Chris Keathley
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Episode Transcript
Amos: Welcome to Elixir Outlaws, the hallway track of the Elixir community.
Chris: What's been going on?
Amos: Not mu- like running around with family stuff, right? Trying to
Chris: Holidays. Holiday plans.
Amos: -Get the most out of the holidays that I can, you know, with the least amount of people that I can. Cause, cause of of that's the way we roll now in this society. So yeah, I've been having a good time. I went fishing a couple of times, took my daughter fishing in waders. She got waders and climbed in the water for the first time. I mean, she's been in the water before, but not like that. So it was pretty good. We had a, had a good little break, got a little bit more of a break and we don't actually do our family gifts until this upcoming Wednesday.
Chris: Oh, okay.
Amos: On Epiphany is when we do our immediate family gifts. And then we do like wider family gifts, um, on Christmas Day.
Chris: So you still got, you still got things to look forward to.
Amos: That's right. Yeah. Right. And next and next year, what? Look, look, what is out today is New Year's Eve. We're going to date this podcast.
Chris: As we record this, we are on the cusp. The very, the very precipice of a new year.
Amos: I hope this new year is better than the last for everybody.
Chris: What things are you planning to do differently in 2021 that you will immediately give up after, let's go ahead and say two weeks?
Amos: Um,
Chris: What, what, uh, decades long habits have you formed that you are going to attempt to rata like eradicate via several quick fixes and approximately two weeks worth of work?
Amos: I don't normally do New Year's resolutions because of the same thing of not being able to follow through with them very well. But I am planning on setting aside specific time for reading and letting my family know, like, this is time for me to read.
Chris: It's reading time.
Amos: It's reading time. I can do it, I can do , it in a public area of my house.
Chris: (quietly singing) It's a Reading Rainbow.
Amos: Uh, thanks. LaVar Burton. Um, no, like I-
Chris: Oh look, there's a butterfly in the sky. I can go twice as high!
Amos: I'm done. I can't even,
Chris: This is the, this is the material. This is the show. Amos get it together. Get your game face on.
Amos: If only I could see again. Yeah. So just, I want to read more than I do. Um, and used to read a lot more, but I find that I am easily interrupted and I think that my kids are old enough now that I can be like, Hey look guys, you're 13, 14 years old. You never speak to me until I have a book in my hand. So let's, let's fix that.
Chris: Are you hoping to read more fiction, nonfiction, technical stuff? What are you, what? What's on the what's on the menu?
Amos: A little bit of everything. So I want to read some more technical things and then, uh, some, some stuff about people and like working with people,
Chris: Stuff about people.
Amos: Yeah. Stuff about people. Like, I don't know, project stuff, psychology, things like the, like, you know, uh, I gave my talk last year about the thinking is greater than typing more things along that those lines of, of how can I be more productive in my own learning in life without expending tons more hours. And then how can, how can I bring that to working with teams too? And hopefully end up making all of us happier at work every day by doing that.
Chris: Okay. Excellent.
Amos: And then I'd like to read some more white papers and part of that setting that side of time, allso, I also wanted to set aside like an hour or two a week to work on personal projects, whether they be open source or just playing around with something from maybe one of those white papers that I read or, or some of the books that I read, just, just actually setting time. I find that I am not good at -I'm too social, too. So it's not just my kids interrupting me, but like, I'll sit down and want to work on something, but my wife will be sitting in the same room as me. And so after a minute or two, I'm like, Hey, what are you doing over there? How's life goin?' What'd you do today? And then I realized like, I haven't done anything, but talk to her for an hour, which is great. Sure. I love talking to my wife, but I, so I need to set time aside for things. That's my goal.
Chris: So you're, you're, you're going to attempt to do very intentional reading.
Amos: Yes.
Chris: Right. I see. So in order to better yourself, let's say to, to gain and acquire new skills.
Amos: Yes.
Chris: Okay. What's uh, What's. What's uh, what are some choice, some choice titles. What's on the, what's up first? What are you most excited about digging into?
Amos: Well, right now I have a, uh, an Elixir book that's not out yet that I really need to, to finish, finish reading.
Chris: Wow, alright, that's a weird flex.
Amos: I'm not trying to flex. Um, I should.
Chris: So the super-secret, the super-secret book, you probably haven't heard of it yet. It's just not out yet. I mean, only a couple of people have even been able to see it.
Amos: I, I don't like-
Chris: No, I've seen it, you know, because I know a guy here's the thing, you know, people know me.
Amos: I don't like saying what the books are, when they haven't been published yet, because you never know.
Chris: They're they're not even in pre-release yet.
Amos: Right.
Chris: They're not even in beta.
Amos: If it was a beta, I would talk about it. Um, because you never know if somebody is going to finish it. I've, I've read two books now, partial part of the books they weren't done. They weren't even in beta that never made it out of that phase because the authors got burnt out.
Chris: Yeah. Couldn't deal. Couldn't just push yeah. Push through that. Not push through that. So I don't want to say they could not. Yeah. Got other things, right. It's a hard writing. A book is, is, is hard. Um, that's, that's what everyone says. It's, it's very, very difficult. Look as someone who struggles to write blog posts that are, you know, 500 words or whatever a book is, is like, that's, that's a daunting, that's basically, you know, the Lewis and Clark expedition. Like you don't know if you're going to come back from that.
Amos: That's, that's very fitting, considering where I am in Missouri. There's like 50 Lewis and Clark statues around here.
Chris: Is it accurate? I think like only one person died on the Lewis and Clark, Lewis and Clark expedition. And I think, I think they died of like something that they caught before they left.
Amos: I can see that sounds totally plausible.
Chris: You know what I mean? I think they died of like, uh, of like, like a cough or you like, they had, like, they had, it was effectively dysentery, you know what I mean? It was like they had some sort of, they had some sort of malady.
Amos: That's terrible. Yeah. I'm talking about looking forward to the next year. And then you're like, this guy died.
Chris: No, like they went out into the, they went out into the wilderness, um, and like, it was like wildly successful. So they never found that, you know, that that river, they were looking for.
Amos: That's too bad.
Chris: But they did find prairie dogs, lots of prairie dogs, there's a whole, there's a whole story about them trying to like capture a prairie dog to send back or something like that.
Amos: I feel like I should know more of this because of where I live, but maybe because of where I live, I'm completely not interested.
Chris: Were you not like me and watch that Ken burns documentary like multiple times as a kid?
Amos: No, I did not.
Chris: Oh, I guess you would have been in college at that point. So probably busy doing other stuff.
Amos: Thanks. (both start laughing)
Chris: I'm just that's listen. I just, that's the timeline. It’s just accurate.
Amos: I'm still in my thirties. Uh, I can tell you what, there is a fiction book that I'm, or, two of them actually that I really want to read next year.
Chris: Okay.
Amos: One is Neal Stephenson. Seveneves.
Chris: Oh, yeah. That's that's a, that's a quality book.
Amos: I've had it sitting on my shelf for a year. It's a big boy.
Chris: It's it's, it's a, it's a tome.
Amos: And I also know that Neal Stephenson has a tendency to write fantastic books right up the end.
Chris: Yeah.
Chris: And so I'm, I'm a little bit, uh it's there's always,
Chris: There's three books in Seveneves like, it's, there's literally three books in Seveneves.
Amos: Well, I'm, I'm looking forward to that. I also got the audio book just in case
Chris: Seveneves is a really, really good book. Like a really, really good book. Some people don't like parts of it. I won't say which parts like, and by parts, I mean whole sections of it or like get pretty, but I found it to be pretty gripping throughout.
Amos: I did read the beginning of it. Um, yeah, when I, when I first got it, but then it got shelved because I had too many other things I had to get done.
Chris: Sure. It's a big book. It's a big book.
Amos: And I was super excited about it. So I, I, uh,
Chris: There's no real better opening to a book.
Amos: No, yeah. It's it's like from like page two, you're like, “Whoa, this is crazy.”
Chris: The first sentence is amazing. What it is a first sentence is like the moon exploded, uh, suddenly and without warning or something like,
Amos: But then it goes back. Yeah. I can flash it back. Okay. Yeah. I, I read part of the flashback to where people start coming up to the station. And that's when I stopped. And the other one that I'm really looking forward to is Providence by max Barry. Um, Max Barry is like one of my favorite authors. I've read all of his books now, except for this one. When it came out, I bought it the day that it came out, but still haven't read it because of other things that I need to make sure.
Chris: Yeah sure, you got to life, things are going on. I get it.
Amos: And I want to finish Behind Human Error.
Chris: I should start Behind Human Error. I bought it and it's on my shelf behind me as we speak. And I have not cracked it open, just not hasn't made it to the, on the, on the list yet.
Amos: I read a quarter of it and it was really good. And then just, I don't know. I think I got sidetracked.
Chris: Yeah I'm not in the mood to spend, uh, any of my like extra time doing any sort of technical reading right now. Just me personally. It's just not what, I'm not what I need at the moment. Not just, I don't have the, I don't, I'm pretty crispy at the moment.
Amos: So, so does that mean you're only gonna read fiction or?
Chris: Yeah. I mean, I've been reading a lot of fiction. I've been reading a lot of, I don't know, I've just been occupying my free time with stuff that's not technical. I haven't written a line of code and like three weeks, four weeks now.
Amos: (sighs) Sometimes that's really nice,
Chris: It's potentially the longest time period in that I can remember.
Amos: So what's your, okay. So what's your favorite book that you've read in the last year?
Chris: Oh, favorite books that I’ve read in the last year? I don't even know. I didn't actually read that many books. All things considered, especially when you like talk to people who actually read books. Like, you know what I mean? You read a lot of books. I think I read like 20 books this year. Um, I kept a list. I'd have to go back and look at it, but I also did a lot of rereading this year, largely because I needed comfort food. You know, I didn't want to think that hard. And so I went back and I read a lot of stuff that I had already read or, you know, was, was knew that I already really enjoyed. So like, I re-read all of the Dresden Files this year.
Amos: I've never read those.
Chris: Oh man. Oh man. Yeah. I re-read all the Dresden Files this year. They're so good. Uh, and they are total comfort food for me. Like, I've read a couple of them a couple of times now. And like, they're the sorts of things that like you, when you just need, when, you know, I dunno when you're in the mood for like, it's partially escapism, but you're also escaping into like a thing where you don't have to, those books are really good. They're very there. Several of them are very emotional and all that sort of stuff. But when you've already experienced those emotions and they provide more catharsis, like you don't have to invest as much emotional energy into them. Um, and so that's, I was just craving a lot of that sort of stuff this year for obvious, for the, for the obvious reasons.
Amos: I haven't re-read anything in a long time. And I do really enjoy that rereading and being able to go faster through it and kind of hit the highlights really and relive some of that. But I haven't done that in a long time. I think the last thing I re-read was I re-read Ender's Game.
Chris: Oh, yeah. Okay.
Amos: Because I really wanted my daughter to read it and so I re-read it at, and then now I think she's read the whole series except for the very last book. Uh, I think multiple times and she refuses to read.
Chris: It's weird.
Amos: It does get weird, but she won't, she doesn't read the last book because she says that's like the last- She owns it, but it’s the last.
Chris: She won't read it because then it’s done. Then it’s over.
Amos: She's like, “That's my last hurrah with Ender,” and she doesn't want that to-
Chris: Don't be, don't be sad because it's over be happy because you know, you got it. It happened.
Amos: Yeah. I think she said, that's her one of her favorite books or her favorite book is Ender's Game right? Oh yeah, she's nodding.
Chris: That's how I felt about The Last Colony, which is like at the, was at the time, like the last, like Old Man's War, uh book. And I was like, “Ugh, so good.” You just have to be happy that it happened. That you got to be part of it. If you've read Old Man's War books are like,
Amos: I have not.
Chris: Those, the series is really good, dude. That series is like really good.
Amos: I think you've read a whole lot more than me.
Chris: I don't know about that, but you've seen, well, you've seen my bookshelf. You've seen my, at my house.
Amos: You have- you probably have more books than I do. Definitely. Especially fiction. I read a L I didn't really, I loved to read until I was in about eighth grade, you know? And then they make you read books that you don't like.
Chris: They make you read all the American classics that are all like, you know, super racist and boring and hard to get through.
Amos: Old Man and the Sea, I hated, uh, Charles Dickens, pretty much anything he's written. I can't.
Chris: Unless you get a really good teacher who can like explain all the metaphors and symbolism to you. And that's why, you know, privileged kids always walk away, either loving, you know, the Great Gatsby is like their favorite book or like To Kill a Mockingbird is their favorite book or something like that. And to be fair, to Kill a Mockingbird is like literally one of my favorite books. And it's because it like, it hits you at the right age where you're just old enough to start understanding symbolism and metaphor and allegory, and like all this sort of like undertones and like all the things the author is trying to convey to you. And then you pick up on that. And especially if you have a really good teacher who shows you that stuff in a way that, that makes it real to you, those books have like a profound impact on you at that like really important emotional age. I feel like this is all, this is all like borderline stoner theory. Like this is not, this is not a real thing, right? Like this is not science.
Amos: It’s 2 a.m.
Chris: This is, I don't think this is math, but this is like how I feel about it. That's like, The Great Gatsby is not like a really a good book. It's that it hits you at the right age, in as much as like, it's not any, it's not like a revolutionarily great book in the modern age, right? Like, would you rather read the great Gatsby or Harry Potter?
Amos: I've never read The Great Gatsby, but if I had a choice, I would read that over Harry Potter. I've never liked Harry Potter either.
Chris: You're out of your, you're out of your fool mind.
Amos: Sorry. (laughing)
Chris: You're old. That's, that's what it is.
Amos: Maybe. I think when the, when did the first Harry Potter book come out?
Chris: I don't know. I was, I was nine or eight or something like that.
Amos: Oh, wow. Okay. So I was probably high school.
Chris: Yeah.
Amos: And I dunno, I just wasn't into that. I was reading Dragon Lance novels, which is
Chris: Wow.
Amos: Not any better.
Chris: Wow. Yeah. You have a character who's yellow the whole time.
Amos: Yeah. Does everybody know that he's jaundiced? Like, he's got an alcohol problem. I think.
Chris: I mean, well, you know, he's also like, you know, he's also evil the whole trip.
Amos: It's true. it's true. He is pretty self-centered.
Chris: I haven't read those books in a long time.
Amos: I bought the set this year as like one book it's like the 25th anniversary or whatever.
Chris: Autumn, Autumn Twilight, the whole thing. Yeah.
Amos: And I, I got about I'm, I'm partway through it through the first book again. And it's like,
Chris: It's a little pain.
Amos: I know why I liked it. And I can, I still can recognize that, but I'm like, this is, this is not the greatest writing.
Chris: No, it's really not.
Amos: And there's not.
Chris: It's very obviously based on the D& D game.
Amos: Yes. Yes.
Chris :
(laughing) There's certain things it's like, there's so many archetypes and that sort of stuff, oh man.
Amos: Which I, I can, I can go back. I can appreciate it though.
Chris: Oh yeah, sure. Absolutely.
Amos: But it's, but it is not the roaring adventure that I don't want to put the book down. Like, it was when I read it, like my freshman year.
Chris: Sure. Absolutely.
Amos: I just, I blew through that my freshman year. I was like, this is the greatest book of all time and now I'm reading it and I'm like, Oh my, I don't know how I, how I blew through that book in a year or two.
Chris: Right, it's like how I read, you know, something like a hundred of those Star Wars, extended universe books.
Amos: Oh, yeah.
Chris: I read all of them. I think I like legitimately read all of them at some point, you know? And they were amazing as a, as a young person. Cause you didn't you, so you don't, you sort of don't know any better.
Amos: I didn't know better till this year.
Chris: And literally all that it matters is that anything happens in those books.
Amos: Right.
Chris: As long as anything happens, the milieu just drives you through the rest of it, but you don't care about the plot at all.
Amos: Right? I mean, well, you’re part of your imagination is being driven by the movies and your, your other knowledge too. So it's not that that book gets to build on a universe that it doesn't need a whole lot for your imagination to run.
Chris: And at some point, well, at some point the what makes it fun is just adding more knowledge to your head about the universe. Like, that's really what the whole thing's about. Like, you're just adding more stuff into the hopper. And so, you know, now when you're inventing your own stories or like, playing with your friends or whatever, you can run around outside, and like you have all this extra head canon to, to play around with.
Amos: That's true. And maybe that's why those books were so fun is because you knew that you were going to apply that to play.
Chris: Yeah, that's half of it was like, it was like an exploration for cool ideas.
Amos: Yeah. And now I-
Chris: I didn't really care to learn about, I didn't, I didn't, I- Did I need to understand how IG88 was formed and what his motivations were and why he wanted to kill Han Solo. Cause it turns out all the bounty hunters had a personal vendetta with Han Solo, not just Greedo. It was all of them. Han Solo had screwed over every single bounty hunter in the galaxy. The galaxy is a small place as it turns out.
Amos: That's why he's awesome.
Chris: I mean, that's why he's the best, but in any case, did I need to know, you know, why, you know, Zuckus was motivated by the things he was motivated about. Absolutely not.
Amos: Nope.
Chris: Did it help to understand why Bossk personally hated Han Solo? Probably not, (Amos snickers) but I read Tales of the Bounty Hunters. So,
Amos: But it was fun.
Chris: Yeah. I can't tell you that those books were well-written. I honestly don't remember.
Amos: I, uh, did an audio book of a Star Wars extended universe this year.
Chris: Oh, you listened to one?
Amos: I listened to, one. Cause I had like a, a long drive and the book fit right in that.
Chris: How'd it go? How was it? Well, tell me about this. I want to know this is, this is w Book Outlaws.
Amos: Okay. It's called Bloodline.
Chris: Okay.
Amos: And it's really about Leia after the Senate is reinstated after, after the Empire is destroyed and-
Chris: It's is this immediately like Thrawn, like, era?
Amos: Um, I think there's this like post that like, you know, I think it's post that it did like the station.
Chris: Are Jason and Jayna alive at this point? Like what is the, you know, what's the canon here? Give me the title again.
Amos: I don't remember.
Chris: Has Jason lost his arm yet?
Amos: This is, this is where they're- it is the very beginning of The New Republic is what it is.
Chris: Okay, okay, so like Thrawn-ish. Pre-Thrawn timeline. Pre-thrawn?
Amos: I would say pre, just barely.
Chris: Okay.
Amos: Or, or, um, it is when they elect the new Republic leader. That is the book. So I don't know. It, it, you know, again, not, it didn't seem like the most well-written thing in the world, but it was an audio book. They had some voices, it was well done. And I had a lot of imagination to build on with all of the movies and it was better than Leia floating out in space and then being sucked back in. That's all I'm saying.
Chris: You didn't like Leia Mary Poppins?
Amos: (laughing) It was, it was terrible.
Chris: I have so many. It's so funny. I have so many thoughts about that movie specifically. I think that's the movie that no, that's not the movie that broke me. The Han Solo movie is the movie that broke me where I just gave up. I was like, you know what? I think Star Wars has wrung has wrung me dry at this point. I mean, Leia Poppins, totally didn't bother me. I haven't seen the most. I haven't seen the final, the final one.
Amos: I did. I did.
Chris: I haven't seen it. I literally have not watched it yet. I know the reveal.
Amos: It's not, it's not absolutely terrible.
Chris: I listened to the flop house episode about it, which tells you, which tells you everything you need to know.
Amos: It's not, it's not the worst movie I've ever seen.
Chris: No, I mean they're all whatever it is, what it is. Like all those movies had like super troubled development and all that stuff. And like at the end of the day, my problem with it is, is more just that, like, I sort of had all the answers to all the questions that I had at the end of Star Wars and all, all of my, like things that I thought about with Star Wars and like what a prequel, what prequels would be like as a kid. Right. And what sequels would be like, I got all those answers from me, like reading all those EU books and playing Star Wars with my friends. And like, we, we had answers to all that stuff. And like, we knew how it all played out and like that, that fulfilled everything I needed. And so like, I have my own head canon basically. Like I don't, I just have fanfic at this point in my head about it, about how it all works.
Amos: In your head.
Chris: Yeah, exactly. That's all that I really needed. I don't even know. It's just, it's just so wildly different. I just don't need, I don't need more answers.
Amos: For me. I watched them because I feel a little bit like a completionist like, I need to have it done except for, with book series, I don't necessarily do that because there's a lot of, well,
Chris: There's a lot of books in general.
Amos: There's a lot of commitment to finishing a book series that you're not enjoying anymore. Right. Like it takes a lot more.
Chris: Yeah.
Amos: Where a movie I'm like, I can spend an hour and a half and watch it.
Chris: And like, my eyes will be stimulated at least like it'll hit a certain neurons in my brain that made me feel good.
Amos: Sometimes I'll sit there while I'm watching a movie with like some other work that I'm doing and I just kind of have it on in the background.
Chris: Sure.
Amos: And I feel like I can do that with a movie. I really can't do that with a book. Even, even in audio, even an audio version of a book, I can't do it.
Chris: Absolutely. Yeah.
Amos: Cause it takes more concentration. So that, that ability to put it on in the background, I think when I watched the final Star Wars, I was actually like,
Chris: Okay, I haven't seen any of the Marvel movies since like, I haven't seen any Marvel movie in theaters since like Avengers. I don't think I've seen-
Amos: (Whispers) I don't blame you.
Chris: I don't think I've seen any of the Marvel movies since I don't even know when I-
Amos: I won't tell Juliet because she will be upset.
Chris: That's fine.
Chris: Those were like the greatest of all time for her.
Chris: It's fine. No, I listen. That's not a, sorry. This is not a judgment call on anybody who likes any of these things. You love star Wars L on Z, man. Like, I am not going to tell you you're wrong. I read all the EU books. Like, listen, no judgment free zone. Like, um, I just don't, it's just not, that's not my thing. That's not my jam.
Amos: I can't can't judge people. And one of my favorite things that I read this year is We Are Legion, We Are Bob. And it is,
Chris: I don't even know what that is.
Amos: It's a, it's a sci-fi novel about a guy who has his head frozen so that he can be brought back to life later.
Chris: Oh, you told me about this.
Amos: Yeah. And it's like, super cheesy.
Chris: You told me about this. And I said, I was like, it's like, it's ripping off Transmit.
Amos: Yeah, and it's, it's cheesy but enjoyable. And it's a series. Um, I grabbed the second one as an audio book because I'm not, I can listen to it in the car or whatever, and it's not something that needs a lot of, uh, concentration to follow. So it's just an enjoyable little, little book. I don't know.
Chris: Going down my list real quick. Cause I have my list here. We'll do this quick and then we can talk about things, but might we change topics, but uh, stuff that I thought were highlights, I re-read all of the Dresden files. They're really good. People should read the Dresden Files. They're really, really good. The first, the, re rereading them, I'll say the he's that the author is very raw in the first one to three books. The third book. I mean, they're all good. I'm sorry. That's not to say they're bad, but like the third book. Oh boy, does he hit his stride? And then it just like, sort of takes off. I read for the first time, this is an old book, but I read for the first time, at the very beginning of this year, the Soul of a New Machine, which I thought was amazing and totally worth reading by, uh, Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder. It's it's from the early days of computers. Um, and it's a journalist, Tracy Kitter, uh, sort of famous New York journalist, um, doing a long form essay about building a new about these people, building a new computer, uh, effectively building a new mainframe. Um, and it's like in the era of like the VAX and that sort of stuff. Um, totally fascinating and compelling. And yeah, if you're into computers at all, it's a, it's a super, super, super good read. Let's see, uh, nothing else super jumps out at me. I've read a bunch of like fantasy books and other things, nothing else is like was, was all it's all, all of it was fun. All that was great. Nothing else like is, was amazing. Uh, but Soul of a New Machine was really, really good. There you go. There's some books-
Amos: No textbooks?
Chris: No, I mean, whatever I read Team Typologies, which was like, I don't know, it was like a Malcolm Gladwell book. It was like, you had one idea that you turned into a book that could have probably just been a blog post, but we did, but you did manage to stretch it out. You did manage to say the same thing in slightly different ways, long enough to stretch it out into an entire book that being said, Team Typologies it's like really good. The ideas in it are really good. It's just, didn't need a whole book to explain all that. You could just watch the talk and probably get as much out of it. Um, the book was good. Um, I don't know that everyone needs to read it. Uh, yeah. I, I don't really, I didn't, I don't keep track of like my, like the technical program-y books that I read. I never really read programming books, like all the way through like I cherry pick pieces out of them at this point.
Amos: Yeah.
Chris: That I need when I need them. So I have a lot of like reference material effectively. So yeah, that's it. That's what I got. Oh, I read Bad Blood, which is not also did not come out this year. Anything like that, which is, but it's also fascinating and really good, totally intriguing and terrifying. Highly terrifying.
Amos: Maybe I'll add those into my hour or two a week of reading.
Chris: Uh, Bad Blood is all about Theranos.
Amos: I don't know what that is.
Chris: It's- really?
Amos: Yeah.
Chris: Okay. Well, we don't need to. It's fine. We don't need to go into that.
Amos: Moving on.
Chris: The people who made fake like, blood tests.
Amos: Oh, okay. Okay.
Chris: It was like those blood testing machines that like literally never worked.
Amos: It sounds like a fiction novel so.
Chris: Elizabeth Holmes.
Amos: Yes. ok. I know who you're talking about now.
Chris: Okay. Yeah. It's a book about that.
Amos: Okay. That sounds like it would be interesting.
Chris: It's, it's a totally fascinating read.
Amos: I mean, I need to know how I'm going to run my next Ponzi scam. So it's just-
Chris: Trick a bunch of, uh, old white army people into giving you millions of dollars. That is the, that's the technique.
Amos: And then just don't go to jail.
Chris: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Also, also important. That's a key part of this that's key step should get to getting a new topic, new jabbing what's happening in your Elixir world right now?
Amos: Um,
Chris: Anything, if anything, here's a question. I got a question for you. I'm going to put you on blast as the kids say. Um, do you need to ask Juliet what that means?
Amos: No. (laughing)
Chris: Now I'm going to ask you a question in this context.
Amos: All right, fine. I don't have to ask her
Chris: Do some idle speculation.
Amos: Okay.
Chris: Because by the time this comes out, who knows if we'll know or not, what is Jose working on?
Amos: I have no idea.
Chris: What do you think it is? Secret thing. What could it be?
Amos: I don't know. I'm curious about what the trade-offs are, because he's talking about all these performance increases and those usually come with trade-offs in other places
Chris: I saw somebody say it's, it's probably Lumen.
Amos: Yeah. I heard that too. I'm guessing it's uh, not that.
Chris: I'm gonna guess it’s not
Amos: If it is…
Chris: Oh man, we're going to be so, oh, are we going to have egg on our face? When it turns out to be Lumen?
Amos: From now on the Elixir is built only in Lumen. Um, I really don't know. I don't know. It's something
Chris: I think it’s something to do with strings.
Amos: You think that they're just changing the way strings work or like the performance underneath?
Chris:I don't, well, who knows? But I, the reading between the lines of like the different benchmarks and stuff, I think it's strings. Somebody also joked to me and said, “What if it's vectors”, which I thought was funny.
Amos: Just for you?
Chris: I mean, we'd be able to replace lists, which are a garbage data structure.
Amos: Okay, fair.
Chris: (in a high-pitched, whiney voice) "But they have really good access for the first thing on the list." (regular voice) Okay, great. Cool. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. Totally general purpose data structures should definitely be the default sequence. (whiney voice again)" They're fine. You can just use maps as an indexed array. "(regular voice) Okay. Try it. How can you, can you concatenate and split that efficiously? (whiney voice) "Well, you can do" (regular voice) No. You've admitted to me that lists are bad at this point. How are we still having this discussion? (whiney voice) "But I don't like that you use the word crap to decide to describe Elixir. That makes me sad." (regular voice) Well, I'm sorry to be more critical of things that you like. (whiney voice) "I still like Elixir" (regular voice) You can do both. You can do both of those things. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, straw man. (whiney voice) " Bye." (laughter and a pause)
Amos: There's a lot of history there, right? In that one little conversation. Good job.
Chris: Uh, I think, I think the new data structure would be cool. I don't, I don't think,
Amos: I don't think it is because the benchmarks are all just about performance and I don't see it as being a single data structure that they would be talking about. Cause it's not really improving performance across the board. It's improving performance of a data structure.
Chris: I wonder if it, I mean, it's P I think it's possible it's strings because there are other efficient string data structures to be used for immutable strings, which are interesting. But I don't know. It feels, I think for whatever reason, I thought one of the benchmarks specifically was about like concatenation or something like that. It seemed like it was string related.
Amos: Concatenation well, what else can you concatenate?
Chris: I mean, you can, concatenate all kinds of things, depending on how you define concatenate.
Amos: That's True. That's true. Anything that's adjoined.
Chris: Yeah. I mean like you want to, you want to get math-y about it?
Amos: No, no, we don't need to go that route.
Chris: I, for whatever reason I read, I was reading into it and felt like it was strings, but I have now, I don't know why I was, I thought that. I mean, it's possible, it's like lower level VM stuff. I has to be like probably in Erlang Right? You have to assume. Or lower level than that.
Amos: Well, hopefully so, so some of the, some of the other things that, um, you know, I've, I've heard theories of is that they're replacing something with like a, with a C implementation and then, and then there are big trade-offs there.
Chris: So, like hopefully it's not just like we wrote a NIF.
Amos: Right.
Chris: That's what I'm hoping.
Amos: So will, am I, am, am I going to be happy with the trade-offs? Is, is it going to be something useful? I hope so. Yea
Chris: Yeah. Here's the thing Jose, cause I know you listen to this program a couple times (Amos laughing) and if you don't someone you work with will- Hi Wojtek
Amos: (laughing) Friends of the show.
New Speaker:
Here's what I want. I want all benefits and no trade-offs so please provide that to me with whatever it is that you're doing. You can take that into account when you're making your decisions, all benefits, Chris, Keathley wants all benefits no trade-offs.
Amos: I asked about the trade-offs and got no response. So they're really good at keeping whatever they're working on secret.
Chris: When I talked, when I asked him, I was like, “This better not be a type, this better not be static types.” He was like, "Well, you said you'd leave if we added types. So I was left with no choice. So I was forced-“
Amos: (laughing) So I was forced to add types. Nice. Yeah. I don't, I don't know. Here's what I really hope
Chris: You don't get an opportunity like that all the time. You have to take it. Listen, you're not going to miss your shot.
Amos: I hope it has something to do with inspecting a bit string so that I don't have to see the, uh, the bug report come through my email that goes to the Elixir saying, "Hey, I tried to print out this list of numbers and I got a, I got a word. "
Chris: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Just change the default change the, change that default.
Amos: Please! And can we stop having that come through, like it multiple times a year.
Chris: I unsub I unsubscribed to the core mailing list it a long time ago.
Amos: It's well, the core mailing list is pretty quiet. It's the GitHub thing that I, I unsubscribe to.
Chris: Oh yeah. I don't understand. See here's okay. I'm going to give you a productivity secret. You can keep being like, I'm going to set aside time to do this stuff. Let me give you just a nickel's worth of free advice.
Amos: Alright.
Chris: Unsubscribe from all the things that you don't actively need to pay attention to.
Amos: Well, that's probably true. I don't read every one of those emails that comes in, but I read a lot of them.
Chris: It’s like you're like, "Man email sucks!" But you're bad at email.
Amos: I am. I am.
Chris: You know what I mean?
Amos: But I have unsubscribed from a lot.
Chris: But you refuse to archive any of your,
Amos: No, I archive have my emails, so I cannot have my inbox being full.
Chris: So this is an analogy, Amos.
Amos: Oh, okay.
Chris: It's like, “Man, Twitter is just so noisy,” but you follow 2000 people.
Amos: Fair.
Chris: It's like, well, I found the problem. My, I think I see the problem now.
Amos: All right, fine. Fine. You may have talked me into unsubscribe. I don't, I actually only read about like 1% of those that come in anyway.
Chris: But they, but you just listen. So you got to stop the noise in your head, my friend.
Amos: No, I'm saying you're probably right.
Chris: No, I know I'm right. I'm not wrong often.
Amos: Like if I have 99% of those, I just delete because I'm like, don't have time to read that right now that 1% is probably not worth keeping it around.
Chris: Yeah.
Amos: But I was trying to do it to like keep up with what's going on and learn more about like what's going on with Elixir.
Chris: That's why we have our super0secret chat channels that we talk to with our friends.
Amos: (whispers) Super-secret chat channels.
Chris: They'll keep us, someone will keep us apprised of all the, of all the things.
Amos: Alright. (sighs) You, you heard him, super-secret friends.
Chris: Keep us updated.
Amos: That's right. Secrets don't keep friends, but good friends are secrets.
Chris: I keep wondering. I think its binary, but I wonder if it's a myth or some other low-level thing. We will see.
Amos: Yeah. and, and there's all kinds of other things. Like does it effect across the board or in just one area.
Chris: It could be all kinds of things. It could even be a boat. It's much faster, I'll tell you that.
Amos: Wait, are they working on the Git?
Chris: I mean, I don't know. I don't know what they're doing. This is idle speculation times while I'm talking to you, this is supposed to be good content. I need you to, I need you to get your head in the game.
Amos: I wish I had more speculation, but I'm like so lost in that whole conversation. Like I've been following it. And I think your thing, your idea of strings or binaries is probably not bad.
Chris: And it's one of the slower things, right? It's one of the binaries are kind of like a problem, generally.
Amos: And it would have a major impact on, on web development. Cause there's a lot of strings going back and forth there.
Chris: Yeah. It probably makes LiveView faster. Right. Because you have, it's faster to send over stuff over the wire.
Amos: Yup. Yup.
Chris: So, yeah. It’s gonna be pretty cool.
Amos: That, I mean, that would, that would have a major impact on like 90% of the people using Elixir.
Chris: Maybe they finally got sick of people, trotting out those tech empower benchmarks and be like (in whiney voice) "Why is Elixir, I mean C is, Python is faster than Ruby and which is faster than Elixir" Okay. Sounds good. Let's just.
Amos: Let's just look at the benchmarks.
Chris: And they're like (whiney voice) "Let's just look at these Hello World benchmarks" . You mean the one where you just like whoever sits on the Unix socket and responds as quickly as possible is the winner. Yep. That makes sense. Absolutely. That's real. That's realistic. That's what most apps do you see, Amos.
Amos: Yeah. Well, as long as you can get to that Unix socket through a Kubernetes deployments process.
Chris: Yeah, obviously. Well, I mean, that's just, I mean, what do you, you have to, you have to have a modern architecture.
Amos: Well, right. Like I have a thing at home. It's a Raspberry Pi. I'm the only person that connects to it. I deploy to it with a Kubernetes and Terraform.
Chris: Oh, well obviously, I mean, listen, you gotta be modern. You can't use Ansible like an animal, okay. You gotta.
Amos: Or for my single application.
Chris: I, uh, I saw there was a, for whatever reason, I saw an ad for red hat yesterday and first I was like, “Wow, Red Hat is still a company.”
Amos: I didn't know that.
Chris: And then second of all, I saw a, uh, they were like, Kubernetes is, is more than just a way to deploy your dockerized microservice architecture to the cloud. It's a way to reach your customers. And I was like, is it though? I don't think it is. I'm pretty sure your customers do not care if you're deploying to the Kuber-net-is. Kuber-neat-us. Do you struggle with Kuber-neat-us?
Amos: You got Wilford Brimley coming in.
Chris: Where's my Tumblr? Where's my hashtag hates k8s Tumblr? That's what I want. I want a GIF Tumblr that's just hates k8s.
Amos: We need to do that. I don't know.
Chris: Yeah, get on that for me. Would you do that? Would you do that please?
Amos: I’ll work on it. Juliet, we need some Tumblr work.
Chris: I actually don't even hate Kubernetes that much. I just hate the industry.
Amos: Yeah. I don't, I don't think that.
Chris: I hate the mentality of, we have five services and a team of 10 people, but what we would probably need is an Istio and gRPC.
Amos: Yeah. Like.
Chris: And I'm like “No, what you needed was Postgres. Like you could just do it with Postgres.
Amos: Everybody. Everybody wants to jump on that, that new thing. And nobody like so many of the conversations that I have are about, have you thought about the trade-offs to this decision that you've totally are like, gun-ho we have to have this. And the answer is always like, well we need orchestration, or we need X or we need Y, like I think we need to get, use RabbitMQ, or Kafka.
Chris: People are bored. that's what it.
Amos: And it's like, why do we need Kafka? What are the trade-offs to Kafka? Are there other ways that we could do this? Is it, I mean, Kafka might be the answer, but let's talk about that. Let's not just jump on. And I'm like, well, why do we need Kafka? Well, we're going to have to send messages.
Chris: I was talking to a friend of mine who like got called out in a meeting cause he suggested RabbitMQ for a background queuing type stuff and was told that they would obviously be, have to use Kafka because RabbitMQ is ancient technology.
Amos: Wow.
Chris: And I about, uh, he told me this story and I was just like, we're I'm I, this is, I'm reaching a point where I want to quit. I want to quit software. The industry's current feticide fetishization of like cloud-scale whatever, whatever it's like- Oh my gosh. And I think that when I get upset about Kubernetes and stuff like that, it's not actually that I dislike Kubernetes. I've run Kubernetes clusters in production. Like I have done that. That's partially where I like where my vitriol comes from. But it's also just that like, people adopt these things, like with such a flippancy and you just, the sensibilities, you get doing this for a decade, you know, you start to see things like coupling and complexity and you just like you get, so you just run screaming from that stuff because you know the pain that you're looking at, like you see the future that you're looking at and Kubernetes has its place. Like all that stuff, all those things, Kafka has its place. Like all those things are useful in contexts where you like have made the right decisions to do that. But like, you don't want to just, don't, stop being so irrational. Like, like, I mean, I just like stop, stop pretending that I don't even know, like I'm actually at a loss where I said, I don't understand it. Like, it's like, it's like an ideological thing of like, what if you just like, did the simplest thing that would work today? And then, you know, by the time you need to scale up, you understand your problems, then you do that thing. And I think people are like, well, we just got to apply a plan for this or whatever. And it's like, well, yeah, but like,
Amos: But you can take a project and add k8s to it. Not change anything else. It's not like it changed the way that you had to write your application, right. So if you get to a point where you start to need that-
Chris: -In theory.
Amos: In theory, right. Like there, there are some things it's, it's not something that is extremely difficult, like to add later. There are things that if you don't do them at the beginning of a project, going back and changing can be like nearly detrimental, but a lot of these are not, most things are not.
Chris: But yeah, I don't know though, but like how much, what is your, I mean, Fred talks about this in his like, "Complexity has to live somewhere " post, it's like how much of that are you willing to pay for? How much of that do you want to own yourself? And how much of that do you need to take on today to achieve like, the goals?
Amos: Yep.
Chris: And if you've got 10 things, I don't know, like, I don't know that I buy it. Everyone's going to have their own sensibilities about that stuff, but it's just like people take on, I just remember seeing a brand-new startup, that's like, we run literally the, the modern web stack. Right. We have a Kafka, we have a Kubernetes, we have an Istio, we have a blah, blah, blah. And it's like, you have 20 people. Like how did you let this get out of hand? And then I remember people that we are, that we are, that we talk to on a regular basis being like, eh, it's fine. Oh, that seems like a totally reasonable stack to me. It's like, what are you talking about? Like, how are we in this place where they that's reasonable?
Amos: The management of all that might take 20 people, that's where I like get, I don't know.
Chris: And, and yeah, I don't know. It's like, how is that a useful expenditure of time, spoiler alert, I talked to the people who actually work there and they're like, it's not. So, you know, there you go. But it's, but like now you make some of these decisions and then you do have to live with them. Like you can't just go rip out some of this stuff.
Amos: Right.
Chris: Because you start to like, become reliant on that stuff. You start to become reliant on certain things. And there are certainly great benefits. You know, Kubernetes has service discovery built in for whatever that's worth. You know, it's like, it's got, you know, you have to go through three or four layers of software defined networking, and it's slow as hell. But like, it does work, most of the time. And like, you know, you can make that you can, you can jam all that stuff together and make it all work.
Amos: Yeah.
Chris: Or you could like, you know, like it's a false dichotomy, right. But, or you could have, uh, you know, or you cannot, or you can just not do that.
Amos: I've seen it work well, Kubernetes service discovery to have multiple nodes be able to connect up to each other in an Elixir app.
Chris: Yeah. There, there are tons of benefits to it. The only lib, that's the only lib cluster adapter that works like, you know, so if you're going to use lib cluster, it's the only one that you, that you probably can safely put into production. And like, count on.
Amos: And also, how far can you go with maybe a little bit of hard coded, but for services, like you can get really far that way. Most people are not needing to have auto expanding
Chris: How many nodes do you need to run? I mean, if you're doing it, I mean, here's the thing is like, if you're doing it for scale and you've got a reasonable run time, how many nodes do you need to run of any given?
Amos: Oh, and do we want to talk about auto scaling?
Chris: Oh, I mean, auto scaling, like forget auto scaling. Like, no. Auto scaling is a cost saving measure only. Like, 100%. We've talked about this before. Like auto scaling is not resilience.
Amos: Right.
Chris: In the sense that it's not, auto scaling does not buy you anything on its own. You need everything else before you need auto scaling.
Amos: Well and it, (sigh) auto scaling to me is like the, the, "Oh shit" handle.
Chris: And by autoscaling, I don't mean like detecting dead nodes and replacing dead nodes and all that sort of stuff. Dead containers and restarting apps and that sort of stuff. I mean like, Oh, well we can just go from a hundred, to or 10 to a hundred instances instantaneously. It's like, well, no, you can't. And also, that's not math. Like that's, that's not, that's not science. That's not queues. It turns out there's literally not math that will govern this. And that's not math.
Amos: Well, and like, oftentimes what I see in auto-scaling architectures is that the database actually ends up being your bottleneck. And then you start auto-scaling app servers and you just have not done anything better.
Chris: Um, no. And, and I mean, if you're using like a junky, like single-threaded runtime that can handle 10 requests at a time. Sure. Adding more instances will enable you to handle up to maybe even potentially 20 concurrent users.
Amos: What I found is that in a lot of auto-scaling of the web server itself, what you've really done is every web server has a queue of requests that can only be so large before it starts dropping them on the floor.
Chris: Yeah. Yes, exactly.
Amos: So all you do by adding another node, let's say one node can have a hundred things in its queue. You add another node. Now you've just expanded the ability to queue more things. You have not made things run faster. You you've actually probably slowed things down even more.
Chris:nYeah. Well, and yeah, I mean, because now you've, you've just moved the bottleneck. Right. You've pushed the bottleneck into some other part of the system and that thing may have even worse. And yeah. The knock on effects of that they yeah. Have, have marked, uh, performance impacts.
Amos: Like, a lot of that is to say service discovery, you can get by really far with just some hard-coded or semi-hard coded things, you know, I mean, like to go to the Kubernetes level.
Chris: Well, and, and like, if you're doing it for scale, right. And the, the real answer to that is that most services are not about scale at all. Like you don't break stuff. I mean, people claim to break out services for scale reasons. And sometimes that does happen. Like, like all these things do do occur. In the majority of instances, you're breaking out services because of team dynamics, you know, you're breaking out services because of the huge gaping wound that you, that you incurred by, you know, Conway came along and shanked you because you like, didn't like you didn't, you decided that you could ignore it. And like, that's what, that's what you're trying to defend against half the time. So that's how you end up with 50 services is you have 50 teams that don't talk to each other very well.
Amos: Right.
Chris: And like, you know, yeah. And then you end up with that problem. And so it's an answer. All of these solutions are a way to platform-itize, if that's a word, a common thing, right? Like we need a way, if you've got 50 teams that don't talk to each other very well, you do need a way for them all to deploy software. So now you get one team who just manages nothing but the deployment of software, which really just means just keeping that FTDI alive. And then as long as the FTDI is alive, we can deploy software. And so you keep that alive. And then now you can, now your 50 teams can continue to not talk to each other, except now they can talk to, they cannot talk to each other, but more efficiently.
Amos: Right.
Chris: Which is actually good for your productivity for your individual productivity, to be honest, right? Like that's, that's the trade-off you're making. Right. You can move a lot faster if you don't talk to each other.
Amos: To a point.
Chris: But if you, yeah. Yeah. Well, uh, unless you care about not reinventing things or like having disparate data stores for stuff, and like, you know, having all this domain knowledge, spread across all your different systems and then trying to reconcile that eventually when you need to do reporting, you know, you need a team to, you know, do nothing, but manage a data lib as they call it, you know, or whatever. Like that's the problem. Right. And so, and you know, Kafka will not save you, the database turning the database inside out will not save you. Um, nothing saves you except communication. And, but that's, that's the point you're trying to mitigate a people problem. The people problem being, I have 50 teams doing 50 disparate things. They all have their own services, how do I make that
Amos: Yeah, and then when they talk to each other, you know, if you can reduce the number of people that a specific team has to talk to, which ends up splitting services even more.
Chris: Right.
Amos: I don't know.
Chris: And I mean, yeah. And it's fine. Like, you know, if you want to target a deployment thing, Kubernetes is whatever, if you know, it's just a lot of YAML, a whole lot of YAML you're right. More config, then you'll write, you know, application code half the time and then you'll have some things. So if everybody's like, well, no, I just have my own scripts that I'll just copy into everything and then just works fine. And then it's like, well, okay, whatever you say,
Amos: Well, if a lot of your projects are the same. And I've seen that.
Chris: Yeah, sure. And if everything is just a crappy GO binary that you put in Docker container, it's probably fine. So like, it's, it's good. It is what it is. So
Amos: I have found that anytime that we need something new on every team that I've worked with that did Kubernetes, that it didn't matter what that thing was or how complicated it seemed to be. It was going to be at least a week, up to a month for things that I, you know, we, everybody was like, Oh, that should be easy. We'll we'll have that done the end of the day. We're going to go ahead and deploy that change to Kubernetes. And then they're like a week later they're still like beating their head.
Chris: Yeah, sure. Yeah. I mean, you, eventually you figured out and you write some Go plugins, and you get it to work with AWS or whatever your, your cloud provider de jour, and then, you know, you get, you get it all to work. And I mean, so it, like I say, like the scaling thing is not, that's not really the main motivation, right? Because at the end, if you want to scale, you wouldn't use containers at all. Like, if you want to scale, you go rack some boxes. Like if you wanted, if you wanted like high, like, you know, if you want to, if you're going for highest throughput, you're going to go run like your own network at some level, you know,
Amos: And have the maintenance team for that.
Chris: If you want, if you want higher, high-ish through, you know, throughput, you know, you just, you default back to Amazon's crappy network. And then you, you just use that if you like, so there's different scales of it, right? And like, if you want, if you want to try to eke out the most of your, of your, your performance you're not going to like jam an app in a container and then give it a bunch of times slice CPU, like you're just going to give it the most CPU and the most Ram and just let it ride.
Amos: Right.
Chris: Um, that's not the point of all that the point of all this stuff is like cost savings, commoditization of this stuff, commoditization of compute power and trying to make it consistent, so you don't have to talk to 50 teams all the time. It's just a people problem. Um, and there are, there are certainly lots of benefits. And man, I'll tell you what programmers see all the benefits all the time, being, programmers know the benefit of everything and the trade-offs of nothing like,
Amos: That's the quote of the day.
Chris: Like people, people people know that constantly. And so it's, you know, it's not, like I say, you're not really doing it for scale. I mean, to put it in perspective, we ran a Phoenix channels app, um, with like 150,000 connected users doing several hundred requests per second on five nodes. They were big nodes, but five. And we had tons of headroom and like, and like, that's, that's, you know, if you just think through your problem and, and we made a bunch of trade-offs and design decisions to do that, like, you never hit the database. Like you never, you never go do anything expensive and it's all best effort and it's all you know, you start from in-memory first and all that stuff. And then you're, and then you're fine. And they're not even like that big, the nodes weren't even that big. And technically speaking, we weren't even running, we were still running on time slice CPS. We were running on ECS. So we just like, we had a pretty big allotment of time and you start to think like, well wow, if we just gave these nodes like a real box, and just dedicated all the resources of those virtual machine to this one app, we'd be in really good shape.
Amos: With two boxes.
Chris: Yeah. I mean, you know, we definitely get away with, I w I don't know about two, but like get away with a lot more, have a lot more headroom. But in any case, all that, to say, like the potential there, the potential, or the potential is there to just not run that many things. But like I say, it's not really about, I'm just repeating myself now. It's not really about running. You know, it's not really about scale. You're not, you know, you don't split you very rarely split services for scale or, or rely on quote unquote "reliability". Sometimes you do at a very large companies, you have enough people power to, to make those kinds of decisions. Most of the time, it's, it's just purely politics.
Amos: Well, and people get, I think a lot of the times when, when working, if we don't, we don't necessarily think about the actual performance requirements of the software that we're working on. Right. We think about the, the, uh, I'm gonna call it business logic just for you. Uh,
Chris: Sure. I mean, you think about the things that things you actually need to do
Amos: Yeah, like what needs to happen, but not, not when it needs to happen or what happens when it fails or, um, what are, what are the performance characteristics? Does it need to respond in under a hundred milliseconds or is five seconds okay.? Like those trade offs aren't thought about until way late in the game. And I think if we can move those up to an upfront conversation, that then we can know how to design and like, know whether, whether it's okay for us to throw it up in a cloud, whether we need to have bare metal, uh, we don't mind spending four, we can, we can either have four virtual nodes or 400 like that, it makes a big difference in how you want to design things. Um, so if like cost, speed, number of connections, like those things should be things that we think about a little earlier in the process than what we do.
Chris: Yeah. I mean, I don't necessarily disagree that. I think, I think it's all business logic, right? We've had this conversation, like, I think performance is business logic, just, you know, and, and I think in as much as performance encapsulates, uh, throughput and concurrent users and all that sort of stuff, right. You can't have, you know, every request can't take 10 seconds. If you have thousands and thousands of users who are all gonna use your site all at once, just partially, unless you're JIRA partially, just because that's no, one's going to stand for that. Like, people will think your service is miserable, but also partially just because, you know, you now have a major problem. Like you can't service everybody. I mean, you know, I think those things have to be part of the conversation cause it's, it's relevant to your business at the same time. I think most companies just don't have that many users and it's fine. You can, you can run a couple of million-dollar business on a handful of users relatively speaking, right. You don't need to be Google to, or Facebook or Twitter and these other mega mega network things to build up several million dollar a year business, you know, like that's just not how the scales break out. And so if you ha you know, we were talking about today, it's like most people will be thrilled to death to have a hundred requests a second, right. Because that would indicate that you've got like a very successful business at that point.
Amos: Oh, yeah!
Chris: Or like at least a successful business, right. Depending on what your aims are and what you're doing. But, and so I think most people can get a, when people talk about performance, not being a thing, or like not worrying about performance as part of the, you know, this is a DED thing that comes up a lot, I feel like, or at least in, from that community, it's like, if you can just get by, thinking performance is a secondary problem to, you know, design or something like that, or feature development. That's true, only in as much as you just don't have any users or like you don't, you're trying to get users, especially if you're early stage, you know, you're trying to like figure out what people will even pay for. At that point performance like super doesn't matter, because you don't have anything, you don't have anyone to perform with or perform to. You have no audience. So just figure, get an audience first before you make it fast.
Amos: And I mean, you can, you can perform enough for a handful of users that it's not, you're probably not going to matter, unless your users are automated devices that are pummeling your server.
Chris: Yeah. I mean, everything's gonna, I mean, and that's the thing is like every, every context matters. Context is king in this case, or, or context is the in-charge, let's do it that way. If you, you know, you have to understand your business, you have to understand what it is that you're actually designing for and work within that spectrum to accommodate that. Maybe you have no users, but it's the all-connected devices. And they send thousands of telemetry points, you know, uh, every second, well, you got to accommodate that. You have to learn how to, how to handle that. Uh, and that's the thing that you're preparing for. So all that to say, like, I don't actually hate Kubernetes. I wish that programmers and so-called software engineers would stop and consider the choices that they're making on their own merits, as opposed to like, everyone should default use this because it's the future. And that, that really bugs me because I think that we could be, you know, we're we as an industry, I think we're in a very like self-serving place right now. I think worse than, than probably like I've seen in a long while. With all with like, with this fetisi fetishization of like infrastructure.
Amos: So is that, that's the New Year's resolution for the industry?
Chris: I don't believe in New Year's resolutions. I just believe in resolutions.
Amos: So what's the resolution for the industry?
Chris: If you're going to make some giant change in your life, why did you wait till the new year? Why is it not important enough to do it right now?
Amos: I agree, but its New Year's Eve I'm going to call it a New Year's resolution.
Chris: Are you going to eat black-eyed peas tomorrow?
Amos: Dirt peas. That's what those are. Dirt peas.
Chris: You've never had, you’ve never had-
Amos: I've had good black-eyed peas. And they're okay.
Chris: I'm here to tell you, you haven't. Not the way I do it.
Amos: Let's hear it.
Chris: You get the whole ham hock.
Amos: Yeah, my family's from Alabama.
Chris: Yeah, but are you sure?
Amos: Oh, I'm pretty sure. They also used to put sugar in there, too. Yeah.
Chris: Oh, what?
Amos: Yeah. I had an aunt that put sugar in there.
Chris: See, yeah. I mean maybe some hot sauce, but not sugar. What are you talking about?
Amos: Keep that bitter. Keep that centered.
Chris: Just beans and rice.
Amos: I like them better now that I'm old, but when I was a kid, I was like, “These things taste like dirt.”
Chris: Yeah. Since, I mean, same to be fair. Same, same. A lot of times people use like white rice too. Instead of like, you know, like wild rice and you really got to use wild rice.
Amos: It's a big difference in the flavor.
Chris: It makes a huge difference. Anyway.
Amos: So ours were often just the beans, like no rice, just beans pile on your plate. Like you're like, you're eating a pile of corn, but instead it’s a pile of beans.
Chris: No, no, no, no, no, no. See this, this is what I'm saying. That's not Hoppin Johns. That's not, that's not what that is. It's you've got to have, you literally have to have the rice for it to be the whole dish. Yeah. I will probably not subject my kids to it this year, mostly because I don't think we have black-eyed peas and we can't find them at this point. I think there's no way I'm going to the store at this point to go out and just try to scrounge up some black-eyed peas or purple whole peas or any of that stuff. But I make, I make some dope Hoppin Johns, I'm just gonna throw out there, I make some tasty, tasty Hoppin Johns.
Amos: Okay, well, next time that we can actually travel and it be safe. Uh I'm coming and you're going to give me some Hoppin John.
Chris: Yeah, I'll make you Hoppin Johns and-
Amos: I'm in.
Chris: Yeah. We'll make a thing of it. There'll be a whole, it'll be a whole day.
Amos: Sit in the back.
Chris: Well, I got a new, I got a new, I got a new cast iron for the holidays.
Amos: Ooh.
Chris: Ooh, it's good. It's so good. (whispers) It's so good.
Amos: I'm like slowly trying to convert everything to cast iron, except for making eggs, making eggs and cast iron, they do taste really good. But
Chris: Yeah, eggs is, is making eggs is, is where you is, that's what the, that's the cast iron bread and butter.
Amos: Oh, I always get 'em stuck.
Chris: It's the, it's the cast iron butter and eggs.
Amos: I always have them stuck to the bottom.
Chris: Then you're you gotta season that cast season some more.
Amos: Okay. Season more.
Chris: How do you season, let's talk about this is important and we'll go. How do you use, how do you personally season?
Amos: Okay, uh, i I usually get bacon in it and then put it in and then put it in the oven-
Chris: -I've got notes.
Amos: at 340, 50. And let it ride for a while.
Chris: I got notes for you.
Amos: What?
Chris: Bacon is the worst thing to season your cast iron with it. Uh, I used to know the actual chemistry of this, but bacon specifically. Um, there are certain properties of bacon grease that strip seasoning from cast irons.
Amos: Well, crud. All right. What do I need to season?
Chris: Yeah, uh, do you want, like, do you want to food or do you want to eat? Do you want to, do you want to get gained seasoning? You know, the way, the way your grandparents did or do you want to like,
Amos: Cn you start with a cheat and then move on to the way my grandparents did it? Cause that's what I would probably do.
Chris: Absolutely.
Amos: Because I've done olive oil before. And I tried avocado oil too. Since it's got a high flash point.
Chris: Hmm. You want olive oil has a very low flashpoint so you don't wanna use olive oil.
Amos: Right, that's why I switched to avocado.
Chris: You can use avocado, to be honest, it's not good for the environment. Canola oil is like kind of one of the best, easily accessible things you can use or lard, lard, grape seed oil.
Amos: I have some of that.
Chris: You can use grape seed oil. And, and here's the thing you put a little bit on there a tiny bit, a tiny bit. And basically, like it shouldn't look shiny. Like once you, once you scrub the surface of it, put it in the oven. Better yet. If you have a grill, you can use the grill right now, it's cold outside, but you could use the grill and that way doesn't smoke up your whole house, unless you have a very nice oven that can get rid of that smoke.
Amos: It's not.
Chris: And then you really need to leave it in there for like, you just put it in there, cold, heat it up, let it sit for like an hour and then like cool it Let it cool. Back down again in the oven.
Amos: I can, I can do that.
Chris: Or on the grill. You can do it in the grill too, grills, a better place to do it because one, you can get it hotter. And two, you can get the smell outside.
Amos: All I have is a charcoal grill.
Chris: That'd be fine. It'll be fine. You just need it hot.
Amos: Oh, I can load it up.
Chris: Not over like direct flame to if you can get it up on like, so it's more convection. Anyway. So you do that. And uh, yeah, a little bit of grape seed oil. Do that a couple of times you'll build the seasoning back up on there. Don't do too, don't put too much on there or it'll gunk up. It gets all gunky and all sticky.
Amos: I'll do that.
Chris: And then, and then in terms of cooking, so that's the cheat, get your seasoning built back up,, and then you want to cook stuff in there, like, you know, sauté some sauté, some, or not sauté but um caramelize onions in there, call it caramelize some onions.
Amos: I do that a lot in there, yeah. And peppers.
Chris: And that makes me pancakes. Pancakes are a good one because they're high heat. So yeah, that sort of stuff. And then, and bacon every once in a while, like once you get the seasoning built up again, bacon's okay.
Amos: But don't start with it. I started with it.
Chris: You don't want to do that, that often and. Oh yeah. Yeah. Don't, don't, don't break in a new cast iron with bacon, you'll strip the seasoning.
Amos: This is probably the most important part of, for whatever reason, the podcast today, right now.
Chris: Yeah. It's all at the end. We leave the good stuff to the end. Uh, that that's a pro move. It keeps them listening.
Amos: I have been using my cast iron to sear steaks and pork chops.
Chris: I bet that's good, too. How do you?
Amos: Uh, sou vide for the pork chops and then like 40 seconds on each side in the, in a hot cast iron skillet. Oh, it's so good. So good.
Chris: Are you familiar with sears all technology?
Amos: No.
Chris: You should go look up a sear, I feel like you like kitchen stuff. I feel like this would be in your, this is be in your wheelhouse. I don't have one of these. I'm familiar with their, with their, with their workings. It's a butane torch adapter. That is actually all it is. It's a butane torch adapter that spreads the heat out really wide. And then you sear stuff with it. Hence why it's called the sears all.
Amos: Oh man, I'm already on Amazon. This is going to be amazing.
Chris: Did you? You've you've already put it in the basket. I in the cart as they say.
Amos: I should. I like that, uh, when you search for this thing on, on Amazon, like three rows down, they have the sears all right next. They have it bundled with uh, sou vide containers.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah. It's a, it's a popular because once you, you know, when you sou vide something, it doesn't look cooked and it doesn't have any that maillard reaction going on there. So you got to get that. You gotta get something out there and sear that thing, but the sears all is hot. Oh, its hot, hot. So you can, you can get a really good sear very quickly.
Amos: I'm in.
Chris: Yeah, there you go. There's mine my gift to you. Now, it's not a gift in physical form, but it's knowledge,
Amos: I gotta find the right one now cause there's not,
Chris: You know what I like more than these 10 Lamborghinis that I drive through the Hollywood Hills? Knowledge!
Amos: I read a book a day.
Chris: Uh, you know what I like none of these 10 bookshelves, my Lamborghinis and these Hollywood Hills.
Amos: Perfect.
Chris: I don't know why. I don't know. I don't think he actually talks like Christopher Walken.
Amos: That's alright.
Chris: (attempting the quote again as a Christopher Walken impression) You know what I like more than these Hollywood Hills, my 10 Lamborghinis, you know, I'm sorry. This podcast is starting to go long.
Amos: I think this podcast is over. We should shut it down.
Chris: The whole thing?
Amos: Oh no, just, just for the day.
Chris: Okay.
Amos: I gotta get some food and I got another meeting, so it's been good.
Chris: Yeah, yeah, go eat. Nourish thy physical form.
Amos: I will, I will. And then next time maybe I'll have something more prepared for us to talk about.
Chris: Yeah, please do. If you could, could look over the notes that I send you, I don't know why you ignore them every time. We have a Google doc. I don't know if you know that.
Amos: I've never put notes in it. Never seen a Google doc.
Chris: Yeah. See the, if you want. So if everybody thinks that I'm just the one who's going, you know, going on tangents and stuff. No, we have a Google doc that Amos just never reads. That's the, that's the behind the scenes and stuff.
Amos: Google doc that Keathley never shared with anybody else. Apparently (both laughing).
Chris: Blogspot.com/keathley/blogspot/keathleythoughts.
Amos: Uh, it was on his, it was on his geo city site up until last week.
Chris: It was on my Zynga.
Amos: Alright, sir, you have a wonderful day l.
Chris: Later.
Amos: See in the new year.