A new monthly show, and yes, there's a pun
Jeff Atwood has teamed up with Leo Laporte for a new monthly show on the TWiT network. The name is Off By One, which is funny for several reasons, most obviously because of the programmer joke: there are only two hard problems in computer science, cache invalidation, naming things, and off by one errors. Atwood did not coin that variation, but he wishes he had. Naming things is hard, and naming a show is harder. Stack Overflow's name was settled by a vote. Off By One was settled in about five minutes.
The show is 1 hour 47 minutes of free-flowing conversation. No negativity. Low-level insanity. Some yo-yo content, because that's where the conversation goes. Episode two is up now, free to view, and the next recording is in four days.
The bits worth pulling out
Three quotes from episode two, with timestamps so you can jump straight to them.
"I am not an elite coder by any stretch of the imagination... I am very persistent."
This is the bit where Atwood pushes back on the canonical version of himself. The advocacy work on codinghorror.com and Stack Overflow has made him the public face of a certain kind of practical engineering. He's here to say that the public face is not the substance. The substance is showing up, day after day, and being unwilling to ship something that will hurt somebody later.
"I advocate for code that doesn't kill you in so many different ways. You know, survivable code. Ideally, no code at all."
The Off By One thesis, if there is one. Survivable code is the kind you can live with, the kind that won't take down a hospital or a bank or a community at 3am. Atwood's argument has always been that the most important engineering decisions are the ones about what not to build, and the most important code is the code you don't write.
"If we simply collected a fair tax from Billionaires, we could literally eliminate all poverty in this country at the 100% FPL level... We have the resources to do it."
The conversation drifts from coding to wealth inequality, the way it always does on Off By One, and lands on a number. The FPL, or Federal Poverty Level, is $15,000 a year. The math Atwood has posted publicly on Mastodon and LinkedIn says that a fair tax on billionaires closes that gap. He makes the point the way an engineer makes a point: we have the resources, we just don't have the system.
How to watch
The second episode is free for everyone. For the first ten people who watch the whole thing and like what they see, Atwood will cover a Club TWiT membership for a year. The link is in the post. The next episode records in four days.