ShopTalk & Friends

You’ve capital-cased, Chris, with several exclamation points… And Dave, you did not. You sentence-cased.

I’ll fix it. I’ve fixed it. Yeah, here we go. I’m on brand now.

Oh, look at that. Do you think a WebSocket was involved there? What technology is used here to send data?

I think it’s a WebSocket. Yeah. I haven’t actually looked under the covers, but I would assume it’s a WebSocket.

Yeah. It’s not. Are we past long polling? Is that over?

I’ve definitely long polled in the last years, too. I can’t remember why… [laughter] Have you?

I think I have, too. I can’t remember why exactly, but sometimes the basics do you right.

Well, how often do you need it to be actually real time?

It’s just more and more. I’ve been bathing in it, because as of yet, unreleased CodePen 2.0 is just very, very real time…

Okay.

…and it requires various technologies to do so.

Is it WebSockets are better?

I was going to say, if you become a MobX [unintelligible 00:03:43.21]

Yeah, at this point, we’re just like – it’s too hard, so we’ve used this company Ably. Have you seen them? We were just like “Screw it, we’ll just send everything through that machine”, which uses whatever they need to use, and it’s not always the same thing, depending on what APIs of theirs you use. But I love outsourcing.

I was going to say, if you become a MobX dork, the podcast’s over, man… [laughter]

That might end the podcast, you know…?

Can’t handle it. I wouldn’t be able to handle it. Yeah.

No, I’m a fan, though. They’re not a sponsor, I’m sure, but they should be.

Heck yeah.

Because it’s good technology. A-B-L-Y. Check it out.

Now, does CodePen have sponsors, as well as your other properties like ShopTalk?

Yeah, we totally do. There’s a piece of the revenue pie that is advertising. It’s complicated for me, because advertising has been good for me in my career…

For sure.

And I’m kind of a fan. Advertising at its best is companies that are hyper-focused on their product, that need to reach an audience, but they don’t have the staff and expertise to do it, because they’re busy building an awesome product.

A hundred percent.

And then they reach out to the media, or whatever, whose expertise is building an audience through good content. And that’s a perfect yin-yang to me. And I like that. I don’t think that needs to change, really. The problem is, of course, the real story is just way grosser than that. Ad companies get crazy with their tracking stuff, and product companies get into advertising, too… So they’re real story is messy, but I’m still attracted to the simplicity of good advertising.

When done well, it’s amazing. When done well.

Yeah. And on CodePen, I’d like it to be such a platform that it would feel silly to have an ad on it, frankly. And I hope that doesn’t offend any of our current advertisers, but imagine getting a GitHub email or something, and having it there be a big ad on the bottom. It just feels not right. GitHub would never do that. They make their money through all the ways that they make money, advertising not being one of them; it just doesn’t feel right. I want to be that someday, when I grow up.

Sure.

Tasteful ads. That’s what I’m for. Well-placed, when you expect them…

Well-considered…

Yeah. Semi-opt-in, in a way. With a podcast you kind of opt-in, because you know that your podcast that you’re listening to is ad-supported, and you kind of expect the ad to be there. Whereas like a GitHub email, or a CodePen email, you’re like “Hey, that doesn’t belong there.”

Right.

That’s not a well-placed ad.

Yeah. I had Carbon ads on my site for a long time, and it was great, good company… And I made like 20 whole dollars a month. I’m on Hacker News or whatever… $20, man. And the click-through rate on those ads is like a hundred X industry standard. Like, it gets 10 clicks versus one. And like –

So it was a good ad, you’re saying, too. And it was still 20 bucks.

And it’s like at the bottom of a website, it’s very discreet…

You’re probably doing more for the ad network than they were doing for you at that point, because they get to say “Oh, get your ad on this site that other developers will recognize.”

X thousand impressions, and… Yeah. But I don’t know, it just seems like even that experience with a good ad company, and I was getting clicks, I wasn’t like reigning – I wasn’t making boat money, you know? And so…

What would that number have to look like, Dave, for it to become like all of a sudden you start thinking “Maybe I could just write”?

[00:07:28.24] Well, yeah, I think – I’ve heard YouTubers or something, where it’s something like the thousand marks, at 1000 subs or 10,000 subs, I think you’re getting into the, like, “This is a chunk of change I can pay attention to, or have fun with.” And then a hundred thousand subs you’re in the “Quit my job territory”, you know? And these are probably like, let’s say like $5,000 increments, or something. Or $3,000 increments. But then when you get to the millions or whatever, then it’s like “Yeah, I should quit my job”, you know? I don’t know, it’s interesting. I’d kind of contemplated, like “What if I just gassed it? Just post, just doing it, every day. Boom, boom, boom, boom. Doing it.”

Really? This is a secret Dave dream/fantasy?

Boom, boom, boom, boom?

Well, I tried, and it was just like “Dude, I’m going to die doing this.” I’m a post a week person, not five posts a day person, you know?

I’m sure somewhere inside of you you know what the real answer is. It’s not good quality vegetables information. It’s just incendiary crap, it’s clickbait, it’s “Five ways to use border radius…” Find some drama. I mean, look at all the biggest channels do that. I mean, I don’t know… Maybe it’s not quite that simple, but…

Well, and all my best content comes from my job. Doing a job that pays money. I learned hard lessons by trying dumb ideas.

We have a tough niche in that way. All of us do. None of us would listen to a developer show where the developers weren’t developers.

Right.

You’d see right through it.

Yeah, that was something I learned pretty young, actually in college, because I had college professors teaching me computer science… And it was fine, but it was stodgy and outdated stuff, and I was like “Why are you teaching Perl when Ruby on Rails exists?” Just one question I asked my web development class teacher. And he was kind of like “Well, because I know Perl.” I’m like “Okay, fine.”

But then I had one adjunct professor who was a databases guy, and it was a night class, because he worked all day doing databases. And then he came and taught a class one night a week…

And you liked his real world action?

Well, he just understood it in a way that I felt like the other guys didn’t… And maybe it was just my selection of teachers and all that, but I was just like “Okay, the adjunct is – this guy’s living in it every single day.” So he doesn’t bring back hypotheticals to teach us stuff. He like actually shows us “I was dealing with this at 3pm this afternoon”, and I thought that had a lot of weight to it.

And so yeah, having actual real world code out there and being into it I think is a big part of it… Which has been a struggle for me, honestly, as I’ve gotten further and further into the editorial process of like continuing to build, and setting a time aside to actually experiment and tinker and build stuff that ships. I don’t want to lose that edge.

Yeah. I sat down for a meeting with – there’s a college here in town, in Bend, Oregon. Oregon, whatever, School of Cascades. I just butchered that. I didn’t go to college there.

Cascading Oregon Sheets, yeah.

Is that like a CSS school?

Oregon State University, whatever it is. The Cascades branch of it. And we just got to talking about the curriculum that they have for computer science. And it was like – they do make an attempt to have people come in from the real world, and they have all kinds of mechanisms for this. During the classes, they have extra stuff… There’s ways to have people that are in the industry talking to them, and I was happy to do it, and did it after that meeting. And it went well.

I thought it was cool. But then she was talking about just the curriculum as it is… It’s not like stodgy, but it’s not – I don’t even think it’s Ruby on Rails. Not that it’s older than that necessarily, but it’s really fundamental stuff that doesn’t concern itself with the technology du jour, really… Because a lot of it is just like “Here’s how you put some data in a database.”

And the purpose of it was so fundamental of technology that it doesn’t need to, and probably shouldn’t change every single year. Because there’s also human beings that need to teach it, and those human beings need a little time to get good at what they’re saying… And if you change it every year, then they’re just not getting there. That’s part of it. And part of it is it doesn’t even matter, because it’s like the concepts of like whatever, an index on an SQL database is not changing that much. Anyway…

[00:12:08.14] Right. Yeah, striking a balance is definitely important. And I don’t think that you should just always teach the framework du jour. There’s a certain point at which you look at a curriculum and you say, “This is 15 years out of date.” But I don’t think you have to be Next.js 11 in your college web dev course.

I know. That’s so old, Jerod. It’s like 15 now, or something.

That’s true. Now I’m showing my age… [laughs]

They’ve just released 15 and it annoyed me, because it’s based on a React 19, which is not stable yet. So you’re like “Really? We’re shipping unstable meta frameworks with unstable frameworks underneath it?” Ooh, that’s a mouthful.

I have just completely avoided Next.js. Not because I’m against it, but because I just have been able to avoid it. Do you guys build with that toolkit? Dave? Chris does?

I do. I like it.

I don’t. I’m in web component land full-time, so that’s kind of where I’m existing.

Oh… Is that the promised land? I hear web component land is the promised land.

Oh, well, yeah, I’d be happy to share the good news of web components with everybody here at the Changelog… [laughter]

Share it up. Go!

Let’s hear it. Tell us the good news, Dave.

Dave’s the president.

Imagine a world – I’m the president of web components. That’s a well-known fact.

Okay… [laughs]

You know, you can be the president if you just say you are. It’s funny… It’s kind of the cool thing about being a president. So, again, framework churn, meta framework churn… I don’t exactly have that problem, because I’m not using a framework. I mean, in web component land you use a library, typically. Fast is the one I use for work. Lit is what I kind of enjoy using… But I’ll even write a vanilla web component from time to time.

Not my favorite, because ergonomically it feels like antiquated, but it’s totally doable. You just check some HTML into a shadow root, and there you go. But web components are – I don’t know, they’re pretty easy to write, they’re super-easy to read and reason about… They’re class-based, which drives, I think, people who are into functional monads crazy… But it’s pretty predictable when you hop into a web component. And even if let’s say – I’ve multiple times converted a Lit component to a Fast component. It’s pretty easy.

Was it? Oh, that’s cool.

Yeah, because a lot of the methods are the same, or the concepts are all the same.

Unconnected callback.

Yeah. There’s prescribed names, and you take a template, you take some styles, and you take a class and you smoosh it together to achieve a packaged web component. And so switching frameworks isn’t a huge deal for me right now. I mean, if I had thousands of components, it might be a whole weekend of my life… But even if all of these died and I had to go back to vanilla web components, that would be achievable as well. It wouldn’t be the end of the world.

I think we’re committing like the baby sin though of being like “Next.js versus web components. Which to pick?” Which is not the dichotomy that should be painted… Because those things even can work in React, which I know is always caveated with the “React didn’t like web components for a long time.” It’s still doable, and it’s gotten a lot better in 18 and 19 and stuff… But also, React isn’t the only framework in the world. They tend to work great with all kinds of other frameworks, too. So it’s not a versus thing. In fact, I think it’s almost problematic to think of it in that way, because it’s like, web components has no story for routing, and state management, and all these things that are the reasons that you pick a framework, or some of the major reasons. And that they can work together.

[00:16:02.28] Dave has convinced me. He talks about leaf nodes, about these little – the smallest of the things; the ones that don’t have a bunch of other children and stuff are great use cases for web components, and that can happily exist in your SvelteKit app. Your whole design system could be web components, whereas the website that you’re producing can be in a Vue app, or whatever.

Yeah. It gives you a lot of freedom, is kind of the ultimate answer. I mean, you can generate your app with C++. I mean, anything that spits out HTML can generate web components. Eleventy, Astro are also good candidates, because they are pretty just HTML-forward in how you author and use them… You mentioned Ruby on Rails. Web components work great in Ruby on Rails. You just put them in there. If you’ve ever tried to staple Ruby and a React app together, if you’ve had that wonderful experience - it’s not my favorite, but web components work pretty great in that context. And we’re seeing a lot of sort of games just work on lower-end devices, less memory usage, things like that. So it’s been kind of a boon for the work we’re doing.

I think the false dichotomy, Chris, has been somewhat promulgated by a lot of the online dialogue, specifically coming from some framework authors around web components, and calling them things like “The most dangerous thing to the future of the web.” And I can’t remember the exact quote, but it’s like, now you’re making me feel like there is just two sides. There’s side web component, and then there’s side framework component, or whatever you want to call it, React/Solid/what have you… And as working developers, we’re busy, we’re trying to build stuff, and like we’re trying to keep up, but we don’t have all of us the time to like dive into the milieu of that debate, and understand that Next.js doesn’t rule me out from using web components in the way that you’ve just described. We just see this versus that, and it’s hard to break through that, and we just write it off and move on.

Yeah, fair enough.

I don’t know how we actually fix that, but I think there’s some of that going on.

I don’t know, because they’re not entirely wrong either. That’s what makes this such a juicy thing to think about, is that you might make a card component in React, and name it capital C Card, and call it and use it. And you also might make a card web component. Those are two things you can do. That is comparable. That is straight up one to one comparable. And it can be complicated, because you’re used to – in React we’re like “Well, I’ll just use the on-click attribute then on the button, and the on click will call my use state thing, and it will change some state”, or whatever. It’s all these things that you can’t do, at least not in the exact same way, in a web component. So then how do those two worlds clash? Can’t you see having that be your first experience, and then being absolutely annoyed with web components? You’re like “Oh my God, that doesn’t work. I’m gonna have to wire this up a totally different way. Why would I use this?” I don’t know… Dave’s also said that everybody’s first experience with the shadow DOM sucks… Which is funny, too. It takes you a minute to work on them, and then you’re like “Oh, I get what this is for…” But that first run in you have with it, you’re like “What the hell…?!”

I guess the question really is, Dave, how do you get to live in web component land? How do you get to have that choice to not bounce and dance around the frameworks, and you get to live in your own blessed land?

[00:19:38.17] To be fair, I’ve come from a lot of like building my own CMSes, Ruby on Rails, CakePHP, things like that… A lot of dynamic stuff. And then I went into – kind of bit by the static bug; a lot of Jekyll, Eleventy, Astro-y sort of work… Some clients wanted Webflow, and stuff like that. And then I did a startup, I wrote that in Vue… That was in Vue. In Vue 2. Nuxt.js. But we were unable to make the jump from two to three, because it was just like so much code and so much work for a small team. But for the last seven months I’ve been working at Microsoft, and their teams at Microsoft are kind of betting heavy on web components to solve some pretty - what would you say - necessary performance profiles.

If you think of Windows - full disclaimer, I don’t speak for Microsoft. So there may be things I can say or can’t say. I don’t really know. But if you think of Microsoft, it’s a company that makes an OS, right? It has a browser, but then they don’t control the hardware of that OS. The OAM ultimately does. And you all have seen different devices that are good and bad, and your stereotypical Windows device is that Dell in your uncle’s big wood cabinet, that also has a big CRT monitor in there, you know?

Classic…

Yeah, classic. But then at the other end, there’s all these gamer PCs, with like LEDs, and you know…

Tricked out.

Yeah, fully tricked out PCs, that mine Bitcoins, and…

Water-cooled.

Yeah, exactly.

All that stuff.

But then there’s all these – but that’s just an example. But you can kind of see, when you break out of the classic $3,000 laptop realm, you start to see a wide array of performance profiles that your products have to meet. And so that’s kind of where web components are fitting in.

So if we go back to your conversation around your humble website and your frontpage hacker news traffic that brings you N dollars per month, where N is not significant enough to double down or triple down…

N stands for not significant… [laughter]

Yeah. I’m not trying to rub it in. I’m just trying to get us back there.

No, you think like “Oh man, if I got on Hacker News, I would be famous, and I would be great.” It doesn’t work like that. It’s like literally four hours of like server sweat. That’s it. You’re just like “Please don’t fall over, because I don’t want to deal with that.”

Yeah. We frontpaged enough times to know it’s like – it’s also the most fickle traffic you’ll ever get in your entire life.

That’s it, right? You don’t want that traffic. I mean, you do; you’ll take it. But what you want is just like organic Google search engine traffic. And that story is even changing, too. But those people are like looking for something. They have a job to be done in their mind. They’re like “I need to learn how to do this thing…” And then they might find it on your website, or they might be like “I don’t know, maybe this other link will have it.” And that’s where you’re getting the clicks, and stuff.

Right. Which was the beauty of CSS-Tricks, because it acted not only as your blog, Chris, but also as this wealth of returnable, organic information that people find solutions to their problems.

Yeah, it was this long tail thing.

Exactly. And you created a beautiful business around that. And what I was trying to bring it back to, Dave - not to just pick on you about your N dollars per month… But just thinking about 2025, you guys are very much website folk, as are we… But I’m wondering about the viability of a website in 2025.

Now, of course, if we think about content site versus driving a business, or apps… I mean, obviously CodePen is a web app, website play as a business, right? But if you’re starting today - we’re at the end of ’24 here, for those listening in the future - is the web a viable platform in ’25, to start a website, and then drive traffic to that website, and make money somehow?

I’m going to buzz in… Too existential. Don’t like the question. [laughter]

Yeah. Error…

Transcripted… Forever… Say it.

Well, I think in the last year or so we’ve witnessed the completely self-inflicted implosion of an entire social network. Wouldn’t it have been nice to have all your stuff on a website, as opposed to threads on popular social media site?

[00:24:18.12] Sure.

So in my mind, a website has become more valuable in 2025 than years prior even.

In the sense of ownership and longevity.

In owning your content. I mean, literally, there’s a case before the Supreme Court where Elon Musk is saying “I want to know I own Infowars.com.” [unintelligible 00:24:42.08] Yeah. I own @Infowars.

Oh, the handle. Okay. Because the website was bought by The Onion, right?

Yeah. Onion bought it. And they’re like “That Twitter handle is an asset that we want.”

I see.

And Elon is –

That happens. That happened to CSS-Tricks. I had @CSS, and part of the sale was that DigitalOcean got that handle. And Elon in this case could have been like “Nope, you can’t make that part of the business transaction.

It’s actually mine.”

Right. It’s actually mine.

Which is technically true. Right?

I suppose. Yeah.

I mean, it is. Even back before Elon, Twitter could reassign a handle. And I remember them doing that. I mean, even if we go to Npm and the kik handle, that’s what created the Leftpad debacle, was the author of the Leftpad Npm package also owned a package called kik. Remember that? And kik was a startup, and they contacted Npm and they said “We’re a startup, and we want to publish a package called kik.”

It’s true.

“And this guy owns that.” And Npm took it from him and gave it to the kik startup. And then the dude pulled all of his packages, including Leftpad.

That’s how that went down? I remember Leftpad, but I didn’t remember that’s how it went down.

Yeah, he was upset that could happen.

Yeah, he was pissed. But they were within their rights to do that, because every Npm handle’s owned by Npm, and every Twitter handle’s actually owned by Twitter, now Elon Musk.

Right. It’s their internal business decisions. There’s no law.

Yeah. Which sucks. And to Dave’s point, you don’t own that property, even though you’re investing in it all these years. You don’t own it.

Here’s one for you. GitHub.com/changelog. [laughter]

Who’s got it?

Who’s got it?

Not us. So it 404s. It’s protected. This is an example of it. We’re just GitHub.com/thechangelog. We cannot be changelog, because they are probably using it internally. We’ve asked over the years. From the outside it’s 404ing, so that just means that –

Yeah, “So what do you care?” Yeah.

Right. And we’ve had plenty of people that are like “Yeah, we can get you that”, because they work there, even high up… And then they’re like “Nah, we can’t.”

But it’s likely being used or protected. That’s the thing. It may be used internally.

Yeah. Just in case.

Right. So…

That’s the real tap on the shoulder, is like “Hey, can you give it to me AND redirect every single link that’s linked from one to the other?” [laughter]

That’s right.

Otherwise it’s not that useful to you, I don’t think. Because I’m sure there’s all kinds of links to it that you would wreck, and it’s like, why bother?

Well, for us, it’s just anal-retentive. Like, we just want to have it the same everywhere. That’s kind of us. We’re like “We just want to be Changelog everywhere.”

See, that’s where I wonder if Reddit won, because they had the /u always…

Right.

Oh, it’s so smart. Oh, my God.

In lots of ways, Reddit did kind of win, didn’t they? I mean…

Yeah. I mean…

They’re still kicking.

Well, and they don’t sit around like “Oh, I want to add a route, but I have to kick somebody.” They don’t have that problem.

That’s true.

[00:27:52.25] We have a file in our in our app called username/blacklist.rb because, the signup process is still Rails; it’s a little service we have… And every time we invent some new little thing we need, a new route of any kind, we have to remember to go into the username blacklist, and make sure that that route is not a taken username. Otherwise we risk somebody signing up for it or something, and having it conflict with the routing. It’s such a silly little detail. And there has been a few cases where we had to kick somebody off a username. They had the username account, or something, and we need /account to do something… So we’re like “Oh, sorry. You can’t have that.” I don’t think anybody’s ever cared. There’s never been like a high profile case of it, but it is annoying.

Right.

I originally signed up as /img, and Chris kicked me. [laughter]

/img…

Yeah. I tried to get API, or whatever.

Yeah. It’s a good little hack there, you know?

So we got here because Dave’s argument was that you don’t own your own content. The Elons are the future owners of Twitter/X/Meta/Facebook… Whatever, pick your platform where you’ve got ownership of some sort of handle you feel like is yours, because you have claimed it… But the platform owner and the conglomerate - it may or may not be - is the true owner. And that’s the challenge. That’s the rub, the viability of the web, is that –

It’s true on CodePen, too. I actually own your thing. Sorry…

That’s right.

I try to be cool about it and –

It’s your website.

…have all your stuff exportable, and all that… Yeah, but if we really need a username or something, I’m afraid that’s an internal decision by us.

Okay, I’ve got one more thing here. CodePen.io…

/changelog?

/changelog. It 404s.

Come on, Chris…

If it 404s on our system, that means it’s just open. You can just go get it.

Okay, sweet.

Go grab it, Adam.

We’ll have to claim that, quick.

You’ve got T minus however many days to figure that out… [laughter]

Or until Chris throws it in his Ruby file, and we can’t have it.

There was a Hank Green video the other day, the internet personality Hank Green… It was like a Mastodon versus Twitter, or versus Blue Sky kind of thing, which - at the time of recording Blue Sky is the new hotness that we are talking about, if you’re listening to this in the future.

Again.

Yeah.

It’s the new hotness, again.

Yeah. He was kind of saying – it sounded like famous guy on internet complaining he’s not getting enough likes. He was like “I posted this here and I posted this here, and I feel like this one got shadow-banned, because I mentioned Blue Sky, because I posted it without the word Blue Sky, and it got more engagement eight minutes later”, or whatever. So it’s kind of weird. Maybe some anecdata or evidence there. But it also just goes to show, there’s also this theory that he exposes that is like Facebook and in Twitter are – and maybe even I guess LinkedIn; I don’t even know. But these social networks - let me say that - these social networks are kind of like impeding the views, the algorithmic views of things with links in them.

Yes.

Because they want you on their own site. A link is a bounce out. It doesn’t keep you there. So it’s better to –

It’s a hundred percent true.

It offends me so horribly.

It’s a hundred percent true, right? Well, yeah, I would love to see more data on it. It seemed like –

Well, it was right there, because Twitter did quote-unquote open source their algorithm. And you can go read [unintelligible 00:31:29.29] Now, the other ones are all kind of reading the tea leaves. So I won’t say it’s a hundred percent true on LinkedIn, but everybody who studies LinkedIn will tell you that it is true. I know at one point in the Twitter open source algorithm, it’s right there. Devalue if it has an external link.

Wow.

That makes me so sad. Just yesterday, as I sat down, I saw a cool – this is good content for a podcast anywhere. Look up Number Flow. It’s a really cool component, and they make it for React, Vue and Svelte, even though it’s a web component under the hood. It probably should offend Dave personally that they should just make the web component usable… But it’s so beautiful. Like, just click those numbers. The shuffle button at the top of the number flow website is so beautiful, you know?

[00:32:14.17] Oh, yeah. That’s cool.

And I was like “I’m going to show people this in a video.” So I’ll just record myself as a little video, and I’m gonna play with it, and I’m gonna show people how to use it on CodePen, too. So now I have this little video that I want to share on my social networks… And then I go to write a little tweet for it from the CodePen account. CodePen is still a little bit on Twitter. It’s harder to stomach getting rid of that for business perspectives. It’s easier personally… But I don’t spend a lot of time there. But if I shoot a video like this, I still want to do a tweet for it. So I write out the tweet and I say “Oh look, this is a really classy web component.” I put the video on there… And then I’m like “Oh, but it doesn’t feel right to not put the link to the thing.” I feel like it’s too weird to – like I’m just playing to the algorithm if I don’t put the link, or I do this stupid little thing where you reply to it and then put the link in the reply… It just makes me vomit, for some reason. I hate it.

That’s why it’s there for a lot of accounts, though. When you see that on there, I’ve seen –

They’re just playing with the algorithm.

They just know that if you put an external link in the main tweet, it’s going to get devalued. And so they put it in the –

Yeah, that’s what makes me just barf in my mouth. I can’t deal with it. So I put the link in the thing. I’m like “I don’t care. Just devalue me then. I’m putting the link in the tweet. I’m just doing it. Sorry.”

It’s like our little form of rebellion, you know?

Yeah. But it attacks what’s good about the web.

100%.

Aggregators, people who share links… Like, “I’ve found this. This is cool.” That’s the fabric, that’s the webbing of the web, and we just like give it up. My favorite blogs are blogs that link to blogs… Followed by blogs that write blog posts about other blog posts. Those are like the two best blogs. [laughter] When I’m on The Verge and they’re talking about a product and they don’t link to the product’s website, I get so mad, you know?

Yes.

I’m just almost like blood rage, like “Please just link to the thing you’re talking about.”

Spend time fleshing out your description. Link to everything if you can.

Yeah.

Well, all the pertinent things, at least… If it was a main highlighted thing, for sure. Try to link out to it, you know?

Yeah. I mean, if you’re reviewing a thing…

Yeah. I mean, we probably ebbed and flowed in our ability to fully best execute show notes, Jerod, over the years…

Sure.

We’ve done pretty well, I would say.

Right. I feel like the more podcasts we produce per week, the harder it is to make awesome show notes every single time.

And now, back in the day, we used to like hand-write sentences, and it was a much more bigger deal.

Well, our solution to it, which is not – I’m not saying “This is the way to go.” But we don’t put links in the transcripts either. Because I think that’s really hard. The moment I say the word Ably again, to link that to Ably… It’s a tall order there, I think. Instead, we just put a pile of the most relevant links at the top. Just being like “Links from the show”, and we’ll just have Ably in the list up there.

Yeah. That’s basically what we do. A list of links. And we try to get them all.

I like your style with that. You’re like – I think you actually used the terminology, “just links.” It’s cool. Just links. Here’s links.

Yeah.

And I think we do something similar, where it’s just like a notes section…. And it could be a paragraph, it could be links, it could be a list, it could be an image… It’s almost like a blog post in a way, in terms of what it can contain. It’s not just links.

I’ve seen people go deep, deep, deep on their show notes. And I have respect for it, but I also just think “That’s a lot of depth on show notes…” [laughter]

You are SEO’d, bud. Good job.

You know? And now there’s AI-generated show notes, and it starts to get where it’s like “Oh, my goodness…”

Break: [00:35:58.02]

I understand the networks out there wanting to contain and subcontain, and deprioritize links… I understand where that thought process comes from. But at the same time - wow, what if you just play to the strength of the people, and the aggregators, as you said, Dave, or just people who are happy to share where things came from? A social network who embraces that, that embraces that… That’s kind of Reddit, in a way. Reddit links to everything. You can go on there… And that’s why Reddit kind of has stood the test of time. One, /u is great, and /r is great… But at the same time, you don’t have these clashes, you have a lot of freedom in there… There’s no - to my knowledge, no deprioritizing links out. It’s kind of like part of the game. I will say that it’s a challenging website to navigate sometimes. It’s hard to understand where the content is…

For sure.

…it seems like it’s not always for me as the reader, or the consumer… And I don’t really like those kinds of practices as a design team, when you make those choices… Like “Let me confuse you by where the rest of this conversation actually is.”

Where the link is…

Yes. Or anything. Like, “How do you continue this conversation?” happens frequently on Reddit.

And then they went and destroyed all the third-party clients. That made me very mad.

What’s that one where there’s a bunch of – people launch their product on it, you know what I mean?

Product Hunt.

Product Hunt. It always had like a weird “Get it!” button that you had to click, or something.

“Get it now!”

It’s just a link to what it is. You’re like “What is Get It?” It’s like, it often didn’t work with the thing being launched… It’s not a thing to get, really, so I don’t know what that is…

Product Hunt was never attracted to me as just a regular guy looking for cool stuff. It felt so – it always felt very promotory, to the point where I just didn’t really want to use it… Even though I saw it – I remember the initial launch, and people were using it… I probably even have an account… I do have an account, because every once in a while I’ll get an email from them like “Hey, somebody followed you on Product Hunt.” I’m like “Cool.” But it feels like promoters promoting the promoters.

What about launch weeks? The next best thing after that comes launch weeks. When you can’t promote it and get attraction on Product Hunt, you create your own week, or month even… Which has become the rage over the last, I would say three-ish years, but more so in the last two years, concentrated.

It’s a weird marketing vector. “It’s so hard to get attention… We’re going to make a whole week of feature releases to just like – we’re just doing it. It’s going big. Everything, we’re landing it all at the same time.” I’m way more like “Let’s do it like –”

Always be shipping.

Always through the year. Let’s not do these big drops. But I don’t know, there’s gotta be a reason around it.

They just want attention on what they’re up to. I mean, I love shipping consistently, but it is hard to get interest on what you’re up to. I remember when the app store first dropped, and I used to read all the release notes of the apps that came out… Because I was a nerd, and I was like “These are cool. I want to see what’s new”, in TweetBot, or whatever it was. And over time, I’m like “I just can’t care anymore, even with my favorite apps.” I’m over it. So it’s hard for development companies and firms to be like “Hey, pay attention to us! We’ve got something we want to show you. It’s not your standard bug fix or minor feature. We’ve got some big stuff, and we want people to know about it”, because there’s so many people shipping stuff all the time.

That brings me to CodePen 2.0, Chris. I mean… You’re trying to probably bring some attention to that release, right?

[00:44:00.17] Yeah… It’s a little early, but it’s about time. I’ve never been in this position in my career, I don’t think, where I have to pick the moment which you’ve got to start the hype train, and that moment is like before it’s fully shipped, you know? Like, I generally prefer to like get it ,done and then just tell people, and then they can use it. But I think that’s probably not appropriate when you’re trying to really build a bunch of enthusiasm, and stuff.

I think it’s maybe just a smidge too early, but we’re in alpha, and the alpha is in good shape as of recently. So if anybody listening really wants to check it out, and wants to check it out with me… Because that’s how we’re kind of defining alpha for us, is that we do little kind of guided tours. You’re still using the website and stuff, but I kind of want to watch you do it and talk about it, and help find bugs and stuff…

And then in the next couple weeks, I think, we’ll be in beta, which is a little more open. Don’t quote me on that. I don’t know when this is going to ship exactly. The better bet is just to email me, chris [at] CodePen.io, and I’d love to show it to any developer. But yeah, I don’t know. You didn’t ask me to do that. Why did I go off on that?

No, it’s all good, because we’re talking about promotion.

He’s a natural promoter.

Are you worried developers aren’t going to fully understand the revolutionary DX, and just paradigm shifting?

It’s all about speed, baby…!

Yeah… I mean, you’re shifting some paradigms, and I love it, I’ve seen it…

He’s shifting tons of paradigms.

It is actually a little bit. It’s kind of a – it has its own compiler. So we’re entering that market a little bit.

Hm… Interesting.

Not a little bit. The whole thing is kind of based on that.

What’s it compiling?

Well, your code, really…

TypeScript, I hope.

Of course it does. But we’re not trying to invent any new languages. We’re just trying to invent a new way to combine technological choices like that. So if you want to write in TypeScript, which most people do these days…

Ugh… I’ve gotta go. I’ll be right back…

[laughs]

Yeah.

No, I’ve come around on it. I don’t know if I’m a TypeScript stan yet, but…

Dave literally left…

Dave’s gone.

Note for the audience, Dave is gone… [laughter]

He’s wiping his lips…

Sorry, I had to let my dogs out, but that was a perfect timing. [laughter] That’s tremendous.

You do sometimes need to think about and figure out how it’s going to work with your stack. Sometimes it needs to be configured, sometimes it’s on you to like “Well, I guess I need to have a TypeScript compiler too, then”, or something.

And I don’t think anybody really relishes that DevOps work. You know, like, how is that going to work in our build process? I want to add something new to it. I’m compelled by, say, Lightning CSS, or something; some new thing. And you’re like “Well, does it work with Astro, though? That’s what I use to build a website… So where do I slot it in? Am I going to find docs for that? Am I going to – whatever?” And it could be a lot of stuff. It’s not just a combination of two technologies. It could be all kinds of different stuff.

As a developer, I kind of want to like push my cart through the aisles of technologies and be like “I’ll have one of these, and I’ll have some web components, and I want to write them in TypeScript, and style them with SaaS, and build the site with Eleventy”, and all that stuff… Wouldn’t that be fun? And our idea is that “Yeah, for sure. You can do that. You literally just click some buttons and then we wire them up for you.” But the way we’re wiring them up isn’t like we read the docs and build configurations for you. It’s the compiler that comes up with a plan to build all these technologies where they don’t really need to be wired together.

So the idea is that – I don’t know, if you need to configure something like Astro or whatever to work with TypeScript, I don’t think you need to. I think it does it. But that’s just as an example. But you wouldn’t if the code wasn’t TypeScript by the time Astro got around to compiling it. Let’s say it was already JavaScript; then it doesn’t matter.

[00:47:59.13] So it’s like, what if we dealt with your SaaS first, and then it was CSS by the time that the next technology needed to touch it? Then you don’t need to configure anything, because it’s already been boiled down to its primitive. We think we can do that with all technology.

All technologies. Could you use that compiler outside of CodePen context?

Yeah, absolutely. It probably won’t be open source on day one, but only for time constraint, not because we’re trying to keep it as proprietary technology. I would love to ship it. I’d love to just have it be on Npm and you just grab it. And it kind of will need to be at some point.

Yeah, I mean, that makes it way more valuable, I think, for both on and off CodePen.

What’s the name of it?

Good question, Adam. I don’t know yet. We have a bunch of really cool –

Rupert.

Rupert. [laughter]

Rupert AI. Lock it in.

I had an awesome name – yeah, Rupert is actually… Yeah, that’s nice.

That’s actually a pretty good AI name. Rupert.

I had what I thought was a name I was really going to push for. I was like “Oh, this is sweet. I really like it.” And then something shipped pretty notably in our very tight industry with a similar name, and I was like “Well, that’s out.”

Call it Bolt?

You can’t wait too long. No, Jerod. Why would you think that?

Was it [unintelligible 00:49:11.05]

[whispering] It’s totally Bolt.

Is it? I called it. [laughter] That’s how tight-knit it is. I guessed it on my first guess.

It’s a good name. It’s like a little fast dog in the movie, and stuff…

But didn’t Bolt have like a – there was like a financial company called Bolt, that kind of tarnished the name of Bolt…

Yeah, they’ve come and gone, probably. Are they still around?

Oh, it’s a good name, but we’ll come up with something good. But yeah, the compiler does need kind of its own name… And we’re just going to sleep on it for a while there.

Super-Bolt. [laugh]

Double Bolt.

Better than Bolt.

Well, it really is kind of a nice name. I mean, congratulations to them. That product is actually super-duper cool.

Yeah, it is cool. Bolt.new we’re referring to, if you want to check it out.

Well, it has other connotations too, like you can bolt things together, which is exactly what we’re trying to do. We’ll bolt things on later.

A hundred percent. Maybe you could call it Lego. That might work. Just call it Lego.

Yeah, yeah. Maybe.

You can Lego things together…

They won’t have any trouble with that at all.

[laughs]

This product is unavailable in Sweden…

Or anywhere else in which they have jurisdiction. Yeah.

You’ve got to spell it with all caps, too.

Exactly. And you can’t pluralize it at all.

Not to change the subject too deeply, but Chris, you and I had a short conversation while at All Things Open.

Yeah, we did.

And I believe, if I recall correctly, you were telling me about something where you had written something fully, and y’all didn’t ship it at all. In regards to CodePen 2.0. Like, you had done something massive, and you just didn’t ship it. You spent a lot of time doing something… Am I incorrect on that?

Or somebody else? I’m trying to think. I feel like I’ve done that a number of times… [laughs] But what would I have told you about…?

You said it was a big deal.

Like a rewrite?

Thousands and thousands of dollars you spent doing something, and it just didn’t ship.

Oh, that’s right. You know what I bet it was? One time we were going to run a conference.

That’s right.

We were going to do an event called CodePen World’s Fair, and we had hired people, and we had done a bunch of custom design work, and booked venues, and really moved far along on it, and then it just kind of – there’s lots of details involved, but it was kind of a cold feet situation. It didn’t feel like it was going to come together in a way that we thought it was going to really be as cool as we wanted… And I think throwing an embarrassing conference can be detrimental to what you’re trying to do.

Nobody wants to do that…

So we were willing to lose the money to not embarrass ourselves.

I don’t know what made us talk about that. We only talked for like 15 minutes at most…

Well, we were at a conference…

Yeah, you were probably talking about conferences.

You were sharing all your secrets… I liked it. I was like “Tell me more.”

Yeah, maybe. I don’t know if I’ve ever really talked about that… But yeah, we had like the coolest website you’ve ever seen for it. Because we were going to do it in Chicago, and Chicago had famously through the World’s Fair at one time, the White City, and all that.

Oh, yeah. The Devil in the Windy City.

Yeah. We were going to kind of play off that a bit.

That’s cool.

[00:52:07.20] But you can imagine, “Oh, we’re going to have screens, floor to ceiling, and we’ll have the creators of some of the most amazing visual stuff on CodePen coming to do it…” And we even had asked and had a bunch of yeses from those types of people, and they were going to build special exhibits for it, and that kind of thing… So sorry to those people. But I think we canceled it early enough that we didn’t waste people’s time too madly.

So - you’re not having to reveal, obviously, if there’s embarrassing or specific details that matter… But what made you finally pull the plug on that stuff? Because that’s a hard thing to do, is actually just stop when you’re so – I mean, sunk cost fallacy is very strong. Was there a moment where you’re like “You know what? We’re not doing it.”

Yeah… Well, we had three founders at the time…

So it was a conversation.

It was. And everybody kind of – I think we coalesced on it pretty quickly, because there was some nervousness… And I think I was probably the most for it, just because it was – that’s kind of up my alley. The other two guys aren’t as conference-forward as I am, you know… But I also didn’t want to embarrass myself. I kind of don’t remember all the exact details that made us think that. But the ambition I think felt – that’s why I was okay with it in the end. It felt like too high. If you’re like “We’re gonna, I don’t know, spend $22,000 on this exhibit. Are we so sure?” I don’t actually know any of these people that say “Yes, I’m going to build a experiential virtual art exhibit on this thing.” Like, it’s rolling the dice till the day of the conference.

High risk.

And how do they even practice doing it? It’s not like I can ship them – I don’t know. There was too much worry, I guess. I’d rather be in a position as a company – because when we killed it, we said “Hey, when we have money to burn as a company, let’s do it.” But we just kind of didn’t at the time. And if we burned that much money kind of for nothing, that would have been dangerous. Now, I don’t know if any company has money to burn, especially these days… But in those days, it felt like it. If you’re MailChimp, they were setting money on fire for a while. And then it worked for them.

Yeah, that’s right.

Mostly.

Have you guys ever considered a shop talk conf?

Yeah, I think it’s come up. I don’t know how serious we ever got, but…

Yeah, it would probably just be like six people in a bar in Atlanta… [laughter]

Sounds cool.

But it’d be fun. I think where we’ve enjoyed is occasionally – I don’t know if y’all have had this experience, but a conference invites the podcast out to put on an after show, or something like that… Those have been great. Like, we’ve met ShopTalk maniacs from coast to coast there, and it’s been good times… But I think that’s probably the better way for a podcast, is just to be a bolt-on to a funded conference.

It’s a lot less work, that’s for sure.

Yeah, yeah. And you just provide entertainment, which - I assume people listen to this for information or entertainment, you know…

We don’t know why, honestly. We’re still wondering. It’s one of those two.

People have to drive, and that’s kind of, you know… It took a hit in the pandemic, but we’re coming back, baby.

That’s right.

The key though is recording it. Right, Jerod? Recording it.

You do want to record when you put on a cool show. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Apropos of nothing Adam brings that up…

Yes. We’re not throwing anybody under any sort of buses… But we did something really cool at a conference, and it just…

Oh, no… You lost it?

They admitted, and it’s like – hey, this happens.

It’s water under the bridge.

[00:55:49.12] I think it was actually their first time back post-pandemic, too. So they had like a lower key AV team, potentially… Not that they were not capable, it was just, everybody was sort of like getting back into a groove. And we were in a slot where it’s not normally recorded.

It was like an after party kind of slot.

Highly entertaining, as you can probably tell…

Great crowd. Great interaction. We put on a game show. The best edition of our Frontend Feud ever, because it came down to the final answer.

Nice.

And the final answer had – the board was down to like four of the five.

I think it was Firebird, too. Firebird was the frontend.

Was it Thunderbird?

Thunderbird.

Mozilla Thunderbird was the answer. I can’t remember what the question was. Something about email clients, right? And it was like back and forth, and they’re all guessing these obscure email clients… And then somebody pulled out Mozilla Thunderbird for the win.

Nice.

And then I go up to the AV people afterwards and I’m like “That was great! When can I get it?” And he’s like “Oh, I didn’t know you guys want to record that.” [laughs] I still remember that conversation.

We were IRL entertainment recorded for a podcast…

“You guys wanted to record that?” I’m like “Well, why do you think I just did this big show?” Just for… Anyways.

That’s awful. I’m sorry. Do you remember Thunderbird? They had an awesome story like a year or two ago. People talk about funding open source stuff a lot in this industry…

Oh, yeah. They had too much money or something, didn’t they?

Yeah, it was wild. Because you see stuff like Vite and stuff do pretty good… But for the most part, open source stuff doesn’t make that much money. And with Vite doing good, it’s like “Oh, there’s $100,000 a month.” Or I don’t know. Maybe that’s even high for them. I forget what the exact numbers are. But all Thunderbird did was put a little interstitial that’s like “Hey, we don’t ask for money very much, but we could use your donations”, and they just got buckets of money.

So much money.

Just millions of dollars just came in. And you’re like “Holy cow. Wow. I guess a lot of people like their email client. Jeepers.”

Well, listeners, we don’t often ask you for money… [laughter] But…

Just this once.

It is the end of the year…

It’s patreon.com/the_real_changelog.

That’s right.

Ooh… [laughter] Adam said “That’s right.” Adam, that is not right.

That is not true. Don’t give that person money, okay? If that is a real person.

He’s going to clip that and make a killing.

I just came up with two businesses in this podcast. [laughter]

Oh, that’s good stuff.

That’s pretty good. Yeah. I think you could do good – I think at the time I was… Well, we started this episode talking about, I don’t know, making money on the internet, and websites, and whatnot… And that you always do – I’m sure in this show, people, if you’re just listening start to finish of this published episode out there, there’s probably been a little interstitial already with like one of the two of you talking to some CTO, or CEO of some company about some product or something. That’s just kind of how y’all roll… Which I always really liked, and wanted to steal that, to some degree. Although so far I’ve found it hard to get people to agree to it…

Really?

So good for you for forcing the issue…

That would be Adam. He’s the one that organizes that whole side of what we do.

It’s pretty cool. But don’t you think you could lift that and do it at a conference, too? You could really reduce the – I think it’d be easier to get a sponsor for a conference if you’re like “Would you like to come not only just sponsor it and like whatever, bring your T-shirts, but also sit on stage with me and talk to me about stuff?” It could be done.

Sometimes that’s cringe. You’ve gotta time-box it, you know?

Yeah…

It’s like “We’re going to talk to the CEO of Revenue Dynamics at… Whatever.” You’re like “Oh, I’m out. I didn’t realize this was happening [unintelligible 00:59:25.08]

I think the key there is it’s got to be editorialized by the person conducting the interview. It cannot be editorialized or agreed to, or you can’t share the questions in advance, or give them insider secrets to what’s being discussed… And they have to be, to some degree, willing, able, and somewhat vulnerable. I would say almost fully vulnerable.

Yeah.

And that’s hard to get anybody to agree to, honestly.

It is hard. Yeah.

[00:59:51.10] The title thing works. I hate to say it to all the dev rels out there, because - you know, God bless; you’re doing good work. But when they send the dev rel to do it, it’s like “Oh yeah, they’re doing the thing that they’re literally paid to do.”

Whereas if you get the CTO or the CEO, it’s like “Oh, they really have made time specially to be here to do this. That is not their normal thing.”

Yeah. That’s why I think the way we do some of the – we don’t always get CEOs, but I would say 80% of the time we get CEOs involved in these ad spots. That’s why I think it works well, because when you get C level or founder level agreement and participation in - not so much shilling, but sharing the story… That’s why I always think like “This is your story. Let’s share your story.” That’s where you get the true quality, and the passthrough.

Right.

Not the abrupt “Oh, this is marketing.” I try to make it anti-marketing.

And that’s when you get the – you know, it’s the Michael Scott win/win/win. Because if it’s interesting content, and they’re actually pointing out something that you don’t know about, that’s a cool service, why not? It’s still Adam talking to a guy about something interesting, which is what the show is… And then obviously, it’s a win for the company, because they’ve got a decent piece of content… Hopefully better than decent…

It doesn’t trigger my fast-forward figure as much…

As much. Yeah. Now, we still trigger it if you’ve heard that particular one. And obviously, they’re hard to produce, and so we don’t have a bunch of them per – I mean, that’s a challenge for us. Sometimes you’ll hear the same one a few times, and that’s going to trigger you to fast-forward. But that’s fine, because you’ve already heard it, right?

Yeah, then you’ve heard it, and that kind of thing. Yeah, yeah. Once you get big enough… I saw it once, or I think my wife pointed it out to me… It was like a Malcolm Gladwell one, or whatever, so his numbers are super-high… And he would just sell them as like a block. I remember when – what’s the new cell phone speed technology? LTE 5, or whatever it is… There’s a keyword I’m flubbing on.

5G? I don’t know –

5G, I guess that’s what it is. Yeah, it was like “It’s better than WiFi” kind of thing. And he had the CTO of Sprint or something on, to do just like a four block. But they were all four different. And it actually was kind of cool. They’re like two minutes long, or something. But it was kind of like “What industries will it enable?” There’s a rural doctor that it’s helping, because they can use these technologies places that they couldn’t before… And it was like a good ad spot, you know?

Yeah.

But because the numbers are so high, they only used it once. It’s a one show, you know?

Right.

That’s harder to do.

And were they still interstitial in the other show, or was it a standalone show that was just that?

No, it was interstitial.

Okay, cool.

Yeah. I don’t know.

That’s where we draw the line. Because we obviously have people who would love to just come on the show and pay to be on the show.

Totally. We get that, too.

And we will just never do that. And we’ve had to say no to lots of opportunities because of that.

I was going to say, y’all seem – I like the CEO ad spot, because it is that middle ground of “Oh man, can my boss come on your show?” Those emails are just so tiresome, you know? It’s like, you just hired a marketing company, you’re blasting this out… You just want a) the SEO, and then b) the bullet point on some resume, or whatever. Like “We went on 10,000 podcasts.”

It’s pay to play, but I think it is sort of this “Well, if you are a CEO, you care about the product, you are committing your life… Maybe you’re just in it for the money, but you’re doing this for a reason. Tell us why why. What makes this thing good that you’ve made, and you’re selling, presumably? You have money, if you paid to be on the show, but what are other people finding value in?” It should be a slam dunk story, you know?

You’re selling it for us, Dave. I like it. Keep going.

Well, I also – this is my grand thesis.

To our own audience!

Yeah. To podcast listeners. I think every podcast – I’m a podcast listener. I assume everyone here is just the same. But I still use products I heard on podcasts in 2006.

A hundred percent.

[01:04:03.25] There is something about how podcasts go into straight into your ear holes, or in your car ears, and just - they make you feel good. And so there’s apps I use, I’ve tried out and stuff like that, just purely because they sponsored a podcast.

And I don’t think anyone – I think everyone who listens to podcasts has had that experience. And so I just think of it as also like – I don’t know, it’s like advertising plus jet fuel, you know? It’s like back to this single ad converts way better. I think a podcast converts way better. How many mattresses do you guys own that came from a podcast?

Oh, gosh…

At least 50% of our mattresses came from a podcast, you know? [laughter] Case closed.

At least 50%. Maybe more. Who knows…?

Maybe more. I literally don’t know how we found out about the other two.

Yeah. Could you imagine where, let’s say, the CEO of Chevrolet, or GMC - because those are sort of like the same product - or Ford, did a real…

Let’s do Jeep for no reason. No reason, just Jeep. Let’s pick it up.

Just Jeep.

Yeah. He actually got fired the other day… [laughs]

Is that right?

Oh, okay. I was like “I don’t know the reason.”

Well, could you imagine where they did a truly authentic ad spend in the way we produce CEO-driven ad spots, that truly spoke to an audience? That wasn’t “Here’s the spin. Here’s the thing. Here’s how things actually work with –” let’s say cars, for example. Or anything else. Even mattresses. “Here’s why the technology in this bed is revolutionary, and it changes the way you sleep”, kind of thing. That’s cool.

I could imagine that.

It would be good. And hopefully they live and breathe it, so it would be so easy for them to do. The only reason you couldn’t is because they’re busy running a company, and they hire people to do that kind of thing… And that’s an acceptable reason in my book.

Yeah, it is. I think there’s a certain size of company that this works well with, and I think Ford is bigger than that size… Where it’s almost more important that it’s somebody who’s founder, or just like living and breathing the company.

During the Lightning launch though that would have been relevant. Like, during a brand new product line the Lightning truck, that’d have been relevant. Not an everyday “Hey–”

Oh, yeah. And I’m not saying it’s not relevant. I’m saying “Is that the person you want to talk to necessarily?”

Well, I think that’s where you get the authenticity. It’s like, if the CEO is in it to win it…

Sure.

…they’re one of the great candidates for it. Versus - like, who else would be listenable?

I would imagine the org structure of Ford though is that there’s some other person running the Lightning division, and the CEO’s like –

Yeah, maybe the product designer or the product leader of Lightning.

Yeah. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I’m just saying there’s certain sizes where it’s like – the CEO has to be pretty abstracted away from some of the nitty-gritty that interests us. Like, the thing that’s actually gonna nerd snipe you. And they may or may not have that.

That’s true. If it was for this podcast, maybe there’s some – the person who designed the user interface for the thing would be probably even more interesting to talk to.

Absolutely.

Potentially. Yeah, and the beauty is let the platform decide a little bit what’s gonna work. I’m sure you’ve seen these type of spots internally, where it’s like “We have the CEO here to do real fireside chat stuff.” And it’s just like too polished. They’re trying to do it, but they can’t. They’re too smooth internally. It doesn’t feel good.

Yeah, they’re so well-trained that it just always sounds shilly.

Yeah, exactly.

Always shill.

Well, I don’t even know how we got here, but… Are you listening, tech companies? Do this.

Break: [01:07:40.24]

What are your guys’ ambitions with ShopTalk? What do you guys do it for? Why do you do it still? It’s been going for a long time… What are your ambitions? Where would you like it to go, if anywhere? And what’s exciting still about it for you two?

See where this long, slow decline goes… [laughter]

Dave? You’re looking very contemplative.

No, Chris summed it up… [laughter] No, I think through the gully of advertising, the drought of advertising, we’ve actually switched to almost 100% community-funded through our Discord. And that’s been really awesome. Our Discord is really active. A lot of nice people in there. Great, wonderful people. The best people. So the [unintelligible 01:09:54.12] have really rallied to make the podcast happen over the last few years. I mean, Chris and I could obviously chip some bucks at it, but just editing and stuff adds up. Transcripts adds up… I don’t think “We’re just going to hand it to AI” yet. I don’t think that’s even in our current plans… So the costs kind of add up. But I don’t know, for me it’s just turned into a great chance to talk to my buddy Chris every week. So that’s been – I’ll keep doing that as long as I can, as long as he’ll let me…

But I also really love how we bring in experts who know what they’re doing about a certain thing that maybe I don’t know as much about. And that’s benefited me numerous times in my career, where I could say “Oh man, I just talked to the person who wrote that thing you’re talking about, and here’s what they’ve said.” It’s maybe a bit of a douchebag move, but it is super-useful to talk with people, and pick their brain about why something exists. We had Thomas Steiner from Google, who does the AI in Chrome thing… And that was super – like, wow, this is kind of a weird new thing that’s not documented very well… And so we got to talk to him about it. So stuff like that is –

Yeah, it’s like a bit of a cheat code for staying on top of the industry, without too much work. I get to benefit from Dave’s insights, and people write in, and… It’s not so much of a lift. We’ve made so many choices over the years of like “What’s the easiest possible thing we can do to keep doing this show? We could have somebody else edit it. We can not change the website very much. We can just stay on this host, instead of change around.” It’s really – it’s to the point where Dave and I throw something on the calendar, and we both show up in a Riverside room exactly like this, we use the same app… And then I forget about it. Our guy, Chris Enns, from Lemon Productions - shout-out Chris - just like logs into Riverside, extracts the audio, edits it all together, puts the MP3 on our host, goes into WordPress, gives the show a title, writes the links… All this, and then hits Publish on the day that – or schedules it for the day it’s supposed to be published. I literally do nothing.

I work with the advertisers when we have one, which is not very much these days, because it just has fallen ,through and I don’t hustle for it, because it’s just – I don’t have the time for it at the moment. Even our transcript lady, Tina Pham, has access to the WordPress site. So when she’s done with the transcript, she logs in, pastes it into the right text area, and hits Save on the show.

Nice.

I hear from nobody. The bill arrives in our email, and I click the Pay Bill button, and that’s it. And so that’s helped. When I come up with things that I need to cut in my life to reduce stress, this is pretty low on the list, because it doesn’t impart much stress. It might even be a stress relief, in a way.

Right.

It feeds you back. It gives you a friend to connect with, and a network to keep connected with, I suppose. To further connect. And also, I would imagine, it’s got to be great to give somebody who has less light shined on them, a light shined on them, you know? Give somebody the spotlight who –

Yeah, that’s increasingly rare, isn’t it?

It is increasingly rare. But there’s still some out there… I mean, recently the Departure Mono Font - they don’t need a lot of extra fanfare, but I thought that was a really cool show to do… It was about a pixelized font, a pixel-based font, that was just super-cool, that I didn’t really know of, just loosely before the show… And now I’m a huge fan of the Departure Mono Font, and all the work they put into it to open-source it as well. It was really cool.

That’s a great. I think I’ve missed that one. I would love to watch that. Dave and I have had some good shows like that in the last year for sure, where like a tiny little spark turns into like “Let’s just see if we can get them”, you know? And we do, and…

[01:14:03.18] We’ve been chasing this idea of niche app builders, like somebody who builds an app for a really niche, specific purpose. Watson comes to mind. He has a disability that affects his muscle movement, but he builds a bunch of apps to just make his day better, or so him and his brother can play games, and stuff like that. And it’s awesome. So it’s just – his homecooked, not-going-to-be-super-famous apps… We had the guy who wrote Cracking the Cryptics Sudoku app, if you’ve seen that YouTube channel…

Have you ever seen this YouTube channel?

No.

I fell into it for a long time. I still watch it to this day, at night.

What’s it called?

It’s Two British Dudes Cracking the Cryptic. It may never grab you. So it’s as niche as niche can be.

It’s 50-year-old men solving Sudoku on YouTube… [laughter]

They’re just these really endearing British guys and they solve Sudoku puzzles. But it’s like they’re charming while they do it, and it really requires some big brain energy to get through these things. You’re watching them use just – the gears in their head just churning to figure out what’s going on in this puzzle, because each puzzle is different. Each one has different rules. When you say Sudoku, you think the number’s one through nine in the boxes, or whatever. Once in a while they’ll do a classic Sudoku puzzle like that, but in this channel they call it Variant Sudoku. Each one has a bit of a different rule set, so they have to learn a new rule set, and then churn through it. I find it helps me go to sleep, honestly. It’s not so engaging that I – a little bit of that, although I don’t get the tingles from this, but I do generally get the tingles… But I do like them anyway.

It took a bit of programming to make this happen, because having a Sudoku puzzle that can be like programmatically solved in a web browser, and then it can tell you if you have the right answer or not required an app. It requires somebody to build this app. But because each one has different rules, it’s actually pretty weird and complicated. And the community that it took to make this thing happen is – it’s just a surprisingly complex story. And we had that guy on the show, and he’s about as quirky as a person can be… And it ended up being an interesting show.

So the person that was from this YouTube channel came on.

Nope. No, they’re a little too big. I don’t think we can get the Cracking the Cryptic guys.

Oh, God. Could you imagine…?

It’s the developer who made the app that they use on the show.

Yeah.

Who is a personality in and of himself. My God, if I met Simon at a party, I would drop dead. I think he’s so cool.

Yeah. I was gonna say, this is a niche, but it’s also a 621,000 subscribers niche.

Yeah. It’s a niche that hits, I’ll say.

Right.

It’s kind of deep. That’s cool. I’m a fan of that too, inviting out to your show – that might not even be developer world, necessarily. It’s like developer adjacent. What comes to mind is recently I had Dennis E. Taylor. Are you all a fan of We Are Legion, We Are Bob, the Bobiverse series? It’s an audible audiobook series. Oh, my gosh.

It sounds up my alley, so…

Oh, Dave, it’s right up your alley, bro. I’ve seen your book list, and it’s so far up your alley… You should have listened to this by now.

Alright…

So I had Dennis E. Taylor on this podcast, and we just talked about the Bobiverse series. And we obviously have a Zulip now, not a Slack, and so we have a community similar to Discord with you all… Except we –

What did you call it? A Zillow?

Zulip.

Zulip?

Zulip. It’s open source threaded team chat.

You hear the hard P at the end there? Zulip.

Okay… Cool.

Zulip. Okay. So we used to use Slack, and now we’re Zulip. And it’s threaded conversation for teams, essentially. Ut’s also open source… But we had Dennis on the show and we talked about the Bobiverse series. Now, Dennis is also a retired programmer, so there is at least that as a connection point, but it’s also an amazing sci-fi series. Like, this guy is – he’s phenomenal with his writing. Five books deep on the Bobiverse series… You will have months of listening/reading if you get into this, if you’re brand new to it. And I just talked to Dennis.

[01:18:15.15] Yeah, that’s awesome.

And that’s cool. We had Heavy Spoilers, Paul from Heavy Spoilers on the podcast before, and we talked about Tenant, the movie…

Nice.

Because Tenant was such a cool movie. And this was not the main show… What was that, at the time? Was it –

We called that show Backstage…

Backstage, yes.

…which was kind of a precursor to Changelog & Friends, which was kind of just like us talking about what we want to, and not feeling like we had to do an interview with a software developer every single episode. And that plus like some of the stuff we do with JS Party and all these other things came together to create our Friday talk show, which you all are currently on right now.

That’s right.

And so that was on Backstage.

That makes me think about – it was probably a good show just because you’re so passionate, and it’s a story that you wanted to tell, and a person you wanted to talk to, and I’m sure everyone enjoyed it just for that reason alone, even if they had no idea who they were.

It’s uncovered a plethora of Bobiverse series fans and would-be fans inside of our community.

Oh, nice. That’s cool.

And so like now we have this new connection point in our community, not just “Oh, what language?”, or whatever, this or that. It’s now the connection point of similarity and likes with sci-fi, and plausible science fiction, and this whole conversation around Bobiverse, and authoring books, and stuff like that.

What’s that series of books where they live on the back of a turtle, or something?

Moana? [laughter]

No… Spoilers… No, I’m just kidding. No, it was something like there’s a book called like Knights, Knights, Knights. Somebody is going to know what it is. But anyway, Terry something is the author. I was like out at a bar after a conference with Jason Lengstorf and his partner, and some other people.. .Maybe Sarah Drasner was there… And they just started talking about this book series, which is like 55 books deep. And I just was like “I’ve never heard of this”, but they’re all like “Oh yeah, did you remember whatchamacallit? Book 23, blah, blah, blah?” And I just –

Book 23. Wow.

Yeah. It was – anyway, let me… Terry Pratchett.

Discworld.

Discworld. Yes.

Discworld. There you go.

Terry Pratchett.

Yeah. Anyway, it’s 50-something books, or something. I don’t even know. But I stumbled into a group where everyone had read it but me, and I felt like so out of place. But it’s cool when you stumble into that, you know? You’re just like “Dude, these people love this. This is weird. This is cool. This makes it so much cooler.” This is people I like.

Yeah. You should chase it. I think that’s okay to podcast. I used to get salty when like Radiolab would do an episode about politics, or something. You’d be like “You’re the science show.” But it’s like, no, they’re just chasing something that they found interesting, or… 99% Invisible did something outside of design and architecture, or whatever… But I’ve loosened up my stance on it. Just chase it. Do whatever you want to do.

We definitely don’t do it on the monthly. It’s more like whenever it might come up, or if it really makes sense… Like, I plan to have a chef on the podcast in 2025, one of my favorite chefs, only because I cook alongside him… Frank Proto is his name, by the way.

When you say alongside him…

Literally, side by side, Jerod. I’m just kidding. No.

[laughs] I mean, he’s on YouTube and you’re cooking, right?

Yeah, so what I liked about it – it’s this series from Epicurious, and it’s like something-something 101. And it’s like this hard recipe… It could be as simple as scrambled eggs. Scrambled eggs 101. How to make the best scrambled eggs. How to make the best chicken. The easiest way to fry chicken, kind of thing. Like, you pick your thing that you think is kind of like generally hard, or you’ve never really mastered it, or it takes multiple steps, and this chef… And it’s Frank and many other chefs on Epicurious, this channel on YouTube - breaking down pasta 101. How to really get the best pasta. What the steps are. How much salt to put in the water. How much water to put, obviously, in the pot. At what point you put it in. Just a little, subtle things like that.

[01:22:18.00] Are you going to make like heavy-handed metaphors for programming stuff?

No – well, I mean, probably not… [laughter] I’ll probably just focus on the cooking, but…

Yeah. Are you going to draw across anything at all? Or is it going to just be “You know what? I like your cooking channel, dude.”

I think it was more like “Could you get more people that are in our audience curious to cook?”

Okay.

Like, things that are generally seemingly hard… Maybe you subscribe to Factor because you heard it on a podcast, and that’s easy, because you just get it and put it in the microwave.

That’s where they send you the meal, right?

Yeah, this is where they send you a non-frozen, freshly cooked meal. This is not an ad, by the way, but we have been sponsored by them before. And so it’s fresh on my mind on how that works. But I enjoy first principles cooking, personally.

The full episode idea hasn’t percolated in terms of like what it’s going to be, but I know I’m going to talk to Frank, because he said yes, and we’ll just talk about cooking. And it could be as simple as like “Hey, I’m a chef, and anybody can do these kinds of things if you just break it down to simplistic forms.” So like step-by-step, keep it simple, one-on-one style.

Yeah… I mean, I don’t know, especially developers, most of us live like a sedentary lifestyle, you know? A lot of us are in our twenties… Not me. No one here in this chat room.

Nobody on this particular call…

But whatever.

We’re aging out.

It skews young, I think. But you know…

In the words of Chris, gotta see where this long, slow decline goes… [laughter]

Yeah. But I remember being in my twenties… I didn’t know nothing about food. It was like, if I made a bowl of spaghetti, it was a freaking miracle. Like, how did that happen? You know? So I was an idiot about food. Even just like – you’re talking to a room of like developers, probably not notoriously good at self-care… So what’s the first thing they need to know about, making food, you know?

Now you make me think we have to get that – who’s that military guy who like runs forever?

Jack LaLanne? [laughs]

What’s his name, Adam?

The guy used to tow trucks with his mouth…

Oh, I know his name… So it’s right on the top of my –

He’s the hardest-working man in the world. He destroyed his own body…

Chris Goggins?

Goggins. Something Goggins. Anyways.

Not Chris.

Somebody on here to motivate all of us to exercise, or something.

Dave Goggins.

David Goggins.

Gee. See? There you go. Chris or Dave. Pick a name.

He’s outside of our league. He’s like Chris’s Simon, and – who’s Simon’s partner on the Sudoku side?

Mark.

Simon and Mark. We can never get David Goggins. He’d be like “Why would I go on a developer podcast?”

Let me pitch you this… A fake David Goggins. David Rupins. He’s a motivational speaker. I know he’s very famous on the circuit… And he comes and talks to everybody.

Okay. How long could he stay in character?

Well, so…

He’s getting old [unintelligible 01:25:12.29]

Two minutes really is kind of the max. [laughter]

Two minutes tops. It’s gonna be a short episode.

That’s a short show.

But I’d be down.

But that’s all the inspiration you need from David – what’d I call him?

Rupins.

Rupins. Yeah.

…to be motivated for a whole life. Just two minutes with David Rupins.

Did you really read all these books in 2024, Dave?

Yes, sir.

48 books thus far.

Yeah, I’m in the Book a Week club, been in there for a few years now… It looks like a miracle, but it’s not. It’s really ADHD. I can’t do – I reward myself by doing the dishes with the podcast or an audio book, and so that’s how it happens.

Is it mostly audio books?

[01:25:59.12] Mostly audio books. I used to read a lot of paper, or Kindle books, but… There’ll be a lot of graphic novels in there too, which are generally paper, but I used to read a lot of Kindle books, but I train my brain to do that before bed. So I read one page and fall asleep. That’s how I Pavloved myself into that. So audio books, I’m pretty successful with. So…

Nice.

Nice. Do you rock the 2x, or…?

Oh, for sure, man.

You’ve gotta do it. In a week, right?

Oh, yeah. I’m not a normie when it comes to –

And listen to podcasts… Holy cow.

Do you guys make a lot of dishes then? [laughter]

I don’t know how, man… Every day of my life I ask my kids “How many cups should a family of four use in a single day?” And they’re like “I don’t know, four?” And I’m like “Yeah. Why are there 23 right here?” And then I had this whole revelation the other day. I’ll share it with y’all… You know the story of Sisyphus; we always use that like analogy of like rolling the boulder up the hill… We recently got stone plates. And that analogy hit so hard.

They’re heavy?

No. We literally take these stone plates, earthware plates down, and then I wash them, and then I put them back up, and then they come down again. And I just was like “I am Sisyphus. The morality of the story is true.” I just spend the rest of my life –

It’s a whole different podcast to have that conversation, Dave… But yeah, I like it.

What kind of podcast is it, Adam?

A negative podcast. Like, where life just repeats…

Oh, yeah. I am just in a Groundhog’s Day of pushing these boulders up into my kitchen cabinet.

“I washed this yesterday! I put that back yesterday, and here it is again, dirty, and needing my attention. Thankfully, I have this book.”

My favorite is when we go out, or we’re gone, and then we even went out for dinner, and there’s still a huge pile of dishes to wash. Like, how did that happen?

Oh, gosh…

Where do they come from?

Who’s in charge of these dishes?

Yeah.

Here’s a phrase I uttered this morning at my children… And I love my children to death, but I uttered this phrase: “Why do you guys suck so bad?” [laughter]

That’s maybe along the harsher edge of like –

Well, they pushed me to that by not – they didn’t run the dishes before bed. That’s like one of the things, is like somebody starts the dishwasher. It’s a button press. You just press the button…

Oh, man… You’re on a higher level than me. I’m like “If you see trash, throw away trash. If you make trash, also throw away trash.” That’s where I am.

Oh yeah, we’ve got that going as well.

Oh my God, I stepped over a piece of trash yesterday, and I got [unintelligible 01:28:48.15]

Oh, man… Who gave it to you?

Don’t do that…

So we have this thing around my house, “Trash on the counter.” So much so that I’ve developed a song… Trash on the counter, trash in the street… It’s just my song.

Do you just sing that whenever you see trash?

Is that a CCR song?

Yeah, it’s like that. It’s like that. Yeah. I’ll bust it out… Because I have to find joy in this repeating “Oh my gosh, who did this again?” thing.

So you don’t yell “Why do you guys suck so bad?” [laughter] Yeah, you’ve gotta have something else to say. I’m going to start singing that. I need a song the next time the dishes haven’t been cleaned, you know?

It’s the cutting of the edge of a bag that you have to open up to take the thing out. It’s like, that thing is now on the counter. Or this other thing. And I’m blaming nobody. My wife listens to this podcast here and there, at least the clips… This may be a clip. Who knows?

Oh, I’m going to clip this part and send it to her.

And I’m not talking trash about anybody in my house, but OMG. And I do it too, though. So I’m part of the trash on the counter committee. I will make this offense.

Okay. So you’re part of the problem… As is Chris, who clearly just stepped over some trash.

I am the problem. Yes. I didn’t mean to be throwing anybody under the bus but myself here.

You made that clear, Chris. I think you’re, you’ve acquitted yourself. Yeah.

Kids’ socks are a problem. My socks - well, that’s a lifestyle. [laughter]

I’m done with these socks. To the corner.

Yeah. Good stuff.

My wife’s like “Why are these socks right here?” “That’s where I put them. That’s why they’re there. That’s where I put them.”

Well, I think we’ve experienced now the long, slow decline… [laughter] We should –

Anybody listening to this part is like “Is there any more good stuff in this show?” And the answer is no.

No, we’ve [unintelligible 01:30:34.16] Apply your software development methodology to this conversation somehow. Refactoring… I don’t know. Cleanliness…

But if they have time, I do have a Plus Plus topic.

Okay. Do you guys have time for one more – just for our closest friends?

Sure.

Hit it, Adam.

Should we say “Bye, friends” first?

Bye, friends.

Bye, friends!

Outro: [01:31:00.18]

This is almost interview… Dave, you could chime in here, but I think your – I don’t know if you have this vantage point, considering I don’t think you’re part of CodePen.

Oh, it’s a CodePen question.

It is a CodePen question. So Chris, have you ever been dribbble-curious? Because codepens are a lot like dribbbles, you know? And you can go and explore codepens, but it’s not quite the way you can explore Dribbble to find a designer.

Well, that’s a great question. I’m not only curious, but jealous, in some ways… Remember, the two original founders were Dan Cederholm and Rich Thornett. Rich worked with us at CodePen for a while, post Dribbble…

Is that right?

…to apply some Dribbble magic to some things… And it wasn’t a clear as like “We should just do –”