A casual weekly virtual chat mostly focused on web and software development.
Weekly Dev Chat is a place to ask questions, hear different viewpoints, and get to know your fellow developers. Every week there is an initial topic posted to get the discussion started. Sometimes we discuss the initial topic the entire chat, and other times the topic changes several times through the natural flow of the conversation.
Everyone and anyone are welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others.
In this Weekly Dev Chat (March 25/2025) we will experiment with GitHub Copliot Workspace. It's a feature that lets you create PRs using GitHub Copilot that will create new files, edit eixisting files, and the like. I'll share my screen and we can do some ~~pair programming~~ pair telling the AI what do.
Everyone and anyone are welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others.
In today's Weekly Dev Chat (March 18) we propose a hypothetical:
If given complete freedom, which project or undertaking would you work on at your current job? If not your current job, then as a personal project?
So, if you're currently working and you get your choice from the Jira buffet or you could propose a new ticket entirely, what would you go for? And don’t worry, the boss is feeling extra persuadable today and there’s no need to time-box. Are you refactoring that entire 700,000-line enterprise codebase (finally)? Are you grabbing your designer to do a complete restart on that eye-bleeding UI/UX that you've had to look at for the past decade? If it's not in your current job, is there a project or learning endeavour you're dying to pursue if only there was more time in the day (or more of you)? Excited to see what's on your personal backlog.
Everyone and anyone are welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others. Zoom link will be posted at 12pm Mountain Time.
Hi! My name is Omar, and I'm happy to be a recent contributor to the weekly dev chats. I'm looking forward to hosting along with Chris and Norman after they put me through an arduous 8-week interview process where they give me 12 unsolvable technical assessments to be done on my own time without compensation. Actually, that’s not true. They're pretty nice people. In all seriousness, though, this does seem to be the state of the current job market for many developers and is what inspired an impromptu discussion during this week's dev chat.
During the chat, a comment was made by someone about how we're returning to a 'zero-trust' industry. Presumably, this was the case following the dot-com bust of the 1990s. Trust is hard to build, and that's probably where many companies and hiring personnel are finding themselves: a position of asking who to trust enough as a potential hire. It's a tough question. People breaking into the industry and those getting back into the job market may have to go back to more traditional ways of building trust to counter the overly-automated, globalized, AI-driven landscape. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as the human connections may come readily to those that have been doing the hard work already. One suggestion from a fellow weekly-dev-chatter was to consider going and writing an actual physical letter/cover letter and sending that to hit the point home that you are serious and real. Food for thought in the new wild west. Cue The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly theme
