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**Adam Stacoviak:** Really well said. |
**Jerod Santo:** Wouldn't you agree? |
**Mat Ryer:** \[11:57\] Yeah... Well, it's funny. It's funny, because I think that also as an idea is quite funny, of tech wars... Some people really do take it very seriously and arguing about languages and things... You know, Go and JavaScript together - you can make some amazing things. So yeah, JS Party is a good p... |
**Jerod Santo:** Better podcast. Okay. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Not as good as -- so that's the thing too on that from, the wars thing. I wanted to scream "Same team!" This war thing - it's good to compete. Competition is great, so I'm always in favor of that. But the warring, the actual fighting, sometimes even name-calling... |
**Jerod Santo:** It's too much. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It doesn't help anybody, really. We're here to innovate the future of technology, not win the individualized war. |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. I think it comes from a place sometimes of - if you're inexperienced, you don't wanna waste your time with something, you want there to be a language that's the one to learn, so you can really focus. So I think people are drawn to these tech wars for that reason. I know lots of examples of that, whe... |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, maybe something that speaks highly of the community then is that - maybe you don't know this, but I produce both of those shows, and I also contribute to both of the Twitter handles... And I've been trying to start a gang fight for a while... Mat, you know this. I've been trying to get JS Party v... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's Anchorman, right? |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, Anchorman. I'm like, "Let's get that going between our podcasts, because you know, that'd be great for interest." And no one's biting. So I think the actual war between the JS group and the Go group is like surface-level, but there's no teeth there. |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. We love each other, really. Brick killed a guy. |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] There you go. Mat's seen it... Nice reference. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Just to loop back a little bit, I did confirm episode 3 of the Changelog; it was in fact titled "The Go programming language from Google, with Rob Pike, principal engineer at Google and co-creator of Go." |
**Jerod Santo:** Way back when... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Confirmed. Go back and listen to that awesome, but terribly-produced show. I mean, it probably sounds terrible, but great content, obviously. Different show back then, for sure. |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, Mat, we didn't bring you on here just to talk about Go Time for the entire show, we brought you on to talk about Bitbar and xbar, which are written in Go, and one is a rewrite of the other... Let's start with Bitbar, let's start with the origin. What it is, why you made it, what it was, and then ... |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, okay. Well, it was many moons ago - I don't know exactly how many moons, but it was probably around 2014. Bitcoin had just kind of come out, and I bought some Bitcoin. I had actually at one point 16 Bitcoin, so you can calculate -- |
**Jerod Santo:** Are you still holding? |
**Mat Ryer:** No, I'm not. |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] You wouldn't be on the show if you were... You wouldn't need us. |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, I'd be on a much higher-class podcast right now. |
**Jerod Santo:** That's right. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It was 2,565 moons, just so you know. |
**Mat Ryer:** Thank you, thank you. \[unintelligible 00:15:33.05\] |
**Jerod Santo:** Do you know how many US dollars though -- or sorry, British pounds. |
**Mat Ryer:** No, don't calculate that, please. |
**Jerod Santo:** Or sorry, Euros. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** 35 million. 47 million Euros. |
**Jerod Santo:** So you had 16 Bitcoin, and you must have wanted to watch the price of those Bitcoins in your menu bar. I'm putting this together. Is that right? |
**Mat Ryer:** \[15:48\] There you go. Exactly right. So I wanted to just see the Bitcoin price in my menu bar. And there wasn't really a way to do it. There was no app to do it, so I started to build the little project just for myself. That's why it's called Bitbar, because it comes from Bitcoin. |
**Jerod Santo:** Gotcha. |
**Mat Ryer:** And I realized that I was able to get the menu bit done, and I was doing it in Objective-C, which I didn't really know... So I was able to get the menu bar pieces working, but I couldn't make a web request to save my life in Objective-C. I'm not kidding. If you look at the code you need to do it, it's -- |
**Jerod Santo:** I've done a little bit of it. It's not straightforward, yeah... |
**Mat Ryer:** Yes. Maybe it's 15 lines of code if you do it properly, and I wasn't doing it properly... So it was just sort of a pain point of doing that. So I thought "Well, I know how to do this with Curl, so maybe I'll just do that and I'll learn how to run a sub-process." So you wouldn't do that, I think, if you kn... |
**Jerod Santo:** No. |
**Mat Ryer:** But what that did is it gave a sort of abstraction, and meant actually that you could write other scripts, the output of which could go into the menu bar. So then I thought "Yeah, that's quite nice, because that is not just what I want this for. In theory, other people could write it, or I could just writ... |
So I open sourced it and I used it, and a few people joined in and added some features... Actually, they added some great features, like image supports, and colors, and different fonts, and things... And then I think it was 2016, it popped into the top of Hacker News, and suddenly then it sort of went crazy, and got al... |
**Jerod Santo:** You'd sold your Bitcoin, you'd moved on... |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** Do you still use it, to track anything else? |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, I use it for lots of things. |
**Jerod Santo:** I mean, back then, in 2016. |
**Mat Ryer:** Oh. Yeah, probably, because there were always little things at the time I cared about... And it's very hackable. Because it's basically -- if you write an executable, any executable, in any language you like, as long as it prints to STDOUT, each line becomes a menu item in the menu. And there's a special ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, that had to be a pleasant surprise... How many times did you have to submit it before it popped in? I'm just messing with you... \[laughs\] |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, actually -- |
**Jerod Santo:** Once a day, every day, finally in 2016 it got on Hacker News... |
**Mat Ryer:** I actually don't think you can do that, can you? |
**Jerod Santo:** I don't know. |
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