Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of JavaScript Jabber. This week on our panel, we have Steve Edwards.
Covering for Aja Yo Yo Yo. Coming at you from someone cloudy and not too cool Portland.
Yeah, I don't know if we directly addressed that. I think Aj said it, but he's kind of backed out of the podcast for the foreseeable future. So I think most of his work is in not in JavaScript these days, and so he didn't feel like it was a tremendously good fit. But anyway, I'm Charles max Wood from Top End Devs. It feels like forever since I've been able to get on and record one of these, so I'm kind of excited to see how it goes.
Yeah, we have Eric Hanschett.
Eric, you've been on the show before and you co hosted views on View I think way back when, so you shouldn't be a stranger to people.
But yeah, welcome back.
Hey, thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure. And yeah view some of you that look that up look that one up back in the in the archives if he can. It was a fun podcast.
Yeah, all of the archives are still out there. We're not producing any new episodes I don't have any plans to bring it back, but if, yeah, if the right opportunity comes up, I guess we could.
It's just yeah anyway, So, yeah, so what's new.
Eric, Yeah, Well, thanks for having me on again. It's good to be back here. I thought it'd be fun. I've emailed Stephen about like different things that are happening, but one is a view COOMF. I thought it'd be fun to talk about VIEWCOMF for those who don't know, that's a there's a couple of different view comps. There's one in the United States, there's one in Europe. But I went to the one in the United States a
few weeks ago. Actually it's May in May, so I guess that's a month ago, and it was in Tampa, USA. So I thought we could chat about that at first.
Yeah.
Now, or all of them put on by the same organization or do they just share a name or how does that work?
I don't know exactly. I believe they are the same organization that does the one in Europe and the one in the United States. It's even you. I believe it's part of his companies that he's working on and he helps put it on I don't think he actually owns the company, but he's a part of it.
Of course, Well that makes sense given his role with you. So yeah, so how was VI KMF.
Yeah yeah, it was awesome. So there's this I know, probably on this podcast and many others, the conversation tends to always move over to React and of course React is still the biggest front and framework out there. However, the View community is still going strong. It's very vibrant.
We had.
It was a three day event, the first day being a workshop, the second two days being talks, and of course Avenue was there and we had this nice, quaint conference center that we were at to give all the talks. But it was really just cool to see all the kind of the big names in the View community come together and talk, and I think like just being there, just see the hallway track itself was worth it. Of course the talks were interesting. I gave a lightning talk.
It was on AI. That's another theme that I saw a lot during the conference is just a lot. I think every probably front end conference in the last two years have had at least one talk or two on AI, and I think this was no exception. So it was really interesting to hear everybody's opinions about how they're using AI. I'm sure you guys had many podcasts recently about that too, or at least touched on that. So it was really cool, like being in person and to hear everybody talk about it.
But like some really nice, really cool people that I got to meet again was Alex Rivier. He did a really interesting talk on props and View three. Daniel Rowe, you've had him on this this podcast before, right, Yeah, we had. I know I talked to him a bunch of times on Views on.
Views on View.
I don't remember for sure if we've had him on JavaScript Jabber.
He did a KNUCKS talk like the state of building Advanced Apps next some more of a NUCKS type talk. And every time, every time you hear about NUCKS, I just think they're just doing so much and it's just so cool that's happening in that community. So you don't know. That's like a meta framework for review. It's sort of the equivalent from React to next js's view to nuxs JS.
They have different approaches though, like in course in the React ecosystem, with next they've really leaned into the server components. While the Knucks side is still by and large client components, but you do have server side rendering, you do have API routes, but it's not like server components by default.
So and hearing him talk about that was interesting. And I also love of every talk that I go to at one of these conferences where they have audience participation, and this is no different like giving during the talk, we could do emojis. So have you ever been to a talk they've done that, Like they're like, hey, if you open up, they'll have a QR code and you'll scan it on your phone during the talk, and then you can press a button and send emoji and it'll show up on the screen.
I've seen things like that. I don't know if I've seen that in particular.
Although I will say someone thought they were funny, so I'm sure they like created a script. So at one point there was like hundreds of emojis on the screen coming down of while he was talking. It was still enough. I think he rate limited enough so it wasn't to the point where you couldn't see the slides completely, but it was like quite a bit. It was like hundreds, and I don't think the audience was pressing like the one hundred times.
That's really funny.
There's always got to be somebody pushing the limits.
I actually was once at a conference where some one did a similar thing, but someone totally like messed up their presentation by sending them like thousands, thousands of things on screen.
Well, that's programmers, I did well.
I did the lightning talk on creating different specs with AI tooling. So one thing that we've seen is there's this vibe coding way of developers are creating apps where you just kind of use cursor, windsurf to go in and create an app, and then you're get help copilot and then you're kind of asking it things and it's
updating it. Well, I think there's better ways to do that, and I called this like a spec development way of doing it, where you're asking the AI to help you create a design document first and then having it create an implementation guide from that design document. So I listed out ways you can use Amazon qcli, which is a tool that we have that's basically free. It's free with something called builder ID. You don't need a credit card
or anything. You just sign up with an email address and then you can start using it on the command line, and you can ask it like, hey, help me go through and at a landing page or ID as I'm using a can you do this? And it can do this, So it can do all sorts of things. And so I walk through this whole presentation of me using it, using this way of creating this design document to help create more complicated apps where vibe coding doesn't quite reach.
Yeah, that makes sense. I have to admit that I've been doing quite a bit of that. I mean for work. Yeah, probably eighty seventy eighty percent of the code is stuff that I'm just writing. But I do find that, you know, I'll ask the AI to help me do something and it'll just, you know, off it goes, and you know, it gets it sixty seventy percent correct, and then I can fix the rest and then I put in whatever it is that I need to do and then do it again.
So I don't know if that's vibe coding, but yeah.
It is. It's kind of an overused term, I think nowadays, but I'd consider that more vibe coding. I guess, if you want, in the purest sense, it's where you literally just prompt over and over again, and you never touch the code at all, and you're just kind of changing the prompts over and over again to get what you want. And I think as us developers, that does get a
little frustrating. Frustrating, So I'm always like going into the code fixing things, trying to make it better, or doing in line edits instead of doing it that other way.
Yeah, yeah, I mean it makes sense.
And I have friends that have just been straight up vibe coding because they don't really understand how the code works. But what I've been seeing a lot where I'm at is that, Yeah, a lot of people are using it as kind of that tool where it's I don't know where to start, or this should be something that the code can you know, it can ingest enough and then you know, give me a faster solution that I can
come up with on my own. And then yeah, with my understanding and skill set, I can I can vastly increase the timeframe.
Under which it does whatever it does.
And so I'm seeing a lot of developers using it that way to kind of speed up their process.
Yeah, I think that's exactly the right way to do it. Yeah, I will say too, good. I was going to say in general too, it was super fun conference meeting everyone, and I think that's half the part of going to these conferences. But I kind of want to say, like
a little PSA just for everyone listening that it. I know it's hard because just the economy and some people can go places cannot, but try try to go to some of these events because I definitely seen I'm a senior developer advocate at AWS, so I'm part of my job is to go to conferences to teach people to meet people, right, But I've seen like the conference overall, the tendance and a lot of these in person conferences kind of they're just not great, like a lot view
comforted well, but it's still like in general, it's down still from COVID and just a lot of people have not are not going to these events as much. They're not going to meet ups as much, and that's a really shame. So hopefully we can just get more people and start growing again. And some of these conferences that it does have a lot of I think has a lot of benefits.
Yeah, I agree, you know, for my job at Price Picks, I'm mostly doing Ruby on rails, but a lot of the lot of the conferences out there, Yeah, they're attendance is low. I will say that the exception in the Rails World is Rails World, and that's put on by the Rails Foundation. And the thing is is seeing I think there are a couple of things that are going on, and one of them is the economy. Rails World sells out in like twenty minutes there now, and you know,
and it's a decent sized conference. I think that the difference, though, is is that people know what they're going to get, and they know they're going to get what they want. And so some of these conferences that have been around for a while, folks are showing up because they're invested in something like view for Viewcom, but it doesn't have that promise of being the thing that they want or giving and delivering.
What they think they need.
And I think some of it is sort of the momentum you know that killed the conference momentum having COVID. But I think also there's a lot going on with people just you know, it's like, Okay, well if I go and take two or three days off to attend, is it going to be worth it? And I think that's on the conference to kind of give that to people and say, hey, we are innovating and here's what
you're going to get. And then also just understanding that, Yeah, the hallway track, at least in my opinion, is worth half the ticket price, and I don't think people realize that. So I echo your call to attend the in person conferences. If you can't, then yeah, participate online if you can.
And then the meetups.
They just started the meetup here again for a couple of the technology areas that I care about, and they're not super well attended, but they're still very very helpful because you'll have somebody else show up and talk through something you haven't heard, and so it's like, oh, that looks really useful and I can use that at work and you know. Anyway, Yeah, there's a lot to like about that, So I agree people ought to really be looking at it.
Yeah.
Also, in my two cents here, I've been when I was living in the djupil world, I went to Drouple Con every year, and like Eric mentioned, the Hallway track was was was probably just as important, if not more important, in the sessions because the sessions are always recorded and
you can come back and watch them later. But one of the things they would do with Drouple cons was they would have a coder lounge where you know, everybody could just sit there and get together and work on a project, and you would see stuff come from those sessions, you know, that would become modules or you know, different
functionality later. I can remember one particular year, I was dealing with a sort of a thorny issue with what's called the migration, which was, you know, where you'd set up a new site and then migrate all your data from your old site to a new site and fitted into the new structure. Couldn't figure it out, and I happened to go into the coder lounge and here's a guy that maintains the module that I'm working with, and sat down ten minutes and he helped me figure it out,
and I was good to go from there. You know, other communications, you know, connections I made with people at conferences that I was able to leverage later, or you know. The big thing is, you know, in an online world, actually meeting somebody in real life that you only know
online is always, you know, fantastic to do. And unfortunately I haven't been able to get to a view comp yet, but I just changed jobs and the organization I'm at now not only do we run our own conferences in the networking space, but we also encouraged going to conferences and making presentations and stuff like that. So my boss and I were already talking about going to view comp next year. So I'm really really looking forward to be able to do that. But the in person stuff is
really worthwhile. You get to you get more than you know if you do it right. You got to get out and meet people. Can't just sit around and go to sessions and then go back to your hotel room. You know, you got to make an effort to get out and meet people. But it's always worth it.
Yeah, I should clarify if you haven't picked up on it by now. The hallway track is basically the socializing that happens outside of the sessions, right, So a lot of times you'll I can't I can't describe how many times I've been to conferences and yeah, I've just been standing right outside of one of the lecture halls and just chatting with people. And I've done this for podcasting conferences and for programming conferences, and the connections are priceless.
I mean people just you know, you'll find people that have solved the problem you're trying to solve most of the time. Oh yeah, and so just having those conversations, oh well what are you doing. Oh well, well there's this, this, and this, or we ran into that last year and we solved it this way. And then the other thing that you run into is just yeah, beyond the connections, it's yeah, people giving you those those technical ideas and
so yeah. So it may be somebody that you interface with a bunch of times after the conference, Okay, well how did you get past this part of this problem? And then other times it's yeah, it's just you know, it's hey, I hadn't even thought of that, and you know, it takes you down a path that solves a bunch of problems for you or your company, and anyway, it's it's really terrific.
So yeah, I remember I was at droupol Con one time and there's this one thorny issue I've been trying to address, a particular side I wanted to create and was real data management heavy. And this is back before a lot of the tools that we have now that make things so much easier before Laravell, before Inertia, before any of the jobascript frameworks where you pretty much just has CMSs. And I met a guy named Travis Tidwell, a Drubel who was talking, who was talking about a
drouple module. But he ended up forming a company called form Io, which is really sweet form rendering platform that uses JavaScript.
And I was going to say, the name sounded familiar, that's where okay.
Yeah, yeah, And we've had Travis on a couple of times. And that was in the days of Angular one, before view was really out. I think React was fairly new, Node was fairly new, and his platform used the They were Mongo Express, Node and Angular, so the mean stack and it's expanded since then to be fairly JavaScript you know, agnostic in terms of framework. Anyway, I said, hey, yeah, this is my site, you know, I want to do this. Would form Io.
Work for this?
He goes, yeah, it'd be perfect, you could do this and this. So I ended up starting to play with it, and I pestered him so much that he asked me to actually come to some work for them, and I actually did a bunch of work for a form io in the in Angular one and then moved on to view after that. But all that from you know, a two minute conversation at a conference, yep.
So you definitely have to be deliberate to make sure that you get those conversations, because it is easy. And I've been to conferences by myself where I've like gone to the talks, went to my hotel room, maybe did the after party the last day, and that's it. But yeah, you have definitely be deliberate to like talk to the
people during between the talks. Actually, in fact, a couple of people I've hung out with, they they'll like skip a talk, Like if they find talk that they don't think is interesting, they'll skip it, and then they'll just hang out and wander around and talk to people that are in the hallways or all day. Usually lots of places will have sponsors too.
Yeah, they'll some kind well usually, I mean the presentations are recorded anyway, so you can watch it at any time, you know, so unless you specifically want to interact with the presenter or somebody in there, you can always watch those later and take advantage of the the other stuff.
I know, one thing that Druplicon used to do that I loved was so much fun was they did a trivia night, and so people would get together in teams and they'd have somebody up on the dais, you know, answering the questions and stuff, than you'd record answers and they'd score. So much fun just because it was so much geek humor. Unless you weren't in the community, you might not get half of the jokes because they're so geeky.
And one of the favorite things I can still remember from when we did at the World War II Museum in New Orleans one year was the team names alone. Just looking at the roster of the team names, the names that people came up cracked me up so bad. But that was so much fun and one of the highlights of the conference every year for sure.
Yeah, Eric, I'm curious. Were there big announcements at View kof new things in View or in the community.
It's more like incremental. It feels like they're incrementally going from View three came out a couple of years ago. They're being very cautious about the updates. Things are kind of taking longer. We heard a little bit more about vat right in the conference because Evenue is basically juggling both projects View and Vet.
And isn't isn't involved in what was vzero?
Void zero void zero void zero?
Yes, yeah, exactly, So that was another He talked a little bit about Void zero and the new company, and then the Vapor Mode, which is this new compilation strategy for View. He's talked about it before in previous conferences, but it was just more detail, more information about it. It's funny a lot of times, it's more a lot of these updates are like, we're just making things faster, which is good, and our compilots are becoming smarter, and
now we have this new built system behind. So that was all very very interesting to see that, you know, the community still moving forward his and I think he
did have some q and as. I'm not sure if it was this one or the last one I had, but he always gets asked like, how are you juggling the work between VAT and View and are you like the soul bottlenecked, and he's every year he says that he's been given more and more the responsibility, especially a View to the community and to these high level View core team members that help run the project, so that way he can step back and do other things. And I think he talked a little bit about that as well.
Yeah, I've heard some talk about, you know, on the Deja View podcast and other places about how there's a whole like for VT, there's a whole team, you know, it's not just him, there's a there's a bat Core team, and I've heard talked from people on there. So you know, there's definitely greater distribution of work, you know, so you don't have the you know, if Evan gets hit by a truck, the propaboial truck, you know, one day, then
the work would still continue on. And there's people that are that are versed in what's going on.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, And I think they're with this rolldown and this his new company. They're really planning to open source a lot of what they're working on to make this compiler faster. I don't know all the details of it. It sounds really interesting though.
Well, I think the idea is as I understood it because I talked about it. I think a lot of weak er previous episodes as picks. But if the idea is to create you know, sort of one I don't know if you want to say one stock to rule them all, but at least one tool chain that's somewhat integrated, you know, because with Vita as it is, he was incorporating roll up and so now they're creating you know, rolled down, which is your own version of roll up except written and go correctly rust.
Well yeah, maybe one of those, yeah.
Yeah, one of the the languages ju jure in that area. But anyway, that's basically what void zero is.
And yeah, I'm just looking at his latest tweet three times faster builds, better chunks, splitting controls of vance chunks, better correcting strictness, model execution, or order guarantee.
So I guess the other the question that I have to kind of bring us back around of yukof a little bit is because I haven't really been following along with what's going on in the View community.
So what what does it look like at this point?
You know, what if I was like familiar with react or, I had been following along with it a few years ago, what's changed?
What's different?
Yeah, it's been pretty stable for a while. The community. For a while, there was this big gap between View two and View three, and a lot of companies were in View two and they were migrating to View three and then View two went had an end of life on it. There is a couple. I think there's one company. There is one company out there that will give you additional support if you pay them if you're still in View two. However, that transition, I think the end of
life was last year. I'd have to look at the Zach dates. So the community is definitely on the View three world now and nuxt seems to be just gaining more and more steam as the preferred way to start your view applications because it has kind of everything out of the box that you need with and it has some really nice features like file based routing and the SSR and staticsite generation and all those fun terms that we've talked about a lot, so you can really start
your app there. If I was starting a new view app today, I would start with Next and they are there is a Next. I believe Next four is coming out soon, and you can with the latest version nuxts. You can do like in a compatibility mode with Next four, but it's not going to be It is a breaking change, but it's not anything to like what View two and View three was, where that was a really major breaking change.
So you can even start playing around with with next four and some of the features they're they're looking at. They speaking of Daniel Rowe, he just put out a roadmap to V four earlier this month. So you can even try out next four alpha if you want to try that out. And so, and you're probably asking, well, what's part of next four like new directory structure, improved
data fetching, consistent component names, enhanced head management. You talked a little bit about that during the talks, but still a way.
So yeah, I'm have to reach out to Daniel and ge him to come on.
Yeah, we definitely should. I'll reach out to him. Yeah. Well cool, anything else that we should know about.
With u KMF No, No, I think we covered a lot there.
Yeah.
I just I really want to encourage people. If you can go to an in person conference, definitely do it. Eric, Are you going to be at any conferences later this year?
Yeah?
Yeah, I've been.
I'm going to be at Cascadia JS.
Oh is that the way of Seattle? Are they doing a Seattle Yeah? I went to that one one time. Okay. It was a cool little conference.
Yeah, yeah, you're not far from there relatively.
I guess it's about four hours through or four hours.
Yeah, September seventeenth through twentieth in Seattle, so check it out. I will be doing a talk there. I'm also going to UH India, albeit meeting some international people. There's a go to server List conference in August eighth, So yeah, I'm doing a little international travel. I usually try to get most of the UH travel in the United States, but I have been dipping my toe into some international travel.
I've been talking to some people who if you once you do a lot of talks, you start meeting a lot of people who do a lot of talks, and it's actually a lot of the same people do do it, especially in like the JavaScript or typescript world, right, and they there's so much international love out there. There's so many international conferences. It really pretty much dwarfs the United States,
to be honest. So we especially in the front end world, in the JavaScript world, there's just way more conferences in general, just in the outside the US. So I'm trying those out. We'll see how this India. I've never been to India before. I'm excited to try it, to try it and see how it goes. Which city you're going to, I'm gonna be in New Delhi and then I'm gonna be in BENGALOREA Bengalore Bengalore. Yeah, I never know the pronunciation exactly. Indian listeners can correct me off.
You get some real authentic Indian food too, I'd love to try out some of that curry man.
Yeah, your your assessment of the international speaking circuit. I mean, in the past, I've been to some of those conferences, not as a speaker, but just because I got invited because of this podcast. And yeah, it seems like a lot of the same people that were speaking at those they'd be like, yeah, and I'm also speaking these other handful of conferences. And from what we've heard from Dan Shapir, since he speaks at a lot of them, Yeah, it seems like he interacts with a lot of those folks.
And you know, after he sees him a handful of times, a lot of times, he'll invite him on this show as well. I'm going to be at a conference. I'm going to be at commit your Code conference in September. It's the twenty sixth and twenty seventh, and I'm speaking and yeah, Eric was saying.
A lot of people are talking about AI.
Yeah, I'm going to be showing you how to build an AI agent with JavaScript, so just you know, just be aware. I'm kind of still kind of dreaming of is you're right, And I don't know if you said this before the call or on the call, but yeah, you know, it's basically you have a model and a prompt and so I'm kind of dreaming of putting some of that stuff together and then I kind of want to figure out how to put an MCP server behind it and just really kind of knock it out of
the park. But we'll see how far I can get in. I think it's a half hour talk and then I'm probably going to be speaking a lot more of the Ruby conferences. But yeah, it's fun stuff to delve into, and it's kind of a fun opportunity to then go and see what other people are doing with it.
So I love commit your Code. I was just talking to Danny Danny, our friend Danny Thompson about it, yep, and who helps put it on. I definitely I'm trying to get in on that one too, So we'll see, we'll see I might be there, but if not, we'll definitely. Everybody check out Chuck's talk yeah, so cool conference, like this is his second year doing it, I believe.
Yeah, if you make it out, we'll have to go get Indian food.
Yeah yeah where it's in Dallas. Yeah yeah yeah check that commit your code dot com.
Yeah, good deal.
I brought that up specifically because I'm going to be speaking JavaScript or type script.
It's probably going to be typeescript, but anyway.
So so, yeah, so you were also you mentioned a couple of times a QCLI.
Do you want to explain what that is because now yeah, there is.
Yeah, yeah, well so I want to speak of view COOMF. I was just there and during my talk I mentioned Amazon q c l I and I asked, like, has anybody heard of it? And like, not many people have heard of it, so hopefully some people, yeah, so hopefully some people do. So we have Amazon q is our
our AI assistant to help developers create code. So we have let me say, our official tagline on if you look it up, it says the most capable generative AI power Assist for software development is exactly the way we put it. So we we're It's an AI system extension that you can download for visual studio code. You can try it out there you can actually down yep. You install it just through the visual Studio, the extension marketplace, yep,
you can use it. Or we just came out with the cli version of it, so it's kind of called Amazon q Developer Cli. And this one you can install with brew. You can sell for your Mac, Windows, Windows subsystem for Linux and install it and it runs on the command line and you have this kind of chat interface with it, so you can open up your project.
You can run q chat on your command line and you can be like, hey, take at add x y z to my app, create add this feature, add a social log in, and it will just run all the code for you. Uses claud for in the background as your model, so it helps does everything for you. It's
really slick. It runs commands on your command line, so you can be like run LS or curl this website, grab this information, change it over to markdown, and include it into the context of the app of Amazon Qcli, and then it will use that to help bring more context. Has MCP support, so MCP's big everybody's talking about that has support for that, so you put all your favorite MCP servers in and once again it's free to use with builder ID, which you don't need a credit card
or anything. You just need an email address and then you can try it today. So I'd highly recommend everybody check it out. Just we're just trying to get the word out on it and like, hey, this is a really awesome tool that you can use to help build your apps with. Yeah, you don't, and some people get confused. They think that it's only if you're using AWS or Amazon products, and it has nothing to do with that.
Don't have to use AWS or anything. It's just a gentic AI assistant that you can use for your coding.
I want to clarify one term.
I just I know it's kind of a hot topic these days in the AI market, but I never want to assume that people know what things are. So MCP is Model, Model Context Protocol, and that's what it stands for. And essentially what it is is it's how do I put it, It's kind of a way of annotating services that your AI can use, and so it basically tells
the AI. I know how to set a calendar in Google Calendar, I know how to set up an event, or I know how to modify an event, or I know how to do this or I know how to do that, And so your model can query the MCP server figure out what it's capable of doing, and then when you ask it for things or ask it to do things, then it'll say I can use this tool to look things up or to to.
Do extra things.
So and then it's not just to prompt like GPT or GROCK or you know or claude, whereas just I tell you a thing and you give me text back, but it actually enables it to, like I said, go look up more information or to interact with the service in one way or another. And so it sounds I love the idea of hooking MCP into some of these tools because then you can make it do all kinds of stuff.
Yeah, Like one thing, I did this video the other day. If you look on our ABS Developers channel, I did the top three MCP servers and you see a funny video that I did. And one thing I really found fun with one of the MCP servers I was working
with was the Brave Search MCP server. So you know, models get out of date and they don't always have the latest and greatest, but then you can saw this MCP server that uses brave Search, and you can have it search for content and then it can add it in to the context window of the of Amazon to Cli, so that way it can more intelligently answer your questions. So you could have it go in and grab the latest information to tail end, like one thing I've seen
a lot just playing around. I love tailwind. Any tailwind fans, oh yeah, yep, But just setting up tailmend for the first time takes you know, it's really easy. It takes
a few minutes. So I like to have my LLLM do it, But my LLLM always gets confused and installs tailwind CSS three instead of tailwin CSS four, so I have to I could use something like an MCP server that goes use the Brave search that searches the web for tailwind for instead of tail and three, and then download instructions and be able to install it for me. So just little things like that are helpful.
Yeah, just to back into that a little bit too. So there's the idea of latent space in your model, and the latent space is here's all the things that we trained it on. And then the way that it works is it predicts what the next word or token should be in its response. So it can only really do that off of the data that it was trained on. And so Eric's talking about, hey, if it got trained on data that's a year old or two years old, then it doesn't know a lot or anything about tailwind four.
And so that's where he's saying, Yeah, I use an MCP server that tells the AI here's how you go look stuff up, right, And so then it goes and it says, oh, well, I don't know anything about TAILWINDOCE, I'm gonna go look it up, and then it pulls it back in. It puts it in the context window, which says, for the rest of the prompts that come in this series, I'm going to remember the stuff in here,
and so then it can do the right thing. And so yeah, it's super super handy to be able to do that kind of thing.
Yeah, that's a little bit of the talk head of yukof gone back to that second. Because you do have a limited amount of space that the LM has to do things. So that's called the context window, yep. So that way it doesn't remember everything forever, so it only has a certin amount of space it can remember things. So every time you talk to a large language model, you want to make sure it has the right information.
You want to kind of preempt preempt the whatever AI assistant tool you're using to make sure it has all the information it needs. So that way it's not relying completely on the model. Although the models you're getting so good. I was at the cloud Code conference in San Francisco last month and with the Cloud four announcement that came out and did they're moving fast? Like yeah, And it's always like every week there's another model, large language model
that's on top, and then someone leapfrogs them. And it's really interesting to see how fast this industry is moving but still contacts Windows. Things you still want to have, like an MCP server is really nice to to help solve some of these problems.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
But the other thing is is that if you have an MCP server that, for example, will interact with GitHub or you know, with your email service or with your reporting service or things like that, then then you can use it to do some of your work or to
get you better information or things like that. And so even though it's not you know, I guess it personalizes it more, is what I'm saying, because it can go and get things that directly affect what you're concerned about instead of just assuming generically you gave me this prompt and here's my answer, and so it really does open up all kinds of possibilities for you.
In fact, in that video I just had the third one I really liked was they get hub MCP server so you can push up prs, you can do all sorts of you can look through your own projects and grab information then add that into what it any questions that you ask.
Yep, yeah, there's so much cool stuff you can do with that. So how do people get the qcli or installed? You said, you can just get it as an extension on vs code, which I assume works with cursor as well, since that's its basis.
What's the base? What? What do you say?
Cursor is based on bs code, so I'm assuming you can get it there too if you want.
Yeah, well, i'd probably recommend, and I'll maybe the show notes is we have a GitHub repository. It's open source, so we'll have Amazon q Developer Cli. I think maybe try that one out first, and just you can either search for Amazon que developers Cli through githubs look at the show notes here, and then right on the GitHub page is instructions on how to install it for mac os, Linux, Windows, or you can even remote, like if you're cessation into a box and you want to use it, you can install it.
Oh nice.
So I'm looking Eric, I'm just looking at the docs page and then also looking at the report. Now, I'm a fan of the WARP terminal, and I don't see that listed in either places. Am I understand correctly that you wouldn't be able to use it with Warp?
Now you should be able to use it with Warp. Yeah, okay, that should work?
Yeah, any I mean WARP is just a it's a CLI but you know, sort of run your z shell or your Bash or whatever. And so as long as it's installed and you have a command line okay, access from the command line, you should be able to run it, right, Okay, I mean Warp has its own AI capabilities.
And so.
Yeah you might.
I don't know those, GiB Yeah, hey, good prompt for q c L.
I right, yeah, it's got Yeah, you can just with home Bruce, I would assumently be But it's really cool.
About the time we're in there's so many neat tools out there, but it's uh, you can really kind of pick and choose what you want to try out.
Yeah, you know the way I'm feeling listening to you know, I've we've talked with people about MCP and you know, we're talking about all this stuff, and I've been in terms of the explosion of tools available. You know, we used to talk about jobscript fatigue. With all the frameworks and stuff, I'm sort of feel like I'm drowning and all the different tools and ll ms and integrations and stuff that well, that are available out there.
As far as that goes, I mean, there are a ton of tools out there that you can try. But I mean I'm getting a ton of mileage out of just copilot get hub copilot and then and that's just because you know, at work, they've already got a license for it.
They're paying a license for me.
And then you know, you can you can pick your model that you want to use, and you can pick a bunch of other stuff to integrate with it. They just approved Cursor, I think, and that's the same. It's the same kind of thing, right, you pick your model and you'd let it do it do the work and so yeah, it's it's really handy to just kind of throw stuff at it and see where it goes.
And if that's as far as you get, you're fine. Right.
It's some of these other tools do other things, and I think they're worth looking at. But if you're looking to get started, something like the qcli or get hub Copilot or Cursor or one of these other ones that just hooks into an LM that's available on the internet is a really good place to start. Yes, And I've heard a lot of good things about Claude.
So yeah, yeah, we I really like Claude works great, check it out.
Very cool.
Well, yeah, was there something else that we wanted to talk about here Amplify. Yeah, we got about ten minutes and then we got to do picks so I can make it to my meeting.
Me too.
Yeah, we certainly can talk about Amplify. I was gonna say, yeah, yeah, definitely, Amplifies is going strong. If we don't know that, it's a set of tools to help front end developers create full stack apps on AWS, and it's kind of a few different things. Just for anybody who doesn't know what this is, it's a it's a supposed saying AI library. We're talking about AIS so much. No, it's they have a UI library for it, which is a free, open source library you can download to have as like buttons
and a bunch of things to it. They also have something called connected Components, which help you connect to AWS services like your S three bucket, like as a file uploader. It has something called storage Browser, and then it has an authenticator which is a way to add in like authentication into your app. And then it has like a JavaScript and a typescript library, and then some other libraries or some other frameworks. And then there's a hosting service.
So we have a hosting service so you can this isn't funny. I was just listening to another rival podcast because I won't name them, but they were.
Talking people should know about them.
Yeah, Syntax FM with west Boss and them, And this was like a couple months ago. And they're like, I can't believe AWS doesn't have a managed hosting service, and I'm like, yeah, we do. Haven't managed hosting service. It's called AWS Amplify Hosting, so you can host your your static sites or your service side rendered sites. We support next, JS, astro View, React, Angular, all your favorite frameworks, so you
can have a managed hosting system. It's called as Amplify, and we're adding new features all the time to that. And then we have something called gen which is more of our infrastructure's code tooling. So we found that a lot of people like a lot of front end vs when they look at AWS, they're like, wow, this is like there's so much there and I got to be
an AWS expert. So we have some label levels of abstraction on top of what we call our Cloud Development Kit, which helps you create the back end for AWS, so you can create s three buckets, am to functions. You can even talk to Amazon Bedrock, which is our API for a bunch of different AI models, large language models, and then you can even drop down to our Cloud Development Kit Layer CDK layer to add other things in. So we have a bunch of different tooling for it
and we're just continuing to move forward. We're trying to get just more people to know that AWS is definitely an option for front end developers and that that it's available out there and it's pretty competitive.
Yeah.
I remember a few years ago go I can't remember who I was hearing about it from, but it seemed like it was this super nice back end as the service. It seems like there's a whole lot more to it now with the UI components and some of the other hosting options and your ability to you know, lock into some of those services that are really nice to have, like the Lambda functions and things like that. So, man, I might have to go have another look at it.
And by the way, I did reach out to Wes after I heard that podcast on just on on X and I'm like, hey, by the way, we do and He's like, yeah, he knew about it just at that one second. He I think even Scott ta Lensky mentioned it after he like didn't realize we had it. So for anyone's listening, you don't need to reach out to Wes.
We talked.
No public shaming required.
Yeah, yeah cool.
So is that something that let's say that I'm using react or View. We've talked a much about View. So how do I start putting something together for Amplify. If I'm thinking I kind of want to build a thing, I don't necessarily want to be a back end expert, and Amplify seems like it's something that will help you know, how do you start plugging stuff into it and moving fast and breaking things.
Yeah. Yeah, well we have a whole dock site. We have a whole like getting started guide on our docks dot amplify, dot aw dot AWS docks, dot amplify, dot aabs and you can just follow like the getting starting or getting started guide to look at how to use this, and you can also mix and match that you can just use the hosting by itself and not use any of the back end services that we have. So that's certainly.
We have a whole amplify console. So once you sign up for your AWS account, you just search for amplify and then you can connect up your GitHub repository or your git lab or a bunch of different version control systems and then once you connect it, every time you push it'll build your site and there you go. You can have different branches if you want to have like a testing branch and a QA branch, and so you can have more well branches multiple We have obviously domains.
You can have multiple subdomains. You can pass or protect them if you like. You can hook it into your existing see ICD pipeline you have like Jenkins or something like that. We have hooks available so you can have it build. But I would say to start off with just check out the docks dot amplified at aws and take a look at some of the guides there and then you can easily just connect it all.
Yeah, what's the URL for that.
Docs dot amplified at Okay?
Oh, I didn't know a WS was the top level domain.
Yeah, oh it's dot as is the TLD.
Yeah it is.
Yeah, that's fancy.
Yeah, you said amplify dot AWS and I was like, I was like, okay, but what's the website? That's good to know, very cool. Well, is there anything else going on with you that we want to talk about here with the last couple of minutes or should we just move into picks?
No?
Yeah, just I guess to go back, hope to see if you are at any of these conferences. We're going to be a yeah, come and say hi to us. Everybody here on the skull included. I guess I know. Steve's Steve. You said even you're gonna be a view comp next here.
Yep, that's the plan.
Yep, Steve. Do you want to start us off with our picks?
Sure? So before I get to the high point, of every episode, at least the ones that I'm on. The dad jokes I'm gonna pick a movie. And I saw this when I was on my way to Washington, d C. With my son's class the end of the last month, and it was called One Life Who came out in twenty
twenty three. It stars Anthony Hopkins, and it's a true story about a guy named Nicholas Weldon who in right before Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia in nineteen thirty nine, they had already taken over the sudett And Land and so there was a lot of orphans and children there whose parents had been taken or disappeared, and so he worked with some other friends and arranged transport of a bunch of
orphans check children to England. And what made it tricky was that England would only take them if they had a family that was willing to take them, and they had to pay fifty pounds for a fee for each child to come across to come over, and so he had to come back and use letters to the editor in the media and raised a bunch of money and was able to transport on eight different trains about six hundred orphans to England to be with families, and the
plan was that they would be able to reunite after the war, while that never happened because all their families
disappeared or were sent to the camps. And so he sort of kept sat on it and kept it quiet, and then in nineteen eighty eight, in nineteen eighties, it was nineteen eighty seven eighty eight, he still had a scrapbook of all these kids, yeah, the addresses where they'd sent and he turned them over to a historian whose husband happened to be a newspaper reporter, and they did some investigation, and long story short, they brought him on this British show called That's Life, which is sort of
a funny comedy type show, and over they introduced one of the kids that he had saved that never knew who had saved her, and then these kids started coming out of the woodwork. I was one of the ones that saved. And so the next week they had like sixty actual kids that he had saved in the nighties that never knew who had helped to get them out. And he ended up being knighted by Queen Elizabeth in the early nighties. Just it is an unreal story, fantastic story.
And the movie is really good and it actually recreates the actual TV show from Britain. If you go on YouTube and just googled Nicholas Winton, w I and to Win That's life, it's the first thing that'll come up. Really moving story and it was interesting for me because I was on my way to d C and one of the things that we saw was the Holocaust Museum when we were there, which is quite a moving experience in itself, but a really really good movie worth watching.
I've already watched it twice in the last month. So on that note, we'll move to the dad jokes of the week while I get my media set up here real quick.
So plus one on that movie, Yeah, have you seen I've been watching YouTube clips of it and like, wow, that really happened. Yeah, there's an interview they did with Nicholas Winston and there was like a sixteen minutes interview I think they do with him, and he's just one of those humble, quiet guys that you ever seen, and it's like he didn't want to brag about the scope
of what he did. But they said at the end of the movie they estimate there are six thousand people that are here as a result of what he did back in nineteen thirty nine. So, anyway, did you know this is some Star Wars trivia that Darth Vader had a daughter named Ella Elevator getting right. So teacher tells her class, all right, makeup a sentence that includes the words defense, defeat, and detail, and the student rites, when a horse jumps over defense, defeat go first, and then detail.
And then one time I was on a train and this woman looked at me, this a really cute woman, and said, every time you smile, I feel like inviting you to my place. I said, are you single? She said, no, I'm a dentist. So it's the dad jokes of the week.
All right, I'm going to jump in here with my picks. I always do a board game pick. I'm going to pick a game. It's called camel Ups. It's basically a camel race, and so what you're doing is you're betting on which camel's going to finish first, which camel is going to be the first and first at the end.
Of each round.
There are other things that you can bet on as well, but yeah, you get paid out at the end of the round depending on what you bet on. And then at the end of the game, if you were the first person to pick the camel that won, then you get money more money, and then the second place person or the second person to pick that camel it gets money. The third place person if you picked wrong, then you it costs you a dollar or whatever the currency is. It's it's kind of a fun game. As you move
the camels around. If it moves on to the same space as another camel, it actually goes on top of the camel. And then if a camel underneath, if a camel moves and there camel's on top of it, they'll move and so it moves itself and everything on top of it, and so it's fun. It I think we played it a half hour. And yeah, this is not a new game by any means. Board game Geek has has it at a weight of one point five so
really friendly, easy to pick up game. Way, the age range it recommends is eight plus and it can play up two to eight players and so anyway, super fun game. So I'm gonna pick that one. And yeah, we we just for my buddy's birthday. We all got together, me and three other couples and we just played board games. Then one of the couples left and then we played other board games we could play with less people.
So anyway, you're a wild and crazy guy. Check. It was a lot of fun. So so camel up.
And then I've been listening to the Sort of Truth Books by Terry Goodkind. I am in the middle of the last one, the fifteenth book, and so, and it's they kind of come in pairs and trilogies and stuff, and so you know, you can kind of pick it up in the middle if you pick the right book, and you know, just listen to the two or three that are in that kind of mini section of the series. But they're really, really good. I really have enjoyed those.
I started reading them in high school and then I went on a mission for the church and hadn't really looked at him in years, and it turned out that he'd written like eight more of them. So anyway, so I'm gonna pick the Sort of Truth Books by Terry Goodkind. Yeah, I think that's all I've got right now. So, Eric, do you have some picks for us?
I was gonna say real quick, with a name like that, you certainly can't be a me and guy, can't you?
Okay, yeah, sure, I have a couple. I love board games.
Those are fun.
I've been I guess I'll just throw out here. My wife gave me the NASA Artemis Space Launch System lego. If you haven't seen this, it's like a ginormous Lego spaceship that you put in that it since like docking bay that you kind of like.
It's at would love that. It's like three six hundred and one pieces o cost.
Goes aren't cheap. It's and it's it's twenty eight inches, is the height through seventy centimeters, it's it's it's a big guy, but it's super fun putting in together. So I've been spending my evenings before Red like putting together this Lego monstrosity. And then while I've been doing that, I've been watching I guess my other pick would be the fifteenth Doctor. So I'm a Doctor Who fan, So
the latest one. His name is Shooty Gatwa, and it's just a fun It's on Disney Plus, so you don't even need to be really uh, you don't need to know the six fifty year history of Doctor Who to like jump in. They kind of set it up so anybody could just start with this these new seasons that are on Disney Plus. So it's been fun getting back into Doctor here after a little bit of a break.
Yeah, how does that? How do they handle that? I've never watched a but how do they handle the changing of all the different actors who played Doctor? Who is there like plotlines or is it just sort of seamless and you just sort of assume it's the same basic person.
Yeah, they regenerate like at the end of their run. Usually it's usually a few seasons, and then they regenerate, and then they usually don't reveal who the new doctor is until like the next season, So you'll see them kind of blowing up in a bunch of lights, and then all of a sudden, the next season will come out and they'll have a new doctor and it's they've had all sorts of people in the last few years, right, that's really interesting fun.
So the regeneration is part of the plot line then.
Yeah, yeah, so yeah, even all the way from like the first Doctor they he kind of falls over different effects back then in the sixties, but then they regenerated into the next Doctor.
Yeah, originally they weren't like the the first doctor, the actor I can't remember why he if he died or if there was some other reason, but they had to replace him, and so they invent the regeneration thing to bring in a new actor, and then they've just used
it for fifty plus years. I remember going to the fiftieth anniversary thing in the theater where they had stuff and they like, I mean, nowadays they could just deep fake it, but they had like brought in clips from all the other doctors and so you had all the doctor who's Anyway, it very very it's a fun series for sure. I haven't watched I think the last doctor I watched was Peter Capaldi or or whatever his name is something like that. Yep, So yeah, I would like
to get back into it. I kind of want to get my kids into it.
So yeah, it's fun.
Yeah, and they do all kinds of shenanigans.
One of the doctors tried to finagle it so that he could regenerate back into his current form because he liked it. You know, he's still regenerated into somebody else.
But anyway, it's a very science fiction heavy, so if you don't like science fiction, may not be your right cup of tea. But it has a lot of science fiction and drown in this latest season.
Yeah, and the history on this it's very I mean, it's fun humor, but there's plenty of kind of British humor because it's a British TV show.
So yeah, a lot of campiness too, Yeah.
Very much.
Some of the campingis like in the eighties, it's like, I don't I don't enjoy this. But in basically from kind of the more modern ones I'm trying to remember the first one, the guy before David Tennant, Chris Eggleston. From then on, I mean there, yeah, some of the effects it's like it's like, okay, you know, you didn't budget enough for that, but they're you know, the campiness is not so overboard that you're sitting there going, okay,
this is stupid. It's it's really been a good show since then in my opinion.
Yeah, if you want to go and see like really bad science really good science fiction, but really bad special effects and campiness, then go back and watch the classic WHO series, which yeah, it's like from the sixties all the way to like early eighties, and then you'll see some really campy stuff. There's some really good episodes, but a lot of things that you'll have to get used to if you wanted to that. But you can start over.
They restarted this, rebooted the series or whatever in twenty two thousand and eight ten something, right, that's where I would start.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, if you get way into it, you can go watch them. Just be ware.
The other thing is is that on the Classic Doctor Who they used to recycle the tapes and so they don't have all of the old episodes, and so if you're watching them in order what they have, sometimes their gaps.
Yeah, the first two seasons for sure. Yeah, there's missing episodes. Those are you can get it like on britt Box if you want to watch that. It's two thousand and five. It is when the new the New Modern Who started.
Yeah, but they're super fun.
The modern ones are super fun and they each have their own flavor of the Doctor which is also fun.
So all right, good deal.
Well, before we wrap up, Eric, if people want to get in touch with you or find you on the Internet, where they find you.
Yeah, you can find me at I'm on x at Eric sch I'm on Blue Sky. If you're a Blue Sky fan at Eric ch or Eric cant On on Blue Sky and yeah, probably those are the best places. Also, if you look at the AWOS Developers channel, you can find some videos for me on there. And that's on YouTube and Instagram and LinkedIn.
Yeah, when he says Eric, Eric is spelled er I K yes you r I k yep r ik.
Yeah. If you can't find it, k you'll find.
Are you still doing much on program with Eric?
Oh?
Yeah, I mean I have my YouTube channel. It's a program with Eric on YouTube. I have stopped posting there as much, but occasionally it still posts there too. Yeah, so check out my YouTube channel, have many many videos on there.
All right, you're doing well once a week for a long time if I remember, Yeah, yeah I used to.
All Right, well, I'm gonna wrap us up. Thanks for coming, Eric, It's good to see you again.
Yeah, good to see you.
Right till next time. Pope's max out.
Okay,