Supper Club × The Primeagen - Vim, Streaming, Rust, all Around Interesting Guy

I sure hope you're hungry.

Oh, I'm starving.

Wash those hands, pull up a chair, and secure that feed bag, because it's time to listen to Scott Tolinski and Wes Bos attempt to use human language to converse with and pick the brains of other developers. I thought there was gonna be food, so buckle up and grab that old handle because this ride is going to get wild.

This is the syntax supper club.

Welcome to the Syntax Supper Club. And today, we're gonna be talking to the prima gen who is a Twitch streamer, a Vim user, and all sorts of things. We're gonna be covering all that and more in today's supper club. My name is Scott Talinski. I'm a developer We're from Denver, Colorado. And with me as always is Wes Bos. Hey, everybody. Stoked to be here. This is gonna be a good one. We are sponsored today by Two awesome companies, Hasura.

They give you a real time GraphQL API instantly when you point it at Any of your data sources and story block the component based headless CMS that gives you the power to develop your projects Faster and better than ever. Talk about all of them partway through the episode. Let's get started

with the primogen.

I like this. I mean, should I should I be talking got this point out now, and is it my turn to jump in now? No. No. Well, I've you know what? So to to give give some inside inside scoop here, we we,

We learned all the ways not to say the primogen, and then I've been saying them by accident because now my head is filled with them. So, if If if you're if you're noticing any Variation? Yeah. A little bit of that. So what's up, The Primogen. Who are you? What do you do? Where's the prime where did the name Primogen come up with? Do you wanna reveal your real name? Is that a is that a thing?

No. We don't have to, but we can keep with my name. And, I can start first with where it came from. You know? So I have this running joke that I make, Which is that I go, oh, yeah. If you knew where it came from, it'd make a lot of sense.

But then I will promptly not explain where it comes from. But I I'll explain it here. It's Freeze. I have it written somewhere, which is, in 6th grade. I don't know if you were playing many video games in the 6th grade, but Nintendo 64 was hot.

Perfect Dark was out not too long, in that region, but then came Turok two. Now you may remember Turok two being one of the hardest games ever created, And I beat that, and the last leader was the Primogen. Oh. Oh. That makes sense. And I thought it was really neat, and then I just never changed it because I was kid, and I thought it was super cool. And then as I got older, I thought, you know, there's this thing that happens to everybody in which you lose the things you thought were funny as a kid Or neat as a kid and you try to become more professional. Right? You you drop the pseudonyms that you used to have and all that, and I decided, I don't wanna be that guy. I'm just gonna lean in and have just an absurd

Internet handle. And now nobody knows nobody knows this Turok origin, so it doesn't even seem that absurd. Exactly. Never beat Turok too because it was like that. That was hard. The draw distance was no good.

Never beat it. Yeah. It took some time. I I also beat Battletoads. I was really into beating really hard games Oh, yeah. So I could beat all the games growing up. And, Man, that was a fun one. So that's kind of where it comes from is, like, that was the hardest game I've ever played. Yeah. That that track. Playing that one. Yeah. I'm I'm not a big video game guy, but I certainly put some time in on that.

And Goldeneye and, Tony Hawk pro skater my neighbor had n 64. I remember.

That was that was a good one. What what what childhood was not complete with at least a little Tony Hawk Pro skater. I mean, I swear everyone that I knew has at least played even people that just don't play games. They're like, yeah. I mean, I did a dark slide once. You know? I I what it is. I did a dark slide. Yeah. I did a a,

a ghetto bird or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. We were talking about that a couple episodes ago, how, skateboarding is so, like, alt culture, but in reality, like, every single kid played Tony Hawk growing up, and, like,

Skateboarding is is not all culture. It's it's huge. It's massive. It used to be not all culture for some time. If you watch the old Rodney Molen videos when he was, like, a kiddo, they were inside of football stadiums.

And it was just like people wearing, you know, like the high the high or the low cut. I'm not sure which Which direction you called on the cut off shorts where the deep man thigh is exposed? Oh, yeah. But they're, like, all sporting that with some kneepads and elbow. Like, a much different world Then what we see today or what is associated with skateboarding today is what it was seventies, eighties, and 9 you know? Or, like, in late eighties. Because it came from, like, It came from surfing initially, and then it became, like, a a huge thing. And then it went, like died down. For a while. And then, like, We had, like, Nigel who's Houston come around, and he's, like, super into nutrition. It's sponsored by Nike, and now it's kinda swinging back the other way. Wes, I dropped in

couple weeks ago. Did you really? In Hawaii. We went to escape ice, you know, and like a quarter or you go full half? Oh, it was a it was, Like, it was on a spine even. It wasn't even on a it was on a spine, and then I I rocked back and forth on a a spine in a quarter. So it was kind of like a really Cheapen. But it was a concrete park in Hawaii. I have not dropped in in a very long time, and I was like, oh, boy. I can't just strap myself Glenn, is this going to kill me?

Yeah.

It it might. Oh, man. It it genuinely might. Those concrete falls are very painful. I can remember quite a few of them. I do not wish to go back to that time period. Yeah. Absolutely not. I would not do that, especially on vacation. Imagine a broken wrist on vacation.

Hey. You're a I did it, man. I survived. Than I am. Here I am.

Alright. Prime gen. Yeah.

You asked me some other questions. I forgot all of them. Yeah. We got distracted.

What do you do? Yeah. We're talking about do? Oh, well, I do I do a lot of things.

I primarily I'd say for for life, I work at Netflix, which is I I think the most boring aspect, of all the things I do In the sense that any job that you work, some amount of hours at, it's always you're just you're just grinding away on some cool piece of technology, but it is what it is. I think the more interesting or the more fun things is just into streaming.

I think that's the kind of a weird world, world in which 5 years ago, if you would have told me I would have enjoyed watching someone play a video game, I would have said no way. And so let alone knowing that people will watch people code. I mean, on my I've I've been historically wrong about what people will like, and so I find that just way more fascinating than, what I do professionally,

No. It doesn't sound nearly as cool. So how long have you been been streaming your coding for?

About 3 years. When we got started, Lana Luck. Shout out Lana Luck. She was always the high one in the tech category, maybe with, like, 50 people watching her. I was always, like, at 30 At that time, and that was 3 years ago. And now it's just exploded, and more and more people are jumping in. You'll see a bunch of the, you know, bigger names On Twitter, starting to jump in. Everyone's kinda starting to focus on this idea that people wanna see other people live code. Very, very strange, But it's definitely catching fire. Do you have, like, a plan going

in to your your sessions? Is it like, well, today we're live coding x, y, and z? Or is it like, I have this thing to do, And now I'm going to just take care of that. So there's 2 types of can I I'll I'll I'll give you this? There's there's a few different types of streamers.

One is going to be someone that kinda comes on more in sense. Like, today, we're gonna talk about whatever. Right? And so they proceed to kinda walk through a bunch of, you know, kind of more structured things, maybe build a program that's more structured. There's 2, the person that's just perpetually building the same project. Today is day 300 of building this thing I've been building. Right? And then I fall into the 3rd category, which is I get up, I put my pants on 1 leg at a time, And then I proceed to just turn on stream and just do something. I don't know what I'm gonna do when I did turn it on. I just start getting very excited, Start yelling, and then

we'll build something. That seems nice. Yeah. I I always seem very interested in this because, like Like, these streams are hours long, and you've thousands and thousands of people watching them. And, like, you again, like, if you were to ask me, hey. Do you think someone's gonna sit there for, for 2 and a half hours and watch somebody sort of figure something out unstructured on a video, I I would say absolutely not, but it's It's impressive how how many people enjoy that. Do you think the people that are watching your thing do it for education or entertainment or both, or do you have any sense of that? Yeah. I do have sense that. So, again,

watch if you watch a few streams, you'll kinda catch the people that I kinda described. There's the, more educational side of things. So I think of, like, John Hu. If you know who John Hu is, he does it on YouTube.

He's like the Rust guy. He wrote Rust for Rust stations.

He will do very structured streams, and the people there are there for this very structured approach. They're there to learn. I even watched some of his videos, you know, afterwards. They make great afterward content as well. Right? And so it's it's a very structured Kind of like a we're there to learn approach. The people that do more of the longer term product, it's a bit more, like, Community oriented, I would say, than anything else. It's just like, here's a bunch of people that, you know, I'm gonna be at my job today. You're programming as well. I will jump over there and type some things.

And, you know, it's not it's not highly educational. It's not usually super entertaining, but it's just more like It's the same thing. So people join in, I think, a lot from for just work purposes.

And then I think probably, like, my style is more meme And education. Right? So I I will go I'll I if just the right mood strikes me, I'll go on a, you know, x minute rant about what makes HP 2 better than HP 1, Breaking down by the frames and all that. But it's, you know, it's more of a rarity.

But mostly it's just it's just memes

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