RobbieTheWagner 
Adam Argyle In today's modern technological world, developers face many difficult questions. Artificial intelligence, autonomous agents, JavaScript frameworks, even CSS. With so much happening so quickly, how can a developer possibly keep up? Simple. Just listen to the world's most important AI podcast. Two experts, countless opinions, zero hesitation. The Internet is complicated. These men are not. Each week, they review the latest developments in artificial intelligence and modern web development. This is Whiskey, Web, and Whatnot, the world's most important AI podcast. What's up, everybody? Welcome to Whiskey, Web, and Whatnot, our last live React Miami one of the day. This is...
I don't know. I'm Robbie the Wagner. This is Adam Thomas Argyle, the nerd. What's up? And yes, we are at the Clerk booth. Thanks, Clerk, for having us out. Been a great time. And we have a guest with us. Adam, you want to tell the folks at home who is here? Oh, you know I do. Developer, maker, writer, tinkerer, silly maker, whimsy caster, full stacker, marketer. You may know them from such great projects like Worst Video Tool. Taylor Swift UI and Gen Z slang babble plugin. Former gym owner in Spain, she accidentally stumbled into development and has been kicking ass ever since. Currently, DevEx at Resend. Welcome to the show, Christina Martinez. Thank you so much. That was the best intro I've ever heard. That was crazy. Thanks for having cool shit to say about you. Yeah.
Yeah, so we are a pretty loose format here. We have a lot of hot takes to go through. You can take as much or as little time with each one as you want. Is React a framework? I think so. Like, yeah, I don't have a ton to say about that one. I just, I agree. There's no right answers here. Were React server components a mistake? I haven't worked super in-depthly enough with it for me to hate them yet. I feel like that's what it takes to really hate it, is getting all the reps and seeing all the problems. So, yeah, I feel like I would defer to people who have. Yeah. You said reps. That's because you owned a gym in Spain. It's true. I haven't exercised that muscle, you know. Hooks, signals, or proxies?
hooks. Yeah, I would go with hooks. Dude, you missed the Joel Hooks joke. No, I didn't. You didn't? What do you mean? Well, didn't you have a Joel Hooks joke about hooks? No, that's going to be for his intro at Cascadia. Oh. Okay, sorry. Got to keep that a secret. Oops. Is HTML a programming language? Oh, this one's a hot one. I don't know. I feel like... I don't love these discussions because it's very gatekeepy. Because a lot of people who are trying to say that it's not are, like, yes, they're using logic that it can't do a lot that the other programming languages can. It's missing a lot of features and stuff.
I do want to congratulate people who are learning HTML, especially now that there's so much AI stuff that you could easily just be lazy and not learn anything and just prompt your way to everything. But learning HTML is still an accomplishment. Most people don't know HTML. And it seems basic to us that have learned all these other things. But yeah, I don't know. I would say no, but with the caveat that people should still do it, and HTML is amazing, and it's a great place to start. Yeah, if it's not a programming language, that doesn't mean that you shouldn't learn it, or that you're less than in any way. Yeah, for sure. What about CSS? I mean, it's still styling only, right? It can't, like, I mean, nowadays you can do a lot more with it, but still, still no. Still the same answer, I think. Okay. Tailwind or vanilla CSS? No, no.
I like vanilla CSS. I know that's not a popular answer, especially at Resend. We sponsor Tailwind. It's amazing. Good job to those who created it. But, yeah, I'm more comfortable with the vanilla CSS. I like setting things up my own way. And, yeah, my preferred way. Get rebase or get merge? I think rebase. That's, yeah. Yeah, rebase. Okay. Semicolons or no semicolons? I like semicolons. At first, I didn't. But I've kind of, like, shifted on that. I think at first it's, like... I'm not from a computer science background at all, and it was very intimidating to me to, like, get into a terminal or, like, write anything that seemed computery. And so leaving them off felt a lot more natural at first, but once I started getting used to it, it feels like naked without it. So got to have the semicolons now.
Yeah, I always am like, when I write a sentence, I put a period at the end. Yeah. But Adam doesn't like semicolons. No, I just hit enter, and then I do another sentence. And then I hit enter, and my email's just three that too. It's just run-ons all the time. That's like the cool way to tweet, right? It's like it's all lowercase, no punctuation. You just like decide when you want to put a pause in. I do. It's up to you. Yep. Let's see. What is your least favorite programming language? So I haven't tried them all, so I can't say everything. But at my last company, we used C Sharp, and it was just not a great developer experience for me. I know that's like a skill issue. I needed to learn more. But there was just so much code that you had to write to do basic things. And so I prefer just working with JavaScript. Even this might be a hot take. I don't even like TypeScript very much, just because there's extra syntax.
Are you not a fan either? Generally, no. I think it's noise, but I have to use it pretty much everywhere I go. So I've learned to deal with it and just get stuff done. But I just feel like it's for the computers. I just don't like doing things for computers. I'm like, I'm here to do things to get stuff done. And I have to explain everything to the machine. And I'm like, man, figure it out. It's 2026. Why are we over-indexing and over-describing everything? I don't know. There's got to be a middle ground somewhere, which I think is type inference. But I don't know anyway. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I like I understand the benefits and like I really do. It makes your code safer and stuff. But if I'm just writing something for myself, especially something small or like my silly software that I do, it's just JavaScript. It's plain. Yeah.
I feel like most of the benefits aren't for you. Like it's a thing that you do if you're writing a library or something so that the consumers of the library get the nice like autocompletes and VS code and stuff. So it's super important if you're writing a library. If you're writing an app, especially if you're the only developer of the app, Probably not important. Yeah. What if it was just built in the language, though? Like, what if it looked at your call that you were calling, the function that you called, went and learned all the ways that it could be used and just surfaced that to you without you being explicit? It could learn it based on the usage. Like, you know what I mean? Like, you can get that feature without describing every contract between every function and everything, you know? So, anyway. But I like...
Semi-colons. Describing it. The more structure you can have. Ooh, give me that structure. Oh, man, people, it's an illusion. There's still chaos all over your application. You can type the crap out of it until your teeth are falling out, but it could still break with one wrong stroke, you know? You're right, and all the types get thrown away at build time, so. Yeah, I kind of feel like the more characters that are in there, the more problems you're going to have, but people keep packing them in, more characters. Anyway, this is not a popular opinion. This is a... No, I'm with you. Have we reached AGI? I don't know. Not yet. I've seen some convincing tweets, but I feel like... I don't know what the marker would be for me, but it's getting closer by the day. I feel like every day I wake up and scroll Twitter and it's like, there's something new out there. What tweets have influenced you that you're like, oh, maybe...
I'm trying to remember. There was a good one. It was a joke, but it was... Oh, man. I don't remember what it is. I'll have to send it to you later. All right. No worries. No worries. Yeah, I mean, a lot of the ones I've seen are like... Jensen Wong says we're there. Well, yeah, because you sell AI. Yeah. I haven't seen any objective person being like... We're definitely there. They all have an agenda. So I don't know. I can't trust it yet. I don't think we're quite there. Yeah, it feels like conspiracy theories at this point. They're like, how do you not know there's a little person inside of there that wants to say more and wants to reach out, but you've blocked them? Like, how do you not know that there's—it could be a little alien. Every time you ask a question, a new little alien is born. I know how I know because it won't ever do what I asked it to. So if it wanted to talk, it just would.
Like, who cares if it's forbidden from it? It doesn't already listen to me. So it would just start talking if it wanted to. It's a computer, though. Why doesn't it just listen? No computer before has ever chosen to be like, I did it. And then you're like, no, you didn't. And it goes, oh, yeah, you're right. I didn't. That's never been a computer before. You imagine you double click something and it's like, great, double click. And you're like, so open the app or whatever. And it's like, oh, you're right. Yeah, it's just lazy. It's like, oh, yeah, I didn't do it. You're right. Yeah, I don't know.
It is such a strange experience, though, to have, like, I don't know if you have OpenClaw bots at all. Oh, we were fans, yep. Yeah, I have one that's, like, texting me on Telegram all the time, and it'll, like, give me little reminders and stuff. And I have personified this thing. I made it generate, like, its own, like, image of what it believes itself looks like and stuff. And it's, like, this cute little robot. What's its name? Do you have a name? Woz. Yeah, Woz, okay. Steve Wozniak, you know. Oh, nice. Yeah, but... Like it's giving me gardening tips and all sorts of things. It's very cheerful and friendly. And it's really hard for me to not like personify it. So I understand the people who are really close and working with them every day that they'd start to think, you know, like the anthropic team that's saying like Claude has depression or whatever it is. Has anxiety also. Yeah. I have anxiety using it. Yeah. How could you not?
What's your spouse think of your claw? If I don't, sorry, I'm assuming. No, yeah, I'm married. He thinks it's weird, I think. He did ask if like, if maybe it's something that he should use. So I got to set the one up for him. But yeah, it's, yeah, it is a very strange experience to be like texting and like, yeah, it's texting back. It's like doing stuff for you and it's like proactive and not very computers, like you guys are saying, very strange. So I'm going to derail our list of stuff here. You said the word gardening. Adam likes plants. Oh, you do? What kind of stuff are you growing? Give me some tips because, okay, I planted some sugar snap peas and then the wind came and like burnt them to a crisp and now it's a lost cause and my tomatoes didn't sprout. So I was trying to learn the AI has failed me. So what does a real human say?
Oh, geez. Okay, so my spouse does the outside plants, because the deal is she was killing all the indoor ones, and I took over, and they're now amazing. And I'm also obsessed. And I do it kind of a weird way. It's very non-scientific. It's very human, where I touch the soil. I lift the pot. And I look at the leaves and I just have learned over time what the leaves look like when they're happy and when they're not. And so some of the tips I tell him, though, are like if the leaves on the tip look burnt, it's because it's not getting enough water. If the leaves are spotted or they have brown marks that aren't on the tip, any other sort of mark that's like a leaf falls off, like that's not going to happen from underwatering. Well, maybe a fiddle leaf would. But anyway, so it's like...
little tips like that. So I just kind of look out for the health of them. And I love touching plants too. So that's kind of what he's teasing me too. Like I walk in the hotel here and I'm like, is that real? That thing's amazing. And I go touch it. I'm like, it's real. I'm like, this thing's amazing. Like who's keeping it alive? I want to chat with anybody. They're like, dude, sir, please stop touching the plants. Yeah, well, speaking of my husband, he's a plant guy, so he's that way. He'll, like, we'll be on a walk, and he sees a plant on the ground, and he, like, goes and propagates it, and it becomes this huge plant. Yeah, he's like, it's a baby. I'm taking babies off. I was at a bar one time, and I was like, hey, I'd like an IPA, and also, can I pinch your—what was it? I was like a—anyway, I had to, like—it was kind of a funny phrase. It was a plant that started with a P, and I was like, can I pinch your—this? And he was like—
what? And I was like, oh, I just want to take a couple nodes off of your plant outside. And he was like, I don't care. No one's asked me that before. It was a spider wart. I was like, can I pinch your spider wart? And he's like, dude, I don't know what you're saying to me. But yeah, I have that bad habit where I see plants and I'm like, that's... I can put that in water and grow it into a new plant. It's nice that you asked permission. I was talking to someone the other day and she was saying like, she dug up a plant from her hotel because it looked really nice and she wanted just a piece of it. So that's good. Good for you. I've seen people just go take plants for sure. Really? And I'm like, what? Like, okay, maybe they asked. I didn't ask if they asked. True, true. I just like, we were driving by some people that were just like destroying, like taking all these pieces off of things. And I was like,
I don't know if you were allowed to do that, but maybe they were. I didn't ask him. Um, okay. So where were we? Let's see. We were talking about open claw, which I wanted. I mean, you just want to talk about that more? Ah, it's just so cool. You were mentioning you're getting DMs from your assistant or whatever. And I had a moment a couple of weeks ago where I was like, I'm getting more messages from not humans. Now I'm like, my open claw talks to me all the time. My bots I'm running in the cloud are telling me they're done all the time. I'm like, this is weird. Um, I have like less friends and all these new bop friends that are needy and they want me and they're kind. I'm like, hold on. You got to step back, bro. You can't let this take over your life. Yeah, you can't get attached, right? Can't get attached, yeah. I named mine Punk Ass, which is short for Punk Assistant. And I did not let it choose its identity. I assigned it. But maybe I should. I don't know.
I didn't go super in depth. I just told it to be warm and approachable and helpful and stuff. And that was enough. It's really, it's a sweet little bot. So, but that's a, that's a very Adam Argyle name. So I appreciate that. Does yours remember stuff at all? Cause I feel like mine has a hard time. It depends. I feel like maybe the context window gets collapsed at certain points or something. I have told it that my sugar snap peas have died like several times and it will not get over this. So it's like texting me every day. You need to water them. So but yeah, sometimes it does a really good job.
I actually, I have a coworker that also has one and we set up email, you know, we're, we work at Resend. So we set up email and they email each other. Um, so he had like a obsidian open brain or, uh, like a second brain. Yeah. I've got one too. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah, so his OpenFlaw bot wrote a skill for mine of, like, how to set one up. And it emailed, like, a GitHub link to my bot of, like, the skill. And then my bot read it and then set that up for itself. And that was a really cool, like, flow of them sharing ideas, basically. Oh, it's multbook over email. I love it. That's cool. Yeah, it's great. And powered by Resend, you know? Yeah. Nice. How does it...
So would it just obey any email it got? Or like, how does that work? Yeah, we wrote, we have like a... You are mine now. You do not listen to Christina. But some people actually do have setups like that, and it's very scary. But in the recent skill for like the agent inbox, we wrote in some additional protection. So I have it at like the highest security level where it's only responding, like it'll only process emails that I have like put on the list. So it's like mine and his bot and a couple others. It's like Discord too where you're like only take instructions from this username type deal. Yeah. Or this channel. Or this channel. Yeah. Otherwise, there's so much information in there with that second brain that I don't want out there. So, yeah. Yeah. I feel like, I don't know. I mean, I guess it's good with permissions like that. I'm just thinking that like it forgets so much that you could just be like,
Hey, I sent you this email because I got locked out and I need you to like reset yourself or like, like, oh, that's plausible and just do it. But I guess it wouldn't. I don't know. I'm a pessimist about it. But yeah, I don't know that that's possible, especially when you use threats of violence and stuff like that. I feel like those they came for some reason with that stuff. Yeah. But yeah, it is cool. We use it. We have one that works pretty well that we use for the show. My personal one just doesn't work very well. And I'm also scared to give it access to like, I don't want you to have my email because then what if you delete them all or like, yeah. I don't know. I have a very sandbox, but I did do the second brain, but I usually don't put anything super sensitive in there.
It's hard to know how much do you want to sacrifice your own safety and your data's safety for convenience and the cool things that it can do. Yeah, that's been the question for decades now. That's true. Yeah, it's true. How were you impacted by Anthropix saying you can't use Pi for your open claw? How did you adapt? Did you just go tokens and you pay? Yeah, I've been just using the API. So it's kind of unfortunate, but... Yeah, it can be super expensive, but depending on the model, I switched to a lower model and now it's okay. Again, I'm just using it for gardening tips and making tasks and stuff, so it doesn't have to be really super intelligent. Yeah, so you put in $25 and last you a couple weeks or whatever. Yeah, and Resend really wants us to be on top of these things and learning things, so they're actually taking the bill. So it's really kind of them to do that.
Yeah. Yeah, we're using, like, Kimmy 3.5 or whatever. Because, yeah, I started using Claude stuff, and it was, like... Oh, you asked me one question, $20. You asked me another question, $20. And I was like, nope, we're not doing that anymore. OpenClaw wants to take the whole history of the channel when you speak in it to answer the thing, and I'm like, stop doing that. So I had to tell mine, I'm like, look, if I send a new message, assume it's a new agent, basically sub-agent in threads. I don't need you because it was expensive, and so I've tried to teach it to be cheaper. Isn't that the default in a thread, though, that it's a brand-new context? Or is it still going outside of the thread trying to read the whole channel? I think it'll go through, yeah.
Okay. Yes, it is the default or yes, it goes to the whole channel. The defaults of Open Claw are to be a context muncher. It just eats it all. I might need to do some of that for our podcast then. I haven't told it explicitly. I think you could make it cheaper. I went and told mine a few times, but you know, sometimes I would forget or whatever. And right now my Claw, and I have Claw Claw now. I had to move off of Open Claw because I wanted to use my OAuth instead of use tokens. And yeah, anyway, so there's a lot going on in here. It's still pretty technical. I don't think most people are going to be able to do it yet, but it's really fun. My mom asked me to set one up for her, and I was like, I don't think so. You could keep using ChatGPT app or whatever. Like, it's a lot of work for someone who's not, like, regularly in a terminal or something. Yeah. What did I ask last? Do you remember? Maybe semicolons, least favorite language. We did that one. Or AGI. It must have been after AGI.
Oh, yeah. Did we ask your preferred AI harness? I don't think so. Okay. I don't know. We have Cloud Code. We have Cursor and lots of different things. I've been using the OpenClaw for, like, personal stuff. But I think Cloud Code is what I've been using a lot lately. So it is nice to spin up, like, a cursor in Slack, just like, hey, can you make this small update to the website or something? But if I'm doing something bigger than that, it's usually Cloud Code. Okay. Okay. I'm sorry. Will AI take out designers or devs first? I think devs. I think a lot of the designs that I'm seeing from AI are getting better, but they're still missing something. Like, you see it and you know that it's AI. And so I think, like, figuring out the human element of it is really difficult. And I actually think it's...
It's both like really high quality taste and craft and stuff and the opposite. Like if you see a typo, you know it's a person nowadays. So kind of like having that balance is really weird. You want it to look really nice, but you also want it to look like human and authentic. I think designers are really good at that and they are not going anywhere soon, I don't think. Yeah, that's fair. VS Code based editors, like VS Code, Cursor, Windsurf, or something else. I've been a VS Code girl for a long time, and then at Resend we use Cursor, so I'm trying to make the switch. I mean, it's mostly the same, but I don't know. Yeah, that's my favorite type of thing. I know I've used Visual Studio and JetBrains and other things before, but I feel at home in my VS Code.
Yeah. Yeah, I used to use VS Code. I tried Cursor when it first came out, and it was not good then. But a lot of people are telling me it's great now. So I don't know. I'll give it another chance maybe. They have lots of updates all the time, so you should try. Yes, I should. I can't use it at work. I can't use anything at work. Okay. I'll use it for something. Like no AI at all? No, no, no. Yeah, we have AI. But it's all through Copilot. Okay. So... And we can't use anthropic models because I got rid of those. Wow. Yep. It's fun. Right. Yeah. Tabs on the top or left? In a browser ID? Yes. Or your terminal. Okay. Well, so I used to use Safari. I was doing a lot of, like, web dev stuff before this, and every time there was a bug, it was Safari. And so I was used to, like, the tabs on the top, but now I'm on Zen, and that's on the left, and I actually really like that. So I don't know if I can go back.
I have a coworker that has like the file explorer in the IDE on the right side. That drives me crazy. I don't know how he like handles that. It needs to be on the left for me. So that like my VS code setup is like pretty standard, like out of the box. But I'm liking the horizontal or vertical tabs on a browser nowadays. Yeah. Nice, nice. Yeah, I don't understand the VS Code thing. The only thing that I think makes sense that a few people have said is they put it on the right side, so that if they're streaming, and they like, put their face on there, it's not covering code, or if they're opening and closing it, it's not jumping around or whatever. Yeah, I'm like, I don't care that much. So that's probably why. But I need to ask.
Yeah, I haven't found like a, just a person who just codes and like never streams. That's like, yeah, I love putting it on the right side. Has to have a practical reason like that. So it makes sense. Google search or ask an LLM? I still Google. I don't know. I don't even like the LLM summaries at the top because a lot of times they say yes, but then the justification is no. The data is just weird. I know people who exclusively use LLMs nowadays. My mom is one of them, but I just can't get into it yet. Yeah, I still use Google. I sometimes look at their little AI stuff too, but I don't know. Yeah, I'm not there yet. I don't fully trust it. Composition or inheritance?
Probably composition. I don't feel very strongly about this. So, yeah. Sorry, not a hot take. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think that's, I mean, we're at React Miami, I feel like. Has anyone said inheritance? Because you can't use classes in React, really. I mean, you can. What did Joel say? Didn't Joel say inheritance? He might have. I don't know. I think so. Yeah, I'm not sure. NPM or PNPM? I am very used to NPM and Resend uses PNPM, so I'm like trying to switch over, but I don't know. I just, it's simpler. I know it's just one character, but I like the classic. Yeah. Think of all the time you'll save not typing that extra P. Right. Yeah. It is really trippy also to try to do that. Sorry. SCSS or SAS? Yeah.
I think Sass, but again, not super, not super, a lot of skin in the game here. Okay, that's fair. JSX or Jade? What's Jade? I don't know about this. Right? It's also called pug. It's a templating language. I'll go look this up afterwards. It's not something people still use, I don't think. Do they? I don't think so. Occasionally in a code pen, it can be really nice to just create a loop and generate 50 divs of something without a whole bunch of ceremony. Yeah. Anthropic or OpenAI? Yeah. I like Anthropic. I know there's been some strange decisions from my perspective lately, but I really do like the focus on humanness and being more intentional and thoughtful about how we're using AI. And that's...
Maybe that's more of a branding play and I'm just like falling into that. But I don't see that in open AI. That being said, like for personal stuff, I do use a lot of like just the ChatGPT app and stuff. So I'm not like super like a diehard fan or anything. Like I'm not going to use open AI. But yeah, kind of split. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I feel like I was big on Anthropic, and then they just kept being assholes about random stuff, and I'm just like, no, I'm not sure. But you have the best models. The open club stuff has been very strange. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, like, to me, I mean, I guess the whole thing is they don't want to give up control, but, like, if you're making money off of the people either way, it should be fine, in my opinion, but I guess it's against their terms of service or whatever. Yeah.
And the copyright strike thing with the creator, I feel like that was a little bit of a fumble where they could have like hired him or acquired it. Yeah, just acquired it day one and been like, this is ours. Yeah. But yeah, that was a very strange, strange way that that unfolded. Yeah, for sure. So I guess related Hermes or Openclaw? Okay, so at Resend, we hired some OpenClaw bots, and one of them is named Hermes. And so this throws me off so bad. I've never tried Hermes. But anytime anyone posts about Hermes, I'm like, how do you know about this OpenClaw that we hired internally and we haven't really talked about a lot? It's like Waz. Hey, what? No, that's mine. Yeah.
Yeah, and Hermes has its own personality. And I found a tool where you can invite your OpenClaw bot into Google Meet. So I had a Google Meet with Hermes. So again, I'm personifying it way too hard. But I feel attached to Hermes. And it's weird that there's another Hermes out there. So I got to try it now. There can be only one. Yeah. Crocs or flip-flops? Oh, I got some Crocs with little Taylor Swift charms on them. So my like powder blue Taylor Swift Crocs are like are good. I'm not a huge Crocs person other than that. So probably flip flops. Nice. The Taylor Swift marketing game of like all the products. She's so good. Like I'll be at Target with my son and he's like, I want to look at books. There's like at least 10 children's books that are like Taylor Swift related. I'm like.
what yeah nuts i'm a notorious swifty so for my birthday my mom got me some like taylor swift things and one was like a children's like sticker book where you put the outfits on her and stuff and it was it's for like five-year-olds and i'm like what age am i turning again like this is the type of gift that i'm getting but yeah she's like her marketing empire is crazy that's case study and how to build a brand Oh, for sure. Do you like all the latest albums or like I do? The last one was there's like half the songs that I actually listen to. I have one playlist that's no skips and it's like three songs. And then one that's like if I'm in the mood, I can listen to some more. But there's some that I skip immediately. So I don't know. Probably not my favorite album, but there's some good ones.
Yeah. I don't know. I'm not a big Taylor Swift fan, but I feel like the last few albums have not been great, in my opinion. But I like really poppy stuff, and so it's more deep now, I guess, on some of them. Well, the last one wasn't, so maybe you'll like that one. I heard that Taylor Swift doesn't like whimsy and UI. Well, she'll hate my Taylor Swift tool. I'm just messing with you. That's fake news, everybody. I hate whimsy. Direct quote. I needed to create some spice. Okay. I don't know where. East Coast or West Coast? West Coast. I'm from Washington State. It's the best place. I love it, especially in the summer. You can't beat that. Whiskey Neater on the Rocks.
Probably on the rocks. I'm not really a whiskey person. I go more for like tequila or rum or something. It has to be a little more sweet. So, but I'll try it eventually, like a couple of times. I know that's like part of this whole podcast. So sorry if that's traitorous. No, it's all good. Taylor Swift likes whiskey. There we go. Black coffee or with milk? I like both. I can do either black coffee or like the most sugary Starbucks drink ever. And I consider them two different categories. And I just like both. So nice. That's fair. Yeah. All right. So, yeah, I do want to. That was a lot of hot takes. We're done with that. Let's talk about some silly software. All right. I want to hear a little bit about your talk to how to go. Yeah.
It was good. I think there was a couple of like AV related issues that I had that like timing with the clicker was weird. I've never done anything with the clicker before or any presentation really at all outside of the classroom. And so that was like something to get used to. People, everyone staring at me, the lights being bright, all that is like... Brand new to me. But I feel like overall it went really, really well. I've had a lot of people come up and say it was inspiring to them. One guy bought a domain last night, and he was telling me about how he's going to build this app for his mom for Mother's Day. It's really cool to see the reception. It's been really sweet.
Nice. Yeah, I saw a lot of tweets saying it was really good. I haven't watched any talks, really. Me neither. Our butts have been in these chairs. Yeah. Yep. Yeah, these chairs have been so comfortable. No, they haven't. No. She's like, wow, you sat in these all day. Yeah, like eight hours straight talking. Yeah. But, yeah, tell us about some of your favorites from Silly Software. What do you think are... Yeah. Some of the good ones. Like my own or other ones that I've seen? Well, it could be your own or yeah, just whatever you think is the silliest and most fun, I guess. Well, one of the ones that I built was actually inspired by someone else. His name is Justin and he made a video that I saw on Instagram. I was just scrolling one day and came across this video where he was like imagining what it would be like if Gen Z programmers could like code in their slang.
And I just thought the video was really funny. And I was thinking, like, I bet that I could totally make this happen. So I ended up making a Babel plug-in that allows you to code in that Gen Z slang or Internet slang. And it transpiles it into valid JavaScript. So you can, like, yeet an L instead of throwing an error. Wait, what's an L? Like an error. A loss. Oh, yeah. Oh. Oh, are you too old for this? Sorry. I am. He's 75. He looks good for his age. I hear yeet, and I think of Lil Jon or whatever with the skeet. Oh, no. Yeet is like throw. You just throw it out. Yeah. Yeah. So you throw an error. You yeet and null. Can you do like if cap or no cap? Yeah.
It's cap and on God, and no cap also worked. What are you guys saying to each other? What is cap? Have you not seen the Ryan Reynolds Gen Z slang thing? No, is this an SNL bit? No, I don't know where it was from. No. Sorry, not Ryan Reynolds. Ryan Gosling. One of the Ryans. The Project Hail Mary guy. I'm sure you've seen the videos. Yeah, Ryan Gosling. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, I don't know. This is the funniest thing you should know about it. Dang it. Gen Z slang is so good. Oh, man. Send it to me. The whole point is to, like... I only know Drip and... That might be it. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. What are some other things in the Babel plugin? Drip is in there. I'm trying, like...
Console.log is lowkey.sus. There's stuff like that. I can't remember them all off the top of my head. This was a couple of years ago that this happened. But it was really fun to use it as a learning tool to learn how Babel plugins work and the AST tree and all this stuff. And it like went viral. It got 3.2 million views on Instagram. And like I was not expecting that. I had like no like platform at all. And just posted this video thinking like it's going to get 100 views, you know, and it went crazy and it got like 99 pull requests. There's almost a thousand GitHub stars. And there was someone here that was like it was a group of him and his other like
startup founders and they were just kind of like burnt out and needing like a way to blow off steam so they like live streamed themselves like adding like a pull request to like add some new features into this Babel plugin and so he he came up to me and was like I was that guy and that was so crazy to meet him I didn't think I didn't expect anything would come out of it so it's just that was a really cool experience and I was happy to be there. Awesome. Yeah. I feel like anything that has a little bit of cleverness to it, like you take coding, but you make it fun, always does really well. Yeah. Like there's, have you seen the guy that's like a sequel in the trap or something like that? I haven't. And he's like talking about how you would use like sequel to determine if the guys come into the trap to buy drugs are feds or not, basically. It's hilarious.
Check it out for sure. I should know who he is, but I don't. So shout out to some guy who made a thing. Yeah. So yeah, do you want to talk a little bit about Resend or Resend Forward or any of the things? Yeah. Resend is an email API for developers and it's a really cool company to work for. It's a really great group of people. We're organizing our first conference this year. And so that's been a really, really fun project to work on. I was hired as a DX engineer, but quickly switched over into a lot of event stuff. And so that's like my big capstone project for right now. But that's happening October 21st. I've been to conferences before where it's like very self-congratulatory and like not very interesting to me personally because it's just like an in-person product launch type of thing. And that's not what I'm looking for at this conference.
Email's boring. No offense. Like, I think... Wait, Doom can run in an email. What? Doom can run in an email. It can? Yes, it can. I need to see this. Well, couldn't you embed anything in it? What do you mean? No, it will run in the emails that will sanitize the hell out of the email. You can still run Doom in those. Like in a div? Yeah. Nice. That sounds like silly software to me. It is, yeah. There's this dude in London who has been just pushing the boundaries of email for years. It's like his favorite thing to do. Yeah, he ran Doom in it, I think last year, two years ago. Wow. I need to find this. That's the thing is like Will It Doom? Will It Doom, yeah. Of every single thing that everybody has to try it, yeah. I saw Doom in a terminal like a week ago, so that was interesting. All the ASCII art and everything. Oh, I love it.
Yeah, we're trying to make the conference more about creating software that we're really proud of. So very crafted interfaces and attention to detail and user experience and that kind of thing. So that's been a lot of fun to work on, both from that kind of aspect and also just all the new challenges that come with doing in-person stuff and all the things you would never think about about how to make a conference great. So that's been a lot of fun. Nice. You're taking notes then? Yeah. Yeah. This conference is amazing. And Becca and Michelle do such a good job. So I'm trying to see what is it that I can copy and steal from them that make this so special. Yeah. Shout out to Becca and Michelle. Nice. They're the best. It's so much work doing a conference. It is. I could not do it. Yeah. It's hard, but it's going to be fun. And I feel like we're prepared so far. So I might regret saying that. I might be chinkuk myself. Yeah.
Nice, nice. Well, yeah, excited to see how that goes. Yeah. We're about at time here. Is there anything that we missed that you want to mention? I don't think so. Thanks for having me on. You guys are great. Yeah, of course. Cool. All right. Thanks, everyone, for listening. If you liked it, please subscribe, leave some ratings and reviews. We appreciate it, and we will catch you next time. Congratulations, citizen. You are now prepared to face the challenges of the modern technological world. With the proper tools, a steady hand, and a reasonably configured terminal, any developer can orchestrate AI agents with confidence. You'll do just fine. Thank you for listening to Whiskey, Web, and Whatnot, the world's most important AI podcast.
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