We're flying (or in) Dallas as you listen to this - ps who is actually listening to this? We chat native vs web apps, backend vs frontend, managers vs no manager jobs, and how Dax defines what's worth glorifying.Want to carry on the conversation? Join us in Discord. Or send us an email at [email protected] 2024StatMuse | Search StatMuse, save time.How we sold coffee from the terminalterminaldotshop/terminalFlutter App DevelopmentExpoInside Out 2 (2024)Topics:(00:27) - Matchy matchy cameras (01:37) - The joys of Primeagen chats (04:13) - The schedule for today in Dallas (10:49) - Who actually listens and knows us? (13:42) - Adam disappeared (17:23) - What's next for SST? (18:51) - Native app vs web apps (28:55) - Just build an API and not have to deal with front end (30:36) - We wish we could do more backend, less frontend (33:33) - Do we want to be a manager again? (41:21) - What is worth glorifying?
Okay, do I sound normal? It's giving.
I was very traumatized after the last situation. I also really like that your background looks so much like mine now. It looks like we really are coordinated. I think I want to move my camera further back so our heads are the same sizes.
Yeah, I don't think I can actually move mine forward very easily. So if you could move yours back, that'd be great. I don't know how much I can move it back, but I'll try. Yeah, if our heads were the same size, that would be perfect.
I think your framing is maybe better because sometimes like depending on where I'm like, if I go like that, see how my head gets cut off. So I think you're just more right. Hope all the audio only people really enjoyed that segment.
The randomness of when I click the record button and we're in the middle of talking about our AV setup every time.
Yeah.
So on this podcast, a couple of things. It might be a little short. I may have a cutoff before we get to an hour. But two, we got to talk a little bit logistics for next week. We are going to Dallas and we're going to double dip and use this podcast time as time to talk through a couple of things.
So we figured some stuff out yesterday. Well, I have a little story about that. So you saw me yesterday message being like, Uh, can I do a call with someone? I'm like a confused on a few things. So prime calls me a video call and he is standing outside and he looks kind of sweaty and it's, it's kind of choppy, like the, like the video quality initially.
So I couldn't fully understand what he was saying, but I was like, Oh, what are you doing outside? He goes, I'm digging a hole. I'm like, But he wasn't like, I'm digging a hole, and here's why. He just said, I'm digging a hole, period. Yeah. So I had to ask, why are you digging a hole?
And he goes, and this is a part I really cut up, so I, like, didn't understand what he was saying for a bit, and then I, like, it was a big awkward pause, but I think what he said was, my dog hasn't been running around or eating for a month, so I think it's time. So...
oh no gonna put the dog down and he already dug a hole for it he was digging a hole and he was like okay now's the perfect time to call dax and talk about this
Between digging the hole and putting his dog down and putting the dog in the hole, I thought, good opportunity.
It's like, it's so hard to get a hold of him in general. Yeah. And that's like the moment he chooses to be like, oh yeah, I'm free.
I love prime messages, like on Slack. It's the best. Like everyone has their voice dictated. And it's like, he has no idea what's going on next week. And I just love it. It's the best.
My favorite form of this is when literally at the last second he'll ask a question being like oh man oh yeah yeah no no no just like he's like he's like kind of like vaguely worried that nothing has been figured out yeah but it's like way too late at this point yeah he's like did we book hotels and it's like we're it's like tomorrow well you you said tomorrow like you're flying tomorrow to dallas
No, no, no. I'm going to Maine for Alan's wedding. Oh, right.
And you're flying from Maine to Dallas. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it just freaked me out for a second that I had the dates wrong or something. That's the first thing I want to talk about is I'm flying in Sunday. I think everyone is flying in Sunday.
Yeah, I get there at 540 something. Prime also gets there at five something.
OK, so we're going to have dinner tomorrow night and then Monday is the basketball game.
That's all. It's Monday. OK, so here's the schedule from Monday. Well, this podcast doesn't go out after I spoil anything.
I mean, I'll go out Monday morning.
What do you mean? I guess it's fine if we spoil a little bit.
Yeah, just spoil. It's fine. Yeah.
Our listeners get a little sneak peek. The schedule is we need to be at the basketball venue around one because the thing starts at two ish. So we go there, like set up figures, figure things out. So if we leave around one, we'll get there at the right time. So that only leaves like from the morning, uh, like around eight, eight, nine ish to, uh, to one for us to do other stuff. So, uh,
I think the plan right now is on Sunday, we'll get dinner and we'll talk through some additional ideas we can do for the basketball stream. Yep. So TJ is going to build just the thing that David designed, the overlay.
Oh, David designed an overlay.
Yeah, he just posted it today. Oh. Yeah. So bare minimum, TJ is going to build that in Laravel with Livewire and all that stuff.
Okay.
So at minimum, we'll at least arrive there already having that. So it's not like we'll have nothing. And then we'll brainstorm some other ideas we can do on top of that to see if we can get some interactivity. Okay. In the overlay going. And they'll have like a couple hours in the morning to build that. Maybe we'll work on some of it Sunday night. Me and you...
are not going to be part of that stream in the morning because we need to go pick up something okay i'm not going to fully spoil it we need to go pick up something uh-huh okay I realize it's better to like half spoil it because then now people are going to really, really want to know what we picked up. Yeah. We got to go pick that up. We need to bring it back.
I don't know if we'll have time to do to film with the thing we're picking up because that's the purpose of this thing. We're going to film with it in the morning because we might need to go to the basketball game before we have time to do that. But the game ends at 5 and we have daylight until 8 p.m. So if we leave exactly at 5, we'll have three hours to do a bunch of stuff.
And I think that's enough for the few things that we want to do. And then we'll go return it. The thing. The thing. If you can't guess what it is when I say we have to pick it up and return it.
We're going to drive it. Sorry. Yeah. We'll leave it there.
Okay. And then Tuesday. Yeah. And then we're pretty much done after that. Like Tuesday, Wednesday is just hanging out. So that's what I was going to say.
Is like Tuesday. When is the conference? Yeah. When is Laracon?
It's Tuesday morning. Tuesday morning.
Just Tuesday. And Wednesday. Oh, and Wednesday. And then everyone's flying out Thursday.
Yeah, flying out Thursday morning.
Okay. I hate missing out on hangout time, but I'm probably going to fly back Tuesday.
I mean, I think realistically I'm going to be working Tuesday and Wednesday during the conference and I'll hang out in the evening.
Yeah, like... I mean, there's the serving coffee. Is there any other responsibility that Terminal has at the conference?
Just hanging out? Yeah, I think just... Because the serving coffee part is handled by the catering company. So we just need to drop off... Oh, right. Drop off all the coffee. We should be there, of course, but...
yeah there's not like active work like there was a lot of time cool well i was stressing out because it's like stat news the nfl season is like our super bowl just when it starts it's like a big deal we got all these releases going out with that and that's just not this week but next week i mean it's not the week we're there but the next week first week of september
And I was all stressed, just like, I'm going to miss all of next week. And I have stuff to get done. And then I realized, like, I don't probably have to be there the whole time. It's Basketball Games Monday. That's the main thing I knew. I've been playing some basketball. I've been getting back in basketball shape. Not really. I'm in terrible shape. Basketball is different.
Like, running up and down a court. Oh, my word. The heart is pounding. My shoulder hurts from shooting.
I'm really feeling like we should switch it to half court. Yeah, maybe. Because my excuse is going to be that it's going to be way easier for whoever's filming because it's kind of ridiculous to ask the person to run around and chase us. Yeah.
So I also want to talk about the streaming setup because this is a big stressor of mine. I've seen messages floating around. So Wes and Scott are going to like commentate, which is fantastic.
Yeah.
Are we going to be doing the streaming from our laptop in the arena? And we're going to use something.
We have a hard line.
Yeah, so we're going to use something like Ping to get their camera feeds? Is that the idea?
Yep.
Okay, so do I need to be doing all that? Because I feel like they were wanting to do a test. No, you don't have to worry about that. I think the only thing that's from you is the camera. Yeah, I'm going to bring the camera and a gimbal, and we can use that for recording, for the stream, for anything we need a camera for, right? And all the wireless stuff.
Yeah, and so Big Inbot can just carry it around. It can be connected to our laptop and send the OBS stream. Yeah. Man, there's so much. If we had a ton of time, there's so much cool stuff we could do with the OBS and the scoreboard. There's just so much. We are going to make the scoreboard live. Oh, we are?
Nice. That's what TJ is. How's it going to be fit? It literally looks like an NBA overlay. It's awesome.
Oh, I got to see this. I'm pulling up Slack right now. Oh, look at this. How are we going to get the score?
Whoever's banging the laptop, we have one of TJ's friends is coming. He's going to be working the OBS setup and he can just control the... Oh, nice.
Okay, cool. This is awesome. These overlays look amazing.
If we had like a week of just all of us focusing on this, we could have done something even cooler. Oh, yeah. I'm sure we could figure out some small things on Sunday and Monday, but yeah, with the ads going on the bottom, like...
I know it's so good. David's just incredible. That reminds me too. I got to make this page for the website. Can AI do it? Can AI do it? Probably. I mean, it's basically just like other pages we have. So I can just change the text. It's fine. It's fine. Okay. Well, is that all the logistics for next week that we need to talk about?
I think so. I think the biggest variable is, are we going to be able to get good footage of the thing we're picking up?
Yeah, the thing. Are we going to be able to get the wheels and the doors? There's some basics that we can do. And the... It's fun teasing this stuff out. I wonder if anyone that listens to our podcast actually cares about any of this. I wonder how many of our podcast listeners know about Terminal.
Well, they know about Terminal because we talk about it incessantly, but actually have bought the coffee, actually follow us on Twitter. I have no idea. I mean, I kind of know who listens, but there's a big chunk of them I don't know.
Yeah, it's really wild. I keep having this experience this week where, and this has been happening the whole time I've been working at SSD, but especially the past two weeks because we had these releases going. People talk to me about really obscure specific things. And I'm like, whoa, you like went and really looked at it to go find that, right? So I...
Uh, so we open source a terminal code base, but I, I opened the source that technically like days before I announced it and people found out, I was already getting questions in the SST discord about like, about stuff in there. And I was like, wow, it's crazy that you were just, what was like the trigger that made you go find it? Were you just like casually checking?
I haven't actually, you made a video too, right? I got to pull this up. I haven't watched the video yet. Yeah. I don't think it's going to be that interesting for you. It's just like a 45 minute overlay of like every older 45 minutes. Yeah. It was a serious video. Serious. Oh, how we sold coffee from the journal found it. Yeah. But the other, I mean the video also, right.
So it's just like a 45 minute. It's not like one of our usual fun videos. It's like a, yeah, it's more of a serious tutorial video. uh but i posted it and like an hour later people were asking me like very specific questions from very specific parts of the video and it's just wild that people do yeah puts up out there people do like Engage with it.
It's even crazy to see just a handful of people do that.
Yeah. There's, I see a read me update and a poll request. That's nice. That was Frank.
Thanks. Thanks. We also know we also had a typo fix from someone, of course. Yeah.
If you're listening and you write code, which you probably do, if you're listening to this, uh, hit up the terminal repo, make some changes, fix stuff for us. That'd be cool.
Open source is great. I also was getting so many messages with people being like, you left the credentials in there. And every time they would say that, I would panic because we have some credentials that are not changeable. Because we do this SSH thing, we have permanent credentials that cannot be rotated.
Yeah. What were they seeing?
I saw your message. So I would freak out and I would go check what they were actually talking about and it was never a real credential. It's just that the readme had information about our AWS SSO setup. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which I totally get because anytime you see account IDs, everyone's like, people feel like that's private.
But account IDs are not private for anyone that's interested in this very obscure fact. They're not private. You don't need to redact them when you send them to people. You cannot do anything malicious with an account ID.
Yeah.
It's kind of a fun trivia fact. It doesn't matter. Yeah. So what's been going on with you? Let's, uh, let's actually talk and not just plan. I mean, I've been so busy. So same.
Yeah. You've been, you've like disappeared. Like I haven't been anywhere.
Well, I dropped off Twitter for sure. That's the first thing to go whenever I get really busy.
I think in general, I feel like I literally, I just, I just haven't heard from you. Um, that's what David just said.
David sent me a DM and said, Hey, you've been really quiet. You okay? Yeah. In what ways have I been really quiet?
I'm realizing now that if I get... 10 or 20% busier, that doesn't seem like that much of a difference to me, but I see how my behavior totally changes from someone externally. So I think it just seems more traumatic to us.
Yeah. I was very chatty probably in the terminal discord before, and I've not been as chatty or chatty at all. I mostly just emote. I just, what's the word? Emote. Oh, I was forgetting those. Yeah. I do those. I laugh at the funny things I see. Yeah.
Yeah, but I've also been pretty busy because we finally got SCV3 out and it was just like... Yeah, I saw that. It was two weeks after we planned on releasing it, of course.
So do imports work now?
Or they already did? Yeah, we had them in there for a little bit. Everything I need for stat news, I guess, is there. Yeah, we even have a migration guide. Like I said, it's all there, but you might still run into some blockers that we just haven't foreseen, but... Like, the stuff that applies to everyone is there. Like I said, migration is still pretty tricky, but... Okay, here's another thing.
So... yeah, we've been working on Ion for six months and yeah, it's been out and people have been using it. But in my head, it's always like software is slow. Like you, people need to like spend years before they actually start to use something. Yeah. I get, I've had a few experiences a week. Someone had an issue. So I said, Hey, can you send me your, all of your SD config?
62?
Yep. And we have someone with thousands of resources. And they're hitting like a performance issue.
Wow. I mean, I thought I had a pretty big project. I thought we used a lot of stuff, but not like that.
Nothing like that, actually. It's really crazy. And because I'm always like, oh, people are really conservative with new stuff. And like, it hasn't been super stable and everything. But it's somehow people power through that to like get this size. So, yeah, I just keep having these experiences this week where I'm like,
This is way outside of my expectations of what I thought people were doing, which is really good. It's great seeing that. So we've just been... Just really on top of every single GitHub issue, all the messages in our Discord. So just been reacting to that.
It's kind of nice, though, because it shifts from a lot of undefined abstract work and thinking to a bulleted list of fix this, fix this, fix this. It's done. Wake up next day, fix this, fix this, fix this. And you look back after two weeks, and now it's suddenly really polished. So it's a good, nice phase to be in.
I love it. I love it as a user of SSTv3 that everyone's using it and making it better now. I mean, like helping you guys make it better because there was something like when it very first versions, there were definitely some rough edges. I'm just realizing on this podcast, we've gone from SST1 to two, and now to three. Wow. And that begs the question, what's the plan for SSTV4?
When are we rewriting again?
Let's go. It's funny because Jay sent this screenshot of all our blog posts for the previous versions, and they're almost exactly a year apart. Wow. And every single time we release it, we're just like... I can't think of anything we could ever do. Definitely a year later, there was like a giant release.
But I will say this time around, even though I said this before, we are like out of fundamental ideas. Like there were all these things that we wanted to do that we just couldn't in V2. Even when we released it, we knew that it was in support X, Y, and Z. Now it really feels like we can do everything. And if this doesn't grow a lot bigger, it just means a fundamental idea is wrong.
Like I don't think it's the execution. I don't think it's any of that. So I'm glad to finally be able to be at a phase where it's clear that if it's working, it's working. If it's not working, it means like... And there's not like any mystery around why it's not working. Yeah. But like I said, even already the adoption and growth has been much better than anything we've done before.
So it feels right.
I love it, man. It's my favorite way to build stuff. I could show it all day long. Uh, and maybe we should do that sometime. Maybe I should just, it's been all podcasts talking through how much I love as a CB three.
Yeah. That's what I've been doing.
Yeah, that's what you've been doing. I'm working on a mobile app. I'm not a mobile developer.
Is that the big release for the NFL season, the mobile app?
Yeah, we're trying to get the mobile app out. We've had an iOS app for years. We've never had an Android app. But the iOS app has been out there, and it's just not the same as our website. It's just a very different thing. And literally every time we tweet like some cool new thing we did, anytime we tweet like product stuff, it's like we need an app. We don't care. We want an app.
Give us an app, bro. Like everybody just wants a native app. And I don't relate to that. Like I guess like maybe because I'm a web developer, I just want the web to be enough. It's like we have a website. It's great. It looks good on mobile. Choose website. People don't care. They want an app. And it's like normie people.
Is it because people don't use their computer anymore? I guess a lot of normal people just do not use a computer.
That's true. They just use phones now. They don't have to get on a computer if they're not doing knowledge work, I guess. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I guess like that is what what is. So this is a good topic. What is the fundamental difference between native apps and a good web app? Like, why does it just feel worse in a web browser? I know it does, but I can't articulate why.
I think it's entirely around the touch and the scrolling. That's my feeling. So if you build a good app, again, take Linear. Linear's a good app. If you use it on mobile web, there's probably nothing better that they can do, really, at that point. And It's just limited by the way it feels.
That's what I want to know. What is it limited by? Like, what are the laws of physics? If we go first principles here, why can't a browser have as responsive of scroll and touch as a native app? And I was joking about the first principles. I was maiming. I'm not that guy. Please don't make fun of me. Sorry. Sometimes I am that guy sometimes. So I have to clarify when I'm joking.
Yeah. But then if you joke too much and you become that guy again, you have to start joking again on top of the joke. It's so hard.
It's like inception.
Yeah. So I think what I think about is there are people that work on high performance web stuff that drop down to Canvas.
and initially it's like why the hell would canvas be any faster right it's like you're still rendering rectangles and like doing all the same stuff your browser does and your browser doing it natively so why is dropping down to canvas at all uh faster like that like just never made sense to me but you do get more performing uis if you do that i think it's it must be entirely around
the browser being a thousand percent backwards compatible with all the old layout systems and all the old styling stuff and like just the decades of of things and i'm assuming that puts a ceiling on on uh on performance which is why when you drop down to canvas you like are not implementing the whole history of things you're just implementing exactly what uh the type of stuff the program model that your current application is doing
So I'm assuming that native apps probably also have a history and have similar issues, but I think it's a little different because you can control versions of the OS. Some apps don't work on older versions. They actually remove things. So I think it's purely that.
I think it's a difference between an infinitely backwards compatible, maximum accessibility, maximum whatever, versus a more controlled thing. I think you're always going to have a gap there.
Yeah. So I guess like if you implemented your, so I've got like a React Native app. It's actually Expo. And it's a like, whatever. It's got normal native stuff in it. It's got some web views. But if I like somehow implemented the StatMuse website in a canvas, let's just assume I went through that pain. Do you think it would feel as good as a native app? I think it could. Really?
People build games in Canvas. And in a browser, it feels good?
Yeah. It's got more responsiveness.
Okay.
Way more complex than a 2D Tom. So who's done this?
Who's built a normal scroll view experience? You should talk to Ken.
I'm pretty sure Ken Network... Oh, Ken has done stuff. Yeah. I think a lot of their stuff is Canvas-driven. Because I think they deal with... They deal with the classic...
ton of data in uh like in a table type of thing yeah and that like very quickly hits the limits of traditional browser stuff yeah yeah the famous example is figma right like they're doing everything that's like is that canvas or is that is webgl the same thing okay yeah it's it's a mix of or something canvas webgl they're all kind of related okay
So if you could just build like normal website functionality using those APIs, then you wouldn't need a native app. Maybe I guess like, yeah.
And this is Flutter, right? This is what Flutter is.
What? I'm sorry. What is Flutter?
I thought Flutter was just Google's react native. Yeah. But I think the web version of it renders to a canvas. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. I don't know if the performance is better. Like it could just be worse given what their. I want somebody. Yeah.
Somebody send me like an example of a web, like a mobile web experience that feels like a native app. I'm sure somebody's done this. Maybe I could just Google it, but it'd be better if you just send us an email at really great mobile web example at tomorrow.fm.
I like just bit.
It was funny.
Yeah.
Yeah. Just aliases, email aliases. You know what? I don't know if I've set up an email.
It's just black holing.
That's funny. Well, we'll see. I'm not going to look.
Let's just, we'll see if we get any emails. Who knows? You should try the Flutter thing. I do wonder how it is. I think the other problem is web. Once you go to Canvas, your operating system has no idea what's being shown on screen. So a bunch of native-y things probably don't work.
Don't work anymore.
You have to re-implement copy-paste in a manual way. You probably have to... Any accessibility stuff, like hitting tab to go to the next element, all that. So I see why people really only use it for things like... that are really not document-oriented at all.
Yeah. Yeah, I'm probably not going to do this because I've mostly got the app built in Expo, and that's going to stay that way.
Did you hate it so much that you're, like, wondering about this?
I didn't hate it. Okay, so mobile web development's interesting. In some ways, I like it. In other ways, I just miss the web stuff. Expo, I will say, feels pretty similar to modern web development. I don't know if you've ever played with Expo.
Yeah, Expo's great.
Yeah, so it's great. I think I get very confused about what's actually happening. There's a JavaScript bundle, and it's doing some stuff. Is it using real native stuff? I don't know. I just kind of build with the normal controls that Expo provides. But most of the app, honestly, is just web views. Yeah.
It's just coordinating a bunch of different web views because we don't want to build every single page on the site, all the different scoreboards and just whatever, standings and all the different visuals we have. We don't want to build them all in Swift or whatever. It's just like, because then when we have new features, we have to build them there too. As a small team, it's kind of untenable.
So we just use the web view. And maybe that's like a golden rule you don't break, like don't use web views. I'm sure there's mobile developers who are like screaming at me right now on the other side of the podcast, but I don't know. It's working for us.
Well, then I guess what's the boundary? Like what did you decide to do natively and what's a web? Why is it not all web?
Yeah, so there's a native... like nav bar at the bottom that has different... They're actually different tabs that have different web views loading to different pages. There's other things, like we don't render the web ads in the web views, so we've got some trickery going on to hide some stuff if it's a native app, and then we render native ads. There's like native ad SDKs. Oh, I see.
So there's stuff like that. Why not just... Yeah, like originally, the first... plan was like, well, we could just build this as a web view and like, could it just load our site? And then like, does that actually improve anything? Is that, is that better than a mobile, like a web app? I mean, it's at least it's in the app store. So the people who are like, give us an app, it's like, here's an app.
They just don't know that they got suckered into using our web app. Uh, but then we thought of some stuff that like the search is more, it's native, like using native controls and the neighbor native keyboard and all that. Just little things like that. It's mostly web views, but there's like the 10% that's native. Just nabbing around and stuff.
How do you feel about the result? It feels pretty good.
Yeah, the app feels pretty good. There were things, rough edges at first, that we exposed, like loading states feeling really slow on a native app because you're not used to that. But we stripped them out and it's feeling a lot better now. Yeah, I don't know. I think the people who are asking for an app will be pleased. It is an app, in fact. And it's the current StatMuse experience.
Like if you go to www.statmuse.com, it feels like that, but just made from an app. So yeah, I think it came out pretty good. Not quite done. Still a few remaining to do's. But we'll actually have it on Android now too. So that's nice. Although I will say, Expo does a lot to make your life easier across these different platforms. There's just all these little weird gotchas, though.
Like, oh, you can't do that on Android. Oh, you can't use this API. And I'm doing really basic stuff. The kind of things that are really annoying to then work around. So as an example, form posts... can't include headers on Android, but they can on iOS. So that's the kind of weird thing that you just ship it for both.
And I've got a team member that has an Android phone and they're like, yeah, I can't ask any questions. It doesn't work. I'm like, sure it does. I don't know what you're talking about. And then I had to download the Android emulator and all that stuff. And then I learned. Yeah. So there's still a little whack-a-mole stuff like that.
This is one of those things where I'm like, Xbox made it a lot better, but... It's still to me, it just is so painful still that I will just reorient what I'm working on to never. Yeah. If you follow this logic, ultimately, I'm going to end up starting a company that only serves an API because I can't think of something like that's how you eliminate anything that like sucks.
Yeah.
If your whole product is just an API.
Well, I always said that when I was doing freelance work. The great thing about doing back-end-y DevOps consulting is there's no feedback. There's no UI complaints. If you build full-stack websites, which I have for freelance clients, the work never ends. They have opinions on literally everything. You build something for the cloud or you do a security audit or you do something that's like...
back-end infra stuff, AWS stuff, there's like no back and forth. It's like, I did the thing, here's the thing, everybody's happy. Whereas you ship some buttons on a webpage and there's going to be opinions about every single thing.
Yeah, that's actually a really good point. There's this tediousness of front-end and we both work on front-end a lot and we care about front-end, but there's like a tediousness to it that just doesn't exist on back-end where I think this is where... the sense that people have that front end is quote unquote easy.
I kind of get why people feel that way because you're not really using your brain that much. Like a lot of the time you're more just exerting a high level of like labor and just tediousness to get through certain things. Whereas back end, you almost have none of that. So it feels like you're just using your brain all the time. Yeah.
I much prefer back end. Have we talked about this? I really dislike front-end so much. And how do we keep ending up doing front-end work in my career? I don't know how to escape it.
I do so much front-end. It's crazy.
It's insane, actually. For what our skill sets are, the amount of front-end work that we do is kind of crazy. Someone explain this to me. Does nobody else want to do it? What? Are we just too agreeable? You care. You just can't not care about it.
You know, it's what it's like.
I don't know. Maybe I want to not care. Can I not care? All the places that I do front end development. What if I just don't want to care anymore? Can I just do back end? I'll talk to Stat News.
Maybe I could just. But then like the front is going to get worse. Like, are you okay with that? No, no.
We've got other front end engineers. They're great. Why do I get put on front end teams? What is it about me? Do I just skinny jeans? Is that what it is? What is it about me? People like you should work on the front end. Never mind all your back end experience.
Maybe it's a racial thing. I feel like maybe I think. Well, if someone looked at you and me, they would guess that you're the front end engineer.
at first glance right oh maybe there's nobody there's nobody that we should actually do some kind of i know people know us too well if we could just put our faces side by side and run like a pole come on engineers that don't know can we just like kind of like use ai to modify the image so it doesn't look like us but it's our skin color exactly like our facial hair everything yeah that's actually really good i would love to know what people say that's really good
Yeah, I do feel, too, like I'm getting a little old. I just turned 38 a couple days ago, by the way. I just turned 38. Oh, congrats. I didn't know that. Yeah, I don't really talk about my birthday. Somebody told me it was a security risk. Wait, do you and Alan have the same birthday? Maybe. Oh. It's okay.
I don't care, actually. You tell me later what your birthday is.
Yeah.
No one's going to get that joke at all. No, not at all. I'm 38. I do feel like, is there a point where you age out of being on the front end team? It's always going to be like me and like the 18 year olds building front ends and I'm going to be 52. And it's like, what is going on in my career? Why am I working at
it's like traditionally a junior thing to work on the front end you're right it is a very fun has a younger younger vibe to it for sure like you got to say things like it's giving and it's bad you're gonna be on the front end team you have to know what it means to say bet unironically And I don't actually. So someone get me off the front end team.
This is ridiculous. This is really funny. Yeah. Someone's going to be upset. Yes, there are some roles that are very senior on the front end. We acknowledge that. Sure. It's also funny.
It is funny. I was also talking to Casey, just speaking of job roles. maybe I want to be a manager someday again, or I was only for like 10 minutes and then I hated it. And I wanted to go back to individual contribution.
Do you feel like you're always just going to be shipping code as a job? I mean, I used to be, I also used to be a manager. Here's, I think it's, I think it's like a weird, if I look at my own situation, I think it's not exactly like, Oh, I'm going to grow out of it. I think it's more like, uh, so my time that I was like a hundred, I was a hundred percent manager, zero code at all, which, uh,
It's pretty crazy.
Sounds awful and awesome all at the same time.
Yeah. Here's the thing. I didn't think it was awful. I did not think it was awful. My work was very, very extremely well defined. Every single day I had to meet with X number of people. Okay. Once I finished that, I had no other work to do. Literally nothing. There's no work I could have made up for myself.
That's what I'm getting at. It's like the individual contributor role is so tiresome. It's one thing to the next. there will always be a thing that I'm trying to deliver.
And you can make work for yourself. You can always make work for yourself. When you've met with everyone, there's no work you can make for yourself.
See, that's what I was feeling like. If I was a manager, I would have a lighter load. That's what I assume.
It's true, you do. Yes, it's an easier job.
At the end of the day, it kind of feels like a fake job to me. It was a fake job. Is everybody happy? Is everyone still hired here? Anyone that needs to be fired is fired? Cool, did my job. Now I'm going to chill.
Here's what the actual job is like. I think it's the perfect Black Swan type of thing, which comes up like every episode. Every single day, my role was extremely predictable, extremely stable, very easy, very straightforward. It gave me a lot of time to actually, I actually programmed a lot while I was a manager, just not at work stuff.
I was able to like work on ideas, learn new things, et cetera, because my day-to-day was so well-defined. But every once in a while, once a month, once every two months, I there would be a couple of days of like intense stress and discomfort because my team failed to ship something and the rest of the company is is really pissed or they're upset.
And like, you know, there's a bunch of chaos and people want to know why and all the stuff. And you're the one has the answer for that. So there was that. No joke. There was also another situation where we were looking for a data engineer forever. And it was like the big bottleneck for a company.
The CTO kept getting bogged down in data engineering stuff because he was the one that built it originally. And we were like, we got to find a data engineer to replace him because like so much is getting backed up for this. We found one. Great, great. Finally, we unlocked this problem. Two weeks in, he was on a call with someone else and there was three people on the call.
I think one of them might have been external. One person left the call and he said something like insanely racist in front of the other person. And then now it's like, okay, well, it's messed up if we would let him go but only keep him because this is a very stressful situation for us. Another person was really upset by it, so... Yeah, then now the back. So it's like stupid stuff like that.
You know, it's like it's when you run into stupid stuff in code, it almost feels like understandable. The world is how the world works. When you run into stupid stuff like that, it's just like it just feels unnecessary and kind of like. genuinely stupid. But I would say overall it was better and it just like it's sort of like workload being predictable and stable and everything.
Yeah. Do you ever see those Twitter threads? Not as much lately, but I feel like there was a heyday for this maybe a year or two ago. Threads from like engineering managers, very serious influencer types. They're like, here's how you get the most out of your team. And if you're just managing and you're not thinking about these things, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I think it's all fake.
I think like How do you even measure a good engineering manager? I don't think managers should exist. So it's hard for me to imagine like your job, you figured it out and you're going to teach people how to manage people so that they're happy. There's nothing a manager could do or say to me that would make me better at my job. Like I'm either good at my job or bad at my job.
And I just think that I'm probably overreacting here and getting way too aggressive. But the whole thing just smells to me. It just seems weird to like obsess about this engineering manager thing. Like it's this high calling and you can get so much out of a team. Show me one like way to measure that, that your job was so important that the team did XYZ. I just don't get it.
yeah i think i agree with you that the majority of the people posting that stuff in these mid-level manager roles at big companies like they're just following some template of like this is what a manager is like and they think that it's impactful when it's really a technically useless job it only exists as a side effect of you do need someone to be a router and coordinate yeah beyond that it's like it doesn't really have to exist
But that said, the previous role I was in, I was also technically a manager, but I was not a middle manager. I built the team from the company being zero people. This was a very different situation because it involved getting people motivated
to do stuff that was like well beyond what they thought they could do or like kind of like irrational at times like working way harder than uh they technically had to just having a team that's like really motivated really excited but like run through a wall that like to say like we need to do this and they were just kind of like run at it yeah i think there that there's something real there there's like
an actual leadership dynamic there. I don't think it shows up in middle managers at all.
So is the difference in the one manager at a startup because somebody has to manage the startup, the leader of the engineering team, versus big company or middle-sized company with lots of middle managers? That's what you're saying?
Yeah, yeah. So if I'm in my current role, I'm no longer in a leadership role, and we're only three people. even though we're only three people, like Jay is technically the CEO. Yeah. And he does pay a crazy amount of attention to all these micro things that I'm not even thinking about. And it adds up a lot. And I definitely, he like definitely like pulls, uh,
Like really, really great effort out of me. So, yeah, I mean, you play sports like you get what I'm talking about. Like there is like an invisible thing that can happen when you have a good leader. But it's not this stupid like check in with your team every two weeks to see how it's never that schedule for your one on ones.
Here's what you should cover. Yeah, I'm realizing like I do this thing where I go really extreme and I just I completely like discount an entire team. a profession or role. And I say things not just that. Sometimes it's people, sometimes whatever. I'm sorry, I shouldn't do that. You're fine. If you're a middle manager, you're a developer manager, whatever, whatever they're called.
I'm sure you're doing a great job. Keep doing it. Keep doing your thing. Don't listen to me. I don't know anything. Great. So I agree with everything you said. You just walked it all back. Well, no, I feel like you were like... Now I'm out here on an island. No, no, no, no. I think you were like being kind and you were like, yeah, yeah, I agree.
But then you were like, but actually it is a real thing and it matters.
No, but I mean, I didn't. I said this other thing is something I value. It's different. And I don't value this middle manager thing. I got you. Here's the thing. Everyone can do whatever they want, but I don't believe in glorifying everything. I'm going to still have my opinions and values on what I what is worth glorifying and aspiring to and being like, that's really great.
Yeah, it's not everything. It's it can't be everything. What is worth glorifying?
Last question.
And then I got a personal it's a personal question, right?
Oh, you don't want to answer personal questions on the podcast? No, I'm saying I can answer it personally. No, I'm asking you. Yeah, I'm asking Dax. What's worth glorifying?
I have this very, you know, here's a good way to figure it out. Mm-hmm. Everyone will cry at some kind of movie situation.
Yeah, there were some tears the other night. We watched Inside Out 2, and I didn't cry, but people in the family. Not that it was bad to cry. Not that it would be bad if I cried. I should have cried. I don't have a soul. Anyway, continue.
No, but there are some things that will bring... I'm not saying you would cry, but some things bring tears to your eyes, whatever. Mm-hmm. I think you can derive what you care about from that. So for me from that, uh, the thing that always gets me is anytime someone's being like extremely honorable, like beyond what you could like imagine someone doing or like doing some kind of crazy sacrifice.
Uh, that's what I really like value. Like that always brings a tear to my eye. And I think I really value that. If you derive that further, like a lot of those things are rooted in leadership. It's usually like a leader that is going above and beyond, uh, for a group of people that are leading. And that's why this flows all the way down to like, yeah, I do really care about great leadership.
I don't think middle managers are represented that, but I do think there are people that are. Okay. That's my thought.
That's a good answer. There is one thing. There's one thing that makes me cry all the time, every time it comes up and I'm gonna save it for next podcast. Oh, look at that.
I love it.
I really do have to go. Okay. I'm going to forget and someone's going to have to remind me to tell you all on the next episode. Dax, try to remember. I'll tell you guys what makes me cry.
Is it when people don't have good lighting in their shot?
No, but that's a good one too. When people don't have the bokeh on their camera. Just right. Anyway. I'll see you in a couple days. Yeah, wow. Yeah, when people are listening to this, we'll be getting on planes to Dallas. We did that once before.
We'll be making fun of Adam. We'll probably be posting funny pictures of him. Probably. We'll probably be taking him to places and situations that he's very uncomfortable with. He's probably going to be having weird interactions with people.
I just saw, by the way, Hacksaw. I don't know if you listen to the podcast, but Hacksaw just pushed a PR to the terminal repo. It's actually a bug fix. Whoa. No, it's an issue. I'm sorry. It's not a PR. It's an issue. You should bring us problems instead of solutions. He posted a screenshot of a chat with me where he was like, could you please do this? And I was like, yes, sorry, LOL.
And I haven't done it. So... That's funny. Anyway. Are you just looking at it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's funny. My bad. I thought it was a four with myself. I'm so excited. Okay. Well, whatever. All right. All right. See ya. See ya.