Robbie Wagner and Charles Carpenter from "Whiskey Web and Whatnot" join this week's episode, featuring some exciting updates in the world of web development. CSS enthusiasts will be thrilled to hear about the introduction of container queries and anchor positioning, which offer new possibilities for dynamic and responsive layouts. They also dive into the latest trends in podcasting, including the power of live streaming and the growing importance of video content. 

 

Charles Max Wood (00:52.578)

Hey, welcome back to another episode of JavaScript Jabber. This week on our panel is Dan Shappir.

 

Dan (01:00.53)

Hello from warm and sunny Tel Aviv.

 

Charles Max Wood (01:03.354)

and I'm Charles Maxwood from Top End Devs. We're doing a crossover episode this week. We're here with the guys from Whiskey Web and whatnot. I don't know who we should introduce first. Let's go in alphabetical order and let's have Charles the third. I know that's an inside joke, but go ahead and introduce yourself and then we'll let Robbie introduce himself.

 

RobbieTheWagner (01:20.113)

Hehehe

 

Charles III (01:25.526)

Sounds great. Yeah. So our one listener knows me as Charles William Carpenter III. And friends and colleagues know me as Chuck as well. But for all intents and purposes and lack of confusion, we'll call me Charles III here. Yep, so I'm co-host of Whiskey Web and whatnot. So avid whiskey enthusiast, technologist, a lot of front-end JavaScript work across my career.

 

And that's me in a nutshell.

 

Charles Max Wood (01:56.918)

Awesome. Robbie, go ahead.

 

RobbieTheWagner (01:57.579)

Yeah. Hey, um, yeah, I'm Robbie Wagner. I go by Robbie the Wagner online because Robbie Wagner was taken everywhere. So, uh, that's my handle everywhere. Um, yeah, I do this podcast with Chuck. We drink some whiskey, talk some tech, et cetera. Um, I do a lot of Ember. I'm like the only guy still doing it. I have been doing Ember since, uh, 2012. Uh, the community's gotten a lot smaller, but I still love it. And.

 

Charles Max Wood (02:08.223)

Ha ha!

 

RobbieTheWagner (02:26.96)

Yeah, having fun doing that.

 

Dan (02:29.082)

Yeah, I would actually that's something I'd like to discuss if we have some time along the way. I mean, how was Amber doing these days and whatnot? That said, I'm also annoyed about the fact that I don't have whiskey right now.

 

RobbieTheWagner (02:34.299)

Sure.

 

Yeah, I have plenty to say.

 

hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah

 

Charles Max Wood (02:41.87)

Ha ha ha.

 

Dan (02:43.706)

I mean, crossover episode, yeah, exactly. Yeah, I'm counting on it.

 

Charles III (02:43.776)

We didn't prepare you appropriately. Yeah, exactly. We'll have to rectify that in the future.

 

Charles Max Wood (02:47.79)

Yeah. I'm the only teetotaler here. Cause yeah, I don't drink. Yeah.

 

Charles III (02:53.614)

That's fair enough. I have a lot of mediocre whiskey substitutes to recommend to you, so don't worry.

 

RobbieTheWagner (03:00.791)

And one good one.

 

Charles Max Wood (03:01.033)

Things that I'll be like, okay, that was interesting. I'll never drink it again.

 

Dan (03:05.082)

water.

 

Charles III (03:06.662)

There you go. You'd be surprised actually, there's been decent feedback on some of them from folks who are also not drinkers and you know a decent flavor there and they give it a little bit of spice to give you kind of a faux burn as it goes down the throat. But in general, I hear it's fairly tasty.

 

Charles Max Wood (03:08.179)

Uh...

 

Charles Max Wood (03:26.762)

Oh, cool. So I kind of want to back up just a little bit and talk a little bit about your show. How did you guys get started with this? Like, what was the idea? Or what was the plan?

 

Dan (03:27.39)

Hmm.

 

RobbieTheWagner (03:41.595)

Yeah.

 

Charles III (03:41.75)

Yeah, do you wanna go with it Robbie? Here you go.

 

RobbieTheWagner (03:44.203)

I sure. Yeah. I mean, it was basically we had some extra cash and wanted a way for whiskey to be a business expense. So that was kind of how we started. And the first, you know, 10 or so episodes, we didn't really know what we were doing. We were just kind of like, let's drink whiskey and have fun and whatever. And we've slowly kind of evolved from there and gotten more legit about it and like had, you know, prominent guests on and gotten more serious with our topics, but we keep it pretty lighthearted still usually and

 

I think it gives a unique format because people get a little flustered. Sometimes they drink a little too much and sometimes they have a really fun time.

 

Charles III (04:23.902)

Yeah, I mean, Whiskey Arbitrage is essentially how I present it initially. And then conversely, there's a couple of different things that go into the concept. I mean, one aspect being like that, we wanted to hear something different from some of the people that we're hearing on podcasts, especially folks who have a particular project that they want to pitch and talk about. You can tell that they sort of have the same notes that they take along to each show and.

 

Charles Max Wood (04:27.257)

Ha ha.

 

Charles Max Wood (04:50.522)

Mm-hmm.

 

Charles III (04:50.718)

It kind of goes down that path and then unless they get some interesting questions, you're just sort of getting their marketing pitch. Um, so whiskey per presents a little bit of. Unintended duress through that conversation sometimes. So, you know, you take it very casual. You start with the whiskey, you get a little of that effect, and then you just kind of start talking as people. So it keeps it a bit more casual. Like part of, I would say like part of the idea or the way that I think about it is if you've ever.

 

seen that YouTube show hot ones how Sean Evans is an excellent interviewer and I wouldn't necessarily say that of myself per se but The fact that he can move through like an interesting interview and present level You know increase levels of duress over time and we're not trying to have people under duress But we do loosen them up and then it becomes more of a fireside chat the fires in their mouth and belly, I guess

 

Charles Max Wood (05:42.774)

Right. No, that makes sense. And that's generally what I've kind of hoped that we do here too is just kind of have more of a conversation among people as opposed to, yeah, and sometimes we do, we wind up walking into and then walking through the pitch that they have. But yeah.

 

RobbieTheWagner (05:44.939)

Hehehe

 

Dan (06:02.858)

Yeah, I just as a side comment, I used to work at Wix. And one of the good things about working at Wix is that at least for a certain time, we had, um, liquor budget as part of our office expenses. Yeah. It was interesting time. Some of the best whiskey I've drunk.

 

RobbieTheWagner (06:07.93)

Hmm?

 

Charles III (06:15.755)

Hmm.

 

Charles Max Wood (06:16.491)

Oh wow.

 

RobbieTheWagner (06:16.505)

Hahaha

 

Charles III (06:23.963)

Interesting. Yeah.

 

RobbieTheWagner (06:25.059)

Yeah, we had a couple people from Wix on our show and they were mentioning similar things, so they're very into alcohol there.

 

Charles III (06:32.339)

Right, yes. Yeah, yeah. That was one of the episodes we recorded at Render ATL, actually.

 

Dan (06:32.454)

and other things.

 

RobbieTheWagner (06:33.912)

Yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (06:40.73)

Oh, okay. Yeah, well, yeah, it was the same weekend that I was at JS Nation and React Summit. So, I was.

 

Charles III (06:42.378)

Yeah, it was like kind of on the fly.

 

RobbieTheWagner (06:51.416)

Hmm.

 

Dan (06:51.846)

Well, I've just submitted a talk to Render ATL next year. Let's see what happens.

 

Charles Max Wood (06:57.686)

Yeah. I have to say.

 

RobbieTheWagner (06:58.597)

Nice. At least they're accepting them now. Yeah.

 

Charles III (06:59.466)

Yeah, I love that they have a CFP process now.

 

Charles Max Wood (07:03.002)

I saw the pictures from Render ATL and stuff and I was like, that looks like fun and you know, seeing people that I know, just like I was seeing people that I know, you know, in person in Amsterdam. It was, yeah. I was like, it's too bad. These are the same weekend.

 

Charles III (07:14.199)

Yeah.

 

Dan (07:14.27)

They're tough. They only they're tough. They're only allowing one submission per speaker.

 

Charles Max Wood (07:20.695)

Oh wow.

 

RobbieTheWagner (07:21.723)

Hmm gotta be really sure

 

Charles III (07:22.718)

Well, I think they're new to that process. So you can understand where they want to just, and so many people go there. It is a huge conference and I can't imagine it stagnating or getting smaller. I mean, it is a very unique, almost like cultural experience. And so if you're expecting, if you have 3000 plus attendees and then you're expecting, there was probably at least a hundred speakers last year or this past year.

 

Charles Max Wood (07:35.61)

Yeah.

 

Dan (07:47.567)

Oh wow.

 

RobbieTheWagner (07:48.754)

I think it was 80.

 

Charles III (07:50.062)

Was it? Yeah, I thought it was around 100. So give or take, I suppose. And and the tracks are concurrent. And so there's what? Four to six rooms, a main stage kind of thing. That's a lot of talks and probably a lot of people submitting to get in on that. So.

 

RobbieTheWagner (07:52.5)

Yeah, give or take.

 

Dan (08:08.302)

It's also one of the fewer conferences in the US that I saw that actually fully cover travel expenses.

 

RobbieTheWagner (08:19.913)

Mmm, nice.

 

Dan (08:20.306)

For some reason, conferences in Europe do, and those in the States are less likely to, at least from my experience.

 

Charles III (08:20.404)

Right.

 

Charles III (08:26.378)

Well, we believe in a thing called capitalism. So.

 

Charles Max Wood (08:28.226)

I think that's changing some.

 

RobbieTheWagner (08:30.868)

Yeah.

 

Dan (08:32.327)

Isn't capitalism about getting paid for what you do?

 

Charles III (08:35.755)

Right? What it doesn't always about sharing the profits is about keeping the money. And I... yeah.

 

RobbieTheWagner (08:37.639)

It's about keeping money. Yeah.

 

Dan (08:41.074)

Hahaha, okay.

 

Charles Max Wood (08:42.543)

It depends. I mean, it's down to incentives, right? And so if they can get away with not paying it, then they probably won't. If they can't get the people that they want, then they might start paying for it. So.

 

Charles III (08:50.03)

right?

 

Dan (08:55.85)

I just got back home from Front Zurich, Front Conference Zurich, which was an excellent conference by the way, so props to them. And they actually even give a stipend to speakers beyond the actual covering of expenses, which is unfortunately even less common. But yeah.

 

Charles III (09:07.181)

Hmm.

 

Charles Max Wood (09:07.866)

Yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (09:14.474)

Yeah, I've been to some that do one or the other, but yeah, not so many that do both, unless it was paid for by like Microsoft or something like that. And I'm kind of curious that, you know, as to how that goes. As far as, yeah, I mean, what was your experience there? Did you do your live show as a session or was it just recording in a room or how did that work?

 

Charles III (09:15.042)

Yeah.

 

RobbieTheWagner (09:15.44)

Yeah.

 

Charles III (09:23.214)

Hmm.

 

Charles III (09:38.354)

We, it was recording in a room. So we had space in their media room and we had a couple of things planned and then many things not planned. So we were just kind of ready to go on the fly and we were just trying to interact with speakers. And then what we learned later was that, uh, folks who were involved, like speakers and, uh, and other folks involved in the conference themselves, found out that we were recording this whiskey podcast and that we had bottles of whiskey available.

 

Charles Max Wood (09:44.131)

Uh huh.

 

Charles III (10:07.446)

that we were sharing with folks. So it became like kind of a little underground speakeasy for people through the afternoon. It's swing in, watch us a little bit. Can I pour one of these? Okay. And then, yeah. So it actually was really interesting just because of the nature of how on the fly things occurred in that. But yeah, we just, we had a big banner and our equipment and stuff. And we just set up in a meeting room that we mostly had to ourselves.

 

Charles Max Wood (10:09.261)

Oh wow.

 

Charles Max Wood (10:13.026)

Oh wow.

 

RobbieTheWagner (10:13.437)

Hahaha

 

Charles Max Wood (10:35.93)

So did they invite you to come or did you invite yourself? I'm kind of curious.

 

Charles III (10:40.654)

Yeah, so we were not invited. We did like a paid thing with them. I think we could have snuck in there and done whatever we want just because it's so big and so much is going on. But yeah, we weren't one of the invited guests though. You know, we just did a paid thing.

 

RobbieTheWagner (10:41.065)

Yeah.

 

RobbieTheWagner (10:53.236)

Oh yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (10:53.987)

Uh huh.

 

Charles Max Wood (11:00.414)

Okay. Yeah. It's, it's interesting because I've gone to several conferences. Like, um, so when I went to the one in Amsterdam recently, uh, they paid for my hotel and JS nation, yeah, they paid for my hotel and airfare and. You know, they had food at the event. So it was just the couple of days extra. I was there. Um, Microsoft, they used to do it where.

 

Dan (11:12.786)

JS Nation, right?

 

Charles Max Wood (11:27.178)

Um, they would pay airfare hotel and food and everything. Um, and then we would come, but they had a number of podcasters. Right. That were coming and they actually had boots set up and they would work with us to figure out who our guests would be. And so we basically just showed up and recorded and walked away with an SD card with recordings on it. Um, JS nation, they.

 

I really appreciated the opportunity, but they didn't do a great job lining me up with the guests or giving me space to record in. And they had a couple of other people there and they just kind of figured it out. So we all just kind of figured it out together. But that's one thing that I have figured out is that if they don't know how they're doing it, a lot of times I can insert myself into the process and say, okay, this is how we're going to do this.

 

and that way they get a good showing out of people showing up and whatnot. But yeah, anyway, it's interesting. So when you say it was a paid thing, you paid them to go? Okay.

 

RobbieTheWagner (12:31.351)

Yeah, we were sponsors of the conference. Yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (12:33.726)

Okay. And I've done that too. And then I've actually, they gave me sponsored space on the floor and we just recorded on the floor. I've done that as well at other.

 

Charles III (12:35.25)

Yeah.

 

Dan (12:43.55)

I'm kind of surprised that more conferences don't do this in a more organized sort of a way, like as a way to promote the conference, you know, contact certain podcasts, have the speakers be guests on those podcasts ahead of the conference, talk about what they are going to talk about and stuff like that as a way to get, you know, as an incentive for more people to sign up for the conference, I would think.

 

Charles Max Wood (12:51.718)

Mm-hmm.

 

RobbieTheWagner (12:53.264)

Yeah.

 

Charles III (13:11.346)

Yeah, that's a great idea. I think, I mean, I would welcome doing this more. We really weren't sure how things were going to go. And then we did the EmberConf also, but we did that as a session and more as speakers. And we have a travel setup that is pretty solid now. You know, ironed it out through a couple of like both those conferences. And then we did an offsite in Portland another time, too.

 

Charles Max Wood (13:17.126)

Mm-hmm.

 

RobbieTheWagner (13:29.092)

Yeah.

 

Charles III (13:39.058)

in like this whiskey library. So we just thought that was on brand. So I would love to do more live stuff at conferences and would definitely welcome that. And I can see it's a great idea conversely, like conference organizers sponsor an episode, come on, let's talk about your thing. And that one, I think that would be cool. We can do it in our format.

 

Charles Max Wood (13:54.602)

Yep.

 

Charles Max Wood (14:00.898)

Yeah, I've been reaching out to some conferences and started putting this together. And instead of just saying, Hey, have JavaScript Jabber or Ruby rogues or react roundup or one, you know, one of our other shows show up. It's Hey, yeah, let's set up some space. Let's put all this stuff together and then let's invite three, four, five. Podcasts, right? You know, depending on what your budget is and, and what you want to cover and see what they're willing to do. Right. Because.

 

Yeah, I mean, you guys sponsored to show up at Render ATL. And so I'm assuming some of the other podcasters out there are willing to put some skin in the game, right? Especially if they know that...

 

Charles III (14:42.465)

Mm-hmm.

 

RobbieTheWagner (14:43.343)

Yeah.

 

Dan (14:43.414)

Yeah, but I'm even thinking like sort of a package deal because both sides are getting something out of it. I mean, if you make sure that the episodes with speakers air in advance, you're actually promoting the conference. So it's promotion that works both ways, it seems to me.

 

Charles Max Wood (14:48.303)

Yeah.

 

Yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (14:54.842)

Yeah.

 

Charles III (15:02.858)

Yeah, I agree with that.

 

Charles Max Wood (15:03.082)

No, I agree with you. And that's more or less how the Microsoft stuff worked, except we didn't do it in advance, we just recorded it and they came out afterward. But for them, it was branding that, that made sense for Microsoft, right? Cause we were, we were not interviewing just people speaking. We were interviewing Microsoft engineers and employees. And then occasionally we'd get somebody else.

 

Charles III (15:23.47)

So do they reach out to you for that, or are you proactive in finding that kind of engagement?

 

Charles Max Wood (15:28.63)

So the Microsoft thing, the way that worked out, the short story is, is that I wound up speaking at a. Dotnet conference that had an enthusiast on their staff for Ruby. And he talked them into doing a Ruby track. And so, uh, we went to that event. It was in Vancouver and, um, dotnet rocks was doing a panel at the conference about agile development.

 

And so they looked around at everybody and said, we all do Microsoft flavored agile. Chuck is a Ruby guy. And so his take on things is pretty different. And so they had me on the panel and I got to know Richard and Carl under those circumstances. And so when the opportunity came up, they ran it through Richard and Carl. And so they reached out to us to have our iOS show and JavaScript Jabber show up at.

 

Dan (16:13.192)

Thank you.

 

Charles Max Wood (16:23.146)

Microsoft build and after that they just had us at all of their events. And so that's how that worked out The JS nation one They reached out to us to kind of do some cross promotion and I pitched them on coming and doing podcasts at the event That's how that kind of wound up working But yeah, I completely agree with you guys I think there is some way that it works or could work

 

where everybody gets what they want and the podcasters mostly have their way paid to the event because it makes a ton of financial sense to the conference organizers to have you there. I'd love to sit down and just figure that out and reach out to a whole bunch of people and just say, hey, are you interested in doing this so that I can say, hey, we've got six, seven, ten podcasts that could all come.

 

Dan (17:07.939)

Yeah.

 

Dan (17:18.282)

And again, you know, a lot of these, when you record at the conference, which is obviously very interesting and creates engagement for next time, but that's it. It's an engagement for next time. I'm thinking that, you know, you can have people that will speak at the conference coming in ahead of time. Because very often those conferences, especially now, you know, in this post COVID period,

 

Charles Max Wood (17:28.386)

Yeah. Yep.

 

Dan (17:43.222)

not all conferences are able to sell all the tickets easily in advance. Anyway, which kind of leads

 

Charles Max Wood (17:46.938)

Mm-hmm.

 

Right. We did that with JS Nation, but we didn't do it well. And I have a page of notes on, hey, here's how we do it again next time.

 

Charles III (17:50.316)

Yeah.

 

Charles III (17:55.159)

Yeah.

 

Dan (17:59.487)

Yeah, which brings me-

 

Charles III (17:59.658)

Yeah, that's it. I would say that it's twofold. It's like, let's come to your conference and be, um, you know, there and recording with folks there that comes out after the event. But I think that there's a buildup that occurs and you have XYZ person who will either be at the conference or as part of the conference organization. And they come on and then they sponsor an episode and they talk about their thing and we, you know, we have that kind of ongoing discourse.

 

Charles Max Wood (18:12.838)

Mm-hmm.

 

Charles Max Wood (18:20.004)

Yep.

 

Charles III (18:27.682)

that continues up until the event. And then you continue that by saying, this is what happened, we recorded there. This was so exciting, look for it next year.

 

Dan (18:37.262)

Yeah. Which brings me to another topic, which I think is really interesting for me, is how do you get the guests for your podcast? What's your process?

 

RobbieTheWagner (18:51.458)

Uh, no. Yeah.

 

Charles III (18:51.967)

It's funny. It's so it's pretty it's a lot easier than it should be. I think I guess you know for the most part we just you know it's basically why I have a Twitter account and just message people and say do you want to be on here you like whiskey. X whatever and whatever thing bird thing former bird thing. Yeah, like.

 

Dan (18:53.839)

It's funny?

 

RobbieTheWagner (18:56.96)

Yeah.

 

RobbieTheWagner (19:04.103)

Yeah. I think you mean X.

 

Charles Max Wood (19:11.718)

I still call it Twitter. It's just everybody knows what you mean.

 

Charles III (19:15.878)

Yeah, if you say X, they're like, is this a family friendly show or no? Yeah, it just alludes to so many other things.

 

RobbieTheWagner (19:16.087)

Yeah.

 

Dan (19:21.106)

I just changed the, you know, the contact me thing on my slide deck from the Twitter bird to an X. And everybody was laughing when I showed that. So, yeah.

 

Charles III (19:32.938)

Yeah, yeah, I can kind of see that. I just put an X through the bird or something, people will get it.

 

Charles Max Wood (19:33.402)

Yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (19:38.33)

Yeah, I would just say it's because I have people that want me to help them start a podcast and they're, well, how do you get these people? And yeah, that's been my experience. 99% of the time, I just ask them. And sometimes it's a month or two or three because they're busy, but most people it's like, hey, here's our calendar link and it sorts itself out.

 

RobbieTheWagner (19:50.524)

Mm-hmm.

 

Charles III (20:00.383)

Yep, absolutely.

 

RobbieTheWagner (20:00.643)

Yeah. Yeah, most people are into it.

 

Dan (20:02.218)

Yeah, yeah, we do the same, although we also get, we're established enough, I guess, that also some people contact us and ask to actually participate on the show. And funnily enough, you know, one of the guests that we had on our show, which, you know, is a, I guess a headliner, which is Dan Abramov to speak about React Server components. He actually contacted me.

 

Charles III (20:27.84)

Mm-hmm.

 

RobbieTheWagner (20:28.134)

Mm-hmm.

 

Dan (20:30.11)

to come on the show rather than the other way around. So people were asking, how did you get Dan? And I said, funny you should ask.

 

Charles III (20:31.99)

Hehehe

 

Charles III (20:37.406)

Yeah. He just...

 

Charles Max Wood (20:37.666)

Yep. Yeah, we get some of those. I don't know if you get all the junk emails. Hi, we work for internet or interview company and we're trying to get some ones. We get a ton of those, but occasionally, yeah, we'll have somebody float through that's released a book or something else and they're an interesting enough person or enough people know who they are to where, yeah.

 

RobbieTheWagner (20:47.482)

Yep.

 

Charles III (20:49.002)

Yeah.

 

Dan (20:50.001)

Yeah.

 

Charles III (21:01.898)

Yeah, I mean it just started out with like people we would read and You know articles you'd read people you might follow a little bit on Twitter or whatever and we're just like we find them interesting Let's let's ask them Yeah, well you were all like doing like 57 ember people I was like I can't talk about this again

 

Charles Max Wood (21:06.527)

Mm-hmm.

 

RobbieTheWagner (21:12.487)

Well...

 

RobbieTheWagner (21:15.799)

It was all Ember people to start, is how that worked, because I knew all of the Ember people.

 

Charles Max Wood (21:19.945)

Hahaha

 

Dan (21:22.829)

And you have the extra incentive of telling them if you come on the show, we'll send you some whiskey.

 

Charles III (21:28.614)

Right, yes. Which, that doesn't hurt either. Again, that's all part of the arbitrage part.

 

RobbieTheWagner (21:28.872)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (21:29.369)

Yep.

 

RobbieTheWagner (21:33.347)

Yeah.

 

Dan (21:37.834)

By the way, I actually think that the situation with Twitter is making things more complicated because I know a good number of people who are intentionally no longer on that platform. So some people are more difficult to contact and reach out to than they were in the past.

 

RobbieTheWagner (21:49.089)

Mm-hmm.

 

RobbieTheWagner (21:55.779)

Yeah, yeah, there's definitely a lot of that.

 

Charles Max Wood (21:56.666)

That's fair.

 

Dan (22:00.438)

Yeah, some dead accounts. You know, most people don't remove their accounts. Their accounts just stay there. You just DM them and they don't answer. And if you then somehow reach them and say, oh, I'm sorry, I just don't look at Twitter anymore. So, you know.

 

Charles III (22:00.621)

Yeah.

 

Charles III (22:15.95)

Yeah, I haven't run into that too much, but I've seen where people like leave. And they come back and they were like, oh, I went to Mastodon and then nobody was there or it was a small circle and blue sky and was the threads.

 

Charles Max Wood (22:18.562)

I haven't either. It has happened though. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do this.

 

RobbieTheWagner (22:24.363)

Yeah, yeah, Mastodon's not the answer.

 

Dan (22:30.178)

Yeah. So for a while I was adding things on my, uh, about me slide in my, you know, my talks at conferences and it got silly where I had like four links and I said, yeah, but I'm actually not there. So I wilted it all back down to X. Uh, you know, whatever we think about the guy who's running it, either good or bad. I'm just there for the people I know.

 

Charles III (22:44.65)

Yeah, right.

 

Charles III (22:56.306)

Yeah, like that's it's more about the community than that. Yeah. And I had rage quit social media, I don't know, like five, six years ago. I just was tired of that or tired of arguing politics with my father-in-law or something of that nature. And so I was just like, I just tired of the whole thing. And then.

 

Charles Max Wood (22:56.965)

Yeah.

 

RobbieTheWagner (22:57.061)

Right.

 

Dan (23:11.714)

And so now you do it on Thanksgiving instead of on social media?

 

Charles Max Wood (23:12.517)

Yeah.

 

Charles III (23:17.134)

Basically, yeah, Thanksgiving and Christmas, and that's the only time. Or we just say, you can't talk about these things in our house. It's just not.

 

RobbieTheWagner (23:18.048)

Hahaha.

 

Dan (23:23.822)

And does that actually work? My experience is that it doesn't.

 

Charles III (23:28.333)

You've not met my wife. It does work. She will get louder or make him leave.

 

RobbieTheWagner (23:35.847)

Interesting.

 

Dan (23:35.999)

Okay, so she's with you on those agendas.

 

Charles III (23:36.407)

Pretty simple.

 

Charles Max Wood (23:37.004)

Yeah.

 

Charles III (23:39.822)

Yeah, well, so it would be fun. I mean, I don't know if you want to go down this path, but the short of it, the TLDR is that I wouldn't even really argue like politics, there would be like a statement or some meme put up. And I would go to like senate.gov and look at voting records and be like, Oh, looks like this wasn't true on this issue. And he would just respond with, well, you have your opinion, I have mine and like, ah, it's not opinion. It's just information.

 

RobbieTheWagner (24:01.703)

I'm out.

 

Charles Max Wood (24:04.214)

Hahaha!

 

Charles III (24:06.978)

There's no alternative facts here, just the fact. Anyway, so.

 

Charles Max Wood (24:07.57)

Uhhh...

 

Yeah, no, it's, and that's been an issue sometimes, just around somebody will throw something out on the show and we just try to steer clear of a lot of that stuff, right, because we're talking about technology and things. Yeah.

 

Dan (24:29.086)

I don't actually recall any situation of politics or stuff like that on our show.

 

Charles III (24:37.855)

Yeah, I mean...

 

Charles Max Wood (24:38.094)

I could go back and find you instances, but most of it occurred before you were on the show.

 

Dan (24:42.338)

Yeah, I think so.

 

Charles III (24:42.602)

Right. And aside from whether you feel adamantly enough to be on this particular, you know, Twitter X platform or not because of your personal feelings about the fellow who owns it. Aside from that, technology is kind of agnostic to that, to all of those things anyway. So that's a beautiful thing to it. We argue about things like tabs and spaces or rebase or merge and, you know, who's this? Who's the smartest person in the room?

 

Charles Max Wood (24:59.642)

Yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (25:04.697)

Yeah.

 

RobbieTheWagner (25:06.371)

Yeah, oh, rebase and merge are spicy.

 

Charles Max Wood (25:11.534)

Yeah. We, we have had people who worked on specific, uh, presidential campaigns say, Hey, we want to come talk about the technology we did on the campaign. And I had a w it never materialized. And basically that boiled down to look, you're going to come talk about the technology and not about the campaign. And they weren't happy with that. And so it's like, look, I, you know, I'm not looking to evangelize anybody. Right. I.

 

Charles III (25:11.906)

which is fun.

 

Charles III (25:31.755)

Yeah.

 

I see.

 

Charles Max Wood (25:39.762)

I have my opinions. I'm very politically involved in Utah. And, right, but people aren't listening to the show so that I can tell them what I think about that stuff. Right.

 

Charles III (25:50.706)

Right. It's not, yeah, it's not exactly the form. And I completely agree with that. And I, you know, great that you have those feelings and opinions and, but that you can separate those and maintain that standard within this, because that is at the end of the day, what we're doing here, right? We're talking about the intersect of things within technology and the specific technology aspects of it. I mean, you know, when you're ready to start the Rust track in your podcast, you let me know, because we got to, you know, work on getting everybody off of Ruby and onto Rust, right?

 

RobbieTheWagner (25:51.639)

Right. Yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (25:59.033)

Right.

 

Charles Max Wood (26:04.13)

Yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (26:08.023)

Yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (26:18.374)

Hmm. Yeah, let's argue about that. No, I, no, it's, it's true, but, um, I have actually been considering the next two languages I'm going to be covering on the show. Incidentally, well, one of them is not a language. Uh, we're starting a Python show and then we're also starting a game dev show. Yeah. Game dev.

 

RobbieTheWagner (26:20.071)

Hahaha

 

Charles III (26:21.558)

I don't know. See, we have other things. It's totally fine.

 

Dan (26:36.997)

Oh yeah?

 

RobbieTheWagner (26:38.492)

Is that the one that's not a language?

 

Charles III (26:41.382)

So, Robbie has problems with anything that doesn't have like, um, ending operators, clear and no brackets, no, you gotta have, you need your braces and you need semi-colons. You just, I don't know, but I like Python, so I think it's good.

 

RobbieTheWagner (26:48.811)

I gotta have braces. I gotta, gotta have it. Yeah.

 

Mm-hmm. Yep.

 

Charles Max Wood (26:56.389)

Yeah.

 

Dan (26:56.823)

There's this meme about writing Java, I think, in a way that looks like Python code. Or was it the other way around? Like, how do you format it in a way that you don't see all the semicolons and the braces? Yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (27:07.569)

Oh, everybody does that.

 

Charles III (27:14.382)

That's funny. Yeah.

 

RobbieTheWagner (27:14.727)

Hmm.

 

Charles Max Wood (27:15.554)

Yeah. So one, one thing getting back into the podcast a little bit is, um, I'm, I'm a little curious, are there certain topics that you try not to cover? I mean, are you pretty open as far as web stuff or

 

Dan (27:17.463)

Um.

 

RobbieTheWagner (27:29.225)

Uh...

 

Charles III (27:31.702)

We're pretty open, and so we've tried to be diverse in other sides of web. It's usually always web specific, so we're talking about being on the web. But.

 

RobbieTheWagner (27:31.92)

Yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (27:39.044)

Okay.

 

RobbieTheWagner (27:39.383)

Yeah. But it can be like tools for building stuff on the web too. Not just like, yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (27:44.249)

Right.

 

Charles III (27:44.286)

Yeah, and other folks that are involved, like we've spoken with recruiter and analysts and just in other parts of like making this thing. And I just think we had a lot of opinions around hiring and the way that has changed, flipped on its head over the last six months to a year, I would suppose. And so I thought that was just interesting. Yeah. So there's nothing like.

 

Dan (28:08.071)

So, so high ring is no longer broken?

 

Charles III (28:11.198)

Oh, I would say it's always been broken. It's always been broken. The difference is that the power dynamic has changed. Yeah, the power dynamic has flipped. And so it's become more broken, I think, because of that.

 

RobbieTheWagner (28:11.891)

Oh, it's very broken.

 

Charles Max Wood (28:15.254)

It's a different kind of broken.

 

Dan (28:17.412)

It's not broken in a different way.

 

RobbieTheWagner (28:17.711)

Yeah.

 

Yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (28:21.649)

Yeah.

 

Dan (28:23.954)

From my perspective, the power dynamic flipped and then it flipped again.

 

RobbieTheWagner (28:24.11)

Mm-hmm.

 

Charles III (28:28.726)

Hmm. I would love to see the other side of that flip because I feel like it's really in favor of the employers at this point

 

Dan (28:33.468)

No, I mean...

 

Dan (28:37.47)

What I mean is that, again, I'm looking at it from the perspective of how things are in Israel. And also, I'm old, so I'm experienced. I don't really have the junior experience. Although my son is now starting to get into the market, so I guess I'll experience what juniors get, their experiences through him.

 

Charles Max Wood (28:43.716)

Mm-hmm.

 

Charles III (28:47.736)

Hahaha

 

Charles Max Wood (28:47.95)

Hahaha

 

RobbieTheWagner (28:48.519)

Hehehe

 

Charles Max Wood (29:02.391)

Mm-hmm.

 

Dan (29:06.878)

three years ago, it was an employee's market, you know, everybody was chasing you. And now it's certainly for juniors and also, but starting to even impact seniors, it's more of the power is more on the side of the employer, prospective employer.

 

Charles III (29:12.38)

Mm-hmm.

 

Charles Max Wood (29:13.355)

Mm-hmm. Oh, yeah.

 

Charles III (29:31.126)

Mm-hmm. 100% processes have become more challenging, I would say, for no other reason than to try and weed people out. Obviously, their applicant pools are crazy, and then I think salaries are being affected by that as well.

 

RobbieTheWagner (29:31.215)

Yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (29:32.509)

Yes.

 

RobbieTheWagner (29:39.108)

Yeah, longer.

 

Charles Max Wood (29:47.106)

Yeah, I do believe though that there are a lot of things people can do to make their situation better and make themselves stand out a whole lot more. And so that it's not as, I guess, I guess in some ways it's arguing semantics, but you know, where you're more likely to wind up in that top tier of the pool that they're actually going to really look at or things like that, that go beyond having five, 10 years experience, right?

 

And so you can do things as a junior developer to make yourself stand out where they're actually going to go. You know, yeah, they don't, they don't check all the boxes, but there's an, there's enough here to make me really think about, you know, bringing them in and seeing what the story is. So.

 

Dan (30:34.838)

I remember at Wix, this designer that wanted to get hired actually did a chalk drawing in the parking lot underneath the windows of the offices. He was writing, hire me, and then doing a lot of art around it. And to be honest, I don't know if it worked or not, but I think it did get him an interview.

 

Charles Max Wood (30:45.711)

Oh, nice.

 

RobbieTheWagner (30:46.935)

Hmm

 

Charles III (30:48.413)

Wow.

 

Charles III (30:53.986)

That's cool. Oh, well, at least got him into the candidate pool or something. Yeah, I mean, I think that if you wanna work one specific place, you gotta really work hard to make that happen. If you just wanna get hired, the problem is that you can't really afford to put that kind of effort into every single application, right? So then I guess the effort goes more around.

 

RobbieTheWagner (30:54.127)

Did they get hired? Yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (31:00.186)

Yeah.

 

RobbieTheWagner (31:01.413)

Yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (31:03.929)

Yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (31:19.748)

Right.

 

Charles III (31:23.814)

making yourself stand out in particular ways. But yeah, yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (31:25.158)

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Showing up in the right places. Yep.

 

Dan (31:28.798)

Yeah, I definitely know about people who wanted to get hired by Google or Meta that went to amazing lengths in order to achieve that, you know, doing courses on getting hired and preparing for weeks on end just in order to pass the exams. I don't know, I've never been willing to put in that amount of effort just in order to get to get in the past initial interview. I don't know, it seemed kind of ridiculous to me.

 

Charles Max Wood (31:41.815)

Oh wow.

 

Charles Max Wood (31:50.958)

Hahaha!

 

RobbieTheWagner (31:51.993)

Hehehehehehe

 

Charles III (31:53.882)

Well, yeah, obviously the financial incentives are there if you do get through that. But then conversely, like you go through all of this training to get through the hiring process and then the job you're going to do, I would say probably 99 percent of the time doesn't reflect what you had to do to get the job. Right. I mean.

 

Charles Max Wood (31:56.56)

Yeah.

 

Dan (32:16.13)

Oh yeah, for sure.

 

RobbieTheWagner (32:16.367)

You mean your job isn't just going on leak code and solving stuff?

 

Charles Max Wood (32:17.927)

Now we're back to why it's broken.

 

Charles III (32:20.322)

Hmm. Right. Exactly. And that's those are things that were always broken. I just the problem is, is that those hiring practices have become more pervasive in other places that don't end up giving you the same financial incentive, though, also.

 

Dan (32:24.954)

Well, maybe they're...

 

Charles Max Wood (32:25.26)

Yeah.

 

Dan (32:34.958)

Yeah, maybe what they're testing for though isn't actually the knowledge that you're studying, rather it's your ability to study and your willingness to put in the work. I don't know.

 

Charles III (32:45.834)

Yeah, I'm not sure. Don't look behind the curtain. There's no man behind the green curtain, that's all I know.

 

Charles Max Wood (32:46.031)

Maybe.

 

Dan (32:52.178)

Ha ha ha!

 

RobbieTheWagner (32:54.315)

It's all broken anyway, because it depends on who your interviewers are. Like they may all ask you the same algorithm questions or whatever, but they might be looking for you to solve it in different ways, or they might ask you behavioral questions that you answer differently. And like, we've talked about this before, I think where like, you know, there'll be seven people that interview you in a loop and then like one guy's like, well, I didn't like the way that he answered this question, like not that it was wrong. I just didn't like it. And then it shuts you down. You don't get it. It's like, well, what if you did really well on the other six? Like it's, it's not a good process at all.

 

Charles Max Wood (32:58.735)

Yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (33:22.53)

Yeah. Or you have somebody that just wants you to make him feel good. I mean... It's so arbitrary.

 

Dan (33:24.295)

Hmm.

 

RobbieTheWagner (33:28.495)

Mm-hmm. Yep.

 

Dan (33:29.594)

Yeah. All too often recently, I'm seeing situations where I hear about people interviewing for a job and in the middle of the interview, they hear that the company that they're interviewing for has just laid off 15% of their workforce. And then you ask yourself, what happens now?

 

Charles III (33:31.906)

Yeah, yeah.

 

RobbieTheWagner (33:44.48)

Oh yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (33:44.855)

Right?

 

Charles III (33:45.158)

Right, right. So then...

 

Charles III (33:51.05)

Yeah, well, I wonder if they're trying to just do a workforce cost reduction. Oh, we just laid off people who have been here for a while and, you know, merit raises and all of those kinds of things. We can hire someone in to do the job for, you know, a 30% cut in that or something. You know, capitalism, again, rears its head from time to time. It's not about people or community. It's about the shareholders.

 

Charles Max Wood (34:15.49)

Well, I think it's short-sighted on the cap. I think it's short-sighted though on the capitalist end, right? If you, if you have people that are contributing at a high level and you're paying them a high salary and they're worth it, right? Then you're a stupid capitalist if you're laying them off just because of some baseline number.

 

Dan (34:16.292)

It's never... It's always capitalism.

 

Charles III (34:31.499)

Yeah.

 

Charles III (34:36.566)

Yeah, yeah.

 

Dan (34:36.654)

Yeah, but the problem is that when you're a big enough company, you stop looking at individuals.

 

Charles III (34:43.703)

Hmm.

 

RobbieTheWagner (34:44.475)

Yep.

 

Charles Max Wood (34:44.662)

Yeah. I guess what I'm arguing is that it's not capitalism itself that's the problem then. There are these other factors, right?

 

Charles III (34:46.142)

Yeah, it's a strange thing.

 

Charles III (34:52.716)

Right.

 

Certainly. And I'm generalizing anyway, and not that I'm necessarily, I'm not trying to come off as anti-capitalist or opportunity per se, just that I think I'm just being cynical from time to time when you start to see this across the board. Now, when you get in there, in the lines, I mean, I have been in companies before and been part of processes where there's been a mandate to reduce workforce. And you have to look at people and say,

 

Charles Max Wood (35:11.726)

Yeah.

 

Charles III (35:25.234)

Oh my gosh, who can we afford to lose and who can we not? And you know, yes, right? And, right, exactly, so.

 

Charles Max Wood (35:27.973)

right.

 

Dan (35:28.702)

Oh, I've been there. I've literally done it back in 2008. You know, I was the VP of R&D for a smallish company managing some 30 something people. And I got, you know, an instruction from the CEO that you need to reduce our salary expenses by 30%.

 

Charles III (35:58.774)

Right? You have to figure out how you can do that. And so...

 

Charles Max Wood (36:01.794)

I've been on the other end of that.

 

Charles III (36:04.554)

Right. And who knows what the factors were that went into that. So anyway, just not trying to drag the whole thing down per se, but just, you know, just clarifying that I was being more cynical than anything else.

 

RobbieTheWagner (36:05.538)

Yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (36:12.846)

Yeah, no, it-

 

Dan (36:12.854)

Yeah, let's make everybody all our listeners. Yeah, let's make all our listeners feel down. Yeah, so let's switch topic. Let's switch topic.

 

RobbieTheWagner (36:14.744)

Yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (36:17.163)

Right. Yeah.

 

Right?

 

Charles III (36:22.314)

We can, yeah. So, yeah, let's regress back to the podcast for one second because on ours, one of the things we like to do is the opening of the bottle and the pouring as part of our sound effects, but it's not really like Foley or anything. It's just like this. Ah, yes, that's me opening a Diet Coke. And then.

 

RobbieTheWagner (36:24.772)

Yeah, yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (36:27.575)

Yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (36:43.035)

Ha ha!

 

RobbieTheWagner (36:43.963)

Yeah.

 

Dan (36:44.373)

Yeah, that didn't sound like whiskey, you know.

 

RobbieTheWagner (36:47.297)

Nope.

 

Charles III (36:47.358)

No, but you're getting some sound effects, right? So anyway, I just wanted to provide you some of that. This is just a fun thing we do on ours.

 

Charles Max Wood (36:47.99)

Oh nice.

 

RobbieTheWagner (36:51.301)

Yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (36:52.518)

Right. So, so you're just putting that right in front of your microphone and just, yeah. Nice.

 

Charles III (36:56.522)

Mm-hmm. Oh, yeah, letting it pick up on that. So it's real every time.

 

RobbieTheWagner (36:57.539)

Yep. Yeah. People think that we like are using fake sound effects or something, but it's no, we just do it.

 

Charles III (37:03.073)

Yeah.

 

Dan (37:04.67)

So I'm going to take this opportunity because that reminded me. So I actually, like, what was it two days ago? We popped a bottle of champagne because my friend Vitaly Friedman from Smashing Magazine recently got married. So we raised a toast to him and his wife who were there at the conference. And yeah, that was really nice. They brought along a bottle of champagne. So.

 

Charles Max Wood (37:05.635)

No, that's fun.

 

Charles III (37:20.329)

Oh, nice.

 

Charles Max Wood (37:21.028)

Oh, nice.

 

RobbieTheWagner (37:21.092)

Nice.

 

Charles III (37:29.303)

Yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (37:29.817)

Awesome.

 

Charles III (37:32.426)

That's really fun. I love that. Yeah, I mean, we've really pigeonholed ourselves into the whiskey thing. And while there are many kinds of whiskey, I always wonder someday, is it just gonna be, are we gonna kind of run out of options? I don't know. Probably not, okay.

 

RobbieTheWagner (37:32.731)

Hehehehehehe

 

RobbieTheWagner (37:47.769)

No, no cuz we started too late

 

Dan (37:49.726)

No, there are always more blends to try, aren't there?

 

Charles Max Wood (37:49.798)

Ha ha

 

Charles III (37:52.95)

Mm-hmm Yeah, and we've tried a lot of things. Oh, actually we did a one year We did like a advent calendar and so we had 24 different little bottles And we would do like two or three per episode. It was so much and so we've tried like

 

RobbieTheWagner (37:53.861)

Yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (37:54.971)

Well...

 

Charles Max Wood (38:03.908)

Hmm

 

RobbieTheWagner (38:05.176)

Yeah, that was a lot.

 

Dan (38:07.37)

And if I may ask, what is the most expensive whiskey that you've had on your show?

 

Charles III (38:13.794)

the show. I think.

 

RobbieTheWagner (38:14.691)

Hmm was it the Magellan or something more than that?

 

Charles III (38:19.995)

Something that was about two or three hundred dollars.

 

RobbieTheWagner (38:22.699)

Yeah, yeah, 300 or so, yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (38:23.59)

for a bottle. Okay.

 

Charles III (38:24.922)

Yeah, and we didn't end up we didn't have a guest on that one. I think that was still more early days. So not per se that we wouldn't, you know, consider that path. But, uh, yeah, most of the time, we're usually in anywhere from like 50 to $100. So it's like we want things to be approachable because we've been we've started publishing early the whiskey that we're going to review.

 

RobbieTheWagner (38:31.152)

Yeah.

 

Charles III (38:46.474)

on the next released episode. So just cause a few different people said, oh, we wish we knew and we could kind of like have it with you while you're trying it. So I was like, okay, sure. Let's go down that path. We wanted it to be a bit more approachable, but yeah, that would be.

 

Charles Max Wood (38:46.63)

Mm-hmm.

 

Dan (38:59.282)

You can try to get sponsorships from some distilleries.

 

Charles III (39:03.326)

Right, exactly. I think we're going to need the both of you on our marketing team to help us. Chuck here is like, you paid for a conference? Are you sure? But that was a good idea. I was like, wait, at the time, I thought it was a good idea. Now I think it's a bad idea. I'm going to go ahead and do a little bit of a

 

RobbieTheWagner (39:04.198)

Yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (39:07.482)

Ha ha

 

RobbieTheWagner (39:08.472)

Yeah.

 

RobbieTheWagner (39:14.759)

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

 

Dan (39:16.919)

Hahaha!

 

RobbieTheWagner (39:19.354)

Yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (39:21.846)

No, it, I mean, it depends on what you're trying to get out of it, but yeah.

 

Charles III (39:26.55)

We were just trying to figure out if that's something we wanted to do and just experiment a little bit. And again, putting together my travel kit was kind of a fun experiment as well. Although we've started to upgrade a few other items such as lighting and camera now. And so who knows how much of that still works in that same way. But I don't know. I like the idea of being somewhat on the go. I'm not... I have a tiny office here that I record in. So anytime I can get out of this thing and do work elsewhere is kind of nice.

 

Charles Max Wood (39:29.871)

Yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (39:40.695)

Yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (39:49.017)

Yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (39:57.058)

Yeah, I hear that. It's funny, I'm moved into a bigger room.

 

Dan (39:57.074)

Just so you know, I sit in whichever kid isn't in the house at this point in time. Because my wife has taken over my office. So it's her office now.

 

Charles Max Wood (40:06.97)

Ha ha.

 

RobbieTheWagner (40:08.179)

Hahaha.

 

Charles III (40:11.914)

We all do what we have to do. Yeah. Yeah, Robbie has been on the road recording for quite some time because they sold their house and then started house searching for a bit. So then they were in a family home and then was homeless for a little while. Not really, but... Yeah, man on the street. Walk around, that's it. Try this whiskey, what do you think? Yes.

 

RobbieTheWagner (40:19.099)

Yeah.

 

RobbieTheWagner (40:24.017)

Mm-hmm.

 

Dan (40:31.695)

Oh, so you recorded on the street.

 

RobbieTheWagner (40:32.235)

Yeah. No, yeah. No, I was in my parents' basement. Yeah. Yeah, that would have been fun to do. Yeah. Get a hotspot going on my phone and just be in public somewhere.

 

Charles Max Wood (40:35.846)

Ha ha ha!

 

Dan (40:36.59)

in your car, under a bridge.

 

Charles III (40:40.95)

Yeah, we should try some theme episodes.

 

Dan (40:45.678)

and your whiskey was in a paper bag?

 

Charles III (40:46.254)

It should be fun. It might have been something else, Mad Dog 2020. We're really highbrow on this show, so our show, not yours.

 

Charles Max Wood (40:47.119)

Right.

 

RobbieTheWagner (40:56.783)

Yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (40:57.195)

So what does your travel kit look like? I'm curious.

 

Charles III (41:00.446)

So we have the road caster pro and I got like a bag for that holds two mics and then So we do that and I've got like some of those small like Gator Mic stands so I still take like the cage for our mics and our same mics. What are our mics again, Robbie?

 

Charles Max Wood (41:08.815)

Okay.

 

Charles Max Wood (41:19.755)

Oh wow.

 

RobbieTheWagner (41:22.06)

The Electro Voice RE20.

 

Charles III (41:24.462)

February 20th. Okay. Um.

 

Charles Max Wood (41:24.858)

Hmm, beautiful Mike. That's what I'm talking about too.

 

RobbieTheWagner (41:27.959)

Yeah.

 

Charles III (41:28.806)

Yeah, I think a mic is key. So we take that, we take the cage with it, and then I've just got some heavier desktop ones that we can use. So mostly between that, it ends up working out pretty good. I mean, AirPod Max headphones, but most of the time, we don't even monitor. Yeah, we get things set up and then.

 

RobbieTheWagner (41:30.946)

Oh yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (41:30.948)

Yeah.

 

RobbieTheWagner (41:44.111)

Well, the headphones we, yeah, the headphones we had a problem with, because we got a bunch of the adapters for the, um, like the lightning cord and they weren't, they didn't do audio the other way or something. Like it was for like something else. So then we just used one and like got all our levels right. And then just stop listening to it and just hope for the best.

 

Charles Max Wood (41:47.002)

Yeah.

 

Charles III (41:53.959)

Apple official.

 

Charles Max Wood (41:56.41)

Right.

 

Charles III (42:03.742)

Yeah, but I'd say like desktop stands that are heavy enough and that road caster and will just record on little SD cards.

 

RobbieTheWagner (42:12.96)

Mm-hmm.

 

Charles Max Wood (42:13.186)

Yep. So do you do video at all?

 

Dan (42:14.051)

Yeah, how you record on the card you don't

 

Charles III (42:17.942)

Yeah, the road caster will record on the card. If we're like on the road, then we're in person. So.

 

Dan (42:23.774)

Hmm. Yeah, I guess you can't you can't count on having good enough upstream connection, I guess. Yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (42:24.844)

Do you do video at all on the road?

 

Charles III (42:30.962)

Exactly. Yeah. And so we'd rather have that kind of backup. Yeah.

 

RobbieTheWagner (42:33.671)

Riverside's also hard for like, it does not let you do local recordings like, yeah.

 

Charles III (42:39.518)

Yeah, it's not great for that.

 

Charles Max Wood (42:39.694)

No.

 

Dan (42:41.058)

Yeah, I also had an issue with it before I got my fiber. Chuck would have to pause me each of my upload for every episode. Otherwise, it would more or less saturate my entire network connection in the house while it was trying to upload, you know, it's full speed. Now, finally, we don't need to do that anymore. I'm listening to all you guys discuss your microphones. I'm just using this dinky.

 

Charles Max Wood (42:48.228)

Yeah.

 

Charles III (42:57.474)

Hmm

 

Charles III (43:03.794)

Yeah.

 

Dan (43:10.73)

microphone on my on my headset.

 

RobbieTheWagner (43:12.495)

Hehehe

 

Charles III (43:15.602)

You know, you do you. I've still, I think we've started the geeking out on it. So maybe it's probably more for us than anything. Like the, it's much like the lighting and everything else. It's something to kind of play with.

 

Dan (43:17.82)

Ha ha!

 

RobbieTheWagner (43:20.42)

Yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (43:20.588)

Yeah.

 

Dan (43:26.002)

No, but funnily enough, when I had the AC going, Chuck actually could hear the sound through this mic because I changed my headphones. So it turns out there that there is value in having good equipment.

 

Charles III (43:33.246)

Oh, right. Yeah. Yeah, these directional mics are really nice, especially when you're at a conference and recording and while you'll kind of get faint background noise, it does a great job of picking up the, you know, the speech there and kind of filtering out as much as it can, like all the background stuff. So it's really helpful in those circumstances. Chuck, you'd asked about video.

 

RobbieTheWagner (43:35.526)

Hmm.

 

RobbieTheWagner (43:39.917)

Yeah.

 

Oh yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (43:55.478)

or when my daughter walks in here.

 

Dan (43:58.85)

Yeah, no, there's actually, I think even a bit of an advantage to having a slight amount of background noise in a conference because it makes you feel, sound like you're there.

 

RobbieTheWagner (43:59.008)

Hehehehe

 

Charles Max Wood (44:06.702)

Yeah. Yep.

 

Charles III (44:08.202)

Yeah, yeah, I got that kind of film.

 

RobbieTheWagner (44:08.461)

Yeah.

 

Dan (44:09.594)

Otherwise you might be back in your house just saying that you're at the conference.

 

Charles III (44:14.846)

Right. Do you guys publish video for any of your? Yes. OK. Because I've only seen it through Apple. So.

 

RobbieTheWagner (44:15.137)

Hahaha.

 

Charles Max Wood (44:18.221)

Yes.

 

Dan (44:20.426)

Yeah, but not in, but usually not in real time. Although occasionally we do.

 

Charles Max Wood (44:24.374)

Yeah, it hasn't been in real time. So, and maybe we'll get into this. I'm curious, go ahead and answer the video question first, and then I'll talk a little bit about where we're heading with some of that.

 

Charles III (44:36.774)

Yeah, we just recently started doing video. Did we do a couple of road caster ones or not? Roka Riverside ones first, and then we did some on the road, but then we were just using a little Opal 4K camera, which is. Yeah. Which is nice, but, um, you, you know, if you don't have good lighting, it, it really can't pick up hardly anything. And also at a distance with guests, it's not the greatest it's a nice webcam for zoom and things like that. But, uh,

 

RobbieTheWagner (44:50.351)

Those were the first ones.

 

Charles Max Wood (44:57.626)

Yeah.

 

Charles III (45:06.198)

So that's basically why we decided to do some camera upgrades to make that, especially on the road, it's going to make that a lot nicer experience.

 

Charles Max Wood (45:14.586)

Right. Yeah, so it was a year or so ago we started publishing the videos on YouTube. So last, was it last week? No, it was two weeks ago. I was at podcast movement in Denver. And I talked to all kinds of people about all kinds of things. One of the things that just kept coming up over and over and over again, as far as growing the show. So back in the day,

 

when we started JavaScript Jabber, which was like 11 years ago, we just grew through word of mouth, right? Because we were one of the only games in town. And so, you know, people were figuring out that they could listen to podcasts and then they would go, oh, I'm interested in JavaScript and they'd find us. And then their friends would tell them, hey, I'm listening to this awesome JavaScript show. And so people would go and find us, right? The market's still growing.

 

Charles III (46:01.219)

Mm-hmm.

 

Charles Max Wood (46:12.886)

you know, podcasts are still growing, but it's not the same. And so, um, when I was talking to people about growth, uh, one of the major strategies is actually live streaming. And so if you, uh, if you live stream your show, um, and you know, some of that is just, you know, you're boosting your numbers because people are going to watch part of it live. And you know, so you can count all of your live streams off of LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, whatever else you're streaming to.

 

Um, but the other thing is, is that a lot of the podcasters I talked to saw their audio numbers off of their hosting. And I don't know if you're hosting through like Libsyn or Blueberry or somebody else. Ours are hosted on Red Circle. Okay. Well, we're on Spotify as well, but, um, yeah, usually. Yeah.

 

RobbieTheWagner (46:54.115)

We use Spotify for podcasters.

 

RobbieTheWagner (47:01.675)

Yeah, it's what used to be Anchor. It used to be called Anchor, they acquired Anchor.

 

Charles III (47:02.006)

They have a hosting thing too. Yeah, it used to be Anchor.

 

Charles Max Wood (47:06.502)

Okay. But yeah, so they see their audio numbers go up too off of that, right? Off of the live streams and then having them available on the video platforms and social media platforms. And so I'm actually working on figuring a lot of that stuff out now. I've actually been negotiating a network hosting deal with StreamYard, so we're probably going to switch.

 

off of Riverside. But yeah, so that's been one of the things that we've been looking at is just, okay, you know, so live streaming them out. Some of our guests like to have them edited after the fact and have some of the stuff removed. And then on the audio end, a lot of people like having it cleaned up, mastered, you know, remove awkward pauses, things like that. And so we'll still keep doing that. And we'll keep posting, you know, the finished,

 

Charles III (47:36.214)

Hehe.

 

Charles Max Wood (48:05.514)

episode on YouTube and things like that. One thing that you can do on YouTube though is you can actually go and re-upload the video after the fact. And so, you know, you'll have the raw video up until then. But there are some pieces we have to figure out too, right? So our sponsors, right, our sponsors have been inserted after the fact. And if we're doing a live deal and we want to sell...

 

sponsorships on those, then we're going to have to figure out doing live reads on the shows. Right? So there are some things to figure out, but that's been kind of the major way that people have been pushing it forward is doing the live streams. And then, yeah, you go back and you do the YouTube magic to make it show up, right? So YouTube will promote it and people will share it and you have all your hashtags and everything else. So we're learning that now. But yeah, the video has been a major, major...

 

arena of growth with podcasting over the last year or two. And I guess the other piece of that is it's somewhat generational. So, you know, I'm old. I'm not as old as Dan, but I'm old. And, you know, so, you know, me being in my early 40s, when I started listening to podcasts, it was nice because I could listen to them on my commute. I could listen to it while I was mowing the lawn. I could listen to it, you know, doing all these other things.

 

Charles III (49:16.002)

Hehe.

 

Dan (49:27.622)

Thanks for watching!

 

Charles Max Wood (49:32.814)

But like my kids, I have a 17 year old son, is my oldest, he's much less interested in audio only content, right? And so picking up kind of the, yeah, the younger millennials and the older Gen Z, they're much more interested in the video content and they will sit and watch people talk to each other. And so where I wasn't as interested in that, and so that's why they're seeing the growth there.

 

Dan (49:45.062)

The TikTok generation.

 

Charles III (49:47.59)

Mm-hmm.

 

RobbieTheWagner (49:48.108)

Yeah.

 

Charles III (49:56.065)

Interesting.

 

Charles Max Wood (50:01.142)

is because A, YouTube put together some podcast focused pieces to their platform so you can change your playlists now into podcasts. And then the other piece of it is that, yeah, more and more of the folks that are 10, 15, 20 years younger than I am are much more interested in consuming video. And so they'll go watch a live stream on Twitter, they'll go watch a live stream on YouTube or Facebook or whatever.

 

Dan (50:29.714)

Here's the thing though...

 

Charles Max Wood (50:29.826)

Um, you know, they'll go watch content on TikTok. And so that's where you're picking up new listeners is you're picking up younger listeners that way.

 

Charles III (50:38.515)

Interesting.

 

Dan (50:38.962)

Here's the thing though, at least for me maybe because again, like you said I'm old but I can't watch something certainly something that's Has you know significant content and do some other thing at the same time? I don't know maybe you know do my in-house cycling Something like that, but you know with a podcast and I literally you know

 

RobbieTheWagner (50:56.974)

Right.

 

Charles Max Wood (51:01.818)

Mm-hmm.

 

Charles III (51:01.961)

Mm-hmm.

 

Dan (51:08.786)

do stuff and listen to podcasts. I can jog, I can shop, I can, I don't know, drive somewhere. These are things that I cannot do and watch a video. So it serves a totally different purpose for me.

 

Charles Max Wood (51:12.751)

Yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (51:21.743)

And I think.

 

Charles III (51:21.854)

Yeah, I mean, well, it sounds like Robbie's the only one that can really speak to this context then because I'm gonna be 46 in a few weeks. And same deal, like I wanna be doing things. Yeah, no. I roll with it.

 

Charles Max Wood (51:24.79)

Yeah, but.

 

RobbieTheWagner (51:29.939)

What do you mean?

 

Charles Max Wood (51:33.902)

You're older than my wife, that is old.

 

RobbieTheWagner (51:37.473)

Hahaha

 

Yeah, I hate watching videos too, though, so I can't even really. Yeah, like I would I would mow and listen to podcasts all the time and. Yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (51:42.838)

No, I hear you. But I.

 

Charles III (51:46.09)

Yeah. But I'm down to put content in other places if people wanna check it out. If that's something that there's demand for, I'm open to trying it out. We just basically push some stuff to YouTube and we don't do it.

 

Dan (52:00.09)

Yeah, you can talk about tech, drink whiskey and model swimsuits all at the same time.

 

Charles III (52:07.125)

Exactly. That's my other career. I didn't know, Dan, you found that.

 

Charles Max Wood (52:09.058)

Everyone's gonna see my tan line.

 

Charles Max Wood (52:13.666)

Yeah, one thing to Dan's point though is, and this is another thing that I kind of picked up while I was there, is that, yeah, a lot of the folks that prefer video, they'll, they'll subscribe to the audio feed so that they can consume it on the go, but a lot of the consumption winds up happening on the video platforms. And so they, they do both.

 

RobbieTheWagner (52:41.113)

Yeah, yeah.

 

Charles III (52:41.302)

It seems like a win-win for us, at least.

 

Charles Max Wood (52:42.998)

Yeah.

 

Dan (52:45.018)

It's interesting. It means that you need to create your video content in such a way that it provides extra value when you're watching it, but still provides value if you're only listening to it. That's not necessarily a trivial thing to do.

 

RobbieTheWagner (52:45.112)

Yeah, I actually...

 

Charles III (53:01.722)

Right. Well, that's where you have the whole like trend of people live coding, like on Twitch and stuff like that. And so. You can't listen. That's what I'm saying is like, that is the visual appeal. If you want to like get something from a visual that is more than the conversation, I would say that arena is where things are happening because they're projecting their screens up so you can see that they're speaking with you and they're going through concepts and then they're.

 

Charles Max Wood (53:01.999)

Right.

 

Dan (53:08.69)

How can you listen to live coding though?

 

Charles Max Wood (53:12.388)

You can't.

 

Charles Max Wood (53:19.332)

Yeah.

 

Charles III (53:28.91)

coding through something and talking about that and giving you opinions and feedback and whatever, and reading a chat. Talk about like, you have to be able to multitask. That's another thing that kind of.

 

Charles Max Wood (53:38.442)

Yeah. But, but you're right. It doesn't translate. It doesn't translate to audio only.

 

Dan (53:39.374)

Yeah, I know AJ does that.

 

Charles III (53:44.13)

No, it doesn't. So, you know, I just think that's the other extreme, right? And so you're talking about tech because you're doing it.

 

Dan (53:49.594)

Yeah, I listen, I watch, for example, stuff that Theo puts out, and that's actually something that you could just listen to. So I actually think that Theo does it fairly well, being able to put out content that's consumable in both types of formats and, you know, has value either way. But it's not an easy thing to do, I think.

 

Charles III (53:55.703)

Mm-hmm.

 

Charles III (54:15.094)

Yeah, I mean, maybe if you're just a visual learner and you want to hear a conversation and remember it and so seeing faces and reactions like I don't know how much value our content necessarily adds other than you can see our faces, you can see our guest face, you maybe associate what you're hearing that you see the whiskey we're having. So that helps you remember what it is. But outside of that,

 

Charles Max Wood (54:15.366)

Right. It's definitely a different skill set.

 

RobbieTheWagner (54:30.715)

can see the whiskey.

 

RobbieTheWagner (54:39.287)

Yeah, yeah, it's definitely more helpful.

 

Charles Max Wood (54:40.998)

So what is your process?

 

Charles III (54:44.93)

I mean, it's pretty loose in general. Obviously, after we get a commitment from the guest, we'll start to look at what whiskies we've tried and what we are interested in and what kind of fits into the profile we think they may or may not like based on any feedback. If they just say, you know, yellow, then we'll pick something interesting that. I don't know. I like to pretend that I think about like, Oh, what is the person working on? Or what I know about them and what. Excuse to their personality type in that.

 

And then we do basic show notes. So, um, you know, some things about their background, depending on if they write blogs or have other content, I'll kind of dig into some older things to see if there's any interesting subject matter tech or non-tech that we could bring up during the show that maybe they haven't talked about before. Um, but outside of that, and then it's just start introducing themselves. We have a couple of like regular questions we ask, try the whiskey and then it goes where it goes.

 

Dan (55:42.974)

And how regular are you about putting out episodes?

 

Charles III (55:47.882)

every week. Record and release.

 

RobbieTheWagner (55:49.583)

Yep, every Thursday.

 

Dan (55:51.419)

And if you don't mind me asking, what's your backlog like?

 

Charles III (55:56.67)

What, in what way, like how many?

 

Dan (55:59.074)

Like, for example, if for some reason in a certain week, like you're unable to record, I don't know, the guest has an emergency and doesn't make it or one of you can't make it or both of you can't make it, something like that, like, does that mean then? Yeah, exactly.

 

Charles Max Wood (56:16.642)

Yeah, how far ahead are you?

 

RobbieTheWagner (56:19.455)

Yeah, right now we're pretty far ahead because we did all those live ones at the conferences. So I think we were like, like a couple of months ahead. So we could like skip a bunch if we want to like, yeah, like Chuck is going to be on vacation for a couple of weeks. Here's our sorry, Charles, don't confuse people. But yeah, so we're covered for that. But then like, when whenever we do have less of a backlog, Charles and I will just jump on and like,

 

Charles Max Wood (56:24.006)

Mm-hmm.

 

Dan (56:24.295)

Hmm

 

Dan (56:28.931)

months.

 

Dan (56:35.832)

Hahaha!

 

Charles Max Wood (56:36.066)

No, it's all good.

 

Charles III (56:36.76)

Yeah, I don't want to confuse people. The third.

 

RobbieTheWagner (56:47.407)

do one with just us. Like we'll always make sure we fill that gap. So we're pretty good about doing that.

 

Dan (56:52.386)

Yeah, we do the same. I think our backlog is currently about three or four weeks, isn't it, Chuck?

 

Charles Max Wood (56:58.798)

Yeah, it's about three weeks.

 

Dan (57:01.55)

Yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (57:03.882)

It's a tricky balance to hit because some of the stuff we wind up talking about is somewhat timely. The other thing is that if we want our guests to engage, then a lot of times if we wait too long, then it's kind of out of mind and you know, so then it's hard to get them to engage on social media and things like that. I think three to four weeks is kind of our sweet spot.

 

Dan (57:09.703)

Yeah.

 

Charles III (57:10.132)

Mm-hmm.

 

RobbieTheWagner (57:10.33)

Right.

 

Dan (57:27.446)

Yeah, it does create some problems sometimes. For example, we talked about it before. I don't recall if it was before or after we started recording, but we had Dan Abramov on our show talking about React Server Components. And he was actually doing the rounds between all the main podcasts. And all of them really got him on as soon as he asked.

 

Charles Max Wood (57:41.933)

Mm-hmm.

 

Dan (57:54.974)

And for us, for some reason, we told them, you know, here's a schedule link. And the only free slot was like two months away. And then it took another month for the episode to come out. So we were like almost two to three months after everybody else, uh, which actually had a bit of an advantage, I think in that particular case, uh, for two reasons, first of all, it enabled us to kind of prepare.

 

Charles Max Wood (57:59.908)

Yeah.

 

RobbieTheWagner (58:00.044)

Hehehehe

 

Charles III (58:03.992)

Mmm for it to come out

 

Charles Max Wood (58:05.957)

Right.

 

Dan (58:20.914)

because I could actually listen to what he talked about on the other podcasts and come up with what I thought were interesting and in, you know, new questions that he hadn't asked before. And we actually were able to dive really deeply thanks to that. And the other thing is that sometimes when you have the same person speaking on all the podcasts at the same time, well, then, you know, it creates a problem of saturation.

 

Charles Max Wood (58:21.51)

Mm-hmm.

 

Dan (58:48.526)

And we kind of had them at a separate time than everybody else, which I think was also potentially an advantage. But sometimes it does create a problem, like you said, Chuck, of not being timely. Like a person does want to talk ahead of a release event or something like that of a new version. And it can be tricky sometimes.

 

Charles III (58:48.846)

Ciao.

 

Charles Max Wood (59:03.878)

Mm-hmm.

 

Charles Max Wood (59:08.578)

Yeah, on some of those, what we've done is we've just rearranged the backlog, right? We've just said, okay, we'll just put this out next week. Um, sometimes we have a sponsored episode. Same deal.

 

Charles III (59:13.847)

Yeah.

 

Dan (59:16.206)

Yeah, but it can get more challenging. It can get more challenging if we want to record them earlier than the schedule seems to allow.

 

Charles Max Wood (59:23.754)

Yeah. So, so there have been a few where, yeah, we've had somebody get back to us and say, it would be really great if you could release it on this particular week. Right. So we just accommodate it because our editor, and I don't know if you guys edit your own shows, but you know, we have an editor that is paid by the sponsorships and stuff and he, um, he usually is editing stuff, you know, the week before it goes live. So.

 

Charles III (59:26.385)

Right.

 

Charles III (59:53.899)

Right.

 

Charles Max Wood (59:54.058)

It's not, yeah, it's not to the point where, you know, it's like, well, I've edited these other two, right? I got to slot this in and hurry and get it done. He just does it as part of his normal course. And we just make sure that he knows that we can advance that this one's going on that one.

 

Charles III (01:00:10.11)

Yeah, that seems pretty reasonable. And no, we don't edit our own. I'm not sure I could be trusted with that kind of thing. That's right. It may change in the future unless we go down the sponsorship path, but thus far we've been kind of handling that.

 

Charles Max Wood (01:00:15.83)

Ha ha

 

RobbieTheWagner (01:00:16.122)

Well, yeah.

 

Dan (01:00:16.146)

that kind of power.

 

Dan (01:00:26.2)

Oh, you're going sponsorless?

 

Charles III (01:00:29.366)

Yeah, so far. So we buy all our own whiskeys, we pay the editor, and all of that.

 

RobbieTheWagner (01:00:36.279)

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's sort of irrelevant now, but we have a consultancy that like had money to pay for all of this before. Now Chuck and I have real jobs. So are Charles and I sorry, I'm never going to get that right.

 

Charles III (01:00:38.378)

Well, we have the benefit of...

 

Charles III (01:00:45.547)

Yeah.

 

Dan (01:00:46.078)

Hmm.

 

Charles Max Wood (01:00:46.511)

Okay

 

Charles Max Wood (01:00:51.022)

No, it's fine.

 

Charles III (01:00:53.461)

Other Chuck, you could just say that.

 

Dan (01:00:53.822)

So wait a minute, do you guys work together now or not in your day job?

 

RobbieTheWagner (01:00:57.96)

No.

 

Charles III (01:00:58.01)

No, we do not. Yeah, we did before. We've been running a consultancy for a few years together, a number of years.

 

Dan (01:01:04.09)

And what do you guys do now, if I may ask? And feel free to not answer.

 

RobbieTheWagner (01:01:04.356)

Mm.

 

Charles III (01:01:08.035)

I'm a janitor.

 

Charles Max Wood (01:01:09.91)

A janitor. I feel that sometimes.

 

RobbieTheWagner (01:01:10.596)

Yeah.

 

Charles III (01:01:11.19)

I'm a janitor because you know, yeah, that previously mentioned difficult job search, I mean, so, you know, we do what we gotta do, Dan.

 

Dan (01:01:12.966)

You're a co-genitor.

 

RobbieTheWagner (01:01:14.052)

Haha. Yeah.

 

RobbieTheWagner (01:01:22.719)

Yeah, no, I work for Amazon. Yeah, for Art 19 specifically. So there it's their podcast hosting platform they acquired. So there's a lot of synergy there having a podcast and working for a podcast hosting company.

 

Charles Max Wood (01:01:23.664)

I have five kids I feel like a janitor. Oh, okay. That's fun.

 

Charles III (01:01:33.858)

that we don't use.

 

Charles III (01:01:40.834)

that we don't use, that's irony. I don't know.

 

RobbieTheWagner (01:01:42.135)

Well, they don't let you use it. You can't like as a casual person, you can't go, I'd like to switch to this provider and like, no, it's like invite only kind of thing.

 

Charles III (01:01:51.506)

Yeah. So there we go. But Chuck has given us lots of insight into ways to improve our potential for sponsorship. So we've been exploring some things anyway, but.

 

Dan (01:01:51.828)

Interesting.

 

Charles Max Wood (01:02:03.106)

Yeah, and I'm happy to talk about it offline too. So where are you a janitor at, Charles? Chuck?

 

Charles III (01:02:10.483)

I'm actually a janitor, not a janitor, but a engineering manager for a platform engineering team. Platform engineering is its own subset of things that people talk about in tech, so there's that as well.

 

Dan (01:02:19.701)

Oh cool.

 

Charles Max Wood (01:02:23.522)

Oh wow.

 

Dan (01:02:28.974)

Yeah, and it can means different things to different people.

 

Charles Max Wood (01:02:29.75)

Yeah. The interest.

 

Charles III (01:02:34.491)

Mm-hmm, indeed.

 

Charles Max Wood (01:02:34.658)

Yeah, we have a machine learning show on top end devs and ML ops, you know, with some of that platform engineering. It gets really interesting.

 

Charles III (01:02:47.634)

Yeah, for sure. Especially depending upon how organizations define that and split work there. And, you know, so many people think about it in the context of like SREs or something of that nature. And that's not always the case. There isn't always a yaml in your life.

 

Charles Max Wood (01:02:57.823)

Mm-hmm. Nope.

 

Charles III (01:03:05.214)

Even though I like YEML, so I'm a YEML advocate.

 

Charles Max Wood (01:03:10.376)

Yeah, might have to see if we can plug you into the Adventures in DevOps show too.

 

Charles III (01:03:14.474)

Oh, there we go. Totally. I'm down. I like talking. I've got a nice, yeah. Well, that's controversial now, right? Is it open TF or Terraform or what? You know, where's that all going? Cause didn't like the cloud native, uh, foundation end up adopting open TF already or something like that.

 

Dan (01:03:17.086)

Terraform, baby.

 

Charles Max Wood (01:03:19.738)

Ha ha ha!

 

Charles Max Wood (01:03:27.044)

Well, it-

 

Dan (01:03:35.23)

I have no idea.

 

Charles Max Wood (01:03:35.31)

I don't know. But it's interesting just, yeah, from the technical side, I mean, are you Dockerized? Are you Kubernetes helm? Are you using some of those? And then something like Terraform to get what you want out of it. You know, right? And then you have your whole secrets management. And then the other end of DevOps is, you know, what are your, you know.

 

RobbieTheWagner (01:03:38.532)

Hmm.

 

Dan (01:03:53.508)

That's what we do.

 

Charles Max Wood (01:04:02.746)

Who are the people involved? What are your practices? What's your process look like? And, oh man, it's really kind of fun to dig into. And then if you back it out far enough, it's like, okay, well, you know, how much of this is influenced by things like agile development or, I mean, you go on and on and on. It's a fun area to be in. Yeah.

 

Dan (01:04:23.29)

What is Agile development?

 

Charles III (01:04:27.15)

Right, yeah, what is your flavor of Agile? Because Agile doesn't necessarily mean scrum and, you know, it's not just a set of ceremonies. Yeah.

 

RobbieTheWagner (01:04:27.308)

Hehehehe

 

Charles Max Wood (01:04:32.142)

Right. Ooh, you just, you're hurting people's souls saying these things, but it's kind of true.

 

Dan (01:04:32.67)

It's a waterfall every week. It's a new waterfall every two weeks.

 

RobbieTheWagner (01:04:35.879)

Ha ha ha 

 

Charles III (01:04:38.186)

Right.

 

RobbieTheWagner (01:04:40.722)

Hahaha

 

Charles III (01:04:41.638)

Yeah, unless I mean, I think it's absolutely true. You know, and go down the, and then there's, there's places where agile is essentially lean and Kanban and, uh, you know, work, work flow, work in progress flows and things like that too. So, you know, it just.

 

RobbieTheWagner (01:04:45.544)

Oh yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (01:04:51.852)

Yeah.

 

Dan (01:04:57.406)

I don't know. I just like having a title with the word master in it. In it, you know, Scrum Master.

 

Charles III (01:05:05.084)

I think it's almost ironic because I feel like that's mmm That's true. It could be anyone You are the master isn't that it's a little different. Yeah

 

Charles Max Wood (01:05:06.207)

Oh, were you talking to me? Sorry.

 

RobbieTheWagner (01:05:09.403)

Ha ha ha.

 

Dan (01:05:09.914)

I'm just kidding by the way, I totally don't.

 

Yeah. Yeah, no. I don't want to be a master of anything. Maybe of my craft.

 

Charles Max Wood (01:05:14.854)

That's right.

 

Charles Max Wood (01:05:20.462)

All right. Well, right. We're kinda getting toward the end of the time that I have, so I'm gonna push us toward the way we wrap up, and then maybe, I don't know, how do you guys wrap up your show? You just.

 

Charles III (01:05:34.518)

We usually ask the guests if they have anything they want to mention or plug or that we didn't talk about, any last minute thing, and if...

 

RobbieTheWagner (01:05:34.768)

Hmm.

 

Dan (01:05:42.31)

I assume that you end your show drunk under the table.

 

Charles III (01:05:45.97)

Yeah, that too. You know, I mean, in my head, that's what I think we say, but in reality, it's a little more like... Like that.

 

Charles Max Wood (01:05:46.502)

Ha ha ha 

RobbieTheWagner (01:05:48.204)

Yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (01:05:53.362)

Yeah, right. All right, yeah. So if people want to follow the show, what are the best places to find your stuff and to find you guys?

 

RobbieTheWagner (01:05:53.851)

No.

 

Charles III (01:05:56.03)

I can hold my liquor, Dan. It's okay.

 

Dan (01:05:58.354)

Alright, dead.

 

Charles III (01:06:07.17)

This is Robbie's part.

 

RobbieTheWagner (01:06:07.519)

Yeah, we're on a whiskey web and whatnot. FM. So you can find all of our other links on there. We have X and tick tock now. I don't know if tick tock links on there. We're trying to do all the new cool hip things and I don't know what I'm doing yet. So yeah.

 

Charles III (01:06:23.29)

Instagram. I don't know. Yeah, we're figuring that out. Again, we need sponsors. Help us down these paths.

 

Charles Max Wood (01:06:23.706)

Mm-hmm.

 

RobbieTheWagner (01:06:30.723)

Hahaha

 

Charles Max Wood (01:06:31.098)

Ha ha

 

Dan (01:06:32.926)

So basically you want to sell yourselves, okay, to capitalism. Yeah, we all are.

 

Charles III (01:06:36.587)

I am for sale, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

 

RobbieTheWagner (01:06:37.176)

Well, yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (01:06:40.826)

Right? All right, well, the way we ended is we do picks and picks are kind of the self promo. You can throw those in there too. But yeah, it's just anything you're really enjoying, liking, wanna shout out about, whatever. Dan, why don't you start us with picks?

 

Dan (01:06:57.706)

Okay, we'll do. So I have two associated picks. The first pick I have is I mentioned that I just got back from a conference. It was on the, on August 31st and September 1st, it was a front conference in Zurich. It was great in, in special in that, um, it kind of brings developers and designers together. Uh, so you have an, a kind of intersection of technology and design.

 

And, uh, you know, things that I learned about things that I usually don't learn about, and it was really interesting in that context and had also a lot, very diverse set of speakers and the audience. And it was a really cool venue and well organized conference. And, and I joined it a lot and it's also in lovely Zurich. So what's not to like? Um, and what's associated with it is that a lot of the talks that I was there were actually about CSS.

 

And it turns out, you know, we keep talking in the front end realm. We talk about frameworks and we talk about meta frameworks and not, and whatnot. But it seems to me that recently the, the real cool things are happening in CSS. Uh, and, uh, and what's really nice is that it's, it's been stagnant. It seemed like being stagnant for a while. And then all of a sudden it's making this big push. And what's really cool about it is that it's.

 

Seems to be supported by all the vendors. So a lot of these things either Already have wide support really quickly after being announced or are in the process of getting wide support So, you know, you're not just seeing these all these cool features that Yeah, you can't use but will you will actually be able to use all of them in a few months? and if some

 

browser or platform still doesn't support them, well, in most cases, there's also really graceful degradation. For example, with the view transitions, is the ability to create really sleek animated transitions between pages, things that could have been possible previously only with JavaScript on top of single page applications, and even then with a lot of work, can now be done really nicely with just CSS.

 

Dan (01:09:26.006)

on top of single page applications or multi-page applications. Now, it's not quite done there. I think it's currently only supported in Chrome, but it seems like the other browsers will support it as well, and it degrades very gracefully in the sense that you just don't get that transition, but you still get that page navigation. And there are some really cool examples online, some frameworks like Astro, Astro 3 recently came out. They've actually added some...

 

built-in support for it, which makes it extremely easy to use from within your framework with very little coding and it works well with components and it's really nice. Other things in that context that can be mentioned are container queries, which for years everybody thought they were kind of impossible to do properly and then the CSS working group figured out how to do them and now we're getting them in all the browsers and they're extremely cool.

 

And something new in that context that I learned more or less today is CSS anchor positioning which enables you to position elements relative to each other so you can actually have you know one div Automatically placed relative to just you know below another div and if that div moves So does this one and you can even have the positioning specified in such a way

 

that it tries to be inside the viewport. So think about positioning a menu relative to a button. And that menu will always try to be inside the viewport, like, you know, like native menus, really cool stuff. So CSS would be my pick and everything cool that's happening with it. And finally, I always mentioned the ongoing war in Ukraine.

 

You know do whatever you can to help the people of Ukraine because that war is still ongoing and those are my picks for today

 

Charles Max Wood (01:11:27.814)

Awesome. I'm gonna throw out my picks and then we'll have our guests go ahead with theirs. The first pick that I have, I always do a board game pick. And so if I played something new, then I'll pick that. And if I haven't, then I'll pick something that's one of my favorites. So the pick that I have this week, it's a card game, it's called Canvas, came out in 2021. And effectively what you're doing is you have three paintings.

 

that you're trying to build. And so you pick cards that have certain elements on them. And then there are like five, what are they? They're symbols on the bottom in the different colors. So there are five colors at the bottom of the card and you slide them into sleeves on the canvas and.

 

So you can stack them. You can stack, you stack three and then your painting's done is the way that it works. So once you have five cards, you have to paint your painting. You can paint it before if you have what you want. And then there are cards that tell you what the different symbols score at. And so you put your painting together and when you're done, your painting will have a name, right? Cause it has a little slot for the name, which is just kind of fun.

 

and you're supposed to explain to the other people you're playing with what the story is behind the penning. You have all kinds of bizarre stuff on it, which is fun. But ultimately, yeah, you're trying to build this painting so that you get the best score. And the score is based on those symbols at the bottom that tell you what elements and how high art your painting is. And it was fun. Played it with some really good friends of mine, generally the people that I'm playing these games with.

 

Board Game Geek has a weight on it of 1.65, which means that it's very approachable to casual gamers. You can play one to five players. We played it with five. It was pretty fun. And anyway, there is an element of you have to pull the first card in the, you know, in the row.

 

Charles Max Wood (01:13:43.87)

unless you have a palette and if you have a palette you give up your palette to skip to the next one. So you can do two or three or four palettes and get all the way to the fifth card. And anyway it was it was a lot of fun we had a good time playing it. These are people that you know we've played games with for years my wife and I and so we anyway we all the inside jokes and everything else that goes on with that kind of a thing. So I'm going to pick that.

 

We talked a little bit about podcast gear and

 

and kind of the mobile setup. So I'm gonna pick one of the things that I actually just bought this. I haven't actually been able to play with it yet. So I might pick it again so that I can tell you all how it worked. But there's a four channel wireless lavalier mic system that you can get. I got the one that'll hook up to your phone, but I also have a DSLR camera that a lot of times I'll be taking with me to some of these.

 

conferences because at this point I want the video as well. Before that I had a Zoom H6 which is a recorder. It records to the SD card. But now that I want the audio or the video, you know, I'm looking at how to take the camera with me. Anyway, it was not cheap. It was $400. But yeah, it's all wireless and pretty easy to set up and use.

 

I'm also planning on doing some YouTube stuff with my kids. And so that's gonna be a piece of that as well because I have a green screen. If you've watched some of the other videos, you've seen it behind me when I'm recording a podcast. But I'm actually gonna be setting it up and lighting it over there. And then I'll have some other stuff behind me here when I'm recording sitting at my desk. But because I'm moving my office, I think I might've mentioned that before. But anyway, so.

 

Charles Max Wood (01:15:42.802)

It just looks like a great way to go, because I can just clip it onto people and we can just talk. And yeah, it may not be as high quality as, yeah, taking some road casters or things like that, wherever we're going, but it's portable, it's easy, and right, I can just hook it up to the DSLR camera and record the whole thing. So anyway, so those are my two picks.

 

Um, I did get something else that I'm going to be using for my triathlon training, but I'll pick that next week because I'm, I want to try it out first. I, I don't think I have anything else, uh, that I want to shout out about at this point, um, other than that you can go check out, I'm actually going to start releasing courses here within the next few weeks on top end dev. So if you want to go check that out, um, you can do that. Uh, Robbie, do you have some picks?

 

RobbieTheWagner (01:16:41.119)

Um, yeah, I guess I would pick the desk that I am sitting at right now. It is a, since I just recently moved, I've gotten some new furniture and things. Uh, this is the B flow tenant desk. Um, it's a standing desk, but it also has like a lot of built in cord management and stuff like that. Um, so I'm very pleased with like, as being a person who usually just has cords everywhere and like not managing that.

 

I like that it has a lot of ways to keep all that in check. So definitely check it out. It's also not cheap, but I think it's worth it. So, and that's all I got.

 

Charles III (01:17:20.811)

That's your only pick.

 

Charles Max Wood (01:17:20.846)

Nice.

 

Dan (01:17:22.298)

You're not going to pick any whiskey?

 

RobbieTheWagner (01:17:22.651)

Yeah.

 

RobbieTheWagner (01:17:26.523)

Um, I mean, I could, we, we like all of the barrel whiskeys. Uh, I think the dovetail is my favorite one. They make barrel craft spirits. Um, check that one out. It's in, I think, Cabernet barrels and like a couple of their kind of barrels or something, so it's, it's pretty tasty.

 

Charles Max Wood (01:17:43.97)

Nice. Charles, Charles the third.

 

Charles III (01:17:48.558)

That's right. My first pick is long names. No, just kidding. So yeah, I was going to say the first pick just because we recently upgraded our cameras and lenses. So I'll go ahead and pick the Sony A7 III. I also picked up the 28 millimeter Sony lens. And I've been very happy with that setup with all kinds of lighting conditions. It actually works pretty well in low light.

 

RobbieTheWagner (01:17:53.127)

Thanks for watching!

 

Charles III (01:18:16.442)

and with specific lighting setups, seems to be working pretty good thus far. And my other pick would be just because it's occupied so much of my mind share over this last month. I'm a big soccer fan and in particular the European leagues, the Premier League. This was a big transfer, summer transfer ending month, just ended on the 31st. So Manchester United football club is in my mind.

 

Often, unfortunately, after this weekend, it is grumpily in my mind. So my third pick will be also whiskey, which will be the Sagamore Rye, which is our tried and true friend. We did a barrel pick last year with that particular one and often recommend it to folks because it's very approachable price-wise, like around $35 or so, and delicious. So those are my picks.

 

Charles Max Wood (01:19:08.506)

Very cool. I have to poke the soccer bear for a minute. I mean, no, in fact, I mostly just figured out that I can watch a Serie A soccer. So I lived in Italy for a couple of years and yeah. I'm a Juventus man. So Inter, oh.

 

Charles III (01:19:12.391)

Uh oh, don't tell me you're a Liverpool fan.

 

Charles III (01:19:28.138)

I have an Italian team too. Uh oh, I was gonna say I'm an inter man because it was the, in 2009, it was, I was at the San Siro, it was my first in person match, European match, so always a special place in my heart there. Jose Mourinho was there and it was just incredible. So they're kind of my number two team.

 

Charles Max Wood (01:19:42.767)

Right.

 

Charles Max Wood (01:19:46.902)

Yeah. I haven't been to a European match in 20, what 21, 22 years. Um, the one that we got to go to was, uh, Verona versus Venezia and they were playing in Verona, which is where I lived. So anyway, it was, it was very fun. Uh, people were lighting stuff on fire and throwing it on the field. It's just, it was wild.

 

Charles III (01:20:03.746)

Very cool.

 

Dan (01:20:07.314)

close to the balcony.

 

Charles III (01:20:12.647)

Yeah, there's nothing like a life.

 

Dan (01:20:12.926)

Chuck, did you live close to the balcony?

 

Charles Max Wood (01:20:17.67)

Um, live close to what do you mean? Oh, Juliet's balcony. Yeah. Um, yeah. So that stuff's all kind of in the downtown area. We lived a little ways outside. Um, I mean, five. Yeah. Five, five minute bike ride. I think from there is where we lived. Um, but yeah.

 

Dan (01:20:19.95)

Is it in Verona? Yeah.

 

Charles III (01:20:20.358)

And Verona, dear Verona, yeah, the beginning of Romeo and Juliet.

 

Dan (01:20:32.358)

Northern Italy is lovely.

 

Charles III (01:20:39.33)

Nice. Yeah, agree, Dan.

 

Dan (01:20:40.162)

Well, like I said, Northern Italy is a beautiful place, you know, Lake Garda, Lake Romo.

 

Charles III (01:20:46.846)

Yeah, I'm a big fan of Como.

 

Charles Max Wood (01:20:46.966)

Yeah. Yeah, we, we rode our bikes. I should probably end the show, but we rode our bikes on Christmas morning. We all got up, took the train out to this little isthmus and dock on Lake Como. And we just rode out on the lake and then rode back. It was awesome. But yeah, beautiful areas. Yeah, I lived in Verona and Port Onone. I also lived in

 

Charles III (01:21:06.51)

Nice.

 

Charles Max Wood (01:21:15.562)

Arezzo, which is in Tuscany. It's in the middle of Tuscany. And that was gorgeous, too.

 

Dan (01:21:21.656)

I have to say one thing about that area. So we visited there a while back when my daughter was something like eight years old. And she goes, dad, it's not fair that they have such beautiful scenery and such beautiful houses.

 

Charles Max Wood (01:21:35.402)

Yeah. All right. Well, we'll go ahead and wrap it up. Thanks for coming, guys. This was a lot of fun.

 

Charles III (01:21:35.907)

Hehehe

 

Charles III (01:21:39.138)

Very true.

 

RobbieTheWagner (01:21:39.736)

Yeah.

 

Dan (01:21:42.33)

Yeah. And I'm waiting to get invited in to drink some whiskey. Indeed, nudge nudge.

 

Charles III (01:21:43.147)

Yeah, thanks for having us.

 

RobbieTheWagner (01:21:43.363)

Yeah, thanks for having us.

 

Charles III (01:21:49.558)

You got it, we'll work it out.

 

RobbieTheWagner (01:21:49.611)

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, we'll get it scheduled. Yeah, yeah, that'll be tough, but yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (01:21:51.616)

Figure out the international shipping.

 

Charles III (01:21:55.233)

Yeah, the logistics is always the hardest part, but we'll work it out, we'll chat.

 

Charles Max Wood (01:21:59.674)

All right. Good deal.

 

Dan (01:22:00.094)

I'm counting on it. Yeah, in any event, it was great having you guys on. Thank you for coming.

 

Charles III (01:22:05.494)

Yeah, thank you.

 

RobbieTheWagner (01:22:06.093)

Thanks. Yeah, thanks.

 

Charles Max Wood (01:22:06.678)

Yeah. So we'll wrap it till next time. Max out everybody.

 

Dan (01:22:10.567)

Bye!