Erik Hanchett returns to the program to discuss his experience speaking at VueConf. He begins by outlining his memorable flight experience, some of the Vue contributors he met, the topics covered, his favorite talk during the conference, and many more!

Steve:

Hello everybody, welcome back to another episode of Views on View. It's been a few weeks because I've been busier than a long tail cat in a rocking chair contest. I just learned that one today. I am Steve Edwards, the host with the face for radio and the voice for being a mime. And I am here with my returning guest host slash guest slash View Ninja, Eric Hanschett. How you doing, Eric?

 

Erik @ AWS:

Hey hey Steve, I'm doing good. Thanks for having me back on again.

 

Steve:

Always

 

Erik @ AWS:

Appreciate

 

Steve:

a pleasure,

 

Erik @ AWS:

it.

 

Steve:

always a pleasure. So Eric pinged me because he just came back from ViewCom. Yay! And, which reminds me. Sorry audience, I forgot about you. I know you're still there, I love you.

 

Erik @ AWS:

Hehehehe

 

Steve:

But they're very happy about hearing about ViewConf. So we're gonna talk about ViewConf and maybe some conferences, just general conference stuff. And a couple other things too, just sort of rambling here. We definitely pre-planned this one.

 

Erik @ AWS:

Thank you.

 

Steve:

So let's start out talking about ViewConf. ViewConf was in New Orleans, Louisiana, that's New Orleans for those who don't get my amazing Cajun accent. and what was happening at VUCOM.

 

Erik @ AWS:

It was funny. It was happening. So those who don't know, ViewConf is like the annual big, let me preface this, ViewConf US. There is an Amsterdam one that's even bigger than ViewConf US, but ViewConf US happens every year. They change locations every year. I've been to one in Austin. It was in like Tampa Bay one year and New Orleans was this year. It was also in People say I'm probably mispronouncing this, New Orleans? Is that how you pronounce New Orleans? I think.

 

Steve:

Nolens is how I see it, you know, an apostrophe A-W-L-I-N-S.

 

Erik @ AWS:

anybody that's listening right now please uh... pardon me because i'll probably mispronounce it. I'm just gonna pronounce it like i used to pronounce it New Orleans

 

Steve:

There you go.

 

Erik @ AWS:

uh... anyways uh... that was the first location of the first ViewConf i believe and now they have brought it back to the same location again so uh... it's a single track two-day well it's three-day conference the first day is a workshop That was Wednesday of this year and then Thursday and Friday were the actual conference part of it. And it was at the Ace Hotel this year. I have gone to it a few times, one in person in 2020, which was a different experience because of the pandemic. It was held in March right before all the lockdowns. It was kind of a weird year. I heard a lot of people like went to Vukoff and left early because it was

 

Steve:

Oh wow.

 

Erik @ AWS:

like, like the pandemic hit right in the middle of it. Um, uh, I remember they, they had rules when you were coming in, like to do fist bumps, not to shake anybody's hands. They had, uh, Ben Hong and, uh, I can't remember his co-presenter. They wore dinosaur suits, like filled up, uh, like one of those dinosaur suits to walk around in. And it was really. It was a different year that year. It was fun though. This year, I believe in 2020, in 2021, it was cancelled. And, or it was only virtual, I think. And then 2022, it was in Tampa Bay, in Florida. And now, or in Florida, that is. And then now 2023, it's in New Orleans. I liked, I try to go to every single view comp that I can go to. I try to talk at every single view comp is my goal. So I'm, every time it comes around, I submit a talk. I've never been able to do like a full talk, but I've done a few lightning talks there. So this was no different. So I was able to do a lightning talk on the first day. I was there.

 

Steve:

and oh, sorry, gotta take a drink.

 

Erik @ AWS:

Yeah, no, go

 

Steve:

So

 

Erik @ AWS:

ahead.

 

Steve:

what was your talk on?

 

Erik @ AWS:

Yeah, so I did a talk on creating my first open source view library. I think I talked about it a little bit on a previous podcast. So this was all about the experience I had at working at AWS. And I, for the first two years of my job, we wrote our we call it an authenticator. It's a way for users to log in, log out, sign up. And so that was an experience. So that was kind of a fun talk to do. It was about 10, 15 minutes on average to do it. It was also, you know, I just love going to ViewConf. Every time I go there, I get to see some amazing people. I got in on Tuesday. Actually, I'll tell a little story. It's my- some people might relate to this. So I'm in Nevada. So I flew from Reno, Nevada to Denver, and then Denver to New Orleans. And I made the classic mistake. So on my trip from Denver to New Orleans, I might, do you travel a lot? Do you travel a lot, Steve?

 

Steve:

Decent amount a couple times two three times a year. I used to travel like two or three times a month But

 

Erik @ AWS:

Yeah, I'm starting to travel a little bit more because I'm doing more developer advocacy for AWS Amplify. So I always bring a few things. I always bring my Steam Deck, which is like this big portable kind of video game. It runs Steam. If you guys haven't liked Nintendo Switch, it's kind of similar, but it's a lot bigger and it runs PC games. I also bring my Kindle. I also bring, of course, my laptops and everything. and I always take those on as carry-on. So on my flight from Denver to New Orleans, I like, it was like three hours long. I took all that stuff out of my bag. I took my backpack on as a carry-on with all that stuff in it. During the flight, I took all that stuff out and I put it underneath my seat in front of me, like I normally do. And I was kind of pulling out the stuff in front of me and looking at it. And I decided to give myself a little bit more leg room. I took the backpack and I... put it in the overhead compartment in front of me, so I'll just have all my stuff on the ground. That was the mistake. So when the flight ended, I'm usually pretty good at this, but I usually take all my stuff and I put it back, I take my backpack out, and I'm always on the aisle seat instead of the one near the window. I like the aisle. So as soon as the flight ends, as soon as the seatbelt sign goes off and we're on the ground, I get up, I take my backpack out. and I start loading my stuff in and this lady next to me, I think she had a long day, said I was taking up the spot in that aisle that I wasn't letting her out. So I had to kind of, I moved out of the way so she could get out, but it somehow like threw my whole rhythm out of place and I left my Steam Deck,

 

Steve:

Oh!

 

Erik @ AWS:

on the plane, this

 

Steve:

Oh.

 

Erik @ AWS:

$600 device, underneath the seat in front of me. And that was the last time I saw it. And I have

 

Steve:

No.

 

Erik @ AWS:

been, I put in my, I put in my lost and found with Southwest and New Orleans and it is still, it was still gone. So that was like the first day of ViewCom for me is leaving something on the plane, which in my many years of being alive, I've never done before.

 

Steve:

Well,

 

Erik @ AWS:

Obviously

 

Steve:

at

 

Erik @ AWS:

it's

 

Steve:

what

 

Erik @ AWS:

no one's

 

Steve:

point

 

Erik @ AWS:

fault

 

Steve:

did

 

Erik @ AWS:

except

 

Steve:

you realize

 

Erik @ AWS:

my own.

 

Steve:

you left it? Was it like way

 

Erik @ AWS:

As

 

Steve:

after

 

Erik @ AWS:

soon as

 

Steve:

you

 

Erik @ AWS:

I

 

Steve:

were

 

Erik @ AWS:

got

 

Steve:

at

 

Erik @ AWS:

to

 

Steve:

the

 

Erik @ AWS:

the,

 

Steve:

hotel?

 

Erik @ AWS:

soon the next, I got to the hotel that later that night.

 

Steve:

Oh.

 

Erik @ AWS:

And then I realized I didn't have it and that flight was continuing on to Florida.

 

Steve:

Yeah.

 

Erik @ AWS:

So I knew that it was, it was gone. Um, so I'm sure someone's enjoying the steam deck now, but that, that was the first day of it. Have you ever left anything on the plane on a plane?

 

Steve:

Yeah, I've left small stuff like books. Oh, I left my phone. Recently I left my phone, but I realized it as I was stepping off the plane. It's like, oh shoot, because I was due, as I'm leaving, I was sort of do your mental checks. Okay, do I have this and this and this? Because there's times where I'll put something in the seat in front of me, in the little holder there on the seat in front of you, and then forget it somehow. So I've gotten in the habit of doing mental checks while I... for whatever reason, I had, phone was in my pocket. And so as I stepped off the plane, I was like, oh shoot. And I turn around and go back like, nope, sorry. Once you're off, you can't get back on. But they just, you know, a lot of times they'll have the cleaning crew already on the plane as passengers are still leaving because they're trying to make a really quick turnaround. And so they already had a cleaning crew on. And so they went back to my seat and found my phone and brought it up to me. You know, other times that was books, but. Yeah, nothing like that.

 

Erik @ AWS:

Yeah, yeah,

 

Steve:

Nothing quite

 

Erik @ AWS:

books.

 

Steve:

that expensive.

 

Erik @ AWS:

Yeah, I wish I would have realized before I got out of the airport, but once I was out, it was impossible. I've had that

 

Steve:

Ugh.

 

Erik @ AWS:

once before where I left something and then they're like, oh, we'll go get it. But I had to wait until everybody's off the plane and the cleaning crew's gone through and everything like that.

 

Steve:

Hmm.

 

Erik @ AWS:

But hey,

 

Steve:

Sorry

 

Erik @ AWS:

if

 

Steve:

to hear

 

Erik @ AWS:

anybody's

 

Steve:

that.

 

Erik @ AWS:

listening and they have found a Steam Deck, let me know. I'm just

 

Steve:

Hahaha.

 

Erik @ AWS:

kidding. But no, I ended up. So, uh, yeah, then I ended up just going to the conference center. They had it at, I think it was called like hotel max or ACE hotel, the ACE hotel, which was a really cool, uh, hotel and conference center in one place. So that's another,

 

Steve:

That was cool.

 

Erik @ AWS:

uh, that's a tip. Like if you're going to a conference, try to get the recommended hotels that most conferences tell you to stay at is probably the one you should stay at. Unless you're trying to really save money, stay

 

Steve:

Mm-hmm.

 

Erik @ AWS:

at the recommend hotel. Cause it's usually the closest to where you need to be. and they give discounts for hotel guests. So that's where I stayed. It was much smaller than the one in Florida the year before. I think the conference, I think they're still recovering from like COVID. I think the COVID years kind of declined. All conferences everywhere attendance kind of declined a little bit. And now like a lot of conferences who were coming back in the last year or two are not at that pre-pandemic level. And that's exactly how it felt with ViewConf US. Still, there was hundreds of people there, which was really awesome. And I spent the first day in New Orleans. I kind of traveled around. I went to Cafe du Monde, which I had a beignet, which was, have you had a beignet before? It's pretty

 

Steve:

A beignet.

 

Erik @ AWS:

delicious.

 

Steve:

Fresh my mind what it is I might have when I was down there. It sounds

 

Erik @ AWS:

It's like

 

Steve:

familiar.

 

Erik @ AWS:

a doughnut. It's like a powdery doughnut. It's kind of a little bit what New Orleans is known for.

 

Steve:

Yeah, I think so, yeah.

 

Erik @ AWS:

Yeah, and so I had one of those, kind of just walked around a little bit. I did have some work stuff to do, so part of the day I was kind of working remotely from the conference, not from the conference room, because it wasn't open on the first day, it was only open for people taking workshops. And I spent most of the day just walking around and then doing a little bit of work. And then the second day, I spent all day at the conference. And I did meet another, usually I go to view comp by myself, but this year I actually had someone else from my department from AWS amplified to come with me. So that was nice. But I would say like going to conferences, I would say, even if you're going by yourself, I think is worth it. Cause you really want to meet other people. I think that's like the, the number one. Goal of going to a conference is just meeting more people, talking to people that. The talks are good, but you could argue that you could like watch the talks

 

Steve:

Great.

 

Erik @ AWS:

on YouTube later or

 

Steve:

All right.

 

Erik @ AWS:

find similar topics and blog posts out there if you really wanted to. But talking to the people was really interesting. I'll take a breath there. Do you have any questions on it?

 

Steve:

Uh, yeah, well, I guess I'd be curious to see one who you met. If there's anybody, you know, maybe that's on your, Hey, I'd love to meet these people bucket lists and to, uh, what you learned from a technical standpoint about view, if you learned anything new about view, what's coming down the pike or anything like that.

 

Erik @ AWS:

Yeah, yeah. So I got to meet, well first I've met Evan you before so it was nice to meet him again and he is so accessible because he was available at the after party. So that's another thing. So they had the first day, the whole day was talks from basically nine, eight, eight o'clock was breakfast and then they had talks until about five thirty. And then they had an after party at 6.30. So this is kind of interesting. They had something called a second line, which is we all gathered outside a Lucy's Surfer Bar, which is like this little bar nearby the conference. And then they had a band play and we kind of marched from Lucy's Bar to where the after party was. And I have pictures, I posted on social media on Twitter, if you follow me, EricCH, you can see it. But we all kind of just walked and talked, and it was like, kind of the, it was fun. It was a little weird. It was like, I've never been in the second line. I guess this is like a New Orleans

 

Steve:

Yeah.

 

Erik @ AWS:

thing where it's to promote people who, I'm gonna look at the definition.

 

Steve:

It's like a Mardi Gras type thing or just in general?

 

Erik @ AWS:

Yeah, second line is the tradition and parades organized by social aid and pleasure clubs with brass band parades in New Orleans, Louisiana. The main line or first line is the second section of the parade or the members of the SAPCA. So it's like a little bit of a parade. I think it has roots in like West African circles and ring dances about people who've passed away. I think it has like a kind of like jazz funeral. roots to it. It was really interesting. So it was fun just kind of walking down the street and everybody was taking pictures and then we got to the to this open bar after party and like everybody was there. Everybody was super open to just answer questions. All the like most of the speakers were there too and then they had food too. So I mean that was that was pretty fun. So answer your question. Yeah definitely Evan. I think if you go to a ViewConf at least kind of just giving him a high five or thanking him for his time is well worth it. And a couple of other people I really liked talking to, I met Daniel Rowe. Have you,

 

Steve:

Yes,

 

Erik @ AWS:

you have had him

 

Steve:

oh

 

Erik @ AWS:

on

 

Steve:

yeah.

 

Erik @ AWS:

this podcast?

 

Steve:

Multiple times, I'd love to meet Daniel, he's awesome.

 

Erik @ AWS:

Yeah, so if you don't know, he's like a Nuxt core team member. So we talked about Nuxt a lot. I think he may have, I'm not sure where he's out of, but he may

 

Steve:

He's

 

Erik @ AWS:

have traveled

 

Steve:

in

 

Erik @ AWS:

far.

 

Steve:

England. He's in London,

 

Erik @ AWS:

Yeah.

 

Steve:

I think, or UK.

 

Erik @ AWS:

Yeah, so like one of the hype you see on Twitter now is, is everybody's talking about react server components. It's kind of the big update through Vercell did recently. Uh, well, Nux did, Next did recently. So I was kind of talking to him about like, what's the difference between that and, and Nuxt and, and Nuxt has something similar with these like server island components. Uh, so yeah, it was great, great talking to him. I did talk to some people from the view school and view mastery.

 

Steve:

Oh yeah, that's Ben Hong and Adam Jarr.

 

Erik @ AWS:

Yep, I talked to Adam. He's always a pleasure to talk to. The stuff that they're doing at View Mastery, if you don't know, is like View School and View Mastery are pretty much the number one view resources out there. They always go to every single view call. They almost compete a little bit too, it feels like, just with getting awareness out for their services. Yes, I talked to him. I talked to Mark Noonan. He's from Cypress.

 

Steve:

Oh, okay.

 

Erik @ AWS:

Have you... have you talked to him on the podcast

 

Steve:

JavaScript

 

Erik @ AWS:

before?

 

Steve:

Jabber, we talked to somebody from Cypress at some point and I don't remember who it was. I have to look it up. But yeah, I remember that. That's been two or three years I think.

 

Erik @ AWS:

Yep.

 

Steve:

Brian

 

Erik @ AWS:

Yeah.

 

Steve:

Mann was who we talked to at Cypress.

 

Erik @ AWS:

I talked to Daniel Kelly, which is

 

Steve:

Yeah.

 

Erik @ AWS:

he does another guy from view school. I talked to Jess Sacks a little bit. Um, she does a lot of testing stuff. Yeah. I got to talk to a, quite a few people and those are all highlights. Um, definitely people I haven't talked to. I got to talk to Ben Hong again. Uh, I hadn't talked to him since 2020 since last time we were all in a conference together. Yeah. It was just a pleasure. Uh, talking to, to everybody and. I'm probably missing a bunch of people I talked to. I'm just trying to look them

 

Steve:

Mm-hmm.

 

Erik @ AWS:

up right now. So that was really fun. It's also, I was going to say too, I got to talk to some people in between the talks and then the after party and then the first night right after the after party everybody went back to the hotel and they had a karaoke night.

 

Steve:

Oh, fun.

 

Erik @ AWS:

Yeah. So a bunch like, I think Evan. I didn't stay long enough, but Evan Yu did his karaoke. He's known for his karaoke, I guess. And a bunch of other people did karaoke, which was really cool. I stayed for a little bit, but I was super tired. I was still jet lagged. I'd only been there a couple of days, so I just went back to my room. But that's the kind of stuff that we did there on the first day. The technical talks, there were so many of them. And a few that I remember is, it's all kind of a blur. The Nux talk view to the edge was kind of interesting talking about how, I think that's Sebastian, that talked all about how Nux works on the edge and how that worked. Patterns for large scale view at JS applications was interesting. That was another talk by Daniel Kelly. So that was really good. The Cypress Talks, like Mark Noonan was really good. Keyboard Accessibility, that was an interesting one. That was, and hopefully all these talks will eventually be up on View Mastery's website, I believe.

 

Steve:

Yeah, they do all, I think they do all the ViewCom videos, if I remember right.

 

Erik @ AWS:

Yeah, Homer Gaines, I got to meet him for the first time. Another guy, amazing also. I got to talk to a lot to Alex as well. Yeah, Homer, anytime I think of accessibility, I think of Homer and he does a lot of conferences and he had a great conference talk on the first day. The second day, I can say actually he was on the second day. No, no, he was on the first day. On the second day. Adam Jars, proven pinia patterns. I'm always just so impressed by the presentations that these guys do, especially anybody in the Viewmaster team. It's like they have such crazy presentations and graphics moving everywhere. It was great. Cecilia did a talk on Ionic that was really interesting.

 

Steve:

to see a Martinez?

 

Erik @ AWS:

Yep, yep.

 

Steve:

Yeah, I did an episode with her on debugging in view.

 

Erik @ AWS:

Hmm Yeah, she's great. She did a really good talk. Conquering Views and Forms in View. Anything about forms? Like forms is deceptively easy. That was by Justin Schroeder. That was good. I think the most favorite talk of the conference, and I think I'm going to make sure I get this right, it was by Lee Martin. Have you ever heard of Lee Martin?

 

Steve:

ringing a bell.

 

Erik @ AWS:

So he did a talk how he was using, and his talk was titled Appetite for Components, but he

 

Steve:

Okay.

 

Erik @ AWS:

creates experimental web apps for artists. So during his talk, he talked about how he used view apps to create apps for like Foo Fighters, Florence and the Machine, Metro Bloomin, I think he mentioned Beyonce one time. And he was talking, Jack White was doing it. So these huge performers will have like a new album coming out and then they'll hire like, I think his agency to create like some kind of app. Like a lot of time it's like AR or it'll be like some virtual reality app. And so he has all these like creative ideas of how to create apps. So like I think the Jack White one was they wanted to do an app, anybody could log into and then you were, you were randomly put together with another person in Jack White's audience. So think of it kind of like, what's that app that people can join randomly to talk to other people? That

 

Steve:

amigo

 

Erik @ AWS:

like Amigo or something like that. So he was talking about how he created that application, how he put it together, then he, then some of the apps that you did was like, oh, you go here, And you play a song and then you could share it. Like he always had like viral parts of the app that he was, that he put in. I'm not giving it much justice from the look I see on your face right now, Steve

 

Steve:

Oh no,

 

Erik @ AWS:

for a

 

Steve:

I'm

 

Erik @ AWS:

podcast.

 

Steve:

reading about it. I'm just reading about it on the conference website. I was looking at some other stuff

 

Erik @ AWS:

It

 

Steve:

too.

 

Erik @ AWS:

was a really interesting, because he also played music and video, and I just had no idea that someone was using a view apps to create these mobile applications for bands and do these really interesting projects. So that was my favorite talk of the show, just because it was really different. And then the last thing we did on the second day is they did PowerPoint karaoke.

 

Steve:

Yeah, I was just reading

 

Erik @ AWS:

I've never...

 

Steve:

about that. It looks like fun.

 

Erik @ AWS:

I've never heard of this before and this is the first time I've been in. I wasn't involved with it but I watched. Is they brought all the presenters up and almost all the presenters got on the stage and then they randomly, they had like this slide deck that was created via AI. Like had slide deck was like randomly generated groupings of images that played for 20 seconds and there's 20 slides and you had each speaker had to go up there and give a presentation basically a five minute presentation just making everything up. And it was just hilarious.

 

Steve:

Oh, that'd be

 

Erik @ AWS:

And,

 

Steve:

awesome. I could have

 

Erik @ AWS:

and,

 

Steve:

fun with

 

Erik @ AWS:

and

 

Steve:

that.

 

Erik @ AWS:

I, and you could see like some of the speakers were like just on top of it, just was able to nail it and it was, it was really funny. So

 

Steve:

Yeah,

 

Erik @ AWS:

overall,

 

Steve:

those that

 

Erik @ AWS:

like.

 

Steve:

can improv, those that can improvise are really

 

Erik @ AWS:

Exactly.

 

Steve:

perfect

 

Erik @ AWS:

Yeah,

 

Steve:

for something like that.

 

Erik @ AWS:

that was another highlight of the show, especially at the end of the day. Like you have all this information and you're just like, your brain's about to explode. And just to have something fun was really cool. Yeah, so overall I had like a blast just meeting everybody. I had some definitely a handful of like viewers of my program with Eric. On my YouTube channel came up to me and thanked me. And it was always like really cool to listen to people that have either heard me on views on view or my YouTube channel, like come up and say hi. So that was really cool. And, and they were all really encouraging to like, just keep going. We want more content and

 

Steve:

Yeah, I was

 

Erik @ AWS:

yeah.

 

Steve:

imagining you having like an autograph line for all your

 

Erik @ AWS:

Nah.

 

Steve:

videos and stuff that you do.

 

Erik @ AWS:

No, no, no. I'm not that popular. I will say

 

Steve:

Yeah.

 

Erik @ AWS:

I went after this conference, I went to render Atlanta and render Atlanta was. I actually saw a couple of quote unquote influencers and they did have like lines of people like people give them high fives taking selfies with them. Like we do have some big people in the tech space that people recognize and talk

 

Steve:

Well, like

 

Erik @ AWS:

to.

 

Steve:

I can't see DOS or something or

 

Erik @ AWS:

Yeah.

 

Steve:

Brendan Eich or...

 

Erik @ AWS:

Like, uh, James Q. Quick was there.

 

Steve:

Yeah.

 

Erik @ AWS:

Danny Thompson.

 

Steve:

We interviewed James Quick on JavaScript Driver, I think, unless we're talking

 

Erik @ AWS:

Oh, really?

 

Steve:

about Quick, the framework, I lose track, but yeah, he sounds

 

Erik @ AWS:

No,

 

Steve:

similar.

 

Erik @ AWS:

yeah, some people that like I know from the YouTube community, you find too when you go to these conferences, at least I can't say for the attendees, but for the speakers, it's kind of like a small community. Like you tend to start seeing the same

 

Steve:

Right.

 

Erik @ AWS:

people, especially for speakers. If you're like in the web development world, and it's really cool to see like these people who you met at other conferences and they're just doing their thing, creating amazing content, teaching people.

 

Steve:

Mm-hmm.

 

Erik @ AWS:

It's awesome.

 

Steve:

Yeah, I can, unfortunately, I've been planning on going to ViewConf twice. First time I was supposed to go was in 2019, and I was all signed up, and my company was sending me, and I was actually gonna do one of the workshops that are on the days before, you know, the presentations start taking place, and I was gonna do one with Evan Yu on a deep dive into view or something like that, and then my own fault. I ended up leaving the company prior to the conference

 

Erik @ AWS:

Hmm

 

Steve:

and didn't get to go. I was so bummed about that. And then within the past couple of years, I had requested budgeting for ViewConf, since that's what I do every day. Yeah, we were going to do it, but then come budgeting time, I was like, yeah, that's not going to happen. So I was like, dang it. So yeah, I really want to go. I've worked quite a bit with Adam Jar. I think I've mentioned to you, I know I've mentioned out here that I did a basic NUXT class course for View. Mastery and actually had Adam on afterwards. I think back in December sometime Talking about the whole process of creating the Videos and what goes into them because it's crazy What they do you mean you mentioned yourself, you know the graphics and the things they do with their presentations

 

Erik @ AWS:

Hmm.

 

Steve:

They're really good at that kind of stuff. They got a couple guys that Do a lot of that for them that are really good and they've got it down to an art So

 

Erik @ AWS:

I-

 

Steve:

yeah, I can just imagine. But Adam's really cool. He's a lot of fun, real nice, easygoing guy to deal with. Just when you talk to him in private, he's just the way he comes across on his videos or doing presentations.

 

Erik @ AWS:

Very clear. Yeah. I'm impressed with them. I was going to say with Adam, uh, with, yeah, I, I am trying to work with view mastery, hopefully on some, at some point on like

 

Steve:

Mm-hmm.

 

Erik @ AWS:

a course too. I want to do that with them and then just working on that too, hopefully for the future. I do have a, I'm going back to the first thing you said, I do have opinions on that. So

 

Steve:

on what?

 

Erik @ AWS:

on like going to conferences,

 

Steve:

Uh

 

Erik @ AWS:

if you can't pay for them,

 

Steve:

huh.

 

Erik @ AWS:

I would

 

Steve:

Oh,

 

Erik @ AWS:

say

 

Steve:

right.

 

Erik @ AWS:

like, I would recommend like to, for most people, if you're listening right now and you kind of just listened to the last half hour and you're interested in conferences or least viewconf is to try to work with your company to pay for you to go. Unless you're like already in the area where the conference is and it's going to be kind of a low lift for you to go. I think almost always like you should try to get your company pay for it. And I think viewconf and other conferences will give you templates like here, download this template and give it to your boss. Like stats of like why you should go and why it's a benefit for you to kind of like convince your boss

 

Steve:

Alright.

 

Erik @ AWS:

to pay for it. Uh, obviously no, that's not going to work for everybody, you know, with the economy and everything that's happening, you know, it's not always going to work, but I'd say. It's I wouldn't pay for to go to a conference unless I was like starting my own business or something, uh, or as a freelancer. I think it's just kind of hard to, to swing. thousand dollars to adjust for the ticket and that's not including travel and everything so I would try to definitely do that and then I would say if you do get and you can also I've heard some people too where they get a where they are able to make a deal with their employer where they'll employer will pay for their ticket and they'll pay for the travel or the ploy will play for the travel and they'll pay for the ticket so I'd say you can make your best judgment if it's worth it, but at least having kind of your employer pay for something. Because it is well worth it as an employee to learn these technologies, to meet these people, to do these things. Even, you know, I said before that you can learn a lot of these things online, and maybe the talks isn't as important, but I think sometimes just being at a place where everybody's watching a talk... is something where you're going to pay attention way more than if you're just sitting at lunch and trying to watch a YouTube video while you're eating. It's not gonna, but if you're in the conference room, you're more likely to like absorb the information. You're gonna be talking to people afterwards. So I think that's kind of a better learning experience. I'd also say like another tip is to put your phone away. I saw so many people with like their phones and then some people just doing work on their laptop. And I've been guilty of that too before. I think. One of the first talks I went to at ViewConf, I spent one talk, I had like some work emergencies, I was on my laptop the whole time and I like barely absorbed the talk. I'd also say, if you can also be very present, put your phone away, if you have your laptop out, only use it for notes, turn off your instant messenger service so that way you can be present. And then another tip I wrote down here too was, when you're at a conference, and hopefully your employer paid for some of it, if not all of it, is to cancel all your normal meetings that you have. Unless it's like a very, very important meeting that you're supposed to be at, it's the worst thing is like being at a conference and then having to leave at like 930 a.m. to go to a, like right in the middle of a talk to go to your hotel room for an hour and then have to come back. It's just like, it throws you off, you'll miss a lot of good information, sometimes you'll miss lunches or... or other things. So I would be like, try to like push off as many meetings I could and cancel them all so you can be just in person there the whole time.

 

Steve:

Yeah. So I had gone, I haven't been able to go to ViewConf yet, but for a number of years, I went to a lot of Drupal conferences, which were, at the timeframe I was going, they were huge. We'd get like 3000 people at a conference and big places like, you know, the Moscone Center, San Francisco, when I had one in New Orleans a few years ago was that, the convention center there.

 

Erik @ AWS:

Mmm.

 

Steve:

So they were huge. But, you know, with my experience and then listening to other people talk about conferences, you know, to your point. Yeah, a lot of times you can watch the videos later of the presentations and the bigger track, you know, conference track that people will call it as the hallway track. In other words, you know, the people you meet out in the hallway and sit down and talk with, uh, you know, from that world, I can remember meeting a lot of great people. And one of the things that the DrupalCon used to do, there was two things. I don't know if the ViewConf does this, but one is they would have what's called birds of a feather sessions. And so these were smaller rooms. that were set up for people that wanted to get together and talk about a particular thing, whether it's mapping or how to do this or that. Everybody had a comment and you'd go sign up, okay, for this room on this day, I wanna have this session, and then everybody would show up for that session. That was cool. And then the other things they would have was called the Coder Lounge. And that was for the geeks that wanted to sit there and program the whole time, even though they're out of conference for whatever reason. And they actually had a good... purpose and that and people would see each other at a conference. Hey, I've been having this problem. Yeah, let's go work on that. And they could sit down and work on something. Um, I know that there were a couple of times where I was running into a really thorny problem in my day to day at my work and with a particular, uh, what Drupal calls modules, WordPress calls plugins, we would call libraries, whatever. And I went into a coder lounge and here's the guy that maintains the whole thing right there and I'd sit

 

Erik @ AWS:

Ah.

 

Steve:

down for like 10 minutes and he'd show me, oh yeah, this is how to get around that. And I could get past that. uh, that roadblock really quick. So, uh, but to my point, just the getting to meet people in person, build relationships. Cause a lot of times you're like, Hey, I met you at UConn. Remember me? Oh yeah. You know, what can I do for you type of thing. And as for someone doing a podcast, it'd be awesome to go and connect with people and, you know, talk to them for sure. Um, and then finally, to your point about, uh, the presentations themselves and being focused, that's, you know, for sure. But one of the things you can do a lot of times. depending on how many people want to do that, is maybe talk to the presenter afterwards. Hey, you

 

Erik @ AWS:

Mm.

 

Steve:

mentioned this thing or this thing. What did you mean by that? What about this? There's things to get. I can remember back in the days when I was first learning Apache Solar, which is your Lucene-based search, it's Elasticsearch or Algolia. Now it's probably the more popular and well-known proprietary implementations. But I remember learning some stuff. at in a presentation that I took back and I was able to look at the video and go through and stop and look okay this is what he was doing here and implement that you know in my day to day. But to your you know to your point just the meeting people the putting faces together and actually getting to sit down and talk to somebody and not have to send him a message email or a you know Twitter DM or whatever and actually hash things out it's similar The way I see it is similar to the benefit of being in person in office versus everybody remote. You know, for that reason, my company, we're all remote, we're all over the country, but we'll get together twice a year at a minimum and just spend a week together in the office working and do some fun things, but working and we get a ton accomplished when we're all in the same room versus when we're all remote at the time. So anyway, those are my comments on. conferences

 

Erik @ AWS:

Yeah.

 

Steve:

and stuff like that. And

 

Erik @ AWS:

I

 

Steve:

then

 

Erik @ AWS:

like

 

Steve:

one

 

Erik @ AWS:

that I.

 

Steve:

thing I will note too for conferences, at least for me, especially in warm places like a New Orleans or a Tampa or something like that, I've never understood this logic, but apparently when it's really, really super hot and humid outside, what you do is you make the inside so cold that you need to wear a parka just to stay warm inside of a building, you know, whether it's a restaurant. So I would go to places like that where it's super warm, but I had to dress for inside the conference

 

Erik @ AWS:

Hahaha

 

Steve:

venue. because it was so cold in there all the time. But I'm also a wimp when it comes to cold. Other people like it that cold and feel comfortable.

 

Erik @ AWS:

think that was on purpose? You think the conference does that on purpose to like keep people awake or something?

 

Steve:

Keep you awake right so you don't get too drowsy. Who knows?

 

Erik @ AWS:

Yeah, it's, I like that idea of the, at Viewcoff they did have a room that was specifically for like meeting people. I

 

Steve:

Mm-hmm.

 

Erik @ AWS:

think, I remember them saying, I'm probably gonna get this wrong, but I remember them saying like the beginning of the first day, like they had one room you can eat breakfast with where you were, I think both rooms had one room. was specifically made for the bigger tables where you're kind of facilitating more people to meet each other, because everybody, like each table was like 15 people. But they also had on the door, like, you can just meet here if you're the first, if you're by yourself at the conference and you don't know anyone. They

 

Steve:

Mm-hmm.

 

Erik @ AWS:

actually had, I think they had, everybody raised their hands at the beginning. I think a good chunk of people, like 25% of people, it was like they were by themselves. So there's a lot of other people. that

 

Steve:

Oh

 

Erik @ AWS:

didn't

 

Steve:

yeah.

 

Erik @ AWS:

have coworkers that are coming with them and they were just by themselves. And then they also had quite a few chunk of people that, this was like their first viewconf in general. So it's definitely meant to meet people. So you could go to these rooms at your lunch and breakfast where you can just sit with other people and talk to them. And then also, I think that an informal way of like, you could go to a room if you don't know anybody and talk to somebody too. When I was at Emberconf, they actually had like a, like a friendly speed, I don't think they call it speed dating, like speed meeting people. Obviously it's not dating, but it was just like for people who were the first time at EmberConf, everybody would go to this event and it happened like at seven or eight o'clock at night, the day before the conference started. And so we all got there and then they had these little tables and everybody sat next to the table. And then a group of people would go around and you just kind of just connect with people. So they had like a very formal process of meeting people for people who were like brand new to that conference. I think they did a pretty good job just facilitating just people meeting each other. I do like that coding lounge because I think at every conference I see just people on their laptops sitting outside the conference just working on something and maybe having a place where all those people can be like at the same place. That would make sense.

 

Steve:

So we got a hard stop for you here in a couple of minutes before

 

Erik @ AWS:

Yeah,

 

Steve:

we get to picks.

 

Erik @ AWS:

yeah, I could

 

Steve:

But

 

Erik @ AWS:

talk for another half hour, but I guess

 

Steve:

well,

 

Erik @ AWS:

I do have to leave, yes.

 

Steve:

one quick question. So

 

Erik @ AWS:

Yep.

 

Steve:

did you notice a particular dominance of laptop brands? I can tell you what I've always noticed. I'm curious to see if you notice a bit like a Linux versus a Mac versus Windows laptops

 

Erik @ AWS:

Generally

 

Steve:

at all.

 

Erik @ AWS:

I see a lot of Macs,

 

Steve:

Yep.

 

Erik @ AWS:

but I don't remember seeing... And then there's always a handful of Windows, but I probably

 

Steve:

Mm-hmm.

 

Erik @ AWS:

predominantly Macs...

 

Steve:

Yeah,

 

Erik @ AWS:

MacBooks.

 

Steve:

that's usually what I see too. That's sort of funny. So, all right. So with time constraints, we'll move on to picks. I'll go first real quick. First of all, I found an interesting post here via Hacker News on a website called Codium. And it relates to VS Code, which is an Uber popular IDE for web developers. And the title is, Why Did Microsoft Build VS Code? Turns out GitHub Copilot. And the TLDR is that Microsoft is breaking its open and extension friendly ethos with VS code in order to cripple GitHub copilot competitors with restricted APIs. So the guy goes through and gives some specific examples and. And other documentation haven't digested the whole thing, but considering the popularity of VS code. In the web developer ecosystem, it seems to be our world, it seems to be. Fairly relevant, for sure.

 

Erik @ AWS:

Nice.

 

Steve:

Dad jokes of the week. People talk about AI and merging technology with humans, sort of a Borg-like thing. So along those lines, I got a clock implanted in my brain, but it didn't take long before I started having second thoughts. The other day I went to, I was talking to a psychiatrist and I asked my doctor, I said, maybe you can cure me of my fear of being randomly sniped, you know, like with a sniper. And he said, that's a long shot. I said, yeah, I know what it means. And then finally my son, you know, he's 20 and he's getting older and he asked me one day what it's like to be a parent. So I woke him up at two o'clock in the morning to tell him that my sock came off. Those of you who have little kids can very easily empathize with that one. Cool. You got any picks for us, Eric?

 

Erik @ AWS:

Uh, can I, can I promo something?

 

Steve:

Shameless plugs, we're all about

 

Erik @ AWS:

Yeah,

 

Steve:

shameless plugs.

 

Erik @ AWS:

shameless plug. I'm starting a new Twitch show. If you go to twitch.com, it's on the AWS channel. It's going to be a front end and web dev hour. So it's going to be 9am Pacific time on Tuesdays. So if you go to the AWS channel on Twitch, 9am. On Wednesdays, I'll be doing this new channel or I'll be talking to front end developers, I'll be doing live coding. You'll be seeing me making a lot of mistakes, trying to do live coding and Googling and probably wasting a whole hour, not knowing what you're doing, but I think it'll be fun and hopefully we'll get some cool users. So yeah, check that out. 9 a.m. Pacific time on Tuesdays, web dev hour on the Twitch AWS channel.

 

Steve:

That's how we outcode, lots of Google A making mistakes, right?

 

Erik @ AWS:

Yep.

 

Steve:

So.

 

Erik @ AWS:

And also be talking about like front end tech and I hope we'll have some interviews too. So maybe Steve, maybe I'll get you

 

Steve:

Oh,

 

Erik @ AWS:

one of

 

Steve:

there

 

Erik @ AWS:

these

 

Steve:

we

 

Erik @ AWS:

days.

 

Steve:

go. Right on. All right, so before we go, I'd like to say thank you to the studio audience for coming. Always nice to have you. Tickets sell out well ahead of time because of demand. So if you want tickets and you're here in the Portland area, then feel free to contact me on Twitter at wonder95. Alrighty, so with that, we will wrap this up. Thank you, Eric, for coming and enlightening us with your VU Comp experience. And we will talk at you all next time.

 

Erik @ AWS:

Bye.