11: Four Roses, Elixir, Flutter, and Whatnot w/ Sundi Myint

Robbie Wagner: [00:35] Hey everybody, welcome to another Whiskey Web and Whatnot. We tried to record last week, and it didn’t, maybe two weeks ago. I don’t even know. It didn’t work well. So here we are again. We have a guest with us today, Sundi, from work at SmartLogic, right?

Sundi Myint: [00:52] Yes. Hi.

Robbie Wagner: [00:54] And of course, as always, we have my co-host, Charles W. Carpenter III, and today we have a Four Roses. Do we just jump right into the whiskey? I don’t even remember how we do this format anymore.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:10] We do start with Whiskey, so that’s the correct format.

Sundi Myint: [01:13] I did listen to the last few episodes, and you started with Whiskey every time.

Robbie Wagner: [01:17] Yeah, I know that we do, but I didn’t know if we should let you say more things about yourself or, like, what we usually have done with guests or if we just kind of jump right in.

Sundi Myint: [01:25] I might struggle with the bottle, so I can do an intro while I’m working on that.

Robbie Wagner: [01:30] Sure.

Sundi Myint: [01:31] Yeah. So, Sundi, I know Robbie from like a million jobs ago for me at this point, but I’m Elixir Dev, been Elixir Dev for the last few years. I work a remote at a company called SmartLogic. I have a podcast, or I’m a co-host on a podcast called Elixir Wizards, where we talk about all things Elixir. We try to have a guest on, talk about what’s new in the community, raise voices in the community, that kind of fun stuff. Yeah. I can’t think of anything else interesting at the moment, but that’s me in a nutshell.

Chuck Carpenter: [02:06] Did you used to work in Ember? Is there any overlap there?

Sundi Myint: [02:11] No, absolutely not. I don’t think I’ve even seen Ember code, so this is a fun one.

Robbie Wagner: [02:18] There was a job that I had at one point where I was not doing Ember.

Sundi Myint: [02:24] I thought you did some Ember, though. I thought you did some Ember on a one-off thing.

Robbie Wagner: [02:28] I may have, like, there may have been some internal thing where I got to choose what I was using, but everything I was working on was Angular one. So we’re, like, 14 versions ahead of that now or whatever.

Sundi Myint: [02:41] Yeah, they moved to the next Angular the summer after you left, I think.

Robbie Wagner: [02:49] But yeah, we have a Four Roses today. I was just going to lift it up and show it, and then I realized we weren’t recording video. Not really a point to that.

Chuck Carpenter: [03:02] The designator for this one. Yes. This is my cue. This is my chime. Yes. So the designator for this one is usually called the yellow label, although I’m noticing it to be much more tan, actually. The color of the walls in the distillery, I think, now. So it’s an 80-proof, just basically their entry-level bourbon. And I was just looking up on my favorite breaking bourbon, the mash bill. Looks like it’s a big mix of things. This can be a little bit confusing, but it looks like it has 75% corn, 20% rye, 5% malted barley. But then there’s, like, some other numbers there, but it’s those three. So it’s a blend of those three. In some configuration, it appears. Kind of makes sense. It does have a sweetness to it. Get to the next fun part, which is pouring it.

Robbie Wagner: [03:56] I thought if it was Kentucky straight bourbon whiskey, like all of those names, that it had to be even more corn. Or is, like, maybe I’m wrong on that? Is it still only 51% is, like, the designation?

Chuck Carpenter: [04:08] Yeah, the straight bourbon whiskey is just marketing. Doesn’t really amount to anything. All right.

Sundi Myint: [04:18] That was really loud. I’m so sorry.

Robbie Wagner: [04:22] We like the sound effects. I try to pour near the mic.

Chuck Carpenter: [04:25] Yeah. I’m utilizing my fancy Norlan.

Sundi Myint: [04:29] This is the only glass I use. I think it’s called the NEAT glass.

Chuck Carpenter: [04:32] Oh, yes, I’ve seen those. I’ve actually used them. Yeah, those are cool.

Robbie Wagner: [04:38] Are they neat?

Sundi Myint: [04:40] Well so the funny thing is, I could never drink this, like, anything in the whiskey family until I had it out of a NEAT glass, and then I liked most things after that.

Robbie Wagner: [04:54] Just less burning or what?

Sundi Myint: [04:56] Yeah, less burning. I think that’s probably it.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:00] More of the alcohol. Touches oxygen and gets some of that I don’t know. Those aromatics out.

Sundi Myint: [05:07] Yeah. So it’s shaped funny. I always look a little bougie when I’m drinking out of it, but it lets me drink it. So here we are.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:18] Yeah, whiskey drinkers are known as bougie these days. Maybe. Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [05:23] Nothing wrong with fancy glasses.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:25] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [05:25] Chuck and I have the same one. Mine’s just clear, and his is.

Sundi Myint: [05:29] Insulated.

Robbie Wagner: [05:29] Like a double walled.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:31] Yeah, it’s not even really, yeah, I guess it is, like, kind of insulated from your fingers. So all it is is a normal Glencairn with, like, the second layer around it, so that way, you don’t warm it up with your fingers. I don’t know. Yeah.

Sundi Myint: [05:52] I have a feeling if this was not in a NEAT glass, it would be burning.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:57] I don’t know. 80 proof is pretty low. 80 proof is pretty low. Pretty high corn.

Robbie Wagner: [06:06] Pretty woody.

Sundi Myint: [06:08] So, let me ask for context since you guys like whiskey aficionados. The only whiskey that I really liked is the DC Costco has a really nice liquor selection, and we picked out this huge bottle of Larceny, and my boyfriend really liked it, and I tried it out of this NEAT glass, and I was like, oh, yeah, this is good. And we just drank that until it was gone. Not in one weekend, not in one sitting.

Chuck Carpenter: [06:36] Especially a Costco-size bottle.

Sundi Myint: [06:39] Yeah, it’s a huge bottle, and, yeah, I really like that. And I had no concept of anything else I liked. It was the first thing that I really just was like, yeah, I drink that any given. Like, whenever we’re like, oh, let’s get a drink. That would be the one.

Chuck Carpenter: [06:55] Nice.

Sundi Myint: [06:56] But then he went to Kentucky tried a bunch of other stuff, and then so when I knew this was coming up, I asked him for what should I think about trying? And we also were limited to what we could get from the Drizly app because I’m also peak lazy.

Chuck Carpenter: [07:14] I respect that.

Sundi Myint: [07:15] I just wanted something that wasn’t too cheap, not too expensive. We landed here.

Chuck Carpenter: [07:21] All right, well, there you go. Sky’s the limit from here. Let me just say that Larceny is a good choice. It’s a good, like, middle bourbon. I think it’s a little higher rye, actually. It’s from the Heaven Hill distillery. And fun fact, it’s supposed to be the same mash bill that Old Fitzgerald was. So it used to be, like, a popular well, it was a huge one in the continued on and bounced around to a few distilleries before landing at Heaven Hill, and it was less expensive, so they kind of remarketed it as Larceny to up the price point or whatever. And there’s recently, they did a barrel-proof Larceny that people really like, but it’s hard to find. That’s the fun.

Robbie Wagner: [08:09] Chuck, are we wearing the same shirt right now?

Chuck Carpenter: [08:11] Maroon Ship Shape shirt.

Sundi Myint: [08:16] Robbie, I was also going to ask you about this cardboard octopus you have back on your couch back there, but I actually can’t tell if that’s what that is.

Robbie Wagner: [08:24] Oh, it is. Well, it’s wooden, but it’s a light-up sign, and I have to find someone to mount it and wire it in, and no one wants to do those things, so there it sits.

Chuck Carpenter: [08:40] Just need to find a handyman who’s okay at electric.

Robbie Wagner: [08:43] Yeah, I mean, I might just mount it myself, and then maybe you and I will do the electric when you come into town.

Chuck Carpenter: [08:51] I’m excited for that. So I’ll just check up on my insurance policy before we come out.

Robbie Wagner: [08:58] We should rate this whiskey before we get too far.

Chuck Carpenter: [09:00] I was going to say let’s regress back to what we’re.

Sundi Myint: [09:04] I do really like your rating scale.

Robbie Wagner: [09:08] The tentacles.

Sundi Myint: [09:09] Yeah. I think, again, one of those moments where I’m just, like, sitting at home by myself listening to a podcast with headphones on, and I’m, like, bursting out laughing because I hear that you rated on a scale of tentacles.

Chuck Carpenter: [09:24] You didn’t think that was fishy?

Robbie Wagner: [09:29] All right, we’ll see everybody later.

Chuck Carpenter: [09:33] Thanks for wasting a few minutes of your life. 9 minutes approximately so far. Yeah. So Sundi, I think you should go first in your feedback of.

Sundi Myint: [09:45] So since my Larceny explorations, I’ve had a few others, and some of those. I’m really bad at talking about this, but I will try. I feel like other ones I’ve had had, like, hints of vanilla or other kind of notes, I guess. I’m not getting really anything from this. I know I’m drinking it, and I’m just getting bourbon. That’s what I’m getting.

Chuck Carpenter: [10:14] I don’t think you’re far off. I get a little sweetness in the nose, like maybe a slight molasses or something like a heavy sweet, not like great sweet. And then when I taste it, yeah, the flavor is pretty mellow, and there’s a little bit of woodiness to it, which you would expect since it’s sat in wood for a bit. But yeah, it’s not complex at all, this price point and proof and things like that. A lot of times, people would utilize this as a cocktail base because it’s giving you a little bourbon but not really much else. And you don’t feel bad mixing those flavors.

Sundi Myint: [10:53] Yeah. And Old Fashioned is my favorite mixed drink, so maybe I’ll just whip out a few of those. So I’m maybe going to give it a four tentacles.

Chuck Carpenter: [11:02] Right in the middle. I don’t think that’s wrong. Yeah, I tasted. I’m just like, oh, you sat in some wood. You’re a little warm on my tongue. Not much of the hug. I don’t know if you listen to any of the episodes where we talk about the Kentucky hug.

Sundi Myint: [11:18] I have missed the hug. So basically, how much burn it has going down? We call it a hug.

Sundi Myint: [11:24] I am warm.

Chuck Carpenter: [11:25] Yeah. Okay.

Sundi Myint: [11:27] Maybe it’s like a side hug, a one-arm hug.

Chuck Carpenter: [11:29] Yeah, like maybe a COVID-friendly hug. Just approaching.

Sundi Myint: [11:34] I call it the coworker hug. The kind of hug you give your coworkers. You don’t know them that well.

Chuck Carpenter: [11:40] Right, that’s fair. I mean, giving them a hug at all is actually kind of a whole other approach. We’re coworkers.

Sundi Myint: [11:47] My first job was with Robbie, and that was a whole. We were friendly people.

Chuck Carpenter: [11:53] He doesn’t seem like much of a hugger to me.

Robbie Wagner: [11:56] Yeah, I mean, I was not the most outgoing of the people, obviously, but I don’t mind hugs.

Chuck Carpenter: [12:04] You rolled with it. Can appreciate that. So I would say, Sundi, if this is your first foray into Four Roses, don’t judge them on this. I think they have a lot of really good stuff. And even if you just go get their single barrel, think it’s like usually in the $35-$40 range, really good. You might enjoy that if you like the Larceny. Similar, like, price point and quality level and a lot more things going on.

Sundi Myint: [12:32] Yeah. And it should be fun because we have a little bit of Larceny left. And then I stocked up for this because I didn’t quite know where we were going, so I just got them all.

Chuck Carpenter: [12:43] Wait, you got them all? What does that mean?

Sundi Myint: [12:46] Let’s see here. Yeah, so my boyfriend brought back Russell’s from Kentucky. That was the one.

Chuck Carpenter: [12:51] He brought back Russell’s reserve. Okay. Yeah.

Sundi Myint: [12:53] And then yesterday, we tried 1792, which Robbie said he couldn’t find in Virginia. Right, Robbie?

Chuck Carpenter: [13:00] It’s okay. Anyway.

Sundi Myint: [13:01] Yeah, well, I actually liked it a lot. I tried it for the first time yesterday. And that one, I really liked the sweetness and the notes of vanilla. And my boyfriend and we had a friend over, they both were like, this is all you. Yours.

Chuck Carpenter: [13:15] Is it wheated?

Sundi Myint: [13:16] Is it what?

Chuck Carpenter: [13:16] Wheated. So wheated usually means they use wheat in the mash bill, and then it’ll have some more sweetness, but not always, like, a requirement.

Sundi Myint: [13:27] The fun thing is that this is right above my laptop, so when.

Chuck Carpenter: [13:30] I love it.

Sundi Myint: [13:31] Things out of the cabinet. I’m always scared I would drop it on the computer. One time my cat made it up there while the cabinet doors were open. Bottled in bond.

Chuck Carpenter: [13:46] Means it’s 100 proof. Yes.

Sundi Myint: [13:49] That’s really all it says, 100 proof.

Chuck Carpenter: [13:52] Can always look it up a different time. Okay. Yeah. Interesting. So you got some Russell’s, you got some 1792. You just mix it up. I didn’t know if you got all of the Four Roses, like, oh, I don’t know. I got every Four Roses they had.

Sundi Myint:[14:07] I don’t even remember what was on the app as an option. Yeah. Honestly, alcohol delivery. We’re living the life. This is the dream.

Chuck Carpenter: [14:18] Yeah, that’s true. It really is. I mean, anything, the food, the booze, anything you need.

Robbie Wagner: [14:27] Unless you live in the country and then.

Chuck Carpenter: [14:29] You’ve gone back, like, ten years or so in life, but you get all that space.

Sundi Myint: [14:41] How was your move?

Robbie Wagner: [14:47] The move itself was pretty good, actually. We got a good moving company, and the guys put, like, three boxes behind them, each somehow, like, carrying boxes that were taller than them behind them, also behind them seems hard, but I guess they can kind of squat it more that way or something. So they were really efficient and fast and good. And then since then, everything in the house has broken on us, and we have not fully unpacked, and like, I don’t know, we’re taking a while to get settled and actually enjoy being there. But it’s okay. That stuff happens.

Chuck Carpenter: [15:25] That’s why I don’t want to move again for a while. I’m fixing all the stuff at my house. Why do I want to make it easy for the next person? Right away, I’m going to live a little more in there.

Sundi Myint: [15:36] Yeah. After moving so many years in college, and then just like, as soon as I got to DC, it was like, let me just hang on. So I was a few years at my first place. Been this place for a few years. Might be looking at moving next year. Just living in DC is a little difficult.

Chuck Carpenter: [15:53] Yeah, I would imagine. I’m going to put a pin in that for a second. I’m going to come back to close out my Four Roses thing, and I think that I’m giving mine three tentacles. Not because it’s necessarily bad. It’s not great, either.

Sundi Myint: [16:06] Have you ever gone to a three on this podcast?

Chuck Carpenter: [16:08] Oh, yeah. I had one where I was like. I hated it and.

Sundi Myint: [16:12] Oh that was the one you couldn’t drink.

Chuck Carpenter: [16:12] Given it negative three. Yeah, I think I gave that away. Yeah. Which if you knew me, for one, I don’t like to waste. This problem that I have is I hate wasting, so I’ll even eat things like, I don’t like it that much, but I don’t want to throw it away and waste it. So to give away whiskey? Yes. I don’t know. It’s just something that’s ingrained in me. I hate wasting. That’s why I’m the one that always eats leftovers. But yeah, that one was so bad, I gave it away because I was like, I can’t tolerate this.

Robbie Wagner:[16:49] Three is just more like, yeah, I need a different whiskey. I’m going to go get a different one.

Chuck Carpenter: [16:56] Yeah, I can’t keep drinking and talking to you with this. So, yeah, three isn’t necessarily like, oh, this is horrible. It doesn’t offer very much drinking. It on its own. It’s kind of like, meh. And I think what it’s like $20, $25, something like that. Again, I think about other things that I know I can get at that same price point. Like Buffalo Trace, $25 all day long. I can straight drink that. Just sip that. So just meh. Doesn’t offer me anything.

Robbie Wagner: [17:31] Yeah, I think I would say four or five, actually. Like thinking about middle-of-the-road whiskeys. I kind of always go back to Jack Daniels, and it’s like that’s kind of your sweeter one that’s less expensive, and everyone knows what it tastes like. It’s like your McDonald’s of whiskey. You know what I mean?

Sundi Myint: [17:50] I’m trying to remember what it tastes like in the NEAT glass because that helps me put it at the right place. And I feel like I have tried that once at, like, a Christmas party with family once.

Chuck Carpenter: [18:03] Do you travel with a NEAT glass?

Sundi Myint: [18:05] No. So my boyfriend was the one who found them and then his family, he got them for them. So they were at the house already.

Chuck Carpenter: [18:15] Got you.

Sundi Myint: [18:15] And his family. They drink more at family gatherings, and my family is like a wine, maybe beer kind of situation. His is, whatever drinks are going to be made, they will be drunk.

Chuck Carpenter: [18:29] All right, fair enough. I hope his family doesn’t listen to this podcast. I’m just saying.

Sundi Myint: [18:37] I think they would agree with my assessment.

Chuck Carpenter: [18:39] Yeah, it’s a fair assessment.

Robbie Wagner: [18:41] As long as they’re not ashamed of it, fine.

Chuck Carpenter: [18:44] Right. Yeah, no, shame on that game. Yeah, I don’t know. That’s an interesting equalizer, I guess, where I wonder if I would feel that Jack Daniels is a four. It is sort of like Starbucks or McDonald’s of.

Sundi Myint: [18:57] You’re saying that the Jack Daniels is a one, Robbie?

Robbie Wagner: [19:00] I’m saying that Jack Daniels is like a three, and then I’m saying this is a step or two above a Jack Daniels. For me, it’s not quite as sweet, and I don’t know, it’s just a little bit better, I think. I don’t know why I hate Jack Daniels so much, honestly, but.

Sundi Myint: [19:18] Usually it’s one night in college.

Chuck Carpenter: [19:20] Yeah. That’s just why I can’t drink Jim Beam White Label ever. It’s a couple of years in college, so yeah, just can’t go back there. Yeah. I don’t know. Like, Jack Daniels is maple filtered, and that gives it that consistency. Right. Sort of like Starbucks burns their beans because that gives them consistency. Kind of the same tactic, I guess.

Robbie Wagner: [19:45] That makes sense.

Chuck Carpenter: [19:47] Reasonable. And so, yeah, that’s where we’ve landed, I guess, on our tentacles. It’s alright. I’d put it in a cocktail. It won’t go to waste.

Robbie Wagner: [19:59] Yeah. I mean, I’ll drink it. It’ll go in my collection of way too many whiskey that Katelyn does not like me having because they take up a lot of space.

Chuck Carpenter: [20:06] Luckily, I’m coming out to visit. We’ll handle that.

Robbie Wagner: [20:10] Oh, yeah.

Sundi Myint: [20:13] I’m not committing to a visit yet, Robbie, but I am working on getting a car. I’m living in the city, but I’m getting a car, so I’d like to be able to do things, visit people.

Chuck Carpenter: [20:23] Wow.

Sundi Myint: [20:24] I don’t love driving, so an hour or so outside of the DC area might be a stretch for me, but I’ll work up to it.

Robbie Wagner: [20:33] I will meet in the middle at, like, a winery that’s not all the way out here or something.

Sundi Myint: [20:38] Yeah, that could work. But I will be commuting like an hour on Fridays because I’ve rejoined my old skating team. So I’m on the synchronized skating team again. And so that’s sort of what the push was for the car because I didn’t want to have to get ride every time. Getting a car in 2021, by the way, peak impossible.

Chuck Carpenter: [21:00] Yeah.

Sundi Myint: [21:02] So that was fun, but somehow figured something out. Be here at the end of the month. Let you know how that goes. But yeah, so it’s fun. I also don’t have a Friday afternoon or evening anymore until, like, I die. No, April.

Chuck Carpenter: [21:18] Interesting. Yeah. I’m so dumb. I’m doing the car thing twice this year. So anyway, I was like, oh, yeah, those people are dumb. Why would they do that? And then two different life things happened that I’m like, well, I guess I’m doing that now. So what part of DC do you live in?

Sundi Myint: [21:35] I’m right next to the zoo area.

Chuck Carpenter: [21:38] Cleveland Park, right?

Sundi Myint: [21:40] Like, to the right of that.

Chuck Carpenter: [21:42] Yeah.

Sundi Myint: [21:42] Okay. I think you mentioned you really liked the whiskey bar that was in Adams Morgan. Was it? Jack?

Chuck Carpenter: [21:530]Jack Rose.

Sundi Myint: [21:54] Yeah. I never made it there because that was my pre-whiskey days.

Chuck Carpenter: [21:59] Is it gone?

Sundi Myint: [22:00] Yeah. Honestly, I kind of move forward with thinking everything’s gone until I’ve confirmed it’s there still.

Chuck Carpenter: [22:07] Oh, okay. I see.

Sundi Myint: [22:08] It’s a really bad way to live. This is how I’m living. I’m actually, like, reeling right now because my favorite sushi place is gone. My go to coffee shop is, like, closed right now. I don’t even want to say this because I’m scared I’m jinxing it because I don’t know for sure that they’re closed. They just weren’t open this weekend for the first time in six years. So I’m just sort of like. Anyways.

Chuck Carpenter: [22:31] I’m going to cancel my trip, actually. I’m like. Jack Rose is gone. I’m not sure what I’m doing there.

Robbie Wagner: [22:37] I just checked. I think it opens, said tomorrow at five. So they’re open, maybe not every day. Were they open every day before?

Chuck Carpenter: [22:47] Yes. I mean, I didn’t go every day. That would be a real problem. The first place we had in DC. We lived, like, basically around the corner, and so that was dangerous. And whiskey wasn’t quite as popular at that point, so you could get a lot of things for fairly normal prices.

Sundi Myint: [23:06] We went to a lot of happy hours and stuff on any given day of the week when Robbie and I worked at that job, mostly because we had a New York office, and whenever somebody was coming down to visit the DC office, whatever day they were here, we’d like, go out to hang out. If they were here on a Monday, they were here on Tuesday, whatever day that was drinking day, to the point where my roommate was like, why do you guys drink on Mondays? That was like, what’s wrong with Mondays?

Chuck Carpenter: [23:34] Right? Better specials, that’s why.

Robbie Wagner: [23:40] Yeah. Less crowded.

Sundi Myint: [23:41] Those years were blur. So many activities and happy hours. To give you some illustration of the friendliness and the way I kind of line it up in my head like a fraternity in terms of, like, networking and, like, I’ve met people who I didn’t even work with there, but I’ve met them, and they worked there after me or are working there now. And they didn’t start when I was there. And they’ll hook me up with a network connection, or they’ll help me with some technology if they’re working on it, or just like I’ve never talked to them before, but they’re cool to hang out. We even had like a reunion thing a few months ago, or, sorry, a few weeks ago in New York. And just so many different people from, I’m calling them, different graduating classes, air quotes came out to hang out, and it was really cool. And that’s kind of the kind of place it was. I don’t know. It’s a different company now. They got bought.

Robbie Wagner: [24:39] Yeah. I would say they did really well at hiring and culture fits and that kind of thing, so everyone was really great. But then, just in terms of managing the company, it didn’t go as well.

Sundi Myint: [24:52] Yeah, somebody I’m friends with who was on Robbie’s team actually mentioned that they were shocked that that company was bought and was successful because it didn’t seem like the product was going to do well enough to be purchased. And then a company me and that person worked with later actually shut their doors, like two weeks ago, and laid off everyone who worked there. Obviously, it was a travel company, so kind of had to happen. And we were just so sure that that was the company that was going to make it. And just like, here we are Summer 2021, and these two companies that me and my friend worked at were just like totally different directions. You never know how technology is going to go. You never know how the market is going to go or predict a pandemic.

Robbie Wagner: [25:36] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [25:38] Yeah. Making the assumption that, as you know, things is the constant is kind of the problem. Right. Very interesting stuff. So did you always work on Elixir stuff, then? Were you doing Elixir at that one?

Sundi Myint: [25:56] That was pretty JavaScript-heavy, kind of that job. Robbie was more on the JavaScript side, and I was more on the HTML CSS-like branding side of things. Very front end, kind of focused. Now when I work on Elixir, it’s mostly back-end stuff, but I am currently. I think we mentioned this, top of the call. I’m currently working in Flutter on a mobile app. So SmartLogic is a consultancy. We build whatever a client needs to be built. So sometimes it’s an API, sometimes it’s like a mobile app. So we make whatever app they need with whatever technology fits the bill. We really like Flutter, but yeah, my online persona as an Elixir wizard and on Twitter or whatever is like, yeah, I write Elixir. It’s kind of funny because right now I’m writing my talk for Elixir Conf in Austin, for I think it’s October, and I’m like writing that, and then I’m like in work doing Flutter, so my brain is like broken. But I started Elixir early 2019 at another job. I used Elixir on the back end, and that’s how I got into it. It was the first language that really clicked for me. JavaScript has always sent my head around in circles. I’ve had to ask like a thousand people for help. No answer anyone’s ever given me ever made sense. Don’t really know how to describe that. Elixir made sense. It read to me like English, which is interesting. Like, the syntax looks like a little bit like Ruby, and it’s not like Rails at all in terms of magic, but a lot of Rails developers are pretty comfortable with it right off the bat. It doesn’t fail very often. If something’s broken in production, it’s usually not the Elixir app’s fault. So it was just a little more reliable, and I could breathe a little easier.

Chuck Carpenter: [27:55] Right. Yeah. Makes sense.

Robbie Wagner: [27:56] JavaScript doesn’t give you a lot of safety in that regard.

Chuck Carpenter: [28:00] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [28:01] It just breaks, and I guess you have TypeScript now.

Chuck Carpenter: [28:05] So there are layers to be forced upon, but yeah, that’s what I used to like about Python back in the day is it felt like it was just, oh, this is kind of like speaking what I want to happen. I just type that, and then that’s what happens.

Sundi Myint: [28:20] Flutter is kind of similar in a different way. The alternative to Flutter for us is React Native. We kind of were experimenting with it because React Native is not reliable when it comes to upgrades. Anyone who’s worked on a React Native project knows that upgrading from one version to the next, especially if you’ve missed a few upgrades, can be really bad, really heart-wrenching for a developer. So we just gave Flutter a shot. We took notes on how the first project went. We liked it enough to try it again. So this is our second shot at it. It was kind of amazing to start a Flutter app and just follow the docs for creating a new application. And it running in 10 minutes on both an iOS and an Android emulator in 10 minutes on both with their little like test incrementer app, where in React native, the iOS one usually spun up. Okay, fine. The Android one, I’d be there for three days. Maybe that’s a unique experience, but I just remember being shocked when I first ran my first Flutter app.

Chuck Carpenter: [29:34] Yeah, I’ve heard in terms of feedback on React native I’ve definitely heard similar things. And then people in the ionic capacitor camps, it kind of depends on what you’re trying to make the app do as to the level of difficulty. And I think Robbie can speak a little bit to that, trying to apply a capacitor to an Ember app. But I hear really great things about Expo, and they went into actual production-ready mode. So I’m curious if there’s any kind of parallels there, but I know that is pretty recently that that happened. Yeah, I mean, in general, I’ve heard some pretty good things about Flutter. I guess the disparate bit to it is that if you have your web app and then again, you have to sort of write the native apps in a different language and React Native gives you more of that one app to rule them all. So I guess that’s really the only decision you have to make. But if you’re just writing an app that’s supposed to be native, then maybe doesn’t even matter, and you can have.

Sundi Myint: [30:47] Yeah, we’ve experienced both. The other one was a back end in Elixir. We just wrote an API in Phoenix the way that we have done a million times. Just some rest endpoints. Hit them through the API on Flutter. Cool, worked out fine. And the thing that I think is really interesting, the thing that I like about Elixir, is that when you have done something wrong, Elixir is good at highlighting what’s wrong by crashing. There’s this concept of the let it crash mentality comes from Erlang. It sounds scary to CTOs usually, but when you say let it crash mentality, it’s just that the app won’t lie to you and pretend like it’s going to work and then fail silently. It will crash. Like in development mode. Right. There’s ways for the user to not see that, but it will crash, and it’ll tell you this is the exception. This is the line. The stack trace is really good. Flutter is similar in letting you know what’s wrong by being. Like, I want to say, like an overbearing older sibling underlining everything that you’ve written, you don’t have yet. You don’t have this package. You can’t use it. Please import this. This is a quick fix. This is a setting. It will not run unless your code can do what it’s supposed to do, but it will tell you before you even try to run it. And you can’t really hit run unless you fix those things. So it is kind of nice. It’s almost like having a spell check. Like, you know how we can’t live without spell check now.

Robbie Wagner: [32:22] I know pretty much nothing about Flutter or Elixir, honestly. Are either or both compiled, or do they just have really good build time checking?

Sundi Myint: [32:35] So Elixir, oh, man, I’m really bad at answering this question. I know Elixir has, like yeah, there are things that happen at runtime and compile time. So I guess you would call that compiled. Flutter, I don’t know how you would describe it. So Flutter is a Google entity, and so they have the resources to make a really comprehensive VS Code extension. So I think that all of those hints and tips and tricks that come in come really far in the editor. I think that’s how that kind of works.

Chuck Carpenter: [33:09] Got you. Yeah.

Sundi Myint: [33:11] Which is also sort of fun because they do a lot of little widget-of-the-week YouTube videos, and they’re great. They’re not just like great production. They’re worded well, they’re two-minute videos, and I learned so much in the 2 minutes, and they’re just so comprehensive. I don’t think I know anything else that has content like that around the language or the framework.

Chuck Carpenter: [33:37] Yeah, they have the resources to evangelize it on all kinds of levels. Right. Like make it fun. Make the path to learning. I don’t know if they’re doing as well around the Golang stuff, but people do love Golang.

Sundi Myint: [33:49] Gopher.

Chuck Carpenter: [33:50] Yeah, exactly. Wow, that’s true. How far from the Tomster is that? Really hamster, gopher. I know. Robbie, where you’re going next in life?

Robbie Wagner: [34:00] Yeah, it’s totally different.

Chuck Carpenter: [34:02] Yeah. Flutter is like a more sane extension of Dart. I don’t know. I’ve heard or understand.

Sundi Myint: [34:09] If you’re writing Dart. You’re writing Dart. Flutter is a framework.

Chuck Carpenter: [34:12] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [34:13] Does it also give you a web app, or is it just more for mobile stuff?

Sundi Myint: [34:19] It does actually give you a web option. You can even debug it in web. If you don’t have a simulator open, it’ll default to your browser. We haven’t looked into it at all, mostly because what we were making really is for mobile. It wouldn’t make any sense in a web version, but I guess for a developer, if they wanted that for debugging purposes, that could be good. And if they wanted to not make things twice, that could be good. There’s a whole gallery around Flutter that gives you a lot of good examples. But yeah, I think for ease of use, they’re both great. Flutter is great. Elixir is great. The big thing that I think we can probably both identify with for having worked for you guys, working in Ember, and for me working in Elixir is there’s like a very small niche community around it, and hiring for it can be interesting. People are very loyal, very not insulated, but community people know community people for the most part. It’s kind of interesting. I know Robbie did a lot of open-source work back in the day, but this was my first foray into a tech community.

Robbie Wagner: [35:39] Yeah, some of the bigger ones, like, just getting on. I guess it was a slack for Angular back in the day. It just was not welcoming. Like, when you’re in a huge community of everyone is just like, you’re like, hey, I’m having trouble with this. And they’re like, Just do it right. They’re not super helpful or welcoming. And I feel like when you have a smaller community, everyone isn’t like that because they want you to join the community, and they want everybody to be helpful and foster that community and make it better. So I definitely think that’s one of the big selling points of Ember and, I guess, Elixir, which I haven’t experienced that community myself, but, yeah.

Sundi Myint: [36:22] Yeah. It’s been good peoples. You run into them at the conferences, which for me has majority of the time been virtual. But there’s some decent apps out there that do, like, the good meet-and-greet situation. I really like the Toucan app. You have, like, little bubbles that float in and out, and the bubble is a person. And then, when you join bubbles, you are talking to them like this. Like, we would be a three-bubble thing in Toucan. And then when somebody joins the app, it will ding, and then you can wave at them, sort of like they walked into the room and you waved across the room, and then they’ll be like, oh, my friend’s here. And then they’ll go join your bubble. It’s cute. It’s a pretty good rendition. We used it for a few conferences this year, and it worked pretty well.

Robbie Wagner: [37:09] Yeah, it sounds nice. What was that thing we just used for happy hour? Chuck? I totally forgot already.

Chuck Carpenter: [37:16] I would have to reference I don’t have Slack or anything open right now. So yeah, we use the thing that lets you do, like, break-off sessions and icebreakers and things like that. So we have biweekly company happy hour, and we usually invite a few extra people that we work with as consultants, and yeah, I don’t know, it’s just one big room. Sometimes people talk over each other and whatnot, so we try to change that by that’s kind of what Toucan will do too. Yeah, we should try that one.

Sundi Myint: [37:48] It’s nice because when you’re like, my company is like 20-something people, and so that’s a little big for company happy hours. We tried it once for company happy hour. And it was nice because you could still break off in the little groups as people left. We ended up as one big conglomerate group still, but at first, it was three or so groups. Every once in a while, people are talking about something you have zero interest in.

Chuck Carpenter: [38:12] That never happens now. It’s so weird.

Robbie Wagner: [38:15] You’re interested in everything.

Chuck Carpenter: [38:18] No, everything I say, people are like.

Robbie Wagner: [38:24] Oh, you’re interesting.

Chuck Carpenter: [38:24] There you go. So I had one foray into Elixir. I was very interested in it because there is a lot of fanfare around it. There’s a lot of this discussion of, like, oh, it feels like natural language, and yeah, being on like leveraging Erlang and this whole it just sounded very stable. So I dove into it. We needed like a simple rest API, JSON API, because Robbie is an overlord. Yeah, I went down the path and wrote one with that. And there’s some nice packages that do some of the serialization and stuff for you, and it was cool. But it felt like bringing a sledgehammer for something that was really simple. And at that time, I was working on some serverless stuff with a client too. So I was like, I don’t know, let me do serverless with this. And then that made it just like simple AWS availability as needed. Because also, for that app, I didn’t expect a lot of people were going to utilize it. So why would I keep this up all the time and available all the time? I did enjoy.

Sundi Myint: [39:35] Did you have any interface?

Chuck Carpenter: [39:35] No, none whatsoever. So yeah, I mean that’s the thing if I was doing the admin on top of that or something, that I might have stuck with it, but if I felt like, wow, I’m bringing a sledgehammer here, and I just need like a little pin hammer. Really low availability.

Sundi Myint: [39:56] So what did you end up using? Sorry, I think I might have missed.

Chuck Carpenter: [39:58] I switched to AWS Lambdas and then utilizing Cognito for login-like authentication to it. So that was actually kind of a nice bolt on too is I could utilize Cognito.

Sundi Myint: [40:12] That was easier? To go smaller?

Robbie Wagner: [40:13] Chuck likes pain, and he likes Buzzwords. If you say Kubernetes, he’ll be like, let me just tell you about Kubernetes for a long time. And I’m like, as soon as you say that word, I just go, no, not even listening.

Chuck Carpenter: [40:26] It’s a box in the cloud that makes your life easier.

Sundi Myint: [40:28] He says Kubernetes, and you stop listening.

Chuck Carpenter: [40:30] Yeah, he definitely does. If you want to anger Robbie, just say mono repo. So I’m doing this as a mono repo, and he’s like, I hate that. Runs away and drinks more whiskey. I don’t know. Yeah, so for authentication purposes, authentication is really hard, and trying to do your own bespoke authentication is like crazy unless you have very specific needs and obviously, there’s like auth zero out there, and AWS has Cognito services. So yeah, basically, deciding to use their serverless functions and then integrating Cognito into it was not that hard.

Sundi Myint: [41:11] I will say that this probably wasn’t there at the time, but Elixir now has built-in auth. If you start a new project, I think in Phoenix one six, oh, gosh, people can’t quote me on these things. I’m pretty sure auth is built in there now. Which people are loving so far. As far as I’ve heard at SmartLogic, since we spin up so many new apps, we kind of have like a standard example app that we start from. I think we built auth like a while ago, like way before I started. So we kind of have that, and then we clone it over and then rip out what we need and use what we need. So we haven’t had to give it a go yet, but it’s there if you want to try again.

Chuck Carpenter: [41:54] Here we go. I’ll see if my boss will give me a chance.

Robbie Wagner: [41:58] I think the hardest part was getting it to be JSON API because no one uses that other than Ember, really. And so getting that to work with any kind of package, unless you’re using Rails, like Rails has a nice just-do-it-for-me generator thing. And several times during Chuck being frustrated, I would be like, hey, maybe you could just use Rails and generate this. But that didn’t go over well.

Sundi Myint: [42:23] I’m not familiar with this from Ember. Is it just like you needed JSON files out of your endpoints?

Chuck Carpenter: [42:29] It’s a spec. It’s basically a rest spec. So says, the shape of your payloads in and out needs to look a certain way, and these are the rules around that. So I respect the fact that there are rules around it. But yeah, kind of like Robbie said, everybody’s like doing GraphQL now, so they don’t care about it so much.

Robbie Wagner: [42:49] It was before GraphQL, and it kind of had some of the same ideas where you don’t have to include everything, so you can tell it include these things, and it will pull down those versus just always getting huge responses. It was ahead of its time. It just didn’t really get picked up except by Ember because all the people that wrote it are like Ember core team members. So surprise, it’s here.

Sundi Myint: [43:13] No, it’s fun for me. I really love watching the history of talks. And so is it Honey Something Honey Loves, or Honey Pot maybe makes these YouTube videos? Like the history of Ember. The history of Elixir. I think I watched those both.

Robbie Wagner: [43:29] Honey Pot. Yeah, I have to look that up. UK recruiting group or something, I think. Does that sound right?

Sundi Myint: [43:35] Yeah, they got interviews for both. I Ember watching the Elixir one. I remember watching the Elixir one. And they got interviews from, like, founders and stuff. I thought that was really cool. On our recent season of the Elixir Wizards podcast, we got to talk to some of the Erlang founding members, which was wild because they built this thing 20, 30 years ago. We’re building on top of it today. And just, like, hear about how they they weren’t even out to make a programming language. They wanted to make a solution for telecom switches to not fail because they can’t. And they came out with Erlang. It was just wild to have the opportunity because one of the founders is no longer with us. Just to have the opportunity to talk to them was super, super cool. So it’s fun. They say, they joke, everyone’s got a podcast, but podcast lets you talk to people.

Chuck Carpenter: [44:32] Right. There you go.

Robbie Wagner: [44:35] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [44:35] Our podcast lets you drink during the day.

Sundi Myint: [44:39] That is true.

Chuck Carpenter: [44:40] Really? Yeah. The fundamental foundation of this particular podcast is that, oh, yeah. And other things like technology and whatnot. I have a whatnot?

Robbie Wagner: [44:51] Yeah, we’re bad at following the format. We kind of go all over the place because we feel like there’s people that probably only care about the whiskey or only care about the tech part or whatever. So we try to do it in a row, but we never really do. So people can’t just skip around, but that’s fine.

Chuck Carpenter: [45:09] We don’t make it easy.

Sundi Myint: [45:12] On our podcast. We definitely have a JavaScript, but sometimes it will just completely go off the rails. And that is usually the most fun when we just throw the script out the window because we found something so interesting and so compelling about our guests that we had to dig into it, like a weird Olympic sport or like a childhood. How they got into programming was so crazy. I think someone got into it because they wanted to impress. They got a girlfriend in fifth grade by learning how to they programmed, like, a MySpace page for a way band or something.

Chuck Carpenter: [45:48] It’s got to be the first time in history that ever happened that you got a boyfriend or girlfriend by writing code until, like, later in life, at least as a kid.

Robbie Wagner: [45:58] If your MySpace is good enough, it brings people in.

Sundi Myint: [46:02] Brings your top three. You go from top three to top two because the top one is always reserved for the best friend. You can’t put the significant other there. No, I remember the rules.

Chuck Carpenter: [46:13] Oh, man, I’m aged out of the rules. I barely engaged on that. My younger brother got me involved in MySpace for like a minute. Okay. Oh, yeah. Background music so cool.

Robbie Wagner: [46:29] Being an actual programmer now, I wonder about how unsafe all of it was because you could just be like, no, I want to move my comments here and do this and just execute JavaScript. It’s cool.

Chuck Carpenter: [46:41] Yeah, well, that was the big thing. There was like some guy that got who wrote some virus that went across MySpace, and it got famous.

Sundi Myint: [46:53] If you ever really want to cringe at yourself, look at your first Facebook post.

Chuck Carpenter: [47:00] I don’t have a Facebook anymore, so I can’t look at it right.

Sundi Myint: [47:07] Well you can’t cringe. It’s particularly bad because it was like the status format, where it would be like, Sundi is feeling this way, or Sundi is at a movie. So it was like Sundi is wondering why something something that’s what statuses were back in the day.

Chuck Carpenter: [47:27] Yeah. Not recommended for the future.

Sundi Myint: [47:35] Well, I hear the kids aren’t even on social media now. It’s just TikTok. Which does that count? That’s content creation. I’m not counting that as social media.

Chuck Carpenter: [47:43] No, not really. That weirds me out.

Robbie Wagner: [47:46] I mean, I’m on nothing. I have always been on nothing. I mean, I have accounts, but I never use social media. I never watch a YouTube video. I never do anything.

Chuck Carpenter: [47:54] You never watch a YouTube video? How do you learn to fix stuff in your house? Because that’s what YouTube is for me.

Robbie Wagner: [48:01] I’ve done that some. But Katelyn will watch YouTube videos for fun, like entertaining ones, or watch TikToks or whatever. I don’t do any of that. I might watch a classic TV show like kids used to watch before all this existed. But yeah.

Sundi Myint: [48:21] I remember one time one time we came to hang out at your house, Robbie, and you had Nick Jr on for ODI. And my heart warmed.

Robbie Wagner: [48:32] Yeah, dogs like little kids’ cartoons.

Sundi Myint: [48:37] My cat does enjoy cat TV, but cat TV is a window of birds chirping. And she’s almost destroyed the TV. Or destroyed herself, really, because she’s launching herself headfirst into it. So none of that.

Robbie Wagner: [48:53] Yeah, that sounds dangerous.

Chuck Carpenter: [48:55] Well, you know not to get a bird now, right?

Sundi Myint: [48:57] Yes, I do know that. We do have a squirrel who likes to hang outside the window and taunt her literally, like dances around on the fence. Like you can’t get.

Chuck Carpenter: [49:07] He knows you can’t get outside. Yeah, exactly.

Sundi Myint: [49:09] It’s basically what the dance looks like when I see it.

Chuck Carpenter: [49:12] Classic squirrel.

Sundi Myint: [49:12] Amusing it is. But Robbie, you mentioning that you don’t do social media or do anything. It’s just like, sometimes, years past. And I wonder how I became friends with some friends. How did we become friends?

Robbie Wagner: [49:30] Just hanging out from work, I guess. I’d be on Slack. You can reach me there. But I’m not really posting anything or any of that.

Sundi Myint: [49:39] I think we had one New York trip. It was a company-wide New York thing where we all went out after that was like a common thing. We had, like, the all-day meeting, and then everyone would go out to dinner for the official thing. And then there were like three different after-hours things. And one of those things was karaoke. And Robbie got up there and belted it. I think it was like, I have no idea what it was.

Robbie Wagner: [50:02] Me and [unintelligible].

Sundi Myint: [50:03] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [50:05] This is going to be a thing that happens. We’re taking a trip to Nashville in a month.

Robbie Wagner: [50:11] Well, depending on the state of the world.

Chuck Carpenter: [50:12] Planned as of now. And Karaoke is a must then, if not then another time.

Robbie Wagner: [50:22] Yeah, I will oblige.

Chuck Carpenter: [50:25] Perfect. I have no idea. This is worth it. The whole journey has been worth it now.

Sundi Myint: [50:30] I also had no idea until it was right in front of me.

Chuck Carpenter: [50:35] You’re like. I can’t believe it. I’m very focused on my hydration right now, by the way.

Sundi Myint: [50:41] Oh, yeah, me too.

Chuck Carpenter: [50:44] Oh, perfect. I like where you’re going. I mixed the two for specific reasons. I started getting into electrolytes. Now, I know that that’s just salt, but there are a number of electrolyte-focused companies, and they’re adding potassium and some other things in there. So I’ve been trying a bunch of different ones. Today I’m having some Liquid IV, and I would say that’s somewhat effective.

Sundi Myint: [51:06] Yeah. I have an electrolyte mix that I love. It’s like lemon-flavored, and when I add it to soda stream or when I add the soda stream water to it, it tastes like fizzy lemonade with no sugar added. It just like straight up tastes like fizzy lemonade to me. I will drink that just to drink it when I don’t even need the electrolytes, which might be bad, but when I’m working out a lot, like, I need the electrolytes. Otherwise, I will just get dizzy.

Chuck Carpenter: [51:32] If you replace the term working out with drinking, same thing, basically where I’m at. Well, today might be different, but yeah, I’ll have two, three drinks a day, I think, give or take.

Sundi Myint: [51:48] I learned the lesson of going lighter on carbs when I happened to be working out a lot, and I actually think I made myself bedridden for two days. I couldn’t walk around without falling over. Yeah, I think I was going keto at the time.

Chuck Carpenter: [52:05] Oh yeah, so trying to make that transition.

Sundi Myint: [52:08] I made the transition into it and was working out a ton. And so I was so dizzy that I was like, okay, I understand what happened. Now I will just make a pot of rice and only eat that. So I just carb-loaded and electrolyte loaded. Yeah, I got better in 48 hours, but it was a rough two days.

Chuck Carpenter: [52:30] So are you doing a lot of cardio then?

Sundi Myint: [52:34] HIIT training? Like a lot of YouTube? A lot of YouTube, Robbie. The wonderful world of YouTube free workouts.

Chuck Carpenter: [52:40] That’s true. Yeah. I’ve done some TRX workouts from there.

Sundi Myint: [52:44] Yeah. I like the ones that don’t have any equipment. I have a very small apartment.

Chuck Carpenter: [52:50] Yeah, right.

Sundi Myint: [52:52] But now I’m skating again, so I have to figure out what kind of cardio world that means for me. Because when you do your whole routine, it’s only like 2 minutes, but your heart rate is, like, at 170. Whatever.

Robbie Wagner: [53:07] Wow.

Sundi Myint: [53:10] And the physics of synchro skating is ridiculous because you’re all linked up together, and then you’re physically linked by hands and shoulders. And so if somebody’s rotating, like, the person who’s at the slow-moving end of the pivot will not be moving at all, but the person at the end will be, like, going 30mph. If they let go or you let go of them, they fly into the wall. Fun time.

Chuck Carpenter: [53:37] Illadvised. Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [53:38] I think I would take the slow side.

Chuck Carpenter: [53:41]Happy to hold on to you as you move. Thank you.

Sundi Myint: [53:46] But it’s way more challenging in terms of thinking about the physics. When I was a solo skater, I didn’t think of any of that stuff. And it’s way more fun to be a synchro skater and just being on a team. Team is way more fun.

Chuck Carpenter: [54:00] Interesting.

Robbie Wagner: [54:00] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [54:02] I didn’t even consider this as a possibility. Synchronized skating. Yeah. I’m going to have to do some.

Chuck Carpenter: [54:08] Like swimming but with skates.

Chuck Carpenter:[54:08] YouTubing, after this, right? You have to consult YouTube to see what it’s like, Robbie.

Sundi Myint: [54:15] Yeah, there was, actually. Do you remember that era? I’m going to censor myself. There was an era where YouTube videos were, oh, Robbie wouldn’t know. Maybe I’m asking a check. The YouTube video trend where it was like, stuff people say to insert group here, stuff people say to athletes, stuff people say to college students. I don’t know. And they were all basically stereotypes. And the stuff is not stuff. The other word.

Chuck Carpenter: [54:40] Yeah.

Sundi Myint: [54:41] And my team made one in college for stuff people say to figure skaters, synchro skaters, specifically. And one of them was like synchronized skating. Is that like synchronized swimming, where the water is frozen?

Chuck Carpenter: [54:56] Because you’re not in the water? That would be very difficult.

Sundi Myint: [55:00] Actually. I explained to everyone recently about how rinks actually don’t use, like they don’t flood the floor with water and then let it freeze. That’s not how it works. They’re like slim blocks of ice, sort of like grass. When you get grass on your lawn, you get it in rolls, and you roll it out. You don’t roll the ice out. I’m pretty sure it comes out in blocks. And then you set it down. Then you do zam over it with the Zamboni. And the ice, like the water, comes out of the Zamboni that makes a cohesive surface.

Robbie Wagner: [55:30] I just.

Chuck Carpenter: [55:31] I had no idea. I just learned that. Yeah, I had no idea. How about that?

Sundi Myint: [55:35] There’s, like, a company that’s doing synthetic ice that doesn’t melt, and you can just lock it together. And people have been figure skating in their kitchens and their front, what do you call it, pavement or, like, on tennis courts or whatever. Wherever they can put it down. Or if it’s flat and it doesn’t need to be cold, it just is slippery enough, and it feels like real ice. That was explaining that, and I was explaining how it wasn’t too different, maybe, from, like, ice in an ice rink. Everyone’s mind was blown.

Robbie Wagner: [56:08] Yeah. I don’t understand how that works.

Sundi Myint: [56:11] Truth be told. I don’t understand how the synthetic ice works. But it’s interesting.

Chuck Carpenter: [56:15] Yeah. Feels like it would wear down quickly. Yeah.

Sundi Myint: [56:19] Old synthetic ice. When I was growing up, people did, like, rich friends, maybe, like, rich skaters would have synthetic ice in their backyards, and that was super expensive. This seems a little more accessible.

Chuck Carpenter: [56:32] You could put it in your apartment and skate around for lunch and whatnot.

Sundi Myint: [56:39] Definitely not jump. Yeah, fun stuff. I mean, it’s crazy to think that I’m doing something with my life during these times, but really have to do something because I’m just, like, burning up in energy.

Robbie Wagner: [57:00] I have not done.

Chuck Carpenter: [57:01] I can relate to that.

Robbie Wagner: [57:02] Any physical activity of really any kind in a long time? It is not good. I did finally reassemble my Peloton. That’s as far as I got. I haven’t ridden on it yet, but.

Chuck Carpenter: [57:16] I put my rower back together too, and I have a space for it now. And then I sleep in in the morning, and sleeping in is, like, 6:30, and the kids are up.

Sundi Myint: [57:27] The most consistent I ever was, I would do, like, a five, like 05:00 p.m. Whatever it would be, no matter where I was or wherever I was in my work, I would just put a pin in it. I would be already dressed. Like, I would be wearing workout clothes all day. Whatever. I’m working from home. Then I would finish working out around 06:00 p.m. I might finish up whatever Slack messages I had and then figured out dinner. That was a really good schedule for a long time. And then, when the summer hit, I just was so hot. I have no energy in the summer. Like, zero energy. I was just laying around like a big potato.

Chuck Carpenter: [58:04] Figurative and literal.

Sundi Myint: [58:07] I eat a lot of potatoes, so, yeah, literal might be more accurate.

Chuck Carpenter: [58:13] French fries are delicious.

Sundi Myint: [58:15] Hash browns.

Chuck Carpenter: [58:15] Nothing wrong with that. Oh, yeah. There we go.

Sundi Myint: [58:18] Trader Joe’s, 2.50 a pack. I don’t know that off the top of my head.

Robbie Wagner: [58:25] I can’t figure out how to cook hash browns. I get in trouble for doing it really badly.

Sundi Myint: [58:31] Well, you know, Robbie, you’ll have to come over to your your new house, make sure that you’ve outfitted your kitchen with all the things you need, an air fryer to really make hash browns perfect.

Robbie Wagner: [58:40] Well, that’s the problem, then.

Chuck Carpenter: [58:42] That’s true. I’ve done it in a cast iron, but it takes a lot more time, I’m sure. Yeah. I am an air fryer believer.

Sundi Myint: [58:52] I really just take the frozen hash browns out air fryer for, like, 15 minutes on the french fry setting. Perfect. Done. Make eggs on the side. It’s great.

Robbie Wagner: [59:04] We’ll just get that. And I’ll stop trying to put them in a pan because the directions even tell you exactly what to do, right? Like, put however much butter or oil or whatever it says, and it’s like, keep it there, then flip it. But then I go to flip it, and most of the bottom is stuck, and it doesn’t flip. And then I get, like, mashed potatoes. It doesn’t work.

Sundi Myint: [59:25] Right. Now that I’m thinking about it, this is not the first time that I’ve advocated for a cooking appliance to Robbie and even went as far as saying that I would come over and do it for you because we did that once with the sous vide.

Robbie Wagner: [59:37] Sous vide? Yeah.

Sundi Myint: [59:38] We made sous vide steak. I was like, Robbie, you got to have this. So I literally packed up my entire sous vide kit, went over there, and made steak.

Chuck Carpenter: [59:47] And then, did you buy one?

Sundi Myint: [59:49] No, but I also was not a good salesperson, I guess.

Robbie Wagner: [59:53] No, it was good.

Chuck Carpenter: [59:55] Works good.

Robbie Wagner: [59:56] We hadn’t really cooked much until we now that we can’t just get everything delivered, we have to cook, and we probably should get more cooking appliances, but before, we were just really lazy and like, hey, there’s a restaurant right next door. Let’s just go there instead of.

Robbie Wagner: [01:00:12] So sous videing can be this is a whole thing. I mean, I’m looking at the time. I just want to make sure I could talk about cooking all day long, but I will say sous viding can be work, but it actually makes weekdays easier if you do some prep on the weekend, like most things. But you vacuum seal chicken, steak, whatever, you can do it from frozen, so you just toss it in a water bath. I mean, I think the easiest dinners I’ve ever had, I happen to have a butcher down the street. I’ll, like, walk over to the butcher. He knows I have a sous vide. He’ll pack the steak for me, with the butter and rosemary inside, vacuum seal it for me. I get home. I just drop it in the water.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:00:47] Wow.

Sundi Myint: [01:00:49] I also am fully capable of vacuum sealing it myself. That’s fine. He just takes the stuff away.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:00:55] Yeah, no, that’s magic.

Robbie Wagner: [01:00:58] I didn’t know that as an option.

Sundi Myint: [01:01:01] Some butchers will actually sell it to you vacuum sealed because it’s just easier so the meat doesn’t drip everywhere.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:01:08] Right.

Sundi Myint: [01:01:0] So if they happen to if you find someone that does that, then you can maybe ask them to salt it and pepper it for you. Most things don’t need a lot of flavor.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:01:18] Yeah, totally. Wow. You need to meet your butcher, your local butcher. It’s probably a butcher out there.

Robbie Wagner: [01:01:27] There’s one in Marshall, I think. Haven’t been there. I mean, Katelyn doesn’t eat meat.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:01:37] You can do vegetables in the sous vide, by the way.

Sundi Myint: [01:01:39] Yeah, it’s not as worth it. So maybe we’ll go down the air fryer route for you too.

Robbie Wagner: [01:01:47] Yeah, we’ve been thinking about one, but I don’t know. We just haven’t.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:01:51] She doesn’t eat meat, but the buffalo wings out of an air fryer are the truth. They’re so good.

Robbie Wagner: [01:01:57] We do the cauliflower wings.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:02:01] Okay, maybe you could do real wings.

Robbie Wagner: [01:02:07]Oh, yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:02:08] I’m whispering. She doesn’t listen to this podcast, that’s for sure.

Sundi Myint: [01:02:12] No, I think the thing that I’ve noticed that’s consistent amongst friends who are podcasters is that significant, and others do not listen to them.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:02:21] Yeah, my wife listened to the first one, evangelized to some of our friends who all were not in tech. They all listened to the first one, and then I’m certain never came back. And, hey, if any of you did stick around and are listening right now, let me know that I’m a liar, but I feel pretty confident.

Robbie Wagner: [01:02:41] I know one of my friends listens to it who’s not? He doesn’t code. I mean, he’s kind of technical. He’s an engineer, but he just listens to it because it’s me. It’s just fun to listen to you.

Sundi Myint: [01:02:53] I think the hardest part, at least for me, is if I’m listening to, let’s say, this podcast, and Robbie will say something about how his name was actually Bob Billy instead of Billy Bob. I’m sitting there screaming because I want to say something, and I could text Robbie and be like, oh, my gosh. And he’d be like, what? That conversation was like four weeks ago. I don’t remember what you’re talking about. Right, yeah, I’m not saying he said that. I’m saying this is usually the experience. And my coworkers have said that about our podcast, too, because it’s a work podcast where they’ll listen to the podcast later on, and because they know us, because they work with us, they’re sitting there like, oh, I just want to chime in on the conversation. And it’s funny to hear that feedback. I don’t think I have any friends who listen to it either that are not in the Elixir community.

Robbie Wagner: [01:03:43] Yeah, I mean, I guess it is like, even though some of our friends are technical, it depends on the technology or specific thing you’re talking about, I guess. But I don’t know. I listen to a lot of different stuff, even if I have no idea what they’re talking about. Just to get some perspective, I guess, but.

Sundi Myint: [01:04:01] My favorite podcast right now is the Avatar the Last Airbender Braving the Elements Recap, where they talk to the people who voiced characters in the show are going through each episode and talking about nuances in the episode and judging the overarching themes. And I’m just sitting there like the biggest nerd in the world. I don’t miss a single one.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:04:26] I don’t want to change the rating of this particular podcast, but the one that I’d been listening to recently and started up in a road trip that we took over the summer is called My Dad Wrote a Porno. And it is amazing. It’s these three British folks. The one guy, his dad wrote erotic literature in his retirement, and they spend each episode reading a chapter, and it’s ridiculous, and the writing is horrible, and that’s what they’re just basically like, what is this? And this is your dad, and I feel bad for you. And that’s really all I need to say. I can’t obviously get in into it. Spoiler alert. Worth it.

Sundi Myint: [01:05:14] Strong no, just a strong no.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:05:14] I mean, it’s not, though. There’s nothing erotic about this literature. It is so bad and so ridiculous. And this old man has no grasp of either writing style, grammar, or anatomy.

Robbie Wagner: [01:05:34] He’s just having a fun time.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:05:36] Yeah, it’s so funny. Anyway.

Robbie Wagner: [01:05:42] Well, on that note, we’re over an hour here, so we’ll wrap it up. Thanks, everybody, for listening. Thanks, Sundi, for coming on. If you liked it, please subscribe. I don’t know what I usually say here, but we’re done. So catch you guys next time.