Chris Biscardi: [00:00:00] I'm Christmas Gardy and this. This is the party corgi podcast. Welcome back to the party corgi podcast. Today we have Lori Barth, who is an accomplished speaker, an egg head instructor, a Google developer expert, a contributor to publications such as CSS tricks and smashing magazine, a member of the 39 educators committee, and in her free time, because apparently she has some, after doing all of that, she facilitates clubs like girls who code.
And then sits back with the cupcake and plays board games with your puppy habit.
Laurie Barth: [00:00:36] It's okay. Everyone does that, and I think it's kind of fun. So I guess, correct. Everyone, her name is Ava. She's adorable. She's a rescue like a year and a half.
Chris Biscardi: [00:00:45] That's awesome.
Laurie Barth: [00:00:47] Yeah, and you, and I'm pretty sure that you just like lifted a resume of like a college student applying or like a high school student applying to college.
Just be like, I joined this club at this club. That is
Chris Biscardi: [00:00:59] like all of like, those are very professional associations though. That is not just a resume. That is like a person who has been working in a software engineer for a long time and knows stuff.
Laurie Barth: [00:01:13] That's what we want you to think, right? That's the goal.
The goal is, is to just add enough. Um, it's like working in Hollywood. How many do you have? Producer and writer and director and star.
Chris Biscardi: [00:01:32] And I played bass one time in high school.
Laurie Barth: [00:01:34] Exactly how to juggle and speak French
Chris Biscardi: [00:01:38] actually. Do you know how to juggle? I'm really, really bad at French.
Laurie Barth: [00:01:42] Uh, I'm really, really bad French as well.
Uh, and I knew how to juggle when I was in like middle school, but I'm pretty sure that doesn't apply anymore. I don't, I don't think it would work. I do know aye. I do know how to use it. Have you heard of the Diablo? Yeah, I know how to do that pretty well, actually.
Chris Biscardi: [00:02:01] I'm like a low key circus nerd, so like, yeah.
Laurie Barth: [00:02:04] Okay. Yeah. I did some circus summer camp stuff as a kid. Awesome. Dorky, weird. Yeah. I literally went to circumstance. I do not still own a Diablo, but I would totally go buy one cause I need entertainment right now.
Chris Biscardi: [00:02:22] Okay. I wonder if those are considered considered essential products.
Laurie Barth: [00:02:25] I mean, probably not.
I've been going off of what I have in my house. So I was very lucky that this summer I purchased the Hogwarts Lego set of 6,000 pieces and I plan to do it over Christmas break and then I got sick over Christmas break. And so it was just sitting there waiting. Coronavirus. 14 what? How lucky. I know, right?
Like the luckiest thing in the world that I just had this in my house and it was going to take me 24 hours.
Chris Biscardi: [00:02:54] Is that how long it takes to put together a 6,000 piece?
Laurie Barth: [00:02:58] Um, I mean, I'm estimating and it depends on who you are, but I broke it out over two different weekends, so probably all told continuous hours of work.
About 24 hours. It was 37 individual packages. And for instruction booklet.
You can, if you want to see it, it's on my Twitter. I posted lots
Chris Biscardi: [00:03:21] of products definitely, and I'm definitely going to link that in the show notes so everybody else see your wonderful construction
Laurie Barth: [00:03:27] and if you go back in history, I also have a tweet of having done the Disney castle Lego set. I have both of them.
The Disney castle Lego set is fewer pieces. I think that's 5,000.
Chris Biscardi: [00:03:38] Oh yeah. Only $5
Laurie Barth: [00:03:41] I could be wrong. It could be like 2000 I honestly don't remember.
Chris Biscardi: [00:03:46] It's just one giant brick look. Oh, I put this together.
Laurie Barth: [00:03:49] Right, exactly. So I've actually thought about this. It would be really awesome if people would pay me to put together really complicated Lego sets for them, but I feel like that defeats the purpose.
But what do I know.
Chris Biscardi: [00:04:05] I don't know that it, like you're talking about like on a consumer level, you're going to go to the people who buy Legos. That's going to be like, you could buy this and putting it together, or you can buy this and I can put it together.
Laurie Barth: [00:04:16] Correct.
Chris Biscardi: [00:04:19] Because I feel, I feel like being a Lego, like I don't, I don't remember what they're called.
Do you know
Laurie Barth: [00:04:23] that's what they're called,
Chris Biscardi: [00:04:24] master.
Laurie Barth: [00:04:26] But the light masters invent the sets and put together like unique. So for example, so it's funny, the reason I have Lego, like the capital, okay. Not the Hogwarts castle. The Disney castle is because it was a wedding gift from one of my best friends who works at Lego.
Mmm. And so I was talking to her a while back. She was telling me that the Lego masters at the time were working on a life size red pickup truck with like working lights in Lego. Wow. That is what the Lego masters do. It's wild.
Chris Biscardi: [00:05:00] How big is that? How many pieces.
Laurie Barth: [00:05:02] I have no, I mean, it's gotta it's gotta be over a million, right?
Yeah. Many,
Chris Biscardi: [00:05:08] I mean, a one to one. Uh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't know how cars work. There's a million pieces in them already, isn't there?
Laurie Barth: [00:05:14] Right? Yeah. I mean, if you want like a sense of scale, watch Lego masters on Fox, like a television reality show right now. And all these teams are building these oppressive sets, but they're not following instructions like I am.
I need a book to tell me how to put this together. This is like Lego. Ikea.
Chris Biscardi: [00:05:34] Yeah. I feel like I need the Ikea. Yeah, for sure.
Laurie Barth: [00:05:39] But it gets hard. You'll be looking at the instruction booklet and it'll just have 10 pieces that they've added. I almost think of it like a spot. The difference photo. Because you'll see the previous step and then you'll see the next step and it'll tell you what pieces were used and how many of them, and then you have to spot the difference and figure out where they put them.
Chris Biscardi: [00:05:59] Oh, moderate the nightmare.
You know, I'm not bad at finding Waldo, but I don't know that I could find 12 Waldos and five other like slightly smaller Waldos and also know that they were put on the backside of the thing.
Laurie Barth: [00:06:14] Oh yeah. That gets hard. They try and use pointing arrows. If it's on the backside. So like pointing to the fact that, yeah, yeah, it's complicated.
I also got into this weird rabbit hole in my head of thinking about whatever CAD modeling software they have to create these instruction booklets and how they like rotate things in order to show you a piece of they've added and how complex and time consuming it must be to make these instruction booklet.
Chris Biscardi: [00:06:45] I mean, it has to be pretty easy at this point, right. Like they have to have specialized Lego documentation building software.
Laurie Barth: [00:06:52] I'm sure they do, but I find that
Chris Biscardi: [00:06:53] fascinating. I would love to, if anybody out there that is listening happens to know what specialized documentation software Lego uses, uh, tweeted us and let us know
Laurie Barth: [00:07:06] because.
Chris Biscardi: [00:07:07] I would love to.
Laurie Barth: [00:07:10] I would also like to volunteer in the evenings to help them. Quality control said document.
Chris Biscardi: [00:07:19] What do you do in your free time? I QA the LIGO documentation software.
Laurie Barth: [00:07:22] I mean, that would require that I have the Legos to test it, so that's increased fair trade off.
Chris Biscardi: [00:07:31] You're on the way to free Legos. That's too bad.
Laurie Barth: [00:07:34] Balkin already exists. I've probably already, you ate that pretty well.
Chris Biscardi: [00:07:39] Yeah. That one's a big one too, isn't it?
Laurie Barth: [00:07:41] Yeah, and it's like a thousand dollars Oh, wow. Yeah.
Chris Biscardi: [00:07:46] With
Laurie Barth: [00:07:46] that. Well, so here's the problem. I had to bargain with my husband for where Hogwarts was going to go because our house is not very large. We live in essentially a city.
Chris Biscardi: [00:07:59] That's awesome though. like walk in, there's just like this mini city of like, well, I already feel like a giant, but regular people can feel like
Laurie Barth: [00:08:12] this is a visual.
We should give the listeners. Okay, so people have probably seen pictures of Chris before and there was this really famous in my mind, a picture of Chris Marissa. Mmm. Where he has to like angle his arm really, really high to get her in the photo because she's particularly short. And if you were to swap, wow.
Marissa, for me, the photo would look the same. Hmm. That's, that's the height
Chris Biscardi: [00:08:41] difference I guess. Now I have to link that photo. Yeah. I have to go find that photo. I'm
Laurie Barth: [00:08:45] so sorry. I can probably, I'm
Chris Biscardi: [00:08:48] sure Jason has it. Just make him find it for me. So I do have a very important question. Sure. Since you are very into cupcakes.
I am. How do you eat a cupcake?
Laurie Barth: [00:09:02] Okay. I don't understand people who break off the bottom and turn it into like a cupcake sandwich. What is that nonsense? No, you take a bite. And then you probably leaked some excess frosting because you can, and then you continue biting into it as if it were a donut or a slice of pizza.
I don't understand this cupcake sandwich nonsense. Why would you not? No.
Chris Biscardi: [00:09:28] So you're just like a, you just bite straight into it. You don't take the frosting off or anything?
Laurie Barth: [00:09:32] No, I'm appearance.
Chris Biscardi: [00:09:34] Hmm. Straightforward.
Laurie Barth: [00:09:36] Great
Chris Biscardi: [00:09:36] for it. What's your flavor of cupcakes?
Laurie Barth: [00:09:38] Red velvet. That felt good.
Chris Biscardi: [00:09:42] Good one.
Laurie Barth: [00:09:42] That is a good one.
And I have, if anyone is ever in the Washington DC area, just send me a message on Twitter and I will give you the top 10 cupcake locations, including what flavors to get where. I'm not exaggerating. That is a
Chris Biscardi: [00:09:55] strong offer.
Laurie Barth: [00:09:57] I, I can do this. I can do similar, I have a similar list. I have a similar list for chain restaurants.
Ranked by the free bread you're given at the beginning of your meal. Really, really,
Chris Biscardi: [00:10:13] what is the, what is the spectrum of bread?
Laurie Barth: [00:10:16] I mean, so there's like incredible hot roles, like for two T says, and then there's really solid, both white and Brown bread combinations like cheesecake factory gives you. And then there's unique things like, Mmm cheese biscuits that red lobster gives you.
And then there's just places that are bad and I'm going, if I say how I feel about this, someone's going to be really mad, but I'm sorry. All of garden breadsticks are trash.
Chris Biscardi: [00:10:48] Yes. Uh, I believe that is the point.
Laurie Barth: [00:10:50] Yeah. They taste like they taste like burger buns, which is not what good bread should taste like, but
Chris Biscardi: [00:10:59] it's unlimited.
I
Laurie Barth: [00:11:01] don't care. So it was macaroni grill bread, interestingly used to be good and then got worse, but for two cheese for two cheese is like the one you want for unlimited delicious bread.
Chris Biscardi: [00:11:15] I'm going to have to put that on my list.
Laurie Barth: [00:11:20] It's about no content at all.
Chris Biscardi: [00:11:22] Oh, this is great. I love this. We could, I could keep going on this. Do you want to dive deeper in a bread and bread
Laurie Barth: [00:11:31] recipe publication that Maggie illustrates? I think that should
Chris Biscardi: [00:11:38] be amazing.
Laurie Barth: [00:11:39] Snickerdoodle bars. That is my
Chris Biscardi: [00:11:41] wish. I would have to learn my own recipes or make my own recipe just to get.
A Maggie illustration. Oh yeah. I've talked about this with other people before. Like a Maggie illustration is the reason that I do, I can have courses. I don't know what your motivations are.
Laurie Barth: [00:11:54] So to be fair, my first ever course was released, uh, December as part of the like Christmas set of courses. And in the process of doing it, I specifically requested that I could get a Maggie illustration cause there were multiple illustrator.
It was just very important to me because I'd always wanted one. It was kind of a bucket list goal and I have one and it's beautiful and it sort of went viral on Twitter, the poster version of it, cause people thought it was so, so cool.
Chris Biscardi: [00:12:23] That is, it was very cool.
Laurie Barth: [00:12:26] We'll have to link that in the show notes.
Chris Biscardi: [00:12:29] Like there's just nothing else to say about that. It's just very cool. Very cool.
Laurie Barth: [00:12:34] And what I think is so interesting about it is. Th they're all different. Like if I were her, I would run out of ideas. Well,
Chris Biscardi: [00:12:43] have you seen her? I'm like nine piece, like blog theories on
Laurie Barth: [00:12:47] how she does and I just, I'm in awe and I, it is not a skill set I possess and I don't believe, I mean, I believe her because obviously she does it, but I'm just looking at it like how, how does your brain come up with this?
I saw her as, she did a stream Jason as well, where they're just kind of. Chatting about misery sandwiches for a while, and what comes to mind with mystery sandwiches that it's some kind of word association. Dave,
Chris Biscardi: [00:13:13] speaking of that hard question for you. There's a hotdog, a sandwich. Oh
Laurie Barth: [00:13:20] God. Okay. I actually have a friend who has a website.
I'll, I'd have to find what it is that talks about whether hotdog is a sandwich and includes tacos and a bunch of other stuff. I do not believe a hot dog. Yeah. Do you not
Chris Biscardi: [00:13:35] believe that? What's your reasoning behind this non hot dog? Sandwiching
Laurie Barth: [00:13:41] so, so, uh, a hot dog, the bread is not separated and it does not include individual ingredients.
It includes a single ingredient plus. Okay. Toppings that doesn't qualify. Includes a single ingredient and the bread is connected, which makes it more like a burger than a sandwich.
Chris Biscardi: [00:14:06] What a burger has separated breath.
Laurie Barth: [00:14:08] Yeah. And a burger is clearly not a sandwich. Everybody knows this. Can
Chris Biscardi: [00:14:12] we? Yes.
Laurie Barth: [00:14:18] I do not understand this argument. I've never understood this argument. In my opinion. It is very clear what is his sandwich and what is it? People's attempts to confuse the issue are not welcoming.
I don't get it. A taco is not a sandwich. A case. The DIA is not a sandwich sandwich.
Does it include deli meat of some kind? Does it include slices of cheese? Does it include, you know, maybe some vegetables? If you feel like being healthy today, great. It's a sandwich. Does that include the large chunk of meat that's more than like a couple centimeters thick? Great. Probably not.
Chris Biscardi: [00:15:03] Wait, so how do you do if take them, which then.
Laurie Barth: [00:15:07] I don't know. I also don't eat sandwiches, so this is very relevant to me.
Chris Biscardi: [00:15:17] Well, on that note, let's talk about a view.
Laurie Barth: [00:15:22] Oh, like BI see you. No, wait, I guess. Mmm. You mean like a model view controller, right?
Chris Biscardi: [00:15:33] No, I meant like the, you
Laurie Barth: [00:15:36] know. Yeah. Well, what do you want to talk about
Chris Biscardi: [00:15:42] NBC, obviously. I mean, I'm already on. Yeah. So you've done quite a bit with you actually, uh, including an ed course and other stuff.
So what his view for people that don't
Laurie Barth: [00:15:54] know. Um, so he was kind of one of the major frameworks that exists in the JavaScript. Their system. I think for most people, they think of react, angular, and Vue is the big three. Some people may consider it the big four, depending on whether you are splitting out angular JS and modern angler.
That's it. Yeah, right.
Maybe, perhaps comfortable. Mmm . And so for me, I know there's questions about, or. There's probably semantic arguments you can make about well, react as a library and it's not really a framework and all of that stuff. I get all of that. But in the abstract things that you use that are popular architecture.
Mmm. I really liked view, I think of view as kind of the middle ground between the very opinionated angular and the very unopinionated reacts. I think it is one of the most approachable. For getting started. And what are the best decisions that they made in my mind is that they have, they no, that most people will want to use a router and most people will want to use, um, some kind of state management.
And so they have crystallized on two best practices, supported, endorsed, bye. The view core team. Libraries for doing so. So if you ex state management and you router is routing, and so there's no guesswork of like, do I use reach router, do I use react router? Do I use, okay, any number of these other things.
And then an angular, it is technically separate. It's not like ship you by default. So I really liked those choices that they made. And. Routing is one of those things that I think everyone who's been a front end developer has had headaches with at one point. Think there are mistakes, but angular made with it not to start some kind of for here.
And I think react has never really just cited on one true routing path. You not only decided on one, they did it well and they documented two within an inch of its life. It's incredible. Mmm. And it's so, it makes so much sense. Okay. It's intelligently written. It's well documented. I'm all about it. And so I just, I decided to make a course about it where I was like, hi people, if routing is a pain in the butt and your building is single page application here, come look at this.
You might be your solution.
Chris Biscardi: [00:18:37] And I've seen this course and it's pretty great. Oh, somebody who has not, for someone who has not used view extensively in the past. The course was a great
Laurie Barth: [00:18:47] introduction. That's kind of the point, right? Is you, is approachable and routing into is approachable. And so I think because some of the stuff towards the end of the course, Mmm.
Like navigation guards for example, or maybe more use cases and then some of them stuff earlier on in the course about making defining routes and even sub routes. Mmm. Those things are. Table stakes in some ways.
Chris Biscardi: [00:19:18] Yeah, that sounds, uh, yeah, I could agree with that for sure. When you were saying that, um, like other, other frameworks had made mistakes, it was kind of funny to me, who's the, like react hasn't made any mistakes because if you don't pick something then you can't make a mistake cause there's no.
Laurie Barth: [00:19:43] Someone's going to cut like for me
Chris Biscardi: [00:19:46] for that one.
Laurie Barth: [00:19:49] Yeah, so, so what I say to people a lot is react is fantastic. React is a little bit the wild, wild West, which is great if you have, really, if you have people who are really well versed in the front end, you have people who have done a lot of JavaScript and they know how to make smart choices and architect something.
It's a really bad decision for enterprise. People in particular who have full stack developers often doing Java or.net and the backend, and they're only forced to pick up JavaScript in order to make their front end work. For those situations, they need a lot four. Mmm. Shielding. They almost need bumpers for bowling.
And so react being so open ended and having so many options is actually. Okay. Okay. Problem for those. So I think it's great and extensible for a lot of people. Obviously I work at Gatsby, like we love react, I love react. Mmm. But okay, pick the right tool for the job. And people say that a lot and they don't really mean it.
Yeah. I like it. I like introducing view because I think it is a good middle ground. It is well-documented, so it can be approachable, but it's also flexible.
Chris Biscardi: [00:21:09] Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. Um, you said that it's good for enterprise developers, and I know that you have a, a lot of it sort of teaching enterprise developers are like working with enterprise developers as part of your history of work. Uh, so can you talk a little bit about that?
Laurie Barth: [00:21:27] Yeah. So hashtag consultant life.
Right. It's funny, this is working in Gatsby is actually my first time on a product team. I have previously always been a consultant. Mmm. And that didn't mean I wasn't building a product. Yeah. I was doing so as kind of an extension of the team rather than it being the place that I, my paycheck at the end of the week.
No, I guess they did one level removed, but you get the wait. Mmm. Yeah, so, so working it's funny, I'm, I'm on Twitter a lot these days. I do kind of be community facing development, I think results in a lot of, well, focusing on leading edge, what's brand new and what's popular. And so you see, for example, felt mentioned a million times and you think everyone's working spell well, Twitter is a very, very small subset of the larger developers immunity.
Both in the United international, , et cetera. coming from this background of working with enterprise people, it's actually the opposite of what you think most people are still using angular JS, and I'm not exaggerating. I mean, the state of JS survey is like, no one uses angular anymore. And I was like, Oh my goodness.
No, everyone uses angular because that was the only game in town. Okay. Less than 10 years later, they haven't all moved off of it. And even when react was introduced, they weren't comfortable picking it up. So they continued on with angular JS in a lot of cases, and then they were with angular. There are some, I mean, many.
Production applications using view, but that's considered brand new in the enterprise world and somewhat untested. Mmm. I actually introduced it to a client at some point. We did their front end in view and it was fantastic. Yeah. They were hesitant about it because it wasn't as household of a name as something like angular react
Chris Biscardi: [00:23:26] was.
You're, how long does it take for, um, a technology to sort of come out and then see enterprise adoption? Like you would see view, uh, sort of get adoption in
Laurie Barth: [00:23:36] the flood? Yeah. So how long it's not necessarily from when it comes out to when it sees adoption, because it depends how long it takes to get attention.
So for example, you existed for a period of time before people really. I noticed it out of in a big scale, react sort of had the word of mouth because it obviously, cause it was backed by Facebook. Mmm. It had the word of mouth almost immediately. And so if you have this clear Bakker who's putting time and resources into it, it's gonna be seen as stable and something worth was faster, then something that comes out of the open source space, likely would be.
Mmm. But it mean. It takes well over a year for it to really hit enterprise land. I remember, Mmm, let's see if I can do this math. It was 2014 I want to say, and we were working on a new portal for enterprise angular 2.0 was just being released. We knew angular was awesome. we also knew angular JS and we saw angular 2.0 is this which departure it wasn't.
Yeah, for sure. Going to move forward without breaking changes and we could not. I convinced our customer to bet on it and so they have an angular JS system that was written in 2014 that I'm pretty sure it's still in use right now because it was a huge lift. It was a huge lift to do, and they're not going to six years later, rewrite it when it's okay.
It has so much traffic running through it. They spent all this money for a team to build it and all of that. And I think that's a piece of the puzzle that people who work nimbly, especially on small personal sites or Mmm know clients' sites, four stuff that can use JAMstack for example. Mmm. I don't know.
I think there's a lot of stuff that gets lost in terms of the enterprise experience and what their concerns are because their stuff doesn't live for a year or two. They're hoping it can live for 10 and it normally should. Yeah. Hmm. Sorry. It normally shouldn't live that long, but for resource constraints, they're going to push it that far.
Chris Biscardi: [00:26:04] That is a long time. Yeah. I think there's, there's code that I wrote in 2014 that is still running in production. The day, as far as I know, and I don't think any of us were thinking about it like that. I don't think any of us were thinking that it would be running. Uh, what is it, six years later now? Yeah, in ages.
It feels like we've been isolated for yours already.
Laurie Barth: [00:26:27] Yeah. So I'm guessing my oldest code's still in production. It was written in 2012. But it was written for the federal government and that stuff never dies.
Chris Biscardi: [00:26:41] That will be alive forever.
Laurie Barth: [00:26:43] It will die and that will still be running. To be fair, if I recall correctly, it wasn't exactly complicated.
It was a bunch of getter and setter methods for classes and Java, and we couldn't auto-generate them in an IDE because the IDE was not a license that we had, and so I had to make them all manually.
Chris Biscardi: [00:27:05] You, you, you know, you say it's not complicated and then you're like, Oh, but then we had to just do it manually, so I did it.
Yeah. That feels like very much a draw. The rest of the fucking owl
Laurie Barth: [00:27:15] kind of, yeah. I mean, I have horror stories, right? We all do there. There are things, there are things that I really appreciate about working on this kind of bleeding edge area with damn stack and. Mmm, very modern front end. And being able to use, you know, novel concepts like optional training that was introduced, you know, a couple months ago and now it's in our code base.
And that, that was a foreign concept to me, not, but a year ago never would have flown.
Chris Biscardi: [00:27:51] That's actually great cause I was going to ask you about optional training. So like you've been writing a bunch of posts on this very brand new like JavaScript syntax, but people are just starting to use in their applications right now.
Uh, why, why tackle modern like very cutting edge, bleeding edge JavaScript
Laurie Barth: [00:28:09] syntax? Because I think it's really fun. Mmm. No, I mean, okay. I think it's, I think it's really cool to kind of take, I mean, there's things like Mozilla, like the MDN docs, um, and those are amazing. But. They're not quite as narrative driven as what I try and write.
And so I try and translate things, especially being involved with TC 39 I try and translate the new stuff we are going to want to know about and I say, Hey, this is a thing. Hey, it's coming. Be aware of it because most of the things that are being adopted into ECMAScript right now are pieces of syntax that existed in other languages and were incredibly useful.
So there's a reason it's being adopted. People want it and they need it. And optional chaining in particular is one of those things that if I had had it four years ago, I would have. Right. And I mean, I tell this story when I introduce it, there's a talk I do where I mention optional chaining, and I was building a portal that was dealing with traffic from a, it was, it was a DDoSs portal, so it was grabbing traffic from a Juniper router, which takes.
It basically sanitizes all the traffic that goes through it prevent the dos attack. And so the re the API results of this router were the gnarliest thing you can possibly imagine. And all we needed to display for the user was something pretty simple. But of course it was nested like six levels deep.
Chris Biscardi: [00:29:39] Okay.
Laurie Barth: [00:29:40] They just dropped fields. If the router wasn't returning the information, it would just drop it because no one had ever thought that this API would actually be consumed by anything that displayed information to a user. And so I, I'm pretty sure this was a file with over a thousand lines with a single function, just doing all of the existence checks.
You get to this piece of information. And do you know how many lines that could have been with optional chaining? One. Could have been one. Okay. And what's so funny to me is that optional training was one of those things that people I thought about and people are still fighting about because they don't want it included in the spec because they're afraid that, for example, everyone's always going to access objects with question Mark.
Dot. Instead of dot, which is a terrible idea. And so to everyone listening to this optional training is really cool. You should use it. If you have a use case for it, it is not your default. Don't use it as a replacement for how you access things. It is more expensive. You're going to hurt performance and you're going to get a bunch of silent errors.
If you control your own data, you probably shouldn't use it at all. Soapbox.
Chris Biscardi: [00:30:56] Hold on. Thank you. That's a great soapbox.
Laurie Barth: [00:30:58] Thank you. But if you have to work with the Juniper router API,
Chris Biscardi: [00:31:02] by all means,
Laurie Barth: [00:31:04] by permission.
Oh man,
Chris Biscardi: [00:31:09] that sounds tough. Yeah.
Laurie Barth: [00:31:11] Yeah. These are the real world situations that never really make it to these discussions. I feel like, I mean, not to bring it up, but like the let versa cons thing. It's one of those things that people always dive into. Yeah, they forget the larger context. Yes. We can have really deep discussions about very specific keywords that we're using, but development is not, it doesn't happen in kind of this utopian world.
It happens in the real world, and most of the time people don't have time to focus on that level of minutia when they're trying to make sure that the integration isn't get a break. Yeah. You know, the security service off, whatever. You know what I mean? Like the actual enterprise considerations are much larger then what we focus on in these more discreet, sanitized examples that we try and give people when we teach them the concepts in the first place.
Chris Biscardi: [00:32:13] Yeah, that makes total sense to me. Mmm. So I have a very important question to ask. You are a person that plays animal crossing.
Laurie Barth: [00:32:24] Hey, new to animal crossing person. I downloaded it on Sunday. It is now what, Wednesday?
Chris Biscardi: [00:32:35] I don't know what day it is anymore, Laurie.
Laurie Barth: [00:32:38] I've been, I've been tweeting that. I try and tweet a few days a week to tell people what day it is and to be clear, it's to remind myself as well.
Chris Biscardi: [00:32:49] Did you say you just tweeted that it was like March 32nd or something like that?
Laurie Barth: [00:32:55] As we all know, April fools is canceled this year, so it is March 32nd today, but to be fair, as soon as I did that, I realized that it's my brother and sister in law's wedding anniversary, so we can't cancel April 1st so they get to have April 1st and everybody else can have March 30 seconds.
That
Chris Biscardi: [00:33:14] sounds great to me. Yeah. Honestly, I don't need to hear any of the April 1st stuff. Um, uh,
Laurie Barth: [00:33:20] and it is leap year.
Chris Biscardi: [00:33:22] Like I don't need,
Laurie Barth: [00:33:22] it's a leap year. It is a leap year. No.
Chris Biscardi: [00:33:26] Yeah.
Laurie Barth: [00:33:27] We had February 29th. So why can't we have March 32nd
Chris Biscardi: [00:33:31] just that's it. The standards bodies need to give us March 32nd.
Laurie Barth: [00:33:35] I can also call it April negative one but that feels like it would just result in a whole lot of it.
Worse stuff like what's the opposite of April fools?
Chris Biscardi: [00:33:45] And then we have to like, let me have to go back through zero and one. Right,
Laurie Barth: [00:33:48] right. One 32nd is more effective.
Chris Biscardi: [00:33:54] March 32nd
Laurie Barth: [00:33:55] yeah, it is. Because every night I played animal crossing, I forget because there, so I got to say the most confusing thing about animal crossing is I used to be a big Pokemon go player.
And the weather in the game matched the weather outside. That was how, yeah, various types of Pokemon, more special would show up in animal crossing. We have weather, but it doesn't match my weather. And so I'm playing this game and it's raining and it's making me sad and I look outside and it's sunny and I'm like.
I messaged my friend who plays animal crossing and is very well versed in this, and I was like, why is it raining? She's like, Oh, that's good. You'll get special fish that way. And I'm like, okay. No.
Yeah. I am an indentured servant to a man named Nick. I call him a raccoon. Apparently. That's not what he is, but he looks like one. Uh, I don't. I don't like how hard it is to catch fish. I don't understand flowers. Apparently they're just for show, but like I'm supposed to collect them. I'm confused. Um, and my museum is ready, but I haven't opened the game yet.
Okay. So I think that's actually a record that's the fastest your museum can be ready because, okay. Chris, do you want to learn something about, and we're crossing. Okay. So. For anyone who needs to entertainment during these rough times, animal crossing. Um, on the first day, if you go and get, I don't even know how many he needs.
I think 30 Oh wait, no. Hold on. You have to go and get either insects or fish and give them to mr Nick. I don't know Tim Knuck, whatever his name is, the nook guy? No,
Chris Biscardi: [00:35:53] the raccoon.
Laurie Barth: [00:35:56] So you need to give him a bunch of those and at a certain point, and he'll ask you if he can send them off to his friend for investigation and you say yes.
And so when you sent his friend enough of those, he invites his friend to the Island and his friend is mr blathers who was an owl. And so mr blather shows up the next day. So you have to like go to sleep, wake up. Mr blather shows up. Mr bothers shows up and you have to give him, I think it is 30 unique species.
That you have caught. So there's fossils, insects, and fish. And so you give him those and then after you've given him those, he shuts down and then for two days you are building the museum. And so the fastest you can do that sequence of events, given the number of evenings that needs to happen, real life time matches in game time, which is why it's confusing that weather does not.
Okay. What when you wake up, the museum will be ready. Okay. earliest on the fourth day. So today is my fourth day, so I have now done it as fast as humanly possible, but it's still actually, I think that's the weirdest thing about animal cross. Like normally the day you get the game is the day you're most excited and so you binge it true.
Any video game. That's actually not really possible. Tandem animal crossing. There's a bunch of things you don't unlock until day two, three and four. It looks like, why did they make this choice? They should have front-loaded a little bit more, but I guess they, we anticipated that we'd all be in isolation and need two measure R.
Yeah. They just knew. Nope. Knows everything,
Chris Biscardi: [00:37:38] knows everything and controls everything. Owen's everything.
Laurie Barth: [00:37:45] My future labor for like a very long time. I think I owe him like 200,000 bells right now. I
Chris Biscardi: [00:37:52] haven't heard of anybody getting out of debt completely yet. Oh wow.
Laurie Barth: [00:38:00] focusing on getting out of debt. Aye. Trying to do that. And then he'd say, Oh great, you're out of debt. Here's a reward for getting out of debt. And then he'd say, Oh, but don't you want to do
Chris Biscardi: [00:38:15] for getting out of debt is more debt
Laurie Barth: [00:38:18] journalistic, I'll tell ya. Yeah. And, and you don't really have a choice, right? Like you can't talk to him about anything else unless you decide that you need that bigger house. He's been telling you, huh?
Chris Biscardi: [00:38:31] Oh man. I'm just imagining like a little raccoon, just like standing in front of you, just completely ignoring you.
Like, Hey, can I get like, I don't know. I want to buy a soda or something. Yeah. And he's just like, you haven't bought my house. Yeah.
Laurie Barth: [00:38:46] Yeah. My struggle is that there are various things I would plan to do to pass the time. So obviously we have discussed my Lego problems because I no longer have any sets in my house to build.
Aye. I am normally a Baker and I can't bake because everyone in the world has decided they are a Baker and there is no yeast. There's no sugar, there's no flour, like there's nothing. So now I have to figure out a bunch of ways to make things to satisfy my sugar craving. Don't involve any of those ingredients.
Mmm. I have been watching a lot of television. I am waiting patiently for, I think it's Saturday. That onward. The Pixar movie is being added to Disney plus. Mmm. We've been watching big love, which is an HBO show from like 2006 and started it, I think two cool. A week ago, two weeks ago. It's five seasons and we'll finish it tonight.
That's the level of time that we have on our hands. Yep. I think we're going to start big little wise. I'm not sure I can get behind this whole tire King thing. That's true.
Chris Biscardi: [00:39:55] Too much about it yet, except that it's extremely dramatic.
Laurie Barth: [00:39:58] You have it? Oh,
Chris Biscardi: [00:39:59] no. Okay. Let me, okay. Going back to like the old TV show, uh, the topic for a second, uh, somebody spoiled the ending of loss for me like two weeks ago.
Laurie Barth: [00:40:10] Wait, how did you go this long without being explained? Okay, so do you know what's worse when lost was originally airing? I'm not gonna say how old I was. I'm pretty sure no. At
Chris Biscardi: [00:40:26] some point
Laurie Barth: [00:40:28] during last round I was in high school. That's not that surprising. Mmm. So loss was originally airing and at some point I've got, I think it's like season three or four maybe, I don't know how many seasons last has, I didn't watch it, but there was a, there was a preview cause there was another show that I watched and there was a preview where, okay.
Like a button's going off and then you see a plane crash and aye. I was talking to my friend. Who was really into lost and all these girls I went to school with who were sitting there and they had all these theories and I was like, based on what? What happened in the five second preview, this is what's going to happen in the episode.
They're like, no, no, no, no. You don't watch loss. You don't have the context. There's so much more going on than that. And then I was right and they didn't speak to me for like a week. Sometimes the person who lacks. Honestly, this is a nice little allegory for documentation. The person who lacks being deep in it is the one with the clearest vision of what needs to happen.
Chris Biscardi: [00:41:38] That is going to be the 32nd clip that I put on Twitter. Beautiful spiel right there.
Laurie Barth: [00:41:43] I mean, honestly, that's how, that's how you justify consultants.
They come in with this like very clear, untouched vision of any everything. You'd give them all of your complex problems. And then they sit there and say, Oh no, you're just making them more complicated than
Chris Biscardi: [00:42:04] doing any of this.
Laurie Barth: [00:42:07] So someone shared this video with me earlier, um, because I, Oh. I put out a tweet and I said, the best solution to it imposter syndrome is to talk to someone who doesn't work in your field because you'll feel like a genius immediately.
It's true. And someone sent me this YouTube video that is, uh, I was, we'll leave some kind of project manager asking for them to add a birthday date on a screen, and then the engineer is sitting there kind of. Kind of pulling out his hair and explaining all the different connected systems and why it's going to take so long to get that birthday on that screen and it's phenomenal.
I was laughing really hard. It's great because it's exactly what happens in every consulting meeting I was ever in. It's like you walk into this company and they're like, here is our architecture, and we're like, okay. We trust that this architecture was born out of the constraints that you had at the time.
But seeing as you are investing in improving it
Chris Biscardi: [00:43:08] to be here, we have to have a real conversation about moving Oh, word. Yeah.
Laurie Barth: [00:43:16] It's hard. I mean, Hmm. Most technology problems aren't technology problems. There are people problems.
Chris Biscardi: [00:43:22] Oh yeah. For sure. 100% agree with that.
Laurie Barth: [00:43:24] Mostly comes down to communication and half the time when people say it's technology problems.
communication problems about people either misunderstanding each other's constraints, flash problems, or people misunderstanding how to accomplish something doing it. The only way they know how and creating technical debt
Chris Biscardi: [00:43:44] isn't all code technical debt though. I
Laurie Barth: [00:43:46] mean, just don't write it and you won't have any bugs.
Chris Biscardi: [00:43:51] Okay.
Laurie Barth: [00:43:52] There was
Chris Biscardi: [00:43:53] never ship it and it'll be fine.
Laurie Barth: [00:43:55] Yeah, I had this, it's always about Twitter, right? I had this tweet the other day. Yeah. I had a tweet the other day where I said, don't create a button with an irreversible action. If you don't give someone some kind of confirmation pop up telling them what the heck is going to happen, because literally there was a button that said, leave stack, I think, and I didn't see an X on the screen.
To navigate away from this modal that had popped up. So I assume leave stack meant cancel. No, it removed all of my information from my account. Perfect. Right. So bad and shouldn't happen. Mmm. And yeah, so I, I tweeted about this and the response was don't create buttons. Don't create. Okay. It was different people.
Each of those responses were different people responding to each other.
Chris Biscardi: [00:44:57] Okay, so we're running out of time here. Uh, it is time for the speed round, which is a concept I made up earlier this morning.
Laurie Barth: [00:45:04] Okay. Guinea pig. Laurie.
Chris Biscardi: [00:45:09] Well, you're not the Guinea pig. Actually, I've done this already. That's why it's called the speed round now and not something I thought of while we were recording the episode.
Laurie Barth: [00:45:19] I can do this. I'm like cracking my neck.
Chris Biscardi: [00:45:22] If you put one lasagna on top of another, it was Anya. Is it too lasagna or one big lasagna?
Laurie Barth: [00:45:28] One big lasagna
Chris Biscardi: [00:45:30] is cereal
Laurie Barth: [00:45:31] soup. No.
Should
Chris Biscardi: [00:45:36] cheese and green onion crisps come in a green bag or a blue bag?
Laurie Barth: [00:45:41] I don't even know what that is.
Chris Biscardi: [00:45:44] Oh, chips. You like sour cream.
Laurie Barth: [00:45:49] Oh, great.
Chris Biscardi: [00:45:54] How many holes are in a straw?
Laurie Barth: [00:45:57] Yep. Ah, okay. Sorry, I can't answer this question. I was a math major in my 400 level course was in apology, and my answer to this question is way too long.
But a straw is a donut
Chris Biscardi: [00:46:14] or can I do that? And I was so happy you did.
Laurie Barth: [00:46:17] It is also a coffee mug. I'm done.
Chris Biscardi: [00:46:22] Coffee mugs and straws are the same object
Laurie Barth: [00:46:24] because we really want to get that sandwich. Question going. Laurie says this straw, so
Chris Biscardi: [00:46:31] I'm gonna. I'm going to start asking people a R a straw and a coffee mug, different things,
Laurie Barth: [00:46:36] and you will learn whether they had to take a typology class in college.
Chris Biscardi: [00:46:42] They're going to drop out in silence and be like, why would you ask
Laurie Barth: [00:46:45] me that?
Chris Biscardi: [00:46:48] Laurie, thank you so much for being on the podcast. It's been an absolute pleasure. Uh, where can people find you on the internet?
Laurie Barth: [00:46:54] Sure, yeah. Um, it's been awesome to be here. Always bud, talk to you. Um, Ori on tech. Is he basically everywhere that's beyond Twitter?
That's my website. Um, and you can also find me on egghead as Lori bark.
Chris Biscardi: [00:47:10] Awesome. Thank you very much again. And, uh, that's that for today. That's all we have time for today. Thank you for listening to the party, Cory podcast. If you want to come and be part of our community of creators and hackers, you can find a link to our discord channel@partycorgi.com you can also find us on Twitter at party corgi pod.
I hope you have a wonderful day.