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How About Mostly Technical?

/ 01:30:22/E94
Aaron:

No. Dax is gonna go crazy on Ship Week.

Dax:

No. But here here's the thing, though. I am going on vacation.

Aaron:

Sorry, Liz. They shit something. Got it, sweet babe.

Dax:

You know, she literally told me she was, like, no funny with Vercel on vacation.

Aaron:

I don't know if she knows you very well. I know y'all are married or whatever, but Whatever. What a what a weekend.

Ian:

Lots to come.

Aaron:

Big weekend on Twitter. I know.

Dax:

Great timing

Aaron:

for this. Let's just start. I don't you guys have backgrounds. You got into computers at some point. Nobody cares about that.

Aaron:

Let's just start. I mean Jump

Ian:

in. Oh, yeah.

Aaron:

Because everybody knows who you

Ian:

guys are.

Aaron:

Yeah. So welcome to the show. Thank you for being here. Super exciting. Do you wanna talk about Laravel JavaScript?

Aaron:

Wanna talk about your you're selling coffee at a terminal. Adam's working on a course. Nobody knows what SST is. It's gonna what

Ian:

SST is. Yes. I have no idea. Yes. We can.

Ian:

And and let me tell you. This is the funniest thing. I love Dax's Twitter persona. Okay? And I have actively not figured out what the fuck he's doing.

Ian:

Like, I don't know what SST is. Like, I don't know. I don't really understand if you work there, docs, or you own it, or even how it makes money. Like, I don't wanna know anything about it because I just love your vibe. And I'm like, if I know too much, it's gonna mess it up.

Ian:

Like, I don't wanna know anything about it. It's some JavaScript y AWS stuff. Good. I just leave it there. So I'll probably learn more today.

Ian:

But

Dax:

It's it's funny because that's, I hear I hear this so much. It's like, I think our marketing is really good in terms of people, like, hearing the literal name, but it just doesn't go further than that. Like Nope. Everyone's like, I've heard of this, and I think I'm supposed to say it's good. But, like, I don't know what it is or what the point is or I'm never looking into it.

Aaron:

So it's a

Dax:

very common situation.

Ian:

It seems it ties to the job. As soon as I see, like, Next JS, I just, like, I just, you know, blackout and I just, like, don't go bother than that. So

Dax:

Yeah. Me too.

Aaron:

But all

Ian:

your code snippets are awesome. So I'm like, oh man, look

Adam:

at it.

Ian:

Like, he's deploying AWS stuff with like one line of code. This is amazing. I should figure

Aaron:

that out. That would be cool. Like, I should investigate, but I'm not I'm not going to.

Ian:

But I'm not going to because I don't wanna ruin the vibe.

Dax:

Yeah.

Aaron:

I also have this question. SST, they you you work there. Right? They pay you. This is your job.

Aaron:

It's not just like 3 friends on a working on a open source thing. Right?

Dax:

Yeah. It's funny because, I I guess yeah. Ultimately, like, we are 3 friends working on a thing, and I guess, we come off a certain way, but, people are always surprised to know that we're a YC company. We are venture funded,

Ian:

like

Aaron:

Didn't know that.

Adam:

You

Dax:

know, by serious VCs. We're a very serious business, you know, with grown up serious stuff like money and things. But as a diplomat yeah.

Adam:

I'm trying to overcompensated a little bit. You just, like, went way too hard. No. It's serious. It's very serious.

Adam:

No.

Dax:

It's really, Alex. It's definitely real.

Aaron:

You don't have to posture. I'm sorry. We know it is. We didn't make

Dax:

it up for sure. No. I mean, I only say that to contrast with, this is the type of company we wanted to build, you know, even though it's it is those things. Like, we just wanna say 3 friends having fun. That's why, like, you know, our our tone is is what it is.

Dax:

Yeah.

Ian:

That's awesome. I love the cofounder thing.

Aaron:

You were YC backed. I did not know you were venture backed. That is that is very much news to me. So

Ian:

Yeah. I didn't know the venture back part. I didn't know YC, but I didn't know the venture back. Oh, yeah. I think I assumed it, but I I figured the money was coming in somewhere somehow.

Dax:

I had a tweet a while ago where whenever people find out that we're a YC company, they're always like, really? You guys? Like, everyone's so surprised. And I'm like, at some point, I just start being offended, I think.

Ian:

We're breaking the mold here, you know? Otherwise, you guys are a certain certain style. You know? You guys have a little different tact to

Dax:

it Yeah.

Adam:

Which is good.

Dax:

And And in terms of money, the company's history is a little weird. So I joined the team 3 years ago, but it had been around a little bit before then, with a completely different product. And that product still makes money to this day. It's just we haven't, like, touched it in several years.

Aaron:

Really?

Dax:

Reason being is, just the space that's in, we saw, like, a ceiling with it, so we needed to pivot to something else. And it's still related. Like, the other tool, was a CI tool for companies in the serverless space. It just oriented around a certain framework that wasn't really growing, so we have to just do our own.

Adam:

That's such a nice way of putting that. Wasn't really growing? Yeah.

Aaron:

I don't know. What's the rep who are we talking about here?

Dax:

Serverless framework. I don't know if you guys

Aaron:

Serverless framework.

Dax:

I remember that. Yep. They are the most confusing framework ever because they own serverless.com. So when I was first trying to learn, okay, what the hell is serverless? I kept landing on serverless.com.

Dax:

And I was like, is this like the concept or is this like a specific framework? So they just had great domain position for years. Great domain. That's a great

Ian:

domain. There's nothing better than a great domain. It's like Oh, man. That's top of my list. Yeah.

Dax:

Yeah. So, they were they actually, I would say, made it as a framework. They grew to a pretty large, like, usage base enough so that our previous product could make money just serving people in that ecosystem. But they just kind of went sideways after a certain point. And if they're not, if they're not hyper growing, we won't either.

Dax:

So that's why eventually we said, okay, we need to do our own framework. There needs to be an angle for us to, like you can't just decide to start a framework, you need some kind of hook. So eventually found that and we started our own thing and that's what we've been working on for the past 3 years. And our new products are oriented around our own framework, and it's it's growing that way.

Aaron:

Cool. You

Ian:

guys have a

Aaron:

Apple product? Sorry?

Ian:

Like, is there a product for sale yet or not yet?

Dax:

Yeah. So, so the new the the new framework we started 3 years ago, we're on, like, it's just been a lot of exploration and figuring out like what exactly we should do. The newest version of it, which we're calling Ion, is like that's like our like, we don't have any better ideas now. We've kind of went through the years, made our mistakes, figured out exactly what we need to do, and this is, like, our really, like, our final bet. And it kinda fixed all the problems we had in the past couple of years.

Dax:

We do have another product, that's the console, which is an optional thing that people using their framework, can use alongside once they're in production. It's pretty small surface area wise, so there's a lot more that we need to do for it. We're actually working a lot on it this week and the next week, but it's just a classic open source situation. You just need to build 2 really good products, 1 the open source 1 and 1

Aaron:

Right.

Dax:

That works with it. So, it's a lot of work.

Ian:

It's a work. Yeah. But

Dax:

Lot of work in

Adam:

front of people. It's great.

Ian:

Yeah. A lot of that.

Aaron:

That part's

Ian:

going great. Of a

Adam:

lot of people on Twitter.

Aaron:

That part's going great. You're crushing it on on that side. Yeah.

Dax:

People love it. Yesterday, I sent my team the screen screenshots because, I I had some tweet where I use the word idiots in my in the tweet. Mhmm. And someone was, like, quote tweeted it being, like, oh, like, someone was upset. It seemed seemingly upset by it.

Dax:

And then they also replied to me, and I just replied to them with the word idiot without seeing anything else. Oh my gosh. And then they followed me. So here's the thing. The people love this is what I've learned.

Aaron:

No. This this

Dax:

is what they want.

Ian:

I love having Boone and Aaron on the same podcast here. This is just like

Aaron:

Can we

Ian:

the yin and the yang.

Aaron:

Can we talk about the time where Dax was the meanest person in the world to me specifically? Dax, do you remember this? Wait. What? Gotten laid off.

Aaron:

Just gotten laid off.

Ian:

That's not even that long ago.

Aaron:

It's not even that long ago. It's not even that long ago. I got a 1000000 kids. I got, like, 4 diseases now. I just got laid off, and I'm I'm seeing I'm, you know, hanging out on Twitter, unemployed, trying to, like, you know, scrounge up some food in the street for my family, and I'm like, alright.

Aaron:

Dax has a tweet. I'm gonna reply, and I'm gonna be snarky. Dax says something like, oh, we're working on something that nobody knows about. If you beg me, I'll release it tomorrow or I'll release it today or something like that. And I just responded and said, no.

Aaron:

I'm good. I'll wait. Dax responds and says, oh, I'm sure you're tired of begging people to hire you at this point. And just, like, from outer space, nuclear warhead, everybody's like, woah, dude. I think I think Jay responded with the ref giving a red card with somebody else.

Aaron:

Yeah. It was just like, oh, guy gotta log off, man. Oh, okay. Brutal.

Dax:

I think at some point, you know, you everyone has intrusive thoughts that enter their head. They're like you're, like, staying in their grocery store. And it's like, what if I just smack the person in

Aaron:

front of

Dax:

me on the head or something? That started happening to me with words. And then at some point, I was like, I just have to say it. So now when I get an interest of thought, I just have to I just have to do it.

Ian:

And there's no go that.

Dax:

I have no control anymore. So I'm I'm sorry for the casualties.

Aaron:

Yeah. I can't co sign that strategy, but I'm happy it's working.

Dax:

It's not a strategy. It's just a it's just like a maybe a disease or something? Disorder.

Adam:

The world

Ian:

needs all types, you know. Gotta cover all the bases.

Aaron:

I feel I feel like Adam is waffling on what he wants his online persona to be. What's the story, Adam?

Adam:

I think my default is to be an Aaron, but I I become whoever I hang out with, and I hang out with Dax a lot.

Dax:

And I think that's pulling me can blame me.

Adam:

It's pulling me towards this kind of, like, hateful, spiteful person.

Aaron:

Duh. I don't

Adam:

love it.

Aaron:

That. Yeah. Yeah.

Ian:

Wow. And I'm a Midwestern, though, so I don't know. I don't know if

Adam:

he's actually that. No. I think Dax is we've talked about this a lot. It's like the East Coast versus West Coast thing. Like, east

Ian:

coast is going on with that.

Adam:

Yeah. There's actually more coming. Going

Ian:

on here.

Aaron:

Yeah. Yeah.

Ian:

Yeah. This is his way of being kind and polite. Like, I get it. This is, yeah, it's the East Coast.

Aaron:

Just just another reason why I don't like New York City because people think being mean is being nice. It makes noise to me.

Adam:

I don't like New York either.

Dax:

I'm T9. Thank

Ian:

you. Oh. Okay. What is this thing?

Dax:

I I always see people talking online about you 2 fighting about New York. What's what's the deal with that?

Aaron:

Objectively, New York is terrible, and Ian loves it. That's basically

Dax:

the Superman has, like, been to Times Square, and then that's it.

Ian:

Exactly. Exactly. No. I

Aaron:

went I

Ian:

went to Times Square, and he's like, there was a naked guy there, and it was dirty.

Aaron:

Yeah. Listen.

Ian:

He's like, I'm a I I eat out of Sparros and a Burger King, and the food is terrible. Like, that's the whole analysis he's given.

Aaron:

Yo. First of all, naked is fine. Naked and pooping is worse. And it wasn't it wasn't a sparrow. It was a Chipotle at the bottom of the Empire State Building.

Aaron:

And I took it back to my room and ate it in the hotel.

Ian:

That is okay.

Dax:

Story. We gotta

Ian:

we gotta all true.

Dax:

Ian, do you live in New York?

Ian:

I live, up up an hour north of New York.

Aaron:

Suburbs. She lives in the suburbs.

Ian:

I live in the suburbs. Yes.

Dax:

Yeah. That's true. Well, we have to all go and fix Aaron's and, I think, Adam's perspective on it. There's there's just no way that someone could truly hate New York. It just feels

Adam:

impossible. I no. There's no way you could actually enjoy New York. I think people cope with New York. They tolerate it.

Adam:

It's just everybody has a different tolerance. There's no way you can my soul hates New York so much. And I've been there, like, a dozen times, so it's not like

Aaron:

my vacation.

Adam:

I just can't imagine that other human beings actually enjoy it. That's how I feel about the park.

Ian:

It's the best place. I also just feel like your business will be more successful if you're in New York. Like, I wish I'd moved to New York City. I feel like I would be even more successful just living there. You got the energy of the city, all the people, the business.

Adam:

That was amazing. You heard

Aaron:

a great idea. You didn't move there because you know the you know the the cost is too high, Ian. The emotional cost is too high.

Ian:

The actual cost is too high. Dan, the actual cost.

Dax:

I lived in the city for 11 or 12 years.

Ian:

Okay. Yeah.

Dax:

My pretty much my entire adult life. It's like I just keep moving to places that people hate. But again, it's just because they only go to the Times Square or the Times Square equivalent. I'm convinced. By the way, I know that New York is dirty.

Dax:

The entire time I lived there though, I I just was blind to it. I didn't I was just everyone's like, it's so dirty. I just sure I just did not see it at all. Exactly.

Ian:

It's not that dirty. Hunting city scale, those other big cities, way dirtier than New York, way dirtier. And for much like the percentage of New York that's, like, either bad or dirty or whatever is much smaller than other cities. It's like every other city you go to, it's like, okay. You got 2 blocks where, like, it's nice and little 2 blocks zone and everything else is terrible.

Ian:

New York City, it's like all Manhattan is good and big chunks of the outer boroughs are good. And, like, it's good. It's great.

Adam:

Did you know even though there are other places in the world where it's 70 degrees in the evening? Did you know that? I don't know if you know that. Adam.

Ian:

Trust me. I do know that. That's like I don't have to live in New York. Yep. As I get older, I'm like, I gotta get out of New York.

Ian:

Like, once the kids are out, I'm like, just New York state, like, just the weather wise, I'm just done with the weather. You know? Like, I just wanna be warm all the time. Like, I am getting to that point. Like, I used to like the 4 seasons of all that stuff, but it's wearing on me.

Ian:

I'm like, man.

Aaron:

Hey. If you wanna if you wanna be warm all the time, I've got just the spot for you. I might

Dax:

have to get down to that. That's great.

Aaron:

Yeah. Dallas.

Adam:

I just

Ian:

discovered Miami last year. I'd never been really to, like, into Miami, and wasn't sure what I think about it, but I went. It was it was awesome. It was great. We had a great time.

Ian:

It was it was good stuff. I only spent 3 days there, but I gotta get down there again.

Dax:

You know, someone showed someone showed me a trick the other day where if you're familiar with the city and you ask chatJpt, and you're going to a new city, you ask it like, oh, what's the equivalent neighborhood to, like, the one you're familiar with? It does like a fantastic job. It like it can like, describe another city in terms of neighborhoods you're familiar with, and it works perfectly.

Ian:

GPT coming through again. That's a great trick. Alright. So let's cover, Adam, we should cover a little bit about what you're doing before we go dive into the controversy of the day. But I was trying

Adam:

to manage your tool. It's not I

Ian:

think your main tool is the stat muse. Right? Is that kind of your main day job?

Adam:

Yeah. Yeah. These days, that's my day job. So I was there. We started like 10 years ago.

Adam:

I was there for like 5 years and gone for 3. I've been back for a couple. Oh, wow. So, yeah, it's my day job right now.

Ian:

So just to describe this to people, it's like, it's like, well, I was looking at more on the sports stats end, but it seems like it does other things as well, potentially. But, and so I didn't realize it was that old, though, because I thought thought it was like an AI thing. I'm like, just type it in, like, who had the most home runs in baseball before 1945? And it's like Babe Ruth. And like so I just figured it's like, you know, it's a cool little, they're doing some AI stuff and turning into queries, but you were, you were doing that before.

Adam:

Yeah. No. We do it, like, the very brute force way. I mean, like, it's

Ian:

not parsing it out.

Adam:

It's not LLM. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Aaron:

You just get a Slack message, and you gotta go look up the chat. The the human Shoot. Babe Ruth, go look it up.

Ian:

Not AWS. What was that? AWS Mechanical Turk. You know? Yeah.

Ian:

Yeah. Yeah. Wow. That's really cool. Luke does a great job.

Adam:

Yeah. No. We, that's how we start. We started just like as it's just giving you, like, tables and charts for sports questions. Now we do have a finance thing.

Adam:

Sports is much bigger for us. Like, we really hit kind of a nerve in the NBA community. Now I think we have we have all the North American sports. We just did, European soccer. So I don't know if you know anything about Premier League, but we've got Premier League now.

Adam:

So that's great. That's big.

Dax:

Yeah.

Ian:

I'm more of a, I was more of a La Liga guy when Messi was there, but now now I just watch Messi in the US, so I don't have to even worry about the Europeans anymore. Fully fully in America.

Dax:

You know what's wild? Okay. So the weird thing about Miami is I don't know. I can't really explain why this is the case, but celebrities just like randomly end up in, like, very normal situations right next to you. Like, do you see all those pictures of him at the grocery store?

Aaron:

I did. Oh, I

Ian:

actually didn't see that. Wow.

Dax:

And I can't I have to, like, really stress this. This is, like, the most normal grocery store in the planet. It's, like, where you would go with your family, and then you turn an aisle and messages there, like, looking at jams. Like, it's it's such a weird situation. And the picture I posted the other day of Jeff Bezos just walking around my neighborhood.

Aaron:

Yeah. Yeah. It was wild.

Dax:

It's really odd. It's wild.

Ian:

That is the cool thing about cities. It's like you got that you know, there's just people walking in New York that's similar. It's like, oh, there's just people walking around, and it's like, there they are, and they're in the restaurant with you or whatever.

Dax:

I think in New York, it's it's so much easier to be anonymous. I feel like you would just never notice someone that's around because there's so many people.

Ian:

That's true. Yeah.

Dax:

I guess I did see a good amount. I think the one that jumps to mind is I was at a restaurant and the table right next to me was Michael Cera the whole time, and he did not look good. He just didn't he just did not look good. Good. Like, he looked kind of bummed out and, like, just not healthy, and I don't know.

Dax:

It just was a sad vibe.

Ian:

There was this place on West Broadway we used to go that was, like, this really awesome restaurant, just like a little hole in the wall type place. And there was like, what's that? I think it's like Josh Hartnett or something like that is the guy's name. That's like 20 years ago or something. And, yeah, he was just in there, like, eating.

Ian:

I think I saw him in there twice. And, just like, Ayash, just just like his spy. He just goes there and sits at the bar and eats, and, like, nobody messes with him. Nobody went up to him and was like, give me your autograph or whatever. Just like you know, he just didn't blow the load.

Ian:

Yeah. We

Dax:

we also saw Louis CK, like, peak cancellation time too, and he also did not look very good. Was that I'm not It was also an ice cream store, so it just looked like he just looked extra depressed because he's just there, like, getting

Aaron:

ice cream. And he's like Eating ice cream alone you're just talking about. Look. Yeah. The only famous person I've run into in Dallas is Troy Aikman.

Aaron:

He was, like, sitting at I was at a restaurant once, and he was sitting, like, one table over. And I was like, I think I know that guy, and I didn't. It was Troy Aikman. Oh,

Ian:

he Do

Dax:

you ever see anyone famous in the Ozarks, Adam? You ever seen Brad Pitt?

Adam:

Brad Pitt all the time, man. No. Actually, he his parents still live here, so his brother has, like, a an electronics store or something here.

Ian:

Oh, wow.

Adam:

And his brother looks exactly like him. Like, exactly like him.

Dax:

But not enough. Right? Because if he looked enough

Ian:

like him

Adam:

I mean, pretty similar.

Aaron:

Enough like him, he wouldn't own an electronic store.

Adam:

That's that's fair. That's fair.

Ian:

We've got

Adam:

no see the famous people. There's no famous people here.

Dax:

Okay.

Adam:

Is that why is that why people live in cities like that? It's the celebrities because I just can't I can't put it together in my mind. Like, people always say, like, oh, you've got everything. Everything is here. I feel like if you have, like, a 100000 people, you've got accommodations for everything you'd wanna do.

Adam:

You have, like, a zoo and, like, what, target?

Dax:

I mean, I don't know. On your list. Beyond it.

Adam:

Like, target. That's the big

Aaron:

Zoo wouldn't have even made my list if I'm being honest.

Ian:

Yeah. I don't know.

Adam:

What like, what do you guys

Aaron:

have not on the list.

Adam:

I don't understand. That's how you You're

Dax:

so you're so oh, you're living such a different life that you don't even you don't even understand what you don't have. That's how far

Aaron:

I will I will say saying zoo and bowling alley, that does that does betray a little bit of the different life you're living.

Adam:

I mean, I'm not using any of that stuff anyway. Like, I don't leave my house, and I wouldn't if I lived in the city. But, like, I just don't understand. Like, what are the things like Broadway, is that it? It's like you can go to Broadway shows in New York.

Adam:

It's like, what is the thing you guys have?

Aaron:

Too too far the other direction.

Dax:

Statue of Liberty?

Ian:

Not have just lived on the Internet. That's what I'm the vibe I'm getting. Right? He's like, you're just the native.

Dax:

Yeah. I know. We do.

Adam:

Yeah. Increasingly so.

Aaron:

I will say, how do you

Ian:

get off the internet? This is an interesting question I have for people. Do you, do you get off the internet or no? Is there anything explicitly you do to get off the Internet or you're just too locked in right now?

Dax:

I'm the last person I could you guys at least have children. So Yeah. I imagine that We're forced. That's kind of important to, like, pay attention to, I imagine.

Adam:

I guess I imagine a day where I spend, like, next to no time on the Internet, but I'm not there right now. Yeah.

Aaron:

Yeah. Adam, you fight. Don't you do, like, judo, taekwondo, something like that? Yeah.

Adam:

Yeah. Jujitsu?

Aaron:

Yeah. There you go.

Adam:

You named 2 martial arts without saying jujitsu. That's

Aaron:

Yeah. Without saying the one. That was perfect. I do know you're vegan. I got that part done.

Adam:

I'm vegan. I couldn't remember

Aaron:

the martial art that you did. Yeah.

Adam:

I did some yesterday. My face is a little beat up. Like, Mondays after open, man, I'm, like, all black eyed and everything.

Aaron:

Here here's a here's a interesting tidbit for you, Ian. Adam, in his infinite wisdom was like, I don't need I don't need health insurance. Why would I ever have health insurance?

Ian:

And then he's like,

Aaron:

I'm gonna get into jujitsu and then also separately for some reason go to the hospital, like, 4 times.

Ian:

Yeah. Literally.

Adam:

I I dropped my health insurance, and I went to the hospital twice and started jujitsu. So Yeah. Not a good recipe. Are you back on the list? I've still saved money, just to be clear.

Adam:

Like, on premiums, still save a lot of money.

Ian:

This is not a philosophy I subscribe to. This is not so risky. Technically approved. This is definitely, that's a bad bad Wait. Wait.

Ian:

Wait. You gotta get the health insurance. At least just get the one that's, like, covers nothing except for, like, your literally get

Adam:

my ass over the weekend. It's not about, though. It's not about the money for me. I've done it for 15 years. It's the principle.

Adam:

I just don't wanna buy into the main system. The system's just so bad and so dumb that I just don't wanna be a part of it.

Ian:

Like, what if you lose your house and all your stuff? Because, like, you're looking for that when you get hit by a bus. Like, that's

Adam:

Oh, don't they say you have to pay medical bills or something? I don't know.

Ian:

You don't even have to pay on I don't know.

Aaron:

Like, oh, I think you're saying it's the opposite. I think

Ian:

they're the only ones you can't discharge. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah.

Dax:

A lot

Ian:

of risk there.

Dax:

My my friends, aunt or something worked at a hospital billing thing, whatever.

Aaron:

And

Dax:

I don't know if this is true. It definitely sounds extremely made up, but he's like, the way they work, if you literally just send them $1 every time they ask you to pay, they'll let some, like, counter resets. And then he keeps going on for years, and they eventually just give up. So That's incredible.

Aaron:

You know what we do with every every medical bill we get, literally everyone that's over, you know, $100, we call and say, what if I give you less?

Dax:

Yeah. Exactly. What if I give

Aaron:

you right now?

Ian:

I was just gonna say that. They always do it.

Aaron:

Right now, I'll give you 70%. You can run my credit card, and they're always like, yeah. Okay. That's fine. Yeah.

Aaron:

It's great.

Ian:

It's great. Glad that I have

Adam:

a used car with Cam.

Aaron:

You just ignore the first letter. Right now. You get the second letter, and then you call, and you're like, oh, wow. Shoot. Oh, jeez.

Aaron:

Goodness. What if I give you 70%? Like, oh, that's awesome. Let's do it. Yeah.

Aaron:

That's great.

Ian:

That that definitely works. That you should everybody should do that for sure. Like, because that's just the odd even if you're like like, we have the high deductible because, yeah, I don't wanna pay whatever. Whatever. I have the money to pay for, like, a couple $1,000 here and there, but I don't wanna have to pay $1,000,000 if I get sick or whatever.

Ian:

So, so, yeah, when we get bills like that, it's okay. You just call them and be like, I'm not paying this. I'm paying out of pocket for this. Like, what are you gonna do for me? And then it's always at least, like, 25% off or more.

Ian:

Not just with, like, the bare minimum fighting back. Just calling. I'm sure you get 50% off if you, like, really stuck to your guns and

Aaron:

Mhmm. You

Ian:

know, I've had even

Dax:

created a situation on that. So Liz had to get her gallbladder out, and they quoted us, like, over a $100,000 or something.

Ian:

And we

Dax:

were just like, uh-uh. And then, I went, we went and looked up, like, all all this stuff and ended up being pushed down to, like, around 10,000.

Aaron:

Oh, wow.

Dax:

They technically keep trying to ask us for more, and we just haven't responded in, like, years and nothing happened. So

Adam:

Isn't there something and, like, I did not do all this research because I was dropping health insurance. But isn't there something where, like, they can't hit your credit or something with medical bills? There's something like if you don't pay, it's a different system or something. I don't know.

Ian:

Yeah. It could be something like that.

Dax:

They usually send to collections and collections tries to bother you and they eventually give up. That's been my experience. I always do that. Yeah.

Adam:

Are you working on a health insurance

Aaron:

too now? This is financial advice, by

Ian:

the way.

Aaron:

No. Nobody listen to this, please.

Ian:

Oh, boy. Yeah. This is rough on you.

Aaron:

Yeah.

Ian:

Yeah. I don't know. I've always had the health insurance. I like the health insurance. It's a write off.

Aaron:

Sort of like the health insurance.

Ian:

Of a write off.

Aaron:

You know, Ian, we're on the same page.

Ian:

There you go. You know, we we have

Aaron:

There you go. Our little disagreements here and there, but I like I like the health insurance. I got it, man.

Ian:

There you go. Yeah.

Dax:

I like that.

Ian:

Good job. Oh, man. Alright. Alright. Let's get into some meat here.

Ian:

We bond on the mostly a lot. Let's jump over to the technical. Yeah. So I you guys are perfect for this because I feel like you guys are on the JavaScripty end of the world. We're on the Laravel end of the world.

Ian:

I mean, I I I know nothing about JavaScript. I know Next. Js, all this stuff. I spent a couple months last year learning React just so I have some idea what's going on. It was like, maybe I was gonna use it for some projects or whatever.

Ian:

So I have a little idea of, like, pure React, but none of the, like, full stack, how it runs in the server, any of that stuff. And, obviously, this week, we've been coming out with, you guys are talking to Taylor tomorrow is my understand understanding, right, on your podcast. So everybody check that out, we'll we'll link that up. But, yeah, so Taylor had his little post, which I thought was from the Laravel perspective, made a lot of sense about how full stack Laravel is and how it lets you build real applications quickly and reliably. And it's kind of like batteries included, has everything you need versus kind of the JavaScript, meaning of full stack, which at least to my understanding and my limited experience is more kind of like all the parts are sort of out there to do it, but you really have to put it all together yourself.

Ian:

And there's not a unifying opinionated overarching, sort of framework or, just even standards around that. So that's my my summary. I don't know if you guys have anything to add to kind of that that summary of the situation.

Dax:

No. I think that that makes sense. Yeah. It's funny because in this situation, yeah, me and Adam represent the JavaScript side, but I think the interesting detail here is we're both I mean, me and Adam are both full stack people, but that term is obviously very, very loose.

Ian:

Proper full stack.

Dax:

Both of us go very deep on the back end side, like deeper than what most people would say full stack because we do a lot of infrastructure work.

Ian:

Right.

Dax:

The question to ask is, why are either of us even doing JavaScript in the first place? It's not like it's the only thing we've ever done. I'm actually, like, somewhat newer to it. Like, I only started doing JavaScript in the back end in the last 3 years. Had a bunch of different Zacks before then.

Dax:

I think Adam's the same as well. So questions like, why are we even here? Neither of us like the language. We're not here because we're like, oh, we love

Adam:

we love JavaScript.

Dax:

No back end and JavaScript engineers really like that. SST also primarily serve even though we talk about front end stuff a lot, our audience is primarily, back end JavaScript engineers. So the only reason any of us are doing JavaScript is because at some point, a lot of us bought into the idea of, picking a cloud and utilizing it maximally. So prior to this, I was building things in Elixir, prior to that in Go, prior to that in c sharp. Those systems are more around, like, creating a nice little bubble for you to live in, and then you can deploy that bubble anywhere, whether it's AWS on your own servers, whatever.

Dax:

There's, like, there's, like, little adapters for things so you can kind of use some of the features that are in each of these providers. But at some point, a bunch of us had the notion of if you really commit yourself to a certain cloud, they can really handle a lot of things for you way more than you can with, like, more agnostic framework. And it just gives us a fundamental trade off. And it's fine that doesn't click for you, but it has clicked for a bunch of people. Unfortunately, the best language to program these things is JavaScript.

Dax:

That's, like, what these clouds were built around. And if you look at some of the more newer ones like Cloudflare, I know Ian's a big Cloudflare fan.

Aaron:

Love Cloudflare.

Dax:

They're they're, like, even way more oriented around JavaScript. So we only bother so we only bother using JavaScript because it gives us access to all these other other things. If you went and built us, equivalent to Laravel or Elixir Phoenix or Rails, we just wouldn't bother using JavaScript. Do we just go back to one of these other systems that are more mature with, languages that we we prefer? That's at least my take.

Dax:

Like, it's the only reason why I'm in JavaScript land. Like, I don't, like, I don't have any love for the for the language or anything. It's just it gives me access to these things that other ecosystems just do they just don't build that way. Yeah. Well,

Ian:

all those cloud elements are accessible from even a backend oriented framework, right? Like, I mean, it kind of removes the requirement, I guess, for some of the, the like they've kind of glued it together with JavaScript where like, it's more accessible from JavaScript, but like all the AWS stuff you can use from a Laravel app too, or the vast majority of it. Right. There are these like things like Cloudflare Workers, which super annoyingly, like, yeah, you have to write JavaScript or whatever. But, all the, like, whatever, s 3 or RDS or whatever, all the big stuff is, accessible from anything, really.

Ian:

So I don't know. Yeah.

Aaron:

I feel like I feel like when they're when, like, the stuff that Dax is talking about is less like the RDS and more like the step functions and stuff like that where it helps

Ian:

you orchestrate the back end.

Aaron:

Yeah. It helps you orchestrate what you would maybe traditionally do in, like, a monolithic back end end in Laravel or Rails. And instead, you break it up into these AWS or otherwise primitives that then kind of form up your back end out of these little pieces instead of a monolith. Yeah.

Dax:

Yeah. And it's funny you bring up step functions because I hate step functions. And I would say on this spectrum of, like, going really hard with, like, doing AWS native stuff, I actually don't go that far. There's just a spectrum. Right?

Dax:

Like, I think that Ian Ian mentioned, like, you can deploy a rel a Laravel app that are using the adapters that are for AWS flavor of things, like for events, for queues, for all those things. Then it's like a step further where you're like, I don't like, imagine that you didn't care about letting me move this Laravel app to a different cloud. You would use it a little bit more intensely and use more of it and have give you, like, functionality, like, spin that stuff up and down really easily. And that's kind of the zone that I operate in. It's kind of the zone that Adam operates in as well.

Dax:

And I would say the majority of, like, modern back end JavaScript that's, like, starting up today, it fits in in that category. If you're not doing that, I don't really know why you'd be running JavaScript as your back end thing. I could just I I haven't really seen it and, like, I don't I don't know. It just doesn't make sense to me.

Ian:

What's your theory? I have this theory.

Aaron:

Alright.

Ian:

And I don't know any this is this is totally This

Aaron:

is it. No facts.

Ian:

There's no facts here at all.

Aaron:

We don't need them.

Ian:

We don't need them. But, like, how much is, like, JavaScript kind of taking over the mindset of a lot of programming and things like that is I guess I feel like a lot of it from the outside world feels very VC money backed. And how are there really a lot of applications in production in the tens, 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars, 1,000,000,000 of dollars that are running like this. Do you know what I'm saying? Like just deploying for the JavaScript front end and the connectors, and that's actually running a $1,000,000,000 business.

Ian:

Like, I'm, like a real, not just a $1,000,000,000 business of like on paper, but a real like revenue generating $1,000,000,000 business. Like, I don't know if it's just too early and they're not there, or maybe they're out there and I'm not as aware of them. Obviously, like, a lot of big enterprise stuff is not built this way, so it's more newer webby stuff. But I don't know. I'm I'm curious what you guys are aware about that it's like that.

Dax:

Yeah. What's funny is, there's actually a lot of enterprise usage of this for the same reason I just mentioned. What do enterprises use? They use AWS. What do they try to do a lot of like, they try to offload a lot of their work to AWS, especially if they're not a tech company.

Dax:

So weirdly, some of the earliest adoption of that stuff is in big enterprise. Like, I Adam probably knows this better, but, like, a lot of the AWS heroes and and people from that world, they all work at these big enterprise companies. Right?

Adam:

Is that a question to me?

Aaron:

Yeah. Sorry. You're asking. On

Dax:

a different planet.

Aaron:

We should've gone over

Ian:

that at the beginning. Yeah. But rhetorical.

Adam:

I didn't know you're actually asking me a stupid

Ian:

question. Yeah.

Adam:

A lot I mean, a lot of the heroes do work at, like, random big companies. I know that because I don't know about these companies. It's, like, not big names that I've heard of, just, like, random companies.

Aaron:

I

Ian:

don't know. Out a new system in this more modern style. It's not necessarily running their whole enterprise. Right. Cause like they have a Cobalt app somewhere doing something, whatever, but it's like, we have a new internal app.

Ian:

That's doing whatever, something for the HR department or whatever they're doing, and they're gonna build it on this stack as like a freestanding.

Adam:

Yeah. One of the big examples, like when people talk about serverless, like, adoption in the enterprise, it's Lego. So Lego Mhmm. Had this big transformation where they went from kind of traditional app architecture to this very modern, like event driven stuff. But I I honestly I know there's like whole pages on AWS' site about, like, companies that have adopted these modern approaches.

Adam:

I don't remember.

Dax:

I said, I don't know. Yeah. So there's there's a lot and I think we've experienced this because our like, SST took a very weird route. Usually, a framework starts, low end of the market and then moves to higher end. Weirdly, we got adoption first in the higher end because these companies were this is how they were building stuff.

Dax:

So they're more familiar with our our approach. And even though our tools are rough, like, they had expertise in it, so they could they were the early adopters.

Aaron:

Right.

Dax:

And we've been working to, like, bring it down market to, like

Ian:

That's interesting.

Dax:

So, you know, the people that are that are building smaller things. But so those are examples on enterprise side, on like, like, the more, like, startup y type thing. I hate bringing this up because I, like, obsessively bring up linear and I'm, like, so self conscious every time I bring it up because I think they're just the best app ever built, and their back end isn't is in JavaScript. It's but the point here though is that, like, my point is, like, it's kind of irrelevant that's in JavaScript. Like, they're just a really talented team and, like, they would have just made it great.

Dax:

And it's not like, oh, they use JavaScript, therefore they were successful. You know, it's just like that's kinda like an irrelevant detail. But there are quite a lot of examples, in the past, like, let's say, 5 or so years.

Adam:

So this whole conversation, I I wanna make sure, Ian, when you talk about, like, the VC and the noise, like, is most of the noise on Twitter? And if so, I don't even know how much of it's even back end JavaScript. How much of it's

Dax:

just, like all front end.

Adam:

Front end JavaScript.

Ian:

There's a lot of more exposure. I think the front end JavaScript. Right? Like, everybody works at Vercel,

Aaron:

and who who

Ian:

knows what they're all doing there? Right? Like, nobody knows. It's like and that kind of thing. Yeah.

Ian:

I do think

Dax:

We we we can't ignore the fact, like, you know, they've spent 300,000,000 or so. I think they've raised another 250. Like, you spend that kind of money in a space, like, it's gonna have some amount of impact. So you can't say it. No one can say, oh, it's 0.

Dax:

It was, like, all natural. And I do think a lot of the noise specifically comes from them, especially with serverless $1,000,000. Sorry?

Adam:

They've raised $550,000,000. Yeah. So now you're like that buys some well, I don't know if Twitter audience or Twitter banter.

Dax:

You're just impacting the world. Like, if you spend that much capital on anything, you're gonna be able to build something out of it unless you're completely stupid.

Ian:

Well, the linear thing's kinda interesting to me because it sort of represents a little bit what we're kinda talking about the sundry because, like, they had a issue. Like, I'm a I I experimented with using linear. We didn't fully move over to it, but, it was on there, whatever. I get their emails and whatnot. And it's like they had some kind of data issue where they lost, like, 12 hours of data and, like, for 24 or 12 or 24.

Aaron:

And I don't know.

Ian:

It was weird to me. Like, they didn't have point in time database recovery and, like, maybe 5 minutes of data, but to lose 24 hours of data is a lot of data. And like, so to me, it's like one of these, like, they're not a back end thinking company. Right? So it's like, yeah.

Ian:

We just shove the data up there. Who knows what those default settings were, if it was configured correctly or whatever? Now maybe they just lost it through some other means. I don't know.

Dax:

Yeah. So

Ian:

I don't know if they have the details there, but

Dax:

it was

Ian:

they I don't think they was kinda weird.

Dax:

I think they did recover it, but that situation was actually not from, like, their database messing up. So the reason why linear is so impressive compared to other apps is because they sync all the data to the front end, and it's like a crazy complex it's basically like treating every browser as, like, another replica in your database. So that is, like, really sophisticated distributed systems problems. And they had some kind of weird issue with that. So I think there were some rights that just stuck locally and, like, didn't make it up or something or there was, like, massively delayed, and obviously reemerging after 12 hours causes a bunch of conflicts.

Dax:

Gotcha. Like yeah. So I I think that was that situation, but I do agree with your point that I think the root of all this is, again, to me, it just feels so made up. It's like there's a lot of people that start with something like Next. Js, and they're like, this is my whole application.

Dax:

It's just a Next. Js application.

Ian:

Right.

Aaron:

And I

Dax:

think the impression externally is, like, that's what the jobs community is. But literally nobody does this. No, like, serious company does this. The reason we focus a lot on helping companies deploy Next. Js is because 90% of their system is this, like, AWS thing, sometimes in JavaScript, sometimes not.

Dax:

They're using Next. Js on the front end, and it's a pain in the ass to deploy alongside the this is not their whole app. Like, they don't they do not care about Next. Js. They're not like, oh, like, we have to, like, have all the latest features.

Dax:

It needs to be deployed on Vercel. Like, they just don't care. It's a It's just the React default.

Adam:

Right? Like, it's replaced create React app as, like, the default way to create a React app.

Dax:

Yeah. And and there are people, like, trying to use it for, like, everything. Like, my whole system is in NextGen. But you can't even it has no solution for doing any asynchronous work. Like, just that's just a nonstarter for, like, anything.

Aaron:

But a real application.

Adam:

Ship week's common decks. They could

Ian:

have happened

Adam:

to us.

Aaron:

It could be this year.

Dax:

That's true. That is true.

Aaron:

So When is their ship week?

Adam:

I think

Aaron:

it's this

Dax:

month. Week?

Aaron:

No. Dax is gonna go crazy on ship week. Week.

Dax:

Oh, but here here's the thing, though. I am going on vacation, to Europe

Aaron:

on Sorry, Liz. Sorry, Liz. They shit something. Gotcha.

Dax:

You know, she literally told me she was, like, no funny with Vercel on vacation.

Aaron:

Well, I don't know if she knows you very well. I know y'all are married or whatever, but You can't resist.

Ian:

How long are you going for? How long are you going for? I'm going to

Dax:

Lisbon and Spain for a week. And Okay. I I'll be here for their ship week announcement, which I am curious about. But,

Ian:

Maybe he could hold out a week. I mean, I I could see

Aaron:

him. There's no way he can

Ian:

hold out

Aaron:

a week.

Ian:

It's not like 4 weeks.

Dax:

It's like 1 week.

Aaron:

Listen. Adam's not gonna understand this in this reference, but this is red meat for Dax. Ship meat is red meat. Like, he's gotta pounce on it.

Dax:

No. No. No. No. My my whole attitude to this is, I have, you know, like, you, like, start a fire, like, you know, I've, like, gotten the smoke going, and I think other people will I can delegate this one, I'm hoping.

Aaron:

I can

Dax:

delegate to the people. Incredible

Ian:

The disciples.

Aaron:

So what did you think, Dax and Adam, what did you think about the the discourse on Twitter around the Laravel JavaScript? What's a framework? What's back end? Michael Jackson, isn't that his name? That's definitely his

Dax:

name. Michael Jackson remix. Waited. The most unGoogle thing in the world.

Aaron:

Yeah. Yeah. Michael Jackson React router version 7. So he weighed in. Ryan Florence weighed in.

Aaron:

Taylor weighed in. Everybody weighed in. Y'all are having them on on the show tomorrow. So what what are your thoughts as you're prepping for this big show? What were your thoughts watching all of this go down?

Dax:

Prepping.

Ian:

They're prepping right

Aaron:

now. They're all in their prepping.

Adam:

Yeah. That Max is allergic. Max is allergic to anything prepping or process

Aaron:

or Perfect.

Adam:

Writing things down.

Dax:

I know. Right? I think Adam had some feelings. I saw him post.

Adam:

I mean, I I just feel like so when people say, like, the JavaScript world, we don't have this kind of, like, full full stack, full list stack, fuller stack. I don't know.

Dax:

We don't

Adam:

have that, but we do like, there are a few of them. People have tried. They just weren't the most popular. Like, they didn't take over

Aaron:

Mhmm.

Adam:

In the way that maybe or, like, are there is there an equivalent in PHP world where there's, like, little, like, do it yourself, grab your own pieces frameworks? Like, what

Aaron:

Some people have tried that. Yeah. That became very popular. No. But some people have tried, like, yeah.

Aaron:

We give you ultimate freedom to pick your favorite packages and tie them together loosely. And everybody's like, seems hard.

Adam:

So my my view is just that it's, like, random. That, like, in the JavaScript world, for whatever reason, the ones that went out and became popular were these kind of, like, modular systems and the ones in PHP and Rails. I think what Dax said, I mean, all that stuff about infrastructure and cloud in the last few years, that makes sense. I get it. I I guess I just I feel like it's all kind of, like, just random.

Dax:

I don't know. I I definitely agree with that. I think there's, like it's people really understate how much things come down to a specific time, a specific person, things lining up in a certain way. So, Jay, CEO of Coppany, he he he described this thing. I forgot what coach it was, but, he was talking about his team over the years, and it's the same group of people on the team, but it's like a different team every year.

Dax:

It's like this is the 2022 team. This is a 2023 team. Even though it looks the same, it's like it's you treat it like a different era. Mhmm. So I think there is a lot of that going on with things that are, like, as incredible as some of this stuff, like, to have to get this big to have this level of influence.

Dax:

There's so much variability and randomness and stuff. There's so many things. Right? Like, JavaScript, I would say, had a big reset with TypeScript. Like, it came out.

Dax:

It got to a point where it sort of became the default, but then it took even longer than that for people to, like, understand it well enough to actually build the right level of tooling. And that's kind of what's happening now. You start to see libraries come out that are, like, correctly using it. And also, it's like we're at TypeScript v 5 now. I wouldn't even say all this was possible to, like, around v 4.

Dax:

So there's just been a lot of change and and and variation. I'm convinced though that every there's been a like, Adam said, there's been a bunch of attempts trying to do the let's have a rails for JavaScript thing. And there's been, like, 1 or 2 projects that are in that category. It just doesn't it just doesn't work. Like I like I said, if if you pitch me that and I look at it, I just wanna go use a different language.

Dax:

That's kinda where I immediately go to. Yeah. In terms of the discourse, it's funny because I think when you're building a framework, you're in this category of you're looking at a very small pool of people. Right? Like, there's, like, very few people that really build and do an open source thing, And you ultimately it's this weird thing where you, like, are so nerdy about this stuff.

Dax:

So you're, like, really into other things even though if it's not for you. Like, I'm sure, like, Taylor is, like, super interested in in what, like, remakes and next is doing just from, like, an academic point of view because, you know, it helps him reorient himself and and vice versa. Like, everyone's, like, studying each other, and there's a lot of, like, just fundamental respect in that way even though your approaches might be completely opposite at the end of the day. So that's kind of what I saw in the initial discourse. Like, that when I saw it, I was okay.

Dax:

That's that's what it is. Like, I study Laravel a lot, like, for our work. Like, we we look at everything from the way they do their docs to what concepts of how big their scope is. And I'm sure everyone everyone is doing that. So I found that initial post interesting from that perspective.

Dax:

I think as usual on Twitter, it's it was like, there's an initial interaction that is fine and then, like, it devolves into a really stupid place after, which is, I think, it's just how everything everything goes. How it is. Yeah. I thought there's almost no value in, like, the general discourse after.

Ian:

Going too far down the thread, you know, makes no there's no point.

Dax:

No. Yeah.

Ian:

You don't wanna go there. First couple. I do think the, the history is super interesting and definitely something people forget. Cause I do feel like PDP in general, of course, is definitely my background is like, and even with Taylor, it's like rooted in a lot of like solo founder with no money at all. And so it's like, you know, and Taylor worked at user escape my company.

Ian:

And then when in early Laravel days, and then he built forge by himself and, you know, went off and did that. And it's like, what are the tools that are going to let one person with no money go and build a product that makes 1,000,000 of dollars? And so that's like the mindset, like you don't want to connect a thousand things and have all the complexity. You just want to be like, I use this one tool. It does everything I need.

Ian:

And now I move forward. Whereas like the modern sort of JavaScript ecosystem seems like it's come from a different place. Right? Like there is money and there's enterprises and there's VC money. And it's like, okay.

Ian:

Like, we can have specialists even in different roles and all that kind of stuff. It's not so focused on what one person can achieve with it, as, like, its legacy. Obviously, now, I think on both stacks, like, one person can do a lot or huge teams can do a lot cause they're, they've evolved to that. But, the kind of core sort of baked in really deep mindset is maybe a little bit different there about what they're trying to achieve and, like, how they're trying to achieve that from, like, a business

Dax:

Yeah. Perspective. And JavaScript is just messier. Like, there's just, like, a it's a messier history. It's a more accidental history.

Dax:

The hottest take I have with this is I don't think good engineers enter the JavaScript space until the last, like, 3 or 4 years. And I think previously, it was stewarded by people that were just a lot less competent.

Aaron:

That is a hot take. I like that. That's like So That's Yeah. It's red hot.

Dax:

And I think it's because of what I described. Like, prior to like, why would anyone good on the back end get into jobs from the back end? Like, I'm sure there of course, there were individual examples, but broadly, there was, like, almost no reason to. I think more recently, it's attracted a much better caliber of, like, you know, people that could serve as leaders. And things are getting better, but there is just a crazy messy history with it.

Dax:

So, yeah, like I said, I don't I wouldn't, like, choose it if it wasn't for a bunch of other reasons.

Adam:

Well, that

Ian:

but that's, like, always the interesting thing about all these languages. Like, the winner like, the back end, the biggest language is still PHP. Like, just in terms of raw number of, like, lines of code out there and, like, JavaScript on the front end. It's like these languages that everybody's like, oh, they're all they're terrible in all different ways. They're terrible.

Ian:

Right? Like, everybody beats on PHP and JavaScript forever, but these are the biggest languages because they, you know, for whatever reason, some of that ugliness is useful in different ways or allows more people to access it or whatever the reason they've actually, you know, kind of survived and thrived. Even though there are other languages that are technically superior and things.

Adam:

Can we can we hear Aaron? Aaron's working on the video. Right? Can we get a sneak

Aaron:

peek

Adam:

of this video?

Aaron:

Working on a video. Yeah. So I I did a I did a did a quick response video that I already published that I was just so freaking proud of. I was just so pumped that I turned it around. I

Dax:

couldn't believe how fast that was. I was like, what the hell? Is it the same day? Oh

Aaron:

my god.

Ian:

That's so nice.

Aaron:

Day. I called I called Steve in the morning and I was like, oh, dude. This is this is gonna be something. We have to do a video. And he was like, great.

Aaron:

Do it. And so I, you know, recorded it and sent it over to him, and he edited it. And we got it up the same day. Super proud of that. So now I'm working on a I'm working on a new video.

Aaron:

Hopefully, it'll be out, you know, today or tomorrow to to capitalize. And it's gonna be there's a little sneak peek for everybody. It's gonna be called Laravel versus React. And then yeah. It's gonna be great already.

Aaron:

You know you know Just the name is great.

Ian:

Yeah. We're good. We're

Aaron:

good. We're done. And then it's, it's kind of a it's kind of a bait and switch, and it's Laravel versus React is a ridiculous question. You should use them both together if you want. React is very good on the front end.

Aaron:

Laravel is very good on the back end. So it's gonna be kind of an overview of, like, how you can use Laravel with React or Vue or even Next JS or LiveWire, and it's a whole, like, I'm gonna have, you know, charts and graphs drawn by Steve that show, like, where Laravel starts and stops and where React starts and stops in terms of, like, front end, back end network. And hopefully, like, my goal and I think this is Laravel's goal as well, is not to convince people not to re to use React. It's to convince people that, like, there are back end solutions that are really thought through and powerful, and you should pair that with your favorite front end solution. I think the thing that I always see is, like, the I think Dax mentioned it where people, like, claim Next JS is gonna be their whole stack.

Aaron:

And then it's like, everyone else is like, y'all, how does that can't work at all. So hopefully hopefully, the video will convince some people that, like, Next is great. React is great. Vue is great. You should pair it with something on the back end that is powerful.

Aaron:

That that is the hope. So we'll see we'll see if we can pull it off.

Dax:

Nice. I'm excited.

Aaron:

Yeah. Yeah.

Dax:

And I think and again, like, just from the systems that we see that just is how even people doing full stack JavaScript, they build a separate system for their back end that is a lot more capable than what this front end framework can do. So, yeah, it's just this weird thing. Like, I don't it's a lot of it feels like it's everywhere, but at the same time, when I go look at, like, our user base, like, it's like, nobody's actually doing that. So yeah. It's like this

Aaron:

Once once again, the discourse and the reality are are are quite different.

Dax:

Yeah.

Aaron:

If you can believe that.

Dax:

Yeah.

Aaron:

Alright. I wanna cover 2 other things. We got we've got Adam's working on a course Mhmm. And we've got the boys started a coffee company. So we gotta we gotta cover that.

Aaron:

Also, we gotta give a plug to

Ian:

buy this coffee. Just how you buy it is totally insane. I love it.

Aaron:

Totally insane. We gotta give a plug for their podcast tomorrow FM or how about tomorrow? I'll just give a quick rundown. The the podcast is basically, Adam says something like, man, Dax, have you ever, god, have you ever really thought that we're all just gonna, like, die one day? And Dax is like, Dax will say something like, you know, I've actually thought about this a lot, and I actually used to work I used to work with a guy.

Aaron:

And so here's here's the reality of the situation. So if you if you like if you like that vibe

Ian:

such a good

Aaron:

that that is their podcast. Yeah.

Adam:

I like to think of our podcast. This is mostly technical. I like to think ours is, like, barely technical. Barely technical. Sometimes sometimes we say some things that are technical.

Adam:

It happens.

Ian:

Right? And if you're if

Aaron:

you're not if you're not very online, you'll get, like, 40 percent of it. Actually actually, Adam Adam plays the foil a lot. He's like, hey, Dax. I saw you tweeted this. What what what do you mean?

Aaron:

Like, what does this mean? What are you talking about?

Adam:

And so it

Aaron:

kinda kinda brings the audience along. So Then once a month, I'll

Dax:

do an hour rant on Vercel, and then

Aaron:

Yes. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.

Ian:

Yeah. We gotta buy you off. Yeah.

Aaron:

Let's let's start coffee, man. Do we wanna go there?

Ian:

Yeah. How did this all come about? This is fascinating. I

Dax:

great? Is it fun? It's also not fun. Fun?

Adam:

It's fun, but it's also not fun.

Ian:

It's way better than the reality. I'm sure. Like, the dream of it is amazing, though.

Aaron:

Yeah. So back up back up a little bit, and somebody give us a story of how these 5 friends came together and how you decided to ship coffee from the terminal. Go ahead, Max.

Dax:

Yeah. So I, this is a while ago. Prime tweeted, the Primagen, for those of you that are online. He tweeted something like, oh, does anyone know a coffee company? Like, I'd love to do, like, some kind of coffee sponsorship.

Dax:

And I have 2 friends that own coffee roasters. So I messaged him, and it was kind of like like, we weren't like, oh, let's do this for sure. We kind of we're kind of like casually talking about it over the course of months. Then eventually, we like, okay, let's do this for real. So we got together me, Adam, Prime, and TJ.

Dax:

All of us know each other from streaming on Twitch. And we're okay. Let's let's, like, do it. Let's, like, build a coffee business. And then a week into it, Prime messages being like, hey, so a comment here just messaged me and they want to do a sponsorship.

Dax:

So sorry, like, can't do it.

Adam:

Remember that time I asked if there were any coffee companies that wanted to

Ian:

sponsor me? Well, there are. There there are. Shock shockingly. Yeah.

Dax:

Yeah. So we're like, ah, bummer. But, you know, that is a good opportunity. He should he should do it. So we're like, okay.

Dax:

We kinda forgot about it. Then a few months later, he was just being like, this sponsorship sucks, but let's do this for real. He just wasn't making, like, any money.

Adam:

Right. Coming to your just get taken straight right here.

Dax:

I mean, their product is great to take. I mean, I don't drink coffee at all. That's another funny detail here.

Aaron:

That's another funny

Adam:

detail here.

Ian:

That's another funny detail.

Dax:

I think it's disgusting. I hate coffee. I'll eat coffee ice cream. I think it's delicious, but

Aaron:

That's the wildest part to me is that you eat coffee ice cream. Yeah.

Dax:

It's it's great. So when we got together again, we're thinking it so the idea was the the I guess the premise is, 1 influencers like Prime, people are trying to do content full time, need a way to, like, you know, make money. They they need to sell something. The people lining up to pay them are usually mediocre developer tool companies that, like, just don't have I'm just gonna be real. Like right?

Dax:

It's like it's it's not like

Aaron:

This is great.

Dax:

This is great. And it's like, yeah, you can take those deals, but then now people are following you because they find you credible and now you're like you know, it's a whole conflict of interest thing, if there's not proper alignment. If you find alignment, that's great. But, you know, it's obviously hard to find that. But something like coffee, you know, that has nothing to do with with anything.

Dax:

No one's gonna be upset at that. Well, not people were upset at that. But, generally, people are not gonna be upset at that. Right. And then the second thing was the developer audience is big enough that you could probably launch any kind of thing, where if you can reach millions of them, that's not like a sizable audience.

Dax:

And it doesn't matter that you're not, like, competing as a coffee company or, like, in this other other bubble. So, like, okay. Let's just do stuff that developers would find funny, entertaining, etcetera. We came across so I use this library for SST that helps us build, like, really fancy terminal based UIs in Go. And then so we're like, oh, let's make a CLI that people can download and install and then they can, you know, buy coffee through this like little terminal app.

Dax:

And then we found out the same company builds another library that you just mount that same UI over SSH. So then it's totally seamless. You don't have to download or install anything. You just SSH into a server and you get that exact same UI. And once we, like, came across that, it was like, oh, we have to do it.

Dax:

You know, we this is obviously the way we have to do it. And initially, we were like, oh, yeah. We'll probably also have a website, but it's funnier just to double down on the bit and just say, if you can't figure this out, like, we don't want your money.

Aaron:

You know? It's a good bit. I will it's crazy. From

Ian:

the early days. Yeah. Yeah.

Aaron:

From, like, a, like, a CTA or conversion perspective, it's insane, but it's a good bit.

Dax:

It's like it's like super high friction, so you think it was

Aaron:

such you know,

Dax:

that's what you wanna do.

Adam:

Actively. That's incredibly

Ian:

scary. I'm like, Aaron, like, is this thing gonna hack me? Are we sure? Like, I'm like just running this command in the turtle. Like, do you have to be back?

Ian:

Just going through all my financials now. And he's just like, this is great. Like, I don't know. Yeah. But that there was no coffee for sale when I went in there.

Ian:

So, apparently, your first I don't know if it was the first run or probably too early. But

Dax:

Yeah. So for the first thing, we we did it in a more, like, ad hoc way. So we, we went with one of my roaster friends. We picked the coffee, and they, like, literally shipped 5 sacks to it. Adam was here at my house when it got delivered, and it is giant That's

Adam:

a pallet. Just giant bags of coffee beans. Yeah.

Dax:

Yeah. And I think all of our reaction because it was getting slowly lowered down, and we were looking at it, and we were just like, that's a lot of coffee. Like, what

Ian:

the hell have

Dax:

we done?

Ian:

Done. Yeah.

Adam:

So we bagged all those first bag. Like, we did the whole thing. You know? Like Wow. Shipped it all.

Adam:

Decks, did all the shipping. Yeah. Wait it out. Sealed them. Not the best.

Dax:

Liz did most of the boxing, just to give her credit. She, like, boxed a lot of the orders.

Ian:

That's the worst. But I did I did stickers once for Laravel, like, 8, 10 years ago, and it was just such an incredible nightmare. And I'm like shipping stuff all over the world. And it's coming back to me 3 months later on deliverable from Guatemala. And I'm like, what?

Ian:

These people don't even know how to put their own address in. Like, the incredible number of people don't know how to do their own address. And the whole thing was just a disaster. I was like, alright. I've never wanna ship anything ever again.

Ian:

So the you guys got that done. It's quite impressive.

Dax:

Yeah. Yeah. So that was, like, initial thing is to, like, try out the concept and see if really it's I think with all these little things comes down to motivation. Like, we knew that if we did a smaller thing and it went really well, we'd be, like, really motivated to, like, go to the next step. And and that it worked out, and we're all really excited.

Dax:

So now we have a much more professional setup with, my other friend who has, like, like, they're gonna handle a lot of the logistics for us and and things like that. But what we're excited to kinda get it up and running because then it just selling coffee to the terminal, like, that's and just having it all fulfilled and stuff, that's, like, the bare bones. But there's just so many funny things we can do with this concept. Like, we had this idea of, like, popping up a random leak code challenge while you're checking out. And And if you solve it, you get, like, you know, percentage off.

Aaron:

There's just, like, there's, like, more friction

Dax:

to More friction. Yeah.

Aaron:

I'm I'm not an expert, but we might need to talk about some of this. I love

Ian:

it. I love it.

Aaron:

As long as

Ian:

you get subscriptions in there, it's fine. Because I only

Dax:

just do it once,

Ian:

and it's fine. You know? Like, then I just get my coffee every month or week or whatever I want.

Dax:

It's all good. An outlet for, like, funny jokes and, like, little things like that. We're gonna have a monthly box where we have a new, bag design and blend every month with just, like, some some joke, for the month.

Ian:

So I love it. I mean, people love coffee. People I mean, selling addictive substances. There's not many better than that. Right?

Ian:

Like that's like really top tier business. And yeah, I don't drink. I, I used to be a big coffee drinker and I do love the taste, but I haven't drank it in like 10 years because hurts my stomach and keeps me awake and whatever. So I've been off it, unfortunately. But, yeah.

Ian:

I I don't know. I mean, I can imagine selling other things too. Like, yeah. When Yeah. That's

Aaron:

what that's kinda what that's what I wanna hear about. You keep hinting at, like, the bigger vision, and I think on your y'all's last podcast, Adam was like, oh, and then, oh, I guess I shouldn't say anything. Oh, no. I can't say anything. So so now that you're now that you're here where no one is listening,

Ian:

like, what's what's

Aaron:

the vision? What's the vision for the future here?

Dax:

So I think one vision is to partner with a lot of other people trying to do content full time and give them their own blends and really give them really solid cuts. Like, like a lot of these partnerships that they get for things like this, I'll make like 50¢ a bag or something. We wanna give people, like, a majority of the profit, just so it becomes like a meaningful thing they actually care about promoting and do custom blends for them and and do fun stuff with them. So that's just on the coffee side, like, just scaling to anyone that wants to that has an audience and wants to wants to sell through us. But I know Adam's been looking at some some other things as well.

Adam:

Well, like, every time I have some stupid idea, I just I feel backs in the back of my head saying, like, slow down. Like, just don't get ahead of yourself. It's so easy to run off with not a note. Just like a realist and, like, let's take it very slow. I don't do things slow.

Adam:

Like, I'm very, like, sprint. I want to go hard.

Ian:

Jump all in.

Adam:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I've, like, planned out the next 6 months in my mind, like, what we could do. And it's it's all kind of, like, pump the brakes.

Adam:

Let's get it.

Dax:

So I mean, we're

Adam:

not even selling coffee right now. So we got to get. I know.

Ian:

I can't buy it like.

Aaron:

Okay, so

Ian:

my wife my wife loves coffee. I tried to buy her some coffee. I can't buy any coffee. So it's

Adam:

sold out within 24 hours. Yeah.

Dax:

The the next round will be, like, it won't be like these runs. It'll be continuously available.

Adam:

On demand.

Dax:

So I'm not gonna tell you guys specifically, but just to give context to what Adam means by when he says he just he's like, you know, off to the races. He got wholesale quotes for an item that costs, like, 100 of dollars per unit.

Aaron:

Perfect. Yep. That sounds that is so on brand. I cannot describe how on brand that is.

Ian:

It's like the Yeah. First day it pops in my head is like a bronze statue of Dax's head, and it's just, like, glorious it's like a glorious beard, a bronze head. It's just like Yeah. I would buy that. I would buy that and put it right behind me here somewhere.

Ian:

Like, it I

Aaron:

I I'm gonna hazard a guess that it's that cool matte black electric kettle. That's that's my guess.

Dax:

It's it's I wish you're extremely close. It's, like, basically, yes.

Aaron:

I think UGG sold those for a little while. Maybe they still do.

Dax:

It's stuff from Fellow. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So there's there's, like They just, like, branded.

Adam:

They'll, like, they'll, like, print for itch onto your yeah. So, like, terminal branded copy making gear. You bet.

Ian:

But I mean, even it's like, sometimes you gotta take that energy. Right. And like, instead of like going down more products, go down more connections of influencers. Right? Like if you had 10 times more people selling just the coffee, that would also be super exciting and obviously profitable and all that stuff.

Adam:

And companies like there's some brands in the developer space, well known that we're talking with, doing stuff, having a blend for their company, their tool or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of different angles that we could go.

Ian:

Conferences even or whatever. One off things for big conferences.

Dax:

Well, speaking of conference

Adam:

talk about that stuff? Yeah. Yeah.

Dax:

Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's not confirmed, but I think we're gonna show up to Laracon.

Ian:

Oh, yes.

Dax:

Oh, yeah.

Aaron:

Are you going? Breaking news. Breaking news. Be there.

Ian:

Nice. Erin's toasting it, and I'll be there. Yeah.

Dax:

No. And I imagine Erin would go because, you know

Aaron:

give yeah. It is it is in it is in Dallas, and and I am hosting it. So yeah.

Adam:

Oh, hopefully, it checks out.

Aaron:

I'll be there. Yeah.

Dax:

It's like me and react Miami. Like, I make us a big deal out of it. I just haven't used react in 3 years, but Yeah.

Aaron:

It's just it's

Ian:

convenient. You

Aaron:

know? Yeah.

Ian:

I'm already planning my empire where I'm just gonna build a website that does the SSHing for people, and I'm just gonna, like, take a little a little cut. I'm just gonna be a middleman. There's no even better than selling addictive substances is being a middleman to addictive substances.

Dax:

No. But here, you joke, but, part of what we're working on is, like, the most absurdly well designed SDKs you've ever seen. Like, we're we're working with the people that did, stripes APIs and they have this new product that just help people ship SDKs that are as good as, you know, Stripes.

Ian:

Oh, that's interesting.

Dax:

So our API, which we're using, is also gonna be public can be a public API. So you can build your own coffee ordering experiences.

Adam:

In the weirdest places you want. Like, put them wherever you want. You can even put them on a website

Aaron:

if you want to.

Ian:

Put them right in my help desk product. It'll be like, order more copy.

Aaron:

Like Yeah. Exactly. Right. You buy it. My absolute favorite part of this is y'all have been in software for so long, and you've just been looking at those sweet sweet software margins, and you're like, that's too much.

Aaron:

We gotta sell coffee.

Ian:

Sell coffee, man.

Aaron:

We gotta sell coffee, man.

Ian:

What's the Every business. Right? Every business just comes down to distribution. And so, like, you guys are known. You have friends who have a lot of distribution.

Ian:

You have your own distribution. Like, yeah, once you have distribution, then you just find whatever sell into it. Right? Like, it could be software, but it could be other things. And so

Adam:

It is. It's funny, like, knowing all the ecommerce things or just, like, being in this space for a long time, just being on Twitter even. You, like, hear all these things, like drip marketing and all this stuff, like the stuff you're supposed to do. And it, like, just doesn't matter for us because Prime can, like, stream for 2 hours and get more impressions than we'd ever get with some email campaign or whatever.

Aaron:

Yep.

Adam:

It's just a really interesting dynamic where you've got already this very active engaged audience. We don't really have to think about, like, marketing or doing that kind of stuff. It just happens kind of naturally.

Ian:

And those things can be the, like the optimizations later. Right? Like people are trying to start with that, but really that's your like later optimization. Doing so much initially, then eventually it's like, oh, we probably should be emailing these people who bought from us before to buy from us again and, like, stuff like that.

Adam:

Yeah. But

Ian:

it doesn't have to be the first thing. It's like a a secondary thing after you're going.

Aaron:

Do either any of y'all listen to Nathan Barry's billionaire creator podcast or whatever it's called? No? No? No? No?

Dax:

I don't drink coffee. I don't listen to podcasts, but I Okay.

Aaron:

Perfect. Produce both. Yeah. Thanks

Adam:

for coming

Aaron:

on the show.

Ian:

Same, actually, to be honest with you. He's he's

Aaron:

been talking. You're connected. Yeah. Yeah. This is this is why I'm paired with Ian, and Adam is paired with Zach.

Aaron:

Otherwise, that's the podra.

Ian:

Can't it's,

Dax:

like, such a perfect it's like the exact same situation. It's so weird.

Ian:

Really is. Adam and

Aaron:

I are both light mode on the side. Ian and Dax are both dark mode on that side. Okay. Focus. Focus.

Aaron:

Focus. This podcast has started talking a lot about how, creators already own distribution and are moving backwards into making brand deals. And I feel like this is this is prime no. Pun intended, I guess. This is this is a prime example of that where it's like, I could sell Cometeer for 50¢, or we could like, I could sell Cometeer for 50¢, or we could do a bunch of hard work and get, you know, a much fatter margin on our own coffee.

Aaron:

And I like, Steve and I are actively thinking about that. I don't, you know, I don't wanna take brand deals forever. I wanna own something. And so this this really lines up, for that in in my mind.

Dax:

Yeah. Yeah. No. It's yeah. You see it everywhere.

Dax:

It's, almost to a degree where I'm, like, kind of I'm, like, is this a good thing for the world? Because if you go anywhere, like, to any store there's, like, some product being featured. It's always a celebrity product. Like, we were at Target the other day and he's he like, The Rock launched his new brand. Yep.

Dax:

I love The Rock and I think he's awesome and I'm excited for

Aaron:

him. Same.

Dax:

But, like, everything, like, all those out like, all those gin Yep. Like, yeah. There's there's a bunch of, like, alcohol companies with, celebrities That was

Ian:

the playbook. Right?

Dax:

Yep. Yeah. So it's, like, at this point, can you make a product without first being a I feel I feel we're getting to the point where it's it's, like, kind of going into that direction. But, yeah, it is such a crazy advantage because you're the main cost of any product is what's your cost of acquisition and it's basically 0 when you're in this category.

Ian:

Yeah. I mean, in the old days, right, everything was so much more centralized. Like, oh, I'm gonna advertise in front of Seinfeld, then I'm guaranteed 80,000,000 people to see my product. Right. And so like, that's where everything went, but now you don't have any centralized points like that.

Ian:

So it's like, okay, well, how do I get in front of people? Will people still pay attention to, you know, whatever their influencer is that they like, whether it's a YouTube star or a musician or whatever? And so it's like, well, now that's how we get products in front of people, right, is we go to them instead. And, there was actually a super interesting article about McDonald's the other day. I think it was New York Times or something.

Ian:

It was like how, like 20 years ago, everybody was like, McDonald's is the worst. It's gonna kill you. Right. All this stuff. And then they started making all these deals with like musicians and they basically did this.

Ian:

And like now it's, you know, more than doubled in stock price in the last 20 years or whatever. It's like, they just had the playbook a little ahead of everybody, but they did all these brand partnerships and influencer partnerships and all this stuff.

Dax:

So it's not gonna kill you anymore.

Ian:

It's not gonna kill you. It doesn't

Aaron:

kill you.

Ian:

It doesn't But somebody else get

Aaron:

rich off of it, which is awesome.

Ian:

90 percent of America has had a meal at McDonald's in the last week or whatever. Right. So it's like, it's like literally

Aaron:

it's like

Ian:

80 5 or 90%. And so, Yeah. So it's percent

Adam:

of America's obese. So Yeah. Well, I know. That

Aaron:

that that that should be good. Not a correlation there. Yeah.

Ian:

You can say it works. But, yeah.

Dax:

Yeah. So I but I think the root of it all is, we actually we genuinely I don't think any of us care if this is, like, massively successful or not, which is very different from anything else I work on. It's just, like, we all like each other, and so we used to hang out and, especially with with these conferencing we're doing, it's, like Mhmm. A very easy way for all of us to get together and have it all be paid by the this larger thing. So if it's just breaking even and it's a way for us to, like, have a good time, it's that's really all it needs to do.

Dax:

But we'll see.

Aaron:

Surprisingly heartwarming from Dax. So so it wasn't wasn't on my beacon.

Ian:

My ammo was there. Yeah. Yeah. I don't

Aaron:

need to crush the souls of my enemies. I just wanna hang out with my friends. It's it's not what

Dax:

I expected.

Ian:

I'm always fascinated by business people and, like, they're like, what I do to relax is is I have another business. I have this other business over here. This is my relaxation business. That's separate from my actual business. Like, that that you just see that all the time.

Ian:

Like, I

Dax:

But but, like, getting myself with this type of thing, I just feel like we can't lose. So I'll give you a perfect example. Right? So we shipped out all these boxes, and it's the first time shipping everything out. And, like, people were getting them in some horrible conditions.

Dax:

Like, they were They

Aaron:

all got crashed.

Dax:

It looked like they got just destroyed. But that just became a meme. Like, people were posting about it, and this became a joke. So it's like, we you just can't lose with with stuff like this. You know.

Aaron:

Yeah. Like, let's go back. You're coming to Laracon? What's all everybody? I know Prime is is gonna be speaking.

Aaron:

Yeah. So what's the story?

Dax:

So we are trying to so, basically, what we did for React Miami was a little bit ad hoc, but we're trying to formalize it a little bit more where we show up to a conference, a couple days before. We'll do, like, a bunch of streaming to get people excited online. We'll do a custom blend with a custom bag for people at the conference. Like, they can buy it there. They'll be in our store a week advance.

Dax:

Maybe the conference can buy a bunch to give out as speaker gifts or or something like that. So we we used to and then we we serve the coffee there when Oh, cool. For the people that were there.

Aaron:

Yeah. I love it.

Dax:

Yeah. I love it. So for React Miami, like, just on Twitter, we did, like, more than, like, 10,000,000 impressions or so. And then Prime streams each day, there were, like, 30 to 40000 people that watched. So these are, like, pretty crazy numbers that are hard to tap into otherwise.

Dax:

Yeah. And we're pretty cheap for if you look at, like like, CPM wise, like

Aaron:

because y'all are in for the friendships. Yeah. So you don't care. You don't

Dax:

care if it's

Ian:

Literally not the time to get in. Yeah.

Adam:

That yeah. That covers our costs, and we get to hang out for a week. It's kinda

Aaron:

So are y'all gonna are y'all gonna come to the Aaron Francis studio of light and sound and do some streaming out of here? Yeah. Of course. Yeah. That's such a good idea.

Aaron:

Amazing. Yes. Of course. Idea. That is

Dax:

a really good idea. Yeah. We'll get stuff nailed down and we'll see. Because the big variability here is, like, if we do have an Airbnb, we don't know what, like, the Internet or situation is. Sure.

Dax:

That would that would be pretty helpful.

Aaron:

Yeah. Yeah. You can't all stay here because it's literally my office and there are no beds, but you're welcome to come up here and stream.

Dax:

It's still a separate it's not like part of your house. Right? It's, Correct.

Aaron:

It is not. Yeah.

Dax:

Okay.

Aaron:

You are welcome to swing by the house, but probably not stay there for very long either. It's kinda so we we got a lot going on at the house. Babies. We can't afford degenerates just streaming all day at the kitchen table.

Dax:

It was it was wild when they were doing that in my house. It was, one of those fun.

Aaron:

I watched a lot of it.

Dax:

Yeah. It it was super fun. 1 of those friends one of Liz's friends, like, came by to pick something up. He walks into the door, and she sees Prime just go up to a camera and just start, like, thrusting

Aaron:

Yep.

Dax:

Just a bunch of, like, crazy thrusting maneuvers.

Aaron:

Yeah.

Dax:

And I just saw her face as being like like, what is going? And she because Alyssa's friends just do not understand what I do for a living.

Aaron:

You never you never want one of your off line friends

Ian:

to clear water and They didn't clear that at all.

Dax:

And she saw that? And that's all she saw when she left.

Aaron:

Yep.

Ian:

Oh, man.

Dax:

Like, that's how we make money.

Ian:

Part with, like, conferences and stuff, though. It's like, everybody wants to see you guys. Right? It's like but how many conferences can you actually do in a year and things like that? There are these, like, just limits of like Yeah.

Ian:

You know, what you can do. But

Dax:

yeah. But the conferencing is more for fun. Like, it's just Yeah. Yeah. We'll be, like, once a quarter.

Dax:

We'll try to find a conference to do and Little vacation. Talk together. Yeah. Basically. But get

Aaron:

out more. That's gonna be fun. I'm so glad. I'm so glad y'all are gonna come.

Ian:

Yeah. This is awesome.

Aaron:

If not, just try to secure the deal tomorrow on your podcast with Taylor Live on air. Be like Yeah. Hey. Just wanted to check-in on this.

Ian:

First item. First item.

Aaron:

Yeah. Close the deal. Yeah. Alright. Are we done with coffee?

Aaron:

I wanna hear about Adam's course, or do we have more coffee?

Dax:

No. That's that's it for coffee. Like I said, the summary is coffee from the terminal, You can buy it soon. I don't drink coffee, but you should still trust me that

Aaron:

it's good coffee. Also, this is what I said earlier about your podcast, this is a perfect example. It's like, hey. You do you wanna start a coffee company? Well, I don't actually drink coffee, but I've got 4 friends that are coffee roasters, and I know this guy.

Aaron:

It's like, oh. Yeah. Yeah. That's that sounds about right. Yeah.

Aaron:

It's

Ian:

at it's at terminal dot shop. So that's where

Aaron:

you get

Ian:

it, and there's a crazy ass command line terminal that you paste in and just hope it all goes okay. It'll be fine. Don't worry about it.

Dax:

By the way, the reason I know

Aaron:

that's where you can't get it. You have to go to your terminal. Yeah.

Dax:

If you can't SSH, we don't want your money, through slogan. By the way, the reason I know all these people, Adam, is because I lived in a city around other people, and it's one

Aaron:

of the benefits of

Dax:

saving in a city.

Aaron:

Bringing it back.

Dax:

There you go.

Ian:

There's no

Aaron:

That's that's the callback right there. Right.

Adam:

I know all these people too. Sorry. I know all these people from the Internet. So there you go.

Aaron:

Oh, you don't you don't know any

Adam:

coffee or a chef. Yeah.

Dax:

No. You don't know anyone that can do anything in real life.

Aaron:

You know

Ian:

anyone that has any skills in the physical world. To know you and how I

Adam:

get the benefits of all of those people you Yeah. Yeah.

Aaron:

No. I know.

Dax:

Great people.

Adam:

Someone had

Dax:

to live in New York. Okay? In this whole chain of events. Yeah.

Aaron:

So, Adam, you are working are you working with, Joel Hooks on this? Badass stuff. Okay. Tell us. You're working on a full on course.

Adam:

A full on course. It's you know, Joel, the way he puts it, it's like a full on small business. It's like it's I want to, like, teach. I really do genuinely want that to be like as a kid before I want to do anything before I do anything about computers, I wanted to be a teacher. Like, I wanna be a college professor for some reason.

Adam:

I don't I really don't know why that specifically. Like, I didn't wanna be a high school teacher. I wanna be a maybe it's a little more sophisticated. I've Mhmm. I've always wanted to teach, and I've always enjoyed, like, explaining things to people, like, to a fault that you know, it's, like, annoying.

Adam:

People get tired of me, like, trying to explain something they don't even wanna learn, that kind of thing. So it's an outlet. It's like, now I'm finally I'm finally taking steps. It's always been this thing I I thought I'd get to in my career, and I just never kind of, like, made the time always busy with other stuff and still busy with other stuff. But but, yeah, I'm I'm pretty excited.

Adam:

Like, we're we're doing kind of the first steps, like, have a paid workshop next month. Mhmm. It's kind of the first Oh, wow. Big step. But it's gonna be I mean, it's gonna be like the rest of this year, really.

Adam:

Like, the first full thing you could buy and, like, take a course will be sometime probably in the fall. Yeah. I'm pumped. And then I see you, like, you're doing a course, and you're like, yeah. We're gonna we're gonna launch it next month.

Adam:

Like, I'm sorry. What? Aaron?

Aaron:

How do you

Ian:

do this?

Aaron:

Well, well, I'm not running a startup, and I'm not running a coffee startup. Coffee. It's true. Yeah. So I I have a little I have a little bit more time, and I don't follow like, Joel has a very good prescribed method where you, like, do a freebie, then you do a course and or I'm sorry, then you do a workshop, and then you do a bunch of emails.

Aaron:

Like, we're just not doing any of that. And so yeah, that's the it cuts the timeline a lot.

Adam:

I do love, like, working with Joel. I just having someone kinda, like, tell me what to do because I feel like if I were just doing it on my own, I would never do it. I would just never get there. But now I have, like, people that are, like, stakeholders and, like, asking things of me Yep. That's been very helpful.

Adam:

Like, I feel like I finally take the real

Aaron:

interesting business model for them where they find people like you, talented creators, and, like, basically, you know, midwife them through the process of creating creating a course. And for you. Yeah. So, like, how did y'all get hooked up, and what's it been like working with the because they've got a whole team. It's like 8, 10 people over there.

Ian:

Yeah. Yeah.

Adam:

It's I mean, it's a lot of the egghead folks, I think.

Aaron:

They can

Adam:

say that. I mean, it's like he's got this team that has worked on developer education for so long and together. And, like, they're all effective working together. And they just kind of like the the way he puts it, I think, that I can say this, is that they're, like, taking bets on different creators to kind of, like, hit a certain niche. So they they, you know, they they have got this team.

Adam:

They they do a lot of work to kinda, like, do the stuff I wouldn't wanna do. It's the way he puts it. Like, I get to just focus on, like, teaching the thing and making videos and and trying to, like, understand, you know, what are my students gonna wanna learn, how am I gonna take them from a to b, And then they do everything else, like the website and, save, manage the live workshops and all that kind of stuff. They sell the seats, and they do Mhmm. The stuff that's just like, I'm sure I would I would spend a lot of time doing that stuff and then maybe even enjoy it because I'm a programmer, like building the website.

Adam:

That'd be fun.

Aaron:

Yeah.

Adam:

It's so nice to not be thinking about that or, like, building, like, a a language or what's the word? The learning an l

Aaron:

learning call? Platform? Yeah.

Adam:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, everyone who ends up doing a course ends up building, like, their own platform for teaching, like, for hosting their video course. And they're doing that, but I don't have to do it.

Adam:

So it's Yeah.

Dax:

It's nice.

Aaron:

I like it. And they they send presumably, they send out email. You give them content, but they send out emails and set up drip sequences and do all that stuff.

Adam:

Yeah. They do all that stuff.

Aaron:

They do everything except recording and editing. Right? You edit your own stuff?

Adam:

I'm editing my own stuff, but, you know, they they do have people for that. Like, they do have an editor that, and for some of the people that they've done courses with, all the editing was done there in house by their people. So Cool. That's an option. I you know, I took screencasting.com, so I feel like heard

Aaron:

of that. That's great.

Ian:

Yeah. I feel like I can

Adam:

kinda make my way around the ScreenFlow, and I'm figuring it out.

Aaron:

That's amazing. What a great domain. That's really cool.

Adam:

Yeah. Yeah. Excellent course. Excellent course.

Aaron:

Yeah. Thanks. You also have not mentioned what your course is about or I

Ian:

was just gonna find it.

Dax:

That's why I ask people to take care of that stuff. Yeah.

Ian:

I'm not

Adam:

so not so good at the marketing. So it's pro AWS. It's basically like so I started on AWS, like, 10 years ago, but I'm very much like a practical, like, web developer. I'm I'm a startup founder, so, like, I'm very like, I wanna build things, and I'm not, like, an enterprise y like, a lot of the cloud is made up of, like, enterprise education, like, teaching very large teams how to leverage the cloud. But there's kind of this gap for, like, I'm a small team or I'm a startup or I'm an individual that wants to build big powerful things, and I wanna leverage AWS to do it.

Adam:

Like, it's basically my consulting work. So I I did consulting for startups for a few years independent. And I'm basically doing that, like, taking small startup teams and helping them leverage AWS. So it's it's that angle. It's like you're a web developer, but you wanna build on AWS.

Aaron:

And I know that you're too nice to brag on yourself, but you also speed ran all of the AWS certifications and got them all within, like, a month or, like, 8 days Yeah. Or something silly like

Ian:

that. Gosh.

Adam:

It's been a few years ago now, but I did I did them in 6 weeks.

Dax:

So I did

Adam:

there's, like, 12 of them. I did 2 a week.

Aaron:

It was

Ian:

sort of like a parlor trick.

Adam:

Like, people ask me, like, what's the value of certification? Like, how do how do you feel about certification? I don't know. I don't really care. We're just talking

Aaron:

about it now, so

Adam:

it works. Yeah. No. I thought it'd be, like, a fun, like

Dax:

It made you a hero, Adam. They literally were, like me. I mean, not

Aaron:

hero things probably. Surely. Yeah.

Adam:

Yeah. That was like a fun challenge. It was like, can I can I do these really, really fast?

Ian:

Yeah. We use AWS, and I feel like that's just a great course topic because it's probably, it's like an infinite

Adam:

source. Yeah.

Ian:

There's so much stuff in there. Nobody has any idea how it works. Like you're always scared touching anything. It's like Yeah.

Adam:

And and for, like,

Dax:

if

Adam:

you're a web developer, it's a very narrow slice of it that you

Dax:

really need or you have

Aaron:

small issues.

Ian:

Yeah. Yeah.

Adam:

So it's, like, just helping guide people through this very, like, vast landscape.

Dax:

Yeah. And, like, here's

Adam:

the stuff that matters to you.

Dax:

And the thing with AWS is there's always, like, 5 ways to do the same thing, but there's actually only one that you should pick. And Yeah. No one ever picks that one. So Yeah. Again, this is just teaching them what what the right one is.

Ian:

Weird stuff. Like, do I need the API gateway thing? And now I'm getting charged more money for some weird reason I don't totally understand, and I like this.

Dax:

Yeah. Yeah. There's every little trick

Aaron:

in the phone. Yeah. I feel like this is this is lining up exactly with my database course experience in that a lot of, like, the education is curation. Like, there's so much information and literally 10% of it applies to, like, a modern web developer. And I feel like a lot of my job is to read through everything and then figure out, like, okay.

Aaron:

Here's the important stuff. Do you feel the same way?

Adam:

Oh, yeah. Absolutely. And and, like, the one advantage I think I'll have going into teaching this stuff is, like, I'm I'm having a hard time getting the material done because I'm still, like, managing a very large consumer site deployed on AWS that I've been building for a decade. So, like

Aaron:

Mhmm.

Adam:

I I still do this work. It's not like a distant thing to me that, like, I don't have practical experience with.

Aaron:

Mhmm.

Adam:

I think that's a big advantage. Like, when you know the thing because you build on the thing, it's like I can't really go wrong as long as I'm staying rooted in that work. Like, I know that my advice plays out in a real world scenario because I'm living it, like, right now.

Aaron:

Yeah. Wow. That's cool. I'm excited for you. Proaws.dev?

Adam:

Dotdev. They did buy the dot com Dot

Aaron:

for

Adam:

They did. Some money. Yeah. It it just redirects to dotdev. But Oh.

Adam:

Oh, man. That's an advantage.

Aaron:

That the other way with the right people.

Dax:

You it's you're kinda like, it's like you're signed to a label. That's what it sounds

Ian:

like. Kinda.

Dax:

Yeah. Yeah.

Aaron:

Or like a publishing house, like a like a book publisher. Yeah.

Dax:

Yeah. That's

Aaron:

cool. Very cool model.

Dax:

Yeah. Here's a funny thing. So Adam is using SSE for the course. I believe this course is gonna do extremely well. I think it's gonna make more money than we do at SSE.

Dax:

Jesus.

Aaron:

Oh. I should

Ian:

I should

Adam:

I should work out some kind of deal here, I guess. No. I should be giving back to the the hand that feeds me.

Aaron:

It's amazing.

Ian:

I think what? This is like the open source dilemma. Right? It's like people are making money on all your work and how do

Dax:

you navigate that? Yeah. I'm actually no, I think it's fine. Like, we're just 3 people. It's not hard to find ways to sustain ourselves.

Dax:

So

Ian:

Oh, it's great exposure too. Of course, it does well. Yeah.

Aaron:

It does it does sound hard. Yeah. Steve and I are just 2 people and we're like, oh, man. Where's the money gonna come from? So Yeah.

Aaron:

Alright. One one last thing I forgot. Lyricon blend. It's got a what are you gonna call it? Are you gonna call it, like, a bambo blend or There's some names flipping

Dax:

around. Ideas.

Aaron:

I don't I don't

Adam:

think we should leak it yet.

Dax:

Yeah. No. Hey. That's fine. But wait.

Dax:

We we don't know what it is. If you have any idea, please send it to us because, obviously, we we don't know what makes for a funny joke.

Adam:

David is a Laravel developer. Oh,

Aaron:

that's true. Laravel developer. Yes. You do have one. Yeah.

Adam:

He's been great to, like, ideate on this front. Mhmm.

Ian:

Nice.

Adam:

Yeah. We could use any more ideas. Throw them out.

Aaron:

Well, if you need yeah. If you need a vibe check before you go to press, just send it to me and Ian, and we'll tell you, like, oh, that's gonna work or that's not gonna work.

Dax:

Maybe we should make fun of PHP developers. Maybe that should be the angle.

Adam:

That is your Like I

Aaron:

said, you need a 5 jack. Send it send it to us before you print it, and we will

Dax:

help you.

Aaron:

Yeah. What an interesting idea.

Ian:

There's a lot of subtleties in there though. There's like some people just consider themselves Laravel developers and not PHP developers. And so there's a whole there's internal factions.

Dax:

Internal streams.

Ian:

I feel like there's some very obvious names.

Adam:

For for what we would do that people It's definitely a couple of things. Yeah. Yeah. There's a couple that are very obvious.

Aaron:

Do you remember the, the funny error that we always used to get in PHP? Unexpected, like, t punonucoditem or

Ian:

whatever that was. It's like a Hebrew word. Yeah. There's just, like, this random Hebrew word because, like, the initial developers where there's a lot of, like, Israeli developers and stuff. And, like, there's this one error you would always get in PHP.

Ian:

I can't remember it. It does.

Adam:

So it's a pretty word.

Dax:

It's pretty bad. There's nothing.

Ian:

Like you have no idea what it means. I don't even know it was like a Hebrew word for like 20 years or I was, like, 10:10 years probably.

Adam:

This is a dude. So it's like What the hell is this?

Aaron:

I I

Ian:

don't know if it's, like, a bad ink

Dax:

dude or Nick Kedotiam?

Ian:

Yeah. Is that what you're saying?

Aaron:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. I think it's an un Is

Ian:

it a quote? No.

Aaron:

I think it's an unexpected, double

Dax:

semi colon. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Double colon.

Dax:

Oh. So we got it. Yeah.

Ian:

In the

Dax:

bag somewhere. That's that's a

Ian:

nice way to share. With that in the bag. Yeah. That's the the the old heads out there. That will

Aaron:

show everyone at a PHP conference that, like, you're one of us.

Ian:

You are one of us. Yes.

Aaron:

If the blend is called t peronucadhyome or whatever it is, everyone will be like, holy crap. They're pretty developers.

Adam:

You're you're

Ian:

from you're from before the linters and the

Aaron:

Yeah. Exactly.

Ian:

Fixed everything for you and everything. Like, you're just in there in a text editor, like, hacking around and

Dax:

Hey. I what? That that's actually true. I I did PHP for Yeah. At least a year.

Aaron:

There you go. I don't remember that.

Adam:

There you go.

Dax:

One of us.

Adam:

A long time ago.

Ian:

Yeah. Yeah. One of us. PHP is the greatest. It's the whole Yeah.

Dax:

That's that's good. I'll I'll get we'll get a shirt with that printed on there. Just so

Ian:

Yeah. There we go.

Dax:

I'll buy

Ian:

that I'll buy that on terminal.shop.

Aaron:

Honestly. Yeah.

Adam:

And it's got 2 2

Aaron:

customers right there. And fed items. Yeah.

Ian:

We did

Dax:

grab the Solve Elite code to check out. So

Ian:

Yeah. Wow. I don't wanna do I don't wanna do that real quick. A lot of

Aaron:

you're gonna lose a lot of us in that one, I'll I'll be honest.

Ian:

Only that way, it is kinda funny to have, like, certain items that only people smart enough can, like Yeah. Mhmm. Get those items and stuff. Like, I I won't get any of them, but that'll be fun. It's funny when it's out there.

Dax:

An another version of this joke was, there's, like, different levels of the code challenges. We were thinking that, randomly, we'd drop in, like, an extra hard one. And if you got it right, we would increase the price instead of decrease it because clearly clearly you

Aaron:

can afford it.

Ian:

I thought you were gonna say, like, you personally delivered or something. Like, you just showed yourself that you delivered.

Aaron:

We we

Dax:

just made them feel bad for spending the time

Aaron:

to do it.

Ian:

You spent 2 hours solving this? That's too bad for you. $52 to buy you about your coffee.

Aaron:

Goodness gracious.

Ian:

Alright. Well, thanks a lot, guys, for coming on. This

Dax:

was awesome. Thanks for

Adam:

having us.

Ian:

It worked great.

Aaron:

Of course.

Ian:

Thanks, Adam. Thanks, Dax. We'll, be interacting with you on Twitter, I'm sure. And, so check out their their stuff. We'll link it all up below with terminal dot shop with coffee and how about tomorrow podcast.

Ian:

So, yeah, check all that stuff out and SST, and whatever

Dax:

that is.

Ian:

Use. Yeah. Whatever whatever SST is. I I am jealous right now.

Adam:

Whatever I

Aaron:

look at it. Snow.

Ian:

Yeah. Yeah. I love the idea of it, but

Creators and Guests

Adam Elmore
Host
Adam Elmore
AWS DevTools Hero and co-founder @statmuse. Husband. Father. Brother. Sister?? Pet?!?
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Dax Raad
Host
Dax Raad
building @SST_dev and @withbumi
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Aaron Francis
Guest
Aaron Francis
Sincere poster. No cynicism, no hot takes. Educator at @planetscaledata. Tweets about Laravel, MySQL, and building things.
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Chris Enns
Editor
Chris Enns
I edit podcasts so you don't have to.
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Ian Landsman
Guest
Ian Landsman
Bootstrapper and software developer.
X Website Link
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