Special Guest: Vitali Zaidman .

Hey folks, I'm a super busy guy and you probably are too. You probably have a lot going on with kids going back to school, maybe some new projects at work. You've got open source stuff you're doing or a blog or a podcast or who knows what else, right? But you've got stuff going on and if you've got a lot of stuff going on, it's really hard to do the things that you need to do in order to stay healthy. And one of those things, at least for me, is eating healthy. So when I'm in the middle of a project or I just got off a call with a client or something like that, a lot of times I'm running downstairs, seeing what I can find that's easy to make in a minute or two, and then running back upstairs. And so sometimes that turns out to be popcorn or crackers or something little. Or if not that, then something that at least isn't all that healthy for me to eat. Uh, the other issue I have is that I've been eating keto for my diabetes and it really makes a major difference for me as far as my ability to feel good if I'm eating well versus eating stuff that I shouldn't eat. And so I was looking around to try and find something that would work out for me and I found these Factor meals. Now Factor is great because A, they're healthy. They actually had a keto line that I could get for my stuff and that made a major difference for me because all I had to do was pick it up, put it in the microwave for a couple of minutes and it was done. They're fresh and never frozen. They do send it to you in a cold pack. It's awesome. They also have a gourmet plus option that's cooked by chefs and it's got all the good stuff like broccolini, truffle butter, asparagus, so good. And, uh, you know, you can get lunch, you can get dinner. Uh, they have options that are high calorie, low calorie, um, protein plus meals with 30 grams or more of protein. Anyway, they've got all kinds of options. So you can round that out, you can get snacks like apple cinnamon pancakes or butter and cheddar egg bites, potato, bacon and egg, breakfast skillet. You know, obviously if I'm eating keto, I don't do all of that stuff. They have smoothies, they have shakes, they have juices. Anyway, they've got all kinds of stuff and it is all healthy and like I said, it's never frozen. So anyway, I ate them, I loved them, tasted great. And like I said, you can get them cooked. It says two minutes on the package. I found that it took it about three minutes for mine to cook, but three minutes is fast and easy and then I can get back to writing code. So if you want to go check out Factor, go check it out at factormeals. Head to factormeals.com slash JSJabber50 and use the code JSJabber50 to get 50% off. That's code JSJabber50 at factormeals.com slash JSJabber50 to get 50% off.

Hey folks, I'm a super busy guy and you probably are too. You probably have a lot going on with kids going back to school, maybe some new projects at work. You've got open source stuff you're doing or a blog or a podcast or who knows what else, right? But you've got stuff going on and if you've got a lot of stuff going on, it's really hard to do the things that you need to do in order to stay healthy. And one of those things, at least for me, is eating healthy. So when I'm in the middle of a project or I just got off a call with a client or something like that. A lot of times I'm running downstairs, seeing what I can find that's easy to make in a minute or two, and then running back upstairs. And so sometimes that turns out to be popcorn or crackers or something little, or if not that, then something that at least isn't all that healthy for me to eat. Uh, the other issue I have is that I've been eating keto for my diabetes and it really makes a major difference for me as far as my ability to feel good if I'm eating well versus eating stuff that I shouldn't eat. And so, um, I was looking around to try and find something that would work out for me and I found these factor meals. Now factor is great because a, they're healthy. They actually had a keto, uh, line that I could get for my stuff. And that made a major difference for me because all I had to do is pick it up, put it in the microwave for a couple of minutes and it was done. Um, they're fresh and never frozen. They do send it to you in a cold pack, it's awesome. They also have a gourmet plus option that's cooked by chefs and it's got all the good stuff like broccolini, truffle butter, asparagus, so good. And you can get lunch, you can get dinner. They have options that are high calorie, low calorie, protein plus meals with 30 grams or more protein. Anyway, they've got all kinds of options. So you can round that out, you can get snacks like apple cinnamon pancakes or butter and cheddar egg bites, potato bacon and egg, breakfast skillet, you know obviously if I'm eating keto I don't do all of that stuff. They have smoothies, they have shakes, they have juices, anyway they've got all kinds of stuff and it is all healthy and like I said it's never frozen. So anyway I ate them, I loved them, tasted great and like I said you can get them cooked. It says two minutes on the package. I found that it took it about three minutes for mine to cook, but three minutes is fast and easy and then I can get back to writing code. So if you want to go check out Factor, go check it out at factormeals. Head to factormeals.com slash JSJabber50 and use the code JSJabber50 to get 50% off. That's code JSJabber50 at factormeals.com slash JSJabber50 to get 50% off.

 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Hey everybody and welcome to another episode of JavaScript Jabber. This week on our panel, we have Dan Shapir. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Hi, all the way from Tel Aviv. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Amy Knight. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: Hey, hey from Nashville. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: I'm Charles Max Wood from devchat.tv. Quick shout out about maxcoders.io. I'm still working on the tagline, but it's something about just helping developers max out their lives. We have a special guest this week and that's Vitaly Zeidman.

VITALI_ZAIDMAN: Yeah, hello from Tel Aviv as well. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: I think I've probably butchered your name every time we've had you on. 

VITALI_ZAIDMAN: No, actually it's great. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Awesome. 

 

This episode is sponsored by Tidelift, the enterprise-ready open source software managed for you solution. Tidelift provides commercial support and maintenance for the open source dependencies you use to build your applications backed by the project maintainers. Save time, reduce risk and improve code health. The Tidelift subscription is managed open source for application development teams. It covers millions of open source projects across JavaScript, Python, Java, PHP, Ruby,.NET, and more. Your subscription includes security updates from Tidelift security response team that coordinates patches for new breaking security vulnerabilities and alerts immediately through a private channel so your software supply chain is always secure. Tidelift also verifies license information to enable easy policy enforcement and adds intellectual property indemnification to cover creators and users in case something goes wrong. You always have 100% up-to-date bill of materials for your dependencies to share with your legal team, customers, and partners. Tidelift ensures the software you rely on keeps working as long as you need it to work. Your managed dependencies are actively maintained and we recruit additional maintainers when required. Tidelift helps you choose the best open source packages from the start and then guide you through the updates to stay on the best releases as new issues arise. Take a seat at the table with the creators behind the software you use. Tidelift's participating maintainers are more income as their software is used by more subscribers. So they're interested in knowing what you need. Tidelift supports GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket and more. They support every cloud platform and other development targets too. The bottom line is you get all the capabilities you expect and require from commercial software, but now from the key open source software you depend on. Check them out at devchat.tv slash Tidelift. 

 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: You wanna just remind people who you are and then we can dive into the topic here? 

VITALI_ZAIDMAN: Yeah, I'm a full stock developer for more than seven years now, I work in a software consultancy by the name of Weldon Software. Currently, I work with Takeaway.com. Their Israeli website is 10bis, and we work a lot on SEO. So I have a lot of experience in this field. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Nice. In fact, we were doing my JavaScript story, and I think you mentioned that you'd been working on SEO for developers or something like that. And I was like, that's an awesome topic. And just to give a little bit of background, one of the things that I'm really working on these days is just covering some of the topics that developers need to understand in order to, like I said, max out their lives or max out their careers. And a lot of times, one of the things that we often ignore is anything on the sort of business end of things that isn't some deep technical topic. And I know SEO can border that line a little bit. But it can be really, really important and really valuable to your employer for you to have those skills. If you have those kinds of skills, you know, again, it's like the management skills and the, you know, the training skills and the mentoring skills and a lot of these other skills that we kind of consider soft skills. And then some of the business concerns, if you understand those, then you can add a ton of value to your employer and what they're doing. And then what happens is then you become more valuable there and it makes it easier for you to justify a raise makes it easier for you to hold on to your job if there's some kind of economic downturn, makes it easier for you to get promoted. A lot of different things start working for you as you understand those things. So I was like, sweet, let's talk about it. So do you want to give us kind of the elevator pitch as far as what SEO for developers looks like? 

VITALI_ZAIDMAN: Yeah, so first of all, I agree with you about the, like learning different fields and different stuff to promote yourself. It's so true, I've said it so many times. Well, in regard to SEO, so SEO stands for search engine optimization, which basically means that it's the process of making your website appear higher on search engines. And people usually focus on Google because they have a huge market share. By the way, it's not true for everybody, but usually people focus on Google and by creating good SEO for Google, they also get nice SEO on other search engines. So that's SEO in a nutshell, just promoting yourself on Google. I can also add that SEO looked completely different, like 10 years ago, I guess, maybe even less SEO, just a bunch of dirty tricks that people used to do. I don't know, like repeating the same word many times. Like many words in transparent box or something. So it's a bad idea to do it today because Google actually have a list of these abusers and they might penalize you or they most probably would penalize you for doing these things. So because Google intends to link people to the best websites for their searches and because they're so good in what they're doing. Today, the best thing to actually promote yourself on Google is to provide great content for your users. So that's from the business aspect. And for us, the developers, the best thing we can do is to optimize the website for SEO, which means just to expose this great content to Google in the best way to make the site smooth, to make it operational, to make it secure, to make it accessible to make it work on mobile, things like that. And that's in a nutshell. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: So I know there's tons of different things that you can do, but what percentage of this just goes back to having good semantic markup and taking the time to understand some of the stuff that we take for granted, like our styling and just basic JavaScript stuff? 

VITALI_ZAIDMAN: Well, yeah, so Google looks at your HTML and that's actually what they're doing. They parse your HTML. And then they look at the structure of your website to try to understand how valuable is it. And also they look how users interact with it. So having all these good semantics helps Google understand what is your site about. So that's the reason why it is important. Also you have many tags, like the title tag, which determines how your website would look on the Google results pages and the description tag. And you have all these tags that prevent duplication, like not all these tags, the canonical, the meta canonical tag. That's a big part of what developers usually do to improve SEO. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: So basically what you're saying is that task number one is just make your website, just use better semantic HTML is probably the first thing you should be doing.

VITALI_ZAIDMAN: Yes, I think it is also because it's kind of easy in general. Like don't use div. If you see an article, just use an article. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah. But how will people know that I'm a developer if I don't use a lot of divs? 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: You can use spans too, Dan. It's okay. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Well, spans with display block, I guess is okay as well. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: Yeah. That's why I asked the question. I think there's a lot of people that enter JavaScript and web development from the HTML, CSS route. So they're pretty educated in this. But then there's also a portion of the community that might enter from a maybe more quote unquote traditional background, like learning Java in college, where they're just learning computer science and programming and not really HTML and CSS. And because HTML and CSS are not programming languages, I think sometimes depending on where you're working, if you're working for like a company that targets consumers, then taking the time to, you know, understand some of HTML and CSS at a deeper level is going to be beneficial, even if it is kind of easy. 

VITALI_ZAIDMAN: Yeah. It's also, it also depends on the size of your company because bigger companies has the privilege of having dedicated teams for SEO. And they usually catch these things and just tell the developers how to improve them. For example, in the company that I work with, take away.com, they have a big, okay, it's not a big department of SEO, but they have a department of SEO with people who are like hardcore experts on this. They work on a SEO for many, many years. If they see something like, I don't know, a wrong tag being used somewhere. For example, I don't know, we use the like the totals, I don't know, use H1 instead of a div or use H2, things like that. They see the things, but this topic is mostly problematic in smaller companies because they don't have these people who specialize in this field. I suggest them reading at least the what Google exposes to the public. We obviously added to the links of this podcast below. So Google has its own guidelines on how to do the things. Yeah, just read it. It's not long and you would learn a lot of stuff from there. It's implemented everywhere. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: I kind of want to jump in on this a little bit, you know, not just in the sense of, yeah, using h1 tags and the makeup of the website. It's, I mean, there are a lot of things that go into it and Google looks for a lot of different things. I mean, not having erroneous HTML on your page and having things reflect in the right way makes a lot of sense. I've been spending a lot of time working on the SEO for DevChat TV and we've seen a pretty significant bump by working on it. And I guess SEO is measured, I guess, in how you rank for the keywords that you're targeting. And so there's going to be a certain amount of content that goes into it as well. But beyond that, the other thing that I found is that Google provides you a ton of tools to actually track this stuff. And so for example, one of the things that we've done on devchat.tv is Google allows you to add questions and answers to the web pages. There's a format for this, it's JSON, something or other, I can't remember exactly what the format is. But you put those questions in, they like you to show the questions, the Q&A on the page as well. The FAQ is what they're calling it. But yeah, then you can put that in and it'll show up. So if you do a Google search for a particular topic and you see like the questions that come after a particular article, those have actually been embedded in that article. You know, Google likes you to play along with what they're putting out there as well so that they can provide better results for the search results and things like that. So, so yeah, so there are a lot of other things that go into it. One other thing that I figured out too, that helps your SEO is the page speed. And just having like your images optimized and having your code minified and things like that, a lot of that stuff that goes into your build process is also going to vastly make a difference in your... 

DAN_SHAPPIR: If I could just add before we move to that, obviously SEO is a significant carrot for having proper semantic HTML, but that's not the only motivation. I mean, if you care about accessibility...If you care about the proper structure of your page, I mean, if you want people, let's say, that are using screen readers to be able to properly access your content, you definitely want to have semantic HTML. So, like I said, getting good SEO as a result is a significant carrot, but that's certainly not the only reason you want to be using proper HTML. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah, that's true. 

VITALI_ZAIDMAN: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Because, for example, if you add even more accessibility features to your website, then you get to a bigger audience. And also Google rewards you with higher SEO. So that's another example. And also if you make your site accessible on mobile or fast on mobile, people would use your website more smoothly, your conversion rates would go up and also Google ranks you higher. So the reason for that, I think, is because Google tries to see trends in the market and they rank for these trends. So for example, something like an year ago, Google started ranking pages based on how they look on mobile. And that's because the world starts using mobile much more. So they saw this trend that people are using mobile phones and they want to give their users the best results. And that's why they switched and started indexing and looking at pages as they're rendered on mobile. Regarding the question and answers, it's called structured data. And yes, it's enriches your, the data that is shown to users on the search result pages. So for example, I'm working with restaurants, like food ordering service. So we have opening hours, we have price ranges. We have these like maps and it's when you see all these things on the search results as a user of Google, you're much more likely to click on it because you get all the information you need upfront. And that's a very good practice to do. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: It's called snippets or something, isn't it? 

VITALI_ZAIDMAN: It's called structured data. It's just adding JSON on top of your, the header of your HTML. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: I recently saw a video where they showed that even just having a table of relevant content in your page, just the HTML table element, and if you're ranked number one, there's a good chance that Google will actually extract that table out of your page and embed that into the search result. So it goes beyond JSON, per my understanding. 

VITALI_ZAIDMAN: Yes, as far as I understand. And that's another thing that changed very, very recently. Google uses the latest Chrome now. So they use an evergreen Chrome to grow your website. They look at it as they're just users and they have very advanced algorithms to read the content and to parse it. They can even parse podcasts. They can even like parse the audio. And that's exactly what you said before. They can do it, but we should probably help them. You know, we should probably optimize for SEO. So we will be sure that they extract exactly the content that we want. So for example, in a podcast, you would consider transcribing the whole podcast for this reason to have keywords on your podcast result page, even though Google says they're doing it, but you don't want to trust them on this. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: They actually crawl your website and they pull things out of like audio tags and Yeah, a bunch of other places. And yeah, it definitely helps if you have the right meta information around things to make it so they can find them. 

VITALI_ZAIDMAN: I worked a lot with Google speed insights. So I have a lot of information about it. And if you want to get into it now. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah, that I think that would be definitely a cool topic. It's one that I've been looking at a lot as well. So it will be interesting to exchange information. 

VITALI_ZAIDMAN: Okay. So Google speed insights, Google uses a tool that's called Google Speed Insights to assign a score to your website regarding its performance. They currently only look at the performance of how your website loads, but they intend to use similar tools to see how your website performs in general. But as I said, currently they only look at how your website loads. They use two tools to achieve it. First of all, they have real field data. I think most of the people don't know it, but if you opt in to help improve Chrome's features and performance when you install Chrome, it tracks how fast websites load on your Chrome and they collect this information to understand how fast web pages load. So they actually collect data from real users and try to rank pages based on this metric. Okay?

DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah, this is called the Chrome Crocs or Chrome User Experience Report. It's worth mentioning that all this information is actually available. You can actually run it's it all goes into a BigQuery database and you can actually run queries on that data. So that's yes, that's indeed a very useful source of information to, to learn about the performance of your own website. Assuming you have enough visitors because they do set a certain mark which they don't advertise that the number of visitors that you get is below that mark, then your site won't be in that database because they consider that there's not enough visits to calculate proper statistics for it. 

VITALI_ZAIDMAN: Yeah, exactly. 

 

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VITALI_ZAIDMAN: Also, they use the lab data, which is just using their own machines to navigate to your website using the latest Chrome. By the way, it doesn't have any special user agent, so you can't detect it in general, but they use real devices or simulated devices in case of mobile. And they navigate to your web page. They collect all kinds of metrics from your website. For example, when the first input was received, so how fast did you respond to the request to get to the website? Or first contentful paint, which means something contentful and big was painted. Time to interactive is an important one since the last algorithm change a few months ago. Time to interactive means the moment where the user can interact with the page. So there's all these metrics and Google always changes the formula and the metrics they use to calculate your score. But the important thing to remember is that it's pretty easy to get a good score on desktop, but the moment you get to mobile, it's very, very hard. Like many websites have a score which is less than 10 or less than 20. Because first of all, Google uses a mid-tier device or sorry, they simulate a mid-tier device. They simulate Moto G4. It might change in the future when the technology, the mobile technology advances, but currently they use Moto G4 and they use a very slow internet connection. So they use an internet connection with 150 milliseconds latency and 1.6 megabits per second, which is 200 kilobytes per second download speed. And the 150 millisecond latency means that every request to a new domain would take you around a second because you have a DNS lookup, takes 150 milliseconds, a connection, then you have SSL authentication. Then you need to fetch the data. And the internet is slow, so you would probably fetch it not really fast. So it means that every single script you add from, I don't know, third party library, or if you add some kind of analytics, it all adds up and in the end your website loads like in 10, 20 seconds on mobile, these numbers are just unbelievable. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah, I just wanted to add two things. First of all, to mention the technology that they use to drive Google PageSpeed Insights, which is if you Google for Google PageSpeed Insights, you will actually find this tool. And you can easily put in your website and see the scores that you get. But the tool that they actually use to drive this, the technology actually, is called Lighthouse. It's integrated now essentially into almost all of Google's performance auditing tools. You even have it built into Chrome DevTools. So if you go into Chrome DevTools to the audit tab, that's essentially the same technology. So it's Lighthouse there in the DevTools, and it's also Lighthouse in Google PageSpeed Insights. And you will get more or less similar results. It will vary, obviously, because you're testing at a different geolocation, whatever. But the results will generally be kind of similar. And it's also in the webdev.dev website. They have the same tool. And also in webpagetest.org, you can actually run Lighthouse from there as well from different locations. So this tool is really all over the place. So that's one thing I wanted to mention. And the other thing I wanted to mention is we're looking at it from the perspective of SEO, but you also need to remember that we in the developed world tend to think that oh my god like moto g4 that's so slow and 3g that's so slow but for a lot of people out there that's the reality of their browsing experience so if you're getting a low google pay speed insight score or psi score that's a potential indication that if you've got users that say i don't know in india or the philippines or or south America. You know, they might be getting a pretty poor experience as well when they try to visit your website. So it's not just the Google bots, it's potentially your visitors as well. 

VITALI_ZAIDMAN: From my experience, the simulation of Moto G4 is great. I mean, I took an actual Moto G4, I navigated to our website, a place in the office where the connection is not very good, and the results were exactly the same. So, yeah, what Google says is true in general. By the way, performance is the main thing that users look for. It predicts conversion rates and user experience pretty well. So as Dan said before, aim for good performance, aim for fast websites. It's very important, not only for SEO. Yeah, totally agree. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Obviously, performance is important like Vitaly said, performance is important for the success of your website. And Google has stated that performance is one of the considerations that they're taking into account when determining the ranking for your site. What I've not seen is any explicit statement talking about how your performance directly impacts your ranking or even more specifically, how your score in a tool like Google PageSpeed Insight impacts your ranking, if at all. So what I'm actually asking is if Vitali has seen any explicit statement from people at Google or from the SEO community at large that correlates more directly between page performance and the SEO, beyond the general statement that having good performance is good for SEO? 

VITALI_ZAIDMAN: Well, I think this question can be applied to many things on SEO, because Google is very vague about their algorithms. And they have so many factors there. We can only assume that it does because of vague statements. But no one can say for sure. And also, they update their algorithm once or twice a day really big algorithms changes all the time, once or twice an year, they also update Google Lighthouse all the time. So I wouldn't say that when you improve your speed, you actually significantly improve your SEO directly. But you might improve it because people would experience the website better. And you might also get rewarded by the SEO gods. But I don't think we know that for sure. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: So here's a bit of information that I've been able to find. I did, like I said, some digging before the show. So back in July 2018, Google introduced an update to their engine. They've done some updates since then. So this information might itself be dated. But they did something called a speed update, in which they said that they will website performance into account for SEO, but, and here I'm quoting, that it will only affect pages that deliver the slowest experience to users and will only affect a small percentage of queries. So, like I said, I'm in total agreement that you should strive to have the best performing site that you possibly can, and that the performance of your site is probably one of the key factors for the success of your site. I am, to an extent, questioning how much impact it currently directly has on your SEO. And just to give another specific example, you know, if I do a Google search for news, just the word news, then not only will I get CNN and Fox News in the first page, but both of these sites actually have a fairly abysmal Google PSI score. So for Fox News, the PSI score, think of something like this thirty something for desktop and twenty something for mobile and if you think that's bad then the score for cnn is ten for desktop and one out of one hundred for mobile so i guess that they're in the first page because you know google tries to figure out intent and they assume that when people look for news they want to see cnn and they want to see fox news so it makes sure put them there. And obviously, if your site does not have such branding and you're trying to build your success and move up the ranks, then obviously your story is going to be very different from that. So again, I don't intend to mean that you should ignore performance. You know, that's more or less the definition of my job at Wix. If I would say that to ignore performance, I'd be out of a job. But I am saying that, you know, we should be careful about directly correlating between performance and SEO.

VITALI_ZAIDMAN: Okay. And also I think sometimes people get obsessed with several aspects of SEO, like performance, like links, like SEO content, which means basically writing a lot of words, meaningful words. And all these things are, we kind of only assume it helps. So again, I get back to my initial advice, just make good websites for users and don't get obsessed over any point especially if you're a small startup or something, don't spend too much time on performance per se. I mean, obviously you probably should focus on performance as well, but don't get obsessed over certain aspects by themselves. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yep. 

VITALI_ZAIDMAN: Another thing to remember is that since Google uses the evergreen Chrome browser to make the lab measurements of speed on your website. You can use all the latest features of Chrome. So for example, you can use a native lazy loading of images and just add this very, very small attribute to all your images where they get loaded lazily, which means Google would load much less data when they navigate to a website and rank it for speed. So that's another piece of advice. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Makes sense. All right. Well, we've got to get to picks because we have another episode coming up for recording here in about 10 minutes. Um, but before we do that, Vitaliy, do you want to just remind people, uh, where they can find you online? 

VITALI_ZAIDMAN: Sure. First of all, I'll include a link to an article I just wrote about SEO. Just another view for developers. So that's my medium.com profile. And also on Twitter, Twitter.com slash vziedman. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Awesome. 

 

Back when functional programming was making its resurgence, I found it really interesting that a lot of people were moving over there, and it almost felt like it was on hype, and I didn't really understand the power of functional programming until I learned Elixir. Elixir is a functional programming language that's built on the Erlang virtual machine, and it really does some interesting things and makes you build apps in a different way. But what's really fascinating about it is the speed of the applications, the ability to distribute work easily and just how it manages the functional programming and all of the nice things about it so that you don't have to worry about side effects and a lot of the other things that come out of functional programming. Plus pattern matching in Elixir is a killer feature. If you're looking for a new language that you want to learn that is going to make a difference for you and give you the opportunity to challenge some of your thinking and find a new way of doing it, Elixir is a great way to go. And we have a podcast now on Elixir called Elixir Mix, and you can find that at elixirmix.com. 

 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Let's do some picks. Amy, do you have some picks for us? 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: I do. I'm going to go with the one we were talking about, Spotify, before we started the call. Looks pretty cool. It is basically, I don't know, looks like a CLI for Spotify, just like a command line tool written in Rust. So I know I listen to Spotify constantly at work. So the fact that maybe I can just do this from my command line and not have to use the GUI looks pretty cool. So that's going to be my pick. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: All right, Dan, what are your picks? 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Well, I might have mentioned this before. But I'll be attending Crove Dev Summit on November 11th and 12th in San Francisco. Hopefully by the time this episode comes out, you know, some of the listeners might be there as well. And if that's the case, I'd be really happy to meet and chat with whomever is there. So do feel free to contact me about that. The best way would be to simply search for Dan Shapiro on Twitter and DM me or send me a message or whatever. Like I said, I would love to meet. Continuing my quest to educate our listeners about excellent but lesser known fantasy books and fantasy authors, this time I want to mention one of my all-time favorite books. It's called The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers. Like I said, one of my all-time favorite books, although this is really not standard high fantasy, it actually takes place in our own world, but it's really weird and an amazing combination of magic and science fiction and time travel and whatnot and it combines ancient Egyptian mythology and romantic English poetry and gritty action and adventure, even a little bit of horror. It's very, very highly recommended. Like I said, one of my all time favorite books in this jeneer. So those would be my picks. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: All right. I'm going to jump in with a few picks. So on Saturday, I ran my first marathon. I ran the St. George marathon. It was really kind of an interesting experience. Even when I was at the starting line, the idea of actually running a marathon still felt completely foreign and impossible to me. But at the same time I've driven the road that, uh, the marathon goes down a bunch of times and the idea of actually running down it didn't seem impossible. So anyway, it's just kind of interesting to think about the, the different ideas that go through your head. So it was, it was pretty cool though. So I'm going to pick the St. George marathon. St. George is about an hour and a half outside of Las Vegas, if you're wondering in Utah. So you drive through the canyon therein, or the gorge in Arizona to get there or to get to Las Vegas from St. George. But yeah, it was pretty awesome. Had a great time. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: What did you think about when you ran so, so many hours? 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: So that's my other pick. I put my headphones in. And I listened to an episode of, it was an interview that Glenn Beck did with a former ISIS bride, which was really interesting just to see the viewpoint there. You know, cause she's, you know, she's changed her views on life and, you know, actually goes and helps rehabilitate people who are radicalized anyway. So it was really fascinating just to kind of hear some of the things that she went through and some of the processes that she went through to kind of change what she thought about the world and things like that. And then the rest of it, I listened to the Adventure Zone and that's my other pick is the Adventure Zone. It's a podcast of people playing Dungeons and Dragons. And yeah, I had just enough episodes left on that story arc to get me through the rest of the marathon. And then I listened to the final episode of that story arc on the way home from St. George when I was driving home. So yeah, the Adventure Zone is a fun show, especially if you really enjoy Dungeons and Dragons. They kind of fudge on the rules a little bit if you're real legalistic about that kind of thing. So if you play Dungeons and Dragons and you're looking for them to be like expert players that always do the things that are in the manuals, it's probably going to bother you a little bit. However, I am much more about the story. And so for me, it was just fun to listen through the story and see where things ended up. And then of course they have a Q and a episode after that. They called the, the adventure zone zone. And, uh, anyway, it was just a fun, you know, people asked a bunch of questions and stuff. So yeah, 

DAN_SHAPPIR: I'm using image in my mind of you running in place before the finish line because you haven't finished the, 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: No. So you don't have to do that because what you do is when you, when you finish, you walk through and you get your metal. So I got a metal, it's not actually made of metal, incidentally, polished sandstone, the one they give you from St. George Marathon. And then you walk into the park and they give you like, you know, the bananas and stuff so that you, you know, and so you pass out on the grass and then you listen to the rest of the episode there. So, yeah. And I did take a few minutes to recover and then went and picked up my stuff and drove back to the condo we were staying at, so. But yeah, it's, it's good stuff. I really enjoyed it. I'm probably going to try and do another one in like March. We'll see. Vitaly, what are your picks? 

VITALI_ZAIDMAN: Yeah. So I'm from a Russian descent. So I have, um, I have recently discovered the website, Arzamas Academy, which is a website that creates really quality content about the Russian culture and the Russian language. So if you spend several hours on this website, you would be kind of educated on this topic. If you spend a dozen of hours on it, then you would obviously be more educated on this topic. So I suggest people who understand Russian and want to learn a little about the Russian descendant stuff, this website is awesome. They create very short videos and they're of a very high quality. So yeah, that's my pick. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Awesome. All right, well, thanks everyone for coming. Yeah, I'm looking forward to this one coming out. And it was really interesting to kind of dive in and talk, I guess, a little bit more about building for an end user that's not really an end user. It's a search engine, so. Yeah, it is a book. All right, folks, well, we'll go ahead and wrap this one up and we will be back next week. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: Bye. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Bye-bye. 

VITALI_ZAIDMAN: Bye. 

 

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