8: Old Elk, NFTs, Crypto, Tech Tangents

WWW - 008 Transcript

Robbie Wagner: [00:36] Hey, everybody. Welcome to another Whiskey Web and Whatnot with Robbie Wagner and Chuck Carpenter. You may also know him as Charles W. Carpenter, but we're just going to start calling him Chuck now. We're from Ship Shape. We do a lot of JavaScript stuff, web stuff, various stuff. So if you haven't heard of us and you've stumbled across this podcast, you can check us out shipshape.io. If you like this podcast, please follow us.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:04] I'm known as Chuck on our website, so I should probably just keep going by that. Really confuse our audience and fans if I called myself something else.

Robbie Wagner: [01:15] We could write a script that changes your name periodically to different things on the website.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:21] Yeah, I like that. Every 48 hours. Mountain standard time.

Robbie Wagner: [01:27] All right, so today we have Old Elk, which I have not had before and bought just because I was looking through the liquor store and was like, hey, this bottle looks kind of cool and has a gold winner tag on it. And that was the exact logic I used when I bought Sagamore for the first time. So it's like, hey, maybe this will be good.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:49] Yeah, those are your criteria for success. This looks cool and I haven't tried it. It must be good.

Robbie Wagner: [01:57] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:58] Okay.

Robbie Wagner: [02:00] So I'm not going to read this because I am lazy, and the font is small. Do you know anything about the mash bill in here?

Chuck Carpenter: [02:08] Well, so what I have done this time and a few previous episodes, actually, I've been leaning into the Internet. I hear it is a wealth of information, and I've found a particular site that gives me some info about different whiskeys. And I just started going back to that. It's called breakingbourbon.com. It's got a review. It's got a breakdown of what the whiskey is, what the company produced, it a little about the distillery. So usually, like, where it came from, was it sourced, was it locally distilled age statements, if exists? So, like, all the stuff that's difficult to read on the bottle and then a few other extra things are on this site. So I'm doing that yet again. Thanks. Breakingbourbon.com, our friends, and future sponsors. Just kidding. No idea. But the site's useful, so I recommend it. So it's a wheated whiskey, which it does say on the bottle. So that just means there's some, although, interesting that it says wheat whiskey. Mine says wheat whiskey.

Robbie Wagner: [03:18] Mine is not.

Chuck Carpenter: [03:18] London straight.

Robbie Wagner: [03:20] London straight bourbon whiskey.

Robbie Wagner: [03:23] Doesn't say anything about wheat.

Chuck Carpenter: [03:24] Oh, wow. Yeah. So this is why I'm confused. It looks like I ended up getting it was difficult to find this here in Phoenix. And maybe this is why I got a special bottle versus the normal bottle. Yeah. So on Breaking Bourbon, it says it's a 51% corn, 34% malted barley, 15% rye. Apparently mine has some wheat in it. So those would be a little different. There's no breakdown.

Robbie Wagner: [03:51] The back of mine says four times more malted barley than conventional recipes, so I think that breakdown sounds correct. Probably has a lot more wheat, I would think.

Chuck Carpenter: [04:08] Yeah, it might not even have any malted barley, and it's hard to say. Let's see here. [inaudible 00:04:14]. The result is a product of winter wheat. And oh, nice. This is 95% winter wheat and 5% malted barley. I don't even know that's possible. This has no corn in it, so it isn't even a bourbon. So there you go. Snafu aligning what exactly we're getting here, and it looks like I have something else other than what you have. So you will try the normal?

Robbie Wagner: [04:46] Let's try them.

Chuck Carpenter: [04:47] Yeah, let's try them and see what we think.

Robbie Wagner: [04:52] It's okay. It's happened before.

Chuck Carpenter: [04:54] Yeah, it has. This is not the first time. Oh, is that a sound effect or that's just you? That was very dramatic. You did it right next to the mic. I'm impressed.

Robbie Wagner: [05:08] All right, so mine standard bourbon. Let's give it a try.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:24] There's no video in our podcast, but if you could see Robbie's face right now, it is not one of joy.

Robbie Wagner: [05:31] Well, it's confusion. It's not that I don't like it. I think it's maybe not potent enough or something. Like, not enough alcohol or enough different flavors. And the back, I think, was talking about how the more malted barley was supposed to round it out, which I guess is what's happening, but it's not very oaky. It's not very much alcohol. It's almost like you took a bourbon and watered it down a lot. And I don't hate it. It's a little too round for me. I like something with some more punch and interesting flavors.

Chuck Carpenter: [06:11] Yeah, I think I've said it before. Needs a little more hug, right? I need a little burn, a little kick. That is like what American whiskey is to me. The alcohol is definitely part of it. Yeah. Even this one here, with so much wheat going on, it's got, like, a sweet smell to it. Even now, granted, I'm coming off of a fairly serious sinus infection, so all of my senses are probably affected to some degree. But the sip, though, gave me does have a little warmth to it. It has a little brown sugary, and maybe what I think it lacks here is some of, like, the oakiness you get out of a normal bourbon. Right. I don't get any of the real oakiness or any woodiness to it. It's got more of, like, a little sweet, a little burn, a little like cinnamon.

Robbie Wagner: [07:09] Yeah, maybe they're not aging these very long. I'm not sure, because I don't get a lot of oak in mine either.

Chuck Carpenter: [07:18] Yeah, well, that Breaking Bourbon website said four years age statement, and since mine's not even bourbon, I think it's probably, like, a two-year minimum age, and there's no age statements whatsoever. Bottled in Indiana. So that means MGP Sourced bottled by Old Elk Distillery, Fort Collins, Colorado. But they probably just, like, had it distilled in Indiana and sourced it out of there. Here's my mash bill. Boom. Two years later, give it back to me. Yeah, I don't hate it. I agree with you. It's not like, oh, this is horrible, I can't drink it. It's better than some bottom-shelf stuff by far. It's rounded. Well, very rounded, but it doesn't stand out necessarily.

Robbie Wagner: [08:11] Yeah, I agree. It's very balanced, but I don't want it to be this balanced, I guess.

Chuck Carpenter: [08:21] Yeah, I want it to give me stronger flavors, and I'm not getting a lot of that. Again, the sweet notes that I talk about, they're pretty mild. So for me, because I talk about it being so middle, I'm going to give it. I guess the middle is four or five. I'm going to give it five because four seems like pretty like, oh, I'm kind of getting to where I don't like this, and I can't say that, but it doesn't do much for me, so I'm going to give it a five tentacles.

Robbie Wagner: [08:49] I think five tentacles for me as well. I don't dislike it. It's just not exciting to me.

Chuck Carpenter: [08:57] I would drink it. I don't think I would buy it again.

Robbie Wagner: [09:01] Yes. Not as bad as the one you had to immediately stop drinking and gift to someone.

Chuck Carpenter: [09:08] Yes. It was like the maple syrup stack one, the Hudson whiskey. Yeah, that one was just not at all for me. But hey, you can't win them all.

Robbie Wagner: [09:20] Yeah. Speaking of not winning them all, something that I lose at almost daily is anything investment related. And we were talking a little bit about some crypto and NFT stuff earlier, and I still don't even understand half of the stuff. Like, there's a new token every day and all this NFT stuff doesn't make sense to me because it's like, okay, you bought a JPEG and it's like $65 million. And it's like, well, how does that work? Anyone else can download the JPEG, but you can say, oh, well, I'm the real owner, but who cares? Everyone else can download it.

Chuck Carpenter: [10:03] Yeah, right. Like, there's no prevention mechanisms around display or what display even really looks like. I don't know. That part I don't understand. Julian, who works with us, he's sort of interested in collecting some of these NFTs and obviously not the $65 million level, but what he jokes about and says is when we all switch to VR headsets or AR headsets, something like that, then you'll be able to see this art on the walls, right? Like, you can program the AR to project your art up, and then it's on the wall kind of like that. Otherwise, you'd be maybe, like, buying some crazy screens to showcase your own art. And then yeah, basically through the blockchain, it would identify this as the original and you as the owner, I guess. I don't know if ownership stuff gets added to that. Now that I say it out loud, I don't know if that has any part of it. But in terms of the authentication of the piece, that's really what it's all about. Because counterfeit art market is actually a really huge thing, and it takes human intervention and a little bit of science to try to identify. But even that is potentially flawed. There was a Netflix documentary around a huge scandal with a very old gallery in New York. I don't remember the name of the documentary, but it's like a very old 100-plus-year gallery in New York that had to shut its doors through a scandal finding out, like, over a 20-year period, they actually had been selling a number of fakes unbeknownst to them, apparently. And I was like, some guy out in Long Island painting them and using chemistry to assemble exactly what would be in paints from that era. And it's really interesting, and you have all these expertise, like, checking off and giving you, yeah, this is certified. Oh, it's gone under microscope. That's certified. Everybody says, yes, it's good to go, sells for $40 million, and then you find out ten years later that, no, it's actually just painted by some guy in a garage out in Long Island. It's crazy. So essentially, that is the problem that NFTs address, which is interesting, but still kind of, like, hard to wrap your head around, right? Because we're so used to assigning value to physical things, like, Can I touch this? This is what is valuable to me, and I'm trying to assign a value to just something that okay. The interesting thing about the whole Internet, right? Like, if you unplug everything, if we didn't have electricity, it ceases to exist. Is that applying to this thing too? Yeah, I can be certain of its authenticity, but what I can't be certain is that it lasts forever. I mean, I guess we assume we'll have an electrical grid for the rest of humanity, but what if we didn't?

Robbie Wagner: [13:07] Well, if we didn't, I think I really don't care about any of the things I own. Right?

Chuck Carpenter: [13:15] Yeah. So perhaps that's a rabbit hole too deep.

Robbie Wagner: [13:20] But for me, it just doesn't make sense because I hadn't thought about what you brought up, about having a virtual kind of gallery, but for right now, everyone's kind of buying them, just speculating that this is the new thing, the new way you're going to buy digital assets and that it's actually a good idea. But other than being like, hey, I'm the guy that spent $65 million on this thing, you can't do anything with it right now. So it's all just like, yeah, you've bought it, but what are you going to do with it?

Chuck Carpenter: [13:55] The intrinsic value is only what you are willing to pay and what someone else is willing to pay you, really, at the end of the day, but collectibles as a whole sort of apply to that or what everybody agrees that the value is. Yeah, I mean, there's this massive speculative market now, and that's kind of what crypto is in general, which is vastly different than the initial white papers around it and what its intentions were. So it's hard to see that come to fruition in those ways. But yeah, crypto as a token of exchange for a process, or that's where all these end up coming into play, right? Like, oh, I need to transfer data, I pay this small fee, and that is a crypto token, and then it all gets logged. And we all agree that this is on the up and up, but how do you buy into that value? And then how do you actually say that I can utilize these tokens? If the value is fluctuating on such a constant, how can I use it for the original purposes? So then people just buy into crypto because they're like, oh yeah, it's a potential investment vehicle.

Robbie Wagner: [15:13] Yeah, I mean, that's kind of what most of it has been. We're still trying to figure out the real usages for stuff, and I don't really understand how the whole thing works. I build pretty UIs. I don't think that deeply about how the blockchain works, but it's like, to me, like you mentioned, say we run out of electricity for like a couple of weeks, right, instead of forever. What happens when everybody comes back online? Does the blockchain fix itself, or does there always have to be at least like one active person on it, or it blows up? You know what I mean?

Chuck Carpenter: [15:53] Well, no, I don't think the ledger ceases to maintain persistence if it exists somewhere in a battery backup data center, somewhere that doesn't dissolve and go away and cease to function or whatever else, assuming like, everything is fine, functionally when you come back online. Like, the ledger is kind of just that, and that's kind of why they call it the ledger, right? You're adding entries into the ledger. The blockchain isn't like a thing of momentum. It is just a thing of security. Like kind of the way that you think of QuickBooks is the ideal is that you're adding entries into this ledger, and they're technically, to a degree, immutable because it's just what it is, and the blockchain is one more level on that to like it's immutable, it's locked into that. This is a bit of what occurred along these lines, and there's nothing you can do about it. It doesn't change if there are no new entries. It's just there waiting for you to add new entries.

Robbie Wagner: [17:03] But since the point of it, too, is that it's decentralized, right? I just don't know how that would I guess it's smart enough to fix itself if everything catastrophically fails for a couple of weeks, and then devices start coming back online. It can reconcile what may have happened elsewhere and not break.

Chuck Carpenter: [17:24] Yeah, well, now you start to get way into the weeds in terms of how it works. And I don't know those answers, so it's immutable. But every single copy of it is the same essentially. Right. And every time you update the ledger, that's permeated across all copies of that.

Robbie Wagner: [17:45] Right.

Chuck Carpenter: [17:49] But I mean across the network and how that all works and what are the failsafes around that? No idea. That's an interesting question. You might have, like, I've made a transfer of a coin from my wallet to your wallet. And that takes time, though, across the network. And that's like one of the complaints about some coins versus others is I try to make a transfer to you and like, Bitcoin now because of the way that it validates takes 5 hours and Ethereum is way faster because the way it validates is a little bit different. If the world shut down during that timeline, that transaction just gets dropped. But how does that actually work? Like, if there's a fail somewhere, does it fail across the ledger, and it's nowhere? Or does if, like, copy A comes online and copy B, C, D doesn't and A has the transaction, is that now, like, the truth and it's done, or vice versa? I don't know.

Robbie Wagner: [18:58] I don't know how it works. I know back in the really original old days of Bitcoin when no one really knew what it was or if it was worth looking at at all, I would do a little bit of mining just for fun sometimes, and you would send some coins, right, when you're done mining and be like, okay, it needs I don't know how many. I think back then it was maybe there have to be like at least five or ten validations or something before it sends it. So I guess it would be that it's probably a lot more now like maybe 300 people have to validate it before it'll go through or something. And I think that's the thing is, once you hit that certain amount of validations, it's like, all right, this must be a real transaction. Like stores it as real, and then that propagates to everyone, I guess.

Chuck Carpenter: [19:46] Yeah. So seems like something like that is probably closer to the truth. So interesting to note, we seem to have really dove headfirst into whatnot skipping over web. Is this something to say for our format? That we're no longer going to follow them explicitly, as the title may suggest?

Robbie Wagner: [20:08] Well, to go down a deeper rabbit hole of that too. Like, do we want to have separate episodes of different things? Like maybe we skip whiskey sometimes and we just talk about web stuff. I don't know.

Chuck Carpenter: [20:23] That really throw off some of the layman. Some of my friends who are more laymen that come in just for the first ten minutes, they just want to listen to the whiskey we're going to try and what feedback we have there and decide if it's something they want to try.

Robbie Wagner: [20:40] Yeah, I mean, I think that's also something to think about. Right. If you're a non-technical person, maybe you want whatnot in the middle. You could listen to whiskey and whatnot and then jump off when we start to babble about tech stuff.

Chuck Carpenter: [20:55] That's true. Yeah. So much to say there. We don't have clear metrics from our audience. How many Twitter replies do we have around content?

Robbie Wagner: [21:06] Zero. I keep trying to see if people will suggest a whiskey or something, and they don't. I think we have a pretty technical, pretty Ember-specific audience, aside from the few that we've shared with across our networks who may follow it. Most people. Like our most listened-to episode is the one with Chris Garrett, where we're talking Ember. Everything.

Chuck Carpenter: [21:31] Proofs in the pudding, I guess, then.

Robbie Wagner: [21:34] Yeah, but obviously, we want to expand that audience outside of that. Sorry, go ahead.

Chuck Carpenter: [21:41] No, yeah, finish your thought before I interrupt.

Robbie Wagner: [21:43] I was going to say if everyone thinks that the only interesting stuff we talk about is Ember, this is your time to comment and let us know so that we can talk more Ember.

Chuck Carpenter: [21:54] Right. Because otherwise, I might push for some other things that I'm now becoming a real junior in. I'm starting my apprenticeship in Kubernetes recently, and perhaps our next guest will be all around Kubernetes and Clusters.

Robbie Wagner: [22:14] I'm busy.

Chuck Carpenter: [22:14] Helm. And just talking about what buttons you're supposed to push to do those things, but yeah, just mix it up. Could happen, unless you may say otherwise.

Robbie Wagner: [22:28] I do think we should explore having some guests from other communities. I just don't know who they are because I'm not in those communities.

Chuck Carpenter: [22:38] Yeah, I mean, offhand, let's see here. I have some ideas. I have folks in the GraphQL community that could potentially come and chat with us, and that might be a topic that you're a little more open to and interested in.

Robbie Wagner: [22:53] Yeah, I like GraphQL.

Chuck Carpenter: [22:54] Yeah, it's cool. It's complex. There's a lot of choices there. GraphQL is just the general paradigm, and then you go into the flavors of it, which there are many. Yeah. Maybe that's a thing that we talk about in our next episode, and I'll see maybe we talk about it first between us and then invite an expert and then kind of go down that place and try a whiskey with them. Oh, man, get crazy.

Robbie Wagner: [23:23] That sounds good to me. We could see if we could get Jeff Bezos to come talk Serverless with us. He's probably pretty well-versed, don't you think?

Chuck Carpenter: [23:31] No, I think the days when Jeff was getting his hands dirty in the code compared to when serverless and just like the functions as a service paradigm came into play as a real thing on AWS, there's probably a few years in between those moments when he launched a bookstore in his garage and then where AWS as the dog food and then a service to the world became a thing. We could talk about those sorts of things, though, like cloud-native infrastructure stuff and, like, services. I had an interesting conversation a week or so ago with a potential future partner, and I've been in the AWS space a bunch more lately and setting up some of our stuff there, doing things for clients. Whatnot? It's very complex. There's a reason why they have a whole certification path. But the feedback that I gathered from this person was around how Google code and the whole Google code platform. Who could say that fast? I don't know. Especially not after a whiskey is a lot easier. It's a lot nicer developer experience because you go in there, and just a lot of these things kind of get done for you, and you just give your preferences along the way instead of being this hodgepodge of products that you have to come up with identities to have permissions along to. And how do I play with this and this together? But also I can do this in five different ways. I guess Google code gives you a lot cleaner paths depending upon what you're trying to do.

Robbie Wagner: [25:13] So what you're saying is Google is the Ember, and we always talk about Ember being the out of the box. Like, just hit a button, and it goes, and then React is like, oh, please install everything, configure your build, do all the things.

Chuck Carpenter: [25:31] Yeah. From a high level, I will say that I agree with you because I feel like I am a very layman practitioner, and I can get some things done. And I have maybe a better understanding than your normal developer that doesn't get into those things. Quite. Your front-end developer may not dive into AWS. I understand more than they do, but outside of that, I've read the For Dummies book, and I can't give too many opinions deeper than that.

Robbie Wagner: [26:03] Fair enough. Yeah. My brain is a bit fried for some of our listeners. If I'm having trouble making sentences or being entertaining, I apologize.

Chuck Carpenter: [26:17] So many people usually describe you as entertaining, so it's very disappointing this episode.

Robbie Wagner: [26:24] Yeah. I mean, everyone always says, I'm like, so upbeat, have tons of emotion. I get that a lot.

Chuck Carpenter: [26:32.] Yeah. If I'm wondering how you're feeling, I usually just look at your face. So another exciting bit of information to share and perhaps a bit of tangential whatnot that we can discuss is what day is it? It's Wednesday. Okay. So this week I'll say instead of saying yesterday, which wouldn't be true, I finally received a piece of fitness equipment. I know I'm probably late to the party because lots of people were doing this throughout the pandemic and being more locked down and so on and so forth. I took the adverse effect and was less focused on fitness and very focused on work things and whatnot and family things. But fitness has taken a massive downturn in my life over the last year. So a while ago, though, I did get on a list to try and order a Concept2 Rower. My wife has a spin bike, and we have some weights and she does the Peloton stuff, and she's tried to encourage me a few times to do other workouts on there. I don't like spinning. Peloton seems pretty nice, and I guess it's a lot of value for money. But I hate the playlists and a bunch of their workouts, and I don't know, it just hasn't inspired me enough, I guess. So I got a rower this week. I've done my first row. Pretty excited about that. It's something I used to do a lot during CrossFit and even just when I did lifting and fitness on my own in the past years. So, yeah, I'm upping the home gym as everyone else goes back to regular gyms.

Robbie Wagner: [28:23] Yeah, I have also let fitness fall by the wayside, for sure. Something about getting tons of Uber Eats all the time and never leaving the house makes you gain weight. I don't really understand it, but.

Chuck Carpenter: [28:39] As someone who has access to your Uber Eats receipts, there are some clues within there. One of the clues is hashtag Taco Bell.

Robbie Wagner: [28:51] Yeah. You'll be happy to know we have Burger King on the way right now.

Chuck Carpenter: [28:57] Much disappoint.

Robbie Wagner: [29:00] But yeah, I've been actually getting more into Peloton. I would agree that I don't love spinning. However, I like how high quality their classes are and how many of them there are, and the different formats and things. The one that I'm doing now is with Ale Toussaint is, like, one of their instructors, and he's, like, super motivational and has this game one now where you choose a team and you practice for a couple of weeks, and then there's, like, a live one where your teams both compete, and you try to beat the other team. So that sounded pretty cool. So we've been doing that. They also added, like, you can do it. You could always do one with friends, but now you can video chat and actually talk to them and see them and stuff. So it's getting more interesting, and having that ability to see someone else for that accountability is good because otherwise I would just sit on the couch.

Chuck Carpenter: [30:05] Yeah, I mean, I totally agree there. And the motivational factor. Most of the problems around this are definitely from myself and not a reflection of issues with Peloton or any other kind of fitness app. I would get frustrated with the playlists. That was a little bit annoying, but I did like a decent amount under the instructors. I cannot get into spin. I've tried it a few times. It's just definitely not for me. If this person has non-spin workouts, which I know that some of them will do some transitional things, some warm-up workouts, some floor-based things, some HIIT workouts. I usually do some kind of strength workouts sometimes I would do, and not recently, but they have really great ab workouts. Cooldowns. And I haven't done any of the yoga things, but I actually like yoga, so it should probably be more open to that. So I would utilize Peloton for those things.

Robbie Wagner: [31:07] Yeah. I mean, I haven't tried a lot of their other stuff. They even have, like, meditation and mental health type of things. But I pretty much just do the spinning. So I'm not sure if he has classes and other stuff, but I would be interested in some of their strength ones. I think I actually did a couple of strength ones because they had some kind of challenge where do one workout of each type or something to complete the challenge. So I did that. I think all the challenges are cool, like motivating you to check those boxes. But yeah, I typically just bench and do squats and stuff, like traditional strength training, and then do some spinning.

Chuck Carpenter: [31:52] Got you. Yeah, I typically collect fitness equipment and try to let it sit in a box of the corner and see how much dust it collects. I'm really good at that challenge. My Apple Watch hasn't notified me yet that I've won that badge, but I feel like I'm getting close. Yeah. I have a TRX, which I would advocate for TRX. There's some great. You can even just go on YouTube and do TRX classes. Those are pretty cool. I've got some kettlebells. I, in the past, really enjoyed kettlebell training. Also a really nice thing. Yeah. So getting over that hump of creating a new habit is really all I'm kind of stuck on.

Robbie Wagner: [32:43]Yeah, definitely. I think my dad is trying to get the same badge you're going for of letting stuff collect dust because he got a it was like months a couple months into the pandemic. I guess everyone's stuck at home. He's like, all right, I'm going to get me a workout machine. Like, not a Bowflex, but like, something like that where it does a whole bunch of different workouts. And so I got down there a couple of months after he finally gets it, like six months into the pandemic, it shows up because it came from China and took forever. But, like, oh, cool. This has been set up for a couple of months. Have you used it? And he's like, no. And then I'm like, well, I want to use it. So I go use it. And I'm like, wait. This doesn't tell you how much weight this is. Are you just supposed to lift random amounts of weight? And he's like, oh, no, it came with a sticker pack. I just haven't put these on to see what stuff is.

Chuck Carpenter: [33:38] Well, so he wasn't kidding. He had used it zero times.

Robbie Wagner: [33:43] Yeah, he's using it now, though. He decided that April was the time and he was going to work out, like, do some. Kind of physical activity, like daily. So he's been sticking to that, I think, which is good.

Chuck Carpenter: [33:56] Yeah. Well, there you go. See? So what we've learned here, based on the evidence presented and maybe even age range, it's hard to say. Your dad and I same.

Robbie Wagner: [34:12] Yeah, my wife's dad and you are closer in age. My dad is like, where is he now? I'm not sure. 66, 67, something like that.

Chuck Carpenter: [34:25] Okay. Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [34:26] Katelyn's dad is like 50, so he's like not far away.

Chuck Carpenter: [34:31] We could arm wrestle.

Robbie Wagner: [34:33] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [34:34] Potentially. So I kind of hope, and then maybe not, that your dad listens to this podcast.

Robbie Wagner: [34:45] Well, I think I was talking to him about it, and I don't know that he realized, one, that we had a podcast, even though I've been posting it on Facebook and stuff or two, like what even a podcast is. So if he were ever to listen to it, if he picked an episode to listen to it probably like the first or second or whatever. I don't think he would get to here. So we're probably pretty safe.

Chuck Carpenter: [35:10] Fair enough. Okay. You want to hear a very interesting tidbit wild fact? If your dad is 67, he is older than my dad, my biological father.

Robbie Wagner: [35:26] Okay, I'm a little confused now. I'm trying to do that math.

Chuck Carpenter: [35:32] You should. Okay, so I am 43, and my father is 23 years older than me. So make him 66. Okay.

Robbie Wagner: [35:43] Yeah. That's not crazy. Like having a kid at 23 is not that crazy.

Chuck Carpenter: [35:48] No, not that crazy. I mean, also a sign of the times a little bit, and as some people who either know me or maybe listen to prior episodes of the podcast, but I grew up in the northern Kentucky, like Cincinnati area, so it's in the Midwest. That's kind of what you do. You get to a certain milestone in life. Oh, twenties. I Mean, even when I was growing up in my early 20, I left that area when I was 21 and people were teeing up for thinking about marriage, buying houses, and whatnot. And I had lots of friends in like the 24, 25 age, get married and have kids. It's not too crazy. Come out of college, maybe think about doing some sort of masters, but also thinking about your family and setting that up.

Robbie Wagner: [36:38] Yeah, I mean, not for me, but people, where I grew up, are like the same. Well, I guess part of it depends. If you didn't go to college, what else are you going to do? You're going to be looking for a wife and kids sooner. But even for those that went to college, I don't know if they moved back to town. It's just kind of not that there's nothing in town. It's just like that's kind of what you do. There's not as much opportunity, and people aren't obsessed with work and working till they're 30 and then having kids kind of thing.

Chuck Carpenter: [37:13] Yeah, I mean, we're zoning in on a few different things here. Why is Eric Hawkin even calling me right now? Let me ignore that call.

Robbie Wagner: [37:22] Patch him in to the podcast.

Chuck Carpenter: [37:24] We should patch him into the podcast. Yeah, it's true. What I should let him know is that you are mentioned on this podcast. Let's see if you actually listen to our podcast and comment.

Robbie Wagner: [37:36] We're watching the IP address. We'll see if you're listening.

Chuck Carpenter: [37:39] Exactly. Live stream. Yeah, no, I think you've actually touched into a whole bunch of potential sociological paradigms there. So for one, I did go to college, but I didn't graduate. I actually quit college. I don't even know if you know that.

Robbie Wagner: [37:59] I did not know that.

Chuck Carpenter: [38:00] Yeah, well into it, too. But I started in architecture and went into some photography stuff, some digital design at the time, which was massively different, to how that's defined now. University of Cincinnati. And then I was like, well, maybe I can just graduate with some B of A in art history. And then I said, well, now I'm just trying to graduate. Like, what's the point of this? Stopped. Moved to Arizona at that time. I have taken lots of school, but not, like very focused school since around photography for quite some time. Actually. That was like a jumping point that got me into the web to begin with. And I went to film school for a year just for fun because I like movies and the whole process of making film and whatnot. But the funny part about it was that I was in film school, and my whole career around web and whatever was really taking off and actually getting a great foothold, and I had some great career opportunities then. So I had to make a decision because if you keep going in film school, well, your life is around making movies, and it's like you're writing or producing your own student films or you're helping someone else do theirs. And I didn't have time to do school and that and then have this career path, so I had to make a choice. And here we are.

Robbie Wagner: [39:32] Yeah, I mean, a lot of people do that, though. Even people that finish school is like. They get a degree in history, art history. It's something that they enjoy. But then they do a little bit of web development, and they're like, oh, I like this, and this pays the bills, and they just pivot. And yeah, there were a ton of people when I worked for Jibe that had nothing technical at all as majors, and I was, like, Interesting. I didn't really get the full stories from all of them, but there's a lot of people that have winding paths to that sort of career.

Chuck Carpenter: [40:09] Yeah, right. So you have the computer science path, and you have the nontraditional path, and it's interesting how that works. And then you have people that appeal to the industry because of the lifestyle. There's a lot of talk about the lifestyle and the potential, and it's interesting because I've never really seen that. So, as you know, I've been in hiring and engineering leadership for quite some time, so I've seen all levels of that. And it's interesting when you know someone is coming to it with that intended purpose. But it takes a lot of work to get good or at least proficient and do work that people accept and you're proud of or whatever. There's tons of people that are just like trying to punch a clock and get the lifestyle, and it never really seems to work out that I've seen.

Robbie Wagner: [41:07] Yeah, I mean, I think we probably mentioned this on previous podcasts, but it's all about your mentality, what you want to put into it. Because a lot of people that go the traditional computer science route are just kind of like, okay, I've spent four years of college learning coding. Like, you should just hire me. I know what I'm doing. I'm not going to put in the time to keep learning. I'm not that hungry for it. It's just my day-to-day thing I'm used to doing. Whereas someone pivoting is like, if they've had a bunch of different jobs, even the more you've had in different types of fields, the more I feel like you can do anything, and that's why you've had so many. So it's like those people are hungry to be like, let me learn this new thing, I'm putting my livelihood on the line here to totally pivot, and I'm motivated, and that is so much better than someone who has a traditional background, I would say, most of the time.

Chuck Carpenter: [42:01] Yeah, I agree with that. I'm going to put myself up for criticism potentially, but the people who go through and get a computer science degree and then just say, I want to turn this learning experience explicitly into my job experience and then build my career on that, oftentimes become Java developers for life.

Robbie Wagner: [42:28] Right, and that's what you learned at school, so that's your expertise, java or C.

Chuck Carpenter: [42:34] Yeah, and not to say there isn't a potential great career path in that. Like for some people, there's definitely a path for those people who want that, and they want to go in and work at the bank and write the Java code for the bank and just keep that, maintain that forever. And I don't know if there are gold watches anymore, but get the gold watch and move on.

Robbie Wagner: [42:58] Yeah, I mean, I'm actually really happy with this whole new just do a boot camp for six months and learn stuff and start pivoting because we didn't even have the traditional computer science path, I think, probably even till today. It's been a while since I graduated, but it doesn't move fast. So they're probably still teaching Java, still teaching C, doing all of this super back-end enterprise programming, maybe mention the web, like everyone's online all day. It's a thing where's HTML at.

Chuck Carpenter: [43:33] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [43:33] I don't understand why they don't teach that more.

Chuck Carpenter: [43:38] I have two comments there. Yeah, I know one of the CS programs had switched from Java to Python, and I can't recall if it's MIT's or Stanford's, but it's one of those major CS programs. And I think, like, iTunes University used to offer all of their classes. And so I recall, like, some time ago, going through some of those classes myself when I was working in Python a while ago. Well, regardless, one of those has pivoted to Python, and Python is a really straightforward language, and the paradigms match all kinds of other things. Not everybody loves it. I like it. I think it's clean. I think it's like speaking a little bit and gives you all those things.

Robbie Wagner: [44:25] I disagree.

Chuck Carpenter: [44:26] Okay, fair enough.

Robbie Wagner: [44:27] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [44:27] Gives you a bunch of computer science paradigms. So there's a plus there. Regardless.

Robbie Wagner: [44:31] Yeah, I agree that it's like a good thing to learn. Like for teaching computer science in a personal preference, I cannot use any language that does not have braces. I'm sorry. I'm never going to press the spacebar. I'm going to auto-format. So I need the braces.

Chuck Carpenter: [44:47] Yeah, you want braces? What about semis?

Robbie Wagner: [44:53] I prefer them, but really, I mean, I can deal with commas or not. Semis or not. I have to have the braces, though, because then I don't have to press space every time I want to go in a little bit. I can just auto-format.

Chuck Carpenter: [45:09] Okay, well, all opinions are valid. Yeah, I don't have a problem with semicolon or braces either, but they don't completely turn me off to other things either. A little soft spot in my heart for Python for, like, back in the day. Who knows if I would ever go back to it, but I have no problems with it. It's just really like, career trajectory.

Robbie Wagner: [45:35] We actually in school learned Jython. Have you heard of that?

Chuck Carpenter: [45:40] No.

Robbie Wagner: [45:42] I think it's like a Python implementation, like Python type of syntax, but built on Java or something. So they call it Jython. Wow. And we only did it for like a week, but it was dumb. We were all like, why don't we just use Java or Python? Why are we using this thing?

Chuck Carpenter: [45:59] Yeah, one wonders if that project died.

Robbie Wagner: [46:04] I would hope so.

Chuck Carpenter: [46:06] If only. What we really got to do is just get you into Rust. That's what everybody's talking about these days.

Robbie Wagner: [46:15] Some days I think it sounds fun to go back to a real computer sciencey, like, let's code some shit type of thing. But then I'm just like, I really like making UIs and doing Web, and I like JavaScript. I don't know. I mean, I'm not opposed to it. I just think, especially when you're running a business, unless we have someone that wants to pay people who don't already know it to learn it and do it, I'm probably unlikely to use it unless we have an internal project that might need it.

Chuck Carpenter: [46:51] Well, Q2, three weeks from now, when I introduce said project.

Robbie Wagner: [46:56] I'm down if you've got it.

Chuck Carpenter: [47:00] So I think for a psychological side note, what has become more and more appealing to me over the years, and I don't like you're saying like, oh, I like building great, beautiful UIs and all that kind of stuff. So I want less access for people to have a personal opinion or tell me what to do. And you could take that however you like.

Robbie Wagner: [47:26] You're becoming that old man.

Chuck Carpenter: [47:27] I think, a little bit, yes. I want you to tell me the business objective. I want you to tell me the goal. And I definitely want to attack that problem, and I just want to do it in whatever way I discover is best. And this is a funny thing. So here you go. These are your favorite side notes. There was a point in my career where I was titled as a not webmaster, although I think I did have that title briefly somewhere, but I was like a web designer. I don't know if that you recall the days of web designer where she was like, you were a little bit in Photoshop, and you're in the code too.

Robbie Wagner: [48:08] I did some Photoshop.

Chuck Carpenter: [48:09] There you go. So you do some Photoshop, and you're like trying to make buttons with rounded corners, but then you're like trying to fight with your boss a little bit because you're like, there's some of these new things. And I know we want to support IE6 or whatever it was at the time, so now I need the images to support that. And you're back and forth a whole bunch. And at this time, I was in an organization structure where there was like engineering, but they did all the dot net back-end stuff. They were just like running the databases and running the ship in the back end. And everything that was presented on the web was through the marketing department. It was, oh, okay, this is how we're viewed to the world. So we want our stamps on this, and we're going to do the design portion and all of that. And I had a really smart VP of marketing who understood that, oh, this is a lot of things happening here, and this is still kind of code. So I want to talk to you about this because I really envision these things as being separate, like, oh, you're a web designer, and you're touching all these things. But I feel like that there's the design aspect, there's all the visuals, and that is one person, and then there's all of that, taking these visuals and through the browser and doing the interactions and thinking about those parts, and that is a different part. So I think you should choose which career path do you really want to lean into. Took a day, thought about it, came back to him, and said, I want this part. I want the part about taking these visuals and breaking down the code aspect and thinking about the active states through all these things and doing all that. I don't want any part of Photoshop. I never want to open Photoshop again. And honestly, I never did. For the most part, I pretty much never did. What is funny is that side note, he's like, oh, I'm surprised by that choice. I actually didn't think that's what you were going to pick, but gave you a choice either direction, valid. Interesting, the impetus for said choice was I had a boss at the time was kind of a micromanager. And as you're designing things and you'd go through very detailed reasons why, like, oh, and I chose this button as blue, and it's a primary objective here through this page. And also we're an international company, so through studying a little bit of internationalization, like, if you make this button red, that means this thing in China and this thing in Holland and blah, blah. And he's like, yeah, but I like red, so I think you should make it red. Right, but here's some information. He's like, yeah, but I got to put my stamp on it. So it's a red button. And there you go. So there's this abstraction layer where I no longer now am beholden to this person who wants to put their stamp on things. Great, put your stamp on whatever. I'm going to solve these problems. And now I think that I'm just going one layer deeper on all of that. People have input now, user experience, UI, all of that is a bit more ubiquitous and floats up through product organizations. And now people are starting to have their own input, and that's fine. And I'm not opposed to input, so I don't want it to come off that way. But also, I like the challenge of solving problems however I want. I want to get to the business objective. I want to solve the problems however I want. So let me just put myself one more layer behind that. You can read into that however you want.

Robbie Wagner: [51:48] Yeah. I mean, in an ideal world, we could all just solve problems however we want, but it's not often the case. But I think we're getting closer. Like, when people have a complex enough problem, as long as they're not also developers and going to be, like, helping solve it, I think mostly they're, like, use whatever. I've heard of these things that might be nice but convince me otherwise. And if there's people that are saying, no, we 100% need to do it this way, maybe we just push back and don't.

Chuck Carpenter: [52:29] I think we have a lot of power in that way in the consulting realm.

Robbie Wagner: [52:33] Right?

Chuck Carpenter: [52:34] We have expertise, we have experience. I don't know what beyond that, but don't lead me along the path because if that was the case, you wouldn't be on our doorstep, right? Like, we've got the battle scars along these ways, and we truly want to help you meet these business objectives. So how we do that, let us carry some of that load. It's not just like, leave me alone in the corner, but it's like, I want some of that responsibility.

Robbie Wagner: [53:12] Right. Like, if you're paying for our expertise, don't tell us that we're doing it wrong and that you want to do it your way because then you've just wasted your money. I don't know if you've seen that GIF on LinkedIn where well, I don't know if it's just on LinkedIn, but I've seen it on LinkedIn a few times where it's like this guy is carrying a bunch of things of concrete, like bags of concrete that are super heavy, right? And this other guy comes up, and he's labeled, like, the consultant, and he has a wheelbarrow, and he gives it to the guy, and he puts all the stuff in the wheelbarrow. And then the guy that would have been hiring the consultant, once he walks away, just picks up the wheelbarrow and carries it rather than rolling it. So it's like you're just not paying attention to this person that you hired as an expert, which is silly.

Chuck Carpenter: [54:01] Right. Yeah. I have not seen that GIF, but I'm interested. I'm intrigued.

Robbie Wagner: [54:11] Yeah. And on that note, my Burger King is here, so I have to be done. So thanks, everybody, for listening to this. It was quite a tangent. There was not a correct order. We talked about a bunch of random stuff. Hopefully, it was still somewhat entertaining, and you enjoyed it. If you liked it, please subscribe. Really helps us out if you do, and we'll catch you next week.