Dax is sick, but his voice sounds amazing so you should still listen, we streamed a basketball game in Dallas, rented a Lambo, went to Laracon 2024, muse on VPS complexity, InstantDB impressions, kids not knowing how to program properly, taking the right size bets in a startup, and going viral on Twitter in 2024.Want to carry on the conversation? Join us in Discord. Or send us an email at [email protected] - modern podcast hosting and analyticsJustin Jackson (@mijustin) / XLaracon 2024Laravel FrameworkDax getting stuffedwip: terminal (initial commit)InstantTurk’s Opinion on NorwegianTopics:(00:00) - Switching sides if the price is right (00:42) - Dax is *sick* (02:43) - Streaming a basketball game in Dallas (06:20) - We rented a lambo (08:21) - Laracon 2024 (09:18) - Sponsor: Dax getting stuffed (09:57) - In person fun (14:33) - VPS complexity (24:38) - Initial InstantDB impressions (34:01) - The kids these days don't know how to do "x" (41:58) - Startups taking the right size bets (44:03) - Turk going viral
Oh, are we team Vercel now? Do we love Vercel? That's what you're doing? You're shifting? I'll just follow you.
We were talking about how we would definitely take, if they want to pay us, we'll do it. Yeah, let's do it. We had a joke that we would take a sponsorship from them for Terminal to do their conference and we would just send cardboard cutouts.
How are you?
Not great. I think I'm sick.
Is that why you went home early?
No. Sorry. My brain is slow. Okay. Liz's sister was watching Zuko and she had to go home a day early. Ah, gotcha. I had to go home a day early. But I think I was sick the whole time I was there pretty much because as soon as I got to...
dallas i felt kind of off and then from tuesday i was like i don't know i felt this weird phase where i was like i feel like i could be sick but i could also just not be sick yeah my my throat was sore that first morning after we went and kind of hung out with the laravel people i think that was just it's the bar thing it's like it's smoky it's loud you're yelling at each other
But then it does make you question the whole time, like, am I actually sick? It's possible.
Yeah, I was confused by that. But I think I definitely am sick because I... There's like a taste I get in my mouth in the morning when I'm sick and I taste it. So, yeah. Yep. So that sucks.
But a successful trip to Dallas, would you say? It was fun. Yeah, it went really well. Everything went...
really smoothly really as far as i know i wasn't too involved in studying the stream so i don't know if there was like chaos there but it came out good it was yeah the the color temperature and all that like i just it drives me crazy when like yeah i don't get it all right and it was like trying to warm up but also get the stream going i would like to to not do camera stuff anymore i think i want to retire from knowing knowing anything about cameras
Yeah, for the next thing, let's just rent everything.
Yeah, that'd be great. Just seeing all those professional crews walking around and thinking like, They're going to do a better job and they're probably not that expensive. I don't know. Man, carrying my bag full of equipment around the airport was brutal. I literally have calluses on my fingers just from like a day of carrying that bag around.
Yeah.
It's insane. It's heavy.
Yeah. And I guess when we rent the person to do it, it's not like we're renting the equipment separately. So it's probably pretty cheap overall.
Yeah, I would think so. Yeah. Did we give any context? We streamed a basketball game in Dallas, normal work activities, just things, you know, average professional basketball players. Hey, we won too. How about that?
Yeah. We're, we're, we're winning professional basketball players.
Yeah, I feel like we just retire now. Want to know on our our basketball career, like the terminal team never lost and never will lose because we will never play again.
I just like this idea that will like accept the challenge for any sport from anyone.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We just do a tour of all of them.
Yeah, whatever sport you guys want to play us in, we're down to try it.
Yeah, I feel like we'd be pretty good at other things. It worked out perfectly that there's five of us and basketball requires five people. How fun was that though? Like just the collection of people on the court, it was just pretty crazy. Like all these people you know from Twitter, all their faces are very familiar and you're running around like banging into each other playing basketball.
It's just a different experience. Yeah.
won't have that one again probably yeah it was funny because we had a uh so we used transistor for all our podcast stuff and yeah and uh jack was there that's the name right justin you're close sorry justin justin jackson yeah yeah so the jack yeah justin was there uh he scored a point on our team which was great yep yeah so it's just funny to see everyone in these situations that they a lot of them were like i haven't played basketball in in 20 years yeah
Just put them in a situation they thought they'd never be in.
I heard there was somebody on the other team that they had never played. They were having to explain that you dribble. You can't take steps without dribbling. They had never played.
Oh, really? Wow, that's pretty crazy.
But then there was the guy on their team. I'm blanking on his name. CEO of Laravel. Whatever. I'm blanking. But he played college basketball. Tom. He was clearly good.
I can tell he wasn't trying. What it felt like to me was... He was holding back the first half because it maybe would be like a little unsportsmanlike. Or maybe he felt like it would be like unsportsmanlike. But then like the last like four minutes, he scored like every point for them.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It kind of took over.
Yeah, I was like, okay.
That competitive, if you've played competitive basketball, like especially in college, I feel like, yeah, something's going to kick in and you're going to be like, screw this.
yeah he said it was 99 though like he hasn't played since 99 college basketball are you serious like night like 1999 isn't that crazy i mean he said he had played like five years ago maybe but like college for that yeah i thought so i didn't think it was that long ago i know it's crazy we're all getting so old he's like 45 wow okay he was really good all the gray beards
We're all just aging. It is kind of random that everyone on the terminal team is base level pretty athletic. It's pretty random, especially for a group of random software engineers.
Yeah, what's that about? I did feel like we are kind of good at this. We could probably play sports as a side thing for a while, and we've still got some legs on us. Yeah, it was surprising. Like Teej clearly plays a lot of morning basketball. Prime just throws his body at everything.
It's like his stream, like prime stream is such a perfect embodiment of like his, his personality and how he plays sports as well. It turns out. Yeah. And it's also just good hanging out. Like we don't get to do that a whole lot in person.
Yeah. I thought it was cool. Cause you know, no one, I don't think anything remotely like this gets done at conferences. So definitely first of its kind. And yeah, Yeah, it'll be cool to see what else we can whip up for the stuff coming up the rest of the year.
We've just been throwing ideas around for how do we top the basketball game. There's lots of cool ideas floating around. Well, not just a basketball game.
Then we have all the Lambo stuff.
Oh, yeah. We rented a Lambo. I forgot. We spent like a few hours with the Lambo and took all kinds of funny videos. I can't wait for those to start coming out. Does somebody have all the footage now? Are people editing?
I think TJ uploaded it into the Slack, I think. I didn't check because I was flying when he did that. But yeah, we got to get those out. It's a... Yeah. And that also, we have the top, like we've got to keep surprising people, which is, which is hard, but it's really fun.
How about vegan bot? I love that guy. I didn't know really much about him. He's the best. Like the first, when he walked in the room, like first meeting him, I'm like, I don't know. I don't know if I'm going to get along with this guy. Like it's just, he was a lot. Uh, but then you just appreciate him more and more. I feel like as you spend time with him, I love that guy. Yeah.
He's just so helpful. And yeah, love that guy. And then you learn that like he sends so many tweets to Teej and Prime.
He's a ghostwriter. Yeah. Yeah. I got to get on that.
Yeah, no kidding. Get in the loop. I think he's got enough ideas for more than just Teej and Prime. Yeah.
Yeah. And what's also cool is he's so I have a few friends that are in this specific space as well, like that art and tech intersection was really big in like the 2010s.
mid 2010s uh especially in new york they're like giant dedicated companies where all they would do is do one-off crazy like tech installations for different different clients yep he's super into that world and yeah it's obviously way crazier now than it was back then but he's got just so many ideas that we could just take and do for our stuff because uh like
you just know stuff that's happened in like other spaces and we can like map that to ours. Yep. Um, so I'm like, just send me all of your ideas. Like I will just build every single one.
Yeah.
I love it. Yeah. He's cool. He's great. It's great.
Yeah, it was a good conference. I felt like my Twitter timeline, I haven't been on Twitter as much lately, but opening it at the conference, it was just, it was taken over by all these things going on.
Yeah, so I remember Laracon last year, and it definitely wasn't this noisy. Like, I remember like a few pictures of Aaron floating around. It seemed pretty quick, but this year it seemed like... Yeah, do you think we did, did we do our part here?
Did we help boost...
awareness with our shenanigans yeah i mean i saw at least several tweets that were like do i need to start learning php now and that's like the the metric for me if like random people are just like having phone if we're giving random like react influencers fomo that's that's the goal yeah i think we did our job cool yeah what's next what's next for terminal oh we also sell coffee by the way if you're interested in some terminal coffee let's throw to our sponsors i'm just gonna say stuff like that because chris does fun stuff when i say things like that
This episode of How About Tomorrow is brought to you by Dax getting stuffed in the basketball game.
Was that a stuff, Scott? Did he get stuffed?
And also by Terminal Coffee, which you can order at terminal.shop. And while we cannot confirm nor deny that the coffee contains the sweat of Prime... We can confirm that it does contain the tears of Dax, as evidenced by him getting stuffed in the basketball game. Be sure to get amazing tasting coffee that's ethically sourced through your command line at terminal.shop. Now back to the show.
Terminal Coffee, though. We sold a bunch of artisan coffee online, some in person. I feel very low energy. Do you feel very low energy? I mean, you're sick. Yeah. This one's going to be tough. I feel like we're both just kind of like reeling from the last few days.
What else? We met Bash in person. That was the first time for me.
Oh, really? Oh, I met her at TwitchCon.
At TwitchCon?
Are you going to TwitchCon? Yeah, last year. I thought I was going to, but I feel like, and I even bought a ticket. I just, I feel like I should reserve all my travel for terminal things.
Terminal stuff. Yeah.
Yeah. We're going to be going to stuff enough that like I can't throw in extra stuff that doesn't really add to that.
Yeah, I feel the same way. Yeah, so we're trying to plan another one for Terminal in November. Is that secret? Can we say where it is, or we should probably wait? I just don't know. It's just not confirmed yet, so I don't want to say. It's going to be in New York, which... Yeah, Liz keeps pushing me to make that one happen.
Just to go to New York. Where do I want to go? Let me see. Are there tech conferences in Southern California? I haven't been to LA in forever.
I haven't been to California in a while, so I would enjoy that. I would too. Is it because... There's tech stuff going on in California all the time that they don't do conferences there?
Well, there are conferences like, I guess, in SF. I hate saying SF. But are there? I think so. Well, you know, it's been a while. I know like when Theo living there and people would be going to his apartment and stuff because they're going to some tech conference. That was NextConf. Was it just NextConf? Oh, maybe it is just NextConf. Yeah, maybe. I think they're having another conference.
I don't know. I heard maybe something about it. Sorry. Nice. Oh, are we team Vercel now? Do we love Vercel? That's what you're doing? You're shifting? I'll just follow you.
We were talking about how we would definitely take, if they want to pay us, we'll do it. Yeah, let's do it. We had a joke that we would take a sponsorship from them for Terminal to do their conference and we would just send cardboard cutouts.
Oh, that's good. I love it. Yeah, I guess maybe there aren't a lot of tech conferences in San Francisco, but definitely not in Southern California, which is where I'd rather go. I don't want to go to the Bay Area. That place sucks. That place sucks? I mean, I just don't like it. I don't know. It's not very clean. Oh, the city? Yeah, the city is sad where it is now. It is, yeah.
I mean, it's, it's like a beautiful place, you know?
Yeah, I guess. Geographically. I like to go to the fairy building and, uh, there's this place called Mary poses. This is bakery. And I have these vegan pop tarts. They're like plum flavored. They're so good. I call them pop tarts. They're like, uh, What would that be called? A strudel. Yeah. Pop tarts. I mean, come on.
It's like whenever you travel anywhere, you just get some vegan.
I really do. Vegan pastries. It's kind of like my weakness. I just traveled to get vegan pastries.
Yeah. There's a lot of vegan pastries in my neighborhood, too. Yeah.
Tell me more. OK. Anyway. Oh, we might come to Miami, by the way. Really? Casey, there's a volleyball camp. I don't remember. December? I think December. Oh, you guys should do it. That'd be really fun. Yeah, it's like there's these camps they have all over the country, and it's like when one intersects with something that would be like, hey, we could go see Dax and Liz.
It's a good reason to pick that one. So yeah, I'll let you know. Yeah, you guys should do it.
It'll be fun.
Yeah, that'd be great. It's actually in South Beach, but... It'd still be fun.
Yeah. You guys won't stay there, but... Yeah, no.
We'd stay closer to you and then we could just drive across the bridge or whatever.
Which, you know, is not going to have a lot of traffic this time because I know it was crazy during React Miami.
Was that just special circumstances that React Miami lined up with something where traffic was really bad or just time of year?
It must have been the conference because I literally... Like, I live here and I consider myself close to the beach over there. Like, it's usually like a 50-minute drive.
Yeah. Oh. Was it the Emerge Americas? The LinkedIn conference? I guess so.
Whatever the hell that is. This Emerge Americas conference just blows my mind. It really does. It's so big. And then you see everyone there. And you're like, who are these people? Yeah, they're all in suits. And Tom Brady somehow spoke there. They're big enough to get Tom Brady to speak there. But like... And it's like in Miami of all places. I just don't get it at all. I don't get it.
Yeah. What's been going on in tech? What else did we miss while we were doing real life stuff? It's so funny to say like IRL. Like, oh, that's my IRL friend. Like Teej came with Sam. He's like, this is my IRL friend. It's like, we're all real life friends. Just not like in person friends. Not enough. Yeah. What is going on in tech? Is anything going on? Or in life. Forget about tech.
Who cares anymore? I just don't care anymore. I think the more people talk on Twitter, like technical topics, the less I care. I care nothing about anyone's technical takes. I just don't. Like I'm sure someone cares. I just, I can't even anymore. I can't pretend. Like your technical takes on Twitter are just, no one cares. No one cares. Oh, there's been so much stuff going on.
Yasin has been, like, attacking all the people that we associate with. And they've been attacking back. Wait, what do you mean attacking all the people?
I mean, like, going after... It was just Yasin and Theo fighting. Was it just Yasin and Theo? I thought there were other people. WebDevCody also was in there.
WebDevCody. I don't really know him, I guess. Then there's, like, DHH hopping in and being like, Ha ha, told you, complexity sucks.
Yeah.
It's been a lot of Twitter drama.
That's definitely a good example of a conversation where I genuinely just felt like I don't... I actually just don't want to even get involved in this at all. Yeah, I really don't like that one. It's like two stupid streams talking to each other.
It keeps coming up, like this... Yeah, complexity versus...
like vps's or whatever i'm just talking yeah i don't care either side sounds and nobody is ever shipping anything exactly what are they i don't know i saw you say something about that and i had to think about it deeply for a moment like are there a lot of people shipping they just don't talk so the people who are talking these people that are always like arguing about you should be a vps it should be whatever it's like i have never used your product
Yeah. Like I've never used any of your products.
What is like one notable product that is like shipped on a VPS?
I mean, I'm sure there are. It's just that Like for the volume of people talking about it, I would expect a proportionate volume of products and there is not.
So, okay. So let's define VPS because I feel like lots of large companies manage their own infrastructure. Like they don't use... I mean, EC2 is a VPS. Okay, right. So like there's this association though with VPS. There's kind of a connotation that it's like... a digital ocean droplet is cheap and it's whatever, it's not using one of the major cloud providers.
Don't you think there's, there's, it's like, I know.
I think the application is that you just, they highlight how cheap it could all be. And obviously EC2 is not cheap in terms of compute.
Yeah. On its own. And it's an AWS thing. So, like, you're not spiritually aligned with the crowd that's, like, the $5 VPS crowd, right?
Yeah. But I think at this point, the war has gotten so large that they're, like, recruiting everyone they can. So they're, like... I got you. Because now I do see people say, like... Just get a server on Hetzner or AWS or whatever. I see that get included.
Okay, so they include AWS, yeah. They're just opposed to... Well, that's the thing. The $5 VPS crowd is sort of really angry at the Vercel and Netlify layer of cloud abstraction, which I also think is stupid and won't exist in five years. Or if it does, it'll look very different. But that's not where we live. We talked about this, at least offline. Yeah.
no yeah but that's what i'm saying i just feel like this group doesn't ship anything because so someone asked me the other day uh i was talking no and that joke post i made where i was like because i just want to flip sides now because everyone is on the anti-vercel side which is like mostly a joke but a part of me is like so tuned to just do the opposite that i'm just like maybe i should be pro-vercel
uh someone replied being like hey what's your recommendation for i'm if i'm building something that is not going to go viral like how would you think about whether i use a vps or serverless or something right and i replied being like i just don't work on anything that i don't think will go viral like what's the point yeah why work on something that yeah yeah so i'm like i i
That like, I don't know what perspective you have at all for that kind of thing. So like, I don't know what it says to do, but they pressed me on it. And I was like, here's actually what it comes down to.
Like whenever this stuff comes up, people like design and architecture from scratch, they're like, you should buy a BPS and then spin this up and do it as though this is like the only thing you're ever going to work on. Yeah. I could do all that. I know how to do all that. I've done all that in the past.
But I don't want one thing I'm working on to look radically different than another thing I'm working on just because it was smaller. At this point, I just pick a capable platform that works whether I'm making something really simple or making something really complicated. That way, all my apps look similar and work in the same way because...
especially when you're working on a lot of things, the context switching of technologies is sucks. And I think people can feel this when like they maybe tried out like solid on some project and then all our projects don't react and then switching between two sucks. And now that also on the infrastructure layer.
So for me, like, yeah, I don't, I don't really consider those other options because I do have big things that I'm managing that do need AWS. So everything else might as well be there.
Yeah. And it doesn't feel like And I'm sure people have said this before, but it doesn't feel like extra work once you... It's not extra work once you know it, yeah. It's like, I hate the idea that just ship a thing as fast as you possibly can. It could be a piece of junk, but ship it so you can move on and make money or whatever.
It's like, it doesn't take me more time to ship something with this stack that works for anything than it does... Like, I don't know what shortcuts I would take that actually save me time by using some other stack or some simpler thing.
And a bunch of other stuff comes up. It's like, OK, now it's in production. I guess because the server I do need to monitor stuff and have to go set up Datadog and have to do all these things. I'm just I've done all this stuff in the past. I just don't want to do that again. So that's what I'm saying. Like, I don't know if these people are actually building anything.
Like, see how my answer was very scoped to other stuff I'm doing in like my life and stuff. I can't like, I can't speak without that context. And a lot of these people make these recommendations without that stuff. So I'm like, yeah, I don't know. I don't think they're actually building anything. Yeah.
What about on the other side? Do you think anyone's building anything with Vercel slop? No, I don't think so either.
Uh, I mean, there are actually, no, to be fair, there are companies, there are products I use that I know.
It's like cal.com. That's, that's a big one. Or did they move off Vercel?
I don't use cal.com, but I use a, I use typefully.com.
which is like uh oh that's a twitter thing yeah i just use it for analytics because they have like the best looking analytics page for that you don't you don't use it to write your your thread boy threads and i did see them in this conversation arguing why they use whatever but just like i just don't i don't know i just really don't care and i think what's been really freeing for me i know if i says already uh just the shift that sst's taken
I feel so not pinned to any kind of way of building. Yeah. So even more so, I like don't care at all. Cause like, I'm not biased anymore about wanting people to build a certain way. Cause it lines up with SD primitives. SD primitives now cover everything. So yeah. Yeah, I'm just like, whatever. Just tell me what you want to do and I'll do it. I have no opinion on whether it sucks or not.
Can I just say when you're sick, you have like the deepest, richest voice for a podcast ever. I need you to be sick more. It just sounds really nice in my headphones. I'm sure the listeners will agree. I know.
I've had this thought before, and I think I can maybe fake it when I... Oh, there you go. I don't know. I think it's to pay attention. Beacon has a really great voice, too. Oh, he does. When he does that, like, voice... Yeah. Like, newscaster voice or whatever.
Uh-huh. I just want to... I want to do stuff with Beacon now. Like, whatever his little brain comes up with, his big brain comes up with.
his weird brain comes up with yeah he's so into like some very specific things and like i can't imagine anyone knows more you know what he reminds me of i meant to say this to him in dallas uh in the movie dune or the books whatever the guys that can calculate what are those called that can like calculate anything yeah yeah yeah he's like that but with like with like internet lore yeah with like memes and lore like you can just tell you anything yeah
That's going to drive me crazy. I can't think of the name of it. Here's the other thing that we also found. This is after you left. You know how whenever any kind of drama happens and it gets deleted, someone's always posting screenshots of it? Yeah, yeah. He's a guy that's just always taking a screenshot right away. He's the guy that takes the screenshot. He's an archivist.
He's got just screenshots of everything.
Yeah. I can see his reaction when he sees something like that. Oh, hang on. Yeah, exactly. Grab a screenshot. Okay, got it.
He's a person that just has everything saved. Any drama you can query him about, he'll produce the artifacts for you.
I have wondered that before. Who are these people that take screenshots? I also wonder when you see really funny memes, who are the people that make these things? And it's also vegan. It's people like vegan. They just have that brain. You can show them any random... you know, like these like cartoon images, people post of like a certain face. Yeah.
Like the Wojak or there was one, I can't remember it. Uh, it was one of the Yassine responses. I think it's like this kind of black and white drawing of a guy. I think it was his response to Adam Rackus. Uh, And like, I just knew when I saw it, like, Beacon will know what that's called. He knew immediately. And like, I didn't even show it to him. I just described it to him. He's like, oh, yeah.
He really is like one of those things.
Yeah. He just, I think he just physically lives on the internet. That's what it feels like.
For real, yeah.
Because it dresses the internet. There was some tech stuff that happened this week. So it was refreshing my memory on Hacker News stuff. instant db which has been like announced for a while and like kind of in being worked on i think it's like officially public now instant what'd you call it instant db.com it's another entrance in the local first category okay uh and is it is it good
I feel like you're good. I haven't been able to dig into it too much. I think my initial look at it, it looks very similar to Replicash plus the Replicash backend that they're now deprecating. Okay. So yeah, it's kind of like a... I think I still put... It's funny how crazy influential Firebase is.
I realize there's so many companies where I describe them as, oh, they're trying to be like a Firebase. But this can mean so many different things. So this is like a Firebase in that...
it is a client-side library that can like talk to a back end that you don't need to build um but they went really hard on all the local first stuff so being able to like sync all data locally uh create queries that are live updated like all of those things but just like taking a step back it's just it's pretty wild to see how much more attention this space
is getting like there's more and more entrance like these are like legit efforts they're not like one-off little things uh like the people behind this have worked pretty hard on all of this and it seems pretty polished and pretty deeply integrated with uh the things i mean they're obviously focused on react yeah but then zero is like
a new way of doing all this i really want to understand better what zero is yeah so so i think the replicash team have experimented with a few different extremes and they're kind of like trying different approaches on this so first was a client-side only library so this is just something that exists on the front end you implement a back-end endpoint that it can sync with and that's what i'm using currently with all my projects
and they went to the extreme of okay obviously setting up that back at endpoint yourself is complicated so let's put a full backend as a service thing that like fully owns all of your data and you can just plug any replicash front end into it and that was called uh reflect okay they ultimately decide not to continue with that and they're like sunsetting it at some point
Now they're trying a different angle, which is kind of an in-between of the two. They give you basically a container that can sit in front of your database and serve a Replicash application, a Replicash front-end, but you still have your own back-end, like a very normal-looking back-end that can serve other things like...
you know just it's like for like a more like realistic app that's not just replicash yeah like you own your database you own yeah all of that does it work with any database or yeah what does it work with it will but right now it's the first version is going to be postgres specific but the underlying architecture is pretty simple like the only database specific part is the replication layer between the database and their server so that they'll implement that for every uh
database they want to support and that's what zero is that's we're talking about zero okay yeah what's cool about that is because so i built our endpoint thing for boomy for sst for uh for radiance i can spend like a year on that if i wanted just to make that endpoint better faster like more features etc but they're basically doing that uh so it allows for so many cool things where you can just like
drop components on a page and it knows what queries that component needs and if you're running this through ssr it'll actually fetch it all uh server-side rendered so zero includes front-end components is that what you're saying it includes integration or it's planned to include like integrations with front-end frameworks right so if you you basically can um and it's if you've ever looked at graphql relay it's kind of similar yeah yeah if you like batches up the queries and
Yep, exactly. So if you have a component like user component, you can say like what data you need from the your data store to fill this user component. Then on there's an SSR hook. So when it's SSRing, it'll resolve all of those from like this replicash layer. So it'll actually get SSRed. But what's on the front end, this data starts getting synced locally and saved.
If there are components you have not visited for a while, they start expiring out of the cache.
so if it's like save the data for a component for your user profile because i looked at it yep and i haven't looked at it again in a week it'll like rotate out and that's a historically that's been like really manual to configure rules on yeah yeah how long to keep data how to like move this slide this window around um so they've just built a way to do this all completely automatically so it'll be pretty nice pretty cool and they just sent me like their reference architecture on how
uh you would deploy this into your aws account or wherever it is like a little complicated there's like simple versions of it there's more complicated versions of it but it's not bad like self-hosting this is like not going to be too hard yeah i wonder like if it's a container is it pretty like does it match with sst's like yep cluster thing yeah but we're actually going to build a component for it oh nice so just drop into an sst app that's so cool
I love that as you see, you guys have the ability to go that level of abstraction. Like here is a replica zero component and everything is done. And it works with your infrastructure. It creates your infrastructure. Yeah, like front end frameworks can't do that. They don't have that power.
So, but anyway, the thing that the reason I brought this up in the first place is instant DB thing. Uh, this is the first time in my career where I can finally check the box if I was early to something.
Um, cause I remember the first time you were early.
I feel like that's not true. No, I think it's true. I think to like pass a threshold of being like, it's funny cause sort of, if I was really early on it, I would have built it. So I wasn't that early, but I would say this is the earliest I've ever been to something. Cause I've seen, um,
I remember talking about this like years ago when like SSR was a thing I was talking about and nobody was like, nobody knew what I was talking about. And now I see tweets every week where someone's like, wait, I tried this local first thing. Like, Whoa, how is this not like the future of everything? Um, like people we know too.
So I'm like, Oh yeah, I finally feel like I've like witnessed that shift and it feels good. Yeah. Yeah. The next, next goal is to be early enough where, you know, you like invent the thing. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, how long has Replicash been... Like, how long ago did he start that?
Must be like five years now. Five years? Yeah.
Yeah, it does feel like the best applications in a browser are going to be local first. It's like any trade-offs... that there are, like, oh, you're not... Like, that just needs to be solved. Like, you need to get the best of both worlds. If you need to server render stuff for whatever reasons, SEO or whatever else, like, we got to just solve that problem.
But there's no way, like, a multi-page app, like, using any one of the SSR frameworks is going to approach...
quality of a local first app without I guess I guess anything could be done with just enough effort but like local first gives you that like amazing application feeling everything's instant everything feels really good feels like you can solve the SSR stuff and it sounds like it already is being solved more easily than like an SSR framework can figure out how to make
like the local first thing that make it feel local first.
Yeah. It's like out of scope for them. Yeah, exactly.
Because I think about this all the time with stat music. It's like, Oh, we don't have much interactivity, but then we keep adding more. It's like, Oh, we need to sprinkle in this interactivity. And it's like, at the end of the day, it doesn't feel very good because we don't have really good tools to kind of like make that all feel instant and smooth.
It's like we started with the SSR and that kind of constrains a lot of what we can do. So, yeah, I do. I think the future is like local first with figuring out all the other things that you need to figure out. But start from that foundation because it's just going to feel better.
That thing that you guys went through is something that I feel like shows up a lot where early on in a project, you're like, oh. the shape of this project is pretty simple. And because it's simple, we can adopt this constraint that would like really simplify things for us across the board. And then all the things you hope to never need, you like eventually slowly need.
Yeah. Yeah.
And this is similar to that, like the VPS conversation where it's like,
like if you have any amount of experience you've just gone through that thing over and over where you just don't want to start from the simplest thing yeah and just like go through that pain of like rewriting over and over um and i think we see like a lot of where how st's positioned is like specifically around this yeah we have simplified components
But we know that you're eventually going to break out of those and need weird configuration. You need more control. And you design specifically around, like our whole framework is designed around the idea of being able to do that. Whereas a lot of these SaaS services are designed around the bet that you'll never need to do that.
Because with a SaaS service, the moment you need to break through to that stuff, the product becomes extremely ugly. It just really breaks down and kind of defeats the purpose of using it in the first place. But yeah, everyone eventually just always needs it. It just always happens.
Yeah, this goes to the Twitter drama. Yasin kind of pointing out the thing that he's angry about, being that it feels like the modern SaaS slop, I guess I'll call it, in honor of his coining it, that slop. He just keeps saying the word slop. That he feels like they're trying to convince new engineers that they're too dumb, they'll never figure it out. I've heard you say similar things, like,
Not trying to lump you in with the scene that like you agree with everything he says. Don't want to get you canceled. But the idea that there's this whole wave of like dev tools companies that are like trying to simplify in a way that just like people aren't learning things they should probably learn anymore or new engineers that are coming into the field.
It's kind of like trying to shield them from something that would be valuable lessons to learn. Do you agree with all that?
Yeah, I think this falls in the category of something that's very confusing for me, which is, yes, I agree with everything there, but it also sounds a lot like what you always hear, which is the kids these days don't even know how to do X.
yeah it's true and and you remember being a kid and you remember like quote unquote kid and you remember like the grown-ups saying stuff like that and you know it may be a lot of it turned out to not matter so i think i let that like kind of check myself to some degree but i also see this other thing where people like see a pattern and they apply it like way too aggressively like yeah this does look like that but it's also different
Yeah, if I think about our early career, there could have been the generation before us looking at us writing our Java and our C Sharp and whatever and being like, this generation hadn't even learned assembly or they're not even writing stuff in C anymore. And I've gone my whole career and hadn't had to do either of those things.
So it's possible that this whole wave coming in now will never have to know how to manage a server or manage lower level stuff like, I don't know, Nginx and whatever else. Yeah.
well i think the thing that i think if i have to like draw a differentiation a lot of that took the simplification that happened in our era allowed for a lot more to be done like a lot more software to be written because like it didn't really give up a lot of capabilities right like yeah if you think about something like garbage collected languages like
that allowed for all sorts of things to be built where garbage collection was fine. Whereas with this modern stuff, it feels more like they've defined a very, very narrow kind of application and they've hyper-optimized for it. And I feel like I can't see like, here's like why 10x or 100x amount of software will be written because of these tools. And maybe it's obvious ahead of time, but...
I think looking back, that's a difference. Like that's why like the quote unquote old timers were wrong because these tools helped a lot more software be built. Yep. Yep. I don't know if that'll happen with this generation of stuff. It feels like you'd actually hear it. Here's what it feels like.
I think the difference between C and a garbage fit language is like a 10 X improvement or like a hundred X improvements, like a massive, massive improvement. Yeah. Whereas this generation of stuff is positioned the same way, but I feel like it's like, 50% better. It's like maybe two times better.
I mean, like Vercel for me is like, it's like CICD, which just feels like a commodity at this point. I mean, like people are, that was the initial big thing. It's like, I can just push to GitHub and not think about it. It's like, yeah, you can do that with like 15 services now. Or like even the underlying stuff, it's getting easier and easier to do that with. Do you agree with that?
Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's like, it doesn't feel... It's like a little bit better, you know?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is that the nature of like diminishing returns or something with progress and technology? No, technology historically just goes up real big. It's like a curve that keeps getting more impressive, right?
We'll see who ends up being right on all this, but from where I'm sitting, I feel like...
this world doesn't understand what like venture scale is at all i've been talking about this a bunch of the past yeah i've seen it on twitter you've been it's like people will build something that is a little bit better and they'll think that this is a venture scale thing and it'll also be very non-contrarian it'll be following like the trend that everyone else is doing where i'm like i'm
one as an investor like you know that all your returns are going to come from a single company that like goes huge and no company ever does that by like following the trend or making something incrementally better like it's so binary if you're just building a nice business for yourself like that's fine but these are all these companies are in the venture scale category i'm just like what is everyone doing like like we've all read the same books we've all i mean jay pointed out this this out the other day he's like
yeah we know power law exists within companies like a few companies end up really winning but it exists inside investors also like only a few vcs really get it only a few vcs really actually win um so that's probably what we're seeing like as weird as it is like i don't think a lot of these pcs understand this i'm like why are you betting on these like
incrementally better products like what where's like the wild contrarian bets like it's just and that's that to me feel it feels weird like this is like the industry that's supposed to talk about that a lot or the industry that where there's like so much reading material about thinking that way yeah but everyone just like oh yeah this seems like you know the next incremental step and incremental steps tend to work it's not like they're like
oh, this is going to be a total bust. They tend to at least work a little. And we're just down for that. They're not like, no, we got to actually do something that's crazy different.
Like, I'm going to make a hosted Postgres service. It's going to be amazing.
There's a trend of... databases then and now we're gonna like join that it's just like everyone just everyone still thinks in terms of trends like there's and i said this thing the other day too where people talk about trends like it's the weather or like like there's like wind blowing and they're like oh like the wind is blowing we gotta like put up our sail yeah and they like
see trends that way that's not what is a trend is a trend is someone like dragging the world into like a new thing like you you're not there to capture the trend you're there to like make the trend and push it um but vc is talking entirely in terms of trends because they're never the ones making the trend yeah so i can see how that affects founders oh it's like the dev tools wave i mean just how much money was flowing into dev tools there's always some hot sector in vc world
that just gets way too much money poured into it. Yeah. And we're still... We're going to watch the unraveling of that in DevTools for a while, right?
The thing I'm pointing out, though, is this way of thinking. I get why VCs see it from this way because that's the only thing they can latch on to. But I think it's infecting the founders, too, who should try to resist that. Like... I keep I always think back to when the clerk CEO responded to you because you were like, oh, why? Like, can you make your pitch to me of why I should use clerk?
And he responded to you with an essay full of like graphs and charts and Gartner research and trends. And like he and he did this again recently last week where they're like, he's like, here are the shifts in the market. And here's how we're going to be positioned to take advantage. It's just like, yeah. that shit does not go venture scale. Like that approach just does not, it doesn't do it. Yeah.
Yeah. But it's weird to me. I'm like, how is this is, this is the thing we're supposed to be doing. Like we all signed up to be a venture scale company. This is the one thing we have to be doing. Why is no one doing it?
So are there examples like I feel like you see so many examples on the wrong side of this where they're not taking big bets? Are there examples that you admire that did take big bets, like that are active startups that you feel like actually chose the right size kind of thing? Yeah.
I mean, I think there's a very simple way to measure this, right? Yeah. I think people have a really tough time separating there. There's two dimensions. There's how likely are they to be right? Yes or no. And the other dimension, which is totally unrelated, which is a part of people have trouble understanding is if they are right, how big is the impact?
So people tend to couple this into one dimension. So when they see that a company is likely to be right, they just assume it's going to be big impact. When they see a company has low likelihood to be right, they assume it's going to be low impact. But really, what you actually look for are companies that have a low likelihood of being right.
But if they are right, it's going to be a massive, massive impact. Yeah. So we were talking about replicash earlier, right? Their bet is the whole web is being built incorrectly. And the right way to build it is this totally other architecture. Is that actually going to happen? I don't know. Very low chance that it will.
But if it does, like they're just going to win like way more than anyone else. Right. Yep. And to me, like nothing is worth working on in venture scale if you can't frame it in that way. Like, yeah. So there are not a lot, especially in dev tools and dev tools tend to be like pretty incremental. Yeah. Outside of DevTools, there's obviously a ton. Yeah, I'm sure.
Yeah.
That is the state of our space. We're quite boring, I think.
We are quite boring. Yeah, I'm quite bored. I'm bored with much of the discourse. And it's helped me kind of get off of Twitter and not be that active right now.
i which i i get like there's a lot of other benefits twitter just the memes and the hanging out or whatever i am there's the fantasy football league i mean that's on twitter so i'm excited for that we're drafting tomorrow actually i think uh turns out turk listens to our podcast and he thinks i am cheating because i talked about my secret weapon last time uh so if you're still listening turk
I love you. That's all. I just like you. You're the best. Thanks for running the league.
Did you see how viral Turk went this past week? Oh, no. Did he? He had a tweet with like 150,000 likes. Oh, my God. It was so impactful that it showed up in Google search trends. What was the tweet? I can't say it out loud because he translated computer science into Norwegian. And it's quite a funny translation.
Okay. Uh, I feel like I've seen more like mega viral tweets lately. Like, I don't know if they're just showing up in my feed more, but like numbers that I don't remember seeing like a year ago on a single tweet. And it feels like it's happened within our little like corner of Twitter. You know what I mean?
Like people we know, I know I've seen Theo has had at least one or two really giant had one recently.
Vic.
Yeah. Yeah. I think I saw that.
I've never had anything go that big. It's pretty wild when people pull that off.
Oh, that's crazy. I can't imagine what you're like... I guess you don't get notifications at that point.
You're just checked out. When stuff leaves our bubble, it goes crazy.
Mm-hmm.
Oh, speaking of going viral, I think Elon said that they are going to do a refresh of the Twitter algorithm GitHub repo.
Oh, has it never changed? I hadn't checked back in. Has it never changed since the first time they put it up there?
No, so he said that it's like... the word 30,000 was there. I don't have to say 30,000 lines or 30,000 changes. I don't know what it is. And they're going to be, they're going to be updating it. Um, and they said they made like a lot of changes recently because they were talking about how they're trying to make it. So it's fine. They were like, we're trying to make it.
So banger tweets go big, even if it's not from a big account. And I'm like, that's a funny way to phrase it. But like, yeah, that's actually what you want. You just want the best content to go big, even if, It's from a smaller account, which I see how that's challenging.
Don't they say that about TikTok? Like that TikTok has that going for it?
The most customizable algorithm in the world, TikTok. Yeah. Oh, really? Their stuff is so wild. I just, I don't even understand how it's so good. I don't use it at all. But like when I see people describe it or I see people using TikTok, I'm just like, How does it know this well?
Yeah. Is it scary to you? Like, is there like a China thing that's scary or something? I don't know.
What it feels like to me is it feels like there's so much content being produced that it's almost... It's hard to differentiate the app... knowing what you like and just like generating it for you in real time from like it just finding content because there's so much content being generated constantly. So there's like by accident enough content for you being generated every single day. Yeah.
And it's so wild. This is so obvious, but I never clicked for me before. Like I don't use these apps much, but like my Instagram, for example, it shows me a bunch of Doberman videos because I have one. I love Doberman's and that's that's what I'll watch. Yeah.
And I had this weird, I realized the other day, I had this weird perception of it where I'm like, Oh, like I'm watching all these videos and I'm like running out of Doberman videos to watch. And like, cause I've seen so many of them already. Yeah. And it didn't click for me that, Oh, but there's like always new videos being made of Doberman's cause there's always more Doberman puppies.
There's always like, you know, more situations where I'm like, I'm really never going to run out of this or like making more than I can consume. And that was different from the way that my head had understood it before. I was like, there's a fixed amount of videos out there and I'm like slowly consuming them all.
And eventually I'm not really going to have any, but yeah, it's just weird to understand that.
It's infinite. There's some infinite content.
Yeah.
I love to hear vegan talk about content. I'll never hear the word content again without thinking of vegan now. All right, well, I really have to pee. And I feel like maybe this is just not going to be as long. I feel like we're both like need a nap or something. Maybe this is like the lowest energy podcast. Yeah, yeah.
You should probably do that. As great as my voice sounds for podcasting.
It sounds amazing. But yeah, it's probably wearing it out too. It's been fun as always. Get well, get well soon. See you next.