121: Tech Stacks, Building Apps, and Gaming Nostalgia with David Cramer

[00:00:00] Robbie: What's going on, everybody. Welcome to Dudes Drinking Drams with Bob Billy and Chuck Billy.

[00:00:12] Chuck: ha, ha, oh, ha, ha, you caught me off guard there, you finally

got

[00:00:17] Robbie: Yeah. All right. Now this is a Whiskey Web and Whatnot with RobbieTheWagner and Charles William Carpenter III, who isn't going to say anything about himself. So I'm never going to give him a pause there anymore. Our guest today is David Cramer. What's going on, David?

[00:00:33] David: Hey, uh, not a whole lot. It's great to be here, especially as I'm a big whiskey fan myself, so.

[00:00:40] Robbie: Nice.

[00:00:40] Chuck: That's the rumor around, around town.

[00:00:43] Robbie: for anyone who has not heard of you, do you want to give a few sentences about who you are and what you do?

[00:00:47] David: David Kramer. I used to be a software engineer. I sort of still am. I do these days is a little confusing, but I started a company called Century a long time ago. 10, 10 to 15 years ago, uh, depending on how you track time. Uh, these days I'm CTO of the company, do a lot of strategy.

technical stuff. Uh, I am still very technical though, and I'm very opinionated,

[00:01:10] Chuck: Mm hmm.

[00:01:10] David: conversations, usually pretty truthful and straightforward, so, uh, hopefully I can be, uh, valuable here, I guess.

[00:01:16] Robbie: Cool, we like

opinionated.

[00:01:18] Chuck: there'll be a couple of nuggets, yeah.

That, that's gonna make hot takes fun. We might have to tweak them a little bit on the fly, but other than that I think we're

good.

[00:01:26] Robbie: I think our first hot take is going to be is this Bourbon because it says it is but it's only been aged for two years. So we're confused but

[00:01:36] Chuck: The federal standards around bourbon are supposed to be Aged in brand new charred oak barrels, minimum of 4 years Uh, 51 percent corn mash bills covered here since it's 100 percent Jimmy Red corn

And, uh, And Jimmy Red, I can't not say it that way. Anyway, I'll, I'll introduce the whiskey first, and then perhaps we'll, uh, discuss the nuances of the legality of calling this bourbon or not.

So, today we're having the High Wire Distilling Company, New Southern Revival, Jimmy Red Bourbon. You know, with an asterisk probably, something there. Uh, age two years, ninety five percent, ninety five proof. Sorry, percent would be ever clear. Uh, like I mentioned, a hundred percent Jimmy Redcorn in the mash bill.

Which was, uh, a, uh, a grain rescued from near extinction. Which I thought was pretty cool, so it's grown in the Carolinas. It's part of the efforts with Sean Brock to bring back a bunch of heirloom grains. And, uh, yeah, let's see how that turns out.

[00:02:37] Robbie: we'll get more into the details on this after we taste, but, uh, I'm using your app, David, to, uh, record this, added you and Chuck as friends on there for the tasting. So we'll put it through its paces here.

[00:02:50] Chuck: Yeah, the Sentry app for rating whiskeys, right?

[00:02:53] Robbie: Yeah,

[00:02:54] David: Something like that.

[00:02:54] Robbie: yeah. Century dot whiskey.

[00:02:56] David: we, dogfooding testbed where I try to make Sentry work really well, and then I just send lots of complaints to the team. I don't know how they feel about it so far, but, uh,

[00:03:07] Chuck: Oh, yeah, no, absolutely. Like, you know, sometimes you have to abstract yourself from being so in the weeds of your own thing. You know, become a user, why not? That sounds, Hmm. Well, it's definitely got sweetness in

there.

[00:03:24] Robbie: Yeah, it smells like, uh, I don't know which flavor yet, but starburst, one starburst flavor of some kind.

[00:03:32] Chuck: Uh, I was gonna say cherry. Not Starburst,

though.

[00:03:35] Robbie: Why

[00:03:36] Chuck: I was gonna say, like... Well, so you know... Okay, I'm gonna get weird with this. Uh, you know the cherries that are in, like, chocolate covered cherries? But not, like, nice ones, but like the ones you get at, like, Walgreens or something? It smells like those to me.

[00:03:50] Robbie: What you're

[00:03:50] David: drenched cherries that have just been sitting in the juices for who knows

how

[00:03:54] Chuck: That are shelf stable for like a decade or so? Yeah, absolutely. Those cherries is what it smells like to me. Yeah, a lot of that. Maybe even a slight chocolate, now that I said it, but I'm not sure. All right, I'm gonna taste it. Or I'm gonna, um, prepare my salivatory glands.

[00:04:13] David: You know, one thing I've, I've been trying to understand more as I've, uh, toyed around with this side project is how anybody can possibly pick out the nuance in flavors or if they're just like, you know, what words do I feel like today?

[00:04:25] Chuck: Exactly. I mean, it's, it's such a subjective vocabulary, right? Like, Where are you coming from with that? Oh, that's interesting. Hmm. It's got a little weird bitterness in the finish. I gotta, I gotta give it another.

[00:04:41] Robbie: It turns out, uh, Cherry Starburst is not one of the flavor notes in the app. I might have to open a PR for that.

[00:04:51] Chuck: And that was a smell note. Are you still getting it in the

taste?

[00:04:54] Robbie: not as much in the taste. The taste is more, um, It's a little bit cinnamony, like very, very slight.

[00:05:01] Chuck: Right, like, I was gonna say that, and like, the charred sugar on creme brulee, like you get a little, I think, yeah,

that's

[00:05:09] David: definitely that, that charred,

[00:05:11] Chuck: yeah,

[00:05:11] David: get out of it right away.

[00:05:13] Chuck: yeah, but not like the leathery woody char that you sometimes get, I'm getting more of like a sweet char, So that's an interesting point. Also, I just kind of thought of, I thought we had come up with the best, uh, whiskey arbitrage business expense kind of thing you could with this whole podcast, tying it to tech. But if you basically booted up an app and you've got to load it with data, so you got to buy a bunch of whiskey.

You might've, you might've trumped us.

I

don't

[00:05:42] David: have a lot of bottles. It's a very expensive hobby. I'm sure, as you all have as well, so.

[00:05:47] Chuck: Yeah, indeed. Alrighty, so, speaking of our hobby, Yeah, if you think we're ready to give it a rating, now our specialized and highly technical rating system, which is a zero to eight tentacles Zero being horrible. You didn't spit it out. So I don't feel like that applies to you for middle of the road Compared to other quasi bourbon bourbons American whiskeys, maybe whatever something of that nature and eight being amazing This is all I ever want again.

Which, I don't even know if anything actually hits that pinnacle where I wouldn't drink something else. But, you know, alas, there it is.

[00:06:25] Robbie: yeah, this is not my favorite. It's definitely because it's younger. I think that's like detrimental to their flavor, but I think what they're doing is cool and I've had worse things for sure.

So I think I'm going to give it a four out of eight.

[00:06:44] Chuck: Okay, that's fair. do you have feelings or thoughts or input you think you could do a rating, David?

[00:06:50] David: I think ratings are tough. I was struggling with this. It's like, would I ever rate any whiskey on like the lower half? Like, any that I would ever drink? Probably not. You know, they're all like, average is like the baseline. And I feel like, there's like, do you rate it on just like, taste, or interestingness.

And I feel like there's a little bit of interestingness, so it's maybe slightly above average, so I'll give it like a 5. Just because, I don't think I would reach for it. But, you know, sometimes you just want something that's not your standard, just like, kind of, caramel y, smooth bourbon y thing. Whether you call this bourbon or not, you know.

[00:07:23] Chuck: Indeed. Yeah, I do try to consider some other, uh, factors along with it. A lot of times I'll just like, uh, apply price as one of those factors sometimes because, you know, you can go out and grab a Buffalo trace for 25 bucks and have like a solid sipper, a good thing for cocktails, everything else. It's kind of hard to beat that in a bunch of different ways.

And you have all these like micro distilleries trying to charge you between 60 and 80 on up beyond that. for things that just, they don't have any kind of reputation and you're taking a risk. and this, this I feel like is, is in that range of they're trying to do something very interesting. I mean, I don't think the price was over the top by any, I think like 60 bucks or so.

so I appreciate like. Yeah, the look and the story behind it and trying to do something else. I would be interested in future expressions that were aged a bit longer, four to six years would probably be, do something else more interesting for me, but, um, And so given some of that, I kind of agree with you, too.

Like, I don't know, maybe I'll say four and a half, really. I don't think it's bad. I don't think it's great. It might do some interesting things to cocktails, but kind of see, sitting on its own, I'm like, Okay, well, we tried that. I'd have been, like, happy enough to get it at, like, a nice whiskey bar, try a different thing, and move on.

[00:08:40] Robbie: yeah, I probably would not reach for it again, but alas, we've tried a lot, so gotta keep trying all of

[00:08:48] Chuck: Yeah, exactly. You can't just keep coming back to the old favorites. And when we do episodes that are just us, we will bring in some lower price options, just to kind of, like, push that, like, oh yeah, I don't want to give a guest a white label Jim Beam, but it doesn't mean I wouldn't have it and talk about it on the show, you know?

[00:09:05] David: Okay, so on that note, uh, you know, I'm not young anymore. I remember having, um, Jack Daniels, like the basic one a long time ago, and I just, I have this disgust in my mouth when I think about it. But I was at this whiskey thing, uh, whiskey, whiskey advocates, whiskey fest, uh, last week, and I tried whatever is not their basic cheap thing that I had when I was a kid.

It was like their age 12 year or something.

Wasn't terrible. I probably wouldn't go buy it and drink it, but it actually wasn't bad at all.

[00:09:33] Chuck: Yeah. Yeah. And there's a, uh, a higher version. Gentleman, or is it? There's a higher version that some people say. We did a Gentleman Jack once. But there's another one that was kind of like, um, Frank Sinatra version or something that had an age statement around it that some folks said are pretty decent, so.

I don't know. I know they're trying to expand out a little bit. I mean, I know things like Maker's Mark. I mean, that's, again, another very staple, common to get. Go to your, you know, drug store, pick that up if you want. And, uh, yeah, it's good, you know, for what it is.

[00:10:06] Robbie: cool. Um, so yeah, let's move into a little bit of the... Tech related things here. so I was curious, I think you had posted some about this. I did not read through every one of your tweets that you were talking about, like talking about the history of Sentry and you know, how things started and different things there.

So I'm kind of curious about that. And like, you know, not just from the starting of the company, but like what frameworks were used and like what lessons were learned along the way and that kind of stuff.

[00:10:35] Chuck: I think he wants to know whether Peated is a Django app or not. Is what he's, is what he's

[00:10:40] David: It's all types, all types script these days, you know. Gotta always be going where the puck is going. That's how I think about it. Um, I mean the century's really old, right?

We started as a Django project. I'm still a huge Django fan, uh, frankly, and love Python. Challenges I have complicated UI needs these days and running multiple stacks is, nobody wants to do that if you can avoid it.

and so I think if it was easier I would still be using Python on the back end in a lot of cases, but it's just, I just want to spin up one server half the time. but yeah, so we, we started as Python Django. It's still, I mean the core service is still a massive Django application. It even runs like modern Django versions.

I don't know why. That's not my choice for what it's worth. Like, we don't use any of the features, so it doesn't really matter to us. Like, mostly just the ORM. but yeah, it's still a great framework. I love it. You know, beyond that, I think there's so many lessons we've learned over the years. I started doing this blog series, um, as of yesterday, or the day before.

where I'm just like, you know, it'd be kind of fun just to write about more of the history, but with like, like, authenticity. no ego, no like, pretending everything's just sunshine and rainbows. It's like, try to be truthful about some of the things that are challenges and go wrong and stuff. and as I was doing this first post, I'm like, there is so much.

That I could, like, write about. And I had to, like, avoid random segues all over the place because they would require, like, four more paragraphs just to explain, like, one minor thing. And so I think there's a lot of things that are interesting over the years that we've learned and we've done.

technology, business, open source.

and so, you know, I'm happy to talk about any of them. You know, I've, I've kind of had my hands in everything that Century's done, so.

[00:12:10] Robbie: yeah, I get that does bring up an interesting point. I, uh, was sponsored by Sentry randomly on GitHub. Do you, did you guys just sponsor people that were using Sentry and open source stuff or like what happened

[00:12:23] David: so...

It's complicated, uh, there's a lot of stuff we do, and more recently we've tried, we've done this program, the idea is like, hypothetically, give a percentage of revenue towards open source every year. We haven't really locked in what that percentage is, and it, and I don't know if we'll be public about it when we do for what it's worth, but that's the idea.

And give, what we mean is like, there's a variety of ways you can give, but like, direct financial contributions with a goal being a large share of those just going to either projects that people like, or want to support, like our employees vote on things. Or, direct dependencies that Sentry has somewhere in the code base, right?

And so I actually couldn't even tell you what the sponsorship would be from because there's so many variants of it these days. But I'm like, I don't know, it's a cool thing we can do. It honestly costs like nothing. we, we gave like half a million this year and I'm pretty sure we spend like half a million dollars in Google Ads each month.

And so, and somebody's gonna be like, Oh, you could give more money then. And I'm like, it's still a lot of money, don't get me wrong.

[00:13:16] Chuck: Right, exactly.

[00:13:17] David: but in the grand scheme of things, like expenses, it's a significant amount, but it's, it's doable, I would say, so.

[00:13:23] Chuck: I've noticed that you've kind of cast the challenge to others as well, like, you know, we're all benefiting from this. It's not hard to give something back about it, and still do really well.

[00:13:36] David: Chad Whitaker, who's running the program, Um, and he's always been personally, like, really invested in these concepts and these ideas. And I like the first thing he did, he's like, Can I just call out Microsoft and GitHub for not really, you know, giving back using their own programs? I'm like, yeah, go for it.

Like, as long as it's truthful, go for it, you know?

[00:13:54] Chuck: Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, uh, I think that's a good point to be made. I mean, some of the biggest ones who, like, how long has Microsoft benefited from open source before they ever started, like, getting into it and doing some of their own? I mean, a pretty long time, really, which is fairly amazing on that point.

[00:14:13] David: I do feel they give back for what it's worth. I just feel like people are afraid to give back to individual contributors because I don't know, taxes are complicated or some excuse. Like they're not actually that complicated for what it's worth. It's just like, there's always excuses, you know?

And so I appreciate what they've done, but they could do more.

[00:14:30] Chuck: Yeah, no, I don't, I don't think you're wrong there. So I think that's, that's a very good point. I think we can go down that rabbit hole for a little bit. You seem like a man with opinions. And we tend to, uh, like to ask some of these hot takes. The things that people argue about in the Twitterverse. And so I think it would be fun for us to make sure we do that a little bit in this conversation.

[00:14:50] Robbie: Yeah. Sorry. I skipped that. I don't know what I'm doing.

[00:14:54] Chuck: Yeah, it's your first day on the job. Uh, David, I'm looking for a co host. If you, uh, if you have some free time. Once a week or so.

[00:15:02] David: I'm busy building a, this whiskey app, you know,

[00:15:05] Chuck: That's true, yeah. And we will get into that a little bit too. Cause I'm, I obviously wanted, uh, to talk about that and you, uh, I think you dropped some tweet around like, Eh, maybe I'm gonna give up on this thing.

I'm like, don't do that yet! Let's get on there. Um, alright. So, in the TypeScript world, do you use inferred types or explicit types?

[00:15:25] David: I'm a person of practicality. I will happily use the any type. If I was allowed. I think there's a case for everything, right? Like, actually, like one of my complaints is I hate types in Python. I would never use them in, in Python. I just don't see the value and it just complicates my life.

But in TypeScript, I think TypeScript itself, actually, if you ignore types, it's a great iteration on JavaScript first off. So I actually like the language. I think from a types point of view, I prefer simplicity in pretty much everything. And so I will happily use inferred types when I can. But I do think there are a lot of cases where you should be explicit about types, and so... I think of it like API contracts. If the contract is so important that you should never break it, okay, like, focus on the types. Like, an example of this space is like, should you have a return type or not? Should it be inferred return type or not inferred? And I think most of the time it probably should just be inferred.

Because, like, why are we writing all this boilerplate code that the system can already figure it out for us? But then I think sometimes, you know, you want, you want that explicit nature. You want to make sure it always adheres to this contract. I think that's fine too.

[00:16:23] Chuck: Yeah, that's fair.

[00:16:25] Robbie: Yeah. I think you, you definitely need explicit type sometimes because sometimes it just won't be the exact type you want. You just be like, no, it returns this and you're good. see. So tailwind or vanilla CSS.

[00:16:39] David: Ooh. I showed up in like a YouTube video one time because I said something not even bad about like Tailwind and I'm like, why are you picking on me? Like, I don't even use it.

here's my thesis. CSS is not that hard for stuff.

Tailwind doesn't make CSS easier. There's a couple cases where it does but we already solved that a long time ago with Bootstrap.

I actually think the reason people like Tailwind is because CSS and JS is such a pain to use, and Tailwind removes that because they built this nice compiler layer to abstract it and all the frameworks have supported it. I don't think this class name shenanigan is actually a better way to write CSS.

I don't know that I have a strong opinion, but I would at least argue I don't think it's better. It's just kind of the same thing. You just move the code from here to here, and I just have to learn a bunch of new properties that I had already mastered before, you know?

And I think there's a lot of reluctance to change, and so that's part of it, not just from me, but, from other people in the industry.

That said, I've adopted Tailwind. I've been sort of pushing, sort of forcefully, kind of, uh, Tailwind at Sentry a little bit here and there. Like, it, like, there's an open question on our new, we're redesigning the website. And there's an open question on if we should use Vanilla CSS or Tailwind. especially if we use Astro, which supports, frankly, what looks like HTML just fine.

I was talking to my co-founder who's a designer, and I'm like, I think you should just use Tailwind because everybody is using it. It doesn't matter if it's better or worse.

[00:17:58] Chuck: Yeah. And at the end of the day, what, the point that you made around people don't want CSS in their JavaScript In their JSX, whatever, in these already comp Separation of Concerns, you remember those days? Like, I loved that. And so, once, yeah, once CSS got in there, I was like, I was very resistant to it. And so, whatever takes that out, I can live with.

[00:18:24] David: there's so much complexity to even make CSS and JS work in some of these modern frameworks like Remix and Next. whether you could argue if that's fixable or not, it's not been fixed.

And at the very least Tailwind works. And so you can struggle with all these edge cases of it not working correctly, whether you want it to or not. Or you can just be like, this doesn't matter. Like, just move on to the thing that works.

[00:18:44] Robbie: I think,

the biggest benefit that people forget about is like having all these CSS files where you don't know what's used or not If you're using tailwind, everything's in the HTML. So when you delete the HTML you're not using anymore, it's gone. You don't have to be like, Oh, are these classes used anywhere in the app?

And I don't know. And yeah, so I think that's like one of the big benefits for me.

[00:19:04] Chuck: Alright, so here's a question that really matters, though. Get rebase or get merge?

[00:19:10] David: That's painful. There's a practicality, and then there's a philosophy, you know?

I mean, I worked at Dropbox, and I used a tool that Facebook designed, and they're all big believers in, a patch is a patch, which I agree with philosophically. The reality is, who cares, who cares about git blame, it doesn't matter, it's not hard to navigate history. I would say the maturity I've gotten as a developer over the years is to stop caring about silly things. Like,

code formatting is a version of this, right? Like, I just don't care where the brackets are anymore. Unless, I have to manually, do something about it, right? Like, if there's prettier or black or rough, great, I will never care again.

Rebase is just hard. It requires so much effort. And it requires people to follow a philosophy, and it requires people to buy into force push, and all these other things. And even though it's cleaner and more correct, it's just like, is it even worth the pain?

And so, I would say I'm a rebase fan, personally.

But, literally I'll just randomly decide on rebase versus merge sometime in GitHub.

[00:20:08] Chuck: Like a true CTO. It's funny and somewhat ironic because it was basically a group of Django developers when I was at National Geographic that browbeat me into being a rebase, fan and user from then on, so.

[00:20:23] Robbie: Yeah. I just hate merge commits. I don't care otherwise, but I don't like the extra commit.

[00:20:28] Chuck: So it just

depends.

[00:20:29] Robbie: Yeah.

[00:20:30] David: Yeah, I would agree with that for what it's worth. I find it frustrating. And frankly, there's so many things where you just want the delta of the commit log. And as soon as you introduce merges, it kind of ruins any of those. It's like, like in Sentry, like the idea is you release a new version of the app and we can easily show you what commits are involved.

But as soon as merge commits get involved, it's like, well those commits might actually be older than the commits that were just released. And you end up in just, frankly, situations that are too hard to explain to normal people.

[00:20:56] Chuck: Yeah.

[00:20:56] David: and we shouldn't have to think about it either. It doesn't matter, like,

[00:20:59] Chuck: that's, maybe that's the next big DX tool written in Rust, which is a new Git.

[00:21:05] Robbie: Oh, that's a big undertaking.

[00:21:07] Chuck: yeah, uh, and then you get to write a new social site around it and everything else, get acquired by Microsoft. Voila. See? I just

figured

it

[00:21:16] Robbie: Business plan right there.

[00:21:18] Chuck: Yeah, exactly. Uh, I'm an ideas guy, I don't know what to tell you.

[00:21:23] Robbie: Speaking of ideas, was GraphQL a mistake?

[00:21:26] David: I don't think, I think I can actually just be honest about these things because nobody cares anymore. And I think everybody agrees GraphQL was a mistake. It's probably great for Facebook. I think for everybody else it's a mistake. Like, nobody, like the only point of, well there's two things. Facebook doesn't even use GraphQL like the rest of the internet.

They use it in a much more controlled way, which is Makes sense. Um, and so that's one. And they actually have the ability to run the concurrent queries and all this other stuff. And it just works for them. But it's like such a hyper specific problem. It's like why, I don't understand why people latch on to some of these things in all honesty.

It's like, we always come up with these new ways of doing things. And I don't think they're, intended to solve problems we have. They just seem interesting and new. And then we adopt them, and then everything's broken. Like all of our technology, our tool chains. Uh, just stop working. And we spend all this time on toolchain.

And then we decide the technology was a bad choice.

And, what did we do? You know?

[00:22:16] Chuck: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

[00:22:18] Robbie: understand why we don't just like pick a framework, like say, you know, react, whatever. And then. Keep the syntax the same forever and just transpile it behind the scenes to do whatever new hot thing you want. And we can keep writing the same code. Why don't we do that?

[00:22:35] Chuck: Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Somebody's bitter about the loss of class

components.

[00:22:38] Robbie: yeah, I

[00:22:41] Chuck: Uh. Yeah, yeah. I think the folks at Apollo have a different feeling around GraphQL, but, you know, there may be some other incentives

[00:22:49] Robbie: yeah,

[00:22:51] Chuck: I think the point that you made about, you know, jumping onto new technologies and regretting some of those decisions down the line.

I love the discourse going on around like, you know, everything old is new again and rails starting to, you know, gain in popularity and folks saying, let's look at some of our base tools. Servers are good now, and compute power is cheap, and so on and so forth. And so like, HTMX is another thing that folks are talking about.

So like, at the end of the day, really, well, maybe one of the best programming languages for the web is actually just HTML. What do you think? Is that a programming language?

[00:23:28] David: I don't know. You gotta learn it. It's all in the same bucket. Is CSS a programming language?

[00:23:33] Chuck: That's the

[00:23:33] David: I don't know.

[00:23:34] Robbie: It can do more math than HTML can

[00:23:37] David: It's true.

I, I, honestly, I don't remember the last time I wrote, like, just generic HTML. And actually, when I adopted Astro, I didn't even realize I was writing HTML. I'm like, why did you, I'm like, why did you decide to make me stop using class name and use class again instead?

I thought it was still React under the hood. Um, and I realized it wasn't. But, uh,

[00:23:56] Chuck: ha!

[00:23:57] David: I don't know. I think HTML is a good set of standards. I don't, don't, I wouldn't say it's a programming language, but it's, it's, I don't know. I don't know what, technology? I don't know. Something.

[00:24:06] Chuck: I don't know, I just think it tells computers what to do, like how to format wording and data and whatever else, and so, are instructions enough? You know, maybe. I mean, it's very basic, but, I don't know, food for thought. I have no incentive to choose one or the other, other than, I too am getting older, perhaps me older than you even, it's hard to say.

At least looking at me, I think I'm older than you. you know, now I'm feeling very like, get off my lawn and back in the day we used to, you know, on GeoCities, yeah. So, I don't know, maybe it is.

[00:24:43] Robbie: I mean I think the question can be applied to anything That like creates a style document is that programming like if anyone has ever used LaTeX, which Probably they haven't It was just for like coding PDFs, right? Is that coding because I'm just making it's just like HTML, but I think they call that a programming language So like where's the line?

I don't know

[00:25:06] Chuck: yeah, I didn't even think about

that

one.

[00:25:09] David: Well, I mean, it's like, is, is Git a programming language? I would say probably not, but it's like, a little different of course, it's more workflow, toolchain, but like, you're not launching a web application without writing HTML at the very least.

And so, can you do things independent with it? Sure. Can you, uh, I don't know, have anything dynamic with it? Not really. Not realistically at least, you know. So I don't know so much that it's a programming language, but I think it's a necessary technology that everybody has to know if they're going to do programming.

At least in the web era, which is basically everything these days.

[00:25:38] Chuck: Yeah, yeah, that's an interesting question. Git, I think Git are essentially instructions to a system built with a systems language, right? so yeah, it's just an interface. I guess Git, you just basically have an interface of commands. That's what, you know, some people use the graphical ones. Some people use the CLI, but, and it is CLI, not CLI.

Anybody who tries that, they're wrong. I'm just going to tell you.

[00:26:03] AD SPOT

[00:26:03] Chuck: all right. So, yo, you actually wrote another article around work life balance, which I think is an interesting point here. And it's, you know, I've had aspects of my career in management, obviously, plenty of time as an IC and back and forth.

We've had the agency all and everything in between. And of course, I'm sure you've also noticed how the Demand and accelerant of what has been like a, a software career over the last five to ten years versus the previous ten years. there was definitely a long time where I had to slug away at it, work long hours, put things into myself to like, earn, respect and, and earn the ability to do more across the web before pushing for things like, I remember when I realized that folks could essentially become a senior engineer in like three years three to five years, you become a senior engineer because demand is so high and you'll essentially just job hop to get the titles and get the bumps because you're not going to slog away for two, three years to get your next level.

You go from junior to mid, no way. You just go from junior to mid and then you jump to another company, you become a senior right after that. So, and I, that really, so the article that you wrote about that, about how, yes, work life balance, like, we want to respect that, but also if you care enough to become an expert of your craft, I mean, sometimes it does take a shift in that, and that's just a matter of priorities and importance.

[00:27:33] David: I just think we've gotten too wrapped up in this, whatever this cultural movement thing is a recently, particularly in tech. And if you look back, first off, nothing great in history has ever been done without without a lot of effort, right? I'm not saying what what we're all doing is great, but it has impact, right?

The idea is like, we're supposed, we're technology, we're supposed to be innovating, improving productivity in the world. You know, it's like, we're not just repeating the same thing we did. I don't even know what a counter example that is. But the idea is if we're moving forward, we're trying to create progress.

And progress isn't free, and it's also not much of a sacrifice a lot of times. But I do think there was this movement in tech, in particular, where salaries got really high really fast. early stage people were just getting jobs because there was such a demand for employment. I mean there's always been this entitlement culture to be fair.

But I think it's made it really bad. And you look at basically any other industry and that doesn't exist whatsoever. Like doctors who also are like super important to like the progress of everybody. They were crazy hours, like, especially the ones that succeed. Right. But we came with a way with this idea of like, everybody should have the same level of success for minimal effort.

And it, my, my kind of point to people is like, especially now that I'm willing to speak my mind about it, it's okay To not do that. To not put in the hours and be okay with those outcomes. But you should also not to expect to succeed at the same level as somebody who's putting a lot more effort.

And is caring a lot more about the outcomes. Who is also probably making some sacrifices along the way if you're, if you're honest with yourself, right? And I think just having that on, honest conversation. Cause everybody just wants to be one side of every conversation. Everybody just wants to like argue, Same thing with like the work from home stuff, remote versus not. Everything is two sided at the very least. Usually many more sides. And it's okay to give a shit, you know? That's, that's how I think about it. Yeah. I was always somebody who sacrificed, I didn't think of it that way, but sacrificed my personal life to like, work more.

And it's just because I liked it. Like, I liked what I was doing. I liked building things. and I succeeded more than, than a lot of my peers actually. In fact, probably more than any peer I've ever had. And it doesn't mean some of them weren't successful. But definitely none of them that didn't really, show up regularly or put in the hours, especially extracurricular stuff, none of them really got that far in their careers.

And again, that's okay. But you shouldn't expect to be treated sort of equally even if you're not equal so or treated fairly even though that would be unfair To treat you the same, you know

[00:29:44] Chuck: yeah, I would say then exactly your point there is that conversely, there's also nothing wrong with meeting expectations and doing a good job. And going home and never thinking about it again until, you know, whatever, 8, 9 o'clock the next morning. There's nothing wrong with that, as long as you're meeting expectations.

But you can't expect to be like, Well, why am I not getting raises? Why am I not getting promotions? Why am I not getting recognized? Well, because you're just doing good enough. There's nothing wrong with that. And I, you know, I would, I would say that in a workforce. There's also, like, nothing wrong with, like, being good at your job and that's the end of it.

[00:30:19] David: Yeah, exactly like one one kind of quip that I recall was um,

I was explaining to people about seniority, right we've had a lot of new hiring managers as centuries grow to things like that And I'm like look just because they've had a job for 10 years That's not the same as somebody progressing over 10 years.

They might have done the same exact job for 10 years. That doesn't make them more senior than somebody else. It just means they have a lot of experience of that sort of level of work, right? And again, that's fine. And frankly, we all get paid well in the industry. So it's even good, you know, for people. but it's like we're doing ourselves a disservice by suggesting the people that Are just like way stronger or put in way more time and thus have become better or more capable Suggesting that they're on the same footing as the people who don't want that and I think the idea is like most people just won't have the honest conversation like it's okay to be both like or have both

like that's just how the world works and You probably want both I guess at the end of the day, you

know

[00:31:16] Robbie: Yeah,

[00:31:17] Chuck: absolutely. I mean, you can't have, for example, you're just like standard, you know, your, your feature team of four where all four are trying to, you know, Become the next team leader, staff engineer or whatever else, because you also have a limited amount of spaces and you're looking for standouts for some of those positions.

And that's the whole point of that. Anyway, I would say probably we're in the midst of the beginnings of a great equalization to a degree, at least within our industry, right? Like big tech has said, We're going to protect ourselves during this recession, potential recession, whatever, you know, however economically you think it is.

And we're going to do a financial reset across that because now demand has changed and there's a flux of talent out in the marketplace. And we'll, we'll shift that then we'll shift the cost

[00:32:08] David: Yeah, I definitely agree we're seeing it and we even think about this a lot of century like

Over COVID, like, the name of the game for all companies was retention. It was such a confusing and complicated environment, and we had this weird, unexpected economic growth in it, And people just didn't know how to react, and I think everybody, including Century, we all over corrected on one side, right?

And we over corrected towards, and I, I don't ignore corporations versus people, I just think in the abstract. We all over corrected where employees had all the power. , and again, it doesn't matter how you feel about that, it's just economics. And now it's coming back a little bit where actually employers have a significant amount of power again.

And there's a happy middle ground you want for everybody because at the end of the day, especially in tech, companies where we're based on, , distribution of equity a lot of times, you actually want the corporation to do really well because for you it should also help out and you do really well. And so I think when it's overcorrected on the individual, what you have is, there's a lot of self, like me, me, me, me, me culture, like selfishness in it.

And we talk about there's a lot of work. Versus like, no, as a team we succeed, right? Like the goal is as a team we succeed. The better we do as a group, the more our equity grows in value. Also, the more money we make, thus we probably cascade that into more salary. You know, things like that. And I think it's easy to just get wrapped up in your own personal lives.

And to be fair, not all corporations are like most tech companies. So it's like, it's not a universal truth, that's how it should be.

But I do think there was that correction and it is coming back and we'll see what happens, you know, it's really, it's obviously hard to predict. We saw that through COVID, so.

[00:33:34] Chuck: Yeah, for sure. Alright, well, we've been talking about your side hustle a whole bunch, and I think we should really get to the, you know, the purpose of this episode, and, you know, your main passion, which is the PETED app, um, you know, which is a TypeScript application for ratings and reviews, uh, a cataloging, too, of whiskeys, future iterations where there's maybe more social interaction there.

You can friend peoples in order to, uh, to filter the activity. Uh, Robbie and I have, uh, both become users. So, yeah, I'm just wondering there, like, you were saying a little bit about utilizing it as a platform to eat your own dog food to a degree, but, like, is there a life beyond that?

[00:34:18] David: I was talking to somebody actually earlier today. Their, their question was like, they have a sabbatical coming up or something. They want to learn more to code and they're like, oh, can I contribute? And I'm like, it's really painful these days. Like, technology is complicated.

And so for me, I, I like building things, and to some degree I've over engineered this to allow me to explore more technology. , like I have ChatGPT filling in parts of the database for me,

which is questionable, , but kind of works in all honesty. And that's just like, I'm like, cool, I get to mess around with something I have literally no use to mess around with otherwise.

And I think at the same time I was giving this person feedback, I'm like, one of the best things you can do, if you actually want to get better at something, is have a side project, because it kind of gives you a goal, like a purpose more so. , and for me, I'm like, well, I want to build something.

I can't really do it at work. Like, usually what happens is I, I build, like, random internal tools. And then, it's complicated at that point, I would say. Like, who maintains them? and they're usually not that complex. Uh, and so this is at least something that allows me to do more of that, and it's been kind of fun.

And to be honest, it's something that I've been wanting to do for, it must be a decade. Like, I, I have wrote so many iterations of this app. Usually, it was just a mobile app. And I was just mad every single time, in all honesty. And so I'm like, I'm just gonna build a web app, I don't care. I finally got it to a point where I actually got past sort of the uh, the starting line, I guess.

and so it's at least, it's a little bit self fulfilling now that I'll probably keep working on it, as long as I can keep the cost low of hosting it.

[00:35:38] Chuck: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:35:39] David: And so, we'll see what it becomes, but...

[00:35:42] Chuck: I'll try not to spam it too much then. But, uh, you know, I was going to tie it into the podcast site and get our reviews real time and then cash them through builds or something. You know, anyway.

[00:35:52] Robbie: Yeah. If you can make the ratings out of eight, we can, uh, do that.

[00:35:56] David: I have, I've been thinking about this because one of my goals, you know, you have wine apps, you have beer apps, uh, and I'm like, it would be just nice to know what I tried and if there was something I wanted to remember. And that's kind of what it was the whole time. And I'm on, and I was also inspired by literally untapped.

I really liked untapped,

, for beer. And so I'm like, how do I kind of do that? And then I'm like, well, what else could I do? That's interesting. And one of the challenges I've had is. There are degrees of users, right? There's like, I'm just going to try whiskey and be like, yeah, I liked it or didn't like it, right?

It's like a yes, no. And then there's like, somehow I have a way to magically rate this on a 100 point scale. and I'm not sure what the science is behind that, but, but it's two extreme flavors. And I've been, one of the challenges of building something like this is like, well, who do you cater to? And one of the challenges I have as an engineer is I'm like, well, I could cater to everybody.

Because it's just technology and it's just software, you know? And so,

we'll see what that turns into, but that's kind of where my head's at at this point. It's just making it more versatile for people to use in different situations.

[00:36:55] Chuck: I mean, the pricing, uh, model is interesting there. I think that, I mean, it's helpful if I like find a bottle and I want to try and get it. And obviously I know it's like on the, on the fly now, but you know, if you Google something, you usually end up with like half a dozen drizzly links that amount to jack shit because if you actually try to click through and buy it and then they cancel your order because it was just click bait to begin with, right?

Unless you bought other things. And so, you know, it's all like fairly useless in that sense. So I think there's probably two elements. I think the pricing element is unique and desirable by folks in the whiskey community. And then if you really want something, you know, there's things like Blue Bottle Book or whatever, like secondary market pricing.

And even just from like an observational standpoint would be also very interesting.

[00:37:42] David: there's this um, in San Francisco, you ever come out to SF, we should go. Uh, there's a place called Gozu that I like. It's just a whiskey and wagyu place, uh, so Japanese themed. Also means it's just expensive.

But ignoring, ignoring that part. Uh, they have a great, like, whiskey sommelier.

And, it's always really fun when we go. We learn about a bunch of new whiskeys and stuff. We also learn how expensive they are. We also learn that they're really hard to get because of the way whiskey distribution

happens.

[00:38:07] Chuck: especially west of the Mississippi. West coast sucks for it,

[00:38:11] David: Yeah. So one thing, you know, I've got this pricing scraper. And part of that was, I'm like, well, nobody even does this for, like, US companies.

Like everyone you find of this is usually like more catered around like, like the UK or something. But I'm like, well I actually have this pricing data and one thing I could do, is I could tell you when say like a new release from Yamazaki or something comes up. Because I would just have never seen it before.

Actually it's kind of like century in that regard. I've like, I've seen the error, I've not seen it, thus it's new. And I'm actually, I have a, a database of every day's worth of pricing data I've scraped from these sources at this point. and the challenge is matching the bottle names up because they're all, they're not symmetrical in terms of their naming approach.

But I'm like, okay, that actually is like a real valid use case I have because what I want to know is like, there's this very expensive, it's like the Pappy Van Winkle of Japan.

Uh, it's, it's called Chichibu.

if you can get a bottle right when it releases in the U. S., it's probably, if I had to guess, I've not been able to do it yet, but if I had to guess, it's probably still 500,

Right.

If you don't get it right when it releases, it's a thousand dollars.

[00:39:10] Chuck: Right.

[00:39:11] David: And, I'm not really in the arbitrage game, however, that also seems like an interesting thing you could do if you could just know about new releases. but also just even like the discovery aspect. I, I, I just love the idea if I can get a lot of data, it's very easy to run things like recommendation algorithms

and what not.

And, and, And, nobody in these industries really is like technology based, you

know? It's a lot of blogs and like review sites and things like

[00:39:36] Chuck: Yeah, it's human driven, right? And it's very subjective to a degree, so.

[00:39:41] David: Yeah, and this is like, I already have like, I don't know, 4, 000 bottles catalogued, 4, 000, uh, distilleries. I mean, I scraped them from some other websites and I normalized all the data.

But it's like an automated process. I didn't have to really go in by hand. And then all the, like I, I backfilled tasty notes. Unclear if they're correct. I will say based on, uh, today it's... It's questionable. and then descriptions and stuff and all that's just chat GPT shenanigans, so. So we'll see what it turns into, but it's, I don't know, it's fun so far.

[00:40:06] Chuck: There's some whiskey people that I have discourse with on Twitter. I'm trying to blend my worlds of technology and whiskey and all that kind of thing. I'd like to say that I'm average all of the above, but, uh... At least I can talk about it and go from there. yeah, I think that is a very enticing, feature that, you know, does more than just cataloging.

Because I think a lot of these do like a cataloging aspect. So, I don't know. I hope you keep going with it. I wouldn't mind being involved and contributing. I mean, and starting, you know, to use it more, too, for my own uses. So, I hope it lives on at least for a while.

[00:40:40] David: Oh yeah, I, I think it'll keep going. I, I, I'm just gotta keep the cost low so I don't get annoyed about paying a server bill. But uh,

but yeah, and it, it is, it is open source, it's on GitHub. I'm pretty sure I put a license file up there, but,

[00:40:51] Chuck: Well, you said you were doing some renovations at home. Could you just put a server room in there and just go the DHH route and like go on prem? Like,

[00:40:59] David: I could, I did, I just, uh, got rid of my server rack. Like full size server rack. So, um, So it's a little complicated now because I'm trying to downsize a little bit with home networking, but It's actually not too bad. I'm just using like GCP and it's like Kubernetes and it's just, the baseline is just annoying in terms of price, so

[00:41:16] Chuck: yeah, there's ease there but it's like not usually for the casual to early user, yeah.

[00:41:24] David: We'll see.

Maybe

[00:41:24] Chuck: Vercel's good for that.

[00:41:26] David: Depends. Well, okay, so here's the challenge. Like if it was just say a Remix app, Vercel is probably fine. But it's a Remix app plus a Fastify, which is like Express. It's

a

web framework backend service. And it's that because I know I want to build a mobile app at some point,

thus I need an API service that's dedicated.

Anyways, like I said, over engineered,

[00:41:45] Chuck: That's what we do, though. You know, we want to play with the fun stuff, or the cool stuff, and that's why we started thinking about, like, Alright, here's the technology, what's the feature that leverages that? You know, that's kind of like our oppositional way of coming at these things versus the inverse with a lot of other people.

Well, I do want to make sure we do a little what not ing cause

I

know I,

[00:42:07] Robbie: speaking of fun stuff,

I want to hear more about this. I don't even know what you call it. I just saw in passing your, uh, thing that is like a self propelled surfboard thing. Like, what is this thing called, I guess, so I can refer to it as a thing. But then also, like, tell me about how it works, and I just don't know anything about it.

[00:42:27] David: I'm in Lake Tahoe right now, which if you didn't know is a giant lake in Northern California. I'm actually not that close to Lake Tahoe, but I'm near the smaller lake. And I'm like, oh, water activities, you know, we can, we can, uh, be out on the lake in the summer. And so for us, that was like, okay, we have a paddleboard and we have a kayak, you know,, there's this famous YouTube video of Mark Zuckerberg holding a flag and he's on, I forget if he's on one of these, cause there's, what is called a hydro foil.

It's basically a. It's kind of like a surfboard with a very long mast under it and a wing, like an airplane wing kind of thing. And the idea is it comes up out of the water and it's very smooth. And so they have ones that are not self propelled. , so you could do it like holding on to the back of a boat.

And then they have e foils, which is the one I got. And it's got a little motor. Um, and like a, it's like a Wii remote, like a Wii controller. Uh, that you hold in your hand to propel it or not and to increase basically like a cruise control speed. , and it gets up to like 30 miles an hour or something.

It's, it's pretty quick. Anyway, so I saw Zuckerberg on one of these. I'm like, this is hilarious. We should get one of these. And I'm gonna hold a flag, and I'm gonna do a parody. And then, uh, I realize he's actually pretty good at it, and that's hard to do. but, it's, honestly, it's like super fun.

It's like, I've only gotten to use mine maybe less than a dozen times this summer. But it is so much fun. It's kind of like surfing in that you gotta learn to balance, like your weight on the board, because what happens, you know like an airplane, uh, the rudders or whatever, it gets angled down so the plane goes up in the air.

I think that's roughly how it works. this kind of has that, but instead of anything angling, your weight shifts. And so you play this game where you kind of move your weight back and the board will like, the nose of the board comes up. And if you're bad at it, it actually acts like an airplane and it goes shooting out from under you.

And so the game is like, can you balance the weight and then get it high in the air, because once you're in the air, they call it flying. Because it literally feels like there's nothing under you. It's just like smooth sailing. There's no current. There's no wake.

So I can just ride over the boat's wake and not feel anything.

And it's like, yeah, it's, it's really fun. And the learning curve's actually not that steep. you know, here's a pro tip. Uh, I just registered for React Miami today.

And you can rent them, uh, you can rent them in Miami and get lessons.

And so,

[00:44:32] Chuck: to do this?

[00:44:33] Robbie: Yeah

[00:44:34] David: be, I might do it. You know, it, it

sounds

[00:44:36] Chuck: We'll talk

about

it.

[00:44:37] Robbie: Yeah, I have a reason

[00:44:38] Chuck: Yeah.

[00:44:38] Robbie: react Miami now

[00:44:41] Chuck: I'm trying to take Primogen's spot and be like the official interviewer of React Miami because he did that thing in Vercell with Theo and, yeah. We'll see. I don't have a strong mustache game so it's going to

[00:44:54] Robbie: Hmm I

[00:44:55] David: You got time.

[00:44:57] Chuck: Oh, I'm going to need a long time. That's in April? Hmm, I should have started last year. Yeah, it takes me a little while. That's not my superpower. So I saw that you're a gamer. Uh, what games do you play?

[00:45:10] David: Okay, I'm like, it's complicated. So, as a kid, teenager, I, I just played games all the time. I actually got my career started from, like, reverse engineering, like, World of Warcraft and stuff, and building

databases out of them. And so, I always, and like, the internet was always fascinating, so MMOs were always fun. I don't really play them anymore, for a variety of reasons. If nothing else, they're a time sneaking, nobody I know plays them,

right? But, I have this just nostalgia from like a teenager where I'm like, I just love video games, you know? It's like a great escape for me. This was an adult, I'm like, I can just buy video games.

And I own far too many games on Steam, with far too few of ours in each of them. And so I, I kind of just, it's like gamer ADD, I don't even know, I try a lot of stuff and nothing really sticks. But, I love, I like, one of the best games of all time is Factorio for me. And I think part of it's because it's like engineering, I'm just refactoring over and over.

Um, but I love Factorio, and I've got like a thousand hours in that thing.

Um, and there's a few other games that are similar mindsets, like, where they're kind of like, build some stuff, or manage some simulation that's going on.

Um, but usually more light hearted, like, I struggle with things like the, the complicated SimCity simulations, and, and like the economy simulations of like, um, I don't remember what the games are called, but where you're like, a trader, and you just trade goods over and over, and you

[00:46:25] Chuck: Yeah. Kind of like Catan, like a, kind of thing.

[00:46:30] David: Kind of, yeah.

[00:46:31] Chuck: Yeah. That's, that's way more, Involved and, and complicated and systematic than I'm like playing Zelda Tears of the Kingdom with my son.

[00:46:41] David: Yeah.

[00:46:41] Chuck: by the way, so, you know.

[00:46:43] Robbie: Yeah, I still have not started it unfortunately but one day

we can talk about it in like a year

[00:46:49] David: yeah, yeah.

I've got one hour into it, and then, I don't know, I had some travel, and I've not played it since. And

that's pretty much how they always go, you

know?

[00:46:57] Chuck: Yeah, yeah, I've had a bunch of like, you were all like, that looks amazing, I'm gonna buy it. I just, I've only got a half hour, I guess I'm gonna pick up this simple, I play FIFA, stuff like that, so I'll be like, oh, play a match of FIFA. I'll get to the other thing later. Which, later is never.

[00:47:14] David: Yeah.

I don't have kids yet, but I think the older you get and the more obligations you get, the more you appreciate, less time commitments. Like, not that you don't want to spend the time, but having something you can pick up and put down without, like, a huge risk to that or something.

[00:47:28] Chuck: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:47:29] Robbie: Yeah, my favorite kind of games are really grindy games, which is unfortunate because you need a lot of time for that. Like I want the thing where I spent 10 hours, like doing a raid to like get some cool gear at the end, but I can't do that anymore. So

[00:47:45] David: yeah,

[00:47:45] Robbie: it's a, it's rough.

[00:47:47] David: You need the reward. It's like, uh, I love progression, you know? This is why Untapped was kind of fun. You would get, uh, you get these little badges. Like, oh, you drank another IPA. You're level 10 of, I don't know, IPA master or whatever they would call it.

[00:47:58] Chuck: I want to feel like my life is a game.

[00:48:00] Robbie: How do you know it's

not?

[00:48:01] Chuck: But low risk. Yeah, I mean

my life

[00:48:04] David: the simulation.

[00:48:05] Robbie: yeah, Are we in control at all? Who knows?

[00:48:08] Chuck: No my wife is. We all know this. Anyway.

[00:48:11] Robbie: Yeah,

that's fair.

[00:48:12] Chuck: of nothing.

[00:48:13] Robbie: so if you weren't in tech, what other career would you choose?

And to clarify, it doesn't have to be based on skills you possess. So like if there's a thing you think is really cool,

you

could just

[00:48:27] Chuck: yeah.

[00:48:28] Robbie: that

skill.

[00:48:29] David: I would still be in tech, but I would change my industry. I would not be in B two B Tech or consumer tech in the, in the way. Like we are kind of in sim uh, Silicon Valley. I would move into the music industry and I've not thought about it from the lens of like, if it was unrelated to my skillset, but my lens is always like, how do I apply my skillset in an, in an industry that is really interesting to me?

And the music industry is where I'm, uh. I've set my sights on. Somehow, someway, I am going to get into the music industry.

[00:48:58] Chuck: Nice.

[00:48:59] David: I just haven't figured out how

[00:49:00] Chuck: sick beats first.

[00:49:02] David: My wife did get me a guitar for my birthday.

Um, I've not gotten very far.

[00:49:09] Chuck: Robbie can give you lessons.

He actually used to be in a band

and

[00:49:13] Robbie: Yeah, but I don't have any formal training though. Like you just look up guitar tabs online and which isn't real music, but it's way easier to read than real music. So

[00:49:23] David: Yeah. This is what my, my buddy, who has had, he's at least gone through like, like college curriculum or something on music. and he's, he'll tell you the same thing. You just look up the guitar tabs and it's

way easier.

[00:49:33] Robbie: Oh yeah.

[00:49:34] Chuck: let's see here. I was gonna say that Robbie had a little thing here about how he saw a picture of the Sentry office in 2016 with a Blink 182 logo. Uh, so it sounds

like you're a punk rock fan.

[00:49:46] Robbie: yeah, I was curious what you think of the new album was the, the full question there.

[00:49:51] David: Uh, I have it sitting over there on the counter. I fucking love it. Uh, it, it just hits like in a way that makes me feel very nostalgic. I think that, I, I mean I went to, uh, when we were young. Uh, a couple weeks in, weekends ago. It was just a music festival in Las Vegas and they were headlining.

And, they, first off, they killed it.

Like, the performance was really, really good. Which is always questionable because, uh, When they've gotten back together before, it's been rough. Um, but I love the new album. I feel like it just like, it reminds you a lot of their music from back in the day. I think Travis Barker is one of the greatest drummers that's ever lived.

which isn't even that controversial. But, like I would

[00:50:23] Chuck: No.

[00:50:25] David: Um, that's a little,

Yeah.

[00:50:29] Chuck: I'm a big Led Zeppelin fan, and I know that they were an assembled, essentially a late 60s boy band, but John Bonham was probably the most incredible drummer I've ever heard.

[00:50:39] David: Yeah. So they, they even at the, at the, like as a flex, they just like blindfolded, uh, Travis Barker at the, the festival. and this is actually an interesting, here's a, here's a poll for y'all. One reason I'm, like, I love Blink 182 is be, it's pure nostalgia for me. I do like their music, I like that style of music.

But it's like, the first songs I ever downloaded, certainly legally, uh, from the internet were, uh, two Blink 182 songs. It was What's My Age Again and All the Small Things.

[00:51:03] Chuck: Yeah.

[00:51:04] David: And, and so that's kind of like where I just always go back to. I'm like, oh yeah, I really like their music and it was like such good memories for me.

And so I'm like, yeah, I still like it today. And so I, it's, like, here, here's the, uh, the push for you guys. What was the first, first album, first song, what was it, you know? It's always

[00:51:18] Chuck: That I,

[00:51:19] David: thing to

learn about people.

That you either downloaded or bought or whatever it was, you know,

[00:51:24] Chuck: well, so I, it's going to be hard to say, but like, I can recall, uh, so I had Tate, well, so when I was growing up, my parents had 8 tracks actually and albums. And there was a lot of classic rock in my home and then I was a skater kid and, but I was also like into rap music.

So I would listen to like the Dead Kennedys and the Fat Boys and. Stuff like that, all at the same time. So those are tapes I can remember getting.

[00:51:52] Robbie: I remember, I bought a G Unit CD from Walmart when I was a kid.

[00:51:57] Chuck: Hmm.

[00:51:58] Robbie: Uh, I don't know what I downloaded first. I think I downloaded stuff before I bought things. Because, like, that was easier than having money as a kid.

[00:52:07] Chuck: Yeah.

that's reflective of the time when you were getting music versus me.

So, I bought cassette tapes at the mall at like, Sam

Goody.

[00:52:15] Robbie: yeah, yeah, I mean the downloads were very slow, to be fair, but, uh,

you know, Kazaa? You guys use that ever?

[00:52:23] Chuck: Kazaa, yeah, Napster. And then there was, um, there was another one that actually had like a slight audio galaxy. It had a recommendation engine attached

to it. So you could like, that one was a great one. I

was

disappointed.

[00:52:36] David: funny story, like, when I was downloading the MP3s, my computer was too slow to decode them. And so I couldn't actually play MP3s on it. And so I had to download, and WAV files are like more of a raw format, and they're significantly larger. But there was some way you could compress WAV files, like, to make them lossy or something.

And so I, those first two downloads were actually these like, small file size WAV files, that didn't require the same level of de, like decoding as, uh, like an MP3 did at the time.

Um, and I'm just like, damn. I'm glad those days are gone.

[00:53:07] Robbie: Yeah,

[00:53:07] Chuck: Yeah, for sure. I mean, that's basically the equivalent of like trying to record your favorite song. When it plays on the radio, you're like trying to time it, and as soon as it starts you hit the record on your ghetto blaster. Oh, that was just me.

[00:53:20] David: I tried, I tried doing that. I tried taking tapes, cassette tapes and recording from the radio and uh, that was painful.

[00:53:26] Chuck: Yeah, it's very painful. And then you get cool, and you get like a double deck, and then you can like take some of those and then record it over to the other to make your own mixtape. So then you could like have five different tapes with your radio records. Yeah, I don't miss those days.

[00:53:43] Robbie: Yeah, Spotify's nice.

[00:53:45] Chuck: Turns

[00:53:45] Robbie: Yeah, I only listen to, uh, Pop Punk pretty much exclusively. My wife gives me a ton of shit about it. Cause she's like, can you like, grow up your music taste a little bit? I'm like, no.

[00:53:54] David: Yeah.

[00:53:55] Chuck: Oh, that's, that's funny. I, I, I just recommended, like, uh, Pennywise, uh, to

someone

recently. Yeah.

[00:54:02] David: in a while.

yeah.

my wife's into a lot of the same emo punk era stuff, and so we'll just like, whenever we see a show, like we see something that, somebody that's playing, it's like, yeah, let's grab tickets. And so like, especially in San Francisco, we've got some great music venues.

I don't know, it's great, like we're going actually to uh, I think it's Fall Out Boy and Jimmy Eat World in, I don't know when, it's probably early next year.

[00:54:21] Chuck: yeah, I love Jimmy at World. They're from Mesa, Arizona. I'm in

Phoenix now.

[00:54:26] Robbie: I think they have one of the

[00:54:27] David: I've never seen them live.

[00:54:28] Robbie: that I've heard. Like, I forget the name of the album, the one that had all the good songs on it. Maybe Bleed

[00:54:33] David: Yeah, Bleed American?

Yeah.

yeah.

[00:54:35] Robbie: Um, like everything but like one song on that is like... Just an amazing song. Yeah,

[00:54:41] David: Yeah. No, I'm hyped. I'm like, oh yeah, I've never seen them live. I'd love to, you know, do that. And we've seen Fallout Boy. They were awesome performers, so.

[00:54:47] Chuck: Yeah.

Jim, I mean, I haven't seen Jimmy at World probably in like 15 years or something. The problem is, is uh, even though they get older and I get older, they still want to come on stage like after 10 o'clock and that just. Doesn't work for me anymore.

[00:55:03] Robbie: Yeah, it's the curse of being a

[00:55:05] Chuck: those things.

[00:55:07] David: Yeah,

[00:55:07] Chuck: it's crazy. I mean, I, Yeah,

[00:55:10] Robbie: Yeah, if they went first everyone would just leave so you can't do that

[00:55:14] Chuck: Yeah, but I would leave satisfied.

[00:55:16] Robbie: true. That's true

All right.

Speaking of leaving we're about a time here. Uh, is there anything you want to plug or mention before we end?

[00:55:23] David: Uh, nothing on my side, you know. I don't ever advertise, so.

But, uh, yeah. This was fun. Yeah, check out PD if you're into whiskey. Give me feedback.

Code's probably trash, but it's fun.

[00:55:36] Chuck: There's definitely no CSS in JS there, so we're all

right.

[00:55:39] David: true, it's all tailored.

[00:55:41] Robbie: Nice

Cool. All right. 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.