S2:E12
[00:00:00] Todd Libby: Welcome to the Front End Nerdery Podcast, a podcast about front end development and design. I'm your host, Todd Libby. My guest today is CIO of Infinite Red, mentor, adjunct professor, published author, an award-winning speaker, and from what I gathered, a pseudo coin collector, which we'll definitely talk about later, Gant Laborde. Gant how are you today?
[00:00:27] Gant Laborde: I'm doing fantastic, Todd. Great to see you.
[00:00:30] Todd: Great to see you. Tell us a little bit more about yourself then we'll get to the coin stuff.
[00:00:35] Gant: Oh, yeah, let's see. Well started developing back in the long, long ago when they were first forming the rings of power. No, just kidding,
I, I, I've always been a nerd at heart. I live in New Orleans, which is a fantastic place, but it's a, it's a lonely place for a nerd. I was just playing video games. I was having so much fun. I had an old NES system and my, my neighbor had Sega. We'd play all the time. And then one day my neighbor came over with a disc and I was like, what game is that?
He's like, it’s whatever game we want it to be. I could change this to be other games. I, that's cool, but I don't know where you put that. He's like, let's go to your dad's work computer. I was like, I'm not allowed to touch that. We did anyway, and we played some games there. And so that really kind of started getting in there.
And one day my neighbor made the computer say, Hello Gant, and I was, that was it.
[00:01:29] Todd: Yep.
[00:01:29] Gant: That was it. All in on computers ever since. And I, I know that kids growing up today probably don't care about that experience. Or you're like, Yeah, of course you can change the stuff on the screen and of course you can change this and that.
It, it was a life altering moment for me as a nerd sitting there just constantly receiving, receiving, receiving. The one day realized I could change what was going on and that was it. I was like, Dad, I want a computer. He was like, you’re gonna wrestle. And I was like, I, I don't wanna wrestle. I want a computer.
He was like, if you wrestle, I'll buy you a computer. I was, Okay. Yeah, no problem. So, I earned my first computer and, you know, my dad actually took all the Christmas and birthday money. You remember those scenes in those movies where the dad like opens it up and like takes the money out of it. That's so that was my part of that.
But anyways, I got my computer. It was the best thing I ever did, and I've been programming ever since writing software and professionally I've been programming for, oh my goodness, 22 years. Got my first professional programming gig in 2000. So, I might have been programming longer than some of the developers I work with have been alive.
[00:02:53] Todd: Yeah, I know the feeling. I, I do know the feeling and I also know the feeling of like you, when you had that moment where the computer said, hello.
[00:02:58] Gant: Yes.
[00:03:00] Todd: It was like I learned to program Commodore Basic from the,
[00:03:08] Gant: Oh my goodness.
[00:03:09] Todd: from the manual. And I made numbers go in sequential order, infinitely. And I’m like, oh my gosh. That is awesome.
[00:03:25] Gant: Isn’t it funny? Like the things that are just moments of you have no idea what I made and like just we take it all for granted today. You know, I think that the passion of programming, developing, creating front end, all that, it's still going strong. But it's just so funny because it, it's changed so much that our origin stories sound silly.
Like I then I made up my own language. It was a vocabulary of 150 words, and I made a program to translate to my own language. Like, that sounds like do not have TikTok? Like what were you doing with your life?
[00:04:01] Todd: Yeah. Right? Yeah. So, I was actually telling some people about the first real programming, I guess project I ever did was I took those choose your own adventure books from way back in the day. And I
[00:04:18] Gant: Good call
[00:04:18] Todd: programed the whole thing in basic.
[00:04:21] Gant: So good. It's so good. And it's, it's such, you know what, it it, it's hard to tell people, but like these things kind of stand the test of time in, in that aspect because storytelling is more important now than it ever was.
As a matter of fact, one of my favorite games when I, when I fly around, so, you know, we saw each other recently in Mississippi. I was in Vegas last week. I'll be in London next week. Sorry, I'll be missing you.
[00:04:47] Todd: Yeah.
[00:04:47] Gant: But one of my favorite games to play on the, the airplane is like a story based rogue style game called Shattered Pixel.
And what I love about it is that you don't need an internet connection and all you do, it’s like it's, it's sort of like turn based, and it has like a little story inside of it of what's going on. And then you could stop it any time you want, put it down, pick it up. It's exactly the last move that you had.
And and the sort of like fast paced action, you know, wild, oh my goodness, you better move faster, click faster. The person's got a faster internet connection. You know, you're not, you're not, you're not doing 60 clicks per second or whatever. It, it, it still like holds your attention for days of interest and excitement because it's telling you a story that you're a significant part in and it's adding new variations and other parts of it.
Those storybook style games I think are gonna make a pretty big comeback at some point once we've saturated what the human experience can finally handle.
[00:05:53] Todd: Yeah, exactly. And that kind of reminds me that the game you mentioned that kind of reminds me, of Zork.
[00:05:59] Gant: For. Oh, yep, yep. That's exactly right. Yeah, exactly.
[00:05:59] Todd: Yeah.
[00:06:00] Gant: Good, Good times.
[00:06:05] Todd: Yeah, definitely, definitely. I think I have an old manual left over from that, from either the first or the second one, and it's like, I love those text based games. From back in the day.
[00:06:15] Gant: Yeah
[00:06:15] Todd: Just loved them.
[00:06:16] Gant: Yeah.
[00:06:17] Todd: So
[00:06:17] Gant: I
[00:06:18] Todd: Why don't we just, go ahead?
[00:06:24] Gant: Yeah, yeah. I believe actually my, my our CTO of our company Jamon, I think he made his own version of Zork. There could be [inaudible], but I think he called it like Kroz, which was like Zork backwards. I might be messing it up. But anyway, it's super cool to recreate those masterpieces. Lots of fun.
[00:06:42] Todd: Definitely. So, let's jump into the questions shall we?
[00:06:44] Gant: Oh yeah, I'm here for the questions.
[00:06:48] Todd: Okay. , so, my first one is usually the same to everybody. How did you get started in your web development design journey? I think you covered
[00:06:53] Gant: Oh
[00:06:53] Todd: most of that, but if you got more,
[00:06:55] Gant: Yeah
[00:06:55] Todd: please tell.
[00:07:00] Gant: Yeah. So. You know, one of the things that I used to do is I was always looking for other people to nerd out with and, and that we made lots, I made lots of programs in Visual Basic.
I made lots of programs and other things. But once there was this interconnectivity, like I could build a website and other people could come to it and see it. I started learning immediately all kinds of cool stuff, and I made so many websites connected to people around the world. And that's honestly like my origin story as a nerd in New Orleans, reaching out and meeting so many people around the world has been open source and building websites.
I actually managed one website that was in a top a hundred thousand websites of, you know, all websites for a while. And it was just a, a hilarious domain name. It was called bleacheatingfreaks.com. Named after a friend of mine who said that once. I was like, that's a domain. And that's, that's just kinda what happened.
And we had contests, forums, boards you know, trivia. I even made some online flash games. Does anybody remember those? I made like four or five Bleach Eeating Freaks online flash games. It was just a treat to see people like right in the beginning, before this was a popular thing, people making videos of how to beat my flash games or getting high scores in them was super cool.
And and speaking different languages. I was like, wow, this is great. And that drew me into this interconnected world that was absolutely necessary. So that's what got me into web development by far was just the, the people.
[00:08:35] Todd: Yeah, definitely. I, I, one of the first major websites I had other than a personal site was a Dungeons and Dragon site. About
[00:08:39] Gant: Nice.
[00:08:40] Todd: this faction of wizards that exist or, I think that still do. And it had messed chords and forms and all this interactivity.
[00:08:49] Gant: Nice
[00:08:49] Todd: And it was, it was, you know, it was really fun. Like that inter interconnectivity from people all over. I remember going on AOL back in the day.
[00:09:06] Gant: Yeah man, I we're gonna scare away all your younger visitors, but oh my goodness the nostalgia. That's kinda, you know, makes telephone internet connection noise like it was perfect times.
[00:09:20] Todd: Yep. So, let's get into some questions I really wanted to ask that I have here.
[00:09:17] Gant: Uh oh
[00:09:18] Todd: So React,
[00:09:18] Gant: Uh, oh. Let’s do it.
[00:09:19] Todd: React Native.
[00:09:19] Gant: Yes, yes.
[00:09:21] Todd: What is React Native if
[00:09:24] Gant: Perfect.
[00:09:24] Todd: We have somebody that you know doesn't know. Me, I don't know a whole lot about it. And what do you use it for? What do you
[00:09:33] Gant: Yeah.
[00:09:33] Todd: What are the applications?
[00:09:43] Gant: Yeah, let's go, let's do a quicker time walk from a shorter time ago like 2009 iPhone world. There's an app for that, you know? Oh yeah. Hey, you don't be really cool If I could get a timer, a Pomodoro timer.
Oh, you'd be really cool. Is if I could do this or that. And then what happens is there's this whole world of build an app on your phone for every idea that you possibly have. And during this time there was a bunch of entrepreneurs who did a fantastic job in making a lot of money. One app was like $900 and it was just a red dot that says like, I paid $900 for this app, or something like that.
And the trick is you could show other people, like, I bought the $900 app and then of course there's a bunch of spinoffs that looked like that. And just a weird kind of time. Cuz there was just iPhones and just iOS and just objective C. And everybody was buying objective C books being like, wow, this hasn't been updated since the seventies.
What's going on here? And then of course Android came along and equalized the playing field to a degree where every single product that ever came out needed to have an iPhone and an Android phone app. And that's where we find ourselves today. The problem with that is while iOS has released you know, Swift and there's all kinds of other ways that you can write apps for iOS, you also have like this similar sort of force on the Android side trying to do Kotlin over the Java.
And so you and then honestly, there's also things like Flutter and all kinds of other languages. So there's all these options that are out there. And so you say, alright, I wanna buy an app. You know, well, you need it for both platforms. And one of the things that really kind of gets people is that gets really expensive, real fast. Apps are not cheap.
You know, in 2009 you might have found somebody who was doing it for the, the street cred or, you know, whatever they had told people to, to make starving artists work. But apps cost a lot. And to write an app twice is ridiculous. So there's a whole bunch of different solutions that people came up with on how to make this better.
And one of 'em was like, let's take all of the web and shove it into mobile. It was like phone gap, if you remember that. And
[00:11:57] Todd: Yep.
[00:11:58] Gant: Changed multiple names well, afterward, it was just a terrible feel interface. It looked and felt janky, and it was difficult. Now, of course, you could put a lot of time and effort into making it work and feel a lot better, but now you're managing two different things.
So what was the savings? And then there came all the React Native and 2015. And the idea was you already you just do it in JavaScript and then it'll render it down into Native components for you. And this one really took off because the React world, it's huge. So, people were like, oh, let's take these React developers.
They already understand React concepts and principles, and then also have them go build some Native apps and React Native. And of course, there are, the transition's not perfect, but the amount of code reuse you get between web iOS and Android, and now also Windows machines, Mac Apple tv, the, the platform independence that you're getting with the well-known language, JavaScript and React.
Like, what's the most popular language in the world? JavaScript. What's the, you know, most popular framework? Arguably, I'd say it's, you know, React. And then you're able to supply all these things to all these platforms. It not only allows you to activate your team, it also feels very good and developing it.
And it's, it's very practical and fast. And you're seeing widespread adoption of React Native, Amazon, Microsoft, Gas Buddy, Coinbase, like why not use React Native?
[00:13:40] Todd: Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. Now I have a story about that, but
[00:13:49] Gant: Yeah
[00:13:49] Todd: I'll save that until after.
[00:13:52] Gant: Okay.
[00:13:53] Todd: Because
[00:13:53] Gant: But I feel like the story could, do the story now. Go ahead.
[00:13:56] Todd: Well, I, I would, but. It, it's best that I leave it for after we go off the air.
[00:14:04] Gant: Okay. Well, what I'll say is it sounds like it might be somewhat pejorative to React Native and, and all, so everybody's trying to do this one solution for everything. Doesn't mean that it's a silver bullet, doesn't mean that it can work perfectly, and people can't screw it up.
You can screw up writing Native code and you can screw up writing JavaScript. JavaScript, however, likes to give you a foot gun with every installation. However, you, it is the language, and we are all sort of like mature JavaScript and Typescript developers now.
[00:14:39] Todd: Yeah.
[00:14:39] Gant: And so, we have a ton of protections, a ton of understanding, a ton of ways of how to test, plan and organize and make sure that we're actually are hitting the goals for accessibility, speed, performance, code reuse.
The, the trick is, I, I'll end it like this. Infinite red, we are a React Native consulting company.
[00:15:03] Todd: Yep.
[00:15:05] Gant: Half of our projects come to us and ask us to build a wonderful React Native experience for them. And half of them come with some code that someone else wrote from, I don't know, where they find these people and ask us to turn it into a wonderful React Native experience for them.
[00:15:27] Todd: Yeah.
[00:15:27] Gant: And that's how we do it. That's a lot of fun. And doing it the right way with people who are professionals rather than, oh yeah, my weekend project is now the main project for the company. Really, really gives the proper support that's necessary for doing a millions of user. It's necessary to give it the focus it deserves.
[00:15:52] Todd: Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I was actually gonna touch on that. Infinite Red does do, you know, React Native
[00:15:56] Gant: Yeah
[00:15:56] Todd: consultant like you said. So that's great.
[00:16:00] Gant: Yeah
[00:16:00] Todd: Now I know that you wanted to talk about Chain React.
[00:16:20] Gant: Yeah. Oh, absolutely.
[00:16:23] Todd: So a little, a little swing here while we're in the React domain.
[00:16:27] Gant: Yeah. Well, quite specifically, there was no React Native conference in the US and we said, let's, let's throw it.
And we threw it, and it has had the highest repeat, like people who have gone to Chain React. Kill for their next Chain React ticket. If please talk to anybody who's ever been there as a serial conference goer, I think I know what's pretty important for a conference to be thrown. You treat your, you treat, first of all, you treat your speakers absolutely right.
They, they need to have red carpet treatment. You need to treat your attendees, you know, fantastic. And then you bring everybody together in a very equal and supportive environment that is focused and friendly and safe. And you give these people the tools necessary to have a wonderful time. And every year we have a blast.
Yeah. Oh, and the next one's gonna be in May in 2023. So, we will be announcing that this week.
[00:17:15] Todd: Very cool. I'll have to ask you a few questions about that later too.
[00:17:19] Gant: Yeah.
[00:17:19] Todd: Cause
[00:17:19] Gant: Yeah, yeah. Throwing conferences is its own art for sure.
[00:17:23] Todd: Yeah.
[00:17:23] Gant: Yeah.
[00:17:24] Todd: Definitely. Definitely. I thought about doing one and, well, it was when I was still living in Maine and everybody was like, could you throw a lobster themed conference,
And I said, you know what, that's a great idea. And then I went, and I did some research, and I went, wow, that is a lot of work. And I am just, one guy.
[00:17:43] Gant: It’s lot of work and a lot of money.
[00:17:46] Todd: Yeah
[00:17:49] Gant: And you have to, to be honest, you have to have a successful conference and the money comes second. Professional conference throwers probably don't make money until they've done it with, they're running four or five conferences and they're sharing resources. Or they've done it for a long enough time, or their goals are just not to make money.
And so, our React Native conference for Chain React is quite specifically to turn around and give the experience right back to the attendees and to the speakers. And just happy to be a part of it makes it a lot easier.
It takes the pressure off because, you know that's a, that's a lot of lot of difficulty to have all those people ready for one week and, and then also trying to make like, you know, what you could make in consulting. No, it has to be about connecting people.
[00:18:43] Todd: Yeah, definitely. I prefer now speaking in and attending. So I think,
[00:18:54] Gant: Yeah.
[00:18:55] Todd: I think I'm good for right now with the, with the whole conference thing. The way it is now.
[00:19:01] Gant: Yeah.
[00:19:01] Todd: I couldn't imagine.
[00:19:02] Gant: I understand that.
[00:19:02] Todd: I, I couldn't imagine. I mean, from, from the organizers I know, you know like Pratik and Vincent.
[00:19:10] Gant: Yeah, yeah.
[00:19:12] Todd: It is a lot of work. It's a lot of tireless work. And they,
[00:19:16] Gant: Yeah.
[00:19:16] Todd: you know, they, the ones I've been to so far that, you know, they've been phenomenal.
[00:19:23] Gant: Oh, yeah. Connected events, which does which is Pratik and Vincent,
[00:19:27] Todd: Yeah
[00:19:27] Gant: Do several different conferences. They do VueConf, they do Connect.tech. They have a part in Refactr, they have a part in Devnexus.
Like they're, they're on the board of the Ajug board in Atlanta and a couple other things. They're also, they're doing one in New Orleans in 2023. All these pieces together make it just high quality fantastic. Another thing I'll say is that Magnolia, Kayla was doing Magnolia and, and her heart was in the right place.
Take care of the people that are there, make sure everybody's learning and is happy. Make sure you give them good food, good music, good tech, proper attention. And that's the formula for success for a conference. It's no small bill that comes due. It is, it has to be a passion and you have to have a very big happiness in throwing something so significant.
[00:20:20] Todd: Yeah
[00:20:20] Gant: Anybody who's throwing it for the paychecks, doing the wrong thing. right? Yeah, Definitely
[00:20:23] Todd: Right? Yeah, definitely.
[00:20:25] Gant: Not the right thing.
[00:20:25] Todd: And Magnolia was Fanta, I mean,
[00:20:30] Gant: Yeah
[00:20:30] Todd: Really, really fantastic. I mean,
[00:20:32] Gant: Yeah, yeah
[00:20:32] Todd: the lineup, the lineup was, was great. I love the single track, you know, where every
[00:20:38] Gant: I love single tracks. I love single tracks. Yeah.
[00:20:40] Todd: Everybody, everybody got the. Hopefully, hear everybody, or mostly everybody. And, and no, that was, that was great. And you know, definitely looking forward to next year.
[00:20:52] Gant: Yeah.
[00:20:52] Todd: So, with that, I, know, we're going a little rapid here with the, trying to get back and forth, but I wanna get into AI because
[00:21:03] Gant: Yep, yep.
[00:21:07] Todd: AI to me
[00:21:07] Gant: It’s an exciting topic.
[00:21:11] Todd: It is, it has, you know, I look at it and I go, you know, stuff like that is awesome. Like, you know, I can control my home with AI.
[00:21:22] Gant: Yeah.
[00:21:23] Todd: But then I, I see robotic dogs that are doing cartwheels and back flips, and I'm like our robot overlords, they, they're going to take over, so.
[00:21:35] Gant: Yeah, I for one, welcome the robot dogs. It's about time.
[00:21:38] Todd: Yeah
[00:21:39] Gant: Let the dogs have their rule
[00:21:43] Todd: Yeah. So, you do a lot of AI stuff.
[00:21:46] Gant: Yes, yes.
[00:21:46] Todd: And I've seen, I've seen you give talks about it and
[00:21:50] Gant: Yeah.
[00:21:50] Todd: You, you're, you're really, I wanna, I wanna say you're very passionate about it
[00:21:57] Gant: Yeah.
[00:21:57] Todd: and you're very into it. What is your favorite thing about AI in that, in, in that space?
[00:22:03] Gant: Oh, well, I, I, I'm just gonna activate everybody's nerd brain and say that to a certain degree that you're able to do things that have never been done before. And for anybody who's been around as long as we have sort of remembers the experience of like, oh, I've done this, or I've created that.
You know if I were to write the code to make a rotating cube or animation or something like that. All that has been done for a long time. The math's been figured out. It's been in games since the nineties, and while it's really exciting and interesting to really understand the linear algebra behind these things or any of those kinds of concepts. There's also, it, it's, you're just sort of in the middle of the road of a large like math textbook that you'll never, ever, ever, ever be able to solve or even like improve.
Whereas if you take a look at the edges, the cutting edge you can take one technology from over here and tie it over to a technology over here and create something that nobody thought would be a really great idea until it's absolutely connected. And its sort of like the advent of like, maps were added to phones, right?
Maps were added to phones pretty early on, you know, it wasn't a complicated thing. They get Google maps or tie all these things in with their APIs, but then Uber and Lyft came out, what, like five or six years after
[00:23:24] Todd: Yeah
[00:23:24] Gant: they were there. Like someone. I hate cabs they never show up. And I wanna see where they are, and wouldn't it be cool if we shared that service out?
What if I glue these three things together and create something new? And then there's a billion-dollar industry where AI is, it’s that sort of place where I actually have more ideas of things that have never been and totally could be than I have time to make. And so, this makes like, sort of like a calling out to my nerd the nerd heard, just people.
There are so many things. If you want to memorize and measure different sorting algorithms on different platforms with different sort of JavaScript engines, there's a place for you to stay inside there and get that information and solve that. It's really fun stuff to do. Don't get me wrong I love, you know, getting schooled on a concept and being able to say like, oh, this is this linear algebra concept, or something like that.
But if I want to like I did with React Native, create a Nicholas Cage detector and find somebody in the audience wearing a Nicholas Cage mask, that's hilarious, fun, interesting. And something that nobody's ever done before. And I could come up with it, create it for talk and make it, and, you know, doing that and React Native in 2018, nobody had seen anything like that.
And so it was really, really, really cool. So, I'd say like my favorite part about the AI is that one, it's exciting. You get to build something that's never been done before. And two, I like democratized AI talking about the robot overlords. That only happens if a few people have control over all the AI.
[00:25:14] Todd: Right.
[00:25:14] Gant: And if we all have some part in AI, then we get things wonderful, like being able to turn on and off our lights and add all these features and do all kinds other stuff. But if you don't then, you know, imagine if it was not public information, the deep fakes were possible. Can you imagine that if that was done behind closed doors, what people could do with that kind of power and that kind of evil?
[00:25:41] Todd: Yeah.
[00:25:42] Gant: Democratizing AI is a second part that's really important for me.
[00:25:46] Todd: Right. Okay. That makes me think about, oh, was it called thispersondoesnotexist.com
[00:25:54] Gant: Yeah. This person does not exist. They have, this bedroom does not exist. This foot does not exist. It kind of got a little weird with it
[00:26:03] Todd: Yeah. I can't go I can't let the podcast go into that realm, but
[00:26:07] Gant: Yeah, yeah. Let's, let's stay away from this foot does not exist. You might get weird flags or a whole listenership you didn't really want.
[00:26:14] Todd: Yeah, exactly. So, so what do you think benefits of AI are when it comes to helping people?
[00:26:24] Gant: Oh, so many.
[00:26:25] Todd: Yeah.
[00:26:25] Gant: It's when, it's, what's wonderful about it is that you know, in a certain way when the phone came out, people who were visually impaired there's this wonderful story I'm, I'm gonna have to send you a link to it, but back in Ruby Motion days Austin this name of the gentleman did this one app where he would point his camera at something and it was supposed to tell this guy's brand new phone and he could tell him what the color of that thing was.
And so he was super excited. He downloaded, he did it, and he goes, he points to up and it was like black. And he's like, okay, points something else’s black. And he put something else’s black. And then he is like, alright, I knew this was too good to be true. You know, it was really sad. And then he. It was nine 30 at night and he's blind, so all the lights were off.
So he went and turned the lights on, and it was like red and yellow, and he is like, no, it was such an amazing moment, you know?
[00:27:18] Todd: Yeah.
[00:27:18] Gant: And then you know, imagine improving that even farther, saying like, I see an apple, you know, that's a $5 bill, especially here in the States where all our bills are the same damn size. Cuz why not?
[00:27:31] Todd: Yeah.
[00:27:32] Gant: You know, that's this, that's that. Helping people with all kinds of stuff. I, I think vision, computer vision is a, is a beautiful thing. Auditory is gonna be even more impressive. I personally have trouble identifying when a bunch of people are talking. What the person in front of me is saying, I accidentally listen to everybody.
It'd be amazing if I could actually, now they have earphones that do not noise canceling, but directional noise canceling where they cancel out the, the sounds of people or like they picks up the, what's being picked up over here is subtracted from what you're looking at. It's, I mean, that's something I need like yesterday.
[00:28:11] Todd: Yeah.
[00:28:11] Gant: Have you ever see me at a bar or at an after party at a conference? I'm just nodding my head like; I don't know what anybody's saying anymore. It's too many noises.
[00:28:22] Todd: Yeah.
[00:28:23] Gant: It's just, there's an infinite supply of tasks that do not make sense for a person to do and absolutely make sense for a computer to do.
Just like it always has accounting sheets and spreadsheets of figuring these things out and doing those numbers. Humans always made mistakes. Spreadsheets don't. And now you can think at an executive level with every project you do because there's a thing called spreadsheets. Now imagine that you you want to watch a conf you, you wanna watch some cool talks about a particular framework from Magnolia JS, right?
Wouldn't it be cool if you could just go in and type that framework's name. It went back, found all the moments in all the videos, over two days’ worth of material and flagged when they were, and gave how long they talked about it, the sentiment in their voice and in their terminology, whether it was positive or negative.
I mean, it's just,
[00:29:18] Todd: Yeah.
[00:29:19] Gant: it's just a, you can imagine way more than it could ever possibly create. And each of these things are like a spinoff startup. Just like, just like in the days when there's an app for that, that's where AI is. There's an AI for that. Yeah.
[00:29:33] Todd: Yeah. So, let's go to the other side of the coin.
[00:29:37] Gant: Yeah.
[00:29:37] Todd: And potentially damaging or harmful ways that AI could affect people.
[00:29:45] Gant: Yes.
[00:29:47] Todd: How do we as professionals, as people that are pretty much behind, you know getting these things with algorithms and all that, and we've seen like Facebook and how Facebook was,
[00:30:05] Gant: Yes, yeah.
[00:30:05] Todd: and even to the same extent Twitter and how that damaging that was.
[00:30:10] Gant: Yeah.
[00:30:10] Todd: How do we, if not eradicate, minimize the impact of damaging AI.
[00:30:19] Gant: Yeah. The, the, the most important part is that we all have some transparency, and that's part of what I was talking about, just like you asking this question right now, that is the answer. There needs to be a person in the room asking these questions.
And I can tell you in all the terrible decisions that have ever been made, there's not been, there's been a bunch of people thinking about profits and no one sitting there and even asking the question. And the problem is when only a few people know about something, only a few people have the control over it.
Only a few people have this. The, if it doesn't affect them, then the ethics are never part of it. We see this constantly where, where people are blind to what their privilege is and what their ability is and what their sort of, their situation is compared to everybody else. And so, one of the things I think is it needs to have more conversation.
It needs to be more involved and we need to have people who say, I don't feel comfortable doing that when you're implementing an algorithm for Facebook, whether it's AI or not, and they're saying like, this is gonna cause people to stay here for much longer and this is what we're optimized for. And we're gonna tag them with someone they hate, with a poli political view that they dislike, so that we draw them back into the app.
And this is called the insert cute name here. There needs to be a moment of saying, wait a second, I don't know if I wanna be a part of this. Right. And the unfortunate part is the Stanley Milgram experiments from back in the, I think fifties or so, show that people just end up usually listening to authority.
So when the authority tells them in the Stanley Milgram experiment, it was, apply an electric shock to this person. They just did it. You know, they didn't think about whether or not it was a good thing or a bad thing or whether or not they were okay. And there's a saying, I forget the saying, but it's a beautiful one that says every snowflake in the avalanche says it wasn't their fault.
Right? We need more authority figures, we need more knowledgeable people, and we need more informed decision makers in the rooms, in the conversations, knowing what's happening and being able to call people out. And I love when I see that happen that creates this sort of power balance. Of, hey, you need to, you have a ton of bias in your data.
Like, what are you doing? They go, go punch them in the face. They need that. They really do. Your data doesn't work for any culture other than the one you trained it on, like.
[00:33:09] Todd: Right.
[00:33:10] Gant: And you wanna release this to the world. Is that really the vision you wanna put out there? And without people saying that, we would still have terrible AI saying racist things.
[00:33:21] Todd: Yeah. Yeah. The biggest thing that surpri and, and it really was a surprise at the time. 2018, I think it was, Josh Clark was giving a talk in Boston and he showed a clip of the the sensors you put under your hands, under the sink in the, in the public restrooms. Right?
[00:33:53] Gant: Oh, my goodness. Yeah.
[00:33:54] Todd: And the white guy puts his hand underneath and it's okay. Black man puts his hand underneath, nothing.
[00:34:02] Gant: Yeah, yeah. That, that, that, that is, so we're in a world now where it's not programmatic, it's data. Data is the new oil, and AI is the new electricity. And what happens is people are finding and having to call out extreme data bias.
And all data don't get wrong has bias. And don't get me wrong, if you do a weekend project where you're doing paper, rock, scissors with your webcam and all it can do is detect you or like maybe you know you and on your background or that you train it on a bunch of different backgrounds, the best I could do is still train it how to see this old white dude's hands. So, the truth is
[00:34:50] Todd: Yeah
[00:34:50] Gant: the data is where the AI gets, its its value. And I could build a fun weekend project and show it on a stage, but the truth is if I wanna release that out anywhere, I have the caveat of saying like, this is what's, you know, if I wanted to sell it right? Now, I'm under an extreme obligation to do proper data selection and proper bias detection and properly anomaly detection and proper all, all kinds of things.
I, I'm, I'm, I'm trying to at that point, I need to give that and what if only a few people have access to the data? What if only a few people, like, who are the data mediums can create those things?
[00:35:35] Todd: Yeah
[00:35:35] Gant: Then the only people who can create new AI will be them.
[00:35:39] Todd: Yeah
[00:35:39] Gant: I do applaud companies like IBM who released a diversity data set for free to the community of 60,000 diverse ethnic faces of all kinds of different shades, colors, and lightings.
What a wonderful thing for IBM to go ahead, collect, handle, and then give away for free. Thank you. Like, that's, that's the kind of stuff we need. That's the magnanimous movements we need for, for, for AI to, to move in the right direction, but without our pressure. Do you think we would've ever seen anything like that?
They'd be like, no. May have them spend millions of dollars to go collect that.
[00:36:15] Todd: Yeah, yeah, definitely. So, with, you know, this, you know, good, bad, you know, my brain always goes to when you know me, and its always accessibility.
[00:36:35] Gant: Yeah.
[00:36:37] Todd: So, and you know, my big pet peeve right now are overlays.
[00:36:42] Gant: Yes, yes.
[00:36:43] Todd: So we see them all the time. Matter of fact, I went and looked I went to look up the menu for Nobu Scottsdale, cuz I plan on bringing my girlfriend there for our anniversary.
[00:36:57] Gant: Yeah.
[00:36:57] Todd: So she's, she's gonna find this out when she does the transcripts. And
[00:37:01] Gant: But you gotta go soon
[00:37:03] Todd: They have Oh, they have an overlay now.
[00:37:06] Gant: Oh yeah. Wow. Right.
[00:37:07] Todd: And so, I'm torn between, alright, do I go or do I think, nah, I don't go because they're using an overlay.
[00:37:18] Gant: Yeah.
[00:37:19] Todd: Now, the inaccessibility of these overlays is it, it, they put up more barriers.
[00:37:30] Gant: Someone's doing a cash grab.
[00:37:31] Todd: Yeah
[00:37:31] Gant: Of course. Yeah.
[00:37:32] Todd: Yeah. It's all marketing. Definitely.
[00:37:34] Gant: Yeah. Marketing cash grab is disgusting. I see it all the time and everything. I mean, like, you could see it at different levels of someone's conning people out on Facebook marketplace to someone's created a pseudo business and has all the hype words and all the connections to sell it all the way up to I don't know, Dogecoin. I have no idea what the top would be, but it is, it is
[00:38:01] Todd: Right
[00:38:01] Gant: it is difficult because they're, you know, remove ethics and you have people like this.
[00:38:09] Todd: So, my question is, how accessible can AI be?
[00:38:16] Gant: Yeah.
[00:38:17] Todd: And I can imagine it can be really accessible in the right hands.
[00:38:23] Gant: Yes. As a matter of fact, I had this conversation at Magnolia with a few people about how Microsoft's actually leading this ability of adding alt text to images automatically and kind of, but, but the real winner, honestly, I, if Twitter would've just embraced accessibility.
They drive me nuts. I can't tell you how many times I've tweeted out a photo and then gone, Whoops. And then what do you, there’s nothing you can do. That's it forever. You can't go at alt text or anything like that. And it's like, okay now I've got 50 likes on it.
Do I delete that and try again? It's, it's, it's such a terrible decision. And then they have that little flag inside the app for only some people to stop you before you hit send. But I think like, wouldn't be cool if Twitter tried to tell you what's in a photo and they had the AI to try to do it. And, and here's the thing.
This is how to implement AI. It's very important. You have to integrate and work and test an AB test and, and, and manage and call the data. You have to. So, if you went to hit tweet on a photo and it says, hey, we're gonna add this text right here as the alt text for the photo. Do you wanna change anything or is this good?
I think anything can establish formats and paradigms and ways that these things kind of happen and, and kinda begin. And the person could go in and edit it and then say, oh yeah. Like, thanks, thanks for this and you're 90% right. Let me just adjust less, last part of this. And then they hit tweet.
Guess what? Twitter just got gold amazing data. Not only did they get alt texts, more searchability and a whole benefit from there, but what they also could have gotten was my edit to it. Improving their engine. And if you had millions of people doing this and just like, you know, whether or not they modified the text or not, you would have a constantly improving, extremely vital image to image description, AI created from that.
The, the data from that would be immense. You know, probably as a service you could probably sell that, you know, many, many, many times over and improve the stock value,
[00:40:35] Todd: Yeah
[00:40:35] Gant: the usability, the searchability of everything on Twitter. And that would be a wonderful way to do it. How not to do these things is like they had this I think they tried to like, remove porn off of Tumblr.
And, and what they did was they just added the best AI they could to it. And it had false positives, but it was just an absolute jerk. It was like a person would like upload a toaster and it was like, not today chump, your toaster is very pornographic, not going anywhere.
[00:41:07] Todd: Right
[00:41:07] Gant: And people were like, this sucks. I'm not using this. This isn't connecting me. This is terrible. What a, what a disgusting story.
[00:41:15] Todd: Yeah.
[00:41:15] Gant: Compare that against, and I'll just do one last example of, of of how to do this right is nextdoor.com did a toxicity detector. And you, you're like, you know what I like ducks, so I don't care what you think, jerk.
And then you type that, you go to hit send and then it goes, hi, we're, we're about to post what you said, but just remember, these are your neighbors and maybe you wanna evaluate that before you go ahead and hit post here. You, you can override us. No problem. And you could say like, Oh, you're right. That'd kind of be in a jerk.
Thank you, nextdoor.com. Or you could say like, no man, burn it down, and you click it anyway. And either way, whatever I click. Such great data for that platform. Either I improved it, or I don't care about it when it comes to ducks, or I'm a jerk and I should have like my visibility restricted at some point after some manual review.
All kinds of things can happen. That's how you should be implementing this to make everybody's life better. Not to dehumanize, you know, click three to speak to a human. That's not what AI is meant to be for. It's meant to help you get you the right information as quickly as possible and help you out. And then I'll get off my soapbox, but yeah, for accessibility, it needs to be done right?
It for, for for connectivity and for for friendliness and for all these features that they're implementing, putting up these disgusting barriers and doing money grabs. I mean, hey, next door I click burn it to the ground.
[00:42:56] Todd: Yeah, right, right. Yeah. Because the more I've read about AI, and the more I've looked at it, it can be useful for, you know, it can,
[00:43:08] Gant: Right
[00:43:08] Todd: it can make things more accessible for people. So the the
[00:43:12] Gant: Right
[00:43:12] Todd: tutor example you use is great because the only, the, the issue I currently have with that is it's an option.
[00:43:21] Gant: Yeah. I wish that they would, that should be on by default.
[00:43:25] Todd: Yes.
[00:43:26] Gant: You're talking about the feature that says, hey, you're about to send a picture with no alt
[00:43:31] Todd: Yes.
[00:43:31] Gant: I, I don't even have that option. It's not even shipped to me on my phone. I, I constantly accidentally forget because their UI drives you to quickly tweet, read and interact.
[00:43:44] Todd: Yeah.
[00:43:44] Gant: Cause that's where their metrics are.
[00:43:46] Todd: Yeah.
[00:43:46] Gant: And that's what's measured, that's what's managed. This other thing is a and, and, and all too often, accessibility is an afterthought.
[00:43:55] Todd: Yeah. That, yeah, exactly. So, to a, to a, the point that you said, you know, you, you tweeted out and it's like, oh no,
[00:44:07] Gant: Yeah
[00:44:07] Todd: there is way around that.
[00:44:10] Gant: Oh okay.
[00:44:10] Todd: And that is to reply to that tweet you tweeted out and put alt text and then your alt text in another tweet following that one up.
[00:44:20] Gant: Okay.
[00:44:21] Todd: Because that works, that works just as good as kind of like a safety valve, because I've done it before.
[00:44:30] Gant: Okay.
[00:44:30] Todd: I, I, I've, I've tweeted out a picture and went, Oh no. But I follow it up with alt text and I, you know, Todd's got a lobster roll in his hands and he’s eating it.
[00:44:42] Gant: Yeah. And, and I wonder, like, I would love to hear from a community of people saying like like that does work or that doesn't work. Cuz in my brain, I think of a situation where you go, oh no, this, you know, they never see the reply because they're just like, that's how, how, you know, that that goes out.
But also, I'd love to hear like, hey, thanks for doing this. It's, it what’s funny about it is it's putting the, it's like recycling, it’s putting the onus in the wrong places when the system itself that we could put together could be a lot smarter, a lot nicer, and a lot kinder.
[00:45:18] Todd: Yep, definitely. So, I use, and let me bring it up here. There is a tool that I've been kind of experimenting with on Twitter called Alt Text Utilities. I will tweet this out later on.
[00:45:37] Gant: Yes.
[00:45:38] Todd: It is. Says here, various utilities for helping screen reader users and folks writing alt text. So, I have tinkered around with this when I see a picture that doesn't have all texts. The issue with it picks up if there's text in the photograph. It picks everything up
[00:46:03] Gant: Yeah.
[00:46:03] Todd: Puts it.
[00:46:04] Gant: There's a little OCR for you. Yeah.
[00:46:07] Todd: Pictures that don't have any text. So, for instance, one I did the other day was a picture of the space shuttle. And it came back with the the net, the number letter combination that they usually had for space shuttles, and then the name of the space shuttle.
But that was it. And then other pictures, there was a picture of an outdoor scene that came back with nothing.
[00:46:38] Gant: Yeah, that's, that's,
[00:46:40] Todd: yeah. And another one with a file name.
[00:46:43] Gant: You know what's really funny? There's a plugin. So, so what happens is if you upload something to Facebook, they actually have this internal AI and tagging system that they place inside there.
But I think it's part of the retention system where where it says like two people, people smiling sunset or something like that. Kinda like just it gets nouns that are inside the image and can actually derive a bunch of nouns. And there's a, there's a Chrome plugin that will actually like, show you what Facebook has derived in there and, and pull it out of the, the, the tags.
And it's pretty interesting to, to get that. But what's funny is there's so much information you could get from these, you know, if, if it were worked on, if it were active, if it were focal, I imagine you could get a pretty decent system. Without, without a, a significant amount of effort.
[00:47:38] Todd: Yeah.
[00:47:38] Gant: I mean, I'd say this saying specifically that I know Microsoft's working on exactly this, so they might be looking to sell something like that pretty soon that does exactly this and, and selling it almost as a service for websites that just want to go ahead and, and it depends on how that's implemented.
Here's a moment, Here's a moment for you, Todd. One person in a company says the accessibility people are after me again. Well, guess we'll buy that stupid service from Microsoft, and we'll run it on all the images, and then we'll just go ahead and embed it and stick it in there. Okay? All right, everybody get off my back.
Or, you know, like, like, like that's the wrong way to, to, you know, just they're shoving all this stuff in there. At least you got them to do that. But as a better system on all this is like. Having it where it runs directly for, you know, like as you're uploading the image, allowing them to edit it, you know improving all of this using it in a multi-faced pipeline of, of improvement.
That would be, that'd be what I'd like to see.
[00:48:40] Todd: Yeah, definitely.
[00:48:42] Gant: It just depends on who's in that room saying like whether or not they want to, they're trying to make money faster when they have to spend this much budget or how they're going to implement that.
[00:48:52] Todd: Yeah. Yep. So the TensorFlow book.
[00:48:57] Gant: Oh yeah.
[00:48:58] Todd: I've gotten a little bit into it.
[00:49:01] Gant: Yep
[00:49:01] Todd: and I hope I get vacation coming up. I hope to dive into it a lot. Cuz it's very interesting. So, when I heard you speak at Connect.Tech
[00:49:10] Gant: Oh yeah. Wow. Feels like forever ago now. Yeah,
[00:49:14] Todd: It does. Yeah. Let's talk about TensorFlow JS book.
[00:49:17] Gant: Yeah.
[00:49:17] Todd: What is TensorFlow and
[00:49:19] Gant: Oh yeah.
[00:49:20] Todd: How do we apply it? How do we use, where would, where, where do we use that?
[00:49:27] Gant: Yeah. So, so the quick part of this is that there's a bunch of AI frameworks out there. No reason to write everything from scratch. If you wanna write everything from scratch. There's a wonderful course from Stanford teaching you all the math from scratch.
Lots and lots of work just to go ahead and get to the beginning. And we see this with programming all the time. Then you get frameworks. Frameworks help you do all the common things, and then have little weird hooks to allow you to exploratory things. And Google's framework for machine learning and AI is TensorFlow.
And because they're Google, they can afford to go ahead and do this. And not only on the back end with Python and TensorFlow and all that stuff, they could also write one they'll run on the client side, and that's TensorFlow JS. And so that's what I wrote a book on. And we, it's, it's really cool because you could, you know, anytime you bring something to JavaScript, it means it can kind of go everywhere.
[00:50:22] Todd: Yeah.
[00:50:22] Gant: You could stick it in React Native, you could stick it in a website, you could stick it all kinds of stuff. So, I generally enjoy that. I have, I have my this is it.
Gant holds up his book Learning TensorFlow.js
They, they, I told them I wanted to reptile, they gave me a turtle. I was like, sure, that's no problem. So, it's TensorFlow.js, and then it's also been translated to Chinese.
Gant holds up hi book Learning TensorFlow.js in Chinese language
[00:50:41] Todd: Chinese, yeah.
[00:50:42] Gant: So, you've got Chinese and English. I think Japanese is coming soon as well too. So super cool. If you're a JavaScript developer and you're interested in doing some of the stuff that we've even talked about or wanna come up with a bunch of ideas that are really, really, really cool you should definitely check out that book.
[00:51:01] Todd: Yeah. I'm looking to, so I was telling a few people I like to go, when I go to a conference, I like to go to a talk that I have no clue about. Right?
[00:51:13] Gant: Yeah. It's fun.
[00:51:14] Todd: That was one of them. When I went to your, I was like, you know what, I, I do the accessibility talks. I'm going to go see Gant and
[00:51:24] Gant: yeah.
[00:51:26] Todd: The, the, the stuff you did, on, on the screen live there. It was, it was great. And I was like, alright, I'll take, I'll shoot my shot when you said tweet out something. And
[00:51:40] Gant: yeah.
[00:51:41] Todd: People will win the book and lucky, lucky me.
[00:51:44] Gant: yeah.
[00:51:45] Todd: As one of those people. So, thank you for the book by the way. Thank you for
[00:51:49] Gant: You’re welcome.
[00:51:49] Todd: Yeah. And I'm looking forward to just like absorbing that and going, okay, I'm gonna,
[00:51:56] Gant: yeah.
[00:51:56] Todd: I'm gonna see what I can do with this.
[00:51:58] Gant: So, it's really fun. In chapter two, you start to like I think we write a truck identifier, and it's really easy. That's a chapter two. It's like, how do tell if there's a truck in this photo or not.
[00:52:10] Todd: Yeah.
[00:52:11] Gant: That's super cool. And then, you know, I go through quite an adventure. I don't ease off the, the math as much as, you know, like you don't have to be a PhD, you just have to have a high school level math skills. And then I, I throw you in a little bit, like, like, hey, let's do a let's do a recommendation engine.
You know, let's do a recommendation engine. I think we did in like chapter three or something. Music recommendation engine. And that is a little math and, and how to do that. But
[00:52:42 Todd: Yeah.
[00:52:42] Gant: I, you know, hopefully I make it fun and exciting along the way. And you just build some really cool stuff. And I really, really enjoy the sort of like the practical application of, of detecting stuff, identifying it, putting it out there putting boxes around it.
You know, I think when like chapter four we, we, we detect pet's faces so cute I could do that all day.
[00:53:08] Todd: Yeah, yeah.
[00:53:10] Gant: Yeah.
[00:53:10] Todd: Looking forward to, to reading the book.
[00:53:12] Gant: Yeah.
[00:53:12] Todd: So now I gotta ask the tough questions.
[00:53:15] Gant: Please do. I love them.
[00:53:17] Todd: Okay, first one is, tell me more about this collecting coins that are not coins thing.
[00:53:22] Gant: Oh, okay. All right, so now we're getting into it. Now you learn, actually you're the first person I've told about this, so I don't know how this happened, but I got a hold of some weird coins that aren't really kind of any kind of currency. And I was like, that's funny. And I gave them to my daughter and then I saw there was some more, and then I, I, I gave away some cryptocurrency to my nephews and I gave them like a little Bitcoin with it, like a little silver, actual Bitcoin and a little different style of coins for the cryptocurrencies they had.
Cuz it's virtual, they don't care. So, I gave 'em like this little coin and then I, each time I did something like that, I kind of just got one for myself, you know? I was like, ah, I want one too, you know? Now I have a treasure chest. And I don't know what happened to me, but I just keep seeing coins that aren't real coins here and there.
Like they're not, they don't have like any real experience like the Hogwarts coins, you know, like they have the, the galleon and the different sizes. You can get 'em from Harry Potter World. And I have those, I have, I have some Dungeons and Dragons coins that you can use if you have. And so now I've got this treasure chest and it's got the weirdest collection of coins ever.
I have to have a hundred crazy coins. I promise you. They're really weird.
[00:54:52] Todd: Yeah.
[00:54:52] Gant: I have a Deadpool coin. Oh, I had a friend of mine send me a challenge coin. He didn't know anything about this. He was like, oh yeah, I'm just sending you a FBI challenge coin since I'm in Washington. And I was like, thanks. So now I have a cha, I have challenge coins.
I have everything I have. It's ridiculous. So, I'll just say that if you're ever walking around and you see a coin as the souvenir that's not, doesn't have any like real legitimate currency. Pick one up for Gant
[00:55:28] Todd: I will remember that in my travel. Definitely. Definitely. I, now that I think about it, jogging my memory real quick. I think I've run into a few.
[00:55:36] Gant: Well, who makes these and why?
[00:55:38] Todd: I, yeah.
[00:55:39] Gant: Why am I keeping them?
[00:55:43] Todd: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:55:44] Gant: Oh, my goodness.
[00:55:45] Todd: That's interesting. That is.
[00:55:46] Gant: But I, I do have a treasure chest and it's full of really weird one. I have one with like Super Mario on it, I love, And here's the other thing. When you've got a treasure chest full of weird coins, it only takes two glasses of wine before you're like, y'all ready to see my coin collection? And you're like, oh, here he goes again.
[00:56:04] Todd: Right?
[00:56:05] Gant: Take a look at this one. What the hell is this? Is that an Aztec coin? I dunno.
[00:56:12] Todd: Yeah.
[00:56:14] Gant: Sure. Yeah.
[00:56:14] Todd: That’s great.
[00:56:15] Gant: I don't think I could ever bring it anywhere.
[00:56:16] Todd: Yeah
[00:56:16] Gant: I just continue to accumulate it. So that's me.
[00:56:20] Todd: So here's another one. Another question for you.
[00:56:24] Gant: Yeah.
[00:56:24] Todd: When I'm in, when I am in New Orleans, and we go out for dinner.
[00:56:29] Gant: Yeah.
[00:56:30] Todd: Cause I'm gonna make this a reality at some point soon.
[00:56:35] Gant: Sounds like a plan.
[00:56:36] Todd: What are the top three places you're gonna bring me for a great meal?
[00:56:41] Gant: For, for what kind of food?
[00:56:43] Todd: Could be anything.
[00:56:45] Gant: Oh, my goodness. So, first thing I'll say is a location-based answer will be Long Frenchman will probably hit something like Snug Harbor or something like that. The steaks good, it's not gonna be great. The food's all gonna be fantastic. Southern, fried, delicious, yummy.
The drinks are gonna put you on your ass. And then we're gonna go outside. We're gonna walk and we're gonna look at art because New Orleans is a city where people can actually be an artist and make a living. And then we're gonna keep listening to music from each bar until we hear something that we like, some bluesy or something, whatever.
And then that's the bar we're gonna go into and we're gonna continue to drink. So Snug Harbor simply because of where it's located. Just a great spot right in the heart of everything. Secondly, we have this we actually have some pretty crazy Cajun sushi.
[00:57:35] Todd: Okay.
[00:57:35] Gant: There's, there's like, you rent out the whole sushi restaurant with 12 people, little hole in the wall place.
And that's a, that's a night in and of itself. That's a start. That's how you start a night off. You get some nice Cajun sushi; you get 12 flights of Nigiri and different types of sushi and sake. I don't even, they, they do like things with filo dough that should have never been done before. I love it so much.
[00:58:00] Todd: Okay.
[00:58:01] Gant: That's another one. And then there's a wonderful restaurant here called Brigtsen's with just some of the best, some of the best food. And I love going to Brigtsen’s and I'd say sometimes Brigtsen and the actual owner does this special exclusive sitting in the kitchen cook for 10 or 12 people, kind of like thing where he explains where he came up with the ideas and he talks about it, and he cooks it right in front of you.
And he makes all like, you know, 10 or 12 of you at dinner, your wine glass never sees the bottom. Somebody's filling it up magically speaking of Hogwarts, right. And then you just, oh, just the food. You're talking to Frank Brigtsen himself, and he, he's cooking dinner for you. That's of course another pricey ticket item but I mean come on.
[00:58:53] Todd: Yeah.
[00:58:54] Gant: That, that's the kind of memories that you think about when you're on your deathbed, not the, you know, couple hundred bucks that it cost you to go ahead and get it. That's what we're gonna do. We're gonna do those things and then we'll go to Commander's Palace for 25 cent martinis. You can watch me drink them.
And then and then I'll, I'll foll over. I will say that New Orleans is very alcohol centric. That's, that's, that's the dangerous part. I, I will have to recall most of what I said. Cause I know you won't partake in that. Just remember, you'll have to carry me along and tell me what we did that night.
[00:59:28] Todd: Alright, hey, I'm here for you. I'm here for you. Right?
[00:59:32] Gant: I appreciate. Hey, the next crazy coin I'm gonna add is a five-year sober coin. I guess. This city will drown you if you're not careful. That's the most, the food. Everything's just, it's amazing place. It's amazing place, but it's heavily tied into everything that we do. Even our tech outings here in New Orleans, which are very small bubble, it’s hard to be a nerd here.
[00:59:56] Todd: Yeah.
[00:59:57] Gant: They're at bars. So,
[00:59:59] Todd: I, I have been to New Orleans before it, it was during
[01:00:03] Gant: Do you remember it?
[01:00:04] Todd: Those, No. No.
[01:00:10] Gant: Yeah, yeah. That's our superpower there.
[01:00:14] Todd: Yeah. That's the, that's the gray area.
[01:00:17] Gant: Yeah.
[01:00:18] Todd: Oh, part of, part of the gray area in my life.
[01:00:21] Gant: Well, we'll give you, we'll give you the, the food besides that. And so, like the way I said there is the suggestions. We, we could adjust those to be less drink centric, of course.
But it's just, it's hard to extract that, just that specific part. It's almost like everything's paired with music, art.
[01:00:40] Todd: Yeah.
[01:00:40] Gant: The whole vibe
[01:00:42] Todd: Yeah.
[01:00:42] Gant: is not meant to be removed surgically. It's almost like you'd have to, you'd have to abstain at the right points, which is how I've survived here so long, is to know when to say I'll have a glass of water.
[01:00:54] Todd: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I, I don't think if I had moved, if I had ever moved down there at that time.
[01:01:01] Gant: Yeah
[01:01:02] Todd: I don't think I would've survived.
[01:01:04] Gant: Oh yeah.
[01:01:05] Todd: So, yeah. I get what you’re saying.
[01:01:05] Gant: No, we, we, I get you. I've grown up here, so I have the antibodies
[01:01:12] Todd: Yeah. Yep. So, here's the point where I get to the three questions that I ask everybody.
[01:01:21] Gant: All right.
[01:01:21] Todd: Short answer, long answer, doesn't matter.
[01:01:25] Gant: Yeah
[01:01:25] Todd: Here's the first one. What about the web these days excites you and keeps you excited in what you do?
[01:01:32] Gant: Let's see. Most exciting thing with the web today, I think is the instant sort of communication that it's creating.
And by that, I mean, you used to have to like go buy a particular headset to, to do 3D or to be in like a 3D world. Now you've got that sort of like a website. It's a link away. You used to have to say like, hey, download this game and now WebGL, it's like right there. It's like a, it's a link away and it's kind of old news, but it's getting better and better and better.
Webcam access, location access. All the cool things that computers do is turning into instant access via the web. And that's super awesome. And like I said, like when, when I do the stuff with AI, I like to do it with the webcam instantly. You know, like, I like to create something immediately and then get that feedback loop of, of seeing like if I did make a truck detector, you do it, you know, if you could do a tutorial, it'll be like code and how to get it on an image.
But you know, in my book we could do it and you could hook it up to a webcam and then you could, you know, by chapter six you could set up a camera out front your house to let you know when someone gets too close to your car. You know, like,
[01:02:53] Todd: Yeah
[01:02:53] Gant: and that's instant. I can send that link to everybody and everybody has that app. So I'd have to say the instant connectivity.
[01:03:00] Todd: Yeah. If there were one thing you could change about the web that we know today, what would that be?
[01:03:09] Gant: Ooh. That's a great question. And I think that I will say that I kind of buy into the concept, not the application, but the, the concept of web three.
You know, that free access, nobody's able to restrict no one's able to say like, oh, my website's gonna load faster than this one because I'm the ISP or anything like that. That sort of free exchange of information that's promised by web three, I know that might be eating those words. And web three is going through all kinds of growing pains.
Everything that's really cool goes through growing pains. So I'd have to say that.
[01:03:55] Todd: Okay. Favorite part of front-end development design. Anything else? In your field, related to your field that you really like the most, that you nerd out over?
[01:04:06] Gant: I love building stupid examples of things. You know, it's not so much to make a chart library.
It's gotta be like the chart library's gotta have a graph of ducks versus horses or something fun like it, it just, the silly examples part of it is, speaks to my sophomore humor heart. So, I love demos. I love keeping the web silly. I love silly examples. And, and you'll see that even in some of the libraries that we do.
I, I put a lot of jokes in my book. I put a lot of jokes in my talks. I put a lot of jokes in my open source.
[01:04:43] Todd: Yeah. Variety is the spice of life, so.
[01:04:47] Gant: Yes, it is. I said, but nothing can beat the spice of Blue India in Atlanta, the best Indian food any of us have ever had.
[01:04:58] Todd: So, yes. Oh yeah, because so when I was down for Refactr, definitely had to hit Blue India.
[01:05:06] Gant: You went back?
[01:05:07] Todd: I, I went back and oh,
[01:05:09] Gant: It was just as good?
[01:05:10] Todd: I had, I had that thousand yard stare again.
[01:05:15] Gant: Can't wait. I've heard that, the so, I'll, I'll be comparing that against London. I'll go London.
[01:05:20] Todd: Yes.
[01:05:21] Gant: And I will try the food there and if their Indian food can beat Blue India in Atlanta, I'll let you know.
[01:05:29] Todd: Yeah, yeah. Because I definitely need to know that. Now, I also found out, and I can't remember who tweeted it at me, but there is a place that does lobster rolls.
[01:05:46] Gant: Ooh. All right.
[01:05:48] Todd: In the area of the venue that I'll be at, I believe, or, or pretty close by the vicinity, I will definitely have to track that down and I'll get.
[01:05:59] Gant: Yeah. Share that with me.
[01:06:00] Todd: I’ll get that to you.
[01:06:01] Gant: Yeah. Share that. I need to see.
[01:06:03] Todd: That I'm very
[01:06:04] Gant: For science.
[01:06:05] Todd: For Science.
[001:06:06] Gant: For science.
[01:06:06] Todd: For science.
[01:06:07] Gant: For science.
[01:06:10] Todd: Definitely. So, I like to close out the podcast with my guests, letting the listeners know what they have currently going on and where people can find you online if they have any questions.
[01:06:22] Gant: Yeah, well, like I said, I'll be at a React Advanced London. I should be at Render Atlanta next year. I'll of course throwing Chain React in May of 2023. Check it out. If you're interested in building mobile apps and you wanna leverage your JavaScript knowledge for mobile apps, check out React Native.
We have React Native podcast, React Native Newsletter, all those kinds of things. So, if you're a web person looking to make your mobile app, we got you covered on that. Just make sure you do it right, just do it right. Meaning like, take a second and realize it's not a browser and there's a little, few differences, but there are not a lot of differences.
Just a few, and we can help you through those. The podcast really helps people sort of get started on those things. And then I'll say like, definitely check out the cool things that I'm, I'm, I'm doing, oh, I'll be at Connect.Tech. I'll be at Connect.Tech in November.
[01:07:10] Todd: Yep.
[01:07:10] Gant: So that's gonna be a really fun one. You could see where I'm speaking@gantleborde.com, first name, last name, and then you could always check me out on Twitter, Gant Leborde on Twitter. See what kind of crazy mad science stuff I'm tweeting about.
[01:07:25] Todd: Definitely. And definitely go out by the TensorFlow book.
[01:07:29] Gant: Yes, please, definitely check it out if you are, if you're a, if you like computer vision, if you wanna like, do things that have never been done before.
I actually don't go down the old hackneyed paths for this. I came up with all cool examples, pet's, faces, drawing things with dice, detecting wine glasses or something. I have a lot of really fun things that I've done in here and I spent a lot of time thinking of how to be creative. So, if you wanna enjoy learning about AI and not have to go get a PhD. Learning TensorFlow JS, that's the book.
[01:08:05] Todd: Alright, Gant, thank you so much for coming on.
[01:08:09] Gant: Thank you
[01:08:09] Todd: Always a pleasure to see you and talk to you. Definitely gonna see you soon in November. Connect.Tech.
[01:08:16] Gant: Yes.
[01:08:16] Todd: And of course, we're gonna, we're gonna tear it up. I'm gonna,
[01:08:19] Gant: Yeah, yeah.
[01:08:20] Todd: I'm gonna tear it up as much as I can.
[01:08:23] Gant: I have one of my teammates will be flying in with me to Connect.Tech as an attendee. He's gonna be checking everything out. I haven't told him anything. I told him you're gonna eat Indian food with me. And he said, okay. I didn't tell him what he's getting in for. So, we'll definitely
[01:08:37] Todd: Yeah
[01:08:37] Gant: we'll be back to Blue India.
[01:08:38] Todd: Definitely, so again, thank you Gant for coming on. Thank you, listeners, for tuning into the Front End Nerdery Podcast.
I’ll be back next time with a new guest, new conversation about front end design, development and other topics. If you would please rate this podcast on your podcast device of choice, like, subscribe and watch on the Front End Nerdery YouTube channel. Links to transcripts and show notes there. We wanna make this as accessible as possible.
And finally, I'm Todd Libby, this has been the Front End Nerdery Podcast. Thanks, and we'll see you next time.