Gonto: Now you make me want to go to a dev conference, like I used to go 1 every week, maybe 8-10 years ago. I miss them. I need to go at least to 1  a year.

Hank: Do it. Why not Laracon?

Gonto: If you invite me, will you invite me to the conference?

Hank: Yeah, I'll invite you.

Gonto: Okay.

Hank:  I'll let you come to some of the cool stuff we're doing, because we're adding a lot of cool stuff on the side.

Gonto: Hello, everyone. We're coming back. We missed a week, but since we missed a week, we're going to use the topic from that week that we missed in the podcast.

We missed a week because our dear Hank was actually at React Miami. And today we have two topics, but the first one is all around React Miami. We want to talk a bit about the event, how it went, what special things they did, how it feels to meet haters face to face, and different things.

On this one, it's going to be mostly, I think, well, I was going to say it's going to be mostly Hank talking, but I don't think that's going to be true. I like talking. But probably have opinion and thoughts on whatever Hank has to say.

So, yeah, give us like a rundown on how React Miami went. And what were your thoughts?

Hank: Yeah, React Miami is good. People always ask why I go, because I'm not technical and Laravel didn't sponsor this year. Last year I went, the last two years I went as an independent person when I was advising.

And then I went the first year because Vercel sponsored it. But I've been to all of these. I like putting myself into a fish out of water situation.

I'm not technical, but I should mingle with my audience that I'm learning to market to. And I've made real friends from this. So, you know, there's reason to go back and so on.

But what was interesting was this is the first year in a few years that Vercel has had a presence. The first year since I left, actually. And so, of course, one of the first things that happened was there's kind of a little side house party at Dax's house where Rauch G showed up.

And, you know, you alluded to it already, like meeting haters face to face. It's no secret they often beef online. But, you know, what should you do if you're going to go to a conference where someone that you have beef with or have public disagreements with, you know, maybe is the nicest way to phrase it. And they both did very well. They're very cordial. They're very polite.

They're not playing dumb with each other. They're playing into it. Some people wanted selfies with both of them and they're totally happy to do it. You know, some people are memeing.

And yeah, like the whole time, they're just cordial. I don't know if you've ever had experience with that of people on your team or that you've worked with, you know, having haters that you got to meet with or even competitors might be a common one. I don't know.

Gonto: Yeah, I feel a lot of competitors. I have seen some haters as well. Like to me, what's interesting is people take themselves and others too seriously.

Like most people that have a beef with somebody online, like, hey, Next.js sucks. No, Next.js is the best in the world. It's not real.

Like a lot of it, like, of course, that's something they think. But I would argue that most of it is engagement bait. It's great for both to have a hater.

Like I think having a hater actually helps you online because people will follow the conversation. There will be two people like us talking in a podcast about it and stuff like that. So beefs overall, I think, help with publicity.

And I think people take those things so seriously. Where in reality, like, look, yeah, I don't like Next. But I don't care how the person who created it. Like maybe I like them. Maybe they are awesome. So in that sense, I think people expect them to hate each other. And most, that's never going to be the case.

Hank: And one thing that's interesting about it is online personas have to be filtered. And especially the more popular the person is on a place like Twitter and the more of a keyboard warrior type of person they seem like, the more likely it is that they are trying to amplify a very specific message. And thus, they have to hone their message down to the essentials.

Gonto: Most people that I've seen that are really good at like writing on Twitter or even on Slack or everything, they are more shy or more calm in person. And the person who is more like shouting and more energetic in person or maybe more shy or quiet on Twitter, like that typically happens.

Hank: Yeah, so that was an interesting thing to witness. But there's lots more to talk about with React.

Gonto: Wait, before we change to the next one, I think like two important things on meeting your hater in person is one, I think it's you never play dumb. You're never like serious or an asshole about it. And to me, the best way to do it is just make jokes about it.

Like do the self-deprecating jokes about how self-aware you are that you do hate online. That's to me the best way for the two of you to connect and also for others to laugh about it.

Hank: Yes, yes, indeed. Rauch G kind of put on a masterclass of that. Maybe we'll jump to this.

The way the conference closed was the Terminal gang, which Dax is part of, and it's Primogen and Tiege and some of these other people. There's this guy, Adam, he couldn't make it. David from the Laravel team does their design.

They put on a parody show of Family Feud. So it was a full-on game show. I sent you some clips of this.

Gonto: It was so awesome.

Hank: It was incredible. And yeah, one of the answers to give our listeners an idea of what this is, imagine Family Feud, but just with a bunch of nerds. So you get two people up there, there's two teams.

And we had a mostly Vercel team and surprisingly a mostly Laravel team because we had a good presence there, which maybe we'll get into that. But we had two people up there with their hands on a button to try and answer. And the question was, what CEOs yap more than they code?

And this guy from the Laravel community like instantly hit it. And his instant answer was Rauch G, which Rauch G was up there having a good time with it. In fact, if you watch the video, Rauch G kind of pointed at himself.

And I don't know if he's saying, no, we should have got it. Or hey, say me, I'm the correct answer. And he's owning it.

Either way, it was great. That type of content, one of my themes for the year, there's like, I wanna get good at AI. I also wanna figure out this whole influencer in B2B marketing thing.

And this is a really interesting thing because they do a whole game show. They had little ad breaks for their sponsors, the people who like paid for the Terminal Gang to like show up there or otherwise sponsor the Terminal Gang. And the brand association is interesting, whether the message is getting through is one thing or another, but the attention they command.

Gonto: But the best part is not having an ad in the game, it's actually participating in the game. It's like, you can get one of your members of your team to become popular enough or be like interesting enough to participate in the game. That's the real ad.

It's not the ad itself that you're doing. But I think people then talk about it a lot. Like people who went to the conference, likely went home and then talk to other developers at home.

And were like, “oh, you don't know. They did this like game show. It was incredible.”

There's these people who are on and this happened. And then somebody might be, oh, who is that people that are attending or something like that. And that's how you think how they get to know others.

So I think what I really like about this game show and other more creative types of content is that it's very shareable. Like you don't wanna share yet another blog post. You do wanna share a game show.

Hank: Yeah, I mean, the thing's already got like 25K views on YouTube. It had a bunch of live viewers. There'll be clips, there'll be jokes.

Everyone…so React Miami is one of those conferences where honestly not a lot of people are watching the talks. There's a strong hall track. Lots of networking happening.

Lots of people just chatting the whole time. That was one of like, there were three things where everybody was seated. The opening, the secret panel, which I'll get back to. And then this game show at the very end. 

And I was sitting next to a guy. The opening was just, you know, the welcome thing from the CEO of G2I talking about, hey, here's how we came to React Miami.

Here's why it's special to us, blah, blah, blah, which he did a really good job with. And then, yeah, during the terminal feud thing, you know, I was sitting next to this developer from Mux and he turns to me and we've both gone to all four years. So we know each other now.

He's like, “this is the craziest thing I've ever seen.” And like, it's rare that you laugh out loud at a developer conference. So one person described this conference because it's also in Miami and there are lots of people pulling all-nighters partying and all that type of stuff that, you know, isn't so much for me.

But one person described it really was it's spring break for developers. It's a fun time. People are recording podcast…Like, you know, there's one corner where there's always a podcast being recorded. They cycle through several guests and so on.

Gonto: React Miami is a great conference to go. Taking into account how conferences go. Like I don't think conferences are for people watching talks anymore. Like we talked about it in the past.

Like that's not what matters. What matters is more about networking, meeting with others and stuff like that. We talked about how NextConf was really good on getting people together to connect.

And I think just because everybody wants to go to Miami for fun, and I think most people want to go living, but for fun, everyone wants to go. It's a fantastic event to network because all of the influencers, all of the people who are running like DevRel or something like that are going to be there. Mostly because on one side, because I know everybody's going to be there.

But on the other side, it's because it's Miami and it's going to be fun.

Hank: Yeah. Well, yeah, it's interesting. I contrast this with Laracon, honestly, where the hall track isn't as strong and people do sit down for every talk and they're honed in.

And there are definitely differences in communities, but React Miami, it's a vibe. It's a good conference.

Gonto: This is more my vibe of conference. Like I used to be DevRel. When I used to speak at conference, I never watched any talk from any others.

And I knew all of the speakers were not either. We were mostly in the halls, just running around and playing around and then went out like drinking or partying or something like that. That was the fun part of the conference.

And interestingly, that's the part that as DevRel made the most difference. I don't remember with which company, but with one company, I remember that I got them to do a partnership with us and share our content because we went to a karaoke and I bribed the person who was choosing the songs. I gave him like 50 bucks to get the other guy to sing faster because he wanted to sing a song.

And then he was just like laughing about it. And that's how I got the partnership, for example.

Hank: That stuff is real. Like that type of networking, I think is the most valuable thing you can get out of these. 

Now, one other thing that was interesting about React Miami and one big draw of it is you get really influential people there.

And this year they had, I mean, they had Rauch G, they had Taylor Otwell, creator of Laravel. I'll get back to why he was there in a second. And they also had Tomo, Tomo Chino of Vercel, who was one of the early people on React.

And they had Jordan, the creator of React. And they put those four on a panel on stage.

Gonto: Oh, History of React, I saw it. I went to the conference and I saw it.

Hank: Yeah. And then they didn't record or stream this panel. So it was really cool to have exclusive content for the people in person.

I'm still interested in gathering feedback on how it goes because I'm like, maybe I should do that at LaraCon.

Gonto: That's really smart. Yeah. I like it because then that's another shareable piece of content because it's like, dude, I went to this panel that wasn't recorded and you don't know like all of the things that I got.

It's…FOMO drives so much of sharing. And it's like, I went to this conference and it was this game show. I went to this conference and it was this panel.

And I think triggering FOMO on others is some way to show off a bit, like it's a humble brag and that makes people share it.

Hank: Absolutely. And the panel, like those four panelists were powerhouses. To be honest, the moderators- 

Gonto: Who was on the panel? Rauch G, Tomo, Jordan, and who else?

Hank: Taylor Otwell.

Gonto: Oh, Taylor. Okay.

Hank: Which you know, the first time he spoke- 

Gonto: Why is Taylor on the History of React? Wasn't it the History of React, the panel?

Hank: It was about open source in general. It was about open source frameworks. You know, they bent it a little to have Taylor on there.

Otherwise it would have just been the History of React. And it was primarily about that. But Taylor did speak up.

The first time he spoke is like, “so why am I up here? Let me tell you.” And you know, he had his whole answer.

You know, we have our answer as Laravel. I'm obviously a representative of Laravel, but you know, Laravel works really well with React front ends. We also recently acquired a technology that makes that easier.

And all of these guys have been in this game for a decade of maintaining open source frameworks. So some of the questions were about like, how do you make open source sustainable? You know, does it have to have a company sponsor?

There was a lot of interesting stuff. But probably half of the time with the panel was spent on just the actual History of React and the early criticism.

Gonto: I remember the first talk, everybody hated it. Nobody understood it. It was in JSConf EU, if I don't misremember.

I was actually there.

Hank: Yeah, they talked about how their coworkers came to them at lunch after they presented this and basically told them what idiots they are. And like, it seems like Jordan still has some trauma around that.

Which of course.

Gonto: I remember…you know what I would do for the next React Miami? I would do like a Dax standup comedy where he just runs on how Next sucks or something like that. Like, I would see that.

Or it could be like a rap, like a hip hop fight. Like, I don't remember the names between Rauch G and Dax, similar to Hamilton.

Hank: Well, I'll send you notes to Michelle, the conference where you answer. But yeah, it was a very interesting conference. It's also very interesting to see this conference sell out when others are struggling.

You know, they had great sponsors. They sold out to 500 people. Meanwhile, we're seeing other, we've talked about this before a couple months ago, how a lot of conferences are struggling.

They're not able to get the ticket sales, let alone the sponsorships to survive. And React Miami's already booked their venue for next year. They're already selling tickets.

Gono: It's pretty awesome. 

Hank: Pretty awesome stuff. I think you had a topic.

Gonto: I did. I actually wanna, now you made me wanna go to a dev conference. Like, I used to go 1 every week, maybe 8-10 years ago.

I miss them. I need to go at least to 1 a year. I like your idea of like doing one.

Maybe I do React Miami next year, or maybe NextConf could be another one. But I'll do one next year.

Hank: Do it. Why not Laracon?

Gonto: If you invite me. Will you invite me to the conference?

Hank: Yeah, I'll invite you.

Gonto: Okay.

Hank: I'll let you come to some of the cool stuff we're doing, because we're adding a lot of cool stuff on the side.

Gonto: That's, I like it. That's the problem. Like now, if I go to a conference, I'm not one of the cool kids anymore.

Before, I used to get invited to everything when I went to a conference. Now, it's harder to get invited to everything. It's like, who is this old guy? Like, he's not a developer anymore. Like, fuck him. 

Second topic. This is something that maybe you saw on Twitter, but Figma sent…

Hank: Wait

Gonto: yeah, sorry about that.

Hank: There is something else I wanna say about these conferences and a great value to going in person, especially as like a marketer like me, who's usually more in the background, and I'm not known, is you do get a good taste for people's personalities and what it's like to work with them. So for example, like I described Dax and Rauch G. They're very warm in person, easy to talk to.

Same with Primogen. Primogen like knew my name just because there's been some stuff we've done with Laravel. But there are other very influential people who I've met and worked with multiple times, and they just don't care who I am.

And like, I don't have an ego about it, but it's interesting to see how people treat you when they don't think you're important. And that actually affects how much I wanna work with them and how much I, you know, if they're gonna ask me for sponsorship, there's gonna be a resistance.

Gonto: And that's- But it's also about, when I was running marketing, I always went to conferences to see how people did booth, how DevRel was connecting with others. I tried to go to side events to see how the side events went and et cetera. Like, I think it's a great place as a marketer to actually learn.

Like, I always say that if you're a marketer and you work with DevTools, you need to go to conferences. You need to go to see talks. You need to go to meetups even.

Hank: Yeah.

Gonto: Like, you need to be there. Like, how can you market to a persona that you don't leave their day to day at least a couple of days a year?

Hank: I think that stuff is more valuable than like learning how to code or use your own product even. Yeah. Okay.

Let's talk about the Figma thing now.

Gonto: So switching topics, I don't know if you saw, but Figma sent a cease and desist to Lovable saying that they've registered DevMode because Figma has these DevMode products. So what they said was that Lovable cannot use DevMode, which they recently added to the product because it was trademarked by Figma. To me, a couple of thoughts on this, like it's number one, how can they trademark DevMode?

Like, is that something real? Like my…

Hank: It's two very generic words. That's actually, that's a really hard trademark to defend. And it's exactly the type of thing that your lawyer will tell you, “If you want this trademark, you have to defend it whenever you see it come up.”

 And so that's, I am sure that's the catalyst of this is Lovable said, “hey, we have DevMode.” And Figma was like, “oh, we're calling it that.”

And a lawyer said, if you want to keep DevMode trademarked, or if you want this trademark to stick, you have to enforce it.

Gonto: Why would they even try to enforce? Anyway, why would they try to enforce like a DevMode? I honestly don't get it.

And to be honest, on what Lovable is using, it makes sense. Like they are now allowed developers or people to see a code to change it and you put DevMode for that. 

What was interesting about it was, number one, CEO of Lovable, I think was extremely smart at sharing it because I think he thought, he knew that most people were gonna be, what the fuck is Figma doing?

And it got like hundreds of retweets. Everybody was talking about it. I even saw the VP of developers, of Devworld I think it is, at Cloudflare saying like, we've had DevMode for a long time showing like the setting that said like developer mode. And we got no letter from Figma. 

So I think Lovable’s CEO was really smart about it. What I don't understand why is, I think his name is Dylan, but why the CEO of Figma played dumb about it?

I would have tweeted something. I would have tweeted something like, “hey, we fucked up. Legal team pushed for this and I didn't see it.”

Or maybe “legal team pushed for it. And I just said, yes, but we shouldn't have done it. Like, we're sorry.”

But I don't understand why he didn't say anything.

Hank: I think it is the type of thing that could have happened without the CEO like really thinking about it. But it's a hard thing because it's the reason it got so much attention is because it's such a hard trademark to defend. And I've been in these situations before where, you know…

So I was at Lambda School. Lambda School, you know, had a trademark dispute. They lost. They're called Bloom Tech now.

I was at Vercel when Vercel changed from Zeit to Vercel. One of the reasons was because there wasn't a lawsuit, but there was a fear that the big German newspaper would start to come after that trademark. And they had sent a kind of an exploratory letter of the sense.

And we said, we don't want any trouble. It's worth rebranding right now. But those are very like...

Gonto: Zeit. I don't even know what it means, but it's not a common word. I think Vercel is a better name, by the way, but I don't think Zeit is like a common name.

Hank: Same with…

Gonto: Devmode…everybody has DevMode now.

Hank: Exactly. And one interesting case that's probably most similar is Copilot. There are a lot of products being called Copilots now.

Gonto: Yes.

Hank: But Microsoft isn't going around and trying to enforce it, I think because they know this is a really hard one to enforce.

Gonto: Copilot was a really smart name. I really like it as well. Copilot, I think, is something that, oh, they thought about it and it sounds great.

Again, it's not enforceable, but DevMode is not even a thought-out name. It's like, how do we call it when a developer can use it? Oh, I know, DevMode.

That's it. It doesn't even require that much thinking.

Hank: And it does its job, I think, in terms of the branding, because Figma is a designer tool and they're trying to say, hey, there's something in here for developers. You flip the switch, it goes into developer mode and you can use it. But it's the trade-off of if you make a very generic name, it's going to get used elsewhere.

And that's why it's Figma DevMode.

Gonto: But even if the CEO didn't see it, even actually more, if Dylan, the CEO of Figma, didn't see it, I even think it's smarter to say like, “hey, we're sorry, I didn't see this and we just sent it and now it's a meme.” Like, I get it. Something like that.

I would have at least tweeted something.

Hank: Well, no, I'm with you, but neither of us would have sent that letter in the first place. The thing is, I don't know the mind of that CEO and whether he believes that they own this trademark and whether he believes that they're going to win this. It's a hard case to make.

If you're the CEO who does that, this is a great moment to backpedal. 

Gonto: Yes.

Hank: Like if you decide…That's the thing that's unclear is are they going to go hard and pursue this or not? If they're going to go hard and pursue this, I think that's just a huge mistake.

It ruins the friendly brand that I think Figma has. 

Gonto: It does.

Hank: I think…

Gonto: Config is coming soon. So I hope somebody asks in Config about it.

Hank: So here's the thing. There are rumors of Figma, like rumors I've seen on Twitter and heard elsewhere. 

Gonto: Bolt competitor.

Hank: They're doing a Bolt, Lovable competitor. So part of this could, hey, how do we, how do we ruffle them up and start a war on multiple fronts? Which I think is dumb.

Gonto: Why would he do that and start a war? But at the same time, I saw Eric tweet today that they have a booth, like Bold.new has a booth in Config. So if you go all in on like “fuck Lovable,” you don't allow a booth from Bolt to stay there.

So on one side, it's like, that's awesome. I will do it. On the other one, it's not.

So it's just weird.

Hank: It could be all of this feels like massive miscoordination internally by Figma. It's silos. It's people operating without communicating.

Yeah, it's, yeah. So there's another lesson here. Cross-functionally communicate before you threaten other companies or before you let them sponsor, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Like you should know.

Gonto: Yeah, you're going to go, right?

Hank: I'm going to go for the, I'm just going for the Bolt hackathon.

Gonto: But it's in the same week as Config.

Hank: So it's the same way. It's part of, it's part of Config, which actually I think they're calling it ReConfig. I think Bolt’s thing is ReConfig.

Gonto:I love it. So that's cool. You're participating in the hackathon or just going because of your friend?

Hank: I'm just going because my friend runs marketing there and it sounds like a great time. I want to sit and I want to see how this event, 

Gonto: They have a band right?

Hank: It's the Chainsmokers. It's like a big deal. 

Gonto: Pretty good.

Hank: Yeah, it's a pretty big pull, actually. And, you know, another event for me to go to and learn and see how this works.

Hackathons are not something I've really run or done. It's something people tell me all the time I should do more of. We've talked about hackathons.

This seems like the perfect thing for me to go to and learn a bit.

Gonto: Well, we'll have another topic in May to talk about. But I think with that, we're closing for today. So thank you as always for listening.

And if you have any thoughts, tweet at us. Thank you.

Hank: Thank you.