• Cursor
• Codeium Windsurf
• GitHub Copilot announcement
• Perplexity

• https://wiki.c2.com/?ResultObjectPattern=
• https://www.chairigami.com
• https://twenty.com
• https://rubycentral.org/news/make-railsconf-happen/
• Adam’s Judo Scale infomercial
• https://boxoutsports.com/graphics/multi-format/multi-format-gameday-90-s-series
• https://boxoutsports.com/graphics/tags/saved-by-the-bell

• https://faineg.substack.com/p/how-i-accidentally-ruined-bluesky
• The hosts of WSUA9 call it skeeting on air
• AOC endorses “team skeets”
• Jake Tapper says “skeeted” live on CNN
• Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech by Mike Masnick
• Composable moderation
• How to set your domain as your handle
• Bluesky reaches 20M users
• https://go.bsky.app/HD2Ty2o
• https://go.bsky.app/EGczjGA
• https://bsky.app/profile/bencurtis.com
• https://bsky.app/profile/joshuawood.honeybadger.io
• https://bsky.app/profile/founder.quest
• https://bsky.app/profile/honeybadger.io
• https://deck.blue/
• https://brid.gy/

• Bluesky startups & bootstrappers starter pack
• Join the Honeybadger/FounderQuest Discord server!
• https://metricswatch.com/
• https://github.com/topfunky/gruff
• https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/The_Homer
• https://jumpstartrails.com
• https://microconf.com
• https://businessofsoftware.org
• https://rubyconferences.org

• https://www.johnnunemaker.com/acquiring-fireside/
• https://www.johnnunemaker.com/how-to-find-a-business-partner/
• https://danbenjamin.com/
• http://sifterapp.com/
• https://www.indierails.com/

• https://cottonbureau.com/p/9EMACZ/shirt/the-process#/17943854/tee-men-standard-tee-vintage-black-tri-blend-m
• https://blog.flippercloud.io/per-seat-pricing-sucks/
• https://garrettdimon.com/journal/posts/data-modeling-saas-entitlements-and-pricing
• https://basecamp.com/pricing
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion
• https://statamic.com/

• https://www.wking.dev/logs/shipping-in-layers
• https://longform.asmartbear.com/slc/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_product
• https://archive.ph/20130719182750/http://www.businessballs.com/treeswing.htm
• https://www.amazon.com/How-Fight-Hydra-Ambitions-Destined-ebook/dp/B07J57YF47

• Shape Up
• Seth Godin
• Blue Ridge Ruby
• Monitorama
• Join the Honeybadger Discord! https://discord.gg/aQaDVBedRf

• Blue Ridge Ruby
• Josh’s Blue Ridge Ruby recap
• Kyle Shold
• Printfection
• JudoScale
• SignWell
• Heroku Add-ons
• Router blog post: https://judoscale.com/blog/heroku-router-post-mortem

Links:
Standardrb

Josh’s 2013 Ruby Style Guide

GitHub Copilot

Copilot Chat for Neovim

Seth Godin

Amy Hoy

My Life in Advertising by Claude Hopkins

This book will teach you how to write better by Neville Medhora
Carbon

Links:
Chartkick

Frictionless Generators

Flipper

todo_or_die gem

heya gem

Userlist

John Nunemaker

Last RailsConf announcement and survey

Detroit People Mover
FounderQuest
Mastodon - @FounderQuest@honeybadger.social
Twitter - @honeybadgerapp
Honeybadger

Links:

pg_cron

Judoscale

Traction

Insights tour page 

Insights announcement blog post 

Meet the badgers
FounderQuest
Mastodon - @FounderQuest@honeybadger.social
Twitter - @honeybadgerapp
Honeybadger
ClickHouse - hosted by DoubleCloud

Links:
Lab Tech

Yabeda
Yabeda for Insights

Vector

Fluentd

Evil Martians blog

Scientist

Meet the badgers
FounderQuest
Mastodon - @FounderQuest@honeybadger.social 

Twitter - @honeybadgerapp
Honeybadger
ClickHouse - hosted by DoubleCloud

Links:

Exceptional Creatures

Kamal

Daily Lex
Clickhouse Activerecord

Scientist

RealGeeks 

Meet the badgers
FounderQuest
Mastodon - @FounderQuest@honeybadger.social 

Twitter - @honeybadgerapp
Honeybadger

Links:
Derek Sivers
Flipper
Meet the badgers
FounderQuest
Mastodon - @FounderQuest@honeybadger.social 

Twitter - @honeybadgerapp
Honeybadger

Links:
BHAG
Meet the badgers
FounderQuest
Mastodon - @FounderQuest@honeybadger.social 

Twitter - @honeybadgerapp
Honeybadger

Links:
Steve Jobs - "Saying No"
Meet the badgers
FounderQuest
Mastodon - @FounderQuest@honeybadger.social 

Twitter - @honeybadgerapp
Honeybadger

Links
Crocs
Joel on Software - Things you should never do
DHH Business of Software
Everyday Information Architecture
Meet the badgers
Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby
ClickHouse - hosted by DoubleCloud
FounderQuest
Mastodon - @FounderQuest@honeybadger.social 

Twitter - @honeybadgerapp
Honeybadger

Links
Meet the badgers
ClickHouse - hosted by DoubleCloud
FounderQuest
Mastodon - @FounderQuest@honeybadger.social 

Twitter - @honeybadgerapp
Honeybadger

Links
Ahoy
Heya
ClickHouse - hosted by DoubleCloud
Michele Hansen - "When done well, marketing and teaching are nearly indistinguishable from one another."
FounderQuest
Mastodon - @FounderQuest@honeybadger.social 

Twitter - @honeybadgerapp
Website 

Links:
Mastodon - @FounderQuest@honeybadger.social 

Twitter - @honeybadgerapp
Website 

Automated transcript (only about 70% accurate)
Ben
 
Welcome to FounderQuest, this has been Today, I'm interviewing Garrett Diamond Star and josh are taking the day off and I get a chat with Garrett, who's a longtime friend of mine and fantastic entrepreneur and all around great person in the world, so I'm excited to have you here. Gary, Thanks, 

Garrett
 
thanks for having me. 

Ben
 
It's always fun catching up with you. I think the last time we chatted was business of software a few years ago, wasn't it? 

Garrett
 
Yeah, not frequently enough, 

Ben
 
so that was, yeah, definitely not frequent enough. One thing I most remember about that business of software was that was when the hurricane was coming through and so I was standing out there in boston with all the wind and the 

Garrett
 
right, having grown 

Ben
 
up in the south, that was kind of ironic that I was there in the northeast and getting a hurricane. Mhm. So have you been 

Garrett
 
three, so just uh probably about the same as everybody else man, you know, just kinda one day at a time and keeping it going um and yeah, I just kind of dabbling and exploring and for once the last year just kind of let myself be undirected and just kind of followed what was interesting and pulled on threads and uh a little unnerving but also kind of nice and refreshing, I don't know, you know, so kind of bouncing around like a ping pong ball. 

Ben
 
Well, that's, that sounds pretty cool. Well, let's talk about that in a minute. I want to catch people up so I'm sure most people know you, but just for those who don't. So Garrett again, it's been a long time entrepreneur I think. I think I first bumped into you with doing sifter, your, your, your app from a few years ago, you built that from scratch solo entrepreneur and then you sold that. Then you're, you're at post uh, postmark for awhile for that. Right. 

Garrett
 
Well, wild bit at large, but primarily on postmark. Yeah. 

Ben
 
Okay. Right. Right. So you're a while, but for a while and then I guess it was a couple of years ago now that you've left wild. 

Garrett
 
Yeah, it's been about . years, I guess. No. Okay. 

Ben
 
Yeah. And so I guess also during that time you kind of did the starting and sustaining books slash video series slash thing. That was cool. 

Garrett
 
Yeah, I've been dabbling in all that, trying to share my battle wounds so that other people can maybe avoid them or less than them. 

Ben
 
Yeah, that's awesome. I remember, I remember buying that. It's good, good stuff. So also linked in the show notes. Maybe we'll get a sailor to uh, you spoke, you spoke at Microsoft a few times or at least once that I can remember 

Garrett
 
I can't even keep track now. Microsoft spoke once attended a couple of times. Yeah. 

Ben
 
And so now you're doing some, some interesting stuff. So I remember, remember when you left a wild bit, you were, you're really interested in getting started on helping amputees have a community and so you started adapted, right? So, we're gonna talk about that for a second, and then we can talk about, you know, how that plan kind of changed for you with the passage? 

Garrett
 
Um, I mean, so I'm a left below knee amputee. And when I was trying to make that decision, I couldn't find any information on what life is really like as an amputee, um, let alone specific information about, can I play basketball still, if so, how does that work? Or what other activities can I do? And there's just not a lot of detailed information, and with disability, even just within amputees, the range is incredible, like above me and bologna makes a complete difference in how you function and your body mechanics, and so I just couldn't find this information out there. And so that kind of planted the seed that obviously it's not out there and, you know, it's woefully under informed, which at first was kind of scary, it's like, oh, I guess nobody does any of this stuff 

Garrett
 
and for me, the whole, ironically, the whole point of amputating was so that I could get back to doing things because of my ankle fusion was horrible and all that, it's just hurt and was miserable and through the whole thing, I was blogging about it, and what would happen is people would email me because they'd go on google and search for amputation, ankle fusion, that kind of thing, and then they'd ask me like, I'm, because I was the only person that came up and I would get these emails, you know, it kind of varies and go ebbs and flows, you know, to a month, once a week, you know, so frequently enough. Um, and uh, one uh, young woman that reached out to me, she actually amputated and then just won a couple of gold medals in the paralympics and like, 

Garrett
 
it just blew my mind is like, how do you find the answers to this stuff? And uh, after being an amputee now about five years and trying stuff and just kind of figuring it out. Uh, my hope was originally, I was like, well, I'm a software developer, I'll build a platform so people can share that information, um, you know, and I figured I was really optimistic about that specifically, because, well I built sifter and rails has gotten way better and I learned a ton from sifters, it'll be way easier this time around, but I didn't really account for was now I've got a family and I'm  years older, uh and so it's been more challenging at the end of the day, I'm just tapped on software because I'm doing that all day and my brain is fried. 

Garrett
 
Um, but I've been doing videos kind of explaining this stuff to people about how legs work and the logistics of like how they change your body mechanics and um, how to do things like go to the beach and deal with sand in your foot and that kind of stuff. Uh, and I did that more is like an exploratory whimsical thing because that was the kind of content I hope people would create and put on the platform. So then you could filter and say, here's my disability, here's the activity I want to do. Give me all the information about that specific thing. Um, but I did it and it just kind of left it for a year, but it just kept going and then more people have been contacting me and so now what I'm doing is kind of 

Garrett
 
stepping back from the software side of it and I'm just gonna keep recording videos for the next short term, um, and having them produced and that kind of stuff and hopefully increasing the quality and the depth and then doing interviews with other amputees and really kind of getting into more stuff, um, and then eventually circling back to building a platform to help people find the right things that meet their needs and that kind of thing. Um, so, you know, it's, it's, it's been tough. I think the toughest thing is realizing that nonprofit side projects are the hardest thing to make time for, um because it's never going to offset my income or anything. And so like 

Garrett
 
now I've kind of been thinking, I guess I need to build...

Spider season
Write for Honeybadger

Automated transcript (only about 75% accurate)
Ben
  
So I've been, I've been using Hook Relay over the past week and I got to say, there's nothing as useful as using your own product to make you see places where the product can be improved. So I've, I've opened a couple of issues. Yeah, yeah. And uh, I mean, they're not, they're not major things, but it's like, oh, it would be nice if this was different, would be nice if that was, you know, different. And it's been, it's been good. So I'm, I'm looking forward to having those things done making the product better. And we, uh, you know, we talked about spending some more time, uh, development time on really the other couple next coming weeks and months because I've had some, some customer requests coming in. So 

Ben
  
it's always a good feeling like when people are actually using it and saying, oh yeah, I like it, but couldn't do this like, Oh yeah, I could do that. It's fun. I love it. I love being developer and just building stuff. So much fun. Yeah. 

Josh
  
Yeah. Looking at our, our dashboard, we've got uh, got a few New year's is coming in. Got some a little bit more revenue than last time I looked at this, so that's cool. 

Starr
  
Yeah, that's good stuff. You know, it's the season for it. The, the pacific Northwest summer is long gone and we're just into the dark, wet now. We've gone through a spider season. Yeah, I mean, right, you've got um, yeah, you've got the summer, you've got spider season, you've got dark with it. 

Josh
  
Is that from that like list of pacific Northwest Seasons or whatever, that's like . 

Starr
  
You can, you can call me out on that. I was hoping to um, I was hoping to plagiarize. 

Josh
  
We should, we should put that in the show notes if we can find it though. That's a pretty good one. 

Starr
  
Yeah, that's a good one. 

Josh
  
I don't remember them all, but 

Ben
  
I'm definitely, definitely more productive in the winter time because like, I'm not outside playing, I'm inside hunkering down from the rain, the cold, so I'm like, I might as well do some code. 

Josh
  
Yeah, 

Starr
  
I mean, personally, I kind of um like I kind of stopped going on my morning walks in the summer because there's too many amateurs out. Yeah. And I started again once the fall comes, once it starts getting dark and drizzly and those are my favorite morning walks. 

Josh
  
Nice even in the rain. 

Starr
  
Yeah, especially in the rain, get out. Yeah, that's why you have a nice like Gortex raincoats and my scoots. Yeah, it's all about the gear. Yeah, it's uh, I don't know, this is very pleasant. I like it. The, yeah, the summer here, like it's nice, but after a while, the sun just, just starts getting to me. It's just like, I can't escape it. It's just boring into my eyeballs. 

Ben
  
It is truly a thing around here when the sun has been out too long has been to many is people do get a little so crazy. Like I need some wet and so the first rainy day comes, you can just feel the relief. It's just, it's just, I don't know how to describe it. It's just a sense of community, like relieved that things are back to normal. There's, there's precipitation again. 

Starr
  
Yeah, I came up with a theory and I have no idea how valid the series, so I'm just going to throw it out there because it's unfounded and I'm wondering, so like I realize this, this winter, this, yeah, this fall as I'm going out. It's like, okay, like the reason I, like this is because like everything is more muted, right? And I get over stimulated very easily. So, you know, noise and late and all that just kind of does it to me. 

Starr
  
And but when it's like dark and gray, like for like, I don't know, this may just be my, my perception, but like the water vapor like mutes the sound a little bit or something. It's not quite everything. Like all the edges are more round and pleasant, nothing is quite as sharp and stab. E And so yeah, and Seattle Seattle is like the pacific northwest in general. It's just like, it draws in like all the computer nerds, all the, all the people who just like it here and like that kind of environment. So it's like, oh do we all just, you know, we all have like sensory issues. I don't know. 

Josh
  
That's why all the tech companies are in Seattle. Yeah, probably. I think I need to get an office still because I think like, I think, I think Ben's right, like I I also would be more productive in the winter, but like working from home in the winter with with uh like Kindergartners is a a different experience than working at home in the dark by yourself. It's a bit of a challenge. So yeah, 

Starr
  
when you turn on the lights while you're working, you don't just leave them off. 

Josh
  
Yeah, sometimes I leave them off. Oh yeah, 

Starr
  
that's because you're a real hacker, I've been doing more marketing stuff lately. So I turn the lights on. I use light mode. 

Josh
  
I mean you probably forgot how to touch type, you know, and use them with you shut up, 

Starr
  
shut up. Shut up, you shut up. I get to say that. Not you. 

Josh
  
So you have to have the lights on. I'm sorry. 

Starr
  
Yeah, I don't have one of those keyboard with a blank key caps. 

Josh
  
Like truth be told. I've been um doing a lot less programming than I used to as well. And it's, it started to bother me a little bit lately. So I've been trying to find ways to get back into it because I'm like, if I'm gonna like forget how to build a rails app if I don't, if I don't like, you know, do some do some work. 

Ben
  
We do have like  items in our backlog for Honey badgers. It's true. She can find something to do. Yeah. 

Josh
  
I don't know, it's just weird like having like a legacy rails out for so long um Like even when you are working, like even when you do work in it, it's still like, I don't know, like your, it's, you know, I'm like not utilizing a lot of the knowledge that I built up like, like we we all built up working on client projects, like where you're constantly solving new problems and like building things out. Like a lot of those decisions are already have long been made in a honey badger app. So it's like, yeah, it's, it's weird. It's a little bit different. 

Ben
  
That's been nice about having the side project because like starting a new rails app and making new decisions and trying the new things and new toys like hotwire and you know, stimulus reflex, all kind of stuff. Like it's, it's been, it's been fun. But hey, you know, maybe uh you know, talking about client work like, hey, take on some client work, right? It could uh do something completely different and take on 

Josh
  
an option for sure. Yeah, I thought that could be fun. 

Ben

SSL Server Test

Second brand marketing tips Twitter thread 

Xhtmlchop

Hook Relay Twitter announcement

Hook Relay blog announcement

Derrick Reimer & Corey Haines Product Hunt launch 

Startup Director List 

Indie Hackers launch repeatedly

Not very accurate auto-generated transcript:
Ben
 - 
you know, last week I recorded a quick little message talking about why we weren't recording our podcast. That was in the middle of the let's encrypt ssl certificate fiasco that swept across the internet and you know, at the time it really didn't feel like a huge problem. Uh like from our perspective there wasn't much of an impact, but there was some impact, but then later on that day and the next day I was reading some articles and like apparently it was a pretty big deal for a lot of people. So uh yeah, wasn't wasn't just us, it's one 

Josh
 - 
of those things like I could just kept seeing it more and more like just pop up in random places though to like, not, not necessarily in our world, but it was just like affected all kinds of different things. 

Ben
 - 
Yeah, yeah, so shout out to ssL labs for their ssl testing tool to put a link to that in the show notes. Whenever you have a question about your ssl you should check that first because it does tell you when, when things are bad. 

Josh
 - 
Yeah, I hadn't used that tool before and it was very very helpful on customer support. Especially like sending to people and we needed to like prove that we were, we were not at fault like you know, it gave us like a smoking gun that we could. Yeah. Yeah. Really great. 

Starr
 - 
That's always a weird thing to do in customer services and it's like um it's like no, actually like I found the line in the library you mentioned. That's actually the problem. It does everything to do with this. Yeah. Yeah. And then um and then facebook goes down so I'm thinking I'm thinking we are like, like spooky Tober is starting up like things are starting to get witchy. 

Josh
 - 
I kind of like I I was like checked out the day facebook went down so I like missed most of like the fun on whatever online and I guess on what the other social networks that didn't go down, twitter mostly. But yeah, that's kind of wild. The story that I at least what I picked up. Yeah, I'm not on facebook. So 

Starr
 - 
my favorite part is how they house since everything was tied together, they couldn't get access to the building. They have the servers to do the like you know, manual physical reset then you had to do 

Josh
 - 
because of that security. 

Starr
 - 
Yeah. Like that's like I don't know that. It seems like it's out of some sort of movie or something. Yeah. It's just like a comedy. 

Josh
 - 
They like accidentally deleted their private keys to the building or something. 

Starr
 - 
Yeah. Or maybe like in oceans  type movie where um like they like the crew does that like the cruise like well if we mess with their DNS records and they'll be locked out of the hotel for six hours, let's give us time to like airlift the loot out. 

Josh
 - 
Yeah. Or what about like just like mission impossible. But with nerds. Uh huh. You know like trying to break into the building. 

Starr
 - 
I mean that's what we are here at found requests aren't right. Mission impossible with. 

Starr
 - 
Okay. Um So in addition to all that um just terrible stuff happening, there was um some good stuff happened. We had our, you know we have the hook relay, we did a little launch to our user base or honey badger user base. Um Do you wanna talk about that a little bit? 

Ben
 - 
Yeah that was that was the day before the ssl problem. So 

Josh
 - 
that was it. Yeah that's maybe that's why I was like the details. I was like trying to like remember what I did last week or whatever and I was like I could and then I remembered I'm like how did I forget about the hook really launch. But yeah, maybe that's I spent the next day, like on support. 

Ben
 - 
Yeah, yeah. Unfortunately, who really was impacted by the ssl thing. And so like, the day after our launch day, we had to deal with the on fire kind of situation. But you know, props to kevin very quickly finding that issue and fixing it. And uh, it's nice to have, you know, the service, uh, deployment that we have, pushing it out was quick. That was that was nice. But yeah, we, we were able 

Josh
 - 
to help some people on twitter because we, uh, we did some crowd sourced troubleshooting and yeah, we're able to share our fix with a few friends. So that was heroes. Hopefully we 

Starr
 - 
were, hopefully we think people like you for everyone. 

Ben
 - 
Yeah, but I think think the launch went well. We had an email out to our, to leveling up mailing list and got a pretty good response right on that. We had put a banner up and on the, on the website and put a banner up on the app. And those had some pretty good click throughs as well. I'm just looking at the stats from Fathom this morning and yeah, it's a good good share of traffic from those sources. So it's nice to see that people care enough to click through and zero working on that was pretty cool. 

Josh
 - 
Yeah, because I think, I think like the, uh, it was, I felt pretty encouraged by just the, you know, the level of engagement that we got from, from everything, like it seems like, I mean the worst that could happen is like you put out the, you know, you put out everything that's just crickets, like, you know, and so yeah, I mean people signed up, we got some sign ups and we started, I mean like we've our support and feature request throughput has increased for sure on like from almost zero to something. So, you know, we got, we got some feature requests coming in, that's that's all good. 

Starr
 - 
Alright. I suppose we should mention what hook really is and why people should be interested in it. Um since, yeah, that's some people might want to know, 

Ben
 - 
are you gonna tell the star what it is? Oh, I, I mean, I'm trying to find out 

Starr
 - 
your, well, uh, I'm on the edge of my 

Ben
 - 
seat over here. 

Starr
 - 
There you go. I don't know. Hook relay is an enterprise level Blockchain analysis tool. It's not love it, look really uh, lets you have um, web hooks that are, you know, as high quality of stripes. Web looks like very high quality, very fully featured and just like a couple of minutes without much code or work. And um yeah, and honey badger. We have a lot of, you know, web hooks that go out and stuf...

Transcription:
*Note, transcription is paraphrased with 1.3% accuracy

Ben "Expired certificates, yada yada yada, internet broke...no episode. Bada-boom-bada-bing, have a good weekend."

Schedulista

Transcript:
*This is an unedited, automated transcript, with only about 80% accuracy*
Ben
All right, so, uh welcome the founder quest today, you have me, Ben, because Star and josh are taking the day off and we have Felix of me who is with us or with me chatting about uh founder related stuff. It's just one of our uh, intermittent founder interview kind of episodes where we're just going to have a great chat, talk about some stuff, so welcome Felix. Thanks. So, Felix was telling you tell me right before we got started about the differences of having an actual conversation versus a podcast conversation and you had a great great tip about email. So, if you don't mind, could you like, hit me with that again? Because I thought that's pretty cool. 

Felix
 
Yeah, what I've noticed is if I write an email knowing that a lot of people are going to read this email, maybe it's an onboarding email that's going to be sent out to uh you know, many, many people, I don't seem to be able to write it in the same way as the emails I write to just that one person and I often feel that if I could just if I was just trying to sell to one person, I could probably do a pretty good job and I think the better attitude for me has always been to then trying to do that and then try and automate that and it turns out very differently than when I'm trying to to do the thing that is going to be automated right away. 

Ben
 
So yeah, I like that, I've had the same kind of experience where it's like, well you spend a lot of time crafting, crafting, crafting and then it feels crafted right? It doesn't, it doesn't feel like a real email. So do you like uh Try to like email individuals for like  times  times first and before you get the final copy that you want to send everybody? 

Felix
 
Yeah, exactly. And I think really not thinking about tools at all is really the right way to go about it um where all you try and do is think what is the best thing for this one customer and you do that for a couple of different customers and then you look for patterns and I would say when you do it a lot and this is the advantage you have with podcast is once you do it a lot, you kind of see some patterns as well, some sort of meta patterns of like how, how do the things that sound unnatural look versus the things that sound natural and I'll just tell you one that I've noticed, I don't know if this is something you've noticed, but when I write an email to a single person, it usually has one sentence in it, maybe two. 

Felix
 
Uh but when I write something that I think is, let's say, an onboarding email of some sort uh it's not gonna be that short. Uh so that's definitely a pattern I've noticed. I think we we noticed that as consumers or business owners, when we see inbound email, we automatically filter emails that have just one sentence very differently than we filter ones that are multiple paragraphs. 

Ben
 
Yeah, I never really noticed that. That's true. Yeah, because most of my personal emails are just like a couple of sentences, man, I was thinking back to the initial like set of onboarding or just stock emails that we had for honey badger, like, you know, you're building has failed or thanks for being a subscriber or whatever. And I was thinking back and like I wrote them and they're all like one or two sentences. I'm like, yeah, that's that's true. It's like versus this big long book, right? Yeah, 

Felix
 
yeah. In general, I think I'm a big fan of looking at software, automating things that people already do. I think sometimes that's the best software and as opposed to sort of rethinking everything, because I think a lot of the time when you rethink everything, most things people can do just less maybe less quickly than it would be if it were automated. And so I think when you rethink everything a lot of the time, it doesn't fit as well as it seems like it might have back in the lab. 

Ben
 
Yeah, true, we'll get back to that. I want to talk more about that, but I want to uh introduce you more fully since everyone might be thinking, hey we just dropped to the middle of conversations like yeah, you did just kind of jump in both conversation because Felix and I are old friends, we've been uh we've been hanging out and chatting about business for years now uh and Felix is an entrepreneur who is running a business called Schedule Ista, So Felix want to give us a quick rundown of what schedule list is. 

Felix
 
Yeah, well before Schedule East it was scheduled to, it was sort of an idea of, hey I want to start a company that is a B two B sas company. And one of the very first conversations I had about that Was with Ben, I don't know if you remember, I was looking back through my email  

Ben
 
yeah, 

Felix
 
our mutual friend paul introduced us and the topic of conversation was marketing and BtB Sas um something admittedly I still struggle with, I kind of had it on in my mind is oh this is something I'm going to be bad at and I don't know how to get customers. Um maybe maybe I need to reach out and figure out how that happens. Um and I don't, I don't know if this is okay to bring up here, but I'm curious to know, I mean, tell me if my characterization of our conversation is correct, but that conversation way back then I think you were pretty pessimistic and or at least I think as a friend you were looking or as a new friend, you were looking out for me and you were saying kind of don't do this crazy thing. Um 

Felix
 
Was that the advice you gave me and then if you were to meet someone like me today, would you, would you give different advice? 

Ben
 
Yeah, my my memory of that conversation was not that I wanted you to not do it, but it was like, I I saw some concerns, some red flags and I wanted to save you some pain just in case you hadn't, you know, like considered like, because as I recall trying to, you know, rewind back to  years ago, what that conversation was like, you're sitting across table from me and you're saying I want to build this business that's gonna require a lot of sales effort because I'm gonna be selling to some people that, you know, I can't really reach well online and here I was thinking, okay, so Felix is going to be like walking down the street, knocking on doors, trying to get people to buy his says and I'm like, 

Ben
 
okay, sure, but are you sure you want to sign up for that? That's kind of but I remember is that is that kind of 

Felix
 
remember, I think that's accurate and that's basically exactly what I did. And we even did some, some things like send out postcards. I might have mentioned that as an idea that I've had, I said, you know, I think uh well used to do that kind of thing and then it fell out of fashion, maybe there's maybe there's some wisdom there and I think um you realized how crazy I really was and how little I knew and there was nothing but love I felt coming from you, which made it even like harder to hear, I think. 

Felix
 
Um so I believed you and the irony too is I think I would probably, so I don't you didn't tell me yet how your answer would change, but I would I tell people, I meet people all the time who say they want to start a bootstrapped company and my first inclination sort of out of love is to say, you know, that can be tough, it can be uh you know, I've seen lots of them fail. And is this are you sure this is something that you want to do? Yeah, 
...

Koombea

Hook Relay

Transcript:
*note - this is an unedited, automatically generated, transcript with only about 80% accuracy*

Ben
  
So I say we we just had a new customer signed up just like minutes ago and said that the reason they signed up was our podcast. So awesome. Good stuff. Good stuff. So pro tip for you says operators out there, put a little box and your on boarding, asking people how they heard about you or whatever. It's very, very informative. 

Starr
  
Yeah, it does. And then do a podcast and wait  episodes. 

Ben
  
Those steps are optional. I really do like they're having like those, those uh onboarding introductions is what we call them. We have a channel in slack for them and having those show up periodically is like a little little endorphin rush. Like I love seeing those show up in our slack channel and you know, we also have a cancellations channel has the same thing with cancellation messages and that's not quite as fun. But thankfully we see if you are those messages that we do the onboarding messages, but I just, I really like having those things in slack. It's nice to see that throughout the day. 

Starr
  
Yeah, definitely. So imagine this is gonna be a little bit of a shorter one because we just recorded um last week's podcast, like on monday in today's thursday. So I don't know if there's, there's not as much time that's passed to let um I don't know to let the hot takes regenerate themselves. Mhm 

Ben
  
Right, well, I have a hot date for you and it's the grape, I guess most hot takes are great 

Josh
  
what we're best at. 

Ben
  
Uh so I'm working on an update to the Roku integration. So, you know, we haven't a clue add on and Uh we started to add on like, I don't know, back early, early days, it must have been like , or so. A long time ago. Well in , apparently Hiroki released an updated version of their API for partners like us and uh it has a new provisioning thing and you can actually call back to their API and get some information about like supervision to add on and stuff like that. Which is great. Uh We haven't ever really gotten around to changing our particular add on because it works just fine. So why bother? 

Ben
  
But I've been looking at synchronizing the Heroku pricing with our current pricing because we've done a number of pricing variations since we launched the Heroku. And so now the two sets of pricing are pretty out of sync. So as I started to get into that I was like well you know well I'm here, how about I just you know update the A. P. I write classic classic rabbit hole. Right? And and and so I spent some time doing that and found you know some interesting quirks and so on about our integration and anyway it's all good like I got the work done and I did a pr and and josh and kevin like giving the thumbs up and I'm ready to deploy except 

Ben
  
I have two questions for the Heroku people about about the migration because the migration you gotta be careful right? Because like the V one A P. I. Is not compatible with the V three Api And so you have to store different sets of data and the I. D. S in particular are different like they used to pass what they call a ready and now they pass an add on I. D. And you gotta you know handle the transition carefully or else someone you know maybe they can't add on the thing. Maybe they can't start being customer, maybe they can't remove the adult which would be a problem because you know or maybe they can't log in that would also again yeah prop trading right? 

Josh
  
And so because they still get the emails 

Ben
  
so so my questions for harajuku around this migration revolve around this idea and like handling sso and making sure that we can still provisions and provisions properly anyway. So I put two questions to them and support two days ago and that's my gripe because that's the holdup. That's the holdup I can't deploy it because I can't get answers to these questions apparently. So I'm just like oh okay I understand like people are busy and stuff but uh I would like an answer some time you know and there's no like there's no auto responder there's no we'll get back to you in X. Amount of time. No it's just like off into the void and I'm just waiting 

Starr
  
did you maybe did you maybe use the legacy um support page Instead of the current ? 

Ben
  
No no use the current one. Okay good question though. Good like that 

Josh
  
this is just another example of like coding being the easy part. Uh huh. 

Ben
  
Yeah and also a good example of like rd party integrations causing you know uh technical maintenance burden like like um oh for example like clubhouse that recently renamed themselves the shortcut. Right? And so we had to, you know, do a little bit of work there and renamed stuff inside of our app wasn't a whole lot of work but it was some work but you you add, you multiply that kind of work by the number of integrations you support and all of a sudden like this is ongoing maintenance work that doesn't, it's just you're just treading water trying to keep up with what everybody else in the world is doing. Right? 

Josh
  
Yeah. And as new as new integration, you know, his new apps come onto the market and everyone wants to integrate with them, you just gradually expand until you, I mean you still have to support the old ones. Yeah, I think we're definitely getting to the point where every new little thing we add is like yeah, yeah, we're starting to feel it, we are starting to feel it. Yeah. And like the the depth of the integration is also I've noticed is like a big, big thing because like there's a few integrations that we like go a lot deeper with like get hub, you know, heroic. Who obviously is like a good example of that. We have a lot of issues with vera I've I've seen but who doesn't 

Ben
  
um 

Josh
  
but it does seem like the like I don't know, the more standardized something can be. Um and yeah, just I don't know when you're like integrating with a lots and lots of custom API's and stuff like that. They're going to switch it out on you at some point. 

Josh
  
Yeah. Support. It 

Ben
  
would be, it would be nice if there was like a happier plus plus, like a next level happier right? Where uh it just, it just abstracts away all these differences and you can just, you know, it's like a universal kind of thing and it's like, yeah, possibly be impossible. But 

Josh
  
are almost like the pitch I get to the pitch there being almost like an LTs, like like an LTs contract for for integration API is like, you gotta, you gotta contract. This API isn't going to change for like  years. Um and they'll just, you know, they'll do the and we'll do the internal migrations to keep the ap the same for you. 

Ben
  
Yeah, there you go. That's that's an interesting idea. I wonder how that kind of service would cost. 

Josh
  
I don't know, I know there's been a few um someone a micro, someone, a Microsoft had like a service that built like manage the integration side for you. Um was that Jonathan? Um Yeah, yeah, I don't know if that was like similar. I know it wasn't quite, that wasn't quite the idea, but like it was the idea that like,...

Transcript:
*note - this is an unedited automatically generated transcript with about 80% accuracy*

Josh: So we really are we doing this, uh, super quick. Do we need to like speed up our voices? Artificially

Ben: The chipmonk episode.

Starr: There you go. No, we should just, we should slow them down. So it'll um, we can just record  a  minute episode and then we'll take  minutes to listen to it.

Josh: Yeah, yeah. That's right. That's what we've been doing all along. That's our life hack is it takes us  minutes to record these episodes and you listened to them in  minutes.

Starr: Yeah. So that's the, um, so I'll fill in our listeners. We, um, we miss our normal recording day on Friday, and so we're making it up on a Monday, which means like we're jam packed in with a bunch of other stuff. Um, so this may be a little  shorter than usual and I'm sorry. I know you just have to have all of us all the time and we're just giving it all we can right now.

Josh: Yeah, it'll be just as off topic though. So, um,

Starr: I would thank God.

Ben: Yeah. Speaking, speaking of off topic, I have, I have a public service announcement to make. As, as you know, I've been getting more into the electric vehicles scene, uh, personal mobility, micro mobility, all that kind of fun stuff. And I, you know, a few months ago bought an electric scooter.  It's a mantis for those who are curious, who are in the know, uh, and I've been really enjoying that, like riding back and forth to work and goofing off and that sort of thing. But the thing that's, the public service announcement is, uh, wear a helmet. If you're going to ride one of these pillars. I just, this past week saw two different people riding on scooters, similar to mine, like higher powered scooters, mixing it up with traffic, like on  mile per hour roads and not wearing a helmet. And I just thought that is insane.  Like, I don't know. Maybe, maybe, yeah, you should definitely wear a helmet if you're going to ride electric scooter at  miles an hour, just saying that's my PSA.

Josh: I did go for, I went for a, my first ride on an EBI bike, um, last week and I must confess I did not wear a helmet. And, uh, I have to say it was, you know, it was kind of fun. Like, you know, little dangerous,  there was no traffic. Like there was very little traffic, so in my defense.

Ben: Okay. That's a plus. Do you remember what kind of bike your Rover's like a super ? Like one of those models

Josh: I have, I have a very bad memory for names of things and I was told, but, uh, no, I don't know, but actually I was, it was with, uh, it was the bike of, uh, Mike Perrin, who is a friend of the show and creator of sidekick. So I'm  sure he will, uh, hopefully listen to this and, and let us know. And then we can fill everyone in the next week. Maybe

Ben: I think, I think he has a super . It's a, and that's a pretty sweet,

Josh: It's like the super it's like one of the fastest ones on the market, he said, yeah, cool. Or something like that.

Ben: I'm going to have to get down to Mike's house and borrow some of his bikes. And

Josh: It was a lot of fun. I'd never, I'd never done that before. And I, I get the appeal now.

Ben: Yeah. So when, when I got my scooter, Mike was like, I don't  know, scooters. They're kind of, uh, I don't exactly what he tweeted, but he's like, yeah, they're kind of sketchy because they're not very stable and stuff and he's right. They are integrated stable compared to the bikes, but it's still a lot of fun. So I just wear a full face helmet to counteract the wobbliness. Yeah.

Starr: Did y'all know I have a, an electric bike? No, it's called a Peloton.

Josh: You were so smug with that one.

Starr: It's the perfect bike for me because it doesn't move. Um, it's like all the, got all the nice things about the bike, like the workout, but you don't go anywhere. You don't have to Dodge any traffic. Uh, don't have to wear a helmet screen.

Josh: Yeah. Those sound, those do sound seriously though. Those, those, uh, look pretty, pretty nice.

Ben: Yeah. I have, I have a low-tech Peloton. It's just a trainer. I brought my bike on.

Josh: Is your bike on it? Yeah. Yeah. But I like, I don't know the what, from what I've heard of the Peloton  , uh, those they've got all the bells and whistles right star.

Starr: Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean, really it's um, it's not so much about the actual bike for me. It is, as it is about having some like super enthusiastic person, like, um, playing really good music and just being like, you've got this, you were born for greatness and just like saying stuff like that at me. Um, while I'm like trying to, you know, read them a little bit,

Josh: You say that, but like, you know, like I, I try to, you know, give that experience  to Katelyn, for instance, my wife and she just like, she hates like, she's like get, get out of here.

Starr: I think, I think it's easier. I think it's a little easier when there's not like an actual person there, you know, Just hire a social exercise

Ben: That started out live, get, you know, the, uh, the motivational speaker guy lives in a, down by the river. I'm just, I'm just thinking about Chris Farley,  like standing by your exercise bike. You can do it. You've got this.

Josh: If we could get a, yeah. If we could get that, um, on the Peloton, I would subscribe like if he was one of the trainers, I mean, like, you know,

Ben: So just bring him back from the dead, have him record some such the Peloton and then, yeah, that'd be awesome. I miss Chris Farley.

Starr: So Ida likes to ride the Peloton too, that she's not big enough for it. Um, but she  is a, her, her feet can touch the pedals. Um, but they can't reach all the way down. So she's kinda like kicks the pedal down and then catches it on the way back up. And so she asked me to put on a little video so she can do it to the music too. Yeah. Oh, I need to give an update about my, um, about the printing press. I know everybody's like waited, waiting the press breath about that

Josh: Date. I thought, yeah. I didn't know. There was news so, well, I

Starr: Mean, the news  is I have given up on it. I went down to Tacoma. I went down to see it and it worked and everything, and I just really got a sense for like how big and heavy it was going to be. And, um, then I started, I measured it and I started actually trying to figure out how I would get it into my building. Um, because like, it's just, my, my office is  in the backyard. It's, uh, it's, we're having our backyard redone soon, but right now it's just all bumpy and lumpy. And so it's like trying to like roll this thing. I would have to construct like a, a path out of plywood. I'd have to build a ramp up to my, um, the doorway, um, then to actually get it into the location where it's going to be. I would have to completely like dismantle all my shelving and, um, then like re assemble it once I had put the thing in place.  And so if I ever wanted to move it again, I'd have to like completely take down all my shelving. I was just like, this is too much. Like, this is, um, like I can't, I can't justify this on it. Like I'm, I'm waking up early in the morning and not being able to get back to sleep. Cause I'm like, how the hell am I going to like m...

Goatse.cx

Full transcript:
*This is an unedited automated transcript which is only about 80% accurate*

Starr
 
Yeah, well, sad news. Um I did not see my printing press last weekend because I I came down with a cold, it wasn't it wasn't covid, so don't worry, it's okay. Um But we're waiting for the test to come back. So you know the difference between now and the before times is now when you get a cold life shuts down and you can't really do anything until your results come back. 

Josh
 
Well and you know the other thing about like during the pandemic, everyone's home like just the printing press market is just going wild right now, so like, there's going to be gone, I'm sure it'll be gone long gone by the time you're feeling better. 

Starr
 
Exactly, everybody's going to print their manifestos, 

Josh
 
right? Yeah, 

Ben
 
well, you know, since my kid is able to take care of his own school needs and I didn't have to like sideline myself for that, like, like star, I actually got some stuff done this week, but uh but not going to tell you me. So I've been really get into this groove on having other people do things, so 

Starr
 
it's not definite, 

Ben
 
it's so nice, so nice. So shall I was able to deliver a feature that we want in Hungary there for a long time and that is being able to deliver to multiple your ills. So we give you a hook address that you post to and then you can say, okay, up to three different Charles will then get that delivery that post. So 

Josh
 
that's pretty cool, 

Starr
 
wow, Broadcasting broadcasting 

Ben
 
your publisher, this is something that one of our customers asked for and something we've wanted for a while and, and uh I apologize, I think to shop because I kind of dropped the ball on, you know, helping this get this, get this feature over the goal, you know, he uh he had done some work a few months ago and I just was distracted and didn't really uh follow up on it, like, I should have, and then and then once I did follow up like I should have, then it's like, you know what, I don't think we want to go with this round, I think I want to go a different round. So we ended up re implementing the whole thing in a different way, but so I appreciate his patients but got that launch, That's feeling pretty good. 

Starr
 
That's awesome. So um so hook really is a product that we're uh you know, we've lost, you can just go sign up for right now, right? Yeah. Ok. Yeah, so it's uh it's like magic for your wife hooks, so if you if you want to um if you want to send a web hook, you just send it to our service and then we make sure that it gets deliver, that's super reliable, that I don't know, there's just a lot of details that you have to implement around doing web hooks, right? And we do this for you. And so now it sounds like you can have that sort of broadcast to multiple points 

Josh
 
also works for inbound web hooks. So no matter what the flaky services that is sending you sending you web hooks, I think what we're doing right now is broadcasting, by the way, um but yeah, no matter what the flaky service that you have to integrate with, you know, to send to receive data from them if your app goes or maybe your app is flaky, if if your app is going down, um you can just be sure that when you get back online, hook relay will be there to relay all the web hooks that you missed. 

Starr
 
Well, I've got I've got a term for it, you can feel free to use this in your marketing. So that means that um since it does both outbound and inbound, that means you're full duplex 

Josh
 
well, Duplex. I like it, I like it going to write it down, You know, like that would be an awesome, like if we did kind of like, you know, like, like I don't know, like s marketing theme, like with me on colors and stuff and we're like full duplex. Just that going well together. 

Ben
 
Do you remember speaking of the eighties, remember back and when you connect with your modem and it would be the wrong duplex setting. And so everything you typed would be double right? You get every care, it could be a double f. You know? And they're like, oh man, full duplex. I gotta reconnect at half duplex. Yeah, 

Josh
 
we should we should do like a, like a marketing, like, like a Youtube video, you know, like this little sketch or something of you trying to connect to your modem. Yeah, 

Ben
 
awesome. 

Josh
 
Yeah. So 

Ben
 
yeah, in fact, I used, I used to create this morning for doing an inbound hooks setting up. So we're working on the broadcast emails, that's the task, that's another task has been on our to do this for a long time. Uh I was working on that this morning and uh we use postmark for our email delivery and when one of the things uh they did recently a few months ago they had this new feature and their product called announced broadcasts, announcements, broadcast exactly what it's called. But basically before this feature, post Margaret, just about transactional email, like it could only send things that were triggered by a user, right? Like a password reset email or you know, in our case we send a lot of notifications for errors, you know, to individual users, 

Ben
 
but then they launched this new broadcast feature which allows you to use their infrastructure for, you know, kind of marketing, like emails like maybe announcements about your, you know, new products or your new features or maybe have new terms of service or whatever. So more and more of a broadcast email rather than an individual email. And uh one of the features that they have and the reason why I was using the web book is they can they have, we'll add an unsubscribe link for you at the bottom of the emails that go out. And so of course the person may click the unsubscribe if they don't want to hear from us anymore, which would be, you know, totes sad, but it happens 

Ben
 
and then it goes to postmark and then postmark records that unsubscribe intent and then sends it can optionally send a web hook to you. And so uh yeah, so I set up a cookery, they target for that postmark web hook so that even if our app goes down, which of course it never does, but if it did then we would have all those, you know, web hooks from postmark happily saved in Hungary. They uh getting along of it to see is nice. I wonder 

Josh
 
like the go ahead. Sorry, 

Starr
 
I was just going to say. So you can um the inbound web hooked payloads get saved and then you can just pull them down whatever you want. That's convenience. Like I want I want that inbound with a hook data, but I don't want to build a web hook right now, I don't want to build like something to like get that right now. I just want I just want to know that the data someplace and get it later. 

Josh
 
Yeah. Yeah. I wondered like the utility of that feature might be pretty, pretty huge depending on like what people are doing with web hooks these days, you know like I don't know like receiving, you know, recording payments or um activated subscriptions. Yeah, 

Ben
 
or you know if you're if you're building a feature that's gonna accept the web hook but you don't it is not launched yet or you don't know exactly what you're going to ...

Full Transcript:
Ben:
Yeah. I've been holding out for the new MacBook Pros. The M1 is pretty tempting, but I want whatever comes next. I want the 16-inch new hotness that's apparently supposed to be launching in November, but I've been waiting for it so patiently for so long now.

Josh:
Will they have the M2?

Ben:
Yeah, either or that or M1X. People are kind of unsure what the odds are.

Starr:
Why do they do that? Why did they make an M1 if they can't make an M2? Why do they have to keep... You just started, people. You can just have a normal naming scheme that just increments. Why not?

Josh:
M1.1?

Ben:
That would be awesome.

Starr:
Oh, Lord.

Josh:
Yeah, it would.

Ben:
M1A, Beachfront Avenue.

Starr:
So last week we did an Ask Me Anything on Indie Hackers, and that was a lot of fun.

Josh:
It was a lot of fun.

Starr:
I don't know. One of the most interesting questions on there was some guy was just like, "Are you rich?" I started thinking about it. I was like, "I literally have no idea." It reminded me of when I used to live in New York briefly in the '90s or, no, the early '00s. There was a Village Voice article in which they found... They started out with somebody not making very much money, and they're like, "Hey, what is rich to you?" Then that person described that. Then they went and found a person who had that level of income and stuff and they asked them, and it just kept going up long past the point where... Basically, nobody ever was like, "Yeah, I'm rich."

Josh:
Yeah. At the end, they're like, "Jeff Bezos, what is rich? What is rich to you?"

Starr:
Yeah.

Josh:
He's like, "Own your own star system."

Starr:
So, yeah, I don't know. I feel like I'm doing pretty good for myself because I went to fill up my car with gas the other day and I just didn't even look at the price. The other day, I wanted to snack, so I just got a whole bag of cashews, and I was just chowing down on those. I didn't need to save that. I could always get another bag of cashews.

Ben:
Cashews are my arch nemesis, man. I can't pass up the cashews. As far as the nut kingdom, man, they are my weakness.

Starr:
I know. It's the subtle sweetness.

Ben:
It's so good. The buttery goodness.

Starr:
Yeah, the smoothness of the texture, the subtle sweetness, it's all there.

Ben:
That and pistachios. I could die eating cashews and pistachios.

Josh:
There you go. I like pistachios.

Ben:
Speaking of being rich, did you see Patrick McKenzie's tweet about noblesse oblige?

Josh:
No. Tell me.

Ben:
Yeah, we'll have to link it up in the show notes. But, basically, the idea is when you reach a certain level of richness, I guess, when you feel kind of rich, you should be super generous, right? So noblesse oblige is the notion that nobility should act nobly. If you have been entrusted with this respect of the community and you're a noble, then you ought to act a certain way. You got to act like a noble, right? You should be respectful and et cetera. So Patio was applying this to modern day, and he's like, "Well, we should bring this back," like if you're a well-paid software developer living in the United States of America, you go and you purchase something, let's say a coffee, that has basically zero impact on your budget, right? You don't notice that $10 or whatever that you're spending. Then just normalize giving a 100% tip because you will hardly feel it, but the person you're giving it to, that'll just make their day, right? So doing things like that. I was like, "Oh, that's"-

Josh:
Being generous.

Ben:
Yeah, it's being generous. Yeah. So I like that idea.

Josh:
That's cool.

Ben:
So-

Starr:
So it's okay to be rich as long as you're not a rich asshole.

Ben:
Exactly. Exactly. That's a good way to bring it forward there, Starr.

Starr:
There you go. I don't know. Yeah. I think there's some historical... I don't know. The phrase noblesse oblige kind of grates at me a little bit in a way that I can't quite articulate in this moment, but I'll think about that, and I will get back with you.

Josh:
Wait. Are you saying you don't identify as part of the nobility?

Starr:
No.

Ben:
I mean, I think there's a lot of things from the regency period that we should bring back, like governesses, because who wants to send your child to school in the middle of a COVID pandemic? So just bring the teacher home, right?

Starr:
Yeah. That's pretty sexist. Why does it have to be gendered? Anyway.

Ben:
Okay, it could be a governor, but you might get a little misunderstanding. All of a sudden, you've got Jay Inslee showing up on your doorstep, "I heard you wanted me to come teach your kids."

Josh:
I don't know. I'll just take an algorithm in the home to teach my kids, just entrust them to it.

Starr:
Yeah. Oh, speaking of bringing things back, I told y'all, but I'll tell our podcast listeners. On Sunday, I'm driving to Tacoma to go to somebody's basement and look at a 100-year old printing press to possibly transport to Seattle and put in my office for no good reason that I can think of. It just seems to be something that I'm doing.

Josh:
Do you like that none of us actually asked you what you were intending to do with it? I was like, "Yeah, just let me know when you need to move it. I'm there." I just assumed you were going to do something cool with it, but ... Yeah.

Starr:
I appreciate that. I appreciate the support. I'm going to make little zines or something. I don't know.

Josh:
Yeah. If I get a lifetime subscription to your zine-

Starr:
Okay, awesome.

Josh:
... that would be payment.

Starr:
Done. Done.

Josh:
Cool.

Ben:
Yeah, sign me up, too. I'll be there.

Starr:
Well, I appreciate that.

Ben:
I mean, who could resist that invitation, right, because you get to... If you get to help with moving that thing, you get to see it, you get to touch it and play with it, but you don't have to keep it. It's somebody else's problem when you're done with the day, so sounds great to me.

Starr:
There you go. Well, I mean, if you read the forums about these things, this is one of the smaller ones, so people are just like, "Ah, no big deal. No big deal. It's okay." But I was happy to hear that there's no stairs involved.

Ben:
That is the deal-breaker. Yeah.

Josh:
Yeah. But it-

Ben:
If you ever get the friend helping you to move their piano, you always ask, "Okay, how many flights of steps," right?

Starr:
Yeah. Oh, I just thought of something I could do with it. I could make us all nice business card to hand out to nobody.

Ben:
Because we're not going anywhere.

Josh:
I just think of my last six attempts at having business cards. They're all still sitting in my closet, all six boxes of-

Starr:
I know. People look at you like, "What, really, a business card? What?"

Josh:
Yeah, like all six generations.

Starr:
Yeah.

Ben:
I hand out one or two per year. Yeah, just random people and like, "Hey, here's my phone number." It's an easy way to give it to somebody.

Josh:
Just people on the street?

Ben:
Exactly. Like a decent fellow, "Here you go." Thank you.

Josh:
Yea...

Full transcript:
Starr:
All right. Welcome back. Welcome back, everybody. So we took a little break. We're going to have her hot vax summer, but that-

Josh:
Hot vax summer.

Starr:
It turns out that was the mirage. It turns out that was a mirage.

Josh:
Well, it did reach 112 degrees in Portland. So it was hot.

Starr:
There you go. Yeah. The summer never existed. It was just an illusion caused by our overwhelming thirst for lots of things.

Josh:
Mirage.

Ben:
Well, there were a couple of weeks there that I thought, "Yeah. This is going to work out. And then Delta.

Starr:
Yeah. It was a couple of nice weeks, wouldn't it?

Ben:
Yeah. It was. It was.

Starr:
Except for the panic about, "Oh, crap. I need to learn how to deal with people again."

Josh:
Wouldn't it be wonderful when we can just look back on those two weeks and just remember those last good two weeks?

Ben:
Yeah. Went 112 in Portland. That's pretty bad. It got to 116 in my garage.

Starr:
Yeah.

Ben:
It's pretty warm.

Josh:
Yeah. That's like melt some things if you're not careful.

Ben:
I did not know this until well, at the beginning of the pandemic, that there was actually a special class of freezer called the garage freezer because at the beginning of the pandemic I wanted to have a freezer in my garage. I'm like, "Okay. I'm just going to go to Home Depot and buy a freezer." Oh, no, no, no, no. You can't just buy a freezer to put in your garage. You have to have a garage freezer to put it in your garage. So we have a garage freezer and even with 116 in the garage, the stuff stayed frozen. So I guess it actually works.

Josh:
Nice. Yeah. My freezer survived as well.

Starr:
I mean, not having a garage freezer in your garage is almost as bad as wearing white after labor day, or is it before labor day? I forget.

Josh:
I don't know. I never wear white.

Starr:
I just don't wear white.

Josh:
Yeah.

Starr:
Yeah.

Starr:
Stains too easily.

Josh:
I just always dress like I'm going to a funeral.

Starr:
All right. So today's going to be a little bit of a short episode. So we should probably get to the content.

Ben:
I thought we were already in the content.

Starr:
I know our reader.

Josh:
Yeah. It might be short. I don't know.

Starr:
Oh, we are?

Josh:
Our podcasts tend to have a mind of their own.

Ben:
That's true.

Starr:
Well, that's true. But we've got this Ask Me Anything schedule.

Josh:
Oh, yeah.

Starr:
20 minutes from now.

Josh:
Well, the great thing about asynchronous ask me anything is that they're asynchronous so you can post them even while you're on a podcast and answer the questions whenever you want.

Starr:
Yeah. Maybe you can, but my brain does not work that way.

Josh:
Oh, I've got it all queued up.

Starr:
I've got a one track mind.

Josh:
It's just a button press. We're locked and loaded.

Starr:
Oh, you're like Kramer. You've got the button.

Josh:
No. I'm ready to go.

Starr:
Sell sell sell!

Josh:
So yeah. At 10:30, we're recording this podcast. It's 10:08 right now. Pacific. And we're going to be doing an ask me anything AMA on the indie hackers forums.

Starr:
Yes. And it's a last minute affair as of 20 minutes ago. I didn't have an indie hackers invite code. We're running around scrambling.

Josh:
Yeah.

Starr:
Yeah. Ben wanted to try a new podcast recording software, and I'm just like, "No. I can't handle this amount of change in my life right now."

Josh:
We need to title this episode, live from the indie hackers backstage, by the way.

Josh:
[crosstalk]

Starr:
Oh, yeah. I don't know if you like a live album.

Josh:
Yeah.

Starr:
Okay.

Josh:
We're doing it live.

Starr:
Well, so Ben suggested, when you talk about one work thing and one vacation thing we did. And I guess, I'll start because I didn't actually have a vacation. I just got sick a lot, which I didn't get COVID, but there was some sort of bug that was going around and I got it and I was out for a couple of weeks. And so I guess that was my vacation. I don't know. I just played a lot of Diablo III.

Josh:
That's cool.

Starr:
Yeah.

Ben:
We got our worst vacations in Diablo III.

Josh:
Yeah. We got away for a few days. We went to this lake up north of Spokane in Washington and just five nights or something. But on the trip there, we're looking at our friends who were already up there, sent us the fire map of Washington. And we are traveling, literally our destination is in the middle of six fires.

Starr:
Oh no.

Josh:
We're like, "Should we be turning around?" I don't know. But it turned out all right. We breathe too much smoke the first couple of days, but it cleared up and-

Starr:
Yeah. After the first couple of days you hardly notice it.

Josh:
I only got a minor headache.

Starr:
Your nerves just die. The nerves in your lungs.

Josh:
Yeah.

Ben:
It's okay. We have good health insurance.

Josh:
I'm an ex smoker. So I'll just tack it on, it's just like adding a couple of days.

Ben:
It's like getting that upgrade package when you're buying a $30,000 car. And it's like, "What's another thousand dollars?

Josh:
Yeah. I've already got the risk.

Ben:
Yeah. I stayed closer to home. I read a bunch of books and I got out for a nice bike ride, went to the Snohomish Centennial trail. So it starts in Snohomish and it goes up through Arlington and it's rails to trail conversion. So there used to be railroad tracks there, but now it's a paved trail. And the thing that's neat though, they have a bunch of trail heads and a few of them have the recreations of the old train stations. So it's like, you can act like you're getting on board that train and actually getting on-

Josh:
Oh, that's nice. Really nice.

Ben:
Yeah.

Josh:
That's cool.

Ben:
That's a lot of fun. Let's see, a work thing that I did. It's a blur.

Josh:
Yeah.

Ben:
I probably migrated something somewhere at some point. And back-filled something-

Josh:
You were busy.

Ben:
Yeah.

Josh:
Yeah. You did a lot.

Ben:
Yeah. I can't remember what I did.

Starr:
Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of things, right? We're working with that sales consultancy, what is it? Intro CRM people?

Ben:
Yeah. Did do that.

Starr:
Have you done some outreach? You got some replies even?

Ben:
Yeah. Yeah. It's been kind of a mixed bag. So I've gotten some replies, but also the outbound stuff has not really been all that productive. So I'm questioning my life choices at this point.

Starr:
Have you had any overt hostility though?

Ben:
No overt hostility.

Starr:
Oh, you're not pushing hard enough then. You want your OH metric to be at least 10%. At least 10%, you want death threats.

Ben:
I will take that under advisem...

Josh:
I will be on vacation next week, and the week after.

Ben:
Nice.

Josh:
I don't know if you saw, I extended my vacation.

Ben:
I didn't see this.

Josh:
Yeah. So, surprise!

Ben:
Two weeks back to back. That's a record.

Josh:
Yeah. I decided I'm feeling it and I don't think a week is going to be enough. So just thought I'd go for it.

Ben:
Yeah, I get that. I get that. It's funny, I was looking... We started this vacation calendar, recently, since we are looking at transitioning away from Basecamp, where our vacation calendar was, we are now putting a vacation calendar in Google calendar, because we use G Suite for all of our stuff. And I set up this vacation calendar, and I noticed that Starr put one on there, and then Josh put on a vacation and then Kevin put on a vacation. And then, Ben Findley, just week after week after week, it's like everybody's taking a vacation. I was like, all right, so I put myself on vacation.

Josh:
Yeah, you got to put yourself in there. Yeah.

Ben:
I did. Yeah. I added myself yesterday, for the week after Ben Findley's vacation.

Josh:
I don't know if you went and... I went in and just put a bunch of vacations for the rest of the year for-

Ben:
I saw that.

Josh:
... myself. Yeah.

Ben:
That's awesome.

Josh:
I mean, they might change, but I figured, if I at least put them in there, that'll force me to think about it and decide. Because that's been an ongoing problem, I always wait too long and then, finally, take the vacation when I just desperately need it, and I want to avoid that cycle, like we're supposed to be. This is supposed to be sustainable.

Ben:
This is a calm company. It means, lots of vacations.

Josh:
Yeah. We should be calm if we're running a calm company.

Ben:
I like that idea of putting on these dates tentatively and just planning on it. I might try that.

Josh:
Yeah. You should just plan them out. Also, yeah, I put our traditionally long winter vacation on there too, which I think is currently the last two weeks of December and the first week of January, which we can always move that around or sometimes we do the Hack week or whatever.

Ben:
Yeah. I've come to cherish that tradition. I like having that-

Josh:
It's nice.

Ben:
Knowing that's going to be downtime. You know?

Josh:
Yeah.

Ben:
I mean-

Josh:
I like the first week of the year off is kind of... there's something about that, where you don't have to go back to work the day after New Year's or whatever. That feels really nice.

Ben:
I mean, in reality, we're still on call. So if something broke, were going to work, but, yeah, it is nice not having that expectation of showing up and doing actual productive stuff.

Josh:
Yeah. Yeah. It's the low bandwidth mode.

Ben:
Yeah. It's also this past winter when we did that, I used that to just experiment with some stuff, work-related stuff like Elasticsearch and whatever, so that's kind of fun. It's a tinkering... even if we don't do an official Hack Week, it's still a good time to do some tinkering and get some of those creative juices going.

Josh:
Read some books on computer science or something like that, get excited about it again.

Ben:
Well, going through the SOC 2 compliance thing, the type two for the first time audit, one of the things that I came across that was new was this continuing education tracking thing. So the auditor wants evidence that we're actually doing continuing education for our employees. We always do conferences and stuff, but 2020 was a bad year for conferences, and we've never really tracked continuing education. We just like, "Yeah, let's do this conference," or whatever, and it's kind of ad hoc. And now it's like, "Oh, we need to track this, it's a good idea to plan something." So yeah, digging out those old computer science books or taking a course or doing a conference. Got to do it.

Josh:
Which is, well, you got to do it, but it's also, to me, that's one of my favorite things to do. I really like learning, so even in my spare time, that's what I like to do.

Ben:
Same.

Josh:
So I realized even with, yeah, my perfect workweek is a couple of hours maximum a day of doing the day-to-day things that you have to do, and then spend the rest of the day reading or learning something or working on improving your skills.

Ben:
Yep. Yeah. I to-

Josh:
That's what makes me happy.

Ben:
I don't try to do that every day, I like the idea, but I try to do that on Fridays. Friday to me is like the decompression day, I'm cruising into the weekend now. And so I try to put aside all the normal stuff and just something kind of interesting. Before we got on this morning, I was playing with some Docker stuff, not that we use Docker, but maybe we will someday, and just fiddling with it. You know?

Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Ben:
I think it's kind of fun.

Josh:
Yeah. Yeah. I like that.

Ben:
Until we get one of those customer requests that come in, I'm like, "Oh, I have to do some actual work now." And so, love our customers, but sometimes they can be kind of inconvenient, legitimate complaints about things need to be fixed.

Josh:
Or when there's an ops emergency, and so I drop everything and fix it. You had some of that going on this week. I know.

Ben:
But with both you and Starr got to experience those ops emergencies. It was actually a funny, so Starr, is on vacation, but the Starr was still on call for part of that time.

Josh:
The first night. Yeah. Because she had scheduled me to take over, was it yesterday? Whatever day it was-

Ben:
But in the morning.

Josh:
... but it was the night before. Yeah. It was like-

Ben:
Yeah, so I imagine in the future she might schedule you to swap a bit earlier, but-

Josh:
Yeah. I feel bad, because she said that, I guess, they had to get up early for a road trip and it's like 2:00 AM or something, or actually it was like 4:00 AM, I think, by the time the alerts died down.

Ben:
Yeah. The bad part was that there wasn't really anything to do. There was this spike in memory usage on our Redis Cluster, but it resolved itself, but only after sending some alerts saying, "Hey, somebody better pay attention to this," because that's a critical part of our infrastructure.

Josh:
Well, I mean, that's happened to me a few times. I mean, that's usually my on-call experience to be honest, and if it's worse than that, there's a good chance I'm waking you up anyways. But I mean, that's part of... You have a system well-architected, at least to the point, where if there is something, it does usually resolve itself, but still you need someone to sit up with it and babysit it until it does, just to make sure. And I mean, it would be totally unfair that you're the one who builds the system and also has to babysit it all the time, so our on call schedule is like a babysitter rotation.

Ben:
Yeah. Yeah. It's funny that you mentioned that, because I was looking at this vacation schedule, it's like, "Oh, when should I take vacation?" So I went and looked at the PagerDuty rotation to try and schedule my vacation away from my rotation on PagerDuty, so I didn't have to swap. And...

Hook Relay

Ben Orenstein 

Tuple
Write for Honeybadger

Full transcript:
Starr:
So Ben is joining us today from his car. It's bringing back fun memories. I recorded, I think the voiceover for our very first demo video in my car.

Ben:
Oh yeah? Nice. So as you may recall, I have a two story building that I lease one of the rooms, and the downstairs is a wine tasting room. Well with the pandemic, the company that had the wine tasting room, they closed shop. They stopped leasing, because who's going to go to a wine tasting room during a pandemic, right? Well they're leasing the space to a new tenant that's going to take that space. Apparently hey, we're getting back, things are reopening, let's taste wine again, but the new tenant wants to have a new door put in. So I got to the office today and they're like, "Yeah, we're putting in a new door." And then I'm like, "Cool." Didn't even think much of it. But then a few minutes later, there's all this drilling going on. I'm like, "Oh, I think probably the car is a better place to record today."

Josh:
Well at least you'll have some new friends soon.

Ben:
True, true.

Starr:
Yeah. Well I'm glad you made it, at least. And so what's up? I missed a week of the podcast and you guys invested our entire Honeybadger savings account into Bitcoin.

Josh:
Yeah.

Starr:
And I'm not sure that was the most prudent investment decision, y'all. I just wanted to say that.

Ben:
Yeah, the timing could have been better.

Josh:
Yeah, we really pulled a Roam Research on that one.

Starr:
Oh yeah. What do you mean by that?

Josh:
They invest in Bitcoin, apparently.

Starr:
Oh, they do? Okay.

Ben:
Of course they do.

Starr:
Of course. It's just a dip. You're supposed to buy the dips, Josh. It's just what, like a 30% dip? 40% dip?

Josh:
I wasn't watching it, but I read that it had recovered pretty quickly too.

Starr:
Oh. I have no idea. I didn't even follow it.

Josh:
As it does.

Starr:
I don't even follow it.

Josh:
Yeah. I just read random people's opinions.

Starr:
There you go.

Josh:
I forget where we left it last week, but I just wanted to state for record that I think I mentioned I made some accidental money in Bitcoin back when I was learning about block chain technology, but I have not bought any Bitcoin since, nor do I intend to, and I do not really view it as an investment asset.

Starr:
This is not investment advice.

Josh:
I just need to state my opinions for the future so I can look back on them with regret. If I don't say what I actually think, I'm never going to have anything to regret.

Starr:
There you go.

Josh:
I'm just going to commit.

Starr:
So you've decided to die on this no intrinsic value hill.

Josh:
Right. I'll let you know if I change my mind.

Starr:
Okay, that's fine. That's fine. Yeah, I don't really check. Last week y'all did the interview with Mike, right?

Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Josh:
Yeah, it was a good conversation.

Starr:
Yeah. I don't really pay attention to it, except occasionally I'll look at the chart. It's the same with GameStop. Occasionally I'll look at the GameStop chart and then just see what wild stuff people are saying about it. Yeah.

Ben:
Yeah, GameStop was hovering at about 150 for a while, but now it's up to like 170-ish, 180. Something like that. Yeah. I peek at it every now... it's on my watch list when I log into my brokerage account, so I just see it. I'm like, "Oh, okay. Cool." And then I move on and check out my real actual stock portfolio.

Starr:
Oh yeah, yeah. I'm not going to buy it. It's like a TV show for me.

Ben:
Yeah, totally.

Josh:
Yeah. To be fair, I really don't have much of an opinion either way. I still don't understand it, so I don't know. I just feel like I probably shouldn't be buying it.

Starr:
That's really good advice. I don't understand anything though, so what am I supposed to do, Josh? Huh? Huh?

Josh:
Yeah.

Ben:
Just buy the index fund.

Starr:
Yeah. I don't even understand that.

Josh:
I don't understand that either though, if you really think about it.

Ben:
That's actually, there was a good thread or so on Twitter. I don't know if it was this week or last week, but basically the idea was if you feel really confident in your own ability, in your own business, given that, you're probably spending most of your time in that business, right? We spend most of our creative time in Honeybadger because that's where we feel the most potential is. So you're investing basically all of your personal capital in this one business. How do you diversify that risk? Or do you diversify the risk? Do you double down? Maybe do you take investment to diversify, and so you buy out? Let someone do a secondary and so you take some cash off the table? If you did that, then where would you put the money? Do you just go, "Okay, I'm going to go buy Bitcoin. I'm going to go buy an index fund," or whatever. And if you do that, is that a better use of your money than having just kept the equity and just plowing more time into your business? Right?

Josh:
Yeah.

Ben:
It's an interesting thought exercise. It's like, "Hm." The whole investment mindset of your business is interesting to me.

Josh:
Yeah. Yeah, that was interesting. I think I saw that conversation, or maybe I saw a similar conversation where they were talking about even just 401Ks and for founders who are already fairly... have at least made it in whatever sense that means. Is it the best financial move to keep maxing out your 401K versus investing in your ability to generate revenue in your business?

Starr:
So a little bit of real talk here. If you are a founder who's made it, maxing out your 401K isn't really a blip on your financial radar.

Josh:
It's not a big... yeah. That was kind of the same thought I had. It's not like you're putting 50% of your income into it.

Starr:
Yeah. What is it, like 20 grand? Something like that?

Josh:
Yeah.

Starr:
It's a good chunk of change, but still. It's not like...

Josh:
Yeah. I don't know.

Starr:
Yeah, that's interesting. I think I'm just going to go all in on Pogs. I think they're due for a comeback. I think that's going to be how I diversify.

Josh:
But I think it's probably a good move to invest in yourself if you have the ability to build businesses. That definitely seems like a good investment, in any case. Probably still have a 401K. I tend to do everything, except Bitcoin.

Ben:
A 401K is a nice backstop. Just keep stocking money away, and later it will be there, hopefully. But in the meantime, really, really spend your time and your energy on making your business even more profitable. Speaking of making your business more profitable, so this past week or two weeks, I've been working on our SOC 2 type two audit, so I'm doing the evidence collection.

Starr:
Oh yeah?

Ben:
So that in this case means I take a bunch of screenshots of settings, like the AWS console and G-suite console to show yeah, we have users, and yes, we have login restrictions, et cetera. All the 150 different things that you're supposed to check off the list when you do the audit. And as I've been going through this process taking all these screenshots, honestly it's gett...

Full Transcript:
Ben:
I'm just gonna dive on in there. I'm so eager. I'm so excited. It's actually weird because Starr is the one that typically starts us off.

Josh:
Yeah. I thought we were just going to start with our just general banter, and then not introduce the guest until 30 minutes later.

Ben:
By the way.

Josh:
It is also our tradition.

Ben:
Yeah. Well we're getting better at this thing.

Josh:
Where we say, "Oh, by the way, if Starr doesn't sound like Starr..."

Ben:
Right, yes. Today Starr doesn't sound like Starr because today's star is Mike Mondragon instead. Welcome Mike.

Josh:
Hey Mike.

Mike:
Hey.

Ben:
Mike is a long time friend of the show, and friend of the founders. Actually, Mike, how long have we known each other? It's been at least 10, maybe 15 years?

Mike:
Probably 2007 Seattle RB.

Ben:
Okay.

Josh:
Yeah. I was going to say you two have known each other much longer than I've even known Ben.

Ben:
Yeah.

Josh:
So you go back.

Ben:
Way back.

Mike:
Yep.

Josh:
Yeah.

Ben:
Yeah.

Josh:
Because I think Ben and I met in 2009.

Ben:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Josh:
Or something.

Mike:
Okay.

Ben:
Yeah, Mike and I have been hanging out for a long time.

Mike:
Yeah.

Ben:
We've known each other through many, many different jobs, and contracts, and so on. It's been awesome.

Josh:
Yeah, Mike, I feel like I've heard your name since... Yeah, for the last, at least, 10 years just working with Ben. You've always been in the background. And we've realized this is the first time we've actually met face to face, which is crazy. But it's great to... Yeah.

Mike:
Yeah.

Josh:
... have a face to put with the little... What is it, a cat avatar? Is a cat in your avatar? You've had that avatar for a really long time I feel like.

Mike:
Yeah, that's Wallace.

Josh:
Okay.

Mike:
So I'm Mond on GitHub and Twitter, and that cat avatar is our tuxedo cat, Wallace. And he is geriatric now. Hopefully he'll live another year. And if you remember in that era of Ruby, all of the Japanese Rubyists had cat icons. And so that was... I don't know. That's why Wallace is my icon.

Josh:
Yeah. Nice.

Ben:
So, so do Wallace and Goripav know each other?

Mike:
No, no, they don't. They're like best friends, right? They had to have met at Seattle RB.

Ben:
Yeah. Internet friends.

Mike:
Internet friends, yeah.

Ben:
Yeah. So, Mike is old school Ruby, way back, way back, yeah. But the other funny thing about the old Rubyists, all those Japanese Rubyists, I remember from RubyConf Denver... Was that 2007? Somewhere around there. I remember going to that and there were mats and a bunch of friends were sitting up at the front, and they all had these miniature laptops. I've never seen laptops so small. I don't know what they were, nine inch screens or something crazy.

Mike:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Ben:
I was like, "How do you even type on that thing?" But it's a thing. So I guess... I don't know. I haven't been to Japan.

Mike:
There are laptops that you could only get in Japan and they flash them with some sort of Linux probably.

Ben:
Yeah. Yeah.

Mike:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Josh:
Okay. I wonder how long it took them to compile C on there.

Mike:
Yeah. So, about the orbit with the founders. So, I think I'd put it in my notes that I... And I consider myself a sliver of a Honeybadger in that I did have a conversation with Ben about joining the company. And then in 2017, I did do a little contracting with you guys, which is ironic in that... So we're probably going to talk about cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin. So the Bitcoin protocol is, essentially, on a four-year timer. And in 2017 was the last time that we were building up to, I guess, an explosive end to that cycle. And I had just been working at Salesforce at Desk.com, And I left because of Bitcoin. And then this year, four years later, I, again, just left Salesforce, but I just left from Heroku. And I didn't leave so much because of Bitcoin, I just got a better opportunity, and I'm a principal engineer at Okta, and I'm in the developer experience working on SDKs, primarily, the Golang SDK.

Mike:
So I think one of the things that they were happy about was that I had experience carrying the pager, and knowing what that's like, and they wanted to have an experienced engineer that would have empathy for the engineers to main the SDK. So I'm really excited to be here, because I'm not going to be carrying the pager, and it is the fun programming. What I imagine, listening to the founders, about the kind of fun programming that you guys get to do, working with different languages and whatnot. So, obviously right now, I'm starting out with Golang. We don't have a Ruby SDK, because OmniAuth provider is the thing that most people use. But, there's also PHP, and some Java, so I'm just looking forward to being able to do a bunch of different languages.

Josh:
Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. We don't know anything about SDK teams, Honeybadger. But yeah, it sounds like we have very similar jobs at the moment. So that's cool. We'll have to trade tips at some point. Yeah.

Ben:
Yeah, I'm excited that you're there, because I'm definitely going to hit you up on the SAML stuff, because SAML's a pain in the tuchus yeah, I'm sure you'll have some insights from your time there.

Mike:
Well, that was how I was even open-minded to talking to Okta, was the recruiter had contacted me and I think actually it was the recruiter... I don't know the structure of how this works, but a lot of companies have a prospecting recruiter. And I think that a veteran oriented prospecting recruiter contacted me. And so being a veteran, I'll usually entertain those cold calls. And so then when I was at Desk, I wrote... So Desk was a big Rails monolith. I wrote a microservice to break some of the SSO off of the monolith itself. And in writing the API documentation that was on desk.com, I actually used Okta as one of the examples as a SSO identity provider using SAML. So yeah, I have had a little bit of experience from the outside of Okta with SAML. And so maybe I'll have more experience here to answer your questions.

Ben:
Yeah. We'll have to have you back and we can just do a whole hour on that. It's a fun world.

Josh:
After we do an hour on SDKs.

Ben:
Yeah, and your code that you wrote for us still lives on in Honeybadger.

Josh:
Yeah. Was it the webpack? That was some of the work, right?

Ben:
Some of it, yeah.

Mike:
Yep.

Josh:
Yeah.

Ben:
And some GitHub integration work.

Josh:
And the integrations, yeah.

Mike:
Yeah, well if I remember correctly with the GitHub integration, I did do some GitHub integration, and it tickled your enthusiasm, Ben, and then I think you went in and like refactored that a little bit.

Ben:
Well, if you have a monolith like Redo that's been around for as long as ours has, things don't... It's like, what was that Theseus' ship, it's goes around the world but you replace things as it goes, and it's never the same app, right?

Mike:
Yeah, that's...

Bluey

Vogmask

Twist

It’s a Southern Thing

If I had a front porch

Full transcript:
Josh:
How y'all doing?

Ben:
I'm doing.

Starr:
Yeah, about the same.

Ben:
I've been riding my scooter to work all week.

Starr:
Oh, how's that?

Ben:
It's a lot of fun. Got a little electric kick scooter and top speed about 25 miles per hour. I was concerned about it being able to get up the hill that I have to go back up on my way home. It does drag a bit on that hill. I only got a single motor. Guess I should have gone with the dual motor. Otherwise it's fun. It's nice to be out in nature, I guess, air quotes, because you're still on the road and you're still a victim of cars and stuff. Being able to see the sun coming up over the hills and down to the valley and while you're just feeling the wind on your face, it's all good.

Josh:
It sounds nice.

Ben:
Yeah.

Starr:
Yeah, sounds awesome. I don't know. It seems terrifying to me, but I'm sure it's a lot of fun.

Ben:
It helped that I have done a lot of bike riding on roads for the past several years, so I'm already comfortable with the idea of mixing it up with cars and weaving in and out of traffic and realizing that people aren't going to see me and things like that. I think if I had just gone from driving a car straight to riding a scooter in the bike lane, that would be a little more terrifying.

Starr:
Yeah, that makes sense.

Josh:
Next you're going to have to upgrade to one of the electric skateboards or a Onewheel or something, just remove the handle bars.

Ben:
Right, right, right. Get one of those Onewheel things.

Josh:
This is leading up to-

Ben:
Totally.

Starr:
We're just working up to hoverboards. I mean I commute to my backyard office, so maybe I should get a zip-line or something from the main house.

Ben:
I like that, yeah.

Starr:
... then I could be extreme.

Josh:
We want a zip-line at our place out into the forest.

Starr:
That would be fun.

Ben:
You could do a zip-line from your deck to the sandbox, send the kids out to play.

Josh:
The kids would love it. Well, I was thinking more for myself though. Screw the kids. They don't need a zip-line.

Starr:
There you go. That's actually not a bad idea. We're going to get-

Josh:
That would be cool though.

Starr:
... a deck in the fall.

Josh:
Oh, nice.

Starr:
I had thought it would be fun to put a fireman pole on one side or something so kids could slide down it. It's raised up a little bit but not that much. It's like a kid's sliding size.

Ben:
That would be totally awesome. That would-

Josh:
We have been loving our new deck that we have had for a month and a half or something now. It's a new deck. If you have a really old, rickety deck, a new one is a big upgrade. Also ours is a little bit larger, too, so it's like a bigger house almost.

Starr:
Oh, that's great. We don't even have a deck it's just like a little stairway.

Josh:
I think you're going to like it, Starr.

Starr:
I think so, too. I know, deck life. It's going to be covered. I was just like-

Josh:
It's just the small things.

Starr:
I know. All I want is to be able to go out on a nice evening or something and sit and drink a cup of tea and be outside.

Ben:
And think about all-

Josh:
I was going to say, where do you drink the sweet tea in the summer if you don't have a front porch?

Starr:
Yeah, that's the main problem with houses up here in the Northwest is there's not real front porches. We have one that's like a weird nod at a front porch. It's like somebody maybe had seen a front porch once when they were... They were like, "Oh, maybe I'll try and do that from memory," without really knowing what it's supposed to be like.

Josh:
Some of the ones in Portland have them, but they're boxed in usually, and they're the older houses-

Josh:
... like the old Craftsmans or whatever.

Starr:
The stately grand dames.

Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Ben:
Well, here in Kirkland we're destroying all those old houses and putting in-

Starr:
Thank God.

Ben:
... townhouses.

Josh:
Hell, yeah.

Ben:
I drove by one this morning. This morning was the first morning since I got my scooter that I actually didn't ride the scooter because it was raining and the ground was wet. I was like, "Ah, I don't want to deal with that this morning." So I just drove. I drove past this house that... Well, yesterday it was a house. Today, it's a pile of sticks because they sold the lot, and they're going to split it into probably, I don't know, four lots and put in some townhouses. It's always a sad thing, but people got to have a place to live.

Starr:
Yeah, it's a shame. They tore down a house on my block, too, except it was a condemned house. It looked like a gingerbread fairy house that you'd find on just a random stroll in the woods where you'd go inside and you'd find just a delicious meal laid out on the table just waiting for you. So I'm a little sad it's gone just for, I guess, the storytelling aspects, the mythology of it. I guess it's probably best not to just have a condemned structure hanging out.

Josh:
I still do feel like Ida's is missing out with your telling of that story. I feel a little sad for you all.

Starr:
I know. I know.

Ben:
You're totally missing the threat possibility there. Like, "Don't misbehave or I'll send you over to the gingerbread house."

Starr:
Oh my god, yeah. Yeah, lots of great ways to traumatize my child.

Ben:
Speaking of traumatizing children, I was going through Twitter the other day, and the Washington State Department of Health had a tweet. I don't remember what the tweet was, but they had a GIF embedded in it. It was Stimpy from Ren & Stimpy as a scene from the show. I was like, "That's from the Department of Health? My generation is now in charge."

Starr:
With the Twitter account at least.

Ben:
We're now putting in-

Josh:
Yeah, exactly.

Ben:
That was the weirdest... It's like, "I'm an adult." That was a weird, weird experience.

Josh:
It is kind of strange when the people in charge start looking more and more like you until you realize they're just like-

Ben:
They're just little kids, just like I am.

Josh:
Then you wonder why the hell they're in charge.

Starr:
I'm getting like Paul Ryan listening to a Rage Against the Machine vibe from this.

Josh:
That's what I'd be playing if I was in charge of the Department of Health's-

Starr:
There we go.

Josh:
... Twitter account.

Starr:
I think this week has all been a little bit... I don't know. We're all maybe a little bit having a hard time focusing. I know I have a little bit just. It seems like that happens every spring as soon as the weather gets nice and it stops being nice, then it gets nice and it stops being nice. You're waiting by the door with your kayak. You just got to get the jump on it before everybody else gets to the lake.

Josh:
Yeah, I think that's a big part of it. Also allergies have been kicking in lately.

Starr:
Oh my god, yeah.

Josh:
I was really on top of it this year, but then I ran out of my Z...

Fluffy Arnold Schwarzenegger impression
Changes at Basecamp

Coinbase is a mission focused company

Faker

Full transcript:
I've been like texting with Zoomer person. And their emoji game is so deep and subtle that I just don't even know how to respond to these. I'm just like a thumbs up and they're just like emoji of falling leaves. How do I interpret that?

Josh:
Is that the difference between us and them? Is that they actually use all the emojis?

Starr:
I think so.

Josh:
We use six.

Starr:
I was just like, I can't just reply this with heart. So I just went and I was just like, emoji of panda bear. That seemed to be like an appropriate reaction to falling leaves. But I really don't know. I could have just completely been a jerk without realizing it.

Ben:
Yeah, I hadn't thought about it Josh but yeah, I think I can list the emojis that I actually use. There's thumbs up, there's troll face, there's pile of poop. Smiley face, heart. Yeah, that's pretty much it.

Josh:
You should get them tattooed on your arm. I think our other defining characteristic is that we're the generation that still use this text emoji and thinks it's cool.

Starr:
I don't think it's cool anymore. But sometimes it's just like, this is just what I'm doing. This is who I am. I'm just going with it.

Josh:
Yeah, we've accepted it now.

Starr:
Because if we keep at it long enough, it'll come back around. I've seen some people use text emojis ... They're emoticons, right? They're not emoji. But it's like ... The Zoomers with the super nuanced emoticon game. They're not typing these out, that's for sure. They've got like a clip file of these somewhere.

Josh:
It's like an additional vector of communication.

Starr:
Yeah, that's true.

Josh:
We'll never be fluent.

Ben:
I think emoticons are vastly superior to emoji, especially for this mighty face case, because it's always going to be the same representation no matter what platform you're on. But the emoji, they change. An apple emoji's differ from a Google emoji, etc. So if you send an emoticon, you what you're going to get.

Starr:
What if the person's using Wingdings as or fonts, though?

Josh:
Yeah, that's a good point.

Ben:
I guess I hadn't thought about that one.

Starr:
Comic Sans.

Josh:
I guess they had similar problems back when emoticons were all the rage, when they were first discovered. What happens if they're like ...

Ben:
I think emoticons are just going to be a symbol of the crusty old man syndrome. I also prefer text based email.

Josh:
That's a get off my lawn.

Ben:
Definitely. Shaking my fist at clouds.

Josh:
I was just going to say on text based email that reminded me of one thing I like about Front, which we recently switched for our support to Front. And they have a markdown mode. I like my email in markdown.

Starr:
So what is Front? Could you describe it?

Josh:
It's like a shared team inbox. Like a support tool ... I mean, we're using it as a support tool but I think it's more than that. It has a deep integration with Gmail. And basically lets a whole team share the same Gmail inbox, basically. But they have their own app and everything. And then it adds collaboration features to your email. So you can assign email, you can even add your personal email to it. So you could assign a personal email to someone on your team, and it would move it to their inbox which is handy for delegation.

Starr:
Yeah, that's pretty cool. I just started messing around with it and I really do like it. I really like this email centric focus of it. Where I guess you can use this as support but that's not really the only thing it's for.

Josh:
Yeah, it has a bunch of add-ons which we still need to explore a little bit and I know it also supports ... You can add custom paints to it like how Help Scout could ... Which we need to add for ... So that when someone emails us to our support address, it'll pull up their customer information from our proprietary admin tool.

Ben:
Yeah, I haven't done that yet. Because the way that Front does it is, of course different than the way that Help Scout did it. But I much prefer the way that Help Scout did it. They hit an HTML endpoint that you define, and then render the HTML inside the Help Scout UI. And then of course it to be simple, an Li or P or whatever. You couldn't do all kinds of crazy stuff because the space in which you would render is very limited. But at least it was straightforward. All I had to do is dump out some HTML, but with the Front, it's like, well, you got to create this single phase JavaScript app and talk to our API. I was like never mind.

Josh:
That's what I heard about it. That you can do more with it but it lacks that simplicity. And I agree with you that I personally would prefer the Help Scout approach, which is ... It's almost dumb but it's good in a good way.

Ben:
The only thing we link out to our admin tool anyways and display some text. Not even emoji, just want to display some emoticons. But Front is nice. I'm glad we switched. The one thing I wish that it did as well as Help Scout is having a widget on the page that's not a chat widget. So I really liked having the Help Scout widget because it just dumped ... Someone could use our app, open up the widget to contact support and they would send us a message rather than starting a chat, which we prefer. And Front doesn't really have that, they have a chat thing. And they do have support for a form submission which you would think would work but it's limited, it's like one URL. You have to specify what URL it is at. It's like, well, I mean, that doesn't work inside of our app because our users are all different URLs every time they talk to us.

Ben:
So really that feature from Front is really meant for a contact page on a website that's static. And that's not a good fit for us. That's frustrating. Now we don't have a widget, and I don't like that as much. Basically every support link now in the app is, well just email us at support. Which is fine but it's just not as nice as having that widget.

Josh:
Yeah, Help Scout definitely seems like it's a little bit more tailored specifically for our SaaS use case was. But overall, the collaboration flow in Front, it seems to be better. But yeah, Help Scout gets a lot right. And Front also doesn't do ... If you have documentation that you're also hosting with your support, Help Scout has a docs feature. And the thing that's nice about their widget is that if you use the docs feature, it also integrates with that. So you can send them to the docs first before they create a ticket. But we never used that so it wasn't a deal breaker for us.

Starr:
Yeah I don't really like it when I go to support and it's like, what's your problem? And I start typing and it's like, here's some links.

Josh:
How often do you click on ...

Starr:
I do click on it sometimes. It's like, this is not what I'm looking for. Thank you. That's why I'm looking for support, not going to your help question.

Josh:
That's a good point.

Starr:
I am going your help desk, I'm not going to go into your docs.

Josh:
Yeah. It depends on how competent or savvy your users are too. Because if you're the type of person tha...

Full transcript:
Starr:
All right. So now you're going to joke about how, since I've been vaccinated...

Josh:
Are you saying you are vacc'ed?

Starr:
In vacc'ed. I'm chipped. I like to say I'm chipped.

Josh:
Got your injection.

Starr:
People always act like being chipped is a bad thing, but now if I wander off, people will be able to return me to my family.

Josh:
Yeah. And I don't know what the big deal is, everyone loves new technology. I don't know anyone who's been bummed out that some new tech came out.

Starr:
That's true.

Josh:
I don't know what the... Yeah.

Starr:
I can't tell you the number of times I've been watching WWC and just being like, "why can't you just inject this into my vein?"

Josh:
Right.

Starr:
And now they are, and everybody's mad about it. Make up your minds, people.

Ben:
Let's see, so Starr you just got number one. Josh had two and I will have number two in a week and change.

Josh:
Yeah. I should have full immunity and well, I know on our next podcast in a week, it's been a week. Yeah.

Ben:
It feels good.

Josh:
So I'm not going to be here next week.

Starr:
Yeah. You get full immunity. Josh. You don't get diplomatic immunity, so

Josh:
Oh, okay. That's good to know.

Starr:
Cool it there, don't go off and rob any banks or anything.

Ben:
Did you see the new space shuttle, Lego kit?

Ben:
It's very cool.

Ben:
Yeah, it's the kit that is from the mission that launched the Hubble telescope. So it includes a little Hubble telescope as part of the kit. And you can mount it by itself, like display it on the stand itself or put it in the shuttle bay, the cargo bay of the shuttle.

Josh:
That's awesome.

Starr:
Oh, that's really cool.

Josh:
Yeah. My, my kids aren't quite Lego age yet. As we were saying the other day, they... what is the other, what's the bigger version?

Ben:
Duplo.

Josh:
Yeah. With their Duplo age, but actually, they're getting. We'll be getting Legos soon.

Ben:
Yeah. It's fun for the whole family.

Josh:
Yeah. It's going to be fun.

Starr:
Yeah. Mine's not really into Legos, but she loves... We just have like this big box full of random craft supplies, and she'll just go dig in through that and start building stuff.

Ben:
Pretty great.

Josh:
That's fun. My kids are both really into Pokemon right now. So that's actually pretty fun, because Pokemon's fun to watch.

Ben:
Have you done Pokemon Go with them?

Josh:
No, I haven't done that yet.

Ben:
I don't even know if the game is still around. Like..

Starr:
Oh, it's around. I know several people who are super into Pokemon Go and yeah, it's around trust me. Especially with the pandemic lots of people just wanted something to get them out of the house. They've been walking around with that.

Josh:
I could see that.

Ben:
We had this thing. So I haven't done Pokemon Go in quite a while, but when I was doing it, we had this Discord group here around town. They would use that to coordinate the battles. You know, they're like, "oh, there's a new ray, let's all go over." And like, oh, wow. I wasn't that into it, but all of a sudden I just hear through the same spot. And they're coordinating the text and the scores. It's kind of fun. So I went to a couple of raids, but I just kind of lost interest before I really got that deep into it. So.

Starr:
I just can't really get into a game where I have to socialize with people to win. Maybe I'm just showing my age. I'm from the generation where you play games, to like get away from people.

Josh:
Is it really socializing? Because you're all just standing around in a park, staring at your phones. Aren't you? I mean, for us, that is socializing.

Starr:
Yeah. That's pretty much socializing. That's what we do at my family some nights.

Josh:
Oh yeah. We all went to the park today.

Starr:
Yeah. So it's beautiful in the Pacific Northwest now. I assume it's beautiful where you are Josh? It's

Josh:
Oh yeah. It's going to be 80.

Starr:
Oh my gosh. It's the first real week of sun after just months and months and months of gray and we all at this point, know not to get our hopes up. It's going to go back to gray pretty soon, but you can enjoy it while you got it.

Josh:
Is this the false spring? Is that what we're in right now?

Ben:
Yep. I think today probably after we're done recording, I'm going to be wrapping up some things pretty quickly and then getting the old foldable kayak out of the trunk and hitting the water.

Josh:
Nice.

Starr:
Oh, that's awesome.

Josh:
Yeah. I was thinking I might go sit in the sun or something.

Starr:
Yeah. So do you have any businessy type tech stuff to talk about today or we're all just have senior-itis?

Josh:
Well, we sort of unofficially launched a React Native support yesterday. So to our listeners, if you have any React Native projects that you want to monitor errors and you should hit us up, because we're looking for beta testers and things.

Starr:
That's awesome. And is that the one that Andre has been working on?

Josh:
Yep.

Ben:
Yeah. Andre did a fantastic job in getting the native stuff going and, Josh wrapped it up on the server side and I was pleasantly surprised at just how little work we had to do to get that working on a server side.

Josh:
Yeah. Source maps... Because React Native is a... I'm not a React Native developer, so it's probably only half working, but from what I understand, it's a little bit tricky, because it's React on top of native code. And so I've heard that you can end up with stack traces that have JavaScript and native, like source locations in them and stuff. And it gets tricky. So what we have, you can generate source maps for your React code and upload that to Honeybadger. And it works just like a regular JavaScript application. So we have yet to implement support for translating the native lines in the stack traces. But that's that'll be up next, I think. At least when someone requests it, so go use it and request it and we'll build it.

Ben:
That's that just in time development, we're not going to build it. Someone asks for it.

Josh:
Yeah. And also we have to understand it before we build it.

Starr:
Yeah. That's a biggie. Like somebody needs to come out with a a paid service that just processes source maps and Java trigger phrases. I know we would be the only customer because nobody has to do this, but us, but it seems like way too much work for what it is. It seems like we should just be able to like buy something and fix it.

Josh:
Yeah. What we're talking about here, basically it would be another source maps, service because are other types of... What is it? Symbolicating?

Starr:
Symbolification? I don't know.

Josh:
I can't remember. I think it's symbolication. Yeah, they switch it up on, you kn...

Full transcript:
Ben:
The struggle is real when it comes to WiFi here. Because until two weeks ago you could've said, "Yeah, use Ubiquiti, it's all great." Now, there's this big disruption that they're having this attack that they didn't want to admit to.

Josh:
Yeah. I didn't hear about this.

Ben:
Yeah. So the thing that was terrible was that they said, "Oh, there was a leak at our third-party vendor." Well, the third party vendor is Amazon Web Services. If you're going to pin the blame on AWS for your lack in security, that's pretty ridiculous. So there was some whistleblower that came out and say, "No, they're really idiots. They're not logging access to the databases."

Ben:
Their press release was like, "Well, we don't have any evidence of access to your data." The whistleblower was like, "Well, they don't have any evidence of access to your data because they don't do any logging to their database." So they have no idea who's been querying what. It's like, oh, yeah, that's not great.

Josh:
That's cool. That's a good excuse.

Ben:
Sure, yeah. So the vagueness plus the misdirection stuff and it's just like, "Okay, my opinion of them just went through the floor."

Josh:
You never track it, you never know.

Ben:
That's right. Exactly.

Starr:
Yeah. It seems like the, I don't know, it seems like you just got to take the hit. Whenever something like that happens, you just got to suck it up and take the hit.

Ben:
Just like YOLO, "Yeah, well-"

Starr:
Yeah. YODO, you only die once.

Ben:
Well, you have to figure also my dad has probably been breached five or six different times from five or six different large companies. So it's like, who even cares anymore? I'll just spray my social security number and my birth date anywhere. I'll just put it on my billboard in my front yard. Yeah, have at it.

Josh:
Yeah. Publish it online.

Ben:
The dark web is like a light gray web now. There's just so much data out there. But it's Ubiquiti or do you buy, I have a really small house so I don't really need these mesh systems which promise this outrageous speed for outrageous amounts of money. So I don't need the great or whatever. And then if you don't go with those options, then all that's left really is TP-Link or NETGEAR. It's like, "Well, okay." But like, fine. It just doesn't seem like there's a really great quality product from a great quality company. I don't know. Maybe I'm just-

Starr:
Yeah. There was a couple of weeks ago.

Ben:
Yeah. They wisened up weeks ago.

Josh:
Yeah. I'd probably still just buy the Ubiquiti gear to be honest. Because they're all leaking your data.

Ben:
That's what I'm saying.

Josh:
Like, yeah, who's better?

Starr:
Yeah. That's why you use TLS.

Ben:
For real. Yeah, can you imagine we actually lived at a time when you would just not even use TLS to log into your websites or no WiFi?

Starr:
I know. I know.

Ben:
Can you remember those days?

Starr:
So unsafe.

Ben:
It's amazing. I had a friend who was all anti WiFi because, this is over 20 years ago, because he's like, "You just take all your secrets and throw them out the window so anybody can get at them." Yeah. It's remarkable to think that we lived that way. Speaking of security though, I was... I don't know why I was looking at this. But for some reason, this morning I looked at Tailscale again. I don't know if you're familiar with Tailscale.

Josh:
Yeah, what's that?

Ben:
It's a startup that they provide basically a smart VPN. It's like a vpn with some magic sprinkles on top. Basically they take a WireGuard which is a late generation VPN product. So you might be familiar with stuff like OpenVPN or even way back in the day Cisco stuff that was done on hardware. But WireGuard is the latest generation of VPN software which is actually not crazy to setup. It's actually reasonably easy to use.

Ben:
And then Tailscale took that to the next level with making it super easy to just connect to whatever. So basically you run their little agent and you can VPN into your network without even having to worry about the stuff. They do the authentication for example, through Google Login or through Octa or whatever. So you don't have to hop on a box and create keys and send out stuff to people one on one. It's basically all just magic.

Ben:
So I was playing with that this morning and it's really quite neat. I was like, "Okay." Well, I'm on my iPad reading about it and I'm like, "Well, just install this iOS." I'm like, "Great." So now I have a in thing. Then it gives you IP addresses for all your internal stuff. It's really cool. We already have VPN for our stuff but I thought that was, well, do a switch.

Josh:
Yeah. At this rate we wouldn't even need to pass our those OpenVPN files or whatever. That would be nice.

Ben:
Yeah. And they have ECLs and stuff. So you can say, "Oh well, the marketing person gets access to the internal dashboard but doesn't get access to SSH to these servers." And then of course there's audit trails and stuff.

Josh:
That's pretty cool.

Starr:
That's really cool.

Ben:
Yeah. It's pretty handy.

Starr:
Yeah. On their features it says magic DNS. I think we need a little more magic in our lives. So I'm going to... Yeah. But that would be useful even if you are... I don't know. I can imagine it being useful if you are traveling and you want to go on your home network even. That would be pretty nice.

Ben:
Yeah, I was thinking about replacing my laptop with a Mac Mini and just leaving it in my office and then using Tailscale to hop in if I ever needed it to do anything. Most of the stuff is getting whatever. It's like I just do it at home from a different machine. But I was just like, "Well, maybe there is that one thing that I'm going to have on my machine at work and I want to have at night." So I was like, "Oh, Tailscale." Put that on there and, yeah. Fun toys.

Starr:
Yeah. It's pretty neat. 

Ben:
Not where they do security though. I have been spending all week on customer stuff like sales stuff, marketing stuff.

Starr:
How's that thing going?

Ben:
Well, I've been floundering a little bit. It's not my background and so everything is more difficult that it seems like it should be. There seems like there's a lot of friction there. Like for example, the early part of the week, we had some suggestions from Harris about some changes that we could make to the website. And-

Starr:
Yeah. Harris is a sales consultant guru guy. Okay.

Ben:
And then we had some other suggestions from another good friend of ours that we can make. So I was looking at the home page and it's like, "Man, copyrighting is hard." It's like getting into that mindset of, okay, what's your customer perspective? When they come to this page and you have a candidate here who's interested, what do they want to see? And then trying to get in that mindset and then come up with some copy that speaks to that mindset.

Ben:
I know that there's this notion of, you go get your customer's voice from reviews and things like that. But sometimes you just got to create stuff. I don't know. So I've been doing that and it's not a skill that I have worked on developing and so it feels very painful to try and come up with it. It's like, "Oh really, this stuff is taking a lo...

Full transcript:
Ben:
You know, today is April second, as we record this. And I am so excited because I survived April Fools' Day without falling for anything online. All the dumb stuff that happens on April Fools' Day.

Josh:
I'm a little worried, because I didn't notice any April Fools' lies. Now, granted, I kind of checked out yesterday and I went for a super long walk in Portland, just because it was sunny and I wanted to get outside, so-

Starr:
That sounds really nice.

Josh:
It was awesome. So I'm hoping that that's the reason I don't... Because otherwise, I've been duped left and right, and my whole world is false at this point.

Starr:
I mean, last year there was that whole thing where people were just like, "April Fools' is canceled. No April Fools'." And so, maybe that just came up-

Josh:
We skipped a year.

Starr:
I don't know. Maybe people are still sort of hesitant to do that.

Josh:
Yeah, well it sounds like Ben avoided falling for some, so did you see any good ones, Ben?

Ben:
No, I never see any good ones because there are never any good ones. I dislike the whole notion of April Fools' Day, so I only saw three or four. And they were all pretty obvious. I started reading a press release or something, I'm like, oh, that's ridiculous. It's April Fools' Day. Moving on. So, yeah, nothing particularly clever or great, so-

Starr:
I kind of like the obvious ones. It's like, they're not actually trying to trick anybody, they're just being silly. You know?

Josh:
Right. Right.

Starr:
I really like it when companies do April Fools' product announcements, where it's like, they're announcing something that would be amazing, but also it's obviously impossible because it's just too amazing to exist in the world.

Ben:
Well, not quite April Fools', but Duke Cannon is a company that sells soaps and things like that, personal care items. And they typically do funny kinds of fake things, like... So they have this body wash that's really thick, the consistency is really thick because they think runny body washes are for wimps. And they're all about manly stuff, right?

Starr:
Oh, yeah.

Ben:
The lumberjack in the woods with his soap, you know?

Starr:
That's real healthy.

Ben:
And so, they put out this set of posters, these fake posters of thick... And a video, actually, I should link to the show notes... For thick beer. And it's like these old-school 70s beer commercials, and these guys are drinking these beers that are just super, super thick. And it's just ridiculous.

Josh:
Oh, that sounds terrible.

Starr:
Like oatmeal.

Ben:
So you can go to Duke Cannon all year long to get that kind of funny stuff. But this year, they actualy did one of those joke things, but then they actually did it. And it was some sort of Irish... I think it was Irish body wash. Anyway, it was very green and minty, and they did it for St. Patrick's Day. But it was an actual, real product. And so, I'm like, "Yeah, they really did it this time." And we bought some, because hey, we thought, "Check that out." And it's great. So-

Josh:
Nice.

Ben:
You can't get it now, because it was just a one-time kind of thing, but keep an eye on Duke Cannon throughout the year for fun, crazy stuff like that, and-

Starr:
Oh, that's funny. I like that it pokes fun at itself at least, because let's be honest, I don't think the effectiveness of soap has anything to do with its thickness. And also, I mean, I've had thick shampoo and stuff, and honest... You put it in your hand, and then it gets hit by a little water and it just slides right off of your hand, just like a solid object, and down the drain. So it's like, is that really better? I don't know. I'm not the target demographic.

Josh:
But have you had thick beer?

Starr:
No, no. But I always wanted to try Pulque, which is a traditional Mexican beverage that... I mean, it's made out of corn. But it sounds like it's in the spirit of thick beer.

Ben:
Well, if you want my personal recommendation for a Duke Cannon product to try, try the Smells Like Productivity soap.

Starr:
Okay.

Ben:
It is awesome.

Starr:
That's exactly the soap I would imagine you would have.

Josh:
It's just-

Starr:
That's your secret-

Josh:
It's marketed... Ben is their audience.

Starr:
Oh my God. Okay.

Josh:
Ben wakes up every morning. He wakes up every morning at 3:30, jumps in the shower with his Smells Like Productivity.

Starr:
Oh. That's so funny. Oh, I made a mistake. I said Pulque is made out of corn. It's not, I was thinking of a different thing. Pulque is made out of the fermented sap of the maguey plant. I don't know. Anyway. Oh, it's made out of the same stuff they make tequila out of, maybe? Anyway.

Josh:
I was totally going to call you on that.

Starr:
Yeah. Yeah, well I mean, somebody knows that in our audience, I'm sure.

Josh:
Yeah, I'm sure. I did want to mention, just in case you probably have been hearing it, if you hear pounding on walls in the background of this podcast, it's because I have people working on my house, directly behind my office, and there's no way around it. So rather than cancel the podcast, I figured we'd just deal with it.

Starr:
That makes a lot of sense. So this week is kind of exciting. After the podcast, I'm going to go and get the final instructions to the first of our authors to be doing our new experimental Honeybadger intelligence reports.

Ben:
Nice.

Josh:
HIBINT.

Starr:
HIBINT. Yeah, yeah. I really love the branding we've come up... For this. Just internally, it's fun. So yeah, if you missed our last mention of that, basically we have a hard time keeping up with all the different platforms that we support. I mean, not actually supporting them, but keeping up with the news and events, and what's the cultural zeitgeist of Python Land right now. That stuff changes enough when you only do one language, right? So, imagine having to keep up with... I don't know. How many libraries do we have? Like eight, or 10, or six? I don't know.

Josh:
Yeah, something-

Ben:
A lot. Yeah.

Starr:
A lot.

Josh:
Something like that.

Starr:
Yeah. There is more than I have fingers on one hand. Yeah, so we're actually going to be hiring authors who are experts in those fields, to make us little quarterly reports about what's going on. And we might share them with the public, depending on how it goes, but I'm excited. It makes me realize that with any new sort of endeavor like this, especially when you're trying to get other people to do stuff for you, working with other people, there's just... I don't know, it's just like it always takes more time than you think, right? Because last week, I was just like, "Okay, I'm just going to reach out to these people." And then I got a good number of replies, I was like, "I'll figure out what to do with them next week."

Starr:
So I replied to everybody being like, "I'll get back to you next week with details." Thinking I'd get back to them on Monday, and then Monday comes around, I've got all these meetings, so I didn't get to it. And I'm realizing slowly, it's like, I've got to figure ou...

Docsketch
Ruben Gamez

AppSumo
Intro CRM

Full Transcript:
Ben:
Yeah, the party doesn't start until you show up, Josh.

Josh:
I'm a party animal.

Starr:
Yeah, that's true. How's everybody doing?

Josh:
Good.

Ben:
I had a good last week. How are you, Starr?

Starr:
I'm doing pretty good. I got to dive a little bit into our sort of usage data for free users, and that's always fun when I get to do that. I got to use JupyterLab a little bit, brushing up on my Python skills, and yeah. So, I had been... whenever I do my sort of deep dives in the numbers and stuff, I would always just make a bunch of Ruby scripts, and use Ruby scripts to kind of process the data and make it understandable to me. But, it turns out there's a whole fricking ecosystem around this this and Python, and it's... yeah.

Starr:
There's a system called JupyterLabs. You can get it as part of this bigger distribution that's basically... it's called Conda, which is a Python distribution that just has all of the data science stuff built into it. And so, yeah. So, it's just this little web app you run, and then you can... it's really kind of awesome. It's like if you took an IRB shell or something and put it inside of a text editor and let you write markdown around it, and then also included a whole bunch of tools for doing really complicated stuff with tables of data, and doing that in one or two lines of code.

Josh:
That's cool.

Starr:
Yeah.

Josh:
That reminds me a little bit of what I've seen of org mode and Emacs. Isn't that the thing where you can embed code, and generate tables, and stuff like that, I think? It's super-

Starr:
I don't know, I've never used that.

Josh:
It's a pain in the ass.

Starr:
Well, this is surprisingly not a pain in the ass. It's actually pretty cool, so yeah. So, I've got some... I'm not done with it, but I'm going to have a little report to share at our marketing meeting, which I think is next week, and yeah, about how to squeeze more blood out of our free users. So, get ready, guys, because it's not going to be pretty. I'm just kidding.

Josh:
Well, we've been very generous to our free users, so there's a lot of potential there.

Starr:
Yeah.

Ben:
I have a suggestion for helping our free users, add value to us.

Josh:
Is this just our monetization model now? We just rant at our free users in this new podcast? It's just like, if you want to hear us stop bitching then sign up for our paid plan.

Ben:
We'll annoy you until you pay us. So, we had a free user upgrade just a little while ago, just this morning, and I went and looked at their account, and they've been a free user for a few months, and the trigger... what I was interested in was, why did they upgrade? And I was actually going to email them because I've been spending all morning emailing new signups and reaching out to people who have signed up recently.

Ben:
Anyway, so I was going to contact this person and say, "Hey, why did you sign up?" But I went and checked their account and it turns out they sent a whole lot of errors, like today or yesterday. And so, they reached the quota limit and so they had to upgrade so they could actually get their errors. And so, my idea is we just send every new signup a bottle of whiskey and tell them that they can only drink it while they're coding, right? And so then can go like, "Oh, a bunch of errors."

Starr:
Oh, there you go. So we sabotage their... yeah.

Ben:
Exactly, exactly. Exactly.

Starr:
We sabotage their code. Our discussion along these lines is really reminding me in a weird way of The Godfather or something. It's like, "Okay, free users: we've been very generous to you over the years. Have you doubted our generosity? No. So, now it's time for us to ask a little favor."

Ben:
I like it.

Josh:
I don't know if it works that way on the internet.

Starr:
No, I don't think so.

Ben:
We need to get a new illustration of the honey badger as the Godfather.

Starr:
Oh, there you go.

Ben:
I can just see him sitting behind the oak panel desk, in the overstuffed chair, smoking a cigar.

Starr:
Yeah, that would be something. I'm not sure people would immediately... we'd have to caption it.

Ben:
Yeah, yeah, that's true.

Starr:
Yeah, because otherwise he's just like an executive, right?

Ben:
Yeah.

Ben:
A fat-cat CEO boss, right?

Starr:
Yeah, exactly. We're not about that. We're the exception monitoring tool for the 99%.

Josh:
Is that why we're so cheap?

Ben:
Buy exceptions.

Starr:
Must be, must be.

Ben:
Yeah, I've been doing this outreach this week, getting started. We mentioned in the last episode that we're working with a sales team coach, concierge app combo, whatever you want to call it. I couldn't remember the name, unfortunately, last week, but this week I can remember the name because I've been doing it, working with them all week, and it's Harris from IntroCRM.com, and they are fantastic. We just started working with them on nurturing our inbound leads, because we do get people signing up all across the spectrum. We get a bunch of those free users, but we also get people signing up who are developers at very large organizations. And so, we're trying to develop a scheme where we optimize our time and reach out to people who... a little more personal approach to people who might be at those big orgs, who might end up being a bit bigger customer.

Ben:
So, this week I've basically just been reaching out to a whole bunch of people, regardless of their company size or whatever. I'm just trying to get into the groove of emailing people and saying, "Hey, what do you think about Honeybadger? Is there something I can do for you?" And then, over time, we'll refine that process and hopefully fill up the pipelines so I can even start doing demos or something crazy.

Starr:
Oh my god.

Josh:
Yeah.

Ben:
Yeah. So, it's been great working with them.

Josh:
You have to get out the old clip-on tie.

Starr:
Yeah. We're going to have to get you some Oxford shirts and a clip-on tie.

Josh:
Do they make some that are just like they just need to cover your shoulders, basically, and just halfway down you torso, just like-

Starr:
I'm sure they have those.

Josh:
It's what we see on Zoom, so.

Starr:
It's like a bib.

Josh:
Yeah, right.

Starr:
A child's bib.

Josh:
It's a sales bib.

Starr:
Or like when you go to eat ribs.

Ben:
Actually, I'm still tying a tie once a week, every week. Yeah, even though I'm still doing church online-

Josh:
On Sundays?

Ben:
Yeah, on Sundays. I'm still putting on the white shirt, putting on the tie, and yeah.

Josh:
I mean, it's got to be kind of comforting to keep some sort of weekly tradition like that during the past crazy... yeah. Groundhog Day.

Ben:
Exactly. I have switched out the suit pants for sweatpants, but other than that I'm still-

Josh:
Nice.

Starr:
Haven't we all?

Josh:
Well, one of the interesting things, that I thought was interesting with that, because we have a Slack Connect channel, now, with the introtoCRM folks, and so they've been givi...

Full transcript:
Ben:
So I am feeling great this morning.

Starr:
Oh Good. Why are you feeling great?

Ben:
So over the past couple weeks, I've been working on cleaning up the low level noise, errors that are happening, that aren't really severe and that get corrected because of retries and things like that. So stuff, that's not broken, broken, it's just annoying. And so I just, yesterday I think, finished off the last of those things. So, we had a few big things over the past several months, we had the account billing migration. We've had the Elasticsearch migration. We've had the payload storage migration. And now as of yesterday, we have no lingering, low level errors happening. It's just clean. The logs are quiet, everything is happy.

Josh:
Nice.

Starr:
That's amazing. Good job.

Ben:
Thanks.

Starr:
Would you say it's like butter?

Josh:
Thought it was kind of quiet around here.

Ben:
It's like butter.

Starr:
It's like butter.

Ben:
Yeah, it feels really good.

Starr:
Oh, good.

Josh:
I got through my to-do list items that were kind of along those lines this week, actually. So that does feel good. I'm onto having time for real work again now until I come in on Monday and I have a bunch of busy work again.

Ben:
Yeah.

Starr:
Well yesterday was my birthday, so I took it off so I'm a slacker this week.

Josh:
Happy birthday.

Starr:
Thank you.

Ben:
Happy birthday.

Starr:
Thank you. It's very nice, just like, I didn't actually really do anything special. I just went about sort of a normal day, but without any rush. I was just like, I'm going to kind of take my time and take as long as I want in whatever I'm doing. And it was very nice. It was very nice just having that off. And I mean, I didn't actually work, but I did just kind of read and stuff, so..

Josh:
Cool.

Starr:
So I was great and I-

Josh:
Sounds like the perfect birthday, to be honest.

Starr:
I know it was pretty great. Yeah. My kid was very enthusiastic until... She was super enthusiastic all week. She made all these decorations and everything and all these tiny little birthday present crafts that were just adorable. And then when my birthday dinner actually rolled around, they went to the restaurant to pick up the food and everything and they came back and she didn't like any of the food that we got. And so she just threw just a shit fit. And it's just like, ah, I was trying to have my nice dinner and you really pumped this up for me. And now you're just you're just like some sort of caveman or something.

Josh:
She definitely did it intentionally.

Starr:
Yeah.

Josh:
This was her plan all along.

Starr:
Yeah. They build you up just to tear you down. That's children for you. But other than that, I got a lot of, I mean, a lot of progress on this interesting project that we're doing, where we're going to be using our sort of blog author set up to generate some reports, to make things easier for us sort of internally, right? Because it's kind of hard for Josh and everybody who's involved with the libraries, the client libraries to keep tabs on 500 different languages at once.

Starr:
It's just like keeping tabs on one programming language is kind of hard because everything changes every six weeks. And so, yeah. So we're going to try and get some authors to sort of go in, maybe start on a quarterly basis and come up with sort of reports about what's going on in a specific community. And yeah. And if it turns out-

Josh:
I'm so excited.

Starr:
Yeah, if it turns out they're useful, we'll probably start sharing them by our blog or email or something. Whatever allows us to extract the maximum value from you people.

Josh:
This came around or it came about, because I was like Starr, I'm tired of reading 15 newsletters every week. And I just want to read one thing, once a quarter or something like that and know what's going on. And so Starr like, I can do that and now we're going to have it. It's going to be awesome.

Ben:
So in a recent episode, when we talked about the vendor that you're not going to name on air Starr-

Starr:
I'll say it. It's okay. It's love sack. I was just feeling weird about it at that time. It's a terrible name. I realized later though, that it's based on love seats. Its like love seat bean bag type thing. At first, I thought it was a pun on love shack, which seemed like a really weird way to, I mean, I guess who am I to talk like my product's in Honeybadger, but yeah.

Josh:
True.

Starr:
I'm sorry. What were you going to say, Ben?

Ben:
So I brought that up to say that we had asked, in our podcast episode where we discussed that, we had asked people to respond to us on Twitter if they had any recommendations. And we actually got a recommendation, which was great. And the person who responded, suggested that perhaps we could engage people via Twitter, more from our podcasts. And so with this report thing that you're talking that made me think, hey, if someone out there would be interested in receiving a report, like we just described, you should let us know on Twitter.

Starr:
Oh yeah. That's a good idea.

Ben:
And-

Josh:
Honeybadger intelligence report?

Ben:
Exactly. Exactly.

Starr:
I'm abbreviating it HBI. Your HBI briefing. That sounds very official. Doesn't it?

Ben:
It does. Yeah. Expect that to come out on the first Thursday of the quarter right after the payroll report or something.

Starr:
Exactly. People are going to just be like, let me just tell you, the markets are going to move when that thing drops.

Josh:
I think that there are people out there that could get benefit from this sort of thing. It's not maybe not everyone, but anyone who has to keep up with multiple, like different tech language communities as a part of their job, which is like me, I maintain all of our integrations and stuff across the entire internet. And so... Or the entire industry. And so there's a lot of news and releases and what are the trends that people are talking about on Twitter? If I tried to stay on top of all that 24/7 I'd just never leave my desk.

Starr:
Yeah. It's so much work. I honestly, I'm kind of in the same boat, even though I don't work on the client libraries. I consider myself a developer. That's not really most of my job lately, but yeah. I'm a Ruby developer and I would like to keep up with the Ruby community and everything. And, but like when you're doing a job that isn't quite... Just day in, day out Ruby development, it's kind of hard to do that, right? So I would love to have like a thing to come to me every few months. Just like I just need to spend 30 minutes reading this once a quarter and I will have a good handle on things. So if I go to a conference, I just don't sound stupid. When people come up and talk to me.

Josh:
Yeah. You'll be in the know. Starr, can we send this out? Like snail mail to people do you think? Like an old school newsletter?

Starr:
An old school newsletter.

Josh:
Like before the internet. People, anyone who had an opinion... We could even have like a section where we like prognosticate and you tell what the future trends are going to be.

Starr:
There you go.

Josh:
Do you ever see those newsletters where those guys would have like their stock tips or the economic trends that they foresee.

Starr:
And here's the thing with that...

Starr:
Oh yeah?

Josh:
Oh.

Ben:
And there are some new electric motorcycles and scooters coming out that are very, very tempting. There's one in particular, the Sondors model, which is going to be first released near the end of the year and it's only $5000 and it had a top of speed of 80 miles per hour. The battery is not really rated for doing 80 miles per hour very long. You're not going to commute for 20 miles at that speed, but it's nice to have that in case you just need to hop on the freeway to get someplace really quick.

Starr:
Wow. That's only like $60 per mile per hour.

Ben:
But I really got my eye on it. And my wife's not a big fan of the whole motorcycle idea, but it's been there in the back of my mind for years and this year might be the year that I actually get my two wheel endorsement and do the training course and all that.

Josh:
Yeah, that would be fun.

Ben:
I just didn't want another combustion powered vehicle and so I've been holding off on the whole motorcycle thing until they got electric motorcycles that were not crazy expensive but also not just useless because it only has a batter for five miles worth of range. And I think 2021 is the year that is actually-

Josh:
Is this going to be your big 2021 post-pandemic life change?

Ben:
Exactly, yeah.

Josh:
Nice.

Ben:
Maybe this is my midlife crisis where I actually buy that motorcycle.

Josh:
You should get a hog, though. Be like a-

Ben:
The LiveWire is really nice. That's Harley Davidson's electric, but it's like $30,000 and I just, I have qualms about spending as much on a motorcycle as I would spend on a car.

Josh:
Yeah.

Ben:
Maybe that's not the right way to look at it, but it's just, I have problems with that.

Josh:
I'm seeing you with some of the... the trike handlebars or whatever.

Starr:
Oh, like a Chopper?

Josh:
Yeah.

Ben:
Yeah.

Starr:
I'm wondering if the electrics have the same cache. Because I'm trying to figure out if all the Bruce Springsteen songs still apply to the electric motorcycles. Like would you call an electric motorcycle a Suicide Machine? It seems a little bit too environmentally friendly for that. I'm not really sure.

Josh:
Ben totally needs an electric Chopper. It'd be the first.

Starr:
I go on walks... I'm sorry. I go on walks in the morning and occasionally an electric car will pass by me because it's Seattle and there's a couple of them. And it always feels so sneaky. It feels like they're just sneaking up on me because I just hear this low whine and next thing I know it's right behind me. It just feels like they're sneaking up on me.

Ben:
Yeah, I think they are.

Starr:
I don't trust that Elon Musk fellow. I don't trust him.

Josh:
Eventually you'll be just hearing that whining throughout your entire walk, just constantly.

Starr:
Yeah.

Ben:
Yeah, like the state of Washington, I think they recently passed a law that prevents any new combustion based cars from being sold after 2035. I think that's what it is. So yeah, the clock is ticking man.

Josh:
Pretty wild.

Ben:
Yeah. But for-

Josh:
Are consumers going to go for it?

Ben:
I think so. I think so.

Josh:
I think they will.

Ben:
But for those who don't know, the reason why it's kind of an inside joke is I've been interested in electric powered vehicles for a very long time and Starr and Josh are well aware of having-

Starr:
As long as I've known you. As long as Honeybadger's been a company.

Josh:
Yeah. Honeybadger was actually going to be a electric vehicle company initially, then we pivoted.

Starr:
Yeah, we really chose wrong with that one. That was a really bad decision.

Josh:
Yeah.

Ben:
It might have required a little more capital than we put into our initial business, though.

Starr:
Yeah, that's true. Well-

Ben:
So that's my week. I've been shopping for electric bikes all week.

Starr:
Well that's good.

Josh:
This has been another one of those weeks where I don't remember where it all went, what I did, but I know I did a lot.

Starr:
That's sort of the pandemic life, isn't it? I mean, you've been doing all the contracting stuff, right?

Josh:
Yeah. Yeah, I've actually been-

Ben:
Yeah, you've been doing the PHP. The library's really had some improvement this week. That's been really cool to see.

Josh:
Yeah, we're almost to zero issues.

Ben:
Yeah, that's pretty awesome.

Josh:
Including enhancements and features. Although I've got a few that I'm going to be creating, so now we can get on to the fun stuff like adding new things.

Ben:
Oh, speaking of enhancements, we had a really awesome customer just last night, this morning, who sent us a request for new functionality in the Ruby gem to be able to notify the API of deployments. We didn't have that code in the gem for a Ruby app to use as a consumer. We had a command line task for that, but it wasn't exposed as code. So I wrote back to the customer, I'm like, "No, we don't have that but I'll create an issue in GitHub and if you want to open a PR, wink, wink, go right ahead." I woke up this morning and there's the PR. I'm like, "Wow, all right."

Josh:
Yeah, isn't that great?

Ben:
Yeah. And he tested it in his app. I'm like, well that's pretty awesome. We have the best customers. We really do.

Josh:
Yeah.

Starr:
That's awesome. So why are we paying people again? Let's just make it all community maintained.

Ben:
This was a related thread and a couple of tweets going back and forth this week on Twitter and people talking about, "Well, you know, developers are a terrible market. They don't buy anything." And a number of entrepreneurs are like, "Oh, I beg to differ, they actually do buy things."

Starr:
Yeah. But they don't buy things, but their employers buy lots of things.

Ben:
Right. Right. And they definitely are interested in not spending their time on things if they can realize that there's a way to get something that's a quality product. And they are the best customers because when they file those bug reports, it's so easy to fix them. It's great.

Josh:
Yeah, I never get that argument. We buy a lot of things.

Ben:
We do buy a lot of things.

Josh:
We buy things all the time.

Starr:
Yeah, we do buy a lot. So I wonder if it has to do with the age of the developer. Like if you're around 20-something developers, early 20 developers who don't have jobs then, yeah, they're not going to buy much

Josh:
That's just age. 20-somethings don't buy anything.

Starr:
I know because you don't have money.

Josh:
Period. I mean, they buy Netflix and iPhones.

Starr:
Yeah, but as soon as they get one of those sweet startup gigs, they're buying fricking $200 fidget spinners.

Ben:
Don't they have company issued fidget spinners if they're working for that sweet startup?

Starr:
I mean, probably. Probably, yeah.

Josh:
Is that the new retirement gift? The gold fidget spinner? Like the gold watch.

Starr:
Yeah, they give it to you when you're 30.

B...

Starr:
Oh, a podcast episode.

Ben:
Yeah. Yeah.

Starr:
I thought you meant a dramatic episode.

Josh:
It's just another episode with John.

Starr:
Oh my God. That guy.

Josh:
That was awesome. Yeah. That was a good conversation.

Ben:
We talked in that conversation about using Flipper at Honeybadger, because we've been using Rollout for our feature flags, which, if you didn't listen to that episode, you don't know what a feature flag is. It's a branch in your code that conditionally runs some feature. You can limit it when you deploy it to people and you don't have to deploy a new thing to all your customers at the same time. You can test it live.

Josh:
I'm not sure if we actually explained it in that episode.

Ben:
Maybe we did, maybe we didn't.

Josh:
This will be good background.

Starr:
I wasn't there. I'm usually the driving force behind backing up and explaining things.

Josh:
Yeah, Starr is good. Always, yeah, you've been pretty good about that. Yeah.

Ben:
Yeah. I went ahead and did that. I put a Flipper in Honeybadger and tested a new feature. We are switching from Postgres to DynamoDB for our notice storage. That's every occurrence of every error. It's a lot of data and we cut over a few weeks ago to be reading from that data in Dynamo because now it's fully populated with the past month's of data and it's being updated. We're basically writing this to two places and now it's time to read from the new place.

Ben:
I tested that with Flipper and I'm so glad that I used Flipper for that feature because it saved my bacon this week. I deployed the reading from Dynamo. Oh, actually. We've been doing reading for a while and what I deployed this week was not writing to Postgres anymore, so stopping the dual rights. I put that behind a feature flag and I turned it on just for my projects. I'm so glad I did because I found a bug that really, really would have caused issues for all of our customers if I had deployed that just willy nilly. Yay for feature flags. Yay for Flipper. Go use it. It's a great thing.

Starr:
That's awesome.

Josh:
It's willy nilly. Is that a Ruby joke?

Starr:
How much money do you think that was worth avoiding that mistake? How much would you pay to do that? A thousand dollars? $10,000.

Ben:
Yeah, it's got to be a more than a thousand dollars, for sure.

Starr:
Okay. We're trying to help John with his pricing here.

Ben:
Yeah, totally.

Starr:
I'm sure that Flipper costs a lot less than a thousand dollars. It does.

Ben:
It's worth every penny.

Starr:
Oh, look at that. Real product placement. We're growing up. Look at this podcast we're doing. We just slid that right in.

Ben:
Yeah. In other infrastructure news, I got to say that having your primary search cluster die is not a fun experience, especially when it happens at 4:30 in the morning.

Josh:
Yeah.

Ben:
But I will say this. Amazon, props, Amazon, because we host our Elasticsearch cluster with Amazon. Yay for not having to figure out how to be an expert at running Elasticsearch myself and having to repair things when they went sideways. Also, the tech support was great. They zeroed in on what the issue was. It's our fault apparently, or kind of. What the real explanation is, everything was looking fine to me. All the stats were green. I had monitored six different things based on the documentation that Amazon provided. All those things were fine. There were no alarms. It just died. I'm like, "What the heck's going on?" That's why I opened a ticket.

Ben:
It took them a while to find out what was going on. It took them, oh, I don't know, two or three hours because they were a little perplexed because everything looked fine. Really what it came down to was the CPU spikes that we had. We had some CPU spikes that went over 90% and this was not in their documentation, but apparently that's a really bad thing. We had enough of those spikes that it just gave up the ghost finally. They encouraged us to upgrade the cluster, which I did. Once that was all done and deployed, then everything was fine. I made a suggestion that they might update their documentation for monitoring that particular metric. They appreciated that suggestion.

Ben:
After things were all good yesterday and I had gone and I was decompressing and things were back to normal. I had done the backfill. I was feeling pretty good about where we were. It wasn't a hair on fire situation, right? The app has been architected so that even if we lost our search cluster, it's okay. The whole app doesn't die, right? You can still use Honeybadger. We're still processing errors. We're still sending alerts. People are still using the UI. The way that we decided to ingest the data into the search cluster was delayed or put in a separate queue so that we could still be processing data and we could replay that data when the cluster came back when I was ready for indexing.

Ben:
I had just spent several hours on building some pretty awesome, in my opinion, backfill scripts using SQS and Lambda. All I had to do was queue up all those things that didn't get processed and they got processed. They got back-filled, so yesterday afternoon, I was looking out my kitchen window and I was feeling pretty happy. I was like, "That went really, really well for having such a really bad thing happen."

Josh:
That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. I noticed yesterday, the outages we have been having lately seem to not usually even be our fault. It's when Amazon has an issue, which I guess, the way you look at it, on one hand, we're at Amazon's mercy now. I think that's the other side of the story, but it is nice that we're not dealing with the actual failures that you get if you're running your own box or something that you're responsible for every little, like network failures, for instance. When we used to have DNS go out or something, or those types of things, it's nice not having those types of issues. I'd much rather be at Amazon's mercy, I think, than be at the mercy of myself.

Ben:
Right. Yeah.

Starr:
I don't know, this has a little bit of a nostalgic flavor to it, right? Just a random, oh, if your CPU usage goes over X amount, your cluster just dies. That's the Elasticsearch I know and love from back in the day. It was nice. It's nice to stay in touch with our roots every now and again.

Josh:
It seems that would be the kind of thing that they could at least have a default notification for. If they know that that's a terrible situation, why don't they just have an email that automatically, it sends you and, "Oh, we noticed you're not monitoring those sorts of things." I could see why you wouldn't want to, but it just seems like it would be a nice touch.

Ben:
Yeah. That's not the way Amazon does things.

Josh:
That's not Amazon. I know.

Ben:
Yeah. They're really a sharp knives kind of company. It's like, "Here is all the tools and we'll give you some good guidance, but you have to go and look for that guidance." I mean, literally, we have eight alarms CloudWatch alarms set up for our Elasticsearch cluster. All of them came from the documentation where Amazon says, "Here, y...

Swag.com

Full transcript:
Josh:
How's it going?

Ben:
I'm working on this Printfection migration and I've been thinking about what to do here. So we got this outreach from Printfection about our pricing going up, in our case, dramatically. We decided we just don't want to pay that much for what we're getting. So I'm going through all of our inventory looking at our Printfection items that we have, shirts and stickers and so on, and thinking, where... So I've got to send it somewhere. Well, I guess I have to send it to myself. I'm like, do I really want to get a box of 800 shirts? It's like, no, I really don't but I don't see there's much of a choice.

Josh:
Well, we could just pay Printfection.

Ben:
Well, I guess. Yeah, that is the other option.

Starr:
Yeah.

Josh:
Yeah, personally I'm on the fence about it because yes, it is a dramatic price increase but the value that they provide us is fairly dramatic from my perspective. So I'm not quite sure what price I attach to that, but I definitely attach more than $75 a month which is what we were paying them. Which just seems insane to me. I see why they would raise our prices, in their defense.

Starr:
How much is it raised by? I forget. I looked at it originally, but I forget.

Josh:
$500.

Ben:
I think it's in the narrative of $500 a month.

Josh:
Yeah.

Starr:
Okay.

Josh:
Now to be fair, we should explain they raised their prices I think a couple years ago, because I remember when they went up and I was like, "Man, I'm really glad that we got this sweetheart deal that they let all their past customers keep." But apparently they went through the same progression as everyone ever, same logic as us, over time... We're probably taking them for everything they're worth.

Starr:
I should probably back up and explain in case this makes it into the actual podcast. Printfection is a company that we have used to... They're an inventory company. They keep our shirts and all of our swag. When we want to mail it to people, we just give them the address, or they have forms that people can fill in themselves and magically shirts and stuff get mailed out to them.

Josh:
When we want to give someone a shirt, what we do is we mention our badger bot in Slack to a shirt meme and it gives us a shirt link that we then send to someone. It's like a magical shirt bog. Like a swag bot. Which is pretty cool.

Starr:
Yeah. I have a couple thoughts on this. The first one is, we were paying $75 a month plus shipping fees and handling and all that. We paid a certain amount to have things shipped out.

Josh:
Yeah.

Starr:
The second is that, as the person who was previously kind of in charge of mailing out shirts, it is a huge, huge time suck and a giant pain in the ass.

Josh:
I've got a closet full of shirts still that is just warehoused at this point.

Starr:
Yes.

Josh:
I don't want to go back to that.

Starr:
It is such a pain in the ass. So while it's like, yeah, $500 a month is a lot, it seems like a lot, if Ben Curtis ended up sending out the shirts, I am 100% sure that you would spend more than $500 a month in your time doing it.

Josh:
Yeah. We're going to pay someone like $300 an hour to ship shirts.

Starr:
Yeah. So let me-

Ben:
So what you're saying is, since I'm the only person that hasn't actually done the shirt shipping, that I'm not a good person to judge the value of this service.

Josh:
Oh, Ben, you don't know what you're getting into.

Starr:
Yeah, when I found Printfection, I was seriously... I thought I had died and gone to heaven. I was just like, please take this off of my plate.

Ben:
So why are you even letting me have an opinion on this? You should be like, "Ben, shut up. We know what we're doing. We're paying the $500 a month, just deal with it."

Starr:
Well everybody gets to have an opinion. Yeah, so I guess there's a couple reasons why this is just hard. So first of all... Since most of our readers probably haven't dealt with swag much, I'll just go through and explain why it's such a pain in the neck and you don't actually want to do it yourself. So, essentially when you order t-shirts from the printer, usually they come in a big box that's just full of shirts. They're not nicely individually wrapped or anything like that. And maybe some printers offer that as a service, but when I got them they tended to be just giant boxes of shirts.

Starr:
So that means if you want to, say, go to a conference and put them on display, you have to fold them up or roll them up in some way. If you want to mail them out, you've got to fold them up into a dimension that will fit flat and be nice in the little mailer. You've got to make sure you've got the right size of mailers at all times. You've got to basically have a little postage setup where you're always going to Stamps.com or whatever and buying your stamps.

Starr:
Then here's a little something that I didn't really expect, but we often would have people want shirts who are not inside the United States, at which time you have to fill out customs forms. You have to drive to the Post Office and drop things off. It's just a huge, huge pain in the neck. It was... Yeah. It was-

Josh:
You're bringing back memories with the folding shirts before conferences. Because there were multiple and I just remember entire evenings the night before my flight, me and Kaylin just folding shirts for my suitcase.

Starr:
And not only that, but do you remember how we had to get the shirts to the conferences? They weren't just delivered nicely folded to the conference organizers. We checked them. We checked bags of shirts.

Josh:
Listen, one time I checked a bag of... Or, I checked a whole box. This 25 pound box of shirts. I think it was to Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh's, the airport there, is a 45 minute drive in rush hour traffic to the hotel. We were five minutes away from the hotel when I realized the box was still at checking. I hadn't picked it up at the baggage claim.

Starr:
No!

Josh:
So an hour and a half... yeah.

Starr:
Well, I had... So these boxes of shirts are big. They're like two and a half feet cubed and they weigh, it seemed like more than 20 or 30 pounds. It seemed like 40 or 50 pounds.

Josh:
Might have been 50. Let's go with 50.

Starr:
50, yeah. Shirts are heavy. So I was at a conference in Denver and I'd never been there before and the cab driver dropped me off in the wrong location. So I was humping a giant box of t-shirts around downtown Denver looking for the right place. It was-

Josh:
Sweat dripping down your face.

Starr:
Yeah, it was miserable. And when I got there, I just kind of... I found my table. The shirts weren't folded or anything because I had timelines, and I just sort of... I made a pile as best I could. The other thing is that if they're not individually wrapped and labeled and stuff, people have to dig through them to find their size because the size is written on the label inside the shirt. So if you don't have everything nicely, neatly organized beforehand, five minutes in you will just have-

Josh:
And they will.

Starr:
... a big pile of shirts. There will be no organization anymore, it'll just all be-

Josh:
Just, it's mayhem.

Starr:
Yeah, it is mayhem. It's Fight Club in there because developers love their shirts.

Ben:
This is awesome. I can see myself right now going back to Kyle at Printfection and saying, "You know what? We're happy to pay that $500, please. ...

Full Transcript:
Ben:
So today we have a special episode of FounderQuest. We have John Nunemaker with us, instead of Starr. Starr was taking a break today. And Josh and I are going to be chatting with John, and talking about the fun things that John's doing. John, I got to start off by saying that I'm a huge fan. I've been following your work since the Harmony days, back at Ordered List, I guess that was ... I don't know when that was, 2000 and something.

John:
'07, 8, yep.

Ben:
Yeah. Yeah. So I think I got introduced to you through the Rails community, being back in the early group. So I don't remember how exactly we bumped into each other back then. But I remember Harmony was pretty cool, and the other stuff you did with Ordered List.

Josh:
Yeah.

Josh:
I was newer to the Rails world back then. So both of you are Ruby celebrities to me. So yeah, it's cool. It's cool to have you here.

John:
Thanks so much. Yeah, I'm really excited about it. I feel the same way about you guys. Especially I remember I was at RailsKits.

Ben:
Yep.

John:
I remember ... Yeah.

Josh:
Yeah.

John:
I remember that. I remember a bunch of the stuff back in the day. And is it Stympy, or something? Website?

Ben:
Yeah.

John:
Yep.

Ben:
Yeah.

John:
Oh, yeah. That stuff sticks out.

Josh:
Nice.

Ben:
Nice. Nice, cool. Fanboys all around. It's awesome. And you're a prolific open-source author. We have in fact two of your gems in our app right now. We have nunes, and we have httparty running in our app. So thank you for those.

John:
That's awesome.

Josh:
Yeah.

John:
That's really cool.

Ben:
Yeah. I love nunes. And I love the description of it. It's like, "This is the monitoring app I would add to your app if I was working with you."

John:
Yeah. I feel like stuff like that, I get lucky and it sticks. But it's just this moment where I'm like, "I got to come up with some kind of a description. I really don't want to do this. What should I put?" And then it's like, "This is what I would. I would do this if I were you." So I'm just going to put that as my description and peel out.

Ben:
It's cool. But I think the ... We're not going to talk about this much today. But I just wanted to toss this in here. And I think one of the projects that you've done that I'm most interested is probably one there is least information out there about. And that's Haystack at GitHub.

John:
Yeah. Yeah. Hey, I can answer any questions related to that too. On air, off air, whatever you want. Yeah.

Ben:
Awesome.

John:
Yeah. I worked on that for a little while. I didn't build it, but I tuned it a bunch.

Josh:
Remind me what Haystack does.

John:
It was the exception tracker-

Josh:
I remember now. Yeah. Cool.

John:
Yeah. Yep.

Josh:
I have built a few of those.

John:
Yeah, I don't know if you guys have heard of exceptions.

Ben:
Yeah, we did a little bit in that line. But yeah, I remember reading some of your blog posts about Haystack, and I was kind of jealous. I was like, "Oh, man. It'd be cool if we got GitHub as a customer." But yeah, I totally understand why you'd have something totally internal and custom to what you do there at GitHub.

John:
Yeah. I still always wonder if they still have ... I need to reach out to people who are still there and ask. I'm always curious what technology has lasted and what hasn't, and stuff like that.

Josh:
Yeah.

Ben:
Yeah. So how long have you been gone from GitHub?

John:
I would say ... Hard to remember. I would say 2018 I think is when I left. So it was right when after the Microsoft stuff went through. And it happened to coincide with paternity leave ending for me, and all the ... Just perfect timing. So all the stuff kind of came down at the same time. And so my last day of paternity leave was a Friday. And that Friday was the day they closed the deal. And then that Monday, I resigned and moved on to the next stuff. I love GitHub. You can see behind me.

Ben:
Yeah.

Josh:
Yeah.

John:
No one listening can, but I have an Octocat behind me in my room. It's completely office is stuffed with Octocats. I'm a huge fan still. I just am not a big company person really.

Ben:
Yeah. Totally can relate to that.

Josh:
Yep.

Ben:
I've never thrived in big companies. So yeah, getting acquired by Microsoft would make GitHub a pretty big company.

John:
Yeah. And it was ... I mean, we were 45 through 50, and then watched it grow over six, seven years to in the thousands.

Josh:
Wow.

John:
And it was just totally different than we had started. So it was-

Ben:
No doubt.

John:
Yeah. And that's kind of where Flipper and Flipper Cloud and stuff like that even came from was because I was working there. And not to jump ahead or anything like that, but that's ... I was like, "I know I'm not going to be a big company person. So I got to come up with some kind of a runway, because I'm the guy who runs off the clock in the fourth quarter." I'm very safe and conservative in my moves. So yeah.

Ben:
I love that. So let's talk about that. That's very interesting.

Josh:
So you're in good company. That sounds a lot like Ben.

Ben:
Yep.

John:
Yeah. So basically it was like ... I mean, Flipper itself, I started in 2013 just for fun on the weekend, which was a lot of ... Httparty, a lot of gems like that, that's where they came from, was just hacking around on the weekend or in the evenings. I spent a lot of time doing that kind of stuff. And I have always been interested in feature flags, because I worked on, a long time ago. I don't know if you guys know this or not. But I worked on Words With Friends, the Scrabble game on the backend. So I didn't work on any iOS stuff, but worked on the backend. And every time I tried to roll out, I always joked that that time period in my life, all I did was write caching for a year. Because it was just trying to ... We scaled from 50,000 requests a minute to over a million. It was insane.

John:
And so we were just trying to keep the service up. And that's where feature flags came in, and it kept going down every time I tried to roll out this new caching. And the new caching was really important, and I couldn't get it to roll out, because every time I added it, the whole site would just screech to a halt due to a cold cache. So that's when ... I was working with Jesse Newland I don't know if you guys remember him from Rails.

Josh:
Oh, yeah.

John:
Yeah. So we were working together on it. We were like, "We should do feature flags." He was like, "Check out this thing called Rollout." And so I set it up and got it working. And we slowly rolled it out. And then I was just like, "Wow. This is amazing." So yeah. So then a couple years later though, I didn't love the API. I'm real picky about APIs and the way the code looks, and the way it feels. And their examples used like, dollar rollout equals, or something. And dollar just made scrunch my shoulders and nose, and everything.

John:
So at that point I was like, "I think I can do it better." And that I feel like how I always end up in open-source is some kind of silly idea like that. It's usually like you change one thing, and...

Ben:
Yeah, it was awesome.

Starr:
I was prepared not to like it because all I heard was everybody talking about how stupid it was. And then I watched it. I was like, this is amazing. This is just my brand. I was the target demographic. I was, I don't know, 16 17.

Josh:
Yep.

Ben:
Yep. That's a great show.

Starr:
Yeah, so.

Ben:
There was some picture. I don't remember who it was. It was Josh Hawley and I can't remember who the person was. But they had them as Beavis and Butthead. They did a montage, had them in a picture together and it was pretty funny. 

Starr:
I feel like the children and their deep fried memes are the spiritual successor to the spiritual child of Beavis and Butthead.

Ben:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Josh:
Could be Yeah.

Ben:
No doubt.

Starr:
Because Beavis and Butthead were pretty deep fried. So, this podcast is just all about giving. We all live in the Pacific Northwest. And this podcast is going to be all about giving our readers, I know, what does it feel like a sense of what it feels like to live in the Pacific Northwest because I've got a guy chainsawing right outside my window. They've got a wood chipper going. And it's an extremely Pacific Northwest thing. I've lived all over the country. And I've never lived in place for about a third of the time, you can hear a wood chipper in the background in a residential neighborhood.

Josh:
Yeah.

Ben:
I think part of that is due to the trend here that I haven't seen anywhere else, of allowing 90 foot cedar trees to grow right next to the houses, right? And so at some point, someone's like, "You know what? We probably should take that down." And repeat that over and over again in every neighborhood around here.

Josh:
Speaking of, I have some chainsaw work to do right after this podcast. So we do live in a grove of cedar trees. And one of them fell in my backyard and took out my fence the other week so I've been working on that-

Starr:
Oh that's good.

Josh:
Slowly.

Starr:
So I learned, a what?

Ben:
You are going to be all set for firewood this winter then.

Josh:
Yeah, for sure. I've been all set for firewood since we moved in here, trees fall every year, it seems.

Starr:
One thing I learned when I started the permitting process for my backyard office is that Seattle has a concept of, I forget what exactly it's called, but it's like there is significant trees or important trees. There's an official designation for if a tree is worth living or if you can just kill it with impunity.

Ben:
Yeah. Kirkland is pretty uptight about that whole tree thing as well. In fact, apparently Kirkland is tree city USA, but there might be, I don't know, 5000 of those in the country. But anyway, for some reason, the people that owned my house before me or maybe the people that owned the house before them, decided to plant a nice Maple right close to the driveway. And that Maple over its lifetime, of course, grew and grew, and its roots grew and grew under the driveway and heading towards the foundation. And I'm like, I got to take this tree out. And the city of Kirkland was not terribly happy with the idea of me taking out this tree that had that designation. I don't know what they call it, substantial tree or something. But yeah, we actually, we have a policy in Kirkland. You can only remove two trees per year from your property. And you have to get special permission if the tree has a particular diameter of trunk. If it's been around long enough kind of thing. So-

Starr:
Oh, yeah.

Ben:
Yeah.

Starr:
That'd be the absolute unit designation.

Ben:
So I actually sent a Google Earth view of my house, my lot and I had to circle this tree and get permits to be able to remove it.

Starr:
And they're like, "Sorry sir that tree is a chonk, you can't remove that."

Josh:
What?

Starr:
That big boy's an absolute unit. You can't just cut him down.

Josh:
So Ben, what's it like living under tyranny?

Ben:
Well, and then tree removal service that, because I didn't want to do it myself. I'm not that manly. They came out and the contract was if you get sued by the city, then it's all you basically, they disclaim any liability of getting in trouble with the law.

Starr:
Oh, that's funny.

Josh:
Do they have tree lawyers or do they hire.

Ben:
They have the tree police that go out every year. And they look for the tress gone missing.

Starr:
Well, actually, I did, so when I was permitting my shed or my office, I call it the shed, but it's actually a pretty nice office at this point. I was originally going to have it on the other side of the lot, but that was too close to the roots of this special tree, which is good. I don't want to kill the tree. So I'm glad that they told me that. I don't care what side I build it on. But there are actually tree lawyers and tree laws. And it's a whole big deal with forestry. Let me tell you a little bit. This is just going to be the gossip episode where I just tell you all about all my family's dirty laundry. So my sister, my half sister, I've got several siblings and my half sister is 20 years older than me. And she got a little weird there and got a little hostile towards the rest of the family. And essentially, the family owns in common this little plot of land in Mountainburg Arkansas, it's just forest, it's pretty useless. It's not even really flat enough to build on.

Starr:
You'd really have to go in and clear it out and bulldozer it to make it a decent place for our house or anything. And so, she is not an owner due to some complications, she sold her part or something like that. But anyway, later on, several years ago, she went and hired a forestry company to cut down all the trees on the land and sell them to-

Josh:
Log it.

Starr:
Yeah, to log it and give her the money, the proceeds which is a pretty shitty thing to do, right?

Josh:
Industrious?

Starr:
Yeah. So anyway-

Josh:
Just take the initiative.

Starr:
So of course, we had to sue her. Just because I don't know it is just out of principle. Anyway, it was such a paltry sum of money, but it ended up being a principle of the thing. But yes, there's lots of laws about cutting down other people's trees. This is something people have really dealt with in the past.

Josh:
Well, if you're going to go into law, tree law seems like a pretty good way to go.

Starr:
Very stable.

Josh:
There will probably be trees in the future. Have you all, back to the Pacific Northwest, have you seen the pictures of the trees back before the whole, the Pacific Northwest was logged, back in the day?

Starr:
It was amazing.

Josh:
Pictures of entire logging crews sitting on the stumps of these trees. That was 20 people or something.

Ben:
Yeah, I was just reading actually, the book, The boys in the boat. It's the story of US Olympic team, rowing team in 1936. And they were from the Seattle area. They were the University of Washington crew. And so there's a lot of Seattle area history mixed in with this book. And they followed one of the members of the crew, his name is Joe and followed basically his life story. And he lived out in Se...

Full Transcript:
Ben:
Thanks to Starr, we are now linked on the Honeybadger site.

Josh:
Nice.

Starr:
Oh, yeah. It only took two years to do that.

Josh:
I saw that on the "about" page.

Ben:
What made me think about it, I'm just, I don't know, surfing the site for something. I'm like, "You know what? We should probably link to the podcast from our site."

Starr:
Yeah, thanks for opening that issue.

Josh:
I thought we had it in the footer or something. Was it not even in the footer?

Ben:
No.

Josh:
Oh, man. We're good at marketing.

Ben:
We are so good at marketing.

Starr:
Totally.

Ben:
That was a good thing, so thank you.

Starr:
No problem. It was good. It's nice to have a tiny, concrete task that I know I can do that doesn't fractally expand into just caverns of uncertainty.

Ben:
For reals.

Ben:
Well, speaking of caverns of uncertainty, I was helping a friend with their website, which is a very old, old website, and I can't even admit while recording what versions of various software it's using, because that's how old it is. But basically it needed to make a move, and I was like, "You know, the last time I touched this, which was two years ago or something, even then everything was crusty and old. There's no way we're going to find a new hosting provider that's supporting all this old stuff anymore." So, what to do? What to do? I was just like, "You know what? Let me just run Wget on the site and just mirror the whole site to static pages, and then dump it up somewhere behind Apache and just leave it at that."

Josh:
Nice.

Ben:
So, I sent that over to her. I'm like, "Here, you should try this. How about this?" So, we'll see. The problem is there's no search now and the contact form and stuff like that won't work. I'm like, "You know what? Just let it go. Just embrace the simplicity."

Starr:
Oh my god, yeah.

Josh:
That's so weird. That is so weird, because yesterday I literally did that with the Heya sales site that was in Rails. I literally saved, I did the "save as webpage" thing, and then edited the CSS paths and just dumped into a GitHub pages branch on the public repository, because we decided not to sell Heya anymore and release it as open source, so we didn't need this fancy Rails app that we were paying to demo it. So, sometimes just "save as webpage" and deploy is the way to go.

Starr:
When you mentioned a search, that reminded me of this client I used to have. It was a freelancing client, it's a Rails app, it's a very, very old original Rails still. I guess technically they're still my client. I never actually dropped them, because they would get in contact with me once every two years and have me do two hours of work, so I was just like, "Okay, whatever." It's mostly because I like them and I know that they're not going to find somebody who's going to do this for them, so I didn't want to leave them high and dry. But I built an export as PDF feature a long time ago for them, and it used, what was that headless browser? Was it Phantom?

Josh:
Yeah, Phantom.

Starr:
I used the headless browser to save as a PDF, or print as a PDF or whatever, and it was all in Heroku. Last year they got in touch with me and was like, "Hey, this PDF thing stopped working," and I'm just like, "Oh my god. Oh my god." Because I haven't touched this in I think it's been almost 10 years, this part of the app. I was just like, "You know, all browsers support print to PDF now. All operating systems, you just press "print" and then you do the PDF. You select "PDF" and it works." I remember trying to get them just to do that-

Josh:
That's a good fix.

Starr:
... the first time I built it, but Windows didn't have that feature. You had to have-

Ben:
Had to get a driver for that.

Starr:
Yeah, you had to have a special software. But this time I guess Windows added print to PDF, so it was okay.

Ben:
Nice.

Josh:
That's amazing. Did it use WK HTML to PDF? Or was it something else? I think I used that graphic-

Starr:
No, it was a headless browser that would output-

Josh:
You were doing it, okay.

Starr:
... to PDF. It was running on Heroku somehow. I don't know how I got it to run on Heroku.

Josh:
Ben remembers what I'm talking about.

Ben:
Yeah. Oh, man, that was painful.

Josh:
On Heroku even, I think. I remember specifically an issue with that where I think we were deploying it to Heroku and it had some PDF function like this, but we weren't paying for multiple dynos or something. The app was having these random failures where it would just not respond to requests, and it turns out that the reason was that it was being blocked by this PDF process in the background, and then it would just block the threads for connections to Unicorn or whatever server it was using, probably WebKit or something, or WEBrick. The solution to that problem was just to pay for hosting.

Starr:
So, you're saying this wasn't a high-availability, high-scalability setup?

Josh:
No. But I think it was for our client. They were extremely cheap. I was like, "You just need to put some money into this."

Starr:
That's a catch-22 with freelancing, because you can be working on a thing and just be like, "This is terrible. I would be embarrassed to show anybody this." But nobody's going to pay you to make it any better, so you're just not, because you've got to make a living.

Josh:
That's the phase of freelancing where you just need to eat.

Ben:
Yeah, that's a terrible phase. Much better when you can get to the point where you can be selective in your clients and pick ones that'll actually both pay you and pay for the things that you recommend they do.

Josh:
One of my last old, old, old clients recently switched their website, like you were talking about, Ben, and I do remember the software versions they were running until within the last couple years I think, they were running a Joomla! 1.0 site, which I think the last release of that was 2008 or something.

Ben:
This was also a Joomla! site.

Josh:
Yeah, it's got to be a Joomla! site if it was from the late aughts or whatever.

Ben:
Right.

Josh:
Good times. I don't know. It must have been hacked 75 different ways. Or I don't know how it wasn't, to be honest. But I advised them to move to Squarespace, which I was looking at for a personal project recently, because I was looking like, "Do I want to build a custom little HTML site or whatever?" I realized for SquareSpace it's $140 a year for just to deploy a basic website. For most small business, like clients that I started out with in the early 2000s or whatever, that job just shouldn't exist anymore. It's just Squarespace or the services like them. You get a decent website that is maintained, and it's an hour of a modern developer's time per year. It just doesn't make sense to roll it myself.

Starr:
It's a little bit sad because one of my favorite aspects of web development was always just getting some mock-up from a designer or getting a screen from a designer, and then you have to make it somehow work using 2009-era CSS. It sounds very masochistic, but once you get into it, it's just a very Zen-type thing, because it just is what it is. You're just moving pixels from one picture to another, one window to another on the computer. It's just, I don't know.

Josh:
That was kind of fun, yeah.

Ben:
I never got into that. That was always for me very frustrating, so I just farmed that out to chop shops would would-

Josh:

Full Transcript:
Ben:
Did y'all buy any GameStop this week?

Josh:
I thought about it yesterday while Robinhood was not allowing buy orders or whatever, because my brokerage, I mean, doesn't shut you out. And I mean, it probably would have been a pretty safe bet given the stock today. But I don't do that kind of shit.

Ben:
Yeah, yeah. I'm in the same boat. I want to, just for funsies, but at the same time, it's like, "Ah, that's really not a productive use of my time or money."

Josh:
Yeah. I deleted the Robinhood app after. Because I tried it out just because you got to see what the kids are up to these days. And the last straw with it was when they added this crypto trading interface that looked like a Tron ... Like some kind of arcade game. I was just like, "This is ... Yeah, I don't need a light cycle to buy cryptocurrency."

Starr:
Yeah, it's a little bit weird. My brother was like, "Hey, do you do stocks or crypto?" And I'm like, "Well, I've got mutual funds. But also, you don't have any money."

Josh:
This is how you know that the markets about to just evaporate, when your brother asks you if you trade stocks of crypto.

Starr:
For the past decade, I've just been like ... This is the last straw, global pandemic, 30% unemployment, last straw, market is going to tank. But I guess not.

Josh:
Yeah, this is new. Yeah, people won't let it fail, so let's just hold it or whatever the meme is. It's the new just thing to live by in general I think. Just hold, always just hold. Just never let go, never let go. Whatever it is, never let go.

Ben:
Diamond hands.

Josh:
Yeah.

Starr:
Explain the diamond hands thing to me, I don't understand that. I saw it, but ...

Ben:
You have to check out Amy Hoy's thread, Twitter thread, where she went and did a sale safari on Wall Street Bets. So sale safari is her and Alex Hillman's process where you go and discover ... You basically research a community, and you find out what the needs are, right. And so you can use that to help formulate some ideas for businesses or products that you might want to create. Instead of coming up with an idea and saying, "Hey, I wonder if someone will buy this?" You actually go and look for people who are looking for things, and you're like, "Oh, yeah, I could satisfy that need, okay."

Starr:
That doesn't make any sense.

Ben:
So that's sale safari. And so she does this just for funsies, right. So she went on Wall Street Bets, and like, "I'm going to do a sale safari and find out what's this community all about." And so she just has this analysis on Twitter. It's a great thread, we'll put it in the show notes. But basically, she went and analyzed what their catchphrases are, and what they're doing in there basically. And diamond hands and paper hands are two of the phrases that show up in there repeatedly. And so if you're not familiar with the whole Reddit thing, which I mean, you must be by now if you're on the internet. But it's all about buying GameStop stock, and watching it go up, and up, and up, and putting the squeeze on short sellers who are just panicking because everyone is just buying this stock and making it go up, right.

Josh:
Which is hilarious.

Ben:
So they're all encouraging each other inside of Wall Street Bets, they're all like, "Hey, you got to hold on, you got to buy and hold, you can't sell." So diamond hands is someone who's holding on strong. And paper hands is someone who's chickening out and they're going to sell.

Starr:
Oh, okay, yeah.

Josh:
So I'm a paper hands?

Starr:
You know what this really resembles to me? It kind of resembles a Ponzi scheme in that-

Josh:
Well that's it, that's the thing, it just resembles a Ponzi scheme.

Starr:
For the stock price to keep going up more, more people have to keep coming in and buying at the higher price. And then eventually, there's not going to be anymore people, and then the price is going to collapse, and whoever came in last is going to be left holding a bunch of worthless stock.

Ben:
So Matt Levine had a great article this week. Actually, he's done multiple on this whole thing. Again, put in the show notes. So Matt Levine writes an economics column. But so he talked about the Wall Street Bets. And he was addressing your point exactly about, why would you buy now? Because you're just basically counting on someone who is dumb to come in and buy at some point later, right. Total Ponzi scheme.

Ben:
But he also provides some alternative exit strategies, as opposed to just depending on someone coming in whose dumber, buying the thing. So we'll post it. But it's a good read. I can't do it justice just to paraphrase it. So I'll link it, and you can read it.

Starr:
Yeah, I'll check that out. We'll put it in the show notes.

Ben:
That said, I wouldn't recommend actually buying GameStop right now.

Starr:
Oh, no, no, no, no.

Josh:
It does seem, just in general, that the world ... Society is rewarding true believers of all kinds right now. So it just seems to be a thing.

Starr:
Yeah, I don't know.

Ben:
It does feel eerily similar to conspiracy theorists and-

Josh:
Conspiracy theorists, populous politics, and just hold on no matter what. Doesn't matter what reality is, just hold on and we will win.

Ben:
Yeah, yeah.

Starr:
One thing that I do enjoy about this is that I've seen a number of people in my Twitter feed that are essentially like ... They're like, "I bought GameStop stock. I'm holding it. I know I'm going to lose this money. I'm doing it specifically to hurt rich people. I just really want to stick it to the hedge funds, so I'm going to put $1,000 into GameStop stock and just sit with it."

Josh:
Yeah, it seems to me like just another populous revolt.

Starr:
Yeah, it's like a Boston Tea Party type situation I think.

Josh:
Yeah.

Starr:
Only its weird, because it involves people staking their money. It's this really weird, abstract ... It's super cyberpunky. I could totally see all this happening in a William Gibson novel.

Ben:
Totally.

Josh:
Yeah. No, it strikes you as a Boston Tea Party, but a real one instead of the ones that people act out on the steps of capitals around the country.

Starr:
Oh, yeah, the Tea Party has connotations now, doesn't it?

Josh:
Yeah.

Ben:
Instead of a LARP, it's IRL.

Josh:
Yeah, it's IRL. The IRL Tea Party in the 21st century would happen on the internet I the world of finance.

Starr:
Oh, totally, yeah.

Ben:
Yeah, my only concern is ... I get the whole ethos of, "Yeah, let's stick it to the man." And, "Those evil capitalists and hedge fund managers." Well, the problem is pensions, and retirement funds, and those kinds of things invest in those hedge funds.

Starr:
Hush now, don't think about that. We don't think about that, Ben.

Ben:
If you destroy them, that could affect me.

...