Slightly Caffeinated

Chris Gmyr (00:00)
Hey, welcome back to the slightly caffeinated podcast. I'm Chris Gmyr

TJ Miller (00:03)
I'm TJ Miller.

Chris Gmyr (00:05)
Hey TJ, so what's new in your world?

TJ Miller (00:08)
What's new in my world man, I Don't know I feel I feel pretty boring lately I've just been like working on prism and gearing up for you know, we've been talking about it the last couple episodes I've got the the Science Olympiad competition coming up tomorrow on Saturday So I I don't know man, I don't know if the kids are really

completely ready for it. We've missed a couple sessions and haven't been able to like double up any weeks. So I think, I think they're going to do not great. Unfortunately, I think they'll do okay.

Chris Gmyr (00:49)
What do you think they're

missing?

TJ Miller (00:53)
Looking at the curriculum, we've got variables and types, operators, order of operations, control flow, if statements, for loops, while loops. We haven't covered loops. Logical operators, we covered them, but I think they're weak on them. And that's the and or not greater than, less than, equal to kind of stuff.

Functions, calling functions, writing functions, we covered that stuff last week. Like string manipulation we've talked about, and then like list arrays. We haven't covered arrays. So like we haven't covered loops and we haven't covered arrays. And there's a couple things that think that might be a little weak on. we'll see how it goes. Like I said, the competition's like two parts. There's a multiple choice question, and then there's like an interactive challenge.

I think they might do alright on the interactive challenge.

I think the written test is going to be a little tough for them. But they are able to go in with an 8 and 1 by 11 sheet of notes and a calculator. So you got to make sure they have a calculator. And then I got to put together their note sheet.

We'll see how goes. I don't know.

Chris Gmyr (02:02)
I don't know. They seem to soak up a lot of the information usually.

TJ Miller (02:09)
They did. I was really hoping so that we had student led like conferences yesterday. So we had to cancel training. And so today's Friday, competition's tomorrow. I had rescheduled our training for today so we could get like one last one in. But I realized this morning that I had like, I double booked myself. So they're not going to be able to do training today. so I don't know, the competition might be a little rough for them, but.

The this isn't the there's like two competitions. There's this one. And then there's like the big the big show, like main one coming up, I think, next month. So I don't know how they'll do on this one. I know for sure they'll do better on the next one because they'll just we'll just have more time to practice in between and everything. And we'll kind of know what they need to work on based on the results of this competition. So I don't know. I've got

Chris Gmyr (02:45)
Mm-hmm.

TJ Miller (03:05)
Unfortunately, low confidence going into it, but I don't know. I didn't really feel like I had bandwidth to do this in the first place and kind of got cornered into doing it. So unfortunately, kiddos are going to get what they get. I don't know.

Chris Gmyr (03:24)
Yeah. Well, it might not be

bad, like going into it and having a little bit of a harder time or adversity because it might also make them more aware of what they need to do and learn moving forward. Cause I know like, at least with my son, like he gets, he gets super overconfident as only like an eight year old and he thinks he's, you know, the self-proclaimed expert on so many things until he actually like does it. So.

TJ Miller (03:43)
Yep.

Chris Gmyr (03:50)
It might check the kids a little bit more if there's stuff like that going on. It might help them kind of re-either prioritize or double down on some of the things that they are learning or still need to learn moving forward. So a little bit of adversity and struggle isn't necessarily a bad thing either.

TJ Miller (04:08)
Yeah, I'm going to see if I can get Ellis to do a little practice tonight on Codecademy and maybe try to get him to go through the like.

at least like maybe loops or arrays and see if he can like at least have an idea of going into like the competition about it so they can make like at least educated guesses on the multiple choice questions. I don't know. We'll see. I wish, I wish we'd be a little bit more prepared, but, biggest thing I can hope for is just like, they have fun, you know, have like, it's, going to be a big, like it'll be a big event.

There's a lot of stuff going on. Like luckily their competitions early in the day. So the team will pretty much be done by like 10 45. So we'll, be able to like cruise around and go look at some of the other competitions, watch like they've got, um, uh, one of the competitions is like bottle rockets. So like you design a rocket out of two liter bottles, fill them with water, pressurize them and like launch them off. So I think that'll be fun to go and like camp out at and watch happen.

And there's, I'm sure, like other events to do like in between. So that's, that's like the big, the big thing going on. Other than that, just kind of like cruising on Prism and work stuff. How about you, man?

Chris Gmyr (05:17)
Well, I

hope everything goes well this weekend with the kids and keep us posted.

TJ Miller (05:21)
Yeah, thanks dude. for sure, for sure.

Chris Gmyr (05:24)
Yeah, let's see what's new in my world. Last weekend, we went out to the North Carolina mountains in Boone. My cousin's daughter is doing play out there. So we went out to go see her in the play. And also, because it's still a little chilly up there, we ended up going skiing. So my wife and I used to go skiing a bunch back when we lived in New York. But it's been, I don't know, 12, 13 years now since we've done that.

And then my son has never skied before. So we took him, him some lessons, and hung out at the mountain, one of the smaller mountains out there. It was super fun. So my legs were a little sore, but not as bad as expected. Didn't fall, didn't get injured, no incidents. So everything went well. We had a good time. And got to hang out with my cousin and her family and go out and check out her daughter's play. And it was a nice little weekend.

on the mountains and then just kind of back into the things this this week.

TJ Miller (06:24)
No, that's awesome, man. I've been like, that's one thing this year that really caught me, but I haven't. I caught the bug real bad to go snowboarding again and just haven't had like the means to do it this year. Like, and there's been years past where I just like, haven't had the bug to do it, but this year I got it pretty hard and I like dying to get out. So that's cool, man. I'm glad you were able to get out and do that.

Chris Gmyr (06:44)
Yeah, yeah. Have you ever skied before or just snowboard?

TJ Miller (06:48)
I've skied once. Not really enough to get the hang of it, but I've snowboarded quite a bit.

Chris Gmyr (06:55)
Gotcha. Yeah, because we were trying to talk to our son about it because he was like pretty excited about just learning or he's like, snowboarding looks cool. And when I was growing up, I took like a bunch of lessons when I was younger and then did like ski club in middle school and high school. So like I've been a bunch and then like one or two years of that. I did try snowboarding and the learning curve is just so much more for snowboarding, at least in my opinion.

TJ Miller (07:19)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Gmyr (07:20)
compared to skiing, it's like, let's slow down. It's like, let's just do the easier route first. And at least with skis, it's like, they're independent. You can still move your feet up and down. You can manage it a little bit better. It's almost like walking, where snowboarding, you're just locked into the board, right? So if you get one of your feet tied up or catch on something a little bit,

TJ Miller (07:22)
Totally agree.

yeah.

Chris Gmyr (07:43)
Like you're just going over, especially as a beginner. There's no doubt about it. You're going over. So I was like, OK, dude, if you really like it, if you're interested in it, we can try it more in the future after we get some more skiing under you. And then if you want to try snowboarding for a little bit, that's something that we can work on. Unfortunately, we're like hours away from mountains. So it's not something that we can do every weekend or something like that. But it's like, let's just start slow. Let's just start with skiing.

Ease our way into it. Like, we've never done anything on a mountain or with snow like this before. So let's just start slow. So he did pretty well for his first time. He did a lesson between me, my wife, and my cousin's husband, who's been skiing a bunch too. Like, we all took turns teaching him, bringing him down the little bunny hills and stuff like that. And then at the end, we went down a few blue runs. not.

Too hard, not too easy, but he did really well. Got a turn a lot more than he does. He just kind of minimal slow plow and did small turns, but still basically straight down the mountain. It's like, no. It's like tree line to tree line. Go all the way across, come all the way back. So just didn't really get the concept of that too much. But at least he could slow himself down. And so I'm confident enough that I was either behind him or on the side or like,

TJ Miller (08:40)
Yep.

yeah, man.

Chris Gmyr (09:01)
jetted out in front of him so he could stop rolling down the hill when he fell and blocking him from other people and stuff like that. it was pretty cool. Got some decent videos of him coming down. So we'll be sure to review those later when he wants to go.

TJ Miller (09:06)
Yeah, yeah.

Nice.

Yeah, that's cool, man. I think for me, like the biggest thing when I was with my cousins and I, we taught ourselves how to snowboard. Like we just went to, we were like at a place and we're like, yeah, let's snowboards. We all rented snowboards and taught ourselves. And we were like, I don't know, 12, 13, and just like yoloed up on a lift and like got to the top and just like fell down the hill multiple times until we started getting it. And the biggest thing.

Chris Gmyr (09:34)
You

TJ Miller (09:40)
for me was I ended up on a lift with somebody who was like older and snowboarding and they like actually like they took the time to explain how edges worked. And it was the eye open like so eye opening for me. I'm like, okay. And like literally the next run I like barely fell and just like now I have like an understanding of like how the thing actually works. And that made all of the difference.

understanding edges, understanding how to like keep an edge, like, and avoid edges, you know, not, you know, canapolting your face into the ground. yeah.

Chris Gmyr (10:15)
Yeah.

100%. Yeah. It's just fun being up on the mountain and just chatting down. And I was a little worried because like I said, we haven't gone in, I don't know, 12 plus years, but it was really like getting back on a bike. It's like, oh, okay. Like stomping through it and like, okay, like get the feel of it. Go down the bunny hill a couple of times. It's like, oh, all right, this isn't too bad. And then went up, did a blue, no problem. Went up.

TJ Miller (10:27)
Yeah.

Chris Gmyr (10:39)
did one of the black diamonds, also no problem. And then it's like, OK, if I can do a black diamond second run, it's like we're good for the day. Let's just have at it. But it was a relatively smaller mountain, too.

TJ Miller (10:47)
yeah. Yeah, that snaps back so fast. Like, it's crazy.

Chris Gmyr (10:52)
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Cool. Yeah, something that I thought we could talk about moving forward, since it's called slightly caffeinated, is having an ongoing coffee, a little check-in, a little segment here. So that is something that we're coffee, caffeine, or whatever it is for the week or two.

TJ Miller (10:52)
Nice.

that's cool man.

coffee, caffeine.

Chris Gmyr (11:12)
So yeah, anything that is new with you on the coffee side of things, any new things that you're trying or gadgets that you're using or anything else like that.

TJ Miller (11:22)
I on Instagram, I sent it to you on Instagram. I recently saw a like super wild decorated espresso machine and I am absolutely dying for it. And like the color scheme, I have a like, think closest we described is like a pink and teal kitchen. And this just almost perfectly matched the colors of my kitchen right now.

Chris Gmyr (11:39)
Mm-hmm.

TJ Miller (11:44)
And I am absolutely dying for it. So I'm, I'm really hung up on like wanting an espresso machine really bad right now, especially after last week talking about going and getting that, like that dry cap. I'm absolutely like just dying for him all the time now. but in like actual coffee, coffee, we've been, on a big like Great Lakes roasting kick. So there are a local roasting place.

Um, and we've been, I think the last three bags we went through were there like Sumatra, which was not bad, but I broke into a bag of the Ethiopia and man, I forgot how much I love like Ethiopian coffee. Like I think, I think if I had to pick a favorite, I think that's, that's very well, could be my favorite. Like I like South American coffee is quite a bit. Um,

but I am just like such a sucker for Ethiopian coffees.

Chris Gmyr (12:38)
Yeah, that does sound good. I think I might have mentioned it here earlier on, but I used to, when I started getting a bunch of different coffees all the time or different subscriptions, in Notion, I made this huge coffee database of all the coffees that I got and where they came from, what roast level that they were, and graded all of them. So because I've just been kind of boring with purity coffee,

lately, like I haven't kept it up to date. But I'll have to check to see if we have a bunch of the Ethiopian in there. I know that there's a bunch in there, but I want to see what they rated. And I can send you maybe some recommendations. But yeah, with me, it's just been kind of boring day to day. Same with the Purity Coffee. Just get some blends from there.

But I forgot to mention last week when we were in Myrtle Beach, now two weekends ago, we went to this Mediterranean and kind of Turkish brunch place that they had there by us and tried a Turkish coffee for the first time. And I can't believe I haven't tried it before because there's a couple of places around here that do them. But I'm like, let's just go with it and try Turkish coffee. And for people who don't know who

what a Turkish coffee is, it's basically like an espresso, but they leave the grounds in there and they just kind of settle to the bottom. And you basically drink the liquid on top of it until you hit the grounds. And it was very similar to an espresso. I would say maybe like a little bit stronger and a little bit more bitter, but it was still like very good and easy to drink. And I would a hundred percent get them in the future many more times. So I enjoyed it.

TJ Miller (14:13)
yeah.

Chris Gmyr (14:15)
You know, you got like a little bit of grounds in there like when you drink it, but like, I don't know, that doesn't really bother me that much and I thought it was delicious. So I would highly recommend at least trying it.

TJ Miller (14:26)
Dude, I haven't done a Turkish coffee in probably 10 years. Like, it is so good, man. Yeah, gosh, it's been a long time. I am so not a fan of grounds in my coffee, but like, Turkish is so good though still. Like, I don't know.

Chris Gmyr (14:39)
you

Yeah, I've unfortunately like gotten a little bit more used to grounds in our coffee with like camping and scout trips and just stuff like that. It's just like, have these, percolators for camping trips and because there's so many adults on it, like they just start making coffee at like 7 AM. So whenever you're starting to wake up, everyone has a cup of coffee and they just keep it rolling until 11 o'clock or so when everyone just kind of, Peters out, but that

TJ Miller (14:42)
That's cool, man.

Chris Gmyr (15:10)
the percolators just get grounds in there no matter what, especially if you're towards the bottom. So it's like, well, I'd rather have the caffeine and the warm drink in the morning, especially when it's cold. So I'll deal with the grounds and it's totally fine.

TJ Miller (15:13)
Yep, no matter what you do.

Yeah, I'm absolutely a princess and I will admit that. Like that last, that last sip of coffee from the French press, like always has like a little bit of sludge and grounds in it. I, no, I'll pass, man. but no, like I, think Turkish is like kind of an exception to the rule. It's like, you just, you, you get, you get to expecting it and it's, it's still a little different than like random.

Chris Gmyr (15:36)
Yeah. Yeah.

TJ Miller (15:50)
errant grounds in your coffee, so.

Definitely a different experience. Highly recommend it if no one's had it. Traditional Turkish is really nice.

Chris Gmyr (15:58)
Yeah, totally. And on the French press, your traditional French press, like all the grounds get pressed on towards the bottom and then you pour out the liquid on the top. As you said, some sludge or some of the grounds kind of get caught up on the top. Have you seen on Instagram any of like the, I don't know what they're called, but they're basically like an upside down French press where the press starts on the bottom. You pour the grounds on top of it. You let it steep.

And then there's almost like a corkscrew on the top, and it raises the plunger up. So it pulls the grounds up over the water. And I'm like, man, I wonder if that would make a much better French press. I've seen them a bunch of times. I'll have to find a link for the show notes. But I'm like, man, I wonder if that would make French press a little bit better.

TJ Miller (16:43)
You know, I just searched for upside down French press and all of the top results are talking about AeroPress.

Chris Gmyr (16:52)
Aeropress is also fantastic. I still have one of those, but I haven't used it in quite a long time. But it's similar, but it's like the same size as a French press, and just the plunder goes up instead of down. I'll have to find it. I'm sure I'll come across that before I post.

TJ Miller (17:05)
Yeah, yeah, no,

I'm curious. I'd love to see it. I use the AeroPress for, I haven't used it frequently, but I do tend to use that as my afternoon coffee, because it's super easy to just make a quick single cup of coffee with it. Because normally, my wife and I will have split a French press in the morning. Sometimes I'll go back for a second cup, but I'll typically do an iced coffee after that.

And then for an afternoon, there's no reason to make a French press. I typically want, at least now in spring, fall, winter, I want something warm. So I'll bust out the AeroPress for just a quick single cut.

Chris Gmyr (17:51)
Yeah, nice. I haven't used mine in forever. I'll try that again. I have to remember how I did it before, because I used to make my own little recipes or copy someone else's from one of the coffee making championships, like the upside down inverted AeroPress, and alter that a little bit. If I made one from scratch right now, I think I wouldn't remember how to do it. So I have to find wherever my notes are and go from there.

TJ Miller (18:16)
Yeah, and honestly, I'm pretty sure I'm not doing it right either. But it's it's, you know, for me, the afternoon cup is a little.

Chris Gmyr (18:20)
Ha ha ha ha.

TJ Miller (18:24)
little more on the like desperate need for caffeine side than it is like hung up on nailing it. but I should probably look it up again and do it proper. Cool, man. I see that we've added some Alfred to Raycast conversation and I am so here for it. I'm at die hard. I was super into Alfred for a long time. Raycast came out. I think.

Within the first month of Raycast coming out, I switched. I think that just happened to coincide with an annual, every big Mac update rather than just like updating. I typically will like do a like full backup of my computer and then wipe it and then like reinstall updated OS and then like move all my stuff over. So I just kind of gets that like

kicks all the cruft out of the system, makes sure that my backup stuff's working, that my provisioning scripts still work. for me, I do an annual refresh on my laptops. And I think that the Raycast release coincided with that. instead of installing Alfred, I just installed Raycast and ran with it. So I've been in the Raycast boat for quite a while. I know you've been like, you're pretty hardcore Alfred user. And I remember.

Chris Gmyr (19:34)
Gotcha.

TJ Miller (19:42)
early on, like you showed me some of your your Alfred workflows, and it's still way more advanced than I use with like, used with Alfred or Raycast. So I'd love to hear how that's going.

Chris Gmyr (19:54)
Yeah. So yeah, I've been an Alfred user forever. I have one of their Lifetime Plus or whatever they call it licenses. So it's a lot of the tools and utilities that aren't just for the free version. And like you said, I went all in on workflows. And basically, it's like a drag and drop editor. But it has a lot of easy to use tools of like, hey, when I do this or have this keyword in the command, split this off.

open this instead of that or run this command over that command. And I would use it for everything. I had, I get so tired of opening up the same applications or closing them down at the end of the day. I'm like, this is taking me forever to manually up or start up all these applications that I don't always want running on startup because then it slows your startup time down. Like I want to say like, okay, I'm ready for work.

and open all the applications that I want for desktop one. Because I use multiple desktops or virtual desktops. So desktop one is like email, Slack, music, random, stuff like that. Desktop two is all for dev. So either like PHP Storm, WebStorm, iTerm, Docker, a few other things like that. So only like dev work and then.

Desktop 3 is for basically just my calendar. So it's like a clear view of the calendar or whatever for the day or for the month. And doing that, it's like so many programs that you've to spin up all the time, especially like Desktop 1 is like, I don't know, 10 different programs that I have running or little apps or utilities that just kind of run in the background. But I only want those running after I get kind of settled. So this was really easy to do in Alfred.

And I had a lot of extra scripts also for the end of the day. So at the end of the day, I would do Alfred and then EOD for end of day. And then I would run a script to basically close everything down in one command. So it closed down Slack. It would close down Arc. It would close down all the utilities, all of the dev stuff, the calendar. And then I have a little

repo for interacting with the Stripe API to update my Slack, sorry, not Stripe, Slack status. So I have other little commands for saying I'm in a meeting or going to lunch and when I'm back. So it'll put on do not deserve for an hour for meeting. It'll change the icon to a calendar, say I'm in a meeting, please leave a message. For end of day, it calculates whatever the time is right now until the end of

or the beginning of next day at like 9 AM. And I'll put like the do not disturb, like pause notifications for that time and make sure my status is off and a couple other things. So I have like all that stuff kind of set up, like running in the background and all connected to Alfred workflows. yeah, so I'll have to, I don't know, maybe we can talk about that a little bit more in depth of like, I don't know, just engineer or dev.

TJ Miller (22:39)
Sick, man.

Chris Gmyr (22:49)
productivity, like little DevEx things that we can do on a daily basis to clean up our daily workflows. Because anytime that I say, this is slow, or I hate doing this on a daily basis, I try to automate it in some way or connect it to a different workflow that I have. So it's been super nice. The problem in the holdout is with Raycast, they don't have the same.

ecosystem for doing these workflows. They don't have the same editor or tools available. So I've always just kind of watched from afar of like, Raycast seems really cool, but I don't know how to get this stuff into Raycast. So I've held out until basically two weeks ago. So I started the new job, got a new laptop. I'm like, OK, fresh start. We're going to move a couple of things over here. We're going to go all in on Raycast on the work computer.

and see what happens. And so far, it has been working out really well. So instead of Alfred workflows, I've started making, they call them custom scripts or custom commands. And basically, it's a choice of you could do bash, you could do JavaScript, I think. And there's four or five different languages that you could do it in. But I was able to convert a lot of my workflows to just simple bash scripts and handle that.

TJ Miller (24:01)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Gmyr (24:03)
through there. So there's a lot of workflows that I would have, different conditionals, like on if the argument was this word, run this type of thing behind the scenes, or if it's this other word or just an else, run these other things. So I'm able to just reproduce all the of WYSIWYG and no code version of it in Alfred to just coded bash scripts, and it works.

just fine. And it works even better because a lot of the scripts that I had run before, it would actually open up either like a terminal window or Iterm, run the script, and then kind of close it out in Alfred. And Raycast just, there's a silent mode, so it does everything behind the scenes. So it's just running the bash itself instead of running a bash inside of a new command terminal. So the experience is much nicer.

TJ Miller (24:38)
Yeah.

Yeah, yep.

Chris Gmyr (24:53)
And the nice little alert or window, like the pill notification that comes up, it's like, you know, your command is successful. Or I have some Bash stuff that gets echoed. So when I say, you know, Slack status lunch, it'll run all the commands. It'll ping the API for Slack. And then the Bash will say, enjoy your lunch. And then it'll turn on the.

screen saver automatically. I can just do the keyword is SS and then lunch. And then it basically boots me off my computer and kind of walk away and join my lunch and come back and do like SS back. And that will run all the commands to set me to back and Slack and run a couple other things. And I don't know, it's just super nice. So definitely enjoying the recast experience. And now I have to.

TJ Miller (25:25)
Yeah, dude.

Chris Gmyr (25:41)
do a couple more things. There's a couple just like personal Alfred commands that I have to convert over. But I think I'm pretty close to moving Raycast onto the personal laptop and updating that. So yeah, I guess I'll pause there. But I've been really liking Raycast on the new computer so far.

TJ Miller (25:58)
Yeah, man, I have a lot of that productivity stuff set up as well, mostly in different bash scripts. I've kind of got this script I've been slowly starting to build for just starting my day in the office and ending my day in the office, because my LED lights in here are all Wi-Fi, and I've got a bash script to turn them on and off, and then a few other things and kind of shut things down and set things back up.

And so those, I've always just been able to just run cause I've just written them in bash. So, um, that's cool that you were able to kind of find that. And the cool thing too is like Claude and like these large language models are like really pretty good with bash too. like anything, if you're like struggling with it, it's easy to go get some like, oh, I'm help with it and have that knock out some scripts for you. Um, or like modify them. Cause it's, if you're not spending a bunch of time in bash, like conditionals are weird. Arguments are weird.

Um, they can, they can take a little like finesse to, or like finagling with to get right. And so it's nice being able to just like eat that stuff at a, you know, a clod or something and get, get your, get your work done for you. Uh, but that's super cool, man.

Chris Gmyr (27:06)
Yeah, so I've liked it.

TJ Miller (27:07)
Have you messed with the,

have you looked at any of the Raycast AI stuff?

Chris Gmyr (27:11)
Just on their website, that was a question for you if you've plugged into that or if you pay for the pro version of Raycast or just using the free version.

TJ Miller (27:19)
I'm just using the free version. I have so many other utilities for interacting with language models that I haven't found the need to put it in Raycast. Like some of my, here I'll pull it up, some of my extensions that I use a lot, like perplexity, so that's like LLM searching. I use that. Like Tailwind Docs, Laravel Docs, I've got plugins for those.

Chris Gmyr (27:38)
Mm-hmm.

TJ Miller (27:43)
like some GitHub stuff. I use like a fair amount of what they call quick links. So I've got some aliases for like quick linking into all of my like Geocode OPRs or like issues or prism stuff. So can just like jump straight into like different web pages. I've got like a quick link for like Laravel collection methods. So it jumps right to the, right to the page and everything I need for that. They use like the GIF search a lot.

The TablePlus extension is also fantastic if you're into that thing. And I use their window management quite a bit too for different window tilings and stuff like that. So super handy. I love it.

Chris Gmyr (28:23)
Yeah, really good too. And it just feels much less clunky or just newer ecosystem in Raycast compared to Alfred. Alfred is still fine. I think it's super powerful, but it hasn't seen a really significant update in a while. And I've noticed over the last year or so that a lot of the extensions that I had,

TJ Miller (28:41)
Okay.

Chris Gmyr (28:46)
before, just randomly stop working or no longer supported by or maintained by the underlying maintainers. So a lot of the extensions that I had in there before just don't work. So it's less and less useful. It's like, OK, well, maybe it's just time for raycast regardless and just making it work. But so far, it's been great and only a couple of weeks into it.

TJ Miller (29:09)
Yeah, Alfred's super useful, very powerful, but I feel like between the two, Raycast just has like another level of polish to it. Like it feels very polished, very clean. Alfred, I think, felt very like utilitarian. And so there's definitely like a big difference in the perceived experience between the two, I think.

Chris Gmyr (29:25)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, 100%. So yeah, I'll still keep tinkering with it and report back. I'm sure I'll find some more cool things to do with it.

TJ Miller (29:39)
Yeah, man, I'm sure. You've got some cool use cases for sure. I feel like I spend a lot of time on my various workflows, refining them, but they're not super fancy. I'm totally cool sitting down and writing a couple scripts, because I'm too lazy to bundle them all up into one and stuff like that. yeah, man. Cool dude, you want to talk a little bit of Prism?

Chris Gmyr (29:48)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah, let's try Prism. What you got for us?

TJ Miller (30:01)
Yeah, because I think

we missed last week, right? So we've got a few things going on with Prism. Let me take a gander at it. So one of the big things that happened yesterday is Prism has now hit 1,000 stars, which is absolutely mind blowing to me.

Chris Gmyr (30:17)
Nice.

TJ Miller (30:21)
Just I, I don't know, man. It's so crazy to see like my little like passion hobby project get big enough to have like a thousand stars. I don't know, man. It seems, it seems silly to be so hype about it, but like I'm definitely super hype about it. Like it's that's so neat. Thanks, man. so like big updates, like that, that big refactor we talked about that shipped a little while ago.

Chris Gmyr (30:37)
That's really cool. Yeah, congrats on that. That's awesome.

TJ Miller (30:47)
streaming landed last week. I think like we missed last week, right? you had snow days, right? We recorded last week. so streaming landed. and that's been going well. There's been some, like a couple of PRs working on that, but, streaming, I'm super happy with like how that's turned out. And I think, you know,

Chris Gmyr (30:52)
no, we recorded. I think that was, yeah.

TJ Miller (31:10)
Streaming's nice. I think I don't have a ton of personal use for it. So I'm really interested to see like what people are building with it and how it gets used because, most of my stuff I've been fine without streaming. So I, like I said, I'm just, I'm interested to see what people build with it. And like that, let that kind of inform where streaming goes next outside of enabling a few other providers. Cause I only, I only, so far we only support open AI streaming. So.

I have Anthropic and Olama that I do plan to support streamings for. And then any other provider, I'm kind looking for community support behind building out streaming for those. And then we've launched some Gemini document support. We've updated embeddings to be able to like, now can return an array of embeddings.

making things a little bit more powerful, more powerful there. Like a big one was adding in Gemini structured output. That's been a big one that I think a handful of people have been looking for. And somebody was recently telling me that like they've been really impressed by Gemini. And so their like top, their order of providers is like Anthropic, which I totally agree with. Like Anthropic holds like the number one spot for me.

But for them, their number two is Gemini now. So I feel like I got to go play with it a little bit more. Yeah, and then we've got a couple of refactors. But really, the big thing that's gone out was Gemini structured support and streaming. And we added a new embeddings provider too. So just kind of jamming along. Next big thing for me is going to be working on

Probably anthropic streaming and the actual like the big task that I hope to accomplish this weekend is reorg in Prism from Echolabs over to Prism PHP. So it'll now be instead of like Echolabs dev slash Prism. It'll be Prism hyphen PHP slash Prism. So just give it kind of its own org because we're going to have part of that was I think that just sits better.

and then the other piece of that is we are going to be publishing some additional packages. So we have, I think the Amazon bedrock provider is ready to go, but we're going to host that as a separate package because it does have a, an additional dependency on the AWS SDK. So rather than including that as a like first party provider,

we're just going to provide it as a package. And so I wanted to kind of like put that all in the Prism org. And I think I've got some other plans later on down the road for some other things. I want to have like an examples repo and some other stuff. So it just kind of made sense to put it under its own org.

Chris Gmyr (33:45)
Nice.

Yeah, totally. That'll be super helpful in the future. And especially if you end up breaking out the individual providers to new packages and all that, it'll just make it a little bit easier as well.

TJ Miller (33:59)
Yeah, yeah, I think so. It'll be a nice bucket to kind of keep things organized in. I really don't know what I'm going to do with Echo Labs anyway. that's just kind of like, that all kind of came about as a new place to put Prism in. So we'll just give it its own org now and call it a day. It was tough finding a new org for Prism though. Like everything's either, like everything's taken and I don't know.

Chris Gmyr (34:24)
Yeah, yep.

TJ Miller (34:25)
It

looks like a lot of name squatting, like, who knows?

Chris Gmyr (34:29)
Yeah, yeah, it's like the old days with trying to get a dot com because there weren't all the other options, know, like there are now feel like there's, you know, hundreds of them now the top level domains and back in the day when you just had, you know, dot com dot org dot net, it was rough trying to find something.

TJ Miller (34:44)
Yeah.

Yeah. So I finally stumbled across it and kind of took a page out of Nuno's book and just tossed like PHP on the end of it. And yeah, it's, think it's going to be, I'm a little anxious to do it. But I think it'll only take like an hour or two and we'll be all squared away. they have internally, GitHub has a like transfer ownership of repo. So it should be just like

button click there, go over to Packagist, update things there, and I think that should do it.

Chris Gmyr (35:15)
Yeah, yeah, should be okay.

TJ Miller (35:17)
So

yeah, and then like other than that, we've got, I think we're working on like one, we've got like one or two more features in the pipeline that could have consequences on the API, which is where like my big push right now is I'm speaking at PHP tech in May and I would like to be at 1.0 before that conference. So.

Chris Gmyr (35:35)
Mm-hmm.

TJ Miller (35:41)
overall, like the big push right now is to just be getting, doing as much as possible to be getting in place for like a 1.0 before that. cause one of the, mean, I'm doing a three hour workshop on building with Prism at PHP tech. And so I'd like it to be 1.0 for that. so overall just like trying to think of things that could have breaking changes and like,

or cause breaking changes and like, get those things out of the way. Cause that's really the only thing preventing me from tagging 1.0 right now is I think there are a couple of things that could introduce breaking changes and I'd rather like just get that sorted out before we tag 1.0.

Chris Gmyr (36:20)
Yeah, 100%. It's a lot. It's not necessarily harder. It's just not as ideal to get those changes out after a fully launched tag release.

TJ Miller (36:30)
Yeah,

especially if it's like for a small breaking change. It's like, do I really want to like go to 2.0 over a small breaking change? And then like, I also don't want to have to like hold onto it until I am ready to do a 2.0 tag. Um, but maybe I'm placing too much significance on it and it's not really that big of a deal to like be ripping through versions and you know, at least to like provide an upgrade guide or something along with them. That's something I kind of wanted to figure out too with the 1.0 is.

Chris Gmyr (36:34)
Yeah.

TJ Miller (37:01)
how to version the docs also so that you could have maybe a dropdown on the doc site to choose what version you're on. So if I do go from one to two, the 1.0, the 1.x branch will always have 1.x docs. And then the 2.x or main branch will have whatever the main docs are.

That way if you are stuck on a certain version, you at least have those docs available. I don't know.

Chris Gmyr (37:33)
Yeah.

Yeah. I wonder if that's something that you can use. Because aren't you using a feed press or something like that for the docs right now? I wonder if there's a way that you can do that or like merge them together in the latest version of the docs. Like if there isn't like an overwritten, you know, V1 or something like that. I wonder if there's some ability to have versions instead of writing.

TJ Miller (37:40)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Chris Gmyr (38:00)
or duplicating the same docs over multiple versions even if they don't change. I wonder if there's an option to do something like that.

TJ Miller (38:08)
Yeah, I don't know. I think probably the easiest thing would be to like script out a way to like archive it all into the main branch. That way, just like all versions of docs live there and then you just like maybe switching subfolder or something. I really don't know. I don't know what affordances there are. But I might have to look at like another doc provider too for that. I really just don't know how to approach that. And I think it'd be really nice.

Like the, I think the choice to include the docs in the package repo was a good call for that. Cause worst case, like if I can't figure out a way to host them cleanly, then at least you can just like dive into your vendor folder and pull up the docs that way. Um, it's all just marked down. So I don't know. We'll see how that plays out, but yeah, the, big

global push for Prism right now is to get to 1.0 and then once we're in 1.0, of like settle back into like feature requests and things like that, but really kind of punting on some of that stuff to just focus on the things that could introduce breaking changes or like things like streaming where I had to get streaming. Like I wasn't going to tag 1.0 without streaming. So I'm also kind of waiting to see what happens with streaming to see if there's any major changes that need to take place before 1.02. Because like I said, I'm

I'm not using streaming a whole lot.

Chris Gmyr (39:29)
Yeah, gotcha. That makes sense. And you got a little bit more time still before tech anyways, so.

TJ Miller (39:33)
So.

Yep, yeah, yeah, I've got like two months, so that's plenty of time, I think, to get to 1.0 or at the very least be at a place where I can tag 1.0 and not have to worry too much.

Chris Gmyr (39:46)
Yeah, totally. Cool. Well, yeah, with that, do you want to wrap up?

TJ Miller (39:50)
Yeah, man, we can wrap up.

Chris Gmyr (39:52)
sweet. So thanks for listening to the Slightly Caffeinated podcast. Show notes and all the links social channels are down below and also available at slightlycaffeinated.fm. Thank you for listening and we'll catch you all next week.

TJ Miller (40:04)
See ya