Adam has dreams of a perfect gated community, Statmuse's mobile app getting accepted, why is Amazon returning everyone to the office, has AWS fallen behind, Dax explains the economy to Adam, Adam catches up on Twitter email sending drama, and did Terminal Coffee save PHP?Want to carry on the conversation? Join us in Discord. Or send us an email at [email protected] Clothing by tentree® | Shop Organic + Plant TreesPleasantville (1998) directed by Gary Ross • Reviews, film + cast • LetterboxdSyd Kitson’s Sustainable CommunityBabcock Ranch TomorrowSearch StatMuse, save time.Ionic Cross-Platform DevelopmentAmazon Office ReturnEmail Delivery ServiceResendwip: terminal (initial commit)Build Modern WebsitesElixir ProgrammingAstroTopics:(00:31) - Talking about the trees (10 of them) (03:50) - Adam's planned community dreams (08:29) - Adam's been working on Statmuse's mobile app (16:44) - Can you ever just relax and enjoy where you're at? (20:03) - Amazon return to office decision (25:20) - Has AWS fallen behind? (27:41) - Remote work didn't accelerate like we thought (34:09) - Dax explains the economy to Adam (40:11) - Catching up Adam on Twitter (42:39) - Of all the reasons to found a company (49:07) - Sponsor: Terminal.shop (49:32) - Did we save PHP?
I'm just DMing right now.
I don't know if we should cut this out. I just don't listen to podcasts. So I have no idea if what we're doing is.
Oh, I don't know if this should stay in or not. I really don't. I'm sponsored by Tentree. No, I'm not. What is Tentree? It's a brand, a clothing brand.
Oh, it's like an actual hat that you buy from a place that makes hats.
Yeah, that you buy from a place that makes hats. That's right. You thought it was actually like a swag item or something.
It's usually the case, you know?
Yeah, usually. No, it's a company called Tintree. They plant tin trees for every item you buy. Oh, wow. Kind of cool. Kind of like the guy who, the Tom guy who gave away shoes to poor people every time he bought shoes. Oh, yeah. Probably for them, it's probably selfish. There's probably some corporate tax write-off or something. I don't know. But you feel warm and fuzzy when you do it, you know?
Have you seen those videos? There's, like, there's a few cases of this. It's, like, it'll be someone that just grew a forest in 10 years or something. And have you seen them walk around and plant trees? No. It's really crazy. They'll have, like, a sack full of, like, little saplings.
And do they, like, throw them into the ground or something?
Yeah. Why do I know this? And in, like, one motion, they'll, like... they'll do something with some kind of tool and they'll like plant the tree. And then they're doing like one every like couple of seconds.
I guess I have seen this or I had a dream because I can, I can picture someone doing that. Like they're kind of like throwing a little sapling in like really fast.
Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy. The other thing though, is have you seen, there's this funny thing where there's human made forests and they'll grow and they kind of look, Oh, like, wow, that's pretty impressive. Like we, we made this forest. Then you'll see a side-by-side shot with an actual forest, and it's way more chaotic and crazy. It's hard to replicate that.
Can't replicate nature. I wonder if it has downstream effects for habitats, for animals. They can't live there.
It's definitely less robust and stuff like that.
It's like we plopped a suburb in the middle of a field, and we're like, move in! Come on, animals! Yeah. We're good at this stuff. We're humans. We build things.
Look at this forest. Liz showed me this video yesterday where it was one of those... Oh, day in my life type of things. Um, but I was with this woman in South Africa. I don't know if you saw it, but, uh, it's like her with her like young kids and they live in this like complex. It's like, uh, it's, it's an apartment. It's like an apartment complex. Yeah.
Then they like, they leave and they walk and they're like super happy. Like, Oh, I love living here. Like now this is my day, blah, blah, blah. And they're walking and there's like this paved over, uh, area and they walk to like this cafeteria where they like they're served dinner and it's like this crazy weirdly structured life.
Like the whole community seems like they take care of everything for you. Like there's like a movie. It plays on designated eat area.
It's like Pleasantville or something.
Yeah, it's exactly. It's there's a movie like that, right? Yeah, exactly. It's like one of those like type of weird movies. And it's, it's just so weird to me that going to, and like the, the dad met them after work at the cafeteria. It's like eating at a cafeteria is,
as a family, as something's just weird about that, you know, it feels like there was something, this is like post-apocalyptic and they were able to survive. Yeah.
community or something i'm gonna say something and you're gonna make fun of me because i'm that boring white family that moves in with the white tesla in your neighborhood in the big cube box we looked at a neighborhood like this like this crazy planned community in florida where they had like this whole main street with like all these shops and there's like little like electric go-karts that everyone can just ride around freely and leave wherever golf carts or golf carts yeah golf carts they have like cards would be fun
They had multiple... Yeah, that would be fun. They had multi-seat bikes where families could hop on a bike and ride it, but you just leave them laying wherever. It's like the whole community, the whole... It has like a store, like a grocery store and like a whatever town center.
There's just like this whole thing played out and like your whole life just lives in this little community or this big community. It's like a huge amount of Florida, whatever. What's that? What's that called? Not the swamp.
They like converted a bunch of... Wait, was this literally like Disney? No. Because Orlando is famously or like Disney has famously these like planned... Oh, really? Back when, like, Walt Disney was still alive, like, they were doing all this crazy stuff. There's parts of Disney World in Florida that are, like, planned. Where you can live there? Yeah, it's, like, designed by Disney.
No, this was South Florida. It was, I think it's somewhere between, like, Naples and Fort Myers. It was this ex-NFL player that, like, retired and built this community. I don't know.
interesting that's interesting i'll find the name of it but it definitely had those vibes like uh like everybody's just like wearing the same thing and like hi neighbor like creepy kind of vibes but we considered it and it's like everyone has to build one of these like three different types of houses and you have to choose one of these builders my parents my parents house is one of those type situations it's like one of five models yeah that was very interesting
It's crazy when real estate developers go beyond the house and they're like, okay, we got to like make this more attractive. So we're going to build these like businesses and everything is like kind of one cohesive thing. I definitely get the appeal. Like there's definitely like, like a lot of stuff just taken care of for you. But the reason I thought of this was it's like the forest.
Like when you do a centrally planned thing, it's just going to feel off, like no matter how hard you try. What's interesting is my neighborhood in New York battery park is,
it's somewhat of a planned community um more so than like any other part of new york uh because it used to be a landfill it's like the very tip right yeah it's like the tip of yeah okay it used to be a landfill so basically when they would yeah when they would like dig a landfill wow
new york city landfill they would dig up like other parts of new york to like build stuff they would just dump everything off the uh like off the coast and like in the hudson and eventually it was so much stuff that they just they like cut they like basically built new land wow by doing this they expanded the land out from digging all this stuff from the center of the island and they cut like a perfect rectangle
And it like actually like codified it and made it like stable ground. Uh, and then whole, all battery park is on a land lease. So like all the buildings are like taking, they're leasing the land from the government. And it's like the semi plan thing.
Um, but it's actually, it's, it's, I would say for a plan thing, it came out pretty good, but it has the exact same problem, which all plan things have, which is, uh, it's just brittle. There's, uh, there's not really like the right type of businesses. Like they're kind of in like weird locations.
Like the natural emergence of them didn't pop up where for what it has, like it has really great parks, like right on the water. Like it's, it's super nice in a lot of ways, but it's totally, it feels totally different from the rest of New York where you can just like walk one foot and like run into like a great restaurant or like you can kind of get everything you need at arm's reach.
It just feels like something's like a little off.
Yeah.
It's also in New York. So there's that downside. I mean, you have to live on Manhattan.
Well, we're going to go to assuming you're coming because you said we're going to New York in November and I'll try to show you a better time.
What are the dates? What are the dates?
We're going to get there. So we're going to probably help us book everything next week. November 15th to the 20th is a plan. 15th to the 20th.
Yeah, I think so. I better double check with Casey. But I think it's clear. I can't miss a terminal gathering. I know. It's the ultimate FOMO. Yeah.
Are you sure?
What have you been doing? What's been going on? What is happening on the internet?
Well, I ask you what have you been doing because you've basically fallen off the face of the earth. No one has heard from you.
Yeah, I've been reflecting. I think I do this every like six months. I think I have like a, yeah, I'm done with Twitter. I'm done with the internet. I guess normally I'm a little more high touch. Like even if I drop off of Twitter, like with you, we skipped the podcast last week. So literally submitted the stat news app to the store this morning and
Uh, it was, it was like this, uh, crazy crescendo to like, I hit the button and then it was like, I'm sorry, you can't submit because you like track or something and you had to fill out this form and blah, blah, blah. It was like this big rejection. As soon as I hit the button, it was so anticlimactic. So then I had to spend an hour like doing a bunch of Apple paperwork, but then I submitted it.
So it's submitted. It feels good. They're going to reject it. Probably too many. I mean, probably no, honestly, too many web views. I don't know how people do this. So, Have we talked about mobile development on here much? No, you probably have. It's all probably fresh in your mind now. It's very fresh in my mind. It's such a, okay, so the dilemma for us, like we have this giant website, right?
And it's been 10 years of building this giant website with all kinds of stuff, like visualizations, it's sports statistics. So there's all kinds of different custom visualizations for different sports and like tons of just UI that we would never want to rebuild on a native app. using native stuff, right?
Like we are the perfect case for using web views to have a native mobile app because people constantly ask us for a native mobile app. We want to say like, oh, the web, the mobile web experience is really good. Just use it on your phone. It's fine. Like for the kind of site we have, it's like, it's fine. It's like a Wikipedia style, like lots of links, clicking the pages, whatever. Yeah.
But people constantly badger us about having an app. Like every announcement we make, there's like five replies to the tweet that are like, we just want an app, bro. Like everybody wants a mobile app. So we're like, okay, fine. We'll build a mobile app, but it's mostly going to be the web experience. You're just going to have a little bit of native like navigation at the bottom.
And that's basically it. So it's all these web views. And I've talked to a few different like native development experts, if you will. And they've given me the green light that this is a case where, yeah, It probably makes sense. We're a small team. Like we're not going to have a mobile developer that just does mobile development. Probably makes sense to just use web views.
Like I've gotten the sign off. I'm not just like spitting in the face of every mobile developer. So we have this case where it makes sense, but it's just terrible. It's such a terrible experience to build a native app using these web views.
All the things you're used to doing in the web and sharing state and local storage and cookies and sessions, all of it is just like ass backwards and broken and you can't do anything you want to do. The amount of effort to build one little thing on the mobile app compared to the web is It's just insane.
And I don't know if it's just because of our use case we're trying to shoehorn a web experience into a native app. That's why we're having such a hard time. Maybe if you're building a purely native app and it's a totally different use case and it's not an existing property on the web, maybe it's not this bad. But it's bad. And the web view is like a community project. It's not like...
built into react native used to be i think but then they spun it off and it's this community thing the number of like quirky bugs for this being like oh it's cross-platform it works on android and ios the number of things that just don't work on android or don't work on ios and you can't use this flag on this but you can on this it's a mess okay soapbox soapbox over i'm done well my question is uh
Does it make, like, you guys use React Native for this?
What about those frameworks that are really more oriented around just web stuff? What are those frameworks? Are you going to say, like, Flutter and all these other words I've heard people say and I've ignored for five years?
No, not Flutter. Like, before React Native came out, there were all these, like, app development frameworks that were just around the idea of, like, shipping web views. But, like, there's a bunch of them, right? Like, I'm trying to remember. I don't know. I'm blanking on any of the names, but...
So React Native is more oriented around, oh, we're going to help you build a native app just in a different way. So I can see why maybe doing WebView stuff in there, they just don't care that much about because the whole point of doing React Native is to not do web stuff, I guess. I'm blanking on like, was it like Capacitor? Oh, I have heard of that. There's like a, oh, Ionic.
Ionic is the one I'm trying to remember. Ionic? Okay.
Yeah. Why didn't you say this to me like two months ago, Dax? Three months ago. Why are we just now talking about this? This is not good. Then I'm realizing like, well, I asked some expert stacks and they said I could just use the web view in React Native. And then I realized I asked React Native experts. Should I use a web view in React Native? Yes.
And maybe if I would have asked, should I use React Native? They would have said no.
oh man yes anyway yeah probably a new way to build and ship for mobile oh my word if this is better and easier and i just could have saved a lot of hair great again i don't know anything about this i've never used it but positioning wise it seems more related to like just straight up using a web view yeah i don't know how that relates to literally just pointing to an existing web app
Which is probably what you're doing, right? You're not even like... Yeah.
Yeah, we're not building from scratch. It's like literally hitting custom pages on our website that are kind of catered to this mobile experience.
Or in some cases, the same pages, but... I think that actually would still work because this just injects certain APIs and you can just access them. Yeah, because I feel like if anyone has spent time figuring out the problem that you had, it's these people, which is because they're helping you build, ship a hybrid app or whatever.
So I'm going to look into it. I do see on their website how you can also build apps across iOS, Android, and the web. And React Native does that too. Why in the world would you build a web app using React Native?
I saw the craziest demo recently.
Oh, there's reasons to do it? It was cool?
Okay, I mean, I can't share too much because I'm just going to blow up their...
It's one of those stealthy, you got an inside tip kind of things.
Yeah, it was a really cool bringing together of several technologies. One of them being React Native for web. The reason being is like, you just want a single code base and you want to deploy the two, three platforms. I think in theory, that's like, I can, I actually really considered it at one point for something.
Really? Doesn't just hamstring the web development so much.
Yeah. But it depends on what you're building. If what you're building. So for you guys, it's like stat muse is like, the golden property. And then this is like, it's like a side thing.
Okay. If you're building a thing, like, like what was the famous that was a Snapchat or Instagram that didn't even have like a web experience. It was just mobile for the longest time. They're like a huge billions of user mobile app.
Yeah. Probably Snapchat. Right. I don't remember them doing web stuff.
So maybe that case where the web is just kind of an afterthought.
Yeah. Or like they're all equal. I don't know. I can see some productivity stuff being in this case where you're equally expecting people to use it.
on the go as at home like i mean this the simplest example is like a shopping list app oh i see that's like you can see how like all three are kind of equal and it's not like you're gonna be doing crazy web stuff yeah okay i just can't imagine leaving behind things like next.js when i could build a website with next.js that's just insane but man i can't wait for you guys to see this this new thing uh
Next.js killer confirmed? Is that... No, it's just... I think we're finally just rotating back to stuff that's actually...
useful like spa stuff spending four years on yeah i mean it's it's just like a great example of again using this react native for web thing and just having a single code base that works across all three plus a few other things that make it all nice can you give me a hint about who it's who's doing this is it someone we've heard of i've heard of i don't get out much yeah okay yeah i'll tell you after okay that's for the the patreon subscribers no i'm just kidding
It's funny. Okay. So you've been working on this app and it sounds like it's been hell. Are you done? Do you feel like you're... I'm sure there's going to be a bunch of other issues that come up.
I mean, the first release, we already have like fast follow releases two and three planned. So such is life. Do you feel like you'll ever just like be cool? Just like, I'm cool with the pace things are going. I mean, not cool, cool, but like... My wife is like, why do you get so into each release?
Why do you push so hard to get this thing out the door when you just have more stuff to do after that? It's not like I'm just done. So why can't I just take a nice, easy pace and just be like, I get done what I get done every day. Life is good. I enjoy where I'm at in life. Why can't I just be that way?
I think I flip between those two modes.
Really?
Yeah. Yeah, because if you look at... I mean, if I think about SSD right now, we're definitely in the... So we call it, like, dummy mode. It's, like, it's... Because, like, the phase we're in right now, we don't have to use our brains too much. We spent, like, six months building Ion. And that was, like, a lot of, like, kind of what you're talking about. Like, you know...
focused effort and like you know pushing but now we've like done all the thinking and now every day we wake up there's a bunch of issues we just fix them one by one and they're all like pretty straightforward uh bugs new features whatever and like we don't have to like the order we do them doesn't matter like we're just totally reactive and we just have to do everything and if we do this for six months we'll look back and i'll be like a very polished product with a lot with a lot of stuff so yeah
It feels more relaxed in that I'm not like having all these existential questions of like, who are we? What are we? What do we want to do? You know?
Yeah.
I feel that shifts. I don't feel like I'm always in.
Yeah, I'm not always. I guess I go through. It's all about the like release calendar. Like if we have a target date, like we're trying to get something out for a certain time frame, then the closer it gets that time frame, the more stress, the more I push. And then after that, I'll go through a few weeks where I'm like, it's the beginning of every new phase. It's like pretty chill.
Like I'm still getting stuff done, but it's just like, I'm not freaking out every day. Like I'm, I got to get this done.
That's probably normal. I guess. I think the other thing is, is like, we don't really have releases like that.
Like we're just, you're just always continuously releasing CICD. Yeah. You shipped a production like 15 times a day. You don't even think about it anymore. Yeah. Twice on Friday.
Well, it's easy for us because the thing we release is a CLI, which is versioned. So, like, if it's broken, it's fine. Just go back to the previous version.
Yeah, web apps, not so much. When you release the web app, everyone gets the web app.
Yeah. So, that's kind of nice. I just finish and I just run one command and it's out. And I don't have to really think about anything. If it breaks, I'll just do another one. So, yeah, it's just different. But... I do think that we do have moments where we're like doing a more like release oriented thing. And it is good because it kind of forces us to go faster than we normally would.
Or like, like there's a good impact of that. I just don't think we can be in like that all the time.
No, can't be like that. It always, but it feels like to me and to my family when we're in the thick of it, it feels like this is how it always is. Like I got to chill out because this is always, we're always pushing, but then we're not, we forget when we come off of it. there are periods of relative chill.
Speaking of relative chill, uh, did you see relative chill at home? Did you see the Amazon return to office thing?
Oh, I did. I saw people leave, like big names. Chris Munns left. I saw other big names people announce they were leaving AWS. Is that all over the RTO? I actually saw the people say they were leaving before I saw the return to office.
Before, yeah. So I don't know how related it is. I mean, they've been bleeding people for a while, so it might just be a continuation of that. But yeah, I think they said... Officially backed five days in the office and everyone's really angry and there's a lot of discussion going on about it.
Do you know what it was before that?
Three.
So you had to live in Seattle. You had to be near an office. No, no, no.
Three days in your hub and now you have to be where your team is, which is likely not where you live and you'd have to move.
Oh, so lots of people are having to go back to Seattle potentially, like where their team's existing. They got to commute. That sucks. I mean, for them, I would never work at a place where I had to live somewhere specific.
15 years now, nobody's telling me where to live at this point. Yeah. I'm totally on the evil side of this. Like everyone's going to hate my thoughts on this.
Oh, you think it's good. I saw your contrarian take. When I see takes like that, when you say stuff like that, I just think like, do you really believe that? Or you just want to be the opposite of what everyone else is saying? Yeah.
Is it both? No, I've been annoyed by this forever. And a lot of it is like personal and irrational. But I do think I also have a rational case. Like you, I've worked mostly remote my whole career. A lot of time was as a consultant. I've seen a lot of companies. Almost none of them do remote well. Almost none of them do remote well. That makes sense. I will only ever work for remote companies.
So I'm willing to, you know, sacrifice the ability to work at a lot of these places that, you know, pay a lot because they require to be in the office. And that's been my position for a long time. Yep. I don't think a company like Amazon that never intended to be remote, that attracted, that kind of offered this opportunity
very stable straightforward path of like making a lot of money i can see why them just flipping to remote overnight doesn't work out yeah right like if i'm being totally honest like a lot of these companies like the motivation isn't very high then the relationship is how do i do the least amount of work while still getting what i need and there's like attention and that's like
At these big companies, that's kind of how it is. And I think when you go to remote overnight, it just swings really hard in one way.
And they probably, did they do it in 2020? Did they do the COVID? Is that why?
Yeah, it was all because of COVID. And there's like, there's different people at fault for that. Like some of it's a company, some of it's the people that are working there, but like just like the employees. But the arguments that people make of why Amazon is doing this, they're not very good. They're like weird conspiracy theories.
I'm sure some of it is because they get to like, it's like a free layoff. It's a way to pare back your workforce, like make some cuts.
Again, I don't.
like that i'm not gonna say that's not a case but it's like a random layoff and like yeah being willing to just like randomly lose people is like it's kind of a stretch i think but i'll acknowledge okay maybe that that is there somewhere i've definitely seen the extreme uh conspiracy theories like commercial real estate like somehow they're in cahoots like what would that look like it's like it's not that it's like if that yeah so when people start talking like that i know like
You just want you just like got remote for free and you like don't really want to fight for it and you want to have some like thing to complain for. If you really want to work remote and you care about that, quit and go find a place like be good enough to go find a place that is like, hell yeah, we'll hire you.
And this just reverts back to how it used to be, which is I work for a bunch of companies that were not remote. I went and I interviewed and I got them really excited about me. Then I had to negotiate letting me work remote.
Mm hmm.
And that was hard and annoying. And oftentimes it was a no, but you can still pull it off if like you really care about it. So that's one side. That's like the personal side where I'm just like, I just find the complaints around as annoying. Like you care about it. Like you can make it happen. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Then the other side is. I think Amazon just needs a reset.
I think any kind of big change is probably going to be good for them, especially AWS. If we look back over the last four or five years, I feel like things have been kind of different. They haven't really shipped as much. They really seem to be lagging. There's a lack of cohesion and they're falling behind in a bunch of places. So any kind of reset for them I think would be good.
Yes, that means losing a bunch of good people and there's going to be pain in the short term. But I think that will be, I just think that's probably good for them. They probably way over hired during COVID. That was definitely a thing. Yeah.
Cause like the internet usage kind of soared during COVID. Right. So internet companies may be over hired or now.
Yeah. But like, it was also just money was cheap too and free flowing. So like, I'm sure like any decision that, you know, there's a 20% chance of make the decision. It probably turns like an 80% chance. And it just, yeah. Yeah. Bloated everything. And yeah, that's why you have this nice cushy job. It's because of that overhiring. So at some point there's going to be a correction.
Do you have any opinions on whether the, you said the last few years, the AWS has kind of been falling behind and just like kind of a mess, a drift. Do you think it lines up with Jassy leaving? Like they had Celepski in there and then now this new guy, it's like, do you think it's a leadership problem or just random and who cares?
I have no idea. I just don't know any of the details. I, yeah.
I do wonder if Jesse was really good at everything. I mean, he's now the, the Amazon CEO, right? Yeah. So he must be really good at everything.
Yeah. Again, I don't know if it was, if it's like, I just don't know. Like there might just be a certain, maybe they just started making money too easily. Like that's also like a weird dynamic that messes this stuff up.
You don't have to fight for it anymore. Just kind of like getting fat and happy.
Yeah, they're making $100 billion revenue a year. It's still growing. That's pretty outrageous numbers.
When you say they've fallen behind, are you talking like the Cloudflare's of the world, like in the serverless kind of ways, like the new edge or new era app development ways? Or what kind of things come to your mind when you say AWS has fallen behind? Because I would say they think they've fallen behind on AI, and so they've hard pivoted to everything about AI they can possibly do.
Yeah, no, but that actually is true. Like why, like they should be leading AI, really. I don't think they need to reorient their whole business around it, but like, yeah, it is weird. They just were completely caught on that. I just don't see them.
It's the same way that Apple too.
Yeah, a lot of the big companies. Yeah, I mean, I just don't see them leading in a lot of places in terms of, like, pushing how we do things, like, you know, pushing the bar on that. They're not, like, lowering prices as much as they used to. They're not, like... Didn't they actually raise prices on something? Like, the first time?
I didn't think the first time ever they raised prices on something. I can't remember what it was. Inflation. I'm just, like, not feeling that thing.
Sorry.
I mean, it's not feeling that thing I'm looking for where I'm like, oh yeah, there's a lot of energy here and they're like pushing and they're thinking about, you know, disrupting their own products and all that. There are like exceptions. I do think there's some stuff coming out that is going to be interesting, but... But it's been a couple of reinvents that were kind of underwhelming.
Like a couple of years of like... I don't know. I didn't leave reInvent being like, man, life is just going to keep getting better.
Yeah, exactly. So I just think they need to reset whatever big disruption they need to do is probably good. Yeah.
Yeah. On the remote thing, I guess I always thought when I started my career remote as well, and I always thought like, especially leading up when the COVID stuff happened and everybody, it was like, oh, it's accelerating the transfer to all of us being remote. I had this assumption that it was like better and that over time, more and more people would work from home.
And I think what you're saying is reminding me that's not true. Like it's not for everybody. It's not for every company. And it seemed like all the articles came out when COVID hit that like, this is just going to accelerate the work from home movement and everyone's going to be remote in five years. And turns out everyone's being sent back to the office. Five years later. Yeah.
It's going back to where it used to be, which is if you can get a company really, really excited about you, they'll still let you work remote.
And if it's the right kind of company, like to your point, an Amazon probably doesn't make sense to be a largely remote workforce. It's like, is it just big companies? Is it just like when you're a company at Amazon scale, is it just harder to be remote? If you didn't, I guess, like you said, if you didn't start remote. Okay. So I'll give you like the dynamics because our team is remote.
You're three people. What's that? And Amazon's about what? Three million people. I don't know.
Well, I think if I explain dynamics, I can actually clearly explain why like, yeah, it's going to be extra hard for a company like Amazon. When we work remote, what that looks like is work infiltrates way more. Oh yeah. Of our, of our life because we don't have clock in clock out. We message each other all kinds of day, like time, like we're working out. Like it just,
We really let it take over way more of our life than we normally would. So weirdly for us, working remote means we're like working a lot more and we're more engaged. But that's built on the idea of all of us being extremely motivated because we're this is like our company. Yeah, right.
We're all innately got steak.
100 x more motivated than i tried to explain this to casey the other day i still am having this conversation with casey about how i don't just have a normal job like i have skin in the game i have a stake in everything i work on you know what i mean and it's beyond just like a financial stake it's like it's like it's like a part of identity right yeah oh yeah for sure we have you know hopes and dreams for it outside of financial success so we're extremely motivated so when we work remote it just like it's like supercharges how much
you know, it like infiltrates our lives. Now, if you remove the motivation, I think, you have the opposite problem, which is now it's very easy to like not do that, like not really do as much work, you know? So at these, I mean, a side effect of being large is it's really hard to motivate your workforce. So yeah, I can see why they struggle with that.
Do they just know, like in leadership at big companies, they just know that like ultimately we get like 10% of an employee's effort that they would be giving at a startup. But if we have a million of them, it's enough.
yeah everyone like lies to themselves and it like you know that thing that like work always inflates the time you have so it always feels like everyone's doing as much as they possibly can so this is what like when they talk about corporate culture and like principles and all this stuff it's to like basically it's religion you're trying to like brainwash everyone under you to like just to get that 10 out of them so that everyone's not just completely checked out doing nothing is that the idea
Or the money is the motivator. Sorry, I'm answering my own questions.
I remember even when I was young, I remember my dad saying that, yeah, if you have someone in the office and they spend 40% of their time working, that's like very good. That's like, you should be really happy with that. And so, yeah, I think it's just accepted. There's just like, there's always going to be, again, this tension of, one party is trying to get as much out of it.
The other party is trying to get as little, trying to put as little work out there as possible. And like you arrive at some middle ground.
It's so foreign being a startup founder and like you, we've just only worked for ourselves on things for ourselves. We work 100% of the time and then like cut into our life sometimes to work more because the thing needs more attention. Like there's no moment of my, or is it like comms and stuff? Are they just saying like,
The 40% doesn't include, like, all the wasted time, like, breaks and communication and meetings.
Yeah, I mean, whatever it is, like, it's just... There's, like, room for... There's, like, wiggle room for you to, like, do more or less. And I think that's kind of what I'm asking.
Yeah, but do you feel like you spend 100% of your time working? Like, I feel like... Well, no.
Okay. But I think... The difference is there's no one for me to scam, you know, back when I was more in consulting. Yeah, I was playing that game of like, how can I build the most hours with the least amount of work? Of course, it's a natural incentive. Yeah, but it's like eating sugar, scamming the customer.
You're trying to be the most efficient. Your body's just trying to get the most dense thing for the least effort.
Yeah, and that's just a natural state of things. But now, when you're doing your own thing, there's no one to, like... There's no one to, like, pull that on, you know? You're just gonna... You're scamming yourself.
You're scamming yourself, yeah.
All that stuff just goes away.
Yeah. I just... I can't imagine, like, only spending 40% of my day, like, moving things forward, whatever work is. Like... That must be nice, I guess, is what I would say. Working for other people and just clocking in, clocking out. Or parts of it are nice.
That's a trade-off. You get to do that and then you lose a bunch of other stuff. But that's kind of why I don't like this whole... It feels entitled for people to be like, no, we should let us work remote. It's like, you're trying to have everything. You can't just be an employee and have the exact type of life you want and just have everything. So true.
And, like, especially, like, I especially don't care because, like, these are engineers at Amazon. Like, you're not... You're making a crazy amount of money for this stuff. And to be, like... Right. To have, like, this, like, weird, like, moral pedestal you were standing on about, like, working remote, like... Yeah, it does get kind of moral, doesn't it?
Like, people start, like, attacking the company like they just... committed a hate crime. I mean, it's like, how dare they?
Also, the company is just made of employees like you that are making these decisions.
Yeah, right. It's your peers, ultimately. So, you know, I have little...
that it like just draws a little empathy from me because like these are like this is like a very privileged category of people like i don't really care about this struggle you know so this podcast is long enough now like two uh two years no how long we've been doing this two years almost two years that's crazy uh i'm getting distracted by my my qualifier at the beginning of this statement uh it's long enough now but i feel like we should check in every once in a while on the cycle
Where are we at? I've asked you this probably in the last three months, but like have things come off of the quantitative easing interest or zero interest rate era? Like has the collapse from all that come yet? Or is it still waiting? Are we still pending? Man, I have no idea.
0.5, 0.5.
That's something.
Yeah. So was it price center to the market? Just for a mortgage will finally go down a little bit.
Yeah, no kidding. Did the market like blow up and go up a thousand points? Yeah, super priced in.
It's so like, to me, it's a lot like, you know how like comedy used to be straightforward. Then like we invented sarcasm. Then we invented like double sarcasm and then triple sarcasm. You know, everything is like so layered now. It feels that way with the market also. It's like bad news is good news, but then no, we go back to good news is good news.
And now we're back to bad, you know, it just keeps slipping because it's like, Yeah. The possibility of a rate cut causes prices to go up because we're excited that money will be cheap again.
But then when the cut isn't as big as they thought it'd be, it crashes.
Or when it just happens, now the possibility is gone, so everyone's cashing in, so the prices go down. It's just like... But like that can circle, wrap around again. So yeah, the market's just so untethered from events.
Forgetting about the market then, how do you feel about like the economy? Capital E, you know, the economy. Mostly in the tech world. I don't care about everybody else.
I mean, I do, but I don't. All this stuff is just so funny because the technical problem we've had is that our economy is too good. Like that's the problem we've had over the past couple of years. And it's easy for people to like forget that because we always talk about it in a negative way. I never knew that. Could you please explain? It's too good. Well, like, why is inflation high?
It's because there's a lot of money. It's because unemployment is low. It's because people are making a lot of money and spending a lot of it, and it's outpacing our supply. Oh, so what's wrong with inflation? Well, if you have an overheated economy, I mean, the problem is, like, you can exhaust... Like, okay, the root problem is we don't have enough stuff. That's the root problem. Oh.
We don't have enough stuff for the amount of people that can, on paper, afford it. So what the Fed has been trying to do for the past couple of years is actually make our economy worse on purpose by making money less available by like targeting an increase. This is what's so funny. Like the president will always like tell unemployment numbers. I'll be like, oh, unemployment is like every month.
Yeah.
President's like record low unemployment. But on the flip side, the Fed is like, fuck, it's too low. They're trying to increase it. They're trying to increase unemployment. So, yeah. So the Fed is trying to lower the amount of consumption that's happening so we can have a smoother transition while like these supply gaps are fixed. Okay. And that's the state we've been in.
And it's been exaggerated in tech because, you know, that's where all like the future facing investment goes in. So when the Fed slows down, tries to like make the economy less overheated, the most overheated places have a drastic reaction.
Why? OK, we can't just let it feel so dumb. This is so hard for me to track. They can't just let it keep overheating to infinity because we don't have enough stuff.
to consume. Yeah. And it's kind of like climate change. There's like a run, there's like runaway effects and feedback loops and you start to get into hyperinflation, which is like not recoverable.
Okay. Oh, I've heard of this. That's happened in some countries, right? They want like a smoother transition. That's what their goal has been. A smoother transition to just normal flation, not inflated, not deflated, just flation. We just want plain old garden variety flation. Yes, exactly. Okay.
Yeah. So it's, it's weird. So the past couple of years were like, like, you know, jobs with like the tech where like people are making less money and like there's less jobs and it's all this like negative economic sentiment. The actual problem is that it's, uh, it was overheated.
So when you say a smooth transition, it's if they don't do anything, it'll be a crash transition. It'll like fall to a deflated state or something.
I mean, they're concerned about hyperinflation, which is there's like historical examples of what that.
They are actually concerned about it.
Okay. That was a concern. Yeah. I mean, we did print a lot of money. So we need to like let the economy absorb that slowly. Okay. Yeah. Is it working?
Are they taking steps that are working?
Yes, it's surprising. So because you would think I've always felt like interventions were very ineffective or like had second order effects. And it's kind of hard to, you know, intervene in a complex system like this. But it feels like the Fed like kind of.
orchestrated it pretty well like inflation is now down to where the goals are we didn't have like this runaway thing really again hard to say it was literally exactly what they did but yeah I mean we all feel bad about the tech sector but like what are we comparing it to like comparing it to like a hyperinflated 2020 2021 state wait what do we feel bad about we feel bad about the tech sector I didn't feel bad so I want to know what everyone else feels bad about that I missed no we're like oh there's less jobs and like hmm
you know like we people aren't able to make as much money but it's all relative to like this overheated state so yeah i don't know so i i don't know where anything's going i i just feel like whatever state we were in a couple years ago i don't we've had a contraction i don't know if it's going to keep going um i don't see how it gets back to that that state that original again if you're in the top x percent of people in this industry it largely doesn't affect you
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So I want to, I want to talk about what you've been up to on Twitter. Cause I, I've literally been on so little that I haven't seen your 30 tweets a day. Cause you just like, tell me some of the bangers, like what's been going on or just what's going on with our friends. Just catch me up. I don't know. Are you just like done or you're just not going to come back?
It's kind of, to be honest, it's kind of nice to just like wake up and program. and then be done and then wake up and program and like not think about the internet and all that's going on on Twitter or whatever. Like I haven't thought about what's happening on Twitter and I don't know how long.
Until just now, which I would like to hear from you, you know, is there anything I've missed that was really fun?
No, it's just the same old stuff.
Prime and Teach had DHH on, just copying us. Now DHH has officially done the terminal tour. Clean sweep, both podcasts. I called him a moron yesterday. Who, DHH or Prime? Yeah. You called DHH a moron? What for?
He was like, he was like, DHH was like, man, these YouTube comments are really nice. Usually there's people that, you know, reply calling me a moron. Moron. Moron. That's a good one. Which, you know, that, that wasn't the first time I had a single word tweet that said moron. I searched my history. I'm like, I think I've done this before and I've had a bunch of them.
And they probably weren't inviting it the other time. No, no, no.
Yeah. And more on reply. It's just the same old. I feel like, uh, there was this funny thing I saw yesterday, which I loved. So, you know how postmark, I don't know if you've been following all this postmark stuff, but they got acquired a bit ago. Yeah.
They had like some pretty crazy downtime and it's, it seems like a result of they got acquired and like companies been like stripped down and it's just not a good product anymore. Um, yeah. And the recent CEO like replies, replied to them being like, or like there was some like postmark downtime thing. And the recent CEO replied being like switch over recent blah, blah, blah. And he like links,
to something. He's like, just going to drop this here. And then Wes Boss replies being like, well, if you're just going to drop that there, you should also drop this there, which is like all of Resend's downtime issues. Because Resend was like ambulance chasing, basically like being like postmarkers down, use us.
But then Resend is like a crazy amount of downtime, including stuff they haven't even like officially written up. Like there was one thing from a couple of weeks ago. I have grown to really dislike Resend. Resend and that company in general. They are just yet another company that are just spending stupid amounts of money on stuff that's irrelevant.
And at the end of the day, they're just building yet another wrapper of SES like...
This is really an interesting conversation right now. Just the multiple angles. It's so interesting.
It's like you go and you're like, I'm going to found a company. And this is like a very big decision in your life. Like it's your career. You decided it's going to be a venture scale thing. Again, another big decision. If it works out, you're going to spend the next 10 years of your life working on this thing. And you're like, I'm going to build a thing that sends email.
That's like what you're going to do of all that. And to me, it's just like, What a waste of resources, effort, whatever. And it's just, you know, people have done this before. There's a million email things like, yeah, just because you like wrap it in this fancy design.
They have this like philosophy page about their, like this like really pretentious designed, like this sort of philosophy on like products and life. And like, we believe that documentation should be good. And we believe that they have a whole section on how they're like,
uptime should be like water like just like crazy shit like that and it's funny to have that section when like they've literally had the worst downtime i've seen i'm gonna defend i'm gonna defend this person because i love dracula i use it on everything it's my keyboard theme like my physical keycaps dracula make dracula he did is it darkula or dracula dracula Dracula? Okay. Yeah.
Just going to defend him for that reason alone. That's fine. Because he wants to buy some terminal coffee for his team. You know what? Maybe we could do a Dracula coffee. I would love to do this, actually, just to spite you. Can we do a Dracula-themed terminal coffee partnership with your favorite CEO? We'll talk about it offline. That would be the best. I'm just like... It's the product. Yeah.
It's kind of like... I'm just tired of this playbook culture. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's not the only start. There's a lot of startups doing similar like low... It's like not having your sights high. Like kind of aiming for... medium outcomes and like doing the whole startup thing.
Yeah. And it's just like, and then it just creates a ton of noise. So the other thing is going back to their downtime, the last downtime was because their AWS account, I'm actually make a quick little short about this later because I've been trying to figure out how to explain this.
So their last downtime was because their, uh, SES sending got banned in us East one, which gives you the hint that they just have a single AWS account and they put all their customers in there, which is, if you are trying to be an infrastructure provider, I hope you at least understand why you shouldn't just use a single native account for this reason.
But this brings up like a more root problem, which is, AWS built a one giant system and they solved the multi-tenant problem. You can go sign up for AWS. You can use a bunch of resources. It's okay if somebody else is also using AWS and they use it for something sketchy or they like have a ton of traffic. It doesn't affect you. They have built a multi-tenant system.
It has a lot of work and they solve that problem. Then you have these middlemen come in where they sign up for one AWS account and they put all their customers in it. And all of a sudden, all these problems come back. It's like, I'm assuming their stuff got blocked because one recent customer did something crazy and affected all of them. And they'll spend the next six months
like fixing this problem that was already fixed and then write a bunch of blog posts about, Hey, we've solved all this crazy stuff for you. It's like, no, you just, it just was already solved. Like this wasn't a problem. And so much of effort is going into this, this thing is kind of resolving these same problems again.
And yeah, to me, I don't believe any like cloud wrapper companies and you have to like be intelligent enough about a company and know enough about a company to know whether they really are just like this third layer cloud wrapper. Um, Like PlanetSkill, not a cloud wrapper. They're an actual business. They build actually great technology and they happen to use cloud resources for that.
But there's a difference. Like there's so many startups that got funded in this kind of like, I don't know why I say third layer. What's the first layer? I don't know. I'm considering like the public clouds, the second layer. I don't know what the first layer is. Just that's my terminology. Okay. It's the third layer. First layer is like electricity and atoms. I don't know. Whatever.
Yeah.
The first layer is the layer that God works with.
Yeah. And then the second layer is where AWS comes in. Okay. And then the third layer is Resend and Vercel. Okay. I just don't believe in those companies. I just think they're all going to die.
What's funny is during this Resend thing earlier, because everyone was looking for postmark alternatives and Resend kept coming up. Again, to me, it's extremely obvious when there's a company in this category. But apparently it's not super obvious. But you know who has a good nose for it is Levels. Because Levels was like, what the fuck?
Like, this just seems like another... He calls it VC pump and dump. Like, he had described it in a bunch of ways. So he has a great nose for it. But the thing that he's wrong about is he always frames it as the VCs are scamming you. No, the VCs are losing money on this too. I guarantee you they are going to, in the end, lose money on all of this. These are not like... Super smart.
That's the one thing he's wrong about. No one's making money. It's just a waste of resources.
Yeah.
Yes. Exactly.
Yeah, I'm with you.
Yeah. So that was going on. That's been bugging me. Or it's been... I'm just tired of this same story over and over again.
Yeah. I haven't really been on the internet since we did the whole Laracon thing. Did everybody switch over to PHP? Is everyone writing Laravel now? Did we do our job?
There were a lot of comments being like, oh, man. I'm sure a lot of people checked it out that they haven't before. And then they were like, oh, PHP looks like that?
Never mind. Arrows instead of dots? I'm out.
just kidding we love php php so great buy artisan coffee terminal dot shop you know what i'd like to do someday i'd like to like get so good at an ad read that like it seems like it's just a pre-recorded ad read but i'm actually saying it exactly the same every time does that make sense that'd be fun like and then maybe throw in one little change like one little intonation yeah yeah just like it could have just automated this could have just recorded it and played the thing but instead i'm gonna say it every time oh let's take a break
Hi, this is Totally Adam, the host of the podcast, reminding you in this sponsor read that is clearly not a pre-recorded bit that you should check out Terminal Coffee at terminal.shop. Amazingly awesome products for developers brought to you by a group of talented, good-looking, and humble heroes like Dax, Adam, The Primogen, Teej, and David.
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I'm sorry. I just remembered I used to do that sometimes. That's what you do on podcasts. We're going to take a break for the podcast. Why do people take breaks? Do they need a break? Do podcasts take breaks? Oh, yeah.
You don't listen to podcasts.
I just don't listen to podcasts, so I have no idea if what we're doing is... I can tell you they do things on podcasts that they don't actually do. Believe me, that's funny. No, they're always like, we're going to take a break. And then they just come right back. And I'm like, did they have to pee? Could they not have just cut that out? I don't know what the break is.
Yeah. Okay, so the other thing, oh, what were we just talking about? PHP, Laravel, Lambos. Oh, yeah, so I've been doing a bunch of Elixir. I started streaming it, by the way.
Oh, yeah, I caught one.
I'm two days into it.
A little hurt that you didn't notice I was in there, 50% of the streams. You were in there. Oh, right, yeah.
Whatever. You said something about Tailwind, if I recall correctly.
I just find an opportunity to just shield Tailwind every turn.
Well, I'm stuck using Tailwind. So I'm using Elixir and Phoenix and Unlight. I'm trying to use all that stuff for the thing I'm building. But... I had a post yesterday about this. Um, so I've used Elixir for a very long time, so I know how to write Elixir. I'm like very familiar with it.
I've done some pretty like deep things with it, but it's my first time using like the batteries included, like out of the box experience with Phoenix and all that.
Yeah.
And man, is it, it is not a good onboarding experience. Like there is just,
so much going on it uses like a crazy amount of macros so it's like really hard macros basically let you invent magic in the language basically yeah yeah and it's just like so hard there's like there's just so much thrown at you right away we're just spoiled with next js let's be honest i mean the meta frameworks have really taken it to another level
Sorry, that was double sarcasm. I don't know if everyone caught that. Or was it triple? It might have been triple. I'm not sure. Go ahead.
So I'm like, okay, these frameworks, I think they don't have this competitive pressure where they need to really focus on this progressive disclosure thing. So after using it for two days, I'm like, oh, the way to do this is I have to go pick up a book on...
phoenix in my view and just read it which is fine like i've done that a bunch of times before but that's just not optimized for adoption whereas if you look at something like let's take astro whatever you know they're entering this like hyper competitive market they're way better about like here's like a really small starting point.
You can kind of get a handle of things and you kind of progressively add stuff and like you kind of grow with it.
Is it just the competition? It's just there's so much more competition in JavaScript world because there's a framework every week.
Is that the idea? I think that's like my explanation, like to explain the differences. I just think that... We've put in so much work to make it so SST is one file. That was so much work to get it to that point, years of refining and figuring that out. So you can start with a single file and then get more complex over time. And you start...
a Phoenix app and it's like so many files and that's not even enough. You like start that, then it's like run all these generators to generate even more files. And it's just like, so much thrown at you. And it's so the different, like such a different mindset than what we're like, what we like spend all day thinking about.
So yeah, I think these frameworks would benefit a lot if they like rethought their process of how can we make this feel like a natural progression where someone can tinker, learn, tinker, learn, as opposed to feeling like, I like learn all this stuff up front and then actually build my thing.
Cause I'm like, as someone that's like, like has used Elixir a lot, if I'm having a tough time getting through this, like that's, that's a good sign that it needs to be improved.
I will say, I do think the like MVC MVVM, like if your framework still uses those paradigms, I just don't think people have the attention span in 2024 to like use that. You know what I mean? Like, The Phoenix app we had at StatMuse, this giant, giant Phoenix app, the number of files in that app just boggles the mind. I guess it's like our node modules.
It's like insanely verbose amount of files and it's all the MVC stuff, I guess. And same, I saw people criticizing Laravel now that Laravel got a little more attention for the same. It's like, there's so many files. I can't wrap my head around all this. I guess JavaScript world, we've pared it down Uh, there's still too many files.
I mean, there's too many like stupid dot files in your root directory for like all the different tools, but well, you have to add those in. Yeah. You have to opt in people for that. Yeah. I blame people for all this stacks, but I do think like the NBC thing is just, it's too archaic feeling at this point. I don't know. Do you agree with that? Or do you think it's like good pattern?
Do that. I just don't know what the alternative is. If you're doing a, uh, what are we doing in JavaScript?
We've got an alternative. We don't do MVC.
I just don't do server-rendered JavaScript.
Domain-driven design.
Right? Yeah, and to be honest, I learned all the domain-driven design stuff from Elixir. The Phoenix documentation on context is where I picked up a lot of stuff I do in JavaScript. Okay, I don't know what I'm talking about then. Yeah, I'm okay with the final set of files being large. I think I'm technically okay with that.
I understand there's a lot of capability in there, and that's why it's all there. If you say there's too many files, they're going to say, well, your framework can't do XYZ things, so...
fine i'll give them that those files are necessary i just want to like get there over time like i want to be like okay i want to do events now and then i start to add the files related to events i don't want it's all like bootstrapped and set up and like kind of confusing me when i'm not interested like 90 of the stuff that's there so to me it's purely an onboarding initial adoption experience thing um
Whether it's not too many files in there, I think that's kind of subjective because people will argue, well, I need those.
That's so reasonable, Dax. Why are you going to be so reasonable?
I'm just trying to be inflammatory. I'm just trying to not have annoying people reply to me with annoying thoughts. That's really all it comes down to. People have really stupid surface level replies to things. And if I'm not specific, I will get those. It's inevitable. I get them anyway.
Yeah, I feel like you became too much of a character on the internet. You got to lay a little lower. You became a little too like people want to they want to say things to you in reply. People don't really care to say things in reply. Maybe because I just talk about like eating plants and jujitsu and stuff and they don't have anything to say.
But I've laid low enough that I don't really get the angry replies. And if I do, I guess I don't notice because I'm not on Twitter.
I don't know. Well, I'm, I'm currently thinking about going in one or two directions. Like, yeah, so that's one option we described. But then when I think about like DHH and levels, I'm like, they're like way more reasonable than I am.
Yeah.
I'm like, should I just do that? Like lean in happier?
Maybe. Maybe.
Who knows?
All right. I got to get off here. I'm sorry. I'm staring at. I've gotten distracted staring at the waiting for review on the app thing. And I have to make changes to the web thing because our thing uses the web. And if I don't make those changes, it's not really ready. Just go, go, go, you know? Okay.
Well, before you go for our event in New York, we need to figure out some stuff with you.
Let's figure it out.
Let's do it now.
not not not right now okay me and listen to talk to you a bunch about a few things because there's like the production of it itself is gonna be a little tricky so i just want to like talk through that to make sure that love it we're gonna have some staff at the venue oh staff like a butler like a no a major d i don't know what are staff i don't know no like like like tech people like tech
oh because they have like nice equipment to like do mic speakers all that stuff wait are we just doing it on iphone though can we just record everything on iphone now is that what we decided well i'm getting my new iphone tomorrow i'm excited there you go we'll just record on your new iphone no no no no no cameras dslr the whole thing I don't know. We need to talk about it. Yeah, I'll talk.
Let's talk. You and your people will talk to me and my people. BeganBot will be my people and you and Liz are your people.
Well, we have a DM with all you guys that nobody's replied to, so...
I hearted it or something. I did something, Dax.
I don't even think Beacon checks that Slack. So I don't know how we're going to contact him. I don't even know if he's confirmed going. Like, it's going to be a mess.
I got to find that message. Was that in? Oh, it's in Slack. I forget. We're a Slack company now. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I'm going to say something in it right now.
As soon as you start doing real things, you have to be a Slack company.
Yeah.
We're doing real things.
Real things. I thumbs up and hearted it. Thank you very much. Okay. Thanks. It's been good. Thanks, Dax.
Thanks for the thumbs up and the heart.
There's more where that came from. More laughy faces and crying, laughing faces. I do those a lot.
Okay. All right. See ya. See ya.