Why Most Developers Overcomplicate Everything w/ Aaron Francis

Chuck

Welcome to Syntax.

Aaron

Welcome to a brand new episode of the front end happy hour podcast. Welcome to this week's JS party.

Robbie

Live from Ship Shape Studios,

Chuck

this is Whiskey Web and Whatnot with your hosts, Robbie the Wagner and me, Charles William Carpenter the third.

Robbie

That's right, Charles. We drink whiskey and talk about web development. I mean, it's all in the name. It's not that deep.

Chuck

This is Whiskey Web and Whatnot. Do not adjust your set.

Robbie

Hey. What's up, everybody? Welcome to your favorite podcast, Mostly Whatnot.

Chuck

That's a completely original name. In no way taken. If if you see another podcast that starts with mostly, they, they ripped us off. It's bullshit. We will sue.

So Yeah. Our lawyers are standing by.

Aaron

Yes. Good. You can call business dad. Good luck with that.

Chuck

It's business time.

Robbie

But in all seriousness, yes, that joke is at the expense of Aaron Francis, our guest today. Hey, Aaron. How's it going?

Aaron

Good. Thanks for, thanks for having me here, and thanks for starting off with a joke at my expense. Now we're ready. I'm ready to go. This is great.

I love it.

Robbie

Yeah. I feel like probably anyone watching this has heard of you. But in case they haven't, you wanna give a few sentences about, who you are and what you do?

Aaron

Sure. I'll give you potentially up to three sentences. Let's see. So my name is Erin Francis. I am a dad of four children, two sets of twins, if you can believe it.

Historically, by trade, I've been a Laravel developer. But starting about a year ago, my friend Steve and I started our own company where we do primarily developer education. So we've done a course on SQLite, on Postgres. We released a guest course today on Rails, and we're working on a course at screencasting.com, kind of a re a refresh of that course. So lots of developer education, lots of open source work, lots of databases, lots of Laravel, that sort of stuff.

Chuck

You did have a follow-up for so your company is TryHard Studios. Robbie is obsessed, so I didn't just say this, but he wants to know if you were influenced by Ryan Reynolds with the name of that company. Yes.

Aaron

Yes. Yes. Of course. I think I wrote at least one blog post and many, many tweets. It was very, very much on brand that I was in my maximum effort era.

And that was, directly inspired by the name of his company. And then when it came time to start a company, I was like, man, that sucks. He's got the good one. And so we kinda, like, thought about it. We're like, oh, we could get pretty adjacent and kinda reclaim the, you know, the try hard thing as a a notion for good.

And so that's what we did. But, yeah, totally love Ryan Reynolds and everything he does.

Robbie

Nice. So do we. We have the Ryan Reynolds fan club stickers for this show.

Aaron

Oh, amazing.

Robbie

We'll have to send you some look

Chuck

like the rec sum.

Aaron

Please do.

Chuck

Crest, kinda, and then yeah. If I can convince Robbie, we'll make soccer jerseys too, but we'll see. He's like, I don't really like jerseys.

Aaron

Oh, that's amazing.

Chuck

Yeah. That's what he sounds like.

Robbie

It's a pretty good question, actually.

Chuck

It's, thank you. I've been working on that. You know, it's part of my, next season's material. Yeah. But, speaking of funny stuff or whatever, let's talk about the whiskey a little Today, we're having Green River foolproof bourbon.

It is a 17.3, so it is not for the mink of heart. It is a mash bill of 70% corn, 21% rye, and 9% malted barley. It is not age stated, but some things that I found in press releases said it's a blend of five to seven year old bourbons. So not too shabby. And, apparently, Aaron's been drinking for the last thirty to forty minutes, so I don't know.

Aaron

Woah. Woah. Woah. Woah. Don't don't speak that upon me.

I poured my drink ahead of time so that I could be focused on the content.

Robbie

And we're drinking this out of Norland glasses. Check out I always forget their website.

Chuck

Norland n o r Is

Robbie

that Norland Glass?

Chuck

I think it is.

Robbie

I wanna I always wanna say Norland Glasses. So I'm Yeah. Well Can you check? Because I'm my, browser is in this tiny

Chuck

I'll do that. Prompter. Yeah. I'll do that, briefly. And, luckily, they don't pay us for this.

So

Aaron

Well, they

Robbie

yeah. They just give give us classes.

Chuck

Yeah. Which is nice and generous. No shade on that. But Norland Glass it is NorlandGlass.com. N 0 r

Robbie

l a

Chuck

n g l a s s Com.

Robbie

Alright. So go there for really good glasses. We actually used these well before they sent them to us. We are big fans of these. So I reached out to them and was like, hey, We love these.

Can we send them to everyone else and make them love them too? And they were like, possibly. So

Chuck

Well, that's And thus far, they have been. Yeah. Are you a whiskey person, Aaron?

Aaron

I, historically, have been more of a whiskey person. Although the past, probably five years, I've been, a gin person. So this is this is bringing me back.

Chuck

Yeah. I like gin too. Gin is really fun. And, the

Robbie

I don't know her.

Chuck

Not gin. Gin.

Aaron

Gin. I

Chuck

know. Maybe you should go, you know, go over to Britain. There's a lot of gin there. That's got some heat. Sorry.

Aaron

I make a lot of yeah. It's it is, I make a lot of Negronis at home. That's my go to drink at home.

Chuck

We are twins, apparently. Just not

Aaron

Are we?

Chuck

Well, I love Negronis. That's probably my favorite cocktail. Most of the cocktails I like the best are actually gin based. That and the last word, amazing.

Aaron

Last word. Great.

Chuck

Love the last word. Yeah. Robbie is always trying to get a last word. I also heard something too. Trying to

Robbie

just get words in, you mean?

Chuck

I know. Yeah. Yeah. That too. Somebody on a recent episode was mentioning.

So I I'm moving my family overseas in the summer. Are you doing something? You no. I I would like freedom, actually. And the best I could do was my wife said she would go stay in Italy if, that's where I sent her.

So Mhmm. It'll be great. Are you planning to move overseas or something? Somebody said, oh, Aaron Francis is doing that. And I'm like, okay.

I wouldn't know. No. No. Never. No.

No. No. No. No. No.

No. No. No. No.

Aaron

No. No. No. No. No.

No. No. No. No. No.

No chance. Before we had kids so before we had kids, this was probably, goodness, 2017, maybe, something like that. My wife and I both worked remotely, and we did move to Paris for three months. So we were just like, why don't we go? And ninety days was the longest you could go without any sort of, like, complicated visa or anything.

Yeah. We just we had a, like, a friend of a friend live in our house. It was like, he was up here on a summer internship, and we're like, sure. Can you stay here and watch our dog? We're gonna go to Paris.

And so we did that for three months, and it was, like, absolutely amazing. And we've talked about we've talked about going back, but given the state of the ages of our family, that's not in the guards for a little while.

Chuck

Alright. Yeah. Well, fair enough. See? That person Plus,

Robbie

we get a lot of plane tickets.

Chuck

Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Are any lap children at this point?

Aaron

We still have two that are under two. So Yeah. But I'm sorry to the children. I'm not flying to Europe with four kids under four.

Chuck

Mm-mm. No.

Aaron

No. I'll go to Europe.

Robbie

Would not really My wife

Aaron

and I will go to Europe. Yeah. We're not all going to Europe. I'm sorry.

Chuck

Doesn't sound great. Alright. Gonna come back to the whiskey a little bit. So

Robbie

Yes. So I have very specific descriptors to the smell. Okay. It smells like you know when you, have a circular saw and you cut through some wood and you get that, like, dust? It's like that mixed with banana.

Like, if your board was made of banana sawdust.

Chuck

Yep. Yeah. Which, you know, in theory doesn't sound very appealing, but,

Aaron

It tastes a lot better than banana sawdust. I I just I have to, like, tell everybody that.

Chuck

Put that yeah. Put that out in the world that,

Aaron

Sorry sorry to Green River Kentucky straight bourbon, but it's banana sawdust now. Yeah. It's banana sawdust. Yeah.

Robbie

So I don't know. Good though.

Chuck

Yeah. I had, read some great things about this online in whiskey nerd circles, and so I've been wanting to try it for a little while. Yeah. I'm not even gonna comment on smell because now Robbie's very much tainted the smell for me.

Aaron

I I did pick it

Chuck

up on the, like, kinda sawdust

Aaron

right away, but, flavor wise. The bananas so much?

Chuck

Not as much bananas. Not for me. Maybe a banana peel.

Robbie

My son has been very into this, banana, bubbles, like, in the bath. We play with him. And it's, like, a lot like that scent. So maybe not, like, actual banana, but,

Aaron

like Artificial banana.

Chuck

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Flavor wise, I'm getting a bit of, like, a little, like, creme brulee, actually.

Robbie

So Yeah. Some

Aaron

Mine mine must have transmutated in shipping because I'm not getting banana or creme brulee.

Chuck

But it's

Aaron

it's possible that's a that's a me problem.

Chuck

It's always subjective. Yeah. What are you getting first?

Aaron

Getting strong notes of whiskey is what I'm getting

Chuck

Oh, yes. About.

Robbie

I get some of those.

Aaron

Yeah. As far as as far as I'm able to go.

Chuck

I don't know. I'm not getting whiskey in there at all. Maybe, like, old tire streaks.

Aaron

You'll you'll find that I'm, in many ways, the, quintessential normie. And so when I taste this, I think this tastes like whiskey.

Chuck

It does.

Aaron

And that's about as that's about as far as I can go. But it's quite good, so I will give it that. Yeah.

Chuck

Yeah. We like to assign arbitrary adjectives anyway to have the conversation seem more interesting, but it does, in the end, taste more Taste like whiskey. Like whiskey. Yeah. Mhmm.

It's definitely whiskey. I don't confuse this with tequila at all or

Robbie

No. Diet Doctor Pepper.

Chuck

Neither of those things. It doesn't have

Robbie

It does not have 23 flavors.

Chuck

No. I don't even think of that. Two. Yeah. Yeah.

Banana sawdust. Yes. Banana sawdust.

Robbie

That's the flavor. Announcing my new distillery, banana sawdust. Check out our products in four years when they're ready.

Aaron

Good luck. Have fucking

Robbie

It's got a good

Chuck

horse racing name or something. You know, horse like, a racing horse. Banana sawdust and is in third coming around, banana sawdust now takes over. I wasn't drinking before this. I definitely didn't know.

So we should describe our scale, though. You probably are ready for the scale, the rating. A highly technical scale for whiskey rating. It is zero to eight tentacles. Zero being terrible, you threw this out.

Four is middle of the road, you know, not that bad. Eight is amazing clear the shelves. Green River can't keep up with your consumption. Yeah. You need a noodle on that one.

Robbie will go first. He likes it. Yeah. It's the only way I let him talk.

Robbie

I forget what you said the mash bill was. Is this just,

Chuck

70% corn, 21% rye, 9% malted barley.

Robbie

Alright. Alright. Yeah. So for that, pretty good. It's a little spicier than a typical bourbon, probably because of the rye.

I like that. And it's it just feels very balanced to me. Like, it's not too sweet, not too spicy. I'm a give this one a seven, I think. Pretty good.

Chuck

Okay. So as not to taint your opinion, Aaron, do you feel ready to go next?

Aaron

Yeah. I feel ready to go next. It is very much above average. I don't think they need to ramp up production on my account. So I will say it's a solid six.

Chuck

Yeah. Nice. Try again.

Aaron

Well, I I do have to say the downward pressure applied is because of it being whiskey and not gin. So unfamiliar with what could be the top of the mountain. So maybe that maybe this is the top. Maybe this is maybe this is an eight and my scale's broken.

Chuck

Well, I mean, as far as your memory serves when you were drinking more whiskey, what was your favorite?

Aaron

Again, back to the the sophistication thing. It was usually just bullet. That was usually it. Yeah. Just kinda, like, right down the middle, normie guy in my mid to late twenties, bullet.

Chuck

Yeah. Solid choice. Yeah. It's something that's very accessible. Price point is good.

Yeah. It's tasty. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Would you rather have well, I guess you might not know. You need to go try some Bulleit again and see where it sits with you now.

Because that's the thing is over time, some you know, your palate changes, been drinking all this gin, come back to a Bulleit, and you're like, maybe not so much.

Aaron

Yeah. That's a good question. Now that now that I'm a a man of the world, I might have different tastes.

Chuck

Yeah. Yeah. You're moving on up. So, yeah, I like this quite a bit. I also like I believe it was somewhere around $50.60 bucks, so it's not crazy in terms of approachability.

I like a higher proof. This is a little hot for me, oddly enough. Once you start to hit over one fifteen to one twenty, then maybe I'm putting some drops of water in here typically, but, would definitely have again. Hopefully, I don't chug this bottle tonight, but, you know, life is depressing. It's hard to say.

And, so I Good. I'm gonna give it like a yeah. I know. Weird. 6.8.

I'm gonna give it a 6.8.

Aaron

Oh, we're doing a decimal. I didn't realize that was We could do it.

Chuck

We could

Aaron

do it. We could do it.

Chuck

In play. Wow. I'm glad you're buying it because, I mean, the whole thing is bullshit there. So you can do what you want.

Aaron

Yeah. That's most much of the world. In fact, you can just do whatever you want. Yeah.

Chuck

Mhmm. So if you wanna change your call yeah. If you wanna change your rating based on that, now knowing that you can go six and a half, you could go six and a half.

Aaron

Yeah. Now that I know fractions are in play, I'll bump it I'll bump it to a six and a half for sure.

Chuck

Yeah. Nice. Well, you continue to enjoy it then.

Aaron

I do have to drive home, so I won't enjoy it to its fullest. But I will continue I will continue to sip.

Chuck

You got a healthy, pour there. So, you know, you probably just shouldn't

Aaron

be full. That's probably an oopsie doopsie on my part, but, we'll see. Yes. Ourselves.

Chuck

I forget about that. Yeah. Like, you had the clever idea of rather than renting an office, you rented an apartment and converted that into, like, studio office. I was like, that is very clever. I was very impressed by that.

Aaron

Well, thank you. Yeah. This behind me is a false wall. In some ways, it is a real wall. It is a two by four stud wall.

However, it is, propped in front of the windows that belong to this bedroom in this apartment where I am currently working. At the time, we had two two year olds and two newborns, and I was like, this ain't gonna work. And so I started looking around at, like, office space. And here in Dallas, they're very proud of their office space. And what I needed was a little bit different than what was being offered.

What was being offered was a lot of, like, co working spaces and share a desk, and here's a 10 by 10 room that will make you depressed. And what I needed was a lot more space to, like, set all of this up and leave it. And so I just there are just apartment complexes everywhere around us. And so this is, like, three minutes from my house. And it's got a kitchen and a bathroom and a gym and a pool that the family uses.

It's like, it's kinda great.

Chuck

Yeah. That's a nice side effect benefits. Yeah. I haven't seen a coworking space yet that offers a pool.

Aaron

No. It's a it's really a wide open market. I've I have actually thought that, like, if I were oh, I don't know. If I were, like, more of a robber baron I'm trying to, like, embody this robber baron mindset, but only the good parts, of course. If I were more of that, I would build out, like, a full complex that's, like, work from home, but it's places like this that are meant to be offices.

And so instead of just having, like, this, you know, bleak office park, it's like you get, you know, a kitchen and a bathroom and, like, not a bedroom, but a room, like an office where you can work. And there are shared amenities and stuff like that. I just think with people working from home, there's still an unmet real estate need, but, real estate costs a lot of money. And I don't have a lot of money. So that's kinda where I stopped.

Robbie

We can call it a working space instead of a co working space.

Chuck

Yeah. No. Because you're just sitting on a little space. Inspired.

Aaron

Yeah. Well, maybe we'll maybe we'll let it bake a little longer, but a working space, it's a good start. That's a great start.

Chuck

A doing space. We could dumb it down a little with, like, a it's a doer space. Like, a maker maker spaces or something. You're doing

Aaron

I thought about calling it the home office.

Robbie

I felt like that was kinda cheeky.

Aaron

You know? It's kinda like,

Chuck

oh, yeah.

Aaron

I'm working out of the home office. Oh, it's your house? No.

Chuck

The home office. The home It's

Robbie

like when you have a bar and you call it the library.

Chuck

Exactly. Yeah. That's exactly right. That's true. Yeah.

I mean Yeah. Alright. Should we go to some hot takes? I know you're

Robbie

We should. These these old lukewarm takes.

Aaron

What was the lukewarm ones?

Chuck

You could skip the lukewarm ones. It's

Aaron

just a list.

Robbie

Which of them are actually hot? I mean, I guess the last couple are kinda relevant. But Yeah.

Chuck

I don't know.

Robbie

I'm I'm gonna start at two. We're gonna skip one for the rest of time.

Chuck

He doesn't know how many is on this list, by the way. So you could just

Robbie

I know. I'm telling you, Chuck.

Aaron

So far, this means nothing to me, but I'm very excited.

Robbie

Tailwind or vanilla CSS?

Aaron

Obviously. Next question. Oh, wait. Wait. Wait.

Okay. So I guess it's not obvious. Tailwind, obviously. I mean, I thought so, but, you know,

Chuck

they say every time. Assumption, assuming. Yeah.

Aaron

Yeah. If you assume, then you'll pick Tailwind CSS every time. Yeah. Okay. Tailwind is clearly far and away the best way to write CSS.

Separations of concerns, not applicable here. The separation of concerns does not mean separation of files. We can just say that. The notion that you're going to switch out your entire look and feel of your website without touching your HTML, adorable. It's the same notion that, like, you're gonna switch out your entire database, and so you need to write everything in the repository pattern.

Because one day, you might need to switch from MySQL to Postgres, and won't you be so glad you have this level of indirection in the middle?

Chuck

Yeah.

Aaron

Not gonna happen.

Chuck

Yeah. No one does that. No one does that.

Aaron

No one does that. No one should do that. No one has ever done that. Tailwind CSS. Alright.

Nice.

Chuck

This one might be spicier. We'll see. Git rebase or Git merge?

Aaron

Git desktop. I I don't know. I I use GitHub's desktop client, and I just I just cowboy Git. I just whatever the little interface shows me, that's what I do. So couldn't tell you.

And here's the here's the hottest take. I don't care. I super don't care.

Chuck

There it is.

Aaron

The people that are like, oh, you gotta keep the Git history pure. Why?

Chuck

For who?

Aaron

Nobody that's around the nobody

Robbie

doing it.

Chuck

The same people who get rebase get log and get log in chunks and do different formatting things, you know, in their terminal, and that is this many people. Like, it's a small subset.

Aaron

I can count on zero hands the number of times I've done git log.

Robbie

Yeah. Because it's I think I've done git log twice.

Chuck

No. See, you both have had very kind coworkers in your past, I guess, because I did

Robbie

get rebase beat into me.

Aaron

Yeah. Same.

Robbie

I still don't do anything else. Like, I do that, but I don't use any other Git commands. Like, I have to look everything else up if I need it.

Aaron

You know, I do some open source work, and then there's there are PRs that come up on GitHub. And it is it is truly just whichever way the spirit leads is what button I press. Squash and merge?

Chuck

Maybe. Maybe.

Aaron

Merge? Who knows? We'll see. It's just like, I don't know. I don't care as long as it works.

And then so I'll merge something, and then I'll be like, you know, I should fix something. I'll come on my desktop, and I'll do some stuff and then push it straight to main. It's like,

Chuck

who cares?

Aaron

I don't care. This is for libraries. This is for libraries. For applications that are being deployed, I always have main auto deployed. And so I don't traditionally do straight to main on applications that I'm deploying.

But, like, my personal website, yeah, I'll just push straight to main and auto deploys, and we'll find out. But, like, our our course platform, you know, we'll do PRs and review them and then merge them into main. But I I still don't think main is protected. I think you can still just straight push to Maine. If you

Chuck

want to, you can push to Maine. Right?

Aaron

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Chuck

We're a small enough team, I'm sure, where it's like, hey. You broke this. Go fix it right now. Yeah. Yeah.

And on

Aaron

I mean, on the other hand, I'll do when I'm working by myself, I'll do PRs, and I'm the only person that's ever seen it. It's helpful to see that code in a different window. So you open the PR, and then you go and you're like, man, did I write that? That's really stupid. And it's just like viewing it in a different piece of, you know, Chrome is is really helpful.

So I have very few hard and fast rules, and around Git, I have zero hard

Chuck

and fast rules. Okay. Fair enough. Nothing wrong with that. Alright, Robert.

What you got?

Robbie

Alright. Let or const?

Aaron

PHP. Right. I was gonna say, like, wait a minute. Don't don't care. Oh.

Yeah. I don't know. It feels like another tinkering at the margins. I think it's probably probably const by default, but it's another place where I'm just like, I don't know. I don't really care.

The only time that I will care about that is when I think someone else is gonna look at it and judge me. And so, like, a lot of this open source work I've been doing recently, I've been like, what are the JavaScript guys gonna say? I gotta be really careful. I should use const.

Robbie

Yeah. Well, most of what they say is bullshit. So just

Chuck

just disregard assholes. I mean, letters.

Aaron

Like I say, I know.

Chuck

I understand. So They argue about a lot of little things.

Robbie

Like letter consts.

Aaron

I will say Yeah. Generally, people on the Internet like to argue about things that I don't find very important, including, like, semicolons at the end or, you know, JS Docker TypeScript. I'm like, I don't know, man. I don't know. Do whatever you want.

Chuck

So Yeah. I mean, the browser can't read that, so who cares?

Aaron

Who cares?

Robbie

And PHP is very do whatever you want.

Aaron

So Yeah. PHP PHP is, has been, and will always be the wild, wild west. And we love it we love it for that. I will say PHP eight, you know, some of the eight series has released a ton more, like, typing stuff. And it's, you know, it's been quite nice.

I think one of the big things that, like, one of the big disconnects of JavaScript and PHP is we don't pass around typically we don't pass around, like, big unshaped data objects as like arrays or something. Because we, like JavaScript, have classes, but unlike JavaScript we use classes. And so like, you basically know, like, you have you have the public interface. You've got the behavior. You've got the state.

It's all wrapped up in this nice class. And so, you know, you'll type hint like to a method you'll type hint like, I should receive this interface or or I should receive this class. But that's kind of the end of it. Like, we're not, like, writing type definitions because we get a lot out of the the class based nature of the language.

Robbie

Yeah. I love classes.

Aaron

Classes are the best. Freaking love those. One time I tweeted about, like, oh, wow. Did you know in JavaScript, with the class, you can't, like, programmatically access a private method? How interesting.

Neat. Let's all have fun. And then everybody was like, you moron. Why are you using classes in JavaScript? And it's like because they're there.

Oh, no.

Chuck

And we fought for, like, ten years.

Aaron

Yeah. I didn't invent the language, y'all. I'm just trying to use it. Yeah. And

Robbie

Yeah. Oh, man.

Aaron

People are like, oh, problem number one is using classes. I'm like, great. Tell me why. And nobody could tell me why. They were all just like, because of classes.

You know what I mean? And I'm like,

Robbie

because of

Aaron

the Americans.

Robbie

So all say it's class

Chuck

don't know what you mean. Inheritance, and most of them probably never used classes when they got to be the

Robbie

first Yeah. Yeah. They don't know why.

Aaron

Yeah. They don't know. They don't know why.

Chuck

It's classical inheritance, but it doesn't

Robbie

make sense. Well, yes. I mean, if you wanna get down to the actual reasons, there are reasons. But if you wanna, like, think about the easiest developer experience and not care about those reasons, classes are the way to go. And, like, all this

Aaron

hooks behavior altogether.

Chuck

Yeah. That's great.

Robbie

Yeah. Yeah. Like, have a you can have a thing that you can reason about. Because my big argument is always, like, people are, like, oh, here's these, like, 15 hooks in React to do this thing. Uh-huh.

And it's like, well, you're still reasoning about this as if it were some kind of entity, which could be a class. And then you could, like, encapsulate all of how it works in that class. Like, what are we even doing here by just showing, oh, we can do it all with functions. Look how cool we are. Like Correct.

Chuck

You know, that's the spiciest take thus far. I don't even know if we can do better than that. But, I'm gonna try. Else you got? Well, just one more thing.

Given what you released today, but, you know, you're on the orange Lambo train, rails or Laravel?

Aaron

I think, obviously, my choice is Laravel. I will say we are, co conspirators fighting side by side Rails and Laravel. Rails and Laravel share a rich history. It's been it's no secret that Laravel has been in part inspired by Rails in addition to being inspired by other frameworks, even stuff as far field as dot net Yeah. Which to me is very far a field.

I think Laravel has made a few decisions that make it more productive to write Laravel applications. Some of those are incidental, and that would be Taylor's pride and joy and source of money is Laravel. DHH's pride and joy and source of money is Basecamp and his cars. In terms of building out the ecosystem, Laravel is a much more cohesive, coherent end to end ecosystem because Taylor is solely focused on Laravel and its ecosystem. He does not have a base camp that makes him a hundred million dollars a year.

I'm sure he would love to have that, but he doesn't. Right?

Chuck

Yeah.

Aaron

And so that works out great for us because he continues he and now the team continue to make things that make the lives of Laravel developers easier. And that includes free stuff. Right? So that includes like, in our ecosystem, we've got something called Laravel Horizon, which the closest, corollary in the Rails ecosystem would be, Sidekick, which is a a third party gem. And it is a very flexible, very powerful queue driver, basically, to, you know, spin up multiple queue workers and retries and all of that stuff.

Horizon is just totally free, totally open source, maintained first party by the Laravel team, where Sidekick is a commercial open source. So part of it's free, part of it's paid, and it's maintained by this wonderful guy called Mike Perham. No association whatsoever to any sort of Rails core team. And so in the Laravel ecosystem, you get all of these things that, yes, are maintained, which I think is important, but more importantly, they have the same sensibilities as the rest of the framework. And what that lends itself to is something like Laravel Cloud comes along, which will be released in, you know, five days.

And you then have the owners and maintainers of the framework fine tuning the framework for cloud and fine tuning cloud for the framework. And that's something that even with Heroku back in its heyday, you didn't get. It was outsiders building something for Rails. And if you wanted to land any patches into Rails, like, go through the normal channels. But as we're watching cloud be about to release, you're seeing commits in the open source repo that's like, you know, if Laravel Cloud, then do this.

And you're like, ah, so this is gonna be pretty seamless because you own the freaking framework. I feel like that's a big incidental benefit is that DHH extracted Rails from Basecamp, and Taylor built Laravel to build what he thought was going to be multiple SaaS companies and ended up actually being multiple SaaS products, but they're all focused on Laravel. And so the origin story is, like, a mirror image of itself. But then I think the other extremely crucial decision was regarding the integration of JavaScript frameworks. DHH is like, no.

Not once. Never. F you guys. Yeah. And Taylor was like, great.

All comers are welcome. And so he, along with the community, developed, you know, inertia, which is this glue between many kinds of back ends, rails included, and many front end frameworks, Vue, React, Svelte, that sort of stuff. And so Taylor, I think I think in an an abundance of wisdom or maybe an abundance of pragmatism, decided, like, people like front end frameworks. Maybe we should support that. And so he has made a way for Vue, React, and we have our own version of, like, live view or HTMX or something like that called Livewire that I think is above and beyond even, you know, live view or HTMX.

It's quite good. But we have all these, like, either first or, like, first and a half party front end frameworks where Rails is just kinda like, hey. We've got Hotwire and we've got Stimulus, and they kinda work, but they're not documented. And if you wanna use React, like, I don't know what to tell you. And so I think Laravel has made itself very productive in terms of, like, starting with Laravel new on your on your desktop and then shipping it all the way to cloud and giving, like, many blessed paths to get there.

And so I think I am, of course, biased, but I do think if I try to be objective, I think Laravel is probably more productive for a few of those reasons.

Robbie

This just in, whiskey.fund is now open for all your merch needs.

Chuck

That's right, Robbie. We're hearing reports of hats, sweaters, and t shirts, as well as a link to join our Discord server. What's a Discord server? Just read the prompter, man.

Robbie

Hit subscribe. Leave us a review on your favorite podcast app, and tell your friends about our broadcast.

Chuck

It really does help us reach more people

Robbie

and keeps the show growing. Alright. Back to your regularly scheduled programming. I do want to, kind of expand on that and ask, like so are people typically using Laravel as, like, shipping the entire application? Like, whereas Rails is used a lot for just the API side.

And then, like, you would build your front end. Can you do the same with Laravel?

Aaron

You could. I have learned that back end for front end is a thing, which is different than back end. But what you could do, you could you could just have Laravel as an API only. And some people do that in conjunction with, like, Next or Nuxt. And so blows my mind.

You're running two back ends at that point. It doesn't make a ton of sense to me, but you could do that. You could also do just like a, you know, a raw view or react front end with an API back end. I do not think that is the most common way to ship a full Laravel application. I think the most common way is either with Inertia, which would combine Vue or React or Livewire, which is kinda like PHP on the front end, but, you know, hand wavy.

Laravel Cloud, for example, so like their in house, you know, flagship SaaS product is Laravel on the back end, React on the front end, Inertia in the middle, mono repo, not we're not gonna coordinate two separate releases. It's just like it's just all right there and we just, you know, push to deploy. So that's I think that is the most common way to ship Laravel. I worked at a company that used Rails, and they had Rails API on the back end and Next. Js on the front end.

And I think that is more common in Rails land because the integration is way worse. Right? So to ship a monorepo that has Rails and React, from my what I understand, is quite difficult. And so I think what people end up doing is Rails, Next. Js, and then we'll have them talk over traditional, API.

Robbie

Gotcha. Makes sense.

Chuck

Yeah. And that's that's, interesting. Because when you think about it, these web application frameworks, like, true, full, everything, all bells and whistles, well, web application frameworks give you everything you need. They've got auth and all that kind of stuff. So if you decide that you want to have a full on front end framework with it, you're kind of cutting off half the benefits to a degree.

Right? Like, if you're just taking in JSON payloads Yep. That you have to interpret and rebuild all the logic on your front end application. You're just doing Then you're inventing the browser. Right?

So you're inventing the application. You're just doing So then

Aaron

you're inventing the browser. Right? So you're inventing client side routing.

Chuck

Spas kinda do that anyway. Right?

Aaron

Exactly. You're inventing session management with, you know, JWTs or whatever that's supposed to be. You're just that you end up inventing a lot of stuff where if you can use the back end and the browser for, like, what they're good for, but still have a super tight integration to a very modern front end, that feels like the best of all worlds to me versus let's use static HTML, which is like, you know, Rails and Laravel both have, like, templating languages where you can just spit out HTML. Sometimes useful, not much anymore. And then on the other side is, like, separate front end, separate back end.

And then you're like, well, how do these two things communicate and share, authentication authorization? And you're like, I don't know, man. So, yeah, we get, like, with Laravel, the term full stack has kinda been co opted in my opinion by things like Next where it's like, you can write server code. We're full stack. And I'm like, yeah.

But when I, like, when I start writing server code, there's nothing for me. You've you've dumped me in an empty warehouse with no tools, and you're like, build your back end. Like, I don't wanna do that. I don't wanna invent auth. No.

No. You don't import another package. It's JavaScript plan. There's a package

Chuck

for that. Just make

Aaron

things like puzzle pieces. You know. They claim freedom, and I see complexity. I'm like Yeah. So you're telling me you're you're telling me you're gonna pull in and off a queue driver, an email, an authorization, authentication.

You're gonna pull in a cron job. And truly, what that ends up being is you're gonna pay for services to do that, oftentimes.

Chuck

And that to me is, like has invested in a bunch of those services in San Francisco.

Robbie

Not Guillermo.

Chuck

No. No. Does it start with playing us?

Aaron

And end with Guillermo?

Chuck

Yeah. Yeah. And so We talk about incentives. I mean Yeah.

Aaron

Yeah. The conspiracy theory is, like the true part is he's invested in every developer tool company in and around that ecosystem. The conspiracy theory is that Next is nerfed because of that. I don't know if that part is true. I I do believe because I continue to see people say it.

We want to choose packages. We want to be free. My opinion is the freedom actually comes from the constraint. Right? So if you if you have a framework that has a an amazing ORM that is built in to the queue driver, that is built in to the email providers, that is built in to the routing.

So, like, you could have a route in Laravel that, like, binds to a model. So you can say, like, podcast slash one. And then in your controller, you don't get the number one. You get an instance of

Chuck

the podcast model because the

Aaron

routing is aware of the ORM. And then in the controller, you can dispatch a job, and the job will serialize itself without the model, but with a reference to the model. And then when it wakes back up to be processed, it will reinstantiate the model because the queue reinstantiate the model because the queue layer is aware of the ORM layer. And so those are the types of things where it's like, if everything is working together, then what you have to do is actually the scary part, and maybe we've arrived at the reasoning. The scary part is you have to build an application and see if people want it.

Yeah. And you don't get to just fiddle.

Robbie

Which no.

Aaron

Right? You have to do the you have to do the hard part. Wow. People sound like

Robbie

a prisoner

Chuck

to me. I don't know.

Aaron

Yeah. I know. It's it's so frustrating to have all these tools at my disposal. I know.

Robbie

Yeah. I think the problem is, like, a small subset of people that like to use React frameworks really love over engineering things. They wanna build everything you just described from scratch. The other side of those people are just following those people saying, oh, they said this was cool. And then, actually, I can't build that, so I'm gonna use a SaaS product for everything.

And then it's just, like, what are you gonna do today?

Chuck

Generous free tier. And if you ever blow up, they send you a bunch of giant bills. Yeah.

Robbie

I will always be team opinionated framework over everything else. Like, it it makes things

Aaron

so much simpler. The stuff that you do have to pay for. So, like, you have to pay somebody to, like, send your emails. Right? And even beyond what you have to pay for.

The way that Laravel operates is everything is driver based. You wanna use MySQL, SQLite, Postgres, Mongo, ClickHouse, Timescale, whatever? Great. We've got a driver for that. You wanna use Postmark, you wanna use Resend, you wanna use SCS, great.

We've got drivers for that. S three, r two, b two, Dropbox, FTP, we've got drivers for that. And so it's not really a situation where it's like, oh, I I really wanna use Redis for my cache, but I'm using Laravel. Great. Just use the Redis driver for the cache, and then everything else continues to work great.

Oh, you need sometimes you need a Redis driver, sometimes you need a file driver, and sometimes you need a null driver just because you're testing the cache and you don't actually want anything cached. You can create three separate instances of the cache all backed by different providers, and you can do whatever you want. It's become this kinda like hub and spoke. Like, you have the interface, and then underneath the interface are all of these different drivers that are the the providers, and that kinda spans every component that you can really think of.

Chuck

Yeah. That makes sense. I mean, it it it does and it has. Right? And to a degree, in various web frameworks, we've had these things for, like, a decade, but there's resistance.

I mean, I I think I understood early resistance around wanting to do more in the browser because compute costs and there was a lack of a cloud, let's say, and, you know, things around that to, like, do more in the browser to create dynamic experiences. But the problem is that browser is

Robbie

caught up. Users' machines.

Chuck

Sure. Yeah. You're offloading computers.

Robbie

Like ten years ago. Yeah.

Chuck

Yeah. Yeah. And then we got some fancy complex interfaces and, you know, front end devs wanted to flex a little bit, and that has worked to a degree. But we have a lot nicer tools now, and compute is cheap and all these other things. And so what has been before has also moved forward with us and gives us, like you said, then we would have to get out of our own way and actually try to make something that people like.

Mhmm. So

Aaron

Yeah. And I I think, like, it's easy to lump in, we'll just say vanilla view and vanilla react with the JavaScript industrial complex. But I I think I think the real perpetrators here are the merchants of complexity, which are like, no. No. No.

Like, you could use React, but what you really need is next. And what you really need is next on Vercel. And what you really need is Turbo Pack. And you're like Do I? What?

I don't know what like, why? That that's the problem that's the problem I have. Who is building a proper full stack application with one of these, like, full stack JavaScript frameworks? Where is the back end? That's my that's always my question is, like

Robbie

No one knows.

Aaron

Who's running the Cron jobs? That's the thing I wanna know. Who's running the Cron jobs?

Robbie

Vercel. Vercel is Cron Jobs. They all

Chuck

they have Cron Jobs now. But, otherwise, it was another SaaS provider. It's,

Aaron

Who's running the queues? Is that another SaaS provider?

Chuck

Oh, absolutely.

Aaron

Because when when I

Robbie

think of like queues, I don't think that yet. Do they? No?

Aaron

When I think of, like, when I

Chuck

think of web applications,

Aaron

I think scheduled commands so that I can do stuff, you know, I can do stuff every hour, every minute, every fifteen minutes, whatever. Crucial. I don't know how to build a web application without Acron. I think of queued jobs. I'm putting thousands of jobs in every hour.

At my old company, we're putting in hundreds of thousands a day into the queue, just to like offload it from request response. And to imagine like trying to do that in, like, a serverless way or, like, someone else is the provider of my queues or crons. And it could be because I'm old. I don't understand how that works. And, like, okay, I need to send I need to send an email.

That is very normal. I don't wanna pay a provider that has their own SDK. Right? I want to use my framework and then decide who will do the actual delivery. And I'm super aware that I could be the old man that yells at the cloud, but I don't understand how you build a a web application without some of these primitives that are, like, available to you.

You know?

Chuck

Yeah. Well well, I think that's the functional programming first.

Robbie

Yeah. I think that's two things is people love functional programming, which whatever. But then, yeah, it's just like everyone just wants to have the pain of figuring out how to do it themselves, I guess. Like

Chuck

I just think that, like, the paradigms of early Internet and then what were the norms of creating websites and web applications and things like that have been diluted and lost to a certain amount of our colleagues out in the world. And the solution to the problem has become, well, I've had these auth providers shoved down my throat. And so and why would you build your own auth? It's so hard and blah blah blah. Just join our platform and move into actually building your product.

But they, I think, were, like, some of the initial ones. But now, very many aspects of creating SaaS applications now has been, like, sign up for these. My I I mean, you've seen a bunch of these tweets. Right? Like, where there it's, like, here are these 10 companies.

This is my stack. It's my custom put together stack. And most of it is integration work. You're doing integration work for a CRUD application. What the hell are you bringing to it?

And if your company does blow up, you're rewriting the whole thing at some point because you're not gonna pay

Robbie

But they like rewriting the whole thing.

Chuck

Yeah.

Aaron

Like that they

Chuck

to win.

Robbie

I've been at so many companies or I guess not been at, but, like, with consulting like we had done. There's so many companies where you work there, like, a year. And they're rewriting a whole thing in, like, whatever the hottest newest thing is right now. And then you know by the time you're done with that, they're gonna redo that process to rewrite it. And, like, we're going to React.

Now we're going to Next. Now we're going to Vue, but, like, we let we may be like Nuxt, but, like, maybe we don't. Maybe we like everyone just likes to rewrite stuff for years and years and years because it's fun. And it maybe it's fun, but, like Yeah.

Chuck

It is fun. It's fun for engineers, but if there's a problem there where that is is basically where you think the ROI is, maybe your your product just sucks. Maybe that's the problem.

Aaron

Well, I don't know if you guys ever used, the screen sharing tool, Tuple.

Chuck

Mhmm.

Aaron

Great tool. Used to work there. Great company. One of the founders has Ben Orenstein has this tweet. And it was actually a subtweet of me, which I can get into later.

Ben and I are great friends, and this was, you know I texted him immediately. And I was like, you're talking about me? And he's like, yeah. I'm talking about you. But it was a subtweet of me, and he said it was basically it was like a quote, and it said, we're building a tool to make developers' lives easier.

That that was in the quote. And then Ben's commentary right below that was, have you ever met a developer? Because they value their time at approximately negative $100 per hour. And it's like, this is the reality. If you're getting paid to, like, play with new tech, who can blame you?

Like, yeah. Do do stuff. Like, have fun. Like Yeah. Build like, you know, waste company time.

It's not my money. But I think there's a there's a big difference when it's like you're out in the world and you have to see something to fruition and then be responsible for maintaining it. And, like, your livelihood depends on this thing working. A lot of stuff just kinda like don't care about that. Falls by the wayside

Chuck

Yeah.

Aaron

And you are solely focused on shipping a good quality, robust, maintainable thing to production, and you don't have time to, like, futz around. I think Laravel has succeeded in part because the PHP community doesn't really have that shiny object syndrome because I think I think it's some sort of, like, evolutionary pressure where PHP has never been lauded. I mean, there's maybe a time in, like, the year February or 02/2001 where it was, like, fine to use PHP. But even back then, it was like, we're using ASP.net. We're not using PHP because open source is crazy.

And it was like, PHP has never been cool or sexy or, like, braggable. And so we don't end up we don't end up bragging a lot. We're we don't end up talking about, like, oh, my PHP stack. And so what that leaves is, like, that leaves a vacuum. And the things that we end up talking about are, like, the things that we're hacking on, the projects that we're building, the SaaS tools that we're trying to create, all of these other things.

And so I think there has been some sort of, like, evolutionary force that has shaped the PHP community towards a more of like a true, like, hacker mentality, bootstrap business builder. It's like, I'm gonna pick the simplest, stupidest, create the universe and destroy it on every request. I'm gonna pick that because I know that I can ship something super fast. And my goal is to ship something super fast because I gotta get paid. And so that has kinda, like, formed, I think, over, you know, twenty five years, the community.

So I think it's a little bit different than than JavaScript in that regard.

Chuck

And that was just a clear end to that discussion. So it's Laravel

Aaron

It's good.

Chuck

Laravel is the vercel for the good guys. That's what I heard. Oh, man. It's the working man. Yeah.

You know, the common folk who like bright orange fucking Lamborghinis.

Aaron

Yeah. That's right.

Robbie

I do respect the hustle stuff. Because anytime you write a dollar sign in PHP, you get an actual dollar.

Aaron

Mhmm.

Robbie

So That's right. If you do it enough, you get a Lamborghini.

Aaron

Yeah. Exactly right.

Chuck

It's not just for jQuery. It's the OG dollar sign.

Robbie

Yeah. Very cool.

Chuck

So alright. Well, we got a couple other tech things. We also we're gonna well, we were gonna talk nonchalant.

Aaron

We talked

Robbie

We talked all covered, but

Chuck

we did a lot of things. Yes. How was your staycation?

Aaron

Oh, wow. That's very nice of you. My staycation was amazing. So my birthday was last week. My wife came in to, you know, like, a few weeks before and was came into the room and was like, hey.

What what if for your birthday, you went to a hotel just by yourself? And I was like Yes. Are you serious? Because that sounds amazing. Because.

And she had done that for her. Yeah. She had done that for her birthday, and so I think she knew, like, what a treat it was. And so Yeah. Yeah.

I I went down to a fancy hotel here in Dallas and just had the time of my life. It was great. I had so much freaking fun. It was very relaxing. You know, ate at the restaurant by myself, which is just the best thing in the world.

Seeing a movie by yourself and eating at a restaurant by yourself Yeah.

Chuck

Those are

Aaron

great. Totally, totally underrated. People are scared to do it, but, like Mhmm. You gotta lean in. That was great.

Hooked up my computer to the TV. So I had I had my computer on the TV with the AirPods in, watched Sicario two, slept in. It was just it was the freaking best.

Chuck

Best. Did

Aaron

a lot of, like, crazy journaling. So I'm sitting at the bar. It's, like, 03:00 on a Monday afternoon. I'm the only person at the bar. Sitting at the bar, having a drink, having my headphones in, have my have my, my trusty yellow legal pad, and I'm, like, scheming about how to take over the world.

And it was it was perfect.

Chuck

It was One Negroni at a time.

Aaron

Exactly. And, actually, I don't know I don't know if this is standard procedure, but I showed up and the concierge gave me a little card two free drinks at the fancy bar.

Chuck

Oh. That's

Aaron

nice. That's $30.

Chuck

You know what that sounds like? That sounds like your wife called ahead.

Aaron

Oh, maybe. Yeah. Knowing Maybe. I don't know.

Chuck

Knowing wives, that sounds like she was like, do this thing for yourself. And I know I did

Aaron

go home and tell her that. I was like, oh, you won't believe what happened. And she didn't cop to it. So No. Either she's either she doesn't want the credit or she didn't do it.

Chuck

Yeah. I don't know. Listen. Just roll with it. Be like, you did this amazing thing.

Thank you.

Aaron

And she's like, I didn't, but I did. Yeah. She's she's way too pure to take credit for that. She'd say, oh, no. I didn't do that.

That wasn't me.

Chuck

Right. Yeah. Just trying

Aaron

to help you out here.

Chuck

But Yeah. Just just roll with it. But Yeah.

Robbie

Yeah. So I am curious. You mentioned at the top of the episode, you have two sets of twins. So I have questions around, did you have the first set of twins and then go, I want more kids. How did you end up with two sets of twins?

Like, was that all planned?

Chuck

Do you

Robbie

want a big family? Like, I don't know. Robbie Whatever you're willing to share.

Chuck

You know how the you know how they they they got there.

Robbie

Right? I I know how it works. Okay.

Chuck

I know how it works. Okay.

Robbie

I know. Yes.

Chuck

But he's a father also. So He knows how it works. Man and a woman are in a covenant relationship. We're gonna describe it to you.

Aaron

Describe it to you. So, yes, we had the first set of twins. They're three and a half and one now. And so we had the first set, through much much pain and difficulty, we ended up with children, and it happened to be twins. Long journey to get there.

Then it was like, we want more kids. We want more than two children. And the first time, it was so it was such an arduous process. Let's start earlier than we think is reasonable, and let's just, like, take all the pressure off. Let's just we're not gonna see any doctors.

We're not gonna, like, to do any apps to track any sorts of time. It's like, we're just gonna let go and let god. Right? And first time, just like very

Chuck

Oh, it goes.

Aaron

First time Got pregnant.

Chuck

Yeah.

Aaron

And, of course, thrilled to death. Like, oh, man. Thank goodness it wasn't this long, horrible Road. She goes to have the ultrasound. We're thinking, like, it's fine.

I'll stay you know, I'm at home working. It's not a big deal. First appointment, whatever. I think I actually had, like, a I was giving, like, a webinar that day, which is so embarrassing. So I'm, you know, I'm on this this Zoom for my old company being a big old doofus.

She comes home, and I go in and I'm, like, nervous, of course, because the first time it was so painful. And I go in and I'm like, what did we see? Like, are we good? Is the egg is the fertilized egg in the right spot? Because turns out, sometimes they don't end up in the right spot.

Been there. Horrible. She's like, yes. It's in the right spot. What a relief.

And then she shows me the sonogram, and I'm like, boy, this looks familiar. This can't be right. Uh-huh. And I This is all true. Record she recorded it.

She we have a video of it, which is really quite nice. And I just started laughing, and I said, are you serious? And she started laughing, and then she started crying. And I started crying. And I'm laughing.

And I'm this just like the craziest possible outcome. And I had always joked that, like, I don't like seeing people left out. And so I was thinking, we can't have three kids because we can't have the twins and the hanger on. Right? The extra.

Yeah. That's true. Four kids. Yeah. We're gonna have four kids so that, like, the singletons, as as we call them, the singletons have, like, you know, somebody they can relate to and the twins have somebody they can relate to.

And I had always joked that, like, honestly, the perfect setup would be another set of twins because then we have a family of four. Perfect setup would be another set of boy girl twins. Everybody's got a twin. Everybody's got an opposite gender. Everybody's got the same gender.

Nobody's left out. What could be better? And, you know, sometimes you you speak it in to fruition. That is exactly what happens. We have two sets of boy, girl, twins, two and a half years apart.

Everybody has their friend. And so, yes, we, we got very, very lucky both in having another set of twins and having, what is, in our opinion, the perfect gender mix, two boys, two girls.

Chuck

Right.

Robbie

Yeah. We we are lacking that gender mix. We we have all boys. We were expecting two boys in, April or May. The interesting thing is yes.

I don't know how this works for for your your situation. But, like, so my generation's behind me. Right? Like, my grandpa's, I think, parents or I don't know. I'm I'm gonna get this wrong.

But, like, there has been every other generation sets of boy twins in my family.

Aaron

Oh, really?

Robbie

And they say that it can't come from the male. Like, the woman determines if it's twins. And I'm like, bullshit. Like, there's no way that this is gonna be a trend.

Aaron

Along the line?

Robbie

No. They're all, identical.

Aaron

They're all identical. Yeah. That is supposedly completely random.

Robbie

Supposedly. Supposedly. But every other generation, we have identical twins. My wife has is pregnant with identical twins right now. So Amazing.

Yeah. I I think, like, we were talking to my cousin about it, and they're like, yeah. I think the the thing is that they it's not that it isn't possible, it's that science hasn't figured out how this part works yet. Like this

Chuck

It must be that. Yeah.

Aaron

Yeah. I have heard that, fraternal travels through the maternal genes because it is, like, it's that aberration where the egg or they release too many eggs. Right? Whereas identical is just, like, luck of the draw. I will say I have an Internet friend who has twins, singleton twins, and both sets of twins are identical.

And so it does seem like there's something a little wonky going on there where it's like Yeah.

Robbie

I wonder if

Chuck

the But

Aaron

this is random. That doesn't seem random to me.

Robbie

So Yeah. I wonder if the the man there, like, if you go back generations has similar to me. I'd I'd be curious to know.

Aaron

I would too. Logan, if you're listening, let us know.

Robbie

If you're not listening, let's know.

Aaron

Still let us know.

Robbie

It was worth it was

Chuck

worth a lot of money. Logan. Yeah. Will you, ask him to let us know? That'd be great.

Aaron

Please do.

Chuck

So for the both of you then, here's the question. Is the shop closed? Yeah. For me,

Aaron

it is. Okay.

Robbie

I mean, I haven't formally closed, but, yes. Oh, I'm formally closed. Yeah.

Chuck

For business. Oh, yeah. I'm form I only have two kids, and I'm formally close, but I'm 47. So it's like Yeah. Yeah.

No. I'm too old. River over there. I can't I can't mess yeah. You called yourself old.

I was laughing.

Aaron

Oh, yeah.

Chuck

You don't know who you're dealing with.

Aaron

Feels old. No. We're super done. We cannot mentally, emotionally, or financially support another set of twins. So, no, we're we're definitely definitely definitely done.

My wife scheduled that appointment for me for sure. Yeah.

Chuck

Nice.

Robbie

Yeah. Yeah. What kind of, vehicle do you have to have

Aaron

everyone? We have, we acquired a new vehicle, which is you can just go and do that. We got a what did we get? A Honda Odyssey. And the reason Oh,

Robbie

nice.

Chuck

That's the premium.

Robbie

So That was my first car. Fun fact.

Aaron

Really?

Robbie

I drove a Honda Odyssey in high school because that was super cool.

Aaron

Character builder. So the reason the reason we got the Honda Odyssey amongst, all of the minivans is there's a YouTube a woman who YouTubes about cars for moms. That's all she does. I think she's actually like, I forget what it's called. Goodness.

It's like car seat mom or something like that. Anyway, she offers this consultation where you can pay it's like, you know, $50 for a half hour. I'm like, girl, you gotta raise your rates. You're famous YouTuber. So I paid for a consultation, and I was like, here's the deal.

We're gonna have four kids that need to be buckled in by an adult into car seats. Because, you know, lots of people have four kids, and their oldest kid is nine. And you're like, okay. Fundamentally different. Doesn't apply here.

Yeah. And so we've got, you know, two newborns and two two and a half year olds, and it's like, we gotta have hands on all four kids. And so we talked to her, and she was she was very helpful. The car mom, that's what it's called. She was very helpful, and we went with a Honda Odyssey because it is the only minivan on the market where the captain's chairs slide left to right.

And so they have a bench, but you can pull out the middle seat, and then you can slide the captain's chairs. Either side, you can slide them over to the middle. And so what that allows you to do is put the little kids in their, more complicated seats, you know, kinda upfront, and then push them over like, push that seat over and pull it forward. And then the big kids can get in the back and an adult can get in the back. Instead of trying to go around the front between the captain's chair and the passenger seat in the front, try to fit between the car seat as a grown man, which is terribly just embarrassing and makes you question your dietary preferences.

But, like, that allows you to get in and out a lot easier. And so Honda Odyssey it was. And, you know, you hate to admit it. It's very convenient. It's very convenient.

Chuck

Oh, are you gonna get Robbie into another Honda Odyssey? I wonder

Robbie

if Caitlin is adamant about no minivans. So we'll see on

Aaron

that one as

Robbie

push. Yeah.

Aaron

So were we. So I drive a Toyota four Runner, which only holds, you know, two children at a time. And then we do have an Au Pair

Chuck

third row?

Aaron

No. Mine mine doesn't. I don't know if any four Runners do. But we do have an Au Pair, and she drives my wife, Jennifer, she drives Jennifer's old car, which is a VW Atlas. And so between the three cars, the minivan is the only one that holds four.

The VW Atlas is set up to hold the big kids, and my four Runner is set up to hold the little kids. So who's going where with whom kinda depends on what car ends up being driven.

Chuck

Yeah. That makes sense.

Robbie

Interesting. Alright. We are about at times. I wanna ask this one thing that we try to ask everybody. If you weren't in tech, what other career would you choose?

And this could be

Chuck

Easy. Easy. Okay.

Aaron

One question's asked. What was it? Terraforming. I would buy I don't know how you make money off of this. This is irrelevant.

Chuck

It's okay. It's a passion.

Aaron

Yeah. I would buy 50, a 200 acres that are, you know, downtrodden, down on their luck acres. And I would I would bring them back to life. I would do some I don't I don't wanna, like, I don't wanna be a farmer. I don't wanna I don't wanna kill a chicken or anything like that.

Chuck

And I have

Aaron

a little dilettante hands. I'm not gonna do that. But what I do wanna do is I wanna build swales, and I wanna capture water, and I wanna build I wanna build earthworks. Like, I wanna do all of that stuff and just, like, bring bring the land back to life, and probably also have a workshop on there where I can do, light woodworking and light hobby electronics. And you know what?

We'll wrap it all up in, like, a YouTube channel, and that's how I'll make money. Yeah.

Chuck

There you go. See, you already know how to monetize. You know why? Because the whole framework is there. Yeah.

Aaron

That's right. It's easy. It's easy. Yeah. Be I could totally do that.

And in fact, someday, I will. When we make it, when Steve and I make it, that's what I'm gonna do.

Robbie

Alright. You heard it here first.

Chuck

Mhmm.

Robbie

So, yeah, before we end, what things would you like to plug?

Aaron

I'm very good on Twitter. You should follow me on Twitter. Aaron, d as in Daniel, Francis. If you're into screencasting, we've got a great course at screencasting.com, which is also a great domain. HighperformanceSQLite.com and mastering Postgres.com.

Chuck

You don't get that one?

Aaron

Those are all of our properties. So if you want to help us afford, diapers and some sort of, you know, other clothing and food for children, that that would be amazing.

Chuck

Yeah. So don't mail you my hand me downs. My kids are five and eight now, so I've got some extras.

Aaron

Send them. You've got the address. Send it all.

Chuck

We'll take That's true. Oh, yeah. Be be careful, especially as it gets closer to summer because I'm gonna have shit to get rid of.

Robbie

It's great. Alright.

Aaron

Send send send it all. We are we are the Statue Of Liberty of of hand me down clothes. Send us your tired, your poor, your distressed. We will we will take it all.

Chuck

Whatever you got,

Aaron

we will take it.

Chuck

Yeah. I will not send you a bag of dicks. I promise.

Aaron

No. Please do not do that. I don't even know what that would be. Send us clothes.

Robbie

Sponsored by bagofdicks.com.

Chuck

Yes. Just yeah.

Robbie

No. Alright. Thanks, everyone, for listening. If you liked it, please subscribe, and we will catch you next time. Is that What is your song, Chuck?

Chuck

Yeah. Is that

Robbie

Alright. No. You don't have to.

Chuck

Alright. No.

Robbie

You've been watching Whiskey Web and Whatnot recorded in front of a live studio audience. What the fuck are you talking about, Chuck? Enjoyed the show? Subscribe. You know people don't pay attention to these.

Right? Head to whiskey.fun for merch and to join our discord server. I'm serious. It's like two percent of people who actually click these links. And don't forget to leave us a five star review and tell your friends about the show.

Alright, dude. I'm out of here. Still got it.