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Speaker 1: this is Carl Franklin.
Speaker 2: And this is Richard Campbell.
Speaker 1: We've got two special shows coming up soon, episode nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety nine and two thousand.
Speaker 2: For episode nineteen ninety nine, we're collecting people's y two
Speaker 2: k stories what did you do to help the Y
Speaker 2: two k event not actually happen?
Speaker 1: And for episode two thousand, we're going to be sharing
Speaker 1: stories about how dot net shaped your career.
Speaker 2: We have a special page at dot netroocks dot com
Speaker 2: slash voxpop where you can record messages for us that
Speaker 2: we can play on these special episodes. So tell us
Speaker 2: what you did for Y two k and what dot
Speaker 2: net means to you, and of course how long you've
Speaker 2: been listening to dot net rocks. So go do dot
Speaker 2: NetRocks dot com slash vox pop now and leave us
Speaker 2: a message before the thought of operates like whiskey left
Speaker 2: in a glass overnight, do it?
Speaker 3: Hey, guess what it's dot net rocks. And I got
Speaker 3: a cold and I sound like pooh, a.
Speaker 2: Little cray, a little croaky there, my friend, This is
Speaker 2: Richard Campbell, and I do not have a cold.
Speaker 3: I feel great. Yeah, okay, rub it in. So let's
Speaker 3: start right off. This is Show nineteen hundred and ninety eight.
Speaker 3: So let's talk about what happened in the year nineteen
Speaker 3: ninety eight.
Speaker 2: Oh, it was quite a year. Got any favorites?
Speaker 3: Well, good Friday Agreement, Yeah, that's a good one. And
Speaker 3: in decades of conflict in Northern Ireland with the Brits
Speaker 3: called the Troubles, didn't.
Speaker 2: Quite end it because a couple a couple months later
Speaker 2: there's the album Yeah, but that really tipped it over
Speaker 2: the edge, Like there were some people that were angry
Speaker 2: at the at the agreement. Then they did that and
Speaker 2: they response that everyone was like, no, we're really freakin done. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so it did take one more bombing, but then it
Speaker 2: was that seemed to be over. That's great news.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So the United States embassy bombings Kenya and Tanzania
Speaker 3: was not good. The Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinski scandal that happened.
Speaker 2: Yeahsted On Drudge, Thank you Internet, Yeah, the pre two
Speaker 2: thousand Internet.
Speaker 4: Monica Lewinsky and I just have to tell you also
Speaker 4: the big Lebowski. Yeah, coincidence.
Speaker 2: I'll get there Lewinsky, Yeah, good call.
Speaker 3: Clinton was subsequently impeached, yeah, eventually, but later acquitted by
Speaker 3: the Senate. The Coosovo conflict between Serbian forces and ethnic Albanians.
Speaker 2: Well at that point they were still the Federal Republic
Speaker 2: of Yugoslavia.
Speaker 3: But yes, sir, right, Yeah, so that you know, we'll
Speaker 3: talk about that next year.
Speaker 2: Yeah, into ninety nine.
Speaker 3: Indian Pakistan did some nuclear tests. Yeah, that was, you know,
Speaker 3: kind of a little dense, little tension over there.
Speaker 2: You know, you can really get weird on the geopolitics
Speaker 2: side of this thing because one of the things they
Speaker 2: did was meant they don't really attack each other anymore
Speaker 2: because they're both nuclear armed, Like they were headed towards
Speaker 2: a major conflict and had been skirmishing for a while. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and adding these weapons to the equation changed the dynamic substantially.
Speaker 2: Not that they're peaceful, no, you know, as the cashieries.
Speaker 2: Even today, it's still bad yeah, but it did definitely change.
Speaker 3: But I think they've kind of figured out that they
Speaker 3: can't really use them against each other because it just
Speaker 3: means mutual blow uppiness.
Speaker 2: And also that's why they have to negotiate. I think
Speaker 2: they can skirmish a bit, but they're not really going
Speaker 2: to go try to destroy each other's countries.
Speaker 3: Big hurricane, Hurricane Mitch in the Atlantic Hitch. Central America
Speaker 3: got devastated by that, the Second Congo War, multi nation
Speaker 3: conflict in Africa. Financial crisis. Yeah, Russia defaulted on debt
Speaker 3: and devalue the ruble, which impacted global markets.
Speaker 2: They defaulted on domestic debt. They just told all the
Speaker 2: foreign debt, yeah, we're not going to be paying right now.
Speaker 2: But we'll get around to it.
Speaker 3: And I'll jump over to Richard's side for a minute.
Speaker 3: Google was founded in nineteen ninety.
Speaker 2: Eight, It's true. Yeah, it's a good one.
Speaker 3: By Larry Page and Sergei Brinn. Yeah, and there was
Speaker 3: some other stuff, but I don't want to be labor it.
Speaker 3: So whoa, there's some spacey Yeah, Big Year ninety eight.
Speaker 3: We'll start off the first one of the very first
Speaker 3: missions of the year in January, small Athena rocket four
Speaker 3: stage Charlot rocket called lifted a tiny satellite called Lunar Prospector.
Speaker 3: It was a bargain sixty three million dollars and it
Speaker 3: did surface composition mapping of the Moon. It found large
Speaker 3: bodies of thorium. It also was one of the first
Speaker 3: intentional tools for trying to locate hydrogen oxygen in the polls.
Speaker 3: Only operated for eighteen months and did get some good sensing,
Speaker 3: and then it's mission ended by deliberately crashing into the
Speaker 3: Moon in a continuously shaded area of a crater, hoping
Speaker 3: to generate a plume that they could then do some
Speaker 3: spectrophy on to try and measure whether it was actually water.
Speaker 3: Didn't work, but they will later go on with the
Speaker 3: Lunar Constance Arbiter and a secondary mission of that.
Speaker 2: That will actually succeeded. That so very relevant for us
Speaker 2: at this moment, Artemis two, while we're recording this is
Speaker 2: in space and on the far side of the Moon.
Speaker 2: First time humans have been back there in decades, and so.
Speaker 3: Well, Pink Floyd went there. That's for a brief moment.
Speaker 2: And every time I played song im back. But Prospector
Speaker 2: was one of these series of missions that really sort
Speaker 2: of set the path to where we are right now.
Speaker 2: Over on the shuttle side, there were what six Shuttle
Speaker 2: missions total, but some of them are really really very important.
Speaker 2: There are two Shuttle Mirror missions in ninety eight and
Speaker 2: Dever in January and Discovery in June, and that will
Speaker 2: be the last time a Shuttle will visit Mirror. It'll
Speaker 2: be deorbited in another year or so. And then there
Speaker 2: are a couple. There's the final space Lab mission with
Speaker 2: Columbia that's the laboratory module in the Paloa Bay, and
Speaker 2: then one of the space Hab missions with Discovery that
Speaker 2: also had at that time Senator John glenn On the
Speaker 2: first first American to orbit the Earth also got to
Speaker 2: be the oldest American to fly in space. And then
Speaker 2: the big ones. So in November, the Russia Federation flies
Speaker 2: the functional cargo block named Azaria as the first module
Speaker 2: of the International Space Station, lifted on a pro con
Speaker 2: k and put into a fifty three D inclination orbit.
Speaker 2: And then the following month Endeavor, the Shuttle meets up
Speaker 2: with that Zaria module and berths not docs because it's
Speaker 2: not autonomous, as she uses the arm to birth the
Speaker 2: Unity module also known as Node one to Zaria, and
Speaker 2: this is beginning of the International Space Station. Okay, on
Speaker 2: the computing side, boy, there's some important things to talk about.
Speaker 2: I'm going to go one of the biggest ones right
Speaker 2: off the bat, which is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Speaker 2: So this was a set of laws passed by the
Speaker 2: US to comply with two treaties that have been plassed
Speaker 2: by the World Intellectual Property Organization out of Geneva. This
Speaker 2: is the whole idea of whether or all electronic works
Speaker 2: can be had to deserve copyright protection, and a number
Speaker 2: of other steps, some of which are fairly clever or
Speaker 2: mostly harmless, and some of them which are really quite problematic,
Speaker 2: which sounds like a very reasonable thing. And to you,
Speaker 2: if you dig in deeper into this story, you realize
Speaker 2: that there's a guy named Bruce Lehman who was part
Speaker 2: of the Clinton administration, who had been for years trying
Speaker 2: to prepare laws for Congress to pass to provide those
Speaker 2: kinds of protections, and the Cress consistently ignored them, and
Speaker 2: so instead he went to Geneva and lobbied with the
Speaker 2: WIPO to get those treaties passed to force Congress to
Speaker 2: pass them and we can debate with it. Really incredible
Speaker 2: at all. Now, admittedly the US had not done any
Speaker 2: copyright legislation since like nineteen seventy six, like something did
Speaker 2: need to be done. But all of this is pretty wacky.
Speaker 2: And there's two aspects that I think most people talk about.
Speaker 2: When is the section five to twelve, known as the
Speaker 2: safe Harbor's rule. This is the whole idea that if
Speaker 2: you run a website with user generated content, you can't
Speaker 2: be held liable for that user generated content as long as,
Speaker 2: when requested, you take it down. Right. So this is
Speaker 2: think YouTube, Facebook, like all those sorts of things. When
Speaker 2: one of their users publishes puts copyrighted material on there,
Speaker 2: you can request takeout and take it down. Now, it's
Speaker 2: problematic in the sense that it has been utilized inappropriately
Speaker 2: to take down things they shouldn't probably take down, you know,
Speaker 2: stuff that you might even have. We've seen copyright holders
Speaker 2: publisheduff and then have it taken down.
Speaker 3: And keep in mind that this is nineteen ninety eight,
Speaker 3: so websites have only been around.
Speaker 2: For five or six You've not even there yet, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: So it there's a lot of conversation about whether it
Speaker 2: should be revised. Let's face it, this is an old
Speaker 2: piece of legislation, like it needs to major refresh. But
Speaker 2: the real sticking point, the real public one, is twelve
Speaker 2: oh one, which is the anti circumvention clauses. So the
Speaker 2: whole idea here was that any activity involved in circumventing
Speaker 2: a protection of any kind like digital rights management so forth,
Speaker 2: is an infringement of the law is chargeable. And that
Speaker 2: becomes really problematic because it was so generalized that it
Speaker 2: blocked all kinds of things that didn't intend to. So
Speaker 2: they have this every three year review where they add exemptions.
Speaker 2: For example, in the first iteration of exemptions in two
Speaker 2: thousand they exempted blocklists. So when the DC blocklists. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so when the DMCA was passed, nominally you could sue
Speaker 2: someone because you'd create a list of ad sites that
Speaker 2: you didn't want to see and block them with your
Speaker 2: DNS would be a crime according to the Handy circumissions,
Speaker 2: So they made an exception for that. Now there's lots
Speaker 2: of argument about the problems, how they've been gone about this,
Speaker 2: whether it even makes sense. Now we're getting into part
Speaker 2: of the right to repair problems. Come around with all
Speaker 2: this anty circumvention, Like, it's probably the most difficult part
Speaker 2: of d MCA, wildly overdue for rework, but I suspect
Speaker 2: that's not going to happen for the next few years. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 2: other internety things that are important. You already mentioned Google,
Speaker 2: which certainly is important. But the IETF, the Internet Task
Speaker 2: Force formerly ratifies IPv six. Nobody cared then, and nobody
Speaker 2: cares now. The W three C moves XML to the
Speaker 2: recommendation status, which now makes us as developers start to
Speaker 2: use it and become sad. And this is the year
Speaker 2: that Internet Explorer passes Netscape in browser market share, which
Speaker 2: is funny because this is also the year that the Department
Speaker 2: of Justice files an anti trust lawsuit against Microsoft. It's
Speaker 2: also the year of Windows ninety eight and at comdex
Speaker 2: Gates shows off a pre release version of ninety eight.
Speaker 2: Goes to demonstrate the new plug and play capabilities, plugs
Speaker 2: up a scanner into the machine and it blue screens
Speaker 2: to a worldwide audience. And since that point, anytime I
Speaker 2: made a senior executive at Microsoft is on any kind
Speaker 2: of stage, there is a mirror system. They put an
Speaker 2: entire second system backstage, and somebody is mirroring the demo
Speaker 2: step by step, and so if something like that happens again,
Speaker 2: you swap to the mirror because presumably that one won't crash.
Speaker 2: Thought that it stopped to other failures. But that's where
Speaker 2: all of that began. Also, this is the year that
Speaker 2: Microsoft announces the unification of the wind nine X and
Speaker 2: T lines that will actually happen with Windows two thousand
Speaker 2: and for us personally, most importantly for Microsoft Visual Basic six.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was a good year. A couple other bits
Speaker 2: and pieces, some other hardware. This is the year that Jobs,
Speaker 2: who's just been back at at Apple for a year
Speaker 2: and a half or so. He came back in ninety
Speaker 2: seven ships the iMac, a Johnny I've divine zion machine
Speaker 2: in the era of the beige PC box. Imax were
Speaker 2: all in one. They were kind of egg shaped, and
Speaker 2: they came in five colors.
Speaker 3: People loved them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they were a design icon, right.
Speaker 3: Rob, Do you have an iMac?
Speaker 4: My mom? Did I inherited the iMac after a while?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Cool?
Speaker 2: And they originally were shipped for thirteen hundred dollars US
Speaker 2: back in the day, which then was expensive. But you
Speaker 2: know it's Apple last, but not least, the very first
Speaker 2: MP three player released in Japan. It's Sahan's MP Man.
Speaker 2: We're still ways away from Diamond Rio yet, right, but
Speaker 2: MP three's coming and we'll be part of later story.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, I have the top ten movies, top ten
Speaker 3: grossing movies of nineteen ninety eight. Godzilla?
Speaker 2: Okay, remember Godzilla again?
Speaker 3: Did you ever see the original Godzilla?
Speaker 2: Well, you go all the way back.
Speaker 3: All the way back to black and white Japanese.
Speaker 2: I have a friend who's collected all of those Godzilla movies. Yeah,
Speaker 2: which wouldn't bother me, except he makes me watch them too,
Speaker 2: which is unfortunately.
Speaker 3: In New England, there was a Channel fifty six out
Speaker 3: of Boston and they used on Saturday have Creature double feature,
Speaker 3: which was like two bad you know, black and white
Speaker 3: monster movies back to back. All right. Deep Impact is
Speaker 3: the Is that the number nine movie?
Speaker 2: Is that the Bruce Willis one?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: I think so, Okay, I didn't watch it. That was Armageddon.
Speaker 2: I think Deep Impact is the Morgan Freeman one where
Speaker 2: everybody dies.
Speaker 3: Okay, Rush Hour with Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker. It's
Speaker 3: kind of a fun violent movie.
Speaker 2: Doctor Doolittle, Eddie Murphy with Eddie Murphy, right, the water.
Speaker 3: Boy with Adam Sandler, Bugs Life, Yeah, so that was was.
Speaker 2: That Seinfeld was just like the Year of the Commune
Speaker 2: in movies.
Speaker 3: Early Pixar movie. Yeah, there's something about Mary Hair Joe. Yeah,
Speaker 3: Saving Private Ryan. Oh boy, Armageddon was the one you
Speaker 3: were thinking with Bruce Willis. Yeah, there you go, Bruce Willis.
Speaker 3: Yeah that was number two.
Speaker 2: Okay, same somebody the Asteroids is during the world year.
Speaker 3: Well, I think that was on everyone's mind. Apparently Titanic
Speaker 3: came out. Oh yeah, that was the number one grossing
Speaker 3: movie by far.
Speaker 2: And yeah, we'll clean up at the Oscars.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Armageddon made about five hundred and fifty three million.
Speaker 3: Titanic made two point two billion dollars.
Speaker 2: Because I think he spent a billion of it just
Speaker 2: making the thing.
Speaker 3: I think you're right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, he was wildly over budget. But it's James Cameron.
Speaker 2: Nobody could tell him anything, and after this he pulled
Speaker 2: this off, nobody really could tell him anything.
Speaker 3: Yeah that's true.
Speaker 2: Avatar. Yeah, awesome.
Speaker 3: Okay, so let's get on to better know for framework,
Speaker 3: unless Rob, you have anything you want to add about
Speaker 3: movies or yeah.
Speaker 4: I was at the time living in San Francisco in
Speaker 4: the Marina District and really fun place to live anyway,
Speaker 4: on Chestnut. I lived right off Chestnut.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 4: There was a street with three movie theaters on it
Speaker 4: and all three of them had Titanic playing. Wow, because
Speaker 4: it was a moneymaker right within it, within a mile.
Speaker 4: I know, it's crazy. You could pick your theater as wild.
Speaker 3: Wow. All right, let's roll the music for better no framework,
Speaker 3: all right, du So, as I usually do, I went
Speaker 3: searching for when I when I don't have a new
Speaker 3: Simon crop.
Speaker 2: Tool, when Simon Krop has it? Just delivered you a
Speaker 2: BF Yeah, exactly as he does also often thank you Simon.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he's awesome. So I went to the list of
Speaker 3: trending repos on GitHub that are English and C sharp
Speaker 3: and I found one that I've never seen before. So
Speaker 3: it's Tixel capital T lowercase I, capital X, capital L.
Speaker 3: But it's really called tool three t L L three.
Speaker 3: It's a real time animation toolkit. And I watched the
Speaker 3: video and it just convinced me how stupid I am.
Speaker 3: There's no way I could ever use this to do anything.
Speaker 2: It's a way of thinking, like anytime.
Speaker 3: You're yeah, anytime you're drawing Bezier curves and heuristics and
Speaker 3: stuff like that to change stuff in real time. I'm
Speaker 3: completely dumb about this, but here's what it is. It's
Speaker 3: an open source app to create real time motion graphics.
Speaker 2: Cool.
Speaker 3: So they're targeting the sweet spot between real time rendering,
Speaker 3: graph based procedural content generation and linear keyframe animation and editing.
Speaker 3: So it allows artists to build audio reactive VJ content.
Speaker 3: In other words, play this video while you're listening to
Speaker 3: this music you know, or you know, make graphic around
Speaker 3: this music in real time, use advanced interfaces for exploring parameters,
Speaker 3: or to combine key frame animation with automation. The video
Speaker 3: is pretty impressive, but like I said, unless you're in that,
Speaker 3: you know, in that genre or in that business, you're
Speaker 3: probably not going to know what the heck to do
Speaker 3: with this thing. That's cool, but you know, if you are, hey,
Speaker 3: it's open source and it works and it's pretty cool.
Speaker 3: I would at least watch the video, yeah, to see
Speaker 3: to judge your stupidity about how.
Speaker 2: Let you know, you don't understand, Okay, I just don't
Speaker 2: understand it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's not my thing, but it's cool. Yes, all right,
Speaker 3: that's what I got. Richard, who's talking to us.
Speaker 2: Grabbed a Comma tav Shows thirteen eighty five. Yes, sir,
Speaker 2: jump back about ten years to a certain show we
Speaker 2: did with a certain Rob Connery called Imposter Syndrome.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, that was a good one.
Speaker 2: Oh wow. It was such a good book, too, right,
Speaker 2: And there were so many good comments on this that
Speaker 2: I shows that I never read. I figured I had
Speaker 2: to go grab one. This is from the running deb
Speaker 2: who I believe his name is Andy, and he says minutely,
Speaker 2: this is nine years ago. I love, love, love this show. Guys,
Speaker 2: I've been smitten, and then prioritetically says, is that too much?
Speaker 2: Am I just a big fan of Rob Connery ever
Speaker 2: since I found out about Subsonic. Yeah, oh wow. I've
Speaker 2: always considered him one of the smartest people in the industry.
Speaker 4: Wow, we do too.
Speaker 2: I think that it's very it's very sweet. I think
Speaker 2: it's very human for everyone to struggle with what they
Speaker 2: know what they don't know. But it's also very important
Speaker 2: to recognize how much you actually know. I ponder on
Speaker 2: this often as I try to be a better developer,
Speaker 2: a mentor and still be open to learning new things.
Speaker 2: It's okay to have a strong opinion on something given
Speaker 2: the information you have at the moment. But what makes
Speaker 2: it even more okay? Tom, you were wrong later when
Speaker 2: you have different information. Nothing is absolute. I will never
Speaker 2: know everything you say out loud and be okay with it.
Speaker 2: I value and honest I don't know much more more
Speaker 2: than when they try to talk like they do know,
Speaker 2: because eventually I'll figure out you don't know, right. I
Speaker 2: think that is the definition of an impostor pretending to know,
Speaker 2: not willing to learn, and not willing to consider something
Speaker 2: outside your box. A friend once told me that smart
Speaker 2: people don't always think they know enough, and idiots think
Speaker 2: they know everything. That's right and as an echo to
Speaker 2: Richard and Carl's point, just because it's easy for you
Speaker 2: doesn't mean it's easy for everyone. Yeah, but part of
Speaker 2: the human condition is to undervalue ourselves, and that goes
Speaker 2: much deeper than education or being an expert in your field.
Speaker 2: I have a calm side agree, but I only have
Speaker 2: a vague idea of what big O notation is. This
Speaker 2: is the first time I heard of NP complete. I'm
Speaker 2: okay with that. When it becomes practical for me to
Speaker 2: learn it. I will.
Speaker 3: You're reminding me of when I wrote my first book
Speaker 3: in nineteen ninety four for John Wellinson's Visual Basic Internet Programming.
Speaker 3: I read all of the requests for Proposals RFPs for
Speaker 3: all these protocols, and I thought I knew what I
Speaker 3: was talking about, but I really didn't, and I made
Speaker 3: some serious mistakes and the technical mistakes and the description
Speaker 3: of some things. But you know, some people were kind
Speaker 3: of mean about it, and others were like, you know,
Speaker 3: it's really cool that he's taking an interest in trying
Speaker 3: to figure this stuff out. Sure it just wasn't figured
Speaker 3: out until the second revision at least.
Speaker 2: So yeah, So Adam, thank you so much for your comment.
Speaker 2: And copy of music Go Buy is on its way
Speaker 2: to you. And if you'd like a copy of music
Speaker 2: Go Buy, I write a comment on the website at
Speaker 2: dot arocks dot com or on the facebooks. We publish
Speaker 2: every show there, and if you comment there and it
Speaker 2: real in the show, we'll send you copy music go By.
Speaker 4: Have you said that before, Richard.
Speaker 2: Nope, first time ever. I just played as a recording man.
Speaker 2: I don't have to keep saying it each time. He said,
Speaker 2: how you just watched me say it again.
Speaker 4: It's Ai. You got caught.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well that voice you heard. The other voice you
Speaker 3: heard is that of Rob Connery. Rob works at Microsoft
Speaker 3: with a vs Code team, creating content for YouTube, as
Speaker 3: well as contributing to open source projects. Rob is also
Speaker 3: the author of The Impostor's Handbook, The Impostor's Roadmap, and
Speaker 3: A Curious Moon, which is one of Richard's favorite books because.
Speaker 2: Especially the ending. The ending is awesome.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it's a novel, right it is.
Speaker 2: It's a novelization that teaches, and he does such a
Speaker 2: good job of it, except oh you're nice. It's one
Speaker 2: of my very favorite stories.
Speaker 4: Yeah. One small correction. I do not work at Microsoft anymore,
Speaker 4: but I used to.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah you have all right, Well, we got to
Speaker 3: update your bio. Do you want to?
Speaker 4: I know, I sent you some out of date information. Sy, okay,
Speaker 4: I'll have my bots, my open claw, I'll have my
Speaker 4: open class send you an updated have.
Speaker 3: Your open claw talk to my open close.
Speaker 4: That's right, exactly.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, open claw. Don't get me started on that.
Speaker 4: No, it's funny. As you guys are doing the intro,
Speaker 4: I was sitting here trying to debug something and I
Speaker 4: managed to completely destroy the whole thing, so it's totally
Speaker 4: bricked sitting.
Speaker 2: Wow, so it's gone.
Speaker 5: Well what you're telling me, Yeah, it's exactly right. I'm
Speaker 5: very good at this AI thing. You got this thing, nail.
Speaker 5: But I've been watching your posts on LinkedIn and elsewhere,
Speaker 5: like you've clearly dove in and really trying to think
Speaker 5: through another way to build software.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's interesting. I was trying to describe this to
Speaker 4: a friend the other day and they said, what are
Speaker 4: you doing? You know, do you even build software anymore?
Speaker 4: I'm like, oh, gosh, you know, yeah, every day I
Speaker 4: have like four or five things that are all running.
Speaker 4: But I also I've gotten into consulting recently with a
Speaker 4: group of friends, and I help them. You know, I
Speaker 4: have to go into these big fortune five hundred companies
Speaker 4: and sit with these teams and so, you know, I
Speaker 4: have to be able to do all the things that
Speaker 4: they're doing because I have to show them, you know,
Speaker 4: what's going on. But it's fascinating where we are. And
Speaker 4: the thing that I found myself getting into the most
Speaker 4: is the human interface between AI and and people. And
Speaker 4: so when I do get calls from larger companies. I say,
Speaker 4: let's sidestep the technical stuff because this is going to
Speaker 4: be organizational for you. It's it's a human thing.
Speaker 2: Oh for sure.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and so we're going to probably you're going to
Speaker 4: be looking at possible staff reduction straight away. Let's not
Speaker 4: do that. Let's think about repurposing folks. Let's think about
Speaker 4: so I instantly get into the human aspect of it all,
Speaker 4: which is fun. It's what I really enjoy.
Speaker 2: Question about how much how many projects have never gotten touched,
Speaker 2: how much tech debt has not been resolved? Right? I
Speaker 2: think about anthropics work with Firefox and turning up a
Speaker 2: couple of hundred bugs in a matter of time, Like
Speaker 2: we should all be doing this to all the software
Speaker 2: that our companies depend on.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's amazing, and security scanning and all of the
Speaker 3: other things that it's good at.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I worked with a client just last week and I said,
Speaker 4: what is the what is the most time consuming boring
Speaker 4: thing that you guys do? And you know, at the time,
Speaker 4: they're like, we're trying to do this new application. We
Speaker 4: want to make this you know, major new shift and everything,
Speaker 4: Like tell me just the boring stuff straight away, and like, oh, well,
Speaker 4: we have the CTL process. It takes us six weeks. Yeah,
Speaker 4: I said, let's do it, and we got it done
Speaker 4: in ninety minutes. Ninety minutes.
Speaker 3: That's so awesome.
Speaker 2: Ninety minutes you had cracked it.
Speaker 4: Ninety minutes. We went through a wizard and I said,
Speaker 4: make it an impotent make sure it's a CLI. Let's
Speaker 4: make this a full application. Now, let's broaden this out.
Speaker 4: And their dev team it was hysterical. They were like,
Speaker 4: there was the two people on the team that were
Speaker 4: openly not liking AI, but once they saw this, they're like,
Speaker 4: if I don't have to do this again, Oh my god,
Speaker 4: this is my favorite figure world. Yeah, ETL. For those
Speaker 4: that don't know, it's an extraction, transformation and loading. It's
Speaker 4: a CSVS into a database usually, and it's a massive
Speaker 4: pain in the butt, the hoops you got to jump through.
Speaker 4: So yeah, sure, but you've done the classic consultant thing.
Speaker 4: You just went and found the eighty twenty moment right exactly.
Speaker 2: Well, it's the thing in creasy, the most pain. Let's
Speaker 2: see if we can move it.
Speaker 4: Let's see if we can get the team on board. Actually,
Speaker 4: that going back to the human layer layer thing is
Speaker 4: you know you got to address the opposition because there's
Speaker 4: a ton and they said, let's just let's get some
Speaker 4: instant winds under our belt, and to do I have
Speaker 4: everybody on board and then probably turn those nie sayers
Speaker 4: into champions and then off we go.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a whole lot of arguments go away, like more
Speaker 2: of that please? Right?
Speaker 3: Yeah? So I particularly like what you said that you say,
Speaker 3: let's not fire everybody. The knee jerk reaction is to downsize,
Speaker 3: but repurpose them and give each of them the tool,
Speaker 3: find out where what the area is that they'd like
Speaker 3: to improve, either in the infrastructure or the documentation or
Speaker 3: the code itself, or and just sick them, you know,
Speaker 3: and say all right, this is your tech, this is
Speaker 3: your thing. You go do that or technical debt. Okay, Bob,
Speaker 3: that's yours.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 4: Well, very curious thing is starting to happen. And I've
Speaker 4: heard this four times between four different clients, which was
Speaker 4: put very clearly to me in this last one that
Speaker 4: I just talked to, that they have these professionals, the
Speaker 4: subject matter experts, whatever, the let's just call them, you know,
Speaker 4: the people that actually do things, and then you have
Speaker 4: the dev team. Right, These professionals are using openclaw and
Speaker 4: other things to make their own applications because they don't
Speaker 4: want to deal with it or the software teams. And
Speaker 4: I was like, well, okay, well now you know where
Speaker 4: the repurposing is going to go. Turn those people on
Speaker 4: to you know, like you've got to loose enough the
Speaker 4: hierarchy here. You can't now have the same orgs anymore.
Speaker 4: You now have to move into having professional services work
Speaker 4: directly with these trainers, because that's what they are, these
Speaker 4: AI folks that keep the tones.
Speaker 2: Of the AI.
Speaker 4: And it's really interesting to walk people through this because
Speaker 4: every time I get a call, you know, they have
Speaker 4: a very clear thing in mind of what they want
Speaker 4: to do. And one client said to me, Okay, help
Speaker 4: me understand this. It's the bottom of the ninth I have.
Speaker 4: I'm going up. You know, they're using a baseball analogy,
Speaker 4: of course, bottom of the ninth. I'm coming up. I'm
Speaker 4: about to swing. How can how can AI help me
Speaker 4: hit a home run? And you know, and I was like, well,
Speaker 4: that's a fascinating question. How about you take five bats
Speaker 4: up to the plate and swing at five pitches at once,
Speaker 4: you know, and knock them completely out of the park.
Speaker 4: And he kind of looked at me. He's like, what
Speaker 4: are you even talking about right now? And I said, exactly,
Speaker 4: you can't. You don't know what you don't know. Literally,
Speaker 4: and the process of finding out as I sit with
Speaker 4: these folks is so crazy because they still even not
Speaker 4: talking to a developer friend the other day, this was hysterical.
Speaker 4: I was showing him a thing that he could do
Speaker 4: to starest up his productivity and what he was doing,
Speaker 4: and he just looked at me. He's like, I had
Speaker 4: no idea that was possible.
Speaker 2: It was.
Speaker 4: I was walking him through an inspiration skill that I
Speaker 4: use with a Claude and where it inspires me and
Speaker 4: then we resonate and then it helps me with rainstorm
Speaker 4: and then we come up with a plan so I
Speaker 4: don't have to think of everything myself. And I had
Speaker 4: no idea that you could do that, and I said yeah.
Speaker 4: Within two days he called me back and said, look
Speaker 4: what I just did, and if what I didn't know
Speaker 4: you could do that.
Speaker 2: It's just so fun.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so's it's a fun learning experience.
Speaker 3: Well, my customers love it that I can be productive,
Speaker 3: you know, and and have those conversations, you know, as
Speaker 3: with an architect agent you know, help me talk me
Speaker 3: through this. Here's what I'm thinking. Is this a good idea?
Speaker 3: Is that a good idea? Just like I would with
Speaker 3: an architect, And you know, nine times out of ten
Speaker 3: come back with this, Yeah, you're you're on the right
Speaker 3: track with this is the wrong tool for the job?
Speaker 3: You've got to do that, or you know this isn't
Speaker 3: necessary because of this and that, And it's just kind
Speaker 3: of good. It's good to even at the beginning of
Speaker 3: the process to help shape your ideas. I mean, it's
Speaker 3: one of the things that we developers like to do
Speaker 3: is just jump in and write code rather than thinking
Speaker 3: through what's the best approach.
Speaker 4: When I'm working with these teams, and it's usually folks
Speaker 4: that either are skeptical or haven't used it or whatever,
Speaker 4: and they basically all want to know the same thing.
Speaker 4: How do I write a good prompt?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 4: And said, all right, well let's start here. You know,
Speaker 4: you write a good prompt by telling the agent who
Speaker 4: it is or what it is, and then you tell
Speaker 4: it what you need. But the last two things are
Speaker 4: the most important thing. What am I not thinking about?
Speaker 4: What's your opinion or what's a good idea? Or what
Speaker 4: do you recommend those two questions. Well, I'll tell you
Speaker 4: if the listeners don't take anything away from this podcast
Speaker 4: other than you're a brilliant opener with all the nineteen
Speaker 4: ninety eight references, just remember those two things. What am
Speaker 4: I missing? What do you recommend? And your use of
Speaker 4: AI will skyrocket? Interesting because it does often because it
Speaker 4: has an infinite checklist. Often it's got considerations.
Speaker 2: You just haven't hit you yet.
Speaker 3: That's right.
Speaker 2: Even if it can't necessarily implement it correctly, that's not
Speaker 2: the important part. It's just now the idea is in
Speaker 2: your head. It won't go away. You've already demonstrated one
Speaker 2: strategy for dealing with nasayers. Are there others? Like how
Speaker 2: do you get past the folks just want nothing to
Speaker 2: do with us or much leadership? I?
Speaker 4: Yeah, so, yeah, it's funny. I talked to a lot
Speaker 4: of folks, which is fun It's one of the things
Speaker 4: I am enjoying about the work I get to do now.
Speaker 4: And I talked to somebody who basically said, convince me
Speaker 4: that AI is the way to go. Convince me this
Speaker 4: isn't a fad. Literally just had this call five days ago.
Speaker 2: Nice and I.
Speaker 4: Said no, and yeah, and they said, well, that's a
Speaker 4: little arrogant, and I'm like, I don't mean to be arrogant.
Speaker 4: I'm not here to convince you. You will be convinced
Speaker 4: so in the next six months. And they said, well,
Speaker 4: that's what I'm asking you to do, and I said,
Speaker 4: I'm not.
Speaker 2: I I.
Speaker 4: It's it feels like you know all these conversations I've
Speaker 4: had in history about the web, right, it's a web
Speaker 4: of fad. You know, everybody thought it was is it
Speaker 4: really going to be taking over business? Of course it isn't.
Speaker 4: You know, it did to a large degree. But you know,
Speaker 4: even you know my Microsoft days, you know, why do
Speaker 4: we care about unit tests? Why do we care about
Speaker 4: source control? Why do we care about this?
Speaker 2: And that?
Speaker 4: It's like, gosh, I could argue with you. I'm not
Speaker 4: here to argue. I'm not here to sell, I'm not
Speaker 4: here to do anything. So it's usually what I do.
Speaker 4: I shouldn't need to persuade you. It should be obvious. Yeah,
Speaker 4: And I usually try and say it the nicest way
Speaker 4: possible because I don't want to come off as arrogant
Speaker 4: at all. But you know, I'll usually say I'll be
Speaker 4: here when you convince yourself in the next few months,
Speaker 4: I'll be here and I'm you know, here's here's a
Speaker 4: few things you can try for yourself, and that's about it.
Speaker 4: And Richard answer your question directly. It's it's mostly solving
Speaker 4: someone's actual problem as opposed to waving your arms with Hey,
Speaker 4: here's a to do list demo, right, and that's the
Speaker 4: hardest thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I know. I think you're totally right, Like you
Speaker 2: went after their hardest, most painful problem and everything gets
Speaker 2: easier after that.
Speaker 4: Exactly right.
Speaker 3: I think it's a good place to take a break.
Speaker 3: So we'll be right back after these very important messages.
Speaker 3: Welcome back. It's dot net Rox. I'm Carl Franklin. That's
Speaker 3: Richard Campbell. Hey, and that's Rob Connery and we're talking
Speaker 3: his AI philosophy and his tooling approach and all of that.
Speaker 3: And I wanted to read about eleven days ago, we
Speaker 3: got a comment on show number nineteen ninety four, which
Speaker 3: was building software using Squad with Brady Gaster, which was fascinating,
Speaker 3: and Paulo Pinto says, while interesting as always, the whole
Speaker 3: squad enthusiasm was pretty much focused on single developers' workflow
Speaker 3: now not having to depend on anyone else to do
Speaker 3: related development tasks. It was all about their nicknamed agents,
Speaker 3: without any ethical discussion of what tooling like Squad will
Speaker 3: have in developer teams. I've already observed how teams have
Speaker 3: been downsized thanks to SaaS products replacing the need for
Speaker 3: back end developers AI tooling doing the work of team
Speaker 3: members that used to do translations or asset creation for
Speaker 3: CMS platforms. Now we get tools like Squad reducing even
Speaker 3: further the amount of humans the loop getting celebrated what
Speaker 3: a single developer can achieve without taking into account the
Speaker 3: repercussions it has on those that are now deemed no
Speaker 3: longer needed to be kept around as employees in a
Speaker 3: late capitalism driven society. If five developers can now do
Speaker 3: the work of twenty developers thanks to tooling like Squad,
Speaker 3: the remaining fifteen are out of the company, and like
Speaker 3: in old Detroit, they will need to find work that
Speaker 3: isn't yet taken by AI.
Speaker 4: Thoughts, well, I think what that person is saying is
Speaker 4: changes here and I don't like it.
Speaker 3: Someone moved my cheese.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I hear it, I hear it. I have
Speaker 4: to deal with this every day. This is unfortunately the
Speaker 4: negative side of my job.
Speaker 2: I would also say it's often untrue, like you know,
Speaker 2: what's his name? The square guy comes out, Jack Dorsey
Speaker 2: and says, hey, we're letting four thousand people go because AI,
Speaker 2: and it's just a blatant lie, like actually, they did
Speaker 2: all this stuff in crypto and it's failed, and so
Speaker 2: he's shutting down that group. But if you say, hey,
Speaker 2: we screwed up how these people and couldn't succeed, your
Speaker 2: stock price goes down, but your layoff as a AI
Speaker 2: stock price goes up, Like this is now the convenient excuse,
Speaker 2: you know for laying people off.
Speaker 4: It's true, and you know, for the thing about squad,
Speaker 4: but there's something in there that I think is very true.
Speaker 4: It's like, how do we do AI with teams? Not
Speaker 4: a lot of people talk about that, But I would
Speaker 4: argue that, you know, the assumption that someone's going to
Speaker 4: get laid off because of AI is how can I
Speaker 4: put this? It's accurate in that for a manager to
Speaker 4: see the ROI or to demonstrate ROI a reduction a
Speaker 4: headcount is boomed the immediate ROI, that's what they can
Speaker 4: demonstrate and go and say, we can lose these people
Speaker 4: but what they're also saying is we can trim down
Speaker 4: from the twenty twenty glut of hiring that we did
Speaker 4: because we wanted to grow, and we can now refocus
Speaker 4: and whatnot. So the question is what those people even
Speaker 4: be around in the next year or two anyway, Right,
Speaker 4: So there's that. But two the other thing is what
Speaker 4: I'm finding a lot of teams are doing is they're
Speaker 4: actually just doing more.
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, there's it's not like anybod who's getting in
Speaker 2: the bottom of the to do list, right, there's been
Speaker 2: stuff languishing there for years.
Speaker 4: It's right, they're just doing more. And so that's.
Speaker 3: A lot of stuff being ignorant because nobody wants to
Speaker 3: touch it, right.
Speaker 2: It's hard.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but these these these these riffs, these are these
Speaker 4: these layoffs are happening because of massive over hiring. And
Speaker 4: it's you know this this industry is people are far
Speaker 4: too used to this industry being what it is right now.
Speaker 4: It has not always been this way.
Speaker 2: Well, we were told, we've been told the twenty five
Speaker 2: percent job of jobs were going unfilled and the industry
Speaker 2: was growing faster than we could hire. And I don't
Speaker 2: know if that's still true or not. I am much
Speaker 2: more aware, you know, in my years now working on
Speaker 2: boards and things that layoffs rarely have to do with
Speaker 2: the reason that we say right there, there's many reasons
Speaker 2: to do a layoff. You know, we talk about Microsoft
Speaker 2: layingoff people. We actually read their annual report. It's like, sure,
Speaker 2: they laid off thirty thousand people, they also hired thirty
Speaker 2: thousand people. Like the hiring never stopped. But hires don't
Speaker 2: make the news. The layoffs.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's true. Well, let's think about it. You have
Speaker 3: twenty developers. Let's say, let's say half of them are
Speaker 3: idea people. In other words, they're they're creative developers, the
Speaker 3: ones that come up with the solutions, that find the
Speaker 3: right architecture, that have those conversations and can develop. And
Speaker 3: the others are maybe the people, like Paulo said, doing
Speaker 3: the asset translations and you know, all that kind of stuff,
Speaker 3: just you know, the grunt work, the scut work of development,
Speaker 3: and they may or may not have the big picture
Speaker 3: about what the applications or the code in the company
Speaker 3: does and may not be able to operate at that
Speaker 3: level with an AI. And I think those are the
Speaker 3: people who were on the you know, the first ones
Speaker 3: to get canned because because they're not used to thinking
Speaker 3: about having ideas and implementing those ideas.
Speaker 4: I would also say that there are always two ways
Speaker 4: of looking at a thing. You can see the negative,
Speaker 4: you know. I call this the dump truck the dump
Speaker 4: truck analogy because my ex wife, when she was riding
Speaker 4: her bike, you know, from Seattle down to San Francisco,
Speaker 4: she had this beautiful stretch of road in front of her. Wow,
Speaker 4: and it was wonderful on the pch right, no one,
Speaker 4: no cars except for one dump truck that was parked
Speaker 4: twenty yards off the highway. And she said, all I
Speaker 4: have to do is not hit that dump truck. And
Speaker 4: then you know, two minutes later, she's skidding to a
Speaker 4: halt one foot behind the dump truck because that's what
Speaker 4: she was focused on, right, and she almost hit it.
Speaker 4: So I think about this all the time. Brilliant story,
Speaker 4: but it's true. You can see the dark, you can
Speaker 4: see the negative and say there's the problem that could happen.
Speaker 4: It's right on the flip side. Is enabling so much,
Speaker 4: so many things. There are people that are out there
Speaker 4: recreating sass for cheaper and they're driving prices down. Those
Speaker 4: are little startups that are happening. There are folks out
Speaker 4: there that don't want to run AI. In fact, one
Speaker 4: of the CEOs that I worked with said, a CEO's
Speaker 4: job is not to have open clock open. It is
Speaker 4: to hire someone to run the open clock. There is
Speaker 4: to hire someone to run this fleet of agents. There's
Speaker 4: still going to be companies out there that want to
Speaker 4: do more instead of doing less. And I think we
Speaker 4: focus on these big companies that yes, a lot of
Speaker 4: them are trimming down, but all those folks are leaving
Speaker 4: now and they can start up their own companies to
Speaker 4: actually compete with the bigger companies. And it's fascinating and
Speaker 4: I think that we're going to see some really interesting churn.
Speaker 4: But I would say, above all, if you're not investing
Speaker 4: in yourself and learning AI and AI touoling right now,
Speaker 4: you're really doing yourself a disservice because it's just here
Speaker 4: and you need to learn how to work with agents
Speaker 4: and orchestrate things and so on.
Speaker 3: So Rob, as you know, the other side of my
Speaker 3: life is as a musician, right yeah. So, and I
Speaker 3: have this great ten piece and it's the best band
Speaker 3: I've ever played with, and we do all sorts of
Speaker 3: great tunes, originals and covers. Steely Dan's our specialty. But anyway,
Speaker 3: the you know, I talk to the audience and I
Speaker 3: you know, say, hey, how you doing get them riled
Speaker 3: up and all that, And the thing that gets the
Speaker 3: biggest response is no AI was used in the development
Speaker 3: of this music tonight, And everybody goes nuts, right, I mean,
Speaker 3: you know, there's something about, hey, we're human, we're on
Speaker 3: stage and there's no AI. You know, people just love that.
Speaker 3: But so AI has a black eye in terms of
Speaker 3: you know, certainly in terms of art and artists and
Speaker 3: especially copyright infringement and all that stuff. Artists are very
Speaker 3: very attuned to the problems there. But in my job
Speaker 3: as a software developer, it's ridiculously helpful, especially when working
Speaker 3: with small teams, you know. So just a juxtaposition.
Speaker 4: Well, it's my girlfriend and I talked about this the
Speaker 4: other day, you know, I said, she said, oh, you
Speaker 4: could just have Claude write this because I have a
Speaker 4: newsletter coming out that I called it my gen X moment.
Speaker 4: We were in Japan and it was great. We were
Speaker 4: in Japan having a great time and she's on her
Speaker 4: phone asking Claude how to get to navigate the Japanese
Speaker 4: train stations. That takes a second. She goes, oh, we
Speaker 4: do this, this, this, this, this, and then puts her
Speaker 4: phone in her pocket and we just went traveling. I
Speaker 4: looked at her. I'm like, have you noticed how much
Speaker 4: more time we have together. We don't have Google Maps
Speaker 4: open all the time, we don't have our transit are going.
Speaker 4: We just we asked AI what to do, come up
Speaker 4: with a plan for the day, and we just put
Speaker 4: the phone away. And I was like, I'm finding myself
Speaker 4: less and less on LinkedIn or other social media because
Speaker 4: it's all garbage. It's just Claude generated garbage. And I
Speaker 4: don't I don't care. I don't want to read it.
Speaker 4: There are a few folks in there that I do,
Speaker 4: of course, but I'm actually sitting here thinking, whoa, this
Speaker 4: is like a drink from the fire hose moment where
Speaker 4: we are having to go out now and live in
Speaker 4: the real world, and I think it's it's kind of
Speaker 4: interesting what technology is bringing about, right and what this
Speaker 4: is the positive side of AI. And so she of
Speaker 4: course equipped me in you know, summary reforms. She said, well,
Speaker 4: you could have AI help you write that post.
Speaker 3: No, that's not what I'm talking about.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, this is the interesting thing. We got into
Speaker 4: a conversation about writing, and he said, writing to me
Speaker 4: is absolutely.
Speaker 2: This.
Speaker 4: It's like doodling to an artist from playing music. For you,
Speaker 4: it's sure assembling words in a way that are kind
Speaker 4: of fun land and image or scene. And I might
Speaker 4: ask for structural help, I might ask for ideas of
Speaker 4: the post, but it'll sit in a corner and then
Speaker 4: I write it all the time. So there is a
Speaker 4: difference there, you know. So I don't know for you
Speaker 4: if you ever use AI to like, well, I have
Speaker 4: a composition and I'm trying to think about a way
Speaker 4: to make this a little bit well no, no, no, no.
Speaker 3: I have friends who use is it suno to generate
Speaker 3: music I think that's the name of it, and other
Speaker 3: tools like that, and they're like and they share it
Speaker 3: with me, and it sounds so good, you know, and
Speaker 3: all that stuff, and I kind of tend to think
Speaker 3: of it. And I've said this before in the show
Speaker 3: as like what Cassio keyboards were to us when we
Speaker 3: were kids. You know, you play a rhythm, yeah, and
Speaker 3: then you play like a bassline. You can change chords
Speaker 3: and doodle stuff. So yeah, it's it's really cool what
Speaker 3: these things can produce. However, I think that people want
Speaker 3: a human experience, whether it's writing, whether it's music or
Speaker 3: art or anything like that. If you smell AI, if
Speaker 3: they smell AI, they'll well, they'll turn up their nose.
Speaker 4: I'm not going to disagree with you necessarily, but I
Speaker 4: do think this is a fascinating thing to consider that Again,
Speaker 4: another girlfriend's story on this. She loves country music and
Speaker 4: I'm not the biggest country music fan, but we're just
Speaker 4: talking about things. We're driving along the north shore here
Speaker 4: of a Wahu and and we were just talking about
Speaker 4: I don't know, she was just talking about something or
Speaker 4: other and I was like, well, if you could see you,
Speaker 4: you know, this is like basically I was trying to
Speaker 4: tell her what I see about how we talked about something.
Speaker 4: And I said, gosh, that sounds like a pretty good
Speaker 4: country riff. And I was like laughing, like if you
Speaker 4: could see you, and She's like, ooh, I like that.
Speaker 4: And then I'm like, let's have some fun. And so
Speaker 4: I have a tesla with groc in it now, and
Speaker 4: then I know, yeah, i'd like write me the lyrics
Speaker 4: to a song and it did. And she was like,
Speaker 4: these are really nice because she's all about the lyrics,
Speaker 4: because that's why she likes country so much. And so
Speaker 4: she we went and had lunch, and over lunch, I
Speaker 4: plugged in these lyrics into chat g BT and I said,
Speaker 4: write me a song. Make it this way, make it
Speaker 4: that way. We kind of went over the lyrics and
Speaker 4: then I kicked up sono and I said, make this
Speaker 4: a country song. And of course, to me, this is funny.
Speaker 4: I was just having a fun time. I played it
Speaker 4: for her and she said that is absolutely beautiful and
Speaker 4: I was like, but it's fake, and she said it
Speaker 4: does doesn't matter. You made it right, and I was like, yeah,
Speaker 4: but it's fake. I didn't do any of the instruments.
Speaker 4: I didn't do any of the singing. She goes, that
Speaker 4: actually doesn't matter to me. The fact that you took
Speaker 4: the time to put this together. For me, it was meaningful.
Speaker 4: Now this is her opinion, and you know, for me,
Speaker 4: I was like, this is such a fascinating conversation because
Speaker 4: you go to you go maybe buy a greeting card
Speaker 4: that was written by somebody else and you might add
Speaker 4: some words. Seris you know what I mean. I'm not
Speaker 4: saying it's good or bad to me. I felt like
Speaker 4: we were going into a place that is part of
Speaker 4: a new world that we are going to figure out.
Speaker 4: And it's weird.
Speaker 3: You know what Kenny Rodgers said when he was driving
Speaker 3: his truck down the Pacific Coast Highway and one of
Speaker 3: his wheels fell off. God pick the fine time to
Speaker 3: leave me loose wheel.
Speaker 2: Oh geez, I've I have many they have the art piece,
Speaker 2: but soft. Nobody's emotional about software right like they want
Speaker 2: the result of the software.
Speaker 4: Have you talked to the guys recently.
Speaker 2: I don't know, no, Because one everybody's using open source
Speaker 2: like it was successful. You could argue their methods, but
Speaker 2: we got there eventually.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the uh. I've always had a fun time making
Speaker 3: up titles of country songs and leaving him there, you know,
Speaker 3: like like here's one put that thing away. That's a
Speaker 3: great country song. That would be it's kind of writing
Speaker 3: itself in your head now right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know it's great, it's fun. Yeah, I have
Speaker 4: come to appreciate country. Was the one lyric I heard
Speaker 4: the other day. If a puzzle, a puzzle, piece of
Speaker 4: your life is missing I can't. It's something like that
Speaker 4: if a puzzle piece of life. Oh gosh, I should
Speaker 4: look it up. I just blew it. But it's a
Speaker 4: really good lyric and it's something about puzzle pieces and
Speaker 4: a missing piece, and I was like, oh, that's really close.
Speaker 3: Here's another one. I only date girls named Julie and
Speaker 3: then in parentheses, so I'm never wrong when I call
Speaker 3: out her name.
Speaker 4: Oh oh god. What was one? Yesterday? Was a lukecum
Speaker 4: song and it said you're the kind of woman that
Speaker 4: makes a man rethink things. What does that mean?
Speaker 3: I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than
Speaker 3: a frontel of botomy. Yeah, that's okay, we digress. So
Speaker 3: I h I feel for the developers that check in
Speaker 3: in the morning, you know, get a list of bugs
Speaker 3: to fix, go about their business, have lunch, come back,
Speaker 3: fix a few more bugs, and then go home and
Speaker 3: you know, don't really have to get the creative part
Speaker 3: of software development. But there's a lot of those guys
Speaker 3: out there and gals of course, where they go. What
Speaker 3: do they do?
Speaker 4: They just fix more bugs, you know, they do more things.
Speaker 4: They it's just a shift, you know, I thought about this.
Speaker 4: It's not the same thing. But Richard, I'd love your
Speaker 4: take on this one. When Rails came out, a lot
Speaker 4: of people don't realize the impact Rails had. Oh sure,
Speaker 4: moving from PHP, moving from dot net, moving from Java
Speaker 4: where we had it was arduous to basically do anything.
Speaker 4: And Rails came out.
Speaker 2: You have to wire updated to a website in that time.
Speaker 2: It was a lot of work.
Speaker 4: Ridiculous amount of productivity. And I sort of like you
Speaker 4: could ask that same question, you know, I used to
Speaker 4: come in and have to you know, do a fleet
Speaker 4: of unit tests and everything, you know, let's say, using
Speaker 4: dot net at the time, Whereas if you move to
Speaker 4: rails and there's a number of folks out there, Steve
Speaker 4: Harmon and others who jumped into the Rails bandwagon, all
Speaker 4: of a sudden we started doing yes, started doing these things,
Speaker 4: and like, well, I still write tests, but now I
Speaker 4: generate them, you know, and I'm I'm doing stuff at
Speaker 4: you know, ten hundred miles an hour. I kind of
Speaker 4: think we're going to get It's just a change, it's
Speaker 4: just a shift. And ideally you work for a company
Speaker 4: that isn't going to try and stay at the same
Speaker 4: cadence that they're at. Instead they're going to embrace moving forward,
Speaker 4: which just means you need to figure out how to
Speaker 4: move faster. Sure, and you know, hopefully just show the
Speaker 4: company that.
Speaker 3: If you are one of these creative people and you
Speaker 3: can go home for the weekend and think about product
Speaker 3: ideas for your company that would augment their product line,
Speaker 3: then and you know how to describe that and how
Speaker 3: to explain it, and you could write a document explaining it.
Speaker 3: You might that might be it. That might be your
Speaker 3: ticket because this is something a that isn't currently being
Speaker 3: done at your company. It's new. It's an opportunity to
Speaker 3: create new revenue. And you know it'll get you and
Speaker 3: you know deep into an AI agent so that you
Speaker 3: could do it yourself.
Speaker 4: Or better yet, just go onto Lovable and build the
Speaker 4: dang thing and show it. Yeah, sure to worry, you
Speaker 4: really want to get in trouble.
Speaker 2: Well, you get to the point, Hrich is we weren't
Speaker 2: building this software for fun in the first place. It
Speaker 2: was supposed to either increase cadence where fewer people could
Speaker 2: do more for the company to make the company money,
Speaker 2: or measure the company more effectively, so you can find
Speaker 2: new opportunities in that in those measurements. This is more
Speaker 2: of that, like I get your idea. You don't let
Speaker 2: people go a you have a huge backlog. But after
Speaker 2: that then you know, it's not like you're just laying
Speaker 2: a year. It's what are the other opportunities we haven't
Speaker 2: executed on what is in your wish list? It we
Speaker 2: never got to how much software. It's just never been
Speaker 2: built because it was never going to meet the backlog
Speaker 2: was already too large to make the threshold to even
Speaker 2: make it. On the backlog, we could actually shorten that
Speaker 2: backlock up. We can add new things to it.
Speaker 4: This is fitting for the nineteen ninety eight show as well.
Speaker 4: When Google came out. Yeah, we as developers, all of
Speaker 4: a sudden had a brand new way of finding information
Speaker 4: because I used to you guys remember this, Carl. I'm
Speaker 4: sure you do too. You wanted to know how to
Speaker 4: do something. You were down at Barnes and Noble more
Speaker 4: Borders and you were buying a book book and you know,
Speaker 4: maybe reading Carl's book. But you know, the point is is,
Speaker 4: like you know you had to read these books, you
Speaker 4: had to find the information from a magazine. Of a sudden,
Speaker 4: you had Google and you were on it.
Speaker 2: In no time.
Speaker 4: That's a massive acceleration point.
Speaker 2: I was suddenly landed on Carl and Gary's VB home page.
Speaker 3: That's right, that's right. Yeah. Well, and and what happened
Speaker 3: all the if I was in the middle of it
Speaker 3: because I worked for a tool company that advertised in
Speaker 3: magazines like MSDN Magazine, Visual Basic Programs, Journal Basic Pro
Speaker 3: before that, and those magazines just died because they couldn't
Speaker 3: keep up. You know, by the time you're reading it
Speaker 3: something in a magazine, it's two months old, and you
Speaker 3: could just go on the web and find what you
Speaker 3: want and copy and paste into your freaking app for
Speaker 3: that matter.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well, welcome to stack overflow. You know when that
Speaker 4: came out, same same thing exactly.
Speaker 2: How are they feeling so?
Speaker 3: And it has some and it has a lot to
Speaker 3: do with dot net rocks too, because those advertisers needed
Speaker 3: a place to advertised, and they found podcasts and they
Speaker 3: found our podcast particularly, and so we grew with that
Speaker 3: whole you know, the TEALERX and the dev Expresses and
Speaker 3: all that stuff. Who are now not advertising in these
Speaker 3: magan and I worked for one of these companies, and
Speaker 3: I know how much they spent on magazine advertising it
Speaker 3: was a lot.
Speaker 4: Oh sure, yeah, well I think we're just going through
Speaker 4: another shift. And I wrote a thing on LinkedIn about
Speaker 4: this too, that, you know, I think folks that have
Speaker 4: been through these massive up people's heels and shifts are
Speaker 4: doing better because then folks who have been sitting on
Speaker 4: you know, at their desk for the last twenty five
Speaker 4: thirty years aren't used to this kind of thing.
Speaker 2: And I see the new folks actually doing better than
Speaker 2: any of us thought because I think they have less
Speaker 2: to unlearned and just gone for it. And the folks
Speaker 2: who've shifted a couple of times going oh we're shifting again,
Speaker 2: let's go, let's go.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: But it's people that have had ten plus years on
Speaker 2: the same stack and it was their first stack, yeah,
Speaker 2: that are really struggling.
Speaker 3: All right. I got a question for both you guys,
Speaker 3: because you're both sci fi people. Obviously, it's the people
Speaker 3: who have imagination, who can think and conceive of software
Speaker 3: and conceive of new features and how things can work
Speaker 3: together and work better that will benefit the most from
Speaker 3: using AI. Do you think reading sci fi and in
Speaker 3: particular what books would spark the imagination of some of
Speaker 3: these developers who might find themselves kind of you know,
Speaker 3: MOPI and you know ere like saying, well, that was
Speaker 3: going to happen someday.
Speaker 4: I definitely. If you haven't read The Martian or Project
Speaker 4: Hail Mary, you know, these people find themselves in these
Speaker 4: predicaments and they have to adapt in a very realistic,
Speaker 4: feed on the ground kind of way.
Speaker 2: So Weird does a good job of writing realistic stuff.
Speaker 2: My problem with science fiction is it's the part, it's
Speaker 2: the tool that has created a lot of the confusion
Speaker 2: around the term artificiinal intelligence in the first place. Well
Speaker 2: that's true, so you know this isn't the fear well
Speaker 2: exactly because for obvious reasons, every flip and movie involves
Speaker 2: the software trying to kill everybody, right, So you know,
Speaker 2: because that's a good story, Yeah, because that's what makes
Speaker 2: an interesting book. What if we created a technology and
Speaker 2: it made everything better the end? It's not ready yeah yeah,
Speaker 2: so but without a doubt. You talk to the folks
Speaker 2: who made the original flip phone, and it's like, we
Speaker 2: were inspired by Star Trek, right, we wanted a communicator
Speaker 2: like you can get inspirational. We get it from But
Speaker 2: I think you're hinting at the bigger thing here, Carl,
Speaker 2: which is when does a big disruption like this everybody
Speaker 2: comes a generalist again, right, Like our current development methodology
Speaker 2: has matured enough now with the incorporation to cloud, which
Speaker 2: is pushing you know, nearly twenty years old as well,
Speaker 2: where you can be focused as a back end developer
Speaker 2: or focused as a US developer. So forth, we've stratified
Speaker 2: ourselves and try to narrow our expertise, cause you can't
Speaker 2: be an expert in everything. And now that it's completely
Speaker 2: disrupted and the tools are all changing, you kind of
Speaker 2: need to generalize and touch all aspects of it.
Speaker 3: Though.
Speaker 2: There will be stratification again, but not this splip in
Speaker 2: year and probably not for several just because it takes
Speaker 2: time for the tools to settle down, the methodologies to
Speaker 2: settle down, and for us to say, hey, there's an
Speaker 2: area where it's we'th spending more time getting good at
Speaker 2: this bit and being a specialized and this bit. I
Speaker 2: don't see any specialties yet in this approach.
Speaker 4: I think a lot of these companies are trying to
Speaker 4: get into the business automation stuff and they are failing hard.
Speaker 4: And you know, there's so many tools out there that
Speaker 4: like open Claw was probably the first that broke through
Speaker 4: to me. I'll call it the human layer, you know,
Speaker 4: being this helper. Yeah, and that's what made it so
Speaker 4: darn popular and it Talking to a friend of mine
Speaker 4: just the other day, I'm like, I am constantly amazed
Speaker 4: at how engineers think that actual humans think, you know,
Speaker 4: like a there's a I don't mean to sound too
Speaker 4: negative on anything out there, but there's a project called
Speaker 4: paper Clip that well, the idea is you could have
Speaker 4: a fully virtual company and it's a CEO and CTO
Speaker 4: and CMO and it's like what company starts off with
Speaker 4: a full C suite that I don't know, you know,
Speaker 4: like that just no, this isn't And then of course
Speaker 4: you know it's all driven by GitHub issues and everything.
Speaker 4: It's like engineers thinking that you know, they know how
Speaker 4: so like right now I'm working with I tried to
Speaker 4: get I wrote a big long screen on LinkedIn today
Speaker 4: about you know, trying to get anthropics tool set to
Speaker 4: do something sane, and it's just it's it's like, wow,
Speaker 4: you guys, how many orgs do you have in there?
Speaker 4: It's this is crazy. It's like I could see each
Speaker 4: each org is shifting and doing their tooling, but you're
Speaker 4: not talking to each other because this is a mess.
Speaker 2: So anyway, the human part of it, I think is
Speaker 2: going to be the toughest. And going back to Worl's
Speaker 2: question after the break about what about teams, it's like,
Speaker 2: this is what's making teams complicated. Is an assembled team
Speaker 2: is about a set of specialties. That's right, And now
Speaker 2: that that's disrupted, it's hard to make a team with
Speaker 2: a set of specialties when you don't know what any
Speaker 2: of the specialties are going to be anymore.
Speaker 3: That's right, well, and the specialty has to be I
Speaker 3: think everyone in the team has to have a business
Speaker 3: specialty that is, you know, for a particular area of
Speaker 3: the business that they feel they can use the tools
Speaker 3: to make better, you know, rather than a technical specialty,
Speaker 3: you know, a business specialty, the domain expertise, Yeah, domain experts,
Speaker 3: but but you know, domains are big, and we have
Speaker 3: islands and subdomains and you know, whatever they're called. And well,
Speaker 3: Rob Connery, it's so great to catch up with you.
Speaker 3: I always enjoy our conversations, whether it's on a boat
Speaker 3: in Oslo eating shrimp and drinking bad wine or you know,
Speaker 3: or on the podcast or summits and stuff.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's always fun talking to you guys.
Speaker 2: I appreciate it all right, awesome dude.
Speaker 3: And we will talk to you, dear listener next time
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Speaker 4: You got jad middle Vans down there
Speaker 2: Is hot than my Texes