How'd you like to listen to dot NetRocks with no ads? Easy? Become a patron for just five dollars a month you get access to a private RSS feed where all the shows have no ads. Twenty dollars a month will get you that and a special dot net Rocks patron mug. Sign up now at Patreon dot dot NetRocks dot com. Hi, this is Carl Franklin.
And this is Richard Campbell.
We've got two special shows coming up soon, episode nineteen ninety nine and two thousand.
For episode nineteen ninety nine, we're collecting people's y two k stories what did you do to help the Y two k event not actually happen?
And for episode two thousand, we're going to be sharing stories about how dot net shaped your career.
We have a special page at dot netroocks dot com slash voxpop where you can record messages for us that we can play on these special episodes. So tell us what you did for Y two k and what dot net means to you, and of course how long you've been listening to dot net rocks. So go do dot NetRocks dot com slash vox pop now and leave us a message before the thought of operates like whiskey left in a glass overnight, do it?
Hey, guess what it's dot net rocks. And I got a cold and I sound like pooh, a.
Little cray, a little croaky there, my friend, This is Richard Campbell, and I do not have a cold.
I feel great. Yeah, okay, rub it in. So let's start right off. This is Show nineteen hundred and ninety eight. So let's talk about what happened in the year nineteen ninety eight.
Oh, it was quite a year. Got any favorites?
Well, good Friday Agreement, Yeah, that's a good one. And in decades of conflict in Northern Ireland with the Brits called the Troubles, didn't.
Quite end it because a couple a couple months later there's the album Yeah, but that really tipped it over the edge, Like there were some people that were angry at the at the agreement. Then they did that and they response that everyone was like, no, we're really freakin done. Yeah, so it did take one more bombing, but then it was that seemed to be over. That's great news.
Yeah. So the United States embassy bombings Kenya and Tanzania was not good. The Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinski scandal that happened.
Yeahsted On Drudge, Thank you Internet, Yeah, the pre two thousand Internet.
Monica Lewinsky and I just have to tell you also the big Lebowski. Yeah, coincidence.
I'll get there Lewinsky, Yeah, good call.
Clinton was subsequently impeached, yeah, eventually, but later acquitted by the Senate. The Coosovo conflict between Serbian forces and ethnic Albanians.
Well at that point they were still the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
But yes, sir, right, Yeah, so that you know, we'll talk about that next year.
Yeah, into ninety nine.
Indian Pakistan did some nuclear tests. Yeah, that was, you know, kind of a little dense, little tension over there.
You know, you can really get weird on the geopolitics side of this thing because one of the things they did was meant they don't really attack each other anymore because they're both nuclear armed, Like they were headed towards a major conflict and had been skirmishing for a while. Yeah, and adding these weapons to the equation changed the dynamic substantially. Not that they're peaceful, no, you know, as the cashieries. Even today, it's still bad yeah, but it did definitely change.
But I think they've kind of figured out that they can't really use them against each other because it just means mutual blow uppiness.
And also that's why they have to negotiate. I think they can skirmish a bit, but they're not really going to go try to destroy each other's countries.
Big hurricane, Hurricane Mitch in the Atlantic Hitch. Central America got devastated by that, the Second Congo War, multi nation conflict in Africa. Financial crisis. Yeah, Russia defaulted on debt and devalue the ruble, which impacted global markets.
They defaulted on domestic debt. They just told all the foreign debt, yeah, we're not going to be paying right now. But we'll get around to it.
And I'll jump over to Richard's side for a minute. Google was founded in nineteen ninety.
Eight, It's true. Yeah, it's a good one.
By Larry Page and Sergei Brinn. Yeah, and there was some other stuff, but I don't want to be labor it. So whoa, there's some spacey Yeah, Big Year ninety eight. We'll start off the first one of the very first missions of the year in January, small Athena rocket four stage Charlot rocket called lifted a tiny satellite called Lunar Prospector. It was a bargain sixty three million dollars and it did surface composition mapping of the Moon. It found large
bodies of thorium. It also was one of the first intentional tools for trying to locate hydrogen oxygen in the polls. Only operated for eighteen months and did get some good sensing, and then it's mission ended by deliberately crashing into the Moon in a continuously shaded area of a crater, hoping to generate a plume that they could then do some spectrophy on to try and measure whether it was actually water.
Didn't work, but they will later go on with the Lunar Constance Arbiter and a secondary mission of that.
That will actually succeeded. That so very relevant for us at this moment, Artemis two, while we're recording this is in space and on the far side of the Moon. First time humans have been back there in decades, and so.
Well, Pink Floyd went there. That's for a brief moment.
And every time I played song im back. But Prospector was one of these series of missions that really sort of set the path to where we are right now. Over on the shuttle side, there were what six Shuttle missions total, but some of them are really really very important. There are two Shuttle Mirror missions in ninety eight and Dever in January and Discovery in June, and that will be the last time a Shuttle will visit Mirror. It'll be deorbited in another year or so. And then there
are a couple. There's the final space Lab mission with Columbia that's the laboratory module in the Paloa Bay, and then one of the space Hab missions with Discovery that also had at that time Senator John glenn On the first first American to orbit the Earth also got to be the oldest American to fly in space. And then
the big ones. So in November, the Russia Federation flies the functional cargo block named Azaria as the first module of the International Space Station, lifted on a pro con k and put into a fifty three D inclination orbit. And then the following month Endeavor, the Shuttle meets up with that Zaria module and berths not docs because it's not autonomous, as she uses the arm to birth the Unity module also known as Node one to Zaria, and
this is beginning of the International Space Station. Okay, on the computing side, boy, there's some important things to talk about. I'm going to go one of the biggest ones right off the bat, which is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. So this was a set of laws passed by the US to comply with two treaties that have been plassed
by the World Intellectual Property Organization out of Geneva. This is the whole idea of whether or all electronic works can be had to deserve copyright protection, and a number of other steps, some of which are fairly clever or mostly harmless, and some of them which are really quite problematic,
which sounds like a very reasonable thing. And to you, if you dig in deeper into this story, you realize that there's a guy named Bruce Lehman who was part of the Clinton administration, who had been for years trying to prepare laws for Congress to pass to provide those kinds of protections, and the Cress consistently ignored them, and so instead he went to Geneva and lobbied with the WIPO to get those treaties passed to force Congress to pass them and we can debate with it. Really incredible
at all. Now, admittedly the US had not done any copyright legislation since like nineteen seventy six, like something did need to be done. But all of this is pretty wacky. And there's two aspects that I think most people talk about. When is the section five to twelve, known as the safe Harbor's rule. This is the whole idea that if you run a website with user generated content, you can't be held liable for that user generated content as long as, when requested, you take it down. Right. So this is
think YouTube, Facebook, like all those sorts of things. When one of their users publishes puts copyrighted material on there, you can request takeout and take it down. Now, it's problematic in the sense that it has been utilized inappropriately to take down things they shouldn't probably take down, you know, stuff that you might even have. We've seen copyright holders publisheduff and then have it taken down.
And keep in mind that this is nineteen ninety eight, so websites have only been around.
For five or six You've not even there yet, right, Yeah, So it there's a lot of conversation about whether it should be revised. Let's face it, this is an old piece of legislation, like it needs to major refresh. But the real sticking point, the real public one, is twelve oh one, which is the anti circumvention clauses. So the whole idea here was that any activity involved in circumventing a protection of any kind like digital rights management so forth,
is an infringement of the law is chargeable. And that becomes really problematic because it was so generalized that it blocked all kinds of things that didn't intend to. So they have this every three year review where they add exemptions. For example, in the first iteration of exemptions in two
thousand they exempted blocklists. So when the DC blocklists. Yeah, so when the DMCA was passed, nominally you could sue someone because you'd create a list of ad sites that you didn't want to see and block them with your DNS would be a crime according to the Handy circumissions, So they made an exception for that. Now there's lots of argument about the problems, how they've been gone about this, whether it even makes sense. Now we're getting into part
of the right to repair problems. Come around with all this anty circumvention, Like, it's probably the most difficult part of d MCA, wildly overdue for rework, but I suspect that's not going to happen for the next few years. Yeah, okay, other internety things that are important. You already mentioned Google, which certainly is important. But the IETF, the Internet Task Force formerly ratifies IPv six. Nobody cared then, and nobody
cares now. The W three C moves XML to the recommendation status, which now makes us as developers start to use it and become sad. And this is the year that Internet Explorer passes Netscape in browser market share, which is funny because this is also the year that the Department of Justice files an anti trust lawsuit against Microsoft. It's also the year of Windows ninety eight and at comdex Gates shows off a pre release version of ninety eight.
Goes to demonstrate the new plug and play capabilities, plugs up a scanner into the machine and it blue screens to a worldwide audience. And since that point, anytime I made a senior executive at Microsoft is on any kind of stage, there is a mirror system. They put an entire second system backstage, and somebody is mirroring the demo step by step, and so if something like that happens again, you swap to the mirror because presumably that one won't crash.
Thought that it stopped to other failures. But that's where all of that began. Also, this is the year that Microsoft announces the unification of the wind nine X and T lines that will actually happen with Windows two thousand and for us personally, most importantly for Microsoft Visual Basic six.
Yeah.
Yeah, that was a good year. A couple other bits and pieces, some other hardware. This is the year that Jobs, who's just been back at at Apple for a year and a half or so. He came back in ninety seven ships the iMac, a Johnny I've divine zion machine in the era of the beige PC box. Imax were all in one. They were kind of egg shaped, and they came in five colors.
People loved them.
Yeah, they were a design icon, right.
Rob, Do you have an iMac?
My mom? Did I inherited the iMac after a while?
Yeah?
Cool?
And they originally were shipped for thirteen hundred dollars US back in the day, which then was expensive. But you know it's Apple last, but not least, the very first MP three player released in Japan. It's Sahan's MP Man. We're still ways away from Diamond Rio yet, right, but MP three's coming and we'll be part of later story.
Yeah. Well, I have the top ten movies, top ten grossing movies of nineteen ninety eight. Godzilla?
Okay, remember Godzilla again?
Did you ever see the original Godzilla?
Well, you go all the way back.
All the way back to black and white Japanese.
I have a friend who's collected all of those Godzilla movies. Yeah, which wouldn't bother me, except he makes me watch them too, which is unfortunately.
In New England, there was a Channel fifty six out of Boston and they used on Saturday have Creature double feature, which was like two bad you know, black and white monster movies back to back. All right. Deep Impact is the Is that the number nine movie?
Is that the Bruce Willis one?
Yeah?
I think so, Okay, I didn't watch it. That was Armageddon. I think Deep Impact is the Morgan Freeman one where everybody dies.
Okay, Rush Hour with Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker. It's kind of a fun violent movie.
Doctor Doolittle, Eddie Murphy with Eddie Murphy, right, the water.
Boy with Adam Sandler, Bugs Life, Yeah, so that was was.
That Seinfeld was just like the Year of the Commune in movies.
Early Pixar movie. Yeah, there's something about Mary Hair Joe. Yeah, Saving Private Ryan. Oh boy, Armageddon was the one you were thinking with Bruce Willis. Yeah, there you go, Bruce Willis. Yeah that was number two.
Okay, same somebody the Asteroids is during the world year.
Well, I think that was on everyone's mind. Apparently Titanic came out. Oh yeah, that was the number one grossing movie by far.
And yeah, we'll clean up at the Oscars.
Yeah, Armageddon made about five hundred and fifty three million. Titanic made two point two billion dollars.
Because I think he spent a billion of it just making the thing.
I think you're right.
Yeah, yeah, he was wildly over budget. But it's James Cameron. Nobody could tell him anything, and after this he pulled this off, nobody really could tell him anything.
Yeah that's true.
Avatar. Yeah, awesome.
Okay, so let's get on to better know for framework, unless Rob, you have anything you want to add about movies or yeah.
I was at the time living in San Francisco in the Marina District and really fun place to live anyway, on Chestnut. I lived right off Chestnut.
Wow.
There was a street with three movie theaters on it and all three of them had Titanic playing. Wow, because it was a moneymaker right within it, within a mile. I know, it's crazy. You could pick your theater as wild.
Wow. All right, let's roll the music for better no framework, all right, du So, as I usually do, I went searching for when I when I don't have a new Simon crop.
Tool, when Simon Krop has it? Just delivered you a BF Yeah, exactly as he does also often thank you Simon.
Yeah, he's awesome. So I went to the list of trending repos on GitHub that are English and C sharp and I found one that I've never seen before. So it's Tixel capital T lowercase I, capital X, capital L. But it's really called tool three t L L three. It's a real time animation toolkit. And I watched the video and it just convinced me how stupid I am. There's no way I could ever use this to do anything.
It's a way of thinking, like anytime.
You're yeah, anytime you're drawing Bezier curves and heuristics and stuff like that to change stuff in real time. I'm completely dumb about this, but here's what it is. It's an open source app to create real time motion graphics.
Cool.
So they're targeting the sweet spot between real time rendering, graph based procedural content generation and linear keyframe animation and editing. So it allows artists to build audio reactive VJ content. In other words, play this video while you're listening to this music you know, or you know, make graphic around this music in real time, use advanced interfaces for exploring parameters,
or to combine key frame animation with automation. The video is pretty impressive, but like I said, unless you're in that, you know, in that genre or in that business, you're probably not going to know what the heck to do with this thing. That's cool, but you know, if you are, hey, it's open source and it works and it's pretty cool. I would at least watch the video, yeah, to see to judge your stupidity about how.
Let you know, you don't understand, Okay, I just don't understand it.
Yeah, it's not my thing, but it's cool. Yes, all right, that's what I got. Richard, who's talking to us.
Grabbed a Comma tav Shows thirteen eighty five. Yes, sir, jump back about ten years to a certain show we did with a certain Rob Connery called Imposter Syndrome.
Oh yeah, that was a good one.
Oh wow. It was such a good book, too, right, And there were so many good comments on this that I shows that I never read. I figured I had to go grab one. This is from the running deb who I believe his name is Andy, and he says minutely, this is nine years ago. I love, love, love this show. Guys, I've been smitten, and then prioritetically says, is that too much? Am I just a big fan of Rob Connery ever
since I found out about Subsonic. Yeah, oh wow. I've always considered him one of the smartest people in the industry.
Wow, we do too.
I think that it's very it's very sweet. I think it's very human for everyone to struggle with what they know what they don't know. But it's also very important to recognize how much you actually know. I ponder on this often as I try to be a better developer, a mentor and still be open to learning new things. It's okay to have a strong opinion on something given the information you have at the moment. But what makes it even more okay? Tom, you were wrong later when
you have different information. Nothing is absolute. I will never know everything you say out loud and be okay with it. I value and honest I don't know much more more than when they try to talk like they do know, because eventually I'll figure out you don't know, right. I think that is the definition of an impostor pretending to know, not willing to learn, and not willing to consider something
outside your box. A friend once told me that smart people don't always think they know enough, and idiots think they know everything. That's right and as an echo to Richard and Carl's point, just because it's easy for you doesn't mean it's easy for everyone. Yeah, but part of the human condition is to undervalue ourselves, and that goes much deeper than education or being an expert in your field. I have a calm side agree, but I only have a vague idea of what big O notation is. This
is the first time I heard of NP complete. I'm okay with that. When it becomes practical for me to learn it. I will.
You're reminding me of when I wrote my first book in nineteen ninety four for John Wellinson's Visual Basic Internet Programming. I read all of the requests for Proposals RFPs for all these protocols, and I thought I knew what I was talking about, but I really didn't, and I made some serious mistakes and the technical mistakes and the description
of some things. But you know, some people were kind of mean about it, and others were like, you know, it's really cool that he's taking an interest in trying to figure this stuff out. Sure it just wasn't figured out until the second revision at least.
So yeah, So Adam, thank you so much for your comment. And copy of music Go Buy is on its way to you. And if you'd like a copy of music Go Buy, I write a comment on the website at dot arocks dot com or on the facebooks. We publish every show there, and if you comment there and it real in the show, we'll send you copy music go By.
Have you said that before, Richard.
Nope, first time ever. I just played as a recording man. I don't have to keep saying it each time. He said, how you just watched me say it again.
It's Ai. You got caught.
Yeah, well that voice you heard. The other voice you heard is that of Rob Connery. Rob works at Microsoft with a vs Code team, creating content for YouTube, as well as contributing to open source projects. Rob is also the author of The Impostor's Handbook, The Impostor's Roadmap, and A Curious Moon, which is one of Richard's favorite books because.
Especially the ending. The ending is awesome.
Yeah, and it's a novel, right it is.
It's a novelization that teaches, and he does such a good job of it, except oh you're nice. It's one of my very favorite stories.
Yeah. One small correction. I do not work at Microsoft anymore, but I used to.
Oh yeah you have all right, Well, we got to update your bio. Do you want to?
I know, I sent you some out of date information. Sy, okay, I'll have my bots, my open claw, I'll have my open class send you an updated have.
Your open claw talk to my open close.
That's right, exactly.
Oh my god, open claw. Don't get me started on that.
No, it's funny. As you guys are doing the intro, I was sitting here trying to debug something and I managed to completely destroy the whole thing, so it's totally bricked sitting.
Wow, so it's gone.
Well what you're telling me, Yeah, it's exactly right. I'm very good at this AI thing. You got this thing, nail. But I've been watching your posts on LinkedIn and elsewhere, like you've clearly dove in and really trying to think through another way to build software.
Yeah, it's interesting. I was trying to describe this to a friend the other day and they said, what are you doing? You know, do you even build software anymore? I'm like, oh, gosh, you know, yeah, every day I have like four or five things that are all running. But I also I've gotten into consulting recently with a
group of friends, and I help them. You know, I have to go into these big fortune five hundred companies and sit with these teams and so, you know, I have to be able to do all the things that they're doing because I have to show them, you know, what's going on. But it's fascinating where we are. And the thing that I found myself getting into the most is the human interface between AI and and people. And
so when I do get calls from larger companies. I say, let's sidestep the technical stuff because this is going to be organizational for you. It's it's a human thing.
Oh for sure.
Yeah, and so we're going to probably you're going to be looking at possible staff reduction straight away. Let's not do that. Let's think about repurposing folks. Let's think about so I instantly get into the human aspect of it all, which is fun. It's what I really enjoy.
Question about how much how many projects have never gotten touched, how much tech debt has not been resolved? Right? I think about anthropics work with Firefox and turning up a couple of hundred bugs in a matter of time, Like we should all be doing this to all the software that our companies depend on.
Yeah, it's amazing, and security scanning and all of the other things that it's good at.
Yeah.
I worked with a client just last week and I said, what is the what is the most time consuming boring thing that you guys do? And you know, at the time, they're like, we're trying to do this new application. We want to make this you know, major new shift and everything, Like tell me just the boring stuff straight away, and like, oh, well, we have the CTL process. It takes us six weeks. Yeah, I said, let's do it, and we got it done in ninety minutes. Ninety minutes.
That's so awesome.
Ninety minutes you had cracked it.
Ninety minutes. We went through a wizard and I said, make it an impotent make sure it's a CLI. Let's make this a full application. Now, let's broaden this out. And their dev team it was hysterical. They were like, there was the two people on the team that were openly not liking AI, but once they saw this, they're like, if I don't have to do this again, Oh my god, this is my favorite figure world. Yeah, ETL. For those
that don't know, it's an extraction, transformation and loading. It's a CSVS into a database usually, and it's a massive pain in the butt, the hoops you got to jump through. So yeah, sure, but you've done the classic consultant thing. You just went and found the eighty twenty moment right exactly.
Well, it's the thing in creasy, the most pain. Let's see if we can move it.
Let's see if we can get the team on board. Actually, that going back to the human layer layer thing is you know you got to address the opposition because there's a ton and they said, let's just let's get some instant winds under our belt, and to do I have everybody on board and then probably turn those nie sayers into champions and then off we go.
Yeah, a whole lot of arguments go away, like more of that please? Right?
Yeah? So I particularly like what you said that you say, let's not fire everybody. The knee jerk reaction is to downsize, but repurpose them and give each of them the tool, find out where what the area is that they'd like to improve, either in the infrastructure or the documentation or the code itself, or and just sick them, you know, and say all right, this is your tech, this is your thing. You go do that or technical debt. Okay, Bob, that's yours.
Right.
Well, very curious thing is starting to happen. And I've heard this four times between four different clients, which was put very clearly to me in this last one that I just talked to, that they have these professionals, the subject matter experts, whatever, the let's just call them, you know, the people that actually do things, and then you have the dev team. Right, These professionals are using openclaw and other things to make their own applications because they don't
want to deal with it or the software teams. And I was like, well, okay, well now you know where the repurposing is going to go. Turn those people on to you know, like you've got to loose enough the hierarchy here. You can't now have the same orgs anymore. You now have to move into having professional services work directly with these trainers, because that's what they are, these AI folks that keep the tones.
Of the AI.
And it's really interesting to walk people through this because every time I get a call, you know, they have a very clear thing in mind of what they want to do. And one client said to me, Okay, help me understand this. It's the bottom of the ninth I have. I'm going up. You know, they're using a baseball analogy, of course, bottom of the ninth. I'm coming up. I'm about to swing. How can how can AI help me hit a home run? And you know, and I was like, well,
that's a fascinating question. How about you take five bats up to the plate and swing at five pitches at once, you know, and knock them completely out of the park. And he kind of looked at me. He's like, what are you even talking about right now? And I said, exactly, you can't. You don't know what you don't know. Literally, and the process of finding out as I sit with these folks is so crazy because they still even not talking to a developer friend the other day, this was hysterical.
I was showing him a thing that he could do to starest up his productivity and what he was doing, and he just looked at me. He's like, I had no idea that was possible.
It was.
I was walking him through an inspiration skill that I use with a Claude and where it inspires me and then we resonate and then it helps me with rainstorm and then we come up with a plan so I don't have to think of everything myself. And I had no idea that you could do that, and I said yeah. Within two days he called me back and said, look what I just did, and if what I didn't know you could do that.
It's just so fun.
Yeah, so's it's a fun learning experience.
Well, my customers love it that I can be productive, you know, and and have those conversations, you know, as with an architect agent you know, help me talk me through this. Here's what I'm thinking. Is this a good idea? Is that a good idea? Just like I would with an architect, And you know, nine times out of ten come back with this, Yeah, you're you're on the right track with this is the wrong tool for the job?
You've got to do that, or you know this isn't necessary because of this and that, And it's just kind of good. It's good to even at the beginning of the process to help shape your ideas. I mean, it's one of the things that we developers like to do is just jump in and write code rather than thinking through what's the best approach.
When I'm working with these teams, and it's usually folks that either are skeptical or haven't used it or whatever, and they basically all want to know the same thing. How do I write a good prompt?
Right?
And said, all right, well let's start here. You know, you write a good prompt by telling the agent who it is or what it is, and then you tell it what you need. But the last two things are the most important thing. What am I not thinking about? What's your opinion or what's a good idea? Or what do you recommend those two questions. Well, I'll tell you if the listeners don't take anything away from this podcast other than you're a brilliant opener with all the nineteen
ninety eight references, just remember those two things. What am I missing? What do you recommend? And your use of AI will skyrocket? Interesting because it does often because it has an infinite checklist. Often it's got considerations.
You just haven't hit you yet.
That's right.
Even if it can't necessarily implement it correctly, that's not the important part. It's just now the idea is in your head. It won't go away. You've already demonstrated one strategy for dealing with nasayers. Are there others? Like how do you get past the folks just want nothing to do with us or much leadership? I?
Yeah, so, yeah, it's funny. I talked to a lot of folks, which is fun It's one of the things I am enjoying about the work I get to do now. And I talked to somebody who basically said, convince me that AI is the way to go. Convince me this isn't a fad. Literally just had this call five days ago.
Nice and I.
Said no, and yeah, and they said, well, that's a little arrogant, and I'm like, I don't mean to be arrogant. I'm not here to convince you. You will be convinced so in the next six months. And they said, well, that's what I'm asking you to do, and I said, I'm not.
I I.
It's it feels like you know all these conversations I've had in history about the web, right, it's a web of fad. You know, everybody thought it was is it really going to be taking over business? Of course it isn't. You know, it did to a large degree. But you know, even you know my Microsoft days, you know, why do we care about unit tests? Why do we care about source control? Why do we care about this?
And that?
It's like, gosh, I could argue with you. I'm not here to argue. I'm not here to sell, I'm not here to do anything. So it's usually what I do. I shouldn't need to persuade you. It should be obvious. Yeah, And I usually try and say it the nicest way possible because I don't want to come off as arrogant
at all. But you know, I'll usually say I'll be here when you convince yourself in the next few months, I'll be here and I'm you know, here's here's a few things you can try for yourself, and that's about it. And Richard answer your question directly. It's it's mostly solving someone's actual problem as opposed to waving your arms with Hey, here's a to do list demo, right, and that's the hardest thing.
Yeah, I know. I think you're totally right, Like you went after their hardest, most painful problem and everything gets easier after that.
Exactly right.
I think it's a good place to take a break. So we'll be right back after these very important messages. Welcome back. It's dot net Rox. I'm Carl Franklin. That's Richard Campbell. Hey, and that's Rob Connery and we're talking his AI philosophy and his tooling approach and all of that.
And I wanted to read about eleven days ago, we got a comment on show number nineteen ninety four, which was building software using Squad with Brady Gaster, which was fascinating, and Paulo Pinto says, while interesting as always, the whole squad enthusiasm was pretty much focused on single developers' workflow now not having to depend on anyone else to do related development tasks. It was all about their nicknamed agents, without any ethical discussion of what tooling like Squad will
have in developer teams. I've already observed how teams have been downsized thanks to SaaS products replacing the need for back end developers AI tooling doing the work of team members that used to do translations or asset creation for
CMS platforms. Now we get tools like Squad reducing even further the amount of humans the loop getting celebrated what a single developer can achieve without taking into account the repercussions it has on those that are now deemed no longer needed to be kept around as employees in a
late capitalism driven society. If five developers can now do the work of twenty developers thanks to tooling like Squad, the remaining fifteen are out of the company, and like in old Detroit, they will need to find work that isn't yet taken by AI.
Thoughts, well, I think what that person is saying is changes here and I don't like it.
Someone moved my cheese.
Yeah, and I hear it, I hear it. I have to deal with this every day. This is unfortunately the negative side of my job.
I would also say it's often untrue, like you know, what's his name? The square guy comes out, Jack Dorsey and says, hey, we're letting four thousand people go because AI, and it's just a blatant lie, like actually, they did all this stuff in crypto and it's failed, and so
he's shutting down that group. But if you say, hey, we screwed up how these people and couldn't succeed, your stock price goes down, but your layoff as a AI stock price goes up, Like this is now the convenient excuse, you know for laying people off.
It's true, and you know, for the thing about squad, but there's something in there that I think is very true. It's like, how do we do AI with teams? Not a lot of people talk about that, But I would argue that, you know, the assumption that someone's going to get laid off because of AI is how can I
put this? It's accurate in that for a manager to see the ROI or to demonstrate ROI a reduction a headcount is boomed the immediate ROI, that's what they can demonstrate and go and say, we can lose these people but what they're also saying is we can trim down from the twenty twenty glut of hiring that we did because we wanted to grow, and we can now refocus and whatnot. So the question is what those people even be around in the next year or two anyway, Right,
So there's that. But two the other thing is what I'm finding a lot of teams are doing is they're actually just doing more.
Yeah, right, there's it's not like anybod who's getting in the bottom of the to do list, right, there's been stuff languishing there for years.
It's right, they're just doing more. And so that's.
A lot of stuff being ignorant because nobody wants to touch it, right.
It's hard.
Yeah, but these these these these riffs, these are these these layoffs are happening because of massive over hiring. And it's you know this this industry is people are far too used to this industry being what it is right now. It has not always been this way.
Well, we were told, we've been told the twenty five percent job of jobs were going unfilled and the industry was growing faster than we could hire. And I don't know if that's still true or not. I am much more aware, you know, in my years now working on boards and things that layoffs rarely have to do with the reason that we say right there, there's many reasons to do a layoff. You know, we talk about Microsoft
layingoff people. We actually read their annual report. It's like, sure, they laid off thirty thousand people, they also hired thirty thousand people. Like the hiring never stopped. But hires don't make the news. The layoffs.
Yeah, it's true. Well, let's think about it. You have twenty developers. Let's say, let's say half of them are idea people. In other words, they're they're creative developers, the ones that come up with the solutions, that find the
right architecture, that have those conversations and can develop. And the others are maybe the people, like Paulo said, doing the asset translations and you know, all that kind of stuff, just you know, the grunt work, the scut work of development, and they may or may not have the big picture about what the applications or the code in the company does and may not be able to operate at that
level with an AI. And I think those are the people who were on the you know, the first ones to get canned because because they're not used to thinking about having ideas and implementing those ideas.
I would also say that there are always two ways of looking at a thing. You can see the negative, you know. I call this the dump truck the dump truck analogy because my ex wife, when she was riding her bike, you know, from Seattle down to San Francisco, she had this beautiful stretch of road in front of her. Wow, and it was wonderful on the pch right, no one, no cars except for one dump truck that was parked twenty yards off the highway. And she said, all I
have to do is not hit that dump truck. And then you know, two minutes later, she's skidding to a halt one foot behind the dump truck because that's what she was focused on, right, and she almost hit it. So I think about this all the time. Brilliant story, but it's true. You can see the dark, you can see the negative and say there's the problem that could happen. It's right on the flip side. Is enabling so much, so many things. There are people that are out there
recreating sass for cheaper and they're driving prices down. Those are little startups that are happening. There are folks out there that don't want to run AI. In fact, one of the CEOs that I worked with said, a CEO's job is not to have open clock open. It is to hire someone to run the open clock. There is to hire someone to run this fleet of agents. There's still going to be companies out there that want to
do more instead of doing less. And I think we focus on these big companies that yes, a lot of them are trimming down, but all those folks are leaving now and they can start up their own companies to actually compete with the bigger companies. And it's fascinating and I think that we're going to see some really interesting churn.
But I would say, above all, if you're not investing in yourself and learning AI and AI touoling right now, you're really doing yourself a disservice because it's just here and you need to learn how to work with agents and orchestrate things and so on.
So Rob, as you know, the other side of my life is as a musician, right yeah. So, and I have this great ten piece and it's the best band I've ever played with, and we do all sorts of
great tunes, originals and covers. Steely Dan's our specialty. But anyway, the you know, I talk to the audience and I you know, say, hey, how you doing get them riled up and all that, And the thing that gets the biggest response is no AI was used in the development of this music tonight, And everybody goes nuts, right, I mean, you know, there's something about, hey, we're human, we're on stage and there's no AI. You know, people just love that.
But so AI has a black eye in terms of you know, certainly in terms of art and artists and especially copyright infringement and all that stuff. Artists are very very attuned to the problems there. But in my job as a software developer, it's ridiculously helpful, especially when working with small teams, you know. So just a juxtaposition.
Well, it's my girlfriend and I talked about this the other day, you know, I said, she said, oh, you could just have Claude write this because I have a newsletter coming out that I called it my gen X moment. We were in Japan and it was great. We were in Japan having a great time and she's on her phone asking Claude how to get to navigate the Japanese train stations. That takes a second. She goes, oh, we do this, this, this, this, this, and then puts her
phone in her pocket and we just went traveling. I looked at her. I'm like, have you noticed how much more time we have together. We don't have Google Maps open all the time, we don't have our transit are going. We just we asked AI what to do, come up with a plan for the day, and we just put the phone away. And I was like, I'm finding myself less and less on LinkedIn or other social media because it's all garbage. It's just Claude generated garbage. And I
don't I don't care. I don't want to read it. There are a few folks in there that I do, of course, but I'm actually sitting here thinking, whoa, this is like a drink from the fire hose moment where we are having to go out now and live in the real world, and I think it's it's kind of interesting what technology is bringing about, right and what this is the positive side of AI. And so she of course equipped me in you know, summary reforms. She said, well, you could have AI help you write that post.
No, that's not what I'm talking about.
Yeah, yeah, this is the interesting thing. We got into a conversation about writing, and he said, writing to me is absolutely.
This.
It's like doodling to an artist from playing music. For you, it's sure assembling words in a way that are kind of fun land and image or scene. And I might ask for structural help, I might ask for ideas of the post, but it'll sit in a corner and then I write it all the time. So there is a difference there, you know. So I don't know for you if you ever use AI to like, well, I have a composition and I'm trying to think about a way to make this a little bit well no, no, no, no.
I have friends who use is it suno to generate music I think that's the name of it, and other tools like that, and they're like and they share it with me, and it sounds so good, you know, and all that stuff, and I kind of tend to think of it. And I've said this before in the show as like what Cassio keyboards were to us when we were kids. You know, you play a rhythm, yeah, and then you play like a bassline. You can change chords and doodle stuff. So yeah, it's it's really cool what
these things can produce. However, I think that people want a human experience, whether it's writing, whether it's music or art or anything like that. If you smell AI, if they smell AI, they'll well, they'll turn up their nose.
I'm not going to disagree with you necessarily, but I do think this is a fascinating thing to consider that Again, another girlfriend's story on this. She loves country music and I'm not the biggest country music fan, but we're just
talking about things. We're driving along the north shore here of a Wahu and and we were just talking about I don't know, she was just talking about something or other and I was like, well, if you could see you, you know, this is like basically I was trying to tell her what I see about how we talked about something. And I said, gosh, that sounds like a pretty good country riff. And I was like laughing, like if you could see you, and She's like, ooh, I like that.
And then I'm like, let's have some fun. And so I have a tesla with groc in it now, and then I know, yeah, i'd like write me the lyrics to a song and it did. And she was like, these are really nice because she's all about the lyrics, because that's why she likes country so much. And so she we went and had lunch, and over lunch, I plugged in these lyrics into chat g BT and I said, write me a song. Make it this way, make it
that way. We kind of went over the lyrics and then I kicked up sono and I said, make this a country song. And of course, to me, this is funny. I was just having a fun time. I played it for her and she said that is absolutely beautiful and I was like, but it's fake, and she said it does doesn't matter. You made it right, and I was like, yeah, but it's fake. I didn't do any of the instruments. I didn't do any of the singing. She goes, that actually doesn't matter to me. The fact that you took
the time to put this together. For me, it was meaningful. Now this is her opinion, and you know, for me, I was like, this is such a fascinating conversation because you go to you go maybe buy a greeting card that was written by somebody else and you might add some words. Seris you know what I mean. I'm not saying it's good or bad to me. I felt like we were going into a place that is part of a new world that we are going to figure out. And it's weird.
You know what Kenny Rodgers said when he was driving his truck down the Pacific Coast Highway and one of his wheels fell off. God pick the fine time to leave me loose wheel.
Oh geez, I've I have many they have the art piece, but soft. Nobody's emotional about software right like they want the result of the software.
Have you talked to the guys recently.
I don't know, no, Because one everybody's using open source like it was successful. You could argue their methods, but we got there eventually.
Yeah, the uh. I've always had a fun time making up titles of country songs and leaving him there, you know, like like here's one put that thing away. That's a great country song. That would be it's kind of writing itself in your head now right.
Yeah, you know it's great, it's fun. Yeah, I have come to appreciate country. Was the one lyric I heard the other day. If a puzzle, a puzzle, piece of your life is missing I can't. It's something like that if a puzzle piece of life. Oh gosh, I should look it up. I just blew it. But it's a really good lyric and it's something about puzzle pieces and a missing piece, and I was like, oh, that's really close.
Here's another one. I only date girls named Julie and then in parentheses, so I'm never wrong when I call out her name.
Oh oh god. What was one? Yesterday? Was a lukecum song and it said you're the kind of woman that makes a man rethink things. What does that mean?
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontel of botomy. Yeah, that's okay, we digress. So I h I feel for the developers that check in in the morning, you know, get a list of bugs to fix, go about their business, have lunch, come back, fix a few more bugs, and then go home and you know, don't really have to get the creative part of software development. But there's a lot of those guys out there and gals of course, where they go. What do they do?
They just fix more bugs, you know, they do more things. They it's just a shift, you know, I thought about this. It's not the same thing. But Richard, I'd love your take on this one. When Rails came out, a lot of people don't realize the impact Rails had. Oh sure, moving from PHP, moving from dot net, moving from Java where we had it was arduous to basically do anything. And Rails came out.
You have to wire updated to a website in that time. It was a lot of work.
Ridiculous amount of productivity. And I sort of like you could ask that same question, you know, I used to come in and have to you know, do a fleet of unit tests and everything, you know, let's say, using dot net at the time, Whereas if you move to rails and there's a number of folks out there, Steve Harmon and others who jumped into the Rails bandwagon, all of a sudden we started doing yes, started doing these things, and like, well, I still write tests, but now I
generate them, you know, and I'm I'm doing stuff at you know, ten hundred miles an hour. I kind of think we're going to get It's just a change, it's just a shift. And ideally you work for a company that isn't going to try and stay at the same cadence that they're at. Instead they're going to embrace moving forward, which just means you need to figure out how to move faster. Sure, and you know, hopefully just show the company that.
If you are one of these creative people and you can go home for the weekend and think about product ideas for your company that would augment their product line, then and you know how to describe that and how to explain it, and you could write a document explaining it. You might that might be it. That might be your ticket because this is something a that isn't currently being done at your company. It's new. It's an opportunity to
create new revenue. And you know it'll get you and you know deep into an AI agent so that you could do it yourself.
Or better yet, just go onto Lovable and build the dang thing and show it. Yeah, sure to worry, you really want to get in trouble.
Well, you get to the point, Hrich is we weren't building this software for fun in the first place. It was supposed to either increase cadence where fewer people could do more for the company to make the company money, or measure the company more effectively, so you can find new opportunities in that in those measurements. This is more of that, like I get your idea. You don't let people go a you have a huge backlog. But after that then you know, it's not like you're just laying
a year. It's what are the other opportunities we haven't executed on what is in your wish list? It we never got to how much software. It's just never been built because it was never going to meet the backlog was already too large to make the threshold to even make it. On the backlog, we could actually shorten that backlock up. We can add new things to it.
This is fitting for the nineteen ninety eight show as well. When Google came out. Yeah, we as developers, all of a sudden had a brand new way of finding information because I used to you guys remember this, Carl. I'm sure you do too. You wanted to know how to do something. You were down at Barnes and Noble more Borders and you were buying a book book and you know, maybe reading Carl's book. But you know, the point is is, like you know you had to read these books, you
had to find the information from a magazine. Of a sudden, you had Google and you were on it.
In no time.
That's a massive acceleration point.
I was suddenly landed on Carl and Gary's VB home page.
That's right, that's right. Yeah. Well, and and what happened all the if I was in the middle of it because I worked for a tool company that advertised in magazines like MSDN Magazine, Visual Basic Programs, Journal Basic Pro before that, and those magazines just died because they couldn't keep up. You know, by the time you're reading it something in a magazine, it's two months old, and you could just go on the web and find what you want and copy and paste into your freaking app for that matter.
Yeah, well, welcome to stack overflow. You know when that came out, same same thing exactly.
How are they feeling so?
And it has some and it has a lot to do with dot net rocks too, because those advertisers needed a place to advertised, and they found podcasts and they found our podcast particularly, and so we grew with that whole you know, the TEALERX and the dev Expresses and all that stuff. Who are now not advertising in these magan and I worked for one of these companies, and I know how much they spent on magazine advertising it was a lot.
Oh sure, yeah, well I think we're just going through another shift. And I wrote a thing on LinkedIn about this too, that, you know, I think folks that have been through these massive up people's heels and shifts are doing better because then folks who have been sitting on you know, at their desk for the last twenty five thirty years aren't used to this kind of thing.
And I see the new folks actually doing better than any of us thought because I think they have less to unlearned and just gone for it. And the folks who've shifted a couple of times going oh we're shifting again, let's go, let's go.
Yeah.
But it's people that have had ten plus years on the same stack and it was their first stack, yeah, that are really struggling.
All right. I got a question for both you guys, because you're both sci fi people. Obviously, it's the people who have imagination, who can think and conceive of software and conceive of new features and how things can work together and work better that will benefit the most from
using AI. Do you think reading sci fi and in particular what books would spark the imagination of some of these developers who might find themselves kind of you know, MOPI and you know ere like saying, well, that was going to happen someday.
I definitely. If you haven't read The Martian or Project Hail Mary, you know, these people find themselves in these predicaments and they have to adapt in a very realistic, feed on the ground kind of way.
So Weird does a good job of writing realistic stuff. My problem with science fiction is it's the part, it's the tool that has created a lot of the confusion around the term artificiinal intelligence in the first place. Well that's true, so you know this isn't the fear well exactly because for obvious reasons, every flip and movie involves the software trying to kill everybody, right, So you know, because that's a good story, Yeah, because that's what makes
an interesting book. What if we created a technology and it made everything better the end? It's not ready yeah yeah, so but without a doubt. You talk to the folks who made the original flip phone, and it's like, we were inspired by Star Trek, right, we wanted a communicator
like you can get inspirational. We get it from But I think you're hinting at the bigger thing here, Carl, which is when does a big disruption like this everybody comes a generalist again, right, Like our current development methodology has matured enough now with the incorporation to cloud, which is pushing you know, nearly twenty years old as well, where you can be focused as a back end developer
or focused as a US developer. So forth, we've stratified ourselves and try to narrow our expertise, cause you can't be an expert in everything. And now that it's completely disrupted and the tools are all changing, you kind of need to generalize and touch all aspects of it.
Though.
There will be stratification again, but not this splip in year and probably not for several just because it takes time for the tools to settle down, the methodologies to settle down, and for us to say, hey, there's an area where it's we'th spending more time getting good at this bit and being a specialized and this bit. I don't see any specialties yet in this approach.
I think a lot of these companies are trying to get into the business automation stuff and they are failing hard. And you know, there's so many tools out there that like open Claw was probably the first that broke through to me. I'll call it the human layer, you know,
being this helper. Yeah, and that's what made it so darn popular and it Talking to a friend of mine just the other day, I'm like, I am constantly amazed at how engineers think that actual humans think, you know, like a there's a I don't mean to sound too negative on anything out there, but there's a project called paper Clip that well, the idea is you could have a fully virtual company and it's a CEO and CTO and CMO and it's like what company starts off with
a full C suite that I don't know, you know, like that just no, this isn't And then of course you know it's all driven by GitHub issues and everything. It's like engineers thinking that you know, they know how so like right now I'm working with I tried to get I wrote a big long screen on LinkedIn today about you know, trying to get anthropics tool set to do something sane, and it's just it's it's like, wow, you guys, how many orgs do you have in there?
It's this is crazy. It's like I could see each each org is shifting and doing their tooling, but you're not talking to each other because this is a mess.
So anyway, the human part of it, I think is going to be the toughest. And going back to Worl's question after the break about what about teams, it's like, this is what's making teams complicated. Is an assembled team is about a set of specialties. That's right, And now that that's disrupted, it's hard to make a team with a set of specialties when you don't know what any of the specialties are going to be anymore.
That's right, well, and the specialty has to be I think everyone in the team has to have a business specialty that is, you know, for a particular area of the business that they feel they can use the tools to make better, you know, rather than a technical specialty, you know, a business specialty, the domain expertise, Yeah, domain experts, but but you know, domains are big, and we have
islands and subdomains and you know, whatever they're called. And well, Rob Connery, it's so great to catch up with you. I always enjoy our conversations, whether it's on a boat in Oslo eating shrimp and drinking bad wine or you know, or on the podcast or summits and stuff.
Yeah, it's always fun talking to you guys.
I appreciate it all right, awesome dude.
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