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The Laravel Podcast is brought to you by Tighten, your friendly neighborhood Laravel experts. Check us out at tighten.com and also by other sponsors you will hear about later in the episode.
Matt Stauffer kicks off Season 8 of The Laravel Podcast with longtime friend Eric Barnes, creator of Laravel News, in a wide-ranging conversation that wanders well beyond code.
They talk about how Eric learned sales on a motorcycle dealership floor, running a business with Profit First, and how Laravel News is changing now that AI has taken away search traffic. Eric argues that editorial curation still matters. They also announce their new project, PHPNews , and Matt makes the case that PHP is the best ecosystem for LLM-driven development.
Along the way, they dig into building a low-stress life, celebrating your wins, and why success really comes down to time.
- Matt Stauffer on X - https://x.com/mattstauffer
- Eric Barnes's Website - https://ericlbarnes.com/
- Laravel News - https://laravel-news.com/
- 2020 Episode with Eric Barnes - https://laravelpodcast.com/episodes/learning-keeping-up-to-date-with-eric-barnes
- Eames Lounge Chair - https://www.eamesoffice.com/product/eames-lounge-chair-and-ottoman/
- Profit First Book - https://mikemichalowicz.com/profit-first/
- YNAB - https://www.ynab.com/
- PHP News - https://phpnews.net/
- Laravel Twitter - https://twitter.com/laravel
- Laravel Website - https://laravel.com/
- Tighten Website - https://tighten.com/
----- Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten - https://tighten.com/
Big thanks to the companies that support the show:
Flare by Spatie - http://flareapp.io and Performance Monitoring - http://flareapp.io/performance-monitoring
Creators and Guests
What is The Laravel Podcast?
The Laravel Podcast brings you Laravel and PHP development news and discussion.
Matt Stauffer:
Hello
and welcome back to the first episode. It's not even welcome back. Welcome to the first episode of Laravel Podcast, season eight. I'm your host, Matt Stouffer, CEO of Tighten. And this season I'm bringing members and friends of Laravel community to talk about what's on their minds this week. My guest today is my dear old friend, Eric Barnes, creator of Laravel News. Eric, I have so many things we were talking beforehand, and I was like, wait, she's just putting that in podcast. So I've got like four things queued up. But first, say hi to the people, tell them who you are, let them hear that beautiful southern accent.
Eric Barnes:
I love it. so I want to say first of all, thank you, Matt, for having me on the show. It's been eight seasons, and this is the first time I've been invited. So I'm I'm not gonna throw you under the bus, but I appreciate
Matt Stauffer:
No way. Is it really?
Eric Barnes:
you finally getting me on here. I think so. I think so. but I don't launch anything, you know, because like I'm I'm the news guy. Like I'm just here
Matt Stauffer:
Really? I mean yeah I b jeeze. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Eric Barnes:
and you know, people read the stuff, but it's like I'm never launching products, I'm never doing the other stuff.
this other stuff. I'm just kinda working on my little business trying to, you know, support the family. So
Matt Stauffer:
No, you are on the Laravel podcast,
April 28th, 2020, learning and keeping up to date with Eric Barnes. I was like, I'm the worst friend ever.
Eric Barnes:
Dang. Dang. Maybe maybe
that's where maybe that's where I got this cup
Matt Stauffer:
That's why you got sitting here holding the Laravel podcast mug that only Laravel podcast guests can get.
Eric Barnes:
I thought you I thought you gave that to me at some point, like at a conference or something. So, you know. Wait the
Matt Stauffer:
Nope.
Eric Barnes:
other interesting thing, that was actually the day before my birthday, that one came out. So there you go. That was that's amazing. Yeah, I totally forgot. Bad.
Matt Stauffer:
Was it really? I love that. See, look at that. Also, April
2020, that was a time. So.
Eric Barnes:
Yeah. That was before
AI. That was back when the it was the in the simpler times of our lives.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
I mean what I was saying is COVID, but you're right. It was a d very different time and you know, 'cause April twenty twenty like right when COVID was hitting, 'cause it was like March April twenty twenty. But yeah, you're right. We
Eric Barnes:
Yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
we we hadn't heard of Claude, Jev, I'm trying to name them all off. I don't even know. Open AI, none of those existed. Okay, so that was season four. Orbs, yeah. that was
Eric Barnes:
Yep yeah. AMP code orbs. Yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
season four, which I think was the one where I wanted to cover yeah, so I wanted to cover like
All the various things. So like one was about routing and one of those about views and one was about debugging. And the number one episode of that podcast was The Ethos of Laravel with Taylor Otwell. And then number two, I guess number one was intro, but the number two real interview was learning and keeping up to date with Eric Barnes. So not only were
Eric Barnes:
I love that.
Matt Stauffer:
you on the podcast, but you were like big dog, you know, big
Eric Barnes:
Mm.
Matt Stauffer:
man on around town of the podcast. So
Eric Barnes:
I like that. I like that. Maybe maybe it's because I have the news I could market it better than the other people that you interviewed. You g you gotta think about these.
Matt Stauffer:
Exactly. Okay, so there's so many
things we talked about that weren't even a part of our plan. And I'm sorry to those of you who are not listening because we're gonna talk video for a second. Eric, you have a beautiful background. I feel like there was a time where you rented out a co-working space and you set a whole setup there, and I think you're back in your house now, am I right?
So what what's the story
Eric Barnes:
That is correct. Yeah, I did
Matt Stauffer:
there?
Eric Barnes:
yeah, so so a new co-working space opened up. It's like an old, you know, like warehouse downtown, downtown Gastonia, which is a city I live in. and I was like, I've never had a real office. I've worked remote basically my whole entire life. So I was like, I'm gonna go
Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm.
Eric Barnes:
set me up my own recording studio. bought rent up little office. You know, it was pretty small, it was actually smaller than this office. got all this lighting, all this equipment, got it set up, and then I absolutely hated.
driving to the office. It's only like four minutes. Four
Matt Stauffer:
How far was the drive? Yeah.
Eric Barnes:
minutes, five minutes. I was like, this I don't even want to go. Like you gotta get up. You gotta get ready.
Matt Stauffer:
Like to put pants on? Like what is this?
Eric Barnes:
Yeah. Yeah. And then I would get there and then it would be like I there was a person in the office beside me and they did like sales calls all day long. So it was like I kept hearing it in my voice or in my ear all day and I was like, why am I paying for this? I d I don't enjoy it. So moved
Matt Stauffer:
This ain't it. Yeah.
Eric Barnes:
everything back here and now I'm back in my home office which I've been in for
Man, since two thousand ten or something like that. So it's it's been great. I I like it. I like it here. I can just
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. okay.
Eric Barnes:
come down and get him all
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, so the next question about your office. So I was telling you that I'm so my wife set up Imani set up this really nice lighting setup in my office with all these beautiful designs. And I was telling that I like, I kind of want to move towards something a little bit more natural. Like she set me up very cinematically. and I I still want cinematic, but I want cinematic like maybe less purple and everything like that. And I'm looking at your setup. What what do you have for those who those of us who nerd about lighting?
What you have going on for your lighting? I know you have those three practicals in the back, but what's actually facing you?
Eric Barnes:
so I have the big it's called like amaron,
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
Eric Barnes:
with a humongous light dome with
Matt Stauffer:
Okay.
Eric Barnes:
the little mesh things on it. 'cause apparently, according to YouTube, the bit the bigger the light, the better it flows on your face. You know, because if you get a small light, it's like it's a hard spot. Yeah, exactly.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. And so the dome kind of distributes it. Yeah.
Eric Barnes:
Mm looks more like the sun coming on you. and then
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, like mine.
Eric Barnes:
And then behind me, yeah, I have those little lights, but I actually have a secret light over here, which is like one of those big ring lights.
Matt Stauffer:
Mm.
Eric Barnes:
and I have it pointed at the bookcase to get that part even more lighted. So that's basically
Matt Stauffer:
Okay.
Eric Barnes:
my only light. I only have one light and then just a backfill. So I don't have anything off to this side.
Matt Stauffer:
I can't believe that you're so
well lit. Yeah. You're the the fact that you're so well it must just be 'cause so mine mine is probably like f four feet by four feet, which f to me feels huge, but it's probably smaller than than yours. And it feels like it's much more direct. So I might be
Eric Barnes:
Yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
fiddling with my lights while we're talking because I wanna look like Eric Eric Barnes.
Eric Barnes:
And mine I do have it up here. Like, you know, it's not direct, but it it's
Matt Stauffer:
Yours is up a little higher. Mm-hmm.
Eric Barnes:
really high at pointing down. and I guess that gives the shadows
Matt Stauffer:
Okay. I might try that.
Eric Barnes:
and stuff on on the side of your face. and then
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. All right. My other question was of the chair sorry, go ahead.
Eric Barnes:
wait, no no, I was gonna say before we get jump off that, the other important thing I bought was for my camera, I bought a mist filter and that actually helps smooth out all your skin and everything, and it just automatically
Matt Stauffer:
Really?
Eric Barnes:
happens. Yeah.
And they're not that expensive.
Matt Stauffer:
I S T?
Eric Barnes:
Yeah, yeah, I think. Or Y S D is Yeah. And
Matt Stauffer:
Mist filter.
Eric Barnes:
you get it's just like small, it's like one eighth or something, whatever the smallest number is. And that made it actually makes a huge difference in just the quality of my picture coming out.
Matt Stauffer:
Never heard of that. I know that Ian Landsman was talking about filters for a little bit, so All right. okay.
Eric Barnes:
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
So now I want to ask about your chair. I hope you don't mind because
Eric Barnes:
Okay.
Matt Stauffer:
I know that those are those are coveted items. is it called
Eric Barnes:
Yes.
Matt Stauffer:
Ames? Is that what it's called?
Eric Barnes:
It's E A E S Eams. I call it Eams, but I I'm, you know, it's one of those things I stay at home and don't talk to anybody that has
Matt Stauffer:
Eams? Yeah. Nobody actually knows
Eric Barnes:
one. So it's a it's an Eames Lounger. it's actually back here in this corner. And I
Matt Stauffer:
It's so nice.
Eric Barnes:
I bought that for myself. So if if you're not aware, they're like one of these like old timey minimal but awesome chairs.
Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm.
Eric Barnes:
And so I bought it for myself when
There was something, something happened. Might have been the biggest contract I've ever sold, you know, in Laravel for Laravel News advertising
Matt Stauffer:
Uh-huh.
Eric Barnes:
or something like that. And because like I know one guy who when he launches products, I think it actually might be Taylor, when he launches products, every time he launches a new product, he buys himself a little gift. That way he has
Matt Stauffer:
cool.
Eric Barnes:
memories of launching that. So that was my theory behind this. And I always wanted one, I think it looks sweet, so I bought it.
Matt Stauffer:
It does look sweet. It is funny that you're like
you wanna have a memory and you're like, I don't know what the memory is, but I remember I did something good, so
Eric Barnes:
I did.
And I I and I have a lot of memories of sitting there reading and I like it.
Matt Stauffer:
that's awesome.
okay. So I actually interrupted you when you're in you're introducing yourself because your introduction included saying that you'd never been on the podcast and then I had to prove that you'd been
Eric Barnes:
Yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
to podcast before. So if if for some reason somebody's eight seasons into this episode and is in the Laravel world and doesn't know Eric Barnes, how do you introduce yourself when you meet somebody on the street who doesn't know about, you know, our world?
Eric Barnes:
my gosh. So I have actually adjusted because I would always tell people I run a news and media website for a for a programming language framework. And they're like, I
Matt Stauffer:
Okay, that makes sense.
Eric Barnes:
d I don't know what a framework is. I don't know what a programming
Matt Stauffer:
Uh-huh.
Eric Barnes:
language is. And I don't so then it's like, so then I'll go through that and then 99% of the time they're like, I don't know any of this. So then I'm like, okay, I basically sell advertising. And they're like, okay, I understand. And that's really what it boils down to. You know, at the end of the day, I make money from advertising. So
Matt Stauffer:
That's the part you get paid for, right? Uh-huh.
Eric Barnes:
That's technically my g my real job is to make money, but I do this. So
Matt Stauffer:
Hilarious. And
that's so funny because, like, obviously, nobody's well, that's not true because you sell advertising for other things, too. I was gonna say nobody's paying for your ads unless you're doing the thing that you used to tell people, right? You're running a media empire. But I'm like, you also sell other ads. So yeah. and you're
Eric Barnes:
Mm-hmm.
Matt Stauffer:
particularly good at it as well, which I feel like one of the things we talk about a lot is like people in our community, very well, not people in developers in general.
are full of ideas and not full of the ability to market those ideas, right? Like it's the if you build it they will come and then you build it and they don't come and it turns out you need to know how to kind of sell things to people. How did you get good at sales and marketing?
Eric Barnes:
Actually it's funny 'cause it goes back to nineteen ninety eight and yes.
Matt Stauffer:
No way. Some many
of our listeners were not alive in nineteen ninety eight, to be clear.
Eric Barnes:
Exactly,
exactly. And that that sort of reminds me of the meme that was going around a few weeks ago. It was like what I looked like at twenty one and I opened my camera roll and it only went back to twenty twenty six or tw two thousand six when I was getting
Matt Stauffer:
yeah. Yep.
Eric Barnes:
married. So yeah, I've I don't have all the memories. All I have is memories from th those days.
Matt Stauffer:
I don't either. Uh-huh. Yeah.
Eric Barnes:
but so my parents owned a motorcycle dealership. and we raced motorcycles my whole life leading up, you know, and then got out of high school or actually in high school, I was like, Well, I'll go work at the shop. So I was
in the parts department, tried the service. I don't like to work on stuff, so got out of there. And
Matt Stauffer:
Okay.
Eric Barnes:
then after I graduated, I moved over to the sales department. And so I've been selling, I was sold motorcycles for like three years. And then so that's probably what built up the sales inside, you know, like how to do it and all that stuff. of course it was a lot different time than you it's not like a car dealer. Like it's there's no hard sale the way we did it.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. So I was gonna ask, are you on a
are you on a a f floor and you when somebody walks in you kind of step up and say, Hey, can I help you s buy this? or what was the sales process like? Okay.
Eric Barnes:
Yeah, I mean, see ours was like
real small mom and pop. You would walk in, I'd let you browse, and then I would just walk up to you and be like, Hey, you know, I'm I'm Eric, I'm the sales guy. You know, if you need anything, you just let me know. I don't you know, I won't bother you, you just do your own thing. and then, you know, five or ten minutes later I'd come up again, I'd be like, Hey, you got any questions about anything? You know, I'm happy to answer them, whatever. And that was basically it. That was that was your whole like cold pitch and it worked probably ninety percent of the time. So it was great.
Matt Stauffer:
Wow.
Eric Barnes:
And so that was that's basically how I got into sales.
Matt Stauffer:
Do you
feel like that's like your natural personality? Like 'cause I feel like there's some people if you were to drop in that situation and they would not feel comfortable with it. And I always think of you as this very charismatic, very personable person. But now I'm like, is that something you've always been or is that something you kind of like built in response to that?
Eric Barnes:
No, I'm I'm the traditional nerd introvert, like don't want to talk to anybody. I grew up like I grew up with basically no friends till like high school. And like I d no, I
Matt Stauffer:
I c I don't believe it. I don't believe it.
Eric Barnes:
talked I talked to zero people and I feel like now looking back that that was actually a catalyst in my career and life was being made to
Matt Stauffer:
Interesting.
Eric Barnes:
be uncomfortable and learning you know, learning those skills to get out and be like, you know.
These people are just people. Like they're either gonna talk to you or they're gonna be like, Leave me alone, go away. And it's like
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
Eric Barnes:
that's that's the only two results. And most of the time people are kinda nice, so it it works out.
Matt Stauffer:
Wow. I never,
ever, ever would have pegged you as somebody who was not like I think about five year old Eric and I'm like, five year old Eric walks into a grocery store and meets every single person on the grocery store
Eric Barnes:
No.
Matt Stauffer:
and has made friends with them. What?
Eric Barnes:
No, I I didn't even t like my mom would like, No, like you would s you was like three and four years old and you would just be in your room playing by yourself for hours and like we'd have to just come find you 'cause you didn't wanna be around people and all this stuff. It was yeah, it was a whole different world back then.
Matt Stauffer:
No idea. I really I really I've known you for over a decade and I had no idea. All
Eric Barnes:
Yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
right. I did also Google, I just happen to have this open. It is is Eames chair. You were right. It's an Eames chair.
Eric Barnes:
yeah, Eames
Matt Stauffer:
so I love this idea. Going back to this idea of like getting a thing to celebrate. I really love the idea. And it's something that I'm terrible at. I'm terrible at celebrating myself. Imani and I talk all the time about the fact that we you you have this vision, you have this dream to do the thing.
And then when you do it, rather than saying, wow, sitting back at that moment that you've accomplished it, it's just sort of like you're immediately on to what the next goal is. Like you don't even have that ability to just kind of rest in the joy of it. so we recently did have like made a financial milestone and forced ourselves to set aside a budget of a little bit to get like a little bit of jewelry if you know, a little bit for each of us. And it's not some massive amount or some kind of crazy thing we never would have spent, but it's just like a little thing. And I we were in Savannah the other week and went into a
A consignment jewelry store, and we were like looking at these things, knowing we would never afford them. And I'm like, wait a minute, we set aside this little chunk of money to get them. And so basically forced ourselves to do it by having set those side because we knew we weren't going to do it otherwise. And so we got her a little ring. I got this new chain that I'm wearing, and it just every time I see it, I'm just like, wow, you need to celebrate that you're doing these things and
Part of it is sort of like this, you know, probably evangelical growing up at the church guilt of like ever doing something nice for yourself. But part of it is sort of like, well, one day I will have hit the point where I should celebrate myself. One day I will. And I'm like, I'm 41 years old. I turned 42 tomorrow. Like there, there the one day I'm more than halfway in at this point, right? Like, well, hopefully less than halfway, but I'm I'm at halfway in. It's time to freaking celebrate things. So anyway, I love, I love your chair. I'm inspired.
Eric Barnes:
Yeah, thank
you. Yeah. No, it's I I and two, I think it's important. Like, you're probably more like me as far as like I've been running Laravel News since two thousand twelve. You've been running Tighten forever. w
Matt Stauffer:
Twenty tw two thousand eleven. Yeah.
Eric Barnes:
yeah, and we don't really we don't have these little like we're not gonna launch products all the time, right? So like when we do, it's gotta be something that we've, you know, kind of have to celebrate and do. So I
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
Eric Barnes:
f I feel like it
'Cause like if you just start it and then like you do nothing but just take money out of your business for twelve years, it's like, I just like it, but whatever, it's not that.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. I appreciate you saying that.
It's funny. At some point, for those who don't know, I co-founded Tighten with Dan Sheets, who is no longer at Tighten. He stepped away and I bought him out. but we ran the company together for eleven or twelve years, and about halfway in we had some conversation with some accountant where we were like trying to figure out how much money to put back in the business and how much money to take away from the business. And somebody in the call, I don't even know if it was the accountant, but somebody said if Tighten shut down today.
Would you feel like the amount of money you've taken out of the business would be would make you feel like it would so basically sorry, for those who don't know, if you own a company, you're usually taking a a salary. And then when the business does well, you're also taking money out, which means you're taking profit. Cause like if a business, let's say if a business makes a million dollars, but the cost to run the business is $800,000, then at the end of that year the business has $200,000 of profit.
And first you have to pay taxes out of the profit. But then with the rest of it, you say, well, what are we going to do? Are we going to buy new equipment? Are we going to you know keep it in the business so the business has more savings? Or do we take it out? Which means either the owners or the owners and the employees of your have profit share will share that kind of profit. And we were basically taking nothing out. We were every single time we had extra money, we threw that money back in the business. We would take the occasional little distribution, which is what we call, for those who don't know, that's what you call taking money out, is it owner distribution?
but basically it was just all sitting there. And so whoever it was on this call asked this, and they're like, if you shut the business down tomorrow, would you feel like the extra cost and load and burden of having been an owner and taking on the debt and taking on the risk would have been paid off? or are you sitting here feeling like, well, the salary pays me to do the job, but I'm really not kind of getting that extra better? And we were we it was very clear to both of us. We're like, no, we do not feel like we have adequately been compensated.
For the work and risk and everything like that. And so that part at that point the accountant was like, you guys need to take more money out of the business. And that was terrifying for me, right? I'm like, what do you mean? Every extra dollar means we build up a massive savings account so we never have to worry about anything ever again. So even just changing to a point of like being able to celebrate the little bits, like those little bits of withdrawals, those little bits of distributions is a thing. But yeah, you're right. Like I can't tell you the last time a defined moment happened that said, this is something worth celebrating at Tighten.
Right, like like a versus
Eric Barnes:
Yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
a Laravel cloud launch and a forge launch and you know all those things that Taylor and folks like them have. So what what is your last
Eric Barnes:
Yes, for sure.
Matt Stauffer:
big thing that you've that you've done? no, go ahead. Okay.
Eric Barnes:
Wait, wait, I wait, I have I have a I have a I have a I have a book recommendation for those listening
about your not not taking enough money out. it's called Profit First. I cannot remember the author, but and that I read that book and that's basically how I've run everything since because from a business perspective, like my parents with the motorcycle dealership, my dad worked there for 20 years, never took a salary because he was a fireman, so he only took this fireman salary. And then, you know, you go
Matt Stauffer:
Wow.
Eric Barnes:
to sell it.
Like he never took any of the good stuff out of it. And so like then it's it's like heartbreaking where I've got the I read that book and I was like, Yeah, you take your profit first because you know, you're doing this to make money. And if it if you take it out, the business fails, well, maybe it wasn't successful successful anyway. So you should just go find something else to do. So that's
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah.
Eric Barnes:
I've been doing that in the last like ten years and it's been great actually taking
money.
Matt Stauffer:
I think somebody told
me about that book. It might have been Phil Zangle or Eric Regan. I think it was probably Phil Zangle. And he told me about either that book or something it was clearly the same concept. And that blew my mind and told me within the last year. So I've been I've been a fifty percent owner of Tighten since twenty eleven. I've been CEO and the primary person running it since twenty twenty three. So that's three years of like being in CEO Brain and the idea of take your profit out first and then
You know, the rest trickles down. Blew my mind. Like, c can you describe to the to the listeners who who have not owned a business before what's the difference between like what's your attitudinal difference between running a profit first business versus a non profit first business? Like what's the change that that makes in how you run a business?
Eric Barnes:
Well, it it to me it keeps me more engaged in the business because, you know, if if you're not making enough money then it's like, Well, why am I doing this when I could just go work for somebody else and make more money and have less headaches and have less stress? because, you know, as a business owner it's very stressful when when the money comes down and you're like, I've gotta make payroll like I these guys are actually relying on me to give them money. And but and but anyway y you said it opens like
Wait, you I think I re heard your question wrong, so repeat that one more time.
Matt Stauffer:
Well, so if if
somebody doesn't understand what profit first means, what what
Eric Barnes:
Mm-hmm.
Matt Stauffer:
makes profit first different? Like in terms of how you do your accounting or in terms of how you think about your business? Like what is actually different about doing it that way?
Eric Barnes:
okay. So the highlights, basically you you the way he proposes is you have like multiple checking accounts, right? So like five. You'll have a profit checking account. You put like five percent in that every month, and that's basically your nest egg that grows. you have operating expenses, that's where you know eighty percent goes. Then you have I I can't remember them all now. I'm gonna have to go back
Matt Stauffer:
Is there a taxes one?
Eric Barnes:
and there is a taxes one which is, you know, whatever twenty percent or whatever it is for you.
you know, for you and then there's like a marketing one maybe or like like if you're gonna buy something I think. but I I can't remember all of but
Matt Stauffer:
I would tell you but I don't know. I haven't actually read it, so
Eric Barnes:
yeah. Well anyway, g go read it and then and then you can make your own, you know, make your own judgment
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
Eric Barnes:
around that. Like for me, I just I do like three. I just do taxes, I do a profit one and then I do the operate well actually I
Matt Stauffer:
Operating, yeah.
Eric Barnes:
guess four. Well one goes to me and then one goes to the operating expenses. So but but yeah it's it and
Matt Stauffer:
Okay. So what what it basically is saying is that you're
you're pulling your profit out before you even worry
Eric Barnes:
Mm-hmm.
Matt Stauffer:
about whether the rest of the things can actually cover everything. You're like, reg regardless, whatever else happens, I'm getting five percent of this for profit, period. Right. Whereas
Eric Barnes:
Yep. Exactly. Yep.
Matt Stauffer:
what we normally do is we take our sales, you take whatever your revenue is, you take out all your operating costs, and at the end you're like, I think this is potentially profit, but it's possible that some of this should go to savings.
Some of this might be needed to hang on for taxes. Maybe I forgot to buy a thing later. So I'm just gonna leave it here just in case. Right? Profit is like profit that actually trickles down to you is the the last of the last of the last of the last of the last things. Whereas this is like, I'm getting my five percent profit. And if there's not enough money left after, well, we have to change some things, but I'm getting my five per or whatever the percentage profit, right? It's a big difference.
Eric Barnes:
Exactly,
exactly. And and I will say this, it works really well for personal finance too. we do we yes,
Matt Stauffer:
I was just about to ask, what do you do for your personal finances?
Eric Barnes:
so we do we're way off Laravel, but it's we have, you know, like four accounts. This is I love it. I love
Matt Stauffer:
D dude, that's this season. I don't care. I just want to hang out with my friends. Yeah.
Eric Barnes:
it. So we we have like four different accounts. We have what we call a vault, which is our emergency fund. We have a recurring account, which we take all of our yearly, you know, all of our monthly or yearly
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, huh.
Eric Barnes:
and we divide out and this is how much it has to go in there every month.
Then we have a grocery account and then we have I think that's all. Yeah, for us, I think that was it. let it the grocery is more like actually we might have a grocery and then we might have a like going out account, which is kind of similar. which we could
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, like a date and trips. Mm-hmm.
Eric Barnes:
we we might actually have that combined with groceries. So it's like groceries and whatever expenses we cut incur that month. but just having the account of like taking all your recurring, dividing it out and putting that into its own account.
not touching it is just it's stress it's takes any stress away from personal finance because the money's there. You don't have to worry about it. especially when you like pay off your house and you get this, you know, six thousand dollar tax bill and you're like, no, I gotta pay this. but now it's already there, it's sitting there, it's ready.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. I love that. I I was literally just about to ask you about personal finances and to to see what you thought about this. So I we're gonna go here. I hope for anybody who's listening who only wants to hear about Laravel, this may not be your favorite season. We are gonna talk about Laravel, but we're gonna talk about whatever because I have been and I told Eric this at the beginning. I was like, I have had so much fun with each season kind of like diving into a specific topic, but it's also me sitting down with people I love.
And being like, I'm going to ask you questions for an hour and a half straight. And I'm like, what about these moments? These moments happen before we record and after we record and you all miss them. So I'm like, I want you all to be a part of this. So we're gonna go. I use something called YNAB Shout out to the YNAB folks in the audience because I know there's some people who are listening who are YNABs Yes.
Eric Barnes:
was is that you need a budget? yeah, yeah, okay.
Matt Stauffer:
so YNAB is a tool to facilitate something called envelope budgeting. And it's very similar to what you're doing, except instead of four buckets, you have like 20.
But basically, and so that's why like you can't have 20 bank accounts. I used to in the past, Capital One Three Sixty made it really easy to like a whole bunch of mini savings accounts. but with YNAB, what happens is you actually don't care what bank account your money's in because you're not looking at the bank accounts. What you're looking at is the YNAB buckets. And so I've got I've got big categories fixed, which is just like you're recurring. So it's things like, you know, water, sewer, life insurance, gas, electric.
mortgage, that kind of stuff. Like it's gonna be the same amount every month or roughly the same amount every month. I've got a fixed annual. So it's like I'll set aside $120 per month for this particular thing, knowing that it's gonna be a thousand something in January or whatever. Right. So like so basically my fixed ones, but each of those has a specific line item. so for example, our security system is three hundred dollars a year and it's in July. And so I set aside, you know, whatever
300 divided by 12. So what 25, set aside $25 a month into that, knowing that that number is going to get bigger and bigger and bigger, and then it'll go down to zero in July. And then I'll just keep doing that all year long. And the good news is YNAB has like tooling for that. I've also got a flexible household one, which is the things where I put a certain amount in every month to that budget, and it gets spent down during the month. So we've got groceries, dining out, fuel, personal care, household supplies, gifts to others, dates, home improvement. And then we've got
let's see. I don't know how to describe this one. I call it ether, but it's basically we know that generally there's gonna be like like medical, for example. How can you budget for medical medical, right? You don't know exactly
Eric Barnes:
Yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
what it's gonna be. It's not gonna happen every month. So I'm like, let's just throw $300 a month into this medical fund and it's gonna grow and grow and grow, and then a kid'll break their arm, and then all of a sudden we're out three thousand dollars, right? Or we have an ER visit and we're out fifteen thousand dollars, whatever. So I'm just throwing money in there hoping that we never need to pull more out of it that needs to go into there.
And it's also things like clothing and, you know, stuff like birthdays. It's just stuff where it's like generally we spend roughly this much per year, this much per year. So I'll divide that by twelve and kind of throw money into it. and then I've also got kind of like my one off savings and investment things like you know, the throw money towards vacation, nothing is a big, big spend, or let's see what else we saved up for a chest freezer recently.
Every time I've got an extra thirty dollars, I just kind of throw it in there and eventually we hit seven hundred dollars like the last month, and now I get to go buy as a chest freezer. So this envelope method is fun. Does it sound crazy to you from the outside?
Eric Barnes:
Yeah, well
see see, for me, everything you're describing sounds like a monthly headache of actually doing all these buckets where I just
Matt Stauffer:
Uh-huh.
Eric Barnes:
don't wanna deal with it.
Matt Stauffer:
So you
guys so if you guys were to be like, I wanna get a chest I hope you don't mind me asking this. If you guys are like, Hey, we wanna get a chest freezer, do you just
Eric Barnes:
no, I don't care. Mm-hmm.
Matt Stauffer:
look at the operating budget and say, Hey, is there chest freezer money? And if you pull the chest freezer out, does that mean you don't have enough money for grocery laders? Like how do you how do you kind of think through, Okay See, that's the headache that stresses me out, you know?
Eric Barnes:
Yeah, pretty much. Yep, pretty much. you know, if y it's it
doesn't stress me out. Like you could go and like buy a ramen, you know, like worst case scenario,
Matt Stauffer:
Uh-huh.
Eric Barnes:
like if you do if you are over or under.
Matt Stauffer:
Uh-huh.
Eric Barnes:
but for the most part, yeah. but I'm trying to think, like, we don't try to do very b very many like huge purchases outside of like
Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm.
Eric Barnes:
our normal thing. So
The but we did just get hit with a huge medical bill, so it's like, yeah, like you said, you can't ever plan for those, so they're terrible. But
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
And what I'm trying to do is avoid being a place where, like, so I just took my car into the shop and it was a thousand dollars. And in the past, before I did envelope budgeting, I would have a thousand dollars and all of a sudden, because I had a thousand dollar car thing, I'm stressed for three months, right? Because, you know, like we have to eat ramen, but also I probably have overspent. And so it's not just this month we gotta eat ramen, because often those expenses are so big, it's more than your monthly budget can absorb, right? And then I'd be like, So I have to spend the next next couple of months like figuring out
Pulling money out of savings and then remembering to put money back into savings. And so my hope, and obviously this is just me trying to like microcontrol because of trauma I've had in the past, but my hope is to the point where generally I have money set aside. And obviously you can move things between. Like if if we have a super expensive medical budget and it's or medical costs and it's higher than what we, you know, have in that particular one, I can just go pull from other ones. You know, I'm saving up for a new car
Eric Barnes:
Right.
Matt Stauffer:
very slowly.
And if something goes terrible, I will just take the money of saving up for a new car. But I'd love to eventually get to the point where when it's time to get a new car, we're buying cash. So
Eric Barnes:
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I love that. I love that. Yeah, the which you you kinda hit on something too, which is unrelated to anything that we've been talking about, and that was your mechanic. That was your mechanic.
Matt Stauffer:
Who cares? Yeah.
Eric Barnes:
I will say a a a big life tip in is going out and meeting people within your community. like I've I've got a
Matt Stauffer:
You were the king of that.
Eric Barnes:
I've got a mechanic that's I'm good friends with now. So like we just take all our cars there. He does he never you know, screws me over. He gives me a gives me a
Matt Stauffer:
Never overcharges, never tries to do
something you don't need.
Eric Barnes:
Yeah, and it's like I I don't think I've had to spend thousand dollars like ever with him for anything. Like it doesn't matter what it is. He's just like, Yeah, you know, like a light bulb. He's like he's
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Well I did get multiple things.
Eric Barnes:
like, Nah, it's free, you know, just bring it up here. I I got it for you. You know, things like that. It's so good.
Matt Stauffer:
Okay, well yeah, that's that's amazing.
I want to talk about it in second. I it's funny because I every other week I have my kids and because of the way I I decided not to stay in the same area of the city as their mom. and so that means that they either have to go to a school in the middle, go to school near me or go to school near their mom. And their mom stayed where they lived before. And so I was like, just keep going to the same schools, they're really good schools, you guys don't have to have a lot of trauma.
But what that means is the school bus doesn't come to my house. So every other week I leave the house at like did it this morning. I leave the house at 7 a.m. I get home at nine. and then I leave the house at 2 p.m. and I get home at four. And then there's also soccer practice in the evening. So every other week I'm just commuting nonstop. And so of course something would go wrong in my truck. And it's like I've had you need to get your admission checked for a month. you know, because my birthday is tomorrow. So I need to get my admission checked before I got the reg got the you know, the the new registration.
The maintenance mode light has been on for 1500 miles. And I'm just like, whatever. I'm going to get to those. There's something else I needed to do. But my brakes started squeaking. And I'm like, like, this is actually a safety concern for my children who I'm going to be driving all around town. We've got two tournament games for travel soccer this weekend. And I'm like, nah, I gotta get this handled. So that's why I took it in and I was like, can you fix the brakes? That was $450. But then I'm like, why don't you also?
Do the inspection and do the the maintenance and blah blah blah. So it's kind of my fault for stacking them all up all at once. All right. I want
Eric Barnes:
Yeah. Yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
to talk about Eric Barnes' strategy of knowing every single person and basically becoming the king of Gastonia, North Carolina.
Eric Barnes:
I don't know if there's a there well
Matt Stauffer:
How did it start? Is it all through golf?
Eric Barnes:
you know I I I think about that and it's it's really not. So like one of the sort of secret advantages I did have was going back to that motorcycle dealership because you know we we were one of four motorcycle dealerships in town. we were a very yes, yes, it was in Gastonia
Matt Stauffer:
And that was in Gastonia too, right? Okay.
Eric Barnes:
too. And like back in, you know, the nineteen eighties, nineteen nineties, Gastonia was
Basically it was a suburb of Charlotte, but it was more rural, like, you know, it was not
Matt Stauffer:
Okay.
Eric Barnes:
like a big city. So like it was kind of small. Like everybody kinda knew everybody. And having motorcycle dealership, you know, everybody would come in and, you know, they'd have kids ride motorcycles or do this. So we I met a lot of people that way that
Matt Stauffer:
Mm.
Eric Barnes:
was from the community. then I became a developer, net never really played golf. And then actually it was right around the COVID is when I decided I would like I was like, I'm gonna start playing golf. And then,
That was actually the other cheat code was joining the little local country club and just meeting all the business owners within the whole community in that place. And now I feel like I know everybody. So it's but it's the same way. It's it's you've got to go out of your way to go and meet people 'cause people are not gonna just come up to you and be like, Hey, you know, whatever. so you have to actually, you know, put yourself out there to meet all the people. But once you do, then you have these connections and friends for the rest of your life.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. And that's helpful for me 'cause I really thought you'd done it all just through golf. And I was like, I you know, everyone else doesn't know this, but I keep you keep telling us these things and I keep every time I'm like, let me go look again at all the golf courses in Atlanta or golf clubs. And once again I'm like, first of all, the vast majority of them I can't even get in because I don't know three people who attend this club because I don't have the connections. But second of all
Atlanta prices in 2026 for joining are not the same as Gastonia prices for joining in 1990, whatever you joined. So it's just like it's it's a little different world. but I've still been like, man, maybe I could justify it because Eric just knows everybody. But I hadn't thought about the fact that you also you know everybody because you've grown up in the same town. You've been in the same town since the eighties, right? That's very different. I moved to
Eric Barnes:
Yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
Atlanta in 2019 and then it was COVID. So I know nobody. So
Eric Barnes:
Yeah. Well that that's
true. Yeah. So my parents my actually my grandfather moved to Gastonia, great grandfather. So it's we've all been in this area since my great grandfather's
Matt Stauffer:
What
Eric Barnes:
day. I grew up on my great grandfather's farm in the like next town over. So we've the Barnes name, you know, we are known within the community for
Matt Stauffer:
No way.
Eric Barnes:
being around so long and knowing all these people. So like, you
Matt Stauffer:
Okay.
Eric Barnes:
know, you know what they say, a good name is better than anything? So like when they hear Barnes, they know my family. So it's like
Matt Stauffer:
Really?
Eric Barnes:
It that that part's actually pretty good. Yeah. Exactly, yes.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. So you actually have decades and decades and generations worth of relationships. Okay. That makes me
feel bad. I mean, not that I don't want you to do well. I'm just, I'm trying to get like you, and it just feels unattainable. And I'm like, okay, cool. Maybe my grandchildren, you know, will say, this, you the Stauffer, the Vaughan Stauffer name. Gastonia has 80,000 people as of 2020. So there's also that. You you've and
you've
Eric Barnes:
Mm-hmm.
Matt Stauffer:
told us this multiple times. You're like, you gotta go move to a small town. Like that's a that's a part of it.
Eric Barnes:
Yeah, sm small
towns are awesome.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
Eric Barnes:
as long as you embrace the small town. Like a lot of people like they're you know, like you can't go from New York to Gastonia. Because you like New York, you just walk down the sidewalk, everybody leaves you alone. Down here, you walk down the sidewalk, everybody
Matt Stauffer:
Not so much.
Eric Barnes:
is gonna tell you hey and good morning. So you gotta get you gotta get used to that. Yes.
Matt Stauffer:
You gotta be in that life.
so speaking and I I know we're literally going everywhere, but y'all, this is just what the season is. speaking of large towns, you obviously are super active in the internet, you know tons of people from all around the world, and yet I feel like it's been within the last ten years that you started doing some of your more international traveling, going to big cities, having like wine and fancier food. Am I right that I'm remembering that? Or is that am I am I misremembering?
Eric Barnes:
No, that's correct. Yeah, we we the so I I worked with Ian at Userscape. That was the first time it was actually w me and Taylor tell this story sometimes. That was at one conference it was like PHP Tech or somewhere. It was in Washington DC before Laracons even started. We went to
Matt Stauffer:
Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
Eric Barnes:
it was me and Taylor who went to Ruth Chris or Morton's or one of those really fancy steakhouses and we used Ian's card and I was like, We're gonna get fired because that was the
Matt Stauffer:
Ha ha ha.
Eric Barnes:
the most expensive meal I'd ever experienced and
Matt Stauffer:
Amazing. Got Eric from Gastonia and Taylor from
Eric Barnes:
so so anyway, that was fun.
Matt Stauffer:
from Arkansas.
Eric Barnes:
Yeah, and again, yeah, no passport. Didn't do it. We we traveled racing motorcycles, but that's just like East Coast USA. I'd been to Vegas or racing. but it wasn't until actually like three years ago, I think was the first time I went to Amsterdam. First time I actu actually left the country. So, yeah, so it's been the last, you know, three or four years is where I've actually s up my travel and and started going places. So
Matt Stauffer:
What's your favorite trip you've taken?
Eric Barnes:
Ooh, favorite. it's it's gotta be with so two years ago, three years ago, I took my wife on our eighteenth anniversary to Paris. That was by far my favorite so far. Yeah,
Matt Stauffer:
I wonder if that was gonna be it. Yeah.
Eric Barnes:
cause like, you know, she was like, Let's wait till our twentieth. And I like, What if we die before our twentieth? Like, I would like to go do this at some point. So we we're just like, All right, we're gonna go. so that's basically really my favorite so far. And that was
Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm.
Eric Barnes:
probably because it was the anniversary I'm with my wife. Like, you know, it's it's
It's special.
Matt Stauffer:
City of love. Yeah.
Eric Barnes:
yeah. The other good one, I mean, I I did like Amsterdam. I feel like Amsterdam's more one one of those cities, like you go to it, the first time's cool, but then like the next time it's kind of the same, I guess. I don't know if I'm gonna get that because I haven't been back to Paris. So we'll see if I when I go back, if it has that same feeling of the first time. and then speaking of travel, the other thing we did for our 20th anniversary was we went back to the same exact resort.
in Dominican Republic that we went to on our honeymoon. So we relived
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
Eric Barnes:
our whole like thing again, which was kind of fun. but but you could tell. Yes, yeah, you
Matt Stauffer:
Love that. Was it was it significantly different twenty I was gonna say, was it different twenty years later?
Eric Barnes:
could tell. Yeah. I've I've way more boujee now than I was back then. Yes. Yes, I was way different.
Matt Stauffer:
say it was different and you were different. So I've been to Amsterdam
a few times, and I do I would say that the first time in Amsterdam I was experiencing more of the touristy areas. But one of the nice things about having been to a place like that before is you don't need to do the touristy stuff in your next times. And so I spent like later times I spent the majority of my time just exploring the neighborhoods around the venue or the neighborhoods around my hotel or in between them. And there's a lot. You could you could just be like, I'm just gonna go to I'm gonna find an interesting.
more neighborhoody restaurant every night and then just wander, like before or after, just wander the streets along there. And it is a fascinating place to be. And I mean you know this from having been there, but just like walking up and down the streets of Amsterdam versus, you know, some place that's been around for I assume thousands of years, I don't remember, versus like, you know, my town that was created in At in Atlanta was then raised, you know, and burned to the ground. it's just like the the seeing the longevity of
These buildings and the culture and stuff like that. It's there's really something special. Plus, Amsterdam obviously has this has canals and people biking everywhere. That's a pretty, pretty cool space. I've only been to Paris once, but I had a similar experience. We were there for 52 hours. that was it, because of my custody schedule at the time. I had the kids on and off like three days, four days, four days, three days or something like that. So I could never go anywhere, you know. And so if I'm traveling internationally, I could never go anywhere longer than forty, fifty hours. and so Imani and I was our first international trip together.
We had fifty two hours in Paris and I feel like we squashed a whole week of experiences into fifty two hours. And I was just like everybody talks about how great Paris is, right? And I was just so I was going like skeptical but like hopeful. And I was just like, this is the most magical place I've ever been. This is for like freaking Disney World for adults. What is going on? And I can't get over how much I still I like can't wait to go back. So you got if you go back, you gotta tell me if it's as good as it was the first time.
Eric Barnes:
For sure. Yeah. We we're planning on it, but I don't know when yet. It'll be a couple of years probably. But yeah, that'd be awesome.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. okay,
so so one of the things I was asking earlier, and then we interrupted ourselves was back to business a little bit. What was the most recent thing that you've done at work that was something you wanted to celebrate? Maybe you didn't get yourself an Eam's chair, but like what was the most recent thing you did where you're like, I made that happen?
Eric Barnes:
man, you throw me on the spot here. Let me try to think
Matt Stauffer:
No.
Eric Barnes:
through this. I'm trying to think, you know, sort of like Laravel News, what we've done recently. and it's it's weird you know, for running Laravel News so long is like it's it it it almost feels like there's never like this one thing. It's just gradual stuff every day for twenty you know, whatever, how many years it has been since two thousand twelve.
Matt Stauffer:
And that's
totally fine if that's what it is. So
Eric Barnes:
Yeah.
And so like I that's the thing. Like I'm I'm trying to think of what would be like, yeah, this is amazing. But to me I guess it's gotta be more of the like AI stuff, just because
Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm.
Eric Barnes:
you know, it's I'm you know, we're all in this industry, it's a love hate relationship. all of our traffic, you know, any tutorial is worthless now, good or bad. But you know, you're not getting that Google traff traffic on that stuff anymore. but
you know, just sort of embracing AI and learning basically letting it help you and make you better is is kind of kind of cool. And I don't I don't know if that's
Matt Stauffer:
Okay, so let's talk about that.
Eric Barnes:
like a thing, but it's like I feel like that was a a pivot in the last year that's been useful, I guess.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. So
I mean you are a you are a primarily a content generation machine, right? You've got videos, you've got podcasts, you've got articles, and you're facilitating yourself and other people making those things. And as you mentioned, the general kind of like ways we used to get just people googling for a thing and then coming to it have really changed as people are now just going to an LLM and the LLM at very best
puts you a tiny little link in the corner saying, I got this information from a
Eric Barnes:
The best.
Matt Stauffer:
Laravel you Laravel News. And usually not even that scrapes it up and we never get brought up. But you seem pretty positive and hopeful. You haven't shut things down. You're there's no big public announcements of you kind of like shutting down all your your so so like what what has your shift been and what has your approach been to kind of shifting your business in the face of this?
Eric Barnes:
So for me it's like s I sort of go back to like I put myself into a like like say I'm a business owner or you know, a C level or even a developer. I guess developer probably not would be the ideal person because what I'm trying to say is like you can ask the LLM what's new in Laravel right now, and I'm sure it will tell you everything. but I feel like
The unique angle that we can bring is sort of what we think is interesting within the community.
Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm.
Eric Barnes:
you know, anybody can like just get all the you can go, you know, read the GitHub releases, you can go do all this other stuff. But I feel like it's nice to just get that email once a week, like the newsletter or whatever. And it's like, they've they've covered this, and I never would have found this if it wasn't for being subscribed here. so I feel like there's gonna be a market there for that because
Somebody's gonna create something and they need to get the word out. And how else are you gonna do that if you don't have if there's no outlets in the world, basically? and for me it it sort of goes back to like like the New York Times, right? Like they're covering what's happening in the world, even though I could just go ask Chat GPT and you know, but where does the Chat GPT or the LLM get their information from? And what determines what's good and bad? And like you have to have like this journalistic
approach to things and you're like, hey, I think that's super cool. It's just some little random feature in this release. So if I write about that or cover that, then you know, more people are gonna get eyeballs on it and gonna like it. That's sort of where I'm at with it. of course,
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah.
Eric Barnes:
you know, it's it's I mean it is what it is, right? Like you c you can't fight the future. You have to embrace it and you have to figure out where that's gonna fit in your works, you know, in your work and in your life.
Because, you know, if you think back to the old days, you know, the telephone, the car, the all this other stuff that was like revolutionary, it changed it changed the industries that they that they came in and disrupted. So we're in the same place and we've gotta figure out how to adapt and get better with it, in my opinion.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
I hear one of the things I hear you saying is curation and taste are important. You know, like the d pure information transfer is is harder to make a case for, hey, this is what I'm providing, when that pure information is now a lot easier to get through an LLM But discernment and like not just c one of the things I've thought often is like the often a mark of a influencer or content creator in the the programming space
one of those marks for me has often been, does this person just share things or do they share things that are good? Can I trust that because this person's covered something, they have actually evaluated and decided this is something worth sharing? And nobody can be expected to only share good things, but still there's like a level of discernment of in decision making. one of the things I've realized is as I do updates to the book.
anytime I switch to a new research assistant, the first thing they think is every single time there's a new change to Laravel, we need to update it in the book. And I'm like, if that were the case, it would be a thousand page book instead of 500. But also the narrative structure and the ability for people to understand what we're teaching as we go would be so broken because they would just it would just be throwing data at them. you could try this, you could try this, and you try this, this, this, this, and this. And sometimes I'll do have lists, right? Here's all the methods available.
But there is still very much a level of understanding humanity, understanding having built dozens, hundreds, thousands of apps, like what actually is going to be used here and what is an edge case. And not to say that LLMs can't ever or can't do that, you know, now, but there is definitely human taste and discernment and and experience is something they're not capable of reproducing. So as the fact that
Eric Barnes:
Yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
you are like Eric Barnes is not the
Therefore being on a keyboard translating, you know, basically the exact same words that were in a release log. Like that's not never been the benefit that you provide. your editorial, I guess maybe that's the word, right? And so you're still doing editorial
Eric Barnes:
Right.
Matt Stauffer:
work now, you're just kind of guiding and shaping a little bit different.
Eric Barnes:
Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And and then yeah, and then like you said, trying to figure out like what's actually worth covering and not worth covering. Like there was a good example actually just yesterday. There was a security report in Laravel AI and Laravel something. There were two packages and it was I asked the team, I was like, Should we cover this? And and then they're like, Yeah, because you know, somebody
might not be on Twitter or somebody might only get the newsletter and they need to know that this came out. And you know, you gotta you gotta sort of reinforce back into your mind because I'm like, that don't matter just for a composer update. Like that's not even worth covering because you're gonna do
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
Eric Barnes:
it anyway. But in the end the day, you're like, no, this will be helpful to somebody. So we've got to we should cover this and and make it make it known to our our community, basically or our audience. which I don't know. But yeah, like you said, I I don't know what the future's gonna hold. Like
this this what I'm doing now could just be totally gone in another year from now if if the LLMs get so much better. And if that's the case, then I'll find a find something else to do. But I'm hoping that's not the case.
Matt Stauffer:
I I find it hard to believe. I mean, I I have a couple things. I don't know about you, and I'd be curious to hear your thoughts here. I have a couple things where I'm like, the you know what? I'm gonna have the LLM round up XYZ for me. And every Monday it's gonna give me this report, or I'm gonna have it give me a prompt out of my email, and every Tuesday it's gonna be like this. And I build these really complicated systems that I feel are gonna like, you know, really transform my day-to-day interaction with my content or whatever or my schedule or whatever.
And then eventually it gets to the point where it sends me this reminder. I'm like, yeah, I don't want to deal with it. Like it's it's like in the end, it's just like every other system I build with the intention of completely transforming my life in which that it's it's a great idea. And at some point it just becomes one more notification that I don't want to deal with when I'm busy. And somehow humans are different than that. Like if a person built the thing, put their effort, put their time in, there's just more motivation for me to interact with it because I feel more confident that this is gonna be a value.
Whereas I don't have that level of confidence. And who knows? Maybe that's because I'm bad at writing, you know, scripts. Ever anytime you have any criticism of of AI, somebody's gonna tell you it's a skill issue. You know, maybe it's just like they'll they'll be better in the future and you'll be able to run every single prompt through and say, now filter this down to something that I'm actually gonna care about. But I still think there's an element of humanity that, I don't know. Maybe I'm just an optimist,
Eric Barnes:
Yeah. What
Matt Stauffer:
but
Eric Barnes:
well I was gonna say I actually do mine different. so I I of course set up all these scripts and and things to like keep me updated on all the news, but I run it manually. I do not automate it because I want to when I see it, I want to take action on it then. If it's sitting there and it's
Matt Stauffer:
Okay.
Eric Barnes:
a notification, I will just ignore it like everybody else, because I'm like, whatever, I'll check on that later. But if I purposely run the, you know, run the task.
And then I see it's like, hey, these are the things that's new today. then I'm way more willing to like, okay, well, let's write up something about this or let's do this or just skip those. and it it could be just all psychological, but to me that's seems like it works better. the only downside is like if you're on it's it's
Matt Stauffer:
No, that's it's very un ADHD of you. Go ahead.
Eric Barnes:
but if you're like on vacation or something, it kind of sucks because you're like, I guess I should gotta go run this. But like
Matt Stauffer:
yeah.
Eric Barnes:
who can like at the end of the day, like if you can't post something for three days.
Does it really matter? Like, I don't know. we always do it daily, but like, does it? Like, is the world gonna end? No.
Matt Stauffer:
No, it's not.
it's funny because I I said it's very un ADHD of you because you have to remember to do the thing. But that also also reminded me of something that we said at the at the beginning of the call, which I was like, hey, I know only booked an hour, but do you have a little bit of f free time? And you're like, This is my only meeting today, and I'm just like, Huh, I want your life
Eric Barnes:
Yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
I have let's see, I have meetings booked from nine AM until two PM, at which point I go pick up the kids.
And then I get back at 4 p.m. and whip together dinner. And then I go take another kid to soccer. And then I come home. And then I feed them dinner. And then I work out. And I'm just like, yeah, no, like I can't tell you the last day where I had more than 30 minutes free. so
Eric Barnes:
That's crazy.
Matt Stauffer:
how much have you I'm saying that to to laugh at, but also like how much how how intentional was building the life that you have between where you live and the access do you have to people and the business you're running?
'Cause like we all joke often about how like Eric just has this dream life, right? You just kinda like, Eric's golfing again or whatever. How intentional was that? Like building would have you built a life around your values and how much of it have you just kind of like fallen into it and then learned to appreciate it as you've kind of happened to be there?
Eric Barnes:
That is a really good question. I say
Matt Stauffer:
Getting deep.
Eric Barnes:
I I know, I say it's about half and half, honestly. Like,
Matt Stauffer:
Okay.
Eric Barnes:
like we fell into like this house. it was a front porch auction. it was a foreclosure. So
Matt Stauffer:
What does that mean?
Eric Barnes:
like it was actually remember the whatever 2000 mortgage crisis thing. so I guess it or not 2000, whatever, two, twenty twenty, whenever it was. Anyway, this house was built.
brand new it got foreclosed on the bank basically takes the money the house and the mortgage and was like we're gonna s short sell it which is basically discount it cheaply and somebody'll buy it. Nobody bought it. So then they're like, okay, we're just gonna auction this house off because we don't want it on our books basically. so we we've my mom found it in the newspaper and sh so we show up on
Matt Stauffer:
No way.
Eric Barnes:
the front porch. I told my dad I was like I've never bid on anything
I want you to go and do the auction for me. I was like, this is our budget. so we stood in the front porch and there was like, you know, I don't know, 30 people out there in the front yard, and then they just started bidding on it, you know. yeah, yeah, literal. Yes, yes. Yes, and you had 30 days to close.
Matt Stauffer:
A literal front porch auction. They the auctioneer standing on the front porch, y'all circle around the yard. my God. Your life is a movie.
Eric Barnes:
Yeah, it was great. so you had 30 days to close. You could not get an inspection, you just had to either trust that it was good or you
Matt Stauffer:
Take it as is. Yeah.
Eric Barnes:
and so we we
We won the auction. he went twenty thousand over our what we were at, what we wanted, but we still got the house. but
Matt Stauffer:
Uh-huh. Good going, Dad.
Eric Barnes:
yeah, exactly. It was worth it. And so that was, you know, pure I say luck. You know, it just happened to be one of those things that sort of fell in fell in our laps. And it's a, you know, great neighborhood. We've got a pool that's like a community pool, so we don't have to upkeep it. We can just got go over there to it. but as
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Don't you guys like ride
golf carts around and everything too? Amazing.
Eric Barnes:
Yeah, everybody has golf carts in the neighborhood. So, you know, everybody rides
around. And then we'll have like everybody has garages, you know, like they've converted to like little man caves. So like everybody'll go watch football
games in other people's garages and all this stuff. So
Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm.
Eric Barnes:
it's a it's a cool little neighborhood. but then as far as like my life in general, like I'll set everything up for low stress. Like I don't like
Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm.
Eric Barnes:
to be stressed out about anything. So if I schedule four things like back to back to back, I'm
I'm like stressed all day thinking about all that stuff.
Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm.
Eric Barnes:
So I try not to do any of that. Like I try to space stuff out. And worst case, like I have a you know, a public calendar that you can go and like join, like schedule a meeting
if you wanted
Matt Stauffer:
Cabinet, uh-huh.
Eric Barnes:
to. But even then I don't you know, I guess the real beauty is because Laravel News, our money comes from advertisers. There's not that many every month, I guess, you know, like
What you got? Like, you know, there's only four weeks. We do one newsletter, one sponsored post, and then the rest are partners. So so a lot of it's just handled over email. So that's the the beauty of it. So so I guess that's that's my big big answer.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah. Do you have meetings with your
team at all? Or is everything asynchronous?
Eric Barnes:
Asynchronous for ninety-nine point nine percent of the time. I'll talk to me and Paul usually talk every Monday. but we talk an hour about golf and then we don't really talk about news because he's big into golf too. So we talk about golf. and then Harris every once in a while, and then Yannick, down in Florida. We don't we don't talk that much, so we probably should. I'm a terrible manager. I mean, I I like to talk to people, but like giving you tasks and all that, I'm like, I
Matt Stauffer:
Uh-huh.
Eric Barnes:
just like this is what we do.
Let's just get this done. Like
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
Eric Barnes:
you know, I don't like I don't babysit or do anything else. It either gets done or it don't. So it's like I'm a I'm not very good in that regard. Yes. Right, right.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Well you your folks are contractors too, right? So it's not like you have W two employees that you're, you know,
yeah, it's it's not the same. Even if they're contractors
Eric Barnes:
Yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
where it's their main thing, which I don't know if it is, it just it's very different than having I have a business with fifteen employees and I gotta make sure they're it's just different than I've got some contractors who do work for me. So
Eric Barnes:
Yeah, true, true. but yeah, they've they've all been here. Actually, Paul's been here for like man, eight years now, something like that. It's been a long time. And then Yannick's been about a year or two. I I need to find out. See, terrible. you know, I should have all these in my calendar. but yeah, they've they've all been awesome. So it's been a huge help, you know, getting getting people that you trust into your business and helping run stuff. So it's been amazing.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
What was your transition from having a job to doing Laravel News full time like? Like what how long did it take
you? How established were you when you'd met that switch?
Eric Barnes:
it was very established. Like, so I started Laravel so I started UserScape in two thousand twelve, January, and then I started Laravel News March of twenty twelve, it was somewhere in there. 'Cause it was like found out me and Taylor were working together and then, you know, the framework wasn't really big or anything back then. So I was like, we'll just I actually found this through a Codeigniter Twitter account back in the day. It was called like CI News or something, because I was big in the co code igniter community and they would just like retweet
Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Eric Barnes:
things. And I like, That's kinda cool. And then
Matt Stauffer:
I'll do that.
Eric Barnes:
And then I think I've told the story. I was like, well that you know, Twitter has a lifespan of like twenty-four hours. So like why don't we put this on a website, threw it up on Tumblr, did all that, went to go buy a like I was spending a ton of time, like after work doing Laravel news. And I remember sitting on the couch, my wife was like, I was gonna buy a Tumblr theme. It like three hundred dollars. She's like, You are not spending three hundred dollars on that. 'cause you're making no money. And I was like, You're right.
So I bought it anyway, and then I was like, I'm gonna figure out how make money. and that's the start of basically Laravel News becoming a a business at that point. and then yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. You need theme money, so
Eric Barnes:
Yeah, and then I I ran it to I mean, I'm still running it, but I ran it as a side business until until I stopped working at User Scape, which was I guess two years ago. so yeah, it was and basically, you know, even
You you might not remember this, but I remember asking you in the beginning, it's like, how can I make money with this website? And and we talked
Matt Stauffer:
Do you remember, yeah.
Eric Barnes:
about like the nonprofit route or like membership route and all this other stuff. And I've sort of found a stride in, you know, working with businesses, you know, at on an advertising basis because to me that makes the most sense because like I want to have everything free for all the users. Like I don't want to be a pay paid access or a pays th a paid thing. and
with the AI and with all the other stuff, you know, now it's you know, all these people are building all these tools and stuff. And if you have no way to market and to reach people, then you're gonna have to find a way to do that. And I feel like that's why Larvel News is sort of really positioned well right now because we have so many developer eyeballs. If you're building anything for developers, it's a really good good outlet for that. So
Matt Stauffer:
And also if you want to see our community do well, it's a good thing. Cause there's a lot of us who are like, you know what, I would be more than willing to just kind of give back to the community, like th theoretically,
Eric Barnes:
Mm-hmm.
Matt Stauffer:
just as an idea. And give back to the community can look like sponsoring Laravel for sure. It a lot of people want to sponsor like all the various packages and stuff, but that can be kind of overwhelming. So just saying, like, look, sponsor Laravel, sponsor Laravel News gets you a really good chunk of just sort of like I threw money at
community being cohesive and being friendly and you know growing whatever. And so just being someone who's providing a free social good and saying I can put my money behind a free social good it really makes it an easy choice. so yes I agree with you like targeting developers is a really good option but like I'm not really targeting developers. I just believe that something like Laravel News should exist. So I do think you're capturing both of those. It's the people who are like developers my target market. Great you're getting all the you know of the developer tools
And you're also getting people who are like, I just want this to exist. I just think this should exist. And and you know, from a marketing perspective, I do want everybody to know that Tighten exists. Right. So like see my name everywhere. The the place that you go every single time when you learn about something sounds great.
Eric Barnes:
Yes, yes. And and Tighten, y'all y'all been a partner at Laravel News forever. And, you know, I think you were one of our first people that signed up. So, you know, we are greatly
Matt Stauffer:
I love it.
Eric Barnes:
appreciative of that. Yeah. And you know, and it's people like that. That's actually made it be able for me to go full time. because without
Matt Stauffer:
I love it.
Eric Barnes:
the partners, you know, it would not be stable enough to actually support me and the family. So then I'd be like never I would never have made that leap from, you know, a full time W two to working on it full time. So
Matt Stauffer:
I love that.
Eric Barnes:
So yeah, the community's awesome.
Matt Stauffer:
speaking of our partnership, Mr. Barnes,
Eric Barnes:
Mm-hmm.
Matt Stauffer:
we have said that by the time this comes out, October thirteenth, we will have launched our first ever time doing business together. now I can I can say that our official business name is Works on My Machine LLC, which is our fun little wilk wink and nod, but can you tell the people what are we working on?
Eric Barnes:
Yeah, so this is this is actually kind of goes back to the power of the Laravel community. we're in Amsterdam at Laracon EU 2026. It was, you know, beginning of this year. And I was doing sort of the live stream interviews. Of course you're you're at the Tighten booth. I think you were giving a talk. Like we didn't have a lot of time to actually talk and get together. but you mentioned something, you're like, you know, I'm on the PHP foundation.
Wouldn't it be cool to do something with PHP? And I was like, you know, I've I've already I've had that idea for years. It's like, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. but then when you said that, I was like, maybe. And then a couple weeks later you reached out to me and you're like, I am gonna make a PHP news website or a PHP community website and sort of, you know, curate all the stuff in it. And I he's and you're like, I would like you to be on board if you'd like to be. And I was like, you know, I've been thinking about this so long. I'm
I'll do it, I'll do it. so that that to me, that was the memory I have of how this started. do you
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
Eric Barnes:
remember it differently?
Matt Stauffer:
I I do but you got some of the pieces. I feel like somebody else was who you talked to at EU and then
Eric Barnes:
Mm-hmm.
Matt Stauffer:
I don't remember who it was. You were talking to somebody else at EU, because I wasn't at EU this year. you talked to somebody and some
Eric Barnes:
well then then who was that?
Matt Stauffer:
s was it s maybe JetBrains?
Eric Barnes:
Maybe well, actually hold on. Was it Laracon US then? Am I getting the EU and the US
messed up? Okay, well that might have been the one.
Matt Stauffer:
We certainly talked at Laracon US about it. Basically, you and I
have have talked about this like three or four times over the last year. And at some point, somebody was telling you to do it, some point I was telling you to do it. And one of the things you said was you're just like, I'm not sure if I have the the access or the whatever. And I was like, I'll do it. Let's do it together. Whatever. So we had multiple points where like you were considering it and then I was considering it. And then I feel like most recently there was just a moment where I was like, Eric, this needs to happen.
I have been working on it. you know, I here's a template I bit to built in your like literally because of our last conversation. I've been working on it too. And I was just like, if we're both working on this independently, we've decided it's worth doing, let's just freaking combine our efforts and do the thing. And so that was what, probably a month and a half ago. It was pretty soon after Laracon US, I think. And so then
Eric Barnes:
Yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
we're like, all right, let's make it happen. So we have been every night, you know, when we're done with our day jobs, sending messages back and forth, be What if we had this? And I did a pull request for this. And I mean, you've also been writing content for
weeks at this point, you know, 'cause we really want it to look good when when it launches versus, hey, we just launched an empty site, right?
Eric Barnes:
Exactly. And hang on. My phone was dinging. I forgot to put it on Do Not Disturb.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, no worries.
Eric Barnes:
yeah, so so I'll I'll go ahead and announce the site. It's phpnews dot net. that's the domain right now. And it is it's sort of the same as Laravel News in a way. and I'll describe it in my in my point of view and then I'll I want you to tag in on the the what you think. But for me, Laravel News, like we love covering Laravel stuff, but there's a lot that happens
With PHP itself, that kind of we never cover because like a Laravel developer doesn't care about, you know, all this other stuff. For example, like an RFC in discussion. do you care about it? Probably not, because until it goes to a vote and gets approved, it's never gonna make its way to Laravel. so I wanted to basically bring out what's happening within PHP itself, outside of just the Laravel framework. And I felt like there was a little bit of a mixture, like
Laravel, of course, Laravel News will of course cover like PHP 8.6 is released, but leading up to 8.6, we don't cover anything because you know it's not out and like we don't really care about what's happening within PHP. Yes.
Matt Stauffer:
It's not impacting the day to day life. Yeah, exactly.
Eric Barnes:
So that was the thought with PHP News is we're gonna focus more on the overall PHP community and
Matt Stauffer:
Uh-huh.
Eric Barnes:
the internals, you know, what's happening, things like that. We've built out an RFC tracker trying to put it more into human readable terms.
Because right now, like I've never really followed RFCs because like to me they've always been confusing and it's like everybody's arguing over stuff. so we're trying to like bring bring it more approachable to the RFC process, things like that. We built out, you know, a PHP version checker. So you can throw your number your version number in. It gives you all the security issues that that came out with that version, you know, what you need to update to, things like that. And then of course the articles, we'll have a community section, we're gonna have videos that
We kind of curate from the community to make sure, you know, like, you know, if people are making videos, we want you to be able to find them and we want everything sort of to be in one place, like one hub that
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
Eric Barnes:
you can go to and be like, this is PHP and this is what's happening within that community and ecosystem.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, that was great. I think there's a and there's a couple different reasons why we're doing it. One of them is certainly just like there's no single central source to find these things. There's individual people who are making PHP content, right? We've talked about Len Woodward's videos about the RFCs, we've talked about PHP annotated and you know, PHP architect and all these various people, but each of them are making their own content.
There's not a single place where you just say this is the place to go to see everything that's happening, all the content. Good luck hunting down, learning enough about the RFC process to figure out what's going on and where do I look? And it's on a mailing list somewhere. And so, like, there is no, I've been telling people there's no sexy, simple, understandable, comprehensible way to understand what's going on with PHP. And I think that impacts PHP developers for sure.
especially people who identify more as PHP developers and are like, I want to know what's going on with PHP. Cause to your point, many, many, many framework developers, people who live day to day in I I I I I even talked about Taylor with this. Like, I don't think writing Laravel means you're writing you know, 90% of what you're doing is writing PHP. A large portion of writing Laravel is facilitating interacting between interactions between systems. It's HTML, CSS, JavaScript, it's it's DevOps. And yes, there's PHP in that.
But like if you're writing in a framework, if you're writing in Drupal and stuff like that, your day-to-day is not just like I sit down and write PHP for eight hours, right? So those folks do we do care to use PHP well, but the level of interaction with PHP in a day is different. Versus some people who are like, I am a PHP programmer, whether it's Laravel, Symphony, Drupal, whatever else, my day to day is writing PHP all day long. Well, those folks, first of all, are probably gonna appreciate having a place where all this stuff is going on.
the the framework folks, hopefully this will be an easier end to what's going on and to keep up to date. But also to me, my number one goal with my involvement with the PHP Foundation is to improve the public communication and perception of PHP the language so that people doing good and beautiful and wonderful things with PHP don't have the same struggles we have historically with PHP's perception.
And the number one issue that people think is PHP is out of date. And I don't want to live in a negative response. So I'm not going to say this again in the future. I'm not going to like say we don't have it on PHPnews.net. PHP, we're not out of date, right? But to me, the one of the biggest reasons why is because if you go to the PHP website, it's a it's it's outdated. It's miserable. And I am working to up update that, but that's a really slow moving bureaucratic process, right?
Whereas with PHP News, we could just make it new and sexy and great. And that's it. We don't need anybody else to approve us. We don't need to, you know, w we didn't have to run the design by people. We don't have to have somebody approve whether or not we're allowed to mention Laravel or WordPress or whatever because we don't wanna be
biased or whatever. We can just put whatever the hell we want there. So I to me, I'm like, this is a way for two people who have a history of doing marketing and education. And and and I've kind of pitched it to the foundation. I was like, hey, just you I'm doing this thing on my side. It's not officially foundation approved in any way, shape, or form. But Eric Barnes is that guy. And I told him I'm like, Eric Barnes knows how to build community. He knows how to do education. And having him do something that is around the PHP world means the PHP world as a whole is better off. So that's my pitch.
Eric Barnes:
Well, I I hope that's true. And and two, like s something else you didn't really mean mention is I feel like if we don't get PHP with a better like you I'm trying to think of a positive wording here. But like LLMs are gonna leave PHP behind if developers don't think PHP is sexy or they don't wanna use PHP. So we've gotta figure
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yes. Yeah.
Eric Barnes:
out how you know, like PHP has struggled with marketing forever. And I figure why not give this a try and I
I do feel like there's still a lot of people using PHP every single day. And if we can,
Matt Stauffer:
There is. Yeah.
Eric Barnes:
if we can get the news out about PHP, give you a good place just to go and and you know learn about what's happening in the community. Because right now, what exists, like Reddit, maybe, and you know, that's it's that's its own, that's its own beast.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, R slash PHP. Yeah.
Eric Barnes:
but where this is like, hey, this is probably what you're gonna be interested in and why, and why we think so. you know, even like
I'm even I'm not doing clickbaity titles, but I am working hard on kind of even like retitling stuff to get it more interesting, even though, you know, it's all the little minor things you have to do when you're running a a a site like this. So so we'll see. But I'm excited to to launch it and excited for it to be out in the world.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. And I I appreciate that you mentioned LLMs because I think for me there's one thing is like we were just having a conversation with some friend, and he's like, if you were to have Claude say, I'm not a developer or build an app, w what tooling would they choose? would they choose Laravel? Would they choose PHP? And I'm like, right now the answer is probably no. The answer is probably full stack JavaScript because the vast majority of sentiment and content on the internet is around full stack JavaScript because that's what the majority of
Educational platforms teach because it's easy to teach. That's what the majority of Silicon Valley believes is the best way to work. And when you get in a nerd world, sure, they're gonna talk about rust and some other things. But like, yeah, the vast majority of them are just like, yeah, next.js, that's just gonna be their answer. But that doesn't mean that that's going to be the case forever. That doesn't mean that we can't tell a story. and when I say tell a story, I mean a true story, but tell a story that helps the world and LLMs understand why that's not always the best answer.
And I've been making the case for the longest time that there is an incredibly strong case for I need to build something on the internet for PHP to think be the thing you reach for. And the funniest thing is I'm on the PHP Foundation board. We're talking about building PHP News.net, and that doesn't mean that I actually think PHP is the best language from a syntax perspective. I have my criticisms of, you know, writing Ruby every day sounds really nice. Writing functional languages sounds nice in some ways, but we're not just talking about syntax. We're talking about the entirety of the experience of choosing to build on a language. And I'm like,
With PHP, you get developers everywhere, affordable and easy to find. You get hosting everywhere, affordable and easy to find, and you get pre-built mature tools that can do anything you freaking want, like no other world. And yes, there's lots of other things. We have really wonderful, friendly, welcoming people. We've got great education, we've got great conferences, stuff like that. But I'm like the built in the pre-built tooling in PHP is is
Nobody even comes close. You want a CMS? We got a CMS. You want a CRM? We got a CRM. Actually, you want a CMS? We got six different really robust CMSs in various different ways. You want a web application development framework that is secure and scalable. We got a couple of those, right? Like the if you want to do something and you don't want to waste your time building the thing from scratch and bike shedding about which JavaScript ORM are we using or which auth provider are we using.
We've got it. Do you want to build something and not have to pay for 16 different systems, the majority of which won't exist next year because they're always competing and they're always bu buying each other, whatever? We've got that, right? Like, and so to me, I'm just like whether or not you like writing PHP, turns out your LLM is writing the code anyway. So
Eric Barnes:
Yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
if you no longer complain about writing the syntax, now you should say what is the most efficacious, what is the most effective, what is the most viable.
For us to have our LLMs write. And it's like the one where the LLM does as little custom work as possible. Because even if the LLM is writing the code, the bigger the code base, the more each change requires the LLM to absorb the entire freaking code base and all the, you know, using up all the tokens and even tokens get cheaper, there's just still so much, only so much context that can really usefully work with. So the more custom code you have, the less effective the LLM is over time. So what is the answer there? Less custom code, more pre-built code.
Who has the best pre-built code? PHP. Bar none. No question in my mind. Like, this is not even a conversation. So I'm like, the the the the answer is already there. The best world to work in with an LLM is PHP. Period. But not everybody knows that. So let's get them to know that.
Eric Barnes:
Exactly. And that was and that was my thinking too. It's like that was per that was a perfect description right there. Yes, let's make PHP known outside of PHP. And how do we do that? I feel like this is a good I feel like this is a good start. Yeah. I feel like this is
Matt Stauffer:
Yep. Yep. How do we do that? Well this is one piece. Yes.
Eric Barnes:
a start. And you know, we'll we'll we're gonna run this, we're gonna see how it works. I've been I've been posting on it almost every day for actually this is my two months now.
Yeah, for two months. So
Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm.
Eric Barnes:
I I've actually been two weeks stuff for two months because before we launched, before we released, I wanted to make sure I was gonna be able to actually do it. you know, put
Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm.
Eric Barnes:
forth the time and the effort. And I was like, Well, if I do it, you know, every day for this long, then I know it's viable and it I think I can make it work. So, so yeah, so it was we tr I try to run for a whole month before I even was like, All right, I think we're ready. So yeah, yeah. but
Matt Stauffer:
Yes, we're actually ready to go. Yeah.
well I I need to just say out loud, I really appreciate your work because I've done no writing. All my work has been behind the scenes business stuff and the finances and the, you know, relationships and stuff like that. I do hope that once we launch I actually am gonna get into some writing and to some content creation, but I just wanna name how grateful I am for how much work you put into this. So you're a great partner, man.
Eric Barnes:
Appreciate that.
Appreciate that. Yeah. And it it's it's funny, right, with a partnership because you're doing the stuff that I actually despise. Like I just don't
Matt Stauffer:
Ha ha ha.
Eric Barnes:
I just don't like it. Like to me it's it's stressful, it's a headache. Am I gonna screw up? Am I gonna get audited? Am I gonna go to prison? I don't like doing that stuff. I like I like
Matt Stauffer:
Uh-huh. Well you won't, I can tell you that.
Eric Barnes:
I like reading. you know, I like finding out what's new, figuring out what I think's interesting, and sharing that. And to me,
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
Eric Barnes:
that's like
That's like a perfect job. It's like, this is great. So so
Matt Stauffer:
I love that. And this is why partnerships
great. And I mean, like, Dan's not at Tighten anymore. But one of the things that would happen when we started the business was I was just like, I am tired of trying to sell. I am tired of and I also similarly, I was like, I don't know about sales and operations and legal contracts. And Dan was like, I'm tired of keeping up on on the latest development things. He's like, I'm in my early 40s. I am trying to tired of this. And I was like, Great, let me
Think about code, think about hiring people, think about operations of people, and then you run all the boring business sides. And that was great. And you know, 10 years in, I was finally got comfortable with doing the legal and doing the finances and stuff like that. So I love at a place where I'm like, if you told me, Matt, every single day you need to write an article and you need to do the same thing every single day for the next five years, I'd be like, my ADHD will drive me off a cliff before it has me do the exact same thing consistently every single day for the next two years.
And so I'm like, you're telling me I have to do unique challenges like legal contracts and figuring out how to set up a business that is operated both out of Atlanta and North Carolina and figuring out the why is the bank not sending us up. I'm like, Great, that's fun. That's unique and it's different and every day it's something new. So love love a good partnership.
Eric Barnes:
Yes, yes. It's perfect. Yeah. It it sorta reminds me of like, I think back of there there was an interview with Travis Pastrana who was a he was a pro motocrosser, then he got into doing tricks. Anyway, I grew up we were we're kind of the same age, we grew up in the same little sphere. But so I I'm a big fan of his and he did a thing. He's like he's like, I partnered with everybody. He's like, because I wanna go out and jump motorcycles. That's all I wanna do. And I don't want to do anything else. So, you know, if other people can like
keep me keep me grounded, keep me having income coming in and I go and do the thing that I love to do, then I do
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
Eric Barnes:
that. He's like, I don't wanna be stressed. I don't want to go do this other stuff. I'm like, and that's sort of my outlook on life too, is like, if I
Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm.
Eric Barnes:
don't want to do that, then why why do it? But
Matt Stauffer:
I love that. we are
about to have to wrap, but I was I was thinking last night, I was in a moment where I had, like I said, you know, driving the kids two hours and trying to get some work in, spend some time with my wife, driving the kids two hours, making dinner. I was late on dinner, and Imani was not supposed to be helping me because she's in full time school and working right now. And so she helped me, and I just felt bad because she was helping me. And I was like, in this moment, I was just like, I could be so stressed and overwhelmed and miserable in my life right now, but I was just like, but
I am providing for my family. I'm spending time with my cat spent. You the the the downside of driving is I'm a constant chauffeur. The upside is every day I spend almost the entire day with my children. Like if they are not sitting in school, they were with their dad. We're we might be hanging out in the car, we might be sitting outside of one kid's soccer, but like I'm with my kids all day when they're not at school. and that's something that I I'm very grateful for. So anyway, I was just like, I get to see my wife.
I get to keep my business running. I get to spend time with my kids. and yeah, man, my my calendar is meetings from the moment I get home from school drop off until I have lunch with my wife. And then it's meetings. You know, it's just like my life is insane. but the things I want out of it are there. Right. I am spending time with people I care about. I am present at my business and helping it grow. I am getting to to do, you know, stuff like this and give conference talks. And so it's like, man, you know what? Like,
If I look at my life from a I wanna breathe perspective, I can be real stressed out. If I look at my life from a am I doing the things I like doing perspective, which I think I think that's probably why our lives look so different, is is cause mine is not a lack of stress, which is not mine that mine is better or worse than yours, because yours is great. But I'm like, from the things I've asked out of my life, I'm like, yep, they're there. And so as long as they're there and as long as these things I care about are happening, I'm like, yeah, I guess that's that's really all I can ask for.
Eric Barnes:
Yes, for sure, yeah. And it and the big thing is not chasing like, you know, we have friends that are very, very, very wealthy and
Matt Stauffer:
Yes.
Eric Barnes:
you just have to learn to embrace, I'm not gonna reach that level. And it's fine. I just wanna make
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah.
Eric Barnes:
enough to where my me and my family are comfortable, happy, and that's it. You know? And
Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Eric Barnes:
that that's hard to do as as an I I think it's
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
Eric Barnes:
grained into the Americanism of us is like you've gotta you've gotta make
billions and millions and
Matt Stauffer:
Yes.
Eric Barnes:
and you know you can't just be like, I'm happy only making this and and but you know I don't know, it's something there.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, something there. I wish we had more time because I want to drive dive down that one a little bit. But I mean, I would the short version I would say is I'm with you. There is a part of me that wants to say that success means that I'm among my friends, at least at the same level, the people at the top of the bucket. And it's a sort of like why? What what you know what what are the things that really matter? And and yeah, to your point, it's just sort of like, can I provide for my family? Can we pay for the things that matter for us? Can we take the occasional nice little trip?
And you know, also we all know also know that like we are I just saw this thing that was like breaking down in US alone. Because in the US alone, we're already unbelievably blessed just for being in the US, right? And then it's it was one of those like, here's the the official US census numbers for what puts you in lower class, middle class, or upper class. and I was just like, These are the types of things I need to be looking at, or the people I live around or family or whatever, because when you live in tech, and especially you and I around some very successful people in tech.
It can just kind of make you think like, I haven't done anything and I don't have any money at all. It's like, no, nope, that's not the case. We're doing great. We're very blessed. So
Eric Barnes:
Yes,
yes, for sure. A and and success honestly means time, you know, like that is judge
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
Eric Barnes:
probably should be everybody's definition because if you have time, you know, like you said, sp i you have time to spend four hours in the car with your kids, like that is literal success.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
Eric Barnes:
you're not grinding at a you know, a building a truck in a in a factory somewhere, you know, like that is that is success. So
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. 100%.
Yeah. okay, so we're at time. there was one last thing I wanted to ask you. I'm trying to remember what it was. I have another podcast, Pragmatic AI, and there's a question I asked on there that I realized I might want to ask everybody this season. I'm not sure. Is there any one creative thing that you're doing with AI that you're like more people should be doing this in their lives? Cause there's a lot it's very easy to talk about the things that are terrifying about AI and negative.
But sometimes I'm like, is there any blessing or joy it's brought into your life or any fun little thing that is saving you time or making your life better in any way? Could be work, could be not work.
Eric Barnes:
Okay, so I I don't know, I don't know. I don't know if this is like revolutionary, but i it it goes back
Matt Stauffer:
Doesn't matter.
Eric Barnes:
to what I was doing last night. So there's this little game on iOS, it's called Balloons T D. It's like been out forever, and there's little balloons that come around and you have to pop them. It's like a tower defense game. And so I've I've been using AI. I'm like, I'm on this level and this this thing, tell me where to put my towers and to get
Matt Stauffer:
Really?
Eric Barnes:
the maximum the you know, to win basically. And it's
Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm.
Eric Barnes:
been like, it's like all right, this is what you need to do. This and I'm like
That is amazing. Because you know, in the old days, I'd have to like go to YouTube and watch a seven-minute video about this kid explaining how to put my towers on this little game. so that's yeah. And so that's not revolutionary, but it's it's fun. and then,
Matt Stauffer:
huh. So you're just totally stuck and it just helps you get unstuck basically? Okay. Doesn't matter. Yeah.
Eric Barnes:
but as far as like business or development-wise, I've I've really been embracing the just letting it go to town and not caring what the code looks like. And it's so freeing, like.
I'm like, it it's still running? Like why did we care so much about code appearance in the old days when it ran? It kinda I kinda feel like I wanna channel levels out and be like, just throw it all in the index file. Like I don't care. Yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
Just single PHP file, yeah.
and one of the things God, I wish we had more time. one of the things that I've been talking with a lot of people about lately is that they're the the how good do the code have to be is going to be different depending on the context you're delivering it in. So for example,
Eric Barnes:
Yes.
Matt Stauffer:
Tighten were a consultancy and we're delivering code that is either being maintained by teams that need to know that the code is good or use the code as a reference point for future code.
and or we're also delivering to teams with no developers and they're not gonna say, you know what, something goes wrong, I'll just throw it at my LLM. Like it needs to not go wrong as much as possible. so our delivery expectations at Tighten are very different than you and me building PHP News.net. What happens if something goes wrong with phpnews.net? First of all, if the site is down for an hour, what happens? The site's down for an hour, who cares? But second of all,
Eric Barnes:
Yeah, exactly.
Matt Stauffer:
you have two developers who've been developing for decades.
Who also have an LLM. And between the thr the two of us and the LLMs we have access to, the th it's gonna be an easy fix. So, like the expectations we have are just so different. And that doesn't make one approach right or wrong. Doesn't mean you should read your code or shouldn't read your code. It means it depends. Just like it has always
Eric Barnes:
Yes.
Matt Stauffer:
been for everything, right? Like Eric and Matt are capable developers, and if we get paid money by a big client to deliver code for them, we're gonna read the code in a way that's different than Eric and Matt building PHP News.net. Same person, right? Different
Eric Barnes:
Exactly. Exactly.
Matt Stauffer:
answers.
So yeah, it
Eric Barnes:
Yep.
Matt Stauffer:
is a lot of fun.
Eric Barnes:
Yep. It's everything is contextual, like a like all things in life.
Matt Stauffer:
Yep. all right. Well we are we definitely have to wrap now. So Eric, I really appreciate you hanging out. Obviously it's fun being in a business project with you. It's really fun having you. Thank you for being the first guest of the eighth season. This is everything I could have hoped for
Eric Barnes:
Excited.
Matt Stauffer:
for it.
Eric Barnes:
I'm excited. I I hope I hope the people like it because I I enjoy this. Like it's
Matt Stauffer:
They will.
Eric Barnes:
so much more fun talking about everything than being like, let's talk about this package or whatever. So yes, I'm
Matt Stauffer:
Yes. Let's talk Exactly. Yeah.
Eric Barnes:
I I enjoy the format as a guest on the show. So thank you so much for having me on.
Matt Stauffer:
love to hear it.
Awesome. And for the rest of you, thanks for hanging out and we'll see you all next time.