The JavaScript Jabber panel teams up to discuss their favorite moments and episodes over the last nearly 10 years of the show. They discuss where things are at and where they're going next.

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CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Hey everybody and welcome back to another episode of JavaScript Jabber. This will be episode 500. Can you guys believe we've done 500? 

DAN_SHAPPIR: This is amazing. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Like, so yeah, real quick, I'm just going to introduce the panel and then we'll get rolling. We have Dan Shapir. You already heard it. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Hey, yeah. Hey, hey from Tel Aviv where it's sunny and warm. In fact, so warm that we are joining the club of countries with raging wildfires. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Ooh. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Welcome to the club, I think.Or maybe not. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah, hopefully by the time this episode airs, it'll be behind us. But it's not it's not really nice now. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah. We also have Amy Knight. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: Hey, hey from Nashville. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: AJ O'Neil. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Yo, yo, yo. Coming at you live from the Purple Room. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: The Purple Room. That sounds so fancy. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Oh, it is. It is. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: We have Steve Edwards. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: Hello from Portland. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: I'm Charles Max Wood from DevChat.TV. My room is kind of purple. I have the light off in here, but there's a wildfire up one of the canyons here in Utah. So the smoke is real bad here in Utah right now. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Oh, so this is new. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: It's not from the California fires. It's up in Harley's Canyon. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Oh, I thought it was just that. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah, we- 

AJ_O’NEAL: Fire's still trapped here. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Nope, we're not importing it anymore. 

 

This episode is sponsored by Sentry. Sentry is the thing that I put into all of my apps. I have to deploy them. I get them up on the web, then I run Sentry on them. And the reason why is because I need to know what's going on in my app all the time. Yeah, I'm kind of a control freak, what can I say? The other reason is, is that sometimes I miss stuff or I run things in development, you know, works on my machine, I've been there, right? And then it gets up in the cloud or up on a server and stuff happens and stuff breaks, right? I didn't configure it right. I'm an idiot and I didn't put the AWS Prudential in. I didn't do that last week, right? That wasn't me. They're reported back. Hey Chuck, I can't connect to AWS. The other thing is, is that this is something that my users often won't give me information on and that's, hey, it's too slow, it's not performing right. And I need to know it's slowing down because I don't want them going off to Twitter when they're supposed to be using my app. And so they need to tell me it's not fast enough and Sentry does that, right? It puts Sentry in, it gives me all the performance data and I can go, hey, that takes three seconds to load, that's way too long and I can go in and I can fix those issues and then I'm not losing users to Twitter. So if you have an app that's running slow, if you have an app that's having errors, or if you just have an app that you're getting started with and you wanna make sure that it's running properly all the time, then go check it out. They support all major languages and frameworks. They recently added support for Next.js, which is cool. You can go sign up at sentry.io slash sign up. That's easy to remember, right? If you use the promo code JSJABBER, you can get three free months on their base team plan. 

 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Anyway, so episode 500, we usually on these, we kind of celebrate the podcasts and talk a little bit about kind of where it came from or what we've liked about it or things like that. And, uh, one of the things that I like to do is we kind of get going is just bring up some of our favorite episodes. And so I'm, I'm kind of curious as we've, uh, as we've recorded some of the episodes over the last 500 episodes, what, what are some of your favorite episodes? I don't know if anyone wants to just jump in and chime in. Otherwise I can kind of call on everyone in turn. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Ironically, I'm going to pick the one in which I got schooled about different aspects of the Chrome internals and HTML history and stuff, because I learned a lot and I enjoy that. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Which one was that? 

AJ_O’NEAL: I'm trying to remember the name of it. Let me go look it up real quick. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah. Find a link, drop it in the chat. We'll put in the show notes. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: You mean the one with Jake Archibald from Google? 

AJ_O’NEAL: Indeed. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah, that was a contentious one. We got some ricochets off of that one. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Well, I didn't think so. I mean, during the episode, I didn't think so. At least I thought everything was going swimmingly, but, you know, Americans tell we are, 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: what was that? The one where we got the feedback that, Hey, why is, why are you arguing with your guests? 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah, that was one. I don't think you were actually on that one, Chuck. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: I don't think I was either.

DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah, that was that one. It was interesting in that regard. But I agree that definitely a lot of information about the inner workings of Chrome were given. And then especially when AJ realized that the person that we're talking to is actually part of the Chrome team. That was an amusing moment. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Well, my opinions didn't change. It's just that maybe I would have worded them a little differently. I don't know. I mean, the internet speaks for itself on some regards, like index DB is too complicated. The internet has voted. People don't get it. Everyone builds abstractions around it because it doesn't make sense the way it is. That's, that's just, that is truth. That is a thing. It exists in the world. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: That one I won't, I won't disagree with. I think that like index DB is indeed one of those APIs that that's apparently too complex for its own good. And, and given that you can hardly count on any other persistence API. I mean, you know, we have local storage, unless you're in Safari when, when either that is broken. But aside from local storage and just kind of are lacking in sort of a standardized, easy to use, always available, always accessible persistence API in the browser for significant amounts of information. 

AJ_O’NEAL: So I actually ran into how local storage is broken in Safari recently. If you have two tabs open at the same time, the local storage is not in sync between them until you refresh, which I thought was rather kooky. Kooky. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: There's the word. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah, it wasn't intentional. It's a bug. It's the, the problem is that with Safari, even if they have a fix for the bug, the fix won't be deployed until the next version of iOS. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Why was it experienced on desktop? But

DAN_SHAPPIR: well, it's kind of the same thing. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Who just liked it. Oh, go ahead. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: No, I was just going to say that who uses Safari on desktops.Other than to download Chrome. 

AJ_O’NEAL: I love Safari. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: You're listening to this podcast. 

AJ_O’NEAL: I love Safari because it's so, dare I say the word, ballsy. Safari is ballsy because Safari will put up a notice on Gmail that says, we crashed this tab because it was using too much memory, you're welcome. And I like that. I like that it just says, like all these popular websites, if you leave the tab open for an hour or a day or whatever, it will crash the tab and say, crash the tab because using too much memory, using too much CPU, you know, whatever it was that was doing, but Safari just protects you from the evilness of people who don't take intentionality in the products that they build or the products that they build are just so complex that, that for whatever reason, I don't know why Gmail listing a hundred messages would need to be taking up so much RAM that Safari decides to crash it, but I'm glad that it does. I appreciate it. That leaves me RAM for the other tabs.

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: I just think it's funny that AJ's, the episode that AJ brought up was the one where he wished he had said respectfully, you're doing it wrong instead of just you're doing it wrong. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Well, so here's the thing. I love people with strong opinions. People with strong opinions don't always love me, which I find to be strange because it seems like we should be in this click together of like, I respect you for having an opinion and sticking with it and being able to defend it. Like I respect you for that. I don't know, I just thought more people with strong opinions would be in that camp of, like we respect each other for having a defensible position and when our defenses are shown to not be true, then to back down and be like, you know what, you're right. I don't know what I'm talking about. Like, I'm fine with that. That's how I learn. I learn predominantly by making assertions and having people correct me. Maybe not predominantly, I mean, I learn in other ways too, but that is one of the ways that I learn. I state what I believe and what I know to be true and then other people state what they believe and what they know to be true. And then we can come down to the differences of what is fact versus what is not fact, because there's a lot of things out there that you read or you hear in a conference talk or whatever that turn out not to be true. Like the whole thing about tree shaking. That's a bunch of bogus bunk, apparently. Doesn't actually happen. Your bundle sizes are still just as big. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Well, look, going to your initial point and not talking about the tree shaking, I think that the one issue that you need to take account of, into account with this type of an approach is that when you express opinions in a forcefully enough, let's put it this way, then people will hesitate to correct you even when they think you're wrong. Because either they'll assume that you must be right, because otherwise you wouldn't be so sure of yourself, or it's also this cultural thing. So you do need to take into account that that one risk that you're running with this approach is that in some cases, people will fail to correct you even when they know they're right and you are in fact wrong. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Okay. Fair enough. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: All right, Steve, what's your favorite episode? 

STEVE_EDWARDS: For me, it had to be the one where I interview, I interviewed Jonathan Reinick of the creator of inertia JS partially because it was something that I've really gotten into using since that interview. When I kept in touch with Jonathan, I'm actually trying to get him scheduled to come on again and talk about updates. But for me, it's been a really interesting tool that addressed an issue I've had or trying to find a backend that I could control more than some of the online CMSs. But yeah, that was episode 443. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Nice. How about you, Amy? 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: Hi. Oh my gosh. I'm going to watch all of my photos lately. I'm going to go with... Man, I know I've given episodes before, but I'm having a hard time thinking that far back. So I'm thinking of more recent ones. I feel like we did one on machine learning with JavaScript last fall. I've been trying to find the links and I can't. And then the... 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Was that with Gantt? 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: Yep. And then the Plumey one, I don't know if that was... I feel like that was the spring. Man, I don't remember. But I've enjoyed the ones that steer in a different direction than what we typically have. I would say those. And for people listening, Plumey one is basically writing infrastructure as code with JavaScript or other languages. 

AJ_O’NEAL: The Pulumi? 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: Yeah. 

AJ_O’NEAL: That was a good one. I've run into a lot of people since that have used Pulumi. Some have good opinions. I think almost everybody has a good opinion about it. I might run into one person that was like, nah, I'll pass. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: And in my opinion, anything's better than writing HTML. But. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Nice. How about you, Dan? 

DAN_SHAPPIR: I'm actually going to cheat. Ha ha ha ha. First of all, I'm going to pick episodes that were during the period where I participated in the show. I kind of joined on episode 400 where I spoke about past episodes from before joining the show. And so this time I'm going to actually focus on the episodes that came since then. And the way that in which I'm going to cheat is that instead of picking one specific episode, I'm actually going to pick I'd call them like a sequence of episodes that had a common theme. And the theme that I want to pick is those episodes that were about people who are making their way or breaking their way into web development. So we had an amazing series of such episodes. And I know for a fact that they were impactful and that many people benefited from them. So obviously we had that episode with Danny Thompson that we know was very impactful. That was episode 442 and anybody who hasn't listened to it should like drop everything else and just go and listen to that episode. We also had an episode with Laura Harvey, who spoke about her experiences breaking into tech, attending a bootcamp in the UK. And I know that she's making a great career for herself. And that was episode 457. And we had another one with also from the UK with Carl Mungusi, who spoke about learning to code by reading code. And he was also relating his experience of transitioning from being a reporter, I think, to being a web developer. And I think he's also a panelist on one of the other shows on your network. Exactly. So he's, he's made an amazing career of it. And that was episode 408. We also had Matt Crook talking about picking a bootcamp, going through a bootcamp. I think he was still in the bootcamp while he was speaking with us, more or less in the middle of it. I know that he is still in the web dev. And recently we had Sam Sycamore also on the show, another excellent episode. So, yeah, we had this and that's episode 496. So we had this entire sequence of excellent episodes instructive for me because it's so different than my own personal path into software development in general and web development in particular. So it was really eye-opening for me to see people who are finding non-conventional ways of entering web development and really changing their lives around the ability to build websites and write code. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Wow, all of those so good. I'm gonna throw out a few of them myself here. One of them that I really enjoyed was the one where we talked to Eric Simons about Node in the browser and web containers. I just felt like that one started out with Node in the browsers, like, Oh yeah, cool. And then by the end I felt like, Oh, my mind blown all the possibilities and where's this going to go and what can we do with this? And yeah, holy cow. Just so much stuff. And then a lot of the core web vitals stuff. I don't know why, but I just really got into that. I, I really enjoyed it. So those are the ones that stand up to me. Yeah. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Some of those were me, so I'll take credit for that. Why? 

AJ_O’NEAL: I also want to say, the what you must know, what you should know, that was great. I learned a lot during those episodes as well. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Thank you. I enjoyed making them with you guys. It helped me organize a lot of my thinking, by the way, myself, around what it is that I think that you need to know in order to be effective as a web developer. And it's not such an easy thing to specify because the term web development covers such a wide range of knowledge and areas of expertise and actual work. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah, it's true. It's interesting too because what that really means is that you have people with widely varying experiences and widely varying sets of concerns. And so boiling that down to common sets of, hey, you ought to know this, you do need to know this, sometimes a little bit tricky. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: I recently got into an interesting argument, let's call it on on Twitter, because it's kind of strange. I mean, who argues on Twitter, but I got into this argument on Twitter because this person tweeted out that you can become a web developer in like 12 weeks. All you need to learn about web development, you can learn it within 12 weeks. And of course, my initial reaction, and not only mine, but many other people as well, was that this is kind of an uninformed and even obnoxious statement, because obviously learning web development the entire field. I mean, I'm doing it for what? Coming on 20 years and you can fill volumes with the stuff that I don't know yet. But then he kind of retorted with, yeah, but you've got people going through boot camps, which are effectively, let's say, 12, maybe 20 weeks and coming out and they're building websites and making a living. So like, are you going to say that like, gatekeep them out and say, hey, you're not web developers? So it exactly has to go to this concept of what exactly is a web developer. Are we talking about the minimal amount of information, the total amount of information, it becomes a kind of tricky conversation to have at a certain point. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yep, absolutely. And yeah, 

AJ_O’NEAL: I think that's something that needs to be promulgated a bit more. Cause I think that, well, what I said before we started the show and things I'm coming to is I think that there is a lack of discipline in the web development community that is growing and being normalized, and we could be having better experiences. But I don't disagree that some people can get really good and develop expertise in a short amount of time. But I think that that's pretty rare. You have to have a high degree of intelligence and a high degree of dedication, and you have to have access to really good materials out of the gate, which is one of the hardest things, because when you look at tutorials on the web, most of them are garbage and teach you exactly the wrong way to do it and very few of them are well designed and trying to cherry pick out the ones that teach how to do things well is pretty much impossible. I mean, if anybody else has a list of like excellent tutorials that teach things very pragmatically and don't have a lot of bad patterns and bad practices that are popular but not good, let's put that list together. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: I'm working on that. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Well, also it kind of depends. I mean, you know, when you're setting out to build a website, okay? You can take very different approaches. You could like literally build it using the lowest level tools out there, like just raw HTML and CSS and whatnot, and put it on some web server in the cloud. Then you're done with Express maybe. And then you can do it that way. Or you could maybe use some sort of an application platform like a Next.js or something like that and say, I'm just going to do it react the whole way. Or you could use something like a WordPress or a Wix to basically just build it by using more or less an existing tool where you drag and drop things around. And it's not always obviously clear what's going to produce the best result for your customer. 

AJ_O’NEAL: I agree with that. Especially when you're talking about WordPress, you get the experience of, you know, assuming that you don't put in a lot of plugins and you only use stuff that's secure and you don't put it shared hosting where it's going to get hacked by something else they get the experience of having a CMS, which I don't, I don't feel like we have other tools yet and we should, I don't know why we don't, but we don't have tools anywhere else that give you, well, there's like one or two things. I think forestry is something that people are able to use. Yeah. We definitely lack something that gives the client the experience that WordPress will give them. But I would not, I don't know, I kind of hesitate to say that this is where the term web developer gets overloaded because I think that when you're dealing with WordPress, and shoot me now, whatever, but you're getting further away from software developer, because it's less about understanding the technology and building out the solution with discipline, and it's more about like, okay, here's some Legos on the table, let's slap this together, put some duct tape on it, it works, it makes money, it's good to go. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: You can kind of go there with some of the other frameworks out there too though, right? 

AJ_O’NEAL: Oh, sure, yeah. Yeah, you definitely can as well. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Look, I'll say it this way. And, and, you know, usually I don't like to talk about Wix too much because I don't want to my being here as a host has nothing to do with my day job there. But you could, but I have to say this, if you're just out to build a scalable, secure website that looks great, you can literally learn to do it in a matter of a few days on the Wix platform or some of our competitors, like, I don't know, highly likely that the website you build this way will be more scalable, more secure, more robust than if you've been doing React for a few months. 

AJ_O’NEAL: I don't disagree with that. I think the question becomes, I mean, really I haven't looked into Wix that much. I did try a demo of building a site or something, but the problem I think with site builders is that it takes you outside of the realm of a web developer. Right? Because you don't have access and control over the HTML or the CSS or these other things. You all of the intellectual property is in the hands of Wix and there's not a way to transport it somewhere else. Now, correct me if I'm wrong on that. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: No, you're actually well, you're not wrong on that. And that's by the way, part of the attraction. I mean, like that you don't need to be a web developer in order to develop or build the website. That's the whole concept of a website builder. And I literally said that in my tweet response that I said, somebody can build an amazing website on Wix within a few days. I wouldn't call them a web developer. And, but the end of the day, if, if your goal is to build websites, well, yeah, but definitely you're certainly, you, I wouldn't call you a web developer and I certainly wouldn't call you a software engineer. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah. But the flip side is, is that it's not just not having to be a web developer because I use some of these systems, right? But I can also say, I need a sales page. I don't have to design it. I don't have to think about it, colors, whatever, because that's stuff I'm not good at, right? And so, yeah, I mean, functionality, does it perform as well as maybe I could get it to perform, maybe not. But at the end of the day, I have something functional. I have it up fast. It does what I need it to do. A lot of times there are tools and integrations that come with it. So there are trade-offs there too, right? 

DAN_SHAPPIR: I'll potentially surprise you and say that it, that there's a pretty good chance that it would, that unless again, that you have great expertise in building sales pages, then there's a good chance that it will be actually faster and more secure and more robust and more scalable because these companies, companies like a Shopify or a WooCommerce or a BigCommerce or Wix can afford to employ people whose expertise is in building such systems.

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: I agree. I, my point is, is that I give up some flexibility sometimes in some of these other things and I may be able to build it so that it has certain attributes that that line up with what I think I want. And I could do that as a web developer, but you compensate for a lot of other things that I'm not good at and performance may be one of those things too. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Well, and we had Sam Sycamore on and at the end of that podcast, I kind of got the feeling that he is more the type of, like his real skill is in marketing. And that's what his new job is, right? Like he was hired as, I don't remember what the title was specifically, but it's marketing. He wasn't hired as the software developer. He was hired as the software developer marketing, what I'll have to go look at his Twitter so I actually get the title right. But I mean, from our talk with him, it sounded like a lot of what he did as a web developer was more on the WordPress, like the kit side of things where he figured out more business, business problem solution statements and then found tools to apply them to more than he was hand coding any HTML or CSS. And I could be totally wrong about that and I don't want to misrepresent him, but that's kind of the feeling that I got that his path to success was not so much on the side of becoming a great software engineer as it was utilizing his existing skills in writing and finding a new avenue through which he could use technology to be a better marketer and uses communication skills. And I think that's a great career path and solves the problems that he was solving for his clients and for himself. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: I think we went on a pretty wide tangent, no? 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: We did, we definitely did. I kinda wanna talk for a minute about just where everybody's at. Like, what are y'all working on these days? 

DAN_SHAPPIR: I think you're gonna have to pick names, Chuck. 

CHARLE: Steve, what are you doing these days? 

STEVE_EDWARDS: So from a job standpoint, I work for a company at least until a couple of weeks ago was a little four-person company called GovTribe. And it's a very large, very large, you Laravel Mongo application that provides, it centralizes data for government contractors because government data sources are an absolute mess and all over the place. So, uh, that's what I get to do. Uh, and then I'm focusing on some most side projects using our inertia and Laravel with view and getting up to speed on Laravel. But it just plans those on the side and then yeah, about it. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Cool. How about you, Amy? 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: Let's see. By the time this comes out, I'm assuming we're a couple of weeks out. I am, so right now I have a very strange title and stuff that I do day to day. Changes a lot, but my title is like DevOps. So I'm doing a lot of infrastructure, but also still doing some JavaScript. We have like some internal applications that I do data visualizations for and stuff like that. And then the week after Labor Day, I am switching teams internally and focusing the DevOps stuff on site reliability engineering. So still we'll do some JavaScript probably. They have probably more node. They have like some services and stuff that they have set up with node because that's what they actually like some Python too, 

DAN_SHAPPIR: but correct me if I'm wrong, Amy, but that's a transition you were really looking forward to making.

AIMEE_KNIGHT: Yeah, it was a long time coming. I started the conversations in April and got the offer, I think it was June or so. So it was a lot of... I don't know. My current team didn't necessarily want me to go over there. But the other team was really promising. And so the team still doesn't know that I'm leaving. But I'm sure by the time this comes out it will be public knowledge. And I doubt that they listen to this podcast because I'm the only one that writes JavaScript. So yeah, so I'm pretty excited about that. It should be some good SRE work at a pretty high scale. So it'll be fun. Lots of Kubernetes, Terraform, GCP, a little bit of AWS. It's my day to day. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: So Amy, out of curiosity, what are you using for your data visualization? 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: Actually, I just use Google charts because it works really nicely with all of our Google Cloud stuff.

STEVE_EDWARDS: I've been knee deep, more like neck deep in D3 and alternatives for the past couple of months. Yeah. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: That's probably worth an episode, Steve. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: Yeah, probably. Believe it or not, Dan, I've just been at email. I'm booking somebody from Observable in September. I've tried to get Mike Vostok, but he wasn't available. So we got one of their people coming on. But yeah, that's exactly what we're going to talk about. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: I think it's still fun to talk about kind of stuff we're doing outside of work too. So I guess still in Nashville. I can't believe it's like five years that I've been here, which is wild after moving around a bit for the military. What else? Still have my cats that sit here while I work. And what else? Not running as much because I broke my foot. I have a Peloton that I'm pretty much obsessed with. Still lifting all that stuff. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Good for you. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Don't mess with Amy. She's tough. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: Is this a little sad? Like I took some time off because of COVID and the gyms closing and lost a lot of strength and haven't really been able to get it back. But Yeah, I don't know. The Peloton has been fun. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Nice. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: I should add if anybody here is like a Peloton person, my handle there is Amy A-I-M-E-S-K, the number eight. We can take a ride together. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Awesome. I'm too poor to have a Peloton. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: Yeah, it's not a cheap bike, but I used a work bonus to get it. And all depends, I guess, on your priorities in life. I don't know. For me, that was a treat. But. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: They look nice. They definitely are. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: They're very nice. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yup. How about you, AJ? What are you up to? 

AJ_O’NEAL: So I still do a little consulting on the side, but I'm working full-time at a company that does system of record for growing businesses. So basically businesses that are preparing for due diligence events with investors and stuff like that, but it handles everything, the formation. It's the whole stuff that you do as a business where there's documents that you need to be able to have them easily organized so that when a situation comes up that you need to share those with somebody who's got interest in your business, you can share them. So it's kind of like the things that as an entrepreneur, you absolutely don't want to do and will never take any initiative to do no matter how easy it is, but that you have to do. We make it so that when you're finally at the point that you have to do it, it's the easiest way to do it. And I do know there and I did, I started learning a little React, but it just made me angry. And so I, uh, I gave that up. I still, I still want to get back to it and learn a little bit more, but it's. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: And that's why I scheduled an episode where I hope to teach you about the underlying philosophy of a React. And, and maybe if you understand that, then it will be easier for you to pick it up. 

AJ_O’NEAL: I think Dan Abramov said it best with something like the problem with React is JavaScript. I don't think those were his exact words, but those were pretty much, that's pretty much what he said in React to the Future. That was a conference talk he gave. And again, I don't think his exact words were the problem with React is JavaScript, but it was very much what he said, regardless of what the words were. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: This is kind of amusing because React. Like the thing about one of the things about React is that like it takes everything like HTML and CSS and you know, everything else in the web and then injects that into JavaScript. So JavaScript becomes the center of everything. So say that the problem with React is JavaScript. Well, that basically reacts one of their core architectural decisions. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Well, no, I don't want to get into it right now, but whatever. Let me see.

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah, keep an eye out for an episode entitled reducing react rage. 

AJ_O’NEAL: I don't think there's enough reactor age is the problem. Anyway, other than that, I have been doing live streams for quite a while now. Almost every day. There's been times when I haven't been feeling well or I've had something else going on that I haven't done it. I have not focused as much on the doing the learning content is what I had set out to do because there's just like so much stuff to do, but I just, I'll live stream when it's something at work where I don't think I'm gonna hit something where sensitive information is gonna show up in logs and I'll have my logs on the other screen just in case and whatnot. And then when I'm working on an open source project, I'll live stream it when I've done a few reviews of people's pull requests, both pull requests people have made to projects of mine and pull requests that I've made to other people's projects and that interaction. And I think that those couple of episodes have been some of the best ones of the live streams in terms of what I would think are good educational content for people to see. Cause getting into the pull requests stuff is, you know, you're dealing internationally, the cultural differences are there, you're dealing with different code bases, different editors, different expectations. You know, it'd be nice if everybody was just using and we could all expect that because you clone the repo and the JS hint files there and the prettier file is there that boom, when you do your PR, everything should be right. But that's just not the reality. But anyway, I've really been enjoying doing that. I feel like it actually makes me a better developer and I would recommend it to anybody. I feel like it helps me stay more focused because I've got the camera on me and I'm speaking out what I'm doing. I'm rubber ducking. I feel like it helps, you know, the rubber ducking aspect, it helps me to solve problems quicker makes me more aware of when I really need to take a break, although I often don't. But I get the sense that, you know, my energy level's going down, I'm not thinking as clearly, I'm not able to explain things as clearly. It's like, okay, it's been three hours, I should go take a break. And then I go another hour. But that whole live streaming adventure has been something that's really been cool. And then projects that have come out of it, I think, have been really cool too. So the most recent one is Bliss which is basically a front end for other blogs. Because I mentioned before, we have this problem where we don't have content management systems for anything except for WordPress. But if you have a blog in Hugo or in Zola or in Gatsby or any of that, Bliss, this front end, will work with any of them because it basically just templates text for the YAML, or the YAML or Toml or whatever the front matter style is, and makes it easier to get all that nitty gritty garbage out of the way, the stuff that you don't want to do. Like you don't want to type out the timestamp and things like that and have a nice web interface for it. But anyway, that's kind of the coolest project that I'm working on right now. And yeah, I don't know, ask me questions if you want. 

 

Hey folks, it's Charles Maxwood. And I just wanted to jump in here and let you know about something that I'm doing. It's free. It's out there just to help you get answers to your questions about the things that you're running into with your career. So if you have questions about how to get. further ahead in your career, how to start a podcast, how to get a better job, how to get a raise, how to deal with the situation at work with your boss, or just maybe you're stuck and you don't know where to go next. You know, how do I get from junior to senior, senior to whatever's next? How do I become a speaker? How do I get to the next level? That's what I'm out here to do. So every Wednesday at 12 o'clock mountain time, I'm gonna be doing a call and it's gonna be free, totally free. Go to devchat.tv slash level up and you can register for the call. It's using Zoom's webinar software. So it's pretty straightforward. And what we're gonna be doing is I'll do 10 minutes and I'll just show you how I do some form of how I level up. And then we'll just answer questions. And it's not gonna be a question and answer like, hey, what's your favorite flavor of ice cream? And then I say, rocky road or whatever, right? Instead, what we're looking for is more along the lines of, yeah, I have this situation, how do I handle it? I'm trying to figure this thing out, how do I figure it out? I'm trying to stay current, how do I stay current? And if you have any of those kinds of questions, I'll bring you on the call, we'll ask some deeper questions, we'll make sure we get you a solid answer, and I'm really looking forward to helping some people out. There will be no sales, no selling, no nothing on these calls. It is literally just 10 minutes of training and then Q&A. So you can go check it out at devchat.tv slash level up. 

 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Is it at all opinionated? 

AJ_O’NEAL: What bliss? 

DAN_SHAPPIR: No, I mean your, your videos. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. No, I, I, I don't soften things up too, too much. And I'm pretty honest too. Like I can, I have times when, when my arrogance or my, you know, whatever takes over. And one of the videos when I was talking about poor requests, cause the guy basically BSed, he said, he said that their tooling enforced a certain code standard. And I'd looked at the repo and I knew that the likelihood of that being true was about 0.01%. And so I was like, you know, right now, I really wanna be an a-hole and just say, you're full of it. You don't have any tooling system in place, but I'm not gonna do that because that's not gonna help me get what I want out of the situation, which is for his code base in my experience to be better. So there's some...Good honest moments in there. I actually don't think I said it quite that bluntly, but something like that anyway. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Well, now you have. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Yeah. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Dan, what are you up to? 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Well, you know, we're recording this in August and this is my seventh year anniversary at Wix. I mentioned before that I'm at Wix. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Wow. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah. Time flies when you're having fun. It's pretty amazing because back when I joined, we were some like 400, maybe 500 people somewhere in between there. And now we are around 6,000 people. So yeah, it's like, I'm definitely one of the old timers at Wix, which feels really strange because it feels to me like, you know, it's, there are people there that have been longer than me, the founders obviously, but it, it kind of feels strange. My job description in, or my title, you might say, has essentially like remained more or less the same, but the actual things that I do have changed a lot. So, you know, I'm the performance tech lead at Wix. And back when I joined, it literally meant that whenever some part of the platform that, you know, the Wix platform had bad performance, they would literally call me over and asked me to look through it and find ways of making it faster. And I would literally like touch almost every bit of code in the system. And we are well beyond that point now. So now my job is kind of shifted to where I educate, support, provide tooling and infrastructure and instructions to people working in a lot of different teams. So instead of just me focusing on performance, there are effectively hundreds of people that are doing stuff that is related to performance at Wix. And And it certainly scales a whole lot better. We made some amazing progress in that regard over the past year. So I'm really happy about that. You know, so, so I'm doing a lot of things related to that. There were, you know, we spoke a lot about Core Web Vitals, which is something that Google introduced last year and I had to learn a whole bunch about that. Browser capabilities and APIs keep shifting and that obviously has a significant impact on performance architectures come along that kind of shift the way that web applications are being created in order to be performant, you know, stuff like the gem stack. We had episodes about that on our show. So there's constantly a lot of information that I need to learn and process, which makes it really interesting. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Awesome. Congrats on seven years. That's like forever for most people that I know in development.

DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah, I tend to stay put for a lengthy period of time. The previous employer before that, I think I more or less stayed around the same period of time. It's probably not that great a choice from the perspective of getting pay raises because usually you get the biggest raises when you switch jobs. But luckily for me, for example, in the case of Wix, stock options work really well, even though the stock has been kind of plummeting during the past few days. But in the general scheme of things, it was a good deal. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yep. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: Back up what Chuck said to you. That's nice to hear. I don't know, I've been at my place for like a year and a half now, which is kind of a long time for me because of the startup turn. And it feels really good to stay somewhere for a while and dig in. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah, well, I'm gonna jump in and talk a little bit about what I've got going on. So last September, I took a full-time job. I'm still debating in my head as to whether or not I wanna actually name out my employer just because of some of the stuff that I've fought with over last year or so. I think I'm going to leave it for now. I do have a couple of things coming down the pipe though. One of the big things that I think affects everybody here and the listeners is that I've decided to rebrand devchat.tv after 10 years, which is a little bit crazy. But I think it really reflects what I'm trying to create with devchat.tv. So over the next few weeks, in fact, probably by the time this goes live, it will have already happened. Everything's going to be on topendevs.com. And the idea is that the shows are geared toward helping people create a career where they are top and devs. And it's funny because I've been talking to a bunch of people about the idea around this. And what it really boils down to is helping people break away from that gravitational pull of being in this mediocre career where it's not fulfilling, where you just kind of you coast from one job to the next to the next. They're not really fulfilled at work. They don't really understand why they were fired up as a junior developer. And then, you know, and they were constantly learning and constantly excited, and then they kind of settle into their career and they're, it's like, well, I'm bored at work. And so just helping people find ways to, to break free of that. And the logo has got a rocket on it, right? Cause it really is helping people break it, break the gravitational pull of the, I guess, kind of the momentum of that default career and going, Okay, what do I want? What's going to fulfill me? And then finding ways to have it. And that doesn't mean that you can't work a job as a developer. But what it does mean is that there may be things that you can be doing that will give you an edge to go and do the things that you're really interested in. And anyway, so that's one part of it. And then another thing that I'm working on, and I'm probably going to actually have a sales page up for it like tomorrow and put up a bonus episode real quick just to let people know about it, is I was talking to a friend of mine today and he kind of pushed me on this and called me out on it. And so I'm going to be launching a podcast launch course. It's going to be a four-week course. It's going to start in the middle of September, which is about when I think this is going to come out. And you can find it at podcastplaybook.co. I've had that domain for a while and I haven't done a ton with it. But anyway, it'll walk you through getting your podcast launched. So there are a lot of ways you can kind of mess it up. And so this just gets you through, you know, defining your audience and then like all the technical setups. So getting your artwork on point, making sure that you're, uh, you sound good, making sure that you are getting the right guests. If you're doing guests that you're talking about the right stuff. If you're just monologuing, finding co-hosts, hiring an editor, where to host, how to host for like web hosting and media hosting and all that stuff. And figuring all that stuff out. Cause I've been doing this. I've been podcasting for 12, 13 years. And yeah, people ask me questions about stuff that I know the answer to off the top of my head. And I'm just going, Yeah, definitely. So basically, what you get, you get a set of videos, we'll have a weekly call, I'm going to set up a Slack room or some way for you to ask questions during the week. And yeah, at the end of it, you'll have a podcast launched that looks professional that you'll be able to use in order to sell courses or build a freelance business or whatever it is that you want to do to take your career off to that next level. And so it ties back again to that top end devs idea where it's just breaking that gravitational pull of settling in, being pulled back into a career where you just show up to work and then go home. And you can do something that maybe means a little more to you. And in this case, it's putting content out that helps people and then finding a way to maybe make a side income or something like that. So yeah, that's, that's kind of the next thing that I have coming. I have a whole bunch of other things that are further down the pipe, but I don't think it's worth really discussing those until I've actually got traction on them. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: You're getting yourself busy. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Busy is good. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Busy is good. Yeah. I guess that's the other thing that I should mention is that the thing that he called me out on and the reason that this is kind of coming around is that as we were talking about sort of the, so I'm not, I've never been the kind of person that really does well showing up to a job and then being told how I'm supposed to show up and what I'm supposed to do and when I'm supposed to be there and all that stuff. And so for me, that gravitational pull into a job, it's rather painful. And so for me, it's also just a way of saying, Hey, look, if I'm going to show you how to get out of the kind of situation that I'm in, then I'm going to show you how to do it. And so that's the other piece of this. And so if you're interested in seeing, I'm going to do a weekly it's going to be a premium podcast because I'm going to talk about some stuff that I don't necessarily want to just go full public on. But yeah, I'll put a link to it in the show notes. But you can get it. It'll be called doing devchat.tv. I'll have to change it because I'm getting rid of devchat.tv. But it's kind of an audio journal where I'll be walking through what I'm doing and putting all that stuff together. And so you can jump on that for like 10 bucks a month. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: And that definitely sounds interesting. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah. So anyway, that's the other piece of that. We're kind of at the end of our time. I know that we were talking about maybe talking about how we got onto the show and things like that, but I think we can kind of hold onto that stuff. And we've also talked a little bit about some of the things that we want to talk about in the future and some of the episodes that we have coming down the pipe, which is also exciting. So yeah, I'm excited to see what comes next, but I just want to let you all know that I appreciate you guys showing up every week and I really enjoy chatting with you every week about JavaScript and web development. So 

DAN_SHAPPIR: I have to say Chuck, two things. First of all, I think we spoke about that in an episode a while back. It was another episode that you organized recently about how we learn the things that we learn. And when I thought about it, I came to the conclusion that a lot of the stuff that I'm recently learning, I'm learning thanks to this podcast. Because you know, we bring amazing guests every week and we get to listen to the experts describe the stuff about the fields where they are the best at. And also I need to prepare so I read stuff about it. And all in all, I'm learning a whole bunch of stuff thanks to this podcast. So I wanted to thank you for that. And I think also that I want to thank you for like your contribution to the community. I mean, you know, the fact that this podcast has been coming out regularly for coming on 10 years, 500 episodes. I think that's amazing. I'm, I'm hard pressed to think of any other source of so much information that's just out there for free for anybody to listen to and learn. It's pretty amazing from my perspective. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Well, thanks. I didn't do it alone. There's a lot of credit to a lot of people that have put in time on these. So I want to reflect that back to the hosts because it really is, it's an effort that we get great people and they show up and you all show up. And I think that's really what it is. I mean, my part in it is, yeah, I show up and talk, but a lot of it's just organizing on the backend and making sure that stuff happens. And for six years, I actually got paid to do it. So I can't complain. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Cool. Well, from my perspective, I thank you as, as very much as,

CHARLES MAX_WOOD:  uh, well, thanks. I appreciate that 

DAN_SHAPPIR: you deserve it. Let's put it this way. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: All right. Well, let's. Let's do some pics before I get any more embarrassed. 

AJ_O’NEAL: You're turning purple, Chuck. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: I am. And I'm not in the purple room. 

 

Hey, folks, it's Charles Maxwood. And I just wanted to jump on real quick and let you know that I am putting together a podcasting course. I get asked all the time. I've been coaching people for the last six months. How do you start a podcast? How do you put it together? What do I need in order to get it going, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I've put together the curriculum and I did it through coaching a whole bunch of people. And now I want to share it with you. You can go check out the course. It's actually going to be a masterclass. It's going to be a four week masterclass or actually walk you through the entire process of watching a terrific sounding podcast and putting together content that people want to listen to. And you can find it at podcastbootcamp.io. 

 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: AJ, do you want to start us off with picks this week? 

AJ_O’NEAL: Yeah. I think I'm going to pick some things that I could pick every day, all day long and never stop picking, which I think I've picked many of them recently. I'm going to pick LawsofUX.com. I think everybody should get that poster in their office. I'm considering getting it in mind. That's kind of pricey, $60. But the website itself, don't worry about the poster, the website itself is one of the most invaluable resources for anybody doing development, where there is a human on the other end of the computer using your software. These are tried and true, accurate rules that if you follow, you will develop a better application. This is not hipster, pop culture, whatever of the day. This is researched, scientific, true UX design principles. And I am saddened that most people that get hired for UX don't know any of them, but that is one that I will pick. The other one, I always, always, always love to pick Douglas Crockford, specifically, I'm going to pick one of his talks that is not in the eight part series while he was at Yahoo, but this one is called The Better Parts. And he summarizes two, there's two quotes in there that are just, I mean, there's probably more than that, but these are just so essential, like so essential. One is perfection is achieved not when there's nothing left to add, but when there's nothing left to take away. And the other is if there are two ways, well, I'm paraphrasing this one a little bit wrong, but if there's two ways of doing something and one of them usually works, but sometimes fails, and the other one always works, why would you ever pick any method than the one that always works? I just love, I love Douglas Crockford. He is a software engineer's software engineer. He's just so pragmatic and thoughtful and deliberate, and I probably wouldn't get along with him in person, but I love his ideas. I'm also going to pick the Zen of Python. I think that this, I wish that it was called the Zen of programming because it is so universally true to software engineering. The things that are in this, it's kind of a poem, but it has, I'll read a couple of the stanzas. Errors should never pass silently. In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess. There should be one and preferably only one obvious way to do it, and so on. I am also going to pick the go proverbs because that like it's kind of the spiritual successor to the Zen of Python, except whereas the Zen of Python almost is nothing that is truly specific to Python. All of these principles can be applied in every programming language. The Go Proverbs are a little bit more specific to Go, but they could be, you can take them and see where they apply to other languages as well. So for example, there's Sego is not go. Basically, when you're transpiling a language, you're not using the language. Like the core language is not the transpiled language, which is not quite transpiling in go, but sego is not go. There's the bigger the interface, the weaker the abstraction. This is just a principle that can be applied anywhere. Clear is better than clever. Again, a principle that can be applied anywhere. And there's a number of these that I wish I had all of them in front of me right now, but I've kind of been collecting, trying to get a list of the philosophical resources that are what I believe to be the best philosophies to follow in software design. Another one that I'd have to pick is, and don't judge this based on the name of it, because it's not what you think. The Agile Manifesto. Agile Manifesto has nothing to do with Agile the way that it's taught to you by your manager or your team. There's the manifesto itself, which is only four stanzas. And then, well, and then a little bit of header and footer. And then there's the 12 principles of Agile software, which I think kind of go into the Agile manifesto. And then along with that, I would also pick the 12 factor app, which is another really well reasoned resource for kind of, this is more about DevOps, I think, than it is necessarily programming, but it's, I mean, they bleed together. They bleed together. And there's a couple more that I don't have on hand, but these are the greatest, most important archeological documents of the 21st century, in my opinion. And I wish that everyone had immediate access to them, knew that they existed, and furthermore that they understood them and were able to apply them as they look at their code. So that we tend towards simpler, more sustainable, easier to read, easier to grow projects and code rather than things that are more magical or cool or have another one of the Go Proverbs. A little copying is better than a little dependency. Not so much so many points of failure in the system. So with that...I'll cut it there. That's my diatribe for today. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Good picks. Amy, what are your picks? 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: Okay. I don't have quite as many, so I feel bad, but this is a GitHub repo that I starred somewhat recently, I think. And it is a command line tool where you plug in, you can like start it running at the start of your meeting and you plug in like the number of people's salaries. You give it a zoom URL and it keeps a running count of how much money your meeting is costing. So I mean, I think some meetings are important, of course, but sometimes people can kind of chit chat a little bit So I thought this would be good man 

AJ_O’NEAL: So anything else so like you plug in people's salaries and how many people are there and then how long the minute meetings going in it? 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: And it starts like a running timer. Yeah, you just give it the zoom URL 

DAN_SHAPPIR: say something about that, you know I have to because look in principle. I agree that Meetings can be a huge time waster and you know distract you from work and whatnot. But in the current situation, 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: can be encompasses are always. So yes, I agree with you, Dan. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: But it depends. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah, no, my point is that with the COVID and a lot of us working from home where we used to work in the office to an extent, some Zoom time has replaced water cooler conversations. So- 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: True, I just like, we gotta keep in mind that some, not everybody there has time to chit chat. Some people are like up against deadlines and you know. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah, but I used to walk into people's offices and bug them. And sometimes I was oblivious to how busy they were and they pushed me out. And I guess it needs to be the same with the word. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: We need something like that. We need like a zoom eject button. Like, gotta go, bye. Nothing personal. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: If you own the Zoom account, you could do that. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah. All I'm saying is that it also serves a purpose in the context of human interaction these days. And in that regard, I'm not sure you should be putting a price tag on it, like the way that you were just describing. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: You're assuming some people are not robots. Anyway. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Amy, are you a robot? 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: I wish I was. I don't know. Sometimes I wonder. Anyways. 

AJ_O’NEAL: What's the movie where they turn people into robots? 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: Sounds like a good movie. Anyways. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Oh, is that Stepford Wives or whatever? 

AJ_O’NEAL: That's not the one I'm thinking of. I'm thinking of one where you elect to have your... That's similar premise, but there's one, I think it's like a kind of like a space cowboy show and you elect to get turned into a robot and get like a chip or something. Yeah, but anyway. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: I guess I have one more, cause I'll make a 180 here. So I can't remember if I've picked this or not. I'm gonna go with the Inner Engineering book. I've been doing that audio book. I may have picked that like recently. I don't remember if I did or didn't, but it's really good. So I'll drop a link for that. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Nice. All right. Yeah, I do have to amend my statement. Meetings aren't always a waste of time. They are just nearly always a waste of time. Steve, what are your picks? 

STEVE_EDWARDS: So I got a couple of picks today. So over the past week, there's been a lot of, as I've heard mentioned on other podcasts, hot drama in the web world. We're not quite on the scale of our president's ineptitude in Afghanistan. But the Chrome Devs decided to completely with minimal notice to say, well, the alert, confirm and prompt dialogues from cross origin didn't want to sort of put it out there and it raised a big stink. So for instance, Chris Coyer who runs CSS tricks and CodePen said, you just broke a lot of our pens. And his inbox was filled with people going, what's going on? Because that's used and has to do with, they use crossword and iframes to have what your code does display separate from your editor. And so it was a big, big stink. And so Rich Harris, I believe it's the same, uh, yeah, it's the guy that invented Svelte or created Svelte, works at the New York Times, has an interesting blog post on it on dev.to about the whole situation, what's going on. So as of right now, the Chrome team rolled back those changes and said, Oh, we'll put it off for six months. Which sounds like it's going to happen. It's just going to happen in six months. But the conversation around it has been quite lively, to put it mildly. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: By the way, you have Weiss, who's a friend of mine at Google and also was a guest on our podcast. I think he's in the team that's actually managing this whole thing. So I think, and I don't think he blogged about it, but he posted a series of tweets about it. So if you care to also see things from the other perspective. I suggest looking at that. He's a very thoughtful person, I have to say. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: And then the second post is a combination of tick and dad jokes. And I don't think I'll be able to play it in here, but I'll talk about it. So there's a Disney just came out in a movie called Jungle Cruise that stars Dwayne the Rock Johnson. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: It was pretty good. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: As the ship and boat captain taking the people down the river. I haven't seen it myself. My son saw it and then told me about the scene. So there's one scene in there where he's telling a few puns to the people on his boat as he's going down the river. And some of them are quite good. Started off talking about two, two can birds who are beak wrestling, talking about how only two can play and he has to explain it. It's really pretty sad, but then it gets onto one of that, that falls right in line with some of my other favorites about how he used to work at the orange juice factory, but he got canned because he couldn't concentrate and they really put the squeeze on him and I was laughing pretty loud. So anyway there's, if you search on YouTube, there's a number of clips of it, but I'll put a link to one of them in the show notes. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yep. Well, I will just chime in and mention that I saw the Jungle Cruise and it was pretty good. So my wife and I went and saw it for a date night. Dan, did we get your picks? 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Not yet. Okay. So my first pick is that while back we had the episode where we spoke about Core Web Vitals and I happened to mention during my picks that I'm running low on show and movie recommendations. So one of our listeners, Adam Bliss, actually hit me up on Twitter and sent me a link to this service he created called Pick-A-Flick, which uses some sort of algorithm or something to find you movie and show recommendations. Now I've not yet had a chance to actually try it out.

 

but I definitely will. And I'm also posting a link to our show notes. So, you know, it's really cool that I get to express my problems on our show and then get solutions. I really appreciate that. So that would be one pick. Another pick that I have, I actually mentioned it before the show, is last Friday, I actually got my third vaccine shot. So should boost my immunity to COVID. I hope it works because we're having something of a surge here in Israel again, which isn't great. I've gone back to working full-time from home again. After starting to come into the office, like, you know, 50% of the time, I'm now back totally at home because of this kind of a surge. And I hope that these vaccines will help mitigate that. And those would be... I had the third pick but I forget what it was. So those would be my picks for today. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Awesome. I'm gonna jump in here with a couple of picks then. The first pick that I have is, I am gonna shout out about Jungle Cruise. Pretty fun movie. I mean, it's lighthearted. A lot of the times you kind of get, they kind of get on one side or the other where it's either, I don't know, it's either too lighthearted where it's almost cheesy or where, you know, it's like, okay, I don't know. It-The stakes weren't high enough, but you just, anyway, I think they really struck a good balance with the jungle cruise. It was fun. And yeah, so I really enjoyed that. Another thing that I'm just going to throw out there, I had a conversation with some folks and I think I bring this up periodically, but I had a conversation with some folks in my neighborhood. The conversation of like masks and COVID and stuff came up again. And one thing that came out that was kind of interesting was that as we were talking about it, we all kind of realized that everybody's kind of form their opinion at this point. I mean, some people may be persuaded one way or the other, depending on what, what they read at this point, but fighting over it on Facebook is kind of pointless because you're not going to convince anybody at this point. So, uh, that, that was interesting. And I mentioned, I think earlier that I, I just, I I'm getting tired of Facebook because people are, I mean, that's all I see is just people commenting about it. And I just want to comment on a couple of fun things with my friends, wishing people happy birthday and Nazi people throwing rocks. So anyway, stop spoiling Facebook, I guess. The last pick I have is the podcast playbook or podcast launch playbook. And that's a podcastplaybook.co. I wasn't willing to spring for the.com because I think it was a premium domain, which means it costs $3,000 or something and nobody's using it. So podcastplaybook.co We'll have you up with a podcast in four weeks. I'll show you how I do it. And yeah, we'll, we'll get you rolling, get you out there with a couple of podcast episodes. So yeah, if that's something you're interested in, definitely sign up for that. I think I'm only going to open it up to 20 or 30 people. So if you want in, you got to get in and uh, yeah, that's pretty much all I got this week. So we'll go ahead and wrap up here and thank you all for being part of this for 500 episodes.

DAN_SHAPPIR: So now we're counting up to 1000? 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: I guess so, yep. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Cool. 

 

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