Transcript

[Banjo music]

MANTRA: Just Build Websites!

Dave Rupert: Hey there, Shop-o-maniacs. You're listening to another episode of the ShopTalk Show, a podcast all about front-end Web design and development. I'm Dave Rupert and with me is Chris Coyier. Hey, Chris! How are you?

Chris Coyier: I'm doing absolutely wonderfully. Thanks, Dave. I heard that you have an app idea rolling around in your brain. Kind of dangerous territory, I'd say.

Dave: Yeah, and I literally bought another Gundam plastic model to not--

Chris: Take your mind off it?

Dave: Yeah.

[Laughter]

Dave: I've learned a new strategy where I buy stuff to distract myself from the thing that's going to distract me for months.

Chris: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Dave: That is the hope. I'm trying to - whatever - elegantly back out of this. It's not a bad idea. Maybe you can tell me, the idea, okay, is it good or bad?

Chris: Okay. There is the idea. I'm ready. I have no idea what you're going to day.

00:01:10

Dave: Okay, so the second brain. Are you familiar with this term, second brain?

Chris: Um... I only think of Obsidian. Isn't that the one that people call that?

Dave: Obsidian. Notion can be a second brain, too. Just basically a big ol' dumping ground where you put all your thoughts and tidbits and stuff like that. Right?

What do you use as--? Do you feel like you use Notion as a second brain? I know you use Notion for work and all this stuff.

Chris: Yeah. Ack! I don't know. I don't know that I have one of these. I am intrigued by it, though, I will say.

I think of it when I'm listening to a podcast, probably a tech one, but it's not Web tech. It's something else adjacent.

For example, Apple. Sorry, everybody, but I do listen to some of those. Sometimes there are people on there (maybe I haven't even heard of, but) they're incredibly knowledgeable about everything Apple has ever done.

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris: What I imagine in my brain is that they have one of these second brain tools that they know what version of OS Apple Watch is on and what the last CEO that went on stage to talk about it was. You know?

Dave: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris: That stuff doesn't... They just know that stuff. To some degree, it's like, "Hey, I know a ton of stuff about Web tech. I can regurgitate stuff probably to a degree that other people couldn't," maybe, just because I keep up with it.

But I actually don't. It's all just off the cuff. I'm not clicking on some secret tool or app that I have that reminds me of all this Web tech stuff. I just know. But it seems like there's too much. I'm definitely missing stuff.

Dave: Yeah. You know I think you can use it for fact-keeping. I think that's one element of it. I think it's also sort of like, "What are you writing in your blog posts?"

I think you probably have a collection of second brains inside different WordPress installations across the Web.

Chris: Yeah, right.

Dave: That you just kind of like, "Oh, I had this thought. I'm going to just cut a draft and hit publish," and that's kind of--

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Dave: You're kind of managing.

00:03:20

Chris: Yeah, you have an actual drafts folder, right?

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: But they're not really connected, though. When I think second brain, I think, well, it's all tagged up and linked all interlinkedly.

Dave: Yeah, yeah.

Chris: But that's never appealed to me. I'm not sure that I would follow those spiderwebs if I needed to.

But maybe my closest thing is Notion in that I do this thing where I use their Web Clipper.

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris: It's a browser extension. And when you're on any URL, you just click it and bookmark it. Now there a lot of tools that want to do that for you.

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris: There are newer ones that are like, "We're going to apply AI to it and help you," down to really simple ones like Pinboard that just chuck it on a list and has really basic tagging.

I don't know why I use Web Clipper. It's not that amazing. It does a couple of things. It saves the link for you and it chucks it into a database in Notion. I tag it from there, and I tag it just to have really loose groups of stuff.

Dave: Yeah, this is about Apple. This is about CSS.

Chris: Yep, absolutely. When I need a topic, because I do write on a schedule sometimes.

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris: The CodePen Spark comes out every week, and I write a section in the CodePen Spark called "Chris's Corner," and it needs to be there every Monday, so it's on my list. It's not like, "When I feel like it, I write." That has to go out.

I like the idea of being like, "Oh, here are my five performance-related links this week," or whatever. It's Ivan this week, Dave. Sometimes they're a year old.

Dave: Well, yeah.

Chris: Links that I've been saving, yeah.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: It's not about news. It's about connecting the dots sometimes. Then I'll kind of group them all together, see if there are any interesting dots to connect, try to make it timely if I can, and go. It's a little bit second-brainy.

Dave: I would probably put that in the second brain category because you could--

Chris: Although, the Web Clipper, too, also puts the whole article in there, too. I don't need that feature at all, but some people really like that, to have their own copy of it.

Dave: You know it's got me out of some binds when a paywall comes up after the fact. [Laughter] You know?

Chris: Oh, sure.

Dave: Somehow, the paywall escaping technology of the Notion Web Clipper is actually really good.

00:05:27

Chris: I take it, though, that these aren't doing it for you.

Dave: Well, So that's kind of the thing. Yeah, so I'm a fan of Notion. I've been using Notion for a long time. And I got into this thing called the PARA method, which is projects, areas, resources, and archive. PARA was invented sort of in the Evernote zone where archive, you had to manually archive.

In Notion, I can just be like, "Is archived? Yes. Filter not is archived," or whatever. Notion has modern ways to archive, so you don't really need an archive.

But this idea of projects, which are the things you're building or the things you're doing, and PARA has this idea of projects have an end date. ShopTalk, not a project under this thing. It would be more like an area, like an area of your life that you are doing.

Areas can expire and start and stop, but a project is like, "I'm going to write a blog post," or I'm going to produce a YouTube video. Something like that.

Chris: Okay. Yep.

Dave: Projects, areas, and then resources are your Notion Web Clipper links. Maybe you take notes about audiobooks or something like that or highlight stuff.

Chris: These are hierarchical a little bit?

Dave: These are kind of the big buckets, right?

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: Then over the summer, when I got COVID, I was manic brain - or whatever - in bed, and I was like, "I'm going to try Obsidian. I'm going to give it the ol' college try, try to get into it, because everyone loves it.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Dave: Notion is fine. It just asks me if I want AI every eight minutes, and that's just sort of like, "Ugh. I just don't want that. I want it simple."

Chris: I know. They're tricky. They're tricky. They've never solved the smokin' performance problem, either. It's like, "Gosh, this app would be so much better if was snappy.

Dave: Yeah. Yeah, so I still like Notion, though. Let me say that.

Chris: Yeah.

00:07:33

Dave: But I'm trying Obsidian. Obsidian is cool. Obsidian has that big tagging thing, like the global tagging. I tag it money because this is about finances. And I tagged this CSS. Then I can go to this graph view, which is all these orbs floating in space, and they're all connected to the tags.

Chris: Does that click with you, though? Do you see that, and you're like, "Ooh, that would actually help me"?

Dave: No.

[Laughter]

Dave: No. It does in the sense of, like, here is what my brain is preoccupied with. It's a visualization of my brain, like, "God, I've been thinking a lot about CSS," or "I went pretty deep on home brewing," or something like that - or coffee.

But it does not speak to me in the, like, "This is a really intuitive way to find things." It doesn't quite speak to me in that way. But it does sort of give me a map of what I've been thinking about, so I like that.

But ultimately, I think I found the Obsidian UI really finicky. It goes in between edit mode and reader mode. You have to BYO data tables and all this stuff.

In some ways, it has all the flexibility that Notion doesn't. And in some ways it really doesn't quite have the polish that Notion has. We could maybe argue that Notion has too much polish because it takes a long time to load. [Laughter]

Chris: Maybe. But yeah, it does enforce some kind of... It doesn't matter what you do, but everything is nested in Notion. You're required to make some top-level pages--

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: --that could be anything, but it does force you into, like, "Where does it go?" I guess people could just have an infinitely flat structure of documents in Notion, but I don't think that's doing you any favors.

Dave: Yeah, and that's what people in Obsidian sort of push you towards is, "Just put it in there, man," because the little orby map will tell you where it is.

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: Or a search, you just search and find it. I'm like, "That's not how my brain works."

My brain wants structure. I want a little bit of guardrails. When I'm reading books, I want to talk about books or find other books, and stuff like that. That's how I think.

Anyway, in this sort of big bucket of a second brain tool and evaluating them, I sort of saw the pros and cons of each, Notion and Obsidian.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

00:10:05

Dave: Then that little thought comes creeping in your brain, Chris, that says, "What if you build it yourself?"

Chris: [Laughter]

Dave: That's where my brain is. Here's what tipped me over. There's this other... There's PARA, right? But there's this other productivity system. There's the Johnny Decimal system, which is you give every category in your life a number, like 1.1.5 is travel, 1.2.6 is pizza. You give every... Basically, like a Dewey Decimal System for your thing. That doesn't vibe with me at all. That seems really terse.

But this one called PPV, which is... Oh, gosh. It's pillars, pipelines, and vaults. That makes no sense, but pillars would be the areas, like pillars of your life. You have family pillars. You have personal growth personals.

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: You have work pillars, right? For me it would be finances is my family pillar. Building Gundams is my personal growth pillar. That's a hobby. Something like that. If I was serious about yoga, I could put yoga in personal growth. Work is whatever - Microsoft. So, that's pillars.

Chris: Okay. Yep. Yep, pillars. Pipelines.

Dave: Then pipelines is basically anything you're trying to get out, like blog posts, to-dos.

Chris: It's not just a note. It's not just... It needs to do something.

Dave: It's an object in motion, kind of.

Chris: Oh... Okay.

Dave: It's an object in motion. Then the vault--

Chris: This is... Which model is this?

Dave: This is PPV (pillars, pipelines, and vaults). Vaults is basically your historical - whatever - your Notion link clipper, Web Clipper.

Chris: I kind of like this one. This one is speaking to me better than the other ones.

Dave: This one is getting me. This is what kind of got me. I think I would kill those terms and I would call it areas and then inputs and outputs, like I have inputs in my life which are quotes, notes, links, books. Those are inputs, right? And outputs are blog posts, YouTube videos (which we don't really do anymore), side projects, things I'm doing, things that have progress states.

Chris: Areas, side projects, and systems, the ASS system.

Dave: The ASS productivity system.

Chris: [Laughter]

Dave: Might just have to change it. But anyway, I'm fascinated with this idea of inputs and outputs or side projects and -- What was it? -- systems. Yeah.

Chris: Yeah.

00:13:00

Dave: So anyway, I think that is... I don't know. I started building this idea, just kicking it around in my brain. What if there was a tool that worked like that? More than duck-punching Notion into a system that works like that, and Obsidian, too, is hard.

I tried to reorganize my Notion into this, but the thing with Notion, I don't know if you know this, but if you have a database, if you said, "Create a new thing," and you have to choose page or database right there at the top. If you choose... Whatever you choose is what it is. You can't go back. You can't make a page a database, and you can't make a database a page, and so it just is this awful sort of thing.

But anyway, I couldn't recognize my Notion really to do that because I didn't have top-level folders.

Chris: Hmm...

Dave: I could have maybe juked team spaces to work. But anyway.

Chris: Yeah, those seem like the pillars to me, the actual workspace.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: But you don't want... If you need five because you're like work, and even if it's garage - or something.

Dave: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris: You can't... Nobody is just willy-nilly making Notion workspaces.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: I don't think so. That's not really how that works. That's supposed to be major, like things that are paid for.

Dave: Engineering. [Laughter]

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: Management. Yeah.

Chris: Or more like ShopTalk Show, CodePen. Those are pretty distinct areas of my life, and those have different workspaces.

Dave: Right. Right.

Chris: You don't just... Yeah, but it's more of a lower-level thing. Anyway, interesting. Yeah. Go on, though. It sounds like you have a coup de grace here.

00:14:45

Dave: Oh, well, so I started going, and the TLDR is I am about armpit deep on IndexedDB right now.

[Laughter]

Dave: Because I thought, "What would be the easiest way to build this?" Spin up some database in the cloud and then... I'm like, "Nah!"

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: IndexedDB, and so now I'm thinking about that. Then I resurrected this old idea of a worker controller I had. But I haven't written any code. This is purely two weeks of thinking too much.

Chris: Yeah, interesting.

Dave: So anyway, I may prototype it, but it's just this really - I don't know. There's this really interesting sort of - I don't know. I think it comes back to that homebrewed app, sort of, like Blake - that episode. Just these home-cooked apps.

Chris: Right.

Dave: What if I had a to-do thing? I could have inputs and outputs, and then I could have that global tagging system. Then I thought it would be cool to have a global to-do system, so then any to-do I had added to a project could also be in the global to-do system. It just has a project idea associated to it - or whatever.

Then I get that global view - or whatever. I don't know. I've just kind of been kicking around these things. I think it would be cool to build and just see if I could make something that mirrors how my brain sort of works.

Chris: Right.

Dave: Could I build this and then--?

Chris: Because you don't have to build a generic project. Notion is tasked with building this tool that hopefully tries to fit with lots of different ways to think. But yours does not need that. It can just be like "Dave's app for Dave's brain."

Dave: Yeah. This is my brain. This is how my brain works. But you know.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Dave: Classic ADHD move is to think you need a system to solve your internal--

Chris: Yeah, maybe.

Dave: An external system will solve your internal problems.

Chris: Yeah. To me, the worry would be is it for... What is it for? [Laughter] Is it mostly for the to-do'ish stuff, or is it really an archive?

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: Or is it really both? Is it really, truly for both things?

Dave: I think it's both. I think that vault idea, the archive, maybe that's what the A stands for [laughter] in A-S-S.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Dave: But the archiving, I think, is helpful. I don't often do it, but I look at the books I've read, notes on books I've read or listened to. I look at notes or quotes and stuff like that. I look those up. I have a whole quotes database sort of thing.

Chris: Hmm...

00:17:26

Dave: Even just random notes. It sounds cool or it sounds weird, but I make notes about stuff my wife mentions throughout the year.

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: She's like, "Oh, I would love," a something, and I'm like--

Chris: Ooh...

Dave: That's for Christmas, you know? I just try to capture those because I'm not going to remember it in six months.

Chris: Oh, I have the same thing, for sure. It does make me think. Oh, my gosh. I do have such a hodgepodge of tools that I'm kind of like - I don't know - "Does Dave really need this? How do we talk him out of it?" But then - I don't know. I look at my own setup, it's such a... It doesn't feel like a mess to me, but I could see waking up one day and being like, "Wow, this really is a mess."

For example, and I'm probably a very basic bitch in this way, these things, it's a to-do list. It's not complicated. But they have been working on it forever, so it does feel like the UX of it just hits right for me. But that is where I'll be like... Oh, you know what? I know my wife doesn't listen to the show, so I can just say it.

There were these really, really absurdly long stem wine glasses that we were at a restaurant and they had, and it was just way over the top. Riedel. And I wrote down, "Riedel wine glasses for Miranda."

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris: I'm going to get her those things one day, dang it. That went right into my Notion because I know I have a bucket there called "Life."

Dave: Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Chris: You know? Life has a subsection called "Gift ideas."

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris: Boom, I just chuck it right in there. It does all kinds of stuff. It's where I log movies and TV shows I want to see and books I want to read and little ideas for things to do with Ruby, just cool, little stuff like, oh, have you seen those Loog mini guitars? I've had that bookmarked forever in here. I think she might be finally ready for that. In the Discord, somebody mentions a game that they played with their kids. I'm like, "Ooh, I'm going to chuck that link in here."

This is my kind of brain, in a way. The problem is it's just not... It's a to-do list. It does not pretend to be anything else. It is not a place for just random notes. You can force it be notes, but it's like, eh. And now they support Markdown in the to-dos, so it's even a little bit more note-like.

But every damn thing has a checkbox next to it, and you can check it, and it goes away. It's not quite where I would keep links or something.

Dave: Right. Right.

Chris: That's not a good place for that. So, then I have Notion. I have a life thing in Notion, but I have a document in there that explains exactly how to use our snowblower--

[Laughter]

Chris: --in case I'm gone and Miranda needs to use it or something.

Dave: Yeah. Yeah.

00:20:03

Chris: That's fine. But then I have Bear, too. Bear is a Mac app that is a little more like... You could organize it. I guess it's in the Obsidian category a little bit because there's tagging and stuff in Bear as well. But I just need a text document right now.

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris: I feel like, for whatever reason, Mac sucks at that. I guess it has the notes app.

Dave: Oh...

Chris: I just didn't really click with that so much.

Dave: Oh, do this. Mouse over the bottom right corner of your screen.

Chris: Oh, yeah. I turned that crap off long ago. Yeah.

Dave: That thing is stupid, dude.

Chris: Yeah.

[Laughter]

Dave: That's the easiest way for me to pull up server codes on my... Like ENV vars in a phone call. [Laughter] It's so stupid.

Chris: Yep. But I do like quick access to this kind of thing, so I'll open Bear. I'll just make a new list. It's just where I write text-related stuff.

Dave: Hmm...

Chris: We were just at Frostapolooza, and I have a Frostapolooza doc where I just wrote down crap, like, "Where is the hotel? Where is the venue? What days are relevant? Where are we going to be where?"

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: "When is my flight?" that kind of stuff just so I know I can reference it. And it's always synced.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: To me, syncing is key, key, key. I have multiple laptops. I have an iPad. I've got a phone. I just need to know that it's in the cloud. That's very crucial to my thinking.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: Then you know how they shipped an iOS version? Not iOS. Mac OS version at one point that lets you put little widgets right on your home screen, your desktop.

Dave: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris: I have a things one there that's my today page, which is great. Always, always on the screen is a little list of the crap I need to get done.

Dave: Oh, nice. It's like a background widget thing? Yeah, okay.

Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dave: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris: Then there's a big one that just says, "New note." You click it, and it opens Bear with a text file there, so I really think that's nice, actually.

Dave: I mean it sounds like you have a system that works. I think it would drive me nuts.

Chris: Right, because I use Notion too. That's three apps, Dave. Three apps.

Dave: Three apps and you've got blog posts in WordPress.

Chris: Absolutely.

Dave: Two WordPress, three WordPress.

Chris: Yep, and email is sitting there.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: Email is always on my list, and open tabs, Dave. I have open tabs for days. That's kind of five now. God, are we going crazy?

Dave: Yeah, so anyway, but you know if it's working, I guess you keep it, right? But for me, I think I would just feel like I'm juggling all the time, or crumbling. Honestly, joining Microsoft and not having Slack open is awesome. [Laughter]

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: It's been this, like, "Oh, wow. It's like 200 different chat rooms just disappeared from my life."

Chris: Mm-hmm.

00:22:43

Dave: Anyway, I think the whole... But I'm also dealing with how do I... I got this idea on one computer. How do I get it over to the other one?

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: But then I also want this to be a work machine. I don't want it to be a time-wasting machine. So, I've been using Web apps. I think IndexedDB, my big idea using the IndexedDB actually falls apart because that's not exactly the most syncable tool.

Chris: Uh... maybe. Yeah, you might end up with... I like the idea of... What is it, MySQL lite, which you can kind of run in the browser with Wasm now? That's pretty appealing to me because it would be compatible with a cloud thing then if you wanted to.

Dave: Well, yeah. What's their names? Cloudflare has Edge, Edge SQLite, which I don't know how that would--

Chris: It's not offline, though.

Dave: It's not offline. Yeah. So, yeah, anyway, that would be... I don't know. I would like to figure out how to sync IndexedDB. That would be kind of a cool thing. But anyway, I'm into this local first idea, too. Maybe syncing is handled by you write, it saves to SQLite just for doing webby stuff. But then there's sort of like an async job - or whatever - or synchronous job that will write a Markdown file in a folder for you. Maybe there's an analog component. Analog is all digital, but maybe there's a write-to-disk component as well as the Web app component.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Dave: Sort of like a lazy write to disk kind of situation. Then your Markdown files are just on disk somewhere.

Chris: Ideal.

Dave: But they also live inside... Maybe that's how you sync. Maybe you sync the Markdown file. Maybe there's a resurrect step where it goes and finds all the files and folders and puts them in the right place.

00:24:41

Chris: Yeah, it could be. Not to get too much into this because I'm not that... I didn't design the system nor did I build it or maintain it, really, but the new CodePen has that as a concept that Pens have files in them.

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris: Those files are actually in a DB, but they kind of manifest themselves on disk.

Dave: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris: They're mountable wherever and then execute and behave as if they're files on disk. But ultimately, sync back for storage in a DB.

Dave: Interesting. I assume you write to database, then to disk.

Chris: Yeah. I don't know, actually.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: I think so. But the DB has to be source of truth.

Dave: Right, right because... Well, and that's probably our fastest. Your IO is going to be the slowest operation there is. You don't want to bottleneck IO, basically. Yeah, I've just been kicking this all around, just interesting to me this idea of a second brain. Could you build something that powers your brain and makes you more productive but also not be a total time sink. That's the other part.

Chris: Right. You've got to convince yourself, too. After you built it, do I actually like this? You better be pretty sure that you're going to.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: [Laughter]

Dave: Yeah. Well, you know what feature I'd really want? This is getting in the weeds of features, which is not what you want to do at this stage, but you know how in GitHub you can click the little boob icon and turn any bullet point into a to-do or into a GitHub issue?

Chris: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave: That's what I want for to-dos because I just feel like that's the best way to do it. I'll make a list of crap but only some of them have to be done. Some of them are like, "Tell Janet," or whatever "that this is going to change." But some of them are like upstream blah-blah-blah to the blah-blah-blah service.

I think the power of getting your ideas into a bulleted list and then just saying, "Okay, this has to be done," or "This is the next thing on this bulleted list," cool.

Chris: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave: Because I can have a bulleted list of stuff I have to do immediately and just bad ideas for later. [Laughter] If I could put the bad ideas for later and not into the issue cue, that's good for me.

00:27:13

Chris: Well, good luck. It'll maybe happen. I saw our friend of the show Andy write "Just Use Paper" as a blog post, too. He kind of is taking the exact opposite route of IndexedDB there. Interesting. It looked like it resonated with a lot of people. You get tool fatigue. It's definitely a thing that happens. Then you're like, "I could write three things down on a piece of paper in the morning and have that serve me," in a way.

Dave: Well, the irony is I do that. I have my analog cards.

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: I do it every morning. It's awesome.

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: I take notes in a physical notebook.

Chris: Right.

Dave: [Laughter] I love it. I'm trying to introduce more analog stuff in my life, but this little idea of, like... Because when I hop into a side project, like building my second brain - or whatever. What would be another side project idea? Whatever. I'm making a couple of games (right) and I have free time. I need to jump in and know exactly what to do. It needs to be at my fingertips. What's the next step I need to do? I'm going to plug this disk into my brain and that's what I'm doing.

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: If I could have that, if I could store that somewhere in my second brain and then just boot it up when I need it, that helps. That gives me peace rather than 1,000 sticky notes on my monitor for different bad ideas.

Chris: yeah.

Dave: Half-baked ideas.

00:28:49

Chris: Yeah, I can't. I read, I think it was, Matt Birchler - or something - responded to Andy's post saying, "These things tend to be on day two of you having tool fatigue and being like, 'Screw it. I'm going to do it this way.'" It wasn't, "I'm six months into using paper and here's how I'm comparing it to those tools." It's more like, "Screw it! Just do this!"

It's like, ask Andy in six months, "Are you still on paper or did you succumb?"

Dave: Oh, that would be good.

Chris: Yeah, which is fair enough. It's fine either way. No big criticism necessarily, but I took both points. Keep it simple and the reason people use more complex tools is because sometimes you need more complex tools. For me, I need it to sync. A piece of paper doesn't sync for me. I write nothing down. Nothing. There's nothing on paper here only because of that idea, mostly, is that I know I'm going to... I know every time I do it I'm going to want to have it and I don't have it and it's going to annoy me.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: So, I take out my phone and I do it. I even do it in times where it's not even cool. I even got a little side eye last night. I was at a jam. You know I play a lot of music out.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: I was writing down stuff, and I'm like, "I'm going to use my bright-ass smartphone in this dark bar that we're playing at. I don't care who is looking at me because I want to remember this note or these lyrics - or whatever it is. I know it's not cool, but I'm not cool, so forget you.

Dave: I think that's a fair argument: where are you at in a year? But I'm three years here on analog, 2.5 or something.

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: I started in '21.

Chris: But it's not every thought in your brain, right? It's today's intentions.

Dave: Not every thought. Yeah. Yeah, it's today's. Yeah, kind of meditate-y like that. Sort of like, "Here are my intentions for the day."

Chris: Right. I want to do that, too. There are three things that I absolutely need to get done, and I'm not leaving this chair until they're done - kind of thing. That's what would be useful to me.

Dave: Yeah. I do. I start at the bottom and put all the calls I have scheduled today.

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: I've got ShopTalk. I've got the 1:1. I've got this. Then at the top, I start with, like, check my email because I got into a situation where I forgot to check my email. Then it took a whole day to check my email.

It's just simple stuff. I'm making time for it. Check the email. Get it down. Then I need to do this PR. Then I need to check up on that PR. Then I need to do this.

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: It's a pretty linear flow. Then analog is cool because it has ten spots on it. If you're doing more than ten things in eight hours, good luck to you. [Laughter] That's a lot of stuff.

Chris: No. Yeah, eight is too many.

Dave: That's a lot of frying pans.

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: It's a lot of frying pans.

Chris: Probably context switching, that isn't doing you any favors.

Dave: Yeah, and some are five-minute bing-bongs, you know, ding-dong. But just carve out time. You make the time.

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: I've really appreciated that. Then notetaking (during meetings) on paper has been pretty cathartic for me. I wish there was a remarkable angle where this got digitized so I could look it up later.

00:32:08

Chris: Oh, yeah. Maybe. I bought one of those Daylight computer things. It's going to be a while until it comes in.

Dave: Really? I'm curious how that works because it looks awesome.

Chris: I thought of it because... Is it a tablet? I don't even know anymore. It's been so long since I ordered it. Is it tablet first? I think it might be.

Dave: I think so, yeah.

Chris: Yeah, so you could do handwritten notes on it. It better, I guess.

Dave: I think it does, but I would have to confirm.

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: But that one looked cool. That would be something I'd be interested in. Could I just get this all?

Chris: Don't you like the idea that, in a meeting, when you're writing stuff down, it's like, "I'm not writing it down to remember it later. I'm writing it down to remember it now."

Dave: Yep.

Chris: It sinks in harder to do that. These physical notes, fine, maybe they'll be fun to look at later. But you could kind of throw them away without losing anything.

Dave: Well, and anymore, AI can do your digital notetaking on your meeting.

[Laughter]

Dave: I'm not going to beat Copilot at this game. But I can make personal notes in here. You know what I mean? Then I can go look at the Copilot meeting summary and see if I heard the same thing that Copilot heard. That sounds really stupid, but it's at least, "Okay, cool. Yeah, that was an issue and I didn't mishear it." I can even recap and watch the meetings in Teams and stuff like that. I sound like a Teams commercial.

Chris: Okay. Yeah.

Dave: But I still like the analog writing, and I'm burning through notebooks, but it's just kind of like, "Hey, I'm able to process what's going on here and feel like I have things up to date. I can circle, star, and kind of plan things and highlight things that stand out to me, things I need to pay attention to."

00:34:00

Chris: I have this thought in my head a while. Notion had a few feature releases, but before I get there, it was just a thought I had about how interesting it was that they started very early on with essentially these databases, which they just kind of called a table, and you'd be like any time you made a table. They had these fancy tables long before they just had table as a layout structure in Notion.

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris: Now you can make a simple table that's rows and columns. But the first table they had was truly a database. It had all this fancy stuff in there, and it appealed to me at the time because I like Airtable, but I don't need Airtable. I don't like it as a lone tool - for some reason.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: Because there are no notes or something. It was like, "Ooh, it's kind of like the best of Airtable but you just slap them in wherever you need them kind of thing." Then it has all these. It could be a type of file. Each cell, I mean. Each cell can be a customized dropdown that's really easy to manage, or a multi-select, or all these things that made it useful.

Then people liked it. That's probably the most powerful aspect of Notion, I'd say, is the data-ish stuff. If anybody is a power user of Notion, they're not talking about designing pages or writing notes. They're talking about things that go into those fancy databases that connect to other databases and have APIs and yadda-yadda.

It's like Notion made us like those first and now... then they can build features on top of it. It's such an interesting thing. A lot of people think, "Oh, I need a tool for building dashboards with graphs and charts." Well, that's nice. You could build the graphs and charts, but you need data to power it.

Notion did it the exact other way around. They're like, "I'm going to make you like putting data into a thing. Now we have your data. Then later, we'll ship graphs and charts."

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: That was one of their releases. And forms, forms is brand new. I haven't even seen it yet. I haven't even played with it. But it's an extra fancy way, a contact form or whatever. But then it puts data into that database.

It seems like a lot of companies would do it the other way around. Make the form first because that's what users want to buy.

Dave: Then you build an API. Then you build a Zapier integration.

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: Then you build... Yeah.

Chris: Yeah, they did it exactly backwards and it was kind of clever.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: They make you love where you're putting the data first.

Dave: Yeah. No, I mean I think it's got hooks. They get your data. [Laughter] But they've done... I think there are a few quirks about Notion, but I still like it. I think I gravitate to it.

Chris: Yeah. I'm looking at it right now. I keep the notes for these shows in there. It has a good structure for that type of thing.

Dave: Yeah. We have a really good sort of setup, and it costs us basically zero dollars to get all this. I can't imagine how we'd do this without it.

Chris: Yeah, I have no idea. I'm sure it would just be some other synced app because, in our case, we both need access to it. Whatever the heck it is, we'd figure it out. It just needs something to be synced. It could be a Dropbox folder. We could make a CodePen team and make each show a Pen. Whatever it is, we'd just both need access to it.

Dave: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it would be 10,000 CodePens, or something. Then we'd have to share the Wufoo login. Then we'd have to share... Yeah.

Chris: Uh-huh.

Dave: It'd be a lot of action.

00:37:31

Chris: Here's something I saw. Topic change.

[xylophone ascending scale]

Chris: Chrome is going to put their LLM Gemini -- Nano, I think it is. That's the good name. It's their smallest model. They're just going to put it in Chrome. They're already doing it in Canary or something. Yeah.

Dave: Yeah. You can say ai.createcontext - or something.

Chris: Create text session - or something like that.

Dave: Create text session, and then you can go--

Chris: Dot prompt.

Dave: Yeah, session.prompt - or whatever you do.

Chris: Oh, I'm glad you went right to the APIs because that's what I was most interested in. This is very appealing for a lot of reasons. One, it's free.

Dave: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris: That's nice, right? Two is it's offline. Hey, that's neat. Three is it's private, probably, unless they track everything.

Dave: Hmm...

Chris: Yeah. Yeah, let's say you put an asterisk on private.

Dave: We'll put, "It's Google private." [Laughter]

Chris: Yeah.

[Laughter]

Chris: And fast, right? I don't know how fast it is. I haven't really tested it. I played with the fasted balls one the other day that Alex showed me. Holly cow. Cerebras.

Dave: Wow!

Chris: C-e-r-e-b-r-a-s inference.

Dave: Oh...

Chris: It's a Llama model, and you type your question into it and hit return and it is... This is absolutely instantaneous on the Web, the answer. And it kind of gets you thinking, like, "Oh, jeepers cripes, how does that work?"

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: [Laughter]

Dave: Whoa.

Chris: The speed of it is interesting. Yeah, I'll send you the link to it. Anyway, I don't know if it's that fast in Chrome, but it's probably pretty fast because there's no network roundtrip at all, and network is often our bottleneck in this industry, I would say. So, that's kind of cool.

But I'm interested in those APIs, Dave. These are Web platform APIs. Window.ai.

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris: It's right on the window. I don't know. When did they put stuff in the navigator? I don't even understand that.

Dave: You don't. Yeah.

Chris: You don't? That's dead? Okay. [Laughter]

Dave: No. No, there are new ones in Navigator. There's a new one. The fig JSON one, or maybe that's window.navigate.

Chris: Maybe. I don't know.

Dave: What's the new whatever? Whatever router.

Chris: But it's like geolocation - or whatever - was on Navigator for some reason.

Dave: Yeah, yeah.

Chris: But that kind of made sense because they're related words.

Dave: Maps and navigation, geolocator, yeah.

00:40:04

Chris: Anyway, they just invented this. I read the blog post this morning on it. They mentioned Web standards nowhere in no way. Right? Does it matter? Is it off to the side of the Web enough that it just doesn't matter, like standards are irrelevant here? What if Apple ships window.instantiateintelligence--

Dave: Siri.

Siri: Mm-hmm.

Chris: --because that's what they called her?

Dave: Oh, you just--

[Laughter]

Chris: Dave has Apple stuff.

Dave: Oh, that's funny.

Chris: [Laughter] Hello. Yeah, so... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Window.callsiri. They could do that, and then Firefox could ship some generic one where you name the LLM. Then you call .ask on it or something. They call could do it differently.

Everybody would like, "Oh, whatever. We love AI. It's so useful. Cool. It helps us generate marketing ideas. We love it. Thanks for shipping these in browsers," and they're all different. Now developers start being like, "If window.ai, then do this. Else, if window.llm, else if," and all of a sudden, you have this bunch of crap in your code base that just depends on the availability of APIs. Then nobody cares, right?

Nobody cares. They're just like, "Oh, it's fine. There are different models. We use the different ones. I know how to write an if/else statement."

But then browsers are like, "Wow, nobody cared. Hmm... Maybe the next feature we ship, we'll just ship it."

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: "We're just going to ship it. Who cares? We'll just ship it and nobody cared last time. Nobody is going to care this time." Pretty soon, browsers are just doing whatever the hell they want with APIs, and your entire code base is full of crazy support stuff and ten different CSS declarations to do the same thing. It can and will happen.

I don't know. I don't understand why this gets such a pass, like, "We just invented some APIs. Here they are." Shipped.

Dave: Yeah.

00:42:00

Chris: They're not shipped yet. It's not in stable Chrome. Fair enough.

Dave: Window.metaverse.

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: What if--? What's the cool one? Whatever is cool right now. I don't know. This is me. I think there's value for having a private LLM in the browser, a small model like this.

Chris: Yeah, dude. Honestly, it's super-cool. [Laughter]

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: I don't know. You think about - whatever - Google docs. I bet they super-like the idea of a summarize function, the summarize button that never even talks to another Web app. You know what I mean? Save so much bandwidth.

Chris: Right. Really simple coding stuff, too, these things are great. You're like, "Oh, I just need - I don't know. Give me a rainbow gradient real quick in CSS." It is so capable of barfing that out for you quick. We have to pay attention to this at CodePen for that.

You're just trying to write something real simple. Just spit it out. To know that it has no network roundtrip. Oh, my god.

Dave: Yeah. Well, I know... You didn't hear this from me. You heard it from another Microsoft employee. But there is a flag in Edge that uses Phi-3, I think, which is Microsoft's model, I guess. So, anyway, that's kind of like their open-source model.

I wonder if this is a trend, or I wonder if people are going to do that. Who knows what Firefox would use there.

Chris: They seem interested only because, if it's new and shiny, Mozilla is like, "Yes, we do that, too. We do that."

Dave: [Laughter] Is it a colossal waste of money? We're in.

[Laughter]

Dave: Gees, dude.

Chris: Yeah, fair enough.

Dave: Hey.

Chris: Ah, anyway, so I do think it's cool but it just needs to be thought out. Maybe they already are and I'm just being ignorant. But I read the dang blog post, and ain't nobody talking about making sure these APIs are standardized.

Dave: I'm going to invest $1 billion into Firefox, but my requirement is that it has to move out of the Valley. [Laughter] That's my only requirement.

Chris: Hmm... Nebraska headquarters, I'm afraid.

Dave: Yep. Mozilla in Omaha.

Chris: [Laughter]

Dave: That's going to be it. Anyway, I do have a conflict here, so I've got a hard stop.

Chris: Oh, yeah. You've got to go. That's all right.

Dave: Oh, well, hey. But hey, this was fun, so maybe I'll build a second brain. Maybe I'll use AI. Who knows?

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Dave: And it'll be private, you know. We didn't even talk... The progressive enhancement thing could be kind of cool, like if window.ai maybe had this. I don't know. But anyway, thank you, dear listener, for downloading this in your podcatcher of choice. Be sure to star, heart, favorite it up. That's how people find out about the show.

Follow us on Mastodon. That's the good one. Then head over to the D-d-d-d-discord, patreon.com/shoptalkshow. The Discord is what makes this show happen, so thank you all for joining us there. Chris, do you got anything else you'd like to say?

Chris: ♪ ShopTalkShow.com ♪