How do you keep millions of people safe on 40 different dating sites while simultaneously figuring out what drives them to buy memberships? Sean Corfield joins Adam and Ben to discuss the surprisingly complex engineering and business challenges of observing user behavior at massive scale.

Sean runs us through fraud detection and prevention (including devastating "pig butchering" romance scams), database architecture at enormous scale (700GB databases with 250M+ row tables), custom domain-specific languages for writing business rules without touching SQL, real-time scoring systems with hundreds of rules, zero-downtime deployments and schema migrations, and the constant cat-and-mouse game between scammers and detection systems.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

Can you really multitask, or are you just rapidly switching between contexts and hoping your brain doesn't lose track? This week, we dig into the cognitive load of deep work, the impossibility of maintaining multiple large projects in your head simultaneously, and the ADHD patterns that shape how many of us think and work.

Carol returns from the chaos of federal government planning meetings with renewed energy and alignment. Adam finds flow in his Jump Run project while navigating compliance season. Ben discovers the exhausting reality of writing actual specification documents for the first time in his career—and realizes just how taxing deep thinking can be.

reCAPTCHA Migration: https://privatecaptcha.com/blog/recaptcha-migration-to-google-cloud-2025/

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

How do you resist the siren call of shiny new features when you're months into a project that really matters?

Adam finds himself six weeks into a 12-week build when his boss floats a couple of juicy AI integration ideas. Ben relates this to his own tendency to get distracted by massive refactors mid-feature. They dig into strategies for staying disciplined—like using future work as motivation, finding small wins along the way, or accepting that sometimes work just has to feel like work..

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.