RobbieTheWagner 
Adam Argyle 
Charles William Carpenter III 
Robby Russell What's going on, everybody? Welcome to Whiskey Web and What Not. With your host, Robbie the Wagner and Charles William Carpenter, the second with another Robbie Russell. It's going on, Robbie. Hi there. Thanks for having me. Yeah, thanks for coming on. I was just skipping right over where I called Charles the second, not giving him a chance to respond. Yeah. Quick question. Is Charles, are you actually the third? I am. I'm the third as well. So we have both have connections there. Yes. There will not be a fourth. Yeah. Same with me. That's the same theme. Yeah, I did make people. I chose not to do a fourth. I was like, this is where it ends.
I vividly remember having a family dinner with my grandfather and my dad there. It was like several of my relatives when I was maybe 13 or so. And I remember, I think there was a question something came up like, oh, will you name your kid the fourth? And I was like, no, I will not. I guess there was like a slight look of disappointment. And then I also just decided not to make kids or not to make people. So I got out of that regard of this. So I'm a much better uncle anyways. But no, I'm the lineage of our royalty has ended for me. Yeah. The line and blood ends. Yeah. And I think our genes were that great anyways. All right.
Well, maybe you should be a hostlier show. Yeah, your self deprecating humor is right on par. This is going to go fine. So there's two robbies and two trays is what I was going to say. You should have at least a few sentences about who you are before we totally skip over letting you introduce yourself. Who am I? That's a good question. I am Robbie Russell. I am a software engineer. I've been running a software agency and I live in Portland. We're going to be doing that since 2002. So that's like 22 years or so. And primarily working Ruby on rails. And I created an open source project called the Oh, my Z shell
nearly 15 years ago, which is where some people know me from. And yeah, blogger and podcast host of the maintainable software podcast. Cool. They're nice. All right. Now you can enter it. Now I may think yes, you may. I give you permission. Yeah. Thank you young man. Okay. So today we're having the mortlock. I don't know if I'm saying that's right, but it's a mortlock single malt whiskey, scotch whiskey. The wee witchie is what it is. It's age 12 years. We know it's single malt. So we know the match bill. It is aged in the Sherry and bourbon casts and it is 86.8 proof. The wee witchie might say that a
bunch. I'm sorry. The wee witchie. I've not heard of this one before. Yeah, me either. Yeah. This was a project solely on the branding because it looked very cool. I like their fonts and logo and stuff. So it looks like a fancy co-working space. I'd work there. How do you pronounce it? Imported from Norwalk, Connecticut, but Dufftown, Scotland. I don't know where that is in the match. Maybe I'll pull up a map later. It's the beast of Dufftown too. And that is also very compelling on the top near the cork. It says the beast of Dufftown. I know to the still that bears the beast of Dufftown. I guess that's what they called the
still an ode to the still. Yeah, I don't know. It must be a very large thing. It's got of a sweet smell. The sherry casks and we've been proud of it today. Yeah. You know, almost like a little bit about some dried apricot? No. Dry raspberries. Dry raspberries. I was actually thinking raisins raisins kind of. I was thinking moist currants. I almost dried. It's not dry. It's not dry. No moist. Yeah. Moist. I almost said cherries actually. Yeah, so that was vacillating there. All right. Let's find out. You might have influenced me a little bit, but I'd get kind of like a sour cherry. So very moist sour cherry. Get a little
of that. A little mossiness to it. How would you describe mossiness? Hmm. Mossiness. Mossiness. Not. Oh. Masino. Masino. Mossimo. That's what my site. The market close. No. Oh, yeah. Masino is what my son used to call marshmallows before he could say where it's good. Masiness would be it has kind of like a leafy earthiness to it and almost like almost like a little bit of. Not dewy, but like. Yeah. It tastes like you went outside in the morning and just licked your lawn. Yeah, maybe a little bit. Yeah. And like someone had maybe dropped or put out a put out their cigarette in the grass. Hmm. There's some tobacco e vibes in there. Interesting.
A little bit. Yeah. And then you licked it. Mine would have a lot of dirt. I do have grass, but there's there's a decent amount of dirt. Like a smoky or char burnt toffee. Just like a little too cooked. Hmm. Maybe charred moss for me is where I'm going. Hmm. I get a little of the toffee though after the sour kind of fades and a little toffee and then it gets into this like something kind of mildewy almost. Sounds delicious. Really selling this one. Yeah. Well, this is the beast of duff town. It's not for the light hearted. Okay. No. It might be a wee witchy. Could be a better way to change my handle to the beast of duff town. Sounds pretty cool. Yeah. The beast of fluff town.
The third. Beastie the third. The wee witchy the third. That's what I would get. Hmm. Okay. Yeah. Interesting. I like it. Robert Wagner. When you feel prepared to give this a rating. So Robbie, I will tell you and our other listener. Just a little reminder on our rating system zero to eight tentacles because we are pseudo engineers. So of course, we have to include the zero for being like middle of the road for you. Not bad. Eight being amazing. Give me nothing else. Basically. Yeah. For me, it's going to be. I'm going to say a five because it's a little better than middle of the road. I think I've had a lot worse sketches for sure. Yeah. I don't know. Nothing like. It's
kind of middle of the road, but it's like not in a bad way. So it's like I'm giving it that one extra point. Yeah. Interesting. Robbie Russell. Yeah. I'm going to I'm going to second that. I feel like it's five. It's a solid five. It feels it's something I can drink and I wouldn't like turn it down if someone was offering it to me. Would I buy another bottle? I don't know. Maybe. Yeah. Yeah. I'm kind of I think I'm going to go four and a half. I was leaning more for. I mean, perhaps. Yeah. Yeah. We can do whatever we want. There's five point two. All right. Perfect. There you go. A little a little above. You have to get the closest without going over.
So yeah. For me, it's like easy to drink. It's pretty smooth. That's some interesting flavors, but it fades away really quickly. It's like quick to forget. It doesn't have much burn. No, that's true. Yeah. And so, you know, it's a little too wee. I would like more wee in my witchy. That's what I think. We wee. We wee. We wee. Ah, we wee. Not scotch at all in that way or not a scotch scotish accent. My suspicion is that my wife will use this and experimenting with some cocktails. We'll see how they all report back on that. That was her pandemic hobby that she picked up over the last several years. She's amazing at making cocktails now, which is wonderful.
That's a nice skill to have in the house. I'll just say other than the rusty nail, I can't say I've really had many like scotch-based cocktails. I think this could be interesting for that though. You know what else is interesting? TypeScript. Is it though? Depending on who you ask. You know what's interesting about it is like this sticker. Oh, I do love that sticker. Yeah, that's a pretty good sticker. Yeah. Shout out the DevTools app. I forget his name. I know it's Hipster's manager. What's his actual name? Oh, sorry, I drew. Anyway, you were going to say something about TypeScript. I was just trying to lead into the hot takes. Yes. So that's our big
hot takes section. Go for it. Yeah, I don't know how much TypeScript and CSS and stuff you're doing when you're doing Rails. Are you building full stack apps or doing more like API work or like do these questions apply or not? I don't know. That's an excellent question. Robby the Wacker. Personally, I have not written more than maybe 20 lines of TypeScript as of yet myself. The most of my work tends to be more on the backend side when I'm helping deal with legacy apps and helping teams get things upgraded and stuff like that. So on the coding side, I don't often get to play with a lot of the fancy new stuff and if it when it comes to,
and maybe this is part of when I a consequence of coming up in an era where we needed to have people that were more focused on the front end to think about all the browser testing and dealing with all that stuff at the time that I was just leave that work to other people on the team that enjoyed making things work in i.e. six and seven or at least enjoy begrudgingly, begrudgingly, make that work across the different devices and make things work when things got responsive or when we were building mobile specific app or as versions of our web apps that we would build for our clients. So I always just kind of like push the front end over to the other people on the team
that were way more that just seemed to have more of an act for thinking about all those all the different contexts that you need to think about there. The people that are I always enjoyed walking around in the office and seeing the people that would be like sliding their browsers with back and forth on their screen to see how things were like when the responsive era happened and so that was someone else's responsibility so that's what they were dealing with that when it came to more of that. But I did do some JavaScript stuff but a lot of that was pre things like React and stuff coming out and I think the last framework that I worked with was
when maybe Ember first came out was kind of a new thing I did some work with that and we did some projects with Angular and React and prior to that doing a lot of stuff like backbone and prototype just raw JavaScript stuff as well so but I was always more of a back end performance fine through the application side person. That's fair. Well luckily Ember is dead so you don't have to do that anymore and then we just inherited a project that is running on running on Ember which has been a while since we've had many companies contact us for that so that's only two weeks ago that that started for us but remembering what that world was like
it's not that it's not dead. No it's not. I just because Robbie is still the deeply involved even currently and so I like to to raz him a little bit so I didn't know if you also were like taking the ideologies of DHH more recently of like ripping TypeScript out and moving to not compiling front end files and no transpile no compile like serve your files as is and utilize more modern web technologies versus falling back on these frameworks and build tool sets and all of that I don't know if you have any thoughts around that that side of things. I think the I know like with this the controversy around them ripping out TypeScript of
that one particular project I don't know I feel like I didn't really understand why there's such a big backlash against that if that's just a project that they decided to do that one particular thing as far as you know like what our teams typically doing we are tending to work slightly on slightly older apps and so we're always kind of stuck a little bit like five to eight years behind and trying to figure out we're going to iterate our way forward and help those apps get updated to get to use new things so you know one of the things we are working on quite a bit is doing a little bit more of like helping clients navigate the process of like adapting from say
something like react and wanting to take advantage of things like hot wire in their apps and so there's some other people my team that are more focused on that side of things that they haven't ever been are sitting at that and coincidentally my company also does a every other year we do a survey of the Ruby on Rails community to get a sense of where people are using all the different tools and so there's a lot of curiosity of like are people potentially looking to migrate what JavaScript package managers are they using now and like what other free JavaScript frameworks are they using with their apps so I'll have more answers on like what the general Rails community does
and we usually get close to you know 3000 people that participate in that survey over a couple years and we've been doing that since 2009 and it's been interesting to see how the ecosystems kind of evolved over the time but my company tends to be a little bit further behind only because where the company that says we're not we're not as interested in building a new shiny new app we're more I'm more I see myself as more of a mentor than a maker I like to help improve things and iterate through things and try to help companies avoid needing to go down the ill-advised big rewrite if possible because everybody's like what'd it be just great if we could
just start over well if you don't figure out how you're going to keep things updated and technology keeps changing and that's just we do make our lives complicated sometimes is a oh yeah I think the software industry I think that's an excellent point around where like you're just trading some problems this set of problems for a different set of problems yeah you end up reorganizing over and over again yeah and your organization isn't good at updating their software over time then right that's always going to be the case so we we have a lot of companies that will contact us because they want us to help them just with the upgrade and my the first thing
I tell them is I think that's really bad idea you need to figure out to get your own team prioritizing navigate this stuff it's a skill set you need to work on and iterate on that and we can come in and we'll take your money and help you do it but if you're not really going to be reinforcing this as part of your process and so I see companies will like well we'll just hire an extra senior person to come in and we'll just kind of like push them off and work on the upgrade and they have their get branched they work on for a couple months and then they get pulled into the rest of the team's projects and it gets deprioritized and you don't remember where
you left off and it's like the same story over and over and over and where was I and then you should bring other people in and you can't track your progress in those projects very well because it's a lot of like digging into rabbit holes regardless I think this is in a rebound rail specific this is just a problem with anything and then everybody's like I don't have enough test coverage to rely on it's safe that everything's going to work and like it's the same story is over and over so that's where we kind of come in and like help teams try to navigate that help them also with when they're when people are about to go down rabbit holes be helped them figure out like
put that that I did down for a moment like document it what were you originally working on and like help steer them in the right maybe a different direction or like not just keep chasing things because you forget where you're at and then one of the problems that breaks down in one of organizations is that say I'm air quoting the product people lose confidence in their team's ability to estimate how long these things are going to take to two because they will give them an estimate and then they go off on rabbit like well there's all these things that popped up along the way and then like and then if you ever if you've ever been in one of those conversations with the developer
and they're just rattling off all the reasons and all the problems and a product person is like I don't need to know all the details like how much time do you think you're that you're going to need and like how much longer do you need on this and then eventually that a road's trust and so people stop asking saying yeah let's invest time there we'll come back to it someday when you can get better estimates or you can get more focus and then and then developers will also then stop asking for a time to do that because they've they've heard not right now a few too many times and then it just becomes like a weird situation to work out so yeah trying to come in and help
teams kind of navigate that is what I've been working on to be like what as a a super shrink I suppose or a superhero type thing but I'm not I'm not here to save the day I'm here to help teams figure this should out for themselves yeah I think that makes a lot of sense too because it's like you know like you said if you don't teach them how to do it later they're just going to have more problems and like teams never prioritize this it's a problem at like 80% and places I've worked or it's just like just do features just do features just do features like we'll eventually hire someone else to update all this stuff because we need you to just do features
all the time and it's like why I mean like we should care like that is a built-in feature is upgrading because it's going to be faster and more performant and like it's more secure usually like there's a lot of security vulnerabilities that happen when you're stuck on a eight years old thing and then you're just like oh shit what do I do now and like yeah it's it's a hard problem estimation is bullshit too especially to the level that most teams try to estimate to because you get these project level things and even if you break that down a little bit they're like I don't know tell me small medium large and then they still try and internally translate that if it's more than six weeks
a week it's too big like if you can't confidently say like you should ship little tiny pieces and then you'd be like this is done this is done this is done instead of like I'm going to build this for four months like yeah yeah yeah making smaller commitments is the only way that you can have confident I can I can confidently estimate things that are like two days or less yeah probably change in that button color probably 20 years ago yeah until you get in there and realize that it's attached to some dependency that you don't control that bootstrap size of the yes some other ridiculous things so anyway I'm gonna regress now back to hot takes before we just talk about serious things
and this is an important one I think you may have a opinion on get rebase or get merge oh that's a good one I am on team get merge hmm hmm I'm a little surprised I'm gonna say 10 year in the space and it has been easier for me to work my way out of weird tricky things and to also work with say other pair with other people and help them kind of wrap their head around it so I think it's just more of like hey can we set the stuff aside and merge like navigate it that way and yeah maybe the secret the secret is out is that even though I might be have been around the get world for such a long time that there's a lot about get that I don't really wrap my head around
enough and then I'm just like I don't I think maybe also because of the types of projects that I ended up working on I'm usually not needing to sync up that much stuff I say that with some some some degree of there but yeah yeah tend to tend to lean more on get merging get rebase yeah I think if you're working on a branch with anyone else that's probably the better choice because I've gotten screwed over a ton about like rebasing or they rebase and you like forget to like reset before you start working and then you go to like pull and there's like changes because they've all changed and all the hashes are different and like you go I don't know like
I usually end up then just throwing all of the like like I keep my changes but I throw all the history away and just like copy everything over and be like there you go like so let's just pretend this never happened yeah yeah it's hard it's a lukewarm take I suppose yeah I think given running an agency I mean that's a smart position I think to take what is the most inclusive yeah that's true a sidebar on the left or right of the s code left for my folders and stuff like that yeah it's on the left okay yeah well it's on the right I think sometimes I have the like the zoomed out version or a view where you can kind of
wait if you're a really really long long file just to kind of get a sense of where you're at but I don't use the right too often for anything what about you two yeah left is the default and I'm lazy yeah I don't I don't know why I don't think I ever really thought about it that much yeah yeah this was a weird thing on twitter where like there were like a couple people who were like I put it on the right and it's like what why and like the only argument I've heard is like because they open and close it a lot and like then their code doesn't jump around because their code is always just aligned to the left and I'm like well who cares like it's just like yeah it moves for a
second but you're probably not opening and closing it every like five seconds so it's like not I rely I mean maybe this kind of speaks to even like oh my Z shell but like I'm a lazy developer in the sense that I do rely a lot on hockey so like the folder review navigating manually with my mouse try to find things just like I only do that when I'm like really struggling to remember and find something but otherwise I'm usually just like open up a fly on then I'm just kind of like tapping between the tabs and that's how I think about navigating and like my I don't need the visual reminder where things sit necessarily in the folder but I say that to somebody read but
I think that's so yeah I get that whole like opening closing that's an interesting thought there but I think it's just more of like left to write to me it's just like the thing is over here and then I open it and it shows up over here and that just seems intuitive for how my brain and maybe in our culture how we learn how things are organized know how that is another parts of the world where they might where the writing is different and maybe maybe directions are a little differently it's true that's true yeah I hadn't actually thought about that one like the context of someone who would prefer the right versus if they read and write to left anyway so interesting
what about something highly important like nested ternaries when you think about those what the house a nested ternary it's a ternary within a ternary within a ternary potentially no comment would you do that I'm googling nested ternary and whatever if I'm just not a savvy enough programmer or even so you think I should join the rails community I mean me either okay perfect I'm in I have no problem with rails yeah it's it's not super important I didn't go to like a proper education when it comes to software programming or anything I'm a high school dropout and so when it comes to like I know how to do like so we're talking like nested conditionals versus using like
key statement type situations or exactly kind of basically kind of yeah ternary is just like where you do the question mark and the colon instead of an if else so it's like a short hand for an if else yeah yeah but then you mess that shit really deep and it gets really nice looking no no no I don't want to well nesting that stuff is if it's too hard to read and follow for someone like that's the whole point of software is the code otherwise we just be writing the level you know so it's just like how simple can we make this for other people to come in and understand what the hell is going on so as expressive as we can be and if you need a lot
of documentation or comments in your code do explain what's happening then I would say I would think let's just some like performance thing that you're maybe beginning to gain at it and there's like a very explicit reason for doing that 99% of the time we'd be like let's just how stupidly simple can you make this to your future self or to some other person that's going to come and look at this project because someone else is going to potentially inherit this project from you and as the person that often ends up re-inheriting a lot of projects they can tell you that I would just prefer people just to be verbose not to the sense where it's like unnecessarily verbose
but at least verbose enough that I can get a understanding like why is this here what is it doing and can I how do I make changes to it and then if it's when you end up getting too clever then it makes it harder for you to know how to change it so that's when you start adding band-aids and weird patches and circumventing things and rather than yeah probably should just refactor that whole thing anyways when it comes to understand it. You just usually now being considerate to the next person who might look at your work yeah yeah remember like there was I think if you did loops backwards and JavaScript it was like a little bit faster oh so like I
would occasionally see people do that where like instead of doing like you know i0 i plus plus you do like you start at the highest number and you decrement i is like somehow faster I don't understand why but like I'm like no just do it the way that's easy to read like the performance gains you're getting are so negligible just do it like the way people can follow it but anyway that's interesting I wonder if there's something about like the iterating through like a collection of something it gets it gets smaller it is it just be quicker to know how many are left in it or I don't understand how this stuff works on them maybe yeah i'm not retaining the same one over and
over and over and just getting to the next thing in it or you can yeah anyway yeah that's interesting yeah um yes I do want to circle back to rails a bit um so rails is like I can feel like back in the spotlight these days like um you know you always take whatever DHH says with a grain of salt but he said something like in like I guess this year or next year for you which year he said but like you know rails what's the new one eight what's coming out is like he's like it's going to be the best way to write web applications and like I wanted to get your thoughts on that because I feel like he's maybe not wrong like we're kind of regressing back to all of like old as new again and like
you know all these things that weren't sexy for so long is like well actually it's been working forever and it works better than ever now so why not I think we're reassessing the web platform and people have uh forgotten about it and you know remember all the things to kind of force us in some other directions and they you know now they're committed to react now they're committed to whatever their tool chain is and so they just keep trying to improve that versus come back to the core let's look what are the native API is what's the web platform look like now and how you know can we actually just leverage that as much as possible instead I mean that's what it feels like
having been part of the Ruby and Rails community for what's over 19 years or something that's wild just stay out loud it's so funny because like early on in the days it was always an argument about like Rails is too new you can't use this and you can't use this for real applications and we should be using Java and I think Java was not even like five 10 years old at the time when I was having those arguments with people and now 20 years later um here we are defending why it's so useful and relevant but I think the there's a couple things I think that have happened one I think teams especially in the in the most last few years are needing to do more with less people
and so I think there's that part of it and that's I think that Ruby on Rails was always really like when it when it came out and landed it was saying the air quoting the market but the the market of software options and frameworks for building my applications it removed a lot of other roles maybe or any like roles that were a lot of companies used to rely on like you you thought differently about do we need a dba on our projects do we need you know someone that manages just thinking about like all the business logic would be tied up in your database and like the idea that that and that was a hard thing for me when I came to Rails was like trusting that the active
record layer was going to be a good protector of the data and manage that the state of our database really well because prior to that it was a lot of every app I ever worked on every other programming language it was so a little bit different and it was like what was the flavor of that that point in time and so Rails is provided a really good set of conventions like hey if we follow you stick within these parameters we make a lot of decisions for you you can build web apps you can focus on building things and shipping things quicker and I think that was really exciting at the time it was like less it was kind of like a going away from the like let's see how geeky we can be
as software developers look how clever we were and it ended up being more like let's just build stuff and ship stuff and let's see if this stuff works and we can make a business out of this versus like these other you know kind of experimental things that we're doing or needing a much larger team of people and specialized roles so Rails became like was early on like kind of like a one person framework from the beginning and it's then I know that DHH is using that and how he talks about it now as well but it's true like you can do a lot as like with a really small team and a lot of companies have grown their organizations and grown lots of teams and so there's definitely
some some aspects as any type of software platform as your teams grow becomes more complicated to try to like all share the same code base and so I can understand why companies like a lot of experience you know like let's split off and do a lot of microservices let's split off the front end stuff we can use this new stuff there's a lot of in the JavaScript frameworks have always been coming and going over the years and and so trying to find a ways how to make that all work together and Rails kind of you know weird way became like oh really good option for like the API would be so there's a lot of companies that use Ruben Rails is the back API and you can just throw
any front end and what's some point you're going to rewrite the front end in a new platform um and that that's happened sometimes I feel like that's that idea is probably happened less in reality than I think a lot of people told themselves they were going to do that because we see a lot of teams that will will do that will those split up you know the back end and the head and they're like well we're gonna have multiple front end applications at some point and so they have different teams or people that are maybe cross developing across both those platforms but they can be like well let's use the best tool for the front end we'll use Rails in the back end
and then a couple years later their teams smaller all of a sudden because they had layoffs or they just don't need that many people anymore and now they're responsible for many co-bases in parallel and every change requires going into two different applications and trying to get that all in sync and it's like it's it's a lot of work because we're not necessarily set up to have like atomic commits and your deployments are all separated and so like they it's been I feel like there's an interesting thing there around having the platform so I think people are re-evaluating that like well maybe it was interesting we needed a lot of other different types of skillsets
and things like that as you know and I've always thought that was a natural split the front in the back end because speaking in my earlier comments that like I didn't want to think about all the web browser related stuff like there's other people can think about that and let me focus on the business logic side of things but I think it's like with Rails 8 coming out and like there's a lot of people maybe if you're starting a new application do you should is it a good idea to spin up multiple repos with different technology stacks in parallel and be like let's build a new app a new platform now when I think Rails is putting a compelling argument to be like hey let's
we can do this all in Rails you can split off when you need to at some point but like let's see how far you can give it just one application for all your different use cases and stuff like that so what I like about that ideology is that I think that resourcing is a big different way to think about that right so we've gone through now like a wave of error that is very VC driven where ideas will get you lots of money to get started which means get you multiple people to build which means you can have a greater separation of concerns right and there's been a massive pullback in that and now you have to think about resource wise I have this idea I can't even begin to raise money
until I'm actually I have users and show revenue I mean that's starting to happen a whole bunch and I can't do any of that stuff as a single contributor what's my accelerate now now I start to look at like what's what what is in you know what in software accelerates me I no longer now when I think about like off either implementing someone else's or rolling my own I don't want to think about ORM so I don't want to think about you know all of that kind of like oh it's cool there's whole companies about this and you can get it as a service but you still have to do work to get it into your application and then you have to spend money and all of these things holy these full stack web
application frameworks the rails the Django's that kind of stuff that now becomes really relevant and part of the conversation isn't because you need all this to get out of the gate right and not needing to think about you know it's interesting thinking about how they're with the next version of rails that there's a lot of emphasis on thinking about like here's some we're going to include now like some guidance on how to deploy the thing whether or not you agree that that's the best approach but like we can you know you can just like let's just simplify that part of the process because you know if you're a we've again to go back to we've worked in the consulting side of things that
we come in a lot of different scenarios where there might be teams that had at one point had 25 30 engineers on their team and now they have five and they're like we have all this stuff the deployment process is like we have all this terraform stuff that some other guy wrote a couple years ago we know how to make some changes to it but we're afraid of breaking it and then and they're just like we don't know what what's running on our AWS account they're afraid of things to faf and so it's just like it was like cheap to spin things up and now there's kind of like a well maybe we could start a little smaller again and like maybe also maybe we shouldn't be individually
ssaging into servers and running like get updates and upgrade ourselves and like maybe there's some ways we can streamline that a little bit now and like the fact that Rails is like going to start including that stuff is kind of exciting for new projects it's also like again because I tend to work on older apps it's kind of like a little out of reach I'm like oh that's great it's also kind of reminding me I'm like some maybe we can unpack some of an undo some of this stuff for some of our clients that they've invested in and be like hey when you were making those decisions you thought your team was going to keep exponentially growing to some degree maybe not exponentially but
like you know like hey or a team of five and we're like going to be adding five more people will be 10 and maybe in a couple more years will be 20 30 people how do we think about how are we making technical choices that it supports a team of that size I've very rarely ever heard a team be realistic be like what happens when our team is actually going to be smaller yeah nobody thinks about getting smaller as like an ideal thing but software eventually will either it gets the power cord gets plugged at some point but it's probably not when there's 50 people on the team anymore it's probably a few people left working on it and so at that point and not that you should be making
decisions be like planning on only having like the one or two people left on your project still keeping it running and stuff like that but if it's too complicated for a few people to understand the whole then it might be good back to come back to those kind of first principles and just like what are we doing here how do we make this simpler do we need this much complexity and the complexity we needed to support growing is maybe not what we need now and how do we unpack that and then a lot of teams that are smaller now they don't feel like they have the resources or time to do that and so those organizations are kind of in a shitty situation and so which is
why they need maybe companies like mine to come in and maybe help them navigate some of those things but it's tricky but I think it's good to question why you're making those decisions and see if you can still support it and know you're probably going to change your mind in a few years too so how do you add something and how can you remove it or swap it out and so it's tricky the bus factor is pretty bad there if you're growing and you know you're very dependent on A and B person potentially and then A and B go away what happens you know there's a big big bit of that although it's funny that a lot of things you said
are very like counterproductive to probably what you know a bunch of your business is fueled by is you that's true tell people to do the problems you want people to do the wrong thing I mean you don't want to they just do it anyway right like you say all right here I am it for us not to see each other again in a couple of years this is what you should do and then inevitably I mean maybe a commission is to put myself out of a job but and and that'll be my legacy is it like there was no more of these but these problems aren't going to go away these they need to be talked about and just in the same way like if all coaches just you know could coach their athletes to be the
best highest performing people great but there's a reason why they're still coaches and the reason why they're still therapists people learn a little bit some people retain that information and can iterate on that and some of them don't and they've something to forget and then you'd remind them and that's okay too listen to my podcast in maybe a book one day oh there you go listen to his podcast I agree speaking of which do you have any tips or tricks or like things for people who may want to start a podcast or like you know or equipment to like you know improve their podcast or like upgrade their co-hosts or I mean yeah just hypothetically yeah good I do
like the idea of like starting your podcast off with whiskey as a good business expense so that's see that that's wise I think finding something that you're excited and passionate about um or at least enjoy consuming when I started my podcast I think it was I think I knew about two years before I did my first interview what I wanted to do and my goal was to capture conversations with people to talk about what I believe is the a topic that we don't often talk about would just how complicated it is to take care of existing code and legacy code and like a large part of our job is coming and do existing situations working on them we're rarely ever getting to be the
person that spins up a brand new application most developers don't get you to that all it off and outside of their own little personal hobby projects if the company is hiring you they probably already have some code and they need you to jump in and rip your head around it and I think the I've often wondered that we've done a disservice and they're thinking about how we educate in and and shine a light on like hey is this a good industry to to to join as a career because you're gonna get to be a creator you're gonna be get to make things you know you're building all these new things all the time and I think I've seen a lot of people come into the
industry and they go through like coding boot camp and they they've learned how to build some stuff they work on some bug fixes for things they get they do their internships that companies like mine they get their first job and they're like all I do is fix bugs and like make small little updates and they're like I thought I was going to be building new features all the time and I'm like that's part of some people's job sometimes but a lot of maintenance one of the project worked is maintenance work and taking care of things and you kind of learn through that over a period of time so I wanted to have conversations with people just let people like that
is actually a really big part of the job and we're often in the role of a menders not makers and so I wanted to capture conversations that I thought would be relevant not just now but also like an indicator more so we don't I don't talk a lot about what's new and shiny and technology don't talk about how it takes very often just recently at a couple conversations people because about AI and how it can be helpful for that stuff but not because like what's new and where do you think AI is going to go for as an industry so that was like the at least coming up at the premise that I thought was like moderately unique I feel like there's a lot of
interesting podcasts around what's new and happening and and so then you're competing with everybody else that's talking about what's new and happening which is important stuff to be talking about don't get me wrong people like to talk about that and but also I live in a world where I often work and as I said projects that are several years old and I'm like a lot of people that are working on projects that are far behind on versions and things like that and they're just like well that sounds great but I'm never going to be there you know we're we're always going to be way behind so if I listen to a podcast or go to a conference and hear about what's new and
rails eight great maybe we'll get there in five years maybe or the or they dream that the only way to get to that scenario is to go to job hop to another company where they think the grass is greener and then they'll get to work on a brand new version of something and then they learn that that's not always a case either so anyway so as far as that part of it that was just like figuring out what my that was my focus for my project and also one of the being not technology stack focused and so I didn't want to talk but just Ruby and Rails people only talk with people of all different spectrums in here different stories and have a lot of similar conversations with a lot
of wide variety of people so that was my angle the other so in terms of other things about the process I don't do the editing I've never done the editing I knew that I would be a bottleneck so I immediately found an editor originally on Upwork and they did 100 and something episodes with us before I had to get my second editor which I have now I knew that it needed to be I can handle the up front part of the process of finding guests prepare for the interviews handle all the communications with the guests up until the interview have the interview automate as much as that stuff as like possibly could and then throw some files into a drop box folder for editor and
be like great and then someone else would pick them up pick up those the output of that process and then they would you know organize all the social media assets and publish it on the web and then schedule that and let the guests know that their episode was published when it was ready so that was the first that was something I knew I needed to do and so until I had that kind of whole pipeline organized I didn't want to like release anything and the other thing I made myself do was like I'm going to record 10 episodes before I tell anybody publicly that this was a thing I'm like I wanted to get a head smart yeah let me get 10 episodes and then I could rearrange which
episodes I was going to have first and so like maybe my first one which I still would think was one of my weakest ones because it was sort of navigate being an interviewer and I can kind of rearrange that a little bit based off of how I felt like those first several on wait I didn't want to be I just become this person that's a bit hesitant to talk publicly about things until it's ready either they're just like because I have projects I've worked on in the past we're like hey I got a book deal and then like sign up and then you find out like six months later by the way I'm not going to finish the book now I'm sorry I asked for email in just six months ago I don't want
to be like vaporware vapor announcement stuff like people do a little time and I'm just like oh yeah like no actually do the thing and be like hey cool you know I so that was another thing I think if you can hold it back I feel it's much more exciting to be like you can actually participate now you can buy the thing now you can subscribe now and start listening right now to me that's that feels like a much more exciting thing I need that is the motivator is like I know that I can get people to sign up but I'd rather it actually just be like this is dropped yeah there's a lot of podcasts that I've seen that'll they get really hype about doing it they like make a cool logo they like
record an episode or two and they're done and it's like yeah if you do at least 10 that you know builds that muscle memory and that like habit and you're probably going to keep doing it and yeah it's it lets you know if you hate it like eight episodes in you should just stop and not even release it because like you're not going to keep going so yeah that's really good advice I think you can also then determine if maybe there was a one one time thing you could just release those eight to 10 episodes and be like this was a one time thing here's a capturing and there's not going to be a season two and this was this was a catalog of some conversations I wanted to share
there's one one series TV shows all the time that's like that that's true it's a limited series you could just reframe it so anyway there's a lot of different ways you can think about that kind of stuff but I think if you try to do one at a time and release as you go then it's really easy to fall off the wagon and not keep up you haven't built up the the consistency of it and and the other thing I would recommend is like when it comes like finding guests is I put a lot of energy into trying to find very diverse groups of people to be on the podcast and now the point where people ask me often like can I be on your podcast or I have a recommendation for somebody to be on
your podcast usually like a PR company or something and I'm like I don't want to talk about like what's the image I need but I now seeker hack is when they when someone reaches out to me I'm I'm open to having you on the podcast but I need you to give me at least three recommendations for other guests that you think would also be good guests on this episode I like that and so before I will schedule with you give me that list and then they'll give me a list and then follow up question do you have any women that you can recommend and they're really so that put some work into that process I can kind of offer that on to other guests and they will usually give me good guest
recommendations and then when people say like I don't have any women to recommend to you to be on the podcast and I could be like well let me know when you can yeah yeah so I think that that that that tends to be a good way and then so I have a pretty large list of like potential guests and then it's always just a matter of just trying to get them scheduled in my own I've got a lot of things I'm focused on as well outside of just having a podcast that's oh yeah not quite I hear that yeah yeah speaking of other things you have going on I do want to talk about and you said it's oh my z-shell I always said oh my zsh but I've always said oh my z-shell yeah oh have you
said z-shell always yeah damn okay I'm in the minority this is the yeah cuz zsh is like that's the the file type thing or whatever anyway and z-shell yeah I've always said I say z-shell typically um it's like you have some authority here yeah yeah why didn't you get to decide yeah well z-shell if you just go to like the z-shell website or I figure somewhere somewhere there's a pronunciation for just z-shell itself okay and for for oh my z-shell I just I think it'd be weird for me to pronounce it otherwise that's true but for people say z-shell because that's just how they say z um some places um I have a recording on my Twitter profile and it's I
pronounce it oh my r-r-r-r-r-r-r and that tends to people I was just at a conference down in Brazil and a lot of people brought that up and they thought it was funny and I don't know why I'm telling you about my own jokes here but um oh my z-shell cuz you had some whiskey that's why that's I'm gonna pour a little bit more yeah do it because I yeah it's funny it kind of makes me think of uh my dot files a couple of things that I always set up on my new computer is homebrew and oh my z-shell like and then I've got my antigen themes and you know all that kind of fun stuff probably is so honored that you you use it you're such an important force Charles William
Carpenter the third yeah you uh everything I'm doing that's right in the world is uh you know you're a part of it yeah see I'm the weird one who uses fish so I used fish too I don't use it I love it I used to use that like 10 years ago but now I feel like I'd be uh turning my back uh we're coming up it's interesting we're coming up on the 15th birthday anniversary what do you what do you say for our anniversary yeah anniversary is good this uh this summer will be 15 years and the it was feature complete when I first released it and because all I wanted was my co-workers when we be pairing on their computers to have the same aliases and shortcuts that I
use because I'm a lazy typer and I couldn't remember everything I'm like I just have all these kick commands and all these other things like three four character things uh prior to using before my Z shell existed in my crazy Z shell configuration before that uh I used to rely a lot on like things like a text expander and things like that it was always about just speeding up my process to have a bunch of shortcuts for things and so anyways yeah it's always a show it's how I pronounce it and 15 years and all I wanted my success was I convinced them all to install this thing because they wouldn't just copy my Z shell RC file because it didn't understand what it did
and I was like well I don't really understand what it all does either it was like a copy and paste with different friends and I some tweaks that I had made over the years from different other people primarily from the Ruby and Rails community um stuff I'd copy it off of like uh I don't know if you remember there was a website called pasty back in the day and so it was kind of like uh like a get up gist type of page where people could throw up like a file of code so we were always like sharing little recipes on how to improve your Z shell configuration and I just love the auto complete features and some stuff like that in there and the uh they wouldn't use my team when
most of the people my team wouldn't just copy my Z shell configuration even though it was perfect obviously because I created it um I'm like well if you want me to work on your computer with you and help you do some coding with you but and I'm and I'm doing typing please add the stuff because it's just tedious to try to remember how to do this um or looking at the the man page for the full syntax and but then one week and I was like I'm going to document and clean up my Z shell configuration just so that I understand what it does so I can explain it to them and then maybe that'll allow them to copy and paste it and then as I did that I'm like oh I'm going to
reorganize it so I created a directory and I sort of organizing stuff in a different sections and then I broke them out into some separate files and I was like well I'll kind of treat this like like a little framework of some sort and it was just a good directory with some subfolders and stuff like that and and like a template file and like the install was basically get clone the thing and then copy this file into or copy this thing or Z shell RC file and you would use it and then it didn't it didn't have plugins it didn't have themes anything that people would reference now none of that existed the day for the first day because it was literally just all
of my configuration and then like day two everybody on my team is and I'm airqueting installed it and then then the next step was the next day one of my team members Carlos said how do I change the colors and I said why my color choices are perfect is it going to change the when I add some different characters and change how that looks and I'm like oh that's stupid so he I'm like we'll just edit this file like it was like a terminal or prompt file or something that I had in there so he made changes and then we he wanted to add some new aliases as well and then so he did and push it you know push it to my it was sharing my gear repository take what the team and so everybody
was like adding stuff but there was a problem he couldn't he couldn't do a get pull because there was now a merge conflict because he had made changes in his file and the prop file and so I had a inflection or this what do we do Carlos has his changes and I have mine I can either put a conditional if it's Carlos do this or Robbie do this and I'm like that's not going to be it that doesn't look good so we created concept like we guess this is a theme so we created a directory called themes stuck his file in there and stuck mine in there and then you just added the thing and we just load the specific theme and then a couple weeks and then I shared it on my blog and people
started using it and then circling contributions and then someone from like the Python community was like hey I don't need all these rails the aliases I want to have some stuff for jingo and I was like well that's stupid so it was like all right so I moved all my rails stuff into a rails file and I'm like I guess that's a plugin and we've got Python plugins or jingle plugins and that's that's how it all like started it was just people being like I want to I don't want all of your stuff Robbie even though it was like oh my z-show my z-show it became like everybody thought of it was there z-show as well I guess my z-show so it just snowballed and everybody started you know
throwing ideas and I'm like oh I want to do it for this thing and here's a command line thing and then you know a couple hundred themes and hundreds of plugins later it's like how did this it became an easy project for people to contribute to but that's the kind of like origin story I didn't have this master creative plan like I'm gonna do this thing that everybody's gonna love it was like how do I get everybody my team to have all those in aliases so when we're pairing we can all save a few keystrokes and scratch your own niche exactly yeah yeah so how is your experience been with like you know it's it sounded like a lot of people just kind of contributed organically
but you know I feel like it's this big problem with open source that like everyone expects everything it's like we're entitled for this to work on everything I could possibly use it on like I'm gonna run this on my microwave and it's using like bash and not z-show and like it should all work like you know how how much of that have you gotten and like you know how do you how do you deal with like deciding what should go in and and like like how all that works that well I mean as far as like the bash versus I mean it's that one's easy enough it's like well it relies on z-show so but there's a people have cloned the concept and there's like oh my bash there's you know I
think a lot of stuff in the fish stuff was somewhat inspired by oh my z-show as well and like there's oh my posh for like windows people so there's there's similar variants of it that have kind of spawned but as far as the the project itself a couple complex parts or periods of time where the I was having a lot of people contribute and we were like working on things that we we were thought about the plug-in system in particular like well if everything is includes one of the biggest complaints we've always had is like oh it's gonna air quote bloated I mean it's like all a bunch of text files so if it's taken up too much space in your computer you know maybe get a
bigger heart rate but that's fine it's not it's not that crazy it's not and you're only loading what you need but there were some conversations around how are we going to make this project or how do we think about plug-ins and so we thought about this like building some more complicated plug-in system that were required and one idea that I proposed this was many years ago was to use get sub modules for that and as we and as we navigated and we're going through and testing things out I was like you know what this seems so complicated for someone new to a terminal environment like we're they're just learning get in general like even whether they can answer the question
I'm get merged versus get rebased like let alone like you do a get clone they can do some really basic things but to start thinking about sub module management when that always felt a little awkward yeah I was like I'm like that might I think that might be a no for me like I had to take a like it wasn't until someone we got far enough long down that path and as I was testing this out and with a couple people I'm like I just think this is gonna be too hard and it's gonna be a barrier for entry so at it was at that point when I was like I guess I need to kind of define my target user is going to be someone that's new like a junior developer coming into this environment like
from step one they install this thing and immediately they are like oh my environment just changed I feel like I just made a big change and all I did was run some command line thing and I can start making some tweaks and pick a theme out and start using some aliases and I feel like a power user all of a sudden let's cater to them and when people can outgrow it in our advance and configure they don't need it anymore great I assume most people would outgrow out on my z-show and do their own thing or find some other thing or just take what they need but then I hear familiar people like oh I just the default's great I don't need I see my theme show up and people's slides and
I'm like I don't know how many different demo videos I see for different products out there that are CLI related things and they're showing stuff and I'm like that's my theme it's just everywhere and I'm like yeah yeah you can use other themes but please use of what you're saying now huh when it comes down to it it's like how easy is this going to be for new people to to be on-board to this and thinking about their that is my target user now and it has been for many years and like let's let everybody feel like a super user day one and then like cool I'm a hacker and that you know and I can sell stickers and t-shirts to those people and that's that's fun so yeah
I think that's that's part of the key that like a lot of people don't think about myself included really is like you're just building a thing to build it but you're not thinking about who is your user and having that like user persona really helps you decide like what goes in and what doesn't because you're like well this doesn't benefit the user I'm trying to serve so it's not going in and like you know I have that problem of like I want to make everyone happy so everything goes in like you know but but then that's too complex and yeah it doesn't serve everyone so that that that's a good thing is like figure out who you're actually who your user is and like try to
cater to them that's strange I'm not had that experience with you so anyway yeah there's it yeah yeah yeah attached to that which like takes us into lighter notes I would say yeah speaking what are you curious about Robert Russell I'm very curious if you weren't in tech what other career would you choose I quit my last job officially 20 years ago this month to do plan our our full time because I thought that I was going to be able to figure out how to be a starving musician so I playing music has and is one of my favorite things to do I love collaborating with other people it's also I still very much involved in it now and have a band and we're finishing up
our fourth hour right now that's going to short tour last summer which is a grand I gotta ask it's not we are a instrumental post rock art band so like if you explosions this guy Maguire yeah yeah I love Maguire I love Maguire so yeah Maguire is one of my favorite bands and that's that's a creative outlet that I've had for a long time and so that would be one thing I used to think that I wanted to be a baker I what I knew I didn't want to do when I was a teenager was working tech or specifically at the time I called it the computer industry because my I grew up in the Silicon Valley my dad worked in hardware he just recently retired he used to work at like hard drive
manufacturing and networking companies and test engineer on real hardware and was always like you should be a software programmer since I was a little kid and I was like this is boring I'm going to go outside and play with my friends because I love playing with computers and I've always used computers and love doing these with them but it was never the thing that drew me I didn't I when I the the approach to like learning at a program when I when it was introduced to me by my father was like him getting me a book when I was like six and like if you type all this stuff in this on all these pages and this editor thing and you can run it then you could play this game and I was like
but isn't the game already made can we can I just play the game why to like just typing everything what I think was missing from the educational experience was and then we'll modify it and then we'll make it we'll personalize it we'll make changes to like that part wasn't really like we didn't really talk about that like let's build a thing to track my little league stats for my team you know like that would have been an interesting thing for me to problem to solve so I've never been interested in the tech itself just for the sake of doing it I was always like what can I do with it and so the the reason I even like learned to start really
getting to doing any web development in the late night you know mid late 90s is because I wanted to sell stickers and I had a mail order catalog thing that I was doing for like in the punk music scene and I wanted to do stuff on the web and so I learned to do some web stuff so people can submit a form on lines like how do I do that I can't afford to pace on them like 17 18 year old kid I'll just figure out how to like have a web page that saves to like a text file or something on a server and I can FTP and see that nobody ordered my stickers the uh so like that's how I learned to start doing web stuff and I pick up those skills over several years and you know 25 30 years
later and I now because of some software I wrote I sell stickers and t-shirts almost daily to people because they want to support the project which is kind of funny so I guess the other career yeah the career which either would love to be a musician or just like a DIY like sticker salesperson on the internet would have been exciting for me um selling stickers for a couple of dollars and pop yeah this sounds like a robby dream yeah I would love to like be a screen printer and self-shirts but like you know or I also music you know a lot of stuff there I was in bands for years and then just like it doesn't pay any money so you can't do that but like it's an expensive
hobby if you are listening and you like the bands that you listen to and you only stream them feel free to pop over to their band camp site from time to time and buy the digital versions of it to give them some money or maybe they'll even send you some vinyl or CDs or cassette tape in the mail cassettes are cool again so they are yeah I don't have a cassette player I don't have any play either yeah vinyl is like for a little while you know I feel like vinyl is cool again and like most people agree with that but like Gen Z is like cassettes are cool again and I'm like are they though like I'm not sure but I had a car from 2000 for a little bit about uh while I bought it six years ago
and I had it for three years four years something like that and uh it had a cassette player for the first two years I really leaned in had a cassette player I was like I'm going to get cassettes you buy them super cheap on eBay go the flea market whatever else and I kind of leaned into that for a bit so I don't know they were cool now they are inconvenient I think they're cool like in a weird way like they're not they're they're not actually cool I think we can most all of us agree that like vinyl is cool because you can like you don't have to rewind it you can just like sell it over like tapes were inconvenient because it's like have you ever played an eight track
no no I have not I've never had an eight because eight tracks are like cassettes that you can't rewind you literally have the separate tracks for the songs and you're clicking through and wherever you left off last that's where you go back to the song I didn't remember that part of that I only ever play with the eight tracks on my my grandfather's basement when he was a truck driver and I remember not the same grandfather that was the uh the third mother other son Robert Russell who also worked in tech he worked at Atari and the earlier Atari he was so that was that was an interesting thing to learn about him I was actually never played with the
Tari's I had in television but never never oh yeah I had Atari 2600 and Atari computer that was the first time I ever did any programming I don't know what it was but I know my grandfather on my mother's side he he was a programmer for Proctor and Gamble we were in like North like Kentucky Cincinnati area so my grandfather there did working computers but it was like I didn't know him that well and he gave me this notepad of things that type in I thought that was cool and then I forgot about it for 20 years and then my dad was a welder like blue collar kind of whatever but he had eight tracks I don't know where I was going with this but anyway that's I remember
finding uh in my grit my grandfather's eight track collection there was like adult themed eight tracks like apparently the people would listen to you while they're on on the road so if I didn't that was it that was an experience that I was not expecting to retain owns my years I should call him he's he's still around he lives in uh Tennessee I should like never I've never asked him about that like hey I once came across some very interesting eight tracks in your basement Yeah, you were a truck driver. Well, those were in a closet, you weren't supposed to get into. That's the thing there. Maybe.
Yeah, the things I found in a closet and the basement were different. Yeah. Stack of vintage playboys. Yeah, vintage, some even modern, possibly. Anyway. Well, you're not just half-lootin' Robbie. You got some Tennessee, you'd blow it in, you know, too. Well, both of us. I didn't know who you were talking to there, because my most whole family is from Tennessee. How are we like, whereabouts? Kingsport, mostly. I don't know where that is. Big easement plant down there. Like they, I don't know what they even make. It smells like crap everywhere, because whatever they're making is rally. Like the literal crap?
No, like weird chemicals. I don't know. Oh, okay. But yeah, Kingsport and some in Knoxville, but not originally from Knoxville. I know a lot of people in Knoxville. Yeah. Lynchburg was like the count over. And so, because that was the dry town. And county, dry county. And my great-grandfather had like farmland in Tolahoma, which was like next to there. And I guess that's over near. What's the name of that music festival? They have out that way, every, it's like the big one. I don't know. I'm too old, I don't know. I think Kingsport was also a dry county, because like my mom has told me about my grandma
with like cross, cross county lines to buy like bourbon to make like a bourbon cake or something and be like worried, like she's driving home. That's funny. Lynchburg is where Jack Daniels, yes, they're just still there. A hard place to get a driver is what they, they call their tagline, right? Yeah, because you can't do tastings there and stuff. So it's, yeah. I went there once when I was a kid and what they would let you do was they would lift up like the top of like some crates or something and then the smell would hit you. Oh, and so I don't know. That was, that was, that was like as close
to like drinking as you could do there. And then there's also being there, it was like there. And what's the other sour mash whiskey there? Oh, Dicol, and it was like buttery as well. It was, might really intrigue into whiskey and whatnot. Oh, interesting. So you started from the Tennessee side, not just this weird scotch shit. No, proper scotch whiskey, right? Oh, but always, yeah, I would always be like Jack mixed with some soda or something and I don't know. Yeah, that's the classic, yeah. Yeah, I did college, what college I did was always Jim Beam and Coke. We were Evan Williams and Dicol nicer
because it was a little cheaper. Dicol was cheaper. Interesting. I think Dicol's actually definitely was cheaper. Oh, yeah, they're like, they're low tier. I still feel all of that is fancier than what? I'm trying to think pop off was the plastic pops. Does pop off make whiskey? No, but pop off is like free. They pay you to take it. No, they don't. But you are able to pull enough out of like a couch cushion to get it. Yeah, that's true. But then the next day, everyone is dead. Yeah. It's like full of like everything you're not supposed to put in there is like all they put in. For sure. Is that even legal anymore?
Probably. Yeah, I always keep a nostalgic thing. I always have a bottle of ride Dicol and all right, whiskey cabinet. So I think it's decent. Yeah, I've got no qualms. They actually do a lot of cool collaborations. I'm forgetting with who right now, but I've seen a lot of them. So like they're, yeah, they're not bad. Is that also in a dry county? Do you know, I've not, I might go back and visit my grandparents who are still around and living out that way. So I'm like realizing I should. I know they can't do tastings all the places, but anyway, I'll report. The only 10, yeah, let us know. The only 10 is C1, I know just because
we've been to the Green Briar distillery, which is where Bell Mead. Bell Mead was like their first big one, which was like sourced and whatever else. But now they have their own distillate out and Green Briar and something else are the two labels. They're actually pretty decent. It's like Nelson and Ashton Brothers. Nelson Brothers, that's right. Yeah, very good, see. You have not had enough whiskey. Yeah, their story was cool because they were like, you know, they went to the county where it started or whatever. And the like historical society had like two original bottles and like the like mash bill of how to make them.
And they were like, oh my God, thank God we found you. Like we want to give these to you so you can start this back up. And they're like, yeah, we do. Thank you, we're gonna start that right now. Yeah, the family was like, yeah, we're trying to figure this out. They got that, yeah, that's a great story. Yeah, I wish someone would do that for me, but they haven't. So they say George Dickel is a brand of Tennessee whiskey produced in Colohoma and coffee county. I feel like they should rename the county. I don't remember the other coffee. Yeah. Well, Bourbon County in Kentucky, the borders of that have changed.
And most of the distilleries aren't in Bourbon County anymore. Anyway, is that going through a whole thing where like if it's not from Bourbon County, can I be called Bourbon? No, that's not true. No, no, no, that's not true. Bourbon is just a married U.S. Yeah, it does have to be a U.S. spirit because it's federally mandated and there's like rules there, but you can make it in Colorado or Kentucky and it's sober. Yeah, as long as you follow the rules, comes out of the U.S. So it's not quite like, well, it's more like Scotch because Scotch has to come from Scotland. Yeah, otherwise it's Japanese whiskey, basically.
We're just single mall in American. I like Scotch is better than Japanese, but do you? Really? That's far. Japanese has no flavor. It's like water. I don't, I don't love it. Like Ayurveda is the thick and make of like 90%, or not 90%, 90 proof thing tastes like water, but also I want some flavor. I just want flavor. Okay. Yamazaki 18, we got to try that together because I've had it, I thought it was pretty good. I think it was like 2014, 2015's like, it was the first Japanese whiskey to get rated number one whiskey in the world at that time. And it was pretty good. And then all the prices got inflated.
Yeah. We are over time here. Is there anything you want to plug or mention before we end? So many things. Let me call out my list here, my scroll. All right. Robbie Russell, we'll be speaking at, no. I thought it was going to be your album. That would have been it. Yeah, actually, you know what? If you had to, my band is called the Mighty Missoula in this named after the famous, like, I forget how many thousands of years ago, floods that would, so there used to be this ancient glacier lake getting the geology nerd thing. Somewhere in like the Montana, Idaho region in the United States, there used to be this huge glacier lake there
and it would flood every so often and would flood the whole Pacific Northwest. It was so massive that it carved out a lot of the Pacific Northwest in the landscape. And so it would go all the way from like that area. It would flood, like, you know, if you're familiar with Oregon, but like the Wallami Valley, like where I live, like that's how far that's where the good one is. Exactly. And so, so it's called the Missoula Flets, is what that's called. So we called, we're named ourselves after that, which is a reference back to another post rock bands. They have a song called the Mighty Real Grande
and we named ourselves kind of, that's what we do. It's as musicians we name ourselves, like naming things is always kind of like a derivative of something else. So anyways, the Mighty Missoula we have our fourth album coming out later this year. We are finishing up mixing that and, you know, so if you look for the Mighty Missoula, maybe have those in the show notes. But otherwise, my company has a plan of argon. Omizisha was Omizisha on the internet. I'm Robbie with a Y, not IE. And I'm the third, but I don't usually say that online. And there's a really good episode of the maintainable podcasts
where I interviewed someone named Robbie Wagner. Robbie though Wagner recently, which was recently published. So thanks for coming on the podcast, Robbie. Oh, you left me out of that. Oh, fuck you guys, because you weren't named around. I'm out. You were the third though. I don't know how to interview two people at the same time, but after doing this, I'm like, man, maybe it's not so hard. I'm a noose. It's less structured for sure, for sure. Well, I guess you're doing two hosts. Yeah, I need to figure it out. I get approached about this sometimes and I'm like, I don't know that I know how to do that yet.
They make it up. Fun fact, we make it up. That's great. We don't know how to do anything. So if you're a user of almighty show, we sell stickers on the internet. And that always tickles me when I see stickers on people's laptops or come see, say hi to me at an upcoming conference. I will send you one on this cup. That sounds great. Oh, yeah, syntax podcast. Like ours, but less whiskey and probably better. And more facts. Yeah. Thank you both. Thank you both for having me on. It's been a delightful conversation and enjoy the whiskey. Yeah, thanks for coming on. Glad you enjoyed it. Yeah, thanks everyone for listening.
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