Laravel vs. JavaScript with Dax & Adam Elmore

Ian

Alright. Hello, everybody. Man, we have ultra special guests. Ultra special guests this week.

Aaron

There's there's never been this many people on the show before.

Adam

There's so many people.

Ian

The party. We got Dax and Adam, from how about tomorrow podcast and all their other various ventures. We're gonna talk to them about all kinds of stuff. I'm sure Laravel versus JavaScript, coffee.

Dax

Oh, man.

Aaron

What a what a weekend. Lots to come. Big weekend on Twitter. I know.

Dax

Great timing

Aaron

for this. Let's just start. I don't you guys have backgrounds. You got into computers at some point. Nobody cares about that.

Dax

Yeah. Let's just start.

Ian

I mean Jump in. Oh, Oh, yeah. So nobody knows who you guys are. Yeah.

Aaron

So welcome to the show. Thank you for being here. Super exciting. We do wanna talk about Laravel JavaScript. Wanna talk about your you're selling coffee at a terminal.

Adam's working on a course. Nobody knows what SST is. It's gonna be

Ian

SST is. Yes. I have no idea.

Dax

Yes. We do.

Ian

And and let me tell you. This is the funniest thing. I love Dax's Twitter persona. Okay? And I have actively not figured out what the fuck he's doing.

Like, I don't know what SST is. Like, I don't know. I don't really understand if you work there, doc, so you own it, or even how it makes money. Like, I don't wanna know anything about it because I just loved your vibe. And I'm like, if I know too much, it's gonna mess it up.

Like, I don't wanna know anything about it. It's some JavaScript y AWS stuff. Good. I just leave it there. So I'll probably learn more today.

But

Dax

It's it's funny because that's, I hear I hear this so much. It's like, I think our marketing is really good in terms of people, like, hearing the literal name, but it just doesn't go further than that. Like Nope. Everyone's like, I've heard of this, and I think I'm supposed to say it's good, but, like, I don't know what it is or what the point is or I'm never looking into it. So it's very common situation.

Ian

It seems it ties to the job. As soon as I see like next JS, I just like, I just, you know, blackout and I just like, don't go bother than that.

Dax

So, Yeah. Me too.

Aaron

But

Ian

all your code snippets are awesome. So I'm like, oh, man. Look at it. It's like he's deploying AWS stuff with, like, one line of code. This is amazing.

I should figure

Aaron

that out. Cool. I I should

Dax

investigate, but

Aaron

I'm not I'm not going to.

Ian

If I'd not like to because I don't wanna ruin the vibe.

Dax

Yeah.

Aaron

I also have this question. SST, they you you work there. Right? They pay you. This is your job.

It's not just like 3 friends on a working on a open source thing. Right?

Dax

Yeah. It's funny because, I I guess yeah. Ultimately, like, we are 3 friends working on a thing, and I guess, we come off a certain way. But, people are always surprised to know that we're a YC company. We are venture funded, like,

Adam

Didn't know that.

Dax

You know, by serious VCs. We're a very serious business, you know, with grown up serious stuff like money and things. But as a different client yeah.

Adam

He's right now. Overcompensated a little bit. You just, like, went way too hard. No. It's serious.

It's very serious.

Dax

No. It's really, Lex. It's definitely real.

Aaron

You don't have to posture. I'm sorry. We know it is. We know it

Dax

is for sure. No. I mean, I only say that to contrast with, this is the type of company we wanted to build, you know, even though it's it is those things, like, we just wanna say 3 friends having fun. That's why I like, you know, our our tone is is what it is.

Ian

Yeah. That's awesome. I love the cofounder thing.

Aaron

You were YC backed. I did not know you were venture backed. That is that is very much news to me. So Yeah.

Ian

I didn't know the venture backed part. I didn't know YC, but I didn't know the venture backed. Oh, yeah. I I assumed it, but I I figured the money was coming in somewhere somehow.

Dax

I had a tweet a while ago where whenever people find out that we're a YC company, they're always like, really? You guys? Like, everyone's so surprised. And I'm like, at some point, I just start being offended, I think.

Ian

We're breaking the mold here, you know? Otherwise, you guys are a certain certain style, you know, guys have a little different tack to it.

Dax

Yeah. Which is good. And in terms of money, the company's history is a little weird. So I joined the team 3 years ago, but it had been around a little bit before then, with a completely different product. And that product still makes money to this day.

It's just we haven't like touched it in several years. Reason being is, just the space that's in, we saw, like, a ceiling with it, so we needed to pivot to something else. And it's still related. Like, the other tool, was a CI tool for companies in the serverless space. It just oriented around a certain framework that wasn't really growing.

So we have to just do our own.

Adam

That's such a nice way of putting that. Wasn't really growing.

Dax

Yeah.

Aaron

I don't know. What's the rep who are we talking about here?

Dax

Serverless framework. I don't know if you guys Serverless framework.

Aaron

I remember them. Yep.

Dax

They are the most confusing framework ever because they own serverless.com. So when I was first, like, trying to learn, okay, what the hell is serverless? I kept landing on serverless.com and I was like, Is this like the concept or is this like a specific framework? So they just had great domain position for years.

Ian

Great domain. There's nothing better than a great domain. It's like

Aaron

Oh, man.

Ian

That's top of my list.

Dax

Yeah. So, they were they actually, I would say made it as a framework. They grew to a pretty large, like, usage base enough so that our previous product could make money just serving people in that ecosystem. But they just kind of went sideways after a certain point. And if they're not, if they're not hyper growing, we won't either.

So that's why eventually we said, okay, we need to do our own framework. There needs to be an angle for us to like, you can't just decide to start a framework, you need some kind of hook. So eventually found that and we started our own thing and that's what we've been working on for the past 3 years. And our new products are oriented around our own framework and it's growing that way. Cool.

Do

Ian

you guys have a sample product?

Dax

Sorry?

Ian

Like, is there a product for sale yet or not yet?

Dax

Yeah. So, so the new the new framework we started 3 years ago, we're on like it's just been a lot of exploration and figuring out like what exactly we should do. The newest version of it, which we're calling Ion, is like, that's like our, like, we don't have any better ideas now. We've kind of went through the years, made our mistakes, figured out exactly what we need to do. And this is like our really like our final bet.

And it

kind of fixed all the problems we had in the past couple of years. We do have another product, that's the console, which is an optional thing that people using their framework, can use alongside once they're in production. It's pretty small surface area wise, so there's a lot more that we need to do for it. We're actually working a lot on it this week and the next week, but it's just a classic open source situation. You just need to build 2 really good products.

1, the open source one and one that works with it. So Yep. It's a lot of work.

Ian

It's a work. Yeah. Yeah. But people work.

Dax

Fun of people. It's great.

Ian

Yeah. A lot of that.

Adam

That part's going on. A lot of people on Twitter.

Dax

That part's still great. You're Christian on on that side. Yeah. People love it. Yesterday, I sent my team the screen screenshots because, I had some tweet where I used the word idiots in my in the tweet and someone was like quote, tweeted it being like, oh, like, someone was upset.

It seemed seemingly upset by it. And then they also replied to me and I just replied to them with the word idiot without saying anything else.

Ian

Oh, gosh.

Dax

And then they followed me. So here's the thing. The people want this is what I've learned. No. This this is what they want.

Ian

I love having good Aaron on the same podcast here. This is, like

Aaron

Can we

Ian

The yin and the yang.

Aaron

Can we talk about the time where Dax was the meanest person in the world to me specifically?

Dax

Dax, do

Aaron

you remember

Dax

this? Wait. What?

Aaron

Oh, yeah.

Dax

This is a good one.

Aaron

This is

Ian

No way he remembers this.

Aaron

Of course, he does. This was one of his best. This was thermonuclear destruction on Twitter. I had just gotten laid off. Just gotten laid off.

Ian

That's not even that long ago.

Aaron

It's not even that long ago.

Dax

It's not even that long ago.

Aaron

I got a 1000000 kids. I got, like, 4 diseases now. I just got laid off. And I'm I'm seeing I'm, you know, hanging out on Twitter, unemployed, trying to, like, you know, scrounge up some food in the street for my family, and I'm like, alright. Dax has a tweet.

I'm gonna reply, and I'm gonna be snarky. Dax says something like, oh, we're working on something that nobody knows about. If you beg me, I'll release it tomorrow, or I'll release it today or something like that. And I just responded and said, no. I'm good.

I'll wait. Dax responds and says, oh, I'm sure you're tired of begging people to hire you at this point. And just, like, from outer space, nuclear warhead, everybody's like, woah, dude. I think I think Jay responded with the ref giving a red card with somebody else. Yeah.

It was just like, oh, guy gotta log off, man. That was brutal.

Dax

I think at some point, you know, you everyone has intrusive thoughts that enter their head. They're like, you're like staying at grocery store and you're like, what if I just smack the person in front of me on the head or something? That started happening to me with words. And then at some point, I was like, I just have to say it. So now I wanna get into just a thought.

I just have to I just have to do it. And there's no You

Ian

got that.

Dax

I have no control anymore. So I'm sorry for the capital.

Aaron

Yeah. I can't cosign that strategy, but I'm happy it's working.

Dax

It's not a strategy. It's just, it's just like a maybe a disease or something. Disorder. The world

Ian

needs all things, you know. Gotta cover all the bases.

Aaron

I feel I feel like Adam is waffling on what he wants his online persona to be. What's the story, Adam?

Adam

I think my default is to be an Aaron, but I become whoever I hang out with. And I hang out with Dax

Dax

a lot.

Adam

And I think that's pulling

Dax

me you can blame me?

Adam

It's pulling me towards this kind of, like, hateful, spiteful person. Duh.

Dax

I don't love it. That. Yeah. Yeah. Wow.

And I'm a Midwestern, though, so I don't know.

I don't know.

Adam

Like actually that. No. I think Dax is we've talked about this a lot. It's like the East Coast versus West Coast thing. Like, East

Ian

Coast is going on with

Adam

that. Yeah. He's actually more tough.

Dax

Going on here.

Adam

Yeah. Yeah.

Ian

Yeah. This is his way of being kind and polite. Like, I get it. This is, yeah, it's the East Coast.

Aaron

Just just another reason why I don't like New York City because people think being mean is being nice. It makes no sense to me.

Adam

I don't like New York either. I'm T.

Ian

V. I. Thinking. Aww. Okay.

Yeah. That's what it does.

Dax

I I always see people people talking online about you 2 fighting about New York. What's the what's the deal with that?

Aaron

Objectively, New York is terrible, and Ian loves it. That's basically

Dax

I'm assuming that he's, like, been to Times Square, and then that's it.

Ian

Exactly. Exactly.

Aaron

No. I went I

Ian

went to Times Square, and he's like, there was a naked guy there, and it was

Adam

dirty. Listen.

Ian

It's like, I'm a I I ate out a Speros and a Burger King, and the food is terrible. Like, that's the whole analysis he's giving me.

Aaron

First of all, naked is fine. Naked and pooping is worse. And it wasn't it wasn't a sparrow. It was a Chipotle at the bottom of the Empire State Building. And I took it back to my room and ate it in the hotel.

Dax

Oh, okay. No. We got

Aaron

it we got it all.

Dax

Ian, do you live in New York?

Ian

I live, up up an hour north of New York.

Aaron

Suburbs. She lives in the suburbs.

Dax

I live

Ian

in the suburbs. Yes.

Dax

Yeah. That's true. Well, we have to all go and fix Aaron's and, I think, Adam's perspective on it. There's there's just no way that someone could truly hate New York. It just feels impossible.

Ian

No. There's no

Adam

way you could actually enjoy New York. I think people cope with New York. They tolerate it. It's just everybody has a different tolerance.

Dax

There's there's

Adam

no way you can my soul hates New York so much, and I've been there, like, a dozen times. So it's not like

Aaron

a vindication.

Adam

I just can't imagine that other human beings actually enjoy it. That's how I feel about that.

Ian

Place. It's the best place. I also just feel like your business will be more successful if you're in New York. Like, I wish I'd moved to New York City. I feel like I would be even more successful just living there.

You got the energy of the city, all the people, the business. Yeah. But you didn't

Aaron

you didn't move there because you know that you know that the the cost is too high, Ian. The emotional cost is too high.

Ian

The actual cost is too high.

Aaron

Then the actual cost.

Dax

I lived in the city for 11 or 12 years.

Ian

Okay.

Dax

Pretty much my entire adult life. It's like I just keep moving to places that people hate. But again, it's just because they only go to the Times Square or the Times Square equivalent. I'm convinced. By the way, I know I know that New York is dirty.

The entire time I lived there though, I I just was blind to it. I didn't I was just everyone's like, it's so dirty. I just

Adam

sure. I just

Dax

did not see it at all.

Ian

Exactly. It's not that dirty. Unthink City scale, those other big cities, way dirtier than New York, way dirtier. And for much like the percentage of New York, that's like either bad or dirty or whatever is much smaller than other cities. It's like every other city you go to.

It's like, okay, you got 2 blocks where, like, it's nice and a little two block zone, and everything else is terrible. New York City, it's like all Manhattan is good, and big chunks of the outer boroughs are good. And, like, it's good. Great.

Adam

Did you know, Ian, there are other places in the world where it's 70 degrees in the evening. Did you know that?

Aaron

I don't know if you know that. Adam.

Ian

Trust me. I do know that. That's like

Adam

and you don't have to live in New York. Yep.

Ian

As I get older, I'm like, I gotta get out of New York. Like, once the kids are out, I'm like, just New York state. Like, just the weather wise, I'm just done with the weather. You know? Like, I just wanna be warm all the time.

Like, I am getting to that point. Like, I used to like the 4 seasons and all that stuff, but it's wearing on me. I'm like, man, oh, well If you wanna

Aaron

if you wanna be warm all the time, I've got just the spot

Dax

for you.

I might have to get that. That's great.

Aaron

Yeah. Yeah. Dallas.

Ian

I just discovered Miami last year. I'd never been really to, like, into Miami, and I wasn't sure what I'd think about it, but I went. It was it was awesome. It was great. We had a great time.

It was it was good stuff. I only spent 3 days there, but I gotta get down there again.

Dax

You know, someone showed someone showed me a trick the other day where if you're familiar with the city and you ask chatJPT, and you're going to a new city, you ask it like, oh, what's the equivalent neighborhood to, like, the one you're familiar with? It does, like, a fantastic job. It, like, it can it can, like, describe another city

in terms

of neighborhoods you're familiar with. And it works perfectly.

Ian

Gbt coming through again. That's a great trick.

Dax

All right.

Ian

So let's cover, Adam. We should cover a little bit about what you're doing before we go dive into the controversy of the day. But I was playing around with your tool. It's not I think your main tool is the stat muse, right? Is that kind of your main day job?

Adam

Yeah. Yeah. These days, that's my day job. So I was there. We started like 10 years ago.

I was there for, like, 5 years and gone for 3. I've been back for a couple.

Ian

Oh, wow.

Adam

So, yeah, it's my day job right now.

Ian

So just to describe this to people, it's like, it's like well, I was looking at more on the sports stats end, but it seems like Yeah. It does other things as well, potentially. But, anyway, so I didn't realize it was that old, though, because I thought thought it was, like, an AI thing. I'm, like, just type it in, like, who had the most home runs in baseball before 1945, and it's like Babe Ruth. And, like so I just figured it's like, you know, it's a cool little they're doing some AI stuff and turning into queries, but you were you were doing that before.

Adam

Yeah. No. We do it, like, the very brute force way. I mean, like, it's not

Ian

parsing it out.

Adam

It's not LLM. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Aaron

You just get a Slack message, and you gotta go look up the ads. The human Shoot. Babe Ruth, go look it up.

Ian

Not AWS. What was that? AWS Mechanical Turk. You know?

Dax

Yeah. Yeah.

Ian

Yeah. Wow. That's really cool. That does a great job.

Adam

Yeah. No. We, that's how we start. We started just like as it's just giving you, like, tables and charts for sports questions. Now we do have a finance thing.

Sports is much bigger for us. Like we really hit kind of a nerve in the NBA community. Now I think we have we have all of the North American sports. We just did, European soccer. So I don't know if you know anything about Premier League, but we've got Premier League now.

Ian

So that's great.

Adam

That's big. Yeah.

Ian

I'm more of a, I was more of a La Liga guy when Messi was there. But now now I just watch Messi in the US, so I don't have to even worry about the Europeans anymore. Fully fully in America.

Dax

I know it's wild. Okay. So the weird thing about Miami is I don't know. I can't really explain why this is the case, but celebrity just, like, randomly end up in, like, very normal situations right next to you. Like, do you see all those pictures of him at the grocery store?

Aaron

I did.

Ian

Oh, I actually didn't see that.

Dax

And I can't I have to, like, really stress this. This is, like, the most normal grocery store on the planet. It's, like, where you would go with your family, and then you turn an aisle and messages there, like, looking at jams. Like, it's such a weird situation. And the picture I posted the other day of Jeff Bezos just walking around my neighborhood.

Aaron

Yeah. Yeah. That was wild.

Dax

It's really odd. Wild.

Ian

That is the cool thing about cities. It's like you got that you know, there's just people walking in New York that's similar. It's like, oh, there's people walking around. And it's like, there they are. And they're in the restaurant with you or whatever.

Dax

I think in New York, it's it's so much easier to be anonymous. I thought you would just never notice someone that's around because there's so many people. That's true. Yeah. I guess I did see a good amount.

I think the one that jumps to mind is I was at a restaurant and the table right next to me was Michael Cera the whole time and he did not look good. He just didn't he just did not look good. Like, he looked kind of bummed out and, like, just not healthy. And I don't know. It just was a sad vibe.

Ian

There was this place on West Broadway we used to go that was like this really awesome restaurant, just like a little hole in the wall type place. And there was like, what's that? I think it's like Josh Hartnett or something like that is the guy's name. That's like 20 years ago or something. And yeah, he was just in there like eating.

I think I saw him in there twice. And, just like, oh, yeah, she's just like his spy. He just goes there and sits at the bar and eats and, like, nobody messes with him. Nobody went up to him and was like, give me your autograph or whatever. Just like,

Dax

you know, he just didn't look at all. Yeah. We also saw Louis CK, like, peak cancellation time too. And he also did not look very good. Was that right?

It was also an ice cream store. So it just looked like he just looked extra depressed because he's just there, like, getting

Aaron

ice cream. And he's like Yeah. Eating ice cream alone is not a good look. Yeah. The only famous person I've run into in Dallas is Troy Aikman.

He was, like, sitting at us at a restaurant once, and he was sitting, like, one table over. And I was like, I think I know that guy. And I didn't. It was Troy Aikman.

Dax

He Did you ever see anyone famous in the Ozarks, Adam? Do you ever see Brad Pitt?

Adam

Brad Pitt all the time. Yeah. No. Actually, he his parents still live here, so his brother has, like, a an electronics store or something here.

Ian

Oh, wow.

Adam

And his brother looks exactly like him. Like, exactly like him.

Dax

But not enough. Right? Because if you looked enough like him

Adam

I mean, pretty similar.

Aaron

Enough like him, he wouldn't own an electronic store.

Ian

It's it's fair.

Dax

It's got

Adam

to be really famous people.

Dax

There's no famous people here. Okay.

Ian

Is that why

Adam

is that why people live in cities like that? It's the celebrities Because I just can't I can't put it together in my mind. Like, people always say, like, oh, you've got everything. Everything is here. I think if you have, like, a 100000 people, you've got accommodations for everything you'd wanna do.

You have, like, a zoo and, like, what, Target?

Dax

I mean, I don't know. On your

Ian

list. What is he

Dax

beyond it?

Like, Target. What's the speed?

Aaron

Zu wouldn't have even made my list if I'm being honest. I

Dax

don't know what

Adam

you're telling me. I don't know. What, like, what do you guys

Dax

have on the list?

Adam

I don't understand. That's how you you're

Dax

so you're so you're living such a different life that you don't even you don't even understand what you don't don't have. That's how far

I will

Aaron

I will say saying zoo and bowling alley,

Dax

that does that does betray a little bit of the different life you're living.

Ian

I mean, I'm not using any

Adam

of that stuff anyway. Like, I don't leave my house, and I wouldn't if I lived in the city. But, like, I just don't understand, like, what are the things? Like, Broadway, is that it? It's like you can go to Broadway shows in New York.

It's like, what is the thing you guys have? Too far the other direction.

Dax

The Statue of Liberty.

Ian

I've just lived on the Internet. That's what I'm the vibe I'm getting. Right? He's like, you're just sitting all native.

Adam

Yeah. I know. We do. Yeah. Increasingly so.

Aaron

I will say

Ian

How do you get off the Internet? This is a an interesting question I have for people. Do you do you get off the Internet or no? Is there anything explicitly you do to get off the Internet, or are you just too locked in right now?

Dax

I'm the last person I could you guys at least have children. So Yeah. I imagine that. We're forced. That's kind of important to, like, pay attention to, I imagine.

Adam

I guess I imagine a day where I spend, like, next to no time on the Internet, but I'm not there right now. Yeah.

Aaron

Yeah. Adam, you fight. Don't you do, like, judo, taekwondo, something like that? Yeah.

Adam

Yeah. Jujitsu? Yeah. There you go. You named 2 martial arts without saying jujitsu.

Dax

That's

Aaron

Yeah. Without saying the one. That's very good. I do know you're vegan. I got that part done.

Ian

I'm vegan. I couldn't remember

Aaron

the martial art that you used. Yeah.

Adam

I did some yesterday. My face is a little beat up. I like, Mondays after open, man, I'm, like, all black eyed and everything.

Aaron

Here here's a here's a interesting tidbit for you, Ian. Adam, in his infinite wisdom was like, I don't need I don't need health insurance.

Dax

Why would

Aaron

I ever have health insurance? And then he's like, I'm gonna get into jujitsu and then also separately, for some reason, go to the hospital, like, 4 times.

Ian

Yeah. Literally. I I dropped my health insurance,

Adam

and I went to the hospital twice and started jujitsu. So

Dax

Yeah.

Adam

Not a good recipe.

Dax

Are you

Adam

back on the list? I've still saved money, just to be clear. Like, on premiums part.

Ian

Still saves a lot of money. Know. Yeah. This is not a philosophy I subscribe to. This is No.

It's so risky. Technically approved. This is definitely, that's a bad bad Wait. Wait. You gotta get the health insurance.

At least just get the one that's, like, covers nothing except for, like, your literally get my ass

Adam

out of the one

Ian

I have. It's not about though.

Adam

It's not about the money for me. I've done it for 15 years. It's the principle. I just don't wanna go into the main system. The system's just so bad and so dumb that I just don't wanna be a part of it.

Ian

Like, what if you lose your house and all your stuff? Because, like, I mean, for that when you get hit by a bus, like, that's. I don't know.

Adam

Don't they say you have to pay medical bills or something? I don't know.

Dax

You don't even have to pay. I don't know. I think you're saying it's the opposite.

Aaron

I think they're the only ones you can't discharge.

Dax

Yeah. Yeah.

Ian

I don't

Dax

know. Yeah.

Ian

A lot of risk there.

Dax

My my friends, on or something worked at a hospital billing thing, whatever. And I don't know if this is true. It definitely sounds extremely made up, but he is like the way they work, if you literally just send them $1 every time they ask you to pay, they're like some, like, counter resets. And then you keep this going on for years, and they eventually just give up. So

Ian

That's incredible.

Aaron

You know what we do with every every medical bill we get, literally everyone that's over, you know, $100, we call and say, what if I give you less? Yeah. Exactly. Right now.

Ian

I was just gonna I was just gonna say that. On the phone.

Aaron

Now. I'll give you 70%. You can run my credit card. And they're always like, yeah. Okay.

That's fine.

Ian

Yeah. It's great. It's great. I'm glad

Dax

that I have a

Adam

used car with cash.

Aaron

You just ignore the first letter. Right now. You get the second letter, and then you call, and you're like, oh, wow. Shoot. Oh, jeez.

Goodness. What if I give you 70%? And I'm like,

Dax

oh, that's awesome. Let's do it. Yeah.

Aaron

It's great.

Ian

That that definitely works. That you should everybody should do that for sure. Like, because that's just the odd even if you're like like, we have the high deductible because, yeah, I don't wanna pay whatever. I have the money to pay for, like, a couple $1,000 here and there, but I don't wanna have to pay $1,000,000 if I get sick or whatever. So, so yeah, when we get bills like that, it's like, yeah, you just call them and be like, I'm not paying this.

I'm paying out of pocket for this. Like, what are you gonna do for me? And then it's always at least, like, 25% off or more. Not just with, like, the bare minimum fighting bag, just calling. I I'm sure you get 50% off if you, like, really stuck to your guns and

Adam

Mhmm.

Dax

You

Ian

know, grab I've had

Dax

even crazier situation than that. So Liz had to get her gallbladder out, and they quoted us, like, over $100,000 or something. And we were just like, and then, I went, we went and looked up like all this stuff and it ended up being pushed down to, like, around 10,000. Oh, wow. And they technically keep trying to ask us for more and we just haven't responded in, like, years and nothing happened.

Adam

So Isn't there something and like, I did not do all this research because I was dropping health insurance. But isn't there something where, like, they can't hit your credit or something with medical bills? Are there something like if you don't pay, it's a different system or something? It

Dax

could be.

Ian

Yeah. It could be something like that.

Dax

Usually send to collections and collections tries to bother you and they eventually give up. That's been my experience.

I could

Ian

see that. Yeah. Are you working on a business

Dax

to do that?

Aaron

Is financial advice, by

Dax

the way.

Aaron

No. Nobody listen to this, please. Oh, boy. Yeah.

Ian

This is rough on here. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I've always had the health insurance.

I like the health insurance.

Dax

It's a

Ian

write off.

Dax

So I

Aaron

like the health insurance.

Ian

Of a write off.

Dax

You know?

Ian

Again, we're

Aaron

on the same page.

Ian

There you go.

Dax

We we have we have

Aaron

our little disagreements here and there, but I like I like the health insurance.

Ian

I got it, man. There you go. Yeah. I like that. Good job.

Oh, man. Alright. Alright. Let's get into some meat here. We've been on the mostly a lot.

Oh, let's jump over to the technical. Yeah. So I you guys are perfect for this because I feel like you guys are on the JavaScripty end of the world. We're on the Laravel end of the world. I mean, I I I know nothing about JavaScript.

I know Next. Js, all this stuff. I spent a couple months last year learning React just so I have some idea what's going on. It was like, maybe I was gonna use it for some projects or whatever. So I have a little idea of like pure react, but none of the like full stack, how it runs in the server and stuff.

And obviously this week, we've been coming out with, you guys are talking to Taylor tomorrow is my understand understanding, right, on your podcast. So everybody check that out, we'll we'll link that up. But yeah. So Taylor had his little, you know, post, which I thought was from the Laravel perspective, made a lot of sense about how full stack Laravel is and how it lets you build real applications quickly and reliably. And it's kind of like batteries included, has everything you need, versus kind of the JavaScript meaning of full stack, which at least to my understanding and my limited experience is more kind of like all the parts are sort of out there to do it, but you really have to put it all together yourself, and there's not a unifying, opinionated, overarching, sort of framework or, just even standards around that.

So that's my my summary. I don't know if you guys have anything to add to kind of that that summary of the situation.

Dax

No. I think that that makes sense. Yeah. It's funny because in this situation, yeah, me and Adam represent the JavaScript side, but I think the interesting detail here is, we're both I mean me and Adam are both full stack people but that term is obviously very very loose.

Ian

Proper full stack.

Dax

Both of us go very deep on the back end side, like deeper than what most people would say full stack because we do a lot of infrastructure work.

Ian

Right.

Dax

The question to ask is, why are either of us even doing JavaScript in the first place? It's not like it's the only thing we've ever done. I'm actually, like, somewhat newer to it. Like, I only started doing JavaScript in the back end in the last 3 years. Had a bunch of different stacks before then.

I think Adam's the same as well. So questions like why are we even here? Neither of us like the language, but we're not here because we're like, oh, we love we love JavaScript. No back end and JavaScript engineers really like that. SST also primarily serve even though we talk about front end stuff a lot, our audience is primarily, back end JavaScript engineers.

So the only reason any of us are doing JavaScript is because at some point, a lot of us bought into the idea of, picking a cloud and utilizing it maximally. So prior to this, I was building things in Elixir, prior to that in Go, prior then c sharp. Those systems are more around, like, creating a nice little bubble for you to live in, and then you can deploy that bubble anywhere, whether it's AWS on your own servers, whatever. There's, like, there's, like, little adapters for things, so you can kinda use some of the features that are in each of these providers. But at some point, a bunch of us had the notion of if you really commit yourself to a certain cloud, they can really handle a lot of things for you way more than you can with, like, more agnostic framework.

And they just give us a fundamental trade off. And it's fine if that doesn't click for you, but it has clicked for a bunch of people. Unfortunately, the best language to program these things is JavaScript. That's, like, what these clouds were built around. And if you look at some of the more newer ones like Cloudflare I know Ian's a big Cloudflare fan.

Ian

Love Cloudflare.

Dax

They're they're, like, even way more oriented around JavaScript. So we only bother so we only bother using JavaScript because it gives us access to all these other other things. If you went and built us, equivalent to Laravel or Elixir Phoenix or Rails, we just wouldn't bother using JavaScript. Do we just go back to one of these other systems that are more mature with, languages that we we prefer? That's at least my take.

Like, it's the only reason why I'm in JavaScript land. Like, I don't, like, I don't have any love for the for the language or anything. It just it gives me access to these things that other ecosystems just do they just don't build that way.

Ian

Yeah. Well, all those cloud elements are accessible from even a backend oriented framework, right? Like, I mean, it kind of removes the requirement, I guess, for some of the, the like, they've kind of glued it together with JavaScript where like, it's more accessible, from JavaScript, but like all the AWS stuff you can use from a Laravel app to the vast majority of it. Right? There are these like things like Cloudflare workers, which super annoyingly, like, yeah, you have to write JavaScript or whatever.

But, all the, like,

Dax

whatever, s 3 or RDS or whatever, all the big stuff is,

Ian

accessible from anything, really. So I don't know. Yeah.

Aaron

But I feel like I feel like when they're when, like, the stuff that Dax is talking about is less like the RDS and more like the step functions and stuff like that where it helps

Ian

you orchestrate a back end.

Aaron

Yeah. It helps you orchestrate what you would maybe traditionally do in, like, a monolithic back end in Laravel or Rails, and instead, you break it up into these AWS or otherwise primitives that then kind of form up your back end out of these little pieces instead of a monolith. Yeah.

Dax

Yeah. And it's funny you bring up step functions because I hate step functions. And I would say on this spectrum of, like, going really hard with like doing AWS native stuff, I actually don't go that far. There's just a spectrum, right? Like, I think that Ian mentioned like you can deploy a rel a Laravel app that are using the adapters that are for AWS flavor of things, like for events, for queues, for all those things.

Then it's like a step further where you're like, I don't like, imagine that you didn't care about letting me move this Laravel app to a different cloud. You would use it a little bit more intensely and use more of it and have give you, like, functionality, like, spin that stuff up and down really easily. And that's kind of the zone that I operate in. It's kind of the zone that Adam operates in as well. And I would say the majority of, like modern back end JavaScript that's like starting up today, it fits in in that category.

If you're not doing that, I don't really know why you'd be running JavaScript as your back end thing. I just That's interesting. I haven't really seen it and, like, I don't I don't know. It just doesn't make sense to me.

Ian

What's your theory? I have this theory.

Aaron

Alright.

Ian

And I don't know any this is this is totally This

Dax

is it.

Aaron

No facts.

Ian

There's no facts here at all.

Aaron

We don't need them.

Ian

We don't need them. But, like, how much is, like, JavaScript kind of taking over the mindset of a lot of programming and things like that is, I guess, I feel like a lot of it from the outside world feels very VC money backed. And how are there really a lot of applications in production in the tens, 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars, 1,000,000,000 of dollars that are running like this. Do you know what I'm saying? Like just deploying for the JavaScript front end and the connectors, and that's actually running a $1,000,000,000 business.

Like I'm, like a real, not just a $1,000,000,000 business of like on paper, but a real like revenue generating $1,000,000,000 business. Like, I don't know if it's just too early and they're not there or maybe they're out there and I'm not as aware of them. Obviously like a lot of big enterprise stuff is not built this way, so it's more newer webby stuff, but I don't know. I'm I'm curious what you guys are aware about that. That's like that.

Dax

Yeah. What's funny is, there's actually a lot of enterprise usage of this for the same reason I just mentioned. What do enterprises use? They use AWS. What do they try to do a lot of?

Like they try to offload a lot of their work through AWS, especially if they're not a tech company. So weirdly, some of the earliest adoption of that stuff is in big enterprise. Like, I don't probably know this better, but like a lot of the AWS heroes and and people from that world, they all work at these big enterprise companies. Right?

Adam

Is that a question to me?

Dax

That's cool. Yeah. You're you're adding

on a different planet. Yeah.

Aaron

We should've gone over that

Ian

at the beginning. Yeah. Lot of rhetorical. I didn't know

Adam

you're actually asking me a stupid question.

Ian

Yeah.

Adam

A lot I mean, a lot of the heroes do work at, like, random big companies. I know that because I don't know about these companies. It's, like, not big names that I've heard of, just, like, random companies. So like, well, they've been, they've

Ian

built out a new system in this more modern style. It's not necessarily running their whole enterprise. Right? Because like they have a COBOL app somewhere doing something, whatever, but it's like we have a new internal app that's doing whatever, something for the HR department or whatever they're doing, and they're gonna build it on this stack as like a freestanding, Yeah.

Adam

1 of the big examples, like when people talk about serverless, like adoption in the enterprise is Lego. So Lego had this big transformation where they went from kind of traditional app architecture to this very modern, like event driven stuff. But I, I honestly, I know there's like whole pages on AWS site about like companies that have adopted these modern approaches. I don't remember.

Dax

I said, I don't know. Yeah. So there's a lot and I think we've experienced this because our SST took a very weird route. Usually a framework starts, low end of the market and then moves to higher end. Weirdly, we got adoption first in the higher end because these companies were this is how they were building stuff.

So they're more familiar with our approach. And even though our tools are rough, like they had expertise in it, so they could they were the early adopters. Right. We've been working to, like, bring it down market to, like

Ian

That's interesting.

Dax

So, you know, the people that are that are building smaller things. But those are examples of enterprise side, on like, like the more like startup type thing. I hate bringing this up because I like obsessively bring up linear and I'm like, so self conscious every time I bring it up because

Aaron

I think

Dax

they're just the best app ever built and their backend isn't is in JavaScript.

It's the

but the point here though, is that, like, my point is, like, it's kind of irrelevant that's in JavaScript. Like, they're just a really talented team and, like, they would have just made it great. And it's not like, oh, they use JavaScript, therefore they were successful. You know, it's just like that's kinda like an irrelevant detail. But there are quite a lot of examples, in the past, like, I would say 5 or so years.

Adam

So this whole conversation, I wanna make sure, Ian, when you talk about, like, the VC and the noise, like, is most of the noise on Twitter? And if so, I don't even know how much of it's even back in JavaScript. How much of it's just

Dax

It's all front end.

Adam

Front end JavaScript portal.

Ian

There's a lot of more exposure. I think the front end JavaScript. Right? Like, everybody works at Vercel,

Dax

and who

Ian

who knows what they're all doing there. Right? Like, nobody knows. Nobody knows. Like, and that kind of thing.

I do think

Dax

We we we can't ignore the fact, like, you know, they've spent 300,000,000 or so. I think there's raised another 250. Like you spend that kind of money in a space. Like it's going to have some amount of impact. So you can't say it.

No one can say, oh, it's 0. It was like all natural. And I do think a lot of the noise specifically comes from them, especially with serverless. Sorry?

Adam

They've raised $550,000,000. Yeah. So I know you're like that buys some Twitter audience or Twitter banter.

Dax

You're just impacting the world. Like, if you spend that much capital on anything, you're gonna be able to build something out of it unless you're completely stupid.

Ian

Well, the linear thing's kinda interesting to me because it sort of represents a little bit what we're kinda talking about the sundry because, like, they had a issue. Like, I'm a I I experimented with using linear. We didn't fully move over to it, but, it was on there, whatever. I get their emails and whatnot. And it's like they had some kind of data issue where they lost, like, 12 hours of data and like for 24 or 12 or 24 And I don't know.

It was weird to me like they didn't have a point in time database recovery and, like, maybe 5 minutes of data, but to lose 24 hours data is a lot of data. And, like, so to me, it's like one of these, like, they're not a back end thinking company. Right? So it's like, yeah, we just shove the data up there. Who knows what those default settings were, if it was configured correctly or whatever.

But now maybe they just lost it through some other means. I don't know.

Adam

Yeah. So I don't know if you

Dax

have the

Ian

details there, but it was the other thing that actually was kinda weird.

Dax

I think they did recover it, but that situation was actually not from, like, their database messing up. So the reason why linear is so impressive compared to other apps is because they sync all the data to the front end. And it's like a crazy complex it's basically like treating every browser as another replica in your database. So that is, like, really sophisticated distributed systems problems. And they had some kind of weird issue with that.

So I think there were some rights that just stuck locally and, like, didn't make it up or something or there was, like, massively delayed, and obviously remerging after 12 hours causes a bunch of conflicts.

Ian

Gotcha.

Dax

Like yeah. So I think that was that situation, but I do agree with your point that I think the root of all this is again, to me, it just feels so made up. It's like there's a lot of people that start with something like Next. Js, and they're like, this is my whole application. It's just a Next.

Js application.

Right.

Ian

And I

Dax

think the impression externally is, like, that's what the jobs community is. But literally nobody does this. No, like, serious company does this. The reason we focus a lot on helping companies deploy Next. Js is because 90% of their system is this like AWS thing, sometimes in JavaScript, sometimes not.

They're using Next. Js on the front end and it's a pain in the ass to deploy alongside the rest of their stuff. So they come to us and we help them figure that out. Out. This is not their whole app.

Like, they don't they do not care about Next. Js. They're not like, oh, like, we have to, like, have all the latest features that need to be deployed on Vercel. They just don't care. It's just It's just the React default.

Adam

Right? Like, it's replaced create React app. It's, like, the default way to create a React app.

Dax

Yeah. And there are people like trying to use it for like everything. Like my whole system is in Next.

Js,

but you can't even it has no solution for doing any asynchronous work. Like, just that's just a nonstarter for, like, anything.

Aaron

But a real application.

Adam

Shipweeks coming, Dax. They could

Dax

have happened

Adam

this year. It could be this year.

Dax

That's true. That is true.

Ian

So when is their ship week?

Dax

I think

it's this month.

Aaron

No. Dax is gonna go crazy on

Adam

ship week.

Dax

Oh, but here here's the thing, though. I am going on vacation, to Europe on

Aaron

Sorry, Liz. Sorry, Liz. They shit something. Got it.

Dax

You know, she literally told me she was, like, no funny with Purcell on vacation. Well,

Aaron

I don't know if she knows you very well. I know y'all are married or whatever, but I can't

Dax

resist. How

Ian

long are you going for? How long are you going for?

Adam

That's I'm

Dax

going to Lisbon and Spain for a week, and Okay. I I'll be here for their ship week announcement, which I am curious about. But,

Ian

Maybe he could hold out a week. I mean, I I could see him.

Aaron

There's no way he can

Ian

hold out a week. It's not, like, 4 weeks.

Adam

No. Like, what year?

Aaron

Listen. Adam's not gonna understand this in this reference, but this is red meat for Dax. Ship meat is red meat. Like, he's gotta pounce on it.

Ian

No. No. No.

Dax

No. My my whole attitude to this is, I have, you know, like, you like sort of fire, like, you know, I've, like, gotten the smoke going and I think other people will, I can delegate this one, I'm hoping. I can delegate to the people. Incredible.

Ian

The disciples.

Aaron

So what did you think, Dax and Adam, what did you think about the the discourse on Twitter around the Laravel JavaScript? What's a framework? What's back end? Michael Jackson, isn't that his name? That's definitely his name.

Michael Jackson remix. Weighed in.

Dax

The most ungoogle thing in the world.

Aaron

Yeah. Yeah. Michael Jackson React router version 7. So he weighed in. Ryan Florence weighed in.

Taylor weighed in. Everybody weighed in. Y'all are having them on on the show tomorrow. So what what are your thoughts as you're prepping for this big show? What were your thoughts watching all of this go down?

Prepping.

Ian

They're prepping. Right now.

Aaron

They're all in the processing.

Adam

Prep. Yeah.

Ian

That that

Dax

is allergic.

Adam

Dax is allergic to anything prepping or process or

Aaron

Perfect.

Adam

Writing things down. I know. Right?

Dax

I think Adam had some feelings. I saw him post.

Adam

I mean, I I just feel like so when people say, like, the JavaScript world, we don't have this kind of, like Full full stack. Full list Mhmm. Stack. Fuller stack. I don't know.

We don't have that, but we do like, there are a few of them people have tried. They just weren't the most popular. Like, they didn't take over Mhmm. In the way that maybe or, like, are there is there an Yeah. That became very popular.

No. But some people have tried, like,

Aaron

Yeah. That became very popular. No. But some people have tried, like, yeah. We give you ultimate freedom to pick your favorite packages and tie them together loosely.

And everybody's like, seems hard.

Adam

So my my view is just that it's, like, random that, like, in the JavaScript world for whatever reason, the ones that went out and became popular were these kind of, like, modular systems and the ones in PHP and Rails. I think what Dax said, I mean, all that stuff about infrastructure and cloud in the last few years, that makes sense. I get it. I guess I just, I feel like it's all kind of like just random.

Dax

Yeah. I definitely agree with that. I think there's like it's people really understate how much things come down to a specific time, a specific person, things lining up in a certain way. So, Jay, CEO of a company, he described this thing. I forgot what coach it was, but, he was talking about his team over the years and it's the same group of people on the team, but it's like a different team every year.

It's like, this is the 2022 team. This is a 2023 team. Even though it looks the same, it's like it's you treat it like a different era. So I think there is a lot of that going on with things that are like as incredible as some of this stuff like to have to get this big to have this level of influence. There's so much variability on randomness and stuff.

There's so many things. Right? Like JavaScript, I would say, had a big reset with TypeScript. Like, it came out. It got to a point where it sort of became the default, but then it took even longer than that for people to, like, understand it well enough to actually build the right level of tooling.

And that's kinda what's happening now. You start to see libraries come out that are, like, correctly using it. And also, it's like we're at TypeScript v 5 now. I wouldn't even say all this was possible till, like, around v 4. So there's just been a lot of change and and and variation.

I'm convinced though that every there's been a like Adam said, there's been a bunch of attempts trying to do the let's have a rails for JavaScript thing. And there's been like 1 or 2 projects that are in that category. It just doesn't just doesn't work. Like I like I said, if if you pitch me that and I look at it, I just wanna go use a different language. That's kinda where I immediately go to.

Yeah. In terms of the discourse, it's funny because I think when you're building a framework, you're in this category of in a very small pool of people. Right? Like, there's, like, very few people that really build and do an open source thing. And you ultimately it's this weird thing where you, like, are so nerdy about this stuff.

So you're, like, really into other things even though if it's not for you. Like, I'm sure, like Taylor is like super interested in in what like remakes and next is doing just from like an academic point of view because, you know, it helps him reorder himself and and vice versa. Like, everyone's, like, stunning each other and there's a lot of, like, just fundamental respect in that way, even though your approaches might be completely opposite at the end of the day. So that's kind of what I saw in the initial discourse. Like, when I saw it, I was like, okay.

That's that's what it is. Like, I studied Laravel a lot, like, for our work. Like, we we look at everything from the way they do their docs to what concepts of how big their scope is. And I'm sure everyone everyone is doing that. So I found that initial post interesting from that perspective.

I think as usual on Twitter, it's, it was like there's an initial interaction that is fine. And then, like, it devolves into a really stupid place after, which is I think it's just how everything everything goes.

Ian

Oh, it

Dax

is. Yeah. I thought there's almost no value in, like, the general discourse after.

Ian

Going too far down the thread, you know, makes no there's no point. No.

Dax

Yeah. You

Ian

don't wanna pass the first couple. I do think the the history is super interesting and definitely something people forget. Cause I do feel like P P in general, of course, is definitely my background is like, and even with Taylor, it's like rooted in a lot of like solo founder with no money at all. And so it's like, you know, and Taylor worked at user escape my company. And then when in early Laravel days, and then he built forge by himself and, you know, went off and did that.

And it's like, what are the tools that are gonna let one person with no money go and build a product that makes 1,000,000 of dollars? And so that's like the mindset. Like, you don't wanna connect a 1,000 things and have all the complexity. You just wanna be like, I use this one tool. It does everything I need.

And now I move forward. Whereas like the modern sort of JavaScript ecosystem seems like it's come from a different place. Right? Like, there is money, and there's enterprises, and there's VC money. And it's like, okay.

Like, we can have specialists even in different roles and all that kind of stuff. It's not so focused on what one person can achieve with it, as, like, its legacy. Obviously, now, I think on both stacks, like, one person can do a lot or huge teams can do a lot because they're they've evolved to that. But, the kind of core sort of baked in really deep mindset is maybe a little bit different there about what they're trying to achieve and, like, how they're trying to achieve that from, like, a business

Dax

perspective. And JavaScript is just messier. Like, they're just like a it's a messier history. It's a more accidental history. The hottest take I have with this is I don't think good engineers enter the JavaScript space until the last, like, 3 or 4 years.

And I think previously, it was stewarded by people that were just a lot less competent.

Aaron

That is a hot take.

Dax

I like that. That's So

Aaron

That's yeah. That's red hot.

Dax

And I think it's because of what I described. Like, prior to like, why would anyone good on the back end get into jobs from the back end? Like, I'm sure there of course there were individual examples, but broadly there was like almost no reason to. I think more recently it's attracted a much better caliber of like, you know, people that could serve as leaders. And things are getting better, but there is just a crazy messy history with it.

So, yeah, like I said, I don't I wouldn't, like, choose it if it wasn't for a bunch of other reasons. Well, that

Ian

but that's, like, always the interesting thing about all these languages. Like, the winner like, the back end, the biggest language is still PHP. Like, just in terms of raw number of, like, lines of code out there and, like, JavaScript on the front end. It's like these languages that everybody's like, oh, they're all they're terrible in all different ways. They're terrible.

Right? Like, everybody beats on PHP and JavaScript forever. But these are the biggest languages because they, you know, for whatever reason, some of that ugliness is useful in different ways or allows more people to access it or whatever the reason they've actually, you know, kind of survived and thrived. Even though there are other languages that are technically superior and things. Can we

Adam

can we hear Aaron? Aaron's working on the video. Right? Can we get a

Aaron

sneak peek of this video? Working on a video. Yeah. So I I did a I did a did a quick response video that I already published that I was just so freaking proud of. I was just so pumped that I turned it around.

Dax

So I knew that. Fast that was. I was like, what the hell? Is it the same day?

Aaron

Oh my god. Same day. I called I called Steve in the morning, and I was like, oh, dude. This is this is gonna be something. We have to do a video.

And he was like, great. Do it. And so I, you know, recorded it and sent it over to him, and he edited it. And we got it up the same day. Super proud of that.

So now I'm working on a I'm working on a new video. Hopefully, it'll be out, you know, today or tomorrow to capitalize. And it's going to be there's a little sneak peek for everybody. It's going to be called Laravel versus React. And then, yeah.

It's gonna be great already.

Dax

You you

Ian

know you know Plus the name is great. Yeah. We're good. We're good.

Aaron

We're done. And then it's, it's kind of a it's kind of a bait and switch, and it's, Laravel versus React is a ridiculous question. You should use them both together if you want. React is very good on the front end. Laravel is very good on the back end.

So it's going to be kind of an overview of, like, how you can use Laravel with React or Vue or even Next JS or LiveWire. And it's a whole, like, I'm gonna have, you know, charts and graphs drawn by Steve that show, like, where Laravel starts and stops and where React starts and stops in terms of, like, front end to back end network. And hopefully, like, my goal, and I think this is Laravel's goal as well, is not to convince people not to re to use React. It's to convince people that, like, there are back end solutions that are really thought through and powerful, and you should pair that with your favorite front end solution. I think the thing that I always see is, like, the I think Dax mentioned it where people, like, claim Next JS is gonna be their whole stack, and then it's like, everyone else is like, yo.

How does that can't work at all. So hopefully hopefully, the video will convince some people that, like, Next is great. React is great. Vue is great. You should pair it with something on the back end that is powerful.

That that is the hope. So we'll see we'll see if we can pull it off.

Dax

Nice.

Adam

I'm excited.

Dax

Yeah. Yeah. And I think and again, like, just from the systems that we see that just is how even people doing full stack JavaScript, they build a separate system for their back end that is a lot more capable than what this front end framework can do. So, yeah, it's just this weird thing. Like, I don't have it's a lot of it feels like it's everywhere, but at the same time, I go look at, like, our user base, like, like nobody's actually doing that.

So yeah. It's like

Aaron

this Once once again, the discourse and the reality are are are quite different.

Dax

Yeah. If you

Aaron

can believe that.

Ian

Yeah.

Aaron

Alright. I wanna cover 2 other things. We got we've got Adam's working on a course. Mhmm. And we've got the boys started a coffee company.

So we gotta we gotta cover that. Also, we gotta give a plug to

Ian

buy this coffee. Just how you buy it is totally insane. I love it.

Aaron

Totally insane. We gotta give a plug for their podcast tomorrow FM, or how about tomorrow? I'll just give a quick rundown. The the podcast is basically, Adam says something like, man, Dax, have you ever, god, have you ever really thought that we're all just gonna, like, die one day? And Dax is like Dax will say something like, you know, I've actually thought about this a lot, and I actually used to work I used to work with a guy.

And so here's here's the reality of the situation. So if you if you like if you like that vibe

Ian

such a good

Dax

that that is their podcast. Yeah.

Aaron

I like

Adam

to think of our podcast this is mostly technical. I like to think ours is, like, barely technical.

Dax

Barely technical. Sometimes sometimes we say some things that are technical. It happens, bro.

Aaron

And if you're if you're not if you're not very online, you'll get, like, 40% of it. Actually actually, Adam Adam plays the foil a lot. He's like, hey, Dax. I saw you tweeted this. What?

I don't know.

Dax

What what do you mean? Like, what does this mean?

Aaron

What are you talking about?

Dax

And so it kinda kinda brings the audience along. So Then once a month, they'll do an hour rant on Purcell, and then Yeah.

Aaron

Yeah. That's what we

Dax

said. Yeah.

Ian

Then we gotta buy you off the

Aaron

Let's let's start coffee, man. Do we wanna go there?

Ian

Yeah. How did this all come about? This is fascinating. I I love anything real world. It's like physical world.

Can we get a box and shove some cross and ship it out? Like, that's so

Dax

bad. Is it fun? It's also not fun.

Adam

It's fun,

Dax

but it's also not fun. And lots of It's

Ian

way better than the reality. I'm sure. Like, the dream of it is amazing, though.

Aaron

Yeah. So back up back up a little bit, and somebody give us a story of how these 5 friends came together and how you decided to ship coffee from the terminal. Go ahead, Max.

Dax

Yeah. So I, this is a while ago. Prime tweeted, the Primagen for those of you that are online. He tweeted something like, oh, does anyone know a coffee company? Like, I'd love to do, like, some kind of coffee sponsorship.

And I have 2 friends that own coffee roasters. So I messaged him, and it was kind of like like we weren't like, oh, let's do this for sure. We kind of we're kind of like casually talking about it over the course of months. Then eventually we like, we're like, okay, let's do this for real. So we got together me, Adam, Prime and TJ, all of us know each other from streaming on Twitch.

And we're okay, let's, let's like do it. It's like build a coffee business. And then a week into it, Prime messages being like, Hey, so commentier just messaged me and they want to do a sponsorship. So sorry, like, can't do it.

Ian

Remember that when I

Adam

asked if there were any coffee companies that wanted to sponsor me? Well,

Dax

there are.

Aaron

There are.

Ian

Shock shockingly. Yeah.

Dax

Yeah. So we're, like, bummer. But, you know, that is a good opportunity. He should he should do it. So we're, like, okay.

And we kinda forgot about it. Then a few months later, he was just being, like, this sponsorship sucks, but let's do this for real. He just wasn't making, like, any money.

Adam

Coming to your just get taken straight right here.

Dax

I mean, their product is great. I mean, I don't drink coffee at all. That's another funny detail here. That's another fun. It's great.

I think it's disgusting. I hate coffee. I'll eat coffee ice cream. I think it's delicious, but

Aaron

That's the wildest part to me is that

Dax

you eat coffee ice cream. Yeah. It's it's great. So when we got together again, we're thinking it. So the idea was the, the, I guess the premise is, 1 influencers like Prime, people are trying to do content full time, need a way to, like, you know, make money.

They need to sell something. The people lining up to pay them are usually mediocre developer tool companies that, like, just don't have it. I'm just gonna be real, like right? It's like it's it's not like

Aaron

This is great.

Dax

This is great. And it's like, yeah, you can take those deals, but then now people are following you because they find you credible, and now you're like you know, it's a whole conflict of interest thing, if there's not proper alignment. If you find alignment, that's great, but, you know, it's obviously hard to find that. But it's not something like coffee, you know, that has nothing to do with with anything. No one's gonna be upset at that.

Well, no people were upset at that. But, generally, people are not gonna be upset

Ian

at that. Right.

Dax

And then the second thing was the developer audience is big enough that you could probably launch any kind of thing, where if you can reach millions of them, that's not like a sizable audience. And it doesn't matter that you're not, like, competing as a coffee company or, like, in this other other bubble. So, like, okay. Let's just do stuff that developers would find funny, entertaining, etcetera. We came across so I use this library for SST that helps us build, like, really fancy terminal based UIs in go.

And then so we're like, Oh, let's make a CLI that people can download and install and then they can, you know, buy coffee through this like little terminal app. And then we found out the same company builds another library that you just mount that same UI over SSH. So then it's totally seamless. You don't have to download or install anything, use SSH to a server and you get that exact same UI. And once we like came across that it was like, oh, we have to do it.

You know, we, this is obviously the way we have to do it. And initially we were like, oh yeah, we'll probably also have a website, but it's funnier just to double down on the bit and just say, if you can't figure this out, like, we don't want your money. You know? It's a good bit. I will it's crazy.

Early

Ian

days. Yeah. Yeah.

Aaron

From like a like a CTA or conversion perspective, it's insane, but it's a good bit.

Dax

It's a good bit.

It's like it's like super high friction, so you think it was Yeah. Such get opposite what you wanna do.

Ian

Actively got incredibly scary. I'm like, Aaron, like, is this thing gonna hack me? Are we sure? Like, I'm like just running this command in the terminal. Like, do they have to have tax

Dax

credit cards?

Ian

Through all my financials now. And he's just like, this is great. Like, I don't know. It was scary,

Dax

but that

Ian

there was no coffee for sale when I went in there. So apparently your first, I don't know if it was the first run or probably too early. But

Dax

Yeah. So for the first thing, we we did it in a more, like, ad hoc way. So we, we went with one of my roaster friends. We picked the coffee and they, like, literally shipped 5 sacks to it. Adam was here at my house when it got delivered, and it is a giant

Adam

pallet. Just giant bags of coffee beans. Yeah.

Dax

Yeah. And I think all of our reaction because it was getting slowly lowered down and we were looking at it and we were just like, that's a lot of coffee. Like, what the hell have we done?

Done. Yeah.

Adam

So we bagged all those first bag. Like, we did the whole thing. You know? Like, shipped it all. Dax did all the shipping.

Yeah. Wait it out. Sealed them. Not the best.

Dax

Liz did most of the boxing, just to give her credit. She, like, boxed a lot of the orders.

Ian

That's the worst. I did I did stickers once for Laravel, like, 8, 10 years ago, And it was just such an incredible nightmare. And I'm like, she would come all over the world. And it's coming back to me 3 months later on deliverable from Guatemala. And I'm like, what?

These people don't even know how to put their own address in. Like, the incredible number of people don't know how to do their own address. And the whole thing was just a disaster. I was like, alright. I've never wanna ship anything ever again.

So the you guys got that done is quite impressive.

Dax

Yeah. Yeah. So that was, like, initial thing is to, like, try out the concept and see if really it's I think with all these little things comes down to motivation. Like, we knew that if we did a smaller thing and went really well, we'd be, like, really motivated to, like, go to the next step. And and that it worked out, and we're all really excited.

So now we have a much more professional setup with, my other friend who has, like, like, they're gonna handle a lot of the logistics for us and and things like that. But what we're excited to kinda get it up and running because then it just selling coffee to terminal like that's and just having it all fulfilled and stuff, that's like the bare bones. But there's just so many funny things we can do with this concept. Like we had this idea of like popping up a random leak code challenge while you're checking out. And if you solve it, you get like, you know, percentage off.

There's just, like, there's, like, more friction to get more friction.

Ian

Yeah. Yes.

Dax

I'm I'm

Aaron

not an expert, but we might need to talk about some of this.

Ian

I love it. I love it.

Dax

If all

Ian

you get subscriptions in there, it's fine because

Dax

that one's 2 at once,

Ian

so it's fine. You know? Like, then I just get my coffee every month or week or whatever I want. Yeah.

Dax

It's just an outlet for, like, funny jokes and, like, little things like that. We're gonna have a monthly box where we have a new bag design and blend every month with just, like, some some joke, for the month.

Ian

So I love it. I mean, people love coffee. I mean, selling addicted substances. There's not many better businesses than that. Right?

Like that's like really top tier business. And yeah, I don't drink. I I used to be a big coffee drinker and I do love the taste, but I haven't drank it in, like, 10 years because it hurts my stomach and keeps me awake and whatever. So I've been off it, unfortunately. But, yeah, I I don't know.

I mean, I can imagine you saw the other things too. Like, yeah, when to get

Aaron

this done. That's kinda what that's what I wanna hear about. You keep hinting at, like, the bigger vision, and I think on your y'all's last podcast, Adam was like, oh, and then, oh, I guess I shouldn't say anything.

Dax

Oh, no. I can't say anything.

Aaron

So so now that you're now that you're here where no one is listening,

Ian

like, what's

Dax

what's the

Aaron

vision? What's the vision for the future here?

Dax

So I think one vision is to partner with a lot of other people trying to do content full time and give them their own blends and really give them really solid cuts. Like, like a lot of these partnerships that they get for things like this, I'll make like 50¢ a bag or something. We wanna give people like a majority of the profit, because so it becomes like a meaningful thing they actually care about promoting and do custom blends for them and and do fun stuff with them. So that's just on the coffee side, like just scaling to anyone that wants to that has an audience and wants to wants to sell through us. But I know Adam's been looking at some some other things as well.

Adam

Well, like every time I have some stupid idea, I just I feel that's in the back of my head saying, like, slow down. Like, just don't get ahead of yourself. It's so easy to run off with not a note, just like a realist and, like, let's take it very slow. I don't do things slow. Like, I'm very, like, sprint.

I wanna go hard.

Ian

Jump all in.

Adam

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I've, like, planned out the next 6 months in my mind, like, what we could do. And it's Mhmm.

It's all kind of, like, pump the brakes. Let's get No. I mean, we're not even selling coffee right now, so we gotta get No.

Ian

You gotta get

Dax

buy it.

Ian

Like Okay.

Dax

So I

Ian

My wife my wife loves coffee. I tried

Dax

to buy

Ian

her some coffee. I can't buy any coffee. So it's

Adam

sold out within 20 hours.

Dax

Just saying. The the next round will be like it won't be like these runs. It'll be continuously available.

Adam

On demand.

Dax

I'm not gonna tell you guys specifically, but just to give context of what Adam means by when he says he just he's like, you know, off to the races. He got wholesale quotes for an item that costs like 100 of dollars per unit.

Aaron

Perfect. Yep. That sounds that is so on brand. I cannot describe how on brand that is.

Ian

It's like the first day I passed my head is like a bronze statue of Dax's head, and it's just, like, glorious. Just a glorious beard, a bronze head. It's just like Yeah. I would buy that. I would buy that and put it right behind me here somewhere.

Like, it's just

Aaron

I'm gonna hazard a guess that it's that cool matte black electric kettle. That's that's my guess.

Dax

It's it's ideal. You're extremely close. It's, basically. Yes.

Aaron

I think UGG sold those for a little while. They're like,

Dax

it's stuff from Fellow. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So there's, like, a daily thing.

They do branded.

Adam

They're like they're like sprint or edge onto your yeah. So, like, terminal branded copy making gear. You bet.

Ian

But I mean, even if, like, sometimes you gotta take that energy. Right? And, like, instead of, like, like going down more products, go down more connections of influencers. Right? Like if you had yeah.

10 times more people selling just the coffee that would also be super exciting and obviously profitable and all that stuff.

Adam

Companies, like, there's some brands in the developer space well known that we're talking with, doing stuff, having a blend for their company, their tool or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of different angles that we could go.

Ian

Conferences even or whatever, one off things for big conferences.

Dax

Well, speaking of talk, can we

Adam

talk about that stuff? Yeah.

Dax

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's not confirmed, but I think we're gonna show up to Laracon.

Ian

Oh, yes.

Adam

Oh, yeah.

Aaron

Are you going? Breaking news.

Ian

Breaking news. There?

Dax

Nice.

Ian

Aaron's hosting it, and I'll be there. Yeah.

Dax

Go on. And, yeah, I imagine Aaron would go because,

you know

Ian

skip yeah.

Aaron

It is it is in it is in Dallas, and and I am hosting it.

Dax

So yeah.

Adam

Oh, hopefully it checks out.

Aaron

I'll be there. Yeah.

Dax

It's like me and react Miami. Like, I make such a big deal out of it. I haven't used react in 3 years, but it's just it's convenient.

Ian

You know? Yeah. I'm already planning my empire where I'm just gonna build a website that does the SSH in 4 people, and I'm just gonna, like, take a little a little cut.

Aaron

I'm just gonna

Ian

be a middleman. There's no even better than selling addictive substances is being a middleman to addictive substances.

Dax

No. But here's you joke, but, part of what we're working on is, like, the most absurdly well designed SDKs you've ever seen. Like we're working with the people that did, Stripes APIs and they have this new product that just help people ship SDKs that are as good as, you know, Stripes. Oh, that's interesting. And so our API, which we're using, is also gonna be public be a public API.

So you can build your own coffee ordering experiences.

Adam

In the weirdest places you want. Like, put them wherever you want. You can even put them on a website

Dax

if you wanted to. Yeah. Yeah.

We'll put

Ian

them right in the office. Yeah. Right in my help desk product, it'll be like, order more copy. Like Yeah. Exactly.

Right.

Aaron

My absolute favorite part of this is y'all have been in software for so long, and you've just been looking at those sweet, sweet software margins, and you're like, that's too much. Yeah. We gotta sell coffee.

Ian

Sell coffee, man.

Aaron

We gotta sell coffee, man.

Ian

What do you Every business. Right? Every business just comes down to distribution. And so like, you guys are known, you have friends who have a lot of distribution, you have your own distribution, like, yeah. Once you have distribution, then you just find yourself sell into it.

Right? Like, it could be software, but it could be other things. And so that's great.

Adam

It's funny, like, knowing all the ecommerce things are just like being in this space for a long time, just being on Twitter even. You like hear all these things like drip marketing and all this stuff, like the stuff you're supposed to do. And it, like, just doesn't matter for us because Prime can, like, stream for 2 hours and get more impressions than we'd ever get with some email campaign or whatever.

Aaron

Yep.

Adam

It's just a really interesting dynamic where you've got already this very active engaged audience. We don't really have to think about, like, marketing or doing that kind of stuff. It just happens kinda naturally.

Ian

And those things can be the, like, the optimizations later. Right? Like, people are trying to start with that, but really that's your, like, later optimization. Cause it's like, okay, once we've like, we're,

Dax

you have no idea.

Ian

So much initially, then eventually it's like, oh, we, we probably should be emailing these people who bought from us before to buy from us again and, like, stuff like that.

Dax

Yeah.

Ian

But it doesn't have to

Dax

be the

Ian

first thing. It's like a a secondary thing after you're going.

Aaron

Do either any of y'all listen to Nathan Barry's billionaire creator podcast or whatever it's called? No. No. No.

Dax

I don't drink coffee. I don't listen to podcasts, produce both. Yeah.

Thanks for coming on the show. Same, actually, to be honest with you. He's he's been talking. What can

I do?

Aaron

Yeah. This is this is why I'm paired with Ian

Dax

and Adam's paired with tags.

Ian

Otherwise, I'm just gonna be a can't

Dax

it's like such perfect. It's like the exact same situation. It's so weird.

Ian

Really is. Adam and

Aaron

I are both light mode.

Dax

I decide Ian and Dax

Aaron

are both dark mode on that side. Okay. Focus. Focus. Focus.

This podcast has started talking a lot about how, creators already own distribution and are moving backwards into making brand deals. And I feel like this is this is prime no. Pun intended, I guess. This is this is a prime example of that where it's, like, I could sell Cometeer for 50¢, or we could like, I could sell Cometeer for 50¢, or we can do a bunch of hard work and get, you know, a much fatter margin on our own coffee. And I like Steve and I are actively thinking about that.

I don't, you know, I don't wanna take brand deals forever. I wanna own something. And so this this really lines up, for that in in my mind.

Dax

Yeah. Yeah. No. It's yeah. You see it everywhere.

It's, almost to a degree where I'm, like, kind of I'm like is this a good thing for the world? Because if you go anywhere like, to any store there's, like, some product being featured. It's always a celebrity product. Like, we were at Target the other day and he's he like, The Rock launches new brand. Yep.

I love The Rock, and I think he's awesome, and I'm excited for him. But, like, everything, like, all those out like, all those gin Yep. Like, yeah, there's there's a bunch of, like, alcohol companies with, celebrities. That

was the

Ian

playbook. Right? Yep.

Dax

Yeah. So it's like, at this point, can you make a product without first being a I feel we're getting to that point where it's, it's like kind of going into that direction. But, yeah, it is such a crazy advantage because you're the main cost of any product is what's your cost of acquisition, and it's basically 0 when you're in this category.

Ian

Yeah. And I mean, in the old days, right, everything was so much more centralized. Like, oh, I'm gonna advertise in front of Seinfeld, Then I'm guaranteed 80,000,000 people to see my product. Right. And so like that's where everything went, but now you don't have any centralized points like that.

So it's like, okay, well, how do I get in front of people while people still pay attention to you know, whatever their influencer is that they like, whether it's a YouTube star or a musician or whatever. And so it's like, well, now that's how we get products in front of people, right, is we go to them instead. And, there was actually a super interesting article about McDonald's the other day. I think it was New York Times or something. It was like, probably like 20 years ago, everybody was like, McDonald's is the worst.

It's gonna kill you. Right? All this stuff. And then they started making all these deals with, like, musicians, and they they basically did this. And, like, now it's, you know, more than doubled in stock price in the last 20 years years or whatever.

It's like they just had the playbook a little ahead of everybody, but they did all these brand partnerships and influencer partnerships and all this stuff.

Dax

So it's not gonna kill you anymore. It's probably gonna kill you. It

Aaron

doesn't matter.

Dax

It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.

Ian

But somebody else got

Aaron

rich off of it, which is awesome.

Ian

90 percent of America has had a meal at McDonald's in the last week or whatever. Right? So it's like,

Adam

like literally it's something that's like

Ian

85 or 90%. And so, yeah. So 80%

Adam

of America's obese.

Ian

So when I know that that that

Aaron

that should work, but,

Ian

But, yeah.

Dax

Yeah. So I but I think, the root of it all is, we actually we genuinely I don't think any of us care if this is, like, massively successful or not, which is very different from anything else I work on. It's just like we all like each other and it's nice to use to hang out. And, especially with with these conferencing we're doing, it's like Mhmm. A very easy way for all of us to get together and have it all be paid by the this larger thing.

So if it's just breaking even and it's a way for us to, like, have a good time, it's that's really all it needs to do. But we'll

Aaron

see. Surprisingly heartwarming from Dax.

Dax

So it wasn't wasn't on my beacon.

Ian

My arm over there. Yeah. Yeah.

Aaron

I don't need to crush the souls of my enemies. I just wanna hang out with my friends. It's it's not what I expected.

Ian

I'm always fascinated by business people and, like, they're like, what I do to relax is I have another business. I have this other business over here. This is my relaxation business. That's separate from my actual business. Right?

Yeah. So that that you just see that all the time. Like, I've But

Dax

but, like, Jeff, I with this type of thing, I just feel like we can't lose. So I'll give you a perfect example. Right? So we shipped out all these boxes, and it's the first time shipping everything out. And, like, people were getting them in some horrible conditions.

Like, they were They all got crashed. It looked like they got just destroyed. But that just became a meme. Like, people were posting about it, and this became a joke. So it's like, we you just can't lose with with stuff like this.

You

Ian

know. Yeah.

Aaron

Like, let's go back. You're coming to Laracon? What's all everybody? I know Prime is is gonna be speaking. Yeah.

So what's the story?

Dax

So we are trying to so basically, what we did for React Miami was a little bit ad hoc. We were trying to formalize it a little bit more where we show up to a conference, a couple days before. We'll do, like, a bunch of streaming to get people excited online. We'll do a custom blend with a custom bag for people at the conference. Like, they can buy it there.

They'll be in our store a week advance. Maybe the conference can buy a bunch to give out speaker gifts or or something like that. So we we used to and then we we serve the coffee there when

Aaron

Ah, cool.

Dax

For the people

Ian

that go there.

Aaron

Yeah. I love it.

Dax

Yeah. So for React Miami, like, just on Twitter, we did, like, more than, like, 10,000,000 impressions or so. And then Prime streams each day, there were, like, 30 to 40000 people that watched. So these are, like, pretty crazy numbers that are hard to tap into otherwise.

Aaron

Yeah.

Dax

And we're pretty cheap for for if you look at, like like, CPM wise, like

Aaron

because y'all are in for the friendships.

Dax

Yeah. So you don't care. Yeah. You don't care if

Ian

Literally, I was

Dax

in time

Adam

to get in. Yeah. That covers our costs, and we get to hang out for a week. It's kinda

Aaron

worth Are y'all gonna are y'all gonna come to the Aaron Francis studio of light and sound and do some streaming out of here? Yeah. Of course. Wait. Yeah.

Dax

That's such a good idea. Amazing.

Aaron

Yes. Of course. Idea. That

Dax

is a really good idea. Yeah. We'll get stuff nailed down and we'll see. Because the big ability here is, like, if we do have an Airbnb, we don't know what, like, the Internet or situation is. Sure.

That would that would be pretty helpful.

Aaron

Yeah. Yeah. You can't all stay here because it's literally my office and there are no beds, but you're welcome to come up here and stream.

Dax

It's it's still a separate it's not like part of your house. Right? It's,

Aaron

Correct. It is not. Yeah.

Dax

Okay.

Aaron

You are welcome to swing by the house, but probably not stay there for very long either. It's kinda so we we got a lot going on at the house.

Dax

Lot of babies. I can't afford degenerates just streaming all day at the kitchen table. Oh. It was it was wild when they doing that in my house. It was, one of those

Aaron

fun. I watched a lot of it.

Dax

Yeah. It it was super fun. 1 of those friends one of those friends, like, came by to pick something up. He walks into the door, and she sees Prime just go up to a camera and just start, like, thrusting.

Ian

Yep.

Dax

Just a bunch of, like, crazy thrusting maneuvers.

Aaron

Yeah.

Dax

And I just saw her face as being like like, what is going? And she because Liz's friends just do not understand what to do for a living.

Aaron

You never you never want one of your off line friends

Ian

to clear water and clear it at all.

Dax

And she saw that, and that's all she saw until she left.

Yep.

Ian

Oh, man.

Dax

Like, that's how we make money.

Ian

Part with, like, conferences and stuff, though. It's like everybody wants to see you guys. Right? It's like but how many conferences can you actually do in a year and things like that? There are these like just limits of like, yeah, you know what you can do.

But

Dax

yeah, but the conferencing is more for fun. Like, it's just

Ian

Yeah. Yeah.

Dax

Would be, like, once a quarter, which I try to find a conference to do and Little vacation. Talk together. Yeah. Basically.

Ian

But Get out more.

Aaron

That's gonna be fun. I'm so glad I'm so glad y'all are gonna come.

Ian

Yeah. This is awesome. If not,

Aaron

try to secure the deal tomorrow on your podcast with Taylor Live on air. Be like Yeah. Hey.

Ian

I just wanted

Aaron

to check-in on this.

Ian

First item. First item. Yeah. Close the deal. Yeah.

Aaron

Alright. Are we done with coffee? I wanna hear about Adam's course, or do we have more coffee?

Dax

No. That's that's it for coffee. Like I said, the summary is coffee from the terminal, you can buy it soon. I don't drink coffee, but you should still trust me that

Aaron

it's good coffee. Also, it's really good. What I said earlier about your podcast, this is a perfect example. It's like, hey. You do you wanna start a coffee company?

Well, I don't actually drink coffee, but I've got 4 friends that are coffee grocers, and I know this guy. It's like, oh.

Dax

Yeah.

Aaron

Yeah. That's that sounds about right. Yeah.

Ian

It's at it's at terminal dot shop, so that's where you can get it. And there's a a crazy ass command line terminal that you paste in, and just hope it all goes okay. It'll be fine. Don't worry about it.

Aaron

By the way, the reset shop That's where you can't get it. You have to

Dax

go to your terminal. Yeah. If you can't SSH, we don't want your money. That's our slogan. By the way, the reason I know all these people, Adam, is because I lived in a city around other people.

And it's one of the benefits of staying in a city.

Aaron

Bringing it back.

Dax

There you go.

Ian

There's Okay.

Aaron

That's that's the callback right there. Right.

Adam

I know all these people too. Sorry. I know all the people from the Internet. So there you go.

Aaron

Oh, you don't you don't know any coffee or the Yeah.

Dax

No. You don't know anyone that can do anything in real life.

Ian

No. Anyone that has any skills in the physical world? I just have to know you, how

Adam

I get the benefits of all of those people. Yeah.

Dax

No. I know. It's great. I'm saying someone had to live in New York. Okay.

In this whole chain of events.

Aaron

Yeah. So, Adam, you are working are you working with, Joel Hooks on this badass stuff? Okay. Tell us. You're working on a full on course.

Adam

A full on course. It's you know, Joel, the way he puts it, it's like a full on small business. It's like It is. It's I wanna, like, teach. I really do genuinely want that to be like, as a kid, before I wanna do anything before I do anything about computers, I wanted to be a teacher.

Like, I wanna be a college professor for some reason. I don't I really don't know why that specifically like, I didn't wanna be a high school teacher. I wanna be a call maybe it's a little more sophisticated. I've Mhmm. I've always wanted to teach, and I've always enjoyed, like, explaining things to people, like, to a fault that you know, it's, like, annoying.

People get tired of me, like, trying to explain something they don't even wanna learn, that kind of thing. So it's an outlet. It's like, now I'm finally I'm finally taking steps. It's always been this thing I I thought I'd get to in my career, and I just never kind of, like, made the time always busy with other stuff and still busy with other stuff. But but, yeah, I'm I'm pretty excited.

Like, we're we're doing kind of the first steps, like, have a paid workshop next month. Mhmm. It's kind of the first

Ian

Oh, wow.

Adam

Big step. But it's gonna be I mean, it's gonna be like the rest of this year really. Like, the first full thing you could buy and, like, take a course will be sometime probably in the fall. Yeah. I'm pumped.

And then I see you, like, you're doing a course and you're like, yeah. We're gonna we're gonna launch it next month.

Dax

Like, I'm sorry.

Ian

What's the end?

Dax

How do you do this?

Aaron

Well, well, I'm not running a startup, and I'm not running a coffee start up.

Adam

Selling coffee. It's true.

Aaron

Yeah. So I I have a little I have a little bit more time, and I don't follow like, Joel has a very good prescribed method where you, like, do a little freebie, then you do a course and or I'm sorry. Then you do a workshop, and then you do a bunch of emails. Like, we're we're just not doing any of that. And so it cuts the it cuts the timeline a lot.

Adam

I do love, like, working with Joel. I just having someone kinda, like, tell me what to do because I feel like if I were just doing it on my own, I would never do it. I would just never get there. But now I have, like, people that are, like, stakeholders and, like, asking things of me

Dax

Yep.

Adam

That's been very helpful. Like, I feel like I've finally taken real steps.

Aaron

So I wanna hear I wanna hear about the process of working with them because it's it's a very interesting business model for them where they find people like you, talented creators, and, like, basically, you know, midwife them through the process of creating creating a course.

Dax

And so

Aaron

Yeah. So, like, how did y'all get hooked up, and what's it been like working with the because they've got a whole team. It's like 8, 10 people over there. Yeah.

Adam

Yeah. It's I mean, it's a lot of the Egghead folks, I think.

Aaron

I think

Dax

I

Adam

can say that. I mean, it's like he's got this team that has worked on developer education for so long and together and, like, they're all effective working together. And they just kind of like the the way he puts it, I think, that I can say this, is that they're, like, taking bets on different creators to kind of, like, hit a certain niche. So they they, you know, they they have got this team. They they do a lot of work to kinda, like, do the stuff I wouldn't wanna do.

It's the way he puts it. Like, I get to just focus on, like, teaching the thing and making videos and and trying to, like, understand, you know, what are my students gonna wanna learn? How am I gonna take them from a to b. And then they do everything else, like the website and, say, manage the live workshops and all that kind of stuff. They sell the seats, and they do Mhmm.

The stuff that's just like, I'm sure I would I would spend a lot of time doing that stuff and then maybe even enjoy it because I'm a programmer, like, building the website. That'd be fun.

Aaron

Yeah.

Adam

It's so nice to not be thinking about that or, like, building, like, a a language or what's the word? The learning an l learning

Aaron

call it? Platform? Yeah.

Dax

Yeah. Yeah.

Adam

Yeah. Like, everyone who ends up doing a course ends up building, like, their own platform for teaching, like, for hosting their video course. And they're doing that, but I don't have to do it. So it's Yeah.

Dax

It's nice. I like it.

Aaron

And they they send presumably, they send out email. You give them content, but they send out emails and set up drip sequences and do

Dax

all that stuff.

Adam

Yeah. They do all that stuff.

Aaron

They do everything except recording and editing. Right? You edit your own stuff?

Adam

I'm editing my own stuff, but, you know, they they do have people for that. Like, they do have an editor that, and for some of the people that they've done courses with, all the editing was done there in house by their people. So Cool. That's an option. I you know, I took screencasting.com, so I feel like I've heard

Aaron

of that. That's great.

Ian

Yeah. I feel like I can

Adam

kinda make my way around Wow. The ScreenFlow, and I'm figuring it out.

Aaron

That's amazing. What a great domain. That's really cool.

Adam

Yeah. Yeah. Excellent course. Excellent course.

Aaron

Thanks. You also have not mentioned what your course is about or what

Dax

your course is about. I was

Ian

just gonna find

Dax

it because

Yes. Yes. People to take care of that stuff. Yeah.

Adam

Not so not so good at the marketing. So it's pro AWS. It's basically like so I started on AWS, like, 10 years ago, but I'm very much like a practical, like, web developer. I'm I'm a startup founder, so, like, I'm very like, I wanna build things, and I'm not like an enterprise y. Like, a lot of the cloud is made up of, like, enterprise education, like teaching very large teams how to leverage the cloud.

But there's kind of this gap for, like, I'm a small team or I'm a startup or I'm an individual that wants to build big powerful things, and I wanna leverage AWS to do it. Like, it's basically my consulting work. So I I did consulting for startups for a few years independent. And I'm basically doing that, like taking small startup teams and helping them leverage AWS. So it's it's that angle.

It's like you're a web developer, but you wanna build on AWS.

Aaron

And I know that you're too nice to brag on yourself, but you also speed ran all of the AWS certifications and got them all within, like, a month or, like, 8 days or something silly like that. Gosh.

Adam

It's been a few years ago now, but I did I did them in 6 weeks.

Dax

So I did

Adam

there's, like, 12 of them. I did 2 a week. It was sort of like a parlor trick. Like, people ask me, like, what's the value of certification? Like, how do how do you feel about certification?

I don't know. I don't really care. We're talking

Aaron

about it now. So it works.

Adam

Yes. Yeah. No. I thought it'd be like a fun, like

Dax

It made you a hero, Adam. They literally

were like

They took me.

Ian

I'm not a hero.

Adam

So it's problems. Surely. Yeah. Yeah. No.

It's like a fun challenge. It was like, can I can I do these really, really fast?

Ian

Yeah. We use AWS and I feel like that's just a great course topic because it's probably, it's like an infinite source.

Adam

It's infinite. It really is. Yeah.

Ian

There's so much stuff in there. Nobody has any idea how it works. Like, you're always scared touching anything. It's like Yeah.

Adam

And and for, like, if you're a web developer, it's a very narrow slice of it

Dax

that you really need or have problems.

Ian

Yeah. Yeah.

Adam

So it's, like, just helping guide people through this very, like, vast landscape.

Dax

Yeah.

Adam

And like, here's the stuff that matters to you.

Dax

And the thing with AWS is there's always like 5 ways to do the same thing. But there's actually only one that you should pick. And no one ever picks that one. So again, this is just teaching them what what the right one is.

Ian

Weird stuff like, do I need the API gateway thing? And I'm getting charged more money for some weird reason. I don't totally understand, and I like this.

Dax

Yeah. Yeah. Because every little trick in the photo.

Aaron

Yeah. I feel like this is this is lining up exactly with my database course experience in that a lot of, like, the education is curation. Like, there's so much information and literally 10% of it applies to, like, a modern web developer.

Dax

And I feel like a lot of

Aaron

my job is to read through everything and then figure out, like, okay. Here's the important stuff. Do you feel the same way?

Adam

Oh, yeah. Absolutely. And and, like, the one advantage I think I'll have going into teaching this stuff is, like, I'm I'm having a hard time getting the material done because I'm still, like, managing a very large consumer site deployed on AWS that I've been building for a decade. So, like

Aaron

Mhmm.

Adam

I I still do this work. It's not like a distant thing to me that, like, I don't have practical experience with. Mhmm. I think that's a big advantage. Like, when you know the thing because you build on the thing, it's like I can't really go wrong as long as I'm staying rooted in that work.

Like, I know that my advice plays out in a real world scenario because I'm living it, like, right now.

Aaron

Yeah. Wow. That's cool. I'm excited for you. Proaws.dev?

Adam

Dot dev. They did buy the dot com.

Aaron

Dot for

Dax

They did.

Adam

Some money. Yeah. It it just redirects to that dev. But Oh.

Ian

Wow, man. That's Advantage.

Aaron

Is that the other way

Adam

with the right people?

Dax

It's you're kinda like, it's like you're signed to a label. That's what it sounds like. Kinda.

Adam

Yeah. Yeah.

Aaron

Or like a publishing house, like, like a book publisher.

Dax

Yeah. Yeah.

Aaron

It's a very cool model.

Dax

Yeah. Here's a funny thing. So Adam is using SSE for the course. I believe this course is gonna do extremely well. I think it's gonna make more money than we do at SSE.

Jesus.

Ian

Oh. I should I we

Adam

should work out some kind of deal here, I guess. No. I should be giving back to the the hand that feeds

Ian

me. That's amazing. I think this is like the open source dilemma. Right? It's like people are making money on all your work.

And how do

Dax

you navigate that? Yeah. I'm actually no, I think it's fine. Like, we're just 3 people. It's not hard to find ways to sustain ourselves.

So Oh,

Ian

it's great exposure to it. Of course, as well. Yeah.

Aaron

It does. It does sound hard. Yeah.

Dax

Steve and

Aaron

I are just 2 people. And we're like, oh, man. Where's the money gonna come from? So Okay. Alright.

One one last thing I forgot. Lyricon blend. It's got a what are you gonna call it?

Dax

Are you gonna call it, like,

Aaron

a mambo blend? Or There's some names

Dax

floating around. Ideas.

Adam

I don't think we should leak

Ian

it yet.

Dax

Yeah. No. Okay. That's fine. But

we don't

we don't know what it is. If you have any idea, please send it to us because obviously, we we don't know what makes for a funny joke.

Adam

David is a Laravel developer. Oh, that's true.

Aaron

We do have one. Laravel

Dax

developer. Yes.

You do have one.

Adam

He's been great to, like, ideate on this front. Yeah. Mhmm. Nice. Yeah.

We could use any more ideas. Throw him out.

Aaron

Well, if you need yeah.

Dax

If you

Aaron

need a vibe check before you go to press, just send it to me and Ian, and we'll tell you, like, oh, that's gonna work or that's not gonna work.

Dax

Maybe we should make fun of PHP developers. Maybe that should be the angle.

Adam

That is your normal

Dax

shit. Like I said, you

Aaron

need a 5 jack. Send it send it to us before you print it, and we will

Dax

help you. Yeah.

Aaron

What an interesting idea.

Ian

There's a lot of subtleties in there, though. There's, like, some people just consider themselves Laravel developers and not PHP developers. And so there's a whole there's internal Wow. Factions.

Dax

Internal strength.

I feel

Adam

like there's some very obvious names for for what we would do that people. It's definitely a couple of things. Yeah.

Dax

Yeah.

Adam

There's a couple of very obvious.

Aaron

Do you remember the, the funny error that we always used to get in PHP? Unexpected, like, t punonucoditem or whatever that was?

Ian

Like a, Hebrew word. Yeah. There's just like this random Hebrew word, because like the initial developers, there's a lot of like Israeli developers and stuff. And like, there's this one error you would always get in PHP. I can't remember it.

Dax

That is

Ian

so crazy word. Word. It's nothing. Like, you have no idea what it means. I don't even know it was like a super word for like 20 years or like 10, 10 years probably.

Adam

This is a It's just like, what I guess is man. I I don't know if

Ian

it's, like, a bad ink.

Dax

Tube or

Ian

Yeah. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah.

Dax

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Aaron

That's a Maybe it's an Is it a quote? No. I think it's an unexpected, double

Dax

semi colon. Yeah. Yeah.

Aaron

Yeah. Double colon. Oh.

Dax

So we got that in the bag somewhere. That's that's a

Ian

nice way. That in the bag. Yeah. That's for the for the old heads out there. That will

Aaron

show everyone at a PHP conference that, like, you're one of us. Yes. If the blend is called t peronucadione or whatever it is, everyone will be like, holy crap.

Dax

They're And

you're developers.

You're you're

Ian

from you're from before the linters and the

Dax

Yeah.

Ian

Exactly. Fixed everything for you and everything. Like, you're just in there in a text editor, like, hacking around and

Dax

Hey. I want that that's actually true. I I did PHP for a

Ian

Yeah.

Dax

Release a year. There you go. I don't remember that. There you go.

What about

Adam

a long time ago.

Ian

Yeah. Yeah. What about PHP is the greatest to the whole story.

Dax

That's that's good. I'll get We'll get shirts with that printed on there. It's just so Yeah.

Ian

There we go. I'll buy that. I'll buy that on turbo.shop. Honestly. Yeah.

And it's got 2 two customers right there. And leak code to check out.

Dax

So Oh, I don't wanna do I don't wanna do that real quick.

Lose a lot of you're gonna lose a lot of this

in that one.

Ian

I'll I'll be honest. Only that way, it is kinda funny to have, like, certain items that only people smart enough can, like, get those items and stuff. Like, I mean, I won't get any of them, but that'll be fun.

Dax

It's funny when it's out there. Another version of this joke was, there's like different levels of Sleep Code challenges. We were thinking that randomly we drop in like an extra hard one and if you got it right, we would increase the price instead of decrease it because clearly clearly you can afford it.

Ian

I thought you were gonna say, like, you personally deliver it or something. Like, you just showed yourself

Adam

the delivery.

Dax

We just made them feel bad for spending the time

Aaron

to do

Ian

it. You spent 2 hours solving this. That's too bad for you. No. It's $52 to buy you about your

Adam

coffee. Goodness gracious.

Ian

Alright. Well, thanks a lot guys for coming on. This is awesome.

Dax

Thanks for having us.

Ian

It worked great. Of course. Thanks, Adam. Thanks, Dax. We'll, be interacting with you on Twitter, I'm sure.

And, so check out their their stuff. We'll link it all up below with terminal dot shop with coffee and how about tomorrow podcast. So yeah, check all that stuff out and SST, and whatever

Dax

that is use. Yeah. Yeah.

Ian

Whatever, whatever SST is. I only, I am jealous of

Aaron

whatever I look at.

Ian

Yeah. Yeah. I love the idea of it, but as much as I know about it, But, anyway, thanks everybody for, tuning in, and we will see you next week. Thanks.

Aaron

See you.