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Speaker 1: dot com. Hey, welcome to the podcast. It's Carl Franklin
Speaker 1: and Richard Campbell and Maddie Montaguilla. It's dot net rocks.
Speaker 1: It's up, Richard, Maddie.
Speaker 2: Good to be back home.
Speaker 1: Galavander, Sir Galivant.
Speaker 2: Spent a couple of weeks in Mexico and Acapoco, you know,
Speaker 2: soaking up some sun because it's awful gray in the
Speaker 2: in the Pacific northwest, right, and then stopped in Mexico
Speaker 2: City to visit with Paul Throt and his wife. A
Speaker 2: few days in Mexico City, and then we couldn't get out.
Speaker 2: That's cool, because the Aero Rexico kept canceling our flights
Speaker 2: over and over again, like two days running. I finally
Speaker 2: just bought a ticket on Air Canada and did the
Speaker 2: long way back to Vancouver through Toronto oh god. But
Speaker 2: the issue was that it was foggy at YVR and
Speaker 2: for what ever reason, Aero Mexico I guess they just
Speaker 2: won't fly in the fog and the air Canada guys
Speaker 2: are like, let's go. So they got home that way.
Speaker 2: But you know, I figured it out.
Speaker 1: All right. Let's start with what happened in nineteen eighty seven.
Speaker 1: This is episode nineteen hundred and eighty seven. By the way,
Speaker 1: we're moving closer to two thousand, which you probably know
Speaker 1: we're going to do live at the party with Palermo. Yeah,
Speaker 1: MVPVP seven And we've asked you for your little memories.
Speaker 1: I guess, yeah, stories, stories, Okay, okay. Nineteen eighty seven, Wow,
Speaker 1: A bunch of things happened.
Speaker 2: What are your favorites?
Speaker 1: Well, Black Monday happened, stock market.
Speaker 2: Crash, right, a big market correction.
Speaker 1: Dow Jones industrial average up twenty two point six percent
Speaker 1: in a single day. Of the Princess Bride, Dirty Dancing.
Speaker 1: Aretha Franklin became the first woman inducted into the Hall
Speaker 1: of Fame. You two, Joshua Tree, Right, all good stuff,
Speaker 1: easy music, yep, yep, yep. Let's see. British Airwaves was
Speaker 1: privatized and listed on the London Stock Exchange. Ronald Reagan
Speaker 1: and Mikhail Gorbachev meet to discuss nuclear disarmament.
Speaker 2: All right, let's start in space, of course. We last
Speaker 2: week's episode nineteen eighty six was the Challenger disaster, which
Speaker 2: grounded all shuttles obviously, and began.
Speaker 3: The geez, you guys have a tough few years here, huh.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was rough.
Speaker 2: Yeah, although obviously there's no spacial flights in nineteen eighty seven,
Speaker 2: this is when the Presidential Commission on the accident is
Speaker 2: going on, they called the Rogers Commission, and the reports
Speaker 2: and implementation are put out in nineteen eighty seven. It
Speaker 2: starts with the solid rocket mooter redesign three to zero
Speaker 2: rings instead of two, and a heater system to make
Speaker 2: sure that those seals never get so damaged. You know,
Speaker 2: they challenge your incident was the most disastrous of the
Speaker 2: problems with the solid rocketbuster, but it wasn't the only one,
Speaker 2: and that technical solution worked, there would never be a
Speaker 2: problem with the boosters.
Speaker 1: Again.
Speaker 2: The harder one was the cultural changes. So they were
Speaker 2: supposed to have an independent safety organization, which they definitely
Speaker 2: laid out on paper just didn't actually ever use it.
Speaker 2: And then this concept that the Rodgers Cousoul talked about
Speaker 2: of normalization of deviantce this sort of recognition that just
Speaker 2: because you didn't have a disaster involving a problem doesn't
Speaker 2: mean it's still not a problem. It should be immediately addressed.
Speaker 2: So engineers supposed to be able to speak freely that
Speaker 2: whenever you have an anomally you take it as a warning.
Speaker 2: This obviously doesn't work, because we'll have the two thousand
Speaker 2: and three Columbia disaster where they had had lots of
Speaker 2: flights where foam was coming off the external tank and
Speaker 2: eventually punches a hole through the wing of Columbia and
Speaker 2: dooms the vehicle. They also add the crew escape system,
Speaker 2: so this is an escape This puts the shuttle astronauts
Speaker 2: into proper pressure suits. Up until then they've been just
Speaker 2: in flight suits, and also adds this escape pole out
Speaker 2: of the hatch. In theory, during a disaster, you were
Speaker 2: supposed to clear down to the lower deck where the
Speaker 2: door was, blow the door out, this rod would come out,
Speaker 2: they would hook to it. That raw would help fling
Speaker 2: them beyond the reach of the shuttle so that they
Speaker 2: could parachute to the surface.
Speaker 1: Funny thing about explosions, though, you don't really have time
Speaker 1: to do.
Speaker 2: That, not a lot of time for any of that.
Speaker 2: Plus most of the flight profile of the ascent does
Speaker 2: not allow this to work. So even though they've added
Speaker 2: all this complexity, most of the ascent was still non survivable.
Speaker 1: So you think it was more like, hey, we can
Speaker 1: spend money on safety watch.
Speaker 2: This and one of the things you see overall and
Speaker 2: the results of the Rogers Comission, we have all of
Speaker 2: this in hindsight is mechanical they could do, they did,
Speaker 2: and the cultural changes just they couldn't pull off. But
Speaker 2: arguably the most important thing that comes from the Rogers
Speaker 2: Commission is acknowledgement that the Special is not an airliner.
Speaker 2: It should not be operated about an airliner and an
Speaker 2: experimental vehicle. The flight rate should be much lower, lots
Speaker 2: more testing done, which just raises the cost of all
Speaker 2: the flights. And of course they would follow that with
Speaker 2: much lower flight rates for a few years and then
Speaker 2: crank them back up again as the demands for the
Speaker 2: International Space Station so come into play. It's great that
Speaker 2: and I went back and read this again. There's a
Speaker 2: whole couple of paragraphs to talk about. Look, this was
Speaker 2: not a technological failure. This was a cultural failure. And
Speaker 2: the only real solution is to change the culture. And
Speaker 2: that's the hardest thing to do. It's right in the dock,
Speaker 2: and it's exactly what.
Speaker 1: They couldn't do ultimately.
Speaker 2: Other than that, Like, it's a pretty you think it
Speaker 2: was a pretty slow space here, right, the Americans only
Speaker 2: through three They had one flight of the last flight
Speaker 2: of a Titan three B lifting an Air Force communication satellite.
Speaker 2: There are two dental delta flights, one for a geostationary satellite,
Speaker 2: one for a communication satellite. But then there's the Soviets.
Speaker 2: It's nineteen eighty seven. It's kind of the height of
Speaker 2: the Space Defense Initiative SDI aka star Wars. This is
Speaker 2: something that Reagan announced in nineteen eighty three and was
Speaker 2: formed in nineteen eighty four. It'll become the Missile Defense
Speaker 2: Agency in another decade or so. It will never actually
Speaker 2: fly any hardware. In fact, in eighty seven, the American
Speaker 2: Physical Society concludes that the technologies that they're talking about,
Speaker 2: which was flying all these little satellites that would track
Speaker 2: and shoot down ICBMs, is decades away from being true,
Speaker 2: but the Soviets don't know that, and they attempt to
Speaker 2: test the defense system. This is the Energy A Rocket Booster.
Speaker 2: This was the first flight of the Energy A Rocket Booster.
Speaker 2: Obstensibly it was built for Barran, and Barran was the
Speaker 2: Soviet space shuttle. It'll only fly once in eighty seven,
Speaker 2: but its first flight. They because it can lift ninety
Speaker 2: five metric tons like that's an incredible payload that basically
Speaker 2: can't be matched at Saturn five level payloads. The most
Speaker 2: powerful rocket the Soviets ever built. They lifted this vehicle
Speaker 2: called Pollius.
Speaker 1: It was supposed to just be a.
Speaker 2: Test payload, but it wasn't. What it was was a
Speaker 2: weapons platform carrying a megawat carbon dioxide laser, but it
Speaker 2: never made it to orbit. It sounds spooky. It's dangerous,
Speaker 2: is what it is, and the failure to get to
Speaker 2: orbit is weird. The Energy of booster worked flawlessly, but
Speaker 2: the vehicle was actually mounted in the launch platform backwards deliberately,
Speaker 2: so as soon as it's separated from the booster, it
Speaker 2: was supposed to turn around one hundred eighty degrees and
Speaker 2: then boost itself to the rest away in the orbit
Speaker 2: and instead of turning one hundred and eighty degrees, it
Speaker 2: turned three hundred and sixty degrees and deorbited itself. The
Speaker 2: debate is whether or not it was an accident, because
Speaker 2: the argument here is as much as the Americans were
Speaker 2: talking about defensive weapons systems in space, they had flown nothing.
Speaker 2: This was the first weapons platform ever deployed in the space,
Speaker 2: again in contravention of the Outer Space Treaty of nineteen
Speaker 2: sixty six. And so there's this whole subtext that maybe
Speaker 2: when Gorbachev figured out what they were doing, insisted that
Speaker 2: they make sure it doesn't get to orbit, and such
Speaker 2: a simple thing to say, instead of turning one hundred
Speaker 2: and eighty turned three sixty, so that everything worked perfectly,
Speaker 2: but it never flew. Now, a lot of the technology
Speaker 2: was developing. The best argument I say in favor of
Speaker 2: this is the fact that they didn't just build one
Speaker 2: test platform. They had built a bunch of parts, all
Speaker 2: the control systems, like a whole lot of them. The
Speaker 2: laser actually came from an anti ballistic missile system was
Speaker 2: supposed to fly on an aircraft, and those parts continued
Speaker 2: to be used. The Mirror Space station, which had gone
Speaker 2: up in nineteen eighty six, and I think I may
Speaker 2: have failed to mention that a bunch of the additional
Speaker 2: modules that went onto that all used parts from the
Speaker 2: Polias project. In fact, even the two of the modules
Speaker 2: are on the International Space Station their technologies directly derived
Speaker 2: from this project. So this project was not experimental. It
Speaker 2: was a large scale, long term project that got repurposed
Speaker 2: away from being a weapon system.
Speaker 1: You know, I forget about writing the history of dot net.
Speaker 1: You got to write a book about this and sell
Speaker 1: the screenplay because it's just like, I'm like on the
Speaker 1: edge of this is.
Speaker 2: The craziest thing that ever happened that virtually nobody talks about.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I've never heard about it.
Speaker 2: Can you do it?
Speaker 3: It is a full episode of this. Like, I don't
Speaker 3: need the text any of it. I'll just sit and listen.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, we do space geek Out every year at
Speaker 1: the end of the year, but this wasn't on it.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's mostly about current stuff, not this historical stuff.
Speaker 2: But Polyia stands by itself. It's insane what actually happened there. Well, also,
Speaker 2: think about a Megawak class laser in nineteen eighty seven. Yeah,
Speaker 2: like honestly star Trek stuff on the other tech side
Speaker 2: of things. So this is the year that the GSM
Speaker 2: standard gets formalized as the European Staminay for telephanites where
Speaker 2: SMS comes from, text messages comes from. Of course, the
Speaker 2: American standard the Quenee Center was the CDMA, which will
Speaker 2: ultimately lose out to GSM worldwide. Of course it won't
Speaker 2: reach this is only the standards point eight eighty seven
Speaker 2: they producle. We're still market till the early nineteen nineties.
Speaker 2: Computer wise, this is the year of the IBM PS two.
Speaker 1: Oh boy.
Speaker 2: This was a three eighty six megabyte machine. But the
Speaker 2: important part of it is that it came standard with
Speaker 2: three and a half inch floppies and the Vega video
Speaker 2: standard videographics are right, really setting the standard for both those.
Speaker 2: This was considered my IBM's push to try and get
Speaker 2: control of the PS of the PC market that they
Speaker 2: invented in lost large control. They sold more than a
Speaker 2: million of these, like they did well when.
Speaker 1: I had my first Vega card and monitor. The most
Speaker 1: I was just thinking of this yesterday. The most amazing
Speaker 1: thing was seeing a depiction or a scan of an
Speaker 1: actual photograph that was beautiful. Yeah, and you know, like
Speaker 1: a woods scene in winter or something like that, and
Speaker 1: I was thinking, oh my god, we've come so far.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the color palette was so much larger. That was
Speaker 2: like a big deal. It was a big deal. So
Speaker 2: this is also the machine that you had a choice
Speaker 2: between Windows two, which was released that year, and two
Speaker 2: STAS four or O.
Speaker 1: S two version one.
Speaker 2: And Windows two was you know Windows when had been out,
Speaker 2: like it was still pretty primitive. Guey, So OS two
Speaker 2: is a reasonable option that So it's all the beginning
Speaker 2: of that. Uh yeah, I got three more for you.
Speaker 2: Language wise, this is the year of Pearl. So Larry
Speaker 2: Wall ships Pearl. He originally built it to do text
Speaker 2: file parsing and report generation, but we know what it
Speaker 2: really became. And this is the quoted term the duct
Speaker 2: tape of the Internet.
Speaker 1: Well and also it reads like a cartoon character swear.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so it was it's you know, it's it's just
Speaker 2: it's a text parsing tool, right, which is perfect for
Speaker 2: the Internet. But yeah, Pearl kept a lot of Internet working,
Speaker 2: a lot of websites functional, Like Larry Wall did us
Speaker 2: all the service, but it's a very challenging. H here's
Speaker 2: why Carl's going to love. This is the year that
Speaker 2: the company called ad Lib from Quebec City is formed
Speaker 2: to make the music synthesizer car, typically known as the car.
Speaker 2: Right they will be bankrupt in five years.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Creative Labs flete at their lunch.
Speaker 2: Creative Labs will clauter them. But they prove the market
Speaker 2: or high quality PC back then.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: Now all motherboards come with audio, but back then they
Speaker 1: did not. Right, you had to get an add on card.
Speaker 2: One last one out of compu serve by a guy
Speaker 2: named still will hedwork is Steve well Hide working for
Speaker 2: the company creates a graphic graphics interchange format or JIFF,
Speaker 2: not giff if not Yiff, because Steve himself the guy
Speaker 2: it said, choosy developers choose.
Speaker 1: Jeff come ondraschange format graphics.
Speaker 2: I'm just telling you what they created. But by the way,
Speaker 2: guy died to COVID nineteen. That's a shame. But he
Speaker 2: didn't he.
Speaker 1: Sorry, wanted everyone to use it.
Speaker 2: That's wheet and he was he bid to play on
Speaker 2: choosey kids, choose Jiff, Yeah, choose Yeah, Yeah, that's choosy mom, Jeff, Yeah,
Speaker 2: all right, cheesy mount Jef says he used that same
Speaker 2: line to get you to use this graphic format that
Speaker 2: would where it's a it's a non resolution losing a
Speaker 2: non destructive compression format like it was a great it's
Speaker 2: still great. Anyway, there's my stories from nineteen eighty seven.
Speaker 1: Okay, now that we've wasted thirteen and a half minutes
Speaker 1: of your time, it was no waste.
Speaker 2: No, I'm kidding, Sory, I talk too much about Poulias.
Speaker 2: About my god, what a coolnes is is so cool.
Speaker 1: That no, I'm serious that that's the best story I've
Speaker 1: heard this year. And you know we're just getting started.
Speaker 2: All right, so history of space geek outs let us know.
Speaker 2: Maybe I'll write a couple all.
Speaker 1: Right, so let's roll the music for better no framework,
Speaker 1: go all right, dude, what do you got? I got
Speaker 1: something that Jeff Fritz and I wrote. Oh nice, Yeah,
Speaker 1: Mattie's mouth just went open.
Speaker 3: Okay, oh yeah, No one's consuming, but I have a
Speaker 3: feeling I know what this is. I'm very excited.
Speaker 1: All right. So we basically have been experimenting with various
Speaker 1: SEQL server MCP servers right because we want to be
Speaker 1: able to ask our you know, copilot or other LLLM
Speaker 1: tell me about this database and you know, and really
Speaker 1: what it is, it's to allow a customer to ask
Speaker 1: questions about a database and get a report. It turns
Speaker 1: out that's a difficult problem and most of the MCP
Speaker 1: servers that are out there all require you to hand
Speaker 1: them a connection string, and I'm like, no, I don't
Speaker 1: want to give you my connection string. That's now I
Speaker 1: got to put up all these guardrails and you know,
Speaker 1: do all this other stuff tell you not to do,
Speaker 1: and I know lllms don't always do what you tell
Speaker 1: them not to do, or they switch that revers it.
Speaker 1: So we came up with this idea that we want
Speaker 1: to first generate a schema from a database connection string
Speaker 1: in Jason and then create another Jason file that has
Speaker 1: all the you know, tell us about your database, these
Speaker 1: tables and what are the aliases that we can call
Speaker 1: them the fields? Do they have aliases as well? What
Speaker 1: fields are protected? And you should never return them? And
Speaker 1: the whole idea is we want the LM to use
Speaker 1: this data to create a system prompt, and from that
Speaker 1: system prompt, it's got the schema and it's got all
Speaker 1: the other information it does not have access to your database.
Speaker 1: It will generate a select statement, not a delete, not
Speaker 1: an insert, not an update, only a select statement. Fun
Speaker 1: yeah yeah, and from that you can now you get
Speaker 1: what you get. You got a select statement, you can
Speaker 1: execute it. So the it's great because it's safe and
Speaker 1: it's performance because you're doing all your loading up, you know,
Speaker 1: on the fly beforehand, not on the fly, you're doing
Speaker 1: it beforehand. But the problem is it takes a lot
Speaker 1: of token so you know, if tokens.
Speaker 2: You guys are gonna have to buy and All you
Speaker 2: can Eat package To make this make sense, every developer
Speaker 2: I talk about is really use these tools. You're not
Speaker 2: only in the all you can Eat package for various services.
Speaker 2: You're getting calls from a regular basis going what are
Speaker 2: you doing?
Speaker 4: Carol and I were talking about Sweetwater the music website before,
Speaker 4: and it's like the rep that calls you and is
Speaker 4: like you want to buy something? They need that for
Speaker 4: like you know tokens, Now, hey you need some more tokens.
Speaker 4: I saw you had a project.
Speaker 1: I've got some tokens.
Speaker 2: It certainly makes the case for some time in the
Speaker 2: near future we're going to be back to running local
Speaker 2: hardware to handle these things.
Speaker 1: It's funny you should say that because I just ordered
Speaker 1: a seven thousand dollars PC gaming PC just to run Olama.
Speaker 1: And maybe I'll use the foundry when that when I
Speaker 1: can figure that one out. But the whole idea, yeah,
Speaker 1: let's let's do this local, because then tokens aren't a problem,
Speaker 1: not going to run out, and you know, now I
Speaker 1: just need a BFI graphics card and a BF computer.
Speaker 1: But you know I'm there, you go.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I've already talking to development organizations where we're talking
Speaker 2: about putting together a couple of racks of machines, and
Speaker 2: they're calling me because I actually used to do this
Speaker 2: stuff and you can't find a lot of people who
Speaker 2: do it anymore. Saying if we were buying some HP
Speaker 2: two hundred, it's like laying out two or three racks
Speaker 2: worth of gear for a team of thirty that's all shared,
Speaker 2: you know, within can we keep it running? Doesn't make sense,
Speaker 2: like this is actually more cost effective buying that kind
Speaker 2: of equipment than it is to pay for it. And
Speaker 2: it's like right now with the all you can eat
Speaker 2: packages at that scale, it's not, but it will be
Speaker 2: because this is all you think cannot continue, Well, the.
Speaker 1: Other benefit, just besides tokens is keeping your data local. Right,
Speaker 1: My customers don't want me sharing the data based schema
Speaker 1: with you know, cloud based llms. So all right, well
Speaker 1: it's called AVN Data Genie and it's on my GitHub.
Speaker 1: So and also we did code it with AI episode
Speaker 1: fourteen about this and you get to see it in
Speaker 1: action and it's pretty cool.
Speaker 2: It's interesting. Good on you guys.
Speaker 1: Yeah, cool, that's what I got, Richard, who's talking to
Speaker 1: us today?
Speaker 2: I got to comment off show nineteen eighty one, and
Speaker 2: that's the show we called The Role of AI and
Speaker 2: Software Development came out just before Christmas. We had Jeff
Speaker 2: with us and Bill Wilf and we did in front
Speaker 2: of an audience which has been very rare. Yes, and
Speaker 2: we had a really great group of people involved in
Speaker 2: all that, and of course listened to a ton of comments,
Speaker 2: not the least of which was ones going, boy, this
Speaker 2: sounded like it was going to be a turkey but
Speaker 2: it was really cool and thanks for that. So it's great,
Speaker 2: you know, because it's awfully pretentious to talk that broadly,
Speaker 2: but I thought we had the right people in.
Speaker 1: The room, Like I agree, good conversation.
Speaker 2: For it, and David grabbed on a comment that I said,
Speaker 2: which was, lots of people going to get hurt, but
Speaker 2: I don't think it's going to be us as rather naive.
Speaker 2: In the long run, it'll all come out in the wash.
Speaker 2: But right at this moment, developers are losing their job
Speaker 2: at companies all over the world as CEOs have been
Speaker 2: promised to dream where a large provider using unspecialized developers
Speaker 2: along AI is a suitable replacement for their subject matter
Speaker 2: experts in ten years time. I figured it'll all be
Speaker 2: figured out, but that doesn't help developers today. Work for
Speaker 2: companies have been sold a lot. You know, I'm not
Speaker 2: going to disagree with you, David, because it's not just developers.
Speaker 2: Lots of companies are using the excuse of AI to
Speaker 2: layoff workers, and arguably some of them are even doing
Speaker 2: experiments to see if this technology can actually replace workers,
Speaker 2: and for the most part are failing because these aren't
Speaker 2: replacement for workers, they are work enhancers like most automation is.
Speaker 2: I would also point out that we saw weirdness in
Speaker 2: developer employment before chat, GPT and the llms took off.
Speaker 2: You know, the pandemic RETAVOC and it seems like the
Speaker 2: tech giants as a whole have been using the threat
Speaker 2: of layoff almost as a weapon to keep their employees scared. Yep, right,
Speaker 2: you know, and which I find ridiculously offensive. But I
Speaker 2: but it's working out for them. They all have record valuations.
Speaker 2: Like God, I can't wait for I can't wait for
Speaker 2: the a bubble land and just for people to get sane,
Speaker 2: you know, Like you know, the upside to a recession,
Speaker 2: as a guy who went into the workforce in the
Speaker 2: eighties during a recession, is that you focus on value,
Speaker 2: and right now we really aren't. We're focused on speculation
Speaker 2: and insane levels of growth that are unsustainable and damaging
Speaker 2: and often stupid, and lots of people are being hurt.
Speaker 2: But I made that comment. I don't think it's going
Speaker 2: to be asked what I was thinking long term in
Speaker 2: the sense that we are used to building automation childs
Speaker 2: for improving people's productivity and using automation kills for protype
Speaker 2: and so we typically get to there faster than most
Speaker 2: By your right, and I completely agree with you, a
Speaker 2: lot of people can be hurt on the way.
Speaker 4: Something about it is just like the multidisciplinaryness of it like,
Speaker 4: I'm a PM, but I have a background in software
Speaker 4: and so, you know the role of a PM is
Speaker 4: kind of in jeopardy too, because the engineers have time
Speaker 4: to actually care about the stuff that I care about now. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and so it's really fascinating. But I do think, like
Speaker 4: you know, it will come out in the wash. I
Speaker 4: agree with that it's going to be painful, but I
Speaker 4: think we'll be fine in the end. The engineers are
Speaker 4: problem solvers, so solve the problem, guys, you'll figure out.
Speaker 2: Yeah. You know, the Internet shook everything up. They move
Speaker 2: to mobiles, shook everything up. The cloud shake and everything up,
Speaker 2: and there were job losses all across those you know,
Speaker 2: making run as through the migration to cloud. The number
Speaker 2: of assisted men's going. They're letting me go because they
Speaker 2: think the cloud will run it all for them. Then
Speaker 2: got hired back in one form or another, but also
Speaker 2: with their skills and mindset changed. You know, my job
Speaker 2: isn't to rack and stack servers anymore, it's to manage them. Yeah, David,
Speaker 2: thank you so much for your comment. Obviously it's an
Speaker 2: ongoing topic. It's going to be all through shows in
Speaker 2: the next few years as this settles out. So we
Speaker 2: appreciate your feedback and a copy of music Bias on
Speaker 2: its way to you. And if you'd like a copy
Speaker 2: of Music co Buying, write a comment on the website
Speaker 2: at dot NetRocks dot com or on the facebooks. We
Speaker 2: publish every show there. Any comment there and I read
Speaker 2: it on the show, we'll send you a copy of
Speaker 2: music Cobe.
Speaker 1: Okay, now we can talk to Maddie and I'll introduce her.
Speaker 1: Formerly Mattie. You heard her chiming in there. Mattie Montague
Speaker 1: is a senior product manager at Microsoft and the product
Speaker 1: lead for Aspire. She's been building dev tools at Microsoft
Speaker 1: since twenty eighteen. Before Aspires, she worked across the dot
Speaker 1: net stack and brought dot net Maui to life. Maddie
Speaker 1: has been obsessed with making developers' lives easier ever since
Speaker 1: her first dev tools internship, where she realized that perfectly
Speaker 1: combined her high tech background with her passion for product development. Officially,
Speaker 1: welcome back to dot net rocks.
Speaker 3: Yay, thank you. I'm excited to be back.
Speaker 4: I gotta tell you, I think the last time I
Speaker 4: was here was like three or four years ago, and
Speaker 4: it was an in person recording.
Speaker 1: No, it wasn't three or four years ago? Was last
Speaker 1: year at a dev intersection where you and I aspirefied
Speaker 1: dot Net Rocks.
Speaker 2: Well that was oh though, that was a Rocks episode. Yeah, right,
Speaker 2: you and David talking about Maui. Yes, maybe it's Doug.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that's right. And we got to jam.
Speaker 3: Yeah we did. Oh my gosh, I was crazy. I
Speaker 3: would love to do that again.
Speaker 4: Now now that I've I've dug into your repertoire much
Speaker 4: more so, I think I can keep up with you
Speaker 4: and Chip Now.
Speaker 2: When I knew you were moving over to Aspire, literally
Speaker 2: my reaction is, oh, I guess it's going to be
Speaker 2: a real product. Is now it's going to have adult supervision,
Speaker 2: like somebody has to rain and Fowler goodness knows. And
Speaker 2: then one thing I know about Maddie is she can. Yes,
Speaker 2: she could wrestle these guys of the crowd. They're scared
Speaker 2: to death of her.
Speaker 4: Yes, it's I now say my favorite my favorite pastime
Speaker 4: is arguing with Fowler and Damien. It's like the highlight
Speaker 4: of every day.
Speaker 2: You've made whole shows around exactly that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean when I when I was looking at
Speaker 4: moving because MAUI touling kind of was in a good place.
Speaker 4: I was like, I need to do the next thing, right, Like,
Speaker 4: what do I do? I don't, I can't. Dave does
Speaker 4: so much. I did so much, Like we have these
Speaker 4: junior pms that were coming up Maui And this was
Speaker 4: like two years ago, and I had like a crisis
Speaker 4: of faith and I was like, I need something new,
Speaker 4: and so I went to my SKIP and I was like,
Speaker 4: the only thing I'm interested in working on is this
Speaker 4: Aspire thing, because they clearly have no idea what they're doing.
Speaker 4: They're building something cool, but I don't know what it is.
Speaker 4: But I don't know anything about.
Speaker 3: The cloud, so it's probably not a good fit.
Speaker 2: And it's kind of an asset coming in because you
Speaker 2: don't you know, there's an awful lot of the people
Speaker 2: who need Aspire who also don't know.
Speaker 4: This right right, And so he was like, well, you know,
Speaker 4: there's a lot of strong personalities on the team, and
Speaker 4: I was like those two, Yeah, okay.
Speaker 2: That's that's what you call strong personality. Okay, so yeah,
Speaker 2: there's the least of your concerns.
Speaker 4: About a month in my now manager Glenn, who's you know,
Speaker 4: also been around and was part of the dot net
Speaker 4: core thing with the two of them.
Speaker 3: But Damien Power, Yeah, he's the best, he says to me.
Speaker 3: He goes.
Speaker 4: It turns out all we needed was to put someone
Speaker 4: from Boston on this team. He was like, it's so funny.
Speaker 4: You know, you're just you're just not You're not very
Speaker 4: You just don't deal with you don't put up with it.
Speaker 4: I was like, yeah, I'm very.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you would be correct.
Speaker 2: And and my experience dealing with Damian and David, I'm
Speaker 2: sure they're delighted.
Speaker 3: Oh they're the.
Speaker 1: Best, absolutely the best.
Speaker 4: They're like my two big brothers. I swear like I
Speaker 4: rib them like a baby sister and they totally take it.
Speaker 3: And I've learned so much.
Speaker 2: But yeah, but I guess that this puts you on
Speaker 2: the spot. Then it's now it's your turn. Define Aspire
Speaker 2: to us. What is this?
Speaker 4: Yeah, Aspire as a tool for building apps, for streamlining
Speaker 4: app dev local first all the way through to the end.
Speaker 3: And it's type safe.
Speaker 4: So it is a is a type safe manifest it
Speaker 4: is a CLI. It's a set of packages that you
Speaker 4: can use to build a what we say distribute an app.
Speaker 4: But that's a website with the database, right, like at
Speaker 4: the end of the.
Speaker 1: Day, and I called it, I think I still do
Speaker 1: a visual studio template on steroids.
Speaker 4: That's I mean, that's a pretty good way to put it.
Speaker 4: It's it's you know, it's a project runner, it's all
Speaker 4: these different things. It's it's a it's a socker composed
Speaker 4: but like times a million.
Speaker 2: Because it's also re entrant, right, I mean, the templates
Speaker 2: always a starting point and then you have to go
Speaker 2: on from there and you're never going back, but you
Speaker 2: can still go back to the Aspire tools and tweak
Speaker 2: things and right, you're not going to destroy the work
Speaker 2: you've done.
Speaker 1: Yeah, happy to tell you that a V and data
Speaker 1: Jenie was done with Aspire. Good. Yeah, yeah, of course
Speaker 1: Jeff worked on it.
Speaker 2: And you two did that aspire ify dot net rocks,
Speaker 2: yes at their last fall, which is hilarious.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we do those. We do streams on Friday. It's
Speaker 3: the shameless plug.
Speaker 4: So Me, Fowler, Damien and the cast of characters from
Speaker 4: the team usually will pick people's apps up and try
Speaker 4: to add Aspire to them or implement a feature or whatever,
Speaker 4: and it's always a complete mess and it's very funny.
Speaker 4: And now we play bingo during it, because there are
Speaker 4: just certain things that happen every time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and so.
Speaker 2: You get a card and who hits all of their
Speaker 2: talking points first or you know, yeah, no.
Speaker 3: One of them is like Maddie swears that happened regularly.
Speaker 2: You can put that in the center because that one's
Speaker 2: gonna have an air.
Speaker 4: One of them is Fouler going wait pause, wait pause.
Speaker 4: So we have a good time on this.
Speaker 2: But it's brilliant. Yeah, it's great to see the team. Hey,
Speaker 2: they're all lovely people, and like, these are the people
Speaker 2: making your product. Yeah, and you put yourselves into jeopardy
Speaker 2: every time, Like, I presume the product gets better from
Speaker 2: this practice.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah.
Speaker 4: We had someone ask us like, so, do you guys
Speaker 4: do it just because you like want to make the
Speaker 4: product look good?
Speaker 3: And we were like, no, make the product look good.
Speaker 2: It would not be this, no way more plan than that.
Speaker 2: But but we've seen this over and over again on
Speaker 2: doing various live things. It's like eating it on stage
Speaker 2: is good gets good because it's life. Yeah, we all
Speaker 2: eat it, yeah, right, and fighting through that and getting
Speaker 2: out the other side. That's how you learn to trust stuff.
Speaker 2: It's like, sure, it's not going to be easy, but
Speaker 2: we're gonna get there.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So Aspired debuted with dot net eight, right, and then
Speaker 1: in dot net nine more stuff, and in dot net ten,
Speaker 1: more and more stuff. So maybe we should go through
Speaker 1: some of the things that have evolved and Aspire since
Speaker 1: dot net eight.
Speaker 3: Well, when dot net eight happened, we didn't have chat GPT.
Speaker 4: It changed a lot, and so Aspire distributed apps, right
Speaker 4: like now AI is just a new type of distributed
Speaker 4: app endpoint or back end or whatever you want to
Speaker 4: call it.
Speaker 3: And so Aspire like kind of accidentally.
Speaker 4: Made a really good story for that, Like you were
Speaker 4: talking about foundry and getting that running locally, Like, it's
Speaker 4: a pain to integrate with an exist app and stack.
Speaker 4: It's good to have it running in isolation, but once
Speaker 4: you need to build it into it a system, it's
Speaker 4: way more complicated. And Aspire basically turns it into another API,
Speaker 4: like another project, right Like it totally simplifies that. The
Speaker 4: other thing is we dropped the name dot net from
Speaker 4: the title.
Speaker 2: Just call it Aspire.
Speaker 3: That's the big thing that's happened.
Speaker 4: Just call it Aspire because we're the dot net team,
Speaker 4: you know, we don't pretend, but everyone writes apps in
Speaker 4: multiple languages, Like, once you get to a company of
Speaker 4: a certain size, there's no way that they standardize on
Speaker 4: one language.
Speaker 3: It's just not reasonable.
Speaker 2: But I mean, at the minimum you were running C
Speaker 2: sharp and sequel at the best of times like this.
Speaker 2: But the reality is there's probably some JavaScript. I bet
Speaker 2: there's some JavaScript like that's kind of unavoidable.
Speaker 4: And with with AI pythons everywhere because people are writing you.
Speaker 3: Know, JANKI scripts that make something do something.
Speaker 2: No, and if you've got some badass optimizers, they've written
Speaker 2: some C plus plus some rust and step get interface
Speaker 2: in front of it so you don't have to touch it.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: If you got some weird sunk guys that are out
Speaker 2: there with some little Haskell or some f sharp, and
Speaker 2: again it's just an interface. You off, you go, Yeah,
Speaker 2: I don't care about your language. Yeah, just wherek in
Speaker 2: which you're most effective at and give me an API.
Speaker 1: I'm good to go.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: And so you know, we were calling it dot Net
Speaker 4: Aspire because it was started for dot net, and then
Speaker 4: we thought, yeah, job with her front end Python whatever.
Speaker 4: Obviously I'm sure you too are fully aware because your
Speaker 4: show is literally called dot Net Rocks that a lot
Speaker 4: of people don't understand that dot net is cross platform,
Speaker 4: open source still still. So yeah, we did a user
Speaker 4: studies when I had just switched over to Aspire. One
Speaker 4: of the PM's in our team, Claudia, was running them.
Speaker 4: She was actually trying to get us to completely rebrand
Speaker 4: and we were like, that's no, like, it's we.
Speaker 3: Can figure this out.
Speaker 4: But she, uh, she had someone do like an interview
Speaker 4: and she was like, what what would you think about
Speaker 4: if someone asked you if you could, like, you know,
Speaker 4: do a job where there's dot net. And they were like, well,
Speaker 4: I don't know how to write like a linked list
Speaker 4: from scratch or anything, so I could never And I
Speaker 4: was like.
Speaker 1: Girl, what, that's crazy, that's the opposite direction. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: didn't say assembler, Yeah I know.
Speaker 4: And so there's all these crazy misconceptions, and so these
Speaker 4: dot net teams were pulling in Aspire left on the
Speaker 4: right because it's this crazy good onboarding tool. It's this
Speaker 4: crazy good like code safe tool now with agentic dev.
Speaker 4: It gives Copilot Guardrails or clod Or or your agent dujor,
Speaker 4: and it gives it a really easy way to talk
Speaker 4: to the running all the different running pieces in their
Speaker 4: logs and everything. We have this MCP. It's just like phenomenal.
Speaker 4: But the JavaScript teams were like, we're not touching that.
Speaker 4: Let's gross.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and so we were like, we have to we
Speaker 3: have to kill the dot net to save the dot
Speaker 3: net in it. That's what we did, and we build
Speaker 3: the features into dot net.
Speaker 1: Well, aspires a good name.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's hard to google, but it is a good name.
Speaker 4: And now we have aspired dot dev the domain, so
Speaker 4: that's the handle, so that works out, you know, put
Speaker 4: on my social media.
Speaker 1: We're out of the long multi syllabic foundation era of
Speaker 1: naming tools and I'm glad.
Speaker 4: Well the only reason they got dot net aspire is
Speaker 4: because they put dot net in front of it. So
Speaker 4: we had to go back to the table and be
Speaker 4: like it's such a generic term, it doesn't matter. Took
Speaker 4: a time, wow, Yeah, but it's been it's been a
Speaker 4: crazy journey. And now we're looking at like how we
Speaker 4: can break further into those other ecosystems, including like could
Speaker 4: you have the app host itself written in typescript and
Speaker 4: it Jason our PCs to dot net as the thing
Speaker 4: that's actually orchestrating everything and kicking it off, so we
Speaker 4: don't have to rebuild as fire. But we're basically like,
Speaker 4: could we have like a typescript shim so you don't
Speaker 4: even have to have a C sharp file? Like how
Speaker 4: much trojan horsing can we do just to get to
Speaker 4: a place to help you exactly, just to help you
Speaker 4: help yourself. You can lead a horse to water, but
Speaker 4: you can't make it's all the dot net run time,
Speaker 4: kind of.
Speaker 1: Like we need to dig a break. Yeah, let's do that.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back after these very important messages. Hey
Speaker 1: Carl here. You probably know text Control is a powerful
Speaker 1: library for document editing and PDF generation, but did you
Speaker 1: know they're also a strong supporter of the developer community.
Speaker 1: It's part of their mission to build and support a
Speaker 1: strong developer community by being present, listening to users, and
Speaker 1: sharing knowledge at conferences across Europe and the United States.
Speaker 1: So if you're heading to a conference soon, check if
Speaker 1: text Control will be there and stop buy to say hi.
Speaker 1: You can find their full conference calendar at dubdubdub dot
Speaker 1: textcontrol dot com and make sure you thank them for
Speaker 1: supporting dot net rocks and we're back. It's dot net
Speaker 1: rocks I'm Carl Franklin, That's Richard Campbell, Hey, and that's
Speaker 1: Mattie Montague and we're talking to Spire. Yeah, Aspire. I
Speaker 1: asked you like about the sort of the evolution from
Speaker 1: dot net eight and into nine and ten, and you
Speaker 1: know where were the most significant updates in that evolution.
Speaker 3: Well, we we've been moving fast.
Speaker 4: I think the first big thing that was a huge
Speaker 4: change was the CLI.
Speaker 3: We shipped a CLI and so we we were like.
Speaker 4: You know, why do I have to why can't we
Speaker 4: have a tool like everybod else everybody has a CLI tool.
Speaker 3: That'd be fun.
Speaker 4: Now you can just Aspire run instead of dot Net run,
Speaker 4: appost project or whatever it is. And that was the
Speaker 4: first kind of custom Aspire experience for tooling we built
Speaker 4: that wasn't just like the VS stuff and the extensions
Speaker 4: and whatever that was that was crazy.
Speaker 3: We did not know what we were getting into, but
Speaker 3: we got into it. That was probably the first big.
Speaker 4: Shift from the original Aspire, right, Like I think everything
Speaker 4: that shipped originally was crazy, and the iterations on it
Speaker 4: have been insane, Like the amount that just the integrations,
Speaker 4: like the packages that have our opinions in them. The
Speaker 4: a month that those have grown and matured is a lot.
Speaker 4: It's been a super incremental.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's interesting to have that development angle of
Speaker 2: it's opinionated in the sense of thinking distributed specifically, you know,
Speaker 2: ideally for cloud right, that sort of cloud native mindset
Speaker 2: where you're pulling in services and so forth, and so
Speaker 2: it kind of gives you a set of scaffolds to
Speaker 2: go down the right path on that, yeah, which is
Speaker 2: very language and platform agnostic actually, but it is still opinionated, right.
Speaker 2: And the funny part now is that and then AI
Speaker 2: stuff shows up and you know what it needs.
Speaker 3: Opinions, opinions guardrails.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, like you're just trying a right place right time.
Speaker 2: If I'm sticking an LM in the playpen of Aspire,
Speaker 2: it likely not hurt me less, Like it needs those
Speaker 2: opinions to kind of do the right thing. I'm trying
Speaker 2: to get to a nice cloud native design, thinks yep.
Speaker 2: And here's a set of guardrails, yep.
Speaker 4: And it has a hard time managing like multiple terminal processes.
Speaker 4: So it's like instead of NPM run and Docker and
Speaker 4: the boat, it just Aspire runs it. It's one command, right,
Speaker 4: and so the CLI accidentally really helped us with that too.
Speaker 4: And then the next big thing we shipped a version
Speaker 4: of co.
Speaker 1: Pilot, and that's the az Dev cl I.
Speaker 4: No, the Aspire Cli, the Aspire Cli, Aspire if you
Speaker 4: will Aspire run. We have shirts that say it.
Speaker 2: I got two new Englanders on the show at the
Speaker 2: same time.
Speaker 1: I get all this accentrific for you, wicked piss.
Speaker 4: And then but a year ago we started working on
Speaker 4: co pilot in the dashboard because we were like, well,
Speaker 4: everyone has a chat now that you ask questions. MCP
Speaker 4: hadn't really become I don't know if you saw this
Speaker 4: the other day, Miguel posted MCP as the new soap, right,
Speaker 4: that's unfortunately, very good tweet Miguel, He's right, but it
Speaker 4: wasn't a real thing yet. So we were like James
Speaker 4: Newton king on our team, like went away from the
Speaker 4: holidays and came back and was like, so I built
Speaker 4: a co pilot in the dashboard and we were like what.
Speaker 4: So we shipped that and by the time that was
Speaker 4: out the door, MCP had started to catch on. And
Speaker 4: now we have an Aspire MCP and so that will
Speaker 4: you know, can to the dashboard and it can talk
Speaker 4: to all of your resources at once from whatever your
Speaker 4: coding agent environment is. And those have been the really
Speaker 4: I think to me, those have been the really big
Speaker 4: moments of like things that we've shipped that have completely
Speaker 4: changed what Aspire was since we started.
Speaker 3: There's a zillion incremental things, and there's a lot.
Speaker 4: Of under the hood stuff in the app post that changed,
Speaker 4: and how we actually run things. We overhauled our JavaScript
Speaker 4: and Python support so they actually felt like more natural.
Speaker 4: That was a really fun exercise in untraining ourselves from
Speaker 4: all of the things we thought are true, and also
Speaker 4: writing casing completely differently because JavaScript is the camel case.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Nice, Yeah, But I got a question, Okay, why thirteen?
Speaker 3: Because why not?
Speaker 1: I could think of a bunch of why not? Now
Speaker 1: what exactly you're talking about?
Speaker 2: Like you put out dot Net ten and so you
Speaker 2: figured you have Aspire ten and said we get Aspire thirteen.
Speaker 3: No, No, because all you people, and I'm saying this with.
Speaker 1: Love, who do you call you people?
Speaker 4: You people, the people of the dot net community. All
Speaker 4: you people kept going, well, I can't use as fire
Speaker 4: or nine because I'm on dot net eight. And we
Speaker 4: were like, it doesn't matter. We just sinked up versions
Speaker 4: because it was easier, and everyone was like, well, when
Speaker 4: as Fire ten comes out, I can't upgrade to dot
Speaker 4: net ten, or like dot Net nine is in an
Speaker 4: LTS release, so I can't use a fire And we're like,
Speaker 4: doesn't matter, it doesn't matter. So we said we're going
Speaker 4: to change the version. I wanted to go back to one.
Speaker 4: I thought that would be cool instead of dot Net
Speaker 4: Aspire nine. It'd be a spy.
Speaker 1: So you figured you wouldn't get any emails saying I
Speaker 1: can't wait till dot Net thirteen.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Well that and we were sitting in a meeting and
Speaker 4: I was talking about it, and they were like, you
Speaker 4: can't on you can't downgrade, and you get package even
Speaker 4: if it's a newer urion, right, so we'd have to
Speaker 4: break all of our packages. Yeah, you have to get
Speaker 4: So we were like, well we had to go higher
Speaker 4: than ten. Eleven feels like we're just kind of like, WHOA,
Speaker 4: I don't want.
Speaker 3: To be ten? Yeah, and why would you pick twelve
Speaker 3: when thirteen is right there? Like that's way more fun.
Speaker 4: This is the reasoning, this is the actual reasoning. We
Speaker 4: were sitting I love it, and I was in a
Speaker 4: room actually in Seattle. I was out there and we
Speaker 4: had Mitch, who's in Australia, on the phone and he goes,
Speaker 4: why don't we just do thirteen? And me and him
Speaker 4: like lock, I aswer the team's call, and I'm like
Speaker 4: this is terrible.
Speaker 1: Yeah and brilliant. Screw them.
Speaker 4: I remember coming home and my husband was like, why
Speaker 4: did they let you make decisions?
Speaker 3: Like you should not go out decisions? And I was like,
Speaker 3: it's great.
Speaker 4: And then we you know, we made stickers with little
Speaker 4: black cats on them, and we're like super into it.
Speaker 4: We're going to do something for Friday the thirteenth, and
Speaker 4: there's two of this year, there's February and March.
Speaker 3: Right, we don't know what we're gonna do yet, we're
Speaker 3: gonna do something.
Speaker 1: At the next meeting where you're thinking about a name
Speaker 1: for something, bring up Duncan.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I like that.
Speaker 4: The real question now is like what's the next version,
Speaker 4: Like do we go to fourteen or do we stick with.
Speaker 3: Only be primes? We could go to seventeen.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, rules, that's it.
Speaker 1: I love it. Only primes that's great.
Speaker 2: But I to your point, this is the version we
Speaker 2: adumpt the dot net name where you focus on things
Speaker 2: like Python and JavaScript, being first cross members like you're
Speaker 2: being the Aspire you want to be and tying yourself
Speaker 2: to version numbers is bad. It's just really bad. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Were there any significant bug fixes in the last version. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: we have.
Speaker 4: We're I've learned to be proud of our bug debt
Speaker 4: because that moves that we're moving fast, which you're kind
Speaker 4: of have toy right now. There will be a contraction
Speaker 4: phase where everybody goes and makes quality the most important
Speaker 4: thing again. And we've done that kind of periodically over
Speaker 4: the last year, like we've taken a release or two
Speaker 4: to just be like bug fixes only. There were a
Speaker 4: lot of weird things with SERTs and getting open telemetry
Speaker 4: wired up, especially cross language, and Damien and David Negstad
Speaker 4: and Carol on our developer control Plane team, they also
Speaker 4: have spent a ton of work basic like figuring out
Speaker 4: how to optimize devserts for all different languages, container orized
Speaker 4: or not without being too heavy handed on your machine.
Speaker 4: And it was I have no idea, I have no
Speaker 4: idea how they made it work, but they made it work,
Speaker 4: and so it's kind of a feature.
Speaker 3: But it felt like a bug fix.
Speaker 4: Because you would run something that you'd think would work
Speaker 4: and it didn't.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but it's very much how you actually serve developers
Speaker 2: as you go where they are, and the sart strategy
Speaker 2: that a Python developer may be using in his organization.
Speaker 2: If you're not supporting it, that guy's out. Yeah, you're gone.
Speaker 2: You can't interfere with my right plumbing, right, the homework
Speaker 2: of whatevery, you know, because he barely understood when we
Speaker 2: got set up in the first place. Nobody understands. That's
Speaker 2: just reality. But if you don't work with their sert strategy,
Speaker 2: they're out.
Speaker 4: It has been fun to see how spoiled we are
Speaker 4: as dot net developers, Like we all love to complain,
Speaker 4: you know, we're developers.
Speaker 3: We complain.
Speaker 4: But you have dot net devserts and you just run
Speaker 4: the thing and it just does the thing right. Nobody
Speaker 4: else has that wow, or there's you know, eighteen million
Speaker 4: branches of how it works, and something like typescript or
Speaker 4: gihon a script it's like, oh, you could do it
Speaker 4: this way, or you could do this way, or you
Speaker 4: could do it this way, or you could just set
Speaker 4: this environment variable. That just makes it so that no
Speaker 4: TLS is authorized anymore on your machine from the node
Speaker 4: run time, And it's like right.
Speaker 2: Uh oh, well yeah, and everybody, everybody has a different
Speaker 2: way of approaching this, and a lot of organizations and
Speaker 2: a lot of different techniques. They literally punt it's like
Speaker 2: use whatever you want, which another way of saying welcome
Speaker 2: to hell. Yep, yeah, right, no, two ways.
Speaker 1: And the fact that I won't be responsible.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well Microsoft did the right. The thing about dot
Speaker 2: net dev SERTs is brilliant free free, right, you know
Speaker 2: what you do to not have to ask the boss
Speaker 2: for anything this, yes, and so that's what they'll do.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you can still do it. It's using under
Speaker 3: the hood.
Speaker 4: It uses the things that you use, right, Like we're
Speaker 4: not reinventing the wheel, which is a problem.
Speaker 3: We've definitely gotten into in dot net in the past.
Speaker 4: I think like where we'll be like we can do
Speaker 4: it better, like we're going to build a whole new
Speaker 4: thing for this, but we've we've gotten far away from that,
Speaker 4: especially like you know, in my decade or so a
Speaker 4: little bit less being in dot netland, where we do
Speaker 4: we do it so that you can always break out
Speaker 4: and do what the thing is under the hood if
Speaker 4: you want to and you don't want to use our stuff,
Speaker 4: and we carry that opinion into a spire where we
Speaker 4: have these opinions and these packages.
Speaker 3: But if you want to just write code to do whatever,
Speaker 3: we don't care. Go nuts, have fun.
Speaker 1: Nice what's next?
Speaker 3: Huh?
Speaker 1: And what's left to do? Oh my god?
Speaker 2: Well you're thirteen point one. So and by the way, Mady,
Speaker 2: I just get a thrill every time I hear the
Speaker 2: PM version of you come out with is, Hey, we're
Speaker 2: going to do fixed versions, and we're going to do
Speaker 2: feature versions, like you've just been down this road so
Speaker 2: many times, Like I hear those sounds. So thirteen point
Speaker 2: one is out. You big up to thirteen. We use
Speaker 2: a heavy left. That's a whole lot of features. I
Speaker 2: got to think that the one is okay? How those
Speaker 2: actually land? Like what did we get in? Like this
Speaker 2: is it's a stabilization rev mm hmm yep.
Speaker 4: Thirteen one was a lot of okay, Like these are
Speaker 4: things that we because we wanted to ship at dot
Speaker 4: net cof right, because even though we were like, oh,
Speaker 4: our whole thing is we're dropping dot Net. Like writing
Speaker 4: the keynote script was very weird. Because I was like,
Speaker 4: it has to be like we're dot net and we
Speaker 4: love this and like this is not bad, but also
Speaker 4: we don't want to lie. Yeah, and so we you know,
Speaker 4: we totally sank that up and then we shipped thirteen
Speaker 4: one like three or four weeks later because we just
Speaker 4: there were things that we were like, yeah, you know
Speaker 4: that didn't get in that could be cleaned up. We're
Speaker 4: also trying to react as Foundry has been developing like crazy.
Speaker 4: We want to make sure we have good experiences for that.
Speaker 4: And so our next release, thirteen to two is coming out.
Speaker 3: Did it What month is it? It's January? Yeah, I
Speaker 3: don't know what's come out, but.
Speaker 1: It's January at my house.
Speaker 3: It's not out yet.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so time is illusion lunchtime, doubly sing.
Speaker 3: That's true, It's true.
Speaker 4: That's definitely more of a stabilization and a docks release,
Speaker 4: Like we're really hunkering down on it because we build
Speaker 4: our own website. So now we have docks on our
Speaker 4: own website, right, so we're making that easier. We're looking at,
Speaker 4: you know, how to get the team to be able
Speaker 4: to contribute docs more without having to have our one
Speaker 4: four docks guide just right at all? Right, and then
Speaker 4: and using AI for that of course?
Speaker 2: Is that is that a learn engine? Aneath at it?
Speaker 3: We built our.
Speaker 4: Own wow wow, Yeah, we we had a lot of
Speaker 4: arguments about it. Part of it was just because we
Speaker 4: wanted to build our website without dot Net and deploy
Speaker 4: it with a spire using the internal deployment stuff, which
Speaker 4: is a nightmare.
Speaker 1: This is you dog fooding.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and we wanted to be able to say we
Speaker 4: have this aspire ified thing that isn't dot net, right yeah,
Speaker 4: and learn, I mean learning a whole bunch of other stuff.
Speaker 2: But yeah, you're not going to lift a whole learn
Speaker 2: engine into that, So we kind of got to do
Speaker 2: it your way right.
Speaker 3: Control the brand, Yeah, and we thought it would be fun.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the brand control is great, And like we're using
Speaker 4: Astro and Starlight, which is really cool. They actually just
Speaker 4: got bought like a week ago, but now we're like
Speaker 4: one of their showcase sites and so it's been a
Speaker 4: really cool way to like build out networks outside of
Speaker 4: our usual realm and it's really easy.
Speaker 1: It was super easy.
Speaker 2: So but anyways, doc debt a link to that to
Speaker 2: Astro build Like folks need to know.
Speaker 1: This is cool. Stuff.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and it's open source by the way, Microsoft Slash
Speaker 4: is fired dot dev on GitHub. So doc stet is
Speaker 4: this release. And then we have to get back into two.
Speaker 4: There's two big things. One is deployment. We have a
Speaker 4: lot of we've we've kind of settled on a direction,
Speaker 4: but it's not done. Aspire has always been local first,
Speaker 4: and then we've made it using AZD or whatever like
Speaker 4: pretty trivial to spin up a dev environment. But obviously
Speaker 4: most people want to put things in pipelines or hand
Speaker 4: them off to their DevOps team, or run checks against
Speaker 4: things and CI and et cetera. And so we've started
Speaker 4: this concept of as fire pipelines and build steps and
Speaker 4: all these things, and we need to polish that up
Speaker 4: and actually finish it and build out stories outside of Azure.
Speaker 4: Because we are multi cloud, you can use AWS and Vanilla,
Speaker 4: Docker and Digital Ocean with a spire.
Speaker 2: But so GCP will work fine then too.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, exactly, and it does work now, it's just
Speaker 4: you have to spit out the app posts as a
Speaker 4: manifest and then translate that into whatever the artifacts are.
Speaker 4: And so that's a big thing we're building out. The
Speaker 4: other thing is obviously AI. Both using and building AI,
Speaker 4: and so the MCP is crazy.
Speaker 3: A Spire MCP and the.
Speaker 4: Playwright MCP together, My god, it is truly like hands
Speaker 4: off because Playwright navigator.
Speaker 2: I am so in danger when I play with the
Speaker 2: Playwright MCP of losing a day every single time I
Speaker 2: touch it. It's an instant rabbit hole.
Speaker 3: It's brilliant.
Speaker 1: We use Playwright MCP to automatically generate documentary for a website.
Speaker 1: I think it was Jeff's website probably yeah, yeah, and
Speaker 1: it did screenshots.
Speaker 3: And now at hire MVP yep.
Speaker 1: Everything.
Speaker 4: It gets the logs, it gets the telemetry, it gets
Speaker 4: the errors. It can stop and restart individual resources and
Speaker 4: run commands against them, et cetera. And then play right's
Speaker 4: the one that's actually clicking for you? And it's like what.
Speaker 4: But then on the other end, you know, I want
Speaker 4: to be able to add a resource into my app
Speaker 4: that's an AI resource, and so I want to be
Speaker 4: able to point it to a deployment on Foundry, which
Speaker 4: they have their whole new their like next gen Foundry
Speaker 4: experience that we were trying to build around.
Speaker 1: Tell us about Foundry just really quickly. I mean, I
Speaker 1: think of it as a Microsoft alternative to a LAMA.
Speaker 1: But tell me what it is.
Speaker 3: Officially, Foundry is. I hope no one on the Foundry
Speaker 3: heame ever listens to this. It's a hub.
Speaker 4: For AI cloud apps, right, agentic apps, so you can
Speaker 4: get all your models, you can get all your very
Speaker 4: lightweight like data and stuff all there. It's a playground.
Speaker 4: The web experience came first. Foundry Local is their o
Speaker 4: LAMA thing. Yeah, yeah, and it's all this kind of
Speaker 4: one brand. Really, the point of it is to pull
Speaker 4: the complexity of Azure out of the experience because, as
Speaker 4: you all know, like if you're an Azure dev or
Speaker 4: someone who's an Azure admin, like there's a rabbit hole.
Speaker 4: And so Foundry really streamlines it and makes it super
Speaker 4: easy for people who aren't already in the Azure ecosystem
Speaker 4: to hop in and start playing around. We also, like
Speaker 4: we have a GitHub models integration, We have just a
Speaker 4: generic open AI integration. You can stick any connection string
Speaker 4: anywhere into your spire app host. But having a really
Speaker 4: streamlined Foundry experience is good for all you. And also,
Speaker 4: like Rich was saying earlier, it's good for us because
Speaker 4: it ties us to revenue, like we're an open source project,
Speaker 4: So we need to tie to revenue or when the
Speaker 4: contraction happens and the bubble starts to burst a little bit,
Speaker 4: we need to make sure that we are actually like
Speaker 4: increase and shareholder value.
Speaker 2: Every CFO is going to go to every death and
Speaker 2: say show your ROI yep, And if you can show
Speaker 2: that you're providing value to the company, you live. And
Speaker 2: if you don't, you're gone.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And it's a win win for Foundry because they
Speaker 4: don't have to worry as much about the devas, which
Speaker 4: is a really complicated problem right now, the devas of
Speaker 4: building AI apps. Like, yeah, together we've really been able
Speaker 4: to create a good story.
Speaker 2: Well and just that awareness to put people in a
Speaker 2: place where they can demonstrate value.
Speaker 1: That's good tooling.
Speaker 2: You know, you can't have to remind people are supping
Speaker 2: Microft actually a tooling company. Yes, that's what it was
Speaker 2: really always about. Yeah, they happen to make languages and
Speaker 2: things along the way, you know, arguably against their will
Speaker 2: they had to, but they you know, and it's easy
Speaker 2: to focus on that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's the business is tooling.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean as fire was originally called a stack,
Speaker 4: which whole other thing, and it's it's the gottenet platform
Speaker 4: team that built a fire, like not the dot net
Speaker 4: tooling team, right, And at some point after I had joined,
Speaker 4: we kind of were.
Speaker 3: Like, this is kind of a tool. Is this tool?
Speaker 3: And it totally changed our perspective on.
Speaker 1: All of it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and then suddenly the languages don't matter and the
Speaker 2: platforms don't matter and it's just about being productive.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yep.
Speaker 2: And at the same and all the good stuff I
Speaker 2: see three different axis is moving at once. Right, that
Speaker 2: there is a shift of the platforms underneath you, a
Speaker 2: shift of the languages off of the side. And then
Speaker 2: suddenly this new wave of tooling with llms and things,
Speaker 2: and you need to hook into each of them. Like
Speaker 2: you look at this list of features, like why are
Speaker 2: they worried about this? It's like, because this is all
Speaker 2: the stuff that will stop you, yes, as a developer,
Speaker 2: from using this tool.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's really interesting. And what a battle.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we have a constant you know battle, that's how
Speaker 4: much do we do and force ourselves to own versus
Speaker 4: how much do we let you fiddle around with? And
Speaker 4: so we still we haven't really come up with any
Speaker 4: strict guidelines yet, Like I think we're now we're talking
Speaker 4: about like, should we have install things for you if
Speaker 4: they're in your appost and you don't have them, Like
Speaker 4: does that make sense? Or should we point you at
Speaker 4: something like is that too heavy handed? But for us,
Speaker 4: it's just you should be able to break out of
Speaker 4: the of our opinions at any time, like no black
Speaker 4: boxes is our number one thing.
Speaker 2: That's exactly the thing I was thinking. You have opinions,
Speaker 2: but so do your customers. Yes, and so it's always
Speaker 2: a question of whose opinions are more tightly held.
Speaker 4: Right right in our given moment, loosely held but we
Speaker 4: think they're good.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but you can you can pop out at anything.
Speaker 2: So I'm not sure what to do. The fact that
Speaker 2: you have an opinion makes my life better. But if
Speaker 2: I haven't told that's the way I'm doing things, you
Speaker 2: need to back off on your opinion or I have
Speaker 2: to go somewhere else.
Speaker 3: Yep, exactly.
Speaker 1: So the Greenfield story is pretty obvious. You start with
Speaker 1: a new visual studio template, you say I want an
Speaker 1: Aspire template, and then you go from there. Even if
Speaker 1: you're not using any of the caches and all that stuff,
Speaker 1: you could still just start that way and you get
Speaker 1: a little bit of extra stuff like the startup app,
Speaker 1: and then you have to click your app to run it.
Speaker 1: But it's not it's not going to impede anything, right,
Speaker 1: so you should always start a new project with aspire I. Yes,
Speaker 1: but the brown Field thing is a little bit different,
Speaker 1: isn't it. And then this is what we did on
Speaker 1: stage that we were talking about. We aspiified dot net Rocks,
Speaker 1: the dot NetRocks dot com website, and it was pretty
Speaker 1: freaking easy.
Speaker 4: It's it's it's really a manifest, like it's a type
Speaker 4: safe manifest. There are things you have to wiggle your
Speaker 4: way through sometimes, and especially with older dot net apps.
Speaker 4: So we had Handsleman come on and do it a
Speaker 4: spiification of his podcast website too, and and you know,
Speaker 4: he's using the same builder pattern that he used in
Speaker 4: dot net Core and we're like, bro, like, doesn't work
Speaker 4: like that anymore. So there's definitely this modernization that has
Speaker 4: to happen because one of our opinions, right is we're
Speaker 4: not gonna let you keep using the old stuff, because
Speaker 4: we don't want the tech det of supporting all the
Speaker 4: old stuff and every matrix of that. We would never
Speaker 4: be a to get anything done if we had to
Speaker 4: worry about you know, the original ihose builders.
Speaker 2: So you are forcing me down the pit of modernization here.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but if I remember correctly, it was just like
Speaker 1: a right click on a solution or something, and it
Speaker 1: was like ad Aspire or was that easy?
Speaker 3: It's that easy.
Speaker 4: And now we have a command line experience too, so
Speaker 4: we'll look and we'll a knit and we're starting to
Speaker 4: build out for multiple languages. So if you have a
Speaker 4: job strip front end and dot Net back end, we
Speaker 4: can aspireify that from the command line, from VS code
Speaker 4: or from vs without you having to jump through hoops.
Speaker 1: So I did a I have a customer that we
Speaker 1: hire Jeff Fritz to aspireify their application, right dot net
Speaker 1: Blazer application, and he did it and it worked fine.
Speaker 1: But there was only one thing that got in the way,
Speaker 1: and that was we were using poly the in it,
Speaker 1: and then you know, Aspire wants to use the poly
Speaker 1: stuff that's in the dot Net framework, but you know,
Speaker 1: just different name spaces and things like that, so that
Speaker 1: became a little bit of a tweak that we had
Speaker 1: to get around. But other than that, it was just
Speaker 1: like easy.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we turned It's one of another one of those
Speaker 4: things we turn on because we think you should probably
Speaker 4: have some level of resiliency.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but you can just comment that out.
Speaker 4: Like, that's the reason that the service defaults, which is
Speaker 4: our our opinions for a dot net back end or
Speaker 4: a dot net app, whatever it is. That's the reason
Speaker 4: it's a template and not a package you pull in
Speaker 4: so that you can go into it and comment things out.
Speaker 1: It was very easy, Yeah, easy to upgrade. So good
Speaker 1: names all around Greenfield, Brownfield, yeah, blue Field. Yeah.
Speaker 4: The other thing, like we keep talking about, nobody's going
Speaker 4: to make an Aspire app that's not like a thing.
Speaker 3: It's an app that uses a spire.
Speaker 4: So you'll do NPM create or you'll clone a template,
Speaker 4: or you'll go into visual Studio and you'll do file
Speaker 4: new project. And like, aspires should be easy to add
Speaker 4: in at any stage.
Speaker 2: I can tell you the other side of this is
Speaker 2: coming into a project as a consultant and someone says,
Speaker 2: we used Aspire for this thought. I know a bunch
Speaker 2: of stuf about you know, hmm right, I know a
Speaker 2: whole bunch about this app. Things you will do and
Speaker 2: won't do if Aspire is actually working.
Speaker 4: And you know, it'll probably be running on your machine
Speaker 4: that day instead of in two weeks.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but you know, but they never call you when
Speaker 2: there's everything's working.
Speaker 3: Well, that's true.
Speaker 1: That's a good point.
Speaker 3: That's a great point.
Speaker 1: So so where are you struggling? Well, Maddie, it's been
Speaker 1: wicked awesome talking to you. And is there anything sorry?
Speaker 1: And is there anything else a that we missed that
Speaker 1: you want to I don't think so.
Speaker 3: I mean it's going to be a crazy year. I
Speaker 3: think is going to be a wild ride hopefully.
Speaker 4: I see you guys at MVP SUMM.
Speaker 3: You know you're doing the two thousandth episode. That'll be great.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I know.
Speaker 2: I've got a I've got a special guest list to
Speaker 2: make sure folks can get in there because it's going
Speaker 2: to sell out.
Speaker 1: So you're on that list, my dear, Oh I will.
Speaker 3: But yeah, I think it's going to be a fun year.
Speaker 4: We're hoping to do an Aspire centric online event, like
Speaker 4: similar to a dot net conf but about aspire'd be
Speaker 4: great at some point, So keep your ears open. I
Speaker 4: might tap you too for that. As the dot net heads,
Speaker 4: maybe you can come in and represent the old Guard.
Speaker 1: It would be the token old dot net guys.
Speaker 4: Yeah, really good for the for the stereotypes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think you need a Python time when you
Speaker 2: need us.
Speaker 1: Yeah, have someone in mind.
Speaker 2: I'll circle back with you.
Speaker 1: Of that, everybody has to be wearing depends. That's the yes,
Speaker 1: that's the me too.
Speaker 4: On the outside, the streams can get long, you know,
Speaker 4: I get it. But yeah, Aspire dot dev is the
Speaker 4: home for everything Aspire, right, so that's the fight now,
Speaker 4: I love it, So just go there.
Speaker 3: We stream on Fridays. We're doing more content. We're around.
Speaker 3: We're pretty honest to a fault. So we have a discord.
Speaker 3: It's all link on the website coming.
Speaker 1: Out And Maddie, what's your home base on the web
Speaker 1: these days?
Speaker 4: Probably Blue Sky is the thing I use the most,
Speaker 4: although I now I get to impersonate Aspire. I'm logged
Speaker 4: in as that brand account, which is horrifying.
Speaker 2: Wow, but a god, you have a brand account.
Speaker 1: Look at you as is here.
Speaker 4: At Aspire dot dev the website or at Mattie Montacuola
Speaker 4: dot net is my personal one, which I use but
Speaker 4: mostly just to retweet other people or heckel Fowler.
Speaker 2: So great and we all know you need to heckle
Speaker 2: Fowler more.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, all right, Maddie. We'll catch up with you
Speaker 1: later this year. Thanks. See you guys, all right, thanks
Speaker 1: and we'll talk to you next time. Rock dot Net
Speaker 1: Rocks is brought to you by Franklin's Net and produced
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Speaker 1: back to show number one, recorded in September two thousand
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Speaker 3: You got jamdvans
Speaker 2: And