Yay, we are officially live.
I'm super pumped for this conversation.
Alex, I'm very happy that you're here.
Why don't you introduce yourself?
Sure.
So my name is Alex.
I am the founder and owner of Novatorious, which is a web development business.
We build some products like siren affiliates, and I'm developing this process with and working
with people on different products and projects and clients and things like that.
So it's kind of like an agency.
We do client work and we do things like that, but really it's kind of this big umbrella
of just web development in general.
I started in WordPress.
I was in WordPress.
I'm still in WordPress, technically.
I mean, I'm definitely in green in that community.
But I've been around working on web development stuff since 2010, 2011.
And a developer ever since picked up work.
I worked for a little while as a freelancer.
After that, I worked at several different agencies.
And eventually I spent some time working for a company called Sandhills Development, where
I worked on Affiliate WP, worked on easy digital downloads, and a few things like that.
And then I ended up leaving that company whenever they got bought out by somebody and I didn't
really want to work with them.
I left that company and I worked over at GoDaddy for a few years.
So I've been kind of all over the place, but mostly just kind of on this clear focus of
development and building things.
Since then, I've built a number of different PHP-based frameworks that have been kind of
iterations of themselves.
The first one was called Underpin, which I still have.
It's still out there.
It's still accessible.
But then I realized I had a different problem that I was trying to solve than what Underpin
was solving.
So then I also created another one that's kind of my darling.
And that is kind of like the fundamental of Novatorious and my business and all that.
And that's called PHP Nomad.
I can't wait to talk about PHP Nomad.
Yeah, it's great.
I love it.
Yeah.
Well, you're doing some really, I mean, you're doing a lot of stuff.
And we've had the opportunity to work a little bit together, which has been really great.
You and I just got the chance to meet, which I thought was interesting because you've been
in the WordPress ecosystem for a long time.
I was in the WordPress ecosystem for a long time, but somehow paths didn't cross until
we both got to meet each other at WordCampUS this year, which was really great.
Yep.
I was in conference mode, so I was a blur just running around.
There are some people who I regularly talk to at conferences, those conferences in one
of them.
He is a particularly, he's a more introverted type.
And he was very outgoing, very friendly and talks to people.
But he usually just people who tend to come to him instead of the other way around.
And he actually, when I was, I came over and I sat down with him, he's like, dude, every
time I turn around, you're there.
You're just in a different group.
Like you're just everywhere at once.
How is that even possible?
And I was like, well, I just, it's what I do.
And then after the conference, I collapse, but it's fun.
Yep.
I do the same exact thing.
I'm like, go, go, go hustle, hustle.
Like I love people as long as they are my peers as they're, you know, fellow technical,
technically minded and curious human beings.
So I'm the same way.
And then also crash, crash.
Yes.
Yeah, crash hard.
Yeah, definitely.
Okay.
Let's get into, let's get into the details, right?
So first question, I mean, you shared with us a little bit about what you're building.
But in terms of gosh, I don't have my actual, I don't have my iPad next to me, which is
where my questions normally are.
I'm like, where did it go?
My kid took it, I think.
Let's start with...
The battery's dead.
Forget it.
Yeah.
I know, right?
Well, he was coloring this morning.
Got to keep him occupied.
Yeah.
Okay.
So let's dive into what you're working on and kind of what your day to day looks like.
Let's actually start with your day to day, right?
What is sort of a normal Alex day to day look like?
And I'm sure you're bouncing around, but you know, what are the things you bounce around
to?
So a lot of the stuff I've been doing lately has been all about process and all about
creating the systems within my business.
I've learned this year that I kind of have...
That my two biggest personal strengths are creating systems, taking complicated things
and standardizing them and automating them, blah, blah, blah.
I love doing that.
I can do that all day, every day.
That's why I'm a programmer.
And then the second thing is I'm pretty personal, personable.
I can take complicated ideas and explain them clearly.
Those two things are closely related, but those are kind of the things that I'm really
good at.
I've been working really hard on creating systems that support those two things, that
let me do those things and really bring out the most value in my own business, right?
So I've been doing a lot of that, but my day to day is basically waking up, talking to
Claude a lot.
Is he working for you?
Because he's not working for me.
Basically, I've got a...
Okay, I have this dedicated project at Claude that I call the Novatorious Expert.
And it's just got a ton of...
Just every document that I ever have, every time I have a conversation with it or something
insightful, I add to it.
And I'm adding and removing from it.
And I just kind of talk to it all the time.
And when I'm not talking to it, I am probably jogging on the treadmill and doing the phone
call thing with chat GPT and having a one-on-one conversation with it while I'm running to
work through an idea.
And then I take that back to Claude and I disseminate it into a document.
But that's about 90% of what I've been doing for the last three weeks, to be honest.
Dang.
I mean, I get what you're doing and where you're at because I'm doing the same things,
but Claude is not functioning lately.
And every time that I'm like, okay, Claude, here's your time to shine because I have my
project set up in the same way.
Not working, won't load.
That's because I'm using all of it.
I actually posted on Twitter and I was like, people stop telling everyone about Claude.
I know that's selfish, but that's funny.
But then in addition to that, I've been doing a fair bit of pretty much all of my development
these days is on PHP Nomad.
Any time there's ever anything I'm doing, I'm developing the frameworks and systems
because Novatorious is all in on PHP Nomad.
Every project we do, every project we do is using it.
And I mean, all the way down to I have a service called Taskmaster that's at my company that
automatically parses to do's inside of code and it turns it into ClickUp tasks.
And the reason why, yeah.
So basically it lets us do what I call code driven discovery.
So you create a PHP class, right?
And instead of defining the methods and building it all out right now, you just create other
classes.
You're creating the architecture, the big level.
How do these classes interact?
What is the role of all these classes?
And then you create a to do inside of that.
And then whenever that gets merged, it automatically turns the to do, to like flesh out that class
in ClickUp for me.
So then I can start to have multiple people work on those things and then they can turn
those individual methods into individual to do's and then those individual methods get
implemented one at a time.
So that's kind of, you're going to see a recurring theme here.
That's kind of how everything works in my business and everything that I'm going to be
talking about today is about taking something that's abstract and then over time, progressively
adding clarity to it until it's crystal clear exactly how to do it.
And it's just a series of action items.
So anyway, my day to day though, gosh, so many tangents.
My day to day is specifically whenever it comes to PHP Nomad is writing code that makes
PHP Nomad better.
Right.
So I'm adding support.
I'm writing documentation.
I'm setting it up to work not only as a wordpress, a framework that supports WordPress.
I'm setting it up now.
I just set it up a couple weeks ago to be able to work as its own independent MVC framework
if you want it to.
Yeah, there's potential for it to become, you know, Laravel integration and stuff like
that.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
You guys probably don't even know what PHP Nomad is.
So we should probably stop there.
Right.
But we'll get there, right?
Yeah, we'll get there.
Yeah.
I was like, I know that my next question is like, tell the people about PHP Nomad because
I'm so excited about it.
Anything else you want to shed light on in your day, you know, just thinking about sort
of, you know, other developers or other founders like you, you know, any other things that
can sort of give them a little bird's eye view into like, what does Alex, you know, have
to take on and deal with them a day to day basis?
Yeah.
So the biggest change I've observed.
I've ran, this is my second time trying to run a business myself in a service based business
like this.
The first time I was running a web agency, right?
And this time, that's an aspect of my business, but it's not the sole aspect.
The biggest difference now versus then is back then I said, I'm going to run an agency
to make some money and then maybe I'll make a product someday.
This time I'm making a product and the agency's entire purpose is to serve that product.
That's beautiful.
Yeah.
So yeah.
So it's a complete paradigm shift in that regard.
But then also just really focusing in on what am I good at?
What am I bad at and not doing the stuff I'm bad at and doing the stuff I'm good at?
I know it sounds simple, but so many people fall into this trap of just putting up with
doing the bad thing because they can't find or haven't taken the time to develop the stuff
needed to be able to have somebody do the stuff they're bad at.
And honestly, it's so easy to fall into.
I did that for almost a decade whenever I was running my last agency, right?
And I never grew because I just kept freaking doing that.
And I was frustrating my clients.
I was burning myself out.
It was just a lose-lose all around.
So this time around, I'm avoiding that like the plague.
I see that and I go, oh, that's something I'm bad at.
And maybe it's just because I got burned so much in the past now that I just have this
visceral reaction.
I'm like, that's a bad thing.
Somebody should be doing that.
It's not me.
That's good though.
Yeah.
There's this like, I don't want to say it's fear, but there's just like this.
It's visceral.
It's truly a visceral feeling.
I'll see a task or something.
I'll be like, that's not for me.
I know, I, you know, yeah.
So there's a lot of it, a lot of just like, I don't know how to just talking to yourself
for lack of better terms.
That's what I mean whenever I talk to Claude or AI or people, right?
I have coaches of course now who are helping me when I'm conversing with.
And I'm just kind of working through and understanding what I'm good at, where I fit in the business,
where I don't fit in the business.
And I think that's just kind of the biggest key difference now.
And I think it's going to make a big difference.
I know it is.
It already has.
I love all of that.
There was so many like awesome things that you shared, but I think obviously you, you
know, utilizing AI and like those different ways of like, Hey, let me just work through
my thoughts because oftentimes like, you know, we know the rubber ducky analogy for developers,
right, you, you explain your problem to someone else and suddenly, well, you explain your
problem to a rubber ducky that sits on your desk, right?
And all of a sudden, you know, you're like, Oh, oh my gosh, I just needed to explain it
to realize that.
I got to expand on this a little bit because this is so good.
So, so chat, the voice mode is really good for this.
So what I'll do is I will, I clear my memory in it because it doesn't have projects.
Not really.
You can't use projects with the voice mode, but you can use the memory.
So what I'll do is I'll clear my memory and then I'll have a call.
I'll know what I need to talk about and I'll go into Claude and my project and I'll grab
the documents that I know I want chat, GVT to know about and I'll literally go into chat
and I'll say, remember this and I give it to it and it remembers that document and I just
go through and I have it.
Remember all the stuff that I need it to remember for the conversation I'm about to have with
it.
Interesting.
Okay.
So I get changed into gym clothes and I go downstairs and I put my, put my AirPods in,
put my turn the voice on and I have a pre-written prompt.
So I know exactly what to say to start the conversation and I say, you know, and I say
the prompt, but the key thing about, and it's not like a super fancy prompt or anything
like that.
Literally the concept is you are going to interview me.
That's what I tell you are going to interview me about this topic.
Here's what I'm trying to solve.
Here's what I'm trying to get out of it.
Here are some of the things that you need to use reference your memory for any extra
context.
You are going to ask me one question at a time and I'm going to answer those questions.
That's fire Alex.
Yeah.
It's great.
And then you get on a treadmill and you start running and it asks you a question and as
you're running, you just answer the question, you know, and, and whenever it's talking, you
turn up your speed a little bit and when you're talking, you turn it down and you get one
hour of voice time per day at that, like that high, the good voice chat with chat GPT
get one hour a day, which is perfect because it's a workout.
So you get a one hour workout, you get a voice call, you get all this stuff.
And then whenever you're done, you go back upstairs to your computer.
That whole conversation is just sitting there and you can go in the chat and say, okay,
I need you to summarize this as a document.
Or in my case, what I do is I copy that whole thing.
I take it into the cloud and I paste that whole thing in there and I say, let's talk
about this based on your context and figure out and disseminate it into documents that
I then feedback into cloud later on afterward.
Once I have it all figured out, there's been so much like just discovery of, of my business
and myself just from doing that.
It's been so good.
Oh my gosh.
I'm so glad that you just shared that walkthrough because I've been utilizing cloud and, and
not chat GPT honestly as much as I could have been obviously, but I've been utilizing
cloud a lot.
And yes, sometimes it can take me down a rabbit hole and then I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm actually
worse off than I was in the beginning.
But I think sometimes it's really, really valuable.
Okay.
So it's like burning away.
So yeah, sorry.
No, no, no, this is good.
This is beautiful.
This is all the stuff people want to hear about.
How can they leverage different tools?
And that's the point of the show, right?
What are you up to?
What do you do?
And what can we do?
But I want to talk about PHP Nomad.
So like let's actually, let's dive into what you're building.
So let's, let's do, give us a breakdown of essentially, you know, whatever you want to
share here, but what's siren, what's PHP Nomad?
You know, what are kind of the things that you're working on?
Let's actually talk about the goodies.
All right.
So PHP Nomad.
Let's start there.
So PHP Nomad is, it employs what I call the nomadic approach to web development, to development
in general, not web development, just programming as a whole.
The paradigm is we, it, it flips the, the relationship.
It's an inversion of control kind of thing, right?
So it flips the relationship of what you're integrating with and what you're integrating.
So the idea is your code should be nomadic.
It should be able to jump from platform to platform and not have to be, require a complete
rewrite to do that.
So that's where PHP Nomad fits into this.
It's done, but it does it by creating abstractions, creating a layer between whatever you're integrating
with and your actual code, right?
So your code is in the middle.
PHP, there's a layer outside of it.
PHP Nomad that serves as the series of interfaces and stuff that you integrate with that are
generic, right?
Generalize and not specific to any platform, but you work in, you write code with PHP Nomad
and PHP Nomad translates it to whatever platform you're writing for.
Dying.
So, yeah.
So that's the idea on how it works.
So the benefit of this is in Siren, which Siren is my performance program, my, my affiliate
program plugin basically.
So it lets you build any kind of performance based system.
Why can't I think of the right word right now?
Just left.
Incentive?
Thank you.
Incentive program.
Yeah, that's it.
Yeah, it's like it's an incentive program, not just affiliates.
Thank you.
It's an incentive program builder.
Yes.
So anyway, that software I built with PHP Nomad.
And in fact, they've both been very closely tightly intertwined because the day I built
Siren, I built it as a WordPress plugin, but I don't want it to just be a WordPress plugin
forever.
And I didn't want to, right, right.
I think you, and I didn't want it to just be that, but I needed to start with what I
know, right?
Which what I know is WordPress.
That's that in terms of integrations.
I've worked with Laravel, I've worked with other things, but I needed to keep this simple
and I needed to get it done.
Otherwise, it would be 2030 and I'd still be building it or I would have burned out before
I got it launched.
I had to get the damn thing launched.
So, but knowing that, having that vision and having that context, I knew I didn't want
to have to rebuild this entire plugin a year or two down the road.
And I didn't want to make it painful to make the switch.
So I created PHP Nomad as this layer between the two.
And it's just kind of blossomed into this thing that not only solves sirens immediately
needs, but now that I've, I have it, I'm wanting to use it for everything because it's like,
oh, because now I don't have to, because there's this whole other benefit to it.
So I built it for that reason so that I could build it as a WordPress plugin.
And then later, if I ever decided I wanted to create it as its own SAS or something like
that, I could just take all the PHP, the WordPress integration, pull that out and plop in an
MVC integration, maybe Laravel or something like that.
I ended up just doing a completely like from the ground up.
It's not from the ground up.
It's using a series of different packages that it's integrating with that combined together
basically makes PHP Nomad into an MVC framework.
But anyway, but the point is now I can do that.
Now I can rip that out and put that into as a SAS without rebuilding siren because sirens
core didn't never integrated with WordPress.
It never touched WordPress.
PHP Nomad touched WordPress.
So I gotta do switch those out.
Good to go.
Wow.
That's super powerful, especially, especially this, I don't want to bring up too much drama
or things, but with the, what is happening in the WordPress ecosystem today, I think
there's a lot of fear around what is the future and where does WordPress go and is this a reliable
ecosystem to continue investing in.
And I think when, when you and I talked and you told me about PHP Nomad, obviously, you
know, I like was very excited because I love siren and I love incentive programs.
And I think they're so powerful to leverage customers to advocate on your behalf or champions,
right?
People who already love you or your product or your service, right?
Why not leverage them?
So siren is such an amazing product.
If y'all can't tell, I'm like obsessed with siren.
I can't wait until it is a sass because it will be something that will be very beautifully
integrated into everything that I do.
But you know, this idea of being able to, to build outside of the ecosystem, even if
WordPress didn't have this drama is so powerful because I think I struggle as feeling like
I'm a very well capable developer because most of my skills have been in like the Drupal,
the Joomla, the WordPress.
I'm in a system.
I'm in a platform and it's a lot harder to go out and be like, well, let me just build
something from scratch, right?
The, the level of build out is much different.
So digressing super pumped about everything that you're doing.
And folks should definitely check out PHP Nomad if they're in that same space.
So keep going if you add more, but I just, I have to say all that.
The extra, the other thing.
So in addition to me getting that benefit, right?
Yeah.
Of the nomadic approach to programming is that it also has become, the reason why I want
to use it for everything now is because now I don't have to contact switch.
I've put myself, I'm like, I'm shielded from the integration itself.
So because of everything I'm writing is working with PHP Nomad.
I know PHP Nomad.
Therefore I know every platform that integrates with PHP Nomad, right?
So I can hire a person and it just makes it easier to outsource too.
Cause if I can get people who understand how PHP Nomad works and they, they don't have,
I'm not looking for WordPress developers, Drupal developers, Jumo developers, Lara
Viva developers, I'm looking for people who know how to write PHP Nomad.
And once they understand that the rest of that conversation doesn't matter, right?
They can literally build this.
They could build software completely devoid of, without ever, they could build a WordPress
plugin without ever installing WordPress.
That's crazy.
Right?
So like, yeah.
When you think about it that way, like it's not just, I can move my code, it's the code
is movable.
So it means that, and we have projects now that I'm working with where, and that people
are building stuff and they're not even installing WordPress.
Like I just said, they're, they're building interfaces, they're building code, they're
building ideas and they're conceptualizing, improving it out in a way simpler environment
than setting up a full blown WordPress install with MySQL and all this stuff.
So like there's just, there's just all these implications that happen and all these benefits
that come from being nomadic that I had never even considered, but now that I've done it
and I've seen it, I'm done.
Forget it.
I mean, my, the, the documentation for PHP Nomad is going to be written in PHP Nomad.
The, the every service that I'm writing is in PHP Nomad.
Every WordPress plugin I'm doing, every site I'm building, all of it.
I'm, I'm obsessed.
It is, it is awesome.
I love it.
Oh, that's, that is how every founder, I love that passion, right?
Like every founder wants to reach that point of just like this, this admiration for something
that they've built, right?
And I think sometimes we do, we get there, right?
But we, we have these like ebb and flows of, of the love language that we have for our
code and sometimes it takes us a while to get there.
So I love your passion behind it.
You really, you really are, you're deeply ingrained in that.
Okay.
Now that I realize my iPad's still missing, I gotta pull my question.
I'm so sorry.
It's okay.
Don't sweat it.
For folks who are watching, I had to run my toddler to, uh, to, uh, to, uh, to, uh, to
his little parents' day out and then come back right when we had to, to get on the call.
So I'm a little out of, okay, I got it.
Got my next one.
Um, what is your developer education?
This one I think is going to be fun.
Yeah.
So, um, I start, I, I've never gone to college as a developer, um, but I've been a programmer.
I've, I've been into computers my entire life, right?
So like the, I'm very much the stereotypical millennial who was three years old, you know,
installing stuff on my computer before I even knew what installing was.
Not realizing that I didn't have to run the install installation every time just to run
the program, right?
It's stuff like that.
Uh, or, you know, my dad got mad at me when I was a kid because I filled the entire, you
know, hard drive with bitmap files from MS paint because I decided I wanted to save all
of it.
Like, so I've been using, I grew up with computer, a computer access to a computer pretty much
a whole life.
Um, I was a web developer.
Uh, that's not true.
I was on the web design team in high school.
Uh, I took every keyboard in class.
Yeah.
Actually I have a somewhere I can, I found a way back machine has a web has, has my
personal web page that I built on the school because a benefit of being on the team, you
got your own page and it is my favorite food was tacos and my favorite movie was Bruce
Almighty, apparently.
Um, you know what was up?
Yeah.
Right.
And honestly, I, where's the lie?
So, um, but, uh, anyway, so I did that for, you know, I was doing that as kids and stuff
like that.
Um, I was a mechanical engineer for a little, for about a decade, which a vocational school.
I did all that for a little while and then, um, realized I wanted to work remotely and
that's whenever I ended up.
And the whole reason why I was a mechanical engineer is because I love computers.
I wanted to do 3D modeling and actually funny enough, my 3D printer is running right now.
So like, I still use that.
Is that what's in the back that you just pointed to?
Yeah, this thing right here.
Yeah.
It's printing a, uh, that's a big one.
Well, it's the case.
That's all the case.
This is, this is the printer.
It's not that big, but, uh, right now it's printing a kite reel for one of my, well,
for kite reels.
Anyway, uh, so like, yeah, cause, cause the tail is annoying to reel in and I couldn't
find a good solution.
So I modeled something up.
Of course you did.
That's what technical people do.
I should say that's what, you know, like, I don't even know if it's technical.
If it's like the curious problem solving mind, you know, yeah.
That's it.
Uh, so, and I've always been that I've always been problems, a problem solver.
I've always loved doing those kinds of things.
So anyway, so I was doing that for a while and then I decided I wanted to work remotely.
This is 2012, 2013, right?
And I had my first kid wanted to be home with it all the time, him all the time.
Yeah, that's funny.
Him all the time.
Um, and I didn't want to work, go into my job at the time.
Uh, mechanical engineering, that was not even possible.
I'm not even sure if it's possible now, but it definitely wasn't possible then.
Yeah.
You have to be close to the plant.
You have to know what's going on, blah, blah, blah.
Um, so I said, screw it.
I'm going to become a programmer.
I built a website in WordPress using, uh, the photo, uh, with tutorials on how to edit
photos with GIMP, the photo editor.
Um, because again, software, love computers, love, loved it.
Right.
Um, so that's kind of, I was tapping into that web design, web development knowledge
of when I was a kid, when I was younger, building my space pages, you know, Neopets,
shop, customizations, all that stuff, geosities, yeah, all that.
Uh, so yeah, all of my origin comes from all that is really just mostly, uh, just having
a life of playing with computers and breaking them repeatedly.
Uh, I installed my first version of Ubuntu in like 2008, 2007, uh, you know, and it's,
um, entirely because I wanted the wobbly windows.
I'm not even kidding.
Oh, still this day.
Go ahead.
Oh, no, I didn't mean to cut you off.
I was literally just going to say we as developers, like our goal is always to save time, but
then we'll also blow so much time just building something really cool that we want to play
with.
It's like, what the heck?
It was, it was, I think it was comp is maybe it was called that, but I can't remember, but
it had the wobbly windows and when you'd switch, when you'd switch desktops, which
by the way, multiple desktops was only Ubuntu at the time.
So I blew my freaking mind when I saw this guy hit a, hit, hit a shortcut key and the
whole computer rotated like a cube to a new desktop.
I was like, this is it for me.
And I love that.
Yeah.
So then I learned, had to learn bash by fire and anyway.
So here I am now.
That's awesome.
I think it's been interesting.
Like people come from different walks of life, obviously, but Mike, who I interviewed yesterday,
he also started in mechanical engineering.
So you and you and him have some, some common interests there, which is fun.
Yeah.
It is super fun.
Okay.
Great.
So we talked about what you're building.
We talked about, you know, like, okay, let me, sorry.
That's okay.
We did that.
I'm, I'm, I'm working through my kind of show process, right?
But okay.
So challenges, I think we've, we've talked about a lot of what you do in your day to
day and kind of how you maybe go about solving challenges and some of that.
But do you have any specific challenges?
I think I'd love to hear, unless you have one around others, but I'd love to hear around
some of the challenges, maybe when you were starting to build out ph me nomad.
Obviously, that's a really robust tool, something that's really cool.
Can do some awesome stuff.
But I'm sure it didn't come easy to build that.
So what were maybe some of the challenges and triumphs that you accomplished with, with
building that out?
So the big, the biggest challenge with that was really figuring out how to understand where
PHP nomad fit into the relationship.
I kind of had this vision for what it would be, but I didn't, I knew what it needed to
do.
I knew the problem I needed to solve, right?
But all of that came from a lot of thinking, a lot of conversations, a lot of looking at
the problem, right?
But the biggest, I guess the biggest challenge was really getting a feel for what the patterns
would be and how, and establishing them and making sure they're consistent and understanding
those things.
But really, once I understood its purpose, where it fit into everything, and I looked
at a few of the different patterns that I wanted to use, mostly like the strategy pattern
and things like that, I was able to basically start digging into how all those things work.
But it would be frustrating for a while when I was developing siren because I would be
building something and I would go, okay, now I need to access the database.
For example, oh my God, the database was a big one.
So I need, because WordPress doesn't have an ORM or any kind of comprehensive thing
like that.
You're writing queries.
So I had to basically build an ORM to make it work.
But I had to do it in a nomadic way so that because that was a cluster.
It was just a lot of effort, a lot of thinking.
Because one of the big things, again, nomadic, I wanted to be able to work across different
things.
If I wanted later on to say this database that I'm accessing that has a list of all
of my collaborators in siren, for example, I don't necessarily know where that data is
coming from.
It's a data store.
It's not a database.
From PHP Nomad's perspective, there's a place that stores data.
That's all it knows.
It doesn't know what my SQL is.
It doesn't know what a REST API is.
It doesn't know what GraphQL is.
It doesn't know any of that stuff.
All it knows is that there's a place that it can go and say, hey, I need this and it
goes and it gets it.
So I had to figure out how to decouple my SQL and the database layer from the data store
layer.
And there was just a lot of complexity that went into that.
But the really cool result of it now is everything is a data store.
So now, later on, if I decide, hey, instead of accessing this data from the collaborators
database table, we've actually moved that over to its own dedicated service on a different
server.
So we're going to access it via REST now.
Here's the strategy.
Here's what implements everything that you need to know.
Go do that instead.
Dang.
So it doesn't matter if something else is even non-my SQL then because, wow.
Okay.
It's completely decoupled.
Dang.
That's cool.
Yeah.
PHP Nomad doesn't know anything about anything.
It's just a middle layer that translates what you're doing into whatever you're integrating
with.
Right?
And the idea being it's as simple as switching out different packages and different loaders,
I call them.
Yeah.
Wow.
Okay.
Dang.
That's cool.
I mean, obviously, when you're talking about data, like anyone who's ever had to work with
my SQL or no SQL or any amount of large data, right?
That can be a nightmare.
But what a beautiful sort of solution and how you've brought that into PHP Nomad.
So now I want to go mess around with it.
I'm like, what can I do?
How can I?
I can really just release 1.0 yesterday.
You know, I'm going to go check it out because I've been back into like my dev chops like
yesterday.
I hung out with someone who I interviewed on Monday and essentially like, as you know,
right?
Like as coming from the space that we're both in or came from or in right now, even building
is different.
And so when you go out into the world of sort of different languages and different stacks
and different systems, it's completely different.
And so I'm like, how do I even like start to build a new system of something I haven't
worked with before?
And what does that even look like?
And so we were starting to dive into it.
And it was just, it was like a moment of, okay, I had it really good over in these open source
PHP stacks where things were, you know, somewhat simple to work with.
But I feel like Nomad would sort of help, you know, venture out, right?
And give you that kind of in between.
So do you agree that that's applicable?
Because I think it'd be interesting for people who are those types of developers that are
really looking to venture out, whether it be because of the ecosystem right now, or just
whether it be generally, hey, I want to venture out from being a WordPress dev.
Yeah, I think, and I mean, in a lot of ways, it's solving that problem for me, right?
I am a WordPress developer.
Big problem I've had is that I want to get out of being just a WordPress developer.
I want to be, I've built complicated things, right?
And in a lot of ways, WordPress developers don't have it as easy as Lareville developers,
right?
Because we have, we don't have the tooling, right?
And it's certainly self-inflicted in a lot of ways, but there's decisions that we can't
make, right?
Like if we're going to do legacy stuff in WordPress, we can't change or won't change.
So with that, I've built a lot of crazy complicated things that's way harder than it should have
been.
That if you did it in Lareville, it's easy.
A few commands that automatically scaffold everything you need and you put it all together.
And I'm not saying, I'm not trying to discount Lareville developers by any means.
I envy you.
But the point is, I'm a very capable programmer.
And I know a lot of WordPress developers who are absolutely capable developers as well.
They just feel trapped because they've worked inside of this context of the WordPress way,
come hell or high water.
And basically, yeah.
So it does present a challenge where it's like, okay, how do I go from that to not that?
It's a big, and it's not just about learning the new language.
It's also finding the clientele, finding the opportunities, finding the work.
There's a bridge that has to exist between those two things.
And for me, PHP Nomad has become that because it allows me to work in WordPress, but to
learn PHP Nomad at the same time.
While I'm learning PHP Nomad, I'm learning a new skill that is applicable to WordPress
that lets me accomplish things in my current setup with my current team, with my current
skills, my current, everything, my network, all that stuff.
I can just start using PHP Nomad to build Nomadic WordPress plugins instead of just
a normal WordPress plugin.
And then now I can go out and start finding opportunities outside of WordPress with the
confidence that I already know how to build software outside of WordPress now because
PHP Nomad gave me that bridge.
Yeah.
That's what I figured.
I wanted to shed light on that because I think that's a beautiful thing for anyone who is
feeling like that.
I think I've got even just a little imposter syndrome myself.
After being in the WordPress ecosystem as heavily as I was, I shifted into more of the
DevOps sort of ecosystem.
And I loved that because it was different, testing, batch scripting, servers and all
the things.
And I loved that and I enjoyed that, but it still didn't necessarily expand my programming
skills in a direction where I can start to build different apps.
It expanded my server knowledge and expanded all those different infrastructure types of
insights and things, which is beautiful.
But I agree.
And so, yeah, summary, check out digital PHP Nomad.
I plan to do the same.
Okay.
So last question, I'm going to kind of wrap them up together.
Where do you go either when you're stuck or when you're looking for a new solution or
a tool?
I know you're one to sort of like dive in and kind of solve challenges, but maybe there's
opportunities and times when you bring in a tool where you build your own, but when
you're technically stuck or you're just, you can't find a solution, what's your go-to
in terms of that sort of, okay, here's the hierarchy of the resources and maybe people
or whatever that you might reach out to.
Yep.
So the first thing I think about is, have I looked at the problem enough?
Nine times out of 10, developers haven't looked at the problem enough and we can solve the
problem by looking at it more.
That's why rubber ducking exists.
Exactly.
So the GPT example, you're sure?
GPT example, yes.
Chad GPT is my rubber duck now.
Yeah, I love it.
Because it talks back to me.
So and not only does it talk back to me, but I let it lead the conversation.
Do you know what I mean?
Yeah.
Yep.
That's power.
Yeah.
So anyway, so usually it starts there.
Yep.
And oftentimes I'll find, as I'm talking through the problem, I'll realize there's a critical
piece of information that I don't know or I'm not sure about.
And it's massaging those details out and finding that not, if I'm going to stick to that metaphor.
And going and figuring out that problem first and then usually I'm able to solve the real
problem.
We love to solve, we love problem solving, but...
Yes, we do.
It's funny how, if you think about it that term, it's problem solving.
We love to solve problems.
That doesn't necessarily mean we love to think about problems.
But thinking about problems and looking at those problems is very much a part of solving.
And I think it's oftentimes important.
Also sleep, big fan of that, would recommend.
I can't tell you the number of times I've worked.
There's a specific pressure I get right here in my head that I know I've overworked for
the day.
And sometimes I will doggedly keep, if I've got a bone, I'm just, I can't let it go.
I have to solve this problem.
I have to do this thing.
This happened to me yesterday.
I was trying to, so I'm working on, I just launched 1.0 of PHP Nomad, trying to get all
that stuff to work with Siren because obviously I was using pre-release versions of PHP Nomad.
So I'm kind of in dependency hell right now with Siren.
Self-inflicted, I kept on putting it off.
It's okay.
It's a part of the process.
I don't mind.
But it was like 504 and I've been working on it for like six hours and I know I've got
this pressure in my head and I'm like, I just, I just want more thing.
I'm almost there.
I've almost got this one problem.
I've almost got this figured out.
I've almost got this thing.
I'll stop after I do this.
And I realize and this is not, I'm not perfect at this, but this is something I'm always
trying to do better.
Is Alex, you feel like crap right now.
Feel your head.
Think about your head.
Think about your state right now.
This doesn't end well.
Yep.
Stop.
You're going to get frustrated.
Yeah.
Put it away.
The best thing I've ever done for myself whenever it comes to solving a problem is opening
myself up to being able to, in the code, add a to do.
That is in all capitals, it says to do, you were here.
That's the first thing it says.
So that later when I open it up, I can do a search for to do, you were here so I can
find out where I was.
And then I describe what I was thinking about in that moment before I quit.
That's as soon as I put that down.
It's like it gives me permission because I feel like I'm always afraid to stop because
I don't want to lose my train of thought.
Same.
But doing that, it lets me transfer that train of thought and put the state of my brain as
much as I can where I can find it in the context where it matters.
Right.
Yeah.
So I'll do that.
So to do, you were here, you were solving blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Here's what you were trying to think about.
Here's how you were trying to solve it.
Yep.
I close the computer and I walk away and I go to sleep.
Yeah.
I don't go straight to sleep.
Yeah, yeah.
I get it.
I go straight to sleep.
I move on.
Yeah.
My brain goes to sleep.
I stop solving problems for the day.
Yeah.
And you know, usually my subconscious takes it from there and I wake up the next day and
I have a cup of coffee and I'm like, oh, this isn't that hard.
Why was I struggling with this?
Oh, I know because my brain was fried.
Duh.
Yep.
Exactly.
Oh, I love that so much.
All right.
So I have to go to a little adorable toddler Christmas performance.
Yay.
I know, right?
It's so cute.
But before we wrap up, where can people find you?
And then on top of it, you are with your work and everything that you're doing.
We chatted about this before the show.
You're looking to expand a little bit.
And I'd love for you to share more for anyone who's listening.
If they're intrigued or interested or like, what is this?
Tell me more.
Tell us all those goodies before we wrap up.
So Novatorious, I'm doing software, I'm building solutions using the nomadic method, right?
Everything that we talked about applies to my business and everything obviously.
From building Siren to building different client projects that we're doing to building
what, everything from building websites and SEO strategies and things like that all the
way over to building software and automations and things like that.
So we're running a pretty wide gamut on the things that we're solving, the problems we're
solving and how we're doing it.
What I'm looking for is people who want to run with me, who want to try this, who want
to use PHP Nomad, who thinks the nomadic method is pretty cool, who is interested in potentially
transitioning themselves out of WordPress or maybe just learning some programming things
or maybe you're a professional and you're looking to take on some side work or things
like that.
I have a lot of stuff going on.
I have a lot of projects that I'm bringing in over the next couple of quarters.
I'm looking for professionals.
I'm looking for not just like domain level experts who could potentially take on whole
projects and work with me on projects on a team with other people and not by yourself
on a contract.
It's not full-time contracts.
But I'm also looking for people who are looking for what I call snacks.
So just a little task, little thing here and there that you can sit down and you can realistically
knock it out in its entirety from start to finish.
No ongoing obligations, no nothing within a day, within one to six hours of your work,
you working on a problem.
But then it's gone.
You don't have to ever hear about it again and you get paid for it.
That's a tight thing.
Yes, for sure.
If you're working full-time and you're looking to make a little bit of extra money on the
side, this is a great opportunity.
You can think of it almost like Uber for developers or Uber for, you know what I mean, where it's
like you are, you've got a full-time job or whatever and maybe on Friday nights, if you're
not doing anything else, you're not busy or whatever, you pick up a couple one or two
things on Novatorious's bounty board basically.
Do that task, get it done and get paid for it.
So that's another thing that I'm developing, I'm setting up, looking for tons of people
for that.
Love that.
I love that so much.
Can you hear my pugs in the background?
Nope, I saw one.
I saw one sneak by earlier, but no, I can't hear them at all.
They're playing and I'm like, oh man, should I yell at them or not?
Very silly.
No.
That's good.
Okay, that is awesome.
All right, so what domain should they go to?
Oh, I'm going to share some links in the description.
I'm going to show notes for everyone after the fact, but maybe kind of like, what's the
primary domain they can go find you right now?
The main domain where you can find, so I've got a few, but the main one for me personally
is alexstanderford.com.
So if you just want to connect with me personally, that's a good spot to go.
I have a website that talks more about Novatorious and our beliefs of being free, being able
to work from anywhere.
A big part of Novatorious's belief is that we should be celebrating working from home,
not just being yoked to our desk.
All a lot of people have done is move their desk from their office at work to their office
at home.
I travel for four years on a camper all over the country, taking advantage of the fact
that I worked remotely and a big part of my ethos and a big part of the business that
I'm building is around encouraging other people to do the same.
I'm not, it's early still, but I'm working on getting to the point to where there's
things in the system that allow and enable people to do that.
So that's a whole another conversation.
But anyway, so Novatorious, which is N-O-V-A-T-O-R-I dot U-S, Novatorious.
And then phpnomad.com will take you directly to the GitHub repository, the GitHub organization
for PHP Nomad.
If you're looking to get started with PHP Nomad or give it a try, there's actually an
MVC framework template that is on PHP Nomad site.
I will start it, make sure it starts so that it's easy to find if you go to phpnomad.com.
Basically that will allow you to create a GitHub repository to be able to start trying
out and experimenting and tinkering with PHP Nomad.
All right.
Well it has been absolutely amazing having you on the show.
Thank you so much for coming on and I hope that everyone has a fabulous rest of their
day.
Yeah, thanks.
We'll see you around.
Enjoy your show.
Bye.