Voices of the Code

Steven F. (00:00)
Alright hello everyone and welcome to episode number two of voices of the code today we have a great episode in store for you because we have special guest Alexander six welcome to the show.

Alex Six (00:13)
Thanks for having me.

Steven F. (00:15)
Absolutely. Carl, you want to say hi? Co-host of Voices of the Code. So let's move right into this thing. Alex, you want to just tell us a little bit about yourself?

Karl M. (00:17)
Hi, I'm Carl.

Alex Six (00:27)
Yeah, sure. So I'm Alex. I currently work as a senior software engineer for Zillow Group. We are a tech company in the United States that does a lot with real estate. If you live in the US and you've ever tried to purchase a house, rent an apartment, you've likely seen us. If you don't, you might not have heard of us, but go check us out on the website. I mean, think we do some pretty cool stuff. I live in upstate South Carolina with my wife and two kids and Corgi who

y'all might see running around in the background. At some point, she's pacing around the office. Yeah, and then in my free time, as little of it as you have with two kids and a dog, I help out with doing DevRel for Filament. We're a tall stack UI kit application builder. I've kind of started calling us just like a meta framework on top of Laravel and using LiveWire and Alpine and all that. So I help out there, and that's a ton of fun.

Steven F. (01:00)
Nice.

Karl M. (01:20)
Can we refer to you as just the everything framework? It's the batteries on top of Laravel's already full batteries.

Alex Six (01:23)
It kind of feels like it.

Steven F. (01:26)
Ha

Alex Six (01:27)
Yeah, it's like on those old ThinkPad laptops where they had like the external batteries that you could plug in on the outside in the case. We're like that. Like, Larriville's the internal battery. We're like that extra like 20 watt battery you can shove in the back of your computer.

Karl M. (01:35)
Yeah.

Or if you have the new framework laptop, it's the battery you can pull off the back and put a GPU into. There you go. Steven's like, yeah, I totally know what you're talking about right now. Okay.

Alex Six (01:43)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Steven F. (01:51)
No, I actually do, which is funny. The framework laptops are awesome. Hey, before we get into any of the technical stuff, how did you and your community in South Carolina do with Hurricane Helene?

Alex Six (01:53)
Yeah

Yeah, so we personally ended up, I mean, beyond lucky, like nothing more than debris dropped kind of around our house. Our neighbors across the street had a massive tree like go through the second story of their house. So it very easily, you know, could have been us. We evacuated for probably about a week. Thankfully, my parents live.

Steven F. (02:23)
No!

Alex Six (02:32)
down in Columbia. So we just drove down there the day that everybody lost power. So we missed all the traffic. We actually we knew to evacuate because we didn't have any food because we didn't prepare because no one knew the storm was really going to affect upstate South Carolina as bad as it did. And so we drove to Waffle House and Waffle House was closed. And that's I was like, that's it. We got to go. We got to get out of here. If Waffle House is an opera. Yeah, we can't do it. So so we made it out. We did OK.

Steven F. (02:35)
Okay.

Right. Right.

apocalypse. We're done. We're done.

Karl M. (02:54)
Waffle house is closed, it's too late.

Alex Six (03:02)
We definitely didn't get hit nearly as bad as Western North Carolina. They are in much worse shape than we are. So we luckily, as kind of a Greenville community, we're not entirely past it. There are still people without power, without internet. Some people are still out of their homes because of damage. But by and large, as a community, we have been able to come together and start moving supplies up to North Carolina, moving volunteers up to North Carolina as much as allowed, just trying to get everybody back on their feet. mean, it was...

Steven F. (03:06)
Yeah, shambles. Yeah.

Alex Six (03:29)
Yeah, I could talk for a long time. It was shocking how unexpected it was.

Steven F. (03:32)
Yeah, I feel like there's a go ahead Carl.

Karl M. (03:34)
Steven and I had a talk with John from Thunk and he was telling us about Daniel and his situation. was like, geez, dude, like, that's rough.

Alex Six (03:41)
yeah.

Steven F. (03:46)
And yeah, I feel like.

Alex Six (03:47)
Yeah, yeah, they got hit much worse than we did. So really hoping that, yeah, hoping that everybody's gonna be okay up there. There's a lot to sort through still.

Steven F. (03:50)
Yeah.

Yeah, I grew up in Florida and so I'm really used to hurricanes. But in fact, my family just went through one this morning and last night, but luckily all of them are fine. So we're good. But man, yeah, I feel like there's just a lot of people that live, you know, hours and hours away from the beach and like middle of the cut in there. Like I never expected to have to deal with this sort of thing because of a hurricane. And now they have so really, really caught him off guard. But

Alex Six (04:07)
Right, yeah, right. Good.

No. Yeah.

Karl M. (04:26)
Okay, I feel like I have to to to bring something in on this one because it's kind of funny. I live in Houston. we get like wiped off the face of the map like every three years. So it's kind of funny when you think about like, hurricanes coming great prep for that because that's that's normal thing here. But then like you hear about North Carolina and South Carolina having no clue. Like, like, okay, we just have extra water for fun.

Steven F. (04:53)
Yeah, yeah, it's totally unexpected.

Alex Six (04:54)
Yeah, it's hard when the communities aren't built to drain water, right? nothing about the mountainous areas of the Carolinas is built to divert water anywhere other than the rivers that it's already flowing down. So, yeah.

Steven F. (05:09)
Right. Yeah. And then they just storm surge like crazy. All right. Well, let's try to move on to slightly more optimistic topics.

Karl M. (05:19)
Let's keep the jokes high. All right.

Steven F. (05:23)
Yeah, right. Glad to hear from what I understand most people, you know, they're really coming together and stuff where, that's like the great thing about like, you know, it's amazing how much people come together whenever in times of need. But all right, so all that aside, can you let us know like what got you into programming, web development, Laravel specifically, wherever you want to start on that journey.

Karl M. (05:33)
community.

Blairville.

Alex Six (05:44)
Yeah, sure. So it all started when I was born. No, I'm kidding. I so I was in college. I went to Clemson to be an engineer. Both my parents were engineers, pulp and paper, which did not end out too well with the rise of technology. So my dad ended up going to electrical, but I was like, I'm going to be an engineer. Went to to Clemson my freshman year, walked in on day one of my engineering course. And I remember the professor saying, all right, we're going to do

a whole unit on converting units. And I was like, great, yeah, I can figure this out. Like I'm decent enough at math. And he's like, we're gonna use the ladder method. And I was like, okay, that means he's gonna like teach us this thing called the ladder method. And he's like, first problem, wrote it on the board and everybody else in the room is like doing what I can only assume was the ladder method to convert these units. And I was like, no, this is bad. I'm already like way behind on day one. And so I tried to stick through it and just was not good.

was not good at engineering and converting units did not have the patience for it. God bless the people who are engineers, because they're a different breed, man. And so I didn't even make it past general. I was going to do electrical. That was the idea. Electrical or chemical, because as my parents did, and it's all I really knew. But I didn't even make it past the general engineering course. So I was kind of floundering after that and didn't really know what to do, hadn't

Steven F. (06:49)
What... what kind of engineer?

okay. Okay. Okay.

Alex Six (07:12)
undeclared my major for second semester, hadn't really thought about much else. And I ended up getting a phone call from a mentor of mine from back when I was in high school, who lived just across town from where I grew up in Columbia, South Carolina. And he was like, Hey, I've got a weird proposition for you. I know you're trying to get into some technology stuff. I've got a small web development startup. You want to come intern for us over the summer. And I was like,

I mean, yeah, it sounds interesting enough. Like I all think about, he's like, we'll pay you. And I was like, I will be there. I will show up every day. I am a broke college student. I got loans to pay, man. And so I did. And so I went and, and, and yeah, I mean, long story short, we, started off doing mostly WordPress sites, but then we got asked to build, you know, build an actual web application. WordPress was just not doing the numbers. It was not, it was not fun.

Karl M. (07:47)
Hahaha

Steven F. (07:52)
money money money money

Alex Six (08:09)
to build a whole actual application with WordPress. And so we tried out this, yeah, we tried out this whole new thing called Laravel 4.2 and the rest is kind of history, been using it really ever since. Yeah.

Karl M. (08:13)
noticing a trend here.

Steven F. (08:20)
wow.

Sweet. Dang. So a while ago, that's pretty sweet. That's pretty sweet. And what was like, so did you end up going to school then for like computer science or? Okay.

Alex Six (08:28)
Yeah.

I did, yeah, so I ended up going back the following year as a computer science major, yep, and graduated with my computer science degree, which admittedly I don't use as much as I would probably like. It was mostly programming and C and C++ at Clemson, big research university, so a lot of theoretical classes, but I think it also just taught me how to learn. I was one of those kids who just definitely needed kind of a kick in the pants to actually like buckle down and learn the stuff and read the documentation and sift through the man pages.

Steven F. (08:40)
Okay.

Alex Six (09:04)
So it was good for me for sure.

Steven F. (09:06)
Yeah, well, I mean, understanding the foundational elements to how computers work is like pivotal. I feel like there's so many people that they could go through a boot camp or whatever, and they like don't actually know what data structure is sitting behind a PHP array and stuff, which is actually very complicated. But like, I don't know, things like that. You know, they just have no idea how a lot of this magic works because there are 12 layers of abstraction above the C layer, much less below that. So.

Alex Six (09:21)
Yeah. Right, yeah.

Right. Yeah, it doesn't come up often, but when it does, it's really helpful to know what's going on.

Steven F. (09:36)
Yeah, I say this from personal experience. I've started doing Casey's like course and ongoing thing for performance oriented code. And I actually remember what the title of it is anymore. But it's just it's like really, really cool for him to break down like, OK, so we're starting with, you know, x86 instruction codes and then working our way up from there. And it's really cool. nice.

Alex Six (09:47)
yeah.

Karl M. (10:01)
That's awesome. So what drew you to Laravel specifically? it just that job that got you in that role or was there something that was like, or what, I guess the other question I guess we could ask is what makes you stick with Laravel?

Alex Six (10:17)
Yeah. So obviously the job was what initially, put me on the path for Laravel. And I think a lot of it was, well, it was twofold. think one, I was so dissatisfied with trying to build full fledged applications with WordPress that I was like, there has to be something better. And then we found literally anything better. Like Laravel, obviously I'm biased, but I think is the best of the PHP frameworks.

but anything better at that point would have been like a godsend for what we were doing. so that definitely obviously piqued my interest. Like this is really cool. This is really nice. I think on, you know, fast forward to today, right. Where I'm even working at a rather large tech corporation that we're the only Laravel, application as far as I'm aware. I think there's a couple of the PHP ones, but I think we're the only ones on Laravel. and we stick with it and we fight for it.

because of the ridiculously high level of productivity you can achieve with Laravel while still achieving enterprise level results, if that makes sense. Like the reliability of the framework, the efficiency and the performance of the framework are good enough, especially with the infrastructure that we've been able to build for our app, that we can go blow to blow with the Java apps and the Go apps and the Next.js apps that...

Karl M. (11:25)
Absolutely.

Alex Six (11:44)
Zillow is deploying all over the place. So it's hard to beat and it's really hard to beat Laravel.

Karl M. (11:50)
Yeah, we have seven applications in production all enterprise ready in Zillow or not in Zillow in Laravel. I would love to get it working in Zillow. Give me a call. Get my people to call your people. It'll be fine.

Alex Six (12:00)
You work at Zillow too?

Steven F. (12:07)
I had so many other things I wanted to ask you right then Alex, but I have to like completely derail where my thought train was going because what you just said is really interesting to me. We're like, you are in, feel like one of these rare situations where you are kind of working for a really large organization, but your day to day is a part of a much smaller team within the Goliath, right? Can you kind of help?

Alex Six (12:35)
Right, yeah.

Steven F. (12:37)
Paint the picture if you're privy to any of this, like help us kind of yeah understand how your team running Laravel is viewed from like the greater organization and like executives and stuff that I have even I don't even know where they would start for understanding any of the technical choices that are going on. But just you guys being like the you know, I can't even remember what the term is the the.

black sheep or whatever that's just sort of over there running your own thing. Help me understand how that is framed within the great organization.

Alex Six (13:12)
Yeah, for sure. So I've got, I guess, one disclaimer, one funny story, and then I'll launch into it. The disclaimer is I obviously only know up to my very particular role working at Aereo. It's like the sub, the team that I'm on, the product that I work on at Zillow. So obviously there could be larger things at play that I'm not privy to. However, that is where my perspective is coming from. Funny story, I was...

Steven F. (13:23)
Okay. Right.

Alex Six (13:38)
probably three weeks into working at Zillow when I went on a company or organization wide retreat and was helping to give a talk about what is Aereo to the wider org. And that's because Aereo was just acquired last year by Zillow. So we're still relatively new compared to Zillow, which has been around since I think 2006, give or take. well, it's been around a while. Yeah.

Steven F. (13:52)
Okay.

Right.

a while, a while.

Alex Six (14:07)
And in that talk, one of the things that I was going to talk about was what our tech stack was, because even though I was new to the team, have been doing Laravel for long enough to know what Laravel is. And I vividly remember when I was like, yeah, we're a Laravel app, we're built on PHP. Some guy in the back of the room was just like, boo. I was like, great, great. I mean, it was obviously in jest. It was funny. But I was just like, good. This is.

Karl M. (14:28)
That sounds like our C sharp guys. That sounds exactly like our C sharp guys.

Alex Six (14:37)
know, week three of being here and I'm already the PHP guy. in general, I think, at least from my own personal experience, this kind of speaks to Zillow's belief about work. As long as the apps are making our customers happy, like customers are our North Star. Like it's such a cheesy, kitschy thing from people who don't think that companies mean that, but we genuinely are obsessed with our customers, with our users.

If our application is doing what it needs to do and more and enthralling our users when they use our app, Zillow Corporate doesn't really care, it seems, what the technology is. We're really productive on Laravel. We've built a piece of software that people really like, that real estate photographers really, like, and we have no intention of changing that. So yeah, it's not viewed negatively in any way.

Steven F. (15:29)
Right. Right.

Alex Six (15:37)
Zillow just really likes to, on a corporate level, give us the tools that we need to go out and build great software for our users.

Steven F. (15:45)
Yeah, man, I would just I would love to be like a couple layers up the corporate ladder and some of these conversations and just feel like, you know, how how's that team doing that, you know, sub organization and like, wow, their velocity per developer is amazing. And I don't know, knowing hosting costs and like getting like the full picture, because it's like so interesting that that's Zillow does represent this one umbrella that has so many different technologies and teams that play that they like.

Karl M. (15:46)
as it should be.

Alex Six (15:58)
Yeah.

Give right.

Steven F. (16:16)
I just have a really cool insight, I'm sure, into the comparative nature of all of these different things that doesn't come up too, too much. So it's super cool.

Alex Six (16:18)
Yeah.

No, yeah. Yeah, it's fun to make comparisons, especially because right now, I mean, I'm working obviously with Laravel, but I'm working really close with a couple of other teams that are built on completely different stacks. And so it's funny when we all have to build kind of towards the same feature, you know, because we're all integrating and coming together. And for certain things, you know, we're done in like a day and other people are like, OK, that's going to take us two weeks. I got to put it on a sprint. And, know, we've got to like dedicate time to it it's going to be a haul.

And there's other stuff where people are like, yep, I already got that library implemented. We're good to go. And we're sitting here like, how do you integrate this with Laravel again? Is there a driver? no, we have to write our own? OK, here we go. So it is fun. It's fun to be able to compare between all these different tech stacks.

Karl M. (17:10)
So does everybody at the like all the developers use the same type of software? Like are you guys all using Jira or is like one part using Jira and somebody else is using like linear? How does that look like for you guys?

Alex Six (17:24)
So as far as project management goes, we try to consolidate as much as we can because we do talk across teams, especially at the work that we're doing. Working more with real estate agents and real estate photographers, we tend to work with all the other people who are also looking at those same real estate agents. And so we try to consolidate as much as we can. Because we were recently acquired, we still have some slight differences and outstanding tech stack choices that we are trying to transition over to.

Like we use linear right now, that we really like it, but I don't think other teams use linear within Zillow. And so that's one those things where it's not the core tech stack. So yeah, like by all means, let's, you know, let's move stuff around if we have to. We're not, we're not under a lot of pressure to move, it seems, but at the same time, like we, it's helpful for everybody to be on the same page and we're totally fine with that. I mean, let me keep Laravel.

Do whatever you want. It does not matter to me one little bit.

Karl M. (18:23)
Right. I'll switch to Jura. I don't care if I can keep Laravel.

Alex Six (18:28)
Yeah, yeah, and listen, listen, if there's like a whole, cause I know it's again, I only have so much knowledge at the level I'm at, but a lot of these big companies that I've worked with just like in a consulting role at prior jobs have whole teams that are like spinning up JIRA, whatever instances, servers for people. Like if Zill's got a whole team, yeah, by all means go manage the JIRA settings and the permissions. I'll use it. I just don't want to have to configure it. That's the piece that I'm not looking forward to with JIRA.

Karl M. (18:58)
Right. Okay. Let's flip the script on you a little bit here. What about filament? How does that whole team work together? I understand that you're on the dev rel side, but you still interact with the...

Alex Six (19:13)
yeah, yeah, plenty, So the filament, I call them the filament core team, but you can call them maintainers, whatever you want to call them. We work pretty much like your standard asynchronous distributed open source. I almost call it open source software, kind of open source suite of softwares at this point. We all have our certain areas that we specialize in.

So like Dan is kind of the brains behind the whole thing. He can kind of dip in wherever he wants. You've got Zep who's been working mostly on the UI. You've got Adam who's been working mostly on plugins. We've got some folks who are purely focused on support, like maintaining our support channels and our help channels. And you've got me who does the dev role side of things for the most part. But we also all kind of slide between the different roles, kind of as they're needed or as we have.

Steven F. (20:03)
Wow.

Alex Six (20:13)
inspiration to build or work on a certain piece of the app. Most of our communication is just done async through Discord, which makes it really easy because there's not a whole lot of, well, there's not a whole lot of meetings. I think we've had one all team meeting since I've been on the team. So like we, there's not a lot of synchronous work going on there, but it still works just as well. mean, we're churning out more stuff than we ever have in preparation for the next version of Filament. So it's a lot of fun.

There's a lot of good people working on the the filament team.

Steven F. (20:46)
Yeah, I think that helps tremendously. The more competent and self-starter type individuals that you have on a team, the less management you really need. You can give them a direction and then just get it going. And then everybody just naturally figures out what to do. So yeah, yeah, yeah, cool. Do you want to rewind the clock a little bit and go back to your earlier career and?

Alex Six (20:57)
Yeah.

Right.

Steven F. (21:14)
bring us up to where you are today. like what was the some of the first stuff that you were doing professionally out of school and stuff like that.

Alex Six (21:20)
Yeah. Yeah. So right out of school, I just kept working at that same company that I had worked for that one summer. So throughout college, I worked full time over the summers and then part time during the school year, just, you know, paying down college debts and honestly getting so much experience. was unbelievable because it was the two owners and myself for a long time. And only one of the owners was technical. The other one was kind of the business ops and design owner.

So was me literally sitting at a folding table in this very dark, windowless garage next to the technical founder and just like learning and just gleaning information off of him as frequently as I could. So I worked there out of college. They had built up a whole team with developers, designers, QA. And then shortly after that, well, maybe not shortly, a couple of years after that, I...

Steven F. (21:54)
Dude, love it.

Alex Six (22:14)
happened to be put in contact with a marketing and advertising firm out of Louisville, Kentucky, who needed a director of technology. And so they were doing a lot of their work in Laravel. They're also doing a lot of their work in Shopify and Webflow. And thought it'd be kind of an interesting change of pace to kind of learn the more commercial, like, e-comm side of tech. And so I jumped over there for a couple of years and helped lead their dev team and their, I guess you'd call it ad tech.

Steven F. (22:35)
Right.

Alex Six (22:44)
the tech side of their ad tech team. So that was kind of fun. Learned a lot about Shopify. Learned a lot about Webflow, which I still think is a really cool tool, by the way, for a no code, low code kind of website builder. It's actually really, really good. And after that, I went to work for a couple of years at Kirschbaum. They're a Laravel partner. They've sponsored Laracons and all that jazz. Worked there for a couple of years and then found my way to Zello. Yeah. Yeah.

Steven F. (23:11)
Cool. And Kirschbaum is now, are they the direct sponsor of Filament? What does that relationship begin?

Karl M. (23:11)
Awesome.

Alex Six (23:18)
Yeah, so that's actually kind of a funny story. So I was working at Kurdish Bomb.

Steven F. (23:25)
Is that how you kind of got into the filament scene? As a... Okay, okay. cool, okay.

Alex Six (23:28)
So it's actually the other way around. I am how Kirschbaum got into filament. So I was working at Kirschbaum and I was live streaming Laravel development as well as some other stuff. I had like a twice weekly live stream that I would do and I was building a tall stack app at one point and was just really frustrated with having to rebuild the same things over and over again. Like, gosh, all right, let me go build forms again. This is obviously well before Caleb released Flux, which I would have

killed for back then. That would have been the perfect solution here. And Adam actually popped into my chat and was like, hey, you should try filament. And the rest is history. Tried it, loved it, was obsessed with it. And I remember we were on a retreat in Boston and I was talking to our owner, Nathan, and I was like, hey, we've got to like try this filament thing. It's going to be big. Also, we need to hire Dan before somebody else hires Dan.

Karl M. (24:27)
You

Alex Six (24:28)
And Push came to shove eventually. I'm sure it was inspired by me in some regard, but I obviously am not taking credit for any of this. They hired Dan and brought him on. by bringing Dan on, they allow Dan, I don't work there anymore, to actively contribute to Filament and build up Filament. And in return, they are acting as one of Filament's official Filament partners.

Steven F. (24:53)
Right. Right.

Alex Six (24:57)
Because of that now on our partners page, you've got Dan's listing, Zepp's listing, and then Kirschbaum is there as well. And it's like, hey, if you want an agency that can help you with filament, here's the one where the guy literally works there. You'd be hard pressed to beat this one. Yeah.

Steven F. (25:09)
Yeah, like this is the crew. Right, right. Do you know is Dan, do know if he basically just works full time on filament or is he doing?

Alex Six (25:18)
So he does a mixture. He does, I think it's primarily contract work. I don't know the exact details of the contract, but he gets like dedicated time weekly, like a good amount of dedicated time weekly to work on filament on company time. Again, from what I understand, I'm not super privy to that anymore. But the idea being, and I think Dan would say the same thing, as I hope I'm not speaking for him out of turn, but the idea is that

Steven F. (25:21)
Okay.

That's awesome.

Right, right, Diana's.

Karl M. (25:46)
We'll get them on next week. I'm just kidding.

Alex Six (25:47)
by, yeah, have him on, have him on. He loves this stuff. By doing the consulting work and actually using filament in production projects, he's learning way more about how the packages need to be built, what needs to be added, what doesn't need to be added. There's a lot of features of filament version three that came into the framework as a whole that were completely taken from very specific needs of the

the applications he was working on for work, from what I understand. I don't know what those applications were, but that's what I'm told. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's important, right? Cause you can build your own meta framework or whatever we're going to call it, series of packages in a vacuum. And you could build the things you think are cool, but they might be completely useless to people. But if you were actively using the software every day and dogfooding your own stuff, it's so easy to build things that people actually want and can actually use.

Steven F. (26:20)
Yeah, cool. Very tight feedback loop, it sounds like. Right.

Right, cool.

where do we want to go from here? Do we want to jump into? go ahead, Carl. Sorry.

Karl M. (26:50)
I was going to ask him. I was going to ask him about his favorite tools and extensions. I know I know something crazy about Alex that. That's this is going to be fun, so you ready for this Alex?

Steven F. (26:56)
Perfect.

Alex Six (27:05)
Yeah, so are you talking like... like devt?

Karl M. (27:08)
All right, so you sat down at your laptop, you've got some work to do. What are we opening?

Alex Six (27:12)
boy. man, I am cracking open that terminal, man. I do as much of my workflow in the terminal as I can. Big time Neo of lover. Been using it for years now. So do all, yeah, do.

Steven F. (27:23)
Uhhhh...

Karl M. (27:24)
Yeah. So you have three VEM users on a screen, all with three different ways of using VEM. Isn't it impressive? So I use VS Code and I use VEM inside of VS Code. Steven uses VEM inside of PHPStorm and Alex uses NeoVem inside of Storm.

Alex Six (27:31)
my gosh, I feel so seen. I feel so heard, I guess.

Steven F. (27:36)
You

Alex Six (27:46)
Yeah.

Steven F. (27:46)
I don't fully believe this because I think if that were true, Alex would have started this conversation and the very first thing out of his mouth would have been, I use Neovim by the way.

Karl M. (27:56)
I use VM.

Alex Six (27:59)
I to hold it back, I really do. The people at work will tell you, it comes up every now and again. I think the other day somebody was like, I gotta get into the server and edit this config file. I'll just use Vim and literally I'm just like lurking in the chat and I just type in Slack like Vim mentioned.

Karl M. (28:12)
What? Share your screen. I gotta watch this.

Steven F. (28:14)
I'm a fan-vention.

Alex Six (28:17)
Yeah, I, yeah, man, I love it. I love Vim. It's been so, so I, have pretty terrible like arm and hand joints. And so I rock like the ergonomic mouse, the split ergonomic keyboard, you know, the whole, the whole thing. And so the less I can move my hands around the day, the better. and so I ended up switching to Vim somewhat because of that. Also somewhat because I was working for a client that gave me a really underpowered laptop that would just

Steven F. (28:19)
you

Alex Six (28:46)
fall over on itself and I tried to boot up PHP Storm. This was a couple years ago. It's much better now with PHP Storm, but... Right, right. Yeah, I would like boot up PHP Storm and the whole computer would freeze. And so was like, I gotta use something lightweight. So I was like, well here's the lightest weight editor I could find. But yeah, I started using it in my, you know, I didn't have to move my hand at the mouse as much.

Karl M. (28:51)
This is back before phpStorm fixed it so that it doesn't s-

Steven F. (28:57)
You want how much RAM?

Karl M. (29:05)
This is a laptop with two gigs of RAM running Windows Vista and PHP Storm. Here you go.

Alex Six (29:09)
It was a Mac too. I was shocked. I was actually was really, but admittedly it was like an old Intel like 13 inch Mac. So it was really thin, really hot and really slow. my gosh. Yeah.

Karl M. (29:13)
God.

Steven F. (29:23)
less powerful than the iPads today. iPad Pros, yeah.

Karl M. (29:28)
I got my wife one of the M4 iPads. My goodness, that thing runs circles around my Intel i9 MacBook. That's insane.

Alex Six (29:36)
Yeah, there's a lot of power packed into those things now, which is good. They need it.

Steven F. (29:40)
Yeah, totally off topic, but super happy with this whole arm transition in the industry. Like, my God. Never hearing my MacBook's fan turn on is like surprisingly a blessing.

Alex Six (29:46)
Yes.

Yeah, I-

Karl M. (29:53)
Well, that's actually how I know when I'm working hard is when the fan on my M2... The M2 kicks in and you're like, okay, hold on, I'm doing something I probably shouldn't be.

Steven F. (29:59)
your hair is just going all over it.

Alex Six (30:02)
You

What do you speed up that, like, 800th Docker container?

Steven F. (30:08)
Honey, grab the ice! My Mac is overheating!

Karl M. (30:13)
You gotta have like 800 Docker containers running or it's stuck in a recursive function or something. don't know. Well, I'm doing something wrong.

Alex Six (30:18)
Mmm, yep.

Steven F. (30:20)
So do you use Mac today, Alex? Okay.

Alex Six (30:23)
I do, yeah. So we were given a Mac for work. So I use that. I actually have a Linux computer that I use personally. I do also have a MacBook, like a personal MacBook that I take traveling because I mean, you can't beat the battery life. I was going to say, I'm so happy with the ARM transition, but I'm less happy with the ARM transition because Linux doesn't have a lot of support for ARM at the moment. They've got like a Asahi Linux that can run on MacBooks.

But don't know if I'm ready to just like wipe Mac OS off my M1 Mac MacBook yet and just figure it out.

Steven F. (30:57)
right.

Karl M. (30:59)
So I kind of went the opposite direction with that one. So for me, I was like, I was toiling with going with Linux. I was toiling with getting a framework laptop. And then my wife was like, okay, well, whatever you decide to do. And I just sat down. I was like, my God. All right. Double down. You're a Mac user. You've been a Mac user for since 2007. It's not changing today. Just double down on that.

Alex Six (31:23)
Yeah, yeah, I so I admittedly I didn't I went with so it's a company called system 76 They build linux computers built in america Really great company and actually I used their linux distro pop os for a long time before I actually bought one of their computers And their support was kind enough to help me figure out pop os even before I had one their products And so was like, all right, i'm gonna buy a computer i'm gonna buy one that I know is gonna run linux I don't have to worry about

Karl M. (31:30)
Same.

Alex Six (31:51)
did I get the right RAM and the right GPU or is it just gonna fall over on itself? They're just gonna build this computer. Right, right, like just give me something that's gonna work. And so I bought this CPU tower and it just worked out of the box and it was fantastic. And honestly, it's funny. We were talking about this before the call. I've been having so many problems with my Mac OS audio drivers in the last couple of weeks on both of my MacBooks, my personal one and my work one. My work one got stuck in a boot loop today.

Karl M. (31:56)
Did I buy one with an Intel Wi-Fi card or is it gonna not work?

Alex Six (32:20)
And I think it was because of the audio driver, I like muted and unmuted really fast and then the whole computer just exploded on itself. And the running joke is always that like audio drivers on Linux are horrible. They're just always going to break. You're never going to have a good time with audio. And I'm like, man, I haven't had to think about like turning on my Bluetooth headphones and then having them connect to my Linux computer in probably two years. And here in the last two months, I cannot get my Mac to do it. So it's just, yeah, it's been funny in my head that

Steven F. (32:45)
jeez.

Alex Six (32:50)
a Linux computer is more reliable for audio, but I still love my Mac. Like they have made some incredible hardware, like mobile hardware. They're just impossible to beat. At least right now.

Steven F. (32:52)
Right.

Karl M. (33:00)
for sure.

Steven F. (33:00)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. For sure. Once you get like really invested in the the Mac and just the grotter like Apple ecosystem, it's it's hard to go back like my dad is pretty techie. Well, very technical, but like he's still primarily a Windows user. And I'm like, he also owns a Mac. And so whatever I like be doing stuff with him. I'm just like, dad, if I just want to sit down with you for like four hours and just show you how to use your Mac at like.

Alex Six (33:03)
Yeah.

yeah. yeah.

Steven F. (33:28)
1000 X the productivity and then you'll love it forevermore.

Karl M. (33:31)
So I used to do that at Apple. That used to be my job at Apple was I would stand there and show people how to use their Macs. I was like, this is a really, really fun job. I get to show people. I used to get the blown away faces when I would hit command space and I opened up Spotlight and then type in messages. And then the people would just be like, I can get my text messages on my Mac. And I'm like, yes, a hundred percent can.

Alex Six (33:42)
Yeah.

Steven F. (33:48)
Yes, exactly!

Alex Six (33:49)
man.

Yeah

Karl M. (33:59)
And then every one of them was like college student, I don't need an iPhone anymore, I can just go live in my backpack because I just need to text my friends. And then Instagram and all that kind of stuff came out and they were like, well, I need my phone again.

Steven F. (34:12)
Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah, totally. feel like if I showed him Raycast, he would just like, it would just.

Alex Six (34:14)
Yeah.

I was about to say, yeah, everyone's blown away by a spotlight and we immediately just wipe it away and put Raycast on there or Alfred. All great.

Karl M. (34:18)
I showed my boss Ray Cassia.

Steven F. (34:26)
one of the two.

Karl M. (34:26)
I showed my boss Raycast the other day because I work in the travel industry and I was like, hey, what airport is HLM? He's like, I don't know, never heard of it. I was like, what if you could ask an app that's running on your Mac what airport HLM is? And he was like, that'd be really cool. And I was like, it's called Raycast. It's already on your Mac. I installed it before you got it.

Steven F. (34:51)
Wow, man, to do that, do you need the AI extension or not?

Karl M. (34:52)
So.

No, there's there's an extension in the store, which is fantastic. Guys, if you are not using Raycast yet, install it, go through their extension store and just I found some of the weirdest things like the Laravel documentation is available in Raycast without opening up the browser. And then if you hit enter, it will take you directly to the page. And I'm like, this is shaped

Steven F. (35:00)
okay. Yeah.

Karl M. (35:25)
A couple of seconds off my day, but you know a couple of seconds over a couple of days is. Can can line up pretty quickly. So yeah, if you're not if you're not already, if you're using a MacBook switched Raycast also I heard recently Raycast is coming to windows.

Alex Six (35:33)
Yeah.

Steven F. (35:33)
Yeah, totally.

Hmm. Okay. I could see that. Yeah. And why not?

Karl M. (35:46)
So that could be kind of interesting. That's a good question. I would like to know, Marcel, please, for the love of God, we need Laravel heard on Linux. Make it happen.

Alex Six (35:48)
Yeah, there's no excuse to use it. When do they come to Linux?

I have this pipe dream that I literally have notes on my desk about right now that the same way that DHH made his opinionated flavor on top of Ubuntu for Rails, but I guess just kind of for development in general, I would love to help build a layer on top of some Linux distribution to help ease that on-ramp for layerable developers, because I think there's so much benefit.

Steven F. (36:15)
Right. Oma cube.

Alex Six (36:30)
in using Linux directly as a development environment that it would be, I think, I'm obviously a little biased, but I think it'd be a huge net positive to get people into it. But to do that, I mean, I feel like we all just kind of take after Taylor at this point where we're all very picky about what our dev environment is and how it works and how it's set up and what it looks like and how it feels. It doesn't matter if it's like you're picky about like,

Steven F. (36:32)
Totally.

Alex Six (36:58)
I don't care or you're picky about I care a lot. So I feel like that would be a hard bridge to get a hard gap to bridge but.

Karl M. (37:04)
I think you're onto something there because I think you're 100 % right. Because if you think about it like, that's a mild inconvenience. I'm just not going to do it. I have to lean over and push the power button on my computer? No. Well, I'm not writing code today.

Alex Six (37:13)
Right. We're kind of pampered.

I mean, even in just writing the code, right, with the Laravel framework.

There's so much built in already, and if it's not built in, Spasi probably has a package for it. And if they don't have a package for it, there's probably a third party, another third party package out there somewhere for it. But if I get to a point where they're...

Karl M. (37:42)
Let's be honest, if Spasi doesn't have a package for it, you don't need it.

Alex Six (37:45)
Well, that's what I was gonna say. At some point, I'm like, do I actually need to integrate with this service or can I get away with something else? We are pampered in the Laravel world.

Steven F. (37:56)
Yeah.

Karl M. (37:56)
For sure, for sure. I mean, 100 % if we can get Laravel heard on Linux, I would reopen that conversation with myself because I was telling Stephen this before we started recording. I recently started using Nix, which allows you to like set up everything. here's my wifi settings for Linux. Set it for me.

Alex Six (38:15)
yeah.

Karl M. (38:23)
then all I have to do is go pull it down and it will automatically have all the passwords and I'll have all the things. And so if I like go to the coffee shop tomorrow, I wipe my computer, go to the coffee shop, connect to the, pull down the script, it just connects to their wifi. I'm like, what the heck? It's fantastic. I'll have to think about it.

Alex Six (38:40)
It's really good. It's really good. spent, I don't know, probably like a week's worth of evenings after the kids went to bed a couple months ago playing with NixOS. Excuse me, I installed it on my, like a partition of my machine. was like, let's just, let's give it a whirl. Yeah, it's really cool. It's exactly what you're saying. Like it's all very declarative. It's in a file. Like if you're a big infrastructure as code kind of developer or, you know, anything like that, it's right up your alley. Like it's so nice for.

Karl M. (38:55)
Okay, so you're actually using the operating system.

Alex Six (39:08)
easily reproducible systems. Now, why I haven't gone further with it is the nagging thought in the back of my head of, but how often am I going to be actively blowing away my system and wanting to just reinstall everything? Maybe a lot, but I haven't had to yet, so who knows?

Karl M. (39:27)
Well, I think it would get easier if you make it simpler to blow away your computer. You'd probably be more likely to do it. I think Stephen and I were talking about this earlier too. Getting a new computer is an opportunity to start over and install all the things you care about. But there's certain things that I know I'm a hundred percent every single time I set up a new computer, I'm going to spend two or three minutes installing Laravel hurt. It's just going to happen.

Alex Six (39:32)
That's fair.

Karl M. (39:55)
So why not automate that?

Alex Six (39:59)
It's cool. It's a really cool idea. I would like to see it continue. think they, at least for NixOS, I can't speak as much just to the package package management system, which is probably putting it way too lightly and all the Linux nerds are going to get mad at me in the replies and the comments, but whatever. I think as a whole, once NixOS could settle on this is the right way to build a system with NixOS, they're golden. Cause right now you've got

Karl M. (40:13)
Yeah, cancel Alex six.

Alex Six (40:26)
Flakes, which are experimental technically, but everybody uses them. You've got just like the normal way of doing it. That's not flakes. There's not a lock file. So you could get newer packages or your, if you like installed or if you use somebody else's next configuration, it might not work because you might have different versions of the, there's like a whole bunch of little paper cuts like that that don't matter by themselves. But I think they add up currently to making it hard for people to onboard. Maybe that's just the theme of tonight, right? Just make it easy to onboard and people will use it.

Like don't make the wall so high that it's hard for people to figure out what's going on. NixOS, its own beast. And I love it. But I think that's the one thing they could definitely do.

Karl M. (40:56)
Yeah, 100%.

I mean, we...

I think technically we could do what you're talking about with NixOS. mean, because technically all we have to do is build out a configuration file and just send it out to the world and, download this configuration file and have everything you need already.

Alex Six (41:20)
So not to dive too nerdily deep into the weeds here, I have considered it very heavily. My only concern is that because of the way Nix manages packages and because NixOS is built on that paradigm, nothing is in the normal Linux folders where you would think it is. So if you already, as a Laravel developer, already have experience deploying your application on like a Debian server or an Ubuntu server, and you're to go look for

I want to go find my DNS settings or whatever configuration file. And you go to look for that directory path, it is not going to exist. It's not where you think it is. Because Nix is stuffed at somewhere else in some SIM linked corner of the operating system. Because that's how it works. That's how Nix does its thing. It has its own structure. So that's the one thing holding you back. Because that's slightly higher bar to entry than let me just install a

Karl M. (41:53)
My PHP installer.

Fair.

Alex Six (42:18)
big air quotes, normal Linux distribution. Even so much that like Fedora is the distro that I use. I love Fedora. I think it hits the best balance between having a stable package set that you can install software from and still being up to date with more modern versions of these packages.

Karl M. (42:37)
Is it because you hate snap?

Alex Six (42:40)
I also really don't like Snap, that's a thing.

Karl M. (42:42)
Good, so you, and Jess Archer are Fedora's user group right there.

Alex Six (42:48)
I love Fedora. don't, I literally, it's so funny writing this conversation. I literally was writing a note to myself, not, you know, an hour ago about this. I was like, I want to use Fedora. I don't think I can use Fedora for this kind of project because everybody deploys their apps and Ubuntu servers. Everybody already knows how apt work. Everybody knows how, you know, how to pull a PPA in, or if you don't, you can search one of the 500 Digital Ocean articles on how to like install PHP from the

Karl M. (43:16)
Thanks, Krissav.

Alex Six (43:16)
on dredge ppa right like it would be just that that extra step so that one might i don't know i might not cave that one yet but that that's kind what i'm getting at it's like

Karl M. (43:27)
You could still build it with Nix on Fedora and that would technically ship fine. But again, think yeah, yeah, this is true. A sliding convenience here 100 % right. But yeah, I think that's one of the things that's keeping me from switching to Linux full time is because every time I turn around like there's a sliding convenience. Nevermind scrap it. Just go back to Mac.

Alex Six (43:31)
absolutely, yeah.

We don't want fine. We're the Laravel community. We want perfect.

Yeah. Yeah.

Karl M. (43:57)
I gotta learn how to make that work. scrap it.

Alex Six (44:01)
Well, who knows? Maybe in 10 years when I find some free time, we'll have something put together. It'll be the year of the Linux desktop. All of my Linux. Yeah, yeah. Well, it'll happen.

Steven F. (44:09)
you

Karl M. (44:10)
says everybody every year.

Steven F. (44:12)
Until I can get my iMessages into Linux, it's not gonna happen.

Karl M. (44:18)
Actually, okay, automatic. Automatic has a solution for you. Texts do work. It's called texts. T-E-X-T-S. And it will pull in your iMessages.

Steven F. (44:23)
Wait, like...

Is this like automatic like WordPress automatic? No, nothing to do with it.

Karl M. (44:36)
Yes. Yes.

Alex Six (44:38)
You actually have to have a big, you have to check the check box that says, am not and have never been affiliated with Apple.

Steven F. (44:45)
Yep. want no lawsuits. So.

Alex Six (44:48)
Don't have to hire a lawyer to use their software.

Steven F. (44:51)
my god, the freaking login checkbox.

Karl M. (44:55)
I saw that this week. Did you see the meme that somebody made where they changed the checkbox to say something derogatory towards the CEO?

Steven F. (44:58)
What are you doing?

No, I bet. No, that had to have been somebody just doing inspector in their browser and making it look.

Karl M. (45:08)
Yeah, it was pretty good. It was pretty good.

no, they they 100 % did, but they did a screenshot of it. It was like this is what it said. It's like weird. My screen says something else. It's a checkbox. It says the CEO of WordPress is a a is D bag and I'm like.

Steven F. (45:24)
Love it.

Alex Six (45:28)
Man, my heart breaks for the WordPress community. Like, I spent so long in WordPress, and I obviously don't anymore, and I do poke fun at WordPress, but I also poke fun at a lot of things, including Laravel sometimes. My heart breaks. That is not a fun thing for a community to have to go through.

Karl M. (45:46)
Your entire community is put between a rock and a hard place.

Alex Six (45:48)
Yeah, because like what do you do as a community member at that point? Like I, the other day I was thinking like what if this was filament? Not that it would be. I have to imagine Dan would not pull something like this. I know him pretty well, but...

Karl M. (45:59)
Well, worse. Let's say it's a Dan and Taylor Ottwell feud.

Alex Six (46:04)
Right. Like, it just, it, it makes it's uncomfortable to be in. It makes from the outside, it makes WordPress and by extension PHP, because for a lot of people, PHP is WordPress look bad. It's not helping anyone's case. Like I understand that there's a disagreement between WP Engine and automatic and however they want to resolve it, they can resolve it. But I do feel bad for the folks caught in the crossfire here.

Karl M. (46:33)
For sure. When your entire community is trapped, quite literally, between picking sides, it's never gonna go well.

Steven F. (46:43)
Yeah, think that man just the absolute craziest part is that like, if Matt really had a bone to pick here, doing this privately, behind the scenes where nobody else really knew that this was going on is like, how you would want to approach the real legal aspect of this not literally sending texts of I'm extorting you right now and I'm going to go nuclear on you.

Karl M. (47:11)
Yeah, I don't know why you'd want to air your dirty laundry like that in public if you legitimately think you have a case.

Steven F. (47:14)
Yeah!

If you really think you have a leg to stand on, you don't go asking for that kind of money and all that stuff. Like, for just the way that... Anyway, anyway, let's not, let's not get down this.

Karl M. (47:27)
I'm calling it now 2025 is the year of Laravel. Because a number of those WordPress developers are going to be like, well, what can I do?

Steven F. (47:31)
Well, I just-

Alex Six (47:33)
Man

I really, really hope Statamac is going to capitalize on this. as much as I would, yeah, mean, as much as I'd love to be like, come use filament, totally different thing. You'd have to build your own WordPress and filament to use filament. Statamac is perfectly made for this exact thing. Or people who are using WordPress just as an admin panel. Because I know I have built my fair share of sites that

Steven F. (47:39)
I was just about to say, I hope StataMake gets some great, great adoption from this.

Totally.

Alex Six (48:04)
WordPress side didn't manage any content whatsoever. It was literally just like, here are all the people that have signed up. Here are all the submissions that have been sent. Would you like to resend the notification email? Like use Nova, go out and get Laravel Nova. It is literally built for that use case or use filament. mean, I would love you to, you'd still have to build your own stuff with it, but like we, Laravel has so many tools that could capture from this. I,

Karl M. (48:22)
So.

Well, the documentation for Filament is fantastic too. Just copy and paste it. 95 % of what you're looking for is already written for you.

Alex Six (48:37)
We are lukewarm on our documentation. So I'm really glad you said that. I appreciate that a lot. We really like, yeah, well, but still though, we are really happy with the fact that, like you said, there's a lot of stuff you can just copy and paste direct from the docs. We're not so happy with the searchability of the docs because we have this kind of weird, unique problem where we've bundled

Karl M. (48:43)
This is just coming from... from Larabats!

Alex Six (49:04)
all of our package documentation into one Docs site, because this makes sense. They all work together. But it makes the search really tricky to get right, like when you're indexing all the search queries and whatnot. Because one second, you know, in a resource, you could be building your form, right, building your CRUD form and looking for our form builder documentation. And then the next second, you're going to hop over to, well, now I've got to show this on the table.

Karl M. (49:29)
Panel Builder.

Alex Six (49:30)
and you go and you search it and you'll find it eventually, hopefully, if the search indexing is working right. But you now, like the sidebar has changed, you're in a different section of the website. It's just jarring to jump around. We've got some fixes in play for that. There's a lot of fun updates coming in V4, but we've got a lot of fixes for that with regards to like recommended posts, or sorry, recommended documentation pages, related pages, things like that, that are gonna show up and hopefully ease that navigation around the docs, just to not confuse people.

Karl M. (50:01)
Fair. My only complaint with filament is the CLI tool is very verbose.

Alex Six (50:08)
Yes, yes it is.

Karl M. (50:11)
And so there's some things where I'm like, make fil- no filament make, nevermind. Just go to the docs and Google it, or look it up again.

Alex Six (50:18)
Yeah.

shell aliases are your friend there.

Karl M. (50:23)
Yeah, I have a lot of them now. I have a lot of filament shell aliases now, but didn't then. So now I have like FillR, which is pretty funny. Filament resource, FillR.

Steven F. (50:23)
Do I drop a skill issue here or?

Alex Six (50:32)
Yeah.

Yup.

Steven F. (50:39)
Fell hard.

Alex Six (50:40)
Phil R. But he gets the job done.

Steven F. (50:41)
Nice. Yeah.

Karl M. (50:44)
but it does get the job done. But yes, if I was going to bring a junior on and tell them, up your terminal and type in PHP, Artisan, hold on, it's fillR for me, what is it for you?

Alex Six (50:57)
Right. Yeah.

Steven F. (50:59)
I'm just hearing skill issue Carl. I'm sorry buddy.

Karl M. (51:01)
It's 100 % a skill issue. 100 % I can't memorize anything but Raycast. Raycast. So I can just go into Raycast and say filament docs. Is that a thing? There is. There's a doc search for filament.

Alex Six (51:02)
Hahaha!

Steven F. (51:06)
Are you sure you're a Vim user?

There you go. There you go.

Alex Six (51:12)
Woof.

Man, we should make a, maybe there is a filament extension. Is there?

God bless whoever wrote that. Whoever wrote that, I need to buy him a beer or something.

Karl M. (51:26)
I don't know but yeah there's there's docs here for it. I will will install it and I'll ping you tomorrow to let you know if it's any good.

Steven F. (51:31)
my goodness.

Alex Six (51:36)
Yes.

Steven F. (51:38)
Alright fellas, were shooting for a 30 minute episode. Here we are at like 52 minutes. So at this point, Alex, is there any like, I mean, okay, you've got kids, filament, day job. I don't know how much other time you've got in your days, but do you have any other projects or side gigs or hobbies or anything you just kind of want to chat about here for a minute?

Karl M. (51:39)
Yeah.

Alex Six (52:02)
yeah, I can like rocket through some of them too many projects to count. Bogdan and I, Bogdan from Upstate PHP and I have something brewing and I won't say much more than that. Cause I don't know how much he wants to say about that. He's definitely the brains behind the operation. I'm just the loud obnoxious face. so yeah, have that as kind of a side project, got a, you know, a million things.

Steven F. (52:06)
jeez, okay.

Mm-hmm.

That was a super tease. Like we got absolutely nothing from that.

Alex Six (52:27)
yeah. No, and you're not. You're not going get anything from me on that one until I figure out what I'm allowed to say.

Karl M. (52:28)
Yeah.

Steven F. (52:33)
Like it could be coffee or it could be an app. I don't even know from that description.

Karl M. (52:37)
it's a tui where you can buy coffee.

Alex Six (52:38)
It could be both, terminal.shop. But it's written with Laravel prompts.

Steven F. (52:43)
That's done. That's been done.

Karl M. (52:46)
Not literal prompts.

Alex Six (52:47)
Yeah, they really missed out on that one. Yeah, so I've got that as a big side project. Got a couple other ideas brewing for open source or SaaS stuff, but nothing super firm. As far as like hobbies and stuff, I'm big into F1, a big F1 fan. Go McLaren.

Steven F. (52:48)
if

Karl M. (52:50)
They did.

Steven F. (52:52)
Okay, cool. Cool.

Karl M. (53:04)
I was gonna ask you, hold on, hold on, hold on. Who is the best F1 team and why is it McLaren?

Alex Six (53:11)
Because McLaren's got the best car, man. And they have Oscar Piastri, who is just a gem of a person to be on the F1 grid. He has quickly become my favorite driver.

Karl M. (53:20)
I watched a podcast where he and his mom were on a call and somebody asked her a question. And the question was, what happened when your son called you to tell you that he got an F1? He was like, well, I asked him what color shirt I needed to wear. then he said orange. And I was like, so you got on my Clarin. And then she realized right away what that meant.

Alex Six (53:25)
Dude.

Steven F. (53:45)
okay, okay, I'm following.

Alex Six (53:49)
Yup. Yup.

Karl M. (53:50)
that she has to say goodbye to Daniel. And her and Oscar both just, no. There's no way. It was just funny.

Alex Six (53:57)
I love how much of a like an internet celebrity Oscar's mom has become in all of this. Like she'll do podcasts and wear like Yuki Sonoda shirts. It's like the best thing in the world. She's she's wonderful.

Karl M. (54:13)
Okay, so funny story about that whole thing in where she became a meme, which is pretty funny. So Charles Leclerc, who is on the Ferrari team, adopted big air quotes, Oscar Piastri, and his mom got on Twitter and was like, wait, what? We have to have a long conversation before that happens. And so just became a, that's where she became like a huge meme. It was pretty funny.

Alex Six (54:41)
when I'm pretty sure even the F1 graphics, for the, least for free practice or something, was like Oscar Piastri Leclerc, like they adjusted his name for it. Like it was a whole thing. So yeah, F1's great. F1's great. If you don't watch F1, definitely, definitely worth it. Especially if you're like pseudo into sports, but you're like, there's too many names to remember. Like if you're, if you want to get into football and you're like, there's too many people on the team, I don't remember. There's literally 20 drivers and even less, there's 10 teams.

Karl M. (54:49)
Yeah, yeah, it became a whole whole new

Okay, I'm going say this. Watch one episode. Watch one episode of Drive to Survive on Netflix. If you're not hooked on Daniel Ricardo after that first episode, I don't know how to solve any of your problems.

Steven F. (55:12)
Yeah.

It's a good series. It's a good series. I really like Formula One, but I haven't been able to stay on top of it very much because my wife is not interested in it in the least. So you guys will have to catch me up. When did McLaren become good? Because I feel like, yeah, like.

Karl M. (55:23)
It is.

Alex Six (55:28)
Hmm.

Karl M. (55:33)
Six months ago. Miami. Miami.

Alex Six (55:34)
Yeah, very suddenly. We were very bad for a very long time.

Steven F. (55:38)
through through covid up until at the end of 2023 season. feel like like they were pretty mid pack. But so they're they're doing good now. What happened?

Alex Six (55:44)
Yep. Yeah, launched ahead.

Karl M. (55:47)
yeah, they've won four. well, here's what really happened. Red Bull. I don't want to say what I'm thinking, but, they did not do well. they made some really bad decisions on the car and McLaren definitely leaned in on that and doubled down. So McLaren, so last year, Red Bull won like every fricking race by like 30 seconds. And McLaren was like, you know what?

Alex Six (56:12)
Except one. Yep.

Karl M. (56:18)
We're doing the same thing. now Lando is winning like three races with like 20 seconds over max in a lot of these races. It's crazy.

Alex Six (56:27)
Yeah.

Steven F. (56:28)
Where's Mercedes these days?

Karl M. (56:29)
Third, fourth, fifth, somewhere in that area typically. Yeah. They're swapping blows. They're swapping blows with Ferrari.

Alex Six (56:32)
Yeah, they're usually punching around with Ferrari They've gotten better over the past couple of races Yeah Yeah, it depends on the track. I think they've got two different cars built for two different types of track. So

Steven F. (56:36)
Okay. Interesting. Okay.

How about MotoGP? You watched that ever?

Alex Six (56:50)
I don't, but I'm more inclined to get into it. Bogdan has like talked to me about it and my gosh.

Steven F. (56:54)
Dude. Holy crap. Okay, if you like Formula One, but you're like, my God, literally like.

Karl M. (57:03)
Let's ramp up the intensity by like 95%.

Alex Six (57:04)
Let's rave about the danger. Let's strap them to the top of the fast moving thing instead of putting them in it.

Steven F. (57:06)
The risk, yes, but like. Yeah, guys, what's OK? What's amazing with Moto GP? Is that? For the most part. No, it has nothing to do with the wrecking. It is like the talent above all else of these freaking writers like in Formula One, there is still enough of an actual raw.

Karl M. (57:17)
They wreck and survive.

Alex Six (57:19)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Steven F. (57:33)
technical speed difference between like the fastest cars and the slowest cars that it makes a statistically significant difference right now the drivers can make up for a lot of that but statistically there's a big gap to try to like fill but with MotoGP yes there is variations in the bikes of course but like dude the driver skill the cojones and everything else is like the

Alex Six (57:41)
Yeah.

Yeah

Steven F. (58:00)
pretty much dominating factor and seeing what those guys do is just unbelievable. As somebody that's like tried to do a little bit of, you know, sport bike racing, seeing what those guys do is unbelievable. So Sue, if you like Formula One, dude, dude.

Karl M. (58:07)
inches off the ground.

inches off the ground, quite literally.

Alex Six (58:17)
Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna have to try it. It's always intrigued me. My dad rode motorcycles for a while until my mom made him stop. And I, you know, just seeing them ride around on the, you know, I-26 or whatever going up to Greenville is a totally different game from them being basically flat against the road as they're going around turns. It looks intense. I really want to get into it. Yeah, yeah, right.

Steven F. (58:39)
Yeah. Yeah. Bumping into each other. Frickin like.

Alex Six (58:45)
Like a Formula One car bumps into another one, the whole thing is just, it explodes into pieces. And you've got these two guys on motorcycles elbowing each other. Like, it's crazy. So, yeah, man. So yeah, F1's a hobby. Other one that I think I should encourage people to get into, fountain pens. Fountain pens rock. No! Carl, knew we were meant to be. This is amazing.

Steven F. (58:55)
It's, it's, it's fricking cool. It's fricking cool.

Karl M. (58:56)
It's insane.

Alright.

Steven F. (59:06)
No, shut up, Alex. my God. Are we having. Dude, guys, are we having a moment right now? Like I've got do I was super and super into Fountain pins in college. I've got I've got a viscante over here, guys. Look at this. I got like one of the sweet. I don't think this was a limited edition again, but like this was the one that it's volcanic rock.

Karl M. (59:15)
HA!

Alex Six (59:17)
No you don't.

What? This is...

Ugh.

Karl M. (59:33)
All right, this.

Alex Six (59:35)
I want that one so bad. Okay, next time you come to Upstate PHP, bring that thing. I want to write with it.

Steven F. (59:37)
Dude, this thing was... okay, so you're gonna kill me.

Karl M. (59:43)
Okay, so we're definitely gonna need an Alex 6 version 2 episode because...

Alex Six (59:47)
Ugh, guys.

Steven F. (59:48)
and all we're talking about is writing your tits.

Alex Six (59:50)
I could go on for hours and hours.

Karl M. (59:51)
Hahaha

Steven F. (59:53)
Dude, I-

Karl M. (59:54)
I, this is a hobby I literally just got into like, my, my family got me like a hundred dollar Amazon gift card and it like, I literally don't have any need, but fountain pens sound like a cool idea. I write a lot for work and I might as well enjoy the experience.

Alex Six (1:00:03)
Yeah.

Yeah, they're awesome. Yup. This...

Steven F. (1:00:10)
dude, a man like in college, I was the only weirdo that used a Neanderthal utensil for taking my notes. I got like, there was like a few people that were like famous on campus for absolutely ridiculous things. One dude was named Segway Jesus because he had a hair like Jesus and he wrote a segue everywhere. I was the fountain pen guy.

Alex Six (1:00:17)
Yep.

Yeah

Karl M. (1:00:37)
I thought he was really good at making segues to podcasts.

Steven F. (1:00:40)
Nope, nope, nope. He literally wrote a segue and he just looked like a Jesus. So he was segue Jesus. No idea what his real name was. And yeah, I was the fountain pen guy and it's hilarious. And then like you actually show a couple of people like using one, like a pretty good one too that like flows really, really nice. And they're like, wow, okay. Yeah, like it is different, but you just have to be like a weirdo that just wants.

Alex Six (1:00:43)
amazing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Steven F. (1:01:04)
to use that type of because like at the end of the day, a good roller ball is still going to be like the more probably productive thing. I'm over here getting ink all over.

Karl M. (1:01:10)
Well, that goes back to the whole conversation we had earlier where we like good experiences and if you pick up a pen and it doesn't write the first time, you're like, well, that's dead. It's perfectly fine. It will work the next time you use it, but this time it didn't.

Alex Six (1:01:12)
I

Yeah.

Steven F. (1:01:22)
Yeah, dude. The first time I'm in class and I'm like doing this and like everything has started and I'm like taking this and I'm trying to get the plunger out and I've got my ink on there and then like I'm doing shit and the bottle of ink fell over on the table and so like there's just stuff and I'm just like, no, no, why did I choose to use this?

Alex Six (1:01:40)
Ugh.

Karl M. (1:01:40)
No.

Alex Six (1:01:43)
What do I do? That's why you ink before class. Yeah, right.

Steven F. (1:01:49)
man. Yeah, I'm just a glutton for punishment, but my God, here I am literally getting ink on my fingers as I'm using this thing. So yeah, dude, hilarious.

Karl M. (1:01:49)
The same reason you use PHP.

Hahaha!

Alex Six (1:01:56)
Nah man, the Ready experience is so worth it.

Yep, just filled this one up with orange earlier. My hands are all orange. It's part of the charm, right?

Steven F. (1:02:07)
Yeah. Yeah. my gosh. I cannot believe I'm, literally on a podcast with two individuals that are into fountain pens. Like I didn't think there was another person on the planet these days that was into us. So

Karl M. (1:02:09)
That's insane. Okay. I didn't think that I was going to...

Stephen we were on the call the other day and I was like hey, we're working on We're working on this Larry Betts thing. Hold on. I gotta go get a box and Stephen's like what's in the box? I was like, I got a fountain pen and he was like

Alex Six (1:02:22)
Nah man.

Hahaha!

Karl M. (1:02:40)
you

Steven F. (1:02:40)
That's awesome though. I mean it's a cool. It's they're awesome little collector things. So whatever whatever I'd be more into watches if I could afford them, but

Alex Six (1:02:46)
yeah.

Karl M. (1:02:46)
They really are. They really are.

Alex Six (1:02:50)
man, you're telling me.

Karl M. (1:02:51)
Nope, I'm just gonna stick with my Apple Watch with my basic...

Steven F. (1:02:53)
Yeah, I saw Alex is rocking something over there, but I don't I can't make out what it is. OK, cool.

Alex Six (1:02:56)
It's a little Timex. Yeah, it's not a cheap one, but I got it for my dad and my father-in-law for a wedding present. And I was like, well, they've got a sale if you get three. I might as well get one too. And I had to stop wearing the Apple Watch. So was getting those phantom taps all the time. Or I was like, I thought it was tapping my wrist. I was like, I had to stop, man. If this isn't addiction, I don't know what is.

Steven F. (1:03:19)
Dude, totally, totally.

Karl M. (1:03:20)
I have, this is gonna go back to that conversation we had earlier. I've gotten to the point where if my phone is the thing that wakes me up, I'm turning it off and going back to bed. But if I wake up from the Apple watch tapping me on the wrist, I'm fine.

Alex Six (1:03:34)
That's fair. It's really good at that. I love it as my alarm because actually I love it that my wife uses it for her alarm because she's always up. She used to be a teacher and so she is up at like 4 a.m. every morning and I finally just was like here have this Apple watch because I was so tired of waking up to her alarm every morning and now I don't hear it's great.

Karl M. (1:03:55)
Right. Fantastic.

Steven F. (1:03:55)
Yeah, yeah. All right, can I ask Alex one last thing? And then I think we'll be kind of ready to wrap this up. This is totally unscripted by the way. So I'm just kind of, yeah, this is true. That was at the 30 minute mark. I know, okay.

Alex Six (1:03:57)
All right.

Karl M. (1:04:03)
We said that like five times now.

Alex Six (1:04:05)
We did. We just keep finding things in common. That's the problem. I've got to say something really controversial and just like end it right away.

Steven F. (1:04:12)
On let me hover over the end recording by the. Yeah, right. I use white mode by in my neo them by the way. So Alex, you're like your senior dev status and I feel like there's potentially going to be a lot of new like.

Karl M. (1:04:14)
Space is better than tabs, click.

Alex Six (1:04:16)
gosh.

Karl M. (1:04:21)
Get out!

Steven F. (1:04:34)
Laravel developers entering the space between maybe what's happening with WordPress, also Laravel Cloud and some of the school stuff that's happening around the community. Is there like one particular tip, trick, learning location, anything that you would sort of say from your experience has been really valuable to you?

totally putting them on the spot.

Alex Six (1:04:55)
boy. No, yeah, that's fine. I actually didn't really even mention this, but I've been doing like mentoring for bringing people into tech for years now. I've headed up three apprenticeship programs at different places I've worked, which are a ton of fun. Like would absolutely recommend again, that's another hour long conversation. So I'll spare the details, but I think for me, and this is maybe not so much specific for Laravel, but obviously still.

Steven F. (1:05:10)
Nice.

Alex Six (1:05:25)
still counts. My favorite tip that I've ever heard, and I'm 100 % gonna steal it from Primogen, who's the one who said it, but I believe it wholeheartedly. The best way to level up your skill at any point during your career, but I think very specifically at the beginning, is not to watch a bunch of videos, to read a bunch of documentation.

to go on somebody's live stream and ask questions and watch them. Those are all good things. But the best thing is just butt in the saddle. Like sit down, build something. Even if you have no idea how to do it, have something to build and actively make progress on that thing. Because it's one thing to sit there and like copy code from a tutorial. It's one thing to sit there and watch all of the insanely well-produced Laracast videos.

It's another thing altogether to take those learnings and actually apply them to something that's unique to you. And I think that's one of the best things when people are coming into tech is that they haven't been polluted by years of just working on software. So they have other hobbies and interests and things they do and want to do outside of tech. Use that, leverage that to come up with an idea. It doesn't have to be unique. It's just for you to learn, right? But come with an idea that means something to you that you'll want to see through to the end.

Steven F. (1:06:47)
Right.

Alex Six (1:06:51)
Because man, that time in the saddle is going to be way, way more impactful than sitting and reading a blog post will ever be.

Steven F. (1:07:00)
I like it.

Karl M. (1:07:00)
Absolutely. All right. Well, that's Alex six, everyone.

Steven F. (1:07:02)
I like it. Yeah, man, we knew of him, by the way, fountain pens, Formula One. We we covered the gamut. So. All right. This is fantastic, fantastic episode. don't think we know who our next guest will be at this point, but stay tuned and we'll let you guys know who that'll be in a future episode and we will go from there. So, Carl, Alex, thank you very much and we'll catch everyone.

Alex Six (1:07:09)
By the way.

Yeah we did. We really did.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Karl M. (1:07:31)
Thank you, Stephen.

Steven F. (1:07:32)
Yeah, we will catch everyone next time.

Alex Six (1:07:34)
Sounds good.

Karl M. (1:07:35)
All right, see ya.