Skip to content

Every Tuesday at 12pm Mountain Time

weekly-dev- chat logo

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.

Giving Thanks and Gratitude

Happy (belated) Thanksgiving! Today's (2026-10-13) chat is giving thanks and gratitude. What are you thankful for, both technology related and just in general? A tool, library, or open source project that made your life better? A coworker, mentor, or community that helped you grow? Any successes from the past year you want to humble brag about? Something else?

Obviously inspired by Thanksgiving, which was yesterday. I'm thankful for you, the amazing Weekly Dev Chat community! Thank you for showing up to listen, ask questions, share you knowledge, tell your stories, and just be a good human. A human that is kind, supportive, and respectful of others.

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.

P.S. - Image created by Claude Code with a prompt asking it to create an image for this post. For me Claude is still ahead in coding but behing in image creation.

Terminal window on a teal background with autumn leaves. It shows "$ whoami" returning "grateful" and a git commit "Thank you!" with "1 community, ∞ insertions(+)", next to the title "Giving Thanks & Gratitude", a heart in curly braces, and "Weekly Dev Chat · October 13, 2026"

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