Aaron Francis

In this episode of the Navbar podcast, Jon and Simon welcome Aaron Francis, a Laravel developer and content creator, to discuss his new library, Fusion, which aims to bridge the gap between Laravel and modern JavaScript frameworks like Vue and React. The conversation explores the challenges developers face when integrating back-end and front-end technologies, the importance of developer experience, and the feedback from the community regarding Fusion. Aaron also shares insights into his new terminal user interface, Solo, designed to simplify the development process in Laravel.In this conversation, Aaron Francis discusses the inception and growth of Tryhard Studios, his approach to content creation, and the importance of staying relevant in the tech industry. He shares insights on the creative process, pre-recording rituals, and the balance between family life and work. The discussion also touches on future plans for Tryhard Studios, including new courses and tools for content creators.

Watch on YouTube →

Transcript

Jon

00:00:00 – 00:00:09

Welcome to another episode of the Navba. This is an extremely special episode where we have a very special guest. So firstly, I'm John.

Simon

00:00:10 – 00:00:12

I am Simon, and

Aaron

00:00:12 – 00:00:17

hello, Jason. I guess that's me. I'm Aaron. Excited to be here in the future. Thanks for having me.

Aaron

00:00:17 – 00:00:18

Over and over

Jon

00:00:18 – 00:00:19

again before we said, I'm

Aaron

00:00:19 – 00:00:25

you said I'm gonna do an intro and then you threw it to me. So Yeah. I know my name. I can can start there. I'm Aaron.

Jon

00:00:25 – 00:00:30

If you could just run the rest of the podcast, that would be fantastic. I'm just gonna turn off

Aaron

00:00:30 – 00:00:32

my camera now. Yeah. Thank you.

Jon

00:00:32 – 00:00:41

But welcome to the NavBar podcast. It's so exciting to have you on. I think you've been a huge influence on, Simon and I for a long time. And, yeah. Thanks for joining us.

Aaron

00:00:41 – 00:00:44

It's awesome. Of course. I'm pumped to be here. I'm excited.

Jon

00:00:44 – 00:00:51

Do you wanna give us a quick introduction as to who you are and why you are so important to to me and Simon?

Aaron

00:00:51 – 00:01:00

I can I can give an introduction to who I am? That's for sure. Like I said earlier, you know, with flawlessly, my name is Aaron. So I love

Simon

00:01:00 – 00:01:01

that one.

Aaron

00:01:01 – 00:01:11

Yeah. That was perfect. My name is Aaron Francis. I am, predominantly a Laravel developer, but but maybe that is changing. Maybe I'm becoming a JavaScript boy, so we'll stay tuned to find out.

Aaron

00:01:13 – 00:01:43

And I think I first came across John because we were both in the database world, and I have since, broadened out, we will say. There's a whole story there. But, yeah, I'm, I'm working on a new library for Laravel that combines, some JavaScript front end with some Laravel back end. And then me and my business partner, Steve, also do have, some courses out there, you know, educational material, that kind of stuff. But, yeah, that's, that's a little bit about me.

Aaron

00:01:43 – 00:01:51

I am I'm here in, Texas, United States, and I have four children at home. So lots of things lots of things going on.

Jon

00:01:52 – 00:02:03

Very exciting. And yes, we will definitely dig into more of all of that. The first thing we wanted to chat about was something that is has it been officially launched or is it coming out, like,

Simon

00:02:04 – 00:02:04

for a

Aaron

00:02:04 – 00:02:09

couple of days? It's coming out Friday. Yeah. Okay. So we're we're running out of time.

Jon

00:02:09 – 00:02:13

Oh, yeah. Well, thank you for taking the time. Of course. Yeah.

Simon

00:02:13 – 00:02:15

As you do when you run out of time.

Jon

00:02:15 – 00:02:17

Yep. So what are you launching on Friday?

Aaron

00:02:18 – 00:02:59

So on Friday, I am releasing a library called Fusion, and I, showed a demo of this at Lyricon EU just maybe last week or the week before. And, the premise of Fusion is basically, what if you could bring your batteries included back end of Laravel together with your modern front end of Vue or React? And, for the astute listener, you might be thinking that sounds like inertia, and it does sound like inertia. In fact, it sits on top of inertia. And it goes maybe three or four or five steps further than inertia does.

Aaron

00:02:59 – 00:03:26

And so kind of the the premise of the whole thing is, like, what if we took inertia way too far? Or said more kindly, what if inertia was only focused on Laravel? What would that unlock? What would that allow us to do? Infusion is the, I think is the logical conclusion of what inertia could be if it were if it made some assumptions that Laravel is definitely the only back end.

Jon

00:03:27 – 00:03:54

Okay. I'm probably gonna ask some silly questions coming from, having had very little experience with Laravel and coming more from the JS side of things. Mhmm. My understanding about inertia is that it allows you to basically write, like a front end client that, that has some nice bits to tie into the Laravel back end. And so, from my understanding, you can write in different front end frameworks like React, Vue, whatever.

Jon

00:03:55 – 00:04:20

Mhmm. But to my understanding, only the client side y stuff and all of the kind of, the direction of things like React and I guess like what Next. Js has bundled up as the app router. Mhmm. All of that kind of server side y stuff, wasn't really taken into consideration because Laravel could kinda do that bit, and then inertia just gave you the front end client.

Jon

00:04:20 – 00:04:26

Does fusion more, like, tie into some of that newer server y stuff? Or what does it give you the inertia?

Aaron

00:04:27 – 00:04:39

Yeah. Yeah. So that that is the question. It's like, what above and beyond inertia, what is fusion? And so just to set the inertia table a little bit, inertia sits kind of in the middle.

Aaron

00:04:40 – 00:05:07

And so you bring a front end and you bring a back end, and inertia will bind the two together. So that actually could be Rails and Svelte. It could be, Elixir and React. And so there's this whole, like, matrix of, like, you can put all these things together. And what inertia the great power of inertia is you end up with somewhat of a, like, client side application, but without all of like, without reinventing the browser, basically.

Aaron

00:05:07 – 00:05:29

So you still get server side routing, but in fact, inertia kinda steps in the middle and, like, you get the you get all the data from the back end and inertia looks and says, alright. Here's the data. Here's the component. Let me swap the component, add new data, all of that kind of stuff. So it greatly simplifies, maybe for a certain type of person, maybe somebody who's used to a, more of a back end framework.

Aaron

00:05:29 – 00:05:53

It greatly simplifies the process of bringing a super powerful front end framework together with your back end framework. So that's kind of that's where inertia sits. Now where inertia stops is once you get the data down to the front end, what do you do next? And so I have been observing from the outside, you know, React server components, Next. Js, that sort of thing, Remix even.

Aaron

00:05:54 – 00:06:15

I've been observing that, in the JavaScript community, there are continued efforts to bring the front and back end closer together. Some of which I super agree with, and some of which I hate. And the ones that I hate are, like, where is this function running? Those are the things where I'm like, this is this is wild. I don't actually know where my code is going to run.

Aaron

00:06:16 – 00:06:32

Part of that could be I'm an outsider. Part of that could be it's not familiar to my eyes and to a trained eye. It's like, oh, this is totally obvious. But for me, I like to have a back end and a front end. And, like, maybe we make the communication easier, but we don't mix the two up.

Aaron

00:06:32 – 00:07:17

And so one thing that fusion, doesn't do and nor does inertia is, like, take your PHP and, like, try to waz them in and put it on the front end or take your JavaScript and try to, like, you know, translate it and put it on the back end. And so where where fusion comes in is what if it were instead of, having some data on the back end, passing it down to the front end, defining the props on the front end, and then receiving it into your component. And, also, with inertia, you have to define your route and you have to define your controller. And then if you want to write any sort of API endpoint to get data back, you've gotta write an API endpoint. You gotta write a route and a controller, and then in the front end, you gotta write your fetch or your Axios or whatever.

Aaron

00:07:17 – 00:08:00

And so Fusion looks at that and says, well, what if we could just, write our PHP inside of a Vue single file component? So you've got the Vue single file component that's got, you know, your script set up, your template, your style, your script, whatever, all those blocks. Fusion goes further and says, you can now write a PHP block inside of a dot Vue file. And so what happens there is, the developer is now allowed to declare state inside of their PHP file and say, like, you know, public property name equals Aaron. And then that state magically shows up inside the view, template or script tag wherever you want it.

Aaron

00:08:00 – 00:08:18

And so what that allows you to do is you don't have to write the controller. You don't have to write the route. You don't have to declare, pass down properties, and then receive them. Any public properties end up in your template. We go one step further by having public action or public methods in your PHP be addressable by the front end.

Aaron

00:08:18 – 00:08:48

So if you're building a podcast index page and you have a a PHP method called favorite, in your view, you have a corresponding function called favorite that you can call, and it will reach into the back end, do all the stuff, and then bring that response back. And so the whole premise is like, how do we basically, you know, to be totally frank, how do we basically have Next. Js but with a powerful back end instead of, like, a piece together your own back end? And that's kind of where fusion, sits. Yeah.

Jon

00:08:48 – 00:09:15

I think in the whole JS ecosystem, that's been something that people have been trying to nail for a while is essentially like, what is the rails for JavaScript? Right. And either it ends up being too heavy and like everything is included by default and you don't have any choice over it, or you have to like stitch everything together. And it sounds like Laravel has nailed that, like include things by config rather than just like, here's everything. Here's a really heavy app.

Jon

00:09:16 – 00:09:18

Just to basically render a hello world page.

Simon

00:09:19 – 00:09:43

That's very last thing you said made it click for me because I I've been I've watched the talk and I can understand quite well what fusion does, but the thing you said where you have a favorite method on the, on the back end, and then you can call that method. Because I've used Inertia a lot and Inertia is incredible, but you do all the thing in the backend and then you say, Hey, now React is limited throughout the world. Yeah. Yeah. But it's just the templating.

Simon

00:09:43 – 00:09:58

You, you don't have all the nice service stuff. And like you said, Next. Js, Vue, Nuxt, Astro, SvelteKit, they all try to have that middle stack or I think you described it as a place where you write server side code. It's not, it, they call it full stack framework, but it's really,

Aaron

00:09:58 – 00:09:59

Hey,

Simon

00:09:59 – 00:10:17

here's, here's a bit where that runs on the server and doesn't get sense to the client. But, that example you just said about being able to hit a method on the PHP code instead of, just calling like, whatever action that hits the controller and then that runs, that, that makes sense for me.

Aaron

00:10:18 – 00:10:35

Yeah. I've been I've been, you know, jealous of parts of the JavaScript community because there are, like, the whole plumbing. Right? That's all plumbing that we're talking about. I just need to get from the front end to the back end and from the back end to the front end, And inertia went super far to cover that.

Aaron

00:10:35 – 00:10:46

But I do think something like Next JS makes it easy to just kind of like dance across the front and back end a lot easier. And so I'm trying to bring that over to the, the Laravel side.

Simon

00:10:46 – 00:10:55

Yeah. Yeah. Because you either have Laravel as an API, John, that's probably for you. Like, and then you just have a traditional React or Next. Js or whatever front end you want.

Simon

00:10:55 – 00:11:25

And you, you just hit an API endpoints like any other API, but then you don't have all the niceness of, authentication out of the box. And And then the, on the other end of the spectrum, Inertia gives you all of these, like you have, you just in your React, templates, you have access to the you like logged in user and all this stuff. And it's like incredibly glued together. But then React is just the, the, just the templating, kind of like React was until React '19, I guess.

Aaron

00:11:25 – 00:11:25

Yeah.

Simon

00:11:25 – 00:11:54

So now React tries to really have the server components. And then I'm always stuck in this middle, like, is there a way to use Laravel and React that is not either one takes everything and one has a little bit or the opposite? Like, try to, like you said, bridge that middle stack a little bit more. And I feel like these two words are really colliding. Like even this morning, considered started talking about how validating it is that the Laravel people are trying to do the same thing of collocating server and client, code.

Simon

00:11:54 – 00:12:02

And you said something interesting at the start of the, the chat, you said your Laravel dev that maybe now is a JavaScript dev.

Jon

00:12:02 – 00:12:02

And I,

Simon

00:12:02 – 00:12:18

I myself come from the JavaScript world and I've kind of blended into the Laravel world recently. So, it's really interesting to see these two worlds colliding and the sort of work you do seems to really try to bridge that gap between these two communities that try to, to have the best of both worlds.

Aaron

00:12:19 – 00:12:32

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I mean, my, my business partner, Steve, is a JavaScript guy. Like he, he loves Vue JS, which I also do too. And he historically has used Nuxt to whole bunch.

Aaron

00:12:32 – 00:12:50

And so when we started working together on projects, and we're using inertia and Laravel, he's just like, wait. How do I get this data into my view components? And I'm like, well, you gotta go back into the PHP controller and pass it down. And he's like, just to get, like, a query string out of the URL. And I'm like, I mean, yeah.

Aaron

00:12:50 – 00:13:08

If you wanna do it right, that's probably the best way to do it. And so he's just, and, you know, we didn't historically have file based routing. And he's like, so how do I make a new page? Like, how do I just make a FAQ page? And I'm like, well, you gotta go to routes/web.PHP, and then you and he's like, why is this so difficult?

Aaron

00:13:08 – 00:13:30

And so that's that's part of the, like, that's part of the, realization for me was when he started looking at it, and I was thinking, wow. This is, like, fully complete. How nice that we have this inertia in the middle. And he's thinking this doesn't go nearly far enough. And so having somebody else with a different perspective come in and say, like, boy, we can do something here, really opened my eyes.

Aaron

00:13:30 – 00:13:33

And turns out he was right. I just didn't realize it myself.

Simon

00:13:34 – 00:13:44

Yeah. It's all about perspective. And I, at at some point you said something like, I don't know, it's my experience with the the frameworks that made it confusing. What is server? What is client?

Simon

00:13:45 – 00:14:03

I, myself, when I looked at Laravel first, I was exactly like Steve. I was like, what do you mean I have to go in web dot PHP and declare a route and then have a controller? And I was like, but I just want a file called about dot JSX or whatever. And that's my route. And I, I know you can do this with the Folio and there's ways to do this in Laravel.

Simon

00:14:03 – 00:14:24

But now I find myself enjoying doing this controller and stuff and the whole MVC calmness. And I'm like, this is so elegant that I write blade templates and I'm like, I, I actually see so much value there. So I think a lot of it is the initial gut reaction and just like Tailwind did back in the days, people were like, ah, no. Totally. Get that away from me.

Aaron

00:14:24 – 00:14:25

Totally.

Simon

00:14:25 – 00:14:48

But when you try something and you go with the flow, actually, you end up seeing the benefits because Yeah. Initially I was like, I don't want to have a routing file that defines my routes. I just want the file based system. And I initially learned Laravel with Folio, which gives you this kind of file based convention. And then I was like, but this is so confusing when I jump back into the project.

Simon

00:14:48 – 00:15:23

Why if I have my web.PHP routes and it declares cleanly what it is, it's Yeah. So I have a hot take that Laravel has been superbly made of convention and simple simpleness, and you just follow the path. And now it's colliding with the JavaScript world and I'm seeing all these different Livewire, Inertia, Fusion. Caleb today was doing some discovery how LiveWire can do fusion esque stuff. And I'm like, oh, we are now bringing the whole JavaScript fatigue ways of helping

Jon

00:15:24 – 00:15:24

us. What

Simon

00:15:24 – 00:15:26

do you think about that?

Aaron

00:15:26 – 00:15:49

No. I think you're I think you're totally right. And I think, I think in the fullness of time, I would like to subsume inertia, and have inertia be sort of like an implementation part of fusion. And I felt really, I felt really torn on doing that because it's like, alright. Thanks for the open source.

Aaron

00:15:49 – 00:16:07

I'm gonna wrap it up and make my own open source. And that made me feel a little bit icky. But then at Laracon EU, Laravel announced that they acquired inertia. And so now it's not it's way less of, like, I'm taking somebody's pet project that they're, like, doing nights and weekends on. It's some fun that's supported.

Aaron

00:16:07 – 00:16:22

It's funded. It's supported. And the thing that I'm building is gonna bring hopefully a lot more users to Laravel. And so I asked Taylor at some point, I was like, hey, man. Would you feel gross if I, like, tried to downplay in the code, like, inertia?

Aaron

00:16:22 – 00:16:33

And he's like, I don't care. It's, you know, it's like, oh, this is way better than taking somebody else's pet project where they're trying to make a living off of open source and then wrapping it up and being like, I made this. And so

Simon

00:16:33 – 00:16:35

the little little yawns

Aaron

00:16:35 – 00:17:04

and everything. Exactly. And so, yeah, I I am very, sensitive to, like, the, you know, the blessed path for Laravel, and the fact that I am muddying the waters a little bit. But the hope is, the hope is that this becomes, you know, inertia plus plus, and can become more of the default on that side. I still think Livewire is great and totally serves a purpose, and I have no, like, I have no plans to try to take, Livewire users.

Aaron

00:17:04 – 00:17:20

The users that I want is Next and Nuxt JS. I want to give them a path into Laravel that is a much, a a much shallower, not a steep path into Laravel. And I think this is the way to get those people to come on over.

Simon

00:17:20 – 00:17:22

Yep. Yeah. I'm excited to give it

Jon

00:17:22 – 00:17:48

a go. I'm exactly that person. And, yeah, the idea of being able to, like, you know, like the nice thing about Next is that you have those servery bits when you need those servery bits, but then you don't have anything else. And so, like, it's nice that, with what you're building, you could, like, when you reach over that gap into the server, you have a fully implemented server with all of auth and the database already there and everything

Aaron

00:17:48 – 00:17:56

that you need. You have a full warehouse of tools instead of an empty warehouse where you're allowed to build whatever you want, which is like That's right. Yeah. I don't wanna do that.

Jon

00:17:58 – 00:18:07

Yeah. Absolutely. Has, has Taylor had, much influence over, like, the DX or the the design of of fusion itself?

Aaron

00:18:07 – 00:18:30

Well, you know, he's the DX god. So, yes, I've definitely talked to him. You know, when I so I put in my talk, proposal for Amsterdam, Laracon EU, and just, like, put the package down. It was like it was barely, you know, a twinkle in my eye, and I was like, hey. If this talk gets accepted, then I'll finish it.

Aaron

00:18:30 – 00:18:34

And, you know, hoisted by my own petard, my talk got accepted, and so I was like, shoot.

Jon

00:18:34 – 00:18:35

Now I gotta, like, build

Aaron

00:18:35 – 00:18:49

I gotta do this library. And then, you know, I did all of that just kinda, like, by myself solo, didn't tell anybody, and Taylor reached out and he's like, hey. What, what's this all about? What are you working on? And so I told him a little bit, and then he sent me a screenshot.

Aaron

00:18:49 – 00:19:07

He was like, hey. If you can get to this level of developer experience, I would be super pumped. And so it did absolutely change my direction a little bit, because he was the one that was like, you know what I really want? I want folio style, page, you know, file based routing. And I was like, sure.

Aaron

00:19:07 – 00:19:33

That wasn't really initially in my scope because like Simon, I kinda like going to the web.PHP and being like, my stuff. But the fact that he, you know, wanted that and the fact that that's so popular in the JavaScript ecosystem definitely, like, pushed me that direction in that feature. And then as I was developing it, I would send him screenshots and basically just say, how does this move you? And he would respond, this moves me. And I was like, oh, great.

Aaron

00:19:33 – 00:19:40

Okay. That's perfect. And sometimes sometimes he would say, you know you know, this part doesn't make sense. But I got a ton of help. You know?

Aaron

00:19:40 – 00:20:15

Some of it from Taylor, but a lot of it from a friend, I'm sure, of the show, Josh Siri, and then Joe Tenenbaum, and a lot of these a lot of these people that, like, have maybe more, JavaScript experience than I do. Josh, for sure, and then Joe is, like, the inertia czar inside of Laravel, and so he, like, knows everything. And so just sending it to them and kinda getting feedback on, does this feel right, from a JavaScript perspective was helpful. And then, of course, sending it to my partner, Steve, because he was, you know, he's the biggest he's not the biggest, but he is a skeptic. Right?

Aaron

00:20:15 – 00:20:30

He is a he's a back end skeptic. And so I would send it to him and be like, how does this feel? And he's like, it feels a little feels a little back end y, doesn't it? And I'm like, oh, it's so embarrassing to be called a back ender. And so I would kinda, you know, I'd kinda fix it up and send it back to him.

Aaron

00:20:30 – 00:20:42

And finally, I got to a point where Steve was like, this is appealing to me, and I would learn Laravel to use this. And I'm like, great, because the conference is tomorrow. So I'm glad we finally got there.

Simon

00:20:42 – 00:20:43

Glad you're saying this stuff.

Jon

00:20:44 – 00:20:53

Yeah. So is this gonna go out on as, like, an official launch on, like, Product Hunt or Hacker News or anything? What are you doing to officially launch it on Friday?

Aaron

00:20:54 – 00:21:09

So, I will on Friday, just obviously flip the GitHub thing live. I will probably, I'll probably do a live stream just, like, kinda casual. Hey. We're gonna do this. Let's, you know, flip it live, do a bunch of maintenance.

Aaron

00:21:09 – 00:21:35

Tons of things are gonna go wrong, so let's, like, you know, get the drama there. But beyond that, you know, probably not too much. After it is out, after it is out, that unlocks the ability for me to start, you know, streaming work in progress of it. So, like, I can, you know, start my day with a hour or two stream of working through issues, adding features, that sort of thing. And then I can also start to make more YouTube videos about it.

Aaron

00:21:35 – 00:22:13

Right now, it's hard because it's like, I haven't released it yet, and so it's hard to make a bunch of content, especially it's like, I don't have time to do that right now. So, yeah, the big the big reveal was kind of the Laracon EU talk because nobody had seen it outside outside of a few Laravel employees. Nobody had seen it before then. And so for that, we did we timed, my talk in Amsterdam, and so it was, like, 8AM, you know, in The States and, like, two or three in Amsterdam. So we timed my talk, which was being live streamed, but we also timed it with a tweet that had a highly produced, like, hype video that Steve made.

Aaron

00:22:13 – 00:22:36

And it took him, you know, it took him two weeks to make the video. It's incredible video. It's, like, thirty seconds long, and just an amazing video. And then also, I had recorded a fusion demo that we put on YouTube, before I left The States. And so when I walked on stage, we pushed the button on all of those things so that hopefully people be watching the hype video and people would be tweeting about my live talk, and people would watch the YouTube video.

Aaron

00:22:36 – 00:22:53

And it it totally worked. Like, it made its way it made its way to the Laravel and Vue JS subreddits where they hated it, and then the YouTube video did great. And so it, like, it totally, like, we did the whole thing at once and it and it paid off. So that was kind of the big launch.

Jon

00:22:53 – 00:22:57

Reddit is the perfect place to find out what anyone might have a problem with.

Aaron

00:22:57 – 00:23:07

Man. Oh, man. They they love they love the single responsibility principle over there. And I'm like, or separation of concerns is another one. And I'm like, y'all

Simon

00:23:07 – 00:23:07

Yeah.

Aaron

00:23:08 – 00:23:24

The concerns are still separated. They're just in one file. Like, we're not mingling front end and back end code. The PHP block runs on the back end. And they just, like, there's a very myopic view of single responsibility pattern and a very myopic view of separation of concerns.

Aaron

00:23:24 – 00:23:38

Simon, I'm sure you heard this a million times at Tailwind. Separation of concerns. It's like, that's not what that means, but, yeah, Reddit Reddit didn't love it, but, it was clear to me that I didn't understand it. And so that is feedback for me is I need to make it more understandable.

Simon

00:23:40 – 00:23:52

I, have a technical question, just before apologies if you hear the, the, the hail on the roof, it's one of these. Oh, it's not sakan at this time. Yeah. Yeah. That's why I muted my mic for a bit.

Jon

00:23:52 – 00:23:55

Hailing in the middle of summer. That's, yeah.

Simon

00:23:55 – 00:24:23

Great. Typical, But yeah, like, just to what you just said, whenever you try different ways to collocate stuff and kinda like a different take on things, you definitely gonna get the ratiers and the whole separation concept of talks. And I have a theory that you kinda need almost like a, like a Trojan horse, a way to get people on, like an onboarding tool. And for Tailwind CSS, the exact same happened. People were like, what are you doing?

Simon

00:24:23 – 00:24:48

CSS file style concerns. And then Adam had that genius of thing, this little apply that lets you write normal, normal semantic class names and then apply your, your crap behind the way you don't see it. And talking with Adam from the very early beginnings, he was like, I do not wanna use this, but this is a tool that gets people on board. And then they're like, there's something here. And then slowly, slowly tried out.

Simon

00:24:48 – 00:25:10

And I think having this file based routing, folio like stuff might be just enough for someone like Steve to be, Hey, I this is interesting. I understand this. And then can I get started trying other ways to do it? But, yeah, technical question. I from my understanding, the way fusion works is it's kinda like dev time.

Simon

00:25:10 – 00:25:37

So you write Vue stuff and then it writes some PHP stuff that lives I think in your demo, it was like in the storage stuff. And then when you deploy the, the functions are already written. So it's almost like a static site generator type where you, you, you do stuff at the dev time. I can talk normally the hell kind of way. So you do this and then to do this, you leverage the VIT framework quite a bit.

Simon

00:25:37 – 00:25:37

Am I correct?

Aaron

00:25:37 – 00:25:39

Yep. Yeah. You're absolutely correct.

Simon

00:25:39 – 00:26:27

So my question, I am gonna grossly underrate the work and generalize, but does it mean that if you were to try to port Fusion to other meta frameworks that are using Vite already, would the work be about doing the equivalent of the PHP tag you have in Vue? Use the syntax of that framework and adjust it to, to detect what, kind of signals to find to, to write your PHP. So, for example, something like Astro, I don't know if you've tried Astro, but it has very much the DX you're going for, where you have three little back ticks at the top, and this is your server code. Whatever's in there is on the server. And then you have the markup under that's basically the, the, the template markup.

Simon

00:26:27 – 00:26:47

And so when you did your PHP tag with the backend code, it already pretty much looks like a vanilla default Astro component. And Astro uses Vite for everything they do. So the only reason I'm asking you this is because I tweeted when you were hyping it up. I said, oh, are you telling me I can use Astro with Laravel and you retweeted that?

Jon

00:26:47 – 00:26:48

So I was like, I mean,

Simon

00:26:49 – 00:26:51

he's hyping this up. It must be possible. So.

Jon

00:26:51 – 00:26:55

Or he's just automated a bot to go and like him. No, no, no automation.

Aaron

00:26:56 – 00:27:01

No, no, no automation. But that was, that was a good like tease for people to

Simon

00:27:02 – 00:27:02

Yeah, the portion of

Aaron

00:27:02 – 00:27:04

the work. What is he working on?

Simon

00:27:04 – 00:27:19

Yeah. The portion of the work would be to figure out how to have a syntax that works in Astro and then adapt the whatever passing you do from the code you send to generate the PHP. Yeah. And technically that could work as well, I guess.

Aaron

00:27:20 – 00:27:33

Yeah. So I'm not very familiar. Well, let me rephrase. I'm not familiar at all with Astro. So I'm just looking at the the site now, and it looks like it is itself a meta framework that you can use React, Vue, PreX, Svelte, and Solid with.

Aaron

00:27:33 – 00:27:34

Is that is that correct?

Simon

00:27:35 – 00:27:52

Yes. But also its own Astro components, which is is basically JSX that compiles to HTML. And it's, to me, it's the ultimate components, composition UI stuff. Cause you have all the niceness of UI components without any of the JavaScript, unless you opt in.

Aaron

00:27:53 – 00:27:54

Speak about language.

Simon

00:27:54 – 00:27:57

Blade it's Blade with a JSX syntax, which

Aaron

00:27:57 – 00:28:16

is pretty So in that case, yes. So here's here's a little bit of here's a little bit of of, how it works. So the, and this is a little bit bizarre. Whether it's good bizarre or bad bizarre is an open question. I think it's good bizarre because I made it, but we'll see.

Aaron

00:28:16 – 00:28:44

So, the the package the the fusion package is only solely a, composer package, which is our NPM. Right? So it is a, PHP package only. However, inside of that PHP package, there are, packages for front end frameworks. So inside of, like, the source that goes down in your vendor directory, which is a a PHP thing, vendor, and then you have all your packages.

Aaron

00:28:44 – 00:29:18

Exactly. Inside of that PHP, package is a bunch of JavaScript. And so, what that allows us to do is publish a single package to a single provider, which in this case would be Packagist, and not try to sync publishing the PHP side and the JavaScript side to different, you know, registries and then having people get them out of sync and just be frustrated all the time. So, inside of that inside of that, package is a Vue, package. Let's say package one more time.

Aaron

00:29:19 – 00:29:44

So inside of that, vendor directory lives Fusion. Inside of Fusion lives a packages folder, and inside of packages lives Vue. And inside of Vue, there's a package dot JSON with node node modules and all of that stuff. And as a part of the installation process, Fusion will modify your applications package dot JSON to require the view package. But instead of going to the registry, it just uses the file, URL.

Aaron

00:29:44 – 00:30:21

So NPM totally supports that. You can just say file and point it at a package as long as it's on disk. So what we can do and what the plan is for React, which is the the one that's coming up next, is you just create a React folder in the in the Fusion, library, And we can then start to extract a lot of the Vite specific stuff that I've written for Vue, and we can pull that up into, like, a common layer. And then, like you said, we'll just have little bits little shims to be like, hey. How do I find the PHP code in this particular templating language, whether it's a view single file component, JSX, or Astra, or whatever?

Aaron

00:30:21 – 00:30:57

And then we can hand it off to, the rest of the process that does all of the work. And so right now, you know, I've written, you know, dozens of JavaScript files, but I won't have to do that for React. For React, we'll pull out the components that are common, and then we'll these these, these front end specific libraries will get much smaller, and the shared library will get much bigger. And provided, provided that everyone uses Vite, which I think is pretty normal these days, that part will be super easy. If somebody if there's a huge framework that still uses Webpack or Webpacker, who

Simon

00:30:57 – 00:30:58

knows who

Aaron

00:30:58 – 00:31:00

can keep up. They still use Webpack?

Simon

00:31:01 – 00:31:05

Yes. But they have now their own compiler. Or whatever. Turborepo?

Aaron

00:31:06 – 00:31:07

Turbo repo?

Jon

00:31:07 – 00:31:08

Ah, jeez.

Simon

00:31:08 – 00:31:10

They hired the guy that traded Webpack. Yeah.

Aaron

00:31:10 – 00:31:25

Yes. So that that is, like that's another so finishing on Astro, yes. It'll totally be possible. I would just need to hook into their build process and then hand off what I glean to the rest of my process, and it'll hand it back to me. That's fine.

Aaron

00:31:25 – 00:31:53

To the question about Next JS, you guys can school me because I don't understand why someone would want, a Next JS app working in conjunction with Laravel. Because in my in my estimation or or the way that I understand it rather is, let's say your Next. Js front end makes a call to your Next. Js back end, and then your Next. Js back end has to make an internal proprietary hidden whatever API call over to Laravel.

Aaron

00:31:53 – 00:32:18

And that just feels like, well, what is the point of the Next. Js back end if it's gonna proxy to Laravel and lose a lot of, like, you know, the session and the cookies and all of that stuff that are traditionally coming from the web, but now you're going through this internal back end route because your Laravel API is not exposed to the public web, that's the part where I'm like, boy, that feels like a lot of steps, doesn't it? And I don't I don't fully understand that.

Simon

00:32:18 – 00:32:40

So I think you have the that bias towards Laravel, all these nice stuff. And then on the other side, Next. Js has all this nice stuff like image optimization and SEO and all the ecosystems. So if I use Inertia, I don't have any of this. I'm like, oh, where's my image component or where's all the stuff that the the crazy smart people at Vercel Is

Aaron

00:32:40 – 00:32:43

that powered by the server side part of Next. Js?

Simon

00:32:44 – 00:32:47

Not necessarily. But if you want to use

Jon

00:32:47 – 00:32:52

it like, at build time, does some, like, image transformation optimization y stuff server side.

Simon

00:32:52 – 00:33:04

It lives in that Exactly. It lives in that middle of the stack that inertia now can, absorb that. Like, no, no, you're just doing the UI templates. You're using React as if it was blade templates, but with

Aaron

00:33:05 – 00:33:05

Right, right, right.

Simon

00:33:05 – 00:33:24

Fancy JavaScript stuff. And so just like Laravel has queues and jobs and mails and stuff, Next has all this, the equivalent for the front end, like the beautiful UX and DX and performance optimization and SEO. And, and so you cannot lose this. And that's why people are like, I love this. I love this.

Simon

00:33:24 – 00:33:29

I just need this too, to find the perfect place to hand over the, the network.

Aaron

00:33:30 – 00:33:53

I see. So if I can repeat that back if I can repeat that back, Next. Js provides a lot of functionality, some of which is back end, some of which is build time, but a lot of that functionality to, empower front end features. And so what I'm always assuming is Next. Js is missing queues and off and email and all that stuff.

Aaron

00:33:53 – 00:34:06

But what it is providing is a lot of stuff, let's say, image optimization, transformation, all that stuff, that empowers front end features, but happens to need to be run either on the back end or, at build time. Is that right?

Simon

00:34:06 – 00:34:44

Yeah. And even also for the routing, like you have really smart ways to generate static content ahead of time, if it allows and opt in, opt out on a, on a per page basis. So, you know, when you did that video talk with the Laravel versus React and your point was like, they work together and you had your little chart with the boss going really deep in the backend and stopping kinda here. And then I feel like this, yeah, the Laravel and Inertia goes way further, but it still has that ultimate bit of like fine tuning and control that Next. Js or Remix or Nuxt or Astro all provide.

Simon

00:34:44 – 00:34:54

And it's like to to have the true full best front end experience and back end experience, you need to find that ultimate way to to connect them both.

Aaron

00:34:55 – 00:35:18

Interesting. I had not I'll be honest. I had not really thought that Fusion and Next would go together because of that whole double server thing, which just blew my mind, but that makes sense to me. So I'll have to I'll have to look into that more because my, my bias is like, no, just use react, like use react on the front end. That's what it's there for, but I understand the other stuff.

Simon

00:35:19 – 00:35:45

I feel like two, three years ago, inertia was the perfect tool because react was just that you had a div with an ID of app and you just throw your app in there. But now every single thing using React and React itself with React 19 is like, no, no, no. We now trying to go full stack, full spectrum. And then inertia with its idea can, like, there's a lot of parallel work and like, I have to abandon this bit because now I'm doing this bit

Jon

00:35:45 – 00:35:46

and Mhmm.

Simon

00:35:46 – 00:35:48

Yeah. It's tricky.

Aaron

00:35:49 – 00:35:50

Boy, it's a mess, isn't it?

Simon

00:35:50 – 00:35:55

Yeah. That's what I mean by we have we have brought the JavaScript fatigue into the whole ecosystem.

Aaron

00:35:55 – 00:35:56

I know.

Jon

00:35:56 – 00:36:05

Vercel will just hire Taylor. Like, they hire up everyone else and it'll all become much, much clearer at that point. That's why work out how to productize it all.

Aaron

00:36:05 – 00:36:09

How about this? How about Laravel just acquires Vercel? How about that? I like it.

Jon

00:36:09 – 00:36:11

It feels good. I like that better. Yeah.

Simon

00:36:12 – 00:36:23

I would love to talk about content and video making as well. I just have one, one recommendation for you. Try to speak with Ben Holmes who works at Astro. You might know Ben Holmes from the whiteboards.

Aaron

00:36:23 – 00:36:24

Yeah, whiteboard guy.

Simon

00:36:24 – 00:36:34

Yeah. Yeah. He's awesome. And I know for a fact that he has played along with writing some PHP in Astro templates because everyone is joking. Oh, it feels like PHP.

Simon

00:36:34 – 00:36:45

And so he's already done exploration and talking together, you might like uncover this, like, 70% of work you've both done and kinda like blocks together.

Aaron

00:36:45 – 00:36:52

Yeah. I'll talk to him. I he's, I've known him online. He's always been very likable. This will be a good excuse to to talk to him.

Jon

00:36:52 – 00:37:03

Yeah. Yes. So before we jump into context, you've also been working on a TUI, like a a terminal user interface. Is this at all related to fusion? Is this just a completely separate thing?

Aaron

00:37:04 – 00:37:05

No. It's completely separate.

Jon

00:37:05 – 00:37:08

Okay. Good. Good. We don't just spend time. I I imagine you're

Aaron

00:37:08 – 00:37:10

just Yeah. Totally. Looking for any

Jon

00:37:10 – 00:37:11

ideas you could with.

Aaron

00:37:11 – 00:37:18

This was like my oh, I've got a big library to write. What if I instead wrote a different one? Yeah. That was smart. Yeah.

Aaron

00:37:18 – 00:37:37

So there's solo, the Chewy. I don't know how it is in in JavaScript land. You probably all just run, like, NPM run dev or something, and everything starts. Right? In in Laravel land, because it is, you know, batteries included, we've got stuff like queue workers and WebSocket servers and stuff like that that you can also run.

Aaron

00:37:38 – 00:38:23

You can also start, you know, an HTTP server, and in most cases, you're also running npm run build or run dev, I suppose, to to start your Vite process as well. So already there, you've got, let's say, four or five different processes that are required to spin up so that you can run a freaking app locally. And I think a lot of the, like, a lot of the the cultural milieu right now is how do we make this simpler? Because I think a lot of Laravel folks have been around Laravel for upwards of, you know, five years, and everybody just knows, yeah, you gotta start v you gotta start HTTP. Sometimes you gotta start your key worker, and then you gotta, you know, you gotta tailor your logs, and it's like, we all know that.

Aaron

00:38:24 – 00:38:49

But when you start to introduce it to a new person, and they're like, you gotta do what now with all these artisan commands? Like, why is it so difficult to start a Laravel application? And so solo the point of solo is basically, to combine all of those processes into one command. And so this would be similar to, like, n p x run concurrently. Yes.

Aaron

00:38:49 – 00:39:12

And the m run of it yeah. Instead of that, which concurrently is great, my qualms with it are, it it munges the output. Right? So it puts all the output together in one giant stream with your little prefix and some color coding, and it does a lot of nice stuff, in in that regard. But when you're running an HTTP server and a queue worker and logs and stuff is just flying off the screen, you're like, f.

Aaron

00:39:12 – 00:39:37

I just missed I missed it. I missed the important part. And so solo is, NPX run concurrently, but, again, taken, like, five steps beyond reasonable. And what it does is it allows you to define kinda like your configuration and say, like, I want, you know, these five processes to start automatically, and I want these three to be available, but don't start them. And then it brings up you run the, you know, PHP artisan solo.

Aaron

00:39:38 – 00:39:51

One command, and it brings up all of these processes. And then across the top, you've got tabs, and it's all in the terminal. So it is a two way. It's all in the terminal. It's got tabs and hot keys, and so you can, like, arrow over to the queue worker and be like, actually, let's go ahead and stop that.

Aaron

00:39:51 – 00:40:08

I'm not working on that part of the app right now. Or you can arrow over to Vite and be like, boy, I mucked that up. Hit r, and it'll just restart the process. It'll kill it and bring it back alive. And then once you're done, you can just hit q, the letter q, and all of the processes will die, and you're, like, you're back into a a clean state.

Aaron

00:40:08 – 00:40:20

And so this is my this is my attempt, on the, like, setting up and running Laravel side to make Laravel more approachable, to to a potential newcomer. Nice.

Simon

00:40:20 – 00:40:27

And so all your research in models in the terminal and UI stuff were written to provide this experience in solo?

Aaron

00:40:28 – 00:40:37

Yep. That's it. I didn't know the first freaking thing about terminals or NC codes or escape characters. I didn't know the first thing about it until I started working on this.

Jon

00:40:38 – 00:40:46

Is this gonna be, like, is the goal to be absorbed into, like, be the default, command for running a Laravel project?

Aaron

00:40:47 – 00:41:22

It would make me very happy if it was included in the Laravel application skeleton. I would be surprised if Laravel Inc ever decides, like, hey. We wanna pull this in to, like, the Laravel framework. It seems outside of the mandate of the Laravel framework to do this, and it is a massive, library. But I I hope it could be included in, like, the when you do, you know, Laravel new app, they do pull in a bunch of they pull in the framework, obviously, but then they pull in other packages, and inertia being one of them sometimes.

Aaron

00:41:22 – 00:41:29

And I would hope that, at some point, it's good enough to where it will be included in the application skeleton.

Simon

00:41:32 – 00:41:43

Complete random comments. But if you ever wanna rebrand your company, you should try five steps beyond reasonable studios. It looks like there's a trend here.

Aaron

00:41:43 – 00:41:49

Yeah. I mean, try hard is pretty close. So, you know, we're not we're not totally off base there.

Jon

00:41:49 – 00:42:03

Yep. Perfect segue into TryHard Studios, which is you and Steve's content creation business. Does this stuff fall under that company and that brand? Is this just stuff you're doing on the side? Like,

Aaron

00:42:03 – 00:42:14

how do you know No. Fortunately like a guy like this. Yeah. Fortunately, everything that is on the side is a part of TryHard. And so that's a nice it's a nice arrangement we have, which is like, hey.

Aaron

00:42:14 – 00:42:49

I'm gonna do a bunch of random crap. But the the idea is that it will bring, attention and followers, and hopefully, at some point, it'll turn into US dollars because that's how we eat and not not an attention. But, yeah, all of all of this, like, exploration, let's go let's build some new stuff. That all, is basically top of funnel for try hard. So the more, impactful stuff I can create, the more people become aware of us, and then some portion of those people will hopefully purchase our wares, which at this course or at this point, our courses.

Aaron

00:42:49 – 00:42:52

So, yeah, it's all it's all try hard. Will this

Jon

00:42:52 – 00:43:01

will the work on, like, Fusion possibly turn into, like, a Fusion course or a Laravel course that uses Fusion? Is there, yeah, motivation there?

Aaron

00:43:01 – 00:43:19

Yeah. A little bit. Yeah. I mean, there's definitely a world in which, you know, fusion works, and it it, like, has legs of its own. And I'm in a good position to teach about fusion or to maybe do, like, you know, other content or even, you know, more advanced starter kits.

Aaron

00:43:19 – 00:43:56

Laravel's put a lot of emphasis on, first party starter kits. And so if there's a if there's a world which Fusion takes off and they do a first party starter kit, I could do a starter kit that includes all the stuff they won't include, which is like Stripe and, you know, all that kind of stuff. And this is one of those things where it's like, let's just do something good and see what comes out of it. Because I think what will come out of it is also something good. Like, if I work really hard and produce something of value, that directionally will set me up to receive some value in the future, even if I don't right now know exactly what that is.

Jon

00:43:57 – 00:44:10

And even just the inspiration of, like, doing something different. Like, not just, like, jumping from one course to the next course and just doing the same thing over and over again. Having this time to kinda focus on other things, think about different problems, like yeah.

Aaron

00:44:10 – 00:44:30

And it keeps it keeps me in the game. Right? Because if I just become if I just become the guy that makes, you know, even just database courses is very niche. But if I just become the guy that makes courses, at some point, I lose my edge of, like, no. I'm an actual working developer, and these are the things that, like, I have learned in that process.

Aaron

00:44:30 – 00:45:00

And so I don't wanna you know, now that I now that our money comes from education, I don't wanna just, like, just keep my knowledge stuck in, you know, 2023 and never never update. And so it's nice. I think that's nice for me, but that's also nice for the audience in that they see me doing a bunch of other stuff. And it's not just like, oh, this guy just makes courses about, you know, stuff he learned five years ago or something like that. So it it has good, externalities all the way around.

Simon

00:45:00 – 00:45:07

Keeping the tools sharp. Yep. Yeah. For sure. I in 2020, I joined Tailwind Labs and I'd for two years, all I did was videos on Tailwind CSS.

Simon

00:45:07 – 00:45:33

And then I went back to consulting and client work and I was like, whew, a bit blunt. I gotta shop in the what's that new React, app router and all this stuff. And I have to do a lot of upskilling. So it's great to, to stay in the game. And, and like you said, like people see, it's not just talking, the talk is actually, he's built this impressive library that writes PHP from a PHP tag in Vue, which is like, seems impressive.

Simon

00:45:34 – 00:45:46

Does Steve go to the same crazy amount of exploration on his side of the business, which is the, the video making and the, the programming? We don't see that much, but I imagine he also does crazy explorations.

Aaron

00:45:47 – 00:46:18

Yes. He does. I don't know that he's as much of an explorer as I am, but he goes to crazy lengths, in terms of effort for sure. And so that's, I think, one of the things that that makes us work so well together is that, the extent that I will go to to make a, you know, a library or, you know, a terminal UI look good or something like that, he goes to the same extent to make videos, like, look good. And so, like, that that hype video that I told you about, you know, is thirty, forty five seconds.

Aaron

00:46:18 – 00:46:45

So Give me forty two weeks or something, and it's flawless. And the funny thing is, like, every time Steve sends me a draft, I'm blown away, and he always says, like, I don't know. I kinda hate it. It's not there yet. And so we kinda have the same, like, in our in our areas of expertise, we have the same, like, haste, basically, where I think he's got a really good eye for, both video and web design.

Aaron

00:46:45 – 00:47:06

Like, all of our course platform sites are designed by Steve and implemented by him too because he's a front end developer. And so he has that same super high bar. But he calls me the the chief exploration officer and he's more of the like quiet, get things done, like adult in the room. And so we kind of have a nice balance there as well. Great.

Simon

00:47:06 – 00:47:39

Yeah. We all three of us have something in common is we programmers, but we also spend a lot of time behind the camera and making videos and editing videos. And I just wanted to make sure we talk a little bit about the whole content creator life and the whole processes. And, I actually have a question from Jeffrey Way, who I work with now, and he's asking, do you have any kind of pre video recording ritual, particular drink, checklist of steps to avoid recording mistakes, voice exercises, etcetera.

Jon

00:47:39 – 00:47:40

Mhmm.

Aaron

00:47:41 – 00:48:13

I I don't have anything written down. I have at at certain points. But now I have I've tried to, in terms of, like, getting everything set up so that I don't screw up, I've tried to automate almost everything. And so I've written a bunch of shell scripts that sit behind this, you know, Elagato Stream Deck. So I can push the button, and the resolution on my monitors change, the monitor brightness goes down, certain apps are quit, my computer is put into DND or do not disturb mode so that I don't get pop ups.

Aaron

00:48:13 – 00:48:38

The background of my desktop is changed. And so it'll execute, like, 10 to 12 different actions, to make sure that my recording is the way that it should be. And then I also have buttons for sizing the windows. So, like, I'll get a window set and I'll push the button and it'll pop two thirds left or, you know, full screen with with gutters around that. And so I have a lot of scripts set up in terms of, like, preparing myself.

Aaron

00:48:39 – 00:49:01

The one thing, I definitely do is so I record in ScreenFlow. It's great. It totally works for me. It's a very normie piece of software, but it's totally fine. And so I record in ScreenFlow, but to make sure that I'm in the right spot, I also open up OBS, and I have a scene in OBS, where I have made in Photoshop, I've made grid lines.

Aaron

00:49:01 – 00:49:30

And so I bring that image over, and I have a scene set up where the grid lines overlay the camera. And so, I always, do I set up the OBS, and then I right click and do, like, preview, and then I right click on that and do always on top. And then I drag the window, like, it's basically a confidence monitor at that point. I drag it up to where it's just, like, right beside the camera. And that way, before every take, I can, like, make sure I'm sitting up straight and my eyes are hitting the one third line.

Aaron

00:49:30 – 00:49:40

Brutal. Yes. And, like, my left my left to right is correct because what you don't want is you don't wanna record a video like a little guy because then, like, you end up with them, like changes just

Simon

00:49:40 – 00:49:41

me doing this.

Aaron

00:49:41 – 00:49:57

It's just like, oh, that guy is sloppy. Like, oh, he's in, like, the bottom third. His neck is all out. He's hunched over. And so I always have that, you know, that confidence monitor set up, lock my chair to make sure I can't, like, just chill during the video, make sure that my eyes are on the eye line, and then I start.

Aaron

00:49:57 – 00:50:18

And so that's kinda like my that's like my prep. And then the only other thing that I definitely don't do anymore is, we have a brand of water called Topo Chico that is just, like, unbelievably bubbly. It's the best water in the world, and it makes me burp one minute into every single video that I record. And so I have to stop drinking, like, Topo Chico's while I'm recording because it's

Jon

00:50:18 – 00:50:20

just like the clap to keep everything

Aaron

00:50:20 – 00:50:22

in sync. Frustrating. No. It's difficult.

Jon

00:50:22 – 00:50:25

Clap. You just know that one minute in, you're gonna pop and

Aaron

00:50:25 – 00:50:37

I'll be in the middle of I'll be in the middle of, like, a good take, and it just, like, sneaks out. And I'm like, god freaking dang it. And so, yeah, that that's it. But, no no checklists or anything like that. I've tried to automate as much as I

Jon

00:50:38 – 00:50:44

can. You've put together a, a a burping supercut of, like, every everyone that you've edited out over time.

Simon

00:50:44 – 00:50:45

Yeah. The Christmas.

Aaron

00:50:46 – 00:50:53

Yeah. They're they're followed by curse words, and And so I don't, I can't, I gotta just delete all that. It's like, God dang it. It's so frustrating.

Simon

00:50:53 – 00:51:08

I have a very, very linked question. How many takes does it take you on average for your very first opening scene? Every time you start a video, the very first thing you say on camera, do you nail it firsthand? Does it take fifteen days?

Aaron

00:51:08 – 00:51:09

No. Never.

Simon

00:51:09 – 00:51:09

In between.

Aaron

00:51:10 – 00:51:36

I'm very much a, I'm very much a scrap it. Let's do it again instead of, like, let's try to salvage. And so my entire process is built around, minimizing cuts because as a personal preference, I don't like videos that are sliced up, like, sliced to death if there's a human on the screen. You can slice up a screen recording easily. Like, that's totally fine because it's not all jumpy.

Aaron

00:51:36 – 00:52:03

But if you slice up a live action video and it's, like, every third second, there's a visible cut, I don't like that. Maybe it's because I'm 35, but I don't like that. And so my whole, my whole process is built around, what I call chunks. And so my goal is nail a chunk, know where you're going to transition and then move on to the next chunk. And so like the intro, for example, usually, let's say fifteen to thirty seconds.

Aaron

00:52:04 – 00:52:26

I'll do it four times until I get it perfect. But then I know that no. Four is not bad. Sometimes it takes 10. So it's like, it's definitely rarely ever one, but I know that after I nail the intro chunk, I'm gonna transition to a picture and picture where I'm top right and the screen is visible, and nobody's gonna notice because it's a big cut anyway.

Aaron

00:52:26 – 00:52:58

And so my goal is always let's nail one, two, three, four minutes of straight pure talk or demo or whatever. And then once you reach that point where you know that a transition is coming in the edit, take your time, reset, and then we can take that chunk four or five times because we know our last stopping point. And so no. It's definitely I I don't use a script because I sound like a robot. And this is my this is my way to, like, keep the flow going and then also not have a huge edit burden at the end.

Simon

00:52:59 – 00:53:01

Steve is thankful, I guess.

Aaron

00:53:01 – 00:53:18

Yes. Steve is actually thankful. When I started working with Steve, he, he commented. He told me he's like, man, you're one of the, like, the cleanest recorders I've ever seen. And I'm like, well, that's great because if you could see the process, it's not super clean, but I'm glad, you know, by the time it gets to you, it's clean.

Aaron

00:53:18 – 00:53:22

So Yeah. That's amazing. The, the the

Jon

00:53:23 – 00:53:31

you're spending a long time on it is doing four takes. Like, sometimes there are 45, 80 takes of me, especially the intro. The intro is just

Simon

00:53:31 – 00:53:32

A segment. Yeah.

Jon

00:53:32 – 00:53:53

Because I try and like you're saying, like nail it all in one go. Because it's so obvious when you have a cut, in a talking head, especially I've started trying to have a little bit more, like, nature in the shot. So trying to have, like, the trees and things. I live up in, like, a rainforesty area, and so I wanted to get some of that in my in in my content. And, like, leaves moving on trees?

Jon

00:53:53 – 00:53:55

Yep. You can't edit.

Aaron

00:53:55 – 00:53:55

Like, it

Jon

00:53:55 – 00:54:00

just Your host. You see these flashes everywhere of everything in the background and the person.

Aaron

00:54:00 – 00:54:10

That that is part of the reason I don't have a monitor or, any sort of clock back here behind me is because if I absolutely do have to do it, I wanna make it as as seamless as possible. Yeah. Whenever I as seamless as possible.

Jon

00:54:10 – 00:54:17

Yeah. Whenever I see a clock in the background of, like, a documentary or whatever, I'm like, alright. Let's see how long it actually took them to get this.

Aaron

00:54:17 – 00:54:23

And and I don't want people knowing that I'm, like, recording a video at, like, you know, 11:30 at night sometimes because then I'm

Simon

00:54:23 – 00:54:26

hitting the battery 7% and everyone focused on that.

Aaron

00:54:27 – 00:54:35

It's like, man, this guy's really struggling. And it's like, no. It's how it fits in around my life. And so, yeah, I just, you don't know when it is. You don't know what day it is.

Aaron

00:54:35 – 00:54:41

You don't know if it's day or night. It's just like I am in my studio that you always see me in. And I I like that consistency.

Jon

00:54:42 – 00:54:58

Yeah. That is another nice thing. Trying to get nature in the shot really does mess up when I can record. I always have like, you know, I just need to record this one little part and then the video is finished, but I have to wait until the sun comes up. And then if the sun's too bright, I have to wait until in the afternoon when it's over the other side and it's just a nightmare.

Jon

00:54:58 – 00:55:23

But speaking of you having no time, how do you get so much done? Like, I wrote just a quick list while we were talking and there's like, you know, you as you mentioned before, you have two sets of twins, quite young, from so wait, Just before I I go through the list, when did when did you move into TryHard Studios? So when did you leave PlanetScale and start TryHard?

Aaron

00:55:24 – 00:55:34

Wow. That's a kind way of asking. When I got laid off was almost a year ago. It was, I think, March of twenty twenty four. So we're coming up we're coming up on Monday.

Jon

00:55:34 – 00:55:40

So in less than a year, you have built an entire studio. That whole thing behind you is a set.

Simon

00:55:41 – 00:55:42

You have a fake wall behind it.

Jon

00:55:42 – 00:56:05

Yeah. Like, literally constructed an entire studio. You've started a whole business like TryHard Studios. You have gone super in-depth, printed out the entire documentation, actually read the entire documentation of SQLite and designed the whole course, done the same with Postgres. You have worked with another content creator on a Rails course coming out through through TryHard.

Jon

00:56:06 – 00:56:22

You've done, like emceeing Laravel conference conferences, doing talks, building libraries and building TUI's and all kinds of things. Not to mention coaching the Laravel basketball team. Like how you

Aaron

00:56:23 – 00:56:24

I don't know if that makes the list.

Jon

00:56:24 – 00:56:28

How you actually spill a bit in? What does a day for Aaron look

Aaron

00:56:29 – 00:56:41

like? Oh, that's kind of you. The days are long. The years are short, but the days are quite long. So, you know, there's a there's no chance I would be able to do any of it, without my wife.

Aaron

00:56:41 – 00:57:03

So my wife is stay at home mom. She, like, if you if you had a list of the things that she does, we wouldn't have time to go through it. And so, she is the one, like, there's there's just there's just no way around it. I mean, I'm able to do the things that I'm able to do because she does the things that she does. And so that's the biggest part.

Aaron

00:57:03 – 00:57:47

We also when we found out we were having a second set of twins, we welcomed a, a young German woman to come live with us, an au pair. So we went through an agency and found somebody who was looking to come to America and work with kids. And so she's lived with us since, the new twins were born because, we were staring down the bail barrel of having two two year olds and two newborns and having, you know, one adult after I, you know, went back off paternity leave, having one adult try to handle four kids under three. And we just realized, like, I don't know logistically how that would even be possible. Because, you know, if you're trying to feed two two zero year olds and you've got two two year olds, like, what how do you how does that even work?

Aaron

00:57:47 – 00:58:04

And so we've had this, au pair. She works, you know, reasonable hours. Weekends, she doesn't work at all, but she's been just an enormous help. And because she's German, she's just good at everything. I mean, she's just like she's she is, like, strict, but kind.

Aaron

00:58:04 – 00:58:24

She's clean, but reasonable. It's just like she it's just perfect. She's the best ever. And so that helps a huge amount on the home front is we we have two adults full time, you know, from, you know, eight in the morning to six, and then I come home and handle bedtime and dinner and stuff like that. But, it's not easy.

Aaron

00:58:24 – 00:58:42

Like, you know, there I wrote a a year end review for 2024, and it 2024 is the hardest year of my life by far without a question. And it's very, very difficult, But I don't like, I've eliminated a lot of other things. Like, I don't have hobbies. I don't watch sports, which is fine. I don't super care.

Aaron

00:58:42 – 00:58:58

But, like, I haven't seen severance yet. I still wanna watch that. I haven't seen it. And so there are just a lot of things that, like, in this stage of life, I'm not able to pull off. And I'm okay with that because I'm sacrificing things I don't care about for things I do care about.

Aaron

00:58:59 – 00:59:17

And that's an okay trade for me right now. Am I tired? All the time. And there are times that I will, like, put the kids down and sit at the top of the stairs and just cry because I'm so exhausted and so overwhelmed. And then, you know, you go downstairs, you have dinner, you do some work, you go to bed, and you get up and you do it again the next day.

Aaron

00:59:17 – 00:59:46

And so this is very much, this is very much a moment in time in a building stage, and it happens that it's a family building stage of life and a company building stage of life. And those two those two coincided in the worst possible way. And the only way to, like, the only way I think to do right by myself is to work as hard as possible on those two things and kind of let everything else fall to the wayside. Like, would I love to exercise more? Yes.

Aaron

00:59:46 – 00:59:50

Have hobbies? Yes. Relax? Yes. Do I do any of those things?

Aaron

00:59:50 – 01:00:05

Not a chance. And so it's like, I don't know. This I feel the the feeling I get whether right or wrong is this is my moment and I have to seize it. Otherwise, it will pass me by. And I think some some part of that is true, and some part of that is fear.

Aaron

01:00:05 – 01:00:06

For sure. Yeah. Well, severance

Jon

01:00:06 – 01:00:10

will still be good when you decide to retire. When it's when it's all over. Not going. It's not

Aaron

01:00:10 – 01:00:15

going anywhere. I don't know. Maybe the streaming platforms, you don't know. But I'll still be able to watch it somewhere.

Jon

01:00:15 – 01:00:26

And if anything, like, all of the seasons will be out. So you'll be able to rush through it. You won't have to go through the pain that we need week by week by week. So what is next for TryHard Studios? What what's the focus gonna be?

Jon

01:00:26 – 01:00:32

Is it gonna be mainly on more courses? It sounds like you're working on some screencasting, like a screencasting refresh,

Aaron

01:00:32 – 01:00:33

which would

Jon

01:00:33 – 01:00:39

be awesome. Are you gonna focus on more libraries and tools and development stuff? What's the focus for 2025?

Aaron

01:00:40 – 01:01:11

2025, we, of course, have a lot, on on the on the to do list. A few of those things are courses, in fact. We have historically focused on intermediates, in terms of the content that we create for these courses. And I think we're gonna give our give a shot at, like, beginners. And so we're we're gonna do an intro to sequel, because I think, I really enjoy taking, juniors or intermediates and leveling them up even further.

Aaron

01:01:11 – 01:01:38

I find that to be so fun because we get to, like, really deeply understand things, and I find that to be very fulfilling. And that has been good business. I do wonder sometimes, is it better business to go after beginners? And is it is it equally as fulfilling to take somebody that knows very little or nothing about SQL and getting them to the point where they can be, proficient enough to, like, build their own web app. Maybe.

Aaron

01:01:38 – 01:02:08

That sounds pretty nice to me. So we have plans to do, intro to SQL, no flavor, just like SQL generally. And then a couple of other, a couple of other, like, quasi experimental courses in that same kind of flavor. And then at the end of the year, we might might might try to hit MySQL again, and do the proper try hard version of MySQL. But that's that's, what we would call a flagship course, and those those are very difficult.

Aaron

01:02:09 – 01:02:33

I have already done it once, so that does make it easier. But we've got ideas for how to make it better. And then, yeah, this month, this month, we're focused on, Screencasting.com. And so that is that is a, that is an arm of the empire that has not gotten very much love yet. But now that I have got, like, I've got the best you know, I don't I have sports now.

Aaron

01:02:33 – 01:02:37

I've got Michael Jordan. I've got LeBron. I've got Steve. And so You

Simon

01:02:37 – 01:02:37

don't have to

Jon

01:02:37 – 01:02:38

look at that.

Aaron

01:02:38 – 01:02:47

Yeah. We apparently, a lot of people care about that here in Dallas. That's where I live is Dallas, and people are furious about that. Fool. Yeah.

Aaron

01:02:47 – 01:03:15

I know nothing about it, but people are so mad. So I've got I've got Luca, in one way and not in the other. So what we're gonna do is I'm gonna redo the, the flagship screencasting course, which is, like, here's philosophically how to prepare things to think about, how to optimize, how to, like, increase your luck, what thing where you should put it out, like, how to record well, that sort of stuff. That course, I'm still very proud of. I think it is still very good.

Aaron

01:03:15 – 01:03:41

And so that'll be relatively easy for me to refresh it with stuff that I've learned since then, but 80% of it will still be the same material, just done a little bit nicer and a little bit fresher. Steve, on the other hand, is going to record adjunct courses for all of the major editors. And so he's got one for final cut pros, got one for premiere. He might do one for, Camtasia, which is the Windows thing. I will probably do the ScreenFlow one.

Aaron

01:03:41 – 01:04:00

And so then that rounds out that offering a little bit more where we can say like, here's philosophically and theoretically how you should record things to think about while you're doing it. And then if you want, like, here's how to set up your panels. Here's the keyboard shortcuts. Here's the hidden slider that you need to go make this thing pretty. Like, that's where Steve is gonna come in.

Aaron

01:04:00 – 01:04:20

Being a professional editor, having used all of them, it's like, well, shoot. Let's, like, take take final cut pro and reveal the 10% of it. The 20% of it you need to do screencasts and, like, not not the rest of it. And so that that's kind of the future for Screencasting.com. And that should be done, you know, that should be done middle March.

Aaron

01:04:20 – 01:04:21

That's the hope.

Simon

01:04:22 – 01:04:22

Very cool.

Jon

01:04:22 – 01:04:53

It's such a good idea going for those, like, individual programs as well because people have, like, their particular editing, application of choice and feel like they couldn't take a course in something else and it be as valuable for them. And I feel like you've got that, like the the main screencasting course itself is kind of catering to those people who haven't really made a decision either way. Like Yes. I wanna learn about how do I set up my space? How do I actually present to the camera and record a take?

Jon

01:04:53 – 01:05:01

And how do I edit that? And if you haven't used anything else, here, use ScreenFlow. This is how easy it is. Mhmm. And then how do you know, like

Aaron

01:05:02 – 01:05:04

It it was difficult. The other one

Jon

01:05:04 – 01:05:06

was kinda yeah. Cadence to everyone else.

Aaron

01:05:06 – 01:05:19

Yeah. It was difficult in the course to be like, I'm gonna show you ScreenFlow, but you don't have to use it. And then not give them a, like, not give them a an another option. And so now I'll be able to say, like, hey. I'm gonna show you how to do this thing in ScreenFlow.

Aaron

01:05:19 – 01:05:28

If you're using Premiere, if you're using DaVinci, Final Cut, we've got a whole thing. Link below. 20% off. You know, whatevers. That part will be nice.

Aaron

01:05:28 – 01:05:41

And then I feel like we will complete the education story to be able to take you from, I want to do video to I have published a video, which Yeah. It becomes a whole new video. Yeah. Yes. It's there now if you decide to use ScreenFlow.

Aaron

01:05:42 – 01:05:53

But if you're like, I wanna use Premiere, then you have to go externally to find some educator that's like, hey, here's how you use Premiere, but, you don't need to know most of it. And there's not a lot of those educators out there. Yeah. And that's

Simon

01:05:53 – 01:06:08

But you can then expand to lighting and, like, on camera, like the thing you said with the grid lines and, like, there's so many segments that it takes to do a great good screencast. And then you're not talking to developers anymore. You're talking to anyone making videos, which is a whole lot of people.

Aaron

01:06:08 – 01:06:18

Yep. Exactly. And Steve has worked extensively in after effects. And so we could do a full, you know Motion graphics. Animation, motion graphics, whatever for screencast.

Aaron

01:06:19 – 01:06:37

And, I have joked with him, but it's not a joke that I'm gonna do whatever he does in After Effects, I'm gonna do it in Keynote and do a course on animation in Keynote. Because I had smooth. Yes. Before Steve showed up, I did a lot of my animations in Keynote and then just exported them as videos and plopped them into ScreenFlow. And it's

Jon

01:06:37 – 01:06:37

like Yeah.

Aaron

01:06:37 – 01:06:42

Hey, that's the poor man's after effects. And so there's a lot of stuff we can do.

Jon

01:06:42 – 01:06:53

The magic animation is just It's amazing. Like, it tries to detect what's on the screen, what moves, and just does it for you. And you can set the easing curves. It's as professional as you need to get for, for most animated.

Simon

01:06:53 – 01:07:06

I mean, with lots of designers, maybe now with Figma and all the tools it's changed, but like five, ten years ago, like everyone that wanted to convey an animation feeling, they would use Keynote. Like in the designers are very Mac heavy and keynote is a Mac app. So

Aaron

01:07:07 – 01:07:07

Mhmm.

Simon

01:07:07 – 01:07:14

The the the keynote for the prototype of the animation stuff and Mhmm. Yeah, it's it's legit and that, motion graphics tool

Aaron

01:07:14 – 01:07:24

And you can export it like as a mov. Like you can just say, hey, Keynote, render this entire thing, and then you'd plop it in your editor, and you'd kinda chop it up, and you're off to the races. It's great.

Simon

01:07:24 – 01:07:26

It is great, the UX.

Jon

01:07:26 – 01:07:32

But I would be, yeah, so keen to see an after effects motion graph any kind of motion graphics course from from Steve. Like, I I was in

Simon

01:07:32 – 01:07:46

And then the fusion alternative, because it's a crazy world in Resolve and Fusion. It's it's the same outputs, but the the the approach is completely different. So the you have to then it's like Tailwind CSS versus BEM. It just got a good change. Interesting.

Simon

01:07:46 – 01:07:47

Yeah. Yeah.

Aaron

01:07:47 – 01:07:55

That that whole world of editors is not something that, like, I have I've never gone past ScreenFlow, I guess, is is one way to say it.

Jon

01:07:55 – 01:08:01

Yeah. Well, you've never needed to like, you've never hit the point. Like, ScreenFlow, you can do everything. It's yeah. But yeah.

Jon

01:08:01 – 01:08:01

And you

Simon

01:08:01 – 01:08:03

gotta let the men go back to work.

Jon

01:08:03 – 01:08:14

Yeah. I think we're gonna have to we're gonna have to wrap up. I feel like we could talk for hours and hours and hours. Yeah. Quickly before we wrap up, we do do sick picks at the end of our our podcast.

Jon

01:08:14 – 01:08:24

So do you have a sick pick completely? You know, we probably should have prepared you for this, but is there something around the office that you have found particularly useful?

Aaron

01:08:25 – 01:08:34

Yeah. Simon Simon prepared me a little bit. He told me, and then I completely forgot. So that's on me, I guess. So I think there are there are maybe a few things.

Aaron

01:08:35 – 01:08:40

Are do you normally is it okay if it's software? That's okay. Right? Someone said it doesn't have to be, but it can be. Yeah.

Jon

01:08:40 – 01:08:42

Yeah. Usually, it's it's pallet tools that we

Aaron

01:08:43 – 01:08:44

Oh, okay. Perfect. You're very

Jon

01:08:44 – 01:08:45

excited about.

Aaron

01:08:45 – 01:09:18

Yes. So I have been, I've been kinda like an AI bro recently. I'm trying to, like, use AI to stay on the wave and not get crushed by it. And so, one thing that I have picked up is AI adjacent, and it's I think it's called Super Whisper for Mac. And it is it's basically a way I can hit, hit and hold option space, and it just pops up like a little floating window, and I can just speak, and it will, will, transcribe it and then put it in my, paste, like, put it in my keyboard or my, paste buffer.

Aaron

01:09:18 – 01:09:34

Right? And so now what I can do is I can hop over to Claude, hit option, option space and be like, hey. Can you take this JavaScript class? And I need to add the ability to append a query string parameter because right now I don't have that. And then it transcribes it, and I just paste it in, and I'm done.

Aaron

01:09:34 – 01:09:54

And so it's it's saving me, like, you know, every time I go to type out a full paragraph of a prompt to to Claude or GPT or something, it saves me, you know, a minute, a minute and a half, and it just keeps me, like, keeps me in the flow. And so I just I've just started using it recently. It's wonderful. The other there's one other thing. It's a physical thing, and it's called, I think it's called the brick.

Aaron

01:09:55 – 01:10:14

Maybe brick it or something like that. And it's, it's a focus tool. And so I've set it up where, it's like a physical device, NFC chip inside, and I set it up to where when I tap the brick, it blocks, it blocks Twitter. It blocks blue sky, LinkedIn, YouTube. It blocks everything.

Aaron

01:10:14 – 01:10:20

And then you can't unbrick your phone without going back to the physical device. And so

Simon

01:10:20 – 01:10:22

going to the store to the Genius box.

Aaron

01:10:23 – 01:10:42

Yes. And so it's great because I'll I have one in I have one in, one in our bedroom in my nightstand and one in my car. And so, like, you know, on Saturday morning when it's like, alright. I gotta stop looking at my phone and get up and go wake up the kids. Let me let me break my phone so that when I'm out with the family, it's not like, you you can open Twitter, but you it's gonna block you.

Aaron

01:10:42 – 01:10:49

What are you gonna do? And so I'll catch myself being like, oh, what's on Twitter? Oh, shoot. Nothing. I just gotta just be present in the moment, I guess.

Aaron

01:10:49 – 01:10:52

So those those are my sick picks.

Jon

01:10:52 – 01:10:54

Temporary bricking of devices as a service.

Aaron

01:10:55 – 01:10:55

It's great.

Jon

01:10:55 – 01:10:56

That's great.

Simon

01:10:56 – 01:10:57

Simon, do you have

Jon

01:10:57 – 01:10:58

a sick pick?

Simon

01:10:59 – 01:11:20

Mine is very niche today. So I don't know what you can see behind me, but I, I work in a space that is a metal structure with drywall on top. So there's not even wood studs. It's like metal studs and then drywall and insulation. And so whenever I wanna mount something on the wall, I the metal studs are really thin, but also really hard to drill through.

Simon

01:11:20 – 01:11:37

So I have to, to go with the stud finder and then drill. And if I miss, I just punch a hole for nothing. And then when I hit it, I have to press really hard for thirty seconds. And then like, it's really painful. And I was like, I tried different things to hang stuff in just a sheet of drywall.

Simon

01:11:37 – 01:12:00

And it's, it's got surprisingly holding capacity. You can hold to up to nine kilos, but it I tried these little hooks that can open like this and it kind of locks it inside. And then one day, one of the trainee who installed, the ceiling fan up here said, dude, you gotta try the little plastic, screw in. It's basically a screw for a drywall. It looks like this.

Simon

01:12:00 – 01:12:19

It's kind of thick and you won't see it, especially if There we go. And so literally all you need is a screwdriver. You put it anywhere you want and you just screw the thing and it goes like in butter, super easy. And then it's like rock solid. And so I've, I've made 16 sound panels.

Simon

01:12:19 – 01:12:35

They're fairly heavy. I've got my little ukulele and some plants and it's, I can now decide anywhere on the surface wherever I wanna put it and I just screw it in and it's in three seconds, no tool, it's done. On the flip side, it does leave a massive hole on the Sure

Jon

01:12:35 – 01:12:38

it does. Yeah. Yeah. Good thing you're a homeowner now.

Simon

01:12:38 – 01:13:06

It is perfect if you have a space where you want to add stuff, but not then remove it because it is going to leave a hole the size of a, I don't know, like way too big. But for what I'm doing, and I'm just filling stuff, knowing it's not going to change. And if ever I'm going to have to, like, it's not painted, it's the drywall with the it's been sanded and but it's very warehouse y. And so this thing, if you have a space like this and you just want to mount stuff anywhere, this is gold. I don't know if you're going

Aaron

01:13:06 – 01:13:11

to take pictures. Drywall anchors. I think, I think they're drywall anchors.

Simon

01:13:12 – 01:13:16

Yeah. Yeah. There you go. I just destroyed. They entered my life recently.

Simon

01:13:16 – 01:13:18

So I'm going to sick pick that.

Jon

01:13:18 – 01:13:30

Nice. Can sick pick something that I think I maybe, I don't know. I may have sick picked them before, but I've been using them in a different way. And so, I love it. These, Rode wireless GoPro squares.

Jon

01:13:30 – 01:13:40

So I bought I bought this as a way to, like, to clip onto my shirt and have, basically get this mic out of my face for Mhmm. Some

Simon

01:13:41 – 01:13:42

To move your nose.

Jon

01:13:42 – 01:14:05

And yeah. Because I I've been doing a lot of shots, like, and so it was an attempt to get one of the pieces out of out of shot that I need to worry about having a a a microphone right there. And the the sound quality wasn't great, and it, like, I just I really didn't like it. It has a little light on it, and it just, like, draws you focus. There's, like, it

Simon

01:14:05 – 01:14:06

says with the when you move around.

Jon

01:14:06 – 01:14:09

Yeah. Totally. It, like, catches the light. Yeah. It's awful.

Jon

01:14:10 – 01:14:44

And so I've been using it with, another Rode little lav mic thing, which was which was the first way I was using it, which was fine. But then I, I had another Rode mic that I used to have on my camera, and it just picked up way too much room noise and just was unusable. But now because I can, I can use the other one of these as just like a wireless transmitter to the camera, which means I can get my Rode mic? Like it's just above, just out of shot of the camera. I know I've got this other big mic in my face for recording the podcast.

Jon

01:14:44 – 01:15:06

We need better quality audio for the podcast, but there is another mic just above the camera here, which is just connected to one of these. And it just like, it means I can move it anywhere. I can get it like right up close to my face and just out of shot. And it just like solves all of the cascading issues that were happening once I decided to take away this nice high quality, like mic right in my face. Yeah.

Jon

01:15:06 – 01:15:08

It's it's solved all my problems.

Aaron

01:15:08 – 01:15:16

So you've got the overhead mic and you're telling me that's connected to one of those little one of those little boxes? And then the other box

Jon

01:15:16 – 01:15:25

it's got an overhead Rode mic. And then on the back here, it's got one of those boxes, which means I don't need to then, like, run an XLR cable all across the office. There's a receiver

Simon

01:15:25 – 01:15:31

and a transmitter. And so, yeah, you Yeah. And the other the other one sits on the camera, plug it into the camera mic, I guess.

Jon

01:15:31 – 01:15:40

Yeah. So it just comes in on the mic, feed as well. So it's like I don't need to, like, see anything up later. Yeah. And it seems to do the compensation of latency and stuff.

Jon

01:15:40 – 01:16:05

I don't know how it's doing that wirelessly, but I haven't needed to correct, like, move it either side, like, how cool audio to be in time. But, yeah, it's just, like, so easy to now move this anywhere I want. And so I've got, like, the camera, a nice key light and a nice microphone, that of kind of the three pieces that then I can move outside. I can move like into a different room if I'm recording. Yeah, it's great.

Simon

01:16:05 – 01:16:26

Because now there's some I'm super cool. From your camera. So it's synced with the video part where we all have I can see a delay in Aaron and then in me as well because it's a a fancy DSLR, and then the the audio doesn't have the latency. So you're supposed to add some frames. But so because you you you record the audio and the video in your camera, they're perfectly matching.

Jon

01:16:26 – 01:16:28

Yeah. And it shouldn't. I don't understand why it is in sync

Aaron

01:16:28 – 01:16:30

because there's still wireless in between.

Jon

01:16:30 – 01:16:39

Exactly. Yeah. Like it's yeah. It has to be latency. And so I guess the camera is accounting for it, but it seems to come HDMI.

Jon

01:16:39 – 01:16:42

Either that or I'm just getting too old to care and I'm like, yeah, close enough. Yeah.

Simon

01:16:43 – 01:16:50

Fine. Do you do you have a overhead mic just above the frame or do you have a a black microphone blending with your black oh, there it is.

Aaron

01:16:51 – 01:17:03

That's another that's another thing I use the confidence monitor for is just I will always do this and then make sure that the it's just, like, barely out of frame and that's that's where I start. But that's another reason that it's it's black. I always wear black.

Simon

01:17:03 – 01:17:07

I did not notice it the whole time and I was actively looking for it. You always wear black shirts.

Jon

01:17:07 – 01:17:12

I was thinking, man, those AirPods, transmitting some really good quality sound right now.

Aaron

01:17:12 – 01:17:13

That's No, no, no.

Jon

01:17:13 – 01:17:14

It's impressive. No, no, no. Yeah.

Simon

01:17:15 – 01:17:23

So when you start recording the dark mode and light mode with, matching t shirts, You and Steve, you're gonna have to have a white little foam as well. You have

Aaron

01:17:23 – 01:17:25

to get a white windscreen. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

Jon

01:17:26 – 01:17:44

Alright. We're gonna wrap it up there. It's way too easy to just keep talking to you, Aaron. Thank you so much for joining us. I think, like, I personally have probably there's probably no one I've taken more inspiration from as a content creator than you and Steve and the way you can present highly technical topics in a super interesting way.

Jon

01:17:44 – 01:17:46

So thank you so much for joining us. It means a lot.

Aaron

01:17:46 – 01:17:52

Well, thank you for having me. I, I really appreciate, both y'all's work and your friendships. Thanks for having me here.

Simon

01:17:52 – 01:17:53

Keep trying hard.

Aaron

01:17:54 – 01:17:56

No. Well, talk soon.

Jon

01:17:56 – 01:17:58

See you later. Bye. Bye.

#33 - Aaron Francis on Fusion, TUIs and Content Creation

Transcript

Not enough emails?