Not Talking About React Drama, Dinosaurs, and Devrel
Hey. We are two engineers
Speaker 2:We do science.
Speaker 1:In one of the oldest professions. In one
Speaker 2:of the oldest professions? What? I don't know. Engineers? I don't know.
Speaker 1:Insanity. Maybe use Ping, l
Speaker 2:o l. You know the company you invested in that does exactly this. Yeah. I know.
Speaker 1:I got I gotta set it up. I just had just I just Okay. Here's my issue.
Speaker 2:All the best features
Speaker 1:are hidden because they're all like secret query parameters. Yeah. Yeah. I just like don't I just haven't I don't even know what I don't know, you know.
Speaker 2:I had set it up in my OBS, but I my for whatever reason, my OBS settings and all my Twitch stuff, every time I come back to it, nothing works. And it's like I have to start over. It's like my NeoVim. My NeoVim's so busted right now. Like, for the I don't know, twelfth time I'm trying to get prettier and astro to work in my NeoVim, it's insane how many times this breaks.
Speaker 1:Wait. But you know, what are you changing? Are you changing anything?
Speaker 2:I'm not I'm not changing anything. That's what I'm well, okay. I updated all the packages. Oh, and I updated to NeoVim 0.9. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But why does everything break?
Speaker 1:I did have a little bit of issue with 0.9, but it wasn't that bad. Yeah. I just I did
Speaker 2:the thing this morning where I was like, okay, an hour. I'm spending an hour just making things better because I had just been, like, plugging through it and, like, every time I save a file, I get two alerts and, like, whatever, just dealing with it. Finally, I I cleaned all that up. But I still don't have Prettier working with Astro. Just the whole, like, Prettier TypeScript, all the things, getting them to work together, node, whatever, all of it.
Speaker 2:Why is it so hard? Why do I spend so much of my brain cycles thinking about the stupidest stuff in the world like formatting?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I know. I think I I I have everything working, but I know my setup isn't correct. I think there's, like, a better setup. So I
Speaker 2:Oh, I copied yours. So that's my problem.
Speaker 1:But mine works. And that's reason I've been touching No.
Speaker 2:Mine doesn't. Can you please after this podcast or maybe right now, could you please save an astro file, dot astro file, and see if Prettier runs?
Speaker 1:Oh, you know what? Yes. There was an issue with this.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There was an issue And with I did
Speaker 1:fix it and I can't remember how.
Speaker 2:Did you not push the change to your environment repo?
Speaker 1:I gotta look. I gotta look.
Speaker 2:Okay. Maybe you just have a local change that will will fix things for me.
Speaker 1:That would Prettier be is one of those things where I'm like, people love rewriting everything in Rust. They'll just rewrite stuff in Rust for no reason. Please rewrite Prettier in Rust. That's like actually useful. It's so slow.
Speaker 2:Is it someone doing that? Like the the Vercel team with Turbo Pack or something?
Speaker 1:I saw okay. Well, there's there's like a few people always like me to stuff but it's never, there was that Rome tools company that was that built that spent like $5,000,000 to build a formatter in Rust and then promptly died. So that that's kind of dead.
Speaker 2:From Rome, yeah.
Speaker 1:And I think I've I've seen like a few a handful of things. I don't know if Vercel is working on a faster formatter. I don't I don't see that anywhere.
Speaker 2:I use Prettier D. I do. I don't know that like I just wish it would all work. I just wish I never had to think about it again and every time I saved a file on my machine, it would format it with Prettier like it always should.
Speaker 1:That's another thing I Like I love Astro but I hate the fact that there's like a whole Yeah. Set of new tooling required and that just means
Speaker 2:I've had a lot of issues with the LSP and with everything else. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's like one it's like you introduce one new change but then it interacts with all the other tools like one to one. So you have like just way more points that can break. I appreciate some of the astro file stuff but to be honest, I would be I would have been okay with just like writing a normal JavaScript file and like declaring all the stuff at the top and exporting.
Speaker 2:You're saying declaring all the markup like in a just like JSX?
Speaker 1:Well, I don't know. I feel like you can get a similar experience without having to have created a new file format.
Speaker 2:Dot astro.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It wouldn't be as like slick but
Speaker 2:But then don't you have the issue then of like so if it's a JS file with HTML in it, then you still have the issue of a custom LSP, right, or no?
Speaker 1:It it wouldn't be any different than like a React file or like
Speaker 2:So it'd be just JSX.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Just any just JSX and I could just use exports to control what's what.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Astro I mean, Astro does feel a lot like JSX. Like, they took a lot of the same syntax stuff like for templating and all that stuff, embedding stuff in there.
Speaker 1:I think it literally is just JSX. Right?
Speaker 2:Oh, is it? I thought it no, it's HTML. It's not like class name, it's class. It's like actual HTML attributes.
Speaker 1:The class that what what you're describing there is a is like a React specific thing because Solid
Speaker 2:JS is that's not a JSX thing.
Speaker 1:No. Like, JSX, I don't know exactly how it's defined but, like Solid's JSX flavor looks different than than React's. And But the JSX and the JSX part is of like like allowing you to like mix JavaScript and like those XML type tags. I think it's like Yeah. It's just that and you can have whatever tags you want, whatever attributes on those tags you want.
Speaker 1:I actually just used, JSX on the back end without React. I needed to What? Render yeah, I know. I needed to render a PDF. So I was like, let me just render let me just return some HTML and I can turn that into a PDF.
Speaker 1:And I didn't wanna learn any of these HTML templating languages. Like, you know, all those ones that are from
Speaker 2:Like what?
Speaker 1:You know, like like, I don't even know, like, Pug or like Mustache or like, know, those random ones?
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah yeah. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I was like, I just need to generate some HTML on the back end. My HTML is more complex than I can just use like a string. Like more complex than I can have loops and all all that stuff. I was like, like JSX, it makes sense.
Speaker 1:So I found a library, I think it's called VHTML. You know how when JXS gets compiled, it just gets compiled with a bunch of function calls that, like, create the elements? And you can swap out that function call. So by default, it'll go to React, but you can swap it out with a very simple implementation that just takes a tag and turns into a string. So I found something called VHTML and I was like returning JSX from a Lambda function and that just got that went back to the client as a as HTML.
Speaker 1:And it was great actually, because I don't need state or any of the complex stuff. I just needed to, like, render static HTML dynamically.
Speaker 2:So is that I mean, isn't that RSCs? We should talk about all that stuff. Right? I mean, just the current React drama. I know
Speaker 1:we have to.
Speaker 2:Do we have to? Maybe we don't have to. Maybe we could just this could be it. We just we said we should talk about it, then we talk about something else, then we put it in the title, like React drama.
Speaker 1:Let's talk about why we're not talking about it. Oh, well, why I don't wanna talk about it. Or I don't it's not that I don't.
Speaker 2:Okay. Can you also remind me can you remind me later that we need to talk about HDMIX? I just wanna know your thoughts on HDMIX if you've ever used it and why they're so good at memes. Okay. Go ahead.
Speaker 1:There's just more drama slash whatever with Next. Js and the migration to app router and all this stuff. Don't care to talk about it because it's just so boring. It's just like I was ranting about this yesterday. I was like, this is such a boring topic and it is the only topic that ever comes up.
Speaker 1:We're just always talking about Next. Js. We're always pretending to care about it. We're always, like, microanalyzing every little thing, everything that goes right with it.
Speaker 2:Does it bother you because you you think like a marketer and you think, like, they're not doing the the cool new ways of marketing and they keep getting all the buzz, people keep talking about their thing when they're not even progressive and, like, doing all the cool marketing stuff?
Speaker 1:I haven't even they're not. No. I haven't even had, like, a meta thought like that. I just took a basic reaction of like, this is just boring. Like, this is just so it's just like so the your front end, like, you're just it's just like the tiniest, most irrelevant part of your stag.
Speaker 1:Like, you're gonna serve around like, I just don't I just don't how how much can we talk about? How much can we dissect and like, analyze this and think about? It's just Yeah. It's way too much and, I I just don't care. I just do not do not care.
Speaker 1:I'm tired of pretending to care. I've never used Next. Js. I'm not going to use Next. Js.
Speaker 1:I never will use Next. Js.
Speaker 2:Do you pretend to care? Do you are you pretending to care? I have not seen you pretend to care. You mostly don't care and and you're very vocal about that. Right?
Speaker 1:I need to understand what's happening so I can have the right context for I mean, we support Next. Js, so we need to understand what's going on and form our strategy around
Speaker 2:it. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:But it's just like who it's just why why like why is it talking about? It's it for most people, it's like a very small portion of their stack. Yeah. For a small amount of people, it's their whole stack.
Speaker 2:It's their whole stack. Yeah, sure. There's And that
Speaker 1:the biggest users of Next. Which are like these ecommerce sites, agencies that like build ecommerce sites, are not even on Twitter. So I'm just like, why
Speaker 2:why why are we just talking about this over and over? Yeah. I don't know. I the what this one, the specific topic, like, the more granular is that it's not stable because it react as a canary release, etcetera, etcetera.
Speaker 1:That's the worst part. It's like there's so little to talk about this topic that the only thing that we can devolve into is like a conversation about semantics. Like, what does stable mean?
Speaker 2:Does it
Speaker 1:mean this?
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah yeah.
Speaker 1:It technically means this, but I feel like it means this. And it's just like, that's the conversation. And to me, it's summarized very simply. I don't give a shit about technicalities words. People are having a tough time moving DApp router.
Speaker 1:There's a wide range of reasons for that. You can talk and think your way out of that or like why they're technically wrong. It just doesn't matter because there are some percent of people that are having a tough time. That's really all there is to this. And don't I really think there's any more.
Speaker 2:I have too many things I wanna say in response to that, and it hurts. I hate this situation on a podcast where there's like four things I wanna talk to you about and I gotta, like, order them. Or can I just list them on you pick? Who am I gonna list them on you pick? Okay.
Speaker 2:Okay. Well, I already said HTMX. That's not in response to that. But do you here's one of the topics. Do you think we'll ever run out of this is just a question.
Speaker 2:Do you think we'll ever run out of things to talk about? Like, will there ever be a moment where, like, there's nothing to talk about? Not on this podcast, like, on tech Twitter or just, like, in the tech community. So that's one thing. The other thing was, I don't know, React.
Speaker 2:So do you think there's ways they could have, like, leaned more into being good for spas, which is what most people use React for or everybody uses React for? Like, was there any more, like, low hanging fruit or, like, progress to be made there, or is that why they're going to the server because they ran out of stuff to do? That's another question. Third thing, wanna talk about dinosaurs. And I know that sounds super random, but I yesterday was blown away by this thought that how do we know what dinosaurs look like?
Speaker 2:We don't because look at an animal skeleton, it looks nothing like the animal. Like, nothing. Like, all the dinosaurs are all thin and ripped and, like, they're just muscle and skin. But, like, look at an elephant. You would never guess an elephant looked that way.
Speaker 2:So sorry. I just I went into the whole topic. I have
Speaker 1:a lot of thoughts on that one. I'm excited for that one.
Speaker 2:Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So that so pick you any of those really.
Speaker 1:So that was three.
Speaker 2:No. HTMX was another one. Okay.
Speaker 1:So I'll start with the first one which I already forgot. I
Speaker 2:might have too. We might have just had the whole conversation. I know. So there it was just like a couple React things that are super boring and who cares? Do we wanna even talk about React anymore?
Speaker 1:Let's get to the let's get
Speaker 2:to those real quick. What if I
Speaker 1:don't I don't remember what
Speaker 2:they were. The first one was, oh, do you think we'll have around things to talk about? Are there ever slow news days on tech Twitter? Go ahead.
Speaker 1:Definitely. Definitely. I was thinking about that. I was shouting this morning and I was like I was, again, just thinking about how annoying
Speaker 2:it is that we just talk about Next. Js.
Speaker 1:And I'm like, to be honest, I myself haven't said anything that interesting in a while. I haven't really seen anyone else say anything that interesting in a while. I feel like we're in a slump right now and that's
Speaker 2:why we're stuck on like,
Speaker 1:the stupid tailwind thing is coming up yet again. I think the week before that was something about is program I actually missed the whole this whole thing, is programming fun thing. It's just like the same stupid topic
Speaker 2:Oh, it's following up.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I think we are actually in a slump. There's nothing new or interesting.
Speaker 2:So I was like, what? So milk. So that's I mean, it's
Speaker 1:basically The milk devolved to conversation. New thing. Yeah. So I do think we
Speaker 2:might so bored.
Speaker 1:Yes. We I think we are very bored right now.
Speaker 2:And can I just say that I feel like like the older I get, the more bored I get with, like, all of it? And I wonder how much of, like, the tech discourse on Twitter is people who've been doing this a long time. I don't know, maybe not. But are we all just collectively getting more bored over time? Is it like the galaxy's moving further away eventually?
Speaker 2:We'll all just be so bored we're not even on Twitter?
Speaker 1:I maybe. Like, there's like, maybe there's just a certain because these topics keep coming up and eventually, when you first enter this space, it's like 80% of the stuff you see is new. And I feel like over time, it's just like, you know, less and less of that is new and like 10 of you see is new and I definitely feel that right now. I'm just like, ugh, this conversation again. I can almost like guess all the replies and guess all the things at this point.
Speaker 1:The first thing. The second thing, are they bored of React or they just don't That's React actually, I never thought about that. Maybe maybe like, yeah, React SPA is fine, has been fine for a while now. In terms of the their current model, I don't know what else is needed. So yeah, they maybe they literally got bored and they're like, okay, we're gonna move to the server now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, it's like I don't know. It feels like they didn't have to do this. Why did they make the decision to, like, completely shift gears and really cater to, like, a whole different use cases with this move to the server stuff. I don't know.
Speaker 2:Like, why why go through all that pain if they're not really just, like, either really convicted or really bored? That's my that's my prediction.
Speaker 1:Maybe we can just blame Alex Russell.
Speaker 2:You know what I'm talking about? Yeah. I know. Yeah. Microsoft.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:He forever has just been angrily shouting about how every all of these people use SPH inappropriately, which is which is an accurate thing. And he's like, he'll always roast the React team over and over about it. Just just like hammer them like insults.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah yeah.
Speaker 1:And maybe it worked. Maybe the React team was like,
Speaker 2:you know what? They finally
Speaker 1:And now they're like Okay. Overly obsessed with SSR and I'm just like, alright, you guys do your thing. I don't know. It just, it feels detached from anything I care about, which is what makes it even worse like, I don't like, it's not even that I don't like it because it's boring but I have to use it. Like, I don't have to use it and I find it boring.
Speaker 1:So it's just like double whammy.
Speaker 2:Double whammy. Yeah. Can you tell me about HTMX? Because when you talk about like a simple templating whatever whatever, it sounds like is that kind of what HTMX or they make it more simple to do minimal JavaScript? What what is HTMX?
Speaker 2:Tiege told me, I forgot.
Speaker 1:I think they make it simpler to do minimal JavaScript. I haven't used it in anything, so I can't really talk about it too much. But it does remind me of how I used to build I can't remember what it was, but I definitely remember back in the day, I would build stuff in a way where, like, an asynchronous request would go from the front end, the back end return like a partial, like a partial HTML and then the front would like swap out a node Yeah. Some node on the screen with it. I remember doing that pattern.
Speaker 1:Same. And I think and maybe maybe from like the ASP days or what? Yeah. Exactly what it was.
Speaker 2:Ajax.
Speaker 1:Sorry. Yeah. Go ahead. So I think HMX is just like a modern better take on that and like formalizing some of some of those patterns. And it looks it looks pretty cool.
Speaker 1:Again, I just never built anything that that makes sense for.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure. They're really good at Twitter.
Speaker 1:They're so good. He's so fun. Well, it's because the guy is the grug the grug guy grug guy? I don't know how you say it. I've only ever read it.
Speaker 2:The grug guy?
Speaker 1:Have you ever seen that website that's like it's like a comedy website, but he makes like interesting points about software engineering where like he acts out one person that's a caveman.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's that guy?
Speaker 1:I think because the Twitter handle is this is is Grug something. Really? So I think it's I think that it's that guy. And that guy is, like, so funny. I mean, those those things are written so well.
Speaker 1:They communicate ideas really well. So I think that that's why he's got a gift.
Speaker 2:Greg Brady. Mount Rushmore of Developer Marketing. We've got HTMX. Definitely. We've got Drizzle.
Speaker 2:Drizzle. We've got SST.
Speaker 1:Who's that
Speaker 2:fourth who's the fourth Mount Rushmore?
Speaker 1:I think Fly might might make it up there because they're
Speaker 2:Oh, that was good blog post. I saw that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Because, I posted it the other day and it was a fundraising announcement and every company does the same boring announcement of like, we raised $20,000,000 from Andreessen Horowitz and we're excited to use this in a very unique way to hire people and build features. It's just like the most boring generic thing ever and I'm sure the SST announcement for our seat was probably very similar. The fly one was so funny. It was like so like funny and self aware of how like boring these usually are and they were like, they actually communicated interesting stuff well but like every other line was like a joke and it was funny, it was great.
Speaker 1:So yeah, they did a fantastic job with that post.
Speaker 2:We'll we'll link the blog post.
Speaker 1:We'll link it in our
Speaker 2:show notes. I can say things like that now and Chris will just do it. It's awesome. Nice.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I think I think they go I mean, it's very it's not like they're not like as weird as Drizzle or htmx's but I will say I have never read a fun one, I don't read like, I hate reading articles. I just skim. So one, don't read articles that often. Two, hell no, I'm not reading a fundraising article.
Speaker 1:But somehow I read like every single line of this this fundraising article and then it was it was great.
Speaker 2:It was really interesting. And it's also like I had I think just lumped Fly as like, it's containers so I don't think about it or care or know anything about it. It was interesting to read through some of that and think about the different Mhmm. Like, angles of they talk about Edge. They talk about this stuff that they're very self aware of themselves in the industry.
Speaker 1:There's definitely some cool stuff that you can build under that model. Like we were thinking about doing, so because SSE has a product seed which is a CI tool. And the thing I hate about every single CI tool is we've made them totally stateless. So there's always like, set stuff you wanna cache and there's a good restore cache setup and that's supposed to make it faster, but then it's like download the cache blah blah blah. I miss the good old days of having just a stateful CI machine that would just, like, sync the code and all, like, once it built and it was done, it
Speaker 2:would just resume from there the next time you got you
Speaker 1:did a push, so everything would just be fast. Yeah. Building a CI tool on fly would be great. You you just give every project a container, it spins up or zooms from where it was, spins down. If there's some issue with like state corrupting things, you can blow it away, whatever.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, there are some cool things you can build. I kind of see them as like, they're like the cloud or they're approaching like the Cloudflare but for like the container model which
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah, will be pretty I didn't know they were out on their own hardware. That's have to be.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That that's the thing that I one of the things that I think is a lot of these companies in their category, basically simplified cloud I mean, fact that was simplified cloud.
Speaker 2:Yeah. A lot of them
Speaker 1:most of them don't own their own hardware. Most of are Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Well, Vercel is at least serverless, so it's a little bit different.
Speaker 1:But, the ones that are more container based, like Railway or like Render, they're built on top of AWS or GCP, whatever it is. I don't think those businesses are viable, period. Because I just don't the margins are there to do that well. And they actually in Fly's blog post, they very clearly spelled that out where like, yeah, we have to own our own hardware otherwise this whole thing, like the margins
Speaker 2:are there.
Speaker 1:Does that
Speaker 2:make sense? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So it was cool to see that that validated and I think they're the only ones that are really gonna succeed with that goal for that reason.
Speaker 2:Okay. So can you that's everything but the dinosaurs. Can we talk about the dinosaurs real quick?
Speaker 1:Yes. Okay. So I love this topic because have you seen, the artist's renditions of like rhinos and leopotamists?
Speaker 2:Is that My wife showed it to me yesterday. Yeah. Yeah. That's where this conversation came from. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Just so first of people have context. Someone did an exercise where they showed artists, skeletons of, like, animals that are alive today, like hippos and stuff. And these animals have really crazy skeletons. And they're the artist to guess what the animal will look like and they drew all these crazy sci fi looking things that looked way cooler than the actual animal is. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And and yeah, it kind of goes illustrate how difficult it is to infer too much just from the bones.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like you take an elephant skull, you would have no idea it has these giant ears and this giant trunk. Yeah. Like it just they have the tusks but they end up when they draw these types of things, it looks like a dinosaur. It's like all gaunt and like freaky looking.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So the but the one thing I will say is so have you seen have you guys watched Prehistoric Planet yet?
Speaker 2:Oh, the second yeah. Yes. We started the first one. Do you know all
Speaker 1:the dinosaurs are chubby now?
Speaker 2:Oh, they already started, like, incorporating this idea into
Speaker 1:Yeah. Because if you think about the things the thing you were saying earlier, like, they're all, like, skeletal and, like, ripped. Uh-huh. And that's a dinosaurs I remember from being a kid, like the models I had or like Jurassic Park and stuff. They don't look cool anymore.
Speaker 2:They all look kinda chubby. Like a hippo. You look at a hippo skull, you would never guess Yeah. How giant a hippo is.
Speaker 1:So I do think they're working with more than the bone because if I remember the way the fossils work, fossils aren't literally the bone, they're like the imprint of So I think the imprint might also sometimes contain like the full shape of the creature, at least like the or like to some degree potentially.
Speaker 2:I thought I read that it's like the skin and all the tissue would shrivel really fast to the bones. So any fossils
Speaker 1:Well, it's kind of like a footprint, right? Like we have footprint fossils.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's true.
Speaker 1:The footprint wouldn't be just the bone, it would be the full shape.
Speaker 2:Okay. So we do we do actually, in some cases, know the outline of some of these dinosaurs.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But I do agree that there's so it's so hard to infer. Some of these things like colors or ages ago. Even that prehistoric planet thing, most of what they do is, look at the hints they have and try to map it to behaviors that exist in animals today. And they're like, okay, it's probably similar behavior.
Speaker 1:Did you see the thing with
Speaker 2:the T Rex arms yet? No. I don't
Speaker 1:It think was We haven't
Speaker 2:even finished the first episode.
Speaker 1:Okay. It was a it's like the most ridiculous part of it because the whole thing is we've always asked like, why do T Rex have these tiny stupid stupid arms? And it's like, especially in, in that show, they really show how small and stupid they are because dinosaurs are kind of fat
Speaker 2:and chubby and it's got
Speaker 1:these like useless little things that are just hanging off of it. So they're they
Speaker 2:have a scene where these two T rexes go
Speaker 1:up to each other, one's a male, one female. And the male just like leans his head up and looks up all the way up Uh-huh. And then opens his arms and starts flapping them in like the stupidest way ever.
Speaker 2:And the and the inside of
Speaker 1:the arms are, are like highly colored. So it's some kind of like mating thing and like it like Yeah. There's some creature, some like creature that is alive today that mates in that in that way. But it looks so stupid where like this cannot this cannot be what the explanation is. But, you know, it might be.
Speaker 1:Who knows?
Speaker 2:Who knows? What's crazy is that, like, a hundred years ago or maybe it was a little longer, but it wasn't that long ago. People didn't even know dinosaurs existed. Like, there have not been that many generations aware of the dinosaur bones. Have you seen that?
Speaker 2:When was it the first dinosaur bone discovered? It was like a hundred years ago, wasn't it?
Speaker 1:I don't know exactly, but I know Oh, yeah. Our depictions of dinosaurs before made them look really stupid, like they were like really slow moving or like they were like kind of too upright. I remember like the way we shaped them. But, I don't think the first dinosaur bones discovered then because I'm pretty sure that
Speaker 2:It was 1677 in Europe actually, Further, further ago than I realized.
Speaker 1:If you're reading Eurocentric history, maybe. Where do you think dragons came from?
Speaker 2:What yeah. Where did dragons come from? Oh, did they come from dinosaurs?
Speaker 1:Maybe I just made this entirely up but isn't it that they just found skulls and they were like
Speaker 2:Oh, so they had found
Speaker 1:there's a dragon?
Speaker 2:Dinosaur skulls. They just didn't publish them in articles.
Speaker 1:That's my I don't know. That's my guy just made this entirely Interesting.
Speaker 2:I mean, is a lot of overlap between a dragon and a dinosaur. They don't exist today. And what what's the other overlap? I don't know. There's reptiles?
Speaker 2:I don't know. Okay. There's a lot of overlap. I don't know what it is, but there's a they're a bunch.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Liz Liz, there's this funny thing which is always like, I always forget dragons really exist. Like to her, like, in the back of her head, they're just some like extinct animal and she's like, wait, no, they're like not real.
Speaker 2:Unicorns, I don't have that problem.
Speaker 1:Unicorn is so stupid. Like, I feel like they didn't do enough
Speaker 2:to make it a mythical
Speaker 1:It's like, the historical horse may have a horn. I
Speaker 2:mean, the rainbow That's not that old. Like, colorful and sparkly nature of a unicorn. Did I make that up? Is that, like, a specific unicorn toy or something?
Speaker 1:Are you describing the background of unicorns you look presented in front
Speaker 2:of? I guess what would be colorful? Their their their tails
Speaker 1:a horn colorful?
Speaker 2:Like manes and their tails are rainbow colored, Aren't they?
Speaker 1:Maybe. I don't know. I'm just thinking about like a Harry Potter unicorn which is just like a horse with a horn on it, I think. It also has blood that can keep you alive forever. So I guess that's a cool part.
Speaker 2:That's right. When you said that, didn't know what you're talking about in Harry Potter until until the blood thing. What's keeping them yeah. Yeah. I remember that.
Speaker 1:My mom says this funny thing about dinosaurs where it's like too ridiculous to her. Like, it's such like a weird concept that they exist that she just can't even believe they're real. Like like, she knows they're real but, like, her mind just rejects the notion of it being real. And I kinda get it. Like, what?
Speaker 1:Like, they're just walking Yeah.
Speaker 2:It is bizarre. And it does like, we've done some studies or something, right, to, like, make sure that things don't just grow over a long period of time, like bones in the ground. They don't just, like, swell. Like, things were
Speaker 1:just lizards. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, things used to be so big. Everything was just bigger. Crocodiles were bigger. Bugs were bigger. One interpretation is that things used to always be so big.
Speaker 2:Another interpretation is things were little and they swell over time. Like, seems like a possible, I don't know, avenue of scientific research.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's I I I My, like, feeling around it is, like, nature would just try and they were like, we're gonna try to make stuff really big and then nature was like, nah. That doesn't work too good.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Let's try something. It's like electronics. Exactly. Just everything gets smaller and better over time.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's
Speaker 1:we can accomplish the same thing and more when this in a smaller smaller size.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think I I I have looked this up and there's theories, at least with
Speaker 1:the bugs thing that there's more, oxygen, like the oxygen in the air, like, there's more oxygen and causing us to grow bigger. But I do think but that doesn't really explain, like, stuff like dinosaurs being big. I just think it was like a random thing. It was just like randomly stuff was just getting bigger for a number of reasons.
Speaker 2:Really? Random.
Speaker 1:Just because it could I mean, as long as it can survive, like, it can just like, why not? Like, stuff just gets bigger and bigger you are, the scarier you are, I guess.
Speaker 2:I just assume there are, like, dinosaurs on other planets too. Like, I don't know. I've just I've taken a very earth centered view of the universe and I've decided this is the path. Life starts as little tiny bacteria, turns into dinosaurs, and then really smart monkeys. All planets all over.
Speaker 2:That's what's happening.
Speaker 1:Oh, you're convinced that that's the case?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. No. I don't know. I don't I don't know.
Speaker 2:I don't hold this belief strongly.
Speaker 1:Well, the thing that I think about is that, as one of those Fermi paradox things that it's so natural to
Speaker 2:Wait. Wait. What was that? You just said it so fast. Fermi?
Speaker 2:Fermi paradox?
Speaker 1:Could you explain what that
Speaker 2:is for all of us who don't know paradoxes and principles?
Speaker 1:It's like, given the size and age of the universe, why isn't it like overflowing with life, like probability wise it should be. Yeah. But why isn't it? So there's like all these theories. And one theory is that, on Earth, it's so natural for us to think of it as the smarter you are, the more of an advantage you have and like, the better your species does.
Speaker 1:So over time, there's a pressure on things getting smarter and smarter and smarter.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:But it's possible that there's something about Earth that makes that uniquely true. In other planets with life, it could be that the taller you are, the more likely
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:You should survive or like, the harder your skin is, the more likely you're So gonna even if this even if life has been around for billions of years, the result wouldn't be a species that can travel space, it would just be a species that's like really tall or something. So it could be that intelligent life is like a unique property of like it's a unique advantage on Earth and maybe not as much as an advantage anywhere else.
Speaker 2:That's really interesting. I'm just thinking about it. I don't have anything to say in response.
Speaker 1:I was listening. I just don't I know. I mean, there's something to say.
Speaker 2:It's like, wow. That's That's a very wow moment. We've talked about aliens again. Go ahead. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Guess I remember we did. All this stuff, everything we just talked about vastly more interesting than
Speaker 1:anything going on in on tech Twitter.
Speaker 2:Way more interesting. This is why we're talking about it, and this is why we've hardly talked about tech for three weeks. We're in a slump. It's just a little tech slump. There's just, like, not much going on.
Speaker 2:It's like I follow the NFL for dumb reasons. Like, I don't know. I just I like Patrick Mahomes. Okay. He's cool.
Speaker 2:So I follow, like, that whole season, and I listen to podcasts, and there's nothing to talk about in the NFL right now. There's just literally nothing. So they just make stuff up.
Speaker 1:What do they talk about?
Speaker 2:What are
Speaker 1:they still They
Speaker 2:make stuff up. They're like, what if you could take one player from every team and make a super team? Who would you pay? It's like dumb stuff like that that you can just talk about randomly. We need to do stuff like that.
Speaker 2:We need to have little, like
Speaker 1:We could do that. I was just
Speaker 2:saying we could do literally that. Oh, wait. Literally what? For the NFL players? No.
Speaker 2:No. No. No. Not not that literally. Take
Speaker 1:make a company. You can draft people. You can draft two people from any existing company.
Speaker 2:Like software engineers? Create a
Speaker 1:Just any anyone anyone
Speaker 2:Oh, like a fake start up. Like a startup simulator. Yeah. Oh, why is that not a thing? Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, super, like, super, mockumentary style, like, making fun of, you know?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Fantasy startup. Yes. How would you what would what would be the ways to score points though? It would be like
Speaker 2:product market fit. I don't know. Product market fit? That's how
Speaker 1:you I don't
Speaker 2:know, score point. It's like dollars raised. It was just You dollars
Speaker 1:could follow week to week. Yeah. Yeah. Money raised, I think, is a good one. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Like getting like dunking on Twitter, that's like another
Speaker 2:that's like
Speaker 1:three points.
Speaker 2:A good meme? A good a good tech meme? No?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. PR's merged?
Speaker 2:PR's merged? Sure. GitHub green boxes filled.
Speaker 1:Oh, you Somebody make it, please. Users. I would say users, but no one has any of those. Yeah. We just
Speaker 2:created the worst the worst game ever, but it should exist. Should definitely be a thing. Yeah. I was thinking about how, like, in tech, people who start, like, becoming creators or public, like, influential people in tech just talk about tech. Why like, is that every industry?
Speaker 2:Like, do doctors just talk about do they just talk to doctors about doctor things? No. I see doctors explaining, like, concepts to me. Why is why are we not doing that in tech? Why are we not, like, talking to anybody outside of tech?
Speaker 2:It's just our audience is tech.
Speaker 1:After this conversation, I was like, I just kind of artificially limited what I talk about. I think I my head, I'm like, okay, I go wider than most people because I talk about tech and also stuff on the business side. Yeah. But that's still pretty narrow in the grand scheme of things. Like, why aren't I talking about dinosaurs
Speaker 2:and aliens and stuff like, I might as well. We should just we should do that. It's just a job. We just happen to work in tech, but we're people.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We're just Yeah.
Speaker 2:Two guys having a podcast. Well, sorry. My wife, she she made fun of me today. Something about how we were two bros on a podcast. I was like, I'm offended.
Speaker 2:I wasn't really offended.
Speaker 1:Wait. So she made fun of me also.
Speaker 2:It was like, okay. Here's what happened. She wanted me to listen to this podcast, which I am, but the episode is, like, two hours and thirty eight minutes or something. It's like a one podcast episode, and it's, like, almost three hours, like watching a Lord of the Rings movie. And I said something.
Speaker 2:I was like, two hours and thirty eight minutes? Like, I listen fast, but, like, that's a long podcast. She's like, well, it's like science. They have stuff to talk about. It's not just two bros on a podcast.
Speaker 2:Oh, ouch. That one hurt. Cut me deep.
Speaker 1:Hey. We are two engineers. Oh, we're software engineers. We do science. The one
Speaker 2:of the oldest professions? What? I don't know. Engineers? I don't know.
Speaker 2:It's funny. I just don't think
Speaker 1:of Prostitutes, I guess, the
Speaker 2:Yeah. Software engineering and prostitution, two of the oldest professionals in history. It's funny. So this the point I'm trying to make is, like, I feel like tech needs some ambassadors controlling the messaging to the outside world.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Like software developers, lot of misunderstandings. A lot of people don't know what it is every time I meet someone. What do you do? I'm a software developer. What is software?
Speaker 2:What is developer? What like, most people around here have no idea. And I'm thinking it's because we're not telling people. We're just talking to each other. Every tech influencer just makes stuff for people that know what they're talking about.
Speaker 2:Why not? Let's explain computers to people. Maybe someone's already doing this. I'm sure someone is. Every time I think something like this, I find out there's like 10 people doing it.
Speaker 1:Well, you wouldn't be the audience for that. So maybe you never makes it to you. Yeah. I mean, it is funny because you're right, explaining what a software engineer does is like, for people that don't work in the space or even adjacent to the space Yeah. Very mysterious.
Speaker 1:That's already hard. Then explaining how I spend my day or how you spend my day is like 10 times harder than that because they're like, the people come in my house, they're like, why do you have like this fancy camera and this mic and this lighting in your room? And I'm like, oh, I'm a software engineer like
Speaker 2:But Ganz, why do you have any of that stuff? I'm just
Speaker 1:like, just it's okay. Just it's too hard to explain. It's not worth explaining. It's weird.
Speaker 2:It's not an interest rate phenomenon. Right? That's not like every all of us having mics and cameras is not just a tech had too much money for a little while kind of thing. Maybe it is. Maybe it's exactly what is.
Speaker 1:Personally, it is. Yeah. Wow. I definitely bought all this stuff in that phase where I was making way too much money.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Same. Do you feel like the interest rate situation like, I still feel like it hasn't happened yet. Like, the real impact of what just transpired in terms of fiscal policy, the drastic change, I still feel like the economy and everything else seems to be going too well for what I feel like just happened. Is Silicon Valley Bank crashing the only fallout from this whole thing?
Speaker 2:Like, I feel like ten years of print not printing. I'm not a bad guy. Was like ten years of quantitative easing Stimulus. Stimulus, all the, like, injecting capital into the system and then shutting that off. I feel like it should be like a seismic effect and it has not been.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, the goal of the Fed was not to have a seismic effect. They were going for a really crazy I mean, okay. The issue is the economy is overheated. Right?
Speaker 1:It's like Yeah. Doing too well and they wanted to slow that down. You can only really slow that down by pushing in the negative direction, but I think they didn't wanna push it too far in that direction. So there is a version of all that and what we won't know what exactly is gonna happen for a while. Yeah.
Speaker 1:There's a version of all this where they actually were very successful in their goal. They just slowed it down. I forgot what they called it. They they made some some new word that they were aiming for. They slowed it down without going into like a deep recession or or depression.
Speaker 1:That's their goal. They didn't really wanna go there, but they have to go close to it. So it's possible they like landed the plane exactly perfectly.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:As weird as that is to believe that that is possible.
Speaker 2:Let me ask you this. Maybe it's just the impact in tech that I don't feel like has been felt in the way I thought it I mean, I know
Speaker 1:there's been a lot of layoffs. So
Speaker 2:I'm not trying to I
Speaker 1:guess so. And the chat is good. It's it's just starting to hit the React team right now.
Speaker 2:Okay. So let's just say there are a million DevReles. I have no idea how many DevReles there are. If there's even like a title that you can like actually I don't know. Let's say there's a million.
Speaker 2:How many do you think there'll be in five years?
Speaker 1:I have no idea. I feel like I felt it in tech heavily.
Speaker 2:Oh, just like the layoffs or other things?
Speaker 1:No. Not the layout. Well, because this the space that I operate in is the first to get influence which is
Speaker 2:Oh, startups.
Speaker 1:Like startups, funding, all that stuff. Yeah. The entire conversation around fundraising is like a thousand percent different than it was for the last five years. And it actually feels great because it's like a return to normalcy. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So I feel like that happened in like the course of a year. And I don't want it
Speaker 2:to go any further because I think we're in like a good
Speaker 1:place right now. Someone messaged me the other day, they're taking a bunch of VC meetings and they were like, man, VCs don't care about growth or traction. Like, just wanna see revenue numbers. I'm like, oh, yeah. Like, that makes that actually makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 1:Like, that's not weird. That's normal. Yeah. But so different from how you would raise money before. I'm happy with it because for the past five years, it's been a mystery.
Speaker 1:Like, if
Speaker 2:I wanted to go raise money, I didn't get it.
Speaker 1:I was like, I see a good business, they're not able to raise money. I see a stupid business, they're raising a shit ton of money. Yeah. Don't understand how to do this. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It doesn't make there's no logical plan. Now it's like returning back to like, yeah, if you have a good business, you get to raise more money. Yeah. If you have a shitty business and don't have a good model, you don't get to raise money.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How it should be.
Speaker 1:I felt it there and that's where most of the craze was happening. So that space got impacted very hard. A lot of VCs are gonna go bust and it's gonna be brutal. And I think every layer down is just less drastic of an impact. But, you know, millions of people did get laid off.
Speaker 1:Right? So it's a good amount.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. I don't know where are we in the layers. Are we lower or higher? You said every layer down is less.
Speaker 1:Less dramatic of an impact.
Speaker 2:What layer do we operate in? Yeah. How much impact are we getting?
Speaker 1:Who's we? Because I think, like I said, me being in the startup space, I think I was closer to to the impact.
Speaker 2:We're not in the same layer. We're in different layers is what you're telling
Speaker 1:know what layer you're in. I don't know what you do every day. I don't What
Speaker 2:layer are you in? Is this like the OSI model kinda like seven layers? Are we talking like a how many layer like a three layer cake? What what are we talking about? How is this going to affect me, Dax?
Speaker 2:Me. It's about me.
Speaker 1:I don't understand any of your finances, income. I don't understand any
Speaker 2:of it. So I have no idea how it's
Speaker 1:Okay. Gonna affect Cool. I believe I am closer
Speaker 2:to the sun than you are. The sun being And like the sun is bad? Do you wanna be closer to The sun being the VC
Speaker 1:Oh, I guess. And the piles of money there, I think I am closer to that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay. That makes sense.
Speaker 2:I don't know. The DevRel thing. I tried to, like, make you talk about DevRel and you just didn't take the bait. So now I'm trying again.
Speaker 1:Melky already posted that clip of me for this week. So I I'm at my limit on talking about DevRel.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Clip. Yeah. I know. I I know.
Speaker 2:You're trying to walk the the line and it's fun. It's fun to just watch you try and dodge all the questions.
Speaker 1:Well, I I said this before. There is no group of people are more terrified than DevRel because there are
Speaker 2:I could take one group. Go ahead. At least one group. Know things should Sorry. Cut Go ahead.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's true.
Speaker 1:Yes. That's true.
Speaker 2:So but I guess, like, here's my real question. And you don't have to talk about it. If you don't wanna talk about it, just don't talk about it. But does Stripe have a DevRel team? Did they just like make good docs and then become like a trillion dollar company?
Speaker 2:Isn't that the model? Why are we all what I don't understand.
Speaker 1:They probably have people doing the role because then no one can define the DevRel role. They probably have people doing that and focusing all their time on docs and SDKs and all the all that great stuff that makes their product great. Yeah. I just think they don't, navel gaze about it as opposed to other people where they don't have I think right I think a very common split right now is like, someone's in developer relations role, they spend 20% of their time doing the job and then 80% of their time talking about the job. I think that's like a very a thing that we see a lot.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Know, maybe the Stripe team just doesn't do that so we never hear hear from them. But they are incredibly good at the point of doing all this, which is making developers happy to use your product and understand how to use it well. But, yeah, I guess we never I don't know anyone with that's like, I'm a Stripe DevRel.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Same. I just think of them as being
Speaker 1:I also got corrected yesterday. Someone was like, you can't say, DevRel because DevRel is developer relations. So you're saying, developer relations.
Speaker 2:And I'm like, shut. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. That's funny.
Speaker 2:I have friends. I mean, I have good friends under the DevRel umbrella. So it's very hard to keep, like, throwing stuff on DevRel. Why are you laughing so hard?
Speaker 1:Well, this is the exact thing where someone says something racist and they're like, well, you know,
Speaker 2:some of my best friends. No. I'm I'm not saying like, oh, I have friends that are Deborah. Don't be offended. I'm saying like, it's hard for me.
Speaker 2:I I have so many things I wanna say about that idea, and it's it feels bad because I feel like I'm saying it directly to friends that good for them. Like, great job. I have no qualms with you doing your job. It's more just the idea.
Speaker 1:Okay. So here's why I think that so that's exactly accurate. I feel it too, like, I like, I know a lot of people in this role and, I hesitate to make fun of it for that reason. But I thought about this the other day, I'm like, I have no issue making fun of literally almost everything else, like, you know, my between two nerds thing I do, I make fun of all these people in the most direct possible way.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And I'm like, this is actually the most offensive thing about this. I'm okay making fun of them because to me it's clear that they have so much value and security they can sit on. On some level, I'm being condescending thinking I can't make fun of this group because Interesting. Something implying that I think they're maybe more insecure about
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:About the role.
Speaker 2:Ultimate burn is not burning. Ultimate burn that I can't even make fun of you. I try to I try to, like, you know, frame you that way when people are like, Dax is so mean. I'm like, no. That means he really likes you.
Speaker 2:I've I've gone to
Speaker 1:bat for you. I did see you post that tweet. I remember Melky replying, what the hell? Dax has only been nice to me. And out of sheer coincidence, I just started making fun of him a lot more after that.
Speaker 2:That's awesome.
Speaker 1:Okay. I think we're done.
Speaker 2:I think we are. Yeah. That was good. Yeah. Thanks, Sax.
Speaker 1:Alright. See you.
Speaker 2:We'll see you later.
