Worst Onboarding Experience Ever

0:00 I'm going to tell the greatest story ever to Casey and he is going to, he is going to be the happiest person after hearing this. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, sorry. Now, this all started because Casey was explaining a build process he made for Rad, right?

0:19 Am I correct on that? Yeah, it was for Rad Game Tools and it was terrible and it ruined, and they're still using it to stay and it's still awful. It recreated pre-process or macros, but with a build system is what it sounded like to me. It's just like, hey, we're going to do imports, but with, with, with comments.

0:37 Whatever you're imagining right now, it was worse, right? Whatever, whatever the worst build system is you can imagine, I've made one that was worse. I've experienced some pretty bad build systems, so that's something to be said right there. But I've never experienced it in the sea world, so this has to be a new level of magic.

0:58 Yeah, it was pretty great. Magic? Oh, sorry. All right, all right, yeah. Perfect. Big guard. So anyways, this reminded us of the story of Tom. Now, you may not be familiar with this case, but Tom? I'm not. He's a genius. And we're talking about super level, like protégé level, super genius. Okay, this guy is the smartest man in the room in any room he's in.

1:22 And who is this? How do you know this Tom or? Oh, we're going to get there, Casey. Okay, lore has been written about Tom. All you need to know is that there are stories on stories on stories about Tom being a super genius. All right, but the story I'm really going to tell is actually about a, about a kid named Jake.

1:41 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.

2:01 He was an intern. It's at an unnamed company, so we don't get to know those details. But it's with node, Jason, 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.

2:19 Oh, yeah, you got, you got JavaScript running on the server. My venture capital wallets are burning. Exactly. So on, on, on his first day, he was talking with one of the non-technical members kind of getting set up. And at the very end of the conversation after explaining how excited he is, they made a really odd comment, which was said, well, you know, the good news is everything we do is built on SVN.

2:43 It's going to be great. You're going to love it. And so he's like, oh, okay, I know. Sure, I don't, I don't really know what that means. But whatever for those, by the way, I know I have a lot of zoomers in chat. SVN is like a predecessor to get. It's probably the easiest way to explain it. I don't want to go into any more details.

2:59 This is for super virgin mix users. It's super virgin mix users. All right. 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 of weeks.

3:22 I want you to just become familiar with the project. And you probably, you can ask for help. But honestly, given your background, you're not even going to need to ask for help. You got this. Now, can I just pause for one second here and point out that I already love everything about this. Because J diesel is such a good acronym.

3:46 I am jealous. Like, yes, I love it. Like I should have named something that I will try to make. There's. There's. I was muted. I was muted. I was muted. Okay. I was going to make the comments. Right. There's someone definitely at the Jersey Shore named J diesel right now. That's exactly what I'm thinking.

4:08 I'm like, hey, what's up, J diesel? Like, it's so good. Okay. You can do one of those like, like those claps where you hit and you just get out. Yeah. It goes on for like seven years. And you're like, when are you guys going to stop saying hello? Like, yeah. Okay. If I could be that cool, I could never be that cool.

4:25 Cool. Cool. Yeah. Oh, that's cool. I really like this. Honestly, being new at the company. What's the first thing you do? Well, you download Tor-Twaz SVN. S-V-N. Tor-Twaz. Tor-Twaz. Tor-Twaz. S-V-N. Tor-Twaz is old this time. It's a tale as it really is. And you, uh, you get the project. You check it out.

4:44 What's something happened when you checked out the project? Estimated time of completion. Two days. What? Wait, hold on. So just for the record, like all of the witness, Jonathan Blow will be on tomorrow. All of that was checked into SVM. That's a giant 3D game, the whole thing. How did they make it take two days to check out something from Tornis SVM?

5:13 Casey, it's called The Weekend. Don't you know, like every Friday, check out. See you guys on Monday. All right, Casey. All right, they call it hair, SVM. OK, you got to make sure you take it to the flow and steady wins the race. OK, it's not that slow. So what happened? What's going on here, Jake? Well, you know, Jake, that's a great question because Jake had the exact same question.

5:35 He went to his coworker and was just like, man, this is taking two days. Am I doing something wrong? Yeah. Should I not use Torclas? Like, well, what do I do here? And they said, oh, no, this is actually, this is expected. This is very normal. You should just play solitaire. So solitaire, he did. And solitaire, he continued.

5:54 And solitaire all the way to the end. It's pretty nice, right? It's a good first week. It's time. Oh, yeah. It's a good first week, is all you know what I mean? Like, that's nice. He's easy on board. 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.

6:14 He's young. He's impressionable. He's ready to put in the hours, burn the midnight oil. So he's going to open up a random file, OK? But when he opens up the random file, he notice 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.

6:35 He doesn't get this. He, what is this? What is Casey? What is this? That's looking, I don't know what that is. You know, push the stack, because I don't want to interrupt this, but I'll just say that functions 899901, I want to talk about that later, because I got a mini rant we can talk about after that.

7:00 So I'm remembering that functions array right there. OK. Keep going. Keep it going, Role, and open up related files that had the same kind of name, like customers JSON versus customer.js. And you just see it filled with a bunch of stuff, but there's no comments anywhere. Nobody has left any breadcrumbs.

7:21 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 code base.

7:46 We have to go to our co-worker, and we're going to have to ask for help and just look like an idiot right off the bat, like, I can't even read the project. Help me read the project. So of course, he goes to his co-worker and he goes, hey, man, I need some help. I need you to kind of help me with what's happening in this project, because I feel genuinely confused.

8:07 Oh, hold on, I'm sorry. I clicked the wrong page. And this is, this is while Jake was working on Batman 2 or something. I don't, I'm just looking at Jake here. It wasn't a while ago. It was a while ago. It was a while back. Yeah, it was a much earlier Marvel film. Yeah. OK. Oh, sorry, DC. Ooh, sorry.

8:24 So his co-worker was like, you just don't get it yet. See, the thing is, is that Jay Deesle, it was written by Tom. And he's a super genius. And he wrote Jay Deesle all by himself. And so basically, that customers.json file was just metadata used to put together the customer class and then he waited for Jake to get it.

8:46 Jake did not get it. In fact, OK. 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? Asked it to be T. Yes. Didn't exist at this time, probably.

9:05 Didn't exist at this time. Didn't exist. Biggin. What do you mean? Yes, jeez. Yes. Well, of course, you ask, well, how do I run it? I'm just going to debug it. I'm going to figure some things out. Well, Scott laughed. OK. His co-worker laughed right as his face and said, you wouldn't want to just run it.

9:22 It takes a couple of days for a new deployment to finish starting up. Jay Deesle can be a little slow, but it's really powerful, like super powerful. Like I said, Tom is a genius. What is going on? This is nuts. How do you think Jake feels right now? OK. He's used to. Part two. Jay Deesle in action. I hope you guys are ready.

9:54 If this isn't a Jersey Shore scene, I'm going to be so pissed. This needs to be something. He's at the beach, pumping iron. You know, I'm not going to do Jersey Shore making. You know, it's against my religion. We already know this. I also feel like Jay Deesle kind of reminds me of Vin Deesle. So I'm wondering if does this thing have a nickname, like triple X or anything?

10:10 Oh, you know what I'm saying? It would be good, but it's all about family here. OK. OK, you see? OK. It's all about family here. It's all about family. So Jake and his confusion, he did the most likely thing he should do. Jake. Yeah, that's a real Jake. That's a real Jake. So what did you do? Well, he asked his coworker, can you at least walk me through what's going on?

10:37 Because I am confused while his coworker, he laughed again. He laughed at these young guys. All right. So the genius part, this is the genius part. You know where it says class. Can you see that right there in that JSON file? OK, good. Well, that's the class name, as you can see, that's how this works.

10:57 And now do you see where it says functions? Yes. Those are subversion links to all the functions that make up that class. What? That 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 less scared about me having gotten that wrong than I am about me having gotten that right.

11:26 That's right. Precisely. Yeah. This coworker, seeing Jake remain confused, was like, OK, 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 the list of functions in the JSON file tells J D so to look up those revisions of the JS file to find what functions are available.

11:49 And in that case, the actual code in the revisions are located at SVN revision 568, 899, 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. So to add all functions you have to check, all you have to do is check in your new code with the updated JSON metadata file with the new revisions.

12:24 Whenever something makes a function call to the customer object, J D so uses the list of function revisions to check out all of the actual functions until it finds a match. Do you understand it now? Yes, I do. And I'm mildly terrified. Oh, well, one quick question, what's the name of my coworker again?

12:52 Sorry. Scott, Scott, if you're asking those kind of questions, Casey, you're really behind. Casey, yes. Hold far behind, OK? So Scott, I just want to know, when you say subversion revision number, do you literally mean that if I were to go fix, say, a bug in revision 902 in this list, for example, when I checked it in and it became revision 3157, I would have to go into this list and replace 902 with 3157.

13:29 Otherwise, it would continue to use the old code that I had rechecked in a replacement for already. You know, our manager did tell me that we had a hot new guns in here that could really pick up the project and sounds like you are really understanding your stuff. Oh, no, Casey, you are built for this, bro, you're really built for this, Casey.

13:53 I'm confused. This is fine, Casey. Are you committing more than one function at a time? Well, I'm 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.

14:15 Oh, first, Casey, you tell us you don't like clean code and now you're telling us you don't like clean revision. I know. I don't know. Wow. OK. Well, let's do this. Keep going, J.D. So let's, let's, this is like the chronicles of ridiculous. Well, anyways, Jake had the same response. He just said, I think so.

14:41 Yeah. And his coworker, of course, just said, like I said, Tom, he's a genius. OK. 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.

15:04 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 there. Oh, this is about they started a terminal-based coffee company. That's actually what I was thinking when I made this, D.D. So for Jake, no obstacles too big. He's young.

15:37 He's virile. He's ready to just 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 coming through it, that this is actually just a simple web portal for customers to be able to update their personal information.

15:56 But thanks to the complexity of Jay Diesel, what should take minutes now takes days? A true 10X engineer, this Tom fella is. And so, of course, Jake being a good citizen decides, you know what? I can fix her. I can get in here and I can make real changes that will help everybody. So he started going through all the code, familiarizing himself.

16:21 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. Back in new ones, really making some amazing changes.

16:41 Jake is a good citizen. Common Jake W. Common Jake W. Absolutely amazing. Part four. Tom. Is Tom still at this fictional company that is definitely not a company that any of you have ever worked at? He's the only one who knows how this works. We can't buy a job. Jay Diesel Casey. I'm saying, but how do you see still there?

17:12 Or has he left this company? We've never received an update from anybody who worked at this company. At the time of the story. At the time of the story. At the time of the story. Yes, at the time of the story, he was the lead engineer. Okay. All right. That's fine. Jake arrives Monday morning, feeling great.

17:37 Okay. He has made a lot of changes. He's done a lot of good work wrapped up the previous week, worked well into the weekend. And now he's arriving Monday morning, but things were amiss. Things were odd. People were running around. People were freaking out. Scott, as you have recently learned, his coworker runs by and says the database got scrambled.

18:00 And he just keeps on going. People are freaking out. People are trying to figure out stuff at all the sudden. Jake hears you. And he turns around and sees Tom. And Tom says, Hey, Jake, you're Jake, right? The new guy. Yeah, I am. What's going on? You broke Jake Diesel. By the way, my name's Tom. And I'm a genius.

18:27 What? Jake is confused. What? I, I, I didn't, I didn't do anything. I, how could I have broken it? You broke J. 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. What has happened? How did I break everything?

19:02 Part five. The meeting. This is a really good story, by the way. Thank you. I didn't write it. I'm, I'm really invested right now in the story of Jake. Like, like, I'm like, I, I need to know this conclusion. Oh, the conclusion. Let's just say everything is just so beautiful. It's so, so beautiful. Okay.

19:26 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, I don't, I don't think I did anything. I've only been here for two weeks trying to learn J. Diesel.

19:46 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 a few commits to subversion. He was very upset about this, right? Because something's obviously happened. Jake did make some commits. He made some comments. He made some good stuff.

20:02 He said, well, yes, I, I added a few coat comments trying to Tom just jumps right in and says, you can't use comments in J. Diesel. Tom shouted, that's what broke it. No. Jake stayed silent. No, no, no, this cannot be true. 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.

20:38 Casey, if you write good code, you shouldn't need comments, all right. My phone stopped documenting. Thank you kind of a code smell. Yeah, it's honestly. It's kind of a sign right now, Casey. Kind of tell him on yourself right now. Okay. He remains silent, just trying to process how comments could wipe out a customer database. I like, Tom continued after the pause.

21:05 I haven't added comments support to Jay Diesel. So the runtime executes comments, like normal code, you must have had a couple database updates in the comments. He asks, Tom obviously being the genius zeros in on what could have been the problem. Oh, what? Jake, of course, he responds with, well, yeah, I put a couple short syntax examples in a comment to clarify. And then Tom bursts up onto his feet and says, I knew it. You broke it.

21:46 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, drops the microphone, leaves the meeting. VP sitting there, the upper crust of the management baffled by Jake's decisions to take down the customer database. So the VP representative and HR start talking right there in front of Jake. They don't need an 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.

22:41 So Jake went on to greener pastors. He left the place. Never to think about Jay diesel or Tom again. And now Jake lives a much happier life, programming in a regular code base that is not insane. And that is the story of Tom, the super genius. Tom's a genius. Tom is in fact a genius. Let's see it in chat. Tom's a genius. Tom is a genius. This is going to end with and Tom's full name is Tom get hub or something. I don't know, like, Tom's full name, the primogen.

23:27 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. My name is Tom. If you didn't know that my real name is Tom. I just don't scratch the top timer. All right. I wanted to read that. I wanted to kind of give you that that a story because you're your build system. It was comments that were executing code, which just it just it reminded me of Tom and prime we said there. I don't remember we said it.

23:55 We'll have to pull the footage or if Casey said it. One of us said that either Casey you said I'm a genius when you were making it. That's how you felt. Or we said you were a genius. And that's why we were saying that was like the next level connection to this story. Yes. Well, the only difference is here that like everyone was very embarrassed about it afterwards, which doesn't seem to have happened to Tom. Tom is apparently just fine with it.

24:24 That's because Tom's a genius. Tom is apparently a genius. Yes. Honestly, case though, you should adopt some of these coding practices. I would say get comments out of your code because I did read an announcement. Get hubs and announce next week. They will be charging more for comments in the code base. So if you can just get into the good habit of removing an arrow. The charging per line of code hosted. Yeah, per line of code hosted. So every piece of documentation. Per line of code hosted per minute, of course. It's a very confusing thing.

24:51 So I guess if I'm reading between the lines here and obviously since this is a not a story certainly that happened to anyone here, you're just recounting an abstract story about two people. One named Tom and one named Jake who don't have any connection to the real world in any way. Correct. It is kind of hard for me to understand how that code was written, like so the parser doesn't fail when it hits a comment. It just ignores the comment.

25:31 And the parser is it's actually like someone re-implemented a JavaScript runtime of their own because they're not using an existing one or it would have handled comments. So they re-implemented the JavaScript runtime parses. It's not that you're making it entirely too hard. Yeah, I am. Casey. Casey, does just answer me the simple question. Yeah. Does the line have select on it?

26:03 Okay. So is what you're saying it basically just searches for the word select, then takes everything to the end of the line and runs it or something like that? That's all I'm saying is hey, okay. If it has select on it, that sounds like a database query to me or multi-line comments and it's doing something line by line. That's the other one that I think is pretty fast. Guys, let's be easy on Casey too. Tom's a genius. Casey's not going to understand. That's going to take a little right away. Okay, that's a good point.

26:35 I can't just drop in here and ask, you know, these sort of pedestrian questions of a genius mind that is just way past any of us here on this podcast. I agree with that. I want to know what everyone's thoughts are. What are the chances they had a singular backup at any time? I would assume no. This based on the VP and everybody's reaction to the customer data being deleted. That was a hard no right there. As I was going to say, so this is one of those ones where someone's like, this system's insane and you just hit them with what I'm going to look up Chesterton's fence. There's a reason why. I don't have time to give you the lore, but trust me, it's there. We use a negative three, negative two, negative one backup strategy for this.

27:34 And, you know, so that means if anything happens, we just don't have any copies of Dave. Yeah, see, I would have been the guy that would have kept a backup earlier, but then I found in my young junior career, like security gets really mad when you make a backup of production database on your computer. They hate it. I was like, guys, I'm being safe. And they said, so all of the real phone number, I'm like, yeah, the real phone number. So what? It's what if we accidentally lose the database, I have it. And they told me to get it off my computer. And, yeah, that's big. And that sounds actually really reasonable. So what are you doing with that on your computer?

28:16 Try to save the company. I do want to, I do want to put in some kind of a way that we can do like a hard break here at some point, because I want to talk about this is actually somewhat of a more serious topic. I wanted to talk about that function or anything. We'll do the hard break right here about this. So I want to make a way that because because what I'm well met a talk about it first too. So can we do a hard break? Yeah, yeah, let me just do a really quick, very simple hard break.

28:42 Hey, if you're joining us on YouTube, you're going to have to listen to the full episode on Spotify, link in the description. Thanks for joining us at the standup. Thank you very much for having Casey Began and TJ on the standup. If you're not familiar with Casey's work, check out computer enhance.com. Also, we might post some of the clips on stand on different channels. So check that link in the description too. True. 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. God, because this will 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?

29:29 Oh, I've seen some. So I'm just going to, it's a shocking story when you get YouTuber drama. Primegin quickly, we did a thumbnail picture of Tom. He's done, okay? Two texts. He's done. He's done. Red arrow top. Red text on bottom. He's done. You're fired. So I don't watch very much programming YouTube.

29:57 I just don't, right? And the reason for that now is you're going to kind of say that. Wow, Casey. Sorry. And the reason for that's pretty obvious, right? Like, I just don't have time to do that. So when I'm going to go watch YouTube, I watch something like totally unrelated to work, right? I don't go watch programming YouTube. 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 have watched programming YouTube all the time, because oh my god, it's exactly what I missed when I was little. Like, how do you do this? Or what are the real programmers doing? Like, it's such an amazing resource when you're younger.

30:38 Thanks, Casey. You don't need the close ways, okay? No, I'm serious. I'm dead serious when I was little. This is what I would have loved, right? But when you're older, you're just like, I'm going to go watch freaking beard meets food or something. Like, I'm going to go watch some guy eat, go like to a restaurant and eat like 5,000 chicken wings. And just because like, I don't want to, you know, if you work at the McDonald's, you don't want to come home and eat a box of McNuggets, right? That's just how that works. Sometimes. So anyway, I don't watch very much programming YouTube. So I'm not necessarily always aware of all the things that are going on. But a couple months back, there was some drama that I will not refer to specifically. And one of the people involved with the drama is

31:31 sort of in game development programming. And a second YouTuber who sort of a second YouTuber has hit the story. I'm dying on the exact like 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 now. Okay. And now being the dick that I am, I watched this video because I'm like, all right, like, I'm going to watch this guy do a code review because like, I would be very snarky about most people's code reviews, right? So I watched this code review and one of the things that the person is like, he's like on a very high horse about the fact that this code has numbers like that function array in it to refer to like random things like, oh, you know, it's got number

32:42 328 is some index into a table of dialogue or something like that. And the person's like, this is just obviously demonstrates that this person has no idea what they're doing and couldn't possibly be a professional programmer. And it's just a Charlotteson and a fraud and all these hard things. And I just what I was wishing I had the button of like, I can interject into other people's YouTube shapes to just be like, I'm like, actually, actually, right? Hard actually.

33:13 Hard actually. I'm like, if you are at the point in your career where you think an uncommented bear table of numbers showing up in the middle of code shows that someone isn't a professional programmer. You're the person who isn't a professional programmer, right? Because every fucking code has some shit like that in it. And there's always an explanation and it's always bad. But that's what happens. All right? That is what happens. So actually, if 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 unjustifiable, I'm like, go to any freaking web, go to Google, go to Amazon, go to never, we'll find that code for you,

34:07 my friend. It's in there. It's running the thing. You're probably in YouTube's code base that you used to upload this has one of those in there. All right? So that's what that reminded me of. When you saw that, a fox was like, yep, I know that list of numbers, right? Yes. And the first off, I do know the video you're talking about. And I knew that I wasn't going to I wasn't going to enjoy the video in any regards, because at the beginning, he pulls out books as his evidence for his reporting. That's like a crazy way to start anything. Be like, I read books. It was done. I get my ready every time I want to have an argument. I don't know. You guys don't fear it's ready.

34:54 The only the only book I keep ready on my is I just keep that one ready to go at all times. But I just keep whenever I need some advice for the family. This is what the help me out. This is not I'm getting rid of the next stage of my life. Oh my gosh. Yeah. It was so fun. You actually made this dream chat break. I got to get a new stream. Just think breaks constantly. That's amazing.

35:27 So what is like, what is chapter one of that book? Like how to put a pill into a drink? What's the what's the start of fatherhood? What's the recco on that one? Okay, I have dramatic reading of father chapter one is at some point your date will wake back up. The opening chapter is called the baffling question. I'll let you guys guess what it's about. Okay. Okay. All right.

35:52 All right. On the coder, you think I will say I love the idea. I kind of want to just join a new company just so I can be like my first coder view. I'm going to produce a YouTube video instead and just like a new coder view. And right away it's just like trash. Look at this trash code. This if statement wouldn't idiot. It's like stop uploading YouTube videos for the GitHub. I'll get fired right away but it'll be funny. We should companies should have prime go in and we can look at a terrible piece of code and then they can tell us why it has to be that way. That would be fun. Yeah.

36:26 Yeah. Because there's there's always bad code and a lot of it was just like well, you know, we are under some pressure and things were this way and this one service wasn't quite right so we had to or it's or it's like we've refactored at 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 we deleted that branch and moved on next year's new new recruits. They tried the same thing.

36:55 They all died right here. Here's here's the here let me let me give an analogy for any really like new programmers out there who are watching this. If you've ever watched a professional baseball game, right? If you know anything about baseball at all or you played little league or whatever. So if you are in little league and they're teaching you how to hit, they're going to be like okay, you know, you put your back foot here in the the batter's box put your front foot out and you're going to put your weight like this. You're going to hold the bat like this, right?

37:29 You're going to step forward and you're going to you know, do this thing and all that they're they're coaching you on all this stuff and keep your head down. 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 here and then you like corkscrew it around and then but finally you sort of get back into a real actual swing and you hit a home run right and you win the fricking game and you're an amazing

38:11 batter right. The same exact thing is true of coding all the crap that they tell you about all this stuff then you go look at some coder who's like absolutely bonkers crazy amazing and like wrote like Tom the interloop like not Tom like it or 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

38:58 readable more maintainable code but the reality of programming is dirtier than that that's just how it is so it's okay well there's a divide I see this on the internet all the time it's always it's a lot of times people who are like haven't had their job a 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 to call managers it's all a lot of factors that will never ever ever let you do that in a real world but you just don't know until you get a job and then you get a job and four years

39:35 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 I mean 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 is like a bunch of like every variables 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 is called no it's it was granny the 3d animation

40:23 system okay 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 mean that for five years I maintained that project and it never broke once so it's just like the reality is sometimes people are just very very good at doing code the way they do it and if they get the results that's fine don't you know

41:14 yeah then at the same time you get jd solar something right the system worked Casey and everyone just all along it was fine till Jake came along yeah just because at runtime when a customer wants to change information you have to do an svn look up to find out the function does not mean it wasn't perfect tour tour oh we know our code is always matching our actual committed code oh no that's integrity yeah yeah anyway it's one tj on your story about rewriting it yeah I know I've told the story once before but when I was working on falc or there's a piece of requesting that really bothered me because I was like dude this code is 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

41:55 ugly phase for requesting so it was a data fetcher in JavaScript that would try to match what's already on the TV and then what's like the minimum amount of data it needs to request next so that way all the things doing like all the components being like I need to display these 20 titles it goes okay I already have 17 of the title so I'm gonna 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 and at first I'm like dude look how much better mine is already the codes way more readable it's all these kind of things and then I'm like all crap I forgot this one case and so then I add in this next case I'm like okay

42:31 it's like a little bit closer but still it's way more readable and like all crap I forgot this one case and by the time I all crap I forgot this one case at the end it was almost a line for line rewrite of exactly and then that's when I realized I'm the problem no that's when you realized I was so smart before and I'm still really smart you got the wrong conclusion from the prime yeah yeah yeah all right and then of course since we're kind of talking about this and people coding this has been my favorite tweet for the last couple weeks or the last week I just keep thinking about it over and over and over again the intertweet goes like this just found out this or just found out that since this I become a top 50 user Evan globally pushing CCTRs a day ask me anything

43:19 now remember uh damage you don't know like this kind of like uh it's like an interesting update interesting update that's pretty interesting hunter it's an interesting update the team is starting to move away from AI coding completely dev in cloud because it's so much harder to review the AI code than writing things themselves it's like my it's 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 yeah it was like how it started how it's going that was the perfect like self self created one of those the funny thing too is that's exactly the amount of time they said before software engineering is dead they're like oh six months from now we're not going to have software developer jobs and

44:05 they're like we we actually deleted all the stuff we tried when we said that this step 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 each other and we're not telling each other yeah all right well there you go it's okay see how do you feel you've learned the story of Tom how was it I mean this is this is the thing right like we've all been there we've all we've all been Jay diesel and here's the thing I just feel fortunate that foot that my Jay diesel phase the worst thing that happened was that build utility

44:56 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 used for something like this it's like you're gonna have some phase in your programming career where you just go down a rat hole or rabbit hole I guess as people more commonly called I've always called it a rat hole or you know I I guess I grew up maybe Massachusetts it's a rat hole yeah more rats than rabbits I don't know let's go down over there more rats than rabbits so you know you go down this thing and you get this wild hair and you're like this is gonna be awesome I'm so smart

45:46 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 and their companies like engineering is terminally screwed um 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 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 it's what I would say

46:33 uh but I came close yeah yeah there's something very funny about that which is that uh we all get the chance to do that and some at some capacity yeah but having people tell you you're a programming virtuoso would reinforce the cycle of what you're doing is actually the correct thing like you could actually you could go your whole life thinking you're doing the right thing exactly and it's just because programming is such a complicated endeavor without a lot of like hard metrics like you know in one in one sense I do think if I can poke Tom's genius balloon with a pin just a little bit once you're at the point where it takes two days to check out your freaking customer database that's a good hard metric telling you that you're actually an idiot not

47:23 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 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 I will say one thing it's I really suggest everyone in

48:07 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 gotta I just got to experience at Thanksgiving my uncle is like an old C programmer so for a decade he's been hearing me about what I'm excited about once a year at Christmas and he started just roasting me throughout the history he was like yeah remember when you were saying everything's going to be a function no more no more microservices oh yeah how that go for you hey remember when you said memory she's going to keep getting cheaper ruby's going to scale remember that face and he just like see he roasted me for a decade of everything and I was like oh I forgot about each of those

48:46 because I'm on to the next one already I'm a genius I'm on I'm gonna I'm gonna lick her a stack now it's gonna scale to the moon OTP don't worry about it guys guys I have a billion dollar idea okay here it is you ready for this yeah code therapist it's not a mentor not a life coach not a not programming courses none of that it's a therapist you go to this person for an hour a week right obviously we'll drive it by AI won't actually have humans involved yeah billion got to be big VC money yeah and what you do is you talk about the code and they ask you they're like so tell me about your build environment right and they're like you start talking about it and then they kind of ask you those questions and they help you get in touch with like your inner

49:37 like like how you're actually relating to this code and whether you have starting to events pathologies like Tom right like and there could be like a DSM equivalent that basically has like here are the neuroses that you may have and they try to like help you uncover those right tell me tell me about tell me about your code review tell me about this I feel like this could be a thing I like this Casey I like this a lot I'm I'm in full support of it I think they call it scrum masters though they're called they're culture masters I think it's called HR who is that not what HR is you're in there every week vegan let's say they love my jokes yeah they always ask you to do a code therapy though code therapy code therapy sounds so funny yeah oh my gosh I want to deal with somebody like

50:26 do you read did like how did that variable name make you feel okay call prime call doctor 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 getting you advice on how to therapy the person that's that's gotta be that's ethical that's fine yeah that is that is ethical that's the word I was gonna use I got a I got another stupid true story for you here I just to show you how much I don't understand anything I like a couple years back I got an email from somebody who was like like I knew through it was like a childhood friend sister or something like like you know who I know who they are wasn't like weird that they would email me

51:09 but it's like not someone I ever emailed with and they were like hey I was wondering like I have a friend who recently got laid off in the like in tech and I was wondering if like maybe you could help them like find a new job somewhere right I know you're out there in in the Seattle area right and I know you do like a lot of programming stuff and you're well known and all this stuff so you know in their mind that means that you like I assume that means that they think you like hang out with all of the managerial people or whatever so they're like so I'm like who like what is the what's the thing and they're like well this they're a they're a certified scrum master and I'm like I'm like I don't know what that is like do they know anything like do they know anything that does something

52:01 like I'm like to get did can they progress they do anything like no they're just a certified scrum master and I'm just like I was like I can't help you like I mean the only people I hang out with program for living like I don't know I don't even know what a certified scrum master is well 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 the scrum what is a scrum master so have you heard of the game no I mean it's so Casey the main way is they have to like and subscribe on this podcast okay okay I would say

52:42 remember chat everyone if you do someone says they're a scrum master I do this every time you can save a lot of heart like this way acts 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 because they could just be impersonating a scrum master big right it's a big problem I could be on those as a felony but it still happens I mean that's the that is the scary world we live in so what does a scrum master do guy like what do they what is that in just a second big in by the way you don't have any like what's it called like filter on your microphone so

53:23 this whole time I can use it oh oh sorry chat I do it deeply and I can't someone made a comment about it now I can't stop hearing you breathe into your phone I'm excited to tell them yeah thank you telling me now I didn't audio test before this and listen to myself breathe for a while and I was like that's kind of pleasant guys I will not breathe anymore okay yeah reminding chat they I know they're holding their breath during the story but it's a it's a liminal thing to remind them to breathe during the story of Jake and Tom chat I'm doing the taz on day for now on working I might goes with me but okay we'll pick it this out chat I'll mute all right so to explain the scrum master so I've I've worked with a certified scrum master on

54:09 many levels and in fact was so scrum mastery that they actually went out and taught other scrum masters how to scrum master okay so I clearly asked the right person because not only can you tell me the the truth straight from a scrum master but from a scrum master master exactly okay okay so I'm not gonna say any names just right I don't get anybody in trouble but and the rest of this podcast has been that way yeah so well except for the part where you're talking about the functions everybody knew the name guys I was trying not to create drama I intentionally did you talk about this thing drama Casey you were good oh no no there's definitely videos being made right now I'm sorry it's already happening Casey it's he doesn't even know what a scrum master is

54:57 okay so yeah and that's a true story 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 okay which is the following that a scrum master is closer to a team therapist slash technical manager than anything else so a they meet with people to make sure everyone's working together well make sure things are actually moving making sure that we're sizing our tasks correctly kind of keeping up to date that our team is adhering to agile principles in a very like sound way sound uh way and then be they also help a lot with a lot of the technical direction they're not

55:43 technically technical managers they're not the ones that's supposed to be making all the tickets and doing things but they often fall into this role and that was my experience was just like yeah but like how do you feel like I got a lot of that and so it truly was this co this this this mentor person so co therapist actually you when you when you said they're called scrum masters you weren't even really joking like you actually that's kind of what they kind of have to do a little bit if they're good if they're good if you had a manager that was a loof a scrum manager like how I kind of took it is that this the scrum 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

56:25 off the rails but instead of the manager that I worked with was uh 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 cost so much conflict that I I've had to delete like a week's worth of work wow just because and then at one time he got super jacked upon promises but he like inlined his promises so I follow this 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 it was crazy because he was just like this what we're doing we're doing promises so I was like all right we're doing promises everybody it was jacked up on promises dude I got jacked up on mountain doing promises and said what the hell were

57:03 you doing I was like I don't know just following what my my boss told me to do I had kind of a rough childhood my dad used to come home late at night all jacked up on promises it's like then and next he's like why are my kids never asynchronous you know it's just they're not even true threads it's just dad you never love both of us it's always one of us in a tie why also I know we we're definitely in the random portion of of the podcast right now but I do have to describe something happened yesterday because I spent yesterday serving coffee and telling people about it's as it's reaching into a coffee website for normies for seven hours straight I will say you have to share the picture chat well do we have people's permission to share their

58:03 pictures you can show it on straight they're all content creators everyone okay we're fair enough just making sure okay technically all I wasn't there okay so I'm gonna show this guys this is an actual photo for me I say this is 100% real you're never gonna believe me but we have multiple witnesses what message or terminal chat this terminal chat that's what you're saying is this was AI generated it's not a basically telling me whatever whatever I'm about to see which I don't actually know what it is yet it is my favorite picture in the universe I can't believe so this is at guys this is a real photo of me showing people ordering coffee in a terminal I swear to that's what's on the screen I am little I'm holding a laugh and I go okay ladies watch this

58:42 so first you all have max open terminal hit command space bar type T you got a terminal you'll see it right there president or SSH terminal dot shop boom there and I showed him and that was actually taken from that moment that is real I promise you this will never happen again this is the first one I have a question while women with SSH skills literally happen like it arch boys be that was that was by the end of the day so I practiced the pitch 40 times because in the beginning you're like sorry to buy the coffee oh you guys can't okay I got to work better on this by the end I had a doubt I was showing him you can't but I'll teach you show you all of also you all have max and holding a Mac was working really well they were like of course we do

59:28 and I said this apps already on your computer they go it really is I go it really is right now in yes Casey so since everyone else got to plug all of their stuff I kind of want to do an extended plug for terminal dot shop here because I legitimately have a question about it okay which is at least I am a lousy business person so maybe that is the answer to the question that I'm about to ask but in my mind when I hear like you can just order something from the terminal I'm like you guys are going to be rich I'm just like you're like that's going to be so freaking 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

1:00:25 freaking stole all the money and they have all the money now so my assumption is that this would be the perfect business thing but for some reason I don't get the sense that you guys are now the world's number one coffee spot so what why do you suck at marketing there's my actual question what is wrong with you 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 cool 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 got to have a cool base of people like every

1:01:11 program I know drinks this coffee what is it you can't have it we do that for four or five years okay people are like I want it so bad it goes you're too dumb then we sell it to them after we sell a big portion to some sort of like private equity for immunoblack rock or something I see so basically what you're saying is you're doing like a the Facebook model it's like oh you wanted to be on this you can't be on it yet like it's not only in by only for this coffee I see yeah really like what's going on guys like what's going on what's wrong with you got a real answer I do I do what's your real answer the real answer even though it's going to sound like in another ad is just we'd rather ship like small batch coffee that's really good which is just hard to ship to a lot of people

1:01:53 in like two a lot of places just like fly constrained basically yes we can't not in any other place but the US even though I know Europe would go hard yep you know we had lots of 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 majors is just like I don't know how to get a roaster in the EU that wants to interface with a custom like SAS be the be slash be does see coffee experience where we like ship them addresses and then you know so it's like that's the we're so we're getting there but that's honestly like we

1:02:43 we figured a part of it you know figured something pretty dark which is apparently taking people's public keys is against GDRP so we have a big issue to get around so what whatever I said GDGLVPR whatever GLP one we get just throw one out of that one GLP one I like that but once we get once the legislation changed we're going to be rich in Europe okay well it's just yeah yeah we're currently lobbying the EU and then we're going to sell all of the public keys to BlackRock like that is the ultimate dude chat checkmate I'm so excited if you guys didn't see when the when 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

1:03:28 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 like we're apparently there's a buyer out there I got a dark web I could find no one we were so we were so confused because we were trying to figure out is there something you can do with these I thought for sure there's nothing you can do with the the public key of an SSH key pair I'm like I don't understand isn't that kind of why we call it the public key is because the public is supposed to be able to have it it we call Sam Alden right away and was like do you want to buy some public keys and he was like stop calling this number we called up Mr. BlackRock and was just like Mr. BlackRock we got a deal

1:04:17 you cannot resist it involves people information he's like I'm listening and like public keys and hung up hundreds of public keys hundreds yeah it could cross a thousand yeah all right well this has been oh I had one I had one last thing yeah just really quick Casey's story earlier reminded me of an ancient proverb from Sunzoo you guys might have heard of him before and it goes a little bit something like this which is some days you do the JD'sling in other days you get JD'sled Sunzoo art of war yep that 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 the name is the stand-up