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Every Tuesday at 12pm Mountain Time

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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.

Code Is Cheap. Show Me the ___.

"Talk is cheap. Show me the code." Linus Torvalds' line assumed writing code was the hard part. With AI tools producing code faster than we can read it, maybe that's no longer true. So if code is cheap now, what's the scarce thing? Judgment? Taste? Tests? The spec? The review? Fill in the blank.

Do you actually review every line the AI writes for you? Be honest. Where do you draw the line between a throwaway prototype and production code? How do you manage your usage: budgets, limits, tasks you'll never hand off? And do you still get the kick from solving a problem yourself, or has the fun moved from writing code to directing it?

Everyone and anyone is welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others. Zoom link will be posted at 12pm MDT.

A dancer performing with live-coded music projected onto their arms

Lessons learned: dealing with failure

In our work, failure is no surprise. Builds break, tests fail, or something happens in production. We've all seen it. The question is, what do you do next? What have you learned from failures you've seen? Do you learn more from others or from your own mistakes?

What habits do you or your team use to learn from these failures? After something breaks, what do you actually change: the code, the tests, the process?

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 MDT.

Collapse of Quebec Bridge

Would I still Choose this Tool?

The initial topic for today's (2026-09-22) chat is: What tool(s) have you stopped using over the past year or two? An IDE, language, tech stack, 3rd party SaaS, something else? Why did you stop using it? Was it a conscious decision? What, if anything, replaced the tool?

Inspired by me evaluating the tools used by Weekly Dev Chat and if we should keep them, switch, or something else. Asking the question: "If I started fresh today, would I still choose this tool?"

Everyone and anyone is welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others.

P.S. Image created by ChatGPT. Really likes green, which I assume it got from our website theme.

Illustration of a bearded developer at a laptop, hand on chin, with a thought bubble reading "Would I Choose This Today?" Beside him a cobwebbed box labelled "Old Tools" holds greyed-out, crossed-out app icons and sits on books labelled Time, Effort, and Investment, while a network of bright green tool icons grows on the other side