Colin: Hey CJ, we're back.
Welcome to Build Learn.
How was how was Italy?
CJ: Oh my gosh, Italy was amazing.
It was my first time traveling in Europe, and we very light, and we
had the four of my crew, so My kids and my spouse, but also we went
with my parents and also a couple of friends that we like to travel with.
So it was like eight of us and we did six cities in 10 days tons and
tons of like tours and activities and everything was like insanely jam
packed with the goal of just kind of sampling and getting a feel for.
different parts of Italy and, and also just like a first
time Europe travel experience.
So we tried lots of different, lots of different things.
We stayed in hotels, we stayed in Airbnbs, we like did the train,
we did boating around Venice.
We did some car stuff and It was amazing.
It was so good to just like disconnect and eat some amazing food and see
some really, really cool old things and get the kids starting to speak
a little bit of Italian, just like practicing, experiencing other cultures.
And yeah, it was awesome.
It was awesome.
But yeah, there, there was like a lot of interesting things that I found convenient
tech wise that I did not realize.
And I think that in hindsight, I probably would have traveled much sooner had
I known how easy it is to travel now.
Colin: Mm hmm.
CJ: We went, there was Apple Pay.
So you could just like tap your phone anywhere.
You don't, like, we got Euros and we were giving people tips
with like Euros and we used it.
We had to use it for a couple of bathrooms, like public bathrooms.
But other than that, like nothing was cash.
Everything was just like, you know.
You know, double click the side of your phone and pay for whatever it
was, whether it's like a breakfast or getting on the bus or you know we
went to, I don't know, do you know Warhammer figurine, like the minifig.
Okay.
So there was like the, the, the like first Warhammer store ever in Rome.
And we went in there and Grayson picked out a bunch of like paints that he wanted
to do and some new glues and stuff.
And so You just like strolling down the street, you pop into some
shop and like, you know, you're able to Apple pay with everything.
So that was awesome.
That was awesome.
Colin: It's not Rome, but next time you guys are in Reno, there
is a Warhammer store at Summit.
CJ: Whoa.
Nice.
Colin: it's been there for a long time.
I'm always surprised that we're able to support a store that niche, but very cool.
Yeah, Apple Pay, huge I mean, Europe and Canada have always been ahead of us in
terms of like, you know chip and pin and all that stuff came from those places
where it was like, it's foreign to even give someone a card and they disappear
with it and they come back with it.
It's like, no one, the waiter's like, what are you doing?
Give me your card.
Like just tap this thing and be done.
And then obviously like tipping culture is very different too.
It's nice to have euros and things for tips for like service things that.
You know, probably still are not necessarily like expected because
people are getting paid, but they should get paid without tips.
But and they have social, you know, social safety net and all that stuff
with insurance and all this other stuff.
But it's, you know, appreciated if someone's, you know, taking
your bags or, you know, doing something for you on a tour.
And then yeah, you found the bathrooms that do require coins, which I mean,
there are a lot of places that I wish we had more bathrooms that you could use.
And I think because our bathrooms are free and they're usually destroyed,
like they see there aren't available to the public or they're just not
created or not put out into the world.
And then there's no like revenue for taking care of them either.
And yeah, they're living in the future over in Europe.
CJ: Yeah.
There was a lot of things where it definitely felt like business ideas.
Okay.
So here's like two business ideas that I came away with that are like I don't
know, probably European only one is yeah.
Paid bathroom.
And the other one was a paid elevator.
So we went to this town on the, on the coast called Sorrento, and it's
like all these little villages are situated on these like massive cliffs.
So the way that I sort of thought about it is like very much like
Big Sur, like you're driving down highway one on the west coast of
California, and there's little, those little towns where you'll see like
a house on like this massive cliff.
And so there was an elevator where you had to pay like a euro
20 or something to go one way it would take you down to the beach.
And I was like, Oh my gosh, like what a great business idea.
You know, you're just like set up an elevator with apple pay
like on one of these like crazy cliff sides in California.
So totally impractical, probably really hard to set up, but
Colin: I have to wonder how much of that is, I mean, they talk
about this with tolls and stuff is that it changes people's behavior.
And so like for someone who needs it, one, it's not great.
There probably is like a, if you're, I have a disability, you probably
get to skip the fee or something.
I bet I would not be surprised, but.
If you, it will cause more people to reconsider, like, do
I walk or do I use the thing?
And if you're using the thing, you're paying for the thing so you can
maintain the thing, which is nice.
Right.
Whereas like in America, even for roads, like there's a tax and gas,
because ideally the more gas you're using, the more you're driving, the
more you're doing things to the road.
So helps to have that built in.
So, so you're gonna, you're going to be an elevator tycoon.
Okay.
CJ: a, I was like, Oh man, this is a genius business.
You just like, yeah, it was like a kind of like vending machines in a
way, but yeah, some giant machine that is kind of like on autopilot,
Colin: Yeah, I mean the bathroom is similar very similar.
CJ: Yes.
Yes.
So yeah, that was kind of interesting.
The There's like so many apps too, that were really helpful.
Google maps, obviously like you can get around anywhere really easily with that.
I was shocked that in Venice where the, like most of the
ways you get around is by boat.
You could go on Google maps.
And ask it for like public transportation directions and it'll tell you, like, go
to this boat station and then the boat, like the next boat is coming at this time.
And then again, you can just kind of like actually for that,
we got like 48 hour tickets or something, but again, like Apple
Colin: in like as many as you need for 48 hours
CJ: Exactly.
Yeah.
And he's like, hop on the boat, like takes you to another part of the island.
You hop off the boat and just walk around through this maze of
little European shops and stuff.
Colin: Yeah.
I loved that about London was that you could use Apple pay just in the tube and
not have to have like, you didn't have to even think about, do I need a 48 hour?
Do I need it?
Whatever.
Like it's just each time you pay.
And you don't need another app.
It's literally just the Apple pay.
Whereas when we were in Paris, you had to go buy these like tiny slips of paper.
They are, they're all super small.
And you had to just have enough of them on you at any given time.
And you're just like running them through this little machine.
And I'm sure Paris we'll get there.
But it was less convenient because sometimes we would like count and
it's like, Oh, we have enough to get there, but not enough to get back.
So now we had to go buy another handful of these things.
But yeah, I mean, just the ubiquity of Apple pay Google maps.
When we were in London, they, they even had Uber branded boats.
To get across some of the channels.
So it was like in the Uber app, you could get a car or you could jump
on this, like fair, it was like a ferry that was like Uber branded.
And I think it was like a Uber like company for boats that Uber just bought
and slapped their logo on everything.
So yeah, I mean, public transit trains, I mean, all that stuff.
Like when we took a train from London to Paris and it felt like the future
to like, it was just like, wow, like this is how all travel should be.
CJ: Yeah, it was pretty cool to see like the 300 plus
kilometers per hour or whatever.
You just, like, there's insanely fast compared to any
train in the United States.
Like yeah.
Yeah, tons of fun.
Oh, the one thing about Google Maps, though that was a little
bit surprising to me was that.
It did not have all of the restaurants.
And so here I'm used to just like pulling up Google maps and like clicking
on the, like the restaurant shortcut and then seeing all of the restaurants
with their ratings and everything.
I would say maybe it had 10 to 20 percent of the restaurants
in the cities we went to.
And so we just kind of abandoned that as a tool.
And we just like walked down the street and stumble into, into restaurants or
like ask locals for recommendations and go to the, those So yeah, that
didn't that didn't solve that need as much translation apps, like
translation apps are insanely good.
Now there was, there's, I mean, the Google translate app has like the
camera, the live, like AR camera.
So you can just like point it at things and then it changes.
The text in line to the translated text.
Amazing.
We also had like the real time conversation app.
So there was a time where we were, my mom is like, she likes to order
things off the menu when, and when you're working or when you're talking
to someone that does not speak English and you don't speak any Italian.
Like that became a challenge.
And so we, we just like whipped out this app and we're having this
conversation gentlemen, it was like amazing that we were able to communicate
like very specific weird needs.
Colin: Yeah
CJ: and it, yeah, totally translated for us.
Colin: on that one Because we're looking at maybe going to Japan and I
guess being It's not it is possible.
It's just not the norm to be vegan in Japan and so there have been a lot of
recommendations to either on a literal card or Having a bunch of translations
and explanations and something you just hand them instead of having to like check
to see like, is this vegetarian vegan?
Is it, you know, not every culture views the same like eggs might
be included and things like that.
So that's something that I've been thinking about a little bit.
And back to the food.
I will put a link to it, but there's this YouTube video called Top Jaw that
is like my go to for any place that I'm traveling in the world now for food
because he, it's kind of Anthony Bourdain.
If he was like born in the YouTube era very charismatic, very good, like editing.
I mean, he just, He'll do like a 48 hours in London, 48 hours in Paris, 48 hours in
Rome, and just breaks down like all the places where all the chefs go and eat.
And so like, cause things like Yelp, I don't think are as big in Europe either.
And so like, and it's tricky cause everyone's reviewing the things
that they don't like more than the things that they do like.
And so this is really just like all the hits.
So if you're only in a place for a short period of time, You know, you could
definitely talk to somebody and get some recommendations, but like this,
this guy is definitely good for that.
What did you guys use for service when you were there?
CJ: For like cell phone
Colin: Yeah,
CJ: Yeah we didn't do anything fancy.
We're on AT& T.
And so I'm sure we, yeah, we overpaid for it.
It was like 18 a day for both of us to have like all of our normal
service and data and everything.
But we wanted to do that because we could still like tether the kids
devices if they needed a break and we're on a train or something, they could
still like play a game or whatever.
And I wanted to access to like everything.
So like,
Colin: Yeah, you don't want to be tying looking for Wi Fi,
which is what a lot of people do
CJ: Yeah.
Colin: The cool thing here.
I have done what you did But depending on how patient I want to be And the eSIMs
are in all of our phones now, right?
We don't have if you have a more modern phone, you don't even have
a SIM card anymore I use this app called Arrow and lets you look for and
download Sims for all the different networks and all the different regions.
So you can do like one for all of Europe, if you're traveling all over.
You can do just an Italy one.
You can really fine tune it.
It does make it a little bit weird in that, like, it's
going to give you a new number.
So like that part of it is weird if it doesn't like teaching my mom
how to enable and disable eSIMs is not the easiest thing in the world.
You're in the settings and you're, if it doesn't work, you're not online.
So you can't ask for help and all sorts of stuff.
But and it's also not something you can practice cause you don't
have access to the network here.
Right.
So like, it's just going to fail here.
So.
That's been nice.
You just download and prepay for the ones you want and then you know
what your price is going to be and sometimes it's like by the minute
or it's unlimited, things like that.
So you can kind of figure it out.
CJ: Got it.
Yeah.
We used everyone that was on the trip, we set up a WhatsApp
Colin: Mm hmm.
CJ: and everyone had different service providers and different stuff, but
we just used WhatsApp for everything.
And even like calling and if we needed to coordinate anything, it was, we either
call each other or we called like, you know, local, like the car service or
Colin: Most of them probably had a WhatsApp number, right?
CJ: Yeah.
They were, or we just called like their normal phone number through
what's, I don't know if they all were just like using WhatsApp instead,
but yeah, we just called through.
Yeah.
WhatsApp was amazing and it worked great
Colin: Yeah, I know in like a lot of places in Asia, like they'll,
well, there'll be like WeChat, but like Bali, almost everything's
like a WhatsApp number or there's a bunch of different apps like that.
So yeah, communication apps, train travel Yeah, I think other tech things.
I'm pretty minimalistic on my travel.
I don't go, you know, with like four rolling suitcases.
So Chanel and I have gotten pretty good at one bag travel.
She has this really cool bag that is two backpacks that clip
together into one giant backpack.
It's like a backpackers backpack.
And then when we get to where we're going, the top shell like on snaps and
that's like all of her extra stuff.
And then she just has this day pack that she can run around with.
I have to like bring a smaller backpack that like folds up
into my regular backpack.
But yeah, so kind of been just like getting all the, the right chargers
and the right, you know things that you need and not having to have 20 different
cables for everything that you own.
That stuff's also just getting a little bit easier.
Everything we have is smaller these days.
Nice.
CJ: do one bag mostly.
So all of us, like all eight of us had one bag and that worked great.
My, my backpack.
Is one that like has like this, the expansion thing.
So there's two giant zippers that if they're shut, then it ends up
being like, I think a 35 liter or maybe a, or maybe a 40 liter.
And then if you unzip those two things, it goes to 65 liter.
And so I was like, I just need it to be small for the carry on.
And then I'll like have my day pack be my like, we had a day pack that
we all needed to carry four people's worth of like snacks and like
jackets and things like that anyways.
And so when we flew, I basically had two bags, but then the rest of the
trip, when we were like in trains and busing around and whatever, then I would
just like stuff it all into like this giant 60 liter and so for our family
of four, that worked really well.
And the kids like did an amazing job of carrying all their own stuff.
It was like shocking.
Yeah.
And we did have to do laundry in a sink once.
And then we did laundry in an Airbnb once.
But yeah, it worked out like great.
So we, I think we all had for 10 days, I think we all had three or four changes of
clothes and it worked like totally fine.
Colin: Yeah.
If you can plan around an Airbnb to do laundry or something
like that, that's, that's huge.
I think that's the challenge is a lot of people will do that.
Like, Oh, what if I need this?
Or what if I need this?
And you really start to learn.
And like, I even have keep a running list of like, these are
the things that I'm bringing.
And then I read down all the things I never used.
And then I just keep trying to dwindle it.
Granted, it's like if you're going to go out for nicer dinners,
you want to have, nicer clothes.
So then it's like a little bit of that athleisure like stuff that could be you
know, the Lululemon work pant that looks like slacks, but it's also comfortable.
And then you start getting into all that kind of stuff.
There's a really good, another YouTube channel called pack hacker.
This is if you want to really go down the one bag, travel, the organizers, all
the things that you could travel with.
Cause I do like to have another bag cause my Big bag can't fit under the seat, but
I want my, if I'm bringing a laptop or an iPad or all my like things so that
I'm not raw dogging a flight I can have that stuff because I think that's that
trend of, oh, how can you you know, go on a long flight without doing anything?
That's not me.
I can't, can't do it.
CJ: Yeah,
Colin: I need ultimate distractions.
CJ: going back to the clothes.
Do you, do you have like special clothing that you've bought like just for travel?
Because it's no.
Colin: No, I mean, it's stuff that I wear today and like
I've, it's not like a uniform.
It's not like the minimalist, you know, I only wear black and gray
t shirts and stuff like that.
It's, you know, a lot of that stuff I ended up just like, as I replaced
my normal wardrobe, I've been just thinking about like, what's something
that can get a lot of different use.
And I'm like, I think we've talked about this on the show, like trying to
start to mature my wardrobe even more.
So like less startup t shirts, more like what you're wearing, you've got, you know
nicer shirts with collars and you know, even card yeah, those kinds of things.
So Yeah.
You don't want to be taking like a huge chunky knit sweater with you.
That's going to take up half your backpack.
And you also don't want to necessarily be carrying literal 60 like a
full weight of 60 liters either.
So like getting the right shape of backpack, I have two,
one that's extremely boxy.
But it holds a lot of stuff and like holds on my back.
Well, so that, cause I, my other one was more like a turtle shell and like
halfway through the trip, I'm just like dreading carrying this thing.
Especially if you're moving around with public transit or how you get around,
you end up like learning what, you know, things like hip, hip the hip straps
and stuff like that can really help.
CJ: Totally.
Yeah, I think the kids like for the kids, we basically just stuffed their
school backpacks and by the end, I think they definitely would have
benefited from like the hip strap thing.
And so if we were to go any, any longer than 10 days, which this
was definitely like a once in a decade type of trip for us.
So I don't know if we're going to be doing any like any more travel
anytime soon, like this long, but
Colin: well, and I wouldn't, I wouldn't recommend like, unless you're going
to travel a lot, don't go out and splurge on these like travel backpacks.
Like it's become a new thing of all the brands are like, how
can we sell you another thing?
So we've got your car camping backpack.
The thing that you're never going to carry.
We've got the away bags with the fancy rollers.
My mom went and realized that in Rome, you're not rolling a
suitcase around super easily.
Right.
But she's also not going to be carrying a lot of bags.
And so it does depend on where you're at in your life.
If you're going to splurge for, you know, someone to take your bags
magically from the hotel to, to the airport for you, stuff like that,
then you can pack differently, but if you're going to be doing hostels or
even Airbnb and stuff that's a big one.
There's this network that I found called Selena.
And then there's another one that I'll try to remember off the top of
my head that we ended up staying at a lot because they're hostile like, but
they're like hostiles run by a WeWork.
If you had to get like very much focused on like a community, but also like,
Same experience everywhere you go.
And so if we couldn't find something, we knew there would be a Selena.
The other one is escaping me.
We'll put it in the show notes that we also used.
And like, we, we, we somehow like bought tickets for the train.
What was it?
We bought tickets for the train to get to the airport, to go to us, to,
from Paris to London, and we bought them for the day that we bought them.
Instead of for tomorrow and we didn't realize it until we got to the train
tomorrow So we get there the next day and the lady's like, yeah, you
missed your train Like we're like, oh, we're almost late for our train.
They're like no you missed it by like a day
So we were able to go right back to the hotel that we had just checked out
of and like check in it was all like automated and like because we were
already a member it was super easy and It wasn't like, if we were at a Hilton,
we'd be like, Oh no, are we going to be able to get a room for tonight?
Are we going to find a new hotel?
So I'll find the name of it.
It's literally like a Swedish brand and it's like an Ikea version of, of a
hostel and very well done and, you know, I'm more interested in some of those
things because of coworking and the community stuff and like watching, you
know, even they had an app and like, how does this work and their onboarding and
all that kind of stuff was really cool.
CJ: that sounds like tons of fun.
I'm curious if you would take, like, would you recommend someone take
their kids to something like that?
Colin: Yeah.
So yeah, like Selena, they had like hostel hostels where you're
in bunks in rooms, but then you could get your own rooms as well.
So I was in my own room because it was cheap enough that it was
cheaper than a hotel, but I just didn't want to deal with people.
And I got lucky on one of those because that was also when I got COVID.
And then I was like just dying in that room.
And I had to tell them like, that's fine.
No one is allowed to come in this room for a few days.
And then I transferred to an actual hotel after that.
Cause they were like, yeah, you need to get out of here.
But if I had been sharing bunks like that would have been a nightmare
one, just being sick, but also don't want to get other people sick.
I think a lot of that also depends.
Like if you're just yourself traveling, you can put up with a lot more stuff
and chaos and just show up, you know, a lot of people, we, we've talked about
the idea of like going to the airport.
I think there was a brand that did this as like stopping people at the airport.
And saying, do you want to spin this wheel?
If we will pay for you to go wherever you want to go, but that means
you're not going on your normal trip.
And so depending on what you're doing, like people are like, Oh no, I can't,
you know, and some of them was like, you're going to Egypt on us around
trip, like hotels, all this stuff.
And it would be fun to just like, Know you have some time, pack some bags,
and just like go to the airport and see what the cheapest tickets are.
Maybe not the cheapest tickets.
More, more, most interesting tickets.
Heh heh heh.
CJ: Our friends on the way home, their flight got canceled.
And so they were sort of in that situation where it was like, all right,
now you have a few hours to figure out what you're going to do for the
rest or like for the next three days until the next flight out of here.
Which was, yeah, I don't know.
I can't wait to have the like margin and flexibility to be
able to do something like that.
But.
Colin: Yeah, I mean sometimes it's expensive to travel last minute, but
then other times if you play your cards right, you've got inventory
that's gonna go unused and you can Get some killer deals too.
So we can talk about deals and points and all that stuff in a future episode.
But yeah, let's see.
Last episode, again, super time dilated.
Who knows when this episode is coming out, but last episode I talked about
making videos, tutorials, streams.
Still haven't done this.
I have a post it next to me that says stream.
I'm going to get there.
Instead I have built, I've been learning unity and I have built
the hardest version of Flappy Bird.
It is, it is it is very humbling but also surprisingly easy to make Flappy Bird.
So it's been, it's been fun.
CJ: So this is starting from scratch with Unity.
You open it up and how much, like what percentage of the work involved with
building Flappy Bird was actually writing code versus kind of like dragging and
dropping and clicking around and kind of like graphic design and audio design.
Things like that.
Colin: Yeah.
I'll, I'll include the tutorial I used.
And I was mostly like, again, I was watching the guy's video.
I was like, this is so well done.
It is amazingly like, I've not seen many software development tutorials
done the same way, even though this is like it is software development,
but it is games, game development.
Is like what we already know in web dev, like tilted 90 degrees.
It has been pretty wild.
Cause we actually see this with discord activities, developers where
they're not necessarily web developers.
And to me, it's like kind of taken for granted, but like, they don't know a lot
about like even making an HTTP request from unity is like a foreign idea.
It does.
It's possible.
But it's, it's just slightly tilted on its head.
And I think when I opened a project, it took me a while to understand.
I'm like, where the heck is everything?
Like I'm like
CJ: Yeah.
Colin: for this word that's in the UI and I can't find it.
And so there is this a little bit of magic that unity does where.
You can drag it.
You can drag in a picture, like a sprite of the pipe and the bird, and
you can give them collision properties.
You don't have to write the code for that.
It knows what it means to run into each other and things like that.
So like a lot of that stuff, when you, if you're going to build a
game from absolute scratch, you are writing that code as well.
You do not need to do that in Unity.
You can do a 2D collider.
You can do a 3D collider.
You can have triggers, so like, you know, a collide with an invisible thing.
So like in Flappy Bird, you need to know when you go through the pipes, but you
don't want to slam into an invisible wall.
So you need to be able to go through that.
And we can then write events to say, when I pass through this barrier, add
to the score when I hit the pipe, end the game, you know, let them restart.
All that kind of stuff.
So it is a little bit interesting 'cause sometimes you like, look for the code.
I'm like, oh, where's the binding for this?
And a lot of the binding is also in the ui.
So this might be similar to VS code, but like you will have
a class and you can create.
In the tutorial, they called them slots, but like they're variables.
So like public variables and private, if you make it public, it
shows up in the UI for that thing.
So like the bird can have a slot that.
is, maybe let's do like a UI, like a text element.
Or even, if we back up even more, the thing that is keeping
track of score can be invisible.
It's just a class.
That can have a slot, which is the text component.
You can drag the text component into that variable.
So you're never tell, like you can tell it in code, Bind this variable to this
text and go find it and use it in code.
But a lot of times you just drag it, which then means when you go
search for it, you're not going to find it because it's in the UI.
And so I can see how there's a lot of like, why isn't my game working?
And you're like, Oh, you forgot to drag this thing into the slot.
I don't know if that's the norm or if it's more like testable to do it in code.
And then you, I don't even know if people write, I imagine they write
tests for video games, but so it is, that's the kind of stuff that's
just like, Oh, this is interesting.
And it does make you think a lot differently.
So that's been fun to do, but yeah, I don't think I could have done it by myself
without the tutorial, just because I didn't know what drawers to put things in.
CJ: yeah, it almost sort of sounds like interface builder for like
mobile, iOS or something where you
Colin: Yeah.
X codes very similar.
CJ: yeah.
Okay.
Interesting.
Colin: Yeah, I mean, it starts to make you realize, like, as long as you have
enough patience to, like, write out and think about, like, what slots need
to be connected to what, what managers do you have, what logic do you need to
have where and then, like, making sure the components can talk to each other,
either through these slots or going and finding them, you can build a pretty
complex game without a lot of knowledge.
I think it's probably easier because I, like, I don't know.
C sharp, but like, it looks like most languages that I've used.
And so I'm just writing, you know, code and it's been fine.
And you know, I'm using when you open the code, it tries to open
it in VS code, which is nice.
Cause then I have copilot, but I can also just open it in cursor.
And then I have cursor at my disposal as well.
So
CJ: got it.
Okay.
And the, so the amount of code that you're writing to get flappy
bird working is like hundreds of lines, like thousands of lines.
Colin: For Flappy Bird, end state, game state is probably 100 lines.
CJ: Wow.
Colin: 50 at most.
Yeah.
So, I mean, it's like on screen, you could see it all if you really needed to.
But again, that's, that's the power of an engine, right?
So like these things like phaser and unity, they all have built in the
idea of that you're going to probably run on a surface or you're going to
run into things and stuff like that.
And so you have events click handlers, input handlers, all that stuff that I
remember doing like V visual studio, like Vs like VS code, like, like
visual studio, basic stuff where you are writing all that by hand.
And so I imagine that that is why we have the game engines that we do.
CJ: Nice.
When we were traveling, my buddy was telling the kids about unity and
unreal and all this and how like they should try downloading game engines.
And as a meta note, I think My kids are reaching a point where
like they don't want to listen to their parents advice anymore.
And so having this like trusted other like advisor or like kind of a mentor
for them, I'm like, okay, if I want them to do something, I should just tell
him to tell them that they should like do the thing because now they're like,
oh yeah, Travis told us about this.
So we're going to like go download unity and get it set up.
And so Yeah, I'd love to, to take a look at the tutorial or like send it to them.
Cause I think they're really interested in just like experimenting.
And I was kind of curious if like you had any issues running C
sharp on Mac, but it sounds like that's like handled by probably by
unity somewhere inside of there.
Colin: Yeah.
I think if you're not used to it, like when you click on the code
scripts, like one, you had to learn like, where the heck do I even put
this thing and where does it live?
When you double click on the code script, it opens another ID and you're
like, what the heck, what just happened?
And like, as you're saving it, it's.
Re pulling it in and doing it like there is an annoying loader.
Every time you hit save in your ID, by the time you switch to unity, it's still
working and then you got to hit play.
And then it does its little build compile thing.
And then, so it's, it can be pretty tedious.
The cool thing is that there's like a.
You don't have to always compile to see what's going on.
Like you can change the code while you're, you can change the code and
the variables while you're in the game.
So making those slots in the UI allows you to even change the score and stuff
while you're playing game to see, like, you know, even before I built the
collider, I just had a little context menu that was like increment score
and to make sure the UI is wired up.
But yeah, I think they'll really like it.
What I loved about the guys doing this.
The way that he taught was really good at teaching the you the the concepts but also
the tools And then it was like a 50 minute video, which I think most of us have
learned is overwhelming when you're trying to learn something But it was broke.
It was well chaptered and he did these recaps like every 10 minutes where it's
like everything that we just learned.
Let's go back over it in case you miss something.
And then you have this new starting point of, okay, we went through the pipes.
Sure.
The game's not very exciting right now.
But I mean, like even that a hundred lines, let's say it's a hundred, like
that's for spawning pipes and randomizing it and handling all that, you know, end
game state as well, restarting the game, which again would be probably thousands of
lines if you had to write it all yourself.
CJ: And the taking it from the point that you're at now and embedding it
into discord, like that, that part, I'm assuming like, that's part of
where you're headed for this particular game, like, it sounds like it's,
it's like, I mean, floppy birds, I guess, solo like single person thing.
Was your, your idea to make it multiplayer or like have a
leaderboard or kind of like what?
Yeah.
What's next
Colin: So, I'm working on figuring out how to better support people
bringing Unity games to Discord.
And I needed to learn more about the tool first.
And so I mostly did this just to learn where the heck everything is.
And then I opened one of unity's sample apps.
So they have an FPS first person shooter sample and like a Mario cart ask sample.
And when I opened those ones, they were three D and I was immediately
overwhelmed because I, again, I couldn't, I was like, I know where the UI is.
But I don't know where the heck it's getting updated.
And it turns out there's also like multiple scenes.
And if you don't load the other scene, you can't even look at that stuff.
So I had to like, what I was able to do after that tutorial with flappy
bird was I was able to open the first person shooter game and then.
Get that game embedded in discord and then also send data from unity
to discord and from discord to unity So that was my ultimate goal.
So that is all working, which is nice So when you load the first
person shooter now, it has your username and your avatar in the game.
It's still one single player So now I'm gonna start to think through like,
okay, what does it look like to do?
multiplayer And I need to figure out like are we gonna do?
Does it make sense to just have the events from the SDK that we have
now and just pass them on to Unity?
Or can Unity get those events directly?
And vice versa, like, can Uni Like, right now I'm Taking unity to make a call
out to the JavaScript, the JavaScript, then making its call back to discord.
Can we just cut that middle man out and just go straight to it?
Cause we use like a post message protocol to do a lot of our stuff.
So like, I'm pretty sure unity can just go straight to it, but that would
just mean that we have a unity SDK, which I don't think the team wants
to build right now, but we'll see.
I mean, I think it makes sense too.
CJ: And like, when you set up a game like this, I am assuming that
like in dev, you're just running the game locally in your like local
instance of unity, but in a production environment, it probably needs to be
deployed to some server or something.
Like,
Colin: Yeah.
CJ: like, how the heck does that even work?
Colin: so getting this to run locally, I have to build the game, so I now have a
An actual built target that I drop into my web app, I'm using a V app as my server.
So I have v running as it's hosting the backend and, and node
and then rendering the front end.
And I'm just embedding the, the WebGL game from, from Unity.
And in that JavaScript app is where I have to instantiate the embedded app.
SDK for Discord, do all the auth.
To the backend to get your access tokens and stuff like that.
And so there is a lot, that's where like, when I say like web
dev and game dev are not the same.
There's a bunch of wiring that I don't think we should
expect game devs to have to do.
So I'm trying to figure out like, is there a way to take
your build target, your game?
And then we just build up all that stuff around it for you or like
a skeleton or like, you know, how Vite and some of these others have
like NPX create unity discord app.
And we just like drop your build here and it just works because
it's a lot of in our tutorials.
I'm like, man, I wish we could cut out half this stuff.
Like it's just something that every person has to do, but we
should probably just do it for you.
So I'm thinking through that as well.
So it's, it's been a little side quest that is very much informing
my actual work, which is helpful.
CJ: Would absolutely love to watch you go through and just like from
scratch, take the first person shooter and like do all the steps you've
already done to put it into discord.
Like for sure.
I think that would be an insanely valuable video prerecorded or not, or
like streamed or whatever, like that
Colin: back to, that goes back to the making videos.
So
CJ: Yeah.
Yeah.
Colin: We'll have to do
CJ: that's, that's your yeah, that's your your, your request.
Colin: Yeah, well, if you and the kids get into unity, I'm very curious to
talk about next episode because yeah, I think there's a lot to learn by us
going into these other industries.
And again, I think I said it last time.
I don't understand why game devs have such a hard time.
And maybe it's just that the companies don't value them.
But like, It is hard to make a game like it is way harder than web development.
So like the engineers, if you are game dev and you're looking
for work, like pick up some web stuff and you are going to be set.
It is a beast.
You have to be thinking like you have game loops.
You're thinking about something that's updating every second
or every frame, really.
And in web, you could do that with CSS animations and stuff like that, but you're
not thinking of FPS and stuff like that when you're, You know, or even like in
flappy bird, you have to like, when you move the bird, you have to multiply it
by this time value because otherwise the bird will move at a different speed
on each machine based on clock speed.
CJ: Whoa.
Colin: I guess in the tutorial, he was explaining that sometimes game studios
will get this wrong and they tied like the item decay to the some value, but
they didn't account for clock speed.
And so like on some computers, the items are just like, to.
Instantly disintegrating and on others they're fine.
So you have to think about the machine that you're running on too.
CJ: Interesting.
Yeah.
Way different.
Way different than web dev.
Colin: I guess we have we have date pickers to deal
with but and and time zones
CJ: It's so fun.
Even just to like, I guess like thinking of that, like T shaped developer, right?
Like it's so fun to reach out on the arms of that T and dabble in like weird
side quests that aren't necessarily kind of like the main thing, whether that's
networking or 3d printing or like any of these other little, little niches and game
dev and, and mobile dev definitely feel like in that same vein for me, at least.
So very cool.
Awesome.
That's exciting.
I think Yeah, I, I I'll get the kids ready for during the holiday break.
We're going to watch some Colin streaming some
Colin: let's do
CJ: of discord stuff.
Yeah.
Colin: What's going on in your world?
CJ: So it is time for me to wind down from craftwork.
I have decided that I'm going to close the, close the.
Door and close that chapter of my career and move on to the next thing.
So yeah, this I'm in the last two weeks now.
So I'm kind of just like wrapping up projects, tying up loose ends,
documenting a bunch of things.
We've got like one big project that I'm like wrapping up like sort of
disconnecting and integration now that we've fully built everything in house.
And then, yeah, just trying to get the team set up as best they can, as best I
can for them to succeed going forward.
And I, I'm really pumped for them.
I think it's going to be really successful and loved working with the team.
So if you're a Rails dev and you're looking for your next opportunity,
Craftwork definitely might be it.
Colin: Nice.
Yeah, i'm sure that the team is gonna miss you But what kind if you can talk
about it, what kind of role are you?
Heading into next.
CJ: I am switching back into Dev Advocacy.
So yeah, going back to Dev Advocacy at a company called Samsara.
So they they're in like the IOT space, so everything will be brand new.
We'll see.
We'll see how it goes.
By
Colin: the time this comes out, yeah, Jinx you will probably have
already been there for a little
CJ: Yes.
Yes.
Colin: Which a little meta, but I'm curious to figure out how
we can get these episodes to be closer to the recording date.
We can talk about that offline, but I think there's a way we can do it.
I don't think we have to, necessarily like go out every week by any means,
but maybe there's a way for us to, you know, do live to tape or something.
It just comes out the day we do it, but we'll, we'll figure it out.
Cause I've been listening to our own episodes, which has been nice when
they come out, because I'm like, it's almost like a journal where I'm
looking back at the stuff that we did.
And I'm like, wow, none of that came to pass or, or we nailed it.
And we're like, oh, all the things we talked about came
out exactly as we had hoped.
CJ: Yeah.
We, I think we have like six or something episodes right now recorded
that are not like edited or published.
So we are,
Colin: That's like 12 weeks of content.
So this will be coming out in May.
No,
CJ: yeah, yeah.
End of Q1 next year or something.
I don't know.
Colin: I think we can maybe figure that out and maybe there might even be
some episodes that we just skip over.
They were good things that we can get it closer to time, but yeah,
stoked for you, pumped for you.
Welcome back to developer advocacy.
CJ: Yes.
Colin: I've got this, and I've not opened it yet, but the, the essential guide
to developer marketing and relations.
There's not a lot of books on DevRel, so I figured I'd just like read
through the ones that are out there and see if I, Gaining the insights.
But yeah, welcome back to the, the other side.
CJ: Thank you.
Yeah.
It's I think it's going to be a little bit different.
I think definitely different from Stripe.
So the, it's the very first dev advocate they've had, or at least the
first they've had in many, many years.
So it'll be kind of like building the function from scratch,
which I love that zero to one, so we're going to get into it.
Yep.
Colin: Very cool.
Well, I guess that means maybe just learning some fun things in
your holiday break with the kids.
I'll definitely share this, this other tutorial because I think you'll appreciate
just the way that he teaches too.
And we can see what the kids built.
CJ: Yes, totally.
Totally.
They're, they're just like the way that they're able to like wield AI
is so shockingly impressive already.
And so I have no doubt that they'll be able to pick this up
Colin: Yeah.
CJ: jet GPT.
Colin: I imagine, I mean, there was like you know, kids who are born into iPads,
these are essentially like AI native, your kids are going to be AI native kids where
they're just used to growing up with it.
I've seen it be a little bit of a, there was a little bit of a backlash
on it in interviews where I think someone was like full on coffee pasta.
Off screen and like accidentally pasted the entire answer into like the on
screen thing and then like immediately pulled it back and hope that no one
had seen it and it's just like, okay, you're not if this is like an interview
where you Don't necessarily need to finish, but we want to see how you
think and how you work through things.
And then there's like a principal's interview, like you're going to fail.
Like, it's just not going to go well.
And I think we still don't allow AI in our interviews.
But we very much encourage it.
And we're like, what our AI strategy is for like, I see like,
what are you allowed to use?
What can you use?
How do we use it?
Honestly, I still haven't found any use for image generation.
Like I just don't like how it looks when it comes out and I don't really
have that much like use for it rather than like, I find that I need icons
and stuff more often than like images.
So like a mid journey doesn't really do what I need it to do.
Yeah.
But from my writing, like I'm still using Grammarly and Copilot and Cursor.
So they're they've become essential, but I could still do my work without them.
If I did not have them.
CJ: Yeah, absolutely.
I think the it's, it's been funny to see the like interview cheating.
The trend, there was a fireship, there's a funny fireship video about
like the rate of, of people cheating on technical interviews with a, with AI.
And I think interviews will just have to shift.
It'll be like an arms race of like, you know, how do you make, how do you ask a
question that can't be answered by AI?
Like you have to demonstrate some understanding instead of just like
being able to read off of some answer.
Maybe, I don't know, like I guess the other part Part of it is like,
if you're proficient enough at like using in some LLM to cheat at a at
a technical interview, then you, maybe you're like also proficient
enough to use AI to do the job.
So,
Colin: That was the argument, right?
Is like, if it's important to do the thing and you demonstrate, you can do the thing.
Does it matter how you got to the thing?
And it's like, well yeah, if the interview specifically said not to I
mean, if it was in pre AI world, it'd be the equivalent of taking a stack
overflow and putting it off as your own.
I think if you know what you're going to be tested on and you use those tools
as prep or like a pairing partner, sure.
Right.
That is what I would use it for.
Like, have it spar with you, have it throw out questions, pretend
to be your interviewer and give you prompts and learn from it.
I'm, we didn't talk about at the top of the show, but like I am
using Advent of Code for that.
I am doing my first pass without AI.
And then I'm asking AI to refactor or tell me if there's a faster
way, a better way, a different way.
What didn't I think about?
And then I'm learning from it.
Am I going to use that?
You know, a lot of the AOC codes are not, are not necessarily things
you're going to do in your day to day.
So like, you're like, cool, run through all these numbers and find the most
different one every fourth time.
Sure.
Like, I'm sure there's 20 different ways to do it.
Now, if these get trained on enough different things, like, are we all
gonna end up at the same answer, or varying states of bad answers?
We'll see, but
CJ: I've been of code this year.
I opened up cursor and like pasted in the example.
And then it was just like, tab, tab, tab, ran it.
And it was the right answer.
I was like, that wasn't any
Colin: Yeah, that's the thing too, right?
CJ: takes away the fun.
Yeah.
It's like,
Colin: Now it depends on what you're doing, right?
Like if your job was just to get it done and you don't care to have fun and you
don't want to spend an hour on it, cool.
But if you want to work the brain, I think this is like working out, right?
If you don't use it, you're going to lose it.
So keep doing it.
And I'm sure, like, I think we, I listened to our AI episode too.
That was the one where it was like looking back.
I'm like, wow, six weeks has already been so different.
But well, I'm sure we will come back to that topic more.
And Yeah, we can probably leave it there.
We're at 50.
I'll
CJ: Sounds great.
Awesome.
Yeah.
Thanks so much for listening.
If You want to check out the links to resources and the videos and blog
posts that we talked about in this episode, head over to build and learn.
dev where you can find all of those.
Thanks for listening.
We'll see you next time.
Bye friends.