Latest / North Meets South Web Podcast / Flavours of busy, restrained features, and variable static views

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Flavours of busy, restrained features, and variable static views · North Meets South Web Podcast

• 0:00
  Hi. I'm Michael Dyrynda.
• 0:01
  And I'm Jake Bennett.
• 0:03
  And welcome to episode 178 of the North Meets South Web Podcast. [rock music]
• 0:08
  Nailed it. Good job, dude. How's it going?
• 0:11
  Nice. Going well. Going, uh, yeah. Going well.
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  -Busy- -Good
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  -... but but well. How about you? -Great. Yeah. No. Same. Same. I [sighs]
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  I've tried recently.
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  I I catch myself saying the same answer that you just gave a lot, which is busy,
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  -right? -Mm-hmm.
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  And and i- it's true. Like, it's not a lie. I mean, we are. We are busy.
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  -We're all busy. -But I realized after a while that I would
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  ask people the same question, they would say the same thing. And it's like, you
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  know what? We're all busy. All of us, we're all busy.
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  -Yeah. -Like, so-
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  All busy all the time.
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  Yeah. I tried to stop saying that, but it doesn't work very well 'cause it's still
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  typically my answer. "How are things going?"
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  -Yeah. -"Oh, you know, bus- pretty busy. But busy
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  work, but the good. Things are good. Things are good." You know, so whatever.
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  -So- -I mean, I don't, I don't know how else to
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  -answer the question because that's- -I know.
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  -That's how I am. -There's so many things going on. It's like
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  -I have to pick one thing to talk about. -Mm-hmm.
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  Uh, it's like I I could talk about a lot of things, but there's a lot of things
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  -going on, so I'm busy. -Yeah.
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  -There's a lot, you know? -Yeah.
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  -We all are. -Busy.
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  -We all- -Busy, busy
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  ... are.
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  You reach that certain stage in life where you, you think... Uh, I remember thinking
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  when our kids were little, like, "Man, once my kids can feed themselves and tie
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  their own shoes, then things will probably slow down." And it's like and then they
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  get older, and it's like then it's friends-
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  -Gets harder -... and sports.
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  -Yeah. -And you're like, "Man, after basketball
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  season is over, then then things are gonna slow down a little bit." And it doesn't.
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  -It just keeps going faster- -Yeah
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  -... and faster and faster and faster. -We're we're just moving into that phase
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  -now with Eli playing sport and soccer. -Mm-hmm.
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  -And now it's- -Mm-hmm
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  Liv has decided that she doesn't always want to... I think more often than not,
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  she doesn't want to go to the soccer games, which is fair enough-
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  -Mm-hmm -... 'cause it's cold-
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  -Yes -... and she's sitting around and she's
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  -bored. And- -Sure. Yeah. Yeah
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  ... she's not really interested in it. So because she's not participating, she
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  doesn't doesn't really wanna be involved. And so one week, I'll take Eli to soccer.
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  -One week, Ria will take him. And so- -Oh, nice. There you go
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  ... it's back and forth, and then, like, figuring out who's going where. And and
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  now that the kids are a little bit more independent and it's a bit easier to do
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  things. Like, before, when we'd, like, bath the kids, we want all hands on deck
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  'cause someone will be washing one, someone will be drying the other one,
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  -getting them ready for bed- -Yep.
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  -And all that kind of stuff. -Yep. [laughs]
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  Now
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  now both of them can basically wash themselves, except when it comes time to
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  washing their hair. And Eli can dress himself, so it's like you... Uh, we just
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  watch them get in and out to make sure that they don't-
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  -Get in there -... slip on the bath.
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  -Yep. Yep. -You know, so that makes it easier to,
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  like, go out during the week so that, you know, Mum can put one of them to bed or I
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  -can put one of them to bed, feed them- -Yeah
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  ... all that kind of stuff. And and it's not like this overwhelming chore of of
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  having to do all of that stuff because they're quite independent
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  already. Um, and so that that makes life a lot easier, so that we don't have to have
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  two people here all the time. It makes it easier for for Rhea to go to the gym or
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  for me to go out and and grab a bite or something like that, so-
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  -Yeah. Yeah. Very true. -It's just a-
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  -That is true. -But it's a different kind of busy, as you
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  -say. -It is different.
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  -You know? -Yeah. That's right.
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  -It's just phases- -Yep
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  ... of busy. And then, you know, once they get to-
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  -Exactly -... the age of your kids, at at the other
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  end, it's, like, more professional sport kind of commitments. Not not professional,
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  -but, like, higher level of of sport- -Yeah
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  ... commitments, where
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  it's training multiple times a week. It's playing multiple times a week. It's all of
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  -this kind of moving around- -Right. Right
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  -... where we now- -They're trying to get better. Like, when
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  they're younger, it's like they're just trying to play. They just, they're happy
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  -to just play. -Yeah. Mm-hmm.
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  And, like, at this level, they have to kinda decide if they wanna be... If this
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  -is what they wanna do, if they don't. -Yeah.
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  And if they do, it's like they've gotta commit to practicing outside of the
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  -practices and games and stuff. -Yeah. That's right. Yeah.
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  And so it's like if you actually wanna get playing time and be good, you gotta do
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  stuff outside.
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  -Mm-hmm. -So coordinating those times as well and
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  -whatever. So... -Yeah.
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  It's all lots of fun, man. It is all lots of fun.
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  -It's good though. -But those, for like, for Graham right now,
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  he's 14, so it feels like the clock is starting.
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  -Mm-hmm. -The countdown is on. You know what I mean?
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  -It's kinda- -The countdown to college because it's very
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  -different for- -Give as much time as we can with him
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  -... for you guys over there. Mm-hmm. -Yeah.
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  -'Cause what's- -Yep.
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  Over there, very, very common for, you know, um, kids to to pack up and go off to
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  -college and not- -Yep. Yep
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  -... not stay at home and- -Totally
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  ... and be away for for months at a time between breaks and things like that.
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  Whereas here, they, they, generally, people will still go to university
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  where they grew up.
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  -Mm-hmm. -And and it's like you'll catch a bus to
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  the city to, like, go, and then you'll come back home at the end of the day. So
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  it's it's very different, you know, hearing those perspectives. I see Abigail,
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  you know, tweeting about it, that they're they're running out of summers with the
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  kids at home and the kids being around and all that kind of stuff. And it's just not
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  something that really
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  crosses our... my mind because
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  short of going to the
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  join the army, you know, like my my nephew did, you don't really... Like, most
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  people kind of tend to stay where they are until they finish study. Not a lot of
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  people will travel interstate for study. Um, I think that's fairly uncommon here.
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  -Interesting. Yeah. -Yeah.
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  -Yeah. That is a cultural thing. -Or is this, like-
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  -I think- -... part of the course for you guys?
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  I think... Very, very common. Yeah. Exactly.
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  -Mm-hmm. -And a lot of kids see it as their first
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  opportunity to sort of escape their hometown. You know what I mean? It's like
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  -they wanna get outta here. -Mm-hmm.
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  They wanna go experience the world, live somewhere different, live apart from their
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  parents and family. Kinda have their their leap into adulthood, if you will. So-
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  -Yeah -... which comes with the pros and cons,
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  you know, because they're only 18, so they're still kids, man.
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  -Yeah. -It's like-
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  -Yeah. -... you can make really stupid decisions
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  as 18-year-olds. You can make really stupid decisions as a 40-year-old too.
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  -But- -Yeah
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  ... got a little bit more life experience behind you. So, anyway, yeah. It's, uh,
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  it's fun, man. It's, it's been a good start to the summer, and
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  things are going good.
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  Um,
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  last show, when we were talking, um, we came up with, like, a bunch of things that
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  we wanted to talk about, and so I wrote them down. And we talked about how we
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  wanted to sort of have a little bit more... What did you call it? Like, not
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  -consistency, but, like- -Continuity.
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  -Continuity. That's it. -Yeah.
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  That's the word. Continuity between the shows. And so last time, we were talking
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  about
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  Wistia, talked about the new Wilber Jobs website and how-
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  -Mm-hmm -... that w- that was pretty cool. Um, I've
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  got a couple things we could talk about with that. Staggered CSS animations, live
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  photos, we could talk about that. Or we could talk about where to store values for
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  templates in static sites. That's an interesting one.
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  -Mm-hmm. -Or defensive programming.... or time
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  bombed feature flags. All right, which one sounds the most interesting to you?
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  Hmm. Time bomb feature flags I've played with in the past, and they've bitten me-
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  -Yes -... because they don't, they don't work-
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  -Ooh -... quite as, quite the way that I thought
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  they would.
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  All right, let's dive in. Let's dive into time bomb feature flags. Okay.
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  -Should I set the stage real quick? -Mm-hmm.
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  You wanna tell me what Pennant is? Tell us, tell all the people what Pennant is.
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  Pennant is a Laravel first party implementation for f- feature flagging,
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  uh, in, in your Laravel apps, right? So Tim McDonald-
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  -Yeah -... built, built that one out, hmm, not
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  last year, the year before, I think. So it's a couple of, couple of years-
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  -Yeah -... it's been around now. And, yeah, it's
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  a, it's a first, first party, you know, it, it feels like a Laravel implementation
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  of feature flags.
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  Yeah, it's, um, it's a really good,
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  um, it's a really good library, and it's very simple. Um, so it's,
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  you know, it's basically the minimum amount of code that you would need in
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  order to be able to run feature flags is kinda how I think of it. So
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  it's really, um,
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  wonderfully simple. Uh, the couple of things that we, the way that we use it is
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  you have...
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  You can either have a closure
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  that helps to give it a name. You can name the feature and then have a function that
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  accepts a scope and then resolves the truthiness of that feature.
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  So
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  you say, let's say, um, the feature is,
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  I don't know,
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  Ken Call Michael. It's Ken Call Michael. The, you know, one of our support people
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  gets a emergency button on their dashboard, which if they need help, they
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  can call Michael. And only certain people get access to this because, you know,
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  there's people who have abused this in the past. And so we wanna start out with only
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  giving it to managers, because managers are the ones who, uh, can escalate calls
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  to Michael. So what we're gonna do is we're going to thi- name this feature Ken
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  Call Michael, and, uh, the way that I'm going to do it is I'm going to implement
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  it inside of a class called Ken Call Michael Feature. And, um, inside of that,
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  I have a resolve function, or sorry, resolve method, which accepts a scope, and
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  I think typically that's just a generic, it's mixed $scope. But you can specify
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  things like user. So I know that I'm passing a user into that scope, and it
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  will fail if I pass anything else. So I'll pass a user in as that scope, and then I
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  can say user hasRole manager, something like that. And I return that, return the
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  truthiness of that statement. So if that statement returns as true, when that
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  person visits the page that, uh, checks that feature, right, where that feature is
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  actually on the page, it will grab that class. It will resolve that feature,
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  resolve that method, and then it will return a truthy or falsey, um, value. And
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  then that will get stored. Depending on what driver you're using for Pennant,
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  it'll either get stored in the database, or it'll get stored, you know, in Redis or
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  other places, wherever you might have it.
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  -Mm-hmm. -And then at that point, it is resolved. It
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  is not stored. It will not ever resolve again unless you delete or, or, uh, purge
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  that feature for that person, which is great.
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  So that's the idea, right? I can turn features on or off. I can also launch it
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  as, like, nobody gets it. I can just, from that resolve function, return false. And
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  then I can go into the database, and I can say only I get it, right? Or I can
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  release it to a beta group of users. So I can test it in production without having
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  any fear of breakages occurring because nobody can see it except for me. So if it
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  breaks, it's only gonna break for me, or it's gonna break for a very small group of
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  users. So really, really nice. Now,
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  after having explained that, Michael, I want to hear your idea or explanation of
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  time bombs,
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  why you might use them, and how you implemented them and how they bit you.
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  Mm-hmm.
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  Yeah. Well, I think it's, it's the, the fact that they are resolved once and
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  persisted that has bitten me because-
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  -Mm-hmm -... the, the time bomb nature is that I
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  would expect that a feature flag applies or doesn't apply depending on how you've
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  got your code wrapped by that feature flag at some point in the future.
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  -Mm-hmm. -So the way that I wanted to use them,
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  rightly or wrongly, last year when, when I looked at it, was to time bomb the
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  -display of speakers for Laricon AU. -Hmm.
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  So, like, on some day in the future, we want this speaker to appear on the
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  -website. -Yeah, yeah.
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  So I don't have to remember to do it. So I don't have to be at the computer to, you
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  know, tick a box or whatever. So I thought, yes, I will, I will time bomb
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  that feature flag,
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  uh, so that that speaker appears at some point in the future.
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  Now, the problem with that was, because that was resolved once, when it resolved
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  -the first time that it was loaded- -Mm-hmm.
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  -It was false -... it was like... It was false. So it
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  went into the database, and that was it. It was just false forever. So I would have
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  to then go in, [laughs] on that time, on that day, to then remove that flag, which-
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  Yeah
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  -... kind of defeated the purpose of it. -Defeats the purpose.
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  -So that's- -Totally.
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  That's where, that's where I got bitten by them. Other than that-
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  -So- -... I think they work fantastic.
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  Okay. So, so
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  it's probably helpful to talk about definitions of what a time bomb is. So
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  what you've explained there is not necessarily a time bomb. A time bomb, as
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  Martin Fowler describes it when he's talking about features and toggling, is a
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  way for you to make sure that feature flags don't stick around for forever,
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  -right? -Mm-hmm.
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  So you could think of a time bomb more as an expiration date than a... Only to show
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  -it at this time. Now- -Mm-hmm
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  ... I think it's worth discussing how we would actually approach your particular
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  -problem that you're talking about. -Mm-hmm.
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  And
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  maybe,
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  I don't know. I- I'm actually not sure how I would solve that with Pennant. I think
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  I would honestly, in that instance, I would literally just put a
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  timestamp check or something [laughs] like that.
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  -Yeah. All right. -I would wrap it with a conditional if that
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  -says- -Yeah
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  ... if, if, uh, now is passed and then pass in the date-
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  -Mm-hmm. Yeah -... and then I would... Then that's how I
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  -would do that probably. -... yeah, this year. This year, we put all
• 12:23
  of the, the speakers into the database, so now we just have a, like, publish date
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  -is in the past. -Ah, so- oh, perfect
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  -That works fine this time -... there you go.
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  Yeah. Which is the sensible way of doing it, but last year, we kind of... The, it
• 12:33
  was all static HTML really, so we, we put all the spon- uh, the, all the speakers on
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  -the page that way. And so we're- -Yeah
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  ... just expecting, like, for each one to then,
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  t-to, to appear effectively when, when the time is in the past, but didn't work out
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  that way. Uh, but this year, yeah. It's just a, just a field on the database
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  that's an announced at or something like that, and we just return all of the
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  speakers where announced at is less than or equal to now, which is much-
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  -That makes sense -... easier way of doing it.
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  -Great way to do that -Don't use feature flags for that. Yeah,
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  -no. -Absolutely. Great way to do that. So,
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  so if we're approaching this idea of time bombs as this, as more of, like, an
• 13:08
  expiration date, um, I, I would love to talk about that just for a little bit.
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  And, and essentially, I'll give you the scenario that
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  we faced that had me looking back into this, which was we had a feature flag that
• 13:20
  was,
• 13:22
  you know, gate, gating a feature that we had written
• 13:26
  and I pushed it out on a Friday
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  -and promptly forgot. -It's time to push down
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  -About that feature. -Yeah. Just want to push down
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  Totally forgot about it. It didn't matter. It was like, "Okay, hey, whatever." So,
• 13:37
  uh, I enabled it for a couple users and
• 13:40
  the users of us who had it just
• 13:43
  looked at it and figured, "Well, everybody must have this," right? We totally forgot
• 13:46
  -that we did not release it for everyone. -Yeah.
• 13:49
  And so six months later, somebody's like, "Yeah, I don't know how to see, like, if
• 13:54
  this file is timed up or not." Like, well, just use the, you know, just use the
• 13:58
  -timed up, you know, thing at the top. -Yeah.
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  They're like, "I've never seen that." And they're like, "Well, like, certainly.
• 14:04
  Like, it's right up here. Here's where you should see it." Go into the features
• 14:07
  table. Yup, not enabled for anybody except for us. Like, ah, crap. And so what
• 14:13
  happened is
• 14:15
  we had this feature flag that was not supposed to be around forever. It was only
• 14:18
  supposed to be for this beta testing sort of idea. And once it was good, then we
• 14:23
  needed to remove it. So the question is, how do you inform yourself when
• 14:29
  you should, you know, how do you basically put an expiration date and say, "Hey, by
• 14:33
  the time a month has passed, we should have figured out if we want this feature
• 14:38
  -or not for everybody." -Mm-hmm.
• 14:39
  It should be general release to everybody, or it shouldn't be.
• 14:43
  -Yeah. -And, you know, we kinda need to pull the
• 14:45
  trigger on one way or the other.
• 14:46
  So I asked Tim McDonald. I was like, "How would you do this?" We had a couple ideas
• 14:50
  for how we would do it, but the way that he did it was very, uh, clever. And so I
• 14:55
  wanted to share the idea that he had, which is,
• 14:59
  uh, to put on each one of your feature classes, which again, is the way that I
• 15:04
  really prefer to do it, is to use a class-based resolution because you get all
• 15:07
  the other things you can do, this behavior, these traits that you can put on
• 15:10
  it and whatnot. But you make a trait called is, like, concerned with
• 15:14
  expiration, you know, maybe something like that. And inside of there, um, you have a
• 15:19
  contract essen- or sorry, maybe it's a contract, not a trait. But it's, uh, a
• 15:23
  contract that specifies that you need to have a
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  is expired
• 15:27
  method that returns a Boolean.
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  And then what you can do is, uh, in that is expired, you can do a date. You could
• 15:34
  say now is past a particular time, or you can do other things, right? You can,
• 15:39
  there's other things you could do. It doesn't have to just be a date, but you
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  just return a Boolean from there.
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  And then what you can do
• 15:45
  is
• 15:46
  you can, in your service provider, you can say there's an event that says feature
• 15:52
  resolved, I think is what it is. So what this does is any time that a feature gets
• 15:56
  resolved, even if it's out of the database, if it's grabbing it,
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  it will look and say,
• 16:02
  um, is this an instance of,
• 16:05
  you know, or does this extend the contract or implement the contract of, uh,
• 16:10
  you know, can expire or something, whatever. Like, what, you know, I'm using
• 16:13
  bad names here, but that's the idea, right?
• 16:15
  -Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. -And if it is, if it does extend that
• 16:18
  contract or implement that contract, then what you do is you check to see is it
• 16:22
  -expired. -Yeah.
• 16:23
  And if it is expired, then you can do a couple things. So, um,
• 16:28
  you know, you could log, warn yourself, something like that. Um, but the thing
• 16:32
  that Tim did, which I thought was really cool, is there's this way that you can
• 16:35
  check to see if you're running tests currently. Have you ever seen this before?
• 16:42
  -So it's like- -The other container that's, like, is
• 16:43
  -running- -Yeah
• 16:44
  ... running unit tests or something like that.
• 16:46
  Yeah. If app dot op running unit tests. So you can do this conditional. You should
• 16:52
  say, "If we're running tests
• 16:54
  and it's expired,
• 16:56
  then we want to throw a runtime exception that says feature has expired." So what
• 17:02
  that does then is if you're ever running a test that encounters this feature, and
• 17:08
  the feature is expired, it's going to force you to make a decision one way or
• 17:12
  -the other. -Yeah.
• 17:12
  -You either need to extend- -Extend it
• 17:14
  ... the amount of time that you have until it expires.
• 17:16
  -Or remove it. Mm-hmm. -Or get rid of it. And I love that because
• 17:19
  it does... It's not destructive. It doesn't ever mess you up in production.
• 17:23
  Uh, you can have it log if it's in production if you want.
• 17:26
  -Mm-hmm. -Instead of throwing that runtime
• 17:27
  exception. Um, but it's a great way to ensure that any of your features that
• 17:33
  you're putting in place have a reasonable expira- uh, expiration timestamp on them
• 17:38
  and that you're forced to deal with them at some point in the future.
• 17:41
  -Um, so I thought that was pretty cool. -I like that.
• 17:44
  -Yeah. -That is a very Tim thing to do. [laughs]
• 17:47
  Mm-hmm.
• 17:48
  To put a thing in there. I've,
• 17:50
  -I've- -So he wa- so he did... So here's the deal.
• 17:52
  He hasn't actually, like, this is not...
• 17:55
  This does not exist. You have to just add it on yourself.
• 17:58
  -Yeah. -Right?
• 17:59
  -Yeah, exactly. Yeah. -That's why I was like, "It would be cool
• 18:01
  if it was first party." He's like, "I mean,
• 18:04
  I didn't feel like there was a good..." He said, "I didn't feel like there was a
• 18:06
  good generic option to put on top of it." So-
• 18:09
  -Yeah -... I built the tools. A lot of the users
• 18:10
  to decide how they wanna handle it, but it's not, it's not difficult to implement
• 18:14
  -it. -Yeah.
• 18:14
  -Right? You could see how you would do so. -Yeah. It demonstrates a lot of restraint
• 18:18
  on, on his part and on, I suppose, on Laravel's part in general about where you
• 18:22
  draw the line in the sand for, for what you do offer as part of the library and
• 18:27
  for what you say, "The tools are there. Go and implement it."And, and I think this
• 18:31
  is, this is a fairly good
• 18:34
  case, use case of the tools that go and implement it yourself. I've, I've gone
• 18:39
  back and forth over the years about whether or not
• 18:44
  using those kind of conditionals in application code is a good idea or a bad
• 18:49
  -idea, you know? -Mm-hmm.
• 18:50
  Doing an, like an environment check or doing a, are we running unit tests? Or, or
• 18:54
  that kinda stuff to then trigger things because you're, you're putting
• 18:59
  test logic inside of your application code to do this kind of stuff.
• 19:05
  Erm,
• 19:06
  I think it's fine, in general. I don't, I don't really see any reason to do that. I
• 19:10
  know that in parallel testing and things like that, we will have all kinds of
• 19:14
  conditionals that check, like, if the parallel testing token is set, then we
• 19:17
  need to go and do this stuff. And then somewhere else we go, "Okay, don't do this
• 19:21
  stuff because we are parallel testing," and, and things like that. So
• 19:25
  there's definitely cases, I think, where
• 19:28
  doing that kind of runtime, testing time logic is good. I think
• 19:34
  forcing you to, you know, blow up your... [sighs] It depends on how strict you are
• 19:39
  on your continuous integration. Like, if you're running this in CI and it fails
• 19:44
  because somewhere between where you pushed a pull request
• 19:47
  -into GitHub and some- -Mm-hmm.
• 19:49
  And, and when the CI ran, your, your test suite is now failing
• 19:55
  because of this expired token or this expired check,
• 19:59
  but it's unrelated to the pull request
• 20:02
  that, that was pushed up. So I think
• 20:04
  that's, like,
• 20:06
  that's the one thing that, that sticks to me. It's like, okay, yes, we need to do
• 20:09
  something about it. It is now impacting on this unrelated thing,
• 20:14
  and it's, you know, a team decision. What do you do with that? Is someone now tasked
• 20:17
  with going immediately and, and updating that? Do we... You know, it, it may not be
• 20:21
  a decision that gets resolved straight away, depending on the size of the
• 20:25
  organization. It, it might be, like, you as a developer or as a founder, you can go
• 20:29
  like, "Yeah, I'll just kick that can down the road a week," or, "I'll go and remove
• 20:33
  all of those feature flags, and this is now just a feature that's part of the
• 20:36
  platform." So yes, it does prompt you to do that, but sometimes that decision
• 20:40
  -involves committees. It involves- -Yeah
• 20:42
  ... product teams, product managers, things like that. You've gotta go ask.
• 20:45
  You've gotta go wait. They don't have an answer. They've gotta go chase it up with
• 20:47
  -someone else. -So now you have a blocked PR, yeah.
• 20:50
  And meanwhile you've got a blocked PR and a failing test suite, and all of that
• 20:52
  -kinda stuff. So, you know- -In fact, every PR is blocked, right? If
• 20:57
  you had multiple PRs out there, all of them are blocked.
• 20:59
  -Mm-hmm. Yeah. -And every single person is trying to
• 21:01
  scramble to figure out what do we need to do with this.
• 21:03
  Yeah, yeah. And everyone's going, "Oh, this is failing. Retry fail tests." Like,
• 21:06
  'cause they're like, "Oh, this wasn't supposed to fail," you know? Es-
• 21:09
  especially, like, we get into situations at work where the, the test suite will
• 21:13
  just be flaky.
• 21:14
  Erm,
• 21:16
  and it's just over time, the, the construct of, of the application has
• 21:20
  changed where, you know, you've got factories that, that are resolved in a
• 21:23
  certain way. Which is okay when you've got 100 tests, but when you've got 500 tests
• 21:26
  or 1,000 tests, those factories can, like, step on each other. You might not have
• 21:31
  something that's unique, so
• 21:33
  over
• 21:34
  enough iterations, you end up with collisions and things because you don't
• 21:38
  have the, like, fake, faker Unique applied in there. So there's, like, all these
• 21:43
  different
• 21:44
  cascading
• 21:46
  arbitrary failures that you might not even look at it for a couple of days-
• 21:49
  -Yep -... until someone goes, "Hey, this is,
• 21:50
  this is failing." So
• 21:52
  I like the idea in
• 21:54
  theory.
• 21:55
  -Mm-hmm. -I think
• 21:57
  whether or not it works depends on
• 22:00
  the kind of company that you're in and how quickly they respond to that. Like, if
• 22:04
  you,
• 22:05
  and, like, whether you put that in there at all,
• 22:08
  uh, really comes down to how quickly someone is going to respond
• 22:12
  when... It may be a case that you log,
• 22:15
  you know, for two weeks or something before the failure,
• 22:18
  erm, even if you are running in test so that something bubbles up somewhere that
• 22:22
  hopefully someone would see.
• 22:24
  Erm,
• 22:26
  but yeah.
• 22:27
  -That's a l- -Yeah, you're, you're-
• 22:27
  ... long-winded way of saying that, like, I think in general, I agree with the idea.
• 22:31
  I like, I like the idea of putting something [laughs] that explodes in, in
• 22:34
  test. Because that's something that
• 22:36
  at some point in your release cycle, whether it's during development locally or
• 22:40
  as part of CI or deployments, like, something will blow up because of that.
• 22:44
  -Yeah. -Erm, and, and what you have in place to
• 22:47
  work around it. You know, okay, we can just merge this PR anyway knowing that
• 22:50
  this is,
• 22:52
  erm,
• 22:52
  -unrelated to that pull request. -Yeah.
• 22:55
  If you do, if you do automated deploys, it's a bit trickier. Erm,
• 22:59
  it depends on, like, if you do... I know with, erm, Laravel's testing stuff, you
• 23:04
  -can --fail on your test. -Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
• 23:07
  And, like, it will f- after the first fail- like, if that's the first failure
• 23:10
  and it doesn't get to something else-
• 23:12
  -There's just stuff there. -Yeah. Yeah, okay, so this is unrelated to,
• 23:15
  to my failure. I'm gonna, you know, ship this anyway. Oh, whoops. There was a, some
• 23:19
  error further down in the test suite that didn't get picked up 'cause we bailed out
• 23:22
  on this thing. So...
• 23:24
  -Yeah. -You know?
• 23:25
  -I'll say that the- -Rest reward, I guess.
• 23:27
  Yeah. The,
• 23:28
  the concerns that you bring up are the s- very same concerns that Andy Hinkle had
• 23:33
  when we were going to implement this. He was like, "I don't like the fact that
• 23:36
  other developers are gonna have to deal with a feature flag before they can merge
• 23:40
  their stuff." So we came up with some ideas and some solutions. The one thing I
• 23:43
  will say too, though, is that this, I feel like, follows the convention that has
• 23:47
  been brought about in many
• 23:50
  different... You know, like we talked about Nuno's, um, thing where it's, like,
• 23:54
  just here's the best practices applied to the app service provider.
• 23:58
  -Mm-hmm. -Where it's like, disallow n+1 queries or
• 24:00
  disallow lazy loading or, you know, those assignment overflow things or whatever.
• 24:04
  Like, those, those sorts of things that only fail if you're in local, if you're in
• 24:09
  your local environment. You know what I'm talking about?
• 24:11
  -Yeah. Yeah, yeah. -So, like, it'll check those things. It's
• 24:13
  not gonna blow up in production. It's not gonna blow up in your face. If you happen
• 24:15
  to ship it to production, it's gonna be like, "Eh, okay. Just let it go." But if
• 24:20
  you're in local dev or in testing, it's gonna blow up in your face and say like,
• 24:23
  "Yeah, you can't do that." You, you can't-
• 24:25
  -Mm-hmm -... you know, do that lazy load stuff. So
• 24:27
  this sort of falls in line with that to me. Um...However, it's not a
• 24:34
  yes or a no, or an always or a never. It's, it's only based on some time-based
• 24:39
  thing a lot of times, which is... So it's not a right or wrong. It's just like if
• 24:42
  you happen to be the guy who runs it just before it expires, or right after it
• 24:45
  expires, then you're screwed. You're the one who has to deal with it. So
• 24:49
  okay, so how do we address this? Well,
• 24:51
  two couple... Two, two different ways I think we could deal with it. Um, one is
• 24:56
  that you could, if you're running,
• 25:00
  uh, your CI on a regular enough basis, you could start dropping warnings a month in
• 25:05
  advance of the expiration, right? So you could say, "If it expires in the next 30
• 25:10
  days, throw a warning on the tests. If it expires in the next..." You know, if it's,
• 25:16
  if it's in the past, then go ahead and throw a failure. You know, something like
• 25:20
  that. So that would allow you to be notified of it ahead of it actually
• 25:24
  expiring, so that you could fix it. Um, and like, you know, you see it, it's, it's
• 25:29
  erroring, or not erroring but it's throwing a warning, and you're like, "Oh,
• 25:31
  okay. I should probably make an issue for that so somebody can fix that or make a
• 25:34
  decision." We have 30 days to do so. The other thing that we talked about is making
• 25:40
  a command that runs once a day at like 6:00 AM, something like that, that runs
• 25:44
  through the features, checks if any of them are expired and if they are, sends
• 25:48
  off an email or sends it or creates an issue, or whatever you might have that
• 25:52
  says, "Hey by the way, these features are expiring within the next 30 days or the
• 25:56
  next 7 days," or whatever. Uh, or they are expired and these need to be addressed,
• 26:00
  and that's it. You know, so there was... That was, there was a couple options
• 26:04
  there. You could say it doesn't ever fail tests, it just sends out a warning to let
• 26:09
  somebody know that this needs to be addressed. Um, so there's a couple
• 26:12
  different ways you could do that there that I could see being effective that
• 26:15
  would not necessarily block the team, but could inform a project manager that these
• 26:19
  are something that we need to prioritize within the next cycle.
• 26:22
  Kind of, you know, deprecation warnings I guess for features.
• 26:24
  Yes, exactly that.
• 26:26
  -Mm-hmm. -Yes, correct. Yep, yep.
• 26:28
  Yeah, and I think realistically that's the only way to, to deal with it. And if, if
• 26:33
  no one's gonna pick up the deprecation warnings
• 26:36
  for the feature flags like that
• 26:38
  on a, you know, across a team, across an organization, you know, if you're
• 26:42
  involving all these different p-
• 26:44
  all these different people, then
• 26:46
  probably have bigger concerns to, to worry about. You know, at least sending that
• 26:51
  email or that notification in Dislike or whatever else
• 26:54
  that happens to be from that scheduled job, scheduled task, is...
• 26:59
  You know, you've got to address it in some way. Um, and if it goes to enough people,
• 27:04
  someone... Well actually, if it goes to too many people everyone's gonna be like,
• 27:07
  "I thought someone else was gonna deal with it," and then you've got to be
• 27:09
  -careful there as well. -Yeah.
• 27:10
  So
• 27:11
  yeah, keep the, keep the list small but make sure it gets actioned, I guess is the
• 27:14
  -main thing. -Exactly.
• 27:15
  But again, comes down to the team and, like, someone actually taking ownership o-
• 27:19
  over that. So
• 27:20
  -yeah. -Yep.
• 27:22
  -Good, uh- -Yep, you got it.
• 27:22
  Good, good problem. Um, I think good, good solution to that problem as well.
• 27:29
  Awesome. Yeah, thanks. I, it was, it was a fun one to kind of run down and it was...
• 27:33
  Uh, yeah. A couple different approaches there, a couple different concerns, but I
• 27:36
  was happy with where we landed on it, so yeah. Stoked about that.
• 27:39
  -Mm-hmm. -Okay. Since you talked about your, um,
• 27:43
  your speakers on Laracon, um, I think this is a good transition into this other part
• 27:49
  which is this,
• 27:51
  where do you store values
• 27:54
  for
• 27:55
  templates in a static
• 27:58
  view? Okay, so let me pitch it to you this way. Let's say you didn't have a database
• 28:03
  for those team members, or not another team members, for those speakers, right?
• 28:09
  Um, because locally you are going to do it and you don't want to have to like... How
• 28:14
  do you, how do you populate your database locally and then push that up to
• 28:19
  production without having to have access to the production database? You can't
• 28:22
  really do that. It's like I know what the values need to be, they're not necessarily
• 28:26
  dynamic, it's just I- I don't... Where do I store them, right? Do I... What are my
• 28:31
  options? If I, if I can't put them in a database, where are the other places that
• 28:35
  I could put them? So I actually came up with one just as we were talking here, but
• 28:38
  there was a couple options here that, that were thought about, right?
• 28:43
  One is you could literally just dre- like
• 28:46
  create a component and then in Blade, just
• 28:49
  you don't even bother doing a loop. You just put in the values.
• 28:52
  -Yeah. -Right? That's it. Create a component, put
• 28:54
  the values in, that is your database essentially, right? You just-
• 28:58
  -Mm-hmm -... write them all out in the blade, and
• 29:00
  that works. That's fine. Like you just basically, your component is going to have
• 29:06
  locations or values, like the values that you would normally store in the database
• 29:10
  are gonna be essentially like arguments to that component, right? So like name,
• 29:15
  image source, um,
• 29:19
  title, announcement date, right, all those things.
• 29:22
  Right? Those are gonna be, those are gonna be stored like in the Blade file.
• 29:25
  -Yeah. -That's one way to put it.
• 29:26
  -Yeah. -That's one spot to put it.
• 29:28
  -Yeah. -Um, can you think of any other spots you
• 29:29
  might, you might put these things?
• 29:32
  I can because this is what we did last year was-
• 29:35
  Ooh, okay. I wanna hear, I wanna hear. I want wrong answers only.
• 29:38
  -We, uh- -Wrong answers only.
• 29:38
  -Wrong answers only [laughs]. Yeah. -Yes. What were the other places you could
• 29:41
  -put it? -We created, we created a YAML file that we
• 29:43
  -hosted in GitHub that you had to- -Okay
• 29:45
  ... in a JS, it was a secret JS... No [laughs], I'm joking.
• 29:48
  -I was gonna say, oh dang. Okay. -You said wrong answers only.
• 29:51
  -That's crazy [laughs]. -You said wrong answers only.
• 29:53
  I- I, at first I thought you were being serious. I was like wait a second, do you
• 29:55
  really? Okay. All right, all right. A YAML file in-
• 29:58
  -No, we- -... a JS that you were pulling in R.
• 29:59
  -In a JS. -Fair enough.
• 30:00
  -That's right, yeah. -Yeah.
• 30:00
  -So if anyone wants to go and- -And then you used Sushi.
• 30:02
  ... uh, and scan. Sushi. Yeah, to use as an-
• 30:03
  Used, uh, Caleb Porzio's Sushi package, yeah.
• 30:05
  ... eloquent database. That's right. Uh, no we just, I just put all that stuff
• 30:09
  -inside of like a config Laracon.php. -Okay.
• 30:12
  And it was just an array of speakers which was keyed by...
• 30:17
  Actually, I don't think it was keyed. I think it was just an, an array that we
• 30:19
  then pulled out and we, you know, we collected it. We put it in a collection.
• 30:23
  We sorted it by announced. We filtered ones that were not, you know, didn't have
• 30:27
  an announced in the, in the past and that was it. That's, that's how we did it.
• 30:32
  -Yeah. -Um, and then I think w- we just used, you
• 30:35
  know, Cloudflare to cache that so we didn't... Well, you know, obviously the
• 30:37
  page gets cached so it doesn't have to hit the origin server to, to resolve that in
• 30:41
  the future. So yeah, that was, that was it really.
• 30:44
  Yeah. Uh, that works pretty good. So, like, you could put it in the config. You
• 30:48
  also, if you're being a little bit crazy, you could just chuck it into the
• 30:50
  -controller. Like, if you wanted to- -Mm-hmm. Yeah
• 30:52
  ... just inline an array in the controller, you-
• 30:53
  -Yeah. Sure -... could kinda put it in there. Uh,
• 30:55
  that's one way to do it as well. Um, so, uh, my,
• 30:59
  my junior-ish developer, he's actually... He's Landon. Landon is his name. Um, he
• 31:05
  played basketball a little bit last year at Laracon with me right afterwards. There
• 31:08
  was a couple dudes that we all played. Me, David, Hemphill, Landon, and then
• 31:12
  three other dudes that absolutely smoked us. It was really fun, but kinda crazy.
• 31:15
  -[laughs] -Landon's a great basketball player, junior
• 31:18
  developer though, and he's, he's figuring stuff out. And so for him, he ini- or
• 31:22
  initially just put it, like, in the controller. Like, he actually had
• 31:26
  a method for each. Like, so we had, like, four locations that we were trying to,
• 31:30
  like, you know, deal with. And so what he did is he put,
• 31:35
  uh, a method in, in the controller.
• 31:39
  So you would have, like, a, a value being passed into the controller, um,
• 31:43
  like, uh, you know, in the, like, the array that gets passed in to the, to the
• 31:47
  -view. I'm sorry, to the view. -Yep. Mm-hmm.
• 31:49
  And he would say, like, "Location one, Fat Arrow,
• 31:53
  this.get('location1')." And then say, "Location two-"
• 31:56
  -Yep. -"... this.FatArrow.get('location2')." So
• 31:58
  he was just calling private methods inside the controller that were sort of then
• 32:01
  -returning these arrays. And I was like- -Yep
• 32:03
  ..." Hmm,
• 32:04
  that is fin-" Like, it works. It's probably not how I would do it, but it
• 32:08
  -works. And so I- -Yeah
• 32:09
  ... was like, "I'm wondering..." You know, config file is the first thing that came
• 32:13
  to mind. But for some reason, I remember when looking at it, there were some
• 32:15
  reasons why it wouldn't have really worked in a config file. And I think partly
• 32:19
  because he was doing some PHP stuff inside of that config file, and, like, it
• 32:24
  would've been weird to do it there. Um,
• 32:27
  but
• 32:28
  the other thing that I'm wondering here is this. If you didn't want to store it in a
• 32:31
  config, what if you just put it in a SQLite database and then shipped the
• 32:34
  -database up? -Yeah. Yeah,
• 32:36
  -totally. -If you put that in somewhere? Like, could
• 32:38
  you... Where would you put that, though? Would you... You'd put it in the storage
• 32:41
  file or something? I don't know how that typically works. If you put it in the
• 32:44
  storage, you have to, like, symlink it or something weird like that if you're using
• 32:47
  -Envoyer. -Yeah. I would just, just put it in the
• 32:48
  database, 'cause that's, that's where the SQL files go by default.
• 32:53
  -If- -Okay
• 32:53
  ... you know, if you, if you, if you do a Laravel new and you say you wanna use
• 32:56
  SQLite, it will create a database/database.sqlite file inside of
• 33:01
  storage. Uh, inside of the database folder, and then you just commit that to
• 33:04
  -version control and off you go. -Yeah, 'cause I'm... As, I'm sure initially
• 33:07
  it's probably.gitignored maybe?
• 33:09
  Hmm, not a... Oh, yeah, maybe database.sqlite specifically, but you
• 33:13
  -could just remove it from there, like- -Totally. You could.
• 33:14
  Just because Laravel puts it there by default doesn't mean you can't change it.
• 33:17
  -Um- -Absolutely.
• 33:18
  Yeah. Yeah, shipping, shipping sqlite is fine. Um, who, who was it? Like, was it
• 33:23
  Aaron Francis was talking about that for,
• 33:26
  for, um...
• 33:28
  I think for his aaronfrancis.com. He's, he ships an sqlite file or something like
• 33:31
  -that, so. -It seems like the right place to do it,
• 33:33
  -right? I mean, like- -[laughs]
• 33:34
  ... you literally have, you have the structure in there. You can pull it using
• 33:37
  -your, uh, you know, using models and- -Mm-hmm
• 33:41
  -... all that good stuff. -And, you know-
• 33:42
  So it's like, I don't really see a reason why you wouldn't or why you couldn't.
• 33:44
  SQLite is, is made to be small and portable like that.
• 33:47
  -Every, you know- -Mm-hmm
• 33:48
  -... the, these things, every- -I mean, the problem is it can fill up
• 33:51
  -... everyone's iPhones- -It's just a flat file, yeah.
• 33:52
  Everyone's Android file. Yeah, it's just, just shove it all in there. Yeah.
• 33:55
  -Yeah. -Um-
• 33:56
  -Yeah, so I think- -I mean, the other thing you could probably
• 33:57
  -do is like a- -... that's, that's an interesting third
• 33:58
  -option. Yeah -... a document store. You know, something
• 34:00
  that writes JSON to a file, and
• 34:03
  -do that, I guess, with, like- -Yeah, but the SQLite thing seems way
• 34:05
  better to me. Yeah, as long as you have... I mean, as long as you can set up... You
• 34:08
  know, you just have to make sure that every person, each person that's looking
• 34:11
  at it,
• 34:12
  uh, when they're trying to develop stuff, uh, that they map... Uh, you know, they
• 34:16
  can open TablePlus to that sqlite file or whatever, right? So-
• 34:19
  Yeah. Yep.
• 34:21
  Yeah, that seems like a good way to do it though. Seems like a pretty good way to do
• 34:24
  it. Um, portable, light. It's still a mi- it's still a, uh, you know, queryable
• 34:29
  -entity. Um, you don't have to write- -You could be-
• 34:32
  You don't have to write, like, factories or anything for it. You could just... You
• 34:34
  know, you just ship it. You ship the actual data up.
• 34:37
  -Yeah. -Yeah.
• 34:38
  You could open up TablePlus and use that as your, you know-
• 34:41
  -Totally -... as your admin interface-
• 34:42
  -Yeah -... to put stuff in there.The only-
• 34:44
  -Absolutely, and you've got- -... the only other thing that, th-
• 34:45
  ... version control on and everything, you know?
• 34:47
  Yeah, yeah. I mean, the only other thing that you might do that's probably a little
• 34:50
  bit more approachable in terms of version control is just a, like, a CSV file,
• 34:55
  -and then use- -Yeah
• 34:56
  ... Switchy to, to, to manage that.
• 34:59
  -Yeah. But I like the- -Because then-
• 35:00
  -... SQLite. I like the SQLite option. -Yeah. The ISQL-
• 35:02
  -And I, I'm not pushing that direction -... is definitely nicer from a, from a dev
• 35:04
  perspective. If, if you needed, like, someone else,
• 35:08
  you know, someone from product or someone from sales or marketing, whatever, to be
• 35:11
  putting data in their CSV would be fine. And just like, "Here's the updated file."
• 35:16
  Yeah.
• 35:17
  -Yeah. -"Drop it in, overwrite, replace it." You
• 35:19
  -know? -Yeah, it's only developers working on this
• 35:21
  one, so I think SQLite's gonna be the solution there. And I think that's, um,
• 35:24
  that's a really great way to do that. So, uh, we're gonna move towards that,
• 35:28
  actually. That's w- exactly what we're gonna do. We're gonna end up doing that
• 35:31
  precisely.
• 35:32
  Love it.
• 35:34
  Love it. Awesome.
• 35:37
  Okay, um, what else we have here?
• 35:41
  Live photos, staggered CSS animation, defensive programming.
• 35:47
  What do you think? Hmm.
• 35:50
  So, uh, Matias...
• 35:53
  I can't say his last name. Starts with a G. Guimaraes, I think. Uh, he's got a
• 35:57
  defensive Laravel
• 35:59
  course coming to Laracasts at some point, so it should be cool.
• 36:02
  I saw Jeffrey tweeted about that, like, today, I think. Yeah.
• 36:04
  Yeah. Yeah, he, um... De- definitely check that out if you're a Laracasts
• 36:07
  subscriber. I, uh, I watched his...
• 36:10
  -It was Event Sourcing Tour- uh, series- -Mm, yes
• 36:14
  ... that he had on Screencast. That was, that was really good. He did a, a good job
• 36:16
  of that, so I'm, uh, I'm keen to see
• 36:19
  his, um,
• 36:22
  his defensive Laravel stuff. Because he, he works at, like, a payment provider or
• 36:25
  -something over, over there- -Oh, interesting
• 36:27
  ... where he lives in,
• 36:29
  pretty sure, Brazil.
• 36:31
  -One of the- -Okay
• 36:31
  ... Portuguese slash and/or Spanish-speaking nations. Sorry, Matias.
• 36:36
  -But, uh, yeah, he, um- -That's right, that's Portuguese, right?
• 36:38
  -Yeah. I- -Yeah, he's a-
• 36:39
  Did I tell you about that, right? When I said-
• 36:41
  -Yeah, yeah -... when I thought
• 36:42
  But I couldn't remember if he was from Spain or from Brazil. But I know in
• 36:45
  -Brazil- -Oh, gotcha
• 36:45
  -... they speak Portuguese. Yeah. So- -Yes, indeed.
• 36:47
  Um,
• 36:49
  yeah, he...So, he does some very intense things, uh, in terms of, like, the
• 36:55
  extremes of what you can do with Laravel, so I can't... You know, he'd be a, he'd be
• 36:59
  a... You'd be hard-pressed to find a better teacher for that kind of Laravel at
• 37:04
  scale type of thing. So, yeah, keen to check-
• 37:07
  -Yeah -... that one out when it drops.
• 37:08
  That'll be really good. I'm sure he'll have some excellent sort of tips on using
• 37:13
  Laravel tools in order to be sure that you can catch things if they happen terribly,
• 37:19
  if they happen to go terribly wrong.
• 37:21
  We had something today where,
• 37:25
  um,
• 37:27
  it was, it was the sequence in which something was working, so we were reading
• 37:31
  an email from an email inbox,
• 37:34
  we were creating a record for it, and on that database we had a unique column for
• 37:40
  the ID of that item from that inbox. So that item from that inbox was given a
• 37:45
  unique, like, Outlook message ID.
• 37:47
  And so it's, you know, it's a GUID. And so it's, it's unique. You cannot create
• 37:51
  another one with that same GUID.
• 37:53
  However, the step after we created it was to move it from that location, that
• 37:58
  folder, to another location.
• 38:00
  If that failed,
• 38:02
  right? So you'd move it from the inbox to a folder called Processing or something
• 38:06
  like that, right? So we create the record, and then we start to process that email.
• 38:09
  We read the body. We read the subject. We do some, you know,
• 38:12
  guessing as to where we think it needs to go and basically have our own really
• 38:16
  intelligent rule system that we can build up off of that database record, right? So
• 38:21
  you create the record, and then you send it to processing. Well, if that sending to
• 38:25
  processing fails for some reason, which sometimes is this weird race, race
• 38:29
  condition, if it fails, then the email doesn't move, and when the inbox gets
• 38:35
  scanned in the next minute, it tries to pick that up again and create the record.
• 38:38
  Well, since you have a unique ID, it fails. So
• 38:42
  yeah. It, it's like just using simple things like a database transaction around
• 38:47
  those two pieces, right? Create it, and then move it. And if it fails while
• 38:51
  moving, roll back the creation so that it can try it again next time without hitting
• 38:56
  a unique constraint. So those are the sorts of things that we're talking about
• 38:59
  here, right? These, you can't anticipate everything that's going to happen. You
• 39:03
  don't know all the different failure points, but you can certainly wrap
• 39:06
  something into database transaction and roll back if something fails. You can do
• 39:10
  that. And that's, you don't have to know everything. You just have to know if
• 39:13
  anything fails in here, roll back. Don't leave this unfinished, weird state, um,
• 39:19
  that you're gonna have to contend with later, especially if you have-
• 39:22
  -Yeah -... constraints around unique values. So I
• 39:24
  hope in, in, you know, in his course he, he covers some of those things or, you
• 39:28
  know, like the rescue function in Laravel is so insanely awesome. Where if there is
• 39:32
  a failure while you're attempting to do something, you can provide a default
• 39:35
  return value and just continue the program running as if nothing failed, right?
• 39:40
  Those, that's incredibly helpful. So Laravel has a ton of tools to help make it
• 39:44
  more resilient and more bulletproof if you know they exist. So I'm sure he'll-
• 39:48
  -Yeah -... cover all that stuff and do a great
• 39:50
  -job doing so. -Yeah. One, one thing I've been caught out
• 39:54
  with by that Rescue helper in the past is typically I'm wrapping something in Rescue
• 39:58
  because I don't wanna know about it, and I always-
• 40:00
  -Yeah -... I, I have on more than one occasion
• 40:02
  forgotten to set the report flag to, to false.
• 40:06
  Uh-huh.
• 40:07
  So I still, I still get the exception to bubble up, and then I go like, "What is
• 40:10
  this?" And then I, I, like, I put the Rescue in there, and I go, "Ah, I forgot,
• 40:12
  forgot the, to report." Because the, the place that we mainly use it is when we are
• 40:16
  trying to parse dates using Carbon or the-
• 40:19
  -Oh -... or the date facade. Because, you know,
• 40:22
  you guys use, um, month, day, year, and we use day, month, year.
• 40:27
  -But- -Ah, yes. Right
• 40:27
  ... if you take something that's day/month/year
• 40:34
  and you throw that at date parse, because that's how we would re-enter it into a UI.
• 40:38
  Yeah.
• 40:38
  When you take day/month/year and put it into PHP, PHP assumes that it is
• 40:43
  -month/day/year. -Yeah.
• 40:45
  And so what you end up with is something that's, like, 13/3/25.
• 40:50
  -Yeah. -And then Carbon goes, "Thanks."
• 40:53
  Freaks out.
• 40:54
  Um, so yeah. We, we've got in a number of places where we're handling that, you
• 40:58
  know, a date create from format, and then we explicitly tell it, like, "This is
• 41:02
  -day/month/year." So that- -Yeah
• 41:05
  ... it goes, "All right. Yeah, this is, this is the right way round." Um,
• 41:09
  and then we fall back to just doing, like, a date pass in case something comes
• 41:13
  through as year-month-day or whatever else and then, then gets picked up that way.
• 41:17
  But yeah. When it, when it hits that first Rescue, uh, callable
• 41:22
  and you don't have the report, then we still get the exception bubble up into,
• 41:26
  um, our observability tooling. And it's like, "Oh, yep. I don't really care about
• 41:30
  -that," because- -Yeah
• 41:31
  ... it's, it's... Like, it will, it will catch the exception from the Rescue,
• 41:35
  report it, and then go to the f- the fallback, so you're, like-
• 41:38
  -Then it'll continue on, but yeah -But, and then you go, "But this worked.
• 41:40
  Why am I...? Oh, okay. Yep. Gotcha."
• 41:43
  -So don't, uh- -Yeah, exactly
• 41:44
  -... don't miss that one. [laughs] -I'm surprised that there's no, like,
• 41:47
  localization thing for Carbon where you can basically just tell it at the top
• 41:51
  level, "Hey, we're in Australia. Please handle dates accordingly."
• 41:54
  Yeah, yeah.
• 41:56
  Probably. Probably is and we just miss it, but, um-
• 41:59
  -Yeah. Maybe -... no, 'cause this is an underlying PHP
• 42:00
  thing as well.
• 42:02
  -Like- -Oh, gotcha
• 42:02
  ... if you were to do... Yeah, if you were to do, like, a create, whatever the
• 42:05
  underlying
• 42:07
  PHP function is, it will do the same thing.
• 42:10
  -Got it. -The, the-
• 42:10
  -Yeah -... the correct approach for that is to
• 42:13
  -use hyphens instead of slashes. -Ah, interesting.
• 42:16
  But no one, no one here is going to enter the dates with hyphens instead of slashes,
• 42:20
  -because that's just not what we do, so. -Yeah.
• 42:25
  -Like, that is- -Yeah
• 42:25
  -... I mean, I assume that's- -We don't, we don't do hyphens either.
• 42:28
  Yeah. I assume that's, like, the workaround in, at the language level. To
• 42:31
  be like, "Oh, yeah, you can do this as long..." But you, you're not gonna tell,
• 42:35
  you know, users of your platform who have
• 42:38
  become accustomed to using slashes to use hyphens in your application wherever else
• 42:43
  -it's just handled, so. -Yeah.
• 42:45
  Yeah.
• 42:46
  Absolutely.
• 42:48
  Well, hey, dude. I think we have a couple things left to talk about next time. Um,
• 42:53
  we could probably talk a little bit more about defensive programming and some
• 42:55
  examples that we have. We could talk about...... staggered CSS animations,
• 43:00
  which is
• 43:01
  interesting to me. This is when you go onto a page and you want, like, this
• 43:05
  effect of when you hit a certain observability point, and there's a, what's
• 43:10
  that called?
• 43:12
  Interaction observer? It will animate something in into view.
• 43:17
  But if you have, like, three paragraphs of text or something like that right
• 43:20
  following each other and you scroll down really fast, you don't want that whole
• 43:24
  block to animate and at the same time. You want them to animate in, like, a
• 43:28
  -PowerPoint- -One after, yeah
• 43:29
  -... like, one, two, three. Yeah. -Mm-hmm.
• 43:31
  Which is a little bit tricky to do. And so, um, I think, uh, motion.dev allows you
• 43:37
  to do that. We figured out how to do that. I still have to implement it. Uh,
• 43:41
  and then this idea of how do we, how do we accomplish live photos on the web, where
• 43:47
  if you roll over something, it kind of moves the photo. It kind of gives you this
• 43:51
  motion, where it changes from a photo to a video while you're rolled over it, and
• 43:56
  -then- -Yeah
• 43:56
  ... and then when you roll off it, it, it stops doing that.
• 43:58
  -Interesting. -So found some interesting stuff about
• 44:00
  that. It'd be, uh, I'd love to kind of talk that through with you and see what
• 44:04
  -your thoughts are- -Mm-hmm
• 44:04
  ... on that. So
• 44:06
  -next show, folks. Come on back and- -Sure
• 44:08
  ... um,
• 44:09
  you know, hey, uh, to go along with the, uh, the news of, uh, Steve and Erin
• 44:14
  breaking up, I, I gotta let you guys know that, um, Michael said he's leaving the
• 44:18
  podcast, and it's, he's just leaving it to me. He said, he said he's giving me
• 44:22
  -everything. Just take it. -[laughs]
• 44:24
  I'm paying, I'm paying him 50% of what it's worth.
• 44:28
  -So [laughs]- -50% on anything is nothing.
• 44:32
  -Since we haven't had a sponsor. -[laughs] Sorry.
• 44:33
  -[laughs] -We are, we-
• 44:34
  -Since we haven't had a sponsor in, like- -[laughs]
• 44:36
  ... years, I'm getting a steal on this thing.
• 44:38
  -That's right. I said, I said to Aaron- -Oh, man
• 44:40
  ... that, uh, that the, the unsponsorable, the unsponsorable comment was ruthless.
• 44:45
  It was fair, but it was ruthless. [laughs]
• 44:47
  -Oh, so funny. So funny. Oh, my. -He'll be fine.
• 44:51
  -Well, anyway. -I think, I think he's for himself.
• 44:52
  Yeah, I agree. I agree. No, totally, totally. He'll do great. And I think Steve
• 44:56
  will do well too. I mean, I think people knowing that he's available, I mean, heck,
• 44:59
  when I heard that he was available, I'm like, "Oh, geez. I have a couple things I
• 45:02
  could have him do actually." Like, actually-
• 45:04
  -I said how- -... one specific thing that I thought of
• 45:06
  that I was like, "I would love for Steve to do this," but I knew he wouldn't have
• 45:08
  -time. -Yeah.
• 45:09
  -So maybe now he does. -Maybe. Get into it. 'Cause I said, "How
• 45:12
  long before he'll... How, how long before he lands on the Lara ship?" So...
• 45:16
  -[laughs] Right. -Get him before it's too late.
• 45:18
  May- Who knows? Maybe that was, uh, maybe that was part of his, his calculation.
• 45:23
  Maybe he was like, "You know what?
• 45:25
  I can have a job over here if I really wanted one."
• 45:27
  -Mm-hmm. -"So maybe I'll just do the job thing for a
• 45:28
  -bit." Who knows? -Yeah.
• 45:30
  Not making any, uh, assumptions here. Hey, folks, also if you have not bought your
• 45:34
  Laracon tickets yet, it's might be too late. But if it's not, you should
• 45:37
  definitely go buy them because Michael and I would love to see you there. We're
• 45:41
  gonna doing some interviews there. We're gonna be enjoying the show, watching all
• 45:45
  the talks, and we would love for you to say hi. So please stop by and say hey.
• 45:50
  Look for, uh, the really tall guy and look for the handsome Australian with the, uh,
• 45:56
  other cursing Australian next to him. That will be Aaron. Uh, OG, OG Aaron.
• 46:02
  -[laughs] -OG Aaron.
• 46:03
  [laughs] OG Aaron making an appearance again at Laracon US.
• 46:08
  -Yeah. -He's gonna be a riot. I can't wait to see
• 46:09
  him.
• 46:10
  Fun.
• 46:11
  -It'll be good fun. -Awesome.
• 46:13
  Episode 178, folks. Thanks for tuning in. You can find us at North Meets
• 46:16
  South.audio/178. Hit us up on X or on BlueSky at Jacob Bennett, at Michael
• 46:21
  Dorando, or at North South Audio. And, uh, if you liked the show, rate it up in your
• 46:25
  podcast app of choice. Five stars would be amazing. Thanks, folks. If you'd like
• 46:28
  to sponsor us,
• 46:30
  also talk to us on those channels. It won't happen. But if you'd like to, we'd
• 46:34
  love for you to. But until next time, we'll see you.
• 46:38
  Oh.