Cody Bontecou is a Software Engineer and he is one of the show's newest hosts. He starts off as he shares his career progression and explains how he started to work with Vue & Nuxt. He also talks about the reason why he chose Nuxt compared to the other frameworks, and many more!

Steve:

Hello everybody, welcome to another thrilling episode of Views on View. I am Steve Edwards, the host with the face of the radio, as you can see if you're watching video, and the voice for being a mime, but I'm still your host. And today, before we get into our new addition to the show, I'd like to welcome the, as always, the studio audience. Thank you for being here people. I know the tickets are expensive, but it's well worth it. So joining the podcast with me now as I've been flying solo for a while, we have a previous guest who overcame huge obstacles and a long application and vetting process. And I mean, it's like, you know, just crazy trying to get into an elite organization. Mr. Cody Bontique, how you doing Cody?

 

Cody Bontecou:

Hey, hey Steve, happy to be here.

 

Steve:

Thank you. Thank you. Cody is coming to us from the very cool and freezing world known as Hawaii. So we will all feel sad for him.

 

Cody Bontecou:

Yep,

 

Steve:

I'm just

 

Cody Bontecou:

yep.

 

Steve:

kidding.

 

Cody Bontecou:

It's tiring looking at this beautiful blue ocean,

 

Steve:

Yeah,

 

Cody Bontecou:

but somebody's gotta do it.

 

Steve:

somebody's got to do it. I appreciate you doing that for us all. So for those that maybe haven't listened, it's been what, a couple years? I don't even remember when we had John, or about a year ago.

 

Cody Bontecou:

About a year ago, yeah,

 

Steve:

Yeah, it

 

Cody Bontecou:

exactly.

 

Steve:

was about a year ago. And so he was just so mesmerizing and enthralling that we said, we got to get Cody on. So anyway, for those that haven't heard you before, maybe seen any of your training videos or... conference presentations once you give us the, what is it, the 411 on Cody.

 

Cody Bontecou:

Oh, the 4.11, sure. So I've been playing around with Vue for the last, I wanna say four, four and a half, maybe even five years now. Primarily started in a Python world, but I just couldn't, I struggled with beautiful websites and Vue is kind of my gateway into making really nice web apps. Started with just like personal projects and passion projects, but now I work with Vue professionally. And I love it, but I tend to actually lean on Nuxt. That's my primary use of Vue is I tend to use the Nuxt framework. And I've been really enjoying Nuxt through the version three. I think it's on like a 3.6 now. I haven't dug into the latest features, but I do look forward to it.

 

Steve:

Alright, so why not?

 

Cody Bontecou:

Oh, so Nuxt, again, my initial, I got into Vue. I was working with Python professionally and Vue was more for personal projects, just like entrepreneurial ideas. And I fell in love with Nuxt for the SSO, sorry, not SSO, S-E-O. functionalities and also at the time I was just graduating from college and so I didn't really have much money and so I love the static site generation and SSR allowing me to host my sites on services like Netlify and now Versel for next to nothing.

 

Steve:

So we're using, how are you using Python? Strict, I mean, to my mind, Python's always been sort of backend. Are you, were you using it only for backend and something else for frontend or, or how are you using it?

 

Cody Bontecou:

Yeah, so prior to getting involved with you, I was working with the Django framework. And so Django is primarily a backend framework, but it does come with like a templating. I guess you could call it. I'm not sure what the proper term is. It's not a framework, but Jinja. I think it's called Jinja 2, which allows you to kind of weave in for loops and data within your HTML files.

 

Steve:

Oh, okay, I see. Yeah, I've actually worked, about four years ago, I was working on a sort of an e-commerce project that was using Django on the backend with Nuxt on the frontend,

 

Cody Bontecou:

Nice.

 

Steve:

which was sort of interesting. And I think they used Nuxt on the frontend because of some of the developer type tools that make things easier, like the directory-based routing and some other things like that. And then you just had API calls to the Django back in. So yeah, I've had a little familiarity.

 

Cody Bontecou:

Yeah, definitely. That was actually my first case of I was able to eventually bring Nuxt into the projects I was working in. And that's the exact stack I was working with was Django REST framework for the REST endpoints and then just the Nuxt front end. It actually wasn't until recently that I started playing with Nuxt on the server side as well.

 

Steve:

So why Nux as compared to Vue for your front end if you have your Django just for server side?

 

Cody Bontecou:

Um, it was for, uh, like static site generation primarily.

 

Steve:

Okay, right,

 

Cody Bontecou:

Um,

 

Steve:

okay.

 

Cody Bontecou:

yeah. And the server side rendering, it allowed for very cheap hosting of the web app, at least,

 

Steve:

Mm-hmm.

 

Cody Bontecou:

um, through services like Netlify and,

 

Steve:

Right.

 

Cody Bontecou:

and to get those SEO benefits.

 

Steve:

Yeah, I actually have a site, a little older site still on Nux2. I'll probably go update some things soon.

 

Cody Bontecou:

Yeah.

 

Steve:

But it's using a Prismic backend, a headless CMS with

 

Cody Bontecou:

Mm-hmm.

 

Steve:

Nux on the front end and then it's just a static generation. And then I host it basically for free on Netlify. Don't tell Netlify. But yeah, I host

 

Cody Bontecou:

Yeah.

 

Steve:

it there and so it's static and so it's crazy fast. And it's one of those sites that doesn't get a lot of content updates, so it's not something where they're always in there having to add things and stuff.

 

Cody Bontecou:

Right.

 

Steve:

But yeah, so NeXT with some sort of back-end certainly is a really good use case.

 

Cody Bontecou:

Right, and that was honestly just like a personal pleasure of mine was how cheaply I could host the website and have it like see how much functionality I can get into it and you know, just create huge builds of just massive websites that eventually ended up being static through Netlify.

 

Steve:

Mm-hmm.

 

Cody Bontecou:

Or just relying on third party APIs that I could just manage on the client side.

 

Steve:

Alright, yeah I don't know if this makes me a bad view host or disloyal, but I've been really partial for statics up to Astro.

 

Cody Bontecou:

Mm-hmm.

 

Steve:

If you played with Astro at all, which has some, I like it, it's straight JavaScript, but what's nice, are you familiar with Astro? Have you ever seen it?

 

Cody Bontecou:

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I haven't played with it, but I've been following through, you know, Twitter and just blog posts for pretty much since it was announced. And I was always fascinated with that idea of kind of this middle ground where you, from my understanding, you can bring in a view component

 

Steve:

Mm-hmm.

 

Cody Bontecou:

and a react component or a spell component and just kind of have them all play nicely with one another.

 

Steve:

Right, yeah I've used it just for some static sites. It's just pretty much straight JavaScript, except for maybe your custom view component that you drop in. And it takes a little bit of getting used to, but once you get used to it, it's pretty easy to use. And they do have SSR capabilities now. Last I talked to Fred Schott, because I've talked to him once on here and once on JavaScript Jabber about it, and then I just sort of keep my eye on it. But yeah, it's a cool tool. You know, it's like... you know, there's all kinds of different ways to do that setup, you know, static site generator or server-side rendering. There's Astro and Nuxt and Next and Svelte kit and Svelte. And so that's just sort of the one that I've, I've liked.

 

Cody Bontecou:

Yeah, and that's something I've just learned over the many years of my career. I'm kidding. But yeah,

 

Steve:

All four years.

 

Cody Bontecou:

it's, you know, like there's all this hype for next, for example. And so I kind of sat down as I'm going to learn next, what is so great about next. And it just, I felt like I was constantly struggling to solve a problem that would have been very simple for me in Nuxt. And it just, I've just realized that I don't think, I don't know how much value there is kind of moving away from one server-side rendered framework to another.

 

Steve:

Mm-hmm.

 

Cody Bontecou:

And I am actually working with Next professionally right now at my job.

 

Steve:

Oh really?

 

Cody Bontecou:

And so I, yeah, so I'm getting a bit deeper. Excuse me. And it is nice, but it's ultimately just JavaScript and TypeScript, it's very similar. And once you understand the pattern of one framework, it's... It's not too different than the design patterns of other frameworks. And so that's kind of why I do enjoy Nuxt. And after like playing around with different frameworks, I've just like, you know what? Nuxt is what I'm best at. And so I'm just gonna, I'd rather really master Nuxt and find all these nice little like intricacies of the framework, then have just a mediocre understanding of multiple frameworks.

 

Steve:

Yeah, right, better not to be Jack of all trades, master of none, just sort of get good at one thing. Yeah, that's been my approach too. There's a lot of stuff out there that I could really learn and my choice has just been, I'm not gonna try to exhaust myself and try to learn five different frameworks and 10 different tools, but rather sort of just get the tool sets that work for me. And the other side of that, though, is to be careful. You don't want it to be the way I used to be with Drupal when I first started, is that everything, Drupal isn't hammer and everything else is a nail. No matter what you use, oh yeah, that's what I got, this is what I got. So I'll use, for something server side, I like to stick where I'm comfortable, Laravel and PHP,

 

Cody Bontecou:

Mm-hmm.

 

Steve:

from a coding standpoint, a backend standpoint, and then I can use Vue or Astro on the front end if need be.

 

Cody Bontecou:

Yeah.

 

Steve:

trying to stick with like you know tailwind for the CSS for the very limited CSS skills that I've got that are always stretched anytime I have to do anything fancy so yeah

 

Cody Bontecou:

Yeah.

 

Steve:

that's the issue and NUXT is you know you can obviously do it for static you can do it for uh... dynamic stuff you know if you want to have a node server running and write some node code so Now, here's one thing with Nuxt, and I've never understood this, and I've talked to Drew, you know, we've had Daniel Rowe on, oh, by the way, Tease, we're going to have Daniel Rowe on here again here in a couple of weeks to catch us up on the happenings in the Nuxt world and see sort of the tallest hog in the trough and the Nuxt organization these days. But going back to that, you know, we always talk about the server-side rendering and running on the server. What I've never, still have never gotten my head around, and maybe you can explain this to me in a way that will get through my thick skull, is when I'm looking at my code, when I'm working in a view template, or a NUCS template, right? We talk about how the backend sends up the rendered code, right, and then in straight view, it's just, you mount it, and then the template goes and gets all this stuff and loads it up, and there's a whole issue with it takes too long for the bot to get to, you got ACO issues. So that's why you send the server side rendered code, right? From the backend, so it's already there for the bot.

 

Cody Bontecou:

Mm-hmm.

 

Steve:

And there's ways around that if you're using a front end, straight view front end like RenderTron or other pre-rendering services. But if I'm looking at my code and I'm watching, using a debugger, whether it's the dev tools in the browser or something else. Where do I see that rendered code that's being sent? Is there somewhere that you can see that as it's coming in before the view component is mounted and you do any front end hydration?

 

Cody Bontecou:

Oh man, you've stumped me. Excuse me, but yeah, that's... But I hear what you're saying, if you can see that server-side rendered code. And yeah, frankly, I'm unsure. That's probably a better question for somebody like Daniel. Like I said, I've just recently actually started playing with the server-side, like actually managing some of that server-side rendering things.

 

Steve:

Oh, okay, I thought you became instant expert when you started working with it. So I assumed

 

Cody Bontecou:

Yeah,

 

Steve:

you

 

Cody Bontecou:

right?

 

Steve:

could answer

 

Cody Bontecou:

Weird,

 

Steve:

all my

 

Cody Bontecou:

huh?

 

Steve:

detailed questions.

 

Cody Bontecou:

No, primarily my experiences on working on like the front end side of Nuxt, just having all this SSR magic occurring and I could just utilize the benefits. And I think it does a good job at that of abstracting away a lot of those that complex things. And I say abstraction, but really it's just magic. I don't understand it

 

Steve:

Mm-hmm.

 

Cody Bontecou:

fully. it just kind of works, which is really nice for somebody with an entrepreneurial goal. I just want to get this out. But I'm sure it would be nice to have a better understanding of some of these things for debugging reasons. But yeah, save that for Daniel. I'm sure he'll be able to tell you. He seems to know everything about

 

Steve:

Oh

 

Cody Bontecou:

Nuxt.

 

Steve:

yeah, he's way down in the bowels, the nitty gritty,

 

Cody Bontecou:

Yeah.

 

Steve:

you know. Drew is like that too, he's pretty, you know, he just uses it all the time on big stuff so he's really pretty intimate with it well so yeah, we'll pester them.

 

Cody Bontecou:

Yeah.

 

Steve:

So what do you use for your CSS? Use just like vanilla CSS, your own CSS, use something like a tailwind or a bootstrap or a bowler or something, or what's your tool of choice?

 

Cody Bontecou:

Sure. So funnily enough, I guess, really I think, I guess you just reminded me, what got me into Vue was actually Vutify. I'm not sure

 

Steve:

Okay,

 

Cody Bontecou:

if you're

 

Steve:

yeah,

 

Cody Bontecou:

familiar.

 

Steve:

forgot about beautify, of course.

 

Cody Bontecou:

So Vutify is this wonderful material design based framework. that just built out all of these beautiful view components that you can just plug and play, just do like a V sidebar drawer

 

Steve:

Mm-hmm.

 

Cody Bontecou:

or whatever, and all of a sudden

 

Steve:

All right.

 

Cody Bontecou:

you have this wonderful animated view component. And so that's kind of initially what got me into view, but the limitations of something like Vudify is it's very hard to customize, or at least was, I'm not sure where it is these days. And so as I started needing... more customizable UI components, I did end up in using Tailwind. And now that's what I use personally and professionally. I absolutely love it.

 

Steve:

Yeah, it's really interesting in looking over the Twitterverse or social media in general. You can see where, even on Hacker News, you'll see Tailwind stuff come up once in a while. You can understand, Adam's told the whole story about how it came to be and why he created Tailwind and how it works their way. And to me it's... you know, it makes perfect sense, you know, what you're trying to do. But man, you get some people that are just anti-tailwind and they hate it. It's like, for some people it's not enough just to say, now I don't like it, I don't use it. It's like, well, this is why tailwind sucks because it can't do this and this.

 

Cody Bontecou:

Yep.

 

Steve:

And so, it's real interesting. You know, my first full-time Vue developer position, we used Vutify. It was an app that was already built that I took over in Vue

 

Cody Bontecou:

Mm-hmm.

 

Steve:

2 with Vutify 2. So we used Vutify and it... You're right, it really does do a lot for you. You can just drop in a component and put it in and you gotta add your, you know, so it's classes and it's using Flexbox and Grid for you and you just gotta put in the right classes. And, you know, it was a real similar thing. We've had John Leader on a couple times actually to talk about, I think we had him on back in like November, December. We were talking about the state of version three. of

 

Cody Bontecou:

Mm-hmm.

 

Steve:

Vutify and at that point it still wasn't fully fleshed out and I'm not sure where it is right now to be honest. You know in my day to day now we use Bootstrap View just because that was what they chose to use at the time that they were first starting to build the app and it's very similar. It just uses Bootstrap behind the scenes and has classes and does a lot of stuff for you. It's really great. But to your point about being able to tweak things. You know, it's like one of those things that out of the box get to 80% of the way there, but the last 20% you need to do on your own. But with some of those predefined libraries like that, you really can't, you know, it makes it difficult, it takes a lot of work. And I think the idea with Tailwind is that you can do that, you can get like truly headless stuff, and then, you know, just put your own Tailwind classes on top of it. And my app, you know, I just. It's really a data heavy app that I've been, my inertia ViewLarevel project I've been working on. It's member management type of thing. And so there was gonna be a lot of data tables. And I really, really wanted to use Viewtify at the time, but one of the last, it was like one of the last four things that hadn't been done was still really in flux was the data tables stuff. And so I was like, eh. Okay, so I ended up just going with straight tailwind and building my own tables.

 

Cody Bontecou:

Mm-hmm.

 

Steve:

And since then I think they've come a long way. I've sort of checked in now and then. And what I did was I started out with, Inertia has a demo app called, oh my gosh, I can't believe I can't remember, it's hard to remember the P that I just took. Used that as my template and tweaked the hell out of it. and added my own component, ping, that's right, ping CRM is what they call it. And it's really sort of a little basic CRM, but I just took that and modified the SNOT out of it and have gotten really good at building my own data tables. I mean, my own completely custom data tables in terms of layout, in terms of styling, in terms of filtering. That was the biggest thing for data tables for me and my use has always been like filtering and sorting and that kind of stuff. And so... Fortunately, Laravel has a really slick tool called Laravel Query Builder. And what it does between, and you have to do your own coding and your view template in terms of passing the parameters, but once you pass your URL parameters to the Query Builder in your controller, it does it all for you. And then you can customize and create custom filters and stuff like that. So for someone like me who really likes to get close to the metal. when I'm developing and know how things are working instead of having just some black box that I say, here, give me this, and it gives me two without knowing why, it just drives me nuts. This gives me a lot of control over something like that. But the other thing I've really been noticing is that from a Tailwind standpoint, there are a lot, a lot of libraries, Tailwind-based libraries like a Beautify, like a Bootstrap View, that have all these pre-built components that you just plug play. you can drop them in, you know, the full list of all your form elements and buttons and, you know, slide ins and all that kind of stuff that you can, and then you just style them yourself with Tailwind. So a coworker of mine has been a real fan of Daisy UI, which is one example. And I've looked at them and they're really, really pretty cool. Just doing stuff like that. I think Prime View is another one. set of components that you can use tailwind with. In fact, there's a guy named Austin Gill. I don't know if you know who Austin is. He, for a brief while, when he was living in San Diego, he was one of our panelists here with myself and Lindsay. And since then, he's moved up here to Portland. He works

 

Cody Bontecou:

Mm.

 

Steve:

for Akamai now. But the reason that I came across him in the first place was because of his headless components library. and I can't believe I'm, VUETNS, V-U-E-T-N-S-I-L-S, VUETNS. And it was just a little project that he had going where you, here's your base components, your select lists, your inputs, your whatever, and then you could apply the classes. And this is sort of before tailwind and maybe early tailwind, so it wasn't specific for tailwind, but it gives you the whole, quote unquote, headless component is the way I've heard it addressed.

 

Cody Bontecou:

Mm-hmm.

 

Steve:

And then you... put your own styles on top of that. So that's sort of the benefit of the Tailwind side of things. Granted, you have to learn the Tailwind classes and their names and stuff like that. But even Tailwind itself has its own set of tools. You know, there's HeadlessUI. If you go to HeadlessUI.com, they have, it's a set of like, you know, popovers and menus and text fields and stuff like that you can drop in and then. you know, style them as you want. And then there's also hero icons they have, which are SVG icons, JSX or SVG icons that you can either import as a component or just copy the SVG and copy that into your template too. So, yeah, that's been my, say, tool of choice for theming and designing and stuff like that.

 

Cody Bontecou:

Oh yeah. One more to add to the list is, was it tailwind UI? Right? Those, yeah.

 

Steve:

Yeah, I bought that. I bought the lifetime membership that it was like, I don't know, a few years ago, 150 bucks.

 

Cody Bontecou:

Yep.

 

Steve:

And Tailwind UI is awesome. I've used that quite a lot just

 

Cody Bontecou:

e-e-e-e-

 

Steve:

because it's all their pre-built components and they're always coming up with new templates it seems like for different things. Unfortunately, with their templates, the way they're designed for, I wasn't able to find one that fit into my use case, for this data management type portal type thing. But, you know, he's got pages and pages of all the individual components. You know, a list of some type or a header or a hero section or a, you know, he's got a whole section on e-commerce and all the different smaller components that you can just copy paste and drop in. And I've done that plenty of times and just, and then just change the styles as you want. So yeah, that's really awesome too.

 

Cody Bontecou:

Yeah, I enjoy it. And as the author of Headless UI, and hero icons, it kind of blends into these. So you get those dropdown menus and popovers

 

Steve:

Mm-hmm.

 

Cody Bontecou:

and things of that nature. So it works really well. And it accelerates, especially like a startup website. They have those pricing pages and all sorts of

 

Steve:

Right, yeah, all

 

Cody Bontecou:

neat

 

Steve:

the e-commerce

 

Cody Bontecou:

aspects.

 

Steve:

stuff and yeah,

 

Cody Bontecou:

Yeah.

 

Steve:

some of this other cool stuff that's built in there I found useful is the typography and the forms Things so the typography the one place where I found that to be really useful Is the in the pro stuff is in the case where you have a Headless cms on your back end and let's say you have like a text field and so what you get from the back end is all the HTML, right? As compared to strictly the text. And so you can do your formatting on the back end, but then it's really, really hard if you wanna customize some of the HTML and the back end doesn't let you. Like I ran into that with Prismic

 

Cody Bontecou:

Hmm.

 

Steve:

in just in terms of being able to format, but with this pros, this Tailwind Typography plugin. you know, descend payments to all tailwind CSS typography, and then you just add your certain classes to the top of your thing and it will handle all the, you know, you can target specific elements and get really fine grained with, you know, like an H1 inside a P maybe, or some of the steps you can target. Once I got my head around it, I was like, oh, that's how this works, this is cool. And you can do all kinds of different things. So yeah, some of that stuff, it's really awesome. But.

 

Cody Bontecou:

Yeah, that's really neat. I'm looking at that right now. I didn't

 

Steve:

And

 

Cody Bontecou:

even

 

Steve:

you'll

 

Cody Bontecou:

know

 

Steve:

see,

 

Cody Bontecou:

that existed.

 

Steve:

yeah, you'll see, but going back to what I was saying, even with all that, you'll see all these posts on Hacker News or other places, oh, well, Tailwind sucks, because it can't do this and this. I'm like, man, find me the tool that does 100% of what you need out of the box. And you'll be a bazillionaire in no time.

 

Cody Bontecou:

Yeah, yeah,

 

Steve:

You know, right?

 

Cody Bontecou:

you know,

 

Steve:

Everybody

 

Cody Bontecou:

let him

 

Steve:

would

 

Cody Bontecou:

hate.

 

Steve:

be at a path to your door. If you don't want to use it, don't use it. If

 

Cody Bontecou:

Yep.

 

Steve:

you do, great. And... You know, so anyway, enough about me and my tools of choice. So another question, so what do you use, get really detailed tools like your laptop and your mouse and your keyboard and monitor and all that stuff?

 

Cody Bontecou:

man. I wouldn't say I'm a super big hardware guy. Let's see, I'm on a M1 Max MacBook

 

Steve:

Uh huh.

 

Cody Bontecou:

Pro, company sponsored.

 

Steve:

Right.

 

Cody Bontecou:

Only 32 gigs of RAM. I had hoped for 64, but that's fine. And

 

Steve:

Well,

 

Cody Bontecou:

that's

 

Steve:

the

 

Cody Bontecou:

about

 

Steve:

M1s

 

Cody Bontecou:

it.

 

Steve:

you don't need a lot though, man. You don't need near as much

 

Cody Bontecou:

Yeah, but maybe in like

 

Steve:

as

 

Cody Bontecou:

a year

 

Steve:

your Intel

 

Cody Bontecou:

or two

 

Steve:

Macs.

 

Cody Bontecou:

with all our VR rendering and

 

Steve:

Alright.

 

Cody Bontecou:

LLMs, local LLMs, who knows, right?

 

Steve:

Right?

 

Cody Bontecou:

And yeah, that's about it. I just, I'm a track padder. I carry

 

Steve:

One of

 

Cody Bontecou:

around

 

Steve:

those people,

 

Cody Bontecou:

a, yeah,

 

Steve:

huh?

 

Cody Bontecou:

I carry around an iPad if I need a second monitor, but all in all, I'm a very nomadic person, I guess. I travel quite a lot. primarily just for pleasure and

 

Steve:

Uh-huh.

 

Cody Bontecou:

surf. And so my actual work station is very small.

 

Steve:

I want as much real estate as possible for my screens. I'll have to show you a picture of my setup sometime, but I look like a control center.

 

Cody Bontecou:

Yeah.

 

Steve:

I've got my own laptop that I use for my projects and outside of work stuff. It's an older Intel-based Mac. And then I just not too recently got a, or fairly recently got an M2 Mac

 

Cody Bontecou:

Nice.

 

Steve:

for work because that's what they're distributing. And then I've got like a 32 inch monitor and a couple 27s. I used to have four monitors on my desk.

 

Cody Bontecou:

Ha

 

Steve:

I had

 

Cody Bontecou:

ha.

 

Steve:

this big old time oak desk that a friend gave me years ago. You know, it's, I don't know, it's probably six feet wide and three feet deep. And I actually used to fit four monitors on here where I had the whole, I mean, it would literally come out to my side to the edge of the desk and then I'd have two back here and it was like, you know, and then two computers and I've got two keyboards. I was separate for each one and I've gotten that

 

Cody Bontecou:

Yeah

 

Steve:

down pretty good. But this last time I was like, nah, four was too many. So now I just have my laptops on either side, keyboards in front of me, and then front central I have my bigger screen, my 32 inch and then my 27s off to the other side. But then I have a KVM

 

Cody Bontecou:

Oh man.

 

Steve:

switch. So I got a KVM switch in the middle so I can flip my middle monitor between the two computers depending on what I'm doing. So during the day I've got it on my work. computer and then other times I switched over to the other one. So yeah, I just, I was listening to somebody on a podcast the other day, he's a well-known coder and I don't remember who it is, but he's like, yeah, I'm one of those people that I've always just worked on my laptop and keyboard. And that's it. I'm like, I would get claustrophobic doing that.

 

Cody Bontecou:

Yeah, I, you know, everyone has their, I guess a friend slash mentor of mine once told me, cause I, you know, I would always have my ID open with like, you know, I might have multiple, not tabs, but like splitting the pain.

 

Steve:

Mm-hmm.

 

Cody Bontecou:

So I

 

Steve:

Oh

 

Cody Bontecou:

have

 

Steve:

yeah,

 

Cody Bontecou:

like

 

Steve:

I do

 

Cody Bontecou:

multiple

 

Steve:

that.

 

Cody Bontecou:

sections. And

 

Steve:

Yeah.

 

Cody Bontecou:

whereas I looked at him and he just had one function and it was very zoomed in. So all

 

Steve:

Mm-hmm.

 

Cody Bontecou:

he saw was maybe like five or six lines of code. And that blew me away. And his philosophy is, you're not, that's all you're thinking about. And so he really tries to just focus on those individual problems that he's working on. And. and that kind of stuck with me. Whenever I expand my to multiple monitors, those monitors always end up just being distractions. You know, magically a YouTube video appears on one of them or a Twitch stream or something. So I try to stay pretty minimal, but outside of my monitor and hardware setup, I do really enjoy my desk. So I do have an electronic up and down desk that allows me to stand when I need to and I'll get a, I have a mini treadmill. that I'll walk on and I actually have a desk outdoors as well so if I ever need to I just pick up my laptop and walk outside and enjoy the view enjoy the birds maybe look at the surf

 

Steve:

No pun intended.

 

Cody Bontecou:

if I yeah so yeah enjoy the view while writing view so that I guess that's more kind of what I shoot for is just very mobile if I want to work on my couch I can you know I'm not I I also love to just go to coffee shops too. That's a big thing for me. So just creating a workstation that allows that mobility is very important. Yeah.

 

Steve:

Yeah, see, I'm the opposite. I like the split pane thing and I do it quite a bit just because if I'm working on something and I'm referencing something that was done somewhere else, that way I'm not having to have them back and forth or whatever your key is to go look at, I can just look at them side by side

 

Cody Bontecou:

Right.

 

Steve:

and work on them.

 

Cody Bontecou:

This was a backend dev. I definitely still have multiple panes where I,

 

Steve:

Alright.

 

Cody Bontecou:

you know, I might have my CSS file there, where I've been working in React lately. So I'll have a CSS, for whatever reason, they have CSS files instead of single, what are they, single file components, like view.

 

Steve:

Right.

 

Cody Bontecou:

I'm spoiled. So I'll have a CSS file open and the actual, you know, template open. And then on the side, I'll have like the actual webpage that's being rendered. So I definitely. And, you know, I don't just look at one function at a time, but.

 

Steve:

Right. So what do you use for your IDE? Speaking of IDEs.

 

Cody Bontecou:

Oh, I'm a VS Code fan. Yeah, Visual Studio Code, but I've recently heard of something called VS Code-ium, I believe is what it's called.

 

Steve:

Yeah, sounds somewhat familiar.

 

Cody Bontecou:

Yeah, open source binaries of VS Code, and so it's basically VS Code without all of the Microsoft telemetry data.

 

Steve:

Ah,

 

Cody Bontecou:

Basically,

 

Steve:

okay.

 

Cody Bontecou:

it's VS Code without the Microsoft, which... I don't know, I've been thinking about more and more lately, just trying to disconnect the data streams where I can. I haven't quite picked that up, but it's on my radar. The only reason I haven't picked it up is it doesn't have all of the extensions that VS Code does. And so I just kind of have to gauge how much I rely on extensions.

 

Steve:

Well,

 

Cody Bontecou:

So.

 

Steve:

it was interesting enough that you mentioned that I posted an article here and it was about VS Code and how... Oh, here we go. Codium.com. Is that the tool? C-O-D-E-I-U-M?

 

Cody Bontecou:

VS, VSCodium.com.

 

Steve:

Oh, there's

 

Cody Bontecou:

Yes.

 

Steve:

a codium.com.

 

Cody Bontecou:

Okay.

 

Steve:

Anyway, they had an article called, why did Microsoft build VS code? Turns out, GitHub copilot. And so the gist

 

Cody Bontecou:

Right.

 

Steve:

is that they're forcing people to use their own chat or AI plugins instead of allowing open source ones to be used anymore. So yeah, that was sort of interesting.

 

Cody Bontecou:

Yep. Yeah, I just thought that was kind of interesting. And I don't know, I don't, I'm on the fence, but I'm starting to think a little bit more of local first solutions

 

Steve:

Right.

 

Cody Bontecou:

to some of my problems.

 

Steve:

Well, I'm a bad guy because I use PHP storm, but, uh, and have for a long time. That's what that's our IDE of choice for

 

Cody Bontecou:

Yeah.

 

Steve:

work, but I'd been using it ever since Drupal days, cause they had specific Drupal integration and I've tried, uh, I've used VS code, uh, I've, I've tried to use it and it may be that I just haven't put enough time and configuration effort into it, but I know there's some functionalities like in particular searching. and different ways and things you can search in that are much better in PHP Storm than VS Code to my mind and the built-in debugging is the XD bug which I live in with PHP is very easy to get up and going so yeah, there's just a number of things that and some of it could be familiarity, you know as well, but it's got you know tailwind compatibility and all that kind of stuff. So for me, it's been a real good IDE to use.

 

Cody Bontecou:

Yeah, I worked with JetBrains primarily in college. You get a free JetBrains license while you're a student. And

 

Steve:

We're

 

Cody Bontecou:

then,

 

Steve:

a student.

 

Cody Bontecou:

yeah, and then after I graduated, that license expired and post-grad I was still very poor. And so,

 

Steve:

Shocking.

 

Cody Bontecou:

it was just one of those things, trimming the fat, trimming the expenses. So I picked up VS Code and... And I actually fell in love with it. You know, the extensions are all open source. And so there's a wonderful community of extensions that actually found it to be much more extensible and customizable than JetBrains products. So I used the, whatever the Python was, Python one was.

 

Steve:

PYCharm.

 

Cody Bontecou:

Yeah, PyCharm, yep, exactly. And so that, yeah, I enjoyed it, but I fell in love with VS Code and. It's really just key binds in my eyes, you know, whichever one you can better understand the key binding and moving it around. That's what you're going to enjoy more. And so that

 

Steve:

Right.

 

Cody Bontecou:

was the hardest part was relearning the key binds that I enjoyed in PyCharm in VS Code.

 

Steve:

Yeah, they tend to be across their offerings. They can be pretty similar. I need, that's one of the things I really need to focus on. And I keep thinking, okay, I really need to focus on this is learning the key bindings instead of using the mouse a lot. You know, there's certain things that I can do with the keys real quick, but you know, people that use like Vim, you actually know that that's everything is key bindings, right?

 

Cody Bontecou:

Yeah.

 

Steve:

And you know, with VS code, with, PHP Storm or Web Storm or your tool of choice. Most of them are gonna have custom key bindings that you can learn. And if you take the time, you don't have to use their default key map. You can do whatever you want. And if you take the time and get some set up and then learn them and memorize them, pretty soon you can just fly all over. And there's certain things I can do with the keys, but not near as much as I'd like to, but I just haven't taken the time to get a good set of key bindings that I'm familiar with and do them. So that's one of those

 

Cody Bontecou:

Right. Are you familiar

 

Steve:

things.

 

Cody Bontecou:

with the Primogen? The Primogen?

 

Steve:

I know the name, yes.

 

Cody Bontecou:

He's a big

 

Steve:

Oh, he's

 

Cody Bontecou:

Rust,

 

Steve:

the YouTube guy, right?

 

Cody Bontecou:

yeah, YouTube, Twitter,

 

Steve:

Yeah. Uh

 

Cody Bontecou:

kind

 

Steve:

huh.

 

Cody Bontecou:

of tech-influency type guy from Netflix. And

 

Steve:

Yeah, I've heard it mentioned as a real good tech guy.

 

Cody Bontecou:

he's a big Vim. Vim, Vim. influencer and he, watching, he'll live stream and watching how he navigates through his code is incredible and how he edits things it's, it's amazing. And it has made me attempt to learn Vim as well. And it's really difficult to learn because it's just so slow and. and painful at first. And so it's trying to set up a system where I can learn it while not impacting my day-to-day work too heavily is something I haven't figured out yet. But I can see how, you know, you spend a couple months or a year, and if you can eventually get to his level of code speed, it's your performance will go up drastically.

 

Steve:

Oh, I'm sure. Now Vim is something you basically run in your terminal, right?

 

Cody Bontecou:

Well, you can, yeah, but you, I mean, there's extensions, even like VS code extensions.

 

Steve:

Right,

 

Cody Bontecou:

So it's.

 

Steve:

but it's not like a separate Windows application that you would open on a Windows or a Mac desktop, right? You run it in your terminal? Okay.

 

Cody Bontecou:

Right, right. Yes, exactly. But there's like, you know, there's like I term and there's custom terminals that you can run that again with them there's all sorts of open source extensions that allow you to really just build out exactly what you want.

 

Steve:

Mm-hmm.

 

Cody Bontecou:

And visually and functionally, but also like VS code has a Vim extension which just transforms all of your navigation to Vim commands

 

Steve:

Oh,

 

Cody Bontecou:

and

 

Steve:

yeah, I think PHP Storm has a different key map options, default ones, and I think BI or Vim is one of them. They have Mac and there's Windows, and I've seen other ones too. So

 

Cody Bontecou:

Yeah.

 

Steve:

it makes it easier if you're coming from them. They make it easier. So if you're coming from Vim, you can keep your key bindings, but then just have the additional.

 

Cody Bontecou:

Right. Exactly.

 

Steve:

I'm just so used to my IDE and having all of my windows and buttons and all that kind of stuff. But, you know, I know Wes Boss, if you ever watch any of his classes, like on

 

Cody Bontecou:

Yep.

 

Steve:

JavaScript, and he's mentioned this on his podcast as well, that people, you know, a lot of times people are like, oh my gosh, how are you flying around the keyboard? That's just crazy how you're doing that. And some of the stuff he does in VS Code where you type this and this, okay, this will give you 30 divs with this content and it with just a few keystrokes, you know, those little shortcuts and things like that. It's like, damn. But even PHP Storm has, Web Storm has templates, live templates and all kinds of things you can customize the crud out of too, you know, and just type a few letters

 

Cody Bontecou:

Right.

 

Steve:

and this could be a whole template or this would insert this code snippet for you or something like that. It's just, as with anything, it's just a matter of taking the time to sit down and learn them. And I know at some point I'm going to have to do that and I'll probably be saying that five years later.

 

Cody Bontecou:

Yeah, you know, that might be a good future podcast, just kind of talking

 

Steve:

Yeah,

 

Cody Bontecou:

about

 

Steve:

no kidding.

 

Cody Bontecou:

little macros and templates and extensions to boost your performance. Yeah.

 

Steve:

Yeah, yeah, for sure. So, all right, so I know you got a meeting you said you got to go to, so we'll call this the Cody Intro episode.

 

Cody Bontecou:

All right.

 

Steve:

And like I said, we got Daniel Roe coming up. For those listening, if you want to be on the show and you want a path to fame and fortune that happens to everybody that comes on the show, you know, you can ding me at wonder95 or at Views on View on Twitter. And yeah, we're always looking for more people with mad view skills to come on. So with that, we'll move to pics. Pics are the part of this show where we talk about really awesome things like my dad jokes or any number of other. blog post or food or TV show or whatever. I am going to make a pick for a t-shirt. There's a, as everybody knows by now, I'm quite the fan of dad jokes. And so there's this Venn Datagram t-shirt at a place called dadinashirt.com. And it's really cool if you know what a Venn diagram is where you have multiple circles and then you can see where they all come together and have something common in the middle. This one, it's got one circle of dad and one circle of jokes. And then where they come together, it's labeled where the magic happens. So it's really definitely got to get one of those put it on my father's day or Christmas or birthday list for my kids to get me.

 

Cody Bontecou:

Yeah, that sounds like you. That'd

 

Steve:

Yeah, that's me.

 

Cody Bontecou:

work

 

Steve:

All

 

Cody Bontecou:

out.

 

Steve:

right. And then before we get to coding, we'll do the dad jokes of the week.

 

Cody Bontecou:

Yeah, that's here.

 

Steve:

Yes. So oops, got to find my Slack here. So. One thing, you know, I've done a lot of resume, excuse me, job interviews, you know, over the years. And one time I went in and the interviewer told me after looking at my resume, he says, your resume says you take things too literally. And I said, when the heck did my resume learn to talk? Right. So a turtle was crossing the road and it got assaulted by two snails. And when the police asked him what happened, the shaken turtle just said, I don't know. It all happened so fast.

 

Cody Bontecou:

Oh no.

 

Steve:

Right? And then, you know, I have kids, my kids are, two of them are grown, and one's still younger, he's about 12. But, you know, when my kids were really little, I spent a lot of time, money, and effort childproofing my home, you know, with the plugs and all that kind of stuff. But the kids still got in. So those are the dad jokes of the week.

 

Cody Bontecou:

Thank you

 

Steve:

All

 

Cody Bontecou:

Steve.

 

Steve:

right, Cody, what do you got for us for picks?

 

Cody Bontecou:

I guess my pick's a little technical. There's, I don't know if you're familiar with, if you browse Hacker News often, but

 

Steve:

every day.

 

Cody Bontecou:

there's this, every day, yeah same, who needs Reddit when you got Hacker News.

 

Steve:

Right.

 

Cody Bontecou:

So there's this guy, sorry I don't know how to pronounce his name, Shua Wei, and he... figured out how to stream Apple vision OS is simulator onto a meta quest Which I thought

 

Steve:

A MetaQuest.

 

Cody Bontecou:

was really neat other

 

Steve:

MetaQuest,

 

Cody Bontecou:

meta

 

Steve:

is that like a VR headset? Okay. I'm going to go

 

Cody Bontecou:

Exactly

 

Steve:

ahead and turn

 

Cody Bontecou:

the meta

 

Steve:

this off.

 

Cody Bontecou:

quest to you is meta Facebook's consumer grade virtual reality headset. And so

 

Steve:

Yeah.

 

Cody Bontecou:

about two or three weeks ago, Apple released their Vision OS simulator, which is only on the Mac. And so you have to kind of, you know, to get a head start, you start building your apps for the Vision OS locally on your Mac, but in a 2D screen. And so this guy was able to actually figure out a way to send that simulator wirelessly to your meta quest so you can actually simulate virtual reality environment within a physical device. but it's an Apple simulator within the MetaQuest headset, which is, I'm sure Zuckerberg's not too happy about that. But from what I've read, there's not really much they can do about it because you're kind of doing like a remote desktop. There's some sort of remote desktop layer that allows this to happen. But I just thought that was really neat. If you're interested in the Vision OS, you can actually start properly developing apps for it. it'll be much nicer in a proper like virtual reality setting than on your two-dimensional on your screen.

 

Steve:

Yeah, we've got one of our devs here, a guy that I hired about last year, about a year ago. He showed me, he's got a setup and I can't remember what the setup is, but he can code in virtual reality and you can have all kinds of desktops and he showed

 

Cody Bontecou:

Yep.

 

Steve:

it to me, he showed a video on time, it just blew my mind. It's like, oh my gosh, to have all that, all kinds of desks and monitors and it's just crazy. He's also the same guy that, you know, on his Mac, he uses multiple desktops. You know, I have like five desktops that he's flipping back and forth and it makes me dizzy just watching. I'm like, how do you do that? Just use a big screen.

 

Cody Bontecou:

Hahaha

 

Steve:

So he likes that kind of stuff. But yeah, it's crazy. Some of the, you know, first time I'd ever seen coding inside of virtual reality.

 

Cody Bontecou:

Right, and so that's with the MetaQuest, and I've tried that, but the screen. The Pixel, the text is very hard to read with their current screen technology, but supposedly from what I've read is this Apple product, the Apple Vision Pro, this screen is flawless. And it also has the M2 chip. And so it's gonna be just as powerful as your laptop. And just from all the podcasts and articles I've read, they're pretty confident this is gonna be a game-changing. So it's just something I've been interested in trying to get prepared for. Because of that exact reason, right? You know, imagine if you don't need any of these screens or devices. It's just you put your headphones on and you're working and then you take them off and you're back and it can be this kind of... supposedly it's very impactful and a lot of the Apple developers that have worked on it claim it's completely changed their work environment.

 

Steve:

Mm-hmm. Yeah, I'd like to see a video or something like that. That'd

 

Cody Bontecou:

Yeah,

 

Steve:

be cool.

 

Cody Bontecou:

it's all under NDA at this point. So, or

 

Steve:

Sure.

 

Cody Bontecou:

just the content creators saying how amazing it is. But every once in a while, you can find some tidbits out there.

 

Steve:

And I'm sure they're not exaggerating at all.

 

Cody Bontecou:

Well, that's the interesting thing is everybody I've heard, like I have yet to hear one person who's put it on that client that didn't think it was going to change the world.

 

Steve:

Hmm.

 

Cody Bontecou:

And to me, that's kind of interesting. Normally there might be like some people love it. Some people hate it. Some people, whatever. But like every single podcast and article I've read and YouTube, it's just been like this thing is amazing. So we'll just have to wait and see. But

 

Steve:

Alright,

 

Cody Bontecou:

I'm excited.

 

Steve:

cool. I will put a link to that whenever link you provide us in the show notes so you can check it out for yourself. Alrighty, so with that, we will wrap this episode up. Thanks for coming on, Cody. We're looking forward to having you on the old podcast where people don't have to just listen to me. So

 

Cody Bontecou:

Yeah, it's great to be here every Wednesday.

 

Steve:

alright,

 

Cody Bontecou:

I'm excited.

 

Steve:

I will live vicariously through you in Hawaii.

 

Cody Bontecou:

All right.

 

Steve:

So that will wrap it up. Oh, before I forget, first of all. Thank you to the audience for showing up again. And if people want to get a hold of you, Cody, or follow you, or give you money, where's the best places to do that?

 

Cody Bontecou:

Oh, let's see. I have a website, just CodyBonseque.com. And I also have a Twitter at CodyBonseque, just my first and last name.

 

Steve:

And

 

Cody Bontecou:

So

 

Steve:

Bonta

 

Cody Bontecou:

those

 

Steve:

Q is B-O-N-T-E-C-O-U, not just you. I found

 

Cody Bontecou:

are...

 

Steve:

that out this morning. I forgot about that. So,

 

Cody Bontecou:

Exactly.

 

Steve:

all righty. All righty, so with that, we'll wrap it up. Thanks everybody, and we'll talk to you next time on Views on View.

 

Cody Bontecou:

Awesome, take care.