Ripples

Greg (00:01)
Hi, this is episode four of the Ripples podcast. I'm Greg.

Michael (00:06)
I am Michael and we are joined today by another guest, Joe. Joe Tannenbaum. Do you wanna introduce yourself to everyone Joe?

Joe (00:17)
Sure. My name is Joe Tannenbaum. Uh, I'm a software engineer at a company called digital extremes. We're a gaming company and I am not a gamer, so that's an interesting match, but, uh, it's a fun time. And, um, I think probably people know me as the guy that just kind of fools around with level prompts and dust stuff in the terminal.

Michael (00:38)
fool's around is a, is a very generous way of putting the crazy things that you're doing. What is it that I called you? Is some kind of mad scientist or some maniac, pretty sure maniac CLI monster. Yeah. It's just, uh, you, you are on that. So this is how you came on my radar. And I'm sure it's in your name about the place, um, before, but this is kind of what put you on my radar of like, I'm actually following this person was like right after.

Joe (00:43)
Heh.

Um, see CLI monster, I think is what, what came out of your, your mouth.

Michael (01:08)
Laricon AU last year when Jess had, no, must've been before that. Cause it was Laricon US that Jess did the announcement for prompts. And it was probably not, not very long after, probably late July, early August that I started seeing these crazy things that you were doing. And the first thing was like, was it re reinventing like the, the display of a car or something like that, that you did?

Joe (01:34)
Uh, no, one of the earlier things was, I think one of the first, I was looking back at this timeline, trying to remember what had been going on. And I think the first thing was I recreated like a data table in the terminal. So, uh, you could search it and sort it. And, and it was sort of an interactive searchable data table in the terminal because I was just trying to get a feel for how prompts worked and. You know what the rhythm of it was and how, how it was, uh, rendering to the terminal. And so that felt like.

something simple enough to do. And because of the way that Jess put it together, it really ended up being pretty fast once I got the hang of it. Yeah.

Michael (02:09)
Mm-hmm. It's a...

Greg (02:11)
I think the first thing I saw was the Norton Commander. That blew my mind. I was like, what on earth? So the first question on that one was, why? And then...

Joe (02:19)
So so I've been around for a minute. I'm not, you know, so young, but people kept when I was publishing these things to Twitter, people kept saying, I'm waiting for Norton Commander. I'm waiting for Norton Commander. And I was like, oh, man, I don't know. I don't know if I know what that is exactly. So I looked up some YouTube videos and I was, you know, reading some articles. And I kind of repiece together what I could tell that it was and put together a little.

Greg (02:30)
Thanks for watching!

Joe (02:45)
sort of workable demo of that. Just as I kept looking for different challenges, I was just trying to like up the skillset, up the techniques with every challenge. That was really the goal. And a goal for nothing. It was just for fun. I wasn't, there's no end game in terms of, it's not super useful all the time. I mean, it's fun to build these things, but you know, there was, I just was having fun. I wanted to have fun coding. And that's why this came about.

Greg (02:56)
Mm.

There's no ending.

Yeah, yeah, cool. So yeah, the skillset things, I mean, you may not ever need to use Norton Commander because we've kind of moved past that as a technology community, I guess, but yeah, you never really, well, what's the... But you never really know where some of that skill might come out. It's also a flashy way, I mean, I think the next one that I saw, the next one that kind of resonated a bit with me was putting your resume up as a...

Joe (03:26)
or moving back into it. It's possible, you know.

Greg (03:42)
as a shell application that people can share. Like, I mean, it's a really interesting way to create cut through, particularly with technical people. Like, I mean, I'm a hiring manager all the time. And if somebody submitted a CV to me, like if someone emailed me and said, my CV is at SSH URL, that would certainly get my attention.

Joe (03:43)
Oh yeah.

Totally.

Michael (04:00)
Yeah.

Joe (04:00)
Yeah, I really was, uh, I was putting these things up and I wanted people to play with them, but I didn't want them to have to download it and figure it out terminal by terminal. And I just, I wanted what was essentially a browser, but I didn't really know how to connect those two pieces easily. And I'm a huge fan of, uh, I don't know if you guys know charm CLI charm.sh. Um, they're a go library that do astounding things on the, in the terminal and it's an open source company.

And they had this thing called. Wish I think it's called Wish, and it's an easy way to set up on your on your server and SSH server so like it can live independently on your server. And so I figured out how to set that up and I was like, oh, I can just have people play with this directly on my server. Resource wise, PHP was getting a little hungry. I had to I had to bump up the server size after people got a little.

ANSI after going to CJ and but yeah, it was a fun way to share it ultimately. And it made me made me happy to sort of plug and play that along the way.

Greg (05:09)
Yeah, cool. Yeah. So, um, I know that we've been saying that you're the, the prompts, the prompts guy. Um, did you want to go and is that the way that you want to be known or do you want to talk a little bit more about some of the other things that you're

Joe (05:23)
No, it's fine. It's it's fine for now. It's fine for now. I really I've always been sort of like in the terminal. I used to always create these little utility scripts. I was a freelancer for a long time. And all of these terminal scripts that I was creating, I had sort of like a central layer of zero utility app on my computer, and it would help me with workflows or, you know, connecting client stuff. And it was a useful way for me to get things done very quickly and efficiently.

Greg (05:52)
Mm.

Joe (05:52)
And then I started building out a sort of a version of prompts for myself, because I don't know if you know this, this library called clack. It's a, it's a node library built by Nate Moore, who I think is the Astro co-creator. And, um, I just wanted that experience. I wanted something a little more interactive for the PHP CLI experience. And so I.

Greg (06:18)
Mm.

Joe (06:20)
started rebuilding that library exactly in PHP. I was like, okay, let's just as a challenge, recreate Clack as PHP.

Uh, so I started rebuilding clock exactly in PHP, like literally verbatim, just style wise to see how far I could push it and what could. Could happen in that realm. And at the time I had, I don't know, I had like a hundred followers on Twitter. I had some things I didn't have much of his, you know, but I was like, let's just share progress along the way. Let's just, just tweet out what I'm doing and see if anybody's into it. And so I'm treated along and people are like, Hey, this is cool.

Like just like little things here and there. I went on this trip and it was an international trip and I came back and we were all jetlagged and my son didn't know what time it was. And so he was waking up at four in the morning, like over and over, thinking it was the start to the day. So I wake up at four in the morning for like the third day in the row. And I look at my phone and it said, Taylor, I will has direct message you. And I was like, no, I'm just not awake. I don't know what's going on. Like I just I literally put the phone down. I was like, I.

Greg (07:26)
I was like, I don't know what that is.

Joe (07:28)
Phone's glitching, don't know what that is. Went and like, you know, dealt with my son and woke up with him and a couple hours later, I looked at my phone again and he had messaged me and he was like, hey man, this is awesome, what you're doing. Coincidentally, we're kind of doing the same thing over here, like this, we're building out a similar library. Do you want to like see it for a second? And I was like, yeah. And I'm here with like, you know, like a hundred followers. I was like, how does he even know what, how did he clock this? I don't even know how he came about this. And so he showed me like,

Michael (07:30)
and

Greg (07:57)
It should be like...

Joe (07:57)
prompts as it was then, this was like a year ago. And my mind was like, I was like, this is so much better than what I'm building, like by a mile. And so then when it got debuted at Lercon US, I was like, this is, it's just incredible. Like just an astounding job. And the experiment started because I wanted to PR something into prompts. And so I had to see how it worked and...

Michael (08:04)
Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Joe (08:23)
Jess has really built this beautiful little simple machine in there that just allows you to say, OK, you have a state class and you have a render class. And they're going to work together. And we're going to hide all of the hard bits. Because I had already built this with the clack thing. But I didn't do it as well as she did. She abstracted it a lot better. And so I was like, OK, you can go beyond these little components and actually take over the whole thing and just start rendering full applications so easily.

Greg (08:38)
I think I didn't do it as well as she did. She abstracted a lot better. So, public became so beyond people.

Joe (08:52)
And I just started doing that and it was, I don't know, I just was in a rut with freelancing. I was a freelancer at the time and I wanted to have fun coding. That's really what it was. And then people seemed to like it and, you know, we're they were sharing it. And that's how we got to where we are today. But, um, yeah, I don't know. It's just about fun. I just really wanted to have fun. And I was, and my wife was like, you're doing actually, I think Aaron Francis,

You can't have a podcast without mentioning Aaron Francis at some point. But, uh, I, I think legally, legally that's how it works. I'm pretty sure. Um, she said, uh, you're just like on the computer after you're on the computer all day and I was like, well, my fun looks like my work, like the both things, you know, look like the same thing from the outside. And so, yeah, but, um, I do other things, but I'm happy to be the prompts guy.

Greg (09:23)
And, but look like, actually, I can't remember. I don't know. Not this podcast. I'm sorry.

Michael (09:42)
Mm-hmm.

Greg (09:44)
Mm. Yeah.

Joe (09:49)
for right now, it's okay. I'm satisfied in that role.

Greg (09:52)
Yeah.

Michael (09:54)
That is, that is kind of the crux of like the riffle and putting yourself out there is that you don't know like that. This experiment that you were doing with, with the, with the terminal is the thing that's going to make you well known in the community. That's going to get, you know, someone like Tyler to reach out to you, that it's going to be the thing that you become known for. And, you know, unless you throw it out there, you have no idea. And the, and the stuff that you were doing whilst it was kind of like tangential.

Greg (09:54)
Yeah.

Michael (10:23)
or running in parallel to the stuff that the Laravel was building. The stuff that you've done as a result and subsequent to that is far and away. Like we, the stuff that we have in the terminal from prompts is amazing. We've got the selects and the type of heads and like all the multi-stuff and, and all of that. But the things that you have built are far and away, like way, way beyond the scope of like, I'm like, yeah, we've got all this, the stuff that we had before.

but better. And now the stuff that you've done is just like, how do we, how did we even get to a point where we're doing this stuff in the terminal with PHP?

Joe (11:05)
Yeah. I mean, that's, that's the question. I kept wanting to stretch it further and further on. I kept wanting to say, okay, how do we push the throttle on how do we do this? Uh, in a way that we haven't really done it before in terms of, you know, these things are tedious when you, when you're, when you're building these things out, you're just like manipulating strings and so like, it's not for everybody, it's not fun for everybody, but it is, it, it's, it scratches an itch for me for some reason it does a

Greg (11:05)
Yeah, I mean that's a good question.

So it did not hurt everybody. It did not hurt everybody. It did not just hurt people.

Joe (11:33)
It is fun for me. And so, yeah, I just kept wanting to push the throttle. And it was always funny because, especially in the latter half of doing all these experiments, the I would set out to say, Okay, I want to learn how to like, say, animate something. And so that part generally went pretty quickly. But it was always something else that I was like, Oh, this is hard. And I didn't realize this part would be the hard part. And so okay, we'll focus on that. I mean, there were times I lost

hours and hours of my night, just trying to figure out how to position a character correctly in the flow of an animation. Um, and then I would start folding in, you know, like React PHP to try to do some async stuff and you know, that, that was an interesting experiment and. You know, we have a good ecosystem and it certainly hits its limitations. And there were some things that I gave up on because I said, well, maybe this just isn't PHP's job, or maybe I don't have the brain capacity for this right now, but, um,

Michael (12:07)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Joe (12:31)
You know, we, we've grown a lot. We, we were, we're in a good place. PHP was.

Michael (12:37)
Yeah, it's definitely a very much an all in, like it does a lot more than it did when I started with it 19 years ago, 18 years ago, like the things that we can do now and the ease with which we can build and then deploy them somewhere is, you know, it was beyond my wildest expectations back then, like I, when I started programming, I didn't even know what a framework was and it was only sort of two or three.

maybe five or six actually years into that journey that I kind of stumbled upon symphony and I'm like going to everyone, did you know that there's these things called frameworks and that like they do all of this busy work for you? Like, yeah. And then, but then I could never, like, I think this was symphony, late symphony two, early symphony three. And I just couldn't get my head around like how to use it. And

Greg (13:18)
Thank you.

Joe (13:21)
It's so much easier. Yeah.

Michael (13:33)
or the yaml and stuff that was in there at the time. And, and that was around when I found Laravel and I was like, this all just makes sense. Like it, it works. It does this stuff. It gets out of the way. And this was like pre-composer Laravel. This was bundles and whatever else. And it was just mind boggling the amount of stuff that you could do. The amount of stuff that you could ship without actually having to do any of it yourself. Um, and like it just.

Joe (13:42)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Michael (14:02)
Taylor and the team are always pushing that envelope. They're always looking for, you know, the next thing. And so it'd be interesting to see what they come up with this year with, you know, all of the plans to grow the team, to bring in, you know, the, the head of engineering, which I hear that they've placed that role now. Um, so, you know, that that's happened. There's, you know, the, the other people, infrastructure people. So it's interesting to see how the business itself is growing. And then.

Joe (14:22)
Yeah, I hear that too.

Michael (14:32)
to see, you know, who ends up working there. Cause no doubt it's going to be some, some familiar names and familiar faces that end up taking some of those early roles and just to see the kind of work that they're going to do to continue to push the envelope and to continue to, to ship incredible things into the hands of, you know, the everyday developers as we are.

Joe (14:41)
Totally.

Greg (14:53)
I think the crazy thing for me on the Laravels, I came to Laravel via CakePHP. So I was a Laravel 4 convert. So I think that was the first one where they dropped bundles and replaced them with components. And I remember being blown away by queues and blown away by the fact that it even had a console solution. And I probably would have been happy if the world stopped at Laravel 4. Like to me, that felt like it was enough. They couldn't possibly put more.

Joe (15:19)
Yeah

Michael (15:20)
Yeah, that was the top of the mountain. Yeah.

Greg (15:23)
They couldn't possibly put more batteries into this thing, but every year, like without fail, there's just something new that's coming. They're now getting to the point where they're sort of going back and making things that did exist even more incredible. So prompts is a really great example of that. I mean, the wrapping around the symphony console was fine. But prompts sort of just pushes that one step further. But yeah, it's just, it's amazing to just see how.

Michael (15:36)
Yeah.

Elevates it, yeah.

Greg (15:52)
much Laravel does for you, then gets out of the way. And then you can just focus on actually doing, on actually solving properly hard problems because your brain isn't filled up with how do I deal with meaningless drudgery? Like I don't want to be figuring out how to handle cues and stuff, just no.

Michael (16:00)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Joe (16:07)
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I think if I remember correctly, I came from code igniter. I think that was the thing I jumped off of and into Laravel. And it was, I remember I was, I was working at this CLE company and this guy was like, yeah, code is OK, but like, have you seen Laravel? And I was like, I don't know what that is. And he goes, look at these two things side by side and like so much code stripped out. And he's like, they're doing the same thing. It's just way less on this side. And I and you can read it. You read it like a book.

Michael (16:07)
Yeah. Yep.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Greg (16:33)
Mm.

Michael (16:35)
Yeah.

Joe (16:37)
And I was like, okay, yes, I get this. This makes sense. Yeah.

Michael (16:39)
Yeah.

I think, I think, yeah, certainly Laravel is to, to PHP developers. What WordPress was to like the masses, you know, it kind of made it approachable. Not that PHP has ever been unapproachable, but when you put Laravel up, as you say, against Code Igniter or against Symphony, Symphony probably a little bit more with like the, um, the template stuff that they do now where you can kind of.

bring in some level of boilerplate. Like if you just look at them side by side, you can do a lot more with a lot less code of your own. Like you don't have to kind of stitch it all together. And I think outside of the Laravel community, that's a little bit understated in just how much further you can get that. And we're seeing that, you know, in the last six, 12 months with kind of all of the people in the JavaScript ecosystem that have been coming back and looking at PHP and looking at Laravel and going, oh, like,

We don't have to build auth every time and wire it up to some third party service and bring in all of these components and do all of this stuff for every single app. No, Auroville just gives you the command to scaffold out a new application that has authentication and authorize that. Like all of that stuff is just there. And then, you know, with the ecosystem around it, we've got

Greg (17:48)
Mm.

Michael (17:58)
You know, sparsely obviously is prolific. We've got all of this tooling and packages and bits and pieces that fill in the gaps that are common use cases, but are not things that belong necessarily in the context of the framework itself. It's just, it's a thriving community. It's, it's like, it has to be a huge amount of pressure for the Laravel team to kind of constantly push the envelope. Like for me, you know, Greg said at Laravel 4 was the peak.

Greg (18:15)
Thanks for watching!

Michael (18:25)
console stuff we had, it was the peak and their ability to kind of see these things that exist that are like good enough for most people and then make them better and everyone going, oh yeah, what we had before was garbage. Like how did we live with that before? It's just having that and there's the expectation, I suppose, from our point of view, from the community at large, they're like, what's the next thing? Like, yeah, we're happy with what we got, but what's the next thing?

Joe (18:25)
Yeah

Yeah.

Michael (18:53)
What's the next thing and for them to just constantly deliver year after year for, you know, 14 years now, whatever it's been that Laravel has been around. It's just like, surely the train has to stop at some point, but I'm enjoying the ride in the meantime.

Greg (19:08)
Now, I think my view on this now, I've been so surprised. I've been at that point of like, yeah, this is the new peak. It can't go any further. I'm kind of the opinion now that you ain't seen nothing yet. Like, I think it's just going to.

Joe (19:09)
Oh yeah.

Well, especially as he adds members and sort of makes this, it's, it's already, it's already a company, but it feels like he's making it a capital C company. Uh, you know, I think it's just going to explode and, and I'm sure he's got more ideas that can't even, they, he doesn't have the bandwidth to implement. And so it's just gonna go crazy.

Michael (19:25)
Mm-hmm.

Greg (19:25)
Oh yeah.

Michael (19:30)
Yeah.

Greg (19:31)
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I.

Yeah. I see that in my own, I see that in my own, in my own world. Like managing a team of people. It's not, it's not, it's not a huge team. There's eight of us. I think we've been as big as 14 in the past. The, you get a collection of smart people together on a single mission, which is a bit different to open source because open source is kind of more like people scratching their own itches. Like it's a sort of loose collective of warring tribes in a lot of cases, but

Michael (19:38)
Yeah, for sure.

Greg (20:06)
when you're in a company, when you're a team with a shared mission, it's not a case of two developers make you go twice as fast. The combination of people's brains allow you to see things that you couldn't see before. And there's diminishing returns, but you get this huge acceleration in like, oh, but what about this? What if we did it this way? What if we did it this other way? I mean, I think Jess talked a little bit about, or talked to me at least over a beer around the sort of prompts thing, getting back onto that.

that it was an itch that she wanted scratched and she'd wanted scratch for a long time because she'd seen some things in the JavaScript community that were frankly better than what we had. And pitch the idea to tailor now to have to imagine that Taylor was then challenging her to kind of like just take it a little bit further. What if we just did a little bit more like this. And you end up with something that's probably arguably better than any implementation, at least that I've seen of a of a terminal tool.

Like that? Like, I can't think of anything that's even remotely close to it. And then you pick it up and go, well, yeah, let's just, let's just take it from great to crazy. Like let's just go right to the extremes of what it's doing. I am curious to think, what I'm curious to think what Jess, what, what Jess actually thinks of your, of, of your work. Like, I can't imagine she thought that she was going to get Norton commander and God knows what else out of it.

Michael (21:04)
Mm-hmm.

Joe (21:18)
Crazy, crazy is a good word for it.

Michael (21:29)
Hehehe

Joe (21:29)
Yeah, probably not. Probably not. Um, I don't know. I mean, she seems she seems to like it. I think probably for the first bit, like I was, I don't know, maybe annoying to her. I'm not really sure because like, you know, I would like tag her in the beginning and stuff because I was just excited. And then I was like, OK, let's maybe chill on that for a while. But she seems to like it. I don't know. We we talk mostly through PRS, if at all. So but she's so.

Michael (21:45)
Yeah.

Joe (21:57)
I find submitting a PR to Jess like very intimidating because she's just like, so I think she's like next level smart. Um, and so I get like, I get like a little nervous. I'm like, okay, let's prep this thing. Let's get it right. Whatever. And then she's so like kind and she's like, so patient and like, I've, she's like, really walked me through a couple of, you know, we're working on a, um, getting a multi-line input into, into prompts. And it's arguably harder than any of the things that I have done on the

It's so detail oriented and it's you really have to make this thing. That's just a string of characters, look and feel and behave like what you're used to in the browser as a text area. It's so hard. And then like every time I'm like, okay, we did it. We really did it this time. Jess is like, cool. Almost, except if you do basically this, eh, it kind of breaks a little bit and I'm like, totally got it. Okay. Next we're doing it. But she's so.

Michael (22:35)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Joe (22:53)
She's so nice about it and she's so kind and I really, I have a lot of respect for Jess.

Greg (22:59)
I actually heard Jess when you said that. I think almost except I think like Michael and I have both been on the opposite side of that conversation a few times. But I mean, yeah, I mean, yeah.

Michael (23:03)
Yeah, heard those words in her voice.

Joe (23:04)
Oh yeah yeah.

Michael (23:10)
Yeah.

Greg (23:12)
Jess is great. She doesn't mean she's, you're right. She's intimidatingly clever. Like she's very, very smart. I am a long time ago. I actually tried to employ her at the same time that Taylor was trying to employ her. So I was never going to win that fight. But yeah, I mean even, even just like approaching her to sort of say, Hey, would you like a job was like intimidating because she's just on a completely other level, but she's also like probably a lot of developers who are good, who know they're good.

Joe (23:16)
Yeah.

Michael (23:24)
the

Joe (23:33)
Yeah.

Greg (23:39)
really radiate. I'm really good. She doesn't like she's really humble and yeah. Yeah, I just I just did this insane. I just did this crazy thing. It's not a thing. It's just a thing. Yeah, she's Yeah, she's great. We'll get her on. We'll get her on soon.

Michael (23:43)
Mm. Nah. That's the Australian in a.

Joe (23:44)
I know she's so low key about it. It's because she's very settled in her own. Yeah.

Michael (23:51)
Yeah.

Yeah. It's the other thing is that like people, people like that, especially when they're kind of working by themselves or their own, own little bubble, you know, before they start putting their, their work into the world, they don't.

Joe (24:00)
Hehehehe

Michael (24:13)
There's a lot of imposter syndrome in developers in general. It's like, yeah, like I'm good in my group of like three or working by myself, but it's like, how does that scale up? And you kind of, you look at people like Adam Wythen, you know, Taylor, Matt, or all of these people out in the community. You look at them, you go, yeah, I'm good. Like I'm here, but you look and you're like, Oh, you're at the bottom of that other ladder.

Greg (24:17)
Mm.

Michael (24:38)
You know, it's like finishing, um, you know, elementary school, you're at the top of the ladder and then you go to junior high or whatever it is, high school and you're like, Oh, I'm like back at the bottom of the ladder. You know? And so it's this like reinforcing thing that yeah, I'm, I'm good in my own context and, and it's not until, you know, you get the knowledge or you take the plunge, you know, either someone pushes you out the door, like I did push her out onto that stage and told her, we need to hear what you have to say. Um, or, you know, you just like yourself, Joe, just

Joe (24:39)
Yeah.

Michael (25:08)
put some stuff on Twitter and see what happens. And it's not even in the context of like, I'm gonna put this out and people are gonna love it. It's just like, nah, I'll just put this out into the world and see what happens.

Joe (25:19)
Yeah, I mean, and sort of on that note, I was sidelined for ever. I was just observing and I was just watching people do things and I was like, Oh, this is cool. And I have my imposter syndrome obviously still exists, but I had it for so long, so bad because I don't have, I have a BFA in acting. I don't have a computer science degree. I don't have a conventional background. I'm self-taught since high school, but, um, I think that's a little bit when, when it comes down to it, my superpower, because like,

Greg (25:21)
and it's on that code. I would, I like.

Michael (25:39)
Mm-hmm.

Joe (25:48)
The grind in me is like very real and I work hard to make sure that I'm like on the up and up and I'm trying to like stay knowledgeable. But I didn't share for a long time because of that. I was like, oh, I'm going to put something out there and people are like, this guy's an idiot for sure, for sure. This guy's an idiot. And like, there's been like two cases of that, but otherwise.

Michael (26:01)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, tomorrow, next week. Yeah.

Greg (26:10)
it like otherwise it's been okay. I'm sure me saying that. But that is the reason.

Joe (26:11)
It's been OK. And I'm sure me saying that is the reason. And it's all in your head. You know, it's and even if somebody does say that, it's who cares next. You know, do you keep putting stuff out there?

Michael (26:12)
Yeah.

Yeah, we, yeah, we, I mean, we see that even like from those upper echelons of people that like, even if you have a huge following and a huge audience and like lots of people respect you and say nice things about you, you kind of become like in the, in the reverse, you become numb to all of that, cause that's all you see and it's that one standout negative comment that can slap you down. And it's like,

Greg (26:23)
Okay.

Michael (26:47)
Yeah, I am terrible. Like nevermind the hundred people that said, this is great. It's that one person that they know the real me, you know, everyone's just being nice and it's, and it's hard to overcome that to, you know, just, just do the thing. But we are very fortunate in, in the LARO community, especially, um, to, to have a very supportive and understanding audience. And like it's a shared audience. Everyone is following, you know, what everyone is doing in our community.

And it's, and it's just is a genuine and really supportive group of group of people. Like even Greg felt that as a, as a first time speaker last year, you know, everyone in that audience is there cheering you on, wanting you to succeed, you know, the people that you look up to are there because you know, they've, they've done the work. Yes. But they were at one point, the people cheering on the people before them.

So, you know, you are now making your way into that position where, you know, you have been cheering people on and now there are people cheering you on. And that, that kind of, that's cyclic environment of like people move up because you know, it, it just feeds itself and it just keeps going. And like credit to Taylor, he, he leads that from the top, you know, he reached out to you, Joe with a hundred followers doing like random experiments. I saw.

Joe (27:44)
Totally.

Michael (28:13)
Um, Jeffrey was like, Hey, we would, uh, he tweeted like a month or two ago saying like, we'd, we'd pay good money to have a course on this stuff on Laricas. Like that stuff doesn't happen if you just too worried to put your stuff out there, you don't know. Right.

Joe (28:28)
If you're

Michael (28:29)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Joe (28:30)
Ryan Chandler, who is another genius that's doing insane things all the time. And he's like, yeah, people care about this. Like, you know, people. And then I got out of a meeting at work and I saw, you know, yeah, Jeffrey Wade commented and I was like, OK, well, OK. Then people care about this, you know, as much as. I guess more than I anticipated, even in that regard. Yeah.

Michael (28:43)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. And, and not some far off thing. Like it wasn't a week or, you know, months later, it was like a few hours after the fact, you know, after you had made that post that Jeffrey was like, let's do it, you know, kind of thing. So I hope, I hope that.

Joe (29:01)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Michael (29:05)
event rates for you into something. Cause you know, being a, a Laracast creator is a good way to get in front of a whole bunch of, of Laravel people. You don't have to worry about doing any of the marketing. All of that stuff kind of gets done for free by virtue of the fact that you are a creator or, you know, a teacher, I think they're called on our cast of Laracast, so yeah, I hope, I hope that all works out.

Joe (29:26)
Yeah, it's a it's definitely the gold star, you know, gold, gold standard of the of the community in terms of like, you know, I've watched. I don't know how many episodes of Laracast at this point over the years. And I've been at this point, I should be a lifetime subscriber, but I still pay monthly because I'm like, I will just keep doing it. But probably would have probably would have saved a ton of money just going lifetime three years ago. But.

Michael (29:45)
Oh yeah. Yeah. I refuse. I refuse to pay.

Greg (29:49)
It's so cheap. It is so cheap.

Joe (29:56)
Uh, yeah, I, yeah, we're, we're working on that. Well, we'll see what comes of that. It's exciting.

Michael (29:56)
Yeah.

Nice. Exciting.

Cool. Greg, do you have anything further?

Greg (30:07)
So, yeah, I mean, I'm just to kind of continue down the ripples path a little bit. I think not long after LariconAU, you started tweeting a little bit about, you know, the first time speakers and stuff at LariconAU. And I think a few of us decided to peer pressure you, I guess, into applying to go and give it a go yourself. Yeah.

Joe (30:33)
Yeah.

Greg (30:35)
Where's that at? When are we going to see Laravel prompts on stage again?

Joe (30:40)
Yeah, there were a couple of people that were pretty persistent saying like, you should you talk about this. You should talk about what's going on here on a stage somewhere. And it's something I've wanted to do for a long time. But again, like, you know, I was like, oh, nobody wants to hear what I have to say or, you know, whatever it is. But it's actually a great fusion of my background and acting. And now my life in tech, my current life in tech. So it's in preparing. It feels very natural. But I submitted some talks to Lerkin, India and.

Michael (31:08)
Mm-hmm.

Joe (31:09)
A couple months ago, I woke up to an email and I was like, Are they are they asking me? And I showed the email because I was like, hmm, they might just be being nice. I can't tell. I can't tell. And so I showed the email to my wife and I was like, is this a yes? Like, are they saying yes? And she's like, yeah, they were very explicitly saying yes. Like, why are you doubting yourself here? And so, yeah, I'm very, very excited. So I'm going to be talking about.

Michael (31:17)
Hehehehe

Hehehe

Joe (31:36)
these building these sorts of apps in the terminal. Uh, and it's, I it's mostly done at this point and I'm, I'm really excited to get up there and do it. It's it, it feels very natural to present in this way. And I'm, I'm excited to do more of this if given the opportunity.

Michael (31:49)
Mm-hmm.

Nice.

Greg (31:52)
Yeah, that's a, I think Larrocon India is probably like, if, I mean, for you having a background in acting, it's probably not so bad, but it'd be hard mode for me to jump up. Like that thing is like three times bigger than any other Larrocon in terms of attendees.

Joe (32:10)
I mean, yeah, the room alone is like gargantuan. I've seen the pictures and, you know, it's funny. I was I was sitting at Lyric on US last year and he got up to sort of promo it and he was saying like, you know, you come to Lyric on India. I looked and they showed some footage and I was like, that looks rad. That looks so much fun. Like I would love to go to that. Like, I don't think I can probably swing it, but like whatever. And now I'm going to be like up on that stage doing it. And it's really it's because I tweeted, which is so it feels so silly to say that. But it's also like that's the reason, you know.

Michael (32:27)
Yeah.

Yep. That's, that's what it is. It's one little tweet starts this cascading series of events that, unless you make that tweet, if you like, if you had gone, uh, is anyone interested in this and wrote the tweet out and just gone, nah, nevermind. Like nothing, nothing would have come of that. Now Taylor's noticed you. Jeffrey's noticed you.

Joe (32:41)
Yeah.

Michael (33:08)
You've, you know, you're speaking at Larik on India. I'm sure that you've applied to Larik on us. Um, Larik on Australia is coming up. If you want to travel 30 hours to the other side of the world, that yeah, 100%. So, you know, all of these opportunities only come your way when you put yourself out there and like, it feels repetitive. Um, and I.

Joe (33:14)
have. But I've seen that list. That is

I'm already doing it, so might as well do it again, right? Yeah.

Greg (33:20)
doing it so might as well do it again right?

Michael (33:34)
I'm channeling my inner Aaron Francis every time I say it. But you know, the whole point of this podcast is to show, like to put it out there in the world that people need to understand this can happen to anyone at any time for any reason, and unless you send that tweet, write that blog post, publish that video, get on that stage. No one's going to know about it.

Joe (34:00)
It's true. And I, if you would ask me a year ago, if any of the opportunities that I've gotten or, and this is just the beginning, I'm not even like that far into this journey, but I would have never ever, ever called it. And Aaron Francis did call it. He called it like the third experiment in the second experiment. And he said, this is your big thing. And I was like, I don't think so. I think I'm just fooling around here. And then I think off the Jeffrey tweet, he

Michael (34:21)
Yeah.

Greg (34:25)
And then I think I'll do that. I think I'll do that.

Joe (34:27)
put it back to me and he said, I called this just so you know. And I was like, you dug back probably eight months of tweets to find a reply to me to quote tweeted back to me. And I have to, I have to respect that, honestly.

Michael (34:30)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Greg (34:39)
Yeah. When Aaron talks, you listen. The guy is more right than he's wrong.

Michael (34:42)
Yeah. And yeah, and it's, and it's not just for sure. It's not just that he said it eight months ago.

Joe (34:45)
Yeah.

Well, he wears the shoes in the house. I don't know if we're going to go that far with it. I, you know, but he's a very smart guy and I love you, and don't.

Greg (34:51)
What?

Michael (34:58)
Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah, it's not it's not just that he said it. It's that he remembered that he said it and he went back and dug it up so that he could throw it back at your feet and be like, here you go.

Greg (34:58)
Uh.

Joe (35:10)
Yeah. Which is very kind of him, actually. It was very, very ultimately very nice of him.

Michael (35:17)
Yeah. Perfect. All right. I think that's a reasonable place to start wrapping things up.

Greg (35:18)
Cool.

Yeah. Is there anything else that you wanted to talk about Joe or where can people who haven't found you yet find you?

Joe (35:26)
I really appreciate it.

Uh, Twitter is mostly the place you can find me at Joe Tannenbaum on Twitter. And, uh, yeah, I'll, I haven't been doing a lot of experience lately. I got a lot of other things going on in terms of, uh, life stuff and whatever, but, uh, I will get back to it because I do, I do enjoy it. So once everything's settled down, I'll start, start fiddling again.

Michael (35:51)
Excellent. We love to see it.

Joe (35:54)
Um, thank you so much for having me on. I really appreciate it.

Michael (35:57)
Happy to have you.

Greg (35:58)
Yeah, yeah, a pleasure, mate. All right, cool. Well, you can find us at ripples.fm. We'll have some show notes, I guess, maybe. I don't know, do you show notes, Michael? Michael does all these things. And yeah, if anyone else would like to come on and talk about their story, you can reach out to Michael and myself on Twitter and we'll sort something out.

Michael (36:00)
Excellent.

it would be nice.

Hahaha

Yeah. Love to have you love to hear your story. Uh, want to keep reinforcing this, this idea, you know, uh, it's not our idea. We don't own it, but I am more than happy to perpetuate it. Um, and I have seen just on that perpetuating it. I've seen the first concepts for the branding for Larik on AU this year. And let me tell you, we are going to continue the ripples this year. It will become a theme. For.

AU 2024. So hope to get that out soon. More information will follow. November is the month. So start penciling that into your calendars if you're interested in attending. But I will say no more at this time. And until next episode, I have been Michael, I've been joined by Joe Tannenbaum and my co-host Greg Skirman and we will see you next time around.

Greg (37:13)
Thanks for watching!

I'm sorry.