Episode 100: The Final Rant

The Queen is dead, long live the King!

Hello friends. We have reached the end of the podcast. At least 100 times Ed and I got together to talk about our thoughts, mostly about technical things, sometimes it was funny, sometimes it was serious. But people change and decide to put their energies into other activities. It is neither good nor bad, it is just how people grow and evolve. If Ed and Chris had not grown and changed as people since we shared the first episode on December 11, 2011, that would’ve been a huge failure.

Thank you to everyone that supported this podcast over the years and reached out to us and became friends with us. Ed and Chris might do something else in the future, but it will not be /dev/hell.

If there is one constant theme, it has been how programming slides towards being complex and fails instead of the majority of people working hard towards making it simple. We end the same way we started — with Ed complaining about the developer experience being so terrible for so many people.

Take care of yourselves and always be pushing to make things better for everyone around you, not just yourselves.

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Episode 99: Can I Keep Flexing (Extended Mix)

Flex

Ed: “Who do you think was our best guest over the years?” Chris (without hesitating): “Paul Reinheimer”

Friend-of-the-podcast Paul Reinheimer has know Ed and Chris for many years and has shared many wonderful stories about himself and his side-gig-turned-primary-gig WonderNetwork both in person and on previous episodes. Who else could tell us about their experiences of dealing with apathetic corporations who are hosting hardware for them in locations around there world?

We jumped all over the place so dig into the show notes for some interesting content.

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Episode 98: No Hair, Don’t Care

Image from page 478 of "A practical treatise on diseases of the skin, for the use of students and practitioners" (1897)

This was recorded way too long ago. We even lost the episode notes that had been so carefully curated. What do you want from us?!?

BLINK TWICE IF YOU WANT MORE EPISODES.

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Episode 97: Hot For Teacher

Hot For Teacher (Van Halen)

As we slouch along towards episode 100, we do something we normally don’t do and have a guest on to try and sell a book they’ve written.

This time out we spoke with Dane Hillard, who is in the process of finishing a book about Python programming for folks who are new to programming. Dane shared his experiences writing the book and why he feels there is a gap in help out there for folks who are looking to add programming to their problem-solving toolkit.

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Episode 96: Chimps and Snakes and Boots

Snake man

Ed and Chris started talking to each other again over a series of tubes, with the end result being another episode of the podcast.

This time around we discussed some weirdness we had been noticing with our episode announcement mailing list, TIOBE and popularity contests, building things for our hobbies, and the never-ending street fight of complexity vs. churn.

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Episode 94: Shaking Off The Rust

Rust and Fire

It’s been a while since our last episode, but this time Chris and Ed go together in the same room down in Pawnee, Indiana to record an episode. Between Ed making faces at Chris while recording and Chris' totally messing up who wrote the testing blog post he went on and on, it was clear /dev/hell is not in the groove.

In this episode Ed talks about some of his personal struggles that led to a long absence, Chris asks about what to do when the time frame for your goals doesn’t align with the types of places you work, and Chris and Ed try to enjoy being together in the same place while hoping the noise from the hand dryer in the bathroom on the other side of the wall from them doesn’t cause a ton of noise.

Don’t worry, the podcast isn’t dead! Ed and Chris intend on talking to each other for a very very long time to come. However, you can expect to see less of us on the conference circuit in 2018. Both Chris and Ed have decided that for personal reasons they need to reduce their travel schedules.

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Episode 93: 40 Attendees Enter, None Leave

Beyond Thunderdome

Chris has finally moved his vast grumpy empire to it’s new location, so it was time to record an episode and get their hands on that sweet, sweet Patreon money.

In this scintillating episode we talk about deliberate change in your life to achieve a new set of goals, along with upcoming conference appearances. Chris also reveals a dark secret about his new adopted home town and Ed mocks Chris for temporarily confusing two Lous.

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Episode 92: JSON and The Argonauts

Argonaut

“…and that’s why this podcast is rated M for mature”

Chris and Ed talk about their thoughts on what might have to change once you become “internet famous” and a reminder that even if you have made mistakes in the past, you can choose to correct them in the future.

We also include a new segment called “What toys did we buy?” to reflect how the hosts numb the pain of every day living through conspicuous consumption.

Thanks to Chance Garcia for allowing us to bring another health issue to people’s attention.

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Episode 91: Check the police blotter in Mountain View

i'm good with the blue, scott richard

Chris and Ed do an extremely rare daytime recording of the show on the American Memorial Day holiday. But why is a Canadian not working on an American Holiday? You’ll have to tune in to find out why along with some thoughts on mentoring and why the current crop of browser-centric testing tools are completely shit.

Thanks to Ben Ramsey for his poetry choice and Chance Garcia for allowing us to bring another health issue to people’s attention.

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Links and Notes

  • Please support Ed’s efforts to make OSMI his main gig!
  • Both Chris and Ed will be at CakeFest 2017
  • WebDriver is an API in heavy use at Mozilla (and elsewhere) for doing browser automation work
  • Ed talked about a testing tool called Fake from his webOS development days that promoted a very different testing paradigm
  • Chris has done browser automation in PHP using Behat, Mink and a lot of swearing
  • Most current browser-centric UI testing tools are Rube Goldberg machines
  • Great blog post from the ClojureScript community showing off property-based testing and immutibility
  • Also some great work being done in PHPUnit with snapshot testing