The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Vibing into the vibe (Friends)

Episode Date: April 18, 2025

Nick Nisi joins us to confess his AI subscription glut, drool over some cool new hardware gadgets, discuss why the TypeScript team chose Go for their new compiler, opine on the React team's complicated relationship with Vercel, suggest people try Astro, update us on his browser habits, and more.

Welcome to changelog and friends, a weekly talk show about AI subscription fatigue. Thanks as always to our partners at fly.io, the public cloud built for developers who ship. If you ship like we do, maybe ship where we do at fly.io. Let's talk. Well, friends, I'm here with David Shue, CEO of Retool. David, I want to talk about awareness beyond Silicon Valley. Retool has a great presence and a great awareness inside Silicon Valley. But what about beyond?

What's really cool is I think we've done a really good job of building awareness inside of Silicon Valley. And so when you look at customers that use Retool, pretty much every big company in Silicon Valley, above a thousand people today, now uses Retool and builds internal apps via Retool. So that's really awesome. And I'm really proud of the progress you've made there. But I think the larger opportunity for us actually,

it's outside of Silicon Valley. When you think about, for example, the Kroger's of the world, the Koko's of the world, many of them are customers already today, but I think we haven't done as good as a job building awareness, if you will, around the developers and all these companies. And that, to me, is where the opportunity lies, because so much of these companies run on software. Software is so important. If you think about Coca-Cola, for example, Coca-Cola's not really gotten any cheaper

than manufacturer in the last 10 or 20 years. Instead, the reason why Coca-Cola is doing well as a company is because they are getting more productive by better software. And so every company needs to become a software company and Retro lets you do that. So Coke is a big company, but the principle rings true. Become more efficient by using better software. There you go.

Well, if you're beyond Silicon Valley, raise your hand. We wanna hear from you. I wanna tell Dave that if you're beyond Silicon Valley, raise your hand, we wanna hear from you. I wanna tell Dave that we reach people beyond Silicon Valley, that we're raising the awareness of what Retool is and what Retool does, and some big announcements coming soon here on ChangeLog, which is cool. Well, if you haven't yet, go to Retool.com,

get a demo, try it out for free, all that good stuff. Again, Retool.com Nick Nisi Nick N making Vim look easy. Hoi, hoi. Still rocking Vim. I wrote you a poem, but that's as far as I got. Ha, ha, ha. I like it.

Do you feel special? You feel sort of special? Cause I wrote you a poem, but also not so special cause that's as far as I got. I, it's, it's perfect. I think that's- Things don't have to keep going if they're perfect. I think that's a metaphor for our entire relationship.

You know? Well, if you were, if you would continue, you would go to TypeScript and that's just not possible. Yeah. That's right. The longer we talk, it's like, what's that rule about Nazi references on the internet? What? You know the rule? I don't know any rules about Nazis. What's that rule about Nazi references on the internet? What you know the rule I don't know he rules

What's it called? I'm thinking of Microsoft a Mmm. What's that? Tell me about that. Oh my gosh. This was a water getting hot in here. You don't remember this story this is a chat about that Microsoft released on Twitter like years ago, but before OpenAI and ChatGPT and all that. And it only took 24 hours for it to go full Nazi. Oh, that's right. It was called Tay. Yeah. Spell that.

T-A-Y. Okay. All right, this is Godwin's Law. See, I just wanted Nick to tell that story long enough for me to get the answer for the previous thing. So thanks, Nick, for that partay. Godwin's law is an adage from the early days of the internet that says,

as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one. So this is Godwin's law but for TypeScript and Nick. Like the longer we talk to him, the probability that he brings up TypeScript approaches one. It wasn't even me. I don't even have to do it anymore.

You'll let your reputation precedes you. Yes. Are you still TypeScripting? I think last time we were hanging out, you were writing PHP and stuff. I was and I am, but I'm still writing a lot of TypeScripts and I'm really liking it.

Are you using that new fast compiler? Not yet. No Hmm how big is the codebase you're working on is it fast enough for you? Oh, it's It's small enough that I can fit it into a paste into Claude the entire codebase. Oh nice What? How big is that? How big is Claude's context window? Oh, I don't know it starts getting mad at me when it's like around 200k. Okay. I use this cool site called get ingest.

And so you just go to like github.com slash whatever, but you replace the hub with ingest. That's right. Did I teach you about that? Maybe. Change our news, man. Yeah, maybe. I logged it a couple months ago. It's cool. Ah. I liked it so much that I had Claude write me a bash script to do all of that for me.

Vibe coding. I feel like that's similar to me writing you a one line poem. It's like, I liked it enough not to write my own bash script, but to have somebody else write it for me, you know? Yeah, so that's how you write bash now. And what exactly are you doing with this? Get ingest bash script? This is for when I'm like making a bunch of changes locally and I don't like it's

not all out on like a public GitHub repo that get ingest can get at. I can just type, I called it digest for some reason. And I can just run digest and it'll throw it on my clipboard and tell me how big it was. So I can see see Like oh, this is you know 200k or 40k or whatever. I feel like there already was a digest command that does like MD5 slums or something You know, I have three Mac computers and one of them has a digest. I Thought there might be a namespace conflict there an old. Yep. That's an old Linux command or something who knows but not the one I use every day.

My work computer for some reason, at least my digest is higher on the path or earlier in the path, so it gets that one. Why don't you name it ingest? I mean, isn't that what you're doing? Because I was creating a text digest of the repo. Okay, fair enough. And how's that working for you?

My script kinda sucks, but Claude wrote it, so what can you say? At least you don't have to personally identify with the crappy code anymore. How's that working for you? Yeah, my script kind of sucks, but They have to personally identify with the crappy code anymore here like you know what Claude wrote that so exactly no big whoop It's wild how much coding has changed in a year not even a year. Yeah describe say more It's a lot of well, I don't know. It's also I'm you know I joined a new team a couple months ago a new company and Left meta which was totally different. Yeah, he was llama. They made you use llama probably I

Laughed when when like I don't listen to Rogan but I saw that clip of Zuck talking to Rogan about how they're gonna replace mid-level engineers with AI like this year That's that's his version of self self driving in three months like right. It's not happening. Yes Not would not with llama not there. Yeah llama 4 was a Disappointing to folks. I didn't even try it, because I saw it was like, they dropped it on a Sunday or something. And it's like, by the way, Lama 4, go play with it.

He's trying to be kind of cool. Zuck always trying to be cooler than he is. And then the initial benchmarks, like I think even the ones they published were like very impressive. And then people actually tried it. And it's like, no, it's not better. We're not as good as, you know, Gemini or whatever the.

Although I found Gemini currently, this is Google's latest to be disappointing, but I'm also disappointing. So, you know, who am I to judge? I have not used Gemini like even once, but I did download the app. I just haven't signed into it I downloaded the app on my phone, but I was interested in it because I heard their context window was way bigger But I haven't tried it because I can't figure out am I using 2.5 per hour or whatever they call it, right?

I'm so sick of picking it like I know it was the best one Why do I have to pick and tell you to use thinking and all of that? I know like that drop down on on chatgbt.com is like, pick your, I'm like, you should just know which one I want to use based on the question I ask you. Shouldn't you? Yes. I mean, you're smarter than me anyways, right?

That's it, my AI today, now post-meta, working at a new company, working on a lot of different languages that I'm less familiar with, like Go, like Python, PHP, all these other languages that are terrible, that are not TypeScript. And it's great, I can just ask all these questions. And I'm gonna say something embarrassing.

This is embarrassing. Okay, please do. I pay for ChatGPT Pro, Claude Pro. Or not ChatGPT Pro, it's plus, I think, right? Because the Pro was like the million dollar one. 200 bucks a month, right? No, I don't pay for that. I pay for the $20 a month.

Okay. I pay for Claude Pro, which is $20 a month. Perplexity, which I'm paying for, and I didn't Claude Pro, which is $20 a month, perplexity, which I'm paying for, and I didn't realize for months because I use Raycast, and Raycast gave me six months free of perplexity pro, and then it just charged me and I forgot about it and didn't realize for months. But then also I'm paying for Raycast AI

because it's just that convenient to have a little one, and I'm using them all, and I'm using them all differently. And here's the worst part, like, this just, I don't know, I don't even wanna admit this, but like, last week, Claude, okay, nevermind. No, you already said you were going to. I didn't ask you to, but now that you actually do have to now.

Okay, last week, Claude came out with, okay, before that, like a couple weeks before that, I was running into this thing with like Claude where I'd be like asking It questions and it's like hey, you can't ask anything more until after 4 p.m. Because like I hit some limit Surely sure and I'm like dang and then I'm like should I let another yeah I'm like should I just pay for another account and and keep going or or what and I didn't cuz I'm not crazy Right, but then last week they came out with, hey, instead of paying $20 a month, you can pay us five times that

and get five times the usage. Or you can pay us $200 a month and get 20 times the usage. And I'm like, that sounds reasonable. I haven't done it, but it sounds reasonable. Which one did you go with, the 10 or 20 or neither? When I do it because it's it's more of a probably a when yeah the state of things I'll go with the hundred dollar one

this month, so you got chat GPT You've got Claude That's 40 bucks, right? You've got Claude. That's 40 bucks, right? Then you got Raycast. He's doing it for the rest of us. Is it like 20 bucks a year? What is Raycast's AI version?

Like 200 bucks a year. 100 bucks a year I believe it is. It's like you have Raycast Pro and then you have what? The AI stuff on top, which is like another $4. So you have to have already paid them 100 bucks a year to pay them another 100 bucks a year to get the AI. Yeah, so that's 200 bucks a year Let's just call it for raycast Pro plus AI Sounds like that's 240 bucks in but I guess you're also getting raycast Right raycast is indispensable. I can't live without raycast out there. Okay. This is not a paid ad

Raycast for life. Okay, this is not a paid ad. Raycast for life, okay? Raycast for life. For sure. Almost lost it there. I have to disagree in order to make it not a paid ad. Look at Alfred over here. There's our Alfred. No, the old Alfred.

The spotlight, man. What? I just found the spotlight. Raycast has ran circles around you. Default Mac OS software for the win. Nick, let's play a... What can Raycast do that Spotlight can't do? Nick, what's your favorite Raycast feature?

Oh, the AI. A lot. Oh, the AI. Okay, non-AI feature feature like serious raycast feature Okay I'm just that's so hard to say Do you launch a lot of apps with I launched a lot of us. Let me tell you about a little thing called spotlight This is an app that like a feature that it just does that there's a million apps that do it But I like that sure just one app and that's

Clipboard manager. I love yes having this pretty much unlimited clipboard that I can just constantly refer back to Yeah, the clipboard history. I believe is unlimited. I Believe it's unlimited. It does not sync across devices So if you have a MacBook Pro and an iMac or something like that, they're not going to sync those clipboard histories. But built in Mac OS does do clipboard sharing. So then it does. Well, I think this is by design. I don't know if this is, I think you can do it, but I think by default it doesn't do this. I like that feature.

Premium feature. Dude, what I like most about the clipboard feature is that when you conjure it, I guess, whenever you elect to have this interface pop up with your history, you can search your history and paste it immediately. And it's like that's like five days ago history. And if fuzzy searches the whole thing, so it's not only just like front or back, it's like all over the place in this thing. And so it's pretty accurate. Well, let me use this opportunity to mention a little piece of freeware, open source freeware

called Mackie, M-A-C-C-Y, which is a clipboard history management tool that lives in your menu bar and does everything you guys are describing. But it's built by an individual who just loves software and just wants to put out free stuff into the world. And I use that for clipboard history. One thing well, guys, one thing well. I was once like you. Okay, tell me how you've become enlightened.

I'm already gonna run Raycast to open my apps. Why, Spotlight opens apps for you. Yeah, but it can't do other things. Like the clipboard management thing that I can use Mackey for. Like Claude, which has their own desktop app, surely. You're not selling me, fellas, you're not selling me. Well, the good thing is we're not here to sell you.

I know you're not. We're here to enjoy ourselves. Well, I did kind of set that up as the, cons of the fair. Getcha. Yeah. Getcha, get the getcha. You know what's funny to me is that in our shared doc of potential topics for this conversation, near the bottom it says,

I don't know who wrote this, are we contractually obligated to talk about AI? And the answer is no, however, I didn't realize this, but Nick's more of an AI junkie than he is a TypeScript junkie, because I mean, what would we go five minutes and he's already confessing all of his subscriptions. Listen, I didn't wanna tell you all this,

this is so embarrassing. However, we're on a podcast, listened to by the world basically. Here's all my stuff. I'm just, you know what? You embrace or you die. Right. Ooh, I like it.

Yeah, embrace or die. This is worse than streaming services though. You probably paying more for... Yeah, that's why I had to add it up. I was like, this is insane. For your streaming services. I mean, is your for. Yeah, that's why I had to add it up. These models for your streaming services. I mean, is your wife okay with this or your employer? Hopefully your employer is helping foot the bill. Listen.

Listen. Listen. Listen, listen up. We don't need to talk about that. Okay, fair, sorry. I don't wanna get too personal. I get some benefit out of it and it's it's real good and I am NOT a person I would not say that I'm a day-to-day vibe coder like for one-off things like a digest script

Yeah, like just do now. Are you just using the term vibe code? Because it's fun or are you really referring to the practice of vibe coding in which you don't even look at the Source code that's been produced that is what I'm saying. Yeah, okay, you don't even look at the source code that's been produced. That is what I'm saying. Okay. You don't even look at it. Like the digest script I barely know. Oh man. You don't even know.

I mean it's bash, right? And who knows, nobody knows what that does. Did you hear about the latest security vulnerability? Yes, yes actually. Yes I did, but I'm still live coding. I'm still even looking at the code. For day to day stuff, I don't like, I don't use it in that way. I'm a team of one right now, too.

So I'm using it as literally another coworker. This is somebody that I can bother. And yeah, they're an idiot. But they're helping me to formulate my thoughts before I go talk to somebody actually smart like any of my other coworkers. It's a warm-up method, right? Is that what it is? I can knock off some low hanging fruit and I'm not like just copying and

pasting code from them. I will give them the repos that I'm working on and like everything I do is an open source. So, uh, I'm freely able to do that, which is like a privilege. I'm sure like where I'm at. Um, but like, I give it that so that it has the context and then I can ask it questions and Hopefully it knows like hey that method that you're telling me to call actually exists and like even when I give it the entire repo 80% of the time it's correct. It'll make up methods the other 20% of the time or things that don't exist, right? So like I totally don't trust it, right? It's better than staring at a blank screen

And wondering what to do I can like ask it some questions and I mostly like keep it at like a high level like architectural trust it, but it's better than staring at a blank screen and wondering what to do. I can ask it some questions, and I mostly keep it at a high level architectural style thing. My favorite thing in the world is to talk through, here's how I wanna do it, okay, now, let's create a mermaid diagram and just visualize how this is gonna fit together.

So now I'm understanding a little bit more while you're paying money because it's not so much the utility of the tool that you want, it's just that you're really lonely. Yes. Yes. Because you're a team of one, you need someone to talk to

and these things just fill that void. You're like, let's make a diagram while I think through this. So you're rubber duck debugging basically. Exactly. Tell me, you know, and who else is going to tell me like how OIDC works to the tune of Lil Wayne rap lyrics, you know? Yeah, exactly.

It'll play along with all your stupid games like I used to on JS party. Oh, funny. Well, friends, I'm here with a good old friend of mine, Terrence Lee, cloud native architect at Heroku. So Terrence, the next gen of Heroku called Fur is coming soon. What can you say about the next generation for Heroku? Fur represents the next decade of Heroku. You know, Cedar lasted for 14 years and more. Still going. And Heroku has this history of using trees to represent ushering in new technology stacks and foundations for the platform. And so like Cedar before,

which we've had for over a decade, we're thinking about fir in the same way. So if you're familiar with fir trees at all, Douglas firs, they're known for their stability and resilience. And that's what you want for the foundation of a platform that you're going to trust your business on top of. We've used Stacks to kind of usher in this new technology. And what that means for Fur is we're replatforming on top of open standards. A lot has changed over the last decade. Things like container images and OCI and Kubernetes and CloudNave, all these things have happened

in this space. And instead of being on a real island, we're embracing those technologies and standards that we help popularize and pulling them into our technology stack. And so that means you as a customer don't have to kind of pick or choose. So as an example, on Cedar today, we produce a proprietary tarball called slugs. That's how you run your apps. That's how we pack to them. On fur, we're just going to use OCI images, right? So that means that tools like Docker are part of this ecosystem that you get to use. So with our Cloud Native Build Packs, you can build your app locally with a tool called

pack and then run it inside Docker. And that's the same kind of basic technology staff we're going to be running in fur. So you can run them in your platform as well. So we're providing this access to tools and things that developers are already using and extensibility on the platform that you haven't had before. But this sounds like a lot of change, right? And so what isn't changing? And what isn't changing is the Heroku you know and love.

That's about focusing on apps and on infrastructure and focusing on developer productivity. And so you're still gonna have that Git push Heroku main experience. You're still gonna be able to connect your applications and pipelines up to GitHub, have that Roku flow. We're still about abstracting out the infrastructure from underneath you and allowing you as an app developer

to focus on developer productivity. Well, the next generation of Roku is coming soon. I hope you're excited because I know a lot of us, me included, have a massive love and place in our heart for Roku. And this next generation of Heroku sounds very promising to learn more, go to heroku.com slash change all podcasts and get excited about what's the come for Roku. Once again, heroku.com slash change blog

podcast. So how do you know, like do these these various, does Claude and ChatGPT, do they know about each other or do you keep them completely separated? Like, is there any sort of weird, awkward relationship vibes going on? Because how do you know which one to turn to and when? Oh yeah, this is a great question. Oh yeah, I'm glad you asked me. All right.

This is mostly vibes I think, honestly. How you're feeling. You have to vibe into the vibe. That's right. It's like pre-vibed coding. That's right. Yes. I don't, the vibe I got is just like,

I don't really use chat GPT much for work Okay, it's more of a hangout after work kind of a chill I have it because like I play with it and you know My kids and I have been doing a bunch of image generation stuff, which has been fun But then also like, you know sometimes Like my daughter and I are like halfway through the first Lord of the Rings book after having just read The Hobbit so we read actual literature, literature, but sometimes we just goof around to a

bedtime and we have like, I'll just like ask my kids for a list of things that they want to hear. And then I'll throw in like a message like, uh, you know, a message about not fighting with your brother and then have Chagy BT generate a story, a bedtime story for us that has all of that. And every single story that my kids create has like, you know, dad fell in the toilet or dad turned into a butt or you know

typical things that a six-year-old and an eight-year-old would be talking about and That's a lot of fun, but that's primarily how I use that And then occasionally for writing although I kind of like Claude a little bit better for that But Claude is the workhorse here. I really like Claude for code. I like the interface for it. I like being able to set up projects for it and like you can give it a bunch of context in those projects that it'll just share each time. And then as of like yesterday, I'm like in this, but I'm also very slow to adopt things. But yesterday I integrated GitHub's official MCP server into it. And wow, that's so nice. So what did that do for you?

It can do a bunch of things. I can have it respond to pull requests and issues and stuff. For me, I'm not letting it go that far yet. There's a trust that has to build up before I do that. But an issue comes in, and I can just be like, hey, issue 44 on this repo, give me a summary of what you might think, and it already knows about all the code because it's in a project, so give me your thoughts

about where I might start looking for, what could be the issue here? And it can just go fetch that, and it's like, it's saving me the steps of having to go copy and paste is basically it. I'm getting less use out of my favorite tool of raycast my my clipboard manager copy paste. Yeah, that is cool So how how close do you think you are to? That trust threshold and you can just tell it go comment on this for me. Oh, I don't know

I'm scared of that because like As much as I use AI I don't want anyone to know that I use AI for. You're telling everyone right now. This is the show as much as you don't send this to your manager. Cut this out. Cut this part out. They're actually really cool about AI, too. Like I was playing with Devin for a little bit. The $500 a month AI coder

And I don't think that it's very good. But Yeah But yeah, I don't know it's it's cool and I like the main thing that you're always doing with all of these is managing The context right? I'm constantly thinking about when Claude's gonna give me the little purple message that says my chats running a little long And how succinct I should try and make things. I've got some like pre Set scripts that I'll throw in there like preset What do you call those prompts? That's like you are you know going forward like there's one specifically that I use right now That's really good

And it's like going forward don't assume that anything I tell you is accurate because like the worst thing about any of these is When they're just like, you know, you your yes, man. They're just like applauding everything you're you're right And it's going to tell you that you're right I wanted to challenge me and tell me like what are the things I'm not thinking about and like I've got I'm Crafting prompts that help me that I can just paste in when I feel like it's getting a little I don't know kiss-ass II for a better when I feel like it's getting a little, I don't know, kiss-assy for a better word. Right. And then I can, yeah, set it straight.

But then you're managing those contexts. And that's where Raycast AI comes in for me. Because Raycast is like, I have it set to option space. And that pops up in a little window. And that is reserved for the queries that I want that are like one-offs. Like I'm having a conversation over here with Claude about this, I don't know, feature of Next.js.

I'm talking to it about Next cookies. And I want to go deeper on Next cookies, but I don't wanna screw up its context. So up pops Raycast, and I have a discussion over there about Next cookies, and then I go back and where do they use them? They using Claude also, but it's a different session. They use they'll use whatever you want. But yes, I use Claude three seven mostly in there He's so excited about this. Yeah. Yeah, look at his face That was like me in temporary mode the other day when I just wanted to be a temporary conversation

Except for it didn't work, but it's like that. Yeah, are you managing the context or is the context managing you? That's too deep for me, stack more flow. Oh gosh, you know, I'm still a Neanderthal with these things, I'm just, I have it set up in Zed, I also just use chatgbt.com and then I have Olama, which I had opened in a terminal session. I just talked to it, but I don't have the patience to wait

for a lot of these things unless they're gonna be right. And I just find ChatGBT is right more than any of the other ones. However, with Zed, which is still my daily driver editor, I can just switch back and forth constantly between different models. And see which one I like the best. And I just don't like any of them, honestly.

I get angry, their code sucks. I'm just like, I can write this better myself. I don't mind. I don't like a blank screen when it comes to creativity, but when it comes to software, I'm just like, got no problem with it. Like I know I just start writing. So I'm still trying to find where it fits out.

I still have, I haven't write functions and stuff for me. I just am always like, this function sucks. Yeah. Oh yeah. And I don't want to think that I want to be like, good job little guy. That's a great little function you wrote there. You know? So.

Sounds like you're in the same boat as me though. Like I don't use it for, I'm going to say like, I don't like how long it takes for responses and things like that. Like when I'm in the flow of coding, it's more like pre-coding where I'm using it the most it's having the conversation and making sure that like validating my thoughts on the approach before I go and waste a bunch of time. Yeah. And I'll actually use it now to, and I've said this on the show a few times already,

just to replace Google basically. Like I just don't Google anything anymore. I just ask an LLM and I'll even honestly ask it for the docs. I'm like, how do I use this function? Like give me the API and a couple of examples. And that for me is faster than going and finding the docs in some cases, especially for obscure libraries and stuff. Although the more obscure, the less accurate

it happens to be, but that's just part of the game. And so I'm basically just using them at that level. Once I have it generating code for me, I'm just, I think maybe I'm just too controlling in particular about code. And it might just be a me problem, you know, where I need to get over it. But I just don't like what, no, it's not, okay, good, thank you.

There's a place for us too. Thank you. But I'm okay with it. And I continue to do more, you know, just like slowly, slowly, slowly more. And I told Adam this on the last friends where it's just him and I talking about, I'm not sure you heard the one where I turned him

into a walrus and all that. But, that's good. That feature inside of Chetch GPT has been a little bit of an eye opener for me of like, we don't got long, man. We don't have very long because that was like a huge improvement all of a sudden in the image generation land where it's like,

why would I hire anybody almost ever, almost ever at this point? Whereas last year I was like, yeah this is not gonna actually produce anything I can use, it's great for like ideas and stuff. But then you have to go hire someone to actually produce the final logo or whatever. I just feel like that ship is sailing very quickly and I don't see any reason why.

Except for maybe the, just the intricacies of the software development platform and all the different things can go wrong maybe might just give us a longer hedge. And the subjectivity of creative work versus the objectivity of does it work, does it work right, you know, that kind of thing. But I don't think we have too much longer left,

do you think, Nick? I go back and forth for sure. Yeah, yeah. Like it's, when I let it, when I let it vibe code for me, it's real bad. So that's why I don't do it much. But I mean, just think of where we were a year ago, two years ago, right?

It's come a long way. So I don't know. Has it come a long way in prose? Because I feel like, I feel like it's so average at writing. Like it's never impressed me the way it has with these images. And I wonder if it's never impressed me the way it has with these images.

And I wonder if it's actually gotten better, if they're still testing that. Maybe you better answer, and Adam as well, because don't you use it to generate some stories and stuff as well, bedtime stories and things, Adam? I have before. Yeah. So Nick's story of the bedtime story was very familiar

except for it was not exactly the same. Definitely have had fun around that stuff. Image generation has been something we've done before. Conflict resolution, like how to respond to a certain email even. I think what I don't ask it for is what to say I ask it for. Like, okay, here's all the context. What am I missing from this scenario to maybe establish more empathy or just, um, word salad them a little bit more than I should, you know, kind of thing. It's really iffy a lot of, a lot of communication type stuff, a lot of framework thinking, a lot of ideation, sort of evolution, stuff like that.

Math. I love doing it with like word math. That's the best. Hypothesizing a scenario with, you know, multiple inputs or, you know, multiple scenarios and which one plays out to have the greater outcome. I don't know. You name it. It's kind of wild, honestly, to even have that as a tool.

Well, let's change subjects since we are just now doing what we do on every It's kind of wild, honestly, to even have that as a tool. Well, let's change subjects since we are just now doing what we do on every episode. We'll just talk about AI. And let's talk about, yeah, I mean, it'll work its way. It's just weaving its way into every part of life. It was like, it's like COVID, you know? COVID weaved its way into every aspect of life there for about two years, maybe 18 months.

And I remember thinking more about the mind virus than the virus virus. Cause it's like, can we talk, I remember one time I was at a meal with friends and of course everyone's just talking about, you know, this and like all the things, I mean, you can go into all the different things like the social distancing aspect, how it spreads,

the vaccines, the lockdowns. Oh, can you believe what they did? This person had it. Here's what happened to them. This person had it. And I was like, y'all, we don't give her any opportunities to hang out and have dinner just us adults here. Like it's actually infected our minds.

Like we can't talk about anything else except for the, back then we called it the coronavirus, you know? Oh yeah. The coronavirus. Because it's like the novel coronavirus. I'm like, can we talk, it's like a mind virus more than it's a virus virus. Anyways.

Can we pause for a second and talk about how Corona beer was actually like hit by that initially. They were like, what is this, guys? It was like a small bounce back. It was like, guys, it was like a small bounce back. It was like, well, hang on a second. The Corona beer and Corona virus, different things. Okay. Right. Don't, if you don't want to get it, don't drink Corona.

You know, like that would have been bad for their branding for like only three months or so. And then we moved on, called it all sorts of them. I'm not sure if that says something good about humanity. Like, are we just that stupid? Yes. Are we just that stupid? Yes. Are we just that stupid? No hesitation.

That's why we're afraid of these AIs. They don't have to be that smart to outdo us, you know? It's not much. To manipulate us for sure. Well, for sure, yeah. It doesn't take much really. I mean, a couple yaks in and you're shaved, you know? I mean, like, come on.

That's right. You're on a whole different subject thinking it's real, you know, and meanwhile it's all simulation. Have you seen the, now we're, now we're getting way upstream, but it's nice up here in the water. Have you seen the ones where there's people that were posting on Instagram and TikTok and other places where they're like skeptical of mirrors

because how can the mirror actually see the reflection? How can it see me over here? I'm just like, this is wild. Do you not understand how our mirrors work? This is wild. How does it see behind the towel? Right. And it's not just one kooky person.

That's like, there's a whole, I mean, there's probably a website with a forum on it at this point. Maybe we do need to reinvest in education. All right. Busy bar. Let's get busy talking about something else. Lame busy bar. Busy bar.

Let's talk about some hardware. You think the bar is lame or what do you think? I'm just, I'm just messing around. Okay. Going from that to like busy bar. Come on. It was not a good, can they compete? We'll see. What is it? What is the busy bar, come on. It was not a good. Can they compete? We'll see.

What is it? What is the busy bar? Okay. I, I, uh, TIL today on this had no idea existed. It's seems to be a hardware device. Yes. That has a, it's programmable in some way, shape or form. It's going to SDK or an API that you can program against it.

You can tell the world you're busy. You can do Pomodoro. You can tell some of your on air for podcasting. It's like an LCD pixel display that does all sorts of cool stuff. Automates into home assistant and other things. It's like the, the hardware meets the ideation software, you know, event change. You're making it sound pretty cool. It's actually pretty cool. Yeah.

So here's why I thought we could talk about this because you guys love hardware. I mean, Adam's always buying stuff. Nick buys a bunch of stuff, don't you? He does buy a bunch of stuff. Any other opinions? He just likes to spend money. Software, a lot of software.

Yeah, a lot of subscriptions. I'm sure there's probably a subscription plate in here somewhere. You're all consolidated down into Raycast. That's true. Now, could you integrate Raycast with Busybar? Probably. Yes, you could. Yes, you could. Because this thing is like,

it's about the size of an alarm clock, wouldn't you say? Maybe a larger alarm clock. It's supposed to sit on your desk or somewhere. I think it can even mount on your monitor. Yes. And like face the other way for, you know, people if you're RTO'd already and you're back in the office. It's got a big, it looks like it really is

satisfying to push start slash stop button, like one big button on top. Massive button. Yeah, and then one dial. Like a national button and triple the size. There's a dial and another knob. And that's about it. They call it a productivity multi-tool. And the thing is just programmable to the hilt.

So I thought this is the kind of thing that Nick would super wanna buy. So I just thought I'd ask you, like, you want one of these? I did see this before you posted it. And I kind of Shrugged it off, but then I saw that you put it in here and I then I was like, let me go look at the Look at it and then I was like, ah fine. I'll buy it Did you actually put a purchase down? Oh, no, you can only give them an email and they'll let you know when it's ready

Yeah, I did do that It's probably vapor hardware at this point. I know and I hate that So many of these hardware projects that just don't come to fruition, you know Okay, but the saving grace of this one is that I think that it's by the people who do this the flipper What you got there? This is the flipper zero. Oh, yeah I had to spin to see your whole screen. You have this thing? What is that thing? It's like a...

Tell the world what this is Nick, it's the coolest little device. Nick buys stuff, okay? He's got all the hardware stuff. Nick is now an official staple. Bring your hardware wares. Alright so what's the flipper? I don't know, I bought it, it looked cool. I don't know! It looked cool. I don't know.

It looked cool. They had a sign up form, so I signed up. It's like a little tool that you can use for some lightweight hacking of various things. It's got some antennas in it and different sensors to make physical hacking kind of cool, I think. Although it's not like super, super. I don't know. Everything's encrypted, right?

So it can't like it's not going to break that encryption on this little tiny device. But like things that aren't encrypted, it can do. It can like old Wi-Fi networks that aren't. It might be able to. Hotel keys. Hotel keys. Yeah, OK. You can do that. I've heard, I've never tested this, I've heard that it can open the gas tank of a Tesla.

Oh. Wait a second, Teslas don't have gas tanks. I mean the charging port. Are you trying to pull a quick one on me? I'm done with that though. He did get me for a second, I didn't even catch that part. Maybe I've been duped on that.

Yeah, the charger, you're talking about the charger you know I'm with a charger container but yeah yeah now why would you want to hack the charger can like to to charge it up for somebody before they know I don't condone terrorism I guess you vandalize one of these Tesla vandals are you oh no not yet no yeah no yeah, no, no, no, this is He's got a hacker tool and he's saying he's not a vandal yet. I have done nothing with this thing I got it and then I got too busy to Play with it and I just for you. I plugged it in so that it's it now has a battery charge. So it's charged up It's no the the red light is on it saying that it's because I just did it like a

minute ago so at best case you bringing out this flipper zero solidifies the fact that busy bar may actually ship because they're the same people good point yeah they shipped a flipper yeah they did and this is pretty renowned to this flipper zeroes is really Sawed after does well. It's I've seen some demonstrations of it. It's pretty cool Yeah, there's some really cool things if you're a switch player like a Nintendo switch You can set up your flipper to be all of the amiibos things that like get you extra like that Oh, that's cool. So you have to go grab them? Yeah. I might actually think that's cool.

You sell me on it. Did you ever have it? When you were a kid, there was this this like toy. It was it was called a Casio Secret Sender 6000. No. Oh, it was like a little it was like a little like PDA before PDAs were really a thing, but it was totally a toy. Public displays of affection?

Like a personal data personal What does that stand for? I don't know. Personal digital assistant. There you go. Yeah, well it was like one for kids and it had like you could have a little journal in it and it had some games and if somebody else within 20 feet of you had one you could send messages back and forth over its IR port. But it also had an IR port so it could be a remote control for any television.

So you know me being the hacker in second grade when they'd wheel in that giant TV. Oh yeah. Oh it turned off randomly once every time and nobody knew. Just one time. They never knew it. I remember the push of buttons too hard. Yeah, oh it turned off randomly once every time and nobody knew Until this podcast right here When I tell the world about my AI infatuation, this is like taxicab confessions with Nick. Oh That's cool I didn't have one of those. I did have a game genie though. Did you guys have game genie? No, I wish I did Game genie was so cool.

What was the fundamentals of the Game Genie? What did it do? Well, it was basically like mods for your NES games. You know, like modding is cool. And so with Game Genie, it would, somehow you'd plug your NES game into the Game Genie and then the Game Genie into the NES. And it would be a middleman.

And you could basically turn on different superpowers and cheats and all kinds of things to make games easier because games were really hard back then, especially some of them. And so it was just a way to make the game kind of more fun. Any serious gamer wouldn't use it, of course. And I was only a serious gamer on a couple of games like Zelda and Mega Man but everybody everything else it's like I don't care

I'm gonna be awesome and excite bike you know mm-hmm so Game Genie was cool I don't know how it worked or why it was a thing or if the game companies were happy about it I'm sure there's probably a YouTube history of Game Genie out there I should go watch but as a cool device well friends I'm sure there's probably a YouTube history of Game Genie out there I should go watch But as a cool device Well friends, I'm here with a brand new friend of mine Kyle Galbraith co-founder and CEO of depo.dev Your bills don't have to be slow, you know that right? Build faster, waste less time, Accelerate Docker image builds, get up action builds and so much more. So Kyle We're in the hallway at our favorite tech conference and we're talking.

How do you describe Depot to me? And Depot is a build acceleration platform. The reason we went and built it is because we got so fed up and annoyed with slow builds. For Docker image builds, GitHub Action Runners, and so we're relentlessly focused on accelerating builds. Today, we can make a container image build up to 40 times faster.

We can make a GitHub Action Runner up to 10 times faster. We can make a GitHub Action Runner up to 10 times faster. We just rolled out depot cache. We essentially bring all of the cache architecture that backs both GitHub Actions and our container image build product, and we open it up to other build tools like Bazel and Turbo repo, SCcache, Gradle, things like that. So now we're starting to accelerate more generic types of builds and make those three to five times faster as well.

And so in simple terms, the way you can think about Depot is it's a build acceleration platform to save you hundreds of hours of build time per week, no matter whether that's build time that happens locally, that's build time that happens in a CI environment. We fundamentally believe that the future we want to build is a future where builds are effectively near instant,

no matter what the build is. We want to get there by effectively rethinking what a build is and turn this paradigm on its head and say, hey, a build can actually be fast and consistently fast all the time. If we build out the compute and the services around that build to actually make it fast and prioritize performance as a top level entity

rather than an afterthought. Yes, okay friends, save your time, get faster builds with Depot, Docker builds, faster get up action runners, and distributed remote caching for Bazel, Go, Gradle, Turbo repoo, and more. Depot is on a mission to give you back your dev time and help you get faster build times with a one-line code change.

Learn more at depo.dev. Get started with a seven-day free trial. No credit card required. Again, depo.dev. But this busy bar does some cool stuff. So for instance, you can, it's smart home integrated. So anything that works with Apple, HomeKit or Google, whatever their competitors called, you can connect everything up. And so this thing, this one button could, like you're busy, you're recording, bam, your whole house could respond, right? Like pause the music, that's playing out of your home device,

what are they called? Your Alexa. Home pod. Yeah, home pod, thank you. Turn off all the lights, in case it's one of those kind of shows. Lock the door, perhaps. Close the garage doors.

Start your laundry. I don't know what else you wanna do when the show goes on. But connect it all, connect it all. That's cool. I would really like that if I had that button and I push it and then like in this like ominous voice throughout my house, it just goes, dad is busy. And it just plays that on repeat over and over.

Like an announcement. It just plays it nonstop over and over. Like an announcement. It just plays it nonstop until you touch it again. But my room is insulated somehow in this magical world so I don't hear it. Right. Yeah, that would get me to buy one. And it's developer friendly.

So we're out of the box. BusyBar comes with an open API ready for integration into your project. So you could probably get your CI CD involved. You can probably get your raspberry pies involved. Uh, it looks like it's taken. Go lang, JavaScript, Python, et cetera. None of your languages, except for you said you're writing some go now, right?

Is it because the TypeScript team likes it? I'm not that basic. Am I? Oh, just wondering. People were up in arms because they picked Go, you know? Like this was a big controversy. It makes sense. Did you read any of the back and forth? Oh no, I watched some interviews with like Anders Halsberg.

Why does it make sense, you think? From my understanding, and I could be totally getting it wrong, but my understanding was that they wanna do like a one-to-one port, to the point where they basically wrote like code mods that would take a line of JavaScript and spit out a line of Go, and went that far.

And switching over to another language like Rust that is not a garbage collected language like Go is and JavaScript is, would mean that memory management would be handled differently, which means it wouldn't be a true one-to-one port, which would let bugs sneak in potentially. Yeah, it'd be more a rewrite, a ground-up rewrite in a new language versus an actual port. Yeah, and apparently Go and TypeScript have a lot of the same idioms, I guess. I mean, garbage collection being a huge one

in that sense, of course. JavaScript itself is kind of a C-style language, which Go is also influenced. So that makes sense. Of course, C-sharp was the one that people were like, come on, it's Microsoft. Isn't C Sharp supposed to be Microsoft's, you know, powerhouse? It's workhorse language. Didn't Anders create C Sharp? He did, but he also didn't write it in Delphi and he recreated that too, didn't he? So I thought it was a cool pragmatic choice by them,

versus being like, well, we are Microsoft, therefore C-sharp. It's like, or Rust, which is also burgeoning inside of Microsoft. It's like, let's actually be pragmatic about what we're trying to achieve and just go that direction. And it sounds like that might have been,

that might have won out, which pragmatic choices, I think in large engineering teams don't always win. But a lot of people were confused about that announcement apparently. They thought it was the TypeScript runtime that was 10 times faster, not the compiler, which would be like a huge win, wouldn't it? Like, hey, all your TypeScript code runs

10 times faster than it did. It's like, oh, you don't know how bad my code could be. You know? You're gonna make my code faster? Please. TypeScript has a runtime? Yeah, well, and Edge, you know, that's the other thing with the C Sharp is like,

well, couldn't you just more easily work it into no that wasn't the C sharp it was actually the rust of people saying if it was written in rust instead you can more easily get it in the chromium and Firefox then in go and then you could start to do what your ultimate goal isn't it Nick it's just to have TypeScript become the runtime of browsers Yeah, I think we're getting there Potentially like I see signs of that with there's obviously the types as comments thing and that's what I'm talking about Yeah, I don't call it type annotations. Yeah. Yeah, but then like in the latest I think 5.8 version of typescript they

Also added that erasable syntax only flag which is like setting you up for success with the types of proposals. Or mining what that does? That prevents you from using things that would require runtime code. So like enums, for example, those get converted into like these weird object things. And so it just prevents you from using them. Another place is like in there's a shortcut when you're using classes in TypeScript where you can just say like in the constructor

you can list out all your private methods and then that way like they're defined as private or private properties I mean they're defined as privates but you don't have to like define them above then define your arguments and then have like in your constructor a setter where you're actually setting them you can like condense it all into one. Well, there's a lot of runtime code that has to happen for that to take place. So they prohibit that as well with this. Basically, it's just like everything has to be erasable, which is perfect because also in the next version of Node, I think you're gonna be able to run TypeScript unflagged, which will be great.

Run it by just stripping the types. Run it by stripping the types. Right. Well, these are baby steps in that direction, aren't they? You think it's ever gonna be actually built in? No, I think that'll be where it stops, but maybe I'm not thinking- You think it stops with the type annotations feature,

which probably will make it into browsers. I think so. Yeah. Do you think that's good enough, or do you wish it was actually- What is it gonna get me? Like faster speeds, is that it? Hypothetically, yes.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know. Maybe, I don't know. I'll say something that I'll regret if I continue. Why would we need that? We'll never say anything that you regret on these shows, Nick. Right. I don't think the TSC is very slow, like when I run it in my editor, but apparently it is.

I think that this was a scratching their own itch kind of thing, meaning like, if you have massive code bases, right, well, of which Microsoft probably does, that's when TSC slows down. I can't remember what file it is, but they're one of the files in TypeScript in TypeScript's code base is like 53,000 lines long and it's just because like it would have performance costs to split it up Is that one that Anders code up on a bender one time or something?

You think he vibe codes? Oh no. No. He's significantly gray haired. The gray beards don't like the vibe codes. Well what else is exciting in the world of TypeScript so we can poo poo it and move on? I don't know. I'm just enjoying writing it again. Yeah. it's fun

Don't miss flow Yeah What is it I mean is flow only inside of Facebook is there other people that use flow They're usually Facebook. I mean meta now. Yeah, there used to be I think years ago before like 2018 2017 somewhere around there. I interviewed be, I think years ago before like 2018, 2017, somewhere around there, I interviewed someone from, I think GitKraken, I think they were using Flow, but they eventually switched to TypeScript too. But that was the only other company that I ever knew of that actually used Flow.

Hmm. It's weird how somebody with the clout of Facebook engineering, which is what used to be called back when these things came out, was so influential that they were able to get React highly adopted and GraphQL highly adopted. Not quite as successfully, but still. But Flow just didn't quite catch on, you know? You ever wonder why certain things do and other things don't?

I do wonder, I don't know why, but I wonder if that was just a fluke that React did catch on in the way that it did. Think so? Well, I mean, React 19, is that catching on as much as it should be? Is it adding too much complexity? Is it too much, like, two in the bag with Vercell?

Is it? That's my read on it, those two things. Yeah. Took too long, too hard to explain. People are starting to get the ick because of the tightness of that relationship. And even when we talked with Dan Abramov, I mean, a couple years ago now,

you and I talked to him and somebody else, I can't recall who, on JS Party. Joseph Ona. That's right. Even then, I was like, isn't it weird that you all's official stances, you should use this in next JS, but that's a project that you don't have any control over?

Like that's a weird thing, like the React team's official stance was you don't have any control over. Like that's a weird thing to like the, the React team's official stance was, don't use this directly, use it via frameworks of which Next.js is the only one that does it back then. Yeah. And I'm like, that just seems like not a good situation to be in.

Why is that? What was that recommendation? Cause there was no framework. I mean, cause Meta doesn't have its own framework. React is just a piece of the puzzle and Next.js was a widely adopted framework that stayed pretty much in lockstep with React's previous releases

and using the new technology that, and there's, I mean, there's Sympotico or they were Sympotico, I'm assuming they still are. They collaborated tightly. There's a lot of friends between the two teams. That's my take, Nick. Why do you think, why do you think anything else? Why that might be the case?

Yeah, I think that when Facebook introduced Flux, like the Flux pattern, remember, they didn't introduce a Flux library. That came later, I think it was Dan Abramoff actually, who came out with Redux. There was an implementation of that. And I think in the same way, Next was the one to adopt server components as an implementation of this theory of how this could be done from the React team or in cooperation with the React team.

But for the longest time, honestly, I don't know anyone else who's doing server components in that way. I've been playing a lot with Remix slash React router and Tanstack start, and they all have their own ways of doing server things, none of which are really like server components in the way that they're described or used within Next, yet at least.

Yeah, that whole messaging is just kind of a ball of wax that was very unattractive to me as a guy who's in the industry but not in the daily mucky muck of the React ecosystem. I'm like, this just doesn't seem attractive, whatever's going on here. And I think a lot of people feel that way. Doesn't mean they're not using React.

And React was a game changer. And so I'm not here to poo poo on it like I am a TypeScript by any means. But, and it's still a great choice, I think, as a standalone library. I think that you can get React features in smaller ways or different ways. But I think the RSC stuff has made it just too complicated

and just too, and the next JS relationships made the whole thing muddy. Because now you're getting in bed not just with Meta, which already doesn't feel like amazing, and the next JS relationships made the whole thing muddy. You know? Because now you're getting in bed, not just with Meta, which already doesn't feel like amazing, but now you're also in bed with Versel. And I don't have anything personally against Versel or anything like that, but some people do.

You know? Some people are like, eh, I don't know about this. Yeah, my recommendation, if anybody asks, which nobody ever does, but my recommendation is to go with Astro until you're absolutely positive that Astro can't solve your problems. Okay, why do you recommend that? It's just such a delight to work with.

I originally switched to Astro because I was like, I really like React and I was using 11D before and like, this is for my personal blog, right? And so it's a nice playground for stuff like this. And I thought, oh, I'll switch to Astro because I like their component model and I can use, I can just use React and it'll be great. And then I set it up and I never used React.

I think I use React now like for one or two things, but like their Astro components are amazing. They do so much. And then built-in support for, with the server island stuff now, you effectively have that way to dynamically reload pieces of the page from the server, from a running worker or whatever,

and it's super nice and so easy to set up. And then when you need React, you can literally just inject React and build a spa on that page. So it's super nice and so easy to set up. And then when you need React, like you can literally just inject React and build a spa on that page. So it's great. Do you think it falls into that category of slightly too obscure? Maybe. Because a lot of people,

like for a lot of people that decision, like that is a major aspect of their decision making. We were just speaking with Anthony Eden of DN Simple and he talked about how he likes Erlang and stuff and that he's built some of their core infrastructure in Erlang and eventually it's like a lot of it's go now and it's just the reason it was like, well, cause like nobody really knows Erlang,

but he, I mean, not, but him, but you know, like just the numbers aren't there for Erlang people. And it's like, what about Astro? Like, is there Astro jobs out there to be had? Or you know, like that whole thing. Is it slightly too obscure? I mean, Elixir's kind of in that middle ground as well, where it's like, yeah, the people who know Elixir

are few and far between. They're generally good developers, but they're also makes them expensive to hire because they are rare and usually good engineers. Whereas Ruby devs are a type of dozen, you know, so to speak, and same thing with TypeScript folk and React people, right? And Next.js, like everybody knows Next.js.

And so does that make Astro slightly too obscure to be worth like investing in? To that point, I've never seen an Astro job listing, but I also haven't looked. Yeah Mm-hmm. I think at that point too. It seems like from my perspective that Astro is focused on like these content-driven sites versus I'm not sure what is not content-driven, but marketing is content-driven. So if you're building a marketing site, it's gonna be content-driven not just driven. So if you're building a marketing site, it's going to be content driven, not just,

you know, you think about who is, you know, what are those kinds of sites being used for? So it's probably a front end to a new tech company. Probably great for that. Right. And then you get into this, just careful now is the world where you might want to say, what about framer instead? You know, so you got Astra, which is like non- non vibe coding and you got framer, which is kind of like vibe coding in a way for you know taking this design tool and turning it into a Developer tool now John long here on this show a couple weeks back Talked about framer and he's a friend ender. He's a developer And he was reaching for framer in the case of his works scenario I think you know if it was a personal project maybe he would choose

probably that Ruby based project but probably something more like astro more like an actual developer tool versus framer which is design turned website And I don't even know how it works, but he's singing the praises of framer. So I haven't used it personally. I've never used framer. I've just gone to the website for the first time. Yeah. And that looks pretty sweet. So there are framer jobs out to the, you can, you could be in marketing or be in,

let's say like product marketing, product management. And there will be listings that say has experience with building out front end websites with Framer. So I'm not sure if that matches to Astro or not, but they're they're like in similar camps. You know, a Framer site is usually a content driven site or a marketing site, probably similar for Astro, where it's either a personal blog, a personal portfolio, or somehow content driven. Yeah, and I think to that, like their first class support for like Markdown and MDX and all of those content pieces,

like does work to their detriment to being considered like alongside a Next or a React router or a framework like that. Well, you know, a lot or react router or a framework like that? Well, you know, a lot of, a lot of options out there. How do you choose is really, I think the thing that has driven me crazy my entire career, like here I am as a personal person, just using 11 D for its principles of like, Hey, it's basically just HTML, CSS with a little

JavaScript if you need it. And in that case, I think what was I using that for? My personal site is in Jekyll. I think it was the CPU website, Jared. Actually, the very first one was like 11 D keeping it simple, some simple page, but keeping the code more simple than literally an HTML page with CSS sprinkled into the style bracket or something like that. That's where I used it.

You know, it's cool though, you know, keeping it simple. I've been using 11D a little bit myself lately. Yeah. Just for a, I've been doing this thing called the developer dictionary and news where I'm just like define, I'm just like jokey definitions of developer terms. And I thought, well, I want these to all kind of look similar, but be kind of content oriented. And I might eventually actually,

as I accumulate these definitions, I might eventually want to put them on a webpage or something. And I'm not a designer, but I know what a dictionary looks like. So I was like, I can put together enough CSS, you know, combined with my coding assistant in order to have a nice little design and I can write, I want to write the definitions in Markdown.

And so I'm writing them in Obsidian and want to then pull those into a uniform looking website that I can eventually publish. And I was like, well, 11.0 can do that. And so I dove into the world of 11.0. I like how simple everything is that over there. Zach's done a great, not just Zach, not just Zach Leatherman, but him and a bunch of people now have done a great job with their docs

and with making it very approachable. And so as a old school, you know, static site guy, it just all makes sense to me. Like I was like very easy to just do stuff. And I haven't shipped anything yet, but I just use it to write in obsidian these definitions. And then each one is like a well-formed markdown file with like the same, I'm using all the YAML front matter as basically data

and eventually I can pull that into a database and write it in an actual CMS somewhere. So it's kind of like progressive enhancement for a web app where it's like it starts off as markdown files and static stuff but there's a very easy path of like turning that into a database in the future. I like that. It's cool.

And 11.d is really great. I think I switched before Web C came out publicly. But I was thinking in components, and I wanted to think in components. Which Astro has that stuff, right? Yeah. And 11.d now does. Exactly, but didn't back then so webc is

11 these take on web components right yeah yeah which I'm touching none of I'm literally HTML CSS zero JavaScript because I was just putting some HDL on page and pretty ended up you know yeah I was doing all of these like short code things in my 11D config, which also couldn't be, last I checked, couldn't be in TypeScript, so I was like just madness because I didn't know what anything was. That reminds me, here's a pro tip that's old,

but maybe people haven't heard it, which is whenever you're writing a bash script, or you're, if you're not vibe coding it, if you're actually writing it yourself, use the long form of the arguments in all of your commands. You know, there's always a short form and a long form, and so like the long form will be like dash dash file equals and the short form is like dash F, you know?

And we get so used to the short forms because it's faster, it's easy for one-liners. But if you're actually writing a script that you're gonna come back to later, it's self-documenting to use the long form every time. And so use the long form in scripts. I'm fine with short form for your one-liners and your command history.

But force yourself to use that long form because it's so much easier to understand, especially if it's like FFmpeg stuff. I mean, so many different flags that mean so many different things. And you can come back and be like, oh, I know what dash dash file means. Whereas dash F, it's like, does it mean format?

Does it mean file? Who knows? Now you're in the man page. So, rando. But you just inspired me to say that. I think there was an old change log post about that. Wasn't there, Adam? Way back in the man page. So, rando, but you just inspired me to say that. I think there was an old change log post about that. Wasn't there Adam? Way back in the day.

I was gonna interrupt you because I wanted to mention this exact thing. This is, I believe Adam Yonk's only contribution. He contributed one post, I believe. To change the blog. To what was the blog, I believe to change to the blog. What was the blog? I guess I have the newsfeed at some point. Like it was just like, it could have been like tips. It could have been pros. It could have been a project like the criteria back then was a little different, but yeah, his was advice. And essentially this, like if you're going to write a script, do the long form form version of it because when you come back to it later itself basically I

remember him writing that I remember him writing that and me being like that's so true it was kind of like something that just is like so obviously true when someone says it but then somebody had to say it once and then he might have the first one probably not what year was that? it's probably like the 80s when someone first said this but It's just good idea. This would have been 1979 No, it was it was probably Mid-2000 early days 2010. Yeah 2010. I Mean that that's crazy to say that's early days. That's early days, though.

2010 is my guess if I find it sometime in 2010. J.A. H. N.K.E. Yonk use long flags when scripting 2013. Now that we've shaved that entire year, we get up in the shadows. I was I mean, that's a good deep dive, because it's phenomenal advice. I think that was the first- It's such a simple little tip, but it's so obvious.

You're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's no reason not to. You're going far enough to write a script. You might as well make it more scrutable when you come back versus inscrutable, which is how they usually are. Now, if you vibe coded it, who knows what's in there?

Who cares? That's why when I r-sync, I'm always long flagging it, man. Oh yeah? Oh yeah. Long flag for life. Heck yeah. I'm just remembering,

not that I've run the tar command anytime recently, but I know like tar dash xvf or xzf, I don't know, but like I don't know what those flags actually do. I just know that one way of doing it will tar something and then untar. Right, and then the model will untar. Yeah.

Dash xvf, yeah, it's like extract. One of them was recursively, or the folder. F stands for folder. Oh, yeah. Whereas if you do it without that, it's just gonna do a single file. The v, I can't remember. And then it's like, no, that's the unex,

that's the extract. The create is dash CZVF. I'm not sure what any of those are, except for the C means create, I think. So you'd know that if you put the dash dash in there. And the forward. This is all from memory, just from typing it out one line, or the whole time.

Mm-hmm, I just asked. But wasn't there like extract Z files? Wasn't there like a mnemonic device people said? Like, I think Kball used to say that. XVF is extract, no XZF extract Z files. And then the other one's like create Z freaking freaking I don't know what it was I'm butchering it whatever it was. I think it was k-ball. Somebody has this like mnemonic device for a member in tar commands uh And those extract z files and the other ones like create the

At this point i'm wondering who's paying attention to this podcast right now. That's probably nobody. Well, we're at the end anyways I'm wondering who is paying attention to this. This stuff here. Phenomenal advice, though. Phenomenal advice, though. Phenomenal advice. Yes. Yeah, this is where the good stuff, you know, we dropped the good stuff at the end. So, mm hmm. What else is on the list here? Revisiting browsers? I don't know. Still using Safari. Yeah. You moved on I

Was my goodness I was forced admitted to use Chrome and like it was chromium for a while and then they like like forcibly uninstalled arc for me and I was very very saddened by that but then in forcibly and it's the uninstalled art for you they need forcibly uninstall it they like all of the internal tools Would like check and they would just not work and then they would eventually lock you out of all of them And you have to go ask to get unlocked and then never use that browser again. It was terrible But I'm back on that I

like I want something like that like something that's easy to manage with with uh tabs on the side And so I'm still an arc. I tried Zen browser for a while, but honestly oh Yeah, Fox isn't it like so you're still using arc. I am Wow you got hooked I did even though it's dead even though it's dead. I know it's like dead man walking. Yeah So how is then that much different than arc? You just pretty close it kind of is but it's it's super confusing in its config and then it doesn't have Sinking so that's a fork of Firefox or it's it just based off Gecko or whatever Gecko is called now. I What does it not have no sinking?

It's basically Firefox. I didn't know Firefox was still a thing. See, here's the good stuff at the end. See now you're listening. Now you're listening. Perk your ears up. We got 21 minutes in the aisles. Let's do it.

All right. Slay that Firefox dragon. Yeah, I don't know. Things just break in it all the time. You just want like, I don't know. At this point, which browser is gonna give me the best experience for the one password extension? Safari ain't it for sure. Oh yeah.

I'm being really upset with one password. Yeah? Let me introduce you to builtinpasswords.app. Life's good over here in builtinland. You know, they just like pop up their UI in these places and I'm like, God, the way, I just want you to be a normal field. Don't clutter up my interface with your suggestions and.

Yeah, I get that. That's not an ad. No, this is, this is actually a, well, I don't know. So, you know, this is where I actually would love to talk to somebody behind the scenes of one password on their product implementation, right? Yeah. Big fans, but like they must have it rough because you have to dance around different idiosyncrasies depending upon the browser so so far It's gotta be a constant uphill battle for them. It's not native. It's never gonna be this

Beautiful work of art, although they've done their best. They should just get acquired and so they're way too big at this point They are too big pixel meter got acquired But my Apple by Apple when what you hear Maybe recently over five or late twenty twenty four. Yeah, really finally. I mean like it took a long enough, didn't it? Yeah, took a long time. Yeah, they're not as big as one password though I've been actually in this really weird world where I'm like anti Mac only software Thankfully one password is not Mac only software. Oh cuz you're a Windows guy now. Yeah, I'm an everything guy I wasn't aware of this before I decided to come on just so you know

What's that? I wasn't aware that you were a Windows guy. I wouldn't have agreed to come on Oh gosh, Nick. You're missing out, bro. Now you're missing out Windows is where it's at. For what? You think I'm kidding around here? Yes. What he wants to know what is where it's at for what? Where it's at for everything, everything works in Windows. Everything is amazing.

And Microsoft works. Yeah, it all works. Linux even works on Windows. I can SSH into my Windows box right now and Treat it like Linux with all my cores and all my RAM available and I can add to it as I want to I can ZFS I can do whatever all via Windows, it's amazing. I'm doing some side work and there's one person who's doing who's doing it all on Windows. And we're simplifying with Docker containers for everything, right? Yeah.

The Docker containers just don't work on Windows. Don't understand it. Could be that I don't know how to use Docker cause I really don't. But Windows. I have Docker containers running no problem. It could be. I would blame the user at that point, Nick. I'm sorry.

It could be, but you know, it does work with the other Mac developer the user at that point, Nick. I'm sorry. No, it could be. But you know, it does work with the other Mac developer that I share it with. So maybe that's more of a commentary on Windows people than it is on Windows. I will admit that Docker runs via WSL, which basically means it doesn't really run natively on windows. It runs natively on windows via Linux, which is the window subsystem for Linux. It's what WSL stands for. That might be more native than on Mac. So yeah, well, it's not native on Mac. That's for sure.

I had an issue with running Plex and passing through a GPU and all that stuff with Docker. So there's definitely some, but that's going to be common. Like a PCIe device pass through to a container is always, you know, a crap shoot. It's always a challenge. Oh yeah. But I really do like Windows a lot. It's actually everything bare metal.

Really solid. Just load your operating system. Put the stuff on there. It is be fine. Everything's going to be fine. Write a script. Run the script be fine. Write a script. Run the script. Vibcode that script.

Long flag it. Yeah, I mean, in all honesty, these bash scripts I wrote for some stuff I do for archiving and stuff like that, they now have been ported to Windows, which basically is nothing. I mean, it's just moving the file there, making executable. Changing the slashesashes the back slashes

No, I don't even do that. You must not be referencing any windows file paths it it reason both What I do is I hop into Windows I up arrow until it says WSL space You're not talking windows space a boon to this is on Windows, dude. Are you kidding me? Last time I checked the host operating system was Windows. WSL is a subsystem for Linux. Yeah, hop into that next thing and I'm on Linux. I can do whatever I want.

Yeah, you're on Linux. Of course forward slashes work on Linux. I can navigate and traverse the entire Windows file path and run any Linux command against that Windows file path. So you can type C colon forward slash. C colon forward slash. Well, you have to CD. Yeah, of course.

Yeah, I mean, it can do either or. You can do it in LS or a DIR. Both, LS is working natively out of the box for subsystem for Linux and Windows. What I think honestly, I mean, is super cool is that you can have this box with Windows and Linux on the same box and it acts as if they're the same, like there's a marriage. There's really no difference between Windows and Linux from the command line because when you run WSL, everything that is Linux can access the Windows file path.

Like there's no difference. It's all just the file path. It's actually really, really cool. I mean, there's probably some challenges with it that I'm not hitting personally, but I mean, I think it's pretty freaking amazing that you can run dockers and all this windows related stuff and Linux. And it's the same box. It's crazy. I know people who pay quite the premium to not run windows ever. Hmm. Yeah, what a shame, though, because I mean, so here's an example

is that you can air cool. Obviously your CPU, right? Like you can run a fan or two fans and have a heat sink on it and keep it cool. But you can also run an all in one cooler, like a water cooler to keep it really cold. And like 60, 70, 80 degrees Fahrenheit kind of thing. Maybe that's Celsius. Minutes minutes Celsius. Yeah, probably Celsius.

It's my guess for that. But you can do that stuff. If you wanted to swap out an air cooler for a water cooler, you could. If I wanted to add a PCI card that adds four NVMe drives and allows me to have a 16 plus or 32 plus terabyte NVMe based ZFS drive on this window box. I could write this instant my gosh, you cannot do that with Mac I mean you can but it's not the same So it frustrates me. Oh, yeah. He likes hardware

Told you my computers barely have fans. Hey, I'm not a fan Well mine kicks mine could actually heat a room It doubles as a heater. Or it could if I didn't cool it well enough. That's what I'm asking right there. That's right. All right, well the nice thing about computers is different strokes for different folks

and we can all do what we like and we can all support each other in whatever it is we wanna do. What are we excited about? I'm excited about getting outside in the spring and seeing what the world looks like. What about you guys? Oh my gosh.

Yeah, we live in the same place and I, every year, like around this time, I'm like I don't think I can last another minute of this cold weather. Just getting like. It's been bad. It's and rough. It's been windy.

Holy cow. I mean, you think you live in Chicago with how windy our city has gotten. I got up on my roof yesterday because the some cap over like the furnace exhaust thing blew off and I had to get up there to measure, to buy a new cap, to go to then go back up there and put it on. And it was like 50 mile an hour winds yesterday or something like that. That's what it felt like up there. I got my dad was holding the ladder and I was it was trembling.

I was so terrified. I'm not afraid. They do it. I did. You get done today. It's like really nice out right now. But yeah, what I did was miserable. I got up there. I made it. Now's like really nice out right now. But yeah, what I did was miserable. I got up there. I measured it.

No, luckily I was very close. I got up there. I measured it and a roofer came today and put it on cause I wasn't going back up there. We're going back up there. He picked a much better day. What about you, Adam? What are you excited about?

Honestly, golf, man. Golf. Okay. You've Mm-hmm. OK. Then golf. Really, really getting into the game of golf. Nice. It's a great time for it, great weather for it.

It's a great game. It is a great game. It's a great thinking game. My brother visited recently, and I've forgotten how much I love golf. And he loves golf as well. And so we just spent time on the on the courses talking and gabbing and riding the carts and playing our shots and you know what you're going to hit with

and this and that. And so it's just been fun getting back into golf, man. I mean, really is a fun game to think through. It's such a mental game more than it is physical. It's both. It's both. Yeah. Yeah, very much both. I mean you can't uh, I mean If you had a disability where you couldn't Do golf like I guess with legs and arms. I mean it's challenging. So I mean, yeah, it's definitely both physical and mental You know, you have to be able so I mean I got two arms. I can I can bear some neck club, you know like be lucky if I hit it on uh,

I can barely see that club. You know what I'm saying? Like, be lucky if I hit it on the iron properly and whatnot, but you know, I love golf. I love the mechanics of, I think like a lot of things you can find the unique details between certain things and say, well, if you're hitting with like a wood versus an iron, there's a whole different way you stand. There's a different place the ball might lie. There's a different approach to it.

There's different, you know all sorts of different mechanics that go into it and so golf is such a such a game to play with friends and such a game to just tour the world with too, so you can you could do a lot man, so like for the next time we traveled you're I'm thinking like man we should hit some golf courses up when we travel instead next time. And yeah, I always struggle because I'm a lefty. So it's hard to find clubs. But what you gonna say?

I was going to give you a pro tip that I saw on TikTok. OK, next time you go and you really want to just like show up all the other golf people, you know, those like cap guns. You can go like caps in there, put one on the golf ball and it'll just make the most amazing smoke will come out. I'm like what? Smoke comes out, that'd be cool.

Yeah, I hit that ball really hard off the tee. I should do that with my kids, like not tell them about it. But just cause, you know, sometimes they'll hit balls in our backyard and just out into the corn tree, corn trees, that's not a thing. Corn stalks. Corn fields. Corn fields, there you go.

And I don't play very often cause I don't like to be bad at things and not very good at golf, but I can go out there and put a cap on it and just explode one and then just retire, you know? And just never hit again. They'll be like, do you see how hard dad hit it? Thing was smoking. That's a good idea.

I should get that working. Well, if you like golf, Adam, let me suggest a close alternative. It's called disc golf. Yes. Okay, now. Oh gosh. Here's the pitch for disc golf. All of the upsides of golf, none of the downsides.

All right, here are the upsides of golf. You're outdoors on a nice day, check. You're with friends, you get the conversations, check. You get to have some sort of challenge mentally, physically, and you're throwing a frisbee instead of hitting a golf ball. Check, all right, here are the downsides that you avoid. It's not that hard. Golf is very hard.

You get frustrated, the ball goes sideways, et cetera. It's cheap, cheap as in free. There's no tee times, there's no signing up, you don't have to dress real nice. You can go shirtless, you can go shoeless if you want to. Nobody cares. It's disc golf. You have to buy discs.

You have to buy discs, but compared to golf clubs, it's cheap. And you know, a round of 18 on a nice golf course, we're talking what? 60, 70, a hundred bucks per round. What are the other downsides? The etiquette's pretty much gone. You know, golf has all the rules, all the etiquette.

You gotta do things right, don't do them wrong. Really? Fix your divots. Oh yeah, do you know all the etiquette? You better learn some. I mean, it's called common courtesy. You know, there's specific etiquette in golf. It's not just common courtesy.

It's like you wouldn't know that if you weren't a golfer. Here's the only downside of disc golf is you gotta hang out with stoners pretty much. They're the ones out there. They're the ones out there disc golfing, you know. It's like you and a bunch of hippies, but they're good people. They're very chill, you know.

They'll let you play through. So disc golf. Give that a shot. It's like frisbee? It's frisbees. Yeah. What happens if I'm throwing it here and it goes way over there?

Yeah, I walk over there and just like golf, you gotta go over there and throw it from there. See, I'm pretty decent at golf. I can hit it on the fairway. All right, well. I'm not that good at frisbee, that's for sure. Now, however though, when I was young, everyone can talk about frisbee.

I'm talking really young. I wanted to be a professional. And you can't say it professionally, you gotta say professional. Okay. Professional. I thought you'd do like a fisherman, professional. And you can't say it professional, you gotta say professional. Okay. Professional. Professional. I thought you were gonna do like,

it's gonna be a fisherman, professional. Professional. Professional. Lawyer. No man. Frisbee player, you know? Really? Yeah.

Like ultimate Frisbee? Skipping it off the ground twice into your hands, you know? Skipping up the ground twice through the hoop. Now there is a pro tour. Catching it under the leg, you know? skipping up the ground twice through the hoop. Now there is a pro tour. Catching it under the leg, you know. There's a disc golf pro tour. This dream could be alive.

Now listen, the dream is dead. Isn't MKBHD, isn't he on like a pro? MKBHD is a professional Frisbee. Ultimate Frisbee, right? Ultimate Frisbee, right here, yeah. Yeah, good game. Which basically means there's no roles. There's no roles and they put gorillas in the...

He's also hanging out with stoners, because Ultimate Frisbee is one of those games that... Yeah, yeah, you know they're, yeah. Yeah, they're hanging out in the common area at the university, you know. What is this podcast? All right, let's call it a show Let us know in the comments. What is better golf or disc golf?

mmm, or What Nick does which he just wakes up at 5 a.m. And rides a bike for two hours. Isn't that what's your thing? Yeah, I want to but I'm becoming such a baby with the cold weather. Oh, yeah Well, it's it's your time man. It's your time What you got there and bike in the cold for two hours, or what's your? Your bicycle guy I try and get like when when I'm not being a baby about the weather I try and get 20 miles in before my kids wake up and 20 miles that's about two hours right or a little less 80 minutes or so. That's what it takes. Yeah I live right next to trail so it's very easy and the wind there's like no wind in the mornings. I found so I am good

Nice interesting. Why don't you just get yourself a peloton something like that? That's so boring Nature really? Yeah, I actually traded my my stationary bike for a Rowing machine much happier Yeah, I'm long peloton Much happier. Oh. Yeah, I'm long Peloton. He ain't lying. Is that a funny joke, Jared?

It is funny. How long have I been long? I've been long Peloton for a very long time. Yeah. I've been so long that they have like, they're like, nah, we're just done. They said so long to you. We're done.

We're done with this. You know, we gotta quit because this guy's just not stopping. All right, well, this show's getting long too. Let's, let's say goodbye. Nick, thanks for hanging out, man. It's always fun. It was a blast. Thank you.

So good, Nick. Bye friends. Bye friends. If you've been wondering about Nick and the JS party gangs promised, but not yet delivered new podcast, The Dysfunctional Developer, well, they've just started shipping episodes.

You'll find two in the feed at dysfunctional.fm or wherever you get your podcasts. We love to hear your thoughts on anything and everything we discussed on today's show in our totally free, totally rad Zulip community. Sign up today at changelog.com slash community then hop in Zulip and let your voice be heard. Thanks once again to our partners at Fly.io, to our sponsors of this episode, Retool, Heroku, and Depo, and of course to the best beat freak in the entire biz, Breakmaster Cylinder.

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