The Magic of Christmas Movies - A Heartwarming Tradition

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer podcast, where we work on getting better step by step, professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well, hello and welcome back. Once again, those bells, those Christmas bells point out that this is a holiday episode. This episode, we're going to get into Christmas movies because it's that time of year, or even holiday movies if you want to get into that, especially if you're on the Hallmark channel or something like that and there's like 4 billion of them. Before we do that, I'm here. I'm not going to ho ho ho. I don't have a bowl full of jelly or anything, a billion of jelly and all that kind of crap. I'm just Rob Broadhan. I'm one of the founders of Developandor.com. Developandor are also Building Better Developers, this podcast, and a founder of RB Consulting, where we, it's Christmas every day when you work with us because we take all of that crap that you got, just like when you're Christmas, you've got all of this stuff and you're trying to figure out how to get it home if you've gone somewhere. We help you with your technology sprawl, all those gifts you've gotten over the years of technology and find a better way through integration, simplification, automation to utilize that stuff to actually make it worthwhile instead of just putting it up on a shelf until a year from now when you go, oh yeah, I got that Christmas gift last year. We help you really make the most of your budget and all your efforts that go into your technology. And the good thing, bad thing sense, good thing is, got a customer this week that we finally got two months of like billing headaches straightened out. And it was basically because it was like, hey, go talk to, you know, shoot this email off here. And I did and it kept bouncing. And I was like, I assumed it was something I did wrong, kept going back and forth and it's fine. It's like, oh yeah, we changed this. It was one of those things. It's just like miscommunication finally got that straightened out. So it's like one headache I don't have to worry about as I wrap up the year. Bad thing is it is that Christmas season and we came into this like, okay, here's what we're going to do. Here's our budget. That has gone out the window. There's all kinds of little stuff. We're like, oh yeah, let's do this. Let's do that. Let's grab that thing. Let's do that thing. As always, January is going to be one of those where like December is great. And you get into January and you're like, why did I buy so much stuff or why did I do so many things? But enjoy it while it lasts because sooner or later the bills come or something along those lines. Along those same lines, let's see how you're doing today. Go ahead and introduce yourself, Michael, and we'll step right into our holiday. Hey everyone. My name is Michael Milosz. I'm one of the co-founders and developer. I'm also the founder of Envision QA, where if you are a software shop or have custom applications that you have had built, if you have buggy software or problems maintaining them, we come in, we look at your systems, we walk through your current processes and we bring a test driven approach to software development and we can help you fix or stabilize your products, make your customers happy and kind of increasing the bottom line. You know, happy customers means more, hopefully more sales of your product. Good and bad. Good. It's the holiday season. All that wonderful, you know, candy, popcorn, chocolate sweets and things that keep getting delivered or we keep buying at the grocery store to our hearts content. Bad thing. My waistline has gone up quite a bit this holiday season by eating too much junk. I think I'm going to have to do one of those faux pas New Year's resolutions where I'm going to lose weight, but yeah, no, right now I keep eating, drinking and that egg nug and eating those Christmas cookies. Yeah, that is part of the bills and the diet programs come due in January. And so that's the same thing as I was a really good and I basically, by the time we got into Thanksgiving, just go in the wrong direction. And it's tough because there's a lot of that where it's like all the sweets and all the other food and just the general food and drinks and stuff like that. Way more than I need. And I'm too busy, so I'm not getting out and exercising enough. So yeah, January is going to be like. Ketchup time, basically, try to like get all that stuff back in order. But for now, enjoy it while it lasts. Christmas movies. Now, this was great because one, there are, I always think of like iconic. There are Christmas movies that are just, you have to watch basically every year. Or I do, I feel, and it's going to be a challenge this year because there's a short, a very short period of time between Thanksgiving and Christmas. And so there's going to be movies I'm probably going to miss that I won't watch this year. So next year I'll have to like figure out how to like really binge my way through them. And we've just been really busy. So we haven't had a lot of Christmas movie nights. In the end, I don't want to throw her under the bus, but Natalie has several times we've sat down to watch like a traditional movie and she's like, oh, I've never seen that. And so we go watch this other movie, which, you know, they're not bad, but it's like, wait a minute. I'd like, I have stuff to do. I have Christmas movies I need to watch. So here it is at this point, almost Christmas. I haven't watched Die Hard yet this year. And this is one of those that like, she's like, ah, that's not a Christmas movie. And yet I forgive her. I know it's like, it's just wrong, but Die Hard, Die Hard 2, haven't gotten to those. I haven't even watched any of the Santa Claus's movies. There's like several of these that I have not gotten into. Now, of course, I got, I got like my Elf fix. I don't think we haven't watched Christmas Vacation yet. I mean, there's like a lot of these like, I'm just realizing I have a lot of movies to watch in the next few days. I have got to really like crank out my movie per day, you know, per diem kind of thing. I do want to mention this. Is not too long ago, Red One came out, and I think that that I see that as being one of these movies that is really well done, that is going to be a recurring Christmas movie from here on out. The most recent previous one to that would be Netflix's Christmas Chronicles and Christmas Chronicles 2, both incredibly good movies, a lot of fun, very much like the old school Christmas movies, Santa Claus, blah, blah, blah, all that kind of good stuff that is really like makes life that much better. I mean, we did get The Scrooge, we got like the and the new Scrooge movie, if you haven't seen the I think it's the DreamWorks version of it. It's a it's a fun one. It's like an hour and a half or whatever, but very much a good movie came out about four or five years ago. And we got like the old, old school. Actually, we haven't. I was going to say it was I think we got in Scrooge, but we haven't gotten Scrooge yet. So we're like we've got a couple we've got to catch up on. What are your thoughts like some of your favorite Christmas movies and where you go during this season? So thanks to my mother years ago, she got us into watching the Hallmark Christmas shows every year. So we're working our way through that. It's just kind of our feel good movies, you know, footballs. We take breaks for that, but NASCAR is done. So I get Saturdays back to kind of watch some of my shows. So my top list, of course, Renee likes Die Hard. I'm. Die Hard one and two is her Christmas movie, so we cannot start watching Christmas movies till we watch that first. So like she is nipping at the butt. November 1st, can we watch Die Hard? I'm like, it's not even Thanksgiving yet. So this year, literally the day after Thanksgiving, we watched Die Hard. And we started our Christmas tradition. So this year I have the argument that Iron Man 3 is a Christmas movie. Because it takes place over Christmas, it snows and you know, it ends with Christmas. So I'm arguing that Iron Man 3 should be a Christmas movie then if Die Hard is a Christmas movie. So is Lethal Weapon. I just want to say because I've seen these arguments. Also, the Hawkeye, the series, the Disney when they did the Hawkeye series, that one is very much a Christmas series as well. So there's a lot of there's a lot of good Christmasy stuff out there. Just got to watch that one again. Not only that, but Hawkeye takes place in well, they basically brought the Netflix Marvel series, like the Daredevil and all that together in that one. So that was like a good series. Scrooge, got to love Bill Murray, got to love that one. That's actually so we have our certain classics. We'll watch the week of Christmas. So like all this week is when we start watching these. So Scrooge is up next. Polar Express. Love that movie. I am particularly a fan of the Snoopys. So, of course, I'm going to be doing the Snoopy Christmas. My wife won't. She doesn't like cartoon cartoons. So her loss. Frosty and Rudolph, of course. Christmas Chronicles. We just watched the first one. We're about to watch the second one tonight. Got Grinch. Both Grinches. I like the animated. She likes the Jim Carrey version. Both good. Different takes on it. We did watch the first Santa Claus movie. So that that was good. We'll probably watch the second one. I kind of like the third one, but the third one is not really my favorite. And the Disney TV series, I just wasn't a fan. I don't know why. It just didn't quite have that magic. So those are kind of like what's on the agenda to watch probably the next few days. Get through that. And of course, you know, like I said, the Hallmark movie. So we're cranking through those. This Netflix actually had some good ones. So there was one with Brooke Shields, which was like in a castle that was really good last year. We just rewatched that one. That one was pretty good. The Princess series that they did, a Christmas Prince or whatever. That was actually a pretty good series. Netflix actually had quite a few over the years. Now, the Lindsay Lohan ones and not really a fan of that. But like during Covid and like pre-Covid, when Netflix really started investing in the Christmas shows, some of those are really good. So I think they're going to start becoming like, oh, we got to watch that next year. We got to watch that next. So those are kind of nice. Disney, like you said, Hawkeye. That was a great one that they did. They tried to do the Santa Claus magic again. And hit or miss on that. But some of the streaming ones have some nice ones coming out. So it'll be interesting to see. We did watch Red One. So now that it's on streaming, we did watch that. And I actually liked it. But I think I understand why. It didn't do well in the box office because it really felt like it was made more for TV streaming than it was for the theaters. I don't know why, just as we watched it, it just kind of had that feeling that this was more like targeted for streamers than moviegoers. Yeah, I mean, it had it. It had some of the spectacle that you want out of a big, you know, a big screen movie. But. Yeah, I think that could be part of it. It's just it was for us, it was great. It was a it was a full theater when we saw it. We happened to it was one of the things we just happened into it. Actually, we missed it. We were going to go to an earlier showing and they were sold out when we got there. And then we went back later and picked it up later and it worked out really good. And it was it was it was a it was a fun movie. I get that. I think that's part of it. It is one of those. That's I guess what I like is one of those. It's very much suitable to just like watch it every year. It's it's moderately predictable even the first time you see it. So it's not like it's that much different. It did remind me that's another couple that I've that I've started into. I always go through the first and second Home Alone. We've already got the first one of those done. And then also like some of the like one offs Christmas with the cranks and jingle all the way. Some of those are always there. And then actually one that's very near and dear to my heart. That's just because if it's not the happiest one is Family Stone, because it's always around Christmas and family gatherings and stuff like that. That's always another good one. And then we wait till the end as we get to the end of the week, because we probably will watch some Christmas movies after Christmas, because we just got to catch up. And then there's always like a Harry Met Sally to me is like like the epitome of a New Year's kind of like getting the New Year's kind of movie. But that's maybe we get into a little bit of the mushy romantic ones as well. But you know, they're all good. And it is to me, that's like part of the season is you just sit there, have like a nice warm drink, maybe have the fire go on, throw a blanket over you and just sit there and watch some TV and just chill for a while, you know, something like that. And maybe you're maybe you're snacking along the way as well. Like we've gone through enough popcorn now that we don't need to do as much, but we still will. I'm sure we'll crank out some more popcorn and we'll be in good shape. So by the time we get in January, we're like, hey, we've used up all our popcorn allotment for the year. So we'll do it next time around. Oh, it's good. And it is it's just one of those. That to me is like, it's what it's about is having some of these traditions and setting some stuff up so that we can have a good time, enjoy the family and the times around there and just, sometimes it is, as we've talked about, it's good to just unplug a little bit and to just not worry about all the other work and all the other crap we've got and just like, you know, veg a little bit. It may be may not be the best use of your time. It's like not productive necessarily or anything like that. But I think it is. There is a productive side of being able to just relax and allow your body to rest and recover and things like that. It's sort of like taking a long nap. And if you take a nap during some of these movies, bonus, you've gotten a little bit, you know, you've got two birds with one stone. You got your nap time in and you manage to like once again, watch one of those movies that just makes it, you know, makes your heart a little bit lighter because you're able to like get through it again and enjoy that season. Closing thoughts from you? Yeah, the other thing as you watch these, a lot of them are not necessarily just feel good movies, but they are happy movies. Yes, there's some rom-coms, things of that nature, but there are a lot of them aren't necessarily too violent. Okay, Red One is probably an exception to that along with Die Hard. But you end up feeling a little de-stressed, a little happier, you know, instead of like all the bad news that happens every day. You get that kind of lift up feeling from watching these movies. The last thing I'll throw out, you didn't mention it, I didn't mention it, but A Christmas Story, The Leg Lamb. I can't watch that anymore because all through school growing up, it literally was played on the channel every day in December, all the way through senior year of high school. That's all we had running on the TV in December. It's like, okay, I'm so tired of this movie, but it is a good movie. If you hear the Leg Lamb joke that came from that movie, you shoot your eye out that came from that movie. It's a good feel good movie. I just can't watch it anymore. Yep, that is definitely one of those. And it's not been, I think that's me, as it was such a part of my childhood and growing up, I've seen it so many times that it is not on my regular list. Now, It's a Wonderful Life is, but that's partially because I actually never saw that movie ever until I was into my 40s, I think it was like the first time I ever watched it. So it's a little more newish to me. Plus it's just like, it is a nice, something that's very comforting about going to an old school, black and white kind of thing. I don't get the colorizer. I've got the original black and white. And there's just something that very much like, takes me back to childhood and stuff like that. So we will wrap this one up just as you're probably needing to wrap up some of your gifts as you're getting close to that time. As always, send us whatever you want, whether it's holiday greetings, whether it's questions, comments, concerns, suggestions, all that stuff. Happy to get it. So happy that you have spent another year with us and we'll next time around, we're going to talk about, so wrap up our holiday specials, talk about the new year, how we're going to dive into 2025 and how we're going to get things started so that as we get to this point a year from now, we are much, much better developers. We have built better developers and wrapping up that season, have a lot of habits to take us into the future basically. That being said, you guys go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, great holiday season, and we'll talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Nor Podcast. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts. We are there. And remember, just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success.