The HotSpot - Episode 387

Thank you for your service Will!

Great to see GB getting a dev perspective and showing some love and appreciation :)

o7 ty Will

As a programmer and a Giant Bomb fan, I found this interview fascinating. I'd love to see more interviews like this.

My favorite dumb coding fact: The P in PHP stands for PHP.

Awww yeah; gimme that open hi hat babyyyy

I'm in the middle of making the career transition away from marketing to web programming so this is a very timely discussion. Currently enrolled in a course with a university and it's really exciting to have finally clicked with the computer science I had always thought I was too stupid to understand. Good luck @wcarle! Hope to make a career that resembles the work you've gotten to do.

Speaking of Konami Code, one works right here.

Everyone left me again

Just wanted to post how cool this interview was. I never could get into programming myself, or coding. However it's cool to hear the "inside baseball" of it and all the neat stories for it. Thanks guys!

i love the unexpected directions this podcast takes

I love this podcast so much!

wow I actually teared up a bit there. Will seems like such a delightful guy, an important piece of this site that will be missed. I hope his next project goes well!

This video should be one of many video guides on the internet into how to get into programming and find a job thereafter.

I've been taking programming classes for a while now at my community college. Haven't taken a single math class since it's not required according to my roadmap and up to advanced programming topics. So far from what I've learned, I can pretty much go into a junior developer job at this point if I'm learning basic data structures and algorithms, but personally I don't feel confident since I feel more better if I get an AS to get my foot in the virtual, if work from home is gonna be the future from thereon in tech.

Thank you for everything Will! Even though I'm not an engineer, I totally relate to what I call the call creep where your job slowly becomes more and more about attending meetings and calls rather than doing stuff and have left a position for that reason. I'm glad you're be able to return to your roots and do what your original passion drove you towards in the first place and wish you the best of luck!

Best of luck, Will. It's always been fun when you surface up to the front-end of the site, and your hard work--as well as the work of the team continuing on--in making GB a better website is greatly appreciated.

Will thanks for GB Infinite

Sad news. Good guy.

GLHB

THANK YOU WILL

enjoy everything you're moving on to, thank you for the big big big task of building this madhouse and keeping it upright. Infinite has been worth my sub for 2020 by itself, and you will be missed!

GIANT BOMB FOREVER

GB Infinite is a feature I use constantly and is greatly appreciated. Really one of those things I pretty much use daily.

All the best of luck to Will!

Thank you for your hard work behind the scenes Will. Best of luck on your next adventure!

best of luck with the new role Will!

In This Episode:

Computer

Hell yeah.

Bye Will!

Thank you for this last pod, Will! As someone who recently graduated from a library program that only lightly touched database/SQL work, you’ve given me a lot to think about regarding how to go forward with my own professional development. :)

Will's a hero. Best of luck with the next stuff!

Good luck, Will! Thank you for GB Infinite and everything else you’ve worked on!

And that's how you get a job...persist.

This was such a great interview. I work in mainframe batch support and just started a coding class. I'm happy to hear everyone's experience with programming and coding!

Thanks, Will! Best luck!

Spider-Man confirmed most powerful super hero.

I always enjoyed Will popping up on GB stuff, and the Devcast was always an interesting look into what y'all think about and look for. Good luck Will!

@vinny RE: does anyone still use perl/can you get a job now using perl?

I've worked at a web hosting company for about a year and a half now which is a perl house, and so had to learn it when I got there. Having prior PHP experience helped because there are similarities, but like Will and Brad say, it's mostly being able to work out logic and less the specific language that really matters. Since I got there, we've been constantly trying to move to something remotely more modern (java or c# likely), but the codebase is so big and old, it's a tough change to try and make. Coding is fun, try it if you're interested!

Thanks for everything Will!

I’m from Jacksonville too. I departed there in 2008.

Thanks a lot Will!

Ah director.. that brings me back.

I always enjoyed when Will would show up on the UPF set. He seems like a genuinely nice guy. I wish him the best!

So great having Will on for one last time (as an employee).

I’m a "frontend engineer" and have been using next.js (and vercel) for the last couple years now and it is indeed excellent, so +1 to the advice in here.

New thing in programming classes at University level is that commenting is bad, your code should be self describing. This is because comments are then another thing that has to be maintained.

I am living demonstrable proof that programming is NOT for everyone. :P

All the best Will, cheers for the years of hard work!

Fun fact, as an engineer at a major aerospace company, the programing language I use the most is visual basic, not because it is what is best but it is the easiest to get on the various closed systems.

Thank you for everything Will. Was great to hear you on the pod & I hope your next job makes you even happier. LLAP

@duxa: Whoever is telling you that is wrong and being elitist dicks in the process.

Code should be understandable by humans, comments sometimes help with that understanding (within reason of course, code should be self documenting, but sometimes that’s not 100% possible which is totally fine. even saying that, a quick comment is low effort with high reward).

I think the idea is not to be 100% against comments, its that if at all possible they should be avoided. Because that will force you to write legible/understandable code.

Code that can describe itself without comments makes code reviews to go much much faster and easier. Not to mention collaboration and someone else taking over your code.

This is actually taught by people that have been CS professors since CS field didnt exist and was just "Math".

@duxa: I agree theoretically, but in the real world it’s very rarely the case. Writing good comments is an important skill to learn and is good to have in your coding repertoire. As you get better at programming you get better at commenting too, so if someone is writing bad code it probably means they’re also writing bad comments, which isn’t the comments fault.

I’ve never seen someone write good comments and bad code, for example.

Ive seen both, a comment description of what a block does, but then the block is spaghetti code that you have to reverse engineer to follow.