Okay. Do I sound normal?
It's giving. I was
very traumatized after the last situation.
Bet.
I also really like that your background looks so much like mine now. It looks like we really I know. Are coordinated. I I almost wanna I think I wanna move my camera further back. So, like Yeah.
Or I need
to the same sizes.
Yeah. I I don't think I can actually move mine forward very easily. So if you could move yours back, that'd be great.
I don't know how much I can move it back, but I'll I'll try.
Yeah. If our heads were the same size, that would be perfect.
I think your framing is maybe better because sometimes, like, depending where I'm like, if I go like that, see how my head my head gets cut off. Yeah. And sometimes I should throw
my chair.
So I think Mhmm. Fingers is more right. Hope all the audio only people really enjoyed that segment.
The randomness of when I click the record button, and we're in the middle of talking about our AV setup every time. Yeah. So on this podcast, a couple of things. Well, it might be a little short. I may have a cutoff before we get to an hour. But 2, we we gotta talk a little bit logistics for next week. We are going to Dallas, and we're gonna double dip and use this podcast time as time to talk through a couple things.
So we did we we, we figured some stuff out yesterday. Well, I have a little story about that. So you saw me yesterday message being like, can I do a call with someone? I'm like confused on a few things. So prime calls me, a video call, and he is standing outside and he looks kind of sweaty And it's it's kind of choppy, like the like the video quality initially.
So I couldn't fully understand what he was saying. But I was like, oh, what are you doing outside? He goes, I'm digging a hole. I'm like but he he wasn't like, I'm digging a hole. And here's why. He just said, I'm digging a hole, period.
Yeah. But
to ask, why are you digging a hole? He goes and this is a part I really cut up. So I, like, did understand what he was saying for a bit. And then I, like, it was a big awkward pause. But I think what he said was my dog hasn't been running around or eating for a month, but I think it's time. Oh,
no. Gonna put the dog down, and he already dug a hole for it?
He was digging a hole, and he he was like, okay. Now is the perfect time to call Dax and talk about this.
Between digging the hole and putting his dog down and putting the dog in the hole, I thought, good good opportunity.
It's like, it's so hard to get ahold of him in general. Yeah. And that's, like, the moment he chooses to be like,
oh, yeah.
I'm free.
I love pride messages, like, on Slack. It's the best. Like, everyone on there, they're always dictated. And it's like, he has no idea what's going on next week, and I just love it. It's the best.
My favorite form of this is when literally at the last second, he'll ask a question being like, oh, man.
Would he put this on the tags?
Oh, yeah. Yeah.
No. No. No. No.
No. Just like he's saying, he's like, kinda, like, vaguely worried that nothing has been figured out.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. But it's, like, way too late at this point.
Yeah. He's
like, did we book hotels? And it's, like, we're we're it's, like, tomorrow.
Well, you you said tomorrow. Like, you're flying tomorrow to Dallas? No.
No. No. I'm going to Maine for Alan's wedding, and I'm looking from there.
Right. And you're flying from
Maine to Dallas. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
No. I it just freaked me out for a second that I had the dates wrong or something. That's the first thing I wanna talk about is I'm flying in Sunday. I think everyone is flying in Sunday.
Yeah. I get there at 5:40 something. Prime also gets there at 5 something.
Okay. So we're gonna have dinner tomorrow night. And then Monday is the basketball game. That's all it's Monday?
Okay. So here's the schedule for Monday. Well, this podcast doesn't go out after. Right?
It's not
gonna spoil anything?
I mean, it'll go out Monday morning. What do you mean?
I guess it's it's fine if we spoil a little bit.
Yeah. Just spoil. It's
fine. Our
listeners get
a little sneak peek. The schedule is we need to be at the basketball venue around 1 because the thing starts at 2 ish. So we go there, like, set up figures figure things out. So if we leave around 1, we'll get there at the right time. So that only leaves, like, from the morning, like, around 8 ish, 8, 9 ish to, to 1 for us to do other stuff.
Mhmm.
So I think the plan right now is on Sunday, we'll get dinner, and we'll talk through some additional ideas we can do for the basketball stream. Yep. So TJ is gonna build just the thing that David, designed, the overlay.
Oh, David designed an overlay.
Yeah. He just posted it today. Oh. Yeah. So bare minimum, TJ is gonna build that in Laravel with LiveWire and all that stuff. Okay. So at minimum, we'll at least arrive there already having that. So it's not like we'll have nothing. And then we'll brainstorm some other ideas we can do on top of that to see if we can get some interactivity
Okay.
In the overlay going. And and they'll they'll have, like, a couple hours in the morning to build that. Maybe we'll work on some of it Sunday night. Me and you are not going to be part of that stream in the morning because we need to go pick up something. Okay. I'm not going to fully spoil it. We need to go pick up something. Uh-huh.
Okay.
I realize it's better to, like, half spoil it because then now people are going to really, really want to know if they're listening. I'm like, I'm
gonna have
to know what we picked up. Yeah. We got to go pick that up. We need to bring it back. I don't know if we'll have time to do to film with the thing we're picking up because that's the purpose of this thing.
We're going to film with it, in the morning because we might need to go to the basketball game before we have time to do that. Yeah. But the game ends at 5, and we have daylight until 8 PM. So if we leave, like, exactly at 5, we'll have 3 hours to do a bunch of stuff. And I think that's enough for for the few things that that we wanna do. And then we'll go return it, the thing.
The thing.
If you can't guess what it is when I say we're to pick it up and return it, like
We're gonna drive it. Sorry. Yeah. We'll just we'll leave it there. Okay. And
then and then Tuesday yeah. And then we're we're pretty much done after that. Like, Tuesday, Wednesday is just, hanging out.
So that's what I was gonna say. Is, like, Tuesday when is the conference? When is Laracon?
It's on it's it's Tuesday morning. Tuesday morning. It's about Tuesday.
Just Tuesday.
And Wednesday.
Oh, and Wednesday. And then everyone's flying out Thursday.
Yeah. Flying out Thursday morning.
Okay. I miss I I hate missing out on hangout time, but I'm probably gonna fly back Tuesday.
Because I mean, I think I think realistically, I'm gonna be working Tuesday Tuesday and Wednesday. During the conference, and I'll hang out in the evening.
Yeah. Like, what I mean, there's the serving coffee. Is there any other responsibility that terminal has at the conference? Just hanging out?
Yeah. I think just hang because the serving coffee part is handled by the catering company. So we just need to drop off
Oh, right.
The, handful of coffee. We should be there, of course. But Yeah. There's not, like, active work like there was last time.
Cool. Well, I was stressing out because it's like we stat news, the NFL season is, like, our Super Bowl just when it starts. It's like a big deal. We got all these releases going out with that. And that's just not this week, but next week. I mean, it's or not the week we're there, but the next week.
Mhmm.
1st week of September.
And I
was all stressed just like I'm gonna miss all of next week, and I have stuff to get done. And then I realized, like, I don't probably have to be there the whole time. Yeah. If a basketball game is Monday, that's the main thing I knew. I've been playing some basketball and then getting back in basketball shape. Not really. I'm in terrible shape. The basketball is different. Like, running up and down a court, oh, my word. The heart is pounding. It's my shoulder hurts from shooting. I'm really
feeling like we should switch it to half court
Yeah. Maybe.
Or before that. Because the my excuse is gonna be that it's gonna be way easier for whoever's filming. Because it's kinda ridiculous to ask the person to run Yeah.
To run around and chase us. Yeah. So I I also wanna talk about the streaming setup because this is a big stressor of mine. I've seen messages floating around. So Wes and Scott are gonna, like, commentate, which is fantastic.
Yeah.
Are we gonna be doing the streaming from our laptop in the arena? And we're gonna use something
We have a hard line.
Yeah. So we're gonna use something like ping to get their camera feeds. Is that the idea?
Yep.
Okay. So I need do I need to be doing all that? Because I feel like they were wanting to do a test. No.
You don't you have to worry about that. And the only thing that from you is the camera.
Yeah. I'm gonna bring the camera and a gimbal. And we can use that for recording, for the stream, for anything we need a camera for. Right?
And the and all, like, the wireless stuff.
Yeah. And so Big Inbot can just carry it around. It can be connected to our laptop and send the OBS stream. Yeah. Man, there's so much if we had a ton of time, there's so much cool stuff we could do with the OBS and, like, the scoreboard. Like, we could there's just so much
We we are we are gonna make the scoreboard live.
Oh, we are?
Nice. Yeah. So that that's what TJ's
How's it how's it gonna be fixed?
It it looks like it literally looks like an NBA overlay. It's awesome.
Oh, I gotta see this. I'm pulling up Slack right now. How, oh, look at this. How are we gonna get the score?
Whoever, whoever's buying the laptop, we have one of, TJ's friends is coming. He's gonna be working the OBS setup, and he can just control the
Oh, nice. Okay. Cool. This is awesome. These overlays look amazing.
If we had, like, a week of just all all those focusing on on this, we could have done something even even cooler. Oh, yeah. I hope we'll I'm sure we could figure out some small things on Sunday and Monday. But, yeah, with the ads going on the bottom, like
I know. It's so good. David's just incredible. That reminds me too. I gotta make this page for the website.
Can AI do it?
Can AI do it? Probably. I mean, it's basically just like other pages we have, so I can just change the text. It's fine. It's fine. Okay. Well, is that all the logistics for next week that we need to talk about?
I I think so. So I'm I'm mainly I think the biggest variable is, are we gonna be able to get good footage of the thing we're picking up?
Yeah. The thing.
Yeah. Are we
gonna have to get the wheels and the doors?
We can do.
And, it's just fun teasing this stuff out. I wonder if anyone that listen to our podcast actually cares about any of this. Like, I wonder if how many of our podcast listeners, like, know about Terminal and well, they know about Terminal because we talk about it incessantly, but, like, actually have bought the coffee, actually follow us on Twitter. I have no idea. I mean, I kinda know who listens, but, like, there's a big chunk of them I don't know.
Yeah. It's it's really wild. I've had I keep having this experience this week where and this has been happening the whole time I've been working at SST, but especially the past 2 weeks because we have these releases going. People talk to me about really obscure specific things. And I'm like, woah. You, like, went and really looked at it to go find that. Right? So I, so we open source a terminal code base, but I I opened the source that technically, like, days before I announced it.
And people found out already.
Getting questions in the SST discord about, like, about stuff in there. And I was like, wow. It's crazy that you were just what was, like, the trigger that made you go find it? Were you just, like, casually checking?
I actually you made a video too. Right? I gotta pull this up. I haven't watched the video yet.
Yeah. I I don't think it's gonna be that interesting for you. It's just like a 45 minute overlay of, like, every older
45 minutes? Yeah. It was
a serious video.
Serious? Oh, how we so caught from the turtle. Found it.
Yeah. But the other I mean, the video also. Right? So it's just like a 45 minute it's not like one of our usual fun videos. It's like a
Yeah. It's more of an
experience tutorial video. But I posted it and, like, an hour later, people were asking me, like, very specific questions from very specific parts of the video. And it's just it's just wild that people do it puts up out there. People do, like, engage with it. It's even crazy to see just a handful of people do that.
Yeah. There's is there do I see a read me update and a pull request? That's nice.
That was Frank.
Thanks. Thanks, everybody. Oh, no.
No. No. We we also no. We also had a typo fix from someone, of course. Yeah. Yeah.
If you're listening and you write code, which you probably do if you're listening to this, hit up the terminal repo. Make some changes. Fix stuff for us. That'd be cool. Open source is great.
I also was getting so many messages with people being, like, you left the credentials in there. And every time they would say that, I would panic because we have some credentials that are, like, not changeable. Like, we have because we do this SSH thing, like, we have Yeah. Permanent credentials that cannot be rotated.
Yeah. What what were they seeing? Like, what I saw your message.
So I would freak out and would go check at what they were actually talking about, and it was never a real credential. It's just that the read me had information about our AWS SSO setup.
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Which I totally get because anytime you see The
account IDs.
IDs, everyone's like
Oh, yeah. People feel like that's private.
But AWS account IDs are not private for anyone that's interested in this very obscure fact. They're not private. You don't need to redact them when you send them to people. You cannot do anything malicious with an account ID.
It happens a lot when I stream where I just let them be on screen. I don't care. And people are like, just saw your you just leaked your account ID. Like, don't care. Doesn't matter. It's kind of a fun trivia fact. Doesn't matter.
Yeah.
So what's going on with you? Let's, let's actually talk and not just plan.
I mean, I've been so busy. So Same. Yeah. You've you've been you've, like, disappeared. Like, I haven't used to be anywhere.
Well, I yeah. I dropped off Twitter for sure. That's the first thing to go whenever I, get really busy.
I think in general, I feel like I literally I just I just haven't heard from you.
That's what David just said. David sent me a DM and said, hey. You've been really quiet. You okay? Yeah. In what ways have I been really quiet? Like, on
this now that if I get 10 or 20% busier, that doesn't seem like that much of a difference to me, but I see how my behavior totally changes from someone externally. So I think it just seems more traumatic to us.
Yeah. I was very chatty probably in the terminal Discord before, and I've not been as chatty or chatty at all. I mostly just emote. I just what's the word? Emote.
Oh, I was forgetting those.
Yeah. I do those. I laugh at the funny things I see. Yeah.
Yeah. But, I've also been pretty busy because we finally got a c v three out. And it was just like Yeah.
I saw that.
It was 2 weeks after we planned on releasing it, of course.
So do do imports imports work now or they already did?
Yeah. We have we have them in there for a little bit.
Everything I need for stat news, I guess, is there.
Yeah. We even have a migration guide. I like I said, it's all there, but you might still run into some blockers that we just haven't foreseen. But like the stuff that applies to everyone is there. Like I said, migration is still is still pretty tricky, but, okay.
Here's another thing. So yeah, we've been working on ion for 6 months and yeah, it's been out and people have been using it. But in my head, it's always, like, software is slow. Like, you people need to, like, spend years before they actually start to use something. Yeah. I get I've had a few experiences this week. Someone had an issue, so I said, hey. Can you send me your all of your SD config? Like, all the all the code Yeah. All the all your files for SSD.
They send me a ZIP. I open it. Sixty two files. I'm just like, how How do people build this big, like, app already?
All their, like, their infra files?
Just just resources files, not their application code at all.
Wow. 62?
Yep. And and we have someone with thousands of resources, and there's, like, they're hitting, like, a performance issue.
Wow. I mean, I thought I had a pretty big project. I thought we used a lot of stuff, but not like that. Nothing like that, actually.
It it's it's really crazy. And because I'm always, like, oh, people are really conservative with new stuff and, like, it hasn't been super stable and and everything, but it's somehow people power through that to, like, get to the this size. So, yeah, I just keep having these experiences this week where I'm like this is, like, way it was way outside of my expectations of what I what I thought people were doing, which is it was really good. Like, it's great seeing that. So we've just been just really, on top of every single, like, GitHub issue, all the messages in our Discord.
So just been reacting to that. It's kind of nice though because it shifts from a lot of undefined abstract work and thinking to like a bulleted list of fix this, fix this, fix this.
Mhmm.
It's done. Wake up next day, fix this, fix this, fix this. And you look back after 2 weeks, and now it's suddenly really polished. So Yeah. It's a good nice face to be in. I love
it. I love it as a user of SSTv3 that, everyone's using it and making it better now. Yeah. I mean, like, helping you guys make it better because there was something like my very first versions. There were definitely some rough edges. I'm just realizing on this podcast, we've gone from SST 1 to 2 and now to 3.
Wow. And that begs
the question, what is what's what's the plan for SST v 4? When are we rewriting again? Let's go.
It's funny because Jay sent this screenshot of all her blog posts for the previous versions, and they're almost exactly a year apart.
And every
single time we release it, we're just like, I can't think of anything we can ever do. Definitely a year later, there's, like, a giant release. But I I will say this time around, even though I said this before, we are, like, out of fundamental ideas. Like, there were all these things that we wanted to do that we just couldn't in v 2. Even when we released it, we knew that it doesn't support x, y, and z.
Yeah. Now it really feels like we can do everything. And if this doesn't grow a lot bigger, it just means the fundamental idea is wrong. Like, I don't think it's the execution. I don't think it's any of that. So I'm glad to finally be able to to be at a phase where it's clear that if it's working, it's working. If it's not working, it means, like, there's not, like, any mystery around why it's not working.
Yeah.
But like I said, even already, the adoption and growth has been much better than anything we've done before. So it feels right.
I I love it. Man, it's my favorite way to build stuff. I could shill it all day long. Maybe we should do that sometime. Maybe I should just spin all our podcast talking through how much I love SSC v 3.
Oh, yeah. That that's what I've been doing.
Yeah. That's what you've been doing. I'm I'm working on a mobile app. I, I'm not a mobile developer.
Is that the big release for the NFL season, the mobile app?
We're trying to get the the mobile app out. We we've had an iOS app for years. We've never had an Android app. But the iOS app has been I mean, it's been out there, and it's just not the same as our website. It's just a very different thing.
Mhmm.
And literally every time we tweet, like, some cool new thing we did, anytime we tweet, like, product stuff, it's like, we need an app. We don't care. We want an app. Give us an app, bro. Like, everybody just wants a native app, and I I don't relate to that. Like, I I guess, like, maybe because I'm a web developer, I just want the web to be enough. It's like, we have a website. It's great. It looks good on mobile. Choose website.
People don't care. They want an app. And so, like, normally normally people
It's because people don't use their computer.
I guess.
A lot of normal people just do not use a computer.
That's true. They just use phones now. They don't have to get on a computer if they're not doing knowledge work, I guess.
Yeah.
I don't know. Yeah. I guess, like, the what what is so this is a good topic. What is the fundamental difference between native apps and a good web app? Like, why does it just feel worse in a web browser? I know it does, but I can't articulate why.
I think it's entirely around the touch and the scrolling. That's that's my feeling. So if you like if you build a good app, like, again, like, take Linear. Linear is a good app. If you use it on mobile web, there's, like, probably nothing better than they can do really at that point. They're just limited by the way it feels.
That that's what I wanna know. What is it limited by? Like, what are the laws of physics? If we go first principles here. Why why can't a browser have as responsive of, scroll and touch as the native app? And I was joking about the first principles that was I was maiming. I'm not that guy. Please don't be funny. Sorry. Yeah. Sometimes I am that guy sometimes, so I have to, like, clarify when I'm joking. Yeah. But
then if you joke too much and you become that guy again, and you can then start joking again on top of
the joke. It's so hard.
There's so many layers.
It's like Inception.
Yeah. So I think what I think about is there are people that work on high performance web stuff that drop down to Canvas. And initially, it's like, why the hell would Canvas be any faster? Right? It's like you're still Mhmm.
Rendering rectangles and, like, doing all the same stuff your browser does. And your browser is doing it natively, so why is dropping down to canvas at all, faster? Like, that, like, just never made sense to me, but you do get more performant UIs if you do that. I think it's an it must be entirely around the browser being a 1000% backwards compatible with all the old layout systems and all the old styling stuff and, like, just the decades of of things. And I'm assuming that puts a ceiling on on, on performance, which is why when you drop down to Canvas, you, like, are not implementing the whole history of things.
You're just implementing exactly what, the type of stuff or model that your your current application is doing. So I'm assuming that native apps probably also have a history and have, like, similar issues, but I think it's a little different because you can control versions of the OS. Some apps don't work on older versions. Like, they they, like, actually remove things. So I think it's I think it's purely that.
I think it's a difference between an infinitely backwards compatible maximum accessibility and maximum whatever versus, like, a more controlled thing. I think that's it's just that you're always gonna have a gap there.
Yeah. So I guess, like, if you implemented your so I've got, like, a React Native app. It's actually Expo. Mhmm. And it's a, like, whatever. It's got normal native stuff in it. It's got some web views. But if I, like, somehow implemented the stat muse website in a Canvas, let's just assume I went through that pain, do you think it would feel as good as a native app or no?
I think it could. Because, like Really? People build games in Canvas.
And, like, in a browser, it feels good?
Yeah. Like, 60 frames is like in
this. Okay.
Way more complex than, to do something.
Built, like, a a normal, like, scroll view, like, experience?
You should talk to Ken. I'm pretty
sure Ken Oh, he's done stuff.
Yeah. I think a lot of their stuff is canvas driven because I think they deal with, they they just deal with a classic, like, shit ton of data in, like, in a table type of thing. Yeah. And that, like, very quickly hits the limits of traditional browser DOM stuff.
Yeah. Yeah. The famous example is Figma. Right? Like, they're doing everything in Figma. That's like is that Canvas? Or is that is WebGL the same thing? Okay.
Yeah. It's it's a mix of
Or Wazom
or something? Canvas, WebGL. They're all kinda related. Okay.
So if you could just build, like, normal website functionality using those APIs, then you wouldn't need a native app, maybe? I guess, like Yeah.
And and this is Flutter. Right? This is what Flutter is.
Oh, what? I'm sorry. What is Flutter? I thought Flutter was just Google's React Native.
Yeah. But I think the web version of it renders to a canvas.
Really?
Yeah. Interesting. I think the performance is better. Like, it it could just be worse given what they're
I want somebody yeah. Somebody send me, like, an example of a web like, a mobile web experience that feels like a native app. I feel I'm sure somebody's done this. Maybe I could just Google it, but it'd be better if you just send us an email at really great mobile web example at tomorrow dotfm.
I like just bit. It is funny.
Yeah. Because I'm typing
with the early emails.
Yeah. Just aliases, email aliases. You You know what? I don't know if I set up an email.
Yeah. People are setting something. It's it's just black hole ing.
That's funny. Well, we'll see. I'm not gonna look. Let's just we'll see if we get any emails. Who knows?
You should try the Flutter thing. I do wonder how it is. I think the other problem is web. Once you go to canvas, your operating system has no idea what's being shown on screen. So a bunch of native things probably like don't work. Like
don't work anymore.
You have to reimplement copy paste in like a manual way. You probably have to any accessibility stuff, like, hitting tab to, like, go to the next element. All that all that. So I see why people really only use it for things, like, that are really not document oriented at all.
Yeah. Yeah. I'm probably not gonna do this. So I've mostly got the app built in Expo. And that's gonna stay that way.
Hate it so much that you're, like, wondering about this?
I didn't hate it. Okay. So mobile web development is interesting. In some ways, I like it. In other ways, I just miss the web stuff. Expo, I will say, feels pretty similar to modern web development. I don't know if you ever played with Expo.
Yeah. Yeah. Expo is great.
Yeah. Yeah. So it's great. I think, like, get very confused about what's actually happening. Like, there's, like, a JavaScript bundle, and it's doing some stuff.
Is it using real native stuff? I don't know. I just kinda build with the normal controls that Expo provides. But most of the app, honestly, is just web views. It's just coordinating a bunch of different web views because we don't wanna build every single page on the site, all the different, like, scoreboards and just whatever standings and all the different visuals we have. We don't wanna build them all in, like, Swift or whatever. It's just like because then when we have new features,
we have to rebuild it with the
build in there too. Yeah. Yeah. It's just as a small team, it's kind of untenable. So we just we use the web view. And maybe that's, like, a golden rule you don't break, like, don't use web views. I'm sure there's mobile developers who are, like, screaming at me right now on the other side of the podcast, but I don't know. It's working for us.
Well, then, I guess, what's the what's the boundary? Like, what did you decide to do natively, and what's what's a web? Why why is it not all web?
Yeah. So there's a native, like, nav bar at the bottom that has different they're actually different tabs that have different web views loading to different pages. There's other things, like, we don't render the web ads in the web view, so we got some trickery going on to hide some stuff
if
it's the native app, and then we render native ads. There's, like, native ad SDKs.
Oh, I see.
So there's there's stuff like that. Why not just yeah. Like, originally, the first plan was like, well, we could just build this as a web view and, like, could it just load our site? And then, like, does that actually improve anything? Is that is that better than a mobile like, a web app?
I mean, it's at least it's in the App Store. So the people who are like, give us an app, it's like, here's an app. They just don't know that they got suckered into using our web app. But then we thought of some stuff that like, the search is more it's native, like Mhmm. Using native controls and the neighbor native keyboard and all that. Just little things like that. It's mostly web views, but there's, like, the 10% that's that's native. Just nabbing around and stuff. How do
you feel about the result? Like, it's you feel good about It
feels pretty good. Yeah. The app feels pretty good. There were things rough edges at first, that we we exposed, like, loading states feeling really slow on a native app because you're not used to that. But, we we stripped them out, and it's it's feeling a lot better now. Yeah. I don't know. I think I think the people who are asking for an app will be pleased. It is an app, in fact. And it's the current statmuse experience.
Like, if you go to www.statmuse.com, it feels like that, but just made from an app. So, yeah, I think it came out pretty good. Not quite done. Still a few remaining to dos, but we'll actually have it on Android now too, so that's nice. Although I will say, Expo does a lot to, like, make your life easier across these different platforms.
There's just all these little weird gotchas though. Like, oh, you can't do that on Android. Oh, you can't use this API. And I'm doing really basic stuff, the the kind of things that are really annoying to then work around. So as an example, form posts can't include headers on Android, but they can on iOS.
So that's the kinda weird thing that you just ship it for both, and I've got a team member that has an Android phone. And they're like, yeah. I can't ask any questions. It doesn't work. I'm like, sure it does. I don't know what you're talking about. And then I had to download the Android emulator and all that stuff, and then I learned Oh,
man.
Yeah. So there's still a little whack a mole stuff like that. This is
one of those things where I'm like, Xbox has made it a lot better, but it's still to me, it just is so painful still that I will just reorient what I'm working on to never Yeah. If you follow this logic, ultimately, I'm gonna end up starting a company that only serves an API. Because I can't think of something like Oh.
That's how you eliminate That's amazing. Yeah. Anything that, like, sucks. Yeah.
If your whole product is just an API.
Well, that's I I always said that when I was doing freelance work. Like, the great thing about doing, like, back in the, like, DevOps consulting is there's no, like, feedback. There's no UI complaints. Like, if you build full stack websites, which I have, for, like, freelance clients, the work never ends. They have opinions on literally everything.
You build, like, something for the cloud or you do, like, a security audit or you do something that's, like, the back end infra stuff, AWS stuff, there's, like, no back and forth. It's like Yeah. I did the thing. Here's the thing. Everybody's happy. Whereas, you ship some buttons on a web page, and there's gonna be opinions about every single thing.
Yeah. That's that's actually a really good point. It's, there's this tediousness of front end. And we both work on front end a lot, and we and we care about front end. But there's a good tediousness to it that just doesn't exist on back end where I think this is where the sense that people have that front end is, quote unquote, easy.
I kinda get why people feel that way because you're not really using your brain that much on front. Like, a lot of the time, you're more just exerting a high level of, like, labor and just tediousness to get through certain things. Mhmm. Whereas back end, you almost have none of that. So it feels like you're using your brain all the time.
Yeah. I much prefer back end. Have we talked about this? I really
dislike does.
I dislike front end so much. And how do we keep end up I I keep ending up doing front end work in my career. I don't know how to escape it.
I do so much front end. It's crazy.
It's it's insane, actually. For for what our skill sets are, the amount of front end work that we do is kind of crazy. Someone explain this to me. Does nobody else wanna do it? What are we just too agreeable?
You care. You just can't not care about it. You know? It's what it's like I
don't know. Maybe I wanna not care. Can I not care? All the places that I do front end development. What if I just don't wanna care anymore? Can I do just do back end? I'll talk to Statenius. Maybe I could just
But but then, like, the but the front's gonna get worse, like, in are you okay
with that? Other front end engineers. They're great. Why why do I get put on front end teams? What is it about me? Do I just do it skinny jeans? Is that what it In jeans. Like, what is it about me? People like, you should work on the front end. Never mind all your back end experience.
Maybe it's a racial thing.
I feel like Maybe.
I think, if someone looked at you and me, they would guess that you're the front end engineer. Just at first glance. Right? Oh, maybe. There's nobody there's nobody that we should actually do some kind of no. People know us too well. If we could just put our faces side by side and run like a poll, come on. Engineers that don't
know us. Can we just, like, kind of, like, use AI to modify the image so it doesn't look like us, but it's our skin color? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
It's been, like, our facial layer, everything. Yeah.
That's actually really good.
I would love to know what people say.
That's really good.
Yeah. I I do feel too, like, I'm getting a little old. I just turned 38 a couple days ago, by the way. I I just turned 38. Congrats.
I know you oh, I
know that. Yeah. I don't really talk about my birthday. Somebody told me it was a security risk.
Wait. Do you and Allan have the same birthday?
Maybe.
Oh.
It's okay. I
don't care, actually.
Would you
tell me later what your birthday is?
Okay. It ends in a no. Never mind. That would definitely give it away. But I'm 38.
It has wheels and doors?
I love it.
No one's gonna get that joke at all.
No. Not at all. I'm 38. I do feel like is there a point where you age out of being on the front end team? It's always gonna be, like, me and, like, the 18 year old building front ends. And I'm gonna be 52, and it's like, what is going on in my career? Why am I working on front end? It's, like, traditionally a junior thing to work on the front end.
You're right. It is a very has a younger younger vibe to it, for sure.
Like, you gotta say things like, it's giving and it's bet. You're gonna be on the front end team. You have to know what it means to say bet unironically. And I don't, actually. So someone get me off the front end team because this is ridiculous.
It's really funny. Yeah. Someone's gonna be upset. Yes. There are some roles that are very senior on the front end. We acknowledge that. Sure. But it's also funny.
It is funny. I was also talking to Casey, just speaking of job roles. Maybe I wanna be a manager someday again. Or I was only for, like, 10 minutes, and then I hated it, and I wanted to go back to individual contribution. Do you feel like you're always just gonna be shipping code as a job?
I I mean, I used to be I I also used to be a manager. Here's I think it's I think it's, like, a weird if I look at my own situation, I think it's not exactly, like, oh, I'm gonna grow out of it. I think it's more like, so my time that I was a 100 I was a 100% manager, 0 code at all Yeah. Which
is pretty crazy. Sounds awful and awesome all at the same time.
Yeah. Here's the thing. I didn't think it was awful. I did not think it was awful. My work was very, very, extremely well defined. Every single day, I had to meet with x number of people. Okay. Once I finished that, I had no other work to do. Literally nothing. There's no work I could have made up for myself.
That's what I'm getting at. It's like the individual contributor role is so tiresome. It's one thing to the next. There will always be a thing that
I'm trying to deliver. You can always make work for yourself. When there's when you've met with everyone, there's no work you can make.
See, that's what I was feeling like. If I was a manager, I would have a lighter load. That's what I I That's true
you do. Yes. It's an easier job. At the
end of the day, it kinda feels like a fake job to me.
Like It it it was a fake job.
Is everybody happy? Is everyone still hired here? Anyone that needs to be fired is fired? Cool. Did my job. Now I'm gonna chill.
Here's what here's what the actual job is like. I think it's it's the perfect, like, black swan type of thing, which comes up, like, every episode. Every single day, my role was extremely predictable, extremely stable, very easy, very straightforward.
Mhmm. It
gave me a lot of time to actually, I actually programmed a lot while I was a manager. It does not have work stuff. I was able to, like, work on ideas, learn new things, etcetera, because my day to day was so well defined. But every once in a while, once a month, once every 2 months, there would be a couple days of, like, intense stress and discomfort because, my team failed to ship something. And the rest of the company is is really pissed or they're upset.
And, like, you know, there's been a bunch of chaos, and people wanna know why and all of the stuff. And you're the one who has the answer for that. So there was that. No joke. There was also another situation where we were looking for a data engineer forever.
And it was, like, the big bottleneck for a company. The CTO kept getting bogged down in data engineering stuff because he was the one that built originally. And we were like, we gotta find a data engineer to replace him because, like, so much is getting backed up
for this.
We found 1. Great, great prior. Finally, we unlocked this problem. 2 weeks in, he was on a call with someone else, and there was 3 people on the call. Like, one of them might have been external.
One person left the call, and he said something, like, insanely racist in front of the other person. And then now it's like, okay. Well, it's, like, messed up if we, like, would let him go but only keep him because Yeah. This is, like, a very stressful situation for us. Another person was, like, really upset by it.
So yeah. Then now now they're back. So it it's like stupid stuff like that. You know? It's it's like it's when you run into stupid stuff in code, it almost feels like understandable the world this is how the world works. When you run to stupid stuff like that, it just like it just feels unnecessary and kinda, like, genuinely stupid. But I would say overall, it it it was better in it just like in terms of, like Workload? Being predictable and stable and everything.
Yeah. Do you ever see those Twitter threads? Not as much lately, but I feel like there was a heyday for this maybe a year or 2 ago. Threads from, like, engineering managers, very serious influencer types. They're like Yeah.
Here's how you get the most out of your team. And if you're just managing and you're not thinking about these things, blah blah blah blah blah, I think it's all fake. I think, like, how do you even measure a good engineering manager? I don't even think managers should exist, so it's hard for me to imagine, like
Nope.
The your job, you figured it out, and you're gonna teach people how to manage people so that they're happy. There's nothing a manager could do or say to me that would make me better at my job. Like, I'm either good at my job or bad at my job, and I just think that I'm probably overreacting here and getting way too aggressive. But the whole thing just smells to me. It just seems weird to, like, obsess about this engineering manager thing.
Like, it's this high calling, and you can get so much out of a team. Show me one, like, way to measure that, that your job was so important that the team did x y z. I just don't get it.
Yeah. I think I agree with you that the majority of the people posting that stuff in these mid level manager roles at big companies, like, they're just following some template of, like, this is what a manager is like, and they think that it is impactful when it's really a technically useless job. It only exists as a side effect of you do need someone to be a router and coordinate. Yeah. Beyond that, it's like it doesn't really have to exist.
But that said, the previous role I was in, I was also technically a manager, but it was I was on a middle manager. Like, I like, I built the team from the company being 0 people. This was a very different situation because it involved getting people motivated to do stuff that was, like, well beyond what they thought they could do or, like, kinda like irrational at times, like, working way harder than, they technically had to. Just having a team that's, like, really motivated, really excited, but, like, run through a wall that, like, just say, like, we need to do this and they would just kind of, like, run at it. Yeah.
I think there that there's something real there. There's, like, an actual, like, leadership dynamic there. Mhmm.
I
don't think it shows up in in middle managers at all.
So is the difference in, like, the one manager at a start up because somebody has to manage the start up, the leader of the engineering team, versus big company or middle sized company with lots of middle managers. That's what you're saying?
Yeah. Yeah. So if and if I look at my current role, I'm no longer in a leadership role, but and we're only 3 people. Even though we're only 3 people, like, Jay is technically the CEO. Yeah. And he does pay a crazy amount of attention to all these micro things that I'm not even thinking about, and it adds up a lot. And I definitely he, like, definitely, like, pulls a really, really great effort out of me. So Yeah. I mean, you play sports. Like, you you you get, like, what I'm talking about.
Like, there there is, like, an invisible thing that can happen when you have a good leader.
Mhmm.
But it's not this stupid, like, check-in with your team every 2 weeks to see how they you know, it's not it's never
that special. For your one on ones. Here's what you should cover. Yeah. I I'm realizing, like, I do this thing where I go really extreme, and I just I completely, like, discount an entire profession or role, and I say things. Not just that. Sometimes it's people, sometimes whatever. I'm sorry. I shouldn't do that. It's you're fine.
If you're a middle manager, you're a developer manager, whatever whatever they're called, I'm sure you're doing a great job. Keep doing it. Keep doing your thing. Don't listen to me. I don't know anything.
Great. So I agree with everything you said, and you just walked it all back. So
Well, no. I I feel like you were, like
on an island.
No. No. No. No. I think you were, like, being kind, and you were, like, yeah. Yeah. I agree. But then you were, like, but, actually, it is a real thing, and it matters.
But, I mean, I I didn't. I I said this other thing is something I value, and I don't value this this middle manager thing. It's I gotcha. Here's the thing. Everyone can do whatever they want, but I don't believe in glorifying everything. I'm gonna still have my opinions and values on what I what is worth glorifying and aspiring to and being like, that's really great. Yeah. It's not everything. It's it can't be everything.
What is worth glorifying? Last question, and then I gotta go.
It's a personal it's a personal question. Right?
Oh, you don't wanna answer personal questions on the podcast.
I'm saying I'm saying I can answer it. No.
I'm asking you. Yeah. I'm asking Dax. What's worth glorifying?
I I have this very you know, here's a good good way to here's a good way to figure it out. Everyone will cry at some kind of movie situation.
Yeah. There were some tears the other night. We watched Inside Out 2, and I didn't cry, but people in the family. Not that it was bad to cry. Not that it would be bad if I cried. I should have cried. I don't have a soul. Anyway, continue.
No. But there are some things that will bring I'm not saying you would, like, cry, but some things, like, bring Yeah. Ears, right, to your eyes, whatever.
Mhmm.
I think you can derive what you care about from that. So for me From that? The thing that always gets me is anytime someone's being, like, extremely honorable, like, beyond what you could, like, imagine someone doing or, like, doing some kind of crazy sacrifice, that's what I really, like, value. Like, that always brings a tear to my eye, and I think I really value that. If you derive that further, like, a lot of those things are rooted in leadership.
It's usually, like, a leader that is going above and beyond for a group of people that are leading. And that's why this flows all the way down to, like, yeah, I do really care about great leadership. I don't think middle managers are representative of that, but I do think there are people Gotcha. That are.
Okay.
That's my thought. That was
a good answer. There is one thing there's one thing that makes me cry all the time, every time it comes up, and I'm gonna save it for next podcast. Oh, look at that cliff. I love it. I really do have to go.
Okay.
I'm gonna forget, and someone's gonna have to remind me to to tell you all on the next episode. Dax, try to remember. I'll tell you guys what makes me cry.
Is it when people don't have good lighting in their shot?
No. But that's a good one too. When people don't have the bokeh on their camera just right. Anyway, I'll see you in a couple days.
Yeah. Wow.
Yeah. When people are listening to this, we'll be getting on planes to Dallas. We did that once before. We'll be
making fun of Adam. We're probably posting funny pictures of him.
Probably. Yeah.
We're probably taking to places in situations that he's very uncomfortable with. He's probably gonna be having weird interactions with people.
I just saw, by the way, Hacksaw. I don't know if you listen to the podcast, but Hacksaw just pushed a PR to the terminal repo that's actually a bug fix.
Woah.
No. It's an issue. I'm sorry. It's not a PR. It's it's an issue. I was
like, you should bring us
problems to the solutions.
He he
posted a screenshot of a chat with me where he was like, could you please do this? And I was like, yes. Sorry, LOL. And I haven't done it. So that's funny. Anyway, are you just looking at it? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's funny. Yeah. My bad. I thought it was a forest, but I'm so excited. Okay. Well, whatever. Alright. Alright.
Okay. See
you. Yep.