How did We Even Arrive Here?

Aug 4, 2024

The hosts share their unexpected journeys into tech and discuss career paths shaped by early interests and networking. They dive into humorous mishaps while troubleshooting hardware and highlight the effectiveness of a travel router for seamless connectivity. Recent topics like a bootloader bug in CrowdStrike, which caused system crashes, are also explored. The blend of tech insights with light-hearted moments creates an engaging atmosphere as they navigate through personal stories and the significance of safe practices in tech.

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ANECDOTE

Michael's Career Journey

Michael's career began with a co-op during college, leading to a 16-year tenure at the same company.
He then transitioned to contracting and startup work.

ANECDOTE

Alan's Programming Origin Story

Alan's programming journey started with a TRS-80, leading to an interest in automation and web development.
His database-centric approach evolved over time through discussions with his co-hosts.

INSIGHT

Unintentional Programmers

None of the hosts initially planned on programming careers.
Their shared natural curiosity contributed to their success in the field.

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We were asked in one of our recent reviews in Apple Podcasts if we would share our career paths and how we got started and how we arrived where we are today. We took some of that info, threw it at Microsoft’s CoPilot / DALL E 3 and that’s the artwork for this episode – you may be a little surprised at how the 3 of us got started as software developers. We also have some fun things to share about recent purchases, tweaks, mistakes made and some information about the CrowdStrike outage that recently occurred.

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News

Atlanta Dev Con
September 7th, 2024
https://www.atldevcon.com/

DevFest Central Florida
September 28th, 2024
https://devfestflorida.com/

This Episode

Career paths – someone asked that we talk about our career paths https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Pearlman
Enabling trace caused a bug that didn’t happen otherwise – in other words, errors in your code (such as in a toString()) could cause unforseen problems when working with other libraries and enabling verbose logging
Upgraded the fans in my Omada switch…may have done something stupid – ie. you should never mess aorund inside electrical components when they were powered on else you may risk injury or even frying some expensive equipment
The travel router experience has been awesome – we mentioned this thing in a recent episode and it really is awesome

Travel Router: https://amzn.to/3W5U8IS
Travel Router Case: https://amzn.to/3zufsyU
Great topic in the Coding Blocks slack #episode-discussion channel – can you buy your way out of a jam when older developers leave and tribal knowledge is abundant? ie. how much money would it take for you to work on an old jquery application nowadays, or maybe support a v1 MVC .NET application
Some craziness with Crowdstrike and several industries coming to a standstill due to a bug
- Government Accountability Office blog entry on the CrowdStrike issue
  https://www.gao.gov/blog/crowdstrike-chaos-highlights-key-cyber-vulnerabilities-software-updates#:~:text=Earlier this month%2C a software,Disruptions were widespread
- Great explanation of what happened
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAzEJxOo1ts
When is Programmer’s Day?
- International Programmer’s day is January 7th, for no reason I can find.
  No joke, it depends! It’s the 256 day of the year, which changes with leap years. This year it’s on 9/12.
- Guess we just need to celebrate all 3!
  https://www.timeanddate.com/holidays/world/international-programmers-day

Resources

Mentioned the old TRS-80 Radioshack handheld – here’s a page with some info on these dinosaurs
https://oldcomputers.net/~oldcompu/trs80pc1.html

Tips of the Week

Hollow Knight, amazing created by 3 people (mostly) fantastic game, it’s not as hard or long as I thought it would be. The gameplay is amazing, the music is amazing, the story is hidden, but amazing. Just play it on just about any platform.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/367520/Hollow_Knight/
Midinous is a cool way of generating midi visually with nodes, similar to decision trees, that can do cool things with randomness and weighting to manipulate all sorts of midi parameters (velocity, mod and pitch wheels, any parameters that your VSTs support!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtTWtzWav8I
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1727420/Midinous/
If that’s not low-level enough for you, check out overtone. It’s an open-source LISP-like wrapper around the SuperCollider audio engine that you can use to make really cool, live looping music.
https://overtone.github.io/
Did you know that k9s has a slick way of supporting skins via XDG_CONFIG, you just drop in a couple skin files and then update a parameter to tell your context/clusters what to use. Great article that walks you through it:
https://k9scli.io/topics/skins/
Starship minimalist prompt for any shell, previously Joe had been using powerlevel10k to show git information, kubernetes information, auto-complete etc, but it’s been deprecated and it looks like Starship appears to be the de jour replacement.
https://starship.rs/
Showing the “hidden frames” in a strack trace in IntelliJ
If you want to see everything that happened in those hidden frames, you will want to right click that stack trace and show traces from external libraries – there are other features there you can enable/disable as well!
Get outside … go for a hike, a ride, go see a concert, go see Deadpool & Wolverine … That one means your back inside, but you had to go outside to get there
Students – get an internship or co-op job … it’s easier to get started in your career while you’re still in school than it will be when you’re out and looking for a job