Mathias Hansen (00:10)
Hey everyone, welcome back to Countdown to Laravel Live Denmark, today I'm speaking with Ashley Hindle. Ashley, how are doing?

Ashley Hindle (00:17)
I'm doing great thanks, thanks for having me. How are doing?

Mathias Hansen (00:20)
I'm doing great, thank you for coming on.

Ashley Hindle (00:22)
Thanks for having me. Excited to chat.

Mathias Hansen (00:25)
Yes, Ashley, you are going to be speaking about MCP servers in a few weeks here, actually. It's coming up soon.

Ashley Hindle (00:33)
Yeah,

Yeah, speaking about MCP, the latest fad or craze. So I'm talking about whether to pay attention to it or not. Like, should you care? Those kinds of things.

Mathias Hansen (00:47)
That's a good question. Are you bringing the answer to that question too, or is it a debate?

Ashley Hindle (00:53)
I'm very opinionated on MCP so yeah there's a very clear answer and the answer is you should care. There's lots more to it in the talk but you should care.

Mathias Hansen (00:56)
Good, good.

And it's like very bleeding edge, right? It's like constantly evolving. I just saw some news come out with a spec update the day or something.

Ashley Hindle (01:13)
Yeah, it's great, isn't it? Yeah.

some people, Pascal did a great talk recently on inertia too. And, know, that was released and it's been improving a little bit, you know, since then. But I am doing a talk with MCP and live coding with AI. And so it's constantly changing and the demos are constantly breaking because just everything is always changing. Yeah. So my next talk, I think.

is going to be something super stable like bash for developers or how HTTP works, know, something that's not going to change on me.

Mathias Hansen (01:50)
Something's been the same for like 30 plus years, yeah. That sounds good. Yeah, I was talking to Peter Su, one of the speakers today, who's also doing an AI-related talk, but about cursor development. And we were also talking about the unpredictability of doing an AI talk and doing live coding. So hats off to ⁓ going ahead and doing a live coding session.

Ashley Hindle (01:52)
Yeah, 100%.

Yeah.

It's not a good idea.

Yeah. I watched Peter's talk at Laravel Live UK and he did a talk on Cursor and the best way, know, how to get the most out of it. It was very, very useful. And most of the demos were great. And then one of the times Cursor just refused, like, no, I'm just going to work completely. Yeah. I was like, oh, thanks so much.

Mathias Hansen (02:23)
Mm-hmm.

Not today.

But it's also fun to ⁓ be watching a talk that's live coded and isn't just static slides, especially with a topic like this where things can go in different directions. And then you can see how to approach when it throws things that you won't expect and demo that as well. Cool.

Ashley Hindle (02:52)
Yeah.

Yeah, 100%. Yeah.

Mathias Hansen (03:05)
Well, actually, I'm sure we'll get to hear a lot more about MCP servers and why you might want to use them, why they might be useful and how. But we'll have to wait a few more weeks for that, for the conference. So I want to dig a little bit into your past. I want to hear about how you got started coding, programming, and got into computers. What are your first memories of using computer and writing code?

Ashley Hindle (03:18)
Yeah. ⁓

Yeah.

So many memories. I remember coding with an Amiga 500 when I was really, really young. But actual coding kind of, I don't know, as we know it, like web coding, I was probably 14, 15, and I really wanted to be a hacker. Like, you know, I was like, I'm going to break into these servers and I'm going to bypass this license check on Adobe Photoshop and things. And so...

Mathias Hansen (03:35)
Yeah

Yeah!

Yeah.

Ashley Hindle (04:03)
I started with hex editing and IRC ⁓ and trying to break into things, shell scripts and things like that, and password cracking, things like that. And then I wanted to promote how cool of a hacker I was. So was like, I need a website, right? And so I learned HTML and had a marquee tag and things. Look how cool I am as a hacker.

Mathias Hansen (04:29)
Lead

speak as well or? Oh yeah.

Ashley Hindle (04:32)
⁓ yeah, my handle at the time had a three in it instead of an

E. ⁓ And so I was like, look how cool they are. then like most people, like, I would like, I can't remember, like a guest book or like hits counter. I wanted to show people who visited this site, how cool they are. So like, okay, now I need to learn something else. Like what could enable that? And I found PHP and...

then I had that website. But actually, I much preferred making websites and PHP scripts than I did the hacking side. And also hacking is very, very difficult. Like, really, really difficult. I remember this was all on Windows at the time, like using MIRC, Merck. And then I remember I got the bus.

with the money that I earned from a little part-time job that I had working in a kitchen to, I think, a PC world at the time. And I bought this big box of Red Hat CDs, I think it was, to install Red Hat on a machine that I was building. And then that was my first proper foray into Linux on my own ⁓ machine, rather than a shell account somewhere. Yes, and that was very weird.

Mathias Hansen (05:46)
Yeah.

Ashley Hindle (05:57)
very very cool and very expensive like considering how you could just download Ubuntu and it's perfect yeah very expensive back in the day

Mathias Hansen (06:07)
Yeah, commercial Linux distribution. And it still exists, right? It's still a thing. A little bit enterprise-y, right? Red Hat, I think.

Ashley Hindle (06:12)
Yeah.

Yeah I think so. Yeah Ubuntu surely is the way forward. Although DHH has something now but I don't know what that's about. Yeah he's got something really cool.

Mathias Hansen (06:23)
really?

So ⁓ for, what was it? I just lost my question. Whatever. So for RSC, I used to be huge into RSC as well and I remember using Merck. ⁓ So ⁓ did you end up customizing Merck and doing all the, your own variant of the, yeah.

Ashley Hindle (06:36)
That's all right.

Yeah.

100 % Yeah, I

wrote a lot of IRC bots at the time and it was very important to be operator in as many channels as you could be and so I would give my bot operator status and so then whenever I came into the channel it would give me upstate, you know things like that. Yeah, so lots of customizations and things there and actually weirdly I don't remember the details

But some IRC channel I was on on FreeNode, I get chatting to this person in Australia or New Zealand, and I'm in England at the time, and I'm on Windows, and they're like, well, I can give you a shell account on my server, and you can just SSH in. I was like, that's crazy! That's a thing, that's possible, you would do that? And so my first Linux experience was...

some random guy's server that you just let the SSH into and I had my little playbox basically of my user which was really cool like people are so welcoming and nice right and yeah it's cool.

Mathias Hansen (08:05)
That's so incredible. That's so incredible. It's just a random stranger on the internet basically opening up a whole new world of, wait, can SSH into someone else's server and access it and do things in the shell. Do you remember what used the server for? Did you install something? What did you play around with?

Ashley Hindle (08:10)
the air.

It's so cool, yeah.

think it was a lot of writing C. So I was writing C on my Windows machine, but in some idea I can't remember the name of and like it began with a D I'm sure. But I was having issues with it. And so to then be able to use GCC and things like as it was supposed to be. don't know, I that mentality. Yeah, so I think it was lots of that. ⁓ But I don't know that I took advantage, as much advantage as I should have.

Mathias Hansen (08:48)
to compile the C code, yeah.

Ashley Hindle (08:58)
like, you know, with that opportunity, so, yeah. And then after all of that, I was working in kitchens, then I got my first job. My first developer job was writing PHP, and then also like live video streaming and phone systems, like, it was supposed to be PHP, and then like, also do all of this stuff as well, so, you know, I got access to lots of weird things.

Mathias Hansen (08:59)
Yeah

Wow.

that sounds like a whole different world of codecs and infrastructure and stuff

Ashley Hindle (09:29)
Yeah, it was really

weird. Yeah, so especially infrastructure. just writing PHP for my own websites, not that much traffic, not that complex, really. You you're writing to a database, reading from a database. Then all of a sudden, handling incoming phone calls on a Windows server that's using MS SQL.

and all these different concepts. then yeah, infrastructure, we co-located servers in a data center and I bought servers from Dell, put them in a car, drove to Birmingham, installed them in the data center, installed ⁓ Debian at the time, and then set everything up and Apache and Lighty and things like that. Yeah, was, at the time I didn't realize it, but now I look back and realize...

Mathias Hansen (10:10)
Ha ha ha!

Ashley Hindle (10:29)
how special that was. Like the access that I had that most of the people didn't. And it was kind of painful, like probably would have been nice just to write PHP and HTML, like keep it straightforward and simple. But I think I have a good understanding of the full stack, you know, now because of those experiences. And a hatred for SIP and phone systems as well.

Mathias Hansen (10:54)
Yeah, like that's my thought too. It's like, well, this is like the full full stack, right? Not just the app server, but like the whole infrastructure. Down to actually physically going to install and set up the Dell servers. That's incredible.

Ashley Hindle (11:00)
Yeah.

Yeah,

there was crazy times. And our live video streaming was really successful, and so we would max out the network throughput of one network device, for example. And so we had so many networking issues that we had to try and solve and like combine network ports to try and get extra throughput and things. Yeah, crazy time.

Mathias Hansen (11:30)
trying

to find the bottlenecks and like you know yeah cool so that must have been really challenging like kind of out swimming with the sharks you know ⁓

Ashley Hindle (11:33)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah,

and it's one of those things... The phone systems were for TV shows on satellite TV and so they were live TV shows and the video streaming was live video streaming. And so, you know, when I break my own website right now, it's not that big a deal. Somebody might not visit it for six hours. But if I break the phone system, you know, there's a hundred people calling in right now. So it's very stressful. Like you can't...

Mathias Hansen (11:50)
Mm-hmm.

Ashley Hindle (12:10)
break it whilst it's going on. So yeah, was something else to go from, it's not too bad if you break things to you ruin a TV show if you break it. So that was weird.

Mathias Hansen (12:23)
Right,

that sounds like a lot of pressure. How far, how long ago was this? Was this last decade or?

Ashley Hindle (12:26)
Yeah.

No,

I'm so old. This was probably 18 years ago.

Mathias Hansen (12:38)
Also from a technology point of view, things change rapidly with technology, but so much has happened in just the last 5 or 10 years, let alone 18 years. ⁓ So I'm sure there was no autoscale cloud option at that time. It was very much like we need the capacity, we're going to set up some servers.

Ashley Hindle (12:44)
Yeah.

Exactly.

Yeah,

we had to get an extra data center, an extra rack for our servers because that was how you scale.

Mathias Hansen (13:11)
That's incredible.

Ashley Hindle (13:14)
It's really cool. It's a cool experience to have. And now I'm spoiled because I can just spin something up on Laravel Cloud, add Nightwatch to it. Everything's managed. I have all of the alerting, all of the monitoring, all of the observability, all of the scaling for no work. I'm like, back in my day. Yeah, it was really difficult.

Mathias Hansen (13:37)
Also on the front end side, I keep waking up every morning and appreciating I don't have to deal with IE6 for example. That's no longer a thing we need to support. Rest in peace.

Ashley Hindle (13:44)
Yeah.

Yeah, it's

very nice. Inertia, I've been playing with a lot recently with React and it's so nice and then before that I spent all of my time with Livewire. It just makes really difficult stuff really really easy. Yeah, it's very nice. Big fan.

Mathias Hansen (14:09)
Things are moving very fast now too, that's also sort of a challenge. least I feel like it's hard to keep up with everything and that's sort of the downside to technology involving but that's how it is and it's nice that things are coming out and things are being updated and things are getting easier to do.

Ashley Hindle (14:14)
Nah.

Nah.

100 %

Mathias Hansen (14:34)
So what was, do you remember one of your, what was one of your biggest challenges working with video streaming for the live TV shows? Or end phone?

Ashley Hindle (14:44)
⁓ So many... I just went through three different things. So bandwidth, like we did have enough bandwidth, that was impossible. Latency, people want live streaming to be barely any latency, a second, not five seconds. And that was very difficult back then, much easier now. But the biggest challenge I remember doing is we had to write some Java code.

Mathias Hansen (14:47)
You

You can just pick one.

Ashley Hindle (15:14)
to add to the RTMP server that we were using so that you could record parts of the stream. So like Twitch has clips now and I think YouTube has clips now. We built clips, you know, 18 years ago. But I'd never written Java and I didn't really understand RTMP streaming. And so the task was, can you allow us to record clips? And I'm optimistically naive.

Mathias Hansen (15:21)
Hmm?

Ashley Hindle (15:43)
and I just assume everything is possible so I said, yeah absolutely I don't see why not. That was very very tricky and I got an intimate understanding of RTMP streaming and disk storage and things then which I've completely forgot now so yeah I'm never revisiting that.

Mathias Hansen (16:04)
That makes sense. And also, you know, very challenging to tackle something you might not have touched before, probably a very humbling experience too, and you succeeded, right? You made the clips, right?

Ashley Hindle (16:11)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, that's

the coolest thing. I'm riddled with imposter syndrome, know, constant imposter syndrome, like many people, I'm sure. But it's nice to think back of like, well, I did do that really cool thing. ⁓ I have achieved some things in the past, so that helps.

Mathias Hansen (16:38)
I wonder how AI or LMS are changing that nowadays because I feel like ⁓ now you can kinda, you're aiming higher, You can kinda attempt things that you wouldn't dare to attempt before because of that extra helping hand in terms of research but also just things like cloud code, right?

Ashley Hindle (16:49)
Hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's gonna be a very interesting world and everybody has their own takes on where we're heading as an industry. And I don't know which one I agree with. ⁓ Nobody knows where we're gonna end up, right? But it's gonna be interesting to live through it. you know, all of this also information overload of all of these takes and trying to keep them all in mind at once.

but also not believing any of them too much because they're very likely all wrong, you know, and it'll be something else. So yeah, it's gonna be a weird future.

Mathias Hansen (17:42)
Also the velocity of writing so much code that has to be maintained in the future, right? The more we ship, the more we have to maintain for possibly ever, right? So it's certainly an interesting time to be a software developer, that's for sure. I think we can all agree on that.

Ashley Hindle (17:46)
Mmm.

Yeah.

Interesting time, agree for ⁓ sure.

Mathias Hansen (18:04)
So Ashley, ⁓ you're of course going to Copenhagen ⁓ in, well, a few weeks. I keep looking at my watch because it really is a few weeks away at this point. And ⁓ of course we promised the weather is going to be perfect, no heat wave, just nice and sunny without, ⁓ But ⁓ anything in particular you want to see, do, or experience or eat while you're in Copenhagen?

Ashley Hindle (18:13)
Yeah, it's exciting.

Nice.

Very welcome.

I think I'm too uncultured to have a useful answer. The thing I'm most looking forward to is the people. just the people within the Laravel world are just great humans, like good eggs. And so I'm looking forward to meeting people, talking to people, seeing what other people's takes are on MCP and AI and the future of coding. And then I'm hoping...

Mathias Hansen (18:40)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Ashley Hindle (19:02)
somebody that lives in Copenhagen. We'll be like, hey, tag along to this cool thing we're doing. promise this place is really good or this experience is really good. And then I'll do as they say and then I'll have a good time.

Mathias Hansen (19:15)
You're up for whatever, just tag along, yeah. Hang out, yeah. We'll pass that on, you know, as a, please invite Ashley.

Ashley Hindle (19:18)
Yeah, just invite me. Yeah.

Yeah, if you could let everybody in Copenhagen know. Yeah, if

that could be like the first slide, you know, on stage, Ashley wants to go do some things, that'd be great.

Mathias Hansen (19:35)
You know, I was talking to one of the other ⁓ speakers the other day, Jakob Stein, and he was basically saying sort of the opposite. He was like, anybody who wants to do something, just tag along with me. We'll figure it out. ⁓ I know the places. He's a local, there we go. ⁓ Right. Just about marrying the right people together.

Ashley Hindle (19:48)
Perfect.

⁓ perfect. Yeah, it's solved! That was easy.

Exactly.

Mathias Hansen (19:59)
And that's the really cool

about a conference like this. It's not a super big conference. all the speakers and attendees are kind of mixed together, and you get to actually talk to everybody. nobody's above talking to someone else and stuff like that. So that really makes the community as well. It's just the people, ⁓

Ashley Hindle (20:15)
Yeah. ⁓

I think

that intimacy, that closeness is really, really valuable. it is nice to, yeah, bigger conferences you can feel a kind of separation between people or you shouldn't go to a speaker or somebody that, I don't know, is running it, say, and they're like more important, but they're not. We're just all humans trying to figure out life, right? And so, yeah, I think that the intimacy is really nice to like go speak to these others.

Mathias Hansen (20:42)
Yeah.

Ashley Hindle (20:49)
go speak to the speakers, go speak to the attendees, we're just figuring it out, let's chat, yeah. So I'm really looking forward to that aspect.

Mathias Hansen (20:57)
Yeah, same here, absolutely. Well, Ashley, it was so good to talk to you today. Thank you for taking your time and looking forward to seeing your talk.

Ashley Hindle (21:01)
Nice.

Yeah, it was awesome. Thank you for having me. I'm looking forward to giving the talk and speaking to everybody.