RobbieTheWagner 
Charles William Carpenter III 
Aaron Francis [00:00:00] Intro: 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.
[00:00:27] Intro: I mean, it’s all in the name. It’s not that deep. This is Whiskey Web and Whatnot. Do not adjust your set.
[00:00:36] Chuck Carpenter: Uh,
[00:00:42] Chuck Carpenter: that’s a completely original name. In no way taken, if you see another podcast that starts with Mostly, they, uh, they ripped us off. It’s bullshit. We will sue. So, our lawyers are standing by.
[00:00:57] Robbie Wagner: Yes.
[00:00:58] Aaron Francis: You can call business, [00:01:00] dad. Good luck with
[00:01:00] Chuck Carpenter: It’s business time.
[00:01:02] Robbie Wagner: but in all seriousness, uh, yes, that joke is at the expense of Aaron Francis, our guest today. Hey, Aaron, how’s it going? Nice.
[00:01:16] Aaron Francis: to go. This is great. I love it. Sure.
[00:01:19] Robbie Wagner: like probably anyone watching this. Has heard of you, but in case they haven’t, do you want to give a few sentences about who you are and what you do?
[00:01:27] Aaron Francis: Sure. Uh, I’ll give you. Potentially up to three sentences. Let’s see. so my name is Aaron Francis. Uh, I am a dad of four children, two sets of twins, if you can believe it. , historically by trade, I’ve been a Laravel developer. , but starting about a year ago, my friend Steve and I started our own company where we do, , Primarily developer education.
[00:01:52] Aaron Francis: So we’ve done a course on SQL Light on Postgres. Uh, we released a guest course today on Rails. , and we’re [00:02:00] working on a course@screencasting.com, kind of a re a refresh of that course. So lots of developer education, lots of open source work, lots of databases, lots of Laravel, that sort of stuff.
[00:02:11] Chuck Carpenter: you did have a follow up for, so your company is TryHardStudios Robby is obsessed, so let me just say this, but he wants to know if you were influenced by Ryan Reynolds with the name of that company. Yes.
[00:02:24] Aaron Francis: Yes. Yes, of course. I think I wrote at least one blog post and many, many tweets. It was very, , very much on brand that I was in my maximum effort era. And that was, uh, directly inspired by the name of his company. And then when it came time to start a company, I was like, man, That sucks.
[00:02:44] Aaron Francis: He’s got the good one. , and so we kind of like thought about it and we’re like, oh, we could get pretty adjacent And kind of reclaim the you know, the try hard thing as a notion for good and so that’s what we did But yeah, I totally love Ryan Reynolds and everything he does
[00:02:59] Robbie Wagner: Uh, So [00:03:00] do we, we have the Ryan Reynolds fan club stickers for this show.
[00:03:05] Aaron Francis: Amazing.
[00:03:06] Robbie Wagner: send they look like the
[00:03:07] Chuck Carpenter: Rexum, uh, crest kinda and then, yeah. If I can convince Robby, we’ll make soccer jerseys too, but we’ll see. He’s like, I don’t really like jerseys.
[00:03:16] Aaron Francis: Oh, that’s amazing
[00:03:17] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, that’s what he sounds
[00:03:19] Aaron Francis: good
[00:03:19] Chuck Carpenter: I don’t know. It’s, uh, I’ve been working on that. You know, it’s part of my, uh, next season’s material. But, uh, speaking of,
[00:03:28] Chuck Carpenter: , funny stuff or whatever, let’s talk about the whiskey a little bit. Today we’re having Green River Full Proof Bourbon.
[00:03:34] Chuck Carpenter: It is a 117. 3, so it is not for the meek of heart. it is a mash bill of 70 percent corn, 21 percent rye, and 9 percent malted barley. It is not age stated, but some things that I found, , in press releases said it’s a blend of 5 to 7 year old bourbons. So, not too shabby. , and, uh, apparently Aaron’s been drinking for the last 30 to 40 minutes, so I don’t know.
[00:03:57] Aaron Francis: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Don’t, don’t speak that [00:04:00] upon me. I poured my drink ahead of time so that I could be focused on the
[00:04:04] Aaron Francis: content.
[00:04:05] Chuck Carpenter: Yes,
[00:04:05] Robbie Wagner: and we’re drinking this out of Norlin glasses. Check out, uh,
[00:04:10] Robbie Wagner: I always forget their
[00:04:10] Robbie Wagner: website. I should
[00:04:12] Chuck Carpenter: Norlin Gla N O R L O
[00:04:14] Chuck Carpenter: N. I think it is.
[00:04:16] Robbie Wagner: I wanna,
[00:04:16] Robbie Wagner: I always want to say Norlin Glasses,
[00:04:19] Robbie Wagner: so, um,
[00:04:20] Robbie Wagner: Can, can you check, cause I, my, uh, browser
[00:04:22] Robbie Wagner: is
[00:04:22] Robbie Wagner: in this tiny
[00:04:23] Chuck Carpenter: I’ll do that. .Yeah, I’ll do that, uh, briefly. And uh, luckily they don’t pay us for this, so,
[00:04:30] Robbie Wagner: Well, they, yeah, they just give, give
[00:04:32] Robbie Wagner: us classes.
[00:04:33] Chuck Carpenter: yeah. Which is nice and generous. No shade on that. But Norland glass, it is norland glass.com. N-O-R-L-A-N-G-L-A-S
[00:04:43] Chuck Carpenter: s.com.
[00:04:45] Robbie Wagner: All right, so go there for really good glasses We actually used these well before they sent them to us. We are big fans of these Um, so I reached out to them and was like, hey We love these can we send them to everyone else and make them love them too? And they were like possibly [00:05:00] so
[00:05:00] Aaron Francis: Well,
[00:05:00] Aaron Francis: that’s cool.
[00:05:01] Chuck Carpenter: and thus far they have been. Are you a whiskey person, Aaron?
[00:05:04] Aaron Francis: I historically have been more of a whiskey person, although the past probably five years I’ve been a gin person. So,
[00:05:13] Aaron Francis: this is, this is bringing me back.
[00:05:15] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, I like gin too, gin is really fun, and, uh, the, whoo,
[00:05:21] Chuck Carpenter: not
[00:05:21] Chuck Carpenter: gen, gin,
[00:05:24] Chuck Carpenter: maybe you should go, you know, go over to Britain, there’s a lot of gin there, whoo, that’s got some heat,
[00:05:30] Aaron Francis: I make a lot of, yeah, it’s, uh, it is, um, I make a lot of Negronis at home. That’s my go to drink at
[00:05:37] Aaron Francis: home.
[00:05:37] Chuck Carpenter: we are twins, apparently. Just not
[00:05:39] Aaron Francis: Are we?
[00:05:40] Chuck Carpenter: Well, I love Negronis. That’s probably my favorite cocktail. most of the cocktails I like the best are actually gin based. That and The Last Word.
[00:05:48] Aaron Francis: Last word. Great. Love a last
[00:05:51] Aaron Francis: word.
[00:05:52] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. Robbie’s always trying to get a Last Word. But I’m tr I also heard something
[00:05:57] Chuck Carpenter: too, but
[00:05:58] Robbie Wagner: to get
[00:05:58] Robbie Wagner: words in you
[00:05:59] Chuck Carpenter: I know.
[00:05:59] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. [00:06:00] Yeah, that too.
[00:06:01] Chuck Carpenter: Somebody on a recent episode was mentioning, so I, I’m moving my family overseas in the summer. Is that something
[00:06:08] Chuck Carpenter: you, uh, no, I, I would like freedom, actually, and the best I could do, as my wife said, she would go stay in Italy if, uh, that’s where I sent her, so. It’ll be great. are you planning to move overseas or something?
[00:06:21] Chuck Carpenter: Somebody said, oh, Aaron Francis is doing that. And I’m like, okay, I wouldn’t know. No? Never.
[00:06:26] Aaron Francis: Not a chance. before we had kids. So before we had kids, this was probably goodness 2017 maybe something like that. my wife and I both worked remotely and we did move to Paris for three months. So we were just like, Why don’t we go? And 90 days was the longest you could go without any sort of like complicated visa or anything.
[00:06:52] Aaron Francis: We just, we had a, like a, a friend of a friend live in our house. It was like, he was up here on a summer internship and we’re like, [00:07:00] sure, can you stay here and watch our dog? We’re going to go to Paris. And so we did that for three months and it was like, Absolutely amazing. And we’ve talked about, we’ve talked about going back, but given the state of, , the ages of our family, that’s not in the cards for a little while.
[00:07:16] Chuck Carpenter: Alright, well, fair enough, see. That
[00:07:20] Robbie Wagner: plus you need a lot of plane tickets.
[00:07:22] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah.
[00:07:22] Aaron Francis: Yeah.
[00:07:24] Chuck Carpenter: I don’t know, are any lap children at this point?
[00:07:26] Aaron Francis: We still have two that are under two, so, but, I’m sorry to the children, I’m not flying to Europe with four kids under four.
[00:07:35] Chuck Carpenter: No,
[00:07:36] Aaron Francis: I’ll go to
[00:07:37] Robbie Wagner: would not
[00:07:37] Robbie Wagner: recommend,
[00:07:38] Aaron Francis: will
[00:07:38] Aaron Francis: go to Europe, but we’re not all
[00:07:40] Aaron Francis: going to Europe.
[00:07:40] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. Uh huh. Uh huh. Uh
[00:07:42] Chuck Carpenter: huh. Doesn’t sound great.
[00:07:43] Chuck Carpenter: All right, gonna come back to the whiskey a little bit. So,
[00:07:46] Robbie Wagner: Yes, so I have very specific descriptors to the smell. It smells like, you know when you have a circular saw and you cut through some wood and you get that like, dust? it’s like that mixed [00:08:00] with banana. Like if your board was made of banana and
[00:08:03] Aaron Francis: sawdust.
[00:08:04] Robbie Wagner: Yep
[00:08:05] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. Which, you know, in theory doesn’t sound very appealing, but, uh, I
[00:08:10] Aaron Francis: it tastes a lot better than banana sawdust. I just kind of have to like tell everybody
[00:08:16] Aaron Francis: that,
[00:08:17] Chuck Carpenter: yeah, put that out in the world that,
[00:08:18] Aaron Francis: Sorry, sorry to Green River, Kentucky Straight Bourbon, but
[00:08:23] Aaron Francis: it’s banana sawdust
[00:08:24] Aaron Francis: now.
[00:08:24] Chuck Carpenter: it’s banana sawdust
[00:08:26] Chuck Carpenter: yeah. So,
[00:08:27] Chuck Carpenter: I don’t know. Yeah, I had, uh, read some great things about this online in Whiskey Nerd Circles, and so I’ve been wanting to try it for a little while. yeah, I’m not even gonna comment on smell, because now Robby’s very much tainted the smell for me. I, I did pick up on the, like, kind of sawdust right away, but, uh, flavor
[00:08:46] Aaron Francis: not the banana. So
[00:08:47] Chuck Carpenter: not as much
[00:08:48] Chuck Carpenter: bananas. not for me. Maybe a
[00:08:50] Chuck Carpenter: banana peel.
[00:08:52] Robbie Wagner: my son has been very into this, uh banana Bubbles like in the bath we play with them and it’s like a [00:09:00] lot like that scent so maybe not like actual banana,
[00:09:02] Robbie Wagner: but like Yeah.
[00:09:04] Aaron Francis: Yeah.
[00:09:05] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah.
[00:09:05] Chuck Carpenter: flavor wise, I’m getting a bit of like, a little, like, creme brulee. Actually,
[00:09:12] Chuck Carpenter: so, Yeah
[00:09:18] Aaron Francis: But it’s, it’s possible. That’s
[00:09:20] Aaron Francis: a, that’s a me problem.
[00:09:21] Chuck Carpenter: It’s always subjective. Yeah,
[00:09:23] Chuck Carpenter: what
[00:09:23] Aaron Francis: I’m getting, I’m getting strong notes of whiskey is what I’m getting. And
[00:09:27] Aaron Francis: that’s
[00:09:27] Aaron Francis: about,
[00:09:28] Robbie Wagner: I get about as, yeah,
[00:09:29] Aaron Francis: as far as, as far as I’m
[00:09:31] Aaron Francis: able to go, uh.
[00:09:32] Chuck Carpenter: I don’t know, I’m not getting whiskey in there at all. Maybe like old tire, streaks.
[00:09:37] Aaron Francis: You’ll, you’ll find that I’m, in many ways, the, uh, quintessential Normie. And so when I taste this, I
[00:09:44] Aaron Francis: think, This tastes like whiskey.
[00:09:46] Chuck Carpenter: it
[00:09:46] Chuck Carpenter: does.
[00:09:46] Aaron Francis: And that’s about as, that’s about as far as I can go. But it’s quite good, so I’ll, I will
[00:09:50] Aaron Francis: give it that.
[00:09:51] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah.
[00:09:53] Chuck Carpenter: we like to assign arbitrary adjectives anyway, to have the conversation seem more interesting, but it does, in the end, [00:10:00] taste
[00:10:01] Aaron Francis: Tastes like
[00:10:01] Chuck Carpenter: like whiskey. Yeah, it’s definitely whiskey. I don’t confuse this with tequila at all, or diet Dr. Pepper, um, neither of those things. It doesn’t evoke those for me.
[00:10:12] Robbie Wagner: flavors.
[00:10:13] Chuck Carpenter: No. I don’t even think
[00:10:15] Aaron Francis: the two.
[00:10:16] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, yeah. Um, I, I don’t. Yes, banana salt. That’s not the flavor.
[00:10:22] Robbie Wagner: Announcing my new distillery, Banana Sawdust. Check out our products in
[00:10:25] Robbie Wagner: four years when they’re
[00:10:26] Robbie Wagner: ready.
[00:10:26] Aaron Francis: Good luck.
[00:10:27] Chuck Carpenter: That’s like, that’s like a good horse racing name or something, you know, horse, like a racing horse. Bananasauldust and Zen 3rd coming around the corner, Bananasauldust now takes over, you know. I wasn’t drinking before this, I don’t really know.
[00:10:40] Chuck Carpenter: , so We should describe our scale though. You probably are ready for the scale, the rating.
[00:10:46] Chuck Carpenter: A highly technical scale for whiskey rating. It is zero to eight tentacles. Zero being terrible, you threw this out. Four is middle of the road, you know, not that bad. Eight is amazing, clear the [00:11:00] shelves. Green River can’t keep up with your consumption. Yeah, you can noodle on that one. Robbie will go first.
[00:11:05] Chuck Carpenter: He likes it. It’s the only way
[00:11:07] Aaron Francis: first.
[00:11:08] Robbie Wagner: I forget
[00:11:08] Robbie Wagner: what you said the Nashville was,
[00:11:09] Robbie Wagner: is this just,
[00:11:10] Chuck Carpenter: Uh,
[00:11:11] Chuck Carpenter: 70 percent
[00:11:11] Chuck Carpenter: corn, 21 percent rye, 9 percent malted barley.
[00:11:15] Robbie Wagner: All right. All right. Um, yeah. So for that, pretty good. , it’s a little spicier than a typical bourbon, probably because of the rhyme. I like that. And it’s, it just feels very balanced to me. Like it’s not too sweet, not too spicy.
[00:11:28] Robbie Wagner: I’m gonna give this one a seven. I think pretty good.
[00:11:31] Chuck Carpenter: Okay, so as not to taint your opinion, Aaron, do you feel ready to go next?
[00:11:36] Aaron Francis: yeah, I feel ready to go next. it is very much above average. I don’t think they need to, , ramp up production on my account, so I will say. It’s a solid
[00:11:48] Aaron Francis: six.
[00:11:49] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, we’ll try again.
[00:11:51] Aaron Francis: Well, I do have to say the downward pressure applied is because of, , it being whiskey and not gin. So unfamiliar with what could [00:12:00] be the top of the mountain. So maybe that maybe this is the top. Maybe this is, maybe this is an eight
[00:12:04] Aaron Francis: and my scales broken.
[00:12:06] Chuck Carpenter: well, I mean, as far as your memory serves, when you were drinking more whiskey, what was your favorite?
[00:12:12] Aaron Francis: Again, back to the, the sophistication thing. It was usually just bullet. that was usually it. Just kind of like right down the middle, normie guy, in my mid to late 20s,
[00:12:23] Aaron Francis: bullet.
[00:12:25] Robbie Wagner: Solid choice.
[00:12:26] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, it’s something that’s very accessible, price point is good, yeah, it’s tasty. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. Would you rather have, well, I guess you might not know, you need to go try some Bullet again and see where it sits with you now. Because that’s the thing, is over time, some, you know, your palate changes, you’ve been drinking all this gin, come back to a bullet, and you’re like, uh, maybe not so much.
[00:12:45] Aaron Francis: Yeah, that’s a good question. Now that, now that I’m a, a man of the world, I might have different
[00:12:49] Aaron Francis: tastes.
[00:12:50] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, yeah, you’re moving on up. , sO, yeah, I like this quite a bit. , I also like, I believe it was somewhere around 50, 60 [00:13:00] bucks, so it’s not crazy in terms of approachability. I like a higher proof. This is a little hot for me, oddly enough. , Once you start to hit, , over 115 to 120, then maybe I’m putting some drops of water in here typically, but, uh, would definitely have again.
[00:13:18] Chuck Carpenter: , hopefully I don’t chug this bottle tonight, but, you know, life is depressing, it’s hard to say. And, uh, so I
[00:13:25] Aaron Francis: Ooh.
[00:13:25] Chuck Carpenter: going to give it like a, yeah, I know weird. 6. 8. I’m going to give it a 6. 8.
[00:13:30] Aaron Francis: Oh! We’re doing
[00:13:32] Aaron Francis: a decimal.
[00:13:33] Aaron Francis: I didn’t realize that
[00:13:34] Aaron Francis: was, I didn’t realize that was in
[00:13:35] Aaron Francis: play. Wow.
[00:13:37] Chuck Carpenter: I’m glad you’re buying it. , because I mean, the whole thing is bullshit.
[00:13:42] Aaron Francis: Yeah,
[00:13:43] Aaron Francis: yeah.
[00:13:43] Aaron Francis: That’s much of the world, in fact. You can
[00:13:46] Aaron Francis: just do whatever you
[00:13:47] Aaron Francis: want
[00:13:48] Robbie Wagner: Mm-hmm . Unless you get caught.
[00:13:50] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, but if you want to change your rating based on that now knowing that you can go six and a half you
[00:13:56] Aaron Francis: Yeah, now that I know fractions are in play, I’ll bump it [00:14:00] to a six
[00:14:00] Aaron Francis: and a half, for
[00:14:01] Aaron Francis: sure.
[00:14:02] Chuck Carpenter: yeah nice. Well, I hope you continue to enjoy it
[00:14:06] Chuck Carpenter: then
[00:14:06] Aaron Francis: I do have to drive home, so I won’t enjoy it to its fullest, but I
[00:14:10] Aaron Francis: will continue
[00:14:12] Chuck Carpenter: a, you got a healthy, uh, pore there. So, you know, you probably just
[00:14:16] Aaron Francis: Yeah, that’s probably an oopsie doopsie on my part, but, uh,
[00:14:20] Aaron Francis: we’ll see.
[00:14:21] Chuck Carpenter: Yes, I forget about that. Yeah, like you had the clever idea of rather than renting an office, you rented an apartment and converted that into like studio
[00:14:31] Chuck Carpenter: office. I was like, that is very clever. I was very impressed by that.
[00:14:36] Aaron Francis: Well, thank you. Yeah, this behind me is a false wall. , in some ways it is a real wall. It is a 2x4 stud wall. , however, it is, uh, propped in front of the windows that, , belong to this bedroom in this apartment where I am currently working. , at the time, we had two two year olds and two newborns, and I was like, This ain’t gonna work.
[00:14:58] Aaron Francis: And so I started [00:15:00] looking around at like office space and here in Dallas, they’re very proud of their office space. , and what I needed was a little bit different than what was being offered. What was being offered was a lot of like coworking spaces and share a desk. And here’s a 10 by 10 room that will, , make you depressed and what I needed was a lot more space to like set all of this up and leave it and so I just, there are just apartment complexes everywhere around us and so this is like three minutes from my house and it’s got a kitchen and a bathroom and a gym and a pool that the family
[00:15:33] Aaron Francis: uses.
[00:15:34] Aaron Francis: It’s like, oh it’s kind of great. Yeah, that’s a nice side effect benefits. Yeah, I haven’t seen a coworking space yet that offers a pool.
[00:15:43] Aaron Francis: No. It’s uh, it’s really a wide open market. I’ve, I have actually thought that like If I were, oh I don’t know, if I were like more of a robber baron, I’m trying to like embody this robber baron mindset, but only the good parts of [00:16:00] course. If I were more of that, I would build out like a full complex that’s like work from home, but it’s places like this that are meant to be offices.
[00:16:11] Aaron Francis: And so instead of just having like this, you know, bleak office park, it’s like, you get a, You know, a kitchen and a bathroom and like not a bedroom, but a room like an office where you can work and there are shared amenities and stuff like that. I just think with people working from home, there’s still an unmet real estate need, but uh, real estate costs a lot of money.
[00:16:34] Aaron Francis: I don’t have a lot of money. So that’s kind of where I stopped.
[00:16:38] Chuck Carpenter: wow.
[00:16:38] Robbie Wagner: call it a working space instead of a co working
[00:16:41] Robbie Wagner: space. Because you’re
[00:16:42] Robbie Wagner: just
[00:16:42] Aaron Francis: Oh, that’s, that’s inspired. Yeah. Well, maybe we’ll, maybe we’ll let it bake a little longer, but a working space, it’s a good start.
[00:16:50] Aaron Francis: It’s a great
[00:16:51] Aaron Francis: start.
[00:16:52] Chuck Carpenter: a
[00:16:52] Chuck Carpenter: doing space, uh, we could dumb it down a little with like a, it’s a doer space. Like they have
[00:16:58] Aaron Francis: I like
[00:16:58] Chuck Carpenter: spaces or something? You’re a [00:17:00]
[00:17:00] Aaron Francis: I thought about calling it, the home office. I felt like that was kind of cheeky, you know, it’s kind of like, Oh yeah, I’m working out of the home office.
[00:17:07] Aaron Francis: Oh, it’s your house. No, no, no. The home office.
[00:17:09] Chuck Carpenter: The
[00:17:10] Robbie Wagner: It’s like when you have a bar and you call it the library.
[00:17:13] Aaron Francis: Exactly. That’s exactly
[00:17:14] Aaron Francis: right.
[00:17:15] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. Alright, should we go to some hot takes? I know
[00:17:19] Chuck Carpenter: you’re itching.
[00:17:21] Robbie Wagner: These, these old lukewarm takes, we
[00:17:24] Chuck Carpenter: let’s just skip those. You could skip the lukewarm ones, you know.
[00:17:27] Robbie Wagner: Well, which, which of them are actually hot? I mean, I guess the last couple are kind of relevant, but, I don’t know. I’m going to start at two. We’re going to skip one for
[00:17:35] Robbie Wagner: the rest of time.
[00:17:36] Chuck Carpenter: He doesn’t know how many’s
[00:17:37] Chuck Carpenter: on this list, by the way, so you could
[00:17:39] Robbie Wagner: I
[00:17:39] Robbie Wagner: know I’m telling you, Chuck,
[00:17:40] Aaron Francis: So far, this means nothing to me, but I’m very excited.
[00:17:44] Robbie Wagner: Tailwind or vanilla CSS.
[00:17:46] Aaron Francis: Obviously. Next question.
[00:17:49] Aaron Francis: Ha ha ha
[00:17:50] Robbie Wagner: No
[00:17:50] Aaron Francis: wait, wait. wait Oh, yeah,
[00:17:51] Aaron Francis: Okay, so I guess it’s not obvious. Tailwind.
[00:17:53] Aaron Francis: Obviously.
[00:17:54] Chuck Carpenter: I mean, I thought so, but you
[00:17:56] Aaron Francis: Hundred percent. Every time.
[00:17:58] Chuck Carpenter: they’re assuming. Yeah,
[00:17:59] Aaron Francis: [00:18:00] Yeah, if you assume, then you’ll pick Tailwind CSS every time. Tailwind clearly far and away the best way to write CSS.
[00:18:10] Aaron Francis: Separations of concerns, not applicable here. The separation of concerns does not mean separation of files. We can just say that. the notion that you’re going to switch out your entire look and feel of your website without touching your HTML. Adorable. It’s the same notion that like, you’re going to switch out your entire database.
[00:18:31] Aaron Francis: And so you need to write everything in the repository pattern because one day you might need to switch from mysql to postgres and won’t you be so glad you have this level of indirection in the middle. Not gonna happen. So.
[00:18:43] Chuck Carpenter: does that. No one
[00:18:44] Aaron Francis: No one does that. No one should do that. No one has ever done that. Tailwind CSS.
[00:18:52] Chuck Carpenter: this one might be spicier, we’ll see. , get rebase or get merge?
[00:18:57] Aaron Francis: git desktop. I don’t
[00:18:59] Aaron Francis: know. [00:19:00] I use github’s desktop client. And I just, I just cowboy git. Whatever the little interface shows me, that’s what I do. So couldn’t tell you. And here’s the, here’s the hottest take. I don’t care. I super
[00:19:14] Aaron Francis: don’t care. The people that are like, Oh, you got to keep the get history pure.
[00:19:19] Aaron Francis: Why? For who? Nobody.
[00:19:22] Aaron Francis: That’s a
[00:19:22] Robbie Wagner: For The sake of
[00:19:23] Robbie Wagner: doing it.
[00:19:24] Chuck Carpenter: The same people who get, rebase get log and get log in chunks and do different formatting things you know, in their terminal. And that is this many people. Like, it’s a
[00:19:33] Aaron Francis: I can, I can count on zero hands. The number of times I’ve done get log
[00:19:37] Chuck Carpenter: Mm
[00:19:38] Robbie Wagner: Yeah, I think I’ve done git log
[00:19:40] Robbie Wagner: twice.
[00:19:42] Aaron Francis: No.
[00:19:42] Chuck Carpenter: same. You both have had very kind co workers in your past, I guess, because
[00:19:48] Robbie Wagner: Well, I got rebase beat into me. , but I still don’t do anything else. Like, I do that, but I don’t use any other git commands. Like, I have to look everything else up [00:20:00] if I need
[00:20:00] Robbie Wagner: it.
[00:20:00] Aaron Francis: you know, I do some open source work and there’s, there are PRs that come up on GitHub. And it is, it is truly just, whichever way the spirit leads is what button I press. Squash and merge? Maybe. Merge? Who knows? We’ll see. It’s just like, I don’t know, I don’t care, as long as it works.
[00:20:18] Aaron Francis: And then, so I’ll merge something, and then I’ll be like, Oh, you know, I should fix something. I’ll come on my desktop, And I’ll do some stuff, and then push it straight to main. It’s like, who cares? I don’t care. This is for libraries. This is for libraries. For applications that are being deployed. I always have main auto deployed, and so I I don’t traditionally do straight to main on applications that I’m deploying, but like my personal website, yeah, I’ll just push straight to main and auto deploys and we’ll find out.
[00:20:48] Aaron Francis: But like our, our course platform, you know, we’ll do PRs and review them and then merge them into main. But I still don’t think main is
[00:20:56] Aaron Francis: protected. I think you can still just straight push to [00:21:00] main. you can push domain,
[00:21:01] Chuck Carpenter: right? Yeah. You’re a small enough team, I’m sure, where it’s like, hey, you broke this. Go fix it right now.
[00:21:10] Aaron Francis: yeah. And I mean, on the other hand, I’ll do when I’m working by myself, I’ll do PRS , and I’m the only person that’s ever seen it. it’s helpful to see that code in a different window. So you open the PR and then you go and you’re like,
[00:21:25] Aaron Francis: Man, did I write that? That’s really stupid. and it’s just like viewing it in a different piece of, uh, you know, Chrome is, is really helpful. So have very few hard and fast rules and around git
[00:21:37] Aaron Francis: I have zero hard and fast
[00:21:39] Aaron Francis: rules. Okay. Fair enough, nothing wrong with that.
[00:21:44] Chuck Carpenter: Alright Robert, what you got? All right, let or const.
[00:21:47] Aaron Francis: PHP.
[00:21:50] Chuck Carpenter: Right. I was gonna say Yeah. a minute.
[00:21:53] Aaron Francis: Don’t know. Don’t
[00:21:54] Aaron Francis: care. Um, I don’t know. It feels like another tinkering at the margins. [00:22:00] I think it’s probably probably const by default. but It’s another place where I’m just like, I don’t know. I don’t really care. The only time that I will care about that is when I think someone else is gonna look at it and judge me.
[00:22:13] Aaron Francis: And so like a lot of this open source work I’ve been doing recently, I’ve been like, what are the JavaScript guys gonna say? I gotta be really careful. I should use Cons.
[00:22:21] Robbie Wagner: Yeah, well, most of what they say is bullshit. So just, just disregard it. I mean, who
[00:22:26] Chuck Carpenter: cares? you know, eh, they argue about a lot of little things. They, I, I will say generally people on the internet like to argue about things that I don’t find very important, including like semi colons at the end or, you know, JS docker type script.
[00:22:48] Aaron Francis: I’m like, I don’t know, man. I don’t know. Do whatever you want.
[00:22:52] Aaron Francis: So Yeah, I mean, uh, the browser can’t read that, so who cares?
[00:22:57] Aaron Francis: who cares?
[00:22:58] Robbie Wagner: and php is very do [00:23:00] whatever you want, so
[00:23:01] Chuck Carpenter: yeah,
[00:23:02] Aaron Francis: PHP is, has been, and will always be the Wild Wild West. And we love it. We love it for that. I will say, PHP 8, you know, some of the 8 series has released a ton more, like, typing stuff. and it’s, you know, it’s been quite nice. I think one of the big things that, like, one of the big disconnects of, , JavaScript and PHP is we don’t pass around, typically, we don’t pass around, like, big, , unshaped data objects as, like, arrays or something.
[00:23:33] Aaron Francis: Because we Like JavaScript have classes, but unlike JavaScript, we use classes. And so like, you basically know, like you have, you have the public interface, you’ve got the behavior, you’ve got the state, it’s all wrapped up in this nice class. And so, you know, you’ll type hint, like to a method, you’ll type hint, like I should receive this interface or I should receive this class.
[00:23:57] Aaron Francis: But that’s kind of. The end of it. Like, we’re not, like, [00:24:00] writing type definitions because we get a lot out of the class based nature of the language.
[00:24:06] Robbie Wagner: I love classes Yeah, oh
[00:24:10] Aaron Francis: This
[00:24:11] Aaron Francis: one time I tweeted about like, Oh wow, did you know in JavaScript, with a class, you can’t like programmatically access a private method?
[00:24:18] Aaron Francis: How interesting! Neat! Let’s all have fun! And then everybody was like, You moron! Why are you using classes
[00:24:25] Aaron Francis: in JavaScript?
[00:24:26] Aaron Francis: And I was like,
[00:24:27] Chuck Carpenter: Because they’re there!
[00:24:28] Chuck Carpenter: And we fought for, like,
[00:24:30] Aaron Francis: 10 years I didn’t invent the language, y’all. I’m just trying to use it. And,
[00:24:35] Aaron Francis: yeah.
[00:24:36] Aaron Francis: People are like, oh, problem number one is using classes. I’m like, great, tell me why.
[00:24:40] Aaron Francis: And nobody could tell me why. They were all just like, ha ha ha, because of
[00:24:44] Aaron Francis: classes, you know what
[00:24:45] Aaron Francis: I mean?
[00:24:45] Chuck Carpenter: Classical Inheritance. They’ll all say it’s Classical Inheritance, and most of them probably never used classes when they got to
[00:24:53] Robbie Wagner: they, yeah, they don’t know why.
[00:24:56] Chuck Carpenter: yeah, They don’t know why. It’s Classical Inheritance, but
[00:24:59] Robbie Wagner: yeah, well, [00:25:00] yes, I mean, if you want to get down to the actual reasons, there are reasons, but if you want to like, think about the easiest developer experience and not care about those reasons, classes are the way to go. And like
[00:25:11] Aaron Francis: State and
[00:25:12] Aaron Francis: behavior all together. That’s great.
[00:25:15] Robbie Wagner: Yeah. Like have it, you can have a thing that you can reason about.
[00:25:18] Robbie Wagner: Cause my big argument is always like, people are like, Oh, here’s these like 15 hooks and react to do this
[00:25:23] Robbie Wagner: thing. And it’s like, well, you’re still reasoning about this as if it were some kind of entity, which could be a class. And then you could like encapsulate all of how it works in that class. Like, what are we even doing here by just showing, Oh, we can do it all with functions.
[00:25:37] Robbie Wagner: Look how cool we are. Like,
[00:25:39] Aaron Francis: Correct.
[00:25:40]
[00:25:45] Chuck Carpenter: Let’s try it. Just one more thing, given what you released today, but, you know, you’re on the orange Lambo train, Rails or Laravel?
[00:25:57] Aaron Francis: I think, obviously, my [00:26:00] choice is Laravel. , I will say We are, uh, co conspirators fighting side by side, Rails and Laravel. Rails and Laravel share a rich history. It’s been, it’s no secret that Laravel has been in part inspired by Rails. , in addition to being inspired by other frameworks, even stuff as far afield as NET.
[00:26:22] Aaron Francis: , which to me is very far afield. I think Laravel has made a few decisions that make it more productive to write Laravel applications. some of those are incidental, and that would be, , Taylor’s Pride and Joy and Source of Money is Laravel. DHH’s Pride and Joy and Source of Money is Basecamp and his cars.
[00:26:44] Aaron Francis: in terms of building out The ecosystem, Laravel is a much more cohesive, coherent, end to end ecosystem because Taylor is solely focused on Laravel and its ecosystem. He [00:27:00] does not have a base camp that makes him 100 million a year. I’m sure he would love to have that, but he doesn’t, right? And so that works out great for us because he continues, he and now the team, continue to make things that make the lives of Laravel developers easier.
[00:27:16] Aaron Francis: And that includes free stuff, right? So that includes, Like in our ecosystem, we’ve got something called Laravel horizon, which the closest corollary in the rails ecosystem would be a sidekick, which is a third party gem. And it is a, , very flexible, very powerful cue driver basically to, you know, spin up multiple key workers and retries and all of that stuff.
[00:27:40] Aaron Francis: Horizon is just totally free. Totally open source, maintained first party by the Laravel team where Sidekick is a commercial open source. So part of it’s free, part of it’s paid, and it’s maintained by this wonderful guy called Mike Perham. No association whatsoever to any sort of Rails core team. And so in the [00:28:00] Laravel ecosystem you get all of these things, that yes are maintained, which I think is important, but more importantly, they have the same sensibilities as the rest of the framework.
[00:28:12] Aaron Francis: And what that lends itself to is something like Laravel Cloud comes along, which will be released in, you know, five days. And, you then have the owners and maintainers of the framework. Fine tuning the framework for cloud and fine tuning cloud for the framework and that’s something that even with Heroku back in its heyday You didn’t get it was outsiders building something for rails And if you wanted to land any patches into rails like go through the normal channels But as we’re watching cloud be about to release you’re seeing commits in the open source repo.
[00:28:45] Aaron Francis: That’s like You know, if Laravel Cloud then do this, and you’re like, Ah, so this is gonna be pretty seamless, because you own the freakin framework! I feel like that’s a big incidental benefit, is that DHH extracted, Rails [00:29:00] from Basecamp. And Taylor built Laravel to build what he thought was going to be multiple SaaS companies.
[00:29:07] Aaron Francis: And ended up actually being multiple SaaS products, but they’re all focused on Laravel. And so the origin story is like a mirror image of itself. But then I think the other extremely crucial, decision was regarding the integration of JavaScript frameworks. DHH is like, no, not once, never. F you guys. And Taylor was like, Great.
[00:29:31] Aaron Francis: All comers are welcome. And so he along with the community developed, you know, inertia, which is this glue between many kinds of backends, Rails included, , and many front end frameworks, Vue, React, Svelte, that sort of stuff. And so Taylor, I think, I think in an abundance of wisdom or maybe an abundance of pragmatism, decided like, people like front end frameworks.
[00:29:56] Aaron Francis: Maybe we should support that. And so [00:30:00] he has made a way for view react and we have our own version of like live view or HTMX or something like that called live wire. , that I think is above and beyond even, you know, live viewer HTMX. It’s quite good. But we have all these like either first or like first and a half party front end frameworks where rails is just kind of like, Hey, we’ve got hotwire and we’ve got stimulus and they kind of work, but they’re not documented.
[00:30:26] Aaron Francis: And if you want to use react like. I don’t know what to tell ya. And so I think, Laravel has made itself, very productive in terms of like, starting with Laravel new on your, on your desktop, and then shipping it all the way to cloud, and giving like, many blessed paths to get there. And so I think, I’m of course biased, but I do think, , if I try to be objective, I think Laravel is probably more productive for a few of those
[00:30:53] Aaron Francis: reasons.
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[00:31:27] Robbie Wagner: I do want to, uh, kind of, expand on that and ask like. So are people typically using Laravel as like shipping the entire application? Like, whereas Rails is used a lot for just the API side and then like you would build your front end. Can you do the same with Laravel?
[00:31:46] Aaron Francis: You could, I have learned that backend for frontend is a thing, which is different than backend, but what you could do, you could, you could just have Laravel as an API only. , and some [00:32:00] people do that in conjunction with like next or next. And so blows my mind. You’re running two backends at that point.
[00:32:05] Aaron Francis: It doesn’t make a ton of sense to me, but you could do that. You could also do just like a, you know, a raw view or react front end with an API back end. I do not think that is the most common way to ship full layer of application. I think the most common way. is either with inertia, uh, which would combine view or react, , or live wire, which is kind of like PHP on the front end, but you know, hand wavy, , Laravel cloud, for example.
[00:32:33] Aaron Francis: So like their in house, you know, flagship SAS product is Laravel on the backend react on the front end, inertia in the middle. Monorepo, not, we’re not going to coordinate two separate releases. It’s just like, it’s just all right there. And we just, you know, push to deploy. So that’s, I think that is the most common way to ship Laravel.
[00:32:55] Aaron Francis: I worked at a company that used Rails and they had Rails API on the back end and Next. [00:33:00] js on the front end. And I think that is more common, , in Rails land because is way worse, right? So to ship a monorepo that has rails and react from my, what I understand is quite difficult. And so I think what people end up doing is rails next JS, and then we’ll have them talk over traditional, uh, API.
[00:33:21] Robbie Wagner: Gotcha. Makes sense.
[00:33:23] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. And that’s, that’s, uh, interesting because when you think about it, These web application frameworks, like true, full, everything, all bells and whistles, well, web application frameworks, give you everything you need. They’ve got auth and all that kind of stuff. So if you decide that you want to have a full on front end framework with it, you’re kind of cutting off half the benefits to a degree, right?
[00:33:47] Chuck Carpenter: Like if you’re just taking in JSON payloads that you have to interpret and rebuild all the logic on your front end application, you’re just
[00:33:54] Aaron Francis: So then you’re inventing the browser,
[00:33:56] Aaron Francis: right? So you’re
[00:33:57] Aaron Francis: inventing client side
[00:33:58] Chuck Carpenter: Well, spas kind of do [00:34:00] that anyway.
[00:34:00] Aaron Francis: Exactly. You’re inventing session management with, you know, JWTs or whatever that’s supposed to be. You’re just that you end up inventing a lot of stuff where if you can use the backend, , and the browser for like what they’re good for, but still have a super tight integration to a very modern front end.
[00:34:21] Aaron Francis: That feels like the best of all worlds to me versus. Let’s use static HTML, which is like, you know, Rails and Laravel both have like templating languages where you can just spit out HTML, sometimes useful, not much anymore. And then on the other side is like separate front end, separate back end. And then you’re like, well.
[00:34:41] Aaron Francis: How do these two things communicate and share, uh, authentication, authorization, and you’re like, I don’t know, man. So yeah, we get, like with Laravel, the term full stack has kind of been co-opted in my opinion, by things like next, where it’s like, you can write server code, we’re full stack. And I’m like, [00:35:00] yeah, but when I, like, when I start writing server code, there’s nothing for me.
[00:35:04] Aaron Francis: You’ve, you’ve dumped me in an empty warehouse with no tools and you’re like. Build your back end. Like, I don’t want to do that. I don’t want
[00:35:12] Chuck Carpenter: Right. No, no. You just import another package. It’s JavaScript land. There’s a package for that.
[00:35:17] Chuck Carpenter: Just
[00:35:17] Aaron Francis: the thing. It’s like
[00:35:18] Chuck Carpenter: Puzzle pieces, you
[00:35:20] Chuck Carpenter: know?
[00:35:20] Aaron Francis: They claim freedom and I see complexity I’m like so you’re telling me you’re telling me you’re gonna pull in an off a cue driver an email an off Authorization, authentication, you’re going to pull in a cron job, and truly what that ends up being is you’re going to pay for services to do that,
[00:35:36] Aaron Francis: often
[00:35:37] Aaron Francis: times.
[00:35:38] Chuck Carpenter: Well, And guess who has
[00:35:40] Chuck Carpenter: invested in a bunch of those services in San Not Guillermo. does it start with G and end with Yermo? Yeah.
[00:35:49] Aaron Francis: Yeah. And so, like, the. I mean, The conspiracy theory is like, the true part is he’s invested in every developer tool company in and around that ecosystem. The [00:36:00] conspiracy theory is that next is nerfed because of that. I don’t know if that part is true.
[00:36:05] Aaron Francis: I, I do believe because I continue to see people say it, we want to choose packages. We want to be free. my opinion is, The freedom actually comes from the constraint, right? So if you, if you have a framework that has a, an amazing ORM that is built in to the Q driver that is built into the email providers that is built into the routing.
[00:36:29] Aaron Francis: So like you could have a route in Laravel. that like, binds to a model. So you can say like podcast slash one, and then in your controller, you don’t get the number one, you get an instance of the podcast model because the routing is aware of the ORM and then in the controller, you can dispatch a job and the job will serialize itself.
[00:36:52] Aaron Francis: Without the model, but with a reference to the model and then when it wakes back up to be processed, it will reinstantiate the model because the [00:37:00] Q layer is aware of the ORM layer. And so those are the types of things where it’s like, if everything is working together, then what you have to do is actually the scary part.
[00:37:11] Aaron Francis: And maybe we’ve arrived at the reasoning. The scary part is you have to build an application and see if people want it. And you don’t get to just fiddle, right? You have to do the, you have to do the hard
[00:37:20] Aaron Francis: part.
[00:37:21] Chuck Carpenter: you sound
[00:37:22] Robbie Wagner: spending
[00:37:23] Chuck Carpenter: me. I don’t know.
[00:37:24] Aaron Francis: yeah, I know. It’s, it’s so frustrating to have all these tools at my disposal. I
[00:37:29] Robbie Wagner: Yeah, I think the problem is, like, a small subset of people that like to use React frameworks really love over engineering things. They want to build everything you just described from scratch. The other side of those people are just following those people saying, Oh, they said this was cool, and then, actually, I can’t build that, so I’m gonna use a Sass product for everything,
[00:37:52] Robbie Wagner: and then it’s
[00:37:53] Robbie Wagner: just, like, what With a very generous free tier and if you ever blow up, they send you a bunch of giant [00:38:00] yeah, I will always be team opinionated framework over everything else like it it
[00:38:05] Aaron Francis: Yeah, and like, the stuff that you do have to pay for. So like, you have to pay somebody to like, send your emails, right? And even beyond what you have to pay for the way that Laravel operates is everything is driver based you want to use ClickHouse Timescale, whatever great.
[00:38:24] Aaron Francis: We’ve got a driver for that. You want to use postmark? You want to use resend? Do you want to use SES? Great. We’ve got drivers for that. S3, R2, B2, Dropbox, FTP We’ve got drivers for that and so it’s not really a situation where it’s like, Oh, I, I really want to use Redis for my cache, but I’m using Laravel.
[00:38:42] Aaron Francis: Great. Just use the Redis driver for the cache and then everything else continues to work. Great. Oh, you need, sometimes you need a Redis driver. Sometimes you need a file driver and sometimes you need a null driver just because you’re testing the cache and you don’t actually want anything cached. You can create three separate instances of the [00:39:00] cache.
[00:39:00] Aaron Francis: All backed by different providers, and you can do whatever you want. it’s become this kind of like hub and spoke. Like you have the interface, and then underneath the interface are all of these different drivers that are the, the providers. And that kind of spans every component that you can really think of.
[00:39:18] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, it doesn’t, it has, right, to a degree. in various web frameworks, we’ve had these things for like a decade, but there’s resistance. I mean, I, I think I understood early resistance around wanting to do more in the browser because compute costs and there was a lack of a cloud, let’s say, and, you know, things around that to like, Do more in the browser to create dynamic experiences, but the problem
[00:39:46] Robbie Wagner: Yeah, leveraging users machines were
[00:39:49] Robbie Wagner: like, was the big thing
[00:39:51] Robbie Wagner: like 10
[00:39:52] Robbie Wagner: years
[00:39:52] Robbie Wagner: ago. Yeah.
[00:39:52] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, yeah. And then we got some fancy complex interfaces. And, you know, front end [00:40:00] devs wanted to, , flex a little bit, and that has worked to a degree. But we have a lot nicer tools now, and compute is cheap, and all these other things. And so what has been before has also moved forward with us and gives us, like you said, then we would have to get out of our own way and actually try to make something that people like.
[00:40:23] Aaron Francis: Mm hmm. Yeah, and I, I think like, it’s easy to lump in, we’ll just say vanilla view and vanilla react with the JavaScript industrial complex. But I, I think, I think the real perpetrators here are the merchants of complexity, which are like, no, no, no, no. Like you could use react, but what you really need is next.
[00:40:46] Aaron Francis: And what you really need is next on Vercel. And what you really need is TurboPack. And you’re
[00:40:50] Aaron Francis: like. What? I don’t know what, like, why? That, that’s the problem. That’s the problem I have, who is building a proper [00:41:00] full stack application? with one of these, like, full stack JavaScript frameworks?
[00:41:05] Aaron Francis: Where is the back end? That’s my, that’s always my question. It’s like,
[00:41:09] Robbie Wagner: No one
[00:41:09] Robbie Wagner: knows. who’s running the cron
[00:41:11] Aaron Francis: jobs? that’s
[00:41:12] Aaron Francis: the thing I want to know. Who’s
[00:41:14] Aaron Francis: running the cron
[00:41:15] Robbie Wagner: Vercel. Vercel now. Yeah, they are They have cron
[00:41:17] Chuck Carpenter: jobs. now, but
[00:41:18] Chuck Carpenter: otherwise it was another SaaS provider. It’s, uh running the queues? Is that another SaaS provider? Because when, when Vercel doesn’t have queues. I don’t think yet. Do they?
[00:41:28] Aaron Francis: When I think of like, , When I think of web applications, I think Scheduled commands, so that I can do stuff You know, I can do stuff every hour, every minute, every 15 minutes, whatever. Crucial. I don’t know how I’d build a web application without a cron.
[00:41:43] Aaron Francis: I think of queued jobs. I’m putting thousands of jobs in every hour at my old company. We’re putting in hundreds of thousands a day into the queue just to like offload it from request response and to imagine like trying [00:42:00] to do that in like a serverless way or like, uh, someone else’s the provider of my queues or crons.
[00:42:07] Aaron Francis: and it could be because I’m old. I don’t understand. How that works and like, okay, I need to send, I need to send an email. That is very normal. I don’t want to pay a provider that has their own SDK, right? I want to use my framework and then decide who will do the actual delivery and I’m Super aware that I could be the old man that yells at the cloud but I don’t understand how you build a web application without some of these primitives that are like
[00:42:38] Aaron Francis: To you, you know, Yeah, well, do that in functional programming first. yeah, I think that’s two things is people love functional programming, which whatever, but then, yeah, it’s just like everyone just wants to have the pain of figuring out how to do
[00:42:55] Robbie Wagner: it themselves,
[00:42:56] Robbie Wagner: I guess. It’s
[00:42:57] Chuck Carpenter: I just think that, like, the paradigms of [00:43:00] early internet, and then what were the norms of creating websites and web applications and things like that, have been diluted and lost. To a certain amount of our colleagues out in the world and the solution to the problem has become, well, I’ve had, these off providers shoved down my throat.
[00:43:22] Chuck Carpenter: And so, and why would you build your own law off? It’s so hard and just join our platform and move into actually building your product. But they, I think were like some of the initial ones, but now. Very many aspects of creating SaaS applications now has been like, sign up for these, my, I mean, you’ve seen a bunch of these tweets, right?
[00:43:44] Chuck Carpenter: Like, where there, it’s like, here are these ten companies, this is my stack. It’s my custom, put together stack. And most of it is integration work. You’re doing integration work for a CRUD application, what the hell are you bringing to it? And if your company does blow up, you’re [00:44:00] rewriting the whole thing at some point.
[00:44:01] Chuck Carpenter: Because you’re not gonna pay,
[00:44:03] Robbie Wagner: like rewriting the
[00:44:04] Robbie Wagner: whole thing like that. They I’ve been at so many companies or I guess not been at, but like with consulting, like we had done. There’s so many companies where you work there like a year, they’re rewriting a whole thing in like whatever the hottest newest thing is right now, and then you know by the time you’re done with that they’re gonna redo that process to rewrite it and like, we’re going to React, now we’re going to Next, now we’re going to View, but like we like, we maybe like Nuxt, but like maybe we don’t, maybe like, everyone just likes to rewrite stuff for years and years and years because it’s
[00:44:33] Robbie Wagner: fun,
[00:44:33] Robbie Wagner: and it, maybe it
[00:44:35] Robbie Wagner: is fun, but like, is fun. It’s fun for engineers, but if there’s a problem there where that is, is basically where you think the ROI is, maybe your product just sucks. Maybe that’s the
[00:44:46] Aaron Francis: Well, I don’t know if you guys ever used, uh, the screen sharing tool tuple, great tool used to work there. Great company. one of the founders has been, Ornstein has this tweet, And it was actually a [00:45:00] subtweet of me, which I can get into later. Ben and I are great friends, and this was, you know, I texted him immediately.
[00:45:05] Aaron Francis: And I was like, are you talking
[00:45:05] Aaron Francis: about me? And he was like, yeah, I’m talking about you. but it was a subtweet of me, and he said, It was basically, it was like a quote and it said, uh, We’re building a tool to make developers lives easier. That, that was in the quote. And then Ben’s commentary right below that was Have you ever met a developer?
[00:45:20] Aaron Francis: Because they value their time at approximately negative one hundred dollars per hour. And it’s like, this is the reality. If you’re getting paid to like play with new tech, who can blame you? Like, yeah, do do stuff like have fun, like built, like, you know, waste company time. It’s not my money, but I think there’s a, there’s a big difference when it’s like, you’re out in the world and you have to see something to fruition and then be responsible for maintaining it.
[00:45:50] Aaron Francis: And like your livelihood depends on this thing working a lot of stuff. Just kind of like, don’t care about that. Falls by the wayside and you are [00:46:00] solely focused on shipping a good quality, robust, maintainable thing to production. And you don’t have time to like futz around. I think Laravel has succeeded in part because the PHP community doesn’t really have that shiny object syndrome because I think I think it’s some sort of, like, evolutionary pressure where PHP has never been lauded.
[00:46:23] Aaron Francis: I mean, there’s maybe a time in, like, the year 2000 or 2001 where it was, like, fine to use PHP. But even back then, it was like, ah, we’re using ASP. NET. We’re not using PHP because open source is crazy. And it was like, PHP has never been cool or sexy or, like, braggable. And so we don’t end up We don’t end up bragging a lot.
[00:46:46] Aaron Francis: We don’t end up talking about like, Oh, my PHP stack. And so, what that leaves is, like, that leaves a vacuum. And the things that we end up talking about are like, The things that we’re hacking on. The projects that we’re building. The [00:47:00] SAS tools that we’re trying to create. All of these other things. And so I think there has been some sort of like, evolutionary force that has shaped the PHP community towards a more of like a true like hacker mentality, uh, bootstrap business builder.
[00:47:16] Aaron Francis: It’s like, I’m going to pick the simplest, stupidest, create the universe and destroy it on every request. I’m going to pick that because I know that I can ship something super fast and my goal is to ship something super fast because I got to get paid. And so that has kind of like formed, I think, over,
[00:47:34] Aaron Francis: you know, 25 years, the community.
[00:47:36] Aaron Francis: , so I think it’s a little bit different than, than JavaScript in that regard.
[00:47:40] Chuck Carpenter: And that was just a clear end to that discussion. So it’s Laravel. Laravel is the Vercel for the good guys. That’s what I heard. And it’s for the working man. Yeah, you know the common folk who like bright orange fucking Lamborghinis.
[00:47:56] Chuck Carpenter: I do respect the
[00:47:57] Robbie Wagner: Well that’s because anytime you write a dollar [00:48:00] sign in PHP, you get an actual dollar. So if you do it enough, you get a
[00:48:03] Robbie Wagner: Lamborghini.
[00:48:04] Robbie Wagner: Yeah,
[00:48:10] Chuck Carpenter: alright, well, we’ve got a couple other tech things. We also, we’re gonna, well, we were gonna talk
[00:48:14] Chuck Carpenter: non tech things. What do you want to cover for? We did a lot
[00:48:17] Chuck Carpenter: of things.
[00:48:18] Chuck Carpenter: Yes. Uh, how was your staycation?
[00:48:20] Aaron Francis: Oh, wow. That’s very nice of you. my staycation was amazing. , so my birthday was last week. My wife came in to, you know, like a few weeks before and was, came into the room and was like, Hey, what, what if for your birthday you went to a hotel just by yourself? And I was like,
[00:48:38] Chuck Carpenter: Yes.
[00:48:39] Aaron Francis: serious? Cause that sounds
[00:48:41] Aaron Francis: amazing.
[00:48:42] Aaron Francis: Um, And she had done that for her, yeah, she had done that for her birthday, and so I think she knew, like, what a treat it was. And so, yeah, I went down to a fancy hotel here in Dallas, and, , just had the time of my life. It was great. I had so much freakin fun. It [00:49:00] was very relaxing, you know, ate at the restaurant by myself, which is just Best thing in the world.
[00:49:06] Aaron Francis: Seeing a movie by yourself and eating at a restaurant by yourself, totally, totally underrated. People are scared to do it, but like you got to lean in. That was great. hooked up my computer to the TV. So I had, I had my computer on the TV with the AirPods in watched Sicario to slept in. It was just. It was the freaking best.
[00:49:27] Aaron Francis: Did a lot of like, crazy journaling. So I’m sitting at the bar. It’s like three o’clock on a Monday afternoon. I’m the only person at the bar sitting at the bar having a drink, have my headphones in, have my, have my, uh, my trusty yellow legal pad. And I’m like scheming about how to take
[00:49:43] Aaron Francis: over the world.
[00:49:44] Aaron Francis: And it was, it was, perfect. it
[00:49:46] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, one Negroni at a time.
[00:49:48] Aaron Francis: Exactly. And actually, I don’t know. I don’t know if this is standard procedure, but I showed up and the concierge gave me a little card for two free drinks at the fancy
[00:49:57] Robbie Wagner: Oh.
[00:49:58] Aaron Francis: Like, that’s 30![00:50:00]
[00:50:00] Chuck Carpenter: you know what that sounds like? that
[00:50:02] Chuck Carpenter: sounds like your wife
[00:50:02] Chuck Carpenter: called ahead.
[00:50:04] Aaron Francis: Oh, maybe.
[00:50:05] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah,
[00:50:06] Aaron Francis: Maybe. I don’t know.
[00:50:08] Chuck Carpenter: wives. That sounds like she was like, do this thing for yourself.
[00:50:12] Aaron Francis: I did, I did, go home and tell her that. And was like, oh, you won’t believe what happened. And she didn’t cop to it, so Either she’s, either she doesn’t want the credit or she didn’t do
[00:50:21] Aaron Francis: it.
[00:50:21] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, I don’t know. , listEn, just roll with it. Be like, you did this amazing thing, thank you. And she’s like, I didn’t, but I did.
[00:50:28] Aaron Francis: Yeah. she’s she’s way too pure to take credit for that. She’d say, Oh no, I didn’t do that. That wasn’t me. I’m
[00:50:33] Aaron Francis: like, Oh, it’s
[00:50:35] Chuck Carpenter: well, yeah, just, just roll with it. But
[00:50:38] Robbie Wagner: yeah, so I am curious, uh, you mentioned at the top of the episode you have two sets of twins So I have questions around did you have the first set of twins and then go, I want more kids? how did you end up with two sets of twins? Like was that all planned?
[00:50:52] Robbie Wagner: Do you want a big family
[00:50:53] Robbie Wagner: like? I don’t know what
[00:50:55] Chuck Carpenter: you, you, know how the, you know how
[00:50:57] Chuck Carpenter: they, they, they got
[00:50:58] Robbie Wagner: I know how it
[00:50:59] Chuck Carpenter: [00:51:00] okay, Yes, He’s a father also, so he
[00:51:02] Aaron Francis: when a man and a woman are in a
[00:51:04] Chuck Carpenter: ha, ha, ha, ha, ha,
[00:51:06] Aaron Francis: Let me describe it to you. so yes, we had the first set of twins. they’re three and a half and one now. And so we had the first set, uh, through much, much pain and difficulty. We ended up with children and it happened to be twins.
[00:51:21] Aaron Francis: long journey to get there. Then it was like, we want more kids. , we want more than two children. And the first time it was so, it was such an arduous process. Let’s start earlier than we think is reasonable. And let’s just like take all the pressure off. Let’s just, we’re not going to see any doctors.
[00:51:44] Aaron Francis: We’re not going to like to do any apps to track any sorts of time. It’s like, We’re just going to let go and let God. Right. And first time,
[00:51:55] Robbie Wagner: Yeah. like.
[00:51:57] Aaron Francis: Very first time [00:52:00] got pregnant and of course thrilled to death like oh man Thank goodness. It wasn’t this long horrible road. She goes to have the ultrasound.
[00:52:10] Aaron Francis: We’re thinking like it’s fine I’ll stay on you know, I’m at home working. It’s not a big deal first appointment. Whatever. I think I actually had like a I was giving like a webinar that day, which is so embarrassing. So I’m, you know, I’m on this, this zoom for my old company being a big old doofus. She comes home and I go in and I’m like nervous, of course, cause the first time it was so painful.
[00:52:33] Aaron Francis: And I go in and I’m like, what did we see? Are we good? Is the egg, is the fertilized egg in the right spot? Because it turns out, sometimes they don’t end up in the right spot. Been there. Horrible. She’s like, yes. It’s in the right spot. Ah, what a relief. And then she shows me the sonogram and I’m like, Boy, this looks familiar.
[00:52:55] Aaron Francis: This can’t be right. And I, she’s, she record, she [00:53:00] recorded it. We have a video of it, which is really quite nice. I just started laughing and I said, are you serious? And she started laughing and then she started crying and I started crying and I’m laughing and I’m, it’s just like the craziest possible outcome.
[00:53:14] Aaron Francis: And I had always joked that like. I don’t like, seeing people left out. And so I was thinking we can’t have three kids cause we can’t have the twins
[00:53:23] Aaron Francis: and the hanger on, right? The extra. So we’re going to have four kids. Yeah. We’re going to have four kids so that like the singletons as, as we call them, the singletons have like a, you know, somebody they can relate to and the twins have somebody they can relate to.
[00:53:39] Aaron Francis: And I had always joked that like. Honestly, the perfect setup would be another set of twins. Because then we have a family of four. Perfect setup would be another set of boy girl twins. Everybody’s got a twin. Everybody’s got an opposite gender. Everybody’s got a same gender. Nobody’s left out. What could be better?
[00:53:57] Aaron Francis: And, you know Sometimes you speak it [00:54:00] into fruition, that is exactly what happens. We have two sets of boy girl twins, two and a half years apart, everybody has their friend. , and so, yes, we, uh, we got very, very lucky, both in having another set of twins, and having, uh, what is, in our opinion, the perfect gender mix, two boys,
[00:54:20] Robbie Wagner: Yeah, we, we are lacking that gender mix. We, we have all boys. We were expecting two boys.
[00:54:29] Chuck Carpenter: Heh, heh, heh.
[00:54:29] Robbie Wagner: the interesting thing is, yes, I don’t know how this works for, for your, your situation, but like, so my generations behind me, right? Like my grandpa’s, I think parents, or I don’t know, I’m going to get this wrong, but like, there has been every other generation sets of boy twins in my family.
[00:54:48] Aaron Francis: Oh, really?
[00:54:49] Robbie Wagner: And they say that it can’t come from the male. Like the woman determines if it’s twins and I’m like, bullshit. There’s no way
[00:54:58] Robbie Wagner: that
[00:54:58] Aaron Francis: Are they all fraternal [00:55:00] along the line?
[00:55:01] Robbie Wagner: no, they’re all identical.
[00:55:03] Aaron Francis: They’re all identical. Yeah. That is supposedly completely random, supposedly
[00:55:10] Robbie Wagner: but every other generation we have identical twins. My wife has, is pregnant with identical twins right now. So, um, Yeah, I think like we were talking to my cousin about it and they’re like, yeah, I think the, the thing is that they, it’s not that it isn’t possible. It’s that science hasn’t figured out how this part works yet.
[00:55:28] Robbie Wagner: Like this.
[00:55:29] Chuck Carpenter: right? Yeah.
[00:55:31] Aaron Francis: I have heard that, uh, fraternal travels through the maternal genes because it is a, like, it’s that aberration where the egg or, or they release too many eggs. Right.
[00:55:42] Aaron Francis: whereas. identical is just like luck of the draw. I will say, , I have an internet friend who has, , twins, singleton twins, and both sets of twins are identical.
[00:55:53] Aaron Francis: And so it does seem like there’s something a little wonky going on there where it’s like,
[00:55:57] Robbie Wagner: I wonder
[00:55:57] Aaron Francis: if
[00:55:58] Aaron Francis: this is random, that doesn’t [00:56:00] seem random to me,
[00:56:01] Robbie Wagner: Yeah. I wonder if the, the man there, like if you go back generations has. It’s similar to me. I’d be curious to know.
[00:56:07] Aaron Francis: I would too. Logan, if you’re listening,
[00:56:09] Aaron Francis: let us
[00:56:09] Aaron Francis: know. If you’re not
[00:56:10] Chuck Carpenter: let us know. Still let us know. Like, if somebody knows Logan, will you,
[00:56:15] Chuck Carpenter: uh,
[00:56:15] Chuck Carpenter: ask him to let us know That’d be great. So for the both of you then, here’s the question. Is the
[00:56:20] Aaron Francis: Mm.
[00:56:21] Robbie Wagner: Yeah. For me, it is. I mean, I haven’t formally closed, but, uh, yes,
[00:56:27] Aaron Francis: Oh, I’m formally
[00:56:28] Robbie Wagner: kids. Yeah.
[00:56:29] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. Oh, yeah, I’m formally I only have two kids and I’m formally closed, but I’m 47. So it’s like Yeah, nah, I’m too Old for that. I can’t, I can’t mess it. Yeah, you called yourself old. I was
[00:56:40] Chuck Carpenter: laughing.
[00:56:40] Chuck Carpenter: I was like, you don’t know
[00:56:42] Aaron Francis: 36. Feels old. Uh, no, we’re super done. We cannot, , mentally, emotionally, or financially support another set of twins. So no, we’re definitely, definitely, definitely done. My wife scheduled that appointment for me, for sure.
[00:56:56] Robbie Wagner: Yeah,
[00:56:57] Robbie Wagner: what kind of a vehicle do you have to have [00:57:00] a
[00:57:01] Aaron Francis: We have, uh, we acquired a new vehicle, , which is, you can just go and do that. , we got a, what did we get? A Honda Odyssey. And the
[00:57:09] Aaron Francis: reason,
[00:57:10] Chuck Carpenter: that’s the premium.
[00:57:11] Robbie Wagner: that was my first car fun fact,
[00:57:13] Aaron Francis: really,
[00:57:14] Robbie Wagner: I drove a honda odyssey in high school because that was super cool
[00:57:17] Robbie Wagner: Yeah
[00:57:25] Aaron Francis: is, , there’s a YouTube, a woman who YouTubes about cars for moms. That’s all she does. I think she’s actually like, uh, forget what it’s called. Goodness. It’s like car seat mom or something like that.
[00:57:37] Aaron Francis: Um, anyway, she offers this, , consultation where you can pay. It’s like, you know, 50 for a half hour. I’m like, girl, you got to raise your rates. You’re famous YouTuber. , so I paid for a consultation and I was like, here’s the deal. We’re going to have four kids that need to be buckled in by an adult into car seats.
[00:57:56] Aaron Francis: Because, you know, lots of people have four kids and their oldest kid [00:58:00] is nine and you’re like, okay, fundamentally different. Doesn’t apply here. And so we’ve got, you know, two newborns and two, two and a half year olds. And it’s like, we got to have hands on all four kids. And so, Um, we talked to her and she was, , she was very helpful the car mom, that’s what it’s called.
[00:58:17] Aaron Francis: Um, she was very helpful and we went with the Honda Odyssey because it is the only minivan on the market where the captain’s chairs slide left to right. And so they have a bench, but you can pull out the middle seat and then you can slide the captain’s chairs, , either side, you can slide them over to the middle.
[00:58:36] Aaron Francis: And so what that allows you to do is put the little kids in their, uh, more complicated seats, you know, kind of upfront and then push them over, like push that seat over and pull it forward. And then the big kids can get in the back and an adult can get in the back instead of trying to go around the front between the captain’s chair and the passenger.
[00:58:55] Aaron Francis: seat in the front, try to fit between the car seat as a grown man, which is [00:59:00] terribly just embarrassing and makes
[00:59:02] Aaron Francis: you question your dietary preferences. But like that allows you to get in and out a lot easier. And so Honda Odyssey, it was, and you know, you hate to admit it. It’s very convenient.
[00:59:13] Aaron Francis: It’s very convenient.
[00:59:15] Chuck Carpenter: Ooh, are you gonna get Robby into another Honda Odyssey? I I don’t know Caitlin is adamant about no minivans,
[00:59:22] Robbie Wagner: so Yeah. So were But yeah,
[00:59:27] Aaron Francis: Toyota four runner, which only holds. You
[00:59:30] Aaron Francis: know, two children at a time and then we do have an au pair, um, uh, mine, mine doesn’t, I don’t know. if any forerunners do, but we do have an au pair and she drives my wife, uh, Jennifer, she drives Jennifer’s old car, which is a VW Atlas, and so between the three cars, the minivan is the only one that holds four, the VW Atlas, is set up to hold the big kids and my forerunner is set up to hold the little kids, so who’s going where with whom kind of depends on what car ends up being driven.
[00:59:58] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, that makes
[00:59:59] Robbie Wagner: [01:00:00] interesting. All right. We are about at time. So I want to ask this one thing that we try to ask everybody. If you weren’t in tech, what other career would you choose?
[01:00:08] Aaron Francis: Terraforming. Easy. Easy. No questions asked. Terraforming. I would buy I don’t know how you make
[01:00:15] Aaron Francis: money off of this. This is irrelevant. Um I would buy 50, 100, 200 acres that are, you know, downtrodden, down on their luck acres. And I would, I would bring them back to life. I would do some, I don’t, I don’t want to like, I don’t want to be a farmer.
[01:00:35] Aaron Francis: I don’t want to I don’t want to kill a chicken or anything like that. I have little dilettante hands, I’m not going to do that. But what I do want to do, is I want to build swales. And I want to capture water. And I want to build, , I want to build earthworks. Like I want to do all of that stuff. And just like bring, bring the land back to life.
[01:00:53] Aaron Francis: Um, and probably also have a, , workshop on there where I can do, uh, light woodworking and light [01:01:00] hobby electronics. , and you know what? We’ll wrap it all up in like a YouTube channel and that’s how I’ll make money.
[01:01:05] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. There you go. See, you already know how to monetize. You know why? Because the whole framework is there.
[01:01:10] Robbie Wagner: Yeah.
[01:01:11] Aaron Francis: It’s easy. It’s easy. I could totally do that. And in fact, someday I will when we make it, when Steve and I make it, that’s what I’m going to do.
[01:01:20] Robbie Wagner: All right. You heard it here first. So yeah. Before we end, uh, what things would you like to plug?
[01:01:25] Aaron Francis: I’m very good on Twitter. You should follow me on Twitter. Um, Aaron Diaz and Daniel Francis. , if you’re into screencasting, we’ve got a great course at Screencasting. com, which is also a great domain. HighPerformanceSQLite. com and MasteringPostgres. com. So those are all of, those are all of our properties.
[01:01:47] Aaron Francis: Um, so if you want to help us afford. Uh, diapers and some sort of, uh, you know, other clothing and food for children.
[01:01:55] Aaron Francis: That would be amazing. Yeah, so don’t mail you my hand me downs. My kids [01:02:00] are five and eight now, so I’ve got some Send them. You’ve got the address. Send it That’s true. Oh, be, be careful. Especially as it gets closer to summer, because I’m gonna have shit to get rid of. great. All right. send send it all. We are, we are the statue of liberty, of, of hand me down clothes. Send us. You’re tired, you’re poor, you’re distressed. We will, we will take it All Whatever you’ve got, we will
[01:02:23] Chuck Carpenter: All right. Yeah. I will not send you a bag of dicks, I promise.
[01:02:26] Aaron Francis: No, please do not do that. I don’t even know what that would be. Send us
[01:02:30] Robbie Wagner: Sponsored by bag of dicks. com
[01:02:32] Aaron Francis: Yes.
[01:02:33] Robbie Wagner: No, all right Thanks everyone for listening. If you liked it, please subscribe and we will catch you next time.
[01:02:39] Robbie Wagner: Where’s
[01:02:40] Chuck Carpenter: not in? Yeah. Is that Boom,
[01:02:42] Chuck Carpenter: bo?
[01:02:44] Robbie Wagner: All right. No, you don’t have to whatever.
[01:02:46] Outro: 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 [01:03:00] 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.