Today Steve and Charles talk about the many updates and events coming to Top End Devs, from upcoming conferences to new courses and content.  Check out the conference lineup at https://topenddevs.com/conferences.  If you are interested in building courses or would like to speak at any of the conferences, contact Charles.  We also dive into a conversation about what it really means to be a 10x developer and a top 1% developer.

All right, here we go. Hey everybody and welcome back to another episode of JavaScript Jabber. This one's going to be a little bit low key. It's Steve Edwards and I. Steve, do you want to say hello?

 

Hello, this is also the podcast known as Two White Bald Guys, for those who can't see us, but just imagine that, and it will enhance your listening pleasure.

 

I haven't shaved, I have hair on my chin. My cheeks.

 

Well, yeah,

 

Anyway.

 

I still got some tube at the top of smooth, at least for now.

 

Yeah. Anyway, we're just going to jump in. We're going to talk a little bit about what we got going on. Some of the new stuff coming out, stuff like that. Steve, what's new with you?

 

Uh, not a lot of work along going through the, as we were talking about earlier, going through the joys of trying to hire people and

 

Oh,

 

it's,

 

that's

 

uh,

 

always fun.

 

Oh, yeah, I got one guy that, uh, just started yesterday as of this recording, uh, getting him up and going, which is cool. Still trying to hire a couple more. So, uh, if you were interested in working on Laravel and view on a really big complex app and, uh, uh, of execs looking for you for sure.

 

Cool, sounds good. And yeah, so you've got a course coming out too, if I remember right, on ViewSchool or

 

View Mastery, yeah, shameless

 

View Mastery.

 

plug here. We can save this to the end maybe, but yeah, I have a course that's in the process of coming out on a weekly basis from View Mastery called Nux3 Essentials. And it's just

 

Nice.

 

a real basic, get your feet wet with Nux3 using composition API, set up functions and stuff to query an external API and display some data. Really pretty basic, but like I said, design for the new new developer to get their feet wet. So yeah, it's coming out. And the added bonus is at the end of every episode, we have cringe-worthy dad jokes with Steve. So that's always the highlight. So it's definitely something to look for.

 

Boom. I don't think I've seen dad jokes in courses, at least not on purpose.

 

I know, I'm

 

So,

 

groundbreaking, can you believe it?

 

I know, right? First of your kind.

 

It's...

 

Very cool. Well, I've been working my butt off on top end devs. I did take a week off because we went to a family reunion out in Illinois, but yeah, I've been working my tail off trying to get this stuff together. And we've got all kinds of things coming out. So we're putting together conferences through the end of the year. The ones that we have currently scheduled at the end of September, we're doing a Rails remote conference. And then the JavaScript remote conference is going to be in October. So I stretched it out. I've done two days. I think I've done three days a couple times. This one's going to be five days, and the last day is going to have workshops. So anyway, if you're looking for a JavaScript conference you can go to without actually going anywhere. That's what we're putting on. And it's going to be single track, four days. You know, we'll have all of the hosts here. And yeah, just putting all that stuff together, to use Air Meet so that we have the hallway track going at the same time, getting some sponsors on board. Anyway, it's been awesome. And so I'm really looking forward to that. The one in November is going to be Angular. And then the one in December is going to be Top End Devs, which is basically how to level up, how to get a better job, how to maybe go freelance, just stuff like that. The stuff that's going to push you forward in your career, there's going to be some stuff on content There's going to be stuff on learning how to be a leader. There's all kinds of stuff. But it's focused on that becoming the top 1% in your area. So yeah, I've been working my tail off there. I also just got the, so I'll kind of tell a little bit of this long story. So as I've done podcasting over the last, what, 14 years, We started out on WordPress. Steve, do you love WordPress? I love, no, I hate WordPress.

 

I have honestly dealt very little with WordPress itself. I've had to jump in and help fix a couple of things here and there or set up a WordPress site, but

 

Mm-hmm.

 

my experience was all in Drupal. So can't say I have

 

Yeah.

 

a lot of experience with WordPress.

 

So my experience with WordPress is if you're doing what it expects you to do, then it's not a battle. I've switched off and on WordPress like three times. And at first it's great, right? Because it's like, oh, there's this thing and I can just plug it in and it just works. But then it gets complicated because we have multiple shows or because we have some other thing, right? And so I'll do some custom code. and then I have to jump through hoops to make the custom code work with the plugins I installed. And anyway, it just winds up turning into this nightmare. And I've been through it enough times where I was just like, forget it. If I'm going to maintain the code, I'm going to maintain a code base that I know I can maintain. And so I've been building it in Rails. And so yeah, so it's been kind of fun to pull some of this stuff together and make it work. But

 

I remember when you were asking for people to help you with that a few years ago. So you're still working on that same system that's been working on for two, three years?

 

Yeah, I finally got serious about it. And so we moved all the shows off of WordPress and onto fireside.fm, but a couple of issues came up with them, the big one, there were a couple of them, but one of them was that they wanted to charge me an extra couple hundred dollars for the bandwidth we were using. And I had looked at some other systems that did a whole lot more for me for what I wanted to do. I don't think people realize, but every month we transmit like four terabytes or something of data. Just our audio files. They wanted to charge me like a thousand bucks a month to host all of our shows to cover the bandwidth. Fireside was cheaper than them, but I kept finding myself, okay, I want to make this kind of thing happen. issue was that If you're on a system that hosts your website and you don't have direct access to the code, then you're basically at the mercy of whatever they give you to put stuff in. I was looking at third-party systems like, what's it called? I used it for a while and then I just gave up on it because it was a pain to. It works and you can plug it into a WordPress site or one of these sites and then you get the pop-ups. have a bar across the top that tells people the conference is coming up and stuff like that. But oh my gosh, you know, it's just another system to use. And so I finally got to the point where it was like, okay, I'm limited in what I can do on the podcast end. I know I want to create content, more content and premium content, and they want to raise That's when I really buckled down and was like, all right, let's hit this hard. Let's get this together so that the podcasts are run. So now all the podcasts run on code that I wrote, which is both a little frightening and at the same time kind of encouraging, especially since I was gone for a week and I didn't have to touch it. So anyway, so it's all written on a Rails code base. But transferring the RSS feeds was not as smooth as I wanted it to be. You know, picking up some of the other stuff hasn't been as smooth as I wanted it to be. We redirected all of the stuff off of WordPress to Fireside FM and then had to transfer it all back and I had moved everything out to their own domains because we have domains for all the shows. Now they just forward back to the show or the episode, but that was a thing that I had to deal with. been kind of a thing to get all the podcasts together. But now that I have it together, one of the other features that I wanted, and you can get it on transistor.fm, or you can go sign up for a service that just does it. But I wanted to give people premium podcast content, right? And so that's one of the things that I'm gonna be launching here within the next few weeks is premium podcasts. And so some of the podcasts will be, you know, like if you sign up for a Top Endeavs membership, you'll get access to premium feeds for all the shows that we currently do. And so you'll be able to start getting episodes that don't have the sponsorship messages in them. Cause I know that some people just, you know, drive them nuts. So there's an ad in the show. Um, uh, another thing that I'm looking at doing, and this is going to be for some of the technologies that I know better, like, uh, Ruby rails, um, JavaScript, I'll probably pick up some of the others, um, and do something with it. about them maybe doing some premium podcast content and getting paid for it. But what I want to do is I want to do like a JavaScript fundamentals podcast, right? And so if you pick up the free feed, right? Then you'll get one episode a week. And if you pick up the premium feed, you get two. Stuff like that. And then I also want to put together the Top End Devs podcast and just start talking to people about how they can get where they wanna go, right? And so there'll probably be some freemium set up on that too. And then maybe some podcasts that you can only get if you have a membership or if you're paying for a subscription forum. And so yeah, just getting all that in there. That's kind of the next stage. And the other next stage is the courses, right? I've got things clicking along with the conferences. If you want to speak at any of the conferences, the CFPs are open on all of them. But yeah, just get that clicking along. And then I want to start making sure that we have a process for consistently lining up the best guests for each show. And so I'm working on something there, but that's not ready to be announced. But my vision is just based on top end devs is I feel like if you're learning something new every day, if you're committing code every day outside of work, if you're meeting people and putting content out and sitting down and making a plan for where you want to end up up and then making it to community events like meetups and conferences, then you'll become that top 1% developer. So I want to provide people with the means of doing all those things so that they can get there. And so that's essentially the grand vision is to be providing enough content to where you can come learn something from us every day, right? code every day. You know, give you the opportunities to come out to the meetups and the conferences and join a community and get to know people. And so all of those things are things that I'm pulling together for this. And that's kind of the big direction that we're heading in.

 

So when you're talking about the top 1% of developers, is that different than the 10x developer?

 

The... So,

 

Don't get me started. Don't get me started.

 

oh man. Well, so the

 

Ha

 

thing

 

ha ha

 

is, is

 

ha

 

like,

 

ha!

 

the problem I have with the 10x developer is that there are things that people are picking up now that they're gonna be 10 times as good as I am at, right? And then there are things that I can pick up that I'm gonna be 10 times as good as them at. And so the whole idea of the 10x developer, it bothers me a little bit everybody takes time to learn different things. And so, you know, in aggregate for that particular company and their set of problems, am I a 10x developer over somebody else? Yeah, probably. But for another company, you know, in the same space even, like if they're doing, you know, a Rails stack that I understand and stuff like that, somebody else may be a 10x developer over what I can do, right? And so that's the issue that I have with the terminology. it feels like it's me pitting myself against somebody else. Where the top 1% developer for me is more along the lines of, I have honed my craft and I've built my network to the point where if you pick me out of 100 other devs, odds with, dabbled with, or gained expertise in, maybe deep expertise in, whatever's out there. I would be a solid choice both for the knowledge that I've built and for the habits that I have and the people I know so that I can be the most effective person you can hire. But then it's not down to, I'm a better coder than you. It's I have built up the skills, resources, and network to be able to deliver in a way That's the deal. What am I pitting myself against while I'm pitting myself against myself yesterday or a year ago? Just making those incremental changes. The other thing is that the challenge then isn't, am I better than Steve at JavaScript? The challenge is, have I made enough incremental progress to move the needle? I don't know if you've read Atomic Habits by James Clear, but he talks about the idea progress, if you do 1% better every day, after a full year you're 37 times better than you were when you started. And so the idea for me is, have I been consistent in my learning and growth to be 37 times better? And if I'm moving the needle for myself 37 times and somebody else is only moving the percent developer because I'm doing more than 99 percent of everybody else. But it's then not me trying to prove that I'm 10 times more effective than somebody else. It really is just down to I'm doing the things that keep me in that top bracket because that's just what top 1 percent elite developers do. Does that make sense?

 

Yeah, I can see that. I guess the one question I always have is how you measure all that. How do you measure if somebody's one times better or 10 times better or

 

Yeah.

 

any times better? You know, that's,

 

Yeah.

 

yeah, I always talk about, you know, smart goals and the M and smart is measurable. So how do you make something like that a measurable

 

Right.

 

quantity?

 

And that's effectively what it's down to, right, is the measurement isn't, I'm 37 times better because I can measure it. The yardstick is, I have been consistent for 365 days. And so in aggregate, I've likely made 37 times progress. But the yardstick is the consistency, the consistent learning, the consistent growth, the building my network. Because at the end of the day, And I know a few people, I guess, that eat, breathe, sleep code, but I'm not one of those people, right? I mean, you know, I have five kids. I, you know, I've got other stuff that I'm doing. You know, I ran for school board, for example. You know, all this other stuff that goes into the pie of, you know, who I am and what I do. And so I want to be excellent at work, but I want to be excellent at work and excellent what I want to achieve. And so I want to be a top 1% podcaster. I want to be a top 1% dad. And so if I'm making these consistent deposits in those areas, along with being a top 1% developer, then I can go have the career that I need to in order to support what I want to get done. And then I can go and excel in these other areas too.

 

I see said the blind man. One of my favorite phrases.

 

Mm-hmm. So yeah, so effectively then it's, okay, so what can I give you so that you don't have to go and hunt up a new blog post every day? Or what can I give you to inspire you to go and work on your side project every day and commit code to it? Or what can I give you to help you level up and understand, oh, I have this option for this thing when I'm building my Angular React or whatever app. Somebody wants me to cross over to react native. What options do I have to pick up and learn that stuff so that I can be effective in an area that matters to my employer, or my boss, or my friend, or whoever? Maybe you want to be an entrepreneur. How do we give you the resources to make the right decisions there? Anyway, it's that kind of a thing.

 

Yeah, I've seen other in terms of the premium or, you know, membership stuff. I've seen other podcast systems do the same thing as well. I have no idea

 

Yeah.

 

how, how successful they've been, um, in doing something like that. But I guess, you know, as with anything else on the web content is King. And so if you've got the

 

Yeah.

 

content, then that'll draw the people.

 

Yeah, and to a certain degree, I can do some of this myself, and I'm planning on creating copious amounts of the content. But I also recognize that there's no way that I can provide this to all the communities I want to provide it to all by myself. And so that's the other piece that I'm trying to pull in is if somebody wants to get into that place where they're writing the book or making the course or doing that weekly podcast on the premium basis that they have an option to do it and get paid for it and maybe offset some of that income that they then don't have to go earn it at a full-time job that they may or may not enjoy. And so it's a big thing for me to help people get fulfillment. And for some people, they're going to get fulfillment because they help build the awesome thing at an awesome place to work. And for other people, that fulfillment comes out of those other places, right? or teaching or being recognized for their expertise. And I don't see a reason for any of those. Some people, they kind of poo poo the idea of getting some kind of level of personal fulfillment out of it or doing things for personal reasons or for selfish reasons is the way that they would put it. But for me, it's, hey, look, if you would love doing what you do and you are fulfilled by it, Why not just enjoy life to the fullest? And so that's another end to this is just, it's like, okay, if you make a video, then you should get a percentage of whatever revenue that video generates. If you're producing a premium podcast, you should get a cut of whatever that generates. If we help you publish a book, then you should get a generous cut of whatever the book brings in. It's those kinds of things that I want to put together for people and just really give them options as far as, hey, look, I want to be a part of this drive to help people be better and do better. My contribution is going to come in this way and I'm going to get some level of compensation back out of it. For some people, it's, yeah, you're on the show. You get well-known. You get invited to speak, or you get all of the things that come with that. But yeah, for a lot of the other premium stuff, I'd like people, if we're getting paid at Top End Devs, I'd like to pass that along.

 

I mean, I can vouch for the, for the fame portion. I mean, ever since I've been on JavaScript Java and views on do you, I can't walk down the street without people,

 

Right?

 

uh, asking for my autograph and thanking me for dad jokes. And it's, it's been crazy. I mean, sometimes I just have to go into hiding because of all the fame, but,

 

hahahaha

 

uh, right. But seriously.

 

Yeah, that's not the way it goes, but

 

I'm gonna go to bed. I'm gonna go to bed. I'm gonna go to bed. I'm gonna go to bed. I'm gonna go to bed. I'm gonna go to bed. I'm gonna go to bed. I'm gonna go to bed. I'm gonna go to bed. I'm gonna go to bed. I'm gonna go to bed. I'm gonna go to bed. I'm gonna go to bed. I'm gonna go to bed. I'm gonna go to bed. I'm gonna go to bed. I'm gonna go to bed. I'm gonna go to bed. I'm gonna go to bed. I'm gonna go to bed. I'm gonna go to bed. I'm gonna go to bed. I'm gonna go to bed. I'm gonna go to bed. I'm gonna go to bed.

 

if I go to a tech conference or something like that, a lot of times people will come up to me knowing who I am.

 

Mm. Or

 

Or

 

they'll hear your

 

I'll

 

voice. Hey, I know that voice.

 

get invited to events. So for example, in October, I'm gonna be at an event put on by JFrog and I'm gonna be interviewing all of their speakers. And I've been invited several times to Microsoft events and done podcast interviews there. You know, there are other methods of getting what you want that don't necessarily involve somebody writing you a check. But

 

Sure.

 

yeah.

 

You know, the other thing I'll point out, um, you were talking about creating courses and, and, you know, content for people, you know, having just come from working on a course for view mastery. And, uh, I've done other trainings in the past and putting classes

 

Mm-hmm.

 

together and stuff, whether it's, you know, at work or on my own, it takes a lot of time. It is a lot of work to put together a really good course. You know, there are some people. that i've seen that i watch on youtube like my buddy eric hanshed or max swartzmiller or others where they're just basically sort of you know recording their screen and going along and sort of a live stream type of thing and that's probably less intensive whereas something like view mastery uh where if you look at their videos they're uh very unique very high quality very fine-tuned and and you know easy to follow along with i can tell you those take a lot of work and a lot of just to put together high quality content like that. So I don't think, and maybe you can just beat this check, you're gonna get rich. You're not gonna get a higher hourly rate from your content unless you're really charging a lot of money for it. But

 

Right.

 

hopefully those who take courses, you look at the more well-known people, Wes Boston, Scott Tilinski from Syntax, for instance,

 

Mm-hmm.

 

or other people, they put a lot of work and a lot of time to making those courses and creating that content. And so it's something I did, having done a course now, I certainly appreciate much more than I did in the past.

 

Yeah, I've seen some people make a bunch of money off courses, but the person that I know that's probably made the most off of courses is John Sonmez. And what he did is he made like a course a week for like a year, year and a half, put him on Pluralsight.

 

pleurocyte.

 

Yeah, well, they're still around, but

 

Yeah.

 

it's interesting, right? So, he had like 60 or 70 courses, and that's why they were paying him piles of money every month. Because he was making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year off of his courses. And the reason was because he was so prolific that he could make more than what most of us would be able want to make for a living, you know, as a minimum. And so, that's one thing that I've seen kind of come out of a lot of the places out there, right? You know, that's why people go to an egghead.io or a plural site or, you know, View Mastery. You're not going there because they have the one course. You're going there because they have a bunch of courses on a bunch of topics that you know are going to pay off for you. And so, anyway, that's I've also seen it work on Udemy, like Max Schwartzmuller. He's got a bunch of courses on Udemy, right? They're not necessarily developer-focused, but they have such a wide marketplace, bringing so many people. Then he's got a bunch of courses on there that I think he makes his living on courses. So...

 

Oh yeah, I'm sure he does. Yeah, his courses were, I took some of his view and next

 

Yeah.

 

courses when I first got into view and that was how I sort of

 

Yeah, they're terrific

 

really

 

courses.

 

got into it. Yeah.

 

And

 

Yeah, he

 

so,

 

always does a really good job.

 

yeah, and so effectively what happens is, you know, he puts out a terrific course, he has enough of them out there, and then yeah, when somebody comes along and says, well, I need to learn React, somebody else who's taken his course will refer them to that course. And then maybe they need to pick up some backend technology too that he's done a course on, or learn how to deploy it or, you know, stuff like that. And so, yeah, that's kind of where that comes together. I'm just looking to do it on my own platform since we have a podcast listening audience of 50, 60,000 people across all the shows.

 

Yeah, it always helps to have a pre-built audience for sure.

 

Yeah. And then again, with the conferences, it's like, hey, come meet some people, come pick up some new skills from some of the talks, come interact with some experts who are going to be speaking, ask some questions during their session, and make it a week and level up and then go take what you learned and go practice it. And all of this stuff kind of comes together that way. It's like, okay, you know, I picked up the course, you know, I worked through the examples, I did the work, I've learned the stuff, I'm practicing it now, right? And so it continues to, to move forward. Yeah. Anyway, so that's what I'm working on building. And like I said, it's the premium podcast and the courses are the next areas that I'm adding on to top end devs. And then yeah, you'll have plenty of content if you want to learn it from me. And if you want to build courses or speak at the conferences or anything else, let me know.

 

Yeah, there's, I would, for somebody who's looking to maybe get out there and make a name for themselves or something like that, having taken advantage of the platform already being there and you just got to create the content.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

That's a, that's a, that's a huge boon where you don't have to

 

Yep.

 

do it all. You know, you can just focus on what you're do best.

 

Yep. Yep, absolutely. And that's the other thing, right? Is nobody wants to build this whole platform. I guess, except me,

 

Hehehehe

 

but I tried some of the other ones and they, they, you know, the issue was, was okay, well, I'm going to have the, um, podcast floating out here, but there's not a clear and direct call to action to the course, or if I want to change it up, I have to go and I have to muddle with all of the stupid other crap and edit the episode down. mess with it instead of just, you know, flipping a switch on my back end and saying, you know, promote this other course, you know, on this episode. Yeah, having it all integrated for me was another big part of the deal.

 

Yeah, I think I remember you had an offer a while ago. Did you, I don't know if you ever got anybody to take you up on this, but I remember you had an offer out to, Hey, if you want to start a podcast, let me know. And I'll host it for you and you can just do

 

Yep.

 

it. Did you ever get much, uh, uh, buy in on that? Anybody that take advantage of that offer?

 

I had a couple of companies do it. The issue was that they weren't very clear on what they wanted to get out of it. And if you're gonna put the podcast together, we can cross promote it with the other shows, but you have to promote it to your audience too, and they didn't do a whole lot of that. And so

 

Hmm.

 

one of them picked up a bunch of listeners, and one of the other ones didn't, and it was just down to sent emails to their list and helped me get higher profile people that were part of their organization on and the other one didn't. And so it's not a slam dunk in the sense that, you know, we're just going to do it all for you and you're going to become dev famous. It's

 

Mm-hmm.

 

hey, look, you know, you're going to have to do some of the work. You're going to have to come up with the content, things like that. But we'll host it and we'll cross promote it. And then yeah, you can take advantage of our infrastructure as well as our network, right? Because we will help you find guests if we know them.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

But yeah. It's not just, hey, I'm just gonna show up once a week and make crap up and it's just gonna all happen. And if you're clear on what you wanna get out of it, I mean, I really don't have a problem with somebody coming on and saying, hey, I'm so-and-so, we're gonna talk about Java, they have a Java show, we're gonna talk about this aspect of Java, go check out my course, and then as they're wrapping up saying, hey, thanks for listening to the Java show, go check out my course. a problem. That's not a big deal. But you've got to be really clear about what you want. Honestly, I think Wes and Scott on syntax could do better at this, right? Because I know that they want to cover this stuff and they want people to know who they are, but they need to let people know, hey, we talked about this for an hour, but I have a course on this that you can go pick up. Whether it's one of their free ones that gets them on their to drop some dollars their way. But anyway,

 

I know

 

either

 

they do

 

way

 

their shameless

 

that-

 

plugs at the end of the episodes. Hey, check out my courses here. You know, stuff

 

Yeah,

 

so.

 

but that's usually their latest course. And yeah. Anyway. So... Yeah. Not that I'm out to call them out or anything. Yeah, they

 

Yeah,

 

seem

 

they seem

 

to be

 

to

 

doing

 

be doing

 

all right

 

alright

 

for themselves.

 

for themselves.

 

Yep. My headphones just died.

 

Yeah, I started hearing feedback there.

 

Oh, back, I don't know. That's weird, all right.

 

Is the battery powered?

 

Yeah,

 

Looks

 

they

 

like.

 

are. I usually charge them in between or plug them in between shows, but I haven't done that for week.

 

I have these plugged in ones that you recommended for me.

 

They're the same ones I have, but I have to charge them up or I can plug them directly into my, I could plug them in, I guess. Anyway. But yeah, that's another thing. So the other things that I'm working on, I am working on podcastplaybook.com, which is the same thing except for podcasters. And so I'm looking at putting on conferences and courses and stuff like that. Cause I wind up recording videos for, especially for Mikayla, who's my virtual assistant. I record

 

Mm-hmm.

 

videos probably once or twice a week for her. Hey, do this. Here's how it works. hey, do this, here's how it works.

 

Oh, uh... Mm-hmm.

 

You know, I set up this system to work this way, here's how you use it. And so, you know, I figure I may as well just record like a full on course for a lot of this stuff. Hey, here's how you set up and run a podcast. One of the things that I'm gonna be pushing through to promote the shows here is doing a podcast tour, where I'm hoping to get some of the hosts and then just, you know, I'll be asking are you interested first, but then if you're interested, then what we do is we say, okay, well, when you're at the end of the show, make sure that you plug the shows that you're on, right? But it raises their profile, it helps them promote anything they've got going on. And then they can also just say, hey, every week you can check me out at views on view.com. And, you know, just get people over. And so, you know, that again helps build podcast listeners coming to listen to your show and at the same time. Anyway, so that's another thing that I'm working on putting together, right? Is that kind of a thing? And then other growth strategies, you know, social media strategies, stuff like that. You know, as I learn it, then I can record it and share it with Michaela, but I may as well be, you know, creating the content for other podcasters as well and saying, hey, this is how we're promoting on social media. Here's how we're promoting on other podcasts. Here's how we're, you know, running our numbers. Here's how we're pricing our sponsorships. Here's how we find sponsors. Because all of this stuff is some of the stuff that I'm doing that I want her to be able to do or to hire somebody to do. And some of that stuff that, you know, she's already doing. But, you know, if she got hit by a bus tomorrow, right, it'd be nice to be able to say, hey, look, I put it all together. in this course on podcast playbook.

 

Yeah, that could be useful. I know, you know, I'll, I'll look for videos all the time. Like I was, you know, recently looking at updating my microphone.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

And so, uh, the one I was looking at is a little spendier and it's a little more complex in terms of how you connect it. Cause you got to go through some additional equipment other than just a direct USB.

 

Right.

 

And a lot of the videos that I found were podcasters, you know,

 

Mm-hmm.

 

people that do podcasts all the times. on how to connect everything and this is a suggested equipment to use

 

Yep.

 

and stuff so there's definitely some out there but that's definitely useful kind of stuff.

 

Yeah, and I'd love to be doing equipment reviews and things like that, right? So it's like, hey, if you're recording on the road, you know, I think that'd be something that'd be useful for, you know, you and the other hosts on Top End Eps, right? Or,

 

Sure.

 

hey, if you, you know, if you bump into, you know, the guy who built, you know, NPM in a bar, right? Here's how you

 

Hmm.

 

record it on your phone or I don't know, stuff like that. So yeah. Anyway, I've talked way too long about the stuff I'm working on, but that's where I'm headed with all this stuff. And my goal is, honestly, I'm gonna be cleaning up my office and creating a lot of this content this week. So. Because if anyone can see the video, we may start publishing the videos on YouTube. If you could see this video, I mean, the desk behind me is a complete disaster. Anyway.

 

I I was gonna say partial disaster, but yeah, it is pretty cluttered there.

 

I was waiting for you to say, I've seen worse.

 

Uh, yeah, yeah, I have actually mine sometimes.

 

Yep. Yeah, I tend to get stuff piled on it and then I'll clear it off and put it all away and then yeah. Anyway.

 

Yeah, it's the dust cleaning cycle. I've been through it.

 

Yep. Alright, well, if there's not anything else that you want to talk about...

 

Well, real quick, we talked about this, I think, before. I live from a professional, and even my side projects live in the Vue.js world.

 

Hm.

 

And I just noticed here recently that Vue 3 is the default version of Vue.js now for their docs and anything on the website. big change from Vue 2 in terms of basic structure composition API versus

 

Mm-hmm.

 

the options API and so on, a big change. And I don't know if it's just because the Vue 3 uptake has been slow, but last month in July, version 2.7 was released, and there's been some incremental updates to it since then. But a lot of the composition API features were backported into Vue 2.

 

Mmm.

 

So Vue 3 itself has backwards compatibility with version 2 in that you could still use the options API. You can still do a lot of Vue 2 stuff in Vue 3. But now the composition has been backward the other way. And so if you're using 2.7 and above, and if you look in the GitHub repo, you can see the updates and the details. They backported a lot of different things. So you can use setup functions in Composition API and so on with view2.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

There are some differences in the Composition API. Between 2 and 3, there are some behavioral differences. Where view3 is using proxies, view2 is not. And so there's some code changes. in the, we can put this in show notes, but in the change log in GitHub, you can see all the details. So that's interesting. And that has implications for someone like myself at GovExec in that we have a very huge application that's based on Laravel and Vue. And it's been around for 10 years. And so it's using Vue 2. And one of the frequent topics. has been upgrading to Vue 3. And we really weren't looking forward to trying to do that with having to change to Vue 3. But with a lot of that backward compatibility, now we can stick with Vue 2, just upgrade to 2.7, whatever. As of right now, the most current version is 2.7.8. And that allows us to start migrating stuff to a Vue 3 and then eventually just fully go to view three. So I think that will be very useful. We were excited when we saw that.

 

Yeah, I was going to say I can kind of see maybe some of the adoption is just, hey, we're trying to figure out this other. You know the view three stuff and you know the migration might be a little bit tricky. So yeah, I can see pulling some of this stuff down to view two so you can do a direct upgrade to you know view 270. I think is what you said it was and then you know I can start adding in composition API stuff and I can start migrating some of my other stuff to this and making sure that it's ready to go before I pull the trigger and upgrade it.

 

Right, yeah. And when it comes to outside of the core stuff, I'm not sure how that's going to work out. With any type of core tool upgrade and large changes in terms of core functionality, there's always a community around it, your different libraries and plugins and external tools. that the community writes to be compatible with the core, then you gotta wait for all those to upgrade too. And so I suspect that's part of the problem with view three is waiting for the community to catch up. I know there's a lot of stuff that has been done for view three. Another one that we're waiting for that we are dependent upon is Bootstrap view, which is views

 

Mm-hmm.

 

wrapper around Bootstrap. They currently don't have a V3 version. Part of the holdup has been that the main developers from Ukraine, and so he's, shall we say, had some issues with being able to focus on development, considering what's going on over there. So that slowed it down. But yeah, I've seen it before with Drupal in large, major version upgrades be written to handle the new version. So I suspect that's what's going on with U3 as well. But like I said, with this backport into U2, that will make things easier for those who want to, need to do a more slow upgrade process.

 

Makes sense. So are you looking forward to playing with it or have you put in any time with it yet? I don't know

 

Yeah,

 

how recent

 

I got

 

it

 

to

 

is

 

play

 

so...

 

with- Yeah, it's been out for a few months. I mean, it was in beta going back to last year, I believe. I forget the timelines. But it's been out and in beta for a while. It takes some getting used to when you're used to the options API for sure.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

And they've done some things to streamline the code. The way you can do a setup function just inside a script tag with a setup attribute is pretty cool. So I got to play with a little bit of the View Mastery course on Next 3 Essentials, which was neat. There's a lot of included stuff. There's some of it is next specific and some of it is view specific. But yeah, like I said, it looks neat. It adds some great features and stuff, but unfortunately I haven't had the bandwidth to delve into too much yet. Hopefully that will end soon.

 

Cool. Well, hopefully you'll have some more time to talk about it on Views on View.

 

Yes, yeah, we will. Yeah, looking forward to doing that for sure. I always had, in terms of Nux 3, I've had a couple episodes with Daniel Rowe

 

Mm-hmm.

 

from the Nux Core team. One of the most awesome people you met. He's so cool.

 

Yeah.

 

He's probably one of the most low key people he'll ever talk to, just in terms of his personality and how he talks, but knows his stuff inside out, obviously, and really good at communicating. with him and Drew Baker, a guy named Drew Baker who's a big Next user in his agency. So yeah, so hopefully soon we'll get to talk some more about Next 3 and V3.

 

Cool. All right, well, anything else?

 

Hey, I was curious to see, I believe you know, Douglas Crockford, right? Yeah.

 

Uh,

 

I know

 

yeah.

 

you, have you talked to him? Yeah.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Okay. You know, so the big thing he said recently, you know, the splash that I've seen multiple places recently was the best thing we can do to JavaScript today is retire it. I guess it was an interview or a talk he gave. Have you, have you seen that and

 

I haven't

 

read that?

 

seen that

 

I'm just

 

one,

 

curious

 

no.

 

to see your thoughts on it. Yeah. I can put on it. Uh, uh, I saw it on hacker news, I think, uh, two, three weeks ago. And it sort of made a splash. I've seen it mentioned multiple times, but you should check it out. I think crotchety is maybe a good term to describe him, at least the one I've heard him talk about before. But his basic premise as one of the original authors or worked with Brendan Eichhahn is where it's evolved is so far away from where it should have gone. And he thinks maybe you should do a Dino type thing and scrap it and start over.

 

Yeah, I've heard a few. rumblings about things like that, but I don't think it's going anywhere.

 

Oh yeah, it's too, it's too ingrained in browsers. Certainly wouldn't be an easy thing to do, but yeah, that's just sort of his opinion, so.

 

Yep. Cool. All right, well, let's go ahead and wrap up. Do you have some pics?

 

Right on. Well, like I said, just that conversation with Douglas Crawford, I can throw that in. It's this interesting perspective on JavaScript, considering we're talking about JavaScript. And then I'll throw in dad jokes. Gotta have dad jokes, right?

 

Yeah?

 

Come on, Chuck. I need some enthusiasm here. Yes, we need

 

Dad

 

dad jokes.

 

jokes,

 

Okay.

 

woo!

 

Woo-hoo or like a like we call them on the viewmaster stuff cringe-worthy definitely

 

Uh huh.

 

So I had a friend who had a dog right got a dog and He named his dog five miles so that every day he could tell people he walked five miles

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Fortunately the other day he ran over five miles So my son is, my oldest son is 19 and you know, he's trying to figure out what he's gonna do for work going forward and he's talked about a few different things and he decided he wanted to create a business that sells foreign ants. I said, I told him I could support him if he could just give me a good reason. He just said, it's important.

 

Mmm.

 

You know, import ant sorry.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

And then finally, um, you know, a lot of times in, in, uh, after sports competitions, like college or professional, you'll see the, the athletes will, you know, throw the ball into the crowd. I think, you know, whether it's football or whatever. And, and so the other day I was, uh, I was playing and after winning this, this really tight game, it decided I was going to do the same thing and throw crowd, but apparently that's frowned upon in bowling.

 

All right, now it's my turn.

 

It's your turn.

 

Okay. So I'm gonna throw out another board game. I think last time I did the Fantastic Beasts, Perilous, whatever. So I'm gonna put another one out. This one, it's an older game. It's a quick game. It's called Quiddler. And my keyboard isn't working so that I can actually look it up. There we go. So BoardGameGeek rates Quiddler, or weights it, at 1.43. Effectively what you wind up doing is you have cards with letters and... You basically spell out words, and so if you can spell out words with all your cards, then you get points for having the longest word, having the most words. You get docked points for any cards you have left in your hand. It's pretty simple. So, anyway, I'm going to just shout it out. It was pretty fun. I like word games. I tend to win word games. why I guess. But yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna pick that. And then I was doing some stuff with charts, and I'm trying to find this charting library I've been using to show

 

Oof.

 

podcast download numbers and stuff. really just take me a minute. It's ChartJS.

 

Yeah.

 

That was hard for me to come up with. Anyway, there's so many of them out there, but ChartJS is working great for me. But yeah, I have the podcast stats page up. I'm working on pulling together some other stats like location and stuff for the audience and stuff like that. And then I'm also looking at adding that the podcast hosts and folks can see what the numbers are. Since I turned this

 

Tart Jazz is pretty cool. You can do some neat stuff with

 

Yeah.

 

it, but it's like, we ran into that. Last year, we had to do some fancier stuff. So I had to delve into the world of D3,

 

Mmm.

 

which is one of those tools that's incredibly powerful, but it's got a credible, in order to use that power, you got to learn how to harness it. And it's

 

Right.

 

got a really deep and steep learning curve. And as a result of that, we had somebody from, I'm forgetting the name of the company now that owns it, on JavaScript Jabber to talk about it. That was cool. But yeah, D3 is awesome. There's a lot to learn.

 

Yeah, I picked up a theme. It's called Smart Admin on Rails. I think they have other versions of Smart Admin. But anyway, so it had most of the integration done. I just had to change the data in it basically so that it would show the data

 

Mm-hmm.

 

for the podcast. And yeah, I've been tracking the stats in my own database for the last month about. or not. They're not exactly accurate as far as letting me know what the listenership is at the moment. So most of my numbers have come off of the old system, off of fireside. Now I'm just working from where things were there until we have a few months worth of numbers here. But...

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Anyway, so yeah, but I've been pretty happy with Chart.js, so I'm gonna shout out about that. And I think I talked about most of the stuff I'm working on, so as we kind of get to the point where we're announcing stuff and getting people lined up for the conferences and stuff like that, I will probably be sharing that and or having sponsored ads inserted if we have openings. So anyway, I guess I'm going to pick as a tool is G2. So G2, they're mostly focused on software. you can put in Slack and it'll show you all the Slack competitors. Anyway, you can put in different tools. And so I've been using it to actually look up potential sponsors. So I go put in a company that sponsored us in the past, or if I know a particular company that I'd like to have a sponsor, I'll go find the information for their marketing folks, but then I'll pop them into G2 and go reach out to all their competitors. And so anyway, it's pretty cool if you're looking for software tools they have like the one that I have right in front of me right now is continuous delivery software and a lot of them overlap with like the continuous integration software but yeah there's some in here that I'd never seen before and so I'm looking at them and you know going okay you know here you know reaching out to them hey you want to come and sponsor the show and get What I tend to do is I'll take the company name and I'll pop it into seamless.ai. And I think I've picked that on past episodes, but seamless.ai, if you put in the position of the person you're looking for in the company, it'll give you a list of people. And then from there, I have automation that if I tell seamless.ai that I want to look up that person, it'll actually add them to my CRM so I can reach out to them about sponsorship. thing and then just click their email address and send them an email or go in a bonjour or something and send them a video. So anyway, it's pretty awesome. So I'm pretty happy. G2.com. And.

 

So we've just talked about D3 and G2. Is there like an A1?

 

Yeah, I put it on my steak.

 

I guess I was going to say steak sauce. Yeah.

 

Actually, I don't put it on my steak. I'm a salt and pepper, maybe a little garlic powder guy.

 

That's it's a funny story. So my, my son and my daughter, uh, work at a really nice upscale restaurant here,

 

Mm-hmm.

 

uh, in our area and, uh, you know, high end. And, and so my wife and I went there, uh, for dinner, uh, for our anniversary here a few months ago. And, uh, I got a steak of some type. I don't remember exactly what it was, but I asked the waiter if I could get some And he gave me this look because I think I just insulted him somehow by asking for sauce on a steak. If I could get some, he goes, yeah, let me, I'll see if I can do it and sneak it by the chefs. And so I watched and as he came walking out of the back with it, he literally was hiding it, like holding it down by his leg as he walked by the kitchen trying to keep the chef from seeing that he was taking A1.

 

That's funny.

 

To me, it was so funny. I remember seeing that. It's like, oh, sorry, I didn't mean to insult him. I just like it.

 

Well, sometimes I'm in the mood for, you know, kind of the flavor that you get from, you know, kind of the tangy flavor from the A1 or, there are other steak sauces that are a little more savory that I, you know, that I like, but most of the time the steak on its own or maybe with some mushrooms or onions or something on it. But yeah, every once in a while it's like, you know, I just want a little bit different. Yeah, there's nothing wrong with that.

 

No.

 

All right, well, let's go and wrap it up here. Until next time, folks, Max out.

 

Adios.