24: Runspired vs. Chris Manson on Solving the Number One Open Source Maintainer Dilemma

Robbie Wagner: [00:09] Welcome to the WWW SmackDown. A Chris cast with Chris Manson and Chris Thoburn, also known as Runspired. They are going to duke it out in the arena over open-source maintenance. Let’s see how it goes.

Chuck Carpenter: [00:33] You’ve been really working on your radio voice. I got to give you kudos on that.

Robbie Wagner: [00:38] Thanks. Thanks. I probably should have made that more legit, but we’ve got us our intro. We do have the Chris’. There are lots and lots of Chris’, but these Chris’ are actually not named Chris.

Runspired: [00:50] We’re fake Chris’s.

Chuck Carpenter: [00:52] Their second identities are Chris. What are you hiding from?

Chris Manson: [00:56] Yeah, a lot of the times when I, like, answer a phone call or somebody asks me what my name is, I kind of ask them, what do you need it for? I give them a different answer depending on the need, and it’s like they get very weirded out.

Runspired: [01:12] I got pretty lucky that most of the banking situations, credit card situations, they were happy to just put Chris on as the primary name, so I don’t have to deal with that outside the medical side or the legal taxes, that kind of side. One of the best things I did in my career was my very first resume. The only resume I’ve ever had to create went to a consultancy who of course, like all talent consultancies or agencies, shopped it to everybody and stuck it in some online database. And that has my name listed as James.

Chris Manson: [01:52] Interesting.

Runspired: [01:53] So I 100% know from first contact email header that I don’t need to open the span from the recruiter because it will always say, James.

Chuck Carpenter: [02:06] See, I love that. I segregate official contacts from unofficial contacts by whether they call me Charles or Chuck. That’s how I know. Right there. I’m looking for Charles. Well, what do you want with him? I would definitely not be him.

Robbie Wagner: [02:21] But don’t you want to be Charles on the internet now?

Chuck Carpenter: [02:24] Well, yeah, I mean, I’m just Charles on this podcast now, but I’m sure that might spiral out.

Robbie Wagner: [02:28] And Twitter.

Chuck Carpenter: [02:29] Yeah, that’s, did you track me down?

Robbie Wagner: [02:32] I didn’t look on there.

Chuck Carpenter: [02:34] I’m your business partner, like, one step over from wife right now in your life, and you haven’t even tracked me down. I gave you an inside scoop. I’m very disappointed. Anyway, I digress.

Robbie Wagner: [02:47] Let’s pour some whiskey.

Chris Manson: [02:48] Yes, that sounds like a great idea. I’ve been dying to open this.

Chuck Carpenter: [02:53] Yes, I’ve been dying to buy it, and I will have to do it next time. Unfortunately, I made the snafu of not going and making this purchase as we were going through all the inventory we needed to acquire for scheduled podcasts before. Robbie is out for a bit and missed this one, but we are having the Murray Hill Club Whiskey, depending on when this one comes out. You may or may not have heard us do a rating and review of it, but I’m sharing it with a new person.

Robbie Wagner: [03:25] Yeah, it’ll be the previous one. So it’ll be.

Chuck Carpenter: [03:27] Yeah, it’ll be like we’re doing this again.

Robbie Wagner: [03:29] Yeah. We recorded yesterday with Mel Sumner.

Chris Manson: [03:32] Cool.

Robbie Wagner: [03:33] And she had threw a little bit of shade on you, Chris Manson. She said that your whiskey choice was not good and that your rating was some bullshit or something to that effect.

Chuck Carpenter: [03:47] I pretty much was like, oh, yeah, what he picked, not great. And I know that one, and it’s bullshit. But I guess here’s the thing I learned from an older gentleman that was leading a whiskey tour at Buffalo Trace years ago, and he said the best whiskey is the one you like. And if it’s a $20 bottle of this or a $200 bottle of something else, Pappy, whatever at the time, which you can’t get for $200 anymore, then good for you.

Chris Manson: [04:16] Well, yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [04:17] And I support you in this. If that is a whiskey you enjoy, then it’s good for you.

Chris Manson: [04:21] I enjoyed that whiskey. And the other thing that you also have to take into account is that sometimes a whiskey tastes like the surroundings, like the environment that you’re enjoying it in. And I was having a good time. That was a good podcast. And I have not heard the podcast yet that Mel was on, but I totally agree and accept any criticism that she had on my whiskey choice because, yes, put it this way, there’s a few people in your life that you should always take whiskey recommendations from. Mel would be one of those. And yeah, trust her more than me when it comes.

Chuck Carpenter: [04:58] Robbie is not.

Runspired: [04:59] I’m going to go a step above that because I think with Mel, she knows what she knows, and she knows what she doesn’t know. And if she’s telling you something or she’s saying something, she’s sure about it. She knows.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:13] That’s fair. I can respect that.

Chris Manson: [05:16] Let me see if I can get a pop here.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:19] Yeah, it’s fun.

Runspired: [05:21] Whoa.

Chris Manson: [05:21] Not bad.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:23] Yeah, not bad.

Chris Manson: [05:25] Okay, let’s see.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:26] Impressive. Well, while you guys go through that, I’m going to give the quick overview for Chris, who’s here. Phoenix Chris. I’m going to call him Phoenix Chris right now because it’s just convenient for me. The Murray Hill Club that you’re having.

Robbie Wagner: [05:39] If you go with Runspired makes it easy.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:41] Yeah, it’s true. Internet names just throw me off, but okay, Runspired, we’re having the Murray Hill Club whiskey, which is from Joseph A. Magnus. It’s a revival brand that was originally in Cincinnati pre-Prohibition. It was revived in 2015 in Washington, DC. This is sourced whiskey of three different kinds. Eleven and 18-year-old bourbon and then a nine-year-old lighter. And then they did like six months finish in like sherry casks or something.

Chris Manson: [06:11] Wow.

Chuck Carpenter: [06:12] Robbie.

Robbie Wagner: [06:12] So the real whiskey for this time is the intended, the Redbreast Twelve Year. It’s a mix of malted and unmalted barley, and it’s triple distilled in pot stills, bottled and bond in Ireland, and aged in bourbon and sherry barrels, apparently.

Chuck Carpenter: [06:34] Just to be fair, I have had it before. I’ve had the twelve and the 18. I had the twelve, like, four years ago in Toronto, and I haven’t had a bad Redbreast.

Robbie Wagner: [06:43] Yeah, it’s pretty good. I would say it’s like a Scotch light. Like, it’s not very Scotchy, but it has, like, little bits of Scotch notes to it.

Chris Manson: [06:55] That is quite tasty.

Robbie Wagner: [06:56] It’s initially a little bit sweet and like, fruity, but then, like, yeah, the finish has, like, just a little bit of, like, smokiness and what you would get from a Scotch. So I think it’s all around nice, a little bit complex. I would give it it’s so hard to rate these because I don’t know how to, like, rate them against each other, but I’m going to stick with a five on this one. Five tentacles.

Chris Manson: [07:23] Interesting. See, this is quite a challenge for me because I think I might have said this last time around that I do. I like a kind of a smooth whiskey, as you said before. You you like what you like. You know, this one’s harder to drink, it’s got a bit more of a burn, but it is definitely tastier, and I didn’t leave myself a lot of room in my last rating. When I give it, I think it was a seven. I get it, and I’d say that this would just about edge out the Glendalock for me. Like, I’d probably prefer this one, so I’d probably give it a seven.

Chuck Carpenter: [07:59] Then I’d say this is an iterative process, and this is your second rating. So you’re coming out of the gate and you’re like, this was great, and then now you’re having something else also new, so you didn’t have that information before. We don’t have strict standards around it. Some of it’s about, like, would you have it again? Do you find it interesting and complex? Is it drinkable? Is it shareable? Is it things like that?

Chris Manson: [08:24] It’s interesting because it is very much an Irish whiskey and I actually did a bit of research because I figured I should know what a pot still was before coming into this since I’m representing here. But this, in my mind, I would categorize in the Scotches. Like, it is very, as you say, Scotch light. I put that in that category. And I have tasted much tastier Scotches than this. As I said last time, go to Edinburgh, ask them what’s good, and they will give you a very tasty whiskey for a very cheap price. Or at least it was back when I went there. So I guess maybe I wouldn’t give it a seven. I’d probably give it a six.

Chuck Carpenter: [09:09] I think that’s fair.

Chris Manson: [09:10] Is what I would say.

Chuck Carpenter: [09:13] It was a friend of mine from Dublin who had suggested Redbreast for me to begin with, and I think that was the first time I had the twelve initially. And I’ve been to Edinburgh and asked them for delicious whiskeys. So I will concur with you that it’s recommended.

Runspired: [09:29] I’ve not been to Edinburgh to ask them for tasty whiskies yet, but if we’re still friends after this, Chris, maybe you can bring them along.

Chris Manson: [09:38] Well, see, this is the thing. It used to be easy for me to get to Edinburgh and to just do whatever, but now there’s more of a border between Ireland and the UK, which is controversial, but, like, well, the thing is, for a long time this year, the Irish whiskey shop has been incapable of getting any Scotches because importing from the UK area has been difficult.

Runspired: [10:07] We have a little bit of that going on in the US where apparently bourbon prices are so high, a lot of places now that the whiskeys that used to be the top shelf, expensive stuff are the easier to get and better-priced option.

Chris Manson: [10:23] Interesting.

Chuck Carpenter: [10:25] Yeah. We have secondary market issues, first of all, and then retailers are actually following suit to the secondary market prices, and then the distillers will start to follow that. So like Bookers, this is an example of like a barrel-proof whiskey that used to be $44 per comes out of Jim Bean. A small batch thing was awesome. It was like best bang for the buck three years ago. They doubled the price.

Chris Manson: [10:46] Wow.

Chuck Carpenter: [10:46] Because that’s what it was selling on the secondary. And they’re like, Why aren’t we getting that money? So it isn’t even like a tariff-related instance. It’s a demand market demand thing.

Runspired: [10:55] Everybody drinking at home.

Chris Manson: [10:56] I don’t want to tank the podcast too early, but that just sounds like NFTs to me.

Chuck Carpenter: [11:02] I was wondering why they started putting these like ugly ape drawings on there, and that makes sense to them. That is all ridiculous.

Runspired: [11:09] Speaking NFT’s how are we doing on the ship shape NFT.

Chuck Carpenter: [11:13] So the ideas there, as you know.

Robbie Wagner: [11:15] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [11:16] Ideas are one thing. Starting them or taking them to fruition, it’s something else altogether. Still, want to do that? Because that will get you something in the 1787 Club. I’m going to make it happen someday.

Robbie Wagner: [11:27] Yeah, we’ll get Juan to do it, but we got to have art for it. There’s a lot of things you got to do. You can’t just click a button, so. It’s coming. TBD.

Chuck Carpenter: [11:35] Put a pin in that one. Anyway, should we talk about tech things?

Robbie Wagner: [11:38] Yeah, I guess so.

Chuck Carpenter: [11:39] Let other people talk about tech things. Okay, fair enough. This isn’t just the Whiskey podcast. Otherwise, we’d really be underwhelming people.

Robbie Wagner: [11:47] Yeah. I think the gist of the topics here are around maintaining open source things and kind of like beginner experience and barriers to entry and different guardrails around things and that kind of stuff. I guess all of us but Chris Manson have a little bit of background into this from the last podcast that hasn’t aired yet.

Runspired: [12:14] I don’t know. Did we actually get into that on the podcast? Or was that just after?

Chuck Carpenter: [12:18] Oh, that’s true. I don’t know.

Robbie Wagner: [12:19] It may have been after.

Chuck Carpenter: [12:21] It may have been after, and then that’s the inception of this episode.

Robbie Wagner: [12:25] Yeah, but anyway.

Runspired: [12:26] I’m hoppy to give a little backdrop here.

Chuck Carpenter: [12:28] Yeah, sure, you could intro it.

Runspired: [12:30] I think that’s worthwhile months ago or whatnot? When Chris’s episode aired, I’m taking a nice road trip. I’m listening to the podcast and I think to myself, I’m liking everything this guy is saying. I’m nodding along and nodding along and nodding along, and then all of a sudden screech car breaks. How did you get to that conclusion? This is one of those cases where everything I agree with and then the outcome is 180 from what I think. And I want to emphasize, I think I don’t know, I have just as much inexperience as the next guy when it comes to this stuff and maintaining open source. We’re all just kind of flying by the seat of our pants and trying our best. But my lived experience around certain things has led me to opposite conclusions in some of these areas, as Chris. So I thought it might be fun to have a conversation around this because I think we both really care about the same problem, which is how do you get more people to successfully contribute to more projects?

Chris Manson: [13:37] We kind of haven’t hit the actual specifics of the thing, but I have a very strong feeling I know which conclusion you’re talking about, but I will say that I think it’s interesting if you phrase it in terms of getting more people contributing to more projects. The challenge is that actually, I think both of us can be right in this outcome because not every person is created equally. Like there are juniors, intermediates, experts, and experts in C++ that are juniors in Web World, et cetera, et cetera. And I think I have a feeling, hopefully, that if I can expand a bit on the points that I made in my previous podcast and kind of what we’re going to talk about today, I hope that there will be a feeling that both concepts or both opinions can live in the same world and both be true. I hope that makes sense.

Runspired: [14:44] I very much agree with that. And as I said, I was sitting there nodding along the whole time, and I took a step back, and I tried to reflect afterwards and think, why do I have this other conclusion? And I don’t know this for a fact. We both work on a lot of things, but I suspect it’s my experience with Ember Data because Ember Data has a complexity to it that most projects don’t.

Chris Manson: [15:14] So before you go into too much detail, do you want to be specific for the listeners as to what the disagreement was? Because I think it will start making sense when you talk about the internals of Ember Data.

Runspired: [15:28] There’s more than one disagreement here, though.

Chris Manson: [15:29] Oh, interesting.

Runspired: [15:30] So the main one for our listeners to kind of stop teasing it is going to be TypeScript, but it goes beyond that. The statement that caused me to slam the brakes was, why is it not the first thing in the world that people are trying to optimize? This is you in regards to developer experience for onboarding new contributors. And I sat there, and I thought to myself, well, everything that you just listed as a barrier, which I agree with, are barriers. Everything that you just listed as a barrier is a thing that we’ve chosen to do in Ember Data. But we’ve chosen to do it for exactly the opposite reason. We actually are trying to optimize the contribution. So how did we get so different? That’s where this idea for podcast comes from. We added as much linting infrastructure as we could. We went to a mono repo. We added ridiculous numbers of test scenarios. We have way more rules around what needs to happen for a contribution to come in, way more process around it than most projects do. And yes, it’s hard to get new contributors, and I want to change that. But I don’t actually think removing those handrails is going to help us. I actually think doubling down on that is going to help us. So I want to talk about why I think about that, but also, I want to try to align that with your thinking because I think there is a middle ground. The question for us to answer is how do we make it where a new contributor can step in? Maybe they’re super junior, maybe they’re super senior, regardless of their skill level, but step into that project and be comfortable enough to make that contribution. And the other side of this, why are we not trying to optimize this? And we are. But where that hit me, the other side of that is you also have to ask what are you trying to optimize for in that contribution. Are you just trying to optimize for great? You fixed our spelling in our docs and ship it. Or are you trying to optimize for you made the correct bug fix, and all I have to do is merge this and, in the case of Ember Data, a project that has lived a long time, where, yes, the documentation could be improved a lot, but it’s really kind of there and kind of built and been there for a long time? The bulk of the contributions coming in are bug fixes. We are a project subject to Hyrum’s Law. And since not everyone’s familiar with Hyrum’s Law, its definition is with a sufficient number of users of an API. It does not matter what you promise in the contract. All observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody. So a bug fix in number data is almost always going to break somebody. So we need to know who it’s going to break and decide. Is there a different fix? Is this a good fix? Is this not a fix to make at all? Because it’s going to fix things for 20% of people and break things for 80% of people. We need to be able to make those decisions fairly quickly. And if we’re sitting there waiting through, well, did you match the code style? Did you actually write this in a good way? Do the tests actually pass? Do we know from the test if this is going to break a bunch of other stuff or not? If we’re still waiting through all of that before we’re judging, is it the right fix or not? Then we’re wasting so much precious time. I don’t have a lot of time to sit there and figure out and think about what do I need to get this PR to the point that I can evaluate if it’s the right fix. I just want to be evaluating. Is it the right fix? So I don’t know if you have any thoughts on that.

Chris Manson: [19:30] There’s a bunch of things there’s a bunch of things here, and there are a few things that you said that are probably objectively provably true, and there’s absolutely no way that you could argue with those. But there are a few things kind of hidden between objectively true statements that should be arguable and there are plenty of arguments to be made that doing this thing has made it more difficult for this whole class of users.

Runspired: [19:59] Totally agree with that because, again, I want more contributors to Ember Data, and it’s not happening. So we want to change this. Like we know we have a problem, we know we want to change it, we want to get more contributors in, but also we want a quality of contribution. How do we optimize more in the middle?

Chris Manson: [20:17] Let’s talk about that one for a second. So I completely agree with this premise, especially for something A as complex, as long-lived, as important as Ember Data. Like, Ember Data, to me is one of maybe five pillars of why Ember is so good, in my opinion. And that’s a challenge in my position on the Ember learning team because there was this whole conversation that started that was like, oh, let’s sell Ember, but let’s diminish the role of Ember Data as, like, it’s the part of the guides, it’s part of the core learning. And I’m like, no, you’re missing the point. It’s so important to what we’re doing. And yes, it’s complex, but if we remove that, we’re going to remove one of the biggest selling points when we’re going out to people and saying, you should be trying Ember. So you have this complexity and this importance. So that last point that you make, any contribution needs to be verified to death. It’s like you can’t merge something that might accidentally break 10% of users ever. It just can’t happen. You can’t do that. But optimizing for that last step is okay if you are capturing intermediates or experts as potential contributors. And the problem that you have is that people might need to build up to the step of contributing a perfect PR that’s ready to hit merge or have a serious discussion on a weekly meeting. Should we do this, or shouldn’t we? To get to that point, there could be ten steps for somebody who doesn’t know Ember, who’s an expert, or like a senior developer. There could be 100 steps for somebody who’s an intermediate HTML and JavaScript CSS developer, doesn’t know any framework, doesn’t know anything about ORMS, or data accessing libraries, or anything like that. And what I am trying to optimize for personally is the first 20 to 50 steps of that process, not the last ten. And this is what I was trying to say at the beginning, which was like, these two statements can be true, but I’m optimizing for a very different part of the flow. I technically want most of the projects that I work with. I want them to be able to intrigue and captivate literal juniors who are learning JavaScript and not capture, not like trick them into using Ember. But like trick them into using Ember so much that they that they become Ember people. And then in four years time, they go, actually, I don’t want to just build blogs and Ember’s things. I want to go and talk to the other Chris and do real stuff in Ember Data. I want to be the top of this funnel for people to try and help them get interested in Ember things. I hope that makes sense.

Runspired: [23:34] It totally makes sense, and it aligns completely with what I saw in terms of success, in terms of getting people into Ember Data as a project. So we went through about a year and a half, two-year period where the project actually got really good momentum. A number of contributors was going up, the number of new contributions going in was very high. It was simply unsustainable unless I was doing it full-time. Because the successful strategy there was if a new issue was opened or a new PR was opened, I sat there, and I spent the hour to work with that person to get them the context they needed to do the right thing or to explain how to write the test to show that there was an issue or to confirm that there wasn’t. So that time overhead was just simply something I couldn’t continue to absorb. But when I did, running the project as if I was a project manager, putting that SLA on feedback to make sure that people felt heard and could continue to contribute, that made it very much more successful. But it’s a hard problem because people in open source have lives too. We’ve got other interests, and it’s difficult to sustain that all the time. So what processes can we put in place? This is where I got very interested. What processes can we put in place by which all those people that I was manually helping before need less assistance for those contributions to make it into a release? And I looked at that, and I realized TypeScript solved a lot of my problems. And the reasons for Ember Data moving to TypeScript go well beyond the contributor problem. But the biggest one is the contributor problem because most of what I was explaining to people when they were coming into the project was, hey, this is how this thing relates to that thing. This is how you’re allowed to use it. This is the expected contract. A lot of stuff is internal. It’s not necessarily public API, but we have this big internal set of interfaces that you need to know about, too, in order to contribute. So TypeScript gives us this documentation. It gives us this flow analysis. It gives us this exploration tool to poke around the code base and figure out how it works and what does what and what goes where. And the more that we’ve adopted TypeScript, the more I’ve seen people capable of making a contribution without my assistance that had the right fix. And this goes back to a key point that you said. One of your points was keep it simple. Like when you’re writing code, keep it simple because if that new contributor comes in and they can’t understand the code, then they’re not going to be able to make the fix, they’re not going to be able to make the change. They probably will just leave and bail because they just can’t read it. The nice thing about TypeScript is if it’s too complex, you probably can’t type it. And if you can’t type it, you’re not going to write it that way.

Chris Manson: [26:59] I have a confession to make, which is probably like, sorry, Robbie, sorry Chuck, would have taken the teeth out of this entire episode if I had confessed this beforehand. I actually think that there is a subclass of projects that TypeScript is the right thing to do, and Ember Data is firmly in that subclass of projects. Like, there is no argument that I could make today or any day that would say TypeScript is bad for Ember Data and it’s harming contributions or whatever. The issues that I have with using TypeScript are firmly in the category of people who are spending 90% of the time thinking about their types for a system that doesn’t need to be typed and that a year ago, two years ago, you wouldn’t have thought to even type it. And all of that time that you were thinking about these complex type structures, you could have had a product out there in front of people a week ago, a month ago, and getting tied up in these weird type systems. And I haven’t really had that much experience in actually building a typed application or anything or a library or anything like that until very recently, where I’m working with an Apollo API. So it’s the whole GraphQL thing. They have a typed facade to like an ancient API, this sort of thing. And in that scenario, I was thinking, is this in this category of things that types would help me? Like, do I put it in the we shouldn’t be using types here, or we should be using types here bucket. And I can see an argument for using types, but types have not helped to define a consistent API surface area of this GraphQL. Do you call it an endpoint? What you call it? I don’t know what you call a collective.

Chuck Carpenter: [29:00] I mean, it’s only one endpoint, right? So it’s usually.

Chris Manson: [29:03] It’s one endpoint. Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [29:04] It’s one endpoint. So you usually discuss it in terms of queries or mutations. I feel like you’re starting another SmackDown with me, possibly around types in Apollo. And so I do agree with you in that sense, and I think that okay in that context. We’re actually starting to align and get to a better consensus of it’s the right tool for the job at the time. What is your use case? Is it a good tool? Don’t add TypeScript because it’s hot and whatever. There’s a good reason why Shepherd JS that’s been around forever. It’s our open-source thing like it’s a UI tour. Could we add TypeScript? Sure, if you want to learn TypeScript, is it necessary for the library and the API it offers? I don’t know.

Runspired: [29:46] On the other hand, if you are pre-building your GraphQL queries, which you should be, if you don’t care about performance at all, totally. Then you also can prebuild the types for what those queries return, which means that you get good guarantees on the front end that you’re using properties that actually exist, that if you remove something from the query, that you’re getting feedback in your application of where you need to go refactor. That’s stuff that I see so many bugs about in feature code.

Chuck Carpenter: [30:22] Yeah.

Runspired: [30:22] Product dev, that whole class of errors that can just be kind of nicely taken away from you by that adoption. But I totally also agree with you, Chris. Like, feature code does not need to be TypeScript as the same way the library code probably needs to be right now. It’s nice when it happens, but it’s not a requirement. In the same way, it’s not as beneficial quite the same way. With feature code, you’re not creating an API that tons of people are interacting with. You’re probably going to use that component in one place, two place, five places, ten places. It’s not going to be used by thousands of apps or tens of thousands of apps in all these different places. So there is a different trade-off there. But I also think you’re seeing the other end of the problems with TypeScript adoption, which is critical mass. For a long time, so many projects were untyped that were library code that if you wanted to type your feature code, you wanted to type your product code, you were spending most of your time writing types for the libraries that you were importing. That equation, I think, is starting to shift. I feel most projects now are shipping types are at least indefinitely typed in some capacity. But as more and more things get adopted into TypeScript ecosystem, the balance of that trade-off is starting to be where maybe actually writing my product code in TypeScript has a win. I don’t know that it’s there yet all the way, but I totally accepted the argument that if you’re writing a feature, if you’re writing a product, why adopt TypeScript from the beginning if it’s going to slow you down?

Chris Manson: [32:13] Yeah. So why adopt it from the beginning and definitely, definitely don’t in the middle of a many 100,000 line code base swap to TypeScript and have to change things and spend months upon months fixing everything that actually it wasn’t broken in the first place? That’s another thing that it scares me when I hear people who are going, okay, we’re going to stop product development for two months to move to TypeScript. Like that seems to be missing the point.

Runspired: [32:49] Bringing it back to the contributor question, though, I think TypeScript adoption to me is not that dissimilar tool to I’m adding a whole bunch of lint rules. For instance, in Ember Data, for a long time, we’ve had two kind of more unique things, and I want to call these out because, in the last conversation around this stuff, everyone’s like, oh well, if it’s in the default blueprint, that’s great. If you found on the convention, that’s great. It’s when you deviate from convention that’s an issue. And every data has deviated from the Ember ecosystem conventions in a lot of places. So what I would say to that is the conventions are starting ground, the defaults are starting ground. They’re probably a place that’s the minimum that you want to adopt and then build from there. And what we did in Ember Data was two things. Specifically, the first thing is we added some lint rules specific to performance situations that people kept hitting where hey, if you’re hiding a contribution and you got a nested for loop, and the Babel transpiler is going to cause this to create excess number of closures. Sorry, you’ve got to rewrite this code because that led to these pathological like every iteration of the loop generating new function situations, which, hey, I’m getting 10,000 records from my API and boom for as many of those safeguards as we’ve put in place. We got a PR for a new one this week. That shocked me because I had zero idea this could happen. An API is returning so many records that the array copy via spread notation doesn’t work.

Chris Manson: [34:40] How is that possible?

Runspired: [34:42] It exceeds the max number of arguments that’s built into JavaScript, which apparently is 67,900 or so.

Chuck Carpenter: [34:52] Wow.

Chris Manson: [34:52] Oh, goodness gracious.

Chuck Carpenter: [34:54] Today, I learned, right? I had no idea.

Chris Manson: [34:57] Yeah, that’s terrifying.

Runspired: [34:59] It is terrifying, but it’s one of those things where when you’re dealing with a library that’s going to be processing a lot of API data, you have no idea the volume performance situations start really mattering, and we would add lint rules for these. So our lint config has always been more strict, always been not more convoluted than other people’s configs, but that is a barrier because it means if I go into GitHub, this is my favorite way to drive by contribute. I don’t fork the project. I just go in, I hit the edit button in the UI, I make the tiny little change, I submit the PR, and I move on. And a thousand percent of the time, the test will fail because either the lints wrong or that I didn’t run the test in advance, so I didn’t know some other thing wasn’t working. But as much as I love that style of contribution, those guards have to be there for a reason. You don’t want to be like, oh yeah, that looks kind of visually correct, and merge it and then 2 seconds later have somebody pop up and go, hey, you broke LinkedIn because this doesn’t.

Chuck Carpenter: [36:07] They still have users?

Chris Manson: [36:11] This is supposed to be a pro-Ember podcast, right?

Runspired: [36:14] So we put CI in place for this, and the moment you put CI in place, you’ve added the biggest barrier to drive by contribution there is because I can’t show up on GitHub and just hit submit on that patch and move on.

Chris Manson: [36:29] So let’s dig into this just a second because I think this is another one of those ones where you’ve said two things and you’ve equated them, but I’m pretty sure there’s like a logical fallacy that’s like false equivalency or something.

Runspired: [36:43] Probably.

Chris Manson: [36:43] I can’t remember. There was a great website that somebody shared to me recently that was like all of the logical fallacies and explained with diagrams. And I’m like, yes, because not only did it explain it, you can link to a single logical fallacy, and then you can just passive-aggressively link people to the logical fallacy that they.

Runspired: [37:04] I swear it was on this podcast, but someone was saying they had, like, a deck of cards that had them all on it.

Chris Manson: [37:09] Oh, that’s good.

Chuck Carpenter: [37:10] That sounds familiar.

Chris Manson: [37:12] I want that.

Chuck Carpenter: [37:13] You know, we drink on this podcast, right? So I don’t know.

Chris Manson: [37:19] I’m not even sure if it’s a fallacy. I don’t actually understand them that much. But you said two things that both sounded reasonable, and you said them together that the typed script checks are no different to the linting checks in terms of like barriers to entry. But there’s one problem with that, and I don’t know if you know, the book Thinking Fast and Slow.

Chuck Carpenter: [37:42] Yeah, I know it.

Chris Manson: [37:43] Cool. So it’s for the readers anyway. For the listeners, the idea at least the good idea, the single good idea that was in the first half of the book and then the rest was a bit trash and proved all to be wrong later. But essentially was that we have these two modes when we are perceiving things, when we’re reading things when we’re trying to understand things. We have the fast system, and I think it’s like type one, and you have the slow system, type two. And the slow system is the like sitting down and seriously thinking the sort of thing that looks like would work well in Robbie’s backdrop there. This kind of like leather-bound books like fancy sipping whiskey, thinking for 2 hours, and coming to a single conclusion. But most of the time, we don’t spend our our day in this second slow system. We make quick assumptions because it’s more efficient. Our brain has evolved over millions of years to make quick assumptions based on fractions of data and move on. And when you are reading code, you have this situation if it looks familiar to you, if you are looking at code that is prettified using Prettier and is the same structure that you’re expecting it to see, that is falling into the like quick assumptions, you can actually read it and understand what it’s trying to say. But then, if you have something that’s just off a little bit, like using the standard output and like missing semicolons and indented weirdly, you have to go into your less fast slow part of your brain to just read the syntax of what you’re looking at to then afterwards try and understand what it’s saying. And this is my main problem with TypeScript in that you can’t look at something and go oh, this is a function that is blah blah blah. If you’re used to JavaScript, you have to go and look at it and go oh wait, that’s a syntax there. Oh, no, it’s not. It’s an angle bracket. Oh, that’s a type, oh, there’s a colon there, that means oh, it’s returning a type. So that’s a type that’s being referenced somewhere else. So if you’re not used to reading TypeScript day to day, and you haven’t become so familiar with it that it’s moved from your slow system into your fast system, then even just reading the code is a barrier. And that is kind of what I’m talking about. And this is another reason why it’s more of a problem in the first 20% to 30% of this 100-step process to becoming a contributor to Ember Data. Because actually, for contributions to Ember Data, you probably want people to be using their slow part of their brain to think about it deeply, think about secondary side effects that they hadn’t seen on first glances, et cetera, et cetera. That is another reason why it’s valuable to have those sorts of slowdowns in library code that can have secondary effects to people that you could never imagine. I hope all of that made sense and it wasn’t too much of a ramble.

Runspired: [40:55] I really think the crux of what I’d like to get at is what are your thoughts on how we balance being super drive-by contributor friendly, super first contributor friendly with quality and carefulness of contribution. So somewhere there in the middle is, I think, a nice ground.

Chris Manson: [41:20] I do have an answer for that, and I think the first answer is that you can’t be you specifically in Ember Data can’t.

Chuck Carpenter: [41:29] I agree with that.

Chris Manson: [41:30] Cater for both of those ends of the spectrum. What we have in the Ember Learn organization is we have a bunch of projects that can cater for those drive-by early steps in that 100-step process and a bunch of projects that can cater to the middle few steps. And we have exactly one project that has the same sort of limitations that you’re talking about that if a drive-by contributor comes in, like, we spend hours looking at that change and making sure that it doesn’t break stuff. And that’s in the Deprecations App because the Deprecations App because the Ember Learn team kind of manages all of the Ember websites and apps and things like that and the documentation. The Deprecations App has an extreme requirement to still support every single Deprecation URL that has ever been published in any version of Ember since 1.0. And people might not know that. People might not be aware of that and might make a little changes like, oh, let’s change this thing because the anchor IDs have a strange extra ID in the ID, and they’re like, no, you’re breaking the link reject. Don’t do that. You can’t change that. It has to be like the biggest legacy software that you can ever think about. It can never change.

Runspired: [43:01] Yeah.

Chris Manson: [43:02] But the answer is to have a pathway to get from junior to all the way to, like, Ember Data or Ember CLI. And a lot of the times when I’m trying to get people interested in contributing to Ember, I see Ember Learn the and all of the things that we maintain as a kind of a gateway drug to becoming an Ember CLI contributor and a framework contributor, an Ember Data contributor. It’s like a training ground. And what you need is not a way to get juniors or intermediates to contribute to Ember Data. You need feeder schools that lead to the University of Ember Data. I hope that makes sense.

Runspired: [43:51] I fully agree with that, which is take back to the previous point I started and probably didn’t wrap up. That’s why I started managing Ember Data more like a project manager because I realized I needed to take contributions from the drive-by stage and see if I could help them evolve as contributors, get more and more involved, up the level of their contribution, and get them into that point where they were regular high-quality contributors. It’s just so much effort for one person.

Chris Manson: [44:27] Yeah.

Runspired: [44:27] If I was full-time employed for Ember Data, no question I could pull that off. But I’m not.

Chris Manson: [44:34] So I think I brought this concept up in the last podcast, but I know that I was talking to somebody this week about it. But that’s not your job. You are better suited doing what you’re good at and focusing on that because we need you. Your brain is great. Keep doing the thing that you do. What we really need is a developer advocate for Ember. We need as a community to find some pool of funding, to hire somebody to be 100% focusing on that pipeline that I’m talking about, getting people in at the bottom, finding ways for them to get from the bottom. To the middle grounds identifying the projects. Project managing people up that scale and getting them to your door when they are ready to contribute to a complex, hard project.

Runspired: [45:33] I’m going to challenge that is we don’t need one of those. I think we need like four or five of those.

Chuck Carpenter: [45:42] Right, but without the right sponsorship, where does that come from? I mean, the reality is you can identify the problems all day long. It takes money.

Robbie Wagner: [45:50] So if only companies had money.

Chris Manson: [45:53] If only companies who depended on Ember.

Runspired: [45:56] I honestly think Ember will be more successful if we don’t try to rely on one company or big companies to be that sponsor. I wish we could get the steering community to take the Open Collective funds and just fund the developer. It’s not quite enough contribution on a monthly basis to do that.

Chris Manson: [46:16] Yes.

Chuck Carpenter: [46:17] But if people knew where it was going, the contributions could change. If people knew it was going to a dedicated person who was helping them, I bet those contributions might scale.

Robbie Wagner: [46:26] I actually had this conversation with Leah and people that sponsor Ember on GitHub. Where does that money go? Right. We don’t really know. Like, maybe to EmberConf, maybe to, like, the management, it does not.

Runspired: [46:41] Core team member meetings, EmberConf stuff, swag here and there.

Robbie Wagner: [46:45] Yeah. None of it goes to people contributing. So if you want to support someone who’s doing good work.

Runspired: [46:50] ATBS build.

Robbie Wagner: [46:51] There’s not an easy way to show that you’re contributing to Ember for that.

Chris Manson: [46:57] I disagree. I don’t represent Tilde like they’re the financial sponsor for the Open Collective. But if you look at Open Collective, one of the most the biggest contributors is GitHub sponsors. So all of the money from GitHub sponsors goes into the Open Collective. And the Open Collective is an accounting system for inputs and outputs. And if you look at it, there are more inputs than we have outputs at the moment. So there is a fund-collecting.

Chuck Carpenter: [47:25] Okay.

Chris Manson: [47:26] But as Chris says, there’s not enough of a fund for Open Collective to pay somebody’s wages and, like, pay for it for more than two months and then fire them. You know what I mean?

Chuck Carpenter: [47:40] Yeah, right. But I mean, who decides that? That’s a thing, though, also. So right now, what’s in there? If there’s something that needs to be done for two or three months or whatever, who decides that someone gets to take that as wages and get the job done?

Chris Manson: [47:56] My answer to that is us. My other answer to that is that we don’t have a process for that from a financial perspective. So there is a Framework core team, there is a steering committee, and I reckon that if you could get a consensus amongst the core team members that we need to spend that money on something, there will be no barriers to actually do that. But obviously, that’s quite a hard thing to do. Get a true consensus.

Runspired: [48:25] I’ll be a little one here.

Robbie Wagner: [48:29] Please do.

Runspired: [48:31] The only reason I still contribute to Ember Data is not the goodness of my heart. I have zero time left right now for contributing to Ember Data. In fact, I have negative time for contributing to Ember Data. And I feel bad about that because I do think the project has stalled more than I’d like to see since that occurred and needs somebody to continue pushing it forward. The reason I’m still there two things. One while I was consulting I’m not consulting currently, but while I was consulting, I had someone come to me and say, we have a specific performance problem, which I knew I could rearchitect parts of Ember Data and address. So I spent the time and worked on that. But the main reason I’m regularly there, I have one sponsor who tosses me $100 a month to work on Ember Data.

Chris Manson: [49:26] Nice.

Runspired: [49:27] And so I just try to make sure I check in. I merge a couple of PRs, I fix a couple of issues here and there, and I don’t have that time, but I want to make sure that that project is in good hands and is continuing to be healthy and somebody is willing to pay me to do that, so I do. I wish out of the goodness of my heart I couldn’t contribute all the time to Ember Data, but I can’t.

Chris Manson: [49:55] So I’m going to add to that story. I have the same problem. I have too many fingers in too many pies. I do too much open-source. And sometimes, when kids are gone to bed, it comes to 09:00. I finished the chores and cleaned up the house or whatever. I’m like, do I sit down on the couch and play computer games, or do I go and fix the bug that’s stopping something working or whatever in Ember Learn? And for the same reason, I have two sponsors on GitHub, and one of them is Robbie Ship Shape, or Robbie personally, and the other is Mel. And I just have that little angel on my shoulder, and it’s 20 quid a month like it’s a fifth of what you get, and it’s just enough to nudge me from you have 30 minutes or an hour left. Are you going to waste it on playing Hades on a Switch, or are you going to fix that bug? And I just go tilted five out of seven times. I would be in front of the computer to fix a bug just because of that little nudge that I have people who are putting their money where their mouth is to say, hey, I like what you’re doing. Thank you for contributing to open source. Keep doing it.

Chuck Carpenter: [51:18] I like that you spend like at least 20% time playing Switch, though. I just want to keep that up. Don’t go less than 20%.

Chris Manson: [51:24] It was 10% last year.

Robbie Wagner: [51:26] Well, so this brings me back to the Ember sponsor issue. It’s like both of you are getting money from people directly to you. Why isn’t some of the Ember money going to you to help with things? I get that there are other things that needs to be spent on, but people are contributing and being sponsors of Ember, thinking they’re helping you and us in the community. And who are they really helping?

Runspired: [51:51] I think, as Chris said, there’s not a process for that. There probably is an excess coming in on a monthly basis that something could be done with, but there isn’t a process for that. And that would be an RFC to determine how what is that process. And I think people are scared to take that on because there will be hard feelings. Kind of RFC. How do you determine who gets what? Oh, you made a contribution this month, so we give you X amount or X percent. And that’s just a broad statement. Is it specific people we will give X a month to? That’s actually very hard to figure out.

Chris Manson: [52:34] Yeah, it’s interesting because we’re also not in the normal times at the moment, like in various parts of the world, we’re coming out of the worst of the times. In other parts of the world, it seems like it’s getting worse. God, but that money used to contribute to flying or transporting core team members to be in the same room four times a year. And if people needed help with their travel and accommodation, that’s where it would come from. And we never saw that because we didn’t have Open Collective until after the pandemic started. But that’s what was happening, and that’s what Leah and Tilde were doing behind the scenes. But nobody would see. And you would see very quickly that, actually, the contributions are not enough.

Runspired: [53:23] There’s not anything left. Once you do that.

Chris Manson: [53:26] It’s not only not enough, so much money would have been coming from elsewhere, from like EmberConf ticket sales or whatever, you know, like that money is so small. And the thing that I’m surprised about is that there isn’t like a 20 grand a year minimum from big companies that rely on Ember from a day-to-day basis.

Chuck Carpenter: [53:50] Well, that’s the license though. So that’s licensing, and that’s some other stuff. So I mean, didn’t this all come to light from the like FakerJS stuff blowing up and this guy like freaking out because Microsoft was taking too much advantage, he was getting contributions, and whatever else. And the community has spoken up and said, yeah, but you set your license incorrectly. Then if you wanted outcome B, you have set your license to outcome A. So now, if you don’t want major corporations to take advantage of that way and if they’re going to resell your product for money and make money from what you’ve built on their stuff, then you have to change the licensing so the onus isn’t actually on the company to do good. Because I think, okay, those of us in America, we know if it’s like you should pay a certain amount of tax, but the law allows you to pay less tax, they’re going to pay less tax because the law allows that. So if you want a different outcome, then you’ve got to play what the law is.

Runspired:[54:46] I’m going to reframe that slightly.

Chuck Carpenter: [54:48] Okay. I think you should.

Runspired: [54:50] A company like LinkedIn, big company uses Ember, hires tons of Ember core team members. They from their perspective, and I think rightly feel that they have invested in the framework.

Chuck Carpenter: [55:04] I agree with that.

Runspired: [55:05] Because they are paying those developers and sometimes not all the time, not even most of them, but sometimes they ask those developers to specifically do something open source, so they look at it as they paid for those contributions, and that’s correct. That’s totally valuable. The problem is open source isn’t just about what the specific feature that one company needs. People say it’s tragedy of commons. I don’t think it’s actually a tragedy the commons. I think it’s a narrow perspective. If you’ve got ten big companies using the same library and each contributing the big feature or the big fix that each one of those ten companies needs, the 10,000 tiny companies that couldn’t afford to do that are still going to be living with all the edge cases that their apps had that the big companies, for whatever reason, don’t have. Whether they internally have a different pattern that they’re using that doesn’t have that, or they have some other library that deals with that. It’s open source. For open source, health needs contributors who are capable of fixing the small problems that don’t necessarily affect a big company.

Chuck Carpenter: [56:27] Yeah, I think you’re speaking from a little experience now. First of all, you’re framing some truth that you’re living. I just want to regress 1 second back to the whole like, but big companies will give their engineers time for open source or personal projects. That whole like 20% time thing, though, that’s a tax game also because R&D credits through the government are also a thing.

Robbie Wagner: [56:52] Oh yeah, so we get those.

Chuck Carpenter: [56:54] They frame it as we’re doing the right thing. Yeah, we know because we’re doing it also, just like anyone else. You can go off and do a project, which, by the way, like Gmail, was a 20% Google project that came back and obviously worked out for them. So it’s a win win. They get to have this R&D potential throwaway code time, but then they can pull a diamond out of the rough. So it’s like, oh, poor them. They’re putting some things into it, but it’s an R&D credit that they get anyway, and then potentially, they get some amazing payoff out of it.

Chris Manson: [57:24] So can I reframe that for you as well, since we’re in the game of reframing things?

Chuck Carpenter: [57:30] Hey, can you guys show up and fix all of my fuck ups from here on out? Because they’re going to keep happening.

Robbie Wagner: [57:36] Yeah. Edited by Chris.

Chuck Carpenter: [57:39] I’ve got two more wives just for the podcast.

Chris Manson: [57:42] So the key thing I just want to, like, change in what you said was companies are never going to do the right thing. It’s never going to happen. That’s not the incentive structure for companies ever. And that includes literally poisoning the well. If there’s a well there and there’s nothing that stops them from poisoning in it, they’re going to do it. But if they have to drink from that well, that is when things change. And the problem that I have is not that we don’t have enough engineers because I was trying to avoid saying any big company, but you said LinkedIn. LinkedIn hire a whole bunch of the Ember core team, and they spent a whole bunch of their time doing a whole bunch of great things for Ember. That’s good, but LinkedIn doesn’t own.

Runspired: [58:30] It is great. We are where we are today with Ember because of that.

Chris Manson: [58:33] And they have a prominent place on the sponsor page on Emberjs.com. And people don’t get there for just giving 20 quid. They get there for doing serious things. And that’s good. That’s great, that’s wonderful. But the point here is that we’re missing a particular skill set in the contributions to Ember. Nobody owns Ember. LinkedIn doesn’t own Ember. If Ember becomes the number one framework tomorrow, LinkedIn gets zero of that spillover. Congratulations. It’s not like, oh, it’s LinkedIn’s Ember. It’s just Ember. So LinkedIn rightfully don’t hire anybody to market Ember. They don’t pay people to go and market Ember. Like, the only thing that they do is pay engineers enough to go to EmberConf to say, hey, we’re hiring, and try and get other engineers in. But there’s nobody whose job it is to make sure there are more people developing with Ember tomorrow than there are yesterday. But on the same breath, people like LinkedIn find it very difficult to find experienced Ember developers to come and join their teams because nobody’s picking up Ember to do their weekend projects. So there’s just one separation there that we need to have somebody whose job it is to make sure that more people tomorrow are using Ember than yesterday. And just because it’s not a direct causal relationship, big companies aren’t paying for that. And that’s why I’m talking about this big chunk of contribution to the Open Collective and have people then hired from that. Because it’s never going to be LinkedIn’s job to hire somebody to do that. It should be Ember, as the community, our job to hire somebody to do that.

Runspired: [01:00:31] And I don’t mean to drag LinkedIn on to all this specifically. There’s more big companies contributing to Ember than just LinkedIn.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:00:40] Right? Like Chris says, just go to the page, you see the sponsors, you see people that are involved. There’s definitely a lot more of it, but I think it all comes down to the end of the day. Like, great, you’ve identified the need, but you have no roadmap to fill said need. And it sounds like the person that would do that need would be evangelizing. The need to incentivize and pay for it, really, at some point. Right?

Chris Manson: [01:01:03] It’s a catch-22.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:01:04] Yeah. Chicken and the egg kind of problem. How do you get there, right? I mean, do you just basically decide, like, okay, let’s add some cash to EmberConf tickets every year? Because these are all people that believe in it, potentially, and it’s getting funded through, partially through companies and whatever else, and then put that into the salary bit. You got to have a real place where this comes from. And is it like the group sitting on this call isn’t enough people, but also you have the old school, and you have people kind of coming into it. Where’s the middle ground there? You need excitement to sort of make that happen.

Chris Manson: [01:01:40] So I do have an answer to that, but unfortunately, it’s an evening and weekends project of mine, so it’ll probably take four years for it to actually come to anything.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:01:50] Right? Exactly.

Runspired: [01:01:51] I have so many of those.

Robbie Wagner: [01:01:52] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:01:53] Yeah. I’m going to work on our NFTs before I can address this.

Chris Manson: [01:01:57] So I’ve actually broken ground on this project, though.

Runspired: [01:02:00] I got to finish X, which is going to be.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:02:03] By the time I create our NFT. It will make us rich. Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [01:02:07] NFTs will be not a thing by the time our NFT comes out.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:02:10] Yes.

Chris Manson: [01:02:12] It could be the last NFT.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:02:14] Web3. They’re on web5. What happened?

Runspired: [01:02:16] It’s definitely more than Web3 at this point.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:02:20] I’m going defi anyway. I think NFT is whatever.

Runspired: [01:02:23] I think the Web3 joke was like, what, 2009, 2010? Or was that web two? I forget. It’s been too long.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:02:30] I don’t think they branded Web2 until there was a Web3, and they’re like, oh, what do we have to say about the old thing? It was like web future or something weird like that.

Runspired: [01:02:37] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:02:39] You know, what decentralized is still someone else’s server.

Runspired: [01:02:44] So this took a very different turn at the end then I think we were intending.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:02:50] The problem we have is that you guys agreed way too much. I was really hoping that we’re going to fly to.

Runspired: [01:02:57] It’s because I like Chris.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:02:57] I’ve seen Peaky Blinders.

Runspired: [01:02:59] I love Chris.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:02:59] And I thought that we were going to fly to Ireland to end this correctly, even though I’m the one wearing the flat cap. I don’t know.

Chris Manson: [01:03:05] I have not seen Peaky Blinders. I know.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:03:10] It is so good.

Chris Manson: [01:03:12] I think it’s just a little bit too close.

Robbie Wagner: [01:03:14] I’m going to sponsor you for more money, and you’re going to take that time to watch Peaky’s Blinders.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:03:20] Yeah. How many? There’s six season oh, it’s five seasons, I think. The sixth season’s coming out.

Robbie Wagner: [01:03:25] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:03:26] Tom Hardy’s in a few seasons. This is.

Chris Manson: [01:03:28] Nice.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:03:29] Yes, it’s amazing. Cillian Murphy.

Chris Manson: [01:03:32] Cillian Murphy is incredible, though.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:03:34] Yeah.

Chris Manson: [01:03:34] There’s a few, like, a1 tiptop Irish actors, and it’s like Cillian Murphy. I watch anything he’s in part from Peaky Blinders.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:03:44] There’s a few different. Yeah. Apart from Peaky Blinders, apparently, you’re just a Batman kind of guy. I don’t know. So there’s some shows and or movies that I have watched that takes me a little bit to get into the rhythm of the accent and understanding what the hell they’re saying. So, honestly, when there’s space between seasons of Peaky Blinders, I have to go back and watch a couple of episodes in order to get into the rhythm, and then I won’t miss what’s in the new stuff. Right.

Runspired: [01:04:11] Is this the genius of just being late to the game and watching it on Netflix?

Chuck Carpenter: [01:04:15] Possibly. But the first two episodes, you’re not going to know what they’re talking about. It will probably work for you right away.

Chris Manson: [01:04:22]Yeah.

Runspired: [01:04:23] I get frustrated these days when I get.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:04:25] Yeah.

Chris Manson: [01:04:26] He’ll go right.

Runspired: [01:04:26] To an episode of a series and I realize there aren’t anymore.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:04:31] So, like Train Spotting. Right. They’re all Glaswegian, and it’s like gibberish for a while. I read the book, too, first, which is written phonetically, and it helps a lot.

Chris Manson: [01:04:41] Very good.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:04:42] That and Clockwork Orange. Clockwork Orange has a dictionary in the back of the terms they’re using.

Chris Manson: [01:04:48] Really?

Chuck Carpenter: [01:04:48] So it’s like okay now. Yes. Oh, you never would it, yeah.

Chris Manson: [01:04:52] Well. No, I’ve watched Clockwork Orange, but I didn’t notice anything odd. But I guess that’s a cultural thing, though.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:05:00] Well, they have, like, specific vernacular that apparently is, like, Eastern European.

Chris Manson: [01:05:04] Interesting.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:05:05] And it’s supposed to be, like, future set. So these are a few of those things. Completely off-topic. Technically, this is the whatnot portion.

Chris Manson: [01:05:14] We’ve moved into the whatnot? Yeah.

Runspired: [01:05:16] We firmly moved into the what-not perfect.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:05:18] Yeah. Here we are.

Chris Manson: [01:05:19] Because I had a perfect NFT anecdote that I wanted to bring up just to dump on NFT some more.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:05:25] I’d say that’s what not. I know it’s technical, but it is, like, arbitrary to a larger audience.

Robbie Wagner: [01:05:31] Yeah. No, NFT is definitely whatnot.

Chris Manson: [01:05:34] It is 100% whatnot. There’s no way that you’re going to argue that that’s technical for me.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:05:39] I want to know. First of all, how many do you own?

Chris Manson: [01:05:42] Me? Zero. I am not contributing to this shenanigans.

Robbie Wagner: [01:05:47] They’re cheap right now.

Chris Manson: [01:05:48] Oh, jeez. Of course, they are.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:05:50] Well, they’ve already jumped up again. They’re like, Ethereum is, like, 2600 or something, but.

Runspired: [01:05:55] I’ll let you know how poor I am. I know. Zero cryptocurrency and no, NFTs. I’ve avoided it all.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:06:02] Yeah, you have a low-risk tolerance. That’s all right.

Chris Manson: [01:06:04] The anecdote that I wanted to share was something I saw on Twitter I think it was today or yesterday, that there was some sort of rug pull where somebody was, like, creating a Minecraft for something something NFT something something, and it was clearly a scam. And the thing that was interesting wasn’t that they went away with, like, $100 million or whatever it was, or maybe it was just 1 million. I don’t know. It’s all relative. But the thing that was interesting is that when I saw people reacting to that, they weren’t calling it a rug-pull scam. They weren’t even calling it a rug pull as, like, a proper noun. They were calling it a rug. So it’s so common that it’s reclaimed the meaning of a real word to mean a scam. That is, somebody ran away with all your money. How is that okay?

Robbie Wagner: [01:07:02] Oh, yeah, it happens a lot.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:07:04] I mean, okay is subjective. You’re okay with it when you get involved.

Runspired: [01:07:08] This is fine. Meme, you’re sitting in the burning room.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:07:11] Yeah, this is fine. Everything is burning. Yeah, the rug pulls kind of thing.

Chris Manson: [01:07:15] But it’s a rug. The people in the know just call it rugs.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:07:19] Yeah, it’s a rug.

Robbie Wagner: [01:07:19] Everyone has FOMO.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:07:21] Wasn’t that Solana or something?

Robbie Wagner: [01:07:22] So it’s like, you don’t want to miss out, so you’re like, all right, I’ll just buy this thing real quick, and then you get screwed twice because the Ethereum gas fees are like a couple of $100. You’re like, all right, I got to spend this couple of $100 just to buy this thing that’s also a couple of $100? That’s then also just a scam, and I just lost $400. It’s crazy.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:07:42] Yeah, well, we didn’t do a scam. I mean, Robbie’s probably done a few scams because he has FOMO, but.

Robbie Wagner: [01:07:48] No. I don’t have any scams. I’ve invested well, all Shiba Inu and Shiboshis and stuff like that.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:07:55] Yeah. And they have dropped to, like, 60% or something. It’s not a rug pull.

Robbie Wagner: [01:07:59] But, hey, when I bought it, I’ve still made money. I’m sorry. You got in later.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:08:04] Yeah, because I listened to you.

Robbie Wagner: [01:08:06] Hey, okay. Don’t listen to me.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:08:08] Yeah. NFT-wise, I have only listened to. So someone who works for us did, like, a charitable local one with, like, some graffiti art. That’s really cool. And so there’s no rug pull there there’s no million dollar payoff. But it was like.

Robbie Wagner: [01:08:23] You’ll hear about that in a week or so.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:08:26] Oh, yeah. When Juan comes on.

Runspired: [01:08:28] Well, you think there’s no million-dollar payoff.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:08:30] Well, then that’s great.

Runspired: [01:08:31] That dude with the selfies every day for a year.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:08:34] Right. I mean, if it

Runspired: [01:08:35] Next thing you know.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:08:36] Comes to be. I’m fine with that. But I also was like, I’m helping this project. It helps children’s hospitals. Great. I’m good with that.

Robbie Wagner: [01:08:44] Win-win.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:08:45] Yeah. And then there was like one other thing I bought because my friend who paid for half of a Tesla with an NFT setup.

Runspired: [01:08:52] Wow.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:08:53] He was like, oh, yeah, Gary V is talking about this thing, and you should buy this pass or whatever. So I did that. It was like $300, but yeah, I don’t have any weird ape drawings or whatever gift things. I was jealous that there was, like, legit artist oh, gosh, what is his name now? No, I kind of forget.

Robbie Wagner: [01:09:14] Must not be that legit.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:09:15] Damien Hirst. I bet Chris knows who it is.

Chris Manson: [01:09:18] Oh, yeah. Is that not well known?

Chuck Carpenter: [01:09:21] Well, no, I found that other yanks don’t know who Damien Hirst is, but I’ve seen some of his stuff in Scotland and big in England and stuff, too.

Chris Manson: [01:09:30] He’s famous enough that, like, okay, so my whole family are like fine artists, like painters, print artists, et cetera. So I’m kind of in the art world and know art names sometimes, but Damien Hirst would be known by any random or on the street over here, so has spilled over into common vernacular.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:09:52] Yeah. So he did an NFT. My friend has one of his, and I was really jealous. I didn’t really know what was going on there for about six months later after his mint. And you can take his and actually burn it for the physical art if you want.

Chris Manson: [01:10:08] Okay. That is interesting.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:10:11] Yeah.

Chris Manson: [01:10:11] See, this is the thing.

Robbie Wagner: [01:10:13] Yeah, I like that.

Chris Manson: [01:10:14] One conversation that I have heard about this whole NFT thing is that you have this problem with collectors and with the pandemic. People weren’t able to collect art, et cetera, et cetera. So NFTs filled a gap, filled a role there. But it doesn’t really make sense because the problem with art collecting is that a lot of the times people buy these really awesome pieces of work and put them in warehouses. Like the same problem, like it’s just collecting a thing, it’s a token, it’s a receipt. And then they put it somewhere and then pay the gas fees for storing it for ten years and never using it and then selling it to evade tax. Like, there are thousands upon thousands of bona fide artists out there struggling to make a living, especially when galleries are closed. Like that wall behind you, Chuck. Fill that with art, you know?

Chuck Carpenter: [01:11:17] Right.

Chris Manson: [01:11:18] Like, fill that with a hundred quid, including shipping actual physical, non-fungible pieces of art from 20 different artists, local, international, Irish, wherever, and your life will be enriched looking at the thing, not just knowing that it’s in a wallet or a warehouse somewhere. Like.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:11:41] Right.

Chris Manson: [01:11:42] Collect art that actually makes you feel good.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:11:47] I think that’s a different marketplace to what is being addressed here. I don’t think you’re wrong. I think that the bit is being addressed here by the Bored Ape Yacht Club is you’re in the club of I have a Louis Vuitton bag, and I have the thing that looks awesome, right?

Chris Manson: [01:12:03] If you want to bridge that gap of both those worlds of I want to have a thing that will appreciate and like, I want to be in a club of people or maybe one of the first people to ever own a go to your local, like most reputable art college or university or whatever the right word is for like third level education for yourself and go to their end of year show for their final years and buy one of like three or four of the artists. There is a good chance that one of those artists will become like world-renowned and that piece will like 10, 20 thousand X in value, and you have just as much of a chance of that happening than like a Bored Ape Yacht Club GIF or whatever the hell it is.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:12:59] The difference is internet marketing. I honestly believe that the difference is internet marketing is developing like this online presence that blows away people that is like, you want this thing. I’ve done tons of marketing, right? Because they’re algorithmically created. There’s a dozen traits put into a thing, and then there’s like make ABC trait more rare and then it just gets pulled together, and then all of a sudden the rarity of one or ten or whatever out of 1000, and then everybody’s like, I can go this cool rave because I own this thing. That’s all that’s happening. It’s not quality of art if that’s the thing is what you’re saying is like emotional movement versus FOMO, and then like, being a part of a cool club, it’s very different.

Chris Manson: [01:13:47] That marketing aspect is also true if you do that thing that I suggested because people who go to an art college and make it to the end are likely to want to be artists for the rest of their lives. And they’re 100% of their being is marketing their own art in every way, in person, online, everything. So you’re essentially backing a person whose job it is from that point forward to make their art worth more until they die and afterwards.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:14:20] Yeah, I don’t disagree with you to a degree. I think that they’re incentivized to do that. I think that they’re a singular being and artistically driven. And I think the other is a collective who are driven to make you want something like just want to be part of something. And both are lottery tickets. I think they’re both lottery tickets. So just like, what do you value?

Chris Manson: [01:14:46] With the art one, you get your lottery ticket, and you put it on the wall, you can look at it and say, look, I bought this, and it looks good.

Robbie Wagner: [01:14:52] Well, with the Bored Ape Yacht Club, you have members like Eminem and Steph Curry and like famous people, and the thing you get is you get to be in a chat room that you have to own one to be in. So you could theoretically chat with all these famous people.

Chris Manson: [01:15:08] You know, for a fact, that they’re going to be filtering that out or having staff deal with those.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:15:16] Probably. I mean, is it Eminem logged in at all those times? I mean, yeah, sure, there’s all those kinds of things, who knows? Yeah, but you think at least that. And then you’ve decided, I have $10,000 disposable income. Do I want to look at a cool thing on the wall, or do I do I want to talk?

Robbie Wagner: [01:15:32] Not enough.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:15:33] Yeah, I know they’re six-figure things.

Robbie Wagner: [01:15:35] Yeah, they’re like, like hundred thousand. Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:15:37] Yeah.

Chris Manson: [01:15:38] Janey Mac.

Robbie Wagner: [01:15:40] It’s a JPEG. $100,000.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:15:43] My friend has one. He was like. He was early days. You know what I love? What was it? There was some developer who had like wrote, oh no, he’s a crypto guy like cyber security and had got into that and said like, oh yeah, but this is just an image link on a server, and you can name the image overwrite it and just put poop emojis up and then that’s it.

Runspired: [01:16:04] Yeah, I think we got to rebrand non-fungible tokens as whatever fungible tokens, and then we can rebrand the podcast as Whiskey Web and WTFs or WFTs.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:16:21] Perfect. Yeah, we do sort of divulge into this topic a lot lately.

Robbie Wagner: [01:16:25] Yeah, it’s not going to stop.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:16:27] No, I mean, I do like proper football, soccer as us yanks say, and I like cars.

Robbie Wagner: [01:16:33] We’re out of time.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:16:36] That’s the problem. No one else really cares.

Robbie Wagner: [01:16:42] We are actually out of time, though.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:16:44] I was waiting for Chris earlier, and I was looking at the European transfer market.

Chris Manson: [01:16:51] Okay.

Robbie Wagner: [01:16:52] So yeah, we are a little bit over time, but we had a heated discussion, and this was good. So thanks, everybody, for listening, and catch you next time.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:17:03] Thanks for listening to Whiskey Web and Whatnot. This podcast is brought to you by Ship Shape and produced by Podcast Royale. If you liked this episode, consider sharing it with a friend or two and leave us a rating, maybe a review, as long as it’s good.

Robbie Wagner: [01:17:18] You can subscribe to future episodes on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. For more info about Ship Shape and this show, check out our website at shipshape.io.