Andrew and Ben sit down to reflect on a massive year for Dev Interrupted, share what they are most thankful for, and give a sneak peek at what is coming in Season 6. But this year, the conversation was too visual for just audio, so we are continuing the party over on YouTube where the team vibe-codes holiday cards in real-time for a special "Part 2" segment that offers a chaotic, hands-on look at agentic workflows - and some of the most fun we’ve had all year.
Transcript
(Disclaimer: may contain unintentionally confusing, inaccurate and/or amusing transcription errors)
[00:00:06] Andrew Zigler: Welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Andrew Zigler.
[00:00:09] Ben Lloyd Pearson: And I'm your host Ben Lloyd Pearson.
[00:00:12] Andrew Zigler: And welcome to this year's holiday episode. If you're listening to this episode, we know you're a true fan of the show. And you found the space where in our holiday season, like to wind down, relax, where we're spending time with folks, and that includes y'all, all of our listeners, and where we're reflecting a bit on the last year that we've had.
[00:00:28] Andrew Zigler: And this episode is just an opportunity for us. To, you know, dig into that successful year and what we're thankful for and what we're excited for next year, and what you as a Dev Interrupted listener can maybe expect tuning in for season six at the top of next year.
[00:00:42] Ben Lloyd Pearson: Yeah, absolutely. So it's a great opportunity for us to, to relax a little bit, have some fun, you know, do some cool things, But of course, you know, it wouldn't be a Dev Interrupted episode at this point without a news roundup. And we also have a gift for everyone. Listening to this episode,, which we're gonna post, later, you'll find out [00:01:00] about it, uh, towards the end of it. Uh, listen to, you know, just listen to the end for more details. But, I'll give you a hint that this episode does have a part two, and it might be on, uh, video platform. Andrew, where do you wanna start? Should we, should we just get right into the news or do you want to maybe talk about some reflections on this year with Dev
[00:01:16] Andrew Zigler: The news? No, we have to, we have to mix it up a little bit. It's our holiday episode, so we have to start with, I think, some reflections and there's a few things I think that we can both reflect on. So, Ben, you know, what are you most thankful for when it comes to Dev Interrupted?
[00:01:29] Ben Lloyd Pearson: Yeah, this, this is an easy one 'cause you know, we, we get to speak to so many really smart people, about, software engineering, leadership, like all these really cool topics. And of course, ai, uh, and I think as AI just like completely transforms so much of what we do. I'm so thankful that we get to have all these experts come into our. know, it's in our, our House or our, our space and share really awesome things with us because I've learned so much just by hosting these people. Uh, so yeah, I'm, I'm super thankful for that. What, what about you, [00:02:00] Andrew?
[00:02:00] Andrew Zigler: I totally agree. Really thankful for the guests, but I think what I'm most thankful for is just how lucky I feel because when Dev Interrupted, it's like I feel like I'm at the right place at the right time. In our industry when things are changing and things are just so. Interesting week to week and with really amazing people too.
[00:02:17] Andrew Zigler: Both you and people behind the scenes, but our amazing guest network. So all of these things together have just made an amazing year. So just thankful for how lucky I am to kind of be in a place where all those things are coming together.
[00:02:28] Andrew Zigler: And what are you most proud of in the, in the past year for both the show and maybe even yourself personally?
[00:02:34] Ben Lloyd Pearson: I think what I'm really like the most proud of is how we've, we've really turned Dev Interrupted in the last year into, I mean, I don't wanna say a content factory 'cause it kind of has negative connotations, but it's a system like, we've really built a, a robust system for generating new content, for trying out new ideas, for experimenting with the podcast and our substack and, and all of those things.
[00:02:55] Ben Lloyd Pearson: And it's really allowed us to iterate. A substantial amount in the last year. Like if you've [00:03:00] been a long-term listener, you've probably noticed some format changes, particularly over the last 12 months. And, uh, you know, I'm, I'm just really happy that we've been able to pull that off because it's enabling us to take on bigger challenges and do more interesting things, so, really awesome to see.
[00:03:15] Ben Lloyd Pearson: So what, what about you, Angie? What are you proud of this year?
[00:03:18] Andrew Zigler: I am just proud of like all of the energy that we were able to put into kind of automating away the toil of the things this year. That way you and I have been able to talk so, so much and, and our producer Adam as well, about the strategy behind how to bring really great conversations and really amazing content to folks.
[00:03:33] Andrew Zigler: And so I'm really proud of our ability to like, iterate and get to that place where. We can strategize that. And also just proud of us every single week for, you know, doing these new segments and covering things when it's easy and when it's not. You know, I think that it, it speaks a lot to like, us showing up here and like what we want to do and why we're so passionate about it.
[00:03:52] Andrew Zigler: And I'm just, you know, really proud of everything that we've been building the last year.
[00:03:55] Ben Lloyd Pearson: Yeah.
[00:03:56] Andrew Zigler: And, uh, you know, what are you, what are you looking forward to now? We talked about like what we're [00:04:00] proud of, but like, looking forward to next year, Ben. What are you most excited about?
[00:04:04] Ben Lloyd Pearson: well, you mentioned automating the toil. Uh, yeah, we have done a ton of that using AI and workflow automations and all of that stuff. And, and you know, we're kind of at a point in the, you know, just in the content production industry where, where we are starting to feel those like multiplicative. Uh, improvements from ai.
[00:04:23] Ben Lloyd Pearson: Like there's just a lot of toil that is just disappearing and, and all of that. And, and I think the next year is just gonna get better. Like, we're gonna be able to, to, to have more automated workflows, better production systems, so that we're just constantly focused on bigger challenges, uh, more and more.
[00:04:38] Ben Lloyd Pearson: And it's, you know, it kind of relates to, to both of our last answer, like, there's just so much more like Greenfield that I see to just build these like AI driven workflows to help us do better content and do it at a higher. Frequency. So yeah, that's pretty awesome. Like what about you, Andrew? What are you looking forward to other than more vibe coding sessions?
[00:04:57] Andrew Zigler: Oh, I'm looking forward to more vibe coding sessions. [00:05:00] I think that's top of my list because in the last year, I think what we've learned, you know, talking with so many engineering leaders. I go back to some really high pro profile guests from even really earlier this year, like Dr. Ashoori at IBM and how she said, you know, folks are evolving from being, uh, action doers to decision makers.
[00:05:19] Andrew Zigler: So, uh, you see this elevation in the IC skillset of, of them becoming more managerial and like how they think about what they do. You also have this really amazing revolution right now happening on like the leadership side of things that are vibe coding now every day, building out prototypes to help their team move faster.
[00:05:36] Andrew Zigler: And I think in 2026, I'm really excited to explore more of those and learn about how folks are solving communication and collaboration problems with. As leaders and as managers beyond just using AI within code itself. So I think that's like something I'm really excited to explore with our audience and our experts, because we got peaks of that this year, but I think we're gonna see even more of it next.
[00:05:59] Ben Lloyd Pearson: Yeah, so stay [00:06:00] tuned. Next year is gonna be another great year for this show. I'm really excited to see all the stuff that we have in the, in the works. Uh, but yeah, let's, let's dive into the news now 'cause that's, uh, you know, what we love to do every week here. So this week we have some pretty awesome stories.
[00:06:13] Ben Lloyd Pearson: So we'll start with MCP agents need real safeguards. We have killing stale engineering process dogmas and big tech sours on remote work. Uh, Andrew, let's just start right at the top with MCPs, and I know you love to talk about this, so I'll let you lead this one.
[00:06:29] Andrew Zigler: Okay, so this is an article, uh, called, it is Not Too Late to Roll Back MCP um, it's from Theory Ventures blog. And, uh, we've covered some of their work here in the past. This article dives into why, you know, AI agents are currently limited to making easy decisions within domains and where. In things like software engineering, we have these preexisting safeguards that were there before AI showed up.
[00:06:54] Andrew Zigler: Things like git and code review and database transaction layers that make decisions more [00:07:00] reversible and less consequential. But then you get AI on the scene and you get MCP, and now you have applications deterministically calling all of these tools, and that is less easy to reverse. So this article calls out how MCP has a lack of system boundaries.
[00:07:15] Andrew Zigler: It lacks like trust and support between intersystem kinds of, uh, tool calls, you know, and it makes it hard for difficult to prioritize the work they do, and it makes it impossible to safely reverse high consequence decisions, like that's why you don't see MCP transferring money outta your bank account, right?
[00:07:34] Andrew Zigler: Because while it's easy maybe to reverse ACH something, it's less easy, easy to reverse an age agentic decision as part of something else that transferred your money away. It makes the problem a lot harder to tackle. And so this, uh. Blog post tackles how we need to extend MCP to support these distributed transactions.
[00:07:54] Andrew Zigler: Develop a standardized criteria for people to like orchestrate the outcomes and the decisions [00:08:00] and the tool calls that agents make. 'cause right now, MCP is operating on a blind trust layer, and that's just not gonna scale, which is what this calls out. And I, I agree with this article. I think there's a, a missing decision management layer in, in the mix here.
[00:08:13] Andrew Zigler: And I, I like how it framed agents work right now as having a lack of reversibility. I think that speaks to maybe some people's hesitation around using MCP because ultimately like somebody has to be culpable for certain actions. And so we're still not at a point, I think where an AI can fully take the CU culpability.
[00:08:30] Andrew Zigler: And there's a chart here as well that I'll, I'll let our audience check out when they read this article. Um, It shows these domains of decisions on like a, a vertical and a horizontal axis, and you can kind of see why wiring money to a stranger is like highly irreversible and highly consequential versus maybe some of the other decisions that AI can make for us.
[00:08:48] Andrew Zigler: Ben, what did you think?
[00:08:50] Ben Lloyd Pearson: Yeah, I mean, you and I both know how MCPs can both be like amazing and terrifying at the same time. Like, I kind of think of them as almost like hooking up a nuclear reactor to your [00:09:00] software. On one hand, they make it really easy to connect GPT to services that provide data and tools that extend their capabilities. You know, we, we both experienced this firsthand, actually just recently with, uh, LinearB b We lo we launched this unblocked campaign where, uh, we actually use Claude connected to the LinearB MCP to prototype an end of year celebration for our customers who, who use LinearB b ai. Uh, to increase their team's productivity. So, you know, it's a really powerful tool on one hand. But then on the other hand, you know, MCPs can kind of explode in your face. Like if you have poor configs that can lead to like overfilling the context window. You know, it's not deterministic, so you can't rely on it to produce the same result twice. And it needs a lot of context and guidance to do some things like the way that you actually want them to do it. So, I really like how, you know, this article. Breaks down this, this onto two spectrums. Like you, you mentioned you have high versus low reversibility and high versus low [00:10:00] consequences. You know, I just love to access spectrums like that. And, you know, decisions that are low consequences and highly reversible are what the author calls like, the comfort zone where MCPs You know, an MCP is, like you said, they can't, they, they can make decisions, but they aren't made able to move decisions from a state of discomfort to comfort. So if something
[00:10:18] Andrew Zigler: Mm.
[00:10:19] Ben Lloyd Pearson: zone, they can do it.
[00:10:20] Ben Lloyd Pearson: But if it's, it's in a discomfort zone, you probably shouldn't trust it as much.
[00:10:26] Andrew Zigler: Yeah, so I think like the key takeaway here is that MCP gives agents capability. Sure. But it doesn't give them safety. And safety requires orchestration, validation, rollback semantics. These learn very subtle layers of the protocol that have not evolved yet. So I, I do think that there's an opportunity for people to implement MCP in a more forward thinking way.
[00:10:45] Andrew Zigler: I think that's actually what this article is really digging at, is that we have to come together as a community of builders that use this protocol to evolve it ourselves. And, uh, of course, you know, this article also shouts out how MCP is part of the age Agentic AI Foundation now new Linux foundational [00:11:00] organization founded alongside many other, uh, foundational AI tools.
[00:11:03] Andrew Zigler: And so if you're reading, uh, if you're building it, anything with MCPs, definitely check out this article.
[00:11:08] Ben Lloyd Pearson: Yeah, absolutely. All right, next story. Your job is to deliver code. You have proven to work. What's this about Andrew?
[00:11:16] Andrew Zigler: Yeah, so this article really hammers on what we just talked about a moment ago, is that software engineers are responsible for delivering the code that they produce, whether they generated it themselves or someone else made it. Just like how a moment ago we said how the agent can't make a decision for you that's outside of your.
[00:11:33] Andrew Zigler: Comfort zone. The same thing goes for engineers. You can't ship code that an AI wrote for you that you don't have awareness and understanding of. And so, this article really hits at the importance of understanding your code, but also using, uh, techniques like manual testing, uh, to make sure you understand how your code works along the way.
[00:11:52] Andrew Zigler: And really calling out the danger and the rise of AI coding tools like Claude Code and Codex Codex, CLI. It just makes it really essential [00:12:00] for engineers to be heavily and aggressively reviewing the code that they create and put out into the world, and ultimately they remain responsible for keeping it tested and working and, and fitting for the reasons that it's created in the first place.
[00:12:13] Andrew Zigler: What do you think, Ben?
[00:12:15] Ben Lloyd Pearson: Yeah, so this article closes with what I think is an incredibly important point, and that is that the human provides the accountability. Like it's perfectly fine to have AI generate code for you, but the code is always your responsibility at the end of the day. I actually recently heard from an engineering leader who said their organization banned the phrase, Claude wrote this because too many of their developers were using it as a way to offload responsibility.
[00:12:40] Ben Lloyd Pearson: and you know, AI will continue to get better at writing code, means that, you know, us humans, we can focus on other bottlenecks to ensure that like code working properly is, you know, one of those things that we can focus on. But I think one common example, you know, is that automated testing is more important than ever, and all [00:13:00] PRs should bundle testing improvements with them. um, one great example of this is, uh, Coinbase actually, you know, they've been making the news recently and we've covered this, about how their CEO claims that, you know, like more than half of their code is generated by AI A big part of that is that they apply additional rigor to AI generated code.
[00:13:19] Ben Lloyd Pearson: So that includes a strict requirement that all new code must have 100% unit testing coverage. So, you know, these are the types of things that engineering leaders should be thinking about right now as we, you know, culturally shift into using these tools, uh, more frequently.
[00:13:35] Andrew Zigler: So our next article is about the five engineering dogmas that it is time to retire. Ben, what is this article about?
[00:13:42] Ben Lloyd Pearson: Yeah, so the article challenge is five common engineering practices. Uh, things like reliance on external packages, mandatory code reviews for all changes um, using two to four week sprints. Feature flags, you know, stuff like that. they excite some examples of, uh, uh, actually one that I really loved of [00:14:00] some NPM incidents, where, you know, a package that gets 160,000 weekly downloads, uh, is just a few, like four or five lines of like sloppily written code that was written as a part of like an someone's learning experience, you know?
[00:14:14] Ben Lloyd Pearson: Um. And you know, the, the author of this article, argues that these dogmas should be regularly reevaluated as they can all introduce inefficiency or complexity if they're applied rigidly, rather than tailored to your team's context. So, you know, you know me, Andrew, I always love. Contrarian takes. You know, I really love that example that they had of, uh, I think the package was called is even, and it just like uses, it imports another dependency to like determine if it's even and then just outputs, like results
[00:14:43] Andrew Zigler: it, it imports is odd and it just returns the opposite of is odd. Yeah. Mm-hmm.
[00:14:48] Ben Lloyd Pearson: me wonder what is odd imports, you know? And you know, and I actually have a good friend who he, he works for a software development consultancy and he once told me about this client, they onboarded where he, he spent the first week [00:15:00] searching through hundreds of dependencies that their last developer added to the stack just to find all the modules that could be replaced with a few lines of code.
[00:15:08] Ben Lloyd Pearson: And there was a surprisingly large number of those modules. So there's a lot of real problems that are being outlined in this article.
[00:15:15] Andrew Zigler: There's a bunch of ones in here that I thought were interesting. One of them, the first one about like, uh, not using Agile, that one like, or waterfall. That one like made me shudder. It's like, yes, like obviously the engineering dogma of like, if you're still a huge enterprise and you're trying to build things with Waterfall, I think you're gonna encounter a lot of problems in today's speed.
[00:15:32] Andrew Zigler: And also having closed tool chains, like just using the same tools over and over and not evaluating new ones. Definitely a dogma that I think should be retired. There was one in here that was interesting about like, team heroics, right? About like counting on the one individual to, to rise up and to like do the most and to, to like, uh, like produce the most output for the team.
[00:15:54] Andrew Zigler: This one was interesting 'cause I think that's less of a dogma and more of just a phenomenon of workplaces [00:16:00] and, and how people interact with each other and their outputs. And I think that like, uh, in the age of ai. Those folks are actually gonna stand out even more and go even faster um, and produce even more code and be even louder.
[00:16:11] Andrew Zigler: And so I think it's really interesting how the dogma maybe needs to retire, but that itself is more of a, a reflection of the workplace that we live in. But But what do you think about um, like the heroics that, that this thing kind of talked about?
[00:16:23] Ben Lloyd Pearson: that definitely stuck out to me. Uh, something that, that I think stuck out even more though was the examples they had of mandatory code reviews for all pull requests. 'cause this is something that we think a lot about,
[00:16:33] Andrew Zigler: Oh yeah.
[00:16:34] Ben Lloyd Pearson: as part of our work for LinearB B. And, uh, you know, just to pull, open the hood a little bit into Dev Interrupted operations. just wrapped up an interview with Ori Keren, the CEO and co-founder of LinearB B about his predictions for 2026. And, and that episode's gonna come out early next year. But a preview that I can give now is, you know, we're entering this phase where the increased volume of AI generated prs will necessitate that we stop treating.
[00:16:59] Ben Lloyd Pearson: All [00:17:00] PRS is one size fit all as many organizations do today. you know, some poll requests need very deep scrutiny. Others simply need to be merged because the risk isn't big enough to spend a lot of time on them. And I think one of the big challenges that engineering leaders will face in the next year in particular is automating the process of determining the difference between those types of prs.
[00:17:23] Andrew Zigler: Yeah, understanding that like not all your code is created equal. They need different levels of care and attention is a really important discovery to make because right now, like everyone is focused on creating code, the code generation, we're less focused on these other parts of delivering software that are encountering bottlenecks from that process.
[00:17:41] Andrew Zigler: So it's about understanding, the kinds of code that is getting created and the level of attention that it needs, and splitting things out into lanes. Otherwise, you're never gonna get out from underneath all of that. You're never gonna get the velocity you're looking for. So definitely a really amazing interview.
[00:17:56] Andrew Zigler: Highly recommend y'all. Check that one out. That won't have me nodding along the whole [00:18:00] time.
[00:18:01] Ben Lloyd Pearson: All right. Now I want to talk about something that is really important to me and that is remote work and how big tech is falling out of love with it. So you know, major tech companies like Meta, Amazon, Google, Microsoft. They're all shifting away from supporting remote and hybrid work to doing things like mandating like three days in office, for example. And non-compliance with these policies, often leading to job loss or just reduced opportunities for growth, those types of things. Gallup did a study of over 400,000 US employees recently and found that about a quarter of them work fully remote and a little over half. Work hybrid leaving only like less than 20% that actually work fully on site, which is pretty, pretty astounding. and then in the background, there's also things like Microsoft's People Officer stating in, uh, a memo in September of this year that you know, when people work together in person. more often they thrive reflecting a broader industry trend, you know, sort of towards these policies. And, [00:19:00] you know, I'm just gonna come out and say it. I don't agree with that statement from this, uh, Microsoft, uh, you know, I, and, and I think return to office mandates really are just as. A stealth layoff strategy. You know, these companies are really just trying to make it so that enough people want to leave so that they don't have to go through additional rounds of layoffs after, you know, the COVID era hiring spree that, that all of these companies went on and, you know, I, I once worked for a very large corporation. That we experienced attrition levels so high at one point that there actually were rumors swirling that they canceled like a round or two of layoffs because of the attrition, which is, I guess that's great for like people who just wanna collect a paycheck, but like, it, it was just frankly demoralizing for everyone else.
[00:19:44] Ben Lloyd Pearson: So, yeah. Andrew, I, I kind of suspect he probably agree with me a lot on a lot of this too. So what's your take?
[00:19:50] Andrew Zigler: Yeah, I mean, honestly, whenever an executive stands up and they say like, oh, we need to be in office collaborations better we thrive, our, it's for our culture. Like that take is always feels false to me. [00:20:00] It feels tired. Uh, I, I feel like that's just not the right way to look at it. And ultimately you have to look at their incentives and why.
[00:20:05] Andrew Zigler: It's like big tech wants people back in offices because they already spent all of this time and money and effort. Building and owning these massive campuses and building out huge real estate portfolios. And that's ultimately a, a cost item that they're trying to justify an expense. And then it has the added benefit of being a helpful, like you said, stealth layoff tactic for managing that because all companies that have this problem have that problem too.
[00:20:29] Andrew Zigler: So I think that they're kind of like a yin and a yang right now. Um, It's kinda like a blender that we're all going through, but I never believe this. When an executive says it, as someone who's worked in, in-person and remote collaborative environments, I don't think that spontaneous collaboration is what people are thinking about or doing more.
[00:20:45] Andrew Zigler: I consider myself a very high output individual. My output is much, much higher when I work remotely. Simply because that spontaneous collaboration is actually protecting me. Uh, no longer can people pivot to me and need things to me [00:21:00] spontaneously that break me outta my focus and pull me outta the things I do and ruin all of my output.
[00:21:04] Andrew Zigler: So for people who say like, oh, it's for spontaneous collaboration, I always read that as, oh, like you need someone else to do your work. And so, uh, that's how I always interpret the words underneath these kinds of things. I thought this one was funny.
[00:21:20] Ben Lloyd Pearson: I, I'm not gonna be able to unsee that now whenever I see that phrase. But, you know, and, and, and I'm with you. Like I've personally worked at least partially remote for my entire career, like going on 18 years. Uh, and 10 of those years I have been fully remote. And, you know, the quality of life improvements from that are just absolutely massive.
[00:21:37] Ben Lloyd Pearson: And it would take. Huge incentives to convince me to go back to an office, particularly considering that I moved away from a big tech hub a few years ago to raise my children and you know, and if these companies were offering like big incentives to come back, you know, I wouldn't be so pessimistic, you know, if there was like childcare and shared transportation services and food services and health benefits and like all [00:22:00] these things that they could provide to make the office experience.
[00:22:02] Ben Lloyd Pearson: More beneficial to the employees, but I think stuff like three days a week in the office just like really make no sense whatsoever to me, especially for these large companies. Like when I was working for the big tech companies, you know, everyone I worked with was distributed across multiple offices, sometimes a dozen or more, and all the meetings were still remote.
[00:22:21] Ben Lloyd Pearson: So
[00:22:22] Andrew Zigler: Mm-hmm.
[00:22:23] Ben Lloyd Pearson: the spontaneous, spontaneous collaboration was usually just with the random friends I made at lunch, and I don't think that, you know, requiring people to work from an office is universally a bad. But, uh, for these large companies, you know, I, I don't think it's gonna create really a noticeable productivity improvement.
[00:22:40] Ben Lloyd Pearson: All right, we got one more story, and that's the cloud fair radar for 2025. What is this, Andrew?
[00:22:46] Andrew Zigler: Yeah, this is the 2025 year in review from CloudFlare. Basically the ruler of the internet, as if you might know if anything goes down. It's always 'cause of CloudFlare. Just kidding, CloudFlare, everything is built on it. And so they have amazing insights into how, uh, the internet has [00:23:00] grown and evolved in the last year.
[00:23:01] Andrew Zigler: And one of the things that stood out is global internet traffic has grown by 19% in 2025. That makes a lot of sense to me, right? It's like we have more AI agents, we have more crawlers, more bots on the internet. And, among these threats as well, like security threats remain significant. 6.2% of global traffic was mitigated.
[00:23:19] Andrew Zigler: By CloudFlare as if it was, you know, malicious, it was gonna be harmful traffic. That's nearly 10% of all traffic in an environment where it was growing 20% year over year. And then 5.6 of analyze emails that went through CloudFlare were identified as malicious. Which is up from last year, which was at 3.9 percentage points.
[00:23:39] Andrew Zigler: So pretty, pretty sharp increase on both like the actual surge of internet traffic, but the dangers that come along with it. So this is just a friendly reminder to you to definitely be always aware and vigilant and protecting yourself online. And I think that honestly, this number's gonna go up even more.
[00:23:55] Andrew Zigler: There was another one in here that was fascinating about Snapchat. Overtaking [00:24:00] X and user engagement as in like users reengaging with the domain over time, which is a really interesting signal about shifting social dynamics. I never really thought that Snapchat would've gotten a surgeons over X, but here we are.
[00:24:13] Ben Lloyd Pearson: our favorite social media platform, LinkedIn also now outranks X. So maybe it just speaks more to the
[00:24:19] Andrew Zigler: Maybe it just speaks more to X. Yeah. In the fall of x.
[00:24:24] Ben Lloyd Pearson: But I also learned about a new attack vector from this report, and that's the harvest now decrypt later attack vector, which I had never heard of. Uh,
[00:24:31] Andrew Zigler: Oh yeah.
[00:24:32] Ben Lloyd Pearson: Yeah, but the idea is that there's malicious actors that might be collecting as much encrypted data about you as possible so that they can decrypt it later once quantum computing advances. But, you know, one of the charts in here showed that now more than 50% of web traffic is at, is protected from this attack. So that's pretty cool to see. And yeah,
[00:24:52] Andrew Zigler: Yeah.
[00:24:52] Ben Lloyd Pearson: AI bot crawler traffic is just kind of all over the place. That's sort of the last big thing that I learned from this. Uh, a [00:25:00] lot of swings, a lot of changes.
[00:25:01] Ben Lloyd Pearson: Things kind sort of like switch on a dime it seems like. Uh, so yeah,
[00:25:05] Andrew Zigler: Cool.
[00:25:06] Ben Lloyd Pearson: pretty good report. There's just a ton of data. There's no way we could cover it all in here. Uh, so I definitely encourage, uh, all of our listeners to go check it out one
[00:25:14] Andrew Zigler: There's one more thing in there I want to call out that I thought was amazing is that Roblox is user, uh, like new users continuing to search by 30% in the last year, which is. Obscene when you already consider how large the user base of Roblox is. And Roblox is the standout for me. Roblox is the company to watch.
[00:25:32] Andrew Zigler: It's actually, I think it is like Zuckerberg's bet on the Metaverse was a generation too soon. I think when the generation that grew up when is playing Roblox right now grows up, that's when the metaverse and the VR and augmented reality is all gonna start to matter. But I thought that was fascinating to see it still growing so strong.
[00:25:49] Andrew Zigler: So another one to keep an eye on.
[00:25:51] Ben Lloyd Pearson: Yeah, the, the Roblox dominating the Metaverse was, was fascinating. I never really expected that, but you know, I just wish it could have been Minecraft.
[00:25:59] Andrew Zigler: [00:26:00] And now that we're at the end of our news segment, Ben, is it time to, uh, reveal our little surprise? Because, you know, at the beginning you mentioned that there's a second part to this episode, and that's true. And so if you've been listening so far we're about to unhitch the, the train, so to speak, and move to a different, uh, platform.
[00:26:15] Andrew Zigler: So me, Ben, and our producer, Adam's always behind the scenes here. Uh, we'll be vibe coding each other holiday cards in our holiday segment. Uh, and you're only gonna find that conversation over on the Dev Interrupted YouTube channel, and I promise that. You know, we're gonna have a ton of fun. So you just check it out.
[00:26:31] Andrew Zigler: And, you know, vibe coding is really fun when you can share and show your work, which is why we're showing it on a video platform. Um, And it's something that we would love to do more of in next year or so. If you've never checked out our YouTube channel before, now's a great excuse to do so, and, uh, maybe we'll see you over there.
[00:26:46] Ben Lloyd Pearson: Yeah, I'm, I'm super excited if, if you're listening on YouTube, just stick around 'cause it'll just kick right over to it. But I'm mostly excited 'cause this is Adam's, Adam Noble's debut on Dev Interrupted. Really exciting
[00:26:57] Andrew Zigler: Oh wow.
[00:26:58] Ben Lloyd Pearson: of fun playing around [00:27:00] with this thing that you vibe coded for us, Andrew.
[00:27:02] Ben Lloyd Pearson: And before we. And before we close out this holiday special, I wanna share a huge thanks to all of our listeners. This show truly exists because of your support. If you have found value in our conversations, please consider hitting the like and subscribe buttons on whichever platform you're listening to us on right now. It's the best way to help other engineering leaders discover the podcast and grow our. Uh, we're gonna be taking a brief holiday rest after this episode, but we'll be back in two weeks to kick off season six on January 6th. And we have some amazing companies lined up to start off the next year. So you don't wanna miss what we have coming around the corner. I'm wishing everyone a safe and happy holiday season and a great new year. Until we're back. Make sure to head over to YouTube to check out part two of this episode.
