TD Cafe #004 - Ivan Stegic & Randy Oest

Ivan: So as much as people say that AI is going to replace junior devs and we're going to lose jobs and they're gonna be annihilated, I don't think that's true. I think we're gonna have to invest even more in junior developers and in. In harnessing this immense power that AI has, and I think it's true not just for devs.

I think it's true for designers, for devs, for PMs. I think it's true across the board.

Ivan: Hey, Randy, it's awesome to see you again. Minute. It's awesome to see

Randy: you too. Yeah, I mean, you know, well it's, it's like the old joke, you know, like, you know, the only way that like men have conversations is if they do a podcast, you know, they never hop on the phone.

It's like you have to do a podcast. It's so true. Which is not, well, it's not true. You and I hop on Zoom calls, but like we do have real conversations in our podcast, but I'm happy to be on this podcast conversation with you.

Ivan: I am too. [00:01:00] And I think it's wonderful the way this is set up without an intro, without people.

It's just us talking, which is great. I have so many things I wanted to talk to you about first, if I may, and it's not on the list, but I saw you updated your avatar using ai. Your ear got filled in with the right amount of beard. Yes. Did you have to give an

Randy: official prompt to do that? No. No.

Apparently, like chat sheet BT is really good with beards, so that was wonderful. Like my little cartoon avatar, I was like, okay, gimme a beard. And then I told her like, okay, add some white to the beard, and then it turned into Santa Claus and I'm like, all right, make it now brown and white. And then it finally produced one that I was like, happy with.

And I was like, this is cool. I'm gonna share it, but I'm, I'm not gonna use it as my avatar. 'cause uh, I don't know. I like my original

Ivan: avatar, so I like your original avatar as well. So you've been on LinkedIn using it, I think in a way that I haven't used it [00:02:00] probably ever. And I would say I have some strong opinions about where LinkedIn is these days.

And let me share those with you. And then I want to ask you about like, what. What your experience has been, but mine has been that I kind of think LinkedIn is a wasteland for trying to find a job. And I've talked to people about it as something we've called fake help, that their only real way of, you know, getting a job if you're, if you're, if you're serious about it and you've been laid off, is to talk to real people.

And meet with real people and have zooms and, and coffees and do connections and what they call networking. And I just kind of call being human. And and so a lot of people complain about, oh, I've sent a hundred thousand job applications on LinkedIn, and two of them got back to me and then they ghosted me and I believe so that's why I think LinkedIn is fake help.

And you've been, you've been using it. Quite [00:03:00] effectively, I think. Has your experience been the same? Like what and Oh, and maybe there's some context that we need as well, so like, yeah.

Randy: So, so, so let's see a little bit of that context. I started like really pushing LinkedIn like a couple of months ago.

That's because, uh, my job circumstances changed and I I sat down when my circumstances changed and I was like, okay, I. What steps can I take to be active? Because, so I will either fall into a depression or I have to be active. Like, whenever I'm like upset, I clean the house, you know, going like, I've gotta, I have to, I have to do something.

Yeah. And so I'm like, I'm like, okay, uh, I'm in the process of being laid off. I need to start reaching out to people. I need to start talking to people. Uh, and I'm really good at posting online. You know, I'm very much a, like, you know, for being one of the olds. I'm a, I'm a digital native and so I started posting and I'm like, you know what?

I'm gonna post every day, even if it's dumb and stupid and not related to anything on [00:04:00] LinkedIn. And I. It's, it's been a journey. And I have to say, I agree with you. I think LinkedIn's kind of a ghetto. There's not like the, the value in LinkedIn is hard to find. There's a lot of people who are like, who are like the, the tech bros who are trying to sell their like email system or course there's a lot of people who, who are genuinely trying to like.

Find a new job and people who are recruiting for a job, but I feel like the people who are recruiting for a job, they're posting to LinkedIn to check a box, not to actually connect. Yeah. And finding the people who are actually on LinkedIn who will make comments and who will actually engage is really tough.

And I don't think I've like broken through like a threshold yet, but I'm like, I'm getting there like, my most successful post, uh, well, we'll talk about that in a moment, but the, most of the posts that get attention on LinkedIn that I found are whenever I, like, talk about my circumstances changing my job, circumstances changing.

Mm-hmm. Like people, [00:05:00] like they swarm to it, they like it, they make comments. Mm-hmm. And like that commiserating, like that's nice in a way because like a lot of people reached out to me to write. Yeah. And that's wonderful. But I also. I wanna be able to post cool things to LinkedIn. Like I I went to a local meetup here in Pittsburgh and I didn't have any business cards because I'm like, I don't have any business cards just for me.

And, and it was like the morning of the event and I'm like, what can I do? I've got a black and white printer and I made one of those little fortune teller things that like can fold up. Uh huh. I made a bunch of fortune tellers and I was just like, okay, I made a dozen of these and whenever I handed them out, I made a big deal talking about it and they, it was just basically kind of like your own, like, like design, like your own creative director, like telling you more white space, make the logo bigger funny, you know?

Ivan (2): Yeah. Make the

Randy: logo bigger. Yeah, and I'm like, that's, that's, I'm, I'm just like, hopefully it'll be memorable and we'll see how to, to create these connections. [00:06:00] And that's where I think LinkedIn starts to become successful is I made a couple of connections there at that event and I'm carrying that forward.

So like, one of them was a person who like. Knew another person who was a hiring manager and like, I pursued that that ended up not working out, but that's okay. Like, but it was a leg up in the process. Yeah.

Ivan (2): You

Randy: know, and and the, the same is true, like I'm following up on a, another lead talking to someone and like just kind of bringing it around.

'cause LinkedIn allows me to professionally connect and allows me to like, send them messages and trying to like, maintain those connections. And as what I do is, as I get. Like, after I've talked to somebody a couple of times, like on a call or in person, I'll move it to like email correspondence to try and make it a little bit more personal.

That's, yeah. You know, because like LinkedIn, no one wants LinkedIn messages. No one is excited for LinkedIn [00:07:00] messages. I if want. Tell me about your excitement for LinkedIn messages. I

Ivan: don't have LinkedIn. I'm actually, I'm, I'm truthfully amassing as many junk messages as I can. So that I can take a screenshot about how many I have so that I can post that screenshot on LinkedIn.

It's very meta. I'm like this. Nobody wants these messages. Why? Why? Just don't stop. Oh, the other thing that bugs me is people think they know exactly how LinkedIn works, and so they give you all of the recommendations. This is how you're gonna increase engagement. You have to have bullets. M dashes are a no-no, because that's all from chat GPT.

Mm-hmm. Like everybody knows, and like all of it's bs nobody knows. Only LinkedIn knows. Yeah. And plus, it's not like the algorithm doesn't change. It's changing weekly, monthly. Who knows? Like, we don't even know that. Right? Yeah. So I, I, for a long time [00:08:00] I, I was posting just to see what would happen. I spent three months and I posted not more than two lines of an update that was pithy or trying to be smart, or just an ob obs, like an observation of something that I've seen on LinkedIn.

And nothing really changed. It was just there more often, and it was getting a few more likes and a few more engagements, but nothing changed. Like it, it's just, I don't know. All social media is the same now. That's my, it's, that's, that's the other thing. Like how is it different than the rest?

Randy: Uh, I, well, I can tell you that when I started posting, like every day when I started like mixing in images and those like PDF carousels and videos, and between that and the consistency, I noticed that LinkedIn was spreading my message a little bit further.

I.

Ivan (2): Oh really like

Randy: it, like I was seeing people who I had no idea who [00:09:00] they were, like liking my things or reaching out to connect. And so I noticed that that helped spread things a lot. Obviously LinkedIn is kind of like rewarding this multimedia approach and so like, that's why I am dipping my toes into like recording videos to post onto LinkedIn.

Like not anything super fancy. It just, I open up photo booth and I have a browser window open and like, you know, just kind of, kind of share that.

Ivan: Dragging the, dragging the camera around when you use an iPhone. Like I, like I knew about that, but I was so happy to see it out there that other people could learn about it too.

That was a good job. Thank you. That was a good job. Hey, I wanted to ask you about the, sorry if I just wanna change the subject a bit. Oh, no, no, go ahead. Go ahead. I wanted to ask you about Figma, because it's been on my mind the last. Week or so. I think they had that conference and a couple of things came out of it.

At least they were interesting in my mind, and I don't know a whole lot of it, but one was Figma sites. Mm-hmm. And the other was Figma Draw.

Ivan (2): Yeah.

Ivan: And I don't know exactly what [00:10:00] Figma Draw is, except that I saw a very well produced, it looked like Hollywood style commercial about Figma Draw, where there was a, you know, a teenage artist in her bedroom using Figma Draw.

And her parents were like. Aghast. So I wanna ask you about that, and then I wanna ask you about Figma sites. Is this just another Squarespace competitor, or do you think there's some legs to it?

Randy: Sure. Let's start with Figma Draw because I started life as a cartoonist. Like I have a, I have a degree in cartooning.

I wanted to make comic books. Yeah. Cool. Yeah, and I went, I went very quickly to graphic design because I'm like, Hey, you know, I can work eight hours to make a. Yeah, to make a hundred dollars on a comic book page. And I'm like, you know, I love making comic books, but I like money more. I like eat. Yeah.

I mean, who knew? So. Uh, so Figma Draw has a, what it's doing is, is it's allowing you to get [00:11:00] richer, like vector controls for, for illustrations. Like you can now do like texture fills. You can control like what kind of pattern is on the stroke. So if you have a like. If you take your busier tool and you draw a line, like you draw a squiggly line with the busier tool you can have it be like rough edged, like it's a, it's a pen on a high tooth like, uh, paper.

You can make it like look like brush strokes. You can control various like thicknesses at various points in the illustration and. The, the most direct competitor is Adobe Illustrator. Adobe Illustrators like, brush tools are still more sophisticated than Figma Draw, but if Figma is going to, to pour a lot of effort into this I'm sure that like it's just gonna be a year or two before they have parody with Illustrator and it is going to be.

Really an illustration tool can you use, which is gonna be pretty awesome.

Ivan: Can you use [00:12:00] draw on an iPad and does it behave differently?

Randy: As far as I know, no, you can't use Figma on an iPad. I've got a little iPad right here. And, uh, you can use. Fig jam on it, but you can't use Figma on it. And so I think like that is, that's another one of the barriers to Figma draw, because like, if you're gonna expect me to draw, I need to be able to do it on the iPad,

Ivan: because that's kind of what it feels like, right?

Mm-hmm. It's, it's in the name. And it feels weird to be drawing with a cursor on in a browser or on a desktop app. It feels like the natural extension would be, Hey man, use this on your iPad. Use the pressure sensitivity of a apple pencil and so on. Yeah.

Randy: Well, I know I, I used to do design work with a wack or Wacom wacko tablet like way back in the day.

And and I really enjoyed that. And so like when I saw Figma draw, I'm like, well, maybe I need to get a tablet again. And do some, do some stuff like that. Because I think that [00:13:00] illustration is something that the web needs more of. Like, we have a lot of like illustration resources, but we don't have enough custom illustrations.

For, you know, uh, individuals like using like a library is good enough. But I like custom illustrations for things

Ivan: I do too. They're gorgeous. They're gorgeous when they're custom, aren't they? Yes. They really are. So nice. Pigite, dude. What's your, what's your take on that?

Randy: Okay, so my hot take on Figma sites is that it's trash.

Ivan (2): Mm-hmm.

Randy: And, and I'll tell you why. Sure. So what it, so what it is, is it's basically taking everything inside of Figma and it's allowing you to publish a website. You can determine break points, you can use all of their auto layout features and publish a website which. On one hand for prototyping.

Okay? For prototyping something and taking a look at it in a browser, I think that's really good and really useful. Okay. I like to be able to look at things in a [00:14:00] browser and be able to like play with it, pass it to clients, talk them through it. I think for prototyping, it's going to be very useful. The reason that I call it trash is that a lot of people are going to.

Publish production work on it. Uh, and part of the, the problem with that is that the engine that's rendering the code on the backside is terrible for accessibility. It's terrible for generating a website. It's all divs and spans all the way down. Wow. No structure to the document at all. No control, like over any of the meta things that you might need for publishing a site.

I know that they've got, they have a content management system coming through, but part of my concern. Yeah. Part of my concern with that is like, do you get locked in to that? Sure. Uh, you know, how do you, like, is it interoperable with like other exports? Can you like, you know, how do you, how do you like make this sort of thing?

Because it's very much like a, a Wix style experience where you're making [00:15:00] each custom page and you're not making a template. That things point to. I don't know. I have, I have a lot of reservations and opinions about this because I think that I think that whenever it comes to production sites, they need to be as good as possible and anything that lets you shortcut people, sorry, I.

Alright, so cow paths, you know, where people, where people take the shortest route, you know, whenever you've got, like if you have a 90 degree sidewalk, everybody's like shaving off that corner and everyone always takes the path of least resistance. Absolutely. And that path ends up being the way that people go.

And providing this as an option. People are going to start, they're gonna be like, Hey, we can just launch your, your pizzeria website using Figma sites, and we don't even need to hire a developer. Yeah. And like it's going to, it's going to, to harm the web, it's gonna harm accessibility, and it's gonna create like more [00:16:00] problems.

Right. And so, like, so yeah. So that's, I know that's a little bit of a rant.

Ivan: No, it's not. I mean, it is a rant, but it's valid. I mean, I think you're, you're talking about things that. That are true and that have evidence, and that like if the accessibility is trash, then why? Like if there's no hierarchy, then why?

Like why? And I agree like prototyping, this gets you much closer to something that a client would maybe sign off on faster. But gosh, the amount of technical debt that it's likely going to incur is horrible. It's horrible. And I like. It's just, I don't know, are we biased? Because we are like, I wanna try to think about it from the other angle.

Are we inside the fishbowl and can't see out? And that's why we have this opinion and maybe there's a good reason why this is going to be amazing. [00:17:00] I personally don't think so. Whoops. I,

Randy: yeah, I, I think what it is is that because we're inside the fishbowl. We know what the standards are for success, for actual success and like this is short cutting.

A lot of those things. You're right. You know, and that's, it's, it's a problem of, of expertise and what this product is, is it's taking the flashiest part of web design and saying like, look, you can do, start to finish super fast. Meanwhile like. The, you know, it's that old saying that the last 20% takes 80% of the time, 80% of the time.

You know, like that 80% of the time is still there. It's not actually short cutting anything.

Ivan: Yeah, I think you're right. I think we can see both inside and outside the fishbowl. I think that's basically what you said. Yeah,

Randy: pretty much. 'cause I mean, I tell you what I have embraced, like this whole like AI vibe, coding thing.

Like [00:18:00] I'm, I'm a strong coder to begin with and I love React and so I've been playing with like V zero and Lovable and all of these services and I've like. Like really leaned into it. Uh, because like instead of me going like, okay, how do I iterate over an object again to get like things that are several level levels down in the data, like, I'm not, it's not natural for me.

I mentioned earlier I'm a cartoonist at heart and you know, by vibe coding I can say like, loop over this and do this thing and it'll get it enough that I can then go in and style it and. That's something that has ex like, helped me produce faster and engage faster. And so like, uh, that was another thing that Figma revealed is that they're gonna, they're coming out with a product that's a lot like Lovable and V zero here soon.

Ivan: Oh really?

Randy: Yeah.

Ivan: Yeah. I'm not familiar with those two. Are they similar to Cursor or are they different? Uh, they are

Randy: similar, yet different. Okay. [00:19:00] They are services where you go there with an idea and you tell it like, Hey, make me, uh, and I'll give you an example. I was, uh, I was meeting internally when with the four kitchen staff about like a higher education client who was like, should we do like a tuition calendar?

And I'm like, yes. I said, let's. Let's see what it would look like. And I put it into, I said to V zero, like, here's the tuition page, the link to their tuition page. And I said, make a tuition calendar out of this. And the, the first version that it produced, it wasn't, it wasn't branded, but it had all the appropriate dropdowns.

It did the math based on everything that was there. And we were able to take that to the client to talk to them and say like, Hey. Why don't we add a tuition calendar and having that like visual interactive thing that could be played with and shown, uh, made that conversation much easier than had we said like, we have an idea.

Because sometimes, sometimes clients don't like [00:20:00] having that vision. Uh, they might not be used to doing that. Yeah. And so the easier we make it for them to see the finished product, the, the easier that is. That's why I go back. Real quick. That's why I go back to Figma sites as a prototyping tool. 'cause it lets the client see what it could be.

Yeah. But then you still

Ivan: have to, to build it. So this reminds me of some vibe coding that I was able to sit in on a couple weeks ago. Two of our team members were experimenting with Cursor and both of them senior devs one, one is our director of development. L and the other one is Jason, our front end architect.

And we're like, you know, we should really figure out what this cursor thing is. And I mean, there was a Drupal site, it was vanilla and the natural language prompt to cursor was build me a weather widget that can tell me the weather where I am. And it [00:21:00] it not only scaffolded and stuff stubbed out an entire Drupal module.

It picked an open weather, API. It configured all of it, and it mostly worked. And not only was it frightening, it was like, holy cow, what do we do with our staff with like, how can we leverage this? How can we be better? How can we be faster? How can we be more efficient? And what we realized was. We need to be investing more in our junior developers, in mentorship, in more, and spending more time with our junior devs because our junior devs because they're so early on in their careers, would not be able to wield cursor the way that a senior dev.

Could potentially wield because of the amount of experience of knowing the things to ask and the things to fix and the things that are need to be identified. Whereas I think there's a risk that junior [00:22:00] developers would. Simply accept the output and not know what to ask or look for. And I don't think you can replace that with ai.

I think you need a human to mentor those juniors. Yeah. So as much as people say that AI is going to replace junior devs and we're going to lose jobs and they're gonna be annihilated, I don't think that's true. I think we're gonna have to invest even more in junior developers and in. In harnessing this immense power that AI has, and I think it's true not just for devs I think it's true for designers, for devs for PMs. I think it's true across the board.

Randy: Yeah. Uh, three things I wanna mention related to cursor. So first you can drop a dot cursor rules file into your, the root of your of your project. And you can give it custom custom prompts that will always go, I.

Everything that you do.

Ivan: No. Really?

Randy: Yes. So I always tell it to like, start every conversation [00:23:00] with an emoji and I put an emoji in and that tells me that it's listening to that prompt listening.

Ivan (2): Mm-hmm.

Randy: Yeah. So, that way I can tell, like, if it ever replies back to me without that emoji then. I know that it, it has like, I've talked too much to it and that prompt has rolled off the backend.

I

Ivan (2): see.

Randy: And then I also like, you know, I'll be like, Hey, don't use type script. 'cause I hate type script. Type script. And you could do things like, this is a Drupal module. Always use this component library coding. Yep. Yeah. Use the component

Ivan: guidelines,

Randy: use STC, like do all of that. Absolutely. The second thing about Cursor is that, that after you do a thing, you can always ask it, make this better, or What are problems or security concerns on the code, and you can like iterate on it as well.

I, I, uh, vibe coded a plugin for Figma to pull color variables for tailwind. And, uh, it was, and I like stubbed out something and then I told her, I said, Hey, rewrite this to make it better. And it [00:24:00] separated everything out and I like reviewed everything and it definitely improved the code. And so I was like.

Great. And then the third thing about Cursor is that Cursor interacts with files on your system. So it doesn't just have to be like a coding project. So if you, uh, if you use a notes app like Obsidian, oh, that uses markdown files. You can use and interact with it it with your notes, with, you know, whatever you want to on that system.

So you could say, like, if you're writing like a story, you can be like, okay, do these five chapters, like, do they relate to each other? Is there any like plot holes? And so you can, can do that because Cursor is just using the LLMs that you would use like Claude or. Chat PT. So, that's another way to, to use cursor.

Ivan: Those are three great tips. I love the first one because it made me [00:25:00] think that you could have a company wide standard rule set that set things up for particular formalism or a particular set of parameters that we just always know we're going to do as a company. Yeah. And maintain those. That's really cool.

Randy: Yeah, you can even like, I mean, add customer rules to, to generate documentation. You know, like, you know, tell it in the cur, I haven't used this yet, but tell it in the cursor rules doc. Like, you know, always add documentation for, uh, new components or new modules.

Ivan: That's pretty damn cool.

Randy: Yeah, it's crazy. You know, we've got all this AI but we don't have any flying cars.

I don't, I don't understand.

Ivan: Oh, you know, I actually saw a prototype of a flying motorbike and it looked like, it looked like those racers that were in Star Wars, that baby Anakin Skywalker raced. [00:26:00] Yeah, that looked cool. It looked so good. Oh, I bet that would be awesome. And, and it, it was, I don't Was it just a, it was just a video.

It was very short. I, I wish I had clicked on it actually. So I don't know much about it, but it looked very cool. So maybe we will have flying cars after the flying bikes. There we go. That would be fantastic. Hey, do you get a lot of spam on your phone? Text. Oh my God.

Randy: Yes, I do. I absolutely do. I just, you know it, I get maybe one a day, which doesn't sound like a lot, but every day.

Like every single day. Oh my goodness. And it's gone up since I started posting on LinkedIn. Oh, really? So, yeah. Oh,

Ivan: that's interesting. Yeah. Do you have your phone number published publicly?

Randy: Uh, I mean, I'm, I'm sure I've published it publicly before. Yeah. I know past iterations of my website [00:27:00] have had it on there, and so like it's just

Ivan: there.

It's interesting that you notice that correlation. I, I wonder if it's related, like it feels like it feels like it should be, but I wonder if it's just perception. Well, it's,

Randy: it's a lot of what I'm, my guess is, is that like, you know, so I, like I'm open to work. I mentioned that, you know, I'm, I'm starting this, this freelance world and I'm becoming a consultant.

Yes. And all of this is like whatever bots are going all out there to do all of this stuff, I'm sure is like processing all of this. And it's like, oh, this person needs like. Business stuff because I am listed as a business owner. 'cause I've had an LLC for more than a decade now. Oh. And so it's like, Hey, do you need a hundred thousand dollars loan?

Do you need this? Do you need

Ivan: that? Yeah. The loan stuff is so annoying. [00:28:00] So annoying. I, I've, I've figured out that all of these spam texts have to use a provider like, uh, Twilio to send the messages out. And they're supposed to say, use the word stop. To stop these messages, but they never do and there's no one in their right mind who is sending these spam messages manually.

So what I've been doing to them is I've just been replying stop, and, and within 30 seconds I get one of those network error mis or network unsubscribe messages, the ones that are required by the cellular providers. And then I delete and report as junk and. Like my volume of spam has gone down considerably since adding that stop response.

So maybe try that.

Randy: Yeah. Yeah. I should stop replying with the F word and you stop. Yeah. Don't instead, so, well,

Ivan: you could reply that and then send a stop. [00:29:00]

Randy: Uh, true. True. So.

Ivan: Hey, do you wanna, do you wanna talk a little bit about higher ed? The, the site you have higher ed? Yeah, I, I saw on LinkedIn you were putting together a whole bunch of work you have done in the past on frameworks and I haven't had a chance to look at the site and to learn more about it. So. Maybe can you tell me about it?

Randy: Sure. It's, I mean, it honestly, so, so I've worked in higher education for a long time. Either like inside, I worked at the University of Pittsburgh for a decade or outside helping them through agencies and I started to compile a list of design systems that are in use in higher education. 'cause it's always nice to know, like, you know, what various entities are doing so that whenever I talk to another.

College or university, I can say, Hey, you know, this person's doing this, this person's doing that. Sort of like what we do with design systems, just writ large [00:30:00] and everyone knows Polaris, uh, from Shopify and primer from GitHub and Salesforce and you know, IBM's carbon and all of that. And there are.

All sorts of lists of design systems, but very rarely do, do higher education design systems get on the list. And I decided to put together a place where people can contribute and we can have a list of these systems. So basically it's a, it's a card grid that says, Hey, we've got Falwell, we've got like Yale's, we've got, you know, all of these different systems.

Ivan: Columbia, Stanford, yes. Texas a and m, I'm just looking at it right now. Mm-hmm.

Randy: Yeah. Yeah. And uh, Mario Hernandez just this morning, right before I launched, provided me with his UCLA one 'cause he's over there now. Really? And, yeah. And so like I. I've got this library. I just list, I just have the logo, the name of the design system, the name of the, the, like the [00:31:00] university and a link to the design system.

I want to grow it, make the list longer, but I also wanna make it more useful over time, so like. As this gets attention and grows, then I'm gonna start to kind of like, be like, okay, so you know, do I start marking which ones are React and which ones are twig and which ones are Drupal and which ones are WordPress?

I haven't gone that deep on them yet, but I do want to, to begin like. Getting that sort of information associated with this. But right now I've got about 15 on the list. 19 and 19. Okay. I just counted. I just counted. Alright, thank you. And, and so, so I'm hoping that more people will, will send that along, send along their, their work because.

If there's one, I don't know if there are, if there's a design team that's ever under sung at a university, it is The, the people who are contributing to the brand and the design system at, at the university website? Yeah, because like they, they work their, their butts off [00:32:00] to make sure that they produce something that's useful for the university and like.

Uh, everybody, some people embrace it really well and some people push back against it and like, I just wanna celebrate those people who do that

Ivan: hard work. I feel ya. I feel ya. I love that The site itself is on open source site and it's a GitHub repo. Is it a React side or a. A JE side or

Randy: what it is, it's React it's written invite.

I literally vibe coded the whole thing because I'm like, you know what I, yeah. 'cause I, I wanted to have this done months ago. Uh, like I wanted it. Oh goodness. Like in January I wanted to post it. Uh, but I just kept not finding the time and I'm like, alright, you know what I'm gonna sit down with. I think it was V zero and I was like, Hey, or no, it was lovable.

I'm like, can you like take this list? I copy and pasted my list from Notion into it and turn this into a website. And it, it produced like this card grid and, and everything. And I'm like, okay, now I have to do some design [00:33:00] stuff. And I used chat GPT to generate the header image. I picked a, an icon from font Awesome.

And then like, you know, did the design pass on things because the design of it was not good out of the box. But that's okay. That's, that's what I'm here for. That's why we're human. Yeah. So, so yeah, I'm hoping that it, that grows and continues to be useful and. Uh, I want community involvement because I, I'm happy to be like the figurehead and push it along, but this is something that, that is only sustainable if people use it and contribute to it.

Ivan: I love it. I love it. It's so you can contribute to it by just opening a pull request. Just a just add, add an

Randy: issue and I will add an issue. Okay. Yeah, I'll take care of it. Uh, I mean, I accept poor requests as well, but you know, I figure I wanna make it a little bit easier for easy people to contribute.

Yeah. So like no one has to fork it and all of that, but if they want to, then [00:34:00] like, you know, I'll give them a gold star.

Ivan: I think that's great. Higher ed duck design. Nice job. Randy. This is cool. Thank you. This is very cool. And I love the different names that the universities come up with. Some of them are just, you know, design system.

Other ones are like decanter, falwell, surface rivet. They're very interesting. I, I just, I think that's cool. What's bucks? That's Ohio State University. Yeah. Why'd they call that? Bucks? Oh, Buckeye. Uh, yeah, of course. Yeah, that makes sense.

Randy: Yeah. No, I, I, I'm a big fan of like, naming big projects and I, I just like you, I love people who named their design systems.

That's awesome. Yeah. 'cause it's, it's one of those things like internally it gives you something to say rather than like, the brand or like our design system or something along those lines. Sure.

Ivan: For sure. So,

Randy (2): yeah.

Ivan: Oh my gosh.

Randy (2): Yeah, [00:35:00] it is. It was a lot of fun.

Ivan: You posted in in our, in our podcast notes about the onion.

I did,

Randy: I did. What was, what

Ivan (2): was this?

Randy: So I, okay, so I am a big fan of what I call like sawdust products or sawdust offerings. Okay. And what that is, is basically like, you know, the, the people who manufacture like wooden planks, you know, they're cutting down trees. It generates a lot of sawdust. And so what they've done is they build a business that uses the adas, so they like compress it into bricks.

So they're fire starters. They use it for a whole host of things. They've really created a secondary business based off of this overflow.

Ivan (2): Yeah.

Randy: And. I like, literally, I think an hour before we hopped on this call, I found out that The Onion, okay, so I love the Onion. I love their like, [00:36:00] funny headlines. I love their approach to like, everything.

It's, I reverent. They, they always think out of the box. They're always so creative. I. What they have decided to do they, uh, the ownership changed hands a year ago, and the new owner is, is opening up a creative agency that is related to the onion. All of the, the writers and the creative powerhouses at the Onion can work on marketing campaigns and creative and strategy.

And so that allows, I mean, think about this like news. News places are going under. All the time. Alright. We're, we're losing a lot of, a lot of them. And so what the Onion has done is they're like, listen with our like idle time, you know, we're going to lean into our strength and our brand and we're gonna offer something adjacent, a sawdust product that I love it.

Yeah. You [00:37:00] know, and I mean, they didn't phrase it that way. This is my framing. Yeah, yeah. But I was just like, I'm like, this is, I'm like, it's gonna help the onion, like stay up and survive. And I mean, I would hire the Onion to run a campaign. I would hire

Ivan: them, of course. Can you imagine the smart people at The Onion that write the headlines and doing the work for you after you've hired them?

I wonder if they'd be interested in partnering. I mean,

Randy: probably they probably, I, I guess they've been running this for a couple of, for a while now, is what they said. Like, I think I half a year is what it feels like. But yeah, I would love to, I'd love to work with the Onion.

Ivan: That would be so fun.

Randy: Yeah. I like, you know, I've got a bucket list of like companies I wanna work with and that, that just got added to my list.

Ivan: So, yeah, I think you're right. I was just talking to a design, uh, [00:38:00] designer that we've worked with in the past last week and we were talking about his business. His name is Ernesto.

He runs a studio called Studio Malon. He's in the process of just tweaking how they're branded and what work they do. So we were, we were, we were brainstorming about that and he has this alter ego and it's called Object Solutions and I think it's object solutions.net. And he has this really irreverent.

Satirical take on the world through object solutions and it's uh, you have to see it to understand it. It's kind of leans into the post apocalyptic, uh. Thing that the internet is setting us up for, [00:39:00] so we have so much screen time. So he invented a coffin that has a built-in screen so you can be in your coffin and just use the screen all day long, all night long.

It's it's pretty great. The, the thing that I was thinking about was can the Onion, oh, so we were talking about how does object solutions. Interplay with his design business. One of the things that came up was, could, could he leverage his skill of satire and not the expected outcome to provide a, an anti idea or an anti prototype in a design scheme?

So maybe you come up with. A brand and a logo, but then you also come up with here's what you shouldn't do, here's the logo you shouldn't use. And how would that stimulate creativity and stimulate discussion? And how would that make the actual product [00:40:00] more refined or the actual logo more refined or the mission more refined and the onion feels like it sort of hand waving me is in the similar sort of place.

Do you know what I mean? Like it's sort of, it's satire. It's very clever and it's the, the opposite or sometimes the thing that you expect, but just it's never reported. And I wonder if those two, if like there's a world in which you could leverage that in a creative discussion,

Randy: I. I, I think that that's where we get some of our most powerful creative from is by like, reversing challenging, using the phrase, thinking outside of the box, you know, like subverting expectations.

I just read an article by Chris Butler this morning, uh, Christopher Butler this morning. He's the, chief Design officer over at Newfangled, and he was writing about how like good design looks at things and great design [00:41:00] looks away. Uh, meaning that like, you know, taking a moment and letting something grow naturally from what it's supposed to be, as opposed to like taking all of these influences in and kind of putting them together, like, like puzzle pieces.

Hmm. You know, and so it's, it's really interesting because think of, think of the iPod. Whenever the iPod came out, you know, it, that little like spiral control, like it was, it was not something anyone was expecting. I. And it was, it was a nice control. Uh, some people didn't like it, but some people really liked it.

I really liked it. I thought it was, was good. And so like, th that's an example of kind of like taking and thinking like, what could this be? If it could be anything, you know, how do we best reflect what it is and have it have something that is uniquely its own? And the iPod click wheel, I. [00:42:00] Did that, did you have

Randy (2): one?

Oh yeah. Yeah.

Ivan: And I remember when that came out, that tactile change in the click, it was just gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous. And then it went to touch and I kind of missed the click. I missed the mechanical.

Randy: It, you know, they, they tried to kind of bring it back with like force touch.

Ivan: Oh, I remember. And the,

Randy: and the haptics, like, I mean, all of the iPhones still have force touch, but it never caught on because it didn't really have value and people didn't really interact that way.

But yeah, I'm with you. I, there is a, a, there's something about hardware having a tactile sensation. Like I don't wanna buttonless iPhone,

Ivan: no. No, I don't either. But we might get that even if we don't, like, we don't want it. We might still get it. Randy.

Randy: Well, I mean, uh, apple has a war on buttons. I mean, do you remember the one button [00:43:00] mouse?

Like the hockey puck?

Ivan: Yeah. Geez. You're right, you're right. Oh, that was a monstrosity. Really was Randy, what? What kind of car do you drive? And the reason I'm asking is I wonder if you have mechanical buttons and things in your car, or if your touchscreen.

Randy: Sure. So we have mechanical buttons and we have a touchscreen.

Okay. Uh, I drive a Subaru Forester Nice. And I spec one of the, the strong reasons for it is that it has CarPlay, uh, because it has a, that gives me a good touch interface. But it also has like a volume control button. It has like little apps, buttons. I can like click around on things. Because, uh, cars need to have like tactile controls, you know, you're driving something that's like a ton, ton and a half, two tons, you know, like around you can't be distracted.

Ivan: No, no, I agree. I agree. I, uh, [00:44:00] I might. Need to buy a car in the next year or so, and I'm kind of dreading it because I don't know that I'll find one that has enough buttons and not too many screens, you know? Well, they're starting,

Randy: they're starting to come back to buttons. Like it's, I, I've seen some news articles in like Fast Company where it's like, oh, buttons are coming back for cars.

Ivan: I hope so. I mean, I really enjoyed having a manual shift car and that was just the best. And then, oh yeah, you can't, you can't even, I don't think you can even buy a manual car. You can't, certainly can't rent one. I mean, if you want, if you want to drive a stick shift, you have to, uh, you know, go on Touro and maybe someone will have a, a car you can use for the day.

But I like, I, I haven't looked for sure, but it just feels like stick shifts are gone. I.

Randy: They, they've definitely been in decline. Yeah, my, I love driving stick. It's my absolute favorite. But same [00:45:00] like, uh, my wife and I we're a one car family, and so she doesn't drive stick. So I'm like, all right, we'll get an automatic, like, not a problem, you know?

But yeah, driving stick is a pleasure.

Ivan: You didn't force her to learn how to, how to drive a stick shift. What kind kind of a human being are you? Randy, listen. Like, you're like empathetic towards other humans and, and listen to what they want.

Randy: Well, I made her watch Star Trek, like all of it. So like, I gotta pick my fights.

She's now a giant Star Trek fan, so. Oh, there you go.

Ivan: Yeah. So that's so funny. Very cool. What do you have going on the rest

Randy: of the day? Oh, I've got a little bit of some extra work I've gotta get to. I've got a bunch of client work this week, so I'm trying to That's good. Keep busy trying to front busy.

Yeah, trying to, trying to front load my week so that, like by Friday, hopefully I'll be nice and light and I can kind of take a nap at the afternoon.

Ivan: I think that's a great idea.

Randy: [00:46:00] Yeah. Naps. Naps always encouraged. Absolutely. How's your week looking or how's the rest of your day looking?

Ivan: Well, uh, pretty good.

I have, I think one meeting, a financial meeting after this meeting. We're just gonna go over the numbers for April and then like the rest of the week is kind of. Booked actually. Tuesdays are always crazy. That's kind of the meeting day. Wednesday's usually pretty sparse, so that's good. And then it's Memorial Day weekend coming up and, oh shoot.

I just said when we are pretty much said when we're recording and so I don't know when this will go off, but surprise, we're recording this the week before Memorial Day.

Randy: Well, you know, with the long weekend, that gives you a, a good opportunity to listen to past episodes of talking Drupal, you know?

Exactly. And catch up on, you know, catch up on those.

Ivan: Yes, definitely

Randy: listen to talking Drupal over the long weekend.

Ivan: Absolutely. I, I would absolutely do that. Especially the ones where Randy and I are on the episodes independently

Randy: of each other. [00:47:00] I was a host for a month.

Ivan: I was too. It was awesome. Yeah. My, my favorite was the last episode when I could have whoever I wanted on.

Randy: Who did you have on? Oh, I don't, I don't remember. I think it was probably something related to Emulsify. 'Cause I was the, the product lead for that. So, I really wanted to, to talk that up because that was that. I mean, it's an awesome project. Who was the, who did you invite on?

Ivan: Jeff Robbins? My good friend Jeff Robbins, I talk to him every month.

He's my business coach and mentor. I've been talking to him for a long time and it just felt like something that we could shoot the shit on with, with uh, talking Drupal and, I mean, he's one of the OG gangsters, so like who better to have than, than Jeff og, gangster. I think I should have just said og.

'cause you know, that's, that's, that's, uh. Duplication.

Randy: [00:48:00] That's like an ATM machine. It's okay.

Ivan: Oh, there you go.

Randy: Yeah. Uh, well, hey, listen, I embarrassed my daughter with slang all the time. She has actually created a rule that I'm not allowed to use slang, like her slang around her friends, she's like, without permission,

Ivan: that gives, that means you absolutely should do that.

Randy: You know, uh, I, I, I'm a nice dad and I agreed to it and I have honored it.

Ivan: So I, I did the opposite and did not agree to it. 'cause my kids made that rule. And yeah, all kids are my bi all their friends are my best friends now too, so.

Randy: Well, there you go. Well, I, I have a shirt's one, like another way it

Ivan: could go.

Randy: Well she, I didn't tell her I wouldn't wear the shirt that says sc ay toilet riz on it. And walk by when she's on calls with friends or when friends come over. So, of course not, I didn't even know what that means, but that's awesome. Uh, I know, but I wish

Ivan: I didn't. Yeah, good. Don't tell me. [00:49:00] I don't wanna know.

Uh,

Randy: it's a mystery.

Ivan: It, holy crap. It's been an hour. Maybe we should wrap it up.

Randy: Yeah, let's do it. What do you think? All right. I think we should, I think we're good. How do we do that? Ivo, it's been, I don't know, Ivo, it's been great

Ivan: talking to you. It's been great shooting the shit with you. It's been awesome, Randy.

And we'll do this again soon. Sounds good. Very cool.