Kalob is a developer and educator for Wagtail, the popular Django-based CMS.
Carlton Gibson 0:06
Hi, welcome to another episode of Django chat, weekly podcast on the Django web framework. I'm Carlton Gibson joined by Will Vincent Halliwell, how are you? I'm good. Hi, Carlton. And today we're joined by Kalob Taulein, who's one of the big contributor on Wagtail. Hi, Kalob, thanks for coming on.
Will Vincent 0:21
Hello. Thank you for having me. Both of us met you. Django con 2019. For the first time. And yeah, you've got really interesting backstory. Maybe you could just start off with how'd you get into programming, and then we'll talk about Django wagtail and all the other hats you were.
Kalob Taulein 0:36
Yeah. Okay, cool. Yeah, definitely did meet both of you at Django con. That was fantastic, by the way, was my first Django con. So I got the real Django experience and that was just community as a different level when it comes to Django.
Will Vincent 0:48
Yeah, it's intimate. It's it's not that big of a gathering. You get you do get a chance to meet almost everyone.
Kalob Taulein 0:54
Yeah, actually, like, you know, be a person with someone. That's that's really nice. So how am I Got into a programming. Yeah, interesting story. So like 20 ish years ago 1999 y2k ish when everyone was buying batteries and stocking up and canned goods. I had a class project, I think I was like 10 years old. And they were like, make this website, which wasn't really making a website, it was like, clicking a GIF and like dropping it onto this terrible green background. And I hated it. It was like the worst thing I could possibly think of as like a 10 year old who just wanted to play outside. I was like, why would I ever want to be on a computer?
Will Vincent 1:31
And I think that often maybe.
Kalob Taulein 1:34
Yeah, I know, right? And it's nice being outside, especially when you can't really be outside too often. So they made me do that a few more times. And over time, I just really grew to love it. And then I started like playing games and joining guilds, and they needed a website work. So I got into programming that way. Mostly PHP, dare I say that? But yeah, I got into it.
Carlton Gibson 1:55
We all have our secrets. Yeah,
Kalob Taulein 1:56
we do. So I got into it. into programming that way, a long time ago before even WordPress. And I've just sort of stuck with it throughout the years.
Will Vincent 2:08
Oh, did I was gonna ask if you if you went to university if you studied computer science formally before it's more something you completely self taught.
Kalob Taulein 2:15
Oh, I would love to say I went to university absolutely did not know self taught all the way Good for you. Yeah, yeah back in the day it was right click View Source or file view source and you just read your HTML and your CSS one or CSS to markup and you just sort of figured out how it worked by writing it yourself.
Will Vincent 2:33
Yeah. Well, I think I 1999 so high school for me that was before I think everyone just stared at a computer all day long. Whether or not they knew how to use it. Yep. So even though Yeah, I think we all sometimes feel like I just stare at a screen. I mean, at least we have some control over it. Whereas you think I saw some study yesterday that like they're, you know, 35 years of everyone's life is spent staring at screens now, which is awesome.
Kalob Taulein 3:00
Wow, that's,
Will Vincent 3:01
that's terrifying. When you think about it in your phone and your computer. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Anyways, so when did Django and Python come on the scene for you?
Kalob Taulein 3:12
Yeah. Okay, sort of two questions in there. So I was working with a startup in Ireland about five ish years ago. We wrote PHP back then. But we had a lot of data. And I needed to crunch a lot of data. And I was like, Well, how am I going to do this, I keep running out of memory, and I need a more efficient way. Turns out people write this stuff and give it away for free using Python. So I was like, hey, let's check this out. So I got into Python that way. And then Django came into the scene about three and a half, almost four years ago, where it was like, well, pythons really nice to work with. But can I make websites out of it? And so Django popped into the scene when I started working with another agency, and just sort of fell in love with with Django and white towel,
Carlton Gibson 3:55
go where you say worked like so straight away. wagtail that was
Will Vincent 3:59
you So I actually learned wagtail before I learned Django. Right. Okay, which is definitely the backwards way to learn it. But it's, it's very, very possible to do it that way. I think the thing I first knew for was your learn wagtail.com site, which has all these video tutorials. Do you? Do you recommend that people just jump in with wagtail? If they're curious with sights, or how do you how do you teach that today? Well, you know, maybe Can you expand upon if you're gonna start from scratch if someone was interested in both? Because a lot of people do use wagtail for agency work? What would be the recommended learning path?
Kalob Taulein 4:31
I would have to ask them what their goal is. So if they really just need like a nice content management system with maintainable code, and a nice editor experience, then yeah, definitely just jump straight in learn wagtail right away. But if someone needs something bigger, like, you know, they're thinking of maybe creating like, Instagram in the early days, or, I believe discuss users at the commenting system. If they want to create something big like that, I would say yes. Definitely jump into Jango first because your content management system is sort of just that layer on top of it. It's It's interesting, though, that a lot of people will actually want that that's exactly what they need. They want to build a website and they need it to be slightly more than just static HTML files.
Carlton Gibson 5:14
It's it's interesting that you because the default choice there is is WordPress, right? That's the big elephant in the room is people just everyone just ends up on WordPress, all in WordPress calm and you sign up and to what extent is wagtail these days as a sort of first entry point for that person who doesn't necessarily already know Python or Django? To what extent is that the option for beginning
Kalob Taulein 5:39
i think this is very developer focused. In essence, like if you were into marketing, or you're trying to sell a product, and you don't really know how to code and you don't really have that much of interest, maybe a little inclination to code but you're not super interested in it. WordPress is a great option for a lot of people. So it was like Squarespace and all these other these other content management's But wait till I think really shines with people who want more control. And you know, who don't just want to install an SEO plugin that ironically makes their site slower. Exactly. You know? We've I think we've all been there. Is it
Will Vincent 6:13
still Yoast? Is that the one there? There's a whole bunch of them. But yeah, yeah,
Kalob Taulein 6:17
yeah, there's a whole bunch of them. Yoast i think is still the brand name out there. And you know, it's good does the job, but it will never do the job that a developer can do when a developer can actually get into the code. It's sort of like washing your car versus getting a mechanic to actually maintain your car.
Will Vincent 6:31
Yeah, well, I mean, at the same time, there is um, I think this is still the case with Google with their like PageSpeed or lighthouse whatever they call it now. If you follow their recommendations for putting the Google Analytics code like like they want it they say put it in the footer versus the header or the if you put it in they want you to put it in the header but if you put it in the header then it'll complain on like PageSpeed you only get a 99 because it's not in the footer. So there's Yep. It was these these ironies are in here. A little bit to the text base.
Kalob Taulein 7:01
Yeah, definitely.
Will Vincent 7:02
Sorry. So you were saying though, so yeah. So if you want beyond the WordPress option as a developer, is that where you would say like wagtail comes in?
Kalob Taulein 7:11
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Also, like code maintainability. When we start a website, really, when anybody starts a website, the idea is to like, keep it small, maybe I just want a blog. And then all of a sudden, it's like, I need a gallery and a contact form. And then maybe it gets a little bit bigger and sort of gets into more just Django II things and then maybe even expands out and gets into like Python based things where like, you're encoding videos directly as soon as you upload them. So that whole chain to me is very related. You've got wagtail and then Django and then Python or the other way around, you have Python and Django and then wagtail. Really, if you want maintainable, maintainable code base, I would say yeah, wait till is the way to go. Otherwise, you're really looking at WordPress, Drupal, things like that. There's tons of other content management systems out there. Some of them are great. And some of them are known for being less great. It sounds it sounds as
Carlton Gibson 8:06
if then the whitetail target market is exactly the Python target market. Certainly the Django target market. It's those developers who want the perfectionist, right? Why is it that people use Python instead of PHP, it's not because you can't buy anything in one language or the other. But Python has a certain aesthetic to it, which draws people away from PHP, and there's lots of people who, you know, don't feel that and so they they don't make that that move. They don't come away from it. Yeah. You know, you can build anything in Drupal quite easily, but like, I was gonna have that Python aesthetic for you.
Kalob Taulein 8:42
Yeah, yeah, that's exactly it. Yeah, the whole having Python is just super friendly, especially if you're gonna build a larger organization or a larger product and start hiring an engineering team. Like, your costs are just going to be lower because it's easier to maintain. It's easier to write it's easier to expand on
Will Vincent 8:59
there's a there's a number have large organizations using wagtail. What are the big ones that come to mind as the standard bearer of you can build a huge site with wagtail?
Kalob Taulein 9:08
Yeah. Okay. So there's a lot of them these days. National Health. NASA know,
Will Vincent 9:14
the NIH. Right. The British.
Kalob Taulein 9:17
Yes, yes.
get around to like, that's very tied with
National Health Service service. Yeah. Yes, that's right. Yeah. So that's, that's a really big one. NASA is using it. I've heard internally Apple is even using it as sort of their intranet. I don't have any proof on that one. Google's been using it. Tons and tons of large organizations, governments, municipalities are using it. So I mean, that sort of gets on the more boring side of things because it's sort of like legally kind of municipality stuff. But still, that's that's a huge Feat. Plus, there's all sorts of other projects like my projects are all wiped out, obviously.
Will Vincent 10:00
Yeah, what is the flow for getting a client to use wagtail? Because my, my sense is a client probably hasn't heard of it. And, you know, so let's let's make this transition to so you work with torch box, which is a large agency in the UK that initially created torch Bach wagtail. I assume clients don't request wagtail. Like, I guess how does that negotiation go? Because I can obviously we, the three of us can see how, as a developer, you'd prefer using wagtail to WordPress, these other systems. But I imagine there's some education that has to go on to the client, because the client just wants a solution that works. That's a really poorly long worded question. But do you see what I'm trying to get at? Like, how does?
Kalob Taulein 10:39
Yes.
So most of the time, but strangely, not every time. Okay, so I've actually had a few clients be like, we specifically want a wagtail site, and I'm like, interesting. How did you find out? Yeah, exactly. But like, 99.5% of the time, they're like, Hey, we want a website. We heard about WordPress or Drupal, can you make that for us or like, well, we have to insert some education here. So what exactly does the client need? And a lot of the times the client doesn't need control over all of their templates, they don't want to have control over their design, things like that. They just want to be able to enter content and have it show up nicely, pretty much every single time. And they can automatically generate menus for you, and all sorts of stuff because the developer can go behind the scenes, automate all that stuff. So usually, there's that form of education, where we say, hey, client, what exactly do you need? They say, Oh, actually, we don't need all this internal control. We're happy to have a developer look at it. Or even if we don't, we can hire a developer to maintain it with on a contract or something like that. Yeah. And so a lot of, a lot of times, most times actually people are like, okay, that actually makes sense because, you know, the site can be performant. We have total control over everything. And, more often than not, we can't break it. There's also So the separation in wagtail, to like in, in WordPress, you can literally do everything you can get in there. And you can break your own code if you want to, not really the case with with work with wagtail, or really any Django site either is what an editor gets is what they get, they can't go and change the design, they can't go and change their SEO, and they can't install a bunch of extra plugins. And that requires them to actually talk to a dev, which means they're likely to make a better decision and keep their site nice, performance maintainable, and keep their customers happy or their users happy. And so at the end of the day, most clients are like, that's what we want. We want to be serving our end user, the best we possibly can.
Carlton Gibson 12:40
I think the key point for me, though, and what you said was that you can't break it. It's really because from a developer's point of view, a CMS is always like a pair of handcuffs. It's like, why do I need this I just, you know, create the template and do exactly what I want. I don't need to define this page model and not go through all that because I can just create it but that doesn't scale out to a team of people where you've got folks who aren't technically literate, who can't get in there and edit stuff without it falling apart. And that's where the content management system comes in. You know, you need forms that are safe to enter data in and that appear nicely.
Kalob Taulein 13:14
Yeah, yeah, that's that's exactly it is. Basically, you've got these developers or a single developer behind the scenes, making sure that your site is always doing what it is supposed to do, and it can't break. I've actually had a client who was like, hey, my co founder likes to break things. And anytime he touches something, picked up his phone and his phone just like shut off. It was like magic. He was like, I bet you can't make a website that he can't break and he hasn't been able to break it yet. Okay. Kudos to both people who work on Django and people who work on wagtail because it's so far unbreakable to the most breakable person I've worked with.
Will Vincent 13:50
I'm just thinking of past co founders when you said that statement. That's great. Well, the The other thing about why tails you know, so WordPress, you every time you log in As a non technical person, there's like another plugin that needs to be updated. And you can often do Just go. Okay. So I guess that gets that. So what is there? I know there isn't obviously the same size ecosystem for wagtail as there is for WordPress, but our third party packages as big a deal, or is it really just all wrapped up within the wagtail? itself space?
Kalob Taulein 14:22
I would say third party packages are a big deal. It's not this massive ecosystem like WordPress, I don't think anything is that Yeah. But yeah, there's there's a lot of third party packages that really help you get more done. Like if you wanted to add capture to like a contact form is third party package, because it doesn't really need to be in wagtail core. The idea with wagtail core is we've got core and contributing packages. And we always want to keep a site nice and performant. So like, if you needed something extra, you could just go and turn it on or install a package in the Python ecosystem and Django ecosystem that's really, really easy to do. So we prefer to keep things nice and lean that way, while sort of maintaining the the core aspect where other people can build plugins. And it's, it's easy to basically say, pip install whatever your plugin is and add it to your installed apps. And it just works.
Will Vincent 15:15
And where do you Where would one find these? I mean, I'm familiar. There's an awesome wagtail repo, is there a Django package? Or is it under Django packages? Like where would you find and get a look at third party packages for for wagtail?
Kalob Taulein 15:30
Yeah, two places. So that awesome lakes repo is probably the best place most comprehensive lists I think I've stumbled on so far. Wait also has a newsletter called this week in wagtail. So every week we send out a newsletter and make a new little page with blog posts and packages and events that are coming up and things we've done to wait till core and the packages that the core team maintains. So that's the second place people can sign up for that newsletter if they wanted to.
Will Vincent 15:56
Yeah, actually, I'm remembering that I think wagtail 2.9 came out recently because someone from wagtail, emailed Jeff triplet and me about our Django news newsletter saying, Hey, we forgot to mention it to wagtail people, but could you mention that 2.9 came out? Which is? Yeah. So
Kalob Taulein 16:16
yeah, and unfortunately, things like that still slipped through the cracks. We're all human. So
Will Vincent 16:20
yeah, well, what so so the spring load, which is a New Zealand agency runs the awesome wagtail repo. When we when, when Tom Dyson was on, he talked a little bit about this, but it's, it's basically torch pox and spring load, are the two main agencies contributing to wagtail. Or how does that look from from a high level in terms of who's guiding the development? So I know there's quite a bunch of hands in there, but there's a sense that those are the people kind of in charge.
Kalob Taulein 16:46
Yeah. Okay, so I'm not super familiar on this. Definitely torch boxes leading the development for sure. Yeah, I think spring load might have moved on but spring load if you're listening. Sorry, if I'm wrong about That? Well, that
Will Vincent 17:02
that's what I saw there was like George box and he, you know, UK and then there was this New Zealand place and then there's sort of a long tail of other stuff. But yeah, that may have changed.
Kalob Taulein 17:11
Yeah, I think yeah, I think spring load moved on again, I could be wrong about that. I think they moved possibly to Drupal. I hope I'm wrong about that. Anyways, there's a Swedish agency called fiord. Really sorry, I know I'm saying that way. But they have been doing some really, really amazing work with wagtail and open sourcing all sorts of stuff. It's been pretty nice.
Will Vincent 17:33
Yeah, what we should say. So you now work for torch box, right? In addition to your educational content? Yeah, that's correct. So how'd that come about? Besides you having like, I think the leading educational site for wagtail
Kalob Taulein 17:46
Yeah, I think it just really came about because of the leading site for for whitetail education. So I made this little wagtail site and one day Tom was just like Tom Dyson from torch box is like hey, Do you want to join the wait till core team and I was like, What I didn't even know that was a thing. So that happened. And then just over time as I got more involved in the team, he was like, hey, by the way, we've got some extra work if you want to maybe get involved, and I was like, I love wagtail I love educating people and awake till I get to work with people who invented wagtail. This seems like a no brainer. So overtime I got involved.
Will Vincent 18:25
That's cool. Carlton, how did you've got several core titles in your bio? how did how did it come about for you is going in rest framework? Well, Russ, right. Well, you're not technically with Django I guess writer. There's
Carlton Gibson 18:38
Well, there's no, there is no cool team for Django. Right. That's why Yeah.
Will Vincent 18:43
But what about process never being of being involved. And then, you know, the other time to
Carlton Gibson 18:49
talk about rest framework because that's how I got into open source was, I was using rest framework in agency work bill, you know, building mobile apps, building the backend. Django and using rest framework to build the API for the mobile apps that was sown early 2000 10s. That was how I made my living doing that. And one day on the make the Google Groups meeting this time just posted a thing saying, hey, look, I'm getting a bit overwhelmed here with all the Stack Overflow answers on the mailing list answers on GitHub. So I got onto StackOverflow and I started answering questions just in my spare time, you know, I did that for a little while. And then, you know, on the Google group answering questions there, and then somehow, or just commenting on the audition, get up and then Thomas said, Hey, well, you know, when you come in, help me maintain. And I was like, Yeah, okay, cool. Super. So I remember drinking that. I, you know, a PR had been sort of helping to review and Tom gave me the the commitment, the access.
Will Vincent 19:48
And I was like, Oh, the bomb the bomb. verisign. Yeah.
Carlton Gibson 19:53
That was amazing.
That was a long time ago. So what I want to talk to you about about maintaining wagtail and in relation to Django. So you know, we throw out a new version of Django every nine months. So you know, it just 2.2 is the current LTS. 3.0? Is the current major version 3.1 just hit alpha. But what's so first of all, what's the state of support across that range for wagtail? And then how do you find keeping up and updating it? And if I'm a user? can I expect to be on the latest version of major version of Django all the time? Or should I expect that I'd have to hang back for the LTS?
Kalob Taulein 20:31
Yeah, okay. All good questions. So our deployment time is not the right word for it is not nine months we try to produce a new version every three ish months. We try to stick to that timeline. Obviously, things come up and we can't quite get to it right on when you say a new version. That's like a sort of new point release like of new features and slightly rip. Yeah. Yeah, new point release. Yeah, so like 2.9 just came out. So three months prior was 2.83 months pirates. Two points. Okay. So what again, what was it what makes you different in 2.8 2.9? Just features, bug fixes, contributions, things like that. We just want to make sure that we're always working on it and getting the latest changes out there. Because like, it's a content management system, people are gonna try to break it. And sometimes people, you know, they find bugs and they go, Oh, by the way, there's a security issue. Here we go, Okay, well, this needs to be addressed now. Then other people will be like, Oh, well, I wanted this new feature. And I wrote a PR for and we go, oh, cool, but it doesn't really need to be in wagtail core right now. So we'll merge it. And then we'll put out a new point release, and within the next three months, and it'll be featured. Okay, fantastic. So you do that every three months, and then Django is released. That cadence is nine months for sort of major version. And how does wagtail map onto that with its versions every three months, right, so is out. We do have some LTS versions of wagtail. And we do try to sort of sync them up with Django LTS as well. But for the most part, Whenever Jango has a new, maybe not LTS version necessarily, but whenever Django has a new point release out, and maybe it becomes a little backwards, incompatible for for wagtail. We tried to make sure that that's always up to date. So when Django 3.0 comes out, we want to make sure that wagtail 2.9 can support Django three, when Django 3.1 comes out, we want to make sure that Django 2.9 or wait till 2.9 and wagtail 210 will also support that as well. So we try to stay in sync with Django as much as possible,
Carlton Gibson 22:32
because that's great news because my my sort of view is, unless you've got specific reasons not to you should be on the latest major version, and you should commit to updating every nine months and if I'm if I want to add wagtail to the mix, I want to be able to update to the latest Django with the latest wagtail and keep that keep that ball rolling.
Kalob Taulein 22:49
Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah. So honestly, for my sites, all I do is just pip install wagtail the latest version. And because Django is a requirement, it just automatically bumps my version of Django as well.
Carlton Gibson 22:59
And just as a One follow up there, do you find it? I mean, from a. So we were always trying to make sure that Django is is backwardly compatible as possible as easy to upgrade as it can be? How, from your perspective as a wagtail maintainer? How do you find that we're doing a good job there? Is it nice and smooth or?
Kalob Taulein 23:17
Yeah, yeah, you're doing a really good job. The hardest part for me, has always been going from Django, one to Django two. And it's not really like there's a lot of big changes in there. It's like some pathing changes, or we use a different module or something. So Oh, the URLs aren't that big of a deal. Yeah, the URLs that one always gets me to, and I always forget about it. I'm like, oh, type in StackOverflow Django 2.0 URLs. Sure enough, there's 30,000 answers for it. So find the solution pretty quickly. But other than that, yeah, no, it's it's perfect updating. There's let me put it this way. There's no reason to never be up to date with Django in my opinion. Super.
Carlton Gibson 23:57
Come on again.
Will Vincent 23:59
Yeah. Come on, come on anytime.
So I want to ask about deployment with wagtail. Because I mean WordPress fame like I've been listening recently to Jason or Josh Cohen, who has WordPress engine, which has like, huge site just for WordPress deployments. Is there a similar default in the wagtail? space? Or how does that kind of look in practice?
Kalob Taulein 24:21
Yeah, so there's nothing like that right now. The Fantastic engineers over at Code Red CMS are working on something like that. It's currently in a alpha beta testing phase. So that's not out yet, but I would keep an eye out for that for sure. Otherwise, most of us, I think we default to just using Heroku. Personally, I don't I'll spend the extra few minutes and set it up on like Digital Ocean or linode or EC two or something like that. Just because for the most part, yeah. Heroku Okay. Okay.
Will Vincent 24:59
I think When when Tom was on, I think he he mentioned Heroku was his sort of default choice. But
Kalob Taulein 25:06
yeah, yeah, less DevOps to have to deal with. And you can spend more time writing application code.
Will Vincent 25:11
Yeah. What it seems like that space, someone you know, as wagtail grows, it makes sense, especially if it's agency work, or you can just build a client. You know, it's one less thing to worry about if there's a tightly coupled solution there. Yeah, exactly. As with Django itself, Heroku is great, but it could be simpler. So perhaps it'll be new deployment things in the future for for Django.
Kalob Taulein 25:32
Yeah, I hope. So. That's one of the things that I actually really love about WordPress. Oh, did I say that? Is like their famous five minute installation, or whatever it is. It's like you click three buttons, and it's up and running. I absolutely love how that barrier to entry is so low that literally anybody can get started with it. And I hope one day that wagtail and Django has something like that as well, where basically it's like, start a new Django three app. Boom, within a minute, it's up and running.
Will Vincent 26:02
Yeah, I think we'll get there. So one of the nice things about wagtail in particular is it has built in search with Elastic Search, which chango does not. My talk at Django con is actually on search. Can you talk a little bit about how that works in practice? I mean, if you've implemented something with Elasticsearch like is that, would you ever use anything else? Are there features that you wish it had that it doesn't like? How does what's the developer experience integrating search on a wagtail? site?
Kalob Taulein 26:29
A search, I think, is really, really easy to implement with Elastic Search or really anything else that's that's supported. It's really just setting it up in your configuration and saying, hey, use Elasticsearch and here's your config settings. It doesn't use Elasticsearch right out of the box. So you do have to set that up. It uses just regular database search. I believe it's been a little a little while since I've touched that part of the code. But yeah, I believe it just uses regular like Postgres database, table search, you talk when you say regular database table says, you're just talking Contains insensitive string matching, right? Whereas Postgres has full
Carlton Gibson 27:07
capabilities, right? And so my understanding, you know, not as information retrieval expert, my understanding is that the kind of implement the search qualities just kind of equally as good because they will use the same underlying algorithms and they're more or less equivalent, but the way where Elastic Search shines is through higher interest rates, because, you know, we'll just pull in the data much quicker than Postgres would. But for a content management system, that's probably not relevant, right? How often, you know, you're not, you know, adding articles or read anything articles, anything like the frequency, the indexing issues will become a problem. So my sort of question is, well, why not? Postgres Full Text Search, why isn't that the default option? Because most people lose spin up Postgres instance. They've already got that instance running. And do you know why I mean, Elasticsearch. Why is Elastic Search the go to option there rather than the the scale up option?
Kalob Taulein 27:59
I think it's Just really how the database is set up with all the different tables, it can just make search a little easier because the Elastic Search, like you said just ingests data so much faster. And it's easier to search through all of that then rather, rather than making a database connection, Postgres fault, I don't know, Full Text Search is the default, but definitely Postgres regular searches the default. actually don't know too much about that in terms of Postgres stuff. But Elastic Search, honestly, and this is just my opinion, other developers might feel differently about this. But when it comes to using whitetails, a content management system, most sites don't need Elastic Search. It's it's overkill. I think it's just engineers wanting to implement something cool. There are some cases though, where we have some, some whitetail sites where you know, they have 100 200 to 300,000 pages, about half a million images that they want to search through to see like when they're copywriting. The stock rates sort of expire. I've seen that happen slowly. Someone will buy the the rights to a stock image. And they have to search through 500,000 images to see when that date is going to expire. And so that's where Elastic Search can really come in and work, they'll definitely scales up pretty nicely. I alone have a couple websites with about 5000 6000 pages collectively all on one database, Elasticsearch would probably be a good place to put that, but I like writing application code. And so I sort of cheat and I just use algolia for the most part. Yeah, cuz I'll do all the indexing for me. And it's, yeah, yeah. So I'll just let them do all the, the heavy lifting for me instead of me having to maintain more code.
Carlton Gibson 29:40
But as well, hosting instances, like Elasticsearch is great when you spin up one, but mmediately start complaining at you that you need, you know, parallel redundancies and it's a bit of a pain to manage. So again, like you know, hosted DB server hosted this or take it you know, pay someone else to run your Elastic Search. cluster?
Kalob Taulein 30:00
Oh, yeah, yeah, I've definitely done that with AWS and Digital Ocean. I'm like, I just want you to take my money and make sure my databases fast. Just Just let me do these queries that I shouldn't be writing as a developer and make it make it fast. And they do.
Will Vincent 30:13
Yeah. Well, I'm glad you said that, that that mimics the advice I gave, at least in the talk and my my search tutorial around, start with basic filtering query sets, then you can add, if you need more, you can, you can either switch to Postgres, Postgres stuff, and then if you need more, you can add algolia and then Elasticsearch is great if you need it, but it is quite a step up in complexity. And algolia really, the only issue is cost. I mean, I've used it a number of sites and it can get expensive, but it's great. And it has all these wonderful like JavaScript autocompletes. And it's, you know, it's basically like a with your mouse, you can click and add the, the boosts and, you know, what is it what's the, what's the phrase for like, you're white. You're white label words or you can do you can kind of like make a custom Dictionary of like common misspellings people make. There's a phrase for that. But yeah, I'm a big fan of algo, as I often will recommend that over Elastic Search, because, you know, if you use Elastic Search, you probably really need it. Or you already know it. I mean, we've had a couple guests on who were just like, I did a prototype over a weekend, actually, the women who did listen, notes calm. And he's just like a search engine for podcasts. And he's like, Yeah, I just spun up Elasticsearch, and this and that, we were like, have you used Elasticsearch before? He's like, Oh, yeah, of course. You know, I had all my notes. So it's like, no big deal. But not a simple thing.
Kalob Taulein 31:36
Oh, yeah. Yeah. No big deal. J. cluster of Elastic Search engines. Not a big deal.
Will Vincent 31:43
Yeah. I want to ask you about creating content, because you Yeah, so maybe I'll start with so you have a couple of courses on Udemy including your complete 2020 full stack web developer course with 80,000 students enrolled somewhere. That? Yeah. Is that yeah. So that's that's PHP is that? Is that an older course you keep up to date? or How did that come about? And then we'll get to your your wagtail stuff.
Kalob Taulein 32:07
Yeah. So when did that come up seven, eight years ago? I don't really know why I just wanted to start teaching people web development.
Will Vincent 32:17
Yeah, it's not a
Kalob Taulein 32:19
jeans. No, it really isn't really. But it's just like, one day I woke up and I was like, dang, I want to teach people. So I made this this huge, full stack PHP course. And like, it still covers things like raw Ajax, which a lot of people don't really even need to know, because we've got like the fetch API now. Yeah. It also teaches like jQuery, which is like super frowned upon, like, this course is definitely old and outdated. And people still seem to love it.
Will Vincent 32:45
Well, it says 2020.
Carlton Gibson 32:48
Yeah, funny thing is, so jQuery still works.
Will Vincent 32:53
Right, a Django admin. I think it's still
Carlton Gibson 32:55
Yeah, well, we're slowly slowly slowly teasing bits away, but yeah, I mean, it's still there. It'll be there for a while yet I mean this,
Kalob Taulein 33:03
they keep updating it. We're doing the same thing with waco. so unpopular opinion here. And I hope nobody, or I hope anybody who's listening to this doesn't hate me for saying this. There's nothing wrong with jQuery, in my opinion, I agree most cases, it is exactly what someone needs. It's a drop in JavaScript library where you can do all of your your Dom queries and add your event listeners. And it just works. You don't have to worry about like transpiling react or JSX into vanilla j. s that supports iE 11, or things like that. It just works.
Will Vincent 33:34
Yeah. So So when did well, just so do you recall when you first created that course, and was so that was a couple years ago that you first created that course? Did you I mean, did you call it 2020 back when you created it, or can you update the title? I'm just curious of sort of, Oh, yeah, you can update
Kalob Taulein 33:49
the title. Okay. Okay. Yeah, so I just added some extra stuff. And I think we're gonna update, I think updated all the HTML content in there. And I added tips on how to get a job as developer as you're learning and things like that. I did that this year. So I guess the 2020 label on it. Yeah,
Will Vincent 34:08
let's good to have that. I mean, that's I've increasingly being asked, How do I get a job questions from people who've read my books, and I probably should have a dedicated resource to point people to What do you say, to certain interests? Because I say, Yeah, well, I usually say you should have three things, you should have a couple open source projects that you can point to, so that people can see what code you've written. If you want a job on Django that way the interviews will be about existing code rather than white board fun. You should have a personal site, really, I guess two things you should have open source projects, and you should have a personal site, documenting your journey, which gives people a sense that you can communicate that you can learn I think people are feel that they don't want to document not knowing stuff. There's a sense of displaying your ignorance, when it's really the opposite. I think it's showing how you've progressed things you've solved, and it really reinforces the learning to teach it right. I think you'd be Agree Kalob, like, you don't really know something until you can teach it to someone simply. Mm hmm. So that's really those two things is have a couple open source. Oh, the third thing would be contributing to Django. That's the third thing. I do make one of the packages maybe? Or one of the packages? Yeah, well, it's true. So, you know, there's all these prs out there, if you if you do that, it proves that you can work in a community. It's some validation. And so if you have those three things to me, if you have a couple open source projects, you have a personal site, and you've done a PR on something Django related, that's top of the heap. I don't really care about formal background or this and that. But those are three things that are not easy to do. But I think those are a better use of time, then aceing your whiteboard tests. Now if you're going to work at a big company, you probably do need to be aware that they'll have whiteboard interview stuff, which is gonna be core Python things. But you know, I prefer talking about real projects and architectural decisions, regardless of where someone is on their journey as a developer, rather than, you know, pinging them straight manipulation. At the top of their head, what would you say Carlton?
Carlton Gibson 36:03
Well, I agree, I think I think one thing you say with the open source project is it doesn't matter if it isn't, you know, 100%, that what you should do is say, yeah, you know, I did this or I do say my part time, you know, I get a little bit of time to work on this every so often. And just to be straight up about how much how much personal power you're able to put into it, because then that shows somebody, you don't you don't have to be embarrassed about it. Because Yeah, is certainly two hours a week, I get to do this. But you do that two hours a week for six months, all of a sudden, it's quite, it's actually quite good. And it's only a couple of hours a week and look at it. It's brilliant. And he totally changes.
Will Vincent 36:40
The dynamic. Yeah. I mean, the fourth thing would be if you just go and start answering StackOverflow, the Django forum, go to a conference, you know, just put your hand up again, regardless of the level that you're at. That will really get you on people's radar. And it's a very as we've talked about a very inclusive community. I don't you know, it's not a No impressed. You know, I'm more people aren't. What am I trying to say? People don't care where you are in your journey as a developer. In fact, it's even actually, I'd say more interesting, someone who's starting out rather than established to kind of hear with where they're at. Yeah.
Carlton Gibson 37:16
And I think, sort of flipside of, you know, saying how much you can give is that if you have only got an hour, two hours, if you can just give that and do it for a period of time, it does add up to enough and people, people worry that I'm not able to, you know, because of whatever reason, you know, I got four kids, I, personally, I got four kids, I can't do more than a couple of hours. Like it just it just doesn't exist. But you just got to keep going at that. And then, you know, that's what I'd say. Same as you.
Will Vincent 37:48
Well, so what what would be the wagtail version of that, Kalob, someone when people ask that if someone asked you for wagtail specifically, I want to get a job, as you know, at an agency or something, what would be your advice
Kalob Taulein 38:01
So definitely everything both of you guys have mentioned, for sure. All of that is top of the list. I would also add, try to expand your network. The reason I say that is because I'm thinking about this from a business perspective. So if you were running a business, and you asked all your employees, Hey, does anyone know anyone that could fit this particular position? And they go, kind of, but no, not really not anyone I can vouch for then they have to go and look for, quote, unquote, a stranger to the company. Yeah. And that's a risk, right? strangers are always a risk. It's a risk who like our personal lives, it's a risk to pretty much everything because you don't know what that person is going to be like, yeah, chances are, the person is going to be a great person because most people are. But from a business perspective, like you still have to realize that you don't know this person. onboarding is very, very expensive. Yeah. And you want to make sure this person is gonna stay around for as long as possible so that they can sounds very busy, but they can increase their return on their investment. And so I always say like if you know someone on the inside that person can at least say, Hey, I know this person, I might not be able to vouch for him. But I know this person I know they can write Django or wait till code. And, you know, I have some form of relationship. So you have that little extra step on the inside at least. So it's not like go to a meetup or join a, you know, slack group, or, you know, these kind of, yep, that's exactly it. Yeah. So, you know, prior to these last few months, I would have said, yeah, definitely go to meetups and just hang out with people be friends with them don't have an agenda or anything, just like, you know, ask people about the the knowledge that they've acquired about Django or wagtail, or Python and just have an interesting conversation. And again, don't try to get anything out of them because humans are really good at picking up on that.
Will Vincent 39:45
Yeah, I was. So I'm, I just googled how to get hired as a Django developer. And I actually wrote a post on this in January that popped up. So maybe that's just because that's how I would phrase it, but it also shows how brain dead I am. But I'm glad that we hit the five point How does open source work have a personal site go to meetups for is contribute to Django and five is Believe in yourself hashtag like contribute on the forum and Google group. So it's amazing how you can you know, it's like walking and talking half brain dead. I should put that in the Learn Django site but
Carlton Gibson 40:18
sorry, yes, Carlton? Well, I was just gonna say like, what is the what is the wagtail version of that look like the whitetail community? This is it. Do you hang it? Is there a Slack channel? Is there? Oh, yeah. So forum is? Oh, yeah. Like if I want to get
Kalob Taulein 40:32
we used, we used to have
Google forums or whatever that is I came in after that. Now it's all slack. So wait. till.io slash slack will bring you to the right URL where you can just pop on slack and have conversations with people ask for help ask really any sort of questions. Maybe bring up an idea for a feature or anything like that.
Will Vincent 40:52
That's great. Well, well, Django has switched or has added recently there's a forum dot Django project calm which is a discourse Hosted site, which, to me Actually, I prefer that format to slack because I find slack hard to search. But it's and I'm constantly referring people there, but it hasn't really taken off yet, even though there's all sorts of heavy hitters on there. So that's great if there's a active slack wagtail community though, so it doesn't really matter what the platform is, as long as everyone agrees to show up there. I mean, I know like Reddit, there's a huge Django Reddit group that I am not a part of, but there's a lot of action there too. So Django is kind of all over the place. I don't know if you'd agree with that, Carlton. They're sort of like the the you know that. I don't know that what used to be core hangs out in one place and then the broader discussion happens all over the place.
Carlton Gibson 41:40
I don't I don't hang out on the Reddit thing. I've always avoided Reddit for fear of my productivity slipping dramatically.
Kalob Taulein 41:49
But same Yeah,
Carlton Gibson 41:50
I do like the forum. I try. I try and check in on the forum, and the mailing list as well.
Will Vincent 41:53
The forum's weren't old school. It's like you can it's not as it's more async I guess I would which is nice. There's I guess I scored I.
Carlton Gibson 42:02
Sorry, go ahead. I guess I struggle with slacks in that. If you always feel with Slack, but if you're not there at the moment, the conversation happens. You've missed it. I never know how to catch up with slack sets.
Will Vincent 42:13
I promise. Like it's like a never ending meeting without an agenda. That's how I've heard slack discussed.
Kalob Taulein 42:18
That's a good way to describe it. Yeah, yeah, I honestly, there's so much conversation in there. I used to be a part of 11 different companies, slacks and different groups and stuff. I cut that down to five and now I'm only active in three of them. And even then, I don't just like go and scan every single channel in there. Just whenever I get like at Kalob or something. I'll be like, okay, I'll check the thread.
Will Vincent 42:39
Yeah. So you've do a lot of video content. I want to ask, how is that for you? Like how do you What's your workflow now that you've been doing it for a while? How do you how do you keep things up to date? You know, because you have I mean, the Learn wagtail site, but wagtail keeps progressing Like what? So I guess a twofer. How do you find creating video content as opposed to text which I'm more familiar with and then how do you do updates?
Kalob Taulein 43:04
Yeah, okay, good questions. video content versus text. Really, if you write a good blog post, you can really just like record yourself going through your own tutorial.
Will Vincent 43:14
And boom, you got a video. So people tell me I should do like, don't don't create new stuff. Just talk through your existing stuff. I refuse to. Yeah.
Carlton Gibson 43:22
Patrick Stewart doing Shakespeare sonnets during the confinement right? Yeah, you could just sit down with a glass of a glass of wine or something like that and read your blog post.
Will Vincent 43:31
Me and Sir Patrick.
Kalob Taulein 43:32
It's a it's pretty impressive, though. How much content one person can create and then like, if it's a blog post, you can turn it into a video if it's a video, you can turn it into a blog post. And how like even just having that extra piece of content somewhere on the internet that points to the original one is really helpful in sort of funneling more people towards your content.
Will Vincent 43:53
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, there's there's literally YouTube channels with people walking through parts of my book. have, you know, six figure traffic? And I'm like, Huh. But But you know, the part I struggle with is the updates, like, because maybe why Yeah, more stats hard. I mean, Django is just, I spent so much time just updating my books. Like, that's what I'm doing this week. It's not even a major release. There's just one thing or another changes. And I don't, that's what I wonder, like, Is it possible to do up to date video stuff for a framework? I mean, I think there is, but I haven't cracked that nut. That's kind of why I pose it to you. Or maybe you just sort of say like, you know, this is pinned to this major release and you're kind of disciplined on you know, I'll revisit it, you know, a certain schedule, but I'm not gonna drive myself crazy the way I do keeping things up to date.
Kalob Taulein 44:44
Yeah, keeping things up to date in video format is really hard. Depending on your platform, though, like Udemy or Skillshare, or any of these education base websites, you can just replace an entire video just like what Vimeo lets you do. So you don't change your URL. You can just upload a new video Hmm. So updating that content is pretty easy there. The the big problem is YouTube, actually, because you can't just go and upload a new video. Yeah,
Will Vincent 45:08
you can only do that right change the title and the description, but nothing else.
Kalob Taulein 45:13
Yeah. And that gets really hard to update. So usually in my videos, you'd be like, Oh, I'm using wait till 2.7 or Django 2.1. And even if it does get a little bit old, there's still going to be people using wagtail 2.7 or Django 2.1. Or there's still a lot of people using Django 1.8. Yeah, and so even if you just tell them that, you're, you're likely to actually help someone out in that regard because they're maybe a little behind or they're trying to upgrade and they're stuck on something that's your video or your blog post or anything your book could help them with. And then I just create new content on top of that. So like if search got an overhaul in wagtail I would just make a new video on how search now works. Hmm. Well, excuse me for the ignorance but so learn wagtail is is it howdy Pay for stuff or is it still all free? So there's two parts. There's a premium course there's a beginner friendly learn wagtail course on, which people can pay for it's a one time payment, no subscription needed. Okay. And then there's also all the free videos, the original learn wagtail content, which has 60 or 65. Yeah, that's
Will Vincent 46:20
when I saw it was like, oh, maybe that's like a Django con. It was like, almost all free. And I was like, Wow, that's amazing. Yep. Okay, sorry.
Kalob Taulein 46:27
Yeah, yeah. So I produced a new premium course. The idea behind that was to just sort of get more income based on that, so I can spend more time making the free videos. Yeah. And that's actually turned out pretty well. I would definitely say, you know, if you can give that a shot, trial, trial it of course, I mean, it always depends on your audience and what people are willing to pay for and what kind of knowledge they're seeking and things like that. But I personally like giving things away for free as much as I possibly can just I like to overwhelm the end user with too much value.
Will Vincent 47:00
how we think about it so you have your your free tutorials then you have this wide for beginners course. And then what's the what's the advanced course? I don't actually see it on your site, but I'm not looking maybe in the right place
Kalob Taulein 47:10
yet. There. No, it's not on there yet. There's no advanced course yet. I've got it all planned out, got the curriculum, everything. I just haven't got around to recording it.
Will Vincent 47:18
Fair enough. So
Carlton Gibson 47:20
why not choose a fuel palace?
Kalob Taulein 47:23
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. If If I had the ability to work longer, without burning out, I would.
Will Vincent 47:29
Yeah. Well, I think I think there is there is a benefit to having a sequential progressive flow to things even if there's kind of repeated content, because probably like you on some level, I'm like, I've already kind of covered a lot of this stuff in one way or another. But still, there's a value to just going like do this, do this, do this, do this, do this. And, you know, just, it saves people time. You just kind of go boom, I'm gonna hold your hand and walk you through through this in a progressive way as opposed to just searching around And, you know, air dropping in solving something but not really getting that bigger context.
Kalob Taulein 48:04
Yeah. So the way I grew up, learning how to code was, like you learn from trial and error. You see someone's code, you paste it into your, your editor, or whatever you're using. And then you edit that code and see what works. What doesn't. Yeah. These days, that's not the case anymore. People want to see exactly how to do things. They want to feel more comfortable from A to Z, and then they'll go and experiment afterwards. Hmm,
Will Vincent 48:29
that's interesting. But you still but people still probably find you. How do people find you initially? Is it YouTube? But do they go directly to this to this learn whitetail site and find a video? How do you think what's that funnel look like?
Kalob Taulein 48:40
Yeah, that's a really good question. I don't have an answer to just because I'm on so many places on the internet now, like I've got a Facebook group with like 40 I think we just broke 49,000 members called learning to code. And people just show up from Facebook in there and then they go to one of the courses or they find a video on YouTube. That is Link to at 1.2 years ago or something. So it's sort of this this big cluster of all these different these different streams that people are coming in from. And I actually don't really know the best one because I don't get like all the metrics from Facebook, or I don't have all the metrics from YouTube or Udemy have a slight idea. But without the the formal knowledge and the whole dataset for all of them. I don't know, in my opinion, it's it's impossible to tell it's
Carlton Gibson 49:29
how long have you been working on it? Would you say over the total, because what sounds like you've got is that critical mass of content where it starts to just feed off itself as a kind of organic life, you know, you're saying, Oh, I posted this link to a YouTube video on Facebook group two years ago, and then they've clicked that and that leads in here, that kind of critical mass. You can't build that in a day you've helped. So how, how long would you say that process has been?
Kalob Taulein 49:54
Yeah. Oh, the length of that process is a long time. It started like seven or eight years ago, I did take a couple years off of teaching because I got a little burnt out from it. Now that I got my process down, I can produce 10 to 30 high quality videos a week. Well,
Will Vincent 50:15
wait a week.
Kalob Taulein 50:16
Yeah, it's Yeah, a week. They're not super long. They're not like hour long words. Most of it
Will Vincent 50:22
will youtuber caption
Kalob Taulein 50:24
yet YouTube will caption it. Udemy will try to caption it. I do go through the Udemy ones though, because there have been some pretty bad ones that could have gotten me in trouble that I'm very happy I caught just for whatever reason it thinks that you say one thing when clearly you did not. Yeah. I tried to do that. But honestly, for the most part, captions get left behind unless it's a bigger, more important course. But if it's like a small course, like how to make a calculator with HTML, CSS and JavaScript, not going to capture that because it's only like 62 minutes,
Will Vincent 50:59
adding text mean so on on this podcast, we've, we've added the transcripts, which helps mainly for search, actually. Which makes sense because if you type something related into into Google isn't as good at knowing the audio content. So it's helpful for search the video. I know, I mean, there was an argument I heard made back when Google bought YouTube that just the data and being able to improve its own algorithms for on the content was worth it for Google, way back when. And if you think about how much content they have on there, they can just process it's, they should have pretty good algorithms.
Kalob Taulein 51:38
Yeah. So I've done a little bit of video, encoding transcoding kind of stuff before. And I'm pretty certain that I don't think they can do it like real time because there's just so much YouTube content. But I'm pretty certain that once your video hits a certain number of views or gets a certain number of interactions, that they go, Okay, we're going to process that content and then we're going to actually throw into how we perform our search behind the scenes. Make sense? Yeah. While we're, we're close to time. Anything else you want to mention or what? You know what? What future content can people expect from you? I mean, you're so prolific. Oh, future content. Hmm. I would love to give you an answer. I don't really know. I've just been sort of making it as it comes up. I monitor like my giant Facebook group. So I monitor that for common questions and ways that I can help people. So you know, if someone or I guess not someone, but if like 50 people in the span of a week are asking, like, how do I get started with coding? I don't know. literally anything about coding? Yeah, okay, well, that's probably a good idea to make a video or write a blog post or something related to that subject. So I sort of have a little finger on the pulse there. And that can change from week to week to it's probably not the greatest way to do it. I know other people, they'll they'll structure out like their next five months of courses or content, and they'll just like, stick to it, but I just don't have that kind of focus.
Will Vincent 53:03
When can I ask what's the? Or how does the mix between contracting and content creation work for you? Like, how do you? Do you keep that at a standard level does that, you know, wax and wane,
Kalob Taulein 53:15
it waxes and wanes quite a bit. It also depends on how much work there is in contracting. But it also depends on like, how amped up I am or how fired up I am about certain content. Yeah, because sometimes you'll make content like about Django stuff. And if you're passionate about it, that's all you want to do is you just like, you're like, I'm just gonna finish this book. I'm gonna put everything else on hold. I'm gonna finish this book, and then the client starts knocking. So where are you going to go? Ah, just five hours left in my day. Okay, I'll power through that real quick.
Will Vincent 53:43
You're just throwing fuel on the burnout fire.
Carlton Gibson 53:45
Yeah, no. So yeah, but that's come out a few times. So let me ask you that. How do you manage energy levels? How do you detect the symptoms of burnout? How do you how do you kind of keep going because it's not it's not this week. It's not this month. It's an ongoing process, right?
Kalob Taulein 54:00
Yeah, burnout is I'm pretty open about burnout. I've made a few videos about burnout and how to deal with it and imposter syndrome and things like that. So, I think it's different for most people, but there are some common symptoms when it comes to burnout. So, imposter syndrome always flares up for whatever reason, like two weeks before I start to burn out, my brain just says, I don't know anything about wagtail Why am I in the core team? Like just gets like super negative, right? Like, I forget this one import from Django and I'm like, What am I even doing here? I'm like, Oh, no, that's probably because I'm burning out for energy levels. I really hope that they'll throw us some money for this. But Red Bull is a great way to rope but
Will Vincent 54:46
if you had 10 or 20 years like me and Carlton,
Carlton Gibson 54:48
it's Red Bull sustainable. It's my question there because Okay, yeah, I see that in that that our, the Red Bull helps and for the next two or three, it's it's doing its job, but then is there not a cost the next day or the next one For the next month for pushing
Kalob Taulein 55:03
them, there is definitely a cost. So for me, it's great for about three or four hours and then after that it's just terrible. My eyes hurt, my brain hurts my muscles hurt. I'm like, is this worth the four hours? And it's sort of my my go to like, I don't have the energy today because I've been working on this content for the last two weeks. Yeah, I just need a quick little pick me up. And every time I regret it, it's just, it's when you when you're so
Carlton Gibson 55:28
busy other sort of, let's say you're pushing yourself on because you've got some content to finish a book to finish or client work to finish. Do you recuperate? You give yourself a recuperation period afterwards or something like that,
Kalob Taulein 55:40
you know, the books finished. I really, really try to I tried to reward myself for all the work that I do, even if it's just like something dumb. Like you make a list of five things you got to do for a client and they're all small things today, it only takes an hour. Make that list check it off, pat yourself on the back say I did a good job right that seems to help me with with burnout quite a bit. hobbies that you love. Very, very important. I, for a long time in my life, I didn't really believe in like the whole work life balance, I was like just what you need to balance, right. And now that I'm getting older, I'm like, it is so important. So I have an indoor garden, and I do a bunch of hydroponic stuff. So that's a nice little hobby for me. I literally get nothing out of it. I just get to care for plants. And that's, that's what keeps me going. I love doing things like that. So
Will Vincent 56:30
yeah, well, I'm gonna mention I just recently saw it. So Jason Cohen of WP engine, the WordPress hosting, he had a talk I really liked on talking about his burnout and he talked about the Venn diagram of wants skills and needs. And if you find yourself repeatedly in the skills and needs or needs to get done, and you have the skills to do it, but you don't want to do it that you know, so you have this excess sense of agency, about like only I can do something or other like I couldn't possibly have someone else, you know, handle it. That kind of exacerbates the burnout and you're really just completely wrong about it. So I found that helpful. But yeah, your point about hobbies is great. I mean, I found out about you Carlton as I as I age, the hard thing is that it's hard to have 100% like relaxation recuperation time, because there are other demands on our life. Whereas when when I was younger, I could just take a day off, you know, on a Sunday or something. But what my Sunday looks like in the absence of work is, if anything more mentally and physically draining than sitting at my computer and coding or creating content, so there's, I find that a little bit of the the challenge.
Kalob Taulein 57:36
Yeah, yeah. So I faced that exact same challenge. I honestly don't really have a good answer for how to deal with that. I think we all sort of have our own ways. Like if you have family, and you love spending time with your kids, I would say just spend more time with your kids. If you just need to veg out in front of Netflix for a few hours and that makes you feel relaxed or you need to go see some friends, you know, got to do what you got to do to get away from the computer, drop the screen time and just be here. For a little bit well there's you know, they're supervising your kids online school and then there's sitting and watching Shira with them. Like
Will Vincent 58:09
speaking of what I did this morning before we recorded this, so I did those things anyway, well they watch Shira well now we tee up my my first grader has like an hour of videos and exercises. She just got her online math game she's got YouTube videos of reading stuff. But you know, so anyway so when I'm supervising that it's maybe not peak relaxing parenting time while I'm with two other kids, but when we're just sitting around watching Shira like you know, that's a little more you don't you don't watch here at Carleton.
Carlton Gibson 58:45
I used to watch here but they're more into what do they like? What they
Will Vincent 58:49
don't even know that he man is a thing which is great.
Carlton Gibson 58:51
Yeah, they don't. They they're watching some Star Wars series is like seven.
Will Vincent 58:55
There's so many of those. There's so many
Carlton Gibson 58:59
loving So you know, tough now sit down watch an episode that Yeah, feed up lovely.
Kalob Taulein 59:03
Oh, I really only watch half an hour of it. I turn it on. I was like, I'm gonna watch this entire season. Yeah, we'd have them do that.
Will Vincent 59:09
Yes. Yes.
Kalob Taulein 59:12
It would. That's healthy.
Will Vincent 59:14
Okay, thank you everyone for listening. Kalob, how can people get in touch? Or where would you direct people obviously learn wagtail calm? Are there other ways if people have questions around your content, or wagtail
Kalob Taulein 59:26
Yeah, learn wagtail comm if you're interested in learning wagtail I've got another sort of website that I have maintained, but looks pretty nice coding for everybody calm, you can contact me through there, or just through standard Twitter at Kalob Taulein. Or if you want to join a Facebook group and, you know, either help people learn how to code or ask questions about coding Facebook group called learning to code. It's got almost 50,000 members in it. And I'm very active in there as the only admin. Wow, good for you.
Will Vincent 59:53
Speaking of burnout, yeah. Yeah. Okay, everyone. Thanks for listening. We'll see you all next time. big mistakes. Thanks for having me.