Betatalks the podcast

In this episode, we talk to Scott Hanselman, who works in Open Source on .NET and the Azure Cloud for Microsoft and is a well-know – perhaps famous - face in the .NET community. He has been a developer for 30 years, has been blogging at hanselman.com for 20 years, has been podcasting for hanselminutes.com and Azure Friday for more than 15 years, and has written a number of technical books. We talk about how he creates his ‘edutainment’; providing entertainment and education, keeping it fun and yet making people think about all the possibilities. For example, by bringing old technology into the modern world, as he recently did by connecting a Commodore 64 to the internet. So it’s half fun, half getting people's brains working. We discuss why he likes to visit thrift shops and the importance of the right to repair; he does not want to be a part of the throwaway society – waste not, want not - and prefers to give away his obsolete (tech) items to someone who can use them. We also dive a little deeper into his Microsoft journey, as he received his 15-year congratulatory email this month. He recalls his collaboration with Scott Guthrie to work on Ruby on Rails and his participation in the first open-source .NET project. Especially zooming in on the change from closed-source to source-open – Rotor as Microsoft called it – to finally truly open-source. And what it entailed to get here.

About this episode, and Scott Hanselman in particular: you can find @shanselman on Twitter and GitHub. Check out his blogs on hanselman.com or watch his video's on his YouTube channel. Also, don't forget to check out his TikTok and listen to his podcasts 'hanselminutes'.

About Betatalks: have a look at our videos and join us on our Betatalks Discord channel

00:00 - Introduction
03:02 - Friend of the day
04:43 - Creating content
11:00 - The reason why Scott goes to thrift shops
18:12 - Scott’s journey at Microsoft
23:47 - What would Microsoft look like if Open Source never happened
30:03 - Totally random question
33:16 - Closing

Introduction – 00:00

Rick
Hey there, and welcome to Betatalks the podcast in which we talk to friends from the development community. I'm Rick.

Oscar
And I am Oscar. Hey Rick, how are you doing?

Rick
I'm doing great. Actually, I've been. I've been working with Azure AD b2c. And I wanted to actually work that into a website, which would be hosted on Azure Static web apps.

Oscar
Is this for your like the user group?

Rick
Yeah, for user group, .NET Zuid. We are a Microsoft user group in the south of the Netherlands. And we actually wanted to provide people with social logins as well. And initially, I thought, well, this is going to be implementation in the web front end, right. But since we are we're hosting on static web apps, you can configure your open ID configuration, if you run on the pay plan for static web apps, which actually means that I can point towards Azure AD b2c to be login provider. And then inside of these b2c, I could, within one afternoon, configure LinkedIn, Google, Twitter, Microsoft accounts, GitHub, all of those authentication mechanisms worked within an afternoon. And by putting all of the configuration in static web apps dot config dot JSON, it actually provides the authentication for me. So I only configured it and it works now. It's impressive.

Oscar
And you are already a fan, right?

Rick
I was already a fan of static web apps. Yes. And this doesn't help in getting it to be less.

Oscar
Yeah, I was a client last Friday, and they had all their front end, they had multiple front ends, but they had it running on storage accounts. So my obvious question was, did you consider because they were doing all kinds of things with custom headers there and stuff. So we also like with within 30 minutes, we had this stuff up and running in parallel build pipelines, like it's that it's Friday, and no one knows about this. Otherwise, we will just push, push to prod. Yeah, it was ridiculous.  It is.  No, but it's a cool product. And we are talking about it a lot. But I think it deserves it.

Rick
Yeah. But what we're actually seeing is that it looks like more and more services that Azure has been is adding are combinations of certain services. And then the way of them working together, made a lot easier because the platform knows how to do this.

Oscar
Now, we discussed this before, right? Like we have some basic services were up to like a couple of levels now with abstraction. And then you get really those use case driven new services that do one thing, combining a few other things, which you could build in the past. But now it's just there and your scenario works.

Rick
Yeah. And I actually, I read somewhere, and I'm not entirely sure if it's true, because I haven't checked. But I think that Heroku free is stopping suddenly,

Oscar
Yeah that was kind of in the news.

Rick
It will no longer be the free service. So I'm expecting a lot of people to turn on look at static web apps for those types of offerings.

Oscar
Yeah, pretty good.

Friend of the day – 03:02

Rick
So who is our friend of the day?

Oscar
Our friend of the day is Scott Hanselman. Scott has been a developer for 30 years, and has been blogging at hanselman.com for 20 years. He works in open source on .NET. And the Azure Cloud for Microsoft out of his home office in Portland, Oregon. Scott has been podcasting for over 800 episodes of hanselman.com, over 15 years, and 700 episodes of Azure Friday. He's written a number of technical books, and spoken in person to over 1 million developers worldwide. He's also on TikTok, which was very likely a huge mistake. Welcome, Scott.

Rick
Welcome.

Scott
How's it going? Thanks for having me.

Oscar
Yeah, it's going amazing. We have a very special guest today. All our guests are special. But this feels like royalty almost right. On a technical podcast.

Scott
I think that's largely overstated, but I appreciate that.

Rick
Yeah. But I do think that you have a certain status within at least the .NET community and then probably with everything going on right now, with open source and .NET becoming cross platform. I think you are a well known face for a lot of people in the industry.

Scott
That's very kind of you to say I am very fortunate when people Google for stuff. They tend to find me sometimes I do the best I can to put out good information.

Rick
Yeah, you do so on a multitude of platforms, right. Because, like your back bios, as you do stuff on hanselman.com And you have your podcasts, but then also we have the Azure Friday videos, and we have your own videos, and then you're on Instagram, I think and you're even on TikTok. So, where do you find the time to manage all of those all of those resources.

Creating content – 04:43

Scott
Well, the funny part is that all of that is actually not my day job. That just enthusiasm. I'm just a kind of a professional enthusiast. TikTok kind of popped up in the last couple of years and I jumped on, I think, middle of last year during the pandemic, and I've found it to be a very joyous and fun, fun place. And since I already had some familiarity with YouTube, creating the video for it was pretty, pretty straightforward. I have taken a bit of a break from my blog after I hit 20 years. I think I'm about six months into a bit of a hiatus on the blog. It was basically every Tuesday and Thursday for 20 years from April of 2002. The podcast has 855 episodes, and Azure Friday has 750 episodes. But I just kind of go where the fun is. And right now I'm having a lot of fun on TikTok. But then I'll also take that same content, I'll upload to Instagram, I'll upload it to YouTube shorts. But again, it's I mean, I think I made $6 last month on TikTok, and it's really it's just a fun thing to do. It's not anything.

Oscar
it's not a big side hustle, income wise.

Scott
Well but see, that's the other difference between me and like other quote unquote content creators is that I don't really take it seriously. Like if it was my job. Yeah, I would be a problem. And I would need to like get, I don't know, like a podcast editor and rent a studio and like do the whole thing. But I don't like I'm just messing around, you know what I mean? So what I think I do pretty well is consistency, even though it is not of the quality of something like your production.

Rick
Yeah, but in the end, it all goes. It's all about content, right? And the value of the content that you bring, because for instance, some of the episodes of .NET rocks aren't necessarily recorded in a studio. I mean, sometimes you can hear that stuff as recorded live somewhere. But the content works, right. So it's not necessarily about the form. It's about what you what you have to say.

Scott
Yeah, for me, I don't like the word content or content creators. For me. It's just it's, it's education, or it's entertainment. So for me, it's edutainment, right. And if it provides a little bit of entertainment to someone, and it gets them thinking about like, oh, wow, I didn't know I could do that. That's my whole thing. Like yesterday, last night. If you look at my latest TikTok I took a Commodore 64 old 40 year old computer and I put it on the internet by using a WiFi to serial modem adapters with a little...

Oscar
I saw that I didn't know it exists. That's amazing.

Scott
Yeah, it's really great. So, you know, not certainly not my invention. But there's a gentleman at CPM stuffed.com, who sells this y modem, w i modem. And it's a bridge. And it's basically one of the wonderful old pieces of technology that lies to old tech to bring it into the modern world. So I'm sitting here with a Commodore 64 It's original, it's not an emulator. It's a real 6502 6510 processor. I got the floppy disk working. And then I pulled it off. And now I emulate a floppy disk with a Raspberry Pi. So the Commodore 64 doesn't know it's being lied to. And then the modem, you actually say not at di t and then a number for the phone. You say ATT T and then your SSID. And that puts you on the WiFi. And why did I do that? Because a bunch of people on the internet then get to say, oh, my goodness, I had no idea. I could do that. And then they'll maybe they'll go off and they'll support that small business. And they'll get excited about retro. Or they'll start teaching people or they'll take it to a school and they'll teach young people about history. So it's half for fun. But also it's to get people's brains kind of going, Oh, wow. I didn't know that existed. And then they run, run, run, go have fun.

Rick
That's actually something that we've discussed several times here in our podcasts that it's the most awesome moment when you try and convey a message. And you see that sparkle in someone's eye. I mean, that's, that's the moment.

Oscar
It's the connection with something. Yeah, that's something you didn't know existed. It's so much fun. Yeah, well, and we also talked, we talked to previous guests in the podcast also about like, it's almost hinting the edutainment there. It's like, if you're doing something for fun and not for this is your assignment. It's supposed to, it's supposed to be in this constraints and we need to sell this product or anything like that. But it's for you. It's fun. Like you can also go wider and you go you cannot just stay with a deck but you can do all kinds of things that make you happy and probably yeah, you connect with some, some other people there.

Scott
Yeah, and your point about not trying to not trying to sell anything. Now in the instance of this little Y modem I really like to support small businesses, smaller companies, so I'm not selling that guy's stuff. I don't know that gentleman, but I think it's cool and it also happens to be a small business. So then that my, my little bit of lending my audience or lending my eyeballs can help that individual that has been another thing that I've been blessed to be able to do over the last several years as my audience has gotten bigger, is if I tweet about a book, I'll get a very nice email later from the author of the book that says, oh, yeah, that was the kick that my product needed, or my book needed to like, get to the next level. So like, on my desk here, you can't really see but I just have a pile of old. You know, I'm holding these up like old circuit boards and stuff, but they're actually reinventions and reimagining’s. Of old technology done by small companies, small businesses, I love to like lend eyeballs and lend my audience to them. And then I love getting that little note at the end that says, oh, yeah, you know, we sold 200 widgets.

Oscar
Yeah, we had a guest on the show. You may know Jan de dobbelaar. He called it the Hanselman effect every time you mentioned something of him, like everything explodes when there's lots.

Scott
True. Jan is a very is a lovely, lovely gentleman. And I like working with him.

Oscar
He's a great guy. Yeah.

The reason why Scott goes to thrift shops – 11:00

Rick
One of the things that also stands out for people following you, Scott, is that you visit thrift shops, right?

Scott
I yes, there are big, very big here in the US. Yeah. But I also don't see any reason to buy expensive things if a perfectly good used thing is in the same shop.

Rick
But that is not necessarily a popular opinion, I think, is there a reason for you to explicitly move towards those thrift shops?

Scott
That is a that is a good, complicated and multi layered question.

Rick
Yeah I prepared.

Scott
Well, I mean, so if you, if you won, what some people argue, oh, well, you have money, then you should go and buy the best, greatest thing. But you know, without being trying to be too much of like an eco warrior. Why do I need to pull molecules out of the rock that we're sitting on, then burn a bunch of stuff to ship those molecules in a boat from China, to me, when the molecules are already here, you know, and if someone can, can have something or create something that will sit around for 50 years, or 100 years, and be useful, I'd much rather do that than to get some single use plastic or some garbage. So you know, I'm very blessed to have some money. And I could certainly go and buy, you know, winter coats for the whole family that are brand new. But we went to the thrift shop just this week, in preparation for winter, which is coming up in three months. And we found brand new, effectively brand new, high end quality winter coats for the kids, for five and $10. I just don't see, I just can't imagine spending $100 on a brand new coat when there's perfectly good coats already out there. And the same thing applies for other things. In fact, not only not only do I go to go to thrift shops, Rick, but I also sell stuff because I don't like throwing things away. So just this weekend, I went and met an older gentleman, and sold him a 1938 projector. So like an actual film projector that I had, and I I've been sitting on this thing, because it played like, you know, eight millimeter, very, very old, black and white film. And I felt like, you know, he, he wanted it. I wasn't using it, it was sitting on my shelf I had long ago digitized all of my family's films. So I have them on, you know, in digital format on three different things. But he really was excited about it. So I could throw it away, I could take it to a thrift shop or I could hand it personally to another individual who will then care for it and share it and, and go on. So all of the things that I have ended up being paid forward to someone else. So yeah, that kind of pervades my whole my whole philosophy and my whole vibe.

Rick
But, but that is actually very good idea, I think because especially if you see now if you buy a printer and you need to buy ink, it's most of the times more expensive to buy new ink than to just buy a new printer. We're living in a throwaway society or at least a lot of stuff is built to only last for a small amount of time and then to be thrown away and repurposed as something else. So I do think that it's...

Oscar
Yeah you see that with the like a right to repair. What is that, that you now have with some devices? I think it's really good too. Because I remember like having an old amplifier or something and bringing that to your neighbor who did electronics and you replace the bit and it worked again for years. And now it's like I need a new one. The kids would I think that.

Scott
Well that Commodore 64 I had a 1541 disk drive and I turned it on and it burst into flames and not burst in flames. But magic smoke came out of the smoke faster. It cost me I don't know 14 cents to replace the capacitor and about 20 minutes of soldering and now it's back.

Oscar
Yeah, the hardware used to be like that.

Scott
Yeah. Well, there's some wonderful things like there's a, there's a laptop called the framework laptop. That is, you know, and then of course, our friends, like I fix it. The right to repair is, I think, a very important thing. So yeah, I don't know, maybe I'm just a visible person that refuses to be wasteful, and buy a bunch of crap. But, but yeah.

Rick
But it's a good message you're sending across. So I think it's power to for that one.

Oscar
I think you see it in in like I heard Scott speaking before about not wasting keystrokes even. Yeah. So like, like, if you do something, why do just for this one purpose or one? Like, I think it's really embedded in you somehow. And it's really good that people because of your exposure, other people will be introduced? Because someone, some people might not even know about thrift shops, or that it used to be repairable your stuff like.

Scott
Yeah, well, I do have to give full credit to my parents, specifically, my dad, my mom was a zookeeper. And my dad was a firefighter. And because many of the houses here in the US are made of wood Firefighting is a very popular thing, as opposed to stone or stucco. And, you know, trying to keep things going was a big part of his whole personality and keep things alive to keep things running. And I have a very, very clear memory, where we would go to this place called the dump, I don't know, if you have these places where you like, you fill the back of your pickup truck with garbage, you take it to the dump, and you pay to dump your trash, and then this big garbage pile. And there's the trash part like food, and you know, waste. But then there's the like, I have an old dresser, or I have an old, whatever. And I have a very specific memory of going to the dump. And he wasn't there to dump stuff. He was there to catch other people dumping stuff. And one of the cars next to him was pushing out a barbecue. And he was like, stop, what are you doing, perfectly good barbecue. And he like ran over to the guy and grabbed this barbecue. And then he got in trouble because the dump doesn't want you to remove stuff like it's, it's right only, you know, that's, that's what's the read only. And then he came home and we took a wire brush and a sandblaster and a wire to clean the whole thing and then painted it. And like a week later, we were eating on that barbecue that would have been sitting there otherwise, and that was the family barbecue for 20 years. So that just really stuck with me. And that applies to computers and legacy software and systems and you know all things waste not want not.

Rick
And probably 20 or 30 years from now. Your kid somewhere will tell the same story. Yeah. Well, I got into thrift shopping because of my dad because he took us to the thrift shop. So that's...

Scott
It think that's a healthy attitude.

Rick
Yeah I think so too.

Oscar
I think I don't even have to explain it because it's normal. Like...

Rick
Yeah, that one.

Oscar
And you need to pass some of these values on. And maybe you didn't get them passed on. And then yeah, if you can see him at certain individuals, that you that are a bit more visible. I think it's a good thing.

Scott’s journey at Microsoft – 18:12

Rick
Definitely. I would like to dive into tech a bit more Scott, if you don't mind. Maybe for people who haven't been around as long as Oscar and I have. Could you maybe explain how your journey at Microsoft went so you, you joined somewhere in 2007? I think.

Scott
I've been at Microsoft 15 years this month. Like just literally the last week I got my 15 year like congratulations, email.

Oscar
Oh, yeah, I saw you you're trying to get a message on your a uhm..

Scott
Yeah, so they send you these big Lucite crystals. And I have a five year and a 10 year and then the 15 year is really big. And each of them has a different color. So there's like a green, blue, red, bright crystal, and then you put it by the sun and it makes like a rainbow color. And the 15 year apparently has an engraving. And it usually just says Scott Hanselman and then like years of service, but somehow I don't know if I hacked into it or they changed the tool. But now I can put any text that I want. So hopefully it'll say love Beyonce. But I there's some concern that maybe they're gonna catch me so I'll let you know if that sneaks through.

Oscar
I already saw that you try that. So there might be someone else at Microsoft following you on Twitter.

Scott
Yeah, but hopefully I'll if they say no, then I have the collective like the, the people will rise up and revolt. And support me. And they'll be like, alright, fine, you can have it.

Rick
We'll help.

Scott
But I've only been at Microsoft 15 years, which means that I'm now because April of this year was it was 30 years in tech. So now I'm finally at my halfway point where I've been at Microsoft exactly the amount of time that I wasn't at Microsoft, which is going to be a little bit challenging. For me kind of emotionally, because I have always thought of my time at Microsoft to be a time of service. Like when someone joins government from industry, and then they do their work in government, and then they leave and they go back to industry. So I always thought of myself as going to Microsoft to support and advocate for people like me, working with Microsoft tech downstream. But if now I've been here longer. Now, I guess I'm an insider. You know what I mean? Because I worked at Nike, I worked at Intel, like, worked in training, you know, like, I did all bunch of work in banking. I did a bunch of work for 15 years. But all anybody remembers is the Microsoft part. The last part? What do I do I quit now and go somewhere else?

Oscar
I don't know. Yep. Because I understand what you mean. Because sometimes I'm interested in some tech history. But yeah, you came out of the open, open source community and joined Microsoft. And I can imagine itself, like I'm helping them out to become a bit more like us, to show them and to show indeed, like minded people, that Microsoft can actually bring that and I think, seeing the history there with everything that happened. I think you joined right after the first open source project, which was MVC, or not?

Scott
No, I was there when we were doing that. I actually met Scott Guthrie, and known him for being an MVP, and an RD a regional director. So the Microsoft has these influencer programs, and I was a member of those. I met him at a thing called foo camp friends of O'Reilly, and it was Tim O'Reilly, O'Reilly Media having a party. And it was weird. Like, I'm not a name dropper, to be clear, so apologies ahead of time. But like, Elon Musk was there showing early Tesla prototypes, and you know, Sergey, what's his name from Google landed his helicopter on the back lawn. You know, and then also me, so it was just totally ridiculous. I was just wandering around...

Rick
Movie scenes.

Scott
Yeah, I just like, that guy's here too

Oscar
Tony Stark and Hanselman.

Scott
Yeah exactly. Tony Stark, and then another guy. Yeah, so I was there. And then I was talking to Guthrie, and he was thinking about Ruby on Rails, and open source. And, you know, I ended up joining and that was the time when like Phil hack, and folks were thinking about Model View Controller and the Microsoft had already tried to open source .NET before but they called it rotor, r o t o r. But it wasn't open source, it was source opened. Right? It was a zip file of source that was read only. But there were no take backs. So trying to come in trying to teach legal and teach all the lawyers how to be open by default, and sort of closed by default. So that Microsoft was closed by default, like, anytime you wanted to open source something, it was like an event. But now, I think that the thing that we should be proud of, you know, all of us that have worked so hard at Microsoft to be an open source isn't necessarily just open sourcing dot .NET and making it cross platform. But it's making Microsoft think about opening things by default. And then even stupid things like 3D Movie Maker that I was able to help open source couple months ago, because why not?

Oscar
Yeah, I can imagine by now you have some Runbooks ready to how to do that. But in the beginning, especially advice and legal of company like that, it's who would who try that?

Scott
Well, people like me know, Miguel, and, and Glen block and Scott Hunter, and just all those a whole team of like minded people who just were like, gosh, this doesn't have to be like this, and support from leadership and, you know, all these different things. But once the once the snowball started rolling, we were pretty good, pretty good situation. And then...

What would Microsoft look like if Open Source never happened – 23:47

Oscar
What do you think if that that never happened? Or you couldn't punch through somehow? Or what would Microsoft would look completely different? I think, with the eco system.

Scott
Like IBM.

Oscar
Yeah. So not there, or what?

Scott
It'd be a big, it just be a big, lumbering, Legacy enterprise thing? Yeah. But the reason I like Microsoft is that it has a lot of products. Like, I don't like without naming other products names, like there are people that go to the various, you know, fangs and such. And it feels like they basically have like one or two products. And if I didn't like working on the product and working on I could go work on Xbox, or I could work on dynamics, I could work on office I could work on, there's like 50,000 things that you're working on at Microsoft, so it's not one giant 100,000 person company. It is that you know, hundreds of 1000 person companies little kind of mid sized companies with, with all with a collective goal. So I like the diversity of stuff I can work on.

Oscar
If I look at when .NET core in his from his early previews and beta's and that was kind of a ride let's say that, or ASP. Net there. It really looked like you're also with Damon Edwards and like, felt like a startup with those weekly stand ups and stuff within Microsoft. It felt so weird that this, like, this was the biggest part of Microsoft I was dealing with. It's like both Azure and like DevStack. But now it's run by guys like us, literally, it felt like that. And there are a few there. And this feels like they just thought of oh, just switch on the camera. And let's have this discussion. It felt so completely alien for me that, that would be allowed within the Microsoft I knew from before, I was also a time before even the whole stack. I was on the other side of that, and maybe a bit too opinionated sometimes. But yeah, it was crazy to see that, that I can imagine that was just grew that it wasn't really planned out. Or people actually really making room for you to do that.

Scott
I think I mean, these things grew because there were things that didn't exist the first time we tried to open source .NET like, GitHub didn't exist, we had CodePlex, we had Sourceforge. But git itself as a collaborative, like Git is basically FTP for code. You know, we were Pat, we were pushing patch files around before that I was using CVS, you know, and you'd hand me a doc patch file, those that was not really collaborative. So Git itself made a big difference. GitHub made a big difference. But also like minded people, right, you said guys like us, but also guys and gals, not sorry, our current VP, Amanda Silver, is really, really innovative in the way that she thinks about how to do Visual Studio, then we have Visual Studio Code happening. And then of course, Julia Loosen, who has been at Microsoft 30 years, this a couple of months ago, and I actually took her on a tour of the Microsoft archives, which is pretty cool. Turns out, she actually wrote code on Microsoft Access. So I've got two VPS, that have written code. They're not just suits for administrators, you know, and that's also meaningful. So it's one thing to have like some boss that has a suit that comes in every once in a while and says stupid things. But to have like Amanda's a compiler nerd, and Giulia, like worked on Visual Basic and Visual, inner Dev and like, wrote code for those things means that I'm led by developers. So then selling the idea of open source to executives that work in development is a much easier push, if that makes sense.

Oscar
That makes sense. Yeah, definitely.

Rick
Now, fast forward a couple of years. And when you started at Microsoft, you just said, you thought that would be a certain period of time. And then now you're keynoting Build. So there's a little bit of difference between joining a company and thinking I'll just be there for a couple of couple of years. And now hosting one of the meet, I think, the biggest developer conference, maybe even at all, but at least as far as Microsoft does. I can imagine that was a different story.

Scott
Well, when keynoting Build is more of I'm representing the team, or like speaking at a developer conference, there's two ways to do it. You're either presenting work that you did, like, look at this thing that I did, that's really cool. You're making a declarative statement, like, here's the thing that I think that you should think also, or in the context of something like Build or ignite or Tech Ed, you're acting as a spokesperson. So it's more of a position that I take with very, very seriously, if that makes sense. So like, I'll speak I speak at conferences all the time. I was in Switzerland last week, and I was talking about, you know, stuff I thought was cool. So it's Scott speaking as Scott. But if I speak at Build, I'm representing 1000 developers that worked really hard for Julia, and I'm speaking on behalf of 1000 developers that worked really hard on behalf of Julia and Amanda to build something. And then we can't put 1000 developers on stage, right? And so how do you pick someone to talk about that? Right? So I really take it seriously to represent their work well, so that they are they are, their hard work is comes through. So then we work harder, we put on stories. I don't know if you ever saw a couple of years ago, we did an episode of The Office. That was like a fake TV show, as a keynote, like doing something innovative, like that isn't just to be goofy. It's to get people to watch and then see the stories and then see the products and then go oh, that's cool. And then that gets back to the original part at the beginning of the podcast about what am I doing? I'm telling people, here's a cool thing that you didn't know existed, you should go check it out. It'll make you more powerful. So there's really no difference between the way that I go and teach people about Visual Studio. And the way that I tell them about like a WiFi modem for a Commodore 64 It's like you oh, this is so cool. That's like, that's the whole vibe.

Totally random question – 30:03

Rick
Yeah. And that's I think the best vibe there is. Oscar? Do you know what time it is?

Oscar
Is it time for a totally random question?

Rick
 It is time for a totally random question. Scott, what bends your mind every time you think about it?

Scott
Bends my mind. I don't know what that means.  Well like, whatever, if you if you think about it, that you still think, wow, that this is that this is out there or that this is the case.

Oscar
Or stop thinking about it must be crazy.

Scott
Oh, I mean, I would just say the fact that I haven't, like rebooted this computer in like 46 days, like, I mean, just the fact that we're here right now, right? Like, there's that there's that one fellow who said, computers are just rocks that we infused with lightning and made them think, oh, yeah, you're I mean, yeah, we're sitting here, I looked down and I've got my, my mini tower. And it's got LEDs and stuff. I got three monitors, I'm looking at you, in 4k across multiple monitors, I'm recording in two different places. I've got this device talking to USB, talking to 15, other USB devices, the whole thing is stable, it just works fine. It's a miracle it works at all.

Oscar
like I have with bugs, sometimes why doesn't it work, and then later is like why does this even work all this? What's beneath it? It's crazy that it?

Rick
And then somewhere in the room, there's this Commodore 64 with a Y modem.

Scott
Well, another thing when you think about just like how does it even work, I'm pulling this out of my pocket right here. I've got an insulin pump. Right. So this is a very old insulin pump. This is not a modern insulin pump with a touchscreen. This looks like a Nokia phone, right? This has a gray green LED LCD screen. This thing hasn't crashed in 16 years.

Rick
Not once?

Scott
So if you think not once, like this thing works, right? The only it doesn't crash. It doesn't freak out. It is, you know, partially waterproof. It is resistant to static electricity, it is resistant to pressure. I've flown all over the world with this thing. So that, that's another way of thinking about software. So while we're out there trying to figure out how to put text boxes over data with React, right? And they were like, yeah, that didn't work. And then we push F 12. And then, like, if you ever go to a webpage right now, and you just like it works, and you check out of the shopping cart. But if you push F push F 12. And look at the console, every website is filled with read errors and exceptions, it still works. And I still was able to buy that thing. But this insulin pump hasn't had a problem in almost two decades, very, very different ways of thinking about software, you know, we have patched zero like zero day patches. So someone releases a game like Gears of War, they put it on a disk, they ship it. And then the day it comes out there's a five gig match but my insulin pump has not changed since like 1987. And that bends my mind.

Oscar
I think that is a terrific answer.

Scott
Thank you.

Rick
Yes.

Closing – 33:16

Oscar
Scott, I know you're short on time. Is there anything you want to get back at or that we forgot to mention that we really need to address in this podcast?

Scott
I am a little sad that more people aren't blogging and creating content. And that the argument is that they don't have time. So I would love to see more people write less email, and take those keystrokes and put them in blog posts. And I'd like to see more people like yourselves, you know, lending your privilege to other people and have them on your podcast. So like the fact that we're even having a chat is good on you. Because you could have called me both of you and said, hey, Scott, can we pick your brain. And then we would just chat for an hour. And then we would leave what you recorded it and you added cool music. And then you'll have a transcript after and then everybody wins. So I would just encourage more people to think about putting themselves out there a little bit more, and then also lending their voices to others. So.

Rick
I think a nice addition to that one is you never have time you make time on that one Scott...

Scott
That was very deep. Rick is all like, brother, let's bring it down.

Oscar
With his voice.

Rick
Thank you so very much for being our guest. It was awesome talking to you.

Scott
Thanks.

Oscar
Thank you. See you around.

Scott
Oh actually I have an idea of what the show is called Betabits, right.

Rick
Betatalks yeah.

Scott
Betatalks. So you know at the end of my podcast, this has been another episode of Betatalks.

Rick
Nice.

Oscar
So we switch end credits.

Scott
This has been another episode of Hansel minutes and we'll see you again next week.

Oscar
We can do that outro.

Rick
Yeah, the guys recorded. We shouldn't be good to go. Thanks. Thank you for listening to Betatalks the podcasts, we publish a new episode every two weeks.

Oscar
You can find us on all the major streaming platforms like Spotify and iTunes.

Rick
See you next time.

Oscar
Bye.