Frank (00:11):
Frank, congratulations on 200 episodes.

Frank (00:18):
of what James 200 episodes of what?

James (00:20):
Of this podcast. Literally the podcast that we were talking about. See, I was gonna, you know, say that, but then we had just recorded the entire podcast and then you then told me that I was super crackly, so no, I had to go get my Mac and now we're rerecording episode 200 episode 200 Frank. We did it.

Frank (00:37):
episode 200 woo party confetti. Yeah, all that stuff. Um, I really can't comprehend how we did this. James. I think I only gave this show about a hundred episodes in my mind before you rage quit because of something I said. And somehow, I don't know how we've managed to make it to 200 episodes and not only that James, but I think people keep listening to it too.

James (01:03):
Yes. I think we should first stay. We are at 200 episodes of first thanks to each and every single one of you that have somehow put up with us.

James (01:11):
I mean, one, I don't know how you put up with me. I think 100 was a good number to call it and put it in the towel there. But I think we've had listeners from episode zero, um, that have stuck with us. I really appreciate that.

Frank (01:23):
Yeah, you've all been amazing. I really love it every week. Uh, hearing people's reactions to the episodes on Twitter. It's a real highlight of my day. I really don't ever want to answer any questions or do any work, but I really just love getting reactions from the show. It's super fun.

James (01:42):
Yeah, it is delightful. I think right now is a time in which I've really seen more and more feedback. Day one come in, you know, people are at home, more people are, you know, listening to the podcast. So thank you through all this time and you know, keeping those download numbers coming in.

James (01:57):
We're super appreciate that and the feedback that we get to, I mean, you know, any episode that ends in a zero is one of my favorites because we use it on to come up with the topics and we did do something different for this episode. But I mean, I think before we get into, you know, lightning topics, um, yeah, I want to thank you Frank. I want to thank you for being with me on this podcast and through this journey and somehow recording 150 hours of content. Frank, that's a lot of content.

Frank (02:23):
Yeah, it is. This is definitely the longest job I've ever had. Um, yep. This is the central month sentimental part. Everyone, this is where James and I compliment each other, but it really has been a wonderful doing the show. I think it's helped me as a software developer. It's definitely helped me as, um, an explainer. I dunno, a presenter, whatever you want to call that job. Um, I take that job seriously. I, I think it's fun. Um, being educational and hopefully a tiny bit entertaining at times. I hope that people at least fake laugh at my terrible jokes. Um, but I found this whole experience very rewarding and a huge part of that is thanks to you James. So hats off.

James (03:07):
Oh, thank you. Good sir. I mean, it's been fun on my end because I get to spend time with them, my best friends in the world, we don't get to hang out that much in the real world. I mean comparatively when you think that I've lived in Seattle for eight and a half years, no new for six years. I, we're, we're both true Seattleites in which we don't hang out with other peoples and that's okay. Not mad. I'm not mad at that. But we do hang out, but we do hang out literally every week. So I think in that regard we're the best Seattleites because we hang out with each other more than any other Seattleite does one to 18 hours every week on this podcast when we have to rerecord 15 times. Um, but

Frank (03:45):
not talk to my closest friends once a week for an hour. So like that puts you in a whole different category. Like I don't even, yeah, I haven't talked to anyone once a week for an hour. Not my parents.

James (03:59):
No, this is a true, I mean I will say like that's why I started podcasting. I started podcasting a long time ago by myself and I immediately figured out that this would be awesome just as a way to connect to my friends after college that had gone back to their home state or somewhere else. So I started doing a movie podcast with my buddy Michael, who now I do the Nintendo dispatch podcast with the reason I started coffee house blunders with Danny a long time ago was because I wanted to chat with him. And the reason we wanted to start it because we wanted to talk as well, but we wanted to talk all the tech cause we, whenever we would meet in person we'd be just having these conversations or like why don't we just record those conversations. And that's kind of the podcast.

Frank (04:44):
Yeah, it is. Uh, someone on Twitter was asking, um, how this got started and actually, um, a lot of it came out of a meetup that we were doing together. If you don't know in the Seattle area, we, we you ran and I semi assisted in a meet up for several years and that was great cause I think it taught us both a lot about Oh community talking to people, what are people interested in, whether we could stand each other or not. Things like that. Uh, so we were able to shake out a lot of those early things and then the rest was just trying to figure out how to get me to focus and pay attention for 30 minutes while we record an episode. Just difficult. Sometimes

James (05:28):
it is difficult. I mean especially when we're so sidetracked by 8 billion different things that are happening, especially now with everything happening in the world. But you know, where we often go into a pod. Often the topics we talk about are things that are timely, things that we're actually working on. And we've always said that, you know, if you listen to this podcast, you will have said that very similarly that whatever we're talking about on the pod is probably what's happening in our real life or it's something that I've been working on for ignite or for build or a Xamarin conference that I can't talk about, but I will talk in and around it.

Frank (06:04):
My friend is writing this app and my friend has terrible programmer is running, running into this problem. Could we talk about it for awhile?

James (06:11):
That's pretty much it. I mean, we could have done an entire episode on Y. Dot. Men crashes when IEnumerable is empty. I don't know why it does, but it does.

Frank (06:21):
Yeah. Yeah. That's my favorite era in the world. I get to see that exception message at least once a week. I'm like, Oh yeah, man. Throws an exception if it's an empty list. Oh yeah. Never going to learn that lesson. Yeah. Yeah. It's fun. Those are actually kind of my favorite episodes. Honestly. I like it when we have a really deep down technical bug because I think when we try to do like a general subject, like let's talk about functional programming, there's just like, where do you even take that conversation? But if it's something like, Hey, I'm getting this weird exception, will you help me out? I'm like, yeah, I hit the record button and let's do an episode.

James (07:01):
Yeah, it's true. I mean there's been so many topics that we've covered it. It almost is like, what are we going to do for the next 200 episodes? I literally have no idea. We were going in trying to figure out what would the topics be for the lighting topics. And we're like, ah, I don't know. Like we got some good recommendations and we're going back and forth. And I mean, to me, what I love about doing this podcast and chatting is that we kind of push each other back and forth. Uh, and also I think our listeners do too. So all of you listening, you push us, you ask us these different topics, you make us investigate things. And, uh, I think I've gotten a lot better at life in some regards at coding, at, uh, delivering applications on, definitely becoming more aware of, of how to make the podcast, uh, grow. How we can help the listeners with like transcripts. I'm listening to our listeners on topics because you know, you may re request something like localization or maybe accessibility and then we do a topic on, I'm like, Oh, these are all the things I'm not doing. I need to go fix this now. You know what I mean?

Frank (08:08):
Why do you have to bring up CIC D in every episode? I'm sorry, I don't have the CD part working. James. I'm sorry. Someday I'll get it working. I promise you it's just every episode you just got to stab me through the Heartland.

James (08:21):
Yeah. If it's not CIC D then it's AI machine learning and that's you, that's your fault. That's in general. I'm just saying

Frank (08:28):
do for an episode. I have to check the chart. Usually I keep a little meter of when I think James will let me do AI again. And he'd be like, yeah, yeah. Anytime. He says,

James (08:39):
I'm serious. You can just, you can talk about it. I mean I literally call on like why do you want to talk about today Frank? And I know Frank actually has about 18 machine learning and AI, different things in the back of his mind. But I don't think I'm, I may let him talk about one today cause we're doing something different. Frank. We decided that instead of going out to the internet, going onto our discord and gathering kind of back topics or lighting talks that we do something different for 200 episodes because it's been 150 hours worth of content. So we said let's do something different. You and I both wrote down six, no three different topics. Six God, you scared me there. Six total topics, three topics each and um, we're going to give each other a lightening topics to discuss now. Now Frank May, you'll prompt it to me but it doesn't mean I'm going to talk for five minutes. Hopefully it's a conversation. We have no idea what each other has written down. Hopefully we didn't duplicate. That's the hard part. Um, and we are going to let it go. And we do lightning tops at topics every episode that ends in zero and they are five minutes each. So when we start here at about the 10 minute Mark in about 25 seconds, if I can ramble on Frank over there is going to give me a topic. How does that sound, Frank?

Frank (09:52):
I like it, but I need a little clarification on the rules. James, I wasn't a part of this pre show discussion. I'm just kidding. Um, so am I going to say a topic and then you're going to introduce it and say the first words about it? I love that. I like making it level up difficulty or do I introduce the topic and go first to no, no. You introduced the topic. Oh boy. And then the other person has to go. I'm so scared. I'm so scared. Well, you can sit back. Why don't you tell me your first topic and I'll just go to town. Well James, our first topic is, and I'm just going to give you, this is all you get. Neo morphism Oh great. I love Neo. Morphism this is like a really cool topic. Um, Neo morphism, which I'm going to Google here, Neo more FISM is it

James (10:37):
sign concept, uh, in a way which has become pretty popular, I would say in the last month or two. I've seen a lot of tweets pop up around them. If you just, um, Bing or Google Neo morphism it's sort of, um, it's, it's sort of, uh, embossing. It's sort of like, you know, in Photoshop, Photoshop back in the nineties where you would just deboss and emboss all fonts. That's basically what it is with like buttons and dials. So everything is sort of lifting out. Everything's sort of, have as a heft to it. So you could imagine, um, a play button that's a circle that has a play icon in the middle. It's almost like the drop shadow behind it is part. It's like stretching the material out from underneath it. I really liked the look and feel of it. Um, I've been using, um, in my recent apps, something called acrylic, which is not quite, um, new, more Neo morphism, but it's somewhere in between material and it, this acrylic type, um, design was from the fluent team and I'm John Murray.

James (11:43):
Um, one of, um, um, Xamarin community members has a sharp NATO library and, and, and build this car. And I thought it looks beautiful. I'm like, wow, it looks like even better than a material. I'm going to use this. It has some, has some, um, like just, I don't know how to say it. It has like some texture to it, almost texturey to it. Um, so I've been looking at the Neo morphism designs. It's really cool. It's sort of like, here's an amp up of, um, of, of material design in a way. And you know, cards have more Haft they're popping or they're going through. So now the application is more on the Z access more than ever. So the Z access is really showing layers to your application. So I'm for it. But the problem I have is, yeah, designers can make these beautiful things. And until I have a library, I can't really do it. So that's me. I don't know. That's how I feel about it.

Frank (12:34):
That's cool. Okay. Yeah, no, you had a lot of opinions. That was really excellent. Actually. You covered a lot of the things that I was going to cover. Uh, from my part though, I would say that it's a nice extension of flat design because there's still a lot of flat design elements to it. Uh, the use of passed out colors, the use of shapes, uh, really strong shapes. It's not skeuomorphic, you know, you're not putting an old transistor radio on the screen, but what it does do is add texture and depth like you were discussing. And I think that it's just a nice evolution of flat design. Flat design was fine. Yeah, it was easy to write CSS for flat design, but it wasn't pretty by any stretch. It was like 1960s modern art. It's not, we can't have the 1960s constantly, you know, like w art develops, design develops, aesthetics develop. So I think it's just very modern. It has a very actually space 2001 book to me. Very Saifai look. Um, I was so impressed by it. I actually started a library on my Twitch stream trying to implement a version of it. Uh, hasn't been too successful so far, but I still have high hopes for it and I just think it's lovely. I'm just so excited for a new aesthetic in UI design.

James (13:50):
Yeah, it seems that this design plays very well with anything that is card or circle based already. And ideally any building control could have a new amorphism texture to it. So one thing that I love, love, love, love, love, love is, I do a lot of stuff in Xamarin forms, but San Fran forms has this concept of visual property and built in as a visual material, which uses Google material design. If someone built an iOS and Android Neo morphism library, you could plug that in and then on my button or on my frame or whatever, I could just say Neo and then boom, I'd be sucked into the matrix and I'd be good to go.

Frank (14:34):
Yeah. But that would definitely be my goal. If I actually tried to release a UI library, because could you imagine like, Oh, I want this aesthetic, so I'm going to design a UI library. Now I have to implement layout binding, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's much easier to just become a renderer Xamarin forms or a visual, whatever they're called. I don't even know how that system works, but it's nice that that system exists because it means that people can innovate on the rendering side without having to implement all the other baggage of UI.

James (15:06):
Do you think this is going to take off? Like have we seen any real applications? I've seen tons of designs, but have we seen real stuff?

Frank (15:12):
Nope. Nope. Um, that's because, um, it's so design heavy that every design you see is um, uh, ad hoc. It's, it's, it's designed just for that moment, that screen. And so no one's come up with a tool for it. There are tools to generate the correct drop shadows and all of that, but it's not nearly as pretty as an artist creating it. And so there are just, there are subtleties that people are missing in their UI libraries, but you know, give it time.

James (15:41):
Give it time. Yeah. Alright. Question, topic number two. This one, it's more of a general topic around, I'm going to be five minutes. No problem. Whatever you say here. Five minutes. Easy. Alright, here we go. Ready? This, I'm already laughing. Oh great. Will Frank ever finished the CAEP? Whoa. Well Frank. Alright, here we go. Will Frank ever finished his secret app and if not, or if so, what is holding you back from doing so?

Frank (16:12):
Wow. Wow. People remember what I was saying about that moment where the show does dance. All right. Five minutes. Um, yes, the end. Well, no. Yes, yes. Okay. I got this, I got this, I got this. Okay. So, um, a year ago I said I was going to work on an app. I said, I don't believe in new year's resolutions. I'm not going to make one. And I didn't. So I haven't broken any new year's resolutions. Uh, but it turns out maintaining a bunch of apps and creating a new app and running for city council takes up a lot of time. And basically running for city council is why that app wasn't released. I tried to do, um, a really quick a finished version of it before Christmas. That was kind of my goal was to get it out before the holiday season. Um, but at the point it was before the holiday season. Um, I shouldn't, I, it wasn't shipping worthy, I'm just put it that way. And then after the holiday season, uh, distractions and then a virus and I'm just all over the place, basically I can't focus. Got it. That's depressing. Thanks for making me depressed.

James (17:24):
Well, you know, I, I'm in a very similar, um, space in a lot of my applications and in fact, the application that I'm working on that we've talked about a lot, um, you know, I'm, I've been this like public, you know, testing phase and I'm like, okay, well how do I even finish it up? Right. I have to get the app store listings. Correct. I have to get the screenshots correct. I have to get the app icon correct. I have to get all my licenses, I have to put that into the, for the open source projects I'm working on, I need to make sure my fonts are correct and I don't have to owe people a bunch of money. So to get those made, it's, it's almost like even if you finish the app, your app is not really done yet. And that's sort of been my struggle. Um, it seems like you're in a different spot, but at least that's what's been holding me back from really like getting super excited about and just how I'm going to work on that and like get this done. Like, Oh, there's all these minuscule meaningless tasks that I need to do,

Frank (18:15):
especially because of this podcast. We have an episode of this podcast when we discussed onboarding and I still think about that episode all the time because, um, I hate it when my apps open up blank and people are just like, well, what am I supposed to do now? So I've always wanted to create a better, um, environment for when they open up. And so I have a lot of, um, Polish and finishing work to do just in that regard. And that's besides the website, as you said, the screenshots, all that kind of stuff. Um, I'll, I'll admit also there's been a bit of feature creep. The when, when you have a code base that's been sitting this long unreleased, you can't help not to have a little bit of feature creep. So part of me just wants to release it so I can stop feature creeping. But it's hard. It's hard. James. Um, yeah, it's hard to release. I wish I had a boss that just yelled at me and said, we're really releasing on Wednesday.

James (19:13):
It's like this podcast where we're releasing every Monday and we like, haven't missed that. And like we've gone to like extremes like you've recorded like in Mongolia or something like that. Like it has happened. Like we made it happen somehow. Even like we were very close. We somehow made it happen. So. All right. Well, do you think that you're going to finish the app? Like do you do now that you're like feature creep? Like is it an app still worth finishing?

Frank (19:35):
Yes. Um, so it's been a little bit frustrating cause I, I've run into a few, um, you know, technical bugs that have taken a little while to work through, but those are getting polished out. Um, it really is a matter of me drawing a line in the sand. And for some reason I just haven't been able to do that and finish it. Plus the tiny little bugs. So there is so much a little fit and finish, but you know, at some point you have to draw a line in the sand for the fit and finish to not just the big features, but you got to say like, okay, my reputation may go downhill, but you know that this shade of gray is going to be 10% off. I just, I hate it, but it's going to be 10% off.

James (20:16):
I've been, uh, I had this weird little issue on one of my apps to, to that point exactly is, um, I'm using like an iOS, uh, tech century. Uh, and you know how the by default there's like the little, little, little wrapper around it, you know? Yeah. I set the background of the same color as my background, but still that, and I was just like, I don't want to write this little bit of code, like there's a renderer to like just remove that thing. Maybe it's okay. Right. It's just the littlest thing. But I'm like, I know I release it without it.

Frank (20:48):
I know it's so bad. Like I think with every app you release, you raise your own expectations too. Or um, you know, is that the right word? Whatever. Um, yeah. I raised the bar on myself, so I look at my older apps and I'm like, I can do better. So I want to do better, but it takes, turns out better, takes longer. So it's, I don't want to be chasing perfection, but there's definitely an element to that. And I try to remind myself perfection is unattainable. Just release the gosh darn thing. Sometimes you gotta do it. And all that brings us to the next topic. Frank hit me. I'm ready. Oh, right, James, you weren't going to hate this one because I'm not sure I fully understood the rules when we came up with these original topics. Great. But James, tell me, because you're a game, you're, you're an ex game game person. What were your favorite 3d libraries in game development or just in general? I guess

James (21:48):
I used to be in game development a long time ago, uh, back in the day, uh, which is when I worked at crunch time games. I made a game on the Xbox. I also, before that I worked mostly on a lot of smaller 2d games. Um, and in Java and in C sharp and a few other things like that. Uh, you know, the problem that I had with game development for me at least, was

Frank (22:13):
that I always struggled a lot with, um, coming up with something by myself. Right. I could follow directions, I could implement things. So we're an hour done.

James (22:26):
Feels really good. Did a lot of work in direct acts. That was like the game engine, I guess we use, we use accent action that we didn't use. XMA wasn't out yet. We used, yeah, direct X directly direct X directly. I was good. Um, so I haven't really had a lot of experience with that. We did do a lot. I did a lot of shader work in direct acts. There was a lot of math involved with that. So a lot of our, like toxic clouds did like texture scrolling and you know, morphing and things like that. So I did a lot of direct acts, direct work. Um, beyond that, I will tell you maybe like stuff that I've been looking at recently. Um, maybe it will spark your engine. I don't know if it necessarily a three D thing, but in the game realm of engines, at least I've been really looking at, I call it Godot, but I think it's really good dough. I think it's good to know. Maybe go dots, I'm not sure. But that's what I've been looking at because, um, there's, uh, an individual at Microsoft, um, there's like some sponsorship there. Um, then they have a Cole C sharp side of it. So that's what I've been looking at. But this is probably not the answer that you're looking for, Frank.

Frank (23:25):
No, it wasn't, but I really enjoyed that direction because I'm good. Don't just release some new support. Like I think they like caught up to the ecosystem somehow. Like I don't know. But that's really cool because you know the big famous C-sharp on out there is unity. A lot of people use that for rendering these days, but good owes a new uh, entry in that world. Uh, I was going to go a different direction because I ran into a library on new gig kind of just by random and I just fell in love with it because, well it's just amazing to be thoroughly honest and I want to talk about it a little bit. Okay. It's, yeah, it's this library from gradient space I believe is the company that wrote it and its just called gradient space 3d but if you've ever done 3d programming, especially with meshes, trying to input 3d stuff, I'll put 3d stuff, render it, all that stuff.

Frank (24:22):
It gets nasty. There's a lot of code to ride, a lot of bookkeeping, a lot of different algorithms out there. You read research papers, uh, this library is just a huge giant collection of algorithms and goodness in the three D world. That is a really nice license. I forget if it's MIT or Apache, but you know, it's a really nice license. Something you run into a lot in the three D world is stuff is GPL, which it's just no go for shipping proprietary apps and this has a beautiful library with a beautiful license attached to it that just has every feature I've ever wanted in a three D library. And it was just so wonderful to see an open source library like that and even better.net 2.0 so it runs on everything. I mean I just fell in love when I saw this library. James, I'm looking at it right now.

Frank (25:16):
I'm pretty sure it's, there's a fuse from gradient space. I see geometry three sharp G S slicer in G S G code, which are all different. Yeah. So let me tell you about this cool part. So they have that general purpose 3d library, but then they also have builtin code to print to a three D printer. That's what the slicer and G code thing are. Someone just a few lines of code, you can output the G code, which is what a three D printer takes. And so with this library, it's very easy for me to create software that generates 3d models that then get exported to a three D printer. It's all in dotnet standard opensource software and it's, wow, it's awesome. It's just awesome. That was pretty cool. I like hard algorithms, really tough stuff. Slicing a three D model is not easy. I wouldn't even know where to begin to be honest with you.

Frank (26:13):
It's also really cool that just, it's just out there. How did you stumble across it? You were just in, you get one day and you're like geometry. Yeah, I mean pretty close. James. Pretty close. Um, I was about to write a slicing library and I was like, you know what? Before I embark on six months to a year worth of work, I'm going to Google. And I started Google and this library showed up and I'm like, this library does literally everything I wanted plus 800 things more. And it's just one of those wonderful feelings of like just finding the perfect library written by smart people who do have very thorough documentation, very clean code. You know, there's not one interface there that's getting nude up by a container or anything. It's just all straightforward, good code. Very cool. Well, I wish I had something better to share with you, but I do have another question for you or topic if I will, because it's not a question here is the, I think it is a question, actually.

Frank (27:15):
I guess I ended up with a question Mark. This is, is this number three? No, there's only number two for you, right? Number two for me. Yes. We're almost done. Yeah. All right. I'm scared. Have we reached peak on wheel? Oh, you're throwing my words back at me. This is hilarious. Um, so you were asking about a one wheel models and things like that and we'll, um, gosh, what's the company called that makes one wheel? Whatever they're called one week. Will they have, yeah, let's just call them that. I think they actually have a real name. Um, will there be a much better model out? And I said something to you, I said, I think we've hit peak one wheel because the one wheel as it stands right now, the ridiculously priced, most expensive one is everything you could ever want it. Um, it's battery lasts basically longer than your legs will last.

Frank (28:07):
And so it's kind of the perfect device and there's a million things like tiny little tweaks I could say like this would be a little improvement here. That would be a little improvement there, but it's kinda like they invented a bicycle and all I'm talking about are tiny little refinements on a bicycle. It's kind of trivial, my refinements and that's why I throw to you that I think we've hit peak one wheel. Like this is kind of a design optimum or at least really close to it. Now when I say also peak one wheel, right? And I think about this, where else do we go in the world of self propel propulsion of things, right? I mean, I always tease Heather all the time that I'm going to buy a one wheel and she's like, you're going to kill yourself and just ride your bicycle.

Frank (28:58):
You don't need a one wheel. I'm like, this is a good point. Um, but you know, I think that, where else did we go? And I, and I put this on the list not only to talk about one wheel, but also because you're always trying to create balanced, botch and you're always automating drones on all these things. Like what is, what is next year, Frank? Ah, yeah. Um, well in terms of balance, for me it's just a very interesting problem. I had a controls professor and we would talk about static stability versus dynamic stability. You can make something stand still, um, and not move, that's stable, but it's not moving. It's not interesting. Or it could be shaking and you could say that's unstable. But the truth is it's shaking about a center. It is kind of stable. And so these are really fun problems to work on as an engineer because they push you to your limits.

Frank (29:49):
I think that's as an engineer, why I like the one wheel because it's kind of a classic problem in controls engineering, the inverted pendulum problem. But this is a company that took controls that took us years to kind of get right. It's basically rocket controls and applying rocket controls to a funny little skateboard device. Where do we go from here? Um, I mean my goalpost is always back to the future, so I want a full hoverboard, a proper hoverboard, but we don't have any power sources nearly capable of outputting the kind of power we need aside from putting little jet engines or rockets on a board, which I don't think parents are going to approve of too soon. But you know, aside from rockets, we don't really have a way to make a hoverboard right now, but someday. Okay. Alright. Someday

James (30:41):
I don't really have much except for maybe I'll buy it. Maybe I'll buy a one wheel. I don't really know.

Frank (30:48):
Oh, this is the part where I'm just supposed to convince you riding on one wheel. No. Um, now I, I've, I have this funny joke where I only T I tell people that I'm only happy when I have wheels attached to my feet. So it has to be like roller blades or ice skates or a one wheel and then I'm happy. So I get to ask you my last question now. Is that, is that the rule?

James (31:14):
I think so. That is the rule that we have, uh, agreed upon somehow.

Frank (31:18):
Okay. Uh, this is a fun one. This is good. I'm actually curious. I'm trying to, I want to word it a little better, but here we go. James, have you ever tried to learn a foreign language and if so, how have you succeeded and have you tried to do so recently?

James (31:36):
Yeah, great question. Uh, so, uh, I took four years of French in high school, so this was 20 some years ago at this point. Um, Oh, I'm old. And uh, and you know, I decided to pick French because my sister took French and I grew up in the Midwest. And little did I know that French doesn't really help me in very many places in the world unless I'm in France or maybe some parts of Canada. There's one or two other places. Forgive me French listeners. If I have mr country, um, I should have took Spanish because Spanish is in many, many countries. Um, now I have for all intents and purposes, forgotten 99.99, 9% of my French. Uh, but when I did go to France not too long ago with Heather, I could pick up on some things here and there. You don't just naturally forget everything so you can pick up, you know, some different words here and there.

James (32:31):
Um, but recently, um, before I got married, I wanted to do something special because Heather is a math and Spanish major to two majors and a minor. She always reminds me of that. She also had, um, and she, whenever we go to Spanish speaking countries, she's able to speak very fluently. And I love when she speaks Spanish. Awesome. And also when she's out with some of our friends and you know, they speak Spanish as well, um, because she majored in it, so she's really awesome. So I thought it would be amazing that if I could propose to her in Spanish, like how great would that be secretly, right. Yeah. But high risk, like you don't want to mess it up. They're like, you got to really roll that R and do that end thing that I can't do. Yes. I can't do any of that either.

James (33:23):
So I signed up last year, yes, last summer, um, for a intro to Spanish class at the Seattle university up in Capitol Hill and that went terrible. So, um, I mean it was, it was an introduction, but it was only once a week. And that was the problem that I had. I didn't do the apps. I didn't do, you know, Rosetta stone or anything like that. Um, I was like, in person, this is going to be good. The problem was that it was once a week, so I'd come home and do the assignment, how they would help me, and then by the next week I forgot everything. And by the end of it I just sort of was like, all right, this is too complicated and I'm just kinda done. So I didn't, I'd propose in English and it worked out great for me. But yeah, that was my, that was fine. So it worked out okay. Still married.

Frank (34:12):
How many words could it have been? Couldn't you just memorize it phonetically? I about learning the language.

James (34:18):
It was a long, uh, pretty long proposal speech. Oh, okay. Yeah. Okay.

Frank (34:24):
Um, I, I brought it up because I've had pretty much the same experience as you. In fact, I took French just like you. Um, but I'm even a bigger disgrace because I took a little bit in college also. So I should be a little better than I am today. I can read like 50% and I can understand 10% spoken. It's pretty bad. Um, but I've also studied Japanese. Croatian, tried to teach myself, German, tried to teach myself Arabic, all of lost causes, all failures. Um, but I've decided recently that I really want to get back and try Arabic again just because I like traveling through the middle East and it would be super helpful if I knew more than three words. And so, um, I started like, this is funny because I went to YouTube and started getting app reviews. So I'm like, I want to know like, what's the good, what's the good technique these days, James?

Frank (35:21):
And um, what it all came down to actually was this new app out there that I wanted to tell you about. It's called, I don't even know if it's new. It's new to me, you know, new to me. Uh, it's a different way of learning a language. It's called hello talk, hello talk dot. And all it does is throw you into a room and says, Hey, here's a bunch of people that are also, uh, learning what you want to learn or learning the opposite of what you want to learn. So say I want to learn Arabic. Well, here are some Arabic speakers who want to learn English and the idea is you just chat with each other and they found that this is the best way to acquire a language. Memorizing grammars just doesn't seem to quite work when you're engaging the conscious brain like that.

Frank (36:05):
But if you do it in storytelling form, if you do it in chat form according to these experts, it's going to be better. So I kind of jumped all in and just started chatting with people and it's kind of amazing. So think of it as like just kind of an open chat room, but with the explicit goal and it's pretty well moderated and all that so you don't have to worry about those kinds of things. It's an established service where everyone's just focused on helping each other learn a language and it's really wonderful. It's like a whole community I've been introduced to and I really love it.

James (36:39):
Wow, that's really cool. I mean I definitely would. I would like to try that out. I noticed that when Heather is engaging and speaking with her Spanish friends, like via via text message or whatever, it really, you know, encourages her to, to even spruce up on it. You know what I mean? So kind of having that conversation, I think that's what was my detriment, right? Is I wasn't having that conversation or trying to go back and forth and yeah, Heather could speak to me in Spanish. I couldn't understand anything. So you start to have to start somewhere. So I'll be interested to see how that goes for you Frank.

Frank (37:11):
Cool. Yeah, and just to keep propping it up. I really don't have that much experience with it. I'm just, but I'm like, I've always also heard that like meetups and you know, lunches and things like that are really good ways to learn a language too, or at least keep it fresh in your ear and things like that. But for all the introverts out there or anyone obeying the quarantine and social distancing and all that, I really think that this app is kind of perfect for this day and age where we don't need to meet. We can just use the internet for what it was meant for connecting people through language barriers. I think it's really nice. I will,

James (37:46):
and I also hope that more of this sort of happens because as the, you know, as we're all inside, but as we start to explore more, like it's, you kind of see like it's very beneficial to have like kind of to be bilingual and it's quite fun. So I love, I love it. That was really cool man. Cool. All right, here we go. Last, it's a tricky one cause I don't even know if I voted for it at all. Oh good. All right Frank and also this is also a question to all your listeners, so I hope that all of our listeners write in and tell us this too. What is your favorite moment from the last 200 episodes? Do I remember any of the last 200 episodes to the great question? What show is this? Which 1:00 AM I episode 200

Frank (38:36):
that's the one that I, Oh, they're all my darlings. James. Um, I keep thinking back, Oh, I'm going to go for the worst episode first. Okay. How about that? Go for it. Um, I think back to an episode where I think I tried to describe how to write compilers. I think it was one of the very earliest episodes, but I use it as a reference in my head for how not to have an episode because I'm pretty sure it was me just trying to give a six month lecture in 30 minutes and probably making absolutely no sense. And I'm like, this can't be what I do on the podcast. So I took that as a moment of a reflection of what's not ever do that again. So that, that was my least favorite moment. Do you have a least favorite, least favorite moment of the pod?

Frank (39:30):
Um, I think looking back at quite a few, the ones that I've, I guess I've been not, I've been let down by the ones that I've been led down by are the ones personally where I sort of make a commitment or promise to some, do something a lot of around like our holiday hacks. And then I don't do them or we don't have a followup for them. That's sort of feel bad. I hate that. I hate it so much. That's like my least favorite, I would say maybe. And that's not even like a specific episode. It's like a part of the podcast. Right. Um, that's definitely been one. I don't think there's been a time where we record a podcast and I was like, that was a bad podcast, you know? Hm. Yeah. Okay. That's fair. That's fair. I was really just killing time so that I could go back and try to remember what all of our episodes have been about because James, we've done 200 episodes.

Frank (40:21):
I'm not sure if you're aware of that. Um, up to a million, uh, listens. Uh, in totality. It's a lot. 1.5. Yes. Oh, it's 1.5. Yeah. Let's just keep complimenting ourselves here. Well, I will say this while you think about yours, I can say that probably my favorite moment of this podcast, um, was in 2018 at build. And this is when we got a podcast booth together. When we got to interview individuals out folks. Um, there was only one other time that Frank and I recorded in person and it was at his apartment and this was actually a terrible recording. It was really bad, like lapel microphones. It went way. It was fine. It was weird, but we haven't really recorded in person. But this was a time where you and I got to sit down together and interview people and I thought that was so much fun because it wasn't just that we were interviewing people. It says that we were there with them in person. Maybe it's more sentimental now in these times where I don't get to see anybody ever. But that was really cool. I mean we sat down with JB, with Miguel, a bunch of other folks. Um, it

James (41:33):
was just like really fun. Like with Paige Bailey, remember we interviewed page? Oh my goodness. She like blew our mind with like machine learning in space. Like that's crazy. I mean those were really cool moments. I mean, I love our moments, but I think because we were there together and it was as cool, like, Oh, this thing could work if we had like a talk show, like that's how I kind of felt.

Frank (41:57):
Oh yeah, that a talk show said, would we have two mugs and two seats or would I be like the weird co-hosts that's always on the couch awkwardly as like the guest comes in, you're like, Frank, move aside a little. We have a better guests now.

James (42:11):
No, no, no, no. It's like, it's like, it's like a, um, it'd be almost, because it's still, it's still audio only, so it'd be like a, a radio talk show. It'd be like, we'd be like two G's. Like, Whoa, why aren't we just got to get the sound board soundboard.

Frank (42:25):
Yeah. Okay. That's fair. I don't know, James, I don't have a favorite moment like that. I guess. I think my favorite moments are when we actually solve one of each other's bugs. I love it when one of us has an aha moment. When the other one's talking, you're like, Oh, you just solved my problem. Thanks. Can we end the podcast right now and I can get back to work. Those are my favorite moments on the podcast. Those little epiphanies, thanks to the other person, you know, it just, I love those moments so much. So that's a general answer to your specific question.

James (43:02):
Perfect. I mean, and that's a great, it doesn't have to be, I guess I shouldn't have pressed with a moment, but that is a moment, right? Those are moments that occur on the pod. So I think that was great. I think that's perfect.

Frank (43:12):
Yeah. So give me one right now. I need an a moment.

James (43:15):
Oh, in aha moment. Well, I mean, on demand, aha moment. I mean, I think that when you solve this min problem that I just had, that was an aha moment for me. Um, I can't, I can't, I, if our listeners too, because we record obviously some stuff for our Patrion members and sometimes we don't record anything. I mean, I think that our conversation Monday, so we're recording on a Wednesday. Here's a record on Monday. Uh, Frank and I, Frank tweeted, he's like, we literally got on the, on the mic and then talked for two hours. I don't even remember. We talked about it now. We just talked for two hours on stuff. Fix the bug in my Android app and I helped you with something I think. I think it went both ways but I don't remember if I helped you or not. Those are the most forgotten and it's almost a moments that aren't in the ponds that also make doing the pod special

Frank (44:05):
every week. Everyone just for a peek behind the curtain, I think it's a small miracle. We put out a show because we usually talk for 30 or 45 minutes and they're like, Oh gosh, now what are we going to talk about? Cause we just talked for 30 or 45 minutes. Pretty much a miracle. It's a miracle everyone. 200 miracles.

James (44:23):
Yes. And I am on the good microphone again. Uh, I still am in an empty room, but I do have a curtain now. This curtain, um, blanket curtain curtain to blanket if you will. Behind me. I get on teams, calls with my coworkers and it looks like a game of Thrones chair behind me almost. It's quite, Oh for me it looks like you're covering something up. You're like, James, where are you covering up? What don't you want people to see? That's a great question and I'm not going to tell you to listen next week to episode two Oh one. Frank, thank you so much for spending four years of your life on this podcast with me. I still don't know why I do it. I'm just kidding. Thank you all for listening. It's, it's really, it's really impressive that you've made it this far. I don't know what you're all thinking. Yes, thank you. And of course, tell your friends about the pod. If you like the pod, hit us up at merge conflict out of fem. Hit us up on Twitter at merge conflict FM as well. Um, you can tell us what your favorite moments or not so favorite moments of the podcast are or what you would like to see on the next episodes going forward. Well, Frank, here's to the next 200. So let's end it like we always do.

Speaker 3 (45:28):
Till next time on Jay's mountain magnet. I'm Brian Krueger. Thanks for listening. Peace.