I hear you're hungry cool I'm starving wash those hands pull up a chair and secure that feedback because it's time to listen to Scott Tolenti and West Boss attempt to use human language to converse with and pick the brains of other developers I thought there was gonna be food so buckle up and grab that old handle because this ride isn't going to get wild This is the syntax of her club Welcome to syntax. This is the podcast with the tastiest web development treats today We've got another supper club for you This is their new part of the podcast where we bring on people from the industry and talk to them about what they're working on and all kinds of interesting stuff Today we're sponsored by two awesome companies aio SEO That's the all-in-one SEO toolkit for WordPress that helps you improve your website rankings is used by over three million websites And as powerful features you need to rank higher talk about them partway through the episode We're also sponsored by whiskey web and whatnot at another podcast They talk about whiskey they talk about the web and they talk about what not we'll talk about them partway through the episode But you're gonna want to check that one out We got an awesome guest on for you today Tom Preston Warner who is Working on redwood jazz amongst a very very large background of stuff We're really excited to talk to him about redwood jazz and possibly whatever else comes on so welcome Tom Thanks so much for coming on thank you glad to be here Yeah, so do you want to give us a quick like one minute rundown of what your background is and all the way up to working on redwood jazz Yeah, well if we go way back I wanted to be a physicist So I get into theoretical particle physics, but it turns out that physics is just math and I don't love math that much So I've always been into computers so I switched to computer science in college And then I actually ended up dropping out of college to work for startup because this was in like 2000 So things were frothy and and look things looked like they could be lucrative if I ended up at the right place So I wanted to get in the startup world Yeah, so I did that for a few years bounce around between a couple of places got into Ruby on rails that eventually landed me up in San Francisco Where I worked for a startup called power set and during that time I came up with the idea for GitHub and started working on GitHub so founded GitHub and then From there did that as you know and then I've done a couple of things since then I worked on a nonprofit called code starter Where we tried to get laptops in the hands of kids that wanted to learn how to code I did a startup with another X GitHub co-founder Scott Chacon called chatterbug. It's a language learning app That's still going and now I've gotten into redwood JS, which is a JavaScript framework that I'm sure we'll talk more about And of course I've done a bunch of open source stuff. So Jekyll one of the first static site generators Define the semantic versioning specification a number of years ago created the Tamil specification the configuration language in a That is used in a variety of different languages and projects now So those are some of the big things and redwoods redwoods kind of the latest project I always have a side project So yeah, yeah, it's kind of the latest amazing can we just point out for second?
We get a lot of people ask this question the guy who made GitHub Jekyll Semver Toml not good at math We get this question all the time for people. I want to get into programming, but I'm not good at math Yes, I think that's awesome to hear the problem for me was I mean math is fine. I like math I like math when it's well taught and And the problem was I think in college it was not well taught and especially things like linear algebra and discrete algebra Like I just couldn't deal with it and then it got into proofs and let me tell you my brain just doesn't do proofs well for whatever reason Like it's like all right. Here's a thing like right down the proof for it I'm just like I just want to be doing anything other than this right now Which is weird because I have I feel like I have a fairly logical brain But for some reason like that part of it just wasn't working for me and then especially getting into advanced physics and it just becomes It's just pure math like it feels totally divorced from the real world Which is fascinating like what is it about the fundamental nature of our universe that the universe is just math that we can describe it so well?
That's weird. We can talk about that later if you want. Yeah, yeah, that is very weird Yeah, I thought I was good at math and I tested into like calc three or something for freshman year of college And I like walk into calc three being like yeah, I know I know math I you know tested out of the first two classes and then I dropped it in like the second week I was like, you know what? I've actually fulfilled all of my math requirements from my high school AP classes So now I'm done with math forever and I will never pick it up again I remember that as well in high school I hated calculus and all that stuff and then we got into like we had a couple problems that were like money math Like the t-shirt cost $12 and it's $5 to get it and how much money will you make and I was I was on board I was like I like this money and I went into accounting and stuff like okay, I like money math but not yeah not physics It's like you'd be good at sticker sticker math.
Yeah Well, the most advanced math I think I've ever used in programming is trig Which I used for a user interface project for kind of a consultancy that I did for myself back in the day That's called cube six media did website design graphic design Yeah, and that kind of stuff and it had this really cool menu This was back in the days of flash, right? So this is like 2002 and so if you wanted to be awesome You had to create the most complicated navigational Concepts that you could with flash like this is how it worked It was the series of circles that it was kind of fractal in how it works So you would click on a menu item and it would then expand that circle And then you'd see the little circles under it that were the sub menu items And it would like rotate and expand and contract as you moved around the menu And it was really cool and it required a lot of trigonometry So I'm glad that I knew some trick that made that possible amazing Yeah flash navigations were a whole thing I mean you had sound effects you had all sorts of animations You had some like really interesting futuristic kind of win-amp designs Oh, yeah, and all that stuff just went away overnight really I know I mean obviously it was not particularly accessible or SEO optimized but it was awesome So I miss those I've only got a lot of people interested I miss those days a little bit where or things like Kai's power tools You guys ever play around with some of the like the photoshop plugins and the kpt stuff Like it was like the most ridiculous interfaces like kpt Bryce I think was one of them for generating like 3d landscapes I played around with all this stuff and I kind of loved that you could just experiment with interfaces back then And anything went we were just exploring the territory Yeah, those are different days And now I feel like I go to any developer tool website and they're all exactly the same It's all like a black background with a gradient font hero text Like they're indistinguishable and it makes me a little bit sad Like I kind of want that creativity back Yeah, if somebody were to like bring out one of these like that maybe the new the new retro futuristic Design style that we need is these ridiculous gradient bump map looking 3d fake texture Like want to be skeuomorphic flash design. It's actually be kind of it's coming back It'll be back mark my word. We'll be full skeuomorphic in like seven years I can almost guarantee it seven years.
Okay. Oh, okay. I'll wait for that We're going that direction right now. There's like the clay morphic where it's kind of the like bubbly looking thing There's new oomorphic or like the the brew was it got they called it something like Brutalism morphic or if there's like a brutalistic one.
Oh, there's a brutal morphic That would actually I really like brutalist designs over me. That would be pretty neat to check out Let's bring it back There's something to be said for the fact that the web has come so far and everything looks the same and back in the day We were strapped for what we could possibly do with tables and photoshop slices and the web was so different on every webpage you went to Transparent Jeff's yeah, let's talk about one of our sponsors a I O S E O it's the all-in-one SEO toolkit It's a WordPress plug in over three million people use it, which is unreal They've got all the SEO features you sort of expect SEO optimizer true SEO score As they do site maps video news integration with google bing yandex and bydo webmaster tools They are instant indexing add-on to get your site index faster You know you're like you build a website and you're just kind of sitting around when's this thing gonna be indexed right? You need to sort of go live when you need to go live Let's talk about this. This is one cool feature that sort of jumped out They have a REST API for building headless websites So if you are building like you're using WordPress as a headless CMS But you still want the sort of SEO juice in your clients to use these awesome plugins for that Well, you can sort of get the best of both worlds because they have a REST API you can pull in all that data and you're using react head or What's the other one react helmet?
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Let's get into talking about redwood Reminisce I feel like we should do some shows sometime. Just talking about the old days But let's talk about redwood. Um, what is it? You want to give us a rundown of that?
Yeah, so redwood is a full stack JavaScript framework that we want to make it as easy as possible for you to scale from a side project to a startup And so if you have an ambitious idea something that you would like to stick with for a long time We're really trying to optimize redwood JS for that So this the basic stack for redwood is react on the front end graph ql to talk from the front end to the back end And a graph ql API implementation on the back end And we've done a lot of things to make that as easy as possible We can talk about and then prisma as the ORM to talk from the back end to your database And then you can use whatever database you want that's supported by Prisma, so that's kind of the stack the idea was to use a set of familiar technologies And then really integrate them beautifully better than you've ever seen it done before In a way that makes you want to use this framework because it's done so much work for you And then on top of that we integrate also just for testing and storybook And if you've ever integrated these things into your apps or set these things up and try to get them working I think you probably know that getting that even to work Can take you sometimes days or weeks to get it to where you're like, oh, finally This is working the way that I want It's a totally non-trivial thing to do and for all of those We try to really bring a level of integration that makes you happy So for instance things on the testing side We've made it really easy to mock your data fetching So because we have a district separation between the front end of the back end via graph ql Then we make it really easy to set up mock data and then specify which of those you'd like to To use for a component that might do data fetching So that you can get mock data in your tests or even in storybook So this is also you can have mock data in storybook So that a component or a react component that you want to look at in storybook That does data fetching you can see and do that in storybook Which is also a non-trivial thing to set up, right? Because normally your component is going to sit there and it's going to try to do real fetching And of course it's going to not work because they're in a storybook context and there's nothing to pull from So you need to be able to specify those mocks and that's not really something that's built in So we've added a lot of layers of things that are nice on top of that to make your life as a person who's building a side project or startup Or anything in between to do that But it's not just a technology we're trying to bring also a community and a knowledge base around building startups with us So we have a whole community of companies now that are using redwood building their startups and we get together All the time we call that the startup club and i'm there and david some of the other co-founders Are there to provide our assistance in helping people understand all the different aspects of building startups and raising money? And so really trying to see this as more of a holistic play towards Someone or a team that really wants to build something Special something that's going to have impact and go much farther in that capacity than any other framework that we've seen as far as like helping you get things actually done Nice. Yeah, i'm really glad that you you mentioned a lot of the integrations right with with like you said storybook Just those types of things as someone who has built a custom react platform with a custom graph ql server and all this stuff I mean you're dead on all of that all of that is a giant pain It's almost so frequently a giant pain that you know you don't want to reach for those tools Like i've looked into reaching for other tools or tried to build my own isolation tools because Getting in mock data such a pain or working and connecting all the dots essentially So I think it's so big that you know you have all of this pre-connected and that's really what this ecosystem has been missing for a long time Wasn't I always talk about the rails of jobs?
The rails have reacted um the benefits that that has where all of these things can just speak and talk to each other So that that to me is one of the most exciting aspects of this is that you're not having to hook it all up yourself Yeah, it's kind of interesting that like we've been saying for years Where's the rails of JavaScript right and the JavaScript ecosystem in the community has always been a little bit different in that like we don't build These single use things we have lots of things and you can use literally anything with anything and you can put it all together But the reality is that that's very hard and like you said it can take weeks So like what are your thoughts on like you obviously built a lot in rails is is JavaScript the stack for building? I think I know the answer is JavaScript the stack if you're building a startup today Is that is this the stack that you should be using? I would I mean I don't want to be prescriptive and say it's the only stack that's gonna work I think rails is still really great if you like rails and that's what you know Then use that to build your thing it'll work you can get there For me these patterns around especially graph ql and at chatterbug at the language learning startup that I co-founded with scotch cone We were using we ended up using rails as a graph ql API So we started it as a okay as a vanilla rails app And then we started using react on the front end and kind of mounting it in multiple different places And that eventually then transitioned into wanting the front end to do to have components do more of their own data Thatching and so we reason graph ql for that and so the the rails back end Well, first of all, we're now rebuilding the back end in graph ql So we have the traditional rails back end that is feeding The views and then we have a graph ql API on top of that and now we have business logic in two different places And it was becoming a nightmare This is where a lot of the learnings of redwood have come from is through that journey at chatterbug and trying to deal with that evolution And eventually rails was becoming just a graph ql API Which it's okay But now you're using javascript on the front end for react and friends and then you're using Ruby on the back end for graph ql And it felt a little weird. I was like, why am I not why am I just using JavaScript everywhere?
JavaScript is great now it can do so much there's so many libraries available for everything What if there was a way to do the entire stack in JavaScript? But there's nothing out there that's that's like a that looks like a framework that would make this easy for me to do because like you're saying Everything was everything's all caught up into tiny little pieces little bits that you can mix and match and so everyone that was doing a react site Was doing it differently so you could work at one company be like, I'm a react developer And then you move to another company and you want to be a react developer there and it's completely different Your stack of technologies is completely different. You're using all different stuff Maybe you're still using react like literally every single other thing that you're using To build that web application is different and so the transition or the transfer of skills from one company to another is really tumultuous And so I was thinking from this rail perspective like the thing about rails Which was very nice is that more of the framework is Opane opinionated and kind of ready for you out of the box So you can know rails and go from one company to another company with much more ease than you could in the JavaScript world And so that was kind of part of it was to say what if we could codify some of what we've found to be best practices And say hey, here's a set of technologies that work well together We've done the integration work We tell you where to put things on in your file system like all of these choices that you have to make when you're doing a react A project of which there are millions and there's not a lot of ways to search for like what you're like How should I lay out my files and everyone's like, I don't know however you want It is such a bigger problem than we like to think it is because you say it's so great to have that freedom But it is at the end of the day. Those are all decisions you have to make I have to make enough decisions for my business for the other things I'm doing the last thing I want to do is make hundreds of decisions in my tech stack as well I would just like to work and be efficient and I myself like I understand the the viewpoint behind rails because I wrote in rails But I was never good at Ruby So having something to that degree where the decisions and the conventions are all there is I think is pretty pre-needed in this in this ecosystem Yeah, and you're starting to see a bit of that happening now you have several different full stack frameworks Things like remix or blitz that have been around kind of trying to do this like what is what is a railsy?
What does a more railsy feel of something look like in the JavaScript ecosystem? And so you see a couple of these happening all at the same time which is so common in history That you'll always find solutions to a problem happening at the same time Which is what you might think is weird like why like such a coincidence But really is driven by all of the various prerequisites for those discoveries or inventions to happen Like they're out there. There's a book that I love by Stephen Johnson called Where where good ideas come from now? I forget I'll look it up for you later but One of the one of the basic concepts in it is about the adjacent possible And that's to say imagine everything that we know as a set of doors that are connected And the things that we all that we know are all connected by open doors But each room has a set of doors that isn't open yet And those represent the adjacent possible the things that are about to be discovered the things that could work next And all it takes is for one of those doors to be open for this for a new type of invention or a new discovery to happen And often there's multiple people opening those same doors at the same time Because that's what's next so things like the discovery of calculus Getting back to math a little bit simultaneously discovered by newton and leat notes at the same At like the same time you're like how was it possible that two different people in two different places in the world could discover This concept this tremendous mathematical concept simultaneously and it's because it was the adjacent possible It was was the next thing that was gonna happen inevitably.
Who was it gonna be that was gonna be the steward of that? Yeah, the book is by the way, it is where good ideas come up. Oh nice. Yeah, you had it.
I just I think it up in the show That's for everyone so yeah, I'm gonna have to check out that book. That seems like something that's right on my alley Yeah, but I think it is for me It's it's about saving people time And if you have concepts that people can agree on to accomplish something and you can have reuse of those concepts across companies across projects Then a person you can hire a person and say hey, we're hiring redwood developers And you can be pretty sure that that person's gonna come in and they're gonna be like, I know this this is redwood. I know this Yeah, and that's and that's awesome. That's huge That's such a productivity gain and again to not have to make zillions of decisions that are really pretty arbitrary You just want them to work well together You can make any set of arbitrary decisions and as long as they work well together you're you're happy or I am as a developer I just want a system that allows me to get done what I care about which is building the things that are special to my Application to my business.
I don't care about all the stuff that everyone has to do all the time like integrating GraphQL and react or getting storybook working like I don't ever want to have to do that again And so great now we've done it with redwood We've done it once and now I can use redwood forever And I have this fully integrated platform that I can use to start with my business logic and my UX And I don't have to worry about any of that stuff just like with rails you generally don't have to worry about that stuff I lost literal weeks with mocking in GraphQL So to just hear that is just music to my ears Not having to waste all that time and just being productive right out of the gate is something that's super enticing So okay, we have this this platform one thing that really stood out to me about your your approach and your platform here is Like you mentioned having essentially a place where you can go to have centralized Learning of this one thing right where everyone can can share that knowledge And one thing that really like sets you apart in my mind is the docs and some of the video content that you've produced Do you want to talk a little bit about your strategy there? We have basically like essentially like a book on redjs or redwood js that's on the website But you also like really engaging video tutorial content Is that like been a big approach viewers to to want to put that learning stuff as a big emphasis in redwood? Absolutely I've always wanted really first-class documentation because as we know as developers If you go and you're looking at some new project that comes out and you're like wow This looks really cool and you go to the docs and you're like all right I'm gonna figure out how to use this and you go there and the docs aren't very good It doesn't matter how good that project is how good that code might be if you can't figure out how to use it You're not gonna sit there and read the code to figure it out It's just not realistic And so documentation to me is equally as important as the code for the project itself You have to have both to have a successful project and I'd argue you need to have an excellent community as well I think those are the really these three pillars that you need for an open source project To really flourish or any project that's especially developer centric ones But really first-class documentation was critical and really fundamental to the first release that we had the O.1 release that we had two years ago March and the way that we Knew what to release as the O.1 in our minds were like well What is the O.1 release this very first public release that we're gonna do what does it need to have and that was driven completely by what it What was required in order to make the tutorial work? So we wrote a lot of the tutorial before the code was actually done In a way that it was it's kind of like read me driven development.
So I wrote a blog post many years ago It's gonna say that interesting the docs driven development Yeah, and it was really tutorial driven development was like what do we want the user experience the developer experience for redwood to be Let's write the tutorial as if we could do what we want to do And then see if we can make the code make that possible And so we did that in a bunch of different ways and really as soon as we and the two kind of you know Coa last it wasn't that everything that we wanted to do with the tutorial or Dx We weren't able to do at first. We've been able to do more of those things now So it kind of went back and forth but by writing the tutorial We made sure that what we were creating was was good because this this often happens Like you create some code and you have an API for it and you're just trying to make it work But you're doing it in this isolated way where you're not really building something real with it You're not using it as you would in real life Or trying to teach someone how to use it or explain it to them And then it doesn't hang together very well And so this this was the approach that we took was start with the tutorial Make it possible as much as as possible make it work with the code And then when that finally worked then we shipped a one like the next day I mean, that's that's huge though having those ready because I mean you think about the react hooks documentation Still not what it's been like three years or something now. It's like I feel like that's the type of thing that uh, I don't know it's really impressive that you put that forward It's saying this is needs to be available for us This is you know what makes a good project Yeah, this is sort of how I've always worked and and some of the things that I've created I've really never written code for like semantic versioning right is a specification There are libraries that help you manage semantic versions and things like that But I've never written a single line of code around that myself Toml is more specifically like, you know, you need a code base to be able to parse and Turn your toml file into some kind of a data structure And I've never ever once written a parser for it There are hundreds of parsers that other people have written So I've found great leverage in being able to describe something as a designer because I feel like I am I am maybe more of a designer than I am a developer Really kind of intrinsically and so just sit down and be able to design something as a read me or as a spec or as a tutorial Or as a set of documentation That is the highest leverage thing that you can do because now you can coordinate with other people and say here's how this should work Let's build this and then it's very clear for people for developers and developers love when there's something that's well specified To say, ah, oh, that's what you mean. Here's the different edge cases So that we don't have to spend our whole time wondering as developers wondering like, okay Well, what did you mean in this specific instance?
Like what about this the state that you can get into? What do I do there? If you can figure those things out beforehand, not so then this is the point of reading different development Not so much that it becomes this thing this document handed down from on high or like some crazy waterfall Process like giant industries do or that you might have to do for an airplane or something Um, but for a web application the ability to specify things fairly well so that you know how they work and how they hang together And then flush out the details as you go along But that allows you to get a team together and say this is what we're building Do you like this if you like this help me build this and we've done a lot of that That's how we've gotten a lot of our contributors. That's neat.
That's great to hear. Yeah, let's talk a little bit more about the the tech behind Some of the stuff. I'm just kind of digging in myself here. Um, there's it's Apollo being used on the client to do all the data fetching correct It is currently a public line.
Yes. So when you need to fetch some data. Are there any I know what's got to pick on this is the generation of Like you generate some hooks for common things like you got six different models and you need to build a fetch one fetch Fetch many you need to be able to update all that is I know there's generation on the Prisma side of things that it will generate all those via the ORAM But is there is there anything or any plans to do that on the client side as well? Or does it already do that?
We have we have generators and one of those generators is a scaffolding generator So if you have some type some graph ql type that you want to interact with on the back end Say in the example in the tutorial we use a blog because everybody knows what a blog is and can understand it It's like, you know, a blog is maybe not the number one thing that you would build with redwood But it serves as a good example because everybody knows what a blog is and how it works So let's say you have blog articles, you know, it's like a post a blog post You have a post model in your database and you want to have a graph ql post type And you want to be able to operate on that from the front end You can use a generator to scaffold everything around that post So if you run the generator from the command line the redwood generator for that Then you'll get all of the crud operations across the whole stack including some UI on the front end To deal with those so much like rails in rails you can do something very similar with rail scaffolds right single multiple Update. Yep, you get the list you get update delete, you know all the normal crud create read update delete all those operations And then reading back a list or a single one all of those are set up Now you might throw you might end up throwing away all of the front end because that's written in a way That's not super useful for what you're doing But all of the back end stuff generally is usable pretty much as is And you might have been some specialized operations that are more advanced on top of that Or you might delete like maybe you don't want to be able to delete them directly in that way So it's just like all right just remove the delete operation That that is essentially the resolver and we do some really nice things on the graph ql side And I'll say this you could use redwood without the front end at all and use it just as a graph ql Api and it'll be the best graph ql API implementation that you've ever used and you want to consume it with something else That's the beauty of graph ql is it doesn't matter like you can have any client you want And this is why we use graph ql we use graph ql because it allows you to have and live in a multi-client universe Which most of us that are building startups today need almost out of the gate So you're gonna have a web application probably you're gonna have a mobile application probably You might have a command line interface you might have a desktop application You might have a public API a public graph ql API that you want to publish for people to use Maybe not at first, but maybe later on or maybe at first Maybe that's what your thing is It's an API right and you want to do all of these things without having to rewrite your back end seven times Right and if you use graph ql you can do that and there are certain limitations and annoying things about graph ql Of course like there are with any technology But it's about choosing the approaches and sets of technology that are gonna match your needs best And I think create the least amount of overall work not only in creating but in maintaining And this is another thing that we focus on a lot at redwood is how maintainable will your code bases be And we think that the strict separation of the front end from the back end gives you a level of maintainability That other systems make a bit more complicated things like next for instance They mix your front end and your back end logic in the same file Which to me is a good way to get yourself into trouble sometimes and so where you're like Where is this code running and what is running this code? Is this running in the browser is this running in node? Like what is the execution context those things matter from yeah On understandability and long-term maintainability perspective and so with redwood you have a level of separation That you might not see in other applications and that leads to some additional complexity It's some additional upfront complexity that we think gives you a much better long-term maintainability profile and scalability of your team Profile also being able to separate in front of your back end once you have dozens of people working You really want to make it easy for your front end developers and your back end developers as you start to specialize to be able to work in Isolation as much as possible To be able to not be blocking each other and that's where things like storybook really start to shine Where storybook to me like a lot of people are just like oh, yeah Just a way that you can catalog all of your components and designers can use it to choose what components they want to use to To like build their pages out of that's one thing that it can do But to me the true power of storybook is that you can develop your react components in isolation From your application which means that it's very easy to see every state of your component that you want without having to try to fiddle with Your database and get it into the state that is going to allow you to see Some specific state of your component in your running application Because I think we've probably all done that and it's always a nightmare and you're always trying to get your database set up in a certain way to do that Or especially for ephemeral states things like loaders It's like you're gonna you're in your app and you're like all right Here's my loading spinner for this one thing that's gonna do async data fetching and i'm gonna set my an open inspector and set my Throttle my network just low 3g so that I get one second to look at my spinner Right and then you're refreshing over and over and over trying to see your stupid spinner for one second at a time It's like no stop doing that put it in storybook and now you can look at your spinner all day long I really love building an isolation right now So I hear you and if you haven't tried it if you're out there and you're thinking that this feels like extra work We just we do it in our own our own tool and it's just like a route on our site in selkit But um storybook and anything like it has really truly opened my eyes to how nice it is to build an isolation Speed in which you can work the clarity in which you have over your components and then you can drop them in It's it's really a fantastic way to develop so um really kudos for including that as well.
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Um some cool guys run on the show You definitely want to check that one out go to whiskey web and whatnot.fm and you can check out the podcast Thanks folks for sponsoring let's talk about this redwood startup fun. You announced uh Why is it just about a month ago now? You said it's a one million dollar fund that will invest 25 to 50k in startups that use redwood As a primary component in their stack that is really cool to me because like you said you're approaching this both from like a developer ergonomics point of view, but you're also thinking about like a business is at the end of the day So you want to talk a little bit more about that? Yeah, so I do a fair bit of angel investing in the developer tooling space and now more in climate I do um have a organization called Preston Warner ventures where I do the angel investing Uh, but my wife and I also do a lot of grant work around climate change So we have a really climate focused thesis there as well as politics we do grants around Climate companies climate organizations and politics in order to try to move the needle on climate So as part of the angel investing work that I do I was thinking about okay I have redwood this project that I'm doing I have this angel investing that I'm doing is there a way to Mush them together so that these different interests combined and I was like Well, we've really decided to do this kind of startup focused push for redwood where this is this is the marketing that we have around it Is to for people to try to understand what redwood is through the lens of oh?
Well, if you can build a startup with it if that's what it's optimized for if it can do that then it can do anything Right then it can be can work for the side product that I have it can work for if you're in the enterprise like we have this greenfield Test of a thing that we're doing and well if you can build a startup with it I can build a startup within my company with it in a large enterprise company So it's really it's really trying to help people understand how sophisticated redwood has become and why it integrates so many things and trying to differentiate through that lens So I was thinking about that We have now probably a few dozen startups that are being built with redwood that we know of that we're working with And how great some of them are and I was thinking what if we could really level that up What if fundraising is always one of the hardest parts for anyone building a startup? Especially if you're not well connected into those circles already And so we've been giving people a lot of advice on that what I haven't been able to do what we as redwood as a team Haven't been able to do is get people to that last mile to really finish it and say okay Well, I have money here's the money Why don't you take this idea which we've been helping you with and we really believe in it and providing actual funds to get them there? So that's one of the big reasons to do this and it also helps me diversify my angel investing in in an even riskier fashion The angel investing that I do is already pretty risky But this is like this is intended to be super like ultra risky like the earliest money Maybe even before person has anything incorporated at all and some of it I'd like to be sort of existential in that the money allows a person to work on an idea that they would otherwise not have been able to even Think about working on because they're busy working a day job or two jobs or whatever the constraints are That are preventing a person from being able to explore an idea I want to have some money to be able to help those people unlock and be able to work three or four months Let's say I read them a 25k check and now they can work three four or five or six months where depending on where they live And their circumstances now they can put some time into an idea and they're building it with redwood and they're part of our community And making all of that work. So that's that's kind of the main reason I want to do it but I'd also really like to Diversify the kinds of people that we see in our community as in most open source communities We're primarily white and male sort of demographics that I see coming in and I'd really like to change that I'd like to see some founders come in.
I'd like to see more women founders I think to see black founders other minoritized people in our community I want to see them here And I'm hoping that some of this money can make that happen And so that's another big reason for the fund and the third reason is I'd like to really prioritize people that are working on climate Focused software ideas things that can move the needle on climate change and having some money to be able to put Towards them and really hoping to get people thinking more about software based Climate change ideas and prioritizing those ideas that come in for that So I haven't figured out the application process yet I will be doing that over the next couple of weeks and we'll have an announcement around that in the meantime You can go to redwood startup fund calm and it's just a mailing list right now But if you sign up there then when we know more then it'll be the first to know cool. Oh, it's really exciting nice job now Yeah, super awesome Just I don't general idea, but also I don't know the ability to execute on things that you want to change in this world And I think that's super admirable. So yeah, if you're interested Yeah, check that out We'll make sure we have that link in the show notes. Hey, Wes.
Do you want to get do you want to get into our separate club questions now? I don't where we go. Okay. This is a new format for us So we're still working out how we do this all but what we have now is a part of the show We're calling the separate club questions was has dessert question mark in the notes.
So maybe at some point this will be called Not even a good name for it. Well, I didn't add it so it had to be a little bit more eventually I'm gonna look at the notion history. Okay, but yeah, we'll start rattling off questions And you can talk for as long or as you as you want on them. All right, what computer do you use?
Right now my primary computer is like a five-year-old iMac Pro one of the like dark gray ones And I specific it's that old because five years ago. I was like I want that computer that thing is amazing It's all you know one one machine. It's easy to kind of move around if I need to move it around And so I specced it out to where it was like $7,000 or something I was like I'm gonna keep this computer for five years. So instead of buying a new computer every three years Yeah, right.
I'm just gonna buy it once and then I'll have it for twice as long But I'll spend twice as much on it maybe as I would otherwise and that's worked out pretty well Though I'm getting a little bit of the m1 mv now So but this thing is approaching six years I think that I've had this computer and it's been amazing because it was like insanely fast when I first got it And now it's still pretty fast like I don't I don't have any problems with it But they don't you know they don't make this more So I'll probably be upgrading to the to the new one that came out the studio here pretty soon and getting the separate screen So I'm looking forward to the to some m1 and and to have a keyboard with a fingerprint scanner on it at least because yeah Oh man, I need that I need to type in my password on my desktop machine and I just Every time I'm like oh yeah Oh yeah, because you don't even have it at all like we've got it on our laptops and I just have to reach over to my laptop like a sucker So I love to have a keyboard like a sucker Oh, I want them to get face ID going but I've heard that that's yeah It's hard to do it's hard to have a channel between It's like how do you make sure that that's secure that you can't get in the middle of that and like spoof it right on the like the The dust-on machine is where it's not like on the laptops. It's one fully integrated thing I mean they put it done it on the iMacs you know if they discontinue them a little bit more space there Alright next question what keyboard do you use? I use the keyboard the the keyboard with the number pad that comes with that iMac pro It's the it's the best everybody's answering that and I show mine every time go yeah Same one It's good. It's it's for the accountants among us.
It's the greatest I have I love having proper arrow keys That's super important to me not those like miniaturized ones Yeah, and I love having a keypad because it's just it's way easier to put numbers in I don't know like it is annoying that it sticks like another Six inches to the right of the center of the keyboard and I also use a mouse like I can't use the trackpad on the on the top I'm a mouse fan. Are we gonna talk about mouse? Are you gonna ask about mice? Here's my mouse?
Look at that it has a cord This is a 10 dollar. This is a 10. This is the Logitech. Oh, it is this one.
This is the M100 It might be a different model now. They still make it It's the $10 or like $8 Logitech Corded mouse and the reason that I use it is not because I like cords the cord is horrible But this mouse weighs like three ounces And so it's just way easier to move around than the ones that have batteries in them You put two AA batteries in a mouse and it's already like way heavier than I want it to be for like just daily Mouseing around you Tristan daily mousing west you want to get the next one? Yeah, uh, what phone do you use? I have a iphone 13 I guess whatever the latest I'm just on the forever upgrade plan.
So anytime anyone comes out. I just upgrade instantly Yeah, I don't know if you need to keep asking that question because everybody says Um, this is I'm very interested about this one what text editor theme and font do you use? I use vs code mostly these days Some probably monoco. Let me look and see uh font.
Oh, no. I have it as fura code right now. I must have been experimenting Yeah, so what theme do I use? I don't know it's it's like us.
It's probably it's a dark theme I like I generally don't like dark mode. I'm not like a dark mode aficionado I'm like websites and stuff to be light mode or if I'm in notion or something I can't deal with that dark mode it's got to be in light mode But I want my editor in dark mode for whatever reason. I'm exactly the same way I don't like dark mode almost always but except for my editor. I want it in yeah Were you ever a vim user back in the day milden github?
No, I was I've never been I you know I've always wanted to be one of those people that's like oh, I'm a I'm a vim virtuoso or like I you know evax is in my blood But I just I tried them I tried I really did I tried and I just couldn't I don't know I just didn't have the time to ever sit down and really learn it So I always feel a little bit like a fraud where I'm like open my text editor Right and type my keys and you know use my mouse. So I feel like a little bit of a you know Fraud in that way. I know developers that they just do wizardly things with them and I'm over here mousing around, you know Like some kind of primitive But for me, it's never been about you know as long as I can get done what I want to get done Then that's what matters to me. And so I did you know, I don't I think people should use what works for them If you can get the job done, yeah, it doesn't matter what your tool is in that regard So I love yes code, you know, I helped um work on some of the versions of atom right before it got released at github And it's it's really cool to see that essential idea that this more web oriented way of kind of building Applications come to fruition and the kind of innovation that that has allowed and vs code is really a great tool So I use yes code beautiful nice All right, if you had to start coding from scratch today, um, what would you choose to learn?
Well language just anything would you some people would go to video games or 3d or um if you were just programming anything and you had You know, it's start fresh and it wasn't necessarily web Um, what would you choose to work on? I mean, I think the web is a really great place to start because you can get something up online very quickly much more quickly than you could be like I'm gonna build a desktop app or a game those things are generally gonna require more shenanigans to kind of create something though With platforms like unity now I think that is much less the case like you can kind of get a starter application going like a hello world But the complexity that you get in the gaming world just increases so rapidly and there's concepts that are gonna really take a while To get into or any kind of native programming is the same the web is so nice because it's like you can start with a pure HTML document And just type test in it and then upload it on like nullify using their drag and drop thing And you're like beautiful within the span of 60 seconds You're like, I'm a programmer now because I published and I have a live website and that like I don't know how you can do that in any other platform in quite the same way So I don't know I would probably start I would start by learning some basic HTML and then some CSS and maybe a little bit of JavaScript Just to see success very rapidly That would be I think that would be awesome. Another great way I think is via Ruby because Ruby does really well on the command line. It's very simple This in-tax to me is one of the best most understandable syntaxes that I've read in the language, right?
It just feels easy things kind of work how you assume they should work and JavaScript has gotten pretty good But it doesn't it's still not as good as Ruby in the and sort of just the the flow of the language to me So if I'm gonna sit down actually I've been writing almost exclusively JavaScript now for several years But if I need to write a little command line application or just something that's gonna you know run some simple algorithm to do whatever I still write Ruby for that like my brain is still deep down. My brain is still Ruby at its core What is your process for staying up to date? I am on hacker news very frequently mostly just to read headlines to kind of I feel like I can stay pretty well up to date by reading just headlines Yeah, yeah We tell people that on the podcast if we if you hear about it on the podcast six or seven times Probably time to check it out right right and so you see sort of trends you see these these large level trends Which is important to me to kind of have my pulse on the overall direction of things especially during angel investing But my investor had on seem like where the macro kind of things that are happening What are people sentiments about things? So I do spend a fair amount of time on hacker news twitter I every time I'm on twitter, I regret that I was on twitter I just just too much I just the signal to noise is really a challenge for me And like I want to I want to be able to filter by people being serious I guess like there's just so much people say I don't know just people say things to get a rise out of people and then they get angry that they got a rise out of people and I'm like What were you expecting like you can't you can't make a joke and then be upset when people don't necessarily get the joke because there's no context Like they don't you know, it's just it's not a I don't know So it's a signal to noise issue for me on twitter But it is it is a really great like every once in a while you come across something that's Like a really great thread or someone's talking about their startup and like that stuff is gold And I found startups invested in just coming across random people announcing what they're doing on twitter So I just want to like filter for for that.
I don't know how to do that. I need to hire someone to reach for me And then put like a digest together I'll give you my block list of mine. I'd be like my I know my My Twitter is very good lately. I was telling Scott the other I feel like people on twitter are so nice lately It's got like no not at all.
I know I've got very good at muting and blocking and then like especially like if there's like a meme joke going around That you know everyone's just going to apply it to the next thing that there were you know Just promptly mute that that phrase and that key phrase and yes I'm totally I'm 100% the same my mutelist is like all these different like meme things and I'm like I can't see the 9000th iteration of Whatever the meme of the day is I just I can't do it the Elon Musk and now that I've bought yeah We had Josh wartel on the show the creator of wirtel And he started off the interview with basically saying I'm glad to hear that you guys have both blocked wirtel Because yeah, it's just too much uh too many word of us Yeah, so I think you have to be you have to be pretty aggressive about how you how you shape twitter to your your needs But those I guess are those are kind of the two big ones and then just being in a community like redwood the redwood community Like things just come up the the apps that people are using are the different projects the different pieces of infrastructure There's so many keeping up to date via a community that is kind of in embedded in that world has been really great And I'll say we started the 01 release of redwood was in march of 2000 like right as the pandemic was starting And it was such a great way to meet new people and kind of feel less Is elated during that period it was really it was so coincidental And so nice and I've made so many new friends through that community that I haven't even met in person yet because you know We're not really doing that too much still hopefully soon And that's where we're flying it Scott and I are flying out to our first conference in over two years tomorrow And it's just been like I can't wait to say hi to people in person again It really is great hanging out with people in person. There's something about that yeah it is Beautiful. Um anything else you'd like to touch on before we wrap this up? Anything we missed?
Um, no, I'd say you know if anything I talked about with redwood seemed interesting to you You're building a startup I'd say evaluate redwood and do the tutorial the tutorial is top-notch and we and you don't even have to do it You could watch someone do it and you had talked about this before the videos So rob camberin one of our founders one of my co-founders of co-creators of redwood is like a video production aficionado And he makes the most hilarious intros to the videos and just does a really top-notch job of of right So he wrote the tutorials and he does the video tutorials And they're just a pleasure to watch so take a whirl through those And if you like it, you know join our community. We have a discord we have a discourse forum also for a kind of long-form Questions and to create kind of a knowledge base as we go along and we really want to see you there Building a community to me is maybe the the biggest reason to do this is like how good can an open source community be? That's one of our things that we strive for and so and for customers as well So we have contributors workshops where david another co-creative price Will spend an hour with people that might want to contribute to redwood and show them how to set it up how to get it going How to how our issue tracking works? So if you're interested in becoming a contributor on a project like this We make it easier than anyone I've ever seen to get involved We have a core team of 20 people with experience ranges all the way from just out of bootcamp To people that have been senior developers for many years And everyone we think has a way that they can contribute if they want to and we just want to continue seeing the diversity Increase and the different kinds of ideas and the different kinds of people coming into the community So we welcome anyone and we're here to answer questions when you have them awesome Well, thanks so much for coming on the show and being One of our first guests on this this new separate club thing we're doing here So yeah, it means a lot and I'm personally really excited about redwood myself So yeah, everyone if you're interested in this type of thing check it out We'll make sure we have all the requisite links in the show notes.
West. Do you have anything else before we grab it? No, that's it. Thanks Aaron for tuning in.
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