155: Htmx, Open Source, Retro Tech, and Dev Tools with Carson Gross

Intro: [00:00:00] Welcome to Syntax. Welcome to a brand new episode of the Front End Happy Hour podcast. Welcome to this week’s JS Party. Live from Ship Shape Studios, this is Whiskey Web and Whatnot. With your hosts, Robbie the Wagner, and me, Charles William Carpenter III. That’s right Charles. We drink whiskey and talk about web development.

I mean, it’s all in the name. It’s not that deep. This is Whiskey Web and Whatnot. Do not adjust your set.

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Robbie Wagner: What’s going on everybody? Welcome to Whiskey Web and Whatnot with your hosts, RobbietheWagner, and Charles William Carpenter III with me. Charles, third one with our guest today. Carson Gross. What’s going on Carson?

Carson Gross: Not too much. Thanks for having me on, guys. Excited beer. And to talk a little bit.

I’m, I have to admit, I’m not, I don’t drink a ton of whiskey, so this is gonna be interesting to see what happens. What kind of

Chuck Carpenter: fishermen are you? You know, you, what kind of fisherman are, you know, I drank,

Carson Gross: I, so I tried to pretend, I was like, you know, in college I drank a lot of [00:02:00] scotch whiskeys and then I, I.

Was like, okay, I kinda like Irish stuff better. And then I realized I just like Jamison, which is like, you know,

Chuck Carpenter: yeah, yeah. This is not

Carson Gross: good stuff. But, and so I drank that for a long, and then I just, you know, you get old and I don’t know, I just, it, I’ve got too much stuff going on.

Yeah.

Carson Gross: Started to wear me out, but, but I’ll try today.

Well, it looks good. Smells real good. So,

Chuck Carpenter: yeah, I’ll, I’ll address your Jimmy comment once we get to whiskey, but Robbie probably wants to let you introduce yourself.

Carson Gross: So, yeah. Um, my name’s Carson Gross. I’m a, a professor at Montana State and, uh, probably most well known for, for making HTMX, which is a front end library that’s a little different than libraries, like React and so forth.

It’s a web front end library and it focuses on hypermedia. So that’s a big topic that I, I talk about a lot. I’ve got a book called Hypermedia Systems, which is at the URL hypermedia systems that, uh, your [00:03:00] listeners can check out. It’s available online for free, but you can buy a hard copy version of it and there’s a, a Kindle version of it.

We’re gonna try and get a paper bag done, but it’s, it’s a lot of work. I haven’t been super happy with Amazon’s printing system for the, for the hardcover, but you know, it is what it is. It’s self-published, so,

Chuck Carpenter: yeah, it’s dope though. Well, before we get into all of that, then let’s address the whiskey portion, expand your palette, whatever.

Today we’re having the bullet rye 12 year, so whiskeys when they are a blend as this one is, they have to age state at the youngest one in, in that blend. And so bullet says there are rise aged up to 17 years. In this one it is 92 proof as a mash bill of 90% rye and 5% malted barley. And away we go. See, we can’t afford a Foley auto artist, so I have to pour into the mic.

Mm. Not on the mic though. That’s a mistake.

Robbie Wagner: It smells like a [00:04:00] Christmas tree.

Chuck Carpenter: Oh, really? You’re getting a little evergreen, huh? Maybe. But I was gonna say, or maybe more like Christmas

Robbie Wagner: time when you’re drinking this like a

Chuck Carpenter: lemon zest for me. But I guess I could kinda see it

Carson Gross: smells like whiskey to me.

Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, it’s definitely, that looks like they put some alcohol in a barrel and that barrel made this, and that is also true.

That’s accurate.

Robbie Wagner: Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. There’s no wrong answers, but yeah, maybe there’s a little, little green little cut grass and lemon for me. So that’s where I’m going with it. I’m gonna prime the

Robbie Wagner: palate. Yeah. I did have the non 12 year one, two days ago. Mm-Hmm. And I’m gonna say this smells better. I can’t quantify why, but has a lot of similar notes.

And one of the notes that I also got on the previous one was like bananas, fostery like Mm-Hmm. Like a sweet desserty. Something in the smell. It didn’t really taste like that, but like the smell smells like that.

Chuck Carpenter: The power of suggestion though, was bullshit. ‘cause as soon as you said that, I started to like feel a little like [00:05:00] caramelized sugar in the back of my tongue.

Yeah, I, yeah, it

Carson Gross: smells, it smells real sweet. It doesn’t, I don’t get it when I drink it. Yeah, it smells real sweet.

Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, this is a pretty high rise, so I’m expecting a lot of spice, but I’m not actually getting a ton of spice in the flavor. Yeah,

Carson Gross: no, I agree.

Chuck Carpenter: I really get a little more, like now I’m saying like a bit of char, a bit of maple in it, and then something else in the middle.

Yeah. Honestly, tastes, um, these are all made up words anyway,

Robbie Wagner: like bourbon should taste, I know it’s not bourbon, but Right. Like very sweet, but also they cut it with that spice, like it’s very balanced, I feel like.

Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, it’s, it’s very rich and flavorful and it’s even got a little burn in it, even though it’s only 92 proof.

So some to that. Listen, listen here, Carson. Yeah. When you grow up, sometimes we do, you start to grow

Robbie Wagner: up, huh? Like 126 proof or something? Like it gets pretty high. [00:06:00]

Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. We have done some super hot stuff. Yeah. We’ve done, there is a, there’s a couple of, uh, there’s a few things they’ll put out like one 30 Pro Plus and there’s a, a, a stag junior that, uh, they’ve done a couple of batches, like a, you know, one thirty, one thirty six proof and they call ‘em hazmats ‘cause they’re too high approved to bring on a, on a plane.

Oh, really?

Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. If you want to expand your palate. I just happened to have been, uh. Uh, situated right near Belgrade Liquors in Belgrade, and that is a very nice shop. So this episode is sponsored by Belgrade Liquors. They won’t ship to me, but I went there once. Yeah, so I picked this up there and they had a lot of really nice choices.

Some like very nice like allocated things and some store picks and everything else. So just a side note, if you decide you want to like not just get Jameson, which I personally don’t think is bad, like it’s, no, I think it’s good. It’s a solid, it’s actually better than, you know, a number of other [00:07:00] Irish whiskeys that I’ve had.

So it’s like a good solid choice. It’s like going and get Maker’s Mark, like, you know, it’s, you know what it’s gonna taste like. It’s gonna be consistent. It’s good. Right now the Jameson 15 is really good. If you wanna like have something special, I’d go that direction. Red

Carson Gross: breast, right? Isn’t red breast the same?

Yeah, same group. Mm-Hmm.

Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. And their twelves and 12 and 15 is also very good. So, okay. Um, yeah. I love

Carson Gross: Belgrade’s a cool town. You’re talking about Belgrade Montana for the list. Yeah. Yeah, that’s true. It’s the, that’s a good point out. It’s the, it’s like Manhattan. There’s a Manhattan, like the next town over is Manhattan, but it’s man Manhattan, Montana.

Which is a little bit different by than I bet than, yeah, slightly than most people know about. But, uh, that’s a great little town. I actually, I go to church out there, so, uh Oh, nice, nice. Very, very Montana town. It’s where the airport is.

Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. Yeah, it is. Where not one of the nicer luck into ends that I’ve been to is also not sure I’d suggest that, but the Belgrade [00:08:00] liquor’s.

Very nice.

Carson Gross: Yeah. They’re building a bunch of new hotels out there, so there should be other options soon. But it’s a better place if you, if you don’t need to be in Bozeman, it’s way cheaper to be out there.

Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, that’s fair. Well, typically I have family in Bozeman, so typically I just have a place to crash, but they just had a new baby three weeks ago, so it was mutually beneficial for me not to sleep there.

Yeah,

Carson Gross: yeah,

Chuck Carpenter: yeah. Inconvenient of them. Yeah, it’s crazy. The timing is scary. Keep making more. Yeah, keep making more rheims like you need more of those in the world. Okay, so as an avid listener of the show, Carson, you obviously know that we have a very stringent rating system from zero to eight tentacles, zero being horrible.

You probably should spit this out. Four. Is middle of the road not bad, not great. Eight is amazing. Clear the shelves kind of thing. We tend to rate against other whiskeys of the same style, but you don’t, certainly don’t have to do that. You can generalize it however you’d [00:09:00] like. And Robbie likes to go first.

Really set the tone.

Robbie Wagner: I do love going first. So this is. Uh, pretty good. It’s very balanced. I don’t know that it is super screaming rye to me, honestly. But the tastes are good. It’s better than the not 12 year, I’m gonna say six point. 8, 7, 6 2 repeating.

Chuck Carpenter: Wow. Yeah. We’re very serious about it. Specific on our show.

Yeah. And later in my kid,

Carson Gross: my kid was, we were watching HGTV one time and uh, it was one of those like really miserable couples that like comes in and criticizes everything. And my uh, middle son was probably about six years old at the time, and he turns to me and goes, that woman is very specific. So.

Chuck Carpenter: That’s funny.

Carson Gross: That’s pretty, that’s pretty specific.

Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. Yeah. And Robbie’s also a woman, so

Carson Gross: not implying that, I’m just saying that’s a pretty specific [00:10:00] number.

Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, it really was. Yeah. He’s, you know, he’s still working on these junkies. Do you feel prepared Carson to give a rating?

Carson Gross: Yeah, I think I’d give it a six.

Definitely better than, uh, average. I, I don’t like the, like really heavy Petey stuff, you know, and that you find in a lot of Scottish whiskeys. That’s really my big turnoff when it comes to whiskeys is, is the, that really Petey taste. So I like the cleaner stuff and obviously the Irish stuff. So this is definitely different being rye, but I like it.

It’s good. It smells a little bit better than it tastes to me, but that’s how it usually is. So

Chuck Carpenter: yeah, it goes that way sometimes, you know, you could always try with a cube or get crazy later on. Yeah. But yeah, I’m kind of with you. I, so, and I tend to, to consider price points and stuff too, like what’s the value for money?

And this is like 55 bucks I think, give or takes, something like that. And so I think it’s a pretty good deal at that price point. Now compared to some, depending upon if folks prefer a [00:11:00] traditional like high spice kind of rye, I think they might find this a little more mellow. But I do think it has some nice, yummy, good flavors.

If I was gonna look at like the $40 normal bullet rye or this, I would definitely pay more money to do this one. So. Yeah, I’m kind of with you actually. It feels a little like a, you know, six or if I’m Robbie, 6.2 5 4 6 8 9 9 9 9. That wasn’t the number

Robbie Wagner: I said, so you already No, it wasn’t,

Chuck Carpenter: but I was just doing one.

I was just doing one. You know, that embellished it for no good reason. But yeah. Uh, would recommend.

Robbie Wagner: All right, let’s do some hot takes two cake. Hot takes. Well, yeah, they’re not that hot, but I always say they’re not that hot. Some of them are hot. I don’t know. In TypeScript inferred types or explicit types, I.

Carson Gross: I don’t use typescripts, so I, I tend to mix, I think the ideal programming language. You use explicit types on the, on the signatures, and then inferred types and the implementation. [00:12:00] So I think like variables, local variables should be inferred, but you should explicitly, and maybe that’s, I don’t know, TypeScript well enough to know if you have to declare like, the types of parameters and so forth, or if that’s like, like OCaml has its whole.

Yeah, OCaml has, like, there’s the, whatever, the Milner type system that’ll figure out everything based on sort of global analysis. I’ve never, I don’t wanna say I don’t like it, but it does, from my understanding anyways, is that doesn’t work well with object oriented programming, which I prefer, I know a lot of people hate on object oriented programming, but I like it.

I think that’s just a good balance of like, you know, for your sign, for your method signatures and maybe your public features, you declare the types and then internally let, uh, let inference do its thing. Definitely for like closures, like, you know, that’s sort of a funky, where you have a, you know, some sort of closure.

Like there you don’t wanna be typing out all the types. That’s typically redundant, so, or not useful. So declarations, I, I’m a fan.

Chuck Carpenter: [00:13:00] Nice, nice. I think you’ll find a friend in Robbie in object oriented programming. So, not that you wouldn’t in me per se, but he is yeah. Hate functional programming. So there, I don’t hate it,

Carson Gross: but I don’t, I, I just like, I like optic trainer.

I don’t know. I grew up, I was a Java programmer first. I mean, I was, I guess technically I was an an a HyperCard programmer. Well, technically, technically I was an Apple basic programmer first. Mm-Hmm. But. My first like real experience with programming was HyperCard on the Mac, which is a totally different thing than anything, you know, most people are doing very, it’s very dynamic, loosely typed environment, really visual.

And then I programmed a little bit in c and c plus plus, which I barely understood and undergrad. And then as soon as I started doing professional programming, I was doing Java. And so I just, I learned, you know, have you guys ever read a thinking in, is it Thinking in Java, Bruce Eckle? Does that sound right?

I think there was, that sounds

Chuck Carpenter: right. I haven’t read it though. No.

Carson Gross: Yeah, it was a, I mean, massive book back in the day when [00:14:00] you bought massive programming books about Java and I just learned how to program from like that book and so, and it’s object oriented, so I like it. Nice. I just like that. So

Robbie Wagner: I would argue that people that go outta their way not to use classes are still thinking about things as classes.

They just don’t wanna admit it. Like you need that entity that you’re like putting all of your pieces on. That like

Carson Gross: Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: Is the way you’re gring what it is, like if it’s all dysfunctions. I digress. Yeah,

Carson Gross: I do. I and no, I agree. Like when I see people and they declare an interface and then there’s like a trait or they declare like a struct and then there’s a trait and then somehow that trait gets like glued onto the struct and I’m like, that seems like an object to me in class.

Chuck Carpenter: Right. You’re just trying to reorganize it differently. Yeah. They’re trying too hard to avoid. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Put all that stuff in one place. Alright. Get Rebase. Or Get Merge.

Carson Gross: I use Get Merge because I don’t understand Rebase. I’ve had it explained to me a whole bunch and I [00:15:00] just. I don’t know. Every once in a while I’ll check rebate, just like to live dangerously.

But I use, I typically let in inte, like I use JetBrains tools, so I let the JetBrains editor like us famous programmers, we have little people that do that stuff for us, like Jet, the Jet Brains editor. So that’s true. I true. I don’t have strong opinions on it. I don’t care. Like people are like, oh God, there’s merge commits.

Like, I don’t know, man. I’ve got so many junky commits in my code base that I don’t care.

Robbie Wagner: Fair enough. Yolo? It is. Yeah. I see You skipped the Tailwind one, Chuck, or we not asked yet? That’s right. Or you wanted me to ask that? You can ask it if you want

Chuck Carpenter: to. I’m, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t apply.

Robbie Wagner: Okay. Uh, css.

Carson Gross: I would use vanilla CSS.

I’ve never picked up tailwinds and I know a lot of people who are really smart who like it. But when I just, you know, and I, my understanding this is the common thing, like people first reaction is really bad, and I’ve never gotten past that [00:16:00] first reaction. I see like 15 class on a, you know, in a class as you, and I’m like, man, that feels like that should be wrapped up.

And may and maybe there’s a tool to do that or something. But I, I think I like a little bit less going on in the, in the class attributes in HTML in general. And maybe part of that is ‘cause HTMX is sort of competing for competing for space on HTML elements. Yeah. And so I’ll see like these examples with tailwinds and there’s like a teeny bit of, you know, like three HTMX attributes and then like this massive tailwinds declaration.

But I don’t know, a lot of, a lot of really smart people I know. Love it. So I can’t say that if I really gave it, uh, an honest try, I would still dislike it. But I definitely have that initial like, eh, I don’t know, man. Yeah, yeah. I just got That’s fair.

Chuck Carpenter: Like, oh, I, I found where it made me very productive and where I don’t have to care about CSS and so I, I don’t disagree with like the aesthetics perception and I know there’s way to kind of like obfuscate that or whatever else, [00:17:00] but I’m just lazy.

Yeah. And this allows me to continue to be lazy.

Robbie Wagner: If there was, and there might be something that exists for this and I just haven’t looked, ‘cause I don’t care. But like, if there were a thing that just named everything for me, that’s my biggest, like the biggest win for tailwind is I don’t have to care.

Like, oh, this is a container, this is a container inside, this is a, like whatever you wanna name this shit like. So it’ll just be like, if this were, if there was like a tool that was like, all this is named, and then I’m just like, all right, I’m styling that and styling that, then I wouldn’t care as much either way.

But

Carson Gross: yeah, I, I get it. And you know, there’s a lot of like just annoying people too that will be like, oh, it’s so big and, and it’s like, yeah, and then you turn on G Zipp and it doesn’t matter. Or you don’t, and it doesn’t matter because

Chuck Carpenter: yeah,

Carson Gross: network’s pretty fast in a lot of cases anyways. But like I said, I know like a lot of people that are big HT MX fans and who are certainly smarter than I am and better web programmers than I am.

Love it. So I, I think it’s probably a skill issue on my part at this point.

Chuck Carpenter: There we go. [00:18:00] Let or const,

Carson Gross: I use var baby. Come on.

Chuck Carpenter: There we go. Use S Floppiness. I use window.

Carson Gross: Window dot. Yeah, window dot. Not

Chuck Carpenter: attach everything.

Carson Gross: I do have a habit of using VAR just because I was trying to be IE compatible for so long with HTMX that, and you can only use var.

You can’t use letter cons. I just have that habit. I don’t hate like feature scoped variables as much as some people do, so I don’t think VARs like that bad when compared with, let you know, at the end of the day, I’d use let. Just out of habit for locally scoped things, you know, the why. Why do you use cons?

I guess if there’s a performance benefit, but my understanding is there isn’t. So you would use No. It’s just a

Chuck Carpenter: readability preference, right? Yeah,

Carson Gross: yeah. You know, usually when you’re using light, you’re in a lo, sort of a local lexical scope and it’s pretty obvious what’s going on. So the benefits of like having stuff be read only is probably not [00:19:00] really high.

So it’s fewer, fewer letters to type let, so I’ll go with the let camp.

Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. Yeah. You’re not wrong. It’s just dumb shit people

Robbie Wagner: argue about on Twitter. Yeah. As you know, I don’t know the reasoning one way or the other. I just saw that someone was arguing about it and I was like, we should talk about this.

But yeah, they have strong opinions.

Carson Gross: No, I don’t have an opinion on it. People argue about dumb stuff on Twitter.

Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, all the time. Yeah, sometimes it’s kind of funny.

Carson Gross: It’s always been such a, it’s always been such a source of intellectual stimulation. It’s

Robbie Wagner: all scholars on there. Yeah, absolutely. What do you think about nested turn areas?

Carson Gross: I do not like them. I don’t like turn. I use ‘em, I use ‘em, but I don’t like ‘em. They’re bad because they’re really complicated. It’s control flow like in an expression and it makes it really hard to like debug for example. So you’re like, oh, I just wanna save lines. Why do you use a turn air? ‘cause you wanna save lines of code.

And also like that’s another situation where. The scoping of like, let can drive stuff [00:20:00] like that, right? Because like let, lets don’t hoist like VAR does, right? And so you can’t have a let inside of two sides of an IF brand. It’s my, uh, that’s my understanding is you can’t have a let that like bleeds out of an if statement.

And so that encourages this use of the sort of conditional logic in the expression. So that’s maybe a strike against lead actually. And I’ve just always struggled with this, like, what do you do in Java? What you, what you do is you declare the variable first and give it a type and assign it to null, or you just declare it and it’ll give it a value.

And then you have to set it on either side, like it does some. Static analysis to make sure the value’s set when you come out of the thing. I think that’s how, I don’t remember, but, but the problem, again, the problem with it is that when you have complicated expressions, even when you have like lots of ands and o’s and so forth, like leaving and I guess there is sort of an implicit control flow with, uh, short circuiting, ands, it makes it really hard to debug and see like when something’s wrong in there.

You know, when I was younger, I used to have, I used to create these really complicated expressions that were [00:21:00] like super tight and packed, like, you know, just everything in, and there’s a, you know, an advantage that you can sort of see it all. And if you know it, you can say, oh, that does all this, but it’s really, really hard to debug later on, is what I’ve found.

I think it’s, it’s better at the end of the day to just suck it up and accept a little bit more code and write the if statement out. Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. That’s fair. I agree with that. I see Robbie, you’ve left for me, the most controversial, uh, question of them all is, you know, they’re pretty much at war with one another.

Alright? You have to pick Intercooler JS or HT MX

Carson Gross: Intercooler versus htm. They’re the same thing. They’re, they’re the same thing. Uh, like that’s why I mentioned that in my talk, you know? ‘cause HTMX is obviously getting popular right now, or in relative terms anyways. Certainly one compared with Intercooler JS and the APIs for those two libraries.

You know, I mean, yeah, you have to bring in jQuery, but who cares? Everyone brings in jQuery anyways, at least like five years [00:22:00] ago. The API is almost identical, and so I think that one of my takeaways from that is that timing is really, really important. Intercooler was too early, you know, and we’ve seen that before in tech.

There were predecessors to react that were reactive, that just like it wasn’t, for whatever reason, the timing wasn’t quite right for those libraries. Similarly with INTERCOOLER and HTMX, and I think the, at the, and when I gave that talk at big sky dev com, one of the lessons, like one of the things you can take away from that is okay if.

Timing is what matters. Then the longer you can hang around, the more likely you are to catch that timing at some point. And so the, to build on that, the best way to hang around is to have fun and try and be, you know, positive. Like you’re, it’s gonna be really difficult for you if you’re like pushing too hard.

You know, I pushed really hard on Intercooler for, you know, I wasn’t as effective as I am now, but for like two, two years and I kind of burned out, like arguing with everybody. I was very negative. And so I’d argue [00:23:00] with people, like I’d go on Reddit and find someone saying something bad about Intercooler and I’d argue with them.

And I know that that wasn’t effective, obviously, in retrospect. So I think, you know, one of my pieces of advice from that talk at Big Sky was to just try and stay, stay positive and really try and have fun, because that’s gonna keep you in the game and take advantage of this dynamic where like the, you know, the tides of technology come in and go out and who knows what’s gonna be cool in two years and maybe your thing will be set up.

Perfectly for it, and it appears that HT MX was like that. I think if I had to pick between the two, like today financially, I’d pick HT MX, but in my heart I would pick Intercooler because, because it was like, you know, it was that thing that was like, it was a good idea. It got a lot of grief. It got definitely a lot of very mean things were said about Intercooler, but I think there was a, there was a, a pretty good idea, sort of like at the core of it.

Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. Well, that’s reasonable. That’s a good, uh, transition too. Robbie was really good with this, but[00:24:00]

Robbie Wagner: Are you wanting me to say something? Yeah, I think you should. Yeah. Yeah. You mentioned, you know, monetarily, like part of the, the major success I feel like of HTMX is the whole. Meme factor and the like, you know, I don’t really know how to quantify it exactly. Just like it’s everywhere. It seems cool. It’s like people maybe can’t say exactly what it is, but like they all like it, which is maybe actually good because like, you know, a lot of people love React for no reason other than they were told to love, react.

You know, maybe that same kind of train, but like, I am curious how it, like, you know, how this whole thing snowballed into like, like why did you decide to start making it like meme culture and all of that?

Carson Gross: Yeah. Well, I, so like I said, I tried it for the first two or three years of Inter I, there was a little bit, it was of, of meme culture in it.

There’s, if you go back, you can go to the intercooler dress.org site and like look at that. I think I called it a blog back in the day. You know, there’s a couple of [00:25:00] jokes in there and, but I didn’t really, it wasn’t like the vibe. Nah, maybe it was, I don’t know. I don’t know. I just, I argued a lot with people.

That’s what I remember from that time. Anyways, it didn’t really catch on. There was one like really brief burst of when you’re an open source, GitHub stars are what you judge everything by, right? So right there was one brief launch from, I think like around a thousand stars to around 4,000 stars because of a hacker news post that got really popular.

So that was an indication. There was some like pent up demand for this sort of alt, alternate, sort of hypermedia based approach to web development. It, you know, tapered off after that and never really regained any momentum. At that point, that was sort of, angular was really popular back then and I think React sort of came along and just stomped on everything and React, you know, solved a lot of really hard problems.

And so maybe that was React was right place, right time compared to Angular. For example, when Covid hit, that’s when, if people haven’t heard the story, [00:26:00] COVID hit and I was trapped inside and was like, okay, I’m gonna, I’m gonna try and pull the jQuery dependency out. And I was like, okay. And I’m gonna rename it and sort of like try and re relaunch this idea just ‘cause why not, like everyone’s trapped inside anyways.

And when I did that, I had the, the inner cooler JS Twitter account, which had, I think like, you know, something like a thousand followers or something like that, which I was like, okay, I hadn’t been on Twitter in. Probably three or four years because I kind of, I got like a lot of people, I, I got alienated by the, the political aspects of it.

It just got so intense and like crazy. I was like, I can’t handle this. I just want to talk about technical stuff. I wasn’t really memeing ‘cause it was sort of, you know, I don’t know if you guys, like, there was a time when like even like what I would consider very like vanilla memes when people would start getting upset about stuff and I was like, ah.

Oh yeah. So I just sort of stopped. I just stopped interacting with Twitter very much. But, uh, when I relaunched I was like, okay, like I’m just gonna go and have fun [00:27:00] again on Twitter. Like there was a time in like 2000, you know, 2013 or whatever, when like everyone just said random stuff and it was like a lot more fun and I’m just gonna go, I’ve, you know, I have a long history and sort of like the memes from like the, the image boards and the message boards and all that stuff, like for a very long time.

And so I said, I’m just gonna have fun. So I started doing it and then, you know, lo and behold, it actually was a pretty successful strategy. I guess I got really lucky in that I was writing a book. So, I mean, this just goes to show you never know what’s gonna happen, but I was, I was, was contacted by a, a, a big publisher by Manning, actually, to write a book about HTMX and I was like.

This is awesome. I wrote like 90% of a book, and then I got a call from the guy, I, I don’t dislike Manning, it’s fine. I got a call from the main guy there and he was like, I’m sorry, we just don’t think we can sell enough of this. And I was like, okay. [00:28:00] Fair enough. I guess not, but they were like, but the rights revert to you so you can do what you want with it.

And so that happened basically like two years ago. I, I got that news and it was a little bit crushing, but I went to the other authors who were working on the book and was like, okay guys, like are you willing to stick around and like, make the push to self-publish this? And we had set it up. So it was pretty scripted.

Scripted. Like, you know, we had it all in, what is it, aoc, I forget the, the, the doc form for books. But we had it all like, so it was easy, pretty easy to generate. And all the rest of it. We were grinding really hard on the book and I released that in July of last year. And right at that same moment, tj, who’s a Twitch like dev streamer, kind of OCaml focused dev streamer, he had sort of picked up on HTMX and he knew Prime and was like telling Prime, Hey, you need to check this out.

Hey, you need to check this out. And then finally Prime, you know, for just the vagaries of the internet, like took a look at it and was like, oh, this is actually kind of cool and [00:29:00] addresses some of these issues that I’ve seen with React. And then he got super into it. And that’s really, I think when he got into it.

And then Fire Ship Dev did that, you know, a hundred, whatever it is, a hundred seconds of HTMX video. It’s gotten over a million views. Like it’s insane. Yeah, the reach that guy has and those two things, sort of like all that came together with the book release, like all in July of last year. And that just, you know, then now everyone’s looking at my Twitter account and I had been getting more and more wild and like having more and more fun and I just was like, okay, we’re just gonna, I’m just gonna go for it and be like, as crazy as I can on Twitter.

And, uh, it worked out. So I haven’t, haven’t alienated anyone too badly as far as I can tell. And, uh, definitely it’s, it is been a very good channel for, you know, just having fun and, and getting the message out. So I don’t, there’s not a lot of strategy there. It’s just been random, you know, just random stuff.

I would argue

Chuck Carpenter: it’s. It’s laser eyes out of a horse face. I would argue that was actually the moment. [00:30:00] Like all those other things are pretty good. But yeah, ever since then you haven’t had to work another day. It’s been amazing. I know.

Carson Gross: I still do have to work. That’s not true. Unfortunately. I have to work a lot.

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Carson Gross: Being a, uh, a professor is like, it’s really not like summertime, you know, like I don’t have to, I don’t have classes, but I’ve got two classes I’ve gotta prep for and so I, I have to grant. It’s, it’s not as easy as it sounds, but, uh, and

Chuck Carpenter: they won’t let you just teach HTMX, like they won’t

Carson Gross: let me. [00:31:00] No. They’re letting me teach HTMX and I have to, like, I, I kept complaining that they wouldn’t let me teach HTMX and now I have to create the course for it.

So you got, gotta make all the slides and all the tests. I gotta create a stupid project. It’s like

Robbie Wagner: careful what you Yeah. Gotta careful what you wish for. Exactly. Yeah. You know, you say it’s all just luck and random, but I, I think there’s a lot that went into to the popularity and I think. At some point you should think about writing another book about how to rebrand a thing that people don’t like and make it way cooler.

‘cause like a lot of people could benefit from that. Yeah. I actually

Chuck Carpenter: do think that there’s, there’s at least like some kind of long form blog article. Like, so I was lucky enough to be a big Sky Def con and heard your talk about the way that you approach trying to increase open source popularity, right?

Mm-Hmm. And that was sort of the context around it of, I have this open source thing I’m trying to work on adoption. These are different ways you can engage, of course, like [00:32:00] meme culture and that kind of, that way of attracting attention Yeah. Can be very beneficial and positive in a bunch of ways as long as you like.

I feel like that’s the problem I have with like, I, I love Hacker News, but also kind of hate it because people, a lot of people there. Are trying to argue how smart they are all the time. And so that’s like no matter what you say, everything sucks and you’re stupid. You know, just have like,

Carson Gross: it’s like the actually meme, right?

Like that’s what Hack News is

Chuck Carpenter: actually. Yeah, a hundred percent that, and it’s fine and there are a lot of like, smarter than me people there, but what the reason why I initially fell in love with programming was I have a set of tools and I have outcomes that I’m shooting towards. And the way that I get to those outcomes is kind of creatively up to me.

And maybe it’s not your way. And yes, maybe there are like ways to improve that incrementally over time, but it doesn’t make me wrong inherently, necessarily, right? Because I’m, I’m supposed to get to this outcome and I did. So that’s already a good start.

Carson Gross: And, you know, human nature is [00:33:00] what it is. Like we clan up, we’ve got our team, we’ve got our texts that we like, we’ve got our editor we like.

But one thing I’ve come to realize as I’ve gotten older is just how effective people can be in tools that I like, have no desire to use whatsoever. You know, I’ve seen people be super effective with like Haskell, and I’m like, no. Not me. Um, I’ve seen people be super effective with like, variants of lisp, and that’s another thing that I’m just, it just, you know, I appreciate it for what it is.

And I think, you know, just in general, but certainly in technology, there’s a lot of cool technologies that you’re not gonna use. Like, cool. Here’s an example of that. People might look down their nose at like cold fusion, right? Mm-Hmm. Cold fusion was, was this sort of PHP like, but more enterprisey system.

But it had a lot of really good aspects to it. And, you know, now, and as much as anyone’s ever heard of cold fusion, they kind of, you know, hold up their nose at it. But there were some good ideas in there and there were some interesting aspects to it. And PHP is another thing that gets, you know, a lot of [00:34:00] hate from like more sophisticated developers.

And it’s like, I don’t know, guys like. People have built a lot of really effective stuff with it, so maybe we should, you know, stop and reconsider

Chuck Carpenter: everyone thinks they work for NASA or need to do like lifesaving calculations or something with half the web applications out there. Have a small user base and don’t, you know, modify cr credit applications or something.

Carson Gross: No, I was just gonna say, you know, one thing, like dynamic languages like JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, you know Yeah. They’re, they don’t perform as well as like go rust and, you know, some of the other languages out there, but they, they have flavors to them and they have sort of a, a culture to them. Like the, the libraries that are produced for those languages are different.

Like Ruby libraries are very different than JavaScript libraries and very effective in their own way. If you can get your. Head into like, this is how Ruby works. And I like that. I, I, as I’ve gotten older, you know, I’ve stopped looking for like the one true [00:35:00] programming language and the one true way to do X or Y or Z.

Like, there’s a lot of different, just a lot of different ways to get stuff done. And I, I like that there are people doing them different ways and that they’ve got their, you know, different take on things. It would be very boring if everything was like, the reality is, the risk today is that everything is JavaScript or type script, probably.

And that’s not to say like, I don’t think you should use either of those languages, but I, I, I hope that there are other significant languages that can, you know, and they can be interesting. That’s one of the best things I like, I say this a lot about HTMX is like, there’s a guy on Twitter who’s super passionate about, oh, what is it?

WS language. Come on, Pascal. What’s the modern Pascal variant? I always forget, I forget, Delphi. Delphi, Delphi.

Chuck Carpenter: Oh, that sounds right. But I would know for sure. Yeah, I’ll do that. And I’m

Carson Gross: not sure. I forget, I, I, it is hard for me to keep everyone on Twitter straight, but the, you know, Pascal is one of those languages that’s like, there’s a lot of people there.

Not a lot, but there’s some people that [00:36:00] love it, man. Like, sure man, if it can make HTML, then you can build, you know, pretty good web apps using that in HTMX, I hope. Yeah. And if

Chuck Carpenter: you can, if you can pay the bills with it, you know? Yeah. Like, I guess it’s relevant in some way.

Robbie Wagner: A lot of that is really like, we’re coming full circle to where it’s like, you don’t have to use the coolest, hottest, newest thing anymore.

You can actually pick what you’re most productive in. Yeah. Like if it’s 15 years old, but it’s still doing a great job, who cares? You can still use it. Like, I think we’ve, we’ve backed off from it having to be like the hottest, newest thing all the time. To like, let’s actually think about what we’re using and I think that’s gonna be good for the future unless you work for.

Well, yes. And then you have to verse probably doesn’t like that. Then you have to do that

Chuck Carpenter: thing.

Carson Gross: So I don’t understand Versel at all. I don’t know anything. I know they’re like the bad guys. Some like some people love them and some people they don’t. Well,

Chuck Carpenter: they wear all black all the time. I mean, you’re asked to right.

They do wear all

Carson Gross: black and you’re asking for I agree with that. They need to, they need, maybe they should do a [00:37:00] horse laser thing or something like that. Yeah. Horse laser thing. IMO to wear

Robbie Wagner: a floral shirt in his next keynote and we, we’ll know it’s turning the corner like a little more magnum

Chuck Carpenter: PI with that mustache.

A little less like, I don’t know. Yeah, like

Carson Gross: flip flops and like some, you know, Jimmy Buffett shorts or something like that. Yeah. I think

Chuck Carpenter: that would like lighten the whole image or watch some old westerns. Good guy wear light, bad guy wear dark. Yeah. It’s not hard.

Carson Gross: Yeah. No, that’s, there’s something to that.

But I think, I don’t know, my understanding of their business model is they kind of sell servers, right? Like sort of like

Chuck Carpenter: resell servers, right? Yeah. So I won’t

Carson Gross: get into it. But I do know what I will say is this, I really enjoyed Heroku and if they’re anything like Heroku, I paid lots of money for Heroku to like resell AWS servers.

To me, I think that something like HTMX actually like opens up the number of servers you can sell, right? Because you could sell like, okay, there’s a Go stack that works well with HTMX, there’s a, you know, whatever. [00:38:00] Like, so I don’t feel like HTMX is, is necessarily aimed, again, I don’t understand it probably as well as I should, but I feel like it’s, it, there’s nothing about HTMX that says like, you can’t sell servers to people.

They still need servers to make the HT L. No. And at some level the servers are more important because that’s where you, you know, HTMX tends to push a lot of logic back onto the servers and so I feel like it’s not, if you look at it from the right direction, I don’t see HTMX as being something versal should be upset about.

Chuck Carpenter: They also sell the idea that they obfuscate complexity. Mm-Hmm. So you go into like AWS console, it’s very hard to do all those things. Yeah. Or you take the next stage where you use their CDK or you Terraform or you whatever to provision and they’re giving you simplicity in having to do all those things so you get right code.

Works this way, local little configuration or whatever they kind of do that utilizes like existing web APIs, like technology that exists, it’s gonna [00:39:00] battle tested it over time. It’s not complex enough, right? Because you are siloing out your interactivity. You’re replacing HTML, oh well just HTMLs, HTML. But they have this specialized framework with its specialized way of now becoming, having server and client side components and intermixing those and having like direct access to your data store on both sides.

Like,

Carson Gross: okay, I keep going back to Heroku. Like Heroku was super magic and I was happy to pay. I was happy to pay because it’s like, oh, I don’t have to deal with AWS, thank goodness. Like I can just deploy my web server and I can set up a database and I read a server and get all the URLs like automatically added to the environments.

I don’t have to deal with like Docker and all this Docker composed garbage to run my stuff locally. I used to run this all myself and I don’t have to deal with K eights or any of that. Like I’m not, I don’t know anything about that stuff. And then that just kinda went away. Like, you know, I know there’s like [00:40:00] fly.io and a couple of other businesses that I think are trying to, but they don’t, they don’t capture that magic of like, create an app.

Here’s my web server, push this URL and look, there it is. Holy smokes. This is amazing. But maybe, you know, maybe a skill issue. I’m older, I don’t know, but Heroku was like so magic. And then, you know, they got bought by Salesforce, I think. And

Robbie Wagner: yeah, they’re still still kind of doing stuff, just not as, not as cool.

But yeah, Versel is, I think. Getting more towards that. Like they were very, we want you to use next Js, we want you to use all the complex stuff. But now they’re like sponsoring Astro and Astro’s very HTML first. Like the, the reasons I use it for my Astro sites are like I can just click a button and get my speed insights and my analytics, like stuff like that where I don’t have to configure any of that and I just press a button and I pay you $5 or whatever.

Yeah. Always gonna choose that because I don’t want to do all that myself Percent.

Carson Gross: AWS, from my perspective, is a nightmare for sure. So anyone who can make that like not a nightmare, particularly [00:41:00] for small to mid-size projects, I think is gonna do great. And even for larger projects, I mean, I’m sure there were some massive projects deployed on Heroku that no one talked about there.

Like you all massive projects start small. So you know, you start small and then you get massive and it’s like, well okay we can have like a six month effort to port this to like raw AWS or we can pay these people 20,000 or $50,000 a month. That’s an easy call. Like not having to have your own, you know, a massive DevOps team and you’re still gonna end up paying a boatload for AWS anyways and getting all that tuned up.

Right? So I think there’s definitely a business there.

Robbie Wagner: Oh yeah. Mm-Hmm. I think it’s super interesting that like AWS doesn’t put any money into making their experience nicer. I. Because I don’t have to, I think it’s on purpose. ‘cause like Versal is probably the biggest AWS consumer. So why would you want to cannibalize that and make it internal?

Like just have them ship you all the traffic like.

Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, because we all kind of assume [00:42:00] also that AWS is basically the defacto standard. They’re the cheapest, they have the most reach, they have the greatest uptime, they have all of the compliance stuff, like all these things you don’t wanna think about they’ve covered.

Yep. From like their standpoint. That’s

Carson Gross: actually, here’s a question for you guys. I teach a class, the very tail end of it is supposed to be cloud computing. So I teach like, first of all like sockets and like, okay, here’s what a normal cloud deployment looks like. But I, I just show them like slides of like, here’s what a load balancer is and here’s what an app server is and here’s what the database looks like and here’s what, you know, storage looks like.

But I don’t, I don’t actually like set anything up and like actually show them how to set stuff up because I don’t want to deal with AWS, like that’s just such a, yeah. Like that would be. Such a nightmare to walk through. So do you have any advice on, on that? Is there any, are there any easier options or is there It’s not.

The problem is cloud is all proprietary. There’s no, yeah, I guess there’s K eights, but that’s like, it’s on, I

Chuck Carpenter: wouldn’t start there. Yeah. ‘cause [00:43:00] that’s like so much overkill for the kind of traffic that most people would need, you know? Right. Container orchestration because you have so many containers to deal with.

Right.

Yeah. And

I really like the SST framework. They’ve done some very interesting things. So they essentially, they started out with the, like the first version of the library was like a wrapper around the A-W-S-C-D-K. And so you’re expressing in. Code like what you want, like you said, oh, okay, I’m, I’m doing serverless, I need API gateway.

Oh, I wanna add authentication. So I just a express all that and type script and whatever else. But their third version now, they’ve expanded out. So they’re not only AWS, but it is still AWS And so it’s like, but you can basically express what you’re talking about in your slide, just in code there and then push it.

They provision through that and then magic.

Carson Gross: Okay, I’m gonna look into this sst.dev, except I do notice that it says, it says pick your front end [00:44:00] and it’s next J SVE remix Astro or solid. There’s no H ht MX on this page.

Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. Well, we’ll, Dax Dax is on Twitter. Yeah, we’ll figure that out. Is this Dax thing?

Dax? This is Dax. Yeah, Dax is part of this. Okay. And uh,

Carson Gross: Dax, I thought we were friends. I was just say, yeah,

Chuck Carpenter: well, so they have the open next project, so they’ve been constantly chasing that and saying, you don’t have to pay V sell. You can actually pay, like. $3 a month through SST provisioning stuff out because they reverse engineer the magic index and actually give you the same benefits, turning those routes into lambdas and all that kind of fun stuff.

Yeah, I know he’s rushing to try to get more and more stuff on that. So, I mean, all things said like Right, an astrocyte can use HDMX just fine. He can. Oh yeah. But you should give him some shit about it for a hundred percent. Oh

Carson Gross: yeah, absolutely. We support giving him laser horse is gonna come in hot as soon as we’re done here.

Oh

Chuck Carpenter: yeah. I saw this. SST bullshit Dax, what’s going on? Yeah, I do think you should talk about [00:45:00] like the exciting news and tell folks what’s up in Golden Master.

Carson Gross: Uh, yeah, so HT MX 2.0 is actually, has been released. It’s not available on the net unless you go to like one of those pirate, like the pirate bait.org or something like that.

So it’s available. Somebody uploaded. It’s not available online via legitimate sources at this point. We released it on floppy disk at, uh, big Sky devcon. So three and what is it? Three and a half and five and a quarter floppy disks don’t tell anyone, but the five and a quarter disc is actually not right.

I got that made and then was like, I gotta change a couple things. But the three there, the three and a half inch discs actually do have what’s gonna be HTM X 2.0 on it.

Chuck Carpenter: You bastard, you gave me the big one

Carson Gross: I gave, just gave away the, the good news, the good news is, is that there’s literally no drives that can read those unless you have like a really old computer that still works and as somehow some way to communicate between that computer and like a modern computer.

Those diss are [00:46:00] basically like look at only because you can’t buy modern drives. For ‘em. It

Chuck Carpenter: sounds like a challenge.

Robbie Wagner: I don’t know them. Floppy drive?

Carson Gross: No, the

Robbie Wagner: three, no. You’d have to have connected the

Carson Gross: three and a half inch discs. You can get the three and a half inch drives. They’re cheap, they’re 20 bucks.

And I think you should have one just ‘cause it’s funny. But the five, five and a quarter disks, there was an adapter you could buy for a while, but that company went bankrupt. Yeah, well the, the guy that I got that made the floppies for me is it floppy floppy discs.com and he’s like the world’s expert on floppy discs.

He’s in southern California somewhere. Oh wow. I asked him, I was like, so like, could I get a, could I get a five and a quarter drive? And he is like, not possible. Like I’ve got all of them.

Chuck Carpenter: Oh, that’s really funny. He’s not sharing. Yeah, he is not selling them off. Not for a healthy, I was just say, I haven’t had one of those since the days of Zork, if anybody knows that game.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that was about the last time I had one. I

Robbie Wagner: would afraid, I really wanted afraid to turn on one of those old computers. I think they would disintegrate, [00:47:00] but, uh, yeah. Yeah,

Carson Gross: I really wanted to get, do you guys, you probably don’t remember ‘em, but Well, for sure Robbie doesn’t remember ‘em, but do you remember the, the eight inch discs, like the real big ones?

The big floppies. Ooh, I don’t

Chuck Carpenter: think I do. No.

Carson Gross: Yeah, there were, didn’t think there were before the, before the compact five and a quarter sloppy disks, there were eight inch discs that were just these ma, they looked like records almost, you know? And they were, they were sweet. And I was like, is there any way we can get an eight inch disc made?

And he was like, not possible man. I think the like nukes, I think the US nukes like still use that format and so I’m sure the government has like some secret program to keep those working but not accessible for civilian use, unfortunately. ‘cause I think that would’ve been hilarious to like, that would’ve been super funny.

Chuck Carpenter: It’d been like you were showing up with LPs or something. Like here it’s, yeah,

Carson Gross: like you’re like an eight track, like here you go, guys control. Oh yes. Now I do remember eight

Chuck Carpenter: track. We had those in the house when I was growing up, but yeah. Well, should we do a little what not Robert?

Robbie Wagner: [00:48:00] Uh, sure. Yeah. So something we try to ask everyone is, if you weren’t in tech, what other career would you choose?

Carson Gross: Uh, if I could pick any career at this point, I’d pick baseball. I like coaching baseball quite a bit like being a high school baseball coach. I’m, I’m more competent to be a high school wrestling coach. That’s what I did in school. I, I wrestled from what, seventh grade, like pretty much year round through high school.

And so that’s what I was like, I gave up baseball. My dad didn’t play baseball. Baseball’s, it’s like fishing or hunting or like golf to an extent. Whereas if your dad doesn’t play it, it’s real hard for you to get into it. But I was super obsessed with it and my dad finally like relented when I was, I think in third grade and let me start playing baseball.

And I got decent at it. My bat was okay. My glove was pretty good and I was fast, but I got really good at wrestling and just ended up getting super into that and I always kind of regretted it. And now my kids, I didn’t want ‘em to wrestle ‘cause I didn’t like the dieting culture, [00:49:00] um, around it. Oh. So I ended up having ‘em, like mainly, not mainly focused on baseball, but baseball I was definitely like most excited about, like everyone else in the United States.

In the nineties I played soccer, but I was never like super good at it and never super passionate about it. And so baseball was kind of like what I, I just always have focused on with my boys and at this point I just, I’m like obsessed with east baseball, so. Hmm.

Chuck Carpenter: So, mm. So it means so I could,

Carson Gross: I could, I could coach some baseball for sure.

Chuck Carpenter: I have two coach. I dunno if it’d a very good coach to follow up to that. Then would your position in soccer, I am gonna guess you played like outside defense.

Carson Gross: You know, I played mid, like I was, I was like a right, right middle back. ‘cause I was pretty fast. And so I was up and back a whole bunch. I was a good rec player and like a really crappy comp player.

So it just was like, I didn’t really fit in, you know, like all my friends were better. And then wrestling came along and it is just, it was so easy to just, I [00:50:00] had a lot of success at it real quick. And it was like, okay, I’m, this is, I’m gonna

Chuck Carpenter: stick with this.

Carson Gross: This is what I’m gonna do. No, I was just, I think in retrospect that was, I don’t wanna say it was a mistake, I wouldn’t be who I was if I hadn’t, you know, done that.

But I really, I, I appreciate the game of baseball, wrestling, you know, it was good. Um, like physical, very individual. I was talking to my wife last night and like. One really good thing about wrestling is you learn how to fall. Like I watch my kids fall and I’m just like, what are you doing? You know, like, you’re gonna get hurt falling like that.

Yeah. When like, when we get, we ski a bunch, and so they’ll go down and they just flop down. And I’m like, guys, you gotta tuck your shoulder. Like, what are you doing? Um, nice. And uh, so there’s, you know, some really good life skills and in it, but baseball, you know, the, the wrestling teams are kind of weird, you know?

It’s so, it’s so individualistic in a way that baseball, I feel like there’s a lot, you know, you’re really working as a team and baseball’s super boring. One of the things I love about baseball is it’s like boring for like ever. And [00:51:00] then it is panic mode. And that’s like how, that’s how life is, you know, like nothing happens.

And then like the primo gen picks up your library, right? And it’s like, okay, panic time, time to time to go. Um, well that’s a good analogy.

Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. So I just.

Carson Gross: That’s one thing I really appreciate about baseball. So

Chuck Carpenter: I was gonna ask for your baseball expertise. ‘cause my friend was sending me yesterday, his son is very into baseball and his freshman year, uh, he’s offensive player of the year.

Sweet. He hit almost, uh, 400, had more extra base hits than singles. Sweet. And one home run. The only one, uh, the only freshman with a homer. Yeah. And he hit the wall eight times and led the team in rbis. So I guess that’s good. Perfect.

Carson Gross: That’s pretty darn good. Okay. Sounds good. Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I was like, this seems good.

Thumbs up. All right. Yeah, I don’t know.

Carson Gross: Yeah, he’s, he, uh, it sounds like he’s a great baseball player and one of the crazy things in baseball is that, you know, the best baseball player on the high school team is like, never even gonna get a [00:52:00] look at like, minor league baseball,

Chuck Carpenter: right? Yeah. It’s just not just the nature of it.

It’s

Carson Gross: incredible. It’s such an incredibly specific sport, and you definitely see, you see this in programming to an extent, but I’ve, I’ve seen a lot of it now in baseball too, where the, the tails, just the variance gets so high out at the tails. This is one thing that’s hard. I think programmers, you know, pretty smart group and like anytime you start.

Sort of getting out on the tails of anything. The variance gets super high and it can be really depressing because you just are around like two or three people that are so much better than you. Even though you’re good, you’re way better than most people. They’re like these two or three people that are just so vastly better than you because the variance is so high out at that tail that uh, it can be a little bit depressing.

It’s one reason why I think a lot of smarter people are unhappy is because they, they get into these situations where there’s like always one or two people that are just way, way better than everyone. And it, you know, if you’re used to being the smart person, well, you know, you get the consequences of that.

So I see that in [00:53:00] baseball for sure. I had a story I tell is my kid was a pretty good ball player. My oldest son, he actually, that’s a long story, but um, he doesn’t play anymore. I think he was 11 and he was playing in an all-star game. And this kid comes up who’s like, just massive, you know, my kid’s like normal size and this kid comes up, he’s massive.

He hit three home runs in this game against us. Yeah. And when he hit the third home run, he’s like running around his whole team’s going nuts and whatever. The third base coach like turns to me and said, that kid doesn’t practice baseball. He comes out to play, he comes out to play because he wants to hang out with his friends who were on this team.

And he was just this incredible athlete who just, you know, and it’s like, okay. Like that’s, yeah, I get it. Yeah. That’s the way it is. Like they’re just people that are really, and that’s true in programming. It’s true. You know, and just, and anytime when you get, it’s an unfortunate consequence of getting good at something, you’re gonna be around these people that just are absolute beasts that whatever you’re trying Yeah.

Trying to do. Yeah. So it can be a little frustrating.

Robbie Wagner: I’m, [00:54:00] I am curious about like, is it like golf where like it has nothing to do with like how muscular you are or how hard you can hit? It’s like the technique? Or is it like, is there any benefit to like working out a lot or like, I. I don’t know how it works.

Carson Gross: Yeah. I don’t want to say there’s no benefit to being strong. There’s quick twitch, like there’s the, the hand to eye, which I don’t think can really be taught too much. There’s a lot of nature in hand to eye. That’s what I see is like the hand to eye because you can work out as much as you want and it’s not gonna make you a good baseball player.

On the other hand, obviously being bigger and stronger, like bigger, stronger kids hit the ball further and throw the ball harder. So it helps. It’s not like, well, I don’t know. I don’t know their sports well enough to say, but, and, and wrestling for sure, being big and strong didn’t guarantee anything. So it’s similar in that regard.

Like technique matters a lot, but it’s not practicable like some of it to me anyways. Yeah, as far as I can tell, it isn’t really practicable. It’s like you, the kid just knows how to. Throw a striker knows how to hit a ball real hard or doesn’t. [00:55:00] That sucks. ‘cause you get these kids like, and I, you know, especially in youth baseball, you’re like rooting so hard for these kids that just want it so bad.

And it’s like, you know, man, I’m sorry. It’s not gonna happen for you. Yeah. It’s not happening for you. And you need that

Chuck Carpenter: leap in natural aptitude. And it’s rare enough that you also also also have a work ethic and maybe you decide to work out a little bit because I think that’s what Tiger brought to golf originally.

‘cause he was like so good and just like killing it in college and whatever else. And then he started lifting and then he just started like just taking his distance that much further, you know? Yeah. It was just like, you’re already awesome now. This is how you just leapfrog everybody.

Carson Gross: Yeah. You can be a good baseball player without a lot of natural talent, but you can’t be, you can’t play college ball without a huge amount of natural talent.

Yeah. And let alone semi-pro or pro ball.

Chuck Carpenter: I wanna take it back just briefly. Another like little whatever question that we ask. So outside of obviously HT [00:56:00] MX and your obsession there and, and react, of course you love, react, um, love, react. Are there any other Yeah, the old React, are there any other developers or projects you’re really interested in right now?

Carson Gross: I don’t, I won’t talk about hyper script, which is my scripting language. I’m interested in that, but that’s not, that’s not that interesting. Probably I, you know, some like, I like a, some of the libraries that kind of quote unquote compete with HTMX. So UN is a great library that’s been around for a long time.

It’s similar to HTMX in that, it’s hypermedia oriented, but it’s a very different take on it. It’s much more batteries included. Library, whereas HTMX is very raw, it basically just makes it possible to make links and forms, you know, out of anything and then replace small parts of the screen. Whereas UN is a much more structured library, it’s, it’s really focused on progressive enhancement.

So it really takes that aspect of web development very seriously. And so, you know, I tell people if you want progressive enhancement, like on Paul’s a better [00:57:00] choice, you have to work at it with HTMX because it’s so low level and raw. Whereas on Paul is just more geared towards it. And, uh, it has like this notion of layers and so.

If the client, if your browser has JavaScript enabled, you can do sort of like popover type things, like with very easy, like it’s very easy to do that. Whereas with HTMX, there’s no notion of that at all. And so you have to do that yourself if you’re gonna do it. And then that notion of popovers, if the person has JavaScript disabled, it will just be full page refreshes.

And so everything kind of still works. And so that’s a, it’s just, it’s a different take. The guy who worked on it is a, a great guy, actually just put up an interview on HTMX with him about sort of the history of on poly. So I’m excited about that. There’s another library that’s similar to HTMX called Data Star, which was created by someone who came in and actually he wanted to, at first he wanted to rewrite HTMX in TypeScript.

Like that was his big thing. He sort of came in. Oh, right, yeah. And I was like, eh, we’re not doing [00:58:00] that. Yeah. And so he did the right thing. He went and created his own version of it, and that’s really focused on, I think server sent events and, and then he uses what, what are called out-of-band swaps where you sort of specify in the.

A content that comes back, here’s the ID to replace in that content. And so that can make things much more dynamic. And if you have, he’s a go programmer. And so in that environment you have, uh, service and event support like is really well baked into Go. And so for him, it’s a very productive system for, for building hyper media.

It’s still a HYPERMEDIA driven app, but it’s a very different flavor than HTMX kind of mixes together. HTMX and Alpine. I’m excited about those two. Those are the two that stick out in my mind to mention. I’m, there’s a lot of like really retro, kind of like simpler games and like sort of, I, I think there’s a big opportunity.

We were talking about this after Big Sky devcon and both in software and in hardware to sort of back off on the, trying to be like the [00:59:00] photorealistic. You know. Oh, yeah. Or like the, the, like, everything’s a MacBook now, right? Like, you know, to take the, the floppy disc thing with HTMX, like, wouldn’t it be cool if like, that was actually a thing, like the, the things were things again, instead of everybody’s got this like super thin MacBook or MacBook clone and everything’s downloaded over the web and, you know, or over the net and like, there’s no, there’s no things anymore.

It’s just this one little, you know, I don’t know. I think it’d be cool if like, there was a sort of return to, to like more differentiation in software and in hardware. Like, let’s just try something a little crazy and maybe like, have some physical, like physical push buttons and stuff like that.

Robbie Wagner: Have you seen analog That’s like making analog now I need

Carson Gross: to look at it.

Robbie Wagner: They make like they’re remaking all the older consoles. So like I have their Super Nintendo and I think they’re putting out it N 64 this year sometime. And it’s all this like. Uses the original cartridges, but it like, oh, doubles the resolution and you can just still [01:00:00] play it with the old controllers, whatever, and like, but a normal tv because you have

Chuck Carpenter: resolution issues there.

Yeah. So that’s, I think Carson would prefer an Atari 2,600, but, well, they’ve made,

Robbie Wagner: I don’t know what all they’ve made, but they, they’re kind of limited. So like they’ll do a console and they’ll make like, I don’t know, a thousand or I don’t know how many they make, and then they’re just like, done. Oh, wow.

Yeah. So it’s, if you don’t get one and it’s the console you wanted, you’re kind of screwed. So

Chuck Carpenter: yeah, that makes the secondary market like probably crazy. Yeah.

Carson Gross: Yeah, I bet. Yeah, that like, I don’t know, I’m kind of wandering from that original question, which was software oriented, but I feel like there’s, and HD MX falls into this too, like this sort of like look back at the past, not just as like, like bad ideas, but like maybe there’s some cool stuff there too.

You know, like old lisp machines. Like that’d be cool to check out like an old list machine and see how it works and like what’s the cool stuff this thing can do that like, you know, these old gray beards were like complaining about like the new stuff. There’s some

Chuck Carpenter: irony there too, [01:01:00] saying that now. But I do think, I know that there’s something to be said about like, can we not retire technology every five years?

Can you go to the library and get a pool? Yeah. Stability is

Robbie Wagner: actually nice

Chuck Carpenter: sometimes.

Carson Gross: Yeah. Stability. And also, I don’t know, the past doesn’t have to be oppositional and like dead, you know? Mm-Hmm. Like, I think it’s healthy when there’s like, uh, you know, even references to the past, like in software. Like I feel like I’m going off on a tangent here again, but I just, I, I like this idea of like going back and looking at stuff and being like, man, that was cool.

Like, you know, and it doesn’t have to just be nostalgia. It doesn’t have to just be this like dead, oh, just so synth wave. Do you guys know synth wave? Like, I don’t know, like synth wave music? Synth wave music? Is this kind of, it’s a genre. It’s, it’s, you know, electronic music. Yeah. But it’s basically sort of like a.

It, it takes sort of nineties riffs, so a lot of like guitar, like 90 or eighties and nineties style guitar and then integrates it into, you know, fairly [01:02:00] standard electronic music. And I just think it’s a great mix. It’s like, yeah, this is like modern coding music that like I can throw on and kind of get in the zone to, but it also has this sort of reference to like a cool era, obviously is when I was young.

So that’s what I like. But, but I, I think that’s cool. There’s another guy, boy, this is getting really out, out there, but Pavlov Stellar, I think is his name. And he takes, he takes like 19, 20 swing music and then sets that to electronic music and it’s like sweet. I don’t really like swing music that much and I don’t really like electronic music that much, but he took those tunes.

But somehow

Chuck Carpenter: this is working.

Carson Gross: It was awesome. Like there’s one he is got that’s, she’s got this sweet tuba line in it, and I’m just like, man, that tuba is crushing right now. I’ll listen to that. I’ll listen to that song all day. You don’t hear

Chuck Carpenter: that often these days. I don’t think you hear that that often in these last 50 years.

Can you imagine like Robert Plan being Robert Plant being like, tuba, that’s crushing. You

Carson Gross: know what? This track needs more tuba. More tuba, more

Chuck Carpenter: cowbell, you know, [01:03:00] more tuba.

Carson Gross: But it’s, it’s a great track. I don’t know what

Robbie Wagner: to

Carson Gross: say.

Robbie Wagner: Yeah. All right. We are over time here. Uh, is there stuff you wanna plug before we end?

Carson Gross: HTM x.org is the htm x website twitter.com/or I guess x.com. twitter.com. BB Twitter, Twitter twitter.com. Twitter com. H tmx org is my Twitter account, which is I hope funny. And then Hypermedia Systems is where the book is, so you can check. Don’t

Chuck Carpenter: forget big sky dev com. Big Sky will be five. You want 20? 25?

Carson Gross: Yeah, 20, 25. Next year we’re definitely gonna do it again. It won’t be as HTMX focused, I don’t think. ‘cause there’s just not that much to say about it. But it was a lot of fun. And Bozeman’s very pretty, which, where, where it is is a very pretty place. Although maybe we’ll have it somewhere else. I don’t know.

Maybe we can move it somewhere else in the state up in Kalispell or something like that.

Robbie Wagner: All right. Uh, thanks everyone for listening. If you liked it, please subscribe. Leave us some ratings and reviews. We appreciate it and we will catch you next time.

Outro: [01:04:00] You’ve been watching Whiskey Web and Whatnot. Recorded in front of a live studio audience. What the fuck are you talking about, Chuck? Enjoyed the show? Subscribe. You know, people don’t pay attention to these, right? Head to whiskey.fund for merchant to join our Discord server. I’m serious, it’s like 2% of people who actually click these links. And don’t forget to leave us a five star review and tell your friends about the show. All right, dude, I’m outta here. Still got it.