147: Oh My Zsh with Robby Russell

0:00What's going on, everybody? Welcome to Whiskey Web and what not. With your host, Robbie the Wagner and Charles William Carpenter, the second with another Robbie Russell. It's going on, Robbie. Hi there. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Thanks for coming on. I was just skipping right over where I called Charles the second, not giving him a chance to respond. Quick question is Charles, are you actually the third? I am. I'm the third as well. So we have both have connections there. Yes. There will not be a fourth. Yeah. Same with me. I did make people. I chose not to do a fourth. I was like, this is where it ends. I vividly remember

0:51having a family dinner with my grandfather and my dad there. It was like several of my relatives when I was maybe 13 or so. And I remember, I think there was a question something came up like, oh, will you name your kid the fourth? And I was like, no, I will not. There was like a slight look of disappointment. And then, but then I also just decided not to make kids or not to make people. So I got out of that regard of this. So I'm a much better uncle anyways. But no, I'm the lineage of our royalty has ended with me. The line and blood ends. Yeah. And I think our genes were that great anyways. All right. Well, maybe

1:39you should be a host on your show. Yeah, your self-deprecating humor is right on par. This is going to go fine. So there's two robbies and two trays is what I was going to say. Hey, Robbie, you should have at least a few sentences about who you are before we totally skip over letting you introduce yourself. Who am I? That's a good question. I am Robbie Russell. I am a software engineer. I've been running a software agency and I live in Portland. We're again, I've been doing that since 2002. So that's like 22 years or so. And primarily working Ruby on Rails. And I created an open source project called Oh, my Z shell nearly

2:1415 years ago, which is where some people know me from. And yeah, blogger and podcast host of the maintainable software podcast. Cool. Very nice. All right. Now you can enter this. Now I may. Oh, thank you. Yes. You may. I give you permission. Yeah. Thank you, young man. Okay. So today we're having the mortlock. I don't know if I'm saying this right, but it's a mortlock single malt whiskey. Squishy. The way with chi is what it is. It's aged 12 years. We know it's single malt. So we know the match bill. It is aged in cherry and bourbon casks. And it is 86.8 proof. The wee wetchy might say that a bunch. I'm

3:01sorry. The wee wetchy. I've not heard of this one before. Yeah, me either. Yeah, this was a project solely on the branding because it looked very cool. I like their fonts and logo and stuff. So it looks like a fancy coworking space. I'd work there. How do you pronounce it imported from Norwalk, Connecticut, but Dufftown, Scotland. I don't know where that is in them. I should maybe I'll pull up a map later. It's the beast of Dufftown too. And that is also very compelling on the top near the Gork. It says the beast of Dufftown. I know to the still that bears the beast of Dufftown. I guess that's what they called the

3:41still an ode to the still. Yeah, I don't know. It must be a lot of the more still. I don't know. It's got kind of a sweet smell. The cherry casks and we've been proud of it today. Yeah. You get almost like a little bit about some dried apricot. No, I was actually thinking raisins raisins kind of I was thinking moist currants. Okay. I almost dry. It's not dry. No moist. Yeah. Moist. I almost said cherries actually. Yeah. So that was it was vacillating there. All right. Let's find out. You might have influenced me a little bit, but I get kind of like a sour cherry. So very moist sour cherry. Get a little

4:33that. A little mossiness to it. How would you describe mossiness? Hmm. Mossiness. Mossiness. Yeah. Oh, Masino. Masino. Mossimo. That's what my site. The market close. No. Oh, yeah. Masino is what my son used to call marshmallows before he could say where it's good. Mossiness would be it has kind of like a leafy earthiness to it and almost like almost like a little bit of. Not dewy, but like. Yeah. It tastes like you went outside in the morning and just licked your lawn. Yeah, maybe a little bit. Yeah. And like someone had a maybe dropped it or put out a cuffs up put out their cigarette in the grass.

5:26Hmm. There's some to back owe you vibes in there. Interesting. Yeah. And then you licked it. Mine would have a lot of dirt. I do have grass, but there's there's a decent amount of dirt. Like a smoky or charred burnt toffee. It's like a little too cooked. Hmm. Maybe charred to moss for me is where I'm going with it. Hmm. I get a little toffee though after the sour kind of fades and a little toffee and then it gets into this like something kind of mildewy almost. Sounds delicious. You're really selling this one. Yeah. Well, this is the beast of Doftown. It's not for the light hearted. Okay. No. It might be a wee

6:12witchy. Could be a better way to change my handle to the beast of Doftown. Sounds pretty cool. Yeah. You're the beast of the beast of fluff town. That's third. Beasty. The third. The wee witchy that's third. That's what that would get. Okay. Yeah. Interesting. I like it. Robert Wagner. When you feel prepared to give this a rating. So Robbie, I will tell you and our other listener just a little reminder on our rating system zero to eight tentacles because we are pseudo engineers. So of course, we have to include the zero for being like middle of the road for you. Not bad. Eight being amazing. Give me nothing else, basically.

7:01Yeah. For me, it's going to be I'm going to say a five because it's a little better than middle of the road. I think I've had a lot worse scotches for sure. Yeah. No, nothing like it's kind of middle of the road, but it's like not in a bad way. So it's like I'm giving it that one extra point. Yeah. Interesting. Robbie Russell. Yeah, I'm going to I'm going to second that. I feel like it's five. It's a solid five. It feels it's something I can drink and I wouldn't like turn it down. If someone was offering it to me, would I buy another bottle? I don't know. Maybe. Yeah. Yeah. I'm kind of I think I'm going to go four and a half. I was leaning more for

7:50I mean, we can have. Yeah. Yeah. We can do whatever we want. There's five point to you. All right. Perfect. There you go. A little a little above. You have to get the closest without going over. So yeah, for me, it's like easy to drink. It's pretty smooth. That's some interesting flavors, but it fades away really quickly. It's like quick to forget. It doesn't have much burn. No, that's true. Yeah. And so, you know, it's a little too we I would like more we in my witchy. Is what I think we we we we we we are way way not scotch at all in that way or the not as scotch scotish accent. My suspicion is that my wife will use this in experimenting with some cocktails.

8:35So we'll see how they all report back on that. That was her pandemic hobby that she picked up over the last several years. She's amazing at making cocktails now, which is wonderful. That's a nice nice skill to have in the house. As I say, other than the rusty nail, I can't say I've really had many like scotch based cocktails. I think this could be interesting for that though. You know what else is interesting? Hmm. Type script. Is it though? Depending on who you ask. You know what's interesting about it is like this sticker. I do love that. Yeah. That's a pretty good sticker. Yeah. Shout out the depth tools. I forget his name. I know it's hipsters. Man, what's his actual name?

9:18Oh, sorry, I drew. Anyway, you were going to say something about TypeScript before I interrupt you. I was just trying to lead into the hot takes. Yes. So that's our big hot takes section. Go for it. Yeah, I don't know how much like TypeScript and CSS and stuff you're doing when you're doing rails. Are you building full stack apps or doing more like API work or like do these questions apply or not? I don't know. That's an excellent question. Robby, the wacker. Personally, I have not written more than maybe 20 lines of TypeScript as of yet myself. The most of my work tends to be more on the back end side when I'm helping deal with legacy apps and helping teams get things upgraded

10:04and stuff like that. So on the coding side, I don't often get to play with a lot of the fancy new stuff. And if it when it comes to maybe this is part of when I a consequence of coming up in an era where we needed to have people that were more focused on the front end to think about all the browser testing and dealing with all that stuff at the time that I was just leave that work to other people on the team that enjoyed making things work in i.e. 6 and 7 or at least enjoy. begrudgingly, begrudgingly make that work across the different devices and make things work when things got responsive and or when we were building mobile specific apps or versions of our web apps

10:40that we would build for our clients. So I always just kind of like push the front end over to the other people on the team that were way more that just seemed to have more of an act for thinking about all those all the different contexts as you need to think about there. The people that are I always enjoyed walking around in the office and seeing the people that would be like sliding their browsers with back and forth on their screen to see how things were when the responsive era happened and so that was someone else's responsibility so that's what they were dealing with that when it came to more of that but I did do some JavaScript stuff but a lot of

11:12that was pre things like a react and stuff coming out and I think the last framework that I worked with was when maybe ember first came out was kind of a new thing I did some work with that and we did some projects with Angular and React and prior to that doing a lot of stuff with like backbone and prototype just raw JavaScript stuff as well so but I was always more of a back-end performance fine-truly on the application side person. That's fair. Well luckily embers dead so you don't have to do that anymore and then we just inherited a project that is running on running our number which has been a while since we've had many companies contact us for that so

11:52yeah that's only two weeks ago that that started for us but remembering what that world was like and it's not that it's not dead. No it's not. I just because Robbie is still the deeply involved even currently and so I like to to resin a little bit so I didn't know if you also were like taking the ideologies of DHH more recently of like ripping TypeScript out and moving to not compiling front-end files and no transpile no compile like serve your files as is and utilize more modern web technologies versus falling back on these frameworks and build tool sets and all of that I don't know if you have any thoughts around that that side of things.

12:42I think the I know like with this the controversy around them ripping out TypeScript of that one particular project I don't know I feel like I didn't really understand why there's such a big backlash against that if that's a stick a project that they decided to do that one particular thing as far as you know like what our teams typically doing we are tending to work slightly on slightly older apps and so we're always kind of stuck a little bit like five to eight years behind and trying to figure out we're going to iterate our way forward and help those apps get updated to get to use new things so you know one of the things we are working on quite a bit is

13:20doing a little bit more of like helping clients navigate the process of like adapting from say something like react and wanting to take advantage of things like hotwire in their apps and so there's some other people my team that are more focused on that side of things that they haven't been are understanding of that and coincidentally my company also does a every other year we do a survey of the Ruby on Rails community to get a sense of where people are using all the different tools and so there's a lot of curiosity of like are people potentially looking to migrate what JavaScript package managers are they using now and like what other free JavaScript frameworks

13:52are they using with their apps so I'll have more answers on like what the general Rails community does and we usually get close to you know 3000 people that participate in that survey over a couple years and we've been doing that since 2009 and it's been interesting to see how the ecosystems kind of evolved over the time but my company tends to be a little bit further behind only because where the company says we're not we're not as interested in building a new shiny new app we're more I see myself as more of a mentor than a maker I like to help improve things and iterate through things and try to help companies avoid needing to go down the ill advise big rewrite if

14:27possible because everybody's like wouldn't it be just great if we get to start over well if you don't figure out how you're going to keep things updated and technology keeps changing and that's we do make our lives complicated sometimes is a type of I think the software industry I think that's an excellent point around where like you're just trading some problems this set of problems for a different set of problems yeah you end up reorganizing over and over again yeah and your organization isn't good at me updating their software over time then right that's always going to be the case so we we have a lot of companies that will contact us because they want us to help

15:06them just with the upgrade and my the first thing I tell them is I think that's really bad idea you need to figure out how to get your own team to prioritize and navigate this up it's a skill set you need to work on and iterate on that and we can come in and we'll take your money and help you do it but if you're not really going to be reinforcing this as part of your process and so I see companies will like well we'll just hire an extra senior person to come in and we'll just kind of like push them off and work on the upgrade and they have their get branch that they work on for a couple of months and then they get pulled into the rest of the team's projects and it could

15:39be prioritized and you don't remember where you left off and it's like the same story over and over and over and over where was I and then you should have bring other people in and you can't track your progress in those projects very well because it's a lot of like digging into rabbit holes regardless I don't think this is in a rebound rail specific this is just a problem with anything like and then everybody's like well I don't have enough test coverage to rely on safe that everything's going to work and like it's the same story is over and over and over so that's where we kind of come in and like help teams try to navigate that help them also with

16:11when they're when people are about to go down rabbit holes be help them figure out like put that that I did down for a moment like document it what were you originally working on and like help steer them in the right maybe a different direction or like not just keep chasing things because you forget where you're at and then one of the problems that breaks down in one of organizations is that say I'm air quoting the product people lose confidence in their team's ability to estimate how long these things are going to take the two because they will give them an estimate and then they go off on rabbit like well there's all these things that popped up along

16:43the way and then like and then if you ever if you ever been in one of those conversations with the developer and they're just rattling off all the reasons and all the problems a product person is like I don't need to know all the details like how much time do you think you're going to need and like how much longer do you need on this and then eventually that our roads trust and so people stop asking saying yeah let's invest time there we'll come back to it someday when you can get better estimates or you can get more focus and then and the developers will also then stop asking for a time to do that because they've they've heard not right now a few too many times and then

17:16it just becomes like a weird situation to work out so yeah trying to come in and help teams kind of navigate that is what I've been working on to be like what I was a a super shrink I suppose or a superhero type thing but I'm not I'm not here to save the day I'm here to help teams figure this shit out for themselves with the Venmo debit card you can turn the mini golf out and your co-workers paid you back for into a trip to Miami with your best friend earning up to five percent cashback youth Venmo to pay for the things you love to do visit Venmo.me slash debit to learn more the Venmo mastercard is issued by the bank court

17:55bank NA pursuant to license by mastercard international incorporated term supply dash cashback term supply this episode is brought to you by indeed when your computer breaks you don't wait for it to magically start working again you fix the problem so why wait to hire the people your company desperately needs use indeed sponsor jobs to hire top talent fast and even better you only pay for results there's no need to wait speed up your hiring with a $75 sponsor job credit at indeed dot com slash podcast terms and conditions apply yeah I think that makes a lot of sense too because it's like you know like you said if you don't teach them how to do it later

18:38they're just going to have more problems and like teams never prioritize this it's a problem at like 80% of places I've worked or it's just like just do features just do features just do features like we'll eventually hire someone else to update all this stuff because we need you to just do features all the time and it's like why like we should care like that is a built-in feature is upgrading because it's going to be faster and more performant and like more secure usually like there's a lot of security vulnerabilities that happen when you're stuck on a eight-year-old thing and then you're just like oh shit what do I do now and like yeah it's also a hard problem

19:12estimation is bullshit too especially to the level that most teams try to estimate too because you get these project level things and even if you break that down a little bit and they're like I don't know tell me small medium large and then they still try and internally translate that if it's more than six weeks a week it's too big like if you can't confidently say like you should ship little tiny pieces and then you'd be like this is done this is done this is done instead of like I'm going to build this for four months like yeah yeah yeah making smaller commitments is the only way that you can have confident I can I can confidently estimate things

19:53that are like two days or less yeah probably changing that button color probably 20 years so yeah until you get in there and realize that it's attached to some dependency that you don't control that bootstrap size of the yes some other ridiculous things so anyway I'm going to regress now back to hot takes before we just talk about serious things and this is an important one I think you may have a opinion on get rebase or get merge oh that's a good one I am on team get merge hmm I'm a little surprised I'm going to say get in your 10 year in the space and it has been easier for me to work my way out of weird tricky

20:43things and to also work with say other pair with other people and help them kind of wrap their head around it so I think it's just more of like hey can we set this up aside and merge like navigate it that way and yeah maybe the secret the secret is out is that even though I might be have been around the get world for such a long time that there's a lot about get that I don't really wrap my head around enough and then I'm just like I don't I think maybe also because of the types of projects that I ended up working on I'm usually not needing to sync up that much stuff I say that with some some degree of there but yeah yeah tend to tend to lean more on get

21:20merging or get rebase yeah I think if you're working on a branch with anyone else that's probably the better choice because I've gotten screwed over a ton about like rebasing or they rebase and you like forget to like reset before you start working and then you go to like pull and there's like changes because they've all changed and all the hashes are different and like you go I don't know like I usually end up then just throwing all of the like like I keep my changes but I throw all the history away and just like copy everything over and be like there you go like so let's just pretend this never happened yeah yeah it's hard it's it's a lukewarm cake I suppose yeah

22:00I think given running an agency I mean that's a smart position I think to take what is the most inclusive yeah that's true a sidebar on the left or right of the s code um left for my folders and stuff like that yeah it's on the left okay yeah well it's on the right I think sometimes I have the like the zoomed out version or a view where you can kind of wait if you're a really really long long file just to kind of get a sense of where you're at but I don't use the right too often for anything what about you too yeah left is the default and I'm lazy yeah I don't I don't know why I never really thought about it that much yeah yeah this

22:45was a weird thing on Twitter where like there were like a couple people who were like I put it on the right and it's like what why and like the only thing I've heard is like because they open and close it a lot and like then their code doesn't jump around because their code is always just aligned to the left and I'm like well who cares like it's just like yeah it moves for a second but you're probably not opening and closing it every like five seconds so it's like that's interesting I I rely I mean and maybe this kind of speaks to um even like oh my Z shell but like I'm a lazy developer in the sense that I do rely a lot on hockey so like the folder review navigating

23:25manually with my mouse try to find things it's like I only do that when I'm like really struggling to remember and find something but otherwise I'm usually just like open up a file and then I just kind of like tapping between the tabs and that's how I think about navigating and like my I don't need the visual reminder where things sit necessarily in the folder but I say that to somebody but I think that's so yeah I get that whole like opening closing that it's an interesting thought there but I think it's just more of like left to write to me it's just like the thing is over here and then I open it and it shows up over here and that just seems intuitive

24:01for how my brain and maybe in our culture how we learn how things are organized no that is another parts of the world where they might where the writing is different and maybe maybe directions are a little differently it's true that's true that's true yeah I hadn't actually thought about that one like the context of someone who would prefer the right versus if they read and write to left anyway so interesting what about something highly important like nested ternaries when you think about those what the hell's a nested ternary it's a ternary within a ternary within a ternary potentially no comment would you do that I'm

24:46googling nested ternary and wondering if I'm just not a savvy enough programmer here to even so you think I should join the Rails community I mean me either okay perfect I mean I have no problem with Rails yeah it's it's not super important I didn't go to like a proper education when it comes to software programming or anything I'm a high school dropout and so when it comes to like I know how to do like so we're talking like nested conditionals versus using like case statement type situations or exactly kind of yeah kind of yeah ternary is just like where you do the question mark and the colon instead of an if else so it's like a shorthand for an if else yeah yeah but

25:30then yes that shit really deep and it gets really gross looking no no no I would want to about nesting and stuff if it's too hard to read and follow for someone like that's the whole point of software is the code otherwise we'd be just be writing the levels you know so it's just like how simple can we make this for other people to comment and understand what the hell is going on so as expressive as we can be and if you need a lot of documentation or comments in your code do explain what's happening then I would say I would think unless there's some like performance thing that you're maybe going to get it came at it and there's like a very explicit

26:05reason for doing that 99% of the time I'd be like let's just how stupidly simple can you make this to your future self or to some other person that's going to come and look at this project because someone else is going to potentially inherit this project from you and as the person that often ends up re inheriting a lot of projects I can tell you that I would just prefer people just to be verbose not to the sense where it's like unnecessarily verbose but at least verbose enough that I can get a understanding like why is this here what is it doing and can I kind of I make changes to it and then if it's when you end up getting too clever then it makes it harder

26:45for you to know how to change it so that's when you start adding band aids and weird patches and circumventing things and rather than yeah probably should just refactor that whole thing anyways when it comes to understand it you just usually know some worth being considerate to the next person who might look at your work yeah yeah I remember like there was I think if you did loops backwards and JavaScript it was like a little bit faster oh so like I would occasionally see people do that where like instead of doing like you know i0 i plus plus you do like you start at the highest number and you decrement i is like somehow faster I don't understand why but like I'm like no

27:23just do it the way that's easy to read like the performance gains you're getting are so negligible just do it like the way people can follow it but anyway that's interesting I wonder if there's something about like the iterating through like a collection of something it gets it gets smaller it is it is be quicker to know how many are left in it or I don't understand all this stuff works on them maybe yeah I'm not retaining the same one over and over and over and just getting to the next thing in it or you can yeah anyway yeah that's interesting yeah um yes I do want to circle back to rails a bit um so rails is like I can feel like back in the spotlight these days like um you know

28:06you always take whatever DHH says with a grain of salt but he said something like in like I guess this year or next year for you which year he said but like you know rails what's the new and eight what's coming out is like he's like it's going to be the best way to write web applications and like I wanted to get your thoughts on that because I feel like he's maybe not wrong like we're kind of regressing back to all of like old as new again and like you know all these things that weren't sexy for so long is like well actually it's been working forever and it works better than ever now so why not I think we're reassessing the web platform and people have uh forgotten about it

28:45and you know remember all the things that kind of forced us in some other directions and they you know now they're committed to react now they're committed to whatever the tool chain is and so they just keep trying to improve that versus come back to the core let's look what are the native API's what's the web platform look like now and how you know can we actually just leverage that as much as possible instead I mean that's what it feels like to me having been part of the Ruby and Rails community for what's over 19 years or something it's wild just stay out loud it's so funny because like early on in the days it was always an argument about like Rails is too new

29:27you can't use this and you can't use this for real applications and we should be using Java and I think Java was not even like five ten years old at the time when I was having those arguments with people and now 20 years later um here we are defending why it's so useful and relevant but I think the there's a couple things I think that have happened one I think teams especially in the most last few years are needing to do more with less people and so I think there's that part of it and that's I think that Ruby on Rails was always really like when it when it came out and landed and I was saying the air quoting the market but the the market of software options and frameworks

30:06for building my applications it removed a lot of other roles maybe or any like roles that were a lot of companies used to rely on like you you thought differently about do we need a DBA on our projects do we need you know someone that manages just thinking about like all the business logic would be tied up in your database and like the idea that that and that was a hard thing for me when I came to Rails was like trusting that the active record layer was going to be a good protector of the data and manage that the the state of our database really well because prior to that it was a lot of every app I ever worked on every other programming language it was so a little bit different

30:45and it was like what was the flavor of that that point in time and so Rails is provided a really good set of conventions like K if we follow you stick within these parameters we make a lot of decisions for you you can build web apps you can focus on building things and shipping things quicker and I think that was really exciting at the time it was like this is us it was kind of like a going away from the like let's see how geeky we can be as software developers look how clever we were it ended up being more like let's just build stuff and ship stuff and let's see if this stuff works and we can make a business out of this versus like these other you know kind of

31:16experimental things that we're doing or needing a much larger team of people in specialized roles so Rails became like was early on like kind of like a one person framework from the beginning and I know that DHH is using that and how he talks about it now as well but it's true like you can do a lot as like with a really small team and a lot of companies have grown their organizations and grown lots of teams and so there's definitely some some aspects as any type of software platform as your teams grow it becomes more complicated to try to like all share the same code base and so I can understand why companies like a lot of experience you know let's split off and do

31:56a lot of microservices let's split off the front end stuff we can use this new stuff there's a lot of it's in the JavaScript frameworks have always been coming in going over the years and and so trying to find a ways how to make that all work together and Rails kind of you know weird way became like oh really good option for like the API would be so there's a lot of companies that use Ruby on Rails is the back API and you can just throw any front end and with some point you're going to rewrite the front end on a new platform and that that's happens sometimes I feel like that's that idea is probably happened less in reality than I think a lot of people told

32:29themselves they were going to do that because we see a lot of teams that will will do that will split up you know the back end and the head and they're like well we're going to have multiple front end applications at some point and so they have different teams or people that are maybe cross developing across both those platforms but they can be like well let's use the best tool for the front end and we'll use Rails in the back end and then a couple years later they're teams smaller all of a sudden because they have layoffs or they just don't need that many people anymore and now they're responsible for many co-bases in parallel and every change requires going

33:04into two different applications and trying to get that all in sync and it's like it's it's a lot of work because we're not necessarily set up to have like atomic commits and your deployments are all separated and so like they it's been I feel like there's an interesting thing there around having the platform so I think people are reevaluating now like well maybe that was interesting we needed a lot of other different types of skill sets and things like that it was you know and I've always thought that was a natural split the front in the back end because speaking in my earlier comments that like I didn't want to think about all the web browser related stuff

33:37like there's other people can think about that and let me focus on the business logic side of things but I think it's like with Rails 8 coming out and like there's a lot of people maybe if you're starting a new application do you should is it a good idea to spin up multiple repos with different technology stacks in parallel and be like let's build a new app a new platform now when I think Rails is putting a compelling argument to be like hey let's we can do this all in Rails you can split off when you need to at some point but like let's see how far you can give it just one application for all your different use cases and stuff like that so what I like

34:15about that ideology is that I think that resourcing is a big different way to think about that right so we've gone through now like a wave of error that is very VC driven where ideas will get you lots of money to get started which means get you multiple people to build which means you can have a greater separation of concerns right and there's been a massive pullback in that and now you have to think about resource wise I have this idea I can't even begin to raise money until I'm actually I have users and show revenue I mean that's starting to happen a whole bunch and I can't do any of that stuff as a single contributor what's my accelerate now now I start to look at like

35:03what's what what is in you know what in software accelerates me I no longer now when I think about like off either implementing someone else's or rolling my own I don't want to think about ORM so I don't want to think about you know all of that kind of like oh it's cool there's whole companies about this and you can get it as a service but you still have to do work to get it into your application and then you have to spend money and all of these things like these full stack web application frameworks the rails the jangos that kind of stuff that now becomes really relevant and part of the conversation isn't because you need all this to get out of the gate right

35:43and not needing to think about you know it's interesting thinking about how they're with the next version of rails that there's a lot of emphasis on thinking about like here's some we're going to include now like some guidance on how to deploy the thing whether or not you agree that that's the best approach but like we can you know you can just like let's just simplify that part of the process because you know if you're a we've again to go back to I worked in the consulting side of things we come in a lot of different scenarios where there might be teams that had at one point had 25 30 engineers on their team and now they have five and they're like

36:17we have all this stuff the deployment process is like we have all this terraform stuff that some other guy wrote a couple years ago we know how to make some changes to it but we're afraid of breaking it and then and they're just like we don't know what what's running on our AWS account they're afraid to come stuff off and so it's just like it was like cheap to spin things up and now there's kind of like well maybe we could start a little smaller again and like maybe also maybe we shouldn't be individually ssaging into servers and running like get updates and upgrade ourselves and like maybe there's some ways we can streamline that a little bit now and like the

36:54factor rails is like going to start including that stuff is kind of exciting for new projects it's also like again because I tend to work on older apps it's kind of like a little out of reach I'm like oh that's great but it's also kind of reminding me I'm like some maybe we can unpack some of an undo some of this stuff for some of our clients that they've invested in be like hey when you were making those decisions you thought your team was going to keep exponentially growing to some degree maybe not exponentially but like you know like hey we're a team of five and we're like to be adding five more people will be 10 and maybe in a couple more years we'll be

37:2420 30 people how do we think about how do we make in technical choices that it supports a team of that size I have very rarely ever heard a team be realistic be like what happens when our team is actually going to be smaller yeah nobody thinks about getting smaller as like an ideal thing software eventually will either it gets the power cord gets plugged at some point but it's probably not when there's 50 people on the team anymore it's probably a few people left working on it and so at that point and not that you should be making decisions be like planning on only having like the one or two people left on your project still keeping it running and stuff like that

38:01but if it's too complicated for a few people to understand the whole then it might be good back to come back to those kind of first principles and just like what are we doing here how do we make this simpler do we need this much complexity and the complexity we needed to support growing is maybe not what we need now and how do we unpack that and then a lot of teams that are smaller now they don't feel like they have the resources or time to do that and so those organizations are kind of in a shitty situation and so which is why they need maybe companies like mine to come in and maybe help them navigate some of those things but yeah it's tricky but I think it's good

38:38to question why you're making those decisions and see if you can still support it and know you're probably going to change your mind in a few years too so how do you add something and how can you remove it or swap it out and so it's tricky the bus factor is pretty bad there if you're growing and you know you're very dependent on A and B person potentially and then A and B go away what happens you know there's a big big bit of that although it's funny that a lot of things you said are very like counterproductive to probably what you know a bunch of your business is fueled by is you you tell people to do the problems you want to do the wrong thing I mean you

39:22don't want to they just do it anyway right like you say all right here I am it for us not to see each other again in a couple of years this is what you should do and then inevitably I mean maybe a mission is to put myself out of a job but and and that'll be my legacy is it like there was no more of these but these problems aren't going to go away these they need to be talked about and just in the same way like if all coaches just you know could coach their athletes to be the best highest performing people great but there's a reason why they're still coaches and the reason why they're still therapists people learn a little bit some people retain that information and

40:04can iterate on that some of them don't and they sometimes forget and then you remind and that's okay too listen to my podcast in maybe a book one day oh there you go listen to his podcast I agree speaking of which do you have any tips or tricks or like things for people who may want to start a podcast or like you know or equipment to like improve their podcast or like upgrade their co-hosts or I mean yeah just hypothetically yeah good I do like the idea of like starting your podcast off with whiskey as a good business expense so that's that's wise I think finding something that you're excited and passionate about or at least enjoy consuming when I

40:51started my podcast I think it was I think I knew about two years before I did my first interview what I wanted to do and my goal was to capture conversations with people to talk about what I believe is the a topic that we don't often talk about would just how complicated it is to take care of existing code and legacy code and like a large part of our job is coming and do existing situations working on them we're rarely ever getting to be the person that spins up a brand new application most developers don't get you to that all that often outside of their own little personal hobby projects if the company is hiring you they probably already have some code and

41:28they need you to jump in and rip your head around it and I think the I often wondered that we've done a disservice is to and are thinking about how we educate in and and shine a light on like hey is this a good industry to to to join as a career because you're gonna get to be a creator you're gonna be get to make things you know you're building all these new things all the time and I think I've seen a lot of people come into the industry and they go through like coding bootcamp and they they've learned how to build some stuff they work on some bug fixes for things they get they do their internships that companies like mine they get their first job and they're like all I

42:04do is fix bugs and like make small little updates and they're like I thought I was going to be building new features all the time and I'm like that's part of some people's job sometimes but a lot of maintenance one of the project worked is maintenance work and taking care of things and you kind of learn through that over a period of time so one of the conversations with people just let people like that is actually a really big part of the job and we're often and there is the role of a menders not makers and so I wanted to capture conversations that I thought would be relevant not just now but also like an indicator more so we don't I don't talk a lot about what's new and

42:38shiny and technology don't talk about how it takes very often just recently at a couple conversations with people because about AI and how it can be helpful for that stuff but not because like what's new and where do you think AI is going to go for as industry so that was like the at least coming up at the premise that I thought was like moderately unique I feel like there's a lot of interesting podcasts around what's new and happening and and so then you're competing with everybody else that's talking about what's new and happening which is important stuff to be talking about don't give me wrong people like to talk about that and but I also I live in a world where I often work and

43:11as I said projects that are several years old and I'm like a lot of people that are working on projects that are far behind on versions and things like that and they're just like well that sounds great but I'm never going to be there you know we're we're always going to be way behind so if I listen to a podcast or go to a conference and hear about what's new and Rails 8 great maybe we'll get there in five years maybe or the or they dream that the only way to get to that scenario is to go to job hop to another company where they think the grass is greener and then they'll get to work on a brand new version of something and then they learn that that's not always the case

43:43either so anyway so as far as that part of it that was just like figuring out what my that was my focus for my project and also one of the being not technology stack focused and so I didn't want to talk but just Ruby and Rails people only talk with people of all different spectrums in here different stories and have a lot of similar conversations with a lot of wide variety people so that was my angle the other so in terms of other things about the process I don't do the editing I've never done the editing I knew that I would be a bottleneck so I immediately found an editor originally on Upwork and they did 100 and something episodes with us before I had to get my second editor which I

44:18have now I knew that it needed to be I can handle the up front part of the process of finding guests prepare for the interviews handle all the communications with the guests up until the interview have the interview automated as much as that stuff as like possibly could and then throw some files into a drop box folder for our editor and be like great and then someone else would pick him up pick up those the output of that process and then they would you know organize all the social media assets and publish it on the web and then schedule that and let the guests know that their episode was published when it was ready so that was the first that was something I knew I needed to do and so

44:53until I had that kind of whole pipeline organized I didn't want to like release anything and the other thing I made myself do was like I'm going to record 10 episodes before I tell anybody publicly that this was a thing I'm like I wanted to get a head smart yeah let me get 10 episodes and then I could rearrange which episodes I was going to have first and so like maybe my first one which I still would think was one of my weakest ones because I didn't want to navigate being an interviewer and I can kind of rearrange that a little bit based off of how I felt like those first several one went I didn't want to be I just become this person that's a bit hesitant to talk publicly

45:31about things until it's ready either they're just like because I have projects I've worked on in the past we're like hey I got a book deal and then like sign up and then you find out like six months later by the way I'm not going to finish the book now I'm sorry I asked for email in just six months ago I don't want to be like vaporware vapor announcement stuff like people do a little time and I'm just like oh yeah like no actually do the thing and be like hey cool you know I so that was another thing I think if you can hold it back I feel this is much more exciting to be like you can actually participate now you can get you can buy the thing now you can subscribe now and start listening

46:05right now to me that's that feels like a much more exciting thing I need that is the motivator is like I know that I can get people to sign up but I'd rather it actually just be like this is dropped yeah there's a lot of podcasts that I've seen that'll they get really hype about doing it they like make a cool logo they like record an episode or two and they're done and it's like yeah if you do at least 10 that you know builds that muscle memory and that like habit and you're probably going to keep doing it and yeah it's it lets you know if you hate it like eight episodes in you should just stop and not even release it because like you're not going to keep going so yeah that's

46:43that's really good advice I think you can also then determine if maybe there was a one one time thing you could just release those eight to ten episodes and be like this was a one time thing here's a capturing and there's not going to be a season two and this was this was a catalog of some conversations I wanted to share there's one one series TV shows all the time that's like that that's true it's a limited series you could just reframe it so anyway there's a lot of different ways you can think about that kind of stuff but I think if you try to do one at a time and release as you go then it's really easy to fall off the wagon and not keep up you haven't built up the

47:21the consistency of and and the other thing I would recommend is like when it comes like finding guests is I put a lot of energy into trying to find very diverse groups of people to be on the podcast and now the point where people ask me often like can I be on your podcast or I have recommendation for somebody to be on your podcast usually like a PR company or something and I'm like I don't want to talk about like what's the image I need but I now seeker hack is when they when someone reaches out to me I'm like I'm open to having you on the podcast but I need you to give me at least three recommendations for other guests that you think would also be good guests on

47:55this episode I like that and so before I will schedule with you give me that list and then they'll give me a list and then follow up question do you have any women that you can recommend and they're right so that put some work into that process I can kind of offer that onto other guests and they will usually give me good guest recommendations and then when people say like I don't have any women to recommend to you to be on the podcast then I could be like well let me know when you can yeah and yeah so I think that that that that tends to be a good way and then so I have a pretty large list of like potential guests and then it's always just a

48:31matter of just trying to get them scheduled and my own I've got a lot of things I'm focused on as well outside of just having a podcast that's oh yeah not quite I hear that yeah yeah yes speaking of other things you have going on I do want to talk about and you said it's oh my z-shell I always said oh my zsh but like I've always said oh my z-shell yeah oh have you said z-shell always yeah damn okay I'm in the minority this is the yeah cuz zsh is like that's the the file type thing whatever anyway and z-shell yeah I've always I say z-shell typically um it's a good I can give you some authority here yeah why didn't you get to decide yeah well z-shell

49:15if you were just going to like the z-shell website or I figure somewhere somewhere somewhere there's a pronunciation for just z-shell itself and for for oh my z-shell I just I think it'd be weird for me to pronounce it otherwise that's true but your people say z-shell because that's just how they say z um in some places um I have a recording on my Twitter profile I pronounced it oh my r-r-r-r-r-r-r and that tends to people I was just at a conference on in Brazil and a lot of people brought that up and they thought it was funny and I'm like I don't know why I'm telling you about my own jokes here but um oh my z-shell you had some whiskey that's why that's

49:54sure I'm gonna pour a look at more yeah do it because I yeah it's funny it kind of makes me think of my dot files a couple of things that I always set up on my new computer is homebrew and oh my z-shell like and then I've got my antigen themes and yeah you know all that kind of fun stuff probably is so honored that you you use it you're such an important force Charles William Carpenter the third yeah you uh everything I'm doing that's right in the world is uh you know you're a part of it yeah see I'm the weird one who uses fish so I use fish too I don't use it I love it I used to use that like 10 years ago but now I feel like I'd be uh turning

50:45my back uh we're coming up on its interest and we're coming up on the 15th birthday anniversary what do you what do you say for our anniversary yeah anniversary it's good this uh this summer will be 15 years and uh it was feature complete when I first released it and because all I wanted was my co-workers when we be pairing on their computers to have the same aliases and shortcuts that I use because I'm a lazy typer and I couldn't remember everything I'm like I just have all these kick commands and all these other things like three four character things uh prior to using reform as you should existed in my crazy as you show configuration before that uh I used to

51:21rely a lot on like things like a text expander and things like that it was always about just speeding up my process to have a bunch of shortcuts for things and so but anyways yeah it's always a show it's how I pronounce it and 15 years and all I wanted my success was I convinced them all to install this thing because they wouldn't just copy my Z show RC file because it didn't understand what it did and I was like well I don't really understand what it all does either it was like a copy and paste with different friends and I some tweaks that I had made over the years from different other people primarily from the Ruby and Rails community um stuff I

51:54copied off of like uh I don't know if you remember there's be webs like called pasty back in the day and so it was kind of like a like a get up gist type of page where people could throw up like a file of code so we were always like sharing little recipes on how to improve your Z show configuration and I just love the autocomplete features and some stuff like that in there and the uh they wouldn't use my team when most of the people my team wouldn't just copy my Z show configuration even though it was perfect obviously because I created it um I'm like well if you want me to work on your computer with you and help you do some coding with you but and I'm doing typing please add

52:32the stuff because it's just hideous I try to remember how to do this um or looking at the man page for the the full syntax and but then one week and I was like I'm gonna document and clean up my Z show configuration just so that I understand what it does so I can explain it to them and then maybe that'll allow them the copying piece and then as I did that I'm like oh I'm gonna reorganize it so I created a directory and I sort of organizing stuff in a different sections and then I broke them out into some separate files and I was like well I'll kind of treat this like like a little framework of some sort and it was just a good directory with some subfolders and stuff like that

53:08and and like a template file and like the install was basically get clone the thing and then copy this file into or copy this thing or Z show RC file and you would use it and then it didn't it didn't have plugins it didn't have themes anything that people would reference now none of that existed the day first the first day because it was literally just all of my configuration and then like day two everybody on my team is and I'm airqueting installed it and then then the next step was the next day one of my team members Carlos said how do I change the colors and I said why my color choices are perfect is it going to change the when I add some different

53:44characters and change how that looks and I'm like oh that's stupid um so he I'm like we'll just edit this file like it was like a terminal or prompt file or something that I had in there so he made changes and then we he wanted to add some new aliases as well and then so he did and push it you know push it to my it was sharing my gear repository to what the team and so everybody was like adding stuff but there was a problem he couldn't he couldn't do a get pull because there was now a merge conflict because he had made changes in his file and the prompt file and so I had an inflection or this what do we do Carlos has his changes and I have mine I can either put a conditional if it's

54:26Carlos do this or with Robbie do this and I'm like that's not going to be that doesn't look good so we created the concept like well guess this is a theme so we created a directory called themes stuck his file in there and stuck mine in there and then you just added the thing and it would just load the specific theme and then a couple weeks and then I shared it on my blog and people started using it and then circling contributions and then someone from like the Python community was like hey I don't need all these rails the aliases I want to have some stuff for jingo and I was like well that's stupid so it was like all right so I moved all my rails stuff into a rails file and I'm like

55:03I guess that's a plugin and we've got Python plugins or jingo plugins and that's that's how it all like started was just people being like I want to I don't want all of your stuff Robbie even though it was like oh my Z show my Z show became like everybody thought of it was there Z show as well I guess my Z show so it just snowballed and everybody started you know throwing ideas and and like oh I want to do it for this thing and there's a command line thing and then you know a couple hundred themes and hundreds of plugins later it's like how did this it became an easy project for people to contribute to but that's the kind of like origin story I didn't have this

55:39master creative plan like I'm gonna do this thing that everybody's gonna love it was like how do we get everybody my team to have all those in aliases so when we're pairing we can all save a few keystrocks and scratch your own itch exactly yeah yeah so how has your experience been with like you know it's it sounded like a lot of people just kind of contributed organically but you know I feel like it's this big problem with open source that like everyone expects everything it's like we're entitled for this to work on everything I could possibly use it on like I'm gonna run this on my microwave and it's using like bash and not Z show and like it should all work

56:15like you know how how much of that have you gotten and like you know how do you how do you deal with like deciding what should go in and and like like how all that works that well I mean as far as like the bash versus I mean it's that one's easy enough it's like well it relies on Z show so but there's people have cloned the concept and there's like oh my bash there's you know I think a lot of stuff in the fish stuff was somewhat inspired by oh my Z show as well and like there's oh my posh for like windows people so there's there's similar variants of it that have kind of spawned but as far as the the project itself a couple complex parts or periods of time where

56:59the I was having a lot of people contribute and we were like working on things that we we were thought about the plugin system in particular like well if everything is includes one of the biggest complaints we've always had is like oh it's gonna air quote bloated I mean it's like all a bunch of text files so if it's taken up too much space in your computer you know maybe get a bigger hard drive but that's fine it's not it's not that crazy it's not and you're only loading what you need but there were some conversations around how are we going to make this project or how do we think about plugins and so we thought about this like building a some more complicated plugin

57:31system that we're required and one idea that I proposed this was many years ago was to use get sub modules for that and as we and as we navigated and we're going through and testing things out I was like you know what this seems so complicated for someone new to a terminal environment like we're they're just learning get in general like even brother they can't answer the question I'm get merged versus get rebays like let alone like you do a get clone they can do some really basic things but to start thinking about sub module management when that always felt a little awkward yeah I was like I'm like that might I think that might be a no for me like I had to take a like

58:10it wasn't until someone we got far enough long down that path and as I was testing this out and with a couple people I'm like I just think this is gonna be too hard and it's gonna be a barrier for entry so at it was at that point when I was like I guess I need to kind of define my target user is going to be someone that's new like a junior developer coming into this environment like from step one they installed this thing and immediately they are like oh my environment just changed I feel like I just made a big change and all I did was run some command line thing and I can start making some tweaks and pick a theme out and start using some aliases and I feel like a

58:45power user all of a sudden let's cater to them and when people can outgrow it in our advanced and configure they don't need it anymore great I I assume most people would outgrow my z-show and do their own thing or find some other thing or just take what they need but then I hear familiarly people like I just the defaults great I don't need I see my theme show and people's slides and I'm like I don't know how many different demo videos I see for different products out there that are CLI related things and they're showing stuff and I'm like that's my theme it's just everywhere and I'm like yeah yeah you could use other themes but please use

59:22what you're saying now when it comes down to it it's like how easy is this going to be for new people to to be on board to this and thinking about their that is my target user now and it has been for many years and like let's let everybody feel like a super user day one and then like cool I'm a hacker and then you know and like it's all stickers and t-shirts to those people and that that's fun so yeah I think that's that's part of the key that like a lot of people don't think about myself included really is like you're just building a thing to build it but you're not thinking about who is your user and having that like user persona really helps you decide like what goes in

59:59and what doesn't because you're like well this doesn't benefit the user I'm trying to serve so it's not going in and like you know I have that problem of like I want to make everyone happy so everything goes in like you know but but then that's too complex and yeah it doesn't serve everyone so that that that's a good thing is like figure out who you're actually who your user is and like try to cater to them that's strange I've not had that experience with you so anyway yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah attach to that which like takes us into lighter notes I would say yeah speaking of what are you curious about probably Russell I'm very curious if you weren't

1:00:38in tech what other career would you choose I quit my last job officially 20 years ago this month to do planet argon pull time because I thought that I was going to be able to figure out how to be a starving musician so I playing music has and is one of my favorite things to do I love collaborating with other people it's also I still very much involved in it now and have a band and we're finishing up our fourth album right now that's going to go in a short tour last summer which is the Greenish I gotta ask you know it's it's not we are a instrumental post rock art band so like if you explain this guy Maguire yeah yeah yeah I love Maguire I love Maguire yeah so yeah

1:01:25Maguire is one of my favorite bands and that's that's a creative outlet that I've had for a long time and so that would be one thing I used to think that I wanted to be a baker I what I knew I didn't want to do when I was a teenager was working tech or specifically at the time I called it the computer industry because my I grew up in the Silicon Valley my dad worked in hardware he just recently retired he used to work at like hard drive manufacturing and networking companies and test engineer on real hardware and was always like you should be a software programmer since I was a little kid and I was like this is boring I'm gonna go outside and play with my friends

1:02:01because when you're I love playing with computers and I've always used computers and love doing these with them but it was never the thing that drew me I didn't I when I the the approach to like learning at a program when I when it was introduced to me by my father was like him getting me a book when I was like six and like if you type all this stuff in this on all these pages in this editor thing and you can run it then you could play this game and I was like but isn't the game already made can we can I just play the game why to just typing everything what I think was missing from the educational experience was and then we'll modify it and then we'll make it we'll personalize

1:02:39it we'll make changes to like that part wasn't really like we didn't really talk about that like let's build a thing to track my little league stats for my team you know like that would have been an interesting thing for me to problem to solve so I've never been interested in the tech itself just for the sake of doing it it was always like what can I do with it and so the the reason I even like learned to start really getting to do any web development in the late night you know mid late 90s is because I wanted to sell stickers and I had a mail order catalog thing that I was doing for like in the punk music scene and I wanted to do stuff on the web and so I learned to do some

1:03:12web stuff so people can submit a form on lines like how do I do that I can't afford a piece I'm on them like 17 18-year-old kid I'll just figure out how to like have a web page that saves to like a textile or something on a server and I can ftp and see that nobody ordered my stickers the uh so like that's how I learned to start doing web stuff and I pick up those skills over several years and you know 25 30 years later and I now because of some software I wrote I sell stickers and t-shirts almost daily to people because they want to support the project which is kind of funny so I've got the other career yeah the career which either would love to be a musician or just like a

1:03:47DIY like sticker salesperson on the internet would have been exciting for me um selling stickers for a couple dollars a pop yeah this sounds like a robby dream yeah I would love to like be a screen printer and sell shirts but like you know or I also music you know a lot of stuff there I was in bands for years and then just like it doesn't pay any money so you can't do that but like it's an expensive hobby if you are listening and you like the bands that you listen to and you only stream them feel free to pop over to their band camp site from time to time and buy the digital versions of it give them some money or maybe if they'll even send you some vinyl

1:04:25or CDs or cassette tape in the mail because that's or cool again so they are I don't know because a player I don't have any new play either yeah vinyl is like goes for a little while you know I feel like vinyl is cool again and like most people agree with that but like Gen Z is like cassettes are cool again and I'm like are they though like I'm not sure but I had a car from 2000 for a little bit about uh while I bought it six years ago and I had it for three years four years something like that and uh it had a cassette player for the first two years I really leaned in had a cassette player I was like I'm gonna get cassettes you buy them super cheap on eBay go the flea market whatever

1:05:04else I kind of leaned into that for a bit so I don't know they were cool now they are inconvenient I think they're cool like in a weird way like they're not they're they're not actually cool I think we can most all of us agree that like vinyl is cool because you can like you don't have to rewind it you can just like sell it over like tapes were inconvenient because it's like have you ever played an a track no no I have not I've never had an a track because a tracks are like cassettes that you can't rewind you literally have the separate tracks for the songs and you're clicking through and wherever you left off last that's where you go back to the song

1:05:40I didn't remember that sort of that I only ever play with the a tracks on my my grandfather's basement when he was a truck driver and I remember not the same grandfather that was the uh the third my other other son Robert Russell who also worked in tech he worked at Atari in the early era of Atari he was so that was that was an interesting thing to learn about him I was actually never played with the Tari's I had in television but never never oh yeah I had Atari 2600 and Atari computer that was the first time I ever did any programming I don't know what it was but I know my grandfather I'm like uh mother's side he he was a programmer

1:06:23for proctor and gamble we were in like northern Kentucky since in that area so my grandfather there did working computers but it was like I didn't know him that well and he gave me this notepad of things that type in I thought that was cool and then I forgot about it for 20 years and then my dad was a welder like blue collar kind of whatever but he had eight tracks I don't know where I was going with this but anyway that's I remember finding uh in my grip my grandfather's eight track collection there was like adult themed eight tracks like apparently the people would listen to you while they're on on the road so if I didn't that was it that was an experience

1:06:59that I was not expecting to retain owned my ears I should call him he's he's still around he lives in a Tennessee I should like never I've never asked him about that like hey I once came across some very interesting eight tracks in your basement you were a truck driver with those were in a closet you weren't supposed to get into that's that's the thing there maybe yeah the things I found in a closet in the basement were different yeah stack of vintage playboys yeah vintage some even modern possibly anyway well you're not just half lute and robby you've got some in Tennessee you blood and yeah well both of us I didn't know who you were talking to there because my

1:07:40Mark's whole family is from Tennessee oh yeah whereabouts uh king sport mostly I don't know where that is big big easement plant down there like they I don't know what they even make it smells like crap everywhere because whatever they're making is smelly like a literal crap no like weird chemicals I don't know oh okay but yeah king sport in some in Knoxville but not originally from Knoxville I know a lot of people in Knoxville yeah I remember Lynchburg was like the count over and so because that was a dry town and yeah yeah county dry county and my great-grandfather had like farmland in tola home uh which was like next to there and I guess that's over in your

1:08:29what's the name of that music festival they have out that way every it's like the big one I don't know I'm too old and I do know that uh I think king sport was also a dry county because like my mom has told me about my grandma would like cross cross uh county lines to buy like bourbon to make like a bourbon cake or something and be like worried like she's driving home like haha that's funny Lynchburg is where jack Daniels yes they're just a hard place to get a driver's what they they call their tagline right yeah yeah you can't do tastings there and stuff so no I went there once when I was a kid and what what they would let you do is they would lift up like

1:09:09um the top of like some crates or something and the smell would hit you oh and so I don't know that was that was that was like as close to like drinking as you could do there and then um but also being there was like there and what's the other sour mash whiskey there oh dick all um it was like yeah as well that was might really entry into whiskey and whatnot oh interesting see started from the Tennessee side not just this uh weird scotch shit no proper scotch whisky right always but always yeah I would always be like it's jack mixed with some soda or something and yeah that's the classic yeah yeah I did

1:09:54uh college what what college I did was uh always jim beam and coke we were Evan Williams and dick old nicer because it was a little cheaper dickle was cheaper interesting um I think dickles I haven't Williams definitely was cheaper oh yeah they're like they're low tier I still feel all of that is fancier than than what uh I'm trying to think pop-off was the plastic anything in plastic pop-off make whiskey no but pop-off that is the pop-off uh so what is the free whiskey you're doing yeah but you are able to pull enough out of like a couch cushion to get yeah that's true but then the next day everyone is dead yeah it's like full of like everything

1:10:45you're not supposed to put in there is like all they put in for sure is that even legal anymore probably yeah I always keep a nostalgic thing I always have a bottle of ride dickle and all right whiskey cabinet so I think it's decent yeah I've got no no qualms they actually do a lot of cool collaborations I'm forgetting with who right now but I've seen a lot of them so like they're they're yeah they're not bad at Sierra discover great deals on top-brand workout gear like high quality walking shoes which might lead to another discovery 40 000 steps baby who's on top now Karen you've taken the office step challenge a step too far don't worry though

1:11:28Sierra also has yoga gear it might be a good place to find your zen discover top brands at unexpectedly low prices Sierra let's get moving your data is like gold to hackers they're selling your passwords bank details and private messages mac a fee helps stop them secure VPN keeps your online activity private AI-powered tech scam detector spots phishing attempts instantly and with award-winning antivirus you get top tier hacker protection plus you'll get up to two million dollars in identity theft coverage all for just $39.99 for your first year visit macafee.com cancel anytime terms apply is that is that also in a dry county do you know I've not I might go back

1:12:15and visit my grandparents who are still around um in living out that way so I'm like realizing I know they can't do tastings all the places but anyway I'll I'll report only it's the only 10 yeah let us know the only Tennessee one I know just because we've been to the green briar distillery which is where bell mead bell mead was like their first big one which was like sourced from whatever else but now they have their own distillate out and green briar and something else are the two labels actually pretty decent it's like Nelson Nelson brothers Nelson brothers that's right yeah very good see you have not had enough whiskey yeah their story was cool because

1:12:54they were like you know they went to the county where it started or whatever and the like historical society had like two original bottles and like the like mash bill of how to make them and they were like oh my god thank god we found you like we want to give these to you so you can start this back up and they're like yeah we do thank you we're gonna start there right now yeah the family was like yeah we're trying to figure this out they got that yeah yeah that's a great story yeah I wish someone would would do that for me but they haven't so doesn't say George Dickel is a brand of Tennessee whiskey produced in Tolahama and coffee county I feel like they should rename the county

1:13:31I don't remember the other coffee yeah well bourbon county in in Kentucky the borders of that have changed and most of the distilleries aren't in bourbon county anymore anyway is that going through a whole thing where like if it's not from bourbon county it can't be called bourbon like no that's not true no no that's not true bourbon is just a married US yeah it does have to be a US spirit because it's federally mandated and there's like rules there but you can make it in Colorado or Kentucky and it's still bourbon yeah as long as you follow the rules comes out of the US so it's not quite like well it's more like Scotch because Scotch has to come Scotland yeah otherwise it's

1:14:08Japanese whiskey basically yeah or just single model American I like Scotch is better than Japanese but do you really that's far I Japanese has no flavor it's like water I don't I don't love it like I ever think that they can make of like 90 or not 90 percent 90 proof thing tastes like water but also I want some flavor I just want flavor okay Yamazaki 18 we got to try that together because I've had it I thought it was pretty good I think it was like 2014 2015's like it was the first Japanese whiskey to get rated number one whiskey in the world at that time and it was pretty good and then it all the prices got inflated yeah yeah we are over time here is there anything you want

1:14:51to plug or mention before we end so many things let me call out my list here my scroll all right Robbie Russell will be speaking at no I thought it was going to be your album that would have been yeah actually you know it if you had to the my band is called the mighty Missoula in this named after the famous like I forget how many thousands of years ago floods that would so there used to be this ancient glacier lake getting the geology nerd thing somewhere in like the Montana Idaho region in the United States there used to be this huge glacier lake there and it would flood every so often it would flood the whole Pacific Northwest like it was so massive that it carved out

1:15:30a lot of the Pacific Northwest in the landscape and so it would go all the way from like that area it would flood like I know if you're familiar with Oregon but like the Wallami Valley oh yeah where I live like that's how far that's where the good one no no wires exactly yeah and so so it's called the Missoula floods is what that that's called so we called remember stuff after that which is a reference back to another another post rock bands they have a song called the the mighty Rio Grande and we name it kind of that's what we do it's as musicians we name ourselves like naming things as always kind of like a derivative of something else so anyways the mighty Missoula we

1:16:08have our fourth album coming out later this year we are finishing up mixing that and you know so if you look for the mighty Missoula maybe have those in the show notes but otherwise my company is planning our gone oh my Z show is oh my Z show on the internet I'm Robbie with a Y not IE and I'm the third but they don't usually say that online and there's a really good episode of on the maintainable podcasts where I interviewed someone named Robbie Wagner Robbie though Wagner recently which was recently published so thanks for coming on the podcast oh oh you left me out of that oh fuck you guys because you weren't named around out you were the third

1:16:46though yeah I don't know how to interview two people at the same time but after doing this I'm like maybe maybe it's not so hard no it's less structured for sure the well I guess it's you're doing two hosts yeah I need to figure I get I get I get approached about this sometimes and I'm like I don't know that I know how to do that yet they make it up fun fact we make it up that's great we don't know how to do anything so if you if you're a user of almighty show we sell stickers on on the internet and that always tickles me when I see stickers on people's laptops or and then come see say hi to me at an upcoming conference I will send you one on this cup

1:17:23that sounds great oh yeah syntax podcast like ours but less whiskey and probably better and more facts all right thank you both thank you both for having me on it's been it's been a delightful conversation enjoy the whiskey yeah thanks for coming on glad you enjoyed it yeah thanks everyone for listening if you liked it please subscribe leave us some ratings and reviews we appreciate it and we will catch you next time