Podcast appearances and mentions of andrew culver

Andrew Culver is a long-time Rails developer and creator of Bullet Train, a SaaS framework for Rails, and the organizer of The Rails SaaS Conference in Los Angeles, California and Athens, Greece. Brittany was excited to have him on the show to talk about his hacker origins, his latest event in Athens, and to discuss why Rails World sold out in 45 minutes. Show Notes: Bullet Train: The Open Source Ruby on Rails SaaS Framework (https://bullettrain.co/) The Rails SaaS Conference (https://railssaas.com/) Laravel Spark (https://spark.laravel.com/) Photos from Andrew's Hacker Phase (https://imgur.com/a/lvo7DcK) Indie Rails: Michael Buckbee - Balancing Marketing & Development While Building Wafris (https://www.indierails.com/11) Rails World - 2023 — October 5 & 6 (https://rubyonrails.org/world) Andrew Culver (@andrewculver) / Twitter (https://twitter.com/andrewculver?lang=en) Sponsored By: Honeybadger (https://www.honeybadger.io/) As an Engineering Manager or an engineer, too much of your time gets sucked up with downtime issues, troubleshooting, and error tracking. How can you spend more time shipping code and less time putting out fires? Honeybadger is how. It's a suite of monitoring tools specifically for devs. Get started today in as little as 5 minutes at Honeybadger.io (https://www.honeybadger.io/) with plans starting at free! Mirror Placement (https://www.mirrorplacement.com/) Mirror Placement are the Ruby on Rails & JavaScript recruiters. They are actively engaged with a wide and deep network of Rails, JavaScript, and Full-Stack Open Source engineers and tech leaders we love, with relationships cultivated over 15 years. Contact Brian, co-host of this podcast, here (https://www.mirrorplacement.com/contact).

Nadia Odunayo is the Founder and CEO of The StoryGraph, a new website and app for avid book readers because life's too short for a book you're not in the mood for. The StoryGraph helps you track your reading and choose your next book based on your mood, favorite topics, and themes. Victoria talks to Nadia about coming up with a product based on the concept of mood, what you're in the mood for to read, i.e., this book made me feel this way. How do I find a book that makes me feel similar? They also talk about keeping yourself open to feedback, the ability to flow and change direction, and developing a reviewing system that keeps biases in check. StoryGraph (https://thestorygraph.com/) Follow StoryGraph on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-storygraph-limited/), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/the.storygraph/), or Twitter (https://twitter.com/thestorygraph). Follow Nadia Odunayo on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/nodunayo/) or Twitter (https://twitter.com/nodunayo). Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: This is The Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. And with me today is Nadia Odunayo, Founder and CEO of StoryGraph, a new website and app for avid book readers because life's too short for a book you're not in the mood for. StoryGraph helps you track your reading and choose your next book based on your mood and your favorite topics and themes. Nadia, thank you for joining me. NADIA: Thank you for having me. VICTORIA: And you are a repeat guest at Giant Robots. But for those who missed that episode, tell me a little bit about your journey. And how did this all get started? NADIA: Okay. Yeah, so that first time was in 2015, and that was not too long after I had just got into tech. I did a bootcamp in London in 2014, Makers Academy, and that's where I learned to code. My degree was in philosophy, politics, and economics, so rather different. I worked at Pivotal for about a year and a half after I graduated from Makers Academy. And during my time at Pivotal, I got into conference speaking, and my first talk was around game theory. So I took my favorite topic in economics, game theory, and I combined that with distributed systems because that's what I was working on at the time in Pivotal on their Cloud Foundry PaaS. I think I gave it at RailsConf, and I think someone there recommended me to Giant Robots. And so Ben Orenstein interviewed me, and it was all about different types of conference talks and that kind of thing. So after Pivotal, I left and started a hybrid kind of consultancy/product company with a colleague, did that for about a year, left that, worked for about a year with my friend, Saron Yitbarek, on her company CodeNewbie. And then, when that partnership ended, I essentially had five years of runway from money that I got from the company that I started after Pivotal because we did some consulting with a bank. I'd always been entrepreneurial. I'd been doing various entrepreneurial things since secondary school, actually, high school. It was time for me to just have time on my side projects. And so I started hacking away on one of my side projects at the beginning of 2019 in January, and I haven't stopped since. That's what the StoryGraph has developed into. VICTORIA: Wonderful. And yes, I saw that the very early stages of StoryGraph started as a creative writing e-publication. Is that right? NADIA: So what happened was when I was at university, I started a creative writing e-publication, came up with the name The StoryGraph. Because we had won or we were going for some grant funding or something like that, I set up a corporate entity. And when I stopped working on that e-publication, I remember my mom saying to me, "Don't shut down the entity. I really like the name. I feel like you'll use it for something," that was in 2012. And so fast forward to 2019, and the side project that I was working on was called Read Lists. And it was very specifically focused on tracking and sharing progress through reading lists on a dashboard. But when I was doing customer research, and the scope of the project grew, Read Lists didn't fit anymore. And that's when I realized, oh, I can use The StoryGraph thing again. And so it's basically had two different lives or two different forms, the StoryGraph company. VICTORIA: That's wonderful. And I'm reading about StoryGraph and how it's an Amazon-free alternative to Goodreads. Can you talk a little bit more about the product and why people would want to use it? NADIA: So, as I said, it started life as a very specific focused side project. And I just had so much fun working on it and working in the book space. I'd always been a reader since I was a kid such that I said to myself, I need to find a way to make me building a books product a full-time thing. And so that's when customer research came in because the only way that you're going to make sure that you don't build something that people don't want is by talking to people. As I was doing customer research and figuring out, are there pain points amongst readers, people who track their reading? What would happen was the pain points that came up drove me towards building a more fully fledged reading, tracking, and recommendations product. It actually started as a very focused recommendations product. And then, we got to the point where we needed to build more around it for it to be a compelling product. And as it was growing, we never advertised ourselves as a Goodreads alternative or as an Amazon-free alternative to what was out there. But that was clearly a pain point in the market. There were tweets about us saying, "Finally a Goodreads alternative. It's small; it's independent; it's Amazon-free. And so thousands and thousands, hundreds of thousands of people have come to us because of that. VICTORIA: Wow. NADIA: And so it got to the point...mainly when we launched our payment plan, and we were trying to figure out the reasons why people were pre-ordering the plan, it was at that point where we decided to lean into the Amazon-free Goodreads alternative because that was what the market wanted. VICTORIA: Was that surprising for you? Or were there other things that came out of your research on your marketplace that kind of were different than what you thought it would be going in? NADIA: I think the most interesting thing about the product development journey was that I at least originally felt like I was building a product that wasn't for me. So what I mean by that is in my earliest rounds of research, what I was finding was that people still didn't think that they had one place to get consistently good book recommendations. And so then I started to explore, well, how do you even give somebody consistently good book recommendations? And one of the factors that kept on coming up was this concept of mood, what you're in the mood for. This book made me feel this way. How do I find a book that makes me feel similar? And so it got to the point where I said to myself, oh wow, I'm building a product for mood readers right now; that seems to be the gap, that seems to be the thing that nothing out there yet had properly attacked. And I had never considered myself a mood reader. I just thought I'm a planner. I'm an organized person. I typically decide what book I want to read, and then I read it. And so there was a point where I was concerned, and I thought, wait, am I now building something that is not for me? But then, as I started to work and do more research and talk to more and more people and thinking about my reading experiences, I developed the hypothesis or the viewpoint rather that I think everybody's a mood reader; it's just the scale. Because there are probably some books that I may have rated lowly in the past that if I had read it in a different frame of mind, or at a different time in my life, different circumstance, it probably would have resonated with me a lot more. Now, that's not to say that's true for every single book. There are some books that are just not going to work for you, no matter what. But I do think we're all on the scale of mood reading. And sometimes we say a book is a bad book, but we just read it at not the right time. And so I think the most surprising thing for me is going on that journey of realizing that, oh, I am a mood reader too. VICTORIA: [laughs] NADIA: And I ended up building an app that's a lot less focused on just the pure ratings. I was someone who, on Goodreads, if it had less than four stars, I'm not interested. And the ethos of the product is more about, well, hang on; these ratings are very subjective. And someone else's two, three-star could be your next five-star. What are the factors that really matter? Do you want something dark, adventurous? Are you looking for something funny, light? And then what kind of topics do you want to discover? And then it doesn't matter if the five people before you thought it was average; you might think it's excellent. VICTORIA: Yeah, it reminds me thinking about how bias can come in with authors and writing as well. So a simple five-star system might be more susceptible to bias against different genders or different types of names. Whereas if you have more complex numbers or complex rating systems, it might be easier to have different types of authors stand out in a different way. NADIA: That actually relates to what was going through my mind when I was developing the reviewing system on StoryGraph. You can just, if you want, leave your star rating and say no more, but the star rating is lower down on the page. And up front, we say this book would be great for someone who's in the mood for something...and then you've got checkboxes. And how would you rate the pace of the book? And if it's a fiction book, we ask you, "Are the characters lovable?" Is there a flawed narrator? Is it plot-driven or character-driven?" Questions like that because the thinking is it doesn't matter whether you are going to give the book two stars in your own personal star rating. You can still help someone else find a book that's good for them because they will be looking at the summary on the StoryGraph book page, and they'll go, "Oh wow, 80% of people said it's lovable. There's a diverse range of characters, and it's funny. So the topics fit things I'm interested in, so I care less about the average rating being like 3.5 because everything else seems perfect. Let me see for myself." And actually, we've also had a lot of feedback from people saying that "Oh, normally, I never know how to review a book or what to say. And this system has really helped me, almost give me prompts to get started about explaining the book, reviewing it for other people to help them decide if it's for them. So that's great." VICTORIA: That makes sense to me because I read a lot of books, maybe not as much as I would like to recently. But not all books that I love I can easily recommend to friends, but it's hard for me to say why. [laughs] You know, like, "This is a very complicated book." So I love it. I'll have to check it out later. It's been four years since you've been full-time or since 2019, almost five then. NADIA: Yes. VICTORIA: If you could travel back in time to when you first started to make this a full-time role, what advice would you give yourself now, having all of this foresight? NADIA: Have patience, trust the process because I can sometimes be impatient with, ah, I want this to happen now. I want this to pick up now. I want these features done now. I'm a solo dev on the project. I started it solo. I have a co-founder now, but I'm still the solo dev. And there were so many things, especially now that we've got a much larger user base, that people complained about or say is not quite right. And that can be really tough to just have to keep hearing when you're like, I know, but I don't have the resource to fix it right now or to improve it. But I think one of the things is, yeah, having faith in the process. Keep going through the cycles of listening to the customers, prioritizing the work, getting the work done, getting the feedback, and just keep going through that loop. And the product will keep getting better. Because sometimes it can feel, particularly in the first year when I was so low, you sometimes have moments of doubt. Or if a customer research round doesn't go super well, you start to wonder, is this only a nice-to-have? And is this going to go anywhere? And so that's one piece of advice. And I think the other one is knowing that there are several right paths because I think sometimes I would agonize over I want to do the right thing. I want to make sure I make the right choice right now. And, I mean, there are some things that are not good to do. You want to make sure that you're setting up your customer interviews in a non-leading way. You want to make sure that there are certain standards in the product in terms of the technical side and all that kind of stuff, so there's that. But I think it's understanding that you kind of just have to make a decision. And if you set yourself up to be able to be adaptive and responsive to change, then you'll be fine. Because you can always change course if the response you're getting back or the data you're getting back is going in the wrong direction. VICTORIA: I love that. And I want to pull on that thread about being open to changing your mind. I think that many founders start the company because they're so excited about this idea and this problem that they found. But how do you keep yourself open to feedback and keeping that ability to flow and to change direction? NADIA: I mean, I didn't set out to build a Goodreads alternative, and here I am. VICTORIA: [laughs] NADIA: I just wanted to build this specific side project or this specific...it was a companion app, in fact. Like, the first version of the thing I built, the first thing you had to do was sign in and connect your Goodreads account so that we could pull in your shelves and start creating the dashboards. So as a solo bootstrapping founder, building a Goodreads alternative was not something that I thought was going to lead to success. But through years of experience, and just hearing other people's stories, and research, I just learned that it's such a hard space just running a startup in general, and 90% of startups fail. And I just said to myself that, okay, the only way I can kind of survive for longer is if I am open to feedback, I'm open to change course, I'm patient, and I trust the process. These are the things I can do to just increase my chances of success. And so that's why I kind of feel it's imperative if you want to go down this route and you want to be successful, it's vital that you're open to completely changing the product, completely changing your direction, completely going back on a decision. You'll either lose customers or you'll run out of money, whatever it is. And so yeah, you've got to just basically be quite ruthless in the things that are just going to minimize your chances of failing. VICTORIA: That makes sense. And now, I have a two-part question for you. What's the wind in your sails? Like, the thing that keeps you going and keeps you motivated to keep working on this? And then, conversely, what's kind of holding you back? What are the obstacles and challenges that you're facing? NADIA: I think this kind of role...so I'm like founder, CEO, and developer. In general, I think I thrive under pressure and pushing myself, and trying to always be better and improve. So I'm always trying to be like, how can I improve my productivity? Or how can I run the company better? All these kinds of things. So I feel like I'm getting to explore maximizing my full potential as someone in the world of work through doing this. So that just intrinsically is motivating to me. I love books, and I love reading. I think it's such an amazing hobby. And the fact that I get to make other readers happy is awesome. So even just as the product has grown, the messages that we get about if someone got a perfect recommendation from StoryGraph, or they hadn't read for years, and now an easy form of, you know, what are you in the mood for? Check a few boxes, and we'll show you some books that fit, whatever it is. That's just so...it's so awesome just to be able to enhance readers' lives that way in terms of the things they're reading and getting them excited about reading again or keeping them excited. So those are the things that keep me going, both the personal nature of enjoying my work and enjoying trying to be the best founder and CEO that I can and building a great product. It's always great when you build something, and people just enjoy using it and like using it. So I'm always incentivized to keep making the product better, the experience better. I'm currently mid a redesign. And I'm just so excited to get it out because it's going to touch on a lot of repeated pain points that we've been having for years. And I just can't wait for everyone to see it and see that we've listened to them. And we're making progress still like three and a bit years on since we launched out of beta. What's tough? Previously, what's been tough is navigating, remaining independent, and bootstrapped with just personally trying to make money to just live my life. So I had five years of runway. And it was this tricky situation about when I had a couple of years left, I'm thinking, wow, I really like doing this, but I'm going to need to start earning money soon. But I also don't want to get investment. I don't want to stop doing this. I can't stop doing this. We've got hundreds of thousands of customers. And so kind of trying to balance my personal needs and life situations with the work I've been doing because I've been working so hard on it for so long that in the last couple of years, it's gotten to a point where it's like, how do I craft the life I want out of a product that is very not set up to be an indie bootstrapped product? [laughs] Typically, you want to do a B2B. You want to start earning money from your product as early as possible. And I feel like I've landed in a product that's typically funded, VC-backed, that kind of thing. So kind of navigating that has been a fun challenge. There's not been anything that's kind of demoralized me or held me back, or made me think I shouldn't do it. And it's just kind of been a fun challenge trying to...yeah, just navigate that. And we've been doing things like we're currently in the process of transitioning our...we have a Plus Plan. And when we launched it, it was essentially a grab bag of features. We're completely changing the feature set. And we right now have six and a half thousand people who are on that plan. But we don't have product market fit on that plan, and I can tell from when I do certain surveys the responses I get back. And so we're completely transitioning that to focus in on our most popular feature, which is the stats that we offer. And so that's kind of scary, but it's part of making that Plus Plan more sticky and easier to sell because it's going to be for your power users who love data. So they want all the data when they are reading. And then the other thing is, okay, what kind of business avenue can we start which fits in with the ethos of the product but brings in more revenue for StoryGraph? And so, we launched a giveaway segment in our app where publishers and authors can pay to list competitions for users to win copies of their books. And it's essentially a win-win-win because publishers and authors get another channel to market their books. Users get to win free books, and readers love winning free books. And StoryGraph has another revenue source that helps us stay independent and profitable, and sustainable in the long run. VICTORIA: That's wonderful. And there are two tracks I want to follow up on there; one is your decision not to seek funding; if you could just tell me a little more about the reasoning and your thought process behind that. And you've already touched on a little bit of the other ways you're looking at monetizing the app. NADIA: Since I was a teenager, I've always been interested in business, economics, entrepreneurship. I've always felt very entrepreneurial. I've read so many founder stories and startup stories over the years. And you hear about venture capitalists who come in, and even if it's fine for the first year or two, ultimately, they want a return. And at some point, that could come at odds with your mission or your goals for your company. And when I think about two things, the kind of life I want and also the nature of the product I'm building as well, VC just doesn't fit. And I know there are so many different funding programs and styles right now, a lot more friendlier [laughs] than VC. But I'm just focusing on VC because when I was younger, I used to think that was a marker of success. VC funding that was the track I thought I was going to go down, and that was what I kind of idolized as, oh my gosh, yes, getting a funding round of millions and millions and then building this huge company. That was how I used to be, so it's so interesting how I've completely gone to the other side. That idea that you could have mismatched goals and how it's ruined companies, once you take the first round of funding and you grow and expand, then you've got to keep taking more to just stay alive until some liquidation event. That just doesn't appeal to me. And I just think there's something ultimately very powerful and valuable about building a product without giving up any ownership to anybody else and being able to make it into something that people love, and that's profitable, and can give the people who run it great lifestyles. I just think that's a mark of an excellent product, and I just want to build one of those. And then I think also the nature of the product itself being a book tracking app. I think the product has done well because it is run and built so closely by myself and Rob. And so it's like, people talk about how, oh, you can tell it's built for readers by readers by people who care. And I run the company's Instagram, and it's not just me talking about the product. I'm talking with a bunch of our users about books and what we're reading. And it really feels like it's just got such a great community feel. And I worry that that can get lost with certain types of investment that I've previously thought that I wanted in my life. And so, yeah, that's the reason why I've kind of strayed away from the investment world. And then it's gotten to the point, like, now we're at the point where we don't need funding because we've been able to get to profitability by ourselves. So we don't need any type of funding. And we're just going to try and keep doing things to keep making the product better, to convert more people to the Plus Plan. And, hopefully, our giveaways platform grows in the way we want such that our goal is to just stay profitable and independent forever for as long as possible. And we think that way, we're going to have the most fun running the company, and the product is going to be the best it can be because there's not going to be competing incentives or goals for the product. VICTORIA: That makes sense. And it sounds like, in reality, in the real case, you had a team, and you had the skills yourself to be able to move the product forward without having to take on funding or take on additional support, which is awesome. And I actually really like your background. I also have a degree in economics. So I'm curious if the economics and philosophy, all of that, really lends itself to your skills as a founder. Is that accurate? NADIA: I don't think so. VICTORIA: [laughs] NADIA: I love my degree. I get sad when I meet econ grads or econ majors, and they're like, "Oh, I hated it. Oh, it was so boring," or whatever. I'm like, "No, it was so great." I'm a big microeconomics fan, so I was all about...I didn't like macro that much. I was all about the game theory and the microeconomic theory, that kind of stuff. I don't think there's anything that really ties into my skills as a founder. I feel like that's more to do with my upbringing and personality than what I studied. But, I mean, one of the reasons I did love my degree is because there are elements that do crop up. It's such a widely applicable...the subjects I did are so widely applicable, philosophy, different ways of seeing the world and thinking and approaching different people. And then, obviously, economics that's essentially behavior, and how markets work, and incentives, and all that kind of stuff. And when you get to pricing and all those sorts of things, and business, and then politics as well, I mean, everything is politics, right? People interacting. So there are definitely things and conversations I had at university, which I see things crop up day to day that I can tie back to it. But yeah, I think it doesn't really...my specific degree, I don't think it's made me a better founder than I would have been if I'd studied, I don't know, English or Math or something. VICTORIA: Right, yeah. I think economics is one of those where it's kind of so broadly applicable. You're kind of using it, but you don't even realize it sometimes. [laughs] NADIA: Yeah. MID-ROLL AD: thoughtbot is thrilled to announce our own incubator launching this year. If you are a non-technical founding team with a business idea that involves a web or mobile app, we encourage you to apply for our eight-week program. We'll help you move forward with confidence in your team, your product vision, and a roadmap for getting you there. Learn more and apply at tbot.io/incubator. VICTORIA: So what made you decide to go to a bootcamp right after finishing school? NADIA: So I'd always been entrepreneurial. I remember...I don't know where exactly it started from, whether I got it from my mom. I know she's always been very entrepreneurial and into business. The earliest memory I have of doing something that was very specifically business-oriented was in what we call sixth form in the UK, which is essentially the last two years of high school before you go to university or college; we had this scheme called Young Enterprise. And essentially, you got into teams of people, small teams, or they could be quite big, actually. It could be up to 20 people. And you started a business, and there were trade shows, and pitch meetings, and all that kind of stuff, so I remember getting involved in all that sort of stuff at school. But I'd always been on the investment banking track because when I was young...so my parents...we come from a poor background. And so my parents were very much like, you know, try and find high-paying careers to go into so that you can pay for whatever you want and you have a much better lifestyle. So I had gotten onto the investment banking track from the age of 14 when I went with a friend...at the school, I went to, there was a Take Your Daughter to Work Day. My dad said, "Oh, you want to go to try and find someone whose parent works in an investment bank or something like that. That's like a great career to go into." And so I went with a friend's dad to UBS. And I remember being blown away, like, wow, this is so fascinating. Because I think everything seems so impressive when you're 14, and you're walking into a space like that, and everything seems very lively. And everyone's walking around dressed sharp. They've got their BlackBerries. So from the age of 14 until 20, it would have been, I was very much I am going to work in an investment bank. And I did all the things that you would do, like all the schemes, the spring programs. And it got to my final internship. And I just remember at the internship being rather disillusioned and disappointed by the experience. I remember thinking, is this it? I was studying at Oxford, and I put so much into my studies. And I remember thinking; I'm working so hard. And this is what I come to? Is this it? And so around the time as well, I was also meeting a lot of people in the entrepreneurship space, social enterprises, people doing their own ventures. And I just remember thinking, oh, I feel like I've got to go down that track. And I ended up winning a place on a coding course. It was set up specifically to help more women get into tech. And it was called Code First Girls. I won a place that started...it was just part-time. What I did was I actually...I got the banking job from Deutsche Bank, it was, but I decided to turn it down. It was a very risky decision. I turned it down, and I stayed in Oxford after graduating and worked in the academic office for a while. And then, twice a week, I would go to London and do this coding course. And during it, on Twitter, I remember seeing a competition for a full-paid place at this bootcamp called Makers Academy. And I just thought to myself, having tech skills, I'd heard the feedback that it's a very powerful thing to have. And I remember thinking I should go for this competition. And I went for the competition, and I won a free place at the bootcamp. If I didn't win a free place at the bootcamp, I'm not sure what would have happened because I'm not sure whether at that point I would have thought, oh, paying £8,000 to go to a software bootcamp is what I should do. I'm not sure I would have got there. So that's how I got there, essentially. I won a competition for a bootcamp after having a taste of what coding was like and seeing how freeing it was to just be able to have a computer and an internet connection and build something. VICTORIA: Oh, that's wonderful. I love that story. And I've spent a lot of time with Women Who Code and trying to get women excited about coding. And that's exactly the story is that once you have it, it's a tool in your toolset. And if you want to build something, you can make it happen. And that's why it's important to continue the education and get access for people who might not normally have it. And you continue to do some of that work as well, right? You're involved in organizations like this? NADIA: Like Code First Girls? No. I did some years ago. I would go and attend Rails Girls workshops and be a mentor at them, at those. And while I was at Pivotal, I helped with events like codebar, which were essentially evenings where people who were learning to code or more junior could come and pair with someone more senior on whatever project they wanted to. So I did a bunch of that stuff in the years after leaving Makers Academy. And I was even a TA for a short time for a couple of weeks at Makers Academy as well after I graduated. But in more recent years, I haven't done much in that space, but I would love to do more at some point. I don't have the bandwidth to right now. [laughs] VICTORIA: And you're still a major speaker going and keynoting events all around the world. Have you done any recently, or have any coming up that you're excited about? NADIA: So before the pandemic, my last talk, I keynoted RubyWorld in Japan. That was in November 2019. And then the pandemic hit, and 2020 June, July was when StoryGraph had some viral tweets, and so we kicked off. And amongst all of that, I was being invited to speak at remote events, but it just didn't make sense for me. Not only was I so busy with work, but I put a lot of hours into my talks. And part of the fun is being there, hallway track, meeting people, being on stage. And so it just didn't appeal to me to spend so much time developing the talk to just deliver it at home. And so, I just spent all the time on StoryGraph. And I remember when events started happening again; I wondered whether I would even be invited to speak because I felt more detached from the Ruby community. Most of the conferences that I did were in the Ruby community. StoryGraph is built on Rails. Yeah, I just thought maybe I'll get back to that later. But all of a sudden, I had a series of amazing invitations. Andrew Culver started up The Rails SaaS Conference in LA in October, and I was invited to speak at that. And then, I was invited to keynote RubyConf, that was recently held in Houston, Texas, and also invited to keynote the satellite conference, RubyConf Mini in Providence, that happened a couple of weeks earlier. And so I had a very busy October and November, a lot of travel. I developed two new talks, a Ruby talk and a StoryGraph talk. It was my first ever time giving a talk on StoryGraph. It was a lot of work and amongst a lot of StoryGraph work that I needed to do. All of the talks went well, and it was so much fun to be back on the circuit again. And I'm looking forward to whatever speaking things crop up this year. VICTORIA: That's wonderful. I'm excited. I'll have to see if I can find a recording and get caught up myself. Going back to an earlier question, you mentioned quite a few times about market research and talking to the customers. And I'm just curious if you have a method or a set of tools that you use to run those experiments and collect that feedback and information. NADIA: Yes. So I remember one of the first things I did years ago was I read "The Mom Test" by Rob Fitzpatrick. And that's great for just getting the foundation of when you talk to customers; you don't want to lead them on in any shape or form. You just want to get the raw truth and go from there. So that's the underpinning of everything I do. And then, I learned from friends I made through Pivotal about how you put together a script for a customer research. You can't just have bullet points or whatever. You should have a script. And the foundation of that script is a hypothesis about what you're trying to find out in that round of research. And once you figure out your hypothesis, then you can put together the questions you want to ask and understand how you're going to measure the output. So the first ever thing I was trying to find out when I first started interviewing people was just very general. It was just like, are there any pain points? I was just trying to figure out are there any pain points among the avid reader group of people? And then I remember the results from that were, "No place for consistent, high-quality recommendations." And so then I said, okay, how are people finding recommendations now, or what are the factors that lead to people thinking a book was great for them? And that's how I ended up getting to the moods and pace. But when I do my interviews, I record them all. I watch them back. And I condense everything on sticky notes. And I use a virtual tool. And I try to take word for word. When I summarize, I still just try and use their specific words as much as possible. So I'm not adding my own editing over what they say. Every single interviewee has a different color. And I essentially group them into themes, and that's how I unlock whatever the answers are for that round. And then I use that...I might have been trying to find out what to build next or whether we should go down a certain product direction or not. And so, depending on the outcome, that helps me make up my mind about what to do. So that's the high-level process that I follow. VICTORIA: Well, that sounds very methodical, and interesting for me to hear your perspective on that. And you mentioned that you do have a redesign coming out soon for StoryGraph. Are there any other particular products or features that you're really excited to talk about coming up soon? NADIA: Yeah, I'm so excited about the redesign because we're bringing out...it's not just a UI improvement; it's a user experience improvement as well. So there are a lot of little features that have been asked for over the years. And actually, it was trying to deliver one of them that sparked the whole redesign. So people really want a marked as finished button. There's no way to mark as finished. You just toggle a book back to read. And some people find this quite counterintuitive, or it doesn't quite explain what they're doing. And so when I came to deliver the mark as finished button, this was months and months ago now, I realized that the book pane was just becoming so cluttered, and I was trying to fight with it to squeeze in this link. And I remember thinking; this is not the only thing people want to see on the book pane. They also want to see when they read the book without having to go into the book page. They also want to be able to add it to their next queue. And I just said, you know what? I need to redesign this whole thing. And so I was able to luckily work with Saron Yitbarek, who is married to my co-founder, Rob. There's a funny story about all of that. And she helped me do this redesign based on all my customer research. And so I'm just so excited to get it out because the other thing that we're bringing with it is dark mode, which is our most requested feature in history. And it's funny because I've always felt like, ah, that's a nice-to-have. But obviously, for some people, it's not a nice-to-have; it's an accessibility issue. And even me, I'm quite strict with my bedtime. I try and be offline an hour before bed. In bed by 11, up at 6, and even me if I want to track my pages, I'm like, ooh, this is a bit bright. And my phone itself is set on adaptive, so it's light mode during the day and dark mode during the night. And even me, I can see why people really want this and why it would just improve their experience, especially if everything else on your phone is dark. So I'm really excited to get that out, mainly for the UX improvements. And the other thing I'm really excited to do is transition the Plus Plan to being the advanced stats package rather than the random selection of features right now. Because not only will the people who pay us get more complex stats functionalities such that they feel like, wow, the subscription fee that I pay not only does it still make me feel like I'm supporting an alternative to Goodreads, an independent alternative to Goodreads I also get such value from these extra features. But the other thing is what I found from my customer research is that if you're a Plus customer, there's often one or two of the Plus features that you love and that you don't really use the others. But they're all really great features. And so what I'm really excited about is that we're going to make all the non-stats features free for everybody. And so I'm so excited for, like, we have a feature where if you put in a group of usernames, we look at all of your to-read lists and suggest great books for you to buddy-read together. Now, there's a bunch of Plus users who aren't social and don't care about it. But there's going to be a bunch of our free users who are so excited about that feature, probably will use it with their book clubs, things like that. We have up-next suggestions where we suggest what you should pick up next from your to-read pile based on a range of factors. It could be, oh, you're behind on your reading goal; here's a fast-paced book. Or this book is very similar to the one that you just finished, so if you want something the same, pick up this one. And, again, that's behind a paywall right now, and I'm just so excited for everybody to be able to use that. When I remember starting out with StoryGraph, I remember thinking, wow, the way this is going, wouldn't it be so cool if we could just suggest books that would be the next perfect read for you? Because a lot of people have a pile of books by their bedside table or on their shelves, and they're just like, well, which one should I start with? And this tool literally helps you to do that. And so I can't wait for everyone to be able to try it. And so that's why I'm excited about that transition because the Plus Plan will be better, and the free product will be better. VICTORIA: That sounds amazing. And I'm thinking in my head like, oh, I should start a book club with thoughtbot. Because there are some engineering management and other types of books we want to read, so maybe we could use StoryGraph to manage that and keep ourselves motivated to actually finish them. [laughs] NADIA: Cool. VICTORIA: No, this is wonderful. And what books are on your reading list coming up? NADIA: Yes. I am excited to read...I'm not sure...I'm blanking on the series' name. But the first book is called "The Poppy War." I don't know whether it's called "The Burning God" or if that's the third book in the series. But it's this very popular trilogy, and I'm excited to read that soon. I'm doing a slow chronological read of Toni Morrison's fiction. I recently read "Song of Solomon," which was great, really, really good. And so I'm excited to read more of her novels this year. I'm also on a kind of narrative nonfiction kick right now. I love narrative nonfiction. So I just finished reading "American Kingpin," which is about Silk Road. And I've picked up "Black Edge," which is about SAC Capital and Steve Cohen and that whole hedge fund insider trading situation. So I'm probably going to look for more of the same afterwards. VICTORIA: Well, that's very exciting. And it's inspiring that as a founder, you also still have time to read [laughs] and probably because StoryGraph makes it easy and motivating for you to do so. NADIA: Yeah, everyone thought that my reading would tank once I started the company, but, in fact, it's multiplied severalfold. And a couple of reasons; one is it's very important in general for me to make time for me because I'm in a situation that could easily become very stressful and could lead to burnout. So I make sure that I make time for me to read and to go to dance class regularly, which is my other main hobby. But then, secondly, I feel like I can justify it as work. Because I say, wow, me being a reader and being able to communicate with people on Instagram and on Twitter about books, not just the product, adds legitimacy to me as the founder and developer of this product. And so it's important that I keep reading. And it also helps the product be better because I understand what features are needed. So, for example, I never used to listen to audiobooks. I'm a big podcast person; I love music. So between those two, when does audio fit in? And also, I didn't like the idea that I could just be absent-minded sometimes with some podcasts, but with a book, you don't want spoilers. It could get confusing. But I started listening to audiobooks because we had a large audiobook user base. And they would ask for certain features, and it was really hard for me to relate and to understand their needs. And now that I have started listening to audiobooks as well, we made some great audiobook listeners-focused additions to the app last year, including you can track your minutes. So you can literally get you read this many pages in a day, but you also listened to this many minutes. You can set an hours goal for the year, so not just a reading goal or a pages goal. You can set an hours goal. Or maybe you're someone like me, where audiobooks are the smaller proportion of your reading, and you just want it all calculated as pages. And so I've got it on the setting where it's like, even when I track an audiobook in StoryGraph, convert it to pages for me, and I just have my nice, all-round page number at the end of the year. VICTORIA: That's so cool. Really interesting. And I've had such a nice time chatting with you today. Is there anything else that you'd like to share as a final takeaway for our listeners? NADIA: If you are someone who wants to start a company, maybe you want to bootstrap, you've got a product idea, I think it's honestly just trust the process. It will take time. But if you trust the process, you listen to customers and really listen to them...research ways to talk to customers, and don't cut corners with the process. There have been so many times when I've done a whole round of research, and then I say, oh, do I have to go through all these now and actually do a synthesis? I think anecdotally; I can figure out what the gist was; no, do the research. You don't know what insights you're going to find. And I think if you just trust that process...and I think the other thing is before you get to that stage, start building up a runway. Having a runway is so powerful. And so whether it's saving a bit more or diverting funds from something else if you have a runway and you can give yourself a couple of years, a few years without worrying about your next paycheck, that is incredibly valuable to getting started on your bootstrapping journey. VICTORIA: Thank you. That's so wonderful. And I appreciate you coming on today to be with us. You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on Mastodon at Victoria Guido. This podcast is brought to by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thank you for listening. See you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com. Special Guest: Nadia Odunayo.

[00:04:11] Jason and Andrew have a chat about seeing Drew Bragg at the Rails SaaS Conference and things they enjoyed about it.[00:07:50] We hear about all the talks at the conference from Nadia Odunayo, Joe Masilotti, Michael Buckbee, Don Pottinger, Adam Pallozzi, and Saron Yitbarek.[00:15:27] We learn why the guys had to leave the intergalactic cantina early, and they tell us about more of the talks from Todd Dickerson, Colleen Schnettler, Evan Phoenix, and Mike Coutermarsh.[00:21:26] Jason's explains his fun talk on the Rails Renaissance, find out why Andrew sat up front for it, and the last talk from Andrew Culver, who went through a lot of Bullet Train things.  [00:24:12] Jason gives a shout-out to Paula, the makeup artist, and we hear what she did to Jason's mustache.[00:26:19] Andrew gives a big shout-out to Andrew Culver who organized the conference and making it so much fun. [00:26:56] Jason announces he's finally working on his Active Record Course stuff now, and Andrew tells us about how he's been working on Kredis.[00:28:23] We end with a story about how Jason slipped out of the shower and now has a bruise the size of an IHOP pancake on his leg.Panelists:Jason CharnesAndrew MasonSponsor:  HoneybadgerLinks:Jason Charnes TwitterAndrew Mason TwitterRails SaaS Conference TwitterAndrew Culver TwitterRemote Ruby Podcast-Episode 185: Aaron & Colleen from HammerstoneHi-ChewRuby Radar NewsletterRuby Radar TwitterRuby for All Podcast

Live from Portland, OR is the Ruby Podcast Panel recording from Railsconf 2022! The panelists discuss why they are loyal to podcasting, the state of the Ruby and Rails communities, opening doors for juniors into our industry and themes they noted from the conference. Moderated By: Jemma Issroff, The Ruby on Rails Podcast (https://twitter.com/JemmaIssroff) Panelists: Brittany Martin, The Ruby on Rails Podcast (https://twitter.com/BrittJMartin) Nick Schwaderer, The Ruby on Rails Podcast (https://twitter.com/schwad_rb) Andrew Mason, Remote Ruby (https://twitter.com/andrewmcodes) Jason Charnes, Remote Ruby (https://twitter.com/jmcharnes) Chris Oliver, Remote Ruby (https://twitter.com/excid3) Andrew Culver, Framework Friends (https://twitter.com/andrewculver) Colleen Schnettler, Software Social Podcast (https://twitter.com/leenyburger) Robby Russell, Maintainable Podcast (https://twitter.com/robbyrussell) Sponsored By: Honeybadger (https://www.honeybadger.io/) Honeybadger makes you a DevOps hero by combining error monitoring, uptime monitoring and check-in monitoring into a single, easy to use platform. Go to Honeybadger.io (https://www.honeybadger.io/) and discover how Starr, Josh, and Ben created a 100% bootstrapped monitoring solution. Scout APM (http://scoutapm.com/rubyonrails) Try their error monitoring and APM free for 14-days, no credit card needed! And as an added bonus for Ruby on Rails listeners: Scout will donate $5 to the open-source project of your choice when you deploy. Learn more at http://scoutapm.com/rubyonrails (http://scoutapm.com/rubyonrails).

[00:00:00] Jemma Issroff: Live from Portland at rails comp 2020. We're recording a podcast panel crossover episode. I'm Gemma is off one of the co-hosts of the Ruby on rails podcast. I'll be moderating this panel. We have five podcasts represented here across eight panelists. We're going to go around to start and hear what all everyone is excited about.For rails comp. First up, we have Brittany Martin from the Ruby on rails podcast. Brittany, what talker workshop are you most looking forward to? [00:00:29] Brittany Martin: I have to admit I'm going to go with a meta answer and it's going to be this panel, but also as well to make a switch track, which I ended up curating. We already saw Joel Hawksley gave a fantastic talk as well as David Hill.And I'm just excited for that track to continue. [00:00:44] Jemma Issroff: Sounds great. Looking forward to hearing the rest. Next up, we have Robbie Russell of maintainable software podcast. [00:00:51] Robby Russell: Hello, I'm enjoying so far. The, uh, what does it talk to me like I'm five or I forgot the way it's titled, but yeah, the tracks there have been really great in terms of getting down to some of the basics and such.And so. Kind of mandating most of my teams at, and those ones in particular, if they can do which ones have you been to so far? I just sat in the rails console one and I learned a few things that I didn't know about or I'd forgotten about like using jobs in rails console is pretty fun having sub-processes and there was one earlier on maintaining rails applications.I really enjoyed that one. Next up [00:01:26] Jemma Issroff: Andrew Culver from framework friends. [00:01:28] Andrew Culver: Yeah. So for me, conferences are about people. And so I'm kind of notorious for hanging out in the hallway, track, all attend a few talks, but mostly like for the limited time that I'm here, I come in late. I leave real early. Cause I got kids that I got to get back to back home.But for the time that I'm here, I just try to have as much face time with, you know, everybody like who's in the room right now. [00:01:50] Jemma Issroff: Nick swatter, Ruby on rails pod. [00:01:53] Andrew Culver: I'll do [00:01:53] Nick Schwaderer: two things. One, I like trails con for me, his bag. I'm just so hyped for it. I'll call out. Hi, joined the Ruby community in first week of March, 2014 and never been to rails comp.I've like followed the content for eight. So it's such a treat to be here by will to honor your question, pick a specific thing. I'm excited to see the remote group began talking about a pocket while I won't spoil anything. I love our community, but seeing people not just carving out their niche, but like helping to grow more of things in the community to make it sustainable, to make it more welcoming and open to more people.And so I'm absolutely, as you're saying, the UK buzzing to see, and I agree began, [00:02:31] Robby Russell: and there's a whole [00:02:32] Jemma Issroff: community content. Speaking of remote Ruby, Andrew Mason. [00:02:36] Andrew Mason: Yeah, what's up everybody. I was excited for Joel Hawksley's talk, which is great. Joel, again, Joe's in the audience for anyone listening. I'm excited for Schwan's talk because Schwab always gives amazing talks.I'm always excited for Brittany's talk and Britney's not giving a talk this month. So that's why I'm excited to hear her [00:02:54] Jemma Issroff: here. Uh, next up [00:02:56] Andrew Culver: Jason. Tarryn's. [00:02:59] Nick Schwaderer: Hello? [00:03:01] Jason Charnes: Well, I feel like any answer I have now would just be cheating. I too very much like the hallway track and the people, I very much enjoy Joel sock.Dave, Copeland's giving one. I'm really looking forward to the one I'm least looking forward to is the remote Ruby [00:03:13] Nick Schwaderer: talk. [00:03:15] Robby Russell: Oh. And [00:03:16] Jason Charnes: I'm excited that Aaron Francis is here so we can talk about Laravel this whole [00:03:18] Andrew Culver: time. [00:03:21] Jemma Issroff: Also have remote with me. We have Chris Oliver next. [00:03:24] Chris Oliver: I'm just so excited to like put faces to Twitter, avatars and discord and everything had conversations with so many people.And then finally getting to meet them in person is the best. That's what I'm looking forward to the most. [00:03:37] Jemma Issroff: And we have Colleen Chandler from the software social [00:03:40] Colleen Schnettler: podcast. I am super excited about my workshop, which is coming up in 45 minutes, filling an advanced query builder with active record. And there's actually quite a few active record talks here this week.So I'm super pumped for those. I'm really looking forward [00:03:56] Jemma Issroff: to it. So next question I have is why podcast, and maybe we can get into the community content track a little, or, or what's going on. [00:04:04] Brittany Martin: Yep, Brittany. So I love its ability to be a time capsule. And it's so cool to have a timeline of my own career, but it's even cooler to watch my co-hosts career.Nick's first episode was September, 2018. He was a regular guest, and then he became official cohost in 2021. And then Gemma's first episode was in March, 2021 and then became a cohost also in 2021. And each have had like a really unique path to Shopify and establishing themselves more in the community.And. I feel really grateful that I have an opportunity to talk to [00:04:36] Jemma Issroff: them regularly about it. We feel grateful for the same remote Ruby. I know you're doing a whole talk on podcasting. Do you want to give us a little preview? [00:04:46] Andrew Culver: All are they intrude? If the preview? [00:04:48] Andrew Mason: Yeah, I mean, I think podcasting is a great way to kind of reach a very large audience without as much overhead as producing videos.So our talk is basically on how to start a podcast and it's tailored towards Ruby, but it's going to be about kind of our journey to starting one kind of the lessons that we've learned, because I've, at this point I've been on three. Jason. And Chris started remote Ravi men. Then I joined them later. So I think we have individually a lot to share with the community to help them not fall into the same traps that we did.So that's our goal is to like help encourage people to start their own podcast and do it in a way that they can avoid some of the huge mistakes that we've made over the years. [00:05:29] Jemma Issroff: What are some of the mistakes? [00:05:31] Andrew Mason: It takes a team. In my opinion, to produce a great podcast from editors, from doing marketing, doing show notes, you know, there's so many aspects of it and having cohos.And if you only have two co-hosts one person doesn't show up, what do you do then you skip a week. I think consistency is really important and it's kind of back to us about having a team. And when you don't have that team in place, it can really produce a lot of heartache and headache. And a lot of after hours work on the podcast, which is not the goal.And it really detracts from the. Colleen, [00:06:02] Jemma Issroff: do you have a similar view on podcasting? So [00:06:05] Colleen Schnettler: one of the things I love about podcasting is this concept of luck, surface area. And it's this concept that the more visible you are, the more opportunities come your way. I'm a self-taught developer. And when I got into software, everyone's like, you should blog.You should blog. I could not get into blogging. I just could not get into a good routine. I didn't like it. And then I started podcast. Random people on the internet, listen to the podcast and then people recognize you and then they know you. And I have found for me like professionally, first of all, I love it.Cause I do a podcast with someone who I'm already friends with, but professionally like opportunities start coming your way as you become more visible. And I think it's a very low friction way to become more visible [00:06:53] Jemma Issroff: Andrew yet. Do you have similar thoughts? [00:06:54] Andrew Culver: Yeah. So for me. We were already having conversations.So Aaron and I were already chatting. And so by just hitting record, they gave us this opportunity to kind of like share that. I kind of had a sense, like, yeah, people might find this interesting what you can't. If for anybody that's listening, there are so many podcasts. You have friends like Justin Jackson and like his whole life, his podcasts, because there's so many of them.And so anybody that thinks that they have a unique take on something, if you're thinking about starting a podcast, start a podcast, just do it because what you can't know. Before you do it before you start publishing, before you start sharing your ideas is who's going to come out of the woodwork. And yeah, we got like feedback from people that we knew, but we also met tons of people that we've never heard of before that reach out and say like, Hey, I love that.And people that come up to you at conferences and say, Hey, you know that conversation that you had, I really identified with that. That really captured something that I had been thinking about. And until you start publishing stuff, you can't know if that's going to happen. And it's so low friction, like unlike blogging, which it takes a ton of time.We were already having the conversation. So you just hit record and you publish it. And then I think the other piece of it as well, which for folks who have guests on their podcast, it's amazing. To think that you can provide infrastructure for super smart people, people that are way smarter than me, you can get them on.We had a guy say this to us recently where he didn't want to reach out to people and be like, Hey, can I come on your podcast? But he said, but reach out every six months because I might have something to say. And so the idea that you can get an audio. And then you can share with that audience, the incredible thinking of people that may only want to do a podcast a couple times a year.That's another thing that I love about the medium. [00:08:51] Jemma Issroff: So the ability to enable others or to push others forward. Yeah. You mentioned feedback a few times hearing from your listeners. I know that something that it's tough to do as a podcast host, it's tough to figure out where your listeners are and how they talk to you.Does anyone have thoughts on that? [00:09:09] Andrew Culver: Twitter is the best thing ever. I live on Twitter. And so when you open your DMS, make it easy for people to send you messages. Yeah. Just open that sucker right up. Robbie, have you [00:09:20] Jemma Issroff: had similar experiences? [00:09:22] Robby Russell: You know, Twitter is helpful. So I do encourage people to email me as well.Mike format doing more of like interview style and fairly. Topics, but just a broad range of different people. So, but the angle that I, you know, if it's terms of communication, it's also, but it's going to be lonely as a podcast or not. You don't hear often, sometimes we'll post stuff on Twitter and hopefully the guests will reshare that and their network, or we'll help interact with that.But there's other areas I've found like some interaction over like Reddit. Sometimes I'll post the links there as well, and try to use some controversial title for the episode, just to kind of provoke people a little. That tends to help a little bit as well. Those are some areas, but I do get a lot of emails and occasional DMS and stuff from people.[00:10:06] Andrew Culver: Banana thought. [00:10:07] Brittany Martin: Yeah, for me, I used to have a very loyal listener who would tell me about how terrible my audio was. And I so appreciated them for it because I was learning. And then as I tweak things, I would have sessions with them. And then eventually when we hired a professional editor, he reached out to me and told me how proud he was of me.And then he would just really believed in the podcast. He held on for all that time that I was learning, but I will say too, the greatest joy for me, I will echo Andrew is when I'm on Twitter and someone will tweet an inside joke from an episode and bring it back. Like we get jokes about goo. We get jokes about treading water.It's really fun for me to share those jokes with those lists of. I [00:10:47] Andrew Mason: think you can be the source of your own feedback as well. I say time and time again, like I'm the only one who listens every single week when our podcast listens, I listened to it and that is a way for me to find errors in the way I speak things that I do when I speak like arm, like, and, uh, and things like that also is if you solicit.Kind of going back to what Robbie was saying, that's another great way to get it. And I've also said that when you get that feedback, it may not always be positive and it may not mean that you need to change anything. Not all negative feedback means that, oh, I should adjust this because this one person doesn't like the way we do.[00:11:23] Robby Russell: I was just going to say on the, like, asking for people to do reviews, I've found that if I kind of repeat that over and over, it's kind of becomes an echo chamber of nothing. It's hard to get reviews on apple podcasts and other places. I don't even know where else people were telling me, but go anywhere is stitch.You're still thinking. Do you know, sometimes I'll just kind of go a little off script and then I'll be like, or write something and some chalk on the sidewalk. And then someone sent me a photo that they did that they were like, oh cool. I got a nice review on some sidewalk in someone's neighborhood. So thank you.Whoever that was. [00:11:54] Nick Schwaderer: And feedback is definitely a gift. It's taken me a long time for me to learn that in like most areas. Like, y'all listen to podcasts. I listen to podcasts. It's quite a big commitment to carve out a half hour, 20, 30 minutes, 60 minutes of your day, especially in a remote world where you don't commute.So we don't have that cheat code as often anymore. And so most people, if they're unhappy, what do you do? You just switch off? So like how much does somebody care to? Actually, even if it comes off as quite terse with feedback, sometimes it can either be, well, if it's true, why are you offended? And if it's not true, then hire you.Because not true. I'd always things for me. Any feedback on anything? This is not even just in podcast, but if you can try and wrap a Colonel out of it and make something positive, it's might be one of the nicest things you hear. [00:12:37] Jemma Issroff: Switching gears a little bit. Chris Oliver, what do you love about the Ruby ecosystem?[00:12:42] Chris Oliver: A lot, probably the people the most beside from that, there's something about the Ruby ecosystem that started in entrepreneurship and. The language itself has kinda like designed around humans first, which is unique and rare. So it's all kind of around people and stuff. Hey, [00:13:02] Jemma Issroff: what else have thoughts here?Andrew Kovar. [00:13:05] Andrew Culver: So I think the thing that attracted me to the Ruby ecosystem like 10, 12 years ago now it was tooling. And I think that comes back to what Chris is talking about. That it's a human. Maths is nice. So we are nice, like the whole Mina Swan thing. And then the way that, that bubbles up, I think into rails, since we're at rails comp, as a framework is the developer experience.It's like a framework that was developed with empathy for the way that you would interact with it. And that was different than a lot of what existed at the time. And I think other frameworks have taken inspiration from that. And we certainly don't have a monopoly on developer experience. I think we can look to other frameworks for inspiration.There is. But the focus on tooling, you know, it, it's interesting. There's a white quote. I'm probably going to butcher it a little bit, but I think there's actually like a lesson to be learned from it. So one of the things that Y said toward the end of his tenure was software. So unrewarding to write something and then a year later it gets replaced by something better.And then a few more years go by and it doesn't run at all. It doesn't run at all. There's an inverse way. Of looking at that quote. And that is that our stuff's always getting better. There isn't a monopoly on anything and you can always propose a new, a better way. And we're the beneficiaries of that. And because there's that focus on developer experience that keeps driving us forward rails continues to compete.It continues to be like, I think it is still to this day, the best way to launch SAS applications specifically. And so that's one of the things that I love about rails and love about the community. It's that focus on people [00:14:50] Jemma Issroff: what's missing. And we have a foremost why expert, I think probably in the world next to you, who is nodding along.So I think we can say that quote was all good. What's missing that next year or the next year or the next year we might see in the community. Jason. [00:15:04] Jason Charnes: So they talked about Ruby cough, but Andrew is talking about. But like tooling, it's kind of stagnated. It feels like. And the Ruby community, Ruby ecosystem, and like they were talking about Ruby three's focuses on developer experience.There are times I've considered not writing Ruby. I watched these other people work in languages and they can do amazing things like amazing refactorings and then even things like suggestions. And I'm like, I'm still writing the same Ruby code I'm writing five years ago. So I think that's something we can improve on for sure.And I think they're trying, so that's [00:15:36] Nick Schwaderer: encouraging, I think this will lead into another white quote from it's the similar time which was, and I think that's applies for our community. If you don't create, you become defined by your tastes and your tastes can only alienate other people. So create. And I think that that's something that we can, we have a mature ecosystem.Now we can really be lazy if we want. And I think the railway is awesome. Like the Ruby way is awesome, but I think we can now put the manta on our shoulders and create, even if it's just fantastic, interesting new jams, be the content we want to see in the world. And that goes with podcasting. It goes with open source.I really feel Jason saying. And I think that part of that solution would be to continue to create new and innovative things. I think there's definitely a lot of room for that. We could definitely stagnate and make awesome SAS apps, crowed SAS apps all the time with rails, but I think there's a lot more innovation [00:16:26] Andrew Culver: and fun to be had.I think that's a call to action. I think that's what for anybody that's listening to that if that resonates with you, I think we're just scratching the surface. Of what we can do to make it easier for people to develop software. It's such a lucrative opportunity. I have like a physical product business as well, and the margins are terrible.It's so awful. And like when I sold my first SAS business, the margins, when we went through due diligence for like 95%, we operated at a 95% profit margin. That is an opportunity that we should be trying to get in. And we haven't even scratched the surface of all the SAS software that can be written with rails.You can find a mission in it in creating better tooling, higher levels of abstraction, greater developer experience and usability so that we can give these tools the best set of tools to a greater set of people so they can improve their economic situation. A single person building a SAS app can change their life.And I think we've got the best tool to give to people for that. [00:17:33] Jemma Issroff: Yeah. Or even I would argue, uh, enable people to build their own tools that can lift them up. Robbie, do you have thought there, [00:17:40] Robby Russell: I'm going, go ahead down a little bit of lemon here and say that I disagree with everybody. To an extent I'm actually more interested in maintainable software, but thinking about as new tooling is coming out, I think it's great.We keep building new tools, but it actually becomes. For all of us software engineers, wherever we're like, well, we need to upgrade to this new thing because that's the new thing that everybody's talking about. And there's not enough emphasis on like, how do I help take care of this stuff that was already working, that our apps are already reliably working with, you know, our customers or our clients have already invested time and money into like everybody chasing the next shiny new thing.And I'm like, what about the thing that's already working? How can we refactor that? How can we iterate on that? How can we make sure that those gems are getting more support? Maintainers I maintain. And I created an open source project. It's exhausting to take care of projects for a long time. And so I think we need more in the Ruby ecosystem, less new gems, more emphasis on helping participate in helping take over projects or just helping those maintainers push things forward or help offer to volunteer and things like that.Teaching people how to like migrate these things, how to handle upgrades. So that's the next new shiny object. Isn't the thing that we're trying to compete with? I think the 0.1 of my comrades over here, I was saying here was just, we're trying to make the developer experience great. And we can be a little lazy and we are being lazy as a community at times.And I think we owe it to ourselves and to our future. To take care of the stuff that we've already invested a lot of time and energy and [00:19:08] Andrew Culver: Brittany, [00:19:09] Brittany Martin: I think that's a really interesting take Robbie and it kind of makes me question, you know, in order to grow out the Ruby community, we have to do one of two things.We either need to introduce new people into the community who haven't been here before. Or we need to try to re-acquire the community members who have left for other languages and frameworks. And so the question is if we make the software more maintainable, are we going to be able to coax back the members that we've lost in the past?Like, is it our job to educate how things are better and really are things about. [00:19:39] Jemma Issroff: Nick the Y quote, you pointed to brought up, tastes as being exclusionary. I wonder if anyone has thoughts, in what ways are we as a Ruby community being [00:19:48] Andrew Culver: exclusionary? [00:19:49] Jason Charnes: This is maybe a crappy take, but rails being the only web framework in Ruby sometimes feels a bit exclusionary.I like there a NAMI there Sinatra, but people associate Ruby with rails and that's fine. Through accent. Like I very much love rails and obviously, but I do think there's value to be had from like having alternatives and being able to learn from other people and different ideas. I wasn't around for Merv rails, merger, the murderer.But I think I would have liked to have been because they were like competing ideas that became one, and I think that would help push Ruby [00:20:30] Andrew Culver: forward. [00:20:32] Colleen Schnettler: So I think it's simpler than that. I do these weekly mentorship calls with junior developers. And I usually get like 15 to 20 and a call and none of them are rails developers.And I think because we need more junior level rails jobs, people are going to go where the money is. We all need to make money. If you look, I mean, even as us as we've hired people, we don't hire junior developers. We don't, especially in rails. I mean, I know I'm being real specific, but I think part of that is because these applications are.A little more legacy, a little bit older, you need to have more context. And so I feel like the problem is solvable at the basic level and that's, we need to hire people [00:21:16] Andrew Mason: better than. And to add onto that. Here's a call to action. Everyone listening, you and your company are in a position to argue for and to promote and to do whatever you want to call it, to get more junior engineers into your company.And it's kind of. Management and the senior developers who create and prove that you can have an ecosystem where juniors can thrive. They can learn the way you do rails. They can do all these things, but it really comes down to the people who are already in those positions to bring people into them, to throw the rope down, back after you're done using it and pull up people behind you.And I really think we can say, oh, well, these companies need to change. But at the end of the day, it's the engineers in those companies who can facilitate this change and we need. [00:22:03] Nick Schwaderer: Yeah. And like, plus plus, plus, plus I want to give credit and I won't call out people unless they want to talk about, but people at this table collectively have done so much to lift up juniors and give juniors opportunities.And to give them a voice, I'd say, if you are listening to this, and if you're listening to this five years from now, randomly in a car, if you're just an engineer, you can give a voice to this in your company. I was hired. A self-taught Ruby list. And I got into the game in 2014 and it was the most isolating and difficult and painful time going from nobody's paying me to code to somebody, paying me anything to code, and it did difficult job.And if you are able to facilitate even just one person every two years, you're making a huge impact in the universe. And this is something like, if there's anything, like, if you want me to just give you a shout out on Twitter, if you do this for the good of the community, Just an altruistic or there's something that we definitely believe in, and it's great for the community.And thank you to all of you and everything that y'all have done for juniors over the years, Schwab [00:23:01] Jason Charnes: he'll pay a hundred dollars per junior [00:23:03] Nick Schwaderer: hire. Yeah, I will actually, yeah, I will. I will pay your company a hundred [00:23:07] Robby Russell: dollars and for those listening as well, another thing, if, if you're nervous about the idea of even bring out your first junior developer, bring in interns, do it once a quarter, building your team cycle, keeping them there for six, eight weeks time box it.So. You know, there's an end period. Tell them that you're not hiring them at the end of that. It's like a period that you're going to pay them for six to eight weeks. That way you're not on the hook for that awkward conversation. When they say, do you want to keep me? Because you got to build in that kind of like that muscle of, because what ends up happening is you might hire that person.Then you think I won't have time for the next person. So I'm actually a big advocate for having a regular internship cycles. So. It gets in the habit of having people come and go, because it also helps you improve your onboarding experience for new developers to your projects and build up that resilience amongst your team, that this is an expectation of the job.Not something that we're going to think later down the road. So building internships first, serving in your junior developers, you can do that in parallel as well, but your junior developers have people to mentor immediately when you bring interns in. And so they're part of the process as well. And so that just levels.So [00:24:05] Brittany Martin: at Texas, we'll be hiring two junior backend developers this summer and juniors work well for us because we only hire seniors that are excited to mentor. I can't tell you how many times I have interviewed seniors that have been very technically savvy, but have clearly no interest in mentoring. And unfortunately that just won't work for us.And so I think that's important that you have to establish that as a norm within your organization. [00:24:29] Jemma Issroff: So Chris Winslet, a long-term rails developer is asking, where is the front end going? What's happening to that in the future? Yeah, Andrew [00:24:37] Andrew Culver: Culver. I'm sure everybody up here has like an opinion about this and it's very relevant.I think we're on the right track. I don't think that that excludes react view any of those other toolings, but I think if you go back to that original blog post about stimulus, this isn't exclusive to stimulus. It's a philosophy. What DHH articulated in that blog post, I think is one of the most significant things written in the 15 years that I've been doing software development.It's more than that now, but in that I think there was a fork in the road where a lot of people started going too far to the front end, too much running in the client. The answer to that isn't react is bad. View is bad. Backbone was bad. Angular was. I think of, uh, somebody that I know military vet saw an opportunity in government for a piece of software that needed to be built and he built it.It was really scrappy and it had angular. And then at some point there was a new feature. And so we used backbone for that. And then he used Ember and then he used react because each of those was the best tool for the job of the thing that he needed to build. But it was like bolted on top of a traditional rails model.And so I think the world that we're in right now, sort of canonically in rails with like Hotwire or stimulus, reflex, and cable. Ready, those get you, I think 80%, 90% of the way there. And then if you still need, I work on apps with react bolted on top. I don't do that work, but I think that philosophy pulling out the heavy machinery is the quote from the blog post.I think it's a solid answer [00:26:23] Andrew Mason: web company. That's where the front end is going. In my opinion. Why, why? Because having this entire framework to do maybe this smaller thing, It's kind of going out of style, but what I think is coming more into style is this idea of atomic things that you can put anywhere.And they work the same. I feel like that's the goal of just normal react components or something. It's like, oh, I can build this react component and I can use it everywhere, but that doesn't work in practice. Really. It's the same thing with like a rails partial. So I feel like we are trending more and more towards this idea of being able to like package the whole thing.And ship it and then wherever it shipped to, it has the ability to be configured to work in that environment. [00:27:07] Brittany Martin: So I'm curious on Andrew, do you feel that all rails developers should be full [00:27:10] Andrew Mason: stack? Yes, [00:27:11] Nick Schwaderer: I do. I don't have a stiff opinion on this, but I think that something that in wherever it goes, it needs to think of, I won't call anyone out.I'll say people like me, people like me, who in the eyes of the law are full-stack people like me who run from CSS and JS, but we. And our happiest and the pure Rubin about blah, blah, blah. But we like that rails can help us from the beginning, build a thing. I need to concern myself with my business logic and the problem and the user and what I need to solve for them.I need as little friction in the way. I'm glad that rails has moved, not just convention over configuration, but like having the support for all the ways that people want to build things. So they figured a friend who is an expert in a thing. They can build the thing on top, but we always need to make sure we support the ability to just build.I mean, I'm very interested in the new tooling that's coming out, but maybe there's some front end whizzes in here who disagree with me. But as long as we think of the people who are full-stack, but not really, but want to be one person builders, as long as we keep servicing that community, then I think we got, it's [00:28:15] Jason Charnes: going to sound like I'm sucking up because it's on the front row.But view components are kind of a big piece for us, like at podia of moving forward. The thing I like five very fascinating about it is I actually. I'm going to be burned alive at the end of this, I actually kind of like react, but I don't like the JavaScript part of it, but I like the idea of components.Sorry, sorry. I liked components, I guess it was on trying to say. And so I like the view component because things like sidecar assets where you can like attach JavaScript functionality, Sal sheets, it's kind of isolated. You can test it. I'm not saying like build your app with a full design system beginning as we've learned how to use them.Like at podia, it's been very valuable because. Now people like me who are like Schwartz that in the eyes of the law considered full stack developers, like we can ship consistent interfaces and we're not as worried about how they look every time we're just rendering out components. And I really, I think that's a good way we're moving as well.[00:29:15] Andrew Culver: One thing I'll say on that with the few components, I've also found. That there's anybody that that's out there looked at it and they're like, ah, I don't think view components are for me. I think partials also answer some great questions. Like you can go very far just with partials, so you don't have to go to some crazy front end framework.We've got a lot of tools on the backend, but it all falls under that umbrella of like HTML over the wire. I do think that that's a good place to be. Joe [00:29:45] Jemma Issroff: is asking how can we as open source developers or maintainers? Invite more folks, especially those who are underrepresented to contribute to the open-source community.Yeah, [00:29:56] Brittany Martin: Brittany, I think it is inviting those guests onto the show. My first episode that I ever recorded with Nick was his first poll request into rails. And we just dug into what that meant and how like he navigated it and discussing with their contributor. And just really trying to lower the bar and make it clear that it's accessible to everybody, but also making it clear to you, invite guests on that work on smaller projects.They don't have to be these large, big public projects and then encouraging them as well. Like after you wrap up that episode, Hey, have you considered, you know, supplying this Ruby weekly, they're always looking for content. So get your name out. The other [00:30:33] Chris Oliver: thing, another thing is like, you know, as a maintainer, there's a lot of things that are easy for you to fix that are quick, just like intentionally not do them and label it as a good contribution for somebody new and kind of work the process.If somebody is not sure how the flow goes, like have a whole kind of script of star here, work through it, write it down, like all the edge cases that you need to think of and leave those opportunities open, even though like you could fix it in five minutes yourself. It's nice to be able to have. Some of those, you know, left open on purpose.[00:31:11] Andrew Culver: I think we need to do more with all of our employers campaign, hard to donate substantially more amounts of money to the open-source projects that you use. I'm not talking 500 bucks. I'm not talking 500 bucks a month. I'm talking like we're going to dedicate 50 grand to this project that we get substantial economic value.I work on such a project, right? So I have an open source framework that people use on top of rails and we have substantial financial backing on the source side. And that doesn't all go to me that goes out to like seven or eight developers that help me on a regular basis. One of them it's the first professional Ruby he's ever written in his life.He's a English teacher in Japan. And so that comes from. And so I look at the projects when that was a commercial framework. And I look at the libraries that we use to support. And at 500 bucks a month to some of those projects that we were supporting, we were the highest pain contributor. That's ridiculous.We have to have a serious conversation. If we want to talk about getting juniors into open source contributions, we need to make a disconnect between open source being unpaid. We have so much money in the businesses that we're in. We're raising so much venture capital. We have so high margins let's donate more money to open source projects.Now, just to put [00:32:40] Robby Russell: in a little bit, a couple [00:32:41] Nick Schwaderer: of thoughts, number one, just write this down. If you're not already aware code triaged.com and then just go and look at it later. But if you're going to mentor a junior without it, it allows you to pick a couple of repository. And act settings and just like one polar request a week, I'll just get sent to your inbox.You can look at it and maybe it's somebody who has been ignored for years and you can like dig into that and learn a bit more. But it's passive first. You have to get that passive contributor experience going down, but what's the goal. Where am I trying to get with this as a junior or senior or an intermediate while I like this term.And I use a lot privately become an open source civilian. We're not all going to be full-time. Paid to maintain a thing, or some people very luckily are heavily in that, but I feel like we all have a duty as to be an open source civilian, and it's more than just like, oh, I found a bug it's like that passive work.And maybe just pick a couple of things to participate in. Now the final, I think directly to your point, what can we as casters, besides me just saying. What can we, as podcasters do to further that? I think we need to normalize that. I think we need to make sure that we do what we think people should do.And then we talk about it because I had listened to podcasts for many years before I ever was on, on, I lived in the country. I didn't talk to Rubius. So I really influenced how I thought about things. Like I remember listening to Derek Pryor and Sage Griffin years and years ago on bike shed and what they talked about.Their opinions and how they acted in their life. Really informed how I thought I ought to talk and act and we can do the same to say, oh yeah, yeah, that was just on blah, blah, blah repository. And I have to look at this PR firm a couple of years ago that got him from code triaged. She said that a couple of times people will be doing the same.It lowers the barrier. It makes it just a few hours a month and it becomes a good thing you can do, but like mowing your yard. [00:34:26] Robby Russell: I was going to say that one other strategy. I created this thing called once upon a time. There's been a couple thousand people that have contributed to the main project. I don't know how that's managed to happen, but there's a lot, but a lot of participation from people.And I think that project makes it easier for people to participate for. Sometimes it's quite often their first open-source project that they've contributed to. I didn't do anything intentionally. I don't have to feel like I have the secrets. At all there. But one thing that I have seen work effectively for me and other people that are helping maintain the project is we've had universities reach out to us.We've had small groups reach out to us. And so when they're like, Hey, we have this idea. We want to participate in, help, get involved in open source project. Can we help contribute to and inquire about this? And we'll be like, all right, well, cool. We're, we're gonna end up working with like three to five people.We can work on like a project. Maybe there's some ideas we've had for a while. It's sitting in the backlog. We haven't got to go through and review those things yet, or work on some new things. Your gut, some features when we do it in that sort of way, that's made it easier for us to kind of wrap our head around it.Cause we're not then. So just to saying like, I think it's really important to try to help the individuals that reach out to you and want to contribute. But if you're listening and you're like, I want to contribute, try to maybe find a few people that you'd want to contribute together with, and then you can approach a project and be like, Hey, we're a little more organized.We've got three of us. Someone's going to be a point of contact. This is what we're hoping to accomplish. This is our. What can we work on? How can we help your project move forward? That makes it way easier for me as a project maintainer, to figure out how I'm gonna wrap my head around what the goal is.And again, this is like a timebox to it. They're going to get something further collectively, and then they're going to work amongst themselves as well. So they're, you know, they're, they're able to help themselves. And that has been a helpful way for me to bring in people outside of the people that is individually.[00:36:07] Jemma Issroff: We're going to take one more question. Before we wrap up, John Manel is asking, how can we make our development environment mimic our production environment, especially if it's quite. [00:36:18] Andrew Culver: If somebody says, Docker, I'm outta here, Docker, you can use Docker, but your battery will last [00:36:23] Brittany Martin: for four hours. It's true. And I think we've always said that, you know, I've done episodes on this, where we talk about having something like the deployment, where it's just baked into the framework.And I truly don't believe that we're anywhere near that. It is a really good question. I feel your frustration, John, like it's really difficult to solve a bug when it's only something that's going to be present in the ecosystem that you've built in production. And let's not joke around. You might have read is going Alaska, search a CDN.There's just a lot of stuff. And to try to clone that locally as really [00:36:53] Robby Russell: difficult, I got to take the position that I don't think rails should solve that. I feel like if you're building out a SAS, there's like patterns you can follow. And I don't feel like that should be baked into rails. We've had Capistrano.We saw projects that we deployed with Capistrano. It works great for those projects. And, but we have a lot of ones that I'm like, I don't understand what happens when we push this stuff to a branch. Some magic happens, someone else made that stuff work and they don't understand the pipelines. That's okay.I'm not answering your question, but I don't feel like that should be a rails thing because I don't think we should have a strong opinion about where it gets deployed, but it gets back to the point around the development environment. Those are trade offs that each of those organizations, especially larger organizations.If you got an engineering team of 50 to a hundred people. We just wrapped up doing our biannual Ruby on rails survey, community survey, and the growing is like 11% or something. I don't remember the exact number. Our company had, 11% of teams are like 50 plus engineers right now. Or maybe it's like 14% or something like that.That's a lot of people, a lot of systems are probably in place. And so it's not going to be like, oh, this is really great. When there was like three of us on a team and we could all get everything up and running in like five minutes on our machines. No. How do we connect all these differences? We have serverless stuff.What is serverless even mean? But, um, so there's a lot of challenges there. I think that those are trade offs that each company is going to need to make in terms of infrastructure. And I don't know that developers should be always be the ones that are making long-term hosting solutions necessarily either kinda make decisions for the organization.[00:38:12] Andrew Mason: It's funny that Bernie said active deployment because in one of my first podcasts, in like 2018, maybe 2019, we had a guest who. Specifically named it active deployment. I'm pretty sure. So it's funny that we're still having this conversation, even though I feel like the ecosystem is getting better and better, there's more and more services to deploy your app.Like hatch box, fly render. I mean, you can keep going and going and going and going. So I don't feel like deployments getting harder. I feel like developers are complicating their setups more than they need to. And I feel like that's part of the problem. [00:38:45] Andrew Culver: Also, my dig at Docker was a joke. I don't love it. I use it every.Because of some of the complicated infrastructure stuff. So [00:38:53] Jemma Issroff: Chris Oliver, any thoughts there, it's [00:38:55] Chris Oliver: one of those things where, as a developer, you don't want to have to worry about the operation sides of things. You know, if you could get away without Docker and just have everything running and you have your dependencies and all that, that would be awesome.But yeah. At some point somebody's going, gonna kind of come up with a, an alternative to Docker that can probably mimic that a bit better. They're still solving a lot of problems on Docker itself. And I think eventually we'll see it, it probably won't come out of the rails ecosystem itself. It's kind of more of a DevOpsy area to work in.And so I feel like we're oftentimes just consumers of that activity that's going on instead of. Creating those things ourselves and the community. So part of me just feels like, you know, waiting for changes to happen and stuff like that. [00:39:46] Andrew Culver: One thing I want to point out, it's not directly related to what you're saying, but I think it's really exciting.And Chris didn't mention it because it isn't directly related. But I think when you look at hatch box, how many infrastructure companies can you think of all of those companies that are doing interesting infrastructure, things that are boots. The only ones I can think of are layer of L forge and you've got hatch box and that baby was grown in the rails ecosystem.And I don't think he's done yet. So I think there are exciting things happening in infrastructure, and I think that they can happen in the rails ecosystem. And I think that can be a call to action to anybody that's listening to this. So [00:40:26] Jemma Issroff: we have very many calls to action and that's a full cap. I just want to say thank you so much to all of our listeners, always, and especially the ones who are present today, watching this panel and thank you to everyone on the panel for being a part of it. .

Robby was invited to join a panel of several hosts from podcasts at RailsConf 2022 in Portland, Oregon. In their conversation, they discuss podcasting, engaging with our listeners, the state of the Ruby and Rails communities, we also dug into some topics related to maintaining open source projects, opening doors for juniors into our industry and into open source, among other topics.This episode will be cross-posted across several of our podcasts.Hosted by Jemma Issroff, Brittany Martin, Robby Russell, Chris Oliver, Jason Charnes, Andrew Culver, Andrew Mason, Nicholas Schwaderer, and Colleen Schnettler.Podcasts InvolvedThe Ruby on Rails PodcastMaintainable Software PodcastFramework FriendsRemote RubySoftware SocialJoint the Maintainable Community on DiscordSubscribe to Maintainable on:Apple PodcastsOvercastSpotifyOr search "Maintainable" wherever you stream your podcasts.

[00:00:58] It's Day 1, Jason and Andrea got to ride in Andrew's mustang and Jason now feels like a cool, hip Boomer and Andrew is sporting the Adidas wardrobe as usual. [00:04:11] The guys tell us that Drew Bragg gave one of the most entertaining and engaging talks they've ever seen, as well as Chris Seaton from Shopify. [00:05:11] The guys discuss some other great talks with Kelly Sutton, talking about Sidekick, Matthias Lee, a twelve-year old, who gave a great talk on the history of Vim, and Thai Wood who did an engaging talk on incident response.[00:10:21] In case you're wondering what happened at lunchtime, Andrew went swimming, Jason had a frozen strawberry margarita, and Andrea Fomera had a fantastic talk on the upgrading process for Rails.[00:13:58] Is it Day 2 or Day 9? The guys chat about Brittany Martin's talk on, “What it's like to the be the technical person on the call,” which had some really interesting ideas.[00:16:58] If you need a break from the Vegas strip, the guys tell us about The Neon Museum, the light show they saw there, and going to downtown Vegas which was a ton of fun. We hear a story of Andrew getting carded at the Roulette table.[00:19:46] We hear about the Evil Knievel themed pizza place the guys went to called Evil Pie. The first talk of Day 2 was with Ivy Evans and her talk on security, and Andrew tells us about an interesting podcast called, Darknet Diaries.[00:22:45] The next talk is Nikita Vasilevsky, where he talked about “Do you test your tests,” and then the talk with Andrew Culver, creator of Bullet Train. [00:25:53] Jason posterized Andrew, and we learn more about Colleen Schnettler's talk on Arel, Nick Schwaderer's talk on the gem Hobix, and Jason's amazing talk which Andrew raves about![00:36:27] Find out about the guys racing experience, and what their favorite part of the conference was and their favorite meal. ☺Panelists:Jason CharnesAndrew MasonSponsor:Hook RelayLinks:Ruby Radar NewsletterRuby Radar TwitterJason Charnes TwitterAndrew Mason TwitterSin City RubyThe Neon Museum-Las VegasEvil PieDarknet Diaries PodcastRailsConf 2022Ruby Conferences 2022Bullet TrainDrew Bragg TwitterChris Seaton TwitterKelly Sutton TwitterThai Wood TwitterAndrea Fomera TwitterBrittany Martin TwitterIvy Evans TwitterNikita Vasilevsky GitHubAndrew Culver TwitterColleen Schnettler TwitterNick Schwaderer LinkedIn

In this episode, Andrew Culver and I discuss the origins of Bullet Train, finding ideas for new products as a consultant, developer productivity, domain modeling, and the benefits of attending a conference like Sin City Ruby.Andrew Culver on TwitterAndrew Culver.netBullet TrainBullet Train BlogSin City Ruby

Birth is a part of life, but so is death. In this episode, the gals tackle their first brushes with death in a medical setting with guest Dr. Andrew Culver, DO and speak about how to cope with the emotions that accompany it. If you have a story you want to tell, contact us at impersonatingdoctors@gmail.com.If you want to support us, check out our patreon at https://www.patreon.com/user?u=53683451Music: What A Wonderful Day by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.comAny statements or views expressed by the "Impersonating Doctors" podcasters and their guests are made as an individual personal opinions and should not be interpreted as statements or official standpoints of their respective schools, places of work or employers. 

Check out Hammerstone! http://hammerstone.dev/Michele Hansen  0:00  Michele Hansen  0:00 Hey, welcome back to Software Social. This episode of Software Social is sponsored by Noko. https://nokotime.com/When you're bootstrapping on the side, every free moment counts. But do you really know how you're spending those moments? Which days you're most productive? If your product have time sinks that just don't pay?Here's one way to find out: Noko is a time tracker designed to help you learn from the time you track. And Noko makes it frictionless to give yourself good data, too — you can even log time directly from your Github commit messages. Try Noko today and save 15% off every plan, forever. Visit  Nokotime.com/SocialPod to start making your time work for you.Hey, everyone. So you may remember a couple of weeks ago, Colleen was facing a big decision about whether she should join an exciting project that some of her friends had started. So I'm here to tell you today that Colleen did decide to join that project. And we thought that you should hear about it from her and the team she's joining. So she is joining Hammerstone with our friends, Aaron and Sean. And you may remember Shawn from our episode a few months ago, where he was helping me learn how to market a book. So we thought we would let you listen to the episode that Colleen did on the Hammerstone podcast recently, where she's talking about joining the team. And after you listen, make sure to go subscribe to the Hammerstone podcast to get more updates about that really exciting project.Unknown Speaker  1:54  All right, we are recording. And we have three people here with us today. So the third person you want to introduce yourself.Colleen Schnettler  2:03  Hello, everyone. My name is Colleen and I have been working for Shawn and Aaron for about six months now. And this is my debut appearance on the Hammerstone podcast.Unknown Speaker  2:14  Welcome to the show. Thanks. So Colleen has been working, she said for us. But now Colleen is working with us. Colleen is a part of the Hammerstone team now. She's the third partner.Colleen Schnettler  2:29  Yes, I am super pumped. Super excited to join the team.Unknown Speaker  2:34  Yeah, so I guess we've been talking about this client for like, a year or more. And we've mentioned Colleen several times, I don't think it's been a secret. And she's the one that's been doing. She's the one that's been doing the rails side of the Refine product. And so, Shawn and Colleen have been working on this client for a long time. And the client has kind of been like, hey, what if we just keep doing this for a long, long time, we're like, great, we, that sounds good to us. And so Colleen is gonna continue working. But this client for they just, they just love Colleen, they just can't, they can't get enough of you. So, yeah, she's coming on as a partner and Hammerstone and she's gonna own the rails side of things. And I own the Laravel side of things. And Sean owns basically everything else. Kind of kind of a huge change, you know, in a whirlwind the past couple of weeks, but welcome.Colleen Schnettler  3:41  Thanks.Unknown Speaker  3:43  Yes, super cool. So speaking of owning all the other things, actually, can you guys hear me the sound just cut out weirdly for a second? We're good. You're okay. Yep. Yeah, so we, since there's three of us now, Aaron, and I have been, as I put it on the call with the lawyer yesterday, just yoloing it for the last year with our sort of like, operating agreement. So we got to hammer that out, you know, and actually do that properly given there's three of us, and that's an extra level of complication. So, the, the thing that we talked about with the lawyer, which I wanted to bring up with you guys was so first of all, I brought on my lawyer, Dalia who's awesome, and the best lawyer that I know. And I was like, Oh, yeah, I definitely want dahlias represent Hammerstone that Dalia immediately brought up that it's a conflict of interest of her because she's representing me. I'm planning for aliens. And I was like, Oh, well, I'll just find another lawyer for planning for aliens. And that's when I realized like last night, I was like, do I want to do that? Like it's, I want Dalia to represent Hammerstone but I also like kind of still want to have Dalia around for other shit for me. So I think that she had mentioned this as a possibility where like, she could represent us both. And then if there's a conflict of interest step aside, and it would go to me by default, I think is what she said. And then Hammerstone would have to find another lawyer. How does that sound to you guys?Colleen Schnettler  5:18  Yeah, so what I took from that conversation was exactly that, like, she can represent you, she can represent Hammerstone. But if the three of us as Hammerstone have a problem, she would then have to step back and then all of us would, like, if we're at the point where we all need our own attorneys, like something has gone terribly wrong, right? Like, we're probably just gonna want to Anyway, when we're talking about attorneys, that's all we're talking about is these horrible situations, right. So that is what we're talking about right now is a horrible situation that, you know, potentially could happen in the future. Get it? I'm not putting anything out of possibility. Like, I'm fine with that. I don't know, she had said something about how someone has to wait, like waive the conflict of interest. So you can ask her what that means. But I mean, I have no issues with this, because I just, I know, no one ever sees themselves in these situations, but I just cannot imagine a situation where that would happen. And if it did, then, I mean, you're so far gone by that point that, you know, I'm okay.Unknown Speaker  6:29  Yeah, I think I think I understand the same thing. So she'll represent planning for aliens, which is your holding Corporation. Shawn, shall represent planning for aliens shall represent Hammerstone. And should, Shawn Colleen and Aaron ever need representation against each other not as Hammerstone against each other as individuals, then that's when we have to say conflict of interest, or, you know, Colleen, and I get our own lawyers or whatever. Does that seem right? That's exactly it. Yeah. Yep. I'm on board with that. That's fine.Colleen Schnettler  7:02  Yeah, I'm totally fine.Unknown Speaker  7:03  She'll give us whatever papers to sign about that. And then Alright, cool.Colleen Schnettler  7:07  Sure. What I didn't understand from that call was the accountant thing. At the election, yeah, way into some tax law with a vesting schedule. For me, and that was kind of Whoosh. SoUnknown Speaker  7:24  So you got to talk to our accountant, like, so this is what we're talking about. We have our accountant, you could you could have your own, or you just use Aaron, I'm like, pushing, we just use the one accountant for all the stuff. I mean, it's not. He's an accountant. So I don't know if there's like, there's not like a conflict of interest, right? He's just gonna tell you like, what's the optimal thing to do?Colleen Schnettler  7:43  Right? This is how you should structure it. Yeah.Unknown Speaker  7:46  Yeah. And, and my understanding, I never thought about this before, I guess, because it's gonna be like a taxable event, that you could decide, take the taxes now or take the taxes later. And I think that'll probably all depend on your whole personal, you know, finance situation plus, like, what you think's gonna happen with Hammerstone, etc. So,Colleen Schnettler  8:06  right, so you guys have a Hammerstone accountant, who is also Aaron's personal accountant. It's my it's my personal accountant, but his name is Aaron is Aaron. Oh, hence. Yeah. Okay, so Shawn, you have an accountant named Aaron, who has been doing Hammerstone taxes and your personal taxesUnknown Speaker  8:30  and planning for aliens. Correct. And he's gone. Hammerstone he hasn't done Hammerstone taxes yet. We just had no money last year. So we just write ourselvesColleen Schnettler  8:39  and then Aaron, not you Aaron not accounting there. You then have your own accountant for your own stuff for your LSIUnknown Speaker  8:47  I Aaron am an account I forgot. Yeah, yeah. So it makes it worse. I'm a CPA, however, I'm not our CPA, and I'm not my own CPA. I have my own personal accountant. For Jennifer's and my taxes. And I have a I have an LLC called bits and things. And so she does, she does bits and things she does our personal stuff. She does. And I've recently switched because my old one was terrible. So yes, I have my own personal one as well.Colleen Schnettler  9:15  Okay, because I have an accountant, but I'm not totally crazy about him. So I don't know if it's easier to just switch like we're, I'm cool with that. We can talk about that more. But yeah, okay.Unknown Speaker  9:26  I think I felt like the advantage for me if having Aaron jado match to my@aol.com do my personal and LLC or an S corp actually needs the one that set that all up is that he knows like how to optimize both and they both writer and they both come into play and otherwise there's going to be a communication point between the two of you have two separate accountants or find like DIY, my personal account my personal taxes. So just for him to optimize things and be more, you know, fluid in that. It was easier to just have him do it. And then like as far as my recommendation of Aaron, like, I feel like I have a lot less problems with there. And then anybody else that I've ever talked to about their accountants and like I have, he saved me automatically a lot of money the first year that I hired him, and I have not been audited. I was audited prior to this prior to hiring him, and hadn't been audited said so. Anyway, that's, that's my pitch there.Colleen Schnettler  10:28  Yeah, not a pitch. It's really up to you. Yeah. But just not to get like two businesses. So like, my first accountant, had all these like, cool. I don't know if they're cool ideas, but he had a lot of ideas about how I should structure my LLC for like tax benefits. And then his wife died. And he retired and it was kind of dramatic. And then my new accountant who I've had for two years now, he's just not into that stuff. Like he doesn't provide recommendations. He like, I think he just puts everything in TurboTax and tells me what I owe. That's why old accountant Yeah, exactly. Nice guy. But I'm like, I can literally do that myself, like you are, you aren't advising me on like, structure anything. So I'm open to trying something new.Unknown Speaker  11:07  Yeah, so with Aaron, I do have to, like, I gotta push a little, like, if I do nothing, he'll just do what he's got sort of squared away from me. And I think he makes by default, good choices. And he's not just doing plug it into TurboTax stuff. Like he's thinking through all the various implications. And if he thinks there's something we need to talk about, then he'll generally bring it up with me. But like, I do have to, like, I wish he would provide me with like, a prompt of like, here are all the things that you should tell me, because these are the things that are gonna like impact, you know, the taxes or whatever. But I've had to kind of come up with my own list. Well, that sucks. But generally, if I'm doing something that's potentially having a tax implication, yeah, I mean, I've reached out to him, like we sold our house, I have this money sitting around from selling the house and like, what do I What do I need to do with this? etc? He's good at all that stuff? Yeah. Very cool. I still feel like space in our in our community for like, a really good accountant that like, actually does their job, like high level high touch could charge probably twice as much, you know, as mine does. And like they would be so busy. It would be ridiculous.Unknown Speaker  12:16  I agree. I think any any accountant that wants to book using savvy cow, I think you'd have a million customers. bootstrap customers, right? Oh, you you savvy Cal. You're not you're five years old. Colleen, is this accountant, the one that sent you like a 40? page? Yeah, organizer right here. Fill out all of your documents. And I said, you should just tell him No, I'm not going to do that. Is that this one?Colleen Schnettler  12:42  That's the that's the one. Yeah, I was like, What am I paying you for? Like, and again, he's a nice guy. But it was just like, like, I pay you. So I don't have to fill out the 40 page document. Like I might as well just do it in TurboTax. If this is what we're doing, yeah, yeah. SoUnknown Speaker  12:59  yeah. Any other accounting lawyering? So one sided? One thing? Yeah, the one thing that the lawyer was saying we need to talk to the accountant about is the 83 b election, which I think determines when the taxable event, like when you recognize the taxes of your new part of Hammerstone. So I think, you know, just for context, that's what she was talking about. But I don't know too much else about that. The other thing she mentioned, which I thought was interesting, is his colleagues portion of the company coming from Sean's and my portion, or is the company somehow magically expanding to have more shares? And that's something we'll need to figure out because I have no clue. I think that's also a tax base decision, basically. I think it is.Unknown Speaker  13:52  Yeah, but yeah, we're gonna have to explore all that cuz I totally get it either. Yeah, even though there was another Oh, go ahead.Colleen Schnettler  14:00  I was gonna say even stuff, like invoicing. Like we invoice the customer, the client? Do I invoice you guys? Ask us guys, US people, US people? Or do I from my LLC? Or do I take a distribution? Like how youUnknown Speaker  14:14  just did you just destroyed our bank account to yourself? Yeah. So we'll just invoice Amazon, you can just pay yourself?Unknown Speaker  14:22  Yeah, I think that's right. But I don't know, actually, we need to check because I don't know if, you know, Colleen takes that as an owner distribution. That doesn't. That doesn't offset our revenue. So like if Hammerstone makes, you know, let's say Hammerstone makes $10,000 but actually 9500 Oh, call is a good point. We need to recognize that as an expense otherwise, hammer stones pay $1,000 Yeah, so not an owner. Just contribution. No, we shouldn't do it that way. That's right. So let's not do accounting live on air because this is something that's definitely definitely one we'll need to get sorted. I don't think anything changes. You've been invoicing us, and we've been paying you and I don't think anything changes but wanting to double check that. Yeah, fun stuff.Colleen Schnettler  15:25  I know. It is like surprising. I'm sure we will be happy. We hashed all this out. But like at this point in the business, it feels frustrating, right? Because it feels like it's slowing us down. We have to have meetings, we haven't talked out lawyer to like, Oh my gosh, can we just do our work? Like, IUnknown Speaker  15:40  don't want to write tests. I just want to write the products like, this is this is the testing of business. You have to do all this stuff you don't want to do. Yeah, that's funny, though.Unknown Speaker  15:50  I don't mind it at all feels absolutely necessary. Really great. Yeah. That's wonderful. Oh, that gets a job that we have to do. I mean, got to do it.Colleen Schnettler  15:59  That's interesting. Yeah, I just I don't know. I'm just like, let's just skip all this. It's fine. But it's good to do it. You're absolutely right.Unknown Speaker  16:07  That's why we have you, Sean. So I think, you know, we have all this context. And this is actually a podcast, not just a Hangout. So I think it would be interesting to talk just quickly about how the three of us like how we ended up here. Because like Sean said, he and I have just been yoloing it and just like, yeah, we own 50% of the company. Let's shake hands. And that's because Shawn and I didn't just meet on the internet yesterday. And you know, bringing in a third partner is a big deal. But we didn't just, you know, meet Colleen off the street. So, Shawn, do you want to talk about how you and I met? And how long ago that was?Unknown Speaker  16:52  Yes. Before Isaac was born, so probably eight years ago. And I was I just quit my job to start writing sketchy CSS and I went to the bacon biz conference, right? Is that what it's called? bacon bits. Yeah, yeah. Amy hoy. And yeah, anyway, now pixelmon. The other thing. The first one, actually, right. wasn't the first one. Yeah. So yeah. And you shared a room with Josh Pigford on that.Unknown Speaker  17:18  Yeah, I did I share it with Josh Pigford. Because the way that I knew Josh Pigford was cuz I shared a room with him at micro comp. He was on. So micro comp and bacon bids were the same year that year, and he had posted on the micro comp thing like, Hey, does anybody want to share room I'm normal. That's like, I doubt you're normal. But I'll look you up. And I looked him up. And we had like a zoom call. And I was like, Yeah, sure. I don't have any friends there. And I need like, you know, when you when you go into a conference, and you don't know anyone, and it's terrifying and like you're in high school with no friends. That's how I felt. So I was like, Yes, I'll share a room with this guy. And then he went to bacon business. So we shared a room again. It's so funny that you remember that?Unknown Speaker  18:06  Yeah, I met you. I met buckbee. I met Barry. Hmm, I think there was there Pete was there. I was not there. No, no, no, Pete wasn't there. He wasn't there. He wasn't. No, no, I didn't meet Pete in real life for a few years. Oh, wow. Yeah. But Pete was working on his stripe book around that time. And then and then Andrew had. So Andrew had a company called churn buster, Andrew Culver, a mutual friend of ours. So he had this company called churn Buster and turn Buster had a HipChat support channel, which he just had it so he would invite people to hang out with him in there. And then every now and then, is it chat customers or be his churn Buster customers would pop in and ask questions. And we'd be like, well, Andrew is not here. But like, have you tried blah, blah, blah. troubleshoot the problem?Unknown Speaker  18:58  It was such a scam. We did all this support for him.Unknown Speaker  19:02  Yeah. And there was also briefly, same in that same HipChat room, there was Patrick Collison a like yeah, that's right. It was in the HipChat room with us. forgot about that. Yeah. We've had people graduate out of Yeah. Yeah, but that's what we all met was that room like buckbee invited us from that conference. And then we started hanging out together there and then meet in real life every now and then, you know, it's making this conferences etc. So we just have this little community which has been growing and changing over the years. Now, it's a Slack channel. It's not Andrews. How to intercept or gel anymore.Unknown Speaker  19:47  Yeah, eight years ago, and then Colleen, you met Andrew first. Is that right? Are you met Michelle?Colleen Schnettler  19:54  Andrew? No, I met Andrew first Sean actually. Put Michelle and I Touch I believe. So I met Andrew, I was going to the Ruby on Rails meetups in Virginia Beach. And there were like three people that attended these meetups like it was not. They were not well attended. But Andrew came to speak at one. And this was maybe four or five years ago, I don't remember. Andrew came to speak at one. And afterwards, we all went out to get drinks all four of us, because he and one of our mutual friends knew each other really well. And so Andrew told me so this is like back when I'm in my just want to launch a product phase kind of that, you know, in the beginning when you like have that really strong desire, but you're aimless because you don't have any contact salutely Yes, yeah, that's back in those days. So Andrew and I were talking about business ideas. So he told me about the slack group. So then I joined the slack group. And then I started having weekly lunches with the Virginia Beach people. And that's kind of how I got to know everyone. And then I met you guys will show that I had worked on and off together. Occasionally we were on the same contract. But we never really worked together. I feel like we were always we didn't really know each other, even though we kind of worked together. And then I met you two, what, two years ago, in real life. I think it was two years ago in the dc, dc. DC was the first time so before that I had never met Aaron and you were really active Aaron in the Slack channel. So I like didn't even know who you were. And Sean I kind of knew because he was like the React guy that worked on the same contract I worked on, but we've never really worked on together. Yeah. And then I met you guys IRL, as they say, yeah.Unknown Speaker  21:39  And we have another so obviously, we skipped the retreat last year. But we have another in person retreat coming up. Yeah, hopefully.Colleen Schnettler  21:49  Hopefully. Yeah. We'll see. I'm nervous. I'm nervous about it. Yeah, same. I will say though, good.Unknown Speaker  21:59  Saying that I feel nervous about it, too. I wasn't even thinking about it. But until recently, when all the sudden I've had to start having new, like, bubble conversations with my parents about like, Who's gonna watch Isaac if like, he has an outbreak in his class? And like, should we do the after school care for him where you guys want to commit to it? So he's not like with all these other kids? And I'm like, Oh, no, this is a retreat even gonna happen?Colleen Schnettler  22:22  Yeah, I hope so. We'll see. But I would say like going back to the three of us working together, we never really got to know each other. Well, I would say until we started working together recently, about, what, eight months ago now. I mean, I think that I don't think I any of us, and I can just speak for myself, you guys would not have invited me in to this company eight months ago, right? Like, we didn't have that relationship. I mean, we had no context on each other, we had never worked together. So I think like us forming a partnership has really grown over that working together almost every day, you know, over the extended period of time. Definitely.Unknown Speaker  23:00  Yep. I would absolutely agree. Yeah, I think. So. I think, just from my perspective, like the thing, the problem that we're working on, and maybe we should describe it, because I don't know that everyone has listened from Episode One, which you should. So the thing that we're doing is, it's like a visual Query Builder. So you know, when you go to, let's use ecommerce, because that's an easy example, when you go to an e commerce website, and you're like, I want shoes that are Nikes, in size 11, or 12, and are black and are under $100, and ship in two days. So like, you can build up your, you know, your perfect filter, just kind of like on the fly. We're building that as a component. So you can just drop it in to your Rails application, or you can just drop it into your Laravel application. And then the application developer can say, here are all the conditions that I want to offer my users, I want to offer them shoe size, and shoe color and price. And then Hammerstone, y'all figure out how do you show that on the front end? How do you do validation? How do you apply that to the database? How do you store that so that they can like, you know, generate a report and send it later. So that's like, that's the product we're building. And it's called refine, and that's what we've been working on for a long time. And I think, from my perspective, one of the reasons that I was like, Yes, we absolutely have to have Colleen is because you've spent like eight months or a year getting your head around this problem, which it takes that long, and I think you have an extremely good grasp on the problem space and it's like a very complicated problem. And you've got, like, you've got ideas on how to make it How to make it successful in the rails world, which I don't have, I don't have the context, I don't have the knowledge, I don't have the experience. And so somebody that has the whole problem set loaded into their mind and is really excited about it and wants to make it a Rails thing. I was like, Yes, let's do it. Bring her on. Absolutely.Unknown Speaker  25:23  Yeah, I think it makes sense. Because it makes sense. If we're, if we're just doing like a really small, like little project, that's gonna make a couple 1000 bucks a month. First of all, Aaron, you should just launch that without me. And then, but we're not like I think we have, I have at least a larger sort of thesis in mind for building a lot of different types of components like this. And we realized that like, we can build front ends that are compatible with different back ends, and we could build a Rails version level version of Python version, like, there's a choice for how we could like, expand our market, we could do, we could go down that route. There's other ways to do it. But like, that was a possibility. And here we are, we were presented with the opportunity to build a Rails version paid for by a client. And now we can have somebody take over that piece and own that, that's a no brainer for me. So it kind of commits us to the strategy of like, we're going for two different markets. And that's how we're going to, you know, like, increase our market size. But I also think that makes sense, long term. And it makes sense that Coleen run the run the rail side.Colleen Schnettler  26:38  I think so I have listened to your podcast, I think you guys are really, like, I feel like your excitement, I don't know, I know, you can kind of see the potential. But literally everyone I have ever worked for could use this query builder. So it's just I mean, when you describe it, Aaron, I think it's hard to describe it. Because someone asked me, he was like, What is this thing you guys are building that you're so excited about. And I was like, I don't know how to describe it concisely. But the power like when you guys first, when we first talked about this, I literally thought it was just going to be, you know, a couple scopes, right? Like, you're just like, Oh, I'm going to scope the model, and I'm going to send you the string. And you're just going to scope the model on it. And that's not what it is at. All right. So I just think, I think we can grow this business with just this product to, you know, larger than any of us have done before, like, This product is really spectacular. I mean, it's just so cool. And I think it'll be cool to like, approach it on different fronts, it'll be really interesting to see how it does in Rails versus, you know, Laravel, and just kind of see the growth trajectory. And both of those ecosystems. Yeah, it's gonna be cool.Unknown Speaker  27:47  Yeah. To get there, though, like, there's, there's some problems. You know, like, it's not, like, Yes, I definitely could, every entrepreneur could see how their product could be used everywhere. Like, that's 100% true of every entrepreneur who creates a product, like everybody should use this. But like, I think that for us, there's the obvious, like, low hanging fruit of, we're gonna get some sales from on the site, like you and Aaron are basically gonna do like dev rel, you're going to do like a little bit of content marketing, you're going to be building up the those relationships, and we'll get a few sprinkles of sales there. And those are going to be people that are going to buy it like because they're like, Oh, yeah, I was gonna build this, but instead, I'm going to buy it right. So they're already at that build versus buy decision point, then, and they already know, like, they need the thing. They already know, they need a query builder that they probably already, like, use that word or phrase even. So they're pretty far along in the process. In order for us to get out further and deeper into the market. That's where we have to start doing some convincing or pointing out to people that like, Look, you can, you could drop this into your product. Now you don't even see the need for it. But like, I could we then show can show the need for it. And I think that's a that's like another harder problem. So there's like, how far can we get on people that are going to make build versus buy decision? And how, how can we figure out systems to get in front of them right then? And then what's the next step, the next layer, like pulling in these other people that like you could add this into your app now. And it solves pains You didn't even know you had kind of situation, which is a lot harder. That's like a lot harder. A thing is possible. I mean, I've already had conversations with somebody who's interested, like they're just what are you doing? And I explained it to them. And then I explained it in the context of their app. And they were like, Oh, I need it. Right. So I know it's possible. But it's very hard. Which that's gonna be my job. Yeah, seriously.Unknown Speaker  29:48  Yeah. And I think like, Colleen, you've worked on a bunch of different clients. So you're not just looking out and being like, oh, the world needs this. You're looking back on your clients and being like, no, the people That I did work for in the app, they need this. Is that right?Colleen Schnettler  30:04  Yes. Yeah. And since they're my clients like I would, I mean, that's the nice thing about consultants. Right? I'd be like, you all need to buy this immediately. And they would. But yeah, to Shawn's point we how do we expand past our existing networks? Right? Like, that's basically, you know, we have we have pretty good networks of people in our community, people in the indie SAS community. How do you expand beyond that?Unknown Speaker  30:31  Huh? Yeah, exactly. That's, that's the hard part. But if we do that, then we definitely have a business. But that's like one of these things that we have to that's, that's the hard part. Yeah. My my movies a coupleUnknown Speaker  30:44  years, my move so far has not been expanding beyond my personal network, it's been expanding my personal network. So like I'm trying right now, to gather up more and more Laravel like connections and eyeballs. And the way I've been doing that, as you know, putting out either open source projects, or blog posts or torchlight is another great example, something that something that's not gonna make us rich, you know, independently, but is getting a lot of traction within Laravel the ecosystem of people saying like, Oh, this is really cool, let me you know, follow the story, follow this guy who's doing it or sign up and use it myself. And so that's been my move so far. But obviously, that only scales, that only scale so far, but it's definitely like, it's definitely step one, I mean, might as well start with the inner circle. SoUnknown Speaker  31:45  I think there's been me is another benefit of having Colleen was, like, takes it I was gonna have to do what Colleen is doing now, like on the rail side, like what you're doing in Laravel, I was gonna have to do that. And I am a Rails developer, but it's, I'm not as well connected in that community. And it's a bit of a stretch, I could get there. But like the learning curve was going to be large. I was trying to figure out ways to like hire contractors to like, kind of get me there and like, So this takes that off my plate entirely. And then like, focus on the hard problem. Which is like where I've been, I have gotten to the point where I have a business that is selling products, paying my bills, doing what you're talking about Aaron doing the devil stuff. And like having doing content marketing and that sort of thing. I've been there getting past that is a whole other thing that I want to figure out and do. And that's, like, that's the goal for me at least.Unknown Speaker  32:43  Well, I've never gotten to the point where I have a business paying my bills, like a product paying my bills. So I'm glad we have you beyond that, because you've been there I have not calling you haven't either, right? You have simple file upload, but it doesn't pay bills. And so to have your mind working on that issue, well, Colleen and I are doing other stuff, I think I think it's gonna work out quite just knowUnknown Speaker  33:10  for everyone. Like, I could just get you guys ahead of you and tell you how you're gonna feel a year from now. You're gonna be like, how do I make more money than this? I'm like, right on the cusp of like a real business. What do I do? Yeah. It's just the next step. Yeah. Well, hopefully you've got it all sorted out by then. Yeah, we'll have it all figured out. Yeah, perfect. I'll just have buckbee tell me what to do. Seriously,Colleen Schnettler  33:35  that usually works. Yeah, that does usually work. Alright, what else? Nobody, nobody, nobody. I'm good.Unknown Speaker  33:51  So we're gonna do, we're gonna do three people from now on, right? calling your game to join all of Yeah, yeah. Hope, right. That's great. Some, some weeks you and I can just talk technical the whole time. I think that's gonna be one of the fun things is, like, I've already picked up a lot of good stuff for the lair Val product from, like working with you. And I think that is going to expand beyond just the Refine, like, refine is the name of our product just beyond refine, into other, like, either open source packages or other products be like, hey, what? what exists in Laravel that doesn't exist in rails and vice versa. I think that'll be a fun, like cross pollination opportunity, either for content or for products. But I'm thinking right now, especially for content. Yeah. So, all right, well, so we just call it there.Colleen Schnettler  34:57  Sounds good. All right.Michele Hansen  35:00  Michelle again. That's all for software social for this week. You can go to Hammerstone dot dev to learn more about that project and listen to their past episodes. We'll talk to you next week.Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Today we are spotlighting Andrew Culver of Bullet Train. Bullet Train saves you weeks of development by starting you off with all the features that are the same in every SaaS, so you can focus on what makes your app unique. Connect with us at wearelatech.com/podcast and tweet @WeAreLATech and @EspreeDevora. https://twitter.com/bullettrainco https://twitter.com/wearelatech https://twitter.com/espreedevora

Andrew and I got together to discuss his software Bullet Train, service objects, POROs, and the value of code testability.

Today we continue our conversation with Andrew Culver, founder of SaaS products like Bullet Train and Churnbuster. We talk to Andrew today about his new product Bullet Train – what it is, how it came to be, marketing, risks, and more. Mailing List Every month there are more great articles and content about the business […]

We’re joined today by Andrew Culver, founder of SaaS products like Bullet Train and Churnbuster. We talk to Andrew today about how he got into entrepreneurship, his start at Borrowed and Blue, and how his experience at Borrowed and Blue led to his first SaaS product Churnbuster. Along the way we talk about combining consulting […]

Ben and Derrick are together again, at MicroConf and working on their new products and businesses. From making T-shirts to thinking about finding funds, things are continuing to move forward. Derrick is focusing on Level, an open source team communication and management tool. Ben is considering the name, Tuple, for his pair programming tool alternative for Screenhero. He is focusing on all things business-related, from equity to entity options. Today’s Topics Include: What’s equity? Ben determines how to break up partnership percentages for his company Each partner will have their moment in the sun, and contribute more or less at various times Forming an entity; should Ben’s business be an LLC, corporation, private company...? Domain scheme options when it comes to handles and extensions Ben’s next milestone is to do a small alpha, and charge people to use it Embedding iframes, custom domain options, and promotions How cagey to be about technology being used; the secret sauce and general public licenses Learning how to pitch a product and what resonates with people Tools can be improved, and education on how to use them needs to be provided Is Slack the problem, or the people who use it? On premise vs. Cloud options; the pros and cons If you’re enjoying the show please give us your ratings and reviews in iTunes. Links and resources: Ben Orenstein Website (http://www.benorenstein.com/) Ben Orenstein on Twitter (https://twitter.com/r00k) Derrick Reimer Website (http://www.derrickreimer.com/) Derrick Reimer on Twitter (https://twitter.com/derrickreimer) Angel Funds (https://angel.co/angel-funds) MicroConf (https://www.microconf.com/) WebRTC (https://webrtc.org/) Andrew Culver (https://github.com/andrewculver)

Things are getting back to normal in our respective business worlds. Brian has launched his podcasting service and Jordan is back to business as usual after a visit from Ben and Rok. Today we kick off our “armchair quarterbacking” sessions, and we are starting with Andrew Culver's SaaS product, Bullet Train. We also give general updates on what is going with Carthook and Audience Ops. So tune in to hear about Brian's new service and Jordan's newfound ambition after having a rare full team meetup. [tweetthis]We [founders] think in a certain way and maybe we don't remember what it is like to be an employee. - Jordan[/tweetthis] Here are today's conversation points: How having Rok and Ben around has energized Carthook's team. The presentations and social activities that helped Jordan's team get better in step with each other. Adjusting back to regular business after Rok and Ben left. Brian's new podcasting service. The hiring process Brian is using to build his podcast service. An update on the Productize Course and Brian's closed cart approach. Jordan's upcoming conference projects. The struggle of working during business travel. The benefit of doing one-on-one discussions with your employees. The first armchair quarterbacking session: Bullet Train. Why agencies would be the best fit for Bullet Train. [tweetthis]Nobody is going to get as fired up and keep pushing than the founder. - Brian[/tweetthis] Resources Mentioned Today: Audience Ops Bullet Train Carthook MicroConf. Productize Shopify Unite As always, thanks for tuning in. Head here to leave a  review on iTunes.

As part of his new business journey, Derrick requested that customers schedule time to talk with him about Level, a team communication and management tool he is developing. Luckily, about 40 people signed up, and he has completed 14 of these calls. What are his customers saying? They confirm main pains they feel with current tools and are very willing to share their frustrations with existing tools. Derrick has not been surprised yet about their answers. In Ben’s world, he is spending time on slinging and reading about Haskell. He is full of questions. Both Ben and Derrick are learning a lot every day, which is fulfilling and exciting. Today’s Topics Include: Level will not be a project management tool, but may have some project management capabilities Derrick’s list of initial questions for customers: What is their company and role within it; the size of their team; what tools they use and when they adopted them; and the balance between chat, email, and project management in their organization Derrick also asks customers: Why are they interested in Level? What problems do they want it to solve? What’s working well for them with Slack, and what’s not? What aspects of Slack do they use and don’t use? Ideas for improvement have come from Derrick’s customers Continuous integration is the clear winner for usefulness Gauging willingness to switch to another tool, such as Level Customers expressed using Level on a pilot basis for specific teams or projects and in coordination with at least one other tool Being unable to post asynchronous, long-form discussions is a pain point for some customers Paying for a tool would not be a big deal Derrick plans to kick off his building Level series and build mock-ups for customers to view Positive use of minimalist user interfaces Debating whether to offer a pre-payment option for Level Ben uses Ansible for the deployment of Haskell code Ben is seeking a Dev Ops person to hire - must have strong opinions and can fix stuff SaaS Renaissance? More developers are starting SaaS companies - a trend already on the way out? Level will be SaaS but with an open source core Tools SaaS companies will want to have and buy Not Built Here Syndrome: Engineers who outsource non-essential parts to someone else Pricing Pages as a Service: Shopify’s checkout page feels natural but still represents the company Avoid rebuilding stuff If you’re enjoying the show please give us your ratings and reviews in iTunes. Links and resources: Ben Orenstein Website (http://www.benorenstein.com/); Twitter (https://twitter.com/derrickreimer) Derrick Reimer Website (http://www.derrickreimer.com/) Basecamp (https://basecamp.com/) and Getting Real (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdx5Dk3EWTe2i8YDA7bfl6g) Haskell (https://www.haskell.org/) Programming in Haskell book (https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Haskell-Graham-Hutton/dp/0521692695) C Programming Language (https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Language-2nd-Brian-Kernighan/dp/0131103628) by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie (K&R for C) Ruby on Rails (http://rubyonrails.org/) Ansible (https://www.ansible.com/) Drip Salesforce (https://www.salesforce.com/) Product Hunt (https://www.producthunt.com/) GitLab (https://gitlab.com/)and Discourse (https://github.com/discourse/discourse) Stripe Atlas (https://stripe.com/atlas) Andrew Culver’s Bullet Train (https://twitter.com/i/moments/906824077612109824?lang=en) Adam Savage: One Day Builds (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKqXxhKj-VjqKzdBYPeqQUM2No2Ps7qU3) MicroConf 2018 (http://www.microconf.com/)

Today Craig is joined by fellow bootstrapped founder Andrew Culver.  Andrew was previously the founder of ChurnBuster, and has since gone on to have several really interesting opportunities in the tech and startup world, and most recently has founded a SaaS development tool called BulletTrain. As anyone who’s built a SaaS app knows there are […]

In this episode, Andrew Culver, talks about how to handle working remotely while traveling and important aspects, such as equipment and a reliable Internet connection, to consider to make it...