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Backend Banter

Backend Banter

Boot.dev

The only podcast dedicated to backend development, technologies, and careers. Lane Wagner, the founder of Boot.dev, interviews successful backend engineers to get their takes on various trends, technologies, and career tips for new backend developers. Golang, Python, JavaScript, and Rust are the programming languages most commonly discussed, but speakers dabble in all sorts.
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Top 10 Backend Banter Episodes

Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best Backend Banter episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to Backend Banter for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite Backend Banter episode by adding your comments to the episode page.

Today, we bring back a dear guest and friend of the podcast, ThePrimeagen! Now Ex-Netflix engineer who turned his full focus to content creation surrounding software engineering and tech.

In today's episode, we talk about his new Git course on boot.dev, where he shares motivations on why he decided to write a course on Git, how he incorporates it into his workflow and shares some hot takes regarding today's tech education landscape, his opinion on bootcamps, colleges, and what his ideal way of teaching computer science is.

To finish off, he shares some of his exciting new ventures, namely a coffee shop and a Doom game which you can play through twitch chat!

Learn back-end development - https://boot.dev

Listen on your favorite podcast player:

https://www.backendbanter.fm

ThePrimeagen's Youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/c/theprimeagen

ThePrimeagen's other Youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/@ThePrimeTimeagen

ThePrimeagen's Twitter: https://x.com/ThePrimeagen

Terminal Coffee Shop: https://www.terminal.shop/

Timestamps:

00:00 Introduction

00:27 Why teach about Git?

02:55 Was Prime taught Git?

04:50 add files individually or git add .

07:22 Hot take about git in school

10:27 What should you learn in school in the first place?

11:34 Where did school come from?

16:42 You can't become a software engineer in 3 months

19:45 Contents of Part 1 and what will Part 2 of the Git course be about

22:58 Rebase vs Merge and Prime's current workflow

24:22 Why you shouldn't merge

29:10 A lot of the times, people just don't know the tools

32:29 The advantage of rebase

34:03 Rewriting history criticism

36:30 Prime's terminal coffee shop

44:22 Doom in the terminal?

54:08 Is the bandwidth the problem with the Doom game?

55:27 Ideas for the controls for Doom

58:57 Where to find Prime

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Backend Banter - #063 - I was fired for using HTMX
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07/22/24 • 63 min

In today’s episode, we bring Spiro Floropoulos, a senior developer and architect with over 20 years of experience. This episode is an unusual one, as Spiro recently got laid off due to a bizarre chain of events that involved HTMX, overworking, and technical debt.

But we’ll learn from this story, as we want to shed some light on how situations that Spiro described could be avoided, namely how the tech industry is obsessing over developer experience and why that’s detrimental, why abstractions should be teaching you the technology as opposed to just doing the work for you, why you should be able to train your junior devs and much more!

Learn back-end development - https://boot.dev

Listen on your favorite podcast player: https://www.backendbanter.fm

Spiro's X/Twitter: https://x.com/spirodonfl

Spiro's Website: https://spirofloropoulos.com/

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

00:35 Why are we having this conversation

01:33 How was HTMX involved in this?

03:38 Spiro's background

05:58 Why are we focusing so much on developer experience?

13:38 The Tech Industry as a whole is headed down the wrong path

16:17 Abstractions teaching you about the underlying technology rather than hiding it

18:47 What are the long-term consequences of unresolved technical debt?

26:46 There's things you can't blame frameworks for

28:27 We have to slow down

30:46 What happened after the introduction of HTMX into the project?

40:26 Hiring juniors is great, but you should have the resources to train them

47:00 The Technical Debt

50:32 The more complex the feature became, the bigger the struggle with HTMX

53:42 The reasons why Spiro was let go

57:10 Instead of Agile we should treat our programmers like adults

57:31 HTMX was instant and testing ability was better

01:01:21 Is Spiro looking for work?

01:02:00 Where to find Spiro

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Backend Banter - #039 - Get promoted by being lazy feat. Dax Raad
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02/05/24 • 65 min

In this episode, Lane talks to Dax Raad, a well rounded engineer that is currently a developer for SST, a framework that helps people build Full-Stack applications on AWS with ease. Today, they talk about personal opinions on industry practices, scale, financial decisions, infrastructure mistakes, reflections on long-term company commitments and many more!

Learn back-end development - https://boot.dev
Listen on your favorite podcast player: https://www.backendbanter.fm

Dax's Twitter: https://twitter.com/thdxr

  • (00:00) - Introduction
  • (00:51) - Dax's Tweets and Personal Branding
  • (01:31) - You have to learn to be yourself
  • (02:56) - Intrusive thoughts
  • (03:33) - When did Dax become active in the Tech Twitter scene
  • (06:30) - What was the Zero Interest Rate Phenomenon (ZIRP) in the tech scene
  • (09:33) - Should people choose fun early in their career?
  • (12:22) - Lane's take on the expertise when abstracting
  • (14:15) - SST's Philosophy in regards to abstractions
  • (16:35) - Merging roles
  • (19:28) - People don't want to care about the cloud
  • (21:31) - Less stressed about work = better results
  • (24:10) - Managers vs leaders
  • (25:20) - Dax shares stories about managing vs leading
  • (29:36) - Did Dax ever have users?
  • (31:24) - Most Startups Fail
  • (32:09) - Dax's reason for joining startups
  • (33:25) - Staying at a company for decades
  • (35:53) - Main downside of staying at an established company for a long time
  • (36:34) - The World changes, so don't look at how already established companies do things
  • (37:57) - Scale has a different meaning for different companies
  • (40:07) - So much goes away when you have less people at the company
  • (41:51) - Sometimes not saving money is a better option
  • (43:35) - Moving off Stripe
  • (46:54) - Rolling your own payment processor
  • (49:05) - Which debate on Tech Twitter annoys Dax the most
  • (50:52) - Stored Procedure debate
  • (53:31) - What's a BIG mistake in the infrastructure space?
  • (57:31) - Kubernetes
  • (01:02:58) - What Dax misses from Google Cloud
  • (01:03:19) - Is Sundar Pichai a bad CEO?
  • (01:04:51) - Where to find Dax
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Today we welcome Chuck Carpenter aka Charles The 3rd, co-host at Whiskey Web and Whatnot.

As two content creators in the tech scene, we discuss if and how celebrity developers and tech influencers are a good thing for the community, how we should be careful when choosing technologies based on influencers’ opinions, why so many people nowadays want to speedrun their whole career and how that could be self-sabotage, and a lot more!

Learn back-end development - https://boot.dev

Listen on your favorite podcast player: https://www.backendbanter.fm

Whiskey Web and Whatnot: https://whiskey.fm/

Charles' X/Twitter: https://x.com/charleswthe3rd

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

01:27 Does Charles listen to his own podcast episodes?

03:33 Are celebrity developers a good thing?

09:11 Podcasts are usually centered around a business

10:06 We are essentially entertainers

14:04 Tech choices being influenced by creators

17:37 Why ThePrimeagen stood out from other tech influencers

20:26 Career speedrunning

23:44 The biggest miss when starting something

24:51 What is wrong with Full-Stack application frameworks?

29:03 How Frankenstein is the Boot.dev web application stack

37:41 Rolling your own stuff vs using a provider

46:01 It's easy to screw up your architecture

50:53 What is Charles building with in 2024 and what is his preferred stack

56:39 Does it seem like people don't talk about security anymore?

01:00:30 Accessibility

01:02:02 The amount of people that are "kinda" interested in cybersecurity

01:11:03 Have some patience

01:11:37 Where to find Charles

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Theo Browne is a notorious tech YouTuber and streamer, CEO of Ping.gg, TypeScript advocate and creator of the t3 stack. In this episode Theo sheds some light on his background in Elixir, a functional programming language that runs on the Erlang VM, and why he made the switch to TypeScript while working at Twitch.

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Backend Banter - #029 - Write Laravel, not PHP (feat. Aaron Francis)
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11/27/23 • 58 min

Lane and Aaron Francis sit down to talk about Laravel and PHP, and why everyone who uses them tends to make a lot of money. There seems to be something to avoiding the technical hype cycle and just shipping web apps that people want to use.

Learn back-end development - https://boot.dev
Listen on your favorite podcast player: https://www.backendbanter.com

Aaron Francis' Twitter: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis
Aaron Francis' YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@UCbixkBITOOa2XNviJLxMh2w
Aaron Francis' SQL Course: https://planetscale.com/learn/courses/mysql-for-developers/introduction/course-introduction
Learn to make Screencasts: Screencasting.com

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Lane chats with Richard Feldman, creator of the Roc programming language, about why he decided to create it. They discuss object oriented programming and whether it did irreparable damage to the industry - or not. Follow along as they talk about all of that and functional programming too!

Learn back-end development - https://boot.dev
Listen on your favorite podcast player: https://www.backendbanter.com

Richard Feldmans Twitter: twitter.com/rtfeldman
Roc Programming Language: https://www.roc-lang.org/
Software Unscripted can be found on any podcast platform!

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In today's episode, we welcome Casey Muratori, a seasoned programmer who specializes in game engine research and development who is currently working on a narrative game about organized crime in the 1930s in New York.

And oh boy, is this episode packed with valuable knowledge!

In this talk, we go over the differences between different job positions in the Game Development Industry and how it compares to the Web Development arena, as well as dive deep on the notions of technical knowledge, is it all useful or is some of it just a waste of time? We talk about bloated systems, how we already surpassed the tipping point of code written, so that new exploits will be appearing indefinitely. Casey gives us his opinions on what a programmer should ABSOLUTELY know to be the best at what they do, and a lot of other exciting and interesting topics.

Learn back-end development - https://boot.dev

Listen on your favorite podcast player: https://www.backendbanter.fm

Computer, Enhance!: https://www.computerenhance.com/

Casey's Twitter/X: https://x.com/cmuratori

Timestamps:

00:28 Casey's Background

02:43 Game Developer vs Game Designer

09:08 What are the different ways people should think about careers that exist for game developers

14:33 Is all knowledge useful or is some of it a waste of time?

16:16 Computer, Enhance! and Casey's teaching methodologies

24:00 Devil's advocate about understanding at the hardware level

29:48 Software is getting slower, bloatier and less performant

35:42 What is the primary reason behind the rise of slow software

38:20 Top 3 concepts that people SHOULD know

43:43 Do you need to know both ARM and x86?

57:03 30 million line problem

01:08:29 Is there any way to mitigate these types of problems?

01:13:39 Where to find Casey

01:14:50 Which was the best part of Twin Peaks

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Backend Banter - #010 - Distributed Web Apps with Kyle Simpson
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07/17/23 • 59 min

Lane chats with Kyle Simpson, principal software engineer at Socket Supply. They talk about a new wrapper around mobile apps that allows developers to distribute the backend data required for their apps to run directly on various client's devices.

Learn back-end development - https://boot.dev
Listen on your favorite podcast player: https://www.backendbanter.com

Kyle on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/getify/
Socket Supply: https://socketsupply.co/

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FAQ

How many episodes does Backend Banter have?

Backend Banter currently has 70 episodes available.

What topics does Backend Banter cover?

The podcast is about Technology and Podcasts.

What is the most popular episode on Backend Banter?

The episode title '#054 - CS Programs Should NOT Teach Git feat. ThePrimeagen' is the most popular.

What is the average episode length on Backend Banter?

The average episode length on Backend Banter is 59 minutes.

How often are episodes of Backend Banter released?

Episodes of Backend Banter are typically released every 7 days.

When was the first episode of Backend Banter?

The first episode of Backend Banter was released on May 16, 2023.

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