Building Better Foundations: Setting the Stage for Season 26

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. We are in a new season 26 of Building Better Developers, the Developer podcast. Yes, we've been doing this for a long stinking time. 26 seasons, especially when we consider there's two seasons alone encompass over 200 episodes when you add those two together. We're doing pretty good chugging along. I'm not going to spoil it yet. I'm going to let you guys hang on. What is the topic? We just figured it out literally moments ago, so we're still just basking in the glow of figuring out what are we going to do for this season. First, I want to introduce myself. My name is Rob Broadhead. I'm one of the founders of Development or Building Better Developers. Also the founder of RB Consulting, which often would be considered like boutique consulting and things like that. But what happens really is we help you cut IT costs. We help you understand IT. We help you wrangle technology. We help you figure out what do you do with this thing? What do you do with this technology that you've got, the applications that you've got? A lot of it is understanding your business. How do you take the processes that are in your head, get them down on paper or in a digital form? So then either your people or your systems can actually systematize, automate those, simplify them, integrate it with other systems, or we can even sit down with you and create an entire new solution. That's what we do. We'll sit down. We start off with our little assessment with you and then either you can take it or run or we will take it as far as you'd like to go with it. You can check us out at rb-sns.com. We've got a little like Insta assessment tool there that takes about 10 minutes and then we also have, you can do a very quick assessment product that takes you basically two hours of your time, an hour up front and an hour at the end. We spend a little time between that, a few hours and we build out a roadmap for you and you're off and running. Good thing, bad thing. This is like the epitome of good thing, bad thing actually. Bad thing is we had a house that was being rented by a child. We'll go ahead and we'll be that direct. Was being rented by a child and the child, said child found a house that was a dream home and moved very quickly. We suddenly were like, oh, we don't have anybody. We have to do something with this house. That's the bad thing is now we're under scramble mode yet again. The good thing is that we are actually still here. We haven't moved away. We haven't done anything where it would be much, much harder for us to do so. Actually we've got somewhere else that we've got a place to stay that's literally like six, seven minutes away from this house. We're able to get some work done and stuff like that. That's a good thing is that at least it's, the bad thing is it happened. The good thing is it happened now instead of three or six or nine months from now. The other good thing is I do have a co-host that helps me out with so much stuff. Actually helps me out. 80-20 rule. He does 80% of the work. I do two and then the rest falls in the cracks. Michael introduce yourself. Hey everyone. My name is Michael Mollage. I'm one of the co-founders of Building Better Developers, also known as Developaner. I'm also the owner and founder of Envision QA where we help businesses take back the control of their custom software. We build custom software around your needs, not the other way around. So we make the software work for you. Our focus is simple. We create service, smart solutions and a rock-solid quality. We build tools that replace frustrating systems, streamline operations and are fully tested to work right the first time. If you want to learn more, check us out at EnvisionQA.com. Good thing, bad thing. Good thing. Getting towards the end of a project. It's been a bit of a slog. Not really a slog. We've uncovered a lot of things and we want to do it right. So it's a little over our original estimates. Bad thing, as we're getting to the end of that, the nerves and the doubts and all that creep in and it's like, are we going to really make it? Yes, we are. This is just one of those things that happen when you run your own business. You have the wins and you have the stress that comes pre before the wins. So I'm in that little mix right now of the good and the bad stage. Once we get across the finish line, it's going to be sunflowers and sunshine until the next project. Until the sunshine goes away and the storms come and the flowers die and all that kind of fun stuff. Happy times, happy thoughts. There you go. Well, this season, actually we're in a pretty good mood because we figured out what we're going to talk about. We're going to do building better foundations. We've done developers and businesses and things like that. We've done it with AI and we actually did use AI a little bit in this, but we're actually going to pick on AI, I think part of this season. We are going to really go back to it's taking the things that are these big things of buzzwords and these big concepts that people struggle with. How do you actually implement it? Some of these things that we know we need to do, but how do we actually make that part of our habits? We've talked about a lot. We've talked about it with some of the challenges. We've talked about it in actually the building better developer seasons. The developer book itself talks about habits and all these little things you can do, but I want to modernize this a little bit and let's get some of the hot topics of the day and some of the things that are most likely going to be in your mind because they're the things that you're struggling with. We're going to have some, at least one, we are going to have some interviews this time around because we're going to sprinkle some of that in. I think that would work great to us to get just some hot topics, but also some things made a little bit different that we haven't thought about and then do that. It really comes back to that foundation as a developer. What are the things that you need to keep in mind while you're tackling all the stuff that's changing, all of the technology that's out there? This is going to be one of the seasons I think that is, yes, from episode to episode, we may shift a little bit, but we're also going to try to keep a couple series in case. For example, AI will probably have several that we'll be talking about that. Cloud computing will probably have several that talk about that. We talk about the DevOps and we'll probably have some stuff on that. There'll be a couple of seasons, a couple of episodes on that. We'll just see where these take us because some of these, it's like unwrapping, it's an onion kind of thing. You sort of peel off a layer and like, oh, now there's another layer and another layer and another layer. I think I'll stop there and get sort of your thoughts on that because literally we've just come up with this. So we'll see what, hopefully the two of us can sort of come to consensus of where we're planning on going before we dive too much into the first topic. Well, yeah, and kind of where this topic initially came from was we were kind of talking about like current news and things like that. What is the buzz in our industry right now? Like AI, cloud computing, five coding, no code, things of that nature. We felt that we wanted to do a season to where we kind of break those down. Basically, what is the why behind these buzzwords? Why do you want to do them? Why are they important? And that is where I think in each episode we'll pick kind of the topic of the day and peel that back, like Rob mentioned, peel back the onion and get into the why. Why is this important to us as developers? Why is it important also not just to us, but why is it important to our customers, to business and the industry? Why do we need to use this? What is the importance of this? You know, AI, you know, big buzzword constantly thrown around. You know, cloud computing has been around long enough now that most people have heard it. Most people understand it. However, I still run into people that ask me, what is the cloud? Some people out there just really don't know what the cloud is. It's a buzzword. And for a lot of people not in tech, they don't care what the cloud is. They just know it's something out there. There are softwares out there, it goes out there, whatever. So I think as we go through the journey of this season, we'll help flush that out. We'll help kind of break those barriers down and help our listeners understand where to go. You know, what buzzwords quote unquote buzzwords are what foundational skills are the skills that they need to really be focusing on for themselves and for their growth? Because sometimes you may run across a system that is 30 years old that you have to still have the skills to understand how it worked to bring it to a modern, to basically bring it up to speed, to bring it up to scale to today's standards. And if you don't understand the why of why that system was built, what's it's for, translating that to something current is going to be a problem because you're not going to fully understand the why and you may pick the wrong technologies. So to me, I think that's where I think this will be beneficial to a lot of our listeners around, you know, how can I take these buzzwords? You know, where is the industry going? How can I grow? And I think that's what we'll kind of get to as we pull these topics down. Yeah, and I think those are some of the things I want to focus on is the with most, especially with new technologies, it seems like it's very easy, or at least it's easier to do a like a startup application or some sort of jumpstart application where you start from scratch and you build this thing out and you're like, oh, okay, this is how it works. It's very different when you take that with an existing system and now you try to map that existing system into some new technology. It's very different, just like the simplest things of like a desktop application to a web application. And we're going to talk about some of these things like what are the what are the considerations? We want to take it more than just like, well, here's how you can use it. Like, here's some of the gotchas. Here's some of the things that you need to do, essentially, architecturally to make sure that you are going to be able to actually use that thing correctly. Some of it's it does go back to like using the right tool in the right place. Sometimes it's like, oh, yeah, that's a really spiffy drill. But that drill is going to be really annoying if you're going to try to use that to cut down a tree or something like that. So, you know, it's it is it does go back to choosing the right the right tool for the right problem, but also understanding what you're getting into. And I want to I think with a lot of these things we're going to get into go a little deeper than, oh, we'll go just check this out. We're going to talk a little bit. There's going to be some war stories as to be like, okay, well, you know, this is what we're finding, especially with some of these things that now that this has been going on for a while, we're starting to see where there's some of these issues. And we've we've brought some of these up, but we want to, you know, swing back around and make sure that we're clear on some of these things so that you don't get bit. So you don't suddenly have a, you know, ten thousand dollar cloud bill from last month or, you know, some of these kinds of things that you need to you need to be very intentional. And you need to actually learn a little research a little before you dive into whatever the cool is newest thing is. And think about it a little bit, too, because I think once we get that's why we came up with the foundations is it's really more about like when you go back to the foundational stuff of what are we trying to do, what do we need to be thinking about, what do we need to worry about, what do we need to add that is the value add to our application, regardless what that application is, whether it's a big, you know, huge server systems used by billions of people or a little like phone app that's only used by one person at a time. There's still certain considerations that are, for lack of a better term, the best practices. You know, that's I don't know if that's really I've seen I've seen arguments against best practices even being used as a word that it's too buzzy, too much of a buzzword, but it's doing the right thing is doing the smart thing. It's keeping the why in front of you, no matter what the technology is. And that I think that's really what makes you a developer. That's one of the things that that would be. To me, that's like a marker of a good developer and not just a coder is that you have those fundamentals and that regardless of what environment you're thrown into, you still have those things essentially ingrained in your system. You're still thinking about you're thinking in a certain way. You're thinking in a certain manner. And I think that's why, you know, as we like Michael mentioned, vibe coding. I think that's one of the things that people miss is it. It's stealing thoughts from other people. It doesn't know how to put the two pieces together. And if you don't know how to stitch it together, you can have all the fabric in the world you want. You're not going to make a pretty dress, you know, something like that. That's probably not the best analogy. But hey, we'll go with that. Final closing thoughts on this one? Yeah. So as you're going through that, I thought of one that I think we'll probably touch on with this season as well is a lot of these tools are out there. A lot of these buzzwords, if you're not already using them, it's sometimes hard to know which skill set or which tool to jump into to start learning something. Yes, some of these new technologies may be very quick to get code out there, but you're going to find very quickly that there's a limitation to how quickly some of these applications you build in these can scale. They may not be able to be enterprise level applications. Yes, you can get a product out there, but then you're going to quickly find that crap. I have to now go to a more mature language or infrastructure or something else to get me to that business scale because you may have adopted something that's not there yet. So that's one of the biggest problems with just grabbing buzzwords and grabbing new tech and just jumping out there and running with it is there will be limitations to what you can do. And understanding those upfront can help you one, you can get a product to market fast. Yes. However, if that goes gangbusters and you can't scale with that, your product's dead. So you need to be able to kind of follow that journey as you're going through the process. Okay. Yes, I have a working model. Now, how quickly can I scale this? If I can't scale it, okay, how quickly can I pivot to something else to get the same product out that can scale? And you just stole some of the thunder from an upcoming episode, I'm sure, but that's okay. Stay tuned. We will go further into that one. But before we do that, we're going to do our famous, love to do it every time. Actually, I don't love to do it. I hate that this is like one of those repetitive things, but I do like the results is it shoot us an email at info at develop a nerd.com. Let us know what you think. Let us know good or bad. I love to hear your feedback on the prior 25 seasons or this season. What do you think? What are some, some buzzwords or some areas that you would like us to tackle? I definitely have a few of those out there and I think those are going to be those will topics will filter into this season, but we're always looking for more because we're here to serve you to help you become better developers. Granted, we become better developers along the way because we're researching this and doing a lot of the same things. We're taking the same challenges. We're growing together, but we want to make sure that you guys are a part of this as well. We love having the community side of it. I also leave us feedback on YouTube on the development or channel on X. We are at develop a newer. We have the development or Facebook page and developer.com. You can go and there's tons and tons and tons of content out there. You can check that out. That is, you know, heads up is that is going to be in a transition mode over the next few months as we're making some changes and updating some things and cleaning stuff up and things like that. Some of those, maybe some examples we even use during these upcoming episodes. So that being said, just want to say welcome to season 26. We appreciate so much that you've been here for the prior 25 seasons and that you're sticking around for one yet another one. And we're going to try to do our best to make it every bit. Every minute that you're here worth the investment of your time. Go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week. And we will talk to you. Thank you for listening to building better developers to develop a newer 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.