/dev/hell

Episode 100: The Final Rant

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Sun, 31 May 2020 21:27:00 -0400

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

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

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

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

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Links and Notes

How Complex Systems Fail

Episode 99: Can I Keep Flexing (Extended Mix)

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Sun, 26 Jan 2020 12:47:00 -0500

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

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

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

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Links and Notes

Paul likes using Amazon Athena for storing WonderNetwork’s information-rich log files
What to do when an HTC Vive breaks before you even use it
Space Pirate Trainer
Control (the game)
The Outer Worlds
The Football Manager series of games
Game Maker Studio
Raku is what Perl 6 ended up becoming
The “leftpad incident”
What is the Commonwealth
Chris uses WonderVPN for all his adult-content watching needs
Ed is still making music over at Dead Agent
We argued about radio royalties
The well-off-but-not-elite people of Ontario often lust after properties in Cottage country
Microconf is a conference for small business owners who don’t intend on taking VC money

Episode 98: No Hair, Don't Care

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Sat, 26 Oct 2019 15:49:00 -0400

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

BLINK TWICE IF YOU WANT MORE EPISODES.

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Links and Notes

Check out Ed’s musical project Dead Agent
Check out Chris' latest book “The Grumpy Programmer’s Guide To Testing PHP Applications”

Episode 97: Hot For Teacher

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Sat, 6 Apr 2019 21:23:00 -0400

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

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

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Links and Notes

You can find “Code Like A Pro” at Manning books
You can use the promo code poddevhell19 to get 40% the book (and maybe others?)
Dane used ASCIIDOC to format the book
You can find Dane on The Twitters at @easyaspython
Chris talks about how he is learning about CQRS and Event Sourcing

Episode 96: Chimps and Snakes and Boots

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Thu, 24 Jan 2019 18:35:00 -0500

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

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

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Links and Notes

The TIOBE Index
Chris’s and Ed'spreferred IDE for doing Python work, PyCharm
The Rust programming language
The Go programming language
The concept of duck typing
Bootstrap-Vue component and grid system
Chris' site for his Magic the Gathering EDH league

Episode 95: That Took Longer Than We Expected

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Wed, 2 Jan 2019 15:57:00 -0500

It did, in fact, take longer than six months.

This was recorded on June 20, 2018.

Still here.

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Episode 94: Shaking Off The Rust

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Sun, 19 Nov 2017 19:13:00 -0500

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

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

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

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Links and Notes

Matchbox Cowork Studio
The Black Sparrow
Apologies to Martin Fowler for attributing this awesome post about testing at Google hosted by Mr. Fowler and written by Mike Bland to Michael Feathers

Episode 93: 40 Attendees Enter, None Leave

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Fri, 25 Aug 2017 19:13:00 -0400

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

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

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Links and Notes

Is Chris a sleeper agent for the Black Donnellys?
It’s not Spy vs Spy but Lou vs. Lou
Chris decided to try something different for computer equipment when travelling
This film once prompted an accusation that “When Goose died, Hartjes cried”
Check out Firefox Nightly to see what in store for Firefox 57, to be released in November 2017
Chris is speaking at WeCamp 2017 and Symfony Live Berlin
Ed will be speaking at Elixir with Love, AllThingsOpen, and TechCampMemphis

Episode 92: JSON and The Argonauts

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Wed, 28 Jun 2017 19:13:00 -0400

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

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

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

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

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Links and Notes

Ed talked about how easy it is to be a dick online back in 2015
Ed recommends checking out this book on non-violent communication
Interested in iOS development like Ed? Check out the Swift programming language
Ray Wenderlich is a go-to person for Swift knowledge
Now that Ed is a baller and has a dedicated desk at his co-working space, he bought a new Dell 4K monitor
Ed is also using the Rain Design mStand for his laptop
Chris is trying out a mechanical keyboard for the first time in 20 years — a bluetooth one from lophree
Chris also has some very ambitious networking plans for his next house
Ed will be appearing at WordCampDC, PyOhio and has his fingers crossed about PNWPHP
Chris will be coaching at WeCamp 2017 and doing a testing workshop (and maybe more) at Symfony Live Berlin

Episode 91: Check the police blotter in Mountain View

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Mon, 29 May 2017 19:13:00 -0400

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

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

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Links and Notes

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

Episode 90: Same As It Ever Was

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Sat, 20 May 2017 19:13:00 -0400

Chris and Ed talk about Ed’s new laptop and his decision to transition to do OSMI full-time. They also talked about their new Patreon that’s helping them find sponsors for the podcast.

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Links and Notes

Please support Ed’s efforts to make OSMI his main gig
Back when we got a new MBP Chris talked about his new setup

Episode 89: Selling Out Never Felt So Good

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Tue, 28 Mar 2017 19:13:00 -0400

Chris and Ed decided to push themselves out of their comfort zone and talked to Laravel community superstar Matt Stauffer. We talked about Matt’s experience writing a book for a major publish (with an animal on the cover and everything), asked the question “does consistency in code matter for OSS projects” and Chris sadly muted his mic while Matt and Ed discussed the Analogue NT Mini gaming console.

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Links and Notes

Matt’s book Laravel Up And Running
Chris hacks away on OpenCFP
Symposium is an app designed to help speakers collect their talks
The Anologue NT Mini is Ed’s latest console purchase
How weird film shot at 120fps will look
Matt is one of the big shots at Tighten
You can play video games in your browser thanks to the Internet Archive’s Console Living Room

Episode 88: Ocho Ocho

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Tue, 21 Feb 2017 19:13:00 -0500

A short-ish episode this time out where our Dynamic Duo went guestless and talked about their recent conference experiences in Salt Lake City, Antwerp, and Miami.

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Links and Notes

Eric Lindros gets wiped out by Scott Stevens, never to be an elite-level player again
Chris and Ed spoke at SunshinePHP, enjoying the crazy happy-hour scene and tropical drinks
Ed spoke at LoopConf
The video of Ed’s talk is up on YouTube where he dressed like Emo Ernie
Chris spoke at PHP Benelux

Episode 87: Asking Questions Down Under

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Mon, 23 Jan 2017 20:31:00 -0500

This time out we asked our listeners to submit some questions because we are tired of winning so much and wanted to let others get in on it. Along the way Ed talked about a recent computer-related purchase he made on eBay while Chris talked about one the earliest science fiction short stories he can remember while feeling incredibly old at the same time.

Don’t worry, Chris' ego let him know he was not old and is still awesome.

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Links and Notes

“What would you do if we weren’t programming as a career?”
“How do you get to the point where you don’t need to submit resumes to get jobs?”
What the heck is the Commodore Plus/4 and why doesn’t Ed know everything about CP/M
Ray Bradbury’s A Sound Of Thunder is a legendary time travel story

Episode 86: Necromantic Spies and Imagined Corporate Friends

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Tue, 10 Jan 2017 21:29:00 -0500

YOUR 2016 PHP PODCAST OF THE YEAR from simpleprogrammer.com

Welcome to the very first episode of 2017! We’re back after a nice break for the holidays and ready to get back to being insightful and unfiltered.

In this episode we talked about the concept of “programming as craft” with Chris and Ed having a great discussion about what should follow after the phrase “programmers need to learn empathy.”

Ed also released some music, and is donating all the proceeds to OSMI. Chris was sad that he did not get the opportunity to re-record the vocal tracks from some of Ed’s older material in his own signature vocal style.

Chris also talked (not so briefly) about the new laptop he bought and the security measures he decided to take with it.

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Links and Notes

Kent Beck’s tweet about programmers and empathy
Ed recommended a book on non-violent communication
Ed’s music stylings as Dead Agent
Chris bought a Satechi Slim Type-C Multi-Port Adapter and one of the Apple USB-A-to-C adapters for his YubiKey
Can Single User Mode get around FileVault?
Prey can help protect your laptop if it gets stolen
Chris blogged about his new laptop and setup
Both Ed and Chris have had great success with recommendations provided by The Wirecutter

Episode 85: Brand Dilution As A Source Of Happiness

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Sun, 18 Dec 2016 15:23:00 -0500

Welcome to our end-of-year episode! It has been probably the most gratifying year in a long time for both Chris and Ed. Chris' work at Mozilla has really changed his perspective on the value of the open web and his future. Ed finally got the chance to sink his teeth into a true leadership role at GraphStory and with a lot of help OSMI became a non-profit poised to continue doing excellent work in the field of bringing awareness to mental health issues.

Crazy travel schedules, the last TrueNorthPHP, Chris and Ed laughing about things more than usual, and a very passionate non-testing-related speech from Chris can be found in this final episode of 2016.

We know 2016 sucked for a lot of people and 2017 is likely to suck worse. Hang in there, we will be here for you.

Feel like helping OSMI raise some money this Christmas while consuming conspicuously? Please consider using Amazon Smile to send a small portion of each purchase to OSMI.

We’ve included a large number of links below for things we have bought or considered buying for our loved ones (and often ourselves) with Smile affiliation.

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Links and Notes

GO HERE FIRST BEFORE YOU BUY

Amazon Smile purchases all benefit Open Sourcing Mental Illness.

Episode 84: Whiny Feedback Loops

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Sat, 22 Oct 2016 14:11:00 -0400

Chris and Ed record a very quick show to talk about Ed’s latest conference adventure, the launch of some new stuff from OSMI, and Chris talks about feedback loops, hoodies that don’t fit, and the end of TrueNorthPHP.

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Links and Notes

Ed spoke at DevSpace 2016 in Huntsville
There are now some donations-welcome ebooks available from OSMI
Chris and Ed will have a rare meat-space meetup at Eternal Weekend
All the OSMI t-shirts and hoodies are done through Clockwise

Episode 83: Sasquatch Uses PHP

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Tue, 11 Oct 2016 20:52:00 -0400

Pacific Northwest PHP co-organizer Tess Mero joins Ed and Chris to discuss her work organizing one of the newer regional conferences, Joomla, and what the hell does Cisco have to offer PHP developers.

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Links and Notes

Tessa’s blog and Twitter account
Big Fan with Patton Oswalt
Cisco DevNet
Thinkful
The always awesome Jeremy Lindblom
Joomla
Tessa learned a lot about Joomla via courses at Open Source Training
Fellow developer evangelist Mike Stowe
Cisco Spark
Tropo
The Pacific Northwest PHP conference

Episode 82: Open 24 Hours, Just Not All In One Day

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Fri, 9 Sep 2016 17:59:00 -0400

In this scintillating episode Chris and Ed shift gears and talk about their own experiences working “in the open”. Chris is very fortunate that everything he does at Mozilla gets open-sourced while Ed talks about his experiences back when he was running Spaz.

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Links and Notes

Chris' work at Mozilla generally ends up in their Mozilla Services GitHub repo
When Ed’s employer does open source things, they fall under the Graph Story repo
Mozilla is using TestPilot to test new features for their browsers
Opera had a pretty nasty security breach
Ed mentioned that one of Graph Story’s open source projects is a iOS Neo4J library
Ed is also getting better at branding — GLOSSY has been renamed HackLafayette despite Chris saying it should be called G-POSSY
The last ever TrueNorthPHP is coming up fast — November 3-5
Ed was the lead on Spaz, one of the first 3rd party Twitter clients
Chris used to get great schadenfreude by reading about all sorts of stupid failed startups over at Fucked Company

Episode 81: It Feels Good To Be A D-List Internet Superstar

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Sun, 28 Aug 2016 19:34:00 -0400

This time around Chris and Ed attempt to shame you with their D-lister activities and ability to purchase things they want but don’t need.

We cover PyOhio, the long-anticipated php|cruise, and some useful gadgets they’ve incorporated into their work flows.

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Links and Notes

Ed spoke about his usual stuff at PyOhio and Chris thought the event looked awesome
Ed’s talk from PyOhio
Chris got sucked in by the Facebook advertising for the Henge Dock
Chris brought his long-suffering wife along with him for php|cruise and highly recommends cruising as a vacation option
Ed likes the Roost Laptop Stand
Chris bought some generic monitor-stand-and-USB hub at Winners
Ed had some UPS fun with his new Tom Bihn bag
Both Chris and Ed highly recommend the Wirecutter’s travel gear guide

Episode 80: Lifestyles of the Moderately Privileged and Internet Famous

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Tue, 2 Aug 2016 15:08:00 -0400

This episode, Chris remembers his feline companion and Office Manager who passed away recently. Then we get into an insanely long discussion of travel tips and horror stories.

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Links and Notes

Episode 79: Unlikely Hero Fails to Press Mute

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Mon, 11 Jul 2016 15:51:00 -0400

This time out we spoke with Noelle Daley who shared her experiences at New Relic moving developer relations to being a developer via a programming bootcamp. We also discussed Ed’s latest round of work promoting OSMI and Noelle’s talk she gave at OSBridge in Portland.

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Links and Notes

Noelle on Twitter
Noelle polished up her developer skills at HackBright
She works on the New Relic APM product
It’s pretty awesome that New Relic provides opportunities for people to transition into different types of jobs
Ed’s local newspaper talked about his work on OSMI
Chris had a great time at PHP Southcoast
He also got to hangout with 1300 fellow co-workers in London
Perl 5’s super-chill release manager
Open Source Bridge
Find out what conferences are accepting papers at The CFP Report

Episode 78: Who Leaves Velveeta and No Beer In A Fridge?

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Wed, 8 Jun 2016 14:28:00 -0400

It’s rare that we have some folks who work for the same employer back-to-back on the show, but this time out we spoke with Jessica Rose. Jessica is Tracy Osborne’s boss (Tracy was on the show in Episode 77) and talked about her own experiences creating a different kind of developer relations team at Dream Factory.

Along the way we found out how much better Chris handled jet lag at the same Australian conference Jessica was at and how thankful she is her husband pays zero attention to Twitter.

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Links and Notes

Jessica on Twitter
Her employer Dream Factory
Jessica and Ed really enjoy AirBnB while Chris is a dedicated “sharing economy” hater. Meet the new middleman, same as the old middleman
The famous “no regerts” tattoo
The Car Wars game from Steve Jackson Games
Read the crazy story of when Steve Jackson Games got a visit from the U.S. Secret Service
Baseball Stars
Canadian hip-hop band Dream Warriors
Don Rickles
Gap Jumpers
Ian Banks “The Culture” series
Univeral Basic Income
Uber’s plan to have driverless cars

Episode 77: Escaping To The Canadian Hellscape

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Tue, 24 May 2016 09:14:00 -0400

On the 77th episode of you favourite comedy podcast about technology and aging programmers, Chris and Ed spoke with Tracy Osborn about her new job in developer relations, living the sweet rent-free life in the Bay Area and how she is making the smart move of relocating with her Kanuckistanian husband to Toronto.

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Links and Notes

Tracy on Twitter
She works at DreamFactory
Her wedding startup
500 Startups Accelerator
Be sure to read the source at Reportive.com
Docker
The drive-in theatre near Chris
Tracy went to Cal Poly for Computer Science but quickly switched
Zed Shaw’s Learn Python The Hard Way
Tracy’s Hello Web App books
Both Chris and Tracy know Amy Hoy
Ed’s series of tweets about a self-absorbed programmer giving up on Rails

Episode 76: No, YOU'RE A Tool

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Sun, 8 May 2016 22:20:00 -0400

Photo by Sira Sara - CC BY 2.0

Chris and Ed sit down to talk about their recent travels to conference both near and far and to also discuss what tools and languages they have been using at their day jobs.

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Links and Notes

Tools we use:

Languages:

Ed: PHP, JavaScript, Python
Chris: Python with a side of PHP

Editors:

PHPStorm*
Sublime Text
Nano
Marked editor for previewing Markdown documents
Atom
Vim

Libraries and tools

Vue.js
HTTPie
Ed did not like Webpack
py.test
Chris just got into the private beta for Docker
Paw HTTP client for OS-X

Things we wanted to use but never got into it

Ed: I bought multiple ruby and rails books
Chris: Node, Emacs, step-through debuggers

Episode 75: Together But Alone

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Fri, 15 Apr 2016 12:51:00 -0400

We’re three-quarters of the way through to The End! In this episode it was just Ed and Chris talking about two issues that are very important to them. We go over the early results from Ed’s Open Sourcing Mental Illness survey and then have a very long discussion about the events surrounding LambdaConf 2016.

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Links and Notes

Please fill out the OSMI survey
LambdaConf organizer’s explanations
Brendan Eich resigning as Mozilla CEO after 9 days
Body Count’s “Cop Killer” controversy
Ed spoke at The Combine
Ed will be speaking at Kalamazoo X
Chris spent 27 hours flying each way to speak at PHP Austrailia Conference

Episode 74: raise MentalHealthError

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Fri, 25 Mar 2016 10:24:00 -0400

Photo by Kittenlive - CC BY-SA 3.0

In this episode we were extremely lucky to get Kenneth Reitz on the show to discuss his experiences when he had a mental health event that resulted in a stay in the hospital and some major life changes as a result.

Normally we’re a comedy podcast that focusses on technology, but issues surrounding mental health are very important to us. We’re extremely grateful that Kenneth came on and was very open about what happened to him.

We hope you enjoy what was a great, open, freewheeling discussion about how the symptoms of some mental illnesses appear beneficial from the outside.

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Episode 73: Old Guys Last Longer

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Sat, 12 Mar 2016 15:56:00 -0500

This time out we had PHP community icon Cal “Doesn’t Follow Chris On Twitter” Evans on to discuss the traveling minstrel show known as NomadPHP, the awesomeness of Day Camp 4 Developers, his thoughts on how Mailchimp handled The Mandrill Issue, and helped trigger Chris in to an epic rant. Chris also hopes that Cal has not noticed he hadn’t finished that thing he was supposed to do for him yet. It will be done really soon!

We’ll be giving away 4 free tickets to the Day Camp 4 Developers on Modern PHP on April 22, 2016! Sign up for our mailing list now to enter the drawing!

Don’t forget about our special offer for listeners! Get 50% off Backup Pro’s CMS plugins by using the promo code devhell! And get trials of Backup Pro for ExpressionEngine 2, ExpressionEngine 3, Craft, WordPress, PrestaShop, and Concrete5!

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Links and Notes

One of Sean Connery’s finest scenes
Chris' favourite movie
Guy who harpooned the FedEx pilots
NomadPHP
Day Camp 4 Developers
Box Lunch
Josh Holmes
Josh Lockhart
Josh’s Lockhart’s Modern PHP Book
The SlimPHP microframework
Lorna Jane’s website
Rob Allen (who took a very popular picture of Chris)
New Zealand developer Chris Pitt
Aaron Piotrowski
Icicle
Sara Golemon
The 12th Man
I can’t wait to use HHJVM
Patrick McKenzie
MailChimp’s thought-provoking post about the future of Mandrill
Amazon SES
Mailgun
SendGrid
SparkPost
Feedbin
Feedly

Episode 72: Hermits and Horses

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Fri, 26 Feb 2016 18:59:00 -0500

Jason Myers came on the show to talk about his experiences running not one but TWO conferences in the Nashville, Tennessee area, along with how he ended up writing a book about a popular Python database abstraction tool, and why he prefers the hermetic lifestyle. Along the way Chris and Jason also managed to beat a dead horse for a few minutes.

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Also! Listeners can get a 50% discount on Jason Myers' book Essential SQLAlchemy, 2nd Edition! Discount will show when you add it to your cart. Go buy it now!

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Episode 71: Bespoke Tokens

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Mon, 1 Feb 2016 18:19:00 -0500

We really do appreciate our sponsors so when we get a chance to thank them in a way other than our awesome ad reads, we do it! On this episode you get twice the guest because we invited two of the three folks behind WonderNetworks to join us.

Paul Reinheimer and Gemma Anible came on (and even did video via Skype so they could tell when we were getting bored) and talked about how WonderNetworks got started, Paul and Gemma’s preferred development style and Paul seemed determined (as he always is) to tweak Chris.

Corrections and Updates

From Episode 70 – Chris was wrong about the French legal system
From Episode 70 – Chris was wrong about who played the creature in “The Thing From Another World”

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Episode 70: Anti-Canuckite Leanings

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Wed, 20 Jan 2016 13:41:00 -0500

Welcome to a new year and hopefully a more frequent podcasting schedule of recording on the 2nd and 4th Sundays of every month. Can your favourite old-but-lazy duo maintain such a punishing pace?

During the discussions for topics for this episode, Chris went to the bathroom for some quiet time. When he came back Ed had asked dedicated grumpy-Canadian hater Amanda Folson to join this episode to talk a bit about the life of a developer evangelist, Greg LeMonde, the Battle for PHP CoC, how Composer saved PHP, and CodeMash.

Along the way Amanda and Ed ganged up on Chris showing their hatred for their peace-loving neighbours north of the 49th parallel and during the aftershow drove him away with talk about audio recording equipment.

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Links and Notes

Amanda on Twitter
Amanda’s employer PagerDuty
24 Days In December
RFC for a PHP code of conduct
Why I Still Use PHP by Ed
Composer
Packagist
The best ever conference held at a water park
Madalyn Parker gave an awesome talk at CodeMash about “Mental Health at Work”
SkiPHP
PyTennesee
Stay on top of what conferences are accepting papers with The CFP Report
The severely underrated Yul Brenner
The Matt Dillon with talent

Episode 69: A Festivus Miracle, Part 2

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Wed, 23 Dec 2015 16:41:00 -0500

After some airing of grievances and snarky emails, we managed to get our long- time personal friend Elizabeth Naramore to come on the show and talk about how she was scared for her life the first time she ever met Chris.

We also got to continue to show how immature the three of us are with our constant giggling and inappropriate comments due to the innuendo-laden episode number.

When we weren’t giggling we did talk about Liz’s studies into the psychology of open source communities and her work helping to teach more people how to use Gi-Thub. Ed and Chris discussed how the marketing efforts for their own products are different yet have the same end goal.

Chris also talked about how he stupidly lost his passport while in Orlando for an all-hands meeting (1270 people!) for Mozilla. He was so stressed he didn’t even use the free park passes to Epcot, Hollywood Studios, or the Animal Kingdom.

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Episode 68: A Festivus Miracle, Part 1

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Wed, 23 Dec 2015 16:32:00 -0500

In a great feat of strength we were lucky enough to have future Digital Prophet Samantha Quinones join us to talk about how she got involved with the PHP community and what it’s like to work for a company who’s office is constructed out of old CD’s.

Along the way we talked about ways to discuss AOL with your millenial, her close personal relationship with the “You’ve Got Mail” Guy, and how to sell tampons using caching and firehoses. Ed also shared his latest updates about OSMI. Naturally there was also time to make fun of Chris' new employer

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Episode 67: Working for the Weekend

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Tue, 27 Oct 2015 17:07:00 -0400

Super special guest Gary Hockin of JetBrains, and previously dog wrangler at Roave, joins us for much fun discussion and blame-taking. We babble about Slack vs IRC, the dev evangelism life, software subscription models, and video games. Also we make the say command in OS X utter profane phrases.

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Links and Notes

Episode 66: Aquinas on Customer Service

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Wed, 7 Oct 2015 13:23:00 -0400

Episode 66 was recorded live right after the inaugural Pacific Northwest PHP Conference. We make fun of our sponsors, talk about smelly tests, Thomas Aquinas, remote pairing with juniors, and new stuff happening with OSMI.

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Links and Notes

Episode 65: Entrepremurder

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Fri, 18 Sep 2015 16:27:00 -0400

Episode 65: slow roasted for sweet mesquite flavor! Derick Bailey of WatchMeCode fame joins us for an awesome discussion of the trials and tribulations of developer entrepreneurship. Derick talks about why Signal Leaf is going away, and we swap terrifying PayPal stories.

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Links and Notes

Episode 64: Dogs Using iPads

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Sat, 15 Aug 2015 15:21:00 -0400

We recorded this ep with special guest Joe Ferguson about a month ago, but all sorts of family stuff delayed the release of this and Episode 63 (which we just released last week). On this episode we talk canine gold farming, bald eagles and beavers, how Joe secretly controls NomadPHP MC, NomadJS, and MemphisPHP, whether you’re supposed to drink Magners over ice, and how great Chris Cornutt is. We talked about more stuff but I got tired of writing things down.

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Episode 63: Made in Ontario

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Sun, 9 Aug 2015 19:24:00 -0400

So we recorded this nearly two months ago, but some family stuff delayed the release of this and Episode 64 (coming very soon). On this episode we talk about large developers, cars, Ed learning Java against his will, and Chris re-learning how to teach people.

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Links and Notes

Episode 62: Talmudic Maxims for the Unwashed Masses (phptek 2015)

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Fri, 5 Jun 2015 10:13:00 -0400

phptek 2015 featured an awesome live recording of Development Hell in front of a rowdy audience. Our special guest Yitzchok Willroth, aka coderabbi, drops Talmudic knowledge on us, and we have great discussions about “hard” and “soft” talks, tech vs personal skills, and had a great Q&A session with the audience.

Note that the audio quality isn’t quite up to our usual standards here. Recording live can be hard — sorry about the background noise!

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Links and Notes

Episode 61: Double Vision

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Fri, 22 May 2015 18:25:00 -0400

Two Chrises? God help us. Our guest this episode is Chris Fidao, creator of the ultra-successful and awesome Servers For Hackers web site and e-book. We talk about info products (because Chris has to talk about his money making schemes all the time), what devs should know about devops, Nginx vs. Apache vs. Your Mom, and old tech that keeps on keeping on. Also an update of Gary Hockin’s ongoing embezzlement campaign.

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Episode 60: Welcome to the Shotgun Shack

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Sat, 9 May 2015 15:57:00 -0400

This week on Development Hell we brag about how awesome we are via discussion about conference prep as a speaker. How much crap should go on your slides? How do we change our talks for different audiences? What’s our worst presenter experience? We also throw Paul Reinheimer under the bus.

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Episode 59: Ultimate Hardware Modz

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Wed, 15 Apr 2015 10:31:00 -0400

We are joined by super special guest Arbi Arzoumani, PHP community vet and hardware modding expert. We talk about everything from the Amiga to the Raspberry Pi, with lots of console mods inbetween. Chris gets all excited about building a MAME cabinet, and we chat some about home theater PC stuff with XBMC and Plex. If you’re into hardware stuff, you’re gonna looooooove it.

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Links and Notes

Episode 58: I Have A Mouth Problem

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Sat, 4 Apr 2015 21:25:00 -0400

So we kinda forgot we recorded this until a month after the fact. Whoops! This ep is all about side projects, kicking off with Chris and Ed talking about CBTTool, Ed’s electronic worksheet for folks with anxiety disorders. Then we discuss Chris' new book The Grumpy Little Book of Hack, and Ed’s experience technical editing Modern PHP by Josh Lockhart. Then we get into a boring discussion about marketing. Plus we have STICKERS!

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Episode 57: 57 Flavors of Hell

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Mon, 2 Mar 2015 08:48:00 -0500

This episode we are joined by PHP whiz kid Anthony Ferrara to discuss recent happenings on PHP Internals, where a productive community member stepped away entirely. We discuss the merits of the proposals (particularly the controversial Scalar Type Hints RFC), and what the PHP community could be doing better to prevent contributor burnout. Also I guess we talked about baby animals…?

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Episode 56: Targeting the Amber Monochrome Market

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Mon, 16 Feb 2015 12:16:00 -0500

The PHP Bard himself, Jeremy Lindblom, joins us for much discussion of fun things, like how PHP is used inside Amazon, the upcoming Pacific Northwest PHP Conference (PNWPHP), and what it’s like to be a bard in the age of automation. Also Ed bought a new TV and wrote some music once.

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Episode 55 REDUX: The Erotic Possibilities of the Holodeck

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Thu, 29 Jan 2015 09:52:00 -0500

We’re republishing this episode to (hopefully) get the right episode out to listeners using feeds/podcasting tools. It was originally linked to Ep. 53’s audio, and some podcast aggregators may not get the updated version

Everything old is new again! Sort of! We chatter about Chris' 1% car and how rough it is to upgrade. Then we babble about WebOS, LuneOS, and Ed’s experiences running the Spaz open source project. Chris made some open source stuff once too.

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Episode 55: The Erotic Possibilities of the Holodeck

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Tue, 27 Jan 2015 20:43:00 -0500

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Episode 54: Phil is Still Wrong

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Tue, 13 Jan 2015 17:11:00 -0500

Our latest episode was special in two ways: we recorded video of it, and it was a simulcast with our friends at the PHP Town Hall podcast. What great people! They’re still wrong, but that’s okay. We talk about mouthing off in public, whether async features should be built into PHP, and the appropriate ways to encourage people to use current versions of PHP. Then Chris gets mad.

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Links and Notes

Episode 53: Let's Get This Thing Over With

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Thu, 18 Dec 2014 13:29:00 -0500

Guest-less and listless, Chris and Ed slouch their way back to their studios. Chris talks about the time he tried to murder a disabled woman with his new luxury sedan, we discuss artisanal PHP-Nuke sites, and how we got our local user groups started. Then It really goes off the rails with a discussion of the awesomeness of Dragon Age: Inquistion, and what happens to games and other services that rely on Internet connectivity.

Correction: It looks like Ultima Online and Phantasy Star Online are still up!

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Episode 52: True North PHP 2014

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Sun, 30 Nov 2014 15:28:00 -0500

On a cold winter’s night in the far north, Chris and Ed recorded a podcast at the True North PHP 2014 hackathon event. It was loud and fun! We’re joined by special guest Ben Ramsey and others to talk about organizing conferences and generally being awesome. Enjoy!

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Links and Notes

TrueNorthPHP

Episode 51: Strange Loops for Serial Killers

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Fri, 10 Oct 2014 10:54:00 -0400

We’re joined for Episode 51 by Margaret Staples, backend programmer extraordinaire on Brunelleschi: Age of Architects. She shares her experiences doing indie game dev, traveling to the Strangeloop conference, and meeting geeks celebs. We also talk about serial killers and Ed’s new job (obviously).

This is our first episode released in stereo. The file size is larger, but man does it sound better. If you have any issues with playback, let us know.

Big thanks to our new sponsor Offload.io!! It’s a great resurce for finding and sharing contracting work.

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Links and Notes

Episode 50: The Airing of Grievances

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Tue, 9 Sep 2014 10:54:00 -0400

EPISODE FITTY!!!!! Learn the INSIDE SCOOP on THE ORIGINS OF DEVELOPMENT HELL! EXCLUSIVE BEHIND the SCENES ACCESS!!! WE SUMMARIZE HOW CRAPPY ALL THE EPISODES ARE!!! Also how Chris' DNS got haxxored.

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Links and Notes

We basically didn’t write any notes down because we wanted to keep it real.

THIS SPACE LEFT INTENTIONALLY BLANK

Episode 49: Rogue Transmorpher

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Mon, 4 Aug 2014 12:10:00 -0400

Our guest this week is Beth Tucker Long, the editor of PHP Architect magazine and respected PHP language trainer. We talk about her role as editor of the top PHP Magazine in the world, her experiences teaching people to code, the best PHP books for beginners, her awesome upcoming MadisonPHP conference, and XBox Kinect paranoia.

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Episode 48: Old As Dirt

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Fri, 11 Jul 2014 10:02:00 -0400

Our guest this week is Elizabeth Smith, PHP internals veteran and guru of PHP on Windows (she says “I wish every company was as good at giving back to open source as Microsoft”). We talk about being Old as Dirt in relation to a blog post Ed made last week, how to mentor up and coming developers, and the history of PHP on Windows.

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Episode 47: NOT THE BEES

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Fri, 27 Jun 2014 20:36:00 -0400

This time around we are blessed by the presence of Eryn O'Neil, Tech Lead at Clockwork. We talk about the importance of UX for programmers, getting started speaking at conferences, and BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES BEES.

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Links and Notes

Eryn O'Neil on Twitter
Eryn would like to make a correction: “80-90% of the world’s almonds come from CA, but only 60% of the US’s bees end up there. IT’S STILL A LOT OF BEES THOUGH.”
Blues dancing / swing dancing
Imposter Syndrome
#phpmentoring on IRC
Joind.in
The engineer’s interface
You Can UX Too: Avoiding the Programmer’s Interface
The Non-Designer’s Design Book: Design and Typographic Principles for the Visual Novice
Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition
Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks
Bee beard joe
The Swarm
Africanized honey bees
Drone explodes during copulation
Terry Tate – Office Linebacker
This could be us but you playin
http://beesbeesbees.com/
Death in fam

Episode 46: php[tek] 2014

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Wed, 4 Jun 2014 21:11:00 -0400

php[tek] was once again upon us, so we did our annual live show! Special guest Paul Reinheimer of WonderNetwork joins us for much frivolity!

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Episode 45: Single Quotes for Web Scale

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Wed, 28 May 2014 14:27:00 -0400

This week is all about PERSONAL BRANDING and WEB SCALE with special guest Steve Corona. We talk about Steve’s book Scaling PHP. We also reminisce about the old days of Twitter API dev, until Steve humiliates Ed by not knowing what Spaz was.

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Episode 44: Gorf Fever

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Sun, 4 May 2014 16:04:00 -0400

This weeks brings us a new guest and a new sponsor! Paddy Foran is an old friend of Chris and Ed’s who makes his first appearance on the show, talking about the Go programming language, software architecture, open source projects, and his new book “Your API is Bad.” We also welcome new sponsor Roave!

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Episode 43: Erotic Art The Right Way

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Sun, 13 Apr 2014 17:55:00 -0400

Our latest episode features someone who we’re been trying to get on for a while: Josh Lockhart, the developer of the Slim Framework for PHP and the founder of the PHP The Right Way project. We also have a new sponsor in ~~Nude~~ New Relic!

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Links and Notes

Episode 42: Hacking Difficult People

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Mon, 24 Mar 2014 14:41:00 -0400

For episode 42 we are blessed by the wonderful and talented Laura Thomson, Senior Engineering Manager at Mozilla. Laura drops science on managing engineers, Minimum Viable Bureaucracy, HHVM and Hack, and her mid-Atlantic coast accent. This is a must-listen for folks who manage tech teams.

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Episode 41: Let Me Wet My Beak

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Mon, 10 Mar 2014 13:11:00 -0400

This week we’re joined by David Rogers, aka @al_the_x, to hear how he’s teaching PHP in college courses for brand-new progammers. We also talk about what possessed Ed to develop his own unit testing framework.

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Links and Notes

Episode 40: Poly Life Mentoring

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Fri, 28 Feb 2014 12:08:00 -0500

The big four-oh hits us, this time with our special Fictive Kin friend Sean Coates. We talk lots about deploying web applications in various languages, the imapct Composer has had on PHP development, formal and informal mentoring, and how to get accepted to speak at conferences.

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Links and Notes

Fictive Kin
Calvin & Hobbes transmogrifier
RVM + Bundler
Composer + Packagist
PIP + Virtualenv
Built-in server in PHP 5.4+
Flask
Shared-nothing architectures
PHPMentoring.org
Tug Mcgraw
Webshell
Variadic functions in PHP 5.6
- https://wiki.php.net/rfc/variadics
- https://wiki.php.net/rfc/argument_unpacking

Episode 39: Animal Style

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Thu, 20 Feb 2014 08:57:00 -0500

Okay, first off, this episode sounds like crap. We weren’t really prepared to record and used half-assed equipment and stuff. Sorry guys. It should at least be listenable.

Anyway, this was recorded the night before SkiPHP started, which was an awesome PHP conference in Salt Lake City. We ramble about a lot of stuff, including our first conferences, America’s first serial killer, our approaches for giving talks, and Chris' secret identity.

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Episode 38: Dark Secret Branding

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Thu, 21 Nov 2013 14:01:00 -0500

In this podcast recorded AFTER True North PHP, Chris and Ed are joined by the esteemed Jonathan Snook, web developer extraordinaire. We talk about the heady days of Twitter app dev, how Jonathan got to be a Big Deal, and why there are so many Snooks in web dev.

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Episode 37: Jets vs Sharks

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Wed, 20 Nov 2013 14:01:00 -0500

In this podcast recorded before True North PHP, we talk to Paul M Jones, creator of the Solar framework and Aura component library. Lots of stuff about confusing things like dependency injection and human behavior in tribes. Probably someone will get mad about this episode.

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Episode 36: Maybe PHP Isn't As Lame As We Thought

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Tue, 29 Oct 2013 19:08:00 -0400

So our pace is a little slower due to work crap, but DEV HELL LIVES. Episode 6d6 kicks off with us waxing about what’s exciting in PHP development nowadays. We also talk about upcoming appearances at TrueNorth PHP, NomadPHP and SkiPHP. Then we get into the discussion of alcohol consumption at tech conferences, and malware on the PHP.net site.

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Episode 35: Summer of Funksanity

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Fri, 20 Sep 2013 10:41:00 -0400

FINALLY! We’re back from the Summer of Funksanity hiatus with a new show. We talk about Ed’s speaking tour stops at OSCON, Distill, and Madison Ruby. We also discuss the exciting new mental illness awareness campaign Engine Yard has started, called Prompt. PHP Internals jabbering gets touched on a little, and Chris’s softball league.

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Links and Notes

In our usual epic-length conversation we talked about:

PHP internals
Ed’s Open Sourcing Mental Illness speaking campaign
Prompt
OSCON
Distill
Madison Ruby

Episode 34: Is Sara Pissed?

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Wed, 17 Jul 2013 09:28:00 -0400

This time out our Very Special Guest is Sara Goleman, long-time PHP core contributor, author of the only good book on writing extensions for PHP and the driving force behind that open source projects of HipHop for PHP, a virtual machine, runtime and Just-In-Time compiler for PHP that powers much of Facebook’s infrastructure.

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Links and Notes

In our usual epic-length conversation we talked about:

The HipHop Virtual Machine
The soul-crushing experience of the “PHP internals” mailing list
Ed’s Open Sourcing Mental Illness Summer Tour
The TrueNorthPHP Call for Papers opened up and the code is open source
Discussions about how the three of us find the energy to give a shit about everything
Alternate books from the Bible
Comforting sounds to work too
Finally, how can we tell if Sara is pissed?

Also, as a totally random thing from the show notes, you might want to take a look at Blue Hackers

Episode 33: Pol Pot-level Sucks

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 10:04:00 -0400

Back in the saddle for the double-tres, Chris and Ed rap about the loss of trust in Google and how that affects their perception of the Go language. Then Ed babbles for way too long about vintage gaming and computing. Chris wonders how you could be truly private on the Internet in the light of widespread government surveillance. Finally, we talk about the importance of automation and repeatable processes.

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Episode 32: tek13

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Wed, 5 Jun 2013 19:05:00 -0400

At this year’s tek13 we did another live show. The difference this time is that we didn’t have free booze, so turnout was a little low, but it was still super fun. We talked about hobbies we have outside of coding and how they impact our dev skills (hint: minimally), and what folks favorite talks at tek13 were. Probably other stuff too, but it’s been a while and I forgot.

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Episode 32: tek13

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 19:05:00 -0400

WHOOPS! GO HERE.

Episode 31: Feline Tooth Extraction

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 19:05:00 -0400

Short notes time: In this episode, Chris and Ed talk about conferences we always wanted to go to, and languages & tools we’d thought we’d hate and turned out to like. Then Ed waxes on the Open Recipes project.

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Episode 30: It's Episode 30, you guys

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 15:07:00 -0400

In our action-packed 30th episode Ed and Chris discussed their experiences with JavaScript testing tools, specifically how certain tools push you towards specific refactoring patterns.

Chris talked about the successful launch of his latest book on using PHPUnit and got into some honest talk about revenue and how the product development course helped him make this book do 4 times the launch day revenue of his previous one.

Ed discussed his plans to talk about mental illness on the conference circuit this year. Please help out by donating to the campaign!

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Links and Notes

Mocha
Sinon.JS
Jasmine and Jasmine-node
QUnit
The Grumpy Programmer’s PHPUnit Cookbook
30x500
LoneStar PHP
Open Sourcing Mental Illness
Require.JS
PhantomJS
Zombie.js
Karma
“It’s pronounced ‘jif’”
Chris' new favourite thought leader
Async JavaScript made the jump from Leanpub to bigger publisher
DadBoner

Episode 29: Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Thu, 7 Mar 2013 08:33:00 -0500

Being totally out of ideas, we turned things over to our legions of fans who joined us on IRC. Lots of interesting questions, and people learned what Ed thought was horseshit.

Special thanks to Joel Clermont for killing the show with this joke:

Q: “What’s the difference between a junior and senior developer?”
A: “$40k”

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Links and Notes

Sublime Text 2
Vim
Emacs
Eclipse
BBEdit
HomeSite
HTMLKit
SubEthaEdit
TextMate
Has PHP reached it’s limit?
Yahoo! calls all remote workers home. Is there a hidden motive behind it
Liberal vs. conservative programmers
Thoughts on the male gaze
Chris feels this essay shows a lack of understanding about collaboration
Estimating projects using the metric system
Should the PHP core team care what users of the language want

Episode 28: Canadian Twinkie Smuggler

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Sat, 16 Feb 2013 13:52:00 -0500

You can blame Chris’s tomfoolery for how crappy he sounds, because his computer pooped all over himself and he had to call in on his iPhone. Nevertheless, we were able to discuss in detail the smuggling of mass-produced pastries of the Twinkie and Tastykake varieties. We also get framework security in the context of recent Rails vulnerabilities, and how PHP developers seem to have a heightened awareness of potential vulnerabilities. Ed’s details his experiences starting a local user group, and then discusses his efforts to speak at developer/tech conferences about his struggles with mental illness.

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Links and Notes

Episode 27: Artisan Database Administration

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 12:18:00 -0500

This episode marks a return, both for special guest Selena Deckelmann, and our special hand-made artisan podcasting. Know that this episode was made with locally-sourced bytes, harvested with care and respect for the Earth. We talk with Selena about working at Mozilla, her switch to Linux on the desktop, and how marketing is weightier than merit in determining a product’s success.

This episode’s super-special sponsor is EasyBib! They are looking for junior and senior PHP devs to work on their awesome academic web app. Check out the job description and email stuff to till+php@imagineeasy.com.

As always, thank you to our awesome sponsors at Engine Yard and Wonder Network for providing cashmoney and bandwidth for our live stream, respectively.

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Links and Notes

Episode 26: Sassy!

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 08:51:00 -0500

The first episode of 2013 find Chris and Ed talking about the tragedy of Aaron Swartzs' suicide, both in the context of governmental power and mental illness. We also talk about Ed’s favorite (and only tolerable) Apple-related podcast ending. Finally, Ed rambles about SASS, a superset of CSS3 that makes writing CSS less painful.

We have a new sponsor! EasyBib is looking for junior and senior PHP devs to work on their awesome academic web app. Check out the job description and email stuff to till+php@imagineeasy.com.

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Links and Notes

Lincoln Park Chicago Appl store
Linkin Park’s Mysterious Cyberstalker
Aaron Swartz
- How to Get a Job Like Mine. “I followed these rules. And here I am today, with a dozen projects on my plate and my stress level through the roof once again.”
- Jacob Applebaum (IOError)
- Centre for Addiction and Mental Health
- National Alliance on Mental Illness
Hypercritical podcast
Mike Wilner
SASS
SMACSS – Scalable and Modular Architecture for CSS

The Development Hell Guide to Podcasting on the Cheap, Part 1: Hardware, Software and Recording

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 13:55:00 -0500

We started recording /dev/hell because we thought it would be fun. We wanted it to sound decent, but we didn’t want to work hard at making that happen, because we are lazy. And cheap.

I’ve had some experience with indie audio production, so I know a few things about making stuff sound better than it should. That, and a lot of stuff I’ve picked up on the way, has helped make /dev/hell sound semi-decent on a very, very small budget.

In this series of articles, I’ll detail the hardware, software, and processes we use when we record /dev/hell. If you’re thinking about making your own podcasts, this will get you started with a minimum amount of cash and a maximum amount of awesome.

All of the /dev/hell podcasts are recordings of voice chats between Chris and me, plus any guests who happen to be with us. This is actually a lot easier than recording in person, and lets us optimize a lot in terms of hardware and software expense. We record with pretty cheap hardware and software, and do a bit more post-production work to make stuff sound decent.

Note that we do all our podcasting work on OS X, so hardware and software have only been tested there. Most of what we discuss should work with Windows, but I’m not sure about Linux support.

Hardware

I use a Logitech H555 headset to record on my side. It’s also my go-to headset for any voice chat. My speech sounds clear and intelligible through it, and it does a pretty good job of cancelling out ambient noise. It’s USB and wired, so I don’t have issues with connectivity there, and it has a physical mute switch, which is really handy when you have to cough or throw up. It’s not the cheapest headset you can find, but for the price, the voice fidelity is very good. The only significant issue I’ve found is that the mic will pick up the sound from the headphones if I have it really turned up, but I can mitigate that with a noise gate in post-production. I’ve carried this thing all around the country, and it has consistently Just Worked as soon as I plug it in.

Alternately, you might check out the Logitech USB Headset H530, which is similar, but looks like it would be a bit more comfortable (but less portable).

I have messed some with bluetooth headsets and ear pieces, and they all have sucked. Constant pairing issues, audio quality problems, and battery drain. You don’t want to mess with this stuff just before you’re scheduled to record, let alone have it die in the middle of a sesson.

I also avoid any cheap stuff that plugs into the 1/8” analog inputs on my computer, particularly microphones. That stuff is almost always garbage – poor quality, prone to clipping and picking up hums and noise. Don’t do it.

You can get better quality mics than my headset has, but it also introduces a lot more hassle and expense. Decent-quality USB mics are going to run you at least $60, and they tie you to a desk or mic stand. If you want to have more flexibility, you can get XLR mics (I have a Shure SM-58), but then you’ll also need an outboard audio interface and mixer – more equipment to tie you down, and now we’re getting into at least a few hundred dollars in hardware.

If you do get a separate mic, I’d recommend a dynamic mic, especially if you’re only recording yourself talking on Skype. Chris is currently using a Blue Yeti condenser mic, and it picks up tons of ambient noise in the room. Condensers are great for doing in-person interviews where you just drop the mic on a table between everybody, but they’re not well-suited for for voice chat. You’ll end up muting yourself any time you’re not talking, and spending time in post-production editing out squeaky chairs and keyboard typing.

Software

We use Skype to talk to each other. It has the best audio quality of all the voice chat options I’ve tried, and it’s free and available on all major desktop platforms. It’s not perfect, but it’s the best option available.

To record our Skype conversations, I recommend Call Recorder, a $20 add-on to Skype for Windows and OS X. The biggest win with Call Recorder is its ability to split the two sides of your conversation intp separate tracks, so you can process and edit them separately in post-production. It also has a simple, easy to use interface. There’s a 15-day fully functional trial, so it should work okay for one-off guests who don’t want to drop $20 just to be on your show.

We’ve also used Audio Hijack Pro, a $32 application for OS X. AHP is much more flexible than Call Recorder: it can record any audio being generated by any application in OS X, do timed recordings, and lots of other cool stuff. It also can separate Skype conversations into the left and right sides of a stereo track, so you can treat them separately in post-production. But, being a significantly more complex application than Call Recorder, it’s also easier to screw stuff up, which I’ve done a few times.

Recording

Before you do any recording, use the Skype test call feature to record yourself speaking as you would in the session. Have a paragraph of text handy and recite it into the call. Alternately, call up your co-host and just shoot the breeze for a few minutes, recording it with Call Recorder. Listen to the recording, make note of issues, and address accordingly.

All the session participants should be in a quiet area where they won’t get visitors and don’t get a lot of echo (carpeted areas are better in this regard). I always record in a big recliner in the corner of the living room with my laptop on my lap, and always wait until 9pm so the Kinder are in bed. Let folks in your home know that you’ll be recording, so they don’t bug you about stuff in the middle of the session.

If you’re the person who will be doing post-production, have a notepad handy – physical or virtual – to write down possible edit spots. If you hear a big glitch/slip-up/disconnection/meltdown, it is much easier to find it if you have written down the time it happened. Listening through your entire podcast to find it will be extremely tedious, especially if you tend to ramble like we do.

About 10 minutes before you’re scheduled to record, get everyone on the Skype call. This should allow you to hear potential issues and try to address them before you start recording, like excessive background noise or bandwidth problems.

One thing I recommend is that you get people to record on a computer that’s connected via wired ethernet. WiFi gets really flakey, and can cause glitches in Skype that you wouldn’t anticipate. This is particularly problematic in more densely populated areas. You may not have much issue – I’m lucky in that my WiFi is very fast and consistent – but it’s definitely safer to be wired. If you’re not able to connect directly, at least sit where you have good, consistent WiFi reception, and don’t move.

When you’re ready to start the podcast, the easiest thing to do is just have one person record using one of the above applications. This works okay if everyone involved has a very solid Internet connection and local network. The more people you have on the call, though, the more problems you’re likely to have.

I recommend having every participant in the session record on their end. This can be a bit of a pain if you have frequent guests, but the 15-day trial version of Call Recorder should allow them to handle this without spending any cash. With everyone recording locally, you can get a high-quality local recording of each participant, mitigating the glitchiness that you’ll get with Skype. It also means you have backup recordings in case you forgot to hit Record (not that I’d ever do that). The relevant settings I use in Call Recorder’s preferences are:

Audio Encoding: AAC Compression
Audio Quality: High
Show Recording Controls At Launch
Keep Recording Controls In Front During calls

Note: normally you never want to record with “lossy” compression like AAC or MP3. But because we’re recording speech, and our final format is relatively low-fidelity (64kbps mono MP3), I don’t think there’s any perceptible advantage. It’s fine to record compressed files, though, and would be a good idea if you’re striving for the best possible fidelity.

When you’re done, have everyone upload their recordings in a shared space so you can grab them. A shared Dropbox folder has worked well for us.

Note that you won’t be able to magically sync up all your recordings. You can and should try to start recording all at the same time (a little bit before you actually start the podcast), but you’ll have to manually line stuff up in post-production.

That’s it for recording. Next time we’ll cover post-production, where you turn your separate audio tracks into something worth hearing.

Episode 25: Quarter Century

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:00:00 -0500

It has now been 25 times that Ed and Chris have fired up Skype and talked to each other and some friends, old and new, about whatever the hell they felt like talking about.

They would keep doing this even if nobody else listened, because developer misery loves company. Thank you to everyone who has been listening to us work out our own issues with the technologies that help shovel money into our bank accounts.

In this episode Ed talked about his experiences at CodeConnex, Chris tried to goad Ed into further ranting and arguments about the latest round of push-backs against the microframework manifesto and people crying about other people crying about dependencies in their code.

The show then ended with Ed speaking about the very real challenge of creating awesome infinite scrolling experiences, which made Chris realize he is better off learning Javascript just to use Node and avoid the mess that is the DOM.

As always, thank you to our awesome sponsors at Engine Yard and Wonder Network for providing cashmoney and bandwidth for our live stream, respectively.

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Links and Notes

Where Is It Up API
CodeConnex
PHP Mentoring
Aura Framework
Pretty much anything Paul Motherfucking Jones has written about programming
Air BnB’s infinite scrolling library
Palm’s Mojo widget library
HP’s Enyo list widgets
SlickGrid
Ember Table

Episode 24: Members Only

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 09:59:00 -0500

Special guest Matt Turland joins us for episode 24, and tells us how much of an asshole Chris is in real life. We also talk a lot about team development processes, including ramping up new hires, documenting processes, and workflow tools. Lots of super smart stuff that we’re usually too lazy to do.

If you’re the corncob on our picnic plate, you’ll do these things:

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Links and Notes

Episode 23 redux

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 09:50:00 -0500

Well crap. Episode 23 had a bad edit screwup in it, and the last 30m was basically unlistenable. This has been corrected below and at the original URL. For notes and comments, see the original post.

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Episode 23: The Bozo Brush

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Sun, 25 Nov 2012 20:52:00 -0500

UPDATE Nov 28 2012: We fixed a bad error in the original audio file. Please re-download to get the corrected file

Episode 23 is packed chock-full of awesome guests. We talk about the controversy around the cancellation of BritRuby, and the larger issues of diversity and inclusiveness at tech conferences, with Ashe Dryden and Reg Braithwaite. We also get into the goofiness of Star Trek and the wonder of railroad games.

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Links and Notes

Episode 22: Object-Oriented Home Renovation

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 16:05:00 -0400

We hit the Double Deuce this week with special guest Jim Gay. Jim is the author of Clean Ruby, the upcoming book that applies “Data, Context and Interaction” (DCI) concepts to Ruby and Rails development. Jim is clearly much smarter than us, so we took this opportunity to attack him mercilessly as a representative of the sexist Ruby community. Jim also shares his experiences as a self-published author. In addition, we talk about how True North PHP planning is going for Chris, and Ed’s experiences at Brooklyn Beta.

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Links and Notes

Episode 21: The Grace Hopper Rape Whistle

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Sat, 6 Oct 2012 22:24:00 -0400

Twenty-one. Like blackjack. Like the gun salute. For those about to rock.

We recorded this episode just a few days after #20, because we were able to get Elizabeth Naramore as a super-special secret guest! She talks to us about Codeconnexx, an open source tech and life skills conference in Indianapolis Nov 8-9. We also talked a lot about getting women to submit talks to conferences, including the success that Jan Lehnardt has had in this area with JSConfEU. We then get into Chris’s experiments with JS testing, and what we think of App.net from a developer perspective.

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Links and Notes

Episode 20: Chris Hartjes's Kitchen Nightmare

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Mon, 1 Oct 2012 11:46:00 -0400

EPISODE DOS EQUIS! Our 20th show goes out to all the haters. IN YOUR FACE HATERS.

This week we talk about how Chris sucks at cooking food, which segues nicely into a discussion of the True North PHP conference that he’s co-organizing in Toronto in November. Thankfully he will not be catering the event himself. We also talk about Ed’s move from doing PHP to Python for day-to-day work, and the plusses and minuses he’s encountered during the transition.

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Links and Notes

Episode 19: Almost An Apology

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 11:49:00 -0400

After some downtime spent taking mental reps, Chris and Ed are back with a vengeance for one of our best shows. Joining us is Chris Shiflett, PHP fellow and security expert. They talk about how we interact with non-techie members of dev teams, what they’re doing with Node, the state of the Canadian soccer program, heavy vs lightweight frameworks, tribalism in programming communities, and the importance of balancing work with life. We also talk to Chris Shiflett about his role as co-founder of Brooklyn Beta, and what they’re trying to accomplish with the conference.

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Links and Notes

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
–Robert A Heinlein

Episode 18: Pull Requests Welcome

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Sun, 19 Aug 2012 19:48:00 -0400

This week on /dev/hell is “let’s talk about arguments Chris got into on Twitter” week. Most of the discussion revolves around how we interact with users, both developer-types and average joes.

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Episode 17: This Show Is Terrible

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 20:30:00 -0400

This week on /dev/hell we talk about mentoring. Chris discusses his experiences taking a young up-and-comer under his wing, and we talk about the PHP Mentoring project. Then we babble about Aspen, an interesting, non-traditional Python web framework. Good and bad stuff in PHP gets knocked around again. Finally, Ed talks about fixing his dryer and yells at the audience.

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Episode 16: Foam Cowboy Hats

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Sat, 7 Jul 2012 10:54:00 -0400

After a couple weeks off, we get back into the profane swing of things. We kick off with alittle followup on the previous episode on mental illness, but decide to quit bumming everybody out by moving on to cool tech stuff. Ed talks a little about Reaper, a new digital audio workstation he’s using to do production on the podcast. Then we chat about remote pair programming with browser-based editors like Cloud9. Finally we cover Chris' experiences at Lonestar PHP, and what each of us gets out of speaking at conferences.

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Episode 15: Whack Job Central

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 18:27:00 -0400

On today’s Very Special Episode of /dev/hell, we talk about Ed’s struggles with depression and anxiety, and how it’s impacted him as a member of the open source community. Yeah, we know, total buzzkill, but this is important stuff. We hope that by talking about it, folks with similar issues will be more likely to seek help.

We’d really like to hear from you about this topic. You can leave us a comment, or send us a link & we’ll collect the responses.

Here’s your homework for this week, suckas:

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Episode 14: The PHP Guy Is Sulking

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 14:52:00 -0400

This week we’re joined by Justin Searls, JavaScript developer and JS testing EXPERT. We talk lots about building and testing “fat” browser apps, particularly about best practices and different testing approaches. After a while Chris felt bad and told us to shut up.

This was the first podcast we broadcast live while recording. Big ups to WonderNetwork for providing the streaming bandwidth, and Engine Yard for sponsoring the podcast. Keep an eye on the @dev_hell Twitter account for info on our next live stream.

If you love us, you will do these things:

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Notes

Episode 13: #tek12 or something. I don't know

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Sun, 3 Jun 2012 13:42:00 -0400

This episode was recorded at the tek12 uncon in front of a live studio audience. We talk about pair programming, what we’d recommend to folks who want to start programming, the PHP-FIG & PSRs, and our favorite events from tek12. Also Chris punched Ed a couple times. It hurt.

Video hosting for this episode is provided by WonderNetwork, who generate some really cool ping data.

This was lots of fun, and we want to thank all the folks who came out and participated.

Extra special big thanks to Michelangelo Van Dam for lending us his audio recording hardware, and Cal Evans for recording the video!

Please do this so we don’t have to burn you alive:

You should follow us on Twitter here.
You should rate us on iTunes here

Listen

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Notes

Episode 12: Irish Eyes Are Always Smiling

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Mon, 14 May 2012 23:38:00 -0400

Through a haze of jägerbombs and extreme fatigue, we were able to shovel out another pile of podcast for your listening enjoyment. Chris says it’s episode 11 when it’s actually episode 12, but hey! This week we talk about:

Apple’s magical devices, and what’s holding back Android from being comparable
How Rackspace completely and repeatedly dropped the ball
Fun times with Python, and the value of defining guiding principles in an open source project

Here’s your homework for this week:

You should follow us on Twitter here.
You should rate us on iTunes here

Listen

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Episode 11: From Gas Station Attendant to Java Developer

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 22:47:00 -0400

This time out we are blessed by the presence of Joël Perras, PHP developer extraordinaire and Fictive Kin brosef of Ed. We explore Joël’s rags-to-riches story: a young academic schlepping coffee and 44oz soft drinks at a gas station, where he’s discovered by a grizzled dev team manager in need of Java skills. From there it’s been a whirlwind of web sites, programming languages, and more ops than you can shake a stick at.

Actually I was sleepy and wasn’t really listening for the first half-hour. I bet it’s good though.

Feel free to hit us up on Twitter at @dev_hell or harass Ed and Chris directly.

Download now (MP3, 42.9MB, 1:31)

Episode 10: Looks Like A Lot Of White Dudes

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 23:51:00 -0400

No guest would permit themselves to be shamed in the typical /dev/hell manner this week, so this time around you’re stuck with the gruesome twosome. We hit on a few topical topics in this episode, including a dude scoring Internet Ego Points for saying PHP sucks (really?), the “technology preview” of Meteor (no, not that Meteor), and an Important Startup Guy who says that remote working is baaaaaaad. Plus we say “horseshit” a lot.

Thanks again to our awesome sponsor for this episode Engine Yard. You’re the most specialist.

Feel free to hit us up on Twitter at @dev_hell or harass Ed and Chris directly.

Download now (MP3, 43.2MB, 1:23)

Episode 9: I Was Really Into Bigfoot When I Was A Kid

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Thu, 5 Apr 2012 19:44:00 -0400

This episode had us diving into the real-time web with Nathan Fritz, the Chief Architect for &yet, and the man who has foolishly agreed to help Chris learn the finer points of Node.js. You can just hear the excitement in all our voices as we discuss Web 3.14159 aka the Real Time Web. Nathan is one smart motherfucker so be prepared to have lots of knowledge exploded into your brain.

Nathan also discusses his previous life as a PHP guy, what XMPP is all about, and his book-in-progress on Lua scripting in Redis.

Thanks again to our awesome sponsor for this episode Engine Yard. Don’t worry, we’ll spend your sponsorship money wisely.

Feel free to hit us up on Twitter at @dev_hell or harass Ed and Chris directly.

Download now (MP3, 43.2MB, 1:23)

Episode 8: Fry Guy, Cleanup in Aisle App

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 09:56:00 -0400

First off, we now have a sponsor for the podcast: Engine Yard. This is something they will surely regret after listening to this episode.

We started off with the idea of talking about technologies we wish we had time to play with. Ed was talking about his attempts at exploring Clojure, and how it’s likely he’ll be using Python for work in the near future. This leads into a discussion of what attracts us to certain languages and technologies, and when to try to work a personal interest in to your day job. Then Chris talks about how he will likely mess around with evented stuff like Node.js or Twisted for his next book about HTTP APIs or whatever.

We also go off on a discussion about HTPC stuff. I can’t really remember how we got there.

In reality we mostly bullshitted through the whole thing, and made fun of Engine Yard a bunch. Hopefully they know that they have awesome products and don’t hate us now.

Feel free to hit us up on Twitter at @dev_hell or harass Ed and Chris directly.

Download now (MP3, 38.7MB, 1:20)

Episode 7: You Have Entered A Pants-free Workzone

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 21:50:00 -0500

This week the gruesome twosome talk about working remotely:

the tools you need to make it work
the problems of being the Remote Guy when everyone else is local
techniques for staying focused
being a goddamn adult and GTTFD
why a company should invest the time in being remote-friendly

Chris also talks a bit about his new gig at Kaplan, where he’ll surely make grown men cry.

Feel free to hit us up on Twitter at @dev_hell or harass Ed and Chris directly.

Download now (MP3, 37.5MB, 1:13)

Episode 6: I Do Not Code With My Vagina

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Suffragettes rejoice because we have our first female guest. Selena Deckelmann bullied her way onto the show to talk with us about Postgres, her lack of real Perl skills, Open Source Bridge and women in open source and technology in general. She also proved that cheap laughs are always possible by picking on Canadians. Also, how awesome it is that she shares a birthday with a famous NFL player.

Feel free to hit us up on Twitter or harass Ed and Chris directly.

Download now (MP3, 65MB, 1:45)

Episode 5: The Hammer That is PHP

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Fri, 3 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

In our fifth episode we speak to our first ever guest Brian Moon, ancient PHP elder of dealnews and someone who has probably forgotten more about PHP than our two hosts will ever know. Chris admires his stamina for staying with the same employer for 14 years and counting.

In this episode we talk about dealnews, how they use PHP (and how they also use it in some interesting ways), and his thoughts on issues like concurrency and evented systems. We also cover features of PHP that allowed for some major changes and approaches they used in the code base for the site.

Feel free to hit us up on Twitter or harras Ed and Chris directly.

Download now (MP3, 41MB, 1:14:37)

Episode 4: The Cool Kids Club

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Update: Our first posting of this episode had a glitch in it around 14:50. It should be fixed now. If you already have the episode, you should re-download it.

Our fourth episode is all ready for your listening pleasure. In this exciting episode we focus on “The Conference Experience” and discuss why programming conferences are so important to developers. Chris talks about why CodeMash was so awesome and the awesome talks full of awesomeness that he attended. Ed talks about his own experiences with speaking and attending conferences, complete with a total derail by Chris on why a certain conference rubbed him the wrong way.

Oh yeah, you also find out our opinions on what constitutes a “well-written PHP application”. I’m sure you will be surprised by our answers.

As always, we welcome your feedback. You can always hit us up on Twitter where we love to read what you say and promptly ignore it or privately mock it.

Download now (MP3, 51MB, 1:20:18)

Episode 3: Beatings Will Continue Until Test Coverage Improves

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Sat, 7 Jan 2012 20:03:00 -0500

Fresh off our holiday break, we’re back with our longest show yet. We talk about Chris' new book The Grumpy Programmer’s Guide To Building Testable PHP Applications, including his experiences self-publishing with Leanpub. Chris also explains how he fears no precipitation on his excursions to the Codemash conference in Ohio. Then Ed talks about the thought process that lead to his latest shit-stirring blog post “The MicroPHP Manifesto.” Ed may or may not begin crying openly. Finally, we discuss when it might be necessary to trash your existing application and rewrite it.

Download now (MP3, 60MB, 1:40:33)

Episode 2: Talking Chris Down

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 10:00:00 -0500

Doing something the second time is always the toughest, but we somehow managed to get our act together for a second episode of “Development Hell”.

Our hosts Chris and Ed got together and discussed whatever was on their minds that night. Thanks to Ed for doing a masterful job of editing the results of using my crappy headset for the conversation.

Summary of the show:

Git and git workflows
Node.js vs. Twisted/Tornado
How being opinionated and objective about a topic is impossible
Building your online brand

Download now (MP3, 40MB, 1:12:50)

Episode 1: What We Hate About PHP

devhell@devhell.info (Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 19:49:00 -0500

Listen to a couple old dudes complain that they don’t like PHP anymore. Yes, I know, this sounds pretty compelling.

Feel free to hit either of us up on Twitter

Download now (MP3, 43MB, 01:26:19)