Podcasts about google maps api

Should Viewers Be Able to Book Their Own Viewings? In this episode, we're tackling a surprisingly controversial topic in the UK property market; should your clients be able to book their own viewings? Estate agent and tech expert Ian Preston shares his insights on how technology is reshaping the way we handle viewings and why it's time to rethink the traditional approach. While many estate agents still believe in the “personal touch,” where negotiators pre qualify clients before they view properties, Ian argues that consumers are increasingly demanding more self service options. With over 50% of lettings bookings and 40% of sales viewings now booked online, it's clear that the market is shifting. The real challenge isn't about whether to use technology, it's about changing the mindset of agents. With the right systems in place, such as affordability checks and smart scheduling, self bookings can reduce friction and save agents valuable time. Plus, tech solutions like Google Maps API and zero carbon viewings are making the process more efficient and eco friendly. Want to learn more about how embracing tech can benefit your business? Listen now and share your thoughts in the comments.

איך להטמיע מפת Google עם Google My Business והביקורות באתר וורדפרס

How to Embed a Google Map with Your Google Business Location and Reviews on Your Websitehttps://itayverchik.com/embed-google-business-map/Want to display your Google Business location and real-time customer reviews on your website?In this tutorial, you'll learn how to embed a Google Map featuring your business location and show Google reviews dynamically – no coding required!How to embed a simple Google Map on your website.How to use Google Maps API for a dynamic, customizable map.How to display Google Business reviews on your site.Tips for enhancing user experience with maps and reviews.Method 1: Simple Google Map Embed (No API Required)Best for quickly adding a static business location map.Steps:Go to Google Maps.Search for your business name as listed on Google My Business.Click “Share” > “Embed a map”.Copy the generated iframe code.Paste it into your website's HTML or Elementor/WordPress page.Pro Tips for Enhancing User ExperienceCustomize the map design to match your website branding.Add a direct link to Google Maps so users can get directions easily.Show only high-rated reviews by filtering reviews above 4 stars.Encourage customers to leave reviews by adding a CTA like “Click here to review our business!”.Subscribe for more tutorials on SEO, Google My Business, and website optimization!Don't miss more tutorials on the channel:https://www.youtube.com/c/ItayVerchik?sub_confirmation=1To Sign Up For The Keywords Tracking System:https://say-v.com/Join now the community of Webmasters and SEO Marketers completely free:https://www.facebook.com/groups/itayverchikTo purchase Elementor Pro, the world's best WordPress page designer:https://trk.elementor.com/2500Don't Have A Web Hosting Account Yet Or Are You Just Not Satisfied With Your Existing Hosting?Get A 25% Discount For Cloudways Web Hosting For The First 3 Months:https://platform.cloudways.com/signup?id=314159&coupon=VERCHIK

Today we welcome Nenad Conic of Maksimer, to discuss some of the challenges and solutions in WooCommerce e-commerce projects. Maksimer, which has been at the forefront of WordPress and WooCommerce-based e-commerce solutions since its founding in 2009, has been creating large-scale and complex online stores. Nenad gets into the work required to operate a WooCommerce store with over 1.2 million products, and talks about how they developed a specialised platform for online medication management, utilising WooCommerce for subscription services within the constraints of healthcare regulations. The episode also gets into an ambitious endeavour where Maksimer used WooCommerce Bookings to craft a booking system for a camping site website, integrating a React application with Google Maps API to enhance the user experience. It's a really great implementation and shows how, with the right knowledge, Woo can be used for unconventional e-commerce scenarios. It's a fascinating discussion, showing what Woo is capable of if you've got the time, budget, expertise to hire a team like Maksimer. Good food for thought concerning the future of e-commerce in WordPress.

In this episode of DevCast, the brilliant minds from Portage Bay Solutions join our ever-curious host, Dan Smiley, for a deep dive into the synergies of FileMaker and JavaScript. We'll showcase the versatility and enhancements possible with the Carafe Kitchen tool, allowing for a seamless integration experience. Plus, witness the magic of integrating the Google Maps API, demonstrating functionalities in FileMaker that were once thought to be beyond reach. Tune in to discover how you can push the boundaries of what's possible in FileMaker with a touch of JavaScript ingenuity!

It was great to see John and Kate from Portage Bay Solutions at Clean Pacific with their new ICS-213RR Resource Request application. They have been helping me with custom ICS solutions since 2012. In this great episode of The Tactics Meeting, we discuss developing custom applications, creating maps using the Google Maps API, adding text messaging to a 201 app, and much more. If you're a nerd like me, you will love it. If you are not a nerd, you will want to be.

Episode 30 of the Shiny Developer Series reveals just how the power of open source software can be used to provide meaningful improvement to our daily lives. In the first of a two-part series, chief data scientist Mike Thomas reveals the motivation behind his brilliant COVID-19 test locator Shiny application, empowering a local community in Connecticut to efficiently report and track availability of test kits in a huge time of need. After a tour of the application interface, Mike shares his favorite techniques to bring an efficient user experience and the backend integrations with APIs to bring production-grade features to life.Resources mentioned in the episodeCOVID-19 At-Home Test Spotter (App) - ketchbrookanalytics.shinyapps.io/covid_test_spotterCOVID-19 At-Home Test Spotter (Code) - github.com/ketchbrookanalytics/covid_test_spotterApp blog post - www.ketchbrookanalytics.com/post/ketchbrook-analytics-launches-website-to-help-connecticut-residents-find-covid-19-test-kitsOlivia Adams' interview with CNN - www.cnn.com/videos/health/2021/02/08/software-developer-builds-simple-massachusetts-covid-19-vaccine-website-olivia-adams-intv-newday-vpx.cnnR Packages by Hadley Wickham and Jenny Bryan - r-pkgs.org{googleWay} Shiny vignette - symbolixau.github.io/googleway/articles/googleway-vignette.html#shinyEpisode Timestamps00:00:00 Episode Introduction 00:01:31 Mike's introductiona and journey with R & Shiny 00:07:20 Data science consulting and Ketchbrook Analytics 00:11:40 Olivia Adams' inspiring story 00:17:40 Demo of Mike's COVID-19 At-Home Test Spotter App 00:31:55 App code introduction 00:32:10 googleway package integrating the Google Maps API 00:36:25 Pulling addresses from map searches 00:41:10 Using MongoDB for records collection 00:43:15 bslib to simulate the multi-page app experience 00:46:20 Episode wrapup shinydevseries::session_info()

Episode 30 of the Shiny Developer Series reveals just how the power of open source software can be used to provide meaningful improvement to our daily lives. In the first of a two-part series, chief data scientist Mike Thomas reveals the motivation behind his brilliant COVID-19 test locator Shiny application, empowering a local community in Connecticut to efficiently report and track availability of test kits in a huge time of need. After a tour of the application interface, Mike shares his favorite techniques to bring an efficient user experience and the backend integrations with APIs to bring production-grade features to life. Resources mentioned in the episode COVID-19 At-Home Test Spotter (App) - ketchbrookanalytics.shinyapps.io/covidtestspotter (https://ketchbrookanalytics.shinyapps.io/covid_test_spotter/) COVID-19 At-Home Test Spotter (Code) - github.com/ketchbrookanalytics/covidtestspotter (https://github.com/ketchbrookanalytics/covid_test_spotter) App blog post - www.ketchbrookanalytics.com/post/ketchbrook-analytics-launches-website-to-help-connecticut-residents-find-covid-19-test-kits (https://www.ketchbrookanalytics.com/post/ketchbrook-analytics-launches-website-to-help-connecticut-residents-find-covid-19-test-kits) Olivia Adams' interview with CNN - www.cnn.com/videos/health/2021/02/08/software-developer-builds-simple-massachusetts-covid-19-vaccine-website-olivia-adams-intv-newday-vpx.cnn (https://www.cnn.com/videos/health/2021/02/08/software-developer-builds-simple-massachusetts-covid-19-vaccine-website-olivia-adams-intv-newday-vpx.cnn) R Packages by Hadley Wickham and Jenny Bryan - r-pkgs.org (https://r-pkgs.org/) {googleWay} Shiny vignette - symbolixau.github.io/googleway/articles/googleway-vignette.html#shiny (https://symbolixau.github.io/googleway/articles/googleway-vignette.html#shiny) Episode Timestamps 00:00:00 (https://youtube.com/watch?v=21MnLDuRbS8&t=0s) Episode Introduction 00:01:31 (https://youtube.com/watch?v=21MnLDuRbS8&t=91s) Mike's introductiona and journey with R & Shiny 00:07:20 (https://youtube.com/watch?v=21MnLDuRbS8&t=440s) Data science consulting and Ketchbrook Analytics 00:11:40 (https://youtube.com/watch?v=21MnLDuRbS8&t=700s) Olivia Adams' inspiring story 00:17:40 (https://youtube.com/watch?v=21MnLDuRbS8&t=1060s) Demo of Mike's COVID-19 At-Home Test Spotter App 00:31:55 (https://youtube.com/watch?v=21MnLDuRbS8&t=1915s) App code introduction 00:32:10 (https://youtube.com/watch?v=21MnLDuRbS8&t=1930s) googleway package integrating the Google Maps API 00:36:25 (https://youtube.com/watch?v=21MnLDuRbS8&t=2185s) Pulling addresses from map searches 00:41:10 (https://youtube.com/watch?v=21MnLDuRbS8&t=2470s) Using MongoDB for records collection 00:43:15 (https://youtube.com/watch?v=21MnLDuRbS8&t=2595s) bslib to simulate the multi-page app experience 00:46:20 (https://youtube.com/watch?v=21MnLDuRbS8&t=2780s) Episode wrapup shinydevseries::session_info()

Un resumen rápido y sencillo de lo que es una REST API, varios ejemplos y consejos para crear la tuya propia.- Google Maps API: https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation- Public APIs: https://github.com/public-apis/public-apismail: info@joantolos.comSwag: http://store.joantolos.comOfficial web: http://www.joantolos.comApple podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/es/podcast/nada-nuevo-bajo-el-sol/id1563220961Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6BcHhm3wO3cvSIMZL6ssG8

第65回 Podcast 11月16日(月) 1. 番組紹介 このポッドキャストは、三十路のおっさんと二十代の若者エンジニアが 雑談ベースで話すポッドキャストです。 2. 自己紹介 マーク(tetuo41) 36歳男性。既婚。一児の父です。 須貝(sugaishun) 38歳男性。既婚。一児の父です。 駿河(snowlong) 在宅社長 3. 話したこと オープニング 駿河さんの帰省話 懐かしの学習デスク Apple Silicon PS5 『鬼滅の刃』を読んだ 『鬼滅の刃』完結は英断。無残に引き延ばされなくてよかったと断言できる理由 【５金スペシャル映画特集Part2】『鬼滅の刃』が突きつける人間の本来あるべき姿とは 『映画 パウ・パトロール カーレース大作戦 GO! GO!』予告 鬼滅の刃 シーズン1 コンサータ飲むのやめた コンサータの処方に関して 楽天ポイントでSuicaをチャージできるようになる マークさんが米倉涼子のモノマネをする エンディング Slackで雑談してポッドキャスト本編がネタ切れ問題 ファイザーのCEO、世界を救うコロナワクチン発表と同時に保有株の60％を売り抜けるナイストレード ワクチン開発期待で「巣ごもり株」が急落、Zoomは15％安に Googleフォト、無料で写真を無制限アップロードできるサービスを来年6月に廃止。ただしPixelユーザーは引き続き利用可能 無制限のストレージを利用できたG SuiteのサービスがGoogle Workspaceへの移行で廃止される Google Maps APIの値上げ具合がヤバい！実質10～100倍の値上げ！個人で採算を得るのは厳しい！？[Google Maps Platform] Yarukinai.fmファンクラブ

第65回 Podcast 11月16日(月) 1. 番組紹介 このポッドキャストは、三十路のおっさんと二十代の若者エンジニアが 雑談ベースで話すポッドキャストです。 2. 自己紹介 マーク(tetuo41) 36歳男性。既婚。一児の父です。 須貝(sugaishun) 38歳男性。既婚。一児の父です。 駿河(snowlong) 在宅社長 3. 話したこと オープニング 駿河さんの帰省話 懐かしの学習デスク Apple Silicon PS5 『鬼滅の刃』を読んだ 『鬼滅の刃』完結は英断。無残に引き延ばされなくてよかったと断言できる理由 【５金スペシャル映画特集Part2】『鬼滅の刃』が突きつける人間の本来あるべき姿とは 『映画 パウ・パトロール カーレース大作戦 GO! GO!』予告 鬼滅の刃 シーズン1 コンサータ飲むのやめた コンサータの処方に関して 楽天ポイントでSuicaをチャージできるようになる マークさんが米倉涼子のモノマネをする エンディング Slackで雑談してポッドキャスト本編がネタ切れ問題 ファイザーのCEO、世界を救うコロナワクチン発表と同時に保有株の60％を売り抜けるナイストレード ワクチン開発期待で「巣ごもり株」が急落、Zoomは15％安に Googleフォト、無料で写真を無制限アップロードできるサービスを来年6月に廃止。ただしPixelユーザーは引き続き利用可能 無制限のストレージを利用できたG SuiteのサービスがGoogle Workspaceへの移行で廃止される Google Maps APIの値上げ具合がヤバい！実質10～100倍の値上げ！個人で採算を得るのは厳しい！？[Google Maps Platform] Yarukinai.fmファンクラブ

For this forty-sixth episode, I talked to Steven Benson, Founder and CEO of Badger Maps, a leading mapping platform and route planning app for field sales people. After studying geography and doing an MBA, Steven spent his whole career in field sales at companies like IBM and HP and then went on to sell the Google Maps API to businesses. Being exposed to a lot of mapping problems, he figured there was a space in the market for a mapping product for field sales people. That's when Badger Maps was born. Almost 9 years later, Steven now leads a bootstrapped business with a team of 75 people. We talk about the power of podcasting, studying languages, doing three-hour bike rides on a stationary bike, and why he might move his company out of the Valley.

Published Aug 15, 2016 Thanks for joining us for the 41st instalment of Get Fact Up! Wow - 41 episodes. Today we interrupt this program for some important announcements. Google Maps Updates Breaks Websites Worldwide! And Instagram Shamelessly takes on Snapchat. How do they do that you ask? Find out what has Snapchats authorities so up in arms. And just quickly we thought we'd add in that we love the new Facebook Update to their Business Page layout - We'll show you a few pics! Please, grab your coffee and enjoy the 41st week running of Get Fact Up! Subscribe to our Get Fact Up series for weekly updates: https://www.memedia.com.au/get-fact-up Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/memedia Join us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/memedia Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/me_media ______________________________________________________________ GOOGLE MAPS UPDATES BREAK WEBSITES WORLDWIDE AND INSTAGRAM TAKES ON SNAPCHAT | GET FACT UP #41 - Good day, Australia. I'm Chris Hogan, founder and CEO of MeMedia. It's time to Get Fact Up. Today we interrupt this program for some important announcements. A Google Map update breaks websites worldwide, and Instagram shamelessly takes on Snapchat. In a recent Google Maps API update to version 3.3.1, many websites worldwide started breaking with their embedded maps plugins, which meant some rather ugly and unhelpful error messages were appearing on websites worldwide. Pretty sure this is where I'm supposed to be, but doesn't look right. Google have buried some important information in their developer's blog about this Maps update and how you might be affected in the not too distant future. When you're re-embedding your Maps API, you may need to understand that it will only be free if your page is seeing 25,000 visits or less per day. That is for the map views on that page. Anything more than that, and you could be up for paying for the Google Maps API service. Yoast have come out with a great article which helps every Wordpress user understand why it is your maps may have broken and how to fix it. And if all this is too confusing for you, well, you know we're here to help. Now let's jump onto Instagram. This August, Instagram introduces Instagram Stories, a new feature that allows you to share everything that's happened in your day, and not just the photos that you want to appear in your profile. You can bring your story to life in new ways with text and drawing tools. The photos, videos will appear after 24 hours and won't appear on your profile, grid, or in feed. You'll see stories from people you know in a bar at the top of your feed from your best friends to your favorite popular accounts. When there's something new to see, their profile photo will have a colorful ring around it. You can even choose to feature a particular part of your story by posting it on your profile. Instagram Stories will be rolling out globally on the iOS and Android platforms over the next few weeks. Wow, that was such a cool idea, Instagram! In fact, I think we may have seen that before. Oh yeah! It's just like Snapchat. You guessed it. And they've received a bit of backlash about it, too. A lot of people are saying, "Take it down! "Take if back!" We'll, we at MeMedia actually applaud Instagram for having a crack and integrating a new feature into a platform that people are already very familiar with. That's actually gonna make a huge difference to the amount of users they keep on their platform. Instead of them having to feel like they need to experience this Snapchat-like feature on Snapchat, they can experience it on a platform they're already familiar with. And above all, the navigation and usability is actually a little bit better on Instagram according to the video that we've just shown. And also, CEO of Instagram, Kevin Systrom actually gave Snapchat all the credit for the idea publicly in one of his posts. Good on you, Instagram, and we'll see what happens when Instagram Stories come to you. And just quickly, we thought we'd jump onto Facebook, where they've updated their business page layout, which, we had to say, we absolutely love. It's far more user friendly for business page managers, and navigating the business page while you're not in business manager mode is so great as well. What up, Facebook? I think you've made usability much easier for our admin teams. Well, that's all we got time for this week, Australia. Thanks very much for listening to Get Fact Up. We'll see you next week where we get back into our usual program and deliver some awesome marketing or web development advice just for you.

After dabbling with acting and music, Greg Downing found his true calling in all things photography related — and the world is a better place for it. His passion for the medium took him from home experiments with plaster casts and turntables to create panoramas of European landmarks to building a new HDRI camera for effects house Rhythm & Hues. At the same time, Greg has indulged his passion for documenting the wonders of the world with cutting-edge technology. He’s used gigapixel photography, photogrammetry, VR, HDRI, dome theaters and the Google Maps API to capture and display Yosemite’s El Capitan rock formation, Everest’s base camp and historic paintings in Chinese caves. In this podcast, Greg talks about these projects as well as his work with Björk in Iceland on her immersive VR album “Vulnicura” and his collaborations in the world of lightfields with technology pioneer Paul Debevec at Google.

Your favorite Marks Mirchandani and Mandel are back hosting this week to touch base with Angela Yu about recent updates in Google Maps. As Angela describes Google Maps at a high level, it is your window into the real world, with coverage of Earth’s land and oceans. Google works hard to keep that information updated with satellite pictures, street view Google vehicles, and even backpacks for hikers to record hard to reach areas. The Google Maps API makes it easy for developers to use Maps data in their own projects. It can be used for something as simple as showing location to something more complicated, for example showing the user specific things around them to help them make decisions. Game developers can create rich experiences by building real-world gaming situations with Maps and augmented reality. Using the Places API can display parks, government buildings, and other interesting places beyond streets. And the Routes API can expand the user experience by providing directions, tracking drivers in real time, etc. Maps and Google Cloud together work well with BigQuery to search huge amounts of data and visualize them on a map. In the future, Angela is particularly excited about how ridesharing apps will continue to use Maps and Routes to optimize their businesses. She also looks forward to more augmented reality projects beyond gaming, where data, directions, and more are overlaid on the physical world. Angela Yu Angela Yu is a developer advocate for Google Maps Platform. Throughout her career, she has geeked out on voice recognition, mobile app development, and IoT. You can find her trapped in escape rooms or on Twitter. Cool things of the week Google to acquire Looker blog New Translate API capabilities can help localization experts and global enterprises blog Google Cloud networking in depth: Cloud CDN blog Save money by stopping and starting Compute Engine instances on schedule blog An update on Sunday’s service disruption blog Interview Google Maps Platform site blog docs Google Maps Places site Google Maps Routes site Google Maps Treks site Visualizing data from Firebase on a Google Map site Google Maps Platform Codelabs site BigQuery site BigQuery Public Datasets docs Deck.GL site Google Maps SDK for Android Beta site Popular Antipodes on Google Maps site The True Size of countries site Google Maps on Github site Google Maps Client Libraries site StreetView Gallery site Earth Engine site xkcd: Map Projections site Beautiful data visualizations using deck.gl on Google Maps demo and docs Question of the week What is helm, and how do I use it? GCP Podcast Episode 50: Helm with Michelle Noorali and Matthew Butcher podcast Kubernetes Podcast podcast and twitter Kuberenetes twitter Where can you find us next? Angela will be at the Chrome Dev Summit. Mark Man will be at Tokyo Next. Mark Mirch will be customer filming for Stack Chat in NYC. Sound Effect Attribution “Striking a Match” by Nebulousflynn of Freesound.org “Bad Beep” by RICHERIandTV of Freesound.org “Correct” by Tristan_Lohengrin of Freesound.org “Spaceship Atmosphere 02” by RICHERIandTV of Freesound.org “At the jazz concert Crowd laugh.wav” by Ftom_woysky of Freesound.org

Guest: Dillon Kearns: @dillontkearns | GitHub | Incremental Elm In this episode, Dillon Kearns joins the show to talk about techniques for experimentation with Elm, making those experiments safe, the concept of mob programming, why you would want to experiment with Elm in the first place, and how you too can begin to experiment with Elm. Resources: Grant Maki's talk on experimenting in your team "Types Without Borders" by Dillon Kearns @ Elm Conf 2018 Dillon's Elm GraphQL library How Elm Code Tends Towards Simplicity by Dillon Kearns The CSS as ByteCode Talk by Richard Feldman This show was produced by Mandy Moore, aka @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. Transcript: CHARLES: Hello, everybody and welcome to The Frontside Podcast, Episode 114. My name is Charles Lowell. I'm a developer here at the Frontside. With me today as co-host on the show is David. Hello, David. DAVID: Hey, guys. CHARLES: David is also a developer here at Frontside and we are going to be talking about something that we've been talking, I guess a lot about recently and we're talking about Elm. I think we first started talking about this several years ago and then it kind of simmer down a little bit but recently, it's been top of tongue. With us to talk about Elm today is Dillon Kearns. Welcome Dillon. DILLON: Thank you so much for having me. CHARLES: I understand that you are a full time Elm consultant. You have a background as a Lean and Agile coach but have recently transitioned to doing Elm consulting full time. Now, what exactly does that mean in 2018 to be an Elm consultant. DILLON: Actually a lot of my motivation for getting into Elm consulting in the first place is I kind of realize that Elm to me is just an extension of the things that I was passionate about with Agile and software craftsmanship. I'm trying to help teams have a better experience with their code, make it more maintainable, make it easier to change, make it easier to drive things based on customer feedback and I really believe that Elm helps people do that. I used a lot of the background and experiences that I've had with Agile and Lean coaching and a lot of those same skills, in order to help organizations adopt Elm. One thing I've seen a lot of teams struggling with is trying out a lot of different frameworks. I've encountered teams that have spent months, very painfully trying out different frontend frameworks and having trouble coming to consensus about that. One of the things that I think really helps address that is having an experimental and iterative approach, that you can really use the scientific method to focus on learning, rather than getting it right the first time. I think that there's really a need to help teams through that process of introducing a new frontend framework like Elm, so that that's why I've gone into full time Elm consulting. CHARLES: That's an interesting process. It sounds like you really need to be constantly sending out spikes, doing research on whether it's Elm or some other technology to help you kind of bridge the chasm to the next generation. How do you actually do that as an organization? My guess, this kind of a question independent of Elm but maybe we can talk about how you see that play out in the context of Elm. DILLON: Right and actually, for any listeners interested in that question, I would really highly recommend Grant Maki's ElmConf talk from this year. He spoke about exactly that topic and it was at ElmConf that it's relevant whether your team is considering Elm or looking at other frameworks. I think that the key is you need to get good at experimenting in a way that's low risk and in a way that you can be constantly learning and seeing how these different technologies fit in your codebase and fit for your team. There's a quote that I really like from Woody Zuill. Have you guys heard of mob programming before? CHARLES: I heard of mob programming from a paper by Richard Garfield a long, long time ago, almost 20... I don't know if it's the same concept. DILLON: Yes. It gained a lot of momentum these days. Mob programming is essentially pair programming but with more people involved. I've really enjoyed that process actually. I think it's actually a great way to experiment with different technologies because you get all of the minds together and it's a very good way to kind of transfer knowledge and explore things together but Woody Zuill talks about mob programming and he likes to ask the question, "Why did we begin doing mob programming for the team at Hunter Industries that originally started mob programming?" People would give answers like, "Because it cuts out code review from the process because you have lots of eyeballs on it in real time," or, "Because it reduces bugs," or, "Because it gives you better quality code. It gives all the best ideas into the product in real time," and all those things are valid points that are really good benefits of mob programming. But he says those things may be true but actually, they're not why we tried mob programming. The reason we tried mob programming was because the team wanted to try it. That's a really important point. The team needs to be experimenting with things that they're passionate about and they need to be exploring things on their own terms. But with that said, another lesson from that story of kind of his team at Hunter Industries discovering mob programming is that the team didn't discover mob programming in a vacuum. Really, the team discovered mob programming because the team became really excellent at experimenting and evaluating those experiments and then, they like to talk about this phrase that Kent Beck coined, 'turn up the good.' When something is working well, we often focus on the negative things and trying to eliminate those things but what happens if we take the things that are working well and 'turn that dial up to 11.' CHARLES: Yeah, I love that. I remember in the kind of the original layout of extreme programming, talking about how I really just wanted to turn up all the things that were working for 11 or to 11, so testing, refactoring, incremental releases and things like that. DILLON: Exactly. CHARLES: I actually had one question that's maybe a little bit of a diversion. This is actually the first time I've heard of mob programming. It's definitely not the same sort of mob programming I learned about in Richard Garfield's paper. I think it was more referring to massively distributed open source in the form which is really kind of commonplace now that happens on GitHub. I think it's maybe, an obsolete definition of mob programming but how many people would be in a mob like two, three, four, five, six, seven, 10? DILLON: That's a great question. Really, the answer is of course, it depends. That's a consultant's favorite answer but it really does. My rule of thumb is I find it usually three people is a very nice size for a mob. I find that mobs tend towards around three or four people but that being said, it's important to note that mob programming is all about this idea that what is the true cost of programming. I think that often we look at programming as the act of writing code, initially and that's a very limited way of looking at coding. Because of course, 90% of our effort is spent maintaining code, making decisions around code, reproducing bugs, fixing bugs, communicating with customers about bugs -- bugs are extremely expensive -- the farther out they get, until eventually they get to the point of a customer discovering them, bugs are in extremely expensive part of software. If we can minimize bugs, that's very valuable. When you look at programming on this bigger scale and look at the bigger picture of programming, then you realize that you may be able to get one person to write the code faster but then, that person needs to code review it. That person needs to go and ask somebody question down the line when they don't have context because they weren't involved in the decision making. For example, maybe there's a UX person who doesn't have context on certain choices that were made, so there's a lot of churn, so you can kind of eliminate that churn by getting all the relevant people involved right away and that's the idea. In my experience with mob programming, it works really well to keep kind of a core of around three people. Sometimes, somebody goes up to have a conversation with somebody, take a break or answer somebody's question, maybe somebody from another team has a question that type of thing and so, the team can keep coding as a pair or whatever. But ultimately, the idea is that you get faster because you're building up this shared context and you're not spending as much time down the line answering questions, doing code reviews and things like that. CHARLES: Right. I see. DAVID: That kind of matches with my experience. Mob programming on previous teams, the way we had it set up is there was a regular mob programming chat session that the whole team was invited to but it was optional. You can just show up if you wanted to and really, that sort of made it so that there was a set of people who regularly attend -- three to five people in a session -- and they were the core group, essentially. DILLON: Right. That's another great point. Invitation is a powerful technique. If you're kind of mandating the people try an experiment or work in a certain way, ultimately it's much more powerful to let the team experiment on their own and follow their passion and they'll discover great things. It's about experimenting, rather than choosing specific experiments. While we're on this topic of kind of the real cost of coding, I think this is a good point to talk about this quality in Elm because, I think that this is one of the things that really motivates me to use Elm myself and introduce it to others is that, I think that Elm really get something about programming where there's a sort of superficial ease of certain techniques that Elm kind of goes beyond and says, "Actually, let's optimize for a different set of things that we think make code more maintainable and more delightful to work with in the long run." CHARLES: I wanted to also transition between, we were on a little diversions on mob programming but do you use mob programming as explicit technique for introducing Elm when a team is considering adopting it? DILLON: That's a fantastic question. I absolutely do. Of course, I honor the ways of working in a particular organization or team. I think that's important to do but I do strongly encourage using mobbing as a technique for knowledge sharing and when I'm on-site with a client, I find it extremely powerful as a technique for knowledge sharing and also, let's say you do an experiment, somebody is off in a corner and they're trying out Vue.js or they're trying out Elm or they're trying a particular coding technique. Then they come back to their team and they say, "Hey everybody, I tried this great thing," and now they have to spend this time convincing everybody and saying like, "Wait a minute. You didn't try this, you didn't try it that way. It wouldn't actually work in our context because of this." I think that it's very powerful to have everybody kind of involved in that process so that you can evaluate it together as a team. CHARLES: Because the thing is like, when you experience win or you experience fail, it's a very visceral feeling and that's the thing that sells you or turns you away. You can argue until you're blue in the face but words have a very limited capacity to convince, especially when compared with like physical and emotional feeling. It sounds like you can get everybody to have that shared experience, whether for the good or for the bad, you're going to arrive at a decision, orders of magnitude more quickly. They have to rely in conviction of that decision spread around the team. DILLON: Exactly. I think that hits the nail on the head and you say that we have this sort of skepticism of arguments from theoretical conversations, rather than 'show me the money,' but it's actually, try solving a real problem in this and that's exactly as it should be. I think that's one of the big antidote from this problem that I've seen in a lot of environments, where there's this analysis paralysis, especially with the state of the JavaScript ecosystem these days. I think that one of the keys to improving that situation is to get good at trying things, rather than theorizing about things. We have a tendency to want to theorize and when we do that, then we say, "Can it solve this problem? Can it solve this problem? Can it solve that problem?" You can talk about that until the cows come home but it doesn't get you anywhere and it doesn't really convince anybody of anything. The key is to find very small experiments and what I really recommend and what I'm dead focused on when I'm initially working with a client is getting something into production. Now, that doesn't mean that you need to have a road map for turning your entire application into Elm. In fact that's the whole point, is that you're not trying to do that. The point is you're trying to get as realistic of an experience as possible for what problems might occur if we do this? Will the team enjoy working with this language? Will it work well with our built pipeline? Will there be any unforeseen issues? You don't know until you actually try it, so you've got to try it and you've got to try it in tiny, tiny steps and low risk experiments. CHARLES: Right but you've got to try it for real. You don't want to try it with a TodoMVC. DILLON: Exactly. It needs to be meaningful, to really have a good understanding of what it's going to be like. CHARLES: I would say that I tend to agree but I've definitely encountered the counterargument and I also think this counterargument makes sense or perhaps where the pushback lies is if I'm constantly experimenting, then what I'm doing is I'm internally fragmenting my ecosystem and there is power in similarity. Any time you introduce something different, any time you introduce one fragment, you're introducing complexity -- a mental complexity -- like maybe I have to maintain my Elm app and I also have to have my Legacy... Or not Legacy, I've got my other JavaScript tool kit that does it in one way. Maybe I've got a couple of more because I've run these other experiments. I'm not saying that there is one way but there is power in uniformity. There is power in diversity. Where do you find the balance? DILLON: Those are all excellent points. To me, I think really the key is it's about the scientific method, you could say. The thing with the scientific method is that we often forget the last part. We get really good at hypothesizing about things. Sometimes people leave it at that, which we kind of just discussed. Sometimes, people go past the hypothesizing stage and they actually run the experiment and that's great. But then, the majority of people, if they get to that point, will forget to do the last step which is to evaluate the results. I think the key here is you need to be experimenting and this is what it means for it to be a low risk experiment. It means that you're not setting yourself off in a direction where you can't turn back. You want to set it up in such a way that you can turn away from it with minimal cost. One of the things that is really helpful for that is if you build a tiny, independent, little widget in your application, try building that in Elm. Some people will do that with a little sort of login badge in the corner of their application. One of the teams where I've introduced Elm at a Fortune 10 company, actually where we introduced Elm, we started out with just a tiny little table in one page and if we wanted to back that out, it would have been trivially easy but we decided that we wanted to go in further and invest more. CHARLES: That makes a lot of sense. Effectively, you need to have a Plan B. Don't sync all of the available time that you have to invest in an experiment. Make sure that you have a Plan B and if you need to do this widget or this table in Angular or React or Ember or whatever, you are thinking about that -- how would that work. DILLON: Exactly and the thing with experiments is the purpose of an experiment is not to build something. It's to learn. I really like this kind of ethos of lean startup, which I think is really getting much more into the mainstream in the software industry, which is a wonderful thing. The idea of lean startup, the kind of core concept is this idea of validated learning. Basically, in an environment where there's uncertainty, which is pretty much most of the things you're doing in software, the main goal is you're not shipping a product like you would be if you're trying to manufacture cars as quickly as possible. The main thing that you're producing is what they call 'validated learning' and so, you want to minimize the amount of time it takes to validate or invalidate your assumptions about something and then, you want to make it as cheap as possible to move on from that. CHARLES: I like that. So if you're going to organize your development process around this principle or maybe not organize it but integrate it into development process, how do you know that you're conducting a healthy number of experiments, versus I may be conducting too many experiments? Is there a metric that you can look at? We need to have this many experiments running at all times or this is just too many or something else. DILLON: That's a really interesting question. I think I would tend to think about that more again, as looking at the way the experiments are run, rather than 'are there too many experiments?' That's just not a problem that I've seen there being too many experiments. The pain that we tend to really see in environments where experiments are hurting teams is the way the experiments are being done. It's hard to backtrack from those experiments and as you were saying before, you kind of put yourself down this path where you can't walk it back and you create this sort of rift in the way the code is being written, which makes it more difficult to work in that codebase. The thing with experiments is they can have really big payoff. Now, you want to make sure that you're not just going in and picking up every shiny object that you see. One thing that can keep you honest with that is if you're kind of coming up with a hypothesis before you start. If you're saying, "This is the value to our business and to our team if we attempt this thing and this is what will prove that it seems to have that value and this is what will tell us, 'Actually, it doesn't have that value and we should drop it and cut our losses.'" CHARLES: That's a great heuristic. As you're saying and imagining how that might have saved my bacon in the past because I've definitely made the mistake of playing with too many shiny objects and picking things because I didn't fully evaluate what I thought the value. I was explicit with myself about what is the value that is going to bring to this project or this business. I have a theory about it but I am not thinking what is my hypothesis and how am I going to validate or invalidate? I'm thinking, I've got a short term pain that I'm experiencing and I'm grasping for this thing, which I think will solve it and I'm not properly evaluating how it's going to affect me long term. DILLON: Right and that could be a great team practice to play around with is often, teams will kind of come up with action items out of retrospectives. One thing that I think can be really beneficial for teams is to kind of flip that notion of doing action items which again, it's really just doing the middle part of the experiment where you're conducting the test but you cut out the hypothesis part and the evaluation part. Try to bring that into your team's retrospective and try to have explicit hypotheses in the retrospectives and then, in the next retrospective, evaluate the results. CHARLES: All right. I will definitely keep that in mind but this feels like a fresh take on kind of how you manage software development that I haven't encountered too much, being more scientific about it. It sounds like science-oriented development. DILLON: Right. DAVID: I like that. DILLON: There are a lot of buzzwords these days in software development, in general and it's really becoming a problem, I think in the Agile community but really, what it boils down to is these basic elements and basing decisions on feedback is one of those fundamental unit. You can call the scientific method, you can call it lean startup and validated learning, you can call it agile, you can call it whatever you want but ultimately, you need to be basing things on feedback. I think of it almost like our nerves. There's actually a disorder that some people have, which can be fatal, which is that their nerves don't tell them when they're feeling pain. I think this is a great analogy for software because that can happen to companies too. They don't feel the pain of certain decisions not landing well. Because they're not getting feedback from users, they're not getting feedback from metrics and recording, they're not getting feedback from doing that final evaluation step of their experiments, so when you fall on the ground, a small cut could be extremely harmful because you don't know the damage it's doing to you. CHARLES: I think that is a good analogy. One of the things that I'm curious about is we've been discussing a lot of techniques for experimentation and how you can integrate that into your process and how you can make your experiments safe, so let's talk a little bit about -- first of all, two things -- why would I want to experiment with Elm in the first place? Because ultimately, that's why we're here and why we're having this conversation. What's compelling about it that would make me want to experiment? And then how can I begin to experiment with Elm? DILLON: I actually just published a blog post yesterday. It's called 'How Elm Code Tends Towards Simplicity.' To your question of why would a team consider Elm, I kind of talk a little bit in this blog post about a case study at a Fortune 10 company where I introduced Elm to a few of the teams there. One of the teams there, we had actually seen an Angular project that they had worked on and often, in an enterprise environment, you have projects moving from one team to another. I actually had my hands on this Angular project. It kind of moved over to another team and we were experiencing some major pain trying to make changes in this codebase. Even making the simplest change, we were finding that there were a lot of bugs that would be introduced because there's some global variable. There's some implicit state. Sometimes, it was even reaching in and tweaking the DOM and really, the topic of conversation at our team lunches was how afraid we were to touch this codebase. Fast forward a few months and this team was asking my advice on picking a new frontend framework and I introduced them to Elm. They took a run with it and it was pretty remarkable to see this same team that had really struggled with AngularJS and they didn't really have a strong sense of what were the best practices. They weren't getting any guidance from the framework itself and the tooling around it and they actually loved the experience of working with Elm because they were saying, "This is amazing. Maybe it takes a little time to figure out how to solve a particular problem on Elm but once we do, we know that we've done it in a solid way." One of the things that I think is most powerful about Elm is that it keeps you from shooting yourself in the foot. I think that's a really good headline kind of summary of what I love about Elm. For example, tweaking the DOM. Now, it might seem like a pretty obvious thing that we just won't tweak the DOM and that's fair enough. That might not be a problem for a lot of teams. People wouldn't even reach for that technique because they're disciplined about it. But at a certain point, you start taking on enough things and then go from kind of those basic things that are going to make your code more unreliable and unsafe like tweaking the DOM and you start getting into the realm of best practices. There's so much discussion these days in the JavaScript community about best practices, which is great. It's great to discuss that but my concern is that there's a new best practice each week and the team has to agree on it, you have to find techniques for enforcing it, people have to make sure that these best practices are being followed in code reviews. Then when you look at a given piece of code, you have to trust that those best practices are being followed, so it requires a lot of work to make sure, in your reducers, in redux that you are not mutating anything. With Elm, data is just immutable. That's just how it is. There are a lot of these kind of things that are baked into the language and the expressivity of the type system allows you to bake in your own constraints. One of the things that I find really compelling about Elm is its design really prevents you from shooting yourself in the foot and it gives you tools for making sure that you take it even a step further and it helps you enforce these best practices at a compiler level. CHARLES: Now what's interesting here is it's almost like the opposite tension of experimentation is a work, right? like here, we have an example of uniformity being the more powerful track but then inside the actual macroscopic process, you want a lot of experimentation and diversity. But at the microscopic level, inside your application, it sounds like you want less experimentation and you derive a lot of strength from that but -- DILLON: That's a great point. CHARLES: -- Experiments that are possible, yeah. DILLON: I think that there is a lot of pain these days in the JavaScript community. We hear people talking often about JavaScript fatigue and it's a real thing. It takes a lot of work to stay on top of the latest best practices and frameworks and that can be a lot of fun. I love learning about the latest new frameworks and tooling but ultimately as you're saying, we don't want that experimentation so much about the fundamentals. We want some dependable, solid fundamentals and then we want the experimentation to happen within there. I think that's exactly what we see in the Elm ecosystem. We have a single kind of data store or way of managing state in Elm. It's called the Elm Architecture. In fact, it's what Redux is based on and it worked extremely well and you don't have to experiment with different data stores in Elm because that's just what Elm code looks like. Now, if you want to experiment in Elm, then there is a lot of innovation happening. One of my favorite things about Elm is that the compiler and its expressiveness has sparked a lot of creativity. One of my favorite things about Elm is the library called Elm UI. Actually, a client that I'm working with right now, it's a really interesting case study. They are kind of a very small startup. They just kind of branched off of a larger startup. They're building some tooling for this ecosystem. They were engineers at a company called Procore that does cloud document management for construction companies. They wanted to get a product-ready for a big conference for their potential clients. The reason they brought me in to help them was because they wanted to reach this ambitious target of being able to do a demo of this brand new product at this conference and they wanted to iterate very quickly. One of the things that really drew them into Elm in the first place is this library Elm UI. Elm UI essentially, Richard Feldman gives a talk on it, where he uses the analogy of it being treating CSS and HTML as bytecode for your views. I think that's a really apt way to put it. If you break down this idea of CSS -- Cascading Style Sheets, it removes the cascading part of CSS and it removes the sheets part of CSS. What you're left with is a way of expressing style and it's a way of expressing style that is able to part ways with all of the baggage of the entire history of backwards compatible decisions that CSS has ever made. If you want to vertically aligned something, then you just say, "Align vertically," you know, center vertically. If you want to center something horizontally, you say center X. It creates a high level language for expressing views. My experience with Elm UI, this may not be the right choice for every team but I love it. I use it on all of the projects that I maintain personally. I love using it because it gives you that same sense of invincibility refactoring that you get with Elm, which is remarkable that you could have that feeling with managing views. CHARLES: It's definitely something that feels like a dark art and it can't be called science. It's an art. It's a science for some people but it's historically been a dark art and something fiddly to work with. In terms of being able to make the experiment with Elm, when we talked a little bit about why you might want to experiment with it in the first place, what the business case is, I guess my next question is or a question that immediately comes to mind is supposing that we have decided to experiment with this, how do you mitigate that experiment? We talked about lowering the cost, having a way to turn away from it, having a way to make it inexpensive. For example, one of the things that I think of when evaluating a new technology is how well can I use it with old technologies. I have a lot about best practices in my tool bag. We all do. We got our all favorite libraries and pathways that are just familiar to us. One of the things that I've noticed is when adopting a new technology, one of the things that makes it easy to experiment with is how well it works with the existing technologies. I know that, we talked about Elm UI, kind of rethinking style in CSS and your views and Elm itself as a completely different language within JavaScript, that can be both liberating but it can also be limiting in the sense that I can't reach back for my existing tool if no tool exists in this new space. The kind of experience that I've had where this is really worked is systems like JRuby or Clojure, where there's a very clear pathway to be able to use Java libraries from those environments, so you always have kind of an escape hatch. What's that like in Elm? DILLON: This is a really interesting conversation because it highlights, in some ways some of the most defining features of Elm. In terms of how do you kind of pull Elm into an existing application, there are a lot of different techniques for that. It's pretty straightforward to create a little Elm app. We usually don't call them components for reasons that we can get into if we want to but that's a whole can of worms. But if you've got a little Elm application that you want to use to render a widget on your page, then it's as simple as just calling Elm.yourmodule.init and rendering it onto the page there. That's quite straightforward and if you want to interface with your existing code there are several ways to do that. There's something called port in Elm, which is how you kind of communicate by sending these messages and data back and forth between your Elm app and JavaScript. Now, this is one of the decisions, I think that defines Elm as the language and the reason this is important is because Elm decided not to make the choice that a lot of other compile to JS languages do. For example, if you look at ReasonML or PureScript or a more extreme example, TypeScript. TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript, so it's trying to allow you to gradually introduce this to get some incremental improvements for your JavaScript code, so it's extremely easy to experiment with it, which we've talked about the importance of experimentation. Now, the challenge with this technique, the tradeoff here is it's great, that it then becomes very easy to transition into it and that's an excellent strategy for the goals of TypeScript. Elm has a different set of goals, so the things that elm is focused on giving you is a truly type-safe experience. When you're working with Elm, if your Elm code says that this data is a float, then it is a float. Either, it is a float or that code is not being run and so, that's very different than the experience in TypeScript where you have these escape hatches. This is an inevitable choice for any compiled to JS language. Are you going to have escape hatches or not? Elm is really the only language out there, I think that chooses not to have escape hatches and that is actually the thing that that I love about the language because that's the only way you can truly have guarantees, rather than, "Yeah, I'm pretty sure that these type guarantees hold." DAVID: Yeah, wishes and dreams. DILLON: Yeah. CHARLES: What does it mean to have no escape hatches? because you talked about ports. Does it mean like it's impossible to use an external JavaScript library? DILLON: That's an excellent question. You absolutely can use JavaScript libraries. It means that it's being explicit and upfront about the fact that there's uncertainty in these areas. That's what it comes down to. Take for example dealing with JSON. In a JavaScript application, what we get when we're dealing with JSON is you make a request up to the server, you have some callback that passes in the data you get back and then you start pulling bits and pieces off of it and you say 'response.users subzero.firstname' and you hope that none of those things are null, none of those types are different than what you expected. In a way, it's kind of letting you pretend that you have certainty there when in fact, you don't and with Elm, the approach is quite different. You have to explicitly say, "I expect my response to have this shape. I expect it to be a list of things, which have a first name and last name which are strings," and then Elm says, "Okay, great. I'm going to check your assumptions," and if you're right, then here you go and you're in a well typed-space where you know exactly what the types are and if you're wrong, then that's just another type of data, so it's just a case statement where you say, "If my assumptions were correct, then do something and if my assumptions were incorrect, then you decide what to do from there." CHARLES: Right. For me, it sounds like there is some way because ultimately, I'm going to be getting unstructured but I'm going to be getting JSON back from the server and maybe, I have some library that's going to be doing that for me and enhancing it and adding value to that JSON in some way. But then at some point, I can present it to Elm but what you just saying is I need to be complete in making sure that I handle each case. I need to do or handle the case. Explicit about saying if the assumptions that Elm wants to make, turn out to not be true, Elm is going to make me handle the case where those assumptions were not true. DILLON: Exactly. I think that TypeScript of any type is the perfect illustration of the difference. TypeScript of any type is sort of allowing you to say, "Don't type check this. Trust me here," and Elm's approach is more kind of just be explicit about what you want me to do if your assumptions are incorrect. It doesn't let you kind of come in and say, "No, I know I'm going to be right here." CHARLES: Right but there is a way to pass data structures back and forth. DILLON: There absolutely is and actually, there's a technique that's starting to gain some traction now, which I'm really excited about, which is rather than using this sort of JavaScript interrupt technique we talked about, which is again, it's very much like communicating with a server where you're kind of sending messages and getting data back -- getting these messages with data back. But there's an alternative to that which is using web components. Actually, there's quite good support for assuming that you don't need to be compatible with Internet Explorer. Basically in a nutshell, if you can wrap a sort of declarative web component around anything, it could be a Google Maps API, it could be a syntax highlighting JavaScript library, something that you don't have an Elm library for but you want to use this JavaScript library, it's actually quite a nice experience. You just render that custom element using your Elm code just as you would any other HTML in Elm. CHARLES: Yeah I like that, so the HTML becomes the canvas or composition with other JavaScript and the semantics are very well-defined and that interface is actually pretty thin. DILLON: Exactly and the key again is that you wanted to find a declarative interface, rather than an imperative one where you're kind of just doing a series of statements where you say, "Do this and then set this value and then call this and then set this call back." Instead, you're saying, "Render this Google Maps custom element," which is centered around these coordinates and has this zoom level on. You declaratively give it the bit of information that it needs to render a particular view. CHARLES: Okay. Then I guess the final question that I have around this area is about being able to integrate existing tools and functions inside of an Elm application. Because it sounds like you could theoretically develop large parts of your application, is there a way that you can actually have other areas of your application that are not currently invested in Elm still benefit from it, in the sense for kind of need of JavaScript APIs that Elm can make available. DILLON: Right, so you're kind of talking about the reverse of that Elm reaching out to JavaScript. You're asking about, can JavaScript reach out to Elm and benefit from some of its ecosystem? CHARLES: Exactly. I say that is that another potential vector for experimentation. DILLON: It's a really interesting thought. I haven't given it too much thought, to be honest but I actually have heard it come up before and my gut feeling is that it's probably more fruitful to explore the inverse, reaching out to JavaScript from Elm and the reason is kind of the main appeal of Elm is that when you're operating within Elm, you have this sense that if it compiles, it works. Because again, this central decision to not allow escape hatches is what allows you to have that sort of robustness, so you have this feeling of bullet proof refactorings and adding new features seamlessly where you change your data modeling to say, "Here's this other case that can be represented," and then suddenly, the Elm compiler says, "Tell me what to do here, tell me what to do here and tell me what to do there," and you do it and your app is working. That's the real appeal of Elm, I think and you don't really get much of that by just calling out to an Elm library from within JavaScript. That's my gut feeling on it. CHARLES: Okay, that's fair enough. On the subject of interrupt and using tools like JSON, you actually maintain a GraphQL library for Elm. You probably have a lot of experience on this. Maybe we can talk about that as a concrete case that highlights the examples. DILLON: Yeah. I think to me this is one of the things that really highlights the power of Elm, to give you a really amazing refactoring and kind of feature creating experience. A lot of Elm libraries are prefaced by the author name, so it's still DillonKearns/ElmGraphQL. I spoke about it this year at ElmConf. In a nutshell, what it does is it actually generates code based on your GraphQL schema. For anyone who doesn't know, GraphQL is just kind of a language for expressing the shape of your API and what types of data can return. What DillonKearns on GraphQL does is it looks at your GraphQL schema and it generates an API that allows you to query that API. using this library, you can actually guarantee that you're making a valid query to your server. Again, you get this bulletproof experience of refactoring in Elm where you can do something like make a change in your API and recompile your Elm code and see whether you've made a backwards incompatible change. All of this effort of doing sort of this JSON decoding I was talking about earlier where you kind of have to explicitly say, "These are my assumptions about the shape of the JSON that I'm getting back." When you're using this library, you no longer need to make any assumptions because you're able to rely on this sort of schema of your API and so you know when you're requesting this data, you don't have to run it, see if it works and then tweak it and run it again -- this sort of cycle of checking your assumptions at runtime. It moves those assumptions that you're making from runtime to compile time and it can tell you when you compile your application, it can say, "Actually, this data you're requesting, it doesn't exist," or, "It's actually called this," or, "This is actually the type of the data." CHARLES: Right. I love that. How do you do that? Because it seems like you've got a little bit of a chicken and the egg problem because the schema is defined outside of Elm, so you have to be able to parse and understand the schema in order to generate the Elm types to be able to compile Elm code against them. Maybe I'm not -- DILLON: That's exactly right. That's exactly what it does. Now, the nice thing is that GraphQL is really designed for these types of use cases. It supports them in a first class way. If you have a GraphQL API, that means you have built into it whether you know about it or not, a way to introspect the schema. All of the queries for kind of interrogating that GraphQL server and asking what types of data does this return, what are all your queries that I can run, it's built into it by the framework, so that comes for free. Getting up and running with this package I built is as simple as running a little npm CLI, pointing it to either your URL for your server or the JSON form of your schema, if you prefer and then, it generates the code for you. CHARLES: Wow, that sounds fantastic. This is the exact kind of thing that feels like it would be cool if I could just start using this library to manage the GraphQL of my application but I'm consuming that GraphQL from other JavaScript but it's the Elm code that's managing it. Do you see what I mean? DILLON: I hadn't considered that. I guess you could. You're right. Maybe I'm so smitten with Elm that it's hard to see an in-between but I guess, you could get some benefits from that approach. CHARLES: Right and as an experiment of course. DILLON: There you go. There you go. CHARLES: All right. With that, I think we'll wrap it up. Thank you so much, Dillon for coming on and talking with us on the podcast. DILLON: My pleasure. I really enjoyed the conversation. CHARLES: I actually got so many great tidbits from so many different areas of software development in Elm but also, just in kind of other things that I'm interested in trying. It was a really great conversation. DILLON: I had a lot of fun and I love discussing these things. For any listeners who are interested in this stuff, feel free to reach out to me on the Elm Slack or on Twitter. I'm at @DillonTKearns. I'm also offering a free intro Elm talk for any companies that are kind of entertaining the idea of doing an experiment with Elm. If you go to IncrementalElm.com/Intro, you can find out about some of the talks that I'm offering. CHARLES: All right. Well, thank you very much and we, as always are the Frontside. We build software that you can stake your future on and you can get in touch with us at @TheFrontside on Twitter or Contact@Frontside.io on email. Please send us any questions you might have, any topics that you'd like to hear about and we look forward to hearing from you and we will see you next week.

In this episode we recognize some listener feedback, and then Ryan asks his dad how we got our Paragon machine. We then discuss in detail our ongoing transition from the Google Maps API to an alternative, as well... Read More

In this episode we recognize some listener feedback, and then Ryan asks his dad how we got our Paragon machine. We then discuss in detail our ongoing transition from the Google Maps API to an alternative, as well as moving some of our stuff from Heroku to AWS. We interview Portland operator Chris Rhodes about […]

Most everything we interact with in life is designed, and the news is no exception. In this episode, we talk about the experience of news in the modern era of "fake news," Facebook, catered-news apps, and the changing models of paying for content. Additional UX topics include changes to Amazon's text, Google Maps API, and email functionality. Links: Amazon Changed Its Website Fonts, and Some People Are Not Taking It Well Google revamps its Google Maps developer platform Death to Bullshit Mike Monteiro – How to Fight Fascism Steve Jobs told Rupert Murdoch Fox News is an “incredibly destructive force”

Google Maps Platform is the new commercial model for Google Maps API. It will change the way many businesses use the APIs and will allow many companies that previously couldn't make the business case stack up to start using it. However others will find their costs go up. Google's Nicola Dalmazzo sits down with NGIS to talk about the changes and where we can get value out of the world's favourite webmap.   Topics in this episode: 0:51 Google Maps is evolving - where is it going as a platform? 4:06 How are people using Google Maps to innovate today? 6:26 Where would you like Google Maps to go next and what problems could it solve? 7:48 The nexus between Google Cloud Platform and Maps - you can ask so many new questions, but where do you start? 10:03 Are GIS people going to move more into cloud or vice versa 12:36 How does the new Google Maps Platform commercial model align with companies' revenue model? 15:39 How does someone determine if Google Maps is good value for their business? 18:11 What sorts of companies will benefit from Google's new commercial model?

Maps are an essential part of any real estate website. They’re used to show the location of listings and the boundaries of communities. The visual and interactive nature of online maps adds a lot to the user experience of an agent’s site. When it comes to online maps, Google is king. Nearly 14% of the [...] The post Google Maps API Key Changes Impact Real Estate Websites appeared first on Agent Evolution.

This week’s episode brought to you by Slice on Broadway, Alex Kahrs Design & Media, and The Millvale Music Festival! It may be the first day of spring, but we’re not sure Pittsburgh got the memo. While Chilla is tucked away all nice and warm in Studio C, Sorg and Dudders braved the snow to make it into the Sorgatron Media studio for this week’s tech talk, including: Katie is sharing a YouTube web streaming option that doesn’t require an encoder. Chilla is sharing some apps for sketching as his Awesome Thing of the Week with Concepts and Linea Sketch. Sorg has been playing more video games lately. He’s telling us about Inside. Sorg shares how he recently deleted all of the freemium games from his phone. Fan of the show Alex Kahrs shared some thoughts on One Cast and a live stream option he’s using these days. Thanks to The Incline for including us (and our friends) in the Big List of Pittsburgh Podcasts. Amanda put CMRA on our radar with her addition to this week’s tech news. Google is opening their Google Maps API to game developers. There’s an AR version of StreetFighter! Sega Genesis’ collection of games is coming to PS4 and Xbox One! Who kept their Tamagotchi alive? There’s a chance to redeem yourself! Looking for the next Raspberry Pi option? Raspberry Pi 3 and Model B+ are available! We are sending Katie into the world looking for Raspberry Pi. We’re taking wagers on how many times she’ll be offered Raspberry Pie instead. Waze is offering a carpool option in Washington State. Web OS is still alive – and making our news cycle as they go from HP to LG and now Open Source. Sorg recently discovered Fortnite. Apparently the Sony Playstation will die without porn? [LINK NSFW] After the show remember to: Eat at Slice on Broadway (@Pgh_Slice) if you are in the Pittsburgh area! It is Awesome! (sliceonbroadway.com) Want to be part of our studio audience? Hit us up at awesomecast@sorgatronmedia.com and we’ll save you a seat! Join our AwesomeCast Facebook Group to see what we’re sharing and to join the discussion! Follow these awesome people on Twitter: Katie Dudas (@Kdudders), John Chichilla (@chilla) and Sorg (@Sorgatron) Our good friend, Zach Rizza is raising money and awareness through the Dick’s Sporting Goods Foundation Team Pittsburgh 2018 Pittsburgh Marathon. Check out his fundraiser page at: https://www.crowdrise.com/dsgfpitt2018/fundraiser/zachrizza Have you seen our AwesomeTips videos? You can support the show at Patreon.com/awesomecast! Remember to check out our friends at the River’s Edge (@RiversEdgePGH) and The 405 Media (@The405Radio) who replay the show on their stream throughout the week! Also, check out sorgatronmedia.com and awesomecast.com for more entertainment; and view us livestreaming Tuesdays around 7:00 PM EST!

This week’s episode brought to you by Slice on Broadway, Alex Kahrs Design & Media, and The Millvale Music Festival! It may be the first day of spring, but we’re not sure Pittsburgh got the memo. While Chilla is tucked away all nice and warm in Studio C, Sorg and Dudders braved the snow to make it into the Sorgatron Media studio for this week’s tech talk, including: Katie is sharing a YouTube web streaming option that doesn’t require an encoder. Chilla is sharing some apps for sketching as his Awesome Thing of the Week with Concepts and Linea Sketch. Sorg has been playing more video games lately. He’s telling us about Inside. Sorg shares how he recently deleted all of the freemium games from his phone. Fan of the show Alex Kahrs shared some thoughts on One Cast and a live stream option he’s using these days. Thanks to The Incline for including us (and our friends) in the Big List of Pittsburgh Podcasts. Amanda put CMRA on our radar with her addition to this week’s tech news. Google is opening their Google Maps API to game developers. There’s an AR version of StreetFighter! Sega Genesis’ collection of games is coming to PS4 and Xbox One! Who kept their Tamagotchi alive? There’s a chance to redeem yourself! Looking for the next Raspberry Pi option? Raspberry Pi 3 and Model B+ are available! We are sending Katie into the world looking for Raspberry Pi. We’re taking wagers on how many times she’ll be offered Raspberry Pie instead. Waze is offering a carpool option in Washington State. Web OS is still alive – and making our news cycle as they go from HP to LG and now Open Source. Sorg recently discovered Fortnite. Apparently the Sony Playstation will die without porn? [LINK NSFW] After the show remember to: Eat at Slice on Broadway (@Pgh_Slice) if you are in the Pittsburgh area! It is Awesome! (sliceonbroadway.com) Want to be part of our studio audience? Hit us up at awesomecast@sorgatronmedia.com and we’ll save you a seat! Join our AwesomeCast Facebook Group to see what we’re sharing and to join the discussion! Follow these awesome people on Twitter: Katie Dudas (@Kdudders), John Chichilla (@chilla) and Sorg (@Sorgatron) Our good friend, Zach Rizza is raising money and awareness through the Dick’s Sporting Goods Foundation Team Pittsburgh 2018 Pittsburgh Marathon. Check out his fundraiser page at: https://www.crowdrise.com/dsgfpitt2018/fundraiser/zachrizza Have you seen our AwesomeTips videos? You can support the show at Patreon.com/awesomecast! Remember to check out our friends at the River’s Edge (@RiversEdgePGH) and The 405 Media (@The405Radio) who replay the show on their stream throughout the week! Also, check out sorgatronmedia.com and awesomecast.com for more entertainment; and view us livestreaming Tuesdays around 7:00 PM EST!

EP110 - Holiday 17 Hot Take with Rob Garf of Salesforce.com Rob Garf (@retailrobgarf), is the VP of Industry Strategy and insights at Salesforce Commerce Cloud.  His team has access to insights from all the Salesforce Commerce Cloud clients (formerly Demandware).  We have a broad ranging conversation about what he's seeing this holiday season and trends he expects for next year. You can read more about his teams insights here: Salesforce Reveals Black Friday Was the Busiest Digital Shopping Day of the Holiday Season Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 110 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on November 30th 2017. http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, SVP Commerce & Content at Razorfish, and Scot Wingo, Founder and Executive Chairman of Channel Advisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. New beta feature - Google Automated Transcription of the show Transcript Jason: [0:25] Welcome to the Jason and Scott show this is episode 110 being recorded on Thursday November 30th 2017 I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your co-host Scot Wingo. Scot & Rob: [0:40] Hey Jason and a welcome back Jason and Scott show listeners. Jason R series that is a hot take on holiday 17 continues here in episode 110 we're excited to have the first time to the show someone you and I've known both for a long time and I've been trying to get on the show and we finally made it work, Rob Garf rub is the VP of Industry strategy and insights at Salesforce Commerce Cloud welcome to the show Rob. [1:06] Thanks gentlemen it's great to be here I feel honored to be amongst digital Commerce loyalty I feel like I'm obliged to say first time long time. Jason: [1:17] Appreciate it you know one thing we always like to do on this show is give listeners a little bit of context about how you came into your your control, I'm in what what the scope of the current role is so I know, like ourselves I know you've been kicking around the industry for a little while can you you talk to us about your career matriculation and what you're doing at Salesforce today. Scot & Rob: [1:44] Yeah yeah absolutely literally retail is in my blood my father actually was at a supply chain a bunch of different retailers around the country when I was growing up and I didn't have any, prettiest aspirations of getting into retail but I did grow up working in his distribution centers and working in some stores at. Ricky work for in retailers that he worked for and really really cut my teeth in a genuine way in headquarters, right around 99 2004 Lids the specialty hat retailer, where I live Ecommerce and at the time we're doing some really fun things like buy online pickup store we had an endless aisle app we didn't know, really what we're doing and put it together you know I shoestring budget but it worked and it was a lot of fun, and tell you guys probably are the only ones on the show that will remember that we ran into world back almost 20 years ago of course they're long gone as a, e-commerce platform but anyways from there. Certainly continue to kick around was industry analysts at AMR research leaving retail practice moved to lead retail strategy to IBM when I was in fortunate to land at demandware. Which took me about 5 years in when we got Acquired and summer 2016 by Salesforce, what is known as the Commerce cloud my role it's really fun I get to kind of put all the hats on that I've worn over the last 20 25 years and I lead a team called Industries for insights and really. [3:22] In short it's it's our job to stay in the market, understand where the industry's going would you that primarily through research and then we turn that back over to the industry, our customers and we use that to better understand where we should bring our company products so it's been a lot of fun over last coming up on 7 years for the last year-and-a-half as part of Salesforce. [3:44] Very cool and then another one of the reasons you wanted to get you into this series is you guys have been releasing some holiday data and I don't I don't recall you doing much of that, demandware tell us about what's going on there and for listeners that don't know let's let's kind of help them understand the scope of the day that you guys would have and kind of where it comes from. [4:06] Sure yeah I think that's going to start some good contacts on the conversation I'm sure we're about to have so even wear a cloud platform that enables retailers and Brands to connect, to their consumers across the Myriad of different channels whether that's personally online or through mobile store. Social even the increasingly iot invoice devices we collect a lot of data in fact on a monthly basis we have 500 million Shoppers Traverse City. Rousey ultimately buying, AR platform across around 3000 sites and not representing retailers in 53 country so we take that information we aggregated up and very thoughtful and secure way and it really helps us, gauge meter Digital Trends and then again we as part of our perky turn that back over or consumers help them Benchmark I'm sorry. Back over to our customers retail Brands and allows them to better Benchmark the business and then broadly it allows us to see you know where where the industry's going what are some of the major Trends and we've been doing, what are we reporting for some time but we really double down on the holiday this year to turn it into some interesting insights as to what we predict and then be what we're seeing. [5:27] Cool so if we if we kind of start at 30,000 ft view did you have any forecast for holiday or you're not in the forecast visiting just kind of looking at insights. Yeah so week we had some predictions based on the data from the platform, what we see in the past quarter past years and we also did some primary research as well, so yes and I get right into it tell him which I talk to you about kind of what we saw a little bit and get back yeah, you know like how did you guys did you think holiday would be 15% that came in at 20 and then you have any other kind of macro stuff and we'll get into some of the individual days in a minute but the the big picture what do you think. [6:09] The big picture yeah so you know back in September October we release them prediction information or three key points that we among many others that we hold in on and in one piece was, cigarettes, wow discounts were going to be abundance as they normally are creeping earlier and earlier in the year we felt like the holiday season would smooth out, a bit in terms of actual demand and that's in fact what we saw by the end of. Monday Cyber Monday only 35% of digital shopping was completely, and so there's still a lot of Runway to go there the second piece that we saw is that 40% of. Statically Millennials will be doing a lot of research and Discovery through voice assistance in. Alexis in the world in the Google homes and Sirius of the world and we don't have data yet to back it up. Quantitatively button talking to our customers there they're definitely testing and. Playing with poison in Lexington circular craving some skills around shipping notifications and, order status which I think is a nice step forward on the convenience play of the of the three. Last one was in this really started last year. [7:38] Black Friday becoming more and more of a digital day you know we score screw up all of us here Scott Jason you know with. Black Friday more of a store based way doorbusters and getting out of the, Thanksgiving craziness at family and getting some the stores and works we're seeing a real uptick both and we predicted and we in fact saw it as a really big, really big digital day as well so I can dive in all of this in particular but those are some of the variations Rahsaan and how they kind of played out over the last. 789 days I would say. Jason: [8:15] Awesome but just want to get an idea of how Granny or the data use you see is your the the actual platform that that all these retailers are are using for their, so I'm assuming you get, pretty granular data so you you mentioned for example discounting like are you are you able to to see the actual sort of. [8:35] Is was pricing that that is offered by your customers and are you guys sharing any data about like how promotional this holiday. [8:44] Season has been versus past holiday season. Scot & Rob: [8:47] Yeah yeah absolutely so you know one of the things we saw as I mentioned discounts starting earlier and earlier we're calling it. You know game of discount chicken right it's like the retailers are moving it more and more, towards the beginning of November opening hoping that the consumers will by and by the way though we all know, what happened but in terms of the rates and yeah we're seeing across the, the Cyber week starting on the Tuesday 2 days before American Thanksgiving and then going through through Cyber Monday, we saw an average at 28%. Discount rate so there's some really nice discounts really teaching on Cyber Monday will see a little bit of a wall and then once again we anticipate another Spike, around December 11th and for few days further when, consumers are starting to feel the crunch of the shipping window starting to close and retailers taking advantage of that kind of emotional oh gosh I need to get it now or I'm not going to be able to get that deliver to my doorstep. I'll put the other interesting part if I could be on just discounts is what we saw a round free shipping. And so across the week as I defined a moment ago we saw 84% of orders, that were free shipping in fact on Cyber Monday alone it actually spiked up and was the highest 89% so in what was seen as a really nice to have in past years really the expectations the consumer is. [10:30] We want it free or not at all and so as a consumer if you're on and listening, definitely look for those free shipping and if your retailer you got to get the game if you're not already. Jason: [10:44] Yeah yeah and I did just maybe put that in a little bit of context comes Gore would say that that year-round about 65% of all e-commerce sales are with free shipping so when you see a spike up to 85 to almost 90% that's, a version of a promotion that retailers are running and it just turns out free shipping is the most effective promotion you can run if you if you don't already offer it because, it seems like consumers are really weary to make any purchases that that where they have to pay for shipping. Scot & Rob: [11:16] Yeah that's right and that's why I talked about in the context of. Discount since you know a lot of our customers are in the luxury and apparel space where they want to try to us from Apperception perspective hold onto price Integrity but free shipping is a nice way as you mention to essentially give, it total cost of ownership if you will discounts on getting that a product you on. Jason: [11:39] For sure you also mentioned Black Friday becoming a little bit more of a digital holiday and that that's only seems like a trend that we've seen as well, are you starting to see you mention that a lot of deals are peaking on Cyber Monday are you starting to see a spike of. Online deals on Black Friday as well or do you feel like like as a consumer you're going to get better deals on Monday then you can get on Friday. Scot & Rob: [12:03] Yeah I mean it's it's just to get really deep we saw a 27% discount rates on Black Friday compared to 29% on Cyber Monday. [12:16] Negative Outlets closed right but generally speaking when I step back we're seeing that, deals have really in demand in fact has been smooth over across, the seven days of cyber week where in the past it was for consumers got to get the deal on Friday in the store or Monday. I'm online and I'm finding both based on a research and helping a sample size of one and doing a bit of shopping myself is that retailers are becoming a lot more transparent about the length. [12:53] In the duration of their promotions and there's not as much of a. Gosh I got to get it on Friday or I'm going to lose out so yeah I know that's my roundabout way of saying there's a spike Cyber Monday at 29%. We see 27% but overall we're seeing deal smooth out through the entire week. Jason: [13:17] Yeah that that is interesting that is that's one of the challenges with promotions right is that the promotions are going to be most effective, if there's almost some scarcity to them like if consumers believe that that deal is going to end on Friday and that's the best deal I'm ever going to get if. It we're promoting stuff on Friday and all the consumers have a a real belief that there's going to be an even better deal on Monday then the. Promotions tendon not have the desired effect into your point in the old world the consumer attended the only know what we tell them right so we said hey big sale on Friday that's the only information the consumer has not had but today. The consumer knows everything and they have. Perfect transparency and oh by the way there's probably 50 websites that are designed to telling them what what deals are the best each day and what did the historical, best time to buy all these products are so it's hard to hard to get away with any of those those promotional games anymore. Scot & Rob: [14:13] It's really good point I think it's a really good point in the fact that. Retail for finally listening you know what I mean in terms of their acknowledging that consumers have a lot more control in Access than ever before and why not be a little bit more, transparent around the pricing in motion so that while you are giving a little bit away on the scarcity side you're giving a little bit more away saying I don't. Each go to another retailer cuz I think I missed that window right. [14:44] Put it makes me I know Salesforce is really big on the AI in it you guys call York or a Einstein if you guys do any exploration of kind of could you plug that in there and try to have the AI out smart smart the consumers on this whole, pricing game of chicken thing, yes and we are doing that in fact we actually have some interesting data around artificial intelligence and how that has actually influenced a lot of the, the sales when it comes down to it so what we found across again these sample set that we have is that. [15:21] And I'll pick on Black Friday so on Black Friday 6%, Shoppers engage or clicked on a product recommendation that was powered by artificial intelligence so that recommendation was based on the shopping Behavior. Either a known consumer in the various digital profile and preferences that have been accumulated or an unknown based on the clicks that. They did either on-site or off-site and while it was only 6% its Rove 32%, of the revenue so huge impact when retailers can turn this data into intelligence and get it in front of the consumers in a meaningful way throughout the journey. Jason: [16:14] That that's fascinating I'm always curious like how how are you defining artificial intelligence for the recommendation and in that case cuz it you know obviously you know there's there's multiple definitions of artificial intelligence but I have a feeling all the the vendors that are in the the Salesforce Commerce Cloud link exchange that have been doing, recommendations for for 5 or 10 years would probably call their engines artificial intelligence wouldn't they are. Scot & Rob: [16:40] Yeah they likely will and so yeah we're at the very core it's. From machine learning that is taking in all of the data that's, being generated on the platform by that retailer and allowing the algorithm to continually learn and in an automated way. Dr. Relevant interaction LG interesting part is that, artificial intelligence Einstein is both making the merchant in marketer the retailer smarter so they're just getting more fishing around planning, their pricing in there but then it's also Autumn eating a lot of manual rules-based type of Assortment, that the consumer will interact with on the site cool, yes it's need to see you and you're always Acquisitions talk about synergies sounds like there's already a rich set of capabilities over on the sales for side that you guys are tapping into. [17:41] For sure yeah I mean particularly on the Einstein front given the fact that salesforce.com on this across across the entire company so yet while we have a date, with in Commerce Cloud we are we are definitely leveraging, all of the Innovation that's happening back at San Francisco from machine learning to visual, intelligence to voice intelligence to natural language processing so it's it is really exciting where as we came, India the Acquisitions with some pretty cool. [18:20] Artificial intelligence were able to now look to our colleagues and really amp it up quite a bit and again. The fun part about this is It's really baked into the plan. So it snow in the same console that a marching will do their promotions in their assortments and figuring out the promotional calendar so they don't have to talk between different screen so you know going back to data. It's really showing while you know small, portion of consumers are coming across these product recommendations and stay clicking on then it's driving a lot of Revenue and I assume at some point we'll talk about mobile but, in a very small form factor world that we're living in now making sure where you might have one if two products that are made available getting those right ones, in front of the consumer makes all the difference in the world yeah real estate is definitely the premium, just want to talk about mobile one quick thing that you just kind of made me think about so early are you talking about skills being kind of a prediction you guys as part of the platform can you just kind of turn on for a new beer Merchants an Alexa skill or or. [19:36] You know you're watching what's happening there before you do something like that. [19:40] Yeah so you know Boyce in general is something we're looking at our customers given our open platform already testing some out there finding it just the way they're not necessarily seeing. Today. You're clicking the bottle like it's not really clicking or tapping are you but you know having to buy happen but it's more on some of the purple, research Discovery or on the other side service but that's more happening for your partners or independently given again are open platform our customers are able to innovate and extend vrep eyes, Darius didn't ask Dex like order and customer and price and, so on and so forth I figured I would keep your interest though given I know it's a Hot Topic around these parts so obviously what you're seeing on The Voice side it's typically around this holiday anything. Pop up for you and your discussions, I always check the specials that the Amazon has there and just interesting to see what they're choosing to push that way I think. Retailers that are doing it our way out on the Edge at this point we haven't heard a ton Jason have you heard anything. Jason: [20:53] In general I think even though the most dominant voice players would say nobody really expects voice to be a primary interface for Commerce I mean there's there's just a bunch of. Deficiencies like most things you buy have a bunch of variance you pick a color and a size and potentially a brand and like, getting interrogated for all of those details to place a a Commerce order via voice. [21:16] Actually isn't a super elegant experience so while they're there certain products that lend themselves to voice Commerce and there certainly are people that are engaging in voice Commerce. [21:26] It's not like oh man that's the better user interface in the whole world is going to shift to voice. For Commerce I think it's really obvious that voice is going to be a major you user interface overall and I think we're going to see voice being used a lot too. Manage and modify order so you know once you start buying all your groceries online for example and you have an auto replenishment order. You probably using voice to say hey I'm going to Grandma's for Thanksgiving you know let's cancel this week's grocery order or hey I need to make a pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving, let's let's add these ingredients to my. [22:04] My normal list but I really think that's going to be the the primary role of a voice in Commerce more so than it is. [22:15] Product Discovery or you know first time order types. Scot & Rob: [22:19] So it's super interesting to me is incorporating voice for on-site search right so you're still looking at, the screen but you're able to search using voice and then layering on top artificial intelligence or putting artificial it's on the bottom whichever way you want to look at it architectural e in any case but being able to really help. Again really cut down the time between inspiration and ultimately getting to the product that. The customer wants but I hear what you're saying in terms of perhaps you know on site to eat navigation versus doing it by. Talking to a device saying I want this product that I've never seen before. Jason: [23:02] And I think the use case you mentioned makes all the sense in the world in particularly on mobile we already see you like that voice as a user interface in Mobile has huge adoption in China are ready and so I think that's inevitable. Here and in there are some fascinating nuances that happened there right because when customers type into our search box with a keyboard. We've taught them all how to type to how to do keyword searches right so two people type the words that they think. [23:34] Are are most likely to come up with that results but when people speak to a voice interface they tend to speak in full sentences and so what's what's interesting is. There's voice search as we get 10 to have a lot more contacts. Then that type searches and that actually enables us to give more relevant results. Which is which is interesting but you do have to think about your indexing and your your if your you know a content creator on this product detail Pages you need to think about your SEO strategies and things differently when a meaningful percentage of your. [24:08] Your customers are are searching via voice so I would certainly agree with that and I think. [24:13] I'm not sure that that's a huge piece of the market this year but I would suspect by next year. [24:19] It's a much bigger part I guess weather thing that slightly interesting is to the extent that you are going to shop via voice obviously Alexis the dominant voice platform out there. And you know they predominantly want you to buy from from Amazon although you know they recently made an announcement of a partnership with. [24:36] Best Buy to enable you to do Commerce through Best Buy. [24:41] You know that you have to add a few extra words to that search but what's interesting is so everyone that wants to compete with Amazon has the problem of not having a product catalog like Amazon has and not having all the sales data that Amazon has to help. [24:54] Sort of determine what what brand you probably want when you ask for batteries and so we're seeing like Google in particular. Go out and start to do these Partnerships with retailers where the retailers are sharing their first party data with Google to make search more more context really relevant on. Google home with those retailers and it occurs to me that they'd be really smart to partner with a platform like you to enable that for all of your clients not. [25:25] How to give away any future product strategy but yeah. Scot & Rob: [25:27] Your way into much but I can say that certainly you know we're always looking at ways to extend our platform and I'm realizing that. [25:38] More and more Commerce is happening off property right and so you know our whole business model from the beginning of time was. Consumers go to a Retailer's website and buy and the reality is more and more of that happening off property so. Retail RC to push their brand or the consumers are we want to help them we want to help them do that and if that's you know again partner in to make that happen. Definitely looking at those Avenues Cooper Ford Jason continues to, can you know an uncontrolled Corner about future product releases this pivot to mobile, so I remember the early days of demand where you guys were in this wacky thing called the cloud and and some of the earliest successes were convincing people to let you run their mobile site because you guys were really good at responsive and all that and then, pretty quickly earned the entire site so you guys have been kind of mobile Pioneers from from as early as I can remember I've seen a lot of your. Quotes of been around mobile give us what what do you see in as far as mobile Trends and and how did that meet your expectations. [26:50] Yeah so. Willie we think the headline or one of the key headlines for the holiday this year so far is Mobile in the continued adoption. [27:04] By consumers not just to browse but to actually buy and if you remember mention one of the three predictions was Thanksgiving being a really big digital. Holiday and we take the major driver to that is mobile. You know cuz really in the past it was consumers had to wait either well going to the way back time machine to 2005 one day to get to a high speed internet connection but even at home. On Thanksgiving or Black Friday oh gosh I got to open my computer I got to put in my username and password I got to bring up a browser I got up, yeah there are a lot of steps there's a lot of friction and really it do the day the mobile phone is the remote control of our daily lives right it's tether to us so, it's really just creating instant access like it does any time of the year. During Thanksgiving during Black Friday through the entire cyber week for consumers just to take out their phone. And in brows but what's happened you know the last couple years is. Most retailers have really stub their toes around their their mobile strategy didn't really make it easier so why you kept on seeing traffic creep up. They were still that friction Aaron consumers ultimately like either wait until they get to a computer or weighted went to the store to buy but again. [28:38] Consumers are pulling out their phone on Thanksgiving on Black Friday and actually buying so just some of that we think are some, mind blowing status is. Some I guess I'll give it to you for the Cyber week we saw Mobile Share, traffic at 61% to 61% of the traffic was coming from Mobile by the way we to find Mobile as home, .. Tablets are a separate category there but what I think is even more interesting is that, mobile Sheriff orders for the week was 41% and that was up by the way from 34% for the week. [29:21] Your prior so the idea. And we can talk about and I love your perspectives on this like what are retail can talk about what a retailers doing to make it easier but that's that's the bottom line they're really breaking down the friction between inspiration and purchase and not. Part of what's contributed again to Black Friday being a big digital day in the smoothing out in general of demand across the entire 7 Days of cyber week so it's really, if I could say inflection points a big shift that we've been seeing for quite some time and it's actually coming through to fruition. Jason: [29:59] Yeah I I think it's it's really fascinating we talked about it it'll a lot on the show we called the mobile Gap and essentially that's that. That you know the fact that. [30:11] Increasingly traffic is all shifting to mobile but the conversion rate on mobile tends to be a lot lower than desktop and so on these big holiday days when. It's in a mobile traffic by Stephen Moore. Like you know there's there's a potential catastrophe of 61% of my my traffic is on mobile in that unit converts it you know 1/3 or 1/4 the desktop traffic used to convert I'm actually going to lose money on the site and Zoe. That the fact that you're seeing that mobile Gap Nero like obviously. Is 61% of traffic and only 41% of the sales are happening there still is a gap but that you know that's a lot better than when it's 60% of the traffic and only 25% of the sales. [30:53] So interesting to think about the series y that Gap is near Owings I certainly have some I'd be curious to hear if you have any thoughts but. It is equally interesting question is. [31:09] Whitney Rose is it just narrowing because of something that you need to Holiday. And so once we get through holiday. We're going to revert back to that you know same old nasty mobile Gap we've been living with for the last couple years or have we systemically figure you know improve the mobile experience enough that we're actually starting to see a permanent shift, tomorrow mobile purchases. Scot & Rob: [31:31] Yeah so I think the flywheel has started and it's not going to slow down and so one other interesting data point and then I'll give you a couple of my. Hypotheses as to why no. Why this is happening but I hate this part of the conversation by the way so if we do the mask on Thanksgiving. For the first time mobile order share bypass computer order share so that's like. Big deal right so 46% of orders on Thanksgiving were Mobile in 45 we're on computer now actually reverted back for the rest of the week but it just shows you like. Okay computer is continue to. Creep down and finally mobilize that Stout I think that's going to continue to a degree you know going to the point around why you no like I contributed it. [32:31] Put it on two things one we talked about a bit or more than a bit which is a I so applying to buy to the small form factor. That's huge benefits cuz they get that you mention it so little real estate figuring out what that it goes back to the what has no right product Right Price Right Time there it is, and then the other one that were tracking is around the check out because it was not terrible was an awesome but it wasn't terrible and so I was terrible. We all missed the rookie still are in terms of okay now I can put my name okay now I send put my address and credit card and whatever else the. [33:15] Adoption of integrated payments like Apple pay and Android pay in PayPal for that matter. We should not really helping in fact we anticipate nearly 10% of iOS orders will be by Apple pay and so that's just making it. Easy and so I think it will go higher as more and more consumers use Apple pay, and I'm part of the reason why isn't hires because more more people are using it yet but it's on again one of these things so that you know I'm a man and I do think it's one of these things work, consumers kids are getting this experience they're going to have more confidence where they didn't before that it will then. [34:01] Come make its way into the other 360 ish whatever many days you want to say year. Jason: [34:07] Yeah for sure and I'm going to. Drill down into those in just a sec but I do want to ask one of the data point if you happen to have it so, you're one of the problems we always have with mobile as is conversion rates lower right so that's what we've been talking about but another typical problem with mobile is, people tend to use mobile to buy fewer items per cart so you know the average order items per cart you know is a lot closer to 1 on a mobile device than it is on a desktop so I'd be curious when using these like nice bikes in Mobile / holiday. Are you tracking the items per order and are you seeing that Spike up as well. Scot & Rob: [34:48] So we track it I don't work all of that data is, and the next episode or we can sweat it out at some point right let's do that because that stuff ice we definitely track it and we know what it is generally but I don't know what it is comparatively for this time of year between mobile, shopping cart so let's let's get that with W nice cheese or let's get that out today. Jason: [35:10] Perfect. [35:12] If I do surgery with you like I tend to think that there's kind of a systemic thing that's improving about mobile that hopefully makes for a permanent change in Mobile Gap and then there is a. Kind of tertiary thing that improves mobile around holiday right like to this system a thing to me I totally agree with you it's improving the checkout experience and reducing friction in the checkout experience. And integrated payments is the easiest way to do that there also are just. [35:41] Better best practices in user experience there's things like using you know the Google Maps API or someone's Alice's API to enter. [35:50] Addresses with waywest clicks then the traditional Fifield thing the the Apple pay. [35:59] Those things are interesting but for example this year Google launched this thing called the payment request API. Which is a 8 method built into their browsers in their mobile browsers that makes it way easier to store payment information on your phone. Once and auto and security auto fill all those forms from from every retailer that supports it and so once retailers start supporting that that pin request API. Check out becomes much lower friction there and we're starting to see see some pretty significant deployment so I think they're a bunch of things working in favor of. Reducing checkout friction and I I suspected hope that that's going to. Eagle a permanent reduction in the mobile Gap and that's super important to me because Scott and I actually had a debate about whether that mobile Gap was going to go away or not last year and I think I said it was so if it doesn't I'm going to I'm going to lose that fat. Scot & Rob: [37:00] What happens when it goes away. What are you talking about well I guess you got plenty of topics. Jason: [37:04] Yeah yeah I mean by quick weave shortage of topics has never been Scott and eyes problems. [37:12] The but the other thing that I do think just works in Mobile favor over holiday is what I'll call buying intent right that. [37:22] There's a lot of reasons a consumer would go to a Retailer's website. [37:26] So you know I used to use the phone book to get the phone number and find out if there's a product in stock. [37:33] Today I'll go to the website and look up online whether the product in stock before I drive to the store. I used to use the newspaper circular to see if the store has a sale today I'll go to the website and look and see if they're having a sale. I used to use the Yellow Pages to see where the store nearest me was today I'll go to the store locator on the site to see where that the store was all all so they're all these. [37:56] Visits that happened to a retailer site where no one ever intended to buy anything they intended to get information off and that they're going to use to visit a store. [38:07] And so all of those things are actually happy things that you unscrewed that consumers are doing but they have the unintended consequence of making conversion rate look lower. [38:16] Inside out during holiday when a higher percentage of the overall traffic are coming to the site with the specific intent to buy something. [38:26] That that affects gets diluted and so I think it's. It it's just a natural thing that as traffic goes up on these on these days when people are mostly trying to buy online. That we're going to see the mobile Gap near a little bit but I do also think that the the the longer-term happier reason is. It is just getting easier and easier to, to check out and send Chopper stuff into your point as artificial intelligence gets better so the right product show up in front of you quicker and as we know it. Things like boys interfaces that are easier and faster than, typing you know complicated searches and a search engine that I got that just all going to work in mobiles paper. Scot & Rob: [39:09] For sure I'd like to find you some we actually track that throughout the year and that's a that's a nice leading indicator as to what consumers are thinking so I'd like that like that apply to the mobile in Holiday. [39:22] Any talk about some of the key days hear anything else on mobile that that you want to. [39:32] Again I think the key piece of it is it's it's helping to a bit smooth out the the demand because the consumers have that access and control in Tazewell. Reference before that transparency and and it's in it showed. As as consumers just continue to go to that as their mechanism to connect with the retailers. [39:57] About a Multi-Device because you guys are running, go towards the side against after you logged in effectively but anything anything interesting their arguments people I say as well people are on their phone and they're doing research and they throw something in the cart and then they go to the desktop and check out now, I've never been a big believer of that but haven't had enough data to either agree or dispute. [40:23] Yeah for sure I mean that is happening and we're seeing the data because we're able to give an arm. Persistent cart were able to see that consumer through most of the digital if not all of the digital Journey right and we are seeing fact that there are multiple digital touch points before. The buy button which is of course just driving retailers absolutely Baddie because most of them can't attribute know where the demand is coming from and where else only they're buying and kind of needing it all together but we're finding that. For sure to be the case and that we're seeing it even, more so during the holiday time when if you can believe it or not, consumers are even more time starved and distracted so they are starting their shopping journey in one stage for One Touch point and then. Consummating in another so yeah that's it that's a big Dynamic that's happening and also they're using in many cases the, you know the shopping cart if you will as a registry or a wish list and allowing them to also do a lot of research for not only, gifting to others but self-gifting is well will self-gifting on, the start digging into so many ski days and you hit on some of them is as we, been going over the broader topics but what was pick November kind of first which is I guess the kickoff there through Thanksgiving but not including Thanksgiving. [41:54] Anything have you guys been watching that. And as I feel like it is accelerated compared to last year a lot of retailers are kind of now calling it you know a month of black Friday's and they're trying to get consumers to ACT earlier or any anything by that kind of. Early holiday. Talk about. [42:11] Yeah for sure I mean it goes back to this game of discount chicken and it's not only between the retailer and a consumer it but it's between or among all. The retailers and there were some that just went out of the gate really strong right on November 1st and if retailers didn't. Already planned for that we saw that there were several that actually scramble to to make it happen but. Are TV shows that wow the discounts continue to. He brought forward the consumer is still in control and it might have helped with. Brand recognition and certainly to get a jump on the preference of the shop where and when but. Only 35% and I say only cuz it still needs a lot of Runway will occur of digital shopping by. [43:09] This month is not Monday what we also stopped by the way just to kind of give you a broader sense of When shopping will be complete we anticipate we, predict that 50% of the digital shopping will be complete by December 3rd so that's right up on us and then 80% by December 15th right again right around. [43:28] That what I would say nautical shipping windoware. People even though they might be promise to get the product in a certain amount of time or it's starting to get a little worried about that but that's my long way of saying yeah we're definitely tracking this the discount keys. [43:45] And other promotional activities what we started to see to I don't know if it was purposely plan for. This time of year or not but more more subscriptions. That are being launched a subscription Services right so stance as an example just launching their there. [44:09] Their subscription for socks or Fruit of the Loom so I wonder if that has a little to do with hey this is an interesting gift to get this time of year that last throughout the entire year. Jason: [44:21] That is totally interested I haven't noticed that transfer I will redouble my Maya observations and follow that, as we move from that kind of pre pre Thanksgiving. And start looking at it's a big 5 days what what are you guys seeing in terms of Thanksgiving Black Friday, that the weekend and then Cyber Monday. Scot & Rob: [44:43] Yeah absolutely yes sir we saw just actually across the seven days to. Throw it out there we saw a 26% / All Digital growth and we saw. Really high spike in Black Friday and it actually based on our data was the biggest digital shopping day. Of the holiday season but we also saw Thanksgiving being. Significant growth as well so people aren't again aren't waiting and so you know across the board we're seeing some really really nice growth as we anticipated because of the strong digital growth that we saw. In our shopping index in Q3 we anticipated it but it was really really interesting to see you again particularly on Black Friday. Jason: [45:36] Very interesting in just a clarification some vendors like see a subset of all the the. E-commerce traction transactions and they they use a statistical model to try to extrapolate that and say. And here's you know here's what we think happened in a hundred percent of the industry in your case. I think you're being a little more straightforward right like when you say 26% grilled you're talking about like all the Salesforce Cloud customers I sent you a saw 26% growth in so that that may or may not perfectly mirror the entire. E-commerce industry or the entire internet 500 or something like that do I do I have that right or are you trying to do a. Scot & Rob: [46:19] That is. [46:21] That is totally fair and so we do have a great cross-section of retailers and branded manufacturers of every size, but that is in fact the case we do not apply Cisco model on top of we have here we just used the R3000 sites across 53 countries as as the sample set, and that's another important the 6th and I think is ours is global we can and do subsequently slice it by. Size and by geography and by segments phenotype. A retailer but in this case we are providing Global numbers across all of the segments. Awesome so we're running up against time and appreciate you recording this in the evening preciate you taking time out of your end of your busy day here I was going to get out of holiday mode towards the end here and, you've already been super helpful with some of the voice Commerce stuff that we left talk about in an AI, any interesting non-holiday trends that that you can share as you look kind of towards the next year or even three to five years out. [47:33] Yeah you don't want friend where fracking really closely and it's I would say in the context of AI is. Actually putting the consumer or. The consumer data back in the consumer experience near a hypothesis is that we've been talking about putting the customer incentive everything you do for the last 10 15 20 years I remember. Writing reports on it as an analyst but with. The increasing importance of AI there's increasing importance on actually figuring out how to better manage and. Operationalize your consumer data physically because it's just scattered in many cases all across the difference operational systems and so, really interesting Theory Focus over the next 12 months on the data which isn't that, sexy honestly but it's something we need to do so we think there's going to be a lot of investment there were looking at that closely from the my team and a research perspective and what that's going to look like. [48:37] We also you know given. [48:41] Now part of Salesforce for the last year-and-a-half certainly looking at what does a platform look like. That helps manage the journey from all the way up the final at you know as you know, Discovery research coming through Commerce and fulfillment and service and advocacy and that's what's really getting us excited as you know with the densities coming together. Salesforce applying artificial intelligence to it we think there's this great value to be had by by retailers Brands to and rethink their front end systems, animal holistic of unified way. Jason: [49:30] I do think that's an interesting opportunity I actually think there's two Trends are somewhat related in that like one of the problems we had start they have a data is that there's a ton of of. Data within an Enterprise but it's all trapped into these you know the spirit silos so there's like. The personalization engine on top of your eCommerce engine that knows something in your analytics for e-commerce know something else and your customer service guys know something else and you know that to that consumer that doesn't look at those two separate Services they're like. Man I sure did all this information about myself and they should go to use that to have way more relevant interactions with me and reduced you know a lot of friction and they shouldn't be asking me all these questions they already know about me. But for the retailer to solve those. They got to break down all those silos and integrate all that that data so I actually think the leveraging AI to get better experiences and kind of you know. Doing a better job of integrating all of your systems are are closely related. Scot & Rob: [50:32] Yeah for sure no I think you articulated that really well if they all kind of playoff each other I guess the other point to is what can send you to see, your Brand's going Direct on and become even more vertically integrated in retailers, certainly going back for this life-changing and creating unique differentiated through products and services and so forth but you know really where you'll become interesting is. How Brands and retailers as a reference before moves Beyond just their property which is, really uncomfortable for many of these organizations because since the beginning of time it was about pulling the consumer to their property and owning them and not sharing them and now needs to be more of, pushing their brands where the consumers are and that might be in various Partners or third parties that you know, that's where the demand is being created so be asking to see I'm more of whatever you call it distributed Commerce or conversational Commerce property, Daiquiris retailers outside your comfort zone from a technical perspective much as you know operational perspective as well to go where the consumers are. Jason: [51:53] I totally agree and in fact I'll even give a little Club to your architecture that's sort of beneficial for all those those things. [52:03] The challenges you know that all of these new opportunities are launched it's hard to know which ones are going to be huge successes and which ones are are just kind of. [52:14] Buzzy and there's potentially a significant amount of effort to implement the technology to try these things so Pinterest launches shoppable pins. Hey is that going to be a huge thing or is that a novelty Apple pay makes itself available through a web browser is that you know the most important thing I could do my inside or not and if you're. [52:36] If you're a site with a non-friend Connor solution that you sort of own. And you got a bunch of developers that have to implement each of these things you have to make big strategic bets about which ones you're going to chase and which ones you're going to try to be a fast or follower on. But when one of the awesome things about your cloud-based solution is. [52:59] You guys tend to do those implementations and then you know the customers wake up to the new version of the platform and it and just all of those those things are available and often like super easy and low friction to turn on and try. And you know I do think. That your your customers you know tend to be in a better position to implement and try some some of those new features and learn which ones are going to work and which ones aren't much quicker then. Then maybe some of the the more Legacy on-prem Solutions. Scot & Rob: [53:32] Yeah well I appreciate that and certainly the consumers are moving really quickly in, stating the terms to a large degree and so yeah I mean gone are the days of 12 months implementations to get a mobile site up or even you know a month to get Apple pay going it's Let's test the stuff if it works awesome, it doesn't let's move on but let's not invest too much time and energy and put too much risk on the business oh yeah I'm in the cloud model continual innovation. Certainly agility we're seeing our customers take advantage that weather we're putting. The innovation in the platform of their innovating but themselves or third-party say I appreciate it specially coming from you the recognition of that and you know Cloud certainly as a key enabler. Jason: [54:20] Well Rob that's why she can be a great place to leave it because it does happen again, we have burn through our a lot of time but definitely one thank you for taking time out during what I know is a super busy season for you and sharing what the Salesforce. Scot & Rob: [54:38] Thanks so much helmets absolute pleasure and happy holidays to everybody thanks Rob. Jason: [54:43] Until next time happy commercing.

Bas and Roy start off with a discussion on their individual SEO training and education from teaching from how to prevent spam to linkbuilding to Google Pagerank. They also discuss how Google + is now made available on Google apps, and the limitations Google is making to their Google Maps API.

Justin and Jason discuss how Justin has managed to get out of debt so quickly, Jason's Appignite generated issue reporter - Complainer, how Justin and Jason are teaming up to do AnyFu and some ideas on how the site might work, how Justin optimized Pluggio using APC byte caching, overriding include_once and increasing MySQL's buffer pool, Justin's idea on how to grow the show, how disappointed they are that the TV show The Event has been canceled, why Jason is jealous of Colby's big summer, an update on Pluggio's numbers and the integration with Totango, Jason's idea for how Justin could increase Pluggio's traffic, Jason's idea for starting a non-profit to fight patent trolling, the new version of Uber's God View and working with the Google Maps API, the speed and flexibility of JSONP and why ordering posts chronologically devalues them.

This week Nick explains visual contrast and Jim shows you how to embed a map in your pages using the Google Maps API.

This episode will wrap up the google docs series. You can start with Part 1 and Part 2, or jump straight into this one. With our persistence layer (the Google Docs Spreadsheet) and unit tests around geo-targetting addresses completed, we’ll tackle the view and try and visualize our data using the Google Maps API. This…

This video will is part of a multi-part series on looking at how we can leverage some of Google’s API’s to build a fancy mapping tool that’s driven from a Google Docs Spreadsheet. If you haven’t worked with Google Docs or Zend_Gdata before, I suggest you take a look at the video introducing Zend_Gdata and…

Google maps, with all the dragging and zooming and satellite view and all, is my mapping service of choice. Google offers an free API for their maps so you can integrate them right onto your site. Set you own default location, zoom level, widgetry. Even add your own markers with custom balloons. Remember though, if a map and directions are vital to your site, nothing beats some “plain English” directions. Links from video: View Demo Download Files Google Maps API… Read article “#34: Integrating and Customizing Google Maps”