In today’s episode we have a powerhouse of guests joining us: Jared Novack and Lukas Gächter!

➡️ Jared is a co-founder of Upstatement, a digital product studio based in the US and a member of the kyu Collective. Today he runs finance and operations, but he used to do fun stuff like build websites all night long. He started Timber in 2013 to scale the development of WordPress sites across front and back end collaborators.

➡️ Lukas has been building websites for 20 years. He runs a small design and development agency with a couple of friends in Switzerland. He works for small companies and organizations and mainly builds corporate Websites using WordPress. He discovered Timber in 2015 and started contributing to the open source project as a way of giving back to the community, driving the project forward and elevating his developer skills along the way.

They dive deep into the world of open source software development, focusing on their experiences with the Timber library. Jared shares insights into the strategic decision to open source Timber, the competitive advantage it provided, and the importance of community contributions. Lukas elaborates on the vital role of documentation, community input, and addressing underlying issues for the evolution and sustainability of open source projects. Together, they weave a compelling narrative about the intersection of open source and product development, the challenges they’ve faced, the community’s impact, and the learning opportunities they’ve gained. Join us as we unravel the valuable lessons and industry insights shared by our esteemed guests. Stay tuned for a podcast episode brimming with wisdom, practical advice, and thought-provoking discussions!

You can also listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts!

If you like this episode you might also like No Server Space Needed: Test Plugins and Themes with Playground – Interview with Adam Zieliński

Jared Novack [00:00:00]:
And here’s what open source does, and it gives you that feedback. It gives you that experience. It made you makes made me for sure a better developer because you gotta think not just about, like, okay, here’s this thing that I’m making and it’s kind of a black box. It’s just for me. Maybe someone’s gonna open it in 3 years from now, but, hey, that’s 3 years from now. Who cares?

Maciej Nowak [00:00:21]:
Hello, everyone. My name is Maciej Nowak, and welcome to the Osom to Know podcast where we discuss all things WordPress. And this episode is different from previous ones because today we have not 1, but 2 guests. We will be talking about an open source library called Timber with Jared Novack, founder of Upstatement Agency, and Lucas Gachter, a very prominent contributor to Timber. And we will discuss a range of topics from why would you even start, contributing to an open source project, to what you can learn from the process, and also many other things.

Maciej Nowak [00:00:51]:
If you don’t want to miss new episodes and keep learning about WordPress, subscribe to Osom to Know newsletter at osomstudio.com/newsletter. This is osomstudio.com/newsletter. If you watch this on YouTube, give us a thumb and subscribe to the channel. This means a world to us. Without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Jared and Lukas.

Lector [00:01:21]:
Hey, everyone. It’s good to have you here. We’re glad you decided to tune in for this episode of the awesome to know podcast.

Maciej Nowak [00:01:29]:
Hello, gentlemen. You. Pleasure to have you on the podcast. Thank you very much for making the time.

Jared Novack [00:01:35]:
Well, thank you. It’s a lot of fun to to get together and be able to talk about this stuff.

Maciej Nowak [00:01:40]:
You. Exactly. Exactly. Jared, good morning, mister Novak as we used to joke. Yes. Good

Jared Novack [00:01:45]:
morning, mister Novak. Or good evening, mister Novak.

Maciej Nowak [00:01:48]:
You. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Luca, it’s great to have you here as well.

Lukas Gächter [00:01:53]:
Yeah. Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here. You.

Maciej Nowak [00:01:56]:
Yeah. So this is first time I’m recording with 2 guests. I was a bit nervous how to manage it. So, You know, everything is on the everything better is on the on on this humble host. And, so maybe let’s start with introducing yourself. You. From my left to right, Jared Lucas, can you can you introduce yourself to to our listeners?

Jared Novack [00:02:18]:
Sure. So I’m Jared Novak. I am cofounder, over at an agency called Upstatement here in the US. But most relevant today’s discussion also started the, timber project about 10 years ago now, maybe 11, oh, gosh, 11 years ago, which is a tool for WordPress, which I collaborate on with Lucas and many others and excited to dive in Tuesday.

Maciej Nowak [00:02:44]:
Perfect. Lucas?

Lukas Gächter [00:02:47]:
You. Yeah. Lucas Geister. I live in Switzerland in a small town called Winterthur with my family. You. And I also own a small design and development agency with a couple of friends. We mostly work for smaller companies and organizations, you. And, we do brand strategy, print and digital design, and a lot of websites.

Lukas Gächter [00:03:13]:
And you. That’s also why we we came to use Timber. I started using it back in 2015 and then Quickly did my 1st pull request. 1st pull request ever, actually, for Timber. You. And, yeah, I started contributing then, and I’ve been doing that ever since.

Maciej Nowak [00:03:41]:
You. Perfect. We will get to that first 2 request, in, let’s say, due course. But what interests me, like, very, very much is you. How to, agency owners, you know, divided by an ocean. How did you guys started to work together, on that project. So I I’m very curious about the restart. So look as you mentioned this, you you started using timber.

Maciej Nowak [00:04:06]:
So maybe, Jared, can you now you. Explain a little bit more about the, the reason for creating such a project.

Jared Novack [00:04:14]:
Yeah. And I think it’s it’s interesting that, you know, Lucas also does both programming like I do but also has to, own the agency and kinda be responsible at the end of the day because that’s what really led to Timber’s creation. And that was seeing all the ways in which designers and engineers were stuck using WordPress together and all of, like, the ways that WordPress is theming, Lair, was really preventing good collaboration between people who knew how to build stuff on the back end and then designers who, you know, knew, obviously, the visuals, but also just enough CSS and HTML and JavaScript to get them get themselves into trouble. Well, you can get yourself, into a lot of trouble when you’re dealing with PHP directly. And that’s what WordPress has you do out of the gate or with any of the, you know, default 2015, 2016 themes and stuff that we were kinda coming up against at the beginning. And what why we wanted I wanted something like Timber to exist, and I was looking for it. I said, certainly, Someone else has had this problem. Certainly, someone else has already done this.

Jared Novack [00:05:21]:
And what I found in looking through all of these resources was this amazing templating layer called Twig. And I said again, great. Someone’s made this. I’m sure someone has integrated this already with WordPress. You know, the world’s most used and comprehensive CMS, runs 20, 30, 35% of the internet. Certainly, certainly, this already exists. And it did. You know I saw a few sort of, like, started and then quickly abandoned the projects.

Jared Novack [00:05:48]:
And then I had that lightning bolt of, like, well, when you realize that someone should do this, maybe you are the person who should do it. So that was the thing that sort of led to it getting off the ground and a lot of, like, late nights or plane flights or train rides where I try to, like, piece those pieces together so that we could really unlock and and create a layer that designers and front end designers could be comfortable in working with HTML and CSS and doing some really, you know, interesting and in some ways even, like, very complicated sort of, like, template, logic and and management. But then also kind of keep that cleanly separated from the PHP layer and what a back end engineer really needs to dive into. So that’s where it came from and that’s the thing that really helped unlock kind of a big thing at our agency where all of a sudden we were able to really streamline that collaboration. And we had great WordPress people. We had great HTML and CSS people, and now they could collaborate through Timber.

Maciej Nowak [00:06:47]:
You. Alright. And, for our listeners, can you dig even more into you. What Timber is now because, you know, this is a 10 year history, 11 year history. I’ve been you. I I’ve been digging into, you know Yeah. History is 10 years, and coincidentally, you were first because, I was you. I was curious if this was the for the name, the timber.

Maciej Nowak [00:07:13]:
It wasn’t inspired by that song that was very popular 10 years ago. But I I dug I I dug into, comic history, and you were first before they released their, their song, Cold Tinder as well. But I I was I was curious if this was related. It it it’s not.

Jared Novack [00:07:32]:
No. No. We beat Kesha and Pitbull by a couple years, you. But we did play that song at my wedding, which was a lot of fun. So Timber, it’s kind of a you know, looking at Twig, which is the template language that Timber uses. The inspiration was to to kinda follow kind of like the twig, I don’t know, woodland themed naming convention, I guess. So that’s where that came from. And and, you know, where things started in terms of, like, the codebase was very much like, you know, these are Upstatement’s needs.

Jared Novack [00:08:01]:
These are Jared’s needs. It had a lot of ways of connecting PHP and AppLogic and WordPress to Twig, but also a lot of things that, were probably unnecessary. A lot of things with like routes and how you handled paths. A lot of stuff with different sort of utilities and shortcuts. Things that Upstatement was building it for, and it really helped us. But then as we started to open it to a wider group, you know, the world over realize that we had overbuilt it in a lot of places. And actually, that’s, I think, a big part of what Lucas and other contributors have done. Where it’s like, how can we streamline this and make it really great at what it’s supposed to do? And I think that is really kind of, a big underlying philosophy of a version 2 point o that we just released in the last few months.

Maciej Nowak [00:08:46]:
Mhmm. Exactly. Because we started, you. Talking about recording’s episode when there were plans for, to point out release. Now it’s, out in the public for a couple of months. You. And, I’m curious now, Lucas, maybe you can, you can answer this. Also to give us a, like, bigger picture you.

Maciej Nowak [00:09:08]:
From your perspective, how it started for you? You mentioned that you started using it for your own agency and then started contributing. You. So I’m curious to know, why why did you, you know, get get involved? Why why did you get involved in this project? You.

Lukas Gächter [00:09:25]:
Yeah. Well, first, for us, it wasn’t really the same reason that we started using Timber. It was not that, it was easier to collaborate collaborate on projects because we’re such a small agency. It’s mostly just 1 developer working on a project. You. But, because we have so many similar clients, which are small companies and, All these, companies have the same needs usually. And we were just thinking like, yeah, we are you. Reinventing the wheel with everything that we build from a basic starter theme.

Lukas Gächter [00:10:02]:
And so, we realized that when we could use timber. It was just easier to to build components that you can reuse. While yeah. While also, Having having a code base that feels like it’s, it’s a little cleaner. We didn’t like the That, you had, everything in a PHP file. And just when looking at it, it it was it was hard to to see, like, what’s going on here. So yeah. We also try to to fix that.

Lukas Gächter [00:10:38]:
And Timber was, like, kind of a revelation. Just, worked really well from the beginning. And, Yeah. We we started it using it in all of our projects and, you. Then actually built kind of a a startup package, for websites that we built. So, you. Yeah. In Tymbo, you also have to start a theme, which I guess many developers used to to start out a website, but we we actually took some kind of that code and then built our own thing, Which is also, a very good use case for what you can use.

Lukas Gächter [00:11:23]:
Timber, I guess. And you. Yeah. Then if you if you start using a library, you quickly realize, yeah, I I also need that or, oh, here’s a bug. You. And and I could fix that. So, yeah, why not do a pull request? Maybe it’s going to be accepted. 1st, it was like it was like really nervous because it Was my 1st pre request ever.

Lukas Gächter [00:11:48]:
And I thought like, oh, yeah. I’m gonna have to describe it really well, you. So that it hopefully gets accepted. But then it was it was no problem. It just went through. You. And, that motivated me to, like yeah. So I realized I can actually I can actually introduce, changes that I need.

Lukas Gächter [00:12:13]:
So I can I can also have a say in the project? So, Just to be able to to define something or create something new in it that you Helps you as a as a developer in your in your daily life, but also the thinking, that it could also help others. You. So the motivation that, any change you make could help thousands of developers is actually, heck, really nice. You. Yeah. Giving back or helping people is actually, was quite a quite a motivation for me to contribute. There are you. Few other reasons why why I I contribute.

Maciej Nowak [00:13:00]:
Yeah. Because this is this is one one thing is that, you started using it, but then you started contributing. And and, my question, like, more broader, would be also, you. Why why even contribute to any open source? This this was for you. Like, okay. I have this I’m using this stuff. Right? So in my best interest is to fix as much as much elements in within this because then I will benefit from it. But also, you know, on a more broader scale, let’s say, you.

Maciej Nowak [00:13:31]:
Why why should you even start thinking about contributing on the open source at all? Maybe, you know, because there’s so much open source written. You know, you Thousands of people are writing open source, but there are so many times more developers just, you Like, using that that that stuff. And there is that famous picture with with blogs, you know, a lot of different huge blogs, commercial blogs of software Standing on 1 very tiny, like, a straw of open source, 1 man, show, project, let’s say, you know, solo solo developer supporting that open source project, for for the giants to to use that. So this is very famous, like a description depiction of how open source sometimes software sometimes work. And, you know, just maybe you. For the listeners who are no. Didn’t never never made that barrier through which, you you went. Like, okay.

Maciej Nowak [00:14:32]:
This is my first pull request. And I am I am doing it even though I’m stressed. You know? Maybe this is prevent this prevents some people from doing it. So I, No. This is very long question. But to shorten it, why should you contribute to open source project?

Lukas Gächter [00:14:49]:
That’s that’s quite a hard question. You. Maybe yeah. I I I won’t go and tell anybody, well, you should contribute to open source because, it’s can be very time consuming, Can be frustrating at times. You’re doing it for free. So, it’s It’s actually like a hobby. So you really have to like to do it. There are cases where, like, agencies give developers the time to contribute to open those.

Lukas Gächter [00:15:20]:
But, yeah, I think it’s it’s a big problem of the of The web industry or the tech industry, in general, that so much depends on open source and developers who you. Gift their give the time to work on stuff, and, they are not really compensated for that even though, Yeah. Like big companies. So, like the biggest one, like Apple, is, relies on libraries that are you. That are just free. And I see it a lot in in many, discussions on GitHub as well on social media that this is a a big problem, you. To which I think nobody really has a solution. I I can just, talk from personal experience what it what it brought me to contribute.

Lukas Gächter [00:16:18]:
You. And, for me as a as a developer who is working in a small agency, you. For me, it it opened up a world of, to work with others. So, after studying, the question for me was, yeah, where where am I gonna work? Am I gonna work at a at a small agency, where I’m also The owner and can can, decide myself where where we’re gonna go, you. Or, am I going to work in a in a bigger agency where maybe have, senior developers who helped me you Through my experiences and teach me a lot of things, where, yeah, you. Whether the path that I that chose was a, was a path where I am mostly for myself, you. When when coding. And that was actually kinda nice to to be able to Just start working with other developers and also putting yourself out there and seeing, yeah, where where am I with my skills? You.

Lukas Gächter [00:17:30]:
I I still don’t think I’m a I’m a I’m a really good developer. I I would say I’m an average developer, but you. There’s just so much more around, developing, With the project management and stuff, writing documentation and stuff so that it all goes into that. And, you. I think yeah.

Jared Novack [00:17:59]:
So this this is actually where I’m gonna disagree with you, Lucas. You’re definitely not an average developer. You. And maybe, like, in 2014 before you got involved, maybe maybe maybe that might have been true. And here’s what open source does, and it gives you that feedback. It gives you that experience. It made you makes made me for sure a better developer because you gotta think not just about like, okay, here is this thing that I’m making and it’s kind of a black box. It’s just for me.

Jared Novack [00:18:28]:
Maybe someone’s gonna open it in 3 years from now, but, hey, that’s 3 years from now. Who cares? Instead, you’re making stuff that other people are going to rely upon, other people are going to scrutinize, other people are going to make sure that, like, it doesn’t contain clearing sort of, like, security or memory leaks or other things like that. It it changes your mindset. And when, you know, before people would say, oh, you know, you gotta do testing, test driven development and stuff. I said, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, look, we got, you know, a dozen websites we gotta jam out.

Jared Novack [00:18:59]:
We don’t have time for that. All of a sudden you realize, oh, this is where test driven development makes sense. This is how I can include that in a sustainable and sensible way. I need to be able to communicate not just, the code, and, Lucas, this is a thing that always jumped out about early contributions. But the why, the how, the, considerations like why I chose path a instead of path b, and which is better, and is path b better, but it’s gonna take, you know, so much longer or involve so much more risks. Like, Those are the things in my mind that take someone from an average to an excellent developer is, yes, it is the code, but it’s all of those surrounding things around the code, the why, the communication, the documentation, and that’s something that open source is gonna force you into. Whereas if you are working at a small agency or your own shop, you just don’t get that structure or feedback. So I think that is just a a huge benefit that open source provides to young engineers.

Lukas Gächter [00:20:00]:
Yeah. It was definitely the case for me. You. Me too. With with the with the example that that you that you you said, like, for me, it was it was also a lot of thinking out loud. You. When I when I wrote down these lengthy issue descriptions, I mostly just noted down what I what I was Learning about the problem without already finding a solution and kinda hoping that people jumped in and you Would would happy figure it out as well.

Jared Novack [00:20:34]:
And you take that against what we see a lot in some pull requests where people will say, like, hey, good news. I fixed, you know, 10,000 lines of code or, you know, tabs to spaces or spaces to tabs or whatever it is, and they give you 2 sentences and you’re like, what can I do with this? And the ability and maybe it is a natural ability that you have or something you developed to kind of, like, put your thinking out there, in the message and allow others to sort of, like, not just see the end result, but see the thinking and the questions that sort of brought you to that solution. That is valuable, not just on GitHub, but in so many sort of like engineering conversations that happen between different, you know, senior or principal level engineers where they’re trying to figure out some really fundamental and important questions that could guide sort of the technical architecture for a long time for a particular product or company. Those discussions and being able to be confident and comfortable sort of like both putting yourself out there, but also the humility to listen and the humility to recognize, oh, I was totally wrong about that and this other person has a much better idea. That takes a communication muscle, and open source is gonna help you develop that, especially because so much of what we have to do. And I say we and, of course, you guys are the ones who actually have to do it, not, you know, this this dumb American. You’re translating that across language and culture sometimes.

Maciej Nowak [00:21:57]:
I I think there is also another component which is obvious in this discussion, but it’s all written communication which is, missing. Now maybe not so much missing in the remote era, in the era of remote work you. Where so much more is done, in recent form. But I know before COVID, everyone worked from most of people work from from the office. And those were just discussion, you know, live discussions on meeting and so on. But when you have to you Explain the problem you encountered in a way in in a fashion that is understandable after first reading. It’s you. Totally different game of communicating, clearly and, coherently that so that other contributors who will understand and will want to read this and and follow through and and and so on.

Maciej Nowak [00:22:51]:
And this is, you know, no mental shortcuts and and and stuff. And this makes it totally different way of communicating that publishing, let’s say, on an open source project done in a free time. So, you know, I can spend as much time as I want because it’s my free time. You. So changes the way you also work in your workplace because you hone that skill of Writing in a clear way so that you are, understood under after the first reading.

Lukas Gächter [00:23:26]:
Yep. That’s surely, you. One thing I always strived for. And, yeah, the thing about you. Written communication is also really nice. I realized, like, we are now talking about problems that we also talked about 5 years ago. You. And I remember we talked about them.

Lukas Gächter [00:23:47]:
So but when I say talk, like, yeah, we wrote about them in you Buried somewhere in a pull request or an issue. And I I oftentimes, just search for Some keywords and try to find, the discussion. And that really helps. Like, you have a you have a really long trail of of history in the you In that re GitHub repository. And, I think it prevents you from from doing too many loops you Over over certain topics. But, yeah, like, you. Maybe maybe it’s it’s difficult if if new contributors come in, then then they just see the the current co pays. You.

Lukas Gächter [00:24:37]:
And they they have to rely on somebody that knows a little bit about where where we’ve come from and what problems we, encountered along the way. Yeah.

Jared Novack [00:24:51]:
It makes me think, Lucas, when you were kinda talking earlier about, you know, Ytimber and stuff in the organization that it promotes in regards to, like, having, like, well structured themes instead of these messy PHP files. And at one level, you could think like, okay, you know, that’s just aesthetic. Who cares? But what you’re getting to is the why it really matters. Because when you’re trying to maintain business critical code bases this over a period of years being able to have smart organization and, you know, kind of like a paper trail of decisions. You know, why is this organized like this. How did we decide? Why did we decide that? So that 2 years later, someone doesn’t spend, you know, 3 weeks of their time digging a hole that someone already dug and then patched over. Those are some of the big architectural challenges that organizations now have. Because unlike, you know, even just 5 or 10 years ago, it’s like, I don’t know.

Jared Novack [00:25:51]:
We have a website. We have an app. Who cares? It’s cool. Now it’s like, oh, no. Your business is that app. Your business is that product, that website. So it makes a lot of sense to to invest and spend money to have really great organization and have really great sustainability in there so that the reasons, the decisions, and so forth you be well architected, and, therefore, you spend your time not redigging the same holes, but rather, you know, not maybe not digging new holes, but you’re actually building something. And and that’s what good technical architecture allows for, and promotes and why you have to be kind of like a great or excellent to great developer or engineer to start to have a meaningful impact.

Jared Novack [00:26:37]:
Again, that’s that is just an escalator you can take with Open Source as opposed to, trying to do it on the job where the stakes are very different, the eyes are very different, and the amount of permission that you might have to grow or to fail. It’s gonna be much more limited because it is on someone else’s dime.

Maciej Nowak [00:26:55]:
I have a feeling it’s somewhere between said between the lines is that you. You are taking over some parts of the project in a way you want to you want to. So you are you’re you’re not Asking for permission, you are doing this. And with your poor request, you are making it happen. And then, okay, the the review kicks in and everything, but you you have some kind of, like, we are influenced over a piece of code that will influence then, you know, those thousands of, of other developers. So I I I think this is this is amazing. And I I wanted to go back a little bit, in history. You.

Maciej Nowak [00:27:34]:
Jared, to you. So we know why to contribute to to a project. But why to why do you open source something that can be your competitive advantage as a company because this started within your agency. And this is a business decision to open source this. You know. Why?

Jared Novack [00:27:52]:
Well, number 1, it is amazing to get free contributions to your work from all

Maciej Nowak [00:27:57]:
of the old Fair enough. Fair enough. Reason.

Jared Novack [00:28:00]:
Let me tell you a real story, which is that we were bidding on a project and the, client was interviewing us and they said, okay, we’re talking to this other agency. They recommend that we use this, WordPress system called Timber. You. Is that something that you would also recommend or you also use? And I said, well, as it so happens, we actually wrote that library and maintain it here at Upstatement. That was kind of the end of that conversation, and we got that job. So you’re able to establish, a a authority for yourself because now it isn’t just some sort of secret proprietary sauce that you sprinkle on in the back end, but it can become a part of the kind of technical vocabulary that people might have or they’re evaluating. Further, when we go into meetings sometimes and we’re we’re having to talk about our technical approach, we will often, assuming that is what we recommend for that project, talk about timber, talk about how we’ve used it. But then we also have the other validation that says, let me give you a list of some of the other agencies that you might be familiar with who also use it.

Jared Novack [00:29:06]:
Let me give you a list of other organizations who use it. We’re able to rattle off top universities, tech companies, hear President Obama’s foundation uses it on their website. So, you know, we list these kind of big headline names. Some of them might be from the upstatement portfolio, but we’re able to sort of scale the upstatement portfolio. And anyone any agency that uses it, and we’re able to kind of, like, peek into the code and figure it out, that becomes a feather in our cap to go through and say, hey. It’s good enough for president Obama. We hope it’s good enough for your organization.

Maciej Nowak [00:29:42]:
I love it. I love it. It’s it’s a success story, I I I would say. You. But but, you know, building on on on what you said that, out of it it it takes, I don’t know, agreed or, you, a lot of effort to maintain a project over many years. And there are so many projects that you appear and then disappear or just get abandoned. So, you know, what what what makes you or what makes a good open source project? Why? You know, because if you are going to invest some of your free time, instead of, you know, running, cycling, whatever, you code for free somewhere something, you know, how to choose a project that you want to contribute to. Because then you you you you you might end up in contributing to, You know, at the very early stage, which which is very, like, rewarding that you build part of the initial framework.

Maciej Nowak [00:30:35]:
But then if it gets not if it goes nowhere, this is, you know, a sad feeling, I guess.

Jared Novack [00:30:41]:
Right. Well, that that’s the thing. Results not guaranteed. And, I would say that, like, this is where Timber’s contribution community makes all the difference. If it was still just a 1 man show, so to speak. If it was just an upstatement only thing, Timber would be long gone and into the past. What I think you’re trying to do both as a maintainer and a contributor is to create that virtuous cycle. And that’s easier said that done, but making sure that, you know, from kind of like the origination end, I am not too precious about sort of like where things go because the truth is, Lucas, Eric, Nicholas, others who are working with Timber just as much and now far more than I am have a better read on the current landscape and being able to let go of some of the things that I thought might have been important.

Jared Novack [00:31:35]:
And maybe they were important in 2014, but we’re not in 2014 anymore. We’re in 2024. So I think the the difference is you have to either, a, decide that I am optimizing it for the current point in time or I’m optimizing it for something broader. And and if you choose that, you’re also choosing to sort of let go a little bit and allow things to take form and to take shape with what the current technology landscape demands. I don’t know. Lucas, you’re you’re confronting this much more. I’m interested kind of, like, what what you see as the difference maker there. I guess the difference between sort of like, like we were talking about, what’s the difference between that dead end thing that someone puts on GitHub and it seems like the new hotness for a month or 2, and then you check back a year later and it says, you know, this repo has been archived.

Jared Novack [00:32:26]:
Please use blah blah blah.

Lukas Gächter [00:32:29]:
You. Yeah. Yeah. I think yeah. If if a project if a project hits it’s, Some kind of threshold where, enough people are using it, then Maybe it’s hard to kill. If if it, if it’s it’s not evolving in a way Where it’s something completely different, a couple of years later. You. But I think some of the things you really have to to care about are, It’s not like just updates to the code itself, but also, for example, documentation.

Lukas Gächter [00:33:18]:
You always need to be aware, or to to to really care about that everything that you, do instead you what you change is is documented.

Jared Novack [00:33:31]:
We

Lukas Gächter [00:33:34]:
you. We also have a a lot of inputs from, from the community, through issues, or for example, through Stack Overflow, we ask people to to ask, timber support questions through Stack Overflow, and, you. I read through a lot of those. And so, you start to get a feeling you. For what people actually need or how they are using it. And also where the parts are that they you. Don’t really get yet. And then you can start working on these Type of things.

Lukas Gächter [00:34:16]:
Like, one example is that I I realized that, there’s Because Timber grew how it grew. Because, Chad, you you added things that you needed on the way. There were a lot of inconsistencies around, function names, for example. This isn’t something that you that you anticipate if you if you start, writing the library. But then you you start to see, like, okay. Well, here’s a problem. You. And you don’t you don’t see this problem through reading 1 issue.

Lukas Gächter [00:34:54]:
This this is a kind of problem that only emerges if you read hundreds of of issues and maybe 200 questions on Stack Overflow. You start to see patterns, underlying patterns. And, I think, yeah, you. This is then the interesting thing to solve. Like, it’s it’s it doesn’t, you. It’s not about singular features. Like, okay. I want to I want to have this feature, but I actually want to make it.

Lukas Gächter [00:35:29]:
I want to change the project in a way where it’s, still Usable and understandable, when you when it’s evolved. You. It’s hard to describe that. I mean I mean, like, yeah. One example is That is actually why why we introduced Timber two or why we we had to use, a next major version because there were so many underlying issues, that we wanted to solve that I think if we didn’t do that, you. It would, it would just not work in the future, and the project would come to an end at some time.

Maciej Nowak [00:36:15]:
You. Open source is the approach is the community build stuff de facto for themselves a little bit. Right? You. This this started as a as a project to streamline the work at the agency. And I’m comparing this to a to to product companies that are building for their customers trying to, trying to, you know, figure out product market fit. Not always managing to do this. And what’s your opinion? Because it it it like, It came to my mind that these are totally opposite ways of building software. You build a SaaS platform or a product company, you.

Maciej Nowak [00:36:57]:
And you are figuring out features for your customers and then you test it. Versus with open source, you are building this for yourself, But such software can also grow to a very considerable sizes or even create campaigns. WordPress, for example, are automatic. Right? The or or or or other, huge organizations based on open source software. So my my question to you is how you How do you how would you, like, in your in your opinion, how do you how would you compare building software for opens like as open source software versus products for customer customers. And on top of it, do you also see an Similar problems that you keep on building and building and building stuff that is unnecessary or not you entirely required or just requires in 1% of cases and the waste of time, on this particular feature.

Jared Novack [00:37:58]:
You. Well, I’m not so sure that they are all that different. I mean, let you you mentioned how it’s a difference between building something for yourself or building something from for a customer. A lot of software that we use actually was in this in between zone. Like, Slack famously, I think, began as a internal messaging tool built by a company that was trying to develop some sort of, like, video game. Them. And they’re like, well, we need you know, just to kind of keep our video game developers kind of in sync, we need to make this little internal messaging thing. And then little by little, they realize, wait a second.

Jared Novack [00:38:33]:
This internal messaging thing, that’s the thing, and they kind of kept following that thread. And what’s powerful there is the idea that, When you are the customer and it just so happens that there are a 1000000 or, who knows, 1,000,000,000 other people just like you out there, wow, that gives you a real advantage because now you can go through those cycles really quick. Because you can say, does this help me in terms of what I am trying to do, in terms of being in an office or in a development group versus having to rely on surveys, focus groups, other sorts of user testing, which, you know, is sometimes necessary, but it just slows down that process. In open source, you you get to kind of start from that Idealspot of, like, yes, you are a customer, so to speak, and there are gonna be tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of other customers just like you out there. And the more your solution is actually solving your problem and the more your problem is similar to the problems that others have, well, then you’re really going to find that product market fit. Of course, you know, there are a 1000000 markets out there that are like, well, those people aren’t developers, so they don’t use, you know, intercompany messaging services, so it doesn’t quite work. But it’s it’s all about that idea of, like, trying to shift, you know, where is that customer because the more you can internalize that customer through you being them or having great data, great surveys, great analytics. That’s where you can kinda get into that cycle super, super quick.

Maciej Nowak [00:40:06]:
You. Mhmm. But don’t you get into that trap of building more? Or is it like because you you. You are doing this for yourself. You are so, careful careful about your free time because you are doing this most of the time on the free you drink your free time. So we are very careful about what you’re spending time on. So you naturally avoid and then, like, building traps for stuff that’s you That will never be used. Oh, I

Jared Novack [00:40:32]:
I’d say you naturally, build that stuff. You naturally do build the traps. You naturally do

Maciej Nowak [00:40:37]:
Okay.

Jared Novack [00:40:37]:
Kind of, like, get into the things. I mean, all the mistakes that you highlighted, Lucas, in terms of, like, it being very upstatement and Jared centric at first, That is a part of, you know, my growth and learning that it’s like, you can be overfit to a particular market or a particular customer. Because I’m sure when you first looked at Timber, it’s like there were parts that were really useful and there were parts that were, like, you. Okay. That is solving a very specific problem for 1 or 2 very specific people and trying to balance those 2. And, you know, I learned a lot from watching Lucas and others sort of, like, take things apart and say, oh, that’s not a normal, you know, customer. Or for for us, we need to kind of, like, better segment that out or recognize that this thing that we have built, is not as good as this thing that already exists, so let’s separate those 2, focus on the thing that we are really great at. And I think that that is just a lesson also of, like, SaaS software where the software that tries to do too much and be all things to 1 customer or all things to all people, that tends to stumble and fail and sometimes spectacularly and very expensively.

Jared Novack [00:41:50]:
Whereas products that are able to really discipline themselves and have the confidence to say, I know what my customer is. I know what they need to do. I know also where I am going to kind of create some, like, hard lines and not go further. Very similar problems. Sometimes it is solved with a SaaS user interface. Sometimes it’s solved with JavaScript and PHP and other code that makes some kind of, opinionated choices about what we’re gonna do and what we’re not.

Maciej Nowak [00:42:18]:
I I wrote in 1 newsletter that you Purchased are in the niches or something like this. So that is very, very narrow, area of expertise for an agency, for example, or for the product is you. Is the competitive advantage of of knowing so much. And so doing so so the problem on such a deep level that you you. You are, I don’t know, not maybe unbeatable, but at least you have very, very good fit for, for your ideal customer.

Lukas Gächter [00:42:46]:
I’d also say that, you. Like for for a SaaS, when when they build a product, they they start to add these small features that help the customers. You. But for us as open source age, an open open source project, you. I think we we’re more like a platform to help developers build those features. So you. That’s what we tried to do recently to remove some, some features that were there. Jared mentioned it, like, stuff that was, made sense for for very edge case scenarios, but wouldn’t make sense for a lot of developers.

Lukas Gächter [00:43:31]:
You. We started to try to remove these cases and, move into a direction where it’s more like, you. Oh, you want to build that this feature? Yeah. Like, you can use this and that as a base for it. But, maybe we Well, give you the complete solution. So in a way, I’d say it’s, yeah, it’s more like a a platform on which you build your own product. You So in that sense, it’s also a little different.

Maciej Nowak [00:44:01]:
Uh-huh. Well, let

Jared Novack [00:44:02]:
me let me, just hard disagree with you again, Lucas, perhaps

Lukas Gächter [00:44:06]:
Okay.

Jared Novack [00:44:06]:
Where some of the most successful SaaS software that we see, becomes that platform. Right? It’s, like, let’s take YouTube, for example. You know, is YouTube, like, a piece of SaaS, or is it a platform? You. And this is a trend you see in so many other places where it’s like it tries to do something, but then they’ve invested a lot of space in figuring in how, an ecosystem can be created in a platform, the ways in which, you know, content creators can be a part of something, a way in which data can be exported and interact with, you know, everything from Zapier to data warehouses and things like that, like trying to recognize the ways in which a, piece of SAF software is much more powerful when it actually recognizes that is a part of a larger ecosystem and it’s able to, you know, use embeds and other sorts of, like, ways of trading information back and forth to become an integral part of an individual or company’s practices. You. So I I I see the differences, but I also see that these things are becoming more and more intertwined and their ways lessons from software and open source communities that SaaS can adopt and vice versa.

Lukas Gächter [00:45:23]:
Sure. You.

Jared Novack [00:45:25]:
I can

Lukas Gächter [00:45:25]:
also see that now.

Jared Novack [00:45:27]:
Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me I’m wrong. You’re you’re still full of PS on that one, Jared. You’re just trying make a a mountain out

Maciej Nowak [00:45:35]:
of that.

Lukas Gächter [00:45:37]:
It’s just all, like, evolving in in waves and circles and loops. And,

Maciej Nowak [00:45:45]:
you. Speaking of evolving, I I I would like to get back also to that, 2.0 release because this is like a major, I don’t know, you breakthrough. For some reason, you decided to change that leading version from 1 to, to 2. So what was your, I don’t know, planning process. Why did you decide to take this action? You know, just also from, like, architectural or or or planning or growing a piece of software. Why would you Do this asset point, 2 point o instead of yet another, I don’t know, minor revision.

Jared Novack [00:46:26]:
Well, I’ll start this one, which is to say that, like, I think with our, there came a point where we knew that, like, breaking changes would be necessary. You know, as much as we want to honor the idea of, you know, deprecation and and allowing, for backwards compatibility, at some point, you kind of have to make a choice, that we encountered that it’s like there is some stuff here that is just, you know, fundamentally in conflict with how it should be. And, really putting a stake in the ground and saying like, okay. This is where we’re going to require that, people who want to go with us on the next stage also might have to change some things that were overly, edge case or were sort of a quirk of decisions or code back from, you know, the 20 teens or whatever to where we are today. Now how we got there, was definitely a long road. And, Lucas, you’re probably best to speak to some of those really significant changes and and why they have, such an impact on development today. Yeah.

Lukas Gächter [00:47:32]:
I can definitely talk a lot about Timber two because It took such a long time to to get there. This was also a learning that we had, like, because, you. We’re working on an open source project, and it’s not like, just a website you do for a client that you come to update. You. There’s so many things you have to consider. There’s so many details that you need to get right. You. And I guess, we we completely underestimated that, a couple of times.

Lukas Gächter [00:48:11]:
You.

Maciej Nowak [00:48:12]:
So In a row. Yeah. There’s that saying that 95% of the project, you. Takes 95% of the time and the remaining 5% of the time, hey, of the work, it takes, the remaining 95 Percent of the time. Sound like to that to that type thing.

Jared Novack [00:48:31]:
We we felt that for sure. Right? Yep.

Lukas Gächter [00:48:34]:
We we had a lot of moments where we said, oh, yeah. 22.0 is just around the corner, and then and then so many So many more issues and, problems popped up that we that we knew. We we’re gonna have to fix that before before a two point o release. And then, you. We also started to to be more open to breaking changes then. So we said, like, you. Oh, this is also an area that we we have to touch. So let’s think about how we could improve it so that you.

Lukas Gächter [00:49:07]:
It’s not gonna, be a problem in a year or 2. And, you. So what we really try to do was, to introduce a lot of breaking changes now that, are gonna be, necessary to have a good base to work, in the future. So I guess 2 point o is all about Making things more consistent. This is, something that we already talked about like, the functions that you actually use, how they are named, how these functions work across different types you. Of, for example, posts or taxonomies or users or comments In WordPress, how you can, access different parts of of this Functionality in Timbrem. We made that more consistent or tried to do it. There’s always one thing that you.

Lukas Gächter [00:50:22]:
Was a a goal of mine to to make the API understandable and usable. So that was was always, you. Kind of the the first approach that I took. Like, how how how should it look like, if I, as a developer, you. If I’m gonna use it and then start to think about, okay, what what what do we have to do in the back to to get it working? It should work not only, for more experienced developers who are very, Proficient in the in the MVC pattern, PHP coding patterns. It also has to work for, developers Who are more on an entry level, who maybe just discovered you. We’re perceiving and also discovered timber and then try to make it work. And maybe it’s even the 1st, website coding project.

Lukas Gächter [00:51:22]:
We we also try to to consider, that it should work for Different skill levels. And then yeah. Of course, it should also work for, From what experienced developer present, these developers, they want to extend timber With, with different coding patterns. And we also did a lot Under the hood to to make it possible to to extend Timber in a way that, Yeah. That that’s that’s common in, PHP development, I’d say.

Maciej Nowak [00:52:07]:
Alright. But and not bad. But you. What was the most, like, difficult part here? Is it, developing that courage to start you. Breaking things mean, no. It wouldn’t be backward backwards compatible, and now you had to spend some time on it. Developing that muscle to finally make this make a decision. This will be 2.0 because we will break so many things that this is, you know, This is totally different library, I’d say.

Jared Novack [00:52:40]:
Yeah. I’d say in some way, the hardest part was knowing when to stop breaking things.

Maciej Nowak [00:52:44]:
Oh, right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That that building trap. You. Right? Yeah.

Jared Novack [00:52:48]:
Because it’s like you you like Lucas is kind of saying, well, we don’t want to put, users through this constant cycle where every 6 months, it’s like the thing that you were used to gets kind of ripped out from underneath them. You wanna say, okay, we’re we’re kind of resetting the table and doing that once. And towards the end, it was like, oh, but this one thing, you know, we just noticed or just remembered and, oh, jeez, it would only take, you know, a few one last poll request. You know, give me 1 more, 1 more. And we at some point just said, nope. That’s gonna be 3.0 or that’s gonna be 2.1 or 2.5 or whatever. Like, we just had to kind of say, like, you know, the number of rooms in the house that we are renovating is extensive enough and we accept that, like, you know, 2.0 is not going to solve every single problem or every 2nd level problem, but this is where we are stopping and we’re gonna make that really good. We’re gonna keep that commitment.

Jared Novack [00:53:42]:
You, but also we’re gonna make sure that there is now momentum to go forward and say that is gonna happen in 2.1 or 2.2 or 3.0 and stuff. Because I think the other risk is that you say, well, I need to now wait until it’s perfect. And I think this is where we did get ourselves caught where, that becomes a very sort of, like, delayed and pregnant big version, and it’s just forever waiting, forever waiting because it’s one more thing, one more thing. It’s the classic issue of scope creep, you know, and and being able to put out something that is really good and accepting that it’s not perfect. You, and, indeed, you know, few few things in this world have ever been.

Maciej Nowak [00:54:20]:
Mhmm. Yeah. And then your users has to have to, you. Catch up on so many elements. The bigger the the the the the bigger the, amount of changes, you. The more they have to learn, this is like a learning curve for them, but barrier of entry for the old ones. New ones will get this, you know, they don’t know about anything about previous versions, but those that have to switch, it’s the the more they have to change, the more It’s more difficult for them.

Jared Novack [00:54:49]:
Right. And that’s also where you need the feedback as a developer around, like, actually, even if what I would have done before, I thought was perfect based on the feedback that we’re getting different from the community. It turns out we did something that is not perfect, and we need to go back and reexamine or rethink something that, hey, we thought we had kinda checked this off the list, but actually there are some issues. And I think that’s where you you need that humility with your community to say, we’re putting something out there and we do really wanna learn from what is working out in the world, what is not, so we can come back and make it sharper and better in the next cycle.

Maciej Nowak [00:55:25]:
You. And so speaking about this, did you worsen any areas of the library? Because, you know, you. The the intention is we are getting better on every front, but was it also the case that you made some areas, you No. Even worse? Not even. Just worse? Like, did you did your did your community met, like, screamed at you, I want this reverted immediately.

Lukas Gächter [00:55:51]:
Some some things we we did in terms of How Timber can be extended. We were we did it in a way that was too strict. Maybe we wanted to be To cater to, tools like PHP stand who who can show you a lot of issues, through static analysis of the code. And, sometimes yeah. We we we followed a couple of, suggestions it had. You. And then there came some developers who said, like, oh, yeah. This is this isn’t going to work for me.

Lukas Gächter [00:56:32]:
And, you. Then we circled back actually on on these ones. And I think we we’re still we’re still waiting for feedback because, you. A lot of developers still have to do the the update. But I guess, in general, you. I hope nothing is like worse now. You A lot of a lot of the things are different. And, maybe you have to rewrite things, in your own copays.

Lukas Gächter [00:57:07]:
You. And it’s also can also be a lot of work if you if you have more advanced patterns to reuse in your theme. And Sometimes it’s not going to be easy.

Jared Novack [00:57:22]:
This is I think your point there, brings up that question though. Right? What is better and what is worse? You chase, like, the higher PHP stand score because you think that is like, well, look, that is a standard and objective thing. I want I want the biggest number possible or the fewest number of issues possible. Well, you just create problems kind of in the real world. So I think it is all about sort of figuring out, like, what what is that balance between sort of, like, you know, better or worse or perfection versus what people actually are using or encountering or need in their workflow. And, unfortunately, that’s an area that you requires a lot of, like, wisdom and judgment to sort of make those terminations. And, Lucas, I I remember that issue now where it was about, like are you referring to the final,

Maciej Nowak [00:58:07]:
what you call

Jared Novack [00:58:08]:
it, declaration. And it’s yeah. That that totally made sense. That would be a way that kind of like would keep things better, you know, strict and and governed. But then that’s exactly the frustration that I used to have with WordPress in different places where it’s like, just let me code, man. Like, I can do it. You trust me. You know? I I I will I will take on that risk, and and it’s all about sort of, like, figuring out where you want to kind of, like, hit things, you know, perfect, so to speak, but also where you’re gonna make some really sort of, like, smart and or hopefully smart considered compromises that say, this is what we need to do to differentiate how we believe, our product should be used.

Maciej Nowak [00:58:52]:
You. Like chasing, for example, 100 score on PageSpeed Insights.

Jared Novack [00:58:56]:
Yeah. It feels good. Right? But Exactly. Actually, you I’ve I’ve yet to see a a trophy show up at anyone’s house or a giant check that says, oh my god. You’ve got a 100%, you know, code coverage or or anything like that or a plus code score. It’s like those are good things to watch because you don’t wanna do things that are just, like, dumb, but I think the wisdom is sometimes knowing that it’s like, am I chasing the am I chasing the right thing here? And, that that takes a little bit of, like, gumption to step back and be like, oh, yeah, that’s that’s not the right thing to be chasing right now.

Maciej Nowak [00:59:30]:
Mhmm. And do you guys have any other, let’s say, Learnings and findings from the process. We talked about, that perfectionism. Right? Or or or chasing that that chasing for the sake of chasing instead of, let’s say, sometimes let’s say solving. But you What else brings to your mind when when thinking about learn learnings, from the whole process across, you know, 11 years

Jared Novack [01:00:01]:
now. Yeah. To me, one of the the biggest things that I’ve learned is, you know, talking about, you know, the the the not perfection, the first version of Timber was objectively terrible. Like, you know, just, you know, fundamental errors in terms of, like, how things should be structured. But it was through that process that it was able to sort of, like, find, some users who pointed that out. For me and now we’re talking, like, you know, 2013 era before Lucas, you even got to the scene to be like, what on earth are you doing, man? You know and and having that pointed out was, so valuable. Whereas, if we had kept that stuff completely in house, completely proprietary, completely secret, we would still be making the mistakes of 2013, 10 or 11 years later and what what a total tragedy, you know. So it’s it’s about sort of, like, putting things out there, learning, you know, there have been different sort of, like, complimentary, packages and stuff that we slash upstatement slash Timber has put out over the years, some of which have really found sort of like a zone.

Jared Novack [01:01:16]:
And others have been like, yep. That has not been updated since 2017, and no one cares. You know?

Maciej Nowak [01:01:25]:
Alright. Lucas, anything to add?

Lukas Gächter [01:01:28]:
Yeah. Sure. I think yeah. For for me, it just, I just learned so much, actually. It made me, you. A better developer. I I learned stuff like, test driven development through Timber. I actually started to to apply it.

Lukas Gächter [01:01:48]:
You. And when I when I look at, how I started out, you. Contributing. I think, I’m a person who wants to To do right by everybody. Like, I want to to to cater to everybody, so everybody’s happy. But then I had to realize, yeah, you. This is also not going to be possible. Like, you have to to take decisions on what issues you going to work on and what you’re going to accept to be included in the code base.

Lukas Gächter [01:02:24]:
And oftentimes, it’s, yeah. You you just have to say no, you. Which I can do better in the meantime. At the beginning, it was it was much harder for me. Yeah. But, I think there’s there’s also some other people in the project that That that helped me get through this. Mhmm. Others who said, like, Yeah.

Lukas Gächter [01:02:45]:
Maybe we shouldn’t add that. And then Yeah. You have to be humble enough to to reconsider and maybe sleep 1 or 2 nights more overrated. You. Think about yeah. There’s so many so many, ways in which timber can be used. And Sometimes you make assumptions and they are wrong and you get corrected and yeah. You.

Lukas Gächter [01:03:13]:
You start to. And and try to to accept them and be humble about it.

Maciej Nowak [01:03:19]:
The and people are the users are not, you. Softening the blow, I guess. Or or or are they? Because this is, like, open source community. So I I what kind of feedback do you get if you, you. I don’t know. Worse than the things. Is it like the blow is softened or or or is it not really?

Jared Novack [01:03:41]:
95% of people, I think, are just, like, you know, wonderful humans, out there who wanna help. And then occasionally and it’s really occasionally. Sometimes you’re just like, why did you say that? Like, that’s mean. Like like, what’s the problem? You know? And, but, you know, the the vast majority of people are just, like, you know, you know, just just wonderful an understanding users, collaborators, downloaders, testers, tryers, you know, and and people, I think, are fundamentally, like, you know, on your side and they’re there to, like, help and try and make things better. And, you know again, I can count on maybe 1 and a half hands the number of negative interactions I’ve kinda directly experienced. For the most part, it it really is just rewarding and and supportive.

Lukas Gächter [01:04:34]:
Big shout out to the community. That’s, It’s really nice, from all of you that that you’re just so understanding and nice to us.

Jared Novack [01:04:47]:
Totally. We’ve got a 100 plus people who have, you know, official code commits in the timber repo. And I would guess 5 times as many people who have submitted comments, questions, etcetera, through GitHub issues or pull requests. And at the same time, like, when the pull requests come through and it’s like, hey, this is a really good idea, but it’s not for us. I can’t think of any time anyone has ever freaked out and said, you have no idea what you’re missing. You know, this is the most and people are like, okay. Cool. I get it.

Jared Novack [01:05:20]:
Like, I’m gonna, you know, either a, try something else or b, maybe this is the perfect thing for my own sort of like personal layer or kind of a proprietary library, and that’s where a lot of other tools have been born that sort of take timber and go to the next level and say, how can we make this a more specific form fitting thing for our particular client center agency? And, again, it’s it’s people are generally, like, really smart, really understanding, and all looking toward to to build the best possible pieces out there.

Maciej Nowak [01:05:52]:
You. That’s that’s great. This is I I I think if it would be the other way around, that wouldn’t be so, rewarding to work on or or would scare people off. You. Alright. So before we wrap up, what’s on the roadmap for 3.0,

Jared Novack [01:06:07]:
let’s say?

Maciej Nowak [01:06:08]:
You this is like Roughly. Roughly.

Jared Novack [01:06:11]:
Yeah. That’s like asking a woman right after she’s given birth, like, well, when’s the next kid coming? You. Okay. I’ll I’ll empathize with a little bit. I mean, from my end, what actually I wanna focus on is the rhythm that we get into, not for 3.0, but for 2.1 and 2.2 and that sort of rhythm because I really wanna may learn from the mistakes of, like, waiting for this big giant release that’s gonna fix all our problems and, instead, closing that cycle and saying, what can we do in the next 3 to 6 months to address the most relevant issues and the most important new use cases that have developed. Zero in on those. Focus, release something, get that feedback, and then learn, you know, rinse and repeat. So, that is to say, let’s we’re gonna focus on raising this kid, I think, before before the next one.

Jared Novack [01:07:04]:
What you think, Lucas, I am I wrong there? What what are your big dreams right now?

Lukas Gächter [01:07:10]:
Yeah. Well, if you talk about Timber you. 3 point o. Maybe you think like, oh, it’s gonna be a completely different thing again. But I guess it’s not. We’re not going to reinvent the wheel, but we want to focus more on getting things even more stable and, Ready for the future. There there are updates coming to PHP, to WordPress, where we have to stay compatible. You.

Lukas Gächter [01:07:40]:
And we are trying to to do that in a way that, yeah, that’s you. Going to work for developers. One thing that we we try to work on, which is maybe an area in itself is, image manipulation. You. Like, the whole area about, how you can work with images in timber, is probably going to to get an update. You. There are some very nice ideas out there, for how to to make it even easier To to apply different manipulations to images, be it resizing, be it, Converting it to different image formats. And also, like, handling all the files that Timber generates.

Lukas Gächter [01:08:33]:
You. That’s also one topic that we want to focus on. I think we we we’re gonna going to add more strict types, you. Which means, like, the the language in p a PHP in With the last versions, it evolved in a way that, it allows you to to add more types to classes, functions, parameters so that, you get more errors if you you. If you have a wrong type that you input into a function, this is something that makes Codebase much more reliable, and I think we’re we’re striving towards that. And you. One quote that I always come up with again, which is actually by you, Jared. You said that in another podcast is that, Timber tries to to get out of the way.

Lukas Gächter [01:09:34]:
So maybe we’re going to see some changes where, we’re going to remove some parts of timber and, add a library instead or Tell you. Yeah. Like, you can use this, this, or this library to to actually, get to the same result, which is going to you. To make it easier for us to to maintain the code if we if we don’t have to to, like, maintain every single feature that Timber provides.

Maciej Nowak [01:10:12]:
This is very humble. Uh-huh. Very humble statement.

Jared Novack [01:10:16]:
Well, that that goes back to, Lucas, what you said earlier today. It’s, you know, that platform mindset and being able to create a space that you can make it easier to mix and match and pull in all these different things while trusting that developers know what they need, and we wanna support and help them get there, do so in a way that has a certain sort of logic that everyone is, like, aligned with, but then recognize that, like, the best stuff has still yet to be built. And we wanna make sure that things are open enough so that you’re not running into walls that we’ve built, but rather roads that we’ve paved.

Maciej Nowak [01:10:55]:
Nice.

Jared Novack [01:10:57]:
Write that down. Write that down.

Maciej Nowak [01:10:59]:
It’s all recorded it’s all recorded. Another quote. Alright? Alright. Gentlemen, thank you very much, for for the recording. And it was great conversations. Thank you very much. This is also for us, you know, at awesome we we use Timber. Right? Yeah.

Maciej Nowak [01:11:18]:
That’s why you. That that that that’s why this is so interesting to me and, and and for the team. So thanks again, and and take care. All of us in 2024. It’s very early January, so I’m I guess I can say that.

Jared Novack [01:11:34]:
Definitely. It was a lot of fun. Thank you so much for for bringing us together.

Maciej Nowak [01:11:39]:
Pleasure is all Thanks.

Lukas Gächter [01:11:40]:
Thank you. Thanks for having us.

Lector [00:01:12]:
If you like what you’ve just heard, don’t forget to subscribe for more episodes. On the other hand, if you’ve got a question we haven’t answered yet, feel free to reach out to us directly. Just go to osomstudio.com/contact. Thanks for listening, and see you in the next episode of the Osom to Know podcast.