#422 – Stick 'Em On Whales

Chris Gammell: This is The Amp Hour Podcast. Released December 27, 2018. Episode 422. Stick'em on whales. Welcome to The Embower. I'm Chris Gammell of Contextual Electronics.

Alicia White: I'm Alicia White of Embedded FM.

Chris Gammell: I'm Chris White of Embedded FM. Not a fan of the show names still. I think we could do better than that, but I think it's what we're stuck with now. Now that we've done this, what, two, three times now? We could call it something else. We could call it the Am...

Dave Jones: No, we did Ampedded once, didn't we? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: We did Ampedded once, yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, I mean, we could be like The Avengers, the greatest crossover movie of all time.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. How are you guys doing? It's been... A year? Well, we talk a lot on Slack, but it's been a year in the talkie-talkie, so...

Dave Jones: It's a year that feels like 10.

Alicia White: Yeah, it's been a long year.

Dave Jones: But I haven't accomplished a damn thing.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Alicia White: You have, Chris. You've been doing a lot of things.

Chris Gammell: I've been doing some things, yeah. I left my job. I'm now consulting. I announced a conference that I'm running. So, yeah, a couple things. It's been good, though.

Alicia White: And the conference is the KiCad conference? KiCad conference? That's right. I'm just going to keep...

Chris Gammell: KweCad is higher. KweCad, as Brian Benchoff says, yeah. The KiCon is going to be in April of 2019 in Chicago, where I live. And I'm really excited about it. You guys going to come out for it? Huh? Huh?

Alicia White: No.

Dave Jones: Oh.

Chris Gammell: You know, I would have predicted that, but I'm still a little sad.

Dave Jones: I mean, if you get Harrison Ford to, like, give Keynote or something. To Keynote it?

Chris Gammell: Okay. Oh, yeah.

Dave Jones: We should call it the Kynote. I've never actually opened said program, so I'm not your target demographic. That'll also do it, yeah. Right.

Chris Gammell: I have. If people are interested, I'll link it in, but it's probably not as many of the embedded listeners as I'd hope for, huh?

Alicia White: I don't know.

Dave Jones: Probably more than... Yeah, I mean...

Alicia White: More than you'd expect.

Dave Jones: Our listeners are probably more interested than... Or more targeted than we are, so... I mean, we don't...

Alicia White: We don't even go to San Jose anymore to go to conferences.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. Yeah, we just go over there for croissants.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That's a good reason, though. I mean, what kind are we talking here? Like chocolate croissants? Oh, yeah, yeah. Chocolate. Chocolate almond. Chocolate almond, yeah. Okay. That's worth the drive.

Alicia White: That's good. And consulting. You've been doing that for six months now?

Chris Gammell: No, only like four and a half. Four and a half, five months back in, I guess, August, so... But it's going well. Yeah, it's great. I mean, it's... You know, someone had... So we had basically... You know, we had been putting... You guys are always so good about show notes. And I saw one of the questions from the embedded Slack was asking about skill building and stuff like that. And I'd love to talk about that kind of stuff. But that was one of the things that I was most excited about is that my skills... I was doing a lot of marketing stuff and my skills were just falling off, you know? And it... I don't like that. And now I'm just kind of back in doing 3D modeling and doing, you know, circuit design and doing some firmware stuff. And it's... It's not easy by any stretch, but it's... It's great to be back into it. And it's really like that.

Dave Jones: No, that's great. The great thing about consulting too is, you know, you end up getting exposed to a lot of different things. Whereas even if you went back full-time... I'm a double E full-time at megacorp.com. Yeah. Right. You know, you might find that you still feel like you're not learning anything or your skills are stagnating because you're doing one kind of design over and over again. So, yeah. I really liked consulting for that because it was like, oh, these people need this and well, I have no idea how to do that, but I better learn really quick.

Chris Gammell: Well, you've both been consultants for a long time or you have done a lot in the past. So like what should I keep an eye out for on the... When's it going to turn? Like what made you go back to the... Chris, I guess you're back at a full-time gig, right?

Dave Jones: I can't really say what made me go back without sounding like an ass. So I'm not going to... Is it money? Is it money? Is it money? Is it money? Yeah. Yes. Let's say that. Okay. Well, yeah. This is probably something I shouldn't discuss. Okay. That's fine. That's fine.

Chris Gammell: But at least you've gone back and forth before, right?

Alicia White: Yeah. I was at... I was doing consulting and then I went to ShotSpotter because they needed my skills and it was a really interesting company. company. So I... They didn't want contract because they wanted to develop algorithms in-house. And so I did. I went back to full-time and then went back to contracting and have applied for a full-time job in the last year. Not because I don't like contracting, just because I wanted that job.

Chris Gammell: Oh, I see. Okay.

Alicia White: And it didn't work out. Although now I have a contract with those people. So we'll see.

Dave Jones: Okay. I've got an answer now.

Alicia White: Okay. Go ahead.

Dave Jones: Part of it was because I was made an ultimatum. It wasn't stated as an ultimatum, but it was probably an ultimatum. And I had a choice whether to go do something else or continue what I was doing with the people I liked working with and go full-time. So that was a large part of it. And, you know, it's been good so far. Things are getting a little, eh, a little full-timey.

Chris Gammell: I mean, that's the thing. There's more meetings. There's more politics.

Dave Jones: There's all the stuff that I've experienced, I suppose. Yeah. And the big thing for me, which is kind of personal and idiosyncratic, is I found that when I was full-time, especially at startups where I had a lot more responsibility of a smaller team, I was way too emotionally connected. So any decision that people above me made that I thought was ill-advised, I would get kind of angry. Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense. And, you know, I'd get angry in meetings and stuff. And I really didn't like that. And that was one of the reasons I went contracting the first time, which is now almost 10 years ago. So, yeah, going full-time, all those meetings and things that when you're a contractor, you can kind of say, well, I'm hourly. You guys can talk all you want to.

Chris Gammell: You don't want to pay for me to be there, you know?

Dave Jones: And if you don't want to listen to what I have to say, then it's your dime anyway. Yeah. Now it's like, wow, this is, you know, the company is, you know, there's some emotional investment there. So now decisions like that or arguments like that become more personal. So there is a different kind of psychology that I find, that I have when I'm working full-time versus contract.

Chris Gammell: And how do you define contract versus consulting? I don't, I always keep getting those intermeshed.

Dave Jones: You, you have a...

Alicia White: I do. Um, contracting is where you do the implementation and the work. Consulting is where you usually work more with the managers to create a plan that somebody else implements. Uh, so if you're doing architecture work without implementation, then that's consulting or mentoring or doing the reviews, that's more of the consulting. But when you are, you know, sitting down to do the technical work, that's contracting. And I enjoy doing both. Um, sometimes it's really fun to come in and be their sounding board or to solve bugs that they're having trouble with. Um, but sometimes you come into a situation and you don't get all the information you should. And so you spend a lot of time consulting for things that don't make sense.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I'm not sure it's a formal definition, but it's a good, I like it. Um, people use it interchangeably. I've always used it kind of interchangeably. But yeah, consulting, you tend to be dropped in for a shorter period of time. Maybe like, yeah, we have a specific problem that we need your expertise and here's, here's our code. Could you look at it and tell us what's wrong? Here's our board. Could you fix it? Right. Uh, less about, okay, well, for the next six months, we'd like you to work on this part of the system and finish it for us.

Chris Gammell: I was thinking about the contract being like an actual like chunk of time. Like, oh, it's only three months, but you're here for that whole time and we get you for, you know, half of your time or something like that. It felt more, that felt more like a contract kind of thing. Obviously there's a contract in both cases, but whatever. Um, versus like, yeah, here and there kind of stuff, like a consultancy kind of feels

Dave Jones: like. So how are you finding stuff? Are you marketing yourself? Are you working with your existing network?

Chris Gammell: Some would say I'm marketing myself right now, Chris. Call today to talk to Chris Gammell.

Dave Jones: For three easy payments of $19.99.

Alicia White: Are you doing it under your own name or under Analog Life?

Chris Gammell: Under Analog Life, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm, uh, I'm, I'm back to use. I mean, I've had an LLC for a long time, but, um, it's, uh, I think I'm going to probably try and switch to the, I was thinking about your accounting episode a couple of weeks ago. Um, and I'm probably going to switch to an S Corp next year and do that kind of thing. And it works out fine. I don't know. I, I, I, I, right now I'm just like a, you know, a 1099 and a Schedule C employee, not even an employee, I guess. I'm just. No, you can't say that. Yeah. Yeah. Not, I'm not. I'm just, I'm just a guy waiting here to do circuits for you, you know? Uh, and, uh, yeah, it, it, it works okay for now, but I think next year it'll be a little bit more, a little bit more formalized and payroll-y and stuff like that. And so I, I really, and, and if people haven't listened to your episode about that stuff, I, I always recommend that. I think that was a great, it was a very unexpected, but a great episode about like understanding how the accounting stuff works and, you know, it can eat a lot of your day if you, if you do it right or wrong.

Dave Jones: So much of your day. Especially if you make a mistake. As, as complicated as electronics and, and, and software is a, uh, an untraceable error in your books is, it's often much harder to solve. Yeah.

Alicia White: I haven't done our books yet. Don't, don't curse it.

Dave Jones: Like all year?

Alicia White: Or just for the month? I, I, I usually do it by the quarter.

Chris Gammell: Oh, okay. That's not bad then. Yeah. You know that, yeah, this, it's like silly things for, uh, for us. Like, so we have very generous, uh, patrons and, uh, you know, so we get donations as you do, I'm sure. And, and people should support Embedded FM's Patreon. Um, uh. And Ampowers. Yeah, sure, sure. Uh, but it shows up. It shows up as like a payment is like, you know, so like we get a, you know, say we get a $5 donation, you know, PayPal sends a, uh, $4 and 28 cents once a month. And then that is like a journal entry. And that's like a thing you have to deal with, you know? And it's like, I'm very grateful for the donation, but it's like, it's just like these small things that I just need to clean up my process and stuff.

Alicia White: That's it. And Patreon doesn't do that. They send it all as one chunk of that. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right. Right. Yeah. We still have people from the old days as well, but it's, uh, yeah, we had a, we, me and Dave talked about business a couple of weeks back and it was two people who don't know anything about business, just complaining about business pretty much. But it was, uh, it's, it, it definitely changes the focus. You know, you get to do less technical stuff. And I think the thing I always think about is as you get bigger and bigger as a company, that stuff must just take over your life. You know, like that just must like having actual employees and dealing with larger employees. Yeah, exactly. Right.

Alicia White: I mean, I think the bookkeeper is one of the first five people you've hired because it does take up so much of your time if, if you want to do something other than play with QuickBooks.

Chris Gammell: It's true. So, uh, other than that, other than like the businessy stuff, um, it's, it's been, it's been really good. And I should mention too, if people on your channel haven't heard on the Amp Hour, I do have a consulting forum now. Um, and that's been very helpful. It's semi-private, you know, so people share their names. You have to apply for it. I'll put a link in for, uh, the application. Uh, but people that are consulting or contracting, uh, that's the main focus. If people are getting into, into that space, they can also apply. Um, but it's been really good just for like, you know, putting, putting stuff out there of things that are having issues with and best practices and things like that. And it's been really helpful for me and hopefully for other people that are there. So I, I like that. It's, you know, cause it's just like putting on, yeah, putting on Twitter would be a little bit different, I think.

Alicia White: Well, it's hard on Twitter to say this part of the contract looks a little odd to me. Can anybody tell me if it's ever been used against them or, or what they think of it? And on a smaller forum where you know everyone, it's, it's easier. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And I mean, I've even put out a couple of, uh, a couple of people come to me with, with gigs that I just couldn't do, uh, either cause the skills or because of timing. And so I've already put a couple there too. And, you know, I think one of them has worked out out of the three that I put there. So that's encouraging. I don't know if that'll work longer term. They all have to be remote obviously. And, uh, but I do wonder like, I mean, both of you work remote, right? Yeah. So, so I mean, where do you see remote, remote work going? I mean, like, do you think that that's still a consulting, like a consulting thing that's going to keep happening or is that increasing, decreasing? What's the trends you're seeing?

Dave Jones: I don't see it decreasing really. Um, because the, the demand for talent is so high right now. Still, uh, a lot of small places are looking for whatever they can get. And some of the small places are in remote places. Like, you know, you've had contracts come across from like Denver and, and, uh, Denver

Alicia White: and Boulder always seem willing to do remote. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. So it's like, well, we're not, you're not going to get as vast a pool of talent out of Colorado maybe. But if you are willing to work remote, then you can, you know, pull in Bay Area people or Boston people or, or what have you. Chicago. I don't see it decreasing. Chicago next, I think. Yeah. Sorry. That's good. Um, yeah, I don't, I don't think it's decreasing. I do think there's, there's a tendency for larger companies to go through this period of everyone needs to sit next to each other and we're getting rid of all remote workers and we're consolidating. Yeah. I've seen that happen a couple of times and doesn't tend to fix any problems.

Chris Gammell: No, of course. Yeah. If you're not communicating next to each other, you're not going to communicate. If you're not communicating remote, it's not going to help if you're sitting next to each other.

Dave Jones: But yeah, I don't see it. I don't see it decreasing. Do you?

Alicia White: No, no, I don't. Um, the tools are getting cheaper. So it used to be having your own oscilloscope or your own logic analyzer was too expensive. So you had to go in and use theirs, a shared resource in a whole company. But now, you know, I have my gear, I have a soldering station that's not bad and it exceeds my abilities. So if I break something so bad, it needs more soldering than I can do here. I would have had to bug somebody at work anyway. And it's amazing how fast the postal system will work if you're only going a couple hundred miles.

Dave Jones: Now, at least, at least for software, the collaboration tools have gotten better too. Like most people use GitHub, you know, for a small company and gets reasonably good for collaborating and has all the code review stuff you need. And it's, you know, it's in the cloud. So you don't have to have infrastructure at your company that somebody needs to share. I don't know. Is that true for electrical stuff?

Chris Gammell: I mean, these days I'm using GitHub for all of my, uh, all my repos for, uh, for like hard, like all of my hardware repos are, are on GitHub and similar. Sometimes Bitbucket or, or what's the other one? GitLab, I guess too. But who cares, right? I mean, like it's all the same on the, on my end and, uh, yeah, I mean, one time, I mean, I think it's, it's interesting seeing when, if, when, and if the hardware people that I'm working with know how to use it, I think that that's definitely a skill that hardware people should be working on if they don't already know how to do it. Command line Git is, it's really important and understanding how and when to do commits and all that other stuff. But I think that is much, much, much more, uh, prevalent than it used to be.

Alicia White: I'm going to, I'm going to take a plug here, uh, for our, for one of our shows. And that is Yolo snarf, where we talked about Git and version control as a theory, as, as the, the idea was to have a basics episode where we, we just talked about it and we started to find a fake, uh, uh, version control system called Yolo. And then we would just make up commands to describe the general process. And it worked out really well for me because I don't love Git. Maybe it just isn't my, the way my brain works. Maybe I haven't used it well.

Dave Jones: No one loves Git, except Linus.

Alicia White: I kind of like it. I like it.

Dave Jones: Linus and Chris.

Alicia White: But the, the Yolo episode, I started thinking about, okay, so if Yolo was a real thing, how would I explain it? How would I do it? And then I would type a Git and whatever I wanted, whatever I would have put into Yolo into Google. And suddenly I got a lot better at Git because I got a lot better at thinking about what it is I wanted to do instead of just doing Git reset remote head purple penguins. And that never, that command never worked for me.

Alicia White: That command is very dangerous.

Dave Jones: You should never type that command.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I think the big thing with hardware is that it's because you can't, you can't really merge stuff. Right. Well, you can, but it's a, it could be a mess. Not easy. Yeah. But most hardware people aren't working like that anyways, right? It's a lot of, it's a lot of, you know, doing a chunk of work, handing it off to someone, doing a chunk of work, handing it off to someone, you know, back and forth like that. So I think from that perspective, revision control can work great for that, that stuff. Um, but yeah, I love it. I don't know. I sure as hell love it when I, when Kikehead crashes, you know, it still happens. So yeah.

Alicia White: And you'll lose an hour or two or a day as a work instead of weeks.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right.

Alicia White: So you did a show recently where you were, uh, talking to Jeff Kaiser and Dave, uh, about your view on the industry. Was it last week? Yeah. Yes. I'm so behind on podcasts. I got into an audio book and then it was a trilogy and now I'm just like, okay, it'll be another three months.

Chris Gammell: We'll take a pause. We'll take a pause on, uh, Jeff and Dave. What's, what's the audio book?

Alicia White: Oh, it's, um, Ilona Andrews, uh, starts with Clean Sweep and it goes through three others. And it's kind of silly, but it's also really fun.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Okay. I'm down. Science fiction. I was just doing, I just did the second, uh, book in the, uh, uh, uh, what's the sci-fi show? Um, they made it into a sci-fi show, but I haven't watched it yet. It was Leviathan Wakes and then Calum Expanse. Oh, Expanse. Yeah. Expanse. Yeah. Oh man. And the book, this, the audio book was amazing for the second one.

Alicia White: I thought the book for those were a lot better than the sci-fi shows.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I haven't, I haven't watched the show yet. So, okay. Well, I'll check that out. Quick, quick, quick interlude. So that's good. Ilona Andrews. That's good. What was the question?

Alicia White: Uh, so, uh, they were talking about what's your view on the industry and, uh, and Chris thought up his answer many hours after they recorded. So I figured we should give him a shot. So Chris, what is your view on the way the industry is going?

Chris Gammell: You know, that's a great question, Alicia. I'm glad you asked it. Uh, you ever noticed that people do that in interviews? Radio announcer voice. Yeah. Yeah. Um, that's always like the stall that people do.

Alicia White: Oh yeah. That in media trading, that's what they tell you to do. That's a great question. Or I'm really, really glad you brought up your point. That's just waste two seconds while your brain answers it.

Chris Gammell: I've forgotten what the question was, but yeah, I'm glad we went on that interlude. Um, so the, the thing we were, we were, we were talking, we ended up just kind of divulging into, not diverging into, um, you know, the, the hype curve and stuff like that. And that was silly just cause we were floundering. I was floundering. Uh, but one thing I actually was thinking about, and then there was a video that was posted today on your Slack channel that would actually hit this perfectly, um, was just how PCB prototyping has changed. And so on your Slack channel, um, one of the people had posted a video about actually showing, showing the different, uh, the, the, the quality of, of prototyping PCBs over the past eight years. And, um, it is pretty stark. So it was user Andy Brown on YouTube. I'll, I'll link that in. Um, but not even just the quality, I mean, the, the quality has definitely, definitely changed, but, but it's even more so just the cost. It's just so cheap. And so I've come to this idea of like doing what I call Lego prototyping. Um, and the idea of like, you could just take modules off the shelf, quickly connect things together in your CAD program of choice, put a bunch of headers on board. And then just, you know, instead of wiring things point to point now, it's literally faster and cheaper to just do it in a repeatable way using a two layer, four layer PCB. And I just think that that's changed a lot of things. Um, obviously very specific to the electrical side of things, but that, that is, uh, you know, that has changed the cost basis, I think for even assembly and modularity and, uh, a lot of things. I don't know. I don't know if you've, you've both seen that.

Alicia White: I haven't seen the video, but I understand where you're going because things have changed so much. It used to be, you couldn't dev boards cost $10,000.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right.

Dave Jones: Right. Right.

Alicia White: And you never bought them. You were only given them by the reps for like two or three weeks.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Alicia White: And you couldn't get a, an accelerometer board just to try it out. And now you just go to SparkFun and there's all this stuff.

Dave Jones: A couple bucks.

Alicia White: I was kind of appalled to find out that some of them, some of the dev boards, like the nucleo ones from ST, you're not supposed to OEM them. So if you want to build something with that as a core, you're supposed to make your own board. I was a little disappointed.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. But some of those things are huge, right?

Alicia White: Yeah. Except I was, I was doing something that was, you know, I, we only needed about 20 of them and it wasn't size constrained. And it was kind of like what you were saying. It was, it was Lego blocks put together for a fairly looks like works like prototype. Oh, okay. And, and yet I was like, ah, this isn't right. We shouldn't do 20 because they're saying we shouldn't do this. But on the other hand, making our own boy to do exactly this is dumb. I wonder why they do that.

Dave Jones: I mean, I doubt they're taking huge losses on dev boards.

Alicia White: I think because dev board quality control is not as important as OEM quality control. If your dev board doesn't work, you just get frustrated. If your product doesn't work, you go after them. Yeah.

Dave Jones: But I mean, they don't, I'm not going to give you any warrant here. They can just say this is not warranted if you, I don't know.

Chris Gammell: But yeah, I think it's just the, I think the margins are definitely lower and they don't want it to extract stuff out of the supply chain either. Right. So if you think about, well, we're going to make 5,000 dev boards this year and we, cause we expect the demand to be 5,000, but then one user, for some reason, the cost basis, even if they're making money on it, whatever. Right. But then the cost basis is good enough that they're like, oh, well, we're just going to design 4,000 of these into our product. And then they go and buy out the supply chain. Oh, sure. Sure. And then their parts not in the hand of what they expected to be 5,000 engineers or on the shelves of 5,000 engineers as the reality usually is, or maybe the shelves of 2,000 engineers. The idea being that I think it's just because it's a marketing vehicle, they don't expect it to, they don't want it to be part of a product.

Alicia White: That makes sense. I mean, you, you do give your dev boards a lower profit margin than your production boards.

Chris Gammell: And I'm sure it's like internally too. I'm sure that it's charged as a marketing expense versus a development expense. Regardless. So they, they don't want it to be like, well, our, you know, our design division is, you know, doing $2 million a year in boards. Obviously this is ridiculous. And our marketing department is doing $20 million a year in boards. But in theory that could get skewed in a certain way, you know?

Alicia White: So going back to prototyping faster. Um, so one of the things you were talking about was that's changed in the industry. That was one of the things you talked about last year as a resolution was learning to prototype faster.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Alicia White: Is that, are those related?

Chris Gammell: Uh, they're not related actually. That was actually, but you, you had written that on the list after the fact. Um, but I think that, I think that just doing consulting and such as, as actually kind of just knocked me into that mode of like, well, I don't have time. I have to kind of glue this stuff together. Um, but like, as an example, I did a, I did a project a couple, a couple months ago where it, I didn't have time to spin up all an entire new board, but you know, I took a dev board off the shelf. I made a sensor board that was custom for my application. Uh, there was a standard pin out on the, the dev board. I just hooked into that. I had a screen that hooked into that. And then I 3d printed a 3d design, 3d modeled a case around it. And at the end, you know, it was a thing that had a screen. It did sensing. It did. It had RF on board. Like all of these things were something that it was basically a proof of concept, but at the end of the day, it was a thing that I needed to get done and out the, out the door. It was probably, I don't know, 10, 20 times what it would cost in a final, in a final version of it, but it worked out great for, for what I was talking about. So in that case, like the, I think the PCB cost two bucks to, to make, you know, I think the, uh, and then the prototyping, I get to 3d print prototypes at my work. I get to make space for like the cost of materials, which is amazing. And, um, so like really it's just the, the, the need to quick, quickly turn things around, um, kind of drive, drove me towards doing faster prototyping. And then the cost of materials makes it kind of a no brainer at that point.

Alicia White: The cost of materials. I'm glad you brought that up because it used to be when you made one or 10 of things, the cost of the materials was as much as the cost of the NRE. But now the cost of material is, is so cheap and NREs is still expensive.

Chris Gammell: So yeah, it is kind of, it's kind of tough. Cause it's like, well, like, so we were talking about consulting and now it's like, yeah, that thing's going to cost, you know, a hundred bucks to make, but it's going to cost you $5,000 for all of my time to get it to the point of working. And I think someone looks at that as a, as a customer and they're like, eh, really? And it's like, at the end of the day, the thing still costs $5,100. Right. But, uh, but they say, well, it only costs a hundred dollars in materials. Well, okay. That's a pile of atoms until someone puts them all together. So what are you going to do about it? You know, it's just a, it's a tough from a sales standpoint, I think.

Alicia White: Well, the good news is the second one also costs a hundred dollars.

Chris Gammell: That's true. Yeah. Right. You're, you, you're amortizing $5,000 each time you build another one, I guess. What are, uh, what are some skills that, that both of you trying to, trying to learn?

Alicia White: I've been on this robotics and AI kick. I'm still on it. And I am fortunate enough that I, I did a bunch of work on it on my own. Cause I had some free time. And then suddenly I had a contract that was using every single bit of it. Wow. Um, from robot operating system to image processing, to deep neural networks. And it was really strange to fall into this project that I had. It was like my hobby became my job, but in a good way.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Usually that's not said with the, uh, with a positive spin on it. Yeah.

Alicia White: I mean, it wasn't like I was doing ceramics and I tried to make that my job. It was always related to my job, but getting to work on large autonomous robots is pretty cool. I didn't expect to have that to pay off so soon.

Chris Gammell: Was that because you talked about it as you were going along? Is that how you found the gig?

Alicia White: I think that the person who recommended me is someone I know in real life or knew before, have known many years. Um, and maybe he knew I was working on it because of the show, or maybe he just recommended me. And, um, I talked to the, the guy who was looking for the person and I, I guess maybe I had, I answered all the questions right. You know, it's like feeling out. Yeah. Well, do you think this processor will work? And I'm like, well, let's talk about this. We want to do this and this and this, and here are the risks and here's how we'll figure it out. And here's how, and so I think I just, you know, the connection was made and I, because I had been thinking about that and working on it, the connection went forward. So, yeah, I don't know if it was, if it was show related. He definitely didn't know about my typing robot, uh, before we had the full conversation.

Chris Gammell: You're like, I'm typing you right now on a robot. You didn't even know.

Dave Jones: My dirty little secret is I have not been an embedded developer since October.

Chris Gammell: It's only a few months.

Dave Jones: Yes. I am learning iOS development.

Chris Gammell: Are you going to change the name of the show or what?

Dave Jones: My, my job now is iOS developer. So I'm working on, I'm working on iOS application code and learning Swift and Objective-C and all that good Apple-y stuff or bad Apple-y stuff.

Alicia White: When are you going to make a game that makes us millions?

Chris Gammell: Never, right? Does that still happen to, do app developers still make like buckets of money like they did at the beginning?

Dave Jones: It's pretty damn rare.

Alicia White: It's winning the lottery.

Dave Jones: It's really rare unless you've got something really special. You know, it's the whole viral thing, right? I have a viral app. Right, yeah. Or if you're, but there's a lot of money being spent on development. So to do something that competes well, you have to, uh, you have to have a real company. It's just becoming a normal software industry. Yeah, except the, it's a gig now. Yeah, right. Okay. It's a marketplace, whatever. Average price is super low. So that's an additional problem. Um, so, but yeah, I've been learning a ton of new codes, new language, um, new frameworks, new methodologies. Well, sort of new. I mean, things I knew about, but wasn't proficient in it at all. It's way different. It's so different. And it's almost, it's almost the difference between sometimes what I think electrical engineering and software is, but just going to the, because it, there's a lot you can do with very little code, but knowing what the very little code is, is a huge challenge and reading it back is a huge challenge. Like one line of code can be this huge expressive thing that, you know, goes through your entire array of things and they could be random things and it does something to all of them and it does them on different processors and then it all comes back in an asynchronous something. And that can be one line of code. Whereas in C you'd, you know, you'd be spending days coming up with just stepping through infrastructure to make that happen. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, but to read that, you know, that's, that's the challenge of learning is, is okay, here's some sample code or here's some code from, uh, the application I'm working on. It's like, what? Okay. I need to spend a half an hour reading this line of code because I don't quite get it all. Yeah. Yeah. And, and for someone who's been doing software for forever, uh, it's kind of demoralizing at times. It's like, wait a minute.

Chris Gammell: I know, I know this, this is, this is code, but no. How are the people that are, that you're, you're interacting with are like, how, so like, are you working with people that are coming into Swift as like new developers who don't have that background and they're just like, oh yeah, this is just the way it is. So they get it. Or are they also staring at that one line of code?

Dave Jones: It's a mix. So my team is mostly new developers who are at the same stage as I am. And then there's an existing team that's, that's been doing it for a while. Swift isn't that old. So, uh, you know, it's. You need 20 years of experience. Yeah. I think it's, I think it's maybe five years, something like that. Five years old officially or something. Um, but it's also changed really fast. Like they had major revisions every year since it came out and they're starting to slow down on what those major revisions do. But for a while it was like, okay, next language revision, uh, breaks all your code. Oh wow. Okay. You have to rewrote, you have to, you know, rewrite, submit substantial portions of your code because we changed language so much. Uh, so everyone's kind of learning and everyone has a different kind of opinion of how idiosyncratic to be. So yeah, you can do some really exciting things with a very few lines of code and make it unreadable or you can write readable code and they probably compiled the same thing, but then you're not using all the cool stuff. Right. So, yeah. So I get code review comments. You're like, oh, you should rewrite this as this. And I'm like, okay. And I rewrite it. It's that. And then I commit it. And then somebody says, oh, you should rewrite it back to the thing you had before. I'm like, hey, you two, you two get in a room and, and work this out.

Chris Gammell: Cause I don't care. I'm going to put a couple of baseball bats in there. Whoever comes out winning, that's who I'm going to pick.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: That's been interesting. And I've been happy to have the opportunity to learn something basically completely new to me as, you know, in a full-time job. Yeah. It's like getting paid to learn pretty much. That's great.

Alicia White: Yeah. Full-time. I mean, that's one of the advantages with megacorp.com.

Dave Jones: Unfortunately, our team has been noticed and people are like, oh, we need this feature. And they're, they're putting stuff on us and now we have some pressure. It's like, well. Oh my God. You have to work now? We aren't the experts, but we'll try. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yep. Yeah. I've been, I've been playing around with the CircuitPython. I don't know if you guys have played with that at all. Uh, that's the Adafruit version of MicroPython specific to the, to the SAMD 2151 chipsets and now NRF 51, 52. It's a good system.

Alicia White: Yeah. I mean, I, I understood about MicroPython and then started looking at the ADA stuff and it's, you can get a lot done with that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, you can. Uh, what Chris was just talking about with like looking at lines of code and be like, uh, I'm like, I'm a bit Python challenged. Um, and, uh, I'm, I've been struggling, uh, as especially like, cause I'm basically even still just modifying someone else's drivers and some of the things I'm looking at, you know, it's just basically looking at object oriented stuff that I'm, you know, I'd feel like I just got a better handle on C, you know, and not even, not even that good. And now it's like, oh, okay, there's all this other stuff now. So it's, uh, there's a lot of unbuild hours there.

Dave Jones: Object oriented is super, super hard transition because you can look at, you can look at a program and not be able to see at all how things flow. It's like, okay, there's all these stuff side by side and I thought, where does it start? And once it started, where does it go? And it's, it's very hard to analyze statically a piece of code that's, that's really object oriented. Whereas with C, it's like, okay, we start here, it calls this, it calls this, I can map out the flow pretty easily.

Chris Gammell: Start it, started zero, zero, zero, zero, whatever the memory location is and go from there. Right. And, uh, it, yeah, it's, it's challenging. Uh, I don't know. So hopefully that'll get better over the years. Yeah. I don't, I don't know how much of that will, I don't know how much like Python, like all the way down to the low level stuff. Like there, there is a lot of stuff in there, uh, in between. And, and like, so I can even see, so this was like a, I was doing writes to a chip and I can like very easily see how much slower the writes are to the chip. Oh yeah. Um, it's, so I, like, I, I agree it's, it's much easier to do things, but I think it's like, there's going to be a lot of tinkering with now instead of, uh, just doing single writes, I'll need to do like bulk writes and bulk reads. And basically at the end of the day, I'm not sure how much more, uh, optimized it will be. Not even optimized. The flexibility versus the optimization. I'm not sure how much that's going to matter.

Alicia White: Whether or not you're building a prototype or a maker thing versus a product that has to be optimal and cheap, fast and reliable. Yeah. I haven't seen a lot of that. I mean, there's just this, this divide between let's make it and then let's make it robust. And I don't feel like we're addressing that well enough because it has gotten so easy to get to the point of let's make it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, totally. And you talked about that with the, uh, the prototype author, right?

Alicia White: Yeah. Alan Cohen, uh, prototype, prototype to production or maybe prototype to product. I keep getting it wrong, but that was a good book about how to, uh, the immense number number and, and quantity of, uh, the, the steps to go from here. I made it work once to here. I'm shipping a million of them.

Chris Gammell: Oh yeah. I've definitely, I've, I've, I've told the story, I think before in the amp hour before, and maybe even when I've been on your show, but like, uh, at one of my past jobs, we, we had like this three model. It was beautifully like industrial design and, and, uh, we got it cut out of like a block, solid block ABS in China and like just really, really gorgeous looking prototype. It was exactly like the drawings. It was, you held it in your hand. You're like, Oh man, it's done. And so my boss showed it to like one of the VPs. He's like, this is great. We'll, we'll take 25,000. He's like, uh, that's a prototype. You, we, no, we can't do that. Uh, and, but it's, it looks so real that it like the, that, you know, to, to untrained eye, they think it's done. They think it came from a mold and it's like, uh, no, no, no, we're going to need another six months. You know, it's like, that's just to get, and that's just to get the money to do the thing that's going to take six months.

Alicia White: And software is the same way. And circuit Python is, is, is that shiny, pretty prototype.

Dave Jones: Well, there's always been this divide though, in software, visual basic was always a thing that professional developers sneered at and, you know, people making products with Excel macros and, uh, there's always been, I've been in that, I've been in that train. Oh, me too. The easy path that, that people wrote stuff in and, and you'd come into a job and it's like, well, here's our whole product. It's, it's, it's in QBasic. Uh, and it's really slow. We don't know why. So I, I don't think that's ever going to change because there's always going to be, there's always going to be more accessible languages that you take a hit in performance at the cost of, you know, at the benefit of being able to develop.

Chris Gammell: And I think we've talked about on the show before too, either the show we've done together or even just talking other times, uh, you know, like the idea of like people coming to the world with an Arduino thing. It's like, yeah, that works actually like really great. And then it's the, you're going to hit a wall at some point. It's like how soon until the wall, until you hit that wall. And when you do it's a, then you have to start from scratch and that's when you start seeing Kickstarter problems and workarounds and weirdness and not great products, right? The not, not long-term products. Yeah.

Alicia White: So I have a question from our embedded Slack, uh, channel. Is ESP 32 just a fad?

Chris Gammell: Hmm.

Alicia White: Seems topical to this.

Chris Gammell: I don't think so. I mean, I think that they're coming out with a new product soon. Espressif is. So in terms of, is the ESP 32 as a standalone chip, a fad? Um, well, I still haven't seen many production level devices with it. Maybe it's out there more than I know. Um, but the cheapness really, you know, it's kind of like the PCB thing we were talking about. The cheapness really changes the equation a lot. Um, and, and when you really look at what's in there, you get a dual core with wifi and Bluetooth and a crap ton of peripherals. And it's like for four bucks in a, you know, a certified FCC certified module. It's like, okay, well, when something cheaper comes along or better, or, you know, that actually has a sleep mode, uh, comes along, then yes, that'll, that'll usurp it. But I think until then it's like, I think people are going to keep making stuff with it. And I think that the development community that comes up around it, uh, will keep it, keep it going because that's what got a lot of it started in the first place. Did I answer that question at all?

Alicia White: Yeah. I don't know how many products are made with the ESP 8266, the older version. I felt like it, it came on the market and everybody loved it, including me. But then when I tried to think about how would I put this in a product, I was like, this isn't secure. This isn't as configurable as I need it to be. This isn't, this isn't the one. And I was hoping the ESP 32 would be closer, but I felt like it, it wasn't yet. And I'm hoping they come out with something that's a little, a little bit more robust to use that word again.

Chris Gammell: Definitely targets, uh, more consumery, low cost markets in the first place. I'm interested just cause I like cheap stuff, uh, especially when it's over specced and cheap, but like, um, I think there will be a place for things, chips like that for a long time. So I don't think that's a fad. And I think that people will keep chasing low cost components because of how that ends up stacking up costs over time. So I don't, I don't think, I don't think that low cost wifi connectivity is going anywhere.

Alicia White: Not going away. It's not for sure.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Oh no, I agree. I mean, or even, even, uh, trading off for a less secure, uh, less well-documented, less, less everything else kind of solution. I don't think that's going away anytime soon, but I don't know.

Dave Jones: Maybe you have other ideas. No, I think that'll continue until, until it becomes, uh, too painful to do that.

Alicia White: You mean security wise? Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Security. Come on. Well, there's going to be companies that are going to ride that wave of this is cheap and I can get something out there. Uh, and then there's going to be other companies that are like, we need support and we need, we need documentation and we need certification and we need to be able to understand this chip before we're going to integrate it. And you know, there's, there's, there's multiple kinds of companies out there. So I think there's definitely a market for integrating the cheap, uh, the super cheap stuff that the expensive, some things you might not want to be expensed. But I mean,

Chris Gammell: I wonder, I wonder if people will, will like miss not mistakenly, but like if someone's gives it a shot and puts it out there and then just happens to be a breakout success product, like that's very possible. And that might also lead to those security risks like you're talking about. But at the end of the day, that will mean that it's even more proliferation. More people might be willing to give that a try as like a production level thing. So I think if you really get into the high volume stuff, people are willing to say, well, let's just start from the beginning. Cause we'll get better pricing from a, a TI or a Broadcom or whoever, you know? But yeah, I'm excited about it. I think it's still, it's still fun to play with. So that's, that's enough to keep things going. The thing that I'm surprised about though, is that like, why isn't there a better way to hook into wifi networks still?

Alicia White: Provisioning. The, the process of putting in your wifi name and password, the provisioning piece, it still sucks. It's always going to suck. It just sucks. I hate it. I've hated it for more than 10 years and it hasn't really changed. It has.

Dave Jones: If I hold my phone up to my brother's phone, it says, would you like to send your, your, your wifi credentials? And you push the button and it goes.

Alicia White: Cause he's in your contact list. Yeah. No, that, that was, that was cute.

Dave Jones: And there are other ways to do it now. If you've got Bluetooth as well.

Alicia White: I think that's one of the reasons the ESP 32 has both.

Dave Jones: Uh, so it can be easier if you've got your phone with an app and then your device and then it connects over Bluetooth and then they negotiate and then it sends over the credentials. Um, that, that could be easier, but there's no, I don't think there's going to be any kind of wifi, IEEE protocol improvements that are, cause it's, I'm not sure it's really solvable because anything you try to do to solve it probably is a security hole. Yeah. Right.

Alicia White: Right. Right. The button you push on your router. Yeah. Yeah. That didn't last.

Chris Gammell: That was the, yeah, that didn't. Yeah. I was actually asking about, so I've been thinking about this for, uh, some product ideas I have, but the, the, I really care about it because like when you really start thinking, you know, if you get all the BS terms out of the way, the IOTs, the, you know, smart homes or whatever, right. At the end of the day, it is useful to have a thing on wifi and, uh, it is useful to like be able to manage a big bulk amount of them. And so I started looking around like, all right, so if I was going to design something in with an ESP 32, if I was going to take that plunge, uh, how do I then go in update firmware on all of them? How do I manage all of them? How do I make sure all the data is coming back? Assuming I'm in control of this fleet of gadgets, you know? And I don't know, I don't know if you saw that, that Twitter thread, but I was asking about it on Twitter just because I haven't seen all that much about it. And, and I've got a couple of irons in the fire, but have you, have you seen how to do that? Yeah.

Dave Jones: So there's, there's people, people, there's companies that do that for a living. Uh, so electric imp, that was their whole deal. Even though they sold devices, it was the management of the devices in the backend. Um, particle does the same thing. Um, or.

Alicia White: But those are both platforms.

Dave Jones: They're both platforms.

Alicia White: They both want to sell you the hardware in order to make you pay for the software.

Dave Jones: Microsoft Azure, I think Microsoft Azure has a whole IOT management platform, not, not hardware, but they're, they're, you know, on their servers and things. I think this stuff exists.

Alicia White: AWS IOT.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Alicia White: I think we have another question on here somewhere is what, what do you think is coming in 2019 and what do you think is overhyped? And those two, I was thinking IOT management, it is overhyped. It's poorly implemented. And underhyped. And, and, and it's going to be very important, but there is no solution that looks like it's going to win. I mean, if.

Dave Jones: There shouldn't be a solution that wins.

Alicia White: But there should be a pattern.

Dave Jones: It's not, it's not a protocol thing. It's not, nobody's going to have a, you know, at RFC for IOT management. It's going to be several companies. I don't need it to win the whole market.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. I just need it to win from, I just need a solution. Like I need something to buy, honestly. Like I need like. Yeah. I need to pay 50 grand and three to choose from, you know, like that's fine. But I still actually haven't seen that. I found a couple of things. But I was curious if you had seen them otherwise. Cause like, so you had mentioned particle and electric cam, both of those require that you buy their hardware. Yeah. So they're running custom firmware on a, so like the P0, P1 from particle, which is, you know, a great solution for some people. And they got their new stuff too, which looks cool. Um, it's a, you know, it's a bespoke piece of chip, a piece of hardware that runs bootloader firmware and has like a wrapper thing. And then you write firmware that runs within that wrapper. I think that's as far as I understand it. And then you pay a platform fee for each device and however much data you send and, and that including for wifi. And then you have to buy the hardware for them. Cool. Fine. That's, that's like a very specific solution. I think a lot of people like that. I was talking like, okay, now I want to design with just an arbitrary piece of hardware, specifically in this case, the ESP 32. Is there a way to get an arbitrary piece of hardware, you know, that has maybe some starter code and then has that wrapper for firmware updating OTA type stuff. And then on the website, then it's like, okay, well now you have 30 devices in the field. Here's all the things, all the names you gave them. And now you want to push firmware updates to 20 of them. Okay. Click go, you know, and it tells you which one's worth it.

Dave Jones: I think you need to look at Azure. IOT hub.

Alicia White: UbiDots was doing that, was doing some of that. What? UbiDots. UbiDots.

Dave Jones: I don't know. Okay. Microsoft Azure has IOT hub. That's what they call it. I think AWS has something similar.

Alicia White: AWS has IOT.

Dave Jones: I don't know what the costs are. So IOT hub. So that's what, a lot. Yeah. Okay.

Alicia White: A lot of them are a lot. There's a homebrew one that's I think called home automation.io or something along those lines.

Dave Jones: Okay. It does seem like the sort of thing you should be able to spin up on AWS instance for your.

Alicia White: Well, and there was a SparkFun thing that was doing that, that they abandoned. Is it Rhino or something?

Chris Gammell: I don't remember. Sure. So the things that I found so far are one is the Amazon's version of free RTOS. That was, I think you guys talked about and I also talked about on Ampower. I didn't quite understand it, but that actually is one thing that they're talking about. So it's actually compiled for ESP32 and it can handle some of that stuff. Like, so like ESP32 has an OTA bootloader, whatever's internally. And then Amazon wrote it so that basically it can handle that. You know, I receive a piece of a new chunk of firmware. I'm running my old firmware. I try to swap them out and do all that stuff. So that's part of what that is. And then I think on their, their cloud side, they can do it. And then the other one was, uh, uh, Andrea Spies, the, one of the YouTubers, him and his, uh, his business partner started up a new one too. So I'm trying to find the name of it, but I am failing, uh, miserably on that side of things. Uh, but there is, uh, yeah. So there is another one and it's not professional. It's like, there's no professional pricing plan yet, but they're working on that kind of thing. Something maybe in the new year.

Alicia White: This is, this is going to be one of those areas that I think next year we will see a lot of, uh, shuffling, but we won't see any resolution for two or three years.

Dave Jones: Or we'll see the IOT bubble collapse.

Alicia White: Oh, please. No, cause then I wouldn't have a job. Wait, no, no, my jobs depend on that.

Chris Gammell: Hey, hey. All right.

Alicia White: Uh, yeah, it's, it's very fuzzy and I think there's money to be made, but you are dealing with lots of people who don't really want to pay anything.

Dave Jones: Or it's every company that does this that needs it spins up their own thing.

Alicia White: I don't think that's going to continue to happen. It's just too hard. When you're managing 30, it's fine. But when you're managing 300, you need somebody to have thought of all the problems.

Dave Jones: When you're managing a billion or a million, you don't want Microsoft doing it.

Alicia White: I don't know if Google has a manager. I mean, we said Amazon and we said Microsoft. So I feel like there must be a Google one just because the great balance point of the,

Chris Gammell: uh, of the fang world.

Dave Jones: Google cloud IOT fully managed IOT services. Try it for free. Yeah. Everybody's got this.

Alicia White: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Use cases.

Chris Gammell: I think the thing, I think the tough thing is that in either case, you need to have some kind of hooks in the firmware, right? You need to be able to have something that is actually modifying the firmware and then, or like self-modifying. For firmware update. Yeah, exactly. And then, and then there needs to be a cloud component piece. So like, I, I don't feel like I'm capable of writing the cloud component piece, even if I was able to write the OTA piece. It's like a lot of, it's a lot of things in that stack that end up being a hassle.

Alicia White: Well, and you're focused on updating the firmware, but most of these also need status and verifying things are awake occasionally while still sleeping or taking small amounts of data.

Dave Jones: 90% of it is I have an app for my thing, like your weather station in your house, and I want to see what the temperature is at my house. Yeah.

Alicia White: There's some piece of data.

Dave Jones: It goes to the server and says, well, the IOT thing checked in 20 minutes ago and here's the temperature. So that's a big piece too.

Chris Gammell: But that's like, that is a lot of, that's a very webby thing, it feels to me. Like a lot of. Well, it's all webby at some point.

Dave Jones: It's all, it's all HTML endpoints, right?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. But I mean that the, like, so an Azure team could spin that up without knowing anything about the hardware. They're just, they're just, they're just, they're making a door and then a device gets itself onto a network, goes and knocks on the door and it says, Hey, I have a key and I can get through that door and dump my data in there. That's all they, that's what they really want to do. Cause it's super low. It's very hands off. I think the other problem is that like when now you're going other direction, you're saying, well, now I have a door and I'm going through the door and I'm now going down to your device and I'm dropping a package. It's like the, the Amazon ring or what was that called? The Amazon thing where they're going to drop packages off in your house. It's more like that. And nobody liked that idea.

Alicia White: Well, and there, I mean, when we go back to security, you mentioned the ES, no, the NRF 52. They have a pretty good, pretty secure method of firmware update, except for the whole fact it's Bluetooth. But the methodology is very reasonable. And yet I, the last time I did one of those, every device was keyed differently because that's the smart security way to do it. And how am I going to update all of them with different keys?

Dave Jones: No, you, well, for, yeah, I mean, we're going to get into detail. Well, yeah, this is all. But I mean, you do it with certs and you, you have, you know, public private key relationship for the, for the site that has the, the firmware update and it delivers it. And the device is the thing that should be authenticating it at that point in that direction. You want to authenticate to the, to the cloud when you have a device attaching, but you don't need to have a separate key to get firmware updates, but change, but if you need to change every key, is that what you're saying?

Alicia White: Cause that, every device had its own key.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Then you just burn them. Yeah.

Alicia White: Uh, yeah.

Dave Jones: You come out with version two.

Alicia White: It's, it's a very complicated problem and it requires quite a bit of intelligence on the device. And so to make the devices more manageable, they are more expensive.

Dave Jones: And then that's why you write in Python.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, on one of the, uh, one of the projects I was working on, we were doing a Python thing and it, it was way easier to do that kind of stuff. Um, so. So I can at least, I wasn't actually doing the Python writing, but I was working with the person doing the Python writing way easier. But I think it's also like understanding the stacks of how that stuff works. Like I, I don't know, I, I'm starting to learn more about the, the key system and certificate, certificates like you're talking about. And I think until you learn that that's even a thing would be, it's difficult to know where to look next.

Dave Jones: Right. And it's super easy to make a mistake with that stuff is the other problem. That that's one of those areas where if you don't understand it completely, you can just subtly mess it up and have a, you know, have a big problem.

Alicia White: And if you understood it completely last year, it's already changed.

Dave Jones: And if you understand it completely, you're a security engineer and you're not doing what you're doing. Okay.

Alicia White: So aside, aside from that, uh, do you have any, do either of you have any wild speculations for 2019?

Dave Jones: New tech, new methods? I don't see anything super exciting with new tech besides what we already know. I, boy, yeah. I'm kind of a downer on next year.

Chris Gammell: Get off my lawn. I was a downer on this year too.

Dave Jones: So then, you know, I think somebody will do a cross country self-driving car trip. That'd be cool.

Chris Gammell: Um, I think, I mean, I guess the high level stuff, I look, I look at like those, those high level things like self-driving cars do. And it's so far from anything I'm doing that I don't, I don't have any visibility.

Dave Jones: It's not super far from what, what Elise is doing. So, okay.

Alicia White: Giant autonomous robots. Sorry.

Dave Jones: Um, but yeah, you know, just in, in terms of processors and stuff, I mean, everything's going to proceed as it has been. There'll be some new cores that do something slightly better.

Alicia White: Christopher's barely managing not to, to take his finger in a circle and do the big whoop sign. I don't know.

Chris Gammell: I mean, a lot of, a lot of what my favorite, my favorite version of that is, is when in Little Rascals, when, when the kid that plays Buckwheat goes whoopee. And then his mom's played by Whippy Goldberg. Classic. Just classic. Yeah. I don't know. I didn't catch that. Sorry.

Dave Jones: I, I, I feel like, uh, everything that's exciting now is just the culmination of the last 20 years. And the internet was really cool in 1995 and now it's on everything. So what does that mean? Well, it's on everything. Um, I mean, the protocols are the same. I'm just jaded. Yeah. I think, uh, oh, I, I think, uh, I think there's going to be some absolutely stunning uh, security holes found in every process of architecture. Like, like the, yeah, I mean, uh, the meltdown stuff inspector was just the beginning and it's going to get much worse. How's that for possible? Thanks.

Chris Gammell: Chaos communication camp, uh, is going on in four days or sorry, Congress chaos communication Congress is going on in four days. And I know one of our past guests, uh, Dmitry Netaspozov and, uh, Josh, uh, Daco, who was just on our show. Uh, they're basically talking about, uh, holes in crypto wallets and, uh, yeah, they're not

Dave Jones: working very much anymore.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's true. That helps a lot, I guess. But, uh, the wallet.fail is the, uh, is the site that they, they, they've basically done marketing for a talk that they're going to do. So wallet.fail is the site to check out if you're interested.

Dave Jones: Uh, it's going to be, it's going to be very fun. All right. All right. How about you two? Any wild speculations? Positive, maybe. I have some. Alicia, you go first. Okay. Yeah, go. Please go first.

Alicia White: So, uh, uh, Christopher showed me this little robot. There was a desk robot.

Chris Gammell: Oh, the Anki.

Alicia White: Anki? Oh, yeah. I've seen that.

Chris Gammell: With a little, uh, the front loader shovel thingy. And it like, yeah. It's called Vector.

Alicia White: Vector. Yeah. It was called Vector. Vector. And it was, uh, something, uh, Echo or, or Google Voice-like.

Dave Jones: Yeah, it had the word Echo.

Alicia White: And, um, and it, so it could go to the internet and it could respond to voice commands. And it had this adorable emotive affect about it. And so my prediction for 2019 is that we are going to see an explosion of adorable robots that act as assistants. And they're not going to be very functional, but they are going to be darned cute.

Dave Jones: Where did I just see this? I just read an article that somebody was lamenting that the, uh, what was it called? The Hitchhiker's Guide where every single thing had a personality. Oh, yeah. Like the door, the doors, the personality doors. Somebody was lamenting this is what's going to happen. Everything's going to have a personality.

Alicia White: And I think that's true. I mean, I think your water pitcher is going to be cute and have a personality and have, when it, when it's empty, it's going to be sad. And when it needs its filter changed, it's going to look, I don't know, constipated. I just, it's...

Dave Jones: Genuine people personalities. That's what it was called. That's right. GPP. Yeah, that's right.

Alicia White: I do. I think that's coming. And I think that the internet of things and the, uh, prevalence of enough processing power to make basic, uh, neural networks work on this sort of thing is going to just kill us with kawaii style cuteness. That is my prediction for 2019. Everything is going to blink at you with giant eyelashes.

Dave Jones: I think that Facebook is going to be broken up.

Alicia White: Oh, I hope so.

Dave Jones: Well, yeah. That's my, as you said for wild predictions, there's a wild prediction.

Chris Gammell: That's a wild prediction.

Alicia White: Chris, what about you?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I got, I don't have much. Um, I'm still like I talked about on the amp hour. I'm, I'm still pretty excited about Laura Wan. I know that that's like very in the dirt kind of like protocol level versus higher, higher level, like robot emotiveness, but, uh, emotivity.

Alicia White: I just wanted you to explain Laura Wan. I mean, I think we've talked about it, but never, never for more than a minute. So could you give the two minute version?

Chris Gammell: Oh, sure. Sure. Okay. So I got this real confused at the beginning. Laura is, it's long range or low, low power radio or something like that. It doesn't matter. It's basically how the chip talks to other chips. That's the easy way to think about it. Laura Wan is then a protocol layer that's on top of that, that basically, uh, it works kind of like the internet. So now, uh, a device is in the middle of a field and it's saying my temperature is four because I live in Chicago. Uh, and, uh, for what? For C, sorry, for C, uh, or F that's, that's coming too. Uh, it's tough guys. I might, I might come visit. I have to say, uh, so the device is sitting in the middle of the field. It's, it's saying my temperature is four. And then there's a bunch of listening devices that are called gateways. And basically, uh, any, it receives all of, all of them receive the packet or, you know, maybe there's three in the area and they all receive that the thing is four. And then also there's like stuff in the header that says where that package should end up going. And basically it's, it's certified to be on the gateway. And then the gateway says, Oh, I know where to send this. And it sends it back to like a, uh, application server that then the application server receives from three different gateway servers. It's, Hey, you know, Nord node 23 out in the field, just said it's temperatures for it gets that three times. It says, okay, I get that this, you know, that I definitely got this packet and now I'm going to hand that over to the AWS IOT or whatever, whatever your graphing charting interfacing system is. So the idea is there's like software layers on top of the protocol layer. Um, both of which are interesting, but it's stupid that they gave them the same name. So yeah.

Alicia White: Very, very low power and very, very low information and long distance.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. So it's like 600 bytes per second or bits per second rather in the lowest power, uh, mode and, um, and you might do it once, uh, you know, once every hour or day. Um, so, but you can have a thing that runs for 10, 10 years on a battery. So it's, that's kind of cool. So I mean, I'm personally very excited about it. I think that's super cool. Um, I'm going to be doing more Laura stuff, uh, for professional. I've already done a couple of professional projects. I'm doing a personal project right now and, uh, I'm very excited about it, but I don't know what that means for other things, but I think that that's a, that's a winner in my, in my mind. Um, there's definitely a lot of, just like anything else, a lot of security questions there too.

Alicia White: Do you have to pay for your bytes to go over?

Chris Gammell: Uh, if you use the things network, it's an open source. That's that conference I went to last year in February, um, in the Amsterdam that's coming up again. Um, and that is an open source, uh, open source implementation. It's basically like a shared, uh, network of network nodes where everybody processes think packets that are allowed to be on the things network. Um, and you do not have to pay for that. Uh, Comcast right now is spinning out, uh, basically every cable box in the nation will have LoRaWAN receiving capabilities. Um, and so you'll have to pay to be on that. But at the same time you'll have, uh, imagine now every cable box in every suburban household that Comcast is in, which is a lot, uh, basically we'll have these chipsets in there and then it'll hand it right back to the network. Yes and no. What band is that on? In the States, uh, it's 433 and 915, both ISM band. Um, in Europe it's 868 and in Australia it's 902. So.

Alicia White: Well, it's nice. You can use the same radio for all of them. Not.

Chris Gammell: You can't. You cannot. Oh, okay. You got that. Uh, but a lot of the chipsets switch over. You basically, it's just a configuration bit. Yeah. So like, like the stuff in the, uh, so there's a SX 1276 is one of the Semtech chipsets. Um, and that's 76. I don't know. Whatever. One of the Semtech chips, basically you just set a register and you go and it's, it's basically swaps between 868 and 915 really easy. So that's nice. And the antenna is kind of close. So I'm excited about that personally, but I don't know, you know, like who knows how it's going to work out. I just think that a lot of the times people are going to, uh, think that they're going to do a lot more than they actually can do with that on a really low battery power. And it is like bidirectional too. So you could put push firmware back down and do a bunch of other stuff, but, um, I don't

Alicia White: think you could push firmware down. It's too slow.

Chris Gammell: You would have to do it in chunks. Um, so like basically there was a, yeah, right. Uh, there was a, uh, arm embed is just, they just verified that was on our, our subreddit. Um, they just verified that they, they could push firmware back down and it does it in packets and there's a CRC and all that other stuff. It would take a long time though. So I'm excited about it. I talk about it a lot, I guess. Sorry.

Alicia White: No, it's cool. Um, we don't talk about it that much, but it is something I've been keeping my eye on. So I'm, I'm happy to have you bring it up.

Dave Jones: I can't get past like, uh, what applications that, well, I could have a billion sensors thrown through a wilderness reporting on. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That's actually what I think about is like, yeah, you basically have a, like, imagine like, so that, and one of the personal project I'm thinking about working on is like basically having an enclosed, waterproof battery powered thing. Right. And then you imagine that like, is like enclosed in like a rubber ball effectively. Yeah. Um, and this is not going to sound good. It's going to sound actually very bad for the environment, but imagine you'd have a handful of these and you just chuck them and then they all talk back to a node. Now, granted they would stay there and you have to go pick them up or whatever, but like, um, you know, the idea is that like, like chuckable, chuckable sensors. That's kind of the idea. Um, and I think that that, that could help for environmental stuff and hopefully you pick them up when you're done. Stick them on whales.

Alicia White: Stick them on whales. Yeah. Yeah. Always a fan of sensors. You can just throw it away.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. You have to still find them, I guess, and get close enough, but then you're good. What was your, uh, what was your favorite gadget of the year? Did you have favorite gadgets?

Alicia White: My favorite gadget was something I got off of Chris's wishlist for Christmas last year and it has nearly no electronics and the worst beeping sound I have ever heard.

Chris Gammell: That was the annoy-o-tron?

Alicia White: Um.

Dave Jones: It's an egg cooker.

Alicia White: It's a hard boiled egg cooker. It's, it's my favorite gadget. Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's so embarrassing, but that, that's, that's the one. But it does sound like a fire alarm when it's done. Yeah. Yeah.

Alicia White: Are you going to choose a synth or something actually reasonable, Christopher?

Dave Jones: I mean, I think I have to.

Alicia White: Yeah. Given the-

Dave Jones: Although I'm not sure which one. Continuing. I only got, I only got two synths this year. Two. Only two. One isn't even real a synth. That's a sampler.

Chris Gammell: That's not bad. I mean, like, that's not bad.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And one of them I just got a few days ago, so I barely made it.

Alicia White: No, I, I'm pretty sure that more electronics-

Dave Jones: Oh, electronics have arrived, not synthesizers.

Alicia White: This is one of those things where you tell me that something's a drum machine versus a synthesizer versus a MIDI player versus a-

Dave Jones: No, I only got the Octatrack and the DeepMind. They're all, they're all the same to her, Chris.

Chris Gammell: Come on, man. I know they're all the same. They're just blitz and bleeps and blurbs. It's counting.

Dave Jones: Exactly. Thank you, Chris. It counts. It's fine.

Chris Gammell: Get yourself a frigging acoustic piano, for the love of God, you know? I don't want acoustic pianos. Then you can't use headphones.

Dave Jones: I've had one. They take up a lot of space. They do. They require weird people to come into your house and fix them periodically. Not weird people.

Chris Gammell: It's one of my life goals. Fascinating people. To have a grand piano at some point. That's a life goal of mine. We'll see.

Alicia White: What was your favorite gadget, Chris?

Chris Gammell: A personal one? Just got a Roomba. So that was fun. It's interesting interacting with that thing. Obviously not new. New to me. Not new to the world.

Alicia White: What did you name it?

Chris Gammell: Jim. Oh, Jim? Yeah. I find ours clean.

Speaker ?: Actually, I didn't name it.

Chris Gammell: My girlfriend did. And she was really upset that all of the voice assistants are all named females and that you're bossing females around. And I agreed with that. And she's like, you know what? We're going to boss Jim around. And I was like, all right. And also when he gets stuck on something, we're going to say, he's dead Jim.

Dave Jones: Or Jim's dead. No, it doesn't work. Whatever.

Alicia White: I did find that our Roomba works quite a bit better now that it has Googly's eyes on it. So just a tip there.

Chris Gammell: I will definitely be doing that. I might take a pause here and order some on Amazon.

Alicia White: Okay. Let's see. What else do we have on our list? Tons. Tons. Yeah. We have a lot because we asked the embedded Slack people and that's our Patreon reward is you get to be on the Slack channel where sometimes we show up and talk and it's really useful. And sometimes we don't really show up and people talk and it's really useful. And it's...

Dave Jones: You just let it run itself.

Alicia White: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. It's nice. It is. I'm there. I like it.

Chris Gammell: It is nice. Too many Slack's though. How do we improve telepresence and I don't know. Slack's are just...

Dave Jones: Yeah. I'm adding it. I'm adding one soon. They're too much sometimes. Everyone's getting rid of HipChat. HipChat's being discontinued. So a lot of companies are going to Slack. Oh boy. There'll be more Slack's. I don't like it. Yeah. I think telepresence can only be improved by those robots on a stick that you drive around.

Chris Gammell: No. Those are creepy. Those are so creepy.

Dave Jones: I just put that in there for a sec.

Chris Gammell: You know, there was a line in Snow Crash. You ever read Snow Crash?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Uh-huh. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And the one engineer she's talking about, like, her big thing was she basically added eyes to the avatars that are in the system. And, like, that was, like, the thing that made the whole system. And I think that's it. I think that, like, having... We're talking about emotive robots. How about emotive telepresence, whatever. Right? But being able to... There was someone talking about it recently, I think, on a podcast. They were talking about, like, being able to see when someone's eyes are dilating or when you're, like, mirroring movements. You know, like, all of the things that are, like, very, very human, you cannot do when you're telepresence. You know, it's just, like, you're just a floating head. And if you don't have that, like, detail of, like, human connection, then you're never going to figure it out otherwise. So, we need to make emotive robots that actually mirror my face. That's what I'm trying to say. There's a vast, uncanny valley to cross there, I think.

Dave Jones: Yeah, I think you're right. Mirror your face. That would be weird.

Alicia White: It's true. If you are an introvert or on the spectrum or just face blind and you are one of the people who have trouble connecting with someone, mirroring, like, their head tilt and how they're doing their hands and their shoulder tilt and occasionally making eye contact, these make other people a lot more comfortable, even though if you're like me, it makes you much less comfortable.

Chris Gammell: Well, it's comfortable until you notice it. And then you're like, oh, ugh, why you do this? Well, I mean, yeah.

Alicia White: But most people actually don't notice. Yeah, I know. The strategies for meeting me. But it's very effective. I mean, if you're really socially inept, practicing on the baristas as you get coffee is quite good practice.

Chris Gammell: So step one, make a robot. Step two, take you to Starbucks. Step three, we'll find out.

Alicia White: How many coffees can a robot drink?

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, let's see.

Alicia White: We should go into some of these sillier things.

Chris Gammell: Speaking of silly things, I gave up caffeine. That's something I'm trying. And it's very weird. I still drink a lot of coffee, but it's all decaf.

Dave Jones: Well, then you haven't given up caffeine. There's still caffeine and decaf.

Alicia White: Not a lot. Don't take away his decaf.

Dave Jones: My metabolism says there's still caffeine and decaf. Oh, that's true. Yeah. Yeah, if you're really, really sensitive to it, then yeah. I can get too much caffeine by sitting next to someone who has an espresso. Oh, got it. How's that going? Are you finding that you're sluggish?

Chris Gammell: No, no, no. I mean, after the initial thing, I'm definitely less anxious. Like, I haven't had heart palpitations in, like, weeks. So, yeah, it's good. You know, it's one of those things where I just wanted to break free of it. And I think I am. Minus the... I still like coffee.

Alicia White: Well, yes, because coffee is excellent. You've made a lot of changes in the last year. Yeah. You were already in Chicago a year ago. But you were just still... Yeah. You weren't... You were only barely settled.

Chris Gammell: Last year, I had been there for a year. So, I moved there, like, August of 2016. So, it's been two and a bit now. Two and a third. But, yeah, lots of changes. It's good. You know, got to keep moving. No.

Dave Jones: No. No. You can just sit still. It's nice. You should try it.

Alicia White: Katie, Chris has already been to our house. He knows how much we just lay around.

Chris Gammell: You guys walk to the beach and listen to the whale sounds. And it's a good life out there. You guys got it great, you know?

Alicia White: Oh, yeah. It's really good. Let's see. What are your favorite books for 2018? Or movies or TV shows?

Chris Gammell: Oh, man. I think we... Yeah, there's a lot of TV. I probably won't touch TV shows, but...

Alicia White: Well, there's The Good Place and Mrs. Maisel.

Chris Gammell: Okay, I watched My Good Place. I love Good Place. Yeah, yeah, fine. I love Good Place.

Dave Jones: I don't know. Movies have been kind of bad this year.

Alicia White: The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs was the best book about climate change I have ever read.

Chris Gammell: Really? Okay. Putting that on my list now.

Alicia White: It's paleontology and paleobiology. And the dinosaurs lived in a less stable climate. And if you wonder why there are big sites where many, many dinosaurs died, it has to do with their unstable climate. It makes you want to go, oh, we really shouldn't screw that up.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Alicia White: Good luck with that. Yeah. Do you have a favorite book? Are you just going to say Lord of the Rings because that's the book you read every year? Or this whole set of books you read every year?

Dave Jones: No, I don't read it every year. It's like every five. Nothing stands out that I read that was really great this year. It's kind of been not a great year for books. I'm trying to think.

Alicia White: I can't believe you're still reading the book you're reading. You're like, pick it up every day and you're like, this is so dumb.

Dave Jones: I'm like 90% done and it's boring, but I have to finish it now. Got to power through it. God, yeah, no, I feel bad because I don't really have any, I need to find some better books.

Alicia White: We have many of them. There are many good books. I don't know why you keep reading the boring ones.

Dave Jones: Because they're the ones that, what? The same books you're reading, some of them.

Alicia White: Yes, but I only gave it three stars.

Dave Jones: I don't track your ratings on, I mean, three stars is pretty good for your ratings.

Alicia White: I'm all nice on Twitter, but I'm really mean on Goodreads. Okay, Chris, what about you? He'll have something. He'll have something.

Chris Gammell: Energy and Civilization. I think I've talked about it a couple of times because it's going real slow, but it's like every time, I keep reading before bed. So it's like, you know, slapping me in the face. But it's really, so it's basically about how energy has changed and like energy consumption and food and how like farming has changed everything. It's basically using energy as an excuse to talk about civilization and how it's changed. So it's great. Vaclav Smil. It's very, very good. I think I found it on a Reddit list or something. But yeah, that's a good one. All my other ones are like marketing books and lame. So don't listen to those.

Dave Jones: I might have read Sourdough this year. So that would be my favorite book of the year. Oh, that goes into- I thought I read it last year, but it might be this year.

Alicia White: Into which episodes did you like this year? I know one of Chris's favorites was when we interviewed the author of Sourdough, Robin Sloan. Oh, yeah. And he's a best-selling author and really had nothing to do with Embedded. And it was so fun.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Alicia White: We had a lot that weren't really Embedded related this year.

Dave Jones: Sunshine Jones was this year too.

Chris Gammell: I've noticed that. I've noticed that. You guys really don't stick to the Embedded all the time, but that's okay. I think that people are there for the variety of conversation.

Alicia White: I had the recruiter this year too. I hope so. I mean, otherwise they're all gone.

Dave Jones: We've had a lot of good shows this year. And they're all connected to the experience of being in tech in some way. That's all it needs to be.

Alicia White: The theme of people who are on our show is people I want to talk to. So it's...

Dave Jones: Yeah. We should rename the show people. People at least here wants to talk to. I've thought about that. Dot FM.

Chris Gammell: That would work.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I always point people at our... I mean, me and Dave talk about a lot of the same stuff over time where we talk about the news and things like that. And that's still going strong, actually. But I always point people at the guest episodes to start with. I think that's the best place to start. I really enjoyed doing... I did 10 episodes in four days at camp this year. And so...

Alicia White: Yes. And they were fun and weird and good. I really enjoyed that.

Chris Gammell: I was editing podcasts in a tent by Lantern Light at one in the morning most nights. So that was a little weird. I was like whispering into a microphone like, Welcome to the amp hour. This is Chris Campbell. Would you like to be scared? Yeah. Right. Right. So that was a lot of fun. I mean, I don't know. I just... This is... The reason we still do this, you know, however many years later is because it's very rewarding for us. I think that hopefully people recognize that. We're doing it for the audience, but we wouldn't keep doing it unless it was fun for us, too. And so... I think I just saw the Jerry Ellsworth episode was posted onto the... Like a Reddit a couple days ago. So... And that's... Jerry's been on our show four or five times now. And this last one was talking about how working with naming consultants for the demise of Cast AR.

Alicia White: Yes. I saw that. It sounded like so much wasted money. It was so painful to listen to.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. But also funny. I mean, Jerry's great. Well, yeah. It was awesome. Yeah. Interesting and funny. There's...

Dave Jones: Right. Exactly.

Chris Gammell: So, yeah. I don't know. There's a lot out there.

Dave Jones: It's hard because we do so many. And, you know, both of us, we do so many. And I can't even remember, you know, when a particular interview was. And sometimes people will say something like, oh, you remember what you said on episode 197? I'm like, no. Not at all. I don't remember. But I'm very... It was on that show.

Chris Gammell: Let me go search. Very flattered that you do remember that. That's usually what I say is because, yeah, people saying that is very, very kind of them.

Alicia White: It is very kind.

Chris Gammell: I actually did have that last week with Jeff and Dave. And, like, we were talking about Signal Integrity people and how there was, like, three big names. And I was like, oh, yeah, but we never got Dr. Howard Johnson on our show. And then I was like, oh, no. We did. We did. Sorry.

Dave Jones: I could not remember at all. Yeah. So, when people ask favorite episodes, it's like, oh, I don't even remember what we've done. And I don't listen to them except editing. So, I don't have the same experience that other people do. I mean, I remember sort of once, oh, I really enjoyed talking to that person. But I don't know specifically why or what we said. So, yeah, it's hard. But it's like, you know, it's like asking musicians what their favorite stuff is. Like, well, I made that record. I don't listen to it.

Chris Gammell: It is interesting, too. And it's like a song. Like, I think I heard that from Billy Joel. He gave his top five songs. And one of them was like a song that most people do not listen as top five. And that's nice because it's like you know that it's something special about it. But then you listen to it. You're like, yeah, I'll go back to the hits. Thanks.

Alicia White: Yeah. There are these things that we've done this year that have sort of sunk. Like, one of the good things about podcasts, about our podcasts, is even when I'm like, okay, that show sucked. Somebody almost always tells me they liked it. And even if I love to show, usually people will say they liked it. But then there are other things Christopher and I have done this year that we worked really hard on them. And they were really cool.

Dave Jones: Oh, God, we're going to go into this.

Alicia White: But nobody noticed.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Have you had anything like that? No, this is the time to do a callback. Oh. Yeah, exactly. I don't know. No. I mean, if Dave was here, he'd probably talk about like the his whiteboard videos never got like they're like technical and take more time. And I personally think they're better. But like, you know, the mass audience doesn't care about them as much. I don't we don't really do all that much special stuff here.

Dave Jones: So what are you talking about? So for me, she's talking about my cover music project and my other music projects. Nobody listens to music or they don't like it either way. Yeah. The cover thing was and still is a thing to keep me engaged in making things. And I put it out there as kind of a milestone or deadline or keep me honest kind of thing. So I don't really care if nobody listens to it. But then it's hard to not care if nobody listens to it. Right. So I don't get feedback. I mean, don't even get negative feedback. Like somebody if somebody came and said, you know, that was great. But you could have done this. I listened. That's something you really want to hear. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I listened or, you know, I didn't really like that even. It's fine. But so it's it's it's it's hard to make things and not get any traction. And but that music has been like that for a while. And even though I know some of the stuff that my brother and I and our bands have produced is good because we played live and people come up to us and throw money at us and do strange things and, you know, invite us to go play parties and things. So we know at some level that we are engaging. But recorded stuff on the Internet, I just doesn't go anywhere. And I don't know that there's a way to make it go anywhere. Yeah. That was my thing. And you had your your zines.

Alicia White: The llamas. Yeah. Yeah. I worked really hard to make the llama drawings about different IOT technologies. And I did it for Supply Frame for their magazine. But it turned out that we didn't know how to print it properly. And so it didn't get into their paper magazine. It got on to electronic. But even then I was like, OK, I'll put it on my website and it'll be really cool because I worked really hard on it and I think it looks neat. And nobody cared. Nobody cared at all.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Alicia White: Which is fine. Not everybody needs to love everything I do. And I do it more for myself. I have to remind myself that. Yeah. But that and and some blog posts and it's just it's it's hard.

Chris Gammell: The thing is like the closest thing that I have that you're talking about is like I'll post a show and like, you know, one or two people will retweet it. You know, it's like I think a really good guest has been on the show and people would be interested in whatever. And there's just, you know, a couple of people that are interested in it. And then, you know, I'll post some offhanded tweet about silliness and it just resonates with more people. It's like a mass market thing versus a specific thing. And like, I don't know, it's it just feeds back into my nothing's harder than getting people to give a crap about something on the Internet. I think the easy way to do it is to, you know, copy what other people are doing and just slightly vary it and be snarky with things. And if you're going to make something new, it's going to, you know, be tough. It's but that's always been the case.

Dave Jones: Well, and you just got to keep doing anything else. And you have to thing I've come to realize you have to decide what you're doing it for because you're doing it for adoration. That's probably not a good approach.

Alicia White: But it is tough when you put a lot of work in.

Dave Jones: But it's hard not to have positive feedback or any feedback. Yeah.

Alicia White: But you put a lot of work into a podcast or a blog post or even, you know, a project you're working on. And then you tweet about it three times and you get a couple of retweets and maybe somebody likes it if you're lucky. And then you post a picture of your dog and you get like 20 retweets and 20 likes. And you're like, let's talk about what I wanted here.

Chris Gammell: That's just the I think this is just the modern conundrum. And the more controversial it is, too, the more it'll the more it'll take things on, you know. Oh.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah. Oh, let's see. Okay, I've been picking the wrong cover songs. Yeah, exactly. Now I've got some ideas.

Chris Gammell: And I just saw Chris posted an oatmeal comic about this, huh? Yeah. Okay. We'll post that. That's a good way to end, I think, because I have to go. It's holidays here and my nephews are about to come knock on the door, I think. Well, it's not holidays here.

Dave Jones: Oh, he's in a different time zone.

Speaker ?: I'm kidding.

Chris Gammell: He's in a different time zone. I live in the future. You're in a different holiday zone. That's right. We are closer to cocktail hour around here. So, you know, that is a different holiday zone for sure.

Alicia White: It's been really good to talk to you. Yeah. I look forward to these. Yeah. Even though we talk a lot online, sometimes it's just nice to say hello sort of in person.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, hopefully we'll get to see each other in person in the coming year. Like I said, I might hop on a plane and just come escape to not Midwest weather in the winter here.

Dave Jones: It's not super great here right now. Don't tell me these things. I'll find out when I get there.

Alicia White: It was sunny today and warm-ish.

Dave Jones: It was not warm. It was. Yeah. I'm in Buffalo right now. So it's much worse. I see. Yeah. Yeah.

Alicia White: All right. I don't know how you close your show. Happy New Year.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And all that stuff. And now a Winnie the Pooh quote, I'm sure. Yeah?

Alicia White: No. Actually, I don't have any quotes today. Oh. I was. It was Happy New Year and go build good things. And thank you to everyone for listening.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Thanks, guys. Talk to you soon. Bye. Bye. Bye.

Chris Gammell: Bye.

Speaker ?: Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x