Navigating Tech Shifts, Expanding Your Developer Toolkit

Zach Stepek:
Hi, I’m Zach Stepek, and I’m here joined by Carl Alexander again for another episode of Expanding the Stack. Carl, how are you?

Carl Alexander:
I’m great. I’m a degenerate workaholic right now. I mean, to be fair, it’s like. I mean, you got all the US Got a lot of cold and snow, but, you know, like, it’s been going. We’ve. We’ve gotten a really early. Well, you’re far up north, so you’re kind of the same as me. But the winter started really, really early this year, so.

Zach Stepek:
It did.

Carl Alexander:
I’m like, I’m holed up. I’m holed up and working right now. That’s like. That’s been my January.

Zach Stepek:
I am wintered out.

Carl Alexander:
Oh. I was wintered out before winter actually started. Right. Because winter starts just December 21st. Right. So. Which is like, people don’t realize, like, the season of winter just starts in December. I’ve been wintered out before winter officially started.

Zach Stepek:
You know, I. I was wintered out before November had even ended.

Carl Alexander:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m like. I’m just like, absolutely. I’m like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, yeah, because I’m. Yeah. I wish I was, like, in Mexico or something or like Brazil, but here I am right now. So I do the best of it. I’m in my little hobbit hole basement apartment with the heater running like I. I blast it. I’m like. I’m a weirdo. But, like, ever since COVID when I couldn’t travel, I basically have rebelled against winters. And I basically cook. I cook my apartment so I can wear shorts in it.

Zach Stepek:
Okay, so.

Carl Alexander:
So I don’t know how to say it in Fahrenheit, but it’s like 20. It’s like, it’s. It’s. It’s 90, you know, in my apartment, I think.

Zach Stepek:
So that’s a little warm. A little warm.

Carl Alexander:
Yeah, yeah, it’s. It’s warm. Like, wait, let me figure it out. 90 Fahrenheit to Celsius. Oh, no, no, it’s not that high. Okay. It’s like in the 80s.

Zach Stepek:
Okay.

Carl Alexander:
80 Fahrenheit to Celsius. Yeah, so it’s 80. It’s 80. So. But still very warm. Right? Like, still very warm for an apartment. You know, I sometimes I nickname it the sauna.

Zach Stepek:
Yeah, that’s fair.

Carl Alexander:
But that’s. That’s what you got to do. Like that a lot of vitamin D and so just deal with the seasonal stuff. But, yeah, wintered Out. How about you?

Zach Stepek:
You know, it’s been, it’s been really good. I’ve been working on trying to find balance between all the things and that’s a hard thing for most of us to find.

Carl Alexander:
Yeah.

Zach Stepek:
So, you know, being a little more intentional about time spent with family and time spent doing things like reading and you know, enjoying the, the things that I have in the life that I have and the friends that I have. And so it’s been nice. I did go on a, a short little weekend run with a band for three days which was a lot of fun in December and another little run in, in January, another weekend run in January with my friends and Riding With Killers. Kind of little bit of a show, man. We did, we did three shows that weekend.

Carl Alexander:
So. Okay, so Friday, Saturday, Sunday kind of thing.

Zach Stepek:
Yeah, I went to Cincinnati, went to Louisville, Kentucky and then went to Evansville, Indiana, which is an interesting city. Evansville is a lot of fun.

Carl Alexander:
Why is it interesting? I’ve never heard of it.

Zach Stepek:
It’s so. It has a reputation that’s not great as a capital of the United States for a certain drug, but it’s also just got a great music scene and great people and I’ve got a lot of friends out there. So it’s, it’s always nice to come back to Evansville and see the folks that I know out there, especially my friend Kirk. So, Kirk Martin, I know you’re not listening to this, but it was good to see you, especially a couple days before your birthday.

Carl Alexander:
Nice.

Zach Stepek:
But yeah, it’s, you know, it’s a good time and got to go to a venue owned by the drummer of the band knocked loose in our, on our Louisville date. Got to go to a, a famous venue in Cincinnati called Express. Okay or no, that’s Madison Live there. Madison Live, it’s technically in Covington, Kentucky but yeah, it’s right over the border from Cincinnati, six blocks from Cincinnati. But yeah, it’s a great venue. We were in their smaller room. It’s a theater complex so they have multiple rooms, mostly club size shows. So it was a good time. On my way out there, I got a flat tire in the middle of Indiana, which is always fun. Hit a one. One of the famous Indiana potholes on the side of their highways. They do a very bad job of taking care of their roads. So that’s, that’s basically, you know, been my, my winter is spending a lot of time in building partnerships, working, you know, the, the role at Big Scoots and then occasionally taking a weekend and just going off and being a rockstar photographer for a few days and coming back, that’s great.

Carl Alexander:
I can’t say I have a good life balance right now. I feel like I, there’s so much to do like with AI and stuff now. Like I just feel so unleashed and I’m just like, I have so many things I’m trying to tackle and so little time and also like, I don’t know, like it, it’s fun. Like I think, I mean I’m on Twitter a bit more now again and it’s like a bit kind of echo chamber for the AI stuff. But yeah, I think one thing that’s kind of true though is it did make programming feel like a lot of fun again. Yeah, like not, not, not that it wasn’t before, but did an order of magnitude difference in the amount of fun I have programming.

Zach Stepek:
No, I get that. I stopped coding actively a while ago. Right. Because I’ve been in more executive leadership roles for a while and AI and the, the tools that are available now have brought me back into that world of coding more. And so it’s really, it’s fun to be back and to be learning new things with this. I, I don’t want to say pair programmer, but kind of junior programmer that I get to direct. Yeah.

Carl Alexander:
I mean it’s changed a lot over the holidays. Like I, I, I’m, I’m still writing my year review. 13, 000 words. We’re still, we’re getting there. We’re getting there.

Zach Stepek:
Wow.

Carl Alexander:
I have a, I have a couple thousand words on AI and stuff and some of it is like related to the holidays. I think we hit a really big inflection point around December. So it’s, it’s people are still, I mean the jury is out whether like it actually like, you know, gets you to like, you know, everybody can code but it’s like, okay, marketing is more important than ever now basically and because there’s even more noise, even more apps and stuff. But, but it is fun. And like, like a lot of, I’ve seen a lot of executive. I’ve sent one.

Zach Stepek:
Okay.

Carl Alexander:
I don’t know if I can actually say the company name, but so I have a friend, I’ll keep the company name anonymous. But basically there’s a, there’s a company called Sentry. They do like error monitoring and stuff like that. During the holiday the CEO sent a, an email to, to say like, look, this is an inflection point. And then he used to be a developer and he’s like, look, I’ve been shipping stuff for Century that’s going in production, doing security fixes and I’ve been doing it with agents for the past six months. So I’m not saying that you need to like you will get fired if you don’t use agents, but you should be aware that this is happening and this is impacting stuff. So I send this to a friend who’s working at a very big company who, who’s the, the CEO is very AI pilled and I, I don’t know if we could swear but I’m going to say it anyways. The cheeky DMS, the CEO on Slack with that email because you, the CEOs trying to get everybody to like use AI and stuff like that, but they’re kind of like curdling it in and stuff because they have to use Asia. And then he’s, he’s like, that’s it. So you know, like let it rip basically. So I, I indirectly got this big ass company to go like all in on, on AI because I sent that to my friend. It was a good email. I’ll try to get it for the show notes for Bob, but, but it’s a really good email. But I think, yeah, it’s changed a lot and I’ve seen a lot of takes. I think the jury’s out whether it’s like super good for like the large businesses or what the impact is. My favorite take is to Javon’s Paradox which is like, you know, as technology advances it doesn’t actually shrink the amount of work, it increases the amount of work because like you, you hit more stuff. And I feel this intently like with Emir basically like I went from like, oh, I’ve like all these things I can’t do to like, oh no, now it’s just a question of priority and triage. Basically like nothing feels out of. And that’s why it’s exciting and fun because I’m like, oh, do I have to learn Rust? I want to do this thing in Rust. I’m like, now I can learn Rust, but I also can have the AI write the Rust for me. So and just review and do a lot of it at the same time. It’s like, it’s amazing. I’m having so much fun but workaholic.

Zach Stepek:
So I similarly have been pursuing some things outside of the WordPress space. And one of the things that I’ve been doing is learning After Effects actually. And After Effects has a whole scripting language that lets you control aspects of video with code, which is really cool. So I’M learning how to generate random fractal based noise in order to create grunge effects. And that’s cool. It’s so much fun. And you know, that’s kind of me, my pursuit outside of WordPress at the moment.

Carl Alexander:
Yeah. The one I want to use with YMIR. It’s blowing up. It’s like this tool called Remotion. It’s like how to do like videos in react, like these kind of motion videos that you see like a lot of like companies do where like they zoom in on a screen and then they like some stuff underneath. So they came out with a skill thing and now like people are like doing tree prompts and getting these cool like little product demos for their products like right out of the. So I’m sure After Effects is going to have something like that too where you can be like, hey Claude, like do this graph and you know, and then get all this stuff out. So it’s like. Yeah, it’s crazy. Like, just. I feel like if you’re a really capable person, like you’re, you’re. The ability you have to do stuff has just increased exponentially. There’s a lot of. Yeah, there’s just so many of these fun scenarios. Like there’s Toby, I, I forget his family name. But basically the CEO of Shopify, he, over the holidays he got an MRI and he was like, oh, I need to buy this Windows thing to cost like thousands of dollars to view my MRI. And then he just had like I generate a web app to view as MRI scan, basically.

Zach Stepek:
So.

Carl Alexander:
And it was just like, you know, little things like that. Again, business wise, still not 100% sure like how this plays out. But for me, who’s running a business, very enabling because I can do a lot more and, but it, yeah, it’s been really difficult for the life balance because I’m just like, okay, well my to do list has just grown exponentially. And before I would just be like, ugh, I guess I’ll go play a video game. It’s not like I can do this now. It’s like, oh, I’ll just start having AI work on it and just like work with it. And then stuff’s getting done and I’m like, okay, I guess I should, you know, go out. Like at least I go to the gym and I do all that stuff still. So like, that’s really important to me. But, but it’s just like it’s very hard to get myself to not work right now. So it’s like very, it’s A very interesting time, basically for that reason. But yeah, I have to manage my. Not burn myself out and all that. You still have to be very careful with, you know, your life and stuff.

Zach Stepek:
Yeah, well, Toby. The CEO of Shopify.

Carl Alexander:
Yeah, Lütke. Yeah. I forgot his name, his family name.

Zach Stepek:
But Toby actually had a really interesting start to his career. And yeah, he was a huge fan of video games. I think a lot of us that are in programming today were. But he read all of John Carmack’s plan files and that’s how he learned systems design.

Carl Alexander:
Okay, I didn’t know that one. I knew a bunch of stories from like, Tim Ferriss. Like, they. It started like Shopify started as like, their platform for their, like, snowboarding shop, I think store like that they had.

Zach Stepek:
Yeah, Snow Devil. That was there.

Carl Alexander:
Oh, yeah, Snow Devil. Yeah. But you were talking about video games. But for a while, if you don’t know what the game factorio, like, he would just buy, like, if you started working at Shopify, he would like, literally, like, give you a free copy of Factory because. Yeah, and there’s a lot of analogies right now that are like, basically AI is kind of like factorio. And I. I somewhat agree to a certain extent. But yeah, he’s definitely kind of a interesting character in the sense of what he does with his company. I mean, I love people that are like that.

Zach Stepek:
Yeah, no, absolutely. And when you think about it, I mean, John Carmack, for anybody who’s listening, who isn’t familiar, one of the founders of ID Software, right. They created Doom and Wolfenstein.

Carl Alexander:
Yeah, he’s the OG video game, 3D video game developer person.

Zach Stepek:
Yeah, just a amazing guy. They created Commander Keane kind of first before any of that. And I didn’t.

Carl Alexander:
I love Commander Keen. I didn’t even know he did that, but I love Commander Keen. Buy that on fucking floppy disk at the store. I forget which. I forget where. What stores you could buy that in. But there was no video game stores per se, but computer store maybe you could buy. Buy it at.

Zach Stepek:
Yeah, there was. There was a company.

Carl Alexander:
You have to get cards, like red card, green card to open some doors and stuff. This is like.

Zach Stepek:
Yeah, there was a company out here in the United States called Egghead Software, that the domain got acquired by Amazon when they filed bankruptcy. But Egghead was where I bought some of my first video games. And then CompUSA as well was.

Carl Alexander:
Oh, yeah, CompUSA. Yeah, yeah, but.

Zach Stepek:
But yeah, that’s actually. I. I bought my first 500 gigabyte hard drive at a Comp USA for $700. It was the biggest hard drive you could buy at the time. And I was doing some video work back then, which is why this whole video exploration thing is kind of full circle for me. I was doing Nonlinear editing in Premiere 3 on a power Mac 8500 in high school. So yeah, it’s really interesting to look at kind of the origins of people and where they started from and, and then to look at what we’re doing now. You and I both have a heavy interest in the WordPress space and have for a while, but we’re also looking at what’s next and what’s outside of that. And for this episode I wanted to look a little beyond WordPress and talk about some of the things that we’re going to be looking at over the next year, both professionally and personally, but also as part of what we’re doing for our podcast here at Open Channels.

Zach Stepek:
So first, a lot of people know that you have Laravel experience, but not everybody does. Not everybody knows that a lot of Emir has been built on Laravel.

Carl Alexander:
Right. I mean it’s all Laravel. Most of my consulting that I have left is actually like more or less Laravel. We’re very Laravel like focused in the sense that like roots that the, the, like the, the WordPress community that does a lot of the advanced stuff has like a paid framework called Radical, which is like this hybrid Laravel WordPress thing that Emir actually supports. That’s kind of like how I got my foot into hosting laravel sites. Yeah. So I do, I’m working on a large project around that of just like having basically most WordPress be more of a backdrop to the whole thing. But yeah, no, I mean I have a heavy experience in php. I think I Think it was known and then forgotten because again, like, I. The world’s changed a bit since COVID But like, I, I’ve mostly always promoted myself as kind of a PHP dev, more than WordPress dev for Veri. Because, like, you know, the Emir Cli is all. Is heavy. I mean, laravel has a lot of symphony, but like the Emir Cli is all symphony, right? Like, it’s got no laravel in it. Like, I just like PHP a lot as a language, but I’m increasingly open, especially with AI, to other programming languages and other things. But yeah, no, definitely more of a developer. But yeah, doing a lot of Laravel because I think laravel is exciting.

Zach Stepek:
It absolutely is. And it keeps evolving, it keeps getting better. And so you’re working on laravel support inside a mirror, which is cool.

Carl Alexander:
I mean, laravel is kind of interesting because so here’s. I’m very into the, the, the, the ecosystem. Like, I listen to a lot of the podcasts, I pay attention to a lot of what Taylor does and stuff. And there’s kind of an interesting aspect to the Laravel stuff right now is that for. On the tech side, they’re so far ahead, right? Like, you know, like, they do a lot of cool stuff. Like, I think the closest thing to like, laravel is the Rails framework. Like, it’s good. It’s. It’s really like they call it batteries included. You know, like when you get something with the batteries included, like, it’s a what they call batteries included framework where you get like everything you need. Like, you need billing. You. We got billing, we need this, we got this. Like, you don’t have to go too far from that. And it hasn’t even been a year yet. And they’re doing like laravel Cloud now, right? So they came out with laravel Cloud. They’re kind of like shutting down Vapor. They’re going very aggressively against. Vapor is basically the product BMOS. Is based on. So they’re aggressively going that. But it’s kind of interesting. What they’re doing with laravel Cloud is all stuff that we in the hosting space, the WordPress hosting space, we’ve known for a long time or done for a long time. Like, for example, I’m talking to a Laravel Vapor customer and somebody that I just like talking with. And at Laravel laracon Europe, they’re doing a dinner for anybody that spends like $30,000 a year on AWS to just like try to bring, you know, you know, those corporate dinners that we’ve been to a million of Them. Right. But like, like all this kind of enterprise stuff and the way they’re doing their architecture and the struggles they’re having around support is very interesting to me because it’s kind of like, oh, this is like table stakes in the WordPress space. So it’s kind of like interesting seeing like these kind of two dynamics play out, where you have a framework that’s like really far ahead technologically, especially compared to WordPress, but in the hosting space it’s, it’s, it’s not that it, the UI and everything looks great and modern, but like what they’re doing and where they are is like so far kind of like behind stuff. Some of the stuff that we’ve seen over the years, like they’re, you can see that they’re kind of growing this thing, you know, right now because they’re doing things that you would never have seen even like six months ago. Like I said, like a dinner for. For high rollers is not something you see very. You never ever saw at a laracon or something like that. But now in the WordPress space, very table stakes.

Zach Stepek:
Absolutely.

Carl Alexander:
So it’s very interesting to see those two dynamics play out well.

Zach Stepek:
And I think that laravel is at a point now where it’s definitely a mature ecosystem, has been for a couple of years now, at least at that state of full maturity. And it’s just getting better every single release. And so it’s really a natural progression for a PHP developer who has familiarity with PHP and WordPress to expand into a system like Laravel as an additional skill set. And so that’s something that I want to talk about this year, is what laravel is and you know how to make a good transition from WordPress to Laravel knowledge. And you know what is eloquent? What’s an object relational mapper? What are these packages that are part of laravel that handle things like authentication and authorization, or what’s a database migration? Like, how do we actually work in a way that, that something can be migrated without breaking everything? These are all really important topics. And there are things in Laravel that handle job queues and task scheduling and events.

Carl Alexander:
WordPress has that, but it’s.

Zach Stepek:
Yeah, we have it all right. But it’s all very well abstracted for most users.

Carl Alexander:
But also it’s kind of. It’s also not promoted in a way that you can use it. Right. I’m using it for my projects, but you have to kind of be deliberate in your desire to use those systems. And they’re not really like Laravel kind of wants you to use queues. WordPress doesn’t really go out of its way to teach you to use them, you know, things like that. So it’s very interesting. Yeah. And there’s definitely stuff to learn and it’s, it’s interesting also like what the impact of AI has on all of that. Right. Like, Right. As well. Right. So.

Zach Stepek:
Well, even just looking in ecosystem Laravel Boost. Right, right.

Carl Alexander:
Well, I think this is one thing I think WordPress is struggling with.

Zach Stepek:
Right.

Carl Alexander:
They’re going very hard on the AI stuff, but for building blocks and stuff like that, but not for like.

Zach Stepek:
You.

Carl Alexander:
Know, they have a kind of MCP server, but it’s not an MCP server for working with WordPress in the sense of you’re a developer working with WordPress, it’s a MCP to like create posts, manage the site and stuff, which is important. But again, this is like, I think one of the things with Taylor that’s so obvious and also DHH too is like their love for developers.

Zach Stepek:
Yeah, yeah, right. They build tools for coders. They’re built for coders by coders. And that’s very apparent.

Carl Alexander:
Yeah, it’s very apparent. Like, I was just on the docs today and they have copy to markdown.

Zach Stepek:
Yep.

Carl Alexander:
To, to for the AI stuff. So I think it’s, it’s very interesting to see that space and compare it to like where WordPress is again, because WordPress powers so much of the web. But a lot of what made it so powerful was this developer ecosystem. And I, I, it feels more and more how like it’s stagnating, you know, especially when you compare like how fast they’re iterating on their side on that stuff. It’s like you’re like, okay, well you need mcp, you need stuff to work with WP, cli to do this, to do that, to do all these things so that you can build faster and solve problems faster and all that stuff. As a developer in the WordPress space.

Zach Stepek:
Absolutely. And I think that, you know, just Laravel is just one piece of this, this ecosystem. You know, it is its own ecosystem, obviously, but it’s just one piece of all of the technologies that are sitting adjacent to what we do in WordPress that are either involved directly in WordPress or, you know, ancillary too, in some way. And so, you know, Roots and the, the Roots project would be a great topic for us to, to go through at one point during this, this season.

Carl Alexander:
Yeah, we should definitely try to see if we can get one of Them like Ben or something too. To come on.

Zach Stepek:
I think that would be great. I. I want to shoot for the moon and try and get Taylor Otwell to come and join us.

Carl Alexander:
I know you’re freaking me out, but I think it’d be.

Zach Stepek:
I think it’d be a great time. I think it would be a great conversation.

Carl Alexander:
He’s super friendly. I’m just. I. It’s mix of, like, you know, I don’t. I don’t like, you know, it like, so it’s just like. But he’s. I’ve met him in person. He’s super friendly. He’s a giant. It’s hard to tell, like, in person, like, he’s a really tall guy.

Zach Stepek:
Well, that coming from you is saying a lot because you’re not short.

Carl Alexander:
No, I’m not sure. I mean, he’s not like, you know, six foot eight, but I think. Think he’s six foot three or four, you know, like. Like I’m between six foot one, six foot two. So, yeah, he’s a good inch, a couple inches taller than me, I think. But yeah, no, he’s super friendly. But yeah, I think what’s fun with him is just every time you hear him talk, it’s so obvious how much you, like, we’re. We’re aligned in that sense. Because I always loved developers. That’s always been like, I’m even with Emir, like, I was like, willing to. To lose in my business, to just have the customers I want to have.

Zach Stepek:
Absolutely.

Carl Alexander:
And for me, it was always developers. It was always technical people. Even in Montreal, before I got into WordPress, I was trying to apply. I think I talked about it maybe last time at the last podcast, but I was trying to apply for tools developer at, like, Ubisoft and stuff, you know, like, I didn’t want to be a video game developer. I wanted to develop the tools for the video game developers. Right. It’s just like it’s always been in my DNA.

Zach Stepek:
So, Taylor, developer enablement. Yeah, absolutely.

Carl Alexander:
Developer dx developer. You experience, you know, like, I’m using that a lot with AI. Like, I’m like, how’s the dx? How’s the dx? How’s the dx? Like, just to make sure that it’s, like, as good as I can make it. But, I mean, Taylor is way better at that than I am, than most people are.

Zach Stepek:
I will just throw it out there. Way better at it than most people are. So we do have other technologies, though, that I want to address during the season. So I want to get further into JavaScript, I want to talk about react, I want to talk about things that are happening in that world. I want to get, you know, some front end love into the podcast here, which is, you know, difficult because you and I both come from a very strongly back end background.

Carl Alexander:
So. Yeah, and also I prefer to try to avoid the JavaScript ecosystem. Like I do Live Wire. Like I’d rather do. Like I’m more in the DHH camp, you know, like I want, I want a very interactive front end and great experience, but I don’t want to like blend my stacks absolutely. As much as possible, but.

Zach Stepek:
And Livewire does a really good job of that. But you know, in that ecosystem though, JavaScript has changed so much over even just the last year. So I want to look at getting some folks that I know from that world in on the podcast as well. You know, I’ve got friends that own educational companies in that space that I’d like to get to come in.

Carl Alexander:
Felix is at Vercel now too.

Zach Stepek:
Yeah, yeah, I saw that. And that would be really cool to bring Felix in and talk about the Vercel ecosystem and what they do there. And so JavaScript definitely an area we want to cover more. We want to talk about some of the front end technologies. We’ve had some talks in the past about developer relations, but I think that that’s becoming increasingly important. I’d like to have some conversations about support and how important support is. So, you know, when we say expanding the stack, we’re not just talking about, you know, that we’re wanting you to expand the number of programming languages, you know, or the number of technologies you’re implementing. We also want you to be able to think beyond just the box of code or the constraints of being a builder in the WordPress space. Right. So we’re here to give you new things to think about. And so I want to make sure that throughout this year, throughout 2026, we are exploring things together that help all of us grow. And so if you have ideas, we say this a lot, but if you have ideas, we want to hear them from you. If you want to come and talk about one of the topics that we’re talking about here, we want to know that and we want to bring you in and have you be a part of this journey over the next year. As we Explore things beyond WordPress, we’re still going to have WordPress content, of course. That’s just, it’s a core of who we are. It’s a core of what this podcast network is about, but we also want to provide a little bit of expansion to that. The whole reason, the impetus behind moving from just being do the woo to being open channels FM was to expand beyond just that core of what we were. And so I want to drive some of that with conversations that are still developery. You know, we want to, we want to stay with the things that we know well, but also talk about the things that enable developers through developer relations, talk about how we support the work that developers have done through customer support and ways to make customer support even better and really just kind of explore where this ecosystem is going and have some great talks about AI. We do it a lot, we talk about AI quite a bit. But I want to bring in some experts who are working in that area, working that space. I want to learn what’s happening from the people who are making it happen. So that’s my overarching goal for this season, for this year. And I know, Carl, that that fits very closely in with what you’ve wanted from, you know, this from the beginning.

Carl Alexander:
Yeah, from the beginning, essentially. I think it’s going to be hard not to bring AI into every conversation, but I really think it’s really important because if AI can do a lot for you, then it becomes more important than ever to be aware of what’s going on everywhere, because then you can just bring some of that into your own life and you don’t have to be as scared as, as you. You have to be. And, you know, I think it’s a very hard transition period for, for people right now and. But it’s also like a very empowering time. At the same time, it’s a, it’s a very. You can hold two ideas. I love the paradox of holding two conflicting ideas, but it’s, it’s essentially that, because it is a scary time. But it’s also, like I said, like, I’ve never felt more enabled in my entire career and I’ve been coding for 35 years, you know, so it’s like I, you know, and. But part of it is exactly what the mission of this podcast is, and it fits so nicely because it’s more important than ever to like, expand the stack, basically. Because. Because I think in a year or two, even something as quaint as calling yourself a front end or a backend developer will just not matter. Basically. You know, you might have a certain expertise or knowledge, but, you know, if your goal is to just get stuff done, it won’t matter. Right? You just have to be aware of what’s out there so that you can, you know, use the tools at your disposal and let AI do a lot of the work for you. And so that’s why I think the mission’s more important than ever. And I agree, like bringing people, not just, like, support marketing, like marketing, like how to. How do you brand yourself, how do you, like, promote yourself, how do you stick out? Like, all these things are. Are difficult right now. And I think that’s like a real challenge and something worth talking about as well, because they’re all part of. Of expanding that stack of. Of knowledge of things you do, of things you can do. You know, like, I never wanted to do react, but I might end up doing some react, but it’s just like, you know, because I just have AI do it and I can review and I can do some stuff. But again, that’s why I think it’s really important in this, like, transition time.

Zach Stepek:
Yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. And I think that there are. There are so many things to learn and the. The world is moving faster now than it ever has. Right. The changes are coming faster than ever before. And yeah, it was already a lot to keep track of before all of this, before AI, before, you know, this land, this really landmark shift in direction for the world as a whole. But it’s harder than ever to keep track of everything that’s going on. And I think we both want to be a source through this podcast of a way to kind of cut through the noise and find the things that matter. Right. And not just the things that matter to us, the things that matter to the community as a whole. I mean, I’d like to think we’re focused on the things that matter to the community as a whole, and that lines up and aligns perfectly with what matters to us, but it’s not always the case. So that’s why it’s important that we hear from all of you. And there is a hashtag you can use on any social network to make sure that the feedback you’re giving goes.

Carl Alexander:
To the right place.

Zach Stepek:
We’re still trying to make it a thing. We’re going to continue trying to make it a thing. Hashtag bugbob, Hashtag bugbob. Yeah, we’ve been at that for over a year now, Carl, and I love it.

Carl Alexander:
I love it. I mean, you know, whether it works or not, it’s okay. I still like saying hashtag bug Bob, so I get a pleasure out of it either way. Yeah, I think. I think like you said, it’s trying to align yourself and also try to keep A, you know, like I’m not as AI pilled as some of the people I read. I just think it’s important to like, I take, you know, I move forward and then I, I stay there for a bit and then I just kind of like experiment where things are, I’m not like. Because I mean if you try to follow AI, it’s worse than JavaScript, right? In the sense of like the turnover and stuff. It’s not worth your energy. I think what’s important is just to be aware of it and just think about how it can be a source of, of good in your life.

Zach Stepek:
For.

Carl Alexander:
Your career and for the things you do. It’s just, it’s a rough transition time and, but by bringing I think other people from other places, like you can see the impact, you can think about other things, you can like rethink how to leverage this tool and, and what the impact is and what it’s, and what people’s careers have been too because career change happens.

Zach Stepek:
So it’s just, it’s just, it does.

Carl Alexander:
Those things, those things happen. So it’s just, it’s about navigating this time too. And even for me, we didn’t talk about it but you know, yeah, of course I do like Laravel, but I went to like, it was the 25th anniversary of Drupal two weeks ago so I went to a Drupal meetup. You know, I think it’s good too because sometimes we just are so inward focused into this community. That was like one of the things that brought me to like expand this whole thing was just like we have to just not be inward focused and look at what’s happening a bit everywhere. So like you said, bringing react people in, JavaScript marketers, tech support people, everybody’s life is changing right now and, and their work is changing and it’s really interesting to hear about those things and what their trajectory is and how they feel about things and all of that.

Zach Stepek:
Yeah, yeah. And I think that one of the things that you gain from hearing from these diverse and outward facing technologies and technologists is that you reduce the strength of the echo chamber of WordPress. Right. And I think that’s a trap that a lot of people in the WordPress space fall into is that we know what we know and we’re okay just knowing what it does to affect WordPress because yeah, we can make all of our money in the WordPress space and do all of that, but I’ve personally been affected by falling into that trap once in the past and actually More than once.

Carl Alexander:
What trap was that? Tell us.

Zach Stepek:
I was a Flash developer.

Carl Alexander:
Oh, yeah.

Zach Stepek:
And I made good money as a Flash developer. And then the industry shifted because of a little letter penned by somebody that turned into bad press, that turned into more bad press because somebody at Adobe handled things very badly when they were rolling the end of life ing the mobile version of Flash Player for Android in favor of using the Adobe integrated runtime or AIR to generate native applications, which was part of their phone gap acquisition. Right. And so they handled the PR for that very badly. It led to a lot of people saying that Flash was dying. And within two weeks of TechCrunch publishing an article, I had people canceling contracts, millions of dollars worth of contracts. So I’ve been there when the technology has died. I was a cold fusion developer. It’s still not dead, but it’s not what it is, what it used to be. When I started as a cold fusion developer, it was the way to build a dynamic website because PHP hadn’t evolved to where it is today. And, you know, the option before ColdFusion was CGI. That’s basically. That’s all that was there. Right. But that industry, you know, it’s not gone, but it’s definitely not what it once was. So I think it’s important for a career longevity standpoint to have your eye on things outside of the ecosystem that is currently feeding you. And it’s a lesson I learned the very hard way, multiple times, but it is one that I’m not going to get caught up by again. And so I think, you know, I want to impart some of this knowledge that’s not directly WordPress to the community as a whole in order to help to curtail some of that effect if, if ever. And it is still an if, but if ever, we start to lose market share. Right. 43% is pretty high. That’s. That’s a lot. You know, that’s four and four and a third out of every 10 websites that are built on WordPress right now. That doesn’t mean it’s going to be that way forever. I hope it is, because I think it’s a great technology that has a lot of room to grow. And I’m very happy with some of the things that are happening in the WordPress ecosystem right now too. But I also know that things can change on a dime. And so having a more diverse base of knowledge is good for a number of reasons. It’s good because you can pivot if you need to. It’s good because it makes you more valuable to your team as an employee or more valuable as an individual contributor or an agency owner or a contractor. If you do any of that type.

Carl Alexander:
Of work.

Zach Stepek:
Expanding your stack can only increase your value. And so I think it’s. It’s a noble cause that we are trying to pursue here. We want to try and be even better at it this year than we have been in the past. And I hope that you all enjoy the journey with us. I know we’re a little shorter than normal right now, but I think that’s okay.

Carl Alexander:
We had some little technical issues getting on. Yeah, Bob will be happier.

Zach Stepek:
I had to reset my router because my. I couldn’t connect to Riverside for some reason. But it’s fine now. It was probably freaking DNS.

Carl Alexander:
It’s always DNS.

Zach Stepek:
It was probably a DNS issue.

Carl Alexander:
It was probably all as DNS.

Zach Stepek:
Yes.

Carl Alexander:
Duct tape of the Internet. The duct tape of the Internet.

Zach Stepek:
That’s been the story of like the last couple of months. Huge DNS issues and outages from multiple places. So. But again, if you have any feedback for us, we want to hear it. If you want to hear about something or learn about something, we want to learn about it with you. Let us know what you’d like to hear about. Carl, any final thoughts to leave us with?

Carl Alexander:
No, I think this is a great year. I have a great plan for the year. I’m very excited. I’m excited to do that with you. I’m excited to see which what guests we get to bring on. So looking forward to it.

Zach Stepek:
Awesome. Well, I look forward to seeing you next month. We are going to stick to our normal release cadence as much as possible this year and try to work around travel and other things as much as possible. So hope to have an episode to all of you at least once a month this year and not miss as many as we did last year because of travel and work and other fun things that came up. So, you know, going to commit, trying to be better about that this year. We really appreciate all of you who listen. And again, Bugbob, for any feedback you have for us.

Carl Alexander:
Yeah. See you soon.