Show NotesLinks:GatherRoblox Vs. Second LifeDocsketchRuben GamezAppSumoIntro CRMFull 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...

Show notes:Links:Intro CRMAhoyAndrew KaneFull 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...

The podcast discusses the hosts' fascination with affordable electric motorcycles and scooters, along with their plans to get their two-wheel endorsement. They also talk about developer buying habits, moving to Docker containers, setting up an image squishing feature, paying for software, and exploring high frequency and algorithmic trading.

The podcast hosts discuss the benefits of using feature flags, their experience with Roll Out, and testing DynamoDB with Flipper. They talk about relying on Amazon's infrastructure, reminisce about past challenges, and suggest improvements. They also discuss work-life balance in remote work, upgrading their app for TLS protocol, implementing and maintaining documented processes, and office setup and bean bags.

Show notes:Links:PrintfectionSwag.comFull 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. ...

Show Notes:Links:John Nunemaker WebsiteJohn Nunemaker TwitterFlipper CloudSpeaker DeckScientistFull 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...

Show Notes:Links:The Boys in The BoatFounding SalesAll your base are belong to usWrite for usFull Transcript:Starr:I loved Beavis and Butthead so much in the 90s.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...

Show Notes:Links:HeyaBen Curtis’ Mad Money DreamHost Affiliate Link Write for usFull 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:

Show Notes:Links:Amy Hoy - Wall Street BetsBloomberg - How Will the GameStop Game StopClayton Christensen - Theory of Disruptive InnovationArt of The Product Podcast - Does Tuple Ever Crash?Jobs@honeybadger.io Write for HoneybadgerFull 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....

Show Notes:Links:Cobol On CogsSquare Hole TikTok VideoHook RelayUniversal Honeybadger.jsFounderQuest Accounts EpisodeWrite for Honeybadger's BlogFull Transcript:Ben:Did you see that tweet I posted in the channel, the TikTok video about the shape sorter?Josh:It was so good.Starr:So good.Josh:Laughed really hard.Ben:So good. I just loved the voice of the person doing the shapes.Josh:Yeah.Ben:"And where do you think this one goes?"Starr:So it's a shape sorting thing. And they've got all different color blocks, like a kid's toy and you're supposed to match the shape to the hole in the top of the bucket, but it turns out all of the shapes just fit inside the square hole. And so-Josh:That's why there's a hole in there.Starr:Yeah, so it's a reaction video. This woman's watching it and she's just getting more and more dismayed as he just puts everything. She's like, "No, put it in the triangle hole," and he's like, "No, this one goes in the square hole." So I think this is a metaphor for how users as well use Excel for every single task in their business.Ben:Yeah. So I'll have to put the tweet in the show notes, but that was funny that I found.Starr:Yeah, that's really good. I like-Ben:Well, I am... Go ahead.Starr:I was just going to say I like watching TikTok, but I'm like I'm too old to actually watch TikTok, so I just watch video compilations of TikTok that somebody shows me.Josh:Yeah, TikTok on YouTube.Ben:Saying, yeah, I watch TikTok on Twitter.Josh:Twitter. Yeah.Ben:So, yeah.Josh:Yeah. That's an interesting thing about TikTok, because it's like half the people who enjoy the videos aren't even on the platform or whatsoever.Starr:And that's just the internet.Josh:But these are everywhere. They're all over Instagram. I guess, yeah, it is.Starr:I just want to know like how much of... So there's got to be a number out there, like the total traffic on the internet per day, like total bandwidth use. How much of that is just sending around videos and screenshots of other parts of the internet?Josh:Yeah.Ben:Yeah.Josh:Well, I guess like the same thing happened with Vine.Ben:It's like marketing attribution. Right? You never know where your traffic is coming from. Like TikTok, they have no idea where the video is actually being seen.Josh:Yeah.Ben:Like, is it on TikTok? Is it on Twitter? Is it on Reddit? Who knows? It's got to be tough-Josh:They were pretty-Ben:... for their engagement numbers, you know?Josh:They were pretty smart to put their watermark on the videos.Ben:Totally.Starr:So you were about to tell us how great you're feeling, I think, Ben?Ben:Yes. I'm so excited. Today has been a great day so far. I mean it's early. But-Starr:What happened?Ben:Well, I finally, after many, many weeks of having this on my to do this, I finally got it this week and this morning I finished off putting together everything required for the Heroku add-on for Hook Relay.Starr:Oh, awesome.Josh:Nice.Ben:Yes.Starr:So Hook Relay is a product you've been working on that adds sort of like push button reliability to people's implementations of webhooks. Am I right?Ben:That's correct.Starr:Did you pivot?Ben:I haven't pivoted yet. No.Starr:Okay, good.Ben:And as I was writing up that Heroku, for Heroku, of course you have to like put in a description of what your thing does and you have to upload some screenshots and you have to do pricing. And all that stuff was basically done. But the last thing to do, I think I kept on putting off because it's just not my strong suit. And so, you know how that goes, you just do the things you'd like to do over the things you don't like to do. But the last thing was putting together the Dev Center documentation page. So each Heroku add-on needs to have some documentation at Heroku, it tells you how to use the ad-on and how to provision it, things like that. And it's pretty straightforward and simple, but I'm just not a big fan of writing stuff like that.Ben:And so anyway, I kept putting it off. But bonus was Kevin had put a quick-start page together for Hook Relay, like months ago when we launched the product, which is basically like, "Here's how you use it," which is basically the same thing that Heroku wants for this page. So I copied and most of his stuff and just shifted a little bit. But the thing that kind of threw me this morning as I was finishing it off, there's a field on the Dev Center page. There's this big text blog where you put your documentation, and that's fine, but there's a field above it, and it says meta description. And I was like, what's supposed to go in there. I don't know. I mean, because there's a separate spot for doing it like you're marketing blurb. Like, "Hey, give us the one line description of your add-on that's someplace else." And so I'm like, so what is a meta description? I don't know.Starr:Is it like for SEO?Josh:Like a meta tag.Ben:Well, I'm not exactly sure still, but when I saved the content, like the big blurb of text that will make up the page, it took the first line of the content and put that in the meta description. I'm like, okay, so, I'm thinking maybe this is a TLDR. So I tweak that a little bit. And as I was tweaking that, I came up with a tagline for Hook Relay that, "Now, I'm no marketing specialist, I'm no guru. I'm no copywriter either. But-Josh:You're just the guy on podcast.Starr:... we're going to workshop this real time."Ben:But I'm pretty proud of what I came up with here.Starr:Ratings are going to go through the roof.Ben:And so here's the tagline. And Kevin helped me tweak it a little at the end. It is just, "Send a post request and let Hook Relay handle the rest."Starr:Nice.Ben:Yes. And Kevin's suggestion was that rest should be all caps because of course... Yes.Josh:Of course.Ben:Yeah. It's the rest, you know?Josh:There you go. I can see. Yeah.Starr:There you go. Yeah. The catch is that like post and delete requests cost extra, you got to pay more for those.Ben:Right. So there we go. So now I'm feeling pretty good. Like Hook Relay is signed, sealed and delivered. It should be on their Heroku marketplace next week. Somewhat by the time this drops, it should be there.Starr:Awesome. That's great.Josh:That's, yeah, really exciting. And don't we like have a customer or something?Ben:We do. We actually have a paying customer. That's pretty exciting.Starr:That's amazing.Ben:So, that's pretty impressive considering we haven't really done any real marketing or advertising for it. And I've talked about it on the podcast and I tweeted about it a few times, but it's been pretty quiet. We've done that on purpose. We're kind of laying low to do the gradual buildup, make sure things are working before they ship to the masses, but yeah-Josh...