---
title: Monoliths, GraphQL, Next.js, and DevRel Insights
slug: monoliths-graphql-next-js-and-devrel-insights
published_at: 2024-06-24 15:00:00 +0000
updated_at: 2024-11-18 21:17:15 +0000
summary: Colin and CJ explore the ongoing debate between monolithic architectures versus API-driven frontends, touching on the pros and cons of GraphQL and REST. The conversation also covers the intricacies of integrating Next.js with Rails applications. On the personal front, CJ shares his solar pool heater project and Colin prepares for his upcoming relay race, Reno Tahoe Open (RTO). Both hosts reflect on their work anniversaries and discuss the challenges and strategies for effective Developer Relations (DevRel).Monoliths vs. API-driven Frontends: The pros and cons of each approach, including the challenges of maintaining large JSON payloads and ensuring API stability.GraphQL: A critical look at the limitations and complexities of GraphQL, including rate limiting and authorization issues.Next.js and Rails Integration: Strategies for connecting a modern frontend framework with a traditional Rails backend.Personal Projects: CJ&#39;s DIY solar pool heater project and the considerations involved in making it efficient and safe.Relay Race Preparation: Colin&#39;s training for the Reno Tahoe Odyssey and strategies for managing challenging race conditions.DevRel Strategies: The multifaceted role of Developer Relations and how to balance content creation, community engagement, and internal advocacy.ResourcesWhy I’m Over GraphQLStack Recommendations for Connecting a Next.js AppTaylor Otwell’s Tweet on Next.js and LaravelRails Developer Survey 2024Unity Learn PathwaysChris Trag’s LinkedIn PostRemotion: Create Videos ProgrammaticallyThanks for listening!
description: &lt;div&gt;Colin and CJ explore the ongoing debate between monolithic architectures versus API-driven frontends, touching on the pros and cons of GraphQL and REST. The conversation also covers the intricacies of integrating Next.js with Rails applications. On the personal front, CJ shares his solar pool heater project and Colin prepares for his upcoming relay race, Reno Tahoe Open (RTO). Both hosts reflect on their work anniversaries and discuss the challenges and strategies for effective Developer Relations (DevRel).&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Monoliths vs. API-driven Frontends:&lt;/strong&gt; The pros and cons of each approach, including the challenges of maintaining large JSON payloads and ensuring API stability.&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;GraphQL:&lt;/strong&gt; A critical look at the limitations and complexities of GraphQL, including rate limiting and authorization issues.&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Next.js and Rails Integration:&lt;/strong&gt; Strategies for connecting a modern frontend framework with a traditional Rails backend.&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Personal Projects:&lt;/strong&gt; CJ&#39;s DIY solar pool heater project and the considerations involved in making it efficient and safe.&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Relay Race Preparation:&lt;/strong&gt; Colin&#39;s training for the Reno Tahoe Odyssey and strategies for managing challenging race conditions.&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;DevRel Strategies:&lt;/strong&gt; The multifaceted role of Developer Relations and how to balance content creation, community engagement, and internal advocacy.&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;div&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Resources&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=\&quot;https://bessey.dev/blog/2024/05/24/why-im-over-graphql/\&quot;&gt;Why I’m Over GraphQL&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=\&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/rails/comments/1d3z4o2/stack_recommendations_for_connecting_a_nextjs_app/\&quot;&gt;Stack Recommendations for Connecting a Next.js App&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=\&quot;https://twitter.com/taylorotwell/status/1791468060903096422\&quot;&gt;Taylor Otwell’s Tweet on Next.js and Laravel&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=\&quot;https://railsdeveloper.com/survey/\&quot;&gt;Rails Developer Survey 2024&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=\&quot;https://learn.unity.com/learn/pathways\&quot;&gt;Unity Learn Pathways&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=\&quot;https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7200031105222103040/\&quot;&gt;Chris Trag’s LinkedIn Post&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=\&quot;https://www.remotion.dev/\&quot;&gt;Remotion: Create Videos Programmatically&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;div&gt;Thanks for listening!&lt;/div&gt;
duration: 2327
keywords: []
author: CJ Avilla
co_author: Colin Loretz
url: https://www.cjav.dev/podcasts/monoliths-graphql-next-js-and-devrel-insights
embed_url: https://share.transistor.fm/e/f9f2052a
share_url: https://share.transistor.fm/s/f9f2052a
image_url: 
podcast_show: Build and Learn
type: podcast_episode
---

# Monoliths, GraphQL, Next.js, and DevRel Insights

*Published: June 24, 2024*
*Duration: 2327 seconds*
*Podcast: Build and Learn*

## Listen

[Listen on the web](https://share.transistor.fm/e/f9f2052a)
[Share URL](https://share.transistor.fm/s/f9f2052a)

## Show Notes

&lt;div&gt;Colin and CJ explore the ongoing debate between monolithic architectures versus API-driven frontends, touching on the pros and cons of GraphQL and REST. The conversation also covers the intricacies of integrating Next.js with Rails applications. On the personal front, CJ shares his solar pool heater project and Colin prepares for his upcoming relay race, Reno Tahoe Open (RTO). Both hosts reflect on their work anniversaries and discuss the challenges and strategies for effective Developer Relations (DevRel).&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Monoliths vs. API-driven Frontends:&lt;/strong&gt; The pros and cons of each approach, including the challenges of maintaining large JSON payloads and ensuring API stability.&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;GraphQL:&lt;/strong&gt; A critical look at the limitations and complexities of GraphQL, including rate limiting and authorization issues.&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Next.js and Rails Integration:&lt;/strong&gt; Strategies for connecting a modern frontend framework with a traditional Rails backend.&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Personal Projects:&lt;/strong&gt; CJ&#39;s DIY solar pool heater project and the considerations involved in making it efficient and safe.&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Relay Race Preparation:&lt;/strong&gt; Colin&#39;s training for the Reno Tahoe Odyssey and strategies for managing challenging race conditions.&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;DevRel Strategies:&lt;/strong&gt; The multifaceted role of Developer Relations and how to balance content creation, community engagement, and internal advocacy.&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;div&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Resources&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://bessey.dev/blog/2024/05/24/why-im-over-graphql/&quot;&gt;Why I’m Over GraphQL&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/rails/comments/1d3z4o2/stack_recommendations_for_connecting_a_nextjs_app/&quot;&gt;Stack Recommendations for Connecting a Next.js App&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/taylorotwell/status/1791468060903096422&quot;&gt;Taylor Otwell’s Tweet on Next.js and Laravel&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://railsdeveloper.com/survey/&quot;&gt;Rails Developer Survey 2024&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://learn.unity.com/learn/pathways&quot;&gt;Unity Learn Pathways&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7200031105222103040/&quot;&gt;Chris Trag’s LinkedIn Post&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.remotion.dev/&quot;&gt;Remotion: Create Videos Programmatically&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;div&gt;Thanks for listening!&lt;/div&gt;

## Full Transcript

  [[00:00:00](#t=0h0m0s &quot;Jump to 00:00:00 in this episode&quot;)] Hey, how&#39;s it going, CJ?  [[00:00:06](#t=0h0m6s &quot;Jump to 00:00:06 in this episode&quot;)] Good. How are you doing, Colin?  [[00:00:07](#t=0h0m7s &quot;Jump to 00:00:07 in this episode&quot;)] Pretty good. We&#39;re back working on just work projects, taking a little break from personal projects. How about you?  [[00:00:14](#t=0h0m14s &quot;Jump to 00:00:14 in this episode&quot;)] Yeah, exactly. I was just joking with Mike that I am procrastinating my personal projects by doing work projects. So I don&#39;t know if that&#39;s a good thing or a bad thing, or if it&#39;s because the work projects are better organized and linear or they just feel more productive or something, but I&#39;ve definitely got a list of stuff that I want to do on the side, for side projects, but it&#39;s just not happening.  [[00:00:36](#t=0h0m36s &quot;Jump to 00:00:36 in this episode&quot;)] But I think that&#39;s all good.  [[00:00:38](#t=0h0m38s &quot;Jump to 00:00:38 in this episode&quot;)] I bet Mike loves to hear that. Do you organize any of your personal things in like linear or projects or just rolling around in your head?  [[00:00:47](#t=0h0m47s &quot;Jump to 00:00:47 in this episode&quot;)] I just started putting like ideas for courses and, little projects in a personal linear, just to see if maybe that helps a little bit  [[00:00:54](#t=0h0m54s &quot;Jump to 00:00:54 in this episode&quot;)] nice.  [[00:00:56](#t=0h0m56s &quot;Jump to 00:00:56 in this episode&quot;)] So live customer support messaging [[00:01:00](#t=0h1m0s &quot;Jump to 00:01:00 in this episode&quot;)] backed by LLMs with a little co pilot tool that works with Twilio, that works with email inbound and outbound, that works with voice inbound and outbound. yeah, it&#39;s gonna, I don&#39;t know. I think we&#39;ve built something pretty cool at Craftwork and so I just want to show people how to do  [[00:01:16](#t=0h1m16s &quot;Jump to 00:01:16 in this episode&quot;)] That&#39;s cool. Yeah, that&#39;s very timely. It&#39;s a good way to take what you&#39;re doing in your day job and share with the world.  [[00:01:26](#t=0h1m26s &quot;Jump to 00:01:26 in this episode&quot;)] I hope, we&#39;ll see. It&#39;ll also be useful, later on when I happen to need to build this again, I just go back and look and,get the reminder. But,  [[00:01:35](#t=0h1m35s &quot;Jump to 00:01:35 in this episode&quot;)] you could release it as a once product. Just kidding.  [[00:01:38](#t=0h1m38s &quot;Jump to 00:01:38 in this episode&quot;)] Ooh, yeah, maybe. I was thinking, our, Craftwork is built on top of Jumpstart, and Jumpstart just gives you so many batteries included, and I was a little conflicted about should we start from jumpstart and then try to work it out with go rails and say okay, maybe you can only have the course, or maybe you get the course and jumpstart together or something so that, cause I don&#39;t want to give away the [[00:02:00](#t=0h2m0s &quot;Jump to 00:02:00 in this episode&quot;)] jumpstart repo, but I do want to give people access to the  [[00:02:03](#t=0h2m3s &quot;Jump to 00:02:03 in this episode&quot;)] And you don&#39;t want to start from pure Rails.  [[00:02:06](#t=0h2m6s &quot;Jump to 00:02:06 in this episode&quot;)] yeah, exactly. Cause there&#39;s so much table stakes stuff that you need to build in order to, I feel like. I don&#39;t know. I feel like it would be weird to not Rails new at the beginning of a course like this, but  [[00:02:17](#t=0h2m17s &quot;Jump to 00:02:17 in this episode&quot;)] yeah, coming into it, if it had like authentication and a bunch of stuff already built, I think folks would be like, what the, like, how did that happen?  [[00:02:23](#t=0h2m23s &quot;Jump to 00:02:23 in this episode&quot;)] How did that  [[00:02:24](#t=0h2m24s &quot;Jump to 00:02:24 in this episode&quot;)] right. This is the, this is the how to draw an owl tutorial in reverse.  [[00:02:29](#t=0h2m29s &quot;Jump to 00:02:29 in this episode&quot;)] It&#39;s they&#39;re like, wait, where did you draw those two circles? We need the,  [[00:02:33](#t=0h2m33s &quot;Jump to 00:02:33 in this episode&quot;)] yeah, there&#39;s a bunch of courses that happen where you like, you follow them and then you&#39;re like, wait a minute, there&#39;s like a whole step missing here because I don&#39;t have that.  [[00:02:41](#t=0h2m41s &quot;Jump to 00:02:41 in this episode&quot;)] it&#39;s not,  [[00:02:42](#t=0h2m42s &quot;Jump to 00:02:42 in this episode&quot;)] you&#39;re not successful with it, but yeah.  [[00:02:45](#t=0h2m45s &quot;Jump to 00:02:45 in this episode&quot;)] Yeah. , at Stripe, we built this set of videos called the like Stripe fundamentals or something. It was basically just like teaching you how to use the SDKs. And we went from scratch, here&#39;s how you install it. Here&#39;s how you set up environment variables. Here&#39;s how [[00:03:00](#t=0h3m0s &quot;Jump to 00:03:00 in this episode&quot;)] you do all the basic things with the SDKs.  [[00:03:03](#t=0h3m3s &quot;Jump to 00:03:03 in this episode&quot;)] And my intention with that was to like, build these foundational. Core concepts that we could then build from so that we didn&#39;t have to teach people, here&#39;s how you make the boilerplate HTML page with a, Stripe element on it every single time. and I want the same thing for rails, but there&#39;s just I don&#39;t know.  [[00:03:21](#t=0h3m21s &quot;Jump to 00:03:21 in this episode&quot;)] you almost need rails one on one and rails one on two and rails one on three, and then I want to teach you all like this other, Like  [[00:03:28](#t=0h3m28s &quot;Jump to 00:03:28 in this episode&quot;)] Yeah. You don&#39;t want to have to teach from zero to one every single time, zero to two.  [[00:03:33](#t=0h3m33s &quot;Jump to 00:03:33 in this episode&quot;)] Even the, it might be worth checking out. Unity has like pathways on their learn website.  [[00:03:41](#t=0h3m41s &quot;Jump to 00:03:41 in this episode&quot;)] And I really do like that idea of there is a point at which if I&#39;m more advanced, I want to jump in and not be told, I don&#39;t want to have to skip around to figure out where I need to find things. And you can literally create what was, there was another really good rails. it&#39;s like Rails Mastery or something that was very [[00:04:00](#t=0h4m0s &quot;Jump to 00:04:00 in this episode&quot;)] similar to that where it&#39;s okay, there&#39;s a fork in the road. Do you want to go learn, in the forest of authentication or, like it was all themed and fun and it was, like a dnd quest where you choose your own adventure. But then that way it&#39;s like revealed complexity. And then when they release a new thing, it&#39;s okay, here&#39;s how you add some LLM powered tool to your rails app. Instead of starting from rails new every single time.  [[00:04:24](#t=0h4m24s &quot;Jump to 00:04:24 in this episode&quot;)] Exactly. I Was also considering just like speed running part of it and then the other thought was like I&#39;ll call the first part like phase zero and if you&#39;re comfortable with like off and you know Setting up a brand new rails app. And you really just want to get into the meat and potatoes.  [[00:04:40](#t=0h4m40s &quot;Jump to 00:04:40 in this episode&quot;)] then you can just jump to phase one, which would be like, okay, here&#39;s where we&#39;re going to actually start implementing messaging, but I don&#39;t know, it&#39;s a hard problem in terms of instructional design. And I, yeah, when people are just making individual videos or even just like a, subset of videos, it&#39;s, I [[00:05:00](#t=0h5m0s &quot;Jump to 00:05:00 in this episode&quot;)] feel like it&#39;s easier to just be like, okay, I&#39;m going to gloss over certain topics or here&#39;s the prerequisites or whatever, but.  [[00:05:05](#t=0h5m5s &quot;Jump to 00:05:05 in this episode&quot;)] I want to make sure people are set up for success. And, yeah, it&#39;s just something I&#39;m thinking about. Nice.  [[00:05:12](#t=0h5m12s &quot;Jump to 00:05:12 in this episode&quot;)] yeah.  [[00:05:12](#t=0h5m12s &quot;Jump to 00:05:12 in this episode&quot;)] is going on in the world of tech this week?  [[00:05:15](#t=0h5m15s &quot;Jump to 00:05:15 in this episode&quot;)] Oh my gosh.  [[00:05:16](#t=0h5m16s &quot;Jump to 00:05:16 in this episode&quot;)] what do you have here?  [[00:05:18](#t=0h5m18s &quot;Jump to 00:05:18 in this episode&quot;)] a couple of things like flew across my radar and it&#39;s interesting cause we&#39;ve been talking about this internally too. So like how, what&#39;s the best way to implement your front end and your backend and should they be a monolith? And, there&#39;s a lot that goes into this. And so there was one, one article that came out today from someone that said, why I&#39;m over GraphQL.  [[00:05:41](#t=0h5m41s &quot;Jump to 00:05:41 in this episode&quot;)] So like why not to use GraphQL anymore? And then there was another question on the Rails subreddit around recommendations for connecting a Rails app to an XJS app. And internally, we&#39;ve been having conversations about how, like where we should build certain features. Should it be as part of the Rails app and like part of the [[00:06:00](#t=0h6m0s &quot;Jump to 00:06:00 in this episode&quot;)] monolith, or should Rails expose an API and then we use a Next.  [[00:06:04](#t=0h6m4s &quot;Jump to 00:06:04 in this episode&quot;)] js front end to consume that? And so it&#39;s something I&#39;ve been thinking a lot about. And, one of the core, I don&#39;t know, one of the core decision Pieces that go into this conversation is, finding qualified employees. And so I think a lot of people are tending to, choose react based solutions because there is this idea that there&#39;s a lot more react devs.  [[00:06:33](#t=0h6m33s &quot;Jump to 00:06:33 in this episode&quot;)] And so you can build more stuff with it. And I think there&#39;s, there is definite concern for picking rails because they&#39;re not sure if they&#39;re going to be able to find rails devs. And it&#39;s like a chicken and egg problem, right? Like maybe we&#39;re not supporting juniors enough to grow the community big enough and fast enough to make this like a really sustainable ecosystem, or maybe it&#39;s like a mismatch in terms of the expectation around, can you find a rails dev or not?  [[00:06:58](#t=0h6m58s &quot;Jump to 00:06:58 in this episode&quot;)] And, and yeah, [[00:07:00](#t=0h7m0s &quot;Jump to 00:07:00 in this episode&quot;)] I don&#39;t  [[00:07:00](#t=0h7m0s &quot;Jump to 00:07:00 in this episode&quot;)] Have you seen, there&#39;s been a lot of conversation. I&#39;ve been listening to like fairly technical with Ian Landsman and, Aaron Francis and some others. There was a post from Taylor Otwell from, from Laravel talking, it was like trying to compare Next. js and Laravel, which are very different things.  [[00:07:18](#t=0h7m18s &quot;Jump to 00:07:18 in this episode&quot;)] And what you&#39;re talking about is very true. But it also is like, how much of it is the shiny new with JavaScript stuff, like JavaScript seems to always have a new thing and people are jumping around and he had a shot fired at, it feels like an ad for clerk, for authentication as a service companies.  [[00:07:37](#t=0h7m37s &quot;Jump to 00:07:37 in this episode&quot;)] And whereas you go to jump into Laravel or rails and it&#39;s Batteries included. If you&#39;re, even if you&#39;re not using, jumpstart, you can jump into, devise and all these different things. And you&#39;d I think a lot of JavaScript people when they&#39;re new to it, don&#39;t enjoy like how many files something might take to implement. But in a Laravel app and in a rails app where things are stored and kept, and it&#39;s like, what drawer is [[00:08:00](#t=0h8m0s &quot;Jump to 00:08:00 in this episode&quot;)] this in? And in  [[00:08:01](#t=0h8m1s &quot;Jump to 00:08:01 in this episode&quot;)] JavaScript, Yes, there&#39;s probably a perception of more React devs and things because you have a lot more bootcamp grads, and, just a lot of courses and stuff teaching it. We talked about it last episode with the last RailsConf being next year, what does that mean for the perception of Rails? And you have all these,  [[00:08:18](#t=0h8m18s &quot;Jump to 00:08:18 in this episode&quot;)] React conferences, but I don&#39;t think most programmers are going to any of these conferences, right? it&#39;s a small subset of, very online people who are also going to these.  [[00:08:27](#t=0h8m27s &quot;Jump to 00:08:27 in this episode&quot;)] These conferences and you have developers all over the world, just being productive in their tools. it&#39;s an interesting argument. I don&#39;t know which one I&#39;d go for. I do think like when we were at orbit, we were all rails based. We started before my, before I joined, it was a front end JavaScript app with a backend API separate. And apparently it took them way longer to do anything because they had to make sure they built that contract between the front end and the backend and they had to implement it. And it almost felt like you were implementing the same [[00:09:00](#t=0h9m0s &quot;Jump to 00:09:00 in this episode&quot;)] features twice,to get things done.  [[00:09:02](#t=0h9m2s &quot;Jump to 00:09:02 in this episode&quot;)] One idea that I keep coming back to, whether you build your front end with React or not is around this idea of using stuff that&#39;s built into the browser as much as possible. And what I mean by that is that like, when you&#39;re building a form that is going to submit some data to the server, right?  [[00:09:22](#t=0h9m22s &quot;Jump to 00:09:22 in this episode&quot;)] there are conventions that have been around since the beginning of post requests on the internet. And if you choose to build a form that follows the same conventions that The internet has been using for a very long time. Then the code just feels so much more robust and reliable and dependable.  [[00:09:42](#t=0h9m42s &quot;Jump to 00:09:42 in this episode&quot;)] And so I find that when we start layering on these big, heavy front end frameworks like react or, and I would even put. In some regard, like Rails form helpers in this bucket. but anytime we start adding layers [[00:10:00](#t=0h10m0s &quot;Jump to 00:10:00 in this episode&quot;)] into the front end, including turbo, including whatever, we are introducing complexity that is going to be hard to track down when things break, it&#39;s going to introduce complexity around like state management.  [[00:10:11](#t=0h10m11s &quot;Jump to 00:10:11 in this episode&quot;)] and yeah, it just gets, it gets gnarly. And so we&#39;re finding ourselves in a world where. There&#39;s just so many different options from the react side, what form library are you going to use and then what validation library are you going to use and how are you going to manage your HTTP requests?  [[00:10:27](#t=0h10m27s &quot;Jump to 00:10:27 in this episode&quot;)] Are you going to use, react query? Are you going to use a graph QL thing? And then that&#39;s all just assuming react is the front end. And if we talk about next JS, like maybe you&#39;re layering in. A server side component to your front end, where like maybe your next JS backend is the thing that&#39;s actually calling your rails API, or maybe your next JS front end is the thing calling rails API or whatever the backend API is.  [[00:10:52](#t=0h10m52s &quot;Jump to 00:10:52 in this episode&quot;)] But, one thing that I really like about Laravel and rails and Django and. Sort of these older [[00:11:00](#t=0h11m0s &quot;Jump to 00:11:00 in this episode&quot;)] monolithic frameworks in a, in addition to all the batteries included stuff is. Because they&#39;ve been around so long, they&#39;re built around the same fundamentals of the basics that you get from the browser, instead of layering on a lot of like additional meta framework stuff on top of JavaScript that&#39;s running in the browser.  [[00:11:20](#t=0h11m20s &quot;Jump to 00:11:20 in this episode&quot;)] And at least from a maintenance perspective, I&#39;m finding that it&#39;s like the things that are built in the most basic ways are the ones that are the most maintainable. And there&#39;s always a time to play with the new stuff for new sake, but I have to wonder how much of it is like a lot of people are drawn to Laravel and rails because they need to, in some cases get the feature done because they have a business to run, A lot of  [[00:11:42](#t=0h11m42s &quot;Jump to 00:11:42 in this episode&quot;)] solo founders, a lot of, bootstrappers are doing that because they need to be able to sleep at night.  [[00:11:49](#t=0h11m49s &quot;Jump to 00:11:49 in this episode&quot;)] They need to know that,I&#39;m going to try this new edge thing. Tool on this new edge platform. And yeah, you&#39;re not wanting to do deal with your own SEVs in the middle of the night. and I know, this is [[00:12:00](#t=0h12m0s &quot;Jump to 00:12:00 in this episode&quot;)] where then you see the jokes about Oh my God, I can&#39;t believe how slow rails is.  [[00:12:03](#t=0h12m3s &quot;Jump to 00:12:03 in this episode&quot;)] Or it&#39;s we could make that call for almost anything. And for a lot of the  [[00:12:07](#t=0h12m7s &quot;Jump to 00:12:07 in this episode&quot;)] stuff on the internet, does it really need to be that fast? are you really going  [[00:12:11](#t=0h12m11s &quot;Jump to 00:12:11 in this episode&quot;)] to notice if it&#39;s, stable, but a little bit slower. and,I think that, even like we mentioned earlier, like RailsConf not being a thing, there&#39;s like a resurgence in Ruby meetups, which I know is not rail specific, but that gives me hope for the language and the tools around it, Laravel&#39;s. Going super hard, super strong. Like I almost want to go  [[00:12:32](#t=0h12m32s &quot;Jump to 00:12:32 in this episode&quot;)] to Laracon just to go see that world. cause I haven&#39;t touched PHP since WordPress, which is not, it&#39;s not the same, it&#39;s, I wouldn&#39;t even say WordPress is PHP anymore. Like it&#39;s its own thing. So  [[00:12:44](#t=0h12m44s &quot;Jump to 00:12:44 in this episode&quot;)] Yeah. Just as a, an exercise I went and built a couple things with Laravel and it is very nice. I found that there were a couple additional like layers and a couple additional, um,like components that you had to understand.  [[00:12:59](#t=0h12m59s &quot;Jump to 00:12:59 in this episode&quot;)] So it [[00:13:00](#t=0h13m0s &quot;Jump to 00:13:00 in this episode&quot;)] wasn&#39;t just model view controller and a handful of routes. And here&#39;s how you write your views. There was like, some other concepts and, basic things like validation happened in a different spot, but there were some really nice things like out of the box, you get authentication out of the box, you get , framework specific deployment tools, which are slowly but surely making their way over to Rails.  [[00:13:20](#t=0h13m20s &quot;Jump to 00:13:20 in this episode&quot;)] But, yeah, I think of the three that I&#39;ve worked with, Laravel&#39;s probably the most mature in terms of, at least first party tooling and support, and then Rails, and then probably Django last. But, Yeah. I don&#39;t know. I am curious your take on GraphQL though. I think, yeah, I know we messed around with it a little bit at PantyDrop, but, yeah, I think it was a fun idea, but, haven&#39;t used it since then.  [[00:13:46](#t=0h13m46s &quot;Jump to 00:13:46 in this episode&quot;)] So debate. I think it&#39;s just that it&#39;s really cool to be able to do these queries that you can reduce and return only what you want. There&#39;s a lot of promise there that,sometimes if, when you&#39;re doing rest, you don&#39;t get control over what [[00:14:00](#t=0h14m0s &quot;Jump to 00:14:00 in this episode&quot;)] comes back and you might have to make multiple calls, to get what you need.  [[00:14:03](#t=0h14m3s &quot;Jump to 00:14:03 in this episode&quot;)] And then you&#39;re doing. Building your own little map on your, on the side to keep track of what you need. what happens if one of those requests fails? there&#39;s all sorts of things that can happen there. So I think it&#39;s really cool. I almost wish that we could just. In rest, define what fields we want back and stuff like that.  [[00:14:21](#t=0h14m21s &quot;Jump to 00:14:21 in this episode&quot;)] But then I guess you&#39;re like  [[00:14:22](#t=0h14m22s &quot;Jump to 00:14:22 in this episode&quot;)] rebuilding GraphQL.  [[00:14:24](#t=0h14m24s &quot;Jump to 00:14:24 in this episode&quot;)] so yeah, I hadn&#39;t had  [[00:14:26](#t=0h14m26s &quot;Jump to 00:14:26 in this episode&quot;)] time to read this blog post, but I think I, a lot of people are over GraphQL.  [[00:14:31](#t=0h14m31s &quot;Jump to 00:14:31 in this episode&quot;)] Yeah, there were, I think there&#39;s just like a handful of gotchas with GraphQL that this blog post I think articulates pretty well. And yeah, authorization rate limiting. If you just scan the headings here, we&#39;ll share the link in the show notes. But there is just a, a set of problems that you run into that are standard across the board.  [[00:14:53](#t=0h14m53s &quot;Jump to 00:14:53 in this episode&quot;)] And yeah, I don&#39;t think anyone&#39;s really found like a great answer to those. but yeah. , did you ever get your hands on [[00:15:00](#t=0h15m0s &quot;Jump to 00:15:00 in this episode&quot;)] O data back in the day? Or, are you familiar with  [[00:15:02](#t=0h15m2s &quot;Jump to 00:15:02 in this episode&quot;)] think so,  [[00:15:03](#t=0h15m3s &quot;Jump to 00:15:03 in this episode&quot;)] Okay. I think this might have only been in Microsoft thing. And it&#39;s basically like a GraphQL thing, but from the front end, and you could write like these interesting queries that were passed basically in query string. And it would give you back. like your filtered data. and I remember when I first saw this, I was like, this is so cool. I love this. And, yeah, it&#39;s like similar idea to expand in a way, which is a feature of the Stripe API where you can pass okay, I want this object and I want to expand this other thing so that it&#39;s included in the response.  [[00:15:39](#t=0h15m39s &quot;Jump to 00:15:39 in this episode&quot;)] I love expand is so good. Yeah.  [[00:15:42](#t=0h15m42s &quot;Jump to 00:15:42 in this episode&quot;)] totally, but it&#39;s also insanely expensive. To maintain that because if you build your integration and you&#39;re expanding, but you don&#39;t actually need the expanded objects,  [[00:15:51](#t=0h15m51s &quot;Jump to 00:15:51 in this episode&quot;)] that&#39;s like increasing. Yeah, it&#39;s a waste. It&#39;s like increasing the latency and the overhead for the API and the maintenance of the API.  [[00:15:59](#t=0h15m59s &quot;Jump to 00:15:59 in this episode&quot;)] [[00:16:00](#t=0h16m0s &quot;Jump to 00:16:00 in this episode&quot;)] One of the cool things that I&#39;ve, that I love about GraphQL is that. I think there&#39;s this thing where you can say here&#39;s the properties I need and from the server, you can understand what the client is actually requesting, right? So if the client only tells you I need three fields and maybe another client tells you they need three different fields, but maybe you&#39;re returning like you&#39;re, Or you&#39;re generating potentially 20, that you can safely remove the fields that aren&#39;t included there, which gives you like these awesome performance gains so that you can just like strip down and understand that you&#39;re not going to break clients because they&#39;re being explicit about what exact fields they want from you.  [[00:16:39](#t=0h16m39s &quot;Jump to 00:16:39 in this episode&quot;)] And that&#39;s a problem we have today because now we are using, we have a rest API. on the rail side. And in order to avoid too much stitching together of different resources on the front end, some of our rest end points return these giant Blobs of here&#39;s your project and all the photos and all the tasks and all the statuses and all [[00:17:00](#t=0h17m0s &quot;Jump to 00:17:00 in this episode&quot;)] the, people that are involved and all the whatever&#39;s with their avatars and all of their like work history and whatever.  [[00:17:05](#t=0h17m5s &quot;Jump to 00:17:05 in this episode&quot;)] and so you get these like huge things. It&#39;s like basically just a JSON blob of your database between certain date ranges or something. And that also isn&#39;t great. In fact, we like ran into an error the other day where, versus, Vercel and Next. js were throwing an error because.  [[00:17:20](#t=0h17m20s &quot;Jump to 00:17:20 in this episode&quot;)] The payload was too big. I was like, I don&#39;t know if it was five. Yeah. It was like five megs or something just for some, a TRPC call. and it was just crashing because there&#39;s just too much in the JSON blob. And yeah, it is a really, it&#39;s a really tough problem to solve. and. So that same resting point, right?  [[00:17:39](#t=0h17m39s &quot;Jump to 00:17:39 in this episode&quot;)] If we want to go and thin it out or make it more optimized or cache certain parts of it or whatever, we have to be super careful because we don&#39;t want to break, one of our calendars that&#39;s backed by that API. We also don&#39;t want to break the mobile app that&#39;s backed by that API. based on that API, we don&#39;t want to break the front end like marketing site that&#39;s based on that API.  [[00:17:55](#t=0h17m55s &quot;Jump to 00:17:55 in this episode&quot;)] it definitely makes it more challenging when just using vanilla rest and not understanding [[00:18:00](#t=0h18m0s &quot;Jump to 00:18:00 in this episode&quot;)] what properties the front end is asking for. But it does make it a little easier to do things like rate limiting, authentic authentication, authorization,  [[00:18:10](#t=0h18m10s &quot;Jump to 00:18:10 in this episode&quot;)] And I assume you&#39;re not doing this in like a real, you have a JavaScript front end, right? So if you&#39;re doing this in rails, you would just access all the data that you need, but then you probably have a bunch of very interactive agent type behaviors and stuff that are happening or project management style. Yeah.  [[00:18:29](#t=0h18m29s &quot;Jump to 00:18:29 in this episode&quot;)] Yeah. So we have. We have we have what we call, like the dashboard basically that is for internal users to do all the project management and customer communication sales and whatever. And then we have in through there, that is like just vanilla rails app with hotwire. and a lot of that is working Great.  [[00:18:49](#t=0h18m49s &quot;Jump to 00:18:49 in this episode&quot;)] And has separate controllers from our API controllers. and then the API controllers drive the marketing site, the mobile app, and some other things. and they also [[00:19:00](#t=0h19m0s &quot;Jump to 00:19:00 in this episode&quot;)] control the really interactive parts of the dashboard. So we have, we&#39;re using full calendar, which is this really nice react library for men working with calendars.  [[00:19:08](#t=0h19m8s &quot;Jump to 00:19:08 in this episode&quot;)] but. It&#39;s just, yeah, it&#39;s like a way that we can use our rails monolith, use hotwire as much as possible, but then where needed, we can drop in a react component and then build with react just for that one, like really interactive part. but yeah, now we, then we would have the calendar, the mobile app, the front end, and some other things that are all depending on the API, not changing.  [[00:19:31](#t=0h19m31s &quot;Jump to 00:19:31 in this episode&quot;)] Nice.  [[00:19:31](#t=0h19m31s &quot;Jump to 00:19:31 in this episode&quot;)] yeah. Yeah.  [[00:19:34](#t=0h19m34s &quot;Jump to 00:19:34 in this episode&quot;)] Good old.  [[00:19:34](#t=0h19m34s &quot;Jump to 00:19:34 in this episode&quot;)] know the answer.  [[00:19:36](#t=0h19m36s &quot;Jump to 00:19:36 in this episode&quot;)] It&#39;s at the end of the day,  [[00:19:37](#t=0h19m37s &quot;Jump to 00:19:37 in this episode&quot;)] everything is, HTTP  [[00:19:39](#t=0h19m39s &quot;Jump to 00:19:39 in this episode&quot;)] Yes, exactly.  [[00:19:41](#t=0h19m41s &quot;Jump to 00:19:41 in this episode&quot;)] always has been  [[00:19:43](#t=0h19m43s &quot;Jump to 00:19:43 in this episode&quot;)] fun side project though is building something else. I don&#39;t  [[00:19:47](#t=0h19m47s &quot;Jump to 00:19:47 in this episode&quot;)] What are you building? Yeah. Tell me.  [[00:19:49](#t=0h19m49s &quot;Jump to 00:19:49 in this episode&quot;)] yeah So we opened our pool as early as possible. It was like the day that we didn&#39;t see any more freezing temperatures on the calendar.  [[00:19:57](#t=0h19m57s &quot;Jump to 00:19:57 in this episode&quot;)] We opened it, but that means that it was like [[00:20:00](#t=0h20m0s &quot;Jump to 00:20:00 in this episode&quot;)] 40 degrees or something when we opened it up. And the pool here in new England stays pretty cold throughout the summer. And it&#39;s a very old pool. it&#39;s built probably in the late seventies. Early eighties. And so it&#39;s very simple. It has a pump with a filter and two little inlets and outlets.  [[00:20:18](#t=0h20m18s &quot;Jump to 00:20:18 in this episode&quot;)] no heater. And so it&#39;s been my idea for a long time to build like some sort of heater for the pool so that we can make it,a temperature that is livable and that we&#39;re excited to go out and spend some time in. Right now it&#39;s very refreshing if you&#39;re out in the yard doing some work and you just want to take a dip you can splash in, but, yeah, pool heaters like if you buy like a proper pool heater it&#39;s pretty expensive and so I had these DIY ideas around building a couple different, iterations of this.  [[00:20:48](#t=0h20m48s &quot;Jump to 00:20:48 in this episode&quot;)] So the first one we&#39;re going to do is a solar based pool heater. So I got like a bunch of irrigation tubing, just like black irrigation tubing, and we&#39;re going to coil it up and [[00:21:00](#t=0h21m0s &quot;Jump to 00:21:00 in this episode&quot;)] maybe we&#39;ll like, spray paint the thing we&#39;re going to mount it on black also. And then just like a solar panel, we&#39;ll point it at the sun and then we&#39;ll have a little pump that sucks the water out of the pool.  [[00:21:11](#t=0h21m11s &quot;Jump to 00:21:11 in this episode&quot;)] It runs it through these coils basically of irrigation piping and then goes back into the pool. and yeah, the idea being that ideally the pump is also solar powered. I don&#39;t want to spend electricity on this, but.  [[00:21:24](#t=0h21m24s &quot;Jump to 00:21:24 in this episode&quot;)] But you also want it to be safe.  [[00:21:25](#t=0h21m25s &quot;Jump to 00:21:25 in this episode&quot;)] And, yeah, I will. Is the plan to have it continuously?  [[00:21:31](#t=0h21m31s &quot;Jump to 00:21:31 in this episode&quot;)] I think it would, it depends on, yeah, I think it depends on the temperature outside. if the temperature drops below a certain mark, then it probably doesn&#39;t make sense to run it. And we do have a lot of gloomy days where it doesn&#39;t make sense to run it. And it might probably make  [[00:21:48](#t=0h21m48s &quot;Jump to 00:21:48 in this episode&quot;)] sense to have it heat up in a storage and then circulate out and then bring in new water. It&#39;s a little more complicated, because if it&#39;s constantly circulating, it probably isn&#39;t going to heat up [[00:22:00](#t=0h22m0s &quot;Jump to 00:22:00 in this episode&quot;)] fast enough when it goes through the coils.  [[00:22:02](#t=0h22m2s &quot;Jump to 00:22:02 in this episode&quot;)] Yeah, it totally depends on how fast it&#39;s pumping through. Yeah, and so and how much, yeah, like you said, like how much storage. So if we end up building just like a giant black PVC pipe thing with  [[00:22:13](#t=0h22m13s &quot;Jump to 00:22:13 in this episode&quot;)] And if it&#39;s slow. Yeah.  [[00:22:16](#t=0h22m16s &quot;Jump to 00:22:16 in this episode&quot;)] Yeah, exactly.  [[00:22:17](#t=0h22m17s &quot;Jump to 00:22:17 in this episode&quot;)] So that&#39;s the first iteration and then the second iteration is a wood fired one where we&#39;ll just get like a drum, like a 50 gallon drum, and then wrap it with copper, and then put fire in it.  [[00:22:29](#t=0h22m29s &quot;Jump to 00:22:29 in this episode&quot;)] There&#39;s some really  [[00:22:29](#t=0h22m29s &quot;Jump to 00:22:29 in this episode&quot;)] good tutorials on this for hot tubs.  [[00:22:32](#t=0h22m32s &quot;Jump to 00:22:32 in this episode&quot;)] yes. Yes, that&#39;s where I got the idea. It&#39;s like the hot tub version. Yeah, that&#39;ll be fun too. I think like technically there&#39;s some physics where you can make it work without a pump, right? Where like just the heator  [[00:22:45](#t=0h22m45s &quot;Jump to 00:22:45 in this episode&quot;)] the heat.  [[00:22:46](#t=0h22m46s &quot;Jump to 00:22:46 in this episode&quot;)] it rises. Yeah.  [[00:22:47](#t=0h22m47s &quot;Jump to 00:22:47 in this episode&quot;)] Exactly. Yeah.  [[00:22:48](#t=0h22m48s &quot;Jump to 00:22:48 in this episode&quot;)] You&#39;re not going to get that with pure solar. I don&#39;t think, unless it&#39;s like really hot.  [[00:22:54](#t=0h22m54s &quot;Jump to 00:22:54 in this episode&quot;)] exactly. Yeah. There&#39;s also, I think like.the examples that I saw, at [[00:23:00](#t=0h23m0s &quot;Jump to 00:23:00 in this episode&quot;)] least of the hot tub version, the top of the drum was always level with the hot tub. And so the water could come out the bottom of the hot tub and then go back in the top of the hot tub.  [[00:23:11](#t=0h23m11s &quot;Jump to 00:23:11 in this episode&quot;)] But the pool is in the ground. So like in order to get that same sort of like gravity fed, Piece to suck into the pipe. We would need to bury part of it or something, or I don&#39;t know. There&#39;s definitely some physics that needs to happen here. And so I think Chachapiti will help us work through all the different requirements.  [[00:23:30](#t=0h23m30s &quot;Jump to 00:23:30 in this episode&quot;)] But,  [[00:23:32](#t=0h23m32s &quot;Jump to 00:23:32 in this episode&quot;)] You&#39;re gonna learn about you&#39;re gonna learn about hydrostatic pressure over there  [[00:23:36](#t=0h23m36s &quot;Jump to 00:23:36 in this episode&quot;)] yes, exactly. And I don&#39;t want to burn the kids either. So if the, if the water going through the pipe, Flowing fast enough, but it heats up too quick. Then it might just shoot out like insanely hot steam, which would,  [[00:23:48](#t=0h23m48s &quot;Jump to 00:23:48 in this episode&quot;)] you&#39;re also gonna have a fire in your yard anytime you want to  [[00:23:52](#t=0h23m52s &quot;Jump to 00:23:52 in this episode&quot;)] yes.  [[00:23:52](#t=0h23m52s &quot;Jump to 00:23:52 in this episode&quot;)] Yeah. Which, yeah. Coming from Nevada, like it felt like, Oh man, you can&#39;t. We, no one&#39;s going to have a fire. It&#39;s so dangerous for [[00:24:00](#t=0h24m0s &quot;Jump to 00:24:00 in this episode&quot;)] fire risk. I am not joking when I tell you, it took me three hours to get the fire going, to get the fire started. We did syrup because it&#39;s so wet here. It like, it is just always like misty foggy and like high humidity.  [[00:24:14](#t=0h24m14s &quot;Jump to 00:24:14 in this episode&quot;)] And  [[00:24:15](#t=0h24m15s &quot;Jump to 00:24:15 in this episode&quot;)] yeah, even your you need a place just to store your wood to make sure it&#39;s not wet. Yeah Dehumidifier  [[00:24:22](#t=0h24m22s &quot;Jump to 00:24:22 in this episode&quot;)] exactly.  [[00:24:23](#t=0h24m23s &quot;Jump to 00:24:23 in this episode&quot;)] and yeah  [[00:24:24](#t=0h24m24s &quot;Jump to 00:24:24 in this episode&quot;)] Yes. Yeah. Yep. You&#39;re, you got it. You got it.  [[00:24:28](#t=0h24m28s &quot;Jump to 00:24:28 in this episode&quot;)] amazing the homesteading continues  [[00:24:31](#t=0h24m31s &quot;Jump to 00:24:31 in this episode&quot;)] Yes. Yeah, I guess  [[00:24:33](#t=0h24m33s &quot;Jump to 00:24:33 in this episode&quot;)] You&#39;ll be sitting in, your hot tub with your maple syrup and you&#39;re on your way  [[00:24:40](#t=0h24m40s &quot;Jump to 00:24:40 in this episode&quot;)] Yep. Yep. Yep.all So you&#39;ve got another race coming up. We&#39;ve talked about your running in the past. I think even last year when you ran, the RTO, we talked about it. What&#39;s the plan this year? Is it the same crew? Do you know what legs you&#39;re running?  [[00:24:55](#t=0h24m55s &quot;Jump to 00:24:55 in this episode&quot;)] it&#39;s tomorrow. I&#39;ve got same kind of crew. I&#39;m part of [[00:25:00](#t=0h25m0s &quot;Jump to 00:25:00 in this episode&quot;)] this beer running club called the McKellar running group, which has like meetups around the world. So we have a crew here. so I&#39;m doing it with them because it&#39;s a pretty chill crew. They just want to run. They&#39;re not worried about how fast we do it.  [[00:25:13](#t=0h25m13s &quot;Jump to 00:25:13 in this episode&quot;)] But, I am doing the hardest leg this year. So we will see how that goes. But doing, the first, The first run of the first leg is eight miles and six of it is uphill and it will probably  [[00:25:26](#t=0h25m26s &quot;Jump to 00:25:26 in this episode&quot;)] be at the hottest time of the day tomorrow. So just going to get through that one. And then my other two are like at night and easy and we&#39;ll be good.  [[00:25:35](#t=0h25m35s &quot;Jump to 00:25:35 in this episode&quot;)] But I&#39;ve got a bandana that you put ice in. it&#39;s like specially designed for that. So I&#39;ve got that ready cause it&#39;s, there&#39;s a little bit of shade. But not until you get to like mile six. So I gotta run uphill in the sun for a good six miles. And I mean it&#39;s like 1500 feet, over six miles. So it&#39;s quite a bit. But yeah, ready for that. [[00:26:00](#t=0h26m0s &quot;Jump to 00:26:00 in this episode&quot;)] took most of the day off tomorrow to do that and into the weekend. So we&#39;ll, we&#39;re estimating it&#39;ll take us about 24 hours like it usually does.  [[00:26:09](#t=0h26m9s &quot;Jump to 00:26:09 in this episode&quot;)] And are you, . Are you practicing running uphill right now? is  [[00:26:13](#t=0h26m13s &quot;Jump to 00:26:13 in this episode&quot;)] Yeah, I live downtown and so most of my running is usually like just getting it in is running on the river and there&#39;s no uphill whatsoever. And it&#39;s good to get out and get cardio, but you don&#39;t get any I forgot the phrase, but like you. You basically earn your stripes on the hills.  [[00:26:30](#t=0h26m30s &quot;Jump to 00:26:30 in this episode&quot;)] And then when you go do races, like usually they&#39;re not that insane. So I&#39;ve been doing a lot of trail running up above, Reno where, some of them it&#39;s you can&#39;t run, you have to end up hiking, but you&#39;re still heart rates high.anytime you look at like ultra trail races, it&#39;s a lot of hiking and then you run when you can. And you&#39;ve got like these really cool, like collapsible hiking poles that you need to take with you and stuff. So that it&#39;s not that bad. The run tomorrow is just like a gradual mountain, like fire [[00:27:00](#t=0h27m0s &quot;Jump to 00:27:00 in this episode&quot;)] road. but it&#39;s good to go do those. And then makes other things feel easier.  [[00:27:05](#t=0h27m5s &quot;Jump to 00:27:05 in this episode&quot;)] that&#39;ll be good, but I&#39;m actually moving up to that area soon.  [[00:27:09](#t=0h27m9s &quot;Jump to 00:27:09 in this episode&quot;)] So I&#39;ll be able to like, just run from my front door out into those trails, which is going to be nice. I&#39;m trying to still balance the, like how much time I spend away from a computer, given how much time we spend in front of a computer.  [[00:27:23](#t=0h27m23s &quot;Jump to 00:27:23 in this episode&quot;)] Totally. Yeah. And what a great way to do it is get out, run around in nature. You&#39;re getting your exercise, you&#39;re getting your forest bathing, you&#39;re getting your,  [[00:27:32](#t=0h27m32s &quot;Jump to 00:27:32 in this episode&quot;)] yeah, I&#39;ll have some updates because I&#39;ve been dealing with some breathing and heart rate stuff and I&#39;ve been doing a lot of like health hacking to figure out like how do I get this fixed and I might have to go get an MRI or something if it doesn&#39;t fix on its own just to see is something not something torn is something not right because it&#39;s like lung and heart related but not in a way that&#39;s like dangerous just like sometimes I find it harder to breathe than normal but I&#39;ve had  [[00:27:57](#t=0h27m57s &quot;Jump to 00:27:57 in this episode&quot;)] this since I had a really bad [[00:28:00](#t=0h28m0s &quot;Jump to 00:28:00 in this episode&quot;)] bout of COVID.  [[00:28:00](#t=0h28m0s &quot;Jump to 00:28:00 in this episode&quot;)] So it could just be something I have to rebuild. so I have some things that I&#39;ve been trying that we can talk about in a future episode.  [[00:28:08](#t=0h28m8s &quot;Jump to 00:28:08 in this episode&quot;)] Okay. I don&#39;t know. I feel like I&#39;ve always just sucked at running. And so anytime I run, I feel heart and lung pain.  [[00:28:17](#t=0h28m17s &quot;Jump to 00:28:17 in this episode&quot;)] shouldn&#39;t be pain. Like being out of breath is one  [[00:28:19](#t=0h28m19s &quot;Jump to 00:28:19 in this episode&quot;)] thing, but hopefully no pain. But you do a Peloton stuff, right? And that&#39;s good cardio.  [[00:28:24](#t=0h28m24s &quot;Jump to 00:28:24 in this episode&quot;)] Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Now, yeah, it&#39;s. Yeah, I guess it&#39;s, I don&#39;t know. Maybe the other thing too, that I always wondered about was like how allergic I was to the stuff that was around me and outside. And so  [[00:28:36](#t=0h28m36s &quot;Jump to 00:28:36 in this episode&quot;)] a big factor  [[00:28:37](#t=0h28m37s &quot;Jump to 00:28:37 in this episode&quot;)] practice, like dying of can&#39;t breathe, but maybe I just allergic to the grass or  [[00:28:41](#t=0h28m41s &quot;Jump to 00:28:41 in this episode&quot;)] or asthma or yeah, something.  [[00:28:43](#t=0h28m43s &quot;Jump to 00:28:43 in this episode&quot;)] yeah,  [[00:28:44](#t=0h28m44s &quot;Jump to 00:28:44 in this episode&quot;)] Yeah.So yeah, another kind of in my world today is actually my one year anniversary at discord  [[00:28:53](#t=0h28m53s &quot;Jump to 00:28:53 in this episode&quot;)] Whoa. Congratulations.  [[00:28:55](#t=0h28m55s &quot;Jump to 00:28:55 in this episode&quot;)] that I think you also have an anniversary that recently happened or is coming up soon.[[00:29:00](#t=0h29m0s &quot;Jump to 00:29:00 in this episode&quot;)]  [[00:29:00](#t=0h29m0s &quot;Jump to 00:29:00 in this episode&quot;)] Yeah, my one year at Kraftwerk was,30 days ago,  [[00:29:03](#t=0h29m3s &quot;Jump to 00:29:03 in this episode&quot;)] we, I know we both made that switch, which I&#39;m not working on any side projects or personal projects right now. It&#39;s just been a lot of like travel and like onsites and life happening, getting ready for this race and stuff. So it&#39;s been nice to just I guess other than the game boys that we talked about last week,But I&#39;ve been thinking a lot about this and actually a link to this post on LinkedIn from,Chris Trag. but I&#39;ve been thinking a lot about DevRel, which is interesting. So developer relations for anyone who hasn&#39;t heard that term. But really like advocating for DevRel internally, and just making the case for, for this and Trag has this little cartoon that he put together on LinkedIn and the, office space meme of what is it that you do here, is very timely because DevRel is very different at every company.  [[00:29:54](#t=0h29m54s &quot;Jump to 00:29:54 in this episode&quot;)] And I think I came across a quote from, I think it was Kelsey Hightower. That was like, Debra is [[00:30:00](#t=0h30m0s &quot;Jump to 00:30:00 in this episode&quot;)] whatever the person paying you says it is. And I understand that cause that&#39;s who&#39;s paying the bills. But I also think that there&#39;s some like first principles that you have to think about, yes.  [[00:30:11](#t=0h30m11s &quot;Jump to 00:30:11 in this episode&quot;)] And it&#39;s yes, it&#39;s whatever, every company is different, but at the same time, there&#39;s still these tried and true things. and we&#39;re very different. Different. I think we&#39;ve talked about this before. Like we do a lot of product launches. We do a lot of working with engineers as they&#39;re developing products and features to like, make sure that they&#39;re going to have a good developer experience. And we don&#39;t do a lot of the content creation. And, going to talks type of DevRel, which is very, it&#39;s a different flavor. It&#39;s very valid. Some teams have the person who goes to conferences, the person who does content, the person who does the internal stuff, maybe slightly sales engineer, DevRel type thing too.  [[00:30:50](#t=0h30m50s &quot;Jump to 00:30:50 in this episode&quot;)] And there&#39;s only two of us at Discord. So we&#39;re doing like a roadshow where we go to all of our, all the different functions of the company. Teach people what we do [[00:31:00](#t=0h31m0s &quot;Jump to 00:31:00 in this episode&quot;)] and how to like interface with us. And that&#39;s just making me think a lot more about what do we want it to be? What do we want to do in the future?  [[00:31:08](#t=0h31m8s &quot;Jump to 00:31:08 in this episode&quot;)] What do we, what have we always done? What are we doing today? And so immersing myself in DevRel. meta world for a little bit of go, we&#39;re going to go to DevRelCon in July. I&#39;ve been reading a lot of this blog posts from, Slack and Stripe and all those kinds of things. I have my own opinions, but I&#39;ll start trying to evolve some of those opinions and maybe put them into action. Right.  [[00:31:34](#t=0h31m34s &quot;Jump to 00:31:34 in this episode&quot;)] I definitely struggled a little bit with how to balance between all those different flavors of DevRel and not just try to do all of them at once and lean into the ones that you&#39;re good at.  [[00:31:42](#t=0h31m42s &quot;Jump to 00:31:42 in this episode&quot;)] Also, something that I learned from Trag, When he was my manager, it was this fact about how common burnout is in dev rel and that like usually people only last 18 months or whatever, and then they switch that they came into it from a engineering role or they&#39;re going out of it into an engineering role or they came into [[00:32:00](#t=0h32m0s &quot;Jump to 00:32:00 in this episode&quot;)] it from, product manager type role or technical writer or, Documentarian, And then, yeah. And then maybe they leave or maybe they leave as a documentarian, maybe they leave as a product manager, but, I think that he did a great job as the manager of making it, a marathon and making sure that everyone was feeling productive. And, I think his, mindfulness around that was really powerful for our team at that time.  [[00:32:28](#t=0h32m28s &quot;Jump to 00:32:28 in this episode&quot;)] And yeah, I&#39;ve definitely seen some other organizations where that is not true. And it they have a lot more churn in the DevRel team. But,  [[00:32:37](#t=0h32m37s &quot;Jump to 00:32:37 in this episode&quot;)] like a discord, like we don&#39;t have a Debrel manager, like track, We are embedded on an engineering team, which is great. Like I would prefer to be on engineering over marketing. Marketing is important. But  [[00:32:50](#t=0h32m50s &quot;Jump to 00:32:50 in this episode&quot;)] unfortunately, like working at orbit, we saw DevRel teams of all sizes and types and making a single product for DevRel was hard when it doesn&#39;t look the same at [[00:33:00](#t=0h33m0s &quot;Jump to 00:33:00 in this episode&quot;)] every company and the goals are different, even KPIs, like where we find it hard pressed to define actual metrics for what we do. Like we know what we do. It&#39;s, but then when you get asked, what do you do? It&#39;s so many little things. Like oftentimes it&#39;s reactive comms, sometimes it&#39;s proactive, long term thinking. Usually we don&#39;t get as much time for that as we all probably want. the burnout is interesting.  [[00:33:26](#t=0h33m26s &quot;Jump to 00:33:26 in this episode&quot;)] Cause if you&#39;re an engineer, like I would say that&#39;s, it&#39;s a difficult job, but. It&#39;s different in that you know what things you need to do. And maybe there&#39;s some surprises, but like for the most part, you have maybe tickets or things that you need to get done, but you don&#39;t have the community also, to think about as much, I think you still should, you hopefully have a connection to the customer and stuff like that.  [[00:33:49](#t=0h33m49s &quot;Jump to 00:33:49 in this episode&quot;)] But sometimes we just have to put out some fires in the community. And sometimes our tooling doesn&#39;t work. that something happens in our, in SDK, every SDK that we release, every new surface we release is [[00:34:00](#t=0h34m0s &quot;Jump to 00:34:00 in this episode&quot;)] like more surface area. yeah, just trying to quantify that and I think it&#39;ll help when we get to like performance reviews again.  [[00:34:06](#t=0h34m6s &quot;Jump to 00:34:06 in this episode&quot;)] And just thinking backwards from that, what do we want to be able to say? We did instead of just reacting to things all the time and then trying to compile the list of all the things that we reacted to over the last six months.  [[00:34:18](#t=0h34m18s &quot;Jump to 00:34:18 in this episode&quot;)] In hindsight, I&#39;m really grateful for, The flavor of DevRel that I tended to lean towards was the content creation one. And there&#39;s, that creates so many like publicly visible artifacts that at the end of the, at the end of the performance cycle or whatever, it was easy to be like, okay, here&#39;s, 35 videos that I made and five blog posts and whatever.  [[00:34:41](#t=0h34m41s &quot;Jump to 00:34:41 in this episode&quot;)] And, which is much harder when it&#39;s okay, yeah, I&#39;m doing these internal docs things that we can&#39;t even release because the product isn&#39;t ready. That&#39;s or oh, I spent five weeks of my time this quarter. Triage and things in, yeah. In like discord support while working with developers, trying to help them integrate, that&#39;s like much harder to show [[00:35:00](#t=0h35m0s &quot;Jump to 00:35:00 in this episode&quot;)] different activities.  [[00:35:00](#t=0h35m0s &quot;Jump to 00:35:00 in this episode&quot;)] Docs is even tricky because it&#39;s like, there is that can a developer do the thing, yes or no, but also different developers may not be able to do the thing just depending on their background. And they may not have used something similar. So like,I think like I got something similar when we really started SDK for activities. there was like a quote where it was like, the docs were a little weird before, and now they&#39;re not. Now they&#39;re good. I was like, okay, I&#39;m going to put that in my performance review. I guess that&#39;s a good review. But, and I&#39;ve seen like in Stripe, you have they&#39;ve got all sorts of like things that each page where it&#39;s was this page helpful?  [[00:35:37](#t=0h35m37s &quot;Jump to 00:35:37 in this episode&quot;)] Was it missing anything? that kind of stuff I&#39;d like us to do so that we can get a little bit better sense of the journey. And we know that if you land on the docks today, you need to go through. Yeah. World build on your own. And we need to do some world building ourselves, but, trying to get into some generation of reference docs and stuff so that right now they&#39;re all handwritten, it&#39;s pretty painful.  [[00:35:59](#t=0h35m59s &quot;Jump to 00:35:59 in this episode&quot;)] So if we [[00:36:00](#t=0h36m0s &quot;Jump to 00:36:00 in this episode&quot;)] can clear our plate of that, then it gives us more time to write out. The customer like developer journey, maybe to start getting into video. we really want to do video, but video, as is expensive to maintain, expensive to create if anything goes out of date, the suddenly the videos are out of date and so they&#39;re not as easy to go find where and when and all of that.  [[00:36:22](#t=0h36m22s &quot;Jump to 00:36:22 in this episode&quot;)] someone can crack that nut, that would be great. just make a product that makes a maintainable video that you can push updates  [[00:36:28](#t=0h36m28s &quot;Jump to 00:36:28 in this episode&quot;)] It&#39;s it&#39;s like a bunch of. Road signs. It&#39;s get video, right? It&#39;s okay, we&#39;re  [[00:36:34](#t=0h36m34s &quot;Jump to 00:36:34 in this episode&quot;)] gonna we&#39;re gonna rebase this one merge This is good up until here and drop in the new one And this maybe this is where like using a vtuber avatar or something is usefullet&#39;s just edit the  [[00:36:47](#t=0h36m47s &quot;Jump to 00:36:47 in this episode&quot;)] script and drop in the new screenshots.  [[00:36:50](#t=0h36m50s &quot;Jump to 00:36:50 in this episode&quot;)] We&#39;re done.  [[00:36:50](#t=0h36m50s &quot;Jump to 00:36:50 in this episode&quot;)] Yeah. Yeah. So there, have you seen the react video thing or I think it&#39;s called react video, there&#39;s like some tool that lets you build [[00:37:00](#t=0h37m0s &quot;Jump to 00:37:00 in this episode&quot;)] videos with react.  [[00:37:01](#t=0h37m1s &quot;Jump to 00:37:01 in this episode&quot;)] Here we are back on the react train. react.  [[00:37:04](#t=0h37m4s &quot;Jump to 00:37:04 in this episode&quot;)] it, I don&#39;t know if it&#39;s video react. It&#39;s like it generates, gosh.yeah, that&#39;s it.  [[00:37:12](#t=0h37m12s &quot;Jump to 00:37:12 in this episode&quot;)] Yeah. Remotion. um,this is pretty sweet. And my, like one of my ideas, long time ago was like, use remotion to build the video in code. And you could use like code snippets in all the different languages that you support for your SDK. Then write your script and then you can have your script translated to other like spoken languages.  [[00:37:34](#t=0h37m34s &quot;Jump to 00:37:34 in this episode&quot;)] And then you can just spit out just like this giant multiplexed, like set of videos that get uploaded. And it&#39;s just, it&#39;s the same simple topic. But. It&#39;s then generated and also then you could make a PR to it  [[00:37:46](#t=0h37m46s &quot;Jump to 00:37:46 in this episode&quot;)] And  [[00:37:46](#t=0h37m46s &quot;Jump to 00:37:46 in this episode&quot;)] then if you could drop in a new explainer, new screenshots. Yeah. Interesting.  [[00:37:52](#t=0h37m52s &quot;Jump to 00:37:52 in this episode&quot;)] It&#39;s there&#39;s always another thing to do.  [[00:37:54](#t=0h37m54s &quot;Jump to 00:37:54 in this episode&quot;)] yes, always.  [[00:37:57](#t=0h37m57s &quot;Jump to 00:37:57 in this episode&quot;)] Nice.  [[00:37:58](#t=0h37m58s &quot;Jump to 00:37:58 in this episode&quot;)] What do you say? Should we call it there?[[00:38:00](#t=0h38m0s &quot;Jump to 00:38:00 in this episode&quot;)]  [[00:38:00](#t=0h38m0s &quot;Jump to 00:38:00 in this episode&quot;)] I think that&#39;ll do it. Enjoy. enjoy the heat pump experiments. I&#39;m curious to follow along. definitely share, share your updates and don&#39;t,don&#39;t electrocute yourself. Don&#39;t blow yourself up.  [[00:38:13](#t=0h38m13s &quot;Jump to 00:38:13 in this episode&quot;)] We&#39;ll try not to. And, yeah, good luck on the race. Hopefully, you have a good first leg and then those other ones should be all downhill from there. enjoy. Yeah. All right. you can find all the links to the resources we talked about today over at buildandlearn. dev. Thanks for listening.  [[00:38:31](#t=0h38m31s &quot;Jump to 00:38:31 in this episode&quot;)] Bye friends.  [[00:38:36](#t=0h38m36s &quot;Jump to 00:38:36 in this episode&quot;)] ​  All audio, artwork, episode descriptions and notes are property of CJ Avilla, Colin Loretz, for Build and Learn, and published with permission by Transistor, Inc.  [**Broadcast by**](https://transistor.fm &quot;Broadcast by Transistor.fm&quot;)

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