40: Dealing with Mergers and Acquisitions

Now you got me all wound up on these like kitchen creations. I have to go back and look there was an episode that I saw on YouTube some show There's like some prison meal that these guys would make because you know like they don't get a lot of money in the commissaries to spend and so Like they had this one thing that if they saved up money they could get and it was some crazy combination where they they'd it was a special brand of chips That now it's so popular now because of this that oh, I know what you're talking about you know what I'm talking about I know the type I don't know the name of the chips, but I know exactly what you're here And so you can order them now, but they would get a big bag of these chips and they would like throw in what like boiling hot water, a ramen packet. - Yep. - Some other crazy shit. Like all kinds of processed foods went into this thing. - Shabang. - Shabang. (laughing) - Shabang potato chip. - So okay, so what is the recipe, man? Like the Shabang. - Oh, I don't know. - In a bag. - Shabang prison recipe. - It's gotta show up. Sorry to my work who is getting this. - Shabangs, oh, they call them spreads. So when you make stuff in prison, we watch a lot of prison TV. - You do? - Yeah. - You and the Mrs. - And absurd amount. - That's like going to bed TV. - Is there some kind of kinky thing here I don't wanna know about or what? Got a fire field prison show as before. We go to bed. - Watch a lot of lock up. (laughing) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - Welcome Mike and everybody online to episode number 40. - The big 40 of the coffee and code cast. - Wow. - The tech podcast where of course we talk about neither coffee or code. - Neither. Let's do what we need to do here and break these out for episode number 40. - Oh, look at that. We got a couple of these just hanging out back here. How about that? - Product placement right there, buddy. - Love that. - Cheers. - Cheers episode 40. - Hey, what are we got going on on the show today? - Well, I think we're gonna catch up a little bit on what we've been up to for the 4th of July and last week or two. And we've got a lot of Apple news to cover today. Some new product announcements, not some new product announcements, and some other tidbits. Our topic for today is gonna be on mergers and acquisitions and how they impact your tech team. - Welcome to show episode 40. - Yeah, this is very exciting to be at this point. - Who knew, we've come a long way. - Yeah. - 40 episodes in under two years. Are we under two years? - We are under two years. It'll be two years in October. - Yeah, this year. - I don't wanna do too much, but considering the frequency we were putting out episodes to begin with compared to now, pretty impressive. - Yeah, right, I did the math on that at one point and I don't remember. I think we've done the same output the first 18 months that we did, well, we're not quite at two years, but it was like the first year in a few months. - Right. - We've already surpassed that just in the first seven months of this year so far. - Consistency is key, man. - We've been pretty consistent. We did miss a few weeks there just with travel and could have done a better job scheduling. And so we'll have to keep an eye on that going forward. But I don't think it was nearly like it was before. We take a few months off. - Yeah, a little bit of planning would help us out a little bit. But really, I just wanted to do that to give our good friend and listener Dave Lester some time to catch up. He was way behind. He was like only on episode 29 a few weeks ago. - Well, it could be that or maybe wasn't taken enough road trips. I don't know whatever the case might be. - He just was, he was behind, I'm not really sure what. - He'll like that. He'll really like that. - Well, we're on episode 40, so welcome everybody. We got some good stuff to talk about despite earlier, probably an hour ago, not in the home, what the hell were you gonna talk about? - What were we doing an hour ago? We're sitting on the couches out here. I had the iPad out, what do we wanna talk about today? - Yeah, we were taking suggestions from the team. Speaking of the team, I think something that I wanted to talk about just real briefly is, we're 40 episodes in like we just talked about, and up until now, or maybe not now, but recently, we talked to people about the cast and it would come up in conversation and people would kind of joke it off or laugh it off or whatever, and sometimes that still happens. There's jokes made about the cast, but I think the point is there's a lot more people than I wanna be on it, or think it's a very interesting show, or the word's getting out. - Yeah. - And we've talked about this. I think it's a matter of repetition. We've talked about it in my mind, we just don't stop talking about it. I think it comes up in meetings and it comes up all over the place, but it's taken months of repetition for people to really take notice and start listening. And now we've had a growing following and even in the workplace, a lot of good feedback coming from folks that have been checking us out. - You know, you had some concern on this episode. I don't, just for you all listening and watching out there, I don't have any test liners on the show. - I was so concerned. - I looked away, I'm gonna loop it back here. So this is how bad it was. - Well, go ahead, finish. - Well, I'm gonna equate our show to Tesla. I just keep talking about it until people finally just succumb. - Wow. - And accept that Tesla is like the king of cars and just buy one. - And you're really, and what's the kickback that Elon's giving you with this? (laughing) - I don't know, I should get a kickback here. - Man, you're just trying to wear me down. You figure if you do it enough, then I'm just not gonna ask any more questions. I'll just roll on with the news. - Yeah. I don't want to hear any more complaining. It's working. Hey, did we ever log into Slack? I don't know if GOMERS are around. Let me pop that up here. 'Cause I forgot to do that. And he might be hanging out there. Maybe. We've got a few people on there too. He's been sending me a lot of horrible airplane accident videos. Oh, like prop planes or like big ones. Jetliners. The most recent one that he sent me was, I think it was even a Delta Jet where the fan like cap, you know, usually they have like a swirly design on it. You can see it spinning. - Yeah. - That cap like busted off and you could like see it like flying around in the fan. - That's not good. - It was a little freaky, yeah. It does not look like a big comb or a zone. So we may not get any Cheeto news today. - He's not, but my homeboy PB just popped in. So hey, what's up Patrick, how you doing buddy? My barbecue friend over at the Nolo. - Oh excellent. - I try, yeah my travel buddy. - Yeah. - Yeah, I think that it is just a matter of repetition. We talk about it enough and it's getting out there enough and people are starting to pick up on it and check it out. And so we've had some good conversations in the workplace about it. We've had good conversations that start at work that land on the cast, and then it kind of fires up a debate afterwards about some of these topics, like management and structuring teams and that sort of thing. Yeah, exactly. And so I've been very happy about that. And we have a lot more interest for guests come on to show too. So try to get something last minute here. This week, and it didn't quite happen, but we'll be a better prepared. and we've got a short list now that's not so short. People that wanna come on. - Yeah, there's a lot of folks in town and we tried to bring a number of people on, but either timing didn't work out or they weren't comfortable or whatever the case might be. - They already did it twice, but I think that was Zaxida. - That was an accidental, I call myself a drink. (laughing) - But yeah, we had a lot of people in town, so we tried to get some people on. A lot of people have expressed interest. Maybe they'll be in town another time here and we'll get them on or bring them on remotely. I think we need to set something up. Maybe next week, maybe we could do something. - We should try that because we do have people that are in the Denver office, and I know Zach, we talked to what coming on to, and we can take calls, we can do Bluetooth on this rig. - Yes. - So we don't have to be in the office to do this. - Doesn't have to be at this time either, we could pre-record something, so we'll figure something out and get that going. - I think so too. And is there anything else you wanted to say about episode 40? - No, let's get a move in. - Yeah, well the next thing I wanted to showcase here is that we're trying to expand our video production, So we don't really have the room set up, you know, ideally what we want to be, but we do have another camera angle. So if I can just pop that on, I think I just double click that thing. Maybe, I don't know, do I do that? - If it's on the bottom, it should be live, right? Do I get a cross also? - Oh, it did change, I just didn't see it. Okay. - Yeah. - It was so fast I didn't see it switch and it should show up on my Facebook feed. - Right. - And it was a couple of seconds just having that. Did it go? Yeah, it did go pretty good. - It did, that's the wide angle. - Yeah, so we got the wide angle lens over there. This is coming off of your iPhone XR. - Right. - Pretty damn good quality for an iPhone. - Not bad. - Or for just a camera phone. Like I don't have anything against the iPhone camera, I'm just saying, like for as far as phones are concerned, that's not pretty fucking good. - We can have a lot of angles here. That's kind of the beauty of the Sling Studio setup that you purchased a while back. We've always been just doing the set shot straight in front of us. - Yeah. - This is the first time we've tried multi-angle. So we ultimately eventually do wanna do multi-angle. like to have kind of one right on Mike one right on myself and then kind of a wide angle. Trying not to scare too many people away. Yeah, it doesn't need to be too close. With the close angle yeah, exactly. Now let's get back to the other one. I like generally speaking a little better there is. Excellent. So yeah, my parents were in town here recently and we've done a lot of traveling and all that kind of stuff and something I threw in here and I was curious because you're a Midwest guy. I am. I do hail from Chicago. We were talking even recently kind of about Midwest isms, right? - We sure do, yeah. - You were crossing somebody's path and apparently it's a Midwestern thing to be like, "Whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop." - I don't know how you say. - Whoop, whoop. - I don't know, it's not even really a fully formed sound it just, whoop. - I don't know, it's just like an acknowledgement of, sorry I'm in your way or something else, yeah. - Yeah, that's right. - Yeah, other Midwest isms like humidity and casserole dishes. - Casserole, that's right. You said, yeah, you had hot dishes. Dude, hot dish, everything's in a fucking hot dish. Even dessert comes in a hot dish. Somebody had made a dessert for one of the parties, and it was in a hot dish. - What would it be? - Apple pie? - Just like, what the hell would it be? - This one was some kind of like M&M cookie cake thing. I don't know, not even sure what it really was, but it came in a nine by 12. They don't come in like individual servings there. They come in a nine by 12, Pyrex, and lots of hot dishes. - Well, it's unfortunate that my parents aren't on. Either my mom or my dad here. - Oh, my dad doesn't listen. - But Karen is not on the chat. - She's not listening. And what I wanted to discuss here, because when they were recently here, there was a lot of debate regarding the use of the word supper. - Yeah. - You use the word supper? - No, I don't. - I don't either. - Sold school, man. - It's lunch and dinner. - Yeah, lunch dinner. - And lunch is your 12 meal. - Yeah. - And dinner, oh Lexa's on now. So here we go. - 12 meal? Can you tell me what the hell a 12 meal is? - 12 meal? - Like, is that the fourth meal? - That's what I'm wondering, that's what I'm asking you. - That's a 12 meal. You said lunch is the 12th meal. Oh noon noon meal. Oh, yeah, I thought it was just some I thought that was another like Midwestism or Yeah, there you go. She's already like oh boy. Oh boy. Yeah, well, and then dinner is your six o'clock meal like what the hell is supper? That might be fourth meal. It's the farmer meal. Maybe Maybe now fourth meal is Taco Bell. Well, I know but they could have adapted that from supper Like that's the new supper is fourth meal at Taco Bell. Hmm. I don't know. I don't either I don't like it. I think that they're one in the same, aren't they? Isn't dinner and supper the same thing? No, apparently dinner, like supper is like a dinner, I don't even know. We need to look it up. Who's the look it up person here? Yeah, somebody, I don't know, somebody listen and maybe look it up. Maybe Lexan probably knows what's going on. I think we had a pretty healthy debate about this already. So I know, it deals with like, I think oftentimes farming, which is why it's a Midwestern thing. But I think if I want to say supper, okay. - So something's sundown then, it's like a time of day when you gotta stop farming and then you have to eat 'cause there's no more farming that could be had. It's too dark. - Well, apparently there's two meanings for supper. One is a light evening meal when dinner is taken at midday. So it's a sup, it's a-- - Who the fuck eats dinner at midday? (laughing) - Or a light meal eaten before going to bed. That to me is fourth meal. Although that might not be so light. - Yeah, if you're going to tea bell, dude, you're usually like trying to order the kitchen sink. I've been told the farmers used to have lunch at 10 and 2 pm. So there'd be two lunches. Now I'm super confused, two lunches. - That's what I'm saying. This is really confusing. My parents would always be like, "Oh, what are we having for supper?" I'm like, "Well, what time is supper?" - Yeah. - Christina thinks lunch then supper then dinner. - No, there's no supper. - I have heard more long those lines. Like I thought it was gonna be dinner then supper. I thought like supper was like after dinner. - Desert. - And then you have dessert. - Okay. And that's time for breakfast again. - It's just like a number of courses throughout the day. - I guess. I don't know. I need some more clarity on this. And then a separate noon meal. - Oh my goodness. - Isn't that lunch? - Good Lord. - See, - Farmers ate pretty well. I'm figuring out here, man. - These are the types of topics we need to talk about. This is very divisive. - Yeah, this is like, this is very contentious. Everybody has their own opinion about it. And I've had none of these meals. I've had eight lunch and dinner. - So it missed not a lot of meals. - What would you call it if you're fasting? If you're doing your, what, 18, six? - 18, six, I.F. - Yeah, what that is. - So what do you, what's your meal called then? - There is no meal. The first meal you have after that is breakfast, tense breaking the fast. - That's true. - That's what that is. - See, that's even worse. - That's what that's all about, yeah. - 'Cause breakfast, I bet you if you're defined breakfast, that's probably in that early, that's gonna be defined as an A.M. meal, right? - It would be yes. I don't think there's any, - But is there any disagreement about that? - Well, but 18, six, you might come off that at noon. - Well, I think that breaking a fast, sure. I think that historically people don't eat overnight. You're sleeping and that's your fast. I don't think they're historically breakfast just means an AM meal to break the fast. But you need to go to a technical, you couldn't. - It does say the first meal of the day, usually eaten in the morning. - Usually. - But it's just the first meal of the day. I feel like this might be like kind of a cake first pie debate. - Now we're getting really silly because I don't eat breakfast. I break fast at lunch. So for me, my breakfast is at noon. - Yeah, exactly. It just says usually in the morning. So in that case, it still would be breakfast. - Yeah. - Yeah. - Yeah. Well there you go. We've come to some conclusion. - What is this? I'm getting something from the left around here right now about the podcast. You need to do what now? Scoop one. I'm game for whatever you want, Bagel. Tell me what you want me to put on here, man. I don't know. I don't think you know what I'm gonna do. - You're not gonna-- - I'm not gonna recite what he said. I don't really understand. - Yeah. - Anyway. - I don't understand what he says most of the time. - That. - All right, let's move on with that one. - Well that was a fun follow up. I guess it's a follow up to something what you did last weekend. - Traveling, yeah, traveling with the fam. - Travel. I was in the Midwest last weekend. I was in Omaha. - Yeah, and then you had, oops. - Oops, I had that happen. - Yeah. Yeah, that was pretty sweet, man. I just, to elaborate on that, it was kind of fun 'cause my mom just moved into a new place and so I was able to go check that out and we had a couple parties with our hot dishes over there and I don't know, it was so humid, man. It was so humid and I came back here and I was freezing my balls off because it's only like 68 degrees in rain when I landed on Sunday. - And you, yeah, you booked it out here the last episode and we recorded and I think you were out the next morning or that evening. - Yeah, the next morning, early morning. I didn't stay after because I had to go home and pack and then it was a 4 a.m. wake up call to get ready and go to the airport. And I wanted to go to the lounge. I did not go to the lounge before the flight. It was really kind of a disappointment. - I would have to lounge? - How you gonna go? - Well, I was on Alaska this time. - Oh, well you got dual status so it doesn't matter. - It doesn't matter. But the problem is is that they don't, you know, I wanted to go have a little beverage before the flight but they don't serve before six, man. No drinks before six a.m. (laughing) I wanted to break my fast early that day and I didn't work out. - All right, that's all I gotta say about that. - Yeah. The only other thing I had on here is some health issues. If you notice, I'm not wearing my glasses today, which is I think the first time that's been the case for a couple weeks. I had an eye-riders. - At least. - Which I totally thought you were just bullshit. - No, that's a real thing. - Eye-idus. I figured you had something. - It's not eye-idus. - Eye-riders. - Oh, I write-is. - Oh, that's why I have some of the extras. - Yeah. - Oh, okay. - Yeah. - What is an eye-diss? - I don't know. - Okay. have one of them or two of them or one? - I had it in both eyes. - Jesus, dude, that sounds pretty serious. - It's not normal. When I talk to the eye doctor this morning, she definitely was like, this is not an normal thing, like usually it's accompanied by some other medical anomaly. So definitely advocated that I get some blood work done and all that kind of thing. But good news is with some steroids. So I'm pumped, getting that taken care of. They're pretty clear now. can wear my contacts, but I gotta keep putting the drops in for another month, but finally, I have to wear glasses, I fucking hate glasses. - So I misunderstood that. I thought you said you had to wear them for one more month. - Wear glasses for a little? - Yeah. - No, no, no, no, put the drops in for another month. - Oh, well that's cool. That's way better than. I thought you had to wear the glasses too. - No way. - Yeah, that's why I said, oh that's a bummer because I thought, shit dude, you're gonna have to do that again. That's no fun. - Idis is a medical condition accompanied by inflammation, which is exactly what it was. Like my eyes were fireballs. - Wow. - Yeah, as red as your shirt. - Ooh, yeah. - Yeah, nice. We're kind of matching a little bit there today. - Hey, we did that on purpose. - Yeah, like that. - We need to have coffee, coat cast colors. - Well, we should order some shirts. I know that I would, there you go. Here's your free merch if you want a sticker. - I still love Gomer a sticker, he hasn't got one yet. He requested one, but I'm-- - We'll need to send it out to him. - Lazy to send it, yeah. - Speaking of the old Gomer, it was funny because last week, if wasn't that the Cheetos breaded sandwich, - Yes it is. - And so I left, I had to go run an errand after the show. And so I got in the car and left and I went and grabbed some Taco Bell and they had the big Cheetos board. I didn't make the connection that it was like at the Taco Bell/KFC. I knew it was there but I didn't think about it and I pulled up and I'm like, "Oh god damn, that's the Cheetos sandwich. I'm not going to get it." On Christina's workslacks, somebody had to go in and posted a picture of the actual unboxing of this thing. Literally. and it's like literally like a bun with some Cheetos stacked in it. Yeah. And then like a chicken patty on top of it. Like it was just a torul. There's a guy on YouTube that I really find entertaining and he's a young dude. I think he's probably like, he looks like he's 17. He's probably 22 or 23 I think. And he's got this channel called The Week in Review or The Weekly Review. And it's a, and he just reviews shitty food. Like he would go and get the Cheetos sandwich and he would give a 10 or 15 minute unboxing and try it and give a review on it. And he's done it with like Domino's pizza, McDonald's Big Mac. - Is it kind of like this, subreddit where it's like actual versus reality or whatever, whatever versus reality where it's like, they give you the picture of what burger king, this is what burger king says it looks like. You actually get. - No, he doesn't do that. I mean, that's, yeah, I know what you're talking about and I like that too, that's kind of cool, but because it never looks the same. - Yeah. - It's like, it's a beautiful fluffy bun and then it's like, just someone sat on it, you know? There's gotta be somebody that's always at the end of the line to smash it. The sandwich smasher. The sitter, honey. Yeah. Somebody's always keeping them warm. You're keeping them busy. Like a fuck, man, I don't want to be busy right now. I'm gonna smash the sandwich, you know. Keeping a warm under the cheeks. Oh god, that's nasty dude. I don't want to think about that shit. That's terrible. So yeah, I went through. I did not, I skipped on the Cheetos chicken sandwich. That's too bad. But I did. Alvarados? I did check it out. When I was back home, I did not hit up Alvarados. Maybe a little, uh, once a lot of mesa erotic photo hunt. Yeah, I missed out on that neurotic. I forgot about amazing. Alvarados did do a lot of mesa. And we had a lot of, um, you know, hot dishes. So I didn't have a lot of a lot of hot dishes and light beer. Yeah. And and bar desserts, right? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Big desserts, pan bars. Yeah. Yeah. Huge like all kinds of crazy shit. I, I really stayed away from it. There was this one dessert that was just fucking insane, dude. Like somebody had this big like pampered chef bowl that like massive bowl. I mean, I don't know. It was probably 10 inches tall and maybe like eight inches in diameter and it was just a combination of like fudge, caramel, Oreo cookies, and whipped cream or something. I don't even know it was in there. - That sounds amazing. - It was amazing. I waited until like there was only a scoop left at the end like three days later, everybody was working on this thing. And I finally just did a little scoop of it. And it's a good Lord, man. like I would be diabetic if I just like had any more of this right now. Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's say someone's commenting your sister's commenting here on hot dish with Lutheran binder. What's that? I don't know. I've never heard of that before. And I think there's more details on that. Yeah. Yeah, provide some more detail. Please, I don't understand what you're talking about. Yeah. In the meantime, should we move on to the news? Yeah, let's set up some news. All right. (upbeat music) - So I wanted to talk about some Apple News since you didn't have a lot of Tesla stuff to talk about today. So I just got a few things. There's some new, some not so new. But the first one is the 12 inch MacBooks being discontinued. - This is called, I think nicknamed the MacBook Adorable. - 'Cause it's so tiny. It's so tiny. - Yeah, yeah. - Actually, I really liked this one. It wasn't very powerful. - Yeah. - But like if you would look at the size form factor compared to these like gigantic things. Like it's tiny, tiny in light. - Right. - But still capable. - And this was not the MacBook Air. This was just the small form factor MacBook. So it was more, I mean, it's not too far off from the iPad Pro, really. - It was a little bit, yeah, it was a little bit kind of geared towards students. And I think it was kind of like the MacBook Air came out, the original one. - Yeah. - They never updated that for quite a long time. They came out with kind of this guy. - Yeah. - And I think that was kind of like the next step for students and then they refresh the MacBook Air. So now they're kind of like, well, we don't need this one anymore, right? - It makes sense to me. It's a crowded place between the MacBook Pros and the MacBooks and then the iPads. I don't really think a 12 inch. You already have what, a 13 inch MacBook Pro? - Yes, 13, 15. - Yeah. - A ledge, a 16 is coming. - Oh right, that was the refresh you saw. That might be a little larger, yeah. - There's a rumor, yeah. - Okay. So not a big disappointment here. I think it makes sense probably to clean up a little bit of the line up there, right? Yes. So it wasn't only the elimination of this, but they also did a few updates, right? Yeah. To some of the other line up, to kind of, I guess fill it out. And they also brought some prices down. They did. So the other news was that what they're going all in on the touch bar now. So all models of the MacBook Pro, all models of the MacBook are now. You can't get one without it. That's right. You're going to get the touch bar everywhere now. So how do you feel about it? You've had the test bar on yours for, well, as long as you've owned it. How long have you had that? - A year, I've had it for a year now. And 95% of the time that I use this thing, it's docked and closed, so I don't use the touch bar. I really, I said this before, I really want them to have a magic keyboard with the touch bar. Because I think then I would get a better idea if I'd use it or not. I do like using it for the volume and some stuff like that, but it's not a go-to because I just don't have the lid open much. Right, I'm way more enthused about iOS 13, iOS 13 having the native support for iPad as a secondary display, because I do that all the time. So when I'm traveling, I do have the laptop open and I've got the iPad as a secondary, and that's really nice. But as far as the touch bar goes, I just don't get a ton of mileage onto that thing. Which is too bad because it's really nice, especially in a VM. So I'm running this thing with parallels, Windows 10, and you get touch bar support with that, like Visual Studio, all those things have touch bar icons in there. So, it's pretty. It's a cool visual. And occasionally I'll see something and be like, oh yeah, boom, mute, change the screen, resolution or whatever. But it's just not something I can take advantage of. It's my normal workflow. >> It's not always supported by every application, right? It can change based on the app you're using, but not all app support it. >> Right. >> And then it's a little bit strange too, because the keyboard is something that you always kind of, have been taught that's a fixed thing. It doesn't move, it doesn't change. - Right. - And now it's changing based on the context of whatever it is you're looking at. So the idea is good. I like the idea of it. The practicality of it, I can't say is, you know. - But it's hard to, it's hard to, like you think of even like keyboard shortcuts, right? Like those don't change. I mean, you can change them, like via usually config or something like that. But like the keyboard is a static thing, whereas like now you're changing the contents of what's displayed on the keyboard and then like context switching. So like the keyboard is changing based on what you're looking at. So if you expect something to be there and then you're in a different app that doesn't have that same functionality, it's a little bit strange. I agree. Yeah, I agree. I don't know. That's all I got to say about that. Sorry, I got to say about the touchpad. Yeah, I think so. But the keyboard has been a big topic of debate lately and there's some news coming out now that they're going to ditch the, this would be the fourth iteration if I'm not mistaken. Is that right? I think you're correct. So yeah, butterfly keyboard mechanism that they announced, I don't know what, five years ago, maybe something like that. - Yeah. - Spinning the news, it's the one that, like, you get a little dust particle in there and then it gets jammed and-- - Gotta have a little can to air to get it out of there. - Yeah, just, I've not had the problem, but a lot of people have had problems with this one. - Well, but you have like the third generation. - Right, and I think there are still complaints about that as well, but so far so good. - Yeah. - And I'm looking at it now and there's a bunch of dust particles and stuff in there, I need to clean it out, but it's fine, I haven't had any problems tight on it. - Well the issue is on the, I guess the throw of the key, like the key doesn't travel very far. It's like a mouse click, I think we've talked about this before. - Yeah. - But so there's no room for any dust to be under it. It doesn't move very far. So, it doesn't take much. - Yeah, once you have a dust particle under there, you can't get it to make the connection to register a keystroke. - Right. So they're gonna ditch that design. I think they've tried to iterate on that a few times, four times now and it's still not living up to the promise of what they hope to be. And so the rumor is they're going to more of a scissors switch. Interesting. So the old scissors switch design. That's going to be coming out in the next version. I don't know when. That's a rumor at this point. Right. To say who the rumor came from. No, I don't. Analyst. Some random analyst. Yeah. Yeah. It's I think it's about time. Those keyboards have been problematic since they first came out. The very, I don't remember which MacBook version that came out on, but immediately people started having that trouble. They've tried to replace the membranes to keep dust from getting underneath it and a number of different, in the four different iterations that they've tried and none of them have worked totally successfully. So if you're buying a product that, like that thing, what costs three grand probably? It's the one you purchase it. Yes. Yeah. Huh. Like you're buying a three grand machine and the thing that should be like the most stable of any of it is the keyboard. And it's not. That's a disappointment. Hey, man. Beautiful machine. Kids don't work. Exactly right. Who needs a reliable keyboard input entry device, right? Keyboards have been around for how long? I mean, that should be like the most rock solid thing that you could ever put together as a keyboard. That's what, you know, it's funny because, you know, this is a lineman who is going to be our guest tonight. we were talking about this. There's a bunch of new recruits in the Denver office, and a bunch of young bucks, and everybody over there has the mechanical keyboards now. - Oh, a little click and be clackety click me. - So like, oh fuck dude, like everybody's like, (imitates a dog barking) you know? - Yeah. - It would take a lot of dust to clog one of those up, man, those things have like nine inches of travel. - Yeah, exactly. Well, you had one of those. - I did, everybody in the office here was like all over those for a little bit. - I did start the trend here at the office. I will take that title. - Trends, I did. - I was a trend center. I got the nose, Jillian. I got the happy Jillian. - I wonder how she's doing. She's in Vegas now. - Yeah. - Working for MGM or something like that. - Yeah. - I just wanna go out there and see if I can borrow her MGM card and just get some free meals. She gets some pretty nice perks of that job over there I'm told. - But you got like, I don't know, you got him to order what? 10 different mechanical keyboards that they had in stock and then everybody just started grabbing them. - Well, that's what happened. So Jillian had the nice course there. keyboard, the gaming keyboard, and that was the LED programmable. So there was like, you know, it's a full RGB key, and you can program and be any color you want. So she had that. I thought that was pretty fancy, and then I got approval for one. And after that, it was pretty much game over. Like everybody wanted one. So yeah, they ordered a bunch of Google ones or generic logitech ones or something like that. And then I've since ditched mine, and I think most people have ditched theirs too, and now it's back to this like something. I think we just like to have new shit. I don't think it matters what it is. It's just like, "Oh, it's been three months. Like, there's gotta be some new fucking keyboard out there that I would like to have my hands on." - Thing looked like a rave. Like, "Oh, dude, this is like swing around." Like the LED pattern was just like light up in different colors all the way around it and just like going to straight. - That's right. Yeah. It just was randomly doing all this shit. It was super crazy. And then ultimately I didn't like it because it has a massive USB cord on the back. It's not cordless. I don't feel latency. I think they have to do it that way. Well, on power I would imagine. And power. Battery power. How many LEDs? Yeah, that would be pretty shitty. That's certainly the case. Yeah, for battery life too. Right. So you use now your desk, you're using an Apple Magic keyboard. Magic keyboard. And Magic Mac Trackpad. Yeah. I love the Trackpad. And it's a clean look. I go back and forth, but I'm more minimalist that way. And so I do like it. I've got the curved monitor. and a, so it's what, a curved 34 inch monitor, 37 maybe? I don't know. And then the keyboard and mouse and a little tabletop size pad, like mouse pad. Which I don't know how you pulled off the curved monitor, by the way. The only other two people that in this company have a curved monitor like that are executives. [laughs] I'm not going to reveal my secrets, but you know, I have a way of, it's like you said with the Tesla news, man. You just like bring it up enough and you eventually wear them down. - Oh well, I'm gonna. - So Brad, if you're listening. - Yeah. - I'll be, I'll be hitting you up. - Well you can get away with it now. I'm sure Brad will get you one. I was down in Sacramento last two weeks ago and they had everybody had one down there. - Oh, you're gonna told me that. - Yeah, so you just need to talk to him and say, "Hey, what the hell do you, that?" These guys are all getting some curved monitors down in Sacramento. - They got the sweet new office. Like all modern looking great. - They have a great office down there, man. They have an awesome office, yes. - I'm gonna have to go into Brad's office in the morning. - They don't have any alcohol over there, so I think we still have the edge. - Squares light, man. - No, but we have like taps and other things. - All right. - All right, what else we got on the Apple News? I wanna talk about our topic. Let's go to some show on the news. - We got some more Apple News. - Just a little bit. - Did you know iPods are still a thing? - I did not know that was a case until very recently. - Yeah, apparently they were dead. I thought they were dead in the water. - Not the clicky like wheel iPods that they used to have back in the day or like the shuffle. - Right. - Right. - No. - iPod touch still exists and they updated it. So this has been, I don't know how long it's been, a few years, didn't they stop producing these things like four years ago or something like that? - The touch has been in production forever. They just haven't updated it. - Oh, they just, okay, it's been there all the time. It has stopped updating. - It's just super dated. - Wow, okay. Well, this thing looks like now an iPhone 7. - That's right. - It looks like the same, 'cause you have the home button and then the front and the rear camera. And wow, they're pretty inexpensive. They start at $1.99. - Yep. - Yeah, exactly. A lot of people use these for like kids. - Yeah. - Before they get them an actual cell phone because it'll do everything that a cell phone will do just without LTE connectivity, basically. - Right. Yeah, I think that I was in the bar. Imagine that. I was in the bar the other day and someone was talking about their kid wants to get one and they, a lot of kids now in middle school or whatever, I don't know how young these youngsters are but kids want these things now. And you can still do messages in FaceTime. You just don't have the chip. You don't have the cell chip in there. - You could even do iMessage because you have an iCloud account. You just wouldn't have a phone number. - Right, right. - You can do all the different things that you would do data wise. - Right, no problem. - Just under the context of Wi-Fi, there's no LTE. But they're super thin. If you actually see in one of those, they're probably like, three quarters of the thickness of your iPhone. So they're really, really thin and super light. - Zach's following me on Twitter now. Zach, are you on, man? If you're on, say hello on Facebook, because that'd be cool. We're just talking about you. Yeah, exactly. Sorry to interrupt. But anyway, yeah, super thin, because why? They don't need probably, the battery probably goes to like the other radio antennas and other shit, and they probably stripped out quite a bit. They may not have Bluetooth either. I'm not sure on connectivity that way, but probably can strip out some radio, some, it's an A10 fusion, so it's not a bad chip. It's just, I mean, for an I, for a music player and the app, it's great, you know, should we get enough? - I'm sure the LT radio is a battery hog. - Yeah, I would think so. - That thing's using data all the time and pinging towers all the time, so I'm sure if you remove that, you can probably remove part of the battery as well. - Right, yeah. - It looks like everything else is there. It does have Bluetooth because it works with AirPods, so there you go. - Love my AirPods. - Yeah, I do too. The AirPods are good. - So that's cool, it's funny. I saw this news and I was like, holy shit, they still make eye-pots. I'd forgotten about them. I knew they were there just because I think some of my, you know, some of my wife's, nieces and nephews, or maybe it was my niece and nephew I can't remember, but had 'em back in the day, before they could have actual full-blown cell phones. I knew there were things and we're still around. I just knew they hadn't been updated forever. - Well, now you know. - Yeah. - And that's the rest of the story. - Oh. - So it looks like the Lutheran binder is cream of celery soup. - Who? - How did you not know that? - I would, I know that. - I don't know. I figured you lived in Iowa for a long time. I figured if anyone knew about a hot dish, you might have a few ideas. (laughing) - What is Iowa have to do with Lutheranism? - Oh, I don't know about that. I just assume it's a Midwestern thing. - All right. I don't know. - Okay. - Whoop. - There you go. Hot dish with the cream of celery soup, the old Lutheran binder. I'll have that for supper. - There you go. - Yeah, supper. I'll have that when I break my fast sometime in the morning possibly. - There you go, yeah. - Not necessarily. (laughs) - There's cream of everything, right? - Yeah. - You use that for your cast roles, your hot dishes. - Right, yeah, exactly. - Cream of mushroom and chicken. - Yeah, that's a good one. (laughs) My roommate in college, this guy, he's a character and I saw him when I was back there again last weekend and he was a med student And also pretty-- - And Drew? - And pretty lazy individual. Yeah, not with studies. I mean, he was very good with studies, but like anything outside of the realm of studying, he was kind of, did, wanted minimal effort. You know, he was very, he wanted to be very efficient with. And so, I just remember him doing things like that. Like he would eat, he might have a cream of chicken, but he's not gonna heat it up. Like he would get like the spaghettios and just open the can and just scoop them out. (laughing) - Well, I don't want to get into this too much, - But my dad has a favorite meal. And all it is is, well, it's not even spaghetti, it's a Franco-American spaghetti, which is spaghetti and a can, which is horrible in itself. - Is it like noodles, like the long noodles and a can? - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Oh, that's impressive. - With, I guess you'd call it sauce, I don't know. (laughing) - Well preserved. But then you brown up hamburger, so you get a pound of hamburger. - Okay. - You throw that in there, put it, mix it together. - That sounds good. - And then you get a bag of ruffles, and you use that as your scoop. - Oh, really? - Yeah. - Really? - That's my dad's bachelor meal when he's home alone. - Okay, that actually sounds kind of interesting. I would like to try some, if I remember back there, man. - Maybe, well, maybe next time we're on the cast here, we'll have to have a pile of it. - Yeah. - You can eat it on the show. - I always wanna say, like Mason City, that's not where you're from though. - No, Albert City. - Albert, okay. - Yeah, I was forget that. - Mason City's a lot bigger. - Yeah, okay. Well, that's not saying much. Mason City's not that big of a town either, is he? - No, okay. - They were in 800. - Yeah, I've been up there before though. - Yeah. - And some family up there before, so. from the Earth area. But now you got me all wound up on these like kitchen creations. I have to go back and look. There was an episode that I saw on YouTube, some show. There was like some prison meal that these guys would make. 'Cause you know, they don't get a lot of money in the commissaries to spend. And so they had this one thing that if they saved up money, they could get, and it was some crazy combination where they'd, it was a special brand of chips. That now it's so popular now because of this. - Oh, I know what you're talking about. You know what I'm talking about? - I know the name of the chips, but I know exactly what you're doing. - And so you can order them now, but they would get a big bag of these chips and they would like throw in what like boiling hot water or ramen packet. - Yep. - Some other crazy shit. Like all kinds of processed foods went into this thing. - Shabang. - Shabang. - Shabang, computer chip. - So okay, so what is the recipe, man? Like the Shabang. - Oh, I don't know. - In a bag. - Shabang, prison recipe. It's gotta show up. Sorry to my work who is getting this. Shabangs, oh, they call them spreads. So when you make stuff in prison, we watch a lot of prison TV. - You do? - Yeah. - You and the Mrs. - And absurd amount. - That's like going to bed TV. - Is there some kind of kinky thing here? I don't wanna know about or what? Got a fire field prison show as before. We go to bed. - Watch a lot of lock up. (laughing) - Oh, but the scene I was online And then I think I'm just assigned off. - She's out now. (laughing) They're called spreads though, when they like take and mash together like all these things they can get from commentary. - Yeah. - Yeah. - Yeah, exactly. Okay, so it's called a spread. - Yeah. - And this particular one was just like, somebody went out and brought, like met with an ex-con who was released and like it was an journalist, and he brought him a bunch of these bags and he was like, "Hey, we have to try this spread." And so they made this thing. And I mean, it was pretty wicked. I would definitely like to try it. It was just probably like 972 grams of carbs. Like they care. - And some hot sauce. Well yeah, nobody gets a shit there. You just want something to taste good. You're just tired of like stale bread or whatever. - I found a link to one on Pinterest. I want to look at it, but I have to sign in here. So cover me here for a minute. - Yeah, no problem. I'm just gonna sip a little bit more of my cures later. - We'll put this on the show notes by the way. So you can check out prison spreads. - Yeah, can you get the recipe and put up there for all our listeners, I wanna make their own prison spread. - I'm not joking, Christina. - If you can get the chips now, I mean, you could certainly do it. 'Cause usually it's like, usually it's like, crush up the chips, put them as a base, like melt some snickers down, put them on, or like, it's like horrible. - Yeah, it is. - Some Cheetos on top of that. - But people like, well, fight for that shit. That's the thing to their hands on that, that's what they wanna do. It's interesting too, because there's one company that does all of this stuff. There's an actual like laser, you know, I don't know who they are, who's the major. That makes the chips? Yeah, like conagra foods, you know, or there's like a big company like that, like a top food maker that just does prison food. And so like they make the Shabang chips and all that sort of stuff too, but it's like a whole separate line that you never see in stores that's just geared towards like prisons cross country, private prison. That's pretty funny too, because I know like they talk about that actually on a number of episodes of of a lockup that those chips are just not available on the outside. That's right. big deal and people get out and they're like, what the fuck do I do now, man? I can't make my shabby. (laughing) - Oh, it's a video. I should send it to you. - Yeah, well let's make sure we just link to it at least. - Yeah. - Well, I don't know what they're cutting up. Oh, now they're cutting up some real veggies. They're using the lid of a can. So like they pop the top off a can. - Yeah. - And they're using like the lid. Edge of the lid do like do some chopping. - Oh, it's like a knife. - Yep. Exactly. Now we're pouring a can of like, or milk chili in there. Yeah, buddy. - Oh, wow. - This is gonna do wonders for your gut problems. (laughing) - If you didn't have any before, then you certainly will now. - All right. Well, I have this saved here, so I'll make sure that's gets in the show notes. - Sorry, I apologize. - It must be back in the up there now. It's too busy. - Well, that's all right. In fact, I'll post it here to the, to our good old coffee coat cast, live broadcast so people can check it out. - Oh, there it is, excellent dude. Yep, that's cool. - I wouldn't want people, if they need their supper this evening. - We don't want to keep you waiting. - You can get your spread. - You can thank your good friends there. Here are the hosts of the coffee co-cast for your supper spread. - Yeah. - See, we're pros here. We brought it all the way back around. - Full circle. - Yeah, exactly. - Yeah, we didn't, you know, didn't even tend to do that, but it just happened that way. That's how good we are. We don't even have to think about it, it just happens. - Yeah, so we move on to the topic. - Let's please do so. We only have about 20 minutes left. - What's the topic? So our topic for today is, it's about mergers and acquisitions, right? And how that impacts your tech teams. And I wanted to talk about it just because it was relevant. Again, a lot of these topics, we just pull from real experience. Man, I've got like, these coolers lights are extra carbonated today, man. Been like having to turn my head every five minutes over here. But it's a topic of discussion that's been coming up a lot recently. And especially this week, having our friends here from headquarters down in Charlotte, North Carolina. and some other, we had some of our other offices around your two, Zach and Denver and whatnot. So, you know, kind of, I wanna discuss, just kind of have, not even a debate, but just a conversation about like some of the issues that arise. So, you know, I'll set the stage a little bit. As you know, we were kind of, for a lot of years, running solo, it was just us, just QDub, doing our thing, right? And then we partnered with other third parties had API integrations back and forth, that's always been a common part of our history. That's not a big deal. You can do Ajax calls and API calls, and that's pretty fine. But then we made some small acquisitions over our history. And one that was kind of a larger one was down in Sacramento. So we picked up a call center and like a call product that we wanted to build. And so we acquired a company down there. Boom, all of a sudden now, it's not just API calls, but it's like, well, they have a copy of the client database and we have a copy of the client database and we have a do-not-call list and you have a do-not-call list and how do we deal with that? And how do you share them? The obvious answer is you share it across both companies, right? You create some service that both can access. And that sounds great and that's the obvious easy solution. But how do you get there? Because your service has schema XYZ where you need these 15 pieces of data. of information. My service only needs 10 pieces of information. So how do you make them talk together, how do you make them work together and make that in a cohesive unit that works for both parties is an extremely difficult problem to solve? It's not easy and you can get away with it inexpensively in the beginning just by doing what you describe as creating these integrations that kind of do a mapping of sorts and then you say, "Okay, well, we're just going to notify you when something new happens." But pretty quickly and now, and this is kind of what makes it even more pressing now is that we were required and so now there's three of us, right? There's three kind of entities here and even if you look at the subsidiaries they have, there's plenty more. And who knows like how many of those will have to interact with down the road too, but now you've got potentially three sets of data. You've got three client tables, you've got three, do not call lists, you've got three, et cetera, et cetera. And it's just like now, you're just getting, I mean, this thing is really starting to grow in complexity because there is no source of truth. And in order to have a source of truth is going to be very difficult to achieve because it's going to be hard to go into legacy apps that rely on some other source of truth and make sure that it's calling the new thing. And so yeah, I don't know. I think it's a series of trade-offs and there is no right and wrong answer, but it's just one of those questions like, how do you handle that situation? Like, and how do you, I think there's something to say about short-term fix, but then how do you work towards a long-term goal of just having one unified system? Or do you not do that? Is that not really the panacea that you want to go for? Well, I think you mentioned earlier that there's three systems in play now, and I think that's an important distinction to make, because with two, it's much, much easier, right? With two, you can say either one is the point of truth. of the truth at any given time. And it might be, you know, A or it might be B, either one could be the source of truth, that's fine. That still works. But once you throw a third party in here now, and he needs to make a request to say, like, hey, I need piece of information, X, right? Who owns that? And who do they talk to to get it? Ideally, they talk to one place. But even if you start making kind of an abstraction in the front of that and say, like, here is the thing you call to get value X, well, this does a thing now, have to call back to company A and company B and then figure out in some weird way, like which one is the winner and deliver that back. And then that creates, you got another data point. So now you have it here, here and over here. - Right. - You're opening yourself up to failures. You're gonna have lots of problems if you have all these dependencies now that are springing up across the organization, right? - Maintaining consistency becomes a major problem. - Yeah, and it might be less of an issue if you're just doing read-only type stuff, but when you're doing writing And now there's a whole different can of worms. And if you're doing these rights and you're trying to do them over some kind of API layer, then that's just fucking scary. I mean, because you don't know if that's gonna be successful or not, and then you have to think about retry mechanisms and how do you verify the data integrity across these systems? >> Yeah, and these are problems that we've all been solving with the project that I've been working on. You've been working on. >> Yeah. >> And there's a couple ways that we've tried to approach it. In some cases, it's okay to just make an API request, right? >> Right. >> In that example, you know, update piece of information. I need to tell you that that information has also changed. I hit your API, boom, we're good, right? >> Right. >> That makes sense and that's okay, but what if you're down? Now, the problem is I make the request to you. It fails, okay, you didn't know that that even happened. >> Yeah. >> Right? >> So that creates a major problem. So then the alternative is to start using like a pub sub model, which we also use. >> Pump it into a messaging queue. >> Exactly. So put it in a queue. You can have these consumers that are all reading this queue. If they care about it, they can, you know, basically, it puts a message in the queue. It says, hey, this piece of information updated. My application is constantly reading that queue and saying, hey, I care about that. Update my system accordingly, right? >> Right. >> That's a much more resilient system. Because if you're down, it doesn't matter. You'll pick it up later. Whereas like the API, it's just gone. You've lost it. >> Yeah, so you have a little layer of protection there because you will get it when you come back later. So it might not be real time, but it'll be eventual time. Some time you'll get it. but it creates its own problems, right? So now you're not in real time anymore. Like, if you get behind in reading, you're not getting the real time updates, so that can cause other problems. Like something may have happened that you haven't yet implemented in your system, and your system is now relying on that data and doing something incorrectly during that, small window of time where the data was incorrect. - Yeah, I think if it was some kind of e-commerce type of an application where you wanna know if the funds are good or something like that, or if the, yeah, maybe you cash some of these things. You know, it's basically if you don't have the latest data, then you might approve something that shouldn't be approved or charge something that maybe you shouldn't be charging, you know? - Yep. - And so. - Or think of a good one would be like a refund, right? Like somebody on my system requested refund. - Yeah. - I issue the refund, I say to Mike, I say, "Hey, this user requested a refund, we processed it." - Yeah. - And Mike doesn't get that message. Mike's application allows refunds to be requested as well. Now they can go back through his app, request it again, boom, you've lost the money twice. - Yeah, I think there's a lot of gaps there. And I think we've talked about the goal is single source of truth. The reality is that it's just more difficult to get there. And by the way, it's not a sexy thing to the business. Like you can't just go upstairs and say, hey guys, we want to take eight months to rewrite our applications to have the single source of truth, that's just not gonna get any votes. - Right. - And we're just gonna stop like revenue-producing activities like new features and that sort of thing to tackle this tech debt 'cause now at this point, it's a pretty big sizable tech debt that you have to deal with here. - Yeah. Well, then it becomes ownership becomes another question in the equation, right? Who owns? So if you do wanna go down that route, you know, and we're gonna create a new layer that kind of gives you a single point to hit that gives you the source of truth. Who owns that? Who has to build that? - Yeah. - Who manages all the intricacies that are behind it? - Mm-hmm. talking to you, talking to me, making sure that whatever whoever's the source of truth for that data gets the correct thing. Right. You know, there's a lot of overhead there that somebody has to deal with and does that fall on the parent company. Right. Right. The big acquisition company or does it fall on the person that owns the data? Like there's a whole lot of questions that you have to get resolved. I think you ultimately have to have a collaboration too. I think that it's only going to work if it's not done in a vacuum. So you, but that begs another question, like how do you pull all these resources together because everybody right now is so strapped focused on their own projects. Everybody is running pretty lean. So resources become an issue. Yeah. And how do you, you have your managing redundant data storage, which I think is kind of what we've been talking about, but like how do you, without replicating everything? Yeah. How do you manage data that everybody needs? Yeah. without like replicating records just over and over and over to many different systems, right? So instead of, you know, if we take in, let's say back to the e-commerce example, if we have an order, now you need the order data, I'm not going to ship you the entire order, right? And then we're not going to ship that order now to parent company X, right? And then that company ships it to somewhere else. You're going to take the bits and pieces that you need, but again, It's a matter of like how do you define and scope what you send to all the various organizations that need the information and kind of condense it? Well, and I don't know all the right answers. I know that something that I advocated for that we've discussed gosh, probably even two years ago now when we were sitting in this room as an architecture group and as a design, you know, committee was like we eventually have to get to this place where we do introduce kind of like the by by context or by You know like in a domain driven design architecture You break the business down into like those functional components. You say billing or clients or I don't know like the bigger pieces you know of the organization that people need so in the case of we're talking about transactions and billing then really you really need to have one billing service for all billing right I don't know how you do that though because now you've got three bit billing or two billing services oh alarm you have to take your drops is that me I don't know is it coming from over there must be usually it rings my watch too that's a little bit strange weird dude is the watch disconnected Kyle's getting his I drop alert at 657. Maybe, or just something else. So I'll just carry on for a moment. I think that where we're going down this road, we're trying to get to is a point where we can have one source of truth per domain. So you say, OK, when it comes to billing and payments, that you have a billing provider that is the central one. That's what you want to get to. And maybe there's a way where you just build that thing out. Like we were talking about user profiles today. That was an example that came up. Because we all have our own clients that we maintain kind of in a separate place between the different business units and companies that have come together. And my thinking when we were talking about it is like what if you just, you don't stop all work to do this thing, you keep doing it the way you're doing it now, and it might be a little more complex, but you just introduce this new user profile domain that everybody's going to be using. And you get it spun up and you give out the new URLs and you say, look, we're going to check this one first. And if we don't have it there, then we can go to our respective ones. But then eventually we have a migration path to say, like, new stuff's going to go in here. We're going to migrate what we've got into that. I don't know. I feel like that's got to be a hybrid model in order to make this thing work. But you'd stop it too. You have the old stuff, whatever it is, and then you have the new one. It's like you reference the new one until you can get off the old one. That seemed to be a successful model we've had with just updating legacy applications, things like that. That's definitely the way we've taken the approach with like, error handlers, for instance, we did that. I think that model and approach works pretty well. That's what we talked about. conversations about that today or over these last three days with kind of letting tree here in the office. Things that they're building that we can leverage or vice versa, right? So if there's a service, a good one was an attribute service. You know, you have widget X and it has these 150 different attributes that you can configure. That could be a centralized service that is in one place that everybody can reference the same exact attributes, right? Because that same same problem exists there. Like, you know, the Sacramento office needs these attributes. We need the attributes, you know, other applications in the organization need the attributes. So if you have a common reference and everybody's talking with the same pieces of data, it makes a lot of sense. And you can cash it more effectively and manage it more effectively. And I think it's a good way to go. It's just a matter of like, what's the roadmap that you were describing? You know, how do you get from here to there in an effective way without it taking 20 years? and without it getting another iteration behind it. That's another kind of major possibility that can happen is you were like, well, we only have the two. And that's great, I agree, that's what we should do. However, all the time, what will happen is somebody else will come up with a third iteration. And now you have three in play and it gets really, really confounded really quickly. - Well, it comes down to architecture and it comes down to having a higher-archie of management leadership. I think that for a long time there, We ran in silos and we didn't take time out to collaborate about maybe somebody already invented the wheel and we don't have to do it again. And so we ended up with multiple versions of the same thing, error logging, exception handling, as a trivial example, but that's something that we did 150 different ways. And I think one thing I appreciate about the maturity and the growth that's happening here over the last year and a half, two years. And I saw it this week with everybody coming to the table, is just that, There is a need to have this kind of oversight group, and it could be we were talking about with like architecture committees or something, but an oversight group that whose focus is really making sure that we're implementing patterns and practices across the org that include things like this. So we're not just going to roll another service for this application, but we should probably bubble it up and say, do we already have one? Yes or no? If we do, then like, can we use that one or how do we integrate them? How do we have a central source of truth around this thing? I'm happy we're having the conversations. I mean, I don't like the work that I had because there's so much work to do. But I think there was a time when we didn't even ask those questions and we just ran with it. And now we are coming to the table. And so that's a step in the right direction too. - And I think we need to come to the table with more of a plan than just like build attribute service X, right? It should be a fully fledged plan from, what are we building, why are we building it? And then who's affected? So if my product is affected, and if trading is affected, and if the call center is affected, then let's put them on the project plan and let's say, hey, we're going to have this API or whatever the service is done by XYZ Date. So we want you guys looking at this and implementing this API by that date or shortly thereafter. Here's the specs. Here's the definition of that API. Implement it. And let's get everybody moved and moving in a cohesive way towards using that service. And then rip apart the other pieces that are there, instead of kind of letting them live and slowly just die on the vine or maybe live forever because in some cases that's kind of how cold fusion is. >>Never goes away. >>Yeah, exactly. It's still living. It's been here for a decade. >>I just wonder better yet, is there any way that we could squeeze some more juice out of the carrot, I guess, or whatever? I don't know, I'm just juices in one of those. There's some. >>What do you mean by that? >>Well, we've got a lot of resources. We've been getting a lot of requests for new hires and we've been successful in getting those. I wonder if we could make another appeal to get a team and it could be like a new team that's cross-functional between the multiple offices, but an internal tools team. It's not a half-baked thing where they come once a month or whatever, but it's like, "No, this is an internal tools team that we prioritize within Tech even to address some of these things." It doesn't have to be just in tech. It could involve the business as well, but maybe they would care less to a lesser degree about it. But their sole focus is trying to, what are the biggest problems within the tech organization around software development? And how can we solve those? And then boom, our job is to figure out, okay, we'll have a project manager and we'll go to the individual teams who use our profiles and find out, what do you need in the user profile? Let's gather specs and requirements and okay, we're gonna build a new one And then we're gonna agree to this format and we will work with you guys to do it. And then there might be technical debt in those other areas, but you have a dedicated team that's focused on that. - And I don't think it has to be pain points. I think they can identify the commonality, right? With some fact-finding and with some research and dedication, I think they can find the areas that there is obvious need for consistency across different applications, different companies, different parts of the organization, and they can start with those. Like if, like I said, a widget attributes service is the thing that they should start with 'cause everybody needs it and everybody uses it, then so be it, let's do it. If authentication is the thing that everybody needs, then so be it, let's do it. Like, focus those guys on something that makes a lot of sense and it's gonna get the biggest bang for the buck really, really quickly. I think it sounds at least to be like an internal dev team. Like it doesn't sound like it would be a business-centric team. I don't know how much business value there would be or how much they would care, like you said. - I just mean that we can be transparent with them as much as they want information, but it doesn't have to be a hidden entity, but it should be a separate dedicated team because right now it's not gonna be someone's part-time job, it'll just never get there. - Oh yeah, absolutely. - And so I think that would be an interesting proposal to make is like, could we get funding for this development team with a PM and with all the proper pieces in place that we need QA to do this? And then, hey, you guys go around, often run it. In 18 months, we would be surprised at it, like the progress that was made. And this is an interesting topic too, and we don't have a ton of time to talk about it, but we've talked previously on the show here about the two team approach or three team approach, whatever the case might be here. He got it again. three times for Dave Lester today, the Tri-Fecta. - That's right, buddy. - The Turkey. - Yeah, three team approach here. We talked to Lenin Tree quite a bit about their team structures and they use a concept of pods, which is just a description really for kind of what we were discussing anyway. - Yes. - It's a full vertical team that can accommodate a project, or many projects. So in this case, we would just implement another pod in that kind of terminology that could attack kind of internal distributed APIs that could be across the org. >> Yeah, and I agree. And it wouldn't necessarily be bound by that. I think it could also just be solving things in the database where I, right? Like, I mean, yeah, internal APIs, I guess, we're talking about the same thing. But it's, like, I'm just thinking too, when you said API I'm just thinking like, oh, we're not making web requests necessarily, but just like, even how, like fundamentally, our data is stored in our respective databases, structured or unstructured or otherwise. It's like, we might tackle that too and like, oh, the way that we store consumer lead data. We might want to standardize that across the organization and we're going to worry about how to migrate that shit and how to get it into a new schema that we all need. I think smaller tasks like that do make sense. I think if you're going to try and task them to take the database and try and tear it apart and split out all the different entities that exist in there, and split apart the business units that exist in there. I think that's way too large of a job for a team like that. I think you would need to hold dev organization, but I think if it's smaller little tasks, like you said, like taking a piece and peeling it away and making a more standardized way of doing it, I think that makes a lot of sense, and I think that would be a good way to do it. - Completely. - Yeah. Well, I just thought about that while we're talking. So I think that's something to run up the chain and see if we could get some support for that. - Right on, man. - That'd be cool. - Just like that, we cranked out number 40. - So 40 in the books, we had no idea what we're gonna talk about two hours ago. We made it through more than an hour. Covered hot dishes. - Got less food in there three times. - Prison spreads. - Prison spreads. - Yeah. - All the goodies that you need and your tech news as well. - Shabang chips. - Mm-hmm, chips. (laughing) Bring us home, brother. - All right, our artwork is provided by Yourna, the gentle giant. Seriously, go check out his artwork. It's really, really, really, really good illustration work. CoffeeCodeCast.com/GentalGiant. You can check us out on Facebook or Twitter at CoffeeCodeCast and you can email the show at CoffeeCodeCast@gmail.com. Podcasts available from iTunes, Spotify, Tune in Stitcher, Google Play Music, and Radio Public, or wherever it is you get your podcasts. - If you like the show, jump on over to CoffeeCodeCast.com/Review and help us out with a quick note. Give us a rating and a few words what you think of the show. As always, thanks so much for listening and we'll see you next Wednesday. Bye. [Music]