WEBVTT 0:00:15.200 --> 0:00:20.960 Programming throwdown, episode 178, working from home. Take it away, Jason. 0:00:21.600 --> 0:01:20.060 Hey, everybody. We are here with a new episode of Programming throwdown, and it's Patrick and I talking about working from home. But before that, we're going to jump into a little bit of intro topic for people. This is their first time listening. You know, some news. News and links of the day, book of the show, tool of the show. And then we will dive into our main juicy topic, which is Working from Home. And it's going to be interesting because this is one of the few topics where Patrick and I disagree. So we're going to have a little bit of a friendly debate here about working from home. From home. But before we go into that, I want to talk about smart homes. I remember hearing about smart homes a really long time ago and thinking, you know, actually, here's where I first heard it. Remember when Bill Gates. This is like, I think in the 90s, he showed off his home, and as he was walking through the house, the lights are turning on, the sound was following him. 0:01:20.060 --> 0:01:20.300 Same. 0:01:20.300 --> 0:01:24.300 Yeah. I remember thinking, that was amazing. This is what a billionaire does. 0:01:24.300 --> 0:01:28.140 You know, actually, I had one before that. It was Carousel of Progress. And then that. 0:01:28.550 --> 0:01:38.510 Oh, man, Carousel of Progress is so good. So just for people who don't know, Carousel of Progress is this amazing ride at Disney. It's still around. I took my. 0:01:38.510 --> 0:01:41.990 Amazing is a bit of an oversell, but yes, it is a ride at Disney World. 0:01:42.230 --> 0:01:56.190 Yeah, I guess it's dated now. It's like, in the future, we will have microwaves, but at the time, it blew my mind. And they go through the progress of the American story and stuff. 0:01:56.190 --> 0:01:56.870 It's really cool. 0:01:57.220 --> 0:02:27.420 Um, at the very end, they talk about the future, which is now the past, which is kind of funny to think about. But. But in the future, we'll have an Oculus Quest, effectively. And. And they had a smart. Was a smart oven. Yes, correct. And then the guy, the. The, you know, the father of the show, he. He. He says something about, like, the sun is 900 degrees or something and it's game oven. Yeah. What was that? 0:02:27.500 --> 0:02:31.660 The score is like, getting his score. He's like, I've got 800. I've got 900. 0:02:32.220 --> 0:03:43.440 Oh, yeah, that's right. And the oven thinks he's setting the temperature and burns the turkey is hilarious. But. But, yeah, that's. You're right. I remember seeing that and thinking, there's no way an oven would be able to understand what you're saying. And here we are. Then I Went through a phase where I thought, you know, the problem is that it's too expensive to retrofit a home. And so, like, you're never actually going to really see any of these things, which I think was true for a long time. But now, you know, people are buying new homes and the technology's been around for a while. And so I'm actually starting to see more, like, smart things in homes, which is really cool. I personally went through and redid all the switches in the house to go through Alexa. So now I can tell Alexa to, you know, turn off the lights in this room or turn on lights in that room. And I have them on a schedule. So, you know, when the kids forget to turn the lights off in the morning, it turns all the room lights off every weekday morning. And it's been pretty awesome. And it's been actually pretty easy to set up. 0:03:45.200 --> 0:04:02.690 Yeah, I actually don't think homes are becoming more smart. I think actually a lot of this stuff is figuring out how to retrofit them. It seems to be anyways. But I kind of like that. It's kind of like smart TVs. I kind of have a beef. I hate smart TVs, because even my TV. 0:04:02.770 --> 0:04:08.370 Okay, great, so I like the TV, but the smart part, I don't know. I don't want to see ads when I start my tv. 0:04:08.370 --> 0:05:14.960 That's not only that it's like two, three years old, and then it's laggy as I'll get out. And they force you into the, like. There's no hardwire base OS that will just, like, let you switch to whatever you've plugged into hdmi. And so it ruins the modularity. And all of a sudden your nice, expensive TV feels junky, which probably somewhat intentional, but the smart home stuff, I guess, can be on a very big spectrum from, like, frustrating to amazing. I also retrofit a lot of my lights. I did it with kind of a hard mode, so I did it with Lutron Radio raw, which is you actually go into the electrical box, open it up, rewire in the switches, and sort of switch them all over. And it adds dimming capability. But you. There's like, some features locked behind, like a training class. You have to go to them and get. Or whatever. So I had to do some kind of, like, workarounds to. And I bought all my switches used on ebay because there are, like, physical actual switches rather than buttons. So they're, like, really nice. And they. They're color matched to all the other light switches in the house. So I made it. 0:05:14.960 --> 0:05:30.780 Yeah, I have, I have the same thing, except I got the Amazon Basics version, which connects to Alexa and all that. But it's the same in the sense that you have to pull out, physically pull out the switch and it replaces it with, as you said, a button. Yeah. 0:05:30.780 --> 0:05:57.380 So this one has still an actual switch and it will work if the Internet, you know, it doesn't connect over WI fi, so has its own, like, backhaul radio network, you know, like, or whatever. And then you have like a hub in the house and then the hub bridges into Ethernet so that, you know, you can expose it in, in my case, Siri and Google Home and whatever for. For that optionality. But same thing, you know, setting schedules and, you know, connecting various things. Fans and whatever. 0:05:57.940 --> 0:06:06.020 Yeah, none of us, Neither of us have done. I'm assuming you haven't done like a smart fridge or a smart stove or anything like that. 0:06:06.020 --> 0:06:07.380 No, that doesn't. 0:06:07.380 --> 0:06:32.850 I've seen a. I've seen an amazing stove where you set, instead of setting how much heat you want, you set the temperature. So you're like, I want this base plate to be 350 degrees. And apparently if you get it to the right temperature, then you don't need cooking oil. Like you could throw an egg on. And if it's the right temperature, it'll like caramelize the outside and the egg will just slide around. 0:06:32.930 --> 0:06:51.220 Oh, that's cool. I. I don't know, but I've seen the ones where, you know, you tell it, like, what kind of meat it is in approximately, you know, how much it weighs. And you stick a temperature probe, you know, kind of on the inside, and it's measuring basically the temperature gradient. Like, it knows the outside temperature with the temperature probe and then it knows, like, the internal temperature. And so it's trying to. 0:06:51.460 --> 0:06:51.860 Right. 0:06:51.940 --> 0:07:02.500 You know, kind of intelligently. Guy, it sounds cool, but I just don't know. Like, I normally keep toasters in ovens for more than a decade. I don't know. Like, in a decade, is that going to age well or not? 0:07:02.980 --> 0:07:29.760 Yeah, my, My parents have one of those. They have like a Ninja. And it's actually amazing. Like, neither of my parents. I hope you're not listening, Mom. Are freaking good cooks, to be honest. Um, but this thing is like, you can't mess it up. Like, you basically take a raw steak, you put it in, you put the probe in, you press a button, and then like a perfectly cooked steak comes out. And even they can do it. So I've Been really impressed. So nice. 0:07:29.920 --> 0:08:13.590 But I have seen people on the Internet with, you know, home assistant setups and stuff that have insane scripts. And all I can think of is, like, what happens if something were to happen to me and I end up in the hospital or whatever and I'm not home. And like, my spouse, my wife, like, you know, she can't figure out how to, like, debug the fact that, like, the light switches aren't working or, you know, air conditioning keeps going to random temperatures. And so I. I do actually think there's, like, a sweet spot in what parts you want to be just a little bit better than a dumb thing can do. But actually, you can go overboard with, you know, RFID tags and scanning in and a whole procedure that could just, like, be very fragile. And I would shy away from any. I've not embraced any of those things myself. 0:08:13.830 --> 0:08:53.920 Yeah, the other thing which is kind of adjacent to Smart home is I have, like, these smart tags on all of our keys. And so every. Every three months, I have a little calendar notification for myself that's like, charge all the tags. And they're all. They all take, like, a little micro usb. And I actually bought a hub that has, like, an octopus of micro USB flanges that come out, and I plug in all the keys into them to recharge the little tags. But that's been a life changer because, like, so many times, like, oh, I can't find the keys. It's like, hang on. You know, it's like you're Captain America. You press the button, it's like you're Captain America. 0:08:55.680 --> 0:08:57.280 You feel like a hero at home. 0:08:57.520 --> 0:09:01.480 All right, I should be an advertisement for etacs. 0:09:01.480 --> 0:09:12.740 But, yeah, I will say I'm the one who has to go onto all the apps and ping various devices to get, you know, help. Help finding stuff. But I remember growing up, that was always a thing. I can't find this, I can't find. 0:09:12.740 --> 0:09:20.020 That, and you freaking can't find the remote. Okay. All right, Jumping onto news. You have the first news. 0:09:20.420 --> 0:10:18.879 Yeah, I wanted to cover this. Somebody pointed out to me the other day, conversation got to rocket launches in space, and they're like, patrick, you're the one who always seems to know all of these things, when's this happening? Or whatever. I was like, okay, well, I feel attacked. But you're not wrong. Anyway, so I feel like we had to cover it on here, which was since last recording, which has been a while. SpaceX had their IFT5 launch where they sent a spaceship and the booster up and landed the booster back. Caught it on chopsticks at the SpaceX headquarters there in Texas. And then the starship went all the way, almost all the way around the world, but it went to the Indian Ocean and, and splashed down and they actually caught it on a buoy camera. It's very cool. If you haven't seen it by now, I guess you're probably hiding from the news, but like definitely go watch it. It is very cool. And I just wanted to, you know, talk about that. That is a huge engineering feat. Like, you know, just in general, like all of it. People. 0:10:18.960 --> 0:10 Yeah, it's amazing. 0:10:20.400 --> 0:11:35.780 Didn't know this like cost to orbit. I, I still think, I know, I think I've said this before probably on this show, but I've you know, told people there's a few things I think will just like completely transform stuff in a way we don't understand. And I think really, really low cost, like per mass to orbit is one of them because you can put lots of things up, manufacturing systems, whatever you can like start to harvest asteroids. I just think like it's very hard to predict all of the things that can happen if it's cheap and frequent access to, to space. Just my personal opinion, even starting to see that with Starlink and like there was some natural disasters, some hurricanes here in the United States and people getting Internet fast and you know, being able to request assistance and that kind of stuff is, is just, you know, transformational. And now even they were turning on cell phone to satellite direct communication for calls. So there's just all sorts of things I think we're not. We're going to be in a future where there's just constant Internet connectivity for everything as a given is just like the low barrier. And that's already pretty transformational. But then also, you know, just like I mentioned, you know, all the other things that that kind of come on. Abundant power, like almost infinite power would be another one that I think people underestimate how transformational it'll be just while we're on this topic anyways, but going. 0:11:35.780 --> 0:11:58.170 Back I had a question about the harvesting asteroids because I've played like X4 and Everspace. I've played a lot of video games where you are harvesting asteroids in space. And I always wondered like, is that a real thing? Like do asteroids have rare metals? Like to. So they have enough rare metals to justify going and harvesting them. 0:11:58.490 --> 0:12:51.240 So rare metal is like rare on Earth in a cheap and abundant, you know, like way to access. So it's not, it's not a thing that would happen today. And I think people have tried to make it happen because like it's on the verge of affordability. But it's one of those things, like you can try to be an early person and someone will be the first. But it's also true that in whatever, 50 years it'll just be a no brainer, right? Like hey, to go out to that, you can get propellant up and then use that propellant to go out to the asteroid belt, get an asteroid, look for an asteroid, whatever, bring it back. It's not going to be like humans of the old west, you know, like going out and panning for gold kind of stuff. I don't think it'll be people locating one, bringing it. But imagine if gold went from like a relatively rare thing to cheaper than, you know, maybe not like iron, but cheaper than, you know, just normal metals or whatever. 0:12:51.400 --> 0:12:54.600 And so you would drop the asteroid in like a lake or something. 0:12:54.760 --> 0:13:25.010 Like you would maybe. But no, I mean I think if propellant, which is a problem because it's heavy and bulky, if you could get it up, get to asteroid, bring it back to Earth orbit or mine it with things and sort of refine it to some degree and then you would bring it back just in a capsule or whatever, not the whole asteroid, but the, the gold, I mean, we bring back. Imagine like what, you know, you four humans in a dragon capsule come back down safely. Imagine if the capsule was instead, I may be really heavy, filled with gold. That's gold. 0:13:25.010 --> 0:13:25.370 I guess. 0:13:25.370 --> 0:13:26.370 That's a lot of gold. 0:13:26.690 --> 0:13:32.650 Why can't you just drop the gold in a lake? Because, I mean it won't burn in the atmosphere, right? I mean. 0:13:32.650 --> 0:13:40.530 Oh yeah. Well, it'll turn into plasma and then you'll have like disassociated gold spread all over the Earth. 0:13:41.160 --> 0:13:47.960 Oh, I didn't realize. I didn't. I thought the melting temperature of gold was like a lot higher than that. It's really low. 0:13:47.960 --> 0:14:00.440 Yeah, I mean almost anything. Like you know, we get hit by rocks all the time and you. So you lose a lot of it. So I don't know, maybe some people have some ideas on doing that. Or if you very controlled the entry somehow. 0:14:00.760 --> 0:14:10.360 Wait, so maybe. Okay, this is kind of a dumb question, but like if, if gold destroys then like how does the spaceship not destroy when it comes in the atmosphere? Like is it something stronger than gold? 0:14:12.400 --> 0:14:15.200 That's not a single dimensional question. 0:14:15.280 --> 0:14:17.080 Right, like. Oh, I see. Yeah. 0:14:17.080 --> 0:14:48.160 Well, I mean gold is not a very strong thing, period. But Yeah, I mean the bulk of it is by shedding, shedding heat. So you get these ceramic tiles is the most common thing and they're I guess, somewhat ablative. So like the parts on the outside, they're very insulative, so the heat doesn't pass in. Ceramics themselves have a very, very high temperature. And, and then I believe they also use some forms of like parts of it is, is burning away, but that reaction of burning the outside away is actually cooling the stuff underneath. 0:14:49.120 --> 0:14:50.040 Oh, interesting. 0:14:50.040 --> 0:14:58.800 It's very careful. But for a metal, you don't get that. Right. Metals are very conductive, so if you burn something on the outside, it would just all that, all the heat would just come through. They're hyper conductive. 0:14:59.040 --> 0:15:08.920 So like you could in theory like, like surround a huge chunk of gold in space with like ceramic plates and then throw it at. Sure. 0:15:08.920 --> 0:15:12.700 Like build a capsule around the gold or in a capsule and. Yeah, landing. 0:15:12.700 --> 0:15:15.500 Yeah. Okay, that makes sense. That is super cool, man. 0:15:16.460 --> 0:15:38.300 So we'll see. You know, and I think that's also, you know, controlling the speed using propellants. I'm not saying that's going to be five years. I just like, you know, it's very cool to see somebody, you know, almost exponentially improving our access to space. So shout out to any SpaceX people who may be listening to this and like cringing you. Feel free. Maybe we'll have to. 0:15:38.300 --> 0:15:47.400 Oh yeah, SpaceX people hate us right now. I have a few friends there and yeah, they work incredibly hard, so they're very dedicated and yeah, huge props to them. 0:15:48.280 --> 0:17:02.890 And so upcoming will be the test number, I guess are numbering at six. So in the next couple weeks as of recording. So maybe already done by, by the time you guys listen to this episode. But they're going to kind of attempt to do most of the same things but you know, just a little bit better. And so build up, you know, repetitions and learn and, and you know, measure better sensors. Try, try some, you know, small modifications but, but definitely very cool, very exciting. And then the thing that I mentioned to people that I guess a lot of folks missed was landing the booster back on the pad with, you know, the chopsticks and eventually even the starship back means you can basically set it back down, fill it back up again and shoot it up. Like this whole thing where you don't splash it down or land it on a drone ship or you know, landing pad and have to like vary it means you literally just like that. And that is the plan. They just like lower it back down onto it is the launchpad. Just lower it back down on the launch pad, pump it with propellant again, check to make sure nothing's broken, and send it up. So you can sort of send a single ship up multiple times a day at sort of like production. And so with a dozen ships doing, you know, even two launches a day, that's 24 flights to space a day. Think about how much stuff you could put up. Like, it's crazy. 0:17:03.950 --> 0:22:03.150 Yeah, that's wild. Super cool, man. Yeah. I mean, there's so many things that could go there, but we'll, we'll just, in the interest of time, check out the video. If you haven't seen it. I've seen it. It's. It's really amazing. And yeah, huge props to those folks. All right, my news first. News is shared. B. There's a really cool library. I've used this for a variety of projects and the basic premise is maybe I'll just start with git as an analogy, right? So you know, with git you have commits and like you can make a commit. Don't consider yourself yet with branches just for a moment, but like, you know, you can make a commit. And then if I go to make a commit to main, it will say, oh, you can't do that because you're not on the latest version. You need to fast forward. And so you do a git pull. And so it will try to, you know, if someone's made changes while I was working, it'll try to like, you know, undo my changes, make their changes, and then redo my changes. And most of the time that works. Except it could be a conflict. Like if, if you deleted a line and I added some characters to that same line that's now deleted. Now we have a conflict, right? Because, you know, I'm modifying something that you deleted. And so it's not obvious what we should do there. Like maybe it should be undeleted or maybe my modifications are now irrelevant, right? It's not clear. And so git will warn you. It'll say, hey, we have a conflict and you go into your code editor and fix it, right? This is all stuff that everyone knows, but you could imagine like an autonomous, like a rule based system. So for example, for the example that I gave, you could say, well, if there's a conflict and one person deleted a line and the other person modified it, then just delete the line. Um, so you could end up like defining rules for how to govern these conflicts without any human intervention. Now, it might not do what you want, but it will not require any human in the loop, right? And so this is the premise for something called Operational transform, which is effectively just a set of rules such that like, you never end up in a state where you don't know what to do. And so Google Docs, any of these collaborative things, if you've ever used Notion or any of these tools, they all work under this premise. Like if, if, if Patrick and I are editing a Google Doc together, as we literally are right now, and and Patrick deletes a line, right? As I'm modifying it, Google Doc doesn't pop up and say, oh, I have a merge conflict. It has some logic to handle it. I don't know off top of my head what it does, probably just deletes the line, but. But it will handle it, right? And so as you can imagine that handling it is not trivial. There's all sorts of weird edge cases that could happen and that you have to think about. And so this library, Shared B is actually made by the guy who made the sharing feature in Google Docs. So bit of background, this guy built this way for people to collaborate, you know, using the browser and operational transforms and all of that. Google bought his company that turned into a product called Google Wave that was managed, in my opinion, poorly as a product and subsequently failed. But then Google Wave was absorbed by Google Docs to make what I think is an amazing product, which is, which is docs and sheets and presentations and all of that using that same technology. So that gentleman has since left Google and built an open source version of the same technology. And this was a long time ago, like I think eight years ago he left Google and I'll have to look up his name but. And so he's going to continue to work on it and make it better and better and better. And so SharedB is the latest version of it. I've used this in a few different projects. If you have something and it can actually work on JSON now too. So imagine like you have a JSON object that represents the state of your app and you want multiple people to mutate this state. You can use the SharedB library and it will handle like the websockets and all that stuff for you. So I'm a big fan of this library. I've used it in a few projects. I said I think it's really fun, definitely it's easy, relatively easy to, to get started with. And yeah, if you ever have a project like this, I would recommend it. 0:22:04.750 --> 0:22:25.070 That's really interesting. I tried briefly to search, but I was having name collision with the. With the. The name of the database with the. Who. Who wrote it. But that's awesome that like you mentioned it feels there's probably a bunch of apps that end up needing to solve the same issue. And so having sort of like backend that just kind of helps you do. 0:22:25.070 --> 0:22:29.190 It is actually really cool. Yeah, totally. 0:22:30.950 --> 0:25:33.090 All right, my next news topic is something that's been off and on in the news. Something the topic we've covered which is augmented reality and virtual reality. And this one just got me really excited. Some advance happens every few years and then nothing happens and then something happens again and I get excited again and I just, I just want to it to be a thing and I don't know when it was will be which is that Meta talked about their Orion augmented reality glasses. I think they kind of said that it's too expensive. They have no plans to make it into a product at this time. But they wanted to kind of show off what it was presumably, you know, get some press around it, show that they're still working on their kind of metaverse ideas. But you know, if you haven't seen any of the coverage about it, definitely check it out. From an engineering and technology standpoint, it's. It's very, very cool what they, they are attempting to do. And again, like I said, I think there's been Google Glass, you know, these, there was, you know, various startups have attempted to get into this space. Feels like this one is now the front runner of like people who got closest to the vision of, you know, you walk down the street and you just have overlays on your glasses. And as someone who's worn glasses since I was pretty young, I have always been like, there's this space where you could just put stuff. Like I wish I could could see things and, and you know, still, still not. So hopefully in our lifetime we'll sort of get this, you know, a technology to come through. I just think it would be be pretty cool in my opinion. Other people disagree, but I think it makes so much more sense than smartwatches or your phone. You see so many people now just walking around like looking down at their phone and just from a situational awareness thing, as a pet peeve, I was like out the other day, you know, doing a run and I ran past so many people that were outside walking presumably to get exercising, just literally staring at videos on their phone. I don't want to throw stones at TikTok, but anyways, it's just like it got to me in some, like, old man, get off my lawn kind of way. Like, you're outside walking around, like, have headphones in, have, like, whatever. But, like, you totally aren't paying attention. It's. It's a little dangerous. And, you know, also, like, if it was under glasses, two things. One, maybe they would keep more awareness, and second, I wouldn't know. And so the world would be a better place anyways, so shout out for meta. Those Orion, you know, augmented reality glasses, I think are really cool. You know, there's obviously ways we still have to figure out. Like, you can't actually, like, project Black over something, right? So actually mask something out is still a challenge. But I'm excited for having just, you know, even a very basic. Just very easy to use, not super expensive, little bit of display, you know, in my glasses. Even just like a blinking light or something. Like, let's just. Let's just get, like, lower our expectations a little. I don't really care. Just something that'll. Maybe I can plug one up in my smart home. You know, a little light that flashes when someone's at my front door or something. 0:25:33.410 --> 0:25:41.280 I mean, I would definitely get rid of my smartwatch if I could just get notifications on my glasses. So it's like one less device I'd have to wear. 0:25 --> 0:25:48.880 Yeah, it makes sense to me, but it's just. It's a hard problem, and I think smart people are working on it. I wish them luck. 0:25:49.520 --> 0:29:20.760 Yeah, totally. All right, my second news. Blade and Sorcery 1.0 is out. I totally love this game. You know, a lot of games, when they get to 1.0, it's not really that different than 0.99. You're like, okay, well, congratulations to you. But for me, as a consensus consumer, it really doesn't matter. But this game had a major, major overhaul in 1.0 that made it even more fun. Oh, man. I mean, I've put just countless hours into this game, so I'll tell you my routine really quick. I might have already said this on show, but I have these things called heavy hands. They're about, like three pounds each, and they're basically metal gloves. I almost said gauntlets, but they're not really. They don't protect you at all. But they're metal gloves that you wear on top of your hands that just add a lot of weight. And I'll put on these, like, really heavy gloves. You can still hold the. The Quest controllers with them, and I'll basically swing swords and. And, you know, fight bad guys and stuff in this game. And that's like an amazing workout. You will sweat bullets if you wear these heavy gloves and try and swing a sword around for an hour. And so up until 1.0, it wasn't really even. I would consider a game in the sense that there's no progression, there's no hook. It's basically like you go in an arena and enemies show up and you sword fight them. But. But there was. It wasn't really. It was more of a tech demo than a game. 1.0 makes it truly a game. There is so many fun things you do. Just for example, not to. I won't spoil the ending or anything like that, but. But there's a mini boss that you fight and he's got like, kind of like, if you ever played the game Star Fox or any of these games where the enemy has like a weakness, like a certain point, that's a weakness. So the boss has a weakness point, but it could be like, way up high. And the mini boss is extremely tall, so like 20ft tall. And. And the weakness might be like on the top of his head. And so you literally have to climb on this boss's back while he's like, thrashing around and trying to get you off of his back. You have to climb on his back, get to the top of his head, and start whacking him with a sword. It is like, exhilarating. I actually never get seasick or anything like that. Playing I'm fortunate. Maybe it's just too many years of playing Pixelated Doom and these other games in the 90s, but I'm somehow immune to it. But I. I could imagine, like, pretty much anybody else getting sick on this because this guy's like, throwing you around and you're trying to hold on and you're trying to like, wall climb, rock climb, this. This giant thing. So extremely, extremely fun. They added, like, skills so you can, like. There's a skill tree. I put all the skills into the athletic stuff, so I actually don't do any of the sorcery part in Blade and Sorcery. I just put all the skills into being able to like, hit people harder with the swords, which goes along with the exercise part of it. I found it extremely fun and it is totally worth whatever they're charging, which is pretty reasonable. I don't think it's like a $60 game or anything. 0:29:22.300 --> 0:29:31.980 I've. So I haven't tried this one. I'm curious if I should. I tried the Gorn people were like, really into Gorn. And I was like, gorn is good too. Okay, I don't like that. So then maybe I won't like this one. 0:29:31.980 --> 0:29:45.500 By a correlation, this is a million times better. So it's, it's directionally the same as gorn. So like if you didn't like the whole premise of Gorn, you might not like this one, but this takes it to the next level for sure. 0:29:45.820 --> 0:29:58.920 Maybe. I just, I, you seem to be into very skill, skillful VR stuff. I've never, I, I was more do like puzzle puzzle games like Escape Room. I expect you to die. That kind of stuff has been. Been my go to. 0:29:58.920 --> 0:29:59.560 Oh yeah. 0:29:59.640 --> 0:30:29.740 The like let me get better at the game itself. I just, Yeah, I haven't. I guess I should keep. Keep trying. I think partly I don't get super, super motion sick, but I do a little bit. And so the ones that are more aggressively like move around and you know, be fast and quick. I feel like you see the limitations of your VR system quicker because of update rates and stuff versus, you know, slow and I can move, but it's a more applauding pace isn't. Isn't as problematic. 0:30:30.620 --> 0:30:47.180 Yeah, I mean, so I just checked, it's $30. I think you can refund it within 48 hours. So you could always grab it and then say like, oh, I'm, I'm volt floor. Yeah. So. 0:30:47.500 --> 0:30:54.440 So do you use a broomstick handle as your sword? Like is there a danger of whack TV or any other people in the room? 0:30:55.320 --> 0:31:15.880 That's an interesting idea. I never thought about that. That would be pretty cool. Someone should make basically what I've, what I've done but with a broomstick handle. So like, you know, a really heavy glove that goes on the outside that doesn't interfere with your thumb so you can still. Right. And then a broomstick handle for the sword so you can whack yourself in the head. 0:31:16.280 --> 0:31:46.180 I know that. I know they have them like 3D printed like gun rifle like attachments for some of the shooting games and stuff. They don't look like gun, they're just degenerate. But you know, hold the, hold the handles a proper spacing apart or feel a little bit like a pistol grip or whatever for, for some of the tools I've seen online, I, I as a 3D printing person, you kind of bump across those things sometimes. So I wouldn't be surprised if someone has, you know, iron pipe or. No, I'd probably break a snap. But like anyway something heavy to attach and really get A workout? 0:31:46.820 --> 0:31:54.060 Yeah, it's super fun actually. If you, if you had something really long, you'd get that cantilever force right. So wouldn't even. 0:31:54.060 --> 0:32:02.220 I was going to say that you just need something with those Olympic weightlifting weight attachments to the end and you could put like a 10 pound plate, you know, a foot out from you. 0:32:02.380 --> 0:32:03.740 Oh, that would be so hard. 0:32:03.820 --> 0:32:10.420 You couldn't like the torque would be, you know, or go a meter out and then you do like a pound at end of a meter and you'd. 0:32:10.420 --> 0:32:19.420 Just be like, oh, oh. And then it's like I have to explain to my family why there's like a Olympic weight sized hole in the wall. 0:32:20.300 --> 0:32:25.700 I guess I mixed my. I gotta make people upset. I said a pound a meter away. You'd have to 500 grams a meter away. 0:32:25.700 --> 0:32:26.010 There we go. 0:32:26.160 --> 0:32:26.400 Go. 0:32:26.880 --> 0:32:31.760 Yeah, we're in America. You have to do it in like dove farlings. 0:32:33.040 --> 0:34:02.440 It's. It's a half stone at a furlong distance. All right. Book of the show. Mine's an actual legit book this time. That is the book that Wouldn't Burn by Mark Lawrence. I've recommended a series from Mark Lawrence before and this is the. The first book in a series. Not actually done with it yet, but I am enjoying it so far. I will say for me personally it was a bit of a slow start. I kind of just went off of, you know, recommendation that it was an author and it was getting good reviews and I didn't even read the description. So it was a bit like trying to figure out what it was going. And then I kind of got excited and then I was like when to prepare for this and read the summary and was like, oh, this was just like literally the back of the book. Okay, anyways, but definitely been an interesting parallel storylines that intertwine. Telling of a kind of interesting world. I don't know the full details yet, but one of those things where rather than tell you all of this stuff up front, you're just kind of learning as the characters sort of go through their story and there's some interesting ideas and sort of a mysterious world that's being inhabited and you're trying to figure out how similar or dissimilar is this. And so definitely check it out. Book that wouldn't Burn by Mark Lawrence. If you're into that kind of like science fiction fantasy. If you've read something from Mark Lawrence before. 0:34 --> 0:34:05.560 Very cool. So it's the first book of the trilogy. 0:34:05.560 --> 0:34:06.840 It is the first book in a new series. 0:34:07.240 --> 0:34:10.840 Okay, so yeah, you have to be prepared to wait for the second. 0:34:10.920 --> 0:34:31.249 Oh, okay. Yeah, fair point. I guess I should have. I tell people that the Library trilogy, I think the first and second book are already out. And the author. Yeah, the third one isn't yet, but this author, Mark Lawrence, has been able to finish multiple series before, so it's not their first rodeo. 0:34:31.489 --> 0:34:32.129 Yeah, right. 0:34:32.129 --> 0:34:45.300 That's not name calling. Any specific Patrick Rothfuss that they can't finish their series. If you're listening, Patrick, I'm here for you, man. 0:34:46.180 --> 0:34:48.580 Yeah, we get back to work. 0:34:51.700 --> 0:34:54.660 I've heard much worse things said to him. So I feel. I do feel bad. 0:34:54.660 --> 0:35:01.380 I do feel bad for them. Yeah, totally. No one likes to be stressed, to be. Do something creative. I mean, that's like, people probably have no. 0:35:01.380 --> 0:35:03.060 No idea what we're talking about. 0:35:05.940 --> 0:36:49.400 My book of the show is also a book. It's called Masters of Doom and it is a biography of John Carmack and John Romero, two of the founders of ID software that created Doom. It's awesome. I mean, I'm a huge fan. I put countless hours as a kid into Doom, into Commander Keen, into so many of these shareware games. Kingdom of Cross is actually mentioned. They work closely with Scott Miller, who made Kingdom of Crime Cross. So it was just like a total nostalgia trip. If you're not, you know, a millennial, maybe this won't relate like. But man, it. It just really threw me down memory lane. So fun. I am about two thirds of the way through it and I'm just having absolute blast listening to this book. The. One of the interesting things is they really talk about. Some of the people wanted to make a really gory demon like game since the beginning. But they started off making Commander Keen and making some of these silly games. But they always had this big vision, at least on the artistic side, you know, on the technical side, you know, John Carmack's always been kind of like head and shoulders above all his contemporaries, which is, I think, pretty admirable. And they. They talk a lot about that. Yeah, overall, I thought it was. I think it's a fantastic read and I recommend folks to check it out. 0:36:50.520 --> 0:37:53.830 I have read that book. I was actually looking quickly. I was for sure. I probably recommended this, but I have not. So, yeah, good, good recommendation on Masters of Doom, like you said. I actually didn't play a lot of the games that were talked about there, but I kind of knew about them. But reading about. I don't call it like the dichotomy between folks just trying to push for artistic versus technical. And John Carmack still today, I feel like is around and we were talking about VR and had some stuff going on there with Meta and Oculus and the work he was doing there. But you know, I think definitely like for a lot of people, a very formative figure in the programming space and sort of the way he approached things and the way he did things and just, just kind of going for it and you know, kind of a rare, A rare talent there but, but definitely an interesting read. Even if for nothing else, it's kind of interesting to start to see those retrospectives of things that are largely software or programming. 0:37:53.830 --> 0:37:54.070 Right. 0:37:54.070 --> 0:38:25.470 There's not that. That many of them where programming is really the, I don't know, star of the show. And here, here it kind of was. And so we're kind of getting to the point where you can have those historic look backs. I also did happen to see recently randomly some recommended book list from. From Elon Musk. Not that endorsement of him, but this, this book was on his list. So I think you're in. I guess maybe, maybe you can. That's correlation, right? If you guys read and recommend the same books, then like you're. You're going to have the same outcome in wealth. 0:38:25.730 --> 0:38:32.730 So yeah, I will eventually be able to catch something with chopsticks. I mean, I've been trying basically my whole life to pick up a dim sum. I can't do it. 0:38:32.730 --> 0:38:38.130 That's true. I am really bad at actual chopsticks. So maybe I should engineer robotic chopsticks. Maybe I would do better. 0:38:38.850 --> 0:38:39.570 That's right. 0:38:42.210 --> 0:40:45.600 All right. Times for Tool of the Show. Well, I did a book for Book of the Show. I'm not doing a tool for Tool of the Show. That's okay. I'm doing Balatron, which is a very weird thing. I don't ever say it. It's just one of those words I always see. But B, A, L, A T, R, O, which is a. I guess you call it a roguelike. Yeah, that's playing roguelike. It's been around for a while on PC but it recently had mobile releases on Android and iOS and so you can now play it mobile, which is very bad for my free time. For a while I'd been playing it on my Steam deck actually and it was bad for, you know, anyways get his fancy Steam deck. And all I did was play this card game. Anyways. It was much better on. On my iPhone, but I've been playing it. It's one of those like perfectly finds the balance of like it's random and you can do as good as you can and you still just lose. And I play kids with, play games with my kids sometimes and they think they're just amazing and I try to like, express to them. You realize you, you took a very bad strategy. You needed a specific, very unlikely outcome four times in a row to win and you got it. Like, yes, you won, but like, I don't know that. You should be super proud. Anyways, this is that game. Sometimes you just really, really bad draws or whatever and you can lose, but you can always just be trying to improve your probabilities. And I feel like with these games you can't overthink it. You just got to kind of go fast. There's no, don't get analysis paralysis. You just kind of zip through it and, and you know, try to do your best. But definitely been having a good time. Um, I think it comes in, I, I got it off of Apple Arcade or whatever, so, so I didn't pay for it, but I believe it's not super expensive on the various platforms. So if you've never heard of it before or never, you know, tried it, I would, I would definitely give it a shout out for that, you know, plane ride, bus ride, train ride, sitting in the car, having a few minutes. Definitely not while you're using the restroom, you know, definitely don't use your phone when you do anyways. But like, those are the perfect opportunities for, for getting in, you know, a few hands for, you know what. 0:40:45.840 --> 0:40:54.160 Okay, small digression here. Okay, but sorry, you can use your phone in the restroom. Totally fine. No, really, are you joking or are you. 0:40:54.160 --> 0:40:56.480 No, no, I'm sorry, I was just like, go ahead. 0:40:56.560 --> 0:41:34.510 Okay. But you know what you cannot do? You cannot use your laptop in a toilet stall. And then you definitely cannot put the laptop on the ground and the toilet stall. Like, I saw this one time at work and I was like, this is like a whole new level of disgusting. Like, this is like, like there's people who for some reason like, spit in the urinal. I don't understand that either. But like, this is like even worse than that. This is like, oh, I need to put my laptop on the floor of the toilet stand stall. Like, what are you thinking? 0:41:35.390 --> 0:41:46.270 I, I, I, let's just, I can't just gotta keep going. Let's keep going. I, I don't want to know where you're playing your games from. I don't want to know where you're slacking me from. Just like, let's just Keep it. It's, it's fine. 0:41:46.350 --> 0:41:49.310 Yeah, we don't need to go scatological on this show. 0:41:49.790 --> 0:41:50.390 Oh no. 0:41:50.390 --> 0:44:00.550 But yeah, don't. Don't bring your toilet, don't bring your laptop into the, into the toilet stall. Just don't do it. It's not that important. That code can wait, you know. All right, my tool to show is, and actually I thought, unbelievably amazing tool. It's called Cursor. It's a ide. I guess because of whatever limitations, they couldn't just make this an extension on Visual Studio code, so they had to actually fork it. So it's a complete fork of Visual Studio code, but it does some pretty wild things. Like for example, I renamed a function and it was like, hey, you know, you called this function in like all these other places all over your code base. You want me to fix it for you? I was like, sure that I think already exists, you know, in different, different things. Like we've had that refactor option in NetBeans like a long time ago, but. But then it just kind of like got more and more sophisticated to where like, yeah, you're changing things and it's like hopping to different points of the file and other files and like, hey, you should do this, you should do that. And like I wrote a doc string for a function and when I was done it like jumped to the next function and started a doc string for me. It's like, hey, it looks like you're in doc string writing mode. Like, let's keep writing doc strings. I thought it was awesome. I think it's a real threat to Copilot and to these other tools. And so I would imagine Microsoft's probably hard at work to you know, make the actual Visual Studio code do some of these things. But. But yeah, I hadn't really experienced IDE like that before. So it's totally free. I think it's a usage based model, so if you code enough, you'll eventually hit some kind of a limit. I haven't used it enough to hit any limit, but at that point, or maybe it's a time limit, I'm not totally sure. But at some point you'll have to start paying for it. But they have a pretty generous free tier, so I totally recommend folks trying it out. It's pretty wild. 0:44:02.390 --> 0:45:01.830 I haven't used it. But I will say some of the stuff you're talking about was discussed. I was listening to the Lex Friedman podcast and he interviewed the team at Cursor. The folks that are there. And they talked a bit about why fork visual studio code, why not a plugin? I also talked about some of the difficulties in sort of the human machine interaction and then also, like, how to trade off various models, selection between each other for potentially different tasks, and just even the suggestion diff flow and how that would work. So if this is a topic that's interesting to you, I'll give a shout out to that podcast. It's definitely not a short podcast. I guess ours isn't very short either. But if you're interested, they're. It is an interesting discussion. They also talk a little bit about, you know, how to tell if LLMs are kind of, like, intelligent. What problems do you think they could or couldn't solve? Like, what's the extent? So I thought that it was an interesting listen. 0:45:01.830 --> 0:45:34.150 So, yeah, totally. I've, I've. I'm definitely in this camp where for whatever reason, I, I haven't had as much. Oh, you know, it's because I've been reading books in the car instead of doing podcasts. So I've been doing Masters of Doom and some of these other books, but because of that, I've been accumulating notifications of things that I want to watch. So I have on my phone all these notifications of all these episodes of Lex Friedman, and I don't want to clear them, but I also don't seem to have enough time to get to them. 0:45:35.670 --> 0:45:47.200 Yeah, I, yeah, I do them while I'm exercising. I tend to listen to. I have. I haven't done listening to books. I have books when I drive. Podcasts when I exercise has been my. It's been my balance. 0:45:47.600 --> 0:45:51.520 Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head. I need to actually exercise, and then. 0:45:53.360 --> 0:45:55.680 I'll save that diatribe for another time. 0:45:56.640 --> 0:49:21.740 All right, so let's jump into the topic. Working from home. So let me set the stage here. I originally got interested in working from home around 2018, 2019 when we decided to move to Texas. And so basically, you know, this is pre Covid. Pre all of that. And, you know, there are undoubtedly a lot more tech jobs in, in, in the Bay Area that there are in any city in Texas. And so. And so working from home seemed like a nice way where we could move, you know, closer to family and all of that. But still, I could, you know, keep. Keep the job that I really enjoyed. Now at the time, it wasn't an option. And so I was in the middle of interviewing for, you know, in person jobs in Texas because I was Pretty committed to move when the pandemic hit. And I remember I was actually sick. I don't think I had Covid. I think I just had a regular cold. But. But I was sick during the time when they said, like, this is the last day you can come into the office. And I was. I was super sick. And so I actually couldn't even go in and get my stuff. And so it took me like probably half a year to get my stuff out of the office because at some point they just completely shut it down. And. And so at that point I decided, hey, well, we're all working from home here. I might as well make this. Make this move. So, so we did move to Texas. And so I worked. Worked from home for a while. And so, you know, as did a lot of other people. And so then at some point, companies opened back up and now what we're experiencing is a big debate around RTO or return to office. So notably, you know, Amazon has said that their employees have to come into the office five days a week. They even went a step further and said, if you're in a satellite office, you know, if you're like the one person in Nashville, even if you're at an Amazon office, that's not good enough. You have to go to where the rest of your team is. So even people in the office have to move to a different office. That's maybe I think, the most extreme version. Then there's a whole gradient. I know Dell said you can't get promoted if you're working remote, which I thought was actually not very smart. I feel like that creates all sorts of weird side effects. My opinion. But they did that. And then all the way to. On the other end of the spectrum, companies like Figma, actually, ironically, Twitch, which is owned by Amazon, really taking a stand in the other direction and saying, no, you know, remote is here to stay. Remote is better and we will never give up on remote. Really taking a stand there. And that's kind of where we're at right now at this real crossroads, is that. What's your take on that, the current situation? 0:49:22.630 --> 0:52:39.990 Yeah, I think you have a decent summary of it. I'll say. We used to do a lot of interviews and I think a lot of the companies we talked to had strong opinions on remote work, and I think a lot of those were even before COVID I will say I think the tooling around remote work and the expectations and some of the stuff I think we're going to try to talk about today is evolved a lot in the last since COVID and sort of everybody went and had to go do it for a while. I think there's a better understanding of, of what it means. And there have a lot of companies that were built sort of ground up saying we want the best people no matter where they are, and we're going to build up a culture around it. And I do actually think that that's really important. But the other thing I'll just say to bring up here in the, in the intro is there are two, at least two very important pieces of work from home, which is company and the company's culture and the company's expectations, but then also personal. And just like there are many, many kinds of companies, there are many, many personal situations. And so I think to be reductionist about either, that there can only be one company. Well, I mean, I guess insert a free market argument here. But also to have a belief that everybody is the same and because you have a certain way that you are, it's really one of those things, almost one of the most extreme ones I've seen where really taking time to communicate with others and empathize. Maybe their situation, their house, physical setup, their family situation, their whatever could just be so divergent from yours that it's very hard to understand their desire to be in the office or not have to come into the office. And then, you know, as, as Jason mentioned, I guess to like muddying it all is those things being forced to change or changing over time. Anytime I think there's a change. It's also difficult because people's ability to handle or deal with change can, can vary. And so I think all of those make it a, a topic that's not one size fits all. But I do think there's some things to talk about that, you know, if there, if you're going to work from home full time or part time, there are some, I think things you can do to, to be aware of, to help yourself to, to sort of think about it. And I, I do agree that there's a spectrum from, you know, no remote work, all remote work, hybrid plans. And I think going forward with high confidence, I feel I can say there will probably be more diversity, more variants in the kinds of companies and jobs available than there was pre Covid. Pre Covid, it was almost always in office expectation for full five days a week or more. And very, very few companies were, you know, fully remote. But I think in the future, I think that variance will be a lot higher. I think you'll see a lot more different kinds of companies and even new models and ideas popping up. And so, you know, I think we'll have, in, in that way they'll hopefully be better because you can kind of choose based on your personal, personal preferences. 0:52:40.870 --> 0:55:08.120 Yeah, that totally makes sense. So, yeah, I think, yeah, I think maybe we should start with, with kind of our background. So. So, you know, both of us were from Florida. My family ended up moving to Texas. Your family's still in Florida. And we were working, you know, thousands of miles away in California. And I do think that we should just acknowledge that that's tough. Like, I mean there's a lot of people who do it. It's like not uniquely our problem. There's people whose families are on the other side of the planet. Right. That's even harder. But, but I think, you know, as you like have kids and then try and raise those kids, they take a lot of time and the more time you put in, the more sort of nurturing life that they have. So of course you're really compelled to do that. And, and so that, that's when you really start wanting to have more family around. So I think that it does tend to the work from home benefits do tend to skew kind of older. And then on the flip side, you know, it's good, you know, before you have a family or any of that, it's nice to go into an office where you have, you know, we went into an office before we had kids where we could benefit from like having other people around and just all the sort of passive communication that goes on there, the sort of water cooler chatter and all of that. So definitely there's, as you said, there's a lot of different factors I think, like sort of spoiling the ending here. I think that we do have to take sort of a relativistic approach and say, look like different people are in different situations and the company just needs to be able to handle those situations on like a case by case basis. So blanket things like all remote people are fired, like what Amazon's doing or, or they don't get promoted or on the other case, like to the other extreme, like we're not going to pay for an office and so you will never have a place that you can go to that's your place to work. So I mean, these are two extremes that I think are just not going to help. Not as helpful as finding some middle ground. 0:55:09.960 --> 0:58:36.630 I think. Yeah, I think you summed up the basis and motivations about family situations being a key reason, I think for both of us, of why, of why the situation ended up where we did. I do think there is something to be said for sort of software only companies or parts of the company versus companies that have a physical or manufacturing or business component. I mean, I think it can also be reductionist. Like I think where you and I both have spent most of our time working are companies that had very large software only organizations or only software organizations and very little hardware or integration components. And so those things can be very different than, you know, places that have manufacturing lines. And so I think from that way it's also hard for a one size fits all approach or people to kind of understand the needs of both. And then like you do mention, I do agree that I think earlier in your sort of career having camaraderie around for a variety of purposes and mentorship and that kind of stuff, there's less rigor in your schedule and it can help a lot to be in the office. I do agree with and I think Facebook has come up and said some stuff about that where, or Meta I guess, where they had some, you know, a little bit of a different handling for junior engineers versus more senior engineers. And you know, over time they've, they've sort of worked on that. And so I do think there's some, you know, merit to those, those discussions. And I, and I do really think that. But I also think a lot of people don't realize when you're, you're sort of work from home that internal motivation, the psychologically and being really brutally honest with yourself and saying, hey, if nobody's around, like when everybody's around, there's that peer pressure, right? Like hey, even if you have an envelope, like people are kind of seeing you working, you're seeing other people working. And there's like a deep in internal level of like I should also be, you know, working. And it can be true if everyone's just playing around or goofing off at the office, that's also a distraction. But seeing everybody work can be really motivating for you to do work as well. And if you're home, are you going to be able to do that or are you going to be distracted by the stuff in your life or your situation that are going on or the things outside or the noises or going for a walk or whatever, right? Like are you actually going to be able to sit down and focus no matter, no matter what's going on or you know, I will also say it is difficult even, you know, I work from home. And for instance this week there was a Partial holiday, I don't know how you call it. So I was working but like my family had off and some people worked, some people had off. It was, it was sort of mixed. And so I was sitting at my computer, my family was off doing something, you know, more or less fun and around the house and then out and about and coming and telling. And I'm sitting here like attempting to get my work done. And they were respectful to me. But am I able to be motivated enough to stick with it and get what I need to do done? Even though those distractions around and if you're in an office, that motivation is sort of there for you because you're there, right? Like, yeah, kind of cut off from it, you've already committed versus if you're sitting there and hearing video games being played or hearing, you know, stuff happening, are you still sitting there and typing your code with the same focus or are you not able to have that internal motivation is something only you can answer and it's going to be different for everyone. 0:58:37.430 --> 1:02:10.920 Yep, yep, Totally. Okay. So I think we got, we did a pretty good job covering what it is, what we should cover now. So, you know, if you're not working from home, you're going to be working with people who are working from home. And so it behooves you, no matter what, to understand the best like the do's and don'ts of working from home. This can help you. If you're managing people or even if you're a peer to somebody who's working from home, you can always offer this advice or you could suggest that they listen to the show. But just knowing goods and bads I think are really important for this. So the first thing we have on the list is scheduling. I think that this is extremely, extremely important. Some kind of general things I've done that worked really well is, you know, I did finally kind of like color code my calendar. I put a bunch of personal things in my calendar. So for example, if I'm working from home on Friday and I have an intent to smoke a brisket on Friday while I'm working from home, which is a great idea, highly recommend it. I will actually set up like tiny 15 minute meetings for like, okay, you know, take the brisket out and wrap it and put apple cider vinegar on it or whatever, like so if you're thinking like I'm going to do my laundry while I'm at working from home or these other things, just make them explicit. You know, if you're ashamed to like put these Things on your calendar where everyone can see it. You can make them private meetings, you know, so people don't have to see. I, I don't really care. So like, sometimes I'll, I'll go to a meeting and they're like, how's that brisket coming? But, but I think being intentional about your time when you work from home is really, really important. And as I said, you could be private and just have a bunch of busy blocks, or you can just be transparent. That part is less, less, less important. But what is important is that you can look back and say, yeah, you know, this, this day, you know, I, I, I smoked some brisket, I did some laundry, I went for a run, I did all these things. But, you know, I worked from like 9 to 9 or something, or 9 to 7 or something. So like, you know, I did the hours, I just took breaks in the middle and it, it works out. I think it's easy to fall into a trap where you start, like, running a lot of errands and doing a lot of other things and, and then at the end, like, you just don't know whether you really, like, put in enough time. And I guess, like a meta point, it doesn't really matter how much time you put in. What matters is getting your projects done right, so you don't have to put in eight hours a day. But, but, but I think that it's all kind of connected. So, like, you could end up in a position where, let's say a pro, a deadline slips, then you're going to kind of wonder, did I just not work as hard as I should have on this? And so that's where you go back to your calendar and say, like, oh, no, I actually was, you know, I did work a ton of hours. I just miscalculated how hard this project is versus, you know, when you're at work, you have this, like, because you're driving to work and back, you have this like, general sense of how much you're working. And when you're at home, you lose that sense. You have to replace it with something explicit. 1:02:13.070 --> 1:04:12.230 I absolutely agree on this on the scheduling front, and I think the reverse as well too, is having a schedule with your family as well, so that it is a, a mutual respect thing. Like, hey, from this time to this time, like, you're going to see me, I'm around, but I'm, I'm, I'm not here. Like, this is, this is time. I'm dedicated. But then there's also times when I'm not And so I'm not doing work in this block. And this is family time. And, you know, it's at the end of the day so that you don't end up accidentally working, you know, 14, 15, 16 hour days because you just didn't plan otherwise. And I do think you got to try to strike that balance or even just burnout. And so I think scheduling is important on both fronts. I also think scheduling is maybe a bit more of a important topic in making sure that you connect with team members that you need to. And really, even if it's not going into a meeting, scheduling that, like, hey, I'm gonna have a email conversation or slack or connect with this person and do this thing. Cause there's no, oh, I'll just do it when I see them. Cause you won't see them, right? Like you're not gonna bump into them. So those things have to be sort of planned and sort of thought through. And I think that it can be a bit weird. We were having this. I was explaining to someone what CRM software was because they were like, oh, I don't even know. Salesforce is this huge company and they're do CRM and I don't even know what CRM is. And that's explained to me like, oh, that sounds dumb. That's just a spreadsheet. And I was like, wow, okay, whatever. But. But this part, one part of it is managing your relationships with other people at work and building up. Maybe that's talking very condensed about work stuff, but maybe it's also having casual time to. To connect with people and understand who they are and sort of like build up that. That rapport with people and it has to become intentional. And so scheduling those things as well, I think can be a bit weird at first, but it's definitely important. 1:04:13.830 --> 1:06:36.040 Yeah, totally, totally agree. I think, you know, looking back, so. And I think we've kind of like foreshadowed this. But, you know, I found working from home personally to be really difficult. I wasn't like, I mean, the work got done, but I feel like I didn't, you know, communicate as often. I just. I just didn't build the same relationships. So, like, when I look back at my work from home time, you know, I still have closer relationships to people that I worked with in person before the pandemic. And so I've spent the past two months working in person, two, three months. And I feel like I have a closer relationship to some of these people than people I worked with remotely for much longer. And again, it's this is a spectrum. So if you worked with me remotely and we're close friends and we talk all the time on, on sms, this is obviously not directed to you. But, but just in aggregate, I feel like I didn't develop as many as close relationships and I think a big part of that was just not being again, explicit. So just, you know, especially, especially with people above me in the chart. You know, I, I never really felt comfortable setting up a meeting with my boss to just talk about the weather like that. Never really felt okay or even like my boss's peers or even other peers who are higher level than me. And so because of that I didn't really build any of those relationships. And the relationships I did build remotely were, you know, people who like either reported to me or were like kind of reported to my peers, et cetera. So, so I, I do feel like you have to get out of your comfort zone and understand like, yeah, you know, my boss is definitely busier and has more responsibility than I do. That's why he's my boss. But, but that doesn't mean that he won't take like 15 minutes to just talk about the weather over zoom. That was, that was, I think in hindsight kind of like a mistake that I made. But, and then Patrick, I think you've been working remote, you know, same time I have, but you're still working remote. I think you've found you've really thrived remotely. 1:06:36.680 --> 1:06:57.420 Yeah, I mean I think for me the. So, so you, we should say, I guess you started working remote at a company, you moved to a new company where you were more or less remote and then you've, you've kind of, kind of moved on. So I've been at the same company the whole time, so I think maybe I'm a bit rose colored glasses because I had built a lot of those relationships ahead of time and then brought them. 1:06:57.500 --> 1:06:58.620 Oh, that's a good point. 1:06:58.700 --> 1:11:03.050 Remote with me. So I haven't had to rebuild them. Like I had rapport with almost all of the people that I work with and even, even my management. I do think you have a great point though that people should be aware of is being very careful. And in hybrid situations, if you're remote and other people are on site, especially if you imagine a manager that's on site and has some people that are remote and some people are, there is a, I think there's a natural sort of difference that can build up there. And some managers may be very good at sort of handling that and others may not be. And you just gotta be real. Realizing that like Jason's saying, like, you need to make sure that you're intentional about building rapport that people on site wouldn't need to be. Is that fair or unfair? Well, like Atomica, it doesn't matter. Life's not like it doesn't need to be fair or unfair. It's just the way it is. And you can either realize it or not. It's your choice, I guess. But spoiler, it's the way it is is you're gonna maybe have to be intentional about some things that aren't. And that goes into. If that's part of why you don't like it. Yeah, that's fair. Oh, that's different use of the word fair anyways. But yeah, I think that the. You're absolutely right. Like building those. Those relationships is critical and I think it feeds into. Everyone's talking about next. It's just communications. And I think if you're for companies that are fully remote, you know, comes like, obviously everybody got to figure it out. But remote work also generally comes with people in different time zones or different schedules that are even more divergent than being in the office. And so I think figuring out a culture around your. Most people have now sort of the. The meetings, the sort of Zoom, Microsoft Teams, WebEx, whatever, you know, video conferencing. There's email, you know, and then there's some instant messaging kind of thing. Whether you do that over text or Slack or the teams product or whatever, right? People discord. People have these sort of like, I guess three modalities as well as sort of wiki, page editing or whatever. And I think figuring out the right way to communicate what you're working on, what your availability kind of is communicating where you leave off on something, if you're handing it off, or what you need people to do or how like what you're looking for help with or, you know, hey, I need this, you know, PR to be reviewed, whatever those kind of things are. And being very, you know, deliberate about all of your communication, or the very vast majority of your communication becomes written as opposed to casual in person. I'll just, when I see them, I'll tell them. And as someone who continues to work remote despite working with people who are. Are in a more hybrid situation, it's kind of funny to hear people say that, right? Like, oh, I'll just tell them when I see them. And it's like, okay. But for me that's. That's like, I might have a meeting scheduled with them, you know, once a week or that they're in the chair, but otherwise I'm not going to see them. So to me, if I need to tell someone something, I have to type it right now, like, or, you know, plan to type it because otherwise, you know, that communication won't take place. And so I think just across all of those things, finding the right way that people are aware of the work that you're doing so that there's not conflict to be resolved. Right. Like making sure there's no overlap or we're doing the same thing. So being intentional about communicating what you're doing, when you're doing it, how the work is getting done. And it's. I found there are some people that I work with are very good about expressing their status over, you know, in team rooms or in personal messages proactively. And then other people really have to be sort of prodded to give a sort of update and as if you are the person who's in a remote day or a remote, you know, working situation permanently. I think making sure to be proactive about communicating what you're doing and what you're working on so that. Not that like people like Jason, you don't have to. It's not getting your 40 hours in. It's just like that people are aware that you're there and the tasks that you're taking on and that they feel they know situationally where you are. And that's something you have to, to sort of pursue yourself. 1:11:04.010 --> 1:12:32.600 Yep, yep. Totally agree. I think you said something that really stuck with me too much. The, the, yeah, the, the whole like, I'll see them, you know, I'll just tell them when I see them. I think that another important thing there is to keep notes because, you know, you can't really. There's certain things that like, aren't practical to do immediately. Like, for example, the example you have is perfect where, you know, it's not just something I can text somebody, it's something that requires like a face to face conversation. Um, but it's not practical for me to just set up a zoom call right now with some person because who knows what they're doing. Like you would like in person, you could just walk over and say, hey, blah, blah, blah. But over zoom, like it's a little bit more challenging because the person might not even get your, your zoom invite in time if you did it for five minutes from now. Right. So what I did instead is which I, which I thought was a really useful. And I've carried This over even to when I work in the office is just keep notes. You know, I use a remarkable pad but you could also use, you know, a Kindle scribe or you could use Google Docs. It doesn't have to be a physical thing. Paper and pencil. I haven't heard of this thing but apparently it's some new invention. But yeah, just keep notes. I think that's important and that. 1:12:35.260 --> 1:12:35.380 And. 1:12:35.380 --> 1:12:42.540 That way you know, when you do meet with somebody you have like four things that you can cover and so you know, it ends up being more efficient. 1:12:44.540 --> 1:14:34.500 Yeah, absolutely. I think I, I use a notebook and pencil. I, I don't know, I don't know half the time I don't think I ever go back and even look at what I wrote or be able to make sense of it. But just you know, helping you and jotting down like you said, a few notes about things. And I do think there is a culture in office as well just to be balanced about it where some people are more okay being interrupted, others less so. And this is for a variety of reasons but you can kind of read people, you know, like see like do they look like they're really busy or do they look like they can interrupting. But it's this try. I don't even try. It's a, it's a difficult problem. Like I have a certain priority of thing that I need. They have a certain desire or lack of desire to talk right now. And like this is unspoken, unspoken but it, it's a non verbal communication in person that, that sort of happens and needs to be normalized there online. It's like you said, it may like people don't know like am I just sitting doing code, am I just doing training? And they are free to ping me, I'm happy to pause it and talk to them. You know, it's really difficult. People don't know, you know, kind of what you're doing. And so I try to express to people, hey, for me, if you want to meet with me, you know, again here are the hours I'm generally available. So you can generally expect me to be available within this time. But I might have meetings. So just you know, send me a message and say hey, I want to chat. And then I'll either tell you yeah, let's do it now or you know, like hey, here's the next time I can kind of do it in and that you should never feel bad about asking because I like I won't feel bad about telling you no. Um, and you know, or not now or you know, here's the next time I can do it. And that they shouldn't feel like making it very clear, hey, you can't see me, so just ask me. And you know, most of the time I'm able to, to make time to talk to them. 1:14:35.140 --> 1:15:59.430 Yeah, definitely. Also, you know, setting up kind of like social things, that's another kind of thing I would put under communication. You know, when, when I was in person, usually the org leader, you know, the director, whoever would set some kind of event like, oh, it's Taco Tuesday. I'm gonna go and order a thousand taco, or I don't know, 200 tacos for like the entire org and. Or, you know, hey, this is this day, or let's do, you know, board games on Thursday or whatever it is. But online, when you're working remote, you know, I think you might have to be the person to set that up. And it's important to have that kind of social time. And it follows more or less the same rules as in person, where not everyone has to go to Taco Tuesday. You know, you could just, you could continue to work at your desk. You don't, you don't need to, to do that. I mean, I wouldn't recommend that. I think, you know, socializing is actually really important. But, but I'm saying, like, you don't mandate. There's no mandate to go to Taco Tuesday. And similarly, there's no mandate to, you know, hop on a social zoom call and play. Play like web hangman or something or some little fun game. But so you don't make it mandatory. But I think having that space for people is really important. 1:16:00.950 --> 1:16:15.730 Yep, I completely agree. And then I think the last major thing we wanted to cover is if you're going to be doing hybrid work or work from home. I mean, I think planning your space you're going to do the work in is. 1:16:16.370 --> 1:16:17.170 Is very important. 1:16:17.250 --> 1:17:28.680 I mean, I think that there's this like, oh, I'm going to just do my work from the couch or I'm going to, you know, just be wherever. And sometimes I do that, but it's very rare. I think that it's a lot better to have a dedicated space that, you know, even if you go work from those other places, you can at least, you know, have the place that you go to focus. And your brain knows this is the focus place, and you go there and that's where you focus. And it may be a space that's used for other stuff at other times, but during the days that you're working from home, or if you work from home all the time, maybe it's a permanent setup. And again, I, like I mentioned in the beginning, depending on people's life situation, that may be a lot easier or harder for them, but for me it's been very important to have. This is my desk. I, I've spent time trying to curate it into the, the way I want and we can maybe talk about some of what that, that is. But when, when I'm sitting here doing this and I always have to, you know, tease to people, to people in the house with my family is like, if you hear me clackity, clackity, clackity on my keyboard, like that's not the time to just ask me casually something, you know, whatever, like maybe wait. But I think having those, those things is very critical. 1:17:29.480 --> 1:18:39.740 Yeah, totally. I mean, I went through a period where basically like at 4 o' clock the kids would start like banging on the door to want to come in and play video games. So we have all of the video games in the same room that I do all my work in, which is spicy. Yeah, not a good idea because, you know, the kids want to play games and we give them like half an hour a day during the week of game time. So it's not like they get more time if they come earlier. But of course they just really want to do it as soon as possible. Right. So that just creates this weird situation where I would start acquiescing and saying, okay, at 4, I'm going to go work in the spare room on my laptop. But then it's not very comfortable and kind of lost your context. And so finally I realized like, okay, no, you know, from, you know, whatever until 5 o', clock, you know, the office is off limits. Like I have to focus and that made things easier. I totally agree. Having a dedicated space is huge. If you could do it. 1:18:41.180 --> 1:19:59.540 Yeah. And so, I mean, when people go to the office generally, and this can vary, some people get stipends for, you know, an allowance for setting up their home office. Many people don't. Um, but you know, in the office you often are provided, you know, keyboard monitor, that kind of stuff. But at home, you know, that's not necessarily true, but I don't know, I still probably have better setup than I probably did at the office. But you know, I have a standing sitting desk, even though I sit the vast majority of the time. But at least it's sort of micro adjusted to where I want and I can stand up. And so I have a Nice standing sitting desk. I have my computer up on or my monitor up on a monitor arm. So the desk underneath it is nice and clean. And I think having that space that just, I don't know, maybe other people are like, no, I'm not really, I don't really care. But I have, you know, speakers because I don't need headphones. I'm at home. So I have speakers set on my desk to listen to music at an appropriately ear sensitive volume but, but still sounding good, you know, a webcam for doing my, my stuff and having it all set up really nicely and in the same spot. So every time when I go into a meeting, like I know where things are, I have the stuff I need, I know what I'm going to do. But yeah, and I have a, I did get a nice chair. I think a lot of people have really crappy office chairs but. 1:19:59.700 --> 1:20:08.900 Oh wait, really wait, tell me more about this because I, I'm definitely in this camp where I, I think I have a crappy chair. But like how do you. What actually makes a chair good? 1:20:09.380 --> 1:21:36.940 For me it's one that's like adjustable. I, I'm not gonna like go and it's a really nerdy deep topic but I mean you go on the sort of Reddit and see a lot of common ones that people are suggesting and offices close all the time. I personally, I mean, and when I was in the office, I sat in conference rooms all the time and that had random people sitting in the chairs and never bothered me. So for me buying liquidated office furniture which you can find on ebay for like 20% of the price, you know, like 80% off or, or most cities of a decent size have like office liquidation warehouses which, where I got my chairs from, you can go in and sit in them. And so there's like, you know, Herman Miller chairs that, that people really like and they can be customized and be very nice. But adjustable seat height, adjustable seat depth, adjustable, you know, like lumbar support. And where I live it's very hot in Florida, so I have mesh backed chairs so there's no like cushions so that there's airflow and I don't get a sweaty back. But you know, all those things are, are important to me to be really comfortable. I get back pain which goes back to the exercising. You gotta make sure you exercise but also have having a comfortable chair cause you're gonna be there a lot. And in the office you often move meeting to meeting. If you have meetings and generally move at home, it's Very easy to sit down and then not like leave your chair for vast majority of the day. 1:21:36.940 --> 1:21:37.260 Right. 1:21:37.480 --> 1:21:51.080 So you're sitting in the same spot even more than in the office. And having those intentional get up and walk around times is actually, actually important. But, but having a nice chair to sit in. Cause you're going to be there longer in my opinion, or at least for me, I was there longer is super important. 1:21:52.200 --> 1:23:25.490 Yeah, that makes sense. Another thing that I would put on the list is, is going outside. I noticed that like when I work from home, like, you know, like. Okay, so general, my general strategy, I've talked about this on the show many times, but just to recap is I'll work a ton of hours during the week. Like if, if, if things get busy, I will put more and more and more hours during the week, but the weekends are totally off limits. Like I'm only going to work on the weekend. If something's truly on fire, there's like a major disaster. But because of that, like, yeah, I'll come in on Monday, there'll be a lot to do. I'll work Monday or Tuesday, I'll work Wednesday. And at some point around Wednesday I'll realize that like I haven't left the house in like 70 hours or something and it'll just be out of control. And so, and so yeah, one thing I would recommend is, is you know, do like a fake bike to work or something where you bike for like five miles and you just end up back at home. But like it's, it's like your bike to work, you know, or do do something where you spend some time outside. I am fortunate in that I get a lot of natural light in the office. So, so it's not like I'm not seeing the sun or anything like that, but, but I think being outside is, is super important. And you know, even if you're there on the weekends, you know, doing a lot of fun stuff, it's, I think it's still important during the weeks to just take some time, go for a walk, do something where you're gonna be outside. 1:23:26.610 --> 1:23:28.250 So what you're saying is you need. 1:23:28.250 --> 1:23:35.970 To touch grass, Touch grass every day and not like a chia pet on your desk. That doesn't count. That's cheating. That's a cheetah pet. 1:23:38.370 --> 1:24:49.800 No, I, I, I agree. I think in the personal thing it's, you know, as you mentioned, I sometimes will take account of when was the last time I, so I, I do go outside a little bit to, to your point, to that level. But when was the last time I wasn't just, you know, my house? And then sometimes it can be, I won't admit to how long it can be a very long amount of time. And I'm okay with that. But people around me ask am I okay? Like when they, if they figure it out or realize I haven't gone anywhere but like, hey, you haven't like been anywhere in a certain amount of days or whatever. Like are you okay? Yeah, fine. Like I have plenty to do here, whatever. And like you mentioned I exercise. So I do running, so I run outside. You know, I'm, I'm out in the outdoors, but I won't necessarily go anywhere else. And like you said, when you're at work, you tend to drive to work and drive home. That's at least a thing. But you also tend to, at least I did stop on the way home sometimes if you need something from the store or whatever, versus for me, I don't. Yeah, if you could get it delivered, you can, you know, I have other folks who, who are out and about more so my wife will pick stuff up or whatever. But I do think like you said, it is important for your brain to go somewhere else from time to time. 1:24:50.680 --> 1:27:17.570 Yeah, I mean, kind of related to that. One thing that, that I found really useful was to go to different kinds of meetups and different events and basically create synthetically that kind of water cooler chat where you know, it's, it's a bit like strange because it's like not your coworkers, it's other tech people who work for presumably other companies. Unless you happen to have coworkers nearby who are going to the same meetup. But you know, it gives you that sometimes you just need to like be with a group of people with some kind of like topic and just kind of talking and grabbing some pizza. And so, you know, you can kind of get that same kind of energy, you know, by finding like minded tech people in whatever city you happen to be working in. I think we covered a lot of home setup stuff. You know, I definitely, for better or for worse, don't really like pay a lot of attention. I guess one thing I do have is a laptop stand. So the laptop screen is higher. I was finding that was kind of like, you know, more hunched over. So I do think getting the screen at the right eye level will save your back. I think that's important. And oh, what about like, how do. So I'll talk, I'll talk about my setup and then you can tell me yours because I Have a feeling yours is probably way better. But what I have is I have my gaming desktop and I have my work laptop hooked up to the same peripherals, you know, same keyboard, mouse, you know, monitor, etc. And so I never quite got the whole KVM thing to work. I think I bought one and then returned it to Amazon. So what I have now is I have a display port splitter and a USB switch switcher. And so I have to press two buttons, which is kind of annoying, but if you do it right, you can actually press both at the same time. But Basically I press one button and it switches over to my laptop DisplayPort. Press a different button and my laptop now is controlling the mouse and keyboard and webcam and all that. And then when I want to go back, I press the buttons again. And so I found that to be pretty useful because you can get one nice ergonomic setup and use it for both things. 1:27:20.210 --> 1:28:34.720 I mean, I guess it's going to depend. Situation, situation. I did have a setup very, very similar to what you're describing for a while, actually like almost identical. But my current one, I just have two identical desks side by side. And so my gaming and like sort of family PC is like on a same desk, same chair, not the same monitor. My work monitor is a little bigger, a little nicer. And I have a laptop stand I actually have my iPad on, which is what I use for video conferencing. So it's like a custom built device. Doesn't matter what I'm compiling or doing in the back end, my videos run smooth. But yeah, I have two side by side setups that are very similar but not identical. I use a split keyboard. Split mechanical keyboard versus the regular desktop is a conjoined one because not everybody has gone through, you know, the just the sitting there for the same length of time and making sure to figure out the right finger habits and stuff. So other people use that computer. I'm the only one who uses this computer. And so yeah, I have a very similar setup, but I have it basically duplicated. And that's a luxury, right? Like, I understand that's not possible for everyone, but it works for me and I really like it. 1:28:35.680 --> 1:29:50.490 Yeah, I guess that kind of goes into our second to last topic, which is, you know, handling distractions. I think we talked a little bit about this with family distractions. I think, I mean, just to recap, I think being distracted or like maybe another way of saying it is kind of like, you know, in, you know, interleaving, you know, personal Stuff and work stuff. Some amount of that is probably fine. Like probably, you know, even more productive than going into the office and not being able to do any of those things. But again, it's just really, in my opinion, it's really about measuring, measuring all of that. Now there are some things that are truly distracting, like if you have a dog that keeps bothering you or something like that, that's a true distraction. But I think most of the time it's really just we're conflicted with things that we need to do around the house that are just so much more apparent. Even just simple things like, oh, a trash is full. I see it now three, four times more than I did before. And so you have a tendency to just spend a ton of time on these things. 1:29:53.170 --> 1:30:33.610 Yeah. And I think like getting deliveries to the door, you know, being there kind of is an advantage of being home. And I tell the people sometimes before there was any work from home. And you know, my company, they have a hybrid. So even people who are in office are, are still have some days at their, their home. I. It's very like there's so much expectation of like getting deliveries or purchases or whatever. Like people want you to be home and then they don't necessarily keep the hours they're supposed to be there. I had a repair person come the other day. They were like six hours late and I had called several times like, to try to figure out where they were and they got upset, like, I'm gonna be there. And I'm like, but if I wasn't gonna be home all day, like, this is gonna be ridiculous. And I slotted time for you to be here and then like, you're not here. 1:30:34.810 --> 1:30:35.210 Yeah. 1:30:35.210 --> 1:30:54.780 And so I think absolutely, you're right. I think having careful diligence about like, what happens, what, what are you going to handle? Because come on, like some stuff just needs to be handled right. Like some part of your house on fire or something. You probably should take care of it. You know, that meat has to get tended to. It's got to be delicious. Yeah. 1:30:54.780 --> 1:30:56.860 I mean, that Jet Ski is not going to drive itself. 1:30:57.740 --> 1:30:58.300 Listen. 1:30:58.380 --> 1:30:59.180 No, I'm just kidding. 1:31:00.140 --> 1:32:17.550 But you're right. Things like the dogs, children, like, so, you know, my kids are, you know, kind of middle school age during the summer they're home. That's not fair to others for me to, you know, change or behave differently. Right. Like when they're home, that's how I kind of view it. So I have to set up a way to interact with them where, you know, like, hey, I can be here, I'm here to help you. But like you also, you know, can't. Like these times are times where I'm doing focus. And so I think. Absolutely. Right. Like distractions and people. Especially if you're. If in a, an asymmetric thing, if everybody's work from home, I think everybody kind of can do the same thing and it'd be similar. But I think also being cognizant, if some people are in the office and you're not, then like you kind of don't want this like constant awareness that you are, you know, doing all this random stuff and they're here trying to get your attention or be focused. And so, you know. Yeah, like I said, I think a lot of that can be very difficult, but you gotta be, I think intentional about it and making sure that you don't have lots of noises, you have a space that you can work from or, or we didn't talk about it, but I mean it was a thing before now kind of like with WeWork, but kind of went away. But shared spaces where maybe you're remote but you still go to a place that has an office. 1:32:17.870 --> 1:35:32.030 And actually yeah, let's. A lot of these things, let's dive into that actually. Because I forgot actually a whole chapter in my story which is related to that is as I said, I wasn't crazy about working from home. I did change jobs and, and actually the, the, the biggest reason I changed jobs was that it was a in person job. And this was a few years ago, so like around 20, 21 or so. And, and it was a WeWork, so there were about eight of us. The, the, the whole company was 1600. So this was like a tiny fraction of the company. But it was enough that they could get a, an office. And so it started off as eight. I think it grew to around like 12 or 13 people. Obviously it's all sorts of random people at the company. So it's not like I had a whole team there or anything like that. But the WeWork thing was, was, was interesting. You know, it, it's sort of a good middle ground where you know, you don't have like a shared space. You know, it's like when you go to the water cooler, there's people for all sorts of different companies. You have kind of like your one room that you have to lock. You can't, you don't really know the people in the other rooms, at least not in the beginning. So you can't really trust them. So it is kind of like, a weird situation, I would say. I don't think it's uncanny Valley territory, you know, Like, I don't think it's actually worse than being at home or being. Being in the office. You know, it's not like something that's like, strictly worse than both of those, but it is somewhere kind of in the middle where it is not quite that office feeling, but you do get some of it. And I like, too, that you get the commute. And it's also close to. At least in my case, that we work was close to downtown. So I'd have a lot of different events in the evening where I could leave my car parked at the office and then go and hear someone talk about, you know, go lang or something. And so. So I think it checked a lot of those boxes. And then just, I guess to finish off the story, the company I was at got acquired, and the. The parent company that acquired us shut down all of WeWorks, which was kind of personally kind of a bummer, but I understand why they did it, but. Oh, yeah. So getting back to your point, the weworks are pretty nice. And, you know, if you do feel like you want to go in an office and you have a small coalition of people at your company who feel the same way and are close enough together, you can recommend a WeWork. You know, I basically did the whole thing in a sense. Like, I found the WeWork, you know, we dealt with all the pricing. I ordered the monitors for everybody. So I basically did the whole thing from bottom, from scratch, and. And actually ended up not being as expensive as I thought it would be. You know, for a company, it was very reasonable. So. So, yeah, something to consider. 1:35:32.910 --> 1:35:38.990 Do you think it's something that an individual could do? Like, if they're just in a place by themselves, can they just, like, rent a space there or. 1:35:38.990 --> 1:36:30.610 Yeah, a person on my team at my last job did that. They got a WeWork for themselves. I know this because they asked me if we could reimburse them, and I tried and we couldn't, but. So I'm sorry about that. If you're listening, I tried my hardest, but. But. But they ended up paying out of pocket. It was actually pretty reasonable. I don't remember the number. Also, they're in New Jersey. So, yeah, I'm sure it's region. It would. Yeah, it would vary wildly, but. But yeah, I do know people who have done that. And, you know, especially like in his case, I think he has two kids who are under 4, I think, and so he's like I just can't be, it's just, it's just yelling all the time at home. So he's in an apartment. So, so I think it made a ton of sense for him. And yeah, I'd recommend that as a thing folks can, can try out. 1:36:33.010 --> 1:36:41.570 There's a bit of a wide ranging bit of tangent laden podcast today. But, but I, you know, I think we, we covered it from all aspects. There's good, it's bad. 1:36:42.910 --> 1:36:57.070 Maybe like one last thing to cover is the future. Like where do you think this is going? Do you think RTO is going to be enforced by a lot of companies? You think the pendulum is going to swing back? What do you think the future is going to be? 1:36:59.070 --> 1:39:35.690 This is hard. I, I mean I think like we said there, this existed for a long time. So I think the, there is an economic advantage in my opinion for companies to pursue, not just the same solution. I think there's comfort in sort of doing the same thing as all your other industry peers. But I mean I think there's economic advantage to companies who are willing to do things different and try different things and offer stuff that's off normal or for very large companies it doesn't even have to be. The whole company has one policy, right? Like I think that's an advantage of big companies. And so I think we will see more variants. I think we'll see a lot of struggles with companies changing and I think not all the time, but sometimes companies change policies and this has been true before and it's true now around remote offices and remote work. I think famously you and I worked at a place that changed. It's how many remote offices they wanted to have and this was a big thing. And is that, you know, part of the economic cycle? Is it part of trying to reduce headcount, save expenses, consolidation? Tactical. Like it's very difficult to disentangle these things because even if people say why they're doing something, always say it. So I think you'll continue to see ebb and flow and people pointing at, you know, reductionist views of why that happened. But I think we'll see more variants. I think as video technology gets, you know, just more accepted and more reliable percentage of people who do remote work, you know, let's call it at least two days a week or more, probably going to continue to be pretty high, but we'll probably stabilize for a while until we see some other change that, that drives it differently or an innovative, you know, really big up and coming company that people tried to to fight against really shows a different way forward, I guess. So I think we'll probably be stable roughly where we are for a while. And I think it kind of makes sense, I think the belief that some people do it, but for the most part, not. Like everybody's going to be van dwellers and we're all going to be in a van and travel around. Like, it's remote work, but it's nomadic, virtual nomad, van dwelling, whatever. You see these things from time to time. Like, oh, I worked from Southeast Asia and I worked from the ski resort in the winter. And I were. And for all the reasons we just said, I actually don't think that's anything except a vanishingly small minority of people. 1:39:35.690 --> 1:39:47.450 Because, yeah, I was talking to somebody and who did this for five years and they got actually really burnt out of being a nomad. And so, yeah, I agree. I don't think it's sustainable. 1:39:47.770 --> 1:40:35.790 I think all the distractions around, getting a reliable Internet connection around, you know, maybe if you run your own business, I mean, there's always exceptions, right? But the distractions, if you have a family, if whatever, like, it's just even I talk to people, you know, because, you know, I'm remote or like the place I work offers remote weeks. People like, oh, I'm gonna take this while we go on a family vacation to Europe. And it's like, okay, so all your family is going to be like, doing cool things in Europe because, you know, we're in the United States and they're going to travel to Europe, going to do fun vacation things, and you're just going to sit and work in the hotel in a much worse than normal place to be working, cramped, bad Internet, you know, whatever. And like, you think that's going to actually be productive. And most people kind of agree. They realize it. And so it, it's very rare that someone does that. 1:40:37.070 --> 1:41:07.120 Yep, yep, Totally agree. It's. It's one of these things, like, it sounds cool, like, until you really think about it and it's like, okay, do I want to work for five days in this, like, cramped hotel room just so that, like, I could ski, you know, Saturday and Sunday and maybe Wednesday evening? Or do I want to work in like, a very ergonomic, friendly place where it's quiet and then just take two weeks off and go skiing every day? Like, it just. The other one just doesn't make a lot of sense when you really try it out. 1:41 --> 1:41:10.360 Cool. 1:41:10.360 --> 1:44:08.660 Yeah, so I, I guess I'll give my prediction. I think that. I think that we'll reach some kind of, you know, stable equilibrium where, where, you know, there will be like a. A couple of remote folks, you know, on each team. And so no team will be able to. No team will be. Will be like, all get to getting together all the time. And so it's going to be kind of expected that, like, hey, when there's a team meeting, there's going to be zoom there and there's going to be accommodations made for remote people in every team meeting. I think that's going to be the norm. I think that dam has, like, completely broken and there's. There's no way there's a reason to do anything different. I think, I think for people, managers, that's where I could see companies like, continuing to, to draw a firm line. And so it could get to the point where you say, look, you could be an engineer, maybe you could be a line manager, but if you want to get that promotion to vice president, you know, you have to move across the country. And so we might see a situation where, you know, like, empty nesters, like, relocate. It's like, okay, you know, I've. I raised my kids, they moved out. I'm ready to be a vice president. I have to move to the headquarters. And so kids go to college and you end up going to headquarters of, you know, Company X or whatever it is, because that seems like where they're going. Although there was that notable case where the Starbucks CEO, I guess, doesn't live in Seattle. And there's like a big hoopla about that. So. So yeah, I do think that for certain roles, and obviously Patrick talked about, you know, manufacturing and things like you just literally can't do remote. But, but of the roles that are, you know, entire that can be done remote, there's going to be a certain set of those roles where there's just continuing to be pressure to be in the office. I actually find that research is one of these roles. Ironically, there's this feeling that, oh, if you're a team of researchers, that you have to be around the whiteboard together, which I think is actually completely wrong. I think actually, as someone who worked in research for many, many years, I think research should be like one of the first things that you distribute. But. But we'll have to see how that plays out. I think there's still a lot of unknowns, but I think we both agree that remote work is not going away. And I think that, you know, people should feel comfortable, you know, moving to. And I'm just going to pick, no offense, to Idaho. But moving to Idaho and being able to get a tech job remotely, I think that people should feel confident. If you're wondering whether to make that move to Idaho, if you're still going to be able to have a job, I think you can make that move to Idaho. 1:44:10.180 --> 1:44:17.140 I don't know. The Internet quality in Idaho, that used to be a big concern. Now you just use taking it full circle. Use Starlink. 1:44:17.300 --> 1:45:14.940 Yeah, that's right. Yeah. You just catch the Internet on chopsticks. Cool. All right, folks, another awesome episode. Thank you so much for listening. Thanks so much for supporting us on Patreon. A lot of fun there. And we will catch you all next time. Share alike and kind of.