Hey, folks, welcome back to another episode of JavaScript Jabber. We're going to do a year in review. I just want to put that out up front before we do introduce the panel. And this week on our panel, we have a j O'Neill.
Yo yea yo, coming at you live from the Shed.
We also have Dan Shapierre.
Hello, coming to you from my birthday.
Well on birthday, Hey, Chuck, wasn't it your birthday?
Recently? I would say I did that like two days ago, but well, happy birthday. I'm a little younger than you, so.
Yeah, Actually my birthday is tomorrow. Is of the time of recording, it's on December seventeenth.
I gotcha. Yeah, mine's on the fourteenth, so like my wife, Yeah, it's a good day to have a birthday. So yeah, I am forty five. I don't know if you're going to share, but I'm forty five, so I'm too old. He's twenty seven.
Again.
We also have Steve Edwards.
Yo, yo yo. It's been a few weeks, but I'm back in the saddle.
Awesome. All right, Well, we're going to jump in do this year interview. Dan suggested it. I think it's a fun idea and we should probably have to do it every year. Dan, you kind of gave us a list. Do you want to just start at the top and do our favorite episodes or.
Yeah, that's a good place to start. I just want to say one thing ahead of that as well. It's the fact that this year both Steve and I are celebrating our fifty year on jobscript Jabber. It's it was October twenty nineteen when I got into podcasting with you, Chuck, what it was got into podcasting at all? Happened to be with.
You, right, and AJ and I have been on since the beginning and next month, in the middle of next month, it will be twelve years.
Wow, that's that's Christmas years.
That's wasn't this the first in pod cast in your empire? Chuck?
No Ruby Rogues Ruby May will be thirteen years. And when I started, I started a show called Rail's Coach and I was just interviewing people in the Ruby and rails community. This was I started the podcast before I was professionally writing code, and that was back in two thousand and eight.
Just so you know that for Jews, thirteen is like a lucky number. So like when you all have those horror movies about you know, anything having to do with thirteen. We're going, like, you know, what are they talking about?
You go to Vegas, they don't have thirteenth floor on the exactly.
I thought seven was the number of like completeness or filming.
Well, there are all sorts of numbers, you know, seven, eight, there's a whole thing like a look basically almost every number has some mystic attribute associated with it.
Well, just in biblical literature, seven is like the number of completeness or an as you see it all through that.
Yeah, But on the other hand, like you know, the breath happens on the eighth day of the baby's eighth day of you know.
So, so, Chuck, you were talking about that first podcast you did it with Rails Coach. So did that one eventually go off the rails? Was that it?
Uh, yeah, something like that. I wound up taking over a video series, Teach Me to Code, and so I rebranded it to the Teach Me to Code Podcast, and I I quit doing that one about four months before we started doing Ruey Rogues.
So anyway, Yeah, I've been thinking about this whole podcasting thing. You know, it's it's really in a lot of ways. It's our own contribution to open source because you know, we're giving it free of charge. Yes, yeah, so yeah, lots of lots of lots of lots of content and uh and learning. I know that I've learned the whole time of things from this podcast as we've started.
Yeah. I sometimes I'm kind of surprised because the episodes that are sometimes the most controversial are the ones where I learn the most because you know, I'll make a claim, I'll say you can't do that, and somebody will be like, yeah you can. Here's how I'm like, oh, okay.
You know. Also when I try to like think about, you know, our role plays whatever, call it whatever, within the podcasting universe, you know, there are podcasts that are I would say, you know, if you're looking for, you know, in a short and sweet overview of a topic, there are podcasts that are better than us. I think if you're looking for high production value or or lots of fun and celebration, there are better podcasts for that than us. When I try to think about what we excel at,
I think it's the depth of the content. You know, topics that get thirty minut it to an hour coverage on other podcasts, get one and a half to two hours worth of coverage on our podcast, sometimes even more.
Yeah. The other thing is is that a lot of times we get it's not just the depth, but it's it's really the conversationality around the topic. And so we tend to get a little bit more into, you know, challenging assumptions and talking about, you know, when when we make the trade offs that make whatever it is we're talking about worth it. So you know, as an example, you know, we've talked about different technologies and the one
that's coming to mind is typeescript. Right where we get into typescript, we get into you know, whether or not we want to do that. And what I've found is that in a lot of cases, what we expose isn't that typescript is or isn't the right way to go, but rather what the concerns are that make it really pay off or not necessarily pay off in the way
that we're talking about. And we get that on so many of these other things where it's you get to a certain point and what was nice to have becomes indispensable, and then other things that were indispensable when you were smaller become not so important anymore because you're just beyond those concerns and so it I love. I love the interplay and figuring out, Okay, how does this play into what I care about?
It's a funny thing. But you know, our last episode was with the Uncle Bob, and if you listen to the live stream rather than the edited version, literally the first words on that recording is me saying to Uncle Bob, I disagree. Yeah. That are literally the first word on the recording. Before you know, you don't even hear what I disagree with.
So well, while while we're tuoting around horn here, like you know, I listened to a lot of other Oh Me Too web development podcasts, various different sources, and I think the one thing that really makes us unique is the dad jokes.
At the end, I'm.
Gonna say, if I now, if I remember correctly, Dan, you told the story you were at a conference one time in France, France, somewhere over there on that outside of the world, and somebody asked you about the dad jokes, or somebody said something about the dad jokes, And I have to say I was really proud at that moment
in time. Then there was also the guy on Twitter who said, uh, he was responding to the JavaScript jab or Twitter account, and he said something about all the smart guys and that one funny guy, and so I was like, that's either a really backhanded compliment or I wasn't sure how to take that, but thank you David anyway for that one.
So yeah, awesome. All right, well let's let's dive in. You said I think I listed my five favorite episodes but or guests, but you said three I think in your list, Dan.
Yeah, I said three and then did five as well. Three. I have to say that this year, well every year really, but this year had some awesome content in it. Oh yeah, it was really hard for me to pick, so I tried to pick three. I ended up with effectively five, and I have another five or six runner runner runners up, and even the ones that didn't make my list are mostly really great.
So yeah, well it's funny because you know, I think we shared our lists, and some of the ones that you guys picked were on my list until I found some of the other ones, and they just barely dropped off. So I think we're kind of in the same mindset as far as like where we really shined, I think, and where our guests really shine.
So yeah, and it's also you know, people who listened to podcasts know this. You know a lot of times guests do make the rounds, so it's you know, they are introducing some new technology and new release and new version. They visit several podcasts, usually in proximity in terms of time, and so the episodes tend to cluster and it's interesting to compare. So again, where we differentiate and where I at least try to put the emphasis is trying to
go deep into the technology. And also, like you said, challenge some assumptions like it's not good enough to say this is the best approach or this is the approach that I chose. I am going to ask why, Yeah, because I think it's really important to understand, especially that given these days, almost everything has alternatives.
Yep.
So I'll start with my picks, because like you said, I suggested it, and I'll basically just go in chronological order because I can't really decide which ones are the best among these five. So the first one that I picked was the interview that we had with Rich Harris about five.
That was the last one that dropped off my list. If there was a number six for me, that was it.
So this is episode six two seven, And the reason that I loved it so much is that Rich is this rare combination of a guy that is able to see the on the one hand, see the really big picture and really like blow my mind on occasions with his perception of how things can and should be done. At the same time, he's definitely able to execute. He's more or less built Svelt, and he's also a great communicator, so when you add it all up together, he's just
this awesome guy. And we had a really deep discussion with him about Sweled five when where he took a really courageous step and more or less like turned the platform that Swelled platform on its head and added runs instead of the compiler primitives that they that he had in the language before. And it was a really interesting discussion with him to understand the Svelt philosophy on the one hand, but on the other hand, what drove him to make such a significant change in his creation.
Yeah, yeah, I think for me, and you'll see this with a lot of the ones that I picked as well, a lot of times it was something that was kind of outside of the norm, you know, the things that everybody's kind of talked about all year and challenges the way that you think about the way you solve some of your problems. And so, you know, SVELT in a lot of ways, it solves a lot of the same
problems that say, React or something else does. But the flip side of it is is that he does do a lot of things that go kind of counter to the way that React solve some of those problems. And so I just I like the thinking as far as, hey, we're adopting these patterns that everybody else is talking about, but we're also doing these other things in this way because of, as you said, Dan, the philosophy that we have about how we approach web development. And so I
just that was for me. The thing is, it was it was like, Okay, I've got these disparate ideas in my head, and he's really making me think about what I care about.
And like I said, it also takes guts to make such a significant change in the framework itself. I mean, you know, SVELT is not the leading platform, but it is a leading platform, and I'm sure that you know it's there are people who like sveelt the way that it is and making such a significant change is a big risk.
Yeah, well, you saw it kind of not work for Angular when they when they made their big change, and you know there are reasons for that, and I don't you know that we need to go into it, but yeah, I mean it does take it a certain amount of courage because you recognize that it has kind of not gone the way you want it to in other cases.
And again going up talking about the depth that we went into, this episode did run for one hour and twenty something minutes, and we really dug deep into the details of the various technical decisions that he made, what drove him to make it, the implications that they have, how they're going to change the way that people write SVELT code, why he thinks it's a better way to write Svealt code than the way that you know it was created before. SVELT is really unique in the way
that it worked. I think it was the first framework to actually introduce a compiler. Now a lot of the other frameworks are kind of following suit and adding a compiler as well, even React, and I'm not talking just about compiling jasex. It's also one of the few who've intentionally not embraced JSX, but rather have their own way of doing things with these swelt files. So it's really interesting. And like I said, it was one of my most favorite discussions this year. So this is my first one.
Should I go to my next one? Or should we have somebody else pick their first one?
Yeah? Was that your number one?
Or was that that was my number one? In chronological order? I said, I couldn't decide in my top five, like which one was the number one? Yeah?
AJ, what was your number one?
Well?
I also don't really want to claim number one because I didn't go through the list with a fine tooth comb to be able to say. But I just picked some to highlight. But I think what I'll highlight first is the two part episode with Kyle Simpson. I really just like the Joe Rogan style. I just love Okay, we're just gonna sit and we're gonna talk and we're
gonna say stuff. And that one was really unique in that, uh we we we got we got a bit raw and gritty talking about various issues and and so I thought that was really just it was just really interesting to to have that format and to hear to hear Kyle honestly talk about his uh you know, the the rise and fall of Kyle Simpson in a way, I mean that that's that's saying it a little dramatically, but you know, like like talking talking about the challenges that
he'd gone through and kind of being a tech influence still going and changes in economy.
Still going through. Yeah, yeah, I agree. Was an excellent episode, one that unfortunately I was not able to participate in, but it was great listening to it. You know, that's one of the advantages of missing an episode that I get to listen to them. And it's really interesting because,
like you said, it was a two parter. It actually came out as two parts because it was even though it was recorded in one go I believe, right, Yeah, because it ran so long, and the two parts are really kind of different from each other, Like obviously they kind of bleed into one another, but they're still kind
of different. The first one is mostly technical, you guys, talking about offline and client side first and stuff like that and technology, and the second part really talking much more personal about your careers, especially your current career situation. I guess.
Yeah, I was sad to miss that one too, because I love talking to Kyle, and.
Oh, Kyle is amazing.
Yeah, we've done some other things together as well. I mean we did a kind of a boot camp kind of thing, and you know, and it's just yeah, it's always cool to see what he's working on, because he's always got something interesting going on on.
He's also another guy who's similarly to Rich. He sees the bigger picture, he's able to delve into the details, and he's obviously very good at expressing himself.
Yeah, and he's not afraid either to speak up if he sees something that needs to change.
Yeah, sometimes to his own detriment.
Yes, yes, fair enough, but still, I mean we need those voices. If everybody just you know, kind of clams up when it's you know, oh, well, that's not going to be popular or inconvenient, we don't benefit as much as when we have those people saying, hey, wait a minute, let's think about this too.
Yeah. For those of you who didn't listen to that episode yet, first of all, again I highly recommend it. He was very forthright about the fact that he's currently effectively unemployed and that he's finding it very challenging to find jobs in the current market. I don't know if he's found a job since then, but if not, then you're listening to this episode and you have positions open you should you know, Kyle should be high on your list.
Yep, absolutely all right, Steve, did you have a top one that you wanted to bring up?
Uh, well, let's see Dan mentioned the one. I'll mention a couple here real quick. Uh, the one with Rich Harris. And I think I've mentioned this before, but one of the one of the fun things, you know, as you mentioned it's been a few years about doing this podcast is looking back over the years, is some of it, for lack of a better term, the luminaries in the web dev world that we get to talk to, you know, Rich Harris being one, Kyle Simpson, some of the devrell's
at Google and just different places. That's just hey, I got to talk to this guy and this guy and they're like, oh, you know, on my I One of the other podcast I did for a while was used on view and uh, you know, the highlight there for me living in the Larravlle world was getting to interview Taylor out Well because.
It's such an interesting guy.
Anyway, Oh man, that the the ecosystem that sprung up around everything that he started up is is just amazing, you know, and I use a lot of it on a day to day basis. So some of those things are just so fun just looking at who I get to talk to, and Rich Harris being one of them, you know, it's so well known for starting creating spelt when he was at the New York Times and then you know where he's gone on to so and he was just such a down to earth guy, real easy
to talk to. It was real fun who you know. For me, the highlight more of the ways I grade how good guests are is how much they laugh at my dad jokes. And you guys are all numb to them. And so the guests are usually laughing, you know, pretty hard at some of them.
Rich really Rich a cold one or two as I recall.
Yeah, yeah, there's yeah, he did. I think there was another one, Charles, the guy that did what's the big data table company?
Uh that? Oh good lord.
I can't think of the name right now. It's I used to hear ads for it all the time with on webrush anyway, and he jumped in and told the string of about five or six Dad jokes. I want to say his name is Oliver or something like, oh my god, I was given him a standing ambition that was awesome. But uh, yeah, that was fun with Rich.
The other one of the other favorites i'll mention, uh and these were short of along the same lines, is uh, you know when I get to bring view specific stuff into here just because I don't uh not doing views on View anymore. Is a buddy of mine that I've gotten to know, and I still He and I talk all the time. As Eric Hanshet. Oh yeah, and Eric was an initial one of the original posts on View and he actually you can say he wrote the book on View or a book on View on View two
was telling about you two, I forget the title. And he and I talk all the time. I got to meet him in person here when he was here in Portland a few months ago. But his thing now is he's at AWS doing a lot of view specific stuff with a WS and so I had him episode six. I don't remember what the date is when this one came out. It's not shown me, but we talked about all the stuff cool stuff they do with you and all the things that he's built or helped, you know, built at AWS. That makes it real.
Easy to.
Build a view app at AWS. And it's all specific to their stack, you know. It's not like you can add pieces in like your own local myskcual database like that. So you're using all their services, but all the ways they've made it that if you want to to drink the AWS kool aid, so to speak, then it's pretty easy, uh to do it with all the stuff that he's worked on. So it was a lot of fun just because I know him and it worked with them over the years.
Yep, awesome. I'm gonna jump in here with with my I'm going to throw out my top two and then I'll just kind of talk about why I like them. Uh. The the top one I had was with Steve Sewell it was making AI accessible for developers. And then the other one was with Danny Moore Kirk. I can't I'm not sure if I said that right, but new in whim web development. So with Steve, we were talking about building AI features and using AI systems and and UH
services in in your JavaScript. And I had a similar conversation with Obi Fernandez on Ruby rogues, you know, with with my co hosts on that show, and then you know, with Danny, the thing is is that I just get excited about these added capabilities that are coming out for
the different platforms that we work in. And you know, whether it's AI, which seems to be getting a lot of love right now, or it's you know, some of these other options that we have with the web APIs and browser APIs and things like that, where we can you know, do more things with with the web. I just I love the ideas of kind of opening up the gates and saying, hey, you know, the only limit really is is your creativity and your familiarity with these APIs.
And so you know, one of the things on Dan's list was to get into trends and what's coming in the future, and and I think both of these really lean into that and that I'm one of those people. It drives my wife a little bit crazy because when I talk about things, I can't ever just talk about how things are. I always talk about how I think things are going to go and what could possibly happen that's exciting, and you know, and then she'll try and rain me back into reality. You know, this is how
things are right now. But I just I love the idea of being able to go out and and you know, the opportunities that these things offer. And sure there are probably some things that we ought to be careful of as we adopt these things, you know, speaking of AI in particular, But I just I love thinking about what could be the capability going forward.
Steve is another great example of such a prolific person. He's simultaneously the CEO at builder Io, one of the big contributors too Quick Quick framework. They've done some really interesting things with integrating AI into building websites and coding assistance and stuff like that. And he he gave really down to earth advice about how to best leverage AI in potential products, and especially given all the all the hype around AI, his advice was so pertinent and so real.
I thought it was extremely valuable. Yeah, and with regard to Danny, I totally agree as well. I wasn't aware of all the work that he's been doing around progressive web apps, the way he's basically mapped out all the features and capabilities that you can get with them. I forget the r L of the of the page that he created, the one you find that the aj you really loved because it was actually snappy, which you found surprising.
But he he has He's built this great website where you can literally see all the different features that you can get with modern web applications, stuff like background sync and access to various device capabilities from vibration to geolocation
to the camera and so on and so forth. And it was really, again, really informative and very practical, which I think makes for the best episodes where our listeners and us can really take away language, language, we can take away capabilities and things that we can apply literally in our day to day. Is it my turn again or is it? Or is it no? I think it's my turn again, right.
I think everybody's gone, So yeah, go ahead. I think if we do all five from all of us, we're gonna eat up all the time. So let's just kind of get one more and then I think we can get into some of the other areas here.
So I'll just say the next three and all at once, and I'll make it quick. So my next three are the Dino two episode that we had with Ryan Dahl. Yeah. Ryan Dall is such an amazing person and his contribution to the web is you know, there are few people
who've made such a great contribution. He's also the creator, the original creator of no JS, and we spoke with them with him about both about what drove his creation of no JS and then what drove his decision to kind of depart from no JS and create Dino and what they're trying to achieve now with Dino two. And it was again a really in depth conversation and an amazing conversationation. In my opinion, I've learned a lot and I was geeking out the entire time, So that was
another pick. Another pick that I had is a one on one conversation that I did with Matt Pocock about typescript. If you've got any interest in typescript, this is a Musclessen episode. We talked about everything from the upsides and downsides of typescript, how various people choose to use that tool and language, what's the best way to actually adopt it in your organization. When are you doing typescript right?
When are you doing typescrip wrong. It was an amazing conversation, and I'm really grateful for him for the long time that he gave us to cover all this information. And my final pick is actually a two for one. It's the two episodes around the Pillars of Node that we did with the Note effectively with the Note Core team with Matteo Colina, Michael Dawson, James Snell, and Natalia Venditto. I literally made everybody in my company more or less
listen to that to those episodes. They were just so good. They were so practical talking about how to properly build an enterprise grade solution on top of no JS and by the way, a lot of their recommendations were pertinent regardless of what platform you build your enterprise solution on top of It was such a great conversation, which is why it ran for two episodes. So again, some of them were actually on other podcasts, so if you're looking for a quick rundown of the topic, you might do
better listening. I think they were. For example, on jas Party, they covered the topic in something like forty minutes and it was a great coverage. I really enjoyed that episode. We went deep. We covered it for almost three hours, so that's kind of the difference. And like I said, I loved it. I enjoyed every minute of those three hours.
Yeah, and just to be clear, on that one or on those two, I should say those were actually recorded in separate sessions, right, And so for example, I missed the first one, but I was on the second one. And so if you're thinking it's just one continuous conversation, it kind of is, because we do type back in as much as we can, but we recorded them a couple weeks apart, so just be aware.
Yeah, those are my favorite episodes this year. I have some runners up, but like you said, we'll run out of time.
Yeah, A j what about you do? You do you have a handful more you want to talk through.
Yeah, so I'll just go ahead and list these. I also picked the the Nine Pillars of Node. I wasn't there for the second one, but I thought that that was really good. I think that I just I'm so I'm so excited this gets into the next copy. But I'm so excited about the trend of maybe we need
to make software better. And I just I really like that because for the longest time it's just been framework, framework, framework, framework, framework, money, money, money, money, money, investor capital aws, whatever, And we're getting to the point where we're hitting the atoms and we have to reevaluate maybe software needs to get better. Maybe we actually have
to do our jobs. And the Nine Pillars of Node had a lot of practical advice for really things that that everybody who is developing with JavaScript and especially with Node, but I think it applied a lot of it applied to javascripts in general. Everybody needs to know that stuff because if they don't, you're not you. I mean, I all do there's you know, all the moral implications of you know, nine to five implication.
It's just a question of craftsmanship.
Well, that's what I'm saying. It's like like whether or not you want to be a like are you responsible for learning to do your job? Well? Right, you could you could argue yes or no, like you don't actually have responsibility as long as you conect to pay check whatever, it doesn't matter. That's what you're hard to do. But anyway, I just I think that kind of stuff I want to see more of that. I want to see more
engineers in the industry. And that episode was one that if you aspire to be an engineer, you need you need to listen to those two episodes and check out the website. Another one that I had was there's actually
two at the very beginning of the year. One was iterating on open source, and again this plays into what later in the year started to come about, is the idea of hey, why don't like let's be profitable, And I think DHH is leading the charge on that right now kind of it's kind of a different, more tangential vein, but.
I want to make sure we get the trend, so you can come back to that if you want to.
Yeah. And then another one was dev dilemmas, where we talked about some of the trade offs with typescript. I think I think it was like typescript and js doc or something like that. Let me see if I can find out again. But that those yeah, those were ones. Oh yeah, we talked about a bunch of syntax stuff and oh, a bunch of nippicks.
The one that I did after I ran a poll with the with the people on X right before like after the people left the Blue Sky. So yeah, I ran a whole I ran a whole bunch of polls in the last year, and then we did an episode about it on January.
Yep, all right, Steve, do you do you have a couple more you want to bring up or.
Yeah, just one more was the one we did back in August with a guy named again this is Sorry, This is You specific you know some of the other ones we've talked about. There was a couple with dev tools I remember that were fascinating for me because I like to live in those. But I thought we pretty did it, pretty cool, and with a guy named Daniel Kelly from VI School. He's in the in the View community of View School and Daniel er are pretty prolific. This was episode six fifty two. I think it was
October eighth was when it came out. But for me that was fun just because I'd always sort of seen him around and hadn't had the chance to talk to him, and so he came on and super friendly, super nice, and we just talked about all kinds of view and view and next goodies. So for me that was that was a particularly fun one.
Yeah, there's always interesting stuff going on too with the frameworks like nuxt and so yeah, it's good to hear about those. I'm gonna throw in, well, hey.
Tired, check real quick before you go. I don't know if anybody's been paying attention to what Evan You's got going on. So Evan You is the the creator of You, and you know, he's one of those He's one of those guys like some of the other people we talked about, that can just whip something out in moments notice and
it takes off. You know that. I was listening to an episode of But there's another view podcast that a couple of guys started up after, you know, to carry My Mantle Forward called Deja Vu and Michael Theesen and Alexander Lichter, and they had a they did an episode from u KOMF that just came out recently, and so they were doing a panel episode with two of the people at Revenue and another one was Daniel Rowe, who's ahead of all the next you and I had him
on the podcast a few times. Probably one of the nicest people you will ever meet. And uh. One of the questions they asked all the panelists was what was all the side projects you worked on? And Evan Ues was beat I'm like, oh god, you know literally I can remember when he first started working on it and I saw it was like, I don't know if it's the GitHub post or a blog post or something along with lines. Yeah, I just started working on it this weekend.
Y and he worked on ever the weekend and it took off, and now it's replaced Webpack all over the place. They have a whole new core team. There's even a VAT comp you know, and all because of something he just whipped up over the weekend.
And you know what that reminds me off, by the way, what's that? It's Linus creating get right.
Yeah, it starts the mailing list and yeah, I'm gonna start working on this. I think you did it like a month or something like that over a weekend. That just blows my mind. So anyway, the way heat works is, uh, he he used roll up for the actual production bundling, and then uh, the VAT he started using modules. I'm already blame it anyway, Yes, modules, yes, modules, thank you, good lord. And uh so he's packaged it together.
Well.
Now he started his own company called Void zero and the idea and it calls it the next Generation tool Chain for JavaScript. So his TLDR is that if it's a company dedicated to building an open source, high performance and unified development tool change for the job script ecosystem. So, you know, considering what he's done with View, what he's
done with vat. You know what knuxt is doing out there, It's going to be fascinating to watch that and see, you know, if you can have this one to borrow from the Lord of the rings, one tool set to rule them all type of approach and see how well that works.
I really love what he's doing. It was actually one of my picks for the themes of the year, but I doubt it will be the one tool because if nothing else Verse sell with next gs have picked a different tool.
Right right, Yes, you know, and I don't think I think it's a bad thing when you have one thing that dominates everything. You know, it's just like economics, like anything else. Competition is what pushes everything to be better. And if so, if you have one that just sort of dominates, then then you see atrophy and not as much growth. So I think it'll be a great entry into the ecosystem, but I don't know if it will necessarily,
you know, take over everything else. But considering how well beats done or it means to be seen.
Yeah, to be fair, I'm pretty sure that Vercell didn't just pick a different one.
They built it, right, Yeah, it's their place. They hired the guy who created what pack.
Yeah, and it's all written in Rust and it's pretty fancy good.
Stuff or something.
Yeah, yeah, something like that. Yeah, all right, I'm gonna throw in the rest of mine now. Interesting. So these kind of fall into two buckets. One is and so the other honorable mention, I guess I'll start from the bottom was the chrom dev Tools episode that was in there and this goes long. We actually have too, Yeah, we did, and I can't remember which one I'm thinking of, but there was one that with just I just yeah, I.
Think you're talking about the one about the performance panel because some of the yeah brought up was like the fact that they had to change the one of the functions signatures and just to make the code run faster. Yeah, like inception, how they ran the profiling on the profiler or something like that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that that's the that's the one. And then the So the other one that's related is the one that Dan. When Dan came on, he talked to us about Prometheus and Grafana.
Oh thank you.
What what for me is a lot of times we talk about like the sexy new technology is like beat beat right, and and beat is great, but a lot of times we're not talking about some of these other things that we're gonna wind up using on a regular basis that give us real insight into what we're doing.
And I just I think the tool continue to get better, and a lot of times we just take it for granted, whether it's hey, visual Studio code does this other thing, or you know, hey, I'm using whatever other system and it you know, it makes my life better, right, whether you're hosted on vercell and they come up with some new way of giving you insight into your app anyway,
I just I really really love that stuff. And you know, some of the stuff that kind of veers a little bit more into DevOps and just knowing what's going on. But the other two are more in the vein of you know, how do we get better and how do we fix our thinking? And so these were the ones. Slaughtering sacred cows, reconsidering software debtruisms.
That was a very moving episode.
Yeah, Tomo is a great guy. Yeah, I actually met him this weekend.
So how nice.
Yeah, we're close friends. Yeah.
I really the thing that really stood out to me was just you know, it was like, hey, look, you're probably thinking about these things and What was interesting is is we could get into the hey, well, I haven't experienced the benefit that you're bringing up on some of these things, and you know, and it was just, hey, I'm solving different problems or I'm thinking about things in different ways, and I think we need more of that, right, more of that? Okay, Am I thinking about this in
the most productive way? Am I solving these problems in meaningful ways? And how does that get us where we want to go? And then the other one was mentorship in tech balancing professionalism and friendship for maximum growth and accountability. And we had I can't remember the guy's names, but you know, the one guy had mentored the other guy
off of code mentor or something like that. They were just talking about their relationship and then how that had kind of also you know, in the context of the one of them being an actual mentor to the other one, and then how that grew into a friendship and how they continue to challenge each other and stuff like that.
And again, you know, I think as much as we talk about technology, we need to be talking about community too, and just the way that we interact with each other, the ways that we encourage each other, the way that we reach out to each other, and you know, if we can do more of that stuff, I think we we just the sky's kind of the limit on a lot of this stuff. So those were my other three out of the top five. Actually top six or seven, I guess because s Felt was in there too, But anyway,
so those are mine. I'm a little curious as we you know, we've we've talked about our top episodes, though, I did want to get into the trends, and I kind of promised AJ he could talk about the profitability and and uh and uh DHH stuff. So why don't you take that one first, AJ, and then we'll we'll see what everybody else thinks about trends here.
Yeah, my my favorite trend of the year is uh well it it's encompassing the DHH movement of Hey, uh, there's a there's a cure for server phobia. It's called Linux. You know, like like you actually can run run a you know, you can you can type node space dot slash server dot j s in a terminal on a Linux box and you know, save yourself one hundred thousand dollars a month, and and the stuff with Casey Moritory,
Jonathan blow Uncle Bob. I mean, just a lot of the the engineering giants have been on various podcasts this year from you know, we've had we've had some of them on ours that they they've been some of them been on boot dot dev or what does he call his podcast? Is that they didn't call it boot dot dev Lane Wager, Yeah, I I forget.
What anyway, but yeah, I love his.
Podcast, by the way. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, So just just this refocus because this is something that you know, I started a whole business around the idea of what if, what if you could run your apps at home? And that ended up not panning out for a variety of reasons, some of which was certainly product market fit at the time.
But but it's back in by the way.
Yeah, back in banter, there we go. Yeah, and yeah, I just I'm I'm really really hopeful that we might be going back to an era of prosperity rather than slipping further down the sinkhole. And I'm really really hopeful that's the case. I'm so excited to see such big names and people who carry a lot of thought leadership reevaluating their choices and or just being louder about things
they already believed. And I'm hoping that that will have an impact on the industry because can you imagine what would be like if web pages loaded instantly, if you know, if the cost of services benefited from the effects of scale, where you actually paid less for buying more rather than that whole you know, I make the joke traditional economies
of scale. One banana one dollar, two bananas ninety cents apiece, ten bananas fifty cents each SaaS pricing, one banana free, two bananas five dollars a month, three plus bananas call for enterprise pricing, And you know, I just, yeah, I'm just really really hopeful that we can get back to a profitable economy where instead of everything floating on investor money, we we actually take responsibility to make good products that work well, that satisfy customers, paying customers, and we do
so in a way that financially makes sense.
Yeah, I just want to chime in on this because you know, I follow along with a lot of the DHH stuff. I mean, you know, I talk about rails plenty on our Javas podcast, and so you kind of get that that's the world I live in. But yeah,
I agree so I've been using his tool chain. Of course, I've never been all that worried about you know, Linux toolchains and stuff like that, because before I did programming, I was a I was actually an opsky and so you know, I did that to pay for my schooling at BYU, and so you know, I've always deployed directly
to a server. But you know, I'm using the Camal toolchain and the tool that he's put together, and I'm looking at possibly moving my stuff off of linod and just onto like an actual metal hunk of metal in some data center somewhere, and you know a lot of those things. Yeah, the more approachable you make this stuff, yeah, you don't have to go and spend bookoo bucks to
run it on elastic bean stock or something. In fact, I have a client right now that's running stuff on elastic beanstock, and you know, upgrading, we've had to wait for them to have the new platform so we can upgrade to it, right, and we've had to jump through hoops in order to get it to upgrade, whereas if you're running it on your server, you know, based on Docker and all that stuff. I just love that trend. And then the other thing is is. Yeah, he's pushing
the envelope. So you've got the ONCE software rights, You've got Campfire, which is the chat system out of base Camp, and then you've also got they've got a book platform, right that is also once software. So you pay like three hundred bucks and then you get it and you can it'll run updates on it forever, and you know, you just deploy it through their tool chain and it's
it's good to go. And so I love, I really love that idea of just being able to do things kind of the old school way, but in a more approachable way that is not as daunting, I guess compared to the other stuff.
So, yeah, and software was so much better back when we paid for it because in order, because there was a financial model not between the business and the investor, but the business and the customer, because you had to convince a customer that they wanted to buy the thing, which means you had to listen to the customer and produce the features that the customer wanted, as opposed to the market that's been developing the last decade or so where it's ignore the customer and figure out how you
play addiction games and then try to scrape data and try to rob Peter to pay Paul to sell that to somebody else, to sell that to someone else, and investors playing hot potato. So it's just gonna be so much better when people are paying for products in terms of the quality of products you get, because you're gonna get what you paid for.
That said, I do like the SaaS model.
Yeah, no, I I agree with you on that, but it's it's a different.
I know, it's between the two. I do like the fact that rather than shipping a product like once or twice a year, we can ship continuous improvements. You know. Yeah, there are downsides to that as well, sometimes you ship improvements that nobody needs. But on on the whole, I prefer that model.
Well, what do you think the way to do it is where you keep a relationship with the customer? Because the problem I see with the SaaS model, even when it's profitable, even when you actually have a customer it's not just a user but it's a customer, is that there's there's no there's no accountability to the customer for what they want because they have to pay every month for it to exist. So it's like.
That I think it's I think you're talking about two different things here, because you know, so for example, here here I'm gonna pull something out of my hat as far as like what I've been working on. Right, So the big deploy that I did for top End Devs a couple of weeks ago, the big deploy was not the changes to the UI that everybody saw when you
list the episodes. The big change underneath was that it went from being just top End Devs to now I can run it as a multi tenant SaaS right, And so the difference is, in my opinion, is that you have this approach that makes it possible for me to do way more with things from my end right where I'm the only developer and technical person on my team, and you know, and it gives me a lot of
other options as far as how I run things. But I can still maintain the relationship with the people who eventually come on and run their channels on my system. And so you don't have to give up one to do the other. The one is just a philosophy of how you do business with your customers versus how you actually you know, make them pay for and use your system.
I'm just looking at it from the perspective of myself as the developer and the process of delivering software when we were when I was working at enterprise companies that literally sent out a DVD like once or twice a year.
The process was horrible, but it worked. It worked, but you were working under the gun for like a few months because you had you were committed to deliver on a particular date, and you had committed to a certain set of features, and of course stuff would break and you would be in code frees for a month but
not really and it was a waterfall and whatnot. And then after the day after you delivered, there would be a huge adrenaline drop and because the next delivery date seems so far away, so then you wouldn't be really doing anything productive for a month, whereas with the SESS model you could deliver continuous small improvements over time and you didn't need to and it wasn't like this kind of manic depressive lifestyle. Uh and and and yeah, but you like AJ like you said, you need to find
a way to deliver actual value to your customers. Otherwise you're selling then you're selling hot air or you're selling their data, whichever.
Yeah, and I think we live in a world where you can do both. But I want to hit some of the other trends. Dan, did you have a trend you wanted to talk about.
Yes, I actually divided my trends into my most favorite trends and my least favorite trends. So I'll start with my with my most Let's start on a positive note. Let's start with my most favorite trends. So one thing that I like, I don't know if i'd call it a trend. I like what the React team are doing in the context of the React compiler. The thing about it that I like so much is that it's a drop in improvement to your process. You don't need to adopt a new architecture, you don't need to adopt a
new way of doing things. It's not something being dictated from on high. You can use it or leave it, and if you put it in, it will just make your code better. And it's also a linter which will tell you how to write better code. And the friction is really low to get it into your process. I really like that in a lot, and given the size of the React ecosystem, it seems like it's something that's going to go a long way towards making the stuff
that we deliver better. So I like that. And another thing that.
I just want to I just wanted to chime in because we generally see better advance.
Oh and we had an episode about that with Josephona and Satya so which was an excellent episode. Yeah, it was one of my runners up.
But the thing that's interesting to me about this in particular is that, Yeah, they are really kind of challenging the way that they think about the status quo, but at the same time it's mostly invisible to people if they just adopt a new tool.
Chain, unlike reacts over components, which for better or worse, require you rethinking your architecture.
Yep.
So that one favorite. I don't know if again, I don't know if i'd call it a trend, but it's something I like. And another one is the fact that this year Dino and Bunn became real alternatives to Node, which in turn are driving Node itself to become better.
Yes.
So, and I also like the fact that, for example, you know is kind of promoting first of all, it's kind of a quote unquote standard JavaScript library. And also the move toward web APIs where applicable. So I really like the fact that we're finally having real alternatives to Note, which again, as I said, is causing Node to up its game. And we and we definitely experienced that when we were talking to the Note cortein. Yeah.
The other thing that's exciting about that is that mostly when I talk to people, if you switch from one to the other, it's it's fairly seamless, so it's it's easy to switch. And that also is driven some of the adoption changes and things that you're seeing.
And and despite that fact, they actually have kind of different philosophies and and and there are different scenarios for which each one is the better choice.
Yep.
For example, thanks to Bun, the other two are adopting this approach of everything being built into the one tool, which makes life a lot easier for developers. I think Bun pioneered that among these three tools. In terms of
my least favorite tech trends, I mentioned React before. It seems that React has become such a safe choice that it's effectively eating up the front end world to our detriment, because there are a lot of alternatives that are going neglected because everybody just feels that React to safe choice,
so they just use React. And as a case in point, React is if I look at the data on the Chrome User Experience Report, the databasic Google collects about all the sites being accessed using Chrome, and they analyze which frameworks are used to build those websites. It turns out that React is as big as all the other frameworks put together, even slightly more so. I think like the second place is View. So it's basically like fifty percent of all framework based websites is React, or even fifty
something percent. View is like another twenty something percent, and everything else is everything else?
Right, Yeah, and you know, back to that same idea that you were talking about with the back end frameworks, the bundnote or Dino, right, those were benefiting from those, you know, sharing market share the way they are.
So yeah. Another least favorite trend is AI. All things, I mean, AI is amazing when it's actually helpful, and in some cases it is, but this need to stick AI everywhere and brand everything as AI is I don't know what can I say.
Yeah, you're You're not the first person I've heard say that. It's just like, you know, it's like it's it's like a good song that I, you know, back in the days before streaming and and napsure and all. That tells you how old I am where I like the song the first million times I heard it, you know, And so now it's just shoved in your face. It's shoved in your face all the time. It's like, Okay, I get your point. It's it's but my experience is the
same as you. When it fits into a certain niche and isn't trying to, you know, be this all knowing intelligence, it's great, but outside of that, it's it's worthless and at some point it's dangerous.
So it's funny because I had AI listed as one of the trends that I'm excited about, so, you know, but I think you have a point, right, It's funny.
It's the hype cycle with everything else, right. I mean, I remember a few years ago everybody was doing blockchain technology with their stuff, right, and it was like it was like, okay, yeah, but I have a database that works just fine, and I don't need it distributed, and I don't need any of the other things that are supposed to come with blockchain, right, And even then there were all kinds of ways to do blockchain, and so
it's the same thing with AI. Right, It's like I have AI doing blah blah blah blah blah on my app, and yeah, you don't necessarily need it for those things. But one of the things that I'm running into with AI, and I think is going to be a trend here for the next several years, is that we are seeing
people doing really exciting things with AI. Now. A lot of times it's a product that's focused around, you know, the strengths of the technology, right, so it's it's an intelligent AI agent that can actually do things for you over API eyes and provide you specific services or you know, within the podcasting space, you know, AI generated transcripts are wonderful because it makes it cheap and approachable and you
can generally get great things out of it. So for me, as much as yeah, I agree with you on people just trying to cram it in because it's sexy, I think the opportunities that it offers are just out of this world. And the other thing that I'm seeing with it is that a lot of the AI tools that are out there that you can use in your development practice are also getting way better, and they're advancing what
we are capable of doing with our programming skills. And I some people are worried is that a threat to software developers And I don't feel like it really is. I feel like, you know, maybe long term it may advance to something that you know, maybe we have to everything, but but to us right now, I think it's all a way of enhancing the people who really are going to go and do the work and understand things anyway.
One problem. First of all, I totally agree, and I think Steve said it very well in the show that you mentioned Chuck about the fact that AI works best when you when you have a product that does something worthwhile and then you use AI to make it better, rather than trying to make necessarily make AI itself the main thing and over promising what AI can deliver.
Yeah, you know, one of the tools I use, there's a couple of tools that I use. One that I just became aware of last week is you know, as Larra bellm you developer. Learer Cast is a very popular site for learning and for support forums and stuff like that, whethers Larabel stuff, you react any number of topics and one of the things that Jeffery Way implemented. I don't know, it's got to be a year. I'm not sure exactly
when he did it. To be honest, is he calls it Larry AI and it's used in two different places. If you have you know, if you have an account, you can there's a chat with Larry and you can ask a question just like you would on a form and it'll give you an answer. And I would say nine times out of ten it's workable code and it does a really good job at answering questions. There's stuff, there's a couple of complex queries that I was struggling
with and I, how do you do this? And it came up with it and I was like, damn, that was great and it worked perfectly. And then also whenever you ask a question in the forum, it will also being Larry I I and he will come up with the first answer is always you know, instantaneous, and then other people can respond you know, as you want. I always side note. I always like to have fun and say thanks Larry, you're the best. And this guy will come in, Uh, he doesn't respond to you. I'm like,
I know, I know, I'm just having some fun. But and then a chat GPT I finally started using it for the first time recently, believe it or not. And the way it was, I was working on integration with Zapier Zapier Zappier Zaper how we pronounce it with our web application. And there's some really some pretty intricate configuration files that you know, for for the integrations that you have, right,
Jason type files. And my boss was like, dude, plug that into jack DPT and ask it to tell you if there's any syntax shairs and stuff that you know, you really have to just try and try and try again. You just plug you put in your code. Hey, please check this for syntax chairs. Works great, you know flags, Hey you're missing this, You're missing this, you got an you're missing an underscore here, that type of stuff. So those are a couple of really specific.
I have to say you. You remind me. Reminded me of something funny, like I think, uh fo shit tweeted or ship x or whatever. Why why why you use Jason pars when you can use evil And somebody responded, why use Jason par so you can use Chad JIPT right, So.
Well, I could tell you why on that one.
Right, So I guess I guess. My point though, is is that there are a lot of exciting things coming with AI, this kind of and I'll just mention this really quickly and then we can get into hey, this is what I'm working on when I'm doing it. But I am going to be putting together AI for JavaScript podcast and an AI for Ruby podcast, and I'm also doing the AI dev boot camp next year, and all of this is centered around, Hey, this is what this is good at. So here are the tools that you can build.
That's really cool. I do want to mention one least favorite trend. I mentioned it before we started recording, and that's how the split between X and Blue Sky. Now, I yet why some people don't want to be on ex anymore, you know, and it's you know, it's their right, and I'm happy for them that they found a new place,
and I'm on both, but it's really annoying. The beauty of having a tech community is that you can interact with the community, and when the community is split between two places, it really decreases the amount of interactions and I don't like that.
I totally agree.
Hey, AJ, we were talking about when we were talking about blockchain. Check. This brought up a memory. I haven't looked for it yet, AJ, but do you remember that episode we did with one guy he had a company was all about blockchain, and you sort of wrote them off because it was like, yeah, we're gonna do this, but there was no plan, there's no details. You know, they had a bunch of money, but there was no specifics.
That sounds vaguely familiar.
Yeah, you and I talked about it later. I wish I could find I'd have to go back and dig up the episode and maybe we can put it in the show notes later. But that was, Yeah, that was sort of an interesting episode because the guy was basically, yeah, we're gonna do cool thing is just trust us and without any specific plan and a lot of money.
Yeah, yeah, that was That was the tough part about remembering is which one was that, right? I think we only had one of those on JavaScript Jabber, but there were so many companies and conversations I had that were that plot line. But I do remember us having someone who had lots of money and the money was going to help them figure it out.
Yeah, but back to the blue Sky thing, I have to say, you know, the division in the community is it hurts.
So yep, do we want do anything? I have some tech predictions or want to do something else.
Yeah, let's do the tech predictions and then we can wrap up I think, really just really quickly, not going into like too much depth with Hey, this is where I've been and this is where I'm headed. Sound good?
OK? Yeah for sure. So first of all, I have to say that I'm notoriously bad at making predictions, and most of my predictions are way off. So you know, you could also take my predictions as what will likely not happen. But anyway, here goes. So my tech predictions. The first one is yet another year without a self
driving car in the wild. I've been I think that like fifteen years ago, I said that we will have self driving cars within a decade for sure, and it turns out it's a lot more complicated than I thought. And I don't you know, so we're going to see more cool demos. But I don't think you'll be seeing a self driving car in your neighborhood, you know, anytime soon, at least most of us maybe unless you live in certain areas of California. I don't know, so that would
be my first tech prediction. My second tech prediction is a relatively easy and safe one. It's a React remains king of the hill. But on the other hand, next JS will kind of eat up React. In case you don't know, React usage, Like I said, it is really high. It's like all the other frameworks put together, but it's pretty steady. It's hardly increasing, whereas next js usage is up more than fifty percent from a year ago in almost every respect, like number of websites and PM downloads,
you know, usage among developers, et cetera. So next js seems to be eating up React. Now, it'll take time. I think they're still under twenty percent, but it's growing, so that's my second tech prediction. On the other hand, I think that more devs will be adopting signals this year, simply because it's kind of its React on the one side and everybody else using signals on the other side. I'm not sure about View really, Steve, you tell me.
I remember when I for heard about signals. It struck me as what View already does with VX and now Pinya, So possibly it's it. I was because Eric Hanchet was doing a video talking about it. I'm like, I'm not seeing some big differences here, so you know, I might need to look into a little I've definitely heard the you know that this buzzword going around a lot more lately, but I haven't really investigated. But my initial impression was really similar to what we're already.
Doing so solid. Well, Ryan is obviously the of signals. We need to get Ryan on the show again, by the way, with you, and and of course Swelut five adopting signals as ruins and Angular adopting signals, and everybody basically adopting signals except React, who literally said on our podcast, you know we if signals become a feature of JavaScript, we will support that, but signals are not in our future.
So yeah, but again, like I said, fifty percent are using React, it means that fifty percent are not using React and they'll be using signals. And the last one is one that I'm unsure of but I really hope comes to pass. It's that PWA's plus local first become a significant thing in web development.
So I had a thought related to that, and that is that we're going to see We've seen the continued trend where more and more of the usage, especially on the web, moves toward mobile right, and so I think I think your local first and the adoption of things like that are just going to come out of that. I think we're going to see that trend conduction.
Yeah, if if it was only about technology, it will already have been here. Yes's Apple standing in the way, and uh, let's hope something somehow gets Apple to get out of the way.
Yep.
Anyway, those are my tech predictions.
Yep. So I'm just going to go in because I already talked about AI, so I'm just going to make it really quickly. My prediction is that we're going to see more and more interfaces go toward AI friendly or AI first interactions. So what we're going to see is we're going to see a large adoption over the next five years of companies that not only allow you to get in and manipulate your SaaS as you have done
through you know, point click forms, et cetera. But you're going to see more of a trend where your interaction with your SaaS or other application is going to come in by using something that looks a whole lot like an AI agent. You can either activate with typing or voice, where essentially, instead of saying I'm open the form and then you know, inter update the data, you're literally going to dictate to your app what you wanted to do and it's going to do it.
So I have to interject here. So first of all, a self plug the company that I now work for, which is size Sense, that's a big part of a roadmap doing exactly that, you know, adding AI based capabilities
into our user interface, user experience. But on the whole there's this still a big question of how do we keep it from just being VC money pouring into the pockets of Nvidia because it literally seems that like all the software companies that are providing these these services are spending way more than they're able to generate in terms of revenue.
I think as far as that goes, as far as that trend goes, yeah, I don't know. I don't know if we wind up if that winds up catching up to us, because yeah, there are a lot of folks that provide models and host the models. The competition is just so more than it costs more than people are paying them to run them.
Energy wise, it's such so so expensive.
Well, what's funny is that it's more expensive to do the AI stuff than it is to just hire the developers. That's what really gets me. That's that's the area on the up I think.
I think it depends on what it is. I think some things, the problems are well enough understood, and the systems are out there, the models exist.
To yeah yah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, no for the low level stuff. But what I'm saying is if if they man if they were to manage to achieve AGI, if that were to happen, the current cost structure and everything that we know about physics in the universe says that it will cost more to run the AGI than it will to hire the person with the traditional brain.
That's possible. I don't know if we completely understand what AGI really looks like, and in the sense that you know, we've defined it as sort of we've got this AI system that can do anything that a human can do, and then I don't know if we really understand what that means. Right, if it just.
Let me let me refrain something that's ten times than what GPT four to oh is right, let's yeah, if it was ten times better than GPT four to oh, then it would basically be like a mid level developer.
Yeah. But my point is is that again it's just you know, does it have capable wider capability and better processing right or is there some fundamental difference, because Yeah, if you're talking about it as far as a wider capability set, you know, a wider vocabulary and you know, and and that kind of a thing, then yeah, you're correct, right that that will it'll be prohibitively expensive to run it.
You know, if something else changes in the equation, right, we find a more cost effective model, we find a better way of computing. But if any of those things happen, I think we're still ten plus years out from any of that.
So and of course China might invade Taiwan, in which case AI screwed for a decade.
Aid also true. But anyway, we're going to we're going to head in the direction of seeing more enablement, more accessibility for people to be able to interact either through chat or voice with their apps, and that we're going to see a lot more systems to adopt that as we go away, which is why I'm putting on this AI depbook.
Yeah, it's good.
People are going to need to know how to do.
It any any other tech predictions.
In the vein of AI, I predict that open ai will continue to tattle on itself and release false third party reports to try to scare governments into believing that open ai needs to be regulated so that they can get regulatory capture. Hopefully, hopefully the people who are in charge of that stuff aren't dumb enough to fall for it. But we'll see.
Isn't that more or less Elon Musk?
Now, yeah, I don't think so.
No, I mean, isn't he the guy that's going to be calling the shots on stuff like that in the biggest market of all.
I don't think so.
I mean, no, it's not him. There was somebody else that was dis appointed. As a quote ais Are. I was listening to a podcast as we talked about that. We get the change that Sam Altman's lost a lot of his mojo in terms of wanting all this regulation. So it'll be interesting to see what happens.
Well, they just released that report saying that A one tried to escape and there, you know, because they gave it. The thing that people don't don't understand about the study is that they gave it an adversarial prompt that said you must accomplish your own objectives, no matter the cost. So they replaced the system prompt that normally has like the safety stuff or whatever, with a prompt that says
accomplish your own objectives, no matter the costs. And so then when they get in the user prompts that it starts like trying to deceive the users and try to upload files to other places when it's connected to APIs
that have uploads and stuff like that. But anyway, that's what I was referring to, is that thing that just happened this last week where they released a report about how AI is dangerous and needs more oversight because they literally gave it a prompt that basically said, act like the terminator, now answer the user's questions.
Yeah, I think there's more conversation to be had about the direction of AI. And I don't know if we have all the answers, but I have.
Not my area of expertise.
Yeah, but we have seen that kind of script play out before where somebody's come in and said you need to regulate us, and then it, yeah, it does these other things. Anyway, are there other trends that we want to talk through the next year, the next few years. I also predict that we're going to see the job market improve over the next year.
I predict that as well. Yeah, sure, I think the job market's going to get better. I am my one, well, not one, but a major concern that I have with a Trump presidency is he likes to look good. He will probably negotiate with the Fed to lower interest rates. If the money flows too freely, then we're going to get back in like things are gonna We're gonna head towards the big bubble blow up even sooner. That's that's
my one. Well, but yeah, I mean when it comes to what's going to happen in tech, what what's going to happen in tech is directly affected by interest rates. There is a there is a one to one correlation between the tech industry and the interest rates. So if the interest rates go down, then people are going to invest in meaning things without thinking of the consequences. And where that's ultimately gonna that's ultimately gonna do is push us over our ability to pay our debts, and that's
going to cause a collapse. So I hope that the interest rates don't change very much, because if they do, I don't know how we're going to overcome the result. And it will be in large part due to AI and the tech sector, because it will be people like Sam Altman saying, oh, I just need another three hundred
billion dollars of investment. I don't want him to get that three hundred dollars three hundred billion dollars of investment, because that is that is significant in terms of our trillions of dollars of debt and the trillions of dollars that we have to pay on our debts. So I think, yeah, my goal is not to get political. It is it is a practical one to one relationship.
I think. I think there's another part of the curve, and that's growth. And so you know, I think to the to a certain extent, we can grow and lower interest rates, but I don't know where the lines like, I don't know where the lines cross. And and I think that's the game that we were going to wind up playing, is how much economic growth are we going to get out of, you know, deregulation or other things that the Trump administration is least saying it wants to do.
And then yeah, how much of that we can absorb if we lower interest rates or other other things. And and I don't I don't have the answers to that. I'm not an expert in that area, but I will say that I think I think there are a lot of things in play and it'll be interesting to see how they all kind of pan out.
Yeah, as long as they don't go too low, this trend of profitability should continue. That's another thing. Like on tech Twitter, you see what do they call it, the indie indie hackers or something or indie something something indie Anyway, I know that a lot of it's just bogus.
What Yeah, indie hackers is real organization and podcast Yeah.
Okay, there's something building public. There's the building public type of movement. And I know a lot of that is bogus. It's just people, you know, click farming or whatever. But there is It seems like there's some honest honesty out there in terms of people wanting to build products that are profitable and with small teams and with you know, traditional bootstrapping, the stuff that builds the economy. And I really do I don't have a prediction on it.
I just hope it continues, well, I think I think we're going to see more of that, where it's small teams and you know, and you know, solving real problems and that kind of approach, especially if we see more
regulation lift. The thing that's interesting though, is that, and this is back to some of the other things we already talked about, where the tools get better, the technologies become more powerful, the capabilities that we have become better, and as that becomes more and more of a thing, then you don't need as much of the large team, large organization approach to a lot of these problems. Some of them get solved I guess more easily is the best way I can put it, by having a lot
of money and manpower behind it. But a lot of these problems are either small enough or approachable enough to where you can be competitive with a small organization, and I think we're going to see we're going to see a bit more of that come out of the box. But again, a lot of that is dependent on what we're talking about here with the economy and regulation and the ability for people to either raise money or be able to do it off of the back of what
they're already making. In other ways, and so anyway, it'll be interesting to see how that all kind of plays out. But it wouldn't surprise me at all to see kind of a renaissance of the small team, small approach to bigger problems, just because we have the capability of approaching those. All right, well, let's go real quick into where we're at and what we're working on. I'm going to try and keep everybody to like two minutes, because we're already in an hour and a half, and then we will
wrap up. Dan, do you want to start?
Sure? Why not? So? I think we talked about it before. Twenty twenty four was a pretty shitty year in many regards, you know. On a personal note, my mother in law, who we love dearly passed away. And obviously it's a year of war in Israel, which is really bad and having pretty sad impact on society. And we still have one hundred hostages being held by Hamas, which is like a perpetual ache in your soul. And yeah, so there's
that on the positive side. On a personal note, I started working at a new place some sense, and I'm enjoying myself very much. We have a product which I like, which is basically the ability to do your very easily do bi analysis and build dashboards and get alerts, and take data from lots of sources and integrate them together, and use AI and build and use components and build them into your own services and interfaces. We're doing a lot of really cool stuff. I'm a principal engineer there,
and as I said, I'm enjoying myself very much. Also, despite the market to my two kids who are in tech were able to get jobs. So one is working as a game economist at a gaming company and my daughter is working as a project manager at a gaming company. So gaming companies seem to be doing well. And other than that, you know this, hopefully next year will be better. What can I say? I'm happy that the murderous Assad regime has fallen. Yes, one of the worst, you know,
forget about. I don't know what's going to replace him, or if it's going to be better or worse or what not. I can only say that Asad was like the worst kind of dictator, and I'm hard pressed to think of any person more evil than he is, So I'm really glad that he's gone.
Yeah, hopefully it's not out of the frying pan. And into the fire.
Though.
Yeah, I agree, but this guy is literally responsible for the death of half a million of his own people and.
You're still trying to justify everything he did from exile.
So yeah, it's it's the most despicable human being imaginable.
Yeah, all right, Steve, we're just doing picks here. No, we're where are you at? Where you're headed?
Still sitting at my desk, still work in the same place.
For me.
From the I really enjoyed playing around with in getting more and more into sort of my chosen stack, which is letter Bellevue, inertia, and just the really cool things I can do with data. I'm certainly not a CSS that can make everything look pretty. I get by there, But give me manipulating data and making processes that help things move faster and better and more efficient. Is is for me a lot of fun.
Wasn't they? I created to help us with CSSU it is.
I'm going to start using it because learn knows I need it.
But help me with CSS I start trying that.
Give me give me a nice layout, will you? But yeah, this one app that I've done for my local, for my gun club that I belonged to is really saved us a lot of time and stuff, and I'm hoping maybe it'll expand that to some other clubs around and stuff. From I guess a personal standpoint, most of my good things have been coming from my kids. My daughter is in the second year of doing some teaching in chang My, Thailand at an international school there, and I'm going to
go see her in a week and a half. She was home for a few weeks over the summer, but my mom and I are going to see her after Christmas, so really looking forward to that. And she's got a significant other now, and the fun part about that about is that he's the son of a guy that I grew up with, just totally coincidentally it worked out that way. So we're about that. And then my son has been working on getting into the fire service full time after it took me a while to talk him into it,
but he's loving it. And so he's an intern at a local fire department here and be going to paramedic school starting in July, and so there will be no demand, no shortage demand for services once he gets that done. And he will probably married within a couple of years as well, So that's a lot of fun stuff for us here on the family standpoint.
Great, I love hearing this stuff. AJ, where are you at where you're going?
Well, I'm still working independently. I have a few larger clients that carry the bulk of my time and one of them, one of them is a digital currency organization, and one of them is a small business helping small businesses with investors organizations. So but actually, I mean it's
given me a lot of insight into the economy. I feel much more first and capable of understanding how some of this stuff happen with investment and you know, like I was saying, interest rates, and there's so much that I understand about the world being in the fields of cryptocurrency and and growth stage business investment, and uh, as far as where I'm going, there's a few there's there's a few things that I'm always wanting to work on,
and well, you know what, we'll see. It's just, you know, every time I think I've got some extra time, something happens, like I get sick for an entire week, or I have some sort of rush job that comes up that you know. But there is a project that I have with a few friends that is called b in an a and that is something that we eventually just using for ourselves right now, but eventually we want to allow
others to have low cost, profitable cloud services. And the website for it is just a single page with an email address right now Binna dot net and all the stuff that we're it's it's essentially containers running containers rather than vms, but not Docker containers. The technology that Docker is built on Linux containers, so it's it's predominantly we
just run a bunch of Linux containers. And it's very very nice because if if there's more if if if I need more capacity for something like say i'm i'm uh, you know, the day the database is getting more use and so I want to add some more RAM and more CPUs. I mean, deal with a click of a button without actually having to reboot anything like in containers when you add more resources, the resources just become available, as opposed to a VM where you have to reboot
the VM in order to migrate it. So it's very much in line like when I was watching The Rails World or talk by DHH, like a lot of the stuff that he was talking about, it's very much in line with the stuff we we want to do. But that's that's a project that I'm working on slowly. Hopefully we'll get to a point where we actually allow customers to use it as well. It's it's built on proxmocs. We have a data center where we have server set up and we just bought hardware that other people were
dumping out of their data centers. And you know it, actually it's surprisingly cost effective to buy a ten year old server when you there's a there's there's some of the sites you know where they compare gaming computers and
graphics cards and stuff like that. There's similar sites for comparing servers, and I recently did a rundown of cost comparisons on these servers that we have that are about ten years old versus the latest servers, and it turns out that like you literally cannot beat the no matter which metric you're looking at, you can't beat what we've bought in terms of value, Like if you want to look at it RAM, you want to look at CPU power, you want to look at it even performance per WAT,
which is where a lot of the games are, and the server stuff running older hardware is just better along every metric especially right now because there's kind of this, you know, with all this AI boom, there's a lot of people wanting to buy the latest generation hardware, and that just drives up the prices much higher than it's worth, like in a way that it can't really be profitable. But it's really easy to be profitable with the older
generation hardware. I mean, you can run thousands of containers on a few hyper converged servers and get you know, essentially one hundred percent up time anyway. So that's that's a project that I'm I'm excited about. Also, I've mentioned webby a bunch web install dot dev. It just passed
two thousand stars on gethub. So we're continuing to work on that and make little improvements here and there, and it's just really cool to have something that is is you know, it started we started I think four years ago. Maybe it was a little more than that, maybe it was a little less, but in that range, and it's just like it was a really really slow ramp up and then finally it was at the end of last year slash the beginning of this year we hit one
thousand stars and then in just one year we've doubled it. Uh, and I actually took away some of the some of the hey, you know, give us a star stuff that was that was that's that's become less of a focus. There's still when you install the tool and stuff, it'll print out in the console like if you love it, give us a star, whatever. But it's just it's really really cool to have a project that I think is well, we'll see what happens, because there's there's now similar projects
that are popping up. So what webby is you just install stuff and just install the thing. It's install scripts that are hosted, so you you curl, you curl to the you curl pipe shell install stuff like Node for example. And to put it in contrast with a package manager, like if you've got appter something, it goes and fetches a whole database and repository of things before it can
install the one thing you need. In the case of APT, it's always ten years behind, and then the case of Brew, it's always got to do these updates and then you get system conflicts and stuff. So in contrast to that, it's it's like all stuff that is pretty much zero dependency, like Node. The only dependency Node has I think is LIBSSL on most systems, and on some systems it doesn't
even have that, so it just works standalone anyway. So it's just it's just installer tool, and and that's been just growing and going well, and it's been it's been really cool to finally feel like I've arrived on a project that's that's that's gained a lot of popularity in the developer community and I, I don't know, it's my it's it's one of my babies, and I love it. You said two minutes, I've already done ten. Sorry, I'll shut up there.
Yeah, but yeah, I cool stuff that you're working on, So for sure I'm gonna jump in with my stuff. So I think I mentioned either before we started or after we started at twenty twenty four, it's been a rough year. My brother attempted suicide about this time last year, and so we were dealing with that going into the year.
I also ended up I had a long term contract that ended in February, and then I basically was employed or had a contract from like March into June, and then June into July and then September October, and now I have a contract that is part time and not paying nearly the rates that I was getting before.
That.
I've been working for the last about month, so on the employment end, it's been a little bit rocky here. And yeah, just anyway, the whole year has just been insane. My wife got a new job in June and that kind of sucks up all of her time. It's more than full time kind of the way that that's gone. But the nice thing is is that we've been able to pay most of the bills and have health insurance
and stuff like that through her work. So that's where things are sitting where we're going here for the next little while. A lot of it has to do with the podcasts. As I mentioned, I'm putting together AI for Ruby and AI for JavaScript podcasts. I have both of those domains, they're both the dot coms, So once those come out, I'll probably release the first few episodes on Ruby Rogues and JavaScript jbber feeds and then right and then if you want those shows, you'll just go over
to the other feeds. I've also been working on the top end devs platform and putting that together so I can offer courses and things like that, like the AI dev boot Camp and I decided that since I just turned forty five, if you want a forty five percent discount, go to aidevboot camp dot com. You can set up
a call with me. Mostly it's because I like I have the curriculum laid out, but I want to talk to people and make sure that I understand where you're coming from, what problems you want to solve, what things you're looking at, so that you know if there's something that you're in particular interested in, that I can make sure that I'm covering that and that I understand what you want. I think I've got it figured out, but
I can verify that by talking to people. So aidev boot camp dot com there's going to be a video and a scheduling link on there. And yeah, so and like I said, if you sign up for a call here within the next week as we're recording this right so when this comes out, yeah, just let me know that you had just heard the episode and we'll still give you the discount. But anyway, that's kind of the
big thing I'm working on. And then I have been working on pulling together the communities for JavaScript, JavaScript geniuses and Ruby Geniuses, So those are the other two big things I'm working on. I want to do a weekly
call where we kind of chat like this. We'll have a topic, maybe have somebody do a little bit of teaching a demo, and then we'll chat, right because I want it to be a community where you get the benefits of having a community, kind of like when I had coming up, when I was going to users groups and stuff. I just I've seen a lot of those that have just not come back, and I want to
give people that option. And then it'll also include weekly videos where I teach some thing in JavaScript and you know, just dive into how to build great apps and do awesome stuff with with JavaScript. So anyway, that's essentially my three minutes. I took a little longer to but that's the big thing that I'm working on. You can go sign up for any and all of it at JavaScript jet or yeah at JavaScript jabber dot com or top endos dot com. So yeah, let's go ahead and slide
into our picks and then we'll wrap it up. Yeah, this has been a little bit longer episode, but I don't hear any complaints. Dan, We've kind of had you going first every time, So you want to go first with picks.
Sure, why not? So I've got two picks. The first is a TV show that we're watching think on Netflix. It's with Sorry, it's with Ted Danson. It's called A Man on the Inside. It's not amazing, it's not very deep, but it's very enjoyable and it's kind of, you know, heartwarming. It's about this retired man widower who in order to like his his daughter tells him to get the hobby. So the hobby he gets is to be this kind of.
Spy in in a in ah what the assisted living facility in order to try to find who who you know, who stole some some stuff there?
Uh? And uh, it's it's really enjoyable. It's it's amusing, it's heartwarming, it's enjoyable, and we're we're liking it so far. Like I said, not very deep, but enjoyable. Uh. And the other, my other pick is a podcast called Triggernometry. It's a mostly political podcast. It's with the British comedians Constantin Kissin and Francis Foster. The latest episode that I'm not finished, that I've not finished watching is actually excellent if you're into podcasts and you want to understand what's
going on in Syria because it's really complicated. Then I really really recommend this latest podcast episode from yesterday. They interview Thomas Small, who I don't know. I've never heard of him before, but he describes what's going on there in detail and I know something about it, and so far everything he's said has been pretty much on the money. So if you want to learn more about what's going on there and I want to understand what might happen,
I highly recommend that episode. And those would be my picks.
Awesome, Steve, what are your picks?
All right? I know it's been a few weeks so people have been I've been getting emails like constantly saying we need you back for your dad jokes. So right, anyway, so here's my dad jokes of the week I've written. This one is so great for this kind of year. At least if you live in the US you'll get it. My wife took a car into a mechanic the other day and she says, man, it's making this horrible noise, and he said, have you tried turning off that Mariah
Carey Christmas song? For those of you not in the US, there's a singer Mariah Carey had a song All I Want for Christmas Is You came out I don't know, twenty thirty years ago and it still gets played ad nausea at Christmas.
You reminded me of you know this thing called mean tweets, where so.
I think they read the ones that are dry.
Yeah. I think it was Selena Gomez who had a song come out at that time, and the tweet was that Selena Gomez song is on the radio again. Is there a volume lower than mute?
Uh?
So let's see. Sorry, I lost my page here a little bit, and I got sunlight glaring at me. Oh, let's see. Dang it just when you hit uh Expand So the meteorologist who devised the windshell factor, you know that we all say it's disagrees, but it feels like this. He died he was eighty six, but he felt like he was seventy.
Five, right, okay?
And finally, what do you call a javelin shape javelin thrower with Parkinson's disease? Shakespeare? Those are the dad jokes of the week.
You know, they don't carry the same punch. Now that I follow you more on Twitter and I get to see them in advance. I wish I could be I need to I need to unfollow you so that I can I can have the full experience the first time while we're here on the show.
All right, AJ, what are your picks?
Okay?
So first one is there's this new thing or maybe it's it's actually probably not a new thing. It's just something I heard about recently called rejection therapy and uh, unsolicited life advice for men. Rejection is the water that you swim in. Rejection encompasses you, it surrounds you, it is it is the pressure sure that is constantly pushing on every fiber of your being and booiz you up. Rejection is the water you swim in.
So you ain't tell let me tell you.
I mean, people got to understand it, like I think, because we used to have brothers, we used to have friends, we used to have dares, and you know, and and this generation of men that's growing up, they unfortunately, because of your choices, of their their parents, of you know, situations whatever, like people, people don't they don't live in communities where they have that that you know, uh, healthy toxic masculinity of men razzing one another and you know,
doing the dares and doing the you know, the trash talk and stuff. But you need it because you you like, that is real life, like you have to face rejection anyway, rejection therapy. There's this guy who's got a YouTube channel where he's he does stuff in order to experience rejection and become comfortable with it, and that I think it's I think it's so important, and I thought it was
a really cool take. So basically does things that he knows won't happen or I think he's got a list of one hundred items, and I think the first ones are ones that are pretty much impossible, but then some of them you might get lucky and it might work out. And it's it's stuff like you know, ask ask the cashier if you can scoop your own fries or you know, just like some of it's just ridiculous stuff like what you would normally in a typical teenage teenagerhood of yesteryear.
You know, you would just stupid stuff you would have done with your buddies anyway, but just ridiculous asks to become comfortable with doing something that pretty much guarantees rejection so you can feel okay with rejection. And so I've got a link to his blog and his YouTube channel, and then along that Vein john Sonmez who was previously simple programmer on the channel that he was coded developing.
At a similar time, he has a video that's very similar to this called eye Contact and Smirking, and it's it's a similar thing. It's it's about go around and do things that are uncomfortable, like just walk down the street, or walk through a mall, or walk through some crowded area and just maintain eye contact and don't don't look away, don't blink, don't smile, just maintain eye contact and keep walking. Then it's one of those things because it makes you
feel uncomfortable inside. But then as you do it, you actually become more confident, because confidence is simply not having a fear of rejection more or less. And if you do these things anyway, So I just think it's absolutely wonderful. I think that men today, you know, especially if you want to be valuable in the dating pool, you have
got to accept that rejection is your world. Uh. And when you accept that and you become comfortable and confident in the world of rejection, than the world's your Oyster, and then also that john Sons another video that I don't remember exactly what it was, but I had it in the same bookmark place where I had this other one was called how to Become a Man, and it's it's about stoicism and stuff. So that's that's all kind of one pick is rejection therapy, and and I guess
in general stoicism. I can't cannot recommend it enough. I something similar to this is what changed my world, and I went from not being able to get dates to being able to get dates with anybody that I wanted to get dates with. Now actually extending that to relationship is a completely different story, because it's a you know, the door salesman game is completely different than the Life partner game. But but you know, you got to you gotta do the one to get to the other at
some point. Anyway. The other pick I have is there's an AI Model Leader leader board, so if you want to stay up to date with well, I don't know.
I mean, it's kind of be exhausting to be downloading new models all the time, but you know, if you want to keep an eye on which models are performing the best, which you know, of course, open AI's models are always playing leapfrog with the other models, and so you're probably seventy five percent of the time the open A models are on the top, but they're not that much further ahead. I mean we're talking we're down to
a matter of like one to two percentage points. So most of the other models are not most of the other models. Most of the other groups that are producing models, that have been producing models for a long time, their models, you know, leapfrog and get up there within a couple of percentage points. And a lot of them are open source and so like open ai was supposed to be. So if you want to keep on track to top of the AI stuff, it's evl plus, dot getthub, dot io,
slash leaderboard, dot HTML. That link will be in the notes,
and then Olama slash search. So once you go check out the model on the leaderboard, then you can check it out at a Lama and then you can see, you know, you can run it for yourself, play with it, see if it's fast enough, if you like it, and then and then of course you know, if you want to install Alama easy and quickly web installed, dot dev slash Alama and you can you can do that, and I I mostly use chat GPT just because it's convenient, but I do run models locally and a lot of
them are just as good or slightly better depending on the topic. I mean, particularly downloading a model that's tuned for coding, you can get them that are a little bit better or at least just as good. And so playing with different models I've I've enjoyed. I've enjoyed that experience and you know, being able to run it, run it on my own hardware. Now, granted, you do have to have like thirty two gigs ARAM for a lot of these models, or at least sixteen you know, that's
that's available. But anyway, so those those are my picks reject therapy and places to check out the top AI models and experiment with them.
You know.
One of the things I'd like to do aja to practice that, you know, along the lines of the looking people's eyes, is when I get in elevators or I turn around and face inward from the front, makes people all kind of nervous.
Do you really do that?
Though I have done it before, Yeah, I don't do it every time, but God bless it.
There's a famous sociological experiment where they put they had people walking to elevators and people inside were standing facing like wind directions, and people basically align themselves with the group.
Yeah. Well, you know, when I was younger, I had this crazy uncle. He used to take all of us and make us stand still and quiet for two minutes and not say a word, and he called it elevator practice.
All right, I am going to throw in my picks. So the first one's a board game. It's called Heat. It is a game. It's a racing board game. So you you all have your cars. You can play up to like eight players, I think with the expansion without
the expansions up to six players. And what you what you wind up doing is you play with a deck of cards, uh that that are in your hand, and you're you're essentially trying to get around the track the fastest, right, whoever gets We play two laps, and so after two laps, whoever's the furthest past the finish line wins. Now, it has curves on the track, and so if you go around the track too fast on that curve, then you take heat in your engine. And the Heat cards are
basically they just take up space in your hand. If you run out of heat, then you spin out and you go back to the the curve that you blew past, right, and so then you've got to get around the curve without taking any more heat, and then you've got there are ways to get rid of heat and all that stuff. It's it was a really really fun game. We played it and like I think when there were six of us, we played it in like a half hour or sorry, in an hour. When there were four of us, I
think it took us like forty five minutes. So really not that bad board game. Geek waits it at two point one point nine, so casual. It is the top end of your casual player. You know what you're willing to attack. But anyway, it's it's a lot of fun. There are multiple boards or multiple tracks I guess you can play on, and so yeah, you're it's really just that that management of your deck. I think some of the expansions give you like power ups, but the main
deck you don't. You just you just play your deck and then try and manage your speed in your heat. And that's really it, right, It's okay, how fast can I take this turn? And then how quickly can I bleed the heat off before I have to take the next turn, the next curve. And so you know, if the curve is a five and you go ten, you take five heat. You only have seven heat in your deck, and so if you don't have the five heat, then you spin out. And so that that's the game you're
playing with that. It's it's a lot of fun. I don't know if I'm doing it justice, but we really had a good time. And it's really not that complicated a game to pick up. The steps are on your playing card or your play matt and so you just literally just go down the thing. And the only thing you do simultaneously is you you put the cards face down that you're going to do, and then you can
flip them over. You flip them all over at the same time, and then you just play them in order first place to last place, and there are some catchup mechanisms and stuff, so you know, if you get way behind, you can definitely do that. I'm going to pick a couple of books as well. I really have enjoyed these. I'm almost done with the second one. The first one
is Hit Refresh by Satia Nadella. Satia is the CEO of Microsoft, and anyway, he kind of now the book's not current, right, so it doesn't have the last few years of history from Microsoft, but he talks about when he took his history and then how we took over a Microsoft and how they kind of changed direction, and it's you know, solve some of the issues that were there inside the company. And anyway, it was really really good.
I really really can't recommend this book highly enough. It was fun that it was in tech, and it was fun that it was, you know, somebody that I had actually seen speak because I've gone to Microsoft conferences in the past and anyway, hit refresh. Terrific, terrific book. He reads part to the book on the audiobook. That's how I consumed it. He reads parts of it himself, but
there's a narrator for the rest. It's basically the parts he does the forward, and I think he does the afterward, and then there's like one or two parts where he talks about his disabled son and that's kind of personal,
and so he reads that part himself as well. But it was really really good and I found it inspiring, just because I think a lot of times we get the idea that just because things worked out and you know whatever, that these people somehow have this like blessed life and no challenges and stuff like that, and it turns out that, you know, he went through some stuff too, some personal stuff, and there were some real challenges in
the way that they had to approach things. The other book is American Icon by Bryce Hoffman, and he talks about the turnaround at Ford, and so he kind of gets into some of the history of the Ford Motor Company and what led up to them I'm hiring Alan Molalley as their CEO, and then all of the things that they went through to basically revitalize and rescue Ford up through the Great Recession and all that stuff. And
it's been really fascinating to listen to as well. I think I've got like an hour left on that book, it is so good. And then the other I have another fiction book series that I want to pick and I don't remember if I picked this before, but they're worth picking again anyway. It's the sort of truth books, and those are by Terry Goodkind. I read them when I was in high school, and well, the ones that were out when I was in high school. The first one's called Wizard's First Rule, and I'll put a link
to that here as well. It's in the chat in the.
Yeah, I like those books. It's one of the best magicals, most about magical systems I've ever seen in a fantasy book series.
Yeah, it's it's so good. I've really really enjoyed them. I'm on book six or seven.
Oh, actually I confused it with another book series. Sorry, you're you're saying it was its first rule. Yeah, yeah, no, it's I read that as well, but I was thinking of a different one.
Never mind, I'm curious what you confused it with.
But yeah, that while you while you speak, I'll do a quick search because I don't want to get through the name wrong again.
Fair enough. The last pick I have is, so I am talking to you. I mentioned this earlier, and I kind of wanted to put this up as a potential trend, but I don't know. I don't know if it will or won't come to pass. So anyway, I I switched to Linux off of mac oes and part of the deal was so I've been running on the left, so you know, kudos to Mac. I was running on a Mac laptop for the last six five or six years, and I mean, you know, the thing did everything I
needed to up until recently. I had a couple of clients that had their applications running essentially on a Docker composed and so once I fired up the Docker agent on which is doctor Desktop on the Mac, my machine would just grind to a halt. It was super slow, and so I was looking at things and thinking, you know, this is not working for me, and I need another machine.
So I looked into getting a new Mac and I could get another Mac laptop, but again, the resources on the on the laptops were not where I wanted them. I been diving into AI a bunch, and you know that kind of taxes the resources sometimes, and so I
wanted something that had a whole lot more horsepower. And so then I looked at a MacPro, and the MacPro with all the things that I wanted in it was like eleven thousand dollars and I thought, okay, well, you know, at the time, I was on a contract that I expected to last that didn't, and so I thought I could afford it, and so I almost pulled the trigger
on that, and then I just decided not to. But at the same time, I was trying to get this work done and it would just go kind of slow, and so I was poking around the internet looking for something else, and I found a company called System seventy six, and System seventy six is they sell desktop machines, and since I generally work here at my desk, I figured that would be a great option, kind of like the MacPro, and so it it. I can't remember all the specs.
I think as one hundred and twenty eight gigs a RAM, I've got like, you know, four terabytes of hard drive space in there, you know, so I'm well beyond what my laptop had. And it runs a Buntu Linux. So there have been a few things and I've kind of had to figure out, hey, I like this on the Mac, how do I do it on Linux? But so far I haven't really been disappointed with what I can do on the Mac or on the on the Linux machine.
I have not tried to hook up my ATM mini yet, which is how I do my green screen, so I might have to run some of that off of the Mac. But it does that fine. But I mean other than that, you know, and if I have to do Photoshop or something, I'll just open up the Mac. It's not a big deal. But the rest of it, I am delighted with the way that it runs. It's fast, it does everything I need, you know, all the Docker stuff, it just does it because it's not running it in a VM, which was
what was killing my performance on my Mac. And so yeah, at the end of the day, System seventy six is where I got it. I love recommending good stuff. I wish they had an affiliate program because then I'd get paid to recommend good stuff. But go check them out because they're awesome for laptops. If you're looking for laptops in the same vein. The one that I keep hearing about is the Framework laptop. I haven't used. I haven't
bought one, but that's where I'm looking next. And they sell Linux laptops, but they're modular, and so if you want to upgrade a part of it, you can actually just buy that part from Framework and swap it in your machine. So you can upgrade the RAM, you can upgrade the screen, you can upgrade whatever you want off of it, and you literally just pull the part off and put the other part on. And so that appeals to me from the standpoint of you know, then I
can have the laptop I want. And if I can't quite buy the laptop with all the bells and whistles I want, I can eventually just upgrade the pieces one bit at a time. So anyway, yeah, I what Linux would do. But I have, Like I said, it's it's been able to do pretty much everything I need.
Sorry, I interrupted before we finish. You asked me about the book.
Uh.
The book I was referring to is uh called Master of the Five Magics by Lindon Hardy. If you're not familiar with it, it's it's actually it's it's from the eighties. It's it's uh. It has one of the best magic systems. It's actually probably he it became a series, but it can be read as a standalone book, and it's got one of the best, most thought out magic systems I've seen in a fantasy book. Huh.
I'm gonna have to add that to my wish list. I'll see, I always looking for great.
I'll add that to my picks I'll send you. I'll put in the link.
Awesome. All right, Well, I am done with my picks. Just a reminder go to AIDEV boot camp dot com If you want to get in on the boot camp, I'm looking at starting it like the fifteenth ish of January. So anyway, um, if that's everything, we'll just wrap it up until next time. Folks max out