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In this episode of Voices of the Code, hosts Karl Murray and Steven Fox welcome Trevor Varwig, a developer with a rich background in software development. Trevor shares his journey from creating mods for Microsoft Flight Simulator to working in various industries, including LNG and education software. The conversation delves into Trevor's current role, his interest in security, and the nuances of red team hacking. They also discuss the Houston Laravel Meetup, Trevor's passion for smoking meats, and his enthusiasm for Microsoft Flight Simulator. The episode wraps up with insights on development practices and the importance of understanding the tools we use.
Takeaways
Takeaways
- Trevor started developing at a young age, starting with Microsoft Flight Simulator mods.
- Security is a growing focus in software development, with Trevor studying for security certifications.
- Red team hacking involves testing the security of applications by attempting to breach them.
- The Flipper Zero is a tool for demonstrating security vulnerabilities in physical devices.
- Trevor enjoys smoking meats and experimenting with different flavors and techniques.
- The Houston Laravel Meetup aims to connect local developers and grow the community.
- The oil and gas industry often relies on outdated software, presenting challenges for modernization.
- Trevor emphasizes the importance of understanding code and not relying solely on AI for development
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Development Journeys
06:12 Transitioning to Laravel and Full Stack Development
11:26 Exploring Programming Languages: Go, PHP, and Beyond
18:10 Diving into Security: Best Practices and Learning
24:28 Understanding RFID Security Risks
31:24 The Evolution of Microsoft Flight Simulator
39:36 Challenges in the Oil and Gas Software Industry
44:59 Remote Work Trends Post-COVID
52:05 Rapid Fire Questions and Personal Insights
57:45 Programming Tips for New Developers
00:00 Introduction to Development Journeys
06:12 Transitioning to Laravel and Full Stack Development
11:26 Exploring Programming Languages: Go, PHP, and Beyond
18:10 Diving into Security: Best Practices and Learning
24:28 Understanding RFID Security Risks
31:24 The Evolution of Microsoft Flight Simulator
39:36 Challenges in the Oil and Gas Software Industry
44:59 Remote Work Trends Post-COVID
52:05 Rapid Fire Questions and Personal Insights
57:45 Programming Tips for New Developers
Creators & Guests
What is Voices of the Code?
Karl & Steven interview different members of the wider Laravel community.
Karl Murray (00:01)
Welcome to Voses of the Code. My name is Karl Murray and with me as always is the fantastic Stephen Fox.
Steven Fox (00:08)
Hello.
Karl Murray (00:10)
And today we have a really special guest, a good friend of mine by the name of Trevor Varwig. And I think Trevor is just born to be a developer. His last name starts with Var.
Trevor Varwig (00:22)
That's funny.
Steven Fox (00:23)
Nice, yeah. I hadn't even put that together.
Karl Murray (00:27)
Alright Trevor, go ahead and say hello.
Trevor Varwig (00:27)
It fine, never correlated that. Hey everyone, my name is Trevor Varwick.
Steven Fox (00:33)
Cool.
Karl Murray (00:35)
So Trevor is a founding member and I say founding because we've only done this twice of the Houston Laravel meetup. Trevor, tell us a little bit about what got you into development and then eventually we got you into Laravel specific.
Trevor Varwig (00:53)
So I started developing when I was probably, gosh, 13 or 14. So I've always had a fascination with Microsoft Flight Simulator. Aviation's been a big part of my family. And I was creating different modules and stuff for Flight Simulator 2000 something. I don't know what it was. Somewhere around there. And I wanted it a way to showcase or have other flight enthusiasts.
Steven Fox (01:01)
Hmm.
Trevor Varwig (01:22)
see those different mods that I've created for it. Most of them were different skin types for aircraft and things like that. Just very basic courses of that was back in the day that wasn't what like it is today. So I created a website about domain on Bluehost or something like that and the only thing I could find back then was PHP BB.
and back in the day, right?
Steven Fox (01:48)
Good old bulletin boards. Here we go.
Karl Murray (01:52)
Before Discord.
Trevor Varwig (01:56)
before Laravel. So I created that site, I uploaded different mods and stuff like that and I wanted to be able to change the theme, the layout, things like that. So I started messing with the code here and there and I just did that for a little bit. That's kind of how I started programming as a And then when I was about 18, I'm an Eagle Scout, one thing is about me, I was really big in Boy Scouts back then.
region that I was in in the western region wanted a website done so I created a website for them in PHP and if I remember right it was the Smarty template language or template engine
Steven Fox (02:38)
Dude, nobody knows about Smarty. That's crazy.
Trevor Varwig (02:43)
So I remember creating that in Smarty and I was like, well, this is pretty good. I like this stuff.
Karl Murray (02:50)
I feel like somebody revived Spartan not too long ago.
Trevor Varwig (02:55)
I honestly have not looked into it, I'm not sure.
Steven Fox (03:01)
Once you've got Blade, who cares, right? I only know of it because at a previous workplace, we used XCart as an e-commerce platform. And I'm pretty sure they were using Smarty. anyways, sorry, not to derail you, Trevor. Keep going. Keep going.
Karl Murray (03:03)
Right.
Trevor Varwig (03:03)
Right.
Okay.
Karl Murray (03:18)
You
Trevor Varwig (03:19)
No, that's good. After that, I moved to Texas from Colorado and got a job in an LNG field. I worked in the LNG field for about four years and I went into steel manufacturing. When I was there, I was doing steel estimates and stuff like that and the company realized I had some programming background. So like, hey, we're gonna dual rule you. So I went and...
started coding a little bit for them here and there. They were really big in automating different platforms and stuff, like using scanners to scan codes, trying to move material throughout the shop, stuff like that. It was a fairly large manufacturing facilities. They built offshore oil rigs and maintained them and realized them and stuff like that. So it was a fairly large shop, a lot of data, just gigabytes and gigabytes of day of data.
going through all their different servers and stuff that we set up. Because of that, I like a lot of software. I had to use like a lot of binary software, so I learned Go. Go was really good. This would, gosh. I used Go when I was still in beta. Whatever year that was. Gosh, that was a while ago. Something like that, yeah.
Steven Fox (04:29)
When would this have been, Trevor? Sorry again? Like what? Year-ish?
Okay.
So in like, yeah, 2018s? Okay.
Trevor Varwig (04:45)
13, 14, somewhere around there. can't remember. Then for a lot of dashboard stuff, I started dabbing into Laravel. I heard about it and looked into it. I created a bunch of dashboards in Laravel for the company internally. And we were used to rapid enqueue to use the programs the Go's ran into to get into the SQL database and then show it display on Laravel platform. So that's kind of how I started with Laravel.
After about eight years there, I went and just started just freelancing for about a couple of years. Then after about a couple of years of freelancing, I decided it would be better for me to get a full-time job again. So now I work for an education company. What we do is we create software for tutors and for school districts that help students achieve better on the SAT and ACT.
Then we also built different packages and for advising, like financial advising and college search and things like that. So I've been doing that full time now.
Steven Fox (05:55)
sweet. So with the job that you're currently doing, is Laravel a part of that core stack?
Trevor Varwig (06:01)
Yes, 100%.
Steven Fox (06:02)
Nice, nice.
view. Now, I heard through the grapevine that you're actually a svelte guy.
Trevor Varwig (06:11)
I like Svelte. I don't know, it's a lot less coding I think. A little bit easier to read in my mind. If you look at it, the statistics on how fast the page loads and things like that is faster than Vue or React. Because I know React as well, because I did little bit native React back in the day as well.
Steven Fox (06:13)
What makes you like that?
Karl Murray (06:34)
So Trevor's over here making me look bad, which is good.
Trevor Varwig (06:42)
That's funny. Well, I'm not making you look bad.
Steven Fox (06:42)
He's like, I can do anything.
Trevor Varwig (06:49)
I do like React. I like where it was going. I think it could go really far if lot more people started using it. Of course, there's a little trade-off between Vue and React and Svelte and stuff, but I think it's really good framework.
Steven Fox (07:07)
I've never written a single thing in Svelte. So maybe once we stop this session, you'll have to show me. I know a little bit about it, but I've never taken the time, never had a reason to write a front end with it. So it'd be completely foreign to me. But that's pretty cool. I'm curious. go ahead.
Trevor Varwig (07:10)
Really?
Yeah, for sure.
Okay.
Karl Murray (07:25)
I feel like that's a YouTube video in and of itself is watching Trevor teach Stephen Svelte.
Steven Fox (07:35)
and just listening to me ask all of these silly questions because I don't know what I'm doing. So how would you do this in Vue? That's basically how most of my questions would probably go. Out of curiosity, since you have a little bit of a background using a compiled language like Go, how is your feeling between something like Go and now using PHP and Laravel in production?
Karl Murray (07:38)
Ha
Steven Fox (08:05)
Which one did you like more? Any pros cons? Stuff like that.
Trevor Varwig (08:08)
like both I think they're unique in their different ways and they have their own use cases differently like for example in scanning software we have something where it had to be fast it had to be a binary we couldn't use any type of script or anything like that it had to be an actual executable to interact with the scanners and stuff so I think they there's different use cases for them what I personally build like a web app and go probably not
Now if I was trying to transfer terabytes for the data in a minute, maybe, but most people are not doing that, Unless you're like Netflix or Facebook or something, but most people are not. Laravel, I think, works for 99 % of the use cases out there for a website and API. So that's one reason why I stick with Laravel. Like I have experience with Express.js on the node side and things.
Steven Fox (08:43)
All right.
Gotcha.
Right, right.
Trevor Varwig (09:07)
Problem is with like those frameworks, they're absolutely amazing frameworks, but they're so bare bones, then you have to keep adding different stuff to it. Like your own authentication and your own, there's multiple like database layers to choose from and things like that. And it can, it's hard for other developers to look at it and say, wow, okay, I need to go through this and just kind of see what packages you use and stuff like that. I feel like with layer avail, everything is.
Straighten forward you should be able look at code and if it's written correctly know what it does
Steven Fox (09:39)
right and hopefully not pulling in a thousand dependencies.
Trevor Varwig (09:41)
Well.
correct.
Karl Murray (09:45)
Never roll your own off.
Trevor Varwig (09:48)
So I've done it before in Express JS and that was interesting for sure.
Steven Fox (09:54)
Yeah, well cool I've like Thought a little bit about trying to pick up another language or two Mainly for fun just to dabble and so far go and zig have been my my top contenders So what do you think should I pick up? No, okay
Karl Murray (10:12)
So on that subject, on that subject, I'm going to add another one to your to your plate. Tari uses rest behind the scenes in JavaScript on the front end.
Trevor Varwig (10:22)
Right, for desktop applications, yeah.
Karl Murray (10:25)
it tarry 2.0 does mobile applications as well.
Trevor Varwig (10:30)
Really, I did not hear that. That must be new.
Karl Murray (10:31)
So you could do native desktop applications or native like desktop applications and mobile apps in one code base.
And all you need to do is you can pick your JavaScript front end so you can do it in Svelte and you have access to Rust on the back end and the Rust make HPI calls the layer of all if you want.
Steven Fox (10:56)
Gotcha. Yeah, I'm not sure I'm ready for rest. It's a...
Karl Murray (10:59)
you'll be fine. You don't need to know a whole lot of rust in order to be good at it. But.
Steven Fox (11:05)
feel like, yeah, from what I've heard, is just one those. It's like, OK, to pick up enough that you could write a Hello World program in it, but to do it professionally, you've got to go full deep end. And you're talking a long time before you're writing really good, competent, safe, like, actually good Rust. So I don't know if I'm quite there yet for something. I'm literally just going to dabble in on the weekends. But anyways.
Trevor Varwig (11:05)
All
Karl Murray (11:19)
I don't
You
Trevor Varwig (11:33)
If I remember right, stack overflow said the rest was the highest paying.
Steven Fox (11:38)
Yeah, it wouldn't surprise me. It wouldn't surprise me. It's incredibly powerful. And like the type system is, I don't know what a good descriptor is, but it looks insane. I think very, very powerful and flexible. I think it's just like a little bit too much to jump into. I really liked the idea of Zig because I've never done a systems like language, something that's that low level. And yet at the same time, the syntax is
pretty straightforward and a little bit simplified. A little bit more Go-esque on that particular part of its consideration. But yeah, I know Go is just becoming really popular. And when you want to get an actual feature done or something written quickly and turned into a binary that can be executed somewhere, it's a really good choice. So it's just sort of like, do I want to play?
Or do I want to have an additional language under my tool belt that is actually useful for a real world application sometime in the future?
Trevor Varwig (12:43)
Go, I know Docker and Kubernetes are in and go and those are time-tested right now for sure and they're major popular outside the layer community
Steven Fox (12:53)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure.
Karl Murray (12:55)
Laravel developers are like, nope.
Trevor Varwig (13:00)
Have you tried to put Laramie into a Kubernetes pod?
Karl Murray (13:04)
It's a nightmare. did it in my previous job and I did not enjoy it at all. It's not impossible. It's just not fun.
Trevor Varwig (13:10)
It is a disaster for sure. Just trying to separate all the concerns with the same code base. It's doable for sure, but it's definitely not fun.
Steven Fox (13:22)
Hmm. Can you?
Karl Murray (13:22)
That's Trevor's next project is he's going to open source dump all of that stuff.
Steven Fox (13:30)
Can you help me understand why that is actually difficult versus just a serverless concept?
Trevor Varwig (13:38)
Because what you have to know the syntax of kubernetes very well One thing that's kind of difficult is getting the like the jobs in the background to play nicely and communicate without Multiple job instances picking up the same job for example Like if you don't set it up correctly and you send out like a job for example dispatch an email to send out Multiple even though you might have it coded
to only have one run, that doesn't mean one always runs.
So you because that was one problem I had When putting it in kubernetes because it would actually dispatch it to different job pods and Those pods would run side by side and sometimes it would just wouldn't work quite right So you really had to fine-tune it really? Understand how kubernetes works under the hood to try to really get all that working. Just just good perfect anyway
Steven Fox (14:13)
Gotcha.
Gotcha. Can we deep dive a little bit more into what you're specifically doing with this educational company? Is there a particular developer role within the company you do, or are you all over the place?
Trevor Varwig (14:43)
What's up?
Yeah, I can talk a little bit about it.
I'm just a standard, just full stack developer within the company. honestly, there's only three of us at the moment. So we're a fairly small team. We all work fairly well together. So my job right now, so I'm working more on the admin side and the internal tooling. Just trying to, just we're migrating off of WordPress. It's something that we've been wanting to do for about a year now.
Steven Fox (15:22)
Okay.
But within the last month you're like, okay, we really need to get off.
Trevor Varwig (15:28)
so.
Yeah, they're really right. Yeah, WordPress has been fun lately, hasn't it? Yeah, I've been watching all the WordPress news and that's been, it's gonna be interesting to see how that plays out.
Steven Fox (15:35)
Hmm.
Karl Murray (15:42)
Watching companies like frantically try to find ways of getting away from WordPress is... Oof. That's painful.
Trevor Varwig (15:51)
right and honestly our WordPress isn't bad but we're just having to just code everything at Laravel now that was on WordPress and get the stripe all the reporting and stuff into Laravel so that's kind of what we're doing right now. We're not moving off WordPress because any of the situations that's been going on with WordPress but just I don't know we like everything on one platform instead of two.
Steven Fox (16:16)
Right. Yeah. Yeah. Totally get that. Seems like a lot of the companies that did get going with WordPress, if they have any other option at some point, like, do I want to continue to be using WordPress for this business 10 years from now? The answer is frequently no. So it's like, OK, what's our next option? Cool.
Trevor Varwig (16:37)
WordPress was a great, was really good during its day and a lot of people, still, if I remember, I still have 40 some percent of the web.
Karl Murray (16:38)
Well...
Steven Fox (16:46)
yeah, still huge. Yeah.
Karl Murray (16:46)
It's pretty massive. But Laravel being rad and making a $58 million evaluation kind of makes it really hard to ignore.
Steven Fox (17:03)
Cool. Before we start this, you mentioned that one of your technical points of interest right now is on security side of things. Do you want to talk about that at all?
Trevor Varwig (17:14)
Yeah, for sure. I've been watching a lot of like Stephen's security tips. Yeah. No, that's funny. No, Stephen Rees-Carter. just talked at a Lorkon Australia. He has a lot of good security tips that I've been watching lately and he has a new course coming out which...
Karl Murray (17:21)
Bruce Carter.
Steven Fox (17:21)
thank you.
Just kidding.
Trevor Varwig (17:43)
signed up for and hopefully it'll be fully out soon. Yes I am. if every Laravel developer should be reading his blog post for sure. Just goes into every little thing about securing cookies and course proper core setup and different pen testing stuff that you can do with your website.
Karl Murray (17:46)
Are you on his newsletter? Good.
Well, but not only that, but it's always the first thing he tries when you hire him. So it's like, now his job gets harder, which is great.
Trevor Varwig (18:17)
right. His stuff is very good. Just all these little tips and tricks and he updates his blog probably multiple times a week it looks like.
So one thing happened.
Steven Fox (18:30)
Let me leave myself a note to get on there. Sign up for that newsletter.
Trevor Varwig (18:34)
Right.
SecuringLarival.com
So I've been studying a lot of Security Plus, the CompTSA Security Plus. I'm hoping to take the test by the end of the year, which definitely helps out a lot with like the PPI and a lot of basic security when it comes to networking and given the correct user's rights, access to what type of data and just different things like that. So hopefully I should.
Karl Murray (19:02)
I'm gonna stop you real quick Trevor, because you said PPI and I don't know that everybody knows what PPI stands for. Do you want to help them out?
Trevor Varwig (19:11)
Yes, personal information. So that's anything like your name, your email address, number and address, things like that. When you store that in a database, legally it has to be only seen by the people that allowed to see it. It should not be available to everyone, I think.
Karl Murray (19:29)
And MD5 hashing is not safe.
Trevor Varwig (19:32)
That is correct.
Karl Murray (19:37)
Alright, sorry, go ahead.
Trevor Varwig (19:37)
Yeah, ever use MD5 for sure. So just a lot of different studies on that. Security Plus is a really good one. And then after that, I'm either debating on Pentest Plus with CompTIA or like OSCP or something like that.
Steven Fox (19:54)
Very nice. That's sweet. Sweet. So security into the broader realm of things, not specifically Laravel, stuff like that. That's super cool. Very nice. Carl?
Trevor Varwig (20:00)
correct.
Karl Murray (20:08)
So one of the things that Trevor is also really into is the red team hacking. If you've ever heard of what that is, Trevor, do you want to fill us in on what that kind of red team hacking is?
Trevor Varwig (20:20)
So red teaming hacking is going into a, like a website for example, and trying to break it. Trying to bypass authentication, trying to bypass any type of authorization checks, try to get data that you should not have access to. On the opposite end, blue team is trying to secure everything to make sure the red teamers don't get any of that data. So red teaming is kind of going in most of the time blind into a website.
sometimes not even knowing what the framework is, trying to just dig deep into just what the framework is, trying to see what type of security they do have on their website. And also if you can break into the servers as well. So it's definitely one thing that takes a lot of studying and a lot of trust. If you ever do, like Steven Rees-Carter is like pen testing is kind of like a red teamer.
It's kind of kind of goes hand to hand there then
Steven Fox (21:22)
Gotcha.
Karl Murray (21:22)
But red teamers tend to do a lot more physical stuff as well. So physically breaking into buildings that they aren't supposed to be in. Technically, they're paid to be there. They just don't tell the security team that they're paid to be there.
Trevor Varwig (21:28)
Craig.
Right. I haven't studied a lot of that yet, but it's what I've been reading a lot about it and like sometimes like breaking into their Wi-Fi, so get into their networks, so they can get into their servers, get into their applications. That's one way to break into some applications. So some reteamers actually do that. They'll sit outside the office hacking the Wi-Fi and internally that's how they get access to their databases and stuff.
Steven Fox (21:53)
Damn.
Karl Murray (22:05)
Trevor is also one of the only people I know that owns a Flipper Zero.
Steven Fox (22:10)
What is that? What is a flipper zero?
Karl Murray (22:12)
man, here we go.
Trevor Varwig (22:12)
Eh.
A Flipper Zero is a tool, right, it's a tool to where you can trigger RFID and different other type of radio frequencies. For example, I can have it listen for like when like a garage door would open, then I can what's called a replay. And then once I replay it, I can reopen that garage door. So on it, so it's.
Steven Fox (22:17)
Can of worms just opened. Let's go.
great.
This is making me sound so safe at night.
Trevor Varwig (22:49)
So honestly it's a tool to demonstrate how programmers should be programming physical devices kind like a garage door. Like most of them have what's called rotating keys so like whenever you press a button open a garage door it sends a secured key kind of like a TLS encryption. And then if I try to go replay that it's expired so it shouldn't happen.
Karl Murray (23:14)
So it's kind of like a one-time password where it exists for like 30 seconds and then it refreshes.
Trevor Varwig (23:18)
Correct.
Correct. And that's how all the physical devices should work. That doesn't mean that's how they all work.
Steven Fox (23:28)
about to say used should there so I'm assuming there's a lot that aren't.
Trevor Varwig (23:34)
Correct there are nowadays are getting a little bit better when it comes stuff like that like gates and garage doors and just different things but another thing you can do is for example I can pretty much point it and any television and and that turn on off change channel things like that too and it's kind of set stuff as like a universal remote type thing
Steven Fox (23:52)
Okay.
Gotcha.
Karl Murray (24:00)
OK, so one thing that you could do with this thing, Trevor, and correct me if I'm wrong. Your RFID badges that you have to wear when you're walking into an enterprise business. They have a code that is singly assigned to a single person. Trevor, how long does it take to steal that code off of those cards using the flipper zero?
Trevor Varwig (24:08)
Yes.
seconds.
Karl Murray (24:27)
So don't show a hacker your badge ever. Matter of fact, when you're outside of the building, don't have the badge in sight ever.
Trevor Varwig (24:31)
Dope.
Steven Fox (24:36)
What is the distance requirement to pick up a thing like that RFID badge? OK. So you have to be right there. OK.
Trevor Varwig (24:42)
Usually like it's less than a foot. So you have to be standing next to the person. Correct. Like credit card, a lot of people that a lot of criminals that do still credit card numbers, that's how they're doing it. Also like a gas stations, there might be a reader onto the chips. That's how they're doing it. Because it's that really close proximity. And that's how they're able to steal that information.
Steven Fox (25:02)
Gotcha.
Yeah. I feel like I've heard about something recently where people, especially for people that will hang up their car keys, which for a lot of the newer cars, right, they're using like a near field communication to just know whenever you're approaching the car and to unlock it, you don't have to hit any physical buttons. And if you hang your keys like right at a door or near a wall that's exposed to the exterior,
you can like try to trip that using a device like this and then you'd be able to get into the vehicle if it's outside of the house outside of the garage though it sounds like even if it were in the garage you might be able to get into yourself but is that like along the similar lines?
Trevor Varwig (25:43)
It's possible.
right? It is possible for sure. It is definitely possible.
Steven Fox (25:53)
And great.
Karl Murray (25:54)
Just don't do it within a foot of your front door. For the love of God.
Steven Fox (25:59)
So I just need to put all of this stuff in a Faraday cage and then... Wonderful.
Karl Murray (26:02)
Yep. Yeah. Put your WiFi in there as well. I heard that's very beneficial.
Steven Fox (26:09)
great, perfect, yep. I'll just run ethernet everywhere, forget that wifi exists, and we're good to go.
Karl Murray (26:16)
Yeah. Yes.
Trevor Varwig (26:18)
I read a story, I think it somewhere in Detroit or something, where the criminals were going around and doing like a Wi-Fi blast and creating a DDoS attack against Wi-Fi. What that was doing, that was killing all the ring cameras and all the wireless security cameras were around them, so they weren't broadcasting.
Steven Fox (26:40)
Hmm.
Trevor Varwig (26:42)
So security cameras, I definitely recommend to be hardwired.
Steven Fox (26:46)
Yeah.
Karl Murray (26:46)
Yeah. Even if they're on a PoE switch, you have to be careful with them as well because they can still knock those off line as well.
Trevor Varwig (26:55)
Right.
Steven Fox (26:56)
cheese.
Karl Murray (26:58)
Yep, you're not as safe as you think you are, Stephen. Sorry, buddy.
Steven Fox (27:01)
Yeah, great. I hope my wife doesn't listen to this particular episode.
Karl Murray (27:08)
Secondly, Steven now owes like $30,000 worth of technical equipment to be able to safely secure his stuff.
Steven Fox (27:10)
Uhhh...
Gonna be going through the attic to run hard lines to all of our ring cameras. Thanks a lot guys.
Karl Murray (27:21)
You're welcome. Trevor also has a really cool interest in Microsoft flight simulators. He mentioned that earlier. Do you still have a rig or no?
Trevor Varwig (27:22)
You
Yes.
I still have the rig, I haven't played in a long time, it's been a while, but the new flight simulator 2024 comes out this week. So I may run and get a new GPU for that, we'll see.
Steven Fox (27:43)
cool.
Are you using a VR headset for that or monitors?
Trevor Varwig (27:53)
I just use monitors. I've never really gotten into the whole VR thing yet.
Karl Murray (27:58)
I'll bring mine over. You'll love it.
Trevor Varwig (28:00)
Okay, I want to get that set up for sure.
Steven Fox (28:01)
I considered a headset a while ago almost exclusively for the purpose of stuff like Flight Simulator because it just seems really freaking cool to be that immersed in it. And as you turn your head, you look at the various windows outside the plane. that seems really, really cool to me.
Trevor Varwig (28:19)
Right.
Karl Murray (28:22)
I was deal I was driving a McLaren in my in my simulator. Not really, because they don't let me have McLaren's for obvious reasons. but it's weird, because you can see like, the tags on the seats, and stuff like that. So like, they'll claim they'll clone, like get down to that level of detail to like the tags on the seats. Inside simulators, it's crazy how cool how cool this is.
Steven Fox (28:47)
That's awesome.
Trevor Varwig (28:47)
Yeah.
I think it's close to 80 gig download. It's insane. That's just the bass.
Karl Murray (28:53)
That is insane.
Steven Fox (28:53)
Wow. Yeah. Man. Well, whenever the current generation, I guess you'd call it, of Microsoft Flight Simulator came out, because there was a large hiatus, right? There was the original, and it was a bunch of this very low-res geographical data and building data. And then whatever year it was that the new generation came out that was just truly
Karl Murray (28:57)
Hahaha
Trevor Varwig (29:16)
Right.
Karl Murray (29:20)
like 2020 or something like that.
Trevor Varwig (29:22)
2020 was the year.
Steven Fox (29:22)
Accurate. Yeah, representations. That was so cool. Remember going up and I'm flying around like, my gosh, like I live in a fairly small town, but I'm like, no way. Like that's the highway exit. And yeah, like there's my grocery store. Like, I mean, it doesn't have literally everything, especially for a more rural location like where I'm located. But it had a surprising amount for kind of being in the middle of nowhere. I was like, this is so cool. That's awesome.
Karl Murray (29:33)
There's my house.
Trevor Varwig (29:50)
Yeah, they're using satellite data and AI to generate a lot of that and it's fairly accurate nowadays. It's kind of scary how accurate.
Steven Fox (29:57)
Yeah, yeah. Well, it's a, I mean, even now, like, completely different purpose, but you go on like Apple Maps and you turn on 3D and the accuracy of the building geometry and details that are in all places of Apple Maps is really phenomenal. So I'm sure there is a very similar technique for flight simulator, but yeah, really, really cool. Really cool. And then of course you have to take an underpowered plane and try to fly over Mount Everest. That's like the...
Trevor Varwig (30:14)
It is.
Right?
Steven Fox (30:27)
I was like the very first thing I did. I have no idea why. It's like, can I take this little single engine diamond to 30,000 feet? No.
Karl Murray (30:32)
Steven's got
Trevor Varwig (30:32)
a little.
Nope. Doesn't work. I don't
Karl Murray (30:40)
Waiting for him to grab a prop plane and.
Steven Fox (30:43)
Yeah, yeah. And then, of course, the very next the very next flight is grab the I remember what fighter jet they like give you out of the stock game, but then you pick that up and it's just like, OK, well, afterburners all the way, let's see what can what it can do. Yeah.
Trevor Varwig (30:57)
Right. Yeah, I think the 2022 was F18.
Steven Fox (31:03)
Okay. What's expected for this 24 release? Is it just more of the same or are they any sort of a big revolutionary thing?
Karl Murray (31:12)
More internet bandwidth because they're gonna do like real-time weather
Trevor Varwig (31:17)
Yeah, so that's one day real time weather too, but this one's supposed to give a large update on it, especially like on cloud businesses and stuff like that. It's supposed to be a lot more accurate. They're going to do a lot where they call missions style. let's go around. for example, you can do like rescue missions and like off oil rigs and the mountains and just things like that. A lot of mission style. It's been kind of interesting how they implement that, but it's been kind of cool.
Steven Fox (31:17)
I
Nice.
Karl Murray (31:45)
Do you think they're trying to go, do you think they're trying to sell the game as like a real flight simulator so that people can actually learn to fly before they get their pilot's license?
Trevor Varwig (31:57)
Possibility I almost have my private license at one point And I use flight simulator a lot back then just kind of help me out especially with talking to air traffic control And things like that was a really big study guide for that
Karl Murray (32:13)
I do have a friend that's getting a private pilot's license. Joe, you're listening, shout out. Congratulations. I hope you get closer. He's a really cool guy, by the way. But yeah. So.
Yeah, lol. Thanks for ruining that one, Carl. I don't know where I was going with that train of thought. Yeah, I was there. It was there. But yeah, that would be cool to see Trevor get his his private pilot's license. Make that so.
Steven Fox (32:33)
It was on the tip of your tongue. man.
Trevor Varwig (32:34)
You
Yeah, one day. It's expensive. It's not a cheap hobby.
Steven Fox (32:52)
Very expensive. I was actually also extremely interested in it as well. I went to Embry-Riddle for university, which is like the number one flight school in the world. so I've whatever, just been around that environment a lot, have a friends that are now pilots. And I really wanted to, and then I started looking more and more into it. I'm like, okay, what is the actual kind of return on such a financial and time investment?
How is my family going to get to use a plane? Where will we be able to go? How much is it going to cost? And like, whoo, you just start adding it up and getting the certificate is just the first step. And then actually using the things gets very expensive.
Karl Murray (33:34)
Well then you have to have like 200 hours or something like that. It's a fly time before you can even do something with it. And you're not even allowed to make money off of it at that point. You have to have something like two. You can't make money until you're like 2000 hours or something like that. was insane.
Trevor Varwig (33:47)
Can't make my...
until you get your commercial license. Yeah, you have to have a commercial license.
Steven Fox (33:54)
Not quite. Not quite. Yeah, it's a commercial. Which the minimum flight time for that, I believe, is 250. But you're kind of getting into a whole other realm of stuff. But like for us, or for me, I just wanted to be able to take my family to a destination that would normally take six hours in a car, especially going up and around mountains. And instead, you could just fly direct for two hours or something in a 182.
Karl Murray (34:15)
Stephen just wanted to be able take his family to lunch in Colorado and fly home. That's what it was. Let's be honest.
Steven Fox (34:22)
I wish. wish. Nope. Nothing that crazy. But yeah, I mean, it's just they're, man, like as soon as COVID hit and stuff, like the private aviation realm got extremely expensive. So now I just got a bum off of other people that already have their license in.
Trevor Varwig (34:22)
would nice. I would love to do that.
Karl Murray (34:41)
There's a YouTuber who does that kind of stuff where he'll post videos of him like leaving Florida and then going to Colorado for lunch and then like getting back in the plane flying home and like, that's insane. Yeah, like he.
Steven Fox (34:53)
Colorado for lunch boy you have to be flying a jet at that point because and anything anything propeller that's that's a long time
Karl Murray (35:02)
It's like a three hour flight for him and then he flies back home. it's an all day thing.
Steven Fox (35:08)
Not from Florida. Not from Florida. Yeah. Planes are fast. They're not that fast.
Karl Murray (35:12)
Well, it might have been like North Carolina or something like that, but yeah. So it's.
Trevor Varwig (35:19)
Right.
Karl Murray (35:20)
It's an all day thing for him, he's making enough money from the YouTube videos and the ads alone to pay for that flight,
Steven Fox (35:28)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But stuff like that. I mean, I am in North Carolina. My whole family, including my wife's family, is out in Florida. So that was like a perfect example. It's like 500 nautical miles, kind of right at the limit of what normal private aviation planes could do on a tank. Maybe you would have to make a stop. But either way, it's like three-ish hours of flight time, whereas in a car, it's like nine. So it would just be amazing to be able to, yeah, exactly. Get up.
Get in the plane at 9 a.m. and you've, you know, hopefully landed by about lunchtime and that would be amazing. But it would also cost you like about $1,200 to do that.
Karl Murray (36:10)
Yeah, a friend of mine was. Yeah, Joe was telling me the other day how much money it was going to cost for him to fly from like Indiana to Texas was like something like $550 or something like that. I was like, that's not too bad. He's like, yeah, but I gotta fly home. I gotta rent the plane. It's cost time and I'm like alright fine. Don't fly to Texas. We don't have to hang out.
Trevor Varwig (36:10)
Bye!
Steven Fox (36:32)
Yeah, yeah.
Trevor Varwig (36:34)
Right like even living in Houston like if I would go down a Corpus like a power drive, right? It's like an hour and a half flight. I think you're it you're going to assess that so that's like one reason why I like going out of Corpus or even gals and it's like still an hour and a half drive from me and Hopping a hop of the plane and go
Karl Murray (36:41)
Yeah.
So so Laricon was in. So it's kind of funny when you think about it, cause like Laricon was in Dallas this year, which is a 30 minute flight. Right, so like Houston to Dallas was a 30. Yeah, it's a 30 minute flight. That's insane, but then you think it's like, well, I gotta get to the airport two hours early. I'm going to be at the airport for two hours. It's a three and a half hour drive like what what makes more sense?
Trevor Varwig (37:01)
commercially, yeah.
Steven Fox (37:17)
Yeah, at that point, might as well drive. Yeah. Yeah.
Karl Murray (37:20)
So. The Houston Lercon either Houston Laravel meetup was kind of a fun project that Trevor and Nick and. Ryan, thank you. I'm sorry Ryan, don't I didn't mean to forget your body. So yeah, he's going to get mad at me. I'll have to send him a text message later. So that was a project we started because.
Trevor Varwig (37:21)
Yeah.
Right?
You
Karl Murray (37:49)
It took us leaving Houston. To hang out in Dallas to get to know that there were other Laravel developers in Houston.
Trevor Varwig (37:58)
If it's true.
Karl Murray (38:00)
so fun story. We're actually trying to grow that group right now. It is just four guys that are hanging out in each other's homes and talking about Laravel and drinking coffee. but that is something that we do eventually want to grow to be something that's a little bit bigger. I kind of got jealous a couple of weeks ago when Steven was talking about, the upstate PHP and I was like, man, I want to get there.
Steven Fox (38:28)
Yeah, in Greenville, South Carolina. Yeah. It was really cool. I'd be surprised if you guys don't have a lot more developers in your community. So it's just a matter of finding them.
Karl Murray (38:30)
I want to get there.
So, yeah.
no no no no we're oil and gas. It's all oil and gas all the way here, so it's C++. You're going to have desktop applications. No, no, the oil and gas industry does not move at all, so if they desktop applications is been all they've ever known and that's all they will ever know for until that industry gets disrupted. Steven could tell you or sorry Trevor could tell you about that all day long.
Trevor Varwig (38:44)
That's a lot of oil and gas.
Steven Fox (38:48)
See.
Karl Murray (39:08)
Trevor, do you want to tell us some stories of these horror stories that you've dealt with working in the oil and gas industry?
Trevor Varwig (39:16)
Horror stories, where do I begin?
Steven Fox (39:19)
There's too many to count.
Karl Murray (39:19)
There's a lot of them. There's a lot of them.
Trevor Varwig (39:23)
Some of the software, you're correct though, Carl, it's just some of the software in the oil and gas industry has been there for 20 years and it still works to this day. Like most of it is written in C and C++ and just it's old but you know what, it works. And their motto is like, break it if it's not broken type thing.
Karl Murray (39:38)
yeah.
Right. And as long as Windows supports whatever version that they're on, they're going to keep doing it.
Trevor Varwig (39:52)
Right? That's true, it was a...
Steven Fox (39:53)
Hey, if you know what you're doing, mean, isn't, you know, like Chrome and there's tons of extremely important stuff written with C++. So you just gotta know what you're doing or you blow off your whole leg.
Trevor Varwig (40:04)
That's right.
Karl Murray (40:06)
Well, yeah, but a lot of what they're doing is like ordering parts and then like locating where oil can be found. So it's like, do you really, really need a desktop application for that? Or could we, you know, put this in a web app and loaded on an iPad? This is the kind of technology that I'm talking about where it's like. No, we gotta ship this guy across the country with a $40,000 laptop that are Lenovo Toughbook.
Steven Fox (40:24)
I see.
Karl Murray (40:35)
That could fall out of the plane and still survive because we don't trust an iPad. That's the level of crazy we're talking about when it comes to the oil and gas industry. So no, I legitimately thought, OK, I'm probably one of the only Laravel developers in Houston. And yeah, I got in a group chat and they were like, no, I'm from Houston. I'm from Houston. I'm from Houston. I was like, no way.
Steven Fox (40:42)
I
I gotcha.
Karl Murray (41:04)
So yeah, thought it was funny that we had to all you know fly or drive three hours to find out we exist in in the same city
Steven Fox (41:13)
the same location. How big is how big is Houston for you guys? Like wherever you meet up is does it take a while for you guys to all assemble? OK.
Trevor Varwig (41:14)
That's true. Like, I think...
Karl Murray (41:24)
Depends on traffic. So we're all, ironically, we're all within 30 minutes of each other, it was no traffic. But with traffic, last meetup was like an hour drive.
Trevor Varwig (41:27)
Right.
Yeah, that's about an hour and 20 minutes for me with traffic.
Steven Fox (41:39)
Ugh.
Karl Murray (41:41)
Yeah, yeah. And that was.
Steven Fox (41:43)
And you're like actually in Houston. You're not like, you know, 45 minute suburb. You're like in. She is.
Trevor Varwig (41:45)
Yes.
Karl Murray (41:49)
Now, I, yeah, he's, I'm not gonna say exactly where, but he's like the northern side of Houston, and we're on the northwestern side of Houston. So there's like no, well, there are major freeways that go from there to there, but they're all tollways mostly. So it's kind of expensive to even meet up. What is it, like $20? Like there and back.
Trevor Varwig (41:50)
in Houston.
Steven Fox (42:15)
I see.
Trevor Varwig (42:17)
It's about $20 for me to, or less me to, yeah.
Karl Murray (42:20)
Yeah. So it can get pretty expensive to just maneuver around Houston for an hour and a half to.
Trevor Varwig (42:28)
Houston's 8 million people in that area. So it's fairly large. Yeah, it's growing tremendously. So I actually live in a brand new neighborhood and they can't build homes faster.
Karl Murray (42:31)
Yeah, and growing.
Steven Fox (42:32)
Yeah. Okay.
man.
Karl Murray (42:40)
Yeah, the city that's not far from me and ironic. I'll put city in air quotes because not really city just had a grant to build 300,000 new homes. And they've like 70 % of them have already sold out. To to give you some context, when I was looking for my home that I currently live in, one of the houses was selling for $200,000.
Steven Fox (42:53)
Holy moly.
Cheers.
Karl Murray (43:08)
And my wife and I were like, all right, we're going to put in an offer for 230,000 because homes aren't staying on the market. And a guy pulled up with in a Tesla with California plates, and I just looked at my wife and said, we're not getting this house because that's that's how bad it is in Houston right now when it comes to like buying a home, even with the recession and the housing prices and taxes, not kind of stuff for through the roof.
Steven Fox (43:37)
What's the cause of that? Why are people going to Houston?
Trevor Varwig (43:43)
think jobs, honestly, there's a lot of jobs here that people can get. Housing is a lot cheaper. There's no income tax here for state. And taxes are fairly reasonable.
Karl Murray (43:49)
lot of them.
We have no state taxes either.
Trevor Varwig (44:00)
Great.
Karl Murray (44:01)
So yeah, the other part of it is I think a large portion of this was like during COVID. A lot of people were figuring out, hey, I can go remote. I don't have to work in my cubicle in California. So let's go find a place in Houston where I can chill out and, you know, still have a lot of people in a lot of places to interact with people, but not have to pay the ridiculous California sales taxes and all that kind of fun stuff.
Steven Fox (44:32)
Hmm. OK. Interesting. Gotcha. All right, Trevor. New plan. Rather than the rather than the, you know, private certificate for planes, you just need to get a helicopter license and then you just go plop down right in Carl's front yard, assuming he has one. Pick him up and then you guys are good to go. And it'll be like, you know, two grand to get to your next meetup. But it'll be awesome.
Karl Murray (44:50)
Yeah, I do.
Trevor Varwig (44:54)
Alright.
That would be pretty sweet.
Steven Fox (45:01)
You
Karl Murray (45:01)
Actually, we could cut our beat up in half because of the fact that we could just meet up in the helicopter.
Steven Fox (45:07)
my gosh! Perfect!
Karl Murray (45:10)
We could do it like what's the maximum flight range of a helicopter? We can do it like 3000 feet in the air. It'd be great.
Steven Fox (45:17)
Dude, sick. Just.
Trevor Varwig (45:17)
for it.
Karl Murray (45:19)
Which is just just hover over Houston like 3000 feet with you know coffee and four guys talking about Laravel for for three hours
Trevor Varwig (45:20)
It'll be fun to do once.
Steven Fox (45:32)
burning like $100 a minute in fuel and just chilling. Actually, I have no idea. yeah. Yeah. That's what's crazy. we had Hurricane Helene come through the Asheville area, it was really cool, interesting seeing a bunch of the kind of like private people that do own regular helicopters like come into the area and they were rescuing.
Karl Murray (45:38)
It'll be fine, don't worry about it. It'll be fine.
Steven Fox (46:00)
and helping so many people because they literally could just plop down in the street right in front of the person's house, save them and out they go. So was like, man, that's so cool.
Karl Murray (46:09)
We see a lot of that. We see a lot of that. I mean, you think about the Jericho that we had earlier this year. People are walking down downtown Houston and suddenly glasses flying out of the tops of these skyscrapers. People are like running like literally the Jericho hit. Nobody knew it was coming and then suddenly glasses just blown out of skyscrapers. So the hurricanes happen here are.
Trevor Varwig (46:11)
Yeah, we see a lot of that here in Houston.
Steven Fox (46:34)
Man.
Karl Murray (46:39)
Once every four or five years, Houston gets basically wiped off the face of the map. People are like riding canoes to go save people. I've seen that one that was that was kind of heartbreaking. I've actually done the whole like removing drywall and carpet and stuff like that from old churches so that people would have places to sleep while they're rebuilding their homes. So yeah, I've.
Trevor Varwig (46:48)
Yep.
you
Karl Murray (47:08)
been there done that got the t shirts not fun. Seriously, they gave us all t shirts because they don't let you wear your regular clothes in there because there's diseases and stuff like that that you're dealing with when you think about like swamp water and stuff like that that could potentially be bacterial growth and stuff like that and the drywall and
Trevor Varwig (47:15)
All right.
Karl Murray (47:36)
carpet because it's been underwater for. You're welcome. But I mean, that's that's what it's like sometimes.
Steven Fox (47:37)
This is great podcast content. Just love this.
Trevor Varwig (47:40)
Hahahaha
Steven Fox (47:44)
People are going to be listening. How did we get here? Why are we talking about amoebas and water? What's what's going on here?
Karl Murray (47:51)
Yeah, I mean, that's that's Houston sometimes. It's real. But yeah. So we went from flight simulators to, know, amiibos. Thanks. All right, Trevor, I'm going to go ahead and start wrapping this up here pretty soon because I know we've all got things to get back to. But I'm going to ask the question that we love asking. What are your hobbies?
Trevor Varwig (47:52)
You
Nope.
Steven Fox (47:59)
I gotcha. Cool.
Trevor Varwig (48:20)
Okay, my hobbies. I have an offset smoker. I like smoking meat, brisket particularly. I try to do that every weekend if I can afford it.
Steven Fox (48:26)
heck yeah.
Karl Murray (48:32)
Houston Lericon Meetup at Trevor's House when? Next time.
Trevor Varwig (48:37)
All let's do it.
Steven Fox (48:37)
about to say. you, you a, what's your favorite like meat? Are you like a brisket guy, pork shoulder, ribs, something else?
Trevor Varwig (48:45)
I like ribs. like experimenting with ribs. One, they're a lot cheaper. All the different flavors and stuff you can put in a rib. just like that, honestly yesterday we had a Jamaican jerk, which was really good. I've tried different ones, like a Peruvian honey. I did that one last week on the ribs. All those, delicious. So honestly, I've been getting, I've been doing that a lot here lately. And I just try different wood flavors and things. So it's been fun. I'll enjoy it.
Steven Fox (48:57)
nice.
Sounds good.
Nice. Nice.
Karl Murray (49:15)
What is your favorite seasoning? Like what's the one that you grab every single time?
Trevor Varwig (49:20)
it would have to be like a spicy honey like a habanero honey when it to ribs anyway. I put that on ribs and pork shoulder offset. So mainly keeping the fire going like a good old boy scout days and just and just maintain the fire and good temperature consistent temperature is really important. So it's been fun. I've been trying to do that a lot here lately and just study a lot on it. So maybe one day I'll compete.
Karl Murray (49:29)
Are you using a Traeger or something else?
Steven Fox (49:48)
Nice.
now we're talking.
Karl Murray (49:51)
There's a lot of those competitions in the Houston area.
Trevor Varwig (49:56)
I judged last year in my local county, so that was fun. So that's really helped me get into that.
Steven Fox (50:02)
That's cool. That's cool. I've done a little bit of smoking, but only with a big green egg. And so I'm like, man, how do I convince my wife to let me get another outdoor appliance? At that time, we had the big green egg, gas grill, two pizza ovens. It's just like, OK, how do I get a 300 pound offset smoker onto the patio without her killing me? Yeah.
Trevor Varwig (50:08)
Sorry.
All right.
Mine's about 3,000 pounds, right? Yeah, I got a big one. That's about 3,000 pounds, it's a pretty good size.
Steven Fox (50:32)
So all right, cool.
Karl Murray (50:38)
All what else?
Trevor Varwig (50:41)
that too.
Steven Fox (50:42)
You're demanding a lot from this guy. Jeez, he's spending all day coding and cooking. What more do you want from him?
Karl Murray (50:43)
Yeah!
Trevor Varwig (50:49)
Okay.
Karl Murray (50:50)
Trevor is that that meme where it's like you spent eight hours cooking smoking. He's like, yeah, it was a brisket.
You
Steven Fox (51:03)
Gnu!
Karl Murray (51:03)
You
Trevor Varwig (51:05)
That's funny. You're gonna have to put that meme together. That'd be hilarious.
Karl Murray (51:05)
You
It's already a thing. I'll send it to you. You'll love it It's like boss. What why are or where were you for eight hours? He was like of smoking. He's like you spent eight hours smoking He's like it was a brisket All right, Trevor it's been awesome having on the show Stephen do we have anything to close this out or No
Trevor Varwig (51:12)
Okay.
It's hilarious.
Steven Fox (51:33)
can do a couple of our quick rapid fire questions if we want.
Karl Murray (51:37)
Let's start with the favorite one. What social media platform can we find you on? How can we find you?
Trevor Varwig (51:43)
at X and LinkedIn.
Karl Murray (51:47)
All right, and what are your tags? I still can't, I can't either.
Steven Fox (51:48)
I still can't call it X. I just can't. It's Twitter. It will always be Twitter.
Trevor Varwig (51:53)
Yep, I agree.
Karl Murray (51:54)
And what's your handle, Trevor, for the listeners?
Trevor Varwig (51:57)
I'm assuming just my name Trevor Varwing, believe
Karl Murray (52:04)
You
Steven Fox (52:06)
A correction can be applied if needed, after the fact.
Trevor Varwig (52:09)
Right, so X is just my name Trevor Varwee and LinkedIn I believe is the same.
Karl Murray (52:09)
Yeah.
Steven Fox (52:17)
What's your
Karl Murray (52:18)
And if you're ever confused, could just look up Trevor Varwig Houston on LinkedIn and I'm pretty sure you'll find.
Trevor Varwig (52:25)
I do have a cousin named Trevor Barwick. He lives in California, so don't confuse me with him. That's right.
Steven Fox (52:25)
Nice.
It'll be one the two. What's your text editor of choice, Trevor?
Karl Murray (52:30)
Yeah.
Trevor Varwig (52:35)
Vim. I used to be in PS Storm and it's just it's a memory hog and my M1 is slowing down now so I'm so I went to Vim, Neo Vim so...
Karl Murray (52:36)
Ooh, this one.
Steven Fox (52:38)
my-
Karl Murray (52:50)
One of the one of the latest meetups Trevor showed me his PHP config or his PHP storm config and he had like eight gigs of RAM allocated to PHP storm and I was still crawling. I was like no Trevor. Something is wrong here.
Trevor Varwig (53:06)
right? I've
Steven Fox (53:08)
Jeez. See, I don't know why people like I have never experienced that with PHP Storm. It is always super snappy.
Trevor Varwig (53:14)
It crawls. It is super slow, auto-completion slow. So I'm going to new them. So I've been using it for now about a month. Right.
Steven Fox (53:20)
I don't know how we made it this far in the conversation without you telling us that. Isn't that the very first thing? Hi, my name's Trevor. I use Neovim by the way. Isn't that?
Karl Murray (53:29)
No, it's because he uses a MacBook. He doesn't use Arch, so...
Trevor Varwig (53:35)
I'll probably come to that once if this thing dies. I'm going straight Linux
Karl Murray (53:40)
my goodness, I can't believe we. We talked about this. Trevor and I were looking at the framework laptops like really, really, really hard during one of the calls and yeah, I think Trevor was the one that like pushed me over. It was like, yeah, I gotta get one.
Trevor Varwig (53:58)
Yeah, they're nice.
Karl Murray (54:00)
So.
Steven Fox (54:00)
Wait, so that's happening? You're getting one?
Karl Murray (54:02)
I'm trying to convince Lumenfire to get me one, but it's gonna be a while before they'll be willing to do that.
Trevor Varwig (54:09)
Alright.
Steven Fox (54:12)
Gotcha.
Trevor Varwig (54:12)
Yeah, so I have a few laptops and deep like a he booted a desktop or a couple of other desktops There's always something that doesn't work with it, right some driver that's needed that doesn't quite work with this model stuff like that So there's one computer out there that
Karl Murray (54:25)
Wait, you said what operating system is that?
Trevor Varwig (54:31)
You're to.
Karl Murray (54:32)
OK, so I made you repeat that because there's one of my friends who listens to this podcast absolutely gets angry whenever somebody says Ubuntu. It's Ubuntu and it makes him absolutely mad whenever people say it wrong.
Trevor Varwig (54:45)
Ubuntu.
That's funny. I probably pronounced it wrong a few times.
Karl Murray (54:54)
So yeah, every time somebody messes it up, I'm going to make them repeat it just so that Scott can hear that and get mad. It'll be fun.
Trevor Varwig (55:03)
That's funny. Yeah.
Karl Murray (55:03)
Ugh.
Steven Fox (55:05)
OK, so NeoVM user.
Karl Murray (55:06)
Okay, so what other operating systems are we using fairly regularly, Trevor?
Trevor Varwig (55:11)
Honestly just Matt or me been to I used it being for servers who I have to set up a new server for something I prefer to be in It's pretty much about it honestly
Karl Murray (55:23)
I'm waiting for you to say like that super hacker distro that everybody uses. Yeah, Kali Linux.
Trevor Varwig (55:29)
Callie. Callie. do have a Callie. I have a Callie VM on my back.
Karl Murray (55:36)
Are you going to call that VM Cali? Is that like the name that you're going to call it?
Trevor Varwig (55:41)
Like Kali, Kali or Kali, yeah. That's what it's called, yeah. So if you don't know what Kali is, it's a pen testing operating system. has thousands of tools installed to help break passwords or getting to different websites and break them. It's just a lot of different tools. Wi-Fi is one.
Karl Murray (56:03)
Wi-Fi. There are tools to help you hack other people's Wi-Fi. There you go. We, okay, I feel like this episode needs a disclaimer. We are not condoning hacking people in any way shape or form. Lawyers, stay away from us. We don't make any money off of this podcast.
Trevor Varwig (56:09)
There are.
Right.
Just saying, as long as everything you do is white hat and legal, that's how it should be.
Karl Murray (56:30)
Yep. Get permission and get paid. That way they can't say that you didn't do it for a reason. You can say, look, no, you paid me. Here's the receipts. I was there for legal purposes.
Trevor Varwig (56:33)
Absolutely.
Join HackerOne, that's a really good platform for you to definitely stay legal and just make sure you read the scope of terms and don't go outside the scope.
Karl Murray (56:57)
If you want to play, hack the box is great.
Trevor Varwig (57:00)
That was wonderful. I went through all their courses.
Karl Murray (57:04)
They give you a VM and they tell you to hack it and they tell you how to hack it. So you can do it legally. For not a whole lot of money.
Trevor Varwig (57:14)
It's really cheap.
Steven Fox (57:16)
That's cool. That's cool.
Karl Murray (57:18)
Yeah. All right.
Steven Fox (57:19)
Out of curiosity, Trevor, do you have any programming, web development, or Laravel specific tips that you feel like any listener would want to know? Yeah.
Karl Murray (57:28)
specifically for new developers.
Trevor Varwig (57:33)
Definitely, Laravel is definitely really good to start out with if you're in a start out programming. It kind of gets you showing you what clean code is and how everything should be. Don't try to create your own thing because it's probably already out there and it probably works. But that's probably my tip for any new coders. Don't let AI write your code for you.
Definitely know what you're coding for sure. AI is a great assistant, but don't let it just have it right the whole thing for you.
Steven Fox (58:08)
Okay, cool.
Karl Murray (58:08)
Stay away from cursor. Otherwise, he will use Kali Linux to figure out how to hack your app and...
you
Trevor Varwig (58:19)
As long as you tell me it's okay.
Steven Fox (58:23)
man.
Karl Murray (58:24)
Alright, well this has been an awesome, awesome episode. Trevor, thanks so much for being on the show. And I'll see you at the next Houston meetup. It'll be fun.
Trevor Varwig (58:31)
Thank you for having me.
Awesome. Thank you.
Steven Fox (58:37)
That sounds great. Thank you, Trevor. For anybody listening, please feel free to like, subscribe, or leave us a comment. there's anything you'd like to ask a future interviewer or interviewee on the show, we'd be happy to do that for you. And I think that'll be all for now. So yeah, Trevor, once again. go ahead, Carl. What's up?
Karl Murray (58:53)
wait, wait, one last thing. One last thing. If you want to be on the show, send me an email. Carl at Carl dot dev K a R L dot at K a R L dot dev. And we can get you on the show. Right? Yeah, we should. I'm working on it. There's there's so many things to do. Yeah, there's so many things to write. Come on.
Steven Fox (59:06)
There you go. We should probably set up like a show specific email, but.
We're just developers. We don't know how to do that kind of stuff.
Trevor Varwig (59:19)
You
Steven Fox (59:22)
Hmm hmm hmm hmm hmm
Karl Murray (59:24)
I'm not Aaron Francis, I can't just build things because I want them to exist.
Steven Fox (59:27)
my god. Okay. And on that note, great episode. Catch you guys later.
Karl Murray (59:35)
Bye.