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In this inaugural episode of Voices of the Code, hosts Karl Murray and Steven introduce themselves and share their journeys into the world of Laravel and programming. They discuss their experiences at Laracon, the importance of community, and their shared passion for keyboards. The conversation also touches on their collaborative project, LaraBets, and their personal hobbies, including rock climbing and coffee roasting. The episode wraps up with insights on networking at tech conferences and plans for future episodes.
Takeaways
Voices of the Code aims to highlight lesser-known figures in the Laravel community.
Both hosts have unique journeys into programming, with Steven starting from a business need and Karl transitioning from retail.
Networking at events like Laracon is crucial for building community and collaboration.
The hosts share a passion for custom keyboards and their impact on productivity.
LaraBets is a fun project that combines predictions and betting in a light-hearted way.
Personal hobbies, such as rock climbing and coffee roasting, enrich the hosts' lives outside of coding.
The importance of community and shared experiences in the tech world is emphasized.
The hosts plan to bring on guests to share their stories and insights in future episodes.
Justin Jackson's involvement highlights the supportive nature of the tech community.
The hosts are committed to producing weekly episodes to engage with their audience.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Voices of the Code
03:05 Getting to Know the Hosts
06:05 The Journey into Laravel
12:00 The Keyboard Enthusiasts
18:03 Projects and Collaborations
23:59 LaraBets: A Fun Betting Project
30:01 Hobbies and Personal Interests
36:03 Networking at Laracon
40:58 Wrap-Up and Future Plans
Takeaways
Voices of the Code aims to highlight lesser-known figures in the Laravel community.
Both hosts have unique journeys into programming, with Steven starting from a business need and Karl transitioning from retail.
Networking at events like Laracon is crucial for building community and collaboration.
The hosts share a passion for custom keyboards and their impact on productivity.
LaraBets is a fun project that combines predictions and betting in a light-hearted way.
Personal hobbies, such as rock climbing and coffee roasting, enrich the hosts' lives outside of coding.
The importance of community and shared experiences in the tech world is emphasized.
The hosts plan to bring on guests to share their stories and insights in future episodes.
Justin Jackson's involvement highlights the supportive nature of the tech community.
The hosts are committed to producing weekly episodes to engage with their audience.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Voices of the Code
03:05 Getting to Know the Hosts
06:05 The Journey into Laravel
12:00 The Keyboard Enthusiasts
18:03 Projects and Collaborations
23:59 LaraBets: A Fun Betting Project
30:01 Hobbies and Personal Interests
36:03 Networking at Laracon
40:58 Wrap-Up and Future Plans
Creators & Guests
What is Voices of the Code?
Karl & Steven interview different members of the wider Laravel community.
Karl Murray (00:01)
Welcome to Voices of the Code. I'm your host, Karl Murray, and this is...
Steven (00:05)
I'm your co-host, Stephen.
Karl Murray (00:07)
Awesome. Okay, so this is gonna be kind an interesting first episode. Basically what we're going to do is we're just gonna kind of introduce each other, talk back and forth, and then the next episode will have a lot more structure. We have a lot more questions we can ask, and we can get some other perspectives in here. What do think?
Steven (00:26)
Yeah, absolutely. Why don't we kick things off by telling people what voices of the code is going to be all about.
Karl Murray (00:31)
Sure. So my thought for Voices of the Code was we have a lot of podcasts where we can meet Adam Wabbins, the Taylor Outwells, Aaron Francis's of the world, but we don't have a whole lot of the Stephen Foxes and Carl Murray's. So was kind of interested to get to meet those people. And that was kind of my whole thought was I wanted to go to the lesser known, the wider Laravel community and
Steven (00:50)
You
Karl Murray (01:00)
and get to talk to them and find out what's going on in their worlds. That's it.
Steven (01:04)
Yeah, totally. And I feel like Lercon was like a really good indicator for a lot of this because you just meet so many really cool people that are working on stuff that's all over the spectrum. And I think it'd be a lot of fun to have conversations with them to chat about all of that stuff. So some of it might be fairly technical. Sometimes it'll just be conversations about whatever with these guys. So it's to broaden the community experience.
Karl Murray (01:33)
Absolutely. So yeah, Stephen, tell me a little bit about yourself. What got you into writing code?
Steven (01:34)
Sounds good.
Sure, so about six years ago at this point, I actually acquired a little business called Backer Club. And to make a very long story short, I needed to basically redo the whole website. And so I chose Laravel to do that. And so at that time, I figured out how to do things. Thank you, Laracast and Jeffrey Way, predominantly to get me going.
Karl Murray (02:06)
Shout out to Jeffery Way.
Steven (02:09)
And yeah, so here we are six years later, still running the business and that's like my day to day. It doesn't take up all of my week at this point, but that is what got me into Laravel. The platform is based on Laravel serving like a restful API and like admin, the admin stuff and email sending. And then the front end is a Nuxt app.
And that's what got me into a lot of this. And that's sort of my background. And now there's a whole lot of other little side projects going on, which we can get into here in a minute. They really do. It's funny, as soon as you start to like meet cool people in this space, you're just like every week coming up with new little projects to work on. Some of them are like maybe viable business ideas. Others are just like,
Karl Murray (02:49)
They go all over the place, don't they? There's a lot of sprawl inside projects.
Steven (03:05)
I'd really like to do this for fun. Do you want to help me? Yeah, yeah, let's do it.
Karl Murray (03:08)
Right, right, right. And that's kind of how Stephen and I met. So I guess we can snap back to that one for a second. So everyone jokes about the secret chat that secretly ran all of LairCon, which I think is pretty funny. There were...
Steven (03:12)
You
Pretty much, yeah, there's like 150 something people in it or whatever.
Karl Murray (03:28)
Yeah, there's 150 people in a little joke about how they secretly ran all of Lericon. Like they were feeding Aaron questions to ask on stage. There was all kinds of really cool chaos that was happening back there. But it was really cool because it allowed us to like get to know each other long before Lericon. And that was like a week out. So we were getting to know each other and kind of getting interest and going, OK, who do we?
Who do we talk to? Who do we want to hang out with? What are the people that we want to try and collaborate with pretty early on, which is pretty cool. And funny part about that is there was an ongoing joke about this little project called Larabets that was like, bet you two beers or whatever at the local tavern if something new gets announced at Laricon.
And it became a joke where Bogdan actually was like, yeah, that sounds like a really good idea. And I jokingly said something like just off the cuff of like, yeah, buy the domain and I'll contribute. And like two seconds later, I got a text back from Bogdan. He was like, here's the domain. I'm like, OK, well, I guess this is real.
Steven (04:45)
And more off.
Karl Murray (04:50)
And we're off.
All right. So yeah, that's kind of where LyraBats came from. So inside information for you guys.
Steven (05:01)
Yeah, yeah. But yeah, and that's also how Carl and I met and now we've been hanging out a little bit off air. Everything from video games to other little projects. And now here we are bringing you guys Voices of the Code. So hopefully this goes well.
Karl Murray (05:16)
Yeah. By the way, if you guys are into Space Marine 2, ping Steven and we can add you to our little chaos group. It'd be fun.
Steven (05:25)
Yeah, every now and again there's three of us running around shooting aliens, so you know, it's a pretty fun time.
Karl Murray (05:34)
And one of us dying and the other one like going, I'll save them. Yeah, it's great. It's great.
Steven (05:36)
Yeah. So let me flip the tables a little bit on you here, Carl, and go ahead and introduce yourself and what got you into Laravel and then what you're doing as a day job today and other little stuff.
Karl Murray (05:43)
All right, let's go.
Sure. So, the fun thing I used to work in retail. I spent 13 years working in retail. Absolutely hated it. I'm not a, I'm not a, I'm not a sales person. I can do sales, but I'm not like, I don't like marketing. I don't like sales, which is ironic because I got into web development as a marketer. So was like, Hey, I'll help you build your website for,
Steven (06:05)
Well, glad you're not in it anymore.
okay.
Karl Murray (06:23)
500 bucks, which is kind of ironic. So I got out of retail because I hated doing sales only to do more sales. It's great. Now, when I started, I was doing like Adobe Muse, if anybody knows that product, which is basically a static site generator. Like you draw squares on a screen and then you go publish the server and that's it. There's no CSS, there's no writing code. It's just drawing squares on a screen.
Steven (06:42)
Okay.
Karl Murray (06:53)
Then that product disappeared like Adobe just said, no, we're not doing that anymore. So I went on to WordPress, which is really cool because it allowed me to do one thing that I didn't have with the static site generator like Adobe Muse, which is I had access to the database. I could store stuff in the database and loop over it and do all kinds of crazy cool stuff with it. And I got pretty well known in the
Steven (07:11)
Right.
Karl Murray (07:22)
What is it? What was that thing that everybody used back then? Divi. WordPress theme called Divi. And I was pretty well known in that Facebook group and I started asking questions that were frustrating me about WordPress. And one of the guys, this is a long winded way of saying this, but he, he messaged me because I was complaining about how hard it was to work with. And he was like, Carl, just
Steven (07:31)
Okay?
Karl Murray (07:52)
Write code. It's not hard. If you can learn Divi over a weekend, you can learn how to write code. Shout out to Thomas, by the way. He is still a really good friend of mine. We talk all the time. I actually flew out to North Carolina to go to his wedding. I was I've never met the guy. Yeah, I was in the Winston Salem area. up north. Very. OK, I need to stop meeting people from North Carolina on the Internet and hanging out with them.
Steven (08:08)
sweet. You were in my neck of the neighborhood. Yeah, like, OK, cool.
Cool, that's like an hour for me.
It's where the best folks are.
Karl Murray (08:23)
yeah, I'm moving next week there. We'll see.
Steven (08:27)
For listeners that don't know, Carl is in Texas.
Karl Murray (08:30)
Yeah, yeah. And a little Texas joke for you guys this morning. I was walking about four fifty three a.m. because of a stupid APB. Yeah. So anybody in Texas will get that joke. Everybody else would just be like, that's not funny. But you're welcome. Anyway, so Thomas was like, learn how to write code. It's like it's not hard. You've done this. You've got it. And so I was all right. Well.
Steven (08:46)
You
Karl Murray (08:57)
What language do I learn? He's like, well, you're already in the WordPress world. You might as well learn PHP. OK, so I wrote some PHP. I built my first website in it. It was a fair website that had a bunch of really complicated things because they did renting of like venues and stuff like that they had on the fairgrounds. So like you can go get married in a horse trap if you want. I was like, yeah, that's not my thing. But there are people who do. And so.
Steven (09:02)
Yeah.
Was this within like a framework or you just raw dogged it?
Karl Murray (09:26)
No, this is raw PHP, vanilla PHP. This is gonna snap back to Thomas really quickly and you're gonna laugh because it's really funny. So I built out this website and it took me like three months to build out. There was no authentication. It was just raw PHP and the ugliness that it came to. But I was having a lot of fun. I was learning a lot, having fun with it. So Thomas said, and I quote, if you're having fun with this and you wanna do it full time, you're gonna need to learn a framework.
but I'm not in the PHP world, so I can't help you. You're gonna need to find a framework yourself. So I did what everybody does. So went to YouTube, typed in best PHP frameworks, and Laravel community popped up multiple times. And so that is why I'm here. This would have been like 2018, 2019, 2017, 2019. Yeah, so it's like a 5.6 and 5.8.
Steven (10:12)
And sorry, what year would this have been, you think?
okay, so Laravel was mature. Yeah.
Karl Murray (10:25)
So I started learning with PHP or with Laravel 5.6 or 5.7 somewhere in that area and then like snapped into 5.8 and that's when I was like, okay, this release is out. I'm good. I'll start learning Laravel full time. And so my wife, she's crazy because I wouldn't have let her do this, but I stopped working. I stopped doing everything for six months and just taught myself Laravel. That was all I did for six months.
Steven (10:53)
nice.
Karl Murray (10:55)
so yeah, and did I mention that she was like seven months pregnant at the time? No big deal. So I'm a jerk. That's, that's, that's the short end of that. but now I've been at Fox world travel for about four and half, three and a half years pushing four years in March. And so yeah, that's, that's kind of where I'm at.
Steven (11:20)
Okay, wow. So retail to like basically WordPress and then raw dog and some PHP. And now you're into Laravel and you've been doing, you know, yeah, professional development work enterprise. Great. Yeah. At at Fox for a while. So that's super cool. Nice.
Karl Murray (11:27)
to WordPress.
Enterprise grade code.
Yep, that's Stephen, we have a really common interest and this is one that I feel like a lot of Laravel share a lot of Laravel members share, which is custom keyboards.
Steven (11:49)
What's up?
sure. I feel like anybody that's just like bashing on keys as their source of income and probably has got an opinion about keyboards. So.
Karl Murray (12:02)
For those
Yeah, I thought it was funny because a for those of you who are watching and listening, I didn't I didn't tell Stephen I was going to ask him that question, but I thought it was kind of funny to throw at him anyway. ironically, we have the same brand keyboard and it's not like a well known brand. So I thought that no.
Steven (12:28)
Yeah.
really, you don't think so? Well we have ZSA, so we have ZSA keyboards. I feel like ZSA is fairly well known, I mean like, I can't remember what they started with, like Ergodox and stuff, I thought got a decent amount of notoriety, and now with like the Moonlander and the new stuff.
Karl Murray (12:44)
Yeah, but they sell, yeah, but they sell like thousands of keyboards. I feel like most people would be like, cool, I have a Razer. They sell millions of keyboards.
Steven (12:53)
Yeah, yeah, my Apple keyboard does very well for me. Thank you.
Karl Murray (12:58)
Right, right, right, right. Is it Jeffrey Way that uses a standard Apple keyboard for everything? like...
Steven (13:03)
Yeah, but like he's got to have one that's quiet. So I feel like that's a totally different necessity, right? Meanwhile, I'm over here in my office by myself, so I get to make as much as I want.
Karl Murray (13:07)
Yeah, fair.
Right, fair, fair.
Sounds like music to me. I don't know what you guys are complaining about. Cool.
Steven (13:23)
But yeah, so yep, we've got our ZSA keyboards. I've spent a lot of time. yeah, there we go. I spent a lot of time updating my configuration so that, I don't know, it works really well for me with PHP Storm. Yes, I guess I'm an old school person and I still use PHP Storm as my editor of choice over.
Karl Murray (13:28)
Or ZSA if you're in the north.
Steven (13:50)
VS code or something else, but I do use Vim, so give me some credit.
Karl Murray (13:55)
Yeah, fair. That is another weird trait that Stephen and I both share that didn't realize. I also use PHP Storm for work, mostly because one of our legacy stacks still require us to upload files through FTP. Yeah, ow. So that's really not fun to do in VS Code. Yeah, we don't talk about it. So that's really hard to do in VS Code, so I still use PHP Storm for that.
Steven (14:11)
man.
We just won't talk about that one.
Karl Murray (14:25)
but I am actually switching back to VS Code from PHP Storm. And this is the part where I get the dagger stares from Steven as that knife twists in his side. So for me, it's about customization. Like I like getting rid of as much stuff off of the screen as physically possible and only calling it when I need it. And shout out to Kayla Porzio and the Make VS Code Awesome course.
Steven (14:35)
I just don't get it.
I just don't get it.
Karl Murray (14:55)
That does actually make VS code awesome. And so I was able to get rid of all the things that were driving me crazy and allowed me to easily switch back to VS code. So that's why I did it.
Steven (15:09)
So you must be really looking forward to the Laravel extension that was announced at Laricon.
Karl Murray (15:14)
Absolutely. So I'm actually doing this really cool thing right now where I don't install extensions as much as possible. Like I need the extensions that do things like syntax highlighting and Laravel, but the go-to's like all of those methods are now, I just don't have them yet. And I don't plan on installing anything until the Laravel extension comes out. So.
Steven (15:35)
Right.
Have you heard about I won't say it's a trend, but like, are you familiar with the Odin programming language? OK, well, there's this guy. actually can't remember what his real name is, but he goes by Ginger Bill, I believe, and he's the creator of Odin. Yeah. And I want to say I think you're the right guy. And like so like his thing that he's chatted about, I just saw this on the primogen via interview. And apparently Ginger Bill had like he turns off
Karl Murray (15:47)
I am not.
Okay, I do know that name.
Steven (16:09)
all language server provider stuff. It's like he has basically nothing. Like it's just, you know, I don't know if there's any, I don't even think he gets like auto-complete or anything. I mean, he is just like, but he said that it has turned him into like a better programmer because it's forced him to remember and utilize like, you know, the key methods and all of that type of stuff.
Karl Murray (16:11)
All LSPs.
So yeah, I have.
Steven (16:37)
So anyways, I find that really fascinating that I guess it's in you just saying that you're not doing extensions kind of makes me think of that. Like what would it be like to code in Laravel without any hinting or IntelliSense whatsoever? And like.
Karl Murray (16:49)
all right. I still have hinting. I still have IntelliSense because I'm not that level of Chad yet, but I am using them in both VS code and PHP storm. Yeah, there's just so many things that I can do that is so much easier to do with a keyboard. And I also am trying not to use the mass as much as possible. Like I I actually switch back to a trackpad.
Steven (17:00)
Yeah, I mean you've got to.
Karl Murray (17:16)
and the ZSA keyboards have a gap between them. So I actually have the trackpad in the middle of the two keyboard tabs. that I, instead of having to do the whole thing where you like your arms flex out to grab the mouse, it flexes in to touch the trackpad, which feels really, really nice to me, but I still trying not to use it.
Steven (17:35)
Interesting.
Right. Yeah, it's always funny whenever you're like as a developer, I just feel like you do get really good at using a keyboard for a lot of things. And then like I have a business partner with Backer Club and he's not a developer. So when we're like in our emailing system, like answering stuff together and we're on a screen share and I'm just watching him use his mouse for like almost everything he'll like use it for.
command C and command V to like copy paste stuff but like so many other things where I'm just like BOOM open up raycast do this hit this snippet blah blah blah blah blah I'm like he's gotta use a mouse
Karl Murray (18:14)
a coworker that's the same way. I have a coworker that's the same way. And the other day I got him to use his keyboard shortcut where he went back like one character at a time to select the entire word. I'm like, God, there's such a better way of doing this.
Steven (18:27)
Carl, I used to work with this guy. Super good guy, very talented with a camera. But when he would type, in order to make a capital first character for a sentence, or just anywhere that you needed a capital character, instead of holding shift and then hitting the character, he would tap caps lock, hit the character, and then turn caps lock off. And it was a...
Karl Murray (18:52)
the opposite. Okay, so my keyboard, my keyboard does not have a caps like you guys, it is gone. I don't have one.
Steven (18:57)
I don't have one either. I have a backspace where caps lock would normally be. So... Okay. Yeah, no. That's my backspace.
Karl Murray (19:04)
That is my control key. So for me, where caps lock would be is a control or... I'm going to hit myself for hating this. It's either a control key or an escape key. There we go.
Steven (19:17)
Okay, well don't hit it now because we're recording. So I don't want you to go bye bye.
Karl Murray (19:20)
Yes. No, no. It's either a control key or an escape key, depending on if I'm hitting extra keys.
Steven (19:28)
Okay, okay, cool. But yeah, funny stuff. It's just like, yeah, once you get really good with it, with and I'm not even like a guru on the keyboard, right? Like, but still you sort of hit like that level. And then you remember what like 99 % of the population, how they interact with a computer. And it's just like, it just, it feels so different.
Karl Murray (19:30)
So, yeah.
One of my coworkers, it's really funny. If you ask him what keyboard shortcut he just used, he can't tell you because his ErgoDocs is so messed up. Like he is completely like if he holds a certain letter, it's the same as like five keys all at once. I'm like, okay. But like, yeah. So he literally cannot tell you what keyboard shortcut he just used because it's like, I could be, I don't know. It's five keys. Who knows? It's insane.
Steven (20:04)
Like some complicated macro and stuff. Yeah
Good stuff.
Karl Murray (20:19)
He's good guy though. Just I would never get to his level. I'm not that good So yeah
Steven (20:29)
What's the next thing we want to talk about? Let's see, do I have any other projects going on that I would want to let people know about?
Karl Murray (20:35)
Well, you're several podcasts deep at this point. do know that.
Steven (20:40)
We're trying. We'll see if any of them get any traction. I'm doing one. The other main one is going to be with Shane Rosenthal and Simon Hamp. So it's all S's. We're calling it the bucket. And if you're a developer that uses AWS services, you might be able to figure out where that name is coming from. But I don't know. We'll see how it goes. I've been... Yes.
Karl Murray (21:05)
Toil alerts, S3, the bucket, ha ha, there you go.
Steven (21:10)
Okay, I've been trying to get them to do something for a while just because like we have good conversations and I was just always like, guys, why are we not just recording this and making it a podcast? And so we're finally making it happen. We'll see if it goes anywhere, but it has no particular theme. It's just three guys that are gonna talk about what we want to talk about. And so probably not gonna be quite as structured as what voices of the code will eventually be after this episode once we start having guests on, but we'll see.
Karl Murray (21:32)
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
Steven (21:39)
And yeah, we could chat a little bit about layer bets since we're both working on that.
Karl Murray (21:44)
Yeah, absolutely. So this week has been a lot of fun with Blair, but Stephen and I kicked it off Sunday. Yeah, I corrected the term this time. Last time I said it, I said that we had launched it and it was like, no, that's inaccurate. We kicked it off and I feel like the progress has gone pretty well. I rewrote Breeze using FlexUI, which I thought was pretty cool. Knocked that out in like the first
Steven (21:57)
NNNNGGGGHHH
Karl Murray (22:13)
day, which is pretty fantastic. Everything else would have taken me like a month to probably do and I probably would have scrapped it and said, screw it, we're sticking with Breeze and defaults for everything. that's gone. Steven, you've been working on something kind of interesting. You want to talk about that for a second within Lairbats?
Steven (22:27)
Right.
Sure. I okay. Yeah, again, refresher. The whole idea of Lara bats is we would have these occasions events where users would get some coins. So like no actual monetary involvement here. No, like it's all for fun. But anyways, you get these coins and then people could submit predictions of what they think and then others can participate and like, yes, I bet that that will or will not happen.
Karl Murray (22:48)
It's all for fun, guys. All for fun.
Steven (23:01)
And so I have been trying to figure out the math behind all of this and like the algorithms involved with placing bets, how that should change the quote unquote like markets inferred probability that the outcome will occur. Making that stuff fluctuate, ensuring like liquidity factors into the algorithms kind of makes sense and doing a lot of that. And I think
I think we're at a pretty good point for like a minimum viable product, and we're not trying to make this go as extreme as something like Polymarket where we're like a decentralized nature involved or anything like that. Like it's a lot simpler than that sort of an approach. But yeah, it's still, I think, going to be like a true I would call it more along like the sports betting realm of algorithms. And it's just like Lara Betts is the house.
And so we're going to be able to just like control kind of how like that stuff works. But it really it will be the placing of bets that dynamically changes and calculates what future bets will cost for people. Hopefully you would reach some sort of like a stable outcome and a perfect market. But like, mean, it's going to be ridiculous predictions anyway. Like, how do you really know how many times VS code is going to appear on a speaker's screen? But
Regardless, it'll be fun and it'll like actually work, I think. So we'll see. We'll see. Stay tuned.
Karl Murray (24:34)
So one crazy question for you. How much of this terminology did you know before Sunday, before we rolled into this conversation?
Steven (24:42)
Yeah, zero, zero. We literally kicked it off on on Sunday, like in the middle of the stream. I'm like trying to figure out if any of this stuff is even remotely viable. And then throughout this week, I've just been trying to get caught up because like I'm not a betting guy to begin with. So I don't even know, the sports betting lingo, really. I mean, I think there's like over under and yeah, like the spread and you know, stuff like that. And
Karl Murray (25:05)
right? Sports? What are those?
Steven (25:12)
We're not even doing like a true order book, right? This isn't going to be like user A wants to sell shares of a bet to user B. It's just like we're just going to let people place the bets that they want to and the house provides like virtually unlimited liquidity in a way. Sort of like how you can place a bet for roulette at a casino. And it's just like you get to choose that you want to call a bet on red and like
that just happens. You don't have to buy that bet from somebody else in the casino type of a thing. anyway, don't want to go too far down that rabbit hole. I really hope it'll shoot myself in the foot by saying that it's like kind of work in this way. And then we never actually get there. But I'm feeling, you know, like approximately 72.3 % good about this. So we should get there.
Karl Murray (25:52)
Yeah.
It doesn't do that and then it turns around does it.
We should. And we do have a very crazy goal of doing this and getting it live before LericonAU, which is what, four weeks away, five weeks away?
Steven (26:19)
Yeah, I was actually gonna have to talk to you about that. I was gonna do this off air, but why not just do it right now? I'm a little nervous about that launch timeline because I was thinking like, in order for people to actually benefit or to really use LaraBets in the way it's intended, they kind of need to be placing their bets before the event. Yeah, so like they would actually need to get onto the platform today so they can be placing bets over the next whatever until like...
Karl Murray (26:24)
Yeah, let's go.
now. Yeah. So.
Yeah...
Steven (26:47)
I don't know, probably most predictions you would have to close like the day of the event starting maybe for some predictions it actually had to be earlier than that.
Karl Murray (26:56)
That would have been a good idea to think about Sunday. Maybe we can get a beta out next couple of weeks.
Steven (26:59)
Yeah.
Okay, look, I think realistically, we'll shoot for something people could halfway use with Lerocon AU as like a proof of concept. And then I feel like the first real utilization of Lerobets will be possible for Lerocon EU, which is in February. Right, so it gives us a little bit more time to actually like polish things, making sure it's working, let people know about it. And then they can be, yeah.
Karl Murray (27:21)
Okay, yeah.
out if there's market interest. If there's no interest, then we're spinning our wheels on nothing.
Steven (27:33)
Yeah, yeah, But yeah, and then letting people submit their predictions and place some bets like in January leading up to Lericon EU. I mean, I think I have, I think that's when Lericon EU is, we will find out here in just a second.
Karl Murray (27:47)
yeah, that's a... Yeah,
Steven (27:51)
Yeah, February 3rd, 4th, so perfect. Like we would need to get it out by or like polished by the beginning of January so that people can be using it for the month leading up to it.
Karl Murray (28:02)
Okay, so new timeline is we have a beta for AU.
Steven (28:09)
Yeah, maybe like an alpha.
Karl Murray (28:11)
Okay, fine. And Alpha will have a pilot for AU and then beta for EU and then see if there's still intercept for EU.
Steven (28:16)
Yeah.
Yeah. And I mean, this is really what like, Carla, this is like a portfolio project. This isn't even like something that's going to be huge or anything.
Karl Murray (28:26)
All right, so we're gonna commit it.
Yeah.
You say that we're going to get a call from Taylor and he's like, Hey, so this project you're working on is pretty cool. Like let's keep rolling with it. Here's a couple of dollars to keep working on it.
Steven (28:44)
I would say if we're lucky, he'll like offer to host it on Lericod Cloud as a sponsorship and that'll be the extent of it.
Karl Murray (28:53)
If we're lucky, we'll get a shout out on stage of him going, Hey, by the way, if you're on Lara bats, VS code, VS code, VS code.
Steven (29:00)
my god. Yeah. So anyway, that's where we are with our bets. We'll see if that continue. Carl and I are interested in contributors. So like we can't make it open source, but we are happy to get people involved that have access to Flux and whatnot. So if you're in that pool or you're just kind of interested in even giving us, you know, conceptual feedback and stuff like that.
Karl Murray (29:24)
feedback getting early beta access or alpha access? Absolutely. If you are a project manager and love writing linear tickets, let me know. There are people out there, there are people I know that are like, I love writing JIRA tickets. I'm like, you're insane, but all right, here you go. So yeah, if you're one of those types of people,
Steven (29:30)
Just let us know.
Karl Murray (29:51)
ping one of us on Telegram or if you know our phone numbers or discords or whatever, send us an email, whatever. We're interested in your feedback.
Steven (30:01)
Totally, totally. So is there anything else? Let's see, we're at 30 minutes. We'll probably go ahead and wrap this up pretty soon. there anything else interesting we could chat about ourselves?
I mean, man, there's a lot going on. just don't know if like,
Karl Murray (30:17)
What's your most fun hobby? The hobby that is most interesting to you? Alright, let's go there. Rock climbing.
Steven (30:20)
I'm into
I'm into rock climbing.
That's my family's jam. Yeah, we've already got our little three year old. I mean, he's not even three yet. He's like started rock climbing when he was, shoot. mean, we have a wall in our house. Yeah. I mean, it's nothing big. It's like literally we have a playroom that's like the room above our garage. And it's sort of got this like A-frame construction for this.
Karl Murray (30:39)
wow.
sounds a lot like my house.
Steven (30:56)
for the ceiling. And so I was just like, you know, I bet I could whack some plywood up on the wall and put some bolts on it. And so literally it goes up and over the roof and then back down and we just climb on it. Anyways, we got our littlest one on the wall. mean, mean, like shortly after he could stand, like we would just let him play around. And now like a year and a half later, you know, he can actually like climb and he weighs just enough to do the auto belays.
Karl Murray (31:10)
That's pretty cool.
Steven (31:25)
That's the thing where like you can self hook into it. It goes up and then it lowers you slowly. They have like a 20 pound minimum weight limit or something around that ballpark and he's like just under 30. So he gets to use that and he can actually go like halfway up the tall walls at our local gym and have fun with that stuff. But it's like our, it's our family hobbies. Our closest friends we met through climbing. It's actually a really good.
Karl Murray (31:45)
That is awesome.
Steven (31:52)
community like it's just really nice people that do it and It's like a fantastic way to combine exercise problem-solving And being social like all in one Setting so anyways, how about you Carl? What's what's your jam?
Karl Murray (32:09)
Awesome. That's awesome. Guitars. I've been playing since I was 12 years old. So I've been doing it for a really, really, really long time.
Steven (32:14)
Guitars. Sweet.
Is there a particular genre that you focus on?
Karl Murray (32:27)
yeah, I'm a huge fan of like David Gilmore from Pink Floyd and, Tempe Taranishi from Thrice. Like there's a bunch of, it's kind of all over the place cause, but it's a bunch of different like rock type bands, from various genres that are pretty cool. so I'm kind of all over the place. I've even tried to do some slip knot at some point and that was just like, no, I'm good. my hands don't work that well.
Steven (32:33)
Okay.
Well, maybe maybe in some episode, we'll just have you like interject with a little rift and I'll put you on the spot.
Karl Murray (33:06)
Just cut you off. Just cut you off and play something. That'd be pretty funny. All right.
Steven (33:11)
Yeah. So if you randomly hear a guitar in a future episode of Voices of the Code, you'll know it was Carl Jamming on something.
Karl Murray (33:19)
It'll just be like me jumping on stage and going, doodledoo, and in comes Steven. That would be pretty funny. All right.
Steven (33:25)
Yeah, yeah. I'm also into, I'm kind of a foodie, but like not in the traditional sense. Like I'm a weirdo.
Karl Murray (33:32)
Are we like the custom like weird types of tools for cooking or like utensils or is it like?
Steven (33:40)
yeah, I'm definitely a gadget guy. we have every kitchen utensil you could pretty much possibly imagine. Like, damn near a commercial kitchen in our house. But yeah, I'm like a weirdo. I roast my own coffee, which...
Karl Murray (33:53)
Me too. This is there's a coffee shop around there. Well, I don't roast my own. I buy roasted beans, but they freshly brew them like that day. So yeah, lots of
Steven (34:05)
Yep, no, literally in my kitchen I have a commercial grade sample roaster. Like...
Karl Murray (34:11)
Okay, so I'm going to Stephen's house. The next episode will probably be there.
Steven (34:16)
Yeah, so that's kind of wild. My wife just like got me going on that. She was like a random Christmas gift one year and she was trying to figure out what to get me. They'd be a little surprise. Like we try to do that every year. It's like the normal list and then it's like, okay, what's something I could just sort of surprise you with you didn't ask for? And like I can't remember how many years ago it was, but she just like got me this little hand roaster. had to do over an open flame.
It like this little ceramic thing for like, I don't know, 40 bucks or something off of Amazon. I was like, wow, this is kind of fun. I quickly got off of that because I was like burning my hand and stuff. But then I got myself, yeah, like a very entry level little electric convective heat one. And then from there, it just kind of kept getting worse and worse. And now I'm like, I have like my in-game, like this is my fourth roaster. I will never need.
Karl Murray (34:51)
and just became a hobby then.
Steven (35:14)
anything better. But it's a lot of fun. like, I guess eventually it would pay for itself because I can I can basically get green coffee beans for between like half to one quarter of the cost of roasted. So if I'm like, if I'm drinking coffee that wouldn't I get like because it's so much cheaper for me to do it, I can get coffee that at a store would be 40 plus dollars a pound.
It's like really gourmet coffee, but it only cost me $10 a pound. So it's like only slightly above Starbucks, you know, price levels.
Karl Murray (35:51)
Right, you can get two cups of Starbucks for one price or you can go home and roast your own coffee and spend an hour doing it. Yeah.
Steven (35:56)
Yeah. So about once a month I break out my roaster and I roast my stuff. And I'm really into pizza. I like my Neapolitan pizzas. so we, I go pretty all out on like dough and our sauce and stuff like that.
Karl Murray (36:03)
My
So Stephen's next side project is building an app where you can buy his roasted beans.
Steven (36:19)
I hear there's this thing called like a group of guys that do they sell coffee in the terminal?
Karl Murray (36:23)
isn't there this company that... Yeah, what the heck is that? Terminal.shop, by the way. They were there. It was pretty cool. Did you meet the Primogen while you were there or...?
Steven (36:28)
I don't know, is that Laircon?
I mean super freaking briefly like I didn't get to have a full blown conversation.
Karl Murray (36:39)
He, all right, I'm gonna go on a quick tie rant here. He is the coolest guy I've ever seen. If you watch his YouTube videos or watch him on Twitch, he's goofy, but he's genuine. Like everything about him is like, go out and do that. Go bet on yourself, go do your thing. That is legitimately his vibe everywhere.
Steven (37:05)
Yeah. Yeah.
Karl Murray (37:07)
I was talking to him, was like, hey, I'm a Laravel developer, I write PHP, but I'm also interested in doing stuff in Rust and Golang because of your YouTube videos and stuff. And he's like, do it. Absolutely. I'm an idiot. He's the coolest guy because of that. He'll just be like, I'm an idiot, if I can learn it, then you got this. it's like, he is not. He is very intelligent guy.
Steven (37:20)
Yeah.
He's totally not an idiot, but.
Karl Murray (37:37)
Okay, so the key takeaway here I guess is go to a lyricon these people are just walking around Like I bumped into Taylor out well like 50 times the guy is just everywhere Aaron Francis everywhere Adam Lavin was just standing in the middle of the room waiting for people to walk up to it was pretty cool Caleb Porzio Right, right
Steven (37:56)
Yeah, plus like 900 other people that you might not know their names, but they're totally worth meeting. So.
Karl Murray (38:03)
Absolutely. mean, I meant to meet Stephen Fox at Lercon, but apparently he's hard to find.
Steven (38:10)
We became aware of each other because of...
Karl Murray (38:13)
Fair enough, fair enough. But like, yeah, there's not only the big names that are walking around that you can actually talk to and like ask questions to, but there's like people that are walking around that have a very different background from you. And you can be like, hey, so where do you work? What do you do? And the coolest part is you guys always have something in common. You can just be like, hey, what got you into Laravel? And that conversation starts itself. So go to a Laricon. It's 100 % worth it.
Steven (38:38)
Totally.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's nice too, as like an introvert, you realize you're around a thousand other introverts. So it's like easier to break the ice because you know nobody else wants to do it either.
Karl Murray (38:44)
and.
Right. But it's kind of this weird thing, at least I noticed, is you see people walking around and eventually you lock eyes with that person and you just walk in and start talking. I don't know how it works, but it's just like you're walking around and you're like, all right, you look interesting. Let me go ask you a question. I don't know how it works. It's the weirdest thing to me. But there was also that Telegram chat where people were like, hey, I'm over here if you guys want to meet up. I'm over here if you want to meet up.
Steven (39:23)
Yeah. Yeah, honestly, and those were like some of the best. I mean, like the people I'm staying in touch with quite a bit from Larry Conner, the people that I just got like, you know, a beer with before one of the or not before an event, but like before the day of the event, I guess it was like Monday night and we just all met up at like one of the local breweries and like it's nice having those conversations between eight, 10, 12 people.
Because once the event really starts, there's like 900 people in the room, or even the after party, there's hundreds, and very loud, and so it's hard to have very lengthy conversations with some people. So I just really enjoyed the dinners and the lunches and stuff like that, where you get to kind of break off and hang out with specific people for a little while.
Karl Murray (40:14)
There's also some pretty funny moments that happen. Me and my coworker are sitting in the fourth row, right in front of the stage on the right side, and we had an empty chair next to us. This is gonna be a really funny story, but I'll go ahead and say it anyway. So we're sitting there, there's an empty chair next to us, and this guy just walks up and plops down next to us. like, hey, is this seat taken? And he's cool, he's really funny, he's kinda goofy.
And he's just like having a good old time. I'm like, yeah, man, go ahead. Have a seat. He's like, thanks, thanks, thanks. And you want to you want to ask me who that person was? It's really funny. It was Justin Jackson.
Steven (40:51)
So Carl, who was that person?
No. This I was about to say, we don't have like a technically traditional sponsor for this show, but Justin Jackson.
Karl Murray (40:58)
So transistor FM, everyone.
Justin Jackson from Transistor FM is actually technically sponsoring this on, or they're hosting it for us. So yeah.
Steven (41:13)
Yeah, so thank you, Justin. He was actually, see, he was actually one of the people that was at the brewery that night on Monday night. Yeah, he just, he showed up and yeah, cool.
Karl Murray (41:16)
Absolutely, Justin, you're amazing.
Really? Yeah.
He's a really cool guy. If you guys ever get a chance to meet him, he's he's like every freaking tech conference I've ever heard of. Like he posted the other day. He's like, yeah, I'm at next JS con. And I'm like, the heck is that? Didn't even know that was a thing. He's like, yeah, I'm here. I'm like, OK. So, yeah. All right, that's going to wrap it up for us.
Steven (41:29)
super nice.
Yeah, he was super nice. He was super nice. All right.
Yeah, that sounds good. I think that was a, we're at a good point and next week, we're gonna try to do this show weekly, right? I think that's the plan.
Karl Murray (41:59)
Yeah, the plan is weekly. My goal is to try and get, think, and don't quote me on this, but I think it's gonna be Alex Six from Thillo. So I'll try to reach out to Alex and see if he's good to do next week.
Steven (42:09)
Okay.
That sounds good.
But yeah, we'll figure out a guest and we will bring them to you. And we'll start chatting with a bunch of the really cool people in the Laravel community that you might not have heard of.
Karl Murray (42:31)
Absolutely. All right, see you guys next week.
Steven (42:33)
That sounds good. See you later, Carl.