Coding Blocks - Reflecting on 2023 and Looking Forward to 2024

Episode Date: January 8, 2024

It’s that time of year…the time we (reluctantly) look back at what we said we were going to do this past year and see if we actually did it. Then, we repeat history and set some goals we’ll likely look back and wish we’d accomplished this time next year. In addition, we continue with the […]

all right well let's do this what are we talking about uh this is episode 225 oh come on doing resolutions as we do oh yeah do we think that like do you think that like someone just accidentally subscribed they're like maybe maybe smash like every subscribe every button they see that says subscribe they're like done they gotta do it thumbs up if you like it i i thought about this a little bit too much as as i saw that this was 225 i was like man it's a shame that 224 wasn't the previous episode going in 24 and all that i you know what because at the start you had the show notes uh you left the 224 in there and i thought wow what a coincidence it's 224 and we're going to talk about 2024 stuff and then i realized oh no that was a mistake it's it's really 225 yeah hey hey so hey for real

we actually need to say who we are reply all it'll tell you why. So I'm Alan Underwood. I'm Joe Zach. Is this a joke? I'm Michael Outlaw. You're just joining us if it was one of your New Year's resolutions to find more tech information podcast. So we welcome you. We're sorry. Awkward intro. Yeah.

So they kill me with this. All right. So we are going to talk about 2023 and 2024 in this episode. Before we get into the reviews and all the good stuff that we typically do. So I actually ran into somebody that listens to the show the other day. And ironically enough, I wear one of the Coding Blocks t-shirts every other week or so. And I happened to be out and about. I was at Whole Foods down the road from where Outlaw and i and maybe soon to be out jay-z live and and i was i was putting the shopping cart back up or something and the guy's like are you michael hello i was like oh i was like no he's like but

hold do you do cody blocks i was like yeah yeah i yeah, I do. I was like, yeah, I'm Alan Underwood. He's like, I knew I recognized voice. I just didn't know whose it was. And, and he's like, and I was wearing the t-shirt. He's like,

you are your Cody block. So a guy named Steven, I don't know his last name. Uh, he ran into, we thought I wouldn't want you to put him on blast anyways. Yeah. Right.

But I was like, look, dude, seriously, contact us. We'll do lunch. Like we're right around here so you know and you'll see that we look nothing alike that's right no mistaking us just just

bald-headed good-looking guys that's all um so so yeah i mean in all seriousness like steven if you listen to this i'll appreciate you reaching out he actually works for microsoft azure and so yeah it was really cool that he stopped me and said hi to me. His hands were full and I was like, well, I guess I can shake his hand and drop all this stuff. So, you know,

it's kind of awkward, but yeah, it was really fun and really cool to have somebody be like, Hey, are you? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

That's it's sort of me. So, yeah. So, so people don't completely know our voices yet. It's only been a few episodes. So, you know, I guess we need to say it when we do these.

Well, it doesn't help when you get your voice all high pitched up there, like in my register. What are you talking about? That's what I do. When you just did that. Like, that's not fair. Of course, they're going to mix it up. That's how I talk. Yeah.

All right. So in this episode, we're going to sort of look back at what we said we were going to do in 2023. Maybe some of us will. And then, you know, kind of what we're looking forward to in 2024 and what the plans are and, you know, see if they all completely come off the rails as we go. So, you know, without further ado, as we like to do, we like to have Outlaw here read off the names as he does. You're welcome. Yep, yep. All right. outlaw here read off the names as he does you're welcome yep yep all right so uh from itunes we have a and 012 and this one i'm pretty sure this is how this one's gonna be pronounced so bear with

me aj's whistle you got me nailed it thank you that's. And the, the bays girl. Thank you. Which I don't know. Yeah, go ahead. No, you do. No. Did you read her?

Her? Yeah. That's great. Right. It was like, it was great, but also like, Oh,

somebody's going to take that serious. Right. Yeah. So hers was hilarious. The title of it is just bad. And then, and then her, her actual review was so bad i want to barf but she gave us five stars so it's like oh i guess i can play too much but pretty sure that's good yeah right i think it's she's gonna vomit because she's laughing so hard yeah it's

like when bad is is is cool you know like that's so bad that's so cool you know it's like a really old thing you know but now like if you vomit that's cool right like that just means you're partying good right yeah i think we went back to 80s on this one we so bad we're good yeah so yeah that one was fun that we should mention you know when we ask for reviews it's really the stars that we're asking for you go whatever you want in there so if you're not a star please don't leave us a review right like oh you didn't start as you write whatever you want the the the other one by the way the how do you say his name again i think you nailed it oh there we go yeah so his was pretty good

because i think he's randy from uh what is it's not america's got talent what was the other one the super popular one for a long time trailer park boys no no no the the one where kelly clarkson came from what's what's the uh oh uh american idols american idol yeah so randy on there he's he said so all in all it's a yes for me dog i was like hey like, hey, we got Randy from American Idol. So there were some great ones. All right. So let's get back to you got Spotify as well. Yes. Also from Spotify, you know, Rodney, Dylan, Ghost Merc and Finn Pomfret.

Very good. Thank you. Oh, by the way, by the way, I don't know. Maybe I know how to pronounce some names now because I got the last one right. He's been studying. No, no, no. Did you see, I think it was in the last episode where Stefan said that my pronunciation was pretty good.

Yeah, it was pretty good. And even one of the other names, I think it was a German name he said, he was closer. Yeah, it was pretty good. And even one of the other names, I think it was a German name he said, he was like, no, you're pretty close on both of them. So I was like, ha-ha. Outlaw growing. All right. And that's it for my New Year's resolutions for the year. I am complete.

Jay-Z, you got a few things. Yeah, I wanted to mention mention our code camp is coming up uh february 24th and you should go it's awesome uh you get to hang out meet a lot of speakers it's a free event um usually have t-shirts you know sponsors work out and uh usually have lunch also uh sponsors work out which it always has so well how many sets did they do? You said they work out. How many? How many sets? I worked out. Remember that song? Yeah.

Talk about coming back in time. Is that going to be our whole thing? That was a good song. We'll have that in the resource. It was a good song, wasn't it? It was a great song. You're right. I'll still quote it slash sing it on occasion.

Well, I've got a teenage son who's always trying to like blow up to me and act like he's bigger. Wait a minute. Hold on. It's not boomer hour yet. Hold on. You're getting ahead. I'm not complaining. I'm not complaining.

That's just funny. All right. So I actually had a random thought. So ironically, before this episode, I was having networking problems, which really irritates me. But so this is not security now. So I won't go too technically super crazy deep on the technical wise and everything, but something has really been bugging me the past few months. Like the more smart devices you put in your home column, thermostats, cameras, whatever, right? Like everything smart plugs, uh, lights, switches, everything. It's all there. What bugs me is they're all on the same network as all my other stuff, my NAS, my, my personal laptops, my

whatever, right? Like I cannot stand that they've got access to that same stuff. And what bugs me is most, most of your routers, wifi access points, that kind of stuff that are consumer grade things, right? Like residential type things. They'll have two access point IDs, two SSIDs that are available. Typically one's usually your guest network and the other one's typically your main network, right? And you can keep those segregated so that anything on your guest network can't see what's on your main network, which is great. However, if you need more than just that, then it kind of stinks. So the guest network, that doesn't necessarily solve your problem, right? Because that's supposed to be. So if somebody comes over and you want to be able to get on your network, you can just give them

that, right? And that's what it's supposed to be for. So it still doesn't solve the problem of taking your IoT devices and putting them on their own thing, right? Away from everything else. Well, they're away from all your stuff. They're just with any guest. Right, right. And then to take it one step further than that there are i just want to call out i want to say that it's the new netgear orbeez have three ssids that you can do those things are expensive like you're close to two you're you're close to two grand on that setup that can actually do the three and what really started sort of bugged me is it's like, why is this not a thing? Why, why has this not been easier for people to do? And let's be honest, I don't plan

on firmware upgrading my stuff to put open WRT on it. I don't want to deal with all that, right? Like I want the firmware that came with my stuff and I want to use it. So for that reason, I'm actually thinking about going away from my setup, which is currently like some Asus routers. Like they're pretty nice. They're Wi-Fi 6E routers and access points and all that stuff. Zen Wi-Fi. Zen Wi-Fi. Right.

Which Asus makes some good mesh Wi-Fi stuff. Like I'm not going to downplay it or anything. Like it's pretty good. But it's still very basic setup. And what I want is I want to be able to set up VLANs so I can separate my IoT devices from my work devices, from my home devices, from that kind of stuff. Right. And I started doing some research and there's unified that's been out there for a while. Their stuff is kind of pricey. Uh, you can get it. Like if you go to micro center, they'll have that stuff there.

It's kind of pricey. It works really well. But TP link also has their own brand of like, I guess it's enterprise business grade type stuff, but they've kind of got a cross section between the stuff that's more prosumer versus true enterprise type stuff. And it's called Omada. And I'll have a link in the show notes, but you can get a reasonable setup that will do everything that you want it to for probably about like, if I wanted to set up my entire house, the square footage, the floor separation, all that kind of stuff with theirs, it'll probably cost me a little over a thousand dollars, which ain't cheap. Like, don't get me wrong. It's not inexpensive. However, I can set up VLANs. I can segregate traffic. I can lock things out. I can, I can truly set up the network

to be the way that I want it to be. And, and that gives me more functionality than the 20, than the $2,000 Netgear Orbi set up that, that has the three SSIDs. So at any rate, it's just interesting. I thought I'd bring it up if anybody else listens to it. And actually it was, it was Steve Gibson from security now, like a couple years ago when he was talking about the way to do it, his was a little bit more complicated because he was talking about using residential stuff and then having like separate routers set up and separate wifi access points. And like, you know, you were truly just going to be piecing stuff together left and right. This is more of a unified system that has a management console to where you can just go in

and set the stuff up and then it'll work for you. Right? So it's made to do that instead of you trying to piecemeal stuff together. So at any rate, if you're considering any of that kind of stuff, like I said, I'll have a link in the show notes. And if you have questions about it, I mean, hit me up on, on Slack or whatever, and we'll have a conversation about it because it's really interesting to me. Yeah. He's he, if I remember correctly, Steve Gibson was a big fan of the ubiquity edge routers because there you could it's really interesting to me. Yeah. He's he, if I remember correctly, uh,

Steve Gibson was a big fan of the ubiquity edge routers because there you could have like massive control over it and you could have each individual port be its own separate VLAN if you wanted to. So all the traffic could be segregated away from each other. And then with that setup, you could have like a different access point connected to a different port. So you could have these multiple access points set up for your house or whatever, but technically be routed on different traffic.

Yep, and you can do the same. Different VLANs. Yeah, and you can do the same different vlans yeah you and you can do the same exact setup with this with this omada stuff and i'm sure like even with the other unified stuff you can as well um but it's just it's just i don't like having a bunch of stuff on my network that you don't even know what it's doing right like you don't know what traffic's coming out of that you don't know how it's pinging things on your network it just drives me crazy i just i don't even know what it's doing, right? Like you don't know what traffic's coming out of that. You don't know how it's pinging things on your network. It just drives me crazy.

I just, I don't know. I would probably just take a cheaper approach. Which is? Until it didn't work. Yeah, I would just run like two different sets, you know, of hardware. Like, God. Then you have Wi-Fi signals like fighting each other all over your house right uh maybe but they're the whole there's the whole point is that they're supposed to uh

like find a channel that's not in use and stay on that channel because how would how would you doing that in your house where things like you're going to have two how would that be any different than some of the apartment buildings in any given big city right where like every apartment has their own one so you running two in your house is not really that big a deal and so you know you you could have two different mesh you could even go with different vendors if you wanted to just two different mesh networks and then plug them into different uh ports on your on your router from your ISP, right? And, you know, be good enough. For me.

Yeah, that could work. But, I mean, let's be honest. Like, that Asus setup, like, if I were to buy two of those, I'd be right up there at the same price or more than the Omada, right? Like, those ETHs are not cheap. Like, they're kind of ridiculous. Yeah. I mean, I tried those.

So, you have a pair of my hand-me-downs and I, you know, that I just wasn't as happy with. So, I mean, you're definitely, it's definitely a fair call out to say that your mileage is going to vary depending on like, in terms of costs, like what is going to be your preferred brand because uh you know i think i would come ahead you know similar cost at best similar cost if not ahead but also too um the main reason why i would do that was just the ease of it yeah totally and i get that but i will say there's another thing about the Yamatas that is kind of attractive, and it's that they have outdoor setups for access points and stuff, right? So if you've got an area outside that you typically go to that has a weaker signal or whatever,

they've actually got solutions for that. So it's all part of it, right? Like, matter of fact, when you go to their site, you could say, hey, what's your use case? It could be, hey, I own and operate a hotel and it'll tell you all the pieces you need to do it. Right. Or you could say residential like I did. And it could say, Hey, do you have an outside area that you're trying to access? And it'll tell you all the things that you can set up. So, you know, I don't know if it'll be easier or harder. My guess is it'll be harder with what I want to do because configuring any kind of stuff like that is an insane um thing if you've never done it so yeah it may actually be more difficult

um mentally to get it going properly and it might actually make my whole family mad while i try to figure it out i asked the one thing that like i mean listen you know for anyone that's like oh that's a crazy idea what Outlaw said to have too. If you super enjoy getting into the weeds of that and setting that up, by all means, go for it. I'm not telling you you shouldn't pursue your happiness. Go for it. But to me, that's an appliance that I just want it to work. I want to think about it as little as I have to, you know.

It's like a microwave, right? Like, that's why it's still blinking 12. Why does that have to plug on anyway? Yeah, that's actually the problem that I have is I want it to be an appliance too, except for the fact that I have all these things plugged into my network that I just don't like them being on the same thing where my sensitive data and all that kind of stuff, it drives me crazy. Well, that's why even that though, I'm like, well, I don't know, man.

Primary network, guest network would be good enough in my mind. But even the Zenify wifi though, I could have sworn that when supported three. Nope. Only two. I've been all over the settings and that thing like all over them. And it drives me and say, now you can set up,

there's, there's some sort of radius server type thing you can set up, which I have no experience with. I don't know anything about it. That's an authentication thing. Well, with that you can set up vlan type routing and you can make it a member of it but i was like man i'm not doing

that i don't i don't plan on setting up another appliance that i got to figure out how that thing works i just you know want my wi-fi to work and i want to think about it but i want everything segregated on a different network so they can't talk to all my stuff. Why can't I do that? Yeah. I just use my neighbors whenever I'm having a problem. That's where I put all my IoT stuff. That's amazing. All right.

So that was my last random thought before we actually get into things. So I guess we're going in order of what we have here in the document. So it's funny. I guess, uh, I guess we're going in order of what we have here in the document. So, um, it's funny. I started listing out what I want to do in 2024. And I look back at my 2023 goals and they were mostly the same. So, so some of them I failed on some of them, but did all right with, so, uh, looking back at 2023, the things that I actually did that weren't even on my list, but just kind of came in based off the episodes we did. And you can probably think outlaw for some of that is like DevOps is a culture. Like I've fully bought into that, right? Like I, it's not that I don't think it can be a role. I think that everybody

should still participate. And I think by not doing it, you're doing a disservice to your team. So fully on board with that. I, I tried like crazy to make sure that anytime something came up that was sort of that, that sort of realm that I didn't just go knock it on somebody's door and been like, Hey, outlaw, this thing's not working right. Or, or Hey, so-and-so I need you to go look at that. I would actually try and find a dig into it and figure out what was going on. And I think ultimately it, it, it made everything stronger because then when, when conversations came up about, well, this is happening, then I could actually have some insight and some input, maybe valuable, maybe not, but Hey, I saw this. What about this? Right? Like I could ask questions that are at least relevant at that point. So I think that buying into that was, was a big one for me in 2023.

I can't stand being dependent on somebody else for knowledge. Like it's just a pet peeve of mine because you know, there might be times where like I want to do something at 10 o'clock at night and I don't want to have to be like, Oh, but how do I get, but I gotta go. I guess I'll have to wait until the morning to ask. So, so like we all run into those situations. They're inevitable. But like if I, if there's, if I can just take the time to learn it so that I can avoid that, then I will do it.

I think we're tinker tinkerers by nature. So we're, we're already curious, right? So anytime I can dig into something, I will. But like I said, it was, it was almost like a thing, like a realization of light went off, like, Hey, really people do need to buy into this because you need to own this thing from the time you wrote it to seeing it through to working somewhere. Like it should be embedded in your soul to want to do. All right. So it's not a job title. to want to do that all right so it's not a job title it is a culture god it is both it's both i went i won i remember

uh what about you what about you jay-z any thoughts on that one uh no i mean i just agree uh and i just googled it actually it is a job title there's many listings for it right now so they're wrong it's a trap don't everybody's many listings for it right now. But they're wrong. It's a trap. Everybody's wrong but me. Yeah, that's right. We're going to start calling people out for being wrong. Sit back. So Festivus is over.

Put the poll away. Let's move on. So the next one for me that was interesting was I really, really hardcore bought into Kubernetes for everything. So before 2023, yes, I was working with it. I was learning it, all that kind of stuff. But the more I have worked with it and the more understanding I've gotten of it, the more I love the idea of setting up what you want the state to be and letting it try to make that happen for you. Right. Because it's really good at it.

Like I'll give you an example. Um, I I've, and I'll get to this in a later bullet point, but you know, I, I'm putting, I put out a talk to see if it, if see if I'll be accepted somewhere for doing like data streaming, real-time analytics and whatnot with Apache Kafka, Flink and Pino. And I got thinking about Kafka and the way that it's typically done in business is, especially for big, big clusters, is they'll put it up on bare metal stuff, right? So they'll run Kafka bare metal so that they're getting the fastest performance. And I was thinking about that in my mind. I'm like, you know what? I'll go away from bare metal to get the convenience of what Kubernetes buys you and keeping that thing alive, right? And not only just keeping it alive, but like the operator, like Stremsy, for example, it'll have metrics baked in.

It has the distributed tracing. So the open telemetry.ai stuff that we talked about previously, like it has all this stuff baked in. So why would I want to manage that on a one-off basis on a piece of hardware as opposed to, hey, just get Kubernetes running on that hardware and let it run there and let it be gone, right? If you're building a product that people are going to take and run, it makes sense that you build it for Kubernetes. And you program how it's supposed to scale, how it's supposed to upgrade, how it's supposed to manage certificates. You can build all that in and just kind of sell it and give it to your customers it's amazing yeah it just makes sense yeah i can't even imagine going back the old way where like hey we need to buy this piece of

hardware so that we could run this this uh database technology or whatever on it like that just seems like such a foreign idea to me now imagine like you're you're creating your own database now you're like create a new database it's you know uh new and cool and special and oh this is how we scale and this is how we manage your secrets and this is how like no man like oh who wants to reimplement all that stuff like oh I mean, at this point, I think even if I were to go to a smaller place and they did buy a new piece of hardware, I would just install Kubernetes on it. Yes. I would use it as one of the nodes, and then I would continue to just do everything in Kubernetes. That's exactly what my thought process was when I was looking at the stuff last night is like, man, if I really had to do this, I would put Kubernetes on it and run it in Kubernetes so I could set up a configuration, a runtime, you know, steady state configuration so that it can handle it.

Right. Like, it just does not make sense for me to do it the old way. Like, I don't know, man. You remember when we first started looking into Kubernetes and when Docker was getting big and everybody's like, oh, but you're going to lose performance. Like if you run SQL Server in this, you know, you're going to lose performance. And there's absolutely 100% a level of performance you're willing to give up for something to just work. Right. That's a big thing. Well, I think the real takeaway, though, is that the DevOps as a culture has really,

you can see how well it's ingrained itself into you now because now you're all about Kubernetes and infrastructure as code. So, you know, win-win. It's worked on me. It for sure worked on me this year. See, it's not a title. And this one, actually, this came from, again, I think I always sort of knew this, See, it even a little bit longer, you know, if you had a database and you had your data in that database, you wanted to try and do everything in that database with that data, right? Like you're going to run reports off of it. Even if it was your transactional database, you're going to run reports off of it.

You can do everything there. And that's wrong, right? Duplicate your data intentionally. And so by that, I mean, okay, so you have a transactional database, right? Sure, that's where your orders come in or whatever it is. That is what that's for, is your transactions. Then if you want to be able to search that data, put it into a search engine, Elasticsearch, Lucene, some version of that. If you want to do analytical type queries of it to find statistics and all that kind of stuff, put it into an analytical database, right? An OLAP type database. And you know what I really liked about the Designing Data Intensive Applications book that we went through is they call it out in black and white.

When you have data in a database and you're trying to make that data work for reports as well as transactions, you create indexes on it. Indexes are duplicating that data. It's not as obvious to you, right? Because you're saying create an index, but behind the scenes,

it's just writing that data in another way so that it can find it faster. And if you create another index with more columns, it's duplicating that data again. So it's hidden from you. So I guess my point is be intentional about how you want that data to be used and don't feel bad about putting it in different places to use it in different ways. Or said in other ways, don't lie to yourself thinking that you're not already duplicating it by keeping it in one place and just indexing it how you need. For sure. For sure.

I think it's also consistent though with like a year to probably back. We had talked several times about some of the articles from the Uber engineering blog and we had referenced some of their drawings and they were definitely, you know, had like what you could kind of think of as like a hub and spoke architecture of like, there'd be like one central data lake maybe, but there were all,

all of these spurs off of it that would have copies of certain parts of the data that they wanted to index in whatever way they needed or for whatever use case they had at the time. And it was, it was just super impressive to see some of the things that they were doing at the speeds that they were doing it and scale that they were doing it to. And they couldn't have done it if they tried to shoehorn it all into one

technology, right? Like it wouldn't have worked. Yeah. And sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. No, you're good. I don't think I was going to say that they even like as a side effect of that though, ended up creating some pretty cool software that they ended up giving back out to the, to the open source community. So, you know, yeah, I mean, it was both an, uh, like you're in awe of what they did, but also,

you know, thankful that they, they contributed some of that technology back out. Oh, for sure. Uh, all right. So then the, the things that I didn't do as much of that I had on my list for 2023 that I did a little bit of, but you know, I don't know. I wish I'd done more is I'd said I wanted to do more content creation, right? Like, so some more YouTube videos and whatnot. And I did find myself at times doing it right. Like I, I'd have an idea and I was like, man, I'm just gonna go downstairs and record, try and do a rough cut and then just put it up. Right. Like, so I did a few of those and, and I think it was good. I want to do more of that. Right. Like I actually like it. Like I mentioned that, you know, I've submitted a talk on real-time data streaming analytics, and I've actually been thinking maybe I should make videos

about like how much work actually goes into it. Right. Like your thought process, sitting down, trying to make this stuff work, you know, I've spent three nights this week trying to get Kubernetes working on a new Mac. It's amazing how much time you sink just trying to make things work. Yeah, and spend an hour in a corner crying to yourself because you're like, God, why couldn't I figure that out? No, just kidding. Man. You know, my favorite type of YouTube videos to watch now are the ones where people are just doing stuff.

And they're not reviewing some product. They're not trying to teach you, like, this cool trick that will take you from 96% to 97%. It's just people who are doing stuff. And they kind of talk their way through it. And they mess up and whatever. And stuff takes too long. And it's great. Man, our YouTube history is very different.

Yeah, no doubt. Let's see so so yeah one of my resolutions coming forward is is to get way deeper into data streaming so uh you know i'm spending my free time my work time you know researching and doing flink data streaming type stuff and and it's it's it's a brain twister like there's there's things in there that just don't make sense from a regular standpoint because you have to think about things so much differently but on but on top of it like and we're going to get into this when we start talking about it because i think we mentioned that we're going to be doing a series on like flink apache flink and that but when you start getting into super high volumes of data, right,

like billions of records hitting, you have to start being concerned about the things that you typically wouldn't be concerned about, like the speed of serializing and deserializing things, right? And the implication implications of that on your code. So, so there's, it just goes so deep, like everything that you find, you find something else. Then you do something and it doesn't work. And you're like, oh, it's because they had to do this to make it work fast. So there's all kinds of cool stuff in there. So getting pretty deep on that. Yeah, even just thinking about it from the point of view of like,

when you're processing data at that scale, waiting for you to have the collection all together is too late. So you just have to do it as the one bit of data comes in at a time and start doing things there. Cause that's basically what like a Flink streaming kind of environment is like, you know, rather than waiting for every row to go into your nice SQL, you know,

relational database, you don't have that. Ain't nobody got that time. Right. Right. Oh, it's insane right like i mean we'll get into it when we start talking about it deeper but yeah it's you have to break your mental paradigms that you've had on having an entire record you just don't you don't have that it's it's it's hard to wrap your mind around sometimes um the next one so jay-z's actually done this

right and he's probably my inspiration for even wanting to go this route is i want to use more of the ai stuff out there right um i i was actually looking last night at paying for like the chat gpt what is it plus membership or whatever and then and then also there's a can't remember the name of it right now but there's there's another image ai type thing out there that's supposed to be like one of the better ones even journey huh yeah mid journey yeah yeah it's really good yeah so i was even looking at you know paying for that because i mean god it's amazing the kind of stuff you can do with this and between jay-z and some of the stuff I've seen on X where like, people are like, Hey, I asked for it to build me a cartoon house with a, this and that. And you look at it, you're like, that's unreal.

I mean, this is the kind of, I don't know if I'm sure you guys remember when we were trying to get a logo designed, right? Like it was frustrating, like sifting through hundreds of designs and being like well which one do we like like you could probably do that with ai now and like i don't know 30 minutes and a few dollars and then you can call yourself an artist right right yeah so i think we're about to get canceled here oh yeah yeah, we probably will. And no offense to any artists out there. It's just, it's a really hard thing. So, and especially for people that are more apt to do code and then be like, well, I want a good image to go with it.

You know, it's nice to be able to have that at your fingertips. Well, where I thought you were going to go with this at first though, is that you could just use AI to write your, uh, your presentation for you. Like I just write the code for me and to write your presentation for you. Like, I just write the code for me and then create a presentation for it. I need this many slides. Man, look, dude, I will tell you, that's actually been my biggest frustration with AI, and we've talked about this,

is they cut off the learning for GPT-3. I forget, was it 2021 or something? Yeah. So if you're doing things that are just basic level programming that are using data instructions and stuff, it's absolutely amazing. If you're using anything that's like recent, you know, APIs, you're hosed, right? Like you can't be like, hey, write me a Flink app that'll do this.

You just can't. Yeah, you know, when I was using copilot uh i don't know if they had like a chat interface i always just did it through like comments and stuff and you know we're like writing a function name it'll do the rest i've been experimenting a little with uh google's uh kind of contender called duet there uh and it like really pushes the chat interface on you and it is up to date are you purring are you are you like oh that content yeah this cat busted into the room i locked the door and he got in and he's sorry he's purring like right in the microphone i'm like you know what he's like hey dad bring that back

yeah he likes this thing he likes to attack the. That's amazing. Jay-Z's so comfortable with this that he's purring. So you said it is up to date, so it knows about newer libraries and whatnot. Yeah, and same with Copilot. Also, they keep that more up to date than 2021, at least as far as I know. I could be wrong, but that was my understanding with it. And because of the chat interface, which Copilot probably has, I just never used, you can still do a lot of those, like, hey, or, you know, write me an outline of whatever. So like code related, it will be more up to date.

See, so that's the kind of stuff that I want to get into this year is like really utilizing these tools more, uh, before they get canceled by the government for being too scary to take over the world. So yeah, there's that. Wow. That got extreme quick. Well, it did, right? Like, I mean, you guys have heard all this stuff where, oh, this is scary. It needs to be stopped. So who knows what's going to happen, but whatever.

All right. So the next one, this one's big on my list. So this is, again, looking forward to 2024. Not so much in 2023 did this happen. More automation and less manual intervention. So I can't tell you how frustrated I've been by revisiting the same problems over and over and over because you don't have time to deal with them. Right. So you, you don't have time quote unquote to deal with them, but yet you're going to go back to it and do the same thing 20 times.

It's like, man, if I just bitten off the time after time number two or three and put something in place to take care of this, then I wouldn't have to deal with it the next 15, 20 times. Right. So got to prioritize that for 2024 because I cannot stand doing things that are just manual steps. Let's see. Next. And so I said, hopefully more YouTubing. I'd really like to do that. So ironically, here's a funny story.

So you know how we like to buy toys, right? We all have the different toys that we like. So I know Jay-Z and Outlaw, they have guitar toys. For whatever reason. They're instruments, sir. Okay, they are instruments. I agree, I agree. So for whatever reason, sir. Okay. There are instruments. I agree. I agree. So for whatever reason, my love, and you probably all know this by now, I love audio.

Absolutely love audio. Like I plan on, I'm even thinking about going to the Munich, uh, audio show. That's like supposed to be the creme de la creme, right? Like I'm thinking about going to that. I think it's in May. So the other thing I love video and audio recording equipment. I have a ridiculous, weird love for that stuff. As these guys know, because they've known me for a while. You know, there was that $6,000 camera that you were supposed to get for Christmas. Well, it's not out yet. So I couldn't have got it for Christmas. My wife is still going to kill me whenever that does happen. When?

Notice he said when. Last month it was an if. Now it's a when. How am I going to hide this? Yeah, how am I going to hide it? So I actually, it was during Christmasmas while i was upgrading my nas everything was on sale except for this that i bought uh so road has these wireless microphones that you can hook up to cameras or whatever and they had they had this kit i was like i gotta have it

and i haven't used them yet i've had them for a month, but I need to use them. So, so this is going to force me to make some more videos, which is going to force me to put my sound proofing and stuff on the walls in here. That's going to force me to do all the other projects that I need to do just from this one purchase. Right. So it's the power of that that may make this happen. Wait, now I'm curious about this wireless mic though.

Like we're talking is this just like an add-on that you add to the uh like to the xlr no no no no so these are actually made they're like wireless lapel mics so they're made for doing like video content and okay but the cool part is they have a transmitter and it looks like a pack like that like well this is this is oh no no it doesn't have anything like that when it's very similar to that what i'm trying to show alan is uh this is a sure uh it's similar the glx d1 plus z3 pack that you can use for more i'm using it obviously for guitar because you see the connection but uh you can use it for other stuff too and they have a setup for microphones and whatnot yeah so it's very similar to that it has a receiver and a transmitter on it and one of the

cool things about this particular one i think uh for anybody's interest i think it's the road wireless pro go to something something like that find out but here's the reallyode Wireless Pro Go 2 something. Something like that. I'm glad to find out. But here's the really cool part about it. They have a 32-bit float algorithm on the thing, so you don't clip. Like on regular, like if we were to turn up our mics here and one of us got really loud, it would clip and you'd hear it like buzz out sort of, right?

This has enough data on it to where it can maintain it without the clipping and you can actually recover it in post if you need to. So really interesting type stuff. Anyways, I got a toy. I'm going to do some stuff with it. So here's the interesting thing though. So you're talking about the Wireless Go. Am I looking at the right one?

Hold on, let me look. It's Rode Wireless Go 2 Pro. No, Wireless Pro something. Hold about the Wireless Go? Am I looking at the right one? Hold on. Let me look. It's Rode Wireless Go 2 Pro. No, Wireless Pro something. Hold on. A Wireless Pro? Yeah, Wireless Pro. There is a Wireless Go 2, and then there's a Wireless Pro. Wireless Pro 2, I think, is what it is.

Yeah, the Wireless Pro 2? No, it's just Wireless Pro is what it is. Okay. Because the one thing, like I did a bunch of research into this, and the one thing that, one reason why I went with that Shure pack that I did was that a lot of these systems, you have to decide, are you going to run on a, like which spectrum are you going to run on? And for guitar, like there's all kinds of different systems

that you can get out. Some of them are like weird UHF frequencies and whatnot, but there's a lot of them on a 2.4 gigahertz range but that's just such a busy crowded frequency range that you run into problems and this one uh that that i showed you it can run on a uh the 5.8 gigahertz range and it can actually run on either like it'll figure out like which signal do i need to use um but yes it was interesting i don't even know what frequency it communicates on it looks like 2.4 from what i'm seeing using utilizing standard the art series for 2.4 gigahertz digital transmission okay so yeah so the so what so the only thing i'm trying to

like call out and be aware of is that like you have to be concerned about its proximity to routers and stuff you know other certain other devices as well can interfere with it from but it it could be that like guitars might be more susceptible to that kind of interference because the frequencies that you might play on a guitar are going to be higher than what you're going to record for someone saying and whatnot so you might run into like different issues there yeah i put a link in the show notes for this one yeah i'm kind of excited about it i haven't like i said i don't use it yet but you know whatever i will and then the last thing is I'm thinking about trying to attend more, attend more events

this year, right? Like, so some more meetups and cause I want to say like outlaw me, Jay-Z, we used to go to several, right? Like every year we would go to meetups or, or conferences or whatever. It was, it was a lot of fun and it you know blame it on the pandemic like it just kind of it killed everything and most things hadn't even come back like we uh outlaw and i went to a devops one and recently and honestly i mean not not trying to be mean but it really just wasn't it still wasn't quite where it needed to be in terms of the content.

And I don't know, I think that stuff's just now coming back around pretty well. And so I'd like to get out and attend more and hopefully see this stuff come back to life a little. So that was it for me. Good stuff. All right. Well, it looks like I'm up next. So first, looking back at 2023, I kind of had that whole healthy, wealthy and wise thing going on thanks to Ben Franklin. And, you know, as far as things went, healthy total fail. Like, yeah, not a good healthier. Yeah. So that sucked. wealthy totally fine uh you know the whole uh thing about like paying yourself first and whatever yeah it works it's fine uh so you know i set up a system there a

long time ago and it just keeps doing this thing and i forget about it and it's great and it's probably fine i don't know how it looked let me take a hold on let me take a note here it's fine ish i need to leave it's probably fine you should check out your backups while you're at it too you should check out your financial stuff every once in a while probably a good idea wrote that down alright and as far as wise goes total fail again

so I did not spend any well not a total failure I did not spend any significant extracurricular time working on like spring streaming or league code which i planned on doing but i did do a lot of game dev a lot of weekends a lot of just kind of side project time doing it around the laptop i spent some time with good good though and uh even with github actions and stuff and kind of doing some automation stuff so

that was really cool i really enjoyed that time and uh so that was pretty much it for 2023 wait did you move away from unity because prior you had been messing with unity quite a bit you stopped doing that yeah i definitely most of my time has been in unity and then uh i got into godot because i was interested in github actions and i just wanted to see what that was about and i couldn't do that i couldn't automate builds with unity because that requires their license which is like two thousand dollars a year uh and so i was like okay well let me try this one and it just turned out that i really liked it it's really lightweight compared to unity so it doesn't like you don't like start it and go get a coffee and

come back and okay now it's up and it crashed like let me go get another coffee i guess while it starts up again and it just seemed um simpler and it just seemed to kind of fit better with like how i want to work on things like it's it's definitely lower level it doesn't have all the bells and whistles but uh it also means i spend more time with code and not diving through menus and googling how to dive through menus hey so two more two more follow-up questions on this you're saying godot isn't it that thing that's like godot yeah that's how you spell it yeah okay godot all right all right just making sure i wasn't missing something and then the other thing so you're on a mac doing this stuff right was was unity development totally fine on a mac totally fine

yeah you're on a mac you're on an m series mac so the apple apple silicon type stuff yeah i had to use the beta when i was working on unity and Godot was just fine with it. Okay. And was unity okay with it as well? Yep. Okay, cool.

Yeah, no problems. I haven't had any problems with the, with the M series. Yeah, that's been great. Uh, as far as,

uh, 2024 goes, uh, same goals, healthy, wealthy, and wise. Now healthy. I am going to do like a food diary thing,

which I did in 2022 or something that worked out well for me. In fact, I didn't appreciate how well it did for me because as soon as I stopped doing it, everything fell apart. So we're going to bring that one back. And when you say food diary, tracking calories, all that kind of stuff, like what you're eating. Basically, I use MyFitnessPal as the app that I like. I was going to ask.

Yeah, and you can log your calories. I say food diary instead of logging calories because I really don't want to be stressing out about, like, whatever. Like, if I eat a hamburger, I just want to, like, search hamburger and find something that looks about right and use it. I don't want to, like, weigh food. I don't want to whatever. And so I'm pretty loosey-goosey about it. I found that, like, that helps me just kind of say, you know and i was bad yesterday i had a big breakfast let me be good today okay so it's really being accountable like being aware being aware of it of what you're

doing can help with accountability yeah totally totally but yeah i've been using my fitness pal for years now it's nice they i will say like there were features that they kind of like hidden into like a pay version yeah that i miss like one of them was that um back when because it was originally owned by under armor and um at that time you could there was a there was a scan feature where you could use the barcode scanner to scan whatever you bought. And if it was in their database, then boom, that popped up as one serving. And they ended up, when Under Armour divested themselves of that and sold it off, whatever, the company that bought it eventually made that a pay feature to use the barcode but they did add a feature where like you could literally like point the camera at your plate

and it would figure out what's on your plate yeah absolutely insane hey by the way i like your approach though jay-z like that would make it more more something that I think more people would use is if you did it more like what you're saying, right? Like, all right, I ate a cheeseburger with bacon on it, right? Like I don't need to say that it was a cheeseburger with bacon on it from this restaurant, you know, with, with this, you know, whatever. Just, just looking at it being like, okay, that was 850 calories, right? I don't care if it was actually 950. It was a lot of calories. I should,

I should lay off. I think that's a really good approach to it. Yeah. You never get to get exactly like I made it. I created a meal called sushi and I, when I first created, I did it based on whatever I ate that night and kind of, you know,

did my best guess for it. And then from then on, uh, if I eat sushi, I use sushi. Is it more or less? I don't know. I,

but then again, I'm not, you know, I'm not going to bust out the food scale and start tearing apart the rolls to measure how much salmon and how much cream cheese and how much whatever. Yeah. Cause then you just hate it all. Yes.

Yeah. I do. I hate the ads. I cannot stand that. So I pay for it, even though I don't want any of the fancy features just cause I hate those garish ads, like flashing at you. And I mobile ads i hate you can use the barcode feature

yes i can't it doesn't always work oh really it doesn't yeah it used to be super reliable but yeah i would say probably 75 percent of the time it works but it's annoying when it doesn't those are the times i remember i mean i but okay so okay, so as a long-time user of the app, though, what I will say is that, you know, like you mentioned a burger, for example. It's like not all burgers are created equally. So I take the time to just go ahead and say, like, you know, if they have the burger, if it's a restaurant that is in their in their location right then i will go ahead and put that in there because then like it keeps a history of everything you're doing so like you know if you go to a specific restaurant and nine times out of ten

like you know you get the same thing or like you know it might vary by like four dishes or whatever like you know you can easily search that. And then from the search results, just be like, add, add, add, add, and then done. So like that first time is only the time that it's a hassle. And so I say that because like, you know, in the beginning, you know, maybe you don't want to like care about being specific. But then when you do decide that you want to care, like, you like you know yeah reusing that stuff and like having your history is huge it turns out you eat the same stuff almost all the time yeah i'm i'm definitely a creature a bad creature of habit in that regard too so yeah makes logging easy though it really does because

especially then because uh you know like if your breakfast is the same and it's like, hey, swipe right if you want to add yesterday's breakfast. Yeah, of course I do. Costco meatloaf. Yeah. Wait, meatloaf for breakfast? No, no, no. Costco meatloaf. No, actually the chicken bake from Costco is where it's at, but that's fine.

Okay. Yeah, good stuff. I mean, it wasn't going to be a show without a costco commercial boomer hours coming up later okay i can't wait for it or maybe i can but uh so next one up is wealthy basically just doing the same thing you know maybe tweak a percent here or there but whatever i don't have to think too much about that now wise uh there's some things that worked out for me well last year that i just want to kind of keep going with and develop more and then uh the things that i didn't do so well on last year uh as far as like text days and stuff i'm just gonna give up apparently i don't want to do them so you, you know, I'm going to listen. I'm going to listen to myself.

I'm going to love myself more this year. Fair. So Obsidian, I love Obsidian. Every time I have to look up something in Obsidian about something I did before or some script I ran or what happened on this date, I am so happy when there's information in there. And it's annoying to me now when there's a day when I didn't use as much and the notes aren't as good, or I didn't save some command that I didn't think I would do it again. And so I just want to be more diligent about doing stuff in there first and

using it as like a right ahead log. Like if I've got some tasks to do, if I got some little scripts to run, whatever, like drop it in there first. And now it's searchable is it turns out a lot of stuff I do is a stuff I've done before. Hey, so you got more more tags there what do you mean by that i just want to be better about tagging stuff so like if uh if i have a production support incident now i have a production support

tag so i do like prod support or something you know hashtag prod support in the item and then it links them so then next time i have a prod support issue, I'm like, oh crap, was this last week or two weeks ago? Let me just click prod support and there you go. There's a list of all my prod support tag documents and there we go. There's only four or five that. Yeah, it's wonderful. Because I use Obsidian a lot

too. Ever since I saw you using it for notes one time, I was like, that's amazing. It's so good. I use the tags right at the top now like something with kafka hashtag kafka that's so good i didn't i didn't know about it all right killer and then dates is there any special functionality around dates or you just put them in there so i love them and that you know like you think like uh you know the dates are you can view histories of files you could view you know create dates whatever stuff like that

which is you know fine most of the time but i have never been upset to see a date in a file name or a date in a notepad you know in my life it does not offend me to see it and so many times it's really helpful especially if you're trying to figure out something and you're like i know i did it like a month ago and you can like zoom in and see your files and they're just named that way it's so much easier than like trying to go in and sort and stuff and especially with updated dates which are totally unreliable like you know i want to be able to update a note that i had and i don't want to worry about like losing it so like if i'm going in and adding stuff to a note that i created last month like i'll just throw it you know the date of today

that i'm adding it in there i know it's in the file history but it's not searchable it's not as easy to read when i'm just like looking for something quickly so to make sure you're saying that like in your tag that are not tag in your title of the document you'll have the date in that and so and that's how obsidian names its files is whatever's in the title yep and then actually in the contents too like say let's say i'm like working on a java upgrade uh story or something a ticket then i might create uh something with the date in it the story you know title whatever in the file name and then i'll you know have all my notes in there and then when i'm done take it i'll go dump that stuff in the ticket and then two weeks later there's some problem that i didn't understand so i'll go back to my note about the java upgrade and i'll add

another little date header i'll link it to today's to-do list or whatever and so it just kind of ties things together so if i'm in a hurry i'm like oh what was that thing i fixed now i have to do it again i don't remember what i did just fix it faster okay and it really doesn't take any time to to kind of enter that stuff and it saves so much time when i need it so i'm just i want to do more of it okay one more question on obsidian because i I love seeing your usage of it because it's actually sort of led me to how I use it a lot. Do you do the thing where it syncs it to other places or do you just have it on your one system and that's it? So work, I do not.

I don't want it going out anywhere. So what I do is I put my directory location in my Google Drive, obviously, which is something like whatever work says. Work says, hey, you're allowed to use OneDrive. You're allowed to use whatever for sharing systems. There you go. It's backed up. You can access it from other devices and stuff that are company approved, and it's just great.

In my personal one, I do sync, so that way I can have it on my computer and on my phone and stuff a little bit easier and for the work stuff i don't really need to be easy if i need to look up something on my you know phone whatever assuming i can access it from my device oh so that's interesting so you're saying basically you have the google drive app installed on your computer and then you just save it like it's a file on google drive and then it hadn't even thought about that and it's all plain text it's markdown files yeah which is super indexable super super searchable, you know, all that stuff. So you can go in and search, you know, Java upgrade in Google Drive. Right. And it's going to find everything that's in there.

Oh, that's really good. I like that. Hey, massive good tips here. Yeah. And you save yourself the $10 thinking fee. Although I'm happy to pay it and I use it for my personal stuff. Yep. Cool.

Oh, yeah. And let's see. Oh, I did sign up for my personal stuff. Yep. Cool. Oh yeah. And let's see. Oh, I did sign up for musician this year. Musician is an app where it'll kind of teach you like guitar, bass, ukulele, voice,

or piano. Those are the instruments that they support. And they'll either work with like MIDI or it'll actually listen to you. So if you're singing, it'll say like sing the so latido or whatever. And you sing it and it'll you know like either hit the notes or whatever and it'll kind of like work you up and um like guitar and bass like uh i haven't actually tried those ones i was just trying to with um piano uh

so far i just kind of like the idea of like spending 15 minutes a day or a couple times a week and just you know doing these things and just it does this uh has this notion of a weekly streak or it doesn't try to make you do it every day but every week they encourage you to go back to it i figure that's a good system to try and get better at stuff i kind of like the idea of like you know i'm frustrated at piano this week and i'm not trying to like hardcore learn piano uh let me do ukulele or let me do bass or let me try singing what the heck and just have fun with it so it's a nice way to kind of keep in touch with like musical stuff and also mix things up and just have a little fun well you know when you come back up

here we're gonna we're gonna you know get the band back together so that's right i did just sell my guitar amp but i do still have my bass amp so so wait you listed out bass ukulele voice piano are those all the ones that you're trying to do you pick it up those are all the ones they have and i have all those instruments oh that's awesome yes i need to get better all those instruments i know she didn't list banjo or drums well ukulele is sort of like a banjo not completely no way not completely not completely it's close close-ish so little i love it no they have finger picking this a little bit different oh whatever i'm terrible just i got rid of my drum set it's gone oh you did okay yeah yep well i guess alan's gonna have to buy a drum set to play drums. You don't want me playing any instruments.

I imagine Alan behind a drum set would be much like Animal from The Muppets. You might not roll. Man, that's a bad hobby to have. I love drummers. Drums are fantastic. They sound great. They're so important and so many different kinds of music but man if you got the bug i feel for you it's so hard to practice it's

so hard to enjoy like the thing that you love you know well nobody wants to hear it not now though because now there's like the electric pads that like you can have all the same like beat you know swing and hit it and beat it and whatnot and they're much quieter yeah yeah they are but all it takes is uh having a spare bedroom in your house dedicated to it yeah you need that yeah you need to have the computer and you need to have the speakers but same thing applies for guitar though like you know yeah you could play you know play your amp through headphones and whatnot but somebody's still going to hear the strings and every missed pick. That's true. I hate the room that takes for a drum kit and like little stool,

like, like no matter what, like the smallest area you're going to get into is like maybe four by four. And that's like pretty crunched in there with the sound modules and stuff. Like all those wires going to your computer, you know, whatever the sound interfaces. So what I'm hearing is Jay-Z is going to have a new room set up for this

stuff. And he's going to invest about $12,000 in soundproofing the room completely. So his wife can't hear him. Yeah, I think we're good. Yeah, that's it. Easy. It's simple. Oh, so I want to keep going.

Yeah, I want to keep going with Godot. And I don't have any sort of system in place. I'm not trying for any sort of weekly streaks or anything I just like it so I think that's going to kind of come naturally when I have the time and that kind of energy to spend on it but I also want to try publishing more so I actually making smaller games or tools and just putting them out there just for fun but also soundtracks like I really like kind of video gamey music and stuff like that I always have so I kind of did some experiments over like the holiday holidays uh here in the states and like hey this is pretty

fun like i could conceivably put this up on itch for free and like maybe someone would use it and that would be really cool so yeah i'm gonna try to do that that's excellent and then this one is something i do have to like think about but i would like to have some sort of fun little web project just to keep me in touch with uh web kind of front-end work because i am so far removed from it right now that i'm kind of scared i don't want to get too far away it's like remember for like years i felt like a moving train like jumping on and it was tough but not like i i don't know if it's slowed down or if i just don't know much about it well you know i mean like off-run in development now they don't even use javascript no no it's poopy script they got something else

you know poopy script uh you know 2024 or something i don't know i think it's all tailwind it feels like it has fleshed out a little bit though right like you still have the big players angular react and then you've got some some more niche type things right but it does feel like if you still up there um i think svelte is still a big one but but it feels like it's calmed down since the three of us were like heavy in it. Well, yeah, I mean, definitely nothing compares to the nineties as far as like how crazy the iteration cycles were for, you know, web technologies. Or like every six months is a completely different world. But yeah, I think I would agree though, that it seems like definitely in the last handful of years, it feels like the dust is settling on the major players. It needed to.

Yeah, I will say in terms of like Angular, because it's now Angular, not AngularJS, my experience with it recently was actually pretty positive. I didn't feel like the learning curve was like, oh, I can't do this for another three hours. I'm going to lose my mind. It actually felt natural to a certain degree, which was lovely. And the tooling around it is super guiding, i'll say like it definitely like leads you in in the direction to be successful with it when you like want to you know do an ng create you whatever your new component is so yeah i was impressed i'm super impressed all right well we've got all that out of the way. It's time for, you know, leave us a review. And then.

Just the stars. Bad. Oh, the stars. I forgot to mention. Thank you for the clarification. We need stars. No, if you haven't. No, we do.

We do greatly appreciate all the reviews that we get. They're all amazing. We do appreciate you when you take the time. And it really does, you know, some people are like, hey, I would buy you a cup of coffee. And it's like, hey, you know what? Leave us a review.

Right. So I guess five stars equals one Starbucks. Is that how it goes? Not anymore. That's like 0.1 Starbucks, but that's fine. Yeah, it's pricey. Yeah, Starbucks got crazy's fine it's yeah that's pricey yeah starbucks starbucks got crazy right like it used to be two dollars for my cup of coffee and now it's over four so i just don't buy starbucks anymore because i'm mad at it yeah four bucks being you're getting

like a plain old coffee then i know yeah i don't do any of your crazy pumpkin pumpkin latte things right like those are like seven eight dollars Yeah. Here comes a boomer hour. Wait for it. Yeah. I can't be doing all that. Well, I actually stumbled onto it. Didn't I? I got kids guys.

Look at the almonds themselves. Come on. Outlaws kids are out of the house. Jay-Z doesn't have it. I got kids. I can't be doing that. Yeah. All right.

Well, uh, let's head into my favorite portion of the show. This is mental blocks. Lots of those. Let's do it my favorite portion of the show. This is mental blocks. We got lots of those. Let's do it. All right. So according to TechCo's trademark rules of engagement,

this is Alan's turn to go first. I'm going to win. Yep. I like the attitude, like spirit. So we'll see. There you go. Like it. The competition's there.

All right. So your categories are ants. And here's the one you're definitely going to pick. Big screen basketball. Or, hey, that's not an element. and you'll tell us which of these elements is not on the periodic table for that one or we we history uh and just to be clear we we would be like yes yes yes spelled out yeah yeah uh in you know. We, we, I should have said it. I should have made it more clear,

right? That's my bad. That's my bad. You could say the names properly at the front of the show, but not the titles of the cat. Well, I think if I had a beret to go along with it, that I could wear the time that I would say it,

it would be a little bit more clear. There we go. But, um, all right. So, uh, chicken five wave ways sorry i almost said waves

chicken five ways i'll say it again oh oh five i got it yeah five different ways yes uh okay and also the last one is also an animal sound. Okay, we're going to do the big screen basketball thing. I don't even know why I wasted my time with the other ones. Going for the kill. Four. Four. Yes.

Is there anything Denzel Washington can't do? Turns out he's even good at basketball as seen in this 1998 joint. Oh, good lord. Really? Buzz, buzz, buzz, come on. Really? Oh, man. Why did you pick a pop culture topic? It's called big screen. I know. I watch movies. I watch a lot of good Zoom movies. Your defense is

I watch movies. I got training day. What? Come on. Maybe he killed somebody, right? Woody Harrelson. Come on. Oh, is it White Man Can't Jump? What's your answer, Joe? White Man Can't Jump? What's your answer, Joe? White Man Can't Jump.

No, you're both wrong. That was Wesley Snipes. Yeah, he wasn't in that. That was Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson. All right, we both got it wrong. What was it? He Got Game. Oh, I never saw that.

That's not a popular movie. Let me mark some goose eggs here. I was really curious to see what Chicken Five Ways is. Can we just read one for the fun of it? Chicken a la King. Let's pick number the third level. Yeah. A debate that continues to tear the country apart.

Should chicken wings come with a side of blue cheese or this ranch ranch? And the answer, the answer is blue cheese though. So it doesn't matter. Thank you much. If you said otherwise, you don't deserve to be here. Okay.

All right. Well, uh, Jay-Z, this is your chance to get some points on the board. Maybe take the lead awake. All right. Well, Jay-Z, this is your chance to get some points on the board. Maybe take the lead. I'm awake. All right. Your choices are, or categories are, random U.S. state facts.

Okay. The one you're probably going to pick, post-apocalyptic pop culture. Okay. apocalyptic pop culture or out of breath. And here each correct response will be made entirely out of letters in the word breath. Yeah. Sorry. Well,

I was trying to like, I had, I had a mental mental breathe. Cause I'm like breathe or breath. And I'm like, no, no, no.

Breathe has the E at the end. Yes. Yes. All right. See, it's not just proper nouns see all now all right the next category book dedications meditation and from z to a this one's a little easier all the correct responses will begin with z and end with a there's five of these zebra is the answer yeah that's it for all of them it's the only one okay zambia is another one hold on let me figure out the five he's already got Google open. That's not allowed.

There's only five words. There's not that many. Like I feel like those are both answers to questions there. I know. I mean, we got to go post a lot apocalyptic and that is probably my least favorite kind of sci-fi. So I'm going to go with a three there. Oh,

you did pick that one. Yes. Okay. For me to there, I thought you were going with the z to a because you know no i already know i already know there's no fun well i'm gonna make you regret that by reading you the number three from the z to a just to tease you in a classic 1986 nintendo game 1986 Nintendo game Link tries to rescue this little princess from

Ganon. Wow. Ganon? Wait. Ganon? Ganon, man. Get up out of here. I said proper nouns. You did. Alright, so

over Ganon. Ah! You did. You did. All right. So over. Good night. Get out of here. Well, what else do you put in a canine? You fire a canine ball out of a canine. You're so right. Thank you. You did it wrong.

Thank you. It's a long time. Yeah. God, you got to love my crippling disease here. All right. We're getting back on topic here. The number three category is over 11 total seasons of The Walking Dead. This Z word was surprisingly never used by a character. Zombie.

What is zombie? Yes. Zombie. Zombie. That's so lame. Did they never really say zombie? No, they always called them walkers. Well, that's right.

The walkers. Yeah. That movie jumped the shark around season like four or five i don't know that was a tv show not a movie so maybe you don't watch oh yeah that season the show jumped the shark i'm sorry they split from the comics and that was it if you read the first comic book and like watch the first episode it's almost like scene by scene like what the heck is going on oh that's awesome all. I got to go for the win. You got to get some points on the board.

So. Nah. Categories are islands, countries, the DNA of music. The one you're definitely going to pick. Alaska. Airport stores. Oh, the irony or lastly what is what it is and the quotations around the is marks mean that the letters is will appear twice in each correct response

let's do what is what it is for four all right four dang i'm going for the really like i'm gonna lose big or one day it's gonna be one of the other like a mythical character who loved his own reflection people with this personality style are in love with themselves. Oh my God. Why can I not think of the word? It's a, oh man, this could be game right here. Oh, come on.

Nope. That's not it. It's not narcissism. What? It's not. Oh, I can't think of it. What is narcissism?

That is correct. oh narcissus and echo yep i like how confident you were that that wasn't it as you were saying i had nothing else man all right well final jeopardy this is where or i'm sorry final mental blocks gosh there might be hunt to us. Wait, how we need to be able to, you know what? We need to send you, this is how we need to do it. We need to send you our amounts in a, in a direct message and Google chat. It's always all of it. Okay.

Okay. Send me your, send me your message. I'll wait. Yeah, here we go let's see all right i've got allen's and jay-z says jay-z he bluffed me you can't jay-z tried to bet more than he had. He tried to daily double it like he had 100 and he was going for 1,000. I bet a million. All right.

The category is astronomy. I probably should have given you the category first, though, because that would be more consistent. I won't take all those back. Too late now. Discovered in the 1960s and 70s. Here comes the proper noun. Cygnus X-1 was the first of these light-trapping gravitational bodies to be identified. Oh.

I know. I know. What do we do? We type it in? Yeah. We're going to type it into our area yeah type it into your area let's see and then we'll say three two one and then hit enter where's our area yeah i'm doing it in my point section yeah yeah all right

three two one one where did jay-z write his oh that's right oh the answer is black hole and you both wrote black hole or holes yeah yeah i'll tell you i'll take that credit he could have no we need judges well the answer is black holes, but technically it says the first of these. So black hole, black hole, same thing. Now here's where it gets interesting. Here's where it gets interesting.

So we look at the answers, the scores. So Alan, you gambled three. And Jay-Z gambled three. What does it say in that message? He literally did type in four the first time.

He did. He did. So, we tied. Yeah. So, yeah, you won by a point. Asterisk on his uh yeah he won by a point on his victory that was awesome also asterisk on the victory but yeah let me let me notate that i'm sorry i got a new win streak going congratulations you didn't really win but congratulations i put an asterisk in there for posterity purposes. I like it. I like it. So, all right. So moving right along,

I'm looking back on my 2023. First, it starts with me clearing my throat. Apologies. So one of the things that I had in there in my 23 was related to Kotlin wanting to get more involved in that. So, you know, success definitely got, you know, to experience the Kotlin, the Kotlin, wanting to get more involved in that. So success, definitely got to experience the Kotlin joy

and also the Java ecosystem pain at the same time. Amen, brother. But maybe that's mostly just because I was working in a Maven project and Maven is just I find painful in regards that it wants to rebuild everything all the time and it just doesn't natively without using a native maven cache extension which yeah i got to experience that too but also that turned out to prove more problems but kotlin yay there's some soup there's some some super cool syntactic sugar that I liked about Kotlin and built-in functions and things that you could do,

mapping things and whatnot, or even just initializing things and saying this to, literally the word to this thing. So yeah, I feel you know got that one but i had deeper on streaming technologies and i don't feel like i got to the level of satisfaction you know the satisfactory mastery level that i wanted to get there so i'm hoping that that's skipping ahead now if I'm looking forward to 24. Flink specifically is super high on my radar, which you already covered. We're going to be talking about the – we already have a book in mind to discuss for that.

So I'm looking forward to getting into that more. And then, um, you know, also in my 23, I had music theory and techniques, uh, you know, getting a better grasp on some of that, which, you know, I feel like that's just something that you're just always going to be iterating on. Um, and so like, I feel like I'm getting there am i if i mastered it yet you know no obviously not but um i feel like it's important though to have like to not be a one trick pony right like i don't want software development to be my only thing right so that's why i'm like you know using a different part of the brain to like do other stuff right so be creative and uh you know learn learn something totally new and different.

So, which, uh, you know, I went back and looked and it was really in, um, it was July of 21 is when I decided to like make a serious, um, path into music, you know, and, and learning that. So, I mean, so that's like what, two and a half years or no. Yeah. Yeah. About two and a half years of it. So, you know, I'm considering two and a half years. I'm, I'm pretty pleased with where I am, um, with that, but I still, you know,

skipping ahead to the 20, looking ahead to 24 stuff, you know, I put like sweet picking, for example, as like one of the techniques that, um, I would love to, to be able to master, uh, you know, so I'll get there, but also in regards to just music in general, there's like just better being able to like remember specific areas of like, if you're in a given key and knowing like, okay, these are all the different scale patterns I can play with and that, and having that kind of like fretboard knowledge to help with improvisation kind of stuff. Um, you know, that, that's definitely on my radar for the the 24 year but um also

in terms of like other technology uh reaper is one piece of software that i definitely want to master i tried i tried getting into it like a couple years ago and it was it seemed a little daunting at the time and i just got sidetracked and never came back to it so it's definitely been on my radar for this year and in fact that's sorry i don't know why i can't speak all of a sudden um it's all those proper nouns messed me up so so uh i had I had assumed that we were going to be doing, um, the game January this year. And so I had planned on like, uh, since I did the, you know, audio for the previous, some of the previous games, uh, I was thinking like I might do that again, but like use that

as an opportunity to force myself to, to use Reaper because the recordings that I did previously weren't of the greatest quality that they, you know, they, they could have been better quality, but because of the way that I recorded them, they weren't. So I was hoping to, you know, get into Reaper. So, so question why, why Reaper over something likeition, which you have, right? Fair question. So Reaper specifically, so I have this ridiculous, what would you call this, like effects processor that is just way more than I ever need, but I love it and it's it's my precious but so there's there's a company called line six and they make these series of effects processors all under what i'll underneath the brand name helix but there's a whole there's a whole family of these different effects processors and the super cool thing that line six did is basically all of these things are just purpose-built small computers running linux and uh you know have have this

software in them that you know makes the effects processors and whatnot well that same software that you that is running on the pedal is available as a plug-in to reaper reaper so what you can do is you can in reaper and jay-z can definitely just talk to this way more detail than i can but for example you can record in reaper and just have just the like the raw signal from your guitar with like no effects or anything like that but that's what you're recording in reaper but then in the editing process you can decide well i want to add this effect to it or i want to add some delay or i want to add some chorus or maybe you know i want to like increase this or that or whatever so so you have like all that control after the fact but because it's um

you know you by by focusing on the recording with just your clean signal though like you can definitely kind of focus more on your on getting like clean picking and whatnot and fretting and uh but you know after the fact you can do all the edits with and just an experiment with what what effects do you like better you know very cool so okay that makes sense because the way you uh oh go ahead well i was just gonna say the lat to close that thought out because the way i've recorded the things to date that i've provided were i recorded that the signal after it already had an effect on it uh right yeah i was saying um so uh reaper like like you mentioned like the plugins that supports vst

uh and most dolls do but audition doesn't it doesn't support uh like virtual instruments and um some other plugins stuff like that and it also doesn't support midi which uh is useful if you ever want to add drums or anything so i don't know what kind of like other stuff they might have for music but it seems like audition is more tailored for like like voices or like you know film like that sort of thing and not really so much for like music editing and kind of having that full suite of stuff actually it's not audition i was thinking of it's uh what's apples oh garage band oh logic logic is what i was thinking that's great yeah apple logic is what i was thinking because you have that as well um logic pro was actually my my brain went to audition because

that's what we do for the podcast but but we had actually bought Logic back in the beginning days to do this stuff. Yeah. You got a Windows box sitting there, so I assume that's why you're going the Reaper route. Yeah. My Mac is a bit long in the tooth, so it might die if I tried to spin up Logic. Yeah. Let's spin up a Logic session and do a live recording with it. See how well that goes.

Yeah. Makes sense. So, uh, where we covered flame covered that. Okay. So then the last thing that I just want to add, like I'm always setting myself like,

um, not necessarily like anything, um, resolution related, but I kind of felt inspired to include it since based on some of the stuff that Jay-Z said. But, you know, I always give myself like health goals that I want to try to accomplish, you know. And so like last year, and we talked about this during like the black Friday, uh, episode, uh, last year, though, I started using, um, a treadmill desk, just trying to like, you know, evaluate like how would I like it? But it was like more of like an add on, you know, add a desk onto your existing treadmill kind of thing. Um, if you already had a treadmill, but, uh, so then at the end of the year, I invested in like, you know,

a for real dedicated treadmill desk setup. And, uh, I've, I've decided that I'm going to set a goal for myself that I'm just going to do five miles a day. Cause last year I would like vary it based on like, I would set goals for myself based on the amount of time that I would spend on the treadmill or the amount of steps that I would get on the treadmill while I'm working. And I decided, you know what? It's fine. that the company that makes the treadmill, they're going to do their best guess at how many steps you're getting or any kind of fitness device that you're going to wear, you know, wearable that you're going to use to use is going to try to do its best guess

at getting like how many steps you get. But I would expect that the treadmill manufacturer would have a better chance of being more accurate in regards to the mileage, because it's going to know the length of that belt,

you know? So I decided to just make it easier on myself and go for five miles a day. And then, you know, obviously, you know, we've talked about cycling in the past two, so I just want to get more cycling in.

So that's on my agenda. Very nice. Yeah, good stuff. Yep. So, yeah. So that's the, we'll have some resources that Alan likes. No, that was J.C., but I like it too. Oh, was it J.C.?

I thought that was you. Okay. I'll work it out. Gosh, no. We'll have some other resources that that three of us do agree on though and we head into alan's favorite portion of the show it's the tip of the week all right i had to share uh another instrumental artist i recently found uh their name is tony anderson and they're a music producer that specializes in what I would probably call

minimalist ambient piano music. It's really lush and it's got that kind of inspiring tonality to it. So it's not like Brian Eno or whatever music for Air Force. It's ambient piano and it's very peaceful and relaxing and whatever. This is more, um, more kind of driven,

I think more kind of appropriate for work. Uh, and I just think it's really cool. It's got like a real, like almost like kind of film or orchestral kind of sentiment behind it, even though it is just mostly piano and a lot of tons of reverb, but it's really good. It's just, i recommend putting it

on someday when you get something done and like next you know an hour's gone dude this is really good yeah i love it so the uh the previous i think the last show you did lo-fi girl and i found myself a few times this week like just turning it on because it really is just it's like you said it's there's some there's some like study music that it's almost like too i don't know man i i don't know how to describe it but it just it almost lulls you to sleep to a certain degree and that lo-fi girl stuff like some of our channels are upbeat enough driven just enough yeah to to keep you engaged in what you're doing and not make you want to close your eyes and go to sleep yeah this one

that he just put here this tony anderson guy the first song on that link that you have the ephemerie man that's beautiful so good yeah so i'll it sounds like i'll be listening to this a lot this week yeah i actually found them um i was watching i was looking sounds like i'll be listening to this a lot this week yeah i actually found him um i was watching i was looking for like uh inspiration for like desks and stuff for like you know with like slide outs for keyboards just what other people did and i found a tour of his studio in la which is basically a home studio and uh he's got all these crazy uh old synths like uh analog synthesizers from like the 70s and 80s and like he details them and he's nuts about it and uh he's got like this beautiful piano he's taking the face off so you can see all

the keys and everything because he likes the sound of like the the kind of the hammers and the felt and stuff the open and like once you know that and you listen to music like you totally hear like the the hammers and that like you hear the motion of the piano and the music he does and it's just really cool man that's why i'm so addicted to like good sound like so so for reference like i'm seriously this year i'm going to be buying the speakers that i want i'm going to be getting the amps and all that kind of stuff that i want and it's because like that that audio show i went to i'm not even kidding you if you went into a good room with two speakers, two speakers, it sounded like you were there, right? Like the people were up on the stage in the right spot. The instruments were three-dimensional.

Like it is absolutely amazing what good stuff does. And like I'm listening right now in some Audio-Technica M50s, which to this day are one of my very favorite pair of headphones you can get for a reasonable price. And that, I mean, it's absolutely gorgeous. And Spotify doesn't even have the best sound quality. Like they don't record or they don't rip their music at a high bit rate. It's actually very lossy. So I have no doubt if I open this up on

Apple music, it's just going to be even that much better. So I'm, I'm super excited about this. All right. So now that I, I hijacked his, because I'm excited about the music you picked, uh, I will talk about the stuff that, that, uh, I found that is been pretty awesome and very frustrating. So I have the M3 Apple MacBook Pro now, and I have run into problems with it, with compatibility with things. And one of them was I want to get Kubernetes set up. Like I said, I'm looking at doing a talk on the status streaming. So I wanted to get everything set up. I didn't want to use Docker Desktop.

And there's really two reasons. One, because they went to the whole licensing thing. That's a little bit different. I know that you can still use it personally and it doesn't affect you until you download so many things, whatever. But I was like, you know what? I'm going to go and give pod man a shot, man. Golly. It was so frustrating. Like it just wasn't working with Apple Silicon. Like there were in, and I found threads and ended up following them. And it took me a couple of days and I finally got it working, right? So was it worth it?

I don't know. It would have been easier to just stick with Docker desktop and move on. Yeah, I had a rough time with Podman recently too, where I was trying to do Docker and Docker where one of those Dockers was Podman. It was not happening. There was some workarounds and stuff that I didn't really like that you could have kind of done, to do docker and docker where one of those dockers was podman it was not happening there

there was some workarounds and stuff that i didn't really like that you could have kind of done but because i was working it wasn't really an options i ultimately abandoned it but i spent days on it yeah so that was that was a bummer it's frustrating so i will say now that i've got it working very happy with the overall experience of podman so so i so I could never get pod man, just the CLI thing working by itself, but pod man desktop, I was able to get working and, and it's really good. Like it's really good.

If you, if you're used to Docker, basically you can more or less just swap out the word Docker for pod man and all your commands. And it just works right for the most part. Um, what if you just alias pod man as Docker? A lot of people do that. Yeah. Yeahcker a lot of people yeah yeah a lot of people

do that i i haven't yet but i haven't used it that much it's probably what i'll end up doing at some point um just because my muscle memory goes there but so once i got that working i was super happy about it there there are some interesting things about it and and there was a reason besides just the fact that docker went to its different licensing the other is podman doesn't run as a demon in the background so it's actually using less cpu and all that kind of stuff so when you make a request to podman it's processing at that point it doesn't have some demon sitting there waiting for for a command to run and all that kind of stuff so it it's actually, it's eating up less of

your energy on your laptop, which matters if you're sitting in your chair trying to do some stuff, right? So that was one of the other things and it's truly open source. So I thought that was all good. Well, then on top of that, I want to do Kubernetes. And this was another reason why I steered away from Docker desktop, even though technically, technically you could have used it with the next thing that I'll mention. But we mentioned it on the show previously. Docker desktop is really nice in that if you just want to get Kubernetes running, you can click a box in their configuration and it's up and going. The biggest problem with that is you are tied to whatever Docker version they have. So if they update, you know, Kubernetes to the next version, when you update Docker, you have no, there's, you're stuck with whatever version of Kubernetes

shipped with that version of Docker, right? If you use their built-in Kubernetes. And I was like, you know what? I don't want to deal with that because when you're creating something, it's already hard enough to make sure everything's working. And if that changes out from underneath you, while you're in the middle of developing something and get ready to go present it it's like you want to melt the world down why wasn't minikube a consideration though so i thought about minikube and part of this is me just inflicting pain on myself i want to try something new oh we should have started with that but there was something interesting that i found so there's a thing called kind and it's actually from kubernetes so i have a link to both of these and and in our notes here but what kind allows you to do is you get to run your kubernetes cluster as a container

so you're not like minikube is very sort of strict, how like setting up a VM and all that kind of stuff, right? Like it wants to take a certain portion of resources and all that. If you run in kind, you just run a container and it's your Kubernetes node. And the interesting thing about this that I actually like even more. And the reason why, other than I just wanted to try something new is if you want to go to a multi-node cluster, so you can test out different scenarios, right? Like Kafka is a good example, right? You want Kafka distributed across multiple nodes for distributed, whatever. You can actually test out the scenario with kind because you spin up multiple containers, which are multiple nodes,

and those are your nodes for your Kubernetes cluster. So it's actually really interesting. Okay, so it sounds like in a Minikube world, those that have been VMs, and that's part of the hassle of using Minikube is that you have to be sure you allocate enough space, like disk space is a common one that you know we would experience uh because all of your docker builds or podman builds whatever your images are going to get pushed

to that vm so that vm is going to have to have enough storage also cpu memory but you're saying with this you're using the same whatever you're using to build and run your containers, Docker or Podman or whatever. You're basically on bare metal of your machine in terms of there is no VM to worry about. So you don't have to worry about like how much memory do I get this thing? How much disc do I give this thing? Correct.

You allocate it once and then when you spin up your nodes, they have access to that stuff. Because I want to be fair to Minikube, you could spin up another Minikube cluster locally for your multi-node situation, right? Yeah. It's a little bit more aggressive in how you have to set the thing up, right? Like you said, you'd have to say, all right, give it two CPUs, whatever. Give it this, give it that.

No, I think I misspoke. It wouldn't be spinning up another VM. It would have to be configuration of the existing VM, because otherwise it would be a different cluster than the other VM. And we're not trying to set up a different cluster. No, we don't want a new cluster. So it's different nodes. So it's actually really cool it's all it's it's

actually really cool how it all works i i was i was very impressed with it now to take it even a step further that i thought was interesting this is kind of what led me down this road of where i landed anyways is i think i googled something like best mac development kubernetes setup something like that right and it took me to this article that I'll link to from open credo, but the gist of without going too deep into what he was looking for here, the gist of it is he wanted to test out Kubernetes locally, like it was running in the cloud. And one of the things that is typically a pain in the butt and you don't get locally with Kubernetes is low balancers and,

and that kind of thing. And so he wanted to get this thing set up to where it looked like it does in GKE or EKS or AKS or any of those. Right. And so he was able to using, he didn't use pod, man. He used,

what did he use? It with a c uh kalima so he's using the docker cll client kalima which i've looked into that it's it's a cli only thing so it's very lightweight but um i think it's it's also a little bit more complex because it's all configuration based type stuff um and then he used kind and then there's a metal LB, which is their load balancer thing. And so he's able to through a little bit of configuration stuff here to be able to set up a Kubernetes cluster that more or less looks like it's running in the cloud with real load balancers and all that kind of stuff.

Right. So, so that's kind of what steered me in the direction that I went was like, Hey, if I ever want to get crazy with this, then I'm already, you know, 70 percent of the way there. Right. And I can take these extra steps to do the rest of it. Yeah, it looks looking at the documentation for kind, though, it reminds me a lot of the mini cube. Terminal output when you would start it up and whatnot,

like, you know, um, but I, I did go back and check and yeah, with mini cube, if you wanted multiple nodes, it's just a dash,

dash nodes equal, you know, dash, dash nodes and however many you want. And then that, then you have the, your VM with all your nodes. Oh,

that's interesting. I don't think I'd ever tried it that way. Yeah, so I put a link to that next to the kind and the documentation. Yeah, so I guess to recap. I still think the kind would be easier because you wouldn't have to worry about like, oh, how much memory do I want to give this? Because you have to specify that when you start up Minikube. Well, or at least we were specifying that on the command line we

weren't letting it default to anything yeah so that's actually the the real benefit here of kind over minikube just to summarize is you're already setting up your in the case of podman you're setting up how many resources you want podman to have just like you would docker desktop right now you don't have to do any of that any further right you just say hey i want i want a node to start up inside this thing and be part of my kubernetes cluster so you're not having to now also specify again how much more resources do i want to get from my computer you've already defined that yeah so it's it's again i i was super impressed with it the one funny part is if you go this route like i did when you start up the kind cluster and it sees that it's using podman it's like using experimental oh yeah and i was

like dang it throwing shade are you yeah but it worked so um and then i was starting to get into the strimsy and all that kind of stuff so it's uh it's pretty interesting and one other thing i don't even have in the notes here but one other thing i want to look at is i don't know if you guys have ever looked at this we've talked about telepresence right and how we love it for being able to communicate with pods and things with inside a cluster uh there's another one that's by the CNCF. It's called MirrorD. I want to spend some time with that too, because there's some aggravations

that we've run into with telepresence. And I don't know what to attribute it to. I don't know if it's because of software installed on the Windows machines that have been trying to use it, but we could never get it to work, right? So basically we had a Windows machine. On a Windows machine. Works flawlessly on Mac. Perfect on Mac. And again, I don't want to blame this on telepresence because we really don't know. There's too many variables that we don't control that it's hard to say what it is.

But on a Windows machine using either WSL or WSL2, and then with various endpoint software installed on the machine, we could never, ever get these Windows machines to use telepresence properly to proxy. And so I want to look into MirrorD because it does things a little bit differently. Like I think it installs the stuff with the processes as opposed to having these, uh, you know, pods that are sort of intercepting and doing things. So, um, both of them are supposed

to accomplish similar things, just doing it different ways. So, uh, I'm probably going to take a look at that at some point. So yeah, that was it for mine. Uh, hold on. I got it right here. Oh no. And I apologize for that. Uh, there,

I apologize for that, which I should be apologetic of. Is that not the best apology ever? Sorry. Perfect. Okay. I'll get back on track here. So I had another tip of the week and I forgot it.

So instead of giving a good tip of the week, I just want to evangelize what we had previously talked about before in regards to get rebase. And if you haven't listened to the series of episodes that we did on, um, on get, I guess we're not friends, but, uh, but yeah,

so we did do a deep dive on get and how that, how that works and everything. And one of those episodes we talked about was in regards to rebasing things and specifically i recall at the time alan pointed this out i didn't even realize this was an option but um because when i do rebase uh i don't rebase often, but what I do I typically mix it in as part of a pull operation so my common workflow is I'll do get pull dash dash rebase equal true origin trunk and in that case I'm pulling from origin

a remote named origin and I'm pulling a branch called trunk, and I'm going to rebase all of my commits on top of that. And in that one episode, Alan, you called out that you could say, like, dash dash rebase equals interactive. And when we did that episode, we went through all kinds of cool things that you could do when you're in the interactive rebase operation. And for the most part, like, you know, definitely like if you're going to rebase, definitely, you know, be careful, know what you're doing and, you know, know that you're not editing shared history, yada, yada, yada. You've heard

that disclaimer a thousand times. It's meaningful, but whatever. whatever so yeah i'm not trying to like you know yeah definitely but i mean by now it's 2024 you know we've heard it uh for the most part though like i don't really ever have a need though to like do some of the crazy cool things that you can do aside from squash. But where I found myself in this situation recently was I had a whole slew of commits that I had been iterating on some effort. And when I was ready to package this thing up as a pull request, I very specifically wanted to give everyone on the team different commits that if they needed to cherry pick something,

they could cherry pick one of the commits and it didn't have to be an all or nothing. And then at the end of the day, there were three bodies of work that I really wanted to have as three separate commits. They were all part of the same effort. So that's why they were part of the same pull request.

But, but they affected like different things that were, you know, you could make an argument that I should have done them as three separate pull requests and you know, you're fine for making that argument. But yeah, I mean, it's, it's fair, fair but you know it was one body of work and and but the point is is that like during my iteration of all these things right i didn't necessarily work on each one of them independently so to like add a little bit more color to it and so this doesn't seem so vague like uh imagine that you're working on things for Alpine and you're working on some things that affect like Debian or Ubuntu and the things that affect Alpine have nothing to

do with any of the stuff you're doing with Debian or Alpine or Ubuntu, but yet collectively they all go together. Right. Uh, as far as like one, one body of work that you're doing, but the commits don't necessarily, you could have one without the other. And so what I wanted to do is package all the Alpine commits into one and all the Debian ones into one. Right. And then there was some other stuff where I was just doing some cleanup. Um,

and using the interactive rebase option, I was able to like reorganize all my commits to, to like, uh, put them in the order that I wanted to, which is crazy. Cool. You can do.

It's amazing. It's just so insane. Like, Oh, I'm just going to like copy this line and move it up there. And now guess what? What's even more insane is what you're about to say that you did after that. What emerged it?

No, I assume that you squashed. Oh no no no i squashed other ones together yeah so i reordered all of the commits into the order that i wanted and i purposely did that so that i could squash a group of commits together right so that i had these three groups of commits that eventually got squashed into three separate commits and it's just so crazy awesome that you can do that that i wanted to just like once again evangelize get but specifically this ability to do your interactive rebase that we discussed in a prior episode so you you were basically able to treat it like you had done your work in a completely different order than what you did it in and put it into three concise chunks that people could,

could use if they needed. Yeah. And, and, and I did it that way so that like if there was ever a, you know, if anyone ran into a problem in one of those specific things, like they could get,

Oh, I want the Alpine commits, but I don't care about the Debian or vice versa. Right? Like I wanted to give you as a member of, you know, of our developer community, the ability to choose which commit you want it to P to cherry pick without

having to take all or nothing, you know? And I definitely didn't want to encourage like, Oh, just copy, you know, or the file or re remake the change or whatever. I wanted to be able to give you the ability to like, oh, just copy the file or remake the change or whatever. I wanted to be able to give you the ability to like, hey, here's the easy button.

Cherry pick that one commit. That's awesome. So, yeah. Thanks for listening. Hey. What's that? Rebasing is the best. But hey, also, speaking of things that are best, you can subscribe to us on iTunes, Spotify, or using your favorite podcast app. We're still doing all that. Rebasing is the best. But hey, also speaking of things that are best, you can subscribe to us on iTunes,

Spotify, or using your favorite podcast app. We're still doing all that. That's right. Hey, and you can, you can leave us a review. If you go to coding blocks.net slash review,

we've got some helpful links there. Hey, and while you're up there, make sure you check out the show notes, examples, discussions, and more, and check out our Slack channel at coding blocks.net slash Slack.

I said all of that. No, you did. You did. It doesn't apply. I you did you did thanks for listening it's all there it hurts we're gonna have to cut this put it at the top of the show be like hey no for real for real we're a show that's been around for a minute we're gonna tell them at the top of the show thanks for listening i can make that happen we have a website too.

We do have a website. There's your fun web project. We're going to have AI remake it at some point. That sounds good.