Voices of the Code

Karl Murray (00:26)
Welcome to Voices of the Code. My name is Karl Murray and with us as always is the fantastic Mr. Stephen Fox.

Steven Fox (00:33)
Good afternoon.

Karl Murray (00:34)
Hello. All right. So if you are not familiar with the show, basically what we do is we interview random people and get to know them. Some of these people we've met at LairCon, some of them not so much. Today we have Mr. Phil Maru. Phil, introduce yourself.

Phil Mareu (00:50)
Hi, hey, thanks for the invite. I appreciate you didn't ask me to join this.

Steven Fox (00:56)
Did we get that last name right?

Karl Murray (00:56)
Absolutely.

Phil Mareu (00:58)
Yes, you did.

Karl Murray (00:59)
I said, so pre-context, before we get started, I usually ask them how to pronounce their name. And I was like, Phil Maroo. So like maroon, both at the end. And Phil was like, yes, absolutely. So I was like, OK, perfect. So yeah, I'll nail it.

Phil Mareu (01:14)
Yeah. It's, it's, yeah, it's a, think, like Moo. So Maroo, Moo, yeah.

Karl Murray (01:22)
Right, right. So Phil, where are from?

Phil Mareu (01:27)
From central Kansas, it's hard to really say where I'm from in central Kansas because it's just a bunch of farmlands. There's little dots, villages in town, but more rain. The GPS is 38, no.

Steven Fox (01:36)
I want GPS coordinates. Let's go. I'm kidding.

Karl Murray (01:38)
Yeah, we need GPS count.

The other thing we need to know is what year did you get DSL? Just kidding Just kidding

Phil Mareu (01:50)
90.

Steven Fox (01:50)
He has to use Starlink. He doesn't have internet. Yeah, yeah.

Phil Mareu (01:52)
I have no idea. idea. Sorry. You know, we actually had some pretty decent technology for being in the middle of Kansas, formerly, and it was really, really surprising. The town I grew up in literally had 100 people in it. That was it. And then that town and about two or three other towns combined to form one school, which had about, know, my high school had a total of 80 students and I graduated with 16. But in the, you know, this isn't gonna give away my age here, but this was in the early 90s. And we had classrooms

Steven Fox (02:13)
Wow.

Phil Mareu (02:22)
that were remote from other schools in the local area. So we had videos and cameras and screens. So even in the 90s, there was a little farm town. We still were doing some pretty modern stuff. even the computers we had, we had apples, had window machines, and I had a lot of access to them. So it was, even though it was a small town in Kansas, we still had some pretty good access to technology.

Steven Fox (02:40)
Dang.

Karl Murray (02:45)
It's awesome.

Steven Fox (02:45)
Yeah, that's way better than what I remember from my school. And it was one later and two at a larger town than that. So that's pretty impressive. What kind of farming is around that area? Is it corn or is it something else?

Karl Murray (02:49)
Yeah.

Phil Mareu (02:58)
Kansas is known as the wheat state and so yeah, and central Kansas is a very arid climate. That's where you gotta grow wheat so you need to dry out really well before you can harvest it and harvest is a big deal. I've worked at the grain elevators for summer and it's, you know, 14, 15 hour days for about 10, because it's a mad dash to get all the wheat harvested. There's crews from Canada that come down and help so you'll just see combines.

Steven Fox (03:00)
Wheat? Okay.

Phil Mareu (03:28)
all through the night just harvesting the wheat as fast as they can before like rain comes or anything like that. So wheat is the main, main item, yeah, wheat.

Steven Fox (03:36)
wheat.

Well, I do like my bread, so I appreciate the farming.

Karl Murray (03:41)
Right.

Phil Mareu (03:41)
Yeah.

Karl Murray (03:44)
That is what Steven likes to do on the weekend is make his own.

Steven Fox (03:49)
I- you know I'm a big pizza guy, so the dough is a pretty crucial part. I'm not gonna say I'm not into bread, so. I- I do-

Phil Mareu (03:55)
Do you make the Napoleon dough? Where you get the double lot, put it in the fridge, make it cold, you use cold water? Yes, yes, I do the same thing. I've got a friend who has a fantastic outside oven. We can get that thing up to 900 and it's incredibly satisfying to throw that pizza in there for a minute and half and just have like a perfect pizza. Yeah, all right.

Steven Fox (04:01)
I do, do. Yep, I'm a Neapolitan pizza guy. Yep.

Yeah, last Christmas season, I was fortunate enough to get a Gosney dome. I've got a like, I mean, it's not big, it's a single pizza sized oven, but it's a propane slash wood fired oven that gets really, really, really hot. yeah.

Phil Mareu (04:28)
Mm-hmm.

that might be the same one he has. Is it kind of oblong, like a hamburger-shaped kind of thing? Yeah, okay, I bet that it's same thing. His takes wood as well, so he could do wood or, yeah, yeah, it's fantastic.

Steven Fox (04:39)
Kind of, yeah. Mm-hmm. It's pretty popular. It's great. So once you get into pizza, man, it is a rabbit hole. You can spiral deep down. So now were these super long days whenever you did some wheat help, and were you like, yeah, I can't do this, and this is what got you into programming?

Phil Mareu (04:50)
Yeah.

You

No, was, that was only one summer. And actually, I actually, I did that later in my, I wouldn't say career at that point, but yeah, if you want, can start and start talking about how I even got into writing the old code. So, grew up in a little farm town. We had a couple families with, well, was, it's actually an apple.

Karl Murray (05:04)
great segue.

Steven Fox (05:06)
That's what's up

Yeah, let's hear it. Let's hear it.

Karl Murray (05:26)
Commodore 64.

Phil Mareu (05:31)
TI-99, I'm sorry, not an Apple, a Texas Instrument 99, so it's a TI-99. Which I've asked a lot of people, when I give a talk or something, I ask, nobody's ever either heard of one. It does, but it is like a Commodore, it's the same shape, takes cartridges.

Steven Fox (05:43)
That sounds like a graphing calculator.

Karl Murray (05:47)
Yeah, at one point in time, TI did more than calculators. They've kind of scaled back since then. Yeah, I see it. Yeah, you won't be able to, but that's fine.

Steven Fox (05:48)
Okay.

Phil Mareu (05:52)
Right, I have it behind me but I know it's audio and video, I could grab it. Actually it's, it's right there in the corner, yeah. Your viewers might not be able see it but that's okay. Yeah, so it's not my original. But anyway, so my dad bought this, know, which is interesting because he wasn't really a tech guy but I think he kind of wanted to, you know, hear about or learn about what these computers are all about. So he buys it in Amyang, 12, 13, and I started messing with it and it came with a book, Learn How to Program Basic.

Steven Fox (05:53)
Yeah, okay.

Phil Mareu (06:21)
And I opened it up and I started typing some lines of code and I look at the screen and it just says, hello world. And I'm just like, I'm sorry, did I just do that? And it changed my life, that was it. That book, every exercise, I did everything in it and it just clicked. I had no issues learning it at all. And at that point I was hooked, I was writing games on that TI 99 and then eventually I got an Apple IIe.

Steven Fox (06:22)
cool.

Phil Mareu (06:50)
and I started writing games on the Apple TV. I still have some somewhere around here, which I can find, but I have sprites that I drew for my games and then like maps that you would go into and random events would happen. You have to fight them. Again, this is late 80s, I think, or something like that. And just got into it. Now, in a small town, there wasn't a big computer club or anything like that. So was me and maybe another couple other people that would do that.

Steven Fox (07:05)
That's awesome. Yeah.

Karl Murray (07:08)
That is awesome.

Phil Mareu (07:17)
But it was fun having that experience going into high school, taking programming classes, because I would just finish the whole semester in like a week and a half and then have the whole semester to just do whatever I wanted with the computers, you know? And then...

Karl Murray (07:31)
I think it's funny that Phil and I have a very similar background. Like my dad got me my first computer and like I got internet and all that kind of stuff. And the day I showed him eBay, he was like, this is amazing. I could buy boat parts on eBay. And then like a couple of weeks later, they'll just be on my doorstep. But I started with Java and it was really funny because my teacher...

Phil Mareu (07:34)
Really?

You

Karl Murray (07:58)
actually got me a copy of my Java textbook. I still have it. And he was like, because at the time he was just printing them off like pages and like handing out a chapter at a time. It's like, hey, take care of this. And I thought it was really funny because he was like, hey, Carl, here's your copy of the book because I'm going to waste so much paper just printing off your stuff because I was completing them so quickly. But yeah, I think it's funny that you and I have a very similar background.

Phil Mareu (08:22)
Yeah, yeah, nice. Yeah, I remember with that TI, which this is something I always like to share, I think it's fun, that you had a cassette player.

Does this sound familiar to Yes, and you plug in the cassette player and the cassette player has the ticker, the zero, you know, the little ticker. And so what you would do is you have a piece of paper basically at your manifest of where your programs are. So you would go to like your last program, let's say it's at 023. So you go to 0, you fast forward to 023 and then you would type in a command on the screen and you would hit record.

Karl Murray (08:34)
Yes. Yeah.

Play it.

Phil Mareu (08:56)
on the device and hit enter on the screen and it would start taking the data from the recording it on the tape and you hear this like noise and then when it was done it would tell you to stop and then you write the last number down to 23 to 27 and then you wrote what your program was. So anytime you need to load a program onto the machine.

You would you would fast forward or rewind you fast forward rewind to the right ticker You know so 17 this is my no wizard program And then you would hit play and it would do the other direction and then you'd hit stop and then it would be in there so I

Steven Fox (09:19)
man.

Karl Murray (09:30)
Yeah, the Commodore 64 worked the exact same way. was crazy. Yeah.

Steven Fox (09:31)
Wow.

Phil Mareu (09:32)
Did it, yeah. But yeah, so I just really did it as a hobby. I'd never thought of it as a career at all. It's just something I really enjoy doing at home.

And, but in addition to that, always really liked science. And I had a grandfather who was an electrical engineer and we used to just geek out all the time. And he always bought me like electronic kits to build things and so forth. So I really kind of felt like I wanted to be an engineer, but I wanted to do something that was more.

Mechanical, mean, I guess that's the best way to put it, but I like building stuff with my hands. And so in my mind, I wanted to go and become a mechanical engineer. So right out high school, I did that. I only made it a semester in school and ended up dropping out, still coding at home, still writing code, not even knowing this could be a career, just doing it as a hobby, and then just working odd jobs for quite a while.

And then eventually years later, I decided to go back to school. I worked for a company that offered tuition reimbursement and book reimbursement, everything, no matter what class you took. And I said, you know what, I'm gonna try to go back to school. And so I went back to school and instantly I was like, I need to go back to school. I decided to get a degree in mechanical engineering, I transferred to the University of Kansas, started going to school there and there was a, I don't know what you wanna call it, a programming platform called Matlab.

And Matlab is, okay, so you're second-hand, so you're familiar with it. So everyone is not familiar with it. Basically, Matlab is a matrices, a specialized matrices programming language. I mean, they specialize in matrices, but it's basically what engineers use to write programs, do a lot of calculations, a lot of differential equation stuff, and so forth. It's not really made for graphics and writing games, but...

That's what this guy did with it. I go back to, hmm?

Karl Murray (11:32)
Right. It's kind of like latex. Latex or I think that's how, yeah. Yeah, basically it will do all the, the power of two and stuff like that, it'll do all that kind of stuff for you. It's not super, not super graphic intensive. You might see it on a calculator, pass that, you're not getting a whole lot.

Steven Fox (11:32)
Yeah.

Phil Mareu (11:39)
yeah, yeah, I know what talking about.

Yeah, I

I kind of felt, mean that to me was the first thing where I was like, this is a career. These engineers are writing code. And honestly, there was a good portion of my class that really just didn't understand programming. know, they're mechanical engineers, they like to build stuff and they know the physics of things, but programming was very different to them. And there's only a few of us in the class that really excelled at programming. And I graduated with a degree and immediately had a job in engineering writing.

MATLAB code, and it was fantastic. So half the time I was doing that, the other half I was doing some analysis on a different computer system called FEA. But I wasn't super happy with the job, and in my new hobby hours, I wasn't coding as much, but I was building projects. So I was building...

I was working on cars, I was building stuff for the house. There's just things I like to work on. I always, if I can find an excuse to build something, I do it. And I wanted to showcase these items, and so I'm like, well, why don't I just build a website? And so I found a website tool. I'm gonna give it up to RapidWeaver. I bet no one's really heard of RapidWeaver, have you? Okay. I'm not gonna lie, it's still available today. I just checked it out not too long ago.

Steven Fox (13:10)
Nice.

Karl Murray (13:14)
I've used it. I've used it.

Phil Mareu (13:24)
It's really... Yeah, but better, but better. Yeah.

Karl Murray (13:24)
It's the Mac version of Dreamweaver, basically. But better. Well, it had like drag and drop components that were pre-built. So you can be like, I need an accordion. Go grab the accordion, drop it in, and now you have an accordion that you can literally interact with.

Steven Fox (13:30)
better.

Phil Mareu (13:42)
Right, yeah, it was pretty easy to use. And at that time I did use, I was doing something for the mechanical engineering department. I was kinda helping them and I was using Dreamweaver and I remember that was very difficult. This was very easy because it was very wizzy wig-like where you could just build it out. But it wasn't doing everything I wanted it to do.

Steven Fox (13:42)
Hmm.

Phil Mareu (13:59)
So I said, well, I know how to code. Why don't I just learn what the code is that makes this stuff work? And so I bought an HTML and CSS book and I read it over a weekend and it just clicked. And I said, okay, let me dig in the code. Now I can go into source, read it and make adjustments. And it just kind of happened where I was like, okay, I really wanted these boxes over here and started working at it. And then that led me to, I need more dynamic capabilities. And that...

was the next step to PHP. Now what's interesting here is in 2007-ish, I graduated, I'm not in school, know, buried in books for 100 hours a week. Now I have a little more free time, I was able to go out and meet with some other coding groups. And if you are familiar with Django, Django was invented in the town that I'm living in right now. And not only that, yeah, it was invented in Lawrence, Kansas.

Karl Murray (14:47)
chained.

No way.

Phil Mareu (14:54)
hung out with the original founders, creators of Django. At this time, I have no idea what, it was pretty young then too. This is like 2007-ish. And so they had a meetup, the Python crew had a meetup where they go out every Monday night or something and I hung out with them and still friends with them today. In fact, one of the, probably the primary shops in the country for Django development is called RevSys.

They're here in Lawrence. Jeff Triplett's a good friend of mine, known for a long time. This is his mic that I'm borrowing. I just messaged him. I said, hey, any mic can borrow? He's like, So the reason why I'm bringing this up, because it's very interesting that I didn't all of a sudden, or I didn't step towards Python and Django. And I kind of want to talk about that because when you're a new developer, you get inundated with a lot of technologies you might not understand. And you're like, well, maybe this is the way I should go.

Karl Murray (15:28)
That's awesome.

Phil Mareu (15:51)
And I looked back and the issue I was having was what the framework provided was just beyond what I was capable of really understanding at that time. And I think if I would have forced myself into that framework, I think I would have had a very difficult time and might have got discouraged. And so I think that the progression I went to eventually to get a framework worked out pretty well, even though feel like I wasn't able to do some the sophisticated stuff I wanted to do. So at that point, I just really didn't think about using

Python and Django for my little projects that I was working on. just didn't understand. I could understand HTML and CSS and eventually PHP just kind of clicked. And so I kind of went down that path, no framework. But I was surrounded by a lot of talented devs that gave me a lot of good advice. In fact, I wasn't using Git for a long time. These groups were like, Phil, you gotta use Git. And I'm like, I don't know, seems difficult. And now I'm using Git, of course. But yeah, so I...

was working at this engineering company and also building stuff on the side and trying to build websites to show the stuff that I'm building on the side. And eventually just started falling in love with building websites and just started building random websites and designing them too. I've always been someone that's interested in the design or the aesthetics of things as well as how they work. So for me, it was a combination of being able to design something, being able to make it work and be able to present it.

very quickly and that appeal is just fantastic for me. So in the evening I just started working on Web bill. I started building sites for some people. It got attention. In fact, the University of Kansas, while I was working at this other company, is like, we need some web help. Would you just mind coming in and give us a hand? We'll pay you, you know, whatever. And that ended up being my first, I guess, professional. I was just doing some basic stuff for them. This might have been 2008, maybe 2009.

But as I kept working on things in the evening and honing my skills, I really kind of felt like this is something I should dive into. And here I am, I worked hard to get a degree in mechanical engineering. I'm working a pretty good job. mean, the job I had was very, this is 2007, and it was very late. I mean, we talk about, what is it, unlimited time off or whatever it is now, but that wasn't a thing in 2007, but it was implied.

Steven Fox (18:04)
you

Phil Mareu (18:17)
Like they didn't care. When you took off, you showed up when you wanted, you left when you wanted. It a very nice situation. But there were some things I just wasn't happy with though. And so about 2010, I was kinda like, know, I feel really good about my web skills. People are wanting me to do work for them. And so I decided with really no big runway set up, I decided to leave my job. I gave two weeks notice. Hands shaking.

It's like, here's my vaccination. I'm gonna, because she's steady paychecked. I've also been kind of like, I've also felt like I've been kind of like an entrepreneurial spirit kind of individual, if that's a thing. But I've always felt like somebody that's always done more than you need to at a job. I've always done, you know, I've always moved up pretty quick. And I feel like it was time for me to try to apply that for my own company. That's kind of what happened as well. And so in 2010, I quit.

Karl Murray (18:48)
Dangerous move.

Phil Mareu (19:16)
And a couple months later, I started a little boutique web development company here in Lawrence called FillSquare. And really I just focused on whatever I could find on Craigslist. I need help with CSS, I need help with this. I just, you know, was bootstrapping it and I just needed income in any way I could. I sold my TV, I had a treadmill, I sold like everything I could to keep the business going, but I really believed in it.

And then eventually I landed a couple just big gigs, you know, that kind of swoop in and they're like, we really need all this work. And I'm like, okay, I'm up for the challenge. so that helped out quite a bit. It also helped that I was really focused on customer service. One thing I noticed with talking with customers is that they were very unhappy with, and this is 2010, they were very unhappy with the web developer. They were condescending. They would not respond within,

You know, two weeks, a month sometimes just to fix a spelling error or something. So I was listening. What's that?

Karl Murray (20:20)
Ugh. Yeah, as somebody who works at an agency like that, it's like, no, you cannot wait that long. You get a day or two max.

Steven Fox (20:22)
Jeez, that's like... ugh.

Phil Mareu (20:33)
Yeah, so there was a lot of upset, you know, individual companies in this town. And so I leveraged on that. I mean, if I got an email, I responded within as fast as I can. Honestly, I still do this to this day. Responded very rapidly. And I just take care of my customers. I've lost money on customers just because I wanna make sure they're happy. To me, that's more important because I know they're gonna give my name to somebody else. And so that really kind of boosted the company.

And at some point, which I wouldn't recommend pulling back on marketing no matter how well your company's doing, but I did kind of do that because I was just getting so much word of mouth that I didn't really have to market much. And it was pretty fantastic. One thing we specialized in and I was really passionate about is just having designs that were unique to the company. This was the time when WordPress was pretty...

Karl Murray (21:08)
You

Phil Mareu (21:27)
I mean, it was growing pretty fast because the themes looked really good and people could throw them on their website real quick and add a modern, at that point, a modern looking theme and it could be mobile friendly and so forth. And I also adapted WordPress to the company early on because of that. I knew that was gonna be an easy low entry but what we did is we never used any off the shelf theme. We always built everything from scratch. I say we because I did hire a designer.

full time at some point, 2011 to 2014 or 13. the fun thing about the WordPress is I had no idea how to use WordPress whatsoever. And one marketing thing I did to promote my business, which I think is pretty fun, is I put posters up and said, hey, I'm holding a workshop on how to use WordPress. Now, as these posters are going up,

I've never ever seen WordPress. So I put them all up and it's like the day before the workshop and I was like, maybe I should install WordPress now. I mean, that was my plan. I just, so I install WordPress and I just, I really liked the pressure. I think that's what it is. I just like, so.

Steven Fox (22:34)
Yeah

you

Karl Murray (22:41)
It's like watching Josh Siri and it's like, I'm gonna try this out today. It's like, yeah, I'm gonna film myself trying it out. I might look like an idiot, who knows?

Phil Mareu (22:49)
Exactly, Honestly, I should do stuff like that. I should just like hit record, do stuff, put pressure on me, because I do like it. But yeah, just installed it. I looked at the admin panel. I put a curriculum together and I just showed up the next day. I found a place that had a computer lab that, I don't know if they rented it to me. I think they did for like $150 or something like that.

And it worked out great. So I became the WordPress expert all of a just like that. And I held a couple more workshops. 24 hours. know? exactly. So now we're working WordPress and we're building themes and we're building our own plugins. The issues I noticed early on with WordPress is that you have these other plugins that can be made by anybody with any kind of standards.

Karl Murray (23:25)
Not knowing WordPress.

Steven Fox (23:25)
24 hours.

Karl Murray (23:29)
What a difference a day makes.

Steven Fox (23:29)
my god, this is fantastic.

Phil Mareu (23:49)
And I think that has a benefit, of course. I don't wanna go too much into WordPress now, yeah, no, But back then there was a lot more problems. The things customers thought they wanted WordPress for wasn't as concrete as they really realized. I think they were thinking like, I can make all my own updates. I can add all my own plugins. I won't need a developer.

Karl Murray (23:56)
Yeah, don't start that debate. You don't want to hear the end of it.

As long as you know HTML, sure, but 95 % of you do not.

Phil Mareu (24:20)
Yeah, well that and if you install a plugin, because it'll just go to the plugin library and just like, you know, young kid that probably doesn't have any experience just did it for a high school project and now it's available to put in my project and they put in their commercial project and it interacts with someone else, you know, and so these were issues that were happening. So we really kind of shied away from that. And eventually, well, not eventually, but even early on we were also getting some,

jobs that required some sophistication. And so along with WordPress, I found CodingNighter. And so CodingNighter was the first framework I ever used. And it took a little bit for my mind to understand a framework. The whole thing about routing, and CodingNighter has implicit routing, so it implies to a controller, you don't have to explicitly define it.

And that was just very interesting to me. I, you know, it took a little bit, but I liked all the helpers and everything they provided. So I started working with CodeIgniter.

Karl Murray (25:22)
thousand hour head start.

Phil Mareu (25:25)
Yeah, yeah. And then in the Uniter ecosystem, there was a CMS called PyroCMS, and that was built in Coding Uniter. So we started switching from WordPress to PyroCMS. And PyroCMS was pretty fantastic, really. mean, it was cool because the plugins were actually many Coding Uniter applications. So if you knew the Coding Uniter framework, you could build a plugin. And so you would just actually put that entire app into the framework.

And so if we needed to build like a schedule manager or something like that, we just build as a standalone coding editor. We make a few adjustments. We can make a package that we can implement into our CMS. And it worked really well, but they made an announcement, hey, this is where I learned about Liar of El. So PyroCMS is making an announcement, hey, we're migrating off of coding editor and we're going to move towards this framework called Liar of El.

Steven Fox (26:04)
Nice.

Phil Mareu (26:22)
This is 2000 and I wanna say 13. Early days. It might have been 14, but I feel like it was 13. The reason why I say that is that they announced it, but I don't think I really looked at Laravel that much until 2014, because that's when I really started using it. But I wanna say 2013, they announced it. And what was happening is I was waiting for them to come out with it before I worked on or added a new project.

Steven Fox (26:22)
Mmm.

okay, like early, early days for Laravel.

Phil Mareu (26:51)
I really wanted the new framework on Laravel before I start building these legacy projects. And so I was kind of putting some stuff on hold and eventually they just took too long. It was probably two years maybe and they still haven't moved it to Laravel. And so what I decided to do was just fire up Laravel and let me just see what I can build with Laravel.

Steven Fox (27:13)
Mmm.

Phil Mareu (27:19)
And it just took me, I don't know, less than a week to do that and play with Laravel and build an app that I was just like, okay, I'm sorry PyroCMS, but we're gonna have to part ways. And so that was my journey into Laravel. And so in 2014, I dropped WordPress, PyroCMS, and I think it was the only two-frame worksheet, and Code Uniter. Dropped everything and went 100 % Laravel in 2014.

I emailed my clients, I said, hey, here in the next year or two, we are no longer providing WordPress services. I really want to help you move to a new developer or we can convert your WordPress site into a Laravel site. And believe it or not, I had good portion, like we want to stick with you, but whatever, I don't know what Laravel is, but let's convert it. yeah. Yeah. Well, you know,

Karl Murray (28:07)
I don't care, it doesn't matter what Laravel is. Yeah, that's always so fun.

Steven Fox (28:15)
a really good business strategy Phil. Be like, having that reputation. No, no, no, having that good of a reputation with your customers and you can just tell them, sorry, I'm not doing that stuff anymore, but you can hire me to redo all of that work on this new framework. It's actually, I mean, that's fantastic.

Phil Mareu (28:17)
What

Karl Murray (28:18)
Completely alienate your customers.

Right, fair.

Phil Mareu (28:32)
Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I really like to take care of my customers and they trust me. it definitely wasn't like something I wanted to say, hey, sorry, you're out in the cold. I found other developers and worked with these other developers to transition them. So I've worked with every customer I had to transition them. And the ones that did want to convert, was like, there's a cost, it wouldn't be like full cost, converted it over and they wanted it. Yeah, I mean, it's like any service you have, right? You a good mechanic, and they're gonna switch over, I don't know.

to a different location. You might actually drive an extra 10 miles just because you like the mechanics. So it's kind of the same mindset. So, but yeah, what a gamble. I mean, I had no idea where this framework was in this scheme of anything. This is a time where CakePHP was around. I knew some CakePHP developers. I'm drawing blank at some other PHP frameworks, but.

Karl Murray (29:14)
Right.

Phil Mareu (29:28)
But so at this point it's just something I knew PyroCMS led me there. was like, me try it out. I think I knew another developer in town that was using it. And yeah, I liked how easy it was to just make database calls. And that was my biggest weakness at that time. I mean, I would still say SQL is not my strong suit, but being able to have this abstraction that can just write stuff in any order and the query gets built correctly was...

Really nice, and also going into a model and just putting a class to relate to HasMany and it just knew how to, I mean that just, I was like, I'm gonna get so much done. I'm all about efficiency, so if there's something that comes out that's gonna make my life more efficient, I will take a day and learn it so I'm keeping that more efficient. So with Laravel, it just catered to that so well. So at this point, now I'm pretty much not doing a lot of web.

site stuff, I'm doing more web application development stuff. A lot of mobile development. We were a big mobile shop. And this is back before I think the term responsive was even around. had a, this time I had a designer who was, he was just ahead of his time. He knew CSS really well and he knew how to do graphic design. He knew how to do 3D modeling. He was just beyond like what I, which, know, looking back, I wish I would have had the funding to keep him around, but.

Steven Fox (30:47)
nice.

Phil Mareu (30:52)
He's probably on an island right now. I'm telling you, he was fantastic. But he made, he handcrafted, is, there was, think Bootstrap might've been out. Is it Twitter Bootstrap? Yeah, Twitter Bootstrap, right. I think it was around, but we built our own responsive framework using media queries. I'd say we, but actually he did most of that. And in fact, I think a couple of our projects are still using it to this day and still working fantastic. So it was a good time.

Steven Fox (30:56)
Yeah

Phil Mareu (31:22)
So where does the journey go from here? So Phil Square's going great. I'm learning how to run my own business. I'm also learning that I'm not great at running a business. And you know.

Steven Fox (31:35)
You

Karl Murray (31:37)
First step to running your own business. Realize you suck at running your own business.

Phil Mareu (31:40)
Yeah, yeah.

Steven Fox (31:40)
Yeah. Fall back to disc golf? Maybe?

Phil Mareu (31:44)
Yeah, so also, I ended up working with a client. So disc golf is something that, I'm glad you brought that up, Steven. So, we're gonna turn this into the disc golf podcast now. Yeah, so disc golf is something, I love it. Well, I'll get back to that, that voice of the disc golf for a second, because I got something that's, so I got into disc golf.

Steven Fox (31:52)
It's like I knew it's crazy. Yes, I'm here for it.

Karl Murray (32:01)
Voices of the Disc Golf.

Phil Mareu (32:14)
very early on, but I never played it that often, seriously. It was something I just kinda did, took a frisbee, threw it around, you know. And then in 2014-ish, 2015, I worked with a company here in Lawrence, and this company creates what is now the standard disc golf bag that we wear in our backs, like these backpacks that have an open back that you can open up. That was designed and developed here in Lawrence, Kansas. And...

He needed some help integrating into like warehouse automation or something like that where it just like he needs to be able to send stuff to the warehouse API or whatever so helped him work at well at that point I was kind of like I'm sitting at the desk coding a lot and I'm not doing anything physically I needed I used to play basketball, but you know weak ankles kind of put a damper on that but I really

Remember enjoying disc golf that I got there and play casually every now and then I decided to take it a little bit serious and so at that point I was playing almost every day I started understanding the mechanics of a held all the different disc work and Once you get in it and once you get the bug I'm telling you it is it's a rabbit hole. It's really fun. So I Compare it to bowling in a way because if you just go and casually bowl, it's fun, you know, but when you get into it

Steven Fox (33:22)
fun sport.

Phil Mareu (33:32)
you understand the mechanics of the ball, how you have the asymmetrical balls that are different than the symmetrical balls, and then you have the different oil patterns on there that a lot of people recognize that there's different oil patterns and how you got to, once you learn about those little details about the sport, then it starts really opening up these permutations that you can, that you'll want to attain or aspire for. So anyway, so yeah, I'm deciding to play golf and then I'm using a lair vowel.

to build Disc Golf related apps. I was excited, I was building these little social, I built like a social media site that, because that's what you do in 2014, you build a social media platform. And everyone can post their scores on a feed, and you can put comments on it. It also has some statistical stuff on it. And eventually I reached out to the sanctioning body of Disc Golf, which is called the PDGA.

Steven Fox (34:06)
Perfect world.

Phil Mareu (34:32)
And I said, hey, can I use your data to get event information and course information? And they were like, sure. So I built two or three projects over the next several years that were disc golf related, all in Laravel, and then eventually Vue.js. So that was also my introduction to Vue.js. I think Laravel brought it up somewhere, Laracast or something, and I was like, yeah, let's do it. And...

Karl Murray (34:56)
Yeah, Taylor tweeted about it. He was like, I started learning React. I hate React. Vue.js is so much easier to learn. And right after that, it seemed like everybody was hopping on Vue. So that is pretty funny.

Steven Fox (34:56)
You

Phil Mareu (35:08)
Yeah, including me.

Steven Fox (35:09)
And knowing Phil, you put up advertisements that you'd have a view workshop. The next day, and so you just picked it up.

Phil Mareu (35:15)
I did not.

No, I-

Karl Murray (35:21)
He went from not knowing how binds work to the next day explaining how binds work. Yeah.

Phil Mareu (35:26)
Right, yeah. Well, I will say before Vue, I was doing a lot of interactive, I love making interactive UIs, but I was doing it with jQuery. And I was also doing reactive stuff with jQuery. Basically, you're manually updating the DOM as stuff happens. So I've sent a request, I get it back. I'm like, okay, now I can update the DOM, right? I just do it manually. And...

When Vue came around, took me a couple weeks of just working with it to wrap my mind around that when you just change the variable, it automatically updated everything across the screen. It's a weird thing now to think about, but then it didn't seem like that technology really was that advanced. Like, does it really doing this? And so once I got the data bind, yeah, I just couldn't believe it. And then once that clicked, I was off to the races. It was just like I...

Steven Fox (36:11)
Right. Right.

Karl Murray (36:12)
Two-way data binding. It's a magical thing.

Phil Mareu (36:20)
I had to just see how far I could go with VJS. But anyway, so I'm building VJS projects in Larabel and all my client projects are VJS in Larabel. So I'm building these disc golf projects and I do have, I have a direction with the disc golf stuff. So everyone listening, hang in there with me. So I'm running Field Square and in 2014, my wife and I get married.

And we decided in 2015 to just let the lease expire on our house by a camper and just travel around full time with no house. no worries, no worries.

Steven Fox (37:03)
I love the spontaneity and just willingness to like, go for it. This is awesome, Phil. Okay, sorry, keep going.

Karl Murray (37:11)
This is now the second time that Phil is just taking the gloves off and he's like, nope, no safety net, we're on.

Phil Mareu (37:18)
Now let's do this. Well, my wife, she was working remotely in 2000. She had a job where she could work as little or as many hours she wanted. And so she was working remote. I did have an office here, so it wasn't totally remote, but it was pretty easy to convert it to remote. I reached out to my clients, like, hey, let's just communicate on Skype. I was gonna say, what was it? Big scam.

Steven Fox (37:28)
Okay, that does help.

Karl Murray (37:43)
scam.

Phil Mareu (37:48)
or email and they're like, okay, sounds good. And so before this trip, I had maybe two or three projects that were gonna be my income for a little bit. And immediately we're on the road and those two of those projects drop. Like one of them, they had to forfeit their deposit and it was just a bad deal, yeah. And so now I'm on the road and I'll tell you what, when you're in a physical location,

Well, it depends on how established your business is, but mine was really established as a local business. And so when you're established as a local business and you don't live locally anymore, it's tough to find new work. You know, we're living in a different place every week, every two weeks. And so I just can't walk into a coffee shop or something and say, hey, is there an app I can build you? You you need to build up a little bit of... So that was, it was very difficult times. It also was a time where I recognized that PhilSquare kind of, you know, outgrew.

building some basic websites and apps and decided to completely commit to doing more sophisticated app stuff. And then I also decided to commit on a little project called DG Tournament, which was a site that would show you tournaments for disc golf on a map. And I built it because there was nothing like this at all. And when I was traveling around, for me to find out if there's a tournament, I would have to go to a list.

on a page, on the PDJ website's page, and just look at the state, and then there'd be, you know, 100 cities with tournaments, and I'd have to, where am I near this city? Am I near this city? And I'd have to like, just go back and forth. And so, eventually I built this, and then I built a tournament manager in it, so there's nothing like this, again. Tournament managers can go in there, they can manage, they can sell sponsorships, and I thought this thing was gonna just like, you know, take off. Like, I, I,

My wife and I, got a booth at some of the tournaments, major tournaments, and tried to get people to sign up. I would go to, I'd play leagues as we traveled, which is really great. You can find a league almost anywhere in this country. And I'd play with the grip people, and I'd start talking to someone that might be running tournaments, and they would treat me like I was selling them a vacuum cleaner. And I'm like, no, I just want you to check out this, you know. It was very difficult. However, during this time, you know, I'm struggling, finding more work.

And then also eventually my wife and I decided let's have a kid. And so in 2018, we have our daughter. And at this point, before she was born, I decided let me just go back into the job market. Let me just go work for corporate, get a steady pay job. Pay job, well, pay job? Paycheck. You know what I'm saying.

Steven Fox (40:37)
Yes. Paid job with a paycheck.

Karl Murray (40:38)
Same thing.

Phil Mareu (40:39)
Yes.

So I do that. I ended up, I should say I was contracted by the PDGA to help them with a legacy PHP app. So I was already kind of working with them and I hinted at them like, I'm gonna start looking for full-time work. I'm probably gonna get out of this. And I go, if you have something, that'd be great. And they did and they made me an offer and I'm on Facebook like, I found my dream job.

I'm never going anywhere, I just can't believe it. Disc golf's my life. mean, keep in mind, I played disc golf almost daily. I trained, I played tournaments, I wrote software around it. It was my life. Traveled around, met pros, and so landing a job with PDGA was, you know, it was beyond exciting. So I started working for the PDGA. I'm bringing my ideas, my modern app design and development ideas to this, and this is what I thought.

they wanted to bring me in for. But it was a little bit of a meet your heroes kind of scenario where, yeah, yeah. Well, this is, mean, everyone, I feel like I've talked to enough developers where almost everyone can relate to this. It's just that 15 year old PHP app that just lingers around and nobody wants to mess with or change things and so it was very difficult.

Steven Fox (41:47)
I was about say, when is the butt coming into this? Because I feel like there's a butt coming.

Karl Murray (41:50)
Yeah.

Phil Mareu (42:09)
for me to work with in my natural kind of development process.

Steven Fox (42:14)
Yeah, no one wants to touch a PHP 6 app. Let's be honest.

Phil Mareu (42:19)
Yeah, yeah, and so I had to build, I did get to work with Laravel and I remember working with the raw PHP app, no Laravel, so I had to do a couple different things. One, I had to build something and they did not want me to use the framework at all, because my approach to all these legacy applications is let me build an API that interacts with your database.

and my Laravel app is gonna be basically abstraction of whatever feature you have and then we can deprecate the legacy one and use, know. So I started doing that but they did not want that. They wanted it in the PHP. I'm talking, it's got the SQL, the HTML, CSS, all in the, yeah, all in the PHP. So it was not great. However, I went in there and I started taking folders, doing includes and actually kind of hand rolled my own routing controller system.

And there's another dev on the team who's like, hey, so I see you made your own router controller system there. I was like, you weren't supposed to notice that. The manager didn't notice, but he did. But it was so complicated to obviously go through these huge scripts. So I started doing stuff like that to kind of handle requests and things like that. So that was interesting. However, I will say, legacy app aside, I was able to build a wearable app and view JS.

Karl Murray (43:11)
I've done that.

Steven Fox (43:20)
Yeah.

Phil Mareu (43:42)
So the Lawyer of El was the API towards their legacy database that I used to communicate with this Vue.js app that is getting used half a million times a year at the PDJ for their sanctioned tournaments. And what a game changer for the sport because traditionally what you would do is you'd have a physical scorecard and every team, every group of four that's out on the course would go and they would write down their scores at the end of the round or the whole they were done, right? They'd write it down. And at the end,

the, you add up all your scores and then you look at it and if you get that addition wrong, you get two stroke penalty. So what happens is you've gotta add it up, you've gotta get it right, right? You're exhausted maybe from the round, who knows, but now you gotta do math.

Karl Murray (44:28)
Or you can't read your handwriting because you just spent an hour throwing a disc.

Steven Fox (44:31)
Yeah.

Phil Mareu (44:32)
can't read a handwriting, you you're questioning whether that was... Exactly. So then you turn them in and then whoever you turn it into also counts them by hand. And then you don't know who actually wins until all the cards are turned in. So you might still be waiting another hour and a half, two hours before you even know whether you placed or anything. So you're just hanging out, which is great. There's a lot of stuff to do and you get to talk to people. So there was no other...

Steven Fox (44:36)
You

Phil Mareu (45:02)
like digital solution for these sanctioned tournaments. There was for the pro, very, very, very elite pro level, there was a company that makes the live scoring app, it's just for the very top, top elite tournaments. So I was tasked to build a live scoring app, and man, what a fantastic project. mean, everybody, every tournament director, also the difference trying to promote a product that's sanctioned by the PDJ versus just

lonely old Phil, the developer that no one knows, apples and oranges. I would call up a director and say, hey, from the PDGA, and they're like, I'm all ears, and got this thing we're working on. was like, yes, whatever you need me to do. And it was a pretty fantastic experience. I one of the best development experiences you can have, because you got people really excited for the product. They want to help. They're giving you feedback. And you get to see people use it every weekend. yeah, and I also built it as a...

Steven Fox (45:35)
Yeah.

Phil Mareu (46:00)
A PWA that would work offline. So the way that would work is if you load the app initially and then if you were, sometimes I played a tournament in Colorado where there was internet where you started but then when you got up kind of more in the mountains you just lost internet completely. It would still work. So it's still T-Store and the way I wrote it is the next hole when you saved it, if it actually saved it would go, okay, okay, we saved it. Hey everybody, who's waiting, who's waiting? And it would just shove all the.

previous ones. didn't trust that you can have a PWA where it'll auto sync, but I never really trusted that. I never had great luck with that. So I actually just hand rolled something that would do that. And then eventually I just wasn't happy with the rate at which I could get stuff done because of the technological restrictions that it broke my heart, but I decided to leave and pursue another development career. So.

I'm gonna shorten this up a little bit. So I worked three other jobs until 2021 and when you run your own business and you're used to using certain technologies and being able to accomplish things in some sort of timely manner, it is very frustrating getting back into corporate where you know, your pace is dependent on other developers pace that even though you can help and

there might not be that desire. And so you're just kind of at the mercy of a variety of different scenarios, including the business side, and then translating that to the CTO and then down, and you know, was just all this loss in translation that was happening that made it very difficult to get things accomplished. There was a lot of meetings about how to fix something. I would propose stuff. It seemed very intimidating.

So what we do is we would talk about it once every two weeks for months and months and months. And I remember having a pull request that was ready to go, but they don't want to really worry about making updates to the project. It was the main project too. It took a month. In fact, I gave two weeks notice a month after the...

I put the poll request in because I said this is just not, it's frustrating. You wanna see your stuff come to life and be used by people. And so it was a very frustrating experience me. So in 2021, 22, I'm sorry, I.

Steven Fox (48:22)
Ha

Phil Mareu (48:41)
No, 20, 22. boy. I guess it's coming up. No, it's 23. I'm sorry. 23. 20.

Steven Fox (48:50)
It's like all of the early 2020s is just like COVID, COVID era. You know, you just sort of they're gone. It's like PHP six. They just they don't exist.

Phil Mareu (48:57)
Right?

Karl Murray (48:58)
Wait, okay, so that's the second time Stevens made that joke. And if you don't know, PHP5...

Phil Mareu (49:00)
Exactly.

Steven Fox (49:06)
No, don't tell him, Carl. Don't tell him. If you're listening to this podcast and you don't understand my joke, you can go Google. So.

Phil Mareu (49:13)
Yeah, exactly.

Karl Murray (49:15)
Google PHP 5, just Google PHP 6. I actually know people who are on PHP 5 and are desperately waiting for PHP 6. And once PHP 6 comes out, they'll move forward. till PHP 6 comes, no, I really wish, really wish I was.

Steven Fox (49:20)
Yeah.

Phil Mareu (49:27)
No.

You're joking, right?

Steven Fox (49:35)
There's gonna be something funny when like PHP nine comes out and then you can just like flip the nine upside down with a little graphic.

Phil Mareu (49:41)
Yeah, there you go.

Karl Murray (49:42)
No, no, they're gonna do what everybody else does they'll skip nine because in German, you know problem

Steven Fox (49:49)
Nah, I got you. All right, Phil. it's 20, it's 2023. You've moved on.

Phil Mareu (49:53)
20, 20, 23. where am at? Okay, so I decided to leave, leave my last job, hopefully my last job and, and, and rehire. Yeah. I mean, well, it might as well, right? Well, also my daughter was a little older now too. So that, you know, I mean, the first year of her life, she lived on the road with us. So her, she, we traveled around in a camper and a baby for the first year of her life.

Karl Murray (50:02)
Again, take the gloves off, say goodbye to the safety net.

Steven Fox (50:07)
Let's just have another kid maybe while we're at it. I don't know.

Karl Murray (50:09)
You

learning how to walk in a camper.

Phil Mareu (50:24)
Yeah, well she didn't quite, we were in a location when she decided to walk, so that's probably for the best. she, yeah, so that was really.

Karl Murray (50:30)
Okay. Yeah.

Steven Fox (50:36)
Props to you, I can't imagine doing that as a dad. Like there's times when I would have wanted to have been more than 40 feet away from my child, so.

Karl Murray (50:43)
No, no, Even as a dog owner, I couldn't imagine wanting to be like that close to my dog all the time.

Steven Fox (50:47)
you

Right?

Phil Mareu (50:50)
We ran into people that, you know, they would travel with two or three dogs and two kids in a small van sometimes. And I just, don't understand how they do it, but yeah. So, 23. I did. And well, thanks for joining us and you'll just have to figure it out on your own.

Karl Murray (51:01)
All right, so 2023.

Steven Fox (51:04)
No, I don't want to know actually let's just stop right here, okay

Karl Murray (51:06)
Yeah, just get that we're done. Sorry

Steven Fox (51:16)
you

Phil Mareu (51:17)
No, I decided that it was time to rehydrate my company, PhilSquare. But I had a little better vision of what I wanted to do at PhilSquare. And it was related to seeing these companies using some really interesting tools to support operations. And one of them is Excel or Google Sheets. Or it would be another service that they're using just a fraction of that service. And there's times where

I would approach and say, we've got a development team and we can use something to kind of build these out.

And at this time I was a heavy user of Nova. And so I was like, can spawn up Nova and we will have an interface instead of that Excel spreadsheet that'll, you And it was very difficult to get the green light to do that. You know, a lot of people really like their Excel spreadsheets or their little bespoke apps that they're paying $1,000 a month for for one feature, you know. And it's hard, it's really hard. And so what I decided to do is kind of focus more on those tools for businesses.

and see if I can come across, because when you're a contractor, you get a little bit more yeses than you do as an employee. You have a little bit, coming from an outside perspective, you're the professional, but when you're an employee, it's a lot more difficult to get your point across. And that was my findings in the last four years, working at jobs. So yeah, I feel like we've talked a lot about my path, but I...

Steven Fox (52:44)
This has been great.

Phil Mareu (52:45)
do want to plug Filament because that has changed my career just like Laravel did 10 years ago. I feel like Filament is the new kind of Laravel paradigm to me.

spent a lot of time at PhilSquare building some very unique apps for any kind of client. Like, hey, we want this thing where I built something for a client where they want a picture behind tiles and they want people to click on the tile and purchase the tile and it reveals part of the image and it goes towards the fundraiser, you know? And I built it and I could do it, but it was a lot of, you know, stuff that I would never use on any other project. A lot of technology, a lot of code, a lot of...

you know, weird loops that I had to do and interactions that if I had to rebuild it, anything, would just, it would, it would be a lot of money to the client and it'd be hard to maintain. So I built a lot of projects like that. But one thing I, you know, end up building is a lot of dashboards, you know, a lot of forms, lot of, know, crud stuff. And in 2014, 15, I don't know what it was, 13, 12, when did Nova come out? 2012? Anybody know?

Karl Murray (53:56)
16?

Phil Mareu (53:59)
16, okay, it might be around there.

Steven Fox (54:00)
I'd say Laravel was around 2012. So I think it was, it was going to be.

Karl Murray (54:02)
Yeah, so I think it was 16.

Phil Mareu (54:04)
Okay, so before Nova, I was working on, it was called Layer Manager, and I built basically a very rudimentary version of Nova, and I was so excited about it. I built a website, it had documentation, screenshots, had a file manager, and like, I worked hard because at this time I was trying to like, promote myself as, you know, someone in the community trying to do this development work, and a friend of mine goes to the LayerCon.

Karl Murray (54:19)
man, you know it was legit, it had documentation.

Phil Mareu (54:34)
And he messages me, he's like, you're not going to believe this.

their this project this project they just announced called Nova it's basically what you're working on except and I was just like okay well that's great so but Nova really was there was a lot of projects I built that were like I'm building a table for somebody I'm building a filterable table I'm using like data tables you know I'm building that and building a lot of forms and graphs and there's all these things and then the authentication the navigation and I'm hand rolling it because they want it designed a certain way or I want to design it a certain way and so every project

Karl Murray (54:45)
There we go.

Steven Fox (54:47)
Yeah.

Phil Mareu (55:09)
different in some way in some character.

And so what I've learned through all these years of doing all this different development as a business, especially a small business like me, it's hard to like think about, I need to take this giant job. It's going to be tough and they want me to do all these weird things, but it's a big job. found that it's been, that's been hurting the business more than doing smaller projects that are consistent, that you can maintain. Currently with my filament projects, a customer calls up like, Hey, we would love it if we could

you know, select all these items and send emails to everyone on this list. Okay, five minutes go by. Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm trying to work on a subscription service where it kind of works out in the long run, but they get almost unlimited updates. So it's something I'm kind of tinkering with this year.

Karl Murray (55:49)
Yeah, that'll take me like an hour. See ya.

Steven Fox (55:53)
Yeah.

Phil Mareu (56:06)
But the idea is to have these tools that you can develop stuff really, really quickly. A lot of clients are really surprised how quick I get stuff done. And it's just my experience and the tools and not trying to go outside of those tools. So I'm trying to, I mean, I don't even use a single plugin for Filament. Not that there's not great ones out there, but I'm trying to build, okay. Alex6? The thing is, is I've worked with a of developers where I,

Karl Murray (56:24)
Yeah, I'll Alex who said that.

Steven Fox (56:29)
Yeah.

Phil Mareu (56:36)
talk about technology and their first reaction is, mean, Nova's a good example, working with a team, said, hey, this Nova's gonna replace your hand-rolling Nova. Let's just use this, it's supported by Laravel. And the first thing they do is they go to these obscure, not obscure, but they go to these other websites that are Nova package plugins. That's the first thing, they don't even look at the documentation on Nova. They just immediately go to see what packages they can plug in and do.

And that happened a lot, I noticed, some of these positions. And the problem with that is, you know, it can be difficult to maintain stuff. And here at PhilSquare, I am trying to build stuff that I can maintain, and I am okay with telling customers no. You know, I wanna make sure that I'm not providing them an experience that's gonna be troublesome throughout the years. I'd rather just say immediately and be upfront with them. A great example is, I have a client right now that wants me to do some PDF work.

and they're a good client and I said, know, I'll do it, let me just, you know, but I've worked on it and it's just not a trivial task at all. By the way, if anybody or if you guys know anyone that knows how to configure a Forge server to be able to produce PDFs with the Spotsy library, let me know, I might have some work for you.

if I can't talk them out of the PDF. But what I do do is offer them solutions. So instead of the PDF, because they want to email their clients a log of things, these are mechanical logs that tell them that there's something wrong.

Karl Murray (57:58)
It's

Phil Mareu (58:11)
and they get emails of those logs, the managers do, and they can see if there's anything going on with this equipment, and they want to just send a PDF to them. So what I offer is say, let me just provide, which I've done, I just make a webpage that links from the email, now that I can control that webpage, right? Now I have, I can always adjust it in E2, but also I can add actions on that webpage. So it might be like, hey, we want an estimate on fixing this, and they can click on the button. So that's kind of my approach, is I pitch it towards like, let's move towards

modern technology, it's not go back to printing out stuff and PDFs. So these are things I'm trying to do to stick within a maintainable, scalable, you know, solution where I can accommodate more customers instead of one bigger customer, which might ask for something that is going to be out of my technology skill set that I'll have to learn and never use on any other project again. And that's kind of where I'm at right now in my career.

Steven Fox (59:08)
Yeah. Those are some wise words for people in the freelancing realm. So good little nugget.

Phil Mareu (59:14)
Yeah, I mean it's tough. Yeah, I mean it, I will say it is tough. There's a lot of temptation to, especially if you, you know, if you need to keep the lights on and you get, you know, somebody says, hey, do you work with X? And you're like, I don't, but you know, I can look into, it's really tempting to do that, but you're gonna thin out. Yeah. Give me a week, we'll have a workshop ready. Let's get other.

Steven Fox (59:35)
can do a workshop for it though

Karl Murray (59:42)
You don't need a week, just a day! You already proved that one!

Phil Mareu (59:44)
That's true. That's true. So bad. Yeah, I get it

Steven Fox (59:50)
Yeah, that's great. That's great.

Karl Murray (59:52)
Well, we're going to start wrapping things up, but there is a couple of questions we love asking new guests. Again, the whole thing of this is getting to meet new people. So what got you to LairCon in 2024? Let's start there.

Phil Mareu (1:00:07)
I went this year and I went last year, which is really interesting. It's been, only years have gone, but I think financially just it makes sense for me in the previous years.

But I really wanted, since I was restarting my business, I really thought it was important to get out there and started re-engaging with the community. Because when I was working, I wasn't really engaging as much with the Larable community. And so I'm trying to ramp that back up. It's a slow process. also I have a glare on my face. Do I need to shut my curtain? Okay, all right.

Karl Murray (1:00:40)
Yeah, now you're going to get it.

Steven Fox (1:00:41)
You're fine. Don't worry

Phil Mareu (1:00:45)
But yeah, so I decided to go as a way of really solidifying my commitment to restarting my company. I was like, you know what, this is what you do. You get out there, get an idea of what it is to be a sponsor, understand what it is to be a speaker, and these are all things that I wanted to experience firsthand. And of course, meeting people. And I work right now pretty much.

work by myself every now and then. I have a friend who I contract to do some stuff as well.

Just being able to talk shop, talk Laravel shop and talk vocabulary. think vocabulary is the big one. When I was working or before I went working for other businesses, I wasn't working with a team. so working with a team, it's very validating to understand where your skillset was with other team members, but also using the words out loud that you never do when you work for yourself and by yourself. So going to Laricon, I think helps with all those

things but I definitely enjoy real meetups so that's that's big for me I really like real meetups and meeting people and and talking about our different stories talking about Laravel learning what we can do in Laravel what everyone's using Laravel for so

Karl Murray (1:02:07)
I Chris Morrell, two things real quick. I think Chris Morrell would be mad at me if I didn't say something about PHP world. So yeah, if you're not a part of that, definitely think about starting a meetup for Laravel in Kansas. That might work well for you.

Phil Mareu (1:02:23)
So I can talk on that a little bit. At Laricon, everyone's pumped, right? You come out of there, you wanna build 20 apps and you wanna... So I was the same way. There's some friends I met up with the last night that I was telling them, like, man, I really wanna start a Laribel Kansas City meetup. And I have experience running student organizations and running meetups and I ran a different...

Karl Murray (1:02:31)
yeah.

Steven Fox (1:02:52)
workshop.

Phil Mareu (1:02:53)
workshop.

Karl Murray (1:02:55)
I actually I'm going to set up a joke for that, but I'm gonna let Phil finish before I do that

Phil Mareu (1:03:05)
But and I came out of there like I need to do it but the thing is restarting a company that you kind of sunset You know five years ago is a little bit more difficult

then you might think. And so that's been my absolute focus. I have to have some sort of consistent clientele and I have to get that, I have to have things just functioning in a way. So if I hire, they can jump in, they know what we're working on, they understand my clear vision. So these are all things I'm working on. Marketing is a big part of it. I'm not great at executing marketing plans. It's not kind of something I have a lot of experience with.

I'm great at going out and meeting people, talking about what my business does, but it's hard for me to do that in a more marketing way where I'm just like, hey, I'm Phil. So these are things I'm focusing on, it comes up in my mind probably once a week about starting a Where About Kansas City meetup, but it also bounces back and forth between there's already a PHP meetup, and so I don't engage with that meetup very often.

It's in Kansas City. I'll do the live or the streaming events every now and then. So I don't know if it would clash with them, but I do like the idea of, you I have some swag from the Laravel, from Laracon and...

I have a friend who owns a brewery and I'm pretty sure he'd be okay picking a day that he wouldn't mind the extra business and he would reserve a whole section for us. so he's in Kansas City, pretty centralized. So there are things in my mind. Yeah, so I...

Steven Fox (1:04:48)
That sounds good to me. Yeah, like come pick me up, Phil. I know you'll pick up people at a Laircon airport, so.

Karl Murray (1:04:49)
Yeah, Steven's flying out. He's already booked.

Phil Mareu (1:04:53)
I've got to, I wanna, let's do this. That is true, I will do that. But yeah, I need to find someone else that I help with. So if anybody's listening to this in their Kansas City area and they're thinking about this at all, I'm looking for someone to help me with this and I wanna do it right where we're planning, you know, maybe every two months and then we plan for the one, the next one, the two months before. But I also wanna engage with,

With wearable themselves, so there I I know that if you reach out to them, they'll help out as well They might even like buy pizza things like that

Karl Murray (1:05:26)
Yeah, PHP World, if you aren't a part of that, there's a lot of the Laravel core team members are a major component of PHP World. So reach out, get in there, and you will get a lot of support. I was able to start PHPX Houston relatively quickly with just using them. yeah, it is a thing. Anyway.

Phil Mareu (1:05:38)
Okay. Awesome.

Okay. Yeah, that's good to know.

Karl Murray (1:05:56)
The joke I was going to queue up earlier that I think would be absolutely hilarious is Phil trying to talk Taylor into giving a talk on stage without giving Taylor the context of what his talks going to be about, because he has no clue what it is yet. He's just going to make it up as he goes. I'm trying to imagine how Taylor would take that. He'd just be like, yeah, sure, I guess.

Phil Mareu (1:06:11)
Do it live.

Yeah, he's probably gonna be no, although I'm trying to build up some sort of presentational.

portfolio. So 20, I've already gave one a few weeks ago. First time giving a presentation in a long time. It's really exciting to give that presentation. And so I'm hoping to work on some more than that. I don't know if I'd ever speak at LERK on MIB outside of my league, but I do plan on speaking more. But with that said, Carl, I used to joke, not joke, but I used to not really prepare for client meetings.

because when I'm in the meeting, like I'm on point, you know, I just know enough about what I need to know and then, but for me to like sit down, write a ton of notes, try to go over, here's where we're go over or whatever it is, I just, the meetings, I just feel comfortable because the meetings never really go the way you want all the time, right? So I've just gotten really comfortable with just flexing, but also staying within my lane. So I'm not trying to talk about something that I don't know anything about.

Karl Murray (1:06:57)
And then nail them, just knock them out of the park.

Phil Mareu (1:07:26)
I just meet with someone that it's a topic of very comfortable way. So I feel like I can, you make, make decisions or conversations based on what their needs are. So, but it does for me, it does help to just have that extra pressure of like, you know, sort of prepared, but I'm also ready to flex, you know, anyway, I need to.

Karl Murray (1:07:47)
Yeah, not everybody needs to be Jess Archer walking on stage and talking about.

column databases and all that kind of craziness. Like there's no way any one of us could be that prepared for any subject. That was fantastic.

Phil Mareu (1:08:01)
was a good talk. Yeah, that was so good.

Karl Murray (1:08:05)
All right, so Phil, closing up, what hobbies do you have outside of writing code and obviously disking?

Phil Mareu (1:08:16)
I like to build things. That's probably the, I guess I like to generalize it as a word DIY-er. So Stephen, you're talking about making pizza dough. I put that right up there. If I can make it myself, whether it's in the kitchen or whether it's furniture, like 80 % of the furniture in this house I've built. And the camper, I gutted the entire camper, did all the plumbing, all the wiring.

all the woodworking, everything, I think put all the solar in, figured it out. Took me a couple tries over three years, but you know, so I think that for me, that's a big hobby for me, just getting in the shop and building something, figuring out how stuff works. Yeah, those are, that's really it. mean, just building stuff, disc golf, and coding.

Steven Fox (1:08:44)
Nice.

classic engineer mindset.

Karl Murray (1:09:03)
Up next, Phil, right, I was gonna say up next, Phil starts a YouTube channel where he just films himself doing things that as he's figuring it out and learning.

Phil Mareu (1:09:05)
Yeah.

Yeah, what's really fun, thinking of making stuff in the kitchen, my daughter really likes, she's starting to get into, we're not a big soda family, but she's starting to get into what she calls lemon lime, but it's like Sprite or that other brand. And so we were at the grocery store and she saw lemons, she saw lime, she goes, we can make our own lemon lime. I'm like, you're darn right we can.

Steven Fox (1:09:37)
That's my daughter, let's go!

Karl Murray (1:09:37)
with a SodaStream.

Phil Mareu (1:09:40)
Yes, I was so excited. So I got a bunch of lemons and limes and then bought club soda or something, came home, a little bit sugar, whatever, and just baited. Yeah, she drank it. That's my other hobby. That's what I love doing, just making stuff.

Karl Murray (1:09:54)
That's awesome.

I love watching my kids figure things out. That is so much fun. It doesn't matter. Yeah.

Phil Mareu (1:10:04)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. It's like, I know, I...

Karl Murray (1:10:08)
Sorry, as a dad.

Steven Fox (1:10:09)
or when they don't figure it out and just watching them scramble trying to determine what to do. That's also equally.

Phil Mareu (1:10:14)
You

Yeah.

Karl Murray (1:10:18)
So my son's autistic and the other day it was really funny because he's standing at the top of the stairs and he's got like a bilgeillion balloons. I'm not kidding. He has like literally at least 50 balloons and he's just dropping them from the top of the stairs and watching them like bounce down the stairs. And I'm like, I'm just curious like what he is learning at that moment. I just think it's fun. But yeah.

Phil Mareu (1:10:43)
Well, the reaction between, you know, one object with another object and how far they bounce depending on how they're inflated. What's that?

Karl Murray (1:10:49)
I'm convinced he's just testing gravity. I'm just convinced he's testing gravity. Yep, Isaac was still right.

Phil Mareu (1:10:57)
Yeah.

Love it. Love it.

Steven Fox (1:11:04)
That's great.

Karl Murray (1:11:04)
All right, well, do you have any last words, guess, for lack of a term? Well, let's start with our final question that we love asking, is tips for a brand new developer.

Phil Mareu (1:11:10)
Do I or Stephen?

I would say, I'm gonna sound like a high school football coach or basketball coach here, but fundamentals, you know, don't spread yourself out too thin. If you feel like you're redoing the same thing over again, you know, if it's the fundamentals of development, it's okay because...

you're gonna run into these errors where you're doing everything you did just previously, but now it's broken. And I think experiencing those fundamentals really gets you quite a ways. And another way can say this is where if you're going out and you're trying to do a bunch of different things at once, and some of these things break over here, might be related to this thing over here, which you don't know, because now you've added all these things, whatever you're trying to develop. So if you're doing, okay, I'm gonna simplify this a little bit. So you've got HTML, CSS,

you add PHP, then you add a database, you're authenticating, you start adding these things. If you do all that at once when you're trying to learn, let's say you're reading a book and it's like, put all these things on there, you have all these layers, and now you're trying to debug it, now you gotta figure out which one of those is having given you the issue and if it's the interaction. So I think really the fundamentals, but overall.

Karl Murray (1:12:25)
Which layer is broken? Yeah.

Phil Mareu (1:12:32)
try to build side projects. mean, if you, even if it's something that help you keep track of one date a year or something and you just want to send you an email, it could be that simple. Just build something.

and publish it. Because you're going to go through that process and the more you do that, the more relaxed you'll be when there's problems. So, if you're building side projects in their own and you try to deploy and something goes wrong, it's your personal project and you fix it, it goes wrong. You're going through that process with these side projects. If something happens at work in production or whatever, you're going to be I think a little more controlled because you have all this other experience. You're not going to be so shocked by when things happen. So, I think having these

other.

things to work on or try to build stuff that accommodates your need, I highly recommend it, but I would not try to just do too much. My development process is I write down, I have like an Asana board or something of all the ideas that pop in my head as I'm going through the month for a project. And then when I sit down, I look at that list, like, know, I could really, if I just did this one thing, that would be amazing. You know, and so I think the same thing, if you're trying to build something on your own to get better,

craft. It's okay to think of a list of things you wanted to do but I would never be like it has to do all these things or I'm not gonna use it. I would I would highly discourage you from doing that. I would say just build these two things right here and then use it because what you might find out is that's enough or you might find out one of those features you'd never use and you're glad you didn't build it.

Karl Murray (1:14:14)
Awesome. All right, Phil, it's been awesome having you on the show. Love your takes and your vision. That's awesome to instory. I'm still sitting on the edge of my seat trying to figure out how this is going to end. yeah, absolutely loved having you this show. I'm still trying to figure out what happened in 2023, OK?

Phil Mareu (1:14:19)
Appreciate it.

Steven Fox (1:14:25)
story. That was a great journey. That was a great journey.

Phil Mareu (1:14:35)
Ha ha ha!

Steven Fox (1:14:37)
You

Phil Mareu (1:14:39)
What?

Why you mean why I left is that where you like take the

Karl Murray (1:14:45)
Or PHP6 or what happened there or Bill's next major talk or whatever. There's a lot that's happening here.

Steven Fox (1:14:54)
Yes.

Phil Mareu (1:14:54)
I don't...

No major talks coming up, 2023. I don't even know what to say about that. It was the last straw. It was the last straw. was at this job and I could tell it wasn't, there was some financial issues. just, I was like, no, I gotta move on. But not only that, it was.

Karl Murray (1:15:02)
You

Phil Mareu (1:15:17)
It was difficult because it was a job where it seemed like most of the people that were kind of in the ranks were just tired because they were friends, you know? So the skill set wasn't there to lead and manage. So it was a frustrating experience of like, hey, what's going on here? We should do these things. And then they're like, I don't know. We don't really understand what you're saying. So.

I don't know, was a, dynamic wasn't, wasn't fantastic. So that was the last straw where it's just like, it was very, very difficult to take my skillset, build something, get it done with the team, you know, wanting to, well, not the team really as management, try to get, get stuff in. is, so 2023 was really just a series of like, I think it's time for me to.

to take everything that I'm talking about with these companies and putting my mouth where my money is. Is that the expression? It sounds right, right?

Karl Murray (1:16:12)
Want to hear where your mouth is?

Steven Fox (1:16:13)
Close enough. enough. Paid paycheck.

Phil Mareu (1:16:15)
I

Karl Murray (1:16:18)
I never understood the expression because no one puts their money in their mouth. Come on.

Phil Mareu (1:16:23)
Right, Well, I mean, I guess what I'm saying is to really see if I could, you know, I really want to figure out the expression, but what I'm saying is I've been talking about how we can improve businesses and how we can, you know, increase efficiency and things of that nature. And I've just decided, well, you know, what I need to do is just incorporate that into my business and make that a new business. And so that's me, you know, trying to prove to myself.

Karl Murray (1:16:49)
I would argue you've already done that, Phil. I mean, it's not cheap getting a ticket to go to LairCon. So, yeah, buy the ticket first of all, and then to get here, and hotel, and all this stuff. You've already put your money where your mouth is.

Phil Mareu (1:16:54)
It is not, no.

Well, I will say, I have, I have, you know. And you know, there's things this year that, that one Django shop, they were approached by a company that had a L'Hairvel project that the developers kind of let them down and they referred me. And that was a pretty big step. My first filament project was with them.

And that led me to like, you know what, I'm gonna stick with filament and I've been working on that since January. So I've only been doing filament since January, but I already, feel like I've got it. So yeah, it's been tough though. I will say I've had some runway, you know, that helps, but you know, that only.

You can only do that so long and then you've got to make sure you're getting the bill of spade. But yeah, I hope it continues. I would say that what any contract can tell you, even though you have a couple contracts, a couple jobs, you're still always thinking about after that. Or at any point they can drop you, right? But that is the trade-off of working for yourself. get, yep.

Steven Fox (1:18:18)
Yeah, always risk with that reward.

Phil Mareu (1:18:21)
So I love it, so I love it.

Steven Fox (1:18:24)
Sounds good. Let's go ahead and start to wrap this up. Carl, we have a new domain for voices of the code.

Karl Murray (1:18:30)
we do. Yeah. OK, sorry. I was really busy last week while we were on the Thanksgiving break. so, voices of the code dot com is a real thing. Finally legitimized the business and stopped being cheap and actually bought a domain and set up emails. So now Steven and I have an email. We also have a blue sky account. And if you go to voices of the code dot com, it actually takes you to this podcast.

Steven Fox (1:18:43)
Yay!

Phil Mareu (1:18:44)
Awesome.

Karl Murray (1:19:00)
from Transistor FM, so I stopped being lazy and we actually can do things now. So if you want to be on the show, you can either email Stephen or I at voicesofthecode.com. So that would be Carl, K-A-R-L, at voicesofthecode.com or Stephen at voicesofthecode.com. Assuming he set up his email, I don't know that I checked. Did you set up your email? Get on it, Stephen.

Phil Mareu (1:19:06)
Amazing.

Steven Fox (1:19:26)
Well, we will now, if it's not. By the time I edit this episode, it will be there.

Phil Mareu (1:19:28)
You

Karl Murray (1:19:30)
I bought the domain and set it all up, so come on.

Beautiful. yeah, steven at voices of the code.com or K r l.

All right, it's been awesome having you on the show, Phil. Thank you so much for coming on.

Steven Fox (1:19:49)
Phil, thank you so much for your time. And for the last minute, to let all of our listeners know, Phil was awesome and he made this happen in literally a matter of hours. So this was a great conversation to have at such last...

Phil Mareu (1:19:51)
Thank you guys.

Karl Murray (1:19:59)
Yes.

So yeah, story behind that. We had somebody scheduled their week booked up really fast. And so we were like, are we going to do a podcast this week? And I was like, I don't have time to like look around and talk to people. So I was like, Stephen, my amazing co-host, can you book somebody? And he was like, yeah, I got you.

And so Phil is literally I was notified like an hour two before the podcast started that we were going to have a guest today. So that is fantastic. Thank you guys so much.

Phil Mareu (1:20:38)
It was good timing. is a perfect day, honestly. I think I was talking about this earlier, but yeah, this ended up working out great.

Karl Murray (1:20:45)
That's, that is awesome. I'm so glad you were able to make it last minute. Steven, should we tease who's going to be next on the show? Cause we kind of already know who it is.

Steven Fox (1:20:59)
Yeah, if we feel like his schedule's going to work out for next week, let's do it.

Karl Murray (1:21:03)
I'm just going to say here's your tease. He is the first person to be on voices of the code that is actually talked at layer.

I'm not going tell you which Lericon, but there's your hint. All right. And bye! was nice seeing you guys.

Steven Fox (1:21:16)
Nice.

Bye guys, thank you.

Karl Murray (1:21:35)
Yeah, we failed to get awesome.

Steven Fox (1:21:38)
Nah, it's all good. Take care, Phil. Thank you.

Karl Murray (1:21:39)
All right. Bye.

Phil Mareu (1:21:41)
Yep, thanks. See ya.