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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.

Let's Mob Play 7 Billion Humans

Today's (2026-08-25) chat is mob playing 7 Billion Humans. From the publisher's website:

Automate swarms of office workers to solve puzzles inside your very own parallel computer made of people.

...a thrilling followup to the award winning Human Resource Machine. Now with more humans!

I'll share my screen and we can try to solve a couple of the puzzles together. Learn more about the game at:

https://tomorrowcorporation.com/7billionhumans

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

P.S. - The image for this post was created by ChatGPT. I asked it to create an image for this post, which I cut and pasted into the chat, and it produced the below. No other tweaks needed. I'm amazed at how much better image creation has gotten in the past couple of years.

Weekly Dev Chat poster in the style of 7 Billion Humans: cartoon office workers moving binary digit blocks along a conveyor belt, with the text "Let's Mob Play 7 Billion Humans" and event details for August 25, 2026

Bring your own topic

On this rare sunny day, if you have a topic you’d like to bring up, now is your chance. Come join us at the campfire.

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.

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When Should a Company Have an Internal Software Dev Team?

The topic for today's (2026-08-11) chat is: When should a company have an internal software development team? Is there an ideal size or other factors that influence that decision? When is internal development better than paying for consultants and/or 3rd party software?

Inspired by me currently discussing this issue with two companies and having this discussion in the past. Would love to have a specific yes/no metric but haven't found one yet. My current answer is "it depends ...". I would love to hear others' thoughts on the subject.

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

P.S. - The feature image is from Lumo, Proton's AI assistant. It took a couple prompts to get an image that was useable and it really struggled putting any correct text on the image. Thoughts?

Illustration contrasting an internal software team collaborating around a computer with a business person shaking hands with an external consultant