RobbieTheWagner 
Charles William Carpenter III Robbie Wagner: [00:09] What’s going on, everybody? Welcome to another Whiskey Web and Whatnot with myself, RobbieTheWagner, and my co-host, as always, Charles William Carpenter III, with our guests today, Stephen Shaw. How’s it going, Stephen?
Stephen Shaw: [00:26] Good, guys. How’s it going?
Robbie Wagner: [00:28] Good.
Chuck Carpenter: [00:30] Better than last week, that is for sure.
Robbie Wagner: [00:35] Yeah. So for folks who haven’t heard of you, do you want to give a quick intro into who you are and what you do?
Stephen Shaw: [00:43] Yeah. So I’m Stephen Shaw. That’s pretty obvious. But I work for Code Pen. Building, kind of a code editor for the web. You’ve probably run across it in some capacity. People frequently use it for sharing code samples or demos or showing off their work. And I’ve been doing that about four years now, actually. Over four years now. And we got some great stuff cooking behind the scenes that isn’t public yet but is really exciting. And you all should stay tuned for that. I also ran a live stream where we did animation, web animation, live on the air, kind of recreating Dribble UI animations, and all that, called Keyframers with David Khourshid. We both have been rather busy with other things for the past two years or so, so it’s just kind of been on hiatus. But, yeah, those are my main things.
Chuck Carpenter: [01:40] Cool. Very cool. Later on, we can talk about what kind of boss Chris is.
Stephen Shaw: [01:47] You’ll be pleasantly surprised.
Robbie Wagner: [01:49] He’s great.
Chuck Carpenter: [01:49] He seems like such a jerk otherwise. All right, but for now, to loosen you up for that conversation, we will start with the whiskey. And the whiskey today is an Angel’s Envy straight bourbon whiskey. It’s the Devil’s Advocate, which I think has more to do with the barrel selection itself. Sometimes you get to name them or whatever. Angels Envy is known for port-finishing a lot of their whiskeys. This one was from the prime barrel pick number 54, for whatever reason.
Robbie Wagner: [02:21] Wish we could have gotten 53.
Chuck Carpenter: [02:23] Yeah. 108 proof. The mash bill for all the Angel’s Envy stuff is 72% corn, 18% rye, and 10% malted barley, typically age between four and six years, as must be with a bourbon whiskey. And I don’t know. That’s all we know about it. It has this little metal annoying thing on it.
Stephen Shaw: [02:45] Yeah, just took mine off.
Chuck Carpenter: [02:48] Let’s give it a shot.
Robbie Wagner: [02:50] It smells like a really rich red sangria to me. Very fruity. I don’t know exactly what fruit. Not sure.
Chuck Carpenter: [02:59] I mean, I do like sangria, but I feel like it’s more of a we made this very mediocre alcohol better with fruit and stuff.
Robbie Wagner: [03:08] Hey, don’t put your best wine in sangria.
Chuck Carpenter: [03:11] Yeah, it turns out. It’s interesting because I think I remember reading that the barrel had actually proofed at, like, 118 something, and they proofed it down that bottling even further. So it must have been, like, pretty hot.
Robbie Wagner: [03:24]Interesting.
Chuck Carpenter:[03:26] Tastes like brown sugar to me.
Stephen Shaw: [03:30] Yeah, there is, like, a sweetness coming through, but it’s mostly in the smell.
Chuck Carpenter: [03:34] Yeah.
Stephen Shaw: [03:34] The taste is a lot more flat.
Robbie Wagner: [03:37] Yeah.
Chuck Carpenter: [03:38] Oh, yeah. That’s a little disappointing.
Robbie Wagner: [03:41] It’s kind of like a really mild gingerbread on the taste. What I get?
Chuck Carpenter: [03:46] Yeah.
Robbie Wagner: [03:47] Like a little gingerbread man.
Robbie Wagner: [03:48] Yeah, it’s a good description.
Stephen Shaw: [03:51] No, not my gum drop button.
Chuck Carpenter: [03:53] It’s okay. It’s got some heat on the finish and gets a little. I don’t know, I get a lot of, like, brown sugar through the whole thing. Some gingerbread kind of nutmegyness. And then the finish has kind of like a cinnamon spice, like, burn to it for me.
Stephen Shaw: [04:09] Yeah.
Chuck Carpenter: [04:10] Maybe it’ll open up a little bit more, but okay.
Stephen Shaw: [04:13] Maybe the barrel was made of gingerbread.
Robbie Wagner: [04:16] That would hold up well.
Chuck Carpenter: [04:18] That’s part of the federal mandate, is freshly burned barrels of gingerbread. That’d be a different technique. [inaudible 00:04:27]. So, Shaw, I’ll tell you how the process goes. It’s heavily enforced here. It’s one to eight tentacles as far as a rating on this whiskey or any whiskey that we would have. And one being the worst you’ve ever had, eight being so amazing, and everything else in the middle. Robbie and I tend to segment our whiskeys now kind of by category just because we’ve had so many. And so it gets to be a little easier to say, like, oh, a finished whiskey, a port-finished whiskey. This is a bourbon for sure, and it’s port finished, so we’ll kind of think about it in that context. But if you don’t have that much whiskey, you can totally just put it all time.
Stephen Shaw: [05:06] I’m not too much of a connoisseur. I do enjoy a fine one. I did actually bring some Woodford Reserve, which has been my go-to lately, to directly compare so that I can give a more accurate assessment here.
Chuck Carpenter: [05:21] I think that’s great. That’s something you enjoy and that you’ve been having lately. It gives you kind of a baseline around what you like or don’t like.
Stephen Shaw: [05:31] The Woodford is a lot sweeter. It does not have nearly the kind of burn that the Angel’s Envy is. So I would probably give it a three or a four so far.
Chuck Carpenter: [05:44] Yeah.
Stephen Shaw: [05:45] I’ll get into it a little bit more, and we’ll see if that changes over time.
Chuck Carpenter: [05:50] You can let us know if, over time, it kind of goes up or down for you. Oh, my gosh. What was I thinking?
Robbie Wagner: [05:56] Yeah, for me, thinking about other port-finished things, I think one of the barrel ones that we had was maybe port-finished or kind of lumping those into at least the same category of finished and unique things. I would say this is much less good.
Chuck Carpenter: [06:13] Me no likey.
Robbie Wagner: [06:13] I might give it a little higher, though. Maybe a four and a half, something like that. It’s not terrible.
Chuck Carpenter: [06:20] Yeah, I think that the lack of diversity and the flavor as you’re having it a little bit and then like that real harsh finish to it. I don’t mind some burn and hug, but I don’t feel like I’m getting enough to earn that on the back end. I was going to say a four. We’ve had a bunch of other finished ones, some ports, some rum, some whatever else. So I would have expected a bit more sweetness to this heavy spice rye bomb here. So, I don’t know Prime Barrel. I guess you won’t sponsor us because we’re not supporting your choices.
Robbie Wagner: [06:53] We’ll still buy all our whiskey from you because you ship everywhere.
Chuck Carpenter: [06:57] Yeah. Damn you.
Robbie Wagner: [06:59] So, yeah, the first thing we like to start with is some hot takes. And this first one, I think, is not going to apply to you based on what you’ve said in some of the topics you gave to me, where you said talking about how terrible TypeScript is was one of the things.
Stephen Shaw: [07:12] Yeah.
Robbie Wagner: [07:13] But if you’ve used some TypeScript, have you at all, or do you just avoid it completely?
Stephen Shaw: [07:19] Unfortunately, yes.
Robbie Wagner: [07:20] Okay.
Stephen Shaw: [07:21] We’re in, I wouldn’t say, the middle. We’re in a process of implementing TypeScript throughout an existing code base, which I do not recommend at all. If you have existing code that works, don’t add TypeScript, and that’s not going to make your life any easier. But yeah, we’re in the middle of all that.
Robbie Wagner: [07:41] Okay. Yeah. Well, then the question is, do you prefer inferred types or explicit types when you have to use TypeScript?
Stephen Shaw: [07:48] If you’re going to get into it and actually use types, I think being explicit is helpful. I have been surprised at how well TypeScript is able to infer a lot of times. I still don’t really feel comfortable with it, and I still feel like I need to make it explicit. But overall, yeah, go explicit if you can.
Robbie Wagner: [08:10] Got you. What about for CSS? Do you use Tailwind? Vanilla CSS? Something else?
Stephen Shaw: [08:17] Not a Tailwind fan. I learned coding in the 90s, and inline styles were all you could use, and that was fine for the time, but we’ve grown up a bit, and I do not prefer that. The flavor we use is SCSS at Code Pen. And that’s just kind of been my go-to. It’s just enough, like extra on top of CSS for convenience, nesting, and variables, and easy imports and mix-ins and that kind of stuff without being overbearing. So yeah, I’ll generally just gravitate towards Sass just for convenience.
Chuck Carpenter: [8:59] Got you.
Robbie Wagner: [08:59] It’s reasonable. You want to do a couple Chuck?
Chuck Carpenter: [09:02] Sure. We’ll ask the big Git rebase or Git merge.
Stephen Shaw: [09:07] See, I’m more of a Git UI kind of guy.
Chuck Carpenter:[09:12] Yeah.
Robbie Wagner: [09:13] Same.
Stephen Shaw: [09:13] So most of my rebase experience is googling. I’ve screwed things up horribly in my branch. How do I fix this? And copying and pasting that, I got into source control way late in the game. It was probably only like six years ago that I even really started dabbling. And I think at the time, I even chose something weird like subversion or something like that. I don’t really even remember. So my Git knowledge is not very strong. I’m totally comfortable moving around in it, and I love working in GitHub and that kind of setup. But yeah, the intricacies of it always get a little bit lost in.
Chuck Carpenter: [09:57] Right. I want to stick on the initial topic then of this. And you seem like a very if it ain’t broke, don’t try and force your tool on me kind of guy.
Stephen Shaw: [10:09] Yeah, that’s safe to say.
Chuck Carpenter: [10:12] And you’re mentioning that Typescripts, you’re converting an existing project. I’m guessing that’s just kind of a team decision for whatever pros and cons were decided upon there. So I’m just curious, you’re not a fan of TypeScript in general, but here you are going on this journey. How did you get into that then? What was the thing that is like, well, we still need it?
Stephen Shaw: [10:34] So overall it’s one team member kind of with more experience in it.
Chuck Carpenter: [10:42] Chris.
Stephen Shaw: [10:42] Not Chris. Robert.
Chuck Carpenter:[10:46] You don’t have to out anybody by name, Robert.
Stephen Shaw: [10:49] Yeah, he’s amazing, but he just prefers it because it does help catch a lot of things. But the main problem for me is so much of our app is completely dynamic. It happens at runtime because we’re querying for data, and we’re running all these things based on those callbacks, and you really just end up with a situation where TypeScript isn’t actually catching any of that. And all that work to set up TypeScript in those utilities. Like you get helpful hints in VS Code and all that kind of stuff, but it’s not actually catching any problems, and you spend more time setting up the types or debugging what TypeScript actually wants instead of actually implementing the code or writing tests that would actually help. So if TypeScript was a little more client-side, like, I’d totally be on board with it. And we’re currently looking at some things like Zod that do client-side validation for content and can actually output TypeScript types based on that validation. That’s super great. So that’s mainly like our process right now is the TypeScript adds a lot of useful information for our tool base and does catch some things where you’re not misusing functions, and you get that helpful hinting, but it’s not helping too much with our actual runtime app.
Chuck Carpenter: [12:17] So just casting as any, that’s how you fix it.
Stephen Shaw:[12:21] Unfortunately, we have an ESLint rule that disallows any types. So I have a shortcut for the disabling next line for ESLint TypeScript any.
Robbie Wagner: [12:34] Or do as unknown as the thing you want done.
Stephen Shaw: [12:38] Man, the as thing is so tricky.
Chuck Carpenter: [12:43] Or Satisfies. That’s a good thing too.
Stephen Shaw: [12:46] Satisfies is that?
Robbie Wagner: [12:47] I haven’t gotten Satisfies to work. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.
Stephen Shaw: [12:50] That’s a legit.
Robbie Wagner: [12:51] Yeah, you can use it instead of as, and it’s supposed to be like, I want to say that it completes the shape of this thing, but it doesn’t necessarily have all the same things, and I’m cool with that, but it’s never worked for me. I don’t know why.
Stephen Shaw: [13:08] That sums up typescripts for me.
Chuck Carpenter: [13:10] You just couldn’t satisfy it. Budum tss.
Robbie Wagner: [13:14] I’m not satisfying enough.
Chuck Carpenter: [13:15] There are a lot of weird things, I think, in previous episodes or whatever we’ve talked about, like partials and omit and those kind of things to sort of take a shape of one thing and force it into the other hole with some of less corners.
Robbie Wagner: [13:30] Yeah, there’s a lot you can do, but it does get difficult.
Chuck Carpenter: [13:34] Yeah, I guess that comes back to what things around, like implicit and explicit type inference.
Stephen Shaw: [13:43] Yeah.
Chuck Carpenter: [13:44] Sometimes, yes. Great if all of your friends with their packages have done their jobs, but not always.
Stephen Shaw: [13:51] Yeah, that’s confusing. Like the exports of types and what you’re expected to be able to set up based on another library’s types is always hit or miss for me. Some internal types are just kind of hidden away, and you don’t have access to them, but they get returned, and you end up in this messy situation where you don’t have the actual type that you need, but you’re expected to be able to validate against that. I don’t know. I’m a little bitter here.
Chuck Carpenter: [14:23] Well, I want to draw more of that out. So hopefully, this mediocre whiskey will get into that.
Stephen Shaw: [14:29] It’s getting there.
Chuck Carpenter: [14:30] We did have one more hot take about things, and maybe this should be a good one, I think. What do you think about signals?
Stephen Shaw: [14:37] Signals? Like the Preact kind of setup?
Chuck Carpenter: [14:40] Yeah.
Robbie Wagner: [14:41] SolidJS.
Stephen Shaw: [14:42] Is it exclusive to Preact? I’ve kind of only seen it there.
Chuck Carpenter: [14:45] No, SolidJS is a big one where that is like the primary data directional pattern.
Robbie Wagner: [14:52] It’s like the opposite of React. Like React wants to rerender everything, and you tell it what not to rerender. And signals is the opposite of like. I’m going to rerender nothing unless you tell me to rerender this thing.
Stephen Shaw: [15:03] Yeah, I haven’t actually gotten into using it too much, but from what I’ve seen from the API, it is a lot like hooks. We use a lot of React at Code Pen, and we have a lot of complicated hooks and a lot of complicated logic for trying to prevent rerenders for different scenarios and everything. So I do like the setup of signals and how it’s kind of a less Reactish hook if you will. But yeah, I haven’t played with them enough to give too much of a thumbs up or thumbs down to them.
Robbie Wagner: [15:41] That’s fair. We just try to take anything that people yell about on Twitter and ask people about it. So if there’s a hot take there, we like to get it out.
Chuck Carpenter: [15:49] Well, I’ve got one more thing then.
Robbie Wagner: [15:51] Oh, yeah?
Chuck Carpenter: [15:51] And that is what do you think about just rewriting Code Pen but in Rust?
Stephen Shaw: [15:58] Well, yeah, I don’t know. We’re always in the middle of rewrites. Code Pen has been around 13 years or so now. It’s getting up there in birthday candles, and I forget what it started out as, but it ended up being a Ruby on Rails app. And now we’re in this process where it’s, like, a quarter Ruby on Rails, a quarter React rendered UI, a quarter, like, GraphQL that’s hitting the Ruby on Rails API and a quarter GraphQL API that’s hitting a Go API. So there’s a whole mishmash of things that are just all integrated, which works surprisingly well for now. But the goal is kind of migrating away from Ruby into this Go-based API and more fully React front-end and server-side rendering with, like, Next and that kind of stuff.
Robbie Wagner: [17:07] Fancy.
Stephen Shaw: [17:08] So no opinion on Rust, but Go seems to be doing fine for us.
Chuck Carpenter: [17:12] But you’re fine with Next and all of that VC money.
Stephen Shaw: [17:16] Yeah, if they can redirect some of that to us, that’d be great.
Chuck Carpenter: [17:21] There you go. Yeah. You’ve got the one part that Guillermo hasn’t really narrowed down the talent on yet. And so if you could just swoop in, get in there, be set. I remember there being some kind of very cool magic in, like, the guy now that you mentioned Go when Chris was on, he was, like, talking about this I don’t know, just, like, on the fly, like, rerender magic that happens when people kind of make changes within Code Pen. And then it’s like and how the version controlling of that happens.
Stephen Shaw: [17:52] Right. So we’re working on top-secret stuff, as you can imagine. It’s probably a code editor of some sort. And the big part of Code Pen is instant rendering of things. And so we’re working through all that in new Go API stuff and handling how those conversions happen.
Chuck Carpenter: [18:14] Without giving up the secret sauce. Like something exciting. Yeah. Kind of high level, like that.
Stephen Shaw: [18:19] Yeah.
Chuck Carpenter: [18:19] I’m sure it’d be pretty tough to redo. So Robbie believes that you all have an open-source overlap. You want to ask about that?
Stephen Shaw: [18:27] That’s spicy.
Robbie Wagner: [18:28] Yeah. I wasn’t 100% sure, and I probably should have just looked because I could have checked now. But did you used to maintain cache? Ken Wheeler’s cache thing?
Stephen Shaw: [18:38] Yes.
Robbie Wagner: [18:39] Okay.
Stephen Shaw: [18:39] Yeah. That’s funny.
Robbie Wagner: [18:41] Yeah. So I think I submitted a few issues there or maybe a PR or two or something and chatted with you, some on there years ago.
Stephen Shaw: [18:47] We probably argued heavily about some implementation details that was highly opinionated at the time as to what it should be.
Chuck Carpenter: [18:55] Yeah.
Stephen Shaw: [18:55] Man, that’s funny. So, yeah, that probably would have been, like, 2016 or something.
Robbie Wagner: [19:01] I don’t know. All the years seem the same. Yeah, I think around then. Sounds right.
Chuck Carpenter: [19:07] It says a jQuery replacement, so to me. Are you sure it wasn’t, like, 2004?
Robbie Wagner: [19:12] No.
Stephen Shaw: [19:13] So this was in the era where jQuery was still, like, a legitimate need because overall browser support and handling of the DOM was a necessity. But the heaviness of jQuery to still support IE9 and lower and all that, it wasn’t as appealing. There were a lot of native DOM APIs for query selector all and that kind of stuff that generally replaced a lot of what jQuery did magically. So cache was kind of sitting there in between where it would use a lot more native DOM APIs but still smooth over things in generating arrays of the elements, and you could easily add a class to all of them and that kind of stuff to just make the DOM a little more easy to manipulate. And just as an experiment to learn JavaScript better, I essentially rewrote jQuery. And then I came across cache, and I was like, hey, could I just merge my stuff into this? And Ken was like, sure, I don’t care about this anymore, and gave me like editor access or whatever. So I ended up maintaining that for like a year or something. And then somebody else has swooped in and is continuing the legacy.
Chuck Carpenter: [20:33] Yeah, he does that. He creates the thing, and then he’s like, I’m going to go make some beats over here.
Robbie Wagner: [20:40] Or some pizza burgers that I saw.
Chuck Carpenter: [20:44] There’s so many things wrong with that. Yeah, that was like a today tweet or yesterday tweet or something where he was like mixing two greatest foods, and it was like just a burger and sauce.
Robbie Wagner: [20:53] And it turned out worse than if you just made them separately.
Chuck Carpenter: [20:56] Yeah, no, I don’t think they’re all hits. I’m just saying.
Robbie Wagner: [21:00] No.
Chuck Carpenter: [21:03] I would pass on that burger, and I’ve had some pretty mediocre burgers, but anyway, yeah, we don’t need to dwell on that.
Robbie Wagner: [21:11] Tell us some more about web animation because I feel like it’s hard to, like, we’re given all these tools for animation, but it’s hard to know what to make. Right. How do you decide? Should people be designing animated things in some tool that I am not aware of because I just look at Figma? But how do you get started on that, and what recommendations do you have around that?
Stephen Shaw: [21:35] Tooling wise I’ve never been up on it too much because there’s always been kind of a lack in it before. I worked at Code Pen, I worked at an advertising agency, and we were kind of multifaceted. We did web. We did design. We did video and animation. 2D and 3D as well. So we were kind of uniquely positioned with the talent we needed in like 15 people to implement all kinds of really cool stuff for the web because we had awesome animators that could put it all together and then basically me to make it happen on the web. So most of my experience was just like taking what they had made and either recreating it or reimagining it for the web with essentially like green sock GSAP to just make it interactive or make it more efficient or size efficient compared to a video, that kind of stuff. So overall, there’s been a real good development of the toolset. I can’t even think of the main one that’s out there right now. It’s not Figma, but there’s another one that actually is a lot more animation-focused. That’s really good. But as far as I go, just actually coding it out and everything has been the route I always take. I would love a more UI-based approach that actually generates solid code and responsive animations and all that. And I think we’re getting to that point. We’re just like right at the threshold of it. But yeah, GSAP is still kind of my go-to if I have something intensive that I want to get done. But for the most part, CSS animation gets a lot done these days, especially.
Robbie Wagner: [23:30] Yeah. I mean, I feel like we’re always just chasing what Flash gave us forever ago.
Stephen Shaw: [23:35] I know, right? It really is surprising how far we were able to go in the late 90s and early 2000s.
Chuck Carpenter: [23:44] We could do things with websites that was meant to be for, like cartoons and other animations. Like if I want to remake Ren and Stimpy, what replaces Flash for me?
Stephen Shaw: [23:56] Yeah, there’s not too much right now. Rive is one that’s been coming up. I haven’t gotten a chance to play with that too much. But that one, I think, is intended to kind of be somewhere between Adobe to web animation. But there really isn’t a good, just like Flash-like option right now.
Chuck Carpenter: [24:17] Yeah, because in Flash action script, right, was like the superpower, but you could just use the GUI and do all kinds of stuff and draw things out and whatever else. Where’s Figma that has a stage that goes into animations? All right, I’m going to jump off here and go make this software right now. Apparently, there’s a real need in the space.
Robbie Wagner: [24:43] Yeah. So I guess taking that a step further. You had mentioned, I guess it’s not really related, but like things that we can’t really do on the web very well. Yet you had mentioned the future of VR and AR in the web. What are your thoughts around that?
Stephen Shaw: [25:00] I think that we’re very close to a crossroads, similar to back in what, what was it, 2007, when the iPhone was introduced and suddenly everyone was scrambling to have a mobile website. We’re probably two, three years away from a similar scramble for AR and VR-based experiences for the web. We’ve had experimental kind of stuff and little things like view this product in your room kind of interactions on the web that have been cool to see. But we’re just like a consumer-ready device introduction away from the need for web APIs and real web tools for developing those kinds of augmented reality or virtual reality experiences on the web. And there’s been some good work done in that space, but I don’t think anyone has real UI or understanding of how that’s going to impact the web as a whole. If you’re interacting with the web through an augmented reality device. How does that change things? Like in the same way that touch changed from a mouse interaction and the different ways that we had to account for multitouch and zoom and all these different things. How much more are we going to have to account for 3D real-time interaction with stuff and trying to display that and yeah, I don’t have the answers for any of that, but I think it’s very important for us as web developers to start considering that. Because rumor has it that Apple’s introducing some kind of headset this year, and that is probably going to be the wake-up call that a lot of people have needed.
Chuck Carpenter: [27:02] Yeah, that does sound dangerous. I think that you make a great point around that. Specifically. Actually, I forgot about and have used those apps where you want to see the product in your space, and you can kind of see that, and it looks pretty good and gives you a real good general idea. But I mean, that’s like singular thing. You’ve got games that are using AR pretty well. Obviously, you’ve got VR games, but they’re these weird geeky over. They’re not so mass appeal.
Stephen Shaw: [27:31] Right.
Chuck Carpenter: [27:31] And yeah, we’re one mass appeal device away or one mass appeal experience that doesn’t require the one specific thing. Like, right, the iPhone changed it, and everybody needed a smartphone, and now smartphone is part of what you have. Not everybody has Quest goggles, right, or one thing away of this is how you consume the thing in this whole new.
Robbie Wagner: [27:57] Yeah, I think that could open up a lot of cool stuff, though. Like, I’m just imagining you start your website with the normal look and feel that you would view on a desktop, and it kind of like zooms past it and makes it 3D or something, and there’s a whole nother world past everything. There’s a lot of cool stuff you could do, but I think someone needs to make some cool libraries for me to use first so that I can do it well.
Stephen Shaw:[28:20] Yeah, I think, surprisingly, Firefox has been pretty on the forefront of a lot of the web AR and web VR stuff. They have some good tooling or at least some good information around all of that. If you like Google Web AR, they’ve got that kind of stuff out there that’s really cool to see. Some of the demos are really cool.
Robbie Wagner:[28:43] I have to check those out.
Chuck Carpenter: [28:44] Yeah, it’s like further integration with the hardware, right? More and more access from the browser into machine hardware, which I guess helps open some of that up.
Stephen Shaw: [28:53] Well, and integrating with real space. That’s so cool. Just thinking about Google Maps and an actual arrow or an actual line projected on your path for you to follow. That’s a real basic interaction that’s super cool and super helpful and minimalist, and out of the way. That that’s the kind of stuff we have to be considering for even web apps. If You’re In The Store and You’re Looking At A Product, and You’re Amazon, and You Want People to Be Able to Buy Your Product Through Them instead of the store. Like scanning things and showing price reductions and all of that. Showing that in real space. There’s a lot to consider there that hasn’t been touched yet, even in phone apps and other AR kind of devices. But that’s going to open up with the web as well.
Chuck Carpenter: [29:44] Right. Yeah. And maybe integrating all of the above is kind of part of what makes it work. Right. A goggle that isn’t like a giant block-your-view goggle but becomes just an AR screen that integrates with your phone that you already have. So there’s some compute power, and give me your watch and your phone now I’ve got double the amount and start just yeah. Can you imagine having to figure out interaction points and what all that is? Oh, let me hit this button here, or let me touch choice on my watch that then goes through this screen and these glasses that I’m wearing. Yeah, it could be very interesting.
Stephen Shaw: [30:29] Yeah. One of the even more basic uses of augmented reality to me is just not needing a monitor, not needing a TV. You’ve got your AR glasses. They’re comfortable. They’re lightweight. They’re no problem to wear at all. They’re easy on your eyes. And you just sit at your desk, and you’re looking at an invisible monitor. You’re looking at 30 invisible monitors in front of you, and you can just turn your head and rearrange them. Willy-nilly, that, to me, opens up a lot of possibilities, even for just regular users, regular computing kind of needs. You don’t even have to think about monitors necessarily, but thinking about just Windows and managing Windows in a 3D visual space.
Chuck Carpenter: [31:16] All I can see is Minority Report.
Stephen Shaw: [31:19] Exactly.
Chuck Carpenter: [31:20] Moving around.
Stephen Shaw: [31:21] Less arm movements.
Chuck Carpenter: [31:22] I don’t know. I like the arm movements. I like those. I’m Tom Cruise.
Stephen Shaw: [31:27] Got to be exhausting, though.
Chuck Carpenter: [31:29] Yeah. For some people.
Stephen Shaw: [31:30] They were like, need a Tom Cruise workout to be able to do that.
Chuck Carpenter: [31:34] Yeah, just sell your soul to Scientology, it’ll be fine. No, I didn’t say that. No, they don’t listen to this. It’s totally fine.
Robbie Wagner: [31:43] Tom Cruise or all Scientologists.
Chuck Carpenter: [31:45] Tom Cruise over Scientology or any Scientologist whatsoever.
Stephen Shaw: [31:48] They’re both fair game.
Chuck Carpenter: [31:49] Yeah, it could be wrong. Maybe they would have sponsored us, and I just ruined it again. See, we’re never going to get anywhere now.
Stephen Shaw: [31:58] You’ll be sued into oblivion.
Chuck Carpenter: [31:59] Yeah. You can have the act.
Robbie Wagner: [32:01] I do love that the guy that started Scientology is famously quoted as, like, the best way to make money is to start a religion. It’s like, all right, but anyway, maybe we don’t go down.
Stephen Shaw: [32:13] Doesn’t instill confidence.
Chuck Carpenter: [32:14] Elron Hubbard. Yeah. He owns a couple of houses in DC. That was interesting thing. Yeah. Like one of the first houses, and then there’s. Two of their houses. Then they were in DC proper when working on that. I mean, you got to lobby all those politicians to get your official religion recognized as a nonprofit.
Robbie Wagner: [32:34] That’s true.
Chuck Carpenter: [32:35] Tax status. That’s the best way to get out of taxes. Start a religion. The religion of TypeScript. Shaw, are you in? Sponsored by Microsoft.
Stephen Shaw: [32:47] That will be A typescriptist.
Chuck Carpenter: [32:49] Yeah. Well, if Microsoft was to buy Code Pen, things might change for you.
Stephen Shaw: [32:55] Yeah, we’ll see.
Chuck Carpenter: [32:57] I hope you got some equity in that. Otherwise, we’ll talk to Chris.
Robbie Wagner: [33:01] Yes.
Chuck Carpenter: [33:02] Listen. You had CSS tricks. Give them something.
Stephen Shaw: [33:07] I’d appreciate that.
Robbie Wagner: [33:08] Yeah. Microsoft is good at buying cool stuff, so it’s not out of the realm of possibility.
Stephen Shaw: [033:14] Yeah, they’re getting into the realm with GitHub Codespaces. They’ve kind of got their own pony going there.
Chuck Carpenter: [33:24] Yeah. I feel like Code Pen has its kind of niche in type of user, though. So you talk about animations and CSS art and all of that. Code Pen is a place to go for that.
Stephen Shaw: [33:35] Right.
Chuck Carpenter: [33:36] You’re not going to code Sandbox for that, or what was the old one?
Stephen Shaw: [33:40] I didn’t say it.
Chuck Carpenter: [33:41] Yeah, I can say whatever. None of these people can.
Robbie Wagner: [33:44] JS Bin.
Chuck Carpenter: [33:45] JS Bin. That was, like yeah, one of the old-school ones that was just run code. It was basically.
Stephen Shaw: [33:51] JS Bin, JS fiddle. Glitch.
Chuck Carpenter: [33:53] Yeah, Fiddle. Yes. Which was basically just like the developer console. Yeah. So I don’t know what GitHub Spaces is going to niche into, but like I said, I’ve always felt like Code Pen kind of has its space. You can use it for all kinds of stuff, but you can always go there for like cool art and animation, things like that.
Stephen Shaw: [34:11] Yeah. We pride ourselves as more of a social network than just a code editor.
Chuck Carpenter: [34:17] Right.
Stephen Shaw: [34:18] But obviously, having a simple, easy-to-use code editor is kind of essential to all of that. So that’s where we put our focus.
Robbie Wagner: [34:27] I don’t know if it’s SEO that’s really good or if it’s just that everyone that does this uses Code Pen, but anytime I need a cool loading spinner or animation or something, and I Google it, it’s like Code Pen, Code Pen, Code Pen. Someone’s doing something right on SEO, I think, or just everyone is there. I don’t know.
Stephen Shaw: [34:46] Yeah, I think just our link juice, whatever you call it, is so high. But that’s the majority of it. We do have some fans at Google. I think they help with that.
Chuck Carpenter: [34:58] Yeah, they push the nudge them a little more a button.
Robbie Wagner: [35:00] Chris calls them, and like, just make us higher.
Chuck Carpenter: [35:03] Like all right, help me out. Let’s talk a little bit about you were talking early career, how you created jQuery or something and working at an agency, and what was your path into this career.
Stephen Shaw: [35:19] Man, so there’s a photo of me as a baby, probably like 1987, something like that, with one of the early laptops. That’s really not a laptop, but more of like this computer tower that had like a detachable keyboard on the front, and then the monitor was behind that, so you could essentially carry a computer everywhere. I don’t know why my dad had this. He was some kind of basic programmer at electrical companies and that kind of stuff, but he had this portable computer, and so I’m a baby just sitting at it. So obviously, I got into programming right then and there before I learned language or anything like that. I was into programming no. Later, in early teens, I remember sitting in my dad’s laptop in a cabin in the middle of the woods, no internet or anything like that because it was not that time in the 90s. I found an HTML file, and I found the view source option, and at the time, in Windows, that opened up in Notepad, and I figured out that wasn’t read-only like you can edit this text. And so I started editing the text, and then I went back to the browser, and I refreshed, and my changes were there. And so this important documentation that my dad had was now transformed into a list of my favorite Sonic characters. And this was this light bulb moment for me that computers is more than just like these icons and stuff that you can click on. You can actually get them to do things. So from there, I just kind of kept diving into HTML, and around the time, like GeoCities and Tripod and Angel Fire, and all those were kind of the rage. So I was getting in there and doing all kinds of horrible websites and copying and pasting snippets to make annoying cursors and that kind of stuff. It just always kind of kept building in me this desire to create and build with computers, and eventually went to school for a degree in digital media which spanned the range of audio production and video production and a small segment on web. And we did a little bit of Flash and all kinds of random stuff, but I was always killing it on the web projects and that kind of stuff. And the other stuff was so helpful to have and gave me a different perspective on how the web could be used and animation and all that kind of stuff. And then, I got a job at a church doing church website and moved from there to another church doing a bigger church website. And I met my wife the first day on the job there, and that was wonderful. So I was working there, and that experience working in a church and building a church website, that’s a very kind of unique setup because there’s a lot of different people with a lot of different needs, but ultimately you’re trying to serve the congregation or the people that they’re trying to reach. And so the perspective there that I learned was like, we really have to be conscious of who we’re talking to, what they need, and how we can connect with them, like how we can kind of build that relationship. And so from there, I got a job at an advertising agency, and I kind of carried some of those values over of thinking about the audience, thinking about what they need, what they’re looking for, and how we can connect with them. And from there, I came over to Code Pen. But there’s a lot about the web that I think is special and is unique. And no matter what kind of device we’re accessing it on, I think that it is going to keep this space of, like if you need information, this is where you’re going to go to get it. And that’s kind of my idea as a web developer. Like, I want to make information accessible. I want to figure out who the audience is and how to best make them connected with what they need.
Chuck Carpenter: [40:10] Yeah, well, inherently, right there, that’s the purpose of HTML, right, is to make information accessible.
Stephen Shaw: [40:17] Exactly.
Chuck Carpenter: [40:18] And understanding HTML helps you consistently make it accessible, right? Because you understand the information and sorry, Robbie, I don’t want to cut you off, but I will forget my forget my thoughts again. So briefly, go through two points. First of all, you mentioned your foray into HTML early on, and I just ignore it. And that list, Tails. Tails was the right answer, by the way.
Robbie Wagner: [40:42] No, I was going to ask, is it Knuckles or Tails?
Chuck Carpenter: [40:45] Tails.
Robbie Wagner:[40:45] That was my only thing I wanted to know.
Chuck Carpenter: [40:47] Great.
Stephen Shaw: [40:48] Tails was the top, for sure.
Chuck Carpenter: [40:50] Perfect.
Robbie Wagner: [40:51] Because you can fly, but what else do you want?
Chuck Carpenter: [40:54] Exactly.
Robbie Wagner: [40:55] Anyway?
Stephen Shaw: [40:55] Knuckles can glide, and he could break through walls. He was definitely the better choice. But Tails.
Chuck Carpenter: [41:02] I mean, he’s so likable too.
Robbie Wagner: [41:05] I always chose tails.
Chuck Carpenter: [41:06] Adorable, likable, all those things. And then the other part is actually, I was thinking about when you were talking about your time working for churches and having this sense of responsibility around serving everyone’s needs. And that one aspect of that that I think is really cool is to have work where you essentially have access to all of your users. It’s unknown. It’s this pool of people who come into this building, and if I have questions or I need clarification, I can get that. I can go right there and have that and then learn from that and then get better. I think that’s, like, especially early in career, that’s a very unique experience to have access to and know who your users are and access to them to get better at giving them what they need.
Stephen Shaw: [41:59] There’s a lot of immediate feedback. I will say.
Chuck Carpenter: [42:02] That’s a nice one.
Stephen Shaw: [42:03] Internally and externally, you get good information to use, for sure.
Chuck Carpenter: [42:08] Yeah. I think, in general, having that access is like a great learning tool for later on. Well, that’s not always the case when it’s everyone in the world. Potentially, it’s kind of a different thing. I mean, I know you’re not selling T-shirts or something, but still, a lot of people access that site. That site and your demographics are like all over the place, I’m sure.
Stephen Shaw: [42:29] We did sell T-shirts. We most recently took that down, but.
Chuck Carpenter: [42:34] Nobody sent me one. Jerks.
Robbie Wagner: [42:37] Yeah, Chris doesn’t like us that much.
Stephen Shaw: [42:38] Talk to Chris. He’s got boxes and boxes of them.
Chuck Carpenter: [42:41] I will.
Stephen Shaw: [42:42] I’m sure he’ll gladly.
Chuck Carpenter: [42:44] Okay. Yeah.
Robbie Wagner: [42:46] So the important thing that I think we need to find out here is, have you gotten Tears of the Kingdom yet for your Switch?
Stephen Shaw: [42:54] No. No, I have not. I’ve actually not gotten into Breath of the Wild at all or Tears of the King. I was never a Zelda guy. I was never a Zelda guy.
Robbie Wagner: [43:04] I think we’re done here.
Chuck Carpenter: [43:05] Interview over.
Stephen Shaw: [43:06] Yeah, so I remember sometime early ninety s. I remember being in probably Toys R US at the game aisle and looking at what was the game for Game Boy. Link’s Awakening. I remember holding that in my hand and my mom looking at it. She was like. There’s ghosts and witches and things in this. You can’t, so that was the end of my Zelda nostalgia opportunity. So I have played some of them in the more recent eras, but yeah, Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. I just haven’t gotten into any of the 3D Zeldas.
Robbie Wagner: [43:49] You should try it. I’m sure you’ve heard from other people that you should try it, but they are so, so good.
Stephen Shaw: [43:55] Yeah.
Chuck Carpenter: [43:58] If you like any of those games where you have this super open world for exploring, I think agnostic to the initial storylines. It does so much with explaining all those things anyway. You can kind of come in first time, and then you just have this massive world to do all these crazy things. It just goes on and on. If you like that, then I would say yes. If you played Skyrim and you liked that.
Robbie Wagner: [44:23] Lots of exploring and making stuff.
Chuck Carpenter: [44:26] There’s less vampires, but.
Robbie Wagner: [44:28] Yeah, no vampires at all.
Stephen Shaw: [44:30] Okay, so I haven’t played Skyrim, but there are vampires. I thought it was more of a dragons kind of thing.
Chuck Carpenter: [44:36] There’s dragons. Vampires.
Robbie Wagner: [44:38] It is that’s the main story is dragons.
Chuck Carpenter: [44:40] Yeah, there’s mostly dragons, but there’s vampires and thieves and murderers and werewolves. There’s werewolves see other terrible things and.
Robbie Wagner: [44:48] You can somehow be, I think, like, both a werewolf and a vampire at the same time, which doesn’t make sense.
Chuck Carpenter: [44:53] Just don’t complete.
Stephen Shaw: [44:54] A werepire.
Chuck Carpenter: [44:55] All the quests is how it works out. You’re like part of the way through both of them, and you’re like, you have to fully commit one way or the other. And you’re like,
Robbie Wagner: [45:03] Yeah.
Chuck Carpenter: [45:03] No, I want all these badass powers.
Robbie Wagner: [45:05] Yeah, Chuck never commits, so he’s like, I got the werewolves, the vampires, the thieves, the mages, everybody’s with me.
Chuck Carpenter: [45:12] I learned how to get a party of like six following me. And then it helps you through the whole main storyline because you’ve got all these side quests that you didn’t complete, so you’ve got a companion to help you finish the final part, and you’re like, no, they all kill people with me. It’s fine. Why would I want to become any of them anyway?
Robbie Wagner: [45:32] Yeah, speaking of games, I’m uneducated in this, but you said you have beaten Tetris. I didn’t know it was beatable. Like, that’s a thing you can win.
Stephen Shaw: [45:42] So, fun fact, after a certain point, Tetris just stops counting.
Chuck Carpenter: [45:47] Oh, really?
Stephen Shaw: [45:48] The score reaches a certain point, and Tetris is like, all right, I give up. You did it. But the game actually doesn’t end. So in college, I had a DS, and Tetris DS was out, and what’s amazing. And so I was playing in the endless mode and just kind of kept going with it. I was taking it to my classes and playing underneath the desk, and then the ability to just close the DS and, like, resume later was was awesome, and I just kept building up. You know, once you once you reach, like, level 20, the speed is essentially maxed out, and that essentially means that the pieces are just, like, appearing. But once you get that balance of working with the pieces in that capacity, it’s just kind of the same over and over. So I just kept building up my high score, and I think it was, like, 999,999,999. It just stops. And unfortunately, it doesn’t actually save that high score because it’s maxed out. So, like, the you know, the actual high score list doesn’t doesn’t show it. But I’ve I’ve got pictures to prove it if anybody.
Chuck Carpenter: [47:03] If anybody wants to challenge you.
Robbie Wagner: [47:04] Yeah. Tweet it at us later.
Stephen Shaw: [47:06] Come at me.
Robbie Wagner: [47:07] Yeah. Yeah, I remember. That reminds me of I forget which system and which pinball game it was. One of our professors had said, yeah, I maxed out the pinball, and that they used signed ints, so it only went to so high. If they had used an unsigned ints, it would have gone higher. He wrote them a letter about how they could have done it better or something like all right, that’s a very professory way to do that.
Chuck Carpenter: [47:37] Thanks, Virginia Tech. Yeah, that’s what I would have responded with had I made that game. It had been like, thanks, Prof.
Robbie Wagner: [47:45] Thanks, Prof. That’s the whole thing.
Chuck Carpenter: [47:47] That’s all you get. Yeah, that’s my response. So, Shaw, what other hobbies do you have?
Stephen Shaw: [47:53] Really? Not too much right now. I’ve got two kids, so they pretty much dominate any free time but trying to integrate them in things has been a really interesting process. My oldest is nine, and she’s amazing, and my youngest is four, and so he’s just at the point where he’s getting able to play games and do things in that capacity. So the Kirby games have been really phenomenal. They’ve got a lot of handholding kind of options so that the adult can be the main character, and then the other kind of side characters can be a lot more of a supportive role.
Robbie Wagner: [48:40] Nice.
Stephen Shaw: [48:41] So, yeah, we love to play the Kirby games or, like, Mario Kart has awesome options for staying on the rails and auto-going so that you don’t have to hold down a that’s really helpful.
Robbie Wagner: [48:55] I didn’t know about that.
Chuck Carpenter: [48:56] Okay. No, I didn’t know that. I need to look at those adjustments again. Yeah. The first time I ever played Mario Kart with my son was probably, like, two years ago. And it was that he basically was going backwards at all.
Robbie Wagner: [49:07] Wrong way. Wrong way.
Stephen Shaw: [49:08] Never finishing the race.
Chuck Carpenter: [49:10] Our first race, never finishing the race. I was like, this is fun. Let’s do it again.
Stephen Shaw: [49:15] So if you pause Mario Kart 8 on Switch, there’s, like, some options. If you hit, like L, it activates the stay on the path mode. And if you hit R, it activates the automatically go-forward option. So with both of those in place, my son finishes, like, 40 seconds after the rest of us. So we don’t have to wait around or race for him or anything like that. He can press the button to release items and that kind of stuff, but he doesn’t have to hold the rest of us up.
Chuck Carpenter: [49:47] I love it.
Robbie Wagner: [49:48] That’s really cool. Nintendo really thought of a lot of things there.
Stephen Shaw: [49:51] Yeah.
Chuck Carpenter: [49:53] Those characters are so appealing to young kids. I mean, my son is six, and he is obsessed with Mario now. We saw the Mario movie, so that was like the whole next oh, that’s it.
Stephen Shaw: [50:01] Of course.
Chuck Carpenter: [50:02] He’s been playing what is the Odyssey game? Some.
Robbie Wagner: [50:06] Mario Odyssey. Mario Odyssey. Yeah. It’s like Mario World Odyssey or something else. But we played Mario Kart before. My daughter she’s not really ready. She might be ready for Switch now. I didn’t think she was, but we’ll see what happens. She’s four. She just turned four at four.
Stephen Shaw: [50:20] Yeah.
Robbie Wagner: [50:21] Just put on the go automatically mode, and she’s ready.
Chuck Carpenter: [50:24] Exactly. They both can race that. And that’ll be a big winner this weekend. I’m about to be dad of the year. Yeah, thanks for that.
Stephen Shaw: [50:33] Yeah, that’ll be big.
Robbie Wagner: [50:34] You both get to play Mario Kart for hours. Here you go.
Stephen Shaw: [50:39] Fully charge those controller batteries.
Chuck Carpenter: [50:42] Exactly. Hours will probably be 30 minutes to 60. My wife’s cut off on most games, and we’re done.
Robbie Wagner: [50:50] Yeah. Depends on what you’re doing. If you’re having fun while they’re having fun, it’s fine.
Chuck Carpenter: [50:55] Right? I’ll send her off. Go have brunch with your mother, and they’re going to play games, and I will take a nap. Something like that. Yeah. So very into games. I saw the Mario Lego thing behind you, and I was like, yeah, Mario. So, yes. Very cool.
Robbie Wagner: [51:10] Yeah. Is that a custom build, or was that, like, instructions for that?
Stephen Shaw: [51:14] Yeah, that was just some pieces I had. I always loved Sprite art. That was one of my initial computing and programming kind of things, was like drawing and generating sprite sheets or using sprite sheets for animation that had a short stint in creating fan games and that kind of stuff. So I always loved sprites. And so when I had the available Lego options, I built a little Mario 3 Mario.
Robbie Wagner: [51:45] Nice.
Stephen Shaw: [51:46] Fun fact, though, Mario Legos are not cubes. They’re rectangles. Just like the standard Legos is a rectangle. So it’s actually a little shorter than it should be. It’s not fully to scale.
Robbie Wagner: [52:01] Yeah, well, we won’t judge you.
Chuck Carpenter: [52:03] He’s just about to grow. He just had a mushroom. He’s about to become Super Mario.
Robbie Wagner: [52:08] He got like slightly squished for a second. Yeah.
Stephen Shaw: [52:12] You have to add like a flat plate on top to make it fully square because it’s three flat plates to a regular plate.
Chuck Carpenter: [52:21] Yeah. I didn’t realize that we have so many Legos in the house. Should know a little better. I usually just follow the instructions, and I’m like, have at it, kid. That’s the best part.
Robbie Wagner: [52:30] Yeah.
Chuck Carpenter: [52:30] You want to make something else? Enjoy.
Robbie Wagner: [52:32] Yeah, I actually bought the one where you can build the NES.
Stephen Shaw: [52:37] Yeah.
Robbie Wagner: [52:38] But I haven’t built it yet because I’m just busy. But I have it.
Stephen Shaw: [52:41] Get on that. Great one.
Chuck Carpenter: [52:43] Yeah. What are you waiting for? You could have been doing this entire episode and at the end play the game.
Robbie Wagner: [52:48] Well, I mean, right now, I have the new Zelda that came out yesterday to play.
Chuck Carpenter: [52:53] Yeah.
Stephen Shaw: [52:54] Little occupied.
Chuck Carpenter: [52:55] Yeah. On any break.
Robbie Wagner: [52:58] Yeah. Did you also get it?
Chuck Carpenter: [52:59] Yeah, absolutely.
Robbie Wagner: [53:01] Yeah, I haven’t started it yet. No spoilers.
Chuck Carpenter: [53:04] Well, it’s crazy that Link is a robot.
Robbie Wagner: [53:07] First of all, he’s actually Mario now.
Chuck Carpenter: [53:10] Really surprising. I will say that aliens and a zombie arm were a surprise. Didn’t see that. And I’m not making that up. Aliens and a zombie arm.
Robbie Wagner: [53:22] Wait, you’re not making that up?
Chuck Carpenter: [53:24] I’m not making that up. That’s actually.
Robbie Wagner: [53:26] Now I have to play it tonight.
Chuck Carpenter: [53:28] You were going to do that anyway. But you really should get into it. It’s a cool opener, and I don’t know. Yeah, I haven’t fought any dragons yet. But aliens, on the other thing. I don’t know.
Stephen Shaw: [53:40] What about zombies or werewolves? Or vampires? Werewolves.
Chuck Carpenter: [53:43] No, I haven’t fought those. There are goblins, and some of the familiar characters from the first one are all there.
Robbie Wagner: [53:50] Things that come out at night?
Chuck Carpenter: [53:51] Yes, the freaks come out at night.
Robbie Wagner: [53:53] They do.
Chuck Carpenter: [53:54] You guys wouldn’t get that reference. That was like in the early 80s. It was like the freaks come out at night.
Robbie Wagner: [53:59] Yeah, no, I know the song.
Chuck Carpenter: [54:00] The freaks come out. Yeah. Okay.
Stephen Shaw: [54:02] Songs last longer than a year.
Chuck Carpenter: [54:05] Yeah.
Robbie Wagner: [54:06] I don’t know any movie you saw in literally 1980. Exactly. Like, I know some later 80s maybe.
Chuck Carpenter: [00:54:12] But Empire Strikes Back came out in 1980.
Robbie Wagner: [54:14] Well, okay, so I know the Star Wars movies. Okay. That doesn’t count. Everyone’s seen the Star Wars movies.
Stephen Shaw: [54:19] I’ve seen one.
Chuck Carpenter: [54:19] Yeah. Well, I saw Empire Strikes Back and my parents’ custom van at a drive-in, fell asleep in the back. I was only three.
Stephen Shaw: [54:26] Wow.
Robbie Wagner: [54:28] That’s another level.
Chuck Carpenter: [54:29] So I had to see it again later to really get it, which is a creepy one to take kids to.
Robbie Wagner: [54:33] I watched all the Star Wars movies in one day, one time, which takes a really long time.
Chuck Carpenter: [54:39] So all nine?
Robbie Wagner: [54:41] Not the new ones with the like, not the new Skywalker saga or whatever.
Stephen Shaw: [54:45] The semi-new.
Robbie Wagner: [54:46] Yeah, the the semi-new, like the 2000s ones and the originals. Yeah, I watched like all six in one day. And that was a really long day.
Chuck Carpenter: [54:54] That is a very long day. A lot of movies. You had to come out for breaks and stuff.
Robbie Wagner: [54:59] Oh, I definitely did.
Chuck Carpenter: [55:00] Or was it weird, and there was like all these milk bottle milk jugs of pee and stuff when you were done?
Robbie Wagner: [55:06] Well, no, I took breaks.
Chuck Carpenter: [55:07] Howard Hughes reference there.
Stephen Shaw: [55:10] Yeah, I saw the special editions in theater. That was pretty cool. That was my first Star Wars kind of experience. I was aware of all the lore and things, so I wasn’t surprised by Vader and Father and that kind of reveal and stuff. But yeah, experiencing it on the big screen was fun.
Chuck Carpenter: [55:30] Yeah, that’s a strong move to get it. First time in there now. I saw them on LaserDisc and VHS.
Robbie Wagner: [55:37] Laser Disc.
Chuck Carpenter: [55:38] And all the things later too.
Robbie Wagner: [55:38] Yeah, LaserDisc was so cool.
Chuck Carpenter: [55:40] I was very into it.
Robbie Wagner: [55:41] I don’t know why. It just was.
Chuck Carpenter: [55:44] There was an Ewoks cartoon in the 80s that was so corny, but people liked it.
Stephen Shaw: [55:49] I’ve heard bad things.
Robbie Wagner: [55:50] Oh, was there? Really?
Chuck Carpenter: [55:51] Yeah.
Robbie Wagner: [55:51] I didn’t know about that.
Chuck Carpenter: [55:55] You can watch it again on something. I’m sure they’ve pulled it somehow or another.
Robbie Wagner: [55:59] But it used to be on Disney Plus. Probably has it. They have so many Star Wars cartoons.
Chuck Carpenter: [56:04] Probably does.
Stephen Shaw: [56:05] I don’t know. There’s a lot that was buried about Star Wars with the holiday special.
Chuck Carpenter: [56:10] Yeah. I was going to say, did you see it? It was on Disney Plus. Like the 70s Hollywood. Yeah, it was pretty bad. I think we watched that at one point and then watched the original Muppets. So as a kid, like the Muppets TV show. I was really into that.
Robbie Wagner: [56:24] Was it not good?
Chuck Carpenter: [56:26] No, I thought it was pretty well. It was mostly good. There were a lot of more 70s cultural references that were like, oh, yeah, no, this didn’t age well, or whatever Elton John is like in the first episode, I think, or something.
Robbie Wagner: [56:39] Well, everyone knows who Elton John is now.
Chuck Carpenter: [56:41] Yeah, but that wasn’t the reference. That was like, oh, this doesn’t fly anymore. Not that it was like bad or offensive, it just was nobody gets this now.
Robbie Wagner: [56:49] Okay, yeah, that’s fair.
Chuck Carpenter: [56:51] But they had a lot of really iconic ones, like those alien monster guys that would be like, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. No, no, no.
Stephen Shaw: [57:00] I thought those were only Sesame Street, but they they originated on the muppets.
Chuck Carpenter: [57:05] Yeah. Yeah. Unless the Whiskey is kicking in, I’m fairly certain I feel good about, like now you might second guess my puppet. Who knows?
Robbie Wagner: [57:15] But we are at time here. Is there anything we missed covering? Anything you want to plug before we end?
Stephen Shaw: [57:21] No, just go pro on Code Pen. There’s a lot of great benefits, like privacy and assets. You will definitely enjoy having that access. And got a lot of cool stuff brewing, so be on the lookout for that.
Chuck Carpenter:[57:37] Brought to you by DigitalOcean.
Stephen Shaw: [57:41] Not yet.
Robbie Wagner: [57:42] Well, for CSS tricks. All right. Thanks, everyone, for listening. If you liked it, please subscribe, leave us some ratings and reviews. We appreciate it, and we will catch you next time.
Chuck Carpenter: [57:56] Thanks for listening to Whiskey Web and Whatnot. This podcast is brought to you by Ship Shape and produced by Podcast Royale. If you like 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: [58:11] 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.