0:00

You're listening to Coding Blocks, episode 209.

0:11

Is that edited in post, or is that real? I'll

0:15

do it again. You want me to do it again? No, that's

0:17

OK. There

0:19

it is, 209. All right, subscribe

0:22

to us on iTunes, Spotify.

0:24

No, just kidding. Spotify, Stitchify,

0:27

wherever you find your podcasts. Visit

0:30

us at codingblocks.net, where you can find

0:33

show notes, examples, discussion, rants,

0:35

links, whatever, stuff, social

0:37

stuff. There's things there. Yeah.

0:39

I don't have the lungs that Outlaw

0:42

has, so I'm just going to stick with

0:44

the short words. Send your feedback,

0:46

questions, and rants to our comments at codingblocks.net.

0:49

Email the old way. You can go to

0:51

slack, codingblocks.net slash slack,

0:53

and do it the new way. How

0:55

crazy is that? Will you send me an inter-office

0:58

communication? On

1:00

Slack, please. You can follow

1:02

us on the Twitters, at codingblocks.

1:05

And we should probably sign up for our Blue Sky account. I'm going

1:07

to do that right now, if I can. Waitlist.

1:09

And also, codingblocks.net, you can find

1:11

other social links at the top of the page. With that,

1:13

I'm Joe Zack. I just feel like elongating

1:16

it. I'm Michael

1:19

Outlaw. He's

1:21

practicing for his, he's going

1:23

to start doing events at,

1:26

it's no longer the Georgia Dome. It's Mercedes-Benz Stadium,

1:28

right? Oh, yeah. Yeah, there we go. Yeah, me

1:30

and Tay Tay, I think, are performing tonight.

1:33

I like it. Yeah. I like it. So

1:35

with that, I'm Alan Underwood. Not going to

1:37

be doing any events.

1:39

I did see a sign, because she's

1:41

in town, right? So I don't know if you saw

1:43

this, the billboard where, Atlanta's

1:46

often referred to as ATL, the airport

1:48

code. And it said A-TAY-L.

1:50

And I have a hard time saying it every time, A-TAY-L.

1:52

I

1:54

mean, dude, that lady has

1:58

such a cult following, man. And like

2:01

didn't people go crazy when,

2:03

when a ticket master had problems with

2:05

her concert? Like there was like just

2:08

a mutiny because of the Taylor Swift

2:10

debacle.

2:11

Well, I think there was other things that

2:14

play there though. Right? Like, where

2:17

like tickets have been pre sold

2:19

beforehand or something like they, there are not enough available

2:21

or something like there was, there was other craziness involved

2:23

there, but yeah, she definitely has an extreme

2:26

following for sure.

2:27

So I heard she's in town and they expect

2:29

a hundred thousand people

2:31

to be in town this weekend. They're like,

2:33

if you have something to do in town, you

2:36

either need to get there at two o'clock in the morning or

2:39

skip it. Well, what's also worse

2:41

though, too, I don't know if you know, but miss

2:43

Janet, if you're nasty is in town Jackson.

2:46

Yeah, both. Yeah. Cause her, cause I think

2:48

her show got delayed

2:50

because of them are overlapping.

2:52

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So they're both

2:54

overlapping now. Yeah. That's

2:57

you think the people would play these things out better,

2:59

but you know, the funny part about that is that's

3:01

probably because they thought there was no way the

3:04

Atlanta Hawks. Yeah. I've

3:08

seen them play. Yeah.

3:11

We got this. We got it. It's okay. Fine.

3:15

It'll work itself out. Just trust me. It'll be fine. We're

3:17

going to take a gamble on this and it's going to

3:19

pay off dividends. It's amazing.

3:22

So, Hey, uh, real quick,

3:24

we did a outlaw myself. We had a

3:26

chance to go meet with Jamie Taylor.

3:28

If you don't know him,

3:30

he does the.net core podcast. If

3:32

you're into.net, definitely go

3:34

check that out. He's been doing that one for years. They've

3:37

got, he's also got another one that he does

3:40

with, uh, uh, James

3:42

and Zach and they do

3:45

tabs and spaces. That one's also very entertaining.

3:47

It's very much like the style of the show that we're doing

3:49

today, where we're just talking about random

3:51

topics.

3:53

And then he's also got one about video

3:55

games called waffling Taylor. So if

3:57

you haven't checked out any of those, go check

3:59

them out. Jamie is an awesome dude. I

4:02

had a good time catching up with him. We

4:05

even, we even talked a little bit about work code

4:07

stuff.

4:08

Um, so, you know, everything from, you

4:11

know, just

4:12

what's life like to, Hey, what

4:14

are good development practices?

4:17

And you gain Java cakes.

4:19

We did not get any Java cakes. I feel like

4:21

I got a job cakes. I got cakes.

4:24

Man. Hey, those things are actually

4:26

interestingly good. They're not real food. I don't

4:28

think, but they're

4:30

pretty tasty. You know what I forgot to ask him

4:32

and I'm

4:33

going to ask him now because I've

4:35

always wondered like, because

4:38

his handle on Slack is GA prog

4:40

man. And I always thought like when,

4:42

when I first saw it like years ago, I just

4:45

assumed like, Oh, he's a programmer. He's

4:47

a guy who's a programmer lives in Georgia.

4:50

That was my immediate like reaction

4:52

to that name. And then,

4:55

but wait, he lives where no, not

4:57

like, so like, cause he's

4:59

overseas, right? So I've always

5:02

been curious, like, Oh,

5:03

what, what does it mean? Do you

5:05

guys know?

5:06

I have no idea. I mean, maybe it's gap.

5:09

Rog man instead of Georgia.

5:12

It's the capital G capital P capital

5:14

M. So yeah, it's

5:16

G G a prog man.

5:18

Yeah. So, so maybe he'll, he'll fill us

5:20

in here.

5:21

Yeah. I forget. He told me once cause I asked the

5:24

exact same question in the exact same way. And he told

5:26

me, and that was years ago. It's

5:28

gone now. And if the a

5:30

was this was capitalized, I would assume

5:32

it would be like, you know, a per like a code level, like

5:34

general availability kind of like release type

5:37

reference.

5:39

So I'm confused. So yeah, Jamie,

5:41

let us know. I forgot to ask you. I'm sorry. Yeah. Good

5:44

stuff. But yeah, it was really nice to catch up with him.

5:46

Um, he's an awesome dude. If

5:48

you, if you get a chance and you like podcasts,

5:50

definitely go check his stuff out. Yeah,

5:52

it was awesome. And Alan definitely picked a great

5:54

place for us to be able to hear everything that was said to you.

5:57

That was a thousand percent.

5:59

Yeah.

5:59

Totally by choice. Totally by choice.

6:02

We ended up at the Hard Rock and what

6:04

was it? Maybe third grade class

6:06

or something? I think it was, yeah, there was definitely like

6:08

a third grade retreat going on there,

6:11

you know, field trip to the Hard Rock Cafe

6:14

and they were singing every song that would

6:16

come on as loud as they could,

6:18

but only like the parts they know. So it was so hilarious.

6:21

Yeah, YMCA. Because like the YMCA would come on. They

6:24

knew the alphabet part of the song, but you

6:26

have to be on that and it like, it

6:28

plays kind of quiet.

6:30

I mean, we're talking like 130 decibels, right? It

6:33

was, it was louder than a football stadium.

6:36

It was crazy. It was

6:39

the real insanity of it was

6:41

when they left

6:42

just how quiet you could hear a pin drop

6:45

and it was like, Oh wow. But

6:48

by that time your ears are ringing, so it didn't matter.

6:50

Yeah, it was, it was fun. But hey, it

6:52

did give us a chance to actually eat our

6:54

sandwiches and stuff in between. Right. Well,

6:57

in fairness, I didn't say how big the pin was that dropped

7:00

that you could finally hear. So that's

7:02

right. Oh man. So

7:04

yeah, good time.

7:05

All right. So this on the show,

7:08

yeah, on with the show, this particular episode,

7:10

we're kind of just going to talk about some things.

7:12

This is more water cooler style and

7:15

one that has sort of bugged me

7:17

because it seems that this

7:20

is always the case. If you

7:22

wrote a piece of code, does that mean that you are

7:24

the one that has to support it and own it forever?

7:27

Is that how things are supposed to work? Well, wait,

7:29

Mick, because clearly based off of your

7:31

tone, I'm assuming you are thinking of

7:33

like in a business setting, not

7:35

like code you wrote on your own for

7:38

a freelance project or open

7:40

source project. Yeah, that's fair. I guess

7:42

if you do it for an open source project, you kind

7:44

of do it on it. But yeah, I'm

7:46

talking about, well, even if it was open source

7:48

project, it would depend on how open source, like,

7:50

you know, if it's on

7:52

your own private Allen Underwood repo, that's

7:54

open quote, open source. That's different.

7:57

But if it's like, oh, I contributed to Kubernetes.

7:59

Yeah, I think they'd almost treat it different,

8:02

right? Like if you were working on just a huge open

8:04

source project, then you're just, you're

8:06

nobody, right? Like you just

8:08

contributed some lines of code. But it

8:11

worked. It seems like if you,

8:13

it doesn't matter how big or small this thing

8:15

is that you create, like, I

8:18

mean, we've all done it, right? Like we've all written

8:20

something, and

8:22

from the most minor

8:24

things that go wrong with it to the most

8:26

major, it's like everybody's

8:29

like, oh, well, that's Alan's.

8:31

Well, worse than that, you know that we're all

8:34

guilty of, well, Alan wrote that, you

8:36

should probably go ask him.

8:38

Yeah, and I think the idea is that it's faster and easier

8:40

for him because he's more familiar with it, even if

8:43

it's been a break. But the downside is, is like

8:45

the longer you've been somewhere, like you just get stuck, you're

8:47

like saddled with these things that you worked on

8:49

years ago that no one else is touching, and it

8:51

just makes the problem worse where now no one's familiar

8:53

with it five years later,

8:55

and it's like even harder for them to

8:57

get into.

8:58

You know, it's funny, you know, you said we're

9:00

all guilty of it, and we all are, right? Everybody

9:03

who's ever programmed to anything is guilty of this.

9:05

But I feel like

9:08

I really try my best not to go

9:10

on poke the person that did something.

9:13

Like, I mean, I have

9:16

tons of examples, but I

9:18

will try and get stuck before

9:21

I like go knock on

9:23

somebody's door, right? And

9:26

I feel like most people don't do that.

9:28

I feel like most people, they're like, hey, this thing,

9:31

it's throwing this error. I'm like, did

9:33

you search the code for that text and

9:36

see what happened? Like, no. And

9:38

the reality is, if it's been more than

9:41

a few weeks, that's what I'm gonna have to do.

9:43

You know what I mean? Like, I

9:45

don't remember the logic flow to get

9:47

to this exact point, so. Hey, do you

9:49

remember verbatim says, bit of code

9:52

that you wrote three and a half years ago? Because I'm

9:54

getting this obscure error. It's

9:56

error 8,000, one, two, three, minus

9:58

four divided by PI. Do you remember what

10:00

that means? Yeah,

10:03

I mean, or hey,

10:05

this thing didn't start. Do you know why

10:07

it didn't start?

10:09

Cause I wrote it for Windows 95. That's

10:12

right, that's right. Why are you still bothering me? And

10:15

you know, here's the worst part. And this is, I think

10:17

this is the part that drives me the most insane,

10:21

is you can do your level best

10:23

to make it so that people don't

10:25

have to come to you for it, right? So

10:28

you can write wikis, you can have read

10:30

me's in the code, you can do everything that

10:32

you possibly can. Information

10:36

goes to die, that's the place.

10:38

Yeah, I mean, we've joked about this before, but I

10:40

totally believe it. The wiki is the place

10:42

that information goes to die. Well,

10:45

there's also one other benefit of wiki is you can

10:47

passively aggressively throw it at people.

10:49

So like, they'll ask you, which would be like, I

10:51

answered that, I guess you haven't read my wiki.

10:54

You know, it's right here. That's so

10:56

amazing, because that's exactly what Jay-Z

10:58

does. Because he's not

11:01

a,

11:01

he doesn't have a combative

11:04

personality. He's not confrontational

11:06

at all, yeah. At all, right? Like, you

11:08

can't create a fight with Joe, but

11:11

he will definitely drop wiki leaks on you.

11:14

That always makes me giggle a little. You mean, wiki

11:17

books. That's right. Yeah,

11:19

if Joe wrote it, it's complete.

11:22

Here you go, half of this is wrong, but

11:25

not this part. I try

11:27

not to be passive-resident, I try to just do it helpfully

11:30

and try and encourage people to write in

11:32

a wiki. But every time I say it, I'm like, oh man, I

11:34

sound like such a swarmy little something.

11:37

No, you don't. The way you said that, though,

11:39

it's almost like you could substitute

11:41

the technology there or a word

11:43

there, and it would sound even as hilarious

11:46

as what you said, where it would be like,

11:48

sounds like you don't even subscribe to my newsletter. Yeah,

11:51

exactly. It's

11:53

like, if you listen to episode 206 of

11:56

Coding Blocks, you would know. Yeah, that's right. Read

11:58

my blog. That's right.

11:59

You don't, you know, though,

12:02

the

12:02

Wiki versus the read me, I mean, we've

12:04

had this discussion in the past too.

12:07

I love the read

12:09

me in line with the code.

12:12

I love it at the root. I'll never have

12:14

too many read me's. No, totally. Like

12:17

put them in every module, right?

12:20

There should be the baseline one that is, Hey,

12:22

this is how you get up and running. This is how

12:24

you get things set up for your environment, blah, blah, blah.

12:27

Nobody has to go find a Wiki, right?

12:29

Like they don't have to know what to search for in the Wiki.

12:32

They have the code. They can open it. And

12:34

then every sub module, put a read

12:37

me in there. If there's anything that

12:39

if anything, that's probably the one,

12:41

the one place where I think I get frustrated

12:44

is,

12:45

you know, there'll be all these things to start

12:47

up a thing. And this, I guess this is why people come

12:49

buggy, right? Like, Hey, I see you have

12:51

this command line runner and there's these 12 options.

12:54

I don't know what they do. Right. But

12:56

that the read me, put it in the read

12:59

me. I'm a strong

13:00

fan of information

13:03

about the code should live

13:05

with the code and iterate with the

13:07

code. So it should be a read me in

13:10

the repo next to the code.

13:12

Like if it's about how to use this thing, how

13:14

to run this thing, you know,

13:16

like that, like what you just described, that's

13:19

in a read me next to the code. If

13:21

it's, Hey, here are the 18 environments,

13:24

you know, like information

13:26

about them or architecturally,

13:29

like how, you know, we're doing

13:31

things like that might be in a Wiki. Sure.

13:34

Fine. But things about the code live

13:36

with the code. I agree. Yeah.

13:38

You can do images and videos and stuff and link those in there

13:41

too. There's not, I think it's still a case for a

13:43

Wiki. Like there's reasons like meeting notes, things

13:45

like that. Sure. Stuff

13:47

like that, like schedules and stuff like all that stuff is nice

13:50

to have in Wiki and it's easier to link. Like it's hard

13:52

to link from one read me to another. Oh,

13:54

you know, you move it and it doesn't update all the links, you know,

13:57

stuff like that. But that was one thing I was

13:59

going to call out though.

13:59

is that you can, I don't know, I was

14:02

talking about like have like the parent read me and then

14:04

like sub-module read means, you can have

14:06

read means that are like linked to other read means,

14:09

you know, like GitHub will interpret that.

14:11

Yeah, it doesn't like, or even Visual Studio Code

14:13

will.

14:15

Yeah, it just, and you can do the whole control click.

14:17

It just, it doesn't, it doesn't like automatically

14:19

update if you move a read me or something, you know. Sure.

14:22

Yeah, it's rare. That's not a reason

14:24

not to do it. Yeah, true. I

14:27

will say we, you do

14:29

end up moving directories and stuff a lot more

14:31

than what you'd think as you start figuring out

14:33

better patterns and things, especially when you

14:36

move to new languages, right? Like if you

14:38

lived in a Java world forever and you went to Python, you're

14:40

probably gonna do things in a non-Python-y way

14:43

at first and then you're gonna realize the error of your

14:45

ways, so. Yeah, but I mean like what

14:48

I am not a fan of is

14:51

let's say that you have a repo

14:54

and to

14:57

get that thing running requires,

15:00

say, some number of steps, right?

15:02

Beyond just compiling, right? Because maybe there's

15:05

environment variables you need to set or

15:07

authentications that you need to already have sorted

15:10

out or whatever, you know, but

15:12

if you put that stuff over in a wiki,

15:15

then like as that code is iterating

15:17

and changing, well, the

15:19

instructions in that wiki, which version

15:21

of the code do they refer to, right? Because

15:25

they didn't, you know, it's not like they're

15:27

linking to a specific commit. They're just like generally

15:29

this is how you do this thing. But

15:31

if you put it in with the readme, then

15:35

maybe as you check out different branches or

15:37

different commits or tags or whatever,

15:40

maybe the instructions change with

15:42

that particular version of the code. And so that's

15:44

why I prefer things about

15:46

the code living with the code.

15:48

Yeah, I agree with that completely. And I would

15:50

say also get into the habit

15:53

of,

15:54

as you make changes with the code, think about,

15:56

hey, is there anything in the readme that needs to be updated

15:59

to support...

15:59

right for that very reason because it

16:02

does version right like if you check out on last

16:04

week's branch of the code It should have a different

16:07

read me if something was changed

16:09

on significantly for the new week's code. So It

16:13

is a fantastic way to let other

16:15

developers help themselves as they're

16:17

going through things

16:19

So PR is MRs too. It's a good chance

16:21

for someone say like hey I see you changed arguments,

16:23

but you didn't change the read me like that's not gonna

16:25

happen with a wiki. That's a great point Yeah

16:27

for sure

16:29

So yeah on on the thing of

16:32

should you support the stuff you work that

16:34

you created should it be yours forever? I

16:37

personally don't think so. I think

16:39

Do your best to make it to where people

16:42

can

16:43

can find information on it by the read

16:45

me via wiki You can link to a wiki

16:47

from the read me, right?

16:50

Try and make it to where they they can and then

16:53

passive aggressively send them the read me like

16:55

it'd be like hey Um, here you

16:58

go

16:58

So I don't know. I feel

17:01

like we should be better about everybody

17:03

spreading out the support and Understanding

17:06

of things so that you don't have one single

17:08

bottleneck on anything I feel like

17:10

Joe sends out the wiki links, you know

17:13

And and I'll send out like here's a link to the

17:15

read me because I love how

17:17

like github Azure DevOps They all will do

17:19

this where like they will interpret the markdown

17:21

for you You know so you can see this pretty

17:24

view of it in in the browser And

17:26

so I'll send those links out. I

17:29

do this question like how does this work or how

17:31

to use this or like? Well, what does that parameter mean?

17:34

Here's

17:34

the read me. Yeah, you know

17:36

that's interesting because I used to I

17:38

used to like send the path

17:40

to the file on my system, you know,

17:42

like Repository

17:45

whatever and over time I was like,

17:47

you know what exactly what outlaw just said I

17:49

know that this thing is formatted pretty in

17:52

in github or if you have an on-prem

17:54

get or whatever So I'll actually go find

17:56

the link to the file directly for the

17:58

branch directly

17:59

And then that way they go straight

18:02

to it and there's no questions. Well,

18:04

maybe this is a tip of the week then for you, because

18:06

in Visual Studio code, you don't even need to

18:08

find anything. You can just right click on it and say

18:11

open or copy remote path,

18:14

file path, and it'll give you the URL

18:16

to the repository version of that file.

18:18

Oh, that's good. I didn't know that. That is

18:21

tip of the week material right there. Yeah.

18:23

So you, and you can get like, if

18:25

you wanted the relative path. So like you were saying,

18:27

like how you would, you would previously give

18:29

them like the, uh, a link, you

18:32

know, a directory path based

18:34

on the repository. So like, Hey, wherever you have the repository

18:36

cloned, this is where you would find the file. You

18:38

can do that too.

18:40

But if you know the file, like in

18:42

that type of situation, I'm like, you know, command

18:44

P type in the file name, then the

18:47

explorer tree on the left automatically navigates

18:49

to the file. I right click

18:51

on the file, copy remote URL, boom,

18:53

paste that into Slack. There you go.

18:55

That's my passive aggressive version of Jay Z done

18:58

in a read me fashion.

18:59

I love that. I know

19:01

that works with the get hub. I wonder if that works for like other,

19:04

other sourcing or other like

19:06

source code repositories. Like it's get hub, you know, it's

19:08

like, it's, it's not just that path, right?

19:10

You know, like get hub.com slash org

19:13

name slash repo. And then it's like, it would be based

19:15

on the repo or something. Yeah. But

19:18

there's like, there's that little thing that you need to, there's like that, the

19:20

branch name and then the tree, right? There's

19:23

like some other word in there. I'll look it up, but

19:25

it's not just, uh, uh,

19:27

I don't think it's blob. I thought it was

19:29

like on this tree, but

19:32

it's not, uh, it's not like a standard URL. There's

19:34

not like a standard for get

19:36

website hosting paths.

19:39

Um, yeah, I mean, it could

19:42

be right. It might be, uh,

19:45

specific to, to

19:47

get hub. I

19:49

guess where this existed too under Azure DevOps,

19:51

but both of those would be Microsoft products.

19:54

Maybe there is some standard convention.

19:57

I just assumed it was based off of the. the

20:00

.get folder, like it knew how to

20:02

traverse that repository.

20:04

Right.

20:08

And now you're just like, oh, swap in remote name

20:10

here.

20:12

But maybe I'm wrong.

20:13

Still a good tip.

20:16

Yeah, so there's my quasi tip of the week

20:19

because Joe had to go and knock it down with a wiki.

20:22

Or a wiki, that doesn't work like that,

20:24

Michael. Yeah, I just like

20:26

to be a jerk. That's a good Joe impersonation, right?

20:29

That sounded just like him too. Yeah, totally,

20:31

totally not. Totally

20:33

not, wait, what? All

20:36

right, so. That was hashtag nail day, what are you talking

20:39

about? Nailed

20:41

it. That's hilarious. All

20:44

right, so here's another one that

20:46

I was wondering

20:46

what you guys, like just

20:49

your thoughts on this. So

20:51

there's always something that comes

20:54

up that's a work item

20:57

that is not super

20:59

appealing, right? Like it's

21:02

work that seems like it's not gonna

21:04

be fun. It's not, it

21:07

has to be done. Do

21:09

you raise your hand for that to take

21:11

one for the team? Knowing

21:14

that you're trying to do something for the greater good?

21:17

Like what are your

21:19

feelings and why are your feelings?

21:23

I think sometimes, I think some of that work

21:25

is like really important even though it's not

21:27

fun. But and it's, you

21:29

know, you should volunteer if you've got the space for

21:31

it. But you'll see like over time, like there's certain people that will just

21:33

never volunteer for stuff like that. And I think

21:36

that's not right either. So I think, you know, maybe

21:38

that's the conversation with the manager or something and be like, look, I've

21:41

taken the last couple of ones for the team. We need to spread this

21:43

out.

21:45

Okay, I'll

21:46

bet you, I'll.

21:48

I mean, I'm just thinking about from my own

21:50

past experience where like, I

21:52

mean, I feel like I've absolutely done that in

21:54

the past, you know, others

21:57

might argue that, but.

22:02

I just kind of view

22:04

it as like, I think

22:07

though the examples that are coming to

22:10

mind though, like I like empowering

22:13

other people like that, that,

22:15

that multiplication kind of factor, you

22:17

know, where I did something for the

22:19

team and now because that

22:21

like

22:23

everyone else is going to be able to like benefit,

22:25

you know, greatly from it, you know, kind of thing. So

22:30

because the kind of things that are coming to mind, like when you mention

22:32

them, like, oh, DevOps is

22:34

definitely like, I feel like this is definitely

22:37

a DevOps thing, right? Like where you take one for the team

22:39

and you're like, okay, I did this thing. I

22:41

made it better for us. And you know, I

22:43

put the work in, but like we all benefit

22:46

from it kind of thing. I mean,

22:48

I know that's not what you were talking about, but as definitely

22:50

like an a take on it. DevOps

22:53

can definitely feel that way. I'm talking about

22:55

more like,

22:56

Hey, there's a project that needs to be done. Everybody

22:59

thinks that the success rate is going to be garbage.

23:04

You know, you're working with stuff

23:06

that is hard to work with

23:08

and maybe even working with teams that

23:11

don't really even want to deal with it. Like,

23:15

but it needs to be done. Yeah. I

23:17

think like the, the bigger one though is like when it comes

23:19

to, Hey, here's an old bit of

23:21

technology and we need

23:23

to, we don't want to rewrite it. We don't want

23:26

to change it, but we need to like add a feature or update

23:28

something on it

23:29

and nobody wants to take it because

23:31

they're all like, well, I like to work on

23:33

the shiny new thing, not on that

23:36

turd. Yeah.

23:38

So, I mean, yeah. What are your thoughts

23:40

on that?

23:41

Yeah.

23:43

I'm of the, yeah. I'm

23:46

with Joe. Like, if it needs to be done, I will

23:49

do it. If that's what it's asked of me.

23:51

You know what I

23:52

mean? Yeah, totally. So

23:54

it's funny that all three of us think very

23:56

similar on that. I think that might be why,

23:59

why we are.

23:59

of the type of developers we are.

24:02

I think, uh, you know, I've definitely

24:04

taken them for the team. You know, like, here's

24:07

this thing that nobody wants. It's

24:10

like, all right, I'll do it.

24:12

But I do think what Joe said

24:15

is really important. There are some people that will never

24:17

raise their hands for that work.

24:19

And

24:20

it's not right that some

24:23

people always get tasked with doing the dirty stuff,

24:26

you know? So you got to figure

24:28

out a way to balance that out with a team to make

24:30

sure that you don't have one person

24:32

always stuck in the mire while other people

24:34

are always getting to do the fun stuff or, or

24:37

maybe it's not even fun. Maybe it's just the not

24:40

taxing stuff, right? Like there's some stuff that's

24:42

just taxing because there's

24:44

a, there's a super tight deadline. And,

24:48

you know, it may be that's the other thing,

24:50

right? Like it may not even be hard. It's

24:52

just that, Oh, this has to be done. And it has to

24:54

be done soon. And so it's going to be a grueling

24:57

type thing to get, to get through or

24:59

maybe it is a tight deadline,

25:02

but it's also like mentally

25:04

grueling. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

25:06

I mean,

25:07

it's okay, I think to take those

25:09

on occasion, but you also have to balance out

25:12

the mental health aspect of it too. Like there's some

25:14

things that'll just drag you down and it, and

25:17

it's hard to come up out of that rut sometimes. So

25:19

yeah.

25:21

Um,

25:24

here's the other thing to it.

25:26

Sometimes there are pros to doing that,

25:29

right? And the pro might be

25:32

you've created a trust with, with

25:34

your team or your management that

25:37

they know that you're one of the people that's a go-to

25:39

person. Um,

25:41

but that may also create the con

25:44

because they know that

25:46

you're the person that they can go to

25:48

to get these things done. And so they've built that

25:51

trust and they're going to lay, they're going to lean

25:53

on that trust over time. You know, so

25:57

yeah, that's

26:00

People problems are the worst problems.

26:02

They're the hardest. They're the hardest to solve. They

26:05

really are. Yeah

26:07

So yeah, I don't know I

26:09

mean, I guess for anybody out there doing

26:11

these type of things, you know, there are benefits

26:14

to it, but

26:15

But definitely try and balance it out

26:17

with with other people on the team who can who

26:19

can do those things

26:25

Yeah, I mean You

26:27

build good karma there You

26:29

do at least you hope you do you you hope

26:31

you are Yeah, it's

26:33

it's seriously. It's one of the tougher things

26:36

that I think

26:37

as a developer you deal with

26:40

ever is Like man,

26:42

I know this is gonna suck real bad Really

26:46

really want to raise my hand and offer to do this So

26:51

I don't know somebody's got to or somebody's gonna

26:53

point you out You remember like you'd sit in class

26:55

and teachers like hey, is anybody know the answer

26:57

to this? Nobody raises their hand and eventually

27:00

they're like, all right. Well you outlaw Tell

27:03

me oh you were asleep. All right. Um,

27:05

wow. Wait way to go I'm

27:07

like, I'm not even paying attention in your

27:09

fictitious example. That's right I

27:13

mean I saw it happen Yeah,

27:17

I mean that's what eventually happens

27:20

and you know what you know What really stinks about

27:22

that is sometimes the wrong person

27:24

will get paid for it Everybody starts grumbling

27:26

about it. And did you like hold up?

27:29

How's everybody upset? Like nobody volunteered

27:31

to do it?

27:32

So yeah

27:37

All right, so we got

27:39

to get here before Joe does because otherwise things

27:41

go sideways quick If

27:44

you haven't already left us a review you

27:47

can find some helpful links at Code

27:49

in box net slash review. We do greatly

27:51

appreciate reading those. They do put

27:53

a small interface. They mean a lot to us I

27:56

mean over the years you guys really like we

27:58

are in our tenth

27:59

year right now. Right.

28:02

That's crazy. And over those years,

28:05

nine plus years, we,

28:07

some

28:08

of the stories that, I mean, they're

28:10

truly, you know,

28:12

they, they truly play the heartstrings, right? Um,

28:14

I think I said that phrase, right? Um, but

28:18

yeah, that's what it was. Dang it. It

28:21

was so close. Um,

28:23

but yeah, I mean, there've been some really, some

28:26

really, uh, heartfelt messages that we've

28:28

received over the years. So we do really appreciate

28:30

those and, and I appreciate and thank those people

28:33

for reaching out and sharing those stories with us. So, uh,

28:35

if you have something you want to say, uh, you

28:38

can find some helpful links at coding blocks.net slash

28:40

review. And with that,

28:42

we head into my favorite portion of the show.

28:45

Survey says,

28:47

Hey, you know what we haven't had yet.

28:49

Nobody's like named their kid after coding

28:51

blocks or anything. So I guess, you know, we still

28:53

have room to grow. Okay.

28:56

I mean, maybe,

28:59

maybe not. I call my kids block heads all the time. You don't.

29:01

Oh yeah, probably.

29:04

Uh, well McGee sounds pretty good,

29:06

right? Wait,

29:09

you wanted them to name in your

29:12

world. The naming of the kids would be

29:14

after the three of us. So

29:16

somebody wouldn't name their kid

29:18

Joe Zach. Yeah. No, like outlaw underwood.

29:21

And then whatever your last name is, outlaw

29:23

under Zach. Smith

29:27

out under Zach, out under

29:30

Zach. There we go.

29:33

This is a terrible idea. Nobody please do this

29:36

all day. No, actually

29:38

I endorse this. I'm

29:40

looking forward to hearing what could come out

29:42

of this. This might

29:44

be the most amazing thing. This is the most

29:46

amazing idea we've had yet. I'll

29:49

get a tattoo of don't

29:52

believe them. Yeah. For real. Where's this

29:54

visual studio? I

29:56

can't show you. I'm

30:05

trying to even remember like why you promised

30:07

to get a visual studio tattoo.

30:09

Visual studio ever came out on Mac.

30:12

Oh, that's right. It's

30:14

crazy. Like Microsoft was so different back then 10

30:16

years ago. Yeah, and then it did. Yeah.

30:20

Yeah. So yeah, you still owe us a tattoo.

30:23

So yeah, I'm not, I'm not going to listen to your,

30:25

uh, your one about the names.

30:28

All right. Well, uh, like I said, we

30:30

head into my favorite portion. So this is

30:32

episode two oh nine. According

30:35

to, to that Co's trademark rules of engagement,

30:37

which we now all understand what I mean

30:40

by that. Yes. Uh,

30:42

it is Alan's,

30:44

uh, turn to go first. So

30:46

let me grab a winning streak. It's

30:54

awesome to create that, that

30:57

winning streak. All right. Well,

30:59

I'm going to give you an easy one to start with it. No bias

31:01

here, but you know,

31:03

uh, name a three

31:05

letter word that starts with the letter Z.

31:10

Really? That does not start

31:12

with Z. Sorry. All right. This

31:16

was, uh, this is from California, right? Do

31:20

these questions have an origin like that? Like

31:23

that in the show is shot. Like,

31:25

I don't know if these came from, so if it,

31:27

if it included the, you know, the UK and like,

31:30

oh, cause I didn't say said, oh, but I'm going

31:32

to go with, uh, I'm going to go

31:36

to California word. I'm going to go zap

31:38

zap. Okay.

31:39

Yep. I think

31:41

I got this one. Okay.

31:44

So number five answer on the

31:46

board.

31:48

This one's gross. Zit.

31:51

Oh yeah. 13 number four. Really

31:54

high Zen. Yeah.

31:57

Four 13. Okay. Good.

31:59

over here so I can see these two things at the same

32:02

time like a smart man would do.

32:06

Number three answer on the board is

32:09

Zap for 15. Pretty

32:12

good. Number two answer on the board

32:15

for 18 points, Zip

32:17

and rounding it out for 40 is Zoo.

32:20

Wow, look at that. All

32:22

right. So. That's

32:25

not even a commanding lead. I don't feel good about this. So.

32:28

It's California by the way. Figured it out.

32:30

Here you go Joe.

32:33

You ready for this one? There's no Zed. Yep.

32:36

Name an office supply

32:39

you'd use to pick

32:41

food out of your teeth. Jeez.

32:49

That is harsh. I

32:51

mean I

32:52

would just use paper.

32:54

A piece of paper? Yep. Okay.

32:57

If you're gonna get stuck in there then you're gonna need

33:00

the paper clip to get it out. Paper.

33:03

Yeah. That was my second choice.

33:05

Okay. So yours is paper. Alan

33:07

yours is. The paper clip. Paper

33:10

clip. All right. So

33:13

number six answer on the board is

33:15

Tack pen or pen

33:17

for six. No. No,

33:19

no, no. Letter opener for

33:22

number the fifth answer for eight. Fourth

33:25

answer is Staple. Nine. That

33:27

worked. Pen or pencil was the number three

33:30

answer for nine. That's really dumb.

33:32

These are pencils that make it worse right?

33:34

Right.

33:35

Now it's like why are your teeth graphite colored?

33:40

Number two answer on the board

33:43

for 12 points paper

33:45

or an envelope. Really?

33:48

You can get an envelope. Imagine getting a paper cut on your gum

33:51

between your teeth. Oh man.

33:54

Remember like you remember when we were kids did

33:56

you guys have like what's grosser than

33:58

gross? Do you remember this? kind of thing. Yeah.

34:01

Like that's what the paperclip cut between your teeth

34:03

reminded me of. Yeah. Like what's more painful

34:05

than painful. Okay.

34:08

Number one answer on the board

34:10

for 53 points

34:13

is paper. I feel a little bit

34:15

better now. Got some breathing

34:17

metal. I can't do the metal.

34:20

All right.

34:21

You don't

34:24

accidentally swallow a paperclip. So

34:31

Alan, uh, as his tradition,

34:33

you get to pick

34:35

the next and final question. Your

34:37

choices are name

34:40

a weather condition. That would be a good

34:42

name for a wrestler. Name

34:45

something that has the word super

34:48

in it, or name

34:51

something that parents can't wait for their

34:53

children to get out of the

34:57

third one. Okay. Okay.

35:00

Let me out of. Yeah.

35:04

So I don't even care if I lose this one. This is

35:06

pretty fun. Okay. Go the house, the

35:08

house. I

35:13

hope you're kidding around when you just said that. Oh,

35:26

that doesn't even want me here. That's

35:30

the right answer. But

35:30

I think I know the number one answer. Yeah.

35:33

Diapers. Diapers. Oh, that's a really

35:35

good answer. All right. All right. All right.

35:39

Number four answer on the board

35:41

and the lack of

35:43

options here should give you some indication. Number

35:46

four answer on the board

35:47

for four points.

35:51

Teens slash puberty. Okay.

35:54

Yeah. I get that. That's not a bad answer. Oh my God.

35:57

I house that number one. Right. I'll

36:00

take diapers any day of the week. Yeah,

36:03

here's the misconception because Joe said diapers,

36:05

but diapers are like, you know,

36:07

like every couple hours there might be

36:10

like, oh, I gotta go change the diaper. No big deal,

36:12

right?

36:13

But when they're going through puberty,

36:15

man, it's like

36:18

nonstop. Like that's

36:21

like you're literally, you have a crazy person

36:23

living in your house. They

36:26

are insane. Yeah. Yeah.

36:29

And constantly mad at you because

36:31

you chose to breathe. Yeah.

36:34

How dare you choose to breathe? Yes. Um,

36:37

number three answer on the board

36:40

for 21 points. Oh, these

36:42

are climbing school or

36:44

college. Thought

36:45

about that one. Yeah.

36:48

Number two.

36:50

Diapers. Wow. Did

36:53

I get the number one answer? I got 35

36:57

points for diapers. Number

37:00

one answer on the board for 36 points is the

37:02

house. Look

37:06

at that. I took number

37:08

one on all of them. Wow. Somebody,

37:11

somebody is continuing their winning

37:13

streak of one.

37:14

I studied. Okay.

37:20

That's amazing.

37:22

All right. Got the winning streak back. Yeah.

37:24

Good.

37:25

So welcome. Hey, uh, welcome

37:28

to the, to the winning circle here, Alan. Uh,

37:30

I appreciate it. Yeah. We'll give you

37:32

a first time winner's jacket. It'll

37:35

be like coding blocks blue, you know,

37:37

there we go. Yeah. Masters has their green jackets.

37:40

We'll have the blue jackets. Be out

37:42

under, out under Zach be written

37:44

on the back somewhere.

37:49

Oh man. Outward

37:52

under out Zach. Yeah. We'll have

37:54

to work with that. Okay.

37:56

Yeah. All right. That's going to take some work. Yep.

37:59

I think you need an. syllable in your name, Joe,

38:01

that's the problem. He had these one

38:03

syllables and we can't work with that. Yeah,

38:06

he gets to steal the whole part of it. See, we

38:09

could be like Joe Underlaw,

38:11

you know? Yeah, yeah. See where

38:13

we get to go with this? You're ruining things,

38:16

Joe. I

38:19

blame your parents for your stupid name. Hey,

38:21

wait, but you said on a show that that

38:23

wasn't your original name, right? Like it was

38:26

Polish or something. Yeah, yeah, I can't pronounce

38:28

it. Exactly. It's got like 12

38:31

syllables, so we should go back to the- Yeah, depending

38:33

which cousin you ask, like they all say it differently and

38:35

spell differently. Do you guys, are you even related?

38:37

Do you have your own, do you

38:40

have a side

38:41

show that we aren't aware of, this like Joe

38:44

between two computers or something? Yeah.

38:47

Joe Zach Galifianakis between

38:49

two computers. Yeah, good luck Googling it though. Well,

38:52

I can't spell it, no, you can't spell it. That

38:54

was awesome. No way. All

38:56

right.

38:57

All right. So I had one more that

39:00

popped into my head that

39:02

drives me crazy. And

39:04

I think we've talked about it before, but- Mm-hmm.

39:08

We definitely have. You'll get some

39:11

commands

39:13

from up above that you have to hit a certain

39:16

unit test coverage or code

39:19

test coverage number

39:21

with your stuff. And man,

39:23

that drives me crazy. So like I I'm

39:25

curious, you guys, the thoughts on on

39:28

test coverage percentages

39:31

versus

39:34

the actual usefulness of the tests.

39:37

I, okay. So here, here

39:39

I do not have a problem with having

39:42

a target percentage

39:45

of code covered by test. I

39:48

think that that's, you know, not

39:50

a crazy metric. If you wanted

39:53

to like have a PR gate, for example, around

39:55

like, Hey, you know, you

39:58

introduce so much new code.

39:59

brought the percentage down you you that

40:02

implies that you aren't testing it and so

40:05

therefore we can't merge your code in until

40:07

you do that. The problem that I have

40:09

with this though is that when

40:13

others above will say

40:15

that that number needs to be

40:17

really high because to me that

40:20

that number and like the PR gate example that

40:22

I gave

40:23

you know it

40:25

if you aimed for like 70 ish

40:28

percent give or take five you know like to

40:30

me that seems like a reasonable thing

40:32

right because there's absolutely going to

40:34

be code that cannot be covered with

40:37

a unit test because by definition

40:40

it's an integration

40:41

it's integration test code right you or

40:43

integration code because it's like trying to actually connect

40:45

to a database or whatever so there's absolutely

40:48

code that won't get

40:50

covered

40:51

and but you know

40:53

you'll have sometimes though these

40:56

really high numbers that would be given to

40:58

you

40:59

and the example that I was given to one of our

41:01

friends was that you

41:04

can have a code you

41:06

can have code that is a hundred percent test covered

41:09

by test that doesn't mean that

41:11

the code is bug free or correct

41:14

or good or anything like that and so the example

41:16

that I gave was like imagine if you had a simple

41:19

a simple function that

41:21

that just took in two

41:24

numbers and you know it

41:26

was called divide takes into numbers and returns

41:28

back a result right you could absolutely

41:31

write a test

41:34

that

41:34

gave you know for

41:37

into and expected an answer

41:39

of two and boom now that method

41:41

is a hundred percent covered by

41:43

a test right right so as far as management

41:46

could be concerned hey our

41:48

code is perfect because we have a hundred percent test

41:50

coverage but then the real world comes along in

41:52

the first time that a zero is thrown

41:54

in as the divisor

41:57

suddenly your code is broken right

41:59

right And so that's an example of where like a hundred

42:01

percent test coverage

42:04

does not mean what some

42:06

think it means. Right. And

42:09

it's not, it's not like the

42:11

metric that you should go after. It's not

42:13

the metric you should care about necessarily. And

42:15

to your point,

42:17

all it means is it was referenced

42:20

once in a test, right? So a hundred

42:22

percent coverage doesn't mean that you thought about

42:24

all the cases, the use of that code.

42:26

It's just, you touched it. And.

42:29

I exercised it once. Right. And

42:32

the part that bugs me more is like, when you have things

42:34

like pogos or

42:36

pocos and C sharp or whatever, like

42:38

those are not classes you need to test

42:41

their data movers. You've put a value

42:43

in them and you move them. And if you're writing unit

42:46

tests that,

42:48

that check to make sure that you didn't pass a string

42:51

for a number, it's like, is

42:53

that a useful test? I don't think it is right.

42:56

Like I think that's, that's

42:58

writing test code for the sake of having test

43:00

code, you know, a pogo or any

43:02

of that, like those shouldn't matter.

43:07

Business cases, the divider

43:09

is as simple as it is, is actually

43:12

a good, a good example

43:14

of something that is, is testable,

43:16

right? Hey, you know, there are, are

43:19

cases where like putting a zero in for a

43:21

divisor should throw an exception because it's not,

43:24

you can't divide by zero. So that's

43:26

a, a, a business, um,

43:29

a business rule, right? And

43:32

that's what you should be testing with unit

43:34

tests and integration tests should

43:36

be testing that the flow of something from

43:39

point A to point B

43:41

works as expected. Now those are going to

43:43

be slower, but in my mind,

43:45

that in some cases is

43:48

more useful than trying to test something like,

43:50

well, in every case that's more useful

43:52

than testing something like a pogo. And that's why

43:54

when,

43:55

when like blanket blanket

43:57

statements, like you need to have 80% code.

43:59

coverage or 90% or something like that,

44:02

it's like, man, no, that doesn't

44:04

get you to the point

44:06

of what I think testing is supposed to be, which

44:08

we've all talked about before, which is the

44:10

confidence to make a change.

44:13

And I don't think any of what we just talked

44:15

about does that. All that does is say,

44:17

hey, we have a really high test code coverage

44:19

number. Yeah.

44:21

I mean, I agree with all of that. I can't

44:24

say anything really

44:26

extra other than I think it's good to have

44:29

a goal. Having it be

44:31

unreasonable is just demotivating, but

44:33

you got to pick something and it makes sense

44:35

to pick something high. But

44:38

the problem is, is if you start going after

44:40

like, um,

44:43

if you make an unreasonable

44:46

requirement of like, Hey, the test code coverage has

44:48

to be like a hundred percent, 95%,

44:50

whatever 90%, you

44:53

know, just something high,

44:55

you can game that you can completely game that

44:57

and you're not, uh, you

45:00

know, really getting the goal

45:02

that you want. You're just in

45:05

fact, what you as the manager

45:07

don't even realize that you're doing is you're actually

45:09

encouraging your people to game the system

45:12

so that they can get to that number so

45:14

that you can like check your box

45:16

to like, and try to convince

45:18

your upper management, like, Hey, we are,

45:21

our code's perfect, dude. 100% test code

45:23

coverage. And really like to Alan's point, it

45:25

doesn't mean anything. Like, so what you ran

45:28

it through one test case

45:30

out of an infinite number. Like

45:33

no, you're not even like pushing. You don't even necessarily

45:35

have to push it to the extremes. I would rather,

45:37

I would much rather have code

45:40

that might not, they might have a lower

45:42

test

45:42

coverage percentage, but what

45:45

code is covered is thoroughly

45:48

ran through its paces. And it's

45:50

crucial to your, your, your

45:53

app, your project, whatever, right? Make

45:56

sure the backbone

45:58

of your code, the thing that does the.

45:59

important work is thoroughly

46:02

tested and is good.

46:04

That seems like the most important.

46:06

Like when outlaws talking about like gaming

46:08

it, like we were talking about this the other day, um,

46:10

me and some coworkers, like one of the ways

46:13

people cheat this type stuff is they'll just put

46:15

code that they think shouldn't really

46:17

even be tested and it try catch

46:20

and then it's tested.

46:22

You could totally put thing in there. It could fail

46:24

and you try to catch it and it's covered. Like

46:28

gaming the system sucks. It doesn't help

46:30

anybody. So creating unrealistic targets

46:33

also sucks because it, it

46:35

encourages people to try and figure out ways

46:37

around it.

46:39

It is, it reminds me of password. You guys remember

46:42

when they were like, Oh, your password needs to, it

46:44

has to change every time. And so people were like,

46:46

okay, this is ridiculous. So instead of having

46:49

a really strong password, uh, people

46:51

would just use the same password and put the

46:53

month number at the end of it or something. Right? Like,

46:55

when you, when you, when

47:00

you enforce

47:04

bad rules,

47:06

then you basically make it

47:08

to where people don't want to have to deal with it.

47:11

Right. Yeah. I mean, like we

47:13

as a, as a

47:16

civilization, right? Like we're,

47:18

we're pretty good at problem solving. Like that's, that's

47:21

how we have survived, you know,

47:23

thousands of years, right? Uh,

47:25

is figuring out how to survive and problem solve. So

47:27

if you put some obscene obstacle

47:30

in our way, we'll figure a way around it. That's,

47:33

that's the, that's the end of it. Yeah,

47:35

man. So, um,

47:38

but this is actually a pretty cool segue

47:41

into my question that I have for you

47:43

guys, which is what's a technology

47:45

that has reignited excitement

47:48

in you?

47:51

Uh, I guess I'll go first. So, you know, a GPT

47:54

is something that I think is really cool. I've been playing around a little

47:56

bit, uh, with it, but there's also a Google

47:58

bar, there's llama.

47:59

There's a couple other things. I think there's

48:02

a lot of innovation space that's really cool. So

48:04

I started working on a little thing that would let me compare results

48:07

across, like, Bard. Not

48:10

Bard. I don't have access to Bard yet. Dang

48:12

it. But GPT

48:14

has API and a

48:17

pack up. So I can just have one prompt and

48:19

see what both do. It's totally

48:22

silly and doesn't really accomplish much. But

48:24

I'm just experimenting. And I

48:26

think it's cool. Also, Unity, just game dev

48:28

in general, has been really fun. It's so different

48:30

from what I do day to day. It's fun to make stuff

48:33

jump up and spin around. Now, before

48:35

you answer, Alan, do you think

48:37

that

48:38

Joe got that answer because he went to

48:41

chat GPT and chat GPT said

48:43

chat GPT was the thing? I think

48:45

so. Yeah. It sounded like that. That's what

48:47

it said. I don't know what I was supposed to do. Think

48:50

about myself. Man, so that's

48:52

interesting. I mean,

48:55

chat GPT and all the AI stuff out

48:57

there that's coming to life now has

49:01

me interested and curious.

49:03

But I haven't touched it. I know

49:05

Jay-Z's always messing with it. He's the

49:08

gift for Secret Santa

49:10

for Outlaw was generated from an AI

49:12

thing from him. He's been messing

49:14

with this stuff quite a bit. So

49:18

from the information he's been sharing, I'm

49:20

super curious. The thing that I've actually

49:22

touched

49:23

that

49:24

ignites interest in

49:26

me, and I've always said this, I love big

49:28

data. I love huge amounts of data.

49:32

So

49:33

streaming technology still to me

49:35

are just,

49:36

I haven't gotten to mess with them as much as

49:38

I want, even though I gave a presentation on

49:40

them a couple of years back. Great.

49:43

Now I'm thinking about donuts. Way to go, Alan. Right, donuts.

49:45

There we go.

49:48

But yeah, I mean. His presentation was

49:50

on streaming donuts. Yeah, streaming donuts.

49:54

The challenge is

49:56

when you start thinking about unbounded sets

49:58

of data and how you have. to do

50:00

state and all that kind of stuff is really interesting

50:02

to me. I mean, there's sort of hard computer

50:04

science, the problems to solve a lot of times. And

50:08

those are fun. Those are interesting. So, um,

50:10

I'd say that was probably the one that,

50:13

that most has

50:16

grabbed my interest over the past several years and

50:18

kept it honestly, which is, which is crazy.

50:20

That doesn't usually happen.

50:24

So I guess I'm, I'm behind the eight

50:26

ball, you know, compared to where you

50:28

two guys have been here recently in

50:30

our professional

50:33

lives, only because just the way, like you take

50:35

them, talking about taking one for the team, right? Right.

50:37

Like I've definitely been on some, uh, you know,

50:40

you're, you're two different, like year

50:42

long efforts that put me behind

50:44

the eight ball and stuff. So there were like things that you guys

50:47

were talking about and I'm like, looking at it like from

50:49

the surface and I'm like, yeah, that does look cool.

50:51

That is cool. But I never had a chance to like super

50:54

dig in, you know, dive in and, like

50:56

get, uh,

50:57

you know, like more than just

51:00

a toe wet. You know what I mean? And

51:03

so this is why I say, uh, this

51:05

is a great segue cause you're talking about the test coverage

51:07

and all that.

51:08

So for me, it's been

51:10

Kotlin here in the last, uh,

51:13

you know, several weeks. And in

51:15

the, in the segue there was cause you were talking about pogos

51:17

and all that. And I was like, Oh yeah, well Kotlin actually

51:19

like makes it super clear. This is a data class.

51:22

Like, yeah, that's all I,

51:24

all I expected of this thing. It's literally

51:26

named. There's a keyword data. Boom.

51:29

It's a data class. And if you try

51:31

to do anything else with it, you know, what's wrong with

51:33

you? Um,

51:35

yeah, there's just so many cool little like smart

51:37

things about it that I'm like,

51:39

I really, I really, uh,

51:43

you know, that's, that's like super well thought out. Like one, I

51:46

got a tip of the week coming that I was like just

51:48

super in love with like how

51:51

clear and

51:52

expressive it was. Like what was happening there.

51:54

But, uh,

51:55

but on the other hand though, there's, it's not that he's

51:57

necessarily perfect though. Cause like the bang bang.

52:00

operator and Kotlin kind of like

52:02

upset me because I'm like wait this means something

52:04

different in other languages and we've kind of already

52:06

agreed on like what this means why are we why

52:09

are we changing the this definition

52:11

you know instead of that stuff

52:13

yeah instead of it being like related to not

52:16

knots or what not

52:18

not not what not hey I just did that okay

52:21

that just happened but yeah

52:24

so I'm

52:25

just in also and

52:27

I guess this is a segue into my next comment here

52:29

though too I

52:31

think that part of the thing that has like

52:33

made me super in

52:36

love with it and like just appreciative

52:39

of it and you know enjoy like

52:42

it's just can we just say like what a pleasure

52:44

it is you know

52:47

like like just to write in Kotlin

52:49

it truly is right

52:51

but going apart and

52:53

going along with that though it's kind of in an old

52:55

school kind of like dopamine hit was

52:57

like when you do have a question

52:59

right

53:00

JetBrains documentation

53:03

for Kotlin is amazing

53:07

it's outstanding it is awesome it's

53:09

like it's like back you remember back

53:11

in the 90s when like the MSDN documentation

53:15

was the thing man like nothing

53:17

touched it right yes it was like if you

53:19

had a question boom you know there

53:21

you went right and of course we all loaded the MSDN

53:24

documentation like on off the

53:26

CD onto our computer or the floppies you

53:28

know depending yeah

53:30

because it was that awesome you know until took out

53:32

all webified but uh

53:35

you know I say

53:37

that that's a segue in my next comment because what

53:40

is also frustrating is that

53:43

from the beginning of time for Java right

53:45

they there was this concept of Java

53:48

doc but the

53:52

frustration in working

53:53

in like a Java ecosystem

53:56

is that where some projects

53:59

and or developers or what

53:59

whatever, will treat, will can

54:02

think that, oh, well, we

54:04

have Java doc. So we have, we have documentation

54:06

for our project. Here you go. And you're

54:08

like, that's no,

54:11

it's, it's okay. I

54:13

see what you did there. Like, yeah, you

54:16

gave me a page that says, here's

54:18

the method name and here's the parameters. This

54:20

parameter is a string.

54:22

Thanks. Yeah. I couldn't

54:24

tell that before. Yeah.

54:26

No, you really went out of your way with that one. Why

54:29

would I use that?

54:30

Like, when do I need to use that? Like, you

54:33

may be an example of like when and why and what.

54:36

Oh, so frustrating. Uh,

54:39

so, so I, I

54:42

strongly, I have, I have, if

54:45

any project where they like treat like, oh, our

54:47

Java doc is our documentation. I'm like, yeah,

54:50

like I'm already like antsy. Like it better

54:53

be really good Java doc then. It

54:55

never, it never is. It

54:57

never, I've never seen good Java docs. That,

54:59

that goes onto my whole rant about bowel

55:01

dung or bail dung or whatever it is. Like

55:05

they are just a step past Java docs

55:07

in most cases. Like, you know,

55:09

they sort of lead you to what you

55:12

sort of

55:12

need, but they leave out all the import

55:14

statements, they lead out all the con, leave

55:16

out all the contacts. Like you can't actually

55:18

make anything work from their docs. And it's

55:20

like, I give, Oh, I mean the, the, the

55:23

Kotlin documentation is such a pleasure

55:25

because like, if you do have a question about

55:27

something in a lot of their, uh, code examples,

55:30

there's a play button. You can actually,

55:33

you know, experiment and execute the code

55:35

right there in the browser and be like, well, how

55:37

does this work? What is it? What if I want to do this? Like, what does

55:39

it do? And then boom, and there's a link to a playground

55:41

if you needed

55:42

to take it further, like Kotlin

55:44

for

55:47

the win. It's gotta be

55:49

like the best technology that's come out in

55:51

like, you know, one of the top technologies

55:54

has come out in recent years.

55:56

They're, they're up there with the C

55:58

sharp documentation because dot net.

55:59

It also went to that same whole thing, right? Where

56:02

if you had a question about code, they've got the stuff

56:05

on the page, they've got the Git snippets, they've got

56:07

all that stuff. Did they put live

56:09

examples with the Play button? I haven't seen that lately. They

56:11

do, yeah. Shows you how much C sharp

56:13

development I've done recently. Yeah, I mean,

56:17

Microsoft was always top notch,

56:19

right? Like they were always tier one. And

56:22

Kotlin is right there with them, which is

56:24

shocking because you'd think Java would be

56:26

as long as it's been around and as much

56:29

time as they've had to get there. And as popular

56:31

as it is, yeah, and just crap. The

56:34

one thing that I do really appreciate

56:36

about the

56:38

current MSDN documentation that

56:40

Microsoft provides is the GitHub link.

56:43

You find a problem? Here's the GitHub

56:45

repo, go submit a PR, you can fix that documentation

56:48

or improve it or whatever you want to do. The

56:52

Kotlin documentation doesn't take it that far, but

56:54

still, I'm not gonna hold that against them. But

56:57

yeah, that's, I mean, the streaming stuff, definitely,

57:00

I mean, how do

57:02

you not like solving those kind of problems,

57:05

right?

57:06

They're definitely

57:09

big,

57:10

you know? They're interesting, right? Like, I mean,

57:13

windowing, like

57:15

if you've never had to deal with data

57:19

coming in in some sort of stream

57:21

versus a batch, just look up

57:23

windowing and your whole world

57:25

will go, oh, how

57:28

do we, ooh. I never thought about

57:30

that. Yeah, yeah, how do I solve

57:32

that? It's just, it's really interesting problems.

57:35

I mean, any kind of problems at scale,

57:38

which is basically what you're, you know,

57:40

in a nutshell, you could kind of think of big data streaming

57:43

problems as like a way

57:45

to solve data at scale.

57:48

All scale problems are like super

57:50

interesting, right? Like, who was

57:53

it? And it wasn't

57:55

Martin Fowler, who was the screaming?

58:00

um, code one,

58:03

uh, stack overflow,

58:05

uh, streaming

58:08

code. No. The screaming that,

58:10

that, that, um, Oh

58:12

my gosh. He's like avatar. He's like, he's

58:14

screaming like, Oh, Oh, Jeff. Yeah. I believe

58:17

it was Jeff. Yeah. That,

58:20

uh, that had like an article

58:22

about like all things are fast

58:25

for small in,

58:26

you know, does that ring a bell

58:28

with you guys? So like, you're like, yeah, okay.

58:30

Who cares? Like whatever, you know, but when

58:32

you can make something fast at like the large scale,

58:35

right? That's when it's like, Oh, super interesting,

58:37

which is what you're describing. Yeah,

58:39

totally. That's exactly what it is.

58:42

So, um, but you know

58:44

what, uh, Jay Z definitely had, right. I should have

58:46

gone to chat GPT and asked to chat. You

58:50

said you have a phone

58:52

app. You have, uh, I just go to the website

58:54

on my phone, but, uh, yeah, like, uh, if you can't

58:56

use it at work, like you can still get advice for it, but like, you

58:59

know, depending on your work policy and like what their,

59:01

you know, reasons are, what they're trying to avoid. Uh, yeah,

59:04

it's like still nice sometimes to just, just

59:06

pull it up in your phone and be like, how do I do this stupid

59:08

Excel formula or like this function

59:10

is deprecated. What should I be using instead?

59:12

As long as it's before like 2021, 20, you

59:14

know, early 22, then you're

59:16

good. Right. Yeah.

59:19

Yeah. I mean, I do think

59:21

I do agree with you though, Joe, like it is going to be

59:23

interesting to see like, where does that take

59:25

us? You know, there's definitely like a

59:27

lot of, uh, you know, experts

59:29

that are talking about like, you know, ramifications

59:32

and things like that. Like, what is this going

59:34

to mean for us? So there's definitely

59:36

a lot of excitement there. So that's why I'm saying like, I'm

59:38

definitely behind the eight ball. Cause my dumb answer

59:40

was Kotlin, you know, meanwhile you're

59:42

picking something extremely topical. Um,

59:45

but, uh,

59:47

you know, um,

59:49

it, it, I am excited to see

59:52

like, where do we go from here? And like,

59:54

I thought, I don't know if I said this on the show, but,

59:57

um, I think I had talked about this with, uh,

59:59

you know,

59:59

family or friends, I forget. But

1:00:02

there was a comment about, with

1:00:07

things like chat GPT where

1:00:09

you can ask it, in your example,

1:00:11

like, hey, I wanna write a function

1:00:14

that does X, Y, and Z, or I need a script that does

1:00:16

blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then chat

1:00:19

GPT will put it out and everything. And

1:00:21

somebody made a comment about, well,

1:00:24

I wonder if we're gonna need developers, or

1:00:26

is this gonna be the end of developers, or something to

1:00:28

that kind of effect, which that type of comment has

1:00:30

come out before, right? And

1:00:33

my response was,

1:00:34

well, I don't think it's

1:00:37

necessarily gonna replace this, it's gonna,

1:00:40

the industries that'll be, and it's not

1:00:42

just developers, it could be like legal or

1:00:44

whatever, right?

1:00:47

The

1:00:49

people that'll succeed will be the ones that know how to

1:00:51

use the tools. And chat GPT

1:00:54

is another tool at our disposal, right? It'd

1:00:56

be like if you're trying to fly the enterprise and you don't know

1:00:58

how to talk to the computer, right?

1:01:00

Yeah, I totally agree.

1:01:02

There's some things that it's terrible at, too, like things that

1:01:04

you would think like math, you would think that a computer

1:01:06

would be good at math, right? And just other

1:01:08

stuff, like you gotta remember, like this thing is not,

1:01:10

like a person that doesn't really have intents, it's a

1:01:13

language model, it's literally just stringing stuff together

1:01:15

probabilistically, and it's easy to forget

1:01:17

that, so I think that the sooner you start kinda mess with it,

1:01:19

the better you'll get at using it, and I think that the

1:01:21

people that do start are just gonna have

1:01:23

a head start on where tooling and stuff is going.

1:01:26

Yeah.

1:01:27

That's excellent. All right, well, we'll

1:01:30

have some links in the resources we like

1:01:32

section for all of this, but with that, we

1:01:34

head into Allen's,

1:01:36

oh, no?

1:01:37

Oh, so in the resources we like,

1:01:40

we were talking about the Kotlin Playground and that kinda

1:01:42

stuff, I went and just grabbed one example

1:01:44

of the Microsoft stuff where

1:01:46

they have something very similar to that, where they have

1:01:48

things that they're teaching you what to do, and then they've

1:01:50

got their little playground thing on the side. But

1:01:52

this

1:01:53

is... This is their learning thing? Yeah, this is different.

1:01:56

This isn't their documentation. Their documentation

1:01:58

has things in line, like...

1:01:59

which you were talking about, like run this code here or whatever,

1:02:02

but I couldn't find that as quick because

1:02:04

I couldn't think of a method to go check this out. Yeah,

1:02:06

that didn't count. That's a learning thing. That's

1:02:08

not documentation. But it's pretty good. It's good, yeah,

1:02:10

it's definitely good. Yeah, absolutely.

1:02:13

So I'll find something else before these show notes go live,

1:02:15

but yeah.

1:02:16

All right, so with that, we head into Alan's

1:02:18

favorite portion of the show.

1:02:20

It's the tip of the week.

1:02:24

Hey, you're kind of muted, Joe, so nobody.

1:02:27

More than kind of muted. You were actually

1:02:29

muted. Yeah, sorry. I

1:02:31

usually don't, and I think I am. But yeah,

1:02:34

I just decided to drink water right when

1:02:36

I was, anyway, so I got

1:02:38

two tips here. One from Dave Fallot. Thanks, Dave.

1:02:40

Warp AI is a currently free,

1:02:43

but won't always be terminal for macOS

1:02:46

that integrates in AI. I

1:02:48

say NIAI because you have two choices.

1:02:51

You can run a local AI, which means your

1:02:53

stuff isn't getting uploaded anywhere. So none of

1:02:55

your context and your files and your stuff is being

1:02:57

uploaded, or you can do a cloud-based AI and

1:03:00

I actually have installed it. I

1:03:02

haven't been on my personal laptop for a

1:03:04

while. I haven't done any coding stuff, so I haven't used it much.

1:03:07

But it does have several nice features like that I've

1:03:09

got, I'll tell you in a second. And

1:03:14

so I'm getting out of myself. Yeah, so

1:03:16

command prediction, which is just what you might expect.

1:03:18

So it's like, you know, better than normal IntelliSense.

1:03:21

It'll actually kind of help predict what you're trying

1:03:23

to do and fill in

1:03:25

some stuff with like tab auto-completion. Quick

1:03:28

error lookup, which is really nice. So imagine like you

1:03:30

get an error code like when you run a bash

1:03:33

command or just, you know, like you run a Python

1:03:35

program or something and you get some, you know, like

1:03:38

exit code NPE line 2005 error

1:03:41

code ABC. Then

1:03:45

what they do is they give

1:03:47

you a convenient shortcut for just clicking on it and like

1:03:50

not doing a Google, but actually,

1:03:52

you know, doing some sort of like

1:03:54

AI kind of base recommendation

1:03:56

for what you might need to do to correct that problem.

1:03:59

integrated search, which is nice. So

1:04:02

you can actually search for recommendations

1:04:04

with things that are not AI based, like Stack

1:04:07

Overflow, Google type stuff, which is actually kind of crazy

1:04:09

to think that my terminal doesn't

1:04:11

already have that. I never really thought to want that,

1:04:13

but now I kind of do, because I really hate tabbing

1:04:16

out of the context of it, I want to stay there. And

1:04:18

of course it's got an AI prompt, so you can just kind of ask questions

1:04:21

or whatever.

1:04:23

And so that, yeah, that's a war with AI. It

1:04:25

is macOS only for

1:04:27

the moment, so it has to be pretty dang

1:04:29

good to get me out of I-term too, but we'll

1:04:31

see. It will be.

1:04:33

I got another one for you. So this

1:04:36

is a book called Nature of Code, and this is

1:04:39

thanks to MicroG for suggesting this code.

1:04:41

And what is it? I

1:04:44

guess I can say the word physics. It's a book on kind

1:04:46

of like the type of physics

1:04:49

stuff you would be doing in games or just visual

1:04:51

programming. So like the first chapter is all about

1:04:54

vectors, adding vectors, finding intersection,

1:04:57

the points where two vectors would

1:05:00

meet, finding parallel,

1:05:02

finding tangents, things

1:05:04

like that. It's got chapters

1:05:06

on forces. I don't

1:05:08

know what oscillation means here, but

1:05:10

cellular automata, fractals, just

1:05:13

kind of like cool visual type stuff.

1:05:15

And it's at a low level, so it's not really starting

1:05:19

with any specific, I think it mostly does processing

1:05:22

as a language, but it's more about kind of the principles

1:05:24

behind this stuff and how to integrate

1:05:26

them with programming. That's one thing I noticed

1:05:28

with like physics 101 type

1:05:31

stuff from like high school, college, or whatever, you

1:05:34

learn these formulas and then you go to kind of do them in programming.

1:05:36

It doesn't translate

1:05:38

super easily sometimes. And so it's

1:05:40

the way you kind of think about stuff

1:05:42

when you're doing it on pen and paper versus

1:05:46

we're doing it in a programming language, which is different. So it's kind

1:05:48

of cool to have a book that bridges that gap

1:05:50

between like

1:05:52

kind of low level physics-y

1:05:55

type stuff and programming.

1:05:57

And the book is totally free, by the way. You can order a

1:05:59

physical copy if you want. like a print on demand time

1:06:01

thing, but the entire book is available just

1:06:03

on the website.

1:06:04

You know, I was going to say that they, I was

1:06:06

going to be disappointed that maybe like uh,

1:06:08

an opportunity had been missed, but

1:06:11

then when I go and look at it and

1:06:13

I see that in fact, uh,

1:06:15

the author, Daniel Schiffman did

1:06:18

in fact take advantage of the opportunity that I'm

1:06:20

thinking of. And I super appreciated this because

1:06:23

there is a quote from captain over Roger

1:06:25

Roger. What's our vector Victor. And

1:06:27

uh, yeah,

1:06:29

so thank you for throwing that in there. Mr.

1:06:31

Schiffman. That, that means a lot

1:06:33

to me.

1:06:34

Yeah. That's what's going on.

1:06:37

That's it for me. All right. So,

1:06:39

uh, you know, I mentioned kind of tease this earlier

1:06:42

about, uh, Kotlin and, uh, think,

1:06:45

so one of the examples of

1:06:47

like something super expressive that I thought you

1:06:49

could do with Kotlin. And I was like, oh, what a, what

1:06:51

a pleasure. So nice. The

1:06:54

map of feature in Kotlin

1:06:58

where you can just literally like

1:07:00

whatever your key is the word

1:07:02

to, and then whatever your value is. So

1:07:04

key to value done. And

1:07:07

you can have like a whole list of these things and

1:07:09

it would create that map of it.

1:07:12

And where I needed this where like, I was like,

1:07:14

well, I don't really want to create, you know, something

1:07:18

complex for this, but I want to create

1:07:20

just a simple Jason format

1:07:23

of like these key value kind

1:07:25

of pairs and, and you know, there's going to be

1:07:27

multiple of these and I need it in a Jason format. And

1:07:29

so, uh, Google has a

1:07:32

Jason library

1:07:33

and you can say to

1:07:36

Jason of some thing,

1:07:38

some object type, right? And it'll automatically

1:07:41

return back a Jason representation

1:07:43

of it. And one of the things that you could pass in was

1:07:46

the map.

1:07:47

And in

1:07:49

Kotlin, it just was so

1:07:51

easy to get just a nice simple

1:07:54

Jason representation of this thing using

1:07:56

some like Gson dot two Jason

1:07:59

parentheses. map of key to

1:08:01

value and and you

1:08:03

know repeat however many keys and values

1:08:05

you have but that's

1:08:08

just I love where we're

1:08:10

at I love where we're at can we just say that

1:08:13

it is nice when you get a

1:08:15

little bit further you'll see to build lists

1:08:18

oh yeah they have

1:08:20

list of but

1:08:23

they take it like to a computer

1:08:25

science II next step to

1:08:27

where you'll have list of or mutable list

1:08:30

of so you'll know whether or not you have something

1:08:32

that can change or not right so they're introducing

1:08:35

some of the tech terminology

1:08:38

into the things that you do well that was one of the

1:08:40

things that like threw me for a loop in the beginning

1:08:43

to with Kotlin that I was like why in the world

1:08:45

did they change this like because

1:08:47

like when you declare a variable right

1:08:50

like let's go back to old-school way right you

1:08:52

know long time ago you wanted to declare

1:08:55

an end you'd say it I equal 0

1:08:57

right and if I was going to be a constant

1:09:00

then it'd be like constant I equal 0

1:09:03

right

1:09:03

and then you know languages

1:09:06

evolve for example

1:09:08

C sharp comes along and they're like hey you know what

1:09:10

if we can if we can derive the type

1:09:13

you don't need to tell us just var the

1:09:15

type and we'll figure it out so

1:09:17

var I equals 0

1:09:20

and implicitly we figured out that it's an end right

1:09:23

based on how you're using it right

1:09:27

but then in Kotlin it

1:09:29

was like well Val I equal 0

1:09:31

and we'll figure

1:09:34

out what the type is or you know

1:09:36

you could do Val no I guess it would be technically

1:09:38

yeah

1:09:39

yeah and I had it right or or you could

1:09:41

also do like Val I colon

1:09:45

and equal 0 if you wanted to but

1:09:47

then there was also var I colon

1:09:51

int equal or colon

1:09:53

int I equal 0 you know wait a

1:09:55

minute Val versus var like why why

1:09:58

it's so weird because like everywhere

1:09:59

else is var

1:10:01

and then majority of the time in Kotlin

1:10:03

you wanted to be Val and what took me

1:10:06

like a minute, I never read this

1:10:08

so I don't know if this was, I assume this is their

1:10:10

rationale for it, but I got to thinking because

1:10:12

like in Kotlin to

1:10:14

your point Alan, Val was something that's

1:10:17

constant, it's not going to change, you can't

1:10:19

change it, right? But

1:10:21

var is changeable and I'm like,

1:10:24

I hated it in the beginning. I was like, what a stupid

1:10:26

subtlety that's only one letter

1:10:29

difference that's not even the first

1:10:31

letter of the word so you really

1:10:33

got to be paying attention to catch that, but

1:10:36

then what I grew to appreciate

1:10:38

is I'm like, well, you're really being

1:10:40

expressed like totally expressive because in

1:10:43

my mind Val is, this is a value

1:10:45

and a value can't possibly change.

1:10:48

It is the value period, but if it's

1:10:50

variable, it's a var and

1:10:52

a variable by definition can vary

1:10:55

and so that's the thing and

1:10:59

like I said, I didn't bother to read

1:11:01

it so I'm sure that other

1:11:03

people are like, yeah, of course dummy and of course that's what

1:11:05

it was, but it

1:11:07

just kind of dawned

1:11:10

on me one day and I'm like, oh, that's

1:11:13

so clever.

1:11:15

Those little nuances

1:11:17

are why Kotlin is probably

1:11:20

tied for first with C sharp in my love

1:11:22

of a language is because

1:11:25

they've made it very explicit

1:11:28

for you to express what you want to do. Right?

1:11:31

So the valve versus var right. The valve can actually save you

1:11:33

if you try and reassign it, it'll throw an error.

1:11:35

Yeah. It's like, no, you can't do that. Oh, okay.

1:11:38

Cool. I didn't really want to override that. It

1:11:41

filled time. It throws the air. Like it's a red squiggle

1:11:43

as soon as you do it like you immediately know.

1:11:45

And the same thing with the Knowles, right? Like

1:11:47

I think every language out there, if they could go

1:11:49

back in time,

1:11:51

the Knowles would like be,

1:11:53

no, you have to really choose to want this to be

1:11:55

knowable and that's what Kotlin forces you to do.

1:11:57

Yeah. You want us to know?

1:11:59

sign up to be like this variable can

1:12:02

be nullable or this

1:12:04

reference type can be nullable.

1:12:07

So it actually saves you in

1:12:09

a lot of cases and that's why it's fun. So

1:12:12

continuing with the Kotlin stuff then,

1:12:15

so Outlaw asked a

1:12:18

question the other day about the bang bang to his point

1:12:20

like it's different in every language right or

1:12:23

in most languages it means truthy

1:12:25

right. Is this sort

1:12:27

of true or is this you're like

1:12:30

double knotting an operation so you're

1:12:32

saying like hey is you know

1:12:34

is the variable true

1:12:36

now is it not true is it not

1:12:39

not true right so is it and

1:12:41

it's called truthy because it's like basically

1:12:43

you're just testing sort of is this

1:12:45

thing a number is this thing of

1:12:48

whatever well

1:12:50

in Kotlin that's not what it means in Kotlin

1:12:52

it means I have a variable

1:12:55

if I put bang bang at the end of the variable

1:12:57

it says hey this is not allowed

1:12:59

to be null if it's null it's going to throw

1:13:01

an exception and it allows you

1:13:03

to do things like if you had a person class

1:13:06

and you tried to grab the age from that person

1:13:09

if the person object is null

1:13:12

then you can't get the age right.

1:13:15

So what you do is you say my person

1:13:17

bang bang dot age and so that's

1:13:19

basically saying hey that person value can't

1:13:21

be null so go ahead and get the age from

1:13:23

it. Well outlaw there

1:13:26

was some bit of documentation on

1:13:28

on the Kotlin thing that was like hey

1:13:31

you know we convert this

1:13:32

and when they say convert it's it's

1:13:36

unclear whether or not they're making a copy

1:13:38

of the object and doing something with it or whatever

1:13:40

so he asked the question and I was

1:13:42

like no I don't think so I don't think

1:13:44

it's making a copy.

1:13:46

But if you said you were

1:13:48

going to convert an int to a string you

1:13:50

would assume that like oh it's a new thing.

1:13:53

Right you're going to make a copy of it and cast it

1:13:55

or something right so so

1:13:58

he said that it it just kept.

1:13:59

kicking around in the back of my head and I was like, you

1:14:02

know what, you can look

1:14:04

at the bytecode. And he's like, oh, that's lame. Nobody

1:14:06

wants to look at bytecode. And I would agree, I

1:14:09

would agree, except for the fact

1:14:11

that IntelliJ makes it so

1:14:14

easy. So you can actually

1:14:16

write code, some Kotlin code.

1:14:19

You can basically go up to an IntelliJ,

1:14:22

tools, Kotlin, and show bytecode. And

1:14:25

so your code, your Kotlin code, you can highlight

1:14:27

the chunk that you actually want to see, the bytecode

1:14:30

of, and it will highlight it over in the bytecode

1:14:32

section.

1:14:33

And so it

1:14:35

was super valuable. So it turns out

1:14:37

it does copy something. It

1:14:40

copies a pointer in

1:14:42

the stack to whatever that object

1:14:44

was,

1:14:45

but then it just does an assert

1:14:47

not null.

1:14:48

And if it's not, then it just typecast

1:14:51

it. So it's not actually copying the value.

1:14:53

It is copying a pointer to it. Not exactly

1:14:56

sure why it does that, but it

1:14:58

is interesting that you have such

1:15:00

quick access to be able to see, hey,

1:15:02

is this doing something nasty behind the scenes? So,

1:15:06

you know, if you're doing Kotlin or anything, and

1:15:08

I'm sure that they probably, IntelliJ more than likely

1:15:10

has something like that for Java as well, hey, show

1:15:12

me the bytecode for the Java, and then you can go see

1:15:14

what the actual compiler is putting together. So

1:15:18

really, really

1:15:18

cool stuff.

1:15:20

And then I have to call out that Micro G went

1:15:22

behind the scenes with several of us and pointed

1:15:24

out this book. Because, yeah,

1:15:26

he cheated on us then. Yeah, that's right.

1:15:30

So yeah, the nature of Kotlin, I

1:15:33

was like, hey, that's gonna be a tip of the week. And

1:15:35

then I saw Joe's up there, and I thought it was funny,

1:15:37

so I had to point it out. So this could be in there

1:15:39

twice.

1:15:41

All right.

1:15:44

All righty, well, with tips

1:15:46

that are so good, we say them twice, you can

1:15:49

subscribe to us on iTunes, Stitchify,

1:15:52

wherever you like to find your podcasts. Be

1:15:54

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1:15:57

you haven't already, you can find some helpful links at codenbox.net

1:15:59

slash review.

1:15:59

review.

1:16:01

Hey, and while you're up there, make sure you check out

1:16:03

our show notes. We have lots of good stuff up there. Join

1:16:06

in on the discussion more and make sure you

1:16:08

go check out our Slack channel. We have a lot of amazing

1:16:11

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1:16:14

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1:16:16

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1:16:18

right. And make sure to follow us on Twitter at Coding

1:16:20

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1:16:22

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1:16:25

And if you go to Codingblocks.net, if we ever get that stuff,

1:16:27

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1:16:29

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1:16:31

Sounds good.