/dev/hell

Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler

Technology

Software How-To

Two angry web developers complain about life in development hell

Last refreshed: July 26th, 2025 at 2:42 PM ⓘ

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Episodes

Episode 11: From Gas Station Attendant to Java Developer

This time out we are blessed by the presence of Joël Perras , PHP developer extraordinaire and Fictive Kin brosef of Ed. We explore Joël’s rags-to-riches story: a young academic schlepping coffee and 44oz soft drinks at a gas station, where he’s discovered by a grizzled dev team manager in need of Java skills. From there it’s been a whirlwind of web sites, programming languages, and more ops than you can shake a stick at. Actually I was sleepy and wasn’t really listening for the first half-hour....

Apr 27, 2012

Episode 10: Looks Like A Lot Of White Dudes

No guest would permit themselves to be shamed in the typical /dev/hell manner this week, so this time around you’re stuck with the gruesome twosome. We hit on a few topical topics in this episode, including a dude scoring Internet Ego Points for saying PHP sucks ( really? ), the “technology preview” of Meteor (no, not that Meteor ), and an Important Startup Guy who says that remote working is baaaaaaad . Plus we say “horseshit” a lot. Thanks again to our awesome sponsor for this episode Engine Y...

Apr 12, 2012

Episode 9: I Was Really Into Bigfoot When I Was A Kid

This episode had us diving into the real-time web with Nathan Fritz , the Chief Architect for &yet , and the man who has foolishly agreed to help Chris learn the finer points of Node.js . You can just hear the excitement in all our voices as we discuss Web 3.14159 aka the Real Time Web. Nathan is one smart motherfucker so be prepared to have lots of knowledge exploded into your brain. Nathan also discusses his previous life as a PHP guy, what XMPP is all about, and his book-in-progress on Lu...

Apr 05, 2012

Episode 8: Fry Guy, Cleanup in Aisle App

First off, we now have a sponsor for the podcast: Engine Yard . This is something they will surely regret after listening to this episode. We started off with the idea of talking about technologies we wish we had time to play with. Ed was talking about his attempts at exploring Clojure, and how it’s likely he’ll be using Python for work in the near future. This leads into a discussion of what attracts us to certain languages and technologies, and when to try to work a personal interest in to you...

Mar 28, 2012

Episode 7: You Have Entered A Pants-free Workzone

This week the gruesome twosome talk about working remotely: the tools you need to make it work the problems of being the Remote Guy when everyone else is local techniques for staying focused being a goddamn adult and GTTFD why a company should invest the time in being remote-friendly Chris also talks a bit about his new gig at Kaplan, where he’ll surely make grown men cry. Feel free to hit us up on Twitter at @dev_hell or harass Ed and Chris directly. Download now (MP3, 37.5MB, 1:13) Links Kapla...

Mar 01, 2012

Episode 6: I Do Not Code With My Vagina

Suffragettes rejoice because we have our first female guest. Selena Deckelmann bullied her way onto the show to talk with us about Postgres, her lack of real Perl skills, Open Source Bridge and women in open source and technology in general. She also proved that cheap laughs are always possible by picking on Canadians. Also, how awesome it is that she shares a birthday with a famous NFL player. Feel free to hit us up on Twitter or harass Ed and Chris directly. Download now (MP3, 65MB, 1:45) Link...

Feb 16, 2012

Episode 5: The Hammer That is PHP

In our fifth episode we speak to our first ever guest Brian Moon , ancient PHP elder of dealnews and someone who has probably forgotten more about PHP than our two hosts will ever know. Chris admires his stamina for staying with the same employer for 14 years and counting. In this episode we talk about dealnews, how they use PHP (and how they also use it in some interesting ways), and his thoughts on issues like concurrency and evented systems. We also cover features of PHP that allowed for some...

Feb 03, 2012

Episode 4: The Cool Kids Club

Update: Our first posting of this episode had a glitch in it around 14:50. It should be fixed now. If you already have the episode, you should re-download it . Our fourth episode is all ready for your listening pleasure. In this exciting episode we focus on “The Conference Experience” and discuss why programming conferences are so important to developers. Chris talks about why CodeMash was so awesome and the awesome talks full of awesomeness that he attended. Ed talks about his own experiences w...

Jan 26, 2012

Episode 3: Beatings Will Continue Until Test Coverage Improves

Fresh off our holiday break, we’re back with our longest show yet. We talk about Chris' new book The Grumpy Programmer’s Guide To Building Testable PHP Applications , including his experiences self-publishing with Leanpub . Chris also explains how he fears no precipitation on his excursions to the Codemash conference in Ohio. Then Ed talks about the thought process that lead to his latest shit-stirring blog post “ The MicroPHP Manifesto .” Ed may or may not begin crying openly. Finally, we discu...

Jan 08, 2012

Episode 2: Talking Chris Down

Doing something the second time is always the toughest, but we somehow managed to get our act together for a second episode of “Development Hell”. Our hosts Chris and Ed got together and discussed whatever was on their minds that night. Thanks to Ed for doing a masterful job of editing the results of using my crappy headset for the conversation. Summary of the show: Git and git workflows Node.js vs. Twisted/Tornado How being opinionated and objective about a topic is impossible Building your onl...

Dec 21, 2011

Episode 1: What We Hate About PHP

Listen to a couple old dudes complain that they don’t like PHP anymore. Yes, I know, this sounds pretty compelling. Feel free to hit either of us up on Twitter Download now (MP3, 43MB, 01:26:19) Links Intro/outro music is Entombed’s “Out of Hand” from Wolverine Blues PUT Method Support...

Dec 11, 2011

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