We get frustrated with Nintendo. Then, dig into the 30-year-old backdoor that was recently exploited and the hard lesson we should learn from it. Then, we'll break down some "hot tips" that promise to make you the next DevRel star.
This is Coder Radio, episode 591, recorded on October 8th, 2024. Hey friend, welcome in to Jupyter Broadcasting's weekly talk show. Taking a pragmatic look at the art and the business of software development and the world of technology. My name is Chris, and joining us over there from Florida, it's our host, Mr. Dominic. Hello, Mike. Hello. Hey, handsome.
You know, I'm sitting here trying not to get worked up. I can't help but get mad. I know Nintendo does Nintendo things. But they're going after a project that I have personally been using on my Steam Deck hooked up to my TV to play Switch games. And it's an open source Nintendo Switch emulator. They've already gone after one of them. And this is the one I was using.
And they kind of like played hardball in a different way than their typical tactic. They kind of like got a hold of him and they're like, it would be good if you were to shut down your GitHub. Let's just say this project should disappear. If you were to go away, our legal team may move on to other things. You know what I mean? They got that kind of contact.
So GitHub gets taken down, voluntarily deleted. Well, voluntarily in response to Nintendo's demands. But the website's still going, and the Discord channel remains active. So, like, maybe there's... I'm sure there's ways you can still pass around a tarball of this thing or something like that. So that's happening.
And then additionally, they're going after the modded hardware folks who make, like, a Nintendo-like device. So now the modded hardware website is private. And they have... They're fighting, though. In this one, this one is a straight-on legal fight, and they're taking it to court. I think... I think they might be self-representing.
I'm not positive, but I think I read that he's self-representing, the guy that runs... That's a wild choice. Yeah, going up against Nintendo? Yeah. Yeah. But he claims he has... Previous legal cases that he can point to that show what he's doing is totally legal.
But so now the lawsuit's progressing to the discovery stage where Nintendo is going to get access to all his books and all that kind of stuff. So they're going after it's just. I don't know, I guess. Where I where I still sit on this. Is these experiences, especially when you're a kid, like Super Mario World for me and the Sega games like Sonic and stuff, which I was more of a Nintendo guy.
But like those games are slow, like they have such nostalgic value for me. You know, 10 out of 10. Right. I just I hate the idea that something like that can get created, which is kind of an art. And then can completely just disappear unless you continue to buy a $300 device. And now you also have to pay a monthly or annual subscription to Nintendo Online Plus or whatever it's called.
So that way you get access to these emulators like they just keep making it more cost prohibitive just to get access to the stuff that you've already bought 30 times in your life. And you want to be able to just experience one more time. And like with Breath of the Wild, I love that so much that I didn't want to play it on a switch anymore.
I wanted it on a device that I could back up, that I could move, that the family could share. It just was just like I have more flexibility. And so when they kill these projects. They're killing our ability to preserve this art. And I know that the Nintendo Switch is a current product, but it's not the easiest thing to run. It requires a pretty high-end computer.
It's a pretty technical thing to set up. So I doubt it's cutting into the people that are buying Nintendo for all of the Nintendo suite of games to play with the family. It's more for people that maybe they can't afford the Switch or they prioritize the PC over buying consoles. I don't know. But for me, it's about preserving access to these things that me and my family love.
Beyond just the lifetime of a particular console or subscription program.
So, yeah, it's kind of a tough thing, right? I mean, I agree with everything you're saying about backups and historical, you know, keeping the history of these games. I would also add, just as an aside, this problem of keeping the history of these games and like preserving them.
is there's actually a much worse problem and that's all that all these games are now live service games yeah service is turned off the game your disc or your digital copy or whatever you have is effectively you know broke right your DVD or blu-ray is a is a coaster
I imagine these DRM anti-cheat checks, too, are going to make that a problem.
Going to make that hard. Yeah. I can't say that I 100% agree with Nintendo's hyper-aggressive actions and, frankly, you know, Godfather-style tactics here.
I kind of understand it with the Switch. It's a current product. But the modded hardware folks are more about classic, you know, old-style stuff.
I definitely see it with the switch. And I also like it. It's nice to talk about the historical preservation stuff. I would be willing to bet if somehow you did a real investigation, it's the vast majority of it's just piracy. It's gotta be right. It's gotta be just people who want to not pay for the games.
Yeah. I think that's always, you know, a percentage of the market, especially when the games are 60 bucks and the consoles are $300. Um, But I think there's also a pretty large market that doesn't want to fuss with it. The reason why they buy a Nintendo is they want a really smooth experience that's just The games work out of the box on the thing just like you expect.
The controllers, you know, they work just like you expect. Everything just works with the Nintendo and the Nintendo Switch. And I think a lot of people buy it for that experience and for those games, and they don't really care to pirate it. I think that's still a huge customer base regardless of these tools exist.
Oh, for sure. For sure. So, you know, I don't know. It's one of the – if you're doing one of these projects – You know, this isn't like a new development, right? Nintendo has been, I mean, Nintendo didn't want people to post YouTube reviews of their games.
This is why I get frustrated with myself that it still works me up after all this time, because I know Nintendo's going to Nintendo. Right. You know what I would like to see, you know, would make me a little bit happier, like in the case of modded hardware. What if they just sold a $100 Super Nintendo console? You know?
Put a tiny little machine in there. No, because $14.99 a month is more money. And if you want access to those games, you're paying it in perpetuity.
You're right. You're right.
And also it looks better for the markets because the way they – I mean this is wild, right? This is like inside baseball. But generally the way that revenue is valued for valuations, recurring revenue is better.
So I have upstairs here in the studio a Super Nintendo that I bought off eBay that's hooked up to a CRT monitor. Nice. Yeah, and that works pretty well. And I fire it up once a year, you know, and make sure it still works. But I don't really play it as much as I thought I would. But that was my solution, was just go find the actual hardware and buy it.
But, you know, that's not going to work forever. Stuff's not going to last forever. I'm grateful it lasts as long as it has, though. The Coder Radio Program is a value-for-value podcast. What is that? Well, it's a monetization model. It's a content format. And I guess it's a way of life, if you will. It's the idea that podcasts should be open.
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So we've recently been talking about AI regulation on the show and sort of the long-term second-order impacts that can have, which we're always a little cautious of. And then in between shows, a story came out about some Chinese hackers. I think they call themselves Salt Typhoon. And they breached AT&T, Verizon, and a couple of other carriers recently.
And we're just discovering what they did is they got access to the wiretap systems that are in place for the government. And these are called the C-A-L-E-A, CALEA. And it's a 30-year-old law that mandates that telecom companies comply with government orders to get... access to wiretap. It's mandated. They have to do it. It's federal law. And as you can imagine, something like that ages.
that has massive access like that, it becomes a pretty big target. So U.S. investigators believe that the hackers potentially accessed the wiretap warrant request, so they got maybe access to all of the warrant requests or more. They don't know.
I think the goals of the Chinese campaign are not yet fully known, but the Wall Street Journal cited a national security source who considers the breach, quote, potentially catastrophic. The intrusions into the U.S. wiretap system are the latest examples of malicious abuse of the back door, ostensibly meant...
For lawful and legal purposes, the law says, this is a quote, the law says your telecom must make your calls wiretappable unless it encrypts them, creating a system that was always a target for bad actors. This is according to a Stanford academic and encryption policy expert. They write, the hack exposes the lie that the U.S.
government needs to be able to read every message you send and listen to every call you make. And I wanted to bring this up because it's about regulating backdoor access into technology. And as we see the pressure that's being put on Telegram and just the conversation around encryption and the EU chat laws that have been, well, they're still getting kicked around.
A lot of it is about baking in backdoors into these things so that they can do ostensibly wiretapping. The Signal president wrote on Mastodon, quote, there's no way to build a backdoor that only the good guys can use. Yep. All right. So do you think a little reality check? Is this a fair case and study to point to and say this is why we don't legislate backdoors built into things?
Because look what just happened here. These salt typhoon hackers. I've apparently been persistently accessing this information for quite a long time using something that was mandated.
I mean, I can tell you what the other side is going to say. What? I'd love to try to steel man this. I'll steel man it. The next time, first of all, we'll do our normal joke. Think of the children.
Of course. Or terrorism, right? There's always terrorism.
Or election interference. Yeah, I think they'll go with the terrorism stuff first, but yeah. We talk about this all the time. Every couple months this comes up, right? If your goal, if your stated aim is to prevent all crime, right, you're going to have this stuff and it's going to cause all kinds of trouble.
Well, okay, hold on. To steal a man a little further, I think maybe the perspective is Look, we have a job to do. These are common channels of communication. We have been doing our job for a long time with access to this. We believe we do it responsibly and under the rules of the law. And we want lawful access to these communications so we can do our job.
And if I can't decrypt what's in this kid's messages after he set off a pipe bomb, I can't do my job. I'm not trying to I'm not trying to peep on you. Well, I know, but that's what they this is the argument that they're going to use, I think.
Well, police have been policing since Grog, the third caveman, was like, hey, we need one of us to stop the other cavemen from stealing things and attacking the women and children or whatever. Even back then, there were cave paintings that said, think of the children, I bet, right? So it's bull, right?
Police used to be able to do policing without all this technical wizardry and constant surveillance. And you know what they had to do instead of relying on technology? And same thing for civil cases, like, oh, I have the text messages. You actually have to do some detective work, right?
You have to actually gather evidence, interview witnesses, and not just, you know, get a couple of keystrokes and say, well, you put this, especially if you look at places like our good friends in the UK, who were now like, you know, that angry drunk text you sent might now be a felony. It's really, that is a thing that happens in the UK. Yeah. I hate all of this. This was bound to happen.
The worst part is this was happening apparently for a long time, and you're just hearing about it now.
Yeah, there is that.
If I'm a Chinese spook here... Because none of this is anonymized, right? So you could just go through and find particular people you'd like to put pressure on. Like, hey, Mr. Executive at a company that has valuable IP we'd like to, you know, research we'd like to exploit. So that's a pretty cute college girl you got there that you see every other week. Be a shame if your wife found out. Sure.
Much like, or hell, you're Nintendo, right? What an interesting GitHub project you were texting about.
Right, right. Or just in your browser history or whatever it might be.
The opportunities for intimidation and blackmail.
Because they're ISPs as well. They're not just telco providers. They're tracking people's data too. They're seeing what GitHub project you're going to.
I've gotten to the point where maybe this is just like, you know what? The cops were able to do their job before. The feds were able to do their jobs before. I think everything – they should write a law. There should be a regulation here. The regulation is end-to-end encryption becomes mandatory. Right. And no one can get to it.
And then there will be risk and there will be cases and you will have, you know, pearls being clutched. But it's better than how many years was this going on? How much data, sensitive data, right? Personal stuff. Maybe you're a military officer and you're secretly gay. How many of these do we even find out about? Right. The case I just made happened.
The government, Sisyphus, I always say wrong, stopped Grindr from selling itself to foreign investors because they're like, look, man, you could say whatever. This is like 2022. But that is a blackmail vector. So, this is terrible. This is why the backdoors should not only not exist, it should be illegal, everything should be end-to-end encrypted.
And we just, we have to go back to understanding that you can't, it's like if you live in Florida, right? You want to create a hole in your house to get a better breeze. Great, but the snakes and the gators can get in there too.
Yeah, I think you're right. And I think two things would have to be true in order for me to sort of be pro backdoor to encryption into chat apps. Just keep it in that room. One, I think like what you're inferring, the legal machinery and apparatus is too out of tune. It is too dysfunctional to be fully trusted at this point with that kind of power.
Even if it didn't affect us individually, it could be used for political blackmail. It could be used for all kinds of shenanigans behind the scenes that we'd never know about. And so there's just not the trust in the legal apparatus that would be around this to govern it correctly.
But then, and to a point that Wes is making in the live chat, the second thing that would have to be done is we'd have to be able to manage our infrastructure and build things in a logical way that can be maintainable and sustainable and that can remain secure over a 30-year period. And I can't yet point to anything that demonstrates that we have the ability in those sectors to do that.
These systems are old, decrepit, and probably very easy to exploit. And if you know what systems to take advantage of, you can probably get in there pretty easily. Probably people in our audience can do it. The reality is these are not particularly well defended systems to begin with. And they rot. There is just this sort of rot that happens with these things as tech moves on.
And we don't have any kind of proof that we have any kind of skill to maintain it. And we don't. I just you'd have to show me and demonstrate we can do that before we start backdooring everything.
Also, first of all, I have tremendous faith in our audience's ability to do all kinds of hacking. So I guarantee you, not only could they do it, Chinese government, if you're looking to hire somebody, the Coder Radio audience, you couldn't find better people.
Yeah, we do have the jobs chat on Matrix. Yeah.
You know, if you're a troll and you're listening to this next week, you got to go in the jobs chat and have like a panda bear with a red flag being like, hello, Coder Radio people. Yeah, there you go. No, it's, it just, okay, so I can, I briefly did a contract for one of the telcos. It was a stupid thing, but it was a stupid mobile thing for them.
And the level of we're not changing anything or updating anything unless we're getting paid for it is strong with these guys.
Yeah, I've noticed that just from the IT side of things, working as they would bring connectivity to a building or something. It's like working with IBM. Yeah. You know, it's just they have their way of doing things and we're not deviating from this and we've been deploying this for the last 15 years. It works just fine.
Well, and it's also a cost center for them. Oh, for sure. So their incentive is to be like, oh, we have to comply with the stupid government thing. Let's just like give them an open thing so they can look themselves, which is how it works. Yeah. Right.
So I'm just, you know, it's really this is one of those cases where whoever decided this was a good idea either didn't understand technology enough to know what would happen, which seems super likely. I'm going to assume incompetence or didn't care.
Well, 30 years ago. Things were much more, you know, offline.
Well, that's true. 30 years ago, the risk would have been more like physical security. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Like the AT&T guy gets blackmailed and goes in and steals the data. I mean, that would be.
I but that's my kind of my contention or my point is that. We would build something today and then 30 years from now, technology will be so advanced that we have the same problem, only probably in a quicker, faster, shorter time period. Like you can build it for today, but we have no way to actually know we would maintain an update and keep things secure as technology evolves.
So even if it was safe today, it won't be 30 years from now. And then we'll have it deployed everywhere because it takes, once this stuff's out there, it takes forever to get rid of it. So it seems just short-sighted. Back to your main point. There's other ways to do the job.
Speaking of jobs, I thought you and I, as a couple of longtime seasoned professionals, should review the head of developer community for SignalFire's hot tips for unlocking the aha moment for a developer relations lead. So this is advice targeted at a DevRel employee. position, somebody who's supposed to be working for a company out there that wants to build a community around their projects.
It's written by Jared Rise, and I will say there is actually some good stuff in this. So I'm not just, we're not just taking shots at it. There's some good stuff in here, but there are a couple of questionable things. He writes, while many startups are eager to build a community from day one, doing DevRel well at an early stage requires you to focus your limited resources. So,
He's going to focus on particular things and how to create an aha moment for your early users. Early stage companies have developed... They say it's essential to have developer relations in your product marketing. Every interaction from documentation to demo should quickly drive developers... to a pivotal moment. He's got these tactics they should follow.
And I want to bounce a couple off of you, okay? This is one I think I'm kind of mid on, and I want to get your take. This is of like probably five or six of them. So here's one of the tactics. Companies need to focus. Don't be everywhere all the time. Nascent startups must resist the temptation to cast a wide net with developer relations initiatives.
A targeted approach is not only more cost effective, but also yields better results. Examine your early adopters, those enthusiastic individuals who jump at the chance to test your alphas and betas. Let that guide your focus. Identify the job titles and roles of your early champions. If you target an audience, focus only on the channels that those audiences frequent.
Should you sponsor a conference? Well, it depends on your goals. If you're trying to generate a pipeline, you should consider sponsoring conferences where you know your audience, your primary P0 audience, will be in high attendance. One word of advice, if you're seeking for product activation, consider only supporting conferences where you have an accepted talk as well.
Last but not least, focus on geo-located communities. If you're based in a specific city, start by building a strong presence there. This allows you to establish a deeper connection with your early champions and build a solid foundation for growth.
So what do you think of this tactic about focusing specific areas, certain conferences, and then identify early enthusiastic adopters in your community? That seems kind of like semi-decent advice here. Advice?
Yeah. Most of that is basically the read any – you're an entrepreneur, but you don't know how to do sales because you're like a – well, a developer, right? This is how you do sales. Of course you want to focus on your enthusiastic early adopters who took a risk on you when nobody else did. Of course focusing on one niche, right? That's basically what he's saying by focusing down.
It's the only way if you're a small shop because you don't have the resources to go wide and it doesn't make sense to do it anyway. Focusing on a geographical area, I could see how that would make sense because, again, you have limited wood to put behind the arrows. The only one I thought was a little weird is you won't attend a conference that you're not a speaker at.
That's like, yeah, all right. That's kind of like, do you know who I am? I don't know. I don't think that is necessarily true.
Yeah, so I want to talk about the conference. The conference one is, I think, the hardest to figure out what the return on value is for an individual. It's going for people that are trying to pitch their employer or for people that run their own business or, you know, whatever. It's like, okay, so what am I getting out of this?
So having a talk, you know, it's kind of like, well, I'm on the schedule. There's going to be some people that show up. I get to plug some stuff for the business. It almost kind of guarantees you're going to get a little bit of value out of the... Yeah. whole travel, I suppose, so I kind of get that. It's a tricky one.
What I think, and you're right, most of these are pretty on the nose, and yet most tech companies don't even follow these basic ones. And I think some of them get it pretty good. I think Tailscale has a pretty good community outreach and YouTube channel, but A lot of these companies try to go global by producing online media that just sucks. It might as well be a AI product.
And it's just, you know, it's because it's so narrowly focused and they can't help it. All these companies are insular. So you're in your own little bubble in your company and you go make content and it's bubble content. It's not good overall general content. They don't get big audiences. They try to become YouTubers and they try to create YouTube channels and do live streams and
do product release events on live streams. And you see a lot of this out there. And it's such, and having been in some of these companies that do this, it is such an utter waste of the company's time and efforts in outreach. And this is what they consider developer outreach. And it's a massive distraction.
And you see so many companies blowing this and putting out substandard content that actually makes their brand seem a little cheap and amateur. And yeah, you know, you read this and you're like, oh yeah, this seems obvious. Focus. Nowhere in here did he say launch a YouTube channel. Nowhere in here did he say create a podcast. Right? Yeah.
Okay, now here's the one that I don't know kind of left me feeling a little weird. It's maybe it's the language. Leverage open source as an engagement engine. Creating an open source utility that complements your product can be a powerful way to engage developers.
I mean, I don't know how I feel about that from a practical perspective, because if you want to really manage a properly manage an open source project, that's a lot of work. And you're you're unless it's something like really fundamental, like you're the guy who invented jQuery, your ROI. I just don't think it's going to be there.
Yeah. And what I don't like is he kind of argues for like, OK, take your main product. And then like take something kind of related to your main product, but it's not core to your business, but it's useful. Open source that and let your community feel like they're making a big impact there. And you don't have to open source your main stuff.
It can be a piece of your product. Or you could be like, you know, insert project here. We'll just use our pals at Docker as an example. Open source your product and have Amazon capture a bunch of the value.
Well, to me it sounded like a little bit like open core. Like it's just a new – It is open core.
Yeah.
Yeah. It sounded like – I don't know. And he says identify a utility that's closely related to your product and valuable to your target audience. Open source it and build it collaboratively. Okay. I agree with that. But then it goes on to say, track the usage of your open source tools, the number of contributors and how it drives traffic and signups for your main product.
I think if you launch an open source project with the intention of driving signups to a main product. Yeah, I don't buy it. That's not going to work, son. That's just not going to work. That ain't it, Jif. That ain't it.
I can give another example, MongoDB, right? MongoDB will love to sell you Mongo enterprise stuff, right? But how many people just using MongoDB and their node app are actually even like in the ballpark of being Mongo enterprise customers? I would say 0.01% maybe.
Well, and then you think about how it works internally. You got to derive all of these metrics of like, okay, What kind of click through and performance is our open source efforts bringing through our community edition? What is that driving to our main product? And what's the cost to do all that?
And like, if you think about how you got to do that from a number standpoint, well, he's got tips on that. He's got tips on that.
Oh, wonderful.
He says, you know, first of all, you need to set up micro funnels to track each stage of developer engagement. Measure time on documentation, conversion from engaged users to monetized users, and the overall time to value for new developers. I guess he means from making money off it from when they become a new developer to when you're making money off them.
I would argue in many cases there that just won't be a thing.
Track these metrics in a plain old spreadsheet, he says, and then later on you get a more advanced system that will help you track all of it.
Yeah, this is a misunderstanding of how open source generally works. One, I mean, if you're able to market your open source product such that it's generating sales for you, I would argue that your energy would have been better spent just marketing your core product because you're really good at marketing and sales.
Yeah. And also if it's like a library utility, you know, it may just get pulled in from a package manager. They have no idea.
They may not know. Yeah. Right. That's that's a great point. The person developing the end application may be pulling some other, I don't know, NPM library that pulls another one that pulls yours and have no idea who the hell you are.
And so he's got, okay, so first, here's the core metrics. Time to first success, e.g. first API call to first deployment. The documentation engagement, so the time spent and pages viewed. Conversion rate from documentation to sign up. Retention rate after the first aha moment. I can measure that.
And number five, the last one, number of developers influencing deals, which I guess that's maybe like they're advocating the product to their company or something.
Wes is right. He's in the chat saying this sounds like LinkedIn lunatics more and more. This is the kind of crap you get like somebody's LinkedIn article post.
Well, and what they're trying to do – and this guy is trying to put himself out there as like this expert on managing developer communities. They're trying to turn developers into sales advocates and sales channels. So they don't really want your contributions.
What they want is you to sign up for their bigger product or, as they put here, number five, number of developers influencing deals, which I take to mean you find their open source product in your own little home hobby project, cute little home hobby project. Then when you go to work and do your real job, you tell your boss that you should go buy this thing.
So they're using them as basically free salesmen. I guess they get an open source utility in the process. I don't know. It's like that's where it really took a weird turn for me. Like that's not going to work.
You still have to develop the entire open source utility.
Yeah. Well, you know what came to mind at scale is VS Code.
Well, for Azure, right, and for GitHub. Yeah.
And Copilot. It is the VS Code strategy.
Oh, that is true.
And it kind of works. And you get a decent text editor as a result. I mean, maybe it's not your – I don't know. The listener has their favorites, but – Like, it's not bad. And it is kind of, it is like a front-end, it's how you get into the Microsoft Store. It's for how developers get to the Microsoft Store. Just all the back-end services and stuff. So it's totally the Microsoft playbook.
And you know they're probably tracking those kinds of metrics in Microsoft about conversion and stuff like that. So, I mean, this is the game, I guess.
Yeah, they really are, too. That's the game.
So that's why I'm asking for the audience to boost in any companies out there that seem to be actually doing dev relations right in a way that doesn't gross you out. And, of course, I'd love the bad ones, too, just so we can comment here on the show. Because, you know, I guess that's what we like to do.
We could do a segment. This is the – you know, I've been getting some real whoppers. I shit you not. So this is – we're doing a double because of Hurricane Milton today. I know I'm breaking the illusion. Someone had the balls to send me an email trying to get me to buy their offshore development services, which is a thing I don't do. What kind of – what's the pitch there? What's the – Oh, no.
No, dude.
Hey, man, you know, I realize your business may be obliterated by 170 mile power winds.
Are you ready? Here you go. Dear Mr. Dominic, I want to extend my deepest sympathy. Not sympathy. It's just sympathy. But fine. You know, I'll take it. It's a minor. Uh, to you and your family and the whole firm at Mad Botter. Cool. I want to know that I'm happy to help my firm offers. And it's just the normal list of like, here's our $20 an hour offshore or whatever it is, uh, development rates.
Um, I hit the spam button with a sledgehammer. I couldn't take it. That's some scummy stuff right there. And I am sure that's regular email. So this person took the time to get my email. I guarantee you, and I know they don't listen to the show because they spelled Dominic wrong and they spelled Mad Bonner wrong. But my LinkedIn messages...
are going to be – if this is the new tactic, whatever scummy sales tactic is the new thing, I keep getting it. I don't know. I'm just pitching in, Moni, but leveraging a natural disaster that puts people's families in harm's way as – That's a certain kind of cynical.
Sell the storm, baby.
You watched Wall Street and were like, Gordon Gekko makes a ton of sense to me. I don't understand what the deal is with this movie. Yeah.
I'll tell you, to me, I hope that everything goes so smooth and these people look so ridiculous. You don't need anything like that. What would you do if the storm came in and disrupted your business operation for a few weeks?
I don't think that's possible.
No? Because it's online mostly? Yeah.
It's online mostly. I have the generator. We talked about this just two weeks ago when there was another game. I have my Verizon Jump thing. They don't call it Jump anymore. It's like a MiFi, but a hotspot. I know what you mean. The first one I bought was called Isis, hilariously. Yeah, I remember that. They quickly changed that. Yes.
So I'm kind of like prepared, but I could see like I'm sure I'm not the only one who got this email. Right. I bet there's a couple of people who got it like that want to throttle this guy.
Yeah. Imagine if they end up getting investigated or something.
So this is Mike's scumbag of the week. It should be a new segment.
A plus one. All right. Stay a while and listen. Got a listener email I wanted to get to before we get out of here. MJVC highly recommended Mermaid.js for diagramming. Hearing the discussion on making diagrams, I wanted to highlight Mermaid.js, which is a domain-specific language for making diagrams. It's up on GitHub. You can use VS Code with it. You can integrate it with GitHub.
You can use Obsidian and more. I really like using it as a starting point for a lot of diagrams because it's plain text and popular. Many LLMs are fairly competent at generating them. Yeah, so I looked it up, and it does look really cool. It is a JavaScript-based diagramming tool, uses Markdown-inspired text definitions, which probably makes it pretty easy to pick up if you know Markdown.
The main purpose of Mermaid is to help documentation catch up with development, they write. It lets you create diagrams and visualizations using text code, JavaScript-based diagramming and charting tool. Mermaid even allows non-programmers to easily create detailed diagrams through the Mermaid Live editor. And then, of course, they have a bunch of integrations,
Like I mean a bunch, like all of the integrations, really. Like everything. Yeah, a lot of them at least. Notion, Obsidian, Joplin, GitLab, GitHub, GitT, GitBook, Azure DevOps, all the Atlassian products, and a bunch more. Couldn't go through all of them. And apparently LLM integration using HueHive to create mermaid diagrams with text. So that I will put a link to in the show notes.
Again, it's MermaidJS. It's very cool. Yeah, it is, right? I do.
Yeah, that is. That's interesting.
You can find it online at MermaidJS.org. It's a .org over there. And so, yeah, thank you to MJVC who emailed it in at coder.show slash contact. Thank you also to all of our members who support the show at coder.show slash membership. And everybody who boosts in will have the boosts in next week's episode if all goes as planned.
Mr. Dominic, is there anywhere you want to send the good peeps before we get out of here?
You know, but just don't send emails trying to sell things with natural disasters. And then go to alice.dev if you're experiencing a great day where we can help with your ETL and automation needs.
Also, I'll add in there a hot tip. You don't have to email recommending great guests who just wrote a book. It's so funny when they'll write and be like, hey, guys, I really love the show, and I know you've had some great guests, so I want to recommend one. And then it's like a book author. It's like, lady, we have guests like once a decade. What?
And usually, and I remember we had to throw one out because the audio was so good. Yeah, it happens. That happens too. That's why we don't do guests. Yeah.
All right. Links to what we talked about at coder.show slash 591 will be live next week. You can find it at coder.show slash live on a Tuesday at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern or in your podcasting 2.0 app or jblive.fm. It'll be in your local time at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar as well. But hey, even if you don't catch a live, we're just glad you listened.
Thank you so much for tuning in to this week's episode of the Coder Radio program. I'll see you right back here next week.