Erik Hanchett is an Engineer at Amazon Web Services. From exploring a new app designed for esports fans to navigating the world of streaming and developer advocacy,  dive deep into the world of technology, coding, and the ever-evolving tech industry. Join Steve, Cody, and Erik to discuss the challenges of transitioning between projects, the rise of developer advocates, measuring the ROI of advocacy efforts, and the value of learning multiple programming languages. 

Steve (00:02.127)

Hello everybody, welcome to another exciting episode of Views on View. I am Steve Edwards, the host with the face for radio and the voice for being a mime, but I'm still your host. With me today, I have my lovely shiny new co-panelist, Mr. Cody Bontacue. How you doing, Cody?

 

Cody Bontecou (00:19.294)

Hey, hey everyone. I'm again, very happy to be here. Love and life. Happy Wednesday.

 

Steve (00:25.803)

Yeah, it's just that terrible weather in Hawaii. You got to feel the pain for Cody. It's just awful.

 

Cody Bontecou (00:29.691)

Yeah, sorry. Someone's gotta do it.

 

Steve (00:33.023)

And also with us, we have our returning occasional guest host panelist, Mr. Eric Hanchette. Everybody knows Eric, how you doing, Eric?

 

Erik @ AWS (00:41.666)

Hey hey, thanks for having me on guys. Appreciate it.

 

Steve (00:44.267)

Always a pleasure to have Eric back. Eric, for those who might be uninitiated, has a long history as a YouTuber, program with Eric on YouTube, and is also now a dev rel at AWS, Amazon. So we have had a couple of episodes in the past where we've gone into detail about some of the stuff he's worked on. So you can go back and listen to those for more detail. We'll put links in the show notes.

 

but we just like to have Eric on because he knows a lot of stuff and a lot of people. And plus we had a guest canceled today at the very, very last minute. So we'd like to have Eric on anyway, so don't take it. We're only having him because guests canceled. We'll take him any day for sure. But yeah, so we're just sort of winging it today considering the last minute cancellation. So before we started recording, we were talking about some of our

 

Erik @ AWS (01:26.99)

I'll take it.

 

Cody Bontecou (01:27.938)

happily.

 

Steve (01:40.687)

development histories and programming histories and languages we like to work with, other than Vue, Vue being the top of the heap, of course, since this is a Vue podcast. But Cody was telling us about, I already forgot, Elixir and Erlang and the uses for that. We do allow for other programming languages and realize that Vue isn't the hammer when everything else is a nail. So we'll diversify our topic a little bit today.

 

Cody Bontecou (02:10.998)

I mean, Vue is definitely a gateway, right? It's what people are interacting with. Yeah, it's what gets us into that client side. Goodness. And in fact, you will use Vue. So yeah, I've been exploring Elixir in some of my free time to build out real-time distributed systems. So I have a personal project that...

 

Steve (02:13.999)

There you go. It's a gateway drug. That's right.

 

Cody Bontecou (02:38.054)

I built out with SuperBase on the backend originally and it interacts with streamers and I'm not going to go into too big of details of the app because it's not really there yet. But when I initially launched it with SuperBase, I hit the, I think it's 1000 concurrent user limit, almost immediately and just like completely broke the app and I realized like that's SuperBase's limit.

 

And when dealing with streamers, you tend to need closer to like 20 to 50,000 concurrent users per streamer in each individual like socket space. And so that either you use like a pre like a other than super bass. There's something called I think it's pusher and uh

 

that costs a lot of money for just like a side project to get it to scale like that. I think you're already enterprise level payment systems. You're paying hundreds of dollars. So I decided to just build it out on my own. Um, and so for those not familiar with Elixir, it is a functional programming language built off of Erlang. Um, and Erlang is a programming language built to solve, I think, like telephone communications. Um,

 

just like highly scalable distributed systems. So anyways, I'm going on a tangent, but it's been very fun, very different from JavaScript. And hopefully I can release this system sooner rather than later.

 

Steve (04:12.131)

So a couple things there. One, let's clarify what SupaBass is. If I remember correctly, SupaBass is like the open source version of Firebase. Is that correct?

 

Cody Bontecou (04:20.887)

Right, that's correct. Yep.

 

Steve (04:22.955)

OK, so is it like, do they have like a SaaS platform where you can use it from there? Do you have to self-host it or both, or how does that work?

 

Cody Bontecou (04:31.538)

Yeah, so both. So they have like a, yeah, they have like a easy to use online SaaS platform. It's very similar. It creates like a very easy to use authentication system. You just like npm install superbase.js and now magically within your Nuxt or Vue application, you have OAuth, you know, superbase.auth and you pass in like Twitch or Google.

 

And it's very easy to integrate with these third party auth platforms. And then it also has all of your easy to use, you can define your database relationships. And it just magically creates a typed API where you can just say like, super base dot and then whatever your table name is, and then dot fetch all, something of that nature.

 

And then yes, there is a self-hosted platform, but I actually haven't explored that too deeply. I just kind of hit limits and realized this probably isn't the solution for me and kind of moved on. But for like very simple or not even very simple, I'm sure it could scale in other areas. I just don't think their focus is on real time.

 

Erik @ AWS (05:48.47)

I will say, Amplify, AWS Amplify, the project I work on right now is compared a lot to SuperBase. And we have very similar things that we offer too. I just have to get a little plug there. Because once you mentioned being able to create like open a library that just in a few lines, create talk to authentication and use like GraphQL or schemas to connect your database, that's exactly what AWS Amplify has too.

 

Cody Bontecou (05:55.254)

Mm-hmm.

 

Cody Bontecou (06:17.426)

Yeah, and honestly, I'm a big fan. You can really kind of avoid a lot of the backend engineering for most like CRUD apps that people actually imagine. And you can just use one of these like off the shelf systems with like a UI to just kind of toggle what you need and you're good to go. So that tends to be where I have been building.

 

for the last couple of years, I try to just avoid as much backend engineering as possible. But that's when you do start hitting limitations is when you have to kind of dig in and build your own solution. At least part of the solution. I have read that one of the solutions is actually just having my own kind of real time server.

 

and still utilizing something like SuperBase or my own REST API that server communicates with my real-time server. But I haven't gotten too deep into that.

 

Erik @ AWS (07:20.758)

Where did you end up hosting the Elixir app?

 

Cody Bontecou (07:24.694)

Oh, it's not even hosted. I'm very much in the hacking phase of just local development. In fact, I'm taking it very slow. I just yesterday went in and got near a hundred percent code coverage on, on um, like kind of the logic that I've built out so far.

 

Erik @ AWS (07:26.582)

Ha ha ha.

 

Cody Bontecou (07:48.222)

And then, you know, I was just playing around with GitHub actions to make sure that code is ran every time I push to GitHub. And then there's actually this like package called XCoveralls that I can then, you know, it generates that code coverage badge and gives you an interface to see all of like the functions that you've tested, things of that nature.

 

Erik @ AWS (08:13.986)

I remember playing around with Elixir years ago. We were talking a little bit offline before we started. And I just remember like wrapping my brain around going from TypeScript, like a type language, like JavaScript, and then going to a completely functional language. Like there's just some paradigms where you're like, oh, now I have to like kind of map through this a certain way. It's like you have to, you have to kind of think differently when you move over to it. Would you say that's true?

 

Cody Bontecou (08:39.15)

Oh, a hundred percent. Uh, it's funny cause I, I've been writing TypeScript for probably two or three years now and prior to that, I was a Python dev and I like genuinely prefer writing TypeScript than Python.

 

even for minor scripts, like just having the ability to like have the autocomplete and just like those errors that occur like hey you know like this value doesn't exist or this is assuming any like it type scripts is wonderful and that is a big issue going into elixir it's kind of like a black box there's a layer of like guessing and

 

Erik @ AWS (09:20.654)

Did you use, I know when I was doing it, and when I was learning it, I think, I can't remember, I was just trying to Google it, there was a command line utility that, that like was a game almost that helped me like learn it. Do you know what I'm talking about?

 

Cody Bontecou (09:33.218)

Oh, interesting. No, no, no. I do. There's a CLI tool. I think it's called IEX. And it's really nice to just kind of hack around and recompile certain modules and run functions on the command line.

 

Erik @ AWS (09:35.002)

Oh, heh.

 

Erik @ AWS (09:40.887)

Mmm.

 

Erik @ AWS (09:49.526)

Now, so there's Elixir 2, which I guess if you're in the Ruby world, you can say that's like Ruby. And then there's... When I use this Phoenix, and that was like the Ruby on Rails equivalent, is that what you're using?

 

Cody Bontecou (09:56.938)

Right.

 

Cody Bontecou (10:01.778)

Yeah, yep, that's kind of what I'm dipping my toes in now is that, yeah, that it, that kind of helps you create your, your HTTP endpoints. Yeah, exactly. But it's something that I haven't quite figured out is like where the real time starts and ends. I don't know if the entire framework is just always real time or if there's

 

Erik @ AWS (10:04.782)

Hmm.

 

Erik @ AWS (10:11.019)

Mm-hmm.

 

Cody Bontecou (10:28.058)

That's kind of where I'm getting to next is basically I've built out like this HTTP like server that I can use. But it doesn't feel like I'm doing anything special. It feels like I just built out my server. And so I feel like I'm missing something. But yeah, so the way that I learned it is there's a guy, his name is Dave Thomas. He's actually one of the authors of

 

Erik @ AWS (10:52.83)

Oh, Wendy's, right? It's a different Dave Thomas. No, it's a different one. He gets that all the time.

 

Steve (10:53.759)

Yeah, so I was gonna say, is the guy that founded Wendy's? Yeah.

 

Cody Bontecou (10:56.57)

Oh, maybe, maybe. Yeah, he, yeah, definitely. Um, but no, Dave, he's the, uh, one of the coauthors of the Pragmatic Programmer, which is a very famous book. And so this course, it's only $30 and it's like 10 hours of amazing content. Honestly, it's very thorough. Um, so that's kind of been my approach so far, but.

 

Steve (11:00.923)

Cody's probably too young to remember that.

 

Erik @ AWS (11:25.57)

Yeah.

 

Cody Bontecou (11:25.786)

Ultimately, this will all be hooked in. Oh yeah, there you go. There's his name.

 

Erik @ AWS (11:29.022)

Yeah, for those of you who are watching our YouTube channel, I'm holding the program at Pragmatic Programmer book. Yeah, he also wrote the Elixir book too, right?

 

Cody Bontecou (11:37.994)

Yep. Exactly. Yeah.

 

Erik @ AWS (11:42.378)

And I know Dave McCord, he created, helped create Phoenix and he has the, a Phoenix book that I hear is pretty good. At least it was a couple of years ago.

 

I think that's his name.

 

Steve (11:55.74)

Did that book rise from the ashes?

 

Erik @ AWS (11:57.43)

Hahaha.

 

Cody Bontecou (11:59.659)

Nice.

 

Steve (12:01.423)

So question for you, quick question. You talked about Erlang, I was gonna say Elixir was a version of Erlang or came from Erlang, what was the relationship there?

 

Erik @ AWS (12:02.182)

Oh, Chris McCord, sorry. My bad, Chris McCord.

 

Cody Bontecou (12:13.774)

It's built on top of air laying.

 

Steve (12:15.535)

built on top of Erlang. So you know how we have Go, and Go goes by Erlang, so can you call it Erlang, just er? Same type of thing, or?

 

Erik @ AWS (12:22.624)

Eh.

 

Steve (12:26.295)

No, okay. Just wondering. People would say, what the heck are you talking about?

 

Cody Bontecou (12:27.178)

You can try it.

 

Erik @ AWS (12:32.147)

No. So, Erlang, as far as, like I was Googling it just right now, it's like, it came out in 1987. It has been around 37 years, and the stable release was the 29th of June, as of this recording, 46 days ago. So it's been around for a long time. So it was ran on old Unix systems.

 

Steve (12:39.454)

Holy cow.

 

Steve (12:55.675)

I was gonna say, like a mainframe type system or something like that.

 

Erik @ AWS (12:56.938)

And that's probably where the history of the PBX phone system came into mind. They literally used it for telephone exchanges back in the late 1980s. It has a long history in the telephony switches industry.

 

Cody Bontecou (13:09.634)

Right.

 

Erik @ AWS (13:23.722)

Elixir kind of was built on top of it. So being like a much more modern take on it But I think you can still drop down to Erlang if you have to but I heard it's a very Not not the easiest language to work with if you're doing like perp pure Erlang It's like going back in time. It's almost like you're doing like Compiling like an old language that isn't around anymore

 

Cody Bontecou (13:42.349)

Yeah

 

Steve (13:51.587)

Yeah, it's what they use. WhatsApp is based on that, or is built with it, right?

 

Cody Bontecou (13:51.722)

Right.

 

Cody Bontecou (13:57.458)

Yeah, I think most, like, pretty much all messaging applications, like Facebook Messenger, Twitch Chat, there's like basically all of these highly scaled real-time systems rely on this language. Which kind of blew my mind. I thought that was like nobody hears about it, but you probably use it daily.

 

Steve (14:23.619)

Is it like a server-based as compared to like say a mainframe system like Cobol or something like that?

 

Cody Bontecou (14:32.242)

now that we're behind, we're before my days. Ha ha ha.

 

Steve (14:36.207)

Yeah, I'm reading Wikipedia here. That's interesting, huh?

 

Erik @ AWS (14:37.878)

It's like a distributed fault tolerant, soft real time, highly available hot swapping type of system. At least Erlang was. It still is.

 

Steve (14:49.731)

Yeah, I was thinking about messaging systems. There's RabbitMQ is one I've heard about, and there's another one, and they're both based on Erling as well. It made sense, you know, if it's designed for, you know, real-time message passing. So yeah, interesting.

 

Erik @ AWS (15:04.515)

Mmm.

 

Cody Bontecou (15:07.006)

Yeah, it is interesting and there's a lot to learn from it. It's very different from any other programming language I've used before. And so it's definitely stretching my brain in terms of how to architect my entire project and what's possible within code.

 

Steve (15:28.055)

I'm assuming it's a compiled language also, right? As compared to like a scripted runtime language, like say PHP or something.

 

Cody Bontecou (15:34.11)

Yep, yep, exactly. Yeah, you do have to recompile, but the Phoenix Live View, which is kind of like their web, their kind of server-side rendered system, does have like, what is it like, what is it, hot module reload, where it just reloads on code change.

 

Steve (15:52.329)

Okay

 

Erik @ AWS (15:52.398)

Thanks for watching!

 

Steve (15:55.735)

Oh, okay, that's nice. So you don't have to change, compile, change, compile, change, compile type thing.

 

Cody Bontecou (16:00.759)

No, no, only when like hacking in the command line will you have to do that.

 

Erik @ AWS (16:06.134)

It has its own package management system too, which is kind of interesting. I think it's called Hex, but you use Mix to use it, right? And so you can, just like NPM, there's a million different packages out there for anything you're trying to do. So you can kind of quickly get up and running.

 

Cody Bontecou (16:15.496)

Yep.

 

Cody Bontecou (16:23.474)

Yep. It actually surprises me how similar it is to, like my code can look very similar to just writing JavaScript functions. But I don't know if that's just because I'm used to writing functions in JavaScript. That's kind of my thinking is there's probably a more functional, a more elixir-like way of writing this code that I haven't figured out how to utilize yet.

 

Erik @ AWS (16:26.709)

is nice.

 

Cody Bontecou (16:55.318)

but otherwise it's very similar.

 

Steve (17:02.676)

So tell me again what this app is that you're building with it You're talking about twitch streaming and hundreds of people for per twitch streamer or what you're trying to do

 

Cody Bontecou (17:05.761)

Yeah

 

Cody Bontecou (17:10.03)

Sure, sure. Yeah, we could talk about it. So it's called costream.app. And so again, there's no real time functionality in it yet. But I enjoy esports. I'm an esports fan. I enjoy League of Legends, World Warcraft, things like that. And so every week, there's like a professional League of Legends match. And what's become popular in that community is

 

There's the official broadcast, which is the League of Legends, you know, on their YouTube channel or their Twitch channel. But people then mute the broadcasters because the official broadcast, they just have like entertainers as broadcasters, which that's all it is. It's entertainment, but it's not very insightful. And so, and then what you do is then you create a second tab and that is just the stream of a pro.

 

whether it's like a current pro or previous pro and you have their volume on. And then there's like this timing aspects where you connect the in-game time of the official broadcast with this professional streamers broadcast. And then basically you're watching the broadcast with the professional commentating. And so it just creates like, in my opinion, a much better viewer experience.

 

And so this app, CoStream, is just making that a nicer interface. But the reason I want real time is to now give the streamers the ability to draw on the screen so all of the viewers can see it or rewind and pause the video for everyone who's viewing. And so...

 

Yeah, so if you're on like, so yeah, so let me know if you have any questions about that or need clarification.

 

Erik @ AWS (19:03.054)

Wow.

 

Steve (19:08.411)

So sort of like the John Madden Telestrator, right? Where you can be over there drawing on the TV and check this guy, he's got the awesome hair over there.

 

Erik @ AWS (19:11.85)

Hahaha.

 

Cody Bontecou (19:12.75)

Right. Exactly.

 

No, no, it's exactly that. But with anyone, anyone can tap into that.

 

Erik @ AWS (19:23.554)

So if you're a streamer and so this would be like you're a streamer and you're watching a stream of somebody playing League of Legends and there's an announcer and you want to be able to switch back between the announcer stream and the person you're watching stream. Is that what I'm hearing?

 

Cody Bontecou (19:42.418)

Right, right. And so, yeah, exactly. So you basically mute or lower the volume of the official stream and just listen to the mainstreamer. Yep.

 

Erik @ AWS (19:52.842)

This happened the other day. So I like to watch Twitch. And I'm, so I'm, I don't have enough time to play games anymore. Because, you know, I got two kids running around, I got, you know, traveling and all, everything. But I do like watching other people play games. Especially competitive games, like I watch a little bit of League of Legends. My kids like Fortnite, so sometimes I watch Fortnite and see the Fortnite guys play. And I watch these like professional streamers that...

 

Steve (20:02.335)

Alright.

 

Cody Bontecou (20:07.068)

Yep.

 

Cody Bontecou (20:16.863)

Nice.

 

Erik @ AWS (20:21.39)

professionals that are in like grand finals and I do see sometimes where I'll watch one of my favorite streamers and they'll be watching another stream on their stream so they'll do reaction content to that stream. I guess it's kind of hard to describe but sometimes they'll go back to the like the official announcement because like Fortnite has like these official

 

Cody Bontecou (20:37.122)

Mm-hmm.

 

Erik @ AWS (20:51.182)

tournament will also be streaming. So then they'll switch to that person's stream and watch them for like 10 minutes and then they'll switch back to the official stream. And it's always kind of maybe a little bit of an awkward transition. So yeah, maybe having something to like combine those two or yeah, I could see there's some use definitely from some of these larger streamers that do things like this.

 

Cody Bontecou (21:10.962)

Yeah. There is. And that's kind of where I hit this limitation was I was starting to get...

 

Erik @ AWS (21:16.174)

Thanks for watching!

 

Cody Bontecou (21:20.19)

Like literally like tens of thousands of users. And so when I like, I like soft launched this feature and just had one streamer, I don't know if you know Doublelift, but he's a, he's a very popular League of Legends streamer and pro. And, um, so he like reached out and it's like, Hey, I want to use this feature. And so I turned it on for him and I just like immediately started running into errors and so I talked to the super base guys and they're like, Oh yeah, like. We don't, sorry, we don't support that.

 

Because most real-time systems are just like chat rooms or like chat support, just a one-on-one type of environment. It's rare when you need like a one to 20,000. And so I understand why they don't support that.

 

Erik @ AWS (22:03.863)

Yeah, that's pretty cool.

 

Steve (22:04.095)

So what does that mean for your app then, that you gotta switch out Super Bass for something else?

 

Cody Bontecou (22:08.53)

Yeah, exactly. That's what I've been working on slowly but surely. Originally, I was just like, well, I guess I'm just not going to do this feature. But then it's just like intellectually enjoyable. Like it's just a fun thing to build, I guess, and explore.

 

Erik @ AWS (22:26.19)

What's the website for it? What's the plug for it? Do you have like a website for the future?

 

Cody Bontecou (22:29.946)

the, for the, yeah, I mean, it's very crude, costream.app. So it's, again, it's very niche. And so you're not really gonna see much on the landing page because what happens is the streamers build out their own URL and then they share it on their stream. So it's just kind of like, basically here, build your stream and then it will kind of generate what you need and then they'll share it for their particular like,

 

thing that they're co-streaming, basically.

 

Steve (23:01.167)

So they're streaming from Twitch also.

 

Cody Bontecou (23:04.562)

Yep, Twitch and eventually I want to do YouTube and like I think Korea uses AfreecaTV. Yeah, exactly. So you're basically, you're viewing two streams, hopefully someday more than two. If you, cause some of the co-streamers do it together. And so if you could watch like both of their faces or yeah, things of that nature.

 

Steve (23:27.675)

So this is sort of like the Manning cast on ESPN, right? From Monday Night Football, where you got the game going on and then somebody else over talking sort of over the top of your main broadcast.

 

Cody Bontecou (23:37.33)

Yeah, I mean, I imagine with like NFL, you know, imagine if you're watching the Super Bowl and instead of hearing the broadcasters, you're like tuned into Tom Brady sitting on his couch and he's just like talking about, or you have multiple players talking and you have like the NFL's per sorry, the quarterback's perspective or the kicker's perspective, whatever, whatever you want. And you can kind of tap into these viewpoints as, as you

 

Steve (24:03.043)

Yeah, that's sort of what ESPN and other people are trying to do. Because if you watch any big game, you'll see four or five different channels of, here's a group of coaches sitting around talking about the game. And here's a couple other people and then here's the main broadcast and stuff. So what you're basically trying to do, if I'm understanding you correctly, then is instead of having predefined channels of this and this and this, the user can sort of pick and choose, okay, I want to listen to this guy and I want to listen to this guy all while looking at the same.

 

Cody Bontecou (24:13.466)

Yep.

 

Erik @ AWS (24:15.502)

Hmm.

 

Cody Bontecou (24:16.795)

And yeah.

 

Cody Bontecou (24:25.745)

Mm-hmm.

 

Steve (24:31.712)

main broadcast.

 

Cody Bontecou (24:32.094)

Right, right, because you can't host your own, you know, like I can't show the main broadcast on my site and like users can't stream their main broadcast. And so it's kind of like this area where, you know, I can watch the main broadcast, I just can't watch it with your face on it. And so, so we've just kind of like mutually agreed that we're gonna watch the broadcast at the same time and I'm watching.

 

the official broadcast just with your voice. Yeah.

 

Erik @ AWS (25:06.934)

very interesting. I like this whole like streaming space in general, like just kind of fascinates me. I've been getting more and more into it because I'm being a developer advocate. I'm trying to get content out everywhere from like YouTube and streaming. And I, the other day I tried streaming on Twitter, Twitter now X, I guess, um, which was actually a lot easier than I thought. I just had to like, I'm using StreamYard and so I just had to like put in a key. I'm like, Hmm, I wonder if I want to like start

 

Cody Bontecou (25:11.746)

Mm-hmm.

 

Cody Bontecou (25:18.559)

Yes.

 

Cody Bontecou (25:33.601)

Mm-hmm.

 

Erik @ AWS (25:35.57)

streaming on Twitter. I don't have like a huge audience on Twitter by the way if you guys want to follow me EricCH but I don't have a huge following but I was thinking like well this is kind of interesting thing and there's always like you listen to these streamers too and they everybody has like hacked setups some people are using OBS like this broadcast software and then they have a bunch of plugins that they use to like make their screen perfect and

 

They use these overlays to make it look like it's a game system and then they have their chat playing on the right hand side. These are all just like plugins. If you're a developer and you want to have fun online, start getting into the OBS because there's so many like, even if you don't like live streaming, there's so many like plugins and ways to do video and you can really have this very unique setup. I watch a couple of streamers, software developers who stream.

 

Steve (26:29.325)

Yeah.

 

Cody Bontecou (26:29.926)

Yep.

 

Erik @ AWS (26:31.251)

Uh, man, that guy's blown up in the last few years. Uh, if you don't know, he does like this. He's a big Rust guy and Vim guy and he just, he's really funny, entertaining on camera and he does a Twitch stream, I think almost every other day now. I think he's, he's does a lot of them, but he has some crazy setup where he has things are like alerts are popping up on the screen and then disappearing and then he'll watch a video, a YouTube video and he'll react to it.

 

Steve (26:45.691)

Mmm.

 

Erik @ AWS (26:59.746)

Definitely interesting, if you're a good developer and you're good on camera, there's a lot of possibilities of things you can do, especially if you start deep diving into all the plugins and things like that. If you don't like any of that, then there's other software like StreamYard that makes it much easier to just press a few buttons in your live, but you can't do as much of those custom things.

 

Cody Bontecou (27:22.814)

Yeah, no, it's, honestly, it's fascinating to watch like Primogen and Theo, some of these more in trash, I guess they're just like a very, like while they're technical, they're incredibly entertaining too. Like they've somehow fused memes and programming. It's...

 

Erik @ AWS (27:41.167)

Yeah, it's definitely a little bit of a two, like it's more entertaining a lot of times, especially when you watch some of these guys, rather than learning. So you kind of have to take it like, and it has a little bit of like commentary that, you know, some people may like, some people don't like, like some very strong opinions on things. But if you like that type of programming, it's a great way to go. I like to watch it sometimes just to see like, what's the hot topics that people are talking about and chatting about.

 

Cody Bontecou (27:48.616)

Mm-hmm.

 

Erik @ AWS (28:10.09)

Yeah, and there's three or four of these big streamers that just kind of raised up in the last few years. Melky is one of them too. He actually works at Twitch, which is their parent company's, is Amazon.

 

Cody Bontecou (28:16.971)

Mm-hmm.

 

Cody Bontecou (28:24.018)

Oh yeah. Yeah. That's I, um, I was actually just listening to a West boss, uh, podcast yesterday. Uh, he does a interview with Indie hackers. And so they, they kind of just explored, you know, the business side of his course creation. And, um, one of the things is that he, that kind of stuck with me is he is very, uh, reactionary. And so he,

 

Erik @ AWS (28:29.601)

Mmm.

 

Erik @ AWS (28:34.21)

Mmm.

 

Cody Bontecou (28:49.274)

Wes doesn't feel the need to kind of pave the way for like future technology. He just kind of sees what's taught and builds courses around it, writes blogs, explores. And so I've noticed that especially on Twitter, lately, a lot of people are talking about HTML X, which I think is kind of like a Python in the browser. I haven't explored it too much. Um, but I.

 

It's interesting to see you see it on Twitter very often just like oh, what's hot this week and you know It's just like oh rust go HTML X. What's what's next? And so I can see you know, there is a never-ending stream of like content creation opportunities there

 

Erik @ AWS (29:35.73)

It's yeah, there's, there's a couple of different, there's the content creators that kind of do teaching like education content, like I do. And then there's the content creators that kind of go for this more, uh, reactionary type field away more, maybe sometimes entertainment, sometimes some hot takes and you kind of get that type and those are fun to watch too. And so, yeah, you get a whole bunch, but it's, it is kind of ex to

 

not to bring this down, but it is a little exhausting to kind of go through the newest trend every week. I don't know if our listeners can relate. So if you start going into Twitter, I'm just gonna call it Twitter and not X, but everybody knows what I'm talking about. If you go through Twitter, every week you're seeing a new trend pop up of something crazy happening in the ecosystem like HTMX or maybe SuperBase comes trending or...

 

Cody Bontecou (30:13.779)

Yeah.

 

Erik @ AWS (30:29.566)

or some of these other technologies. Next 13 with the app router seems like it's been pretty trendy to talk about and people's either likes or dislikes of it. AI of course has been big since the beginning of the year and all the different tech. Now that's gone, AI is beginning so big, like there's influence or tech Twitter people that that's all they talk about right now. And so if you subscribe, if you follow them, you can hear that, but.

 

Cody Bontecou (30:43.147)

Mm-hmm.

 

Erik @ AWS (30:58.034)

It does get a little exhausting because it feels like things are just changing so fast and opinions are changing and everybody has an opinion. And then some guy will come in with some hot take that that's like almost borderline. Like it could probably may be offensive to some people. And then you get like these geek wars, like one side doesn't like the other. And yeah, it's a little exhausting. I've been definitely trying to on Twitter to mute people and not that I don't like them. It's just like, I don't want to hear some of these topics and, and just kind of core.

 

Cody Bontecou (31:16.215)

Thanks for watching!

 

Erik @ AWS (31:28.142)

coordinate my in threads too, if you've moved over to threads, you can do the same thing. Just to kind of get the people, not at Echo Chamber, but like diverse ideas, but people that aren't kind of being on that side of crazy content.

 

Cody Bontecou (31:43.046)

Yeah, 100%. That's is like kind of something I experienced within the last year or two is like the transition between Nuxt 2 and Nuxt 3 was kind of difficult for me. Just this idea of like, oh, I've like gotten very comfortable with Nuxt 2, but Nuxt 3 just broke everything, at least in my mind. So now's a perfect time to learn next and react.

 

You know, that's where all the jobs are. Let's go explore that. Excuse me, but the more I like learn next, I just realized I could, it's just solving the exact same problem. And so I wasn't trying to learn and create, I was just trying to solve the same problem a second time or a third time. And that I realized was exhausting. And so that was kind of when I just doubled down on Nuxt and learned Nuxt 3 and I was like, oh wow, this is actually, this is beautiful. I really enjoy Nuxt 3 now.

 

But I've, and I experienced that even at work. I work at an agency. So we hop between projects pretty often. And so, you know, one projects we're doing database queries and postgres. And then next project we're using some sort of ORM and then the next project, it's a different ORM and it's like, man, we're solving the exact same problem, but I have to just like learn the syntax over and over again. And that's, that's not, that's probably.

 

Erik @ AWS (33:03.362)

Yeah.

 

Cody Bontecou (33:08.446)

The most exhausting part, I think, is like, we're not, I'm not spending my time solving problems. I'm spending my time learning how to solve the problem a different way. Not necessarily better, just different.

 

Erik @ AWS (33:21.398)

Hmm Yeah, for sure That yeah, once you learn one language Program language framework, it's easy to move to another. I just did a video on this recently about You mentioned about where all the jobs are at. I've seen this I don't know if this is a new trend that's been popping up or just I've been noticing more lately. It's like

 

Cody Bontecou (33:37.227)

Mm-hmm.

 

Erik @ AWS (33:42.274)

X technology, there's no jobs in X technology. Like there was a big Twitter thread like Flutter, there's no jobs for Flutter. And some guys like, I've been looking at it. And then every now and then you can see Vue.js, there's nobody hiring for Vue.js developers. And everybody's going to react. And I just feel like this theme comes up over and over again. And I always say like, there's Flutter jobs out there. There's Angular 2 jobs. There's Vue 3 jobs and Vue 2 jobs. It's just.

 

It's really dependent on where you're at, what location you're at, how far you're looking to go either locally if you're looking for remote. There's definitely jobs out there. And maybe some places, and there is, there are definitely more React jobs out there, that's true. But we all agree with that. But you can find your own niche out there. You can find, if you look hard, you can find these other jobs. And if you are a Vue developer, it's so easy to transfer that knowledge over to React.

 

to get a React job, even if you haven't had a ton of React experience. If you know how to create good architected view apps, you know, understand how component design works. You can learn hooks and you can learn a lot of these other things and jump into those other languages and frameworks.

 

Cody Bontecou (34:54.762)

Yeah, yeah, no, I think that's the key really is just learn and explore in the environment you're most familiar with and enjoy the most. And I do think it's much more valuable to get it like a deep, deep understanding of something like viewer Nuxt, then like a very shallow view of both view Nuxt, next and react, right? Cause it, once you get into these deeper areas of these frameworks, it's super, super easy to transition them. It.

 

Erik @ AWS (35:14.985)

Mm.

 

Cody Bontecou (35:22.738)

It's just that, that syntax change. It's like, oh, this is how do I solve this problem? But in this language, you know, and it's, that's a chat GPT will hold your hand the whole way for that one. Yep.

 

Erik @ AWS (35:32.854)

Oh yeah, definitely use that. One thing I did too when I started doing a lot more React work at AWS is I had amazing code reviewers that knew React since 2014 or whatever and they knew it inside and out and they had really great in-depth code reviews. So as someone that primarily worked on Vue and Angular before I worked at AWS, I joined AWS about three years ago.

 

Cody Bontecou (35:45.058)

Mm-hmm.

 

Erik @ AWS (36:00.886)

that it was great having those reviewers come on and be like, hey, by the way, there's a better way to do this, and giving me some feedback. One thing I always like naming, like different types of naming conventions is always hard in software development. Having really great reviewers helped on that, long as you're in a good team.

 

Cody Bontecou (36:22.014)

Nice.

 

Erik @ AWS (36:22.134)

So even if you are able to move over one language to another, just having good code reviews is great.

 

Steve (36:27.383)

Yeah, just as a reminder, remember that the two hardest things in computer programming are cache and validation, naming things and off by winners.

 

Erik @ AWS (36:34.378)

Yeah. Classic, classic joke. Sorry. We're kind of like straying away from your, uh, from your app, Cody. But I thought it'd be good conversation.

 

Cody Bontecou (36:43.906)

Oh no no, that's... this isn't... we're not here to talk about my app. It's all good. Yeah.

 

Erik @ AWS (36:47.054)

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

 

Steve (36:50.031)

That was just sort of the launch pad. So just out of curiosity, Cody, since we are Vue, we'll throw this in a little bit. What's on your Co-Share app? What's your front end? What's the stuff that you see? Is that coming from Elixir as well? Oh, it's Next? OK. So Vue Next.

 

Erik @ AWS (36:52.295)

Yeah.

 

Cody Bontecou (37:06.278)

It's Nuxt. That's Nuxt. Yep. Nuxt 3, so I kind of built this as a way to learn Nuxt 3. And so it's using Nuxt 3, and the whole thing is in the composition API, TypeScript, script setup. It was more of like an exploration, and then it just kind of got popular. And so now I'm just like, oh.

 

No, no, the front end is kind of set. Like there's not really much more to do in the front end outside of just like maybe educational content of like, here's how you use it. Um, but I, I mean, the majority of people that I kind of like advertised it to, um, they, they know how to use it, but I'm sure there's always more you can do there. Um, but yeah.

 

Erik @ AWS (38:01.09)

Did you use... Oh, sorry, did you use server island components?

 

Cody Bontecou (38:07.482)

No, this is no, I didn't. But we did just talk to Daniel last week and I'm a hundred percent going to look at that moving forward because the site's mainly static. There's not much. Um, I think it would be a good use case for it.

 

Erik @ AWS (38:26.218)

I did a video on it this weekend. I don't wanna keep saying I did videos on it, but I did a video on it and I had some lot of little issues with it. And the video did really well. It has like, I don't know, 10 to 15,000 views. So a lot of people are interested in it, but I had like a lot of little issues. I wish I needed to talk to Daniel and figure out what I was doing wrong in a couple of those places. Feels like it's a little, it's great, but I think it's still very, very beta. I think it needs some work compared to what I've seen on.

 

Cody Bontecou (38:34.05)

Mm-hmm.

 

Erik @ AWS (38:54.262)

like React server components I think are farther, Next server components are farther along.

 

Cody Bontecou (38:59.826)

Yep. Yeah. And it was really interesting to talk to Daniel about it because he cleared up a lot of like why, when, when and why you should use it. Cause that's kind of the perspective I'm getting from like Twitter and the react side is like, Oh, you can always use it. Um, but, but that from Daniel's perspective, that that's definitely not the case. There there's very much like a clear use case for these tools and it's not just everything. Um,

 

Erik @ AWS (39:29.602)

Hmm.

 

Cody Bontecou (39:30.874)

And so that's, I do find that interesting and I'm curious how much of it has to do with like Next and like Vercell's relationship. But now we're just getting into the weeds there. But I see, is this your look at server components and server actions video? Cool, I'll definitely check that out. That's, yeah, that sounds awesome. Cause this is, that is like.

 

Erik @ AWS (39:46.154)

Yeah.

 

Erik @ AWS (39:52.77)

Mm-hmm.

 

Cody Bontecou (39:55.318)

the next frontier, I actually just applied for a talk to Vucomf Toronto about Nuxt server components so hopefully that gets accepted. But I would love to dive deeper into that.

 

Erik @ AWS (40:00.351)

Hmm

 

Erik @ AWS (40:08.798)

Yeah, I submitted a CFP to Toronto too, we'll see. Maybe I'll see you there, we'll see. Yeah, I've never been to Toronto. That's, I was at ViewConf earlier this year. I try to make ViewConf every year. Every year I'm like, Steve, are you gonna be at ViewConf? And every year he says no. One day he will come, I think, right?

 

Cody Bontecou (40:13.862)

Oh, that'd be wonderful. Yeah, I would love that.

 

Cody Bontecou (40:24.745)

Yeah.

 

Steve (40:26.728)

I will, I promise I will be there. I will be there at some point.

 

Cody Bontecou (40:28.992)

It's... Yeah.

 

Erik @ AWS (40:31.792)

But yeah, I made it. It was super fun. But I've never been to the Toronto one. Yeah, I want to see what that's all about. I got my passport ready. I'm ready to go.

 

Cody Bontecou (40:40.622)

Yeah, that's so that's actually the only view conference I've been to is view conf Toronto in 2019. So right before COVID started happening. And at the time, I was a very new view dev maybe like one ish years of experience, maybe a little more than one year. And most of the talks went over my head at the time, but I'm still

 

like reflecting on that conference to this day and applying a lot of the techniques or rewatching the talks or using the tools that were mentioned four years ago. And it's just very valuable and it's interesting to just be exposed to these ideas and it's like oh that's how you can do this. highly recommend it. I want to say it was 2019. In in Toronto.

 

Erik @ AWS (41:16.543)

Hmm.

 

Erik @ AWS (41:26.975)

Yeah, so what year did you go?

 

Erik @ AWS (41:31.93)

Ah, okay.

 

Cody Bontecou (41:34.671)

Yeah, it was.

 

Erik @ AWS (41:36.403)

Does your work give you, I know some jobs give you one or two conference tickets where they'll pay for the conference and they'll either pay for your travel or pay for some of your travel. Does your work allow you to do some of that or they only allow you to do if you're speaking there?

 

Cody Bontecou (41:47.79)

Mm-hmm.

 

Cody Bontecou (41:53.626)

You know, that's a good question. Um, they, they're, oh no, I'm happy to talk about it. Um, so, so yes and no, they, um, they kind of make me jump through hoops. Um, I like, you know, it's like, Hey, if you ever want to go to a conference, uh, we'll pay for it if you're talking. It's like, okay, great. So I just got to talk, accept it. I'm going to be going to Spain next month to talk about, um, actually iOS stuff.

 

Erik @ AWS (41:56.363)

If you can't talk about it, it's okay.

 

Erik @ AWS (42:20.41)

Wow, that's awesome.

 

Cody Bontecou (42:24.966)

And then so it's like I reach out and it's like, oh, because it's not in North America, we can't pay for it. And it's like, oh, man, okay, well, so I'm paying for that one. I'm paying for the plane ticket out of out of pocket, but the conference is covering the rest, which is really nice. And then so we'll see what happens with Toronto if I get accepted. Is that close enough?

 

Erik @ AWS (42:32.563)

and

 

Erik @ AWS (42:47.235)

I've talked to, I've talked to so many people, like as I've been traveling around to more conferences that are in the same space where you were. I talked to one guy, um, I don't know if I should say his name, but amazing developer, but he pays his way for every conference he goes to. He lots, a lot of conferences he applies to are smaller and they can't pay for the travel, but a lot of times they'll pay just for the ticket or maybe they'll give them lodging, but he's paid out of pocket.

 

Cody Bontecou (43:00.255)

Mm-hmm.

 

Cody Bontecou (43:12.054)

Mm-hmm.

 

Erik @ AWS (43:13.058)

for all these conferences he goes to. And it's like a commitment. He has to take time off for work. Sometimes his work will give him time off, sometimes they won't. But I'm always like, man, I don't know if I could do that if my work wasn't on board or had make me pay for these big trips by myself. I mean, Europe, or where do you say Argentina? Where was that, Cody? Spain. Spain I get, that'd be amazing. I'd probably pay myself to travel to there.

 

Cody Bontecou (43:33.94)

Spain. Spain, yep, Europe.

 

Cody Bontecou (43:39.046)

Yeah, wife's coming along. We're gonna make a trip out of it. So yeah.

 

Erik @ AWS (43:42.114)

Oh, so that's even better, yeah. But if it was like normal trips going from the west coast to east coast, east coast to west coast, and paying that out of pocket, I wouldn't do it.

 

Cody Bontecou (43:52.574)

And yeah, no, I agree. And I just read of somebody who recently put something on Twitter saying something along the same lines. It's like, you know, I originally just wanted to do like three conferences a year, but this year I'm doing nine and all of it's out of pocket and like, um, but hey, if anyone needs a dev advocate, like I'm looking for a job, um, was kind of the gist of it and.

 

Erik @ AWS (44:06.966)

Ha ha ha!

 

Steve (44:15.863)

Maybe he's getting some NIL money, you know, name it as likeness money, like college sports. Maybe that's how he's able to do it.

 

Cody Bontecou (44:22.626)

Yeah, I mean there's definitely a lot of value in getting your face out there and you know if that's kind of your goal or you know the kind of the whole personal brand thing but I you really have to capitalize on that I think and like that's a lot of money going to nine conferences out of pocket. That's a lot of money and time so I'm fortunate. Go ahead. Sorry.

 

Steve (44:39.076)

Yeah.

 

Cheers.

 

Erik @ AWS (44:43.502)

that yeah, that this go ahead. Sorry, with delay in the, I was gonna say that the developer talking about, he, he posted it publicly. It's JD Hillen. He's amazing developer guy. And he also has, uh, he was at view conf. Uh, he did a talk there. Um, so anybody's looking, I think he mentioned he's, he, he loved to do developer advocacy. Um, but yeah, he spent a lot of money out of pocket to travel to a lot of conferences.

 

Cody Bontecou (45:10.91)

Yeah, so I'm actually curious, you are a developer advocate and I'm curious, is that part of your job description? Like is the expectation that you go to conferences? And I imagine they pay for all of that as well.

 

Erik @ AWS (45:26.994)

Yeah, yeah, I'm lucky enough to be at a company where the developer advocates kind of get to choose what they want to do. So some developer advocates get to, they just love creating content. So they'll create lots of blog posts and lots of videos. Some developer con developer advocates really like the testing part and like giving feedback back to product. So they might be doing that. And then some other developer advocates like travel.

 

Cody Bontecou (45:36.394)

Nice.

 

Erik @ AWS (45:56.406)

So I like travel, so I don't like to do it every week, but occasionally, once every month or two, every few months. So that's the way I like to go and to travel around and talk to developers and do talking meetups. And usually my qualifications to go into a conference is I have to either be, we have to be sponsoring the conference or I have a speaking spot, or usually the two things that I have to have. One,

 

Cody Bontecou (46:23.349)

Mm-hmm.

 

Erik @ AWS (46:25.886)

or the other to be able for me to go to a conference. The kind of the days of me just going to a conference for fun is not happening anymore, just because like it's kind of my job to go to conferences because I, well, that's what I choose what I like to do. So, but if I'm speaking at one or I'm a, we're sponsoring it, then I'll go to it. Now that's kind of how it works. And a lot of, a lot of developer companies are, they have budgets. So they have a budget of how many times

 

or they have a developer advocacy group in their org and they have a budget of how many places they go to and they have rubrics and they create spreadsheets of like how many people are gonna be at the conference versus how many people they're gonna reach. AWS, at least in my department, isn't as specific as that. So we just kind of make judgment calls when we get invited to conferences or we get accepted, our CFPs get accepted. It's a pretty fun, it's a fun job. If you like...

 

Cody Bontecou (47:19.294)

Nice.

 

Erik @ AWS (47:22.53)

personal branding, you like doing podcasts like this, you like talking to other developers. It's not a bad gig. Some people do get confused. Some people think developer advocates are marketing, but not really marketing. Some people think developer advocates don't have technical skills. Like 99% of developer advocates I've worked with you had a career in software development before they moved to developer advocacy. There are some like...

 

right out of college or some newer developers who just moved into developer advocacy right away. But I think most of us have had several years software development experience before we moved over. But it's a fun job. I like it.

 

Cody Bontecou (48:05.266)

I mean, it sounds perfect.

 

Erik @ AWS (48:05.766)

I could talk about it all, I could talk about it for another hour. But of course, we're about 50 minutes in, so.

 

Cody Bontecou (48:08.523)

Yeah

 

Yeah, yeah. Maybe, maybe for another show or I'll DM you with more questions. Cause I am curious about the developer advocate lifestyle. That sounds fun.

 

Erik @ AWS (48:16.535)

Yeah.

 

Steve (48:23.767)

It's the jet-setting lifestyle that everybody wants.

 

Erik @ AWS (48:27.443)

I've talked to engineers though that say, I tell them like I go to conferences, I make content and I talk to people who go to podcasts and they're like, I would hate that. I would not want to ever do anything like that. Put me in front of a cubicle. Let me just sit there and put me in front of my computer and solve interesting problems. And you're right. Like it's not for everyone. It's definitely a different kind of mindset and skill shift. And I'd like to keep. And it's also.

 

Cody Bontecou (48:36.171)

Yep.

 

Steve (48:36.67)

Hahaha.

 

Erik @ AWS (48:55.498)

Yeah, just different parts of skills to do it. I try to keep up with my programming skills by always being a part of the community, creating cool demos. I also work for a company has a lot of open source projects where I can still push code if I want to. So that, that helps me like keep, keep my skills up while doing this job.

 

Steve (49:13.007)

Yeah, that's my thing. I mean, I like the, you know, I've spoken at conferences a few times and it's fun to do. It's, you know, when it comes to training or conference speaking or stuff like that, whether it's here or the fire service or any other place where I spend time, for me, it's more of a, hey, I learned something cool. I want to share it as compared to just being a speaker and I got to find something to talk about if you know what I mean. So I'll go speak or train when I have something that I've learned that I think would be beneficial for other people.

 

but just to be constantly speaking because you have to speak, that's a different story. And then Eric, to your point about keeping your skills up, I know the draw for me a lot of times is, I'll see something, an app that could be used to fill a need, and my first thought is, okay, how would I start to do that? I write it with this, and I could use this and this, and then I wanna sit down and write it. That's my main thing as compared to, hey, I wanna talk about somebody else writing. I wanna be the one doing the writing. So.

 

Erik @ AWS (50:11.242)

Yeah, that's it.

 

Steve (50:12.367)

So for me, an ideal job, I think, would be maybe like a 50-50, you know, where I can code half the time and then be out speaking or coordinating with people half the time.

 

Erik @ AWS (50:23.058)

I've heard of some DAs that do that, that have like hybrid roles, that they're still like software engineers day to day, but they've gotten some sort of permission from their management where they can sort of be like a part-time developer advocate. And so they can go out and do the conferences and get those paid for and not have to worry about paying all their way because they're promoting the company. So that might be the best of like both worlds if you really want to do it. Although, you know, I could see that being a little stressful because now you're still having your own deadlines and.

 

sprint tasks that you need to do, but now you have to worry about creating a conference talk and working on your public speaking skills and submitting CFPs. They're kind of two completely different types of jobs. I was worried about that too when I moved over to being a DA. Can I still keep up with my tech skills and everything? So far I'm doing okay. I also, really nice is, at least at AWS, we have a pretty high bar. So

 

Like when I create demos and things like that, I have a whole lot of smart engineers I can send the code to and like, hey, can you guys give me some feedback? Give me a code review. And that helps me like make sure that I'm not, that I keep the code at high and I can still keep learning.

 

Cody Bontecou (51:35.222)

Something I'm curious about is how do you continue, like the majority of your YouTube channel, I think is mostly like JavaScript related content. And like, what if you all of a sudden did get interested in Elixir or Python or something outside of the scope that you traditionally have worked in?

 

Erik @ AWS (51:48.14)

Mm-hmm.

 

Erik @ AWS (51:55.106)

Nice.

 

Cody Bontecou (52:00.278)

And would you share that or is that, do you try to stay within the balance of what you've always done?

 

Erik @ AWS (52:07.478)

Yeah, so my YouTube channel, so we have ways of creating content. So we have a lot of different channels we can push stuff to. Some channels are like dev.to or a hash node or medium, or these other platforms that are even linked in, you can write whole blog posts on there. So we have a lot of ideas of where we want content to go. And one of the content places we can go is.

 

is like our own personal YouTube channels. And it doesn't have to be like it, we can post on our own personal YouTube channels, but we can also post on our AWS blogs that are out there too, or internal blogs. So if I wanted to like completely change like my personal website or my Twitter account or my YouTube channel, that's fine. I can change it to whatever and put whatever content I want out there.

 

that might not be the same, the right place to put some content out for my developer advocacy job might be better to put it on some internal blogs, replaces. So it's really up, up to me. Um, but I still have the freedom to like, to do whatever I want on my own personal channels, but then reason, obviously.

 

Cody Bontecou (53:22.042)

Yeah, definitely.

 

Steve (53:22.351)

So what is your main goal as a dev rel? That's the one thing I've been trying to get. So you're obviously working for a company. So I would imagine that your main goal is to promote the company and the company's products, right? While at the same time and doing that by one, talking about them and how amazing they are, but two, making it easier for developers to integrate your products into their applications or their projects. Is that a fair assessment?

 

Erik @ AWS (53:52.362)

Yeah, I kind of like to think about it in DevRel in general is you're not just promoting products, but you're getting awareness out there. You're trying to bring awareness to a product. And that's like one of the number one things that we try to do as a DevRel is to bring awareness. And that can be in the form of creating content. It could be creating content on our own sites, external sites. It could be promoting different.

 

products that we have a new product launch comes out could be writing content for that. It could be just talking to users and see how they've maybe they never heard of it. Just explaining what it does at a conference at a booth or it could be. It's a lot of different things. It's sort of it's not a new job title, but it's newish.

 

Like I think only the last three or four years has it gotten really popular. Probably due to the pandemic, so many companies went virtual and a lot of companies like, Oh, well, we need a developer advocate now. And so a bunch of developer evangelism. So a bunch of companies bought, bought into it during the pandemic. And now we're like starting to answer more of these questions. Like, how do you, how do you take a developer advocate? How do you find the return on investment on their time? Like if I fly across, across the country and talk to 30 people.

 

at a meetup and was it worth it? Like, how do we, like, how do we take that 30 people I talked to, or maybe I talked to 50 people, I'm just making this up. Does that, how do we measure the return on investment on you talking to 50 people and that costs, you know, $3,000 to travel and food and lodging and all that. So it, these are like good questions and there's like no really easy answer to all of them. It's a lot of like, um, trying to figure out.

 

Like, did you bring awareness? It's sometimes, too. You might talk to 50 people, and they'll talk to 10 other people, and you have this kind of network effect where eventually your message will get out to a lot of people. Yeah, these are good questions. But that's a long answer to what you're asking, Steve. But awareness maybe is a shorter one.

 

Cody Bontecou (55:51.138)

Mm-hmm.

 

Steve (56:02.799)

that makes sense that's what I would I would anticipate you know if I'm a business owner and I'm gonna pay somebody to do some work for me you know it's basic you know business 101 I need to make sure that the money I'm spending and you're generating return or otherwise you're just throwing it to the wind right

 

Erik @ AWS (56:18.878)

Yeah, and I would say, yeah, that is important consideration. I think the wrong way to do DevRel is like take every single piece of content you put out there and then obviously you want to see views, that's important, but then like adding tracking links and click through rates and be like, okay, you put this content out on January 3rd on X and we see you have 300 views, but only 10 people click the link, so maybe it wasn't worth it. And I think you could do some sort of tracking.

 

to the place where it doesn't make much sense.

 

Steve (56:53.412)

Yeah.

 

Cody Bontecou (56:53.45)

Right, I mean, yeah, it's a very challenging problem to quantify and may even be impossible. I've definitely been exposed to conference talks either in person or through YouTube that did eventually lead to these companies whose developer advocates gave the talks. The company I was working for paid for their product in one way or another. And there's no way they know that.

 

Erik @ AWS (56:58.286)

Thanks for watching!

 

Yeah.

 

Cody Bontecou (57:23.606)

They just got some money a couple years later because so-and-so gave a talk.

 

Cody Bontecou (57:33.238)

And I'm curious if a company like Amazon, you know, one of these bigger companies has created a system or is it just kind of like, kind of trust-based, you know, it's a lot of the software day-to-day work feels like hard to quantify, but clearly it's working.

 

Erik @ AWS (57:52.746)

Yeah, definitely, definitely working. They have lots of different spreadsheets. I don't know all the different ways that they're quantifying it. I probably couldn't talk to that, but it is a hard problem. But I think it's an evolving industry and all, and we're just getting better at trying to figure out how it works and how we, whatever else, how do they spend their most time? How do they get the most time for it? I guess profit for it, or it works out the best.

 

Cody Bontecou (58:17.205)

Yeah.

 

Erik @ AWS (58:23.574)

for their time that they put out there. I'm having like word salad here, but I think you understand what I'm saying.

 

Cody Bontecou (58:25.76)

Yeah.

 

Oh yeah, no doubt, no doubt.

 

Steve (58:32.963)

All right, well we're hitting about an hour here, so we'll wrap up this part of the conversation. Nice thing about having multiple co-hosts is we can fill an hour. A lot easier than me by myself. When the guest comes.

 

Erik @ AWS (58:45.666)

For those who are still listening, thank you for listening to our rants and raves about advocacy and Twitch streaming.

 

Steve (58:53.323)

Oh yeah, these are things I hear discussed in other places as well, so I know they are topic of interest for sure. For sure. So with that, we'll move to picks. Picks are part of the show where we get to talk about anything else we want to talk about, whether we want to toot our own horn, aka shameless plugs, or a book or a movie or a game or you name it. So I guess we'll start with Cody. What do you got first for picks, Cody?

 

Erik @ AWS (58:58.83)

Mm-hmm.

 

Cody Bontecou (59:19.07)

Oh man, I was afraid you'd pick me first.

 

Steve (59:21.631)

Uh oh. Alright, I'll give you a breath and I'll do the dad jokes or a chance to catch your breath and I'll do the dad jokes of the week. How about that? So as I find my media here. So you know, it's, there's a lot of conversation about how things that used to be made in America aren't made in America anymore and made in China or whatever. I think that's a real shame. Like for the other day I went and bought a TV.

 

Cody Bontecou (59:28.381)

Okay.

 

Steve (59:51.255)

And it said built-in antenna. I was like, where's antenna?

 

Steve (59:58.059)

And then the quote of the day, this is a very short quote of the day, but it's important to know who made it. So the quote is, eh, good enough. And it's made by the guy named Mediocrates.

 

Erik @ AWS (01:00:13.016)

Thanks for watching.

 

Steve (01:00:15.351)

And then question for the day. I might've used this one last week, so apologies if I did. They all run together after thousands of dad jokes. What do you call soft tissue between a shark's teeth?

 

a slow swimmer.

 

Cody Bontecou (01:00:34.546)

Nice.

 

Steve (01:00:34.963)

Right? You don't always have to be the fastest. You just have one person slower than you. All right, Cody, you had some time. What do you got for a pic for us?

 

Erik @ AWS (01:00:39.33)

Mm-hmm.

 

Cody Bontecou (01:00:45.03)

Yeah, I got some time. I figured it out. So I got my wife a DJ mixer for her birthday recently. And she actually just posted a YouTube video called Hawaii House Mix by Danny Bontacue. And it's just been, it's just been.

 

It's been so cool watching her DJ around the house. Like basically I'll be working here coding and she just has a table set up and she's just kind of mixing and doing her thing, taking courses. And so it's very, very fun. And I'm very proud of her. So yes, it's on YouTube. It's just, I don't know if it comes up. Hawaii House Mix by Danny. Oh, there's a lot, but Danny Bontacue.

 

Steve (01:01:21.987)

Is this on YouTube?

 

Steve (01:01:33.423)

D-A-N-I or D-A-N-N-Y or...

 

Cody Bontecou (01:01:35.948)

D-A-N-Y B-O-N-T-E-C-O-U. So that's probably what I'll be listening to after this as I get into some code and recommend you do the same.

 

Steve (01:01:38.071)

and why. Okay. All right.

 

Steve (01:01:49.167)

So now I'm not much of a DJ myself, but what was it you talked, you got a mixing station, what'd you call it?

 

Cody Bontecou (01:01:58.614)

Yeah, just like one of those mixer things, you know, it kind of has like...

 

Steve (01:02:02.171)

To me, when I think of a mixer, I think of a mixer with two blades when you're mixing up your whipping cream or something like that.

 

Cody Bontecou (01:02:09.596)

So this is kind of how it has the vinyl, as if there's the vinyl things that you're mixing around, and the buttons and knobs that you're tweaking and everything. So I guess that's really important. It's hard to do that live, digitally. And so they actually kind of carry, DJs carry around this kind of controller.

 

Steve (01:02:15.095)

Right, okay. That's what I thought, yeah.

 

Cody Bontecou (01:02:31.21)

Um, to where they play and you know, day two, we actually went to a friend's house this weekend and barbecued and sure enough, my wife brings out the mixer and she's DJing and all the friends got involved and it was so fun. Yeah. So good excuse for a good time.

 

Erik @ AWS (01:02:42.094)

Thanks for watching!

 

Steve (01:02:44.731)

You know, I'm old enough to remember when the mixing station was a literal vinyl record and you're scratching it with a needle on a record.

 

Cody Bontecou (01:02:52.382)

Right, right, and now we just simulate that, but it sounds similar, I think.

 

Steve (01:02:54.756)

Right.

 

Steve (01:02:58.235)

Cool. Yeah, I'm noticing she's got a video here of your road trip, road tripping through Washington and Oregon, I gotta watch that.

 

Cody Bontecou (01:03:04.48)

Yep.

 

Yeah, yeah, yeah. She's been doing some YouTube videos. She's trying to do one a week, just as kind of like a side gig to hopefully someday get a remote job so we can travel around and be remote digital nomads. But it's fun. It's a good thing to do. And honestly, I love it. I love her carrying a camera around and just kind of documenting our life because it's easy to forget some of these things. So having a video is wonderful.

 

Steve (01:03:35.595)

Oh, this house mix is like 26 minutes long.

 

Cody Bontecou (01:03:38.462)

Yeah, it's a proper mix, like a proper... Yeah, this is kind of a thing, Steve. There's like people like kind of travel the world and make these like very aesthetic electronic music like mixes. Um, and so that's our, our Lanai that's right outside actually where we're recording this is I, that's my view. If you see what she's looking at.

 

Erik @ AWS (01:03:42.668)

That's pretty cool.

 

Steve (01:04:00.527)

Didn't you guys get sorta torched by the fires? Or am I just, I thought Lenny sort of got burned up pretty good.

 

Cody Bontecou (01:04:05.418)

Sorry, Linnaeus in our porch. Maui got burnt, yeah. I'm on the big island. Yeah, yeah. We had fires, but much smaller. Much less destructive, yeah.

 

Steve (01:04:08.016)

Oh, gotcha, okay, I was thinking about Maui.

 

You're on which island are you on? Okay, gotcha.

 

Steve (01:04:20.196)

Right.

 

Steve (01:04:24.023)

Alrighty, so yeah, Danny Bontacue, Hawaii house mix, it's out there.

 

Cody Bontecou (01:04:29.498)

Yeah.

 

Steve (01:04:32.023)

All right, Eric, what do you got first for picks?

 

Erik @ AWS (01:04:34.978)

I've been watching TV in the evenings. I'm watching two shows. One is Strange New Worlds. It's the new Star Trek show. Any Star Trek-ies there?

 

Steve (01:04:45.199)

Oh, oh, that's right. Yeah. Yeah, my wife's Trekkie. So she's into that probably

 

Erik @ AWS (01:04:50.022)

Yeah, excellent. I think it's probably one of the best of the new Star Trek shows. Like I watched a few of the others and I thought they were just okay, but The Strange New Worlds is really interesting. They're on season two now and they just did a musical last week. So if any of you guys are old school Buffy the Vampire Slayers, they had a Buffy episode where... Yeah, they did a musical number in that show.

 

Steve (01:05:12.227)

Sir, Michelle Gillar, yeah.

 

Erik @ AWS (01:05:19.554)

They did Flash did a musical number too. And so now, so did Strange New Worlds. They did a musical number which was really interesting. Actually it was really fun. It's kind of a cool episode. So I enjoyed that and then been watching Apple TV and one called Silo on Apple TV. It's like kind of sci-fi, futuristic.

 

one where all these people are living in the silo and it looks like they can't go outside and there's murders happening and that just wrapped up recently. But you know with this writer strike I don't know what's gonna happen in this actor strike if we're gonna get any TV shows for a while so I might have to be watching some reruns of things uh coming this fall.

 

Steve (01:06:07.675)

Well, you know what's interesting is that strike isn't as hardcore as it sounds. And what I mean by that is that there are a number of shows that have been granted exemptions where they can continue acting and writing and so on. There's quite a list of them actually. I think the one I was reading about was The Chosen, which is a real popular series based on the life of Jesus. And I think they got an exemption. I've heard there's a number of the exemptions too. So it's not like hard and fast. Everything is shut down.

 

But at the same time, I'm sure those exemptions are a drop in the bucket compared to the normal amount of work that's being put out.

 

Erik @ AWS (01:06:44.05)

Maybe we'll go back to like in the 2000s, like when they everything was reality TV Maybe we'll just get like tons of more reality TV coming out soon

 

Steve (01:06:49.143)

Oh, please no, please no. So actually, and before we go, Eric, you reminded me of a pic I have. So Netflix has a show coming out, and it's not until September 8th called Spy Ops. And it's seven episodes, if I remember correctly. And it's all these famous missions, things by various spy agencies throughout the world. So it's not like just the US CIA.

 

Cody Bontecou (01:06:52.482)

Ha ha ha.

 

Steve (01:07:17.583)

There's like MI6 and Mossad and some other different agencies. It looks really awesome. I think the one from the US that I've seen based on the trailer that's out there is the hunt for Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora in Afghanistan back in probably like 2004, 2005, I think. It looks really fascinating. Well, I went to look for it and it's not out yet. Again, it's not out until the first episode is not until September 8th, which is about three weeks as of right now.

 

But I did come across another one and it's called The Spy. And it's about a true, it's a true story about a spy named Ailey Cohen, who spied for Israel against Syria from like 1961 to 1965. And there's six episodes and I'm about halfway through it. And it's really a fascinating story. And if you read the Wikipedia page on him, on Ailey Cohen, Eli like Eli is how you spell his first name.

 

the he really did some amazing stuff. But what's fascinating about us who the actor is. Now, most of us think of Sacha Baron Cohen as you know, like Borat or the Ollie G show or some of the, you know, the offbeat comedy stuff he would do, you know, number. But he's the main actor in this one as Ailey Cohen. And he's really good. I mean, he's really good. The story is just, it's really gut wrenching from a personal point of view and how.

 

you know, as a spy, he's having to hide everything from his family and his wife and everything that's going on. And the end, they sort of shadow it in the beginning. But if you read about it, you learn that he was captured by the Syrians and hung publicly in Damascus, I believe, which is where he was operating. But one, it's just a good story all the way around. It's based in reality. And two, you know, the actor, it's interesting when you see someone who's known for comedy and

 

totally goofball stuff, being a very good serious actor as well. It's from 2021, I believe is when it first came out, but it's just called The Spy on Netflix. Really, really good story.

 

Erik @ AWS (01:09:25.974)

I have to look at look that up. I know he was Sasha Byron Cohen. He was gonna be in that Freddie Mercury biopic Queen and Not Adam Driver, but It ended up yeah, who was the lead on that somebody's screaming out the name

 

Steve (01:09:33.687)

Right, the one that Adam Driver was instead?

 

Steve (01:09:38.595)

No, not Adam Driver, it was Adam something.

 

Steve (01:09:45.955)

He was a guy that had been on American Idol and I forgot.

 

Erik @ AWS (01:09:52.158)

anyone an Oscar for it. Yeah, the Mr. Robot guy, uh, Rami Malek.

 

Cody Bontecou (01:09:52.194)

The Mr. Robot guy? Yeah.

 

Steve (01:09:57.503)

Oh, wasn't it? I thought it was... Okay, well I never saw the movie, so... Maybe that's why I don't remember. I could have sworn it was him.

 

Cody Bontecou (01:09:59.21)

Yeah. It's a great movie. Great movie.

 

Erik @ AWS (01:10:01.79)

Yeah, another one, Mr. Robot, if you haven't seen that, that's a great pick if you haven't seen it. If you're into software development and programming and weird things, it's great.

 

Cody Bontecou (01:10:12.479)

Yeah.

 

Steve (01:10:12.859)

Cool. Alrighty, so with that, we will wrap this episode of Views on Up. Thank you to Eric for jumping on literally with 10 minutes notice today. And for Cody, it was good to have you. And we will talk to you next time on Views on View.

 

Erik @ AWS (01:10:21.552)

Yeah

 

Cody Bontecou (01:10:22.353)

Yeah, thanks Eric.

 

Erik @ AWS (01:10:29.494)

Peace.

 

Cody Bontecou (01:10:30.722)

Take care everyone.