Lane chats with Chris Ferdinandi—creator of Go Make Things and ADHD for the Win—a frontend dev, educator, and all-around expert in making JavaScript (and learning) simpler. Chris has built a career helping devs cut through the noise, level up their skills, and embrace ADHD-friendly ways to stay focused and productive.

We dive into his journey from discovering his own ADHD to reshaping how people learn to code. We talk about why so many devs have ADHD, how gamification can actually help (when done right), and how today’s tech is messing with our attention spans. Plus, we get into the psychology of learning and what actually works when it comes to staying engaged and motivated.

Learn back-end development - https://www.boot.dev

Listen on your favorite podcast player: https://www.backendbanter.fm

ADHD ftw! : https://adhdftw.com/backend-banter/

Go Make Things: https://gomakethings.com/

https://bsky.app/profile/cferdinandi.bsky.social

https://mastodon.social/@cferdinandi

00:00 - Intro

01:58 - Why so many devs have ADHD

03:21 - Quick explanation of ADHD

07:10 - Is ADHD actually more common now?

17:41 - ADHD, dopamine, and why we can’t put our phones down

20:50 - Trying meds for ADHD – what’s it like?

22:34 - How ADHDftw got started

24:21 - Why finishing big projects is so damn hard

25:54 - Best content styles for ADHD brains

28:40 - Gamification: What works and what’s just hype?

34:16 - Which gamer type fits ADHD folks best?

39:27 - Is TikTok basically junk food for your brain?

41:45 - Must-read books on focus and getting stuff done

43:43 - Where to find Chris and his content

46:26 - Is ADHD a gift or a curse?

59:30 - Brutally honest feedback for Boot.dev

01:18:58 - Outro

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We’re joined by Danny Thompson, currently Director of Technology at This Dot Labs and technical leader and organizer of the Dallas Software Developers Group, where he fosters vibrant local tech ecosystem through workshops, cohorts, and meetups.

With a passion to help others learn and find jobs, Danny shares his stories and insights that he gained throughout his extensive and fascinating career! From working as a cashier to now giving talks and organizing meetups for which people fly out to attend, Danny talks about how he got into coding in the first place and his progression, his advice to new developers, how does AI impact jobs now and his perspective on how it will change in the future and a lot more!

Learn back-end development - https://www.boot.dev

Listen on your favorite podcast player - https://www.backendbanter.fm

Danny's X/Twitter: https://x.com/DThompsonDev

Danny's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dthompsondev/

Timestamps:

00:00 - Intro

02:14 - How Danny Got Into Coding

05:08 - Meetups and Affordable Conferences

23:37 - Overview of This Dot Labs

29:28 - Building Apps on Top of Stripe

30:30 - Businesses Focus on Functionality Over Aesthetics

33:00 - Danny's Career Progression

38:39 - Pros and Cons of Product vs. Consulting

43:12 - This Dot Labs Regarding AI

46:46 - Interest Rates &. AI: Impact on Developer Jobs

55:31 - The Pressure to Perform at a High Level

57:51 - Why Recruiters Do Not Call You Back

01:03:41 - Getting Feedback After Interviews

01:04:49 - Danny's LinkedIn Courses and Where to Find Him

This week on Backend Banter, we’re joined by Ryan Fleury, a talented game developer currently working with Epic Games on their Rad Debugger project. Ryan shares his journey from building games to creating powerful developer tools, offering insights into arenas, memory management, and the fascinating world of programming from the ground up.

In this episode, we dive deep into memory management, exploring the differences between stack, heap, and arenas, and how they shape modern development. We discuss the trade-offs of various allocation strategies, the magic of pointer stability, and how arenas simplify managing lifetimes in both games and other applications. Along the way, Ryan shares his approach to developing tools, insights into game development workflows, and practical tips for clean and efficient programming.

Learn back-end development: https://www.boot.dev

Listen on your favorite podcast player: https://www.backendbanter.fm

Ryan's Socials:

Rad Debugger: https://github.com/EpicGamesExt/raddebugger

Website: https://www.rfleury.com/

X/Twitter: https://x.com/ryanjfleury

Timestamps:

00:00 - Intro

00:54 - Ryan Fleury's Path to Game Development

02:49 - From Engines to Debugging Tools

06:51 - Arenas Explained: Memory Management Basics

16:51 - Arenas vs. Garbage Collectors

27:40 - Real-World Applications of Arenas

31:39 - Why Pointer Stability Matters

42:57 - Dynamic Allocation Made Simple

48:48 - How Arenas Streamline Development

01:01:38 - Debugging Tools and the Rad Debugger

01:09:43 - Where to find Ryan

We're back for Backend Banter Season 2, and we bring a very special guest, José Valim, the creator of the Elixir Programming Language, one of the most popular and loved functional programming languages of today. (Fun fact: it's used in production at Discord).

We cover the nitty-gritty of the language, ranging from simple topics such as the decision behind not making Elixir be statically typed, into the more complex cross-machine communication. We go over how Elixir's features compare with those of other languages, work habits of today's developers, José's own day-to-day development, and a lot more!

Today's talk encompasses a great variety of themes, so grab your coffee and tune in!

Learn back-end development - https://www.boot.dev

Listen on your favorite podcast player: https://www.backendbanter.fm

Livebook & Elixir Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pas9WdWIBHs

Elixir Programming Language: https://elixir-lang.org/

Livebook: https://livebook.dev/

Elixir In Action Book: https://www.manning.com/books/elixir-in-action-third-edition

José's Socials:

X/Twitter: https://x.com/josevalim

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/josevalim

GitHub: https://github.com/josevalim

Timestamps:

00:00 - Intro

01:06 - Embarrassing Stories with Foreign Languages

02:58 - Who is José Valim? (and Elixir's Popularity)

06:51 - Does José Use Phoenix a Lot?

08:28 - Why Isn't Elixir Statically Typed?

16:51 - External Input vs. Internal Code Logic

28:16 - Quick Overview of BEAM languages

31:23 - Elixir’s Equivalent to Golang’s Goroutines & Channels

42:43 - Cross-Machine Communication in Standard Libraries

49:15 - Do You Need RabbitMQ When Writing Elixir?

54:53 - Built-In Features in the Standard Library

01:01:52 - Why People Are Too Used To Work The Hard Way

01:04:22 - José and DHH

01:08:01 - Favorite Elixir Features & Immutability

01:17:49 - Purity in Functional Programming

01:21:35 - Where to find José

Today, we bring you the final episode of the first season of Backend Banter! It’s a wrap up for now. With 69 episodes behind us, we want to tell you the story of Boot Dev and how far we’ve come from our beginnings, and for that, we bring Allan Lires, the first official employee and the second person to work on our platform!

We’re going to cover our entire timeline, achievements, hardships, how Lane and Allan were able to go all-in on building Boot Dev and our visions and plans for the future.

Learn back-end development - https://boot.dev

Listen on your favorite podcast player: https://www.backendbanter.fm

Allan's X/Twitter: https://x.com/AllanLires

Boot.Dev Discord: https://discord.com/invite/EEkFwbv

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

00:01 Last episode of Season 1 of Backend Banter

01:45 Boot.dev Story and what this episode will be about

02:26 How and when Allan was hired to work at Boot.dev

05:33 Timeline on Boot.dev

08:53 Guessing game

10:34 The Rebranding Process

12:43 Going Full-time

14:56 What was the curriculum in the beginning?

18:38 What was the original vision for Boot.dev

19:17 Being honest about how long it'll take you to learn to code

22:48 Setting expectations for difficulty

29:55 On learning the fundamentals

34:42 The Long Term vision of Boot.dev

41:30 Old gamification features and why we changed them

50:26 The Track is Never Complete

55:01 We cover a lot of the basics that traditional colleges don't cover

01:00:06 Why do we want to remove JavaScript from the learning course

01:06:12 Million Lessons Completed in a single month

01:08:28 You got to be comfortable being uncomfortable

01:13:25 Where to find Allan

Today we welcome Chuck Carpenter aka Charles The 3rd, co-host at Whiskey Web and Whatnot.

As two content creators in the tech scene, we discuss if and how celebrity developers and tech influencers are a good thing for the community, how we should be careful when choosing technologies based on influencers’ opinions, why so many people nowadays want to speedrun their whole career and how that could be self-sabotage, and a lot more!

Learn back-end development - https://boot.dev

Listen on your favorite podcast player: https://www.backendbanter.fm

Whiskey Web and Whatnot: https://whiskey.fm/

Charles' X/Twitter: https://x.com/charleswthe3rd

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

01:27 Does Charles listen to his own podcast episodes?

03:33 Are celebrity developers a good thing?

09:11 Podcasts are usually centered around a business

10:06 We are essentially entertainers

14:04 Tech choices being influenced by creators

17:37 Why ThePrimeagen stood out from other tech influencers

20:26 Career speedrunning

23:44 The biggest miss when starting something

24:51 What is wrong with Full-Stack application frameworks?

29:03 How Frankenstein is the Boot.dev web application stack

37:41 Rolling your own stuff vs using a provider

46:01 It's easy to screw up your architecture

50:53 What is Charles building with in 2024 and what is his preferred stack

56:39 Does it seem like people don't talk about security anymore?

01:00:30 Accessibility

01:02:02 The amount of people that are "kinda" interested in cybersecurity

01:11:03 Have some patience

01:11:37 Where to find Charles

In today’s episode, we bring back Aaron Francis. If you haven’t watched our previous episode with him, he is a software developer, fellow content creator and co-founder of Try Hard Studios. In the past he’s been an accountant at a Big 4 but now he focuses on Laravel, web development and all things business and video.

This episode will step away from the usual tech focused content and we’ll talk a bit more about the business side of things, how you have to balance entertainment and education when creating courses, Aaron’s High Performance SQLite course, building a personal brand through the discomfort of centering it around yourself, how good presentation matters and how proactiveness puts you miles ahead of the majority, so stay tuned!

Learn back-end development - https://www.boot.dev

Listen on your favorite podcast player: https://www.backendbanter.fm

Aaron's X/Twitter: https://x.com/aarondfrancis

Aaron's Website: https://aaronfrancis.com/

High Performance SQLite: https://highperformancesqlite.com/

Screencasting: https://screencasting.com/

Mostly Technical Podcast: https://mostlytechnical.com/

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

01:32 Podcast listening going up when having a kid

02:25 Podcast about earning the first million

08:54 You have to choose the entertainment vs education levels

10:37 You have to shape your material to the platforms

16:40 Long hour videos vs 2 minute ones

20:16 Are the videos in the High Performance SQLite in linear order?

24:19 Figuring out the metrics

28:06 Building courses on other domains

31:46 Building brands is difficult

35:55 quick disclaimer

36:30 Personal brand vs company

37:57 Is this sellable?

40:23 Do you need an audience?

44:26 The strategy is simple but it is also hard to execute

49:31 The presentation matters a LOT

51:54 On being proactive

57:00 Where to find Aaron

In today’s episode, we bring Adam Argyle, a CSS Dev Rel at Google, content creator, co-host at CSS Podcast, Bad At CSS Podcast and host of GUI Challenges. He’s also the creator of a bunch of tools and utilities for the front-end.

We’re going to touch on a lot of hot topics, regarding the difficulty and power of CSS, how programmers most of the time underestimate and dismiss it as something trivial when in reality it’s one of the hardest things to master in the programming world. We also go over AI, the barriers between designers and developers and a bunch of other topics.

Learn back-end development - https://www.boot.dev

Listen on your favorite podcast player: https://www.backendbanter.fm

Adam's Website: https://nerdy.dev/

Adam's X/Twitter: https://x.com/argyleink

Adam on Chrome For Developers: https://chromeextensionsdocs.appspot.com/authors/argyle/

The CSS Podcast: https://thecsspodcast.libsyn.com/

Bad at CSS Podcast: https://badatcss.com/

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

00:51 CSS Wizard has entered the chat

02:37 HTML and CSS are not programming languages

07:44 There's a case for complex things using CSS

10:28 CSS is declarative by nature

17:58 Writing CSS is a pain

20:43 AI isn't a threat to CSS

21:19 Breaking barriers between designers and developers

26:33 Getting to an entry-level competency on the backend is a bit more difficult when compared to the frontend

31:37 Adam's backstory

33:40 Knowing everything

34:56 The majority of the complexity lives on the frontend a lot of the times

38:48 South Park Reality

39:49 BFF vs BOF (Backend for frontend vs Backend of the Frontend)

47:03 CSS is typed in the browser

51:28 Take on why are there so many mormons and ex-mormons in the webdev and tech influencer scene?

54:08 Where to find Adam