Speaker 1: How'd you like to listen to dot NetRocks with no ads? Easy?
Speaker 1: Become a patron for just five dollars a month. You
Speaker 1: get access to a private RSS feed where all the
Speaker 1: shows have no ads. Twenty dollars a month. We'll get
Speaker 1: you that and a special dot NetRocks patron mug. Sign
Speaker 1: up now at Patreon dot dot NetRocks dot com. Hey
Speaker 1: guess what. It's dot net Rocks all over again. Nineteen
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty nine episodes so far. We'll figure it
Speaker 1: out one of these days. Yeah, one of these days
Speaker 1: we'll learn what we're doing. I'm Carl Franklin. That's Richard Campbell.
Speaker 1: What's up, buddy? Hey?
Speaker 2: Oh you know beautiful summer. We're recording this on Canada Day,
Speaker 2: July first, So oh yeah, I'm gonna make a couple
Speaker 2: of shows today and then I'm gonna head out and celebrate.
Speaker 1: Have some barbecue and some whiskey and all that stuff.
Speaker 1: That's it. It's a grilling day, drink some Canadian whiskey.
Speaker 1: Our friend Lemon is here, and as an honor to him,
Speaker 1: or tip my hat to Lemon, my better no framework
Speaker 1: has something to do with him. So roll the music
Speaker 1: all right, man, what do you got? There's the link
Speaker 1: right there that I just shared with you guys. This
Speaker 1: is the script from the cub pub Conf two talk
Speaker 1: that I did and beat lemon O, who is who
Speaker 1: is the projected winner of pubconf because he always wins? Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: between him and Randolph, you're in trouble. You know, those
Speaker 1: two are wicked funny. This one is all about vocal dyslexia.
Speaker 1: And you know vocal dyslexia. You can probably figure out
Speaker 1: what what it is, right speech, old garb backs, coming out,
Speaker 1: word words, that kind of stuff. There was a comedy
Speaker 1: routine that I stole some of this from, but a
Speaker 1: lot of it I wrote myself, and I wrote it
Speaker 1: as if it was real. And you know that this
Speaker 1: is a secret that I've been hiding from everybody and
Speaker 1: editing out and you know, retaking my dot net rocks
Speaker 1: shows all that stuff. And somebody came up to me
Speaker 1: afterwards and said, I'm so sorry that said for what
Speaker 1: it was a joke.
Speaker 2: Come on, but I sold it pretty well anyway, unless
Speaker 2: I sold it well enough that they're like, nope, no,
Speaker 2: we're rolling.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So the link is to a script in PDF
Speaker 1: format and there you go as another joke. I had
Speaker 1: slides up that had the actual correct wording right, and
Speaker 1: so my script was you know, highlighted all of the puns,
Speaker 1: so it was it was effective. Enjoy.
Speaker 2: It's also out of self control on your part. I
Speaker 2: presume you did not look at the correct wording we're
Speaker 2: focusing on.
Speaker 1: No, no, no, I went on. I went only on
Speaker 1: my script, but I had to check to see where
Speaker 1: I had to write little breaks in the script so
Speaker 1: I could advance the slides. Yeah, or maybe it was
Speaker 1: the slides automatically advanced every minute or so, was it
Speaker 1: forty seconds? Yeah, I can't you lemon.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's like night rules, so it would be a
Speaker 3: new slide every fifteen seconds.
Speaker 1: Yeah ah yeah.
Speaker 2: And it's the challenge that's anything harder in this world
Speaker 2: than a five minute bit, honestly, I know, because it's
Speaker 2: so tight hard right Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a way
Speaker 2: harder problem. And you know, give me, give me an
Speaker 2: hour any day of the week. I thought Yours Lemon
Speaker 2: was hilarious.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I was trying. I was trying to remember that
Speaker 3: one because that was when Todd thought that it would
Speaker 3: be a gift to essentially like write my deck for me. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and so I would have nothing to prepare to Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 3: not like I wouldn't so like so essentially, I would
Speaker 3: like before the show, you're riffing, before the show, I
Speaker 3: would like write up a script of like possible jokes
Speaker 3: of like Okay, well if he writes this deck, then
Speaker 3: I'm going to do this joke. And he writes this deck,
Speaker 3: I'm going to do this And it was just all
Speaker 3: Dolly created versions of me in different occupations.
Speaker 1: It was great. All right, Well enough of that. Who's
Speaker 1: talking to us today?
Speaker 2: Richard Campbell grabbed a comment of a show nineteen fifty three,
Speaker 2: the one we did with our friend Scott Hunter back
Speaker 2: at Build talking about coding agents, and I realized, like,
Speaker 2: we're kind of over the top on AI topics right now,
Speaker 2: like the past couple of months. But let's face it,
Speaker 2: this technology is emerging in a big way and then
Speaker 2: going fast.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I got to tell you I've been hanging out with
Speaker 2: my friend Ken Tol's dad, which we'll drag back on
Speaker 2: the show sometimes soon. He's literally demonstrating using these tools
Speaker 2: to the point where in the meeting to outline the
Speaker 2: requirements for the project, he completed the project. Wow, I
Speaker 2: figured it was six weeks of coding done in a
Speaker 2: two hour meeting.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: I think it's just astonishing and grinded. It depends on
Speaker 2: the project. There's lots of different elements to all of this,
Speaker 2: so the coding agent thing, you know, obviously relevant in
Speaker 2: our commentators Jeremy Hadten who said this was a fascinating
Speaker 2: episode that started to really show what the future of
Speaker 2: programming is going to look like. And yet the end
Speaker 2: result question on everyone's mind, not just technologies, is will
Speaker 2: I be out of a job in a year or
Speaker 2: two time work as a technologists and financial services and
Speaker 2: this question is also the top of mind for my
Speaker 2: business colleagues who respond to AI is often think instead
Speaker 2: of what great services you go to offer to customers
Speaker 2: if you had five assistants. Many of us have worked
Speaker 2: on long lived projects where the list of minor but
Speaker 2: customer annoying defects and future request just grows and grows.
Speaker 2: There's always more important things to do. Imagine a world
Speaker 2: where with the help of coding agents writing pullar quests,
Speaker 2: the list is actually reduced to zero. Maybe we'll have
Speaker 2: permanently delighted customers, permanently delighted.
Speaker 1: I do like that.
Speaker 2: Line, not like anybody's getting the bottom of the to
Speaker 2: do list.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 2: The real question is what are the skills you need
Speaker 2: to focus on to be able to utilize these tools? Well, Like,
Speaker 2: it doesn't surprise me that a friend like Kent Doll's
Speaker 2: stat or any of us really because you can think
Speaker 2: through the whole problem and you're shepherding these tools of
Speaker 2: limited capability. Yeah, so these parts that it can code.
Speaker 1: And I still believe that unless you've done what the
Speaker 1: tool is doing and can spot things that it's doing
Speaker 1: wrong or that you don't want it to do particularly
Speaker 1: that way, and can correct it, Yeah, you're basing your
Speaker 1: whole career around something that may or may not serve you. Well,
Speaker 1: So I still think that you have to be a
Speaker 1: developer and you have to have experience to know what
Speaker 1: to correct. Yeah, yeah, I don't disagree.
Speaker 2: And certainly as soon as the complexity reaches a certain level,
Speaker 2: these tools tip over.
Speaker 3: Yeah, in all of these things, you know, obviously, like
Speaker 3: you know, our hearts bleed for the juniors because you know,
Speaker 3: you need to have somebody get a foothold on those
Speaker 3: kinds things. And that's the first place that this thing
Speaker 3: is supposed to supplant except for like the thing that
Speaker 3: like with all of the doom saying and all of
Speaker 3: the and all of the like cataclysmic you know, earth
Speaker 3: shattering like AI stuff that I think people lose sight of.
Speaker 3: Is I remember living through the entire squarespace revolution.
Speaker 2: Sure, you know why I wouldn't even build a website again,
Speaker 2: Yeah exactly.
Speaker 3: And it's like nobody's going to hire somebody like me
Speaker 3: because they can do something in square space. It's like, yeah, no,
Speaker 3: you absolutely can. Like if you're a you know, a
Speaker 3: Thai restaurant, that is the right move. That's exactly what
Speaker 3: you should be doing. Word Press all that, Yeah, I
Speaker 3: mean that those those those really awful like word Press
Speaker 3: kind of like UI Builder things. Yeah, you know, eventually
Speaker 3: there's like gets hacked. So that's a thing, but like
Speaker 3: until that time, you'll have a site that like is
Speaker 3: slow but like probably works okay. And so that's that's
Speaker 3: a thing that we've lived through a bunch and the
Speaker 3: idea of doing like client service website for money things
Speaker 3: still exists because there is a level that that's not
Speaker 3: attainable at.
Speaker 2: Sure, are you really just being more productive you know,
Speaker 2: more of the same.
Speaker 1: And trusting too, Like a customer is going to trust
Speaker 1: an expert whether or not they use AI. If they
Speaker 1: use it, great, they're more productive rather than just going
Speaker 1: directly to an AI and trying it themselves, because that's risky.
Speaker 3: And you know, I've been in a lot of client
Speaker 3: meetings and like a lot of client meetings, and the
Speaker 3: idea of even just getting something that you can spec
Speaker 3: out for a coding agent to do, you know, like
Speaker 3: the average client like explaining their requirements is Labyrinthian and
Speaker 3: it's Brazil and so like.
Speaker 2: We get back to this idea of you you thought
Speaker 2: your job as a software developer was writing code.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I thought it was to develop software.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: So the one thing I will say to the junior
Speaker 1: develop is before you write a line of code or
Speaker 1: ask the AI to write a line of code, you
Speaker 1: should consult with the AI given your spec to come
Speaker 1: up with an architecture and then get the buy off
Speaker 1: from your customer on that architecture before you do anything right,
Speaker 1: because that's going to be your limiting factor. You don't
Speaker 1: have experience to know what the architecture should be. You
Speaker 1: can get some ideas from AI but ultimately your customers.
Speaker 1: That's all I'm going to say for now, Richard, you
Speaker 1: can get back to the comment.
Speaker 2: All right, Jeremy, thank you so much for your comment.
Speaker 2: And a copy of music Coba is on its way
Speaker 2: to you. And if you'd like a copy musakobea, I
Speaker 2: write a comment on the website at dot NetRocks dot
Speaker 2: com or on the facebooks. We publish every show there
Speaker 2: and if you comment there and everybody in the show,
Speaker 2: send you copy of Musickoba.
Speaker 1: And Music to Cobey is still going strong, twenty two tracks.
Speaker 1: You can get the whole collection in MP three flak
Speaker 1: or wave format of Music to Code by dot net.
Speaker 1: All right, man, let's talk about what happened in nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty nine before we bring on Lemon. All right. Some
Speaker 1: significant events included the admission of Hawaii as the fiftieth
Speaker 1: state in the United States. Wow Yeah, the tragic plane
Speaker 1: crash known as the Day the Music Died, Buddy Holly
Speaker 1: Big Bopper, Ritchie Valens I believe for those three, and
Speaker 1: the launch of the first American satellite explorer seven. Additionally,
Speaker 1: it was a pivotal year for cultural and political changes,
Speaker 1: including the rise of Fidel Castro in Cuba, and the
Speaker 1: introduction of the Barbie doll. What do you got on
Speaker 1: your list? Richard?
Speaker 2: The IBM fourteen oh one, the first mass produced mainframe
Speaker 2: transistor based This is still before you know chips exists.
Speaker 2: They called it literally the model T of computers. Twelve
Speaker 2: thousand units sold over fifteen years or so, going out
Speaker 2: of production in seventy one.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: Introduction of the first photocopier, the Xerox nine to fourteen
Speaker 2: plain paper copier. There were specially paper copiers before that,
Speaker 2: the transfer paper and stuff up by a plain paper copier.
Speaker 2: And my personal favorite, the lecture from Richard Feynman called
Speaker 2: There's plenty of Room at the bottom where he describes nanotechnology. Wow, Wow,
Speaker 2: that's Fineman.
Speaker 1: That's some stuff. Nineteen fifty nine. It's unbelievable. Yeah, okay, well,
Speaker 1: I guess we should introduce our guest Lemon that's his name,
Speaker 1: first name, last name, Yes, with a lifelong passion that
Speaker 1: you know what that joke is from? It was I
Speaker 1: Am Mork from the planet Orc. Is that your first
Speaker 1: name or last name? Yes? Robin Williams all right, with
Speaker 1: a lifelong passion for the weirdness of the Internet and
Speaker 1: a day job as a development lead for whoever hired him.
Speaker 1: Lemon spends his professional time making websites for money and
Speaker 1: his free time making websites for no money. I should
Speaker 1: have read this first. He's created a number of stupid
Speaker 1: things for the Internet, like the games over on kind
Speaker 1: of Fun, the wiki how guessing game, Damn Dog, the
Speaker 1: Google autocomplete game, idiots dot Win, and other things of
Speaker 1: questionable use. He also hosts a podcast that looks at
Speaker 1: some of the Internet's weirder subcultures. It's not safe for
Speaker 1: your work unless you work somewhere really cool. Welcome Lemon. Thanks, yeah,
Speaker 1: very cool.
Speaker 3: That's so great to talk to you guys.
Speaker 1: Good to have you on friend. Yeah. What's on your
Speaker 1: mind these days? Boy?
Speaker 3: A lot, a lot of the the idea of Because
Speaker 3: one of the things that Richard and I were talking
Speaker 3: about a little while ago is is that I think
Speaker 3: that the idea of the traditional web is coming back
Speaker 3: to like win a little bit more. I think that
Speaker 3: the sort of like movement towards like super weighty like
Speaker 3: spas is starting to move away, which means that which
Speaker 3: means that I think so, I think so, and that's
Speaker 3: because I'm really excited to tell a bunch of people
Speaker 3: that I was right.
Speaker 1: That's the important part.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. But like you know, even like in the
Speaker 3: front ends world, like the the newest hotness is astro,
Speaker 3: and like an astro is cool, but like, but I
Speaker 3: do like that, like the thing that is the real exciting, new,
Speaker 3: brand new tech sort of deal is also something that
Speaker 3: is traditional server rendered like MPa, you know, index dot
Speaker 3: HTML pages. And I think that that's that's in my mind,
Speaker 3: a little bit of a return to sanity, which I
Speaker 3: think is great.
Speaker 1: Now this is a this is a great time to
Speaker 1: ask this question. Are you talking about sites for companies
Speaker 1: that their customers are b to B or internal applications,
Speaker 1: or are you talking about customer facing websites that are
Speaker 1: heavy on the client side.
Speaker 3: I think that I think that there's a little bit
Speaker 3: more of it happening when it is like, uh, you know,
Speaker 3: public or customer facing. The idea of when U URLs
Speaker 3: matter more, when when discoverability matters more, when open graph
Speaker 3: stuff matters more. That's where like MPAs do a better job.
Speaker 2: I'm just looking at the set of URLs we just
Speaker 2: had and thinking, look, how coolies are kind of dot
Speaker 2: fun and idiots dot win and damn dot dog and
Speaker 2: Astro dot build.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, there's so many. There's so many TLDs.
Speaker 3: I mean, there's like the idea of I mean, you know,
Speaker 3: like I try to every once in a while try
Speaker 3: to talk clients out of buying you know, the dot
Speaker 3: com or the dot org because you'll have to end
Speaker 3: up with something that's pretty lame. But if you do
Speaker 3: have literally like seven hundred like TLDs, you can probably
Speaker 3: find something really and like damn Dog, that one specifically
Speaker 3: was I saw the like dot dog was a valid
Speaker 3: tld and I was like, can I buy damn Dog?
Speaker 3: And it was like yeah, and it won't be that
Speaker 3: much and I was like okay, cool, and then I
Speaker 3: bought it and I was like okay, what goes here? Yeah,
Speaker 3: And so like the game that I built for that
Speaker 3: domain doesn't really relate to the name, no exactly, Like
Speaker 3: it doesn't like wiki how and damn Dog don't really
Speaker 3: have anything to do together. It was just like, well,
Speaker 3: I got this domain, I got this idea, let'swush them together.
Speaker 1: No, that okay, so funny.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's there is an interesting wave I think people
Speaker 2: are tired of the megasites. Yeah, that that tooling's gotten
Speaker 2: so much better. Like I've had a whole conversation the
Speaker 2: other day about how could we build an Amazon that
Speaker 2: wasn't Amazon. That's just an interface to looking up all
Speaker 2: of the sites for products that you're looking for. And
Speaker 2: I'm like, aren't you talking about Google? It's like and
Speaker 2: it's not Google. It's like, okay, it's just the loathing
Speaker 2: of the tech giants that we've got. Is that what
Speaker 2: this is?
Speaker 3: I mean justify So I mean like I think that
Speaker 3: you know, Fang's done to a fair amount in the
Speaker 3: last couple of years to get some resentment.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, a fair bit of that.
Speaker 2: And you know, again looking at the positive side of
Speaker 2: this AI wave in that we do have tools that
Speaker 2: could do or searching for us, I also wonder if
Speaker 2: we're you know, we're getting walked back to bare metal
Speaker 2: coding because same thing, the tools are really getting really
Speaker 2: good at doing vanilla JavaScript.
Speaker 3: Or doing vanilla JavaScript, which is the part that I
Speaker 3: never want to do, you know, So like like like
Speaker 3: one of the things is that like I've never like, okay, sure,
Speaker 3: like if you're writing code, the one thing that you're
Speaker 3: granted every once in a while, is you get to
Speaker 3: experience a flow state and that's great. Yeah, you're like
Speaker 3: where you're writing code and it feels good and then
Speaker 3: you're like an hour in it starts to feel terrific
Speaker 3: and like that's a lovely feeling. But like you can
Speaker 3: get that in a lot of different ways and genuinely,
Speaker 3: like the actual writing of code, syntax, indenting, semicolons, I
Speaker 3: don't like that at all. Like I've never been interested
Speaker 3: in that kind of thing, like all of those like
Speaker 3: internal like religious holy wars that people will have about
Speaker 3: like this this syntax versus this syntax. Like, boy, if
Speaker 3: we can agree on it, yeah, that's all that matters.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, I got to tell you the past
Speaker 2: few weeks, I've spent a lot of time with a
Speaker 2: bunch of twenty something developers. They really don't care about languages,
Speaker 2: frameworks or any of those things. They are just trying
Speaker 2: to build solutions. We're here, we are, you know, concerned
Speaker 2: for the junior developer. I am not concerned about these guys.
Speaker 2: Yeah they would, they are. They are totally interested in
Speaker 2: solving solutions and with the stack they're use is the
Speaker 2: least interesting part of that.
Speaker 3: I love I love that. Yeah, like be omnivorous and
Speaker 3: you know, like do you like view or react? I
Speaker 3: don't know, Like whoever solves the problem.
Speaker 2: And the other side of this is because they can
Speaker 2: also deliver an MVP in a week or a couple
Speaker 2: of days. You know, when we were committing to nine
Speaker 2: months to the first you know, meaningful build, you could
Speaker 2: spend a few days talking about what stack to use.
Speaker 2: But if you're going to be done in a week,
Speaker 2: you shouldn't spend five minutes on it.
Speaker 1: Just go right.
Speaker 2: The longer debate, the slower you're going.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, And these things get to get cheaper because
Speaker 3: if you are able to build something with that sort
Speaker 3: of expediency to a certain extent, your QA is that
Speaker 3: your QA is the public launch. So like the plans
Speaker 3: that are the problems you thought you would have are
Speaker 3: actually proved out to be something different because now actual
Speaker 3: customers are using it.
Speaker 1: Hey, sorry, I was quiet for the last few minutes.
Speaker 1: I discovered a bug in our or a situation in
Speaker 1: our admin that we use in the back of house.
Speaker 1: You are the first guest that does not have a
Speaker 1: last name, and so my software was looking for a
Speaker 1: space to put it into first name and last name,
Speaker 1: and lo and behold you came up blank love it
Speaker 1: and the guests. So I had to actually pull up
Speaker 1: the database and do an update query and that's why
Speaker 1: I've been signed. So but I did enjoy your conversation.
Speaker 3: It's so funny you your yours is not the first
Speaker 3: database that I've broken with my last name?
Speaker 2: Or is it only a last name? When do you
Speaker 2: switch to a symbol? Because it worked for Prince?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Right, it didn't necessarily work great for Prince, like he
Speaker 3: did go back.
Speaker 1: You can't fill out a form on the internet. Yeah
Speaker 1: for example.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like nobody would say that, like symbol was the
Speaker 3: best period in Prince, Like I love Prince, I'm with you,
Speaker 3: but like, but you wouldn't say that like symbol time.
Speaker 2: That's what his best music was created, and that's when
Speaker 2: he was fighting the music industry and winning.
Speaker 1: Hm. That's right, that was really what that was about.
Speaker 1: The solo on while my Guitar Gently we stands out
Speaker 1: as one of his most spectacular performances.
Speaker 3: Oh that's so good, and you know you know the
Speaker 3: backstory to that.
Speaker 1: Right, Well, I know all about the song, But what
Speaker 1: in particular are you talking about.
Speaker 3: So it's it's uh, it's it's it's it was the
Speaker 3: Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, it's Eric Clapton, it's
Speaker 3: other guitar guys. I don't remember who else is in there.
Speaker 1: Jeff Lynn, jeff Lyn, Ok, yeah, Tom Petty Yeah.
Speaker 3: And so essentially, like the Rock and Roll Hall of
Speaker 3: Fame put this this performance together and they cast it,
Speaker 3: and so you got these like guys that are sitting
Speaker 3: around and doing their guitar thing, and then Prince is
Speaker 3: there and they're like, what is what is the kiss
Speaker 3: guy doing here? Like this is what and like, and
Speaker 3: so they didn't want to hang out with him. They
Speaker 3: didn't they didn't think that he was on their level,
Speaker 3: and so he kind of like sulked in the corner
Speaker 3: and then went home on day one of the actual
Speaker 3: like rehearsals, and then and then that was it. That
Speaker 3: was that was that was the last thing that happened.
Speaker 3: So that actual performance was him showing up without any
Speaker 3: of them knowing, like getting on stage shredding their faces
Speaker 3: off for two minutes. And then he like hired a
Speaker 3: guy to like be in the rafters so that he
Speaker 3: when he threw his guitar up in the air, somebody
Speaker 3: would catch it.
Speaker 1: It just never came down. Yeah, And they never came down.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and then just like walked off on stage like, yeah,
Speaker 3: I'm legit and you just learned that.
Speaker 1: I don't want to get off on a rand about Prince.
Speaker 1: But it goes without saying that throughout his career he
Speaker 1: never put himself forward as the new Jimmy Hendrix, you
Speaker 1: know what I mean. He played guitar just like another
Speaker 1: part in a song, and a lot of times it
Speaker 1: was just rhythm. Of course, in Purple Rain he did
Speaker 1: some spectacular things, but other than that, you know, and
Speaker 1: who knows what that was people. I think he was
Speaker 1: trying to hide it, you know, from the public, just
Speaker 1: waiting for that moment that while my guitar gently weeps,
Speaker 1: moment to prove himself as a shred absolute shredder. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I could be totally wrong. Maybe I
Speaker 1: just didn't listen to enough Prince Real stuff. You know.
Speaker 2: It was then an air crafton line when they asked
Speaker 2: who's the best guitar? What it's like being the best guitarist,
Speaker 2: he said, I don't know, have to ask prints.
Speaker 1: That's pretty good. Probably he's also named like Hendrix and
Speaker 1: Almon and yeah, yeah, he was blown away by Jimmy
Speaker 1: Hendricks when he saw him the first time, as was everybody. Okay,
Speaker 1: the heck are we talking about here? We're talking about
Speaker 1: progressive web apps in twenty twenty five?
Speaker 2: Are we walking towards this? I wanted to talk about
Speaker 2: progressive webps just because we haven't talked about it in ages. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and the areas I can tell. The only thing people
Speaker 2: do with it is create an icon on a phone with.
Speaker 3: Them Yeah, yeah, which is which is something. It's really
Speaker 3: just something you know, you can you can check a
Speaker 3: box by doing that, and.
Speaker 1: That's Notifications are hard.
Speaker 3: Right, Notifications are hard, And a lot of times when
Speaker 3: in my mind when a client says to me, like
Speaker 3: we want a mobile app, what I actually hear them
Speaker 3: say is we want notifications. Like you don't actually want
Speaker 3: a mobile app, You just want to get push notifications
Speaker 3: to your customers. Like you when you say I have
Speaker 3: a restaurant and I need my restaurant to have a moment, Well,
Speaker 3: that's that's silly. We're actually saying as we want to
Speaker 3: sort of like push notifications onto our customers and like,
Speaker 3: and all of that architecture is still like you know,
Speaker 3: it's been in the PWA system for a while, and
Speaker 3: you can do it with all of the same you know,
Speaker 3: Twilio and all of those services will handle that just
Speaker 3: the same.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, that's not so much the notification itself. It's
Speaker 1: putting the little number red circle number on the icon
Speaker 1: on the phone. That is the stuff of legend. Like
Speaker 1: in Android, it's a little easier to do in iOS.
Speaker 1: You have to have a Firebase account and of this
Speaker 1: and a that and services and all that. And in
Speaker 1: a PWA, I thought it was not allowed by iOS.
Speaker 1: Last time I checked, you couldn't do it. But it's
Speaker 1: been a while since I've done a PNWA, so.
Speaker 3: You know, interestingly, you're actually now up against a point
Speaker 3: of ignorance for me, because I don't know if you
Speaker 3: get the little if you get the little dot uh
Speaker 3: on on a p W A, I bet you don't. Yeah,
Speaker 3: but I don't. I don't know that for a fact.
Speaker 3: Somebody would have to fact check me on that.
Speaker 1: I I kind of think that, and I've said this
Speaker 1: before that Apple would rather you put an app in
Speaker 1: the App Store.
Speaker 2: Than every time, you know, they resisted. P w A
Speaker 2: is the longest, but they also support them and.
Speaker 1: They so it makes sense for them to sort of
Speaker 1: cripple if you will, or not allow certain things that
Speaker 1: real apps.
Speaker 3: Have, and they still have you know. That's that's uh.
Speaker 3: There's some things that are available in Android that aren't
Speaker 3: in iOS right now. One of them is you don't
Speaker 3: get gyro in a p w A. You can get
Speaker 3: it on an Android, but if you want to, for example, tell.
Speaker 1: Us what that is, like like like oh gyroscope.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, yeah, I like it, like if I want to.
Speaker 3: And this actually came up not that long ago where
Speaker 3: we were working on something where we wanted to know
Speaker 3: if your phone was on its screen or on its
Speaker 3: back right, And we did that and it actually was
Speaker 3: totally fine on Android, didn't work at all on iOS,
Speaker 3: so we had to kind of like reconfigure how that
Speaker 3: thing worked. The other thing is they will never give
Speaker 3: you NFC. You don't get that that's for Apple pay
Speaker 3: on get Out.
Speaker 2: Yeah I did just look it up and yes, a
Speaker 2: p w A app running on Android will dot uh
Speaker 2: for notifications Oh okay, and it won't on it won't
Speaker 2: on iOS unless you use the badging API as well.
Speaker 3: So you still could then you can, but you just
Speaker 3: have to do all right, Well, that's that's something that's
Speaker 3: not terrible.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's something. And does JavaScript have access just once
Speaker 1: again it's if iPhone or if if Safari, right, does
Speaker 1: JavaScript have access to the gyroscope? Yeah it does, Yeah
Speaker 1: you can use you still couldn't use it.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah you can do it. It's just
Speaker 3: that it just that your iOS device will never ask
Speaker 3: for permission nor grant it, so all of that stuff
Speaker 3: be ignored.
Speaker 1: Okay, what are the other gotchaes about PWA's that we're
Speaker 1: not talking about.
Speaker 3: I mean, I think I think some of the other
Speaker 3: gotchas are like the you know, like the idea of
Speaker 3: people saying like I want it in the app store
Speaker 3: is an actual demand. I think that that's a complicated
Speaker 3: thing because I think that like being in the app
Speaker 3: store is yeah, you know.
Speaker 1: Be careful what you ask for.
Speaker 3: Yeah, right right, you're you're you're you're slicing your cake
Speaker 3: a little bit, because I don't think that like, you know,
Speaker 3: there there was a time when there was there was
Speaker 3: a time when people were using those app stores for discovery,
Speaker 3: and I don't think that's the case anymore.
Speaker 2: No, once you have a million apps, you can't find
Speaker 2: anything anyway, and you're mostly worried about is this the
Speaker 2: app I'm actually looking for?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: I tend not to go you know when I When
Speaker 2: I buy a product that requires an app to use it,
Speaker 2: probably typically a smart home product of some kind. The
Speaker 2: one thing I don't do is go to the place
Speaker 2: store to look for the app, because I'll get the
Speaker 2: wrong one.
Speaker 1: Initially, give you a a QR code or or if
Speaker 1: it's just a name, they'll show you the icon so
Speaker 1: you can at least tell it from all the other fakies.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if you're gonna, if you're gonna encourage people to
Speaker 2: go to the play store, give them lots of evidence
Speaker 2: of this is.
Speaker 1: The correct app.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, this is.
Speaker 2: The name of the company, this is the icon. It
Speaker 2: just speaks to how messed up app stores are that. Yeah,
Speaker 2: we don't trust them for a reason.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Spring brings you back to the U r L thing, Right,
Speaker 1: somebody searching for the dot com completely unnecessary if you
Speaker 1: have a QR code and.
Speaker 3: Then the other sort of uh, what do you want
Speaker 3: to say, like challenge to the thing is that in
Speaker 3: order to do like in order to do kind of
Speaker 3: like anything beyond Baby's first pw A, you have to
Speaker 3: do things with service workers. Yeah, and a service worker
Speaker 3: is a complicated thing to get started in because because
Speaker 3: you're doing cashing. Now you're doing cashing for a thing
Speaker 3: that catches, and that's complix. Yes, yes it is, because
Speaker 3: if you screw it up and you get that into
Speaker 3: you know, the actual like public, and you didn't write
Speaker 3: your service worker right, well, now they've got a thing
Speaker 3: that's going to be locked in time forever. So you know,
Speaker 3: doing that first version of your service worker before you
Speaker 3: get out to the public, making sure that that's pretty
Speaker 3: rock solid and you can do cash in validation is important.
Speaker 1: Very good. I did a PWA version of I think
Speaker 1: it was either Music to Code Buy or something like
Speaker 1: that on the dot net Rock Show or maybe I
Speaker 1: can't remember what it was, but I have it out
Speaker 1: there and it was it was pretty good. There's you know,
Speaker 1: dealing with the cashed data was obviously an issue. And
Speaker 1: if you ever have to, I know that sometimes if
Speaker 1: the cash gets busted or something broke, then you just
Speaker 1: like put a question mark at the end of the
Speaker 1: RL and some entropy data. But I don't recall it
Speaker 1: being a deal breaker for the PW. I have a
Speaker 1: PWA right now that I use in the house, and
Speaker 1: I have a on my mantle. Richard knows this. On
Speaker 1: my mantle, I've got a big screen with a WPF
Speaker 1: that WPF app that randomly shows pictures for thirty seconds
Speaker 1: at a time, And I basically have an app that
Speaker 1: goes to a signal our hub that's also in the
Speaker 1: WPF app with a local DNS. Okay, you know. It's
Speaker 1: a progressive web app and it shows the thing and
Speaker 1: I can advance next previous, I can turn on captions
Speaker 1: like I can do all sorts of things from it.
Speaker 1: And it's very handy and I didn't have to go
Speaker 1: to the app store. I just gave my wife the
Speaker 1: URL and she installed it and I installed it, and
Speaker 1: that's it. It's like a remote.
Speaker 3: That's that's very fun. It seems like unnecessary over engineering,
Speaker 3: but I love it totally.
Speaker 2: Have you met Carl Franklin coming out totally signal He's
Speaker 2: going to use signal?
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's totally for the fun of it. Projects.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but again, you could have been a QR code
Speaker 2: right to just generate it like that.
Speaker 1: Now I would yeah, I wrote it before QR codes
Speaker 1: or a thing. But uh yeah, just because they don't
Speaker 1: make remote controls that I can use with my app.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, they probably do actually, but I didn't want
Speaker 1: to do that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you wanted to use signal.
Speaker 1: R absolutely in a progressive way.
Speaker 2: Well, and of course my instinct as a developers to say,
Speaker 2: isn't there a framework I can use? But it's like
Speaker 2: every framework does p w A stuff, doesn't it. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's not necessarily there's any p w A frameworks per
Speaker 2: se as there is a bunch of frameworks and they
Speaker 2: leverage the pw A library.
Speaker 3: I can run into that sometimes, where like I've seen
Speaker 3: people use because like a lot a lot of the
Speaker 3: other frameworks, you know, your VET and your like webpack
Speaker 3: and roll up or whatever will essentially have like a
Speaker 3: p to BA starter kit. But I always found that
Speaker 3: weird because it's, like you, the idea of a progressive
Speaker 3: web app is that it is progressive, like you're you're
Speaker 3: making a website and then you're adding features like condiments. Yeah,
Speaker 3: so the idea of well, let's get every single capability
Speaker 3: in here. Okay, do you need it?
Speaker 1: Like?
Speaker 3: Where do you go? What are you going for like
Speaker 3: it's a website, add stuff as you need it.
Speaker 1: Start with the basics.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, and I think I opened with the it's
Speaker 2: just about putting an icon on the phone.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, this seems like a good place for a break.
Speaker 1: So we'll be right back after these very important messages.
Speaker 1: And as a reminder, if you don't want to hear
Speaker 1: these messages, you can become a patron for five bucks
Speaker 1: a months. You'll get a feed for dot net rocks
Speaker 1: that has no ads. We'll be right back. Did you
Speaker 1: know you can lift and shift your dot Net framework
Speaker 1: apps to virtual machines in the cloud. Use the elastic
Speaker 1: beanstalk service to easily migrate to Amazon EC two with
Speaker 1: little or no changes. Find out more at aws dot
Speaker 1: Amazon dot com, slash Elastic beanstalk. And we're back. It's
Speaker 1: dot net rocks. I'm Carl Franklin, non Richard Cabell, and
Speaker 1: that's our buddy Lemon and we're talking about PWA's and
Speaker 1: AI and whatever other weird stuff he wants to talk about.
Speaker 1: So the floor is open. You got some more weird
Speaker 1: stuff you want to talk about with PWA or not?
Speaker 3: Oh man ah, you know, I actually one of the
Speaker 3: things that that I'm hoping to cause I don't know
Speaker 3: if you know, I don't know if you know when
Speaker 3: this episode's coming.
Speaker 2: Out wed July seventeenth.
Speaker 3: July seventeenth, Okay, all right, well that's going to be
Speaker 3: my deadline then, because I actually, like I have this
Speaker 3: little I don't want to say arcade, but like essentially
Speaker 3: like the kind of fun thing which is just a
Speaker 3: bunch of like dumb little games and like games no, no, no, no,
Speaker 3: like little web games. Okay, that's that's actually a main
Speaker 3: cabinet right back there.
Speaker 1: It is.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, but uh but yeah, so I actually re
Speaker 3: engineered this thing from scratch because I was originally using uh,
Speaker 3: web sockets and so because I wanted to make a
Speaker 3: multiplayer game and proof that I could make a multiplayer game,
Speaker 3: and so I did the whole thing with web sockets,
Speaker 3: but it broke all the time, and so like people
Speaker 3: would want to do these, like like I made these.
Speaker 3: This one game called Invalid, which is the slogan for
Speaker 3: it was a trivia game of unnecessary suffering. And the
Speaker 3: game works. The game works well except for like, man,
Speaker 3: did that thing crash?
Speaker 1: Does it happen much? Buzzer though, that's that's the thing
Speaker 1: it does.
Speaker 3: It has it has a flying pig. Yeah, and then
Speaker 3: there's a hacking mini game at the end.
Speaker 1: Nice. So congratulations, pigs are flying, You've done it kind
Speaker 1: of thing.
Speaker 3: No, no, no, no, you know you can essentially, you
Speaker 3: can distract one of the players by putting a flying
Speaker 3: pig on their screen, and then the flying pig just
Speaker 3: gives you useless facts. Distract you. That's from the thing
Speaker 3: that you're actually trying to do, and it goes and
Speaker 3: every time it gives a new fact, it goes like
Speaker 3: it oints, you know. But anyway, Yeah, so I had
Speaker 3: built this, I had built this this thing out and
Speaker 3: it was doing. It was doing just kind of like
Speaker 3: a problem because of this this web socket thing. So
Speaker 3: I actually did the whole thing again in fire Base
Speaker 3: because I knew that that you know, at that point,
Speaker 3: like disconnections and the reconnections were less relevant.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And so then the new one that I will be
Speaker 3: launching with that is a game called this Meeting has
Speaker 3: points nice. And so the idea is that you're going
Speaker 3: to be in a meeting with your coworkers and it's
Speaker 3: going to be boring and it's going to last an
Speaker 3: hour and a half and several of the people there
Speaker 3: won't pay attention. So therefore, when you get into the meeting,
Speaker 3: you all join this lobby at the same time. And
Speaker 3: when the meeting starts, it flips over five cards, right,
Speaker 3: and so it'll be like alligator suitcase ten points, like
Speaker 3: let's take the bull by the horn five points or whatever.
Speaker 3: And so you get these phrases, and so your goal
Speaker 3: is you want to slip one of these phrases into
Speaker 3: the meeting without anybody knowing. And so you say the phrase,
Speaker 3: you click on the card, and then a little timer
Speaker 3: goes by, and if that timer elapses, then cool. You
Speaker 3: get the points. However, if somebody catches you, they can
Speaker 3: type in the phrase and then they steal your points
Speaker 3: from you. So the two ways to play or either
Speaker 3: just try to spam it out or just don't like,
Speaker 3: just sit back and just pay attention.
Speaker 1: Right. Have you ever been threatened with getting fired because
Speaker 1: I'm just curious.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've been. I've been threatened to get fired for
Speaker 3: a lot of reasons.
Speaker 1: How I distracted everyone from the content of the meeting.
Speaker 2: In one easy I would argue that I'm encouraging your
Speaker 2: coworkers to pay more attention and meetings.
Speaker 3: You know, they in order to play the game, well,
Speaker 3: you have to pay more more close attention. So this
Speaker 3: is a productivity tool. If anything, I'm going to sell
Speaker 3: it to it. Lancian, I love it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's great. I do you know?
Speaker 2: Talking about games, you mentioned jack Box TV, which was
Speaker 2: big in the during the pandemic. Oh, is that what
Speaker 2: you talk about? A great web client? Anybody's ever played
Speaker 2: one of these? It's like one of you has to
Speaker 2: own the Jackbox game. It's multiplayer, and then you're on
Speaker 2: a streaming zoom or a team's not teams, I mean
Speaker 2: you're on one of those, and then that hosts the
Speaker 2: game and then all the players play from their phone.
Speaker 2: But you don't need you know, it's at works so well. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that people forget the magic that's going on there.
Speaker 3: And they and they had i mean a couple of
Speaker 3: things lined out, you know, to their benefit, right, Like
Speaker 3: like Jackbox was cresting at the exact time of you know, pandemic,
Speaker 3: and so everyone was playing jack Box, which just happened.
Speaker 3: But like, but that's because they were ready for it.
Speaker 3: Like they built something that's really stable, they built something
Speaker 3: that would work in person, but it would also like
Speaker 3: work in any kind of environment. You could play it on,
Speaker 3: you can play it from anywhere, and and it like
Speaker 3: their growth was because they built something really really strong,
Speaker 3: so that when they had it wasn't like this thing
Speaker 3: where like, oh no, your thing's really popular and now
Speaker 3: it crashes and now it stinks.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, I don't know that it ever tipped over ever.
Speaker 3: And they didn't. And they didn't even like you know,
Speaker 3: I mean, they kept their same model, which is like
Speaker 3: we're gonna have a pack of five games, and we're
Speaker 3: going to just keep selling these like different packs of
Speaker 3: five games. But always worked on this idea of like
Speaker 3: there's going to be one host and however many players,
Speaker 3: like a hundred players, Sure.
Speaker 2: Whatever, there's one there's one game that supports like one
Speaker 2: hundred players. So I've used that one for like a
Speaker 2: team meeting where there was thirty something people and you
Speaker 2: could yeah, fire. And this was part of the fun
Speaker 2: of doing this, was like, hey, we're gonna get to
Speaker 2: some serious stuff, but let's play a game for twenty
Speaker 2: minutes first while everybody's getting in, you know, rather than
Speaker 2: just sitting around.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah.
Speaker 3: And they finally, finally finally made something that it's a
Speaker 3: little hacky, but like I have enough of those Jackbox
Speaker 3: packs now that like there's a thing called like the
Speaker 3: jack Box Launcher, right, so essentially like you bring up
Speaker 3: a thing and it has every game that you own,
Speaker 3: and then when you click on the.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because there's like nine now, like I'm always hunting
Speaker 2: for a particular game and I never remember which.
Speaker 3: Pack it's really yeah yeah yeah, yeah, sorry commercial.
Speaker 1: I can't say that I ever played it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that did the you talk about a perfect plua.
Speaker 2: Like you go to a web you go to I
Speaker 2: think it's Jackbox TV, Slash whatever code it is for
Speaker 2: the game you're playing. It's generated on the spot. It
Speaker 2: drops into a chrome less browser like it's just and
Speaker 2: it is so seamless you never remember.
Speaker 1: It's a web page.
Speaker 2: You just it is exactly whatever he developer should aspire
Speaker 2: to wow in a client.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it works really simple, and because it is just
Speaker 3: like you go to this Jackbox TV. You don't have
Speaker 3: like I remember playing like Space Team, which is fun,
Speaker 3: but like but in order to play that with friends,
Speaker 3: there's like four minutes of like, oh, you have to
Speaker 3: go to this thing and download this thing and then okay,
Speaker 3: we have to like whatever, Like, no, you go to
Speaker 3: this u ur l, you punched in this code. You
Speaker 3: know my my eighty three year old father like can
Speaker 3: do it and has.
Speaker 2: Can get a comp Yeah, and doesn't matter what phone
Speaker 2: you have or you're using a tablet or a second
Speaker 2: screen on the PC, like you name it, all of it.
Speaker 1: All of those scenarios just worked.
Speaker 3: The one thing that it took them too long to
Speaker 3: figure out, though, is and is it took them too
Speaker 3: long to understand that as a PWA, you actually do
Speaker 3: have access to weight control, right, because if you're playing
Speaker 3: jack Box, a time can go by where you're just
Speaker 3: not touching your phone, sure for a while. Yeah, and
Speaker 3: so you know, my my thing goes to sleep pretty fast,
Speaker 3: and so sometimes you would be like using the thing
Speaker 3: and then it would go to sleep, and then you
Speaker 3: would like turn your phone back on and maybe it
Speaker 3: lost connection. You have to like reconnect or whatever. Yeah,
Speaker 3: And eventually they got on top of that, but like
Speaker 3: it did take them a while where it was like.
Speaker 2: And it's something that PWA's can't do to say, hey,
Speaker 2: can you do?
Speaker 1: I don't want you to go to.
Speaker 3: Sleep as long as you are properly installed. You can't
Speaker 3: just do that from being a website. But as long
Speaker 3: as you are installed, then you can get you can
Speaker 3: request for and receive permission to control wake access to
Speaker 3: basically be like, as long as my app is the
Speaker 3: one that is in focus, override these sleep controls.
Speaker 2: Okay, And it just seemed its interesting to think go
Speaker 2: through the power of getting you know, get past the
Speaker 2: icon and get into these other capabilities, like you can
Speaker 2: do quite a bit.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like like like the idea of like even like
Speaker 3: one thing that I always found pretty useful is just
Speaker 3: that like native sharing, to be able to say like
Speaker 3: I've got my little blob or I've got my text
Speaker 3: snippet or I've got my whatever, and I don't know
Speaker 3: what you have installed in your machine, but if you
Speaker 3: do have Telegram, you can click on this and then
Speaker 3: it's like you want to share that via Telegram because
Speaker 3: there you go.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think Jackbox even did that, like you
Speaker 2: could take a screenshot off off the game from your
Speaker 2: phone and fire it up.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, no, they they did. They did things where
Speaker 3: and this was this was later on, but they did
Speaker 3: the thing where when you finish the game, you got
Speaker 3: like little and so it would like create like animated
Speaker 3: gifts of like.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they gave out awards right for worst player and
Speaker 2: how kind of thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly and so and so you know, we're able
Speaker 3: to do a thing where you can I don't want
Speaker 3: to say the T word, but you know you could.
Speaker 3: You could post the thing on blue Sky, right and uh,
Speaker 3: you know that's that's smart for them. I don't know
Speaker 3: how many people took advantage of it, but.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's cool, absolutely all right. Should we change
Speaker 1: gears a bit?
Speaker 3: Absolutely?
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I think I appreciate the sort of scope on that,
Speaker 2: and I do like PW PWA Builder, Like for folks
Speaker 2: who are still trying to find their way through some
Speaker 2: of these things are our tools that can help.
Speaker 1: You.
Speaker 2: Don't expect anybody isn't using PWA. All of these frameworks
Speaker 2: use it to some degree. It's just a built in service.
Speaker 2: It's great with Blazer web assembly perhaps. Yeah, yeah, that's
Speaker 2: how I build mine. Sure, it's a nice template in there.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I think that PWA builder is at least a very
Speaker 3: good first step where like it'll give you your first
Speaker 3: man and your first service worker. You know, that's probably
Speaker 3: not the one you're going to go with, but like
Speaker 3: be the one to start with at.
Speaker 2: Least get a feel for something what you're experimenting with.
Speaker 2: All right, I want to talk about some of these
Speaker 2: apps you build, these games and other as you co
Speaker 2: refer to them, stupid websites. Yeah, are they just experiments
Speaker 2: in software development for you?
Speaker 3: They're bulls. I think there's there's two things that have
Speaker 3: to come together in order for one of these things
Speaker 3: to get off the ground. Actually a third thing is
Speaker 3: that it has to be interesting until the end. But
Speaker 3: like there's got to be some sort of idea. For example,
Speaker 3: Like one that I've abandoned more than once was like
Speaker 3: bop it the website You know what to bop it is?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 3: Little now?
Speaker 1: What is that now?
Speaker 3: So it's a little plastic piece of crap that they'll
Speaker 3: sell it, you know, Walmart or whatever. And and it's
Speaker 3: got like a little switch and a knob and a
Speaker 3: turney thing and a button or whatever. And then when
Speaker 3: you start the game, it goes like bop it persia.
Speaker 3: And then like you have these like actions that you're
Speaker 3: supposed to do and it and so you you know,
Speaker 3: you're supposed to do the right action under a time limit.
Speaker 1: So since the tariffs, the price has gone from ninety
Speaker 1: nine cents to ninety nine dollars, right.
Speaker 3: I would assume, So yeah, yeah, So my idea was
Speaker 3: to do something where like you go to a site
Speaker 3: that is bad I sort of modeled after ABC News,
Speaker 3: and the very first thing that happens is that it
Speaker 3: pulls up like a GDPR banner and it goes dismiss it,
Speaker 3: and then like, uh, like a you have you have
Speaker 3: a time limit to dismiss it. And then once you
Speaker 3: do it, then it says like follow us on Instagram,
Speaker 3: like a little modal comes up close it, and so
Speaker 3: it just so it's trying to give you a task
Speaker 3: to solve, but while you're doing it, you're like it
Speaker 3: keeps annoying you and and you lose points every millisecond
Speaker 3: that this annoyance happens. So anyway, I was building this thing,
Speaker 3: and I was like, ah, you know, this is a
Speaker 3: cool idea, but it's so big on scope and and
Speaker 3: it's a little hard to like to let people understand
Speaker 3: like whether where the fun is and so just trying
Speaker 3: to figure out like that thing where like it's like
Speaker 3: it's it's immediately cognizably fun, like the one that I
Speaker 3: did with the there's one that I made where you
Speaker 3: have to like rank different celebrities based on their cameo values,
Speaker 3: like how how expensive is this person on cameo and
Speaker 3: and so so essentially, I want to have an idea
Speaker 3: that like that is sticky and that I can kind
Speaker 3: of like get in and get out pretty easy. Hopefully
Speaker 3: it takes like four minutes to play. And then the
Speaker 3: other thing that I wanted to do is something where
Speaker 3: there's something I haven't done here before. There's some sort
Speaker 3: of you know, like new interface element or or like
Speaker 3: new piece of technology that's just unfamiliar to me, so
Speaker 3: that I can like use this in a safe space
Speaker 3: to be like, if it doesn't work, who cares? And
Speaker 3: if it does work, then I've learned how to do
Speaker 3: that thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah. How many of these things do you have?
Speaker 3: Conservatively? About a dozen? Okay, yeah, let's say a dozen.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, I'm stuck on the not poutine side.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, okay, gonna tell you that's nottine.
Speaker 3: I was watching. I don't know if you've watched Top
Speaker 3: Chef at all?
Speaker 1: Sure? Oh yeah, Top Chef Canada is the latest one.
Speaker 3: Dude, Yes, exactly so they were just in Canada and
Speaker 3: they were like, hey, chefs, uh, you're all gonna be
Speaker 3: doing like a poutine challenge. And I'm like, oh no,
Speaker 3: don't make them do that. And like like one guy
Speaker 3: like did like a like a like a like a
Speaker 3: scale in pancakes and a burnet sauce.
Speaker 1: I know, that's ridiculous.
Speaker 3: I was like, this is unacceptable.
Speaker 1: So so yeah, like you know what that's like, that's
Speaker 1: like taking a Prince solo and just and and instead
Speaker 1: of playing it no for note, making up your own stuff.
Speaker 1: That's what it's like.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's it's an infuriated like like
Speaker 4: the idea of poutine has three three ingredients that must
Speaker 4: be observed, and at that point you want to throw
Speaker 4: pork belly on it.
Speaker 1: I know, Okay, go ahead, yeah yeah.
Speaker 3: Like you wanna, yeah, you want to throw some scallions
Speaker 3: in there? Cool, whatever, But like French fries, fresh cheese curds,
Speaker 3: do not fry them.
Speaker 5: Squeaky cheese curds, squeaky cheese curds, squeaky cheese, And then
Speaker 5: you need some and then you need brown gravy, yes,
Speaker 5: and and so so this the whole thing was like,
Speaker 5: was just this collection, and some of them very much
Speaker 5: are Canadian places that are servingdes that.
Speaker 3: Purport to be uh poutine but aren't.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean love it. You can go back and
Speaker 2: forth on the tater tots or tater tots fries.
Speaker 1: I would let that slide, you would, Yeah, I would,
Speaker 1: because it's still fried potatoes. It's still fried, but just
Speaker 1: in a different shape.
Speaker 3: I don't know, Like, okay, well, okay, but where is
Speaker 3: where is too far?
Speaker 1: Then? Like is where's the line? I wouldn't substitute broccoli?
Speaker 3: Are you accepting home fries?
Speaker 1: No? Because home fries. Home fries is kind of like
Speaker 1: a oh yeah, home fries is potatoes and onions and
Speaker 1: all that stuff like mashed up in a mush. Right?
Speaker 1: Where are different? Are are our single units that you
Speaker 1: can pick up with a fork instead of scooping up
Speaker 1: and whatever? Hash browns are the are the opposite of
Speaker 1: home fries. Those are the crispy patterns of potatoes. I
Speaker 1: don't know as if I would do that either, because
Speaker 1: now you have to cut it right. I mean, the
Speaker 1: whole idea of a poutin is you could stab it
Speaker 1: with a fork and put it in your mouth.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it is cheap, but you know there's
Speaker 2: a great stretch between it's tough to difn a difference
Speaker 2: a potater tot and a roasty.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I don't even know what a roasty is.
Speaker 2: What's that they think you're describing as a hash brown?
Speaker 1: Is that?
Speaker 6: Oh?
Speaker 1: Okay? Hash brown?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a roasty okay, but you know the main
Speaker 2: thing is the crispy.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And to be clear, we're arguing over food you eat
Speaker 2: while drunk in Montreal, right, like absolutely?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Like like has every has every poucine that I've
Speaker 3: ever eaten been delicious? Yes?
Speaker 1: But that's because yes it was. I was I qualified
Speaker 1: to a set at the time. No, yeah, if it
Speaker 1: was broccoli and Berne's sauce.
Speaker 3: Like every every donor I've ever eaten is great, and
Speaker 3: I don't think I've ever eaten a donor before midnight.
Speaker 1: I don't know what a donor is. You guys got
Speaker 1: to educate me here, like a kebab or a like
Speaker 1: d O N N E R that kind of thing
Speaker 1: c O N They are Yeah, yeah, they are all right.
Speaker 2: The varying the name, the spelling exactly got it. The
Speaker 2: drunk food you ate in Stockholm after midnight or anywhere.
Speaker 1: Yeah, here we have we don't have those, you know,
Speaker 1: twenty four hour diners around where I live anymore. There.
Speaker 1: Your only choices are Taco Bell and McDonald's, Wendy's, Burger King, Popeyes.
Speaker 1: That's it. Late nights.
Speaker 3: It's just I remember, like I remember at one point
Speaker 3: that's however, many of us and we're in Oslo and
Speaker 3: we go to this donor place, eat donor. It's wonderful. Uh.
Speaker 3: Then we continue to go out drinking. We go back,
Speaker 3: and then as we're on our way back to the hotel,
Speaker 3: it's like, let's get donor again. Yeah, of course the
Speaker 3: donor place that we went to is closed, but there's
Speaker 3: a donor place right next to it, like literally next
Speaker 3: door that is open. And it was worse, but like
Speaker 3: you know, it's still.
Speaker 1: Don't I know which places you're talking exactly. It's rich
Speaker 1: and rich and I have been there.
Speaker 3: And like we're talking to him at one point and
Speaker 3: it's like he's like the guy was like, yeah, we
Speaker 3: open at one because we found out these knuckleheads like
Speaker 3: close at one, like you're leaving money on the table.
Speaker 1: People don't go to bed at one in Oslo.
Speaker 3: Exactly on Saturday night.
Speaker 1: It's just a mistake. When are you thinking, what was
Speaker 1: the best your best pub comp talk in your opinion?
Speaker 3: Oh man, So this requires a slight backstory. I'll try to.
Speaker 3: I'll try to, I'll try to speed through it. But
Speaker 3: I'm doing NBC Minnesota. And and I had this idea,
Speaker 3: and I had this really ambitious talk that I was
Speaker 3: going to do, and I was terrible, legitimately terrible, like
Speaker 3: just a bad talk, Like insofar as like you know,
Speaker 3: how there's there's for those who don't know that there's
Speaker 3: NDC will do a thing where they have like red
Speaker 3: and yellow and green cards, so like people will score
Speaker 3: like how well you did? And so as I'm sort
Speaker 3: of collecting my things at the end of the talk,
Speaker 3: and I know, I know this didn't go well.
Speaker 1: This isn't a PUBCNS talk. This is a regular talk.
Speaker 3: No, this is NDC.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, okay.
Speaker 3: And and as I'm sort of collecting my things and
Speaker 3: sort of, you know, being shell shocked, one of the
Speaker 3: volunteers walks up to me. He's collected all the cards,
Speaker 3: and he goes that, do you not want to know
Speaker 3: how you did? And I'm like what, and he goes, you.
Speaker 1: Did bad, and he holds up a stack of red cards.
Speaker 3: Right, thanks for looking out, But I appreciate that. So
Speaker 3: I I mean, yeah, so I you know, I'm in
Speaker 3: Saint Paul, which is close enough to my home that
Speaker 3: I don't have a hotel, but far enough away that
Speaker 3: like in order to get back and come back would
Speaker 3: be inconvenient. Yeah, And so I just like spend you know,
Speaker 3: several hours like having a panic attack, and then but
Speaker 3: I need to do a pubcom talk after that, and
Speaker 3: and so I'm just you know, sort of like in
Speaker 3: a weird place. And and and as it's starting off,
Speaker 3: I'm like still in a weird place. And then the
Speaker 3: moment I get handed the microphone to do my five minutes,
Speaker 3: like I was just like, okay, yep, I absolutely have this.
Speaker 3: I I yep, this is I'm going to kill these
Speaker 3: people for five minutes. And so I did this talk
Speaker 3: about how to please your VP by hating your user,
Speaker 3: and it was just like it was just like what
Speaker 3: if every suggestion that your VP made you just did.
Speaker 3: And so we started we show a website and then
Speaker 3: the website just gets worse and worse because like I
Speaker 3: keep saying yes to him, you know when he kind
Speaker 3: of like points at the screen. I'm like, yep, absolutely
Speaker 3: boss right, and uh yeah, and so that went so good,
Speaker 3: like so so good.
Speaker 1: Honestly one I did.
Speaker 3: I did win. Yeah, but I'm like, I'm not I'm
Speaker 3: not exaggerating that. Like people were literally chanting my name.
Speaker 1: Wow. Wow.
Speaker 3: There was a point where John Mills in the final
Speaker 3: So this the the you do the sort of your
Speaker 3: prepared version of then you do a version that's not prepared.
Speaker 3: And so there was a there was a point where
Speaker 3: I do my final performance and then after me is
Speaker 3: John Mills, and like he does a joke and it
Speaker 3: lands pretty good. He loves a joke and it lands
Speaker 3: not quite as good, and he goes, listen, folks, I'm
Speaker 3: just trying to get in second here. Okay, we just
Speaker 3: let me.
Speaker 1: Get in here. This is gonna go. You know, something
Speaker 1: just occurred to me. You you have a you're a
Speaker 1: doppel ganger of Michael Keaton? Am I wrong? Has anybody
Speaker 1: ever said you look like Michael Keaton? I've never heard that.
Speaker 1: I mean before Beetlejuice.
Speaker 3: Okay, okay, before both Beatle Juice.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, when he was younger, right, Okay, you look
Speaker 1: like a young version of Michael Keat's the eyebrows, I think.
Speaker 3: All right, I mean I'm gonna I've never heard that really,
Speaker 3: so no, yeah, yeah, I got I got for years
Speaker 3: and years, I got Jack White a lot.
Speaker 1: Okay, but yeah.
Speaker 3: He started to kind of start to look like Ho
Speaker 3: Chi minh.
Speaker 1: And sorry, yeah he went through different looks. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Well anyway, let mean, it's been a pleasure talking to
Speaker 1: you and hanging out. I wish we could do it
Speaker 1: all the time. You know, I'm available, Let's do it
Speaker 1: and for longer. And I know our listeners really loved it.
Speaker 1: So thank you, oh, thank you both. All right, and
Speaker 1: we'll talk to you next time on dot rocks dot net.
Speaker 1: Rocks is brought to you by Franklin's Net and produced
Speaker 1: by Pop Studios, a full service audio, video and post
Speaker 1: production facility located physically in New London, Connecticut, and of
Speaker 1: course in the cloud online at pwop dot com.
Speaker 6: Visit our website at d O T N E t
Speaker 6: R O c k S dot com for RSS feeds, downloads,
Speaker 6: mobile apps, comments, and access to the full archives going
Speaker 6: back to show number one, recorded in September two thousand
Speaker 6: and two, and make sure you check out our sponsors.
Speaker 1: They keep us in business. Now go write some code,
Speaker 1: See you next time.
Speaker 5: Chapters Middle Vans Day
Speaker 1: A summer time that mess hard than my taxes in
Speaker 1: line