105: Laravel New, Again  ## Metadata - Author: [[Mostly Technical]] - Full Title: 105: Laravel New, Again - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/cdfd0a61-4c7d-4c9a-b99d-795b014e31c4 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Train Trip And Wire:live Experience** - Ian described taking a six-and-a-half hour train to Buffalo for the inaugural Wire:live conference and enjoying the trip and venue. - He praised the intimate ~125-person event format and Caleb's talk, calling the conference well-run and friendly. Transcript: Ian Landsman It was great. Had a big trip. Went to Wire Live, the inaugural Wire Live, which is a live wire conference thrown by Caleb and the Thunk Boys. And it was great. It was in Buffalo, New York, which I never thought I'd even go to Buffalo, New York. Why would you? Oh, why would you, right? It turns out Buffalo is a very nice place. It was better than I expected. Your expectations are so low, you know, that like when it's actually, you know, it's easy to see them, and it did. And not even just like a little bit. It was great. We did some fun stuff. We can go through it all. But yeah, Buffalo was great. I took the train like a proper 1800s gentleman up to the to the great north that was great highly recommend only took you 20 to 40 hours depending on you would think yeah well it actually Ended up being no big deal it was uh six and a half hours okay and because they have a pretty direct train there are other trains but they have like layovers and places and that would have Been like nine hours is it high speed so is it like 35 40 miles per hour right well it's like 35 40 miles yeah so fast that's crazy but here's the thing so my choices are drive which is fine But it's also like about six hours or so it's it's not much faster just beyond my limit yeah yeah It's like, it's not like the nice, oh, it's three and a half hours. Fine. I'm automatically driving. So it's like six hours, the electric car, I'm going to have to stop to charge, blah, blah, blah. Okay. So get that. So I could do that. That would be my A plan generally. The B plan was like, okay, an airplane, of course. But for me, it means I either got to do a layover somewhere from a local airport, which is not happening. Or I got to drive to New York City. I got to deal with traffic. I got to park for $100 a day. It takes two hours to drive down there. So that's two hours down there. You got to be there two hours early, whatever, flights, blah, blah, blah. And if you go through New York City you're either gonna get stabbed or pooped on oh obviously that's that's what they claim but it's not true i just on a little side note just yesterday I went for a beautiful hike a hike through the woods next to a river see that's in new york city in new york city i was in new york city what i was this like a virtual reality experience the Bronx like what would ostensibly be the scariest part of the city. I was in the Bronx and had a beautiful hike on 140 acre park along the Hudson River. It was fantastic. So it sounds nice. It was a little New York City for you. But yeah, so all that, like go to New York City, take a plane actually is longer than six hours and more expensive and more hassle. So I didn't really want to do that. So the train, the train picked me up in my city. Like, boom, picked me up right in Poughkeepsie. Aaron Francis It came by. It came by. It picked you up. I must not know as much about trains as I thought I did because I didn't think they could like swing by. I thought it was kind of a fixed thing. That's awesome. That's because you're from Texas. You don't even know about trains. I don't even have trains in Texas. I'm thinking of old school trains that like stay on the tracks and go, you know, direct places. But nice of them to swing by, pick you up. That's great. Ian Landsman They swung right by. So that was very convenient. And then, yeah, got a business class ticket, a little room. Oh, that's nice. Wi-Fi on the train? They do have Wi-Fi. It was okay. Not amazing. But it was fine. There was actually internet in general, though, for most of the ride, which I'm kind of surprised about because you wouldn't expect this. But most of New York State is extremely rural. And this train goes through much of this extremely ruralness of New York State. Aaron Francis What's the name of your town? Where do you live? Ian Landsman Poughkeepsie. P-O K-E Okay. Aaron Francis Poughkeepsie. Ian Landsman So it's right on the Hudson River. So the train goes up the Hudson River, stopping at various points, hits Albany, makes a left at Albany, and then just goes out that way to Buffalo. Aaron Francis Okay. And then Buffalo. This is good radio. I'm putting it into maps.google Oh, wow. That is far away. Ian Landsman Yeah. New York State's big. New York State is really big. Aaron Francis Okay. Ian Landsman All right. Cool. So, yeah. So, the train was good. You know, the little food car, which no, was not amazing, but actually it was, you know, not as bad as you might expect. I read online that the mac and cheese was solid. So I got the mac and cheese on the way back. Actually, it was good. Aaron Francis Nothing like mac and cheese from a train. Ian Landsman Had some snacks and whatever. It was fine. Free, uh, free non-alcoholic beverages, uh, since I was in business class. So that was a nice little perk. Yeah. Crushed some sodas. Uh, had a little decaf coffee. I've been dipping my toe back in the coffee game a little bit, just decaf stuff. Love that for you. Yeah, so are you a coffee man? Aaron Francis Oh, yeah, big time. Okay, all right. Ian Landsman Not like a coffee snob. Aaron Francis I just drink a lot of it. I'm not very sophisticated. I just like it. Ian Landsman So I haven't had coffee in 12 years. I know. No coffee. None. I know. But this last couple weeks, it was very nice being at a conference, having a coffee. What's better than that? Nothing. Yeah. So I had a decaf. Can't go to the hard stuff. I'm never going back to the hard stuff. But it was nice to have a decaf coffee. Yeah. So that was the trip up there. So, so far, so good. It was got to Buffalo, hung out with a bunch, get there, see like the vehicle guys, hang out with them. So did you get there on day zero, I assume? Yes. So I got there on day zero. Caleb talked about this in his podcast a little bit, but he wanted to do kind of a mostly technical party. I heard. We got the name drop. I love that for us. So he did the little last minute party thing, which was great. I actually only made it to like the last like half an hour that but made it to that whatever had fun chatted blah blah um yeah and then next day was the conference the hotel was really nice Dug the hotel uh yeah it was good and the venue was in the hotel but it wasn't like a conf like a normal generic hotel venue it was like yeah this old theater yeah it was really cool. Apparently it used to be some kind of gentleman's club, not the modern interpretation of that word, but more the old school. Aaron Francis When gentlemen were actually gentlemen. Yeah. They would come together and talk about literature and smoke cigars and stuff. Ian Landsman Exactly. Drink a scotch, whatever. So, yeah, so it was a really nice theater. Aaron Francis All right. Give us a sense of, for those that aren't plugged into the Livewire world, approximate number of attendees, shapes of the programming, that sort of stuff. Ian Landsman Yeah. So I think he said 125 people. I think it was like a good amount. It was like it was small enough that I think everybody wanted to talk to Caleb, got to talk to Caleb, which was cool. And it wasn't like the place was overwhelmed, but it also wasn't empty. It was like just right. I think that worked out good. Aaron Francis For a first year in Buffalo, that's incredible. Ian Landsman Yeah, I think they thought it would be much less popular. And a lot of people flew, like a lot of people. I was surprised how many people flew from Europe, from Eastern Europe. Yeah. So it was crazy. And just ([Time 0:01:55](https://share.snipd.com/snip/efa0f664-9b79-4748-89da-481c65122b35)) - **What Blaze Adds To Blade** - Blaze is a separate Blade enhancement package you opt into by marking components with @blaze to use its compiler. - It precompiles static parts of templates to dramatically speed rendering where components are mostly static. Transcript: Ian Landsman Yeah, so you have to install it separately. It's its own package. It has nothing at all to do with Livewire. So it's not connected to Livewire at all. It's basically strictly a Blade enhancement package. And it's enhancing the rendering engine of Blade. And you have to opt into it further. So installing it does nothing. So you install it, and then you have to put at Blaze at the top of your blade components and that will then use the Blaze compiler instead of the normal blade compiler and that will do magical Things primarily through like code folding and other things I don't fully understand to figure out what it can optimize, what it doesn't need to work dynamically, basically. So this part is a little bit confusing. I haven't totally wrapped my head around it. But basically, if you're passing like dynamic data in, it doesn't really do anything for you. It has some other little optimizations that make it slightly faster, but it's not going to be radically faster but places where you get more static uh type of blade components and those Are much much faster so got it uh it's not fully static but it's like you can pass things into slots and stuff so if you're building like a table and you have like the cell as a component and The row as a component and like whatever the whole thing's a component right all that stuff a lot of that should be much faster or you can at least construct it to be faster so that type of Stuff is what it's really designed for there's other elements where like it can't improve it because it needs access to like like i know one of the examples he's given is like it needs Access to the error bag and if you need if you have something that needs access to the error bag like that has to be dynamic or you have if you have access to the request like it's can't pre-compile It because the request is different every time or if you're accessing like auth user stuff that can't be pre-compiled uh because it needs access to that so again i think long term there's Gonna be like tricks to some of this stuff potentially when you need ultra optimization of like well can i do something in one component and then pass the output of that to a different Component which is able to be compiled and some of that can maybe be helpful if it's being looped over and whatever blah blah but everything is much faster like in practical terms you Know it pretty much instantly make things in like outro like two times faster three times faster and sounds like you did yeah if there's this new paradigm you got to start outro all over Aaron Francis Again from from scratch don't smile like that do not oh no no no you're kidding you're kidding you're doing you're doing it over again Dude. Ian. Oh, no. I thought, what is the most absurd callback I can make to give the people a little laugh on their drive to work? And you just stone cold stared into the camera. You're kidding me. Ian Landsman Laravel knew forever. Never ship. Aaron Francis Laravel knew forever. Ian Landsman I got to get you stickers. Aaron Francis I gotta get you stickers made that say we mustn't ship. That is the new Ian sticker. We mustn't ship. You are insane. This is the worst news I have potentially heard all morning. And I've been up for a few hours now. Oh, no. Laravel New. Okay. I don't know where to go from here. Ian Landsman Do we take a little detour on Laravel New or do we want to hold on that? Aaron Francis This is what happens when you make little jokes. You know, you can't make little jokes because then the show gets derailed. Okay. Let's see. Let's keep going. Let's keep the people. Let's bait them. Let's keep going on Livewire while I recompose myself. Yeah, you have questions. And then we'll get around to Laravel New, which is a disaster. Laravel New! So Blaze. Yeah. So that's pretty much the Blaze story. Ian Landsman It makes your shift faster. Use it. If you use Flux, which you should absolutely be using, Flux is already pre-Blazed so it's just gonna, like, magically make stuff faster that you're using Flux for. So, yeah, so, you know, I think there's still a lot of work there. ([Time 0:13:52](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1a434b3a-de1f-48eb-b87a-99e058939eab)) - **Advocate Merging Blade Improvements** - Consider consolidating Blade improvements like Forte and Blaze into first-party Blade to benefit the whole ecosystem. - Encourage Laravel to adopt community innovations to avoid fragmentation and improve default performance. Transcript: Aaron Francis Want to make a prediction and a prophecy just as an aside. I think Laravel needs to hire John Koster, the king of Blade. And I think John's project Forte and Caleb's project Blaze need to be combined and turned into just Blade. Blade just needs to do this. Blade just needs to be better. We should take all three of those projects, Blade Original, Forte, which is John's, and Blaze, which is Caleb's. Because I have to imagine Caleb doesn't want to maintain this. This doesn't make him money. It just provides for Flux and Livewire to be more performant. So I don't feel bad saying that. All three of those should be rolled into one. John should be the Blade czar inside of Laravel Incorporated, Laravel Holdings, LLC. I'm sorry. And Blade should just get better. That is my prophecy. I'm speaking that into the universe. Ian Landsman I don't know if John is happily employed or not. Who can say? It doesn't matter. Who cares? It's not the point of prophecy. Got to do. I totally agree. It should just be part of Blade. ([Time 0:18:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/08667b8e-3c78-4830-bd11-103fadb6882a)) - **Namespaces And Single-File Components** - Livewire 4 adds single-file components and component namespaces to organize large apps more cleanly. - Namespaced components simplify routing and reduce imports by allowing route declarations like App::home to reference components directly. Transcript: Ian Landsman I mean, there's like a huge thing I found this weekend after Laravel Nude is I've always in general had this. I first, one of the big changes is that now you can have single file components, which you could do with Volt before. So I think this goes further than Volt now. I don't know if Volt really needs to exist anymore. I assume not, but it'll still be maintained in case you need the compatibility stuff. But I think the single file components now native to Livewire will do it. So I was not necessarily into this. I was like, I don't like when everything's all mixed in there or whatever. It's not my favorite. And you can still do multi-file and there's like a traditional class base, which is how it's always worked. There's like a new multi-file, which is like a folder with a blade and a JavaScript and a test and whatever, different files, whatever. But I wasn't going to use a single file. But there's a new thing, which is so cool, which is now you can make these namespaces, component namespaces, which is something I always hit. It's like, where do I put, like, my apps are big, complicated apps. So like there's the, in Outro, there's the app, what I call the app, which is like where you will go in and plan your podcast, right? But then there's like a public facing component of some stuff you can do that's just public. Then there's like an admin panel. Then there's, there's even else already inherent to it. But anyway, there's like already like four or five different like sort of zones and they might have different permissions and different layouts. Aaron Francis In theory, because nothing has ever been built to fruition. But just in theory. Okay. Yeah. Keep going. Ian Landsman So you put those things in folders and then, you know, to call your components becomes this long tree of dot syntax things. And it all feels a little bit fuzzy. And you have things in multiple places because you have a liwire folder and you have the resources folder with stuff in it and whatever. So now you can have the namespaces. So the namespaces let you do this nice little syntax. It's like app colon colon episodes, let's say. And now that's just the path to your component of that page or whatever. It has several different uses. So now it's like, okay. And now in the resources views directory is where all the Livewire components live. And you don't need the other directory anymore, like in the app folders, the traditional Livewire place for it. So now I'm like, so that's kind of brought me around to the single file components because now it's also clean. Now it's like, oh, there's just this one folder with all my Livewire stuff. It's in different folders for different sort of areas of the app, but they're all namespace. So I can reference them nice and easy. You also use these references, for example, in your routing. So when you route, you do like route Livewire. And then, you know, if you're doing the homepage, you do a slash. And then you do app colon colon home as like your route so you don't even have like an import anymore which i also like the routes file in a real app gets like gigantic because there's a thousand Imports whatever so now you don't have any of that stuff just this like little syntax right to your full page component uh which is now a single file and that's all great and then you can Sell a components directory for actual components which are not full page components like just a widget that displays the weather whatever there's a counter blah blah all those little Pieces i can't believe is doing weather now but that makes sense yeah the weather yeah um so this whole thing is just like a little thing that he threw in there. They thought it'd be nice. And I think it's actually super cool for organizing a bigger, real Laravel slash Livewire app. Like this is like a cool little addition. That is also something that maybe makes sense in Laravel itself in some ways. But so you have that. That was a big thing. Caleb, like, you know, I the greatest uh one-on call what do we even call these things what do you call programming pair programming i don't even know what they're called because i've Never done it except for one time with caleb and caleb and me did that for an hour or two and he went off and he took a bunch of my ideas from outro and made that his talk and basically built All the stuff I would need to build. Great. So you got scooped. So Outro is built, but not by you. Aaron Francis Perfect. Ian Landsman But it's in a great way though, because I was going to have to build all this stuff and instead I have to build any of it. ([Time 0:21:53](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a0752a86-918f-4abd-b15d-c2c28750a4d5)) - **Bribed Uber Over The Border For Poker** - Ian and a friend bribed an Uber to cross the Rainbow Bridge into Canada for Poker Day and nearly got stopped for missing documentation. - Despite lacking a passport for one traveler, the border officer let them through and they played at the casino. Transcript: Ian Landsman They specifically set aside for poker so me and daniel colborne are gonna go to canada which is the closest poker and play poker so we go we're on our way we're in an uber the first of all The uber won't go to canada no i should think not that's an international border yeah so option was go to the Rainbow Bridge, which connects our beautiful countries, and walk over. So that was kind of our plan. But, you know, it's a little bit of a hike, whatever. We're actually sure how far the casino was past the bridge, whatever. Aaron Francis That's the sketchiest thing I've ever heard. So, okay. So we can do that. Ian Landsman Option two is bribe the Uber driver. Sure. Aaron Francis I take back the sketchiest part. This is now the sketchiest thing I've ever heard. Okay, keep going. Ian Landsman So that's what I did. We bribe the Uber driver, right? So he's like, oh, 50 bucks and I'll just take you across. And I was like, okay, great. 50 bucks sold. So Uber driver's going to take us across. We go across. Well, we're on our way to go across. And he's like, okay, do you have your passports? And I didn't have a passport, but I knew I had my enhanced ID. And I know my enhanced ID gets you into Canada. Colborne doesn't have his enhanced ID. He thought he has an enhanced ID, but he has a real ID. And a real ID is not an enhanced ID. So we're going towards the border. I'm shocked. I'm shocked to find out that Daniel's headed to Canada with no proper documentation. Aaron Francis This is surprising to me. You're shocked. Of all people. Ian Landsman We're flying towards the border. We don't know what's going to happen. He's like, I'll just get out if it's a problem. But as we get closer, we see it's not so easy. There's nowhere to walk. It's not designed for you to get out and walk away. This whole story, yeah. So I was pretty nervous. We're supposed to fill out some paperwork that we have, money with us, which I don't want to do, so we don't mention the money. The guy at the booth is looking at our document. He's like, this is not the right document. We're like, yeah, we know. We're sorry. And then he lets us through. He let us through. Oh, my gosh. He let us through. Aaron Francis Why does the universe keep rewarding your bad behavior? This is unbelievable. You bribed an Uber driver to smuggle an illegal alien into the country. Ian Landsman That's exactly what happened. That's exactly what happened. Yeah, that's right. You're exactly right. That's what I did. I'm a human trafficker here. You are. Aaron Francis That's right. Oh my gosh. And if anybody is listening, well, the government's shut down. So nobody's listening. Nevermind. I was going to say this is all theoretical, but the government shut down. Nobody's listening. Okay. Carry on. Ian Landsman A great episode of Andor. Nobody's listening in the big fascist government. I don't know if you, did you watch Andor? You didn't watch Andor. It's one of my favorite episodes of TV ever. Nobody's listening. Yeah. We get there. The best part about when you bribe your Uber driver, okay, is they want to come back for more bribes. I bet. So he's like, listen, you want to come back, just call me up and I'll come back and get you. So I was like, great. So now I have my ride home set, which was just going to be later that night. I wasn't spending the night. It was great. ([Time 0:29:51](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9a4f7095-7d18-4107-97a8-ff522712e50a)) - **Laravel New After AI Failed** - Ian tried using AI to convert his app to Livewire 4 but the tool reverted changes back to Livewire 3 and produced unusable code. - He decided to perform a targeted Laravel new migration manually, moving most code and re-implementing only a few components. Transcript: Ian Landsman Again? First of all, it just feels so right when you're there in the terminal and you just type Laravel New, you know? You're an addict. It's so good. It's so good. You're an addict. I had no choice. Yes, you did. I had no choice. No, I didn't. You always have a choice. So here's the deal. First of all, I tried to not do it. I did try. And I was like, you know what? Let me just see how far I can get with AI, right? AI has taken over the world. It's going to be our overlord soon. It should be able to convert this. Of course, it did a terrible job. It was insane. What it did was insane. Aaron Francis I've been telling you, but keep going. Ian Landsman First of all, it doesn't know about LiveWire 4, right? And the whole reason to convert this is to get it to LiveWire 4. Aaron Francis Okay, so the impetus, the inciting incident is upgrade Altro V2 to LiveWire. It was on Livewire 3, and you wanted to upgrade it to Livewire 4. Ian Landsman Yes. And not just, I mean, it could upgrade in place. Like, nothing breaks, so it's fine. Like, there's almost nothing to do to upgrade 3 to 4. Just in terms of Livewire itself, I could just upgrade it, right? But, like, the point is I wanted to use the new things. Like, I want a new implementation. I want a single file components. I want to use various, I want to use the new routing setup. There's a lot of things I want to use. Okay. So it's not just like, oh, it's LiveWire 4, which would be easy. Aaron Francis No, it's like, we got to recode some of this stuff. So can you imagine like recoding stuff? Can you imagine that? Yeah. Like an idiot. Like you sit down at your keyboard and like use your fingers. Ian Landsman Like, oh, could do that can you imagine do that that's so we're not there yet so first i tried the ai and i bundle up the livewire for docs and whatever and blah blah it goes off for half an Hour it does stuff the first time the first time it gets to the end okay it's coded a bunch of stuff okay it gets to the end. And it's final message to me is it reverted it all to 3.6 livewire. There's nothing in git. It undid everything it did. This is a delight. It reverted. This is amazing. So that didn't work. So then I messed with some stuff. I got to do an actual implementation, but it was all trash, as you might expect. So, okay, that's not going to work. Okay. So I could, of course, go through line by line with the AI and have it do it, or I could go through and I started to me go through because I like, forget the AI. I'm just going to like start moving shit around. Right. So I'm in there, I'm moving shit around. It just feels icky. You know, when you have all this stuff pointing in one place and a different place, now you're changing the whole structure of the app, not just like little parts, like the whole where The files live. There's a lot of stuff that's changing. And I just didn't feel good about it. You know, stuff's going to get left orphaned in places, not trying to have weird orphan stuff. The only path forward was Laravel. It was the only path forward. Aaron Francis This sounds so much like post hoc justification, but you know what? It's great for content. So I will allow it. This is objectively insane, but it's going to drive a lot of comments. And so, you know, I'm kind of happy. That's great. That's great for me. So I'll take the edge off it slightly. Ian Landsman Okay me it's not the same as my last laravel new okay so my last laravel new was like okay we are back at a blank slate right i don't like how any of this stuff works in the ui and we are going To reconceptualize what's going on here that is not this so this is already i'm already almost done because it's much faster like all the actions and stuff are fine Move them over. A bunch of other setup stuff and a middleware I have that does some shit and like whatever. All that stuff. Move it over. Move it over. Okay, fine. And all the like UI stuff I've done. I'm not getting into the UI. That will eventually, as I get through the last few parts I have to do, which is like kind of the biggest, chunkiest stuff that was implemented. Like that's all just moving over as is. I'm not redoing the UI. I'm not rethinking about how stuff works. So that part's all the same. Now I will have to re-implement some of that stuff in the LiveWire 4 way with the new LiveWire 4 sorting tricks and some of the other things that have been added and make it faster, better, Stronger. So I will have to like hand code and think through those parts of it. So there'll be a little work there. But that's literally a couple full page components that are at that stage of like, that's a fair amount of work and I'm going to have to work through it. 85% of this is copy and pasting. Most of the rest is not much more than copy and pasting. And a couple, you know, there'll be a couple hours of like work, work. ([Time 0:38:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/341a5be2-39a2-4420-876c-e398394ca0de)) - **Replatform By Copying, Then Rebuild Critical Parts** - When replatforming, move stable app logic and UI as-is and reimplement only components needing new framework features. - Focus effort on a few complex components while copying the rest to regain a working baseline quickly. Transcript: Ian Landsman It's not the same as my last laravel new okay so my last laravel new was like okay we are back at a blank slate right i don't like how any of this stuff works in the ui and we are going to reconceptualize What's going on here that is not this so this is already i'm already almost done because it's much faster like all the actions and stuff are fine Move them over. A bunch of other setup stuff and a middleware I have that does some shit and like whatever. All that stuff. Move it over. Move it over. Okay, fine. And all the like UI stuff I've done. I'm not getting into the UI. That will eventually, as I get through the last few parts I have to do, which is like kind of the biggest, chunkiest stuff that was implemented. Like that's all just moving over as is. I'm not redoing the UI. I'm not rethinking about how stuff works. So that part's all the same. Now I will have to re-implement some of that stuff in the LiveWire 4 way with the new LiveWire 4 sorting tricks and some of the other things that have been added and make it faster, better, Stronger. So I will have to like hand code and think through those parts of it. So there'll be a little work there. But that's literally a couple full page components that are at that stage of like, that's a fair amount of work and I'm going to have to work through it. 85% of this is copy and pasting. Most of the rest is not much more than copy and pasting. And a couple, you know, there'll be a couple hours of like work, work. And then I'll be back where I was. So this is a much shorter okay much shorter laravel new it's not it's not quite as crazy it's ([Time 0:41:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/312dd2ed-27b9-47f4-a51b-696b74e4143b)) - **Reading Habit Replaces Social Media** - Aaron adopted a social-media block routine and replaced many podcasts with Digital Minimalism and The Intellectual Life books. - He reads daily in the studio and uses highlighting to capture valuable passages for later review. Transcript: Aaron Francis He's the guy that wrote Deep Work. He's written a couple others. This one is Digital Minimalism. It's very good. So that's my drive around book. When I get to work, when I get here to the studio in the morning, I start by like spending about 30 minutes reading. It's great. I come in. I've got my coffee that I just drove through and picked up. Walk in. Open the sliding glass door because it's cold outside now. And I sit there. It is. It hits like sometimes it gets into the 50s. Yeah. I know. That's what I'm saying. And then read for about 30 minutes. And then I'm reading at home. So I have my office book and I have my home book at home. Double book. Double, triple because of the audio. At home, I'm reading a book called The Intellectual Life. And I kid you not, this is the best book I've ever read. Oh, the best book have ever read. It's an old timey book. It is an old timey book. It was written in the 20s, written in the 20s by, you'll have to forgive me, I don't know my orders very well. I think it's a Dominican monk, maybe a Benedictine monk. I don't know. That's not really my side of the religion. I don't know the monks that well. But it's really interesting. It's interesting how much he's like, oh, in this day and age, in this day and age, you really have to fight hard for your attention. And I'm like, my brother in Christ, you have no idea. Ian Landsman Can you imagine dropping that guy into 2025? Aaron Francis Oh, no way. Be wild. He would instantly explode. And it's really interesting to read a book that's 100 years old, which is, you know, ostensibly the same spiritual genre as business books, right? It's not a business book, but it's like, you know, self-improvement, that kind of stuff. So it's close enough to business books. Ian Landsman It's not a fictional book from 100 years ago, you know, which is not, it's irrelevant. Like that's 100 years old. Aaron Francis It's not like a book about, you know, the Spanish war. It is like how to improve yourself, but 100 years ago. And these days, business books, self-development, personal development, self-help, whatever. It's like they had one idea and then they filled 180 pages with one idea. With one idea. This book, every single page is something new. It's all built around this like how to live like a life of like studiousness and seeking like to seeking knowledge and truth. It's all built around that idea. But it's not just like I haven't ever read Atomic Habits, Atomic Habits, but I get I get it from the title. You know, I kind of I could read a blog post about Atomic Habits and be like, I got the idea. This one, every chapter, every page is something new and practical very very very practical it's amazing it's so good i'm only like uh i guess now i'm probably 60 of the way through but Yeah i read a lot this weekend and i'm just like highlighting stuff on every page so i'm feeling great what's your note-taking strategy for the book? Ian Landsman Are you just physically highlighting and that's it? Are you bringing digital? No, I physically highlight. Aaron Francis I haven't gotten any further than that. In fact, at the end, one of the last chapters in the book is about note taking. And so we'll see, that may change. I should have started there first. But yeah, right now, and this is how I do my technical studies as well, is I just, as I'm reading and something stands out to me, I highlight it. When I'm doing technical reading, I also have, I don't know if I have any around here, but I have a sticky note flags, just like post-it notes, colorful post-it notes that I've cut such That they're really thin and a little bit short. And then I just flag the top of the page so that I know every page that has a flag has a highlight and I should go back and review it before I start prepping the material. So I'm not like flipping page by page and be like, I haven't highlighted anything in 30 pages. But on this one, I haven't done that. But I imagine, I don't know, I imagine I'll go back through and maybe write out some synopses of like the chapters and maybe pull out some of my favorite highlights or something. I'm not really sure. I'll let you know when I get to the note taking section of the book. But it's very good. It is. It is. I didn't know that this was a religious book at all. And I wouldn't say that it's actually religious. It talks a lot about how seeking good and truth is similar to seeking God. And so it combines those things somewhat often. I had no idea it was written by a monk. I don't even know where I found it. I probably saw it on Twitter, was like, I'll buy it. It showed up. And then like two months later, I'm like, I wonder what this book is. And I opened it up. So that part was like a pleasant surprise. You know, the beginning is all about why this is a good thing for the I think they continue to say Catholic, but why this is a good thing for the Christian person to do to seek knowledge and Be studious and like focus and concentrate. And I'm like, yeah, I'm on board with that. I happen to believe that as well. But then the rest of the book is all about like how to prepare your evenings and your mornings and the fact that you have responsibilities and like you can't just like wander out into the Wilderness and how it's like you do you can become an intellectual on two hours a day. You just need to focus and here are ways to focus and here are things you can do. And it's like, this is amazing. This is so perfect for this like phase I'm going through of like, I need to get my brain back. ([Time 0:50:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/79ebf2a8-aa26-4cb4-b9e1-7204837a80e3)) - **Script Videos Before Recording** - Prepare technical videos fully in writing before recording to speed production and reduce dread. - Aaron found pre-writing all scripts allowed faster recording and smoother screen-to-chalkboard transitions. Transcript: Aaron Francis I've been like just knocking them out. And so I did it a little bit different this time in that I prepared all of the material in written form. Normally, I'm like, I get an outline with some bullet points. I record, I sit down to record a video and I like prepare the video and then record it. And then I prepare the next video and then record it, which ends up taking a long time. Um, but I think in some, you know, you, you have to spend the time somewhere. And this time I decided to spend the time up front preparing all of the videos. So that took a while. And now I'm just like going out there and hitting record and, and doing it. And it's like, it's working. The chalkboard, I'm using it at appropriate times. I don't feel like it's kitschy. I don't feel like I have to use it. I'm still using the screen a ton. But there are times where I'm like, if I were in the studio, I would be like using my hands to try to like, you know, illustrate some point. But really, only I am visualizing. And now out there, I can just draw it and be like, see, when this goes here and that goes there, it's like, hey, Bob's your uncle. And it just works so much better. And so that was my last big fear was I did all this thing, all this stuff. It looks beautiful. But in practice, is it going to be helpful? Is it going to be useful? And I have decided it is very helpful and it is very useful. ([Time 0:57:14](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c28660fd-2cb9-4af1-8362-96971659698b)) - **Advent Of Sequel Donated To Database School** - Dan Kentfield donated adventofsequel.com and its challenges to Aaron so he can run an Advent of SQL event in December. - Aaron plans to expand the challenges with storylines and varying difficulty to attract a wider audience. Transcript: Aaron Francis And I'm like, that's awesome. And the email went on to say, do you want it for free? And I'm like, wait, wait, wait, what? And so I, you know, I emailed him back and I was like, what are you talking about? Are you sure? And he's like, yeah, I think you're the best person for it. I don't, you know, I don't want to run it again this year. I'm actually moving on to advent of vibe coding.com the challenge starts in 27 days so advent of vibe coding.com um which is very cool so dan kentfield uh who's his twitter handle is not A vibe coder so uh this is this is good i think he's actually like a proper engineer um and he's doing this as a way to like help vibe coders become proper engineers um so yeah he reached out And was like sure i'll hand it over to you let me transfer the domain let me get the email export like here's all the challenges i did last year like good luck have fun and i was like are you Kidding me so that's crazy i told him i told him that at some point in the future i'll give him you know free ad reads shout outs whatever because he refused to let me pay um so y'all definitely Go check out advent of vibe coding and be on the listen for more nice things about dan kentfield because he's a very nice guy that donated advent of Sequel to me. Just put yourself out there. I know. People give you business opportunities. It's crazy. So Kelsey and I are working together on coming up with, you know, challenges and increasing difficulty and light storylines to keep it fun and that kind of stuff. So hopefully that'll bring in some cast a wider net than just like people that follow me. So that'll be fun. So thanks to Dan for donating adventofsequel.com. ([Time 1:11:52](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b52a7818-0a78-4352-afdf-4278239860b5)) - **Horse Medical Bill Resolution** - Ian updated that the horse medical bills and lease outcome were resolved after the owner paid bills and submitted insurance. - They will stop paying the horse lease and seek a new horse while keeping losses limited. Transcript: Ian Landsman We were very scared about the cost of the horse content and the horse not horse content the horse situation I'm not going to rehash here listen to last week but it turns out everything's Okay uh the the owner I think didn't put us on her insurance like she was supposed to which is a problem that is but she ended up paying for the bills herself so that she can submit them to Insurance because, like, you can't, you kind of have to, like, be on the insurance. If we had paid the bills, that would have been weird to submit to insurance because we're nobody since we weren't put on the insurance. So she paid the bill. She's submitting the insurance. She's dealing with it. So in the end, we have not lost too much money. We only lost the rest of this lease. So the last six months of the actual cost of the lease. But we're not paying for the horse anymore in the barn. So that part's okay. So we're kind of getting money back, so to speak. And we didn't really pay much of the vet bills in general. Maybe there's going to be a small one. What a fantastic outcome. So it's all roses. It's great news. We're not out many thousands of dollars. And yeah, hunky-dory. So we're on the horse train still. We've got to find a new horse. ([Time 1:14:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d0fcaa0a-9d93-4d63-9abf-3237e2bf263a))