44: Emerging Tech, a Resource Renaissance, and Embracing Ember with Preston Sego

Robbie Wagner: [00:09] Hey everybody, welcome to another Whiskey Web and Whatnot with myself, Robbie Wagner, my cohost as always, Charles William Carpenter III, and our guest today, I believe. Are you also a third, Preston?

Preston Sego: [00:26] I am, yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [00:27] I thought I saw that. So what's your full name? Let's just make it all official for all of us here.

Preston Sego: [00:33] Yeah. So my first name is not Preston. My full name is Lewis Preston Sego III.

Robbie Wagner: [00:41] Nice.

Preston Sego: [00:42] And I think I've heard some of your previous podcasts and there are some other people who are going by their middle names and also have suffixes.

Chuck Carpenter: [00:54] Yeah, it's more popular than you expect.

Preston Sego: [00:58] Yeah, surprising to me.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:00] We're going to change the theme of the podcast to just thirds only.

Preston Sego: [01:04] Alright, I'm in.

Robbie Wagner: [01:04] Well then, I can't be on. You guys got it from here.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:09] Yeah, thanks for joining us, Robbie. You're out.

Robbie Wagner: [01:12] But anyway, most people probably don't even realize that your name is Preston because you are NullVoxPopuli everywhere. What's the origins behind that?

Preston Sego: [01:22] Okay, so I think it was in college or university if we have international listeners. So my old alias was from way back when I was, I think, 13 and I had just grown out of that, so I was looking for something new and I wanted something to reflect what I do and kind of my view on the world a bit. So I had already done a lot of programming coursework, so programming is going to be a big part of who I am. And then at the time and today, this is a little cringey, but I was into V for Vendetta before it was cool before it had all these connotations added around it. And at the time I also had the main character, V, his speech with like 40 some V words memorized and one of the phrases in there was vox populi, which means the voice of the people. So since I was into programming, I was like, okay, how do I combine these things? And then null is kind of like not nothing. So it loosely kind of can be Englishized to no voice of the people or a non-existent voice of the people, which kind of reflects the bleak look I have on how we're all kind of cogs in a machine that we can't control.

Chuck Carpenter: [03:00] We better drink before we get too political here, although we get too far into that, but that's an interesting deal. Yeah, I knew you were more clever than me.

Robbie Wagner: [03:13] Yeah. Let's go ahead and start with this whisky here. I did not open mine yet. Hopefully it's not hard to open.

Chuck Carpenter: [03:19] See, pro tip is open before you start recording.

Robbie Wagner: [03:24]Yeah, I usually do, but I've been busy setting up this room behind me, which you can see the awesome like, slop sink behind me.

Chuck Carpenter: [03:33] Yeah, it's very...

Robbie Wagner: [03:34] Looks great.

Chuck Carpenter: [03:35] It's premium.

Robbie Wagner: [03:36] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [03:36] So this is the Malahat.

Preston Sego: [03:38] Good sound.

Chuck Carpenter: [03:39] Yeah. Malahat Spirits Company handcrafted, not by machines. It is 100% rye. It's like it's small batch from San Diego, which not everybody knows means whale's vagina. What I could find on the Internet is it's aged at least two years in 30-gallon barrels, and it is 92 proof. See where that goes.

Robbie Wagner: [04:05] I was not prepared for the whale's vagina joke.

Chuck Carpenter: [04:09] I mean, how could you not expect that to come anytime you say, San Diego, that's what it means.

Preston Sego: [04:17] Smells fun.

Chuck Carpenter: [04:19] Yeah. Kind of like grassy smell for me. Like fresh cut grass clippings. A little musty.

Robbie Wagner: [04:30] Getting a little, like kiwi on the smell.

Chuck Carpenter: [04:34] Interesting. You always seem to pick up on the sweeter smells.

Robbie Wagner: [04:38] I don't know, just trying to identify something that's not like just a normal whiskey taste.

Preston Sego: [04:46] I think for me, I'm tasting like no, I'm not at all whiskey connoisseur at all. But I'm feeling a little cherry.

Chuck Carpenter: [04:57] Yeah, I could kind of get some of that in the initial flavoring, and then I get a little bitter. What kind of bitter, though. And then it just has that woody leathery finish for me. Not bad. Pretty smooth. A little hug in there. But I could see some fruitness in the beginning and cherry. That kind of makes sense for me. Got that, like, sour tart. Kind of sweet. Not bad. You can tell it's a little bit young.

Robbie Wagner: [05:26] Yeah, it's not super robust. Like 100% rye, I was expecting to knock me out of my chair.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:31] Yeah, like a lot peppery or something. Yeah. Not bad.

Robbie Wagner: [05:36] Not bad.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:37] So not bad is the official review, I guess we can decide a little more on. Yeah. What made us select this one? Malahat. I never heard of it.

Robbie Wagner: [05:48] I went on, Fine Cask, who should sponsor us if they ever happen to listen to this and just went to the rye section and picked one.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:58] There you go. They really sold you. It does have a ship on the front.

Preston Sego: [06:01] I like their label.

Chuck Carpenter: [06:02] Yeah, it's got a ship on the front. And we are all about nautical themes.

Robbie Wagner: [06:08] Fun fact, it did not have a ship on the front on Fine Cask. I don't think. I think they've changed their label.

Preston Sego: [06:14] Just for you.

Chuck Carpenter: [06:15] Yeah.

Preston Sego: [06:16] Special shipment.

Chuck Carpenter: [06:17] That's right. It was a barrel pick and custom labeled. No, not at all. But yeah, I could see this as being fairly drinkable. I'm going to dive into the next part, which is our eight tentacle strict rating system, and I'm going to just kind of compare it to ryes. I'm going to start to segregate a little bit between my brown juices and compared to other ryes, I would put this at like a four or five, kind of in that realm. It's not bad. It's drinkable, but it's not like, oh, wow, I can't wait to have this over, like Sagamore. Sagamore. Think about it that way. Sagamore is kind of our rye. It's like a sweet spot. It's got a good price point. I have no idea what this cost, and that usually does affect my thoughts. On it.

Robbie Wagner: [07:05] I think it's like 50 or $60. Not terrible.

Chuck Carpenter: [07:08] Yeah, $60. I'd get, like, a barrel strength Sagamore before I got this, so I'm going to give it a four.

Robbie Wagner: [07:14] For me, it's got good flavor. It's got nothing that disappoints me from being a traditional rye. I think it's too young. It tastes kind of watery. So for that only, I'm going to say five.

Preston Sego: [07:28] All right. Yeah. So I like that. I tasted a flavor that one of you also detected, so that's extra points for me. I have a coffee subscription, and they have the flavors on them, and I like to try to play the game of guess the flavor before looking at the bag. I'm often wrong, and then this does go down smoothly for me. And since I'm not a whiskey person, I think that's a good quality to have. So I'm going to go maybe five and a half, six. I can definitely drink this again, share it with people, be like, hey this is, yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [08:12] This is good stuff. This is going to taste good. And there's cherry in there, right?

Preston Sego: [08:15] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [08:15] And I say that no one is wrong, though. There's no wrong guesses. I mean, people's palettes are different, and you can influence it by throwing words out there that they might be able to associate similarly, but there's no wrong answer necessarily. And a wise man once said to me, the best whiskey is the one you like. That's the best one for you.

Robbie Wagner: [08:37] Yeah. I'm sure there are people that like Jack Daniels better than everything else. They're not me, but yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [08:45] They aren't me either. That's weird. But hey, if it works for them, it's fine. I don't care. Yeah. Get the thing you like. Yeah, we're all just consuming it.

Preston Sego: [08:55] Yeah. That's a good perspective on life to have, regardless of what it is. Whiskey Web or Whatnot.

Chuck Carpenter: [09:05] That's right. The best framework is the one you like.

Preston Sego: [09:08] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [09:10] That's a good segue.

Robbie Wagner: [09:10] There's some debate there.

Chuck Carpenter: [09:13] Well, define best. It's so ambiguous in a way. Like, best experience, best for you to create the project, best for consumers of said application. Like, I don't know what's best mean.

Robbie Wagner: [09:26] Well define framework, too, because React is not a framework.

Chuck Carpenter: [09:30] It's not, it's a library.

Preston Sego: [09:31] That's gotten ambiguous.

Chuck Carpenter: [09:32] Yeah, I guess you can't really build an app with just React. I guess you can make up a bunch of other parts.

Robbie Wagner: [09:39] Building it with just Glimmer.

Preston Sego: [09:41] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [09:41] One time I built a slideshow in just Glimmer.

Preston Sego: [09:46] Nice. I haven't done that. Well I tried to make a Glimmer app once, and then it aired and that was the end of it.

Chuck Carpenter: [09:54] This was like five, six years ago or something. Like, right after it was announced at EmberConf, and I was still doing Ember, and I did a Local.js talk on it and did my slides in Glimmer.

Preston Sego: [10:08] Nice.

Chuck Carpenter: [10:08] It was like, oh, that was cool. And then I never ever touched it again.

Preston Sego: [10:11] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [10:13] Story of my life.

Robbie Wagner: [10:14] So, yeah, you've been around the Ember community a while doing lots of things, always see new experiments and add ons and things coming out from you. So that's pretty cool. Do you want to talk a little bit about how you got into Ember?

Preston Sego: [10:28] Yeah. So it started with my first job out of college, and the segue to this was in 2011, where I was hired full time by a local company who was using Rails. And one of my co workers, a year or two later was really pushing for using a single page app and kind of trying to get the interface more interactive and app-like. And they chose Ember. I wasn't touching any of this at the time, but I was doing more backend stuff, real stuff. But after I left the company and wanted to try starting my own thing, which was an event registration system, I was like, all right, I heard of this Ember thing. My coworker, who I trust and value their opinion very highly, really liked Ember. So I tried it, and this was pre-Ember one, still so very old, and I had forgotten all of this. So I had kind of recently talked about how I'd gotten into Ember at EmberFest. I had totally forgotten all of this past Ember experience, and I don't know if that was just because of the trauma of using something pre-1.0, but it was interesting. I don't know if I finished porting the realty right to Ember.

Preston Sego: [12:05] I eventually sunset the project because it was more work than I was making money from it. But that's how I got introduced to Ember. And at the time when I was asking most of the questions in the Ember Slack, there was this person, Alex Beller. They helped me learn everything I know today. So shout out to them wherever they are.

Robbie Wagner: [12:27] I think Canada, right?

Preston Sego: [12:28] Maybe.

Robbie Wagner: [12:30] Last I checked. I don't know that's from Isle of Code, right? Or am I getting that wrong?

Preston Sego: [12:36] I don't know.

Robbie Wagner: [12:37] I don't know. Anyway, not important. Continue.

Preston Sego: [12:40] All right. Yeah, so I sunset that project, and then I was doing Angular and React for a long time, and I was really liking React. So this takes me to 2019 when I was kind of like on the side, revamping my Ember knowledge just for fun. I had seen some interesting things happening. I don't know where. Maybe I was still in the Ember slack. Maybe I saw a post on Twitter or something. But I saw that TypeScript and native classes were becoming a thing in Ember. And this is when native classes were still fairly new. Like React was already using them before they migrated away from them. But knowing what Ember was and knowing that I could use all this modern stuff was really interesting to me. So this was around Ember 3.1, so I was trying to use TypeScript native classes, and then as soon as I could, I picked up decorators and I built a chat app because the scope of that can start small, and then it gets ridiculous if you try to do anything serious about it. But it was a really good way to figure out how to use the framework.

Preston Sego: [14:01] But then in 2019, I spoke at EmberConf comparing React and Ember, and a now coworker was like, hey, there's this company Crowd Strike. You should apply. I was like, they sound cool. Security is cool. I had a big interest in security in college, and I applied, and I'm still there today. And now I do Ember all the time.

Robbie Wagner: [14:29] Nice.

Chuck Carpenter: [14:29] Yeah, I remember that talk, actually. Yeah, I remember your comparison talk, and I think you wrote a follow-up article, or maybe it was the other way around, but I was like, now see, this is nice. This isn't like a gang war where you pick your team and like, this thing is because of this. This thing's because of this. You gave a really clear delineation between this is how it's done here and this is how it's done here, and they accomplished similar goals. I really appreciated that, and I feel like it was just like a whole different context than anybody had taken in that comparison.

Preston Sego: [15:03] Yeah, I really like clinical comparisons between things, because if you have any emotion whatsoever in a comparison article, you're going to upset one of the sides and you don't want to do that.

Robbie Wagner: [15:18] Yeah, I don't mind.

Chuck Carpenter: [15:19] That's why we don't let Robbie write about hooks. You're really angry about hooks and functional components, and I'm like, I don't know.

Preston Sego: [15:29] I've had so many mixed feelings about hooks and functional components.

Chuck Carpenter: [15:33] Yeah.

Preston Sego: [15:34] So I adopted them pretty quick when they came out, and I love them. But when auto tracking started coming out, it got me thinking, maybe hooks is a step backwards. Yeah, we're starting to add these dependency lists again. I know why React is doing that, but it feels like an ergonomics loss, and I'm excited to see what StarBeam can do with that and trying to pay attention to StarBeam, I haven't used it yet, but it kind of looks like it's bringing auto tracking to React. That seems cool.

Chuck Carpenter: [16:14] Yeah, I agree.

Robbie Wagner: [16:15] Yeah, that's definitely my plan, if I ever have to do React, is make it as Embery as possible and just go with it.

Chuck Carpenter: [16:23] Hey, there's some people that have an entire business model around that. They're like, oh, they have some good ideas, but it's not the popular thing. So let's pull it over here. There's some of that. Yeah, I'm kind of like 50-50. I actually like functional components, I think dumb functional components, just very straightforward and easy. Hooks, on the other hand, is just like, well, this is better than Sagas and Funk and all this other thing.

Preston Sego: [16:53] Facts.

Robbie Wagner: [16:54] Yeah, I hated all that, too.

Chuck Carpenter: [16:55] Marginally.

Preston Sego: [16:56] Yeah. I mean, Solid.js makes it good. They're kind of the Ember plus React, best of both worlds.

Chuck Carpenter: [17:03] Interesting.

Preston Sego: [17:03] I haven't used it professionally?

Chuck Carpenter: [17:05] No, I read some really good things about it. And that's funny because we were talking about some frameworks earlier today and I was trying to remember the name of that one. Boom, you did it.

Robbie Wagner: [17:15] I think we might be talking to the guy from or some guy from that, let me check here.

Chuck Carpenter: [17:22] I don't know what we're doing. I just show up to these things. Robbie does the planning and reaching out and all that fun stuff.

Robbie Wagner: [17:30] Yeah, it's a guy from Solid.js, so we'll hear from him sometime in the next few weeks.

Chuck Carpenter: [17:35] Yeah. I like StarBeam abstracting that reactivity and bringing it to the rest of the world. Maybe that will be like a really smart, cool framework that goes together. That's like StarBeam, React, Reactbeam. I'm actually reacting now.

Preston Sego: [17:52] I hope so.

Robbie Wagner: [17:53] Yeah.

Preston Sego: [17:53] I've learned that it's not the first attempt at a agnostic reactivity system. Vue has one, but it's using like the name it's published under heavily implies that it's just for Vue. So I've been wondering if that's been holding it back, but I don't know. I'm hoping StarBeam takes off though.

Robbie Wagner: [18:14] People just don't use stuff unless someone says it's cool. Like that's the bottom line. You have to really be doing research to find a thing that's better. Like if it doesn't have 50,000 stars on GitHub. And everyone's like, oh yeah, this is cool. And you're like, all right, well now I have to look and see if it's actually cool and dig into it. Whereas I could just take everyone's word for something and use that.

Chuck Carpenter: [18:36] You get the right people evangelizing it right. You need this whole and then that makes a difference for sure.

Preston Sego: [18:43] Hiring easier.

Chuck Carpenter: [18:44] Yeah, well, I mean, cart or the horse thing, but Remix is benefiting quite a bit from Kent and I'm sure adoption will kind of follow.

Preston Sego: [18:54] Remix is interesting because they keep posting all these things that are just like, look at the MDN docs, and then I've been trying to retweet them and like here's how you do this in Ember. Following the MDN docs. Yeah. So what you can do two-way binding on inputs without any Ember stuff using just MDM's documentation.

Chuck Carpenter: [19:19] Wait, I thought two-way binding bad. What happened to data down, actions up, and weren't two-way binding?

Preston Sego: [19:25] Well, yeah, the only exception though is on your form inputs because no one wants to put value and on change on every input. It's a lot of work. Yeah, and then Svelte brought it back.

Chuck Carpenter: [19:39] Yeah, right? Yeah. Server-side render. Basically the server renders our pages. Now we are single-page apps and now actually, since hardware upgrades and edge workers and blah, blah, blah, all these other things, we just render sites on the server again. So I don't know.

Robbie Wagner: [19:57] It's all PHP.

Chuck Carpenter: [19:58] Yeah, we just going back to PHP, basically. WordPress is cool again. Is that what we're trying to save you? Please don't.

Preston Sego: [20:05] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [20:06] That's a stretch. Yeah. So I guess I haven't really kept up with everything you've been experimenting with. Do you want to tell us a little bit about some of the things you've done recently that you're particularly excited about?

Preston Sego: [20:21] Yeah, there's a couple of things. So the thing that people can use today and is pretty stable, it's been out for a while, is a library I have called Ember Resources, and that is a spiritual successor to a library called Ember Could Get Used To This from zuraq or one of the Chris's. But yeah, it is kind of trying to be I don't know if I'd say a polyfill, but some of the reactivity ideas that StarBeam is bringing Ember Resources has, and then it's like resources to me are like the missing gap since Octane. So Octane was introduced a couple of years ago and you couldn't comfortably convert your old app into all of these new auto-tracking paradigms because we just had concepts that were missing. One of those are resources. They allow you to turn nonsynchronous stuff into derived data. And that could be evented things. It could be something as simple as an Async function. It could be something that maintains its own state. They are helpers that can be used in both templates and JavaScript and provide some API for you to use. And the goal is for you to not care when the value will exist. You can just be certain that it will have a value. You don't need to worry about awaiting or calling events on it or error handling or anything. Just takes care of everything for you.

Robbie Wagner: [22:06] So is this kind of similar then, like on the JavaScript side, to what the templates have kind of always done in Ember, where like, a thing might be loading or whatever, and whenever it comes in, the template will just show it, but you can now kind of just say, just do that in JavaScript.

Preston Sego: [22:23] Kind of. So in the template, that only works if the loading state the value and all of that tracked. Like if you just had a promise you wouldn't be able to resolve that value. There are some helpers to get around that, but they wrapped reactivity around a process. But most generally that is a solid use case for resources.

Robbie Wagner: [22:48] Got you. Yeah, I'd seen them when zuraq had the experiment thing and never really read into what they were or what I should use them for. Yeah, because there's so many things like that out there. Him and Robert Jackson and people just throw up crazy-named repos. And you're like, I don't know what this is.

Chuck Carpenter: [23:07] Yeah, why should I use that?

Preston Sego: [23:09] Yeah, I think the most obvious and beneficial use case is for data loading. Just because loading anything async is a pain in the butt. And I have another library. Ember Data Resources. Which I don't know if anyone uses. But it takes like the find all, find record query, all those methods and turns them into resources so you can use them in the template and in JavaScript and kind of just use direct data patterns to work with data and know that you'll have an up to date record or model or whatever it is.

Robbie Wagner: [23:45] So how does that work? If it is like you try to access it in another place and it's still loading, does it just wait, it awaits internally or something?

Preston Sego: [23:55] For the Ember data case? I don't know. I think it would depend on how Ember Data itself handles concurrent requests to the same resource. If it were up to me, I would kind of treat those as the same and then just have both in a pending or loading state until the request finishes.

Robbie Wagner: [24:16] Got you. Makes sense.

Preston Sego: [24:17] I'm not an Ember data expert.

Robbie Wagner: [24:19] Who is other than Runspired.

Chuck Carpenter: [24:22] I was going to say we know a guy.

Preston Sego: [24:23] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [24:23] And I bet he'd be happy to teach you things.

Preston Sego: [24:27] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [24:27] This is how you do that. Please review some pull requests.

Robbie Wagner: [24:31] Yeah, there was a bug in Ember data, or there was until last night and it had been sitting in PR and I pinged him and was like, hey, can we merge this? He's like, okay, so he's responsive and gets stuff done. He just needs a little push sometimes.

Chuck Carpenter: [24:45] Squeaky wheel.

Preston Sego: [24:46] There's another resources demo that I really like, Yehuda came up with. It is a clock and all it does is just set interval on 1 second and then update the value. Just sets a value to new date and then you can like in your templates just have a reference to this resource and it'll just update on its own. And what I like about that is that in React doing anything with set timeout or set interval is a pain in the butt and using a resource to have a recurringly updated value, it's just so easy. So I really like that demo.

Chuck Carpenter: [25:28] Nice, very interesting. So that's a demo using resources associated with StarBean or associated with your stuff?

Preston Sego: [25:37] Yes.

Chuck Carpenter: [25:38] Okay, yes, both.

Preston Sego: [25:41] Yeah, I have a demo with resources and then Yehuda has a bunch of demos on the StarBeam docs.

Robbie Wagner: [25:49] But no docs on the StarBeam docs or at least last I checked.

Preston Sego: [25:53] There are docs on using Starbucks with React and information about the timeline.

Robbie Wagner: [26:02] Maybe I didn't look hard enough.

Preston Sego: [26:03] They're new.

Robbie Wagner: [26:04] Okay. Yeah, I looked like the day after his talk and it was like docs are coming or something.

Preston Sego: [26:12] Yeah, they were not there.

Robbie Wagner: [26:15] So let's see what else is exciting and I guess anything. I mean you've been into React and Ember and JS in general. Like what are you excited about coming out soon?

Preston Sego: [26:28] So tech-wise I'm excited about a lot of things. Laris Expedition or Ember is pretty cool. I really like the template. Call it if you imagine JSX with the template tag and then ignore JSX in between, that could be how to describe that. But the RC is first class component templates and it solves the biggest complaints that new hires have at my work where people are just like, I don't know how to find this thing. How do you find the thing?

Robbie Wagner: [27:04] Isn't it right next to the JS?

Preston Sego: [27:07] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [27:07] Or is it not?

Preston Sego: [27:08] Well, when we're using the template, the first class component template syntax, it will be right next to the thing. So you're importing a component from a library, you'll see that in the file?

Robbie Wagner: [27:22] Yeah.

Preston Sego: [27:22] Like you won't need to...

Robbie Wagner: [27:24] Know if you made it or.

Preston Sego: [27:25] CD into note modules and then yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [27:29] Okay. Yeah, that's a big benefit.

Preston Sego: [27:31] Yeah and then kind of outside of programming, I really like the framework laptop. It is fully open source hardware and they have this whole community around designing little components for the pluggable, USB slots. So the interface for these things is all USBC and then they give you like a two-inch square by I don't know how many millimeters tall, but anything you can fit in that space, you can make a custom port for because it's USBC, you can hot swap these things out while the computer's on. So I have USB A and C ports and HDMI port that I can plug in if I need it. Some people have an SD card slot that they can plug in.

Robbie Wagner: [28:22] So how does that work with like, if you design one right, are there like third-party stores where you just don't know if it's actually legit, or do they all end up in getting vetted and released through the real company or something?

Preston Sego: [28:36] I don't know, I haven't bought one yet. Okay, like I bought the official ones.

Chuck Carpenter: [28:41] Got you.

Preston Sego: [28:42] But I assume that the development and creation of these things would require whoever is doing the creating to figure out how to print a circuit board or how to outsource that right, and then 3D print the hardware to stick it in the machine.

Chuck Carpenter: [28:59] Oh, you even got expansion cards. 1 TB expansion card looking now. Very interesting. So here's the real question. Can you run a Hackintosh on it?

Preston Sego: [29:12] I haven't tried. I am violently against Mac OS.

Chuck Carpenter: [29:21] This is what inspires a voice in NullVox.

Preston Sego: [29:25] Yes.

Robbie Wagner: [29:25] Yeah, say more. What's wrong with Mac OS?

Preston Sego: [29:29] Yeah, I think Mac OS is actively hostile to developers and that is in part because Apple has a very specific goal for their hardware. And I feel like developers kind of become second-class citizens. So maybe you're familiar with installing Xcode to do literally anything on your computer. But if you're using Ubuntu, for example, that's my favorite Linux, you only need to install one package called Build Essentials and it takes less than a minute. And I think last time I looked at Xcode, it's like many gigabytes and takes a long time to install and download. So for me it is much faster to have some machine, install Linux on it, set up my dev environment, and then get to programming than it is to have a pre-installed Mac OS and then get that going.

Robbie Wagner: [30:26] Yeah, there are definitely a lot of extra steps. Like, you got to start with Homebrew and then install all the things. I usually get a different terminal immediately and all that stuff.

Chuck Carpenter: [30:39] I just have a dotfiles repo and bring that, run those scripts, and then kind of does that in the background for me. But I don't sit down. I go make some coffee, and then I make a second coffee.

Robbie Wagner: [30:52] To drink while you're drinking your coffee.

Chuck Carpenter: [30:55] Yeah, and then it just tells you the time-lapse. So I'm not disagreeing. I'm just saying that I don't sit there and hit the buttons. I can let these things happen.

Robbie Wagner: [31:05] Yeah, fair enough.

Preston Sego: [31:06] That's hard to beat second coffee.

Chuck Carpenter: [31:10] I think you said second whiskey. I sure will.

Preston Sego: [31:13] I also poured a second whiskey.

Chuck Carpenter: [31:17] I'm not sure where you're located, but for me, it's still like 2:45, but it's Friday.

Preston Sego: [31:25] Yeah. 5:44. I'm in Indianapolis.

Chuck Carpenter: [31:30] I've been there.

Preston Sego: [31:32] Crossroads of America.

Chuck Carpenter: [31:33] Yeah. I had some friends in college that went to schools there, so a few times. I can't say I've seen much of Indi.

Preston Sego: [31:40] That's okay.

Chuck Carpenter: [31:42] Yeah. A lot of cornfields on the way there.

Preston Sego: [31:45] I mean, corn is delicious.

Chuck Carpenter: [31:46] It's in everything.

Preston Sego: [31:48] You go too far south and they mess it up somehow.

Chuck Carpenter: [31:51] Oh, those fighting words. Those fighting words. What are you trying to say?

Robbie Wagner: [31:54] Like street corn or something?

Chuck Carpenter: [31:56] Yeah, like street corn or like okay, Southern corn slathered in butter or whatever. That's fine for you.

Preston Sego: [32:01] Well, they burn it.

Chuck Carpenter: [32:02] Yeah.

Preston Sego: [32:03] I think it was Nashville, and apologies to anyone who loves the corn in Nashville, but I just wanted a corn on the cob grilled, but they burned half of it, and I don't like the char.

Robbie Wagner: [32:17] Yeah, fair.

Chuck Carpenter: [32:18] Well, I don't know. I don't think Nashville is known for its corn, primarily. I think it's known for its.

Robbie Wagner: [32:25] The music, maybe.

Chuck Carpenter: [32:26] Yeah, the music for sure feels like everywhere in the south is known for barbecue. They're corn-based beverages. Maybe Jack Daniels has corn in it. Jack Daniels is essentially bourbon. Aside from it being filtered in maple-flavored charcoal. That's what kills it.

Preston Sego: [32:44] Interesting.

Chuck Carpenter: [32:45] Yeah. So sour mash is a normal process for bourbons and everything about it. It is primarily corn. That's all federally regulated. And then the fact that they flavor it, that's what screws it up.

Preston Sego: [32:59] Interesting. So speaking of corn, I've learned that corn used to be really cool. Like the corn...

Chuck Carpenter: [33:07] With a K or a C.

Preston Sego: [33:07] C.

Chuck Carpenter: [33:09] Okay.

Preston Sego: [33:10] Yeah. Not the band.

Robbie Wagner: [33:12] Yeah, they maybe did used to be really cool too.

Chuck Carpenter: [33:16] Yeah, maybe that's why I'm clarifying.

Preston Sego: [33:18] The yellow corn we think of now is just, like, really boring and overly genetically engineered to produce the most money or whatever. But corn used to be multicolored, and it would cross-pollinate with other species of corn. There's so many different species of corn and I have not tasted any of them.

Chuck Carpenter: [33:42] Yeah.

Preston Sego: [33:42] I need to.

Robbie Wagner: [33:43] Yeah, if you get corn from a farm stand or something, they'll have that a lot of times where it's like, multi different colors and stuff.

Chuck Carpenter: [33:51] Yeah. There are tons of different strains, and I can't remember what country it was, but I remember watching some cooking show where they were bringing back all these heirloom strains of corn in Mexico and South America. So, like Central and South America, there's places where they're bringing back all of those variations and their flavor variations, various sugar contents.

Preston Sego: [34:11] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [34:12] There's a whiskey that's made from all Jimmy Red corn. I don't know if you've seen that. I haven't, but it apparently almost went extinct. They had two ears of it left or something and grew it back into a real thing.

Preston Sego: [34:26] That's scary.

Robbie Wagner: [34:28] Yeah.

Preston Sego: [34:29] Only having two left.

Chuck Carpenter: [34:30] Yeah, you're right. Well, apparently the States used to have, like, hundreds of variations of apples, and for similar reasons, we paired it down to the ones we were more easily able to harvest and people wanted and whatever else. But it's like Monticello and Thomas Jefferson's place. Apparently, they've been storing seeds there for years and years and bringing back some of them.

Robbie Wagner: [34:54] Nice.

Chuck Carpenter: [34:54] Fun facts. That's a little more whatnot-y. But it's alright.

Robbie Wagner: [34:58] We're solidly into whatnot here now, I think.

Chuck Carpenter: [35:01] Yeah. So, wait, it says here in notes that you're a pinochle fan.

Preston Sego: [35:07] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [35:08] Are you secretly a retiree in a retirement game?

Preston Sego: [35:12] No, pinochle is a young person's game.

Chuck Carpenter: [35:16] It's coming back.

Robbie Wagner: [35:18] You heard it here first.

Preston Sego: [35:20] Yeah, believe me.

Chuck Carpenter: [35:23] Wait, you're young. Well, then it's not for me, because I'm not a young person.

Robbie Wagner: [35:28] Pinochle is really fun.

Preston Sego: [35:30] Yeah. So I used to think it was a regional thing. I grew up in Minnesota and my family is all about Pinnacle, but when I moved to Indiana, everyone was all like, Euchre. And I'm just like.

Robbie Wagner: [35:45] Yes.

Chuck Carpenter: [35:47] Yes.

Preston Sego: [35:47] No, I hate it.

Chuck Carpenter: [35:49] I love Euchre. Those would be fighting words with my wife.

Robbie Wagner: [35:55] Have you played pinochle, Chuck?

Chuck Carpenter: [35:57] I haven't. No, I haven't played it.

Robbie Wagner: [35:59] So then you don't know then.

Chuck Carpenter: [36:01] But Euchre is good. Euchre is fun.

Robbie Wagner: [36:01] I'm not debating that. I'm just saying you can't say, like, what's better if you haven't played?

Chuck Carpenter: [36:09] Yeah, that's true. I'm not saying what's better, I just viewed it as a game for older people.

Robbie Wagner: [36:16] Yeah, well, I know that my grandpa learned and played in the war, so, like, that's probably where a lot of older people learned it from.

Preston Sego: [36:24] It is an old game.

Chuck Carpenter: [36:26] The war. Which war? I think, at this age.

Robbie Wagner: [36:28] World War II.

Chuck Carpenter: [36:29] Yeah, that was the war, because we were in it.

Robbie Wagner: [36:32] The last real war.

Chuck Carpenter: [36:34] Whoa.

Robbie Wagner: [36:36] Depends on your definition of real, I guess.

Preston Sego: [36:38] We got worse going on today.

Preston Sego: [36:41] Currently. Yeah, the last war. Currently no.

Robbie Wagner: [36:43] Well, the last one the US was in that was like everyone was in, I don't know.

Preston Sego: [36:49] Yeah, now everyone's too afraid to participate.

Chuck Carpenter: [36:52] Yeah, I mean, the end of the world is pretty scary, I think.

Robbie Wagner: [36:55] Yeah, I would be afraid as well.

Preston Sego: [36:57] Yes.

Chuck Carpenter: [36:58] Don't poke the bear. Literally.

Preston Sego: [37:01] A pinochle still has trump, still have tricks. You have more variety into how you score and interact with the trump and tricks. And I think there's quite a bit more strategy too. There's also quite a bit more ways to mess up. There's like team pinochle too where you play you and the person across the table and then two other people doing the same thing. You're just cooperatively trying to get more points than the other team.

Chuck Carpenter: [37:33] Yeah, kind of like euchre in that sense then. I didn't know that it was both either a team or individual.

Robbie Wagner: [37:40] Yeah, you can do three or four.

Preston Sego: [37:42] And three-person pinochle. There's this blind in the middle of the table that you start with and you bid on that. So everyone's competing against each other and just gambling out the wazoo for what could be in those three cards in the middle of the table. And some people will just go all out completely ludicrous, hoping for very specific cards and they usually don't get them.

Robbie Wagner: [38:07] It's fun to watch, just like any card game.

Chuck Carpenter: [38:10] Yeah, I say there's a poker element there that's like a Texas hole with the blind and all that. Yeah. Interesting.

Robbie Wagner: [38:17] I recently played some poker the other night and I always forget that two pair only beats one pair because I get two pairs, I'm like, no one can beat my hand. This is amazing. And then I'm like, wait a minute, this is not good.

Chuck Carpenter: [38:32] This is not three of a kind, this is not all the other things.

Robbie Wagner: [38:38] It seems like it should be harder to get. Like it's two pairs, but anyway, three.

Chuck Carpenter: [38:44] Of the same, I think statistically are harder to get which is why.

Preston Sego: [38:47] Yeah, there's a hot second where I was trying to make pinochle on the web and then I got overwhelmed and distracted and then that's kind of sitting there on GitHub and not being touched.

Robbie Wagner: [38:58] Well, after I don't have like 1000 jobs. I'll help you with that.

Preston Sego: [39:01] Oh, thanks. Yeah, it's really fun to play with web animation API to animate the thing you're never going to actually use, which is the opening and closing of your hand of cards.

Chuck Carpenter: [39:17] Yeah, but that's fancy.

Robbie Wagner: [39:18] Yeah, that does sound fun.

Preston Sego: [39:20] The demo is nice.

Robbie Wagner: [39:21] There was a blackjack one that did a lot of fancy animations. I forget where it was. I saw it maybe a long time ago, maybe like eight years ago, but I was like, oh, let me just copy all of this and make something. I never did.

Preston Sego: [39:34] I was motivated by dislike of this library GSAP by the GreenSock people. So there's no way in 2020 that we need a library for animations now.

Robbie Wagner: [39:50] Yeah, it's a huge library too. Yeah, I have like a lite version, I think, too, but I don't know.

Preston Sego: [39:56] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [39:57] Interesting. Yeah, because isn't that the one that Chris Coyier talks about using for SVG animations or something?

Robbie Wagner: [40:04] Does he?

Chuck Carpenter: [40:04] Yeah, I did some.

Robbie Wagner: [40:05] Like who's Chris Coyier?

Chuck Carpenter: [40:07] I don't know. Nobody's heard of him.

Robbie Wagner: [40:09] Well, JK.

Chuck Carpenter: [40:10] Yeah, CSS tricks rip.

Robbie Wagner: [40:14] No, it's still a thing. He's just not involved.

Preston Sego: [40:16] I still visit them.

Chuck Carpenter: [40:17] Yeah, but he doesn't own it. He doesn't run it anymore.

Robbie Wagner: [40:20] But someone does.

Chuck Carpenter: [40:21] Yeah. Digital Ocean bought it.

Preston Sego: [40:23] Oh, really?

Chuck Carpenter: [40:24] He's got that tricks money now.

Preston Sego: [40:26] I like Digital Ocean. I got a nice little bit.

Robbie Wagner: [40:29] I thought tricks were for kids anyway.

Chuck Carpenter: [40:32] YAML for kids.

Preston Sego: [40:33] What?

Chuck Carpenter: [40:33] I don't know where we're devolving.

Robbie Wagner: [40:35] No, you said he got that tricks money. Yeah, like, I thought tricks were for kids.

Chuck Carpenter: [40:39] I see the rabbit. That's still around. Is that still a thing? Tricks? Is that a cereal?

Robbie Wagner: [40:44] Yeah, they keep going back and forth between little ball shapes and, like, the real fruit shapes.

Preston Sego: [40:51] Interesting.

Chuck Carpenter: [40:52] Yeah, that's basically Kix with the flavor, right? So you got to tricks or Kix.

Robbie Wagner: [40:58] I never connected those dots, but yeah, I guess it is.

Chuck Carpenter: [41:02] Yeah, you got to stay little circles, I think. What did I have? I tried. Not Apple Jack. I don't know. Fruit Loops. I tried Fruit Loops because I have kids.

Robbie Wagner: [41:13] You followed your nose wherever it goes.

Chuck Carpenter: [41:15] Yeah, exactly. No, I just followed it to the pantry where they chose this cereal once, and I was like, oh, yeah, I used to love this. And it's like it's like the lemon one tastes like Pinesol or something. Like sugary Pinesol. I don't know. Maybe it's just my palate at this point destroyed through whiskey. But I was, like, gross. Why would you guys eat this? And they're like, we love it, dad.

Robbie Wagner: [41:35] What cereal do you like?

Chuck Carpenter: [41:37] I don't really eat cereal, so I like the more boring ones.

Preston Sego: [41:40] I've gotten real boring with my grain-based breakfast.

Chuck Carpenter: [41:44] Yeah, like Special K or something like that. I used to like Fruit' n Fibre.

Preston Sego: [41:48] Wheaties plus granola.

Chuck Carpenter: [41:52] There you go.

Robbie Wagner: [41:53] Yeah, I'm on that team. I like Raisin Bran Crunch. Yeah, stuff like that. And my wife is like, Why do you eat that shit? This stuff tastes terrible. So I get all the cereal to myself.

Chuck Carpenter: [42:06] Yeah, I watched this documentary on the Kellogg guy, and he created cereals as part of his diet program. It was, like this whole health and diet thing.

Robbie Wagner: [42:17] So they used to be healthy. They weren't second ingredient sugar.

Chuck Carpenter: [42:21] Right? It was, like, very bland and plain and cardboardy tasting. But it was part of his weight loss program, turn-of-the-century stuff. And then the Post guy is the one who used to work for him, and he branched off and started making cereals, and then he started flavoring them to make them tastier. And then he made all the money.

Robbie Wagner: [42:39] Well, of course, yeah. Sugar is, like, the most addictive thing. Like, more than any drug.

Chuck Carpenter: [42:44] Well, Merriweather Post inherited all that money, and then she bought that big house in DC where she recovered all the Russian relics and stuff. And Mar-a-Lago was actually her winter property.

Preston Sego: [42:58] What?

Robbie Wagner: [42:58] Oh, interesting.

Chuck Carpenter: [42:59] Yeah. Merriweather post built. Mar-a-Lago originally.

Robbie Wagner: [43:04] Fun facts, the more you know. So I think the real thing we're here to talk about is StarCraft, right?

Preston Sego: [43:13] Yes.

Robbie Wagner: [43:15] Got the hat.

Preston Sego: [43:16] My hat has a StarCraft 20 anniversary logo on it. The grey hat was on the Blizzard store for a while, but StarCraft shaped my life in a lot of ways. I started in college, a lot of things started in college, but I started with StarCraft Two in the Beta, and this was during the summer of 2010. So I guess for those who don't know, StarCraft is RTS.

Robbie Wagner: [43:47] What's an RTS?

Preston Sego: [43:48] Oh, real-time strategy acronyms.

Robbie Wagner: [43:50] Yeah.

Preston Sego: [43:51] There are three factions that the player can play as. There's Terran. Which is humans. There's Protoss, which is like this alien kind of telekinetic sort of species. And then there is the zerg, which are these like sentient hive mind bug things. People kind of think they're gross, but they're what I gravitated towards. And during the Beta, I was trying all of these races and I really fell in love with how asymmetric strategy was between these three races and how between Terran, Protoss, and Zerg. Even on the same map that you're playing on, games can just be wildly different based on various timings and strategies. And I was playing a lot in college.

Robbie Wagner: [44:43] Did you play one V one or play with other people?

Preston Sego: [44:46] Oh, yeah, play in the latter. But I would play with other people because I had friends who like StarCraft. And team games just get absolutely ridiculous because you can have people who will kind of just protect themselves and then build up a massive army and then unleash it all at once. It's a risky strategy, but it's absolutely hilarious when it works.

Robbie Wagner: [45:08] Yeah, that's what I do. I play with my friend and he plays zerg and just messes with them the whole beginning, and then I come in with all carriers at the end.

Preston Sego: [45:18] Classic.

Chuck Carpenter: [45:19] Yeah, that's funny. I just looked up that it's on N 64, and I recently got a recall box which has all these system emulators and a ton of ROMs.

Robbie Wagner: [45:30] That's StarCraft One on N 64.

Chuck Carpenter: [45:33] What. You don't - no? Don't do it?

Robbie Wagner: [45:36] No, you can. I'm saying they don't have StarCraft Two on N 64. That was StarCraft One.

Preston Sego: [45:39] Oh, yeah. I don't know how you effectively play with a controller.

Robbie Wagner: [45:43] Especially an N 64 controller. Who designed that thing?

Chuck Carpenter: [00:45:47] It's just meant to move back. I don't know. Yeah, that's a little weird.

Robbie Wagner: [45:51] Like it's for three hands.

Chuck Carpenter: [45:53] I don't use that. I use the 8-bit though controller. I have an SN 30 Pro, which kind of looks like the old-school SNES controllers, but then it has all the extra handles and stuff on there. So it's kind of fun.

Preston Sego: [46:08] Nice.

Chuck Carpenter: [46:09] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [46:10] So what's your highest rank in StarCraft?

Preston Sego: [46:14] So, in 2012, I was like, high diamond, and two-thirds of my games were against masters players. And then I had to take a really long break because my carpal tunnel started flaring up.

Robbie Wagner: [46:32] I can imagine.

Preston Sego: [46:34] And then I just never recovered, never got the muscle memory back. So my highest ever, one v one, one is diamond, but...

Robbie Wagner: [46:44] Nice.

Preston Sego: [46:45] Team games had masters, but I really liked it. There's this level of metagaming, and then you could try to deceive the other player, and playing against people who are really paying attention and know what to look for is fun because you can try to trick them. But it's been a long while since I've played.

Robbie Wagner: [47:06] Yeah, I imagine that you playing is much different than me playing. You're probably, like, hitting tons of keys to do a ton of stuff automated, like, as quick as you can. Whereas I'm like, click a thing, do a thing.

Preston Sego: [47:19] Yeah, and zerg there's a lot of things you have to do, like, every 30 seconds.

Robbie Wagner: [47:24] And you have to hit, like, three keys just to make a unit. Right. Like, select the hatchery, find the larva, do it, like, whatever, I don't know.

Preston Sego: [47:33] Yeah. So for me, it was like, the number four, and then Q, and then whichever button it was to make the unit.

Robbie Wagner: [47:42] Nice.

Preston Sego: [47:42] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [47:43] I see Chuck is tired of this talk, so we can move on to something.

Chuck Carpenter: [47:49] Games. I mean, games are fun. I'm interested. I'll try it out. I will never get to those levels.

Robbie Wagner: [47:53] What retro games have you been playing, Chuck? On this new box.

Chuck Carpenter: [47:57] So what started this whole thing? I don't even know how it came up but Sarah talked about how when she was a kid, they had the Aladdin game on Super Nintendo. She's like, I'd love to play that again. And my brother is very into retro gaming. And so I was like, I'll hit him up. I'm sure he has some solution to this. And he's like, oh, yeah, actually, I've been making these recall boxes for my employees at work as kind of like a nice thank you to them or whatever. I'll just make you guys one. So it's just a little, like, Dell desktop that you plug into your TV, get a USB controller, and fire away. And it's got everything from Atari 2600. I think it has PSP and PS Two, but we haven't really graduated to that yet.

Robbie Wagner: [48:41] Cool. PSP.

Chuck Carpenter: [48:42] Yeah. My son has been playing Sonic and Sonic Two. So on Genesis and the Master system.

Preston Sego: [48:46] I played those.

Chuck Carpenter: [48:48] Yeah. And I was playing, like, on Super Nintendo. They had a bunch of Star Wars games for each of the original trilogy. I've been playing those because I loved those games. I really want to play Conker's Bad Fur Day, though on N 64. I remember playing that in my early twentys and was just like oh this game is amazing. It's so funny and fun. So those are all on my list, I guess.

Robbie Wagner: [49:10] Nice.

Preston Sego: [49:10] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [49:11] The recall box, I mean it's like so simple. You can actually put it on a Raspberry Pi. It's all open source stuff. You can buy like a set up from them if you want, but otherwise, it's just like open source. Slap it on there, plug it into your TV and get a cheap controller. It's a pretty nice setup.

Preston Sego: [49:27] That's cool.

Chuck Carpenter: [49:30] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [49:30] I would be interested in I think the company is called Analog. We may have talked about this before that makes the new Game Boys and Nintendo's and stuff.

Chuck Carpenter: [49:41] But they're not released yet. Right? They're all presale right now.

Robbie Wagner: [49:44] No, they're released, but there's like a huge presale waiting list. Like some people have them, but production is not very fast.

Chuck Carpenter: [49:51] Oh, that's what it was.

Robbie Wagner: [49:52] Okay, but that's what I want.

Chuck Carpenter: [49:53] This emulator has Game Boy on it too.

Robbie Wagner: [49:56] Because I have a lot of cartridges and I like for some reason having the real cartridge.

Chuck Carpenter: [50:02] I see.

Preston Sego: [50:03] Do you like blowing on it too if it doesn't work?

Robbie Wagner: [50:06] Well, funny thing, we actually cleaned one with alcohol one time and it worked amazing. And then two days later it never worked again. If you read the back it says never clean this with alcohol.

Preston Sego: [50:19] Specifically.

Robbie Wagner: [50:20] Yeah.

Preston Sego: [50:21] Wow.

Robbie Wagner: [50:21] So we didn't read that first, but.

Chuck Carpenter: [50:23] Yeah, my brother had a whole business where he'd go to thrift stores and get old game systems and games and stuff and resell them on eBay until there was this virus. It was like his side business.

Robbie Wagner: [50:34] People didn't want games?

Chuck Carpenter: [50:36] He couldn't go to like Goodwills and stuff. So couldn't get inventory.

Robbie Wagner: [50:41] Fair.

Chuck Carpenter: [50:41] Turns out that's hard. Anyway, recall box.

Preston Sego: [50:45] Well, I've kind of abandoned retro games. I really like the new tech.

Robbie Wagner: [50:50] They're a lot of work.

Preston Sego: [50:51] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [50:51] If you've ever played like, Elder Scrolls games, like you go back to Morrowind and you have to read everything. What? I'm not going to do that. I want the people to talk.

Preston Sego: [51:03] Yeah, well, last game where I read everything was Control. That came out, I think in 2019. I don't know, I was just really into the lore of that game because like all these documents from all the different employees of the bureau, really cool. You can kind of just piece together what their day-to-day activities were and kind of just the craziness of an office building that changes the rooms and changes its shapes and then maybe one day locks you in the bathroom for a week. It was just really fun to read about.

Chuck Carpenter: [51:38] Yeah, that sounds cool.

Robbie Wagner: [51:39] So we're about at time here. Is there anything we missed? Anything you would like to plug? Other projects that you're working on? We didn't talk about, causes you care about? Anything you want to let people know.

Preston Sego: [51:53] A big ask.

Chuck Carpenter: [51:55] You can say nothing too.

Robbie Wagner: [51:56] You don't have to say anything, just in case you had something you wanted to say.

Preston Sego: [52:00] Yeah, nothing really on the tip of my tongue, but I guess tryout Ember Resources if you haven't already, solves a lot of problems.

Chuck Carpenter: [52:10] Cool.

Robbie Wagner: [52:11] Cool. Sounds good. Well, thanks everybody, for listening. If you liked it, please subscribe and we'll catch you next time.

Chuck Carpenter: [52:20] Thanks for listening to Whiskey Web and Whatnot. This podcast is brought to you by Ship Shape and produced by Podcast Royale. If you like this episode, consider sharing it with a friend or two and leave us a rating, maybe a review, as long as it's good.

Robbie Wagner: [52:35] You can subscribe to future episodes on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. For more info about Ship Shape and the show, check out our website at shipshape.io.