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Ben Nadel at CFUNITED 2008 (Washington, D.C.) with: Jacob Munson
Ben Nadel at CFUNITED 2008 (Washington, D.C.) with: Jacob Munson

Working Code Podcast - Episode 59: Everything Old Is New Again

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It's easy to be flippant about how often our industry seemingly "discovers" the programming practices and paradigms that experienced engineers have been talking about for decades. But, the truth is more complicated and nuanced. The landscape of the web is evolving at ludicrous speed; processing power and storage capacity are going up while costs are coming down; and, the needs of different applications are beginning to diverge wildly.

As an industry, we're not "rediscovering", we're "Yes, and'ing". We're constantly learning up on timeless techniques and then trying to apply them within the new constraints and pressures of the modern web. Some of these experiments are going to seem familiar; but, each step in this journey is an attempt to answer a new question or speak to a new problem. Everything old is new again because the context is always changing and is in need of new consideration.

This week on the show, the crew talks about the cyclical nature of our industry. And how the pendulum of perspective is always swinging from side-to-side: correcting, over-correcting, correcting, and so on. What's so interesting about this isn't just how technology cycles but how our entire mental model cycle as well. It seems the more experience we have, the more our code begins to look and feel like it did when we were just getting started.

All that and more on this week's show:

... featuring these beautiful, beautiful people:

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

For the full show notes and links, visit the episode page. And, be sure to follow the show and come chat with us on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

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Ben Nadel