Amy Dutton 
===

~With the kids.~

~Okay. Bye mom. Bye.~

~not much like your Vandy.~

~Oh, I have a delay on my end. Let me figure out where it is.~

~are you talking about us? James~

~Like a backwards compliment,~

~Yeah. Or when we started recording, not when we released content. Yeah. It's tax week, . But Mark, we'll, mark two years~

~Thank you my apologies, I already said this to Kate, but my kids are getting on the bus right now, so I'm like trying to make sure that they're getting on the bus and they're licking the mailbox right now, , because there's icicles coming. Yes, . And I'm like, oh, good. It~

~Oh man. It is. But they're on the bus now, so they had a two, they had a two hour delay this morning. Oh my goodness. First it was the tree. I saw them, like the tree branch, and then they moved to the mailbox. So continue on. Sorry for the disruption,~

~That's right.~

~There's only been one that we've had to rerecord but it only took one time.~

~No. You still sound good?~

~Oh man.~

~Oh yeah.~

~He was crying.~

~James did this week I think is gonna be your record. We're gonna record four podcasts. , It's a lot easier though when you don't have to do the post on it.~

~I am the only one on the call. . Yeah, I see that. Thank you,~

~This is a running joke.~

~So what phone do you have? Got it. Yeah.~

~That's what it's called.~

~Awesome.~

~Some of it, I think has to do with what they do in post. Yeah. And I haven't, I've done it once when my, I can't remember what mic failed on me, and so I had to use the other mic and had to do some heavy stuff in post. But I should have written down all the settings. It took quite a bit of tweaking to get it to sound decent.~

~And I was just adding filters like within Premiere. If I wanted to get serious about it, I would've reached for whatever the, I'm trying to remember what the. Adobe product is for that.~

~. . . Yep.~

~Sometimes you can get a little bit of that clicking cutoff and premiere when you do that too.~

~We're just chatting. interrupt.~

~Is it one person?~

~I really went old person on you when you said two windows. I was like, , it's really cold outside to have a window open.~

~do you really? They had a two hour delay. There's icicles on the mailbox, but I went out this morning and got coffee. The roads were fine. I also don't know, we're on the southern border of our county, so I don't know what it looked like for their North~

~Oh, good.~

~Yeah.~

~Oh, sure. Yep.~

~Yeah.~

~Okay.~

~Hoo.~

~Oh,~

~What? Yeah. What program was that in? Was that in Zoom, or is that the Audio Hijack program? Okay.~

~Got it.~

~Oh, sure. . What if I said, no,~

~leave meeting~

~So high maintenance,~

~It's all about branding.~

~That's right.~

~Perfect.~

~Are we trying to say it together? Okay. Yeah. Test.~[00:00:00] 

Hello. Thanks for having me.

Sure. So Compressed FM is a podcast all about web design and development with a little bit of zest. So we cover a lot of topics from front end to back end, a lot of JavaScript, a lot of productivity, and a little bit of design.[00:01:00] 

Nice.[00:02:00] 

Yeah. I think the interesting thing about Remix is it's really leaning into the browser API instead of these things that we've abstracted using React. So Forms is a perfect example. Forms are Notar notoriously hard in React because you're trying to manage all of this state. You're watching for change.

So one of the things that Remix does is it says, why? Why? Because the browser handles all of that for you. Why not lean into that api? And so it's interesting to see that swing not just in Remix, but in other frameworks like Spel Kit is really leaning into that as well. . What's also interesting, I don't know that this will happen, but one of the predictions that I saw for 2023 was someone saying that is in an effort for remix to continue to separate itself from React, that it would lean even further into web components.

So that'll be interesting to see if that actually happens and what that will mean for that particular [00:03:00] framework.[00:04:00] 

Rising Tide[00:05:00] 

Another huge thing for me with remix is I have so much respect for Kent. See Dodds and I mean he's written this Epic React course on React. And for him to come out and say that remix is the best way to use react and implement it is huge and just really respect his opinion. So for him to say that carries a lot of weight.[00:06:00] 

Yeah, that's a great point because I know that [00:07:00] remix, if you look at it was sponsor wear, so it was user supported and then they were able to get funding. . And so then they were able to make that open source truly, and make it available to everyone. But if you looked at their path to revenue, at least the last time I had looked at it, it was talking about hosting options and being able to host remix in their own container to make it the fastest possible.

And in my mind, there's so many hosting options that are out there. You mentioned Versace and Netlify, just to name a two, just to name a couple. But you could go on fly.io render, yada, yada, yada. I even wondered about the longevity of remix standing by itself and how it would reach that revenue point where it's net positive.

So with Shopify, Backing it, then you have an entire ecosystem, an e-commerce platform supporting it. So if anything, I think it's gonna give remix more legs, plus you have more people working on it. The remix team has been very small, and so to bring an entire [00:08:00] team around it, they're gonna be able to move faster and release more features.

What's interesting is James and I just spent some time at that conference. It's called that conference. It's a little confusing, but it's in this particular one was in Austin and spent some time with Brandon who is behind blitz js, and he also runs flight control. And so it was interesting talking to him about Flight Con, or sorry, it was interesting talking to him.

Blitz and how he's supporting that while he's running flight control. And he said for him it was the biggest marketing tool for flight control. So I could even see that with these other frameworks with Nex and Felt Kit. It's a huge marketer for Versace because if those frameworks run the fastest on Versace, you're going to lean into Versace when you get ready to deploy your project because you know it'll be the fastest.

Same would be true for Gatsby and it'll be interesting to see what happens with Remix and Shopify, cuz you don't think of Shopify as a hosting platform, but more of an e-commerce platform.[00:09:00] [00:10:00] 

Yes, felts is probably my favorite framework to reach for, and some of it is just because I feel like I'm writing pure html, CSS and JavaScript. I don't feel like I'm having to write a ton of boiler plate [00:11:00] code that react. Forces you to have. So with forms, since I mentioned that earlier, you can just reference the form and bind a value straight to that form field or with also with forms when you're control when you're processing the form, you can just hand that over to the server and use your standard push and or put commands and things like that in order to process your forms.

If you're setting state, you can just use let, you don't have to use this use state hook in order to be able to store all that information. So from a purity standpoint, I'm a huge fan.

I think one of the most controversial things about Spel Kit right now is how they're handling routes and the fact that your components can co-locate with those routes. It's a folder based routing system, so you'd have a folder, say, named about, and then inside you might have a plus page dots felt file, and all the components for that about page would live right next to it.

And I know for a lot of people it feels a little gross and I think it's just because it's not something that they're not used to seeing. It does make that directory a lot fuller, [00:12:00] but as I've worked with it, I've personally come to really appreciate it because I'm not having to drill down through multiple folders to find the components that I'm looking for that particular page.[00:13:00] 

Yeah, I've found that there's kind of two sets of developers. There's the developer that loves the magic and loves the fact that you have systems and frameworks that do stuff for you. SP Kit also provides transitions and animations. And I look at that and I just think, this is awesome. I don't have to do anything.

I can just add an on attribute and it works. But other developers like, oh no, what happened? It just did something. I've gotta figure all that out. And so other people struggle with a system like SELT that does provide all that stuff out of the box [00:14:00] when they would rather write it themselves and or at least have a better understanding of what's happening underneath the hood.

Yeah, I know. Me too. I'm not a control freak. not a control freak when it comes to that stuff.[00:15:00] 

Well, a huge part of that too is what would it take to convert an existing library over, so it's one thing if you're starting a new project and trying to get buy-in, it's another, if you have a legacy project that you're having to support and trying to switch over to a new language or a new framework.

. That's what I was gonna say.[00:16:00] [00:17:00] [00:18:00] 

I'm a huge fan of Astro as well, but I think what you said at the end there is keep, because it will tell you even in the documentation that if you're trying to create a single page application that does all the things, Astro is not necessarily the best framework to reach for, which I appreciate for them to say we're going all in on, say, personal sites and blogs, static sites where you wanna use [00:19:00] markdown.

We are the framework that you wanna reach for. But if you're trying to do anything else, maybe look somewhere else. And so the fact that they're not trying to be all things to all people allows them to do some really cool things with the group that they are trying to serve.[00:20:00] 

The mashup, those are like written into the contracts so that the actors and actresses don't have to do a lot for that episode. It's like an easy episode. It'd be easy for you, but I'm sure your sound engineer would think it was harder.

Yeah, that's a great call out. I'm not sure I would necessarily say I'm excited about it, but one thing that I am watching is just to see how AI affects design. So I know that's been a big thing even on the tech side with chat G P T, but just the dolly stuff. And is it journeymen journey? Okay, good.

But anyways, it's just [00:21:00] interesting to see because like you could say, I want a stock photo with a girl smiling on the right side. Instead of having to dig through hours of stock photography, could I enter in exactly what I'm looking for and be able to find that? That's an interesting problem that deserves a solution.

So I'm watching that. I heard a quote the other day that was quoting Marshall McMullan, who's like this really old guy that had a lot of stuff to say about tech like a hundred years ago, but a lot of the principles that he said still apply. Sorry, can you hear the vacuum in the back? Okay. But what he said was, just because you don't like it doesn't mean that you're gonna stop it.

I'm totally paraphrasing, but I think that when you have tech people saying, we don't know what to do with chat g p T, or are they gonna write code? Are we still gonna be creating websites? This thing would be true for design or robots gonna design websites. Now. What's gonna happen to our jobs? Just because you don't want it doesn't mean you can't, like you can stop it.

And so to embrace those technologies and get excited about it and [00:22:00] figure out how they can leverage the work that you're already doing and enable you to move faster, that is really interesting.[00:23:00] [00:24:00] [00:25:00] 

Yeah, so at Zeal we're a software consultancy, and a big part of that is a client will come to us and they'll self-diagnose a problem. They'll say, this is what we need. We need you to solve this problem while you do it. And as a consultancy, some of the best. Responses that we can have for that client is to say no.

And it's not cuz we don't wanna do it, but it's because we don't believe that's what's best. So we can say, no, I don't think that's a good idea, but this is what I think is a good idea. And we can help them lean into a better solution. And at least right now, robots and AI are not at that point. What you ask them to do is what they are going to do.

And so you still need a human to help you think through the best business case and the best user experience to be able to reach the problem in the most elegant or reach the solution in the most elegant way.[00:26:00] 

~Yeah, sounds good.~

~Astro's using zd when you define your content types. Yeah.~

~I don't know if you wanna talk about that, but if you do wanna highlight chunks of the sidebar conversation, like as us as content creators, maybe we can incorporate that in the next segment. But like we'll have our eye on things that are coming, but that doesn't mean that you should go and adopt it right away.~

~Like sometimes it'll take me 10 times to hear about Zad before I'm like, okay, what is this gonna take to implement it into our project~

~Yeah. ZD might be an interesting piece of text to bring up. So I've only experienced zd within the context of Astro. We were mentioning that earlier, but you can use it to define your content type. So it's almost like an abstraction of type script. But I haven't d dove Diven, d Dove, . I haven't dove too deep into Zod yet.~

And some of that's, an interesting point to bring up is that yes, we're watching the horizon, seeing what tech is coming up, what people are using, but it'll still take me maybe 10 or 15 times of hearing a specific piece of tech brought up before I'll sit down and be like, okay, now is the time to figure this out and see if I can implement it within an existing.[00:27:00] [00:28:00] 

Another place where I hear about new stuff is conferences. And James and I have been traveling around and doing quite a few conferences lately and had some time to speak to Brad Garpy. He's also been a host on the Compressed FM podcast, but he is an engineer at Atlassian. And so one of the things that we talked about was the adoption rate at a very large enterprise company.

So we talked a little bit about that briefly before, but it's [00:29:00] easy for us to talk about adopting new tech when it's these small demo projects. But when you're talking about a large enterprise corporation trying to bring in new tech, what does that look like? And what I felt was interesting was he described basically a platform team that will vet new technology and then figure out ways to pass that around the company.

And so it's the platform team that does a lot of that education component. And they'll also write. to help migrate some of those scripts over and he would. I think that also just points to the rise of microservices, and if you can isolate those components, then it makes it easier to update those individual pieces until you're able to update the entire platform.

? Yeah. And we mentioned Netlify earlier and them acquiring Gatsby, and part of that is they're going all in on this composable architecture. And it's an interesting term, like what does that mean to you? How does that actually apply? But in a lot of cases it's what is the best tech that you wanna reach for it?

And I'm gonna compose and put all these small pieces [00:30:00] together. And when you think about it and that way it makes sense why they reached for Gatsby. Cuz Gatsy by itself is very limited, but it's their plugin ecosystem that really extends it and allows you to have superpowers when you're working with that particular framework.[00:31:00] 

Yeah, so for Compressed, the big thing is we're gonna keep going. So we have about, I think a hundred twenty five, a hundred thirty episodes now. So next year hopefully we'll have, hundred more. Right now we're doing two a week. So that's been just a really fun project, a great networking opportunity, a great way to learn what's on the horizon and things like that.

One of the things that we're experimenting with, we've been experimenting with this past year, but really wanna be serious about delivering on is a swag store and what that might look like. And we've created a bunch [00:32:00] of peril shirts and stickers and things like that, but actually trying to build the system behind it to be able to deliver those things.

So hopefully we'll be able to release that in the coming.

~There's tons of stuff we can point to, but I think it would be at maybe a left field if we if I brought some stuff up.~

Thank you.

~I can stop on my end too.~