RobbieTheWagner 
Charles William Carpenter III 
James Q Quick [00:00:00] Robbie Wagner: Hey, what’s up everybody? Robbie the Wagner here. This is Whiskey Web and Whatnot. We’ve got a live show today from THAT Conf. You may have seen a bunch of THAT Conf videos from us earlier. This one, the intro got a little messed up, so you won’t hear the usual intro. It’s gonna be a little choppier, but we do have an amazing guest, James Quick. We’ve been excited to get this one out for you. Sorry for the big delay and hope you enjoy what you hear.
[00:00:25] Intro: Welcome to Syntax. Welcome to a brand new episode of the Front End Happy Hour podcast. Welcome to this week’s JS Party. Live from Ship Shape Studios, this is Whiskey Web and Whatnot. With your hosts, Robbie the Wagner, and me, Charles William Carpenter III. That’s right Charles. We drink whiskey and talk about web development.
[00:00:53] Intro: I mean, it’s all in the name. It’s not that deep. This is Whiskey Web and Whatnot. Do not adjust your [00:01:00] set.
[00:01:01] Robbie Wagner: Robbie the Wagner and Charles William Carpenter III. Uh, today will just call me Charles. Slow. All right. I don’t know. It’s the best joke I’ve got offhand because I’m there. ‘cause our guest is quick. That’s right. Okay. Sometimes I rhyme slow, sometimes I rhyme. Quick there. It’s nailed it. Yeah.
[00:01:21] Robbie Wagner: So yeah, our guest today is James.
[00:01:23] Robbie Wagner: Quick. How’s it going, James? Very good. Good to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for coming on.
[00:01:27] Robbie Wagner: Um, yeah, for anyone who has not heard of you, could you please give a few sentences about who you are and what you do?
[00:01:33] James Quick: Yeah. I usually start with, uh, developer, speaker, and teacher. I’ve done some, some combination of those things professionally now for 10 years and I.
[00:01:42] James Quick: Do content creation and consulting full time. So I’ve had seven, eight years of delivery experience, engineering. I got an architecture and now I get to work for myself doing content, coming to conferences, doing YouTube videos, courses, all the stuff to just help teach people how to write code.
[00:01:57] Robbie Wagner: Nice. Nice.
[00:01:58] Robbie Wagner: Yeah. I was listening to a couple of your [00:02:00] podcasts earlier where you were changing your title up. Are you gonna make a random generator for that? Maybe? Yeah. I have no idea what to call myself and it, it
[00:02:06] James Quick: seems so lame when I fill out a bio for a conference or something and they’re like, what’s your title?
[00:02:10] James Quick: And I’m like, I don’t, I don’t really know. So I try to, I have an LLC, so sometimes I’ll say founder of the LLC. Right. Um, and content creator. I don’t know.
[00:02:18] Robbie Wagner: Yeah.
[00:02:18] James Quick: Anyway.
[00:02:19] Robbie Wagner: Yeah. Who knows? Titles are hard. I know you teach people how to code and get better at code and learn different things about code. You show exciting things in code that you like.
[00:02:29] Robbie Wagner: Those are actually some of my favorite videos of yours where you’re just like, Astro four just came out. It’s awesome. Lemme tell you why.
[00:02:35] James Quick: Yeah. Astro overwhelms me. I don’t know if we’re ready to like. Go down that rabbit hole yet, but they released new versions so quickly and I have a course. Yeah. And so right before I released the course, they were like, Hey, we have this new version coming out.
[00:02:46] James Quick: I’m like, thanks for the heads up. I was kind of working on this. Yeah. And then I’m like, three months later or whatever, they released 4.0, which is very exciting. But with mixed feelings, I’m like, stop. Like, let me just sit on the content that I have for a little bit. Yeah. And then you can go and update stuff, but [00:03:00] whatever.
[00:03:00] Robbie Wagner: Yeah, we should definitely get deeper into that. ‘cause we do love Astro too. Yeah.
[00:03:03] Robbie Wagner: But before we do, let’s start with the whiskey, Chuck. Okay. So first of all, I’m gonna refuse to pronounce the whiskey until this is, uh. Osh, is that right? Uh, pretty much. You gotta say it like Ian. It’s kind. Well, no, that doesn’t sound Scottish to me at all.
[00:03:16] Robbie Wagner: Well, I can’t A Scottish accent. Osh Osh, that’s what it’s called. Uh, I’m sure those in Scotland would say it even better, but this is a single malt from Glasgow. It’s aged 12 years, obviously is a hundred percent, uh, malt. And is matured in bourbon and sherry casks and is 80 proof. Uh, I was thinking you asked me to take it a little easy on you, so I think we did.
[00:03:39] Robbie Wagner: I think we may have something tasty and, uh, and not too, uh, deep for the palette. It is two 30 or so. It’s 2 42 now. Oh, okay. Five. Uh, fill out this glass if you like, across the pond. I’m gonna go with this later. So That’s true if you want to have a proper scotch experience. Um. Oh gosh. Sorry about that.
[00:03:58] Robbie Wagner: Anyway, anyway, we can’t get a pore on. You gotta [00:04:00] put your, okay. We’ll see how that goes. I’m gonna skip to it down. Just taking down, pass it down. I brought a nice, my own glass. Nice
[00:04:07] James Quick: spin to it. Uh,
[00:04:07] Robbie Wagner: does it, how, how close does it put me to alcoholism that I travel with my own whiskey glass?
[00:04:13] James Quick: You can just say it’s part of the, that’s part of the podcast.
[00:04:16] James Quick: Like, that’s how, that’s part of the brand. That’s what you have to do. Yeah. Do
[00:04:19] Robbie Wagner: you travel with it when you’re not doing a podcast? I refuse to answer that.
[00:04:26] Robbie Wagner: Ooh, it’s got a smoky, definitely catch up. It smells kinda light. Yeah. Well I get a little smoke, a little bit of like a cherry. That’s probably like the cherry casks. Mm. Smell a little bit of, uh, new shoe leather. Gosh, really? I’m not, yeah, you’re not getting, that’s the best. I’m not, uh, I just old shoes in here.
[00:04:49] Robbie Wagner: Um, so. The, you were asking a little bit earlier. Yeah. The vernacular is, is kind of similar to wines. It’s just like whatever olfactory [00:05:00] descriptors you could come up with that makes sense to you. And sometimes we’ll connect on that, or sometimes we’ll get there. Maybe you say orange and I say lemon. Oh, both citrus.
[00:05:07] Robbie Wagner: I don’t know. Yep. Yeah. All right. I’m gonna take a taste. All right.
[00:05:20] Robbie Wagner: Okay. You may have ruined this for me, Robbie, but there is a little new, new leather in that in the beginning. You wanna know what I’m getting? I’m gonna know Anyway. Um, very slight notes of a cotton candy Gogurt. Cotton candy. gogurt.
[00:05:36] James Quick: When is the last time you had one of those? It’s been a while.
[00:05:40] Robbie Wagner: Yeah. Uh, I’m not getting that.
[00:05:43] Robbie Wagner: I definitely, no, I get like a little bit of like dark chocolate cherry kind of together. Yeah. And then something bitter on the finish. Definitely a lot of smoke on the finish for me too.
[00:05:52] James Quick: Mm-Hmm mm-Hmm. When you said the cherries, that’s what I thought of. But I think going like the dark chocolate cherry, which is usually a good combination for desserts and [00:06:00] for alcohol, whatever.
[00:06:01] James Quick: Yeah. Like, um, I could definitely see that.
[00:06:05] Robbie Wagner: Yeah. Hmm. It’s fairly, fairly tasty, I would say. Yeah. It’s got, it’s got a lot of flavor for it. I mean, 12 years is sort of like table stakes for a scotch, I think. Mm-hmm. For me, if you’re getting one that’s not blended, so they haven’t tried to like change its flavors in that way.
[00:06:19] Robbie Wagner: They’re in used barrels, so that tends to be. It. It takes longer for it to really get the flavors out because Bourbon and Sherry, in this case, have done some of that work already. So you’ve gotta get deep into the wood. 12 years, 15, 18, 20 isn’t crazy for a scotch. You get down that line for bourbon, which requires you to use brand new charred oak barrels.
[00:06:41] Robbie Wagner: Then you’re like, whoa. It gets nuts when they get above 15. For me personally, at least. Yeah.
[00:06:45] James Quick: You know, one of my, I don’t drink much liquor, but beer I drink. I wouldn’t say a lot of, I like beer a lot. Yeah, yeah. But bourbon barrel beers, yeah, like that have been in bourbon barrels for a while. That’s my favorite taste in a beer, like by far.[00:07:00]
[00:07:00] James Quick: Favorite
[00:07:00] Robbie Wagner: beer.
[00:07:00] James Quick: Easy.
[00:07:01] Robbie Wagner: Yeah. There’s a few like stouts that do that actually. A lot of stuff. That’s it. Now. Quarter. Yeah.
[00:07:06] James Quick: The other night at home in, in Memphis, we went to after soccer.
[00:07:09] Chuck Carpenter: Yes.
[00:07:10] James Quick: If it’s early enough, we go to a local brewery who, uh, they’ve actually gotten really big, so they’re in like other cities in the area.
[00:07:16] James Quick: But I found a Bourbon Barrel beer that was 12 point a half percent.
[00:07:20] Robbie Wagner: Woo. That was delicious. Yeah. Yeah. That’ll hit you. Delicious one and yeah. Was delicious. Yeah. Especially after sports. You know, you have something and your body’s like, please give me, yeah. Well, so, uh, I know you’re an avid listener of the podcast, so you’re probably already very familiar with this, but I’ll talk about our rating system and it’s based on a octopi like character.
[00:07:42] Robbie Wagner: So it’s eight tentacles, but then we decided to make it crazy. It’s zero to eight ‘cause we’re developers. There you go. Yeah. Mm-Hmm. Developers, developers. Developers. Um, so yes. Zero being terrible. You’d never have this again. You didn’t throw it behind you, so I’m gonna assume you’re probably not a zero.
[00:07:59] Robbie Wagner: Four, middle of the [00:08:00] ground, eight amazing. Clearly shelves next time you see it. Um, and Robbie and I will sort of like compartmentalize them as like, we’ll probably talk about them, uh, collected with other scotches. Totally don’t have to. You can do it with whiskey in general. You can do it with like, just if I’m gonna have liquor, would I have this or something else, like whatever kind of yellow it a little bit.
[00:08:20] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah,
[00:08:21] Robbie Wagner: but I also won’t make you go first, so I’ll make Rodney go first. Okay. I was not prepared. I thought you were gonna make him go. That’s why I went for you. Um, okay. So in terms of scotches, I’m not a big scotch person, so, um, but this one’s not terrible. Let me think. What is I. A scotch that Jill, the best scotch I liked was the muckety muck.
[00:08:37] Robbie Wagner: That’s probably a seven for me. I’m just some branding alone, I would imagine. Yeah. Yeah. It was cool. Brandy? Yes. Um, I’m gonna give this one, I’m gonna just middle of the road. Four. I’m gonna say four. Yeah. I don’t think there’s any shame in that. If you want to go next, uh, yeah, I’ll go. Yeah, go for it.
[00:08:51] James Quick: Um, I don’t have a ton of experience with scotch either.
[00:08:55] James Quick: I, my first scotch was like very, very smokey. Like scotch is [00:09:00] usually smokey, but it was like intended to be, yeah. Very smokey. And it was way too much. I. Um, I would say a six for me. You always wanna, like not having much experience. You can’t go like all the way to the top and it like, it’s not that delicious, but it is.
[00:09:11] James Quick: I enjoy it. Um, cool. Go six. Nice. Yeah, Chuck,
[00:09:16] Robbie Wagner: uh, I’m leaning in a similar direction in terms of, like, Scott, I, I’ve had this brand before, not this exact one. Um, but I think it’s very drinkable off the shelf. Like I’m, I usually don’t like a ton of smoke and I like how this is already mellowed out a little bit for me.
[00:09:32] Robbie Wagner: I got a little, a lot of smoke at first as I have a second and third sip as that starts to mellow out and I’m getting more of the sweetness and like woodiness and um, and Go-Gurt. Yeah. Cotton, candy, Gogurt, uh, not at all. None of that, somehow or another, but it actually reminds me more of those little like, uh, chocolate cherries that you get.
[00:09:50] Robbie Wagner: You could probably still get ‘em at Walgreens or whatever, seasonally, even though they seem like, are they shelf stable for 20 years? Should I put this in my body? I don’t, I still gonna eat four. Like, they, they kind of [00:10:00] have that nuance to me where like, oh, I like it. It shouldn’t have too much of this.
[00:10:05] Robbie Wagner: It’s okay. So I’m gonna go five. Yeah, I think it’s five. It’s ta You gotta have it again. It’s not knocking my socks off.
[00:10:10] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. Yeah. That’s
[00:10:10] Robbie Wagner: fair. Cool.
[00:10:12] Robbie Wagner: Alright, so now we’ll go into lukewarm takes Luke. Lukewarm Takes most of these are old, so they’re not a time anymore. I, I added a couple new lines. I added some too.
[00:10:20] Robbie Wagner: Okay. Maybe start from the bottom and go back to, yeah, start from the bottom and then we’re here. Now we’re here. Thank you. Good. Glad you went there. Yeah. Um, ooh, what do I wanna do? What do you think about nested turn areas? It’s been a big thing recently, Aries.
[00:10:33] James Quick: Uh, I think there’s most likely no way that.
[00:10:36] James Quick: Makes sense to do. It was probably like I would never do that. Yeah. I think Aries, like, I’m not against Aries in general. Right. But I think you have to be careful with like in what scenario and how much goes into the Aries. Yeah. Because then you could just. Much cl much more cleanly break it out as anything else.
[00:10:53] James Quick: Oh yeah. Uh, so nested I would, I would say no.
[00:10:55] Robbie Wagner: Yeah, I agree with that. Like if it’s one line and it’s a quick, basically a if [00:11:00] else that’s in one line, yep, fine. But if you’re doing multiple, no, it’s not readable. Yeah. There’s a
[00:11:06] James Quick: quick fun fact. Like in our discord, we do live coding Thursdays. So what it’s been mostly it’s evolving, has been me doing lead code problems.
[00:11:13] James Quick: Just for me to lead and other people to like give ideas and blah, blah, blah, to help like just teach people how to approach problems like that. And one of the guys has taken it upon himself to. Take every solution and eventually turn it into a one liner. And these are, these are not like one liner problems.
[00:11:29] James Quick: These are like real decode problems that he just like puts into one line as an exercise, which is actually kind of cool. Yeah. It’s not something you would do, like, you not recommend it at all. Don’t introduce job security is high with that. Yeah. Yeah. But it is a cool challenge to like change the way you think and start to get creative with the things.
[00:11:45] James Quick: You have to force ‘em into one line. Yeah. But readability not something I would encourage you to do.
[00:11:49] Robbie Wagner: Yeah. Whatcha doing? I am looking at comments. Oh, we do have comments. Yeah, but we need show notes, but we also need con
[00:11:57] Chuck Carpenter: Hmm.
[00:11:58] Robbie Wagner: Oh, okay. There [00:12:00] we go. See, audio is good. This is, oh, these are not our comments or these, these are.
[00:12:05] Robbie Wagner: There’s like one that’s like audio Sounds good. Cool. I agree. It sounds amazing. Yes. Um, my, just, my voice outside of a mic is, is incredible.
[00:12:13] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah.
[00:12:14] Robbie Wagner: Uh, okay, so I, I noticed this like nuance in different people’s, like resumes and whatever else we, we, we touch briefly on title, right? Uh, so web developer, right?
[00:12:28] Robbie Wagner: Yes. Web developer or software engineer. How do you view yourself?
[00:12:33] James Quick: Hmm. Um, well, for like title I wouldn’t use either now and I still don’t know what my title is, so I’m kind of like out of that conversation. But I think there’s some level of sophistication that seems to come with like the connotation wise with software engineer like you, that feels like a Google type.
[00:12:52] James Quick: Role that like has some credibility behind it. Yeah. No, not that web developer wouldn’t, but a whole separate rant is like [00:13:00] the meaning, the fact that titles are meaningless. Like you go from one company to another and you could go from a regular junior to like a staff just because the opportunity was available.
[00:13:09] James Quick: So those things like. Are, are really arbitrary and they change from company to company. So at one company it may mean one thing and another. It may, mean may me mean a completely different thing. So completely arbitrary. I think like su software engineers sounds a little more sophisticated. Yeah. But that’s, that’s as much as I have.
[00:13:26] James Quick: Yeah. I always
[00:13:26] Robbie Wagner: felt like the old distinction used to be like, are you create, are you writing software for the web or is it like installed? Yeah. Yeah. And it felt like 15 years ago it was like, if I’m installing it, I’m maybe software engineer and if I’m here, yeah. But I don’t know, web stuff doesn’t feel like software.
[00:13:43] Robbie Wagner: You’re right. Like it is. Right. But it’s like especially how pervasive SAS is at this point. But yeah. Uh, it sounds like you’re advocating for unions, and so I just want to our audience, to James Quick. You heard it here, unionize our, our industry. You
[00:13:59] James Quick: know, it’s funny, I did [00:14:00] a, a panel on AI and we were talking about like having to, having to come up with rules to governance around ai, right?
[00:14:08] James Quick: There’s a lot of open questions, there’s a lot of benefit, there’s a lot of people scared about ia, but governance of controlling that to a certain extent is like, is a missing. Yet to be a evolved thing. Yeah. And I, I was talking about the unions, uh, happening at the time in the auto industry and how like that’s where you get control to advocate for wages and, and that kind of stuff.
[00:14:26] James Quick: And I was saying out of nowhere, like, maybe we need to unionize against the robot, like against robots and AI to standardize whatever we think those requirements are.
[00:14:35] Robbie Wagner: Right? Yeah. I, I think it’s a valid question. I don’t know. I mean, it’s not always a scary word per se. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Unions can be helpful sometimes.
[00:14:45] Robbie Wagner: There you go. Yeah, just don’t ask my dad. He’ll disagree with you. Yeah. Well, he’s watching us right now. I know. So he’s like, no. Okay. So
[00:14:51] James Quick: disappointed. Yeah.
[00:14:53] Robbie Wagner: Yeah. His dad has been disappointed in Rodney for years, so. Well, yeah, that does happen sometimes. It’s a different story though, I guess. [00:15:00] Yeah. Speaking of
[00:15:00] James Quick: disappointing his react too complex now.
[00:15:05] James Quick: Um, react isn’t, I don’t think react itself is any more complex really than a couple of years ago. Like, I think if you’re just doing React. I think you just do what you’ve been doing. Like you can, I think the, potentially the conversation around complex is you’re getting into next js, you’re getting in a remix, you’re getting into Redwood, getting into other frameworks on top of React, and then you’re getting into, now we’re diving into the world of server components, right?
[00:15:30] James Quick: Mm-Hmm. Like, I think that’s probably the biggest trigger for where we are now of next JS has shifted in their world how they do back ends or how they do front ends, right. With server components. Yeah. And so that does. That does change things. But I think React, the things that could be complicated about React, I think have basically been there.
[00:15:48] James Quick: I don’t see anyone using server components with just React. Right? I don’t see anyone using some of those other things that were a little intimidated by in just React. So I think it’s more at the meta framework level, but the [00:16:00] meta frameworks also make things easier. Sure. ‘cause they take care of a lot of stuff for you.
[00:16:03] James Quick: So
[00:16:04] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah,
[00:16:04] James Quick: I don’t, I don’t think so personally. I think it’s always the constant. Maybe at a higher level the landscape of, of what we consider best practices. Continues to evolve. Sure. And staying up to date with that, I think is much more of the challenge than it is react itself being complicated.
[00:16:22] Robbie Wagner: Yeah.
[00:16:23] Robbie Wagner: Yeah. And I think like a lot of people forget that PHP still powers like 60% of the web. Like if there’s a thing you’re productive in, just use that. Oh, absolutely. That’s a whole nother fun conversation. Yeah. But absolutely that, yeah. Yeah. And you gotta bear in mind the incentives for some of these meta frameworks, right, is varied and you can’t.
[00:16:42] Robbie Wagner: Be upset if you opt into that ecosystem, right? Like, like you said, some of these meta frameworks offered react, um, boundaries and best practices and things that people loved. And that’s why they embraced it because choices were finally made. We didn’t write another saga or whatever, right? And, uh, and [00:17:00] that’s good, but uh, the downside is that the goalpost kind of keeps moving to a degree.
[00:17:05] Robbie Wagner: Right. Like, oh yeah, I know how to be awesome in, in next and all of this. So 13 comes out and you gave me some like sugar with that, and there’s some changes. Great. There’s that 14 comes out and now you’ve changed the paradigms. Well, okay. Is this better for me or you? I’m not sure. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:17:22] James Quick: It, I think that that just seems to fall in line with where the industry is going.
[00:17:27] James Quick: Like, so I have a whole nother rant on innovation and if you look at, if you look at cars over the years, a a 2005. Uh, Toyota Camry looks very similar to, um, a Honda Accord or Civic at the time. Yeah. Then you look in 2015 and they like, they oddly look very similar again. Mm-Hmm. In 2020 they look oddly similar even though they’ve changed.
[00:17:46] James Quick: They’ve changed together. Yeah. Same thing with iPhone. Same thing with Android. Like you could nitpick, but like they get the same types of things within a few years of each other. That’s true. And frameworks are more or less the same, which has always been a good thing from a perspective of if I [00:18:00] learn one, I can learn the other.
[00:18:01] James Quick: Yeah. It’s transferable. Uh, but also I think makes it, um. Where you can see those trends and you kinda learn the idea of the trend. And it applies to other frameworks as well. So remix is actually working on server components. Uh, Redwood JS is actually working on server components. Next Js already has, so they’re like doing the same types of things together.
[00:18:20] Robbie Wagner: Yeah, I wanna touch on that a little bit, but I wanna let. Uh, Robbie co cover Hot Takes ‘cause you mentioned Redwood a couple of times, which is really, you know, under the radar for a lot of folks. I think we, we covered, but let’s go to the one that really matters. Okay. Tailwind or vanilla CSS
[00:18:34] James Quick: definitely tailwind for me and it’s, it’s so awkward when I go to something and try to write regular CSS because I’m just trying to type in Tailwind classes and I’m like, why?
[00:18:42] James Quick: What is the syntax for this? Oh, right, yeah, yeah. It’s just, it’s just easier to start with that for me on everything. And that’s not me. Saying that’s the way to do it, but for me, definitively it’s, it’s tailwind.
[00:18:52] Robbie Wagner: Yeah. I think the arguments against it of like, oh, it’s so messy. You have all these classes.
[00:18:55] Robbie Wagner: Mm-Hmm. Like, well, you can abstract it. It’s like any other code. Right. Bring into a component
[00:18:59] James Quick: or whatever. [00:19:00] Yeah. If you have
[00:19:00] Robbie Wagner: a 500 line component, you probably wanna abstract that into smaller components. Absolute. Same with your css, like, yeah. Anyway.
[00:19:07] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah.
[00:19:08] Robbie Wagner: You love asking that one though. I do. I love, I love tailwinds, so.
[00:19:11] Robbie Wagner: Yeah,
[00:19:11] James Quick: same. Yeah, there’s a new, um, tool, I can’t remember the name, but it, it is targeted at solving that exact problem of the bloat and, um, oh, tailwinds. And again, I’m, this is kind of useless ‘cause I can’t remember the name, but keep an eye out for a new tool that helps solve that issue with like, how many classes you have to put into your component.
[00:19:28] Robbie Wagner: Tell us what the name is later and we’ll put it in the show notes. Yeah, absolutely. Go. I’ll see if I can dig that. I think I came across something that like, that’s what it was is basically like mm-Hmm. Trying to just give you this extra sugar on top for, yep.
[00:19:37] James Quick: Which is the number one complaint that people have is the bloat.
[00:19:40] Robbie Wagner: Yeah. Yeah. But, uh, you can also opt into a bunch of, uh, component libraries that were built on top of that, that do their own abstraction things. Mm-Hmm. Too, if you’re trying to go quickly, like giving me some com components that I know kind of the output of like, why not?
[00:19:54] James Quick: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:19:56] Robbie Wagner: Yeah.
[00:19:56] Robbie Wagner: So I’m gonna regress a little bit back to redwood js.
[00:19:58] Robbie Wagner: Mm-Hmm. Um, [00:20:00] just because I had my own kind of, this is family friend, but anyway, come to Jesus moment around like no one can hear us out there. Yeah, that’s true. Here line. It’s just a turn of phrase. But anyway, uh, yeah, it was like, uh, so we have this open source product or open source library that we’ve worked on for like seven years or so.
[00:20:21] Robbie Wagner: I’m trying to like, turn it into a product and, uh. Was working on trying to do an API and SDK and you know, all the other things like other three letter acronyms. Yeah. Yes, exactly. Where tr let’s try next 14. Let’s see how this all goes. And I was doing, um, Alessia js, which is a bun powered API, super cool, kind of fun, bleeding edge, like stuff that, but you know, I’m a one man show, so it was very challenging and I just had this moment where I like.
[00:20:49] Robbie Wagner: Maybe I should just work with some web frameworks that are already a little battle tested. Yeah. Stuff we all know about, like opinions are actually good. Spend a weekend going through like the Redwood tutorial and the [00:21:00] Django tutorial again, because it’s been 10 years since I touched that and, uh, and I landed on Redwood.
[00:21:05] Robbie Wagner: I just felt like, did you Wow. Tutorial was nice. Yeah. It’s a bunch of stuff that I worked with in the last five years, so it’s still kind of top of mind. I can use, uh, tailwinds like some of the new stuff too. Prisma, you know, it doesn’t, I mean, drizzle was cool, but Prisma works. Yeah. Like it just works.
[00:21:22] Robbie Wagner: Mm-Hmm. And we, we talked to Tom like a couple of years ago when we were first starting this podcast actually, and I like how opinionated it is. Mm-Hmm. So. Just because you mentioned it a couple of different times, just wanted to get some of your feedback and thoughts around Redwood and
[00:21:36] James Quick: Yeah.
[00:21:36] Robbie Wagner: If you’ve used it or,
[00:21:38] James Quick: yeah, I haven’t, I haven’t used it so much and I’ll, I’ll admit I’m a little biased now ‘cause my, my co-host, Amy now is a full-time employee at Redwood.
[00:21:45] James Quick: Oh, nice. So that’s why it’s more and more top of mind for me. But I actually had Tom on my livestream. In 2020 and talked to him about what he was building and I, I didn’t really do a whole lot of like, Ruby on Rails as an example.
[00:21:57] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah.
[00:21:58] James Quick: But I, when I was getting into web development, I [00:22:00] went through a couple of different stints of a few different options and, and went through a few months of going really hard on Ruby, on Rails.
[00:22:06] James Quick: And I just love that they gave you so much. Mm-Hmm. Yes. And I think that’s the thing that resonated with me with redwood of like the, the idea of um, not boundaries, what’s it called there? Not context. What’s the. Rats.
[00:22:19] Robbie Wagner: Cells. Cells.
[00:22:19] James Quick: Cells. Thank you. Yes. Okay. I was
[00:22:21] Robbie Wagner: gonna get there. I was like, it is, it is new to me still, but yeah.
[00:22:24] Robbie Wagner: The cells, the idea of
[00:22:25] James Quick: cells in redwood is basically just the idea that for almost every component you have, you’re gonna have these different states of that component. Yeah. And you’re gonna need that every time, and you’re gonna need to get data. So why don’t we just like, give you these tools that do all the things for you that like streamline that process.
[00:22:39] James Quick: And I’m, I’m a huge fan of that. I know it’s always a balance of. I am opinionated or not, like how much flexibility and freedom do I want? My ultimate goal as a developer, going back to no code, low code, like all the things is I just wanna build shit. Like Yeah. Say that right?
[00:22:53] Robbie Wagner: Whatever you want. We, we can wow each other under the hood.
[00:22:56] Robbie Wagner: But yeah, if you don’t have users and they, [00:23:00] you know, first of all, you need to get users, so you gotta build something and they don’t care.
[00:23:03] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah.
[00:23:04] Robbie Wagner: Right. Does it work? Is it snappy? Is it, yeah. Yeah. Well, I think the biggest advantage is moving from code base to code base. So like I’ve been using Ember for 12 years.
[00:23:13] Robbie Wagner: It’s very opinionated. Nice. It’s like I can pull up any Ember app and like start writing production code. Now I don’t have to learn how the app works or anything ‘cause it’s all the same, which I think is the benefits you get from a Redwood or anything with lots of opinions. It’s like you open an app and can start writing it right now.
[00:23:29] Robbie Wagner: It’s not like six months of ramp up of where did you put your components? I don’t know. They go somewhere and yeah, I
[00:23:34] James Quick: like, I like having that structure, taking the guesswork out. I think onboarding exactly like you said is easier. I think, um, onboarding and ramping up junior developers is also easier ‘cause there’s not this ambiguity of like, why, why do we do this here?
[00:23:48] James Quick: Why do we do that there? And it’s different. You have this consistency. So that, that I’m definitely a big fan of. Um, the other thing, and I’ll kind of like take Amy’s spot for shouting out Redwood is they’re working on react [00:24:00] server components. Yeah. So they’ve been historically like this, like a lot of tools around building a spot single page app.
[00:24:06] James Quick: Yep. But now they’re gonna have that, um, backend component prioritization, which again follows the trend of the industry. Mm-Hmm. Yeah. And I think that’s gonna be a really exciting for them. For them. And I’m excited to hear more from Amy as they evolve on that.
[00:24:18] Robbie Wagner: Yeah. Yeah. And I, I don’t think like the ideology behind server components on the react side is necessarily bad.
[00:24:25] Robbie Wagner: Like we’ve, we’ve called them three different things that I could, like, it started as like isomorphic. It was just, how do I render through a node server and push ‘em up? Yeah. And there was, you know, yes but no. And so there, it, it’s been around for a while, long time, server side render kind of thing. But I think it’s just like some of the oddities around like.
[00:24:48] Robbie Wagner: Building them. So co-located and using like the use client use server flags and stuff. It’s just a little like, okay, the organization kind of throws me off, you know? It’s like I could have a shared components [00:25:00] directory and load them in either. I don’t want to say, you know,
[00:25:02] James Quick: I don’t know. Yeah,
[00:25:03] Robbie Wagner: maybe that’s just me,
[00:25:04] James Quick: I think.
[00:25:04] James Quick: I think it’s one of those things that takes time to adjust. Yeah. Like when, um, I’m a big Salt Kit fan as well, so a year and a half ago they went through their big update where they changed. Their router system and the keywords that you had to use next JS is on the ue. Right. To go to like page TSX or whatever inside of a nested route.
[00:25:23] Chuck Carpenter: Yep.
[00:25:23] James Quick: And people, you know, understandably have an adverse reaction to that immediately. ‘cause it’s just not something they’re used to. It’s just different.
[00:25:30] Robbie Wagner: Yeah.
[00:25:30] James Quick: But ultimately, especially the framework dictates it. Like if you wanna, if you wanna be able to write code, you gotta do it. People, people. Get used to it, I think.
[00:25:37] Robbie Wagner: Yeah. Yeah. Stay off my lawn kind of thing. And I think I mentioned, yeah,
[00:25:41] James Quick: Apple’s the best at that. Apple can get you to do anything that they wanna do.
[00:25:45] Robbie Wagner: Yeah.
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[00:26:18] Robbie Wagner: So I do want to kind of take the other side of that.
[00:26:21] Robbie Wagner: I feel like Astro, as we kind of touched on, is more of the correct way to go, in my opinion.
[00:26:27] Robbie Wagner: Like Matter framework should be. Not framework specific maybe. So like we’re doing all this work and then everybody copies it and borrows from it and does the same things. Why don’t we all build kind of agnostic things that do all the glue work and the things you need. And then if you wanna use felt, you wanna use React, whatever, you can swap ‘em out.
[00:26:46] James Quick: Mm-Hmm. Yeah, that’s, that’s one of the really cool things about Astro in addition to many other things. And I remember when I first, um, heard about that Cassidy Williams did a presentation like in my Discord on Astro at the time, like way before I knew anything about it. And she was like, see I can [00:27:00] do like a Vue component and a react component.
[00:27:01] James Quick: I was like, that’s cool, but why would you ever wanna do that? And that was the, it was just because it was an arbitrary example of like mixing stuff. But the reality is like you could have react or Vue experience, come into the astro ecosystem, take advantage of all that they offer, which is similar to a Next.Js and a SvelteKit etc and, and be able to bring your existing skills and and build faster.
[00:27:21] James Quick: Yeah. So that is a really appealing thing and it’ll be interesting to see. Where Astro ends up in the next couple of years. Because I, I rave about Astro’s developer experience and they started really. Niche, which was we’re gonna help you build content driven sites that are static. Yeah. What they started with.
[00:27:40] James Quick: Oh yeah. And they absolutely nailed that experience. It’s the best static, first content driven experience I’ve ever had in any framework.
[00:27:46] Robbie Wagner: Absolutely agree with that. But then they
[00:27:48] James Quick: started that. Now they have a server, they have API endpoints, they have form submissions, they have all these things.
[00:27:52] James Quick: And I just know they’re gonna continue to make the developer experience around that. Better and better, and that’s where I see them more directly, [00:28:00] like kind of competing with the more established next JSL Kit Nuts remix. Like all these things, right. That we have talked about so far.
[00:28:06] Robbie Wagner: Yeah. Yeah. I think some of the benefits too are like.
[00:28:10] Robbie Wagner: If you have a large team, like being in the Ember world, it’s a lot smaller these days and like, you know, everyone always goes, oh well we should use React. We should use React. Okay, well this is maybe a bad example since you can’t use Ember and Astro, but like say you’re using View in your whole app and you bring in a team of like 10 Reactives and they love React, well then just let ‘em write React, because you can write, it can be a micro front end, like, yeah.
[00:28:32] Robbie Wagner: So that’s kind a nice thing and and the difference too there to me is that. So next JS is essentially an entry point into utilizing Elle’s web platform, right? Yeah. They’re not just hosts. Yeah. They’re adding image optimization and they have analytics now and they like, you know, they’re giving you a full web platform.
[00:28:55] Robbie Wagner: Mm-Hmm. So they want you to like come in to us as a vendor. We’re value [00:29:00] adding all the AWS tools into a nice experience and. They, you know, use this tool, do these things this way. You get all this like sugar on top. I get that. I get the incentives around it. So just conversely, you have Astros saying, we’re gonna help you build great shit.
[00:29:16] Robbie Wagner: We’re gonna give you like some APIs to like do that and, uh, bring, bring your own view layer. And, but, you know, it’ll be interesting to see like where that end game kind of goes too.
[00:29:27] James Quick: Yeah.
[00:29:28] Robbie Wagner: And, uh, I think they have the right idea.
[00:29:30] James Quick: Yeah. I’m excited to watch it.
[00:29:31] James Quick: The, the Versel thing is a whole interesting potential conversation too.
[00:29:35] James Quick: There’s, I’ve seen a lot of people comment when I posted something on Twitter about the pricing for Versal, and people are like, I don’t know why they charge you so much when it’s just an abstraction layer on top of AWS and like, you could get this many things for free in AWS, but the tier and is so much lower, whatever.
[00:29:50] James Quick: Mm-Hmm. And I think sometimes people forget that. Like you’re paying for the niceties that they give you, like Yeah. Nobody, I don’t have experience with AWS I’ve never wanted to have that direct [00:30:00] experience because I’ve always been intimidated. You must love yourself. I do. I appreciate my time a lot. Yeah.
[00:30:05] James Quick: And so I, I’m very appreciative of what Netlify offers, of what Elle offers, of what CloudFlare offers. Mm-Hmm. Like, I, I’m appreciative of all that stuff now. I’m still a chief developer. So I have to balance that. Right. But I think people really forget that, like those niceties come at a cost as well. Well the
[00:30:21] Robbie Wagner: people that complain about that too have obviously never accidentally left something on, on AWS and gotten charged $50,000 or something.
[00:30:28] Robbie Wagner: So like, yeah, I think it’s, it’s necessary guardrails and if it’s just. You know, making your cost of maximum. Mm-Hmm. It’s worth it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Hold on here, noob. God. What, what did you just find? Well, uh, your, your favorite podcast, I think. Yeah. Hopefully we’ll see. Maybe just some more of this. I. Oh yeah.
[00:30:50] Robbie Wagner: Uh, a guy. Yeah, there you go. A guy, uh, wearing a tie-dyed rugby. I don’t see anything wrong with that. I don’t know if you do, but, and my whiskey web and whatnot. Bandt, yes, absolutely. [00:31:00] Okay. At whiskeys. That fun. Check it out. Awesome.
[00:31:03] Robbie Wagner: Sponsored by Sentry. Anyway, yeah, let’s go back to, that’s what it says, so I Oh, it does say that.
[00:31:08] Robbie Wagner: I thought you were just being funny. No,
[00:31:11] James Quick: thanks David. Oh yeah, we need that. Which is awesome, by the way. I’ll give them, been shopping them out on our, our stuff. I’m getting to do some work with them. And they were supposed to be here to record an episode with us. Yes. Um, as, as a sponsor, but couldn’t make it unfortunately.
[00:31:23] James Quick: Uh, but they’ve been really awesome. So shout out to Century. They have just killing it. Yeah, they’ve
[00:31:27] Robbie Wagner: been sponsoring all the conferences too. I’m like, whoa. That’s awesome. So, and everyone on GitHub. This is the new thing. I don’t know if you noticed this, like every company that it’s like, I can give five bucks a month as a GitHub sponsor and get like prominent ad space on this person’s profile.
[00:31:42] Robbie Wagner: It’s the new game. Yeah.
[00:31:43] James Quick: And, and just the support, I think. Yeah. Well, yeah.
[00:31:46] Robbie Wagner: I think they’re actually doing it for good reasons. Yeah. But, but there’s also benefit. I mean,
[00:31:49] James Quick: there’s, there’s no. Yeah. That like you, I mean, you spend money to get something to do. Sure, sure. And,
[00:31:53] Robbie Wagner: uh, David talked about this on Twitter.
[00:31:55] Robbie Wagner: It’s like really such a low bar for like what their marketing budget is. Yeah. And how they get it said, [00:32:00] just try to turn it into develop or, or helping individuals versus throwing up Google ads like crazy. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:32:07] James Quick: That’s a, I’ve got, I’ve got a whole lot of rants about a lot of things, but feel free to rant whatever.
[00:32:12] James Quick: Yes. Majority of my career in developer relations, developer experience, and. You know, it’s easy to track numbers. Like how many people did I talk to at a conference? How many people came to my talk? How many people came to a booth? But the reality is like those experiences aren’t the same. They’re not valued the same, right?
[00:32:26] James Quick: They don’t have the same weight. And so storytelling I think is really, really important. And I think when you go down the, the route of being able to support an individual who you can have, regardless of whether or not you talk, like you have a very specific one-to-one relationship of I supported you, do something.
[00:32:45] James Quick: That means a lot or it can, yeah. Like it doesn’t always, but I think those sorts of relationships mean a lot more than having 50 people come grab a T-shirt from your booth. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Agreed. And
[00:32:55] Robbie Wagner: socks these days,
[00:32:56] James Quick: but socks
[00:32:57] Robbie Wagner: are hot.
[00:32:57] James Quick: Yeah. So I don’t like
[00:32:58] Robbie Wagner: the socks.
[00:32:59] James Quick: I, [00:33:00] I love creative socks and I’ve just, I’ve kind of gotten over it though, ‘cause that they became like so common they became the new
[00:33:06] Robbie Wagner: T-shirt.
[00:33:06] Robbie Wagner: Yeah. I need shirts. I don’t need socks. I am, you need shirts.
[00:33:09] James Quick: I’m like still getting rid of shirts.
[00:33:10] Robbie Wagner: Well, no, I don’t mean I’m, I have a deficit of shirts. I. Shirts, I need more than socks. I don’t, I don’t care what socks I’m wearing because you’re not gonna see ‘em. Like, yeah. Yeah. They were nuanced. I liked them.
[00:33:20] Robbie Wagner: I, I was gonna say, I used to be in the Ember community as well. Ember Comp was like one of the first places where they did socks. They did socks. The little hamster actually, century did socks there one year. Yeah, yeah. Century used to be in Ember for like a minute, and then they went No. Well, to be fair, they started in Python and Jko.
[00:33:37] Robbie Wagner: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So anyway, yeah, you lost your place. So I do want to pivot to a little bit, not exactly tech.
[00:33:47] Robbie Wagner: So obviously you’re a newish dad. Yeah. Um, tell us a little bit about how you balance, you know, that obviously you’re doing tons of podcasts, tons of conferences, whatever. Like what’s, what’s the secret to balancing all of that stuff?
[00:33:59] Robbie Wagner: I,
[00:33:59] James Quick: [00:34:00] I don’t know if there’s a secret. I think you, as a parent, you have to do what you have to do, right? Yeah. Uh, my wife is also in tech. She works at all Zero. She’s at the booth now. Oh, okay. And so we’re balancing, we’ve got Jamie, our daughter with us, so we’re balancing as I’m doing podcasts and she’s working the booth, like who’s taking her and she’s holding her now, which is.
[00:34:17] James Quick: Um, very nice and like, anyway, it’s a challenge. Mm-Hmm. And I think we both just realized that we have to do what we have to do. She’s, I think, more subconscious about not being able to dedicate more time to work, just making sure that she’s still contributing at the way that, that she, the level she thinks that she should be.
[00:34:33] James Quick: Sure. Yeah. Yeah, sure. Um, she had six months off, which was super, super helpful. Oh, that’s amazing. That’s great. That’s great. And, uh, for me to kind of get back to work and, and her take care of Jamie. We’ve gotten, uh, we have a nanny in the house three days a week, which is really fantastic, like having her in the house lunchtime, I need to go down and like, get a soda or something.
[00:34:52] James Quick: Like I just walk down and, and see Jamie and hang out for a little bit, which is really, really nice. Yeah. And then, uh, we fill the other two days now with daycare. [00:35:00] Um Mm-Hmm. But yeah, there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of one handed coding or one handed emails. Absolutely. I’m sitting here with baby in one hand and like laptop on the ground on the other.
[00:35:08] James Quick: And it’s gotten exponentially more difficult now that she crawls and wants to pull herself up on everything. Mm-Hmm. Um, I don’t know. Yeah. There’s no secret. I just, you just gotta do what you gotta do. And people, I think before parenthood, like you, you don’t, you don’t know what it’s like until you’re a parent.
[00:35:22] James Quick: Like, I, I can do whatever, like, I can do anything. Like I can, I’ve done, I’ve, I’ve reached every milestone in my life so far, like, I’m gonna be a good parent. Right. Yeah. It’s just, you gotta, you gotta make the adjustments and do what you gotta do. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. And that’s why you
[00:35:33] Robbie Wagner: will be though, because you’re.
[00:35:35] Robbie Wagner: Self con, like self-aware in that way. And you know, like it’s not always gonna be the best. It’s not gonna be the worst.
[00:35:42] Robbie Wagner: And I’m always just gonna give it, you know what I have, I remember seeing recently somebody on like you post on Twitter about like sometimes you got a baby here and you’re like one handed coding or something, and some jerk is like, this is why remote work sucks.
[00:35:56] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah.
[00:35:56] Robbie Wagner: Because clearly you’re just not getting your job
[00:35:58] James Quick: done. Like, oh. So it’s funny, [00:36:00] you’re actually talking about one that was much more recent. And there was a much bigger blow up. My most successful tweet successful being in quote of all time was when she was. A month or two old and I had her sitting on something on my desk.
[00:36:13] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah.
[00:36:14] James Quick: And I was like, this is coding while I can, or something like whatever. Yeah. And this is literally like, I’ve got a free, like 30 minutes while she’s sleeping and I just, I wanna write some code ‘cause that’s what I enjoy. Yeah. It’s just an
[00:36:24] Robbie Wagner: ambassador that or something.
[00:36:25] James Quick: Yeah. And so there was. There was a ton of comments about like, this is the problem with working in America.
[00:36:30] James Quick: I’m like, this has nothing to do with like work life balance in America. If you know anything that I talk about on everything that I do, it’s all about work life balance. Right? And then there was a whole deeper thing, and I, I won’t call it names ‘cause it’s not necessary, it’s, but someone tweeted me to say like.
[00:36:45] James Quick: I can’t believe you would use your child as like a, basically a publicity stunt, like to get attention. Oh, wow. Totally outta left field. And I, again, I, I caveated, this is my most successful tweet ever at over a million impressions. Yeah. And Twitter lost their freaking [00:37:00] mind, and it was so, like, such an unnecessary, targeted shot.
[00:37:04] James Quick: It was so weird. Yeah. But the cool thing about that was I, I realized that I’ve earned so much respect in the community from all the stuff that I’ve done. That people were responding like crazy. You don’t know what you’re talking about. James is out here like working hard, trying to be a dad, trying to work like all these things supporting me, and that was really cool.
[00:37:22] James Quick: Yeah. Yeah. But it is interesting, uh, Twitter being a dangerous place of like, people can take anything that you do. Oh. And they can twist it to whatever narrative they wanna have the conversation about. Mm-Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn’t matter how
[00:37:33] Robbie Wagner: well intentioned you were. Yeah. They will find some way to make it bad.
[00:37:36] Robbie Wagner: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s unfortunate. Yeah. I was gonna say, I feel like we could go down that path for quite some time and then I’m like,
[00:37:44] Chuck Carpenter: well, maybe I temper some of my feelings around that. And I
[00:37:47] Robbie Wagner: was all like. Clearly you just have no idea a, what it’s like to be a parent, what it’s like to feel responsibility, what’s towards your, your, your work and how to like meld that [00:38:00] together and sometimes get it right and sometimes wrong.
[00:38:02] Robbie Wagner: And that’s fine if you feel that way, but also like you, you just clearly have no context there. Like, and they just use this as a way to like shit on someone in one very specific way.
[00:38:13] James Quick: Well, what the wildest thing about that is. The person that quote tweeted people, people went back through his history, his, sorry.
[00:38:20] James Quick: So I gave away his history. We can find it a later. I’m sure. I know. I just, I don’t wanna be intentional about shit. Sure, sure. Shit. Talking other people, but whatever. No, I feel you. Um, went back through, I gave you his history. History, yeah. Now I’m listen up, went back through his history and saw like the same type of pictures and it’s like, I don’t know if they just had a bad day and just like, kind of let loose on the keyboard or what, but you, you gotta be really careful when you have an audience.
[00:38:45] James Quick: The things that you say about other people. ‘cause a lot of people just follow what you say and read it and interpret it the way they just assume what you said. Yeah. Right. So if they take a situation that I do and they twist it, other people follow them, respect them, they’re gonna [00:39:00] believe whatever that like twisted narrative Sure is.
[00:39:02] James Quick: So I think another side of that conversation is just being responsible with having an audience and a platform. Because people, people pay attention to what you say, how you say it, who you say things about and it matters. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is why I just made jokes. Yeah. I was like, we don’t have that big me.
[00:39:18] James Quick: It doesn’t really matter. Never makes you serious.
[00:39:19] Robbie Wagner: Yeah. We have, we have two current listeners, I think from what we can see here, and, uh. And people that don’t know what they found. Yeah. Yeah. They don’t know what they found. And, uh, they stumbled onto something amazing like, uh, they, they went to stumble upon and ended up here.
[00:39:33] Robbie Wagner: I’m a dad of two. I drink whiskey. I talk online and make a lot of jokes and wear bad clothes for That’s not age appropriate. Potentially. I don’t know. So, I mean, you’re keeping it young. It’s fine. Yeah. Keep real. Just changing what
[00:39:45] James Quick: age appropriate means. Exactly.
[00:39:47] Robbie Wagner: That’s what I’m going down. I’m like, this is, this felt good to me today.
[00:39:50] Robbie Wagner: Oh, actually I got this to match my kids ‘cause they made tie that shirts
[00:39:54] Chuck Carpenter: nice. So I was like, oh, that’ll be cool.
[00:39:56] Robbie Wagner: I got it. You know, and so just ing, but uh, I’ve [00:40:00] now put that on the internet. Probably makes me a bad dad. It’s hard to say. There you go. And then win. Yeah, we do have to talk about soccer before this is all done.
[00:40:08] Robbie Wagner: Yeah. So, uh, that’s fine. Yeah, go for it. James. James is into the world sport, right? Yep. The one that everyone watches football where you use your feet. Yeah. Not egg ball game. Yeah. Real, real football. Proper football is what I’ll say often. ‘cause I watch European football and you know, the English invented it so it’s proper in that way.
[00:40:27] Robbie Wagner: I know you were mentioning that you’re a player. Mm-Hmm. Uh, you don’t watch a tone, but, but you do play. What’s your position?
[00:40:33] James Quick: Yeah. Uh, forward striker. Nice. Yeah. Yes. Um, so I played like as a kid through like fifth grade. Yeah. And, and really loved it. And then I played sports all my life. Like everything that you could think of.
[00:40:43] James Quick: Basically. I played baseball through high school. I worked with a women’s basketball team in college. Nice. Played ultimate Frisbee. Oh yeah. Everything that you can think of. I’m a very sneaky. Very good ping bong player. Like, it’s, it’s awkward. Okay. Because people will hear that and say, I wanna play you in ping pong [00:41:00] thinking they understand.
[00:41:01] James Quick: And it’s not like I’m that amazing. It’s just other people don’t quite understand what a good ping pong anyway.
[00:41:05] Robbie Wagner: Yeah. Yeah. Um, I feel like you’re gonna be an amazing pickleball player in the future. Not, I’m forward to the, it’s not, it’s, it’s not
[00:41:11] James Quick: that far. Yeah, I’m,
[00:41:13] Robbie Wagner: I just tried it recently and it’s actually super fun.
[00:41:16] Robbie Wagner: I played tennis, uh, when I was younger for a while, and so tennis doesn’t quite translate is a little bit there, but you’re just like doing too much swing through. Yeah. And ping pong is a little more like this. Yeah. So it’s a little bit of both. Yeah. I think you’re like, ping pong is mostly like. Reaction, time and hand-eye coordination, which I have none of.
[00:41:34] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah.
[00:41:34] Robbie Wagner: So really bad. Like I can do a little bit of tennis or something bigger, but like, yeah. But the folks that stand like three, four feet back from the table and they’re like,
[00:41:42] James Quick: yeah, see that’s how
[00:41:43] Robbie Wagner: you
[00:41:43] James Quick: play. Yeah.
[00:41:44] Robbie Wagner: Yeah. That’s, that’s it. That’s how you, you’re playing with James. That’s how you play. Okay.
[00:41:47] Robbie Wagner: That’s how, so you’re an athletic individual. I’ll bring it back in here. I like,
[00:41:51] James Quick: I like to think so. Yeah. It’s just, it’s always been a big part of my life. It’s, my wife played soccer in college. Yes. Um. That’s the first thing that kind of [00:42:00] caught my ear when I heard that she was an athlete. Nice. And then, uh, anyway, so we, uh, dated through college.
[00:42:06] James Quick: She and I have played co-ed together since then, and I. We’ve actually gotten to play with some really good players, like a lot of people that have played in college. I’ve gotten to be around like pretty high quality for like rec league. Yeah. Soccer and getting to play with some smart players. So it’s, it’s just something we love.
[00:42:22] James Quick: Every time we’ve moved, that’s been the first thing we’ve done is found a team to play on. Together. Usually, like they always need good girls. And so she’ll be on the team and I’ll just sit there like, I can play Yeah. Next season if you need. And then I come on next season. Oh, nice. So yeah, we, uh, we get back Thursday night and have a game Friday.
[00:42:38] James Quick: She plays in a Sunday league, and then we’ll have outdoor starting back soon when, uh, um, weather’s a little bit better, but yeah, that’s Oh, love individually. Yeah. Um, individually love, love playing together and I think thinking towards kids, like I wanna, I want my daughter. To see us being active, which is something I didn’t have with either of my parents.
[00:42:57] James Quick: Right. So it’s important for her to see [00:43:00] us doing those things and, and being happy and enjoying those times together.
[00:43:04] Robbie Wagner: Yeah. Yeah. They, their number one influence are their parents. What do they see you doing? It’s not just about what you tell them to do, it’s, they don’t listen to that. They see you doing.
[00:43:12] Robbie Wagner: They definitely don’t listen to that. Don’t shit in the pool again, what you said, I missed the don’t. Yeah. Daddy, why’d you say shit? They’re like, well, a, we’re at home anyway. Won’t go down that path. But no, not
[00:43:26] James Quick: to that level, to that, uh, yeah. You haven’t got there yet, yet.
[00:43:30] Robbie Wagner: Yeah. It’s a fun one, you know, whatever.
[00:43:33] Robbie Wagner: Um, so I was gonna ask, oh yeah. So you’re in Memphis? Memphis, yeah. Yes. You have an MLS team or no? Uh, we don’t. We have a minor league. What’s, oh, USL us? Yes, we have a Okay. Yeah. Phoenix. Also, same thing. We have USL. Yeah. What does that, what does that stand for? Uh, uni, uh, I don’t know, United Soccer League, soccer, United States Soccer League or whatever.
[00:43:53] Robbie Wagner: It’s actually one’s hard, I guess, older leagues. And it’s essentially like one tier down, but there’s no promotion. [00:44:00] Relegation. That’s a whole other argument, but, um, yeah,
[00:44:02] James Quick: but they can’t be like Nashville Got, um. I, well, I don’t know if it falls under the category of promotion, relegation, but Nashville became an MLS team.
[00:44:10] James Quick: Yeah. So I’m them like the
[00:44:12] Robbie Wagner: Cincinnati area. Cincinnati was in USL and then they, they got, they paid money. What’s the requirements? Is it, well, you pay a bunch of money and you need to show some consistency in terms of like the numbers around attendance and like Yeah, like enough fanfare and stuff. Yeah.
[00:44:26] Robbie Wagner: There’s been a few that did that. Portland maybe, I mean, Portland used to be my, like different leagues, like USL and stuff. Portland and Seattle. Both old teams. The Sounders were like NASL in the seventies kind of thing. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, the local’s kind of fun.
[00:44:43] James Quick: Yeah, it’s, we love, um, we love the games at home.
[00:44:46] James Quick: And my wife actually played, like in high school, she would always play with the guys ‘cause she was good. Um. And one of the guys that she had played with, they were a couple years apart, but he ended up playing at the team in Memphis, which is really cool. [00:45:00] Oh, that’s cool. Um, and then we’ve got another guy that we played with is playing, he plays Professional Indoor.
[00:45:05] James Quick: Oh yes. Which is really neat too. So he just moved to St. Louis to to play there. And then I think eventually. I don’t have the option to continue playing or become the coach there, which is pretty cool. That is very cool.
[00:45:16] Robbie Wagner: Yeah. I actually just realized probably within the last couple of months that we still had, uh, a us like indoor league.
[00:45:24] Robbie Wagner: Mm-Hmm. Growing up in like Cincinnati area, we had the silverbacks and I know they’re not a thing anymore, but it was like indoor was big. Yeah. Every winter everybody played indoor. Yeah. Yeah. I love
[00:45:34] James Quick: playing indoor. It’s totally different game. It is so different. Fast. Very fun. Its own.
[00:45:40] Robbie Wagner: Yeah, like the gr the like artificial grass aspect is always very interesting to me.
[00:45:45] Robbie Wagner: Wait, they put grass in there? Well, so I thought there was some that was like a wood floor. Is that not a thing? That’s foots all. Yeah. That’s different. And it has a different ball. It’s a little smaller and weighted differently. Yeah. So you can juggle it a little more. Okay. And like do little tricks. Uh, so [00:46:00] traditional indoor would just be like, you know, the grass, like tur stuff.
[00:46:03] Robbie Wagner: Sure. You put down newer ones. I played in some leagues where they actually had longer grass and like rubber down and you could play. Oh, I like rubbers firm ground. I’ve done that too. Yeah. Yeah. Which is also pretty interesting. The stuff rubber just flies everywhere. It flies everywhere.
[00:46:18] James Quick: It’s always in your cleats get it’s all over the place, take your shoes off, and you just dump out all the rubber bits.
[00:46:23] James Quick: It is fun
[00:46:24] Robbie Wagner: to watch other people play on it and watch it fly everywhere. Kind of like that. I’m, I’m not saying that it’s better or worse. I, it’s. Maybe not better, but it felt cool to be like inside with cleats. Yeah, sure. Yeah.
[00:46:34] James Quick: Yeah. We had one. So a lot of the indoor places have like the walls all the way around.
[00:46:38] James Quick: Yeah. Which is really fun. ‘cause it’s a totally different dimension to like play off of a wall to yourself or your teammates.
[00:46:42] Robbie Wagner: The extra player we always say. Yeah,
[00:46:44] James Quick: yeah. Yeah. And we had another one that was bigger than traditional indoor, but didn’t have the wall. So it was like playing a small sided outdoor Okay.
[00:46:54] James Quick: Game, which was also a different experience. So yeah. Yeah. I love
[00:46:58] Robbie Wagner: it all. [00:47:00] Nice. Well I I hope you keep the wheels on for at least another 10 years. We’ll see. Yeah, it’s
[00:47:04] James Quick: getting harder and harder.
[00:47:05] Robbie Wagner: Yeah, it gets achy. Just don’t drink a bunch of whiskey. I think that helps. That’s one what I one. Yeah. Staying active helps a lot.
[00:47:11] Robbie Wagner: ‘cause I was inactive for many years and then I was like, I’m gonna go play some basketball. I like basketball. My knee has been hurt for like eight months now. I just can’t recover. That’s what happens. Yeah. Yeah. Gotta go. Uh, get some MRIs. That’ll be fun. Yeah. Yeah. Don’t do it. Yeah. Recently. Um, alright, so this is one that we usually ask most people.
[00:47:33] Robbie Wagner: If you weren’t in tech, what other career would you choose? And this could,
[00:47:38] James Quick: sorry. Yeah,
[00:47:38] Robbie Wagner: well I was gonna just clarify like, this doesn’t have to be a skill you possess. Yeah. If there’s like a pie in the sky that sounds really fun, but you don’t possess that skill, you can choose that too. Yeah.
[00:47:47] James Quick: Um, something sports related, uh, like I said, I worked with a women’s basketball team in college.
[00:47:53] James Quick: And I don’t know like what the role would be like. It could be like a sports manager or, um, a friend of mine that [00:48:00] works with the women’s team with me in college, I don’t know his exact title. Works for the Bucks. Milwaukee Bucks.
[00:48:04] Chuck Carpenter: Oh yeah.
[00:48:05] James Quick: And does something along the lines of like player relations. So like, okay.
[00:48:08] James Quick: As people come onto the team, like get ‘em onboarded, like connect them to housing and stuff, but just help them acclimate and just keep, I don’t know, morale up and stuff. Yeah. So something to be around sports in that capacity would, would definitely be up.
[00:48:23] Robbie Wagner: Cool. Cool. Um, let’s see. Anything that we missed here?
[00:48:28] Robbie Wagner: Um, yeah, I don’t know.
[00:48:30] Robbie Wagner: I mean, I guess most of your hobbies are around content creation and stuff and sports, but like anything else that we miss that you, you like doing or, I love to rap.
[00:48:39] James Quick: Oh, really? I do. Okay. I do rap music myself. Okay. Hold on here. I’m not gonna do it on. You’re not gonna do that. Yeah. So no.
[00:48:47] James Quick: FaceTime is your intro in your podcast. You The intro is me. Okay. On our podcast. I would not have pegged that. Yeah, that’s you. Well, it’s, it was really funny when Amy and I had just met, we did a stream, I had her on my stream and then she [00:49:00] after messaged me and was like, Hey, would you wanna do a podcast together?
[00:49:03] James Quick: Like really? She was like, I really enjoyed, like our conversation.
[00:49:05] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah.
[00:49:06] James Quick: And so that’s where it started. And when we were kind of brainstorming what we were gonna do, I was like, I could, I could write like a little intro. Rap thing. And she was like, oh, okay. Like, okay, not knowing that it may be decent. Yeah.
[00:49:17] James Quick: And so I did it and she loved it. And now it’s kind of a joke. Um, but it, it’s been like a friend of mine, Reggie, one of my best friends in the world, uh, said that he rapped in college. And I was like, like, you can just do that. And so I tried it and like you would, you’d laugh your ass off. You heard what I did at the time.
[00:49:33] James Quick: Okay. Okay. But I did it, and then I started using it, I mean, basically as therapy. Thank you. Thank you, thank you. Yeah. Um, and not to get like dark, but like after I’ve had deaths in my family, it’s been almost immediately like that week I wrote that song. Oh yeah. I’ve got some really deep songs about all that stuff.
[00:49:49] James Quick: So I have a mix of like kind of therapeutic diary type songs, and I’ve done some more like traditional rappy type stuff. True. But I love lyrics. I love the creativity of like, I [00:50:00] need to tell a story. But I have to figure out how to make it work and rhyme. Right? And that’s, that’s a ton of fun. So that is my like secret hobby.
[00:50:09] James Quick: And like, maybe if there was, going back to the earlier question, if there was something, hey, you could potentially do, like, maybe that seems more pie in
[00:50:18] Robbie Wagner: the sky, but like, you know, I know it has a, you know, traditional cultural roots, but like. It is a culture that’s kind of become part of America more. Yeah.
[00:50:29] Robbie Wagner: Especially in like the last couple of generations. Like I grew up on hip hop and punk rock and all this kind of stuff, and that’s like this, you know, amalgamation of things. So I mean, why not? I guess my only question there is then what do we gotta do to get you and Ken Wheeler in a room for a week and see what happens?
[00:50:49] Robbie Wagner: Yeah, so
[00:50:50] James Quick: it’s funny you say that. I had a song. That Ken said he would produce.
[00:50:54] Robbie Wagner: Okay.
[00:50:54] James Quick: And, um, I’ll call him out publicly. Like, he, like [00:51:00] didn’t get back to me after I sent him the song, which I didn’t like. He was doing it for free. So I don’t wanna be like, Hey, finish the thing, whatever. So it’s kind of a, a open door that’s there.
[00:51:10] James Quick: But that’s always, I don’t have a, I don’t have a musical background. I play violin, so I have that, but I don’t have like a producing background. Like I don’t hear the details that other people hear. I just like to write lyrics. Yeah, like, and rap. Okay. So if, if I were to ever do something. Semi-serious. It would have to involve like someone that’s really got the, the talent in the ear to do that sort of stuff.
[00:51:27] James Quick: Yeah, right,
[00:51:28] Robbie Wagner: right. Yeah. Yeah. Ken Wheeler’s got the grill. Yeah, he’s definitely got, he’s got, yeah. He convinced me to, he’s the stack teenage teenage engineering thing. Recently. I’ve seen his stack of ones a few times. Yes. Okay. So our intro. Is actually based, it all started from a video that I saw that Ken put up where he was on this little mid keyboard and he was like, look, you can do these like simple little cool beats.
[00:51:52] Robbie Wagner: And I was like, that kind of sounds fun. And it’s something my kids could play with too. So I go get one off Amazon and then I have [00:52:00] to look on YouTube for how do you fucking do this? Yeah. And came across this dude in Phoenix, like did. Was doing these really cool beats. Shared it with Robbie and then we were like, yeah, we wanna, so that dude from all of that, that’s how we got our intro.
[00:52:15] Robbie Wagner: That’s You got your, that’s awesome. Yeah. This guy in Phoenix using this MIDI keyboard that Kennan convinced me to buy, made our So cool. Made our intro. Yeah. Yeah, it’s amazing. It’s kind of funny in that way. I like that you called him out.
[00:52:26] James Quick: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ve never said anything to him about it until, yeah, very indirectly now.
[00:52:31] James Quick: But if he’s out there and hears a, if he
[00:52:33] Robbie Wagner: doesn’t hear this, we’ll ask him next time. Talk it. I’m actually gonna message him after this, so just, you know, it’s, it’ll be alright. Feel free. It’s
[00:52:39] James Quick: probably like in somewhere, so I’m gonna asshole for like, you didn’t do what you said you were gonna do, but anyway, he’s gonna be like,
[00:52:45] Robbie Wagner: bro.
[00:52:46] Robbie Wagner: Bad. Yeah.
[00:52:46] James Quick: That might be it. That, that he may not have wanted a waste his time. That could totally be it. No,
[00:52:51] Robbie Wagner: that would be like a fair and interesting response. But anyway. Yeah. Alright. On that last fun
[00:52:56] James Quick: fact and then I’ll, okay,
[00:52:57] Robbie Wagner: sure. Yeah,
[00:52:58] James Quick: yeah. Um, the chorus for that [00:53:00] song, I want to be my walkout music when I do talks from now on, so maybe one day you’ll get to hear that at least.
[00:53:06] James Quick: Alright. I hope it’s about tailwind. So that’s a, see, I could talk for days. That’s a whole nother brand I’m debating about doing is like developer rap.
[00:53:14] Robbie Wagner: I think should I thought about, about developer pop punk songs? Yeah. I think that would be cool too. I’ve thought about doing developer comedy routines, so let’s do ‘em all in one.
[00:53:22] Robbie Wagner: Yeah, yeah. We can come up with a A variety show. Variety shows. Yeah. So we could do that. We can have Penn do some of the beats. That’s right. Yeah, we can make this happen. Listen, Ken, if you don’t do this, I’m sending you a bag of Dicks. A hundred percent. So bag of Dick stock. You didn’t send them one already?
[00:53:36] Robbie Wagner: No, but uh, I still wanna be friends. Alright, well as soon as Chuck starts bringing out the bag of Dicks, it’s time to end. I think so, um, yeah.
[00:53:43] James Quick: Is there anything you wanna plug before we end? Uh, I, we talked about Astro. I’ve got astro course@astrocourse.dev and then James t Quick, uh, for website and social media, so Twitter and YouTube, et cetera.
[00:53:54] James Quick: So.
[00:53:55] Robbie Wagner: Cool. All right. Thanks everyone for listening. If you liked it, please subscribe. Leave us some ratings and reviews and we’ll catch [00:54:00] you next time.
[00:54:00] Outro: You’ve been watching Whiskey Web and Whatnot. Recorded in front of a live studio audience. What the fuck are you talking about, Chuck? Enjoyed the show? Subscribe. You know, people don’t pay attention to these, right? Head to whiskey.fund for merchant to join our Discord server. I’m serious, it’s like 2% of people who actually click these links. And don’t forget to leave us a five star review and tell your friends about the show. All right, dude, I’m outta here. Still got it.