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**Jingle:** \[46:26\] to \[46:42\] |
**Jon Calhoun:** Alright, Mark and Ben, do you have any unpopular opinions you would like to share with us? |
**Mark Sandstrom:** Sure, yeah. My unpopular opinion - so I think manually grinding through work is an underrated engineering strategy. Computers are great at automating tasks that you know how to do, and you have to know how to do something really well manually before you can effectively automate it. You see this in p... |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, I think that's a really interesting one, because it didn't come intuitively to me. That's something I had to learn over years of getting it wrong, basically. I definitely have an instinct to jump too soon into automating things... Because the process of solving that problem is quite nice and rewardi... |
\[48:09\] But you're so right. And the point you made about you should be able to manually do it first enough to know it inside out before you automate applies to lots of things I think too, and has so many benefits. I think the knowledge you get from that... |
**Jon Calhoun:** I feel like you're gonna have a hard time for that one being unpopular. I feel like you're gonna have a lot of people agreeing with you. |
**Mark Sandstrom:** Yeah? Okay... \[laughs\] |
**Jon Calhoun:** Especially developers. Because I feel like developers make that mistake a lot, of wanting to automate things. |
**Mark Sandstrom:** Yeah. It's really the manual grind... Sometimes I'll need to make updates across all of our services, and there's literally 200 things to update, and figuring out how to do that in an efficient way... Automation is not always the answer. Automating some aspect of it usually is part of the solution. ... |
**Jon Calhoun:** Yeah. So I make video courses that teach programming stuff, and at first it was really tempting to build my own admin page that I'd upload a video and it would do all these things for me, like create a thumbnail, change all the stuff and do it all... And I kind of felt the urge to do that because that ... |
Now, it's completely different if you host a platform, but when it's just you doing something, it's like, "Is this really worth it?" And it's really hard to say no, because that sounds so much fun. You're like, "Oh man, I'm gonna get to use this API. It's gonna be fun." |
**Mat Ryer:** It's such a good example, Jon, because that is -- even now, I'm thinking "Definitely automate that one." Even just that description of it, in the story where you're saying you learned this lesson; even then, I'm still like, "Yeah, that would be great. That's primed for automation." But Mark, would you res... |
**Mark Sandstrom:** Yes. |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. Boolean answer. Yes. \[laughter\] Cool. |
**Jon Calhoun:** Alright. Ben, while you're here, do you have an unpopular opinion? |
**Ben Kraft:** This may also not be that unpopular, but I think that Go really needs union types. Just like proper, disjoint union... I think generics are just making this really obvious; I think it's especially obvious because they kind of half-way added union types, except they only exist in type parameters, and it's... |
**Mat Ryer:** But you want them. |
**Ben Kraft:** ...but I think it's really getting to be time. |
**Mat Ryer:** For anyone that doesn't know, what is a union type, Ben? |
**Ben Kraft:** So a union type is when you have something like - it could be an int, or it could be a string. There are a lot of distinctions, there are slightly different ways you could think about unions, but that's the basic idea - it's something that could be an int, or it could be a string. It doesn't necessarily ... |
**Jon Calhoun:** I was gonna say, if your unpopular opinion was that your ISP you have is very good... \[laughter\] |
**Ben Kraft:** Yeah, well... No, my unpopular opinion is I might need to switch to the terrible ISP whose service everyone hates. |
**Jon Calhoun:** I feel like there's lots of potential ISPs for that. |
**Mat Ryer:** I love mine. I'm one of those. I have a gigabit fiber symmetrical. It's life-changing. |
**Mark Sandstrom:** \[52:02\] Magical. |
**Ben Kraft:** Yeah. Sadly, we could not get that at this apartment. |
**Mat Ryer:** It's worth running your own fiber around the streets if you can, Ben. |
**Ben Kraft:** I wish. |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah... No one would move it for a while, I think. If you knew someone nearby that had fiber... Just while you do the podcast. Just get a really long -- sorry, I have to stop with this now... |
**Jon Calhoun:** Can I tell you a story about this, Mat? Very related. |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. |
**Jon Calhoun:** So when my wife and I were building our house, I live with my parents, and their internet was terrible... And I later found out it was because their one DSL line runs underground, and apparently there's water getting in, so when it rained, it would just be a really bad connection. So apparently, it's s... |
Then one day the farmer came through to actually plow his field, or whatever he was doing, cutting stuff, and he didn't know that line was there... So all of a sudden, the internet just went out. And then when they came to check it, basically what had happened is he went over the line and just sliced the crap out of it... |
**Mat Ryer:** Oh, that's annoying, man... |
**Jon Calhoun:** It just shocked me, because I'm like "Who thought this was a good idea, to just run a line through some farmer's field and not tell anybody?" |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. Amazing. I mean, yeah, I love that story. |
**Ben Kraft:** That's gonna be me and running my fiber, you know? It's gonna work great, until somebody runs it over... |
**Mat Ryer:** Just avoid the farmers fields. Just be in the streets, I think. That'd be good. Yeah, that'd work. |
**Jon Calhoun:** I have decent internet at my place... But if you get outside of this small town that I'm in, where there's a bunch of farms and fields and stuff like that... When I was growing up, it was awful options everywhere. Like, satellite internet was sort of an option, but you always had these bandwidth caps t... |
**Mat Ryer:** It sounds like you live in a dystopia. Like a Netflix special where -- well, you described this unusual village, with really modern internet, surrounded by... You know what I mean? I feel like we could sell this to Netflix. |
**Jon Calhoun:** I think the only reason the internet is modern in this small town is because there's so few people that they have -- Comcast has cable set up, and there's just not enough people for it to actually be slow. |
**Mat Ryer:** No one's using it, so it's so fast. |
**Jon Calhoun:** Pretty much. |
**Mat Ryer:** It's just ADSL. |
**Jon Calhoun:** I have an uncle who worked at Comcast... Not directly; he worked on the lines, and stuff... But he used to joke that whenever I move back to this town, that the internet got half as fast, because I'm one of the heaviest users... \[laughter\] It's what he would claim. He was just joking, but... It's int... |
**Mat Ryer:** I knew your uncle was joking. I think I'd like him. |
**Jon Calhoun:** Maybe. |
**Mat Ryer:** Can I have his number? That'd be weird, wouldn't it? |
**Jon Calhoun:** I don't know. I mean, it'd be more weird for him, I think, if you just called him. |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. |
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