Kent C. Dodds (00:01.216)
What is up everybody? I'm so excited to be joined by my friend Dev Neill. How are you doing Dev?

Dev (00:08.18)
I'm great. Thanks, kids. How are you doing?

Kent C. Dodds (00:11.0)
Super, super, super happy to have you coming out to Utah for the third time, I think. You came out to Epic WebConf last year and then Epic WebCamp, which was awesome. And then, yeah, we're bringing you out for Epic WebConf again. You must like Utah.

Dev (00:28.555)
Yeah, there's great tech conferences there.

Kent C. Dodds (00:33.346)
Yeah, awesome. Yeah, so I like I think we were introduced through. Let's see, was it like open source stuff? I'm actually trying to remember how we first met.

Dev (00:46.115)
So we went to a conference in Austria, which also had snowboarding included. And yeah, think we became friends on the mountains.

Kent C. Dodds (00:50.124)
That's right.

Haha.

Kent C. Dodds (00:57.678)
Yes, yes, absolutely. that will continue. So we did have a ski day last year as well. That was, let's see, agentconf was 2022, I think. Maybe, yeah, I think it was maybe 22 or 23. And then, yeah, and then our ski day for Epic WebConf last year. And then we'll do it again this year. And then also had you out one-wheeling last year too. So that's...

Dev (01:08.994)
Yeah.

Kent C. Dodds (01:25.666)
That is, yeah, we share quite a few things in common. anyway, Dev, I think it'd be good for people to get to know you a little bit before the conference. So can you tell us a little bit about who you are, what things you're into, and yeah, just kind of a general overview of yourself.

Dev (01:26.648)
Yeah.

Dev (01:45.955)
Sure. Yeah, so I'm a software developer. I'm from Cape Town, South Africa. I've been programming for about seven years and I lean kind of towards the front end of the stack. Like I love seeing what I'm building and kind of iterating slowly towards something more beautiful. Just love that process. yeah, recently I've gone down the road of

solarpreneurship, so trying my own thing, trying to work out all the puzzle pieces outside of just coding, which has been very interesting. And I also love surfing and snowboarding, as we mentioned, and I'm a cat person.

Kent C. Dodds (02:34.476)
A cat person, okay, I didn't know this about you. We can still be friends. That's awesome. So you mentioned that you're working on some of the things for your solopreneurship, some of the things outside of development. What are some of the things that you've found to be particularly challenging or different from what you expected when you struck out on your own?

Dev (02:38.231)
Yeah.

Hahaha.

Dev (03:00.483)
So the two big things outside of coding is marketing in its various forms and then talking to users. yeah, getting yourself out there in front of people, convincing them to sign up for a waitlist or for an interview so you can chat to them, learning how to chat to them the right way, how to write convincing, like copywriting, you know, to convince people that...

what you've built for the world is valuable and can solve their problem. It's, yeah, think writing is the skill that I'm nurturing the most right now.

Kent C. Dodds (03:38.894)
So when you're saying writing, it's like in emails and blog posts and like other marketing things or what do you mean by that specifically?

Dev (03:49.965)
So it's like in content, so blog posts, newsletter issues, and just communicating clearly and succinctly in a way that creates value for people. But then there's also the copywriting side of things. So writing the copy for your landing page that slowly reveals the value to people. And by the end of the landing page, they're like, this solves exactly my problem. I really want to sign up.

Kent C. Dodds (04:07.278)
Mmm.

Kent C. Dodds (04:17.58)
Yeah, you know, I actually had a conversation just yesterday with John Lindquist from Egghead. And he was talking about how often the educators that come on, they just want to create the material and then teach the workshops. And then when it comes to the marketing side of things, they just don't want to even touch it because it's not a skill that they signed up for. So how have you been finding it? Has this been like an interesting challenge or is this like...

Just work that you just can't wait to get done with and over with so that you can get to the stuff you enjoy.

Dev (04:54.851)
It's been really exciting to learn something new. It's kind of like a good challenge to get outside of the comfort zone. But it is hard. I would be lying if I said I haven't procrastinated more than I should have for marketing stuff. But it's fun. I'm enjoying it so far.

Kent C. Dodds (05:09.474)
Hmm.

Kent C. Dodds (05:13.582)
you

Kent C. Dodds (05:19.478)
Yeah, hey cool. So, Deb, why don't you give us a little bit of a preview into your talk for Epic WebConf.

Dev (05:28.909)
Cool. So, yeah, I've realized on this new path that I'm on that programming is only one small piece of the puzzle. There's all the things that we just spoke about, which means I need time for a whole lot of new things. So I need to like optimize my development workflow. And AI, of course, is how we can do that. Luckily, in the age we live in now.

And so I started looking into all the tools available and how can I speed up my development as much as possible. And like, there's this big AI hype bubble out there. And it's like, I know there's all these amazing tools to use, but I don't really know like, which ones are the best? How do they compare to each other? What's it actually practically feel like to use them day to day? You So.

I thought it would be useful for me, but also for everyone else to dive into the hype bubble and find out exactly the tools that are there, how they compare with their features, what it feels like to use them, and put together a report on that. kind of a summary of the state of AI in the web development space. And I want to then take those tools, pick the best ones.

get really familiar with them and try my best to be a power user. And then take the Epic Stack, your app starter template, and combine it with these awesome AI tools and try and take an idea from idea to production in 20 minutes with everyone.

Kent C. Dodds (07:20.652)
That is ambitious. That is, that's awesome, Dev. I, when I saw your proposal, I was like, that is so sick. I definitely wanted somebody to talk about the Epic stack and combining using AI with it is really powerful. Now I'm curious what your take on or like curious to hear your take about tools like V zero and those kinds of like project starter at like with AI.

Dev (07:23.051)
Yeah.

Kent C. Dodds (07:49.678)
I know that they're supposed to be able to integrate with an existing project somehow, but that doesn't seem to work very well. It's mostly from scratch and stuff. I feel like most of us aren't starting new projects a lot. We're typically working with existing projects. And so what's your experience been like using the Epic Stack and AI on your existing projects?

Dev (08:18.947)
So I've kind of been starting out in v0 and iterating and getting the front end to look as closely as I needed to with placeholder data in the back end. And then I've been taking it into Zed. This is the editor I've been using with Epic Stack. They've got some AI features. And it uses Claude's on it too. Basically,

bring in everything from v0 and then use Claude to hook everything up and get the backend working with real data and hitting APIs and stuff. Yeah, so I've kind of been manually copying the code in and plugging it all together for now. But as preparation for this course, I'm going to really optimize those bottlenecks. And like v0, you can import the code directly into a code base. And I'm going to really streamline things.

Kent C. Dodds (08:54.414)
Hmm.

Kent C. Dodds (09:10.51)
Mm.

Kent C. Dodds (09:14.444)
Yeah, yeah. Well, with 20 minutes, you have to do that. It's not a lot of time, but I guess that's kind of the point is you want to show people how quickly you can get something off the ground. And then hopefully with the tools that you demonstrate, that can take people beyond just off the ground and actually help them in their regular development work as they go beyond just the MVP.

Dev (09:18.977)
Yeah.

Dev (09:43.787)
Yeah, completely. I think that's the beauty of having the Epic stack as a starting point. That's kind of like what it would be like joining a company with an existing app. All the foundations there already and you've got to pull the AI into it.

Kent C. Dodds (09:55.022)
Mm.

Kent C. Dodds (09:59.702)
Yeah, yeah, very cool. Well, Dev, what is the, I want to hear from you what you would like people to talk with you about at the conference. So what are the sorts of things that you're into? Like let's imagine you're standing in the hallway track during one of the extended breaks that we've got and somebody is coming up and talking to you. What is something that they could bring up that would be really interesting for you to talk about?

Dev (10:28.387)
So I would love to chat about all the different AI-powered editors out there and which one people are using and why. That's super interesting, just because there's so many exciting tools out there, and they're all kind of a little bit different. I'd love to know the motivations behind why people are picking which one. And I love Shadson UI, yeah, component libraries.

I love frame and motion as well. So using animations on the web is super interesting. I would love to chat about what people are doing with that. Or anything related to solar entrepreneurship, if anyone's doing side projects. Or surfing or snowboarding, fun things like that.

Kent C. Dodds (11:14.318)
Very cool. Yeah. Last question, Dev. what, you travel quite a ways, like right now you're in Cape town, but you live in Germany, if I remember right. And so like when you go to conferences in the United States, it's like, it's a pretty big lift. And last year, both of the events you came out to Utah for, like you weren't speaking, it wasn't paid for you. Like you had to really put yourself out there to attend. Why do you think it's so,

important for people to do that? Why is it important to you?

Dev (11:52.57)
So I learned a whole lot from your first Epic React course, and it kind of introduced me to the whole world of the online JavaScript community. And then I met you and a whole lot of other amazing people at AgentConf, because I was now in South Africa. pretty far away. So you kind of see this whole world happening out there, and you feel like you can't be a part of it. But then I was in Germany.

Kent C. Dodds (12:14.722)
Hmm.

Dev (12:17.853)
And you were going to Asian comp in Austria and I was like, wow, that's right there. have to go. And I met you and everyone else that was there. And it was just such a inspiring, exciting experience. made me feel a part of the community. That when you said you were having a conference of your own in Utah, it was a no brainer to have the same experience again and meet more like-minded people.

Yeah, it's totally worth it. I've loved every experience. Can recommend it.

Kent C. Dodds (12:54.382)
I'm really glad to hear that. I think that you can get the education online and that's great. The education is, there's so many opportunities, but that those relationships that like convert into real experience and opportunities is really best developed when you meet people in person. And...

And then of course, like our lives are more than just our careers, it's also the personal friendships that we develop with people and things that I think are really valuable. So I'm really excited about seeing you again out in Utah for Epic WebConf 2025. It's gonna be epic and we're gonna have a lot of fun. So thank you so much for agreeing to speak and thank you for giving us a little intro to yourself here.

Dev (13:45.731)
Cool, thank you Kent. Thanks for having me and yeah, I'm super excited for the conference.

Kent C. Dodds (13:52.03)
Awesome. Thanks. See you everybody.