Organization using its own product
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2 episodes with dogfooding
2 episodes with dogfooding
2 episodes with dogfooding
2 episodes with dogfooding
3 episodes with dogfooding
2 episodes with dogfooding
Sachin Kansal is chief product officer at Uber, where he oversees the Rider, Driver, Delivery, Grocery, and New Verticals product lines used for 33 million daily trips worldwide. He's been in product for over 25 years (at Google, Palm, Flywheel, and now Uber). He is known for his “extreme dogfooding” ethos—personally completing almost a thousand Uber driving and delivery trips to sharpen his product insight and user empathy—and his “ship, ship, ship” mantra, which drives rapid iteration across Uber's global teams.What you will learn:1. Dogfooding at scale2. “Ship, ship, ship” as a cultural mantra3. Obsession with inputs over outputs4. Uber's hybrid marketplace vision for autonomy5. How Uber changed its culture to focus on profitability6. What to do when data says “no” but your gut says “yes”7. Career advice: maximize cycles8. AI as a research assistant, not an oracle9. Uber rider etiquette tips—Brought to you by:• Paragon—Ship every SaaS integration your customers want• Stripe—Financial infrastructure to grow your revenue• Coda—The all-in-one collaborative workspace—Where to find Sachin Kansal:• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sachinkansal/—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Sachin's background(05:00) Dogfooding in practice(11:24) Empathy and understanding drivers(20:18) Balancing metrics and user experience(22:04) Operationalizing dogfooding(24:26) Challenges and solutions in dogfooding(29:49) The motto: “ship, ship, ship”(36:37) Product announcements and live demos(40:49) Career advice for product managers(43:51) The evolution of product management with AI(46:55) Collaboration between engineers and product managers(49:36) Uber's vision for self-driving cars(55:59) Uber's path to profitability(01:01:58) Balancing data and gut decisions(01:07:21) AI tools in product management(01:10:14) Failure corner(01:13:48) Lightning round and final thoughts—Referenced:• Uber: https://www.uber.com/• Oracle: https://www.oracle.com/• Snowflake: https://www.snowflake.com/en/• Fivetran: https://go.fivetran.com/• Uber for Business: https://www.uber.com/us/en/business• McDonald's: https://www.mcdonalds.com/• Domino's: https://www.dominos.com• PalmPilot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PalmPilot• Praveen Neppalli Naga on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pneppalli/• May Mobility: https://maymobility.com/• Uber strikes deal with May Mobility to deploy ‘thousands' of robotaxis: https://www.theverge.com/news/659563/uber-may-mobility-autonomous-ridehail-partnership• Waymo: https://waymo.com/• WeRide: https://www.weride.ai/• Uber and Avride Announce Autonomous Delivery and Mobility Partnership: https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-details/2024/Uber-and-Avride-Announce-Autonomous-Delivery-and-Mobility-Partnership/default.aspx• Dara Khosrowshahi on X: https://x.com/dkhos• Uber Elevate: https://www.uber.com/us/en/elevate/vision/• Uber AV: https://www.uber.com/us/en/autonomous/• Uber Reserve: https://www.uber.com/us/en/ride/how-it-works/reserve/• Uber for teens: https://www.uber.com/us/en/ride/teens/• Flywheel: https://www.flywheel.com/• ChatGPT: https://chatgpt.com/• Gemini: https://gemini.google.com/app• NotebookLM: https://notebooklm.google/• Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/googles-notebooklm-raiza-martin• BlackBerry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry• Peaky Blinders on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/80002479• Deep research: https://openai.com/index/introducing-deep-research/—Recommended books:• Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies: https://www.amazon.com/Blitzscaling-Lightning-Fast-Building-Massively-Companies/dp/1524761419• Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t: Why That Is And What You Can Do About It: https://www.amazon.com/Nobody-Wants-Read-Your-Sh-ebook/dp/B01GZ1TJBI• Steve Jobs: https://www.amazon.com/Steve-Jobs-Walter-Isaacson/dp/1451648537• Elon Musk: https://www.amazon.com/Elon-Musk-Walter-Isaacson/dp/1982181281• The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers―Straight Talk on the Challenges of Entrepreneurship: https://www.amazon.com/Hard-Thing-About-Things-Building/dp/0062273205—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe
In this episode of The SaaS CFO Podcast, I'm joined by Anna Berger, founder and CEO of Trayd—a game-changing construction payroll and compliance software. Anna shares how her career in marketing and personal roots in the construction industry inspired her to tackle the toughest back-office challenges specialty contractors face, from HR and scheduling to payroll and compliance. We dive into Anna's journey from working at top ad agencies and Marriott International to becoming a two-time founder and YC alum. She opens up about the challenges and wins of building Trayd, raising $4.5 million in seed funding, and the importance of customer retention and consistent branding in SaaS growth. If you're passionate about SaaS, vertical solutions, or just love a good founder story, you won't want to miss this conversation. Tune in to learn how Anna and her team are streamlining complex operations for contractors and driving rapid growth in an industry that's overdue for innovation! Show Notes: 00:00 Diverse Founder Background Advantage 03:31 Unified Construction Software Solution 06:38 Family-Driven Construction Insight 10:56 Startup Fundraising Journey 14:39 CEO Focus: Retention and Growth Metrics 16:37 "Dogfooding to Improve Customer Experience" Links: SaaS Fundraising Stories: https://www.thesaasnews.com/news/trayd-raises-4-5-million-in-seed-round Anna Berger's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/annajberger/ Trayd's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/traydinc/ Trayd's Website: https://www.buildtrayd.com/ To learn more about Ben check out the links below: Subscribe to Ben's daily metrics newsletter: https://saasmetricsschool.beehiiv.com/subscribe Subscribe to Ben's SaaS newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/df1db6bf8bca/the-saas-cfo-sign-up-landing-page SaaS Metrics courses here: https://www.thesaasacademy.com/ Join Ben's SaaS community here: https://www.thesaasacademy.com/offers/ivNjwYDx/checkout Follow Ben on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benrmurray
In this episode of Riding Unicorns, James Pringle is joined by Raffi Salama, Co-Founder & CEO of Passionfruit, a fast-growing marketing OS used by the world's most ambitious brands to orchestrate campaigns across resourcing, planning, execution, and tracking.Raffi shares his journey from launching David Beckham's Inter Miami football club to scaling Passionfruit across London, Lisbon, and now New York. What started as a freelance marketplace has evolved into a full-stack platform for marketing teams in the AI era, already used by the likes of PepsiCo, L'Oreal, Motorway, and Klaviyo.We explore:
Tatiana Fofanova, CEO and Co Founder of Koda Health, joins the show to talk aboutFrom pediatrics to entrepreneurship, and Tatiana's experience as a founder in residence at Texas Medical Center (TMC)The intersection of the law and health, and building an advanced care planning tool that is patient centric.Becoming "patient zero" for Koda Health after being hit by a car and getting diagnosed with kidney cancer, all in the same afternoon. Designing Koda's go-to-market strategy in health care, and how Tatiana has thought about building out her team in a healthcare startup.
We have made progress on our new fitness app, currently codenamed, "Bento Fit." This week we provide an update about the UI, using local Swift Packages for modularization of the codebase, creating custom HealthKit metrics, thoughts on data persistence and syncing, and next steps. Plus, tangents about running local LLMs, the fortunes of COBOL programmers, and some really bad monetization ideas. If you want to get into the headspace of some developers working on a side project, this was basically our project meeting recorded, so enjoy, tangents and all!## Show Notes- Bento Fit Progress Report - https://9to5mac.com/2025/02/08/indie-app-spotlight-bentocraft/ - Temp App Icon - Very basic layout for home view - Settings view placeholder - Add view placeholder - HealthKit permissions - WatchKit integration - SPM refactor - https://www.swiftystack.com - Aaron running miles by week adventure- Stats we want to focus on - Heart metrics - Running miles per week - Caffeine / nutrients consumed- Impromptu monetization discussion - Customized metrics for IAP- How to save preference data - Shared keychain items - Swift Data / CloudKit - NSUbiquitousKeyValueStore- Tangents on Cobol, PS5, etc.- Next Steps - Explore app's personality using Sketch - Add HealthKit metrics - Add tests - Xcode Cloud setup - Add ability to add/remove cards from UI- Wrap-Up - http://phillycocoa.org- Not a Sponsor: https://miovino.app## Chapters00:00 Introductions01:09 Catch-up on Bento Fit History07:12 Bento Fit Progress Update09:03 Bento Fit Progress: Local Swift Package Refactor14:22 Bento Fit Progress: Custom HealthKit Metric17:26 Exploring HealthKit Metrics24:03 Tangent: Bad Monetization Ideas26:07 Tangent: Studio Display is Still Expensive!27:24 Tangent: More Realistic Monetization Strategies28:50 Dogfooding the Prototype31:04 Data Persistence and Syncing Strategies39:33 Tangent: Local LLMs44:48 Tangent: The Fortunes of COBOL Developers47:40 Bento Fit Next Steps01:00:53 Wrap-Up: http://phillycocoa.org01:01:14 Not a Sponsor: https://miovino.app01:03:56 TagIntro music: "When I Hit the Floor", © 2021 Lorne Behrman. Used with permission of the artist.
Jacob Eiting, CEO of RevenueCat, joins us to discuss mobile developers and how they're different, RevenueCat's recent acquisition of Dipsea - and how it helps them dogfood.We also go hard on content - something RevenueCat is great at.We also talk about charisma in founders (but don't worry neither of us said rizz)This was especially fun because I actually used RevenueCat way before I started this show. We discuss:How RevenueCat simplifies in-app subscriptions and why mobile monetization is more complex than it appears.Making developers feel like heroes instead of struggling with tedious implementation.RevenueCat's acquisition of Dipsea—a customer with over 100,000 subscribers—and how it benefits both companies.The advantages of operating an app at scale to better test and iterate on new RevenueCat features.How in-app subscription businesses differ from traditional SaaS in terms of pricing, churn, and optimization.The importance of content marketing and transparency in building trust with developers.The role of personality and authenticity in developer-first marketing.The long-term vision for RevenueCat and how they plan to expand beyond their core subscription infrastructure.This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs. https://workos.com/Links:Jacob Eiting (https://x.com/jeiting)RevenueCat (https://www.revenuecat.com/)Dipsea (https://www.dipseastories.com/)
Rohini Pandhi is a product leader at Mercury, and previously spent over seven years at Square/Block leading product work on Square payments, invoicing, and the Bitkey hardware Bitcoin wallet. She's also the co-founder of the startup bootcamp Transparent Collective and is an active angel investor. In our conversation, we discuss:• Key indicators that it's time to hire PMs• How to build your early PM team• Why founders should initially take on the product manager role themselves• How to attract top PM talent• What she's learned about going multi-product• A case for investing in quality• More—Skip the Mercury Personal waitlist: https://mercurytechnologies.typeform.com/lenny—Brought to you by:• Cloudinary—The foundational technology for all images and video on the internet• OneSchema—Import CSV data 10x faster• Airtable ProductCentral—Launch to new heights with a unified system for product development—Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-build-your-product-team-from-scratch-rohini-pandhi—Where to find Rohini Pandhi:• X: https://x.com/rohinip• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rohinipandhi—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Rohini's background(05:00) The role of product managers at Mercury(09:51) Key indicators that it's time to hire PMs(13:18) Building the product team at Mercury(19:53) Why you should avoid hiring PMs too early(22:26) The different flavors of product management(26:15) How to attract top talent(35:59) Advocating for quality in product development(44:10) Going multi-product(46:37) Organizational structure for multi-product success(50:57) Organizational culture for multi-product success(52:07) Customer obsession and product development(57:36) More lessons from going multi-product(01:05:57) Transparent Collective: supporting underrepresented founders(01:09:54) Lightning round—Referenced:• Immad Akhund on X: https://x.com/immad• Mercury: https://mercury.com• Square: https://squareup.com• Pioneers, Settlers, Town Planners [Wardley]: https://orghacking.com/pioneers-settlers-town-planners-wardley-9dcd3709cde7• Jason Zhang on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-zhang-5645a860• What is ‘Dogfooding'?: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/14/business/dogfooding.html• Mercury Bill Pay: https://mercury.com/bill-pay• Zip: https://zip.co• Jira: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira• The art and science of pricing | Madhavan Ramanujam (Monetizing Innovation, Simon-Kucher): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-art-and-science-of-pricing-madhavan• Gokul Rajaram on designing your product development process, when and how to hire your first PM, a playbook for hiring leaders, getting ahead in you career, how to get started angel investing, more: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/gokul-rajaram-on-designing-your-product• Gokul Rajaram on X: https://x.com/gokulr• Transparent Collective: https://www.transparentcollective.com• 16 Reading Tips from Naval Ravikant: https://alexandbooks.com/archive/16-reading-tips-from-naval-ravikant• Shrinking on AppleTV+: https://tv.apple.com/us/show/shrinking• Bad Sisters on AppleTV+: https://tv.apple.com/us/show/bad-sisters• Slow Horses on AppleTV+: https://tv.apple.com/us/show/slow-horses• Severance on AppleTV+: https://tv.apple.com/us/show/severance• Presumed Innocent on AppleTV+: https://tv.apple.com/us/show/presumed-innocent• Waymo: https://waymo.com• Adam Robinson on X: https://x.com/IAmAdamRobinson• Cyan Banister—From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More): https://tim.blog/2024/11/28/cyan-banister• Bobby Matson on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bobbymatson• Jobs at Mercury: https://mercury.com/jobs—Recommended books:• Vectors: Aphorisms & Ten-Second Essays: https://www.amazon.com/Vectors-Aphorisms-Ten-Second-James-Richardson/dp/0967266890• The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance: https://www.amazon.com/Inner-Game-Tennis-Classic-Performance/dp/0679778314• Pachinko: https://www.amazon.com/Pachinko-National-Book-Award-Finalist/dp/1455563927• Cutting for Stone: https://www.amazon.com/Cutting-Stone-Abraham-Verghese/dp/0375714367• The Song of Achilles: https://www.amazon.com/Song-Achilles-Novel-Madeline-Miller/dp/0062060627—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe
We invite Joanna May into the clubhouse to discuss serialization. We get ever so slightly closer to discovering what serialization even is with Joanna's help! We also have a little time to throw a little shade at Stephen's commenting style and brackets on their own line.ChickensoftTibo, artist of the Chickensoft mascot.Eating your own dog food (Dogfooding) - WikipediaLogic Blocks - WikipediaSerializationProgrammingToolsSerialization - WikipediaBinaryFormatter migration guide - gewarren, jeffhandley, terrajobst, adamsitnik, Microsoft Learn@JsonSubTypes vs. Reflections for Polymorphic Deserialization in Jackson - Ovidiu Mihai Tacu, BaeldungWhat are the advantages of just-in-time compilation versus ahead-of-time compil… - Stack OverflowIntrospection - jolexxa [Joanna], GitHubIL2CPP Overview - UnityMartha had mentioned unit tests (which Mark and Stephen still don't do) in a previous episode.“That wasn't the angle I was going for.”Chickensoft Development Philosophy - ChickensoftJoanna MayGuestJoanna May is the creator of Chickensoft, open source tools for Godot and C# as well as a grassroots community. External linkChickensoft
On this episode of the Hackaday Podcast, Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi talk about the optical witchcraft behind holograms, the finer points of designing 3D printable threads, and the challenges of switching your local network over to IPv6. They'll also cover how a clever software patch improves the graphics in a flight simulator from the 1990s, and why spacecraft flying into orbit powered by the SABRE engine is going to remain a dream for now. From there you'll hear about a reproduction VW gas gauge that works better than the real thing, custom ball screws, and the latest and greatest in homebrew battery charging. Finally, they'll cap the episode off by exploring the conundrum that's heating up London's Underground, and diving into the (mostly) fictional history of teleportation. Check out the links on Hackaday if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Many agency owners dream of transitioning from service-based businesses to creating their own Software as a Service (SaaS) products. The appeal is undeniable: a scalable business model that generates recurring revenue and offers greater autonomy. However, making the shift from running an agency to building a SaaS isn't a walk in the park. It demands careful strategy, meticulous planning, and a clear understanding of both the challenges and opportunities ahead. In a recent episode of the Grow Your B2B SaaS podcast, host Joran sat down with Chris Out, author of the bestselling book Structuring for Extreme Revenue Growth and a seasoned expert in growth hacking and agency management. Chris shared his valuable insights on how agency owners can successfully pivot to SaaS, drawing from his own experience, including his exit from a growth hacking agency in 2020. In this episode, you'll get a deep dive into Chris's journey and learn actionable strategies for building a SaaS business while leveraging the strengths of your existing agency. From the foundational steps to avoidable pitfalls, Chris lays out the roadmap for turning your SaaS dreams into a thriving reality. Key Timestamps (00:00) - Unlocking Agency Growth: A Quick Intro to Revenue Insights(00:54) - Meet Chris Out: Growth Expert and SaaS Visionary(01:26) - Setting Up a SaaS Empire: What Agencies Need to Know(02:45) - The Dream of Building SaaS: Breaking Free from Hourly Billing(03:59) - SaaS Pitfalls: What Can Go Wrong in the Transition?(04:15) - Agency vs. Non-Agency: The SaaS Building Dilemma(05:18) - Top Mistakes Agencies Make When Venturing Into SaaS(06:49) - Lessons Learned: Chris Shares Personal SaaS Development Struggles(08:18) - Foundation First: What You Need Before Launching a SaaS(09:44) - Untouched Revenue: A Vital Metric for SaaS Success(11:11) - Revenue Targets and Team Building: How to Set Yourself Up for SaaS Success(12:14) - Finding the Right SaaS Fit: Does Your Agency Have the Ideal Product?(13:19) - Dogfooding: Why Agencies Should Test Their Own SaaS First(15:25) - Automating Services: Turning Internal Tools into SaaS Gold(17:00) - SaaS Development Hacks: Strategies for Fast-Tracking Your Success(18:03) - SaaS Growth Secrets: The Real Marketing and Sales Challenges(19:20) - Ego in SaaS: Why Letting Go Is Key to Success(20:52) - Simplifying Your Agency Services for a Smooth SaaS Transition(21:47) - SaaS Success Stories: Real-World Examples to Inspire You(23:00) - Co-Creation: Minimizing Risk and Maximizing SaaS Success(24:08) - Structuring Creative Deals with Clients to Fund SaaS Projects(25:06) - Client Relations: Proactive Communication for SaaS Success(26:39) - Learning From Mistakes: How to Pivot and Recover in SaaS Development(27:48) - Balancing Act: Managing Both Agency and SaaS Growth(29:38) - Dogfooding for SaaS Growth: What Chris Learned Along the Way(30:27) - Growing Your SaaS: Insights Beyond the Early Stages(31:21) - Validating Your SaaS: Ensuring Customer Satisfaction Early On(32:01) - Growth and Exit: Planning for the Long-Term Success of Your SaaS
In this week's episode of The REWORK Podcast, 37signals' co-founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson share their approach to product design, explaining why the first version of a product (V1) is always built for the company's internal use case. They discuss responding to user feedback and the importance of actively using their own products to uncover issues. They also dive into the challenges they've faced when building software for someone else's needs vs. their own.Key Takeaways:00:35 - The problem with imagined use cases07:21 - A trimmed down V1 gives you permission to focus on what's most important10:28 - The story of Highrise17:27 - “Dogfooding” to help identify and address product issues20:48 - Avoid the temptation to react too quickly to early customer feedback23:11 - Design breakthroughs come to life by creating innovative solutionsLinks and Resources:Version 1 is for you – Jason Fried's HEY World postBooks by 37signalsSign up for a 30-day free trial at Basecamp.comHEY World | HEYThe REWORK podcastThe Rework Podcast on YouTubeThe 37signals Dev Blog37signals on YouTube@37signals on X
How do you build your own mixed reality headset from sketch to scale? That's exactly what Alfred Jones, VP of hardware engineering at Meta Reality Labs, discussed with host Pascal. From choosing the right display technology, battery, thermal budget and of course hitting the right price point. How he manages to not fall victim to choice paralysis and so much more in episode 68. Got feedback? Send it to us on Threads (https://threads.net/@metatechpod) or Instagram (https://instagram.com/metatechpod) and don't forget to follow our host Pascal (https://threads.net/@passy_). Fancy working with us? Check out https://www.metacareers.com/. Links Caddy: https://engineering.fb.com/2024/07/18/virtual-reality/caddy-cad-mixed-reality-mr-meta/ Timestamps Intro 0:06 Alfred Introduction 1:40 Who do you work with? 3:23 Decision making frameworks 5:20 Is MR the final destination? 7:19 What makes good passthrough such a challenge? 10:18 How to build your own MR headset 13:51 Hardware design constraints 19:00 Prototype phases 22:34 Durability testing 26:23 Dogfooding at Meta 28:55 Magic wand for technical limitations 31:56 Outro 34:26
If you've listened to the podcast for a while, you might have heard our ElevenLabs-powered AI co-host Charlie a few times. Text-to-speech has made amazing progress in the last 18 months, with OpenAI's Advanced Voice Mode (aka “Her”) as a sneak peek of the future of AI interactions (see our “Building AGI in Real Time” recap). Yet, we had yet to see a real killer app for AI voice (not counting music).Today's guests, Raiza Martin and Usama Bin Shafqat, are the lead PM and AI engineer behind the NotebookLM feature flag that gave us the first viral AI voice experience, the “Deep Dive” podcast:The idea behind the “Audio Overviews” feature is simple: take a bunch of documents, websites, YouTube videos, etc, and generate a podcast out of them. This was one of the first demos that people built with voice models + RAG + GPT models, but it was always a glorified speech-to-text. Raiza and Usama took a very different approach:* Make it conversational: when you listen to a NotebookLM audio there are a ton of micro-interjections (Steven Johnson calls them disfluencies) like “Oh really?” or “Totally”, as well as pauses and “uh…”, like you would expect in a real conversation. These are not generated by the LLM in the transcript, but they are built into the the audio model. See ~28:00 in the pod for more details. * Listeners love tension: if two people are always in agreement on everything, it's not super interesting. They tuned the model to generate flowing conversations that mirror the tone and rhythm of human speech. They did not confirm this, but many suspect the 2 year old SoundStorm paper is related to this model.* Generating new insights: because the hosts' goal is not to summarize, but to entertain, it comes up with funny metaphors and comparisons that actually help expand on the content rather than just paraphrasing like most models do. We have had listeners make podcasts out of our podcasts, like this one.This is different than your average SOTA-chasing, MMLU-driven model buildooor. Putting product and AI engineering in the same room, having them build evals together, and understanding what the goal is lets you get these unique results. The 5 rules for AI PMsWe always focus on AI Engineers, but this episode had a ton of AI PM nuggets as well, which we wanted to collect as NotebookLM is one of the most successful products in the AI space:1. Less is more: the first version of the product had 0 customization options. All you could do is give it source documents, and then press a button to generate. Most users don't know what “temperature” or “top-k” are, so you're often taking the magic away by adding more options in the UI. Since recording they added a few, like a system prompt, but those were features that users were “hacking in”, as Simon Willison highlighted in his blog post.2. Use Real-Time Feedback: they built a community of 65,000 users on Discord that is constantly reporting issues and giving feedback; sometimes they noticed server downtime even before the Google internal monitoring did. Getting real time pings > aggregating user data when doing initial iterations. 3. Embrace Non-Determinism: AI outputs variability is a feature, not a bug. Rather than limiting the outputs from the get-go, build toggles that you can turn on/off with feature flags as the feedback starts to roll in.4. Curate with Taste: if you try your product and it sucks, you don't need more data to confirm it. Just scrap that and iterate again. This is even easier for a product like this; if you start listening to one of the podcasts and turn it off after 10 seconds, it's never a good sign. 5. Stay Hands-On: It's hard to build taste if you don't experiment. Trying out all your competitors products as well as unrelated tools really helps you understand what users are seeing in market, and how to improve on it.Chapters00:00 Introductions01:39 From Project Tailwind to NotebookLM09:25 Learning from 65,000 Discord members12:15 How NotebookLM works18:00 Working with Steven Johnson23:00 How to prioritize features25:13 Structuring the data pipelines29:50 How to eval34:34 Steering the podcast outputs37:51 Defining speakers personalities39:04 How do you make audio engaging?45:47 Humor is AGI51:38 Designing for non-determinism53:35 API when?55:05 Multilingual support and dialect considerations57:50 Managing system prompts and feature requests01:00:58 Future of NotebookLM01:04:59 Podcasts for your codebase01:07:16 Plans for real-time chat01:08:27 Wrap upShow Notes* Notebook LM* AI Test Kitchen* Nicholas Carlini* Steven Johnson* Wealth of Nations* Histories of Mysteries by Andrej Karpathy* chicken.pdf Threads* Area 120* Raiza Martin* Usama Bin ShafqatTranscriptNotebookLM [00:00:00]: Hey everyone, we're here today as guests on Latent Space. It's great to be here, I'm a long time listener and fan, they've had some great guests on this show before. Yeah, what an honor to have us, the hosts of another podcast, join as guests. I mean a huge thank you to Swyx and Alessio for the invite, thanks for having us on the show. Yeah really, it seems like they brought us here to talk a little bit about our show, our podcast. Yeah, I mean we've had lots of listeners ourselves, listeners at Deep Dive. Oh yeah, we've made a ton of audio overviews since we launched and we're learning a lot. There's probably a lot we can share around what we're building next, huh? Yeah, we'll share a little bit at least. The short version is we'll keep learning and getting better for you. We're glad you're along for the ride. So yeah, keep listening. Keep listening and stay curious. We promise to keep diving deep and bringing you even better options in the future. Stay curious.Alessio [00:00:52]: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO at Residence at Decibel Partners. And I'm joined by my co-host, Swyx, founder of Smol.ai.Swyx [00:01:01]: Hey, and today we're back in the studio with our special guest, Raiza Martin. And Raiza, I forgot to get your last name, Shafqat.Raiza [00:01:10]: Yes.Swyx [00:01:10]: Okay, welcome.Raiza [00:01:12]: Hello, thank you for having us.Swyx [00:01:14]: So AI podcasters meet human podcasters, always fun. Congrats on the success of Notebook LM. I mean, how does it feel?Raiza [00:01:22]: It's been a lot of fun. A lot of it, honestly, was unexpected. But my favorite part is really listening to the audio overviews that people have been making.Swyx [00:01:29]: Maybe we should do a little bit of intros and tell the story. You know, what is your path into the sort of Google AI org? Or maybe, actually, I don't even know what org you guys are in.Raiza [00:01:39]: I can start. My name is Raisa. I lead the Notebook LM team inside of Google Labs. So specifically, that's the org that we're in. It's called Google Labs. It's only about two years old. And our whole mandate is really to build AI products. That's it. We work super closely with DeepMind. Our entire thing is just, like, try a bunch of things and see what's landing with users. And the background that I have is, really, I worked in payments before this, and I worked in ads right before, and then startups. I tell people, like, at every time that I changed orgs, I actually almost quit Google. Like, specifically, like, in between ads and payments, I was like, all right, I can't do this. Like, this is, like, super hard. I was like, it's not for me. I'm, like, a very zero-to-one person. But then I was like, okay, I'll try. I'll interview with other teams. And when I interviewed in payments, I was like, oh, these people are really cool. I don't know if I'm, like, a super good fit with this space, but I'll try it because the people are cool. And then I really enjoyed that, and then I worked on, like, zero-to-one features inside of payments, and I had a lot of fun. But then the time came again where I was like, oh, I don't know. It's like, it's time to leave. It's time to start my own thing. But then I interviewed inside of Google Labs, and I was like, oh, darn. Like, there's definitely, like—Alessio [00:02:48]: They got you again.Raiza [00:02:49]: They got me again. And so now I've been here for two years, and I'm happy that I stayed because especially with, you know, the recent success of Notebook LM, I'm like, dang, we did it. I actually got to do it. So that was really cool.Usama [00:03:02]: Kind of similar, honestly. I was at a big team at Google. We do sort of the data center supply chain planning stuff. Google has, like, the largest sort of footprint. Obviously, there's a lot of management stuff to do there. But then there was this thing called Area 120 at Google, which does not exist anymore. But I sort of wanted to do, like, more zero-to-one building and landed a role there. We were trying to build, like, a creator commerce platform called Kaya. It launched briefly a couple years ago. But then Area 120 sort of transitioned and morphed into Labs. And, like, over the last few years, like, the focus just got a lot clearer. Like, we were trying to build new AI products and do it in the wild and sort of co-create and all of that. So, you know, we've just been trying a bunch of different things. And this one really landed, which has felt pretty phenomenal. Really, really landed.Swyx [00:03:53]: Let's talk about the brief history of Notebook LM. You had a tweet, which is very helpful for doing research. May 2023, during Google I.O., you announced Project Tailwind.Raiza [00:04:03]: Yeah.Swyx [00:04:03]: So today is October 2024. So you joined October 2022?Raiza [00:04:09]: Actually, I used to lead AI Test Kitchen. And this was actually, I think, not I.O. 2023. I.O. 2022 is when we launched AI Test Kitchen, or announced it. And I don't know if you remember it.Swyx [00:04:23]: That's how you, like, had the basic prototype for Gemini.Raiza [00:04:26]: Yes, yes, exactly. Lambda.Swyx [00:04:28]: Gave beta access to people.Raiza [00:04:29]: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I remember, I was like, wow, this is crazy. We're going to launch an LLM into the wild. And that was the first project that I was working on at Google. But at the same time, my manager at the time, Josh, he was like, hey, I want you to really think about, like, what real products would we build that are not just demos of the technology? That was in October of 2022. I was sitting next to an engineer that was working on a project called Talk to Small Corpus. His name was Adam. And the idea of Talk to Small Corpus is basically using LLM to talk to your data. And at the time, I was like, wait, there's some, like, really practical things that you can build here. And just a little bit of background, like, I was an adult learner. Like, I went to college while I was working a full-time job. And the first thing I thought was, like, this would have really helped me with my studying, right? Like, if I could just, like, talk to a textbook, especially, like, when I was tired after work, that would have been huge. We took a lot of, like, the Talk to Small Corpus prototypes, and I showed it to a lot of, like, college students, particularly, like, adult learners. They were like, yes, like, I get it, right? Like, I didn't even have to explain it to them. And we just continued to iterate the prototype from there to the point where we actually got a slot as part of the I.O. demo in 23.Swyx [00:05:42]: And Corpus, was it a textbook? Oh, my gosh.Raiza [00:05:45]: Yeah. It's funny. Actually, when he explained the project to me, he was like, talk to Small Corpus. It was like, talk to a small corpse?Swyx [00:05:51]: Yeah, nobody says Corpus.Raiza [00:06:00]: It was like, a small corpse? This is not AI. Yeah, yeah. And it really was just, like, a way for us to describe the amount of data that we thought, like, it could be good for.Swyx [00:06:02]: Yeah, but even then, you're still, like, doing rag stuff. Because, you know, the context length back then was probably, like, 2K, 4K.Raiza [00:06:08]: Yeah, it was basically rag.Raiza [00:06:09]: That was essentially what it was.Raiza [00:06:10]: And I remember, I was like, we were building the prototypes. And at the same time, I think, like, the rest of the world was. Right? We were seeing all of these, like, chat with PDF stuff come up. And I was like, come on, we gotta go. Like, we have to, like, push this out into the world. I think if there was anything, I wish we would have launched sooner because I wanted to learn faster. But I think, like, we netted out pretty well.Alessio [00:06:30]: Was the initial product just text-to-speech? Or were you also doing kind of, like, synthesizing of the content, refining it? Or were you just helping people read through it?Raiza [00:06:40]: Before we did the I.O. announcement in 23, we'd already done a lot of studies. And one of the first things that I realized was the first thing anybody ever typed was, summarize the thing. Right?Raiza [00:06:53]: Summarize the document.Raiza [00:06:54]: And it was, like, half like a test and half just like, oh, I know the content. I want to see how well it does this. So it was part of the first thing that we launched. It was called Project Tailwind back then. It was just Q&A, so you could chat with the doc just through text, and it would automatically generate a summary as well. I'm not sure if we had it back then.Raiza [00:07:12]: I think we did.Raiza [00:07:12]: It would also generate the key topics in your document, and it could support up to, like, 10 documents. So it wasn't just, like, a single doc.Alessio [00:07:20]: And then the I.O. demo went well, I guess. And then what was the discussion from there to where we are today? Is there any, maybe, intermediate step of the product that people missed between this was launch or?Raiza [00:07:33]: It was interesting because every step of the way, I think we hit, like, some pretty critical milestones. So I think from the initial demo, I think there was so much excitement of, like, wow, what is this thing that Google is launching? And so we capitalized on that. We built the wait list. That's actually when we also launched the Discord server, which has been huge for us because for us in particular, one of the things that I really wanted to do was to be able to launch features and get feedback ASAP. Like, the moment somebody tries it, like, I want to hear what they think right now, and I want to ask follow-up questions. And the Discord has just been so great for that. But then we basically took the feedback from I.O., we continued to refine the product.Raiza [00:08:12]: So we added more features.Raiza [00:08:13]: We added sort of, like, the ability to save notes, write notes. We generate follow-up questions. So there's a bunch of stuff in the product that shows, like, a lot of that research. But it was really the rolling out of things. Like, we removed the wait list, so rolled out to all of the United States. We rolled out to over 200 countries and territories. We started supporting more languages, both in the UI and, like, the actual source stuff. We experienced, like, in terms of milestones, there was, like, an explosion of, like, users in Japan. This was super interesting in terms of just, like, unexpected. Like, people would write to us and they would be like, this is amazing. I have to read all of these rules in English, but I can chat in Japanese. It's like, oh, wow. That's true, right? Like, with LLMs, you kind of get this natural, it translates the content for you. And you can ask in your sort of preferred mode. And I think that's not just, like, a language thing, too. I think there's, like, I do this test with Wealth of Nations all the time because it's, like, a pretty complicated text to read. The Evan Smith classic.Swyx [00:09:11]: It's, like, 400 pages or something.Raiza [00:09:12]: Yeah. But I like this test because I'm, like, asking, like, Normie, you know, plain speak. And then it summarizes really well for me. It sort of adapts to my tone.Swyx [00:09:22]: Very capitalist.Raiza [00:09:25]: Very on brand.Swyx [00:09:25]: I just checked in on a Notebook LM Discord. 65,000 people. Yeah.Raiza [00:09:29]: Crazy.Swyx [00:09:29]: Just, like, for one project within Google. It's not, like, it's not labs. It's just Notebook LM.Raiza [00:09:35]: Just Notebook LM.Swyx [00:09:36]: What do you learn from the community?Raiza [00:09:39]: I think that the Discord is really great for hearing about a couple of things.Raiza [00:09:43]: One, when things are going wrong. I think, honestly, like, our fastest way that we've been able to find out if, like, the servers are down or there's just an influx of people being, like, it saysRaiza [00:09:53]: system unable to answer.Raiza [00:09:54]: Anybody else getting this?Raiza [00:09:56]: And I'm, like, all right, let's go.Raiza [00:09:58]: And it actually catches it a lot faster than, like, our own monitoring does.Raiza [00:10:01]: It's, like, that's been really cool. So, thank you.Swyx [00:10:03]: Canceled eat a dog.Raiza [00:10:05]: So, thank you to everybody. Please keep reporting it. I think the second thing is really the use cases.Raiza [00:10:10]: I think when we put it out there, I was, like, hey, I have a hunch of how people will use it, but, like, to actually hear about, you know, not just the context of, like, the use of Notebook LM, but, like, what is this person's life like? Why do they care about using this tool?Raiza [00:10:23]: Especially people who actually have trouble using it, but they keep pushing.Raiza [00:10:27]: Like, that's just so critical to understand what was so motivating, right?Raiza [00:10:31]: Like, what was your problem that was, like, so worth solving? So, that's, like, a second thing.Raiza [00:10:34]: The third thing is also just hearing sort of, like, when we have wins and when we don't have wins because there's actually a lot of functionality where I'm, like, hmm, IRaiza [00:10:42]: don't know if that landed super well or if that was actually super critical.Raiza [00:10:45]: As part of having this sort of small project, right, I want to be able to unlaunch things, too. So, it's not just about just, like, rolling things out and testing it and being, like, wow, now we have, like, 99 features. Like, hopefully we get to a place where it's, like, there's just a really strong core feature set and the things that aren't as great, we can just unlaunch.Swyx [00:11:02]: What have you unlaunched? I have to ask.Raiza [00:11:04]: I'm in the process of unlaunching some stuff, but, for example, we had this idea that you could highlight the text in your source passage and then you could transform it. And nobody was really using it and it was, like, a very complicated piece of our architecture and it's very hard to continue supporting it in the context of new features. So, we were, like, okay, let's do a 50-50 sunset of this thing and see if anybody complains.Raiza [00:11:28]: And so far, nobody has.Swyx [00:11:29]: Is there, like, a feature flagging paradigm inside of your architecture that lets you feature flag these things easily?Raiza [00:11:36]: Yes, and actually...Raiza [00:11:37]: What is it called?Swyx [00:11:38]: Like, I love feature flagging.Raiza [00:11:40]: You mean, like, in terms of just, like, being able to expose things to users?Swyx [00:11:42]: Yeah, as a PM. Like, this is your number one tool, right?Raiza [00:11:44]: Yeah, yeah.Swyx [00:11:45]: Let's try this out. All right, if it works, roll it out. If it doesn't, roll it back, you know?Raiza [00:11:49]: Yeah, I mean, we just run Mendel experiments for the most part. And, actually, I don't know if you saw it, but on Twitter, somebody was able to get around our flags and they enabled all the experiments.Raiza [00:11:58]: They were, like, check out what the Notebook LM team is cooking.Raiza [00:12:02]: I was, like, oh!Raiza [00:12:03]: And I was at lunch with the rest of the team and I was, like, I was eating. I was, like, guys, guys, Magic Draft League!Raiza [00:12:10]: They were, like, oh, no!Raiza [00:12:12]: I was, like, okay, just finish eating and then let's go figure out what to do.Raiza [00:12:15]: Yeah.Alessio [00:12:15]: I think a post-mortem would be fun, but I don't think we need to do it on the podcast now. Can we just talk about what's behind the magic? So, I think everybody has questions, hypotheses about what models power it. I know you might not be able to share everything, but can you just get people very basic? How do you take the data and put it in the model? What text model you use? What's the text-to-speech kind of, like, jump between the two? Sure.Raiza [00:12:42]: Yeah.Raiza [00:12:42]: I was going to say, SRaiza, he manually does all the podcasts.Raiza [00:12:46]: Oh, thank you.Usama [00:12:46]: Really fast. You're very fast, yeah.Raiza [00:12:48]: Both of the voices at once.Usama [00:12:51]: Voice actor.Raiza [00:12:52]: Good, good.Usama [00:12:52]: Yeah, so, for a bit of background, we were building this thing sort of outside Notebook LM to begin with. Like, just the idea is, like, content transformation, right? Like, we can do different modalities. Like, everyone knows that. Everyone's been poking at it. But, like, how do you make it really useful? And, like, one of the ways we thought was, like, okay, like, you maybe, like, you know, people learn better when they're hearing things. But TTS exists, and you can, like, narrate whatever's on screen. But you want to absorb it the same way. So, like, that's where we sort of started out into the realm of, like, maybe we try, like, you know, two people are having a conversation kind of format. We didn't actually start out thinking this would live in Notebook, right? Like, Notebook was sort of, we built this demo out independently, tried out, like, a few different sort of sources. The main idea was, like, go from some sort of sources and transform it into a listenable, engaging audio format. And then through that process, we, like, unlocked a bunch more sort of learnings. Like, for example, in a sense, like, you're not prompting the model as much because, like, the information density is getting unrolled by the model prompting itself, in a sense. Because there's two speakers, and they're both technically, like, AI personas, right? That have different angles of looking at things. And, like, they'll have a discussion about it. And that sort of, we realized that's kind of what was making it riveting, in a sense. Like, you care about what comes next, even if you've read the material already. Because, like, people say they get new insights on their own journals or books or whatever. Like, anything that they've written themselves. So, yeah, from a modeling perspective, like, it's, like Reiza said earlier, like, we work with the DeepMind audio folks pretty closely. So, they're always cooking up new techniques to, like, get better, more human-like audio. And then Gemini 1.5 is really, really good at absorbing long context. So, we sort of, like, generally put those things together in a way that we could reliably produce the audio.Raiza [00:14:52]: I would add, like, there's something really nuanced, I think, about sort of the evolution of, like, the utility of text-to-speech. Where, if it's just reading an actual text response, and I've done this several times. I do it all the time with, like, reading my text messages. Or, like, sometimes I'm trying to read, like, a really dense paper, but I'm trying to do actual work. I'll have it, like, read out the screen. There is something really robotic about it that is not engaging. And it's really hard to consume content in that way. And it's never been really effective. Like, particularly for me, where I'm, like, hey, it's actually just, like, it's fine for, like, short stuff. Like, texting, but even that, it's, like, not that great. So, I think the frontier of experimentation here was really thinking about there is a transform that needs to happen in between whatever.Raiza [00:15:38]: Here's, like, my resume, right?Raiza [00:15:39]: Or here's, like, a 100-page slide deck or something. There is a transform that needs to happen that is inherently editorial. And I think this is where, like, that two-person persona, right, dialogue model, they have takes on the material that you've presented. That's where it really sort of, like, brings the content to life in a way that's, like, not robotic. And I think that's, like, where the magic is, is, like, you don't actually know what's going to happen when you press generate.Raiza [00:16:08]: You know, for better or for worse.Raiza [00:16:09]: Like, to the extent that, like, people are, like, no, I actually want it to be more predictable now. Like, I want to be able to tell them. But I think that initial, like, wow was because you didn't know, right? When you upload your resume, what's it about to say about you? And I think I've seen enough of these where I'm, like, oh, it gave you good vibes, right? Like, you knew it was going to say, like, something really cool. As we start to shape this product, I think we want to try to preserve as much of that wow as much as we can. Because I do think, like, exposing, like, all the knobs and, like, the dials, like, we've been thinking about this a lot. It's like, hey, is that, like, the actual thing?Raiza [00:16:43]: Is that the thing that people really want?Alessio [00:16:45]: Have you found differences in having one model just generate the conversation and then using text-to-speech to kind of fake two people? Or, like, are you actually using two different kind of system prompts to, like, have a conversation step-by-step? I'm always curious, like, if persona system prompts make a big difference? Or, like, you just put in one prompt and then you just let it run?Usama [00:17:05]: I guess, like, generally we use a lot of inference, as you can tell with, like, the spinning thing takes a while. So, yeah, there's definitely, like, a bunch of different things happening under the hood. We've tried both approaches and they have their, sort of, drawbacks and benefits. I think that that idea of, like, questioning, like, the two different personas, like, persists throughout, like, whatever approach we try. It's like, there's a bit of, like, imperfection in there. Like, we had to really lean into the fact that, like, to build something that's engaging, like, it needs to be somewhat human and it needs to be just not a chatbot. Like, that was sort of, like, what we need to diverge from. It's like, you know, most chatbots will just narrate the same kind of answer, like, given the same sources, for the most part, which is ridiculous. So, yeah, there's, like, experimentation there under the hood, like, with the model to, like, make sure that it's spitting out, like, different takes and different personas and different, sort of, prompting each other is, like, a good analogy, I guess.Swyx [00:18:00]: Yeah, I think Steven Johnson, I think he's on your team. I don't know what his role is. He seems like chief dreamer, writer.Raiza [00:18:08]: Yeah, I mean, I can comment on Steven. So, Steven joined, actually, in the very early days, I think before it was even a fully funded project. And I remember when he joined, I was like, Steven Johnson's going to be on my team? You know, and for folks who don't know him, Steven is a New York Times bestselling author of, like, 14 books. He has a PBS show. He's, like, incredibly smart, just, like, a true, sort of, celebrity by himself. And then he joined Google, and he was like, I want to come here, and I want to build the thing that I've always dreamed of, which is a tool to help me think. I was like, a what? Like, a tool to help you think? I was like, what do you need help with? Like, you seem to be doing great on your own. And, you know, he would describe this to me, and I would watch his flow. And aside from, like, providing a lot of inspiration, to be honest, like, when I watched Steven work, I was like, oh, nobody works like this, right? Like, this is what makes him special. Like, he is such a dedicated, like, researcher and journalist, and he's so thorough, he's so smart. And then I had this realization of, like, maybe Steven is the product. Maybe the work is to take Steven's expertise and bring it to, like, everyday people that could really benefit from this. Like, just watching him work, I was like, oh, I could definitely use, like, a mini-Steven, like, doing work for me. Like, that would make me a better PM. And then I thought very quickly about, like, the adjacent roles that could use sort of this, like, research and analysis tool. And so, aside from being, you know, chief dreamer, Steven also represents, like, a super workflow that I think all of us, like, if we had access to a tool like it, would just inherently, like, make us better.Swyx [00:19:46]: Did you make him express his thoughts while he worked, or you just silently watched him, or how does this work?Raiza [00:19:52]: Oh, now you're making me admit it. But yes, I did just silently watch him.Swyx [00:19:57]: This is a part of the PM toolkit, right? They give user interviews and all that.Raiza [00:20:00]: Yeah, I mean, I did interview him, but I noticed, like, if I interviewed him, it was different than if I just watched him. And I did the same thing with students all the time. Like, I followed a lot of students around. I watched them study. I would ask them, like, oh, how do you feel now, right?Raiza [00:20:15]: Or why did you do that? Like, what made you do that, actually?Raiza [00:20:18]: Or why are you upset about, like, this particular thing? Why are you cranky about this particular topic? And it was very similar, I think, for Steven, especially because he was describing, he was in the middle of writing a book. And he would describe, like, oh, you know, here's how I research things, and here's how I keep my notes. Oh, and here's how I do it. And it was really, he was doing this sort of, like, self-questioning, right? Like, now we talk about, like, chain of, you know, reasoning or thought, reflection.Raiza [00:20:44]: And I was like, oh, he's the OG.Raiza [00:20:46]: Like, I watched him do it in real time. I was like, that's, like, L-O-M right there. And to be able to bring sort of that expertise in a way that was, like, you know, maybe, like, costly inference-wise, but really have, like, that ability inside of a tool that was, like, for starters, free inside of NotebookLM, it was good to learn whether or not people really did find use out of it.Swyx [00:21:05]: So did he just commit to using NotebookLM for everything, or did you just model his existing workflow?Raiza [00:21:12]: Both, right?Raiza [00:21:12]: Like, in the beginning, there was no product for him to use. And so he just kept describing the thing that he wanted. And then eventually, like, we started building the thing. And then I would start watching him use it. One of the things that I love about Steven is he uses the product in ways where it kind of does it, but doesn't quite. Like, he's always using it at, like, the absolute max limit of this thing. But the way that he describes it is so full of promise, where he's like, I can see it going here. And all I have to do is sort of, like, meet him there and sort of pressure test whether or not, you know, everyday people want it. And we just have to build it.Swyx [00:21:47]: I would say OpenAI has a pretty similar person, Andrew Mason, I think his name is. It's very similar, like, just from the writing world and using it as a tool for thought to shape Chachabitty. I don't think that people who use AI tools to their limit are common. I'm looking at my NotebookLM now. I've got two sources. You have a little, like, source limit thing. And my bar is over here, you know, and it stretches across the whole thing. I'm like, did he fill it up?Raiza [00:22:09]: Yes, and he has, like, a higher limit than others, I think. He fills it up.Raiza [00:22:14]: Oh, yeah.Raiza [00:22:14]: Like, I don't think Steven even has a limit, actually.Swyx [00:22:17]: And he has Notes, Google Drive stuff, PDFs, MP3, whatever.Raiza [00:22:22]: Yes, and one of my favorite demos, he just did this recently, is he has actually PDFs of, like, handwritten Marie Curie notes. I see.Swyx [00:22:29]: So you're doing image recognition as well. Yeah, it does support it today.Raiza [00:22:32]: So if you have a PDF that's purely images, it will recognize it.Raiza [00:22:36]: But his demo is just, like, super powerful.Raiza [00:22:37]: He's like, okay, here's Marie Curie's notes. And it's like, here's how I'm using it to analyze it. And I'm using it for, like, this thing that I'm writing.Raiza [00:22:44]: And that's really compelling.Raiza [00:22:45]: It's like the everyday person doesn't think of these applications. And I think even, like, when I listen to Steven's demo, I see the gap. I see how Steven got there, but I don't see how I could without him. And so there's a lot of work still for us to build of, like, hey, how do I bring that magic down to, like, zero work? Because I look at all the steps that he had to take in order to do it, and I'm like, okay, that's product work for us, right? Like, that's just onboarding.Alessio [00:23:09]: And so from an engineering perspective, people come to you and it's like, hey, I need to use this handwritten notes from Marie Curie from hundreds of years ago. How do you think about adding support for, like, data sources and then maybe any fun stories and, like, supporting more esoteric types of inputs?Raiza [00:23:25]: So I think about the product in three ways, right? So there's the sources, the source input. There's, like, the capabilities of, like, what you could do with those sources. And then there's the third space, which is how do you output it into the world? Like, how do you put it back out there? There's a lot of really basic sources that we don't support still, right? I think there's sort of, like, the handwritten notes stuff is one, but even basic things like DocX or, like, PowerPoint, right? Like, these are the things that people, everyday people are like, hey, my professor actually gave me everything in DocX. Can you support that? And then just, like, basic stuff, like images and PDFs combined with text. Like, there's just a really long roadmap for sources that I think we just have to work on.Raiza [00:24:04]: So that's, like, a big piece of it.Raiza [00:24:05]: On the output side, and I think this is, like, one of the most interesting things that we learned really early on, is, sure, there's, like, the Q&A analysis stuff, which is like, hey, when did this thing launch? Okay, you found it in the slide deck. Here's the answer. But most of the time, the reason why people ask those questions is because they're trying to make something new. And so when, actually, when some of those early features leaked, like, a lot of the features we're experimenting with are the output types. And so you can imagine that people care a lot about the resources that they're putting into NotebookLM because they're trying to create something new. So I think equally as important as, like, the source inputs are the outputs that we're helping people to create. And really, like, you know, shortly on the roadmap, we're thinking about how do we help people use NotebookLM to distribute knowledge? And that's, like, one of the most compelling use cases is, like, shared notebooks. It's, like, a way to share knowledge. How do we help people take sources and, like, one-click new documents out of it, right? And I think that's something that people think is, like, oh, yeah, of course, right? Like, one push a document. But what does it mean to do it right? Like, to do it in your style, in your brand, right?Raiza [00:25:08]: To follow your guidelines, stuff like that.Raiza [00:25:09]: So I think there's a lot of work, like, on both sides of that equation.Raiza [00:25:13]: Interesting.Swyx [00:25:13]: Any comments on the engineering side of things?Usama [00:25:16]: So, yeah, like I said, I was mostly working on building the text to audio, which kind of lives as a separate engineering pipeline, almost, that we then put into NotebookLM. But I think there's probably tons of NotebookLM engineering war stories on dealing with sources. And so I don't work too closely with engineers directly. But I think a lot of it does come down to, like, Gemini's native understanding of images really well with the latest generation.Raiza [00:25:39]: Yeah, I think on the engineering and modeling side, I think we are a really good example of a team that's put a product out there, and we're getting a lot of feedback from the users, and we return the data to the modeling team, right? To the extent that we say, hey, actually, you know what people are uploading, but we can't really support super well?Raiza [00:25:56]: Text plus image, right?Raiza [00:25:57]: Especially to the extent that, like, NotebookLM can handle up to 50 sources, 500,000 words each. Like, you're not going to be able to jam all of that into, like, the context window. So how do we do multimodal embeddings with that? There's really, like, a lot of things that we have to solve that are almost there, but not quite there yet.Alessio [00:26:16]: On then turning it into audio, I think one of the best things is it has so many of the human... Does that happen in the text generation that then becomes audio? Or is that a part of, like, the audio model that transforms the text?Usama [00:26:27]: It's a bit of both, I would say. The audio model is definitely trying to mimic, like, certain human intonations and, like, sort of natural, like, breathing and pauses and, like, laughter and things like that. But yeah, in generating, like, the text, we also have to sort of give signals on, like, where those things maybe would make sense.Alessio [00:26:45]: And on the input side, instead of having a transcript versus having the audio, like, can you take some of the emotions out of it, too? If I'm giving, like, for example, when we did the recaps of our podcast, we can either give audio of the pod or we can give a diarized transcription of it. But, like, the transcription doesn't have some of the, you know, voice kind of, like, things.Raiza [00:27:05]: Yeah, yeah.Alessio [00:27:05]: Do you reconstruct that when people upload audio or how does that work?Raiza [00:27:09]: So when you upload audio today, we just transcribe it. So it is quite lossy in the sense that, like, we don't transcribe, like, the emotion from that as a source. But when you do upload a text file and it has a lot of, like, that annotation, I think that there is some ability for it to be reused in, like, the audio output, right? But I think it will still contextualize it in the deep dive format. So I think that's something that's, like, particularly important is, like, hey, today we only have one format.Raiza [00:27:37]: It's deep dive.Raiza [00:27:38]: It's meant to be a pretty general overview and it is pretty peppy.Raiza [00:27:42]: It's just very upbeat.Raiza [00:27:43]: It's very enthusiastic, yeah.Raiza [00:27:45]: Yeah, yeah.Raiza [00:27:45]: Even if you had, like, a sad topic, I think they would find a way to be, like, silver lining, though.Raiza [00:27:50]: Really?Raiza [00:27:51]: Yeah.Raiza [00:27:51]: We're having a good chat.Raiza [00:27:54]: Yeah, that's awesome.Swyx [00:27:54]: One of the ways, many, many, many ways that deep dive went viral is people saying, like, if you want to feel good about yourself, just drop in your LinkedIn. Any other, like, favorite use cases that you saw from people discovering things in social media?Raiza [00:28:08]: I mean, there's so many funny ones and I love the funny ones.Raiza [00:28:11]: I think because I'm always relieved when I watch them. I'm like, haha, that was funny and not scary. It's great.Raiza [00:28:17]: There was another one that was interesting, which was a startup founder putting their landing page and being like, all right, let's test whether or not, like, the value prop is coming through. And I was like, wow, that's right.Raiza [00:28:26]: That's smart.Usama [00:28:27]: Yeah.Raiza [00:28:28]: And then I saw a couple of other people following up on that, too.Raiza [00:28:32]: Yeah.Swyx [00:28:32]: I put my about page in there and, like, yeah, if there are things that I'm not comfortable with, I should remove it. You know, so that it can pick it up. Right.Usama [00:28:39]: I think that the personal hype machine was, like, a pretty viral one. I think, like, people uploaded their dreams and, like, some people, like, keep sort of dream journals and it, like, would sort of comment on those and, like, it was therapeutic. I didn't see those.Raiza [00:28:54]: Those are good. I hear from Googlers all the time, especially because we launched it internally first. And I think we launched it during the, you know, the Q3 sort of, like, check-in cycle. So all Googlers have to write notes about, like, hey, you know, what'd you do in Q3? And what Googlers were doing is they would write, you know, whatever they accomplished in Q3 and then they would create an audio overview. And these people they didn't know would just ping me and be like, wow, I feel really good, like, going into a meeting with my manager.Raiza [00:29:25]: And I was like, good, good, good, good. You really did that, right?Usama [00:29:29]: I think another cool one is just, like, any Wikipedia article. Yeah. Like, you drop it in and it's just, like, suddenly, like, the best sort of summary overview.Raiza [00:29:38]: I think that's what Karpathy did, right? Like, he has now a Spotify channel called Histories of Mysteries, which is basically, like, he just took, like, interesting stuff from Wikipedia and made audio overviews out of it.Swyx [00:29:50]: Yeah, he became a podcaster overnight.Raiza [00:29:52]: Yeah.Raiza [00:29:53]: I'm here for it. I fully support him.Raiza [00:29:55]: I'm racking up the listens for him.Swyx [00:29:58]: Honestly, it's useful even without the audio. You know, I feel like the audio does add an element to it, but I always want, you know, paired audio and text. And it's just amazing to see what people are organically discovering. I feel like it's because you laid the groundwork with NotebookLM and then you came in and added the sort of TTS portion and made it so good, so human, which is weird. Like, it's this engineering process of humans. Oh, one thing I wanted to ask. Do you have evals?Raiza [00:30:23]: Yeah.Swyx [00:30:23]: Yes.Raiza [00:30:24]: What? Potatoes for chefs.Swyx [00:30:27]: What is that? What do you mean, potatoes?Raiza [00:30:29]: Oh, sorry.Raiza [00:30:29]: Sorry. We were joking with this, like, a couple of weeks ago. We were doing, like, side-by-sides. But, like, Raiza sent me the file and it was literally called Potatoes for Chefs. And I was like, you know, my job is really serious, but you have to laugh a little bit. Like, the title of the file is, like, Potatoes for Chefs.Swyx [00:30:47]: Is it like a training document for chefs?Usama [00:30:50]: It's just a side-by-side for, like, two different kind of audio transcripts.Swyx [00:30:54]: The question is really, like, as you iterate, the typical engineering advice is you establish some kind of test or benchmark. You're at, like, 30 percent. You want to get it up to 90, right?Raiza [00:31:05]: Yeah.Swyx [00:31:05]: What does that look like for making something sound human and interesting and voice?Usama [00:31:11]: We have the sort of formal eval process as well. But I think, like, for this particular project, we maybe took a slightly different route to begin with. Like, there was a lot of just within the team listening sessions. A lot of, like, sort of, like... Dogfooding.Raiza [00:31:23]: Yeah.Usama [00:31:23]: Like, I think the bar that we tried to get to before even starting formal evals with raters and everything was much higher than I think other projects would. Like, because that's, as you said, like, the traditional advice, right? Like, get that ASAP. Like, what are you looking to improve on? Whatever benchmark it is. So there was a lot of just, like, critical listening. And I think a lot of making sure that those improvements actually could go into the model. And, like, we're happy with that human element of it. And then eventually we had to obviously distill those down into an eval set. But, like, still there's, like, the team is just, like, a very, very, like, avid user of the product at all stages.Raiza [00:32:02]: I think you just have to be really opinionated.Raiza [00:32:05]: I think that sometimes, if you are, your intuition is just sharper and you can move a lot faster on the product.Raiza [00:32:12]: Because it's like, if you hold that bar high, right?Raiza [00:32:15]: Like, if you think about, like, the iterative cycle, it's like, hey, we could take, like, six months to ship this thing. To get it to, like, mid where we were. Or we could just, like, listen to this and be like, yeah, that's not it, right? And I don't need a rater to tell me that. That's my preference, right? And collectively, like, if I have two other people listen to it, they'll probably agree. And it's just kind of this step of, like, just keep improving it to the point where you're like, okay, now I think this is really impressive. And then, like, do evals, right? And then validate that.Swyx [00:32:43]: Was the sound model done and frozen before you started doing all this? Or are you also saying, hey, we need to improve the sound model as well? Both.Usama [00:32:51]: Yeah, we were making improvements on the audio and just, like, generating the transcript as well. I think another weird thing here was, like, we needed to be entertaining. And that's much harder to quantify than some of the other benchmarks that you can make for, like, you know, Sweebench or get better at this math.Swyx [00:33:10]: Do you just have people rate one to five or, you know, or just thumbs up and down?Usama [00:33:14]: For the formal rater evals, we have sort of like a Likert scale and, like, a bunch of different dimensions there. But we had to sort of break down what makes it entertaining into, like, a bunch of different factors. But I think the team stage of that was more critical. It was like, we need to make sure that, like, what is making it fun and engaging? Like, we dialed that as far as it goes. And while we're making other changes that are necessary, like, obviously, they shouldn't make stuff up or, you know, be insensitive.Raiza [00:33:41]: Hallucinations. Safety.Swyx [00:33:42]: Other safety things.Raiza [00:33:43]: Right.Swyx [00:33:43]: Like a bunch of safety stuff.Raiza [00:33:45]: Yeah, exactly.Usama [00:33:45]: So, like, with all of that and, like, also just, you know, following sort of a coherent narrative and structure is really important. But, like, with all of this, we really had to make sure that that central tenet of being entertaining and engaging and something you actually want to listen to. It just doesn't go away, which takes, like, a lot of just active listening time because you're closest to the prompts, the model and everything.Swyx [00:34:07]: I think sometimes the difficulty is because we're dealing with non-deterministic models, sometimes you just got a bad roll of the dice and it's always on the distribution that you could get something bad. Basically, how many do you, like, do ten runs at a time? And then how do you get rid of the non-determinism?Raiza [00:34:23]: Right.Usama [00:34:23]: Yeah, that's bad luck.Raiza [00:34:25]: Yeah.Swyx [00:34:25]: Yeah.Usama [00:34:26]: I mean, there still will be, like, bad audio overviews. There's, like, a bunch of them that happens. Do you mean for, like, the raider? For raiders, right?Swyx [00:34:34]: Like, what if that one person just got, like, a really bad rating? You actually had a great prompt, you actually had a great model, great weights, whatever. And you just, you had a bad output.Usama [00:34:42]: Like, and that's okay, right?Raiza [00:34:44]: I actually think, like, the way that these are constructed, if you think about, like, the different types of controls that the user has, right? Like, what can the user do today to affect it?Usama [00:34:54]: We push a button.Raiza [00:34:55]: You just push a button.Swyx [00:34:56]: I have tried to prompt engineer by changing the title. Yeah, yeah, yeah.Raiza [00:34:59]: Changing the title, people have found out.Raiza [00:35:02]: Yeah.Raiza [00:35:02]: The title of the notebook, people have found out. You can add show notes, right? You can get them to think, like, the show has changed. Someone changed the language of the output. Changing the language of the output. Like, those are less well-tested because we focused on, like, this one aspect. So it did change the way that we sort of think about quality as well, right? So it's like, quality is on the dimensions of entertainment, of course, like, consistency, groundedness. But in general, does it follow the structure of the deep dive? And I think when we talk about, like, non-determinism, it's like, well, as long as it follows, like, the structure of the deep dive, right? It sort of inherently meets all those other qualities. And so it makes it a little bit easier for us to ship something with confidence to the extent that it's like, I know it's going to make a deep dive. It's going to make a good deep dive. Whether or not the person likes it, I don't know. But as we expand to new formats, as we open up controls, I think that's where it gets really much harder. Even with the show notes, right? Like, people don't know what they're going to get when they do that. And we see that already where it's like, this is going to be a lot harder to validate in terms of quality, where now we'll get a greater distribution. Whereas I don't think we really got, like, varied distribution because of, like, that pre-process that Raiza was talking about. And also because of the way that we'd constrain, like, what were we measuring for? Literally, just like, is it a deep dive?Swyx [00:36:18]: And you determine what a deep dive is. Yeah. Everything needs a PM. Yeah, I have, this is very similar to something I've been thinking about for AI products in general. There's always like a chief tastemaker. And for Notebook LM, it seems like it's a combination of you and Steven.Raiza [00:36:31]: Well, okay.Raiza [00:36:32]: I want to take a step back.Swyx [00:36:33]: And Raiza, I mean, presumably for the voice stuff.Raiza [00:36:35]: Raiza's like the head chef, right? Of, like, deep dive, I think. Potatoes.Raiza [00:36:40]: Of potatoes.Raiza [00:36:41]: And I say this because I think even though we are already a very opinionated team, and Steven, for sure, very opinionated, I think of the audio generations, like, Raiza was the most opinionated, right? And we all, like, would say, like, hey, I remember, like, one of the first ones he sent me.Raiza [00:36:57]: I was like, oh, I feel like they should introduce themselves. I feel like they should say a title. But then, like, we would catch things, like, maybe they shouldn't say their names.Raiza [00:37:04]: Yeah, they don't say their names.Usama [00:37:05]: That was a Steven catch, like, not give them names.Raiza [00:37:08]: So stuff like that is, like, we all injected, like, a little bit of just, like, hey, here's, like, my take on, like, how a podcast should be, right? And I think, like, if you're a person who, like, regularly listens to podcasts, there's probably some collective preference there that's generic enough that you can standardize into, like, the deep dive format. But, yeah, it's the new formats where I think, like, oh, that's the next test. Yeah.Swyx [00:37:30]: I've tried to make a clone, by the way. Of course, everyone did. Yeah. Everyone in AI was like, oh, no, this is so easy. I'll just take a TTS model. Obviously, our models are not as good as yours, but I tried to inject a consistent character backstory, like, age, identity, where they work, where they went to school, what their hobbies are. Then it just, the models try to bring it in too much.Raiza [00:37:49]: Yeah.Swyx [00:37:49]: I don't know if you tried this.Raiza [00:37:51]: Yeah.Swyx [00:37:51]: So then I'm like, okay, like, how do I define a personality? But it doesn't keep coming up every single time. Yeah.Raiza [00:37:58]: I mean, we have, like, a really, really good, like, character designer on our team.Raiza [00:38:02]: What?Swyx [00:38:03]: Like a D&D person?Raiza [00:38:05]: Just to say, like, we, just like we had to be opinionated about the format, we had to be opinionated about who are those two people talking.Raiza [00:38:11]: Okay.Raiza [00:38:12]: Right.Raiza [00:38:12]: And then to the extent that, like, you can design the format, you should be able to design the people as well.Raiza [00:38:18]: Yeah.Swyx [00:38:18]: I would love, like, a, you know, like when you play Baldur's Gate, like, you roll, you roll like 17 on Charisma and like, it's like what race they are. I don't know.Raiza [00:38:27]: I recently, actually, I was just talking about character select screens.Raiza [00:38:30]: Yeah. I was like, I love that, right.Raiza [00:38:32]: And I was like, maybe there's something to be learned there because, like, people have fallen in love with the deep dive as a, as a format, as a technology, but also as just like those two personas.Raiza [00:38:44]: Now, when you hear a deep dive and you've heard them, you're like, I know those two.Raiza [00:38:48]: Right.Raiza [00:38:48]: And people, it's so funny when I, when people are trying to find out their names, like, it's a, it's a worthy task.Raiza [00:38:54]: It's a worthy goal.Raiza [00:38:55]: I know what you're doing. But the next step here is to sort of introduce, like, is this like what people want?Raiza [00:39:00]: People want to sort of edit the personas or do they just want more of them?Swyx [00:39:04]: I'm sure you're getting a lot of opinions and they all, they all conflict with each other. Before we move on, I have to ask, because we're kind of on this topic. How do you make audio engaging? Because it's useful, not just for deep dive, but also for us as podcasters. What is, what does engaging mean? If you could break it down for us, that'd be great.Usama [00:39:22]: I mean, I can try. Like, don't, don't claim to be an expert at all.Swyx [00:39:26]: So I'll give you some, like variation in tone and speed. You know, there's this sort of writing advice where, you know, this sentence is five words. This sentence is three, that kind of advice where you, where you vary things, you have excitement, you have laughter, all that stuff. But I'd be curious how else you break down.Usama [00:39:42]: So there's the basics, like obviously structure that can't be meandering, right? Like there needs to be sort of a, an ultimate goal that the voices are trying to get to, human or artificial. I think one thing we find often is if there's just too much agreement between people, like that's not fun to listen to. So there needs to be some sort of tension and build up, you know, withholding information. For example, like as you listen to a story unfold, like you're going to learn more and more about it. And audio that maybe becomes even more important because like you actually don't have the ability to just like skim to the end of something. You're driving or something like you're going to be hooked because like there's, and that's how like, that's how a lot of podcasts work. Like maybe not interviews necessarily, but a lot of true crime, a lot of entertainment in general. There's just like a gradual unrolling of information. And that also like sort of goes back to the content transformation aspect of it. Like maybe you are going from, let's say the Wikipedia article of like one of the History of Mysteries, maybe episodes. Like the Wikipedia article is going to state out the information very differently. It's like, here's what happened would probably be in the very first paragraph. And one approach we could have done is like maybe a person's just narrating that thing. And maybe that would work for like a certain audience. Or I guess that's how I would picture like a standard history lesson to unfold. But like, because we're trying to put it in this two-person dialogue format, like there, we inject like the fact that, you know, there's, you don't give everything at first. And then you set up like differing opinions of the same topic or the same, like maybe you seize on a topic and go deeper into it and then try to bring yourself back out of it and go back to the main narrative. So that's, that's mostly from like the setting up the script perspective. And then the audio, I was saying earlier, it's trying to be as close to just human speech as possible. I think was the, what we found success with so far.Raiza [00:41:40]: Yeah. Like with interjections, right?Raiza [00:41:41]: Like I think like when you listen to two people talk, there's a lot of like, yeah, yeah, right. And then there's like a lot of like that questioning, like, oh yeah, really?Raiza [00:41:49]: What did you think?Swyx [00:41:50]: I noticed that. That's great.Raiza [00:41:52]: Totally.Usama [00:41:54]: Exactly.Swyx [00:41:55]: My question is, do you pull in speech experts to do this? Or did you just come up with it yourselves? You can be like, okay, talk to a whole bunch of fiction writers to, to make things engaging or comedy writers or whatever, stand up comedy, right? They have to make audio engaging, but audio as well. Like there's professional fields of studying where people do this for a living, but us as AI engineers are just making this up as we go.Raiza [00:42:19]: I mean, it's a great idea, but you definitely didn't.Raiza [00:42:22]: Yeah.Swyx [00:42:24]: My guess is you didn't.Raiza [00:42:25]: Yeah.Swyx [00:42:26]: There's a, there's a certain field of authority that people have. They're like, oh, like you can't do this because you don't have any experience like making engaging audio. But that's what you literally did.Raiza [00:42:35]: Right.Usama [00:42:35]: I mean, I was literally chatting with someone at Google earlier today about how some people think that like you need a linguistics person in the room for like making a good chatbot. But that's not actually true because like this person went to school for linguistics. And according to him, he's an engineer now. According to him, like most of his classmates were not actually good at language. Like they knew how to analyze language and like sort of the mathematical patterns and rhythms and language. But that doesn't necessarily mean they were going to be eloquent at like while speaking or writing. So I think, yeah, a lot of we haven't invested in specialists in audio format yet, but maybe that would.Raiza [00:43:13]: I think it's like super interesting because I think there is like a very human question of like what makes something interesting. And there's like a very deep question of like what is it, right? Like what is the quality that we are all looking for? Is it does somebody have to be funny? Does something have to be entertaining? Does something have to be straight to the point? And I think when you try to distill that, this is the interesting thing I think about our experiment, about this particular launch is first, we only launched one format. And so we sort of had to squeeze everything we believed about what an interesting thing is into one package. And as a result of it, I think we learned it's like, hey, interacting with a chatbot is sort of novel at first, but it's not interesting, right? It's like humans are what makes interacting with chatbots interesting.Raiza [00:43:59]: It's like, ha ha ha, I'm going to try to trick it. It's like, that's interesting.Raiza [00:44:02]: Spell strawberry, right?Raiza [00:44:04]: This is like the fun that like people have with it. But like that's not the LLM being interesting.Raiza [00:44:08]: That's you just like kind of giving it your own flavor. But it's like, what does it mean to sort of flip it on its head and say, no, you be interesting now, right? Like you give the chatbot the opportunity to do it. And this is not a chatbot per se. It is like just the audio. And it's like the texture, I think, that really brings it to life. And it's like the things that we've described here, which is like, okay, now I have to like lead you down a path of information about like this commercialization deck.Raiza [00:44:36]: It's like, how do you do that?Raiza [00:44:38]: To be able to successfully do it, I do think that you need experts. I think we'll engage with experts like down the road, but I think it will have to be in the context of, well, what's the next thing we're building, right? It's like, what am I trying to change here? What do I fundamentally believe needs to be improved? And I think there's still like a lot more studying that we have to do in terms of like, well, what are people actually using this for? And we're just in such early days. Like it hasn't even been a month. Two, three weeks.Usama [00:45:05]: Three weeks.Raiza [00:45:06]: Yeah, yeah.Usama [00:45:07]: I think one other element to that is the fact that you're bringing your own sources to it. Like it's your stuff. Like, you know this somewhat well, or you care to know about this. So like that, I think, changed the equation on its head as well. It's like your sources and someone's telling you about it. So like you care about how that dynamic is, but you just care for it to be good enough to be entertaining. Because ultimately they're talking about your mortgage deed or whatever.Swyx [00:45:33]: So it's interesting just from the topic itself. Even taking out all the agreements and the hiding of the slow reveal. I mean, there's a baseline, maybe.Usama [00:45:42]: Like if it was like too drab. Like if someone was reading it off, like, you know, that's like the absolute worst.Raiza [00:45:46]: But like...Swyx [00:45:47]: Do you prompt for humor? That's a tough one, right?Raiza [00:45:51]: I think it's more of a generic way to bring humor out if possible. I think humor is actually one of the hardest things. Yeah.Raiza [00:46:00]: But I don't know if you saw...Raiza [00:46:00]: That is AGI.Swyx [00:46:01]: Humor is AGI.Raiza [00:46:02]: Yeah, but did you see the chicken one?Raiza [00:46:03]: No.Raiza [00:46:04]: Okay. If you haven't heard it... We'll splice it in here.Swyx [00:46:06]: Okay.Raiza [00:46:07]: Yeah.Raiza [00:46:07]: There is a video on Threads. I think it was by Martino Wong. And it's a PDF.Raiza [00:46:16]: Welcome to your deep dive for today. Oh, yeah. Get ready for a fun one. Buckle up. Because we are diving into... Chicken, chicken, chicken. Chicken, chicken. You got that right. By Doug Zonker. Now. And yes, you heard that title correctly. Titles. Our listener today submitted this paper. Yeah, they're going to need our help. And I can totally see why. Absolutely. It's dense. It's baffling. It's a lot. And it's packed with more chicken than a KFC buffet. What? That's hilarious.Raiza [00:46:48]: That's so funny. So it's like stuff like that, that's like truly delightful, truly surprising.Raiza [00:46:53]: But it's like we didn't tell it to be funny.Usama [00:46:55]: Humor is contextual also. Like super contextual is what we're realizing. So we're not prompting for humor, but we're prompting for maybe a lot of other things that are bringing out that humor.Alessio [00:47:04]: I think the thing about ad-generated content, if we look at YouTube, like we do videos on YouTube and it's like, you know, a lot of people like screaming in the thumbnails to get clicks. There's like everybody, there's kind of like a meta of like what you need to do to get clicks. But I think in your product, there's no actual creator on the other side investing the time. So you can actually generate a type of content that is maybe not universally appealing, you know, at a much, yeah, exactly. I think that's the most interesting thing. It's like, well, is there a way for like, take Mr.Raiza [00:47:36]: Beast, right?Alessio [00:47:36]: It's like Mr. Beast optimizes videos to reach the biggest audience and like the most clicks. But what if every video could be kind of like regenerated to be closer to your taste, you know, when you watch it?Raiza [00:47:48]: I think that's kind of the promise of AI that I think we are just like touching on, which is, I think every time I've gotten information from somebody, they have delivered it to me in their preferred method, right?Raiza [00:47:59]: Like if somebody gives me a PDF, it's a PDF.Raiza [00:48:01]: Somebody gives me a hundred slide deck, that is the format in which I'm going to read it. But I think we are now living in the era where transformations are really possible, which is, look, like I don't want to read your hundred slide deck, but I'll listen to a 16 minute audio overview on the drive home. And that, that I think is, is really novel. And that is, is paving the way in a way that like maybe we wanted, but didn'tRaiza [00:48:24]: expect.Raiza [00:48:25]: Where I also think you're listening to a lot of content that normally wouldn't have had content made about it. Like I watched this TikTok where this woman uploaded her diary from 2004.Raiza [00:48:36]: For sure, right?Raiza [00:48:36]: Like nobody was goin
Google TV gets a major update while Xiaomi, Huawei and Nothing are bringing the latest to Android globally. Recorded at Droidcon NYC, Mishaal Rahman, Huyen Tue Dao, Jason Howell and Ron Richards break down the news along with an exclusive interview with Shalini Govil-Pai, VP & GM of Google TV.Note: Time codes subject to change depending on dynamic ad insertion by the distributor.NEWS00:06:20 - The numbers are in and Xiaomi passed Apple as the No. 2 smartphone brand in the world00:13:20 - Google is making it easier to sync passkeys across devices, but it's still confusing00:20:06 - Oppo has a launch date for ColorOS 15 and Oxygen OS 15 is getting more iOS esqueHARDWARE00:26:29 - Leaks of the Samsung Galaxy A16 5G are out, along with rumors of 6 years of updates00:29:30 - The Xiaomi MIX Flip is getting global launch. Revisit Mishaal's coverage of the device00:32:27 - The HUAWEI Mate XT is coming to global markets after all, and here's whenAPPS00:36:55 - Microsoft has rolled out a Windows App
In this week's episode we cover "Using your own product is a superpower" on the PostHog engineering blog. Using your own software, AKA "dogfooding", is one of those topics thrown around by engineers all the way up to CEOS. We talk about what dogfooding looks like, why you would want to implement it (if you can), and some pitfalls of working it into your day-to-day.
It's time for another Mind Gap Podcast! This week, Doug and Justin share which YouTube channel they'd subscribe to if they were only allowed to subscribe to one for the rest of their lives. The dorks shift the conversation to the grossness that are corporate buzzwords and Doug quizzes Justin on a few newer ones. Our guys then pivot to a story about a woman who was arrested at an Indiana Applebee's for disorderly conduct which leads to them sharing some of their own horrendous experiences working in customer service jobs. Things are wrapped up with another round of the movie clip guessing game, where Doug plays clips from different movies and Justin does his best to guess which films they're from. Check out our YouTube channel where we livestream our new podcast episodes every Tuesday at 8pmCT and our video game stream every Saturday at 8pmCT. Be sure to like and subscribe for this content as well as episode highlights, Doug Watches Awkward Videos, Justin Plays Video games, and more! We have MERCH now! Follow us on all of our social medias and other platforms!
Andrew Lisowski is the cohost of devtools.fm. In this episode we talk about why Andrew started devtools.fm and what he's learned along the way. Life as an open source maintainer.How the JavaScript ecosystem is different to other developer ecosystems.The importance of dogfooding.The power of DHH.Why obsessing over one problem eventually leads to great resultsShould DevTools start podcasts and how?Links:devtools.fm - https://www.devtools.fm/Andrew's Twitter - https://x.com/HipsterSmoothiedevtools.fm Twitter - https://x.com/DevtoolsFMInterview with DHH https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEZNbM4MUdoInterview with Evan You https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycuYlzuBqcAInterview with Richard Harris https://www.devtools.fm/episode/15
Join us for an engaging chat with Logan Kilpatrick where we discuss the latest AI developments and Google's strategy in pushing the boundaries of artificial intelligence. Learn about the competitive state of AI, the groundbreaking Gemini 1.5 Flash model, and get a glimpse into the future of AI fine-tuning. Gain insights on Google DeepMind's research and its impact, the differences between various Google AI products, and debunking AI rumors. Whether you're an AI enthusiast or a professional in the field, this conversation with an AI industry insider offers valuable perspectives on applying AI in business and understanding the rapid advancements in this dynamic sector. SPONSORS: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. OCI has four to eight times the bandwidth of other clouds; offers one consistent price, and nobody does data better than Oracle. If you want to do more and spend less, take a free test drive of OCI at https://oracle.com/cognitive The Brave search API can be used to assemble a data set to train your AI models and help with retrieval augmentation at the time of inference. All while remaining affordable with developer first pricing, integrating the Brave search API into your workflow translates to more ethical data sourcing and more human representative data sets. Try the Brave search API for free for up to 2000 queries per month at https://bit.ly/BraveTCR Head to Squad to access global engineering without the headache and at a fraction of the cost: head to https://choosesquad.com/ and mention “Turpentine” to skip the waitlist. Omneky is an omnichannel creative generation platform that lets you launch hundreds of thousands of ad iterations that actually work customized across all platforms, with a click of a button. Omneky combines generative AI and real-time advertising data. Mention "Cog Rev" for 10% off https://www.omneky.com/ Recommended Podcast - The Riff with Byrne Hobart Byrne Hobart, the writer of The Diff, is revered in Silicon Valley. You can get an hour with him each week. See for yourself how his thinking can upgrade yours. Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6rANlV54GCARLgMOtpkzKt Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-riff-with-byrne-hobart-and-erik-torenberg/id1716646486 CHAPTERS: (00:00:00) Introduction (00:07:29) Google culture (00:11:01) DeepMind and Google (00:15:49) Native multimodality (00:18:17) Sponsors: Oracle | Brave (00:20:24) What to focus on (00:23:40) LMSYS leaderboard (00:27:46) Rumors (00:36:32) AI is too cheap to meter (00:39:17) Open AI Assistant (00:40:14) Sponsors: Squad | Omneky (00:41:59) Dogfooding (00:48:58) AI Studio (00:52:28) Native Multimodal (00:55:57) VideoFX (01:01:09) Competition (01:04:07) What to do with AGI (01:09:19) Closing
What's happening this week at Jam? We're shipping design updates, making decisions about a new product launching soon & discovering that intuition is a form of data.This week, Jam's Lead Designer joins the podcast to discuss:(00:18) Sharing some design iterations to Jam's Slack app(05:06) Dogfooding at Jam(09:10) Irtefa's very niche idea for new Jam swag: “Only 1 Network Error”(09:58) Future changes we're making to Jam notifications(12:17) Using intuition as a form of data(17:34) Getting a new product in beta ready for GA: from Irtefa-led onboarding to self-serve(21:56) Thinking about the “why” in Jam's onboarding(26:49) Team challenges of the weekSubscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!
* The Aztec death whistle produces a horrifying sound sometimes described as “the scream of a thousand corpses.” * And while we're on the subject of dogs: “Dogfooding” is the term for using a company's product to gain the trust of customers. It's said a dog food company president ate a can of the firm's food in a shareholders meeting to demonstrate that “if it's good for me, it's good for your dog.” We'll take his word for it, thank you. * In 1970, actor Bill Murray joked to a fellow airline passenger that he had two bombs in his...Article Link
In this supper club episode of Syntax, Wes and Scott talk with Salma Alam-Naylor all about her role in DevRel, what's involved in working in DevRel, avoiding burnout, which platforms to focus on, and so much more. Show Notes 00:31 Welcome 01:07 Syntax Brought to you by Sentry 01:52 New jobs and onboarding 03:34 What is Devrel? 11:34 How much of devrel is using your own product? Dogfooding the service? 14:49 What are things devrel people do? 20:32 Devrel burnout issues 24:53 Once you put a number on something, you're measuring that number 29:31 Is there any way to know if devrel is working? 33:47 How could someone get into devrel? 37:37 What platforms should you focus on? 44:12 What's something devrel gets wrong? 47:50 What do you think about speaking at conferences? 51:58 What do you use to stay up on with tech? 53:59 Sick picks Sick Picks Wikipedia on Hell.com Web Archive of Hell.com Fffffound https://twitter.com/webdesignmuseum Shameless Plugs Follow Salma on Twitch Hit us up on Socials! Syntax: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Wes: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Scott: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads
If you want to know what it takes to have a long career in this industry, then this conversation with Anjuan Simmons is just what you need to hear. As a staff engineering manager at GitHub, Anjuan has over 25 years of combined experience across consulting, startups, and big tech.We talked about his work at GitHub, and he gave some insight into their AI tool Copilot, as well as the GitHub Sponsors program. Anjuan also spoke with me about the value of representation, and how it led to him attending UT Austin for electrical engineering, getting his MBA, and eventually becoming an engineer with one of the biggest tech companies in the world. He also dropped a ton of great advice on ways to have more of an impact in shaping your professional journey.Anjuan's intentional approach and personal story is extremely inspiring, and I hope it will help you recognize that you have the power to chart your own course in life!LinksAnjuan Simmons' WebsiteAnjuan Simmons on ThreadsAnjuan Simmons on Twitter / XFor a full transcript of this interview, visit revisionpath.com.==========Donate to Revision PathFor 10 years, Revision Path has been dedicated to showcasing Black designers and creatives from all over the world. In order to keep bringing you the content that you love, we need your support now more than ever.Click or tap here to make either a one-time or monthly donation to help keep Revision Path running strong.Thank you for your support!==========Follow and SubscribeLike this episode? Then subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you find your favorite shows. Follow us, and leave us a 5-star rating and a review!You can also follow Revision Path on Instagram and Twitter.==========CreditsRevision Path is brought to you by Lunch, a multidisciplinary creative studio in Atlanta, GA.Executive Producer and Host: Maurice CherryEditor and Audio Engineer: RJ BasilioIntro Voiceover: Music Man DreIntro and Outro Music: Yellow SpeakerTranscripts are provided courtesy of Brevity and Wit.☎️ Call 626-603-0310 and leave us a message with your comments on this episode!Thank you for listening!==========Sponsored by Brevity & WitBrevity & Wit is a strategy and design firm committed to designing a more inclusive and equitable world. They are always looking to expand their roster of freelance design consultants in the U.S., particularly brand strategists, copywriters, graphic designers and Web developers.If you know how to deliver excellent creative work reliably, and enjoy the autonomy of a virtual-based, freelance life (with no non-competes), check them out at brevityandwit.com.Brevity & Wit — creative excellence without the grind.==========Sponsored by the School of Visual Arts - BFA Design & BFA AdvertisingThe BFA Design program at the School of Visual Arts consistently produces innovative and acclaimed work that is rooted in a strong foundational understanding of visual communication. It encourages creativity through cutting-edge tools, visionary design techniques, and offers burgeoning creatives a space to find their voice.Students in BFA Advertising are prepared for success in the dynamic advertising industry in a program led by faculty from New York's top ad agencies. Situated at the center of the advertising capital of the world, the program inspires the next generation of creative thinkers and elite professionals to design the future.School of Visual Arts has been a leader in the education of artists, designers and creative professionals for over seven decades. Comprising 7,000 students at its Manhattan campus and more than 41,000 alumni from 128 countries, SVA also represents one of the most influential artistic communities in the world. For information about the College's 30 undergraduate and graduate degree programs, visit sva.edu.
Brought to you by Sidebar—Catalyze your career with a Personal Board of Directors | Wix Studio—The web creation platform built for agencies | LinkedIn Ads—Reach professionals and drive results for your business—Maya Prohovnik is currently Spotify's Head of Podcast Product. She was employee #1 at Anchor, which was acquired by Spotify in 2019 and now powers more than 80% of all new podcasts created in the world. In 2023, Maya was named one of the Most Important People in Podcasting by The Hollywood Reporter. In today's episode, we discuss:• How Maya operationalizes “dogfooding”• How to balance data-driven decision-making and intuition• Strategies for preserving startup culture in a large organization• Tactical tips to improve at public speaking• How Radical Candor and the Eisenhower matrix transformed her approach to managing people• What's next at Spotify for Podcasters—Find the full transcript at: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/building-anchor-selling-to-spotify-and-lessons-learned-maya-prohovnik-spotifys-head-of-podcast/—Where to find Maya Prohovnik:• Threads: https://www.threads.net/@mayafish• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mayaprohovnik/—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Maya's background(04:34) Spotify's podcasting platform(06:24) Maya's personal podcasts(11:36) The importance of “dogfooding” (13:24) How Maya operationalizes dogfooding(16:31) How to balance data-driven decision-making and trusting your gut(21:38) Building Anchor 2.0(26:24) The beginning of Anchor's hockey stick growth(28:08) How Anchor utilized interns to make the Apple Podcasts integration “magical”(35:36) Anchor and Spotify's successful integration(37:50) Maintaining a startup culture within a large organization(39:20) Transitioning from a startup to a large company(42:02) Challenges brought on by the acquisition(48:49) How Maya's leadership approach is guided by Radical Candor(51:53) The Eisenhower matrix for prioritization and task management(52:46) Productivity tips(55:10) How to get better at public speaking(59:38) The future of Spotify for Podcasters(1:00:58) Lightning round—Referenced:• What is “Dogfooding”?: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/14/business/dogfooding.html• The Derry Connection: A Stephen King Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/6ixSiYlj3A9NqEXZDBgycf• Blood on Their Hands: A Big Brother Fancast: https://open.spotify.com/show/4VP16lTL8sUniQXCFeBInv• Time Share: A Children of Time Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/38yhl2lNOUajccfsdluh5j• The End of the World as We Know It: A First-Time Parenting Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/3TUr0LxcueYo2nvnyR5rML• Forgotify (stream Spotify songs that have never been played): https://forgotify.com/ • Michael Mignano on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mignano/• Lessons from scaling Spotify: The science of product, taking risky bets, and how AI is already impacting the future of music | Gustav Söderström (Co-President, CPO, and CTO at Spotify): https://www.lennyspodcast.com/lessons-from-scaling-spotify-the-science-of-product-taking-risky-bets-and-how-ai-is-already-impacting-the-future-of-music-gustav-soderstrom-co-president-cpo-and-cto-at-spotify/• Radical Candor: https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Candor-Revised-Kick-Ass-Humanity/dp/1250235375• What is the Eisenhower matrix?: https://www.figma.com/resource-library/what-is-the-eisenhower-matrix/• Todoist: https://todoist.com/• Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity: https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Things-Done-Stress-Free-Productivity/dp/0143126563/• Spotify for Podcasters: https://podcasters.spotify.com/• Children of Time: https://www.amazon.com/Children-Time-Adrian-Tchaikovsky/dp/0316452505• It: https://www.amazon.com/Novel-Stephen-King/dp/1982127791/• Poker Face on Peacock: https://www.peacocktv.com/stream-tv/poker-face• Barbie on Prime: https://www.amazon.com/Barbie-Margot-Robbie/dp/B0CB1TMKR6• Deadly Games: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096741/• 1-800 Contacts: https://www.1800contacts.com/• Lovevery: https://lovevery.com/• CoopCrate: https://www.coopcratechickens.com/—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe
Join us as Aaron Cox from Greymass unpacks the innovations behind WharfKit. Dive into how WharfKit is transforming blockchain development, bridging web applications with diverse blockchain networks seamlessly. With WharfKit's intuitive tools, mastering decentralized app creation has never been easier. 00:00 - Intro 01:01 - How Aaron became a block producer and started working on EOS 04:15 - Origins of Greymass and where the idea came from 13:08 - What is an SDK? Why does it matter? 14:43 - Upcoming features: Session Kit, Contracts Kit, and Account Kit 18:01 - The types of developers who will be able to use these tools 24:13 - How Aaron envisions developers creating and extending those toolsets, and how they can get involved now 28:34 - Wharf's vision for building on EOS and other Antelope chains 33:05 - Release timelines and collaborations within the community 37:05 - Advice for newcomers to the ecosystem 39:32 - Possibilities with new tools 41:30 - How people can learn more about Greymass and support their work in the ecosystem 48:30 - Dogfooding some Wharf kits 52:55 - Upcoming Webinar The EOS Network Foundation coordinates financial and non-financial support to encourage the growth and development of the EOS Network. We're harnessing the power of decentralization to chart a coordinated future for the EOS Network as a force for positive global change. // EOS Network Foundation // https://www.eosnetwork.com https://twitter.com/EosNFoundation https://www.linkedin.com/company/eos-network-foundation https://t.me/EOSNetworkFoundation https://discord.gg/eos-network info@eosnetwork.com #EOS #Web3
Spring Boot: Up and Running by Mark Heckler: https://bit.ly/springbootbookNODES 2023: https://neo4j.com/nodes-2023Building an Educational Chatbot for GraphAcademy with Neo4j Using LLMs and Vector Search: https://medium.com/neo4j/building-an-educational-chatbot-for-graphacademy-with-neo4j-f707c4ce311bLivestream: Going Meta Ep 20Build a Chatbot for Clinical Trials across Multiple Data Sources: https://medium.com/star-gazers/build-a-chatbot-for-clinical-trials-across-multiple-data-sources-f121211cec98GraphAcademy course - Introduction to Neo4j and GraphQL: https://graphacademy.neo4j.com/courses/graphql-basicsLondon Data GraphQL (Sep 7)GraphQL Conf (Sep 19)Creating a Custom Connector in Confluent Cloud to Sink Data to Aura for Real-Time Analysis (Part 2): https://neo4j.com/developer-blog/confluent-cloud-neo4j-auradb-connector-2/Build a Movie Database with Neo4j's Knowledge Graph Sandbox: https://thenewstack.io/build-a-movie-database-with-neo4js-knowledge-graph-sandbox/Knowledge Graph from text using LLM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hg4ahTQlBm0SDN custom queries/projections: https://www.javacodegeeks.com/2023/08/java-application-with-neo4j-how-to-use-spring-custom-queries-and-projections.htmlNeo4j Live - Movie Recommendations: https://youtube.com/live/wndOSi3i5OYUnderstanding HashGNN in GDS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fccFuyjNEcMGoogle Datacloud Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dAnPoFV80cNeo4j Metadata management of NoSQL sources: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZExin7j8ysERoad to NODES training:Interactive Dashboarding with NeoDash (Sep 20)Graphing Relational Database Models (Sep 27)Meetup (virtual/in-person, Austin, TX): Airplane Route Optimization using Neo4j (Sep 13)Meetup (Singapore): Intersection of Graph Databases and AI (Sep 20)Meetup (Australia): Graph Database Melbourne (Sep 21)Meetup (Australia): Exploring the Intersection of Graph Data Science and AI (Sep 28)Pycon India (Sep 28 - 30): https://in.pycon.org/2023/Conference: PyData Amsterdam (Sep 13)Conference: Big Data London (Sep 19)Conference: Big Data Paris (Sep 25)Conference (Germany): JUG Saxony Day 2023 Dogfooding the Graph Ecosystem (Sep 28)
This episode features an interview with Andrew Mok, Chief Marketing Officer of Turo. Here, Andrew's focus is on growing Turo's community of hosts and guests and making Turo an iconic global brand. His previous roles include VP of Growth at DogVacay, Strategy Consultant at Bain & Company, and Front-End Developer for Life360.In this episode, Kailey and Andrew discuss balancing data and human insights, stopping the scroll, and dogfooding your product.-------------------Key Takeaways:While AI can help us become more efficient, it can't replace human connection, something that customers value. Intertwining AI and human insights can help your campaigns stand out from the crowd.It's important to know when to balance data and when to use your intuition. Data can and should be used to structure an experiment, but intuition can lead to creating revolutionary products.Customers are getting savvy to generic value prop messaging. By making content that feels organic and authentic, you're able to hold their attention much longer.-------------------“It's important to remember there's a balance between when to use data and when to use intuition. You should use data when it's available and when you can actually structure an experiment. You also shouldn't get paralyzed by data. You should know when to use your intuition. You don't create revolutionary products by optimizing your way there. It comes from somebody who has a vision or a team of people who have a vision and who execute it.” – Andrew Mok-------------------Episode Timestamps:*(02:38) - Andrew's career journey*(07:17) - Trends in customer experience in car sharing*(10:27) - How Turo is building AI and human insights into campaigns*(15:48) - How personalization and data impact Turo's strategies*(22:53) - Changes in customer behavior at Turo*(32:19) - How Turo is “stopping the scroll”*(39:26) - An example of another company doing it right with customer engagement (hint: it's Amazon and Masters Tournament)*(44:48) - Andrew's recommendations for upleveling customer experience strategies-------------------Links:Connect with Andrew on LinkedInConnect with Kailey on LinkedInLearn more about Caspian Studios-------------------SponsorGood Data, Better Marketing is brought to you by Twilio Segment. In today's digital-first economy, being data-driven is no longer aspirational. It's necessary. Find out why over 20,000 businesses trust Segment to enable personalized, consistent, real-time customer experiences by visiting Segment.com
Neste episódio, vamos conhecer o mundo das contas offshore com nossos especialistas da XP Inc. Descubra todas as etapas por trás da criação deste produto, desde a fase de pesquisa até o pós-lançamento. Vamos explorar os desafios enfrentados durante a implementação, o processo de Market Fit e as lições aprendidas ao longo do caminho. Acompanhe enquanto discutimos a importância dos testes exploratórios, a operacionalização deste processo e as estratégias de testes específicos para garantir a qualidade do produto antes do lançamento. Saiba mais sobre o planejamento e a execução do Go to Market, o processo de criação do Beta Tester, e o monitoramento do desempenho do produto após o lançamento. Finalmente, vamos entender o que é "Dogfooding" e entender como ela se aplica à XP Inc.
“The difference of why some companies are so much more successful at producing high value, high-impact products than others comes to 4 areas of GIST (Goals, Ideas, Steps, Tasks)." Itamar Gilad is a coach and author with over 20 years of experience in product management, strategy, and growth, and was previously a product manager at Google and the head of Gmail's growth team. In this episode, we discussed all things about product management and how to build high-value products. Itamar first shared his journey at Google growing Gmail to 1 billion MAUs and some of his lessons learnt on managing large-scale product changes, getting users feedback, and dogfooding. Itamar then explained in-depth his GIST framework as an alternative to the product roadmap, a collection of methods and best practices for producing high-value and impactful products. He shared some challenges working with product roadmap and how teams can create better alignment instead. He also shared how we can do product prioritization better by using the ICE technique and his Confidence Meter. Towards the end, Itamar shared the different ways of how companies can conduct product experimentation and how to use the GIST board to improve the way we execute product development. Listen out for: Career Journey - [00:04:17] Growing Gmail - [00:06:06] Managing Large Scale Product Changes - [00:07:26] Getting Feedback from a Major Product Change - [00:10:48] Dogfooding - [00:15:21] GIST - [00:19:10] Problem with Product Roadmap - [00:27:17] Creating Alignment - [00:34:22] Prioritization and ICE - [00:38:02] Doing Product Experimentation - [00:43:59] Project & Task Management - [00:48:43] 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:54:39] _____ Itamar Gilad's BioItamar is a coach, author and speaker specializing in product management, strategy, and growth. For over two decades, he held senior product management and engineering roles at Google, Microsoft and a number of startups. At Google, Itamar led parts of Gmail and was the head of Gmail's growth team (resulting in 1Bn MAUs). Itamar publishes a popular product management newsletter and is the creator of a number of product management methodologies including GIST Framework and The Confidence Meter. Itamar is based in Barcelona, Spain. Follow Itamar: LinkedIn – linkedin.com/in/itamargilad/ Twitter – @ItamarGilad Website – itamargilad.com PM resources – itamargilad.com/resources Newsletter – itamargilad.com/newsletter _____ Our Sponsors Are you looking for a new cool swag? Tech Lead Journal now offers you some swags that you can purchase online. These swags are printed on-demand based on your preference, and will be delivered safely to you all over the world where shipping is available. Check out all the cool swags available by visiting techleadjournal.dev/shop. And don't forget to brag yourself once you receive any of those swags. Like this episode? Show notes & transcript: techleadjournal.dev/episodes/129 Follow @techleadjournal on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. Buy me a coffee or become a patron.
Bei Aktivitäten entstehen Ideen … bei den Nerds of Law war es eine Pizza, bei Glasskube Floorball, was, wie sich die Nerds erklären lassen, offenbar Sport ist. Gut, kann Pizza-essen sicher auch sein, aber darum geht es in der Folge nicht. Vielmehr darum, was Glasskube jetzt eigentlich ist und warum Katharina sagt: “You had me at ‘Open Source' “. Glasskube: https://glasskube.eu/ Github: https://github.com/glasskube/operator Floorball (der Sport): https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unihockey Open Source (kein Sport, aber eine gute Idee): https://opensource.org SaaS (auch kein Sport): https://www.oracle.com/de/applications/what-is-saas/ Jira: https://www.atlassian.com/de/software/jira Confluence: https://www.atlassian.com/de/software/confluence Kubernetes: https://kubernetes.io Matomo: https://matomo.org AVV: https://bisset.at/ (ja, da könnt ihr nachfragen) Nerds-of-Law-Podcast-Folge 89: https://www.nerdsoflaw.com/2022/07/nerds-of-law-89-zum-jagen-tragen-mit-dorothea-wichert-nick/ Dogfooding (klingt schon wieder eher nach Sport): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food Gitlab: https://about.gitlab.com Minikube: https://kubernetes.io/de/docs/setup/minikube/ DuckDuckGo: https://duckduckgo.com Penpot: https://penpot.app Figma: https://www.figma.com/de Miro: https://miro.com/de/ Garmin (Uhren): https://www.garmin.com/de-AT/c/wearables-smartwatches Yaizo: https://www.yazio.com/de Fairphone: https://www.fairphone.com/de/ Fußhängematte (Beispiel): https://www.gadget-rausch.de/fusshaengematten-so-entspannend-kann-bueroarbeit-sein/ Subscribe to the Podcast RSS Feed https://nerdsoflaw.libsyn.com/rss Apple Podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/nerds-of-law-podcast/id1506472002 SPOTIFY https://open.spotify.com/show/12D6osXfccI1bjAzapWzI4 Google Play Store https://playmusic.app.goo.gl/?ibi=com.google.PlayMusic&isi=691797987&ius=googleplaymusic&apn=com.google.android.music&link=https://play.google.com/music/m/Idvhwrimkmxb2phecnckyzik3qq?t%3DNerds_of_Law_Podcast%26pcampaignid%3DMKT-na-all-co-pr-mu-pod-16 YouTube https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7rmwzBy-IRGh8JkLCPIjyGMA-nHMtiAC Deezer https://www.deezer.com/de/show/1138852 Nerds of Law® http://www.nerdsoflaw.com https://twitter.com/NerdsOfLaw https://www.instagram.com/nerdsoflaw/ https://www.facebook.com/NerdsOfLaw/ Music by Mick Bordet www.mickbordet.com Nerds of Law ® ist eine in Österreich registrierte Wortmarke.
Notícias que chamaram a nossa atenção nesta Quinta-feira dia 16 de Fevereiro de 2023! Reprodução em áudio do e-mail recebido diariamente pela Newsletters (newsletter@filipedeschamps.com) Newsletter gratuita sobre Tecnologia e Programação: https://filipedeschamps.com.br/newsletter #news #noticias #fdnews #robsonamendonca
4pm - Todd Myers: Climate ‘Education' to Be Mandatory in Connecticut // What is ‘Dogfooding'? // Tom Cruise jumps from helicopter to thank fans for 'Top Gun: Maverick' successSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
The tech industry has turned dogfood into a verb… creating an entirely new word. Ever hear this? Dogfooding. For some reason… in the tech industry… it dogfooding is when an employee uses the company's products. When I listen to KSL… because I work here… that'd be considered “dogfooding”Bosses love when loyal employees use the product. Some people think the term comes from the Old Alpo Dog Food Commercials. 40 years ago the late actor Lorne Greene would talk to the audience as he fed Alpo to his dogs.You can hear the dogs chewing there. Lorne Greene was the spokesman for Alpo… his dogs ate it. Dogfooding…The ultimate example… comes from the CEO of AirBnB. Brian Chesky is worth 8-billion dollars. But he's put his home on AirBnb. Well. Not his home. But he's renting out a room in his home… and he promises he'll be there for the guests.So you might pop outa the shower and run into a billionaire. By the way… price for the room is ZERO dollars. Since it's AirBnB the cleaning fee is probably 250-bucks. But it lists at zero. And availability is zero. It was booked up in a milliseond. So you won't get to personally experience the ultimate example… of dogfooding.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
This week we discuss Aboard.io, cutting cloud costs, commute hours and final thoughts on Google Next. Plus, Matt Ray goes car shopping. Watch the YouTube Live Recording of Episode 382. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZaTjWHqQvA) Runner-up Titles Matt Ray is ready to buy. That's legal in Australia When Ray Mail comes out, nobody cares I am into workflow This is the population of Hobart that we're looking at I want to help you, but you don't even need help Daddy's Meeting Fort Brandon hasn't migrated his mainframe workloads to cloud. All these problems are caused by developers Rundown Aboard.io is coming soon! (https://aboard.io/) NTT Data buys digital consultancy Postlight (https://www.consulting.us/news/7702/ntt-data-buys-digital-consultancy-postlight) Linear (https://linear.app/) Americans Reclaim 60 Million Commuting Hours in Remote-Work Perk (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-18/americans-reclaim-60-million-commuting-hours-in-remote-work-perk) Google Cloud Next ‘22 wrap-up (https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/google-cloud-next/google-cloud-next22-wrap-up) Dual Run for Google Cloud (https://cloud.google.com/solutions/mainframe-modernization) Cloud Workstations (http://cloud.google.com/workstations) Google is serious about its giant video chat booths, starts real-world testing (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/10/google-is-serious-about-its-giant-video-chat-booths-starts-real-world-testing/) Google Cloud Next ‘22 in under 13 minutes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAvDlBe7xqI) Why Cloud Finance Is Broken and Ineffective (https://www.duckbillgroup.com/blog/why-cloud-finance-is-broken-and-ineffective/) Kubecost Adds SaaS Edition to Control Kubernetes Costs (https://containerjournal.com/features/kubecost-adds-saas-edition-to-control-kubernetes-costs/) macOS Ventura (https://www.apple.com/macos/ventura/) Relevant to your Interests Announcing Gloo Platform | Solo.io (https://www.solo.io/blog/announcing-gloo-platform/) Nutanix stock rallies 25% on speculation of sale (https://www.marketwatch.com/story/nutanix-stock-rallies-25-on-speculation-of-sale-11665769665) Zuckerberg's $1,499 Headsets Won't Help Meta (https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-10-11/zuckerberg-s-1-499-headsets-won-t-help-meta) Demystifying the PR/FAQ - Julian Dunn's Blog (https://www.juliandunn.net/2022/09/09/demystifying-the-pr-faq/) Google's 3D video calling booths, Project Starline, will now be tested in the real world (https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/13/googles-3d-video-calling-booths-project-starline-will-now-be-tested-in-the-real-world/) Facebook's Legs Video Was A Lie (https://kotaku.com/zuckerberg-facebook-meta-legs-feet-video-vr-staged-fake-1849656315) Inflation increased 0.4% in September, more than expected despite rate hikes (https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/13/consumer-price-index-september-2022-.html) Netflix feels the heat (https://www.axios.com/2022/07/20/netflix-streaming-subscribers-losses-profits?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axioslogin&stream=top) The creator of Amazon's Kindle has left the company, along with a top Alexa executive, adding to a leadership exodus under new CEO Andy Jassy (https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-kindle-creator-gregg-zehr-leaves-company-leadership-exodus-grows-2022-10?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axioslogin&stream=top) Google Fiber is launching 5-gig and 8-gig plans early next year (https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/13/23403427/google-fiber-5-8-gbps-gigabit-tiers-plans) Bringing passkeys to Android & Chrome (https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2022/10/bringing-passkeys-to-android-and-chrome.html) US Army reportedly planning $1B cloud migration contract (https://siliconangle.com/2022/10/14/us-army-reportedly-planning-1b-cloud-migration-contract/) iOS 16 quietly added native Dvorak keyboard support, delighting weirdos like me (https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/14/23404125/ios-16-dvorak-keyboard-support) Floppy disk fever. The Curious Afterlives of a Flexible Medium (https://we-make-money-not-art.com/floppy-disk-fever-the-curious-afterlives-of-a-flexible-medium/) Anyone Who Does Business With Google Knows Philipp Schindler (https://apple.news/AuqU9JwAeQJ2AUJkVi-5Zxg) The Unlikely Cure for Burnout? A Second Job (https://www.wired.com/story/overemployment-work/) Nutanix stock rallies 25% on speculation of sale (https://www.marketwatch.com/story/nutanix-stock-rallies-25-on-speculation-of-sale-11665769665) DIY laptop offers Apple-like looks with PC repairability (https://www.smh.com.au/business/entrepreneurship/diy-laptop-offers-apple-like-looks-with-pc-repairability-20221011-p5bous.html) Broadcom's VMWare takeover: IBM CEO Arvind Krishna gives deal conditional blessing (https://capital.com/broadcom-vmware-takeover-ibm-ceo-arvind-krishna-deal-blessing) How BuiltWith generates $14 million a year while having zero employees (https://5to9.beehiiv.com/p/builtwith-generates-14-million-year-zero-employees) Microsoft Lays Off Hundreds of Staff (https://www.ign.com/articles/microsoft-lays-off-hundreds-of-staff) With a $13B valuation, Celonis defies current startup economics (https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/16/with-a-13b-valuation-celonis-defies-current-startup-economics/) Computacenter CEO Bashes 'As a Service' as Bad for Customers (https://www.channelfutures.com/business-models/computacenter-ceo-bashes-as-a-service-as-bad-for-customers) CEO Salaries in SaaS (https://blossomstreetventures.medium.com/ceo-salaries-in-saas-b36ffaa6293c) Belkin's mount to turn your iPhone into a camera is now available (https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/18/23411241/belkin-magsafe-mount-continuity-camera-laptops-available) Nonsense ROI of a sticker (https://twitter.com/mbbroberg/status/1503732056429367301) Conferences KubeCon North America (https://events.linuxfoundation.org/kubecon-cloudnativecon-north-america/https://events.linuxfoundation.org/kubecon-cloudnativecon-north-america/), Detroit, Oct 24 – 28, 2022 SpringOne Platform (https://springone.io/?utm_source=cote&utm_medium=podcast&utm_content=sdt), SF, December 6–8, 2022 THAT Conference Texas Call For Counselors (https://that.us/call-for-counselors/tx/2023/) Jan 16-19, 2023 CloudNativeSecurityCon North America (https://events.linuxfoundation.org/cloudnativesecuritycon-north-america/), Seattle, Feb 1 – 2, 2023 Sponsors The MacGeekGab.com (http://macgeekgab.com/) provides tips, Cool Stuff Found, and answers to your questions about anything and everything Apple. SDT news & hype Join us in Slack (http://www.softwaredefinedtalk.com/slack). Get a SDT Sticker! Send your postal address to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com (mailto:stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com) and we will send you free laptop stickers! Follow us on Twitch (https://www.twitch.tv/sdtpodcast), Twitter (https://twitter.com/softwaredeftalk), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/softwaredefinedtalk/), LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/software-defined-talk/) and YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi3OJPV6h9tp-hbsGBLGsDQ/featured). Use the code SDT to get $20 off Coté's book, Digital WTF (https://leanpub.com/digitalwtf/c/sdt), so $5 total. Become a sponsor of Software Defined Talk (https://www.softwaredefinedtalk.com/ads)! SDT news & hype Brandon: InterStellar BBQ (https://www.theinterstellarbbq.com) try the Peach Tea Pork Belly when available (https://twitter.com/Chefjohnbates/status/1330525844536766464?s=20&t=DsVm7JlZgWpz3Ypk9cUVGA) Matt: The Peripheral (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8291284/) Coté: once again, OK burgers (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wYjsdU6qgI). Checking in with platform engineering: “Innovation Insight for Internal Developer Portals,” (https://tanzu.vmware.com/content/analyst-reports/innovation-insight-for-internal-developer-portals?utm_source=cote&utm_campaign=devrel&utm_content=platengpaper&utm_medium=whitepaper) Gartner paper on platform engineering/IDP. Photo Credits Banner (https://unsplash.com/photos/utMdPdGDc8M) CoverArt (https://unsplash.com/photos/6mze64HRU2Q)
Sarabeth Jaffe is CTO and Co-Founder at HelloPrenup, the digital prenup platform designed to get couples on the same page. Chad talks with Sarabeth about dogfooding her own product, completely starting over from a technical perspective using Bubble, a low-code/no-code platform, and appearing on the ABC hit series Shark Tank. Hello Prenup (https://helloprenup.com/) Follow Hello Prenup on Twitter (https://twitter.com/HelloPrenup), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/helloprenup/), YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqe-NOs0xV7yEebsg8om27A), Pinterest (https://www.pinterest.com/HelloPrenup/), or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/helloprenup/). Follow Sarabeth on Twitter (https://twitter.com/sarabethjaffe) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarabethjaffe/). 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: CHAD: 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, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Sarabeth Jaffe, CTO, and Co-Founder at HelloPrenup, the digital prenup platform designed to get couples on the same page. Sarabeth, thank you so much for joining me. SARABETH: Thank you so much for having me. CHAD: I can't say that I was aware of your...or that I wanted to think about prenups and seeking out a product around prenups. But it's super interesting to me. And I'm sure that that's part of both the challenge and opportunity with HelloPrenup. So, tell us a little bit about the product. SARABETH: So, as you mentioned, HelloPrenup is really the first of its kind. It's a digital platform that allows couples to create a prenuptial agreement that they're both happy with completely online and for a fraction of the cost of going to an attorney. So why is that interesting for folks these days? Really it's because couples are talking about their finances a lot more before they go into marriage. People are getting married later in life, so they have more assets to protect, or in many couples' cases, they have a lot of existing student loans or other liabilities that they can actually protect their partner from. So I think a lot of couples are becoming more open to prenuptial agreements as a way to kind of start off their marriage with a clean slate. And I can actually speak to our customers because I actually built HelloPrenup after I got engaged. And I was looking into getting a prenup. My fiancé and I we've been together for over seven years; we've known each other for over ten years. And we've always been really transparent about everything and especially our finances. And I love being financially savvy, looking at my investment portfolio, and being really frugal and everything. So to me, getting a prenup was always just the smart move. Being kind of a realistic person whose parents are actually divorced now, I view marriage as a partnership that, if it's working, when it's working, that's amazing. But if things don't work out, I think there should be a different path that you're able to take seamlessly. So when we did get engaged, I started looking into how to get a prenup, and it was a really confusing process. If you want to get a prenup without using HelloPrenup, you have to contact a divorce attorney before you're even married, which kind of starts the precedent of your marital journey off kind of a little weird. And also, hiring a divorce attorney for your prenup can cost a lot of money. The average cost is like $300 an hour. So it kind of depends on how complex your prenup is. But if you're planning your wedding, buying an engagement ring, maybe trying to buy a house soon, you're going to put a prenup on the back burner because of the costs, even though it's a really important financial planning tool. So that's why I came up with the idea. I'm a software engineer. This is something that I think I could build is a platform for couples who want to get a prenup done really conveniently and for a fraction of the cost. So I started working on HelloPrenup on my own in February of 2021, so a little bit over a year ago. And of course, I quickly found out that I don't know all the laws required, [chuckles] and I don't know how to write a good prenup contract. So I need either a legal advisor or an attorney to really help me figure these things out, especially because the law per state actually is different. CHAD: Just so I understand the timeline, did you start it before you got married? Or did you end up doing a prenup through an attorney for yourself? SARABETH: Ah, yes. So actually, we're getting married this Saturday. CHAD: Wow. Okay. Congratulations. SARABETH: Thank you so much. And we are HelloPrenup users. CHAD: Okay, wow. SARABETH: So we did our prenup with our platform. CHAD: So you managed to get the product done before you got married so that you could use it? SARABETH: Yes, yes. I wasn't going to get married without the prenup and going through an attorney. [laughs] I gotta...what is the expression? Like, reap what you sow or something like that. CHAD: Yeah, or eat your own dog food is another one. SARABETH: Yes. Dogfooding our own product has been amazingly beneficial for our team. So that's kind of where I left off in our story so far. I needed to find an attorney. CHAD: I'm curious, you know, I'm a software developer too. I think we all have ideas. How did it become just from an idea to a thing you were really going to do? Where was that sort of switch? When did that switch get flipped? SARABETH: When I came up with the idea for a digital prenup platform, I was actually unemployed. So this was kind of in the middle of the pandemic. I was previously working at a really awesome startup based in Seattle, Washington. But unfortunately, I was actually going through a lot of depression, and I felt really disconnected from my work. So I ended up quitting that job in November. So I took about three months off to recenter myself and figure out what I wanted to do next. So when I thought of the idea for a prenup platform, I had the mental capacity to dig into the problem. And when I figured that it would probably be a profitable business, that's when I started to work on it full time. And I didn't have another job, so I was able to jump into it. CHAD: Okay, so you then needed to find an attorney. You realized that was something you lacked. SARABETH: Yeah, so I started doing some Googling while I was deciding whether this was something I definitely wanted to commit to, to see if there were competitor platforms. And I actually found HelloPrenup at that time. Of course, I wasn't involved with it. And so my co-founder now her name is Julia Rodgers Esquire. So she is a divorce attorney based out of Massachusetts. She actually had been building this product, which was completely aligned with my envisioning of what I was going to build. But of course, she had the legal background of it. So I found her platform, and I noticed when I tried to sign up for the platform that the system was under maintenance. So I was like, huh, maybe they need technical help. So I actually ended up cold emailing her to see whether she needed any software help with the hopes that we could team up. And the next day, we just hopped on a Zoom. It's interesting talking to someone who you've never met before about possibly teaming up on something or potentially being a competitor to them. I made it very clear that I would much rather team up with her rather than try to figure this out on my own. CHAD: That sort of sounds like a threat. [laughter] SARABETH: Oh my God. CHAD: I'd much rather team up with you than have to do this on my own. [laughs] SARABETH: Well, I really respected what she had built at that point. So she had put a lot of time into actually writing a lot of content and blogs around prenuptial agreements. So she had a really good base for the business. But it was really the software that she was running into issues with. So she had been struggling and working with overseas developers. So as an attorney, she didn't have a lot of experience project managing a software project like that. And especially with contract developers, you can't say, "I want this to be built in a sustainable, scalable fashion." So there were a lot of bugs with the platform. The way I saw it was like, hey, she kind of has this MVP. And she's an attorney, so I think we would make an amazing team. I was also really excited at the prospect of being able to work with another woman entrepreneur. And we hit it off really quickly on our Zoom call. And yeah, so we've been working together since about March of 2021. CHAD: Did you end up keeping what she already had from a technical perspective, or did you start over? SARABETH: We completely started over. I tried to salvage the codebase that they had used. It was like Angular, which I actually despise Angular framework in general. I tried my best to clean it up, but they had no tests. They had a bunch of copy and pasted code. It was just kind of a mess. So that's when I really decided that Bubble would be a great option for us. CHAD: Well, for those who don't know, Bubble is like a low-code/no-code platform. SARABETH: Yes. So it's called Bubble.io. It is, as Chad just said, you know, it's a low-code platform which allows you to actually build full-stack web applications. So unlike other website builders like Squarespace or Wix, you actually have a database or a back-end component to your application. And of course, for the majority of applications, that's really a requirement to build something actually useful for people. So I'd been playing around with Bubble.io before we scrapped the codebase. And it was a good starting point because I'm still currently the only full-time developer on our team. And because we are using a low-code platform, we're able to move a lot faster with a lot of our feature development because there are a lot of things that had been done for us. So there are a lot of drag and drop features that we can leverage via different plugins. CHAD: It's an interesting choice to me, not because I don't think it makes sense, but I think a lot of developers...you are a developer; you know how to code. SARABETH: [chuckles] CHAD: And I think a lot of developers, when faced with that choice, can't resist writing custom software. SARABETH: Yeah. [chuckles] You know, I've always been torn between the development and the product world. And for a while, that was really a struggle for me deciding whether I wanted to be a product manager or a software engineer. So I settled on being a product-driven software engineer. So to me, the use case of like, I could write the traditional code, but it'll be a lot slower, or I could build the product a lot faster by using this tooling. That's where I land most of the time, like, the more time-efficient way to do things. CHAD: From deciding to work together and starting to work together to okay, I'm going to rewrite this in Bubble; what point were you back online with the new version? How long did that take? SARABETH: Yeah, so that took us about three months to get it relaunched, and so I was pretty happy with that. I mean, of course, there's still a ton of work that we're doing to build out the product, but to really get it back up and running and also in a more scalable way so that we actually can provide prenups across multiple different states now. So it's a lot more flexible in the way that it was built. So it took about three months to get it relaunched. CHAD: So at what point then did you go on Shark Tank? [laughs] SARABETH: So [chuckles] there were a lot of variables in play. And so, I was really thankful that we chose to use Bubble because the speed at which I needed to develop this was even more reduced. So we started talking to producers pretty quickly after we decided to team up together. It's a really unusual entrepreneur journey, I would say. I knew that it would make a good story because prenups are kind of taboo, as you mentioned. Television loves something a little spicy, a little bit dramatic. So we started talking to producers, I want to say, in June or July, maybe even in May. And at that point, we hadn't relaunched the product. So we were really just pitching the idea. And we were pitching ourselves as founders to the producers and the exciting concept of how will the American public perceive a product that is a little bit taboo talking about prenuptial agreements before you get married? If you're familiar with Shark Tank, you probably see that they have a lot of wedding-related companies that go on. But we were kind of flipping the script on that. So while I was rewriting the entire software, we were also going through the auditioning process of Shark Tank. CHAD: I can imagine that's pretty intense. SARABETH: Yes. CHAD: I think the closest thing I can think of is when you enter into an accelerator or something like that. You might be in it for three months. You're going to have demo day at the end. But with that, you're presenting to a group of people. It's not broadcast on national television. SARABETH: Yes. [laughs] CHAD: It's probably a little bit of a different thing, and there are no producers involved, that kind of thing. SARABETH: Yeah, yeah, exactly. By the time we had gotten on the set of Shark Tank to pitch our products, we'd only really been relaunched for about a month and a half. [laughs] So we were flying...I'm so bad at expressions. CHAD: [laughs] SARABETH: We were pitching... CHAD: By the seat of your pants. SARABETH: Yes, that one. Thank you so much. [laughter] So we were really pitching the potential of our product. And we were just so ecstatic to be there. Mid-Roll Ad: When starting a new project, we understand that you want to make the right choices in technology, features, and investment but that you don't have all year to do extended research. In just a few weeks, thoughtbot's Discovery Sprints deliver a user-centered product journey, a clickable prototype or Proof of Concept, and key market insights from focused user research. We'll help you to identify the primary user flow, decide which framework should be used to bring it to life, and set a firm estimate on future development efforts. Maximize impact and minimize risk with a validated roadmap for your new product. Get started at: tbot.io/sprint CHAD: When you went on Shark Tank, how much of what you said and those kinds of things was all you, or how much is it put together for the show? SARABETH: Really, the only thing that is heavily vetted by producers is your pitch. So when you walk into the tank, and you give your 30-second to 2-minute spiel that's a bit more theatrical, you practice that over and over and over again. And it was really a fascinating experience. Because as a fellow software engineer, you know we're kind of more chill people, [laughs] more realistic. But they kept saying, "Bring more energy to it. Do big movements, maybe even do a dance or something." [laughter] I'm kind of living this double life where I'm writing software, and then I'm -- CHAD: In between rehearsals, you're opening your laptop and making another thing happen on the app, I'm sure. SARABETH: Exactly. It's like, oh, okay, we have pitch practice tonight, and now I'm going to work on this core feature. Without it, we literally don't have a product. So the producers are very involved in your initial pitch. But then when you jump into the Q&A, when the Sharks start asking you questions, that's all you. CHAD: That's really cool. So are you happy that you went on Shark Tank? SARABETH: Yes, I'm so happy that we went on. I've always been a Shark Tank fan. I think it's been on for over ten years. Shark Tank has been something that's kind of kept me interested in being an entrepreneur. When I started learning how to code, I knew that I always wanted to start a business. And just seeing the number of ideas and the variety of businesses that people are able to build and putting that on a show is just a fascinating concept. So I was really happy to go on the show. And, of course, the impact on our business has been tremendous. Really, it changed the trajectory of our business. We gain most of our customers through organic search. So most of our customers come in through Google saying like, how do I get an online prenup? By getting on national television, we are really thankful that news stations were now interested in talking to us. So by linking to our website, that helped boost our search engine optimization rankings. And so now we're actually a profitable business due to Shark Tank. CHAD: That's awesome. So is the tech team still just you? SARABETH: The tech team is me. And I have started working with another Bubble developer on a contract basis. But calling out to any software engineers or low-code developers, if you're interested in joining a legal tech company that's growing a lot, feel free to reach out to me. So I really do need to be hiring another developer. At this point, I am really the main developer working on things for a variety of reasons. The first reason is that Bubble, while it is very quick to develop a product on your own from a technical perspective, it is lacking in features when it comes to collaboration with other developers. So with traditional code, you'll do code reviews on GitHub, and you'll just do like a diff. But the branching and the version control is definitely a little bit lacking. So I'm trying to wait out the Bubble team. They have some stuff coming down the pipeline that will make it easier to do collaboration. But for that reason, it is a little bit easier as an entrepreneur using a low-code platform to be the sole developer because you kind of know exactly how everything works. And then also, developers are really expensive. So we are actually a completely self-funded company at this point. So we're bootstrapped. We haven't actually accepted any investment at this point. We're a really conservative team. If we hire a developer, we want to make sure that we're able to provide them with a competitive salary and competitive package. And we're able to do that now. It's just a matter of finding the right person, which is actually a really interesting space because low-code developers are still on the up and up right now. CHAD: I know you can't see the future. But do you foresee a point where either Bubble doesn't take you where you want to go, or you need to start augmenting it in some way? SARABETH: I would like to push Bubble as far as I can. I think now that Bubble is getting a lot more recognition...and they just got another round of funding that was pretty substantial. I think that they're going to be improving a lot of things, especially when it comes to, like I mentioned, collaborating with other developers on the platform and performance. A lot of pushback that people give with low-code platforms is like, oh, the page won't load as quickly as if I wrote it with pure React or something like that. So I want to try and stay on the platform as long as possible. If we really continue to grow, I would be willing to move back to traditional code. And we'd actually be set up for success in that way because we would have a fully functioning product, and half of development is figuring out what feature to build next. So we'd kind of say, all right, here's how it works. And then, while we're kind of maintaining our Bubble application, we can have a development team build it within our own platform. Does that make sense? CHAD: It does. And I think with Bubble, it doesn't need to be all or nothing, right? SARABETH: Mm-hmm. CHAD: You can use APIs. Or you can basically extend it with custom code if you really needed to using webhooks and that kind of thing, right? SARABETH: Exactly. And that's the way that we've done it. So actually, the contract generation is written in Node.js JavaScript. And the reason I did that is because it's easier to process data in a sequential order with traditional code versus Bubble. And you can also hook into other APIs, like for us, we do a conversion of the HTML of the contract into a Word doc. So we're able to call into a conversion API and then save it on AWS with traditional code, and you can do all that with Bubble. But it's a little bit more straightforward when you know what you're doing with just like JavaScript; you know a few lines here and there. Does that make sense? CHAD: It does, yeah. I'll be super interested to see how far you're able to push it and what those things you need to do outside of Bubble are. SARABETH: Yeah, I'm really excited to try to push Bubble as an option for entrepreneurs. We were actually the first low-code platform to be shown on Shark Tank. So every Bubble developer on Twitter was really excited about it. CHAD: [laughs] SARABETH: So I think it's a really interesting spot to be in right now. CHAD: Yeah, from a technology perspective, I think that that's one thing we've talked about. And you addressed the other thing that sometimes people say is a promise. Like, it is a commercial platform. It's not an open-source platform, and you're building entirely on top of it. And so that presents a certain amount of risk that like, they might go out of business. You know, they're a VC-backed company, and maybe they'll go out of business. And then where would you be? The fact that they've just raised a significant additional round of funding mitigates that somewhat, but it's still a concern, right? SARABETH: Yeah, it's definitely a concern. And it's something that, as a software engineer, it's terrifying to know that you're relying on someone else for your livelihood and now the livelihood of multiple people on our team. So it is really scary. You cannot export your code from Bubble. But I believe they have said that if for some reason they go out of business, they will allow you to do that. I'm sure whatever code you export from it is not going to be very pretty to look at. So it probably makes sense to write it from scratch. But I think at this point, I'm really happy with where we're at. I like remaining a really lean team. And using different tools in simple ways and trying to keep our product as simple as possible has really helped us grow. CHAD: What's next for HelloPrenup? Where are you setting your sights on? What's keeping you up at night now? SARABETH: Ooh, so many things. We do have an exciting investor coming on. I can't say exactly who, but they were really involved in building one of the largest legal tech platforms out there today. So we're really excited to be partnering with them and be building out our network across all 50 states. Right now, we're actually in, I believe, 32 states. You can use our platform to create your prenuptial agreement. And so, we're excited to be starting to onboard attorneys to the platform. So that's one of the things. Another thing that's on our radar is keeping up with, you know, it's hard to say the trends of what's going on with Web3. But we do have some things that are related to Web3 that we'll be tackling in the next probably a year or a couple of years when it comes to financial data. Yeah, so those things are kind of on our radar of our product. And then, on the near term, we are doing a lot of work to try and normalize the entire conversation around prenuptial agreements. We partnered with The Knot, which is one of the largest online wedding registry websites. And we've been writing a lot of blogs on their website that talk about the educational side of prenups. And we're actually going to be launching gift cards. CHAD: [chuckles] SARABETH: So you can list a prenuptial agreement on your wedding registry, and people can help support it. So there are a lot of initiatives that we're going to be doing on the product development side and then also kind of on the marketing education side of the business. As we start to grow, I'm trying to pull my attention away from those things. But sometimes, it's really hard because some parts of the business that aren't technical are fun to get involved in. And I'm sure you run into that or when you were scaling thoughtbot getting distracted by other parts of the business because they were just interesting. But there's a lot going on right now. CHAD: That's exciting. You mentioned earlier that you hadn't taken investors yet. And so is it about that scale that's causing you to take one on now, or what's going on there? SARABETH: So we're profitable. We don't need an investor, which is we're so thankful for that. So it's really a strategic partnership for us. CHAD: Well, that's really cool. I'm excited to hear everything you have going on. And I really wish you luck in everything that you're doing. SARABETH: Thank you so much. CHAD: So if folks want to find out more about HelloPrenup, follow along with you, get in touch with you; where are all the best places for them to do that? SARABETH: You can check us out on helloprenup.com. And we're on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn. Just tweet at us @HelloPrenup, and one of us will respond. It'll probably be myself or Julia. So you're able to get into contact with us if you have any questions. And of course, if you are a developer who is looking to join a really fun, women-led legal tech company, hit me up. CHAD: Awesome. You can subscribe to the show and find notes with links for everything that Sarabeth just mentioned, along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments for me, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on Twitter at @cpytel. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thank you so much for joining me, Sarabeth. I really appreciate it. SARABETH: Thank you so much. CHAD: And thank you for listening. See you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success. Special Guest: Sarabeth Jaffe.
It is a thing! Dogfooding can truly engage your stakeholders and accelerate their buy-in to your nonprofit and it's mission.Watch this episode on video: https://vimeo.com/725378118This is a recent episode of The Nonprofit Show --the Nation's daily live streaming broadcast where the Nonprofit and Social Impact Community comes together. Each weekday the hosts and their guest experts cover current topics-- from money to management to missions. Thanks to our generous nonprofit sector supporters you will find over 300 special learning episodes focused exclusively on nonprofits and social impact. Nonprofit Technology and Apps topics: https://bit.ly/Nonprofit-Technology Nonprofit Fundraising and Development topics: https://bit.ly/Nonprofit-Fundraising Nonprofit Marketing and Communications topics: https://bit.ly/Nonprofit-Marketing-and-Comms Nonprofit Boards and Planning topics: https://bit.ly/Nonprofit-Boards Nonprofit Management and Staffing topics: https://bit.ly/Nonprofit-Management Connect to The Nonprofit Show: https://bit.ly/The-Nonprofit-Show Listen to us on your favorite podcast channel: https://bit.ly/NonprofitShow-Podcasts The American Nonprofit Academy https://bit.ly/AmericanNonprofitAcademy provides our Nation's nonprofit social impact community collective News, Inspirations, and Training.If you lead or work for a registered nonprofit 501(c)(3), social impact or service organization, or are thinking of starting a nonprofit--, The Nonprofit Show is an excellent resource of current nonprofit information and operating strategies to make your social impact amazing. Each weekday there are new guest experts and thought leaders on the fast-paced 30-minute LIVE show—with topics ranging across nonprofit boards, foundations, grant funding, volunteer managers, donor relations, fundraising experts, NPO marketing, grant writers, philanthropy donors, nonprofit legal and tax professionals, CFRE info, nonprofit software and nonprofit apps providers, Nonprofit CRM programs, charity tax expertise, virtual galas, charity auctions, online nonprofit charity event programs, social impact strategic planning, fundraising and fund development, fiscal sponsorships, capital campaigns, community impact analysis, donation management, nonprofit jobs, nonprofit HR, nonprofit classes and training, global NGO organizations, as well as nonprofit sector Thought Leaders.#fundraising #nonprofit #socialimpact
Grow, make, and eat your own dogfood -- I mean products. Originally published November 28, 2017.
Can you use your product while you are building it? What is one architecture trick that makes serverless easy? How do you build a call center in two weeks? And what is the right number of managers for a team? I invited Yoav Abrahami, chief architect at Wix, to tell the SaaS Developer Community how Wix uses Wix products to build other Wix products. We've ended up covering a lot of great topics: How large Wix really is The benefits of running on 3 clouds Key insight that allowed Wix to build a cheap and resilient serverless backend The right way to dogfood your product Building a callcenter in 2 weeks and even few leadership tips Interested in more SaaS? Join our Slack: https://saas-community.github.io/
Microsoft compra Activision Blizzard / Más de 500 millones de abonados a música en streaming / YouTube cierra Originals / El CEO de Airbnb "se va de Airbnb" / Intel presenta un minero de Bitcoin / AdBlock Plus gana el juicio / Primera candidata real de exoluna Patrocinador: Cuidado con las Macros Ocultas https://www.cuidadoconlasmacrosocultas.com/ es un podcast de divulgación tecnológica para empresas impulsado por Cuatroochenta que responde a preguntas clave de nuestra época en cada episodio: ¿Cómo es un ciberataque desde dentro?, ¿cuál es el impacto medioambiental de la nube?, ¿qué cambiará realmente la IA? — Suscríbete en Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/1IyJTLfo2XlrwNwwm0q2gp?si=2gOAVIqdR3yDHLlRU3CX5g, Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/es/podcast/cuidado-con-las-macros-ocultas/id1582767310?i=1000547511042, Ivoox https://www.ivoox.com/m05-automatismos-robots-avatares-el-nuevo-digital-audios-mp3_rf_80668395_1.html, Google https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9vbW55LmZtL3Nob3dzL2N1aWRhZG8tY29uLWxhcy1tYWNyb3Mtb2N1bHRhcy9wbGF5bGlzdHMvcG9kY2FzdC5yc3M/episode/ZjgxYjg5MDQtODAyYi00MjI5LTk3Y2ItYWUwODAwOTdhZWVi?ep=14, etc. Microsoft compra Activision Blizzard / Más de 500 millones de abonados a música en streaming / YouTube cierra Originals / El CEO de Airbnb "se va de Airbnb" / Intel presenta un minero de Bitcoin / AdBlock Plus gana el juicio / Primera candidata real de exoluna
In this episode, Audrow Nash speaks to Charles Brian Quinn (aka, CBQ), CEO and a Co–Founder of Greenzie. Greenzie make an autonomous driving system for commercial lawn mowers. We talk about Greenzie’s autonomous mowing system, how Greenzie has worked with manufacturers to up–fit their system into comercial mowers, how Greenzie does dog–fooding, safety and standards, and about CBQ’s experiences bootstrapping and with venture capital.EPISODE LINKS:– CBQ’s website: https://www.seebq.com/– Greenzie’s website: https://www.greenzie.com/– Greenzie’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/GreenziePODCAST INFO:– Podcast website: https://sensethinkact.com– Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sense–think–act/id1582090036– Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/52wK4oMDvgijRk6E82tC5d– RSS: https://sensethinkact.com/itunes.xml– Full episodes: https://www.youtube.com/c/SenseThinkActPodcast– Clips: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChfnCpNwZzYtZ32J–pZvNDgOUTLINE:– (0:00:00) Start– (0:00:51) Introducing CBQ and Greenzie– (0:02:40) Why go by initials?– (0:03:22) Describing the Greenzie autonomous system– (0:08:51) Working with mower manufacturers to up–fit their system– (0:15:22) Software on autonomous system– (0:21:21) Mapping the lawn– (0:28:03) Handling poor GPS signal– (0:33:28) Perception pipeline– (0:38:58) Having a human use their mowers– (0:45:15) Standards in the off–road space– (0:50:18) The value of standards bodies– (0:55:00) Depth cameras in the autonomous system– (0:58:37) LIDAR and being venture backed– (1:02:24) Replacing depth cameras with LIDAR? + Tesla and computer vision– (1:03:50) Ruggedized computer– (1:06:36) Microcontrollers, testing, and visualizing data– (1:12:03) Deploying software updates– (1:17:33) Safety– (1:20:57) Testing for deployment + dogfooding– (1:24:54) Training people to work with their autonomous system– (1:29:54) Greenzie's business model– (1:35:13) Bootstrapping a startup versus venture capital– (1:39:23) What CBQ learned from bootstrapping– (1:47:38) Future of Greenzie– (1:51:09) Advice to someone starting their career– (1:54:02) Links and social mediaSOCIAL:– Twitter: https://twitter.com/sense_think_act– Discourse: https://discourse.ros.org/c/sensethinkact/71
Researchers find third party libraries in popular apps have a remote code execution vulnerability Emotet is back with a vengeance Power companies working together to build a coast-to-coast EV fast-charging network DeepMind's AI has cracked two mathematical problems that have stumped experts for decades What happened with this week's AWS outage, and how can we protect online infrastructure? Marco Palladino, CTO of Kong talks about API gateways and management Hosts: Louis Maresca, Brian Chee, and Curt Franklin Guest: Marco Palladino Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-enterprise-tech. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: nureva.com Melissa.com/twit canary.tools/twit - use code: TWIT
Researchers find third party libraries in popular apps have a remote code execution vulnerability Emotet is back with a vengeance Power companies working together to build a coast-to-coast EV fast-charging network DeepMind's AI has cracked two mathematical problems that have stumped experts for decades What happened with this week's AWS outage, and how can we protect online infrastructure? Marco Palladino, CTO of Kong talks about API gateways and management Hosts: Louis Maresca, Brian Chee, and Curt Franklin Guest: Marco Palladino Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-enterprise-tech. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: nureva.com Melissa.com/twit canary.tools/twit - use code: TWIT
Researchers find third party libraries in popular apps have a remote code execution vulnerability Emotet is back with a vengeance Power companies working together to build a coast-to-coast EV fast-charging network DeepMind's AI has cracked two mathematical problems that have stumped experts for decades What happened with this week's AWS outage, and how can we protect online infrastructure? Marco Palladino, CTO of Kong talks about API gateways and management Hosts: Louis Maresca, Brian Chee, and Curt Franklin Guest: Marco Palladino Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-enterprise-tech. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: nureva.com Melissa.com/twit canary.tools/twit - use code: TWIT
Researchers find third party libraries in popular apps have a remote code execution vulnerability Emotet is back with a vengeance Power companies working together to build a coast-to-coast EV fast-charging network DeepMind's AI has cracked two mathematical problems that have stumped experts for decades What happened with this week's AWS outage, and how can we protect online infrastructure? Marco Palladino, CTO of Kong talks about API gateways and management Hosts: Louis Maresca, Brian Chee, and Curt Franklin Guest: Marco Palladino Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-enterprise-tech. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: nureva.com Melissa.com/twit canary.tools/twit - use code: TWIT
Transcript: This is the 52nd episode on Lightning Junkies. In this episode we are joined by André Neves and Fiatjaf. Fiatjaf was previously on Lightning Junkies alongside Rusty Russell on episode 46 (https://sicksub.network/LNJ046). Fiatjaf is known for his contributions to LNURL and many other areas of the Lightning Network ecosystem. André is known for his work with ZEBEDEE, Mintgox, and Lightning Address. Lightning Address is the primary focus of the show, how much it has grown and proliferated within the Lightning network ecosystem. We also explore other topics such as LNURL, Bolt12, and more! We talk about: 0:00 - Introductions 3:37 - André's Background 7:38 - What is ZEBEDEE? 12:56 - ZEBEDEE's Centralization 17:43 - Dogfooding with ZEBEDEE 19:02 - Implementing Infuse CSGO 21:49 - Infuse CSGO Activity 23:23 - What is MintGox? 26:03 - What is Lightning Address? 28:42 - How to get a Lightning Address? 32:39 - Is Lightning Address Worth the Effort? 41:32 - Bolt12/Offers 49:55 - LNURL Future Prospects 1:03:24 - Long Term Vision for Lightning Address 1:15:16 - Profound Lightning Question FIND GUESTS HERE ------------------------------------------------ André Neves: https://twitter.com/andreneves Fiatjaf: https://twitter.com/fiatjaf ZEBEDEE: https://twitter.com/zebedeeio RABBIT HOLES ------------------------------------------------ Federated Lightning Address: https://payaddress.co/ LNURL Generator: https://lnurl-pay.me/ Lightning Address: https://lightningaddress.com/ VALUE 4 VALUE ------------------------------------------------
Listen to the Changelog: https://changelog.com/podcast/459 (15mins in)TranscriptYou said something interesting about the preciousness of our development environments… And I'm with you that we've commoditized the servers, but we definitely have not commoditized dev, because it's so intricate, it's so set up… Sometimes it's like “There be dragons. Please don't touch my laptop, because it works right now, but I'm not sure if it's gonna work tomorrow.” I do hate that. I think it's almost a different skillset, of maintaining that. There's overlap between development and the maintenance of a development environment in terms of things that you need to learn… But it's almost a different task altogether. So I don't like that about it, but it's still very true that our development environments are precious to us, and they're tweaked, and configured, and customized, and all the things. So I'm sure there's probably lots of resistance to this…[00:11:59.29] We talk about our setup - we have probably tens of thousands of lines of code, and very few dependencies in our stack, but GitHub is 14 years old, and there's a million plus commits, and I'm sure the dependency list is very long… What kind of effort was this? Tell us the story of bringing it along.CORY WILKERSONIt is. These are all very, very true points. You know, the last thing I wanted to do was kind of be the vessel that went out to GitHub and said “I wanna change your development environment”, because these things are so precious. Like, I'm an engineer, too. I think my environment is very much precious. And here I was, kind of the face in GitHub of saying “Well, we think we have a better way. Come join us over here.”And I started off on this journey as a skeptic. I think I shared some of this, too… I didn't think this would be a fruitful journey necessarily. I was just gonna go do my level best as an employee, see if I could make it happen, build moment etc. and see if I could find something out there. Now, on the other side of this journey, I feel like I'm completely on the other end now, where I'm just like “This is the future. This is the way that we will absolutely build software…”But going back to the core of the story, it was literally just me out there, calling on my friends to begin with, inside of GitHub. I'd been there for five years, and the first few years were just me tapping into relationships, saying “Hey, can you give this thing a shot? Can you try this out? I wanna get your feedback and feelings about where this is at.” And no one could yet use it on our core repository. We call it github/github - the organization is GitHub, the repository is GitHub. We didn't have this thing standing up in a Codespace yet, but we had other repositories that were compatible with Codespaces.So I'd go out and ask favors of friends, and just be like “Can you try this out and give me some feedback?” And generally, the feedback I would get back was – first it was resistance, like “Why would I do this? It's productivity lost; tax on productivity. I don't trust HTTP. There's gonna be lag”, that kind of feedback. But then people would try it and they'd come back and be like “Huh. That was maybe better than I thought.”At the same time, as I hacked in this space too, I was starting to get some of that “Well, there's something here.” The big a-ha moment for me was connecting VS Code into my Codespace out in the cloud and still retaining that local development experience. So it felt to me like it was still very local. The magic is the synchronization that's happening between the local environment and the cloud. It feels totally transparent.But that aside, it started with just a very small number of users. So we would go back to leadership in GitHub and talk about progress we were making… And the early days, the story was “I have five people that have responded positively to Codespaces.” So not much of a story, but starting to kind of make a little bit of progress. And then maybe it was ten people.Then, the next iteration on this was like “Well, let's go find a team. Let's get a full team on Codespaces. How can we get a single team - 6 to 8 people - committed to using Codespaces, and stick in this thing?” At this point we'd had this other effort running on the side to get github/github, the core github.com repository, compatible with Codespaces. And we'd gotten it to a point – we detail how we did this in the blog post - where performance was mostly acceptable. So now we could go shop this with a team that worked primarily on GitHub.com and see what their experience was. And we're making progress there. So we're ramping in – I think y'all have talked to Kyle Daigle in the past. Kyle was the leader of that effort that got this team spun up inside of Codespaces on GitHub core. And again, it was somewhat retentive. People were sticking, and going like “Wow, this is not what I thought. It's better than maybe what I thought.”[00:15:59.11] But I think the real breakthrough moment came when we stopped calling this dogfooding. You hear this term all the time, dogfood… I think it actually originated – I looked up on Wikipedia; I think the term originated inside of Microsoft a number of years ago.ADAM STACOVIAKIs that right?CORY WILKERSONBut GitHubbers, my colleagues don't respond well to that term. Dogfooding doesn't inspire anyone to go do anything. Just like “Eat the dogfood? Who feels good about that?” And so what we did was we launched what we called the GitHub Computer Club, and I would love to dedicate a full episode on this. It's a really interesting concept, and something I hope to bring out to the industry. But we asked people to join the GitHub Computer Club. And in doing so, they took this commitment or oath. I wrote up this script, “I do solemnly swear to never – no shadow compute, not desktop compute. I'll join this thing and forever be member of the elite, exclusive GitHub Computer Club.”ADAM STACOVIAKI love that.CORY WILKERSONWe made a bunch of noise about it… Yeah, people loved it.ADAM STACOVIAKThat's so cool.CORY WILKERSONPeople straight up were just like, “This is great. Let me in. I want a membership card.” And in doing so – we had to give them something in return. So they would join the computer club, but we offered to our “exclusive” members what we call the concierge team. And this team was built to kind of support their productivity and success inside of Codespaces.So the second these people had friction - you know, one of the requirements of entering the computer club was that you had to kind of raise your hand. You couldn't disappear and go back to local desktop. You had to virtually raise your hand and say “I'm about to opt out of this, because Codespaces can't keep my business right now.” And the concierge team that we had built could swoop in, respond to “What's going on here? Let's dig into it. Why can't we keep your business in Codespaces?”We continued to play that model back and forth between Computer Club and concierge team, until we had built the product and built enough momentum inside of GitHub that one day we kind of looked around and we were like “Wow, we have hundreds of people developing GitHub.com and GitHub Codespaces.” And I think the real story there is just commitment to make it happen. We want it to be successful with this, and not just go talk about it in the market, but actually show that this is a better tool for us. The computer club is still going strong. People are demanding that I give them satin and denim jackets; I'll get around to that at some point.JEROD SANTOWell, I hate to break it to you, Cory, but GCC is already taken as an acronym, so… You've got a namespace conflict on that one.CORY WILKERSONYeah… Well, maybe the Codespaces Computer Club, so we can go with GCCC.JEROD SANTOThere you go.ADAM STACOVIAKAll the C's. I like this aspect because you treat this like a customer scenario. You built a product, and you have to retain customers. And you're actually exercising a great principle for anybody building a product, which is “Talk to your users.” And when they have trouble - swoop in, as you had said, understand those problems and be committed to fixing them. I think that's a great way, a great story for how Codespaces became powerful inside of GitHub, because that's exactly how you build a product. Not just “Let's just try this thing and hopefully our internal team adopts it by force.”As you had said, you wanted to go along with your employee card and be able to see if Codespaces could work, and out the other end you became a believer. But you're not forcing GitHub engineers to use it, you're asking them to try it. In this case, the Computer Club, with the oath… And then as you said, you look up and you see hundreds now.CORY WILKERSONI think that's right. The position was – no Fiat. We didn't wanna lead with “You have to do this.” That's the absolute wrong way to get adoption in your product. We wanted to literally win the business of our colleagues. We wanted to build such a fantastic experience in Codespaces that people would choose it. And yeah, I think the Computer Club probably boosted adoption a little bit, do doubt about it… But what made that work –ADAM STACOVIAKYou've gotta use some emotion in there. You've gotta put some emotion in there.CORY WILKERSONYeah, exactly.ADAM STACOVIAK[00:19:59.04] You have to get them excited.CORY WILKERSONIt had to have a soul. It needed some soul behind it, that was the idea. And the fact that we did respond to this – we actually did win business. When things didn't go well and when people wanted to opt out, they could, and they would, for a week, or whatever… But the goal was “How do we get them back in here, kind of remove whatever that impediment is, and get them productive in Codespaces again?”JEROD SANTOSo what happens if you take the oath and you go back? Do you chop off a finger, or what's the penalty? [laughs]CORY WILKERSONWell, you know, we leave that intentionally vague, so people can assume the worst. No, I don't know that we've had any real regression there just yet, which is good. Codespaces is super-retentive. I think we have people from time to time use local desktop. We have a colleague – this is actually in the blog post maybe… A colleague of mine reported the other day, she said “I was using local development. My environment broke, so I switched over to Codespaces.” And she was like “I actually shipped my task in my Codespaces before my local development environment rebuilt.” I think everyone was like “Wow, that is such a good story.” And it's so true. It's kind of the experience we're all having right now with Codespaces.We talked about it, again, in the blog post - you click a button and the environment is live. So for every new engineers that joins GitHub, I think they all are probably fairly spoiled at this point, because day one they click a button and they're able to run that entire GitHub.com environment. It's just been really incredible to watch.ADAM STACOVIAKSo Cory, the way you've explained the flow of this GitHub Computer Club seems a little smooth. I've gotta imagine you hit some friction. Can you share some of the struggle that you hit? Some opposing forces in the process of rolling this out.CORY WILKERSONYeah. Basically, it started with a bunch of “No” throughout GitHub. I think people had seen previous iterations of Codespaces… We announced it, I think, in May of 2020, at GitHub Satellite.ADAM STACOVIAKYeah. The first tweet I saw about it was Kelsey Hightower's, actually.CORY WILKERSONOkay, yeah.ADAM STACOVIAKSo that's May 2020.CORY WILKERSONIt's been out there for a while… And I think when people first try to use it inside of GitHub, there was a bit of friction. It didn't work for them, and I think first impressions can sometimes be lasting impressions. So when I went out there, I'm just like “Use this thing. It's great. It's really evolved. We feel pretty proud of it”, and it was just a bunch of “No” left and right. So then it became “How are we gonna build this business?” And yes, the Computer Club was a big boost, and the concierge team certainly was a huge, probably the most high leverage practice we discovered along the way… But a lot of this was just like startup style practices. We're building a business inside of GitHub, and I think that's maybe a useful context for anyone that's trying to build adoption of their own products in-house; you've gotta think of this sometimes as like “This is your own business. How are you gonna build it inside of GitHub, in what is a kind of very stubborn audience?” And I'm a developer, I can say that; we're somewhat stubborn and we find the tools that work well for us, and if someone comes and says “I wanna change those”, your response is gonna be “Don't.”ADAM STACOVIAK“Don't touch my local dev environment, Cory.”CORY WILKERSONYeah. And we'll get to this in a second - one of the great parts about Codespaces is that we just commoditized the compute part of this. The environment is now running somewhere else. But dotfiles, VS Code setting sync, VS Code extensions - we bring those all to the environment. So you don't lose your curated workbench. If you've got a dotfiles repo set up on GitHub right now, we bring that into the compute environment; we bring your environment and your personality, your expression of yourself captured in code into that environment. We bring your W out to your compute, which I think is a really nice touch. So you get the unburdened computer running in the cloud so you freed up your local machine, but you can still bring your preferences into that environment.[00:23:54.17] I digress… Going back to building the business a little bit - it felt like startup tactics. So we had the concierge team, we had the Computer Club… We had effectively guerilla marketing. We were out on Slack every day, looking for opportunities to say “Have you tried Codespaces?” People were receiving M1 architecture Macs, and the github/github build just would not yet work. We had not put in the investment to make the github/github run on the M1 Mac, so we'd say “Hey, have you tried with Codespaces yet?” And people would be like “Well, I guess I'll try. That feels like my only path right now.” And they'd click a button, they'd come back an hour later, or a day later, and just be like “What in the heck? This is incredible. How was this even possible?” And those people you just win for life. That's their full mode of operating. So that was the guerilla marketing angle…We did pairing sessions… So we were up in front of everyone all the time, saying “If you wanna get started, here we are. We're gonna hold your hand through this and show you the ropes, show you how we're doing.” Kind of social proof, I think, which is really valuable there. All hands – we'd get in front of the entire company and demo the thing, and be like “Look at this, it's incredible” and just try to build hype.We connected with the right people… I maybe loathe to call them influencers, but the people inside of GitHub that every engineer look up to. They look up to them and say like “This is the person that I aspire to be at some point.” We converted them. We want their business. They're kind of like trendsetters and tastemakers internally. And then really it boiled down to ruthless prioritization. So we listened to our users, “What do you need?” and we demonstrated that we could follow through on those things. For some reasons, someone was trying to run some arcane karma test somewhere that wasn't executing for them. It's just like “Alright, great. Let's figure out how to make sure that works in this environment.” That kind of thing. Even small tasks like that were important in building momentum.And then I'll say it again - one day we just looked up and we'd gone from a bunch of “No” to a bunch of super-fans inside of GitHub. We have cheerleaders. If you go out and look on Twitter right now, the day after we kind of announced Codespaces to the world, they were just like – GitHubbers were out there very enthusiastic about the thing, and it was a very genuine response. We didn't ask anyone to go do that. People were just that enthused about what we built.ADAM STACOVIAKYeah. I saw a tweet from Kelsey Hightower - again, I'll mention Kelsey… I don't know if this tweet was actually towards Codespaces or the announcement, but the timing - it was the same day, I believe, so I think it was a subtweet around it, but he said “Back in the day we wrote code on our own computers.” So I'd assume that he was reflecting on Codespaces and the announcement, but I wasn't sure of that.CORY WILKERSONI saw that, too. I mean, you used to run your server in a grey tower, beige tower underneath your desk too, right? Those days are gone, it kind of feels like. This is this next wave - we're now moving development environments out into the cloud. It just feels to me like two years from now we're gonna see some incredible adoption in this space.ADAM STACOVIAKYou mentioned a bunch of No's in the adoption flow… At what point was Nat a believer in Codespaces?CORY WILKERSONYou know, Nat holds a very high bar. I remember, as we were trying to get GitHub running inside of Codespaces, I'd go back to Nat and we'd show him “Hey, now instead of 45 minutes it's 20 minutes. We've made these changes.” And he was like “That's super-cool. Not good enough.” And we totally agreed, we're like “Yup, it's not good enough, but I just wanted to show you progress.” We'd get that feedback, and then we'd come back again and say “We're down at ten minutes.” “That's great. It's not good enough”, and everyone's like “Yeah, you're right, it's not good enough. It's gotta be seconds for it to be the experience we want.” That was kind of the iterative experience.I think Nat has been a believer in where this thing could go, from kind of the outset of the journey. It's just been a bit of a slug as we worked from the very early days of like “Look, we have all this tech orchestrated that can produce this effect of a Codespace”, maybe the early prototype, down to now the ten second story inside of GitHub. That didn't happen overnight.[00:28:08.25] But the good news is most of that - almost all of that now - has made it into the product itself. So the changes that we've discovered along the way didn't just benefit github/github and the GitHub.com repository, it benefitted the entire product. I think Nat's a super-fan now. I've got some screenshots from Nat that I look at from time to time, that keep me pretty enthused about the progress we've made.
In this episode, Audrow Nash speaks to Tobias Holmes, Quality Assurance Manager at Blue River Technologies. Blue River uses computer vision and robotics in agriculture and was acquired by John Deere in 2017. Tobias speaks about herbicide resistance, spraying weeds, quality assurance and testing on hardware, and on encouraging kids to learn robotics.EPISODE LINKS:– Tobias’ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tobias–holmes–76666369– Blue River Technology: https://bluerivertechnology.com/– FIRST Robotics: https://www.firstinspires.org/robotics/frc– Crystal Ray High School (East Bay): https://cristoreydelasalle.org/PODCAST INFO:– Podcast website: https://sensethinkact.com– Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sense–think–act/id1582090036– Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/52wK4oMDvgijRk6E82tC5d– RSS: https://sensethinkact.com/itunes.xml– Full episodes: https://www.youtube.com/c/SenseThinkActPodcast– Clips: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChfnCpNwZzYtZ32J–pZvNDgOUTLINE:– (0:00:00) Start– (0:01:01) Tobias introduces himself– (0:01:27) About Blue River– (0:02:49) Agriculture 101– (0:09:51) How non–row crops are handled– (0:15:59) Row crops and herbicide resistance– (0:21:04) How weeds work– (0:24:20) Strategy for row crops– (0:27:07) Genetically modified crop– (0:28:55) Blue River and John Deere– (0:31:36) What Blue River does best– (0:37:34) John Deere acquisition– (0:41:39) Timeline for Blue River– (0:42:36) What it means to Manage Quality at Blue River– (0:48:50) Quality assurance in hardware– (0:52:32) Machine learning in weed spraying– (1:01:12) Testing systems in the fields– (1:04:22) Thoughts on robotics and agriculture– (1:11:07) Using AI in mechanical design– (1:14:45) Encouraging kids to program + learn robotics– (1:29:32) Advice for students– (1:37:14) LinksSOCIAL:– Twitter: https://twitter.com/sense_think_act– Discourse: https://discourse.ros.org/c/sensethinkact/71
The name is hard to defend, but the practice of “dogfooding” is a staple in product development. But should every company be product testing this way...or should we leave this practice behind? Join host Christine Dela Rosa and debaters Marshall Walker Lee and Shannon Winter to learn if you really need to “eat your own dogfood” to make products that work.In this episode, co-CEO of Easy Agile Nick Muldoon joins to share his successes with dogfooding. Atlassian's Head of Engineering Paul Slade speaks of the dangers of dogfooding, and Project Inkblot's Akilah Scharff talks about the limits of the practice when your team doesn't represent your audience.For the transcript and takeaways, visit https://www.atlassian.com/blog/podcast/work-check
Is your company working as well as it could be? This new podcast from Atlassian brings you fun and fiery debates over today's trendiest workplace practices, from dogfooding to agile at scale, asynchronous collaboration to ERGs. Join host Christine Dela Rosa and a pair of debaters each week, as they argue if and how you should add these practices to your work life. New episodes out September 7th.
Usar lo que vendemos trae grandes ventajas y no hacerlo puede ser fatal.
00:00 Hello!00:31 How do you take vacations as a bootstrapper?03:58 Brain dumping04:51 How is work is more fun than skiing or ziplining?07:44 Morning Pages from The Artist's Way08:08 How do you balance vacations and family with work?10:13 Needing meaningful work10:50 YouTube to Transistor script for makers.dev13:57 Dogfooding async.dev for makers.dev15:53 Websocks in Rails18:33 Doing art for art's sake vs. making art for a market24:19 What do you want to win by doing?27:52 Christian's non-goals for next week30:18 The privilege to work on what you want34:41 Track your money and time instead of trusting your intuition36:50 What if you don't have the bandwidth to do work you love?39:15 Chris's plan for next week
Brent and Colin discuss the power of dogfooding, hiring a VA in the Philippines, and getting your money back from Tony Robbins.Reach out to Colin Keeley and Brent Sanders on Twitter with any feedback. Publish and sell your audio courses on AvocadoAudio.com.
Ryan Nystrom is a Director of Engineering at GitHub where he's supporting several teams building mobile and desktop apps. In this episode we discussed a broad range of topics from UI, and GraphQL to custom navigation framework, and responder chain. EPISODE LINKS: Ryan Nystrom https://twitter.com/_ryannystrom GitHawk https://github.com/GitHawkApp/GitHawk GitHub for Mobile https://github.com/mobile GitHub Feedback https://github.com/github/feedback Work at GitHub https://github.com/about/careers Chapters: 00:00 Intro 03:24 Manager writing code 05:05 In-app Navigation 09:33 Responder Chain 10:55 App State & Dependency Injection 15:12 Storyboards vs programmatic UI 19:45 SwiftUI 21:46 Networking 26:18GraphQL 28:14 Cache 32:56 Polling 34:41 iOS 13-Compatible Sidebar 39:51 Catalyst vs Electron 41:42 Web UI 46:29 Roadmap 50:40 Client Analytics 54:22 Dogfooding vs Feature Preview 55:42 Open Source 57:35 Outro
Today I share some tales about dogfooding. Dogfooding is the process of using what you create, and while primarily it helps with user testing, it has also helped form some interesting stories about people and their inventions.
Hajime Morita さんをゲストに迎えて、Twitter, リモート、モニタリング、ベンチマークなどについて話しました。 Show Notes SpaceX Trump’s social media executive order and Twitter attacks, explained Twitter restricts new Trump tweet for ‘glorifying violence’ Facebook: The Inside Story Paying Remote Employees Fairly Wrote a little script to open Zoom URL in the current event Dogfooding 101: A Quick Guide to Internal Beta Testing 闘うプログラマー［新装版］ ビル・ゲイツの野望を担った男達 Fastly Debug App Dropbox Debug Canary Testing – Feature Flags, Toggles, Controls Google Fi ‘Joe Rogan Experience’ Podcast Will Be Exclusive to Spotify Rebuild: Supporter Dithering Exponent The Daily - The New York Times BRUTUS(ブルータス) 2020年 6月15日号
Wracamy z tematami technologicznymi i biznesowymi. Rafał opowiada o praktyce, która dla naszego dobra powinna dotyczyć, jak największej liczby firm. Czym jest dogfooding? O tajemnicy siły sprawczej tzw. „Dogfoodingu” posłuchacie w 97. odcinku #BoCzemuNie ? POBIERZ ODCINEK Linkownia: Etui folio od NOMAD Raport IMB Podcast o Apple Watch od 9to5Mac Backupy urządzeń mobilnych Apple na zewnętrznych […] Artykuł #097 – Dogfooding, czyli co? pochodzi z serwisu Podcast "Bo czemu nie?".
Paul surprises Drew with a "fan submitted" intro recording. Drew gets called out for his hand-me-down shenanigans, and is sad he can't get a new phone any time soon. Meanwhile, Paul (kind of laments) his green phone decision after buying a family member a white one. Drew talks about his stunted plans to build a new PC. Paul might have jury duty. Drew attempts to go web-based on all his work-related applications. Then, the boys talk about the practice of "Dogfooding:" what is means, where it comes from, and how it applies to the both of them. Finally, Paul talks about some interesting encounters with someone at soccer practice. Recorded on 10/03/2019 Show links Dogfooding, aka "Eating Your Own Dogfood" DogFoodCon AMD 3950X AMD Ryzen Gen3 Processor Problems Surface Laptop 3 (now AMD processors) Office 365 Web Clients Pickaway County MacOS Catalina
Join us for Episode of The Confessions of Angry Programmers podcast! In this episode David and Woody talk about: Dogfooding: David talks about issues & feature ideas for Microsoft PowerPoint. WTF Were They Thinking?: Woody discusses the recent Azure and Amazon Web Services television ads. Guest We are joined by our guest Ted Neward. Ted discusses the switch from developer to manager, speaking and more! Ted Neward is sometimes referred to as "The Dude of Software", owing to both his remarkable (some say frightening) resemblance to the Jeff Bridges character from "The Big Lebowski", and his ordination as a Dudeist Minister of the Church of the Latter-Day Dude, but he's also been called the "Dr. Gregory House of Software", owing to his tendency to pull no punches when talking about software and how to deliver it successfully. He's comfortable answering to either title, as well as a few others. He's familiar with more programming languages than most people knew existed, and hasn't found one yet that he couldn't turn into a 'mission-critical' application when asked Resources Presentation Patterns: Techniques for Crafting Better Presentations David McCarter's Books on Amazon Next Episode The next episode will feature Dogfooding and WTF Where They Thinking along with a guest.
Join us for Episode 1 of The Confessions of Angry Programmers Podcast! In this episode David and Woody talk about: Dogfooding: Woody discusses the Mint.com website. WTF Were They Thinking?: David discusses frustrations when contracting. Resources Mint.com Visual Studio Code David's Speaking Schedule Next Episode The next episode will feature Dogfooding and WTF Where They Thinbking along with our first guest Bob Reselman.
Join us for Episode 2 of The Confessions of Angry Programmers Podcast! In this episode David and Woody talk about: Dogfooding: David discusses challenges using Adobe Cloud products. WTF Were They Thinking?: Woody discusses Google Chrome updates. Guest We are joined by our first guest, Bob Reselman. Bob discusses coming apart in the age of automation. Bob Reselman is a nationally-known software developer, system architect and technical writer/journalist. Bob has written four books on computer programming and dozens of articles about topics related to software development technologies and techniques, as well as the culture of software development. Bob lives in Los Angeles. In addition to his work on in a variety of aspects of software development and DevOps, Bob is working on a book about the impact of automation on human employment. Resources Google Chrome Adobe Cloud Coming Apart: https://devops.com/coming-apart-in-the-age-of-automation/ Impacts: https://devops.com/automation-impact-cultures/ Thinking about the Future: https://devops.com/thinking-about-the-future-in-the-age-of-automation/ What do we do when everything is automated: https://devops.com/what-do-we-do-everything-automated/ Bob's YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCttfzwxle9zP25q8DY60fdw/videos Next Episode The next episode will feature Dogfooding and WTF Where They Thinbking along with guest Nuri Halperin.
Join Joe and Wayne while they discuss Anbox - the controversial and exciting upcoming Ubuntu Touch feature and 'dogfooding' (what it means and why it matters) and more...
It's our season 3 finale of Product to Product, a podcast for / by product people! We're breaking down, dissecting and debunking the product buzzwords you love to hate, and hate to love. In our last episode, we’re joined by ChartMogul’s Founder & CEO, Nick Franklin to talk about dogfooding. What happens when you use your own products? You can get some great insights from loving and hating the same things as your customer. Nick weighs in on some of the cultural changes that can happen in your organization when you eat your own dog food, or even how it can skew your product decisions. You can subscribe to Product to Product on iTunes, Google Play or Spotify, or get the latest episodes delivered to your inbox by subscribing here.
Choosing the correct SEO keywords, asking for those links and the importance of deep links with a focus on accounting sites. Plus I discuss dogfooding. * As an SEO you can tell when a page is built for SEO gain – 3:05 * It’s Google’s job to work out if your page is offering value or is just there to collect traffic – 4:50 * If you’re ranking #1 but not seeing any traffic, it is possible that people are not searching for your target keywords – 4:55 * Use Adwords to make sure the keywords you’re targeting for SEO actually have demand – 6:40 * Creating lots of keywords targeted pages without much SEO authority will not win you much traffic – 8:00 * Hotlinked images can be an easy way to pick-up some easy links – 8:20 * Embedded videos will increase your visitor dwell time and therefore give an SEO boost – 10:00 * Make sure you optimise your images to reduce your homepage loading speed for an SEO boost – 11:25 * SEO is like an F1 car, onsite SEO is like your aerodynamics and your links are your engine – 12:50 * Once an article on a 3rd party website has had it’s ‘day in the sun’ the long-term value to your business is the link – 14:45 * To me, it is counter-intuitive for journalists to reference a website without providing a link – 16:10 * You don’t lose SEO power by linking out, if you don’t link then it is like not voting – 16:49 * To not add a link to an externally referenced website is just bad internet Etiquette – 18:15 * Getting social signals to your website pages send Google good ranking vibes – 19:30 * The title of your page is more often than not what appears in Google results in blue – 22:20 * Matching your page title to a user search not only increases your ranking but also the click-through rate – 24:20 * Dogfooding is using your product just like your customers would – 27:12
Scott and Wes talk about how to deal with being overwhelmed with our fast paced industry. How do you keep you and your team's skills up to date? Wes' Note: Scott came up with the title for this one. I know. Netlify — Sponsor Netlify is the best way to deploy and host a front-end website. All the features developers need right out of the box: Global CDN, Continuous Deployment, one click HTTPS and more. Hit up netlify.com/syntax for more info. They are also hiring! netlify.com/careers Freshbooks - Sponsor If you are a small business or freelancer check out Freshbooks.com Cloud Accountingand get 30 days free. Make sure to enter SYNTAX into the "How did you hear about us" section. Show Notes 1:00 WELCOME Scott is 32! Happy Birthday Wes Relaunched his React for Beginners course! 4:00 That feeling Being okay with not knowing everything 9:00 How to wait it out When you should jump into a library 1.0 of libraries Dogfooding 13:00 Just In Time learning Doubling down on the fundamentals 21:00 What is JAM Stack? 22:00 Why do you need to stay up to date? Moving or Losing Jobs Comfy Chairs 25:00 Hipster Web Developers 27:00 Someone think of the customers! Technical Debt Falling in love with web development again Constantly challenging yourself 30:00 Complacency in Web Devleopment Motivating Comfortable Web Developers You have to stay up to date 32:00 Working on the weekends Real Talk: part of your job is staying up to date How to find time to learn on the clock 36:00 Adding new tech to projects as a way to learn 39:00 What if your senior developer is holding back progress? How to convince your team or boss that you aren't just a hipster and this new tech is worth it Show them the why! 47:00 Okay, I want to stay up to date. How? Strong handle on fundamentals Twitter Twitter WebDev Reddit NodeJS is Cancer Kitze's LOL Tweet JavaScript Weekly Lunch and Learns Meetups Siiiiiiiick Pixxxx Scott: Never Split The Difference Wes: Containers Podcast Shameless Plugz Scott: Pro Gatsby Wes: React For Beginners Tweet us your tasty treats! Scott's Instagram LevelUpTutorials Instagram Wes' Instagram Wes' Twitter Wes' Facebook Scott's Twitter Make sure to include @SyntaxFM in your tweets
Grow, make, and eat your own dogfood -- I mean products. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/engineering-education/support
About my decision to move manton.org from WordPress to Micro.blog.
On this episode of Well Made, Stephan talks to Gabby about the growth of human grade dog food brand Ollie since they launched in October, the research that went into their design, and what insight she brought from her days at Primary, a kids e-commerce brand.
In this episode of Don't Make Me Code, David and Steve have Liz Bennett in the studio. Liz is a Senior Software Engineer at Loggly, a SaaS based logging company. The three discuss the many benefits of dogfooding as well as some unique-to-developer-tools pitfalls of using your own product to build itself.
In this episode of Don't Make Me Code, David and Steve have Liz Bennett in the studio. Liz is a Senior Engineer at Loggly, a SaaS based logging company. The three discuss the many benefits of Dogfooding as well as some unique-to-developer-tools pitfalls of using your own product to build itself.
In this episode of Don't Make Me Code, David and Steve have Liz Bennett in the studio. Liz is a Senior Engineer at Loggly, a SaaS based logging company. The three discuss the many benefits of Dogfooding as well as some unique-to-developer-tools pitfalls of using your own product to build itself. The post Ep. #11, Dogfooding appeared first on Heavybit.
This week on BSDNow, we have an interview with Matthew Macy, who has some exciting news to share with us regarding the state of graphics This episode was brought to you by Headlines How the number of states affects pf's performance of FreeBSD (http://blog.cochard.me/2016/05/playing-with-freebsd-packet-filter.html) Our friend Olivier of FreeNAS and BSDRP fame has an interesting blog post this week detailing his unique issue with finding a firewall that can handle upwards of 4 million state table entries. He begins in the article with benchmarking the defaults, since without that we don't have a framework to compare the later results. All done on his Netgate RCC-VE 4860 (4 cores ATOM C2558, 8GB RAM) under FreeBSD 10.3. “We notice a little performance impact when we reach the default 10K state table limit: From 413Kpps with 128 states in-used, it lower to 372Kpps.” With the initial benchmarks done and graphed, he then starts the tuning process by adjusting the “net.pf.states_hashsize”sysctl, and then playing with the number of states for the firewall to keep. “For the next bench, the number of flow will be fixed for generating 9800 pf state entries, but I will try different value of pf.states_hashsize until the maximum allowed on my 8GB RAM server (still with the default max states of 10k):” Then he cranks it up to 4 million states “There is only 12% performance penalty between pf 128 pf states and 4 million pf states.” “With 10M state, pf performance lower to 362Kpps: Still only 12% lower performance than with only 128 states” He then looks at what this does of pfsync, the protocol to sync the state table between two redundant pf firewalls Conclusions: There need to be a linear relationship between the pf hard-limit of states and the pf.stateshashsize; RAM needed for pf.stateshashsize = pf.stateshashsize * 80 Byte and pf.stateshashsize should be a power of 2 (from the manual page); Even small hardware can manage large number of sessions (it's a matter of RAM), but under too lot's of pressure pfsync will suffer. Introducing the BCHS Stack = BSD, C, httpd, SQLite (http://www.learnbchs.org/) Pronounced Beaches “It's a hipster-free, open source software stack for web applications” “Don't just write C. Write portable and secure C.” “Get to know your security tools. OpenBSD has systrace(4) and pledge(2). FreeBSD has capsicum(4).” “Statically scan your binary with LLVM” and “Run your application under valgrind” “Don't forget: BSD is a community of professionals. Go to conferences (EuroBSDCon, AsiaBSDCon, BSDCan, etc.)” This seems like a really interesting project, we'll have to get Kristaps Dzonsons back on the show to talk about it *** Installing OpenBSD's httpd server, MariaDB, PHP 5.6 on OpenBSD 5.9 (https://www.rootbsd.net/kb/339/Installing-OpenBSDandsharp039s-httpd-server-MariaDB-PHP-56-on-OpenBSD-59.html) Looking to deploy your next web-stack on OpenBSD 5.9? If so this next article from rootbsd.net is for you. Specifically it will walk you through the process of getting OpenBSD's own httpd server up and running, followed by MariaDB and PHP 5.6. Most of the setup is pretty straight-forward, the httpd syntax may be different to you, if this is your first time trying it out. Once the various packages are installed / configured, the rest of the tutorial will be easy, walking you through the standard hello world PHP script, and enabling the services to run at reboot. A good article for those wanting to start hosting PHP/DB content (wordpress anyone?) on your OpenBSD system. *** The infrastructure behind Varnish (https://www.varnish-cache.org/news/20160425_website.html) Dogfooding. It's a term you hear often in the software community, which essentially means to “Run your own stuff”. Today we have an article by PKH over at varnish-cache, talking about what that means to them. Specifically, they recently went through a website upgrade, which will enable them to run more of their own stuff. He has a great quote on what OS they use:“So, dogfood: Obviously FreeBSD. Apart from the obvious reason that I wrote a lot of FreeBSD and can get world-class support by bugging my buddies about it, there are two equally serious reasons for the Varnish Project to run on FreeBSD: Dogfood and jails.Varnish Cache is not “software for Linux”, it is software for any competent UNIX-like operating system, and FreeBSD is our primary “keep us honest about this” platform.“ He then goes through the process of explaining how they would setup a new Varnish-cache website, or upgrade it. All together a great read, and if you are one of the admin-types, you really should pay attention to how they build from the ground up. Some valuable knowledge here which every admin should try to replicate. I can not reiterate the value of having your config files in a private source control repo strongly enough The biggest take-away is: “And by doing it this way, I know it will work next time also.” *** Interview - Matt Macy - mmacy@nextbsd.org (mailto:mmacy@nextbsd.org)Graphics Stack Update (https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-x11/2016-May/017560.html) News Roundup Followup on packaging base with pkg(8) (https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-pkgbase/2016-May/000238.html) In spite of the heroic last minute effort by a team of contributors, pkg'd base will not be ready in time for FreeBSD 11.0 There are just too many issues that were discovered during testing The plan is to continue using freebsd-update in the meantime, and introduce a pkg based upgrade mechanism in FreeBSD 11.1 With the new support model for the FreeBSD 11 branch, 11.1 may come sooner than with previous major releases *** FreeBSD Core Election (https://www.freebsd.org/internal/bylaws.html) It is time once again for the FreeBSD Core Election Application period begins: Wednesday, 18 May 2016 at 18:00:00 UTC Application period ends: Wednesday, 25 May 2016 at 18:00:00 UTC Voting begins: Wednesday, 25 May 2016 at 18:00:00 UTC Voting ends: Wednesday, 22 June 2016 at 18:00:00 UTC Results announced Wednesday, 29 June 2016 New core team takes office: Wednesday, 6 July 2016 As of the time I was writing these notes, 3 hours before the application deadline, the candidates are: Allan Jude: Filling in the potholes Marcelo Araujo: We are not vampires, but we need new blood. Baptiste Daroussin (incumbent): Keep on improving Benedict Reuschling: Learn and Teach Benno Rice: Revitalising The Community Devin Teske: Here to help Ed Maste (incumbent): FreeBSD is people George V. Neville-Neil (incumbent): There is much to do… Hiroki Sato (incumbent): Keep up with our good community and technical strength John Baldwin: Ready to work Juli Mallett: Caring for community. Kris Moore: User-Focused Mathieu Arnold: Someone ask for fresh blood ? Ollivier Robert: Caring for the project and you, its developers The deadline for applications is around the time we finish recording the live show We welcome any of the candidates to schedule an interview in the next few weeks. We will make an attempt to hunt many of them down at BSDCan as well. *** Wayland/Weston with XWayland works on DragonFly (http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/users/2016-May/249620.html) We haven't talked a lot about Wayland on BSD recently (or much at all), but today we have a post from Peter to the dragonfly mailing list, detailing his experience with it. Specifically he talks about getting XWayland working, which provides the compat bits for native X applications to run on WayLand displays. So far on the working list of apps: “gtk3: gedit nautilus evince xfce4: - xfce4-terminal - atril firefox spyder scilab” A pretty impressive list, although he said “chrome” failed with a seg-fault This is something I'm personally interested in. Now with the newer DRM bits landing in FreeBSD, perhaps it's time for some further looking into Wayland. Broadcom WiFi driver update (http://adrianchadd.blogspot.ca/2016/05/updating-broadcom-softmac-driver-bwn-or.html) In this blog post Adrian Chadd talks about his recent work on the bwn(4) driver for Broadcom WiFi chips This work has added support for a number of older 802.11g chips, including the one from 2009-era Macbooks Work is ongoing, and the hope is to add 802.11n and 5ghz support as well Adrian is mentoring a number of developers working on embedded or wifi related things, to try to increase the projects bandwidth in those areas If you are interested in driver development, or wifi internals, the blog post has lots of interesting details and covers the story of Adrian's recent adventures in bringing the drivers up *** Beastie Bits The Design of the NetBSD I/O Subsystems (2002) (http://arxiv.org/abs/1605.05810) ZFS, BTRFS, XFS, EXT4 and LVM with KVM – a storage performance comparison (http://www.ilsistemista.net/index.php/virtualization/47-zfs-btrfs-xfs-ext4-and-lvm-with-kvm-a-storage-performance-comparison.html?print=true) Swift added to FreeBSD Ports (http://www.freshports.org/lang/swift/) misc@openbsd: 'NSA addition to ifconfig' (http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=146391388912602&w=2) Papers We Love: Memory by the Slab: The Tale of Bonwick's Slab Allocator (http://paperswelove.org/2015/video/ryan-zezeski-memory-by-the-slab/) Feedback/Questions Lars - Poudriere (http://pastebin.com/HRRyfxev) Warren - .NET (http://pastebin.com/fESV1egk) Eddy - Sys Init (http://pastebin.com/kQecpA1X) Tim - ZFS Resources (http://pastebin.com/5096cGXr) Morgan - Ports and Kernel (http://pastebin.com/rYr1CDcV) ***
上杉周作さんと、Nexus 5X, Steve Jobs, Soylent, Blue Apron などについて話しました。 Show Notes Rogue Amoeba | Soundflower Nexus 5X - Google Nexus 5X Teardown - iFixit Things for iPhone and iPod touch Speakers - Chromecast Chromecast - Spotify Sony SRS-X77 Steve Jobs (2015) Aaron Sorkin blasts Tim Cook for calling Steve Jobs movie 'opportunistic' Steve Wozniak: Steve Jobs film is 'unlike any other movie' Soylent.com - Free your body Soylent Green Soylent: How I Ate No Food For 30 Days Blue Apron
What is dogfooding, and why do teachers need it? In the Season 1 finale, we explore the essential practice of doing your own assignments -- to find and fix problems -- before giving them to students.
In this episode we sit down with Grant Holliday and talk about how Microsoft uses Team Foundation Server internally. For feedback contact radiotfs@gmail.com or visit http://www.radiotfs.com
In this episode we sit down with Grant Holliday and talk about how Microsoft uses Team Foundation Server internally. For feedback contact radiotfs@gmail.com or visit http://www.radiotfs.com
> Larry Interviews Stephanie Saad In this episode we talk with Stephanie Saad, a group program manager with Microsoft. Stephanie talks about how Microsoft is already using many of the new features of Team Foundation Server that were announced at PDC. Show Notes Visual Studio 2010 Talks are available at the MicrosoftPDC.com MSDN Developer Conference registration is open. Download / Listen to the Show http://thirstydeveloper.com/shows/TD041.mp3 A Blog you should Know Dave's Pick: Steve Marx Larry's Pick: Engineering Windows 7 Ways to connect with your hosts: Dave Bost: Blog, Twitter Feed, Facebook Profile, GamerTag Larry Clarkin: Blog, Twitter Feed, Facebook Profile, GamerTag
In this episode we hang with Philip Thomas, he shares an inspiring story about how his first failed startup gave him the learnings needed to launch Moonlight, which is bootstrapped and rapidly growing.We discuss many interesting topics with Philip including:when to quit working on an idea, and move onthe importance of getting to know your early users how to validate your idea with data before building anythingways to start a software business and get revenue, before writing codethe importance of experimenting with different pricing modelsand much more!Extra Extra - go deeper on topics from this episodePricing and rake strategies for marketplaces - Bill Gurley, legendary VC @ Benchmark, published this excellent piece on how to approach pricing as a marketplace. My last startup was a marketplace, I would reference this often when modeling different pricing strategies. It's very tricky to keep your rake low to reduce supply-side friction, while also maintaining favorable unit economics to acquire both the supply and demand sides of your marketplace. Bill knows marketplaces very well given years of experience in the space, he was really early in cos like eBay, Uber, and others. Great book about Bill and the founding of Benchmark, eBoys.Remote work is the new LaCroix in 2019 - let that one sink in... companies are becoming more and more comfortable hiring remote workers. This is what allows for products like Moonlight to thrive. Here's a list of 900+ Startups that are hiring remotely.Notable MentionsStripe (1:40) - credit card processor for internet productsOpenDNS (2:20) - where Philip started engineering, they provide consumers with safer, faster, and more reliable internet in their homes. (acquired by Cisco in 2015)Y-Combinator (2:50) - the most prestigious startup incubator in the worldSquarespace (7:40) - modern no-code website builderTypeform (7:45) - the future of web forms and surveysZappier (9:25) - allows you to connect and automate work-flows between popular internet apps (awesome tool)Calendly (10:25) - a tool for scheduling meetings to your G-Cal, I use this regularly to avoid back/forth email schedulingPaid Labs (11:28) - invoicing tool, acquired by Auction MobilityStripe Invoicing (11:30) - Stripe has an awesome suite of tools for end-to-end payment management. For invoicing specifically, hit the link and scroll down to the "Modern invoice made easy" sectionPayable.com (11:40) - nifty tool for paying contractors, it manages all of the tax paperwork (W-9's and 1099's)Dogfooding concept (12:12) - it's a concept that refers to teams that use their own products to do business. There have been multiple references to this concept from major cos like Microsoft and Amazon. Hit the link for more details and referencesStripe Connect(13:00) - this is Stripe's tool for managing the flow of cash for marketplaces. It makes it easy for platforms to take payments and manage pass-through funds to vendors on a marketplace. (think Uber and drivers... you pay Uber, then Uber pays drivers and takes a cut)Lean Startup (14:08) - a product development methodology (and book) that focuses on rapid prototyping and constant product iteration with the goal to capture learnings cheap, fast, and oftenHigh Growth Handbook (19:35) - a book written by legendary angel investor and executive, Elad Gil about the common challenges the best high-growth companies have encountered and overcame to be successfulProduct Hunt (25:40) - a daily list of new products around the webShow HN (25:42) - a way to share something you've made with the hacker news communityIndie VC & Permissionless Entrepreneurship (27:00) - Indie VC is a venture capital firm that has spearheaded a new type of deal structure for startups. Instead of giving up huge chunks of equity in exchange for an investment, you can pay returns with your companies revenueIt's with tons of love ❤️ that I ask you... if you find this interesting at all and want to support this project, please pass this along to a few friends by forwarding this email or text them a link to the podcast. Thank you and enjoy!
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