A Charioteer is a highly skilled engineer that works for Chariot. When discussing the finer details of tuples and wormholes, it is easy to forget that each one of these engineers have a family and a life outside of the code. Every year the Charioteers get together at the Chariot office to show off their technical chops, but also some of my more favorite talks are ones about anything but code.
The day starts with a wonderful breakfast to wake every one up along with the reveal of this year’s t-shirt. It is quite a scene to see the past years’ shirts on the walls of the rec room.
The first and third talk was a two punch combo by James on the mental challenges that many in the engineering community have experience with. The first talk was about ADHD. It was kept light-hearted by the energy of the speaker along with comedic videos of the symptoms of ADHD. Serious complications of the disorder were threaded through the talk and hit home with many of the crowd. James did a great job of talking through each symptom and applying personal and real life scenarios. Medical remedies, tips, and methods to help combat the effects of ADHD for yourself and loved ones helped summarize a riveting talk.
The third talk by James was the more somber talk of the mental health series. 
The presentation was on autism in early childhood. It was a very calm and serious talk about a difficult situation that families face with the diagnosis and after effects of having a child with autism. The talk covered the strengths and weaknesses of an autistic child. What I found very helpful was the speaker helping the audience understand the disorder and how to actually behave and help a family with an autistic child. It was a great talk and hopefully we can post it for people to see as it generated insights of being within the circle that supports a child with neurological differences.
Sandwiched between those talks was a fun jump into the insights of an over ambitious developer by Drew. 
He talked about revamping his simple personal website and said it will be a “simple process”. The simple process turned into a multi-node flow chart with interdependence and design standards. From the cloud of requirements and failed attempts of integrating existing frameworks, Drew “accidentally” invented his own framework which he named buttery. He talked about the strengths his framework gives over other existing ones and why he went down this path. The code walk-through made the new framework seem simple and intuitive as you could manage it via a custom written cli package. The presentation gave a light-hearted reminder at the end that sometimes the journey does not end up solving the original problem as the website is still unchanged.
Lunch was served and was enjoyed with a wonderful espresso martini made by Gina.
A recent former Charioteer, Ken, came back for the next talk on Observability 2.0 and how that is aligned with his new work at Honeycomb. Ken started with the pillars of web app observability which are metric, logs, and traces. Combining the pillars into one place is the 2.0 version and it allows easier investigation into what is going on in the production environment. It is about allowing everyone to be proactive versus the norm of developers having to be reactive. Ken dove quickly into a demonstration of purposely bad code to demonstrate how Honeycomb uses open telemetry standards to quickly identify the problem.
As everyone was hitting the mid afternoon slump, Leo came in with a talk on Clojure and Scala, working hand in hand. You could see the drowsiness was fighting the intrigue of how is Leo going to bring Clojure and Scala together. He started with a river branching analogy to describe the data flows’ complex dance of database and file operations. He then went on to why he needed the two language foes to work together to achieve greatness. Statements such as “we will write Scala in Clojure” received comments and raised eyebrows from the crowd. The amazing realization is that the segregated languages could in fact rely and be helpful by reaching across the aisle and using each other’s libraries. Leveraging the high capacity of Scala and the simplicity of Clojure allows Leo to not have to replicate functionality. Talks of wormholes summarized the ingenious and absurdity of this real life solution.
Snack was served and everybody grabbed their favorite beverage for the finishing talks of the day.
Will sat in front of screen that stated “Producing Bytes for Cold Storage” and everyone was hunkered down for a talk on AWS S3 pricing and availability tiers. What? A twist! The crowd removed the glaze from their eyes when Will pivoted to the next slide that revealed he was going to talk about homemade ice cream! He got technical with the lactose challenges of a family favorite treat. A walk-through of the various tools and methods created a great discussion to keep the audience enthralled in the process. The crowd really perked up when the taste test slide appeared and Will handed out a delicious French style and Philadelphia style ice cream while describing the differences. Wait, there’s more? We took a tour of the history and the world’s different takes on the delectable treat. Will realized the same as Drew that even though he enjoyed and had fun on this adventure, it saved him zero money and his cholesterol did not improve. Will received more excitement from the crowd as he brought out more samples of his ice cream. His French style vanilla fruit loop ice cream caused hysteria about a new business venture for Chariot and requests for seconds.
Dan was nervous following a talk on ice cream and was hoping how he structured webs apps in Go would pacify the crowd. Dan laid out his best practices for a boilerplate in Go. He explained the gotchas and best practices of a new project start and what Go has available for it. Dan covered logging, DB interfaces, and the proper way to shut down. If you are new to Go, it was a great way to see what the language offers and most of what he covered is available in the standard library.
As the long day closed and some people went to dinner and others went home, it was another great year of talks that varied from personal to our daily work. This makes for a well rounded day and gives a glimmer into the interesting life of a Charioteer.