The Bucket

Shane (00:00)
This is it. Welcome to the bucket. All right, so let's talk about that for a second. I think we can probably say the letter and the number without having any issues. If you object, say so now, because I'm just going to say it. All right. Yes, there we go. All right. So Shane, Stephen, Simon, which, except for my name, at least the sound of the end of each of our names also is the same, which is interesting.

Simon (00:03)
Hahaha

Steven (00:16)
S3.

Shane (00:29)
Shane, Simon, Steven. Yeah, so we just like, we've been talking about doing something like this for a few months now, right? I mean, before Leracon, I think the idea came about and I was just like, S3, we're all S's, right?

Steven (00:38)
Yeah.

Shane (00:46)
there we go.

Steven (00:47)
where we've officially come together.

Simon (00:47)
Nah. Yeah. Branding all sorted. Logo sorted. We've got the right colours on our riverside.

Steven (00:55)
Yeah

Shane (00:55)
Yeah, intro stuff.

We're at, this is professional grade. This is what happens when you just rely on the tooling and not, I mean, we're putting some time into this, right? We're putting, we've done a little bit of, a little bit of like work, but not like, you know, I'm not audio engineering everything or, you know what I mean? Like, I'm just kind of setting up with what we've got and hit record. And I think that's where the idea initially came about. Simon and I.

Steven (01:05)
man.

Simon (01:06)
yeah.

Yeah.

you

Shane (01:28)
We had talked about this before I even met Stephen, just some idea of doing something like this. And it's just cause we just had conversations where like, man, I wish we were recording this. I wish we'd just hit record and put a podcast out. Cause Simon's already got a podcast, right? What's that called?

Simon (01:41)
Yeah.

Simon shares something like that.

Shane (01:48)
Simon, you're like, I should know this. No, I was giving you an opportunity to plug it.

Simon (01:54)
Mmm, yeah.

Steven (01:54)
Yeah, that was a blameless little plug right there.

Shane (01:59)
and yeah so and i think everyone i think everyone should we introduce everyone i think everyone knows simon everyone that would listen to this should know simon

Simon (02:12)
What? Well.

Shane (02:14)
Well, they definitely will now. So go for it.

Simon (02:17)
Hi everyone, I'm Simon. Job done.

Shane (02:21)
So I keep finding more and more about Simon that you've built, created, like I keep seeing more and more things that you've done, built, whatever for Laravel in the past. Do wanna go over just a couple of those or 10 of them?

Simon (02:36)
I think you know more about it than I do.

Steven (02:36)
Dude, the bro couldn't even remember the name of his podcast. You're gonna have him pull those out right now.

Simon (02:42)
You tell me what they are.

Steven (02:45)
Your career in 20 seconds Simon go

Shane (02:46)
Well, there's there's laryngobs.

I, there's lardub's slash larder, right? Der. Yeah, yeah, Native PHP. There's other packages though that you've created. Right? I'm gonna get on your GitHub right now.

Simon (02:55)
you mean like community-wise stuff? Yeah.

man, yeah.

I don't know if that's that interesting. Okay, so there was one that I did at the start of this year. I haven't done that many, you know, there's loads of people that have loads of really popular packages and I'm just like, I do this occasional thing and sometimes people like it. Or not. I did the...

Shane (03:05)
happening.

Ugh, so British. Come on, man. Who cares what other people have done?

Steven (03:25)
So humble.

Shane (03:27)
Better than me, man.

Simon (03:32)
The one that I actually like, which I need to spend a bit more time on, is the OG, which is an Open Graph image creator. That's kind of like a nice little small open source package. And it's been getting sort of some traction recently. There was a few people writing about it. Jmac has been using it, trying to use it, and he's struggling a little bit. I need to help him out.

I've not had time, but trying to set that up for his Shift blog. And he's been live streaming that, that's been cool. Yeah, I mean the other stuff, but Lara Deur, I hate that name. I'm gonna change it. Yeah, I mean, hopefully.

Steven (04:24)
I like LaraDev's more.

What do you think, Shane?

Shane (04:30)
I feel like, all right, I'll just, be nice. I think Laredevs is better.

Steven (04:36)
Yeah, for those that don't know, Simon operates this platform currently called LeraDev, but it sounds like might be switching to LeraDevs. Yep, perfect. And it's where a curated high quality list of Laravel developers can host basically profiles, almost like a short portfolio of themselves for.

Simon (04:38)
Good tape.

Shane (04:47)
Now it already redirects, just go to lyradevs.com.

Simon (04:50)
Larradabs.com

Steven (05:05)
job market opportunities. So there you go.

Simon (05:08)
You guys are so much better at advertising me than I am. This feels really bad.

Steven (05:14)
Well, when, when these roles are reversed and like, started talking about, know, Steven or Shane, then, then you get to jump in and help us out.

Shane (05:14)
You do cool stuff, man.

Steven (05:23)
So, yeah, that's Simon. Any other packages you want to?

Shane (05:28)
They hated PHP.

Simon (05:30)
What's that?

Steven (05:30)
Yeah, I would like to talk about that. Like what's the latest stuff happening with native PHP?

Shane (05:37)
Introduce it first because you there and this is one of the things that we're going to talk about today. I believe maybe not a bunch of new developers coming into Laravel, right? So, some, people might not know. So I really enjoyed, Laricon last year watching Marcel Pociot. And I keep, I'll probably say every time I say his name, but I'm pretty sure that's the right way to say his last name.

Simon (06:03)
Yeah, that sounded right to me.

Shane (06:07)
So he kind of unveiled this thing called Native PHP. He had no idea what it was. But you guys, you can take any Laravel application and hit a button or type a command after you install this. And now you have a native, I know people are scared about that word, but a native desktop application. You have an application that will run on your Mac or Windows Linux too or not yet? Just the two, Linux too, yeah.

Simon (06:34)
Yeah, Linux as well.

Shane (06:37)
And so you can you can turn your app into a Into a native desktop application or you can just build something specific to Desktop applications a lot of use cases for that I got excited about it. That's I think when I started the YouTube channel Last year as I just I was just like go and just hit record I think I did eight or nine videos in like two days of just a little half hour things like

Simon (07:04)
Hmm.

Shane (07:05)
You know, snorting stevia all the time and, just going, just going, you know, into it. And it's, yeah, it's, it's, it was a hot topic then. And I think every time you tweet about it, it, kind of resurfaces and everyone's still kind of about it. and it's, you've done some work recently over the last few months, getting windows, something about windows going better and something about redistribution or updates.

Simon (07:09)
you

yeah.

Yeah.

Shane (07:35)
to apps. us about that.

Simon (07:38)
The yeah, thanks Shane. That was a great intro. I couldn't have done it better myself. the, yeah. So native PHP is a massive thing in my head, at least, you know, it's like this, this dream that I've had for years to be able to use PHP to build all sorts of applications, not just web applications, but I love like web technology. You know, I love the

Shane (07:42)
That's what I'm here for.

Simon (08:07)
HTML, CSS, JavaScript way of building stuff because it's very flexible. It's very powerful. It's not everyone's favorite, but I it's my only way of doing it. I don't, never learned any other like systems languages or anything like that. So, yeah, I I've got like these big dreams for where native PHP could be and

Last year it got, we sort of rushed, I will say to get it in front of people. because we had, that Laricon was coming up and Marcel had a slot to give a talk and he thought that it would be a really, he was right. It would be a really good place to announce it. and so, I mean, he spent a lot of time kind of running through building the first kind of electron version of the thing after I'd got

the early prototypes that I was building, working in Tori or Tari or however the hell you say that. And yeah, then it sort of slowed down. I got really busy after Laricon last year. Marcel was really busy as well on other projects and like tickets issues just mounted and I got really down about it. Honestly, it was really tough to like look at it and go,

I need to pick this up and do stuff and I've got all these ideas, but I don't know what to do first. And there's all these people complaining and then a lot of people going, it's a dead project. Like it's just another dead project. It's never going to come back and blah, blah, blah. And I was like, God damn it. No, I'm going to sort this out. And, so yeah, like at the end of last year, I went on the mission to like, I'm going to get it working on windows properly. Cause I think a few people had tried and,

Steven (09:45)
Hmm.

Simon (10:03)
It took me ages, but we finally did it. And it's not, I say it took me ages. The reality is that the underlying thing that makes it possible is this library that is called static PHP CLI, which is a library written in PHP that allows you to build PHP binaries. So if you've got PHP already on your machine, you can download this library from git.

You know, there's actually standalone binaries of that thing as well. But set gets super better. And then you can use it to build multiple versions of PHP for different platforms. So if you're running it on Linux environment, you can build a Linux binary. If you're running it on a Mac, you can build a Mac binary, et cetera. And we couldn't do Windows on it. But I worked closely with the guy who's running that project.

got it to a point where it's working on Windows to build Windows binaries. And then I had to like test it and shoehorn it into native PHP, like the electron environment and make sure that it was actually working. And that's what took me most of the time. So.

Shane (11:20)
that just quick question does that take do you pack PHP into native PHP or are using whatever the users using on their system when you're doing the builds

Simon (11:35)
It's a packed up version so they don't need PHP on their system in order to run the application once it's built. But obviously as a developer you're going to need PHP on your system to run it because you're going to need to compose or install. You'll be wanting to run.

Shane (11:54)
No, well, I think what I mean is like when you run this command to build for Windows, for example, does it take your PHP that you have on I'm on a Mac? Does it take my PHP version or does native PHP when I in composer install native PHP, does that bring its own versions of PHP?

Steven (11:55)
right.

Simon (11:59)
Yeah.

Honestly, it gets a little weird. there's like, because it's electron, right? You've got an electron JavaScript process that's running to do the builds. And that's going to be calling out all sorts of other little scripts and things to actually compile the Chromium application. In the middle of that.

Shane (12:16)
I like it.

Simon (12:36)
We tell it to call out to PHP, for example, to composer install the dependencies for your application. So you get the right dependencies of the right version and not all of the dev dependencies. You know, it does a composer install whatever the command is. That's basically only your actual required dependencies and not required dev. And then that is going to use

I can't remember. It will either use the system PHP that you're using or it will use the one in the bundle.

Shane (13:11)
That is weird.

Simon (13:17)
At that point, kind of doesn't really matter. the, there's just like parts, it's going to switch out to PHP. I the bits that are going to be calling JavaScript and there are other bits of calling other stuff. But at the end, the version of PHP that you've got on your system is the version of PHP that it's going to try and use, but it's not using the same binary. It's just going, I know that you're running PHP 8.2 locally for this application. So when you've tried to build the app, I'm going to try and find.

Shane (13:18)
you

Steven (13:20)
All right.

Shane (13:37)
Okay.

Simon (13:47)
a PHP 8.2 binary. And if there is one, then it will use that and it will bundle that one with your app.

Steven (13:57)
So beyond like the internals, where is the project today? What are you guys working on?

Simon (14:04)
so right now I'm trying to get it to a beta. and there's no, that's just a label. It doesn't really mean much, but, there's a few kind of big, I'll say big ticket items that I would really like to get ticked off the list, which one of them has been this whole idea of like security of the code, which I could talk for hours about, but, and then there's a few like,

Steven (14:28)
Mm-hmm.

Simon (14:34)
feature additions and some improvements to some of the APIs, like the menu API, for example, is not particularly great. It's a bit funky and it's awkward. so I'm refactoring that at the moment. And there's been quite a few people requesting like ways to build with, their own processes running in the side. So.

You could maybe spin up like a little server inside the application that you can then use to, you know, handle network requests into your application, that kind of thing. So you would need a way to like spin up and manage processes, reliably. And there's, a contributor called Willem. I think, I think his last name is Gloverink, but

Steven (15:11)
wow. Okay.

Simon (15:31)
I could, or it's, no, let me get this right because that sounds terrible. Willem Leverink.

Steven (15:32)
We won't quote you on that one.

Shane (15:40)
Imagine if that was actually the way you pronounce his last name. That sounds terrible.

Steven (15:43)
Eh.

Yeah.

Simon (15:46)
No, no. Yeah, me saying your last name is terrible. No, my pronunciation of it was terrible. Yeah.

Shane (15:48)
you

Steven (15:51)
Ehhhh

Shane (15:56)
Well, we're talking about that. Then I want to, it's, it's beta for those American speakers. when he said beta, he meant beta.

Simon (16:04)
Mm-hmm.

Steven (16:07)
Yeah. How do you say route?

Simon (16:08)
Beta.

What's a... Routing is something very different to what I think you mean.

Steven (16:17)
Because it's a root.

Simon (16:21)
It is a root. It's a root like a root vegetable.

Shane (16:22)
What do you think a route is? What is a route? To you.

Simon (16:26)
route is like if you go behind the enemy you know you sort of you route the enemy yeah you can say flank as well a route though it's like you know what's his face the little guy god can't remember his name the french one i just watched i watched who was it napoleon napoleon

Steven (16:32)
flank.

Shane (16:33)
up flank.

Hmm.

on.

Steven (16:45)
That was extremely descriptive.

Dude! With the face! Okay. The little dude. Okay, gotcha.

Simon (16:55)
The little dude with the...

Shane (16:58)
Thank God it's no one alive still, because I was about to say some names, you know.

Simon (17:02)
the

Steven (17:05)
Wow.

Simon (17:06)
Yeah.

Steven (17:07)
Okay cool, so is the current state of native PHP, you guys are still using electron, is Tauria thing in there or not? Or Tauri, however you say it.

Simon (17:17)
It's just Electron at the moment, so the Tauri is taking a bit longer. So they've just announced version 2 of Tauri. That's just been released, like, as of, I think, Wednesday. So... Yeah, it is.

Steven (17:29)
Yeah.

Yeah, I saw that. It looks really cool.

Shane (17:34)
So Electron is gonna be JavaScript under the hood, Tori, I say Tori, whatever, is Rust under the hood? I mean, I know there's like performance one versus the other, but as far as native PHP goes, is there really a reason to build out for both? I mean, shouldn't you just kind of maybe pick, maybe it's Tori and that's the best one, and so we're gonna use Tori, and just support one.

Simon (17:59)
Guys, I didn't think this was going to turn into a native PHP interview. my gosh. We're supposed to be talking about loads of other topics. No, it's fine. The... No, no. It just flows. Let's just let it flow. So, yeah, I think it makes sense still to have the two. Basically...

Shane (18:06)
Surprise!

Steven (18:08)
This wasn't even on our talking points at all.

Shane (18:13)
That's why we do what we do.

Simon (18:26)
Electron gives you consistency across platforms, right? You know that you're dealing with a known version of Chromium, although it's crap because it's an older, it's always going to be a little bit behind. So you're never going to get the latest one, but it's going to be something of a safe bet. I think the, the electron release cycle is quite quick. So if you want to stay on top of it, you're going to be like working all of the time to keep up with electron updates, but

That's a side issue. at least on every platform, you've got like a very consistent behavior, you know? So.

Steven (19:06)
And does an electron at this point still have like the most feature full set or full feature set?

Simon (19:14)
yeah, I, I can't really comment on that, but yeah, I, I think they're getting, I think Tori is getting really, really good. You know, the, the fact that so many people rave about it.

Steven (19:15)
with like system calls and stuff.

Yeah, it seems like with, with Tori too. It's going to be legit. And like the difference in the size of the binaries you'd be shipping is incredible, like massive difference. Which I think would be really nice.

Simon (19:35)
yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'll get the, the, the big issue I think there is Tori is using the web view of the system. That's how it's so small. So it depends then on what the default web view is for the system. So if you've got a Mac, it's going to be web kit web view.

Steven (19:52)
Right.

Right.

Simon (20:05)
And on Linux it's like WebKit GTK or something. And then on Windows, it's a kind of Chromium one, WebView two or something like that. I don't, don't quote me on those things, but they're all slightly different. know, WebKit is basically Safari. I think the GTK one might end up being a bit more like a Firefox.

and then Windows on Linux and then on Windows, it's Chrome. you basically every platform is going to have a different browser environment. And so as the developer, you then have to account for some of the differences. Like they're not all going to share APIs. You're not going to have consistent release versions and things. yeah, surprise. Look at that.

Steven (20:39)
Right.

It's like being a web developer.

You

Simon (20:56)
But we tend not to think too much about that nowadays. I certainly don't, you know, it's like, I don't, I'm not doing bleeding edge, like front end stuff really. So I'm not worried about all of these, you know, this browser has got it, but this browser doesn't. I think it's if you're, if you're really pushing the boundaries of stuff, that's when it gets really hard. and, and maybe it just won't be an issue for most people.

The benefits of Tauri are a lot. think it's, you know, the fact that it's on Rust and there's like this whole security thing around that ecosystem that's been driven by the founders of Tauri. They're like really pushing hard on making sure that it's a locked down thing. And when you're distributing an app, you're not including stuff that you don't intend to use, which I think is very, very good. Electron's been like, yeah, you've got all these APIs. Go have fun. Bye.

Steven (21:53)
Yeah. The world is yours. OK, cool.

Simon (21:55)
you know, so.

Shane (21:59)
That's how I roll.

Simon (21:59)
That's... yeah.

Steven (22:02)
Okay, well if anybody's listening and you know anything about anything we just discussed, contributions are welcome.

Boom. Let's see if we can actually get to some of our talking points that we had for episode one of The Bucket. What's the next thing? Shane, you want to introduce yourself real quick? OK, cool.

Simon (22:09)
Yeah, definitely. Come and join in.

You

Shane (22:24)
Not really.

Simon (22:27)
Guys, I think we should start with something like, how are you doing, you know, after a week of maybe not talking, just the usual friends catching up with each other. so I don't know if this is a good segue into this, but like what's happening for work for you guys at the moment.

Steven (22:52)
Jane? Yeah.

Shane (22:52)
I'll go sure what is going on? Yeah, I've got some cool little thing so I'll tell you so my Where I've been at and you guys already know most of this, but like I've been there well strictly Laravel developer since 2013 so view caught on in like 2015 2016 something like that, so I started doing some view work and TDD started

getting really hot around 2014 or something like that. And so I adopted that in like last year and, and now everyone's switching back to like, you don't need to do tests first, but, you know, whatever. So, at all, right. Yeah. If it works for you, it works for everyone. but, no, mean, so I've, I've, I've had my own company since,

Simon (23:36)
You don't need to do tests at all.

Shane (23:50)
2015, 2016, and I do take on projects or I do take on jobs, I would say, but I'm finding more and more that that's like not what I want. I like the freedom of having a flexible schedule, even though that usually means I'm working a lot more, but I enjoy it more. like to work on client work and make them happy, make them look good and...

So I've been doing, looking a lot more for like just little contracts. And I'd have rather have like three or four or five little contracts than one or two big contracts, because it kind of gives me the diversity. I don't know, maybe it's like ADD or something, but I'm always, I'm always doing something new. Like, like I have a real estate license. I have a pilot license. I'm instrument rated. Like there's all these other, I'm a day trader. Actually, I got to check the markets. It's sender.

Simon (24:45)
Yeah, no, it's broken.

Steven (24:45)
Just the middle of the episode.

Shane (24:48)
forgot about that squirrel. But you know, like for me, makes, that's what makes me feel good is, is, working on a bunch of different things. I just got done doing a, well, I'm almost done with it, but this guy came to me, an old client, he used to have, he used to do t-shirts, but, he had a website called shirt battle, which was a pretty cool idea. He sold the company. he would have all these designers all over that would contribute to.

They would like post designs of like what they want on a shirt. And so for a month he would pick out like the two best ones. would battle each other and the battle wasn't votes. It was by sales. So whoever sold the most, that design got added to the library of the Shopify site, which is pretty cool. but he came to me, he's got this other guy that had, he's a partner and they have this idea for, and I'm not, can't really talk about it too much, but he had this idea. He had all these developers,

Simon (25:29)
Mmm, that's cool.

Steven (25:32)
Cool.

Shane (25:47)
tell them that it can't be done inside of Shopify. They had a Laravel app, which I just found actually it was a Laravel app to do this custom stuff. And I have enough experience to know like I'm strictly like Laravel. I have some Shopify experience too. Shopify for e-commerce platform is going to be better than a home-brewed Laravel application. I'm sorry.

that's gonna offend, it offends me a little bit actually, but it's true. Like Shopify just has so many more tools. If you can afford it, I would always go with Shopify for e-commerce. There are some cool things that I've seen recently, maybe for another discussion. Some, what's it called? I can't remember, but there's a cool, someone's doing something cool with Laravel for e-commerce. There's been some over the years, Amios or Amos or something like that, that.

Simon (26:17)
Mm.

Shane (26:38)
kind of went in that direction. It's just there's so many, there are so many different fringe scenarios with e-commerce, variants on products, variants on variants, and you know, just different things that you have to think through. Where Shopify has already got that done, you know? Anyway, I looked at this problem for a few minutes and I was like, I can definitely make this work. And I figured out a way and I made it work and they're super happy with that. And that's, that's a kind of

Simon (27:03)
Hmm.

Shane (27:07)
That's the kind of work that I look for. Not to always use my, what I want to build in, but to what's gonna work best given budget, timeline, et cetera, for the client and give them what they want. It's hard sometimes to do that, but you you just gotta think outside the box a little bit and learn stuff. So I'm here at, you know, two o'clock in the morning researching these.

really deep into the Shopify docs on how to accomplish whatever it is or, or whatever. so yeah, I've got some other things lined up, some people to talk to next week, some other, some big things I'm working on some little things I'm working on and, feeling optimistic and happy. And even my current state, like I'm still out right now. I'm able to do, I'm doing 20 to 30 hours right now, which is my sweet spot.

That way I can spend a little bit of time working on my stuff, right? I want to get back into the YouTube videos. for those that don't know, I've already mentioned a couple of times the Laravel online. can probably do link someplace for that, but I haven't done any really some videos since last year. I had a back surgery in November and that kind of kicked me out of, that mindset for awhile that and some other personal stuff, but,

Simon (28:09)
Hmm.

Shane (28:29)
Yeah, I'm really excited to get back into that teaching people. have an idea for, I think a forge series. I think there's some people out there, there's some videos out there kind of teaching stuff. people like my dad who he's been a windows.net ASP, whatever developer forever, semi retired. And the beginning of this year, he, I started teaching Laravel. So he's like, how do I, how do I

Steven (28:50)
Ha ha ha ha ha!

Shane (28:58)
you know, connect to my production database from windows, you know, using forge. And so I'm like, that's, that's a great, a great topic. Like not a lot of people are showing this stuff. So, that's where I'm at. That's what I'm, and I think we're doing a podcast. I think we've been talking about doing a podcast. We're going to do a podcast. Yeah. Just another thing thrown into the bucket, you know,

Simon (29:10)
Yeah, that's cool.

Steven (29:19)
Wait, what?

Simon (29:20)
I don't know what. man, he's got all the talking points.

Steven (29:22)
You

nice little nice little name drop there. Not bad, not bad. That was. Sweet. Cool.

Simon (29:30)
Wow.

Shane (29:34)
America.

Simon (29:37)
I didn't see that on there. Is that a... It's not upside down, is it? No.

Steven (29:43)
What are you talking about?

Simon (29:43)
Still can't tell, it just looks like lines. Miracle.

Shane (29:44)
flag. There you go. Now you can see all the dust.

Steven (29:48)
is that?

Simon (29:51)
yeah. Somebody else was talking about dust on hats. I've got so much dust on my hats. So annoying.

Shane (29:52)
Steven, how about you?

Steven (29:52)
For those...

think that means you need to wear them more often.

Shane (30:02)
I get, I get those, lint rollers. Those work sometimes though, with hats that get like, you get actual, like I actually use like just some hand soap and hot water and just scrubbed it up, let it dry in the sink. And, that works too. I've got a lot of hats. I've got a lot of pets.

Simon (30:07)
Mmm.

Such a pro, I bet ChapGPT wouldn't have come up with that idea.

Steven (30:23)
No, definitely not.

Shane (30:25)
It doesn't know what water is, does it?

Steven (30:27)
Mm-hmm.

Can you, okay. Well, for those that don't know me, by day, I'm the owner of a little business called Backer Club that does advertising for crowdfunding campaigns. We'll talk about that in the future episodes, because I think my business partner and I are beginning the transition to an exit. So we'll kind of see how that goes.

Simon (30:31)
Stephen what's going on with you?

Steven (30:58)
And then, yeah, lately I've been trying to meet cool people like this dude, Simon and Shane, I now know pretty well, amongst others, and trying to work on just like some extra projects. So I've been helping Nuno and Punya Paul and some really cool guys with Pinkery, which has been nice. Simon has also contributed some of the Pinkery, which is really cool. And then I'm supposed to be helping Simon with LaraDevs, which I've been horrible at following up on.

because I've had a sick baby at home and just haven't had enough time to do all these things. There's another thing called Lara Bets, which we can maybe discuss for a minute here that I'm doing with this guy named Carl. yeah. And then I don't know if we're ready to talk about it, but there's another thing with Shane and I. And then I'm not even done.

Simon (31:36)
Yeah, that sounds interesting.

Carl.

you

my goodness.

Shane (31:51)
Which one?

Simon (31:53)
Hahaha

Steven (31:54)
Something to do with larychons? Yeah. We're not talking about that yet? Okay, cool.

Shane (31:57)
yeah, yeah. we're not talking about that yet. Mark that clip there.

Simon (32:02)
Gosh, there's so many irons in so many fires.

Steven (32:05)
I mean we didn't say anything, so you know, we'll just leave a little bit of mystery for the audience.

Shane (32:10)
The, well, it's one fire. It is one fire. There's a lot of iron. That's true.

Simon (32:11)
How... Okay. One big Laravel fire emoji. How are you balancing all of the different things that you're doing? Like Shane, it sounds like you're just doing like bits of client work and it's okay. And Steve is like, I'm doing all of the things.

Steven (32:14)
One. OK.

And yeah.

I'm not.

Shane (32:34)
I don't have no, there's like, I, I bought a domain the other day. This code sucks.com. think my code sucks.com. I just had this idea of like, why don't we have a place where we can post gist of the whole, like, you know, how many legacy projects I've worked on that just the code sucks so bad. like, I gotta show it. Like don't put any names. Don't like give away where, you know what I mean? Even make maybe anonymize the people that are posting this. Right. And like,

Steven (32:54)
yeah.

Shane (33:03)
the, the like we up vote every week or month on like the worst code. then, and then here's the kicker. Have people refactor it and then employers can look at this, right? Like.

Steven (33:09)
A paste bin for crappy code.

Simon (33:15)
Or you can have two gists go all out in a gist war and then whichever one wins, he gets printed on a t-shirt.

Shane (33:23)
Just more.

Steven (33:25)
Check out this 200 line function on my t-shirt

Simon (33:28)
Come on.

Look how crap it is!

Steven (33:36)
It's literally just at the top. It's just like the poop emoji and then like this.

Shane (33:37)
Are you looking for?

Simon (33:40)
Fuck you.

Shane (33:41)
Are you looking for a few hours, Simon?

Simon (33:45)
I don't need more stuff to do.

Steven (33:45)
There you go. You just signed yourself up. You've been voluntold.

Shane (33:46)
PoopJizz. PoopJizz.com.

Steven (33:51)
man, I like that idea. Yeah.

Shane (33:56)
Yeah, there's not enough time. And I have a life too. I got kids, I got stuff I like to do that's not work at all related, you

Steven (34:06)
Well, Joe is starting up a new podcast called side projects. maybe hop on there with him and you guys can discuss crappy code.

Simon (34:06)
Hmm.

Shane (34:13)
Joe, which Joe?

Simon (34:13)
Joke Town and Bum.

Steven (34:14)
Tenenbaum.

anyway, yeah. So kind of like got a, my hands in a lot of stuff. Unfortunately, it's not like actual client work. It's just more for fun things that may one day will lead to something. and then, yeah, I actually, I think have an idea for a next to business. Maybe.

Simon (34:42)
Whoa, you just like firing off another one like what? Tell us what about Lara?

Steven (34:46)
I know.

Shane (34:48)
We gotta do it while you're young, right? That's how you retire later. Isn't it like?

Simon (34:53)
I think he's gonna die before he retires.

Steven (34:55)
Yeah, this is why I just have an IV of coffee. Just straight. Just hit me raw. The stevia, yeah. Yeah.

Simon (35:00)
Yeah

Shane (35:00)
Evia dude, it's Evia, telling ya.

Simon (35:05)
I mean that's very appropriate Stevie yeah

Shane (35:07)
Friday too.

Steven (35:10)
There we go, hey!

Simon (35:12)
Yeah.

Shane (35:13)
got a British joke that I got. That's good.

Simon (35:15)
I'm gonna pull a few of those out.

Steven (35:15)
Yeah. So I don't know if I'm ready. I'm not sure if I'm ready to disclose the new business idea here just yet.

Shane (35:19)
you

Good.

Simon (35:24)
You are such a tease. Such a tease.

Steven (35:26)
I Well, I also think I kind of need to chat with you fellas off air about it a tiny bit too, to see if you'd want to get involved at all. And then, you know, we kind of have to decide unanimously if we want to talk about it in the open. anyways, it's just like a little thing that might go somewhere and we can go from that. But yeah, so.

Shane (35:36)
Because we have so much time.

Simon (35:52)
Right.

Steven (35:56)
but like the big ones.

Simon (35:56)
Tell us about Larabets.

Shane (35:58)
I was gonna say that, yeah, yeah, yeah. don't know much about this. Tell me about this.

Steven (35:59)
Yeah, OK, so I've been getting to know this guy named Carl. Yep, mostly from Laricon, and we actually didn't get to meet in person, but like we've just started. I know, right? Just in the the Telegram chat. But he's a super cool guy and we've got to know each other pretty well. We've even like been playing the new Space Marine 2 game with each other like the weekend whenever the kids are in bed.

Simon (36:11)
What?

Nice.

Cool.

Steven (36:28)
But anyways, he and Bogdan, I'm not even going to try to say Bogdan's last name, but Bogdan of InterNACHI and hosts a meetup in Greenville with Jacob. yeah, Bogdan and Carl had this idea that like at future Laracons or even just kind of more generalized, you know, events, but sort of around the Laravel ecosystem. It'd be really funny if there was a betting platform that had no money involved. It's all for fun.

Shane (36:34)
Yeah.

Simon (36:40)
Mm.

Shane (36:41)
Tchenko.

Simon (36:51)
Mm-hmm.

Steven (36:59)
But people could submit like predictions, everything from like, who's going to be the first speaker on day one to like, what will be the longest technical difficulty. are technical issue. They run into that delays the show. Right. And, you get like a certain amount of points, coins, whatever you want to call them before, like well before the event, these predictions go up. You get to like place your bets.

Shane (37:07)
you

Simon (37:16)
Yeah.

Steven (37:27)
and then we just see like who comes out, you know, on top with the most number of coins accrued and they reset with the events. And it's just like a fun, stupid little, little thing. And, so anyways, Carl told me about this. man. think like a week and a half, two weeks ago or something like that. And I was like, yeah, sure. I'll get involved. And he's like, cool. we want an MVP for Laricon AU, which if you didn't know, is in like, is in like

Simon (37:38)
That sounds really cool.

Shane (37:54)
in November yeah yeah

Steven (37:56)
Four weeks. Yeah. So I'm like, okay. Cool. Like I get to. Buzz my ass to volunteer my time to try to make this little thing for, for Laricon AU and like, in reality, if we want people to actually use it for a Laricon, are you like, needs to be out there like before the event so that you could have predictions before. That prediction actually has done an outcome, right? You can't like place a bet on something already know what the outcome was. yeah, we're trying to do that. And,

Simon (37:58)
Yeah.

you

Mm.

Nice.

Steven (38:26)
Unfortunately, we were going to make it open, like just open source, but we're going to use Flux. Shout out Caleb, Livewire. And so because of that, we're going to keep it closed. that just like we're keeping a closed source. But if you're interested in contributing, let us know and we'll just see if we can get you access to stuff and figure out how that'll work. anyways.

Simon (38:34)
Mmm.

Yeah.

Steven (38:53)
It's been pretty interesting because I have never done betting stuff before. So I don't know any of the lingo. I don't know any of the math, but I've been trying to figure this stuff out. And so if you look at my arc browser right now, it's like 74 tabs on prediction markets and the math behind it and all of this stuff. so we just started the repository doing some basic stuff. I think I have figured out.

the kind of core algorithms that will be involved in how, you know, as bets are placed, that will dynamically change the cost associated with making those bets in that favor, you know, so like in theory would reach a stable price and all of that type of stuff. So I think once that's finished.

Simon (39:35)
Mm-hmm.

And there are no like open source libraries that do that in PHP.

Steven (39:47)
Not that I could find. So if you know of any, feel free to let me know. I don't know if it's because I was not knowing exactly what to search because like the you know, like we're doing what is traditionally called a prediction market. So maybe you guys have heard of polymarket or predict it. Polymarket, I believe, is like one of the largest ones, which is kind of funny because can't use it in the US. But a lot of the stuff on there is like the US.

presidential election right now and bets being placed for that. There's over a billion dollars committed to the outcome of the US presidential election on Polymarket right now. Freaking nuts. Anyway, so yeah, like the terminology for this is prediction market. Whenever I just jumped on Packagist and tried to find something, I couldn't really. But at the same time, the way we're approaching this, like we're not going a blockchain route and all of this, like we're not going that deep into this, right? It's just for fun. So it

Simon (40:34)
Hmm.

Steven (40:46)
the mechanics are a little bit closer to just standard sports betting where you had like the book, right? The organizer of the betting maintains the order book and kind of like establishes the odds. So we're doing like this weird hybrid where like the number of bets towards an outcome is what drives the price. So that's very prediction market-esque. But then at the same time,

Simon (41:12)
Hmm.

Steven (41:14)
It's not totally decentralized. And so it's a little bit like a traditional sporting bet where like the house is kind of providing liquidity and stuff like this. don't know. So it's, it's a little bit of the place, but I think we're going to figure it out. I think I have like the core algorithms sort of figured out. so now it's just like for Laircon AU, I mean, we got a dash. So

wrapping a pretty basic UI around these things and then see if anybody actually wants to use it. Unfortunately, it's one of those things that like that's only fun if a lot of people get involved. It's kind of boring to have like a single bet on an outcome. So I don't know. Hopefully people will pick it up. It's fun. It's mostly a portfolio piece. And we'll see what happens.

Simon (42:00)
It sounds like you're learning quite a bit through it.

Steven (42:03)
Yeah, I don't know if I'll have a future application for prediction algorithms, but.

Shane (42:07)
I was going to say, I have a feeling this relates back to your idea that you had for another business.

Steven (42:14)
Yeah. So we'll see. But I mean, it's just been cool. And it's really an excuse for us to use Flux. And I think that that's going to be a part of some of my future applications. So just getting our hands into that a little bit, it's a good excuse for that. And we'll go from there.

Simon (42:35)
It's interesting that you bumped into that kind of like a licensing issue with Flux because I, one of the things that I tweeted out when Caleb announced Flux at Laricon was how I think it would make a really good UI kit inside native PHP applications. Like there isn't really a UI kit for Laravel. I mean, I know

Steven (42:54)
Mmm.

Simon (43:00)
people are doing different things, but there's not been like a...

let's say a blessed one, you know, that, and it feels like Caleb's really gone to town thinking through all of the considerations for how to do this really well. And then it's built obviously on top of Livewire, which is like, know, I don't, don't know really anybody who doesn't like Livewire. I know people avoid it, but, by and large, I would say people who are in the Laravel community are like keen on Livewire. And then it's just like,

Steven (43:09)
Right.

Right.

Simon (43:37)
This, it looks great as well. So it's almost like a signature UI. It could be the signature UI for Laravel applications. know, it's built on Tailwind as well. It's like, my gosh, this is so good.

Steven (43:41)
Mm-hmm.

Simon (43:57)
And, then I'm looking at the license and I'm going, but I can't, I can't distribute this. I can't make like an open source app and expect developers who want to use that or build from that to, get, you know, this $200 or maybe it's not that much, but license so that they can distribute it. And, know, it's just like,

Basically, I feel your pain on that one. And that's, that's kind of frustrating. It would be great if Caleb was open to maybe license, having another license for these kinds of scenarios. Cause yeah, I think projects where that gets really, they maybe get big and flux is like a core part of that.

Steven (44:29)
Yeah.

Simon (44:54)
think he stands to benefit quite a bit from.

Steven (44:57)
Yeah, it's hard. mean, you know, he's made a massive contribution to the community regardless with Alpine and Livewire. So like, you know, I think it's right that the dude gets to eat on like a premium product like that for technology that he's, you know, yeah, brought forth. But at the same time, it is hard because you just want to be able to use stuff like that, especially in open source where you're kind of like wanting to get

Simon (45:11)
Definitely.

Hmm.

Steven (45:25)
really far, really quickly, which for a lot of cases is like your little side open source projects, right? So yeah, it's kind of tough. And I mean, for a lot of that stuff, like realistically, licensing is very much so on an honor system and jazz like that. But yeah, I don't know, maybe one day. What's that? OK, go for it.

Simon (45:28)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Shane (45:43)
That's, that's where I'm gonna interject question. there, huh? All right. So Tailwind UI, same thing, right? You can't redistribute Tailwind UI components. It's not a component. is, it is Tailwind classes in a certain order or something. How do they determine if this has been distributed? Number one, what do they do? would cease and desist probably to start, but are, I don't, I would be very surprised if there are.

web scraper apps out there that are scanning a million, billion, trillion websites to see if there are, is this an idea? Like how would you go about that? Like how would you see if somebody's using Flux and they're redistributing this or not?

Steven (46:23)
Actually.

Right. Which is why I say it's like largely on the honor system. think the little bit difference between like Tailwind UI and Flux is that Tailwind UI is like, well, at least in my experience, when I use it, it's largely something you're just like downloading from their site once you have paid for it and you're just getting the files, right? It's not like I'm going into Composer or adding an NPM package that like is a Tailwind UI thing.

And I actually want to say, if you guys give me a minute here so somebody else keep talking, but I was actually just recently looking at the license and.

Simon (47:06)
you

Steven (47:11)
It might be a little bit different with Tail1 UI, but regardless. whereas with Flux, it really is you're connecting to a packages repository and you have to have an authentication token to pull the package down and get it installed into your project. So that's kind of the protection mechanism. And in theory, it's like an actual package that you're bringing in rather than Tail1 UI, which is like, here's a zip file of

Simon (47:11)
for tailwind.

Yeah.

Steven (47:42)
stuff that you can bring in. Now, I know that's like the mechanics of just getting the thing. But I mean, also, you're saying, Shay, I'm telling you, it's essentially a collection of just HTML elements tailing classes. Now, like a lot of it, they actually do incorporate, especially into their full layout options. You know, like there is actual JavaScript logic involved. And I've gotten like an entire Next app from them and stuff like that. So.

Shane (48:10)
Yeah, that stuff would be a little bit different, I think. even like, yeah, they're not, it's not anything too custom. Like you just go to Tailwind UI and see they're just classes. They're just Tailwind classes in a div and it spans. like, they're not like what Flux did. Flux would probably, like if you were trying to solve this problem of scraping sites to see if they're in violation, whatever, Flux would be a lot easier than Tailwind.

Steven (48:25)
Yeah.

Shane (48:37)
UI components because those are just classes in a certain order. And what's to say? Like I didn't write this myself and they're just the classes are in different order or something. You know, I don't know. Just, not that I'm not trying to find a way around the licensing. I'm trying to see if there's opportunity to build something for people that operate these licenses to help with that problem.

Steven (48:47)
right.

Yeah.

So I just whipped open the eye.

Simon (49:07)
Hack a man shade.

Shane (49:09)
What?

Simon (49:10)
Hacker man.

Shane (49:12)
Yeah, I mean...

Steven (49:12)
I just opened up the Tailwind UI license and it does say you can use the components and templates to create end products that are open source and freely available to end users. So what they are specifically saying you cannot do is use their components and templates basically to create a competing product that you sell.

Simon (49:28)
Yeah, and that makes sense because...

Yeah. Like if you, if you said I'm going to set up Steven UI and it looks exactly like the same things that you've just copy pasted onto your own page and you sell that for $99 instead of whatever the price is for them.

Shane (49:40)
Hmm.

Steven (49:40)
Or that would take market share away from them. Right. It's yeah.

Shane (49:52)
Gotcha. Okay.

Steven (49:54)
Yeah. So. I don't know. I feel like for for Caleb with flux, it's probably one of those things that like, you know, he can keep it exactly the way that it is for a while. And then. I would imagine at some point there will be the honorable people that are looking for additional updates or whatever, and they like continue down all of that stuff, even though if you got is unlimited, it's like free updates forever been stuff. But, you know, eventually, yeah, he might.

Shane (49:57)
All right, well forget tailwind then. I'm just saying flux, whatever.

Simon (50:09)
Hmm.

Steven (50:24)
be willing to open up something so that for free open source software, can use Flux with that particular license as long as it doesn't create something that competes with Flux.

Simon (50:36)
So I don't, I don't actually think the challenge is people wanting to get access to it and having to pay for it. think it's like, if, if I released something open source now and it depended on flux and someone else tries to do some work on it, what's going to happen? They're going to compose or install, you know, the packages and then it's going to fail at flux.

Steven (50:57)
Right.

Shane (51:00)
because they don't have a key, yeah.

Simon (51:02)
Yeah, because they don't have, maybe they do have a license, you know, and it works fine. Great. but it's for the most part, you know, I kind of imagine that people won't. And then what's the story is like, so do you put it in the docs that they've got to go and pay for a license? It's like, now I'm doing free promotion for flux and Caleb's benefiting from that, which is fine. You know, like I want Caleb to succeed, but it.

Shane (51:23)
Hmm.

Simon (51:31)
I think there were, there is an opportunity there to do something a little bit different that makes that story a little bit easier. And I don't know exactly what that is, but it could be as simple as there's a, a specific sort of group license that he enables, you know, like an open source project can have so many seats available to it or something. don't know. I don't know exactly what, like the way that. Yeah.

Steven (51:55)
Right. That'd be the tuple approach, right? If you want to use tuple and you have an open source team, they'll grant you some licenses, which I think could totally work. And it could even be the thing where it's just like, yeah, in order to keep it somewhat contained, you just have to submit what you're going to be using a free version of Flux 4. And then Caleb can either approve or deny it. And you just move on from there. anyways, we don't have to make this a

Simon (52:22)
Hmm.

Steven (52:25)
hardcore discussion on whether or not flux should be allowed in open source stuff right at this moment. anyways, that's the gist of Lairbets. We'll see if we can crank this out. I mean, realistically for Laircon AU, it's probably going to be a dumpster fire. But hopefully for Laircon EU in February for Amsterdam, we'll have something that is actually a little bit usable.

Simon (52:36)
Yeah, that's cool.

Have some faith in yourself, man. You're gonna get it, solid.

Steven (52:55)
I mean, it's like the thing like if you could justify committing. Dozens of hours a week to it like, sure, I mean, it's not that big of an app, so, you know, in like 100 man hours, right, you could literally probably have something that was really well put together and functional. It's just like justifying doing that for something that realistically has no true like immediate return on that investment. So.

Simon (53:08)
Hmm.

Yeah, I know what you

Steven (53:25)
Contributions are welcome. Anyways, we'll see how that goes. And yeah.

Simon (53:30)
As long as you've got a flux license.

Steven (53:33)
Yeah. Yeah. So what else do want to talk about? We've now been rolling for, don't know, close to an hour. Do we want to keep going at all?

Shane (53:34)
Bring your own license.

Simon (53:38)
Yeah.

Shane (53:44)
Hours, hours.

Simon (53:49)
There's one big elephant that we haven't talked about that I think, like I want to talk about is the WordPress situation.

Shane (53:49)
No.

Steven (53:59)
yeah. All right.

Shane (54:00)
Explain it like you don't know it's what's it because I don't pay attention a lot of I purposely don't pay attention to stuff So, you know, I'll tell you what I know about this whole thing I had a client through a client and they Whatever for whatever reason I've been hosting their site on WP engine since like six or seven years and The day this all went down

Simon (54:07)
Did you ever do WordPress? Did you ever like use it?

Shane (54:31)
They had canceled and I was waiting for them to switch over the DNS to their new, whoever they're going with. think they, it's a restaurant they went with toast or something like that. So I was just waiting for that DNS to propagate. I looked at the site that morning and I was like, all right, it's done. So I went on WP engine and canceled and I was like, Hey, do I get a partial refund? How does this work? They're like, someone will let you know in the coming weeks. And I'm like, okay, whatever. It's just standard process. I guess standard operating procedures.

Simon (54:40)
Mm-hmm.

Shane (55:00)
And then I'm like watching my computer start smoking on Twitter of like all this stuff happening with WP Engine WordPress. like, I don't know. It's, it was totally coincidental that it happened to be the exact same time. is all happening. That's all I know about it. Really something with licensing. Someone said something about WP Engine shouldn't be using the WordPress name. don't know. I don't know what, tell me what happened.

Simon (55:13)
It was you

I mean the way that this is right now, like now that you've gone on public record saying it was your fault Shane, fully expect Matt Mullenweg to come after you. He's gonna, you're gonna get a court summons.

Steven (55:27)
All right, Simon, you want to do this go. The mic is yours.

Shane (55:30)
Hmm

That's okay. That's okay. I'll probably get some followers on Twitter.

Sweet. That's all right. I'm down.

Simon (55:47)
them.

No, I think so... Yeah, I don't want to go like deep, deep, deep, but basically it's just... it's been nuts. The... I first saw it when someone I follow on Twitter who is... what's... what's this person?

Well, he's, he's like the WP engine guy. why is his name not coming to my head? I don't know, but he's like super, super well known in the kind of building public community. He's been involved in loads of loads of things to do with startups. And, there's like one conference that he's quite well known for being a part of. gosh, why can't Jason Cohen.

Steven (56:37)
You talking about Jason? Jason Cohen?

Simon (56:40)
There you go. Thank you. Jason Cohen tweeted out something about, you know, WP Engine is getting involved in this debate. And I started reading it I was like, holy, what the dickens is this? And it's just like reams of Matt Mullenweg texts to executives of WP Engine from a couple of days before the word camp that they had in September.

basically saying, I'm just going to trash you on stage. If you don't agree to paying us millions and millions of dollars, it's like, extortion much. And it just got worse from there. Like, yeah, go.

Steven (57:23)
could be wrong shame, but just for context, I think it was like $30 million. It was like 8 % of revenue or something.

Shane (57:30)
So WordPress is giving WP Engine. They're the ones threatening. For what though? For what? Why? Like what is their basis?

Simon (57:38)
They're claiming... Yeah, so...

Steven (57:38)
That's why this is a dumpster fire.

Shane (57:42)
Like they're just a hosting. They made awesome tools to host WordPress sites. So they're like, so what? So what?

Simon (57:50)
So what? So what? Yeah, well, it was fine for, I don't know, 11 years, but now, all very recently, it's become a problem that they call themselves WP Engine. So it's a trademark dispute. it... Well, yeah, no.

Shane (58:09)
Washington post engine, which happens to run on WordPress. mean, like.

Simon (58:15)
Yeah, that's not how trademarks work. But anyway, the, the, the, problem isn't that there's a trademark dispute. Like fine. If there's a trademark dispute, like have that issue, you know, if, people aren't communicating, have it in the open, yeah, go to court. The problem is the way that Matt Mullenweg has basically gone on a, like,

Shane (58:18)
Yeah.

Simon (58:41)
Burn everything in sight. He's literally just gone. Community? I don't care. WordPress.org? Whatever. like, blitzkrieg.

Steven (58:42)
Rampage. Yeah.

Shane (58:51)
Pride comes before the fall. That's, think he's, because 80 % of the internet runs on WordPress or something stupid like that, right? He thinks he's invincible? Is that kind of what everyone thinks?

Simon (59:06)
Yeah, I don't know. I think he feels that he's got himself into a strong position, but I think a lot of people roundly see that that's not the case. You know, it will be surprising to see what happens because now I think it's basically going to go to court. They've filed papers against each other in both directions now, so it looks like there's probably going to be a case coming soon. exactly.

Shane (59:29)
Cool. I'm looking forward to the Netflix documentary on this.

Simon (59:35)
It's got a lot of drama. But yeah, all of that to one side, you know, like it speaks to a lot of the things that are going on in that community and maybe stuff that we sort of inherently know about, like I don't touch WordPress anymore. I haven't touched it for a really long time because I got really fed up of just how disorganized the whole co-base is and like the, you know,

the problems with it in a way they've been the problems that have been attributed to PHP for the better part of 20 years because people see WordPress and they go, what a pile of crap is this? and it's just like, he's going after WP engine and he's like putting it under this facade of, well, I want them to contribute back to the open source thing. They don't contribute back.

Steven (1:00:11)
Right.

Simon (1:00:30)
So I'm going to use a trademark dispute as a way to get money for them, you know, like to force them to contribute back. And then it's like, yeah, but Matt, you're basically destroying the PHP ecosystem by not upgrading this POS that you've got for 20 years. and it's like, I don't know how you can say that on the one hand and then do this on the other. I cover, try and cover your tracks with,

You know, we're one of the biggest donators to the PHP foundation. It's like, great, but that, you know, like that's just money. That doesn't sort of sort out the damage that WordPress is doing in the wider community, the programming community, and, the problems that it presents online and the fact that as he's now proven, he has the power, he's got the scepter.

Shane (1:01:05)
Yeah. So.

Simon (1:01:25)
And the button that can just turn off like a whole hosting company with hundreds of thousands of, sites running through them and effectively make it impossible for them to do business. Not just the host, but also the customers. And it's like, what the hell? isn't the open, this isn't the open web that like where PHP comes from. This isn't the open thing that you say that WordPress is all about.

Shane (1:01:45)
Yeah.

Simon (1:01:54)
This is something else. It's, it's mental.

Shane (1:01:58)
I wonder, I know I, all right, so Jack McDade, Stata Mic, this is an alternate solution to a WordPress sort of thing. It's paid, it's, it's a paid offering, but, and I know that he talked a lot about some, you know, what, what should I do in this position? How can we benefit from this somehow? Because they're kind of in that same space. Did he disclose like how many more people came into Stata Mic in the last?

two weeks or whatever, a week.

No? Okay. I was curious.

Steven (1:02:32)
I don't think so. But I think that's partially what they were talking about out there at the round table. that was just from the mostly technical podcast. Shout out Aaron and Ian. we're like Stata make is in a little bit of a difficult position with this because like, my, can I just jump back my whole take on, on this? Something that I don't think is getting brought up enough and the people that are covering this is that like, yeah, Matt's whole stance on this is he wanted.

Simon (1:02:32)
so.

Shane (1:02:45)
Uh-huh.

Simon (1:02:52)
Mm-hmm.

Steven (1:03:01)
WP Engine since they have used a brand and product descriptors amongst other things that are like very

close to trademark infringements potentially if you cared about forever, the WP was not an issue. It literally said in the licensing that you're allowed to use that however you'd like. WordPress has always been trademarked and you had to use that carefully. So like WP Engine had some services that they called core WordPress and stuff like that, which like, okay, I could see that being a little bit of an issue and stuff like that. All of that aside, Matt's been trying in this whole dumpster fire saying the WP Engine doesn't

give back enough to the WordPress community and organization. That's why he wanted like 8 % or whatever of their revenues. That could either be a complete just cash payout or they could allocate a certain amount of developer hours per week to like make up that difference and all of this stuff. And I just keep sitting here and I'm like, okay, look how WordPress as a community organization and business works.

is you have this extremely popular open source thing, but the reason it is so popular has nothing to do with WordPress itself as like the core CMS engine. It is the fact that it is like this rich plugin, et cetera, ecosystem that people, developers and the little businesses and bloggers and website makers are benefiting from. And so it's like...

this massive, massive ecosystem that goes along with the core CMS and the fact that it's just really easy to use for non-technical people that has made WordPress so incredibly successful, at least in my mind. And to me, the aspect of that that was the final unlocking is for situations like my sister that wanted to start a blogging and some other stuff site.

And so WordPress was an obvious choice because of how easy it is to get that. You needed the hosting provider, right? And so WP Engine provided this service that made it really easy for non-technical people to get a WordPress site going and therefore capitalize from it. The more actual WordPress installations you have operating in the wild is more customers for developers to make plugins and benefit off of, which brings even more attention.

and focus on WordPress as the whole, which makes the actual core CMS better, which provides funding to do extra features and all this stuff. So it's this huge, like, you know, wrapped up thing where like all of the pieces individually are not super beneficial, but like you put them all together and it is what has turned into WordPress representing a gigantic portion of the entire public internet right now. I just don't think that there's enough, like Matt isn't giving enough credit to like how much

Simon (1:05:41)
Hmm.

Shane (1:05:54)
Thanks.

Steven (1:05:59)
WordPress and automatic as a business has benefited from having the services that WP Engine has provided by making it so easy for hundreds of thousands of WordPress sites to be on there and just like fostering funding the rest of the ecosystem that makes it really valuable. So there's my quick take.

Simon (1:06:09)
Hmm.

That's that. Yeah. I think you're absolutely right, Steven. The, but it's, it's kind of straight forward in my mind to why that's the case because it's super difficult to quantify the impact that WPA engine have had, you know, like they can look at their stats and they can go, we've had, you know, an uptick in growth in the last quarter or, you know, the last year where we've got 10 % more WordPress installs and whatever.

Steven (1:06:35)
course.

Simon (1:06:47)
But for automatic to go is WP Engine having a net good on our bottom line. You know, it's like, we don't really know the answer to that.

Steven (1:06:58)
Yeah, especially correct me if I'm wrong, but like now automatic does provide hosting options. So now they're competing on that. And I think that's really the basis of what all of this is, right? Is that Matt is a little bit jealous that WP Engine is like a $500 million a year business with good margins. So they're making a lot of money and he wants a piece of that. So it's like, what can I do to try to do that?

Simon (1:07:05)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, well, it's definitely, the, strategy is going on here, you know, from the outside, looks like there is no strategy. looks like match just like he's had a bit too much Coca-Cola one day and. You know, decided. Yeah. But, I think there is, there is an underlying like strategy to what's happening here and it's playing out. It's not really obvious.

Shane (1:07:35)
a baby.

Hmm

Steven (1:07:39)
Text fired.

Simon (1:07:52)
I'm going to put my like proper conspiracy theory hat on. Did you see that? No, it's not that bad, but it's just like, I feel like they're, they're pieces that are being moved into place right now. You know, the whole like, I know that I'm going to say this stuff and they're definitely going to come out in public with it. You know, I'm going to throw them a cease and desist or, you know, they're going to throw a cease and desist and then we're going to f-

Steven (1:07:57)
okay, let me get my aluminum foil.

Hmm?

Simon (1:08:21)
fire one back and then we're going to do this and we're going to do that. Like, I think they've thought a few moves ahead, you know, and I think this is all part of the game. And what that leads to for me, slightly different to your perspective on it, Steven is I think automatic is actually doing not very well. And it's maybe because of the hosting thing, but I think like it's an angle, you know, they're going, okay, we want to do hosting. There's already a massive player in the market. We're not going to be able to take.

from them very easily. So we need to like do something to get them out of the way or disrupt their brand or something. Yeah. and, and bring people pointing back at us because if we don't, we're, we're on a death spiral right now. You know, we've got a thousand and something employees. we're not making enough money and, we're being propped up by VC and

Shane (1:08:58)
the value.

Simon (1:09:20)
They're all begging us to get their money back and then some. So, what do we do? And I think we're at this like inflection point of automatic where it's now, you know, it's time to pay the piper. Yeah. And, and Matt's gone, okay, this is the only, this is the only way that I can do that. I need to get rid of like a huge bunch of employees. Right. I need, I need to fire.

Steven (1:09:32)
Do or die.

Simon (1:09:46)
bunch of people, but I can't do that because they're distributed all around the world. There's a real legal problem trying to do that in lots of different territories. It's going to be really expensive. And I also want a big pile of cash from somewhere where what Dragon is sitting on pile of gold right now, WP Engine out and they just so happen to be doing a competing product to something we've wanted to do for years.

Steven (1:10:10)
Interesting.

Simon (1:10:17)
So yeah, just like, it's, that is for like, conspiracy hat off. It's an interesting time. And I just don't, I think what we're seeing play out in public isn't necessarily like the actual real what's going on.

Steven (1:10:35)
OK, so you think there's chess moves going on here rather than like the the rapid from that just, you know, the first thing that came to mind is what he's been doing in these messages and stuff.

Simon (1:10:42)
Yeah.

He's been quite cute about some of the things like going on with Primogen. And I think he sort of reacted to, who's the other one that he did over the weekend? Theo. Yeah. cause Theo did a video and then, and then he kind of reacted to that and jumped on with Theo, you know, and even went to his house and stuff. was like, okay.

Steven (1:11:00)
video.

I do wonder if there is any component of that though, where like he did this initial stuff and went nuclear it, if we're camping, then like everybody, like the, I don't know what the leadership, you know, looks like it automatic or for the WordPress organization. don't know if people are like, what did you just do? And it was a little bit like, you need to go try to clean some of that up or something, you know, like, I don't think he has either.

Simon (1:11:38)
yeah i don't think he's done that at all though i don't he's like not repealed anything you know at one point i thought yeah i bet he hasn't got any lawyers anymore because they're just they've run away and he's using chat gvt to write his like cease and desist letter because man

Shane (1:11:39)
Mm-hmm.

Steven (1:11:45)
You

Yeah.

Shane (1:11:54)
Yeah.

Steven (1:11:56)
Yeah. But if you're right, I mean, that's an interesting angle, right? Because like, I do think there's been jitter chatter that like quite a few of the automatic employers are like, this is not what I believe in, right? Like this isn't the type of morale that I was hoping to be involved with with something like WordPress. And so they're like.

Simon (1:12:09)
Mm.

Steven (1:12:18)
skippity-boo.

Simon (1:12:19)
Well, so he he's offered them 30 grand each, all of them. If they want to take it now and go based on being aligned with his worldview and something like 8%, 150 some odd have decided to take it.

Steven (1:12:22)
Yeah.

Yeah, agree or leave.

Yeah, it's interesting that that could be. I hadn't really thought about that particular angle of it, but that feels a little bit more like chess moves to me than what I'm giving Matt credit for right now, but we'll see if that was a big part of it.

Simon (1:12:40)
So.

I, yeah.

Yeah. I, and the, the like wider picture, I think it's kind of interesting, you know, you brought up Shane about Statomic and, how, how does Statomic, how does Jack like respond to this? But I think it's even wider than that. It's, it's not just other CMS, potentially open source platforms, but like all of open source communities. Like how do you manage the brand around?

Steven (1:12:55)
We'll see.

Tatamic.

Simon (1:13:24)
your open source project. So I'm thinking about it for like native PHP and other things as well. And it's just like, yeah, these are, these are big important questions and they play out over a really long time, you know, because although we say it's just recently and, and a Matt has tried to make out that actually this thing's been going boiling up for a couple of years. Really the trademark issue for WordPress has been going on for well over a decade, you know, like when it changed hands from

Shane (1:13:25)
Yeah.

Simon (1:13:54)
whatever it was to WordPress.org and, know, like that set up the organization, this nonprofit that supposedly has it, but then has given sole responsibility of it to the, the automatic, you know, the for-profit organization to, work out what to do with the trademarks. And yeah, like that just feels like a really weird setup.

and it's making, I think it's making quite a few people, me definitely think about what should we do with these brands and how do we protect them and make it so that we don't end up in this kind of mess in, you know, if we ever are in a position where it's making serious money, you know.

Steven (1:14:44)
It's a delicate balance, I think.

Shane (1:14:48)
would just ask you how GPT, so. I mean.

Steven (1:14:49)
Chat, Gippity, help me. Great. We're asking AI for, you know, a moral compass. This is when we know we've hit rock bottom as a species.

Simon (1:14:49)
Hahaha

What should they do in 20 years?

You have to plug in your Larabets algorithms into chat GPT and get it to predict the future.

Steven (1:15:11)
No.

Shane (1:15:13)
Mmm.

Simon (1:15:14)
You

Steven (1:15:14)
Yeah. But like even on, the immediate thing with, you know, Jack McDay was statomic. think it's a, it is a really interesting situation and there's like room to capitalize on the situation a little bit. think what was difficult with statomic is it always has. positioned itself to be sort of like the, the power users CMS and kind of, since it's more flexible and you can do some pretty cool stuff as a developer.

That's what they've leaned into. And unfortunately, I think like the really big benefit with WordPress is that again, somebody like my sister that like probably doesn't even know what Linux is, right? Can go and just like immediately hop on whatever provider, but like she can get WordPress installed and like she doesn't have to actually look at a single line of code ever and can install some good looking themes and the additional plugins and have like a not great.

Shane (1:15:45)
Right, yeah.

Simon (1:15:46)
Mm.

Mm.

Steven (1:16:13)
but technically out there working site with absolutely zero technical experience. So I do think that is a really big opportunity for Statamac, is if they could maintain some of this power user element to Statamac so that you can in the right hands. Like Jack has said, that right now, their bread and butter customer is the freelancers and agencies that use Statamac to build client sites really quickly and well.

Simon (1:16:35)
Hmm.

Yeah.

Steven (1:16:43)
great. But if you could have a twin marketing stance that's like, we're going to put together a one click installer. And if you don't want, you could operate a fairly simple website along with blog articles and this other stuff. And you don't ever have to look at a single line of code. You don't even have to know what language it's being used in any of this stuff. That's where you really start to unlock the door.

Simon (1:17:06)
Yeah.

Steven (1:17:12)
And then the round table that he did was pretty interesting because yeah, then they started getting into like the wider, like, what are my responsibilities as the, you know, maintainer and owner of like the, the, software, but also like this business and fostering like the greater ecosystem to make Stata make more popular and pricing and all this stuff. So it was really interesting.

Simon (1:17:24)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. It's that, that whole hosted thing. Like you were talking about Shopify earlier, Shane, the success of Shopify is a great example of this exact same thing because people want to do e-commerce. They're like hearing about how to do e-commerce and then they're going, what's Magento and all these other weird things. I don't know how to do that. And they just say, you can just click on Shopify and set up my site. yeah.

Steven (1:18:07)
Yeah, it's...

Simon (1:18:13)
cool. And I think in a way, if Matt could go back in time and do WordPress over, I he'd probably start with a hosting service and it might be open source as well, but he'd also just go, right, we've got to do a hosting service and it's paid. know, I think that it, yeah.

Steven (1:18:16)
It's like a perfect example.

Shane (1:18:35)
That's what Taylor's kind of doing. Yeah. With cloud and that like he, like Forge is not hosting. Forge is server provisioning management, et cetera, not the underlying hosting. And that's why when he unveiled the pricing, I thought that was very interesting. He's putting himself in the same category as like an AWS, which is using underneath, but it's pay for your usage. Pay for your traffic, pay for, you know,

how much data is being transferred back and forth, et cetera. I think it's just marking up AWS pricing, but yeah, it's kind of like, man, I wish I could be the one that's hosting. That's where really there's, think it's not just the, there's more money in it. think that's where Laravel kind of should be in general. And I haven't really thought through all that, what that actually would mean, but I don't know. What do you guys think of that?

Simon (1:19:12)
Yeah, maybe.

Yeah, it's, it, think generally like coming back to a business principle for it. It's about positioning yourself on the bridge. Like you want to be the, the, the toll booth on the bridge, right? Cause everyone's got to cross the river. Everyone's got to use the bridge. And if you're, you're gaining the bridge, then you're going to make all the money. There's like the theory, right? I think.

What we're seeing in this situation is because you've made this thing fully open, anybody can create their own bridge and put their own toll booth on it. And then if their bridge looks shinier than your bridge, which is the one that people are going to want to use. don't know. That's a terrible analogy, but you're not allowed to build a bridge. I've got the trademark on bridges.

Steven (1:20:22)
then you just go after a trademark dispute.

Shane (1:20:28)
Hmm

Simon (1:20:31)
But yeah, no, it's exactly, I think the fact that Forge got to be, you know, became the success that allowed Laravel, allowed Taylor to make Laravel into what it's become. a lot about what hosting these, you know, like providing easy to use solutions for the technologies that you're building, you know, is capable of doing in terms of creating a business.

it's the same principle that I want to go after with native PHP. I'm not going to, I don't think native PHP can be supported purely by donations. It may get to a point where it could maybe have somebody working on it full time, but I think that's going to take a while and that's going to be hard. And it's going to be really fluctuate. What's the, I don't know the word. It's going to fluctuate a lot.

Shane (1:21:24)
It'll be flux.

flexible.

Simon (1:21:32)
You do, you want something that's going to be a bit more stable, right? and it's the same kind of thing. I mean, it won't be hosting because obviously the apps that people build will be elsewhere, but yeah, but that there's like a, you've got to create like that little gate. Sorry, what were you going to say?

Shane (1:21:43)
Nah

We talked about that a little bit before, the build tool there.

on market. So we talked about that a little bit before and I don't know what you you want to talk about here or not but like developer like build tools right so if I'm on Windows how hard is it to build for a Mac right? Right so if you had if you had a container set up someplace and it was running on push it'll build these files and put it in your S3 bucket for you or something.

Steven (1:21:59)
no.

Simon (1:22:16)
Yeah, you can't.

Shane (1:22:28)
S3 bucket. You know, they have right 10 years from now. What did you do? know? Yeah, I'm sure he's got nothing else going on. Yeah, I think I think that's that's that's I've seen other things do this. I'm trying to remember what it was like native. What was it called? View native.

Simon (1:22:28)
Yep. yeah. That's a trademark infringement waiting to happen.

Steven (1:22:39)
Please don't listen to Jeff Bezos.

Shane (1:22:58)
or yeah, it's like you just, you have the CLI tool that you can push your code up to their server. They'll build, compile, et cetera, give you all the feedback and let you know if something fails, where it failed or whatever. But something like that where it's doing all these builds that you just can't do, like you just said, like if you're on Windows, you cannot build for Mac. So what do I do? I have to go get a MacBook now? No, you can build a GitHub action or something or.

pay 10 bucks a month and now all your builds are done for you, 20 or 50, whatever.

Simon (1:23:30)
Hey, whoa, don't start setting the boundaries for my pricing of my unbuilt service.

Shane (1:23:36)
$10 per month per deployment.

Steven (1:23:41)
Exactly $12 and 47 cents per

Simon (1:23:42)
$10 per seat. Yeah.

Shane (1:23:45)
There you go.

Simon (1:23:47)
Hahaha

Steven (1:23:49)
You heard it here first, folks.

Shane (1:23:51)
By dollars, I meant euros.

Simon (1:23:53)
there's a larabit on what the price is going to be.

Shane (1:23:55)
On that note, all right guys, this is cool. Thanks for opening my eyes a little bit more to WP Engine, delete WordPress automatic stuff. That's kind of what I was thinking it was, but it'll be interesting to see this unfold. Maybe this is an ongoing sort of topic.

Steven (1:23:56)
Yeah, there we go.

Yeah, let's wrap up that particular topic there. But I actually think that, well, for next episode, it would be really neat to talk about the DHH keynote at Rails World and where they're taking Rails 8 and some of that tooling for their concept of what app development to the hosting bridge sort of looks like.

Simon (1:24:40)
Yeah, that'll be interesting in the context of the Laravel investment as well, just, cloud, like the plan. It seems like Rails and Laravel have been doing this for a long time, you know, going in the same sort of, I mean, Laravel has been sort of following Rails for a while and, and then it's gone ahead. And now they're sort of maybe diverging a little bit. Could be interesting.

Steven (1:24:46)
Yep. Yep.

Yeah, we'll see. So if you want to hear our thoughts on that, tune in next week for the bucket. All right, guys. Well, I think this has been a really full first episode. We should probably go ahead and wrap up before it becomes like midnight for Simon over there. He's going to be getting hungry there soon.

Shane (1:25:06)
Stay tuned. Stay tuned.

Simon (1:25:08)
Hmm.

Yeah

It's a long way from midnight. Do you know I haven't had lunch? my gosh, I need to eat. But yeah. Yeah.

Steven (1:25:32)
Lunch? Isn't it like five o'clock or something for you? Now you're just into dinner, dude. Or at least Leonard. Leonard, man, lunch, dinner. It's like brunch, but the combo of lunch and dinner.

Shane (1:25:34)
It's 430.

Simon (1:25:37)
Yeah, exactly. what? I've never heard that. No. no. No. No, I'm sorry. You can't make those things up. You can't create new meal times.

Shane (1:25:50)
Dunge. Dunge.

Dessunce. Dessunce, dude. Don't you know about breakfast and second breakfast? Dessunce, right? That's when you haven't had lunch yet, but you need some pie too, you know?

Steven (1:25:59)
didn't make this up. This is, this is common lingo. think in the U S like, yeah.

Simon (1:26:02)
No.

We're right we're talking we've got to talk about this the next time

Steven (1:26:11)
Was that a. Did you just drop a Lord of the Rings reference? But Pip, does he know about second breakfast? Dude, something we'll have to talk about. You guys have been watching Rings of Power, but like my wife and I have a man after going back and watching the original Lord of the Rings, it's like. Almost sad to just see like how good.

Shane (1:26:16)
Of course.

What's that? They have pints.

Simon (1:26:21)
11 is afternoon tea!

Steven (1:26:41)
those originals were compared to what is happening now with Rings of Power.

Shane (1:26:46)
I decided not to, I'm very into Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit. I read the books in high school. I made my son read the books when he was four or something. When I saw that this was coming out, I decided that they're gonna Disney-fy Star Wars with this. And I don't wanna be a part of that. I knew I would get my hopes up and I don't wanna.

Steven (1:27:07)
It, yeah, man, I could go on for a long time about this because like, don't know. I'm I'm I hold way too strong of opinions about, you know, certain productions, show and cinema productions for somebody that has absolutely no qualifications to be having these opinions. But anyway, man, who needs qualifications? I'm going to be.

Shane (1:27:26)
Right? Yeah.

Simon (1:27:30)
Who needs qualifications, man? There are WordPress developers out there saying that they're software engineers.

Steven (1:27:37)
Yeah, so soon I'll be contributing to Rotten Tomatoes, but regardless, yeah, we'll maybe have to, I don't know, whatever, not chat about that, because it's, it's sad. But

Shane (1:27:46)
Now Simon's really hungry for lunch.

Simon (1:27:49)
Yeah, stop talking about food, man.

Steven (1:27:55)
So, how do you wrap up one of these episodes? Are we supposed to, are we supposed to do something in particular?

Simon (1:27:58)
I think we just did it. I think that was it.

Shane (1:27:59)
Well, some like, all right, we've emptied the bucket. Stay tuned till next week and stay tuned for next week. Wait till next week when it's full again. I don't know, something like that.

Steven (1:28:14)
There we go. Yeah, I don't think we had an outro planned. So, it's as good as it's gonna get.

Shane (1:28:21)
I think we all like, we'll have some music. We just have to pretend like we're all hearing the music now. So we all have to bob our head at the same time, right?

Simon (1:28:33)
wait, is it just bobbing? Are just like, are we rocking? I thought it was like...

Shane (1:28:40)
Was that like Night of the Roxbury style?

Steven (1:28:42)
And I think we just made our thumbnail.

Shane (1:28:46)
All right. All right. Bucket's empty.

Steven (1:28:48)
perfect. OK. Simon officially hit stop recording or this will never stop.

Simon (1:28:48)
You

It's nearly at two hours, I think we should just go for another ten minutes honestly. No, I'm gonna stop now.

Steven (1:29:02)
my gosh.

Okay.