118: Leveraging CSS, Web Design, and Gaming UI with Adam Argyle

[00:00:00] Robbie: What's going on, everybody. This is Whiskey Web and Whatnot, your favorite podcast about Java, where we talk about enterprise apps and stuff like that. No, it's actually about Whiskey Web and Whatnot, and I'm your host, Robbie the Wagner, with me as always, Charles William Carpenter the third. And our guest today is, I should have asked first, but is it Argyle or Argyle?

[00:00:30] Adam: It's like the socks, like the Scotsman in Braveheart. I'm your uncle, Argyle.

[00:00:36] Robbie: Okay, that's what I thought, but I've heard Wes Boss say it wrong then.

[00:00:40] Adam: Oh, he's very wrong over and over. I think I corrected him once and I was like, you know what, dude? Keep it going. Just call me Argyle. It's like I got a cold call. Hi, is Mr. Argyle there? It's like, no, there's no Argyle here. Sorry, see you later.

[00:00:51] Robbie: Nice.

[00:00:52] Chuck: of West, when's he gonna stop teasing us with, like, t shirts and shit and let me buy something?

[00:00:57] Robbie: What are they, not for sale?

[00:00:58] Adam: I feel like they're brewing up a merch store for sure. I

[00:01:00] Chuck: They, they are, they definitely are. It's just been in the works for a while.

[00:01:04] Adam: mean, can I buy a shirt that has eight tentacles on it?

[00:01:08] Robbie: We should make shirts. I can send you a ton of ship shaped shirts. We don't have whiskey ones yet, but uh,

[00:01:14] Chuck: Yeah, yeah, I... Yeah, we should, we should have swag. I mean, we spend enough money on this thing, though. So, you

[00:01:21] Robbie: Well,

[00:01:21] Chuck: When I get a century budget, When I get a century budget, I will make a lot of merch.

[00:01:26] Robbie: Yeah. Hey, Sentry sponsored me on GitHub. Randomly. Them and CodeCov. Like, it seems like they're just trying to like get free ad space on people's profiles or something. I don't know what they're doing.

[00:01:38] Adam: well, they just got it on this show, you know

[00:01:39] Robbie: Well,

[00:01:40] Chuck: Mm hmm. Well, he's coming on. We've actually paid him. We sent him some. David. Yeah, he's coming on. Not Wes. He's been on. Okay. Can we

[00:01:50] Robbie: tell the folks at home who you

are and what

[00:01:52] Adam: this is cooler. My name is Adam. I work at Google. I'm a crafter of web interfaces. I've been in the industry 25 years, about as long as y'all. I still remember cold fusion, which I still think has the coolest, uh, programming language name, cold fusion.

So

[00:02:06] Robbie: is a cool name.

[00:02:07] Adam: I mean, it's cool. I'm not saying it's the best language in the world, but, um, yeah, I love this stuff, dude.

I soak up all of it. I'm a big JavaScript nerd. I come from type languages, but I'm happily in a loose land these days, even though everyone else is like, Oh, blue socks. I want, I want handcuffs. And like, and I want like five voices around me while I type that all tell me I'm doing stuff wrong. I'm like, cool.

You can continue Devin that way. Uh, I hate it. But, uh, Anyway, uh, yeah. And I, I'm at c ss s at Dere, at Google, and I just love this stuff. Yeah.

[00:02:37] Chuck: DevRel or DevAdvocate? I mean...

[00:02:40] Robbie: And What's the

[00:02:41] Adam: I don't know. Uh, dev advocate sounds like a preacher, you know? Uh, if I'm an advocate, it feels like I'm a preacher. If I'm a Dev re I'm like, no, I'm, I'm relatable. I'm not, uh, at the pulpit, you know, I

[00:02:53] Chuck: Yeah, yeah. Preaching the, the greatness that is CSS. of that nature. I don't know. Um, well, we can spend some time during this episode teaching, uh, Robbie that his joke wasn't that funny at the beginning, because Java can also make the web, so it kind of is included.

[00:03:12] Robbie: Can it though? Do you like it if you're using it? Because I don't, but anyway.

[00:03:18] Chuck: Okay, I digress. Um, cool! So should we talk about the whiskey?

[00:03:23] Robbie: Yeah, you should.

[00:03:24] Whiskey Selection

[00:03:24] Adam: we shall, I have my glass. It's empty. I always like it when you, when you hear the cork of yours when you open it. Oh, yeah. There you go. Mm. Way to go, Robbie. It's good. Oh, let's see if I got it.

[00:03:33] Chuck: See? It works! talk about it, but I'm going to pour it first because you teared, you know, teed me up for that one. So we selected for you the Wild Turkey Rare Breed Barrel Proof Rye at 112. 2 proof. Uh, it is not age stated, has a mash bill of 51 percent rye, 37 percent corn, and 12 percent malted barley, which apparently is like the mash bill for most of their rye offerings.

And then... There'll just be some differences of what they put it, uh, the proof in the barrel. And obviously this one comes out at wherever it lands after, uh, I think they target this proof and that whatever time it takes to get to that proof, that's what they shoot for. This is probably like four to six years if I had to guess.

[00:04:20] Adam: Smells delightful.

[00:04:21] Robbie: Smells like a, uh, Florida based barbecue joint.

[00:04:28] Chuck: Huh. I was gonna go a different route. I was gonna say like, you know, there's like holiday cookies and there'll be like a little cinnamon, a little like sugar cookie with some cinnamon. That's what I'm getting

[00:04:40] Robbie: not getting that meat in there?

[00:04:42] Chuck: Turns out, uh, no. But I was thinking like some of the spices might give you some, some of the

feel

[00:04:48] Robbie: Yeah, maybe the the dry rub of meat or something

[00:04:51] Chuck: Yeah,

dry

[00:04:51] Robbie: it's like it's a little less smoky I think then Then like a Texas barbecue and more

[00:04:58] Chuck: Hmm.

[00:04:58] Robbie: not not a Memphis barbecue It's not super sweet, but like that's why I said, Florida. I was I don't know just bullshitting

[00:05:05] Chuck: You mean Carolina? A little more mustard in there or

[00:05:08] Robbie: Carolina has that vinegar on there

[00:05:11] Chuck: Right. Missed mustard or vinegar. For someone from Virginia their entire life, your southern accent sucks.

[00:05:21] Robbie: I Can't do it on the spot it I have to like Warm up and then go into it. I can get there.

[00:05:27] Adam: Gotta be around the other folks that sort of invoke it out of you. You know, that sort of thing. I liked the, uh, the kind of spicy cookie. Mmm. Cause it is very sweet. It goes down. It hits the palate like a syrup,

[00:05:38] Chuck: Yes.

[00:05:39] Adam: off as it layers over your tongue and brings the spice.

[00:05:42] Chuck: Yeah, yeah, the spice hangs for a bit, and I get more of the cinnamon in the taste. You said syrupy, and I was

[00:05:49] Adam: nutmeg? Nutmeg?

The

[00:05:51] Chuck: could be, could be. Some in the finish I get some like, flat RC Cola, kinda

[00:05:58] Robbie: You're always specific

with

[00:05:59] Adam: shows up in a lot of your,

[00:06:00] Chuck: This is the second one, yeah, yeah,

[00:06:03] Adam: Not, not Coca Cola, but RC

[00:06:05] Chuck: RC Cola. RC Cola, to me, always was like a sweeter, like, more syrup forward

cola.

[00:06:12] Adam: flatter.

[00:06:13] Chuck: But, yeah, and a little flatter. But not like Pepsi. It always had, like, more sweetness than Pepsi for me. Because, like, Pepsi feels a little just like flat coke, in a way. And then, RC just sort of had its own thing going on there. So I have to differentiate, for at least my own palate.

[00:06:30] Adam: And I hear a preference there then for Coca Cola over Pepsi. There's your spicy first question, or what do they call it again? It's uh, a hot take, dude. So your hot take, what's, what's better? Uh, Pepsi or Coca Cola?

[00:06:42] Chuck: Coca Cola, 100

percent All the way.

[00:06:44] Adam: Wrong. Wrong

answer.

[00:06:46] Robbie: Mmm. Alright, well, that's all the time we

have.

[00:06:49] Adam: Coca Cola always, uh, coated my teeth with sweaters, you know?

I'd always know. It'd be like, take a swig of it and be like, Oh, well my teeth are covered in a sweater. That must be Coca Cola.

[00:06:58] Robbie: You mean like the sugar residue?

[00:07:00] Chuck: that this is, uh, This episode is brought to you by Diet

[00:07:03] Robbie: Yeah, Coke Zero. So I can't drink anything with sugar in it because my teeth are trash and it all hurts really bad. So I can't, I have to do a diet soda. So I don't have that problem

of the

coating.

[00:07:14] Adam: Gettin old sucks.

[00:07:15] Chuck: Yeah, yeah. That's what I hear. Alright, uh, so we should circle back to the, the whiskey before we go into hot takes, like, I'm not sure I trust your rating now that I, your flavor preferences are so far askew of mine, but uh, Let's give it a shot anyway. Uh, for our listener, I know I repeat it for you every single time, it's, uh, a highly intense scale of 0 to 8 tentacles, 0 being terrible, never give that to me again, 4 being like, mm, this isn't bad, it's not great, it's not bad, and 8 being like, amazing, clear the shelves.

heh

[00:07:51] Adam: a six and a half. it's delightful. It's smooth. It's strong. it's specifically that flavor palette that I want if I'm reaching for this. Um, but I can't give it an eight tentacles cause that would mean that somehow it knocked me on my ass and I'm laying down going, my God, it's beautiful.

Uh, and I'm not, I'm not doing that, you know? So it's delightful though.

[00:08:11] Chuck: Yeah, I get that. Yeah. I'm ki I'm kind of, uh, I think I'm more at like a five. It's above average for me. I like wild Turkey products across the board. the Russell's reserve line, whether they're rise or bourbons, uh, seems to really, uh, yeah. Yep, there you go. Uh, seems to really kind of do it for me most times.

I like their regular rye 1 0 1, and this is. Slightly better than that. This has got that sweetness that I'm not catching, and I like, the even higher proof than 101. But, uh, so I'm probably at a 5. I'm gonna say it's a 5.

[00:08:42] Robbie: Yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna split the difference and say 5. 75. Um, it's, there's definitely Rye's I like more than this one. But this one's definitely not bad. Like, given the choice, I would choose this one over many lesser choices. So,

[00:08:59] Chuck: Yeah, and it's, uh, 55, 60 bucks in that range. I don't know. Depends on where you get it, I'm sure. and the 101 is usually 35 or so, and so I can see the quality improvement here.

[00:09:11] Adam: I gotta say. Thank you. Um, this is very generous and kind of y'all to be mailing out booze. that's cool.

Thank

[00:09:18] Robbie: It's really

just

[00:09:19] Chuck: asked my kids to...

[00:09:21] Robbie: We're working on that.

[00:09:23] Chuck: As long as I don't send it USPS, it's not a federal offense, by the way. It is just against rules. And I have been in some shippers, not jail, literal, but had my account suspended trying to send... Speaking of Wes, actually, I was trying to send booze to Wes in Canada.

[00:09:39] Adam: Canada. Wasn't that a South Park episode?

[00:09:41] Chuck: Exactly. Um, and they'll accept it, and they'll say they're sorry.

Basically, I tried to send it as, like, collectibles and merchandising or something like that. So, you know, it didn't

spread.

[00:09:52] Adam: not going to open it. He's just going to put it on the

[00:09:54] Chuck: Yeah, yeah, he loves the sticker or whatever. And, uh, it quote unquote broke. So they knew it was whiskey and, you know, contacted me about it and stuff. So I was just like,

[00:10:04] Adam: Would they have Ace Ventura deliver it, you know?

[00:10:07] Chuck: Yeah, exactly. And I was like, um, oh, you can't do that? Oh, totally sorry, it's just a promotional thing, like...

You know, we're not selling it, which is true,

[00:10:16] Robbie: how could they prove that you put it in there though? Right? Like someone else could have opened it and put it in there after you shipped your collectibles.

[00:10:23] Chuck: Right, yeah, I don't know. Yeah,

[00:10:25] Adam: Yeah, they drank it all, spilled a little inside, and said, It was broken!

Yeah.

[00:10:29] Chuck: is kind of true because they print the labels at the office, not like I go to the store and like have them pack it or even just have them do anything. I just, yeah, I don't know. Good story there. But, uh, yeah, maybe if I end up in jail for that, which I don't think is going to happen. Also these, this one, I think we, we've gotten smarter lately though.

Most of the time we just find online retailers and then they have the licenses. They can ship you stuff, so it's not a big deal.

[00:10:56] Robbie: Sponsored

by DeWine

[00:10:57] Adam: lips are feeling the wild turkey.

[00:11:01] Chuck: Mm

[00:11:02] Adam: we explain why it's a turkey too? Cause the whole, the infamous episode that y'all were

[00:11:07] Robbie: well that can bring us to our first hot take is should we have won front end feud

[00:11:14] Chuck: Yeah, I felt, I felt like there were a couple of questions where you were, you were led. to the right answer, or there was some subjective decisions around like, no Robbie that's wrong, it goes to you, and then here's a hint.

I feel like that happened a couple

of

[00:11:33] Adam: A rematch, huh? Is that sort of the request here? Rematch with a better judge.

[00:11:38] Chuck: Ha ha

[00:11:40] Adam: I'll let them know. All right

[00:11:41] Chuck: Ummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

[00:11:42] Robbie: I think like it's luck of the draw too cuz like That whole like question around screen sizes was kind of bullshit because it's like oh, what are these

[00:11:52] Adam: The whole thing's kind of bullshit. I mean that yeah, they're these are like not real things These are and they're sourced from like 20 schmucks. You're like the 20 people that submitted it You're like, I don't know who they are and now we're trying to answer like we're them.

[00:12:04] Chuck: Right, so are you currently still the champion or did anybody knock you out yet?

[00:12:09] Adam: We have not been knocked out yet. We're sort of Stumbling through successes. I mean as you saw it's not like we're like clear winners here Uh, we just sort of at the end like when we uh went off against shop talk show chris and dave Uh, I remember it came down to like one question It was like they either get this or they don't and then we steal it and we take it and win it Uh, and they choked, you know, it's just like well that fell in our laps.

We're not really reigning champs here, but we, we did, we have more points. I'll take it.

[00:12:38] Chuck: Somebody's gotta win, that's really what it comes down to. That's the nature of the feud.

[00:12:43] Robbie: Yeah, but anyway, that was yeah their third win there. So it was a turkey was was the

[00:12:48] Adam: a turkey. Yeah.

[00:12:50] Robbie: reasoning behind this

[00:12:51] Chuck: made it appropriate. I like Wild Turkey, I've always been kind of a fan of most of their

[00:12:55] Adam: Do you like Garth Brooks?

[00:12:58] Chuck: Um, I'm fine with

him, I

[00:13:02] Robbie: what way? As a friend?

[00:13:04] Chuck: Yeah, like, he, I mean, he hasn't, he hasn't texted me back in a while, so I, I might be upset with him, but, uh, in general, I'm fine with him. Garth Brooks always reminds me of high school, and my high school, like, was like a serious heyday for him, and at least one prom had, like, the dance as the theme or something, some bullshit like that, so I was very sick of Garth in the 90s.

And, I think over time, you know, can appreciate the musicianship and all of that. He was funny on SNL, remember when he like, became that rocker guy, Chris something for a minute? He like, took on

a

[00:13:41] Adam: Oh, he did the emo thing. Yeah, he was like a straight flat bangs, black hair, emo dude. Yeah, that was

[00:13:47] Chuck: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, he looked like Robbie Wagner back in the day. Um, yeah, Robbie Cor. And, uh, and he was on SNL and was kind of funny. But, uh, I don't know, why do you ask, I guess?

[00:14:01] Adam: Oh, uh, so Wild Turkey, he's got that song Wild Horses on the album No Fences. And I bought the record just like a lot because you can't find his music anymore. He's like, isn't.

[00:14:12] Chuck: Really?

[00:14:13] Adam: on Spotify, whatever. Yeah, none of it. I think actually a weird first album, some live random ass first album just hit the thing.

Anyway, so he's got that song Wild Horses and I hear Wild Turkey and I just start singing the song. Wild Turkey keeps dragging me away

[00:14:29] Chuck: You know the Rolling Stones? And I think even the Rolling Stones, uh, it might have been a cover. It's a famous Rolling Stones song. And then someone did it...

[00:14:39] Adam: Wild Horses is a cover?

[00:14:41] Chuck: Yeah. If it's Couldn't Drag Me Away, Wild Horses couldn't drag me away.

[00:14:48] Adam: And I'll

lose

[00:14:50] Chuck: why couldn't that, uh...

[00:14:52] Adam: someday. Is that the song? Oh shit, I'm gonna have to go look it up. Dang it! It

[00:14:55] Chuck: Ooh, now that line doesn't, maybe he's taken some liberties, but there's definitely a very famous, Rolling Stones song. And I want to say in the 90s, there's a female who covered it, I don't know who, but it was kind of like a,

[00:15:10] Robbie: No?

[00:15:11] Chuck: in the, in the 90s. I know, uh, you weren't born

yet,

[00:15:15] Robbie: Shakira was in the maybe that was early 2000s. I

don't

[00:15:18] Adam: is early 2000s,

[00:15:19] Robbie: right. I was just the first person that popped into my, uh,

[00:15:24] Chuck: well the person that popped in my head was like Sinead O'Connor, but like, no, that's also not correct. Um, but it's like someone like that. Yeah,

[00:15:32] Adam: Man, I'm like embarrassed that I didn't know that was not an original. That's like if somebody brought you up or like, hey, let's do this as parents. Just promise me right now on this show that you'll do this as a parent. You're gonna teach your kid that Weird Al wrote all the originals. That way when they go to a party and that And they hear Beat It, they're gonna be like, Who ripped off Weird Al?

This version stinks! You know, and just be like, dude, this is Michael Jackson. They're gonna be like, psh, what a rip off loser. And then they're gonna be like, no, he wrote the original. And be like, Dad! Rah! Shakes his fist at you.

[00:16:01] Robbie: I love that. I've always thought of

[00:16:03] Chuck: like that would be pretty

[00:16:04] Robbie: told Katelynn, it would be fun if you just like teach Finn, like three things wrong. Like you commit to everything, but then you're just like, you know, this pizza

[00:16:13] Chuck: What are we gonna lean in?

[00:16:14] Robbie: or something. And then like, just, just, just watch what happens later in life,

[00:16:19] Chuck: Mm.

[00:16:20] Robbie: but we're, we're not doing

that. I

just thought it would be fun.

[00:16:22] Adam: Parental trolling is, is, I approve it. Yeah.

[00:16:25] Chuck: Yeah, yeah. I mean, you want a hot take, depending upon whether you are a spiritual person or not. You potentially could be teaching your child to talk to an imaginary friend, so, you know.

[00:16:38] Robbie: Ooh.

[00:16:40] Chuck: Ooh, spicy hot. I said potentially, whatever else, I didn't, you know.

[00:16:45] Robbie: Hey,

[00:16:46] Adam: It's good. It's good. I'm I'm not spiritual. Oh, actually, I was born and raised Mormon, and I got better.

[00:16:52] Robbie: Oh,

[00:16:52] Chuck: You recovered. Nice. Where did you, uh, where were you, where did you grow up?

[00:17:01] Adam: Pacific Northwest in Seattle, which has a surprisingly strong And then I do have family in Utah. But, Utah is no longer dominated by the Mormons. Did you know this? Even though they still dominate the booze laws, uh, they do not dominate the majority.

[00:17:16] Chuck: That's interesting. Like, yeah, essentially they're very concentrated in, like, Salt Lake and Provo, right? That kinda,

something

[00:17:22] Adam: They were worldwide.

[00:17:24] Chuck: Well, yeah, I mean, they're still worldwide. Yeah, we actually have a, I mean, used to at least a pretty large community in Mesa, Arizona. Uh, when I lived in

[00:17:32] Adam: That's where my brother did his mission.

[00:17:34] Chuck: Nice, nice.

I was going to say, when I lived in Tempe, we used to get them knocking on our door sometimes. We were like, ugh, I don't want to have this conversation. But good luck to you, riding around on your bike in the summer in Arizona.

[00:17:47] Adam: Yeah, cheers you 18 year old, uh, naive person. That's great.

[00:17:52] Chuck: Yeah,

uh,

[00:17:53] Adam: or is it 21? I can't remember.

[00:17:54] Chuck: for the mission, I think it's 18 actually, yeah.

[00:17:57] Adam: Is it 18? Yeah, I blocked it all out.

[00:17:59] Chuck: Yeah, that's fair, that makes sense. I mean,

[00:18:02] Adam: I was the prodigal child. They were like, the oldest didn't go. He's probably in LA doing cocaine. Like that movie we saw.

[00:18:08] Chuck: you?

[00:18:09] Adam: I should have been, that would have been a cooler story than, I sold shoes in LA, I was just a shoe salesman.

I rode to work, I was dressed in a full suit, really nice shoes, probably like 300 shoes cause I got some free ones from work or whatever, and I'd rise, I was so poor, I rode a razor scooter to work, in my suit, and then just like hopped off it and walked on the sales floor and was like, I'm here, I'm an emo kid in a suit, on a razor,

I'll sell you some Ferragamos, let's go.

[00:18:35] Chuck: whoa. You sold the fancy shoes though, so

[00:18:38] Adam: Oh man, it was

[00:18:39] Chuck: you were, if you were any good at that though, you might. Yeah. Yeah. If you were any good at it, though, you might not be here today. So look.

[00:18:46] Adam: It actually, in my opinion, it, uh, directly correlates with why I'm here. I'm not just a engineer. I'm an engineer that can talk to people and I can sell, uh, because I have a lot of sales history and it turns out being able to sell stuff as good, whether you're a designer, a developer, a manager, a PM, a CEO, an exec, everybody is pitching and selling, and you either know how to do it or you don't.

You either look like a wiener when you do it, or you look like a. You know, a tough cookie, like a, like a rock that you can't budge and they're like, just listen to the rock man.

[00:19:15] Chuck: Hmm hmm. You look like a wiener, like a guy in a, in a beanie inside his house.

[00:19:22] Robbie: Hey, I was wearing a normal, like, baseball cap, but that puts like a shadow over my face. So I switched

[00:19:29] Adam: There's no

[00:19:29] Robbie: Because I didn't have time to shower because my day has been shit and we're not going to go into that. But, uh, we should go into...

[00:19:37] Adam: school today for my kids. Oh yeah. Oh yes. Your Segway. You're very good at

[00:19:40] Robbie: CSS a programming language?

[00:19:44] Adam: No, dude. What kind of idiot thinks that writing text into a file that runs with something. Is a programming language. I don't care who, uh, you know, no, the answer is, uh,

[00:19:58] Robbie: Yeah,

[00:19:58] Adam: yeah,

of course it is.

[00:19:59] Robbie: it's the same as people that think HTML is a programming language. What fucking morons like there is no way

[00:20:05] Adam: my mom can make it. Yeah.

[00:20:08] Chuck: I argue that anything parsed, any text parsed by a machine is potentially giving machine instructions. Which HTML does. It does give machines instructions.

And

[00:20:20] Adam: Counter question for you is sheet music. Coding. Is that a programming language? Are you programming humans by putting notes on the lines? Are the humans, the machine, but you're actually still authoring reading or writing code with sheet music?

[00:20:38] Robbie: I think it's

[00:20:38] Chuck: If that's... Yeah, maybe adjacent. Because under that same logic, like, essentially... A story is

[00:20:46] Robbie: Yeah, any any instructions written down for something or

[00:20:51] Chuck: And why only written, too, I guess? Now we're gonna go outside of text, and, you know, am I being programmed in ways when I take in media, or, you know, watch a movie, watch a show, play a game, potentially, cause there's... trying to evoke emotion and response and thought and all those things.

[00:21:09] Adam: Here's my hot take about CSS is it's the only web language that delivers types and enforces them at runtime.

[00:21:17] Robbie: Ooh.

[00:21:17] Adam: It's a typed language that you don't just throw it away when you compile it. TypeScript, you're like, I'm going to write in a typed language that then I take everything that I did and I leave it at the door before I give it to everyone.

You're like, that sounds genius. Great idea. Uh, temporary type safety. That's a great feature,

[00:21:40] Chuck: it's type safety for the humans, not for the

[00:21:44] Robbie: At, at dev time, yeah. So it's like, to make sure you're doing the right stuff, not to make sure that your program is doing the right stuff.

[00:21:51] Adam: I like this irony that the native languages all were typed out the box, right? You got your Objective C, you got your, Java, right? So typed languages and they're looking at us on the web and they're jelly. Yo, they're jelly of us writing JS. So they go and make Swift and Kotlin. Inferred type languages, very loose looking, omitting semicolons, all sorts of the cruft and the dumb shit, because that's the smart choice.

The smart choices make it smaller, easier to read, anyway, it gets really verbose. So then, what did we do on the web? We said, we want what we don't have, also. So we too shall make, we'll make a typed language and we're going to act like ours is. And I'm just like, look at the world that we live in.

This is so funny. Uh, the way that we all can't be happy with our own dev

[00:22:35] Chuck: No, no. Because front end engineers got shit on as being like UIP ons for so long. And now as a community, it has been flipped on its head and now it's like so super complex. yeah, I would say under that like same ideology. Why does an MVC framework come to the client? Well, you know cuz

[00:22:57] Robbie: Cause you can.

[00:22:58] Chuck: end guys.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Let me show

[00:23:00] Adam: well, we have to, we have to show them how, how big we are in the front end. Uh, we can do it too. Here, watch me. What was the first MVC framework you used or, or like, but what was just before prototype? Remember prototype JS? That's when like, hardcore back end people came into the front end and they're like, we're gonna, we're gonna structure up this shit for you and your, your stupid little kid language.

And I was like, you just made a big file with lots of words that does the same thing as like my single stupid function. Like

[00:23:28] Chuck: Mm

[00:23:30] Robbie: Yeah, I do think like there was a time and place for it. Like we do a lot of crazy shit now for like, you know, I, I spent eight years building this thing that optimizes everything to go 20 milliseconds faster. Like, can anyone fucking tell? Like, you know, it doesn't matter. Like before it mattered. Cause

[00:23:49] Chuck: bills can

[00:23:50] Robbie: the only Dom API was like nothing.

So it was like, Oh, well we kind of need jQuery and

stuff.

[00:23:56] Adam: need a jQuery bad, yeah. GetElementsByTagName was whack as hell. Especially when you didn't even have good reducers and filters. Like, we didn't have, like, oh man, it was crappy. Yeah, I agree.

[00:24:07] Chuck: Yeah. Yeah. I mean I can definitely see why tooling had to get better and The hardware side of like offloading things, computing power to clients, to a degree, obviously. , the easy argument is always like jQuery spaghetti or, you know, backbone or whatever it was, you know, that you embraced at that kind, that time.

What felt like a good leap, but it's just continued to spiral. And that's what

[00:24:32] Adam: code I didn't write is spaghetti. That's what it sounds like to people. It's like, oh, I'd, I'd never create spaghetti, but I read yours and it was spaghetti. You're like,

what a

[00:24:40] Robbie: just don't understand it.

Yeah,

[00:24:42] Chuck: Yeah, you just don't understand. No, I created a lot of shitty code, I'm sure. All over the place. Get the job done, sometimes. So, maybe I just

[00:24:50] Robbie: you have to.

[00:24:50] Chuck: It's hard to say. Yeah. I didn't invent

[00:24:53] Adam: we all learned on the job for a while, you know, it's nice. It was nice. You got a client. That's like, we want X. You're like, don't tell him I've never done that before,

[00:25:00] Chuck: Yeah.

[00:25:00] Adam: but I'll, uh, I'll figure it out and then we'll secretly make it look like we're hella pro at the

[00:25:06] Chuck: Yeah, Yeah, exactly. You'll be like, this was amazing. I know. You didn't see the other 14 iterations we went through. But, uh, yeah. Yeah, here it is. I don't know why it took

six

[00:25:17] Robbie: I'm gonna bounce around because that kind of goes into a topic I had on here. I'm curious about the secret CSS features what's the biggest bang for my buck? My boss is like, oh I need You know, this to really blow people away in a demo and you have like a week to do it, not necessarily the fanciest stuff, but like, what's the, the best, easiest way to be like, you know, cool animations or like, I don't know, the view transition stuff is cool these days or whatever, but like, what, what's your recommendation to make things flashy real quick.

[00:25:49] Adam: All right. I got an answer. I even have a talk. I gave a while ago. the pitch was a prototype speaks a thousand comps, a thousand design comps. If you make a prototype, you can create this illusion. So, uh, you can create a PWA that installs the home screen, which means you get the app icon on the home screen.

You tap it. It goes full screen. It looks exactly. And as long as you make it fast enough, you can even go jam stack. The link clicks can load a page so fast that they won't even know that it wasn't there. Uh, anyway, so you can create this illusion with a PWA can make you, you could go land 3, 000, 000 in seed money by making a really.

Badass fuckin PWA. The short answer is, Hells Yats View Transitions, dude. That shit is amazing! You sprinkle a It's one of the most magical fairy dust things you can sprinkle on your website, is View Transitions. You're like, I'll just give this shit a name and then call an asynchronous function right before I mod the DOM.

And then, Oh my god! Morphing! And

it's like, Off the main thread! And then you can customize it. Oh shit, dude, that is some really fun stuff. But also if you have extra time, if you've got an extra day, you want to stay up late and have half a bottle of, you know, some wild turkey, go add scroll driven animations.

And the new spec is very cool. I mean, you don't have to write an intersection observer anymore. It automatically knows when it's entering the viewport and exiting by how much you have words that articulate when you want it to begin and end. You can link to the entirety of the scroll or a portion of your own intersection with the scroll port.

That shit is amazing.

So both those combined together. You can blow someone away. It looks like you're building a native app. And then if you want to do the paw thing, you're definitely you're in 6 million seed territory. Now you're really knocking the socks off the fool. That's like, Oh my God, you did this in a week.

The only bummer is don't tell him you did it in a week because those. Tools are gonna ask you to just do one more week and finish it. And you're like, AHH! It's a prototype, it was an illusion! And they're gonna be like, Oh so what's... How much is, how much is the reality? And you're like,

[00:27:44] Robbie: Years. Yeah.

[00:27:46] Adam: the years, uh, yeah, the reality is, uh, kind of far away.

I mean, didn't you see I was logged in as fucking Rambo? Come on, Rambo doesn't use this app. Uh, anyway, I was, yeah,

[00:27:57] Chuck: I mean, come on, he's living up there in the mountains. Defending himself. What was that, in an abandoned mine or something? Anyway.

[00:28:05] Adam: He's cool. I want to be him.

[00:28:07] Chuck: Uh, First Blood was legit. Like, by, it got so campy by like, Rambo 3 though. And they were just selling toys and it was just super weird.

And it's also like, why are you selling toys of this like, jacked up steroid man with like a,

you know, like, aircraft?

[00:28:25] Robbie: up steroid man?

[00:28:27] Chuck: I challenge you to go look up those action figures and compare them. Because G. I. Joe... Especially, like, initially, was, had proportions that were a little more realistic. As much as, you know, shooting lasers at each other and no one ever dies can be

realistic,

[00:28:42] Robbie: Okay. I just looked it up and this is pretty ridiculous.

[00:28:46] Chuck: toys, yeah, yeah, I remember the Rambo toys. Uh, I mean, there were as, yeah, they're as bad as the Masters of the Universe. Like, I don't know if you ever had any of those original

[00:28:56] Adam: Wait, isn't his name Adam?

[00:28:58] Chuck: Uh, yeah, Adam Greyskull.

[00:29:00] Robbie: Hmm.

[00:29:00] Adam: Yeah

[00:29:01] Chuck: Cringer, who became Battle Cat and He Man, of course.

[00:29:05] Adam: I'm getting massive whiffs of caramel off my cup

[00:29:07] Chuck: Oooh, as it opens up, yeah.

[00:29:10] Adam: oh, man. It's it's dessert It smells like christmas. Oh my

[00:29:14] Chuck: you sure it's not Caramel Color number 43?

[00:29:18] Robbie: Hmm. Yeah, that's how they make it brown.

Yeah,

[00:29:21] Chuck: no. It's nothing to do with barrels and

wood. No, I know. I don't have to list the ingredients. What are these FDA enforcements? Because there's no nutritional value here. I think it's zero calories, though. I have found that it's not... It has nothing to do with...

Like, I could drink a half bottle of this. It's not that. It's the chips and cookies that I eat later.

[00:29:44] Adam: Mmm

[00:29:45] Robbie: it's, it's a slippery slope cause it makes you want more chips and cookies and it has more calories than you think. So like, and it deteriorates muscle. So if you lift it, it's like, doesn't matter what you did today. Like,

[00:29:59] Chuck: yeah,

[00:30:00] Robbie: but it, it's great though.

[00:30:02] Chuck: the brown fat it adds underneath, around your organs and all of that stuff. And then,

[00:30:08] Robbie: a fatty liver from it,

[00:30:09] Chuck: right, it's approximately 160 calories per serving, which is like two ounces, or one and a half

to two ounces,

[00:30:16] Robbie: guess I'm not having dinner.

[00:30:18] Chuck: I think it's, no, maybe it's just 60, actually, because liquors are better. Calorically than like wine and beer.

[00:30:26] Robbie: Yeah, oh,

yeah, Yeah.

the

[00:30:28] Chuck: But I mean...

[00:30:29] Robbie: is like the the high noons that are just like vodka and like no other calories

[00:30:36] Chuck: And, yeah, and like, uh, essence of juice or

something. Sorry, we're taking this down our,

our,

[00:30:41] Adam: It was a whisper of juice.

[00:30:42] Chuck: Yeah.

[00:30:43] Adam: There you go. There's a little strawberry on there.

[00:30:45] Chuck: Slight, slightly more than liqueur. But, uh, still. You know, more about, like, thinking about a grapefruit while I poured this into my mouth.

[00:30:54] AD SPOT

[00:30:54] Adam: Um, I want to talk about milk

[00:30:55] Robbie: Oh, okay. We took that off the hot take, so we would love to

hear your take on Milk. Well, we had the primage, and his episode will be a few away from now. I don't know. I don't even know. But, um...

[00:31:10] Chuck: I can look up

this

[00:31:11] Robbie: He, he was like, yeah, I, I won milk. I did the, the jet skiing or the water skiing with the milk. And then like, there was all those posts about like only white supremacists drink milk from the bottle or

[00:31:22] Chuck: Which is so weird.

[00:31:24] Robbie: he was like, it got kind of canceled. So we took it off, but anyway, tell us about milk. We don't, we don't care if we're canceled or not. So.

[00:31:30] Chuck: I mean, tell us about your racism. I mean, milk.

[00:31:33] Adam: Dang, I uh, I had, I have, so here, okay, I've been listening to y'all's show. Good show. I love the, the, all the three parts. Whiskey, Web, Winona. It's good. But the milk question keeps coming up. I have no idea. I'm like completely naive. I don't know anything about the origins. You know, y'all are like, it had a thing on Twitter.

And I'm like, I believe you, but I have no idea what it was for me. I'm going based off of the Portlandia episode. Have you seen the Portlandia about milk?

[00:31:57] Chuck: mm.

[00:31:58] Adam: Oh man. It's so funny. They basically, um, make milk out of all sorts of shit that shouldn't be making milk. And then they like try to

sip it and it's absolutely disgusting.

That's real life. Okay. So here's my stance on it. Here's my spicy take is, uh, if it's just cause it's white and creamy ish or whatever, it doesn't make it milk. It needs to come from a mammal, dammit. If it doesn't come from a mammal, don't call it milk, call it white juice. If you made it with almonds, or some other fucking nut, I don't care.

It's not milk! Stop selling me

[00:32:27] Robbie: Honestly, I think if you called it almond white juice, a lot of people would buy

[00:32:32] Chuck: Would still buy it. Yeah, milk alternative is a better, like, uh, label of things. We, this came up some, sometime recently and I was, I, I have much the same feelings as you. I've made almond milk before and all that is, is like crushing it down and letting it sit in water for a while so it just absorbs some of that

flavor.

That's not milking. There's no

nipples on

[00:32:52] Adam: that with paper, you

[00:32:53] Chuck: Yeah, yeah,

[00:32:53] Adam: some white and paper pulp in there? I'll make you some paper milk. There you go. It's a creamy white juice for you. We'll just call it milk. Maybe that's what I'll do, is I'll start a whole campaign making things that look like milk, but that everyone goes, well, no, that one's not milk.

And I go, what's the difference between your stupid almond milk and this? papier milk, you know, I'll make it French sounding. Papier, it's papier, uh, milk. What do they call it? Uh, lech, lech, uh, crap. It's like Spanish, but it has it's own, anyway, I took

[00:33:21] Chuck: Uh, yeah, so did I. But, uh, water is, uh, right? And so, E A U is water. Luh, or whatever. Milk, what was milk? It's not leche.

[00:33:33] Adam: Uh, the cow is chevra, right? Cow is

chevra.

[00:33:36] Chuck: actually goat. Chèvre

[00:33:37] Adam: that's goat, oh yeah, chevre cheese, of course.

[00:33:40] Chuck: I was just there a couple weeks ago, so it should be more top of mind, but I did not

order

[00:33:45] Robbie: You never got any milk

[00:33:47] Adam: the special Pokemon from there?

[00:33:48] Chuck: No, I just get espresso, so, uh, what?

No, I did not get any special

Pokemon.

[00:33:54] Adam: not cool. I didn't, I didn't mention Pokemon, you

did.

[00:33:56] Robbie: Okay, I'm upset that it's not still cool because like Pokemon Go being a big thing was so cool for me for like two months when it was cool and then I was like, okay, well I can't play

[00:34:06] Adam: Get on Monster Hunter now. Dude, they just came out with a new game. And it's super rad. Capcom, Niantic, they can't, it's the same thing. You walk around, there's like a dragon a block away right now. And it'll be like, oh man, I'm getting up. I'm gonna go defeat that fucking dragon. And the sword fighting is super cool.

It's like really modern, new age

[00:34:20] Chuck: what is this? Is this on your phone or something?

[00:34:23] Robbie: yeah.

[00:34:23] Adam: on your phone. Yeah, it's like Pokemon Go, except you're a monster hunter. So you're not just like flinging a pokeball at some little fucking squirtle. You're, you're like taking a big ass electric hammer and slamming it on top of a Rathos. Ktsktsktsa!

Anyway, I do have a... A code you can put in when you join that's be like, Oh yeah, this guy gave me the

[00:34:43] Robbie: Yeah, you want to read it out? Maybe someone will use it when they, when they join listening to

[00:34:46] Adam: Oh shit, actually I could, that'd be funny.

The game is really cool though. Monster Hunter Now is the name.

[00:34:54] Chuck: there's no way my wife is gonna let him A, have a phone, yet, and then go out and fight dragons with it. We have enough battles over games in the house right now, so,

[00:35:03] Adam: It is a family game. Oh, by the way, speaking of games, I raised my kids on retro games first. So, uh, Galaga, Pac Man,

[00:35:10] Chuck: oh yeah,

[00:35:12] Adam: uh, Donkey Kong. And it's been really fun. Some like, and then since I have emulators set up, I've actually beat some of the old school games. I beat Super Mario three. It's a holy

[00:35:21] Chuck: Yeah, we have that in our house too. We have, uh, I forget what it's called, but it's, it runs like, we have like 30, 000 games. Actually, my brother,

yeah, like, not RetroBox or something like that. Now I

can't

[00:35:32] Robbie: You mentioned it in several

[00:35:34] Adam: There's a few of them these days. Yeah.

[00:35:35] Chuck: my brother

[00:35:36] Robbie: Refer

[00:35:37] Chuck: imaged it on like some...

[00:35:38] Robbie: No.

[00:35:39] Chuck: Right, exactly, on some old Dell, like, workstation, and, yeah, kind of same thing, and you can go every, from everywhere, like, uh, Atari 26, Commodore, all the way up to like, Nintendo 64, like,

Donkey,

[00:35:54] Adam: I'm obsessed with these. I've got a PC all dedicated to it. there's some really cool modern like have you heard of hyperspin?

[00:36:00] Chuck: mm,

[00:36:01] Adam: Holy shit. It's got the whole like, okay, so let's say you're like standing in front of a cabinet and it sounds like Capcom, you know, it's like ting, ting, ting, ting, things are swirling all over.

So as you like select a game, which is also like scroll snap, I think you could build this with CSS scroll snap, just to like tie it back anyway. So it scroll snaps in as soon as it lands as the selected item in this, it's the snap target, which by the way, this is CSS spec I'm working on snap target. You can then trigger loading the preview of the game.

So it loads a preview of the game, all sorts of album art shows up. And then of course you can launch the game. So it's this phenomenally powerful video, uh, enhanced launcher for your emulators. So it's a front end. They call it a front end for all the emulators.

[00:36:40] Chuck: oh, that's

[00:36:41] Adam: it's called hyperspin. It is the coolest of all of them.

It's also simultaneously the hardest one to set up. It's so. Fucking picky. Uh, I have my referral code. I'm gonna share it before

I

[00:36:51] Robbie: it.

[00:36:52] Adam: Okay. You're you ready? Everybody if you're playing monster hunter now type in uh as your refer six h p r six w Eight w and you won't regret it. The game is actually like totally It's the coolest mobile game.

I played in like four years I honestly was playing pokemon go until I downloaded this i've been playing pokemon go for like years I travel and it's really fun. I'll be like,

[00:37:12] Robbie: I used to go like, so this has been a while, I guess when it was like first out, I would take my lunch break from work, drive, get lunch, park, and like park next to a pokey stop and play for a while and then go back to work. eat lunch after that. Like, so I would basically have like two, two lunch breaks.

Um, just so I could play more. But, uh, doesn't matter. I don't work for them anymore.

[00:37:40] Chuck: Are they in business?

[00:37:41] Robbie: Uh, it's RSA, so I, I hope so.

[00:37:44] Chuck: Oh yeah, they're doing fine. They didn't miss that extra few hours a week. So, I think it's totally good. Alright, uh, I don't even know where we're at

[00:37:52] Robbie: We've been bouncing way around. Um,

[00:37:55] Adam: me a hot take,

let's

do

it. I

[00:37:57] Robbie: Tailwind or Vanilla CSS?

[00:38:00] Tailwind vs vanilla CSS

[00:38:00] Adam: Vanilla CSS, but, okay, so here, I'm so excited for this question, because I hear it all the time, uh, in y'all's show, I get the question a lot,

and I recently had a friend, needed a deck to get built. And I liked the, I like this metaphor of a deck getting built because usually I think about like a house is as complicated as building a website.

Cause you have to register the address with the city. You have to get water and electricity into it. It's like these external resources that you're piping out and back into the house. And then you have to. to feed the water through up into the bathroom. Right. And then you've got your UX engineer. That's like making sure that the handle, uh, is nice and easy to twist and that you have the aerator.

You got to have the aerator at the end of the spout or else it just fucking leaks out instead of shoots out in a nice cylinder anyway. Right. That's like a UX engineer's job. And then you have your backend job, which is to get the water to the room or whatever. but the deck was a really cool one because basically he had a bunch of people show up to give him quotes.

And there were clearly two different types of people offering the job. One was an installer and the other one was a craft person that would build you a deck. So one person wanted to install a deck. And the other person wanted to build you a deck. And this is a really interesting, thing that we, we are in the same spot right now where people want, generally, they ask you to install some shit.

Like your boss is usually asking, I heard some shit is really good. And I'd like you

to install it, you know? And you're like, all right, I'll install that or whatever. Or a client comes to you and they're like, I got X dollars. Install me an app. And you're just like, yeah, that's the stupidest way to ask me for work, but whatever.

Then you have your crafter. Your crafter is like, Oh, I'll take your request and I will uniquely build you something. And it will fulfill your needs for 50 years versus the installer, which will do it cheaper and faster, but you're going to get. Fucking sick of it because they did something cheap.

They cut a corner somewhere. no shade on either of these strategies. These are both valid things that need to get done. Sometimes decks need installed. Sometimes you need a crafted deck. And sometimes there's something in the middle where you like, you install most of the deck and then you craft the railings or some shit or whatever, right?

Okay. All this is to say. Tailwind is for installers. Vanilla CSS is for crafters. Neither of these people are wrong in their industry or wrong in the way that they're doing things, but it is drastically two different sides to get the task done. And it's a mentality thing. When you want to craft something, you want to hold each of the pieces and you want control over the niche because you're going to have opinions when you install, you give the opinions to the thing that you bought and you trust.

It's going to give you things you didn't even think you knew until later you realized you didn't want them. Anyway, that's the thing you're like, I'm going to take this theme. I'm going to install this theme. This'll really make me faster getting this site done. Then you get the theme. You're like, God damn it.

I'm fighting it for days. Just trying to get this one little tweak shit. , so anyway, uh, tailwind is great. you can integrate it with open props, my little library with just values. I think the workflow of Tailwind is phenomenal. The copy and paste ability for installers, if you're an installer, all you want to do is copy paste, man!

And Tailwind has your back. That is the number one place for copy paste. Everything lives on the HTML. You take it, you steal it, you go somewhere else, you paste it, and you're done. If you don't care, that's a Great way to get things done. But if you do, and once you need to go off the rails, once you need to do container queries and you have to learn really weird micro syntax, that's when things start to get weird and you wished that you'd gone vanilla CSS and some sort of hybrid model along the way.

[00:41:19] Chuck: the, I think, the hottest take on that particular question thus far. And, I think Dax would be proud of you by not saying it depends.

[00:41:28] Adam: mean, it depends is the answer.

I mean, do you want something installed? So it's like this guy, this guy didn't want a deck installed because the installers wanted to give him certain types of boards that didn't wear and tear over time but don't look like wood. And he's like, I'm not going to walk around on your weird plastic shit.

And everyone's like, well, but it lasts 50 years. And he's like, I don't care. And he's like, I want to paint my deck. They're like, oh, if you paint this stuff, it voids the warranty. And he's like, what the? and so he's like, I guess I can't get a deck installed because every installer is going to give me this particle plastic board that I can't paint.

I want to paint my deck. So he got, he had to get a crafter for this one weird thing. It's anyway, that's good analogy. I

[00:42:03] Chuck: I think it's a good analogy. It's a, yeah, an interesting take. Robbie, do you have any knee jerk reactions to that in any ways? Like, thinking,

[00:42:11] Robbie: no, I mean, I, I'm a bit on, uh, maybe the other side of saying tailwind has solved CSS for all of us forever. But, um, like, uh, I agree that some of the more complex and newer things, like it takes a while for it to get. abstracted into tailwind land and like, then some of it, how does it even work? Right? Like it, some things can't work in tailwind and I don't think you're wrong if you use both either, because you can, you can use, you know, I, I think having the quickness of being like, I just want to throw like a five pixel padding on this and just use a utility class.

Like, I love that, but then if you need to do something more complex, there's no shame and also just. Just opening a real CSS file and writing some shit, like, it's whatever you're more productive in, but I think most people that hate on Tailwind haven't tried it is the big thing. It's like, I think there's a lot of benefits to using it and it makes you a lot faster for like the base case.

[00:43:12] Adam: It's, it's such a good workflow because so many people spend so much time in their component JavaScript file

and having access and just staying there in your JSX or in your templating framework and just sprinkling in these classes and never having to even go to see that's a great workflow.

I can't challenge that vanilla CSS. It doesn't have that vanilla CSS. Does have the back and forth. You either have to use CSS nesting and tie your styles directly to your DOM structure, which we all know has its trade offs. or you put your own custom class names on everything. Oh my God. Can I share it to you?

Like one of my, uh, it's a hot take.

[00:43:49] Chuck: yeah, it.

might

[00:43:50] Adam: hot take, I tweeted it a couple of weeks ago, but I'm just like, it's so funny. Uh, people are like, I love Tailwind because I don't have to name anything. I'm like, all you fucking do is name shit, dork. You, you name your functions in JavaScript. You name your variables in JavaScript.

You name your rows. You named your columns. You named your, you name everything. And for you to sit here and tell me to my face that like naming classes is somehow the one thing that just really grinds your gears. I'm like, man, you need to look around at all the other shit you named

[00:44:17] Robbie: I do agree

with that though. like maybe not to that extent, but like when you have, say, let's say three nested divs, okay, and you're like, the outer one is like the container. And then the next one is like the whatever. And the middle one is like, what the fuck are those things? Like not having to care and just throwing utility classes on is

[00:44:37] Chuck: BEM wasn't that

hard.

[00:44:38] Robbie: it's yeah.

But also if you don't care what the name is. Just name it whatever. Be like, 1, 2, 3,

done.

[00:44:45] Adam: just, let's just admit then what it is, is you're struggling to come up with verbiage because you don't come from a design background. And so you're looking at a problem that's fucking foreign to you. And so to you, you reject it as bullshit. When the reality is, is like everyone else is happy. If they're in design land, they know the names of these things.

They named them. It's to them. It's fine.

[00:45:03] Robbie: Yeah, so they should have told

[00:45:04] Adam: you're comfortable naming JavaScript stuff. You're comfortable naming everything, but design related things. And so it's like, I think a lot of people just have this. They just reject designing things. And they like, ah, this doesn't get me further in my career.

Right. This is kind of why I like that. Chuck is always constantly like saying like the front end is like a valuable skill, like we need front end developers because they're doing a lot of the work that the JavaScript engineers that are all hardcore mode, quote unquote, or whatever, don't want to do. , and that doesn't make them better or worse.

Like this is a team effort. What I love about building a house and the analogy of building a house is no one shits on each other and the role that they play, the electric engineers and the plumbers and the interior decorators and the people doing the stairs and how they feel like they all respect each other's roles.

We don't do that on the front end. It's weird. For some reason we like have stepped ladders. And so it's like, it's okay. If like, it's hard for you to come up with a name for the middle, middle container. and I don't expect you to, but it's just, to me it's weird in retrospect if you step back. And you're like, dude, how many things you named today?

And you're like, I named a lot of stuff.

Um, but that one was the hardest one to name.

Um,

[00:46:05] Chuck: like to go complain in public about it, right? Because he can't complain in the job. That's not like an acceptable forum to be like, I don't want to name all these stupid CSS things. Hey, designer folks, come name these things for me. Or something like that, right? They don't feel like that is an acceptable path.

They have a little frustration. Let me go over to this platform where people bitch and moan and then bitch a bone about something that doesn't matter.

[00:46:27] Adam: you're also not wrong. Robbie did. It's totally fine to not like naming classes. I just, uh, I just liked one day I was like sitting down and I realized for myself, I had sat there and I did, I named the columns in my database. I named all the functions to get it. I was naming all the backend routes. I was creating six naming structures and then like just to get some data.

And then I was like, oh my God, and then I was trying to name a class and I was like, what do I name this? And I'm like, I just Look at me. I was like,

[00:46:55] Chuck: Well,

[00:46:55] Robbie: I think you're

[00:46:56] Chuck: look, look at you humble bragging that in the same day, by the way, you were naming database columns and CSS classes.

[00:47:05] Robbie: Yeah. Full

[00:47:06] Adam: cold fusion though,

you know, like No, just kidding.

[00:47:09] Chuck: It is the coolest name. It is the worst language I've ever worked in. But maybe that was a product of that particular company in time or something. But I don't, I don't understand why it exists.

[00:47:18] Robbie: I do think you're right that like it's a separate skill designing and UX is different than like the technical side if your designer Doesn't name all their layers and stuff in the design and you're like, I don't know what this box is You're like boxy thing You know, so unless you're like interfacing with them daily and like really talking about why are we doing this?

And how is it helping users to have these four boxes or whatever? Then you have

[00:47:46] Adam: care? And also a lot of people, yeah, a lot of people don't care because it's not benefiting their role.

Like I had to fight so hard for the roles that people that didn't want to write JavaScript at many companies that I worked out where I was leading, and I was like, no, no, no, you, you can't just promote into JS.

You can't because you're going to take the people that do the complimentary work for them and squish them into that role just so that they can make more money. And I'm like, it's not fair. We need both roles. The person that made the calendar widget beautiful and gorgeous and accessible is not the same person that made the data ready for the calendar widget.

And if you think that somehow one is better, you're supporting. The poor choices that we've already been making in the, in this industry at our company. And like our company needs to be the place where we can feel safe that these are roles that we all, ah, geez.

And dude, I never won.

It was so tough. It was super

[00:48:40] Chuck: of course, because like companies don't understand the ROI of that until maybe they get sued or something, because I think you touched on a very important point there,

which is it takes a lot of knowledge and care and work to make sure that you're providing an accessible web.

I don't have anywhere near the appropriate understanding of accessibility.

Right? Because I know that it takes dedication and time. It takes an individual that is valued in a role like that to do it and to work for it and to implement processes and everything else into companies to make it, a reality. That's probably why the ROI for companies hasn't been there.

Because they haven't been sued enough or something. Because it's, it's easily dismissed

and even if it gets implemented initially you can see it get chipped away at too over time.

[00:49:32] Adam: Yeah. There's a guy I know that was coming into web who'd been writing apps for a long time and various old school languages, new school languages, whatever. Anyway, he's writing web for the first time and he's been doing it for about a year and he very honestly, and I love this take, he goes of all the languages I've ever written. HTML is the hardest and he goes, it's not because it's hard to fucking write. It's because it's hard to be considerate and appropriate given the edge cases and the needs of all of the consumers of this. In fact, I'm going to follow this up with a hot take also, , that the front end is the hardest job.

And here's why is if you're a backend developer, you have one consumer. Well, you have a, well you have like developers that are consuming like your API, they're using it, but you have one runtime to worry about.

You have Node. And you have it locked at a fucking version. Do you realize how nice that would be if I could lock a human at a version?

If I could lock a browser at a version? If I could require a browser version? If I could even require a fucking browser? If I could require the screen reader that you use? Here's the thing is when you do front end, I have eight bosses to beat. You have one final boss. I have eight. I have to beat Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and screen readers on Android and iOS.

I have to do Safari on iOS. I have to do all, these are all bosses. These are all consumers of the thing I wrote. They're all different. They're all subjectively different. They're all, and this thing, you write a backend service, you had one consumer you have control over it. It's like super unfair in comparison.

When the front end is I have, not only do I have multiple browsers and multiple screen readers, I have people consuming what I built. It's a visual tangible thing that I built and people are not machines. They have extremely unique needs that you have to meet. And unless you want to be a butthole, which is kind of what a lot of people choose to be a bottle.

Anyway, what I'm saying is the front end has at least. Eight final bosses and every other language has one and it is, well, okay, let's take that with a grain of salt. That's the spicy part. Anyway, it's like, this is why it's so hard is it's not just a single consumer. It's human subjectivity combined with a matrix of runtimes.

And that is so hard to deal with. I get it. Why everyone goes, I don't like it. It's because it's super duper hard. Just quit making it sound like your job is somehow. Better than that other job. This is just like building a house. Quit being a douche about it. Just do your role and be appreciative that someone else is doing that role.

Because, and in fact, go give them kudos for doing the thing that you think sucks so bad. Like, don't crap on them. Make them feel good for it. That way they'll do it again.

If you keep crapping on them, they're not going to come back and build you an accessible calendar widget. They're going to be like, deuces up, man.

Here's my two middle fingers.

[00:52:19] Chuck: yeah, they're like actually I'm transferring to the back end team I'm gonna start challenging you for that next staff role motherfucker,

[00:52:26] Adam: Right? I'm going to bring in the newest MVC framework and make you look small, man. You know, like, whatever. Yeah.

[00:52:31] Chuck: Your, your ColdFusion API sucks, I just made one in Rust that's

[00:52:35] Adam: Spaghetti, yeah spaghetti code. I'm gonna write clean ass rust, you

[00:52:39] Robbie: Yeah, I do think like back end, you know Kind of in the same vein is very data heavy and logic heavy there's you know Roughly one right answer Whereas like it's more like art on the front end. It's like yeah, I don't fucking know like I got a support all these different vendors and whatever and Somebody decided Flexbox is different in this browser for whatever reason like we're in better times now where it's not as bad but like it was really bad for a while, and it's like

Yeah,

[00:53:07] Adam: for a while.

[00:53:08] Robbie: oh

[00:53:08] Adam: I

[00:53:08] Chuck: Yeah, I mean if you haven't had to fight IE6, you don't know what problems are.

that's what I think. Anyway, I like that this show is mostly just hot takes. Let's just like, shit on things for the rest of the

time.

[00:53:21] Robbie: I mean is there any point to anything else

[00:53:24] Chuck: I don't know. Are you, are you left or right handed?

Those look like right handed guitars, but maybe they're strung upside down and you're actually Jimi Hendrix.

[00:53:32] Adam: rad question. I am right handed. Yeah, they're all here. Wait, I've been practicing banjo Do you want to hear can I play for you

[00:53:37] Chuck: Oh, you have a banjo? Nice. I love banjo, actually.

[00:53:42] Robbie: are you gonna do dueling banjos with Chris

[00:53:44] Chuck: No, no, no, no. I like banjo... Oh, yeah, that's true, I forgot. Coyier's got a banjo

out

[00:53:49] Adam: Coir is awesome and banjo is somehow like the I've been playing guitar and other instruments for like 20 years. It seemed to the scariest one I was like, there's no way I can learn this amazing instrument

And then I got a banjo lele, and then I was like, I love this, uh, but I want more twang. And then I got a banjo just a couple months ago, and I've been obsessed.

[00:54:08] Chuck: Hmm. Jerry Garcia was like a studio banjo player before Grateful Dead.

[00:54:13] Adam: Oh, the pressure's on though, let's see if I can do this.

Outro Music

[00:54:43] Chuck: That's sick.

[00:54:45] Robbie: So are you picking each string individually? and we can't see the bottom,

[00:54:49] Adam: Uh, I'm doing claw hammer style, so I'm doing like a, uh, your index finger is punching the string while the thumb does the drone note. So the little one is always hitting the drone. Oh, shit.

It's like a really interesting instrument because like the strings are kind of like an electric guitar, really thin, really easy to hammer on and pull off, but the right hand is all the magic. And so I've got the claw, I'm plucking a main note with my index, brushing the strings. Uh, hitting the drone note, and combining it all with a bum diddly, like a... Here we a little bit more relaxed. Anyway,

cool. Banjo!

[00:55:47] Chuck: Sounds like home.

Do you

[00:55:49] Adam: obsessed. The kids are so tired of it. They're like...

[00:55:52] Chuck: I'm from the bluegrass state. So, you know, it sounds like

home.

[00:55:54] Robbie: Have you uhh I forget what it was called But like the special that Steve Martin and Martin Short Did

[00:56:01] Chuck: Oh, I know what you're talking about.

[00:56:03] Adam: I I

[00:56:04] Chuck: yet. I know he's a

[00:56:05] Adam: banjo recently.

[00:56:06] Robbie: has some kind of line where he's like You know, the, the banjo is like, you know, how is it different than a guitar or whatever? It's like, well, a banjo is very technical and you do this and that and whatever.

And a guitar will get you laid.

[00:56:20] Chuck: That's the most Steve

Martin

thing, absolutely. Yeah, that's perfect. That's funny. Yeah, I love banjo. I love songs that integrate banjo into, like, one of my favorite bands is Travis. And they

have a

couple of songs with... Oh, they influenced Coldplay. They were, like, early... So the song is called Sing, and it has banjo in it, for example.

[00:56:41] Adam: Have you played Outerlands or is that what it's called Outerlands

[00:56:45] Robbie: And space, this Is

[00:56:47] Chuck: Is that a

game?

[00:56:48] Adam: It's space, but it has banjo. It's like a astronaut that will play banjo. It's like got really cool music exploration space, but he's like, it's got a lot of banjo in the music.

[00:56:56] Chuck: Hmm.

[00:56:56] Robbie: I think I played outer lands. I don't remember banjo though.

[00:56:59] Adam: Or, I think it was Outlands? Oh shit, I don't know. Sounded like an old person. Get those Otis

Spunkenmeyer cookies.

Like,

[00:57:06] Robbie: lands is definitely not it.

[00:57:07] Chuck: Okay. You know I play

mostly one game, right?

[00:57:11] Adam: what's the one game you play?

[00:57:13] Robbie: I don't know. I'm playing a

[00:57:14] Chuck: up on the one game I mostly play?

[00:57:17] Adam: No. Yeah, I'm confused.

[00:57:19] Chuck: Okay. Well, I am playing, uh, Tears of the Kingdom right now, so I'm kind of a liar, but mostly, like, 80 percent of my gaming is FIFA.

[00:57:28] Adam: Dang. No, I missed those episodes you talked about FIFA.

[00:57:32] Chuck: Yeah, I'm like

FIFA obsessed. I especially, I was really heartbroken when Stadia went away, because that was like my FIFA everywhere kind of thing, and I had to kind of figure it out.

I did end up getting one of those, uh, Ali ROG, like, it's basically upgraded Steam Deck, and that's been, that's been a better,

[00:57:51] Adam: I like my steam deck. It's good. Yeah

[00:57:53] Chuck: yeah. So, uh, Asus released their version of it, slightly, uh, more powerful, a little bigger screen. So I hadn't, I was almost going to buy a Steam Deck, and then this was released, and I was like, Okay, I'll try that one.

So, same thing, but different.

[00:58:06] Robbie: So the,

[00:58:07] Adam: I like games tears of the kingdom me and my kids beat. It is awesome. We just totally played the whole game together It's

[00:58:12] Robbie: nice. I haven't started it yet, unfortunately.

[00:58:15] Chuck: is playing Breath of the Wild, actually, a bunch, and so I help him some there, and then he'll watch me play Tears of the Kingdom, and, yeah.

[00:58:22] Robbie: Yeah, it was unfortunate timing because Diablo 4 came out and I had to play

that.

[00:58:27] Adam: I wanted to get on that. Yeah

[00:58:29] Robbie: Yeah, so I

[00:58:29] Chuck: Is that the one that

Elon's playing, too?

[00:58:31] Robbie: the, the game that I was thinking about was called Outer Worlds. Is that the game you're talking about?

[00:58:37] Adam: Oh shit, maybe dude. Hold

on.

Let's

[00:58:38] Robbie: it recent? Or, because it was, this was

[00:58:40] Adam: worlds, uh, no

[00:58:42] Robbie: Then maybe not.

[00:58:43] Adam: So you got an astronaut plane Banjo

on it? Uh, no, Outer Worlds is a different one. Hold on,

[00:58:48] Chuck: Okay, yeah, I don't know, this sounds fun. I usually come out of hibernation on FIFA. Basically for like Zelda games and Star Wars games.

[00:58:59] Robbie: Hmm.

[00:59:00] Chuck: I was very interested in that Cyberpunk game, but

I

[00:59:02] Robbie: you should check out Starfield. Do you know about Starfield, Chuck?

[00:59:06] Chuck: I don't know

[00:59:07] Adam: do, I do, yeah, and I would love to play it, but, you

[00:59:10] Robbie: Starfield is by Bethesda, so it's like, uh, Skyrim in space.

[00:59:16] Chuck: I have a plan. I have a plan. Let's build an awesome POC, PWA. Get that 6 mil. And then just like take a

[00:59:24] Robbie: And just play games?

[00:59:26] Chuck: about apps, but mostly playing games.

[00:59:28] Robbie: I like that,

yeah.

[00:59:29] Adam: Awesome.

[00:59:30] Chuck: Yeah,

I'm

[00:59:31] Robbie: And then we'll tell the

[00:59:32] Adam: Outer Wilds. I found, I found the soundtrack.

[00:59:34] Chuck: Hold on, and here, how do you feel about Italy? Because I have been following this, this, uh, Twitter account, it's called Travel Tirement, and he will post up a bunch of, like, very inexpensive European homes in Italy and France. I mean, you're talking about, like, some decent sized places for less than 200, 000.

So we can buy that. That's headquarters. Let's get one big enough, maybe spend 300, 000. Headquarters, bring the families there because we're incubating. Takes a, takes a village. What I've learned in life, as long as that village isn't related to me, people are more apt to kind of jump in. And, uh, and, and figure it out.

But we gotta, you know, we'll PWA and then get to that.

[01:00:17] Robbie: Do they have internet there, though? Because Italy is

[01:00:19] Chuck: Yeah, they have internet. Actually, no, no. Well, they've worked on infrastructure for quite some time for a few different reasons. They had a bunch of those towns that were getting more and more like not quite abandoned, but like they were losing their, their newer generations to jobs in the big city and technology and stuff.

So there's fiber in a bunch of places. And they have approved the digital Nomad Visas, they just don't have the process in place for applications and stuff. So, like many other European places, they've got the Nomad Visa, they've got the infrastructure there, so it's not, it's not bad. And in the North, it's, it's less chaotic.

[01:00:55] Robbie: Yeah, in the north they have good internet.

[01:00:57] Chuck: Yeah, Lake Como. Uh, we can go get a spot by George, hang out by the lake, be

[01:01:04] Robbie: we'll share his Starlink

connection.

[01:01:06] Adam: North.

[01:01:07] Chuck: That's right. Bring your banjo.

[01:01:09] Adam: It's my retirement plan, it's just hammer on that thing. Uh, okay, so the game was Outer Wilds.

[01:01:14] Robbie: Okay, I

[01:01:16] Adam: And yeah, it's got a soundtrack with lots of banjo.

[01:01:18] Chuck: that's pretty

cool.

[01:01:19] Robbie: So we're kind of running out of time, but before we end I do want to ask if you weren't in tech What other career would you choose?

[01:01:26] Chuck: Mm.

[01:01:28] Adam: Oh, oh, it's super easy. answer. I'd be in the gaming industry So just like we're talking about right now y'all are dreaming the game industry. That's cuz that's what I dream to in fact I've got a business plan. I'll just share it right now. So someone else can steal it cuz I'm probably never gonna

[01:01:42] Chuck: Ha ha ha

ha. That's fair.

[01:01:44] Adam: is Many people want to make games and they they do and they sit down and they build them And then they get them on steam and they totally didn't fucking do the UI.

And then, and you can tell that they don't like the UI and that the UI is an afterthought because either the keyboard doesn't work Or the controller doesn't work or some shit like that. So i'd like to start an agency that just builds your UI We'll do the HUD. We'll do the start screen. We'll do the settings screen.

We'll make sure you get All it's almost like building a bootstrap or a, an, uh, like an ARIA kit for gamer, for game builders, and that would also be the studio. So you could either hire us or you could kind of buy our kit. and after that maybe picks up some steam, we'll make our own games in the studio

[01:02:26] Chuck: I li I like this

[01:02:27] Robbie: Yeah, I think

[01:02:28] Chuck: this

idea. You sure you can't raise on

that?

I'd work I'd work on

[01:02:33] Adam: man. I just want to build stuff. I don't want to go sell it and get VC money. I just want to build the UI. So yeah, if you hear this and you think this is a great idea, I will sit down and I would build the world's best, , UI framework for either unreal engine or unity, you tell me which one you want to target first, give me a shitload of money.

And I will take. All of my CSS skills, I'll build responsive typography because the pixel values that are showing up on some of my screens are

absolutely ridiculous. They need to be responsive. You need to have some modern shit in there. You can tell they build UI in these games with like 15 year old technology.

Like all the work is going into the frames per second of the engine, not into the quality of the dev X of building

[01:03:11] Robbie: Yeah. Well,

[01:03:12] Chuck: Yeah, the lead up sells you.

[01:03:13] Robbie: Because Microsoft has bought every game company ever now. And also does a lot of dev stuff. So, if you're listening, give us big piles of money and Adam will build you cool UIs.

[01:03:24] Chuck: Who was buying Activision? I forgot.

[01:03:26] Robbie: Microsoft. Activision Blizzard. Yeah, that's what

I'm saying. So they've got that and, and that stacks the deck to where if anyone's like, Oh, should we build in Mac support for this game?

Fuck no. Like, I can be like,

[01:03:38] Chuck: Right? Yeah, yeah, for sure. Emulate that shit. Fuck them. Uh, I've got a name, I've gotta just name I, I'm joining this agency and it's called Gray Beards

because I got some gray in my beard.

[01:03:50] Robbie: I

definitely

[01:03:50] Adam: Hey yeah, greybeards. And yeah, that'll let us age into some fantasy games that we want to make. Yeah, I'm down. Yeah.

[01:03:56] Chuck: Okay. There you go. Put it out there. I

love

[01:03:58] Robbie: So before we end, is there anything you want to plug?

[01:04:00] Adam: Umm. I, I mean I plugged the wild turkey. That's, uh, that's one thing. Uh, I, I, so I've got a couple of podcasts, which is weird. I have two podcasts which seems like totally exorbitant, like you don't need that many, but one is with Google, and that's called the CSS podcast. And I was very prepared. We sit down, like, and we make outlines like that shit is.

Totally. We break down the specs. It's really nice. Uh, 15 minute episodes or so. And you get, it's the computer science side of CSS. If you don't think it's programming language, listen to that for five minutes and you'd be like, Oh shit, this is as deep or deeper than the way that JavaScript works, I just never paid attention because I'm.

Okay, I'm not gonna call your name, um, but the other show is called the bad at CSS podcast where it's like me and David East We sit down and we talk about well all the shit That's really hard and by us talking about what's hard talking with guests about what's hard other people will learn and hear and be You know, the humility is there plus the education and so we we bring people on to like Chris Coyier came out on He's like I wrote I started writing down the list of all the things that I was bad at CSS and I didn't have enough Paper, uh huh, but it's actually kind of true cuz CSS is really hard.

Um, oh, that's my final, my final hot take is AI will write good CSS last out of all of the programming languages and all of the things that's going to be able to bootstrap for you and edit and do good at it's going to suck at CSS the longest. so I think that job actually oddly has the best job security in terms of AI.

[01:05:22] Chuck: That's my, that's my AI company. Just work, just focuses on getting better and better at CSS.

Two,

[01:05:30] Adam: Damn you, Chuck.

[01:05:32] Chuck: Don't worry, I'll invite you out to the place in Como. George will come over with them all. Bring the kids. Having a, a Nespresso.

I don't know if you've gone to Europe before. No, it's Nespresso, he's, yeah, he's the spokesman for Nespresso,

[01:05:46] Robbie: Yeah.

[01:05:48] Chuck: Anyway.

[01:05:49] Robbie: All right. Cool. Thanks everyone for listening. If you liked it, please subscribe, leave us some ratings and reviews. We appreciate it. And we will catch you next time.

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