Worst Onboarding Experience Ever

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I'm gonna tell the greatest story ever to Casey and he is gonna, he is going to be the happiest person after hearing this.

• 0:12Speaker 00

  Uh, anyways, I'm sorry. Now, this all started because Casey was explaining a build process he made for RAD, right? Am I correct on that?

• 0:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was for RAD game tools and it was, it was terrible and it ruined, and they're still using it to this day and it's still awful.

• 0:26Speaker 00

  He recreated preprocessor macros, but with a build system, is what it sounded like to me. It's just like, hey, we're gonna do imports, but with, with, with comments.

• 0:39Speaker 01

  Whatever you're imagining right now, it was worse, right? Whatever, whatever the worst build system is you can imagine, I made one that was worse.

• 0:49Speaker 00

  I, we've, I, I've experienced some pretty bad build systems, so that's, that's something to be said right there. But I've never experienced it in the C world, so this has to be a new, a new level of magic.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was pretty great.

• 0:59Speaker 02

  Magic, oh, sorry.

• 1:00Speaker 00

  Alright, alright, yeah, Garfield, big Garfield. Uh, so anyways, this reminded us of the story of Tom. Now, you may not be familiar with this, Casey, but Tom?

• 1:08Speaker 01

  I'm not.

• 1:10Speaker 00

  He's a genius. And we're talking about super level prote, like protege level, super genius. Okay, this guy is the smartest man in the room, in any room he's in.

• 1:22Speaker 01

  And who is this? How do you know this Tom, or? Oh, we're gonna get there, Casey. Okay.

• 1:26Speaker 00

  Lore has been written about Tom, okay? That's all you need to know is that there's stories on stories on stories about Tom being a super genius.

• 1:35Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:36Speaker 00

  Alright, but the story I'm really gonna tell is actually about a, about a kid named Jake. And he's not a genius, like by all accounts, people would not consider Jake a genius. But this is Jake's run-in with Tom, the literal genius. Now- Obviously Jake, if you're not familiar, Jake just got a job. And he got a job working on some brand-new technologies and he was very excited. He was young, he was an intern. It's at an unnamed company, so we don't get to know those details. But it's with Node, JSON, the web. We're talking about some cutting-edge stuff back in the early, you know, 2010s, okay? People were excited. I can see TJ over there already doing the "give me a deal", okay? He was excited about this.

• 2:19Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, you got JavaScript running on the server? My venture capital wallets are burning!

• 2:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. So on his first day, he was talking with one of the non-technical members, kind of getting set up. And at the very end of the conversation, after explaining how excited he is, they made a really odd comment, which was said, "Uh, well, you know, the good news is? Everything we do is built on SVN. It's gonna be great, you're gonna love it." And so he's like, "Oh, okay, sure, I don't really know what that means, but whatever." For those, by the way, I know I have a lot of zoomers in chat. SVN is like a predecessor to Git. It's probably the easiest way to explain it. I don't want to go into any more details.

• 2:59Speaker 01

  This is some version, right?

• 3:00Speaker 03

  I thought it stood for "super-virgin Knicks users."

• 3:02Speaker 00

  It's "super-virgin Knicks users." Alright. Well, so let's go into part one. Are you ready for this one? JSON-based, domain-specific language. So he gets thrust into a project. And the project uses something called J-Diesel. His boss says, "Don't worry, take the next couple weeks. I want you to just become familiar with the project. And you probably, you can ask for help. But honestly, given your background, you're not even gonna need to ask for help. You got this."

• 3:34Speaker 01

  Now, could I just pause for one second here and point out that I already love everything about this, because J-Diesel is such a good acronym. I am jealous, like, I love it! Like, I should've named something that. I will try to name something.

• 3:56Speaker 02

  Start.

• 3:56Speaker 01

  Opening magic cards.

• 3:57Speaker 02

  I was muted, I was muted and I unmuted, I forgot.

• 4:00Speaker 01

  You were not muted.

• 4:00Speaker 02

  I was muted, okay? I was gonna make the comment, sorry, there's someone definitely at the Jersey Shore named Jay Diesel right now.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  Yes, that's exactly what I'm thinking. I'm like, hey, what's up Jay Diesel? Like, it's so good, okay?

• 4:12Speaker 03

  You're gonna do one of those like, like those claps where you hit, and you're just gonna, oh man, it'd be so great.

• 4:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it goes on for like seven years and you're like, when are you guys gonna stop saying hello? Like, yeah, okay.

• 4:22Speaker 00

  If only I could be that cool, I could never be that cool.

• 4:25Speaker 01

  Cool change.

• 4:25Speaker 00

  So obviously, being new at the company, what's the first thing you do? Well, you download Tortoise S V N.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  Tortoise.

• 4:34Speaker 00

  Tortoise.

• 4:34Speaker 01

  Tortoise.

• 4:35Speaker 00

  Tortoise S V N.

• 4:36Speaker 01

  A tale as old as time.

• 4:38Speaker 00

  It's a tale as, it really is, and you, uh, you get the project, you check it out. But something happened when he checked out the project. Estimated time of completion? Two days.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  What? Wait, hold on. So, just for the record, like, all of The Witness, Jonathan Blow will be on tomorrow. All of that was checked into S V N. That's a giant 3D game, the whole thing. How did they make it take two days to check out something from Tortoise S V N?

• 5:13Speaker 02

  Uh, Casey, it's called The Weekend, like, don't you know, like, every Friday? Get check out, see you guys on Monday.

• 5:20Speaker 01

  Okay, alright, okay.

• 5:22Speaker 03

  They didn't call it Hair S V N, okay? You gotta make sure you take your time. Slow and steady wins the race, okay?

• 5:28Speaker 01

  It's not that slow, so what hap- what's going on here Jake?

• 5:32Speaker 00

  Well, you know Jake, that's a great question because Jake had the exact same question. He went to his coworker and was just like, man, this is taking two days, am I doing something wrong?

• 5:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:40Speaker 00

  Uh, should I not use Tortoise? Like, what do I do here? And they said, oh, no, this is actually, this is expected, this is very normal. You should just play Solitaire. So Solitaire he did. And Solitaire he continued, and Solitaire all the way to the end.

• 5:59Speaker 00

  It's pretty nice, right?

• 6:00Speaker 01

  It's a good first week.

• 6:01Speaker 00

  And so now it's time. Oh, yeah?

• 6:03Speaker 01

  It's a good first week is all, you know what I mean? Like, that's nice.

• 6:06Speaker 00

  He's rolling, he has the project. He's making inroads with coworkers. He's feeling pretty good. And so now's the time for him to shine. He's young, he's impressionable, he's ready to put in the hours, burn the midnight oil. So he's gonna open up a random file. Okay? But when he opens up the random file, he notices there's no comments. There's nothing with it. He starts looking at a bunch of these weird JSON files, trying to figure out what the heck's going on. He doesn't get this. He, he, what is this? What, Casey, what is this?

• 6:40Speaker 01

  That's, that's looking, I don't know what that is. The, you know, push the stack for a second, because I don't, I don't want to interrupt this, but I'll just say that functions 899-900-901. I want to talk about that later, because I got, I got a, a mini rant we can talk about after that. So I'm remembering, I'm remembering that functions array right there.

• 7:03Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  Keep going. Keep it going, roll, roll it on.

• 7:07Speaker 00

  And then he opened up related files that had the same kind of name, like customers JSON versus uh, customer.js, and you just see it filled with a bunch of stuff. But there's no comments anywhere. Nobody has left any breadcrumbs. And there's all these function calls and things that are just making no sense. Nothing seems to be complete. Every file is completely just filled with stuff that doesn't seem to exist. And it was very, very confusing for him. So this is Jake. He has to do something that none of us want to do when we first landed a job and we just opened the codebase. We have to go to our coworker, and we're gonna have to ask for help and just look like an idiot.

• 7:51Speaker 00

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

• 8:07Speaker 00

  Oh, hold on, sorry. I clicked the wrong page.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  And this is, this is while Jake was working on Batman 2 or something? I don't, I'm just looking at Jake here.

• 8:15Speaker 00

  It was a while ago, okay.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  It was a while back, yeah.

• 8:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was a while back.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  It was a much earlier Marvel film. Yeah. Okay. Oh, sorry, DC. Ooh, sorry.

• 8:24Speaker 00

  So his coworker was like, "You just don't get it yet." See, the thing is, is that J. Diesel, it was written by Tom, and he's a super genius, and he wrote J. Diesel all by himself. And so basically, that customers.json file is just metadata used to put together the customer class, and then he waited for Jake to get it. Jake did not get it, in fact.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  (laughing)

• 8:48Speaker 00

  Okay? Jake did not. So then he asked the, what's the next most logical question? If you don't understand how code works, and you can't just simply read it and understand it, what's your most, what's the most logical conclusion you can do?

• 9:01Speaker 01

  Ask GPT.

• 9:02Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  Didn't exist at this time, probably. Didn't exist at this time.

• 9:06Speaker 00

  It didn't, it didn't exist, Bacon?

• 9:07Speaker 01

  What do you mean?

• 9:08Speaker 00

  Ask Jeeves. Yes.

• 9:11Speaker 00

  Well, of course, you ask, "Well, how do I run it? I'm just gonna debug it, I'm gonna figure some things out." Well, Scott laughed, okay? His coworker laughed right at his face and said, "You wouldn't want to just run it. It takes a couple days for a new deployment to finish starting up." J. Diesel can be a little slow, but it's really powerful, like, super powerful. Like I said, Tom is a genius.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  What is going on? This is nuts.

• 9:39Speaker 00

  How do you think Jake feels right now, okay? He's confused, too. Part two. J. Diesel in action. I hope you guys are ready.

• 9:54Speaker 02

  If this isn't a Jersey Shore scene, I'm gonna be so pissed. This needs to be someone fist bumping.

• 9:59Speaker 00

  You know I'm not gonna do Jersey Shore, Bacon. You know it's against my religion. We already know this.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  Oh, it's J. Diesel in action. Kinda reminds me of Vin Diesel, so I'm wondering if, does this thing have a nickname like Triple X or anything? This like, you know what I'm saying?

• 10:12Speaker 00

  It'd be good, but unfortunately it doesn't.

• 10:14Speaker 01

  It's all about family here, okay, Casey? Okay. It's all about, it's all about family.

• 10:19Speaker 00

  So Jake, in his confusion, he did the next most likely thing you should do. Is that Jake? Yeah, that's Jake doing it all. Yes, that's a real Jake. That's a real Jake. So what did he do? Well, he asked his coworker, "Can you at least walk me through what's going on? Because I am confused." Well, his coworker, he laughed again. He laughed.

• 10:44Speaker 00

  These young guys. Alright, so the genius part, this is the genius part. You know where it says "class"? Can you see that right there in the JSON file? Customers. Well, that's the class name. As you can see, that's how this works. And now, do you see where it says "functions"? Yes. Those, those are subversion links to all the functions that make up that class.

• 11:07Speaker 00

  What? That's precisely what Jake said. He said, "I don't quite get this, but I fear that I might get this, and I don't want it to be true." Yeah, I'm more, I'm less scared about me having gotten that wrong than I am about me having gotten that right. Precisely. Yeah. So his coworker, seeing Jake remain confused, was like, "Okay, so..." You see how you have that customers.json and the customers.js file? The JSON file is the metadata, and the JS file has the code. So you, so the list of functions in the JSON file tells J. Diesel to look up those revisions of the JS file to find what functions are available.

• 11:50Speaker 00

  And in that case, the actual code and the revisions are located at SVN revision 568, 899, 900, 901, and the list keeps on going. What? Now, hold on, before you speak, I don't, Jake, stop being confused. I'm trying to finish this up here. Each revision of the customer JS has one function.

• 12:14Speaker 00

  So, to add all functions you have to check, uh, all you have to do is check in your new code with the updated JSON metadata file with the new revisions. Whenever something makes a function call to the customer object, J Diesel uses the list of function revisions to check out all of the actual functions until it finds a match. Do you understand it now?

• 12:37Speaker 01

  Yes, I do. And I'm mildly terrified.

• 12:45Speaker 02

  Oh, well, Casey, are you committing?

• 12:47Speaker 01

  One quick question.

• 12:49Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  What's the name of my coworker again? Sorry, I forget.

• 12:53Speaker 00

  Scott. His name's Scott.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  Scott. If you're asking those kind of questions, Casey, you're really behind, okay?

• 12:59Speaker 00

  Casey, so far behind, okay?

• 13:01Speaker 01

  So, Scott, uh, I just wanna know, when you say subversion revision number, do you literally mean that if I were to go fix, say, a bug in revision 902 in this list, for example, and I checked it in and it became revision 3157, I would have to go into this list and replace 902 with 3157? Otherwise, it would continue to use the old code that I had rechecked in a replacement for already?

• 13:36Speaker 00

  You know, our manager did tell me that we had a hot new guns in here that could really pick up the project. And it sounds like you are really understanding your stuff.

• 13:44Speaker 01

  Oh, no!

• 13:48Speaker 01

  Casey, you were built for this, bro!

• 13:50Speaker 00

  You are literally built for this, Casey.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  J Diesel!

• 13:53Speaker 02

  Now, I'm confused. This is fine, Casey. Are you committing more than one function at a time?

• 13:58Speaker 01

  Well, even if I am only committing one function at a time, so now I have to check in also the other, I have to check in both files every time. And of course, multiple people might have to check in this file because they're updating different functions.

• 14:16Speaker 03

  So first, Casey, you tell us you don't like clean code, and now you're telling us you don't like clean revision?

• 14:23Speaker 01

  I know, man.

• 14:25Speaker 00

  I don't know, Casey. I don't know.

• 14:27Speaker 01

  Well, let's do this. Keep going, J Diesel. Let's, let's, uh... This is like the Chronicles of Ridiculous.

• 14:34Speaker 00

  Well, anyways, Jake had the same response. He just said, "I think so."

• 14:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:42Speaker 00

  And his coworker, of course, just said, "Like I said, Tom, he's a genius." Okay, you see Tom right here? That man, he's a genius. This lets you track every function that has ever existed. You can add new functions by overwriting a JS file and adding a new revision to the JSON. You can remove a function just by removing its revision number from the function list. And it's still there in history, inactive, but never lost. Scott stood, "Let me know if you have any more questions." He left Jake's desk.

• 15:18Speaker 00

  Part three, rise and grind.

• 15:22Speaker 03

  Oh, this is about they started a terminal-based coffee company.

• 15:27Speaker 00

  That's actually what I was thinking when I made this, TJ.

• 15:32Speaker 00

  So, for Jake, no obstacle's too big. He's young, he's virile, he's ready to just go out there and absolutely crush the universe. And so, of course, as soon as he realizes, as he starts inspecting the code and really starts combing through it, that this is actually just a simple web portal for customers to be able to update their personal information. But thanks to the complexity of J. Diesel, what should take minutes now takes days. A true 10x engineer, this Tom fellow is. And so, of course, Jake, being a good citizen, decides, "You know what? I can fix her. I can get in here and I can make real changes that will help everybody."

• 16:17Speaker 00

  So he started going through all the code, familiarizing himself. He started checking in a couple of code comments, letting people know what's going on throughout the code and how they can kind of trace everything. And even upon just looking at the code, there was obvious bugs, things that just will break. So, of course, he started to even fix those, check in new ones, really making some amazing changes. Jake is a good citizen.

• 16:45Speaker 03

  Common Jake W.

• 16:46Speaker 00

  Common Jake W. Absolutely amazing.

• 16:54Speaker 00

  Part four.

• 16:57Speaker 00

  Tom.

• 16:59Speaker 01

  Is Tom still at this fictional company that is definitely not a company that you, any of you have ever worked at?

• 17:05Speaker 02

  Casey, he's the only one who knows how this works. We cannot fire Tom.

• 17:09Speaker 00

  Broke Jay Diesel, Casey.

• 17:11Speaker 01

  I'm saying, but is he still there, or has he left?

• 17:13Speaker 00

  Uh, of this company, we've never received an update from anybody who worked at this company. At the time of the story, yes.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  At the time of the story, at the time of the story.

• 17:21Speaker 00

  Yes, at the time of the story, he was the lead engineer.

• 17:24Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  Alright.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  That's fine.

• 17:33Speaker 00

  Jake arrives, Monday morning, feeling great, okay? He, he has made a lot of changes, he's done a lot of good work, wrapped up the previous week, worked well into the weekend, and now he's arriving Monday morning, but things were amiss. Things were odd. People were running around, people were freaking out. Scott, as you have recently learned, his coworker runs by and says, "The database got scrambled!" And he just keeps on going, people are freaking out, people are trying to figure out stuff, and all of a sudden Jake hears you.

• 18:07Speaker 00

  And he turns around and sees Tom.

• 18:11Speaker 00

  And Tom says, "Hey Jake, you're Jake, right? The new guy?" "Yeah."

• 18:17Speaker 00

  "I am." "What's going on?" "You broke Jay Diesel!" "By the way, my name's Tom."

• 18:26Speaker 01

  "And I'm a genius."

• 18:27Speaker 00

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

• 18:54Speaker 00

  What has happened?

• 18:58Speaker 00

  How did I break everything?

• 19:02Speaker 00

  Part five. The meeting.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  This is a really good story, by the way.

• 19:07Speaker 00

  Thank you. I didn't write it.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  I'm really invested right now in the story of Jake. Like, I'm like, I need to know this conclusion.

• 19:17Speaker 00

  Oh, the conclusion?

• 19:20Speaker 00

  Let's just say, everything is just so beautiful. It's so, so beautiful.

• 19:24Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 19:26Speaker 00

  Well, they have the grand meeting. Everybody gets there to have the grand meeting and discuss. And one of the VPs turn and look Jake right in the ocular nerve and says, "Tell us what you did to J Diesel." Now Jake, of course, says, "I don't, I don't think I did anything. I've only been here for two weeks trying to learn J Diesel, how the customer portal works. I don't even, I don't even know how to deploy it." Tom interjects in there and says, "You made few commits to subversion." He was very upset about this, right? Because some things obviously happened. Jake did make some commits. He made some comments. He made some good stuff. He said, "Well, yes, I, I added a few code comments, trying to..." Tom just jumps right in and says,

• 20:09Speaker 00

  "You can't use comments in J Diesel." Tom shouted, "That's what broke it!"

• 20:24Speaker 00

  Jake stayed silent. He's just trying to process.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  No, no, this, no, this cannot be true. Are you? This is true as far as we know, as far as we've done, as far as we can tell, Casey. This is, this is a real thing.

• 20:38Speaker 02

  Casey, if you write good code, you shouldn't need comments, all right? My code's self-documenting.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 20:45Speaker 02

  Kind of a code smell.

• 20:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's honestly, it's kind of a sign right now, Casey. Kind of telling on yourself right now.

• 20:54Speaker 00

  Okay. He remains silent, just trying to process how comments could wipe out a customer database. I like, Tom continued after the pause. "I haven't added comment support to J Diesel. So the runtime executes comments like normal code. You must have had a couple of database updates in the comments?" He asks. Tom, obviously being the genius, zeroes in on what could have been the problem.

• 21:28Speaker 00

  Oh, what? Jake, of course. He responds with, "Well, yeah, I put a couple of short syntax examples in a comment to clarify." And then Tom bursts up onto his feet and says, "I knew it! You broke it!" He turns to the VP and said, "I can't deal with coders who don't understand the system. You either fire Jake, or I quit."

• 21:59Speaker 00

  Drops the microphone.

• 22:02Speaker 00

  Leaves the meeting. VP sitting there, the upper crust of the management baffled by Jake's decisions to take down the customer database.

• 22:16Speaker 00

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

• 22:47Speaker 00

  So Jake went on to Greener Pastures. He left the place, never to think about J Diesel or Tom again. And now Jake lives a much happier life, programming in a regular codebase that is not insane. And that is the story of Tom.

• 23:07Speaker 00

  The super genius. Tom's a genius. Tom is in fact, a genius. Let's see it in chat. Tom's a genius! Tom is a genius.

• 23:17Speaker 02

  This is gonna end with, and Tom's full name is TonoldGitHub, or something. I don't know.

• 23:24Speaker 03

  Tom's full name, The Primogen.

• 23:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 23:28Speaker 00

  By the way, my name's Tom, if you didn't know that. My real name is Tom. I just don't scream.

• 23:37Speaker 03

  Thank you, Heimer.

• 23:39Speaker 00

  Alright, I wanted to read that. I wanted to kinda give you that, that a story because your, your, your build system, it was comments that were executing code, which just, it just, it reminded me of Tom.

• 23:51Speaker 03

  And, Prime, we said there, I don't remember if we said it, we'll have to pull the footage, or if Casey said it. One of us said, that either Casey, you said, "I'm a genius" when you were making it, that's how you felt, or we said, "You are a genius." And that's why we were saying, that was like, the next level connection to this story.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  Yes. Well, it, the only difference is, here, that like, uh, everyone was very embarrassed about it afterwards, which doesn't seem to have happened to Tom. Tom is apparently just fine with it.

• 24:24Speaker 00

  That's because Tom's a genius.

• 24:25Speaker 03

  Tom is apparently a genius, yes.

• 24:29Speaker 02

  Honestly, Casey, though, you should adopt some of these coding practices. I would say, get comments out of your code, because I did read an announcement, GitHub's gonna announce next week, they will be charging more for comments in the codebase. So, if you can just get into the good habit of removing them now.

• 24:42Speaker 03

  They're charging per line of code hosted.

• 24:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, per line of code hosted, so every piece of documentation.

• 24:47Speaker 00

  Per line of code hosted per minute, of course. It's a very confusing thing.

• 24:51Speaker 03

  So, I guess, if I'm reading between the lines here, and obviously, since this is a, not a story certainly that happened to anyone here, you're just recounting an abstract story about two people.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  One named Tom and one named Jake, who don't have any connection to the real world in any way. Correct. Um, it is kind of hard for me to understand how that code was written, like, so it, the parser doesn't fail when it hits a comment. It just ignores the comment and, and the parser is, it's actually, like, someone re-implemented a JavaScript runtime of their own, because they're not using an existing one, or it would have handled comments. So they re-implemented the JavaScript

• 25:48Speaker 01

  runtime parse.

• 25:50Speaker 00

  Casey, it's not, you're making it entirely too hard.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I am.

• 25:53Speaker 00

  Casey, Casey, does? Just answer me the simple question.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:59Speaker 00

  Does the line have select on it?

• 26:03Speaker 01

  Okay, so, so is what you're saying, it basically just searches for the word select, then takes everything to the end of the line and runs it, or something like that?

• 26:12Speaker 00

  That's all I'm saying is, hey.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 26:14Speaker 00

  If it has select on it, that sounds like a database query to me.

• 26:19Speaker 03

  Or multiline comments, and it's doing something line by line. That's the other one that I think is pretty possible.

• 26:27Speaker 02

  Guys, let's be easy on Casey, too. Tom's a genius. Casey's not gonna understand his intricate system right away.

• 26:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, okay, that's a good point. That's a good point.

• 26:36Speaker 01

  I can't just drop in here and ask, you know, these, these sort of pedestrian questions of a genius mind that is just way past any of us here on this, on this podcast. I agree with that.

• 26:49Speaker 03

  I want to know what everyone's thoughts are. What are the chances they had a singular backup at any time? A production?

• 26:59Speaker 00

  I would assume no. Just based on the VP and everybody's reaction to the customer data being deleted. That was a hard no right there.

• 27:07Speaker 02

  I was gonna say, so this is

• 27:08Speaker 01

  That would be so stressful.

• 27:09Speaker 02

  This is one of those ones where someone's like, "This system's insane." And you just hit him with, "Uh, I'm gonna look up Chesterton's fence, alright? There's a reason why, alright? I don't have time to give you the lore, but trust me, it's there, alright?"

• 27:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. We We use a We use a negative three, negative two, negative one backup strategy for this. And, you know, so that means if anything happens, we just don't have any copies of the database anymore.

• 27:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, see, Prime, I see, I would've been the guy that would've kept it back earlier, but then I found out in my young junior career, like, security gets really mad when you make a backup of a production database on your computer. They hate it. I was like, "Guys, I'm being safe." And they said, "So all of the real phone..." I'm like, "Yeah, the real phone numbers, so what? It's, what if we accidentally lose the database? I have it." And they told me to get it off my computer and, um...

• 28:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, that, uh, Begin, that sounds actually really reasonable.

• 28:12Speaker 00

  So, what are you doing with that on your computer?

• 28:16Speaker 02

  Trying to save the company.

• 28:18Speaker 01

  I, I do wanna, I do wanna put in some kind of a way that we can do like a hard break here at some point. Cause I wanna talk about, this is actually somewhat of a more serious topic. I wanted to talk about that function array thing.

• 28:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, we'll do the hard break right here. How about this one?

• 28:34Speaker 01

  So I wanna make a way that, cause, cause what I'm, well, meta-talk about it first too. So can we do a hard break?

• 28:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, let me just do a really quick, very simple hard break. Hey, if you're joining us on YouTube, you're gonna have to listen to the full episode on Spotify. Link in the description. Thanks for joining us at the stand-up. Thank you very much for having Casey, Begin, and TJ on the stand-up. If you're not familiar with Casey's work, check out computerenhance.com.

• 28:58Speaker 03

  Also, we might post some of the clips on Stan, on, uh, different channels. So check that link in the description too.

• 29:04Speaker 00

  True.

• 29:04Speaker 01

  So, I, I am going to try and say everything I'm about to say in the same kind of Tom-Jake way, because I don't want to create any drama.

• 29:18Speaker 01

  Cause this would- I can't wait for whatever this story is. This will create, this will create so much drama, even probably me pseudonyming this. Because it's like, it would be like YouTuber drama, right?

• 29:29Speaker 01

  Oh, I've seen some. So I'm just gonna- I hear it's a shocking story when you get YouTuber drama.

• 29:34Speaker 02

  Primogen, quickly, we need a thumbnail, picture of Tom, he's done, okay? Two texts, he's done, ship it.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  He's done. Red arrow on top. Red text on bottom, he's done.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  So- Fired.

• 29:50Speaker 01

  So, I don't watch very much programming YouTube. What? I just don't, right? And the reason for that is- Thanks for telling me that now, you're kinda saying that lie, it hurts a little bit. Wow, Casey. Sorry. Uh, and the reason for that's pretty obvious, right? Like, I just don't have time to do that, so when I'm going to go watch YouTube, I watch something like, totally unrelated to work, right? I don't go watch programming YouTube, any, you know, I don't know. I'm sure if I was younger, like if, you know, when I was growing up, I would've watched programming YouTube all the time, because, oh my god, it's exactly what I missed when I was little. Like, how do you do this, or what are the real programmers doing?

• 30:34Speaker 01

  Like, it's such an amazing resource when you're younger.

• 30:38Speaker 02

  Thanks, Casey, thanks, Casey, thanks, Casey.

• 30:40Speaker 01

  You already fumbled the bag, you don't need the, you don't need the post plays, okay? No, I'm serious, I'm dead serious. When I was little, this is what I would have loved, right? But when you're older, you're just like, I'm gonna go watch frickin Beard Meets Food or something. Like, I'm gonna go watch some guy eat, go like to a restaurant and eat like 5,000 chicken wings. And just because, like, I, I'm, don't wanna, you know, if, if you work at the McDonald's, you don't wanna come home and eat a box of McNuggets, right? That's just how that works, sometimes. So anyway, I don't watch very much programming YouTube, so I'm not necessarily always aware of all the things that are going on. But, a couple months back, there was some drama that I will not refer to specifically.

• 31:25Speaker 01

  And, one of the people involved with the drama is sort of in game development programming.

• 31:35Speaker 01

  And a second YouTuber who sort of- A second YouTuber has hit the story.

• 31:43Speaker 02

  I know, I'm dying on the inside.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  A second YouTuber decides to sort of capitalize on the drama that's going on with this first YouTuber by doing like a code review of that person's code. Yeah. Right? Okay. And now, being the dick that I am, I watched this video because I'm like, alright, like, I'm gonna watch this guy do a code review because like, I would be very snarky about most people's code reviews, right? So I watched this code review and one of the things that the person is like, he's like

• 32:29Speaker 01

  on a very high horse about the fact that this code has numbers like that function array in it to refer to like random things like, oh, you know, it's got number 328 is some index into a table of dialogue or something like that. And the person's like, this is just obviously demonstrates that this person has no idea what they're doing and couldn't possibly be a professional programmer and is just a charlatan and a fraud and all these sorts of things. And I just wa- I was wishing I had the button of like, I can interject into other people's YouTube streams to just be like- I'm like, actually, actually, right?

• 33:11Speaker 02

  Hard actually.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  Hard actually. I'm like, if you are at the point in your career where you think an uncommented bare table of numbers showing up in the middle of code shows that someone isn't a professional programmer? You're the person who isn't a professional programmer, right? Because every fucking codebase has some shit like that in it.

• 33:40Speaker 01

  And there's always an explanation and it's always bad, but that's what happens. All right? That is what happens. So actually, it's the other way around. Like, you're the novice and you're the one without the work experience. If you look at something like that and say that it's like evidence that this is unshippable. I'm like, go to any frickin' web cup, go to Google, go to Amazon, go to whatever. We'll find that code for you, my friend. It's in there. It's running the thing you're, it's probably in YouTube's code base that you use to upload this. Has one of those in there, all right? So that's what that reminded me of when you saw that function size. Like, yep, I know that list of numbers, right?

• 34:23Speaker 00

  Yes. First off, I do know the video you're talking about. And I knew that I wasn't gonna, I wasn't gonna enjoy the video in any regards. Because at the beginning, he pulls out books as his evidence for his authority.

• 34:36Speaker 04

  It's just like one of those clean code and he's just like.

• 34:38Speaker 00

  He pulled out clean, no, he did not pull out clean code. No. This is like, brother, that's a cra- that's like a crazy way to start anything. Be like, I read books.

• 34:47Speaker 01

  It was nuts. I get mine ready every time I want to have an argument. I don't know, you guys, you guys don't have yours ready?

• 34:54Speaker 02

  The only, the only book I keep ready on mine is I just keep that one ready to go at all times, but uh.

• 34:59Speaker 00

  Pill gossiping, father.

• 35:01Speaker 02

  I just keep, whenever I need some advice for the family, this is what that helps me out. This is not going on Spotify, right?

• 35:06Speaker 01

  Josh, censor that book, please. Censor that book, gosh. Yes.

• 35:15Speaker 02

  I'm getting ready for the next stage of my life.

• 35:18Speaker 00

  Oh my gosh, yes. It was so funny. You actually made the stream chat break. I gotta get a new stream chat. This thing breaks constantly.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  That's amazing. So what is, is like, what is chapter one of that book? Like, how to put a pill into a drink? What's the, what's, what's the start of fatherhood? What's the reco on that one?

• 35:38Speaker 02

  Okay, got a dramatic reading of father.

• 35:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. Chapter one is, at some point, your date will wake back up.

• 35:45Speaker 02

  The, the, the opening chapter is called "The Baffling Question." I'll let you guys guess what it's about, okay?

• 35:50Speaker 01

  Okay, all right.

• 35:52Speaker 02

  On the code review thing, I will say, I love the idea. I kinda wanna just join a new company. Just so I can be like my first code review, I'm gonna produce a YouTube video instead. And just like, "Can you do code review?" And right away, it's just like, "Trash, look at this trash code." "This if statement, what an idiot." And it's like, "Stop uploading YouTube videos for the GitHub." I'll get fired right away, but it'll be funny.

• 36:16Speaker 03

  We should, companies should have Prime go in and we can look at a terrible piece of code. And then they can tell us why it has to be that way. That would actually be fun.

• 36:25Speaker 00

  That would be fun. Because there's always bad code and a lot of it was just like, "Well, you know, we are under some pressure and things were this way and this one service wasn't quite right, so we had to."

• 36:37Speaker 03

  Or it's like, "We've refactor'd it three times and we got back to the same code every time." "We started, we did a refactor, and then it was the same exact piece of code." "So we deleted that branch and moved on." "Next year's new recruits, they tried the same thing." "They all died right here."

• 36:57Speaker 01

  Let me give an analogy for any really like new programmers out there who are watching this. If you've ever watched a professional baseball game, right? If you know anything about baseball at all, or you played Little League or whatever. So if you are in Little League, and they're teaching you how to hit, they're gonna be like, "Okay, you know, you put your back foot here in the batter's box, put your front foot out and you're gonna put your weight like this, you're gonna hold the bat like this, right? You're gonna step forward and you're gonna do this thing and all that." They're coaching you on all this stuff and keep your head down, right?

• 37:37Speaker 01

  That's what people tell you about code review, or what they do in a code review. You watch an actual major league hitter and the instructions would be like, "Okay, first you take your batting gloves off like 67 times and put them back on." "Then you like, you know, make the sign of the cross and like adjust the gold chain or whatever." "Then you like, do some crazy thing like, like, like, hold the bat way the hell up." Up here and then you like corkscrew it around and then but finally you sort of get back into a real actual swing and you hit a homerun. Right? And you win the fricking game and you're an amazing batter, right? The same exact thing is true of coding. All the crap that they tell you about all this stuff.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  Then you go look at some coder who's like absolutely bonkers, crazy, amazing and like wrote like

• 38:24Speaker 02

  Like Tom.

• 38:25Speaker 01

  The inner loop like not Tom, like a really good programmer. And it's like you look in this like all the variable names are like one letter. Right? It's just like they have what they got into and the way that they code and they're really good at it. And it's not the pristine thing that's the best, you know, practices advice. That's just, that's the reality of it. It's exactly like Major League Baseball, right? It just, it doesn't work the instructional way. So it's okay, like those things are always sort of general guidelines that we're trying to push you towards more readable, more maintainable code. But the reality of programming is dirtier than that. That's just how it is. So it's okay.

• 39:07Speaker 02

  Well, there's a divide. I see this on the internet all the time. It's always, it's a lot of times people who are like, haven't had their job yet. That's usually, and they're excited. They love code. They're trying to get smart. Sometimes they're in school. Sometimes they're just YouTube fiends and they're just like, why wouldn't you just take the extra time to make the code perfect? Why wouldn't you just always make it right? And it's like, okay, they're called deadlines. They're called managers. It's all a lot of factors that will never, ever, ever let you do that in the real world. But you just don't know until you get a job and then you get a job and four years later, you're a different person and you laugh at those kids. And then the next new crop comes up and it happens again. It's, it's never.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  I'll tell you, I can literally tell you. So the like Jeff Roberts, the guy who ran Rad Game Tools, easily one of the best programmers ever. All the code is basically just like that. It was like a bunch of like every variable is one letter. It's all just kind of like lined up like it's, it's not that easy to read this code. And you'd be like, that's ridiculous. How can anyone work with code like that? It's insane. Like, how do you maintain it? How do you go back and read it? He wrote the compression algorithms for one of the products that I did basically all the other code for. He gave it to me. Sorry, what? No, it's, it was Granny, the 3D animation system.

• 40:24Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 40:24Speaker 01

  It had a compressor built in and he gave me that code. He gave me that code. When he finished making it, it went into the project, my project. There was never a bug, ever, in the entire, not once. I never had to even open those files. That's just how good it is. He just gives you this like, here's a complete compressor I wrote for scratch, completely for your project, and only your project. I've only ever done my coding and my testing on it. It shipped to customers, never broke once in the entire time I maintained that, for five years. I maintained that project and it never broke once.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  So it's just like, the reality is, sometimes people are just very, very good at doing code the way they do it. And if they get the results, that's fine. Don't, you know, then at the same time you get J D S O L or something, right?

• 41:18Speaker 02

  The system worked, Casey, if everyone would just follow along. It was fine till Jake came along.

• 41:24Speaker 00

  Just because at runtime, when a customer wants to change information, you have to do an SVN lookup to find out the function, does not mean it wasn't perfect. Tortoise.

• 41:31Speaker 02

  Oh, well, we know our code is always matching our actual committed code. Oh no, that's integrity.

• 41:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 41:38Speaker 00

  Anyway. Stories one, TJ, on your story about rewriting it. I know I've told the story once before, but when I was working on Falcon, there was a piece of requesting that really bothered me because I was like, dude, this code's ugly. And this was still during my time where I thought I could just write really great code all the time. And so during this like, hey, this code is ugly phase, for requesting. So it was a data fetcher in JavaScript that would try to match what's already on the TV and then what's like the minimum amount of data it needs to request next. So that way, all the things doing like, all the components being like, hey, I need to, I need to display these 20 titles. It goes, okay, I already have 17 of the titles, I'm going to make a request for the remaining three, right? So it was a pretty clever piece of array manipulation is all it was. And so I do this, this whole like, rewrite of the requesting because I'm like, this is bad.

• 42:22Speaker 00

  And at first I'm like, dude, look at how much better mine is already, the code's way more readable. It's all these kinds of things. And then I'm like, oh crap, I forgot this one case. And so then I add in this next case, I'm like, okay, it's like a little bit closer, but still it's way more readable. And I'm like, oh crap, I forgot this one case. And by the time I, oh crap, I forgot this one case, at the end, it was almost a line for line rewrite of exactly what you did. I was like, oh no.

• 42:47Speaker 00

  And then that's when I realized I'm the problem.

• 42:52Speaker 03

  No, that's when you realized I was so smart before and I'm still really smart. You got the wrong conclusion from that.

• 42:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 42:59Speaker 00

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

• 43:23Speaker 01

  An interesting update, an interesting update. That's pretty interesting, Hunter.

• 43:31Speaker 00

  An interesting update, the team is starting to move away from AI coding completely, Devin and Claude, because it's so much harder to review the AI code than writing things themselves. It's like, it's my favorite. It is my favorite. It's just so funny to be like, dude, I'm pushing 60 PRs a day. Actually, my team kind of got upset.

• 43:50Speaker 01

  It was like how it started, how it's going. That was the perfect like self, self-created one of those.

• 43:56Speaker 03

  The funny thing too is that's exactly the amount of time they said before software engineering is dead. They're like, oh, six months from now, we're not going to have software developer jobs. And they're like, we, we actually deleted all the stuff we tried to do when we said that.

• 44:12Speaker 02

  Okay, this definitely ends up like South Park where it's like, they're like, oh my God, he's pushing 60 PRs a day. It's too much. I just have to use AI to review it, but I can't tell him. And then he's over there using AI and both of them are just like, oh my God, I hate this. We're both just AI-ing each other and we're not telling each other.

• 44:27Speaker 00

  Yeah. All right. Well, there you go. So Casey, how do you feel? You've learned the story of Tom. How was it?

• 44:34Speaker 03

  I mean, this is, this is the thing, right? Like.

• 44:40Speaker 01

  We've all been there. We've all, we've all been Jay Diesel. And here's the thing. I just feel fortunate that, that my Jay Diesel phase, the worst thing that happened was that build utility, right? I never, I never shipped anything quite so horrible as, as the entire company's customer database is now running externally on this disaster thing that I made, right? So I feel like it's definitely, it's there but for the grace of God go I, I think is the phrase that people often use for something like this. It's like, you're gonna have some phase in your programming career where you just go

• 45:25Speaker 01

  down a rat hole, or rabbit hole, I guess is people more commonly call it. I've always called it a rat hole, or, you know, I guess I grew up, maybe Massachusetts, it's a rat hole.

• 45:35Speaker 00

  And then Jersey Boys get nipped. I don't know what's going on over there.

• 45:38Speaker 01

  More rats than rabbits. So, you know, you go down this thing and you get this wild hair and you're like, this is gonna be awesome, I'm so smart, but you just don't have the experience to realize that you're really actually being pretty stupid. It happens to everybody at some point. Some people like Tom are too much of a genius to ever pull out of it, so they just stay that way and become head of, of engineering in their companies, like engineering is terminally screwed. But yeah, like the rest of us, like, it's just, you hope you get out of that phase before anyone really does start relying, like, before, you hope you don't end up in a situation where there's nobody smarter around you to like, oh, that's nice Casey,

• 46:21Speaker 01

  like, uh, just let's not do that. And then, you know, in a year or two, you've gotten better and you know better, right? So, I'm just fortunate I never did anything quite so terrible, I guess is what I would say, uh, but I came close, yeah.

• 46:35Speaker 00

  You know, there's something very funny about that, which is that, uh, we all get the chance to do that in some, at some capacity.

• 46:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:43Speaker 00

  But... Having people tell you you're a programming virtuoso would reinforce the cycle of what you're doing is actually the correct thing. Like, you could actually, you could go your whole life thinking you're doing the right thing.

• 46:54Speaker 01

  Exactly, and it's just because programming is such a complicated endeavor without a lot of like hard metrics. Like, you know, in one, in one sense, I do think if I can poke Tom's genius balloon with a pin just a little bit, once you're at the point where it takes two days to check out your frickin' customer database, that's a good hard metric telling you that you're actually an idiot, not a genius, right? So there was a hard metric here that someone should have actually latched on to at some point. But a lot of times, you don't actually have a hard metric. Like, a lot of times, you can get pretty far with something where you're kind of ignoring the red flags.

• 47:39Speaker 01

  Like, you know, for what, you're like in that relationship where it's like, it's been going on for a while and there's definitely some red flags, but it's not like, you know, it's not obvious enough to you yet because you're still wrapped up in it or whatever. So I do think there is a real danger of that because a lot of times there just isn't an obvious thing you can point to that's the clear sign that you're wrong, and it can go on for a very long time.

• 48:04Speaker 02

  I will say, one thing that's, I really suggest everyone in their life, hopefully they have someone, who they only talk to once a year about coding. And so then, when you come back, they get to say, "Okay, what trend are you on now?" I just got, I just got an experience at Thanksgiving, my uncle is like an old C programmer. So for a decade, he's been hearing me about what I'm excited about once a year at Christmas. And he started just roasting me throughout the history. He was like, "Oh yeah, remember when you were saying everything's gonna be a function? No more, no more microservices? Oh yeah, how'd that go for you? Hey, remember when you said memory's just gonna keep getting cheaper? Ruby's gonna scale, remember that phase?" And he just like, he roasted me for a decade of everything. And I was like, "Oh, I forgot about each of those because I'm on to the next one already, I'm a genius.

• 48:48Speaker 02

  I'm on, I'm an elixir stack now, it's gonna scale to the moon, OTP, don't worry about it."

• 48:52Speaker 01

  Guys, guys, I have a billion dollar idea. Here it is. You ready for this?

• 48:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:01Speaker 01

  Code therapist. It's not a mentor, not a life coach, not a, not programming courses, none of that. It's a therapist. You go to this person for an hour a week, right? Obviously, we'll drive it by AI, won't actually have humans involved.

• 49:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, duh.

• 49:18Speaker 01

  It's gotta be a billion, gotta be big VC money.

• 49:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:20Speaker 01

  And what you do is you talk about the code and they ask you, they're like, "So tell me about your build environment." Right? And they're like, you start talking about it and then they kind of ask you those questions and they help you get in touch with like your inner, like, like how you're actually relating to this code and whether you are starting to evince pathologies like Tom, right? Like, and there could be like a DSM equivalent that basically has like, "Here are the neuroses that you may have." And they try to like, help you uncover those, right? "Tell me, tell me about, tell me about your code review. Tell me about the..." I, I feel like this could be a thing.

• 50:01Speaker 03

  I like this, Casey.

• 50:02Speaker 00

  I like this a lot. I'm, I'm in full support of it. I, I think they called Scrub Masters, though.

• 50:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're called, they're called Scrub Masters.

• 50:09Speaker 00

  I think we already have this position.

• 50:12Speaker 02

  I think it's called HR. Is that not what HR is?

• 50:15Speaker 03

  You're in there every week, Vegan.

• 50:16Speaker 02

  Well, that's because they love my jokes.

• 50:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, they always ask to hear them again.

• 50:19Speaker 00

  Code therapy, though.

• 50:20Speaker 01

  Code therapy.

• 50:21Speaker 00

  Code therapy sounds so funny.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:24Speaker 00

  Oh my gosh, I want to do it with somebody.

• 50:26Speaker 01

  Do you, did, like, how did that variable name make you feel?

• 50:30Speaker 02

  Okay, call Prime, call Dr. K and say, "I want to be a code therapist. Teach me how to be a code therapist." And then we can have you just give therapy to someone on stream and he can be on stream watching you and giving you advice on how to therapy the person. That's, that's gotta be, that's ethical. That's fine.

• 50:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, that is, that is ethical. That's the word I was gonna use.

• 50:49Speaker 01

  I got a, I got a, another stupid true story for you here. I, just to show you how much I don't understand anything. I, uh, like, a couple of years back, I got an email from somebody who was like, like, I knew through, it was like a childhood friend's sister or something like, like, you know, who, I, I know who they are. It wasn't like weird that they would email me, but it's like not someone I ever emailed with. And they were like, Hey, I was wondering, like, I have a friend who recently got laid off in tech. And I was wondering if, like, maybe you could help them, like, find a new job somewhere, right? I know you're out there in the Seattle area, right? And I know you do, like, a lot of programming stuff, and you're well-known and all this stuff.

• 51:33Speaker 01

  So, you know, in their mind, that means that you, like, I assume that means that they think you, like, hang out with all of the managerial people or whatever. So they're like, so I'm like, "Who? Like, what is the, what's the thing?" And they're like, "Well, they're a certified scrum master."

• 51:49Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 51:51Speaker 01

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

• 52:32Speaker 00

  So, have you heard of the game?

• 52:33Speaker 03

  No, I mean, so Casey, the main way is they have to like and subscribe on this podcast?

• 52:39Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 52:40Speaker 02

  I was gonna say, remember, chat, everyone, if you do, someone says they're a scrum master, I do this every time, you can save a lot of heartache this way, ask for their credentials. They say they're certified, say, "I want to see the certification, what's your badge number?" Like, there's a lot of things out there, all right? And I will, I will not take a ticket from anyone unless I see their certification. That's just how I operate, okay?

• 53:02Speaker 01

  Yep, because they could just be impersonating a scrum master.

• 53:05Speaker 02

  They could be, it's a big problem.

• 53:06Speaker 00

  We all know that's a felony, but it still happens.

• 53:10Speaker 01

  I mean, that's, that is the scary world we live in. So what does a scrum master do, guys? Like, what do they, what does that mean?

• 53:18Speaker 00

  I'll tell you in just a second. Beegan, by the way, you don't have any, like, what's it called, like, filter on your microphone, so this whole time I can hear you go.

• 53:25Speaker 02

  Oh, oh, sorry, chat. It's ASMR.

• 53:28Speaker 00

  I gotta do it deeply, and I can't, someone made a comment about it, now I can't stop hearing you breathe into your microphone.

• 53:33Speaker 03

  It took you an hour to decide to tell him?

• 53:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, thanks for telling me now. I did an audio test before this and listened to myself breathe for a while, and I was like, "That's kind of pleasant."

• 53:44Speaker 02

  Guys, I will not breathe anymore, okay?

• 53:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, breathing off.

• 53:47Speaker 01

  Reminding chat, I know they were holding their breath during the story, but it's a subliminal thing to remind them to breathe during the story of Jake and Tom.

• 53:55Speaker 02

  Chat, I'm doing the taz on day from now on.

• 53:59Speaker 02

  It doesn't work because my mic goes with me, but okay, we'll figure this out, chat. I'll mute.

• 54:04Speaker 00

  Alright, so to explain the scrum master, so I've worked with a certified scrum master on many levels, and in fact was so scrum mastery that they actually went out and taught other scrum masters how to scrum master.

• 54:15Speaker 01

  Okay, so I clearly asked the right person because not only can you tell me the truth straight from a scrum master, but from a scrum master master.

• 54:27Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 54:28Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 54:28Speaker 00

  Okay, so I'm not gonna say any names, just so I don't get anybody in trouble, but...

• 54:34Speaker 01

  And the rest of this podcast has been that way.

• 54:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know. So, well, except for the part where you were talking about the functions, everybody knew the name, then chat was just the law of the name.

• 54:43Speaker 01

  Guys, I was trying not to create drama. I intentionally didn't talk about this thing.

• 54:48Speaker 03

  That was anti-drama. Casey, you were good.

• 54:50Speaker 02

  Oh, no, no, there's definitely videos being made right now. I'm sorry, it's already happening, Casey.

• 54:55Speaker 00

  Key doesn't even know what a scrum master is. Okay, so...

• 54:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's a true story.

• 55:00Speaker 00

  So, this is, I'm gonna just, I'm gonna tell you my definition of a scrum master. This is not the official definition of a scrum master. This is what I believe one to be after working with one of the pinnacle scrum masters out there.

• 55:11Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 55:12Speaker 00

  Which is the following: that a scrum master is closer to a team therapist slash technical manager than anything else. So, A, they meet with people to make sure everyone's working together well, make sure things are actually moving, making sure that we're sizing our tasks correctly, kinda keeping up to date that our team is adhering to agile principles in a very like, sound way, sound, uh, way. And then B, they also help a lot with a lot of the technical direction. They're not technically technical managers, they're not the ones that's supposed to be making all the tickets and doing things, but they often fall into this role. And that was my experience, was just like, "Yeah, but, like, how do you feel?"

• 55:53Speaker 00

  Like, I got a lot of that, and so it truly was this co, this mentor person.

• 55:59Speaker 01

  So code therapist, actually, when you said they're called scrub masters, you weren't even really joking. Like you actually, that's kind of what they kind of have to do.

• 56:09Speaker 00

  They kind of do. It's like, if you had a manager that was aloof, a scrub manager, like how I kind of took it is that the scrub master is kind of like, it's what the manager should do to all of his employees, which is like check in and make sure everyone's doing okay and that we're not running off the rails. But instead of the manager that I worked with was, he would often just like rewrite part of our app over the weekend and was just always on just coding benders and they were always crazy. And sometimes they caused so much conflict that I've had to delete like a week's worth of work.

• 56:40Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 56:41Speaker 00

  Just because, and then one time he got super jacked up on promises, but he like inlined his promises. So I followed his pattern because I didn't know what promises were. This was like 2011. So I was like, had like then and next functions that I was doing. It was crazy because he was just like, this is what we're doing. We're doing promises. So I was like, all right, we're doing promises, everybody.

• 56:57Speaker 01

  I love jacked up on promises.

• 56:59Speaker 00

  Dude, I got.

• 56:59Speaker 02

  Jacked up on Mountain Dew and promises.

• 57:01Speaker 00

  And said, what the hell were you doing? I was like, I don't know. I'm just following what my boss told me to do.

• 57:08Speaker 01

  I had kind of a rough childhood. My dad used to come home late at night all jacked up on promises. It's like then and next.

• 57:16Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 57:16Speaker 01

  He's like, why are my kids never asynchronous? You know, it's just, it just.

• 57:25Speaker 03

  They're not even true threads.

• 57:30Speaker 02

  It's just, dad, you never love both of us. It's always one of us at a time. Why can't we both?

• 57:38Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 57:39Speaker 02

  Also, I know we were definitely in the random portion of the podcast right now, but I do have to describe something happened yesterday because I spent yesterday serving coffee and telling people about SSHing into a coffee website for normies for seven hours straight. I will say, um.

• 57:56Speaker 00

  Can I share the picture with the girls looking at you?

• 57:58Speaker 02

  You have to share the picture. Chat.

• 58:00Speaker 03

  Well, do we have people's permission to share their pictures?

• 58:03Speaker 02

  You can show it on straight. They're all content creators. Everyone.

• 58:06Speaker 03

  Okay, fair enough. Just making sure.

• 58:08Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 58:09Speaker 03

  I wasn't there.

• 58:10Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 58:10Speaker 03

  I wasn't there.

• 58:10Speaker 02

  So, I'm just gonna show us, guys. This is an actual photo from yesterday. This is 100% real. You're never gonna believe me, but we have multiple witnesses.

• 58:17Speaker 00

  What message or where do we put this?

• 58:19Speaker 02

  Terminal chat.

• 58:20Speaker 01

  So, basically, what you're saying is this was AI-generated.

• 58:22Speaker 02

  It's not AI-generated.

• 58:23Speaker 01

  It's what you're basically telling me, whatever. Whatever I'm about to see, which I don't actually know what it is yet.

• 58:27Speaker 00

  It is my favorite picture in the universe.

• 58:30Speaker 02

  I can't believe. So, this is, guys, this is a real photo of me showing people ordering coffee in a terminal. I swear to.

• 58:37Speaker 01

  That's what's on the screen.

• 58:39Speaker 02

  I am holding a laptop and I go, okay, ladies, watch this. So, first, you all have Macs, open Terminal. Hit Command, spacebar, type T. You got a terminal, you'll see it right there. Press Enter, SSH, terminal.shop. Boom, there, and I showed them, and that was actually taken from that moment. That is real. I promise you, this will never happen again. This is the first.

• 59:00Speaker 01

  I have a question.

• 59:02Speaker 00

  He vegan wild women with SSH skills.

• 59:04Speaker 02

  Literally.

• 59:04Speaker 00

  It actually happened. Like, arch boys, be careful.

• 59:07Speaker 02

  That was by the end of the day, so I practiced the pitch 40 times. Because in the beginning, you're like, so how do you buy the coffee? Oh, you guys can't. Okay, I gotta work better on this. I gotta get it. This is not working, so.

• 59:20Speaker 02

  By the end, I had a doubt. I was showing them, you can't, but I'll teach you. Show you all have. Also, you all have Macs, and holding a Mac was working really well. They were like, of course we do. And I said, this app's already on your computer. They go, it really is? I go, it really is right now, and.

• 59:36Speaker 01

  Yes, Casey? So, since everyone else got to plug all of their stuff, I kinda wanna do an extended plug for terminal.shop here, because I legitimately have a question about it.

• 59:50Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 59:51Speaker 01

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

• 1:00:34Speaker 01

  but for some reason, I don't get the sense that you guys are now the world's number one coffee supplier. So what, why do you suck at marketing? There's my, there's my actual question. What is wrong with you?

• 1:00:45Speaker 02

  Casey, did you just see, we're on the streets going one at a time with people. Here's the key. We do not want to have losers drinking our coffee. We're starting with top quality people who are the coolest people in the world. Who run the world? Programmers, obviously. Start with coolest people, programmers. After we get programmers, then we'll start individually selecting other people in, and then after that, we'll go Starbucks. But you gotta have a cool base of people. Every programmer I know drinks this coffee. What is it? You can't have it. We do that for four, five years. People are like, I want it so bad. And goes, you're too dumb. Then we sell it to them. After we sell a big portion to some sort of like private equity firm, you know, BlackRock or something like that, so.

• 1:01:25Speaker 01

  I see. So basically what you're saying is you're doing like the Facebook model. It's like, oh, you wanted to be on this? You can't be on it yet. Like it's invite only, invite only for this coffee. I see. No, but really, like, what's going on, guys? Like, what's going on? What's wrong with the business?

• 1:01:38Speaker 03

  You want the real answer?

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

  I do, I do.

• 1:01:40Speaker 03

  Give them the real answer.

• 1:01:41Speaker 01

  What's the real answer?

• 1:01:42Speaker 03

  The real answer, even though it's gonna sound like in another ad, is just, we'd rather ship like small batch coffee that's really good, which is just hard to ship to a lot of people and like to a lot of places.

• 1:01:55Speaker 01

  You're like supply constrained, basically?

• 1:01:57Speaker 03

  Yes, we can't, we're not in any other place but the US, even though I know Europe would go hard. Yep. You know, we have to be careful about stuff. Right, so that's, I mean, that's the main, the main thing. I mean, maybe over the next year, we have, we have started working a lot more on the, on the coffee side of stuff in the past like three months, probably. And being a bit more, a bit more serious about it. But yeah, I mean, that's like, the, the major is just like, I don't know how to get a roaster in the EU that wants to interface with a custom, like, sass.

• 1:02:30Speaker 03

  B to B slash B to C coffee experience where we like ship them addresses and then you know, so it's like that's the we're so we're getting there, but that's honestly like a big part of it.

• 1:02:44Speaker 02

  We figured out something pretty dark, which is apparently taking people's public keys is against GDPR. So we have a big issue to get around. So whatever I said GLDPR, whatever. GLP one.

• 1:02:58Speaker 00

  You can't just throw an L at that one. CLP one. I like that.

• 1:03:03Speaker 02

  But once we get the legislation, once the legislation's changed, we're going to be rich in Europe. Okay. Well, it's just.

• 1:03:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're currently lobbying the EU.

• 1:03:10Speaker 00

  And then we're going to sell all of the public keys to BlackRock. Like that is like the ultimate, dude, dude, chat checkmate. I'm so excited.

• 1:03:17Speaker 02

  If you guys didn't see when the when the coffee first went live in Hacker News, it was like number one in Hacker News. That was one of the comments with someone's like, why are they collecting the public keys? They're just, you're just giving them your public keys for free. Everyone idiots. Don't you know the plan? They're harvesting public keys, which we all got together and said, who can we sell these to? Apparently there's a buyer out there. I got on the dark web. I could find no one.

• 1:03:43Speaker 03

  We were so confused because we were trying to figure out, is there something you can do with these? I thought for sure there's nothing you can do with the the public key of an SSH key pair. I'm like, I don't understand.

• 1:03:57Speaker 01

  Isn't that kind of why we call it the public key is because the public is supposed to be able to have it?

• 1:04:04Speaker 03

  People were just so ready.

• 1:04:08Speaker 02

  We called Sam Altman right away and was like, do you want to buy some public keys? And he was like, stop calling this number.

• 1:04:15Speaker 00

  We called up Mr. BlackRock and was just like, Mr. BlackRock, we got a deal you cannot resist. It involves people's information. He was like, I'm listening. And we're like, public keys. And he hung up on us.

• 1:04:23Speaker 02

  Hundreds of public keys. Hundreds.

• 1:04:27Speaker 00

  It could cross a thousand. All right. Well, this has been.

• 1:04:31Speaker 03

  Oh, I had one. I had one last thing.

• 1:04:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:33Speaker 03

  Just really quick. Casey's story earlier reminded me of an ancient proverb from Sun Tzu. You guys might have heard of him before. And it goes a little bit something like this, which is.

• 1:04:46Speaker 03

  Some days you do the Jay Diesel-ing and other days you get Jay Diesel'd. Sun Tzu, Art of War. Yep. So I just wanted to make sure we got that one out there. I really wanted to say that line and you guys kept interrupting. Where Casey was doing that, so thanks. That's all I had to say. That's the end of the stand-up. See you guys next week. The name is the stand-up.