Programming Throwdown, Episode 100.

100th episode. Take it away, Patrick.

Well, it is April of 2020, and the whole world is experiencing COVID-19.

So we're going to have a celebration of our 100th episode.

We're going to try not to dwell too much on it.

We have some work from home stuff we might talk about in another episode

or two and some tips and tricks we've learned. But this week, we want to use our intro topic

to complain about how terrible all video conferencing is. Now that we're all stuck dealing with it

all the time. Video conferencing is hard. I get it, but man, it's as brutal, the latency.

And for me, I never knew until this, you know, we talked about to various guests who work

remotely and talking about working remotely.

And when everyone works remotely individually and with the current latency and everything,

what I underestimated is how hard it is to read a room. So how much I rely on, like, saying something

and looking at people and understanding, are they hearing what I'm saying? Is it interesting?

Do I need to, like, explain it because they look confused? And I just have given up on that.

It's like doing the podcast.

It's just talking to an empty audience and hoping that at the end they'll ask questions.

Yeah, exactly. The latency for me is such a killer. And I feel like it's something that could be

solved so easily. I mean, basically, you know, I think the actual true latency, like if I want to send a packet to any one of the people on the call, that should be much less than a second.

So it's really just that there's buffering and they want it to feel natural and not stutter and everything, which that makes sense.

But then at least

give us something where we can like, like I could press the space bar and my face would just

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