All Laracasts Rapid Interviews - Running Clock Season 1

Matt, the clock starts now. When a newcomer says, "TypeScript sounds like a lot of extra steps. Why should I bother? What do you say?" If you want your integrated development environment to be more powerful, you should use TypeScript. If you don't want it to be as powerful, you should use JavaScript. Perfectly fine. if you don't want a powerful IDE. But now with AI agents, now with everyone rushing to make their ID as powerful as possible, TypeScript is just like a no-brainer. Makes sense. So you've taught TypeScript to thousands of developers, including many live workshops. What's a typical aha moment that you see it click for learning people learning TypeScript? Honestly, it's the error flow. It's literally the feedback you get from Typescript that goes, "Okay, there was a runtime error." And actually, we trace the runtime error. We see, okay, it's erroring in the browser. And we go all the way through and ah, there's literally a red squiggly line under the line of code that caused the error in the browser. Why didn't I pick that up? And dozens, I mean, thousands of companies now are thinking exactly the same way. The TypeScript is just preventing runtime errors. That's what it's for, and that's what it's doing all over the world. What's the most common misconception about Typescript? I think the most common misconception is that it's type safe. You know, like I'm not sure TypeScript is as type- safe as people think it is. And really, it's not supposed to be putting just types in the language just for the fun of it. It's really supposed to just give you a better IDE experience. Without TypeScript, you wouldn't have things like autocomplete, rename, symbol, go to definition inside your IDE. Your ID would be much less powerful. So think of Typescript as enabling your IDE to get more powerful instead of making the language more type safe. Right on. Uh what is one power up Typescript features that more people should learn sooner in their learning journey? I think people should be aware of generics earlier in their journey. Now, if you're building like an application or you're migrating from JavaScript, then generics is actually going to give you a really like healthy experience working on the utility functions because if your utility functions, the things that reused across your app, aren't up to shape, then the rest of your application is not going to be as type- safe and you're going to have to do more work. So, if you learn generics a little bit earlier in your development process, you'll have a much better time building applications. That's a great tip. I'm going to brush up my generics knowledge. Do you personally use TypeScript on personal projects? I use TypeScript every single possible place I can. Do you write types first when you build something as in sort of like a TDD or schemadriven development approach? Great question. And so I always pretty much write my types first and often I end up creating what are called typed holes in my system where you basically just create a function you give it a um parameter types and the return types and then you implement it later. This means you can think at a high level first think about what the shapes of the data are going to be and then especially with an AI that's just able to sort of like spool through and add the implementation it makes things a lot easier. So types first runtime second is often how I approach it. That's great. I love what you said about AI. It makes total sense to embrace that. Where is your personal limit on where it needs to be type safe? Type safe CSS. Yeah. So like type safe Tailwind CSS for instance, you know, like type safe on every single class name, you basically don't need it. I think like as long as you have the VS code extension where you have the nice autocomplete which is kind of what types enable the powerful IDE features then I don't really think in terms of oh this needs to be mega mega mega type safe it needs to be correct it needs to give me the right hints at the right times give me the right warnings at the right times but I don't want every single string in my application to be type safe you know that's that seems a little bit overkill for instance people love making or experiment with type- safe hex codes in their application which is just insane type safe roots, type safe, all sorts. Unless it's going to cause a real bug, if it's wrong, I like to just keep it relatively loose. That's a great answer. All right, we got 45 seconds left. Have you ever regretted using TypeScript? Never ever ever once have I regretted using TypeScript. Love that. And final question, if you could magically add one feature to TypeScript tomorrow, what would it be? the TypeScript is uh TypeScript is rewriting in a uh in Go. So, it's actually like getting 10 times faster. So, I would like that uh tomorrow, please. That would be really nice instead of I think towards the end of the year. Other than that, there are some nerdy things that I would add like um I would love to see TypeScript get better at narrowing generic functions and making sure that the generic types match up to what's actually happening at runtime. And generally narrowing stuff in TypeScript as well could always be improved. And we're out of time. Thank you so much, Matt. That was awesome. Thanks, Simon. I'm going to get better at that. Joe, the clock starts now. So, this blade, there's live wire. What's Inertia doing differently that makes it worth picking for a project? I think what makes Inertia worth picking is that if you like writing JavaScript, if you like writing React or Vue, Inertia is perfect for you. If you like writing PHP, you know, you want to go with Blade, you want to go with Livewire. So, if what you want to do is write client side code, Inertia makes it very, very simple to do that. Beautiful. Yeah. How do you explain inertia to non-technical clients and stakeholders? Yeah. So I I generally describe it as a thin layer of glue between your Laravel backend and your client side code. So it just does little invisible negotiations that you don't really have to worry about. You can kind of plug it in and the two will talk to each other very seamlessly and you'll kind of magically have this single page application. Cool. Uh is there a specific type of app where inertia really shines? There's not a specific app, but if the end game is a single page application and you want all the power that Laravel has to offer behind the scenes, that's where it really feels magical because you really have like this super fullfeatured back end and then you still get to use that client side framework that you love. So it's it just feels very cohesive when you're building like a a solid web application. Yeah, that's a dream for developers for sure. Yeah. Um, so how do teams split front end and backend work when using inertia? Do you see any patterns? Yeah, I mean I think the cool thing about inertia is that everybody gets to play to their strengths, right? So if you have strictly backend or strictly front end or somebody who's leaning back or front end and they're not they're not necessarily full stack. Um, they get to just do what they love and they don't really have to worry about the in between stuff. So you just have to agree like this is the contract, right? So you say like these are the props I'm going to feed you and then the client side framework just acts as the view v i e w not z u e and uh and it just and it just works. So everybody gets to write the code that they love which I think is sort of the beauty of something like inertia. That's amazing. What is something new inertia users get wrong quite often or totally overlook? Okay, so last year we launched history encryption, which I think is a really neat feature that probably is heavily underutilized. I don't think a lot of industry users are probably using it, but if you aren't using it, you should look at history encryption. It's a very cool way to secure your app. Um, and something that was asked for for a long time, so I hope people start using it. That's great. I must look into this. Uh, what's a feature of inertia that just sparks joy every time you use it for you? I love deferred props. I don't know what it is. It makes me very happy. Deferred props. You just say this prop is deferred. You get the snappy page load and it automatically loads those props in into the page asynchronously. I don't know anybody who is doing it like better or easier than that. It's really it makes me happy every time. So cool. So do you use this when you want to load the p render the page instantly and then load something in the background and when it's ready it shows up, right? So if you have some some like heavy data that needs to be loaded, you don't need to wait for the initial page lo page load for that. It'll automatically load it after the page has already done the initial load if you just mark it as a deferred prompt. Awesome. Yep. Do you ever see Inertia moving towards server components? I don't know if you're familiar with React and how now there's client and server components and React can and Inertia kind of battles with that space. You're talking about like writing server side code in a JavaScript component. Is that basically kind of what you're saying or is it Yeah, what what I mean is like React used to be just a client side library and now it's moved towards doing a lot of stuff for server code and so that's the area where inertia operates. So there's overlap here. So I don't think so. I think that's probably not in the future for inertia. I think it's I think we're going to let the back end the Laravel play to its strengths and let the the client side play to its strengths and I think we're going to let keep those separate but cohesive. I think that makes sense. The more I play with inertia, the more I think I don't need the the client side, the server side of React. It's the whole selling point. It's amazing. It really, it really is. All right. And my last question, uh, what's one feature or idea feature or idea that you're itching to add or improve in Inertia or its ecosystem? So, not necessarily Inertia specific, but it's going to play very nicely with Inertia. I really want the two sides to talk to each other. uh even more cohesively. So I want the client side to know as much as possible about what's going on in the back end, whether it's um what type of props it can expect as defined by the back end, what types of models we have, what types of enums, like I want all of that stuff to be things that the client side knows about via TypeScript or JavaScript. And I think that's something that I'm excited about. That's something I'm excited to put out there. And it's something we're working on right now as a as a little project. Sounds Sounds great. All right, Joe, that's all the time we got. Thank you so much. That was amazing. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Michael, the clock starts now. When the doors finally open on day one of Laron AU, what's going through your head? Once once the doors are open, I got I got no control anymore. So, I just try not to think too much about it and uh and have fun with the whole thing. Nice. As an organizer, what's your favorite thing to overhear an attendee say? Uh it it's just nice to have positive feedback and sometimes it's just like on obscure things, you know, nothing specific and nothing bad, but it's just it's nice to hear that, you know, all of the planning has has paid off and that, you know, people are happy to be there and they're they're excited by the talks and they're excited by the community and the atmosphere and all of it. So, it's just it's just nice to hear that people are happy. Yep. Most underrated job of the whole conference crew. Uh, I think just getting the speakers on stage, especially first- timers. People don't think I I think people don't understand just how much goes into giving a talk, but to be giving your first talk, especially at Laracon, there's like a preconceived notion about the quality of what what that needs to be like just just to get them on the stage. And I think the nerves, watching the nerves as they step on, but then watching the relief and the exhilaration and the happiness when it's when it's all finished. I think that's that's probably right up there. Yep. Awesome. Uh, what is something that never goes to plan, no matter how much you prepare for it? Uh, check in. Check in time. No matter how much we plan, like, do we bag all of the swag? Do we like do like a multi-step process? Do we, you know, allocate the badges by last name? Like all of that doesn't matter how much we change it up and how much we think we've definitely got it right. There's something always goes slightly wrong. Nothing bad, but I think checkin's the the toughest thing for us to get right. Cool. Is there any part of the event that you always miss because you're too busy running around? The talks. I I never see the talks themselves. Like I I know all about the talks. I know about the speakers. I know what's going to be presented. But then actually seeing them, I I think I miss maybe 90% of them cuz I'm like going to check the next speaker, going to check that like catering's under control, you know, all of this stuff that that you're just like running around the whole time. Um I'm I'm still only halfway through the talks from last year's Laron. AU, right? Uh, so in that regard, what's one thing every speaker can do to make your life as an organizer easier? I don't know. It's hard because I I feel like my job as an organizer is to make their jobs easier. Yes. Cuz you've got to travel, you've got to, you know, be there. You've got to be overcome nerves. All of this kind of you've got to put the talk together. Like I just want you to turn up and give your talk. And I try and arrange as much as possible. Like I do accommodation, we do um travel, we all of that stuff will send a Uber to the airport for you. Um I I think it's my job as an organizer to make your job as a speaker easy. I don't think there's I don't think it goes the other way. Um but being proactive in communicating I think is always like communication is always the the top of any of this stuff. If someone in another part of the world wanted to start a Laracon style event, what's one piece of advice you'd give them? Uh, that is a tricky one. Um, do it. Start small though. Don't don't go from like no experience to to Laracon. Like try and run a meetup first. Um, there's there's lots of that stuff going on. I know that the Laravel the company is trying to be more proactive and more involved in in that side of things. So, definitely reach out to them. Um, but yeah, start a meet up first and and and try and go from there. Do not do not do what I did and go straight to Laracon. Do not go all out. It's a lot. What is one tiny detail you obsess over that most attendees probably never notice. Two years ago, I would have said like my welcome talk, you know, just doing the the setting the the pace for the conference. Um, and there was like a bit in there that I don't want to go into that like I was very stoked by and no one noticed. So, that's that's probably one thing. Um, we put a ton of effort into the branding. And I say me, we I mean Nucleus, the team behind it. Um, the the the detail they go to, the depths and and the connectivity in all of that stuff is crazy. So, um, yeah, people wouldn't notice all of it, but there's a lot of detail in it. I no doubt there is. Last question for you. What is the first thing you do once Laron is officially over and everyone has left the venue? Sit. I just sit and I try and not think about it too much cuz you it is a very deflating thing, you know? It's like it's done. People are happy. It's all over. Um yeah, just sit. Fair enough. That's all the time we got. Thank you so much, Michael. Amazing. Thanks for having me. You nailed it, man. I want answers to everything. Access to everything. Today we've got Matt Staler, founder at Titan. Matt is also the author of Laravel up and running and a prominent voice in the Laravel community. I've got some business questions for Matt. So without further ado, Matt, the clock starts now. So, how has choosing Laravel shaped the way you hire, train, and run projects at Titan? Yeah, because Laravel is such a full stack framework, we have the opportunity to bring on one person that can do an entire feature the whole way through or two people that can work on it together. We don't have to build these giant teams where you've got 20 people on back end and 20 people on front end just to get anything done. And the ability to trust one person to be able to do something the whole way through doesn't mean that they always will, but it means that you can know that they're going to understand something the whole way through. So even when pairing is happening, we don't have a lot of those shortcomings that come from back-end people trying to speak front-end language or vice versa. So I think like the shapes of our individual people impact the shapes of our teams which impact the shapes of the engagements that we're doing and all those things kind of allow us to be much more nimble. We can still build a big team, but a team doesn't have to be big in order to work with Laravel. Makes a lot of sense. Uh, I've read that Titan doesn't do detailed estimates. So, how do you scope projects and manage expectations without traditional budgeting? Yeah. So, clients ask about budgets because they need to know how long is it going to take and what is it going to cost? And nobody really knows that. So everybody's guessing and they're going to do a whole bunch of upfront research that may or may not be reflected in the reality when the project actually happens. But most likely what happens is either either they at the end are stressing their developers saying going faster faster cuz the sales guy promised something for you and then they're also potentially eating some costs or the client thinks everything's going to fit in one budget and then it doesn't in the end. It doesn't serve anybody. So what we do is we say similar projects have cost similar amounts in the past and we give you that as a ballpark. But when you're talking about as a ballpark, we're all understanding that this is just a guess and we're going to have to adapt. And we can adapt by cutting scope as we go or, you know, saying, "Oh, that, you know, there's an 80%, you know, cost version of this that we can do for you that's going to, you know, it's one of those, you know, 80% of the value in 20% of the time." So, we're constantly working to match their expectations, but they also know that if at some point they want more than we originally talked about, they're going to have to potentially go a little bit longer. So, we start with the expectation that nobody ever knows and we're honest about that and it allows us to enter into a much more realistic relationship than trying to pretend on day one we actually know what's going to cost. This was a fantastic answer. This thrilling episode of Running Clock is proudly brought to you by Lariccast. Yes, sir. Yes, ma'am. It's the Rutinous Tutinis Laravel screencast this side of the information highway. And back to the show. Question from Jeffrey Way. Uh you're the author of Laravel up and running from O'Reilly. Uh considering the substantial time investment. Was it worth the effort? Did it pay off? Uh financially absolutely not. I made less than minimum wage working on that book, especially across multiple editions. But in terms of its impact on what I wanted to happen in the community, absolutely. I'm very very happy with what it's done for other people. And what it's done for me, I think, is also valuable because I have a degree in English, right? I don't have a, you know, a computer science degree. I don't have any credentials that would really convince somebody that I'm a programmer. But I have this book and it's the O'Reilly animal book saying, "Hey, I'm the guy that did Laravel." And to me, that helps me in terms of my reputation, but also helps Titan cuz Titan can say, "Hey, we literally wrote the book and it's actually true. We did literally write the book." And that's a really great kind of marketing tool showing, hey, we really know what we're talking about here. Yeah, you get exposure and reputation through that. Uh, next question. What is one thing most solo developers do not realize about running an agency? Yeah, I mean there's that I'm going to say one, but I'm going to sneak in a second one. The number one thing about it is that people who imagine what running an agency specifically like is they think about it about being building a team and writing code and being creative and what they don't think about is the fact that it's actually running an agency. You know, that's the biggest thing and that's true for anybody who wants to start a business. You know, people want to start a business and so they can do the thing they like doing uh with control. But what happens is you start a business and now your job is running the business and you're paying other people to do the thing you like doing, right? So that's like the one piece. And the second piece is people starting an agency or thinking about starting an agency don't often think about how much of your job has to do with business development. When you're a freelancer, you just have to come up with your payroll. Very quickly after starting an agency, you have to come up with six figures of money every two weeks. And it's just a totally different world. That is very different indeed. Uh last question. Is there a kind of project where you would say nope not using Laravel here, pick something else? It's if there's an off-the-shelf tool that already does everything that they want, they don't need to customize it and they're already comfortable with it or can get comfortable with it quickly. So that might be WordPress or maybe a CRM or something like that. There are great needs for Laravel based CMSs for a large number of clients, but sometimes WordPress does everything they need and their marketing team already likes WordPress or they want a CRM and it's already off the shelf. There's no re reason to reinvent the wheel. That is a very pragmatic answer. And Matt, we're all out of time. Thank you so much. You did great. Thank you. Having the timer is so helpful because when I did this with Michael, I could just talk forever, right? Like each of these questions, I could have gone for 5 minutes. So, I'm like, "Thank you. That was very helpful." I did have Michael on the show and he said, "Dude, when you have Matt Staler, make sure make sure the timer is right there." Really? Make sure you have the timer. All right. You ready? Let's do it. Jess, the clock starts now. Uh what is it like to get the band back together and lead a team of folks that you've worked with at various places through the years? Uh it's a dream come true to be honest. So we a lot of us used to work together at another company and we all just really kind of clicked. We had tons of fun. It was a really collaborative uh way of working and then we all started to go our separate ways at some point. So once we kind of had room uh in the nightw watch team for more people those they were the first people I thought of. Uh we've also brought on other people as well and they've fit right in. Um so yeah it's it's the best. That sounds awesome for sure. Um question does watch run itself on nightw watch? Uh yes. So we do use nightw watch to monitor nightw watch. So our staging environment monitors our production environment and production monitors staging. Uh it does get a little bit confusing sometimes when you're trying to figure out like which nightw watch I need to log into to debug which nightw watch. Um but we use it every day and uh we found it super valuable and a lot of the features we uh have built and are building come from our own experiences and the things that we want to see to make uh nightw watch even better. That's great. Great dog fooding. Uh, what is something that Nightw Watch has surfaced in a production app where everyone went, "Wo, there is no chance we would have figured that out otherwise." There's been quite a few things, you know, over the time we've been using it. We installed it on Forge very, very early on to kind of, you know, help um, dog food it. And on Forge, we found a few things. There was a uh, a brute force login attack that we saw that we probably wouldn't have known about otherwise. So like a huge spike of failed login attempts. Uh we saw people using the API that were like hitting it multiple times per second like consistently over the whole month. Uh all sorts of stuff like that. We had a performance issue the other day that uh there was an issue with the database that kind of brought the entire app's performance down. So we saw our performance graphs like all kind of go up and then as soon as we fixed the problem we we kind of like had an idea of what it was and as soon as we fixed it, we saw the graphs come back down to the normal level beforehand. So being able to see that all of that information, the historical information and see the changes uh take effect immediately has been uh super super valuable. Yeah, it's amazing. Yes, sir. Yes, ma'am. It's the Rutinest What was the MVP version of Nightw Watch? Uh the absolute smallest slice that you shipped and knew that would provide value. I guess I mean we started with uh Laravel Pulse which was just this zoomed out single page dashboard. And so Nightw Watch was like what can we do if we weren't restricted by what tools we were using under the hood. And so I guess the the main MVP or the main thing that we wanted to be able to do was still have that zoomed out dashboard, but be able to click in on any of those things on that dashboard and keep zooming in and zooming in further until we were looking at an individual request. So no longer aggregated data, but an individual request and being able to see everything that happened inside that request. So every query where it sat. So that kind of timeline view. So yeah, going from all the way zoomed out to all the way zoomed in is the MVP and still to me the main kind of thing I use in Nightw Watch. Yeah, it kind of feels like Google Maps where you can just keep zooming in and get more details. I think it's amazing. So how on the counterpart did you decide what not to include in the initial launch even if you thought that's really important? This was a tough one. We had a lot of features, even some that we demoed, um, that, yeah, just weren't quite ready for the time of launch and we didn't want to keep delaying launch. So, there's things like, uh, deployment tracking that, um, we still need to bring in and, uh, are working towards. Uh, there was our server monitoring feature that we had in Pulse, um, which felt really important, but, as we kind of thought about it more and more, it was a lot of work for something that's not Nightw Watch's core feature. Uh, and then there was even like our C monitoring solution. Uh, we kind of had something that worked okay in Pulse, but we were never fully happy with it. And so we still needed to put more thought into it to figure how it would make the most sense in Nightw Watch and kind of re-evaluate a lot of those Pulse features, not just try and reimplement them, but actually kind of take them back to to Scratch and figure out how they made the most sense. Right. And last question, what are you most excited about in the next phase of Nightw Watch being the team or the product? Honestly, there's so so much. We have this like long wish list of features that we're really excited to build. We know we have to focus on building these strong foundations where we can capture this data and provide these valuable insights, but there's so much more we can do with that data to show people more about their applications. There's other data points we want to capture. um entire other features. There's just so so much. So, at the moment, I feel like we've really only scratched the surface. Uh Nightwatch will continue to evolve and have a lot of really big and exciting features uh that I'll be excited to share when they're ready. That is exciting. Well, that's all the time we got. Thank you, Jess. You've done amazing. Thanks, Simon. How was that? Yeah, that was great. I forgot to start the timer as you at least at least I've hit record. There's always one thing that I'm like, "Damn, that button I did not press." Today's guest needs no introduction. The man just does a lot of things. And so I just have a lot of questions. Aaron, the clock starts now. The Laravel new command sets up esculite by default. I like it. Can I or should I use it for production too? You can. Uh should you? That is an it's depends question. Uh but you absolutely can. There are a few settings you need to tweak. And if you're going to run your cues and your cache with SQLite, I would recommend setting up uh three databases. One for your real data, one for Q's, one for cache. Nice. Good tip. You're known to learn by printing and reading from A to Z. What's the latest thing you've used your stabilo bus on? That's a great one. Um, latest thing I've used it on is uh books on Reddus and books on click house. So that's all I can say on on that topic for now. Zip. What part of your work takes the longest but nobody ever notices? Oh, clearly absolutely 100% the research, the studying, the practicing, the playing. Uh there's just so much work that goes into producing something that is valuable as final content. So that includes the printing and stabilosity, the printing, the highlighting, the yes, the existential dread, all of it. Nice. Um you try a lot of experimental stuff. How do you know when to pivot versus when to push through? I wish I had a better answer. Um, I think as long as I am interested, I will keep going. Um, that is a double-edged sword because at some I think at some points I've given up too early when I'm no longer interested cuz I've done the fun part, the hard part, and now I just got to do the schle to get it uh out the door. But as long as I think it's interesting, I don't really care how crazy other people think it is. What is something that totally did not land for you, but you're still glad that you tried? Oh, that that one's right on topic. Uh, Fusion. I wrote a JavaScript PHP combo thing and thought it was awesome and powered through the schle and then everybody freaking hated it. Everybody, people in the community, people outside the community, friends, it just went very poorly. But you're still glad you tried because you learned of course. Yeah, I learned I learned a ton. It was interesting. Uh, it was definitely worth it, but I'm not going to do it again. Fair enough. Um, deep question. You've lived through a tech layoff. What helped you stay grounded in the aftermath? Oh gosh, yeah, that was brutal. um family, my wife, uh for sure, kids, um and you know, close friends, including uh my uh former business partner, Steve. We both got laid off at the same time, and it was nice to have nice to have a buddy. Yes sir. Yes ma'am. It's the Rutinest What's the biggest mistake one can do when trying to build an audience online? Um set out to try to build an audience online. I mean, I think, you know, I think really it's um try to be somebody that you're not and try to do all the right things. I think building an audience online should primarily stem from who you are as an individual and things that you care about and not chase after uh you know what James Clear has or something like Facts. I like it. What's your dream on series course? If nobody was watching, what course would you do? Oh, easy. Um, lessons on comedy from the show Seinfeld. I think it would be I think it would be great to teach a course about small talk and everyday humor just from Seinfeld clips. I like it. It's a very useful skill, too. I know. That's what I'm saying. Um, if everything you've built disappeared overnight, let's hope not. Uh, your audience, your course platform, everything, where would you start again? I would probably start on YouTube. Um, I think if everything disappeared, I would potentially abandon the current Twitter. I don't know. Um, but I think YouTube is still very under underrated for getting started. Yep. It's one of the biggest uh search engines on the planet. For sure. Sure is. And last question, Aaron. In 10 years, what do you hope people remember you for? Um I hope that people remember me for um being congruent in the things that I say and the things that I do. I hope that uh at some part some path along the way I've inspired some people to do something, learn something, try hard at something. But I think uh hopefully people in 10 years will say, "Wow, he really did the things that he told everyone else to do." That's great. And I think uh you're doing a good job at that. That's all the time we've got, Aaron. Thank you so much. You've done amazing. I I tried to talk fast. Thanks, Simon. Awesome. That was easy. Easy peasy. These are fun. I like these. Today I'm joined by Kristoff Rumple, longtime Laravel contributor, educator, and now one of the faces of Laravel on the core team. Kristoff, the clock All righty. Uh, you create a lot of video content. Uh what does your pre-recording routine looks like? Yeah, so luckily it's actually not that much that I have to do. So over the last years I try to make my setup as efficient as possible. So basically I have to press one button to get my desk up and then a second button on my stream deck to get all the lights up here to um get all the shades down and then basically I'm ready to press record and yeah, good to go. That's amazing. I press a whole lot more buttons than that. Um, how has your approach to teaching and screencasting evolved since joining Laravel? Oh, good one. So, I think a few things have changed, of course, like the setup here. I changed it. I try to be as professional as I can be since I'm representing level now in a way. So, I really don't want to mess this up with Taylor. So uh um that's something where I tried to get my level here to the next level or my setup to the next level. But in terms of teaching and presenting and my screencast, I'd say not really much has has changed. I still try to be as eye to eye with the people that I try to present to. I try to imagine there's one person here that I trying to present this new feature or what I do in the video and I try to take them on a little journey from hey here's where you are. Here is where we have something new. Here's an issue here. We can do this. And now this gets you from A to B. And um yeah, hopefully people when they see my video at the end, they know not just what the feature is about, but also how they can use it. Very nice. Thank you. Um how do you keep up with all the new features in Laravel each week? Uh do you get any cool automation in your what's new video workflow? Oh yeah, I do. So yeah, you know, there's a lot going on, especially now that the the team has grown so much and yeah, Taylor and everyone is cooking and yeah, we have a lot of new things on the framework and I'm responsible for the what's new video almost every week. So yeah, there's a lot going on and I have this client a common line interface tool which helps me to where I just pick a specific release. It shows me all the features. I just pick the ones where I think they are most interesting for this video. And then it creates me this whole notion page with all the um with a database with all the features, with all the links, pull request links, with all uh the contributors and their um Twitter tags and so on. So that it makes me makes me as simple as possible to start recording. And after the video is done, I can also use this tool to create a timeline, video description, um some social media posts and so on. And so yeah, I try to work this to get this even better because this is something that I need every week. And yeah, I also really love working on this automations That's super cool. You're very organized. Um I try. This thrilling episode of running clock Yes sir. Yes ma'am. It's the rootist Laravel screencast. this side of the information highway. And back to the Uh you've been part of the Laravel community for a good 10 years. Uh what's something that stayed true since the early days? Oh yeah. Um I think it's now my 12th or 13th year in the level community and I think there's a lot which is still the same. So, right from the beginning, people were super friendly back in 2012 or something. And yeah, I think that's still the case. People just like to show how things are done, try to help you. Every everyone is very positive about everything. We're well very welcoming. Come here. Let's let me show you what we do here. Maybe you like it, maybe not. But yeah, I think that's one of Taylor's biggest success. um the community and yeah we have the framework we have everything but the community people just come here have a good time they work but they also have fun and I think that's just the best combination so yeah thank you Taylor again for this well I'm much newer to the community but I completely agree with what you said so it's true still now for sure uh what is one piece of gear in your studio setup that you wish you had way earlier in your journey oh I mean, there's so much. But I think I got here in front of me a little um prompter, which is really nice because I can directly look into the camera, but I still have our interface here where I can see um you and me and I don't have to look somewhere else to check what's going on. So, yeah, this would have been really nice some years ago already, but it just came out, I think, last year. So, I think this wouldn't have been possible. But yeah, I really love this piece of technology and it helps me a lot. I'm looking into the same thing and I I agree it's it's game changer. Last question for you. What's one piece of advice you would give to your 10 years younger former myself? I think I would say you're good enough. It's okay to learn from others. It's okay to be inspired by others, but don't ever try to compare yourself to others because um you can only fail with this one and it will make you unhappy. So yeah, try to stick true to yourself, to your path, to your journey. Listen to your heart. And here again, you're good enough the way you are, but still keep working. Get outside your comfort zone. You still have to crush it, but overall, you're good enough. What an amazing way to wrap it up. That's all the time you got. Thank you so much, K. You've done amazing. Thank you so much, Simon. Yeah, you did great. Basketball championship. Right. Oh my god. So it must be every day. Pretty much every day. This is my contribution to the the community. It's your open source. Exactly. Today I've got Ashley Hindel, the creator of Laravel Boost. This should be a lot of fun. Ashley, the clock starts now. What's the biggest misconception developers have when they first try AI in their workflow? Probably the biggest misconception is thinking that AI is skillless and you just type in the box and get what you want. But but that's not true. This is a skill that you develop that we need to embrace and practice and learn just like we did Git and new frameworks and TDD. I I think that's the correct answer. That makes sense. Do you think AI will ever replace code reviews or is this something sacred? Yes and yes, but not all code reviews. So, code reviews are sacred and they're critically important, but AI will still replace many code reviews at some point. And OpenAI has just announced that their codeex tool is reviewing the vast majority of their PRs as a first pass. And so human intuition and taste will always be better here than AI, but often AI is good enough. So I think it will, but code reviews are still critically important and sacred and we shouldn't let it take over so easily. Uh, what's a task that you still prefer doing without AI? Probably new project setup. So, I've starting lots of different projects and I don't trust AI to set up packages and composer and CI or test suites or libraries. So, I like to manually make sure it's the foundation is what I want and allow AI to work from there. I have only bad experiences letting AI do that initial setup. Good tip. Uh what's one thing that you have learned about Laravel by using Boost? Uh the probably the biggest thing recently is how to use the HTTP client effectively. And then randomly I'll learn about a new method in the collection or string or array helpers class that I didn't know was there cuz there's like a hundred of them that do things you don't know that you need. Um, so that's always cool when it's like, did you know this exists? And I didn't. And so, yeah, hopefully does. Nice. All right, we're halfway through the time. Uh, what is an underrated way AI makes you faster? For me personally, probably decision making. I sometimes I get into decision paralysis of like there are so many ways to do things. What the hell do I do? And so it's nice for AI to present all the options to me and then I can just say okay let's do option three and move on pretty quickly. And so and because I know AI can do refactoring if it turns out I don't like that and I don't have to go through the pain of refactoring is much easier to just decide and move forward. So probably that. Nice. Uh what is one Laravel specific task AI still struggles with? In my experience, testing or Laravel specific testing patterns like feature versus unit, uh, refresh database, Q fake, carbon freeze, it just seems to ignore all of the nicities we have when I try to build tests. Um, but maybe that's a skill problem. Maybe I just need to be better. Um, what is your personal stance on Vibe coding? Vibe, don't do it. Um, proper vibe coding, not looking at the code, just pushing it. 99.5% of the time it's wrong. For some of my side hacky projects, I will do it if it's never going to go anywhere and I'm only going to use it two or three times. Um, but yeah, don't do it. Don't do it. We have 45 seconds left. What is your preferred large language model if any? Claude Sonic 4 right now for the vast majority of things and GPT5 when I'm working on the front end. Oo, wow. Nice tip. What does the future of Laravel boost look like? That's a tough one. more guidelines, broader ecosystem support, um, more powerful MCP tools, better documentation search. There's more that I want to do, but I can't share those things just yet. And that's all the time we got. Uh, thank you so much. You have done Thank you. Even if I'm talking, you should just stop it at 5 minutes. Like if I was in the middle of an answer, it'd be great just black screen. Yeah. Today I am really excited to have Caleb Posio, the creator of Livewire, AlpineJS, Sushi to name a few. This should be a good one. Caleb, the clock If LiveWire didn't exist today, what development stack would you be using to build apps? Oh, I mean, if I I mean, probably I don't know, like React or something is the default, but I I'd like to think that I would still be doing Vanilla Blade and abusing like all of the web to do the things I want to do. I don't know. It sounds great. Yeah. Emoji prefix or livewire.php PHP extension in your personal project. Uh, wellphp I don't I don't think that made it on stage because I don't think I'm doing that one for a handful of reasons, but it's emoji all day, right? Come on. You want to be right or you want to be cool? Uh, another thing you said at your on US talk and I quote, "I don't hate multiple files. I love collocation. This is Caleb's single responsibility principle. What other aspects of your life do you apply this principle to? I just think mentally in my actual life I'm really scattered like ADHD stuff everywhere, you know, but but it does cause me pain and and so in my mental life and anything it's like I really I have to know where to look and I can only look at that one thing. I'm like really tunnel vision and nearsighted. So when things are in different places and then I have to return to them, it causes me a ton of pain. And so I'm always just like whatever this concept is, can we put it in one place and like put it in a bunker? You know, then I can immerse myself when I need to and when I don't, I can treat it as a black box mentally. Yeah. A key aspect of open source is fostering a great community. Talk to me about the your desire to hang out in real life with the wildlife event in Buffalo. Yeah. So, in my head, I have this project that I love and I'm passionate about and a lot of people from all over the world are passionate about it and I'm in this community talking to friends like you and it's this big beautiful society and then when you unplug or if you look at me from the outside, I'm just a guy in an attic typing all the time and there's something there's just this disconnect. And so this in one way this is like connecting that like people are going to enter my actual life. I really believe like way more than I've ever believed that conferences are like the most important thing for a community for like a tech ecosystem and I've just haven't even tapped into that with LiveWire. So, I'm stoked to start it and create a little beating heart that people can kind of gather around and they can feel belonging and they can launch something and have a stage and and have a community. Yeah. So, I'm excited. I love that. Tutinis Laravel screencast. this side of How much time do you spend deconstructing existing packages and libraries to learn how they work? Almost none. Uh yeah, I don't know. Very occasionally I'll be like, "Oh, how did this thing, you know, solve some weird scroll thing in Safari 16?" But I used to do a lot of source diving. I don't I don't I mean I I source dive Laravel constantly, but no, I mostly like work off the dome and just like chat GPT things I need and whatever, you know. Yep. All right, we got 1 minute 45 left. Uh you recently talked on your podcast about the concept of precedent. Uh and I really like what you said. Can you tell the audience what you mean by that? Yeah, this one I've been thinking about a ton. It's like we have to make decisions a lot about like a change. So there's a new feature or something or a problem to solve. And so the first thing I always do is like how do we not add anything so that it's invisible to the user. Can we solve this without adding anything? But when we have to add something there's, you know, it's a blank canvas, unlimited possibilities. Creativity benefits from constraints and precedent is a great constraint. It's like how do we just use something that you are already familiar with? like what's a term from something you already use or in our own package that we can go oh this new thing you just use this word or you use this method or this technique and people have something to map it to and then as a creator you're not inventing something new that you're beholden to that you regret a year later because you made it on a whim. It's like no if I can take other people's decisions that we all agree is the right thing we have less in our minds and we can just focus. Yep. Ah, excellent. We're all going to be out of jobs anyway. Let's have fun on our way out. How long until AI takes all our dev jobs away? Uh, I don't know. Not now. I with AI for me, it's like AI is great when I am the one doing the thinking and I understand it all. As soon as you let go of understanding and do the vibe thing is when unless it's like a prototype or something that doesn't need to be maintained ever, it you end up regretting it. And so so far I have not seen it take away the need for me to use my brain. So I'm still employed. We're still employed. But I don't know. They're so good. I don't know. So I I said it, but I actually don't believe it. Looks like we're out of time. I would love to speak longer, but we are 5 minutes done. Thank you so much, Caleb. You've done amazing. Absolutely. Thank you, Simon. 5 minutes. I mean, that's the hardest thing in the world for me is to like shut up, you know? You got to Today I've got a very special guest, Jeffrey Wayi, the founder of Lariccast. I know we all have questions for him, so let's get right into it. Jeffrey, the So, uh, when you started Laracas, what was your most crazy optimistic expectations for it? Oh, I wasn't ambitious at all. If I could simply reproduce the income that I had at my former job, that would have been incredible success. So yeah, I I I didn't hope for anything more than that. Nice. And if Laracas hadn't worked out, what was the plan B? Yeah. So it's kind of interesting actually. Right around that time, I lived in the US uh in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and my wife and I were very much at a crossroads. Uh I we had to decide whether to finish building Larcast and launch it as a product or at the very same time I had a job offer from a company called Treehouse. Uh you may know teamhouse.com and that would have required that we move to Orlando, Florida. And we had to decide like do we go out on our own or do we choose the safe route and uh clearly and thankfully I I took a risk on Larcast and it paid off and then amazingly we still ended up moving to Orlando, Florida. Uh just as a coincidence after all these years creating screencast what's the one thing you still struggle with? I think sometimes I I have a tendency to be a little bit verbose and uh that's why I have a like an internal rule where I'm always reminding myself keep it going, keep it going. Like I imagine the viewer is saying come on, come on, come on, move it along, move it along. Uh because sometimes I feel like I need to overexlain when I don't. Um and maybe that's a good thing. It's especially helpful to newcomers, but to people who have been in this industry for a long time, they don't need the explanation. You can move it along. Yep. All right, we're 2 minutes in. Next question. Do you ever rewatch your early episodes? And if so, what makes you cringe the most? They're horrible. Uh I don't make a habit of going back and watching them, but if they ever just pop up, you know, when I'm testing the site, uh well, two things. One of them it's just a a product of the times. Like we didn't have access to some of the um the education that we do now in terms of how to make videos. Now it's like you go on YouTube and there are endless resources for how to set up a camera, how to configure it, how to set up threepoint lighting, as you know. Uh back in 2013, it just wasn't available. If you uploaded a programming screencast to YouTube, I swear it was at 320p and you couldn't read it. So, you had to make the text or the font size like 24 um point in order for the viewer to see it. Otherwise, it would be too blurry. But other than that, uh I I go back and it's just there's a lack of attention to detail. I feel like I didn't respect the format enough. Um and I guess that's just I don't know. Um, to look back and be disgusted by your former self is probably a good thing, right? What's it might be related? What's the hardest part of teaching in 2025 compared to 2014? Uh, I don't think that much has changed. Um, yeah, the main thing like I was just saying is the competition. There are so many people doing the same thing now. And I swear back in 2014, believe it or not, like programming education, it was kind of novel. It was kind of quaint the idea of like videobased educa. not everyone was doing it. Um, so you could get away with a sloppy video. Whereas now, as you know, every single person seemingly has a course. So, we've all had to up our game uh big time. The bar has been raised. Yep. You're a great teacher, but who taught you the most about teaching? Nobody specifically. Uh, I I was trying to think if I have my own like Mr. uh for the four people who know that reference and and I don't really I think the the thing that has truly helped me is to remember about the things that confused me the most. Um in the past when I was learning something I found myself getting mad once I figured it out because I would think well why didn't you just tell me this and if you had just said this this and that I would have understood but you didn't. And so, yeah, whenever I make videos now, I try to remind myself, what do you wish somebody had taught you about this particular subject? Yeah. All right. 20 seconds left. I'm going to rapid fire you. Early bird or night owl? Oh, I have this one for you. Uh, early bird. Ah, one monitor or multiple screen battle station? Just one monitor. And, uh, last one. one weird thing on your desk right now? Uh, absol absolutely nothing, actually. I've I've I've decided to have a clean desk. I have a mat, a keyboard, a mouse. That's it. Uh, nothing else. All right, Jeffrey, that's all the time we got. Thank you so much. You've done great. Thank you, Simon. I appreciate it. All right, that was fun. That's stressful, actually. I know. Well, I I I'm about to know. Right, right, right, right. My guest today is Simon Vash Leotus, a prominent developer, designer, surfer, and Lariccast instructor. Simon, are you ready? I think I'm ready. All right, the clock starts now. Simon, if I gave you a Figma file for a new website build, what is step one for Assuming I'm going to build it with Tailwind, which I probably will, I will try to identify the design tokens, so the colors, the spacing scale that are of the main Tailwind schema or theme. And then I will codify this so that I have a CSS framework that feels right bespoke for this project that I'm building. That's usually my step one. That that sounds right to me, too. All right. Number two. If you were asked to upgrade your video production to the next level, what is the first thing you would do or purchase? I've been iterating on my setup for a good 10 years and there's still many things I'd love to do. I'd say I've reached the point of uh diminished returns in lighting, microphone, everything. So, probably my next step would be an additional camera that is not tethered to my space here so I can place it in different areas and do dynamic intros and B-rolls and stuff like this. So, second angle to make it a bit more interesting. Okay. Diminishing returns. Yeah, that sounds about right. All right. You were prominent in the Tailwind community. Was your first interaction with it positive or negative? It was very positive but because uh I had made the whole discovery of utility first CSS through another library called Tachons a bit earlier. My first encounter with Tachons was not so great at first, but I'm glad I pushed through. Mhm. Absolutely. All right. Name me one maybe less common development tool that is essential to your workflow. Hm. I'm sort of minimalist guy, but uh that might sound silly, but the screenshot tool on Mac, I use it hundreds of times every day to measure uh distances, to check alignment between elements, to take screenshots, to paste into mood boards, or even take a data table, screenshot it, paste it in chat GPT to get the code, like the text version of the picture. I use screenshots all the time. I agree with you. I use it all the time too for little measurements. Yes sir. Yes ma'am. It's the Rutinous Uh tell me one if you will tell me one career related in security that you have. Ha, I uh career transitioned into programming at um in my late 20s, almost 30. Um no computer science degree whatsoever. And so I've always thought uh that I don't know enough. And 15 plus years into the industry, I still have this uh feeling in my head. I'm competing against young people going straight into tech and I always will be playing catchup. And I cannot shake this feeling off. Yes, I I think we can all relate to that. Uh so on that note, what is one tool that you want to learn but you haven't done so yet? Ah there are many many many uh I've watched uh your podcast about programming anxiety that you want to know everything. This is my bread and butter. But I would say probably SolidJS which is a JavaScript framework that takes the good parts of React but makes it much simpler and it compiles to vanilla JavaScript. So, Solid JS is one of these things that I keep hearing good stuff. It's been out for 3 years now, I think, but I haven't had a chance to check it. So, that's probably the one. Interesting. Interesting. All right. In 10 seconds, Simon, can you give us a small tiny teaser of your next Larcast? The next course is called Motion for the Web. We look at everything that moves and animates on the web. CSS transitions, key frame animations, SVG animations, JavaScript animations. So, if you like movement, you will like this course. Okay, Simon, lightning round. Are you ready? Here we go. Let's go. You can only pick one. Surfing or basketball? Oh, basketball. Basketball. View or React? React. Typescript or JavaScript? Typescript. Although it didn't start like this at all. Same. Early riser or night owl? Early riser. Absolutely. When recording a screencast, you prefer natural light or blackout curtains? At heart, natural light, but uh practically control lighting. Okay. Dark mode or light mode? Light modes. At heart again. All right. Last one. What is the earliest CSS framework you can remember using in your life? Foundation probably before that I was running manual CSS foundation. Amazing. It goes way back. All right. And that is all the time we have. Thank you so much, Simon. Thanks for having me and returning the favorite. Absolutely. And we will see you in season two. Right. Season two is coming. It's going to be It's equally stressful for the interviewer, which I was not expecting. Yeah. trying to ask the question. You're trying to provide a little feedback, right? You're trying to keep an eye on the clock the whole time to make sure you get through it. I understand a little more, Simon. This is a little stressful.