The trio is morphing into a duo on this week's episode of FounderQuest, Fireside Chat edition. Ben and Josh talk about their 2020 resolutions, upping their serverless usage, side projects, and holiday plans. Ben also drops a major update from a previous episode.
Links:
Cliff Mass Weather Blog
Full transcript:
00:15 This is our first fireside chat with the two of us, right?
00:18 So you're ready for Christmas?
01:28 I think so.
01:31 How about the kids, are they ready for Christmas?
01:34 They're ready for Christmas. Everyone's been a little bit cooped up because of the winter weather, but I don't think we're going to get any relief there.
01:47 No, I saw that they had this like, what is it called? The pineapple express. This weather pattern that we have where this big stream of moisture comes from Hawaii into the Pacific Northwest and that's what we're doing right now. We've got this big rain storm coming in and I was looking at the visuals from Cliff Mass blog and there was just like the moisture was indicated with colors, right? Like you usually see on a forecast, and it was deeply red. Like all the way from Hawaii to the Pacific Northwest and the end of it, as it passes the U.S. Coast, the kind of like a fist and so people were calling it the Hawaiian punch.
02:36 Hawaiian punch. That's awesome.
02:39 Yeah, we had a road shut down near us because all the rain caused the soil to get unstable and so there's a little bit of a mini land slide, I guess what happened, and some trees fell down and... yeah.
02:56 Ouch and Hawaiian punch, that's like a weather reporter's dream, isn't it like?
03:01 Yeah, basically.
03:01 Getting a name like that you can say.
03:04 I'm pretty excited for Christmas. There's not going to be any snow, but that's okay. It'll still be fun. Oh, it's follow up though, for like a couple weeks ago, I think it was just Starr and I who were having the chat. I don't think you were there for this one, we were talking about the Christmas lights and-
03:26 No, I was there.
03:27 Oh, you were there?
03:28 Yeah.
03:28 Okay. All right. I bought some Christmas lights for the outside of the house.
03:32 Did you? Nice.
03:33 So, now I have one string of lights draped over my garage door and it's-
03:40 That's what I usually have, except I didn't put them out this year yet because I was waiting for my garage door to go in and so now Caitlin and the kids are kind of bummed that they're not up, so I might put them up this weekend just because it doesn't look like it's going to be here.
03:55 Totally.
03:57 Throw them up for a little while anyway.
03:58 It's kind of fun and it is fun, like Starr said, to see them when you're coming home, get that holiday cheer.
04:07 It does, it kind of changes the atmosphere, for sure. So I thought we could talk for a second about a work related thing. Just because I think people are going to be getting this. I mean, this episode's going to go out next week, which is a couple of days before New Year's and so I thought we could, or at least I could share a New Year's resolution, which I normally don't do because usually if you share your resolutions, they don't happen. But I'm just going to throw caution to the wind here, but anyway, I think I posted this in chat before, but one of my resolutions is not to wait on a CI unnecessarily.
04:52 Oh, we got to do the Starr thing though. What is CI Josh?
04:58 So, CI is Continuous Integration, but there's a bunch of services that do this for you. It's like an automation feature that runs build steps on your software basically every time you push into your code repository, like github.com or whatever.
05:13 So we have a bunch of tests, test code for our application and the CI service runs all those tests for you and lets you know if they passed or failed, right?
05:24 Exactly. Yes. Being around for a while, the badgers getting up there in age, we have a lot of code repositories laying around now that we have to maintain and a lot of those happen to belong to me and they all have CI, and so they all have test suites that are running on every code push and that's fine. We've used a bunch of different services in the past but I think we've been using like Travis and Circle for the most part.
06:04 Normally it's fine, like, if I push code and I'm not doing like a ton of changes or I'm not working on a ton of repositories at once, but lately we've been using Dependabot, which is kind of a newer automation tool which automatically submits a dependency updates to your repositories. So it's a good way to keep like your dependencies up to date so you're not like having to go and do like this massive upgrade of all your things at once. What it does is it submits a more granular like, it submits one pull request for each dependency that has a new version that's come out. So on a lot of these repositories, a bunch of them anyway are NPM packages and as you know, NPM is a super low number of dependencies in an NPM project.
07:07 Like usually an average project, like a hello world might have a couple of hundred, more like an actual project might have a couple thousand. I forget how many it is, but it's a lot.
07:23 It's a lot.
07:26 Every time an NPM package that we're using gets updated, Dependabot on what submits a PR, when you want to go and merge all those things together especially, say like the other day I was doing this for six repositories at once that each had a bunch of a Dependabot PRs open. So it's like every time you merge it's generating a new test run, every time Dependabot opens a new PR, it's generating a new test run, every time you merge one PR and then it makes Dependabot need to rebase all the other open PRs, because it changed a package lock file or something and it needs to regenerate that for all the other open upgrades that are in process. Like 50 CIs runs need to happen. Basically I was stuck in this hell of like waiting for CI to run just so I could merge these tiny little PRs.
08:30 So finally I...