Ep 15: Real Edition

Hello, folks, and welcome to episode 15, I think is the correct number, of Campfire Coders. I'm your host, Austin Cameron. And I'm your other host, Jesse Leet. How's it going, man? It's going so good. How are you? We explicitly didn't do our before podcast chat today. So how are you? Could you hear that train, by the way? No, but I would have liked to.

Cool. Sweet. There's a train just honking just as we were starting. Yeah, I was actually just contemplating. Is it a train honk or is it a horn? Or is it a horn that honks? That's a good question. Or is it a... There's another word that's escaping me. It's a simple word, but siren's not the right word. Whatever. This isn't a podcast about trains and honking, folks. Yeah, man. It's good to see your face.

We haven't recorded in a while. Yeah. Well, there's the pre-show. We did record a pre-show. Yeah, we might release it. We'll see. That's a joke.

yeah man what's going on what's going on with you i see your drum kit is uh organized maybe in a different way yeah like with books all over it like i never use it all the dust on top well i'm you don't really need that part of the floor tom anyway Got a stack of books on my floor, Tom. Yeah. Paper, folks. A box set. Wait, is it the Cimmerillion? Did I pronounce that right? Silmarillion? Yeah. It's not. It's not, but it, yeah. Say it again. Silmarillion? Yeah, I said Simarillion.

close enough we're talking about some tolkien books okay it's for nerds whatever it's fine what you drinking i saw that what what yeah okay what am i drinking i'm drinking it's called glass eye Vanilla coffee porter. I'm going to hold up the camera for you. It's really blurry on my tuple end. Nice. Fancy looking can. Can you see that?

We're using Tuple for video right now, but it blurs out my thing. Oh, you know what it is? It's the freaking Mac thing. Oh, the Mac thing. The Mac portrait mode. That's what was doing it. Okay, anyway, vanilla coffee porter. My wife's going to be mad because it's the last beer. I've just got a boring German dob, but it's good. I like it. No German beers are boring. They taste very good.

Usually. Yeah. But I mean, boring as in it's not a vanilla coffee porter with a fancy leaf. It was like 85 today. I shouldn't be drinking a vanilla coffee porter. Okay. But my wife is the savage person. Well, I guess I am too now, but it's cooler. now but she's a savage person where she will it'll be like 90 100 degrees out she'll be like i'll take the stout the darkest beer you got and i'm like you were crazy i want like a light tropical fruity beer yeah okay but yeah

Okay, so you got a German beer. I've got some weird dark beer. What are we talking about? Laracon? Laracon's coming. I almost don't want to say it, but... Was our last episode a Laracon episode? The last published episode indeed was. I'm pretty sure. I'd have to look. But... I believe it was. So folks, a lot has happened since then. Almost a year of time has happened. Not sure how that happened, but life's crazy. We can get to that.

Whether in this episode or future episodes. Laracon, when are you traveling there? We haven't talked about this at all. Off or on the air. I'll be there. Monday to Friday. My flights are on Monday and Friday. Nice. When do you get it on Monday? I actually forget. I got to look at my tickets. Okay. Well, I mean, I'm clearly trying to digitally stalk you now. Yeah.

You'll have to let me know. I'm doing Monday, Thursday this year. I was going to drive and do like the whole week, but that's just not how life goes sometimes. Nice. When are you getting there Monday? Do you know? Like 4 o'clock, 4.30. My co-worker's going this year. Shout out Joe. Shout out to Joe. Whether you want your name public or not, it is now. I'm excited. I'm excited you're going. We can bleep it out if he doesn't.

I'm going to say it 40 more times. So no, we're not doing that. We're not bleeping it out. Joe, Joe's a big podcast guy. So he will probably listen to this. And if you do, Joe. First of all, thank you. Second of all, folks, he has a pretty cool little like free, I guess I would call it progressive web app for listening to podcasts. It's like a podcast listener that's cross device.

Joe, we could talk about Joe a bit more, okay? But I just want to say, check out his app. It's called Podrain. Okay, we'll link it in the show notes. Whether he wants it out there for the world or not. Okay, we're going to stress test his app with all five of the Campfire Coders fans. Okay. Yeah. Joe's cool. He's one of my coworkers. I'm stoked he's going to Laracon. We have the same flight because we live in the same town. Nice. Monday afternoon is when we'll be there.

Excited to meet you, Joe. I wish I had a Terry Black's barbecue. That's the one thing I want to miss from Dallas this year. Like, I don't have that, yo, we need to go here to eat in Denver. And I've been to Denver a lot. I've got some ideas, but not... There's not a Terry Blacks in Denver that I know of. Yeah. You don't have bad memories of Terry Blacks? You were feeling sick last year, the one night. Well, that's just because I drink too much beers on the plane.

Okay, so, well, okay, yeah. I probably shouldn't admit that, but here we are. I mean, you know, it was only like a long two-hour flight from South Carolina to Dallas. No. In all seriousness, no, I mean, you realize you did this too. I guess maybe you stayed a little longer at Laracon, but I ate Terry Black's literally every night I was in Dallas. Yeah. And I probably said that on the last podcast, but it's been so long that it's like a new phrase.

Yeah. We don't know what we said a year ago. We don't. We're good. We don't. Yeah. So Monday, cool. I'm stoked to see you. I'm not going to have as many keycaps in the pocket this year.

Speaking of keycaps, regardless of what I said on the last podcast, I had not made a single keycap until... This past week, basically since then, because I tried to redo my whole mold process and it was a disaster. So I gave up and now I'm using Legos again. And here we are. But now I made a bunch of new molds and they're almost perfect. And it's amazing because I don't really have to sand them. So I'll be casting keys every night for the next couple of nights before Laracon. Nice. Yeah.

So I'll have a few. I saw some of those pictures. The shark. Was that a shark? No, so it's just a... Yes, it's a shark of the rivers of the Northwest. It's a rainbow trout. Oh, it's the trout. No. Actually, my... My friend Pete, we've talked about him, I think, a little bit on here. Pete painted those. Yeah, pretty cool. I have one right here. Nice. Fancy. Is that like a blue resin this time? No, that's actually just...

just paint to make the bass look really cool. Pete is that guy who's... uh really into like miniature painting and has always been the artist that i wanted to be my entire life we've been friends since we were like little kids and he's always been super freaking good at art and i love his art and Shout out to Pete. A lot of shout outs. I think we did a bunch of shout outs in the last episode, ironically, but that would require me going back and listening to know that.

Yeah, so when we were at Laracon last year, you handed out quite a few of those, like 35 of them or something like that. I think there was like 50. I don't know. I don't know. whatever it was it was fun i'm gonna bring some uh this year too i had hoped to do a lot more like developer logos fun stuff um yeah but life's been crazy

I wasn't home for a lot. I can say life's been crazy, but it's more fun to talk about what's going on. We got some homesteading going on. Homesteading. Homesteading. Yeah. I am. Okay. We are pulling utilities to this land that we got. And so utilities as in like, there's nothing there. Right. There's it's a bunch of land. It's 40 acres. I'm so excited about it. There are about nine like buildable acres that aren't like swampy river bottom.

The rest are pretty swampy river bottom. But of course, as a fisherman, I'm stoked about that. I can walk five minutes to the river. And yeah, so we're pulling utilities, power and... We're going to drill a well here in a couple weeks, and then the septic permit should be hopefully granted in the next two weeks. And then we dig a hole for poop. Nice. I guess. I've never done any of this, so.

exciting overwhelming a lot of things um yeah so naturally i'm naturally now i'm like well of course we have to build the house and i could pay someone to do that but as a typical dev I would like to build it on myself from scratch so you know why use a framework of a builder when I could totally

design it all in SketchUp. So I've been really trying to get good at SketchUp so I can design a bunch of homes in it and then probably give up and use a floor plan from a builder. Well, I'm impressed because... When you said homesteading, my mind went to Laravel Homestead. Not sure if you remember that. Oh, we used it extensively. Actually, funny, we maintained our own fork of it for a long time because we had some...

What did we have? We built our own homestead vagrant box fork for a long time that had a bunch of other stuff we needed into it. Shout out to anyone who had to do that. So glad that we're not using the virtualization for that. And if you're using Docker for that, then I guess that's okay. I don't know.

I'm not a Docker guy. Okay. I don't like, okay. Wait, everyone who's listening to this. I know. Yeah. Everyone who's listened to the podcast will certainly know that I'm not a react man, but I'm also. not a Docker man. I understand the usefulness of it, but in practicality for my own personal computer, I don't give a shit about it.

I just, you know, it's okay. But now, you know, something I've wanted to play with, I don't know if you have before, but a friend was just showing this to me recently is, I don't know how to pronounce it, but Durenve. Like D I R E N V. Have you heard of this? No, no. So it's like, I live under a rock, man. Like actually I live under a septic tank. Well, living under a rock is pretty like on par for Montana, I think. Right.

Well, I know there's a lot of gravel and rocks here. I just live. Yeah, that's what I mean. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I get it. Anyway, Durand is like, if I understand it correctly, think of how... Docker gives you a containerized environment and the edges of the container are closed off to the world and you have to proxy stuff in and it gets all complicated. With Durenv, it's more like imagine every single...

project folder on your hard drive could have a different tech stack, but it's all done with just ENV paths. Wait, okay. So this is... Go on, sorry. You change directory from one project into another and Duran is watching you change directories and basically just rewires up the paths available to you. Yeah, it's like, okay, you need PHP 7 for this and whatever.

And MySQL 5.4, is that the right one? I don't know. Doesn't matter. Hopefully you're not on that. If you're on that, folks, reach out to me or Jesse. We can help you upgrade. That would suck if you're dealing with that. We could help you upgrade to PHP 6. Anybody who really knows PHP will get that joke. That's funny. What I was going to say is this is like...

What's it called? What are the Python people use? Virtual ENV. ENV. ENV. Whatever you want to say. Virtual ENV. It's one of those words. It's like when you're reading a book, right? pronounce the character's name in your head. And then when you say it out loud, you'd like butcher it. And then the person who listens to the audio book is like, no, actually it's this, you know? And you're like, okay. Anyway, the Python.

folks all use this thing for years. Are you familiar with this? No, not really. So they, they use, it's like, okay, what you're telling me is that there is now something that is. like that but for php and or whatever dev stuff oh yeah it's not even php it's more just a it's just like a bash i don't know if it's a linux tool or a bash tool or what it is but it's like a

more of just a path manager for managing a stack in any directory. Right, right. It doesn't really containerize you because you can access outside of that folder. But if you run PHP... or you run any command really from a specific project, it's just like setting precedence to what paths come first for that directory. Interesting. Okay. So like the Python people,

I've all had different versions of Python and stuff. And generally how you do Python projects is you use virtual ENV or VENV. That's how I think about it in my head, at least in terms of how you say it.

I think you say it Venv. Yeah. Venv. Okay. So you use Venv and I, that's V Venv is my like bash alias to it or whatever. And like, you can just, it just creates like a, little virtual environment uh for all the right python versions and stuff so it's but it doesn't use docker or anything i don't know that it just like uses some weird python virtualization which is different but

So you're saying there's a generalized one. So you've been playing with it. You've been playing with it? Is that what you said? No, I haven't. I want to. Actually, I guess this kind of reminds me of what's the one people use for NPM again? NPX, maybe? NVM. Oh, NVM. Yeah, that's right. That's the one. NVM for managing NPM installs. NPX means to execute tailwind. That's the only time I ever use it.

NPX. Actually, I use it with Tauri, too. OK. Which, you know, it's like, yeah, every other month, I decide I'm going to start a Tauri project and then give up on it in two weeks. So that's what I do. Nice. No, not really. I've been doing a ton of dev outside of work stuff recently, but been trying to figure out how to pull utilities and where we might want to place a house and learning SketchUp.

That's pretty cool. So you're going to do framing and stuff yourself too? Or how much are you planning on doing yourself versus contracting? Unclear so far. We're in the evaluating phase. Our current plan is to... pull utilities to the property and build a camper pad with some gravel and stuff and we might bury a water line and or

uh what probably will bury water and power lines and put up another pedestal like close to where the house will be um because like there's going to be like a you know green power box or something and then we'll have a pedestal there, but there's also going to be like probably another one. I have the advantage of there being a bulldozer and an excavator, which are my grandfather's on that property already.

So I'm going to be able to hop in the excavator and bury a water line to wherever I want once the well's in type of thing. Well, tell Grandpa that we're going to need that because I've already claimed that little corner in the top. foresty area and that map you showed me. Oh, for the NeoVim shack. Yeah, so as long as we get a water line out there for me, I'm happy. That's the thing about NeoVim, you don't need water.

You harvest the water out of the air, I think, right? You get a little dehumidifier and then you just... NeoVim is like the desert of editors. That's what I'm saying. Oh, is that...

I don't know. I actually had no plan for this metaphor, but I just... I was just curious to see where you're going to go with it. No, that's all I got. Speaking of NeoVim... It doesn't make sense, though. VS Code or PHP Storm comes with all of the... utilities and neovim doesn't yeah you're full of water and bloated with beer too yeah yeah neovim you've you've been hiking across the desert for years and finally figured out how to survive

That's actually really funny. It's funny to me. Don't know how to exit the desert. Speaking of Neovim, folks, I don't know if we said this on the last episode. I'm sorry, but I want to make it known to the world that I, a VS Code user, have influenced Jesse's NeoVim workflow, I'm pretty sure since the last episode.

Probably. You went on your big NeoVim kick for a while. I still haven't finished configuring it. I understand why everyone likes it because you can procrastinate anything by just being like, I'm going to work on my NeoVim config. I went on a whole warpath. It was like, okay, how can I make NeoVim kind of feel VS Code-ish in the best ways? Which NeoVim people are going to cringe at this, but like...

Like VS Code has certain things that are really well done, like the diff editor. Like the diff editor when you have a merge conflict is amazing in VS Code. And like just the control P or command P. Picker is amazing. And that's where I changed the workflow of the man, folks. Oh, yeah. Okay? He's now using what I call the super picker. Tell them. Tell the people. What I did. Okay. I'm so proud. So, yeah. The super picker is, I don't know, if you're a Vim user or a NeoVim user.

A plugin like Telescope is really popular. It's probably one of the more popular ones where you set up fuzzy finders for anything and everything. So one for your files, one for your Git files, one for your project history, one for switching between buffers or open windows or fuzzy selecting commands or fuzzy selecting anything really.

It's super extendable and customizable. So I have three different file pickers. I have my fast one, which was git files. Anything checked into git for the project that I'm in. So ignoring vendor and node modules, basically.

And your env file, because it's a non-committed. Yeah, yeah. Well, obviously anything else, but those are the two main speed boosts. Yeah, so anytime I need to open up a Laravel vendor file... or my env file or something like that um i would open up my all files picker and the reason why you don't use that all the time is because it's a little bit slower so if you want to be just super fast and not be like waiting for it to be like like

parsing the files. On a small project, it's not an issue, but in a big project, it is. I'm smiling because NeoVim is supposed to be fast, but NodeModules has a word to say.

gotcha node modules has a word to say about it yeah and then um i mean you can configure all this stuff you can ignore directors you don't care about and all that and then i had the project history which was you know when i opened neovim if i want to go to a file that i've been working in a lot then i'll open up the project history picker and so

The plugin that Austin found was basically, it combines your Git files and your all files and your history, puts them all into one, and puts the most recent files up at the top, and I don't know. So, okay, translation. for all you translation for all you vs coders out there when we hit command or control p it brings up the picker

And it's sorted by recently accessed files, but it's also all the files in your project. And then based on your, you might have a config to include vendor files. By default, I don't think that it does. translation is all these Neo Vimers have like four different control P's and they're insane. Okay. And what I mean by that is.

When I was trying to use Vim, I was like, wait, now I have to do this, and I can't find this one file in this other picker, so I figured I... became hell-bent on figuring out how to replicate the vs code picker in telescope and neovim and we did it and it's way better because now you just have one picker unless you need

Like your buffer picker or like those are different things, right? Like just your uncommitted files or something like, you know, whatever. Telescope, whatever you have in your NeoVim config, you're still allowed to have all those other pickers, folks. We just combine kind of two or three ish into one and it's great. It's great. I don't know. The thing is, is like, if you want to get real technical about it, um,

when you combine all the results into one, there just needs to be a little bit of extra sauce for the relevancy. The sorting, yes, exactly. That's what makes it good. Yeah, it's like it has to put enough weight on your recently... opened items so that you don't end up with the file that you want is the second result you want to be able to hit enter on the first result otherwise it's slowing you down kind of thing yep so

But I mean, as long as you find something that kind of does. And part of the plugin that Austin was showing me is it loads all the slower loading files. It loads them like async after the fact. I'm glad you remember how this works because I totally forgot the actual sauce. I just was so proud that we finally got it. And I was like, this was a, that was a blocker for me in NeoVim. I was like, I can't believe this.

Yeah. Okay, well, thanks for letting me have my proud moment. That's it. I'm still waiting for you to bring your glowy cursor into Neopim. Dude, stop. You realize I spent... Okay, this is stupid, but you know, it was coming into fall, snow was flying here late fall, and I was trying to procrastinate doing anything useful, so I was like, how can I... have a glowing gradient cursor which is the harder thing no like let's it's more than that it's it's the gradient cursor but then there's like a

this beautiful glow behind it onto your code. Well, like the rest of the world, it seems, using cursor now. I tried WindSurf and deleted it after a little bit. terrible like um i tried zed and it imported all pretty much all of my vs code or cursor settings that one's good i haven't tried it in a while but i would try it again but right as after right right as i configured neovim what here's something that happened

This is all based on the glowy cursor. It's funny you should bring that up. Because in VS Code or its forks, you can style your editor with CSS like... anything you want with css but you had to use it like an extension for this right and it wasn't like fully supported that broke or something yeah so what happened was the vs code like core They switch from CommonJS to ECMAScript modules, I think is the correct terminology for all you React people out there.

No, but like, yeah, so they switched and the extension broke because like the way that it was using some shady JavaScript to like override some prototypes or however it was working. uh to to make it so that you could css style your editor broke but then um so i had tried cursor like kind of in the very very beginning which was a couple years ago now

You know, 37 months into ARI, taking our jobs or whatever we are. I was... Wait, do you still have a job? Yeah, pretty cool. Yeah. I just sprung now. Aren't we all just prompting? Yeah. No. Well, yeah, you opened Cursor and I opened Neovim just so that it looks like we're coding. I'm a professional.

pull request reviewer now i was already going pro but now i'm pro yeah so no what really what happened was The VS Code update broke all of my CSS modifications, including the glowing cursor, which just uses box shadow to have a colored glow around my cursor. I care about those sort of silly aesthetics more than I ever should, than anyone ever should. And what I found out was that cursor, the extension still worked.

So I switched to Cursor, which is the same thing, basically. I was like, oh, sweet. And then we've had this, since then, in the past year, we've kind of had this second wave of AI getting a little better, in particular Cursor's UI. was really front running for quite a while again in terms of the AI and the agent workflow and stuff. And so then I've stayed because now I have my glowing cursor.

And I have a full bleed window and all the CSS stuff that I want in my config file. And it's all, yeah. But I went through so many terminal emulators trying to get that to work in the terminal. I thought some of them could do it. And some of them I got close. I got really close. I think you could probably get close with Hyper, which was by... I tried that one. There was some sort of problem with it.

what was what was the company called zite or something like it's now versell yeah yeah yeah no that one that one was one of the better ones there was something there was like a locker for me in that terminal and i think it was how they emulated the command keys and stuff. And I tried a bunch of stuff and it was just never right. It wasn't right. Because, of course, I want to hit command P in Vim because that's...

I guess that's the kind of person I am. Yeah, see, I used Hyper for a little while. This was going back, I don't know, 2016, 2017 or something. What are you using now? I can't remember now. Is it what I think it is? Ghosty? Yeah. Is it good? I haven't tried that one. Oh, it's great. Ghosty's good. Hyper, though, was like Electron, and you could literally open up the Chromium Inspector, and everything was styled with CSS, but it kind of came at a cost of Electron.

resource usage and like even just if i found even if you had like a command that was spewing out data like pretty fast like uh you were tailing logs or whatever um It would sometimes get a little choppy. No, it couldn't keep up. Yeah, and it's like, you know, there's something to be said for these like GPU accelerated terminal emulators that are like really, like maybe not like Mac OS, like Swift native, but like native feeling as in.

they're implemented with some low-level smarts and using the GPU to render and stuff. You'd think you wouldn't need that kind of stuff, but a terminal really benefits from being snappy as hell. You don't want lagging. There should be no lag there. Yeah, for sure. Ghost is good, though. I'm really... Really liking it. It's funny. Before Ghosty, I don't know if you've used any of these, but I went from iTerm to Alacrity to Kitty to...

Oh, Hyper was in there too. I turned to Hyper to Alacrity to Kitty to Wes term to Ghosty now. I think that was. Yeah. So I tried Kitty, Wes term and Hyper to try. Well, I was only after aesthetics here. with my NeoVim setup, which is on my GitHub .files, folks. I think it's actually pretty slick what I've got going. I don't even remember what I based it upon now. Oh, who's the guy who makes all the little...

little kind of modules. You'll know his name. Modules for which? For any of them. The mini guy. Oh, mini. What's his name? I can't pronounce it.

oh but ask it a lot of novich or something yeah whatever that guy yeah yeah that guy i did like the mini thing and kind of did it modularly and like that i tried like three or four different me and vim from scratch i documented all this someday i should like finish that but um pretty cool i learned a ton about vim and i'm way better at vim in cursor now so there's that

Well, yeah, I'll be honest. Cursor looks really good. I'm also really impressed with what I'm seeing with Zed lately. I should... I should give a little editor battle, but yeah, you know, I should just do that because it's not like I'm doing anything important anyway in my extracurricular work. I'm like, well.

I'm going to try to design some stuff with SketchUp, and then I'm going to go to bed. I don't know if you can do Chloe, Cursor, and Zed, though. I don't know. That's the important question. Yeah. Yeah, you know, I can make a concession for that if the rest of the editor's good. You heard it here first. Yeah. Yeah, so yeah, Laracon's coming up. We're going to try a new thing. We're going to try shorter. What do we call it? Like shorter format episodes? I don't know. More frequent episodes.

Consistency's hard. That's what we're getting at, folks. Consistency's hard. I don't know if you feel that way, but I certainly do. Do you have a timer on this? We've been talking about it for a while. I know. Oh, well. Oh, wait, my audio. Actually, my audio says 32 minutes. Oh, that's great. Okay, mine says an hour and 33 minutes.

oh really i think that i must have the tempo set to something really funny in logic which i'm recording in yeah so like it must yeah i don't know it says we're almost on beat 1000 beat 1,000 right now. Well, it's counting bars and beats, but I also have it counting time, kind of half and half. And it says we're at an hour and 33 minutes now. So whatever we need, I need to set it to.

60 beats per minute, I believe, is what time is functioning on. Well, hey, between the pre-show and this one. Perfect episode length. That's Laracon wrap-up, and now we do another one. Okay, wait. I'd like to make it way longer. Give it to me. Actually, not way longer. I just want to say, folks, if you're going to Laracon, if you're not, we love you either way. But if you're going to Laracon and you see Jesse or I walking around...

You can tell us because of the way that we are. For me, you can see my long hair, which will probably be erratically placed around my head and neck area. And I'll probably be loud. Yeah, I'll probably be loud talking to someone. And then Jesse, you can tell him by his dadly look, beard, and you will hear inklings of knee of him as you get closer. What does that sound like? I don't know. Yeah, I don't... NeoVim. I don't know. You just say the word NeoVim a lot.

I'm not accusing you, by the way. I'm just speculating here. I don't know. All I was going to say, yeah, just want to say, folks. Come give us a hug. Yeah, come give us a hug at Lyricon. We'd love to see you. I can't wait to see all of the friends that we probably talked about in the last episode, all the ones that we didn't. Yeah, that's it. Sweet. Well, that's coming up soon. That's on this coming Monday.

We'll both be there. Yeah. Well, that's it. Sweet. Thanks for coming. See ya. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm still recording.