Episode 65: The One with the Book, the Axe, and the Laravel Training

Because we've been busy this summer...

00:29:17 N/A download


Dave 00:16 Hi, and welcome to another episode of That Podcast. I am Dave.

Beau 00:19 And I am Beau.

Dave 00:20 It's been a long while, Beau. How are you?

Beau 00:21 I've been doing all right. I've been on a very busy spell lately, so I've kind of taken a break from both That Podcast and Astrocasts just to make sure that I could stay up to date on a couple of the projects that I've been working on lately. How about you?

Dave 00:36 I'm good. I'm really good actually. I'm just happy. I've seen so few people. I don't know, I don't think we've spoken since the summer have we? Or have we?

Beau 00:44 Mm, it's been a while. I think it's been at least a month or so.

Dave 00:47 Oh, okay. Well, anyway, since the summer, I don't know whether it was the summer or holidays that reset myself a little bit, but I think once we got back into the sort of the routine after the summer, and the kids are back at school, I've been fitting in most of the things I needed to get done, done, if that makes sense.

Beau 01:05 Mm-hmm (affirmative), yeah.

Dave 01:07 I've started fitting in some exercise. I'm eating healthier. I'm getting my work done. I'm getting some time to myself. All the kids' activities are still mayhem, but we are getting everything done, if that makes sense.

Dave 01:21 It'd be nice to get a bit more side project type time. And I was speaking to Daniel Karp about it earlier today as well. I think realistically, if I want to do anything like side projects, I need to decide how much of my own downtime I'd like to sacrifice. And in the minute, it always sounds like a good idea, like, oh, just an hour a week is nothing. But when it actually comes the choice of, I could play a bit of PlayStation, I could watch some TV, read my book, or do that side project, I'm a bit like leaning towards the former all the time. But this is not a bad thing. I'm doing a full-time job, so I'm not going to beat myself up about it. I think, so I'm in a happy place, definitely. So that's good.

Beau 02:05 That's good.

Dave 02:06 Yeah.

Beau 02:06 Cool. You-

Dave 02:06 The whole family seems happy as well.

Beau 02:09 That's awesome. Yeah, it's been nice now that Luke is back in school, not because he's not around, but just because for everybody, having a schedule is helpful.

Dave 02:21 Yeah, absolutely.

Beau 02:22 Yeah. Just knowing that from day to day, at least during the week, things are going to happen in a certain order. It's no surprises, there's no wondering, there's usually no gotchas. If there are going to be changes, it's usually planned well in advance, like we have Friday off this week, which we actually do. It's like, they're going to play for Brawl Stars, and I'm going to work. We just know that's going to be what's going to happen.

Beau 02:48 I have been enjoying that, but also I've been traveling a lot since school started, so I think that's helped me a bit because when I'm not on the road, it's really good for me to be able to focus when I am home. I think that's been the thing that I've been enjoying the most this school year so far is just, there's stability, and the family has stuff to do if I'm not around. Like if I leave in the middle of summer, sometimes they can get really bored. So this way, they're not.

Beau 03:21 You mentioned books. I don't remember if we've talked about it on That Podcast, but I know you and I have talked about it. But I'd read all of the Black Company novels. Can't remember exactly how to describe it. It's like really dark fantasy. The magic rules and things like that are different, and it's really cool, like world-building stuff. And that was one of my gamer communities was, the guild was based around the Black Company. And I was going back to their forums, which I do pretty frequently – they're pretty quiet these days – but I just realized that there's a new book.

Dave 04:04 Oh, really?

Beau 04:05 Yeah. So I just finished reading that. I think I read it in like four days, which is probably a record for me, but I was super into it. It was a lot of fun. I don't know if I'd recommend it to anybody with a weak stomach, but if anyone else is looking for some hard-core, gritty, military-based fantasy, it's definitely an interesting series of books.

Dave 04:31 Yeah. They're actually on my radar. I haven't read them, but I'm a big fan of the Malazan Empire books. And frequently on Reddit, the Black Company would come up as a recommendation for people who finished all of the Malazan books. I just haven't got around to it. My reading's actually been quite slow recently because I am reading. I'm reading The Hunt by Rebecca J. Marshall. I'm about halfway through. And I'll be honest, this is going to sound awful. I don't mean it in an awful way, but I am treating it a little bit like a chore.

Dave 05:07 She told me not to worry about spelling mistakes and grammatical errors and stuff, but part of me thinks it's just ridiculous for me to read through the whole thing and not to jot them down for her to be able to go and fix. It feels a little bit disjointed when I'm reading the book, I get to an error, and what I have to do is, I put the book down, and I jot down where it is. It's frustrating. Sometimes I'm like, "Oh, I can't bother to write that one down." And then I actually feel guilty because at some point, Rebecca's going to have to go through all of that and do all of that, but yeah.

Beau 05:44 And to be clear for the listeners, this is your wife, right?

Dave 05:47 This is my wife, yeah.

Beau 05:48 She's the author of a book?

Dave 05:50 Yes. So-

Beau 05:51 Okay. I knew that she was doing the writing thing. I was going to ask you about like, what is it, NaNoMo or NaNoRaNoBo?

Dave 05:58 Yeah, no, it started out that way, NaNoWriMo. But yeah, this has been in the work for nearly three years now. She's actually now ... So my mum has read it completely. I'm over halfway through, just on a bit of a go slow. Rebecca's back to editing. I say editing. She's already been through a couple of edits, but now she's going back with a bit more zeal. She's adding chapters, and she's actually feeling quite positive about it now.

Beau 06:28 That's awesome.

Dave 06:29 It's really good. I'm actually really enjoying it. She should be really proud. She's not. She's still in the sort of ... She's quite positive about the work in that she's positive about the work she's doing, as in she feels good about how it's going, but she's still convinced that nobody will ever read it and all that kind of stuff.

Dave 06:47 So yeah. So I mean, I need to pull a finger out a little bit and get her some sort of a website set up. To be honest, I really can't be bothered with WordPress websites and things anymore. I'm in a really strange position of, I always want to own my content, so I don't like things like Medium, for example. But then I also really don't want to have to set up WordPress sites, and install themes, and then the themes are never quite right. Or you can buy your theme for $90, which is great, but it comes with 5,000 types of page, and the links are everywhere, and you've got to ... I only have four pages to begin with or whatever. You know?

Beau 07:23 Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dave 07:24 So yeah, that's where we're at with that.

Beau 07:27 Nice. Well, I've been curious about that because I know that she's been sort of quiet in a sense about what she's doing. At least that's my impression so far is, she didn't have anything really that she wanted to share with anybody that was big. So the fact that she's finished, I'm excited about that because I know that she's been working on it. So that's pretty cool.

Dave 07:50 Yeah. She was at a point where we considered it finished enough for myself and my mum to read. She might have given a copy to somebody else, I'm not sure. But she herself felt like there were a few weaker points in a few places where the story needed beefing up a bit. And yeah, and then we need to start doing things like getting somebody else to edit it, so proper copy editing. And then there are proper editors who know about the structure of stories and how they should go. I mean, I know about things like the three acts or whatever that is, but really serious stuff. Yeah.

Beau 08:25 Cool. That's awesome.

Dave 08:26 I'm excited for her. Yeah, she engages with sort of writers on the Twitter and things like that. They have some cool stuff, actually. I can't remember if it happens once or twice a year, but they do this thing where, as a writer, you put out like a one-tweet pitch for your book. And then the idea is that ... issuing a particular hashtag. And then the idea is that nobody's supposed to like your tweet. Well, not really supposed to like your tweet, but the idea is only agents and whatever they are, they follow the hashtag, basically. And they're buzzing around liking these tweets. So it's like a really sort of low-impact way to pitch your idea to people.

Beau 09:17 Cool.

Dave 09:18 I think the official term for doing the full-blown thing is called querying. So you're like, I guess you're queering the book agents with your pitch. But this is like the most low-fidelity version of that. It's kind of cool. So she did that. I don't think she got any likes from agents, but there are thousands and thousands. It's not like ... And to be honest, we're not really that worried anyway. I mean, I'm 100%, she should be self-publishing. She's a bit not sure. But yeah. But the fact that she did that was good. She knows she's putting herself out there. She's advertising the fact that she has done this year. This is a thing that she's done. So, that's cool.

Beau 09:59 Cool. Yeah, speaking of hashtag things, I tried to get the family into Inktober this year. I posted a couple of my pictures. I posted one of Luke's, then Beckfinally got on board as well. But we both ended up, or all three of us ended up sort of falling off the schedule due to travel and things like that. But we've made a much better effort at it this year. So I was pretty excited about that. I think everybody was excited to be able to share things, and people talk about them or whatever. So those kind of things are kind of fun sometimes.

Dave 10:35 Yeah. I mean, is something like that you're supposed to do every day?

Beau 10:42 Yeah. So the idea of Inktober was, every day you do something. So it doesn't have to be a full piece. It could just be a little scribble or whatever. But the idea is, it's kind of like the ... I think that's what the writer thing is in November, right?

Dave 10:54 Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Beau 10:55 Where you write a little bit, something every day, like just to make-

Dave 10:58 It's more, I think it's that you have to hit a certain target in words in a month.

Beau 11:03 Oh, okay.

Dave 11:04 Yeah. So it's like, I believe people plan up until, and then they're going to write the first ... I think 30,000 words is classed as, it's a novel. So that's what you're aiming for. But I mean, it's one of those where it's just a target, a milestone. I think with something like in Inktober, it's probably better just to say, "Okay, we're going to try and do four out of seven days of ..." You know?

Beau 11:28 Yup.

Dave 11:28 Because as soon as you-

Beau 11:28 Yeah. I actually had to have that conversation with Luke because he was starting to feel like-

Dave 11:34 He had to do it.

Beau 11:35 Yeah, you got to do it, or whatever. It's like, I didn't want him to feel like he had to. So it was very much the discussion about, the idea is to be excited about it, that you're looking forward to it, and just that you're practicing. You want to do something every day just to get better at it. We had fun with it. It's still sort of mid-October-ish, so we could maybe get back into the swing of things.

Beau 12:02 I have on my bullet journal to do 14, 15, and 16, so each day that goes by, I add another day on it. So we'll see how it actually goes. But that's been something we've been doing. So that was kind for a family activity.

Dave 12:20 Yeah, that's cool.

Beau 12:21 So, I did a bunch of things since the last time we recorded. I think the most recent thing was the Laravel certification training, which actually was ... That was a really interesting experience, because I've done one-day workshops and half-day workshops before, but this was like, I knew what the certification was, like I knew what the questions and answers were, so I had a pretty good idea of what topics I had to cover. And it was essentially the Laravel docs. There was a little bit of pretty much everything that had to be covered in it. And covering the broadness of Laravel in three days was a real challenge. So it was a good experience. I wasn't sure how it was going to work since it was the first one. It's the first time I tried material like that.

Beau 13:22 But yeah, we had 10 attendees. I'm hoping that we can find some way to get some sort of analytics to see how many of them actually tried to get the certification, but then how successful they are. Because ultimately, that's the value out of this is, people who wanted to get certified, that they can actually get certified, so the highest priority.

Beau 13:43 But I also spent a lot of time talking about just like general programming concepts and object design things. I'd say a good bulk of the people had used Laravel before, had general idea about what Laravel is used for. They've actually created sample projects or whatever. But they were really used to like newing up new objects in controllers. And just the idea of, what is a service provider, and what would you put there, and why would you do that, instead of just saying, new Guzzle client, inside the controller.

Beau 14:25 It was interesting to sort of see the ... I wasn't sure what kind of people we'd get, if they'd be like newbie programmers or newbie Laravel people, but we actually had a wide variety. And I actually, I felt like I did a fair amount of just general object design stuff because Laravel uses all of that. I know that sometimes people can give Laravel a rough time about how it uses certain patterns or whatever. But at the same time, if you aren't doing dependency injection at all or don't understand it, then you're losing out on a lot of the benefits that you can get from the container.

Beau 15:00 It reminded me of the Silex days, back in the day of trying to tell people which of things go in boot versus which things go in register, whatever the methods were for Silex. I can't even remember anymore. But it was very much like that. It was very broad. So it was an interesting experience to work in that sort of environment. So I'm looking forward to being able to do it again.

Beau 15:25 Have you done anything like that? I know that you've done some talking. I don't know if you've done any training or something more substantial like that.

Dave 15:33 No, nothing like that. I've not even been on ... I've not attended even or anything like that, really.

Beau 15:41 Yeah. I've done a couple of the Symfony training sessions. I've attended one, and I delivered one, but that was ... They had really refined that material and were able to cut it down to like two days to do whatever. And you could pick and choose which pieces you want. So it wasn't like a broad, here's what you need to know, and here's every single thing in Symfony. So yeah, this was different. I don't know. It almost felt like either I need to trim a bunch and do more hands-on stuff, or it needs to be a five-day thing, at least, to give people that hands-on ability and to do a deep dive on each particular feature.

Dave 16:27 Were there a set of prerequisites for attendees?

Beau 16:33 We didn't actually set those out mostly because-

Dave 16:36 Yeah. That could be part of it, you know?

Beau 16:39 Yeah.

Dave 16:40 If attendees are expected to be familiar with the bare basics of routing, [crosstalk 00:16:47] things out with a container, and even if they're not configuring it, you know?

Beau 16:50 Yeah.

Dave 16:51 The bare basics of Blade, and all those things, and Eloquent, then you can expect to go into the deeper stuff in the course. I don't know.

Beau 17:00 Yeah. So part of this first trial run was seeing what kind of people actually joined, like who was looking for training for the certification. We weren't sure if it was like Magento developers who, they've just inherited a Laravel project, so now they need to learn Laravel, but they've never done any PHP that involved Composer. Or we had a couple of people that turned out that had been using Laravel since Laravel 4 and just wanted to make sure that they knew everything that was going to be on the test before they actually took it. So in my mind, that's a little bit of imposter syndrome in a sense.

Beau 17:39 Everybody there was certain they didn't know enough to take the test, or they weren't sure if they knew enough to take the test. And I think that's why they were there. They just wanted to make sure they felt confident. So now that I know sort of ... We didn't end up with anybody who didn't know PHP, for example. Almost everybody was on PHP 7.1 at least, if not 7.2, except one person who was on 5.6 they had to be for their work project. But for the sake of this, they were able to use PHP 7.3 or 7.2.

Beau 18:13 So I don't know. Now that we have a better idea of kind of the people who ... More than just an email address that says, "Yeah, I'm interested in this," now we kind of have a better idea of the demographics. And the materials are there now, so that if we wanted to do a day just on Eloquent, we could probably do a training on Eloquent, sort of like the Eloquent certification side of things as opposed to having to go through the whole thing. So there's a lot of really cool potential there.

Dave 18:42 Opportunities.

Beau 18:42 Yeah, exactly. So that's been the thing that's been looming for me for a little while. I have my big project that I'm working on. I have another project I'm working on other than that. So it's been a very hectic summer for ... or end of summer anyway with a lot of travel and stuff like that. Are you wanting to talk about any side projects that you're thinking about or anything?

Dave 19:11 No, not right now. Nothing on that sort of side of things. I could tell you a couple of things I'm interested in. I don't know if we've talked about masterclass.com on the show before, but yesterday, yet again, it sort of like flashed across my radar. And so many times I've thought I've been tempted to dip in, and I think I'm going to do it. I think it's 200 pounds. I don't know what it is in ... probably $200, just the way the exchange rates are going these days, for a year to subscribe. And I kind of like that they're not going to be much of a sort of ... They're not going to be detailed courses, but there really aren't complete experts that you just don't really get the chance to learn from.

Dave 19:54 Apparently most of the course is around 20 lessons, and lessons that average about 12 minutes. So I'm thinking, "That'd be something nice for me to sit at lunch and do a lesson a day." And I'd do all sorts. I definitely like cooking stuff. So there's Gordon Ramsay on there, Wolfgang Puck, some other people, all the film stuff. So there's Scorsese, Hans, is it Hans Zimmer?

Beau 20:21 Yeah, yup.

Dave 20:22 The composer? Is he a composer, when you compose a [crosstalk 00:20:28]?

Beau 20:34 I think so, yeah.

Dave 20:34 Yeah, and-

Beau 20:34 I just saw Penn & Teller on the list.

Dave 20:34 Penn & Teller, the magic? Yeah.

Beau 20:34 Yeah.

Dave 20:35 You know, I would watch all of these. I spoke to Rebecca today. She'd probably like some of the writing ones because there's some authors on there. I can't remember their names, like David Baldacci, and Dan Brown, and other people. So I guess I just thought I'd mention ... that I could see the tap open there. So I think I'm going to go and dive on that. And so next time we record, I'll be able to tell you a little bit about whatever I'm learning, to be a poker superstar or something like that.

Beau 21:06 Nice. Cool.

Dave 21:09 Recently I went on a weekend course to make an ax. So I went to this ... It was about a 40-minute drive. It was a little house in the country, and he had a garage that he'd turned into his forge. That's what he did. He was an acupuncturist and blacksmith. So he did commissions, so he'd be making knives, axes for people. But he also did these courses. And you could go for a weekend and forge an ax. And I just did it as something fun to do. I thought it'd be cool.

Dave 21:42 And whenever I read those fantasy books you talk about, a lot of them have some kind of weapon sort of law if you like. And they talk about ... I mean, even in one of the most recent Avengers, Marvel films, Thor was having his ... It was an ax, wasn't it, being made.

Beau 22:02 Yup.

Dave 22:04 I'm always quite interested in that kind of thing. So yeah, well, I fancied giving it a go.

Beau 22:09 Nice.

Dave 22:09 It was really good fun. And it was ridiculously hot. Now I thought it was going to be hot, but when we turned up, and I saw the garage, so with big double doors open that open, and this small forge. It was a small forge for a garage. It's like for two people to use, max, you know?

Beau 22:27 Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dave 22:29 But I think he said it averages about 10 degrees there Celsius hotter in the garage than it did outside. So yeah, it was hot. And it wasn't as hard as I thought it was in terms of hard work. We were only working on a fairly small piece of steel, and so you do need to give it some force with a hammer, but nothing to the extent where ... I mean, I work at a desk all day, as you know. I do sports and stuff, but usually, if I, for example, were doing gardening for a full day, I'd be a bit achy by the end of it, you know?

Beau 23:05 Yeah.

Dave 23:05 But I didn't really feel that with this. I could tell I'd done something, but I wasn't overly tired. So anyway, yeah, so we started off with literally just a block of steel, two blocks of steel, because we had tool steel to go as the actual blade edge. And yeah, over two days, I whacked it with a hammer load. I drifted it. So that means like I'm punching a hole through it to put the handle in. And it was just really cool. And then I was really chuffed, though it could have been a bit neater, mine.

Dave 23:36 And that was just because really I had the chance to smooth it out and stuff, but I didn't really appreciate where we were in the process, and I was just like, "I think I'm done." He's like, "Yeah, it's good enough for me." But yeah, just really good fun.

Dave 23:50 I'd go back, because you can do the same course, or you can choose to do a knife, so you can make a Bowie knife, or a chef's knife, or a bushcraft knife. I won't mind doing that sometime. Although the friend I went with, we'd both like to make longbows as well, a bit more involved I think, and a bit more expensive to go on, but-

Beau 24:12 Is it the same person, or is that different?

Dave 24:15 No, it would be somewhere else to go, I think. It's quite a different-

Beau 24:18 Yeah. I thought it might be different, but I also thought maybe it was part of the same set of courses.

Dave 24:25 Yeah, no, as far as I know, they don't offer it there, but they do ... It was a husband and wife ... or partners. And they did acupuncture. She was into sort of herbology and things. So she did those kinds of courses. And he did the blacksmithing. So yeah, it was really cool.

Dave 24:44 So I now have this little ax in the garage. I don't really have any wood to chop or anything like that, but it's cool just to have and be pleased with, you know?

Beau 24:53 Nice.

Dave 24:54 Yeah.

Beau 24:56 This is going to tie in, honest. I went to Explore DDD this year. I actually went as an attendee. And one of our past guests, Emily Stamey, was speaking there. And she has a hobby of throwing axes, which sounds like it could be a lot of fun, but I'd be scared I'd hurt myself a little bit. I'm sure you've got to practice a little while before you actually start throwing them really hard. Is that something you're into as well? Or do people who-

Dave 25:25 It's not, but I'm familiar with it. And it's getting bigger as well. In fact, the blacksmith guy said, because of the growing popularity in that, he's getting more and more business because people are either commissioning him to make their own custom ax for their ax-throwing, or people are wanting to come on the course to forge an ax because of the ax-throwing.

Beau 25:46 Nice.

Dave 25:46 Yeah. There's quite a lot that goes into it, like obviously the way you're throwing it, but also judging the distance because it could be ... My understanding is a half-step forward could be the difference between actually sticking it in something or just whacking it in, because the amount of rotations you've got to fit in before you hit your target, it's quite interesting to think about.

Beau 26:08 Sounds like also gravity, like if you throw up ... Which angle you throw it at as well can have an impact on all that. It seems like it could actually be pretty cool.

Dave 26:19 Yeah. I mean, it does look fun. I know a friend of mine from hockey. He went on a stag do, and they did it for the stag do. I actually saw a video on Instagram. And he's quite a cocky guy. And I'd say he's almost unfairly quite lucky in some respects. And I saw a video of him, and there was a lady who was there who was organizing their party at this ax-throwing. She was explaining this, this, this, and he actually stopped her and said ... I wouldn't say rudely, but it was a little bit rude from what I could see. He says, "Can I just throw it?" And she went, "Okay, go on then." And he did. And it went right in the middle of the target. His first go, he just threw his arms up and walks off like a [crosstalk 00:27:07].

Beau 27:08 That is awesome.

Dave 27:09 Yeah. But yeah, I can imagine if I was there, and especially if I was the first person to go, and I had the ax my hand, and almost talking to the group, the instructor, and he's just desperate to throw it, yeah. I'd probably want give it a chuck.

Beau 27:27 Nice. Cool. Well, I think we need to keep this one kind of short this time. I'm coming up on doing my first Astrocasts in a while, almost since the last time we recorded is the last time I did an Astrocasts. I've been itching to get back to it, but I haven't had the time. So I'm finally ... I kind of like made myself do this. Even if I wasn't ready, I needed to get it done. So I'm going to be doing that in a couple of minutes here. Did you have anything else that you had on your list?

Dave 27:57 No, I'm all good. If you want to, let's get cracking with your Astrocasts.

Beau 28:01 Yeah. So I had a couple of other things, but I think maybe we could talk about them next time. Hopefully, we'll will be more in a swing this time around and kind of keep going.

Dave 28:11 Yeah. I mean, Wednesday nights are always good for me. But so, let's try and get into the rhythm again.

Beau 28:19 Awesome. All right. Well, we'll keep this one short and call this one a wrap.

Beau 28:35 You've been listening to That Podcast with Beau and Dave. You can find Beau on Twitter and Google+ at beausimensen, and Dave on Twitter at davedevelopment. You can subscribe to this podcast and review it on iTunes. If you'd like to review us, but don't feel like we've earned five stars, email us so that we can talk about your issues. You can also subscribe to this podcast with RSS from our website, thatpodcast.io. From our website, you can also sign up for our newsletter to get supersecret extra content from Beau and Dave sent directly to your inbox. Like the music? You can thank Grillo for allowing us to sample the track, Dust Kingdom, for our intro and outro. You can find Dust Kingdom and other tracks by Grillo at grillo.bandcamp.com, spelled G-R-I-L-L-O.