something that's hybrid is not something that we've really figured out. But those that are remote, we're going to get together and figure out what we want to do and maybe what's our version of our remote summit since we're not going to be traveling. But I feel like that's definitely a direction that needs to be considered as teams are getting in person because if you do have people that can't make it, how can you still bring them in so it's an inclusive event but respect to the fact that they can't necessarily travel? I don't know if that's a concern that every team needs to have, but it's one that I've been thinking about with our team. And then I know others at thoughtbot we've been considering just because we do have such a disparate team. And we want to make everybody comfortable and feel included. CHRIS: Yeah, as with everything in this world, there's always complexities and subtlety. Thankfully, for our first get-together, we were able to get everyone into the same space. But I do wonder, especially as the team grows, even just scheduling, the logistics of it become really complicated. So then does the engineering team have get-togethers that are slightly different, and then there's like once yearly a big get-together of the whole team? Or how do you manage that and dealing with family situations and all that? It is very much a complicated thing that thankfully was very straightforward for us this first time, but I fully expect that we'll have to be all the more intentional with it moving forward. And, you know, that's just the game. But switching gears ever so slightly, we did have a fun thing that we've worked on a little bit over the past few weeks. We've finally landed it in the app. But we were swapping out our masked input library that we were using, so this is for someone entering their birthday, or a phone number, or social security number, or dates. I guess I already said dates. Passwords I think we also use here. But we have a bunch of different inputs in the app that behave specially. And my goodness, is this one of those things that falls into the category of, oh yeah, I assume this is a solved problem, right? We just have a library out there that does it. And each library is like, oh no, all of the other libraries are bad. I will come along, and I will write the one library to solve all of the problems, and then we'll be good. And it is just such a surprisingly complicated space. It feels like it should be more straightforward. And as I think about it, it's not; it's dealing with imperative interactions between a user and this input. And you need to transform it from what happens when you hit the delete key? What do you want to happen? What's the most discoverable for every user? How do we make sure they're accessible? But my goodness, was it complicated. I think we're happy with where we landed, but it was an adventure. STEPH: I'll be honest, that's something that I haven't given as much thought to. But I guess that's also I just haven't worked with that lately in terms of a particular library that then masks those inputs. So I'm curious, which library were using before, and then which one did you switch to? CHRIS: That's a critical piece of information that I have left off here. So for the previous one, we were using one called svelte-input-mask, which, again, part of the fun here is you want to have bindings into whatever framework that you're using. So svelte-input-mask is what we were using before. We have now moved on to using iMask, which is not like the thing you wear on your face, but it is the letter I so like igloo, Mike, et cetera, I-M-A-S-K, iMask. And so that is a lower-level library. There are bindings to other things. But for TypeScript and other reasons, we ended up implementing our own bindings in Svelte, which was actually relatively straightforward. Again, big fan of Svelte; it's a wonderful little framework. But that is what we're using now, and it is excellent. It's got a lot of features. We ended up using it in a slightly more simple version or implementation. It's got a lot of bells and whistles and configurations. We went up the middle with it. But yeah, we're on iMask, which also led to a very entertaining moment where it was interacting with our test suite in an interesting way. And so, one of the developers on the team searched for Capybara iMask. [laughs] And I forget exactly how it happened, but if you Google search that, for some reason, the internet thinks an iMask is a thing that goes over your mouth. And so it's a Capybara, like the animal, facemask. It's very confusing, but this got dropped into our Slack at one point, someone being like, "I searched for Capybara iMask, and it got weird, everybody." So yeah, that was a fun, little side quest that we got to go on. STEPH: [laughs] I just Googled it as you told me to, and it's adorable. Yeah, it's a face mask, and it has a little capybara cartoon on the front of it. Yeah, there are many of these. [laughs] CHRIS: When I think of an iMask, though, it's the thing that you put over your eyes to block the light if you want to sleep. But they're like, an iMask like, a mask that still keeps her eyes outside of it. I don't understand the internet. It's a weird place. STEPH: I think that was just Google saying Capybara iMask. Nope, don't know I, so let's put together Capybara mask, and that's what you got back. [laughs] CHRIS: I guess, yeah. It's just a Capybara mask. And I'm projecting the ‘I' because I phonetically heard that for a while. Anyway, yes. But yeah, masked inputs so complicated. STEPH: This is adorable. I feel like there should be swag for when people move. Like when people find things like this, this is the type of thing that then I stash and then wait for their anniversary at the company, and then I send it to them to remind them of this time that we had together. [laughs] There was also a moment where you said, ‘I.' You were explaining I as in in the letter I, not E-Y-E for eyemask. And you said igloo, and my brain definitely short-circuited for a minute to be like, did he just say igloo? Why did he say igloo? And it took me a minute to, oh, he's helping phonetically say that this is for the letter I. CHRIS: Yep. The NATO phonetic alphabet that if you don't explain that that's what you're doing, now I'm just naming random other objects in the world. Sorry. STEPH: [laughs] CHRIS: And that's why I cut myself off halfway through. I'm like, now you're just naming stuff. This isn't helping. STEPH: [laughs] CHRIS: Yes, the letter I, the letter M. [laughs] STEPH: All of that was a delightful journey for me, and I was curious. I'm glad you brought the test because I was curious if y'all are testing if things are getting obscured, but it sounds like y'all are, which is what helped give you confidence as you were switching over to the new library. CHRIS: Yeah, although to name it, we're not testing at a terribly low level. This is a great example of where I believe in feature specs. Like, within our Capybara feature spec, we are saying, and then as a user, I type in this value into the input. And critically, although this input needs to have special formatting and presentational behavior, it should functionally be identical. And so it was a very good litmus test of does this just work? And then, actually, our feature specs ended up in a race condition, which is just an annoying situation where Capybara moves so quickly that it represented a user. But as we were having that conversation, I was like, wait a minute; I know that users are slower than a computer. But is this actually an edge case that's real that we need to think about? And I think we did end up slightly changing our implementation. So our feature specs did, in a way, highlight that. But mostly, our feature specs did not need to change to adapt to and then fill in the formatted input. It was just fill in the input with the value. And that did not change at all, but it did put a tiny bit of pressure on our implementation to say, oh, there is a weird, tiny, little race condition here. Let's fix that. And so we did race conditions, no fun at all. STEPH: Interesting. Okay, so y'all aren't actually testing. Like, there's no test that says, "Hey, that when someone types into this field, that then there should be this different UI that's present because then we are obscuring the text that they're putting into this field." It was, as you mentioned, we're just testing that we changed over libraries, and everything still works. So then do you just go through that manual test of, then you go to staging, and then you test it that way? CHRIS: Yeah, that's a great question, yes, although as you say it, it's interesting. I guess there's a failure mode here or that our test suite does not enforce that the formatting masking behavior is happening. But it does test that the value goes through this input, gets submitted to the server, turns into the right type of value in the back end, all of that. And so I guess this is an example of how I think about testing, like, that's the critical bit, and then it's a nicety. It's an enhancement that we have this masking behavior. But if that broke, as long as the actual flow of data is still working, that can't break in a way that a user can't use. It sort of reminds me of the Mitch Hedberg joke, an escalator can never break, and it can only become stairs. And so I'm in that mindset here where a masked input that you have proper feature spec coverage around can never quote, unquote, "break." It can just become a plain text input. STEPH: I love how much that resonates with me. And I now know that when I'm writing tests, I'm going to think back to Mitch Hedberg and be like, oh, but is it broken-broken, or is it just now stairs? Because that's often how I will think of feature specs and how low level I will get with them. And this is on that boundary of like, yes, it's important that we want to obscure that data that someone's typing in, but it's not broken if it's not obscured. So there's that balance of I don't really want to test it. Someone will alert us. Like if that breaks, someone will alert us, and it's not the end of the world. It's just unfortunate. But if they can't sign in or they can't actually submit the form, that's a big problem. So yes, I love this comparison now of is it actually broken, or is it just stairs? [laughs] As a guideline for, how much should we test at this feature level or test in general? What should we care about? CHRIS: I feel like this is a deep truth that I believed for a long time. And I think I probably, somewhere in the back of my head, connected it to this joke. But I feel really good that I formally made that connection now because I feel like it helps me categorize this whole thing. Sorry for the convenience as a joke. And so yeah, that's where we're at. STEPH: For anyone that's not familiar with the comedian Mitch Hedberg, we'll be sure to include a link to that particular joke because it's delightful. And now it's connected to tech, which makes it just even more delightful. CHRIS: I only understand anything by analogy, especially humorous analogy. So this is just critical to my progression as a developer and technologist. STEPH: Yeah, I've learned over the years that there are two ways that I retain knowledge: it either caused me pain, or it made me laugh. Otherwise, it's mundane, and it gets filtered out. Laughter is, of course, my favorite. I mean, pain sticks with me as well. But if it's something that made me laugh, I just know I'm far more likely to retain it, and it's going to stick with me. Mid-Roll AD: And now a quick break to hear from today's sponsor, Studio 3T. When you're developing applications, it can often be a chore to work with your underlying data. Studio 3T equips you with a complete set of tools to work with MongoDB data. From building queries with drag and drop, to creating complex aggregation pipelines, Studio 3T makes it easy. And now, there's Studio 3T Free, a free edition of Studio 3T, which delivers an essential core of tools. This means you can get started, for free, with Studio 3T Free, and when you're ready, you can upgrade and enjoy even more features through Studio 3T Pro and Studio 3T Ultimate. The different editions unlock more tools and additional integrations with MongoDB, SQL, Oracle, and Sybase. You can start today by downloading Studio 3T Free, which also includes a 30-day free trial of all the features of Studio 3T Ultimate, so you can try out some of the enterprise features as well. No credit card required. To start your trial, head to studio3t.com/free. That's studio3t.com/free. CHRIS: On that wonderful framing there, I think we should wrap up. What do you think? STEPH: Let's wrap up. CHRIS: The show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. STEPH: This show is produced and edited by Mandy Moore. CHRIS: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review on iTunes, as it really helps other folks find the show. STEPH: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us at @_bikeshed or reach me on Twitter @SViccari. CHRIS: And I'm @christoomey. STEPH: Or you can reach us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. CHRIS: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. ALL: Byeeeeeee!!!!!! ANNOUNCER: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success.

The Iconic Albums team are back, but this time shifting their gaze onto some of Gibson's stranger moments. Some of these guitars were destined for greatness...some had a destiny with a bulldozer. Rob Rhodes - www.rhodetripent.com Gabor Josika - SuperFunAwesomeHappyTime Pedal Show   This episode is brought to you by Fretboard Biology    Fretboard Biology - the online guitar college created by Joe Elliott, ex Head of Guitar at GIT and McNally Smith Music College. Fretboard Biology Guitar Speak Podcast #146 - Joe Elliott - ex guitar head of GIT - launches Fretboard Biology Guitar Speak Podcast Links PayPal Tip Jar Visit us at guitarspeakpodcast.com Subscribe and find previous episodes at: Apple Podcasts Spotify Stitcher   Follow us on Facebook & Instagram   Contact us at guitarspeakpodcast@gmail.com

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) is officially released

About TomTom enjoys being a bridge between people and technology. When he's not thinking about ways to make enterprise demos less boring, Tom enjoys spending time with his wife and dogs, reading, and gaming with friends.Links Referenced: LaunchDarkly: https://launchdarkly.com Heidi Waterhouse Twitter: https://twitter.com/wiredferret TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Couchbase Capella Database-as-a-Service is flexible, full-featured and fully managed with built in access via key-value, SQL, and full-text search. Flexible JSON documents aligned to your applications and workloads. Build faster with blazing fast in-memory performance and automated replication and scaling while reducing cost. Capella has the best price performance of any fully managed document database. Visit couchbase.com/screaminginthecloud to try Capella today for free and be up and running in three minutes with no credit card required. Couchbase Capella: make your data sing.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Revelo. Revelo is the Spanish word of the day, and its spelled R-E-V-E-L-O. It means “I reveal.” Now, have you tried to hire an engineer lately? I assure you it is significantly harder than it sounds. One of the things that Revelo has recognized is something I've been talking about for a while, specifically that while talent is evenly distributed, opportunity is absolutely not. They're exposing a new talent pool to, basically, those of us without a presence in Latin America via their platform. It's the largest tech talent marketplace in Latin America with over a million engineers in their network, which includes—but isn't limited to—talent in Mexico, Costa Rica, Brazil, and Argentina. Now, not only do they wind up spreading all of their talent on English ability, as well as you know, their engineering skills, but they go significantly beyond that. Some of the folks on their platform are hands down the most talented engineers that I've ever spoken to. Let's also not forget that Latin America has high time zone overlap with what we have here in the United States, so you can hire full-time remote engineers who share most of the workday as your team. It's an end-to-end talent service, so you can find and hire engineers in Central and South America without having to worry about, frankly, the colossal pain of cross-border payroll and benefits and compliance because Revelo handles all of it. If you're hiring engineers, check out revelo.io/screaming to get 20% off your first three months. That's R-E-V-E-L-O dot I-O slash screaming.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Today's promoted episode is brought to us by our friends at LaunchDarkly. And it's always interesting when there's a promoted guest episode because they generally tend to send someone who has a story to tell in different ways.Sometimes they send me customers of theirs. Other times they send me executives. And for this episode, they have sent me Tom Totenberg, who's a senior solutions engineer at LaunchDarkly. Tom, thank you for drawing the short straw. It's appreciated.Tom: [laugh]. Anytime. Thank you so much for having me, Corey.Corey: So, you're a senior solutions engineer, which in many different companies is interpreted differently, but one of the recurring themes tends to pop up is often that is a different way of saying sales engineer because if you say sales, everyone hisses and recoils when you enter the conversation. Is that your experience or do you see your role radically differently?Tom: Well, I used to be one of those people who did recoil when I heard the word sales. I was raised in a family where you didn't talk about finances, you know? That's considered to be faux pas, and when you hear the word sales, you immediately think of a car lot. But what I came to realize is that, especially when we talk about cloud software or any sort of community where you start to run into the same people at conferences over and over and over again, turns out the good salespeople are the ones who actually try to form relationships and try to solve problems. And I realized that oh, I like to work with those people. It's pretty exciting. It's nice to be aspirational about what people can do and bring in the technical chops to see if you can actually make it happen. So, that's where I fit in.Corey: The way that I've always approached it has been rather different. Because before I got into tech, I worked in sales a bunch of times and coming up from the—I guess, clawing your way up doing telesales was a polite way of describing—back in the days before there were strong regulations against it, calling people at dinner to sell them credit cards. And what's worse is I was surprisingly effective at it for a kid who, like, you grew up in a family where we didn't talk about money. And it's easy to judge an industry by its worst examples. Another one of these would be recruiting, for example.When everyone talks about how terrible third-party recruiters are because they're referring to the ridiculous spray-and-pray model of just blasting out emails to everything that hold still long enough that meets a keyword. And yeah, I've also met some recruiters that are transformative as far as the conversations you have with them go. But some of that with sales. It's, “Oh, well, you can't be any fun to talk to because I had a really bad experience buying a used car once and my credit was in the toilet.”Tom: Yeah, exactly. And you know, I have a similar experience with recruiters coming to LaunchDarkly. So, not even talking about the product; I was a skeptic, I was happy where I was, but then as I started talking to more and more people here, I'm assuming you've read the book Accelerate; you probably had a hand in influencing part of it.Corey: I can neither confirm nor deny because stealing glory is something I only do very intentionally.Tom: Oh okay, excellent. Well, I will intentionally let you have some of that glory for you then. But as I was reading that book, it reminded me again of part of why I joined LaunchDarkly. I was a skeptic, and they convinced me through everyone that I talked to just what a nice place it is, and the great culture, it's safe to fail, it's safe to try stuff and build stuff. And then if it fails, that's okay. This is the place where that can happen, and we want to be able to continue to grow and try something new.That's again, getting back to the solutions engineer, sales engineer part of it, how can we effectively convey this message and teach people about what it is that we do—LaunchDarkly or not—in a way that makes them excited to see the possibilities of it? So yeah, it's really great when you get to work with those type of people, and it absolutely shouldn't be influenced by the worst of them. Sometimes you need to find the right ones to give you a chance and get in the door to start having those conversations so you can make good decisions on your own, not just try to buy whatever someone's—whatever their initiative is or whatever their priority is, right?Corey: Once upon a time when I first discovered LaunchDarkly, it was pretty easy to describe what you folks did. Feature flags. For longtime listeners of the show, and I mean very longtime listeners of the show, your colleague Heidi Waterhouse was guest number one. So, I've been talking to you folks about a variety of different things in a variety of different ways. But yeah, “LaunchDarkly. Oh, you do feature flags.”And over time that message has changed somewhat into something I have a little bit of difficulty to be perfectly honest with you in pinning down. At the moment we're recording this, if I pull up launchdarkly.com, it says, “Fundamentally change how you deliver software. Innovate faster, deploy fearlessly, and make each release a masterpiece.”And I look at the last release I pushed out, which wound up basically fixing a couple of typos there, and it's like, “Well, shit. Is it going to make me sign my work because I'm kind of embarrassed by a lot of it.” So, it's aspirational, I get it, but it also somehow [occludes 00:05:32] a little bit of meaning. What is it you'd say it is you do here.Tom: Oh, Office Space. Wonderful. Good reference. And also, to take about 30 seconds back, Heidi Waterhouse, what a wonderful human. wiredferret on Twitter. Please, please go look her up. She's got just always such wonderful things to say. So—Corey: If you don't like Heidi Waterhouse, it is a near certainty it is because you've not yet met her. She's wonderful.Tom: Exactly. Yes, she is. So, what is it we'd say we do here? Well, when people think about feature flags—or at this point now, ‘feature management,' which is a broader scope—that's the term that we're using now, it's really talking about that last bit of software delivery, the last mile, the last leg, whatever your—you know, when you're pushing the button, and it's going to production. So, you know, a feature flag, if you ask someone five or ten years ago, they might say, oh, it's a fancy if statement controlled by a config file or controlled by a database.But with a sort of modern architecture, with global delivery, instant response time or fraction of a second response time, it's a lot more fundamental than that. That's why the word fundamental is there: Because it comes down to psychological safety. It comes down to feeling good about your life every day. So, whether it is that you're fixing a couple typos, or if you're radically changing some backend functionality, and trying out some new sort of search algorithm, a new API route that you're not sure if it's going to work at scale, honestly, you shouldn't have to stay up at night, you shouldn't have to think about deploying on a weekend because you should be able to deploy half-baked code to production safely, you should be able to do all of that. And that's honestly what we're all about.Now, there's some extra elements to it: Feedback loops, experimentation, metrics to make sure that your releases are doing well and doing what you anticipated that they would do, but really, that's what it comes down to is just feeling good about your work and making sure that if there is a fire, it's a small fire, and the entire audience isn't going to get part of the splash zone, right? We're making it just a little safer. Does that answer your question? Is that what you're getting at? Or am I still just speaking in the lingo?Corey: That gets it a lot closer. One of the breakthrough moments—of course I picked it up from one of Heidi's talks—is feature flag seems like a front end developer thing, yadda, yadda, yadda. And she said historically, yeah, in some ways, in some cases, that's how it started. But think about it this way. Think about separating out configuration from your deploy process. And what would that mean? What would that entail?And I look at my current things that I have put out there, and there is no staging environment, my feature branches main, and what would that change? In my case, basically nothing. But that's okay. Because I'm an irresponsible lunatic who should not be allowed near anything expensive, which is why I'm better at stateless things because I know better than to take my aura near things like databases.Tom: Yeah. So, I don't know how old you are Corey. But back—Corey: I'm in my mid-30s, which—Tom: Hey—Corey: —enrages my spouse who's slightly older. Because I'm turning 40 in July, but it's like, during the pandemic, as it has for many of us, the middle has expanded.Tom: There you go. Right. Exa—[laugh] exactly. Can neither confirm nor deny. You can only see me from about the mid-torso up, so, you know, you're not going to see whether I've expanded.But when we were in school doing group projects, we didn't have Google Docs. We couldn't see what other people were working on. You'd say, “Hey, we've got to write this paper. Corey, you take the first section, I'll take the second section, and we'll go and write and we'll try to squish it back together afterward.” And it's always a huge pain in the ass, right? It's terrible. Nobody likes group projects.And so the old method of Gitflow, where we're creating these feature branches and trying to squish them back later, and you work on that, and you work on this thing, and we can't see what each other are doing, it all comes down to context switching. It is time away from work that you care about, time away from exciting or productive work that you actually get to see what you're doing and put it into production, try it out. Nobody wants to deal with all the extra administrative overhead. And so yeah, for you, when you've got your own trunk-based development—you know, it's all just main—that's okay. When we're talking about teams of 40, 50, 100, 1000 suddenly becomes a really big deal if you were to start to split off and get away from trunk-based development because there's so much extra work that goes into trying to squish all that work back together, right? So, nobody wants to do all the extra stuff that surrounds getting software out there.Corey: It's toil. It feels consistently like it is never standardized so you always have to wind up rolling your own CI/CD thing for whatever it is. And forget between jobs; between different repositories and building things out, it's, “Oh, great. I get to reinvent the wheel some more.” It's frustrating.Tom: [laugh]. It's either that or find somebody else's wheel that they put together and see if you can figure out where all those spokes lead off to. “Is this secure? I don't know.”Corey: How much stuff do you have running in your personal stuff that has more or less been copied around for a decade or so? During the pandemic, I finally decided, all right, you know what I'm doing? That's right, being productive. We should fix that. I'm going to go ahead and redo my shell config—my zshrc—from scratch because, you know, 15 years of technical debt later, a lot of the things I used to really need it to do don't really apply anymore.Let's make it prettier, and let's make it faster. And that was great and all, but just looking through it, it was almost like going back in time for weird shell aliases that I don't need anymore. It's, well, that was super handy when I ran a Ruby production environment, but I haven't done that in seven years, and I haven't been in this specific scenario that one existed for since 2011. So maybe, maybe I can turn that one off.Tom: Yeah, maybe. Maybe we can get rid of that one. I mean, when's the last time you ran npm install on something you were going to try out here and paid attention to the warnings that came up afterward? “Hey, this one's deprecated. That one's deprecated.” Well, let's see if it works first, and then we'll worry about that later.Corey: Exactly. Security problems? Whatever. It's a Lambda function. What do I care?Tom: Yeah, it's fine. [laugh]. Exactly. Yeah. So, a lot of this is hypothetical for someone in my position, too, because I didn't ever get formal training as a software developer. I can copy and paste from Stack Overflow with the best of them and there's all sorts of resources out there, but really the people that we're talking to are the ones who actually live that day in, day out.And so I try to step into their shoes and try to feel that pain. But it's tough. Like, you have to be able to speak both languages and try to relate to people to see what are they actually running into, and is that something that we can help with? I don't know.Corey: The way that I tend to think about these things—and maybe it's accurate, and maybe it's not—it's just, no one shows up hoping to do a terrible job at work today, but we are constrained by a whole bunch of things that are imposed upon us. In some of the more mature environments, some of that is processes there for damn good reasons. “Well, why can't I just push everything I come up with to production?” “It's because we're a bank, genius. How about you think a little bit before you open your mouth?”Other times, it's because well, I have to go and fight with the CI/CD system, and I'm just going to go ahead and patch this one-line change into production. Better processes, better structure have made that a lot more… they've made it a lot easier to be able to do things the right way. But I would say we're nowhere near its final form, yet. There's so much yak-shaving that has to go into building out anything that it's frustrating, on some level, just all of the stuff you have to do, just to get the scaffolding in place to write nonsense. I mean, back when they announced Lambda functions it was, “In the future, the only code you'll write is business logic.”Yeah, well, I use a crap-ton of Lambda here and it feels like most of the code I write is gluing all of the weird formats and interchanges together in different APIs. Not a lot of business logic in that; and awful lot of JSON finickiness.Tom: Yeah, I'm with you. And especially at scale, I still have a hard time wrapping my mind around how all of that extra translation is possibly going to give the same sort of performance and same sort of long-term usability, as opposed to something that just natively speaks the same language end-to-end. So yeah, I agree, there's still some evolution, some standardization that still needs to happen because otherwise we're going to end up with a lot of cruft at various points in the code to, just like you said, translate and make sure we're speaking the same language.Getting back to process though, I spent a good chunk of my career working with companies that are, I would say, a little more conservative, and talking to things like automotive companies, or medical device manufacturers. Very security-conscious, compliant places. And so agile is a four-letter word for them, right, [laugh] where we're going faster automatically means we're being dangerous because what would the change control board say? And so there's absolutely a mental shift that needs to happen on the business side. And developers are fighting this cultural battle, just to try to say, hey, it's better if we can make small iterative changes, there is less risk if we can make small, more iterative changes, and convincing people who have never been exposed to software or know the ins and outs of what it takes to get something from my laptop to the cloud or production or you know, wherever, then that's a battle that needs to be fought before you can even start thinking about the tooling. Living in the Midwest, there's still a lot of people having that conversation.Corey: So, you are clearly deep in the weeds of building and deploying things into production. You're clearly deep into the world of explaining various solutions to different folks, and clearly you have the obvious background for this. You majored in music. Specifically, you got a master's in it. So, other than the obvious parallel of you continue to sing for your supper, how do you get from there to here?Tom: Luck and [laugh]. Natural curiosity. Corey, right now you are sitting on the desk that is also housing my PC gaming computer, right? I've been building computers just to play video games since I was a teenager. And that natural curiosity really came in handy because when I—like many people—realize that oh, no, the career choice that I made when I was 18 ended up being not the career choice that I wanted to pursue for the rest of my life, you have to be able to make a pivot, right, and start to apply some of the knowledge that you got towards some other industries.So, like many folks who are now solutions engineers, there's no degree for solutions engineering, you can't go to school for it; everyone comes from somewhere else. And so in my case, that just happened to be music theory, which was all pedagogy and teaching and breaking down big complex pieces of music into one node at a time, doing analysis, figuring out what's going on underneath the hood. And all of those are transferable skills that go over to software, right? You open up some giant wall of spaghetti code and you have to start following the path and breaking it down because every piece is easy one note at a time, every bit of code—in theory—is easy one line at a time, or one function at a time, one variable at a time. You can continue to break it down further and further, right?So, it's all just taking the transferable skills that you may not see how they get transferred, but then bringing them over to share your unique perspective, because of your background, to wherever it is you're going. In my case, it was tech support, then training, and then solutions engineering.Corey: There's a lot to be said for blending different disciplines. I think that there was, uh, the naughts at least, and possibly into the teens, there was a bias for hiring people who look alike. And no, I'm not referring to the folks who are the white dudes you and I clearly present as but the people with a similar background of, “Oh, you went to these specific schools”—as long as they're Stanford—“And you majored in a narrow list of things”—as long as they're all computer science. And then you wind up going into the following type of role because this is the pedigree we expect and everything, soup to nuts, is aligned around that background and experience. Where you would find people who would be working in the industry for ten years, and they would bomb the interview because it turns out that most of us don't spend our days implementing quicksort on whiteboards or doing other algorithmic-based problems.We're mostly pushing pixels around a screen hoping to make ourselves slightly happier than we were. Here we are. And that becomes a strange world; it becomes a really, really weird moment, and I don't know what the answer is for fixing any of that.Tom: Yeah, well, if you're not already familiar with a quote, you should be, which is that—and I'm going to paraphrase here—but, “Diverse backgrounds lead to diversity in thought,” right? And that presents additional opportunities, additional angles to solve whatever problems you're encountering. And so you're right, you know, we shouldn't be looking for people who have the specific background that we are looking for. How it's described in Accelerate? Can you tell that I read it recently?Which we should be looking for capabilities, right? Are you capable? Do you have the capacity to do the problem-solving, the logic? And of course, some education or experience to prove that, but are you the sort of person who will be able to tackle this challenge? It doesn't matter, right, if you've handled that specific thing before because if you've handled that specific thing before, you're probably going to implement it the same way, again, even if that's not the appropriate solution, this time.So, scrap that and say, let's find the right people, let's find people who can come up with creative solutions to the problems that we're facing. Think about ways to approach it that haven't been done before. Of course don't throw out everything with the—you know, the bathwater out with a baby or whatever that is, but come in with some fresh perspectives and get it done.Corey: I really wish that there was more of an acceptance for that. I think we're getting there. I really do, but it takes time. And it does pay dividends. I mean, that's something I want to talk to you about.I love the sound of my own voice. I wouldn't have two podcasts if I didn't. The counterargument, though, is that there's an awful lot of things that get, you know, challenging, especially when, unlike in a conference setting, it's most people consider it rude to get up and walk out halfway through. When we're talking and presenting information to people during a pandemic situation, well, that changes a lot. What do you do to retain people's interest?Tom: Sure. So, Covid really did a number on anyone who needs to present information or teach. I mean, just ask the millions of elementary, middle school, and high schoolers out there, even the college kids. Everyone who's still getting their education suddenly had to switch to remote learning.Same thing in the professional world. If you are doing trainings, if you're doing implementation, if you're doing demos, if you're trying to convey information to a new audience, it is so easy to get distracted at the computer. I know this firsthand. I'm one of those people where if I'm sitting in an airport lobby and there's a TV on my eyes are glued to that screen. That's me. I have a hard time looking away.And the same thing happens to anyone who's on the receiving end of any sort of information sharing, right? You got Slack blowing you up, you've got email that's pinging you, and that's bound to be more interesting than whatever the person on the screen is saying. And so I felt that very acutely in my job. And there's a couple of good strategies around it, right, which is, we need to be able to make things interactive. We shouldn't be monologuing like I am doing to you right now, Corey.We shouldn't be [laugh] just going off on tangents that are completely irrelevant to whoever's listening. And there's ways to make it more interactive. I don't know if you are familiar, or how much you've watched Twitch, but in my mind, the same sorts of techniques, the same sorts of interactivity that Twitch streamers are doing, we should absolutely be bringing that to the business world. If they can keep the attention of 12-year-olds for hours at a time, why can we not capture the attention of business professionals for an hour-long meeting, right? There's all sorts of techniques and learnings that we can do there.Corey: The problem I keep running into is, if you go stumbling down that pathway into the Twitch streaming model, I found it awkward the few experiments I've made with it because unless I have a whole presentation ready to go and I'm monologuing the whole time, the interactive part with the delay built in and a lot of ‘um' and ‘ah' and waiting and not really knowing how it's going to play out and going seat of the pants, it gets a little challenging in some respects.Tom: Yeah, that's fair. Sometimes it can be challenging. It's risky, but it's also higher reward. Because if you are monologuing the entire time, who's to say that halfway through the content that you are presenting is content that they want to actually hear, right? Obviously, we need to start from some sort of fundamental place and set the stage, say this is the agenda, but at some point, we need to get feedback—similar to software development—we need to know if the direction that we're going is the direction they also want to go.Otherwise, we start diverging at minute 10 and by minute 60, we have presented nothing at all that they actually want to see or want to learn about. So, it's so critical to get that sort of feedback and be able to incorporate it in some way, right? Whether that way is something that you're prepared to directly address. Or if it's something that says, “Hey, we're not on the same page. Let's make sure this is actually a good use of time instead of [laugh] me pretending and listening to myself talk and not taking you into account.” That's critical, right? And that is just as important, even if it feels worse in the moment.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at ChaosSearch. You could run Elasticsearch or Elastic Cloud—or OpenSearch as they're calling it now—or a self-hosted ELK stack. But why? ChaosSearch gives you the same API you've come to know and tolerate, along with unlimited data retention and no data movement. Just throw your data into S3 and proceed from there as you would expect. This is great for IT operations folks, for app performance monitoring, cybersecurity. If you're using Elasticsearch, consider not running Elasticsearch. They're also available now in the AWS marketplace if you'd prefer not to go direct and have half of whatever you pay them count towards your EDB commitment. Discover what companies like Equifax, Armor Security, and Blackboard already have. To learn more, visit chaossearch.io and tell them I sent you just so you can see them facepalm, yet again.Corey: From where I sit, one of the many, many, many problems confronting us is that there's this belief that everyone is like we are. I think that's something fundamental, where we all learn in different ways. I have never been, for example—this sounds heretical sitting here saying it, but why not—I'm not a big podcast person; I don't listen to them very often, just because it's such a different way of consuming information. I think there are strong accessibility reasons for there to be transcripts of podcasts. That's why every 300-and-however-many-odd episodes that this one winds up being the sequence in, every single one of them has a transcript attached to it done by a human.And there's a reason for that. Not just the accessibility wins which are obvious, but the fact that I can absorb that information way more quickly if I need to review something, or consume that. And I assume other people are like me, they're not. Other people prefer to listen to things than to read them, or to watch a video instead of listening, or to build something themselves, or to go through a formal curriculum in order to learn something. I mean, I'm sitting here with an eighth-grade education, myself. I take a different view to how I go about learning things.And it works for me, but assuming that other people learn the same way that I do will be awesome for a small minority of people and disastrous for everyone else. So, maybe—just a thought here—we shouldn't pattern society after what works for me.Tom: Absolutely. There is a multiple intelligence theory out there, something they teach you when you're going to be a teacher, which is that people learn in different ways. You don't judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree. We all learn in different ways and getting back to what we were talking about presenting effectively, there needs to be multiple approaches to how those people can consume information. I know we're not recording video, but for everyone listening to this, I am waving my hands all over the place because I am a highly visual learner, but you must be able to accept that other people are relying more on the auditory experience, other people need to be able to read that—like you said with the accessibility—or even get their hands on it and interact with it in some way.Whether that is Ctrl-F-ing your way through the transcript—or Command-F I'm sorry, Mac users [laugh]; I am also on a Mac—but we need to make sure that the information is ready to be consumed in some way that allows people to be successful. It's ridiculous to think that everyone is wired to be able to sit in front of a computer or in a little cubicle for eight hours a day, five days a week, and be able to retain concentration and productivity that entire time. Absolutely not. We should be recording everything, allowing people to come back and consume it in small chunks, consume it in different formats, consume it in the way that is most effective to them. And the onus for that is on the person presenting, it is not on the consumer.Corey: I make it a point to make what I am doing accessible to the people I am trying to reach, not to me. And sometimes I'm slacking, for example, we're not recording video today, so whenever it looks like I'm not paying attention to you and staring off to the side, like, oh, God, he's boring. No. I have the same thing mirrored on both of my screens; I just prefer to look at the thing that is large and easy to read, rather than the teleprompter, which is a nine-inch screen that is about four feet in front of my face. It's one of those easier for me type of things.On video, it looks completely off, so I don't do it, but I'm oh good, I get to take the luxury of not having to be presentable on camera in quite the same way. But when I'm doing a video scenario, I absolutely make it a point to not do that because it is off-putting to the people I'm trying to reach. In this case, I'm not trying to reach you; I already have. This is a promoted guest episode you're trying to reach the audience, and I believe from what I can tell, you're succeeding, so please keep at it.Tom: Oh, you bet. Well, thank you. You know this already, but this is the very first podcast I've ever been a guest on. So, thank you also for making it such a welcoming place. For what it's worth, I was not offended and didn't think you weren't listening. Obviously, we're having a great time here.But yeah, it's something that especially in the software space, people need to be aware of because everyone's job is—[laugh]. Whether you like it or not, here's a controversial statement: Everyone's job is sales. Are you selling your good ideas for your product, to your boss, to your product manager? Are you able to communicate with marketing to effectively say, “Hey, this is what, in tech support, I'm seeing. This is what people are coming to me with. This is what they care about.”You are always selling your own performance to your boss, to your customers, to other departments where you work, to your spouse, to everybody you interact with. We're all selling ourselves all the time. And all of that is really just communication. It's really just making sure you're able to meet people where they are and, effectively, bridge your point of view with theirs to make sure that we're on the same page and, you know, we're able to communicate well. That's so especially important now that we're all remote.Corey: Just so you don't think this is too friendly of a place, let's go ahead and finish out the episode with a personal attack. Before you wound up working at LaunchDarkly. You were at Perforce. What's up with that? I mean, that seems like an awfully big company to cater to its single customer, who is of course J. Paul Reed.Tom: [laugh]. Yeah. Well, Perforce is a wonderful place. I have nothing but love for Perforce, but it is a very different landscape than LaunchDarkly, certainly. When I joined Perforce, I was supporting product called Helix ALM, which, they're still headquartered—Perforce is headquartered here in Minneapolis. I just saw some Perforce folks last week. It truly is a great place, and it is the place that introduced me to so many DevOps concepts.But that's a fair statement. Perforce has been around for a while. It has grown by acquisition over the past several years, and they are putting together new offerings by mixing old offerings together in a way that satisfies more modern needs, things like virtual production, and game development, and trying to package this up in a way that you can then have a game development environment in a box, right? So, there's a lot of things to be said for that, but it very much is a different landscape than a smaller cloud-native company. Which it's its own learning curve, let me tell you, but truly, yeah, to your Perforce, there's a lot more complexity to the products themselves because they've been around for a little bit longer.Solid, solid products, but there's a lot going on there. And it's a lot harder to learn them right upfront. As opposed to something like LaunchDarkly, which seems simple on the surface and you can get started with some of the easy concepts in implementation in, like, an hour, but then as you start digging deeper, whoof, suddenly, there's a lot more complexity hidden underneath the surface than just in terms of how this is set up, and some of those edge cases.Corey: I have to say for the backstory, for those who are unfamiliar, is I live about four miles away from J. Paul Reed, who is a known entity in reliability engineering, in the DevOps space, has been for a long time. So, to meet him, of course I had to fly to Israel. And he was keynoting DevOpsDays Tel Aviv. And I had not encountered him before, and it was this is awesome, I loved his talk, it was fun.And then I gave a talk a little while later called, “Terrible Ideas in Git.” And he's sitting there just glaring at me, holding his water bottle that is a branded Perforce thing, and it's like, “Do you work there?” He's like, “No. I just love Perforce.” It's like, “Congratulations. Having used it, I think you might be the only one.”I kid. I kid. It was great and a lot of different things. It was not quite what I needed when I needed it to but that's okay. It's gotten better and everyone else is not me, as we've discussed; people have different use cases. And that started a very long-running joke that J. Paul Reed is the entirety of the Perforce customer base.Tom: [laugh]. Yeah. And to your point, there's definitely use cases—you're talking about Perforce Version Control or Helix Core.Corey: Back in those days, I don't believe it was differentiated.Tom: It was just called Perforce. Exactly right. But yeah, as Perforce has gotten bigger, now there's different product lines; you name it. But yeah, some of those modern scalable problems, being able to handle giant binary files, being able to do automatic edge replication for globally distributed teams so that when your team in APAC comes online, they're not having to spend the first two hours of their day just getting the most recent changes from the team in the Americas and Europe. Those are problems that Perforce is absolutely solving that are out there, but it's not problems that everybody faces and you know, there's just like everybody else, we're navigating the landscape and trying to find out where the product actually fits and how it needs to evolve.Corey: And I really do wish you well on it. I think there's going to be an awful lot of—Tom: Mm-hm.Corey: —future stories where there is this integration. And you'd say, “Oh, well, what are you wishing me well for? I don't work there anymore.” But yeah, but isn't that kind of we're talking about, on some level, of building out things that are easy, that are more streamlined, that are opinionated in the right ways, I suppose. And honestly, that's the thing that I found so compelling about LaunchDarkly. I have a hard time imagining I would build anything for production use that didn't feature it these days if I were, you know, better at computers?Tom: Sure. Yeah. [laugh]. Well, we do have our opinions on how some things should work, right? Where the data is exposed because with any feature flagging system or feature management—LaunchDarkly included—you've got a set of rules, i.e. who should see this, where is it turned on? Where is it turned off? Who in your audience or user base should be able to see these features? That's the rules engine side of it.And on the other side, you've got the context to decide, well, you know, I'm Corey, I'm logging in, I'm in my mid-30s. And I know all this information about Corey, and those rules need to then be able to determine whether something should be on or off or which experience Corey gets. So, we are very opinionated over the architecture, right, and where that evaluation actually happens and how that data is exposed or where that's exposed. Because those two halves need to meet and both halves have the potential to be extremely sensitive. If I'm targeting based off of a list of 10,000 of my premium users' email addresses, I should not be exposing that list of 10,000 email addresses to a web browser or a mobile phone.That's highly insecure. And inefficient; that's a large amount of text to send, over 10,000 email addresses. And so when we're thinking about things like page load times, and people being able to push F12 to inspect the page, absolutely not, we shouldn't be exposing that there. At the same time, it's a scary prospect to say, “Hey, I'm going to send personal information about Corey over to some third-party service, some edge worker that's going to decide whether Corey should see a feature or not.” So, there's definitely architectural considerations of different use cases, but that's something that we think through all the time and make sure is secure.There's a reason—I'm going to put on my sales engineer hat here—which is to say that there is a reason that the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services is our sponsor for FedRAMP moderate certification, in process right now, expected to be completed mid-2022. I don't know. But anybody who is unfamiliar with that, if you've ever had to go through high trust certification, you know, any of these compliances to make your regulators happy, you know that FedRAMP is so incredibly stringent. And that comes down to evaluating where are we exposing the data? Who gets to see that? Is security built in and innate into the architecture? Is that something that's been thought through?I have went so far afield from the original point that you made, but I agree, right? We've got to be opinionated about some things while still providing the freedom to use it in a way that is actually useful to you and [laugh] and we're not, you know, putting up guardrails, that mean that you've got such a narrow set of use cases.Corey: I'd like to hope—maybe I'm wrong on this—that it gets easier the more that we wind up doing these things because I don't think that it necessarily has been easy enough for an awful lot of us.Tom: When you say ‘it,' what do you mean?Corey: All of it. That's the best part, I suppose the easy parts of working on computers, which I guess might be typing if you learn it early enough.Tom: Sure. [laugh] yeah. Mario Teaches Typing, or Starcraft taught me how to type quickly. You can't type slowly or else your expansion is going to get destroyed. No, so for someone who got their formal education in music or for someone with an eighth-grade education, I agree there needs to be resources out there.And there are. Not every single StackOverflow post with a question that's been asked has the response, “That's a dumb question.” There are some out there. There's definitely a community or a group of folks who think that there is a correct way to do things and that if you're asking a question, that it's a dumb question. It really isn't. It's getting back to the diverse backgrounds and diverse schools of thought that are coming in.We don't know where someone is coming from that led them to that question without the context, and so we need to continue providing resources to folks to make it easy to self-enable and continue abstracting away the machine code parts of it in friendlier and friendlier ways. I love that there are services like Squarespace out there now, right, that allow anybody to make a website. You don't have to have a degree in computer science to spin something up and share it with the world on the web. We're going to continue to see that type of abstraction, that type of on-ramp for folks, and I'm excited to be part of it.Corey: I really look forward to it. I'm curious to see what happens next for you, especially as you continue—‘you' being the corporate ‘you' here; that's like the understood ‘you' are the royal ‘you.' This is the corporate ‘you'—continue to refine the story of what it is LaunchDarkly does, where you start, where you stop, and how that winds up playing out.Tom: Yeah, you bet. Well, in the meantime, I'm going to continue to play with things like GitHub Copilot, see how much I can autofill, and see which paths that takes me down?Corey: Oh, I've been using it for a while. It's great. Just tab-complete my entire life. It's amazing.Tom: Oh, yeah. Absolutely.Corey: [unintelligible 00:36:08] other people's secrets start working, great, that makes my AWS bill way lower when I use someone else's keys. But that's neither here nor there.Tom: Yeah, exactly. That's a next step of doing that npm install or, you know, bringing in somebody else's [laugh] tools that they've already made. Yeah, just a couple weeks ago, I was playing around with it, and I typed in two lines: I imported the LaunchDarkly SDK and the configuration for the LaunchDarkly SDK, and then I just let it autofill, whatever it wanted. It came out with about 100 lines of something or other. [laugh]. And not all of it made sense, but hey, I saw where the thought process was. It was pretty cool to see.Corey: I really want to thank you for spending as much time and energy as you have talking about how you see the world and where you folks are going. If people want to learn more. Where's the best place to find you?Tom: At launchdarkly.com. Of course, any other various different booths, DevOpsDays, we're at re:Invent, we're at QCon right now. We're at all sorts of places, so come stop by, say hi, get a demo. Maybe we'll talk.Corey: Excellent. We will be tossing links to that into the [show notes 00:37:09]. Thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate it.Tom: Corey, Thank you.Corey: Tom Totenberg, senior solutions engineer at LaunchDarkly. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry and insulting comment, and then I'll sing it to you.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Links and vulnerability summaries for this episode are available at: https://dayzerosec.com/podcast/taking-over-an-internal-aws-service-and-an-interesting-xss-vector.html Short episode this week, looking at some relatively simple vulnerabilities ranging XSS, to leaking internal service credentials in AWS Relational Database Service by disabling validiation. [00:00:40] Git security vulnerability announced [00:06:37] AWS RDS Vulnerability Leads to AWS Internal Service Credentials [00:14:04] Privilege Escalation to SYSTEM in AWS VPN Client [CVE-2022-25165] [00:18:37] Copy-paste XSS in vditor text editor [CVE-2021-32855] The DAY[0] Podcast episodes are streamed live on Twitch (@dayzerosec) twice a week: Mondays at 3:00pm Eastern (Boston) we focus on web and more bug bounty style vulnerabilities Tuesdays at 7:00pm Eastern (Boston) we focus on lower-level vulnerabilities and exploits. The Video archive can be found on our Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/dayzerosec You can also join our discord: https://discord.gg/daTxTK9 Or follow us on Twitter (@dayzerosec) to know when new releases are coming.

Rob Balducci returns to the show with a brilliant new album, 'Transcendence'. The album is a powerful and personal statement from Rob, showcasing his high energy and emotive brand of instrumental rock. Rob has been described by Steve Vai as having "a really good equilibrium for the technical side of things and the emotional investment". Guitar for the Practising musician named Rob as "New York's finest guitarist". robbalducci.com   This episode is brought to you by Fretboard Biology - the online guitar college created by Joe Elliott, ex head of guitar at GIT and McNally Smith Music College. Fretboard Biology Guitar Speak Podcast #146 - Joe Elliott - ex guitar head of GIT - launches Fretboard Biology Guitar Speak Podcast #40 - Joe Elliott   Guitar Speak Podcast Links PayPal Tip Jar Visit us at guitarspeakpodcast.com Subscribe and find previous episodes at: Apple Podcasts Spotify Stitcher   Follow us on Facebook & Instagram Buy a T-Shirt! Contact us at guitarspeakpodcast@gmail.com     This episode is brought to you by Fretboard Biology - the online guitar college created by Joe Elliott, ex head of guitar at GIT and McNally Smith Music College. Fretboard Biology Guitar Speak Podcast #146 - Joe Elliott - ex guitar head of GIT - launches Fretboard Biology Guitar Speak Podcast #40 - Joe Elliott   Guitar Speak Podcast Links PayPal Tip Jar Visit us at guitarspeakpodcast.com Subscribe and find previous episodes at: Apple Podcasts Spotify Stitcher   Follow us on Facebook & Instagram Buy a T-Shirt! Contact us at guitarspeakpodcast@gmail.com

Josh and Kurt talk about a lot of security vulnerabilities in this month's Patch Tuesday. There's also a new Git vulnerability. This sparks the age old question of how fast to patch? The answer isn't binary, the right answer is whatever works best for you, not what someone tells you is best. Show Notes Patch Tuesday Git security update

In follow-up, John has corrections for himself, but Merlin says he knew what John meant. Errors are so much easier to identify once everybody else has had a chance to see them too. In further follow-up, both the listeners and John have some advice for Merlin on programmatically scooting Git files around on his Mac. This week's mini-topic involves some crossover with _Do By Friday_ via a consideration of the varying depictions of J.H. Christ in the iconography of different faiths. Merlin admired his church's minimalist design aesthetic, but John recalls a parishioner at his childhood church espousing strong feelings about getting the man back on the wood where he apparently belongs. As a main topic, your hosts dive into some recent features introduced by Plex—several of which would seem to scratch some of the itches brought up in their recent streaming media discussions. (_Recorded on Tuesday, April 5, 2022_)

In follow-up, John has corrections for himself, but Merlin says he knew what John meant. Errors are so much easier to identify once everybody else has had a chance to see them too. In further follow-up, both the listeners and John have some advice for Merlin on programmatically scooting Git files around on his Mac. This week's mini-topic involves some crossover with _Do By Friday_ via a consideration of the varying depictions of J.H. Christ in the iconography of different faiths. Merlin admired his church's minimalist design aesthetic, but John recalls a parishioner at his childhood church espousing strong feelings about getting the man back on the wood where he apparently belongs. As a main topic, your hosts dive into some recent features introduced by Plex—several of which would seem to scratch some of the itches brought up in their recent streaming media discussions. (_Recorded on Tuesday, April 5, 2022_)

The new features in OpenSSH, an embarrassing outage, the ugly side of Apple's AirTags, and securing SSH keys when using Git. With guest host Dalton Durst from Linux After Dark.   Plugs Improving Replication Security With OpenZFS Delegation Support us on patreon   News OpenSSH 9.0 released At last, Atlassian sees an end to its […]

Being pregnant is hard, but this tapas episode is good! Steph discovered and used a #yelling Slack channel and attended a remote magic show. Chris touches on TypeScript design decisions and edge cases. Then they answer a question captured from a client Slack channel regarding a debate about whether I18n should be used in tests and whether tests should break when localized text changes. This episode is brought to you by ScoutAPM (https://scoutapm.com/bikeshed). Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy. Emma Bostian (https://twitter.com/EmmaBostian) Ladybug Podcast (https://www.ladybug.dev/) Gerrit (https://www.gerritcodereview.com/) Gregg Tobo the Magician (https://astonishingproductions.com/) Sean Wang - swyx - better twitter search (https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1328086859356913664) Twemex (https://twemex.app/) GitHub Pull Request File Tree Beta (https://github.blog/changelog/2022-03-16-pull-request-file-tree-beta/) Sam Zimmerman - CEO of Sagewell Financial on Giant Robots (https://www.giantrobots.fm/414) TypeScript 4.1 feature (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/typescript/announcing-typescript-4-1/) The Bike Shed: 269: Things are Knowable (Gary Bernhardt) (https://www.bikeshed.fm/269) TSConfig Reference - Docs on every TSConfig option (https://www.typescriptlang.org/tsconfig#noUncheckedIndexedAccess) Rails I18n (https://guides.rubyonrails.org/i18n.html) This episode is brought to you by Studio 3T (https://studio3t.com/free). Try Studio 3T's full suite of features for 30 days, no payment details needed. Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of The Bike Shed! Transcript: CHRIS: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Chris Toomey. STEPH: And I'm Steph Viccari. CHRIS: And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. So, Steph, what's new in your world? STEPH: Hey, Chris. There are a couple of new things in my world, so one of them that I wanted to talk about is the fact that being pregnant is hard. I feel like this is probably a known thing, but I feel like I don't hear it talked about as much as I'd really like, especially in sort of like a professional context. And so I just wanted to share for anyone else that may be listening, if you're also pregnant, this is hard. And I also really appreciate my team. Going through the first trimester is typically where you experience a lot of morning sickness and fatigue, and I had all of that. And so I was at the point that most of my days, I didn't even start till about noon and even some days, starting at noon was a struggle. And thankfully, the thoughtbot client that I'm working with most of the teams are on West Coast hours, so that worked out pretty well. But I even shared a post internally and was like, "Hey, I'm not doing great in the mornings. And so I really can't facilitate any morning meetings. I can't be part of some of the hiring intros that we do," because we like to have a team lead provide a welcoming and then closing for anyone that's coming for interview day. I couldn't do those, and those normally happen around 9:00 a.m. for Eastern Time. And everybody was super supportive of it. So I really appreciate all of thoughtbot and my managers and team being so great about this. Also, the client team they're wonderful. It turns out growing a little human; I'm learning how hard it is and working full time. It's an interesting challenge. Oh, and as part of that appreciation because…so there's just not a lot of women that I've worked with. This may be one of those symptoms of being in tech where one, I haven't worked with tons of women, and then two, working with a woman who is also pregnant and going through that as well. So it's been a little bit isolating in that experience. But there is someone that I follow on Twitter, @EmmaBostian. She's also one of the co-hosts for the Ladybug Podcast. And she has been just sharing some of her, like, I am two months sleep deprived. She's had her baby now, and she is sharing some of that journey. And I really appreciate people who just share that journey and what they're going through because then it helps normalize it for me in terms of what I'm feeling. I hope this helps normalize it for anybody else that might be listening too. CHRIS: I certainly can't speak to the specifics of being pregnant. But I do think it's wonderful for you to use this space that we have here to try and forward that along and say what your experience is like and share that with folks and hopefully make it a little bit better for everyone else out there. Also, you snuck in a sneaky pro-tip there, which is work on the East Coast and have a West Coast team. That just sounds like the obvious correct way to go about this. STEPH: That has worked out really well and been very helpful for me. I'm already not a great morning person; I've tried. I've really strived at times to be a morning person because I just have this idea in my head morning people get more stuff done. I don't think that's true, but I just have that idea. And I'm not the world's best morning person, so it has worked out for many reasons but yeah, especially in helping me get through that first trimester and also just supporting family and other things that are going on. Oh, I also learned a pro-tip about Twitter. This is going to seem totally random, but it was relevant when I was searching for stuff on Twitter [laughs] that was related to tech and pregnancy. But I learned...because I wanted to be able to search for something that someone that I follow what they said but I couldn't remember who said it. And so I found that in the search bar, I can add filter:follows. So you can have your search term like if you're looking for cake or pregnancy, or sleep-deprived and then look for filter:follows, and then that will filter the search results to everybody that you follow. I imagine that that probably works for followers too, but I haven't tried it. CHRIS: I like the left turn you took us on there but still keeping it connected. On the topic of Twitter search, they apparently have a very powerful search, but it's also hidden, and you got to know the specific syntax and whatnot. But there is a wonderful project by Shawn Wang, AKA Swyx, on the internet, bettertwitter.netlify.com is the URL for it. I will share a link to his tweet introducing it. But it's a really wonderful tool that just provides a UI for all of these different filters and configurations. And both make discoverability that much better and then also make it easy to just compose one of these searches and use th