Bianca and Sumitra from Raygun join the panel to talk about Core Web Vitals and how tools like Raygun can help keep tabs on and monitor your performance stats as you change your web application to get you better results on Google.

CHARLES: Hey everybody and welcome back to another episode of JavaScript Jabber. This week on our panel, we have AJ O'Neill. 

AJ: Yo, yo, yo. Coming at you live from the Darkosphere. 

CHARLES: Amy Knight.

DAN: Always amuses me that you need to remember where you're coming from. 

AJ: Well, I have to make it up half the time. 

CHARLES: We also have Amy Knight. 

AIMEE: Hey, hey from Nashville.

CHARLES:  Steve Edwards.

STEVE: Hey, hey, coming from Arlington, Virginia in a very tiny booth in an office building. 

CHARLES: Oh, that's new. Dan Shapir. 

DAN: Hi from Hot and Humid Tel Aviv.

CHARLES: I'm Charles Maxwood from devchat.tv. And this week we have a couple of special guests. We have Bianca. Oh, I didn't even ask how to say your last name. Is it Grisar? Something like that. 

BIANCA: Best not to say it. It's usually my advice. It's a made up name. We pronounce it Gritsa. 

CHARLES: Oh, awesome. And we also have Sumitra. It says M on here, but yeah, both of you. Do you want to introduce yourselves? Tell us where you're from, why you're awesome, why you're famous.

SUMITRA: Again, yeah, introduce myself. So I'm Smetra. I'm an intermediate software engineer at Ragon. I've been at Ragon for just over a couple of years now. It's actually my first job in the tech industry. That's where I started my whole career from intern to intermediate from where I am today. I have been working in the public site space for Ragon, ragon.com, including conducting research and also looking into our core vital metrics and seeing where our blog currently stands and what improves work and actually make on our blog. These days I'm actually more focused on the application side of Raygun though, so my primary focus has been working more on the front end in terms of React and TypeScript and also just general front end space. I love a good CSS challenge as well, I really love my CSS, I've always had the little bit of design side in me. But more recently I've actually been working on a product feature called Alerting which has a focus around smart alerts for core web vital metrics. It’s me. 

CHARLES: Awesome. How about you, Bianca? 

BIANCA: Yeah, sure.

STEVE: I was going to say that's the first time I've heard the term intermediate engineer. I always hear junior and senior. I don't hear intermediate too often. Maybe it's just me, but I thought that was interesting. Interesting. Yeah. 

CHARLES: I think that's when you're flying below the radar, but above the trees. 

STEVE: Something like that. Yeah. 

DAN: That's a good one. Need to remember that. 

CHARLES: All right, Bianca, go ahead and introduce yourself. 

BIANCA: Yes. Hi. So hello from Wellington, New Zealand. It is... insanely early in the morning for us here. So bear with us if we kind of have momentarily breaks to have some more coffee, although I probably shouldn't have any more coffee. I was just saying to Dan earlier, it's really good to have Symmetra with me here this morning. You had an episode recently about bringing more women onto the stage, highlighting the women in tech, and now we have two talking about technology today. It's kind of a rare occurrence for me too. So on some of the episodes you did more extended intros of yourself and I really enjoyed that. And they all seem to be involving like a bit of a personal history of coding. And since I'm a product manager, I have to get my street cred by giving you mine. And so I started writing code in 86 writing basic on a computer that my dad brought home from work and had hooked up to the TV. And I really enjoyed that as a child. And so I picked up a range of obscure languages in school, like Torbo Pascal and Prolog and Scheme and those kinds of things. But I remember our teacher came to us one day and said, there's this new thing called Java and I don't know how it works, so how about you learn it and then teach me. And so this enabled me to.

DAN: I have to say that that's a great teacher. That's an awesome way to get the student engaged.

 BIANCA: It really really most familiar with things like Python and R and Matlab and all sorts of academic things. So I always really enjoyed the process of turning an idea into reality. So kind of doing the end to end planning of all steps. And so it was kind of unsurprising that I ended up doing product management. I've been doing that in various forms for the last 15 years and have hardly coded at all, but still really, really enjoy working with engineers. And I joined Ragon at the beginning of this year. So I haven't been with Ragon for very long, but I found it to be the kind of perfect combination of a very technical product that's very much based in data and in a market that is very interesting and full of opportunities to grow. So that's me. 

DAN: That's awesome Bianca. Thank you very much for sharing that. Really. 

Hey folks, this is Charles Maxwell. I've been talking to a whole bunch of people that want to update their resume and find a better job and I figure, well, why not just share my resume? So if you go to topendevs.com slash resume, enter your name and email address, then you'll get a copy of the resume that I use, that I've used through freelancing, through most of my career, as I've kind of refined it and tweaked it to get me the jobs that I want. Like I said, topendevs.com slash resume will get you that, and you can just kind of use the formatting. It comes in Word and Pages formats, and you can just fill it in from there.

CHARLES: Yep. Now I'm intimidated. We've got these ladies that are way smarter than I am. 

BIANCA: Mission accomplished. 

CHARLES: Yeah. I'm really excited for this too, just from the standpoint of a couple of things. One is, is that we've been talking to JD, who's the CEO of Raygun off and on over the years on JavaScript Jabber. And, and just kind of personally beyond that, also been talking to Andre, who also works over there about some of the stuff that you all have been doing with Core Web Vitals. And then we've put together a couple of episodes about Core Web Vitals. And so I'm interested to see what you all are doing to kind of go deeper on this topic. So kind of in the interest of not rehashing a whole bunch of stuff that we've kind of already talked over, I kind of want to see if Dan, if you can kind of give us kind of an overview of what we've talked about so far in just a couple of minutes. And then we can kind of delve into some of the stuff that we haven't gone as deep on and talk about some of the stuff that that Raygun has that can help us, I guess, knock this stuff out, right? 

DAN: Yeah, for sure. I'd be happy to. So yeah, we have had a couple of episodes about this topic and it's not really surprising because Google has really pushed this front and center, the web world, and it's affecting a lot of people. It's like really hot topic right now. We are recording this at the beginning of August. This is essentially in the middle of Google rolling out an update that causes Core Web Vitals to be used as a ranking signal within Google search. So if you get really good Core Web Vitals, it can actually give you a boost in terms of your ranking. And obviously that's got a lot of people very interested and excited about this. Essentially Core Web Vitals are three metrics that are used to gauge the performance and the experience of a website, mostly around the loading part of the experience. The three are Largest Contentful Paint, or LCP for short, which stands for when, relative to the beginning of the session, the largest contentful item, which can be either an image or a block of text, is displayed. The next one is first input delay or FID, which is also measured in milliseconds. But this one is from the first time that the visitor interacts with the page. An interaction could be a mouse click or a key press, not panning and zooming. Those don't count as interactions. So it measures the time from that interaction until the code that's associated with that interaction, either built-in functionality in the browser, or JavaScript that's associated with the event can run. And the last one is CLS, or Cumulative Layout Shift, and that measures how much things jump around. That one actually isn't measured in time units. It's essentially just a number, it's unitless. But you can think of it as looking at or measuring the amount of shifts that, or movements that content has inside the display, not as a result of user interaction. So if the content moves on its own, common example maybe is that an ad loads and then pushes the rest of the content down and causes you the inconvenience of losing where you were in the text in the middle of reading it, which is really annoying. So these are the three metrics and they're supposed to measure the quality, like I said, of the, of the page load and page rendering. And like I said, Google is starting to use them as, as a ranking signal. And also, you know, in general, when a page is loads quickly and is pleasant to use, then it usually has a really positive impact on, on engagement, reduces bounce rates, stuff like that. So it's not just Google, it's, it's stuff in general. And just to finish my spiel, like you said, we did have a couple of episodes about it. So we had Rick Viscome from Google, the guy who runs the Crux database, which we can talk about later on, talking about how Google collects this information from user sessions. We had Martin Splitt also from Google, who was talking about Google search and SEO, and also explained how Google actually uses this information. as I mentioned, as a ranking signal. And finally, we had an episode with me where I talked in a lot more detail about what these metrics are and what they actually measure and the ups and downs of them. And we can post links to all these episodes. And now we can hand over to our guests. I would like to begin by learning more about Raygun and what Raygun does and what it offers, because I think our discussion is in the context of what Reagan does to help with improving core web vitals. 

BIANCA: Yeah, sure. Thanks for that summary. That was great. And actually, you picked up a really interesting thing at the beginning saying core vitals are now something that's recognized as if you improve them, you can get a boost in your search rankings, which is quite a change from how it was announced initially where Google was talking about penalizing websites that weren't doing this It's been really interesting to see how the conversation about it changed. And that's very much what we're trying to do here, building up on these episodes that you had with other guests already. We particularly enjoyed the one with Rick where he's talking about the Crack Starter Set. And so I'd like to start with a couple of points from that, where that were really interesting for us and really great kind of confirmation we were going into the right direction with how we're implementing these metrics in Riga. So he was talking about the Cracks data set being Google's field data not being a replacement for a real user monitoring tool. And instead, always making sure you've got your own field data about your own customers, and you're using a real user monitoring tool that measures callback writers the same way that Google does. So you actually have a way to compare and track the data in the same way. So Rick also said one thing, and I'm sure he didn't quite mean it that drastically, but it really stuck with me because he mentioned that to him or to Google, it doesn't matter if you've got an FID, say, that is 100 or 1,200 milliseconds, because all that matters is that you're under that good threshold, that threshold set by Google, the passing value that you need to not be penalized to get that boost in search rankings. And of course that doesn't sit well with me because for us, customer experience matters overall. And we want to know exactly what kind of experience your customers are having. And also want to know exactly who they are, which is the kind of other big point that I'm going to be talking to. 

DAN: Yeah. Just to interrupt and to be fair towards Rick. Yeah. You're correct in that Google really puts the score in these three buckets of either good needs improvement or poor. And then they don't really like distinguish like once you're good, you're good and that's it, or if you're poor then, and you get the maximum boost. And if you're poor, then you don't get any boost and it doesn't really matter. If you're slightly poor or very poor. It is important to note that Rick made his comment specifically in the context of the ranking signal and not the actual experience of the people on the page. And in that regard, I totally agree with what you said that it might not make a difference for Google or so much or at all, but it can definitely make a difference for your visitors and for your engagement. I just do want to add that they did afterwards clarify that once you're in the needs improvement range, you do get a gradually increasing score. So, but that, that just came out. This information came out after that interview with Rick. So, so yeah. 

BIANCA: Yeah. And it very much shows that this is kind of like still an ongoing thing. Right. And like I said, the conversation about it, it's still kind of developing and it's, it's definitely developing in the right direction for the way that we look at things at.. at Reagan because our point when we started this project of implementing callback vitals, adding them to our suite of performance measuring and tracking was who are we optimizing for? How much should we focus on callback vitals because it's not just about passing these thresholds. Yes, that's important, but we want to optimize for, well, we want to help our customers optimize for their customers and not for this Google data set, because while there's really good field data and really good benchmark, it's not 100% representative of the customer groups. So that was a very long-winded answer to coming to talking about Raygan itself and giving you a quick introduction.

CHARLES: Can I chime in here real quick? Because one thing that I found just over the last, what, 15 years that I've been a web developer is that a lot of the business folks that I talked to they tend to pick up some of these metrics that they care about. So if they're looking at anything related to Core Web Vitals, they're going to care about which band in the, okay, needs improvement, whatever, that Google puts us in or not. And so they may care about which strata we're in with Google. And so that may be the only thing they care about because they're just really focused on our web ranking, you know, and whether or not we're being boosted or penalized. Whereas others may really actually care about, okay, what is the user experience and how does that translate to the bottom line and what what other implications does it have? And so when we're talking about this, I think it's important. I kind of want to set the stage for Raygun a little bit and set the stage for Crux and some of the other tools that Google gives you as well. You have to understand what your stakeholders want and what they care about. And so if all they care about is your Google ranking, then the Google tools are gonna be your primary source of information because that's all they're gonna be looking at.

DAN: I apologize for interrupting Chuck, but I actually disagree. I think that even if you're looking, if you're focusing primarily on the Google ranking, the Google tools have some significant limitations, which were actually discussed by Rick So, and I think Bianca was actually absolutely correct at the very beginning when she said that even if you're focusing primarily on that, probably you shouldn't. But even if you're focusing primarily on that, then having a tool that gives you more detailed field information can be extremely useful. 

CHARLES: Okay. Yeah, that's fair. But my point is, is you do need to understand what your stakeholders want, right? 

DAN: Oh, yeah, for sure. 

BIANCA: And you need to, you need to have those metrics. But to provide you that context that you were asking for. So, Regan is about enabling developers to deliver these really great experiences to their customers, to build software that is a joy to use, right? And so we do that in a variety of different ways. It's about this instant visibility to what's going on in your software, but it is also very much about actionable insights. And this is where it's coming to this point that we were just discussing is yes, you can read the metrics, but you can do a lot more because we've built our tools to be based in a workflow. So it's about monitoring, detecting, diagnosing, and resolving those issues, not just about reporting a metric. Yes, you can do that as well. Absolutely. And you're right. Sometimes that's all that needs, but we really want to enable our users, our customers to be pinpointing those issues that impact the groups of users that they care about the most, and also manage that workflow of fixing the issue and then measuring if it worked. So we do that by having error logging connected with server-side performance measuring, but primarily in this case of Core Vitals, it's about real user monitoring. And so for us, Core Vitals, when they announced it, it was fantastic because we are already customer-centric. This switch to being more customer-centric you know, search engine optimization centric make total sense for us. And we, we have a, this fantastic tool where we can actually provide all of this granular data that for privacy reasons and for other reasons, you cannot get through the Google tools. And you can really kind of drill down into session level detail. We don't sample all of our data in reuser monitoring. It goes two months back. So data retention of two months. So in parallel with these Google tools, you can really go ahead and figure out, okay, what is happening for these specific groups of uses for a specific metric and how would I go about addressing those issues and fixing them? 

DAN: So to better understand what exactly you're, you're providing. If I want to use Raygun in my website, I guess I need to embed some of your code within my website like add a script tag or something like that. How do I actually integrate your solution into the website itself? 

BIANCA: Sabitra, I'll let you speak to this.

SUMITRA:  So with Rega, it's really easy to set up. Usually for JavaScript, we do actually support quite a few languages, but for JavaScript specifically, you just get like a code snippet when you are setting up, and you just put that into your code base, and you have to, of course, call a few methods just to get rum enabled. And then once you've got traffic piping through, RayGun just fills in your dashboard with all these metrics. That's really easy to set up. I've set it up before and it's really simple. You don't have to do much. When you have frameworks such as React, you can download packages that actually support the specific language that you wanna be, or the specific framework so that you don't catch errors that are kind of more related to the library rather than your code itself. Yeah, so really easy and simple to set up. 

DAN: And the data itself, is that usually collected onto your own servers? So it's kind of a service that you're offering and then I access the data on your servers via the dashboard? 

SUMITRA: Yeah, yeah, that's the one. And you are in complete control of what you send to us as well. So if there is like PII data, for example that you don't want to be sending to us, you can take that control on your side of the code base, and you can tell us what not to send us and what to send us. For example, an IP address. If that's not what you want, you have that full control. So if you do have those regulations in place, it is pretty simple to be able to turn off such things as well. 

DAN: And I assume there's also stuff like scrubbing out passwords and all that sort of thing. 

SUMITRA: Yeah, again, yeah, that's true. Again, that is where I'm going to go that begins with you, and if you want that setting off, you have to specifically state that yourself. If you don't want to be tracking such things, because it is possible to get that data sent through to us, if that's what you've put through, but you can definitely, yeah, again, turn that setting off. 

DAN: And if I'm trying to think from, like, if I do like a course segmentation of the data that I assume that you're collecting, then I assume that one layer of data is metrics or measurements that you get from the browser itself, like for example, Core and Vitals. Another strata would be data that you're collecting from a framework or a library that I'm using. And then another layer you assume would be applicable that would enable me to actually like send notifications or signal events or whatever into your system as well. Is that more or less correct?

SUMITRA: Yeah, I'm yeah, you do have those layers of how you want to be monitoring your data. And if you do want to receive alerts for for example, in crash reporting, if you have a specific error coming through that you don't want, you can be notified and also with our to reuse and monitoring as well. If you want to be notified about what the overall experience is on your specific app, how is it going? Does it need some work? Is it? You can get notified of a daily digest email notification as well. I think it's great to note that with Core Web Vitals within Ragon, we monitor across browsers, so on-chronium and non-chronium based browsers that Core Web Vitals does support. Whereas within PageSpeed Insights, for example, they only monitor Google Chrome users and they only accept the people that are they collect data from people who've actually even opted in Google Chromium users, which can give you pretty skewed results and false positives as well. So if you are looking in Raygun for your core web vitals, you can actually see across the board from all the Chromium and non-Chromium bounces that core vitals actually supports, which you will probably get a lot more accurate results as well and- 

DAN: Yeah, I just wanted to, we kind of do the same thing at Wix essentially that we also, like you said, we collect this sort of data from any browser from which you can get it, and not just from the Google Chrome browser. It's important to note then that on the one hand, like you said, it provides you with potentially more accurate data because you're looking at more sessions. But on the other hand, you do need to remember that at the end of the day, Google themselves are only looking at the sessions that get into crux in terms of their ranking signal. So if you're concerned about visitor experience as you should be, then it's great that you're looking at more sessions. But if your only concern is ranking, then some of the sessions that you're reporting about don't actually impact the ranking. That's just a thing to note. 

SUMITRA: Yeah, definitely. 

CHARLES: I have a couple of questions here. One is, and this is one of the things that I was kind of heading toward when I was talking earlier is so crux, you get your numbers. Like you said, it was kind of, you don't get the individual sessions. It's all kind of aggregated over 28 days. If I remember right. So you just kind of get aggregated information, right? 

BIANCA: That's right. It's a 28 days cycle, which also means, you know, if you make improvements for you to really see the full impact of that. You have to wait 28 days. You don't see it immediately. It's aggregated for the whole site. I mean, you can put individual pages into a page with insights and measure those, but it's fairly tedious if you want to see only specific areas, like business critical areas of your site. And just a comment to what Dan was saying earlier is, this was what Rick picked up when he said, cool, you should be using a run tool in parallel with the crack starter set, but make sure they measure things the same way. So of course we're measuring the core vitals, we're using the library, the Google library for that. But also you have the chance to set up run to be just showing you the data of last month and to only show you data coming through from Chrome users.

DAN: Oh, cool. 

CHARLES: That was the other question I had was, how do you know you're measuring it the same way? And so it sounds like there's a Google library.

DAN: Yeah, exactly. There's a Google library created by Phil Walton, another Googler. We should probably get him on the show sometime. He wrote this nice and actually fairly small and lightweight library that actually collects the data. And yes, it's usually the best way to integrate the collection functionality and indeed ensure that you're collecting it the same way that Google does. 

BIANCA: Yeah. And so we collect the data the same way we show you everything in RAM, but then you can filter down to just look at it the same way that Google would if you're specifically interested in passing those scores. So if you want to make sure everybody has a great experience overall, you want to look at everything. If you want to look at only business-critical areas of your site, make sure that you're passing the scores for that or that people have a great experience there. You can filter it down to that. If you say you have a marketplace or an e-commerce website and you're only selling into specific regions, then you can look at only those customers in those regions and make sure that you're optimizing the experience for them. It's very difficult to make sure you're optimizing co-advertisers globally because of the different conditions and the different hostings and so on. So that's definitely an advantage you have in in Riga to be able to filter and just look at those specific groups of customers uses. 

CHARLES: It's cool. 

SUMITRA: Sorry, I was wanting to jump in and say it's definitely good to note in Raygun that as soon as you plug in Raygun into your code base and you start receiving traffic on your site, the data comes through immediately so you don't have to wait 28 days. Whereas in PageSpeed Insights you do have to wait that 28 days. And another great thing is that you can see historical data as well as Bianca mentioned. You can see two months from past the 28 day retention Google Page Speed Insights actually has. Another thing to also note is that we can also let our users know of when, what the largest assets are within the granularity of the section of loading the asset and how long it takes to load, such as how long there's a transfer load, how long there's a DNS load of specific content. It's basically who of the site visitors are affected by poor Core Web Vitals. So we can definitely, I feel like, back ourselves more with what crux can offer and dashboard wise as well. And again, also the top level filters and ray gun as well can actually pinpoint certain aspects as to what metrics look like in certain countries, like as Bianca mentioned, certain conditions and them as actually poor internet connection in some countries as well. You are catering to not just desktop, but you're also catering to mobile as well. They can have different load times for different aspect ratios, depending on what you're testing on, depending on who you are exactly getting your users to use your website on. So I think LCP, I believe, is going to be very dependent on power processing of devices. And this is great because it's great because for ROM, you can actually use the top-level filters to see how and what devices are affected by poor core web vitals metrics as well. So I'll just point that out as well. 

DAN: That's actually something I wanted to ask you about Besides the Core Web Vitals themselves, are you also looking or monitoring other performance metrics? Stuff like maybe first content for paint or time to first byte or stuff like that? Or can I configure monitoring for additional metrics? 

SUMITRA: Yep. So we definitely do. We have custom timings as well. So you can actually put them whatever metrics you want to monitor for your sites. And we definitely do by default have first paint, I believe, and also first contentful paint as well. There are a lot of performance metrics that we do collect for you. We also collect the fully loaded state. We do XHR calls as well and see how the time it took to call a specific HR request to respond. There is a lot of different metrics that you can collect beyond call advice as well to understand the breakdown of a specific session. Yeah, did you want to touch on that further, Bianca? 

BIANCA: Yeah, I think it was just a great, another great point to say, look, and even Google said that when they announced CO-OP, as I said, it's, you know, we're going to continue to change these, to add more metrics, to further move into a mobile first approach, to put the customer, the user experience at the center. So for us, this message is great because we are saying, monitoring customer and user experience is something you should be doing all the time. And you should be always looking to improve that experience and to measure your data, not just as a one off, in order to achieve a certain search ranking. So it's, like Sumitra said, it's a flexible system where you can put in those metrics that specifically matter to you and will be adding those standard metrics that you need to have because you need to even if Core Web Vitals right now don't have a huge impact on your search rankings, I mean, it's going to become the norm. And so we'll be adding those metrics that are becoming the norm, that make sense in terms of the workflow, and you can add those metrics that specifically make sense to your application as well. 

CHARLES: Yeah, but the implication sounds like, though, that if I am paying attention to some of these other metrics, I may wind up ahead of the curve when Google comes and says performance data? 

BIANCA: Absolutely. And we've seen one of our customers, Ux, has been picking up call it vitals, I think as early as June last year. So they've been writing about it and writing about how they improved the call that vitals and now as a result of that, they're ahead of, I think like 90% of their competition. So this is definitely the message we're sending to the Reagan customers is do this now because now is the time to get an advantage 

DAN: And I'll repeat it again. You know, it's really great that Google is pushing the market in the right direction using this prod, which is the Google ranking. But it's important to always remember that it's so much beyond just the ranking. It's also about reducing your bounce rate. It's also about increasing engagement. If you're... It's been shown again and again that if your site is more pleasant to use, more performant, then you will get higher conversion rates. And conversely, if your site is really slow and clunky, then your visitors will bounce. So even if you're saying, I don't care about Google rank, I'm running, I have enough money to run an AdWord campaign and get my visitors that way, if your site is slow and clunky, they'll arrive at your site But then they'll just leave. So, so it goes well beyond just the ranking aspect, at least in, from my perspective.

CHARLES: Well, the marketing books. And so I kind of play this game where I live in the tech world and the marketing world and yeah, all the marketing literature talks about that too. Right. I mean, ultimately you play the game where you're trying to get the traffic first, but once you're getting the traffic, yeah, the next number you're playing with is how do I get these people to convert? And yeah, if they're bouncing off your website because it's not loading up or they're not having a good experience or the thing that they need to click on, isn't showing up so they don't know what to do. Those are all viable. It's a technology solution, but it's a marketing problem. 

BIANCA: Yeah. And I think this is one of the great opportunities that co-advertis provide, right? It's bringing those groups closer together, developers, designers, because with Core Vitals, there is a measurable goal, a shared goal that people now have, to the point where even the people who hold the budget care now about achieving these good results. And so that enables the teams to work together, but it does require everybody to work together because if you have only developers optimizing your website for Core Vitals, that might be detrimental to your content, which then again, that was detrimental you reaching the audience in the first place. So it has to be done in parallel and you have to be able to measure what you're doing across the board, not just with Covert Vital. So Covert Vital is in context with everything else. 

SUMITRA: That's very easy to put all the work on the engineers as well and give them the work to fix what's currently in production. But whereas with this situation, you do have the opportunity, I agree with Bianca, like you do have the opportunity to be able to work with designers and marketers and engineers as one team and find the best decisions like designing the capability to create a flow and then and decide the placement of the elements like do we need large piece of context on mobile above the fold we need all that content there what happens when a pop-up appears does it doesn't move all the content down the screen or does it just overlay on top of the current content and even from marketers they can make decisions on what content is crucial to have like it right i know at ray gun that's It's a very close relationship between designers and marketers to be working on what is best to actually present to site visitors on our public website. Is that hero image really necessary on mobile? Is it only necessary on desktop? And of course, engineers, they have the opportunity, they have the knowledge to be able to actually optimize the content that is presented to them as mocks from designers to actually compress images or to delay content that's not critical as well. So together, everyone can collaborate and this can be one mission to actually improve these metrics as a team. So it's a great collaboration opportunity in my view. And yeah, of course, it's a great opportunity to actually improve the user experience. I totally agree, Dan, on the point where it definitely is not just about keeping those numbers low, it's not just about getting in the green zone, but it's actually about caring about your customers and your site visitors, caring about what they see, how fast the content loads. And I think the CLS metric is a great example of like, you should really definitely care about user experience because that whole metric there is, it's not measuring load times, it's measuring the impact fraction and the distance fraction. That's why it's not a unit of measurement it's just numbers so I definitely agree to the fact that it is all about user experience and a lot less than how the numbers that come into play.

 

This episode is sponsored by Miro. I've been working lately on a whole bunch of different projects for top end devs. Everything from meetups to courses to podcasts to the website. And a lot of the things that I've been working on have gotten really, really messy. And even though I have some software that helps me manage the projects, one thing that I figured out was that it really helps to have a tool that you can use to manage kind of the layout and the organization of your project not just whether or not tasks are being done. And so I picked up a program called Miro and Miro what it does, I'll just give you an example when I'm building a course, I sit down and I open up their mind map and I just put all of the information into the mind map. And I'll do that for probably anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour, just depending on what it is that I'm organizing. And then what I can do is from there, I can actually reorganize it and rejigger it so that it actually makes sense. And it really, really helps me get all of the ideas on paper or on the screen in this case, and get an idea around how these things come together. So if you're looking to put together a project or organize some ideas, you should definitely check out Miro. You can find simplicity in your most complex projects with Miro. Your first three Miro boards are free when you sign up today at Miro.com slash podcast. That's three free boards at Miro.com slash podcast.

STEVE: question for you here, and this might go off down a little rabbit trail, and I think Dan might appreciate this because we had a friend of his on to talk about this in terms of accessibility. So I know there's, I remember seeing a blog post one time that discussed about how I got this great lighthouse scores, but my accessibility was crap. You know, so we put all this, all this time into making sure everything loads fast and it's a good experience and so on, but for who? And so... I'm not sure, you know, I haven't really studied the Core Web Vitals as much as some of you. So I'm just curious to see how much accessibility plays into a good search ranking or how much that comes into play with Core Web Vitals at all. The stat that comes to mind, Dan, and remind me who your friend was that we had on here. It was a really good episode.

DAN: Bruce Lawson. It was Bruce Lawson. Bruce Lawson.

STEVE: Yeah, and he, one of the studies he mentioned was the amount of money that is left on the table by e-commerce sites because they have poorly accessible websites. And that number was in the billions of dollars or something like that. So anyway, I'm just curious to see if and how much if so does accessibility in terms of being accessible to screen readers and semantic HTML and all that favor into making a web or play into a good score.

DAN: Well, what I can tell you in this context is, first of all, Core Web Vitals are just one signal out of hundreds of signals, and not necessarily even the most important ones. And they themselves are part of what is known as the page experience signals, which include other aspects like being mobile-friendly, being HTTPS. having a safe route, not including malicious code and stuff like that. So, yes, there are a lot of aspects that play into ranking well on Google. Generally speaking, from my experience, having good accessibility goes hand in hand with good SEO. And with regard to performance, even though a lot of people don't think about performance in the context of accessibility, it is actually a form of accessibility. Because accessibility is all about making your content available to a larger segment of people. And if you have poor performance, it means that people in certain countries may not be able to access your content. It means that people who are who belong to certain segments of society might not be able to access your content because they happen to be using lower end devices. So you know, it all goes hand in hand. And at the end of the day, it's all about providing a better experience. And in that context, I definitely think that Raygun and similar solutions play a very important role in improving the quality of the web. 

CHARLES: I'm gonna, I think you're right, Dan. And I kind of want to talk a little bit about taking us back to kind of the Core Web Vitals discussion here for a minute, because I think Sumitra was talking about some of these ideas on some of the things that we can do, you know, so the ideas around improving accessibility or improving Core Web Vitals or, you know, working as a team to do these kinds of things and all of this stuff, right? So the thing that I'm interested in is what are the indicators, right? What is there like a big red banner that comes up or I load up Raygun and it smacks me on the head and says, hey, this isn't good. And then are there helps to know how to fix it for accessibility for Core Web Vitals for other things that are going to improve the customer experience? 

SUMITRA: Yeah. So what I'm aware of Raygun, we don't exactly provide what you can specifically do. to do. You can't you can't necessarily get that information, but I know when I was actually doing research on improving our core vital metrics for our blog site, I actually use RayGun. I use that own tool which takes a separate successor in itself. But I think it was our tool. You can you get the metrics right. You see where the problems are like. For example, if you've got a really long render load within a specific request session, you can see where it all falls down, you do your research to understand why a render would take so long. But on top of that, we support the fact that you want to know exactly what specific assets you want to be targeting, what specific assets are actually taking so long to load. We have a timeline chart which gives you a waterfall view of exactly when specific assets were to load and how long they took. So for example, fonts and CSS files like how long, where did it start in the waterfall chart and how long did it take? Did it take 500 milliseconds? Did it take 1.5 seconds? You can actually see that. And you can also filter down exactly in the timeline chart what assets you want to be looking into. Do you want to be looking into XHR cores? Do you want to be looking in JavaScript? Or do you want to be looking at only CSS? You are able to get that granular filter within content is giving you the biggest bottleneck in terms of your performance. 

DAN: So to better understand what what you're describing, let's say I'm looking at the load time of my hero image. Is it like averaged or something like that across all the sessions? Or do I drill down into a particular session or can I do both? How how do you present this information? 

SUMITRA: You can definitely do both you can look at a specific page of your site and see how it is performing overall, or you can actually look into a user session, which I find quite useful. I think it's good to be looking at a specific session because you get the opportunity to look at a specific country, a specific browser, and our specific operating system as well. Whereas if you compare this to a different session that has a different filter granularity, you can see. performance in terms of how it actually renders in terms of such as in New Zealand versus in the States. So if you had a customer base that was largely in the States, you don't necessarily care about, I don't know, like India or France or something like that. You can actually filter down to the specific country that you want to be targeting itself because that is where your revenue is generated the most looking into a specific session for a specific user is where you will get that granular information to actually be able to optimize and see where the bottlenecks are. 

BIANCA: Yeah. So to come at it from another direction, Chuck, what you were asking is, I mean, I love the idea of having a big red banner that says like, fix this. This is the most important thing. And as a product manager, one can dream that we'll have a list of recommendations that's tailored to you. But at the moment...

CHARLES: Either way, I just want to know what to do, right? 

BIANCA: Exactly. And so at the moment, our recommended workflow there is, is something Symmetra just mentioned, but I want to mention it because I'm super proud of it. And I don't think anybody else offers this at the moment, which is we give you those, those good needs improvement, poor performance segments, like Google does. But then you can actually see what does it mean, not just in terms of page loads, but actually in terms of user sessions. So you can drill into those segments and have a look at who are those people? What are those sessions that are experiencing this specific page or my site overall in a specific way and then identify those patterns? And so if you have a look at the list of sessions with a poor performance and you get all the details, you can start spotting what might they have in common. Is it a specific browser? Is it a region? Or is it something else? And then you use the filters to remove those that you think are experiencing something a certain way and check, okay, does that have an impact on the metrics? If yes, cool. Go further down that way and really identify who it is. And so this is really the workflow that we were talking about before is going through looking at the experiences on a, I mean, you can go as far as granular as specific page, a specific user, a specific session on that page. So really identifying what could be causing it, and then testing your theory on the whole group of users to understand if that's the biggest issue that you should be addressing. But we also absolutely recommend using Search Console pages inside Lighthouse in parallel, because there are some great recommendations on what is causing your scores to be low. So use it in parallel get a recommendation on the Google tools and check in run if that is actually the right thing to fix for your specific group of users. And if it's the most important thing for your business at the moment. 

STEVE: Hey Dan, I did some research and found that if I have you as my hero image on my site, I get a lot of traffic. 

CHARLES: 

DAN: What a looker. Yeah, exactly How would you like to say, how do you like to say it Steve? A phase four for podcasts. 

STEVE: So I have a voice for radio, a voice face for radio and a voice for being a mine. 

DAN: Yeah, exactly. I'm not much different. I actually wanted, I very much concur with what, uh, with what you said Bianca. And I even want to give a concrete example about some of the benefits that you can get from using this sort of drill down and insight capabilities that you mentioned, and also about the fact of multiple people within the organization being able to work together towards a common goal. What I've seen is that very often a cause for bad performance or what are known as marketing pixels or marketing embeds, stuff like the Facebook pixel or Google Tag Manager and stuff like that they can account for as much as 50% of a page load time, which is kind of shocking, but it is what it is. And usually this is something that's totally handled by the marketing department or group within the company, and something that the developers themselves are totally not involved in. And when you have this cycle, or that 28 day cycle with the CRUX data, somebody in marketing could be adding a bunch of marketing pixels, which are really bad for performance, but you may not see it for, you know, potentially a few weeks. Whereas with real time run data, you'll see the impact almost immediately. You'll be able to drill down into the session and say, Hey, I'm loading all these resources that I haven't been loading before. Where are they coming from? And then realize that because we're running this amazing marketing campaign But we never thought about the fact that it's slowing our page load by 50%. 

CHARLES: Now, 

BIANCA: yeah, that's a great example. And also to the accessibility point, it's, it also depends on how you load it. Right. I remember when I was living in China, having no access to a lot of websites because they chose to load things, things like Facebook or even Google analytics in the head of a page and it's blocked in China. So it just stops the loading of the full page. And, and so they were companies, external companies saying, oh, well, China is just blocking our websites when in fact, this was a problem of how they were loading, loading this code snippets on the websites. 

STEVE: Dan, you're bringing back nightmares. I can remember working at a previous employer where we had, and in my case, it has more to do with ads more than, you know, than the software is where we had this great website is really fast. Then we had to dump in all this ad JavaScript and it would just slow things down and the president wanted to know why it was slower and I told him, he said, oh, And left it at that because we got to have the ads. 

DAN: Well, yeah, obviously it is what it is. You know, the fastest website is a blank website, but you know, who cares? So if you if you need to run a marketing campaign, then you need to run that marketing campaign. But all too often, what I see is that when the marketing campaign ends, people just forget to remove that marketing pixel. So you run ads here and ads there and the stuff just accumulates And nobody ever thinks about doing this sort of house cleaning, which could dramatically improve the performance of the, of the website. Now, if you get an, if you are aware, if you see the degradation happen in real time, then first, then two things, first of all, like I said before, you know, what you've done, at least you're aware, you may not have a choice, but at least you know what's happening and you can remember to put in your calendar that, you know, in two weeks we need to remove this stuff because the marketing campaign Will be over by then. 

SUMITRA: Yeah,

CHARLES: I think it's Interesting though that both you Bianca and Dan you more or less made the point that it allows you to be proactive about it Right because otherwise you're gonna get that 28 day lagging indicator and then go oh what's going on here, right? You could catch it in a couple of days if you're paying attention to the metrics the real user metrics coming in. 

BIANCA: That's absolutely right. And also you get the real data, right? So that was another thing from earlier with Lighthouse. Lighthouse is synthetic data. It's kind of perfect conditions. So you might be testing something in development in there and everything seems good. But once you launch it to real users, especially if those are not very similar to the perfect conditions that you have in Lighthouse, then there's going to be a surprise and you don't want to be waiting 28 days to find out especially if this is business critical. And maybe this is, okay, there's a bit of speculation now, but with these marketing campaigns and then advertising, those were always measurable, right? So those are linked to revenue and you have a goal that you're trying to achieve and you have a campaign and you measure the results. Now, what I've been seeing come up a lot more recently is companies publishing how improving CO-OP vitals has impacted on their bottom line on whatever business metric they're trying to improve. And this is now interesting because I don't think that was previously really the case with performance or user experience. So now we have companies saying, well, we improved our LCP and that actually increased the number of sales or increased customer retention, increased these things. And you can actually compare against these marketing campaigns and what they're bringing in in terms of revenue.

CHARLES: Do you have actual examples of that?

BIANCA: Yeah. So it's, there are a few companies posting about it, but most of them are just saying, look, we, we managed to get our co-op artists to this in the score. Google is, is doing a pretty good job at publishing these case studies and examples themselves. So that's kind of the majority. I did mention Ux earlier. So they've been leading in the e-commerce, e-commerce fields about co-op artists and how to improve them. Some things I've found were There's an Indonesian e-commerce platform called Tokopedia, and they improved LCP like I just mentioned and found 55% improvement of LCP led to 23% increase in session duration. And so you'll find a lot of those. But the more interesting ones are when some companies are measuring this directly to revenue and Netzfeld, which is a German publishing company, like an IT news website. They, of course, were tricky and optimized at Co-op Vitals to make their ads more viewable. And by doing that, attract higher value advertising and actually make more money with the advertising. And so that's pretty smart to be combining customer experience and the advertising revenue and really bringing those teams together. And oh yeah, another one I'd like to point out that I thought was super interesting. I mean, first of all, really interesting that lots of these examples are in Asia and it's even, even Chinese companies that like I mentioned before, probably have, have these challenges of not being able to access every, everything due to government restrictions, but still care about the Google search ranking. But one example that I saw recently, here we go, is AgriFi. So this is an agricultural marketplace in Latin America. They actually went ahead and used those Co-op vital scores. So the development team used the Co-op vital scores to go to their management and say, look, these scores are really poor. Yes, we could try and improve them. But really what we should be doing is rebuilding and move off our legacy tech and really start from scratch, address all these issues that we have and all of the technical depth. And then as a result of that, we'll have better Co-op vitals and we can measure, track that and show you. So that was great. And this is a thing where a RUM tool can really help you demonstrate that to management. 

DAN: If I can toot our own horn and I can manage something that we've done at Wix and what we've been able to achieve. So I work at Wix as the performance tech lead at the company. And let's put it this way, approximately a year and a half ago, we were in pretty bad shape relatively speaking in terms of performance the CMS market and the web builder market is very competitive and we were lagging in terms of performance and we kind of made it a company-wide strategic priority. And within the past year, we've managed to increase the percent, the ratio of WIX sites that are eligible for the maximum performance ranking boost from Google by sevenfold. So we're not, yeah, by seven fold. And so we are not yet the fastest CMS in every category or web builder in every category, but I can say that we have the, how would I call it, the, the highest trajectory. So, you know, give us a few months. We hope to be in front and, and we are ahead of most. So yeah.

BIANCA: Super impressive. I saw you have a webinar talking about this on YouTube, right? 

DAN: Yeah, exactly. 

BIANCA: So I saw that. It's super impressive. 

DAN: Yeah, it's really making a difference for a bottom line because we can, in the past, we would literally be losing customers because they were saying, you know, our sites, we built sites on your platform and they're just not performing sufficiently well. And now, you know, it's actually drawing users over to us because they can get better performance on our platform relative to other solutions in the market. 

BIANCA: You're getting this advantage by being, you know, ahead of your competitors with this as the perfect example of flipping the conversation to, you know, people leaving because of poor performance to now coming because you're doing so well. And I remember in the beginning, I first started learning about GovArtels. We talked about these page builders and, you know, how are they going to be dealing with this when Yeah, as a user, as a customer myself, I have limited ability to improve for performance and for things like Core Vitals myself. So great to see that you're leading the way there.

DAN: Yeah, I think I said it before when we talked about Core Vitals is it, you know, we are kind of lucky that we, that Google's bottom line kind of at least for now, aligns with the benefit of the web in many cases, not all cases, but in many cases, and performance being one of them. And it's really great to see how they kind of got the entire market moving in the right direction into the extent that we've started to compete with each other about who can provide faster sites, more accessible sites, safer sites. It's a really, it's a good thing.

BIANCA: It's so important also to again, with things like accessibility, right? Because one of the things I worried about with the launch of Core Applied was that this was an advantage for the large companies, for the companies that have optimization teams that have the budget to spend monitoring and improving performance and lots of smaller sites, especially those on page builders and depending on page builders would be left behind. So I think it's, it's super important for those, for companies like Wix to be doing a good job and actually helping all those people who are using their page villas to run websites, to be on par and not be left behind in the search ranking results, but also be able to provide great experiences to their customers as well. 

DAN: Yeah. So thank you for that. And to reciprocate, I also think that it's really great that you're providing a tool which enables essentially any company. And I assume it's not like super expensive that only like the Fortune 500 can afford to use it that can enable essentially any organization to monitor and improve their performance. 

BIANCA: That's absolutely true. So it's it's it depends on on your traffic. So it the pricing isn't just for enterprise customers. It starts very low and everybody can go and try it. 

CHARLES: Yep. So we're kind of getting toward the end of our scheduled time. If people want to start taking action toward core web vitals on their web applications. They're probably doing JavaScript, you know, maybe they listen to this show and then they have a.NET or a Ruby or some other backend. Maybe it's all, maybe it's a Jamstack, maybe it's something else. But what, what are the steps, right? What are the steps for people to take in order to start getting their hands around this practically on their application?

SUMITRA: I can chime in on this one. So. First step would definitely be to start monitoring your core vitals. It starts with the people being able to fix your core vitals as well. And so having a team that actually can work together, having your designers, marketers, and engineers working together is where the core actually bumping up the core web vitals starts, I believe. And from there, I think in terms of fixing what's currently in place, I would say with plugins, they can definitely be a more of a beware situation. You would not necessarily want to opt in for services that optimize for Core Web Vitals and such, such as plugins. They are more of a one-size-fits-all approach. Only using a synthetic-based tool. You don't want to be using a one-size-fits-all tool. You want to know. You need to know your customers and you know them best. So monitoring Core Web Vitals yourself with... You can use a synthetic tool, obviously, but with a lot more user PageSpeed Insights tool alongside a lab field monitoring tool such as Regan. But with plugins, they are definitely more community driven. So they can be a lot less secure and contain malicious code as well, such as plugins for WordPress. So I would definitely stay away from plugins, in my opinion. At Regan, we use a page builder as well, and we actually switched from our engineers using and maintaining the public site to our marketers now actually maintaining it using a page builder. They can actually optimize your websites quite a lot, which was actually quite surprising to see because I haven't actually gone too deep in the page builder world, but they definitely have gotten rid of like a lot of unnecessary code, they compile the code, they do image optimizations, and they improve the SEO and performance metric quite a bit. It's just one thing to note again, you do still want to be monitoring your core vitals. You want to see if you can actually take more action on your clear bottles or is it great how it is? Upskilling your technical team as well, your non-technical team, sorry, can be a bit of an area you will need to invest time in if your marketing team, for example, is not technical and they want to be working with page builders. So that is another approach. More of a technical side of things, I would opt in for using CDNs so that you can actually cater your content to be served from a server that's closer to your site visitor. Also, Of course, going back to how ads are even rendered on a website, you can use, again, the width and height attributes on images or on certain elements that you want to be reserving space for, for a specific piece of content that you want to load that may or may not take a while. But if it does take a while, obviously, there is a chance that you have images and that need to be compressed as well. And so at Raga, we actually use compressedpng.com, S-P-G-O-M-G by Jake Archibald. And this definitely does improve the LCP metric. This is like a core practice that we do at RayGun. Every time there's an image that we want to be implementing within the app or the public site, we want to make sure it's compressed. So there's a bit of a spitfire tips there that I've got. I mean, I've obviously got more, but I'll just leave it at that at the moment. 

CHARLES: Sounds good. All right. Well, I think we're going to move into PICS just in the interest of time, but this has been really interesting and I just I love all of the practical ideas around this and just the ideas around, I guess, breaking down the data into manageable pieces and looking at the individual user and filtered user data and deciding what really matters to you, not just from the Core Web Vitals Google ranking, but also the user experience. I think a lot of times we just lose sight of that just because we look at Google and say, well, they must know what they're talking about focus on that stuff. So anyway, let's go ahead and do some picks. 

 

Hey, this is Charles Maxwood. I just wanted to talk really briefly about the top end devs membership and let you know what we've got coming up this month. So in February, we have a whole bunch of workshops that we're providing to members. You can go sign up at top end devs.com slash sign up. If you do, you're going to get access to our book club. We're reading Docker deep dive and we're gonna be going into Docker and how to use it and things like that. We also have workshops on the following topics and I'm just gonna dive in and talk about what they are real quick. First, it's how to negotiate a raise. I've talked to a lot of people that they're not necessarily keen on leaving their job, but at the same time, they also want to make more money. And so we're gonna talk about the different ways that you can approach talking to your boss or HR or whoever about getting that raise that you want. And having it support the lifestyle you want. Uh, that one's going to be on, uh, February 7th, February 9th. We're going to have a career freedom mastermind. Basically you show up, you talk about what's holding you back, what you dream about doing in your career, all of that kind of stuff. And then we're going to actually brainstorm together. You and whoever else is there. And I, all, all of us are going to brainstorm on how you can get ahead. Um, the next week on the 14th, we're going to talk about how to grow from junior developer to senior developer, the kinds of things you need to be doing, how to do them, that kind of a thing. On the 16th, we're gonna do a Visual Studio or VS Code tips and tricks. On the 21st, we're gonna talk about how to build a software course. And on the 23rd, we're gonna talk about how to go freelance. And then finally, on February 28th, we're gonna talk about how to set up a YouTube channel. So those are the meetups that we're gonna have along with the book club. And I hope to see you there. That's going to be at topendevice.com slash sign up. 

 CHARLES: Steve, do you want to start us off with picks?

STEVE: Oh, sure. I know that I'm the high point of the podcast with the dad jokes, but all, uh, I'll get us going here. You know, I get messages all the time that people listen just for my dad jokes. But anyway, so I'm curious to see if you guys have heard of the band. They're actually pretty good called 10 23 MB. The problem is they can't get a gig, AJ gig gigabyte megabytes. There.. Oh, thank you. Thank you. And then for my, uh, encore. So my, uh, my wife and my son are really big into big foot. They like some watch those, some of those big foot tracking shows on, on TV. And I told her that, you know, big foot is sometimes confused as Sasquatch yeti never complains. You know, yeti white ETI. 

AJ: Yeah. We get it. Okay. Silent laughter. I wanted the laugh to come out, but it was just, it was silent.

CHARLES: They're good and then it gets sad because you try and explain them.

STEVE: Well, the only reason I do it is because AJ always has this confused look on his face and so I got to make sure he understands it.

AJ: Look, okay. Well, 

CHARLES: AJ always has this confused look on his face. 

AJ: That's not true. I just, sometimes it takes me a minute. Okay. 

STEVE: Anyway, that's all I got for today.

CHARLES: All right, AJ, what are your picks? 

AJ: Okay, so I'm going to start out with, I'm going to have to find the link for this actually. There's a YouTube channel where the.. The girl always starts with, hello brains. And I think it's called how to ADHD. That's the name of the channel. And I never thought that ADHD was a thing. I just considered a personality trait. I kind of still think that's what I consider it, but it does seem like there's some research to show that these people have similar traits but I don't know if there's enough science to say that their brains are actually different or not. I'm still trying to figure that one out, if it's just like a colloquial thing or if it's a real thing. Anyway, point is, you get methamphetamines prescribed by your doctor if you can demonstrate that you have it. So if you want, methamphetamines. Anyway, no, that's, I don't advise anyone to do that. But I just, I'm learning that a lot of the things that are quirky about me, especially things that bug other people or that make my life non-standard, are seem to be associated with ADHD, but I also can't say how much of it is the bias problem of, if you go into a room full of a thousand humans and you say, hey, I have this problem, then someone else is gonna say, hey, I have that problem too. And so then you'd say, well, out of this group of a thousand humans, we've discovered that humans have these problems. And so I don't know how much of it is just confirmation bias and that the people who are active in these communities are sharing the same problems because they have human problems and they happen to be in a group versus like they're statistically significant groupings. But anyway, I think that it seems to be common among programmers. I know a lot of programmers that are diagnosed with ADHD and I was diagnosed with it at myself or in my youth myself. So how to ADHD? I'm just picking that channel. I also have to pick you are not a visual learner by Veritasium, which Dan has picked Veritasium in the past turns out there's no such thing as visual auditory or kinetic learning styles That's just made up bogus junk and when they've actually tested it there is no statistically significant difference It's just something that sounds cool on a bumper sticker And who do you know that doesn't say they're a visual learner anyway? So that's kind of interesting and then the technical stuff brave search still love it. It's great Getee check it out if you want to do self-hosted github, and then if you want to follow me online as I do live.. live streams and stuff like that and educational resources, Beyond Code, I've got all the links in there. And sorry, I didn't contribute much today. I think a lot of the comments I had the last time we talked about this, I commented in. So I don't think, I didn't have that much new stuff to add. So I just kept silent, but I was here. 

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

DAN: I think I'm gonna try to kind of invade Steve's territory with two dad jokes. So, yeah.

STEVE: I set a pretty high standard, so I'm hoping you can... 

CHARLES: Is it catching? 

DAN: We will see. Anyway, I have to tell you that it's so hot in Tel Aviv that today when I took a shower, I literally ran out of cold water. Okay. 

STEVE: Oh, I thought it was serious.

DAN: And the other thing is something that actually literally happened was that my son came back from the gym. And he said, dad, today at the gym, I ran for three miles and then I cycled eight miles and I did it in under 50 minutes. And I said, I didn't realize your gym was that big. Anyway. Okay. Tough audience.

STEVE: Pretty good. I see where you're going. 

DAN: And finally, if we were talking about my son, he actually shared a video with me, uh, which I enjoyed. It's actually, it's on a new video. It's a Ted talk from way back in 2013. about the concept of the multiverse. It's with Brian Green, who's a theoretical, American theoretical physicist. And it's a really interesting and thought-provoking talk. So I'll share the link to that. And those would be my picks. 

CHARLES: Very cool. 

STEVE: People are kind of the dad jokes. Let me know if you need any help.

DAN: Yeah, I probably do. 

CHARLES: All right. So I've got a couple of picks. The first one is I am starting to do some, I don't wanna call them webinars. What do I wanna call them? Basically, no, because so, okay, so you earned a rant, Dan, you earned it. So webinars are you show up and somebody gives you good information and then they do a lame sales pitch at the end. That's webinar. What I want to do is I want to give people just some actionable information and then answer questions and get off. No sales pitch, no funky, whatever, no pressure to do anything other than just, hey, go do something that improves your life. And so I'm just going to give you information. I'm not going to try and tell you anything and then answer questions for people about career stuff and things like that. What I'm finding is some of my panelists or co-hosts on some of the shows run into funky stuff with their careers. It's like, well, what do I do in this situation? And it's like, well, I have thoughts, I have advice. Some people are trying to start podcasts. Some people are trying to get noticed in other ways some people are trying to break into the industry. And I'm just like, I want to help these people and I want to make it easy to find them. So if you go to devchat.tv slash level up, it will take you... It's going to show a Zoom webinar page is what it's going to do. There I said the W word again. And I'm just going to do it every Wednesday at noon, Mountain Time. And you can just show up. I'm probably going to take 10 or 15 minutes and just talk about, hey, here's how you do a thing. So here's how you figure out where you want to go in your career. Here's how you find a tool for this. Here's how you learn a new thing. Here's how you evaluate boot camps, whatever. And if people ask me a question that requires a longer answer like that, then I'm happy to do it. And then the rest of the time, I'll answer questions. And when I answer questions in this way, I tend to go deep. So I'm not just going to... Somebody's going to be like, well, I'm struggling with this situation at work. I'm not just going to be like, oh, read this book I'm actually going to go deep. Okay, what's your situation? What does it look like? Where are you at? What is it? What are you dealing with? Okay, what's keeping you from doing this? What have you tried this? Okay, well, it sounds like this might be the situation. Okay. And we'll actually dig in and talk about it. So it's going to be some form of coaching. I think some of the answers might wind up being short. But I think some of it's going to be a longer conversation. You know, 10, 20 minutes. And I just... I want to help people. And so... If you sign up, you know, that's what you're in for. That's the kind of thing we're going to go to. And we'll just go until we either run out of time or run out of questions. And I'm going to do that every Wednesday.

 DAN: Just to clarify, because you called it kind of coaching. It's, it's not a one-on-one, right? It's, it's a group thing. It's a group thing. And you just register. You don't have to like purchase anything. 

CHARLES: No, you don't have to purchase anything. There's no commitment from you.. You just show up, you ask your question, we'll talk and I'll see if I can help you figure out whatever you're trying to figure out. 

DAN: Very cool. I hope it doesn't come out as being too late on Israel time because it definitely sounds like something that I want to listen in. Like, yeah, it sounds interesting. 

CHARLES: Yeah. And ultimately, I don't want it either to just be a, I have this problem. I also want it to be a, my career is not going in the direction I want or I'm kind of stuck on the default developer career path where I feel I'm eventually going to get promoted into management or I'm going to be stuck in senior development career jobs for the rest of my life. And I don't know kind of what my other options are. And so let's figure out what those are. I want to inspire people. I don't want to just troubleshoot careers. I'm also happy to troubleshoot careers. I'm not ruling that out, but I want to help solve both. So If you're in that spot, or if you're trying to create a product and you're trying to figure out how to start a podcast and build an audience, you can do that. Let's talk. I really want to just dive in and just help some folks out and build relationships and just see where we can go from there. So anyway, I'm going to be doing it on Wednesdays at noon. We're recording this on a Tuesday. So I'm not doing it tomorrow. This will come out in like a month. Next week, I'm out of town. But after that, we're going to be doing it. So when this comes out Go to devchat.tv slash level up. It'll show up. You'll be able to jump on and yeah, we'll have a conversation. If things change when my kids start school, it might show up on a different day of the week at a different time, but I am committed to doing it every week. So anyway, right now it's looking like Wednesdays at noon. So anyway, I'm super excited about it. And I just feel like it's an opportunity to help people, but I am doing that training for 10 minutes, 15 minutes at the beginning.. And so that's kind of where I was like, it's not a webinar, but it's training. So anyway, just putting that out there. And then other picks. I'm almost done with Rhythm of War by Brandon Sanderson. I'm really, really, really enjoying that. It's a fun book. It's a fantasy book if you're into that. It's the fourth book in the Stormlight Archives. So you're probably going to want to start with Way of Kings. And... What else?

DAN: I really liked that series, but the problem is that such a long time has passed since I finished the last book. I'm not sure I remember. 

CHARLES: Yeah, I had to go back and I've been listening on Audible. I've had to go back and re-listen to all the other ones and they're long books. 

AJ: Well, the way the universe expands on that one too is just insane. So I mean, you start off with Way of Kings feeling like one book and one world, but then there's so much growth with the characters and what they're discovering and where they're able to go, that by the time you get to Rhythm of War, it feels like a different world, but in a very natural way, like life is that way. Like you go through a stage of life, you get your first real job or you get married or you have your first kid and life changes and it's different. And that's kinda how I feel like those books are. The things that are happening in the book at the end of that one book and going on to the next, it's a new world to go into. It's just, the dude's amazing. 

CHARLES: Yep. Yeah. It's fun. Well, and they're all part of his Cosmere. So at least three of the characters in the Stormlight archives are actually not from Roshar, which is the world that it takes place in. They're from, I can't remember the world, but the book is Warbreaker, which is one of his other books. 

AJ:  And there's.another two characters aside from who's in Warbreaker.

CHARLES: Yeah. So it's, it's fun to kind of try and pick them out and see, okay, who's moving from world to world, but anyway, so I'm really enjoying that. And, uh, yeah, I'll just wrap up my picks there. Sumitra, do you have some picks? 

SUMITRA: Yeah. I've got a couple of jokes as well. So if Apple made a car, would it still have windows? I hope that... Yes! 

STEVE: I just saw that one the other day and was thought about it, but I'm glad you brought that up. 

SUMITRA: Oh, what was the other one? If you drop a soap on the ground, is the floor clean or is the soap dirty? 

CHARLES: Yeah. 

DAN: Yes. 

SUMITRA: I thought they were pretty good. I saw them online and I thought, yeah, they made me wonder. Another thing, I wrapped up the Formula One series on Netflix wouldn't expect me to watch something like that. But it was very interesting and it's kind of like Ragon on steroids. That's how I see it because they're all about performance. They're so hyped up. They are so the drivers themselves and the team, the engineering team and all of them, they are so motivated to get the work done on the cars and really get out on the circuit to drive the cars and make sure they stay on top and try and get to podium position. It shows great lessons as well. And you really get to understand the mindset of a Formula One driver and you get to see what they actually go through. I thought it was very motivational. It was really interesting to see how Formula One cars work and just in general how actually cars can actually work too. So I thought, yeah, if you haven't, if you guys haven't watched it, I would highly recommend watching the Formula One series. You guys will definitely get hooked on it. I got my team lead hooked on it actually. He and his partner enjoyed it a lot. So yeah, that's my pick. 

CHARLES: Awesome. Bianca, what are your picks?

BIANCA: Yeah. So speaking of webinars for the lame sales pitches, and I did want to point out that we have a webinar that we hosted a couple of weeks ago. So for those people for whom this chat about how Ragon works was a little abstract, it has quite an extended demo in it, so you do not need to sign up to see how we do things at Ragon. You can see it in the webinar And we go into a little more depth of these workflow steps that we touched on earlier. So I'll drop that in the notes so we can share that as well. In terms of my picks, you have to forgive me that my mind is very much immersed in the CoVID vitals world. So it is related to that. But something really interesting that I heard about recently was that Google's motivation obviously is around customer experience. But somebody was saying, well, this is also a step to make websites slot faster, make them lighter. So it's ultimately saving them costs, but it's also saving carbon emissions. And so it's making them kind of a greener company. There's some pressure in some countries for them to be doing that because of the incredible amount of energy that these server farms are using. So for Google, this is also contributing to being a greener company and actually doing something actively to reduce their carbon emissions, which I very much hope is true And so this would be my pick. I've just started doing a bit of research on the impact that, you know, we in the tech companies have on, on carbon emissions, it often feels like we're quite removed from sustainability and climate change and those things, but actually I think making decisions about technology to use and how to load websites does have a direct link to it. And it's super fascinating when you start looking into what's say the selection of your hosting company or the location for that can do in order to contribute to more sustainable approaches and to reducing carbon emissions. So that would be my pick. Have a look at that. 

CHARLES: Awesome. If you both can put links to your picks in the chat, we'll make sure they end up in the show notes. And then if we can just get real quick where people can reach out to you, say on Twitter, GitHub or anywhere else you'd like them to reach out. Sometimes people like LinkedIn as well that would help in that way. If people have questions, they can say, Hey, got questions. I'm also going to put a link to Ray gun on Twitter. 

BIANCA: Yeah, great. That's the Reagan on Twitter is great. You can reach out to me on LinkedIn. If you look for my ridiculous last name, you'll find me very easily. And, uh, but I'm not on Twitter myself, so I'd say LinkedIn or actually good old 

DAN: shame on you

BIANCA:  at Reagan. 

AJ: And for those, for those listening, it's. Spell G-R-I-Z-H-A-R. 

BIANCA: Maybe Bianca at Reagan.com is easier actually, now that you went to that.

DAN: Yeah, but you should be on Twitter. Everybody should be on Twitter. I mean, everybody in tech needs to be on Twitter.

BIANCA: I was on Twitter 10 years ago, yeah.

AJ: I would love to hear why you think that is, Dan, because I think Twitter is a great place to get roasted and to lose your sensibilities. Not as bad as Reddit.

DAN: It depends on how you use it and what you choose to share or not to share. I'm very intentional about both.

AJ: So people who have max self-control should get on Twitter. People who do not have up to 110% self-control, well, at minimum 110% self-control, maybe don't need to be on Twitter. 

DAN: Or maybe don't need to be on social media at all. 

AJ: Well, I don't want to live alone, Dan.

BIANCA: I'll tell you why I'm not on Twitter is like I mentioned earlier, I was in China for 10 years. Twitter is not a thing there. And in New Zealand, we all know each other. 

CHARLES: So there you go. 

DAN: Funny. 

AJ: I thought it was bigger than just a neighborhood.

DAN:  It's two neighborhoods. 

SUMITRA: You can contact me at Sumatra at ragam.com. Yeah. Yep. That's the email address or you can reach out to me on LinkedIn. I believe the link is linkedin.com slash IE and slash Sumitra Manga. Those are my primary contacts there. 

AJ: That's S U M I T R A.

CHARLES: All right. Very cool. Well, thank you both for coming. This has been fun and it's been great to dive into this because I've been curious more and more curious about it since we talked about it last. So I'm going to have to dive in and see, yeah, what we can break on the internet with this stuff. Alright folks, we're gonna wrap it up here. Until next time, Nacks out. 

DAN: Adios. Bye. 

AJ: Adios. 

BIANCA: Thank you very much for having us.