112: The Framework Wars, Certifications, and Cincinnati Chili with Dr. Kate Holterhoff

[00:00:05] Robbie: What's going on, everybody? Welcome to another Whiskey Web and Whatnot with myself, RobbieTheWagner, and my co host, as always, Charles William Carpenter III.

[00:00:15] Chuck: My friends call me Hasselhoff.

[00:00:19] Robbie: All right, Hasselhoff, our guest today is almost related to you. We have Kate Holterhoff with us today. How's it going, Kate?

[00:00:28] Kate: It's going well. Thanks. I appreciate the invitation. I'm a long time listener. First time, what participant

[00:00:35] Chuck: Yeah, there you go. Yes.

[00:00:37] Robbie: Yeah, we're glad to have you.

[00:00:38] Kate: victim.

[00:00:40] Chuck: All of those things prepare yourself.

[00:00:43] Robbie: Yeah, for, uh, people who are listening who may not have heard of you, can you give us a few sentences about who you are and what you do?

[00:00:50] Kate: Yeah, sure. So I am an analyst with a company called Red Monk and a we're developer focused. Uh, so we focus a lot on. I'm the practitioner, we talk to a lot of developers about what they see, we follow trends in the industry, and we're all generalists, but I tend to follow certifications as well as front end engineering, that entire space, because before I became an analyst, I was a front end engineer myself, as well as an academic for ten years.

[00:01:18] Chuck: Yeah.

You kind of reverse that old saying of like, and not to mean this is a detriment to you by any means or your career, but like, you know, those who don't, who can't do, teach.

[00:01:29] Kate: Oh

[00:01:30] Chuck: Have you ever heard that? And you kind of, you kind of flip the script on that. You're like, I can do and teach.

[00:01:35] Kate: it, the mockery is just continuous.

I, yeah, it was funny when I, the way, the way that I transitioned from being an academic, uh, to, to front end engineering was that I took an internship. Uh, so I, yeah, and so they, you know, I was doctor intern because I had, you know, I have a PhD, uh, in literary and cultural studies, which I.

meant that I taught a lot of communication courses and, uh, but I, I was also really focused on design and, spent some time doing, like, public art when I was living in Cincinnati and, yeah, so I painted a lot of murals, so, anyway, so all of that, like, that aspect of, of the internet and the web was, uh, always interesting to me, so it felt very natural, , to, you know, Uh, I guess take my interest in, um, digital humanities as a discipline and, and kind of transition that to actually creating websites, which I did for a couple of years before.

I heard the siren call of analyst work and, uh, and, and left it all behind. So now I

[00:02:30] Robbie: Nice. Now that you've mentioned, uh, Cincinnati, Chuck is gonna wanna know, do you like Skyline or what's the other one,

Chuck?

[00:02:38] Chuck: we had this talk in person though, at render. Yes, yes, this is like the impetus of, of all of that. So yeah, we, we went to, and we can revisit it later for anyone curious, but we'll probably get some whiskey in us first, cause it seems like a good idea.

[00:02:53] Whiskey intro

[00:02:53] Chuck: Uh, today we're having the Hirsch Horizon bourbon.

It is 92 proof, um, it is sourced whiskey from Lawrenceburg, so MGP has a big, uh, distillery there and a lot of, um, small batch producers or micro distilleries will source some of their things or, and do some finishing and whatever else. So this is a blend of two different ones they came up with. 95% of the blend is a four year, nine month aged, That has 75% corn, 21% rye, and 4% malted barley.

The second one, which is only a 5%, which, there's additional cost to that. So, that one, uh, is a six year, two month age with the same exact mash bill. So they're just mostly blending just two different ages of this same one and see how it affects things. So, I don't know, we'll see.

[00:03:44] Robbie: I've never had this, uh, distiller before.

[00:03:47] Chuck: I have a long time ago, so I haven't had like any of their new stuff. It's been a while. So it's like, oh, that would be

[00:03:53] Robbie: smells like juicy fruit to

[00:03:55] Chuck: Juicy Fruit. Hold on, I have to get the sound effects. Cause I'm a burgeoning Foley artist. We'll talk about this from time to time. I just, I'm also looking at career pivots.

And, uh, you know, voice actor, uh, is one that I find interesting. And Foley artist. Yeah. I want to be in like, Oh, it's they make the sound effects for movies. So a lot of that stuff gets added later in post production. And there's a whole discipline where they do different things to like, you know, somebody's walking in the snow.

They don't capture that in, on set. They'll add those effects in later. Just, you know, the challenges with directional mics and all that. So yeah, Foley Artist. Someone who comes up with the clever sounds you hear in movies.

[00:04:40] Kate: Learn something new every day.

[00:04:41] Chuck: Mmm. I, too, am a scholar

of of bullshit knowledge. Ooh, okay. I see where this juicy fruit comes from a little bit.

It does have that whole, like, whatever flavor that was supposed to be was not fruity at all.

It

[00:04:56] Robbie: no real fruit, but like some kind of sweetness.

Yeah.

[00:04:59] Chuck: gum flavor and sugar. those fruit stripes gums that would last, like, they would have stripes that would be, like, crazy intense flavor and

then...

[00:05:08] Robbie: good. Zebra gum.

[00:05:09] Chuck: Yeah, except for it only lasted like four and a half seconds.

[00:05:12] Robbie: Yep.

[00:05:12] Chuck: You know

[00:05:13] Kate: think

that's

[00:05:13] Robbie: see what this

tastes like.

[00:05:14] Kate: gum.

[00:05:15] Chuck: Yeah, uh, uh, what was it, um, Bigly chew. That was another big one around that

time. Yeah, encouraging kids to chew tobacco in later lives. You've already started it with this gum

flavor.

[00:05:28] Robbie: Yeah,

they taste about the same.

[00:05:30] Chuck: Hmm.

[00:05:30] Kate: I think it was just that era of the 90s when the sand lot was so big. Everything was baseball themed.

[00:05:36] Chuck: Right. I can't get this, that smell out of my mind. So I'm going to taste it.

[00:05:41] Robbie: Tastes like a little bit of ginger or... I don't know, like some General Tso's chicken or something.

[00:05:48] Chuck: Hmm. Okay. I mean, I

could

[00:05:50] Robbie: I don't know, I just

[00:05:51] Chuck: something, like a light vinegary pickle flavor, a little bit of, I get some woodiness, a little bit of like, Okay, I don't know if you've ever done this in a cocktail where you like take a flame to the, to the orange peel or whatever peel it is to draw some of the oils out and then you end up with like a little bit of a flame, a little bit of a citrus flavor in your drink.

Any, that, I'm getting some of that. Let me make all these things up, don't, you know, there can be an analyst article about developers making up

[00:06:22] Kate: hmm.

[00:06:22] Chuck: flavor profiles. That's us, it's just about us.

Hmm.

[00:06:25] Kate: put a little water in mine to try to space it out a little bit. I'm having a hard time.

[00:06:32] Chuck: That's fair. I always say that, uh, the water is really great to give you basically two different tastes. You can, like, have your initial taste right out of the bottle, kind of, whatever comes there. You get a few drops of water, put some oxygen in there, and then it opens it up to something completely different.

Which is a nice thing, I keep saying I should bring some of that to the office to give myself that opportunity. But, alas, here we are,

100 plus, yeah, well I have that, big hydration thing, or, or, I'm waiting on my sponsorship from Diet Coke, because I drank like 2 or 3 of these a day, and that will give it a very cola flavor, have that, then drink one, I don't know, yeah, it's like, what do I want to go, zero calories destroys all microbiomes, maybe, I just, There I go, I ruined my sponsorship.

[00:07:22] Kate: Mm hmm.

[00:07:23] Chuck: So, as part of the whiskey portion, as an avid listener, you probably understand, but for the other listener, who may be tuning in now and may have forgotten,

[00:07:32] Robbie: I like how you say singular.

[00:07:34] Chuck: Yeah, uh, so the scale is 0 to 8 tentacles, um, 0 because we're engineers and index based, um, and 8 obviously being amazing, so that 0 or 1, whatever you like.

this is horrible, since you continue to drink it, I'm gonna assume it's not one of

those, but, yeah, four being, it's fine, it's good, it's alright, you know, I can, I can live with this. Eight, this is amazing, this is, I'm clearing the shelves. Um, and, uh, you know, everything in between there.

[00:08:03] Kate: Right.

[00:08:04] Chuck: Yeah.

[00:08:04] Kate: give it a six.

[00:08:06] Chuck: Yeah, you really, you, you were like zoned right into that.

Yeah, you like it? You go there again? Okay.

[00:08:11] Kate: I'd go here again.

[00:08:12] Chuck: Yeah, that's fair. I'm, uh, I'm really warming up to it personally, too. I wasn't sure that that smell threw me off. and then the first taste was a little like, I don't know, but as I've taken like a couple of more tastes, I think I'm going to put it around a five.

I think this is very approachable and might make some very interesting cocktails, too,

because of some of those flavors, like some of that sweetness, high corn like that, but not like corny flavor. It has to be aged long enough, and four years had me worried, but I think the six year kind of got them over, over the line, and gave it, uh, some good flavor there.

So I'm gonna, I'm gonna say five.

[00:08:46] Robbie: Yeah, I'm uh, I'm gonna say four. It's not really impressing me a ton, but I don't dislike it. So we'll say middle of the road.

[00:08:54] Chuck: Yeah, that, that tracks for you. You tend to be like, hi Corn, hi, I'm outta here.

[00:08:59] Robbie: Yeah, I mean it's still better than scotch, but uh... So are lots of things.

[00:09:05] Chuck: There goes our Travel Scotland sponsorship. you might remember that we like to talk about different hot takes now at a different part of the show. And I was trying to think about, like, what would be some good hot takes, but applicable to, like, your relationship with engineering and, you know, I'm sure...

I hope you don't waste as much time as we do following some of, like, the bullcrap tech Twitter stuff down like milk or non milk or what do we do, is milk racist now? I don't know, there's a lot of, like, crazy directions things go. And, uh, so I don't know, we'll see. Um, but, mentioning that, I'm curious, like, have you noticed some of those things, like, tech Twitter folks?

What do you just think in general about that being a place for engineers to go and debate spicy technology disagreements?

[00:09:53] How Kate feels about tech debates on Twitter

[00:09:53] Kate: You mean X, of course.

[00:09:54] Chuck: Yeah, I'm not calling it that. I'm not. I mean, it seems like one step away from Pornhub And I just, you know, I don't, I'm not trying to associate.

That's a, you know, secret life. No. That's,

[00:10:05] Kate: Well, I'd say all of us at Red Bunk are really on the fence about, you know, where to go with our, uh, social media.

I guess following like where we're, where we're trying to look for news or we're trying to follow trends. , but it's interesting. Yeah. I mean, uh, x slash Twitter is, uh, does still seem to be a default.

I had a lot of issues with Mastodon just in terms of like, I had to unsubscribe from folks who just kept posting. I know I'm not alone with that frustration. Um, but I'd say in terms of like, Following trends in the industry. I am doing a lot of LinkedIn lately. I know it's embarrassing. you know, everybody, if you go to LinkedIn, you know what you're getting yourself into.

You don't feel stupid if you're like, talking about something that you're excited about in terms of the tech space. People are like, oh, maybe she's talking, well, you know, other folks are maybe selling things. That's where they go to sell things. Like, it makes sense. You know, it's okay to talk about your job.

Things that you're excited about.

and I am on Blue Sky, but I got a little put off by the porn. So, back to the porn. It just was a lot of naked people. And I was like, this is not... I don't know if they've tamped that down lately. Uh, but I kept getting logged out of it, too. That's probably, you know, they were like updating things.

And then, so I actually am not even logged on to it on my phone, which means I haven't checked on it lately. But, uh, last time I went on my desktop, there wasn't porn, so maybe the porn situation has died down? I don't know. But...

[00:11:22] Robbie: with Mastodon and, and Blue Sky, all these things are like, they, I don't know. I'm pretty uneducated, but like they do like the decentralized thing or whatever. So like, if that's the thing, how do they moderate any porn? Like if they have no control,

[00:11:37] Chuck: probably figured

[00:11:38] Kate: in posting porn on the Mastodon instances that

I,

you know, follow, so that doesn't seem to be an issue. I don't know. That's my lived experience. But,

[00:11:46] Robbie: Only things that Jack Dorsey starts.

[00:11:49] Chuck: It is, it's a very curated community, but it's not interconnected very well, right? How many Mastodon, Mastodon servers do you need to log into? It just started to feel a little too much like Discord, you know, I mean like 50 Discord servers too. And the interface is hard to, you know, I mean, you're, you're getting a lot of real time things, but after that you're just like, I don't know, I just can't keep track.

[00:12:14] Kate: Yeah.

[00:12:14] Chuck: It's an interesting

thing. Bye. Yeah, I think that people get frustrated with the new because, well, they're trying to leave the old, but the old still works well enough to get them what they need, so, you know, unless there's, like, en masse. And the thing is, is that you're getting so much more, like, public discourse around things, too, at times.

And if it's too much of a small community just echoing the same sentiments, then... What's the value I guess? You can go to LinkedIn for some of that. LinkedIn is nice if you want to feel good I guess to a degree or get sold to a bunch. It's just the problem is that to a degree It starts to feel disingenuous to me.

[00:12:51] Kate: Yeah. For sure. But I think it depends on what you're going on there for. So I'm, I'm sitting, I'm not, I was talking to somebody about this who's really good at Twitter. I won't name names. Uh, but I would even call him an influencer. He was explaining to me how much he loves riffing. And I was like, what even?

I was like, I think I'm pretty good at riffing. Like, I go out for beers with folks. I'm, you know, I'm keeping ahead of the conversation here. I like to riff, but I think I don't riff so well online. Um, he's like, yeah, you just gotta, you gotta reply to people. I was like, I don't, I don't know. I just don't do it.

So, I think that's the problem, is like, online riffing is just not my jam.

I don't know. I can riff on a podcast, maybe? I don't know. We'll see here.

[00:13:29] Chuck: yeah, we're gonna

[00:13:30] Kate: so I think it's the whole riff, the discourse of riff.

[00:13:33] Chuck: It's all about timing, I think is the problem too. So if you riff soon enough, right, and then you start to get a little back and forth and you're like, Oh, that was a good interaction. And then you try to do it five or six more times, but you're a little too late, you know, cause you're seeing things and just a strange order of events.

And then you get in there and you're like, well, too late, nobody cared. It was a hundred responses already.

which is why I think it has me coming back, because I'm trying to catch the riff early. I want to catch the good wave early on, otherwise,

[00:14:01] Robbie: Yeah.

[00:14:01] Chuck: know.

[00:14:02] Kate: Yeah, I always had that problem on Reddit, where it was like, you know, anything on the front page that I would be, unless you're there all the time, or like, go to new or something, it's like, everyone's already, you know, there's, you know, thousands of comments, you're like, well, I'm not even gonna bother, what's the point, you

[00:14:15] Chuck: Yeah, yeah, Reddit's more of an archive for me. I want to see what people have talked about and what conclusion they came to. So, like, if I go and start searching, um, Bing, you know, if I Bing search things. Because everybody uses Bing now, right?

No? Okay. Yeah, uh, I will like, you know, scope it to that site, and then I want to get like, what's some real world feedback about what happens?

But yeah, I find it also hard to, to have any discourse there, because again, if you're not early, and I don't have time for all of these places.

Yeah.

[00:14:45] Kate: what are your places then?

[00:14:47] Chuck: I don't even know that I have places, but I think

that...

[00:14:51] Kate: Discord. Are you on Discord then?

[00:14:52] Chuck: I'm on Discord for tech communities. So basically once Slack decided they were going to charge everyone, all open source communities moved to Discord because it was free and close enough.

But it

[00:15:04] Kate: Mhm.

[00:15:06] Chuck: In my

experience, it is terrible.

[00:15:09] Robbie: it's okay.

[00:15:10] Chuck: I don't like it. I hate

it.

[00:15:11] Robbie: it, yeah, I can't put my finger on what I don't like is the problem. Because like, Discord has, on paper, kind of the same functionality as Slack, but I just don't feel good using

it. So it's like, it, it just kills my motivation to like, talk to anyone.

[00:15:27] Chuck: I just feel like the interface is more confusing, and their search function has just never been good enough.

It took them forever to actually get threading, too, which made conversations that much more difficult. I don't know. I mean, it was developed with gamers in mind, and then has become adopted from the open source community, but I still just think it's, like, not quite getting it.

So I don't think that it's probably just Twitter X or whatever is, is the most I do right now. And most of the impetus of that is this podcast because I had a rage quit social media, I don't know, six, seven years ago. Oh yes. I lost my first adopter like Twitter handle and Instagram and like all these things and I had quit everything across the board and then I had to like Kind of passively activate my Facebook account and that was in order to use the oculus because they forced you for a little while and so games And then Twitter's basically I was back on LinkedIn for a while.

I've actually hibernated that even too because It's, it's just too much. People are trying to sell to me constantly or, I don't know, it just feels I have a problem acting fake. , and not to say that other people like it, I don't know, but I just, again, I can kind of, you know, you can say a lot of like edgy things on Twitter and it's nowhere near as edgy as most of the other people.

So it's kind of still okay and you feel like, I can be myself and, and there's not a lot of blowback on that.

I don't know, so I guess Twitter. That's my half assed answer. And only because of this podcast, though.

Because, you know, getting in contact with guests, it's a nice place to do that. It seems to be more centralized and people are responsive there.

So,

[00:17:08] Kate: Yeah.

[00:17:09] Robbie: Yeah, things are just too hard these days, like, like Instagram used to be, I'm just gonna post pictures, right? And now you have to have like reels and stories and like 50 different ways to post the same pictures and videos instead of just doing normal posts, like, just give me my posts back. I don't want to do all this work.

[00:17:27] Chuck: No, I liked it when it was more of an artist community, and I was very into photography for a long time. So it was really about, like, I mostly didn't follow people I knew. I was following photographers that were people who just took photos that I liked and then sharing kind of the same thing. I wasn't like sharing my life or my day or whatever, but

at a

certain point, yeah, my meals, although food porn is allowable, I think.

There's, you know, something to that, but

[00:17:53] Kate: People like that.

[00:17:53] Chuck: Yeah, yeah, give the people what they want. They want to know where I'm eating, uh, and, and what it is. Yeah, brunch. I lived in DC for quite some time, so brunch culture was very serious there. Uh, yeah, the bottomless, they used to do bottomless, cocktails at certain places, and then if you really wanted to push it, there were places that did, like, bottomless uh,

[00:18:16] Kate: Breakfast tapas aren't a thing. They made that up.

[00:18:19] Robbie: You mean like unlimited eggs?

[00:18:22] Chuck: Basically. Or things made to also have eggs and whatever else. Or even, well, it's brunch, so you get like a little of lunch, breakfast, both things. But you can get, you know, they bring you one breakfast taco and one handful of fries and you can just keep ordering it and they'll bring it at whatever cadence they feel like.

But as long as they keep filling up your bloody or mimosa or whatever else, then you're fine with it.

[00:18:42] Kate: Huh?

[00:18:43] Chuck: Hmm.

[00:18:43] Robbie: Well, should we circle back to some technology at all or should we just skip

[00:18:49] Chuck: Keep talking about Twitter ad nauseam? No?

[00:18:52] Kate: I do think it's worth noting as, uh, you know, a native sense of notion. Uh, you know, that

there is a, a very famous, I did, I did , but I, this isn't the first time I've made it up though. I continue, I, I made it up many years ago, and so now it's a thing. Ghetta is the, the, uh, meat, the breakfast, usually breakfast, uh, sort of sausage, that is, you know, native to, to our homeland.

it's funny, every once in a while I'll, I'll see people eating it. Like, I, I was up in Maine and someone had, like, stockpiled Ghetta in their freezer. And that's how we discovered that, yeah, he was from Northern Kentucky, so it was, it was remarkable. But yeah, so there's, you know, I, I feel like it's, you know, worth noting that breakfast can also be, you know, regional.

[00:19:33] Chuck: That's true. Yeah, it's a mix of it's kind of like scrapple in a way, but it has oats in it. It gets, people get it crunchy. I discovered that uh, there's a place that makes a ghetto lettuce tomato sandwich. Instead of bacon, it's ghetto.

[00:19:47] Kate: And

[00:19:47] Chuck: go have that.

[00:19:48] Kate: in Cincinnati.

[00:19:49] Chuck: It's in Northern Kentucky. It's called the Anchor Grill in Covington,

Kentucky.

Shout out. Yeah, I've been there a ton. I didn't know they had this.

It was very, eh, anyway, fun fact.

[00:20:00] Kate: I know, it's funny. I gave up eating red meat when I was 13. So, yeah, but it's funny because my mother was always like, well that means you can eat pork because we live in Porkopolis and the pigs can fly. I was like, that is not quite how that works, mom.

But, uh, you know, because I drew the line on mammals, and I was

trying to explain to her that, you know,

[00:20:20] Chuck: yeah, I

see. No, I'm on your mom's side here. I mean, it's the other white meat. It's in the slogan.

So,

[00:20:28] Kate: it a slogan?

[00:20:29] Chuck: yeah, so.

Okay.

[00:20:31] Kate: technology, we're

[00:20:32] Chuck: Yeah, let's come back to tech. Are you over my hot takes, Robbie? Is that what you're saying? I'm going to let you pick where you want to go with

this,

[00:20:38] Robbie: yeah, that sounds good to me. Yeah, these hot takes didn't really make sense. I didn't know if you pulled them from something, but we're going to skip them. so one thing

I,

[00:20:45] Chuck: all this work in.

[00:20:47] Robbie: that's fine. You can come back to them if you want to, if you want, but, um. So one of the things I wanted to mention from some of your posts, uh, you had some about like framework wars and spas and things like that.

do we think that spas are dead now as the framework wars over? Like, what, what's the next, uh, next chapter?

[00:21:10] is the framework war over?

[00:21:10] Kate: Well, I've been very interested in following it. I wouldn't say that anybody has come down on the answer yet, but what I would say...

When I decided to become a front end engineer, I got some advice that instead of learning JavaScript, I should just learn React. And in retrospect, I was like, how does that even work?

But I've heard, I've heard this advice before. like, other places, like on podcasts and stuff. So apparently, my own mentor wasn't the only one that was just like, just skip it, jump into React. That's what you need to do. And so I would say, from the folks that I've spoken with, React isn't going anywhere.

So if, what you're worried about is a job, React's a great place to go. when I was looking for jobs, I remember talking to some folks who were looking for Angular developers. So, frameworks aren't going anywhere, spas aren't going anywhere. I met some VU folks, uh, recently who were talking up, I had questions about signals.

I was like, what's the deal with signals? I got to hear the VU perspective on signals, but anyways, so, but, but what I've written about was that, yeah, there, there's obviously if you're, if you're following what I guess the, the, the most exciting technology innovations are that are in the front end space.

The debate over what to do with all the JavaScript that we're porting in is number one. And so I think that comes down to this, like, pendulum swing that we're seeing between DevX and UX, right? Where the user experience for The, the folks who are on their mobile devices that maybe aren't able to, that are a little older and having a hard time kind of loading these huge, uh, frameworks onto their, their iPhone or whatever, you know, their mobile devices, that they're the ones who are suffering by our addiction to these spas.

And so I, I think that it behooves us to start to move to a more HTML first approach, whether that's through iLens or, you know, whatever sort of, , ways that we're gonna go about it. So I, I think that there's a number of ways to answer that question. , and I, I think a lot of it will depend on, like, where the framework says zero interest rate phenomena, right?

Are we, are we moving into this, uh, you know, new scenario where we need to? be a little bit more, conservative with the amount of JavaScript that we're, we're sending, , or are we, you know, going to continue to say, well, I can't train up folks on, you know, the newest, uh, you know, on quick or whatever, on the newest frameworks that aren't, completely beholden to, to these, you know, heavy JavaScript, , frameworks.

So. I think it's going to come down on that, but yeah, I don't have a crystal ball. I'm not going to be able to answer that question, but I am following it. I like to, I think that there's a lot of really interesting folks who have very strong opinions about it that I like to. Follow on Twitter, uh, and see, and see what they think on it.

So,

so I'd say I'm more just in the crowd, just eating popcorn, just enjoying it, just seeing where the war's going. Uh, you know, I, I did think I was pretty clever for coming up with Spa Wars. You know, a lot of people were, were talking about it. So, you know, I, uh, pat myself on my back for that one. But, uh, it's all

[00:23:52] Chuck: It's like the latest incarnation of like, what was the browser wars at one point to a degree? Yeah. I mean, I think you're dialed in the whole sense that like the only right answer is it depends. First of all, anyway, right? Like what are your people resources? What is the knowledge skills gap or, or.

what already exists. What are you trying to accomplish? You know, if you're starting today, you might make different choices, but if you're not, obviously you're, you're beholden to the choices you were made before. And then what do you get from shifting from those choices? It's funny because what you were told is essentially things I was told, , forever ago, except for instead of React, it was jQuery.

It was like, yeah, you can learn some of these things, but if you're just trying to, animate a button or whatever, or, or make something pop up once you do this other thing, then jQuery will get you there. And, you know, let's just get it done, get it done. , but you do get painted into a corner around that.

Yeah, like to some degree, React probably never going away. But also, the next time you're looking for a job, you have to only continue down that same path unless you take some personal initiative. And also, you don't, you probably just don't fully understand the, , not you personally, but just like, if that's the path you started on, you know this is a way to accomplish something.

But if you come down and have an issue there, And you start digging into it in the framework, you don't understand what's happening there, potentially, because, right, it's all written in JavaScript. You've got this sugar on top. What is happening over here that's causing my issue? I'm gonna have limiters there, too.

and the new, it's ironic that the new Shiny has become the original thing anyway, right? Like, actually, HTML is, is the new Shiny because it was always there. It wasn't, you know, that's how it all started anyway.

[00:25:34] Kate: Oh yeah, I know, and extend that to like React server components? PHP, what?

[00:25:38] Chuck: Right, exactly.

You

[00:25:41] Robbie: and it's all like, I think there's a middle ground of like,

you know, people all say, you know, learn react because you want to get a job, which I still would agree with in this current climate is like the best thing to learn is react for a job. However, You don't have to write everything in React.

, you could have a separate CSS file. You could have your HTML be like correct semantic markup and not all divs. you don't have to make everything reactive. Some things can be static and then you can sprinkle React in where you need it. And people don't do that. They just wrap everything in a component I think they, they lost sight of.

What it was originally intended for, which was to take a normal site that was HTML and add in some cool reactive stuff to it, but now we just render everything with it. So

[00:26:26] Kate: Well, you know, it works for Facebook, right? I mean, that's, if the original intent was to like, support this massive, , you know, project, then I guess, you know. It's, it's succeeding.

[00:26:35] Chuck: yeah. Success. for sure.

[00:26:37] Kate: Success Success achieved. But yeah, for, for a little dinky, um, e commerce site or something. I'm not sure that that's what you, what you're looking for.

Am I, am I gonna keep, keep your options open?

[00:26:48] Chuck: Right.

[00:26:50] Robbie: still cool though. Like, I think people liked react because Facebook was cool. And then now like, Ooh, maybe it's not anymore.

[00:26:58] Kate: Just gonna go on the record here and say that Robbie's got the hottest take of them all.

React is cool because it came out when Facebook was cool.

[00:27:04] Chuck: I mean, React was cool just because it made like this really hard thing. We were trying to start to move from, Like client rendered applications, because they didn't invent that. That was happening before with a few other, I can't even remember them all, like Knockout, JS was one. We used Backbone at National Geographic.

And, you know, there was a handful of others trying to do sort of a similar thing, saying, all of like the complex backend server side, uh, uh, logic can also kind of be front end to the client as well. And, you know, let's keep trying to evolve that. And React came out and said, well, let's just make it this little sliver of things, which is kind of fun.

and so that made it super cool that you could like do some of these things without like full page refreshes and, and also have it be like, yeah, I think I wrote like the first component and react and pushed it to production in like three hours.

And so that was kind of fun. And I was like, Oh, this is super cool.

But

It's the whole thing where like I'm walking around with a hammer and not everything's a hammer problem though.

[00:28:07] Kate: Mm hmm. A hammer problem, a. k. a. a nail.

[00:28:11] Chuck: Yeah,

exactly.

[00:28:12] Robbie: call them hammer problems now.

[00:28:14] Chuck: Yeah, we, we like, yeah, that's our thing. Hammer problems, our nails, but if you need a

[00:28:18] Robbie: Yeah, go to Home Depot and you get a box of hammer problems.

[00:28:22] Chuck: Ha ha ha ha ha. Hammer problem.

Right, so, anyway. You know, there's that whole aspect and now we're, whatever, ten years down the line, just about, and maybe we should rethink this. Whoa, who knows.

[00:28:35] Kate: Yeah, I mean, I don't think anyone argues that it made the developer experience fantastic, but I mean, I think that's, you know, what's interesting. It's like, do we want the developer's experience to be awesome at the expense of the user or the environment? I think that that's another, you know, component of this when we're, you know, we, we have these massive, um.

things that we're exporting. I mean, that can't be great. That's what always comes up when I think about AI. Everyone's got a chatbot now. I'm like, really? Do we really need to bulldoze another rainforest? So that we can have a chatbot?

[00:29:06] Chuck: Yeah, right.

[00:29:08] Kate: Uhhhhhhh, I know.

[00:29:09] Chuck: All these new startups, like, leveraged on all these other technologies that may or may go, you know, it's like the next blockchain, I guess.

[00:29:18] Kate: Yeah, I mean, I'm hoping it's a little better than that. But, uh, yeah, it's...

[00:29:23] Robbie: it's more useful than NFTs.

[00:29:25] Chuck: Yeah, yeah. I think all of my NFTs are, like, below zero at this point, for sure.

[00:29:30] Kate: Oh, you have a few NFTs, exciting,

[00:29:33] Robbie: Recur just shut down. You talked me into that

[00:29:36] Chuck: Oh yeah, I did. Because I, my friend who bought a Tesla with one of his NFT sales convinced me that was going to be a thing. So I, you know, you can see where you're like, well maybe, you know, I'll make this and... No, I didn't, you know. He, uh, he still has one of those board apes, which I don't think are even worth anything anymore either, but...

[00:29:55] Kate: oh

my

[00:29:55] Robbie: well, they're still worth the most, but not like they were.

[00:29:58] Chuck: yeah, like 100, 000 and now somebody would give them 500 or something, I don't know. I did one for charity,

my,

[00:30:06] Kate: NFT, yeah,

[00:30:07] Chuck: now you do.

[00:30:08] Kate: I do, I'm excited,

[00:30:10] Chuck: I'll gladly transfer it to you, if I could afford the gas to get it to your, you know, turns out not even that anymore. , yeah, so the disclaimer is never listen to Robbie or me for any investment advice.

[00:30:22] Kate: Mm hmm. Mm hmm. I know, you're supposed to... The Andreessen Horowitz podcast, you're supposed to start by saying that, right?

[00:30:28] Chuck: Right, yes.

[00:30:30] Robbie: Well, we didn't start with any, uh, investment advice, but yeah, now that we've talked about some,

[00:30:35] Chuck: yeah,

[00:30:35] Robbie: we still have a ton of, uh, Shiba Inu. I have like 600 million coins or something

[00:30:41] Chuck: Mmm,

[00:30:41] Kate: yeah.

[00:30:43] Robbie: yeah.

[00:30:43] Chuck: the offshoot of Doge.

[00:30:45] Robbie: Yeah.

[00:30:46] Chuck: gonna work out.

I mean, to a degree I can understand the potential and utility around it. Arbitrary JPEGs aside, there's something there, but I think that needs to get refined quite a bit over time and then... Assigning value to, to marks in the chain is probably not super great.

You know, it's a validation tool rather than a, an assignment of value or investment vehicle in some way. But then again, you know, stocks kind of are made up too, right?

[00:31:14] Kate: Yeah, I mean, I think Web3, uh, yeah, definitely money right out,

so a lot of the other research I've been doing has been on certifications, and it was interesting to me that I learned that some of these accrediting bodies for certification programs, they actually use the blockchain in order to ensure that when you put your little, , badge onto your LinkedIn account, um, saying that, you know, you were certified and whatever for the next three years, that the blockchain is actually what's going to ensure that you didn't steal this badge.

You know, you get your special number and everybody's Uh, you know, on the same page that you didn't just, pirate this image and upload it or whatever. So, I think there's probably a lot of great utility that's going on behind the scenes that's kind of like in the third paragraph of the description.

Where you're like, oh, okay, well, blockchain, I guess, is doing other things. So, hopefully that's where the discussion will go in the future. Like, ooh, okay, can work pretty well, I guess. but yeah, I think we're still, uh, in the, um, crypto bros, uh, era. And I don't know when that's gonna, that's

[00:32:09] Robbie: Well, the gold rush is kinda over, so I think, like, now you're starting to see the more utility come out, and that's, that's gonna be, like, you know, nickels and dimes and building its way up. It's not gonna be, you know, hugely, monetarily beneficial overnight, so, like, it's gonna take a while to get the same excitement back.

People being like, oh yeah, this is cool again, but, , I think it'll get there. It does have a lot of uses that are really

[00:32:36] Kate: Yeah.

[00:32:36] Chuck: Yeah, I think the one that you cited is like excellent, that's a thing. and I know you wrote some articles around certifications, which I have said in some ways, I think. would be really beneficial to our industry because there's no, yeah, I mean, so we've talked a bunch of you here about hiring and issues around that and,

you know, a strange marketplace for demand, the crazy arbitrary hiring practices, right?

Like a surgeon doesn't go in and do a practice heart surgery, right? Because, well, the implications could be pretty bad if they don't. Do so well, but then like conversely, right they have certifications and and all of this behind them that proves and then a reputation and some Recommendations like why couldn't something like that work in our industry as well?

It's skilled professionals,

Right.

, maybe something where, like, there's a whole internship and mastery levels and you get, , blockchain certified, levels of, of accomplishment and then that's all you have to be. I have to be me, I show that I did these things, these are what you're asking for, great, let's agree that we can do this work together.

I think that would be, , straightforward, trustworthy, and efficient, rather than what we do now, which is, Bill on the team came up with this code challenge that he feels is, , a strong indicator of someone he'd like to work with,

but Like, that kind of thing. Or, here's um, entire, , businesses built on like, uh, LeetCode problems.

And go practice those, and they're gonna pick, you know, 5 of the 35 that you worked on. Hopefully you did good at them, and, and then you go and you have to just make a button bigger. Or, you know, sort through an

array or something like that.

pretty much 90% of the time you use none of what you do in these times.

And so, why can't we get better with that? I mean, like, Certifications. Is that something we could ever approach as an industry?

[00:34:26] Talking about Certifications

[00:34:26] Kate: Well, I could talk about certifications all day. I don't know if you want me to really go down that rabbit hole. But what I will say is, I think,

technology certifications, and developer certifications in particular, are so fascinating to me. Not only because I came out of higher education, where it's like, There are accrediting bodies, right?

You know, people come out and make sure that your university is actually doing what it says it's going to do, that if you get a degree in CS, that it actually means that you studied this, you know, curriculum that everybody agrees is going to get, you know, that it shows that you can, , you know, walk into a job that is, you know, a junior developer position and, and do the job, right?

That you, you actually are qualified. , but as many of us know, uh, folks with CS degrees, um, information science degrees, They actually have to then upskill themselves after they get that degree in the languages that are actually being used in the industry. Uh, so, I mean, I know, uh, for example, I, I, I was talking to a director of engineering who had to teach himself Ruby on Rails.

The minute that he got out of his, uh, program in the, the, the 2010s because there were no jobs for, for the, the sort of languages that he was learning and, and also he didn't want to work at those jobs. You know, he wanted to kind of work at places that were, uh, you know, rail shops. , so I, I think that that's kind of an interesting part of the conundrum that the bodies that we would look to, to make sure that these, uh, positions are actually being, you know, shifted so that you have to train up yourself.

Or, you can trust a vendor or a vendor neutral organization to certify you. And if you do, hiring managers typically don't care. They're not interested in certifications, you know. , if you go on Hacker News, the most well regarded one tends to be like the AWS certifications. even then, do you really want to pay out of pocket for a certification?

Usually you want your employer to pay for it, so that's usually the path to certification. And so I do, I do find it a little problematic when folks are using certifications as like, uh, a jumping off point to getting into the career. Um, especially folks, uh, who, like, did a boot camp or something and they can't find a job.

And they're like, oh, okay, well I'm going to get certified in, you know, whatever, , product certification thing and I'm going to pay 150 to do it. And then there's all these study guides that actually cost extra and, you know, it's not cheap to become certified. , so I, I do think it's problematic, but then at the end of the day, these vendor certifications are not accredited, right?

It's like the fox guarding the hen house, you know? , there's a lot of motives for companies to have these certification programs as well that aren't necessarily for the good of the person taking that exam, right? It's not necessarily that they're like, okay, we're going to benefit humanity by making sure that everybody can get a job, that everybody knows these skills.

It's usually like, we want to make sure that you understand our technology. so that when you get this job or, or at your particular place where you're employed already, um, that they're gonna, you know, use this, this, particular managed service or whatever.

[00:37:04] Chuck: Yeah.

I

can see where there's a massive gap there in all kinds of things. Like, the institutions who are training, like, through a traditional university or whatnot, Their programs are dated, possibly, and I'm sure there's a lot of bureaucracy to sort of integrate new curriculum. So then, conversely, you have something like the Amazon, which has, you know, they're selling certifications, essentially, to get folks kind of locked into their ecosystem, right?

So they're incentivized in other ways anyway. And so if you're not on AWS, why would you trust their certification? To work within another infrastructure. And then also lots of that is infrastructure. Anyway, you can become an AWS certified developer, but again, everything is kind of skewed towards their system.

I don't know,

[00:37:52] Robbie: And none of it guarantees you a

[00:37:54] Chuck: but none of it guaranteed. Well, in a bootcamp certainly doesn't. And there's no like. slight against those that decide to take that accelerated path.

I think it can work. I think it's a challenging thing to take into play. I just think that you have to have a certain passion and dedication and, just a particular aptitude to work well in that environment.

I think it's just neat. It can be very niche, right? Like there should, there's a whole bunch of different ways you can learn this industry and that one can work. But it doesn't mean it will, and they're incentivized to be like, we'll get you hired. Some of them are like, we'll get you hired or you don't pay us.

So of course they're going to teach you Just React, just for these hiring managers they know, or whatever relationship, sales relationship they have, right? And then that's the career they're going to get you. So it doesn't kind of give you anything out in the marketplace. I'm sure lots of people are finding that to be the case now.

I mean, without suggesting a union, but you know, skilled workers and other, , manual labor areas or an architect or things like that, right? There are organizations that exist that give you certifications for that, but

are we just beyond where that model can work because the speed at which technology changes, I don't know, but something like that is appealing to me.

Like, you know, I'll start the Carpenters Union for, but for developers.

[00:39:12] Kate: Yeah, I love, I love a good union. Yeah, well, I think that that would be a very good way to go about it. I mean, there's a lot of foundations that have certification programs, which tend to be very exacting. They're very difficult to pass. So I'm thinking of like the certified administrator that the CNCF administers.

I mean, so, you know, there's a lot of ways to kind of get around the vendor. , portion of this, however, they, again, they're not cheap and hiring managers look askance at all certifications. In my experience, they're not, just not interested in them. I mean, there's some more established developers who don't even list certifications on their resume.

Like, they're almost embarrassed by them. Shhhhhhh.

[00:39:46] Chuck: Yeah, we're not helping ourselves. I think that's part of the problem too then, right? Like, maybe it'll come to some sort of influx at some point with kind of the reset in the hiring and jobs and salary markets. Right? Like maybe that will for it like, Oh, yeah, I don't care. I don't care because it's working out and for the last five, 10 years, I can kind of call my own shots and bounce around and get more money and more titles and, you know, drive the ship.

And I really feel like there's been a massive shift in that with all of these layoffs and, and just, incredible, available workforce.

So

I,

[00:40:25] Kate: pandemic completely rewrote how we do education. Absolutely. I mean, everything's remote now.

A lot of the folks that I've spoken with who run these certification programs explained to me that they were kind of moving slowly towards remote testing, but when the pandemic hit, they all fast tracked that initiative.

And so now there's very few certifications. That don't offer a remote test, either through, you know, partnering with like Pearson Vue, who can proctor that exam, or just by, you know, creating so much more material. And so like a big trend that we're seeing now is this move towards subscription model learning.

So when, you know, this is like SaaS, SaaS trading, right? So instead of just paying for like, You know, one course, one exam, a lot of companies are moving towards like wanting employers to actually pay for the subscription model so that you can continuously access learning materials because learning is just supposed to happen all of the time.

And so if we look at like the history of certifications and training in general, it's really problematic because , a lot of training used to be paid for through like apprentice models and the unions actually, uh, again, but now, , it's supposed to be, um, sort of employer, uh, led. So then we hear about like employers offering like 1, 000 a year for their, um, developers to like go to conferences to, you know, keep up on new innovations or to, you know, pay for training, pay, pay for these certification exams.

But what I'm hearing more is that, , developers are expected to train and upscale themselves on their own time. So if you can't be contributing to open source projects on the weekends because you've got kids, sorry, you know, we got a backlog, right? You know, there's no time for you to be learning new languages, making sure that, when React finally dies that you, you know, the, the newest framework.

Um, you know, but, but it's, it's really interesting because I think it, it kind of. That's what Silicon Valley has been moving us towards all along, right? Is this idea that, you know, you gotta pull your stuff up from your bootstraps. we got chaos monkeys, right? This is, we, we gotta just, code this out quickly, and, and, you know, put less investment into QA, and just hope for the best, right?

You know, now things are, the pendulum is swinging back a little bit. You know, we're moving more towards making sure that we have documentation, and that, the DevOps movement has, has kind of, made sure that things don't move quite, quite as fast as, as the sort of stereotype that we see on Silicon Valley.

, but there is still this, idea, I think this, um, that, you know, a lot of the sort of more controversial lights in Silicon Valley have, have, promoted that education is no good, that schooling is, is, uh, you know, not going to, to get you the skills that you need and that you should be self trained.

Which I, I think is really problematic because learning is all about community, right? You, you, one must learn in a community setting. That's why I got an internship. I wanted mentors.

[00:42:58] Chuck: Yeah, and that, and that's the way you seek to learn. And I think there's a lot of different ways to learn, and having more options is better than less. And so, whatever model that Silicon Valley had been, forcing into, or encouraging, or whatever throughout that, I think it's, uh, it's one of the possible ways.

But I wonder if that'll start to be less of an influence, with less VC money being tossed around.

And,

[00:43:22] Kate: The Peter Thiel, uh, fund, you know, for, for getting kids to, to not go to college. I mean, that's such a... such a sort of noteworthy instance of, uh, you know, denigrating the value of, of accredited, uh, education.

[00:43:35] Robbie: Yeah. Even if you aren't learning something you're using at college, you're learning to learn and learning how to like, You know, iterate on processes and different things. So, it's like, it's still valuable whether what you learn is applicable to your job or not. So, you know, I think that people saying that there's no value are definitely wrong.

We need to get some more, like, HTML, CSS, JavaScript stuff into college curriculum.

Like I have a CS degree and I had one class that did like a little bit of web stuff and that was it. And it was like, yeah, you can figure it out later. And it's like, well, yes, it is like technically, you know, from a engineering perspective easier or whatever, because it's like not as algorithm heavy or whatever, like, but it's a totally different skill set.

So you still need to teach it or we will have to learn it on our own.

[00:44:27] Chuck: Right. yeah.

And they, they think, well, our time's not well spent here. You can figure this out. Go read additional documentation on your own time.

I mean my, I have a spicy take because I think that I, I don't think that college is useless, but I think that the idea of go to college and be successful and make good money is fading away.

I think that like, that whole, just go get a degree, it doesn't matter, go spend some time there. Prove you can finish something and, the world is your oyster is not necessarily a thing anymore. And I hope there's a course correction around that because otherwise I feel like at some point in the far future when my children are at that age.

that they're looking at college, it's going to be like, well, what do you want to do with your life? You need to have some idea about that because this may not be the best course of action, or at least at this point, if you're like, I don't know, I'd almost rather you like go get a job and think about it a little bit and see how life kind of sucks and maybe pushes you into your interest or go do an internship on something or whatever.

Like,

just doesn't feel like it's the automatic choice that it was.

[00:45:34] Kate: hmm. No, I agree with you entirely.

when I was teaching for a decade, I talked to a lot of freshmen.

because a lot of times I, I taught the, the sort of, uh, beginning, uh, communication courses, like the English 101 courses, um, and I taught, I tended to teach at, , engineering school, so I taught at Carnegie Mellon, and I taught at Georgia Tech, and so I've seen this sort of disillusionment with having to learn , you know, how to write, uh, well, you know, being forced to take a literature course, being forced to have some sort of social sciences, and so I've seen that that sort of frustration.

But then when I later learned that, you know, folks are graduating with their CS degrees and not having the skills they need or that, you know, front end is not even taught, like, I believe that that was the case at Georgia Tech when I was there. , I believe I remember speaking to some students about like.

So, you know, where, you know, where do you learn JavaScript? And I, I'm remembering that that wasn't even really taught in like a specific way, like there were clubs and things. , but I, I, yeah, definitely, I would have to check on that, but I, I know for a fact it wasn't a focus. There does seem to be a disconnect between the skills that are taught and the ones that are, you know, reflective of the marketplace, but also, you know, that are just, I guess kind of, uh, resonate with what the students are interested in in terms of, you know, I mean, I have often argued that the front end is where all the innovation is happening.

So, you know, if universities still think that they're the, the place where, you know, people can be their most creative and explore things like, well, then we should be doing more with front end. I mean, this is, it seems ridiculous. I mean, this is the, uh, I, but I, I often get into that fight, which I, I, I hope I'm in good company with, uh,

[00:47:04] Chuck: For sure, because...

[00:47:05] Kate: the front end.

[00:47:05] Robbie: Mm-hmm.

[00:47:06] Chuck: you know, a lot of folks are, are visual and we have short attention spans now and things of that nature and web applications and working within a front end where you can make, you can do something and see it right away and see like the fruits of what you've worked on. That's encouraging, I think, for a lot of people.

So like giving them that right away and giving them some wins and like with some, you know, basic HTML, CSS. Here's a form. Oh, and now you want to do some cool things. Now you want to process that information in cool ways. Oh, now let's go down the CS path. But like, starting with logic and algorithms and very like, terse, difficult things.

It's sort of like, you basically gave someone physics for their first science class or something. You know? Uh, yeah. So it just feels like... People having gratification, which is what we're seeing in the world, like, people are getting so used to gratification. Giving them some of that. Encourage that, like, let's get a spark going here.

[00:48:05] Kate: I know my favorite exercise for speaking to folks who consider themselves non technical, um, so in the past that has included a lot of marketing folks who consider developers to all be wizards, you know, they don't really understand, is that all you gotta do is like open up the inspector and like change some of the text on a webpage and they are like, what did you just do?

Or like

change a color. And they're like, oh my god. I don't know if you're not starting there. I'm, you know, I got no advice. But yeah, I agree with you. I think that that's probably a more natural way. but maybe there's like a sort of generational difference there. I mean, I guess, um, you know, folks are coming to technology in different ways.

And yeah, I mean, I have small Children too. And I'm terrified about like what, how they're gonna learn about technology through smartphones. I mean, I feel like we should all be First you gotta build the PC, and then we're

gonna, you know, get some... No, not gonna happen. They're gonna, they're playing with the iPad.

It's, it's all, I lost them already. It's over.

[00:49:01] Chuck: Oh yeah, we're down that path. Like, my son got, uh, he just turned seven a week ago. Yep, I'm a terrible parent. he got his own Switch, his own Nintendo Switch. You

know, my wife's very concerned there about video games, and you know, I grew up in a generation of video games, though, and I feel like there was a lot of pluses around that.

What else are you gonna do on a rainy day? They watch TV, they play games, I don't know. Like, yes, we

wanted them

to read,

and

[00:49:27] Kate: SimCity 2000, you had to do it through DOS. So,

[00:49:30] Chuck: Right,

[00:49:31] Robbie: yeah,

You could have gotten him a Super Nintendo.

[00:49:34] Chuck: Yeah.

I should have said, well, okay, so we have this thing. It's an open source. It's called a recall box and you can put a bunch of like retro game ROMs on it and you can play a bunch of systems. So I can, he can play the 2600, he can play the regular NAS, he can play super Nintendo. We've actually gone down some of that path to introduce him to Mario and that way first and then sort of get him, you know, seven is like 27 in my year.

So he can all, he can do all the things.

[00:50:01] Kate: For sure.

[00:50:02] Chuck: Um.

[00:50:03] Kate: that old, so I'm not quite there yet. But yeah, the uh, it's coming up. Yeah.

[00:50:07] Chuck: Yeah. I've got four and seven, and so four she doesn't get the Switch yet. She does have an iPad. She has some learning apps on there. We can control a lot more on the iPad, which I kind of like that too,

[00:50:18] Kate: Yeah. Okay, I've got a four and a, uh, twenty two month, so, uh, yeah, it's, I don't know, we're, we're, we're working our way there, but like today, uh, my four year old just spent a lot of time digging in the dirt, I

feel like that's probably better, better than,

[00:50:33] Chuck: I love that

[00:50:34] Kate: I know, it's like ninety four degrees here in Atlanta too, I'm like, we're just melting out there,

it's like a cloud of mosquitoes,

uh,

[00:50:41] Chuck: Hotlanta for a reason.

[00:50:43] Kate: I know so that so, you know, I met you both at RenderATL. Do you attend every year? That was my first one.

[00:50:50] Chuck: No, that's our first as well. Yeah.

[00:50:53] Kate: what was your major takeaway? The coolest thing you've ever seen?

[00:50:56] Chuck: it, it was fun. I enjoyed it. I liked kind of our setup, the initial setup. So we just, they hadn't really done what we were doing before. We hadn't really done it. We didn't have a full understanding. We knew it was just going to be huge. so it's a very much like this cultural conference with a sprinkle of tech and folks in tech and encouraged to sort of like, Choose your own adventure, so I thought that was interesting.

, randomly setting up shop in like a media room and trying to record podcasts and, and, or end up getting like 10 percent of the conference drunk uh, on free booze that we brought in without permission. That was also kind of fun. so it turns out not even, uh, well I probably shouldn't rat out anyone involved with the conference, but folks involved knew what was going on and it was

okay.

[00:51:42] Kate: hmm.

[00:51:42] Robbie: My biggest complaint was, uh, that they put Kelly Vaughn, Sarah Drasner, and like, I forget who the third one was, like three people that you would want to go listen to all at the same time slot.

[00:51:53] Chuck: Right?

[00:51:53] Robbie: like, Okay, I don't, I don't like that. Like, I feel like the logistics were, needed a little work, but I think overall, like, it's a huge conference, and it's hard to manage, and, I, I think it's a very cool conference, and I'm excited to see how it evolves over time, and we'll probably go back,

[00:52:07] Chuck: Yeah, I would definitely go back. No doubt about that. And yeah, logistically with all those tracks and, , also, I guess one of the things was like, you're usually used to like, kind of a, big name closer, but then like that closer comes on at five, like in the instance of Chris Coyier.

Oh, I want to see Chris's talk and go and see. And I don't think it was well as well attended as they would have liked because they kicked off after events and then like folks wanted to get into those events too. So they're kind of limited. So a lot of people just went to go and like stand in line early and try and do some of the closing out events.

And so there was some like overlap and conflict with that again, like I'm, I'm just kind of used to like, I go to a conference, I'm going to see some talks and then I'm going to do the events. And some of that overlap, but yeah. I mean, again, it's huge. It was, uh, it was definitely cool. A lot of cool things happening.

All at once, though.

[00:53:00] Kate: Yeah.

Atlanta's a good beer town, though. I know we're on a whiskey podcast. I should give my beer opinions to myself, but, um, I don't know if you got to try any of the local beers here,

but,

[00:53:09] Chuck: mm.

[00:53:09] Kate: it's a good place to come visit for

[00:53:12] Chuck: Here's the... Here's the... thing, Kate. As I'm getting older, and, uh, my stomach just doesn't love beer anymore. I don't know what it is specifically, and so I just kind of shy off of the beer. Not because I dislike beer, It just dislikes me, and, yeah,

so, I had some good food there, for sure.

I'm always a food person, so.

Which,

uh,

[00:53:34] Kate: you have? Like, barbecue? Did you stay on brand?

[00:53:36] Chuck: Uh, so we did have Gus's Fried Chicken one time. Uh, I believe some barbeque. We went to some like, hidden bar that was, you had to go through like a phone booth. And they had some

cool... Yeah, Red Phone Booth, that place was cool. Um, yeah, there's like a, like, speakeasy thing.

It's like you have to know the code or show up early enough to where someone feels sorry for you and let you in. And then they have an excellent whiskey selection, some good, like, um, like bars, like nicer bar snacks and food too, so that was good. I think we had Arancini there, didn't we? Or something like that?

I don't know. And then we had pizza and maybe something of that

[00:54:12] Robbie: Yes, we, we did have both of those

[00:54:13] Chuck: Um, and then I went to actually speaking of Kelly Vaughn and went with her and her husband and a couple other folks to a place. It was like a historic house that was changed over and they had like a trout thing and they make their own Mac and cheese.

And there's like all these fancy Mac and cheeses and no, okay. I don't remember what it was called. I can tell you later offline. Um,

but Yeah, I do some of the stereotypes, but you know, I've had a lot of Southern food in my life too, though. So. You know, I was trying to collect both of those things. We should let the other listener, though, because I think we didn't, we haven't talked about this online.

You, we are both from Cincinnati area.

[00:54:50] Kate: Absolutely. Yeah.

[00:54:52] Chuck: I need the public to know this, like, Gold Star or Skyline Chili?

[00:54:59] Kate: Well, I'm Skyline. My family's always been Skyline. But, as I mentioned, I don't eat red meat, so I don't actually eat the chili. I've had no... I have no dog in that fight. I do not care. What I do love at Skyline, though, is the mound of cheese that they put on my beans and rice. And I get it every time. So I get like a mound of cheese, a mound of raw onions.

You know, we all smell great. And, uh, you

[00:55:21] Chuck: Hm.

[00:55:21] Kate: that, to me, is a very good dinner. So...

[00:55:23] Chuck: Yeah. I feel like one of them did a vegan version. Maybe it's recent.

[00:55:28] Kate: Possible? I don't know.

[00:55:30] Chuck: Yeah, I mean I didn't go down that path, but like I remember like Skyline started releasing burritos and some other stuff. Goldstar

does fries and stuff now too. They actually do a burger. And then they put chili on top. And then I think, I feel like one of the two has a vegan version, so.

[00:55:49] Kate: Yeah, yeah. Possible. I don't know. I like the beans and rice. What, so where are you? Are you a gold

[00:55:54] Chuck: I'm gold star. Yes.

So funny thing. Yeah. Well, it's a funny thing. So growing up or when I was really young, my mom worked at gold star. So I had lots of gold star and just kind of, that was my thing, but my aunt worked at and, you know what? Good for her, I guess, whatever. She just celebrated her 50 years at skyline.

And, they, they, in Covington, it was like this old location, they're keeping open, all this stuff. And, uh, the city of Covington made her 50th work anniversary Wilma Day. Because her name is Wilma. Because of course it is.

[00:56:28] Kate: Wow. Local celebrities.

That's

exciting.

[00:56:31] Chuck: I am related to, to, to Wilma Day. Yeah. Mm

[00:56:34] Kate: To Wilma, of Wilma, of Wilma of Skyline fame. Yeah. That's exciting.

[00:56:39] Chuck: hmm.

[00:56:40] Kate: It's worth noting that every skyline has a steamed up window, especially the older ones, so I gotta know, like, is this a real steamed up, uh, skyline? Can the hot dogs be

[00:56:50] Chuck: It, it has to be, yeah, okay. Because hot dogs are already cooked, what's wrong with boiled hot dogs? I have this debate with my wife all the time because I heat up the kids hot dogs by boiling them. And she's like, that's

disgusting.

And I'm like, they don't want burn marks from a pan. And this is how you do it.

How do you think you get hot dog flavored water? I mean, not from... Frying pans. So yes, uh, hers probably does. I mean, it's been remodeled a couple of times, but it's been there as far as I can remember my whole life. If she's been there 50 years, and it's the same, like, Covington Riverfront. , it's next to a place that used to be called, or maybe it still is, called Riverfront Pizza.

And it's been there, like, forever. And you'd go to the bars in Covington and Main Straus area. And

then, you know, you can go to that or the Gold Star if you, if you like flavor.

[00:57:41] Kate: I like the mound of cheese. Does Gold Star do the mound of

[00:57:44] Chuck: Yeah, absolutely. Everybody does.

[00:57:46] Kate: Okay.

[00:57:46] Chuck: All of them.

[00:57:47] Kate: Oh yeah. I know. That's worth noting too. Yeah. You know what's interesting? When I, uh, uh, was painting murals, I did one, uh, behind the Mount Washington, chili. So that was, uh,

you know,

[00:57:58] Chuck: Yeah.

[00:57:59] Kate: Actually, wait, I think I'm saying that wrong.

one was it? Camp Washington. Thank you. I know. I was like, that doesn't sound right at all. Yeah, because, because the mural was called Campy Washington. Like I haven't lived there in so long. It's embarrassing. I know. I still talk about Cincinnati, like I know all about it, but I go there and it's like over the R'S can be completely redone.

I'm like, where

[00:58:15] Chuck: Yeah, you don't get stabbed or buy drugs there

anymore. It's weird.

[00:58:20] Kate: I know. I'm like totally lost. Like there's all these cool places now and everything's super expensive and there's no parking down there. I'm like, well,

[00:58:27] Chuck: Yeah.

[00:58:28] Kate: go back to Atlanta where things make sense again.

[00:58:32] Chuck: It's fair.

[00:58:33] Robbie: All right. Well, we are at time here. Is there anything you want to plug before we end?

[00:58:39] Kate: No, I guess, you know, if you're interested in, uh, what trends were following at Red Monk, we've got a blog. We got to do a bunch of videos. , and then, you know, if you want to follow me on social media, feel free, I'm not, you know, I don't pretend to be, uh, an influencer, but, um, uh, you know, Kate Holterhoff is on my handle on Mastodon, Blue Sky, X, and LinkedIn.

[00:59:00] 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.

[00:59:08] Chuck: Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

​