Detailed Notes
Keeping your developer tools updated is critical for productivity, security, and collaboration. In this episode of Building Better Developers with AI, Rob Broadhead and Michael Meloche explain why outdated tools create friction and how modern IDEs, plugins, and processes help developers deliver faster, cleaner code.
Learn when it’s time to update your development environment and how to evaluate new tools before making the switch.
Key Takeaways: • Signs your developer tools need updating • Balancing team-wide standardization vs. flexibility • How outdated tools impact security and compliance • Smart ways to evaluate new tools without disrupting your workflow
Stay competitive, secure, and efficient — keep your development tools sharp.
Listen to the full podcast: https://develpreneur.com/updating-developer-tools-efficiency-security-collaboration/
*Follow-us on:*
* https://develpreneur.com/ * https://www.youtube.com/@develpreneur * https://facebook.com/Develpreneur * https://X.com/develpreneur * https://www.linkedin.com/company/develpreneur/
Transcript Text
[Music] because we hit record and we are live. Uh, this episode, this thing, the preamble gets really short when we do this. So, this one it's going to we're going to do episodes six and seven this time around. Six for everybody here. We just happen to do two at a time if you've never figured that out. This is the top of the show and the next one is going to be the bottom of the show or something like that. First one we're going to do is updating developer tools, keeping your tools sharp and efficient. And um I need to bring up where I just threw that into chat. GPT. Let's make sure it gave me some answers. Yes, it did. Oh, it gives me a different number of answers again. Huh. So, we'll see how this goes. Um little bonus thing that I was thinking about is that maybe what we may want to do is because we've done this in chat GPT so far, maybe we want to try like Gemini for the next one or something. I don't think it gives I haven't played around with enough to make sure I've got like the settings for what I like the default chat GPT is very chatty like gives you this more discussional discussion based kind of thing. But um I'm wondering if like maybe we maybe we're throwing one of them in there. So we'll see just to try or maybe some of the others that are out there we may play around with that. Maybe that'll be like the big finale. will like take this and throw it through five or six different AI systems and see what we get back. Or we could doing that as our pre-show. Just pick a different one and do it in the pre-show. And if we don't like it, just go back to chat GPT. Oh, that's right. Maybe we'll do that next time around. So, everybody hang out for the next episode because that could be cool. Um, bonus material that is completely outside of this. I was in a conversation the other day. We're talking about dealing with a bunch of founders of companies and they're all AI this, AI that. Everything with AI dash garbage collection with AI. It's like, and I mean I don't mean memory garbage. I mean like actual sanitation engineers garbage collection with AI. Everything is like we do this, but we use AI to make it better. And this guy gave me a great idea that I'm going to throw out there for everybody. I don't know where he got it, but um and I can't remember which engine he was using, but it was basically the idea that, and we've sort of heard this before, you can put um a lot of information into AI, a lot of these tools so that you can store, you know, books, articles, and stuff like that. And he was I can't remember the one that he was specifically talking about, but there's one AI out there that will generate an entire podcast for you. Audio, it'll do all kinds of stuff. you give it some stuff and it'll create a podcast based on that. If you don't uh if you haven't seen or heard of it, you can go Google uh AI generated podcast or something like that and it's actually I listened to it a while back um just like the start of it and it's it like generates it's got multiple hosts. They have like these little personalities. So, it sounds like an AI. It sounds like a podcast, a particularly like not a high-end podcast like this one, but like one of your typical lower-end podcasts. Uh, but it's actually not bad. The idea he came up with this is you take all this information, shove it into AI, and then tell it to create a podcast on that topic and then listen to it. Because basically what you're going to do instead of having to read through all that content, you now have a podcast specifically on whatever that topic is. And particularly if you're trying to enhance your learning, then you're going to know where it's like it's bogus and it's just an AI flaw versus, you know, the general stuff that's out there. So it really to me, I was thinking about it, it's really getting close to where the matrix where they're like, I just learned, you know, karate. We can do stuff like that. So you can, you know, you're going on a long drive or, you know, whatever it is, you're waiting in line somewhere. You can preload those things and think about like, okay, I'm going to have like these six topics I want to be a specialist on. I'm going to go like shove it in AI and have it create a podcast for me. It's not that much different from when we would have, you know, we've done this, all of us have done this at some point where you take like an article or a book or something like that and basically do an audio form of it, you know, books on tape and all that kind of stuff. This you can do a custombuilt topic and do it that way. So, I think of that as like that was really cool idea. That was like a an aha moment like that's actually a really awesome use of AI. Well, I'll tag on to that because you touched on it. So, I've used things like text to speech with Siri. Uh I've used Whisper and I've used Descript to essentially take a text document and convert it into an audio file. In fact, um back before Audible got really popular, I did that with a lot of books that I had um was it? uh EUPID or what whatever the digital format was. Uh when Alexa first came out, they started adding the digital uh you know text to speech, there was a program you could use back then. I think that's now Whisper, but it would essentially take the the text version of the book and generate a audio format of it. And I would listen to that while I was kayaking, driving, whatever. I mean, now you got Audible in your pocket. Same premise applies to like if you have a technical document or something you you want to hear uh because you're driving, convert it and listen to it. I mean podcast is a great idea, but if you need to absorb like a lot of material like a textbook or something like that, this is another way to do it. You could do it while you're at the gym, especially if you're one that learns by hearing, not by reading. I've actually used that a couple times working out, particularly if I'm in something like a um you know, one of the machines where you've got somewhere that you can like take notes. I've used that to refu to review u RFPs to do requirements. Uh lots of documents like that where it's like I really just need to hear all of it and I can always go back and like, you know, re uh you know, go backwards and have it reread it. And I've used that with the um the audio readers for quite a while where I'll just like throw a document. I'll just be like just read it and then it's not even AI. It's just like it's reading the document. So yeah, there's some there's some pretty um cool uses of technology when you you think through it, including an AI generated uh topic thing. So that's what we're going to talk about and that's what we're going to go to. Do you have something you wanted to I was going to say say you're kind of low. Adjust your camera just slightly or Oh, whoop like that. Yeah, there you go. I just grew an inch. Something like that. You're just kind of low. I am. Before I start, I'm going to throw another light on the topic. Heard that one. What's that one? I don't know if this Welcome to the bonus pre-show. That's right. They're going to start doing my makeup next. And that's where it just goes to this. There you go. Makeup done. I look a lot better when it's like blocked out. All right. Had too much fun already. Uh, yes. Bonus is uh Oh, wow. It Oh, that's cool. It doesn't like that color. So, somewhere in there. There you go. Got my wine. Drinking a little malbeck this time around. I'm going for bourbon. Little cheese and crackers and stuff like that. I figured it's a it's a good wine night. We'll cover that in the good and the bad. And we're going to do a little three, a two, a one. Hello and welcome back. We are continuing our episodes, our season that is with AI. We're taking two seasons back, walking through the topics, and we are throwing it out to AI and seeing what AI says and see we'll have some conversations around that because sometimes it's spot-on, sometimes it's not. First, I am spot on. always time always when I'm talking about this except for just right now. My name is Rob Broadhead. I am one of the founders of developer also a founder of the founder of RB Consulting. At RB Consulting, we basically help you work your way through your technology junk drawer. People have got so much stuff out there these days. There's so many solutions, so many applications. They all need to talk together. There are varying versions and all that. We've spent a lot of time, decades now, in the technology world and we help you. We sit down with you. We do a technology access assessment. We figure out where you're at. This is partially also about your business and where do you want to go so that we can figure out a custom recipe for you to move forward with a road map, a technology roadmap that leverages technology the best way it can. And now you don't have to worry about anymore. you're actually spending money to make money and not worried about some big, you know, load stone that you have around your neck called technology or sprawl. We do integration, we do imple implementation, simplification, automation, innovation, all of those things are part of our tool chest. However it is that we can get you best from where you are to where you want to be. Good things and bad things. I'm gonna like combo it because today has been like a perfect good thing, bad thing. Uh recently, last few weeks, months now, I guess, I've had issues with one of my cars. It's like not worked well. And so, finally, we're like, "All right, we're going to take it into the shop cuz we've got a big big trip coming ahead that we're going to be driving the car for a while and we want to make sure it's like up to speed, not no pun intended." We take it in and it turns out that it's like what nobody wants to hear is basically drivetrain issues. It's the like it basically thing needs to be rebuilt. Engine needs to be rebuilt. That sucks. That would be bad news and the fact that we don't have a car. Good news is it's actually under warranty. There was a lawsuit related to this thing. Everybody got an extended warranty. We are just under the mileage so that the extended warranty will still hold out for us. So, we're going to go have this thing rebuilt for us and it's not going to cost us anything because it's covered under the warranty. So, instead of it being like, you know, a 100 miles over the limit, we're actually just underneath it. This is going to be pretty awesome. Not even close to over the limit is Michael and he is going to go ahead and introduce himself. Hey everyone, my name is Michael Malashsh. I'm one of the co-founders of developer building better developers. I'm also the founder of a company called Envision QA where we help startups and small teams deliver high-quality software faster through software testing, automation, and agile development practices. At Envision QA, we're passionate about bridging the gap between innovation and quality. Whether you're building your MVP or scaling it, uh, you know, scaling a large production system, we provide the technology, leadership, and testing strategies to help you succeed. Let's see, good thing, bad thing. Uh, I guess it's kind of mixed. I kind of touched on it a while back. Uh, our TV downstairs uh was acting up on the fritz similar to what you were going through and um we came back from uh our Riverhouse, sat down, got Renee wanted to sit down and watch the um Mexico race and turned the TV on and it just uh the little light indicator just kept flashing. It never engaged, didn't do anything. It was dead. an hour of that it was toast. Good thing she we went to Best Buy and she walked around and on the wall they had one TV left that she absolutely loved. It was the right price and we will have it delivered next week. Sometimes everything works out for you. That's a bonus. And that's one of the blessings of being here in the mighty United States, I guess we'll call it, because you can buy crap on basically every single corner. It is amazing how many even in this day how many still big box retailers are out there. So if you need something, yeah, you can always Amazon it. And we are so spoiled by that. Wow. I've I recently had something that took two weeks to come to me. And I was like, what the heck is wrong with this? And it's like, oh yeah, this is actually how things normally work when you don't Amazon it. That is not a free plug for Actually, it is a free plug for Amazon. If you guys want to pay us, that would be awesome. Thank you. Now, moving on. So, this episode, we're going back to the episode that was called updating developer tools. Keeping your tools sharp and efficient. Once again, if you haven't noticed, the title itself basically came from AI. So, pardon that. I just accidentally paused our stuff. That's too many buttons. Um anyway, so it came back with not the like fluffy thing it did last time. It's just basically like here are several key points and themes that will resonate with your audience of developers and side hustlers. So AI thinks you guys are going to be resonating. So hopefully this will work. Uh we'll see how it goes as far as what we did as well thinking through these things. So core message, why tooling matters, efficiency equals profitability. Outdated tools cost time, create friction, and slow down delivery. Especially harmful for side hustlers with limited hours. Wow. I don't think that we covered that in this episode. I think we have talked about this in many ways in the past. So, and that is really really a key thing. I I'm going to start with this because I have worked with a lot of people that have come out of uh either come straight out of college where they have like their limited tool set and that's it. They really aren't exposed to tools. They're more like command line stuff and things like that. They really some you'll get like an IDE but they really have not really like utilized it. So things like uh debugging usually they're not really comfortable with the debuggers. a lot of the auto autogenerated stuff that are in there like even if you like use like Visual Studio Code that can run across I don't know countless languages if you use the right plugins you can do a lot strictly in the ID and just get going it'll spin up you can spin up containers all that kind of stuff IDs modern IDs are really really stinking powerful particularly coming from someone who goes back to like the Emacs and compile you know G++ C G G G G G G G G G G G G G G G G G G G G G GCC days and stuff like that. Um, this is really I think something we don't spend enough time on in schools and I think too often this is where actually to me this is a little bit of that coding developer coder developer split is that if you get too tied down to your tool and now you're 5 10 15 years into it, you're going to miss out on newer tools and some of the things they can do. I will I will confess that I've been in that situation for a long time. I was stuck with the same uh Eclipse STS stuff that I'd used for years and years and years. It worked fine. It covered what I needed to. But I went over to Intelligj because of a project I was on and it was like, "All right, I'll go jump into this new ID and really liked it. Not to mention the fact that because I had dealt with other IntelligJ tools, it really worked well in the the wheelhouse that I was in." So I think and that's where I think it's the creating friction and slowing down delivery. I think one of the keys is not only that you are using modern tools and staying up to date. Don't fall behind and work on you know Visual Studio 2010 when it's now 2025. But also as a team I think it is very very useful to have everybody just homogeneous tools across the board because you don't have to worry about uh you know like throwing something out a repository and then you down you check it out and now it's got all this extra crap that you don't need or somebody changes libraries for their ID but it doesn't get changed for your IDE. And I will get off my soap box right now and I'm gonna let Michael because I know you have some thoughts on this as well. I want to throw this out to you. Yeah. So the whole IDE thing, we'll just start with that since you were kind of on your soap box on that. Given your team, I I like the idea of everyone using the tools you're comfortable with. But the problem you run in to with that is if you're dealing with larger corporations or larger teams, sometimes you run into issues where, well, you have this guy using Visual Code, he's running into a bug. Well, how do you debug it if the tools aren't really helping them? But yet over here in like Eclipse or Intelligj, oh, hey, we have this nice debugger. Sometimes the right tool or the right IDE really is what helps you. Um, and sometimes it's better to just do maybe do a hackathon maybe once a quarter or twice a year just on development tools or what whatever it is that helps you and your company grow. play around with it. You know, pick a solution like, hey, we need a continuous integration pipeline. We don't have that. Or our current one is slow. Let's go play around with like this team go play with this one. This team go play with this one. Find, you know, come up with a solution and let's see if it solves our problem. Just be careful though that you're not trying to find a solution for something you don't have and then you try to, you know, hammer, square peg, round hole. Don't, you know, don't pigeon hole yourself. make sure you're finding the right tools for the the job. But yeah, when it comes to tools, I mean, God, we've been around for ever. I mean, I don't want to call us dinosaurs, but you know, I remember Lisp and having to write uh, you know, my own programming language back in college on, you know, Silicon Graphics machine that doesn't even exist anymore. They got bought out by uh what Oracle years ago. I mean or Sun and now Oracle. But tools change, languages change. It's everchanging. Don't get into something and never change. Like it always try to keep up with like software updates, uh SDK updates. Um we're on a project right now dealing with uh Python. Well, Python's already gone through two major version changes just while we're on this project. You know, make sure that what you're working on stays compliant. Especially if you're like dealing with banks or whatever industry you're in, you could get into trouble very quickly because, oh, I'm 2 or 3 years behind in my technology and suddenly I'm now running into OASP issues. I'm running into sorbane oxley. I'm running into issues. Be careful with that because it's not just your tools, but it could be external factors that are opening you up and your teams up to other potential problems. Before we move on, I I really want to jump on the idea. I love the idea of a hackathon where it is like IDE specific or tool specific. I think that'd be a really cool hackathon thing to do is to take particularly to take like people that aren't in a certain tool or moving into a new language. It's not just a different language, but a specific tool to really show how that can work. And you probably get some pretty cool sponsors based on that as well. Um, the other thing that I wanted to mention was something that I have now forgotten unfortunately, uh, dealing with different tools and things of that nature. And since I've forgotten it, I guess we can move here. I'll tag back on with that. Um, so with your tools, especially like if you're visual code, you mentioned Eclipse, Intelligj, there are plugins that all these idees use. Plugins are another thing to be very careful of to stay compliant with and keep them updated because if you don't upgrade your idees enough, your plugins could break or they may not work as you continue to go forward. So be careful with plugins, be careful with your idees, but always try to stay compliant and current. The best example of this, you mentioned that your experience with Eclipse kind of waned over time and you went to Intelligj and it's like, oh wow, hey, this is great. But yet I was on a spring project and I actually found that the Spring Eclipse build was better than the Intelligj build when it came to debugging the server information. It just for some reason the Eclipse IDE was just so much easier to look at and play with. But as far as the coding side though, IntelliJ was great. So, I actually found myself jumping back and forth between different IDE for different features within them to get my job done faster. And I do think that's part of it is you get we all get connected more to we're more comfortable with what we know. So, it is helpful for us to be out of our comfort zone at times. Uh, the other thing I was going to mention is the idea of having like regular brown bag sessions or something like that where you talk about a new IDE, uh, the latest improvements on one, plugins that you've used and you've had good experience with. Uh, those kinds of things I think are are very valuable. Um, better tools, better code. Modern tools often encourage better practices, cleaner code, and faster feedback loops. I'm not even going to, you know, mess with that one. Uh, sharpening the saw. Staying updated is like keeping your blade sharp. It's a professional habit, not just a nice to have. We've actually just talked about that. Um, main talking points, signs it's time to update. Let's see how this one goes. Oh, slow performance or crashes, lack of support for new standards and languages, poor integration with modern tooling, for example, GitHub actions and Docker. Team or community has moved on, for example, jQuery versus React. Now, I think all of those are are critical are red flags to say, "Hey, maybe you need to move on or update or upgrade or things like that." I would say that one of the best depending on where you're at again because sometimes you're stuck with what you're stuck with. You're in a an industry that's going to be behind the curve. But I would go point to that last point about team or community is like what is the you don't want to be on the like you don't always want to be the joiner but you do want to look at like what are the the upand cominging technologies languages frameworks um for example JavaScript has like a billion frameworks it feels like uh the difference versus uh react versus node versus angular versus all of this stuff and then especially when you start pulling in uh you know Flutter and Bootstrap and all these things that are like they're you know the varying languages or libraries and frameworks that out there there's a lot out there. It is worth it to stay current in what you've got but it's also particularly if you are at a a point where you can make a change to take a look at what's out there and see if it's time to change. jQuery has been around for a long time and yes there's a billion examples and stuff like that but maybe that's not where you need to be. Maybe it's not. Let's not write another PHP jQuery, you know, type application. Instead, let's move forward and have like a nice little API where it's PHP and you don't you if you really like that language or maybe it's like now use Node for your API server, you use React as your front end, maybe you want React Native because you want mobile. I don't want to get into the religion part of the languages, but I do think that's very important as I think the community that out that is out there is a key portion of your decisions and should be part of your red flags because if you're doing something and people are not supporting it anymore, then you know, you probably need to walk away from it. If everybody's going away from it, but it still has huge community support, then you're probably okay to continue. Thoughts on that? Yeah, the first thing that comes to mind is like Java 8. Java 8's old, but it is still supported. It's still there. Um, it's not something that's going away anytime soon. I I mean, I think it's got like a few more years of uh like end of life before it hits end of life. But I will follow up with that. So, I'm not going to go too because you really touched on a lot of the good points in this. I'm going to touch on the bad points. Learning new things is great. Staying current is great. Keeping up with the trends is great. Moving your project to something that is bleeding edge or looks like, oh, this looks like a great technology. Check GitHub. Check wherever you're at. How re, you know, how old is this technology? How well is it supported in the community? Uh, from a testing standpoint, I will tell you, I've been on many, many projects where people are like, "Oh, well, karate is great." uh or you know cucumber is great or you know testing G is great they go through cycles but the funny thing is 80% of all testing frameworks that were thrown at me I would go out to GitHub oh there's like two people two supporters two people working on the you do not want to go to something that has a very very very small community not yet it may be cool to learn it may be cool to just play around with it But there are reasons that, you know, Java works. There's reasons that Node works. There's reasons that React works. They have very large communities. They're very well supported. And you can basically throw a book at anything. You know, throw Dart. You're going to hit a site somewhere that is going to help you get what you need to get your job done. So, just be very careful with where you go with some of these technologies. Um, I agree 100% that there's some very good points there, things to think about when you're moving. In the interest of time, I'm going to jump ahead a little bit to evaluating new tools and we're sort of wrap up with this because I think while they AI also kicked out categories of tools to regular review. I think we more I'll fly through these IDs and code editors, version control tools, testing and QA tools, build systems and CI/CD. Jenkins, I'm looking at you. Uh, package managers and dependency managers may actually Ant, I'm looking at you if you're using that or worse. Uh, containerization and environment management like Docker and stuff like that. Um, so the one I want to talk about evaluating tool new tools. I want to sort of leave you guys with this thought. So here's some things that gives you gives us four bullet points. So if you're evaluating new tools, ask does it solve a real painoint? We've talked about this quite a bit. Try before full adoption. Start with a side project. Always, always, always, always. You get like a a proof of concept. Uh Michael loves to use the kitchen sink app as his his baby. Um those kinds of things is put something together to see how hard is it to do this or not with this uh with this technology. Check for an active community and documentation. Oh, documentation of some sort. got to have uh balance between cutting edge and stable. You don't want to be so leading edge that you end up struggling with all this stuff when you can just wait a while and let somebody else struggle through that. Um, a bonus point I will actually I will provide because I've been playing around with this lately is um you can actually in a lot of cases take an app depending on how you've got it especially if it's a hello world a smaller app and you can throw it into an AI engine and tell it to recreate it in a different framework a different language and that will help you sometimes to sort of do a a quick step into that language to see what it looks like because now you're going to take something that you know and convert it into that new language. I would recommend if you can do that manually, if you can do it yourself, that's even better. But if you want to do it, if you're, you know, if you're short on time, then do it that way. Uh, Michael, you're going to throw something out there. Just a little asterct with that. Make sure you do not put any proprietary code into AI because AI will own it. That's true. Try to avoid like passwords, usernames, and things like that. you know, the things that you don't want the rest of the world to see, don't put it in there. It's just like if you don't want your pictures showing up on the internet, don't take those pictures and upload them to the internet. There's those kinds of things out there. That being said, we're going to wrap this one up. We have not gotten all the way through it, but we got through a couple of cool points. As once again, it's amazing. It's really fun watching how AI thinks through some of these topics and as we have said so many times there are a lot of good books, a lot of good sites, a lot of good podcasts out there and you're going to find a lot of the same thing. So it does come down to making sure that you like these are these are common knowledge basically. This is common sense kind of stuff. So utilize it. If you see it from eight or nine different sources, it's probably reliable enough. Even if they all made it up, maybe they made it up and it's got some sort of it's it's working for people. So, good things to think about. Another thing you can think about is how to use your email better. Like send one to [email protected] and just see are you able to send emails and we will confirm, hey, we received that email. Let us know what you think. uh any suggestions you have, comments, requests, uh if you want to be a guest at some point, we would love to talk to you about that because we still have that is a uh an opportunity even though we're like cranking through this and AI is our weekly guest right now. We may take a break and pick somebody else up along the way. As always, I'm not going to go through all the places you can reach out to us. just if you see us, feel free to leave us some back, some sort of uh uh update, uh comments, like us, all that kind of goodness. As always, go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Bonus material. One other thing I'll throw out with this is uh you know, we talked a lot about the tools, plugins. I really, it's funny though because I I know you like kind of dinged on. Yes, Jenkins is old, ants old, but you know, you run into some of these legacy arch legacy systems or large complex systems are out there. There's a place for almost anything out there. And there are times where you have to grab something from the old toolbox to get the job done because there's just no way to do it in a quick, timely fashion. Like I can grab Ant to do something that Maven can't quite do. Uh or even Docker can't do. It's like, oh, I need to build a project in a certain way. I I'm I mean, for instance, I'm doing with a project right now that uses Maven, it takes an hour and a half to build the project. If you do Maven clean install, an hour and a half. Look, trying to dig into it. I'm like, why are they doing all this? Well, Maven has to like like there are so many complex things you have to do, especially if you're dealing with a monolithic application that for some reason someone thought it was a great idea. Let's do a large Maven project with four sub projects, two test projects all under the same umbrella and then write one Maven file to put it all together and it would have been so much faster. So, right tool, right toolbox. Make sure everything's, you know, not a nail, you know, make sure you use the right tool for the toolbox. I agree. And I have to actually like Ant was specifically something that I was just thinking about the other day because I've used it extensively over the years. That is like my go-to. And I just recently took a um and I'm like I have gone deep into Ant. I like got all kinds of libraries. I am like doing all kinds of cool stuff with ant scripts. That is my CI/CD like that is my default but I just recently took it took a script and said I want to create this in Python and knew a couple of the things pretty quick was able to basically lay it out and I actually had AI generate most of it and say like here give me these functions how would you do this? gives me the library. So, I can take that, put it together, and now I've got something that is at least a modern language, I guess. And not I don't want to knock on AMP because it does have its value. And it is for what it does. I've got a lot of a lot of project out there that I use AMP builds. They work fine. They're fast. They're I, you know, I cannot complain about them. Um, but I recognize it's an older technology. There are other things out there. And a lot of times it does, this goes back to my one of my pet peeves. I guess or whatever. One of the things that we talk about on a regular basis is technology sprawl. And as you're growing languages, it is very helpful to grow your tools with it. So you don't suddenly go from, you know, let's sayn net world to python world, but you still have some old, you know, Maven that you're using or something like that. You don't have these old tools. You should upgrade those utilities as well so you don't end up in this the world of sprawl. That being said, we're going to wrap this one up because it is time for us, as I mentioned earlier, it's time for us to go do the second round of this. As always, thank you so much for your time, for hanging out with us, and we will talk to you next [Music]
Transcript Segments
[Music]
because we
hit record and we are live. Uh, this
episode,
this thing, the preamble gets really
short when we do this. So, this one it's
going to we're going to do episodes six
and seven this time around. Six for
everybody here. We just happen to do two
at a time if you've never figured that
out. This is the top of the show and the
next one is going to be the bottom of
the show or something like that.
First one we're going to do is updating
developer tools, keeping your tools
sharp and efficient. And um I need to
bring up where I just threw that into
chat. GPT. Let's make sure it gave me
some answers. Yes, it did. Oh, it gives
me a different number of answers again.
Huh. So, we'll see how this goes. Um
little bonus thing that I was thinking
about is that maybe
what we may want to do is because we've
done this in chat GPT so far, maybe we
want to try like Gemini for the next one
or something. I don't think it gives I
haven't played around with enough to
make sure I've got like the settings for
what I like the default chat GPT is very
chatty like gives you this more
discussional discussion based kind of
thing. But
um I'm wondering if like maybe we maybe
we're throwing one of them in there. So
we'll see just to try or maybe some of
the others that are out there we may
play around with that. Maybe that'll be
like the big finale. will like take this
and throw it through five or six
different AI systems and see what we get
back. Or we could doing that as our
pre-show. Just pick a different one and
do it in the pre-show. And if we don't
like it, just go back to chat GPT. Oh,
that's right. Maybe we'll do that next
time around. So, everybody hang out for
the next episode because that could be
cool. Um, bonus material that is
completely outside of this. I was in a
conversation the other day. We're
talking about dealing with a bunch of
founders of companies and they're all AI
this, AI that. Everything with AI dash
garbage collection with AI. It's like,
and I mean I don't mean memory garbage.
I mean like actual sanitation engineers
garbage collection with AI. Everything
is like we do this, but we use AI to
make it better. And this guy gave me a
great idea that I'm going to throw out
there for everybody. I don't know where
he got it, but um and I can't remember
which engine he was using, but it was
basically the idea that, and we've sort
of heard this before, you can put um a
lot of information into AI, a lot of
these tools so that you can store, you
know, books, articles, and stuff like
that. And he was I can't remember the
one that he was specifically talking
about, but there's one AI out there that
will generate an entire podcast for you.
Audio, it'll do all kinds of stuff. you
give it some stuff and it'll create a
podcast based on that. If you don't uh
if you haven't seen or heard of it, you
can go Google uh AI generated podcast or
something like that and it's actually I
listened to it a while back um just like
the start of it and it's it like
generates it's got multiple hosts. They
have like these little personalities.
So, it sounds like an AI. It sounds like
a podcast, a particularly like not a
high-end podcast like this one, but like
one of your typical lower-end podcasts.
Uh, but it's actually not bad. The idea
he came up with this is you take all
this information, shove it into AI, and
then tell it to create a podcast on that
topic and then listen to it. Because
basically what you're going to do
instead of having to read through all
that content, you now have a podcast
specifically on whatever that topic is.
And particularly if you're trying to
enhance your learning, then you're going
to know where it's like it's bogus and
it's just an AI flaw versus, you know,
the general stuff that's out there. So
it really to me, I was thinking about
it, it's really getting close to where
the matrix where they're like, I just
learned, you know, karate. We can do
stuff like that. So you can, you know,
you're going on a long drive or, you
know, whatever it is, you're waiting in
line somewhere. You can preload those
things and think about like, okay, I'm
going to have like these six topics I
want to be a specialist on. I'm going to
go like shove it in AI and have it
create a podcast for me. It's not that
much different from when we would have,
you know, we've done this, all of us
have done this at some point where you
take like an article or a book or
something like that and basically do an
audio form of it, you know, books on
tape and all that kind of stuff. This
you can do a custombuilt
topic and do it that way. So, I think of
that as like that was really cool idea.
That was like a an aha moment like
that's actually a really awesome use of
AI. Well, I'll tag on to that because
you touched on it. So, I've used things
like text to speech with Siri. Uh I've
used Whisper and I've used Descript to
essentially take a text document and
convert it into an audio file. In fact,
um back before Audible got really
popular, I did that with a lot of books
that I had um was it? uh EUPID or what
whatever the digital format was. Uh when
Alexa first came out, they started
adding the digital uh you know text to
speech, there was a program you could
use back then. I think that's now
Whisper, but it would essentially take
the the text version of the book and
generate a audio format of it. And I
would listen to that while I was
kayaking, driving, whatever. I mean, now
you got Audible in your pocket.
Same premise applies to like if you have
a technical document or something you
you want to hear uh because you're
driving, convert it and listen to it. I
mean podcast is a great idea, but if you
need to absorb like a lot of material
like a textbook or something like that,
this is another way to do it. You could
do it while you're at the gym,
especially if you're one that learns by
hearing, not by reading. I've actually
used that a couple times working out,
particularly if I'm in something like a
um
you know, one of the machines where
you've got somewhere that you can like
take notes. I've used that to refu to
review u RFPs to do requirements. Uh
lots of documents like that where it's
like I really just need to hear all of
it and I can always go back and like,
you know, re uh you know, go backwards
and have it reread it. And I've used
that with the um the audio readers for
quite a while where I'll just like throw
a document. I'll just be like just read
it and then it's not even AI. It's just
like it's reading the document. So yeah,
there's some there's some pretty
um cool uses of technology when you you
think through it, including an AI
generated uh topic thing. So that's what
we're going to talk about and that's
what we're going to go to. Do you have
something you wanted to I was going to
say say you're kind of low. Adjust your
camera just slightly or Oh, whoop like
that. Yeah, there you go. I just grew an
inch.
Something like that. You're just kind of
low. I am. Before I start, I'm going to
throw another light on the topic.
Heard that one. What's that one?
I don't know if this Welcome to the
bonus pre-show. That's right.
They're going to start doing my makeup
next. And that's where it just goes to
this. There you go. Makeup done.
I look a lot better when it's like
blocked out. All right. Had too much fun
already. Uh, yes. Bonus is uh Oh, wow.
It Oh, that's cool. It doesn't like that
color. So, somewhere in there. There you
go. Got my wine. Drinking a little
malbeck this time around.
I'm going for bourbon. Little cheese and
crackers and stuff like that. I figured
it's a it's a good wine night.
We'll cover that in the good and the
bad. And we're going to do a little
three, a two, a one. Hello and welcome
back. We are continuing our episodes,
our season that is with AI. We're taking
two seasons back, walking through the
topics, and we are throwing it out to AI
and seeing what AI says and see we'll
have some conversations around that
because sometimes it's spot-on,
sometimes it's not. First, I am spot on.
always time always when I'm talking
about this except for just right now. My
name is Rob Broadhead. I am one of the
founders of developer also a founder of
the founder of RB Consulting. At RB
Consulting, we basically help you work
your way through your technology junk
drawer. People have got so much stuff
out there these days. There's so many
solutions, so many applications. They
all need to talk together. There are
varying versions and all that. We've
spent a lot of time, decades now, in the
technology world and we help you. We sit
down with you. We do a technology access
assessment. We figure out where you're
at. This is partially also about your
business and where do you want to go so
that we can figure out a custom recipe
for you to move forward with a road map,
a technology roadmap that leverages
technology the best way it can. And now
you don't have to worry about anymore.
you're actually spending money to make
money and not worried about some big,
you know, load stone that you have
around your neck called technology or
sprawl. We do integration, we do imple
implementation,
simplification, automation, innovation,
all of those things are part of our tool
chest. However it is that we can get you
best from where you are to where you
want to be. Good things and bad things.
I'm gonna like combo it because today
has been like a perfect good thing, bad
thing. Uh recently, last few weeks,
months now, I guess, I've had issues
with one of my cars. It's like not
worked well. And so, finally, we're
like, "All right, we're going to take it
into the shop cuz we've got a big big
trip coming ahead that we're going to be
driving the car for a while and we want
to make sure it's like up to speed, not
no pun intended." We take it in and it
turns out that it's like what nobody
wants to hear is basically drivetrain
issues. It's the like it basically thing
needs to be rebuilt. Engine needs to be
rebuilt. That sucks. That would be bad
news and the fact that we don't have a
car. Good news is it's actually under
warranty. There was a lawsuit related to
this thing. Everybody got an extended
warranty. We are just under the mileage
so that the extended warranty will still
hold out for us. So, we're going to go
have this thing rebuilt for us and it's
not going to cost us anything because
it's covered under the warranty. So,
instead of it being like, you know, a
100 miles over the limit, we're actually
just underneath it. This is going to be
pretty awesome.
Not even close to over the limit is
Michael and he is going to go ahead and
introduce himself. Hey everyone, my name
is Michael Malashsh. I'm one of the
co-founders of developer building better
developers. I'm also the founder of a
company called Envision QA where we help
startups and small teams deliver
high-quality software faster through
software testing, automation, and agile
development practices. At Envision QA,
we're passionate about bridging the gap
between innovation and quality. Whether
you're building your MVP or scaling it,
uh, you know, scaling a large production
system, we provide the technology,
leadership, and testing strategies to
help you succeed.
Let's see, good thing, bad thing. Uh, I
guess it's kind of mixed. I kind of
touched on it a while back. Uh, our TV
downstairs uh was acting up on the fritz
similar to what you were going through
and um we came back from uh our
Riverhouse, sat down, got Renee wanted
to sit down and watch the um Mexico race
and turned the TV on and it just uh the
little light indicator just kept
flashing. It never engaged, didn't do
anything. It was dead. an hour of that
it was toast.
Good thing she we went to Best Buy and
she walked around and on the wall they
had one TV left that she absolutely
loved. It was the right price and we
will have it delivered next week.
Sometimes everything works out for you.
That's a bonus.
And that's one of the blessings of being
here in the mighty United States, I
guess we'll call it, because you can buy
crap on basically every single corner.
It is amazing how many even in this day
how many still big box retailers are out
there. So if you need something, yeah,
you can always Amazon it. And we are so
spoiled by that. Wow. I've I recently
had something that took two weeks to
come to me. And I was like, what the
heck is wrong with this? And it's like,
oh yeah, this is actually how things
normally work when you don't Amazon it.
That is not a free plug for Actually, it
is a free plug for Amazon. If you guys
want to pay us, that would be awesome.
Thank you. Now, moving on. So, this
episode, we're going back to the episode
that was called updating developer
tools. Keeping your tools sharp and
efficient. Once again, if you haven't
noticed, the title itself basically came
from AI. So,
pardon that. I just accidentally paused
our stuff. That's too many buttons. Um
anyway, so it came back with not the
like
fluffy thing it did last time. It's just
basically like here are several key
points and themes that will resonate
with your audience of developers and
side hustlers. So AI thinks you guys are
going to be resonating. So hopefully
this will work. Uh we'll see how it goes
as far as what we did as well thinking
through these things. So core message,
why tooling matters, efficiency equals
profitability.
Outdated tools cost time, create
friction, and slow down delivery.
Especially harmful for side hustlers
with limited hours. Wow. I don't think
that we covered that in this episode. I
think we have talked about this in many
ways in the past. So, and that is
really really a key thing. I I'm going
to start with this because I have worked
with a lot of people that have come out
of uh either come straight out of
college where they have like their
limited tool set and that's it. They
really aren't exposed to tools. They're
more like command line stuff and things
like that. They really some you'll get
like an IDE but they really have not
really like utilized it. So things like
uh debugging usually they're not really
comfortable with the debuggers. a lot of
the auto autogenerated stuff that are in
there like even if you like use like
Visual Studio Code that can run across I
don't know countless languages if you
use the right plugins you can do a lot
strictly in the ID and just get going
it'll spin up you can spin up containers
all that kind of stuff IDs modern IDs
are really really stinking powerful
particularly coming from someone who
goes back to like the Emacs and compile
you know G++ C G G G G G G G G G G G G G
G G G G G G G G GCC days and stuff like
that. Um,
this is really I think something we
don't spend enough time on in schools
and I think too often this is where
actually to me this is a little bit of
that coding developer coder developer
split is that if you get too tied down
to your tool and now you're 5 10 15
years into it, you're going to miss out
on newer tools and some of the things
they can do. I will I will confess that
I've been in that situation for a long
time.
I was stuck with the same uh Eclipse STS
stuff that I'd used for years and years
and years. It worked fine. It covered
what I needed to. But I went over to
Intelligj because of a project I was on
and it was like, "All right, I'll go
jump into this new ID and really liked
it. Not to mention the fact that because
I had dealt with other IntelligJ tools,
it really worked well in the the
wheelhouse that I was in." So I think
and that's where I think it's the
creating friction and slowing down
delivery. I think one of the keys is not
only that you are
using modern tools and staying up to
date. Don't fall behind and work on you
know Visual Studio 2010 when it's now
2025. But also as a team I think it is
very very useful to have everybody just
homogeneous tools across the board
because you don't have to worry about uh
you know like throwing something out a
repository and then you down you check
it out and now it's got all this extra
crap that you don't need or somebody
changes libraries for their ID but it
doesn't get changed for your IDE. And I
will get off my soap box right now and
I'm gonna let Michael because I know you
have some thoughts on this as well. I
want to throw this out to you. Yeah. So
the whole IDE thing, we'll just start
with that since you were kind of on your
soap box on that.
Given your team, I I like the idea of
everyone using the tools you're
comfortable with. But the problem you
run in to with that is if you're dealing
with larger corporations or larger
teams, sometimes you run into issues
where, well, you have this guy using
Visual Code, he's running into a bug.
Well, how do you debug it if the tools
aren't really helping them? But yet over
here in like Eclipse or Intelligj, oh,
hey, we have this nice debugger.
Sometimes the right tool or the right
IDE really is what helps you. Um, and
sometimes it's better to just do maybe
do a hackathon maybe once a quarter or
twice a year just on development tools
or what whatever it is that helps you
and your company grow. play around with
it. You know, pick a solution like, hey,
we need a continuous integration
pipeline. We don't have that. Or our
current one is slow. Let's go play
around with like this team go play with
this one. This team go play with this
one. Find, you know, come up with a
solution and let's see if it solves our
problem. Just be careful though that
you're not trying to find a solution for
something you don't have and then you
try to, you know, hammer, square peg,
round hole. Don't, you know, don't
pigeon hole yourself. make sure you're
finding the right tools for the the job.
But yeah, when it comes to tools, I
mean, God, we've been around for ever. I
mean, I don't want to call us dinosaurs,
but you know, I remember Lisp and having
to write uh, you know, my own
programming language back in college on,
you know, Silicon Graphics machine that
doesn't even exist anymore. They got
bought out by uh what Oracle years ago.
I mean or Sun and now Oracle. But tools
change, languages change. It's
everchanging.
Don't get into something and never
change. Like it always try to keep up
with like software updates, uh SDK
updates. Um we're on a project right now
dealing with uh Python. Well, Python's
already gone through two major version
changes just while we're on this
project. You know, make sure that what
you're working on stays compliant.
Especially if you're like dealing with
banks or whatever industry you're in,
you could get into trouble very quickly
because, oh, I'm 2 or 3 years behind in
my technology and suddenly I'm now
running into OASP issues. I'm running
into sorbane oxley. I'm running into
issues. Be careful with that because
it's not just your tools, but it could
be external factors that are opening you
up and your teams up to other potential
problems.
Before we move on, I I really want to
jump on the idea. I love the idea of a
hackathon where it is like IDE specific
or tool specific. I think that'd be a
really cool hackathon thing to do is to
take particularly to take like people
that aren't in a certain tool or moving
into a new language. It's not just a
different language, but a specific tool
to really show how that can work. And
you probably get some pretty cool
sponsors based on that as well. Um, the
other thing that I wanted to mention was
something that I have now forgotten
unfortunately, uh, dealing with
different tools and things of that
nature. And since I've forgotten it, I
guess we can move here. I'll tag back on
with that. Um, so with your tools,
especially like if you're visual code,
you mentioned Eclipse, Intelligj, there
are plugins that all these idees use.
Plugins are another thing to be very
careful of to stay compliant with and
keep them updated because if you don't
upgrade your idees enough, your plugins
could break or they may not work as you
continue to go forward. So be careful
with plugins, be careful with your
idees, but always try to stay compliant
and current. The best example of this,
you mentioned that your experience with
Eclipse kind of waned over time and you
went to Intelligj and it's like, oh wow,
hey, this is great. But yet I was on a
spring project and I actually found that
the Spring Eclipse build was better than
the Intelligj build when it came to
debugging the server information. It
just for some reason the Eclipse IDE was
just so much easier to look at and play
with. But as far as the coding side
though, IntelliJ was great. So, I
actually found myself jumping back and
forth between different IDE for
different features within them to get my
job done faster. And I do think that's
part of it is you get we all get
connected more to we're more comfortable
with what we know. So, it is helpful for
us to be out of our comfort zone at
times. Uh, the other thing I was going
to mention is
the idea of having like regular brown
bag sessions or something like that
where you talk about a new IDE, uh, the
latest improvements on one, plugins that
you've used and you've had good
experience with. Uh, those kinds of
things I think are are very valuable.
Um, better tools, better code. Modern
tools often encourage better practices,
cleaner code, and faster feedback loops.
I'm not even going to, you know, mess
with that one. Uh, sharpening the saw.
Staying updated is like keeping your
blade sharp. It's a professional habit,
not just a nice to have. We've actually
just talked about that. Um, main talking
points, signs it's time to update. Let's
see how this one goes. Oh,
slow performance or crashes, lack of
support for new standards and languages,
poor integration with modern tooling,
for example, GitHub actions and Docker.
Team or community has moved on, for
example, jQuery versus React. Now, I
think all of those are are critical are
red flags to say, "Hey, maybe you need
to move on or update or upgrade or
things like that." I would say that one
of the best depending on where you're at
again because sometimes you're stuck
with what you're stuck with. You're in a
an industry that's going to be behind
the curve. But I would go point to that
last point about team or community is
like what is the you don't want to be on
the like you don't always want to be the
joiner but you do want to look at like
what are the the upand cominging
technologies languages frameworks
um for example
JavaScript has like a billion frameworks
it feels like uh the difference versus
uh react versus node versus angular
versus
all of this stuff and then especially
when you start pulling in uh you know
Flutter and Bootstrap and all these
things that are like they're you know
the varying languages or libraries and
frameworks that out there there's a lot
out there. It is worth it to stay
current in what you've got but it's also
particularly if you are at a a point
where you can make a change to take a
look at what's out there and see if it's
time to change. jQuery has been around
for a long time and yes there's a
billion examples and stuff like that but
maybe that's not where you need to be.
Maybe it's not. Let's not write another
PHP jQuery, you know, type application.
Instead, let's move forward and have
like a nice little API where it's PHP
and you don't you if you really like
that language or maybe it's like now use
Node for your API server, you use React
as your front end, maybe you want React
Native because you want mobile. I don't
want to get into the religion part of
the languages, but I do think that's
very important as I think the community
that out that is out there is a key
portion of your decisions and should be
part of your red flags because if you're
doing something and people are not
supporting it anymore, then you know,
you probably need to walk away from it.
If everybody's going away from it, but
it still has huge community support,
then you're probably okay to continue.
Thoughts on that? Yeah, the first thing
that comes to mind is like Java 8. Java
8's old, but it is still supported. It's
still there. Um, it's not something
that's going away anytime soon. I I
mean, I think it's got like a few more
years of uh like end of life before it
hits end of life.
But I will follow up with that. So, I'm
not going to go too because you really
touched on a lot of the good points in
this. I'm going to touch on the bad
points.
Learning new things is great. Staying
current is great. Keeping up with the
trends is great. Moving your project to
something that is bleeding edge or looks
like, oh, this looks like a great
technology. Check GitHub. Check wherever
you're at. How re, you know, how old is
this technology? How well is it
supported in the community? Uh, from a
testing standpoint, I will tell you,
I've been on many, many projects where
people are like, "Oh, well, karate is
great." uh or you know cucumber is great
or you know testing G is great they go
through cycles but the funny thing is
80% of all testing frameworks that were
thrown at me I would go out to GitHub oh
there's like two people two supporters
two people working on the you do not
want to go to something that has a very
very very small community not yet it may
be cool to learn it may be cool to just
play around with it But
there are reasons that,
you know, Java works. There's reasons
that Node works. There's reasons that
React works. They have very large
communities. They're very well
supported. And you can basically throw a
book at anything. You know, throw Dart.
You're going to hit a site somewhere
that is going to help you get what you
need to get your job done. So, just be
very careful with where you go with some
of these technologies.
Um, I agree 100% that there's some very
good points there, things to think about
when you're moving. In the interest of
time, I'm going to jump ahead a little
bit to evaluating new tools and we're
sort of wrap up with this because I
think while they AI also kicked out
categories of tools to regular review. I
think we more I'll fly through these IDs
and code editors, version control tools,
testing and QA tools, build systems and
CI/CD.
Jenkins, I'm looking at you. Uh, package
managers and dependency managers
may actually Ant, I'm looking at you
if you're using that or worse. Uh,
containerization and environment
management like Docker and stuff like
that. Um, so the one I want to talk
about evaluating tool new tools. I want
to sort of leave you guys with this
thought. So here's some things that
gives you gives us four bullet points.
So if you're evaluating new tools, ask
does it solve a real painoint? We've
talked about this quite a bit. Try
before full adoption. Start with a side
project. Always, always, always, always.
You get like a a proof of concept. Uh
Michael loves to use the kitchen sink
app as his his baby. Um those kinds of
things is put something together to see
how hard is it to do this or not with
this uh with this technology. Check for
an active community and documentation.
Oh, documentation of some sort. got to
have uh balance between cutting edge and
stable. You don't want to be so leading
edge that you end up struggling with all
this stuff when you can just wait a
while and let somebody else struggle
through that. Um, a bonus point I will
actually I will provide because I've
been playing around with this lately is
um you can actually in a lot of cases
take an app depending on how you've got
it especially if it's a hello world a
smaller app and you can throw it into an
AI engine and tell it to recreate it in
a different framework a different
language and that will help you
sometimes to sort of do a a quick step
into that language to see what it looks
like because now you're going to take
something that you know and convert it
into that new language. I would
recommend if you can do that manually,
if you can do it yourself, that's even
better.
But if you want to do it, if you're, you
know, if you're short on time, then do
it that way. Uh, Michael, you're going
to throw something out there. Just a
little asterct with that. Make sure you
do not put any proprietary code into AI
because AI will own it.
That's true. Try to avoid like
passwords, usernames, and things like
that. you know, the things that you
don't want the rest of the world to see,
don't put it in there. It's just like if
you don't want your pictures showing up
on the internet, don't take those
pictures and upload them to the
internet. There's those kinds of things
out there.
That being said, we're going to wrap
this one up. We have not gotten all the
way through it, but we got through a
couple of cool points. As once again,
it's amazing.
It's really fun watching how AI thinks
through some of these topics and as we
have said so many times there are a lot
of good books, a lot of good sites, a
lot of good podcasts out there and
you're going to find a lot of the same
thing. So it does come down to making
sure that you like these are these are
common knowledge basically. This is
common sense kind of stuff. So
utilize it. If you see it from eight or
nine different sources, it's probably
reliable enough. Even if they all made
it up, maybe they made it up and it's
got some sort of it's it's working for
people. So, good things to think about.
Another thing you can think about is how
to use your email better. Like send one
and just see are you able to send emails
and we will confirm, hey, we received
that email. Let us know what you think.
uh any suggestions you have, comments,
requests, uh if you want to be a guest
at some point, we would love to talk to
you about that because we still have
that is a uh an opportunity even though
we're like cranking through this and AI
is our weekly guest right now. We may
take a break and pick somebody else up
along the way. As always, I'm not going
to go through all the places you can
reach out to us. just if you see us,
feel free to leave us some back, some
sort of uh uh update, uh comments, like
us, all that kind of goodness. As
always, go out there and have yourself a
great day, a great week, and we will
talk to you next time.
Bonus material.
One other thing I'll throw out with this
is uh
you know, we talked a lot about the
tools, plugins. I really, it's funny
though because I I know you like kind of
dinged on. Yes, Jenkins is old, ants
old, but you know, you run into some of
these legacy arch legacy systems or
large complex systems are out there.
There's a place for almost anything out
there. And there are times where you
have to grab something from the old
toolbox to get the job done because
there's just no way to do it in a quick,
timely fashion. Like I can grab Ant to
do something that Maven can't quite do.
Uh or even Docker can't do. It's like,
oh, I need to build a project in a
certain way. I I'm I mean, for instance,
I'm doing with a project right now that
uses Maven,
it takes an hour and a half to build the
project. If you do Maven clean install,
an hour and a half.
Look, trying to dig into it. I'm like,
why are they doing all this? Well, Maven
has to like like there are so many
complex things you have to do,
especially if you're dealing with a
monolithic application that for some
reason someone thought it was a great
idea. Let's do a large Maven project
with four sub projects, two test
projects all under the same umbrella and
then write one Maven file to put it all
together and it would have been so much
faster.
So, right tool, right toolbox. Make sure
everything's, you know, not a nail, you
know, make sure you use the right tool
for the toolbox. I agree. And I have to
actually like Ant was specifically
something that I was just thinking about
the other day because I've used it
extensively over the years. That is like
my go-to. And I just recently took a um
and I'm like I have gone deep into Ant.
I like got all kinds of libraries. I am
like doing all kinds of cool stuff with
ant scripts. That is my CI/CD like that
is my default but I just recently took
it took a script and said I want to
create this in Python and knew a couple
of the things pretty quick was able to
basically lay it out and I actually had
AI generate most of it and say like here
give me these functions how would you do
this? gives me the library. So, I can
take that, put it together, and now I've
got something that is at least a modern
language, I guess. And not I don't want
to knock on AMP because it does have its
value. And it is for what it does. I've
got a lot of a lot of project out there
that I use AMP builds. They work fine.
They're fast. They're I, you know, I
cannot complain about them. Um, but
I recognize it's an older technology.
There are other things out there. And a
lot of times it does, this goes back to
my one of my pet peeves. I guess or
whatever. One of the things that we talk
about on a regular basis is technology
sprawl. And as you're growing languages,
it is very helpful to grow your tools
with it. So you don't suddenly go from,
you know, let's sayn net world to python
world, but you still have some old, you
know, Maven that you're using or
something like that. You don't have
these old tools. You should upgrade
those utilities as well so you don't end
up in this the world of sprawl. That
being said, we're going to wrap this one
up because it is time for us, as I
mentioned earlier, it's time for us to
go do the second round of this. As
always, thank you so much for your time,
for hanging out with us, and we will
talk to you next
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