40 spoonfuls of Marmite - James Brooks and Greg Skerman
Good day. I'm Mitchell Davis, and welcome to episode 1 of the hallway track podcast. I wanna start the show by thanking you. The reception to the trailer episode has been fantastic with so many lovable folks from all over the world reaching out to get on the mic. And I'm really excited to have as many guests on as I can.
Mitchell Davis:For our first episode, we're starting off with a bang, and I'm so glad to have James Rooks, Laravel core team member and prolific product producer, and Greg Skern, head of software engineering at ISEEK Plant, Australia's number one construction hire marketplace, joining me for a chat. Enjoy. So, guys, can you please say hello and introduce yourselves? James?
James Brooks:Hi. I'm James Brooks, software engineer at Laravel. Greg?
Greg Skerman:Hi. I'm Greg Skerman, director of technology at iseekplant.com.au.
Mitchell Davis:And I am Mitchell Davis, the founder of 2 businesses, Atlas Software. We're a Laravel development agency and RecruitKit, which is a SaaS product for recruitment agencies and large employers to help them onboard new employees quickly and efficiently at scale. So I thought I might kick things off today by talking about podcasting. I've been a listener of podcasts for years now. The first one that got me hooked was the first season of Serial, probably like 8, 9 years ago.
Mitchell Davis:I've never looked back since. For the last few years, I wanted to start a show of my own, but I could never get over the awkwardness of recording solo, sitting in a room and just talking to a mic and like, hoping that it was interesting. So I'm really glad to finally get this show up and running where I'm talking to interesting people about interesting things. I'm so stoked to have you guys both on for the first episode. So, James, you were running the Happy Dev Podcast for a while there.
Mitchell Davis:How did you
James Brooks:find it? Hard. Like, incredibly rewarding, but very hard. So for anyone that doesn't know, happy dev is a mental health podcast where I speak to software developers about their experiences with, mental health and related things. And I started that I mean, this is a really good way to get started, Mitchell, because this is quite deep, but my, brother died in 2018.
James Brooks:And so I I kind of wanted to put all of this, like, build up of energy and emotion into something, whilst helping other people. So I started happy dev and I had I think it was 11 episodes. I had been recording more than COVID happened and kind of in hindsight, it was a wrong decision, but I felt like at the time people had enough going on as it was. So I kind of stopped recording them. And I keep saying I'm going to record more.
James Brooks:I will. It's very high on my list of things to do, but just it as you know, recording podcast takes a lot of time, especially editing. And, people share on happy dev, they share quite, like, some heavy things. And so hearing that back and listening back and trying to edit it so it sounds right and it tells the true story of what somebody's trying to share, that's quite a lot of work. Yep.
James Brooks:But, yeah, I do want to get back to it.
Mitchell Davis:Totally. I think the people would want to hear it. Even just hearing you describe that now. It's like, yeah, that sounds like a really worthwhile, show to have back out there, you know, in the public voice. Because I guess, like, the goal of this show is more to just talk, I guess, mostly around technology and and the business side of things.
Mitchell Davis:But it is really important, you know, to hear mental health and what people are going through. So hopefully, you do. Hopefully, this buzz you on, to to get the show back up and running.
James Brooks:Mhmm. Yeah. I, I definitely want to do it. I the the amount of people that reached out to me since in, like, the last 2 years and have asked me if I'm going to redo it, kind of says a lot about how important it is to people.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. And, Greg, what about you? What's your exposure with podcasts?
Greg Skerman:Yeah. I've I've listened to a few I I guess, I'm an infrequent listener. I might see something come up on on Twitter, and I click on it. I am really enjoying Aaron Francis' current podcast, which is, I love that video, that supercut that got put together.
Mitchell Davis:Justin's one.
Greg Skerman:Of Aaron and Ian. That puts that hilarious. It's like, yeah. If if you're listening, Aaron, you are you are definitely George. I'm sorry.
Greg Skerman:It's just
James Brooks:That's it.
Greg Skerman:Let's
Mitchell Davis:see how he feels about that.
Greg Skerman:Yeah. Oh, he's already roasted me on. That's what he was, so probably at the end of it. But, yeah, I I've, I've I've been a guest on exactly one podcast. So,
James Brooks:one of I don't
Greg Skerman:know if he's still running it, actually. You know? But Aaron had a had or has a podcast for his own business, called the Hammerstone podcast. It was one of these podcasts that talks about sort of building in public and story of of of the the the weekly, work of of building a company. And I, it was around time that, not long after he'd released, the the Laravel sidecar project, which is sort of a a way of running, Lambdas from within Laravel, as opposed to running Laravel in a Lambda, which is what vapor does.
Greg Skerman:And and we leveraged it for, a service side rendering requirement that we had, using Inertia. And and both Aaron and I were sort of in the Inertia insiders group, through sponsorship when that happened. And I think because we were 10 hours ahead of the US, we beat him to the punch, and, he reached out to me. Yeah. I think he reached out because he had I mean, at that time, I don't think anyone had ever heard of me or the company I worked for outside of Australia.
Greg Skerman:And I was, then he's like, who the hell am I? Because, so I ended up on a podcast with him to sort of talk through talk through that journey. That was I hate the fun, and I've been flying for ages to get an invite into another podcast since. But, yeah, busy with life, busy with I think we're out of time. It was sort of 2021, so peak COVID season, and everything was busy and crazy everywhere.
Greg Skerman:And, yeah, just this opportunity counts, so thanks, Phil.
Mitchell Davis:It. You've made it.
Greg Skerman:Put it on.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. I'm, it's great. I'm stoked with the with the reception so far. Like, I've had, I think, 10 or 12 people fill out the application form in, like, a week, which is a lot for me, going from, like, no followers to now I've got 50 followers on Twitter. And it's like, oh my god.
Mitchell Davis:These things go nuts. Like, it it's been hard to organize everyone and and wrangle everything. I I had a false start yesterday was meant to be the first episode. And, I was speaking with someone in another time zone, and, I got the time zones wrong. And so that meant that the recording timeline for the 2 people I was speaking with didn't work.
Mitchell Davis:So, that's been postponed now. So there's a lot that I'm learning, of how how to do this. But, I did listen to that episode, that you did with Aaron, and I remember I was walking my dog at the time. I could remember, like, the exact spot on the route that I take my dog that I was listening. And I was like, this is really cool, and this guy sounds Australian.
Mitchell Davis:You know? And then, like, yeah, I I did a bit of research into it, and we actually started using it as well on on one of the projects that we have, the, using Sidecar. And then, Inertia's sort of taken that even further now. Right? That became like, there's now a story for server side rendering in Inertia.
Mitchell Davis:Right?
Greg Skerman:Yeah. So, like, we the the Inertia story for server side rendering, sort of came out a little bit after Zicar, because I think sidecar on its own doesn't do the service side rendering. Like, there's a there's some stuff that needs to bolt together, in the inertia piece to make that happen. But at the time, the and to be honest, we're we are not, like, right up on the bleeding edge of inertia at the moment, so I don't know whether or not the story's changed. But, at the time, I think the initial release was gonna be that you were gonna run a separate node server that would do the server side rendering piece, and it would pass the the the, sort of compile HTML back to your so so back to the inertia render function, which would then return over the wire.
Greg Skerman:And that is really cool and would work if you had nailed up servers, but we were already so deep on vapor. We're like, we how are you gonna run a node server in vapor when you've got a 15 minute execution time? So I think our initial pass at it and it probably hasn't changed much in two and a half years, to be honest. Our initial pass at it was to take the express server, that, was doing that, on a on a on a node server and sort of take the middle of that out and drop it into into sidecar, and it it just kinda works. The hand wavy on the web the webpack stuff is still, like, is still open up while to this banger.
Greg Skerman:I have no idea what the hell is going on here. Webpack is a complete and utter mystery. If someone wants to explain it to me like I'm 5, I'd really appreciate it.
Mitchell Davis:Mate, I don't think anyone has any idea anymore. It's, yeah, it's a beast.
Greg Skerman:Yeah. Totally.
Mitchell Davis:So on the point of, vapor, James, I remember we were chatting at Laracon, and I don't know if you remember. But I mentioned that, yeah, my preference between, Forge and Vapor is Vapor. And we were having a conversation sitting out in the, like, courtyard area at the front of Laravel, and I was alone with that opinion. Everyone else in this group of, like, 5 or 6 of us was like, I love Ford. I love Ford.
Mitchell Davis:Did you like, you look to me, and you're like, I'll try not to take it personally. I just saw that. It's funny. I
James Brooks:did say that, Mitchell. Yeah.
Greg Skerman:You're gonna
Mitchell Davis:be fired? See it. Again?
James Brooks:Again.
Greg Skerman:Good.
Mitchell Davis:There's there's a bit of a history there. But, yeah. So so, James, in your day to day work, you're mostly focused on forge. Is that right? Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Cool. What does that look like to be working on that on the inside? Like, I know you did touch on this a little at Laracon Australia, but for people that weren't there, like, what's the day to day what's a day in the life, you know, of working on are you are you only working on Forge, or are you working on some of the other tools?
James Brooks:I do work on Envoy as well, which doesn't take as much time. It's quite a stable product, limited in scope as well. So that makes it a lot easier. But, yeah, Forage is my, like, primary, time. I have recently started, looking into Pulse with Tim and Jess, helping out a bit with that as well.
James Brooks:So, yeah, a a a day in the life of is kind of so for backstory, we work on, like, a a monthly or 6 week sprint of of tasks that we're going to do. So we can suggest things to Taylor that we think we should be working on, or he will kind of pick out items from the backlog. And then, yeah, it's it's not as, I don't know what the word is, but I I feel like people have this big expectation that, like, it's just Forger's, finely crafted piece of software and that, magic can't yeah. It's just magic, which to be fair, there is some magic. By the way we connect to servers and stuff, and juggle all of that.
James Brooks:But, yeah, it's a very typical Laravel application. So, yeah, features are quite easy to build. We we've got a very solid framework, and infrastructure for doing so. But yeah. So we only have, myself, Tim, and that's really it.
James Brooks:Like, me and Tim, work on forge. Obviously, Tim does a lot of things with the framework as well. So
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Sure.
James Brooks:Between us, we need to be, like, very full stack. We do a lot of front end changes, lots of back end. And one of the, unique positions that we're in is that the, engineering staff are also the support staff. Although we have Gus as well that works full time and Mohammed, doing support, we're also able to jump in and help out, and we can be assigned tickets that are that that require engineering knowledge, I guess.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Totally. That's pretty unique. There's not many places out there that, like, many products where your engineers are your support. You know?
James Brooks:Yeah. Yeah.
Greg Skerman:I'd I'd dig it. I think it's I think it's great. Like, the number of times like, I I deal with all the factors and the number of times that I'm speaking 40 levels away from the person who maintains it. And I'm like, if you could just get the guy who wrote the thing
James Brooks:Yeah.
Greg Skerman:In a room for 30 seconds, we would instead of gonna instead of gonna play telephone with, like, this massive bureaucracy, I think it's I think it's awesome. I think it's the only way to go personally.
James Brooks:Yeah. It's definitely, personally, I think it's I think it works really well, especially with such a small team, behind these products. And we have so many products as well that if we were to hire, support staff for each product and like a big team of them, we'd be so far removed from the product itself that it'd be kinda hard to really know what direction we should be going in. But, yeah, even though, we have supply engineers, they could just message us on Slack. They can assign a ticket to us and we could just pick it up straight away.
James Brooks:And some of the best ideas come from the customers themselves or kind of like a spin off of their suggestion.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Sure.
James Brooks:I don't know if that really answers the question, though, Mitchell. But
Mitchell Davis:No. It does. Yeah. I think that that absolutely, that covers it. Greg, what about you?
Mitchell Davis:What's a what's a day in the life?
Greg Skerman:Well, I'm, I'm probably way less interesting these days for, like, Nvidia's who like, what climbed the corporate ladder a little bit. So I run a team. I run an an engine call engineering department that I see. That sounds very grandiose. There's 8 of us in the team at the moment, so relatively small team.
Greg Skerman:I do a lot of the sort of people management side of things, so interviews and hiring, you know, 1 on ones, career development plans, those kinds of things. That that that takes up a a reasonable amount of points of time. I also work very closely with product in the business on what the product roadmap looks like to to to effectively align the technical strategy to the product and business strategy so that, you know, when we're looking 6 months down the line at what direction we might be trying to aim the business in that we're trying to make technical choices that, allow us to execute that effectively, and efficiently. Mhmm. I still do get on the tools occasionally.
Greg Skerman:I think, I'm a firm believer that people who manage engineers have to have at least had a career in engineering and need to keep the tool sharp because engineers just do not trust people who can't cope.
Mitchell Davis:They'll see right through you.
Greg Skerman:Having been an engineer with managers who couldn't cope, I'm like, why am I even listening to you sometimes? So, yeah, it's, I I do try and keep the yeah. I do try and keep the edge, like, honed where I can. Like, I stay pretty across what's going on across our our tech stack and tool chain. And and sometimes that's good for the team because I can kinda have one eye on, like, what's next, in terms of what's coming down the the the pipe from a technical point of view.
Greg Skerman:Like, we're not in a position right now to adopt something like React server components where where the Laravel Inertia React was at the real stuff.
James Brooks:Is that right?
Mitchell Davis:I don't know.
Greg Skerman:So but I'm kind of looking at Rack Server Components because I think there's potentially some interesting things that we could do, with that in the future. But while it's probably 12 months away before there's a decent, stable solution for everybody in the React ecosystem to adopt it, And it's a big topic, so having some capacity to look at what, the technical landscape is gonna look for us. We have a lot of customers, and we have, you know, public facing sort of application. We our customers aren't developers, so I think when you've got product where customers are developers, they'll probably forgive you maybe. I don't know.
Greg Skerman:James might have a different opinion, but they might forgive you for, adopting things early and taking some risks in that space. People aren't technically inclined that that's often you often have to be a little bit further back from the bleeding edge. So, yeah, keeping an eye on that kind of stuff. I also look after all of our, infrastructure with I've got a a guy in my team who, who does the infrastructure code stuff for us, but sort of looking at budgeting for how much our AWS bill's gonna be. And, we have some other very big vendors that we have to keep an eye on.
Greg Skerman:So, yeah, it's, it's interesting. So I guess there's a split between the sort of people management and architecture and strategy is kinda where I sit. And then occasionally, I will fix a bug and really irritate my team because I'm not because I'm not always in there. I sometimes, though. Yeah.
Greg Skerman:It's true. Do more more armored good
Mitchell Davis:I could imagine. That happens with me sometimes. We're only a very small team comparatively. We're, we're a team of 2. And Chris, the guy that works with me, he's really good, and he's very, like, detail oriented, make sure that he's going through and, like, you know, dotting the i's, crossing the t's on everything.
Mitchell Davis:And then sometimes I can come in and I'm like, no. No. No. Okay. Let's just do this.
Mitchell Davis:You know, I can be a bit brash and and and brazen. So, yeah, not exactly the same, but I can I can see where you're coming from with that? So, James, I I mentioned in the intro, you, what did I say? Prolific product releaser. You've got a lot of flag things that you've done and put out there.
Mitchell Davis:So I've got here CheckMango, cache, and style c I are some of the big ones. Are there any that I've missed that you wanna
James Brooks:Yeah. The Laravel Artisan Cheat Sheet, Artisan dot page. What else? I I kinda maintain this, like, micro app for Polestar. Well, not for them directly, but last year, I bought a Polestar, which is a electric car.
James Brooks:And I wanted a specific configuration, and they have these like pre configured cars that you can buy where you don't need to wait as long for them to arrive. So I scraped that GraphQL API, stored them all in a database, and then notified me when my specific configuration became available.
Mitchell Davis:You are under by the way.
James Brooks:Yeah. Yeah. Proud. Yeah. Yeah.
James Brooks:I mentioned it to somebody, and they said, I, I'm interested. Can I put my email in? And I was like, ah, well, kinda gotta make, gotta make that an app then haven't I? And I got a, I also have a, this is top net level. I, have a referral link for Polestarz.
James Brooks:If there's anything you need to know about me, it's that I love a referral. Even if I from it, if I can refer somebody to something that I use and believe in, I feel good about myself.
Greg Skerman:I think that was the first time you and I had an interaction, actually.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Probably.
Greg Skerman:If we we had a telegram group, we'll have a telegram group for the the Laracon speakers. And I was looking for something, which unfortunately I couldn't pull off in time. And, yeah. I think Jess Archer Archer beat you beat you by, like, 30 seconds, and you got really angry that she had the referral link and you didn't have it.
James Brooks:I followed up with it though, just in case. So my my Polestar Referral link did convert into somebody actually buying a, a car through me, through my app. And Polestar sent me a very nice, very smart hoodie, which
Mitchell Davis:Hey. That's not bad.
James Brooks:That's good. Anything else that I built? Oh, man. There's been so many apps over the years, but none really related to our industry now.
Mitchell Davis:Well, it's certainly quite a list.
James Brooks:But, yeah, I I would caveat that with, not so successful prolific product launcher. Yeah. That's okay. But, yeah, there's there's things out there.
Mitchell Davis:Absolutely. I I want to talk about cache because it am I saying that right? Cache?
James Brooks:That's how I pronounce it. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Awesome. Cool. Well, we can be wrong together if if I'm wrong. Yeah. So what was the process like?
Mitchell Davis:Because you sold it a while ago, years ago now, and then you brought Yeah. You bought it back. Yeah. How's that been? What's been the the process?
Mitchell Davis:What went into deciding to buy it back? And then Yeah. How's it going now?
James Brooks:Okay. So I think I started in 2014. It's a status page open source status page system used by Fortune 500 companies all around the world. And I attribute cache to me having any sort of personality in our industry, any sort of social media thing. That's really what kind of people knew me for back then.
James Brooks:And then in 2018, I think it was, I sold it to a company. 2018 being the year that my brother died and my first daughter was born. So it was a a very, very, very busy and emotionally difficult time for me. And that was one thing that I didn't need anymore was just, I need to clear my plate. I've got 2 big things going on.
James Brooks:So I'll also start a podcast, but, I, yeah, I sold it and then they kind of did nothing with it. It just kind of flagged and got old unmaintained. And then I've ever since I sold it, I, like past me regretted it because I had such big plans, but I just wasn't able, I wasn't in the place to really buzz pull them up. And then I reached out to the company and, and was like, look, you've not done anything with it. Do you have any plans to do anything?
James Brooks:They said no. So I was like, well, if I can buy it back then, like, name your price. They did. And, yeah, I bought that back. So version so it's currently a version 2.4, but I'm working on version 3.
James Brooks:A Laravel partner and agency called jump 24 have very kindly redesigned it for me. So I'm in the process of getting that implemented. I am looking for volunteers to help out with that because there's a lot to do. But I've also kind of changed how I'm working the project as well. So at the moment, cache is a standalone application, provides a status page.
James Brooks:But with version 3, you'll be able to install it into an existing application or still continue to run it as a as a standalone, which is how I recommend a status page should be. You don't want to have it, like, linked to your actual application. Yeah. But, yeah, it it it's slow. I have a lot going on still now.
James Brooks:But, yeah, I I it's crazy to me how much cache still gets used. It's been installed by 100 of 1000 of times. And, yeah, people people love it, still use it, and I hope to do it some justice soon.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Absolutely. Well, good on you for for getting it back and and having another go at it. I'm sure everyone appreciates it. What about check mango?
Mitchell Davis:How's that going?
James Brooks:Oh, that one that one is slow. That's a slow burner. So check mango is a full stack AB testing platform. And in my old job, I was a software development manager for an OTA, an online travel agency. And we launched like, the ability to book hotels or, holidays online.
James Brooks:So a package holiday, so hotel and and flight. So we launched this this, like, big, big new feature. It it had been such a hard task to get to that point. We launched it, and we're like, yeah. We're gonna be millionaires overnight.
James Brooks:This is what people want. I'm like, no bookings. So we're, like, frantically making changes. Still no bookings. We get getting a lot of, interaction and engagement, but nothing converting.
James Brooks:So we started trying out a B testing and we looked at optimizly, which is an incredible platform, but it's also incredibly expensive. And by the time I was able to get sign off for the large sum required to be able to use it, the prices have gone up. So we kind of ditched that. And then we were using Google Optimize, but we were also making back end changes. So there was a lot of, like, flags being set on the front end that got passed to request in the back end.
James Brooks:And we were able to make bookings eventually. Like, we did start getting conversions. But I kind of had this thought in the back of my mind that there has to be an AB testing platform, full stack AB testing platform, because you do want to do things on the back end as well as the front end, that doesn't cost the air. Because smaller companies, midsize companies, and agencies, they still have a lot of benefit to to pull out of AB testing. And yet if it's gonna cost a 100 grand, that like, that's just not reasonable.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Not gonna happen.
James Brooks:Yeah. Exactly. So I kind of I waited and I kept looking. And there are platforms out there, but none that felt like the developer experience of Optimizely, but in the price point of something a lot more reasonable. And then one Christmas, I think it was 2020, maybe, I just started hacking on it, got something out.
James Brooks:I mean, I've kinda been working on it very slowly ever since. It has officially launched, but, with a platform like that, you need a lot of s s SDKs. There's a lot of work to kind of do there. Yeah. Because it because it's agnostic.
James Brooks:Right? You you could put it into React, Python, JavaScript on the front end, the back end, but there has to be different ways of handling all that. So, yeah, it's a bit of a slow burner. I do have a couple of customers, is nice, very much in the red if I was to account for my time and the cost, but I enjoy it. I think there's, an untapped market there.
James Brooks:So yeah. And also that, Chipmango runs on vapor.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Hey.
James Brooks:I am a I I am a fat Forge fanboy, but ChetMango is a perfect use of, vapor.
Mitchell Davis:Excellent. Excellent. Well, I that kinda speaks to me with what I'm doing with RecruitKit. So RecruitKit, like I mentioned before, it's meant to help recruitment agencies really is who it's targeted at onboard people quickly and efficiently. And I've got one customer for it, and it's been running for two and a half years now.
Mitchell Davis:And I'm trying to get the word out. And, man, it's hard, you know, like, doing all of this stuff, running these businesses, and then, yeah, everything else going on in, you know, life's life's busy. It's hard. It's really hard doing all this. And I'm solo founder.
Mitchell Davis:So I'm fortunate to have Chris working with me. But, yeah, I'm a solo founder across both of these businesses. So yeah. Yeah. I can totally empathize with that.
Mitchell Davis:Slow burn is exactly the word that I would use.
James Brooks:I I feel that. I was always told, so I I kind of solo founded, ChetMango. Although my wife is supposed to be doing marketing, but, she's busy full time parenting, which is Yep. Far harder than some of our parenting. But,
Greg Skerman:yes recovery. Yeah. It's a trick
James Brooks:Listen to this. That's good. So, yeah, I was always told that, getting once you've got one customer, like, that's the hardest thing. The hardest thing is to get your 1st customer. And once you've got 1, that means you can get 5, and that means you can get 10.
James Brooks:My experience, that's not true. I feel like once you've got one, it's even harder to get the next. Also, like, ChipMango is quite a niche product in a way. Like the integration story isn't like Google optimize. It does require developer experience, but that is also the market that I'm targeting.
James Brooks:It's kind of developers like me 5 years ago that were in that position that was looking for this kind of solution. But I, I think unless you've got a lot of time to spend on it, it's or, or you just quit everything and try and go like Ram and profitable, then, yeah, it's it's hard to get time to do things. Right? Absolutely. Yeah.
James Brooks:Like marketing, design, development, support. Yeah. Yep. Same boat. That really resonates very
Mitchell Davis:Greg, have you ever done any any side projects of your own? Have you always been a company man?
Greg Skerman:Hello. Hello. I've I've done side projects that have never seen the light of day. And some I mean, oddly enough, the last attempt to decide project that I had was something in the AB testing space as well. But, no.
Greg Skerman:I'll leave I'll leave that with, to James. It'll be no competition. James is far more talented than I am. But, yeah, no. I've I've, I've I've I've mostly been a been a company man most of my career.
Greg Skerman:I've done a lot of things in the development space. I got we're kind of a bit of a journeyman. So, started around doing application support and then kind of invented an application support developer role out of that by, you know, building tooling to application support and then going from there. I've done things with automated QA, very early in my career. It was probably my first exposure to, to testing in anger.
Greg Skerman:I'm also sort of of the age where everybody had a web development startup at some point when they were just coming out of school, because that was a really great idea to to put to go and work for friends of the family for next to no money and effectively signing yourself up for years of indentured servitude. So so I did that for a long while. Sort of the more it's, I guess, the back half of my career, though, sort of the last 10 to 15 years, I've been in the startup and scale up space. Prior to YC Cloud, I worked for a startup in the not for profit space, which is really interesting, and I had a lot of stuff around, dealing with credit cards and billing and so on. So it was, like, donation portal style work and a CRM that was specifically designed to deal with that, that that sector, which is really interesting, but, you know, unfortunately, didn't end up going anywhere.
Greg Skerman:Yeah. And then I've, spent a lot of time with Isaac. I've been there for, I think, 7 years now. Joined them, when they had a couple of developers. It was just me and another guy for a long time.
Greg Skerman:And yeah. It's it's been a long time at that company, but I think I've seen maybe 3 different versions of Isek Plant in the time that I've been there. So Right. We sort of inherited a code base, which was the initial move from an agency built solution to Laravel, and then the sort of maintenance and version 2 of that. And then these days, we're now
Mitchell Davis:sort of,
Greg Skerman:I guess, on version 3 where we have, you know, 30 plus Laravel applications running in a big service constellation.
Mitchell Davis:You're all in on multiservice. Microservice rather.
Greg Skerman:Yeah. I mean, we're not With
James Brooks:the Laravel Ford. Right?
Greg Skerman:No. It's we're we're we're a 100% vapor, man. If you can't remember on vapor, we're we're not interested. But but we shall we? I'll I'll I'll I'll caveat that a little bit.
Greg Skerman:So the the the business that that that I'm in we're we're Australia's largest online construction marketplace. So people who are looking for construction services, so heavy plant equipment or people to do some surveying on a job site or, you know, land clearing, those kinds of things, come to us. They search our portal to, to find companies that can help them out, and then we we act as intermediaries to connect those people. And we do some really cool things with some telephony technology and, and that kind of stuff. And there's a premium model, so you can sort of advertise for free and then you can pay to get a boost to the advertising and access to more and better leads and that that kind of thing.
Greg Skerman:But the the nature of that is that the majority of the the the the load on the platform happens between 95 when people working. So, for us, Lambda is just such a great fit because we like, another one of the challenges we have is a very, very large site. So, I think we have 400 canonical locations that we no more than that. I think 1600 canonical locations and 400 sort of machine and service keywords that we target. So there's at least that many pages.
Greg Skerman:Multiply those 2 together to get at least that many pages and a whole bunch of ancillary things around the outside. And SEO is a huge a huge part of how, how people find us. So we would periodically get these crawl events from Google. And I don't think that happens quite so much these days. When I look at the logs, Google's kind of just constantly on the site rather than just visiting it every 3 weeks.
Greg Skerman:But because of that, we had to provision a lot of servers to deal with the fact that, you know, Google would come in, hit our site, and go, you're too slow. I'm not crawling you anymore because you just didn't have enough compute. So I think at that peak, we were running, like, 4, Excel servers that 99% of the time were basically idle just waiting for Googlebot to come in. So the great thing about something like Vapour and and Lambda in general is that, yeah, the cost per hour is, like, technically higher, but you're you're paying at the sort of second. So, we only pay for what we use.
Greg Skerman:So it was it was largely a cost control rather than a scale thing for us, although we've then been able to leverage it to do some really, really cool things with, particularly notifications and messaging. So one of our services is a is a notification service. And this is kind of a little bit different, I guess, microservices where people have, these tiny little pieces. Our our services are not micro. They are monolithic in in in their own right.
Greg Skerman:They just deal with one portion of the domain. So we we have a service that is the website, and we have a service that is the supplier portal. And the supplier portal is a Laravel application with a front end and APIs and all that all baked into an application. And I think if you took a pure microservices approach, that'd probably be about 15 different things.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah.
Greg Skerman:So best services, but they're not very micro. They're just sort of there's a model effect. And we do it so that there's a boundary around, so people aren't trying to jam communication stuff into, something to do with companies, for instance. But the notification system is really interesting, because people can send text messages on their platform, and people used to get very cross at text messages coming to them at 11 o'clock at night. So we do things like we batch, the messages overnight so they all get released at, like, 9 o'clock in the morning.
Greg Skerman:Yeah. So we stop sending the messages at 6 PM, and we start sending them again at 9 o'clock in the morning. And and Vapr enables that because we get a huge burst at 9 o'clock every morning that would probably overload, like, a regular queue service, or you'd have to have a lot of workers sort of sitting there. So having that elastic scalability where you can just ramp up to 500 workers instantly, drain all of those cute messages, and then get back on with 2 again. Sort of 80 hours work is is really cool.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Are you doing anything with serverless database?
Greg Skerman:Yeah. We're all in. We're still got rolling on serverless, and I'm really, really I'm really, really excited that AWS just announced, serverless elastic elasticache. So, James, if you can just quickly just just just just in your in the Slack in the internal Slack channel or something for for Laravel, can you just, like, see the idea that we get that?
James Brooks:I've seen it mentioned. I've seen it.
Greg Skerman:Oh, here we go. Yeah. So we're we're all we're we're serverless where we can be. And, again, it's at least it's cost control. I mean, the kind of database we would need to deal with peak load would be a pretty scary looking RDS cluster.
Greg Skerman:So I'd rather not I'd rather have that given that that this sort of profile of the load on the side. I'd rather pay a little more at a theoretical hourly rate and then not use the hours. So, you know, just pay for what I use for, then, you know, get a killer rate and be paying it all the time even when nothing's happening, if that makes sense.
Mitchell Davis:So Totally.
Greg Skerman:Yeah. Yeah. If it's over we will say, like, we're we're we're such a small team, and we don't have for a long time, we used to call ourselves a no ops team. We're not gonna have any operations at all. That that's not true anymore.
Greg Skerman:We do have, an awful lot of Terraform and infrastructure as code now because the the solution becomes so complicated. But I just want I just want other people to to look after my servers. I do not wanna be patching things. I don't wanna I don't wanna be paying someone to sit there and patch servers all day and run MySQL updates and all of that kind of stuff. And the the the risk if you don't do that is, you know, potentially catastrophic.
Greg Skerman:So, yeah. I love the serverless model because I don't have to worry about any of that stuff. That's an AWS problem, not a great problem, which is great.
Mitchell Davis:I like that. Yeah. I I agree. That's the way that we generally prefer to run our projects as well. RecruitKit is all entirely serverless based, both, Vapor and then database as well.
Mitchell Davis:And, we've started using serverless v 2, Aurora for, client project that we've just finished under Atlas, and that's been amazing to be able to schedule business hours. Okay. Scale up the servers and then or scale up the database rather and then scale it back down out of business hours. It's awesome. It's really cool.
Mitchell Davis:I'll, occasionally, I'll go into the project, have a look at the, like, the dashboards for it, just see them rising and falling, rising, falling, you know, over the course of the week. It's, yeah, it's really cool.
Greg Skerman:Yeah. And and Servo's v 2 can scale really quickly. Like, the speed that that thing can scale up and down in response to load is so we use we use serverless 1 for a long time, and and that was that was cool. That's cool bit of technology. It would still take a while for it to to respond to a spike in load.
Greg Skerman:So you'd you'd always be slightly over provisioned, with serverless v 2, you can you can provision it for what you need, and it will burst very quickly. The other thing that's quite cool about it and, unfortunately, you have to go very off rescue and stop using, Vapyr to manage your database to pull it off, but you can come up with some very, very interesting, cluster designs using, serverless features. So you can have, like, your primary, you know, rider node as a purchase reserved instance physical RDS server that you're getting the the the killer est rate you possibly can. And then you can use serverless v 2 as your sort of burst capacity. Oh.
Greg Skerman:You can do we do things like we do things like file automatic file. We're not doing that, but we are doing automatic file over, so which I don't think is configurable by default in viper. I might be wrong there, but we have so we do rewrite splitting, so Laravel has the ability in the database configuration to do rewrite splits, and we automatically file over if one of them goes down, so I don't think that was possible in the serverless v one. The other thing that's cool is the serverless v 2 is, like, full on my MySQL. So you're you're getting, bin logs.
Greg Skerman:So what we we we push bin logs into a data lake so that we can have, like, data analysis happening on at scale on s 3, without impacting without having to run massive analytic queries in the production database. And, again, that wasn't possible in serverless v one. So yeah. Serverless v two was a really or a a really 18.
Mitchell Davis:That's cool. That's why I've got my pay grade. I know some of those words. This is
James Brooks:why I don't work on paper.
Greg Skerman:You're just gonna say it with confidence, mate. Just just just say them with confidence, and then people will be.
Mitchell Davis:The in the beta. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:It's the bin log. It's on s 3. Yeah. Very good. No worries.
Mitchell Davis:So I just want to touch on, Laracon. So, obviously, James, you came to Laricon Australia. You're also speaking at Laricon India. Is that right?
James Brooks:Yes. And EU as well. Yeah. Oh, really? Excellent.
James Brooks:Yeah. Yep. It's a busy year.
Mitchell Davis:How are you feeling about that, all the travel?
James Brooks:I'm loving it. I I I genuinely thought that this year was going to be kind of the year that I I get to do all of this, and then it would just die off next year. But I've been incredibly fortunate that I've been invited back to India. I've been invited to speak at EU this time. I'm PHP UK, which is huge.
James Brooks:So I am riding this wave while it's still going. Absolutely.
Mitchell Davis:Good on you. Yeah. I hope it doesn't, doesn't weigh you out with all the the travel.
James Brooks:Yeah. We'll see. My my wife goes back to work next year. So this could be so 2024 could be my last speaking year, but we're gonna try and make it work. If I get accepted to speak somewhere, then we'll try and make it work.
Mitchell Davis:Well, I I applied to speak at Laricon Australia, and I like I ummed and odd about it. And, you know, I was a bit nervous to to apply, to stop putting myself out there. I knew I could come up with something that would be compelling. Like, I backed myself with that, but I was a bit shy, I guess, about putting myself out there finally. So that's sort of what this podcast is, is, you know, trying to get out there.
Mitchell Davis:Anyway, and, I submitted a talk about, webhooks, which I'm still confident is, like, a really interesting topic. I find them very interesting. And it's something that we build into RecruitKit very early on, way before we had any sort of need for webhooks. But I was like, this is just I really like it. I love one system talking to another and having a scheme.
Mitchell Davis:Whereas yeah. I don't know. It's totally my thing.
James Brooks:There's a lot that goes into webhooks.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. There is. Yeah. There is an versioning of them and, there's like, oh, you're logging and everything. And, yeah, I could talk about that for a while.
Mitchell Davis:But that's that's okay. But anyway, I wasn't selected. And so that was a bit of a driver of, like, right. I'm getting on this. I want to speak next year.
Mitchell Davis:I'll show you, Michael. Yeah. That's right. Because it's funny. I was we're in a, Slack group, the PHP Australia Slack group, and he was in there's a channel for Laracon, and he was trying to figure out, like, he he put in the chat a bunch of the, there were, like, 2 slots or something like that left for talks.
Mitchell Davis:And he put through in the chat, I think maybe 4 or 5 of the ones that he was considering. And webhooks was in there. But I was like, Oh, you got to do webhooks. Like, let's go with webhooks. And I was trying to like, I was talking with some of the some of the other people that I know in there, like,
Greg Skerman:you know,
Mitchell Davis:tell him that you want the webhooks talk. And, anyway, he ended up not going with the webhook. I know which talk got selected. I won't mention it. They did a really good job.
Mitchell Davis:So they Michael made a great choice, with the talk that he ultimately decided. But I was, like, one slot behind that. I was in the top 3, and he had 2 slots left. So just missed out, but that's okay. Maybe next time.
James Brooks:Just to, just to go back to what you said about, maybe being a bit shy and stuff, I I think that's, like, definitely a point that we need to discuss a bit further because Sure. I hear that so often. And, I only started giving, like, conference level talks this year. I started with, Laracon India, which had over a 1000 people.
Mitchell Davis:You kicked it off with a bang.
James Brooks:Yeah. Right? Go back or go home. But I have to say, like, it's it is hard, putting yourself out there and and kind of opening yourself up to, like, I guess, everyone's worst fear is to be hated because you have an opinion that doesn't match what somebody else's is. But I have to say that's not been my experience.
James Brooks:And certainly not been a anything that anyone's ever said when when I've been speaking to other speakers. And something somebody said to me was that everyone out there, everyone that's come to this conference is here to support you and everybody else on stage. Nobody's coming and nobody's buying a ticket just to be sad in in the audience booing anyone. And if that did happen, I know that every, every other person would kick that person out. Like they, it, it would not be acceptable.
James Brooks:And like, just from a speaker perspective, every group of speakers that I've been around have been incredibly supportive of one another. Like in Australia, I was fretting that, Michael has flown me halfway across the world. I really need to do a good job of it. And I was, like, pacing backstage while Nina was speaking. And Fatima was, like, one of the other speakers.
James Brooks:She was like, you know, show me a power pose. Let's let's, like, hiking me up. Be ready. Making sure I got some water. Yeah, everyone is so supportive of one another that even night no matter how nervous you are, you will go out on stage and kill it because you've had such a supportive group of people behind you the entire way.
James Brooks:And, yeah, it is hard. And, personally, I don't think it gets any easier, but it it is a hell of a lot of fun at the same time. Yeah.
Greg Skerman:You know what? I, yeah. I mean, I I care, like, a 100% of that. I I submitted it was what my sort of submission saw was kinda funny. The the the CFP came up, and I was at a swimming lesson with my kids, when it when it sort of came through.
Greg Skerman:And I just started doing the form. And I think it might might have submitted 2 or 3 sort of concepts for talks that didn't have anything prepped, previously. Lot of couple of them had a chance of getting up, and the one that Michael picked was probably the one that I was the had the most sort of confidence that I could do but I thought was gonna be the least likely one because it my talk was sort of more team and business focused, and, I'm I'm not one of these, like, coding psychos who just wanna make their lives really, really difficult by programming on stage.
James Brooks:Thanks, Greg.
Mitchell Davis:That's the type that I like the most. I wanna do that too.
Greg Skerman:No. I I couldn't do it. I I just could not do it.
James Brooks:So that was there's no point in I've I've given this, the talk that I've, did in Australia. I kind of was my talk of the year sort of thing. And, every time something has gone wrong with it, every time I go back and my wife's like, how did it go? And I was like, well, it went it went wrong, like, slightly, but I recovered. And she's like, well, why do you keep doing it?
James Brooks:I'm like, because it's like the hardest type of thing you can do on stage is the live code. And when I went out, like, to Australia, like, my, clicker wasn't working. I've got I had, like, a bit of a thing at the start where I was pacing the stage and kind of giving crap to Australians about Vegemite. I, my clicker didn't work. So I pulled the receiver out of my laptop and my hand was shaking so much that I couldn't get the USB C.
James Brooks:Like pull back in. And I was thinking to myself like, oh God, how am I gonna now type when my hands won't stay still? Like, I can't even put it for the USB thing back in. How am I gonna do it? And, again, she was like, well, why are you still doing that?
James Brooks:I'm like, because it's awesome. It's so cool.
Greg Skerman:I think for for me, the biggest takeaway was, like, I was nervous about a lot of things. I I got way in my own head about it. It turns out that was a stupid thing to do because, you know, you know, you know, your topic and like like what James says, everyone's there to support you. But, part of it for me was there were some really big names in our community there, and I'm just a guy from Brisbane that probably no one's heard about. And it was really funny.
Greg Skerman:I'm I'm sort of backstage with with James and, you know, and I I know Jess because she's, sort of in the Brisbane, not Laravel community. But I've never met Daniel. I've never met James. I've never met, you know, and it was just like meeting up with old mates. Like, it was really, like, it was really, really good.
Greg Skerman:I mean, I think James and I spent a fair chunk of the the afterdoc just just chatting, like, about stuff. It wasn't even necessarily Laravel stuff. It was just, like, you know, happened to be here with mates, which was which was really awesome. And I think, to me, that was a massive takeaway. I had a the morning that I that I traveled to, to Sydney, I, I woke up early.
Greg Skerman:My wife got up to have a coffee with me, and I was really nervous just getting into the cab. And she said, why are you doing this? Like, you knew this was gonna happen. You did this to yourself. Like, why not be doing it?
Greg Skerman:And I that question was sort of running through my head the whole time, and then it was running through my head even while I was on stage. Why are you doing this? And then I got off stage and realized why I did that because the there's this huge rush, this massive release of adrenaline at the end. Like, you feel really for me. I don't know about you, Joseph.
Greg Skerman:For me, I just was completely anxious. I had to go back to the hotel.
James Brooks:Yeah.
Greg Skerman:I missed Daniel's talk. I had to go back to the hotel and crash because like this 3 days of just pent up energy just bleeding that feeling. I don't think I've ever had anything, anything quite like it. And so yeah, I get it now. And I don't know why to do it.
James Brooks:I remember you saying that your shoulders have been so tight. And then after the after you came off stage, you're like, feel so much better. Like, your shoulders just like that.
Greg Skerman:Like, yeah, it's, Yeah, yeah, I think I ended up with some back pain because I've been so tense for so but it was for me, at least, it was that it was that feeling. And then and then at the off the dock, just having people who it was one of the difficulties when you're speaking in front of a large group. We small group of people. Right? Because you're not getting immediacy.
Greg Skerman:The the the feedback some of you have a bit of maybe you get an applause or a laughter joke or something. But you're not sort of like, people aren't necessarily giving you feedback about how well you've done. And I had a whole bunch of people just who I'd never met, just come up to me and and tell me that they that they they really dug what I had to say. And, and that was that was that was really cool. So, yeah, you never get to experience it if you don't put yourself out there.
Greg Skerman:So I reckon
James Brooks:yeah.
Greg Skerman:Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:More people get out there. Right? Yeah.
Greg Skerman:Just keep submitting. You know, as you if you if you get accepted into something and you can't end up doing it because it's a long travel or it doesn't work in your timing, you can always not accept the invite. But, yeah, I I for 1 will be, like, tipping a talk into as many CFPs as I possibly can. Yeah. Just yeah.
James Brooks:Also, like, every everyone had to start somewhere. Right? There was, big big names out there that have, make it look easy, and they're seasoned, and they've been doing it for years. But they still had their first time when they submitted, and they were deciding whether or not it was a good idea.
Greg Skerman:Yeah. Yeah. It's it's so funny because I because I've I've had, had I've had Jess speak at the Brisbane Lara will meet up, and Jess is, like, ridiculous on stage. She's an absolute VIM wizard. Like, I don't yeah.
Greg Skerman:And and I remember thinking to myself, like, a week before week before Laracon, at least I won't have to share the stage with Jess. At least I'm not gonna have to do that. And then suddenly, mhmm. No.
James Brooks:Yeah. She she does very, very, very good. I don't know how her fingers just, like, carries on going so fast. Like, I couldn't even type my name at one point.
Greg Skerman:The the answer, I think, is BIM, but I still don't understand. Yeah. True.
Mitchell Davis:So, James, you also you'd organize PHP Stoke. Is that right?
James Brooks:Yep. Yep.
Mitchell Davis:Yes. So what's that like? How long you've been doing that? How many people
James Brooks:So that started in January. I coorganized it with, some friends of mine that run a Magento agency. We started it in January, and we've run it 4 times, I think, 3 or 4 times. I it's supposed to be a quarterly event, but it turns out, as I always know, I'm terrible at maths and can't ever remember how to divide by 4 and do, like, a rolling rolling a big number.
Mitchell Davis:Look.
James Brooks:It is. So, yeah, we get we get between 50 to 60 people, each time, which, if I'm honest, is 50 to 60 more than I ever thought there would be. Yeah. It we've been incredibly lucky with getting some great talks, And people have traveled so Stoke, because you won't you won't know this. Stoke or Stoke on Trent is, 30 minutes south of Manchester.
James Brooks:We're not like a major city by any means, but we've had people travel from big cities, Liverpool, Manchester, and beyond to to attend, which just is crazy to me because there are other meetups out there, but they're they're coming all the way here. And it it's not like they can grab a train and just come on down. Like, we are sort of isolated a bit. And, yeah, that that's been very interesting doing that, actually. Like, getting sponsorship.
James Brooks:It's a completely free event. And we put on, like, pizza, drinks, and beers and stuff, and we have a very nice venue here. But, yeah, trying to, like, get sponsorship so that we can keep the event free. I mean, we again, we've been really lucky. Companies have have been asking us if they can sponsor.
James Brooks:We've got, like, a backlog of sponsors to
Mitchell Davis:go through.
James Brooks:We get, people submitting talks every time. Yeah. It's been it's been a journey, but it has also given me insights into okay. Well, this is a meetup of, like, 60 people. How do you get people to fly across the world and cover their expenses and stuff like that?
James Brooks:We do one event every now and then with a few people conferences
Mitchell Davis:order of magnitude or 2.
James Brooks:Right? So
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Yeah. I said to Michael Durinda for Laricon AU. Like, I got no idea how he does this. And then I was speaking with Sam, his, his boss or his manager, I think, of here, like, okay.
Mitchell Davis:What does he slow down a bit, you know, in the lead up to this or whatever? And Sam had, you know, obviously nothing but positive things to say that he's just, like, he's able to do all of this stuff, and it's crazy. He's doing the Largo News podcast and the North Meet South and everything.
James Brooks:How do you do all of this? And then
Mitchell Davis:you look at the scale of Laracon AU versus US and EU and India, and they're all, like, 2 or 3 or 4 times as many. And it's how the heck are these people running these things? I know. It it's another level. Props to you for do 50, 60 people, but, yeah, it's just insane.
Greg Skerman:Yeah. I mean, I did the Brisbane Laravel meetup, and and and 25 to 30 people is there's a lot of moving parts to get that to happen on a venue. You've gotta, you know, deal with sponsors, get catering sorted out. Finding speakers is really hard. I imagine finding speakers for conferences is probably a little bit easier, given that there's, you know, a lot of opportunity to be recognized, but the sheer scale of some of these things and, you know, I I know I know Michael had has a really good support structure there with your really supportive, like, bosses and a supportive family and, and friends that that I think help him help out with some of it.
Greg Skerman:But, you know, he he was basically mister Laracon, I think, like, he would sell.
James Brooks:Really was. Yeah. He we had, Greg mentioned we have a Telegram group. And Michael was incredibly responsive to every question and just getting stuff sorted and keeping us updated. Right?
James Brooks:This is what we're doing. This is where we're going for the speaker meal. Choose your menu. What what music do you want to walk on stage 2? And, like, everything was so meticulously planned by Michael.
James Brooks:And, like, I would think I would be spending all my time just running around chasing after every speaker, but he just he always seemed to have time
Greg Skerman:for you
James Brooks:if you needed anything from him. Even when he was running around backstage trying to get stuff sorted, he'd still make time to, like, answer your question and, like, then carry on doing what he's doing. Like, nothing was too much effort, and it just blows my mind how much I
Greg Skerman:With with a wink and a smile too. Like, I was just he was just, like, completely unflappable. And then there were things that were happening. Like, there's always things or something that big that sort of don't go according to plan like that. The Larukon app was sort of famously abused at some people.
Greg Skerman:Mhmm. And it used to roll just roll with punches. I mean, we we had, you know, people were like, there's there was a whole bunch of flight things going on with people even just coming into state. And I had my flight delayed. And by the time I landed in Sydney, he'd already organized the new me and so on.
Greg Skerman:I'm like, don't you have a conference to organize? Like, why are you worried about getting me to the hotel? Like, seriously? Yeah, he he made that experience, like, feel so special, like, made made us or made me at least, but made the speakers feel like rock stars. It was
James Brooks:Yeah. Definitely.
Greg Skerman:It was awesome.
Mitchell Davis:Well Yeah. You're making me very jealous. That's that's alright.
James Brooks:Apply next year.
Greg Skerman:The CFP for India is I will.
Mitchell Davis:I will. As soon as I protect. I'll do my best. Let's see how I go. Cool, guys.
Mitchell Davis:I think that that covers everything that I had. So is there anything else that you guys wanted to go through? Anything interesting to share? Did we
Greg Skerman:start the Marmite conversation?
James Brooks:You know what? I was just gonna I was just gonna say Marmite rocks better than Vegemite, and then just, like, leave the call.
Mitchell Davis:But I am Dola, drop the mic.
James Brooks:Yeah. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Let's see.
Greg Skerman:Should we talk about the super cut, though? The mom went super cut, Jam, or is that the
James Brooks:other Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'll so, for our, introduction kind of, like, the social side of things before the event, Michael had asked us to record a small, like, 10 second video, introducing ourselves in our talk.
James Brooks:And I think I did, like, 40 versions of mine. Jeez. But I I don't know if you've seen it, but, I sit there eating, Marmite from the spoon, which look. I love Marmite. Okay?
James Brooks:But when when you've had 40 mouthfuls of it, yeah, it starts to it starts to lose its, specialness. But in in it, I basically go, and then, was it you, Greg, that asked for the supercut of all of the from every tape? Yeah. Yeah.
Greg Skerman:That was that was
James Brooks:So I I basically
Greg Skerman:a pretty good sport about that. You could've told me to get stuff, but you you you're a very good sport with that. So
James Brooks:Yeah. I will, I'll have to put that on, Twitter, I think, because it I mean, it's quite funny. A bit weird, actually, looking back
Greg Skerman:to me going, mhmm,
James Brooks:over and over again.
Greg Skerman:How many different ways how many different ways you can say, was kind of, well, the camera angle changes halfway through it too, which is just like
James Brooks:Yeah. I I had to so, basically, I got it right. I I finally got that. I was happy with my tape. I sent it to Mike.
James Brooks:He was like, yeah, dude. It it's too long. Can you do it again? So I then I was like, oh, come on. I did another 20 the next day trying to get the next take.
James Brooks:There was only 10 seconds. Yeah. But I, I, I really liked how everything was framed and set up and whatever from the day before. So I had to go recreate it as as best I can, but the light has changed and stuff. So, I mean, I love Marmite, but for that, those couple of days, I was like, I wanna see this again.
Mitchell Davis:Is it salty, sort of like vegemite? Because I haven't had it.
James Brooks:Well, I'm gonna send you some
Mitchell Davis:then. Yeah. Well, I didn't I wasn't lucky enough. You didn't, you didn't pick me out of the crowd or whatever you It's probably for
James Brooks:the best, though, actually, because, so I gave some mamma's away during my talk like an absolute legend. And, the guy that won it was sat right on the front row, which was lucky because I was prepared to throw a a jar, a glass jar of Marmite into the crowd, which probably wouldn't have gone down
Mitchell Davis:very well.
James Brooks:Yeah. Yeah. Yes. It it is a bit saltier, and tastier.
Mitchell Davis:I can imagine that that would have been pretty hard. 40 you woulda gone through your job pretty quick then.
James Brooks:Yeah. Quite. Yeah. It was a full job, brand new, and then I was about halfway through. I mean, what I should have done in hindsight was just pretend, but, I felt like that wouldn't be true to
Greg Skerman:Commitment. You've gotta you've gotta commit. You've got to commit to your art.
James Brooks:If there's one thing you'll know about me, it's that I I am all or nothing.
Mitchell Davis:Absolutely. Well, yeah, do share that video and I'll, I'll add it to show notes.
James Brooks:Nice.
Mitchell Davis:Cool. Alright, guys. Where can people find you online?
James Brooks:I am Jay Brooks UK, jbr0oksUK, like, on Twitter, GitHub, kind of thing, or James dot Brooks dot page, if you want my website.
Mitchell Davis:Fancy. And, Greg?
Greg Skerman:Yeah. I'm I'm Greg Skerban on also, gregskerman, and the same on LinkedIn but with an underscore between my first and last name. I'll I'll get them over to you, throw them in with that.
Mitchell Davis:Awesome. Sounds good. And I'm Mitch Dov, on Twitter and on LinkedIn as well. We'll have all of it in the show notes, links to anything that we talked about as well today. Guys, I wanna say a huge thanks to both of you for joining me, on this first episode of the Hallway Track podcast.
Mitchell Davis:Also wanna thank everyone for listening, sharing the show. If you can rate the show 5 stars in your pod catcher of choice, that'd be great. And adding reviews, it all helps. Thanks so much, guys.
James Brooks:Catch you later. Thank you, Mitchell.
Greg Skerman:Thank you. See you later.
Mitchell Davis:So, guys, can you please say hello and introduce yourself?
James Brooks:James? Hi. I'm James Brooks, software engineer at Laravel and, all round funny guy, I guess.
Mitchell Davis:Yep. No. No ego there.
James Brooks:No. No. No. No. No.
James Brooks:We're starting that again. That was an awkward silence.
Greg Skerman:I was waiting to get queued up.
Mitchell Davis:No. We're not even on that.
James Brooks:Mitchell, we're not doing that. That's not Alright.
Mitchell Davis:No no worries. That's fine. We'll go again. All good.
James Brooks:I I just gotta say software engineer at Laravel and be done.
Mitchell Davis:That's it. No worries. Cool. Alright. We go again.
Creators and Guests
