Greetings, salutations, holas, and welcome to the RealCodez screencasts.

I’m your host, Chris Morris (chrismo). I’ve been a software engineer for over 20 years and for the last 5 have been doing Ruby and Rails coding at LivingSocial where I currently manage the Application Site Reliability team.

RealCodez is a series of screencasts aimed at giving you a behind-the-scenes look at software development in a real, production environment. This isn’t an original idea, but most other screencasts and instructional options these days tend to focus on teaching you one specific thing at a time in an isolated example.

How Did We Get To Here?

You, presumably, clicked on linky things on the internets to get here.

As far as myself, in October 2016 I was listening to one of the first Greater Than Code podcasts with Avdi Grimm and during their discussion, Avdi talked about all the production work that goes into RubyTapas that most are probably unaware of, and while that’s necessary to produce a clean product, it has the one downside of hiding the mess from viewers. The panel went on to discuss the various Impostor Syndrome implications this presents.

A lot of software instruction has this same challenge. In order to clearly teach a specific technique, all of the usual real world clutter needs to be removed. But there are some interesting counter-examples.

Geoffrey Grosenbach’s PeepCode videos (now at PluralSight) include Play-by-Play episodes showing real life peoples solving real life problems, which I was a big fan of (this one with Aaron Patterson and Corey Haines is fun). Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers contains many samples of problems in real world code. Of course, MythBusters is a great show, in part, because of the insights into the discovery process, failures, warts and all.

Impostor Syndrome is also a topic I care a lot about, one that I’ve spoken and written about before.

Another challenge with presenting real world examples is most codebases developers work with are proprietary and they don’t have the rights to share their work. Since this past summer, I’ve been regularly contributing to Bundler, so much so that they added me to their core team. I realized it would be relatively simple for me to record my work there and publish the results in a screencast.

With all of the various inspirations and opportunity, I felt this could be a Good Thing.

Why ‘RealCodez’? Sounds dorky.

It’s intentionally dorky. I want this to be a “serious” look at real development challenges while embracing the crazy, wheels-off nature of grappling with tech.

Without any further ado, you can watch through the brief trailer below, or click through to our first episode.

If you love it, hate it, wanna critique it, I’d love to hear your thoughts, so shoot me an email at chrismo@clabs.org.