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In this episode, Leah Thompson shares her journey from being a math teacher to becoming a developer, her experiences with Laravel, and her transition into the tech community through Twitch streaming. She discusses the challenges she faced while learning Laravel, her experiences at Laracon, and her current project of building a multiplayer math quiz app. Leah emphasizes the supportive nature of the Laravel community and the resources she finds valuable for her learning. In this engaging conversation, Leah Thompson shares her journey from teaching to tech, discussing the challenges and triumphs she faced along the way. The discussion covers various topics including the importance of community in tech, the role of certifications, and the struggles of email development. The hosts and Leah also explore unique keyboard features, the course business in tech education, and the significance of key mapping for productivity. Leah emphasizes the value of building in public and connecting with others in the tech community as essential for growth and success.
Leah's Socials:
Leah's Socials:
- https://x.com/LeahTCodes
- https://www.twitch.tv/leahtcodes
- https://www.youtube.com/@leahtcodes
- https://github.com/leahthompson01
Takeaways
- Leah transitioned from teaching math to becoming a developer.
- She started learning web development through a free bootcamp called 100 Devs.
- Streaming on Twitch helped Leah solidify her learning and connect with others.
- Laravel simplifies many aspects of development compared to the MERN stack.
- Leah enjoys the Laravel community for its support and friendliness.
- She is currently working on a multiplayer math quiz app.
- Leah faced challenges with nested JSON structures in Laravel.
- She values resources like Laracasts and the official documentation for learning.
- Attending Laracon inspired Leah to engage more with the Laravel community.
- Leah's journey highlights the importance of community and continuous learning in tech. Solving tech problems can be a puzzle that challenges the mind.
- Unique keyboards can enhance the coding experience but may require adjustment.
- Key mapping is crucial for productivity in coding tasks.
- Gatekeeping in tech education can hinder access to knowledge.
- The course business can be lucrative, but often lacks substantial content.
- Certifications may not be necessary for all tech roles, especially in programming.
- Building a community in tech can provide support and encouragement during challenges.
- Email development presents unique challenges that can be frustrating for developers.
- Sharing your journey in tech can attract support and opportunities from others.
- It's important to find joy in coding and not get bogged down by difficult tasks.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Leah Thompson
02:18 From Math Teacher to Developer
05:08 The Journey of Streaming on Twitch
07:47 Transitioning from JavaScript to Laravel
09:35 Working at Rugged Software
10:37 Tools of the Trade: Text Editors
12:06 Learning Resources for Laravel
13:30 Experiences at Laracon
20:14 FOMO from Laracon AU
23:33 Exploring Travel Experiences
25:04 Diving into Personal Projects and YouTube
27:44 Building a Multiplayer Math Quiz App
33:50 Keyboard Preferences and Challenges
38:27 The Course Creation Conversation
41:02 Certifications and Career Paths in Tech
44:57 Navigating Certifications and Programming Paths
45:29 Experiences with WordPress and Beaver Builder
47:03 Coding Snacks and Productivity Tips
48:33 Transitioning into Tech: Building in Public
49:31 Engaging with Tech Communities
51:16 Learning Through Public Struggles
53:20 The Challenges of Email Development
55:22 Reflections on Career Choices and Future Aspirations
Creators & Guests
What is Voices of the Code?
Karl & Steven interview different members of the wider Laravel community.
Karl Murray (00:00)
Welcome to Voices of the Code. am Karl Murray and with me as always is Mr. Stephen Fox. Today we do have up. Yeah, we gotta get the hellos in there. Today we do have Leah Thompson, better known as Leah T codes on like every social media platform you've known. Yeah, go ahead and say hi to us.
Steven Fox (00:06)
Hello.
Leah Thompson (00:17)
Hello?
Karl Murray (00:19)
There we go. I love it. Yeah, Leah's fantastic. So Leah is fairly new to Laravel, only been using it for what, two years?
Steven Fox (00:20)
Short and sweet, I like it.
Leah Thompson (00:31)
No, so for Laravel and PHP since basically June, June, July.
Steven Fox (00:38)
Okay, cool. Super fresh.
Karl Murray (00:39)
wow, so really new.
Leah Thompson (00:39)
Yeah, very new.
Karl Murray (00:43)
Alright, well do you want to tell us the story of what got you in? I mean you have a kind of a cool story. Let's let's start there. Math teacher to developer. OK, tell tell us more about that. Like how did we get there?
Leah Thompson (00:53)
Mm-hmm.
So my background is in mathematics. I have a bachelor's of science in mathematics. So I didn't even go to school for teaching or education. It was pure math. And I always wanted to do something that used like, what was it? Applied mathematics. Like I wanted to go into a field like that, but I graduated in May of 2020, so COVID. And like all the jobs I wanted to apply for were gone. So I ended up going into teaching.
because my husband was still in college and I had to support us at the time because I was working at a grocery store, which grocery stores during COVID also awful and you get paid less. So I went to teaching in Florida during COVID and I had no like education background or anything. So I taught high school geometry and algebra for a year and a half. That was awful, obviously, because like Florida, COVID, everything. Like some of my students were amazing, but it just wasn't what I wanted to do.
I started having health issues really bad, so I knew I wanted to quit teaching. So when I looked into quitting teaching, I was thinking of what I could do. So I looked into going to get my master's in statistics, but I found an online bootcamp. It was advertised on Reddit and it was called 100 Devs, and it was a free way to learn full stack web development with the Mern stack, so a full JavaScript stack, MongoDB, Express, React node. So I decided I was gonna try that.
And I started that in January of 2022. And then by November of that year, I had my first developer job.
Steven Fox (02:27)
Dang. Nice.
Karl Murray (02:28)
Wow. So so Josh Siri is known as the is the JavaScript to Laravel guy. So I guess Leah Thompson is the level or the JavaScript to Laravel. Girl woman.
Leah Thompson (02:29)
Yup.
Mm-hmm.
Steven Fox (02:44)
Math math to JavaScript to Laravel
Leah Thompson (02:45)
I don't know about that.
Karl Murray (02:48)
Yeah.
Leah Thompson (02:48)
Well, it's funny too, because my first dev role was actually as an email developer, which are making HTML and CSS for marketing emails. So it could also be HTML to Laravel. Like there's a bunch of different, or like email dev to Laravel. There's a lot of different tags I could take.
Steven Fox (03:03)
Cool. Cool. I'm curious. Have you seen any like, stuff from your mathematics education that has applied to dev stuff you've done or just the act of critical thinking, anything along those lines that kind of made you ready to be a developer?
Karl Murray (03:05)
That's...
Leah Thompson (03:23)
Mainly the critical thinking because I already really like problem solving. with when you major in mathematics, especially like a bachelor's of science versus like a BA in it, you're doing a lot of proofs. Like it's basically all proofs near the end. So I'm used to like, okay, well here's this concept. How can I use this to solve the problem that I'm trying to?
It's like you have a bunch of theorems and then you have to figure out like how to twist those theorems around to solve your problem or like prove what you're trying to, but then make sure your logic is solid. And also, cause I had to take, did, my husband majored in computer science. So like, know a lot of our classes were similar, but I would take like the actual theory versus the applied version. Like I had to take linear algebra and stuff like that, but I was writing proofs for linear algebra versus doing like MATLAB or something for it, you know?
Steven Fox (04:11)
right.
Leah Thompson (04:20)
I know a lot of the logic stuff carried over. It makes sense to me because it's just like mathematical logic is what computer science is built off of. The actual math part, I've seen lately in what I was doing for work, because I was doing some graph theory stuff and breath first search and stuff like that. When I get deep into those, it feels very mathy or whenever I nerd out on like elite code, it feels very mathy. My like every day.
Steven Fox (04:38)
Okay.
Leah Thompson (04:50)
work does not it's just like well i don't know arithmetic you know it's not i'm not like doing the calculus that i love but it's still i still fill it there enough to enjoy it
Steven Fox (04:59)
Yeah.
Yeah, still have the technical mindset and attention to detail and stuff like that. So very cool. Very cool.
Leah Thompson (05:03)
Mm-hmm.
Karl Murray (05:08)
Leah does have a Twitch channel, which is kind of cool if you guys haven't jumped on and watched her stream. She does a lot of programming in that you want to tell us a little bit about how that got started.
Leah Thompson (05:19)
Yeah, so I actually started streaming on Twitch and posting on Twitter whenever I was doing the 100 devs bootcamp. for 100 devs, Leon Noel is the one who founded 100 devs and does it all for free. At the time it was cohort two and he was live streaming it on Twitch. So I made a Twitch account just to watch the classes and in March, so two months after starting to learn web development.
I decided I was gonna start streaming because I was building these projects and I'd post pictures on Twitter and I'd have people in the same program as me asking me for help on theirs or asking me how I built my projects. so the former teacher in me was like, I could stream, teach other people what I'm learning and it'll help solidify the concepts in my head. So I just started streaming. It was like a month or a couple weeks after I started learning JavaScript. So very, very new. I started streaming and I've just kept.
streaming on Twitch since then.
Steven Fox (06:20)
That's awesome. Was it like, yeah, was it super nerve wracking to get into that whenever it such a new thing to you?
Karl Murray (06:23)
For those who
Leah Thompson (06:28)
It was, but it's also weird because like I have pretty bad anxiety like whenever I went to Laricon I like got really nervous and hid behind a trash can for like 15 minutes because it was like my first in-person conference and I was like, god and I got really scared. streaming on Twitch I don't feel that as much which like I know like people are watching me but it doesn't feel as like nerve-racking because I don't see them.
You know? Like, it's fine. I was like, shaking the first time I streamed and a little nervous and I was streaming like, code wars right off the jump. But I already had like, kind of like a community on Twitter. Like, I think I had like 6,000 followers on Twitter at the time. So I had people who had like, followed me right off the bat and I think I had like 30 people show up at my first stream. Like, being really supportive of me. So that really helped too. That I didn't have to start with like, zero people. Cause that would have made my anxiety like, so much worse.
Steven Fox (07:21)
Right, just kind of hanging out with a small group of friends and then that grew from there. Very nice. Super cool. I'm curious how you have seen this transition for you, at least a little bit, from JavaScript side of developing over to Laravel. What's kind of been your take on those two different experiences? Even though I shouldn't say it like that, Laravel still opens the door to using a lot of JavaScript.
Leah Thompson (07:47)
Mm-hmm.
Steven Fox (07:48)
There's something about using Laravel that says you can't use JavaScript a bunch for front-end work, but I'm just kind of curious how you have seen and perceived the Laravel framework and the role that it plays in your learning and anything that you're...
Leah Thompson (08:03)
I really like Laravel. Of course my main stack starting out was like Mern's stack. feel like using Laravel, like because I'm doing Rilt now. So it's like React, Inertia.js, Laravel, Tell1. Like I'm still holding on to JavaScript. I didn't want to like completely dive into LiveWire. And we're also using Rilt for work. Like we had changed it for work. So that's why I like started picking it up too. Compared to like Mern.
using Laravel and the Rilt stack. really enjoy it. I like how it makes auth and stuff like that so much easier. Cause it's a big pain trying to do that with Myrn because they're always changing the dependencies and stuff. So you bring in one, it updates and then everything else breaks. then hours later you still can't get it to work. And then you're crying and you just give up on the application. If it's like my little side projects. I have like three dead repositories that are like...
off it's like off try number one off try number two from my mernaps and then with Laravel that's just not a problem whatsoever
Steven Fox (09:03)
Yeah, it gets a lot of that kind of boilerplate-y standard stuff out of the way and you can really be focusing on business logic rather than foundational elements.
Leah Thompson (09:10)
Mm-hmm.
And it kind of forces you to do MVC, which I appreciate because otherwise my back-end code for the JavaScript stuff was just spaghetti code. It's all together. It's not structured at all.
Steven Fox (09:28)
Right. Yeah. Cool. Carl, do you have any sort of a segue from there? I'm putting, I'm putting you on the spot.
Karl Murray (09:33)
Yeah, there we go. So Leo, you mentioned earlier that your company is using Rilt. What company is that and what can you tell us about that company without breaking NDAs?
Leah Thompson (09:48)
It's an agency I Guess I'll say it's on my LinkedIn, but it's rugged software So it's like a really small agency that I'm currently like doing contracting with There's like five of us so we're very small So it's a small agency and one of the the contract I'm on or a project I'm on is like making a website for a Like a game company in the current
Karl Murray (09:58)
so competitor, got it.
Steven Fox (10:04)
Carl.
Leah Thompson (10:18)
game that it's for is a text-based lit RPG game.
Karl Murray (10:23)
That's awesome. I'm waiting for those to make a comeback. I really am. I was playing with one in the command line the other day. Two E for life. And I'm waiting for those to make a comeback. I really am.
Leah Thompson (10:26)
We might.
Steven Fox (10:37)
what text editor do you like to use?
Leah Thompson (10:40)
I'm using phpstorm. So VS code was my tried and true for all things JavaScript. And I think I also use VS code for Python. So I've like written a bunch of other languages too. Like I've written Python, Java. I tried Ruby briefly. For Java I used IntelliJ IDEA.
Steven Fox (10:43)
Aww yeah.
Leah Thompson (11:04)
the community version, but besides that I stayed with VS Code. But I decided to just go straight to PHP Storm for Laravel just because of the plugin. Which I am gonna try VS Code again because of the new Laravel plugin coming out I think this month for VS Code. So I'm gonna try it again, but I really like PHP Storm.
Steven Fox (11:21)
Right, right.
Nice, good choice, good choice. Carl has a different opinion on this, but.
Leah Thompson (11:28)
and Alexander 6 is trying to get me on neovim so maybe maybe Alex will get me on neovim but I'm resisting
Steven Fox (11:34)
There you go.
Karl Murray (11:35)
If anyone will do it, be Alex for sure.
Steven Fox (11:39)
You know you've made it with coding once you're using NeoVM.
Leah Thompson (11:39)
He's been trying.
lol
Karl Murray (11:43)
What? No, no, no, no. It's it's as simple as this. The second that you figure out how to get out of them, you know you're a developer.
Leah Thompson (11:51)
I can do that. I can do that. Thank you. I said I typed in ooh the other day. Instead of WQ, it was just ooh. And then I was like, why am I still in here? And I was like, my bad.
Karl Murray (11:52)
then you've already done it. Good job.
Steven Fox (11:53)
get out of.
Is there anything in particular as you've been learning Laravel that you have found to be a really valuable source for learning that side of things?
Leah Thompson (12:16)
I like Laircast. My boss pays for us to have a subscription for Laircast. So I like that. Also just the docs. The docs are really good. I'm one who instead of just straight up following a tutorial, I usually go to the docs. So the Laravel docs are really good. The PHP docs are pretty good. The Laircast is good. I think also Laircast...
Steven Fox (12:23)
Nice.
Leah Thompson (12:41)
The website has like forums where people can ask questions. So like I read that a lot or I'll like check stack overflow for stuff. Cause I kind of like Google errors as I go. So those are my main resources. I also did buy a Udemy course for Laravel but I haven't actually taken it yet. I did buy it but.
Steven Fox (13:02)
Okay. Money well spent then. Money well spent. And you said, let's see, you did attend Lericon. It was your first one. Same for me. It's the first one I've been able to go to. Super cool experience. Lots and lots of people. So I definitely understand wanting to hide behind the trash can for the first little bit. Was there anything in particular at Lericon that you really liked? And have you been to any...
Leah Thompson (13:06)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Steven Fox (13:30)
other tech conferences or did you say did you mean that that was genuinely the first tech conference you've been to?
Leah Thompson (13:35)
Generally the first one I've been to. I tried to go to another one, like the same other one twice and each time I had to cancel. So, LairCon's the first one I actually made it to. I am going to another one next month. So it kind of, not LairCon, but going to Commit Your Code Conference that Danny Thompson's doing next month. So LairCon kind of like made me want to go to more conferences. The only reason I ended up being able to go to LairCon too is because I won the ticket from LairBells.
Steven Fox (13:37)
Okay, okay.
Hmm.
Nice.
cool. Very nice.
Leah Thompson (14:06)
So I won it, I think like three weeks before the conference. So I had no plans to go and it was sold out, right? And then I won the ticket to go and I was like, well, guess I'm going to LaraCon. I hadn't, like we had started using Laravel, think it like.
maybe the beginning of June, but I hadn't really done much with it. So I finished the Chirper tutorial, like the night before LairCon. So I'm like brand new, because I hadn't started doing Laravel tickets yet for work. I was still doing like the React front end stuff mainly, but I knew like it was in our code base and I had kind of looked at it a little bit. So I felt like a fraud for some reason at LairCon. like, all these PHP devs and I'm just over here with a little JavaScript girl in the corner.
Karl Murray (14:32)
Wow.
Leah Thompson (14:52)
I was scared. I didn't really know a lot of people like I knew Aaron Aaron Francis and I knew Aaron Francis and I knew some other people but not a lot like I knew Alex Alexander six because he had been streaming on twitch for a couple years But everyone else I really didn't know so I was like scared to talk to people because I had to interact with them online Which now I interact with PHP and Laravel people all the time online
But I really enjoyed the community. Also the talks were really great too, like obviously flying a drone with reverb blew my mind. Also Joe's 2e that makes me wanna do terminal things. Like I just felt really inspired, but also everyone was so nice. Like I was really scared going in because like I said, I felt like a fraud. And then like Aaron gave me a pep talk and he's like, you are not a fraud. You're not telling people you're like a senior PHP dev. It's like, you're nice. Like you're great.
Steven Fox (15:32)
super cool.
Leah Thompson (15:50)
Don't be stressed out. Just people were so nice and like people in the JavaScript world are nice too, but then it's not, it doesn't feel the same. know, like JavaScript we're so divided like on different frameworks, like we're fighting a review and react and angular and everything. And everyone at LairCon was just like, well, we're glad to have you. Like, I'm so excited to see like what you'll do. Just very nice.
Steven Fox (16:13)
Yeah, that does seem to be a common consensus that we've seen is just people like how welcoming the Laravel community is. So I'm glad that you got those vibes.
Leah Thompson (16:23)
Mm-hmm.
Karl Murray (16:23)
Well. One thing I do want to do real quick is I want to give you guys a review of Leah, because she is an incredibly open and very, very nice person to talk to. I actually tweeted at her at Laricon. It was like, hey, I'm here. Where are you? And she was like, I'm over here. And we actually got a chance to meet up at Laricon, which is pretty cool. And normally people would be like, no, I don't know who you are. Stay the hell away from me. Leave me alone.
Leah Thompson (16:50)
I would never do that.
Karl Murray (16:51)
But Leo is like, which is probably one of my favorite experiences at Laricon was cause it was my first Laricon as well. And I'm like, anybody who would be willing to talk to me for even five minutes, I was like going out of my way to go to talk to them. And Leo is one of the first ones that actually like replied to my tweet and he's like, yeah, I'm here. I'm there. Let's go. And, that was pretty cool. so if you guys ever get a chance to go to Laricon and Leo's there, just
send her a message and she'll probably tell you where she's at or hiding and which trash can she's hiding behind.
Leah Thompson (17:26)
I'll be like, where's Waldo? But it's where's Leah? It's like, she's behind this trash can. My trash cans I frequent are normally near the food bar and where like the water stations are. Yeah, exactly.
Karl Murray (17:31)
Yeah.
or coffee.
Steven Fox (17:39)
Yeah, I'm not sure you can classify that as hiding anymore if you make it abundantly clear of where you are located.
Leah Thompson (17:44)
Yeah. Well, that way if I tell people, right, where they should look, then I can't hide. If people come up to me, I talk and that's fine. But like I get scared to approach people. So I just like stay in the side. I did talk to Josh Siri too, because I knew him as well. Because like another one of my friends was learning Laravel. So whenever I started tweeting about learning Laravel, he like instantly tagged Josh and he's like, check out his YouTube videos.
Karl Murray (17:46)
You
Steven Fox (17:51)
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
Karl Murray (18:13)
Josh is Josh is so cool like he is so laid back. I got a chance to meet him at Laracan to just standing around. I'm like alright look for the guy with the hat and of course Josh threw me off by not wearing the hat.
Steven Fox (18:28)
Hehehehe
Karl Murray (18:29)
so that that's really funny. yeah, Ler- Lercon stories can go on for days, especially with, Caleb breaking the screen and everybody having to go on hold for 30 minutes. you forgot about-
Leah Thompson (18:41)
I forgot about that.
Steven Fox (18:42)
That was.
Leah Thompson (18:44)
I've locked it up. That was funny though.
Steven Fox (18:46)
That was the most wonderful 30 minutes of AdLib I've ever seen Aaron and Caleb pull off.
Karl Murray (18:52)
That was fantastic. You could tell that there are really good friends outside of just the Laravel community, because there was no way that they like Aaron joked about like coming on stage and just like trying to help bail Kale about it. Like they just did this whole it literally felt like a Seinfeld sketch for like 30 minutes straight. And it is nowhere on YouTube. I looked for it. So yeah, if you guys get a chance to go to Laricon, there's so much that happens behind the scenes that you guys will never see on YouTube.
Steven Fox (19:21)
I feel like at Lercon, like 2025, now like I want something like that to happen. And then I just...
Karl Murray (19:26)
Right, right. So guys, if you're at Lericon, watch Steven. He's probably going to have a pair of scissors cutting an HDMI cable. I'm just.
Steven Fox (19:33)
I'm going to accidentally trip some chords. And then we'll just like try to push, you know, Daniel and Taylor or anybody else up on the stage and see how they do for 30 minutes. that would be fantastic.
Karl Murray (19:48)
It'll be great while they figure out which HDMI cable is broken. Sorry, my voice is gone.
Steven Fox (19:56)
It's not good. I've been sick. Carl's now sick. This is just great stuff for two podcast hosts.
Karl Murray (20:04)
I, I'm sorry, Leah, you'll probably be sick next week.
Steven Fox (20:08)
Yeah.
Leah Thompson (20:08)
sick last week and then I woke up this morning and I felt sick so it's already happening
Karl Murray (20:14)
Fantastic for those of you who don't know we are right off the cusp of Laricon AU is happening now like it happened last night. They've already done some pretty amazing announcements. They've already had a lot of really cool speakers on and Leah actually tweeted about this. About having FOMO which I definitely have, but I wanted to kind of see what triggered Leah's FOMO from this one.
Steven Fox (20:15)
Man.
Leah Thompson (20:37)
Mm.
Missing out on the live announcements and Jess Archer. Jess Archer is my hero. And like I had to watch her speech on a live stream and it's like, don't want to miss out. Like I feel like first at LairCon US, they announced like cloud and all of these, these big things. I think also it was inertia 2.0 that they announced there too, right? And then now in Australia, they announced nightwatch as well as like a couple of other products. I'm really excited for nightwatch though.
Karl Murray (21:03)
Yeah. Yeah.
Leah Thompson (21:12)
And so who knows what they're gonna announce in Europe, like in Amsterdam. So if I miss out, I'm gonna be watching a live stream again, just waiting to see what they're gonna announce. I miss being there in person, because it's exciting watching the live stream, but it's another thing when you're in person with everyone else. About that, you get to watch the announcements and then you get to go to the after dark and all chat and drink and like.
be excited about everything. And it's not the same vibes whenever you're just like sitting in your recliner with like three blankets to watch on a live stream.
Karl Murray (21:46)
One of those blankets is orange and has Laravel logos all over it. It's an entirely different experience.
Leah Thompson (21:51)
I sadly don't have a Laravel blanket yet, but I need to order one.
Steven Fox (21:55)
man. But yeah, 100%. My wife was very encouraging for me to go to Laricon. I actually had a somewhat similar experience to you, Leah. I didn't get to win my ticket, but I was trying to get my ticket originally, like literally the day that they sold out. So I missed and I had basically kind of given up on it. We had just had our second baby and so life was fairly complicated. And then at like the last minute I made a last ditch effort and asked
Twitter if anybody had a ticket and they weren't going to be able to go. sure enough, three weeks before Lericon, I wound up securing a ticket, had to figure out last minute travel plans and all of this stuff. But that's for Lericon US. But whenever I spoke to my wife about Lericon AU, thinking I wasn't making it to the US event, she was all for it. She's like, heck yeah, Australian vacation, let's go.
But very expensive to get over there. Couple hundred dollars to make it to Texas. Thousands of dollars to make a family over to Australia for a week.
Leah Thompson (23:00)
Yeah, I looked into Australia even just for me and it was like, I don't know, like almost 2k I think with like everything. I was like, I don't think that's happening.
Karl Murray (23:00)
Right.
Steven Fox (23:10)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So really want to go. It's a little bit larger of a barrier, but EU would be awesome too. We've been to Amsterdam before and it's an awesome city. So if you guys have not been to Amsterdam before, it's a very good reason to also attend and stay for a couple extra days for sure.
Leah Thompson (23:14)
Mm-hmm.
I actually haven't traveled a lot. I think the only other country I've been to is Mexico.
Steven Fox (23:33)
man, make it to Europe. Europe is awesome.
Leah Thompson (23:36)
I don't even have a passport.
Karl Murray (23:37)
I'm going break both. I'm going to break both of your brains. I've never left the US. Yeah. The funny part is the funny part is I used to work for a travel company.
Leah Thompson (23:40)
Okay. Okay.
Steven Fox (23:41)
You are so Texan.
Leah Thompson (23:49)
You know what's funny too though is I'm from I live in Colorado now, but I'm from Florida and like I've only left the country once no passport It was because it was with a cruise. So you're saying he's so texan. I'm like, god, I must be so floridian too Like barely barely have left the country
Steven Fox (24:03)
Yeah. What part of Florida are you from?
Leah Thompson (24:07)
Northeast. Northeast Florida. Near-
Steven Fox (24:09)
which I was from like just south of Daytona Beach on the East Coast.
Leah Thompson (24:14)
Okay, so I'm north of Jacksonville. I'm like Florida, Georgia border. Yeah.
Steven Fox (24:18)
OK, so right at the border. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But one of my family's like frequent vacation spots growing up was Amelia Island, northeast of Jacksonville. So kind of familiar with that area. But cool. Yeah, man. So you had, mean, all of the cruises and availability from that. So, yeah, a lot of people are like, I've been to all the Caribbean islands. But guys, I'm telling you, when you can make it to Europe, it's awesome.
Leah Thompson (24:26)
Mm-hmm.
Steven Fox (24:43)
If you do it the right way, I'm sure you can go to Europe and not enjoy it, but it's really easy to enjoy it. Let's just put it that way. So, yeah, it'll probably be very cold for a Lercon EU in February. So bundle up if you make it, but otherwise. OK, where else do we want to take this conversation? I feel like we need to debark from vacation chatter chatter, but.
Karl Murray (24:51)
man.
Leah Thompson (24:54)
Yeah.
I get mentioned that I also started making YouTube videos recently and for those and like for my personal projects ever since LairCon I've tried to stick with Laravel because for a while I was like hopping around like using I was building like a Dating sim game using like Java and libGDX and stuff like that. But since LairCon I was like, I'm just going to stick with Laravel even for my side projects and stuff
So I started building, rebuilding my kind of capstone project from two years ago, which was like a multiplayer math quiz app, but rebuilding that using the real stack. And so that way I could play around with Laravel Reverb, not flying any drones yet, but still cool things and having fun playing around with that. Yeah, true.
Karl Murray (25:50)
That's next week, Leah.
Steven Fox (25:52)
Can you describe the concept there a little bit more for that capstone project? What does that, what does a multiplayer math game mean?
Leah Thompson (25:57)
Yeah. Basically just like the bare bones of it or like the MVP of the project is that it is a quiz app. So it allows you to be quizzed on different arithmetic operators. Like right now it's just set up for addition, subtraction. So whenever you like pick which one you wanna be quizzed on, it will generate a quiz with 10 randomly generated questions.
Since it's multiplayer, like once that's fully set up or the way it worked on the other one, is that whenever you start a quiz, it will generate like a quiz lobby. So it'll give you a code. You can copy that code and send it to your friends and they can use it to join the same like quiz room. Yeah, the same session. And then you're competing against each other on these math quizzes. So a way to like make it fun, because as a teacher, there were a lot like
Steven Fox (26:39)
session. Yeah.
Leah Thompson (26:50)
Anytime we would play Kahoo or like quiz games in my classroom, the kids loved it. Like whenever they could compete against each other, otherwise they were just like not interested, you know, in doing it themselves. So just a way to make it like competitive to solve math quizzes, but also selfishly like for myself because the calculus quiz app I used to use on my phone was taken off the iOS store. So I was like, I need some app wherever I can like do little like calculus mini quizzes just for fun.
Steven Fox (26:56)
Right.
Leah Thompson (27:19)
So that's the thought of it. I do want to like build it out more with like a story mode or something for like single player Which you can kind of like kind of gamifies it more So instead of just being like just straight up one quiz It's like here's this like island you're going through for like addition island and like each little one is like quizzing you on different Concepts and it's like building up to the harder concepts for that
Steven Fox (27:44)
Okay, very cool. Is it competing on time whenever you're in a session and you'd be competing against each other? it time or is it just accuracy?
Karl Murray (27:47)
Leah is way...
Leah Thompson (27:55)
as accuracy, think time would be a fun thing to add in though.
Steven Fox (27:59)
Yeah, yeah, kind of like flash quizzes. Super cool. I'll go back a little bit, but I actually was in the competitive math group at my high school. trying to remember what it was called. For some reason, my head is going to mu alpha theta. I have no idea if that's correct. But anyways, there was like a, I'm pretty sure it was nationwide, like a math competing society. And so yeah, while other people were doing, I...
Leah Thompson (28:01)
Mm-hmm.
Steven Fox (28:28)
other fun things on their Saturday. was on a school bus at 5 a.m. driving to Gainesville to go take a math exam against other kids. Yeah. Yeah.
Leah Thompson (28:35)
went to UF. I went to University of Florida. I love that. I know at UF they would always advertise this program you could do, but I think it was like proofs. You had to do like proofs and speed run them. And I was like, I'm not doing that. No, I could join it, but I'm not doing that. But I know I would be at Universal Studios. One time I was at Universal Studios Halloween Horror Nights and I was in the queue just doing my little calculus quiz app.
Just like quizzing myself on calculus, like doing derivatives off the top of my head and my friends like, what are you doing? It's like calculus.
Steven Fox (29:10)
Yep, yep, that's when you know you've hit nerd status, when you're just electing to do extra math for the heck of it, so that's awesome.
Karl Murray (29:19)
For the fans.
Steven Fox (29:21)
For sure. Is there anything in particular, with you still being relatively new to the Laravel space that you find challenging or a section of it that you want to learn more or anything like that out of curiosity?
Leah Thompson (29:36)
There's a lot of it I want to learn more about. Right now I'm focusing on like the reverb stuff, so more on like the events and stuff like that, just for my own project. I know whenever I was writing like this method to kind of filter some data we had, that was I'm gonna do graph traversal stuff for for my job. I was running into issues with like, if I...
Like I have this, we have this JSON that's pretty complicated. It's pretty complex. And in JavaScript, you can just easily access nested JSON by just doing like the square brackets, you know? But for layer of all, it's like.
I would have to put, so say I put the original collection or the original like array in a collection, but then it's a collection that has arrays nested inside of it. If I want to overwrite properties in those nested arrays, I was getting like errors and having to find like weird ways to override it because like I couldn't just access it the way I would in JavaScript because it said, it wasn't getting it like as a reference. It wasn't changing like at the reference level.
I don't if I'm explaining this well, but I ran into a bunch of issues with that and having to like find ways to get around that. Cause like usually when you look up how to get around that, they want you to use map, like the map over it. But if you just want to change one specific value, like, or in one specific, one of the nested arrays, yeah, then mapping doesn't make any sense.
Steven Fox (31:02)
Yeah, okay.
Hmm. Is it something that like...
Karl Murray (31:09)
They're going to fix that in PHP 8.4. They have like a bunch more array methods.
Leah Thompson (31:12)
Yeah, you were... Yeah. Yeah. I remember you telling me that last room.
Steven Fox (31:16)
Gotcha. I'm not positive I'm fully understanding the problem here. Carl, are you picking up what this is? Is it? Go ahead, go ahead.
Karl Murray (31:24)
Basically, basically, it's not malformed. I think that's a bad term for it. But it's some of the properties that she's trying to access are like six or seven layers deep, and it's impossible to tell if it's an object or an array and how PHP complains about accessing it. It also sounds like she could potentially be running into an issue with
Leah Thompson (31:40)
Yeah.
Hmm.
Karl Murray (31:51)
pass by reference or pass by, I forgot what the other one's called. Yeah. So it may be a pass by reference issue.
Leah Thompson (31:56)
Like value. Yeah. Because it was like Jason, right? So we have this huge Jason structure. then inside of that, I'm accessing an array directly in it, which is like rooms. And then inside the rooms array is like
Steven Fox (31:57)
Yeah, hmm interesting, okay
Leah Thompson (32:13)
hundreds of other objects that then have arrays and stuff nested inside of them. And then those arrays might have more arrays nested inside of them. And then I have to like loop over and change certain properties for like one specific room in like one specific nested array in that.
Steven Fox (32:13)
of objects,
Hmm. OK. And I'm assuming the objects within these arrays didn't, I mean, they didn't have keys, right? Otherwise, we'd be talking about objects within an object, not objects within an array. But so then how would you know, whenever you're trying to update something, one of these objects within an array structure, which one to target? You'd have to just do that by an index number. It has no key.
Karl Murray (32:33)
Yeah, so it's.
Leah Thompson (32:36)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Karl Murray (32:55)
That or a type check, which would be really annoying because it's like every other line of code would be a type check.
Leah Thompson (33:04)
I'm pretty sure they do have a key because for the rooms, at least the rooms array, I converted it to a collection where the ID is the specific VNUM for the room and then the value is the array itself or the object of the room. I don't know.
Steven Fox (33:04)
Yeah.
Okay.
Karl Murray (33:25)
Solving that problem in and of itself is a puzzle and I feel like my brain is just like, I need to see the object.
Leah Thompson (33:31)
Yeah, yeah, and it's like NDA for that so I couldn't. That's yeah, that's why also no no I mean like for this project specifically too like the or also I'd be more detailed about it too but even explaining it I'm trying not to be like super detailed because it's like you don't want to say something that like isn't supposed to be said whoo
Steven Fox (33:32)
Yeah.
Karl Murray (33:35)
For sure, obviously.
Steven Fox (33:50)
And let's move on, time for a new topic.
Karl Murray (33:51)
Right. Yeah, let's just gloss over that topic. so Leah is like Steven and I. She's a weird keyboard user. So do you want to tell us a little bit about what you've got?
Leah Thompson (34:05)
Yeah, so I have an Iris Rev8 from KeyBio.
Steven Fox (34:12)
What you like about it and what do you not like about
Leah Thompson (34:15)
I think I like everything about it. wish I had... What are they called? No, the legs. Like the...
Karl Murray (34:22)
clusters.
Steven Fox (34:25)
So it's
Leah Thompson (34:25)
Camp tinting.
So you choose, I, you can build it your own by yourself, right? So you can just order the kit and build it yourself. I got it pre-built. I didn't want to build it myself. So to get it, when you get it pre-built, you choose like what casing and everything you want on it. And I think the tinting, like the one that had little holes for tinting was sold out whenever I ordered it. So mine doesn't have that. It's just completely flat. I could like,
Steven Fox (34:56)
Gotcha.
Leah Thompson (34:59)
I think people like 3D print certain things to like allow you to have tinting on it, but I haven't done that. So it's just completely flat. So I do kind of wish or like eventually would want one with tinting. But besides that, I pretty much like everything on it. The only thing that gets me is I forget what keys are mapped to what because.
is smaller then I'm like, okay, no, where the hell are my brackets? And I'm having to remember if it's like lower or upper and all.
Steven Fox (35:31)
That's awesome.
Karl Murray (35:31)
Steven, do you use the ZSA KeyMap app?
Steven Fox (35:35)
yeah i use whatever their yeah software is called or or extra thing or
Karl Murray (35:39)
No, they have an actual app called Keymap with two P's and it actually shows you your layout exactly on the screen. You could just see it and if you hold down like your modifier keys, it'll actually switch to that layout as well. So like it would solve Leah's problem if it was available on her keyboard.
Steven Fox (35:48)
so you can just see it like real time? Gotcha.
Leah Thompson (36:01)
I- there is some software available like that for my keyboard and I have to bring it up all the time because I forget.
Steven Fox (36:07)
like if your mapping gets that complicated then you've just lost your productivity anyway because you have to go look up what it is. So if you can't just like instantaneously remember what everything is you just need to try to simplify it some. Otherwise you're going backwards.
Karl Murray (36:13)
right.
Leah Thompson (36:23)
I probably should. I've gotten the hang of a lot of it, but it'll be like little things like the tilde. And I'm like, where did I put this? Cause you might not use it all the time, but then whenever I go to use it, I'm like, okay, where is this? Or whenever I'm trying to do template literals in JavaScript and I'm like, okay, now where is that little thing that I need for this? And I have to go Google it and copy it sometimes.
Karl Murray (36:24)
You're not wrong.
I did see that in the last stream. For those of you who don't know, she does stream on Twitch and it is pretty entertaining to watch her think through some of these problems that she's dealing with. And especially the ones where it's like, what is that key called? Where is that at? It's kind of interesting to see the problems that she has to deal with.
Leah Thompson (36:46)
Yeah.
Steven Fox (37:03)
my god.
Leah Thompson (37:05)
That's what half of it is. then chat's like, chat said something dumb one time about my keyboard. Cause I was like, I need to learn the mapping. And they're like, you should just be so good that you know it all. It's like, you have to know your mapping to know where it all is. But they're like, you just use it and then you know it all. And it's like, no, you have to know where it is. Like, I don't know. You don't just learn it by like hitting buttons.
Karl Murray (37:28)
I thinking, don't know if they are just thinking that you have a standard keyboard or if they don't, I don't know, but it's.
Leah Thompson (37:35)
no. I showed it. That like a minute before they said that I was holding out the keyboard. There's no excuse.
Steven Fox (37:42)
Yeah. Yeah.
Karl Murray (37:44)
There's there's a certain level of gatekeeping. I feel like a lot of people do and it drives me nuts because they do that with Laravel as well. It's like, you you want to know all these really cool things. Well, then you have to buy my course. I'm like, it's all in the docs, guys. Just like tell me what page in the dock it is. I'll read it from there.
Leah Thompson (38:01)
Yeah.
Steven Fox (38:03)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Leah Thompson (38:05)
Their course will tell you though. You pay $80 and then the first little notification will be like, go to the Laravel docs at this URL.
Karl Murray (38:14)
Right, right, and then, and that's like the only value you get from the entire course. That drives me insane. All right, yeah, that is a bummer. All right, bringing this back up to.
Steven Fox (38:22)
Mm. I'd be bummed about that one.
Leah Thompson (38:24)
Buy my next course coming out next month that links only to the reverb ducks and the new lyrical course for it.
Karl Murray (38:35)
It's actually just a link to the the YouTube video where Laravel is announcing reverb and how to use it. And that's that's the entire course.
Leah Thompson (38:44)
Yeah. And I think Josh has a tutorial and I'll link to Josh's too. Josh series.
Steven Fox (38:46)
Man.
Karl Murray (38:50)
Yeah. Josh series. 100 % Stephen 100 % that is I was doing some math on this because you to me is really, really, really bad about putting everything on sale. So literally, if you want to buy a course on you to me, wait a week, it'll go on sale. But I was laughing because I one of the things that you can do on you to me is you can actually see how much money
Steven Fox (38:51)
You guys are just telling me I need to get into the course business, because apparently you can do nothing and still make sales.
Leah Thompson (38:57)
You
Karl Murray (39:18)
A person is making off of that course and one person was like a millionaire off of one course. Yeah. Yeah, I was like one Python course made him a millionaire. I'm like that's insane.
Leah Thompson (39:20)
I don't know.
Steven Fox (39:26)
Holy cow.
Leah Thompson (39:27)
Time to get in. Let's all make a course together.
Steven Fox (39:29)
Cheeeese!
Leah Thompson (39:34)
What if our course is how to become a millionaire through Udemy? And then we make the money. I'm giving us ideas.
Karl Murray (39:38)
I don't give them ideas, Leah.
Steven Fox (39:43)
Okay, you're giving me course inception? I'm not sure how I feel about this. I'm getting confused.
Leah Thompson (39:47)
Well, it's like the people on Twitter who like become like tech influencers and then they're like how to build your platform on Twitter and they sell the courses and I was like just be a nice person and just post your stuff. Like that's it.
Steven Fox (39:56)
I know.
Yeah.
Karl Murray (40:02)
Don't be a per don't be a crappy person. It's not that hard. It's it's like those Amazon influencers as well. It's like here. Let me tell you how to make thousands of dollars a day and then like link like show their bank account on their on their phone. They'll see I made thousands yesterday. I didn't do anything and like yeah, that's called luck.
Steven Fox (40:22)
If they're finding it more valuable to spend their time to teach other people how to make money than just making the money themselves, you know something's up.
Karl Murray (40:29)
Yeah, it they made the money from the course, not from the linking of the Amazon stuff anyway.
Steven Fox (40:34)
Yeah. You see this like all the time. People like talking about how to invest and make a whole bunch of money. And I'm like, if you could be making anywhere near as much money as what you advertise, your customers of your course could be making. You wouldn't need to be doing this course, but regardless, I digress. yeah. So something I am a little bit curious on from, from a recent thing of mine, Leah, have you done any sort of certifications?
Karl Murray (40:50)
Flood the market. That's a great way to make money. Flood the market.
Steven Fox (41:02)
from like, yeah, your like bootcamp experience and then trying to get that first job. Did you happen to do anything like that?
Leah Thompson (41:07)
No, I don't think I have any certifications at all. The bootcamp thing, since it was all online, virtual, we did it ourselves. I was able to finish it really quick. So I kind went through the coursework he gave us. And then from there, I went to doing scrimba to learn React, doing free courses. I decided to use Python in my first rendition of the math quiz app. I used Python for that, and I used FreeCodeCamp to learn that. So I kind of was hopping around doing like,
free online resources. never like did certification things. And I've never, I've bought UNEMI courses and never completed them to get the little digital certificate.
Steven Fox (41:47)
Is it anything that came up during any of like the interview processes that you did or to land your job? Did they ever even remotely ask about any of that type of stuff or was it never a thing?
Leah Thompson (41:58)
No, certification was never a thing. What helped me in interviewing and stuff like that is like whenever I was first trying to go from no job in tech to my first job in tech is that I had built that like quiz app, right? So I had used React, I'm trying remember what I used. React, MongoDB, Python, Flask, and Sockeye.io for that.
So I talked about that a lot. Like I put that on my resume. I put like my jobs from teaching, but like above that I put my projects. So I put that project. I also was in some hackathons. So I did two hackathons where I like won prizes during it. And I also did 48 and 48, which is like a way you can volunteer to do kind of like web development and it's WordPress, which is why I hate WordPress.
It's like wordpress with beaver builder and you have 48 hours to build a website for a non-profit So you're volunteering you're putting a team with like a project manager like three other developers and a designer and you're supposed to build this website for a non-profit in 48 hours and as beaver builder and It was awful. I was like hacking css In like in the thing which you're not supposed to do i'm like adding and stuff and I was the only one that knew how to do that but it's like because the
Karl Murray (42:57)
I
Leah Thompson (43:20)
Preset theme just wasn't working the way it was supposed to and things were displaying kind of weird and then you only have 48 hours I didn't sleep and I'm like panicking So but it was good experience because you're working in a team, you know and delivering something to a client and communicating with the client So I had stuff like that. I put on my resume and I just really leaned into that stuff in the interviews especially the math quiz app one because it tied in my background from mathematics and teaching into like
Steven Fox (43:33)
Yeah.
Leah Thompson (43:49)
Programming so was able to really kind of sell that like hey, I am really passionate about this I'm not just trying to like jump in because you can make good money and then like them be scared I wouldn't stay you know But they'd never asked anything about certifications. They did maybe talk about degrees But again since my degrees in mathematics, it is still like stem. So
Steven Fox (43:50)
Totally.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, yeah. Carl, have you ever seen anything like that? Anything with certifications for you?
Karl Murray (44:16)
No, I do occasionally see some stuff where so my job my current job Does require some stuff like that but they do train you in all that stuff and that's because we do work with doctors offices and dentist offices Occasionally, so we do have to do some it's more security training than it is like certs so
I guess what we're getting at here is if you are trying to get into breaking into tech, you don't have to have the certifications that a lot of other degrees or a lot of other fields would require.
Leah Thompson (44:49)
Mm-hmm.
think it depends on what you're trying to go into. Like obviously if you're trying to go into cloud, you're gonna need certs. Yeah. But like general programming, yeah, I don't think so.
Karl Murray (45:03)
OK, you're going to need some AWS search for sure.
I do want to touch on one thing because I just got through doing a project in WordPress with Beaver Builder. Nick, if you're listening, I did like the project. It was fun. I just don't love WordPress that much. So I can align with Leah and the 48 hours of Beaver Builder.
Leah Thompson (45:16)
Mm-hmm.
Steven Fox (45:18)
Ha
Leah Thompson (45:29)
It just...ugh. Like maybe if I was building my own little site in WordPress and it was like I'm very chill, relaxed, no time restraints, maybe I'd enjoy it. I don't think so, but maybe I'd enjoy it.
Steven Fox (45:29)
man.
Karl Murray (45:42)
I'm just trying to imagine Leah sitting there with her headphones and listening to like lo-fi music and just like zenning out while working with WordPress. I don't think that that's the thing. I don't think you can do that.
Leah Thompson (45:54)
My 848 and 48 experience is like me on a zoom call for like eight hours with also like screamo music in the background and like four energy drinks trying to get this thing done and I stayed up like till I think 6 a.m the day it was due and I didn't wake up again till like 1 p.m right before we were supposed to pass it off to our client so I had to like hurry up and push stuff or like get stuff through
Steven Fox (46:16)
Gosh, I think I feel lucky that I don't know what this beaver builder thing is
Leah Thompson (46:23)
Your.
Karl Murray (46:23)
Beaver Builder is actually really, really, really good, especially if you want something done quickly. Assuming that it's a have you ever played with Divi? You know what Divi is? It's a drag and drop. It's a drag and drop site builder in WordPress. So like you you draw out your columns and rows and then you add content to those columns and rows. So it's really, really, really easy. It's just one of those things. Elementor is another one.
Steven Fox (46:29)
What is it?
No, not really.
Okay.
Karl Murray (46:52)
one of their competitors as well. So if you've done any of those, then you could pretty much pick up beaver builder and have it working in a couple of hours. It's pretty nice. Leah is helpful. so Leah, tell me a little bit about what your favorite coding snack is.
Steven Fox (47:00)
thank you for the link there, Leah.
Leah Thompson (47:03)
You're welcome.
Steven Fox (47:05)
Interesting.
Leah Thompson (47:07)
Yeah.
I don't know. I don't eat a lot while coding. I don't eat a lot while coding.
Karl Murray (47:14)
Come on, you were making fun of me! You were making fun of me the other day because I was telling you about my peanut butter crackers!
Leah Thompson (47:21)
that's true. I mean...
Steven Fox (47:21)
She's too productive, she doesn't waste time eating, Carl, come on.
Leah Thompson (47:24)
No, it's like if I'm going to eat, it's over. Like if I go away from my computer, it's over. I will sit there for like three hours. I'll make like chicken nuggets, jalapeno bites, I'll eat some fruit snacks. I'll just like be sitting there. Those aren't like snacks while eating. Those are like, I'm done. I'm trying to revive my brain.
Karl Murray (47:24)
Right, right, both hands on the keyboard.
There we go.
I was just waiting for Leah to mention chicken nuggets. I was waiting for the nuggets to come out. That's what I was waiting for. Thank you. I can sleep comfortably tonight. Thanks.
Leah Thompson (47:46)
us chicken nuggets.
Of course. You can always bet on me mentioning chicken nuggets. Because I love chicken nuggets.
Steven Fox (47:58)
They're your comfort food. I gotcha.
We all have our comfort foods.
Karl Murray (48:00)
Alright. Yeah, well, we're going to try and land this plane pretty quickly. Leah, what tips would you give a brand new Laravel or not Laravel, but a brand new developer that's getting into tech? Maybe they're just landing their internship. But what kind of tips would you give him?
Steven Fox (48:18)
Or maybe anything to get that since like, yeah, I just feel like it's really cool that, that yeah, like you went from a different, what was going to be career path into what you are now doing. And I feel like a lot of people would gain value from your insights in that process.
Karl Murray (48:22)
You have a lot of experience in that.
Leah Thompson (48:33)
I feel like something that was really important for me with the transition from teaching to getting into tech is just building in public. That really, really has helped me. I've gotten my two jobs so far through Twitter and Twitch, just from putting myself out there. I would say that's a really big thing is also to build a community of people in tech because it can be hard sometimes. If you're trying to learn stuff or even get through the internship by yourself,
and you don't have anyone to talk to about any of your tech struggles or any of that. I feel like it could be really lonely. I don't know if I would have been able to stick with just doing a eight month boot camp if I didn't have that community, you Because you go through the rejection when you first start applying for jobs and stuff, and it gets really hard to push through that. But when you have a community to fall back on, it makes it a lot easier. So I would say try to join a community like that. Even if...
There's a lot of free communities. Laravel community is very easy to get into. Just start posting about Laravel and people will be excited for you. There's places like-
Karl Murray (49:39)
Just use hashtag blue, Laravel on blue sky. You'll get tons of followers right away.
Leah Thompson (49:43)
Yeah, and interact with people who are in larval as well like the larval community as well There's free code camp. There's scrimba. They have like discords that you can join and it's like they have free resources as well So you can just join discords like that communities like that and start talking to people building connections but also if you start like posting on twitter or blue sky or like streaming on twitch and Not only sharing your tech journey, but also like sharing parts of your personality that really
Sorry, my dogs are barking. I think someone knocked on the door. But that really can help as well because people are like caring about you as a person, buying into you as a person, also like seeing your journey and people will want to help. Like you might think like, this stuff is stupid. I don't want to post it. Like me posting like my chirp or tutorial, but people really are always willing to help and like really encouraging. I mean, obviously some people might be mean, but stuff like that I think is really helpful.
Steven Fox (50:13)
you
Yeah, yeah, yeah, There'll always be trolls, but you can ban them, so.
Karl Murray (50:46)
Well, yeah, one of my I love watching Leah and being able to like jump in and like help her out with stuff. One of the funny ones that she was struggling with inertia forms, which is really, really, really cool and very powerful thing. But it was interesting to see her struggle with it and trying to understand like where that line came from to try and help her push over that.
Over that curb so she understood it. I don't know if you ever got around to figuring it out or not. I had that. Fantastic.
Leah Thompson (51:20)
Yeah, it works. One of the errors wasn't my actual code. was something else. Or like it wasn't that I wrote that wrong. It was something else. Yeah.
Karl Murray (51:26)
from here.
weird. But yeah, hop on. It's kind of like that meme where like you don't post. You don't ask the question on on Stack Overflow. You hop on Reddit and you post the wrong answer and you get everybody to course correct you by yelling at you and telling you that you're dumb. But you can do that in public with everybody watching you.
Leah Thompson (51:30)
Yeah.
Yeah. Like 80 people watching you and people yelling at you in chat. Sometimes it's like, why are you doing it this way? So, my God, my bad.
Steven Fox (52:04)
man.
Karl Murray (52:04)
I'm sorry. It's like the whole tab versus spaces argument over Twitch. That would be hilarious. I want to see that one. Leo make it happen.
Leah Thompson (52:13)
No, you don't. I've been in the middle of stuff like that, but it's always like Tailwind versus CSS versus Bootstrap. And then you're doing it and like, why are you using Tailwind? Why are you using Tailwind? Because I wanted to, I want to do this type. And they're like, why are you using Flex and not Grid? Yeah. Well, now I do. It was when I was still emailed of. I was deep in the sass land. Inline CSS.
Steven Fox (52:24)
Hmm.
Karl Murray (52:28)
Cause I use, I use Vrilk for work.
there.
Steven Fox (52:37)
Hmm.
Man, I hate email development. God. It's like jumping back 20 years in browsers. Yeah
Karl Murray (52:41)
Good stuff.
Leah Thompson (52:43)
Me too. I did it for a year and a half.
Karl Murray (52:46)
They need to modernize that. They really need to modernize that. I know they can't.
Leah Thompson (52:48)
They can't, they can't. Well, I think they are going to like cut off support for, what is it? Like Microsoft Outlook on Windows machines, like with, I don't know. It's like specific clients for the Microsoft Outlook desktop client for Windows machines for certain years that use Microsoft Word as the rendering engine.
which is why we have to do everything we do for email development. But I think they were cutting off support for that soon.
Steven Fox (53:15)
Right.
So eventually getting rid of the IE9 equivalent for email is what it sounds like.
Leah Thompson (53:24)
eventually should be able to use divs and emails and put styles on them and it actually render.
Steven Fox (53:27)
I know.
Karl Murray (53:28)
Yeah.
Steven Fox (53:31)
man, there's so many like amazing modern browser features and all of this stuff that just makes web development so much more productive. And then I jump into like our newsletter template and it's just nested table upon table upon table upon table. And you like you have to describe things in both CSS classes, but then also inline styles and then all of this other stuff. it's just like, I just want to fork my eyeballs. It's just horrible.
Leah Thompson (53:39)
huh.
Karl Murray (53:44)
Table, table, table, table.
Leah Thompson (53:44)
Yeah.
Steven Fox (53:59)
Absolutely horrible. So I hope that goes somewhere sometime relatively soon.
Leah Thompson (53:59)
I know. I did it for the parent company of like six big retail stores. Basically the parent company of like men's warehouse. So all of those, it was only me and one other email developer.
Karl Murray (54:09)
wow.
Steven Fox (54:13)
Gotcha.
Leah Thompson (54:16)
making all the emails for them for like Black Friday for all of that. And then they'd be like, let's add linear gradient and curved borders to everything. Let's make the status bar that like goes up whenever you get more like reward points, but we want a gradient and we want it to look this way. And I'm like, this is email development. So it's like four nested tables just to get that. And then they're like, this doesn't render on this specific thing that only 0.001 % of our users use.
Karl Murray (54:17)
no.
Steven Fox (54:37)
That's.
And this is why tons of marketing emails are actually a massive image that is just pasted into an email, because it's easier in Photoshop. It's easier in Photoshop than it is in HTML.
Karl Murray (54:52)
Or my favorite PDFs.
Leah Thompson (54:57)
Most of our emails were like that. was just like grids of images that I had to clip. Yeah.
Steven Fox (55:01)
Yep. Yep. 100%. 100%.
Karl Murray (55:05)
I'm glad I'm not knee deep in doing marketing emails anymore. That stuff is just not fun.
Steven Fox (55:11)
come help me with backer club sometime, Carl. I'll show you the ways.
Karl Murray (55:15)
No, I'm good. I'm good. Higher lumen fire. We'll take care of that for you.
Leah Thompson (55:22)
Whatever you do, do not hire me for email department. People will still message me. I left email department. I fled and people are still like, Leah, can I talk to you about email department? I'm like, ahhhh! It's like I'm trying to get away.
Karl Murray (55:25)
Hahaha
Steven Fox (55:33)
There's not enough money in the world to get me to do email development. Jeez.
Karl Murray (55:33)
You
Leah Thompson (55:38)
I'm just screaming in my head. Like the spongebob thing of them just throwing boxes and it's on fire. That's my head. This is why I'm in Laravel land now and I'm like, ooh, Laravel back in development. Like, let me hold on to it.
Karl Murray (55:38)
Good job, you just triggered Leah's PTSD. Good job. You just mentioned the word email and Leah's like, nope, nope, nope, nope.
Steven Fox (55:50)
Aw man.
Karl Murray (55:50)
no.
Steven Fox (55:56)
Yeah.
I feel the exact same way. Is there anything that we'd to get to in this particular episode,
Leah Thompson (56:05)
I don't think so.
Steven Fox (56:07)
This has been fun. She's like, on that, I'm now mentally exhausted. I need to go get into a food coma with some chicken nuggets. Bye bye.
Karl Murray (56:07)
Leah's like, I've covered a lot.
Leah Thompson (56:15)
I've yapped and now I need food. Yeah, that's true.
Karl Murray (56:16)
She's gotta go buy a Laravel blanket and chicken nuggets and watch Larecon AU tonight.
Leah Thompson (56:23)
Yeah, with my little elephant. look we match. Wow.
Steven Fox (56:23)
Yeah.
Nice.
Karl Murray (56:27)
Yep, mine's over there. You can't see him, but he's right there.
Steven Fox (56:31)
Can we get a quick shout out for your puppy that was trying to be in this episode?
Leah Thompson (56:36)
don't know where she went. I don't know where she went. He's back there. He's sleeping. In his bed. I think she left. I think Ginger left me.
Karl Murray (56:38)
for gender.
Steven Fox (56:38)
Alright, gotcha.
Karl Murray (56:46)
All right, a couple final question for Leah. How can we get ahold of you? I know I mentioned this earlier, but yeah, how can we get ahold of Leah?
Steven Fox (56:56)
Give us your socials.
Leah Thompson (56:58)
So, places to find me are Twitter, Blue Sky, Twitch, and YouTube. And I'm Lea T Codes everywhere.
Steven Fox (57:11)
brilliant.
Karl Murray (57:12)
and she just bought her first domain. Yeah.
Leah Thompson (57:14)
dead. liat.code is my blue sky handle now.
Steven Fox (57:15)
nice!
that's sweet.
Karl Murray (57:21)
She and she did buy the domain just for this guy. She did blue sky that are we calling the poster? What's the term for blue sky?
Leah Thompson (57:30)
The other one people call it a skeet, but.
Karl Murray (57:33)
Yeah, I'm not calling it that.
Steven Fox (57:35)
It's a bluey, but there will be tons of like copyright trademark problems with that. But sorry, as a father of two kids, you know, bluey is like half of my life.
Leah Thompson (57:35)
I mean, you could.
Karl Murray (57:39)
Ugh.
Leah Thompson (57:40)
yeah.
Karl Murray (57:44)
Yep.
I'm a father of two autistic children and so blue sky or bluey is still very much a part of my daily life. Fun stuff. It's a great show.
Steven Fox (57:55)
Yeah, it's a good show. That all said, I think we can go ahead and wrap this up there.
Karl Murray (58:04)
Sure, one last thing real quick. If you do want to be on a on this episode, send me an email at Carl at Carl Dev so KRL at KRL Dev and we'll see about getting you on the show. That being said, I'll see you guys later.
Leah Thompson (58:06)
You
Steven Fox (58:19)
Yeah, and if you enjoyed, go ahead. Yeah, if you liked any part of this, please like, subscribe, leave a comment, wherever you guys wanna see. You guys know all of the stuff to do. There's plenty of this stuff out there already, so. Yes, Leah, thank you very much for joining us today and we look forward to seeing your progress as you continue in your new tech career.
Karl Murray (58:32)
Just do the thing down below. Yeah, there you go.
Absolutely.
Leah Thompson (58:45)
Thank you for having me on here.
Steven Fox (58:46)
Alright guys, you got it. See you guys later.