FounderQuest

Ben and Josh discuss the benefits and perils of using AI assistants for programming.CursorCodeium WindsurfGitHub Copilot announcementPerplexity

Ben, Josh, and John Nunemaker are back from RubyConf and take the opportunity to discuss how to sponsor a conference as a small software company. Protip: bring your furniture from home.https://wiki.c2.com/?ResultObjectPattern=https://www.chairigami.comhttps://twenty.comhttps://rubycentral.org/news/make-railsconf-happen/Adam’s Judo Scale infomercialhttps://boxoutsports.com/graphics/multi-format/multi-format-gameday-90-s-serieshttps://boxoutsports.com/graphics/tags/saved-by-the-bell

Ben and Josh go off-script for a fun and hopefully-not-too-long chat about their favorite Twitter-like social network, Bluesky.https://faineg.substack.com/p/how-i-accidentally-ruined-blueskyThe hosts of WSUA9 call it skeeting on airAOC endorses “team skeets”Jake Tapper says “skeeted” live on CNNProtocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech by Mike MasnickComposable moderationHow to set your domain as your handleBluesky reaches 20M usershttps://go.bsky.app/HD2Ty2ohttps://go.bsky.app/EGczjGAhttps://bsky.app/profile/bencurtis.comhttps://bsky.app/profile/joshuawood.honeybadger.iohttps://bsky.app/profile/founder.questhttps://bsky.app/profile/honeybadger.iohttps://deck.blue/https://brid.gy/

Josh and Ben reconnect with their friend JP Boily to discuss building his startup Metrics Watch for just over 9 years before finding a new owner on Acquire.com.Bluesky startups & bootstrappers starter packJoin the Honeybadger/FounderQuest Discord server!https://metricswatch.com/https://github.com/topfunky/gruffhttps://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/The_Homerhttps://jumpstartrails.comhttps://microconf.comhttps://businessofsoftware.orghttps://rubyconferences.org

Josh and Ben catch up with John Nunemaker after Rails World and dig into John's recent acquisition of Fireside.fm, the podcasting platform created by Dan Benjamin. What's next for John? In short, he's curating some Very Good Software™.https://www.johnnunemaker.com/acquiring-fireside/https://www.johnnunemaker.com/how-to-find-a-business-partner/https://danbenjamin.com/http://sifterapp.com/https://www.indierails.com/

Ben, Josh, and John discuss pricing, including how to approach pricing, what they do and don't like about pricing, and how pricing works at Honeybadger and Flipper.https://cottonbureau.com/p/9EMACZ/shirt/the-process#/17943854/tee-men-standard-tee-vintage-black-tri-blend-mhttps://blog.flippercloud.io/per-seat-pricing-sucks/https://garrettdimon.com/journal/posts/data-modeling-saas-entitlements-and-pricinghttps://basecamp.com/pricinghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversionhttps://statamic.com/

While Josh is on vacation, Ben chats with guests Will King and John Nunemaker about the process and perils of trying to ship reliably. https://www.wking.dev/logs/shipping-in-layershttps://longform.asmartbear.com/slc/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_producthttps://archive.ph/20130719182750/http://www.businessballs.com/treeswing.htmhttps://www.amazon.com/How-Fight-Hydra-Ambitions-Destined-ebook/dp/B07J57YF47

Ben and Josh catch up after a few weeks of heads-down product work, and they have lots to talk about—including a new Discord server for FounderQuest listeners! Plus, hear Josh’s thesis on why it’s a huge problem if you’re not using your product to the max.Shape UpSeth GodinBlue Ridge RubyMonitoramaJoin the Honeybadger Discord! https://discord.gg/aQaDVBedRf

Longtime friend of the pod Adam McCrea joins Josh and Ben to catch up and chat about his journey building Judoscale—an autoscaling service for Heroku, Render, and AWS!Blue Ridge RubyJosh’s Blue Ridge Ruby recapKyle SholdPrintfectionJudoScaleSignWellHeroku Add-onsRouter blog post: https://judoscale.com/blog/heroku-router-post-mortem

John Nunemaker returns to FounderQuest to discuss his writing process—after the guys debate code linters and formatters, of course. It's important to start with the essentials.Links:StandardrbJosh’s 2013 Ruby Style GuideGitHub CopilotCopilot Chat for NeovimSeth GodinAmy HoyMy Life in Advertising by Claude HopkinsThis book will teach you how to write better by Neville MedhoraCarbon

Josh and Ben are joined by John Nunemaker to discuss their recent trip to Detroit for RailsConf, as well as the announcement from RubyCentral that 2025 will mark the final RailsConf (though not the last Rails conference!). Later in the episode, Josh and Ben reveal the outcome of their Honeybadger Insights launch goal and discuss the team's last dev cycle. John also shares an update on his work with Flipper!Links:ChartkickFrictionless GeneratorsFlippertodo_or_die gemheya gemUserlistJohn NunemakerLast RailsConf announcement and surveyDetroit People MoverFounderQuestMastodon - @[email protected] - @honeybadgerappHoneybadger

This week, Josh and Ben dive deep into the marketing strategy for their new product, Insights, in response to a listener question. They talk about what groups they are targeting first, some of the planned marketing tactics for reaching each group, and how they are building awareness within the Honeybadger app without annoying existing users.Links:pg_cronJudoscaleTractionInsights tour page Insights announcement blog post Meet the badgersFounderQuestMastodon - @[email protected] Twitter - @honeybadgerappHoneybadgerClickHouse - hosted by DoubleCloud

This week Josh and Ben discuss shipping Insights, what's next for the product, and their strategies to get people to actually use it. Plus Ben shares the results from his latest performance science projects. Grab your safety glasses and headphones!Links:Lab TechYabedaYabeda for InsightsVectorFluentdEvil Martians blogScientistMeet the badgersFounderQuestMastodon - @[email protected] Twitter - @honeybadgerappHoneybadgerClickHouse - hosted by DoubleCloud

This week Josh and Ben discuss shipping a Clickhouse migration and Honeybadger's new look. They also talk about Exceptional Creatures hitting number one on Hacker News and being featured at the top of Ruby Weekly. Plus, did Ben get interviewed by a rubber duck?Links:Exceptional CreaturesKamalDaily LexClickhouse ActiverecordScientistRealGeeks Meet the badgersFounderQuestMastodon - @[email protected] Twitter - @honeybadgerappHoneybadger

Today Josh and Ben are talking about UI changes in order to lay the foundation to launch and integrate Insights into Honeybadger as well as steps they are taking to avoid some rollout mistakes they've made in the past. They also reveal how testers are liking Insights so far!Links:Derek SiversFlipperMeet the badgersFounderQuestMastodon - @[email protected] Twitter - @honeybadgerappHoneybadger

GOOAAALLL!!! This week Ben and Josh discuss how to get Honeybadger's growth back on track by setting a company-wide goal. They also talk about how to promote new features in your product without annoying your users and what Santa brought them for Christmas!Links:BHAGMeet the badgersFounderQuestMastodon - @[email protected] Twitter - @honeybadgerappHoneybadger

This week Josh and Ben discuss Honeybadger's recent revenue struggles, how they got to this point, and the steps they're taking to weather the storm. They also explain why 2024 could be the company's best year ever!Links:Steve Jobs - "Saying No"Meet the badgersFounderQuestMastodon - @[email protected] Twitter - @honeybadgerappHoneybadger

Kevin joins Josh and Ben again this week as the trio discusses Honeybadger's hack week, processes for making bold UI/UX changes, what to do/not do if your customers hate said UI/UX changes, plus the latest trends in Crocs fashion!LinksCrocsJoel on Software - Things you should never doDHH Business of SoftwareEveryday Information ArchitectureMeet the badgersWhy's (Poignant) Guide to RubyClickHouse - hosted by DoubleCloudFounderQuestMastodon - @[email protected] Twitter - @honeybadgerappHoneybadger

It's a trifecta of badgers this week as Honeybadger's own Kevin Webster takes us on a deep dive into the genesis of his baby/our new product, Insights. There is also a discussion around the challenges of dealing with burnout plus the Holy Hand Grenade!LinksMeet the badgersClickHouse - hosted by DoubleCloudFounderQuestMastodon - @[email protected] Twitter - @honeybadgerappHoneybadger

This week Josh and Ben give further insights into Insights and discuss challenges around shoehorning a new product into an existing one. They also talk about marketing strategies, a Las Vegas trip, and disaster recovery! All this and more in this week's episode!LinksAhoyHeyaClickHouse - hosted by DoubleCloudMichele Hansen - "When done well, marketing and teaching are nearly indistinguishable from one another."FounderQuestMastodon - @[email protected] Twitter - @honeybadgerappWebsite

FounderQuest is back for episode 100! Learn why FounderQuest is down to two hosts. Listen to tales of hosting lavish RailsConf parties. Plus, don't miss the details of the secret upcoming product release that has been a year in the making!Links:Mastodon - @[email protected] Twitter - @honeybadgerappWebsite

Show notes:Links:Garrett DimonMinitest HeatHeat Map Reporter for MinitestReviewStarting & SustainingSifter AppAutomated transcript (only about 70% accurate)Ben  Welcome to FounderQuest, this has been Today, I'm interviewing Garrett Diamond Star and josh are taking the day off and I get a chat with Garrett, who's a longtime friend of mine and fantastic entrepreneur and all around great person in the world, so I'm excited to have you here. Gary, Thanks, Garrett  thanks for having me. Ben  It's always fun catching up with you. I think the last time we chatted was business of software a few years ago, wasn't it? Garrett  Yeah, not frequently enough, Ben  so that was, yeah, definitely not frequent enough. One thing I most remember about that business of software was that was when the hurricane was coming through and so I was standing out there in boston with all the wind and the Garrett  right, having grown Ben  up in the south, that was kind of ironic that I was there in the northeast and getting a hurricane. Mhm. So have you been Garrett  three, so just uh probably about the same as everybody else man, you know, just kinda one day at a time and keeping it going um and yeah, I just kind of dabbling and exploring and for once the last year just kind of let myself be undirected and just kind of followed what was interesting and pulled on threads and uh a little unnerving but also kind of nice and refreshing, I don't know, you know, so kind of bouncing around like a ping pong ball. Ben  Well, that's, that sounds pretty cool. Well, let's talk about that in a minute. I want to catch people up so I'm sure most people know you, but just for those who don't. So Garrett again, it's been a long time entrepreneur I think. I think I first bumped into you with doing sifter, your, your, your app from a few years ago, you built that from scratch solo entrepreneur and then you sold that. Then you're, you're at post uh, postmark for awhile for that. Right. Garrett  Well, wild bit at large, but primarily on postmark. Yeah. Ben  Okay. Right. Right. So you're a while, but for a while and then I guess it was a couple of years ago now that you've left wild. Garrett  Yeah, it's been about . years, I guess. No. Okay. Ben  Yeah. And so I guess also during that time you kind of did the starting and sustaining books slash video series slash thing. That was cool. Garrett  Yeah, I've bee

Show notes:Links:Sweaty StartupHook RelaySpider seasonWrite for HoneybadgerAutomated transcript (only about 75% accurate)Ben  So I've been, I've been using Hook Relay over the past week and I got to say, there's nothing as useful as using your own product to make you see places where the product can be improved. So I've, I've opened a couple of issues. Yeah, yeah. And uh, I mean, they're not, they're not major things, but it's like, oh, it would be nice if this was different, would be nice if that was, you know, different. And it's been, it's been good. So I'm, I'm looking forward to having those things done making the product better. And we, uh, you know, we talked about spending some more time, uh, development time on really the other couple next coming weeks and months because I've had some, some customer requests coming in. So Ben  it's always a good feeling like when people are actually using it and saying, oh yeah, I like it, but couldn't do this like, Oh yeah, I could do that. It's fun. I love it. I love being developer and just building stuff. So much fun. Yeah. Josh  Yeah. Looking at our, our dashboard, we've got uh, got a few New year's is coming in. Got some a little bit more revenue than last time I looked at this, so that's cool. Starr  Yeah, that's good stuff. You know, it's the season for it. The, the pacific Northwest summer is long gone and we're just into the dark, wet now. We've gone through a spider season. Yeah, I mean, right, you've got um, yeah, you've got the summer, you've got spider season, you've got dark with it. Josh  Is that from that like list of pacific Northwest Seasons or whatever, that's like . Starr  You can, you can call me out on that. I was hoping to um, I was hoping to plagiarize. Josh  We should, we should put that in the show notes if we can find it though. That's a pretty good one. Starr  Yeah, that's a good one. Josh  I don't remember them all, but Ben  I'm definitely, definitely more productive in the winter time because like, I'm not outside playing, I'm inside hunkering down from the rain, the cold, so I'm like, I might as well do some code. Josh  Yeah, Starr  I mean, personally, I kind of um like I kind of stopped going on my morning walks in the summer because there's too many amateurs out. Yeah. And I started again once the fall comes, once it starts getting dark and drizzly and those are my favorite morning walks. Josh  Nice even in the rain. <

Show notes:Links:Hook RelaySSL Server TestSecond brand marketing tips Twitter thread XhtmlchopHook Relay Twitter announcementHook Relay blog announcementDerrick Reimer & Corey Haines Product Hunt launch Startup Director List Indie Hackers launch repeatedly Not very accurate auto-generated transcript:Ben - you know, last week I recorded a quick little message talking about why we weren't recording our podcast. That was in the middle of the let's encrypt ssl certificate fiasco that swept across the internet and you know, at the time it really didn't feel like a huge problem. Uh like from our perspective there wasn't much of an impact, but there was some impact, but then later on that day and the next day I was reading some articles and like apparently it was a pretty big deal for a lot of people. So uh yeah, wasn't wasn't just us, it's one Josh - of those things like I could just kept seeing it more and more like just pop up in random places though to like, not, not necessarily in our world, but it was just like affected all kinds of different things. Ben - Yeah, yeah, so shout out to ssL labs for their ssl testing tool to put a link to that in the show notes. Whenever you have a question about your ssl you should check that first because it does tell you when, when things are bad. Josh - Yeah, I hadn't used that tool before and it was very very helpful on customer support. Especially like sending to people and we needed to like prove that we were, we were not at fault like you know, it gave us like a smoking gun that we could. Yeah. Yeah. Really great. Starr - That's always a weird thing to do in customer services and it's like um it's like no, actually like I found the line in the library you mentioned. That's actually the problem. It does everything to do with this. Yeah. Yeah. And then um and then facebook goes down so I'm thinking I'm thinking we are like, like spooky Tober is starting up like things are starting to get witchy. Josh - I kind of like I I was like checked out the day facebook went down so I like missed most of like the fun on whatever online and I guess on what the other social networks that

Show notes:Links:Umm...here's a picture of a Honeybadger sleeping on our 404 page. He's definitely sleeping.Transcription:*Note, transcription is paraphrased with 1.3% accuracyBen "Expired certificates, yada yada yada, internet broke...no episode. Bada-boom-bada-bing, have a good weekend."

Show notes:Links:Felix LivniSchedulistaTranscript:*This is an unedited, automated transcript, with only about 80% accuracy*BenAll right, so, uh welcome the founder quest today, you have me, Ben, because Star and josh are taking the day off and we have Felix of me who is with us or with me chatting about uh founder related stuff. It's just one of our uh, intermittent founder interview kind of episodes where we're just going to have a great chat, talk about some stuff, so welcome Felix. Thanks. So, Felix was telling you tell me right before we got started about the differences of having an actual conversation versus a podcast conversation and you had a great great tip about email. So, if you don't mind, could you like, hit me with that again? Because I thought that's pretty cool. Felix  Yeah, what I've noticed is if I write an email knowing that a lot of people are going to read this email, maybe it's an onboarding email that's going to be sent out to uh you know, many, many people, I don't seem to be able to write it in the same way as the emails I write to just that one person and I often feel that if I could just if I was just trying to sell to one person, I could probably do a pretty good job and I think the better attitude for me has always been to then trying to do that and then try and automate that and it turns out very differently than when I'm trying to to do the thing that is going to be automated right away. Ben  So yeah, I like that, I've had the same kind of experience where it's like, well you spend a lot of time crafting, crafting, crafting and then it feels crafted right? It doesn't, it doesn't feel like a real email. So do you like uh Try to like email individuals for like  times  times first and before you get the final copy that you want to send everybody? Felix  Yeah, exactly. And I think really not thinking about tools at all is really the right way to go about it um where all you try and do is think what is the best thing for this one customer and you do that for a couple of different customers and then you look for patterns and I would say when you do it a lot and this is the advantage you have with podcast is once you do it a lot, you kind of see some patterns as well, some sort of meta patterns of like how, how do the things that sound unnatural look versus the things that sound natural and I'll just tell you one that I've noticed, I don't know if this is something you've noticed, but when I write an email to a single person, it usually has one sentence in it, maybe two. Felix  Uh but when I write something that I think is, let's say, an onboarding email of some sort uh it's not gonna be that short. Uh so that's definitely a pattern I've noticed. I think we we noticed that as consumers or busines

Show notes:Links:SaaslerKoombeaHook RelayTranscript:*note - this is an unedited, automatically generated, transcript with only about 80% accuracy*Ben  So I say we we just had a new customer signed up just like minutes ago and said that the reason they signed up was our podcast. So awesome. Good stuff. Good stuff. So pro tip for you says operators out there, put a little box and your on boarding, asking people how they heard about you or whatever. It's very, very informative. Starr  Yeah, it does. And then do a podcast and wait  episodes. Ben  Those steps are optional. I really do like they're having like those, those uh onboarding introductions is what we call them. We have a channel in slack for them and having those show up periodically is like a little little endorphin rush. Like I love seeing those show up in our slack channel and you know, we also have a cancellations channel has the same thing with cancellation messages and that's not quite as fun. But thankfully we see if you are those messages that we do the onboarding messages, but I just, I really like having those things in slack. It's nice to see that throughout the day. Starr  Yeah, definitely. So imagine this is gonna be a little bit of a shorter one because we just recorded um last week's podcast, like on monday in today's thursday. So I don't know if there's, there's not as much time that's passed to let um I don't know to let the hot takes regenerate themselves. Mhm Ben  Right, well, I have a hot date for you and it's the grape, I guess most hot takes are great Josh  what we're best at. Ben  Uh so I'm working on an update to the Roku integration. So, you know, we haven't a clue add on and Uh we started to add on like, I don't know, back early, early days, it must have been like , or so. A long time ago. Well in , apparently Hiroki released an updated version of their API for partners like us and uh it has a new provisioning thing and you can actually call back to their API and get some information about like supervision to add on and stuff like that. Which is great. Uh We haven't ever really gotten around to changing our particular add on because it works just fine. So why bother? Ben  But I've been looking at synchronizing the Heroku pricing with our current pricing because we've done a number of pricing variations since we launched the Heroku. And so now the two sets of pricing are pretty out of sync. So as I started to get into that I was like well you know well I'm here, how about I just you know update the A. P. I write classic classic rabbit hole. Right? And and and so I spent some time doing that and found you know some interesting quirks and so on about our integration and anyway it's all good like

Show notes:Links:Bold Badgers NFTMantis scooterRidwellWrite for HoneybadgerTranscript:*note - this is an unedited automatically generated transcript with about 80% accuracy*Josh: So we really are we doing this, uh, super quick. Do we need to like speed up our voices? ArtificiallyBen: The chipmonk episode.Starr: There you go. No, we should just, we should slow them down. So it'll um, we can just record  a  minute episode and then we'll take  minutes to listen to it.Josh: Yeah, yeah. That's right. That's what we've been doing all along. That's our life hack is it takes us  minutes to record these episodes and you listened to them in  minutes.Starr: Yeah. So that's the, um, so I'll fill in our listeners. We, um, we miss our normal recording day on Friday, and so we're making it up on a Monday, which means like we're jam packed in with a bunch of other stuff. Um, so this may be a little  shorter than usual and I'm sorry. I know you just have to have all of us all the time and we're just giving it all we can right now.Josh: Yeah, it'll be just as off topic though. So, um,Starr: I would thank God.Ben: Yeah. Speaking, speaking of off topic, I have, I have a public service announcement to make. As, as you know, I've been getting more into the electric vehicles scene, uh, personal mobility, micro mobility, all that kind of fun stuff. And I, you know, a few months ago bought an electric scooter.  It's a mantis for those who are curious, who are in the know, uh, and I've been really enjoying that, like riding back and forth to work and goofing off and that sort of thing. But the thing that's, the public service announcement is, uh, wear a helmet. If you're going to ride one of these pillars. I just, this past week saw two different people riding on scooters, similar to mine, like higher powered scooters, mixing it up with traffic, like on  mile per hour roads and not wearing a helmet. And I just thought that is insane.  Like, I don't know. Maybe, maybe, yeah, you should definitely wear a helmet if you're going to ride electric scooter at  miles an hour, just saying that's my PSA.Josh: I did go for, I went for a, my first ride on an EBI bike, um, last week and I must confess I did not wear a helmet. And, uh, I have to say it was, you know, it was kind of fun. Like, you know, little dangerous,  there was no traffic. Like there was very little traffic, so in my defense.Ben: Okay. That's a plus. Do you remember what kind of bike your Rover's like a super ? Like one of those modelsJosh: I have, I have a very bad memory for names o

Show notesLinks:Hey Dumpster FireGoatse.cxFull transcript:*This is an unedited automated transcript which is only about 80% accurate*Starr  Yeah, well, sad news. Um I did not see my printing press last weekend because I I came down with a cold, it wasn't it wasn't covid, so don't worry, it's okay. Um But we're waiting for the test to come back. So you know the difference between now and the before times is now when you get a cold life shuts down and you can't really do anything until your results come back. Josh  Well and you know the other thing about like during the pandemic, everyone's home like just the printing press market is just going wild right now, so like, there's going to be gone, I'm sure it'll be gone long gone by the time you're feeling better. Starr  Exactly, everybody's going to print their manifestos, Josh  right? Yeah, Ben  well, you know, since my kid is able to take care of his own school needs and I didn't have to like sideline myself for that, like, like star, I actually got some stuff done this week, but uh but not going to tell you me. So I've been really get into this groove on having other people do things, so Starr  it's not definite, Ben  it's so nice, so nice. So shall I was able to deliver a feature that we want in Hungary there for a long time and that is being able to deliver to multiple your ills. So we give you a hook address that you post to and then you can say, okay, up to three different Charles will then get that delivery that post. So Josh  that's pretty cool, Starr  wow, Broadcasting broadcasting Ben  your publisher, this is something that one of our customers asked for and something we've wanted for a while and, and uh I apologize, I think to shop because I kind of dropped the ball on, you know, helping this get this, get this feature over the goal, you know, he uh he had done some work a few months ago and I just was distracted and didn't really uh follow up on it, like, I should have, and then and then once I did follow up like I should have, then it's like, you know what, I don't think we want to go with this round, I think I want to go a different round. So we ended up re implementing the whole thing in a different way, but so I appreciate his patients but got that launch, That's feeling pretty good. Starr  That's awesome. So um so hook really is a product that we're uh you know, we've lost, you can just go sign up for right now, right? Yeah. Ok. Yeah, so it's uh it's like magic for your wife hooks, so if you if you want to um if you want to send a web hook, you just send it to our service and then we make sure that it gets deliver, that's

Show Notes:Links:MicromortNoblesse obligeJosh's dotfilesGitHub Code SpacesFull Transcript:Ben:Yeah. I've been holding out for the new MacBook Pros. The M1 is pretty tempting, but I want whatever comes next. I want the 16-inch new hotness that's apparently supposed to be launching in November, but I've been waiting for it so patiently for so long now.Josh:Will they have the M2?Ben:Yeah, either or that or M1X. People are kind of unsure what the odds are.Starr:Why do they do that? Why did they make an M1 if they can't make an M2? Why do they have to keep... You just started, people. You can just have a normal naming scheme that just increments. Why not?Josh:M1.1?Ben:That would be awesome.Starr:Oh, Lord.Josh:Yeah, it would.Ben:M1A, Beachfront Avenue.Starr:So last week we did an Ask Me Anything on Indie Hackers, and that was a lot of fun.Josh:It was a lot of fun.Starr:I don't know. One of the most interesting questions on there was some guy was just like, "Are you rich?" I started thinking about it. I was like, "I literally have no idea." It reminded me of when I used to live in New York briefly in the '90s or, no, the early '00s. There was a Village Voice article in which they found... They started out with somebody not making very much money, and they're like, "Hey, what is rich to you?" Then that person described that. Then they went and found a person who had that level of income and stuff and they asked them, and it just kept going up long past the point where... Basically, nobody ever was like, "Yeah, I'm rich."Josh:Yeah. At the end, they're like, "Jeff Bezos, what is rich? What is rich to you?"Starr:Yeah.Josh:He's like, "Own your own star system."Starr:So, yeah, I don't know. I feel like I'm doing pretty good for myself because I went to fill up my car with gas the other day and I just didn't even look at the price. The other day, I wanted to snack, so I just got a whole bag of cashews, and I was just chowing down on those. I didn't need to save that. I could always get another bag of cashews.Ben:Cashews are my arch nemesis, man. I can't pass up the cashews. As far as the nut kingdom, man, they are my weakness.Starr:I know. It's the subtle sweetness.Ben:It's so good. The buttery goodness.Starr:Yeah, the smoothness of the texture, the subtle sweetness, it's all there.Ben:That and pistachios. I could die eating cashews and pistachios.Josh:There you go. I like pistachios.Ben:Speaking of being rich, did you see Pa

Show notes:Links:Snohomish Centennial trailIndie Hackers AMAIntro CRMFull transcript:Starr:All right. Welcome back. Welcome back, everybody. So we took a little break. We're going to have her hot vax summer, but that-Josh:Hot vax summer.Starr:It turns out that was the mirage. It turns out that was a mirage.Josh:Well, it did reach 112 degrees in Portland. So it was hot.Starr:There you go. Yeah. The summer never existed. It was just an illusion caused by our overwhelming thirst for lots of things.Josh:Mirage.Ben:Well, there were a couple of weeks there that I thought, "Yeah. This is going to work out. And then Delta.Starr:Yeah. It was a couple of nice weeks, wouldn't it?Ben:Yeah. It was. It was.Starr:Except for the panic about, "Oh, crap. I need to learn how to deal with people again."Josh:Wouldn't it be wonderful when we can just look back on those two weeks and just remember those last good two weeks?Ben:Yeah. Went 112 in Portland. That's pretty bad. It got to 116 in my garage.Starr:Yeah.Ben:It's pretty warm.Josh:Yeah. That's like melt some things if you're not careful.Ben:I did not know this until well, at the beginning of the pandemic, that there was actually a special class of freezer called the garage freezer because at the beginning of the pandemic I wanted to have a freezer in my garage. I'm like, "Okay. I'm just going to go to Home Depot and buy a freezer." Oh, no, no, no, no. You can't just buy a freezer to put in your garage. You have to have a garage freezer to put it in your garage. So we have a garage freezer and even with 116 in the garage, the stuff stayed frozen. So I guess it actually works.Josh:Nice. Yeah. My freezer survived as well.Starr:I mean, not having a garage freezer in your garage is almost as bad as wearing white after labor day, or is it before labor day? I forget.Josh:I don't know. I never wear white.Starr:I just don't wear white.Josh:Yeah.Starr:Yeah.Starr:Stains too easily.Josh:I just always dress like I'm going to a funeral.Starr:All right. So today's going to be a little bit of a short episode. So we should probably get to the content.Ben:I thought we were already in the content.Starr:I know our reader.Josh:Yeah. It might be short. I don't

Show notes: Seriously, this is just an announcement to let ya'll know we are taking a summer break. We'll be back, pinky swear!

Show notes:Links:Write for usMaybeJosh Pigford Flu dataFull transcript:Ben:And today we don't have Starr, because Starr is on vacation this week, fireside chat.Josh:I will be on vacation next week, and the week after.Ben:Nice.Josh:I don't know if you saw, I extended my vacation.Ben:I didn't see this.Josh:Yeah. So, surprise!Ben:Two weeks back to back. That's a record.Josh:Yeah. I decided I'm feeling it and I don't think a week is going to be enough. So just thought I'd go for it.Ben:Yeah, I get that. I get that. It's funny, I was looking... We started this vacation calendar, recently, since we are looking at transitioning away from Basecamp, where our vacation calendar was, we are now putting a vacation calendar in Google calendar, because we use G Suite for all of our stuff. And I set up this vacation calendar, and I noticed that Starr put one on there, and then Josh put on a vacation and then Kevin put on a vacation. And then, Ben Findley, just week after week after week, it's like everybody's taking a vacation. I was like, all right, so I put myself on vacation.Josh:Yeah, you got to put yourself in there. Yeah.Ben:I did. Yeah. I added myself yesterday, for the week after Ben Findley's vacation.Josh:I don't know if you went and... I went in and just put a bunch of vacations for the rest of the year for-Ben:I saw that.Josh:... myself. Yeah.Ben:That's awesome.Josh:I mean, they might change, but I figured, if I at least put them in there, that'll force me to think about it and decide. Because that's been an ongoing problem, I always wait too long and then, finally, take the vacation when I just desperately need it, and I want to avoid that cycle, like we're supposed to be. This is supposed to be sustainable.Ben:This is a calm company. It means, lots of vacations.Josh:Yeah. We should be calm if we're running a calm company.Ben:I like that idea of putting on these dates tentatively and just planning on it. I might try that.Josh:Yeah. You should just plan them out. Also, yeah, I put our traditionally long winter vacation on there too, which I think is currently the last two weeks of December and the first week of January, which we can always move that around or sometimes we do the Hack week or whatever.Ben:Yeah. I've come to cherish that tradition. I like having that-Josh:It's nice.Ben:Knowing that's going to be downtime. You know?Josh:Yeah.Ben:I mean-Josh:I like the first week of the year off is kind of...

Show notes:Links:TwistHook RelayBen Orenstein TupleWrite for HoneybadgerFull transcript:Starr:So Ben is joining us today from his car. It's bringing back fun memories. I recorded, I think the voiceover for our very first demo video in my car.Ben:Oh yeah? Nice. So as you may recall, I have a two story building that I lease one of the rooms, and the downstairs is a wine tasting room. Well with the pandemic, the company that had the wine tasting room, they closed shop. They stopped leasing, because who's going to go to a wine tasting room during a pandemic, right? Well they're leasing the space to a new tenant that's going to take that space. Apparently hey, we're getting back, things are reopening, let's taste wine again, but the new tenant wants to have a new door put in. So I got to the office today and they're like, "Yeah, we're putting in a new door." And then I'm like, "Cool." Didn't even think much of it. But then a few minutes later, there's all this drilling going on. I'm like, "Oh, I think probably the car is a better place to record today."Josh:Well at least you'll have some new friends soon.Ben:True, true.Starr:Yeah. Well I'm glad you made it, at least. And so what's up? I missed a week of the podcast and you guys invested our entire Honeybadger savings account into Bitcoin.Josh:Yeah.Starr:And I'm not sure that was the most prudent investment decision, y'all. I just wanted to say that.Ben:Yeah, the timing could have been better.Josh:Yeah, we really pulled a Roam Research on that one.Starr:Oh yeah. What do you mean by that?Josh:They invest in Bitcoin, apparently.Starr:Oh, they do? Okay.Ben:Of course they do.Starr:Of course. It's just a dip. You're supposed to buy the dips, Josh. It's just what, like a 30% dip? 40% dip?Josh:I wasn't watching it, but I read that it had recovered pretty quickly too.Starr:Oh. I have no idea. I didn't even follow it.Josh:As it does.Starr:I don't even follow it.Josh:Yeah. I just read random people's opinions.Starr:There you go.Josh:I forget where we left it last week, but I just wanted to state for record that I think I mentioned I made some accidental money in Bitcoin back when I was learning about block chain technology, but I have not bought any Bitcoin since, nor do I intend to, and I do not really view it as an investment asset.Starr:This is not investment advice.Josh:I just need to state my opinions for the future so I can look back on them with regret. If I don't say what I actuall

Show notes:Links:Mike MondragonCRDTShip of TheseusExceptional CreaturesShiba Inu Full Transcript:Ben:I'm just gonna dive on in there. I'm so eager. I'm so excited. It's actually weird because Starr is the one that typically starts us off. Josh:Yeah. I thought we were just going to start with our just general banter, and then not introduce the guest until 30 minutes later.Ben:By the way.Josh:It is also our tradition.Ben:Yeah. Well we're getting better at this thing.Josh:Where we say, "Oh, by the way, if Starr doesn't sound like Starr..."Ben:Right, yes. Today Starr doesn't sound like Starr because today's star is Mike Mondragon instead. Welcome Mike.Josh:Hey Mike.Mike:Hey.Ben:Mike is a long time friend of the show, and friend of the founders. Actually, Mike, how long have we known each other? It's been at least 10, maybe 15 years?Mike:Probably 2007 Seattle RB.Ben:Okay.Josh:Yeah. I was going to say you two have known each other much longer than I've even known Ben.Ben:Yeah.Josh:So you go back.Ben:Way back.Mike:Yep.Josh:Yeah.Ben:Yeah.Josh:Because I think Ben and I met in 2009.Ben:Mm-hmm (affirmative).Josh:Or something.Mike:Okay.Ben:Yeah, Mike and I have been hanging out for a long time.Mike:Yeah.Ben:We've known each other through many, many different jobs, and contracts, and so on. It's been awesome.Josh:Yeah, Mike, I feel like I've heard your name since... Yeah, for the last, at least, 10 years just working with Ben. You've always been in the background. And we've realized this is the first time we've actually met face to face, which is crazy. But it's great to... Yeah.Mike:Yeah.Josh:... have a face to put with the little... What is it, a cat avatar? Is a cat in your avatar? You've had that avatar for a really long time I feel like.Mike:Yeah, that's Wallace.Josh:Okay.Mike:So I'm Mond on GitHub and Twitter, and that cat avatar is our tuxedo cat, Wallace. And he is geriatric now. Hopefully he'll live another year. And if you remember in that era of Ruby, all of the Japanese Rubyists had cat icons. And so that was... I don't know. That's why Wallace is my icon.Josh:Yeah. Nice.Ben:So, so do Wallace and Goripav know each other?Mike:No, no, they don't. They're like best friends, right? They had to have met at Seattl

Show notes:Links:Threads.comBlueyVogmaskTwistIt’s a Southern ThingIf I had a front porchFull transcript:Josh:How y'all doing?Ben:I'm doing.Starr:Yeah, about the same.Ben:I've been riding my scooter to work all week.Starr:Oh, how's that?Ben:It's a lot of fun. Got a little electric kick scooter and top speed about 25 miles per hour. I was concerned about it being able to get up the hill that I have to go back up on my way home. It does drag a bit on that hill. I only got a single motor. Guess I should have gone with the dual motor. Otherwise it's fun. It's nice to be out in nature, I guess, air quotes, because you're still on the road and you're still a victim of cars and stuff. Being able to see the sun coming up over the hills and down to the valley and while you're just feeling the wind on your face, it's all good.Josh:It sounds nice.Ben:Yeah.Starr:Yeah, sounds awesome. I don't know. It seems terrifying to me, but I'm sure it's a lot of fun.Ben:It helped that I have done a lot of bike riding on roads for the past several years, so I'm already comfortable with the idea of mixing it up with cars and weaving in and out of traffic and realizing that people aren't going to see me and things like that. I think if I had just gone from driving a car straight to riding a scooter in the bike lane, that would be a little more terrifying.Starr:Yeah, that makes sense.Josh:Next you're going to have to upgrade to one of the electric skateboards or a Onewheel or something, just remove the handle bars.Ben:Right, right, right. Get one of those Onewheel things.Josh:This is leading up to-Ben:Totally.Starr:We're just working up to hoverboards. I mean I commute to my backyard office, so maybe I should get a zip-line or something from the main house.Ben:I like that, yeah.Starr:... then I could be extreme.Josh:We want a zip-line at our place out into the forest.Starr:That would be fun.Ben:You could do a zip-line from your deck to the sandbox, send the kids out to play.Josh:The kids would love it. Well, I was thinking more for myself though. Screw the kids. They don't need a zip-line.Starr:There you go. That's actually not a bad idea. We're going to get-Josh:That would be cool though.Starr:... a deck in the fall.Josh:Oh, nice.Starr:I had thought it would be fun to put a fireman pole on one side or something so kids could slide down it.

Show notes:Links:Write for HoneybadgerFluffy Arnold Schwarzenegger impressionChanges at BasecampCoinbase is a mission focused companyFakerFull transcript:I've been like texting with Zoomer person. And their emoji game is so deep and subtle that I just don't even know how to respond to these. I'm just like a thumbs up and they're just like emoji of falling leaves. How do I interpret that?Josh:Is that the difference between us and them? Is that they actually use all the emojis?Starr:I think so.Josh:We use six.Starr:I was just like, I can't just reply this with heart. So I just went and I was just like, emoji of panda bear. That seemed to be like an appropriate reaction to falling leaves. But I really don't know. I could have just completely been a jerk without realizing it.Ben:Yeah, I hadn't thought about it Josh but yeah, I think I can list the emojis that I actually use. There's thumbs up, there's troll face, there's pile of poop. Smiley face, heart. Yeah, that's pretty much it.Josh:You should get them tattooed on your arm. I think our other defining characteristic is that we're the generation that still use this text emoji and thinks it's cool.Starr:I don't think it's cool anymore. But sometimes it's just like, this is just what I'm doing. This is who I am. I'm just going with it.Josh:Yeah, we've accepted it now.Starr:Because if we keep at it long enough, it'll come back around. I've seen some people use text emojis ... They're emoticons, right? They're not emoji. But it's like ... The Zoomers with the super nuanced emoticon game. They're not typing these out, that's for sure. They've got like a clip file of these somewhere.Josh:It's like an additional vector of communication.Starr:Yeah, that's true.Josh:We'll never be fluent.Ben:I think emoticons are vastly superior to emoji, especially for this mighty face case, because it's always going to be the same representation no matter what platform you're on. But the emoji, they change. An apple emoji's differ from a Google emoji, etc. So if you send an emoticon, you what you're going to get.Starr:What if the person's using Wingdings as or fonts, though?Josh:Yeah, that's a good point.Ben:I guess I hadn't thought about that one.Starr:Comic Sans.Josh:I guess they had similar problems back when emoticons were all the rage, when they were first discovered. What happens if they're like ...Ben:I

Show notes:Links:Lego space shuttleChallenger disasterChallenger: The Final FlightRoamxkcdFootage of Josh two weeks after final Pfizer shotThe Final CountdownThe Beach BoysFull transcript:Starr:All right. So now you're going to joke about how, since I've been vaccinated...Josh:Are you saying you are vacc'ed?Starr:In vacc'ed. I'm chipped. I like to say I'm chipped.Josh:Got your injection.Starr:People always act like being chipped is a bad thing, but now if I wander off, people will be able to return me to my family.Josh:Yeah. And I don't know what the big deal is, everyone loves new technology. I don't know anyone who's been bummed out that some new tech came out.Starr:That's true.Josh:I don't know what the... Yeah.Starr:I can't tell you the number of times I've been watching WWC and just being like, "why can't you just inject this into my vein?"Josh:Right.Starr:And now they are, and everybody's mad about it. Make up your minds, people.Ben:Let's see, so Starr you just got number one. Josh had two and I will have number two in a week and change.Josh:Yeah. I should have full immunity and well, I know on our next podcast in a week, it's been a week. Yeah.Ben:It feels good.Josh:So I'm not going to be here next week.Starr:Yeah. You get full immunity. Josh. You don't get diplomatic immunity, soJosh:Oh, okay. That's good to know.Starr:Cool it there, don't go off and rob any banks or anything.Ben:Did you see the new space shuttle, Lego kit?Ben:It's very cool.Ben:Yeah, it's the kit that is from the mission that launched the Hubble telescope. So it includes a little Hubble telescope as part of the kit. And you can mount it by itself, like display it on the stand itself or put it in the shuttle bay, the cargo bay of the shuttle.Josh:That's awesome.Starr:Oh, that's really cool.Josh:Yeah. My, my kids aren't quite Lego age yet. As we were saying the other day, they... what is the other, what's the bigger version?Ben:Duplo.Josh:Yeah. With their Duplo age, but actually, they're getting. We'll be getting Legos soon.Ben:Yeah. It's fun for the whole family.Josh:Yeah. It's going to be fun.Starr:Yeah. Mine's not really into Le

Show notes:Links:TailscaleUbiquity hackFrontWrite for HoneybadgerFull transcript:Ben:The struggle is real when it comes to WiFi here. Because until two weeks ago you could've said, "Yeah, use Ubiquiti, it's all great." Now, there's this big disruption that they're having this attack that they didn't want to admit to.Josh:Yeah. I didn't hear about this.Ben:Yeah. So the thing that was terrible was that they said, "Oh, there was a leak at our third-party vendor." Well, the third party vendor is Amazon Web Services. If you're going to pin the blame on AWS for your lack in security, that's pretty ridiculous. So there was some whistleblower that came out and say, "No, they're really idiots. They're not logging access to the databases."Ben:Their press release was like, "Well, we don't have any evidence of access to your data." The whistleblower was like, "Well, they don't have any evidence of access to your data because they don't do any logging to their database." So they have no idea who's been querying what. It's like, oh, yeah, that's not great.Josh:That's cool. That's a good excuse.Ben:Sure, yeah. So the vagueness plus the misdirection stuff and it's just like, "Okay, my opinion of them just went through the floor."Josh:You never track it, you never know.Ben:That's right. Exactly.Starr:Yeah. It seems like the, I don't know, it seems like you just got to take the hit. Whenever something like that happens, you just got to suck it up and take the hit.Ben:Just like YOLO, "Yeah, well-"Starr:Yeah. YODO, you only die once.Ben:Well, you have to figure also my dad has probably been breached five or six different times from five or six different large companies. So it's like, who even cares anymore? I'll just spray my social security number and my birth date anywhere. I'll just put it on my billboard in my front yard. Yeah, have at it.Josh:Yeah. Publish it online.Ben:The dark web is like a light gray web now. There's just so much data out there. But it's Ubiquiti or do you buy, I have a really small house so I don't really need these mesh systems which promise this outrageous speed for outrageous amounts of money. So I don't need the great or whatever. And then if you don't go with those options, then all that's left really is TP-Link or NETGEAR. It's like, "Well, okay." But like, fine. It just doesn't seem like there's a really great quality product from a great quality company. I don't know. Maybe I'm just-Starr:Yeah. There was a couple of weeks ago.Ben:Yeah. They wisened up weeks ago.Josh:

Show notes:Links:Exceptional CreaturesTradingViewDuke Cannon - Thick BeerRuben GamezMicroConfAppSumo Community MarketplaceFull transcript:Ben:You know, today is April second, as we record this. And I am so excited because I survived April Fools' Day without falling for anything online. All the dumb stuff that happens on April Fools' Day.Josh:I'm a little worried, because I didn't notice any April Fools' lies. Now, granted, I kind of checked out yesterday and I went for a super long walk in Portland, just because it was sunny and I wanted to get outside, so-Starr:That sounds really nice.Josh:It was awesome. So I'm hoping that that's the reason I don't... Because otherwise, I've been duped left and right, and my whole world is false at this point.Starr:I mean, last year there was that whole thing where people were just like, "April Fools' is canceled. No April Fools'." And so, maybe that just came up-Josh:We skipped a year.Starr:I don't know. Maybe people are still sort of hesitant to do that.Josh:Yeah, well it sounds like Ben avoided falling for some, so did you see any good ones, Ben?Ben:No, I never see any good ones because there are never any good ones. I dislike the whole notion of April Fools' Day, so I only saw three or four. And they were all pretty obvious. I started reading a press release or something, I'm like, oh, that's ridiculous. It's April Fools' Day. Moving on. So, yeah, nothing particularly clever or great, so-Starr:I kind of like the obvious ones. It's like, they're not actually trying to trick anybody, they're just being silly. You know?Josh:Right. Right.Starr:I really like it when companies do April Fools' product announcements, where it's like, they're announcing something that would be amazing, but also it's obviously impossible because it's just too amazing to exist in the world.Ben:Well, not quite April Fools', but Duke Cannon is a company that sells soaps and things like that, personal care items. And they typically do funny kinds of fake things, like... So they have this body wash that's really thick, the consistency is really thick because they think runny body washes are for wimps. And they're all about manly stuff, right?Starr:Oh, yeah.Ben:The lumberjack in the woods with his soap, you know?Starr:That's real healthy.Ben:And so, they put out this set of posters, these fake posters of thick... And a video, actually, I should link to the show notes... For thick beer. And it's like thes

Show NotesLinks:GatherRoblox Vs. Second LifeDocsketchRuben GamezAppSumoIntro CRMFull Transcript:Ben:Yeah, the party doesn't start until you show up, Josh.Josh:I'm a party animal.Starr:Yeah, that's true. How's everybody doing?Josh:Good.Ben:I had a good last week. How are you, Starr?Starr:I'm doing pretty good. I got to dive a little bit into our sort of usage data for free users, and that's always fun when I get to do that. I got to use JupyterLab a little bit, brushing up on my Python skills, and yeah. So, I had been... whenever I do my sort of deep dives in the numbers and stuff, I would always just make a bunch of Ruby scripts, and use Ruby scripts to kind of process the data and make it understandable to me. But, it turns out there's a whole fricking ecosystem around this this and Python, and it's... yeah.Starr:There's a system called JupyterLabs. You can get it as part of this bigger distribution that's basically... it's called Conda, which is a Python distribution that just has all of the data science stuff built into it. And so, yeah. So, it's just this little web app you run, and then you can... it's really kind of awesome. It's like if you took an IRB shell or something and put it inside of a text editor and let you write markdown around it, and then also included a whole bunch of tools for doing really complicated stuff with tables of data, and doing that in one or two lines of code.Josh:That's cool.Starr:Yeah.Josh:That reminds me a little bit of what I've seen of org mode and Emacs. Isn't that the thing where you can embed code, and generate tables, and stuff like that, I think? It's super-Starr:I don't know, I've never used that.Josh:It's a pain in the ass.Starr:Well, this is surprisingly not a pain in the ass. It's actually pretty cool, so yeah. So, I've got some... I'm not done with it, but I'm going to have a little report to share at our marketing meeting, which I think is next week, and yeah, about how to squeeze more blood out of our free users. So, get ready, guys, because it's not going to be pretty. I'm just kidding.Josh:Well, we've been very generous to our free users, so there's a lot of potential there.Starr:Yeah.Ben:I have a suggestion for helping our free users, add value to us.Josh:Is this just our monetization model now? We just rant at our free users in this new podcast? It's just like, if you want to hear us stop bitching then sign up for our paid pl

Show notes:Links:Intro CRMAhoyAndrew KaneFull transcript:Ben:So I am feeling great this morning.Starr:Oh Good. Why are you feeling great?Ben:So over the past couple weeks, I've been working on cleaning up the low level noise, errors that are happening, that aren't really severe and that get corrected because of retries and things like that. So stuff, that's not broken, broken, it's just annoying. And so I just, yesterday I think, finished off the last of those things. So, we had a few big things over the past several months, we had the account billing migration. We've had the Elasticsearch migration. We've had the payload storage migration. And now as of yesterday, we have no lingering, low level errors happening. It's just clean. The logs are quiet, everything is happy.Josh:Nice.Starr:That's amazing. Good job.Ben:Thanks.Starr:Would you say it's like butter?Josh:Thought it was kind of quiet around here.Ben:It's like butter.Starr:It's like butter.Ben:Yeah, it feels really good.Starr:Oh, good.Josh:I got through my to-do list items that were kind of along those lines this week, actually. So that does feel good. I'm onto having time for real work again now until I come in on Monday and I have a bunch of busy work again.Ben:Yeah.Starr:Well yesterday was my birthday, so I took it off so I'm a slacker this week.Josh:Happy birthday.Starr:Thank you.Ben:Happy birthday.Starr:Thank you. It's very nice, just like, I didn't actually really do anything special. I just went about sort of a normal day, but without any rush. I was just like, I'm going to kind of take my time and take as long as I want in whatever I'm doing. And it was very nice. It was very nice just having that off. And I mean, I didn't actually work, but I did just kind of read and stuff, so..Josh:Cool.Starr:So I was great and I-Josh:Sounds like the perfect birthday, to be honest.Starr:I know it was pretty great. Yeah. My kid was very enthusiastic until... She was super enthusiastic all week. She made all these decorations and everything and all these tiny little birthday present crafts that were just adorable. And then when my birthday dinner actually rolled around, they went to the restaurant to pick up the food and everything and they came back and she didn't like any of the food that we got. And so she just threw just a shit fit. And it's just like, ah, I was trying to have my nice dinner and you really pumped this up for me. And now you're just you're just like some sort of caveman or something.Josh:She definitely did it intentionally.<

Show notes:Links:Sidekiq-cron   TextExpanderAlfredSondors MetacycleFull transcript:Ben:So, you may not be surprised to hear this, but I've been doing a lot of shopping for electric vehicles this past week.Starr:Oh yeah?Josh:Oh.Ben:And there are some new electric motorcycles and scooters coming out that are very, very tempting. There's one in particular, the Sondors model, which is going to be first released near the end of the year and it's only $5000 and it had a top of speed of 80 miles per hour. The battery is not really rated for doing 80 miles per hour very long. You're not going to commute for 20 miles at that speed, but it's nice to have that in case you just need to hop on the freeway to get someplace really quick.Starr:Wow. That's only like $60 per mile per hour.Ben:But I really got my eye on it. And my wife's not a big fan of the whole motorcycle idea, but it's been there in the back of my mind for years and this year might be the year that I actually get my two wheel endorsement and do the training course and all that.Josh:Yeah, that would be fun.Ben:I just didn't want another combustion powered vehicle and so I've been holding off on the whole motorcycle thing until they got electric motorcycles that were not crazy expensive but also not just useless because it only has a batter for five miles worth of range. And I think 2021 is the year that is actually-Josh:Is this going to be your big 2021 post-pandemic life change?Ben:Exactly, yeah.Josh:Nice.Ben:Maybe this is my midlife crisis where I actually buy that motorcycle.Josh:You should get a hog, though. Be like a-Ben:The LiveWire is really nice. That's Harley Davidson's electric, but it's like $30,000 and I just, I have qualms about spending as much on a motorcycle as I would spend on a car.Josh:Yeah.Ben:Maybe that's not the right way to look at it, but it's just, I have problems with that.Josh:I'm seeing you with some of the... the trike handlebars or whatever.Starr:Oh, like a Chopper?Josh:Yeah.Ben:Yeah.Starr:I'm wondering if the electrics have the same cache. Because I'm trying to figure out if all the Bruce Springsteen songs still apply to the electric motorcycles. Like would you call an electric motorcycle a Suicide Machine? It seems a little bit too environmentally friendly for that. I'm not really sure.Josh:Ben totally needs an electric Chopper. It'd be the first.Starr:I go on walks... I'm sorry. I go on walks in the morning and occasionally an electric car will pass by me because it'

Show notes:Links:LoomTelestreamRecutLovesacComfy SacksFlipperFull transcript:Ben:You know how we had that recent episode with John Nunemaker about Flipper and feature flags and that sort of thing.Starr:Oh, a podcast episode.Ben:Yeah. Yeah.Starr:I thought you meant a dramatic episode.Josh:It's just another episode with John.Starr:Oh my God. That guy.Josh:That was awesome. Yeah. That was a good conversation.Ben:We talked in that conversation about using Flipper at Honeybadger, because we've been using Rollout for our feature flags, which, if you didn't listen to that episode, you don't know what a feature flag is. It's a branch in your code that conditionally runs some feature. You can limit it when you deploy it to people and you don't have to deploy a new thing to all your customers at the same time. You can test it live.Josh:I'm not sure if we actually explained it in that episode.Ben:Maybe we did, maybe we didn't.Josh:This will be good background.Starr:I wasn't there. I'm usually the driving force behind backing up and explaining things.Josh:Yeah, Starr is good. Always, yeah, you've been pretty good about that. Yeah.Ben:Yeah. I went ahead and did that. I put a Flipper in Honeybadger and tested a new feature. We are switching from Postgres to DynamoDB for our notice storage. That's every occurrence of every error. It's a lot of data and we cut over a few weeks ago to be reading from that data in Dynamo because now it's fully populated with the past month's of data and it's being updated. We're basically writing this to two places and now it's time to read from the new place.Ben:I tested that with Flipper and I'm so glad that I used Flipper for that feature because it saved my bacon this week. I deployed the reading from Dynamo. Oh, actually. We've been doing reading for a while and what I deployed this week was not writing to Postgres anymore, so stopping the dual rights. I put that behind a feature flag and I turned it on just for my projects. I'm so glad I did because I found a bug that really, really would have caused issues for all of our customers if I had deployed that just willy nilly. Yay for feature flags. Yay for Flipper. Go use it. It's a great thing.Starr:That's awesome.Josh:It's willy nilly. Is that a Ruby joke?Starr:How much money do you think that was worth avoiding that mistake? How much would you pay to do that? A thousand dollars? $10,000.Ben:Yeah, it's got to be a more than a thousan

Show notes:Links:PrintfectionSwag.comFull transcript:Josh:How's it going?Ben:I'm working on this Printfection migration and I've been thinking about what to do here. So we got this outreach from Printfection about our pricing going up, in our case, dramatically. We decided we just don't want to pay that much for what we're getting. So I'm going through all of our inventory looking at our Printfection items that we have, shirts and stickers and so on, and thinking, where... So I've got to send it somewhere. Well, I guess I have to send it to myself. I'm like, do I really want to get a box of 800 shirts? It's like, no, I really don't but I don't see there's much of a choice.Josh:Well, we could just pay Printfection.Ben:Well, I guess. Yeah, that is the other option.Starr:Yeah.Josh:Yeah, personally I'm on the fence about it because yes, it is a dramatic price increase but the value that they provide us is fairly dramatic from my perspective. So I'm not quite sure what price I attach to that, but I definitely attach more than $75 a month which is what we were paying them. Which just seems insane to me. I see why they would raise our prices, in their defense.Starr:How much is it raised by? I forget. I looked at it originally, but I forget.Josh:$500.Ben:I think it's in the narrative of $500 a month.Josh:Yeah.Starr:Okay.Josh:Now to be fair, we should explain they raised their prices I think a couple years ago, because I remember when they went up and I was like, "Man, I'm really glad that we got this sweetheart deal that they let all their past customers keep." But apparently they went through the same progression as everyone ever, same logic as us, over time... We're probably taking them for everything they're worth.Starr:I should probably back up and explain in case this makes it into the actual podcast. Printfection is a company that we have used to... They're an inventory company. They keep our shirts and all of our swag. When we want to mail it to people, we just give them the address, or they have forms that people can fill in themselves and magically shirts and stuff get mailed out to them.Josh:When we want to give someone a shirt, what we do is we mention our badger bot in Slack to a shirt meme and it gives us a shirt link that we then send to someone. It's like a magical shirt bog. Like a swag bot. Which is pretty cool.Starr:Yeah. I have a couple thoughts on this. The first one is, we were paying $75 a month plus shipping fees and handling and all that. We paid a certain amount to have things shipped out.Josh:Yeah.Starr:The second is that, as the person who was previously kind of in charge of mailing out shirts, it is a huge, hu

Show Notes:Links:John Nunemaker WebsiteJohn Nunemaker TwitterFlipper CloudSpeaker DeckScientistFull Transcript:Ben:So today we have a special episode of FounderQuest. We have John Nunemaker with us, instead of Starr. Starr was taking a break today. And Josh and I are going to be chatting with John, and talking about the fun things that John's doing. John, I got to start off by saying that I'm a huge fan. I've been following your work since the Harmony days, back at Ordered List, I guess that was ... I don't know when that was, 2000 and something.John:'07, 8, yep.Ben:Yeah. Yeah. So I think I got introduced to you through the Rails community, being back in the early group. So I don't remember how exactly we bumped into each other back then. But I remember Harmony was pretty cool, and the other stuff you did with Ordered List.Josh:Yeah.Josh:I was newer to the Rails world back then. So both of you are Ruby celebrities to me. So yeah, it's cool. It's cool to have you here.John:Thanks so much. Yeah, I'm really excited about it. I feel the same way about you guys. Especially I remember I was at RailsKits.Ben:Yep.John:I remember ... Yeah.Josh:Yeah.John:I remember that. I remember a bunch of the stuff back in the day. And is it Stympy, or something? Website?Ben:Yeah.John:Yep.Ben:Yeah.John:Oh, yeah. That stuff sticks out.Josh:Nice.Ben:Nice. Nice, cool. Fanboys all around. It's awesome. And you're a prolific open-source author. We have in fact two of your gems in our app right now. We have nunes, and we have httparty running in our app. So thank you for those.John:That's awesome.Josh:Yeah.John:That's really cool.Ben:Yeah. I love nunes. And I love the description of it. It's like, "This is the monitoring app I would add to your app if I was working with you."John:Yeah. I feel like stuff like that, I get lucky and it sticks. But it's just this moment where I'm like, "I got to come up with some kind of a description. I really don't want to do this. What should I put?" And then it's like, "This is what I would. I would do this if I were you." So I'm just going to put that as my description and peel out.Ben:It's cool. But I think the ... We're not going to talk about this much today. But I just wanted to toss this in here. And I think one of the projects that you've done that I'm most interested is probably one there is least information out there about. And that's Haystack at GitHub.John:Yeah. Yeah. Hey, I can answer any questions rel

Show Notes:Links:The Boys in The BoatFounding SalesAll your base are belong to usWrite for usFull Transcript:Starr:I loved Beavis and Butthead so much in the 90s.Ben:Yeah, it was awesome.Starr:I was prepared not to like it because all I heard was everybody talking about how stupid it was. And then I watched it. I was like, this is amazing. This is just my brand. I was the target demographic. I was, I don't know, 16 17.Josh:Yep.Ben:Yep. That's a great show.Starr:Yeah, so.Ben:There was some picture. I don't remember who it was. It was Josh Hawley and I can't remember who the person was. But they had them as Beavis and Butthead. They did a montage, had them in a picture together and it was pretty funny. Starr:I feel like the children and their deep fried memes are the spiritual successor to the spiritual child of Beavis and Butthead.Ben:Mm-hmm (affirmative).Josh:Could be Yeah.Ben:No doubt.Starr:Because Beavis and Butthead were pretty deep fried. So, this podcast is just all about giving. We all live in the Pacific Northwest. And this podcast is going to be all about giving our readers, I know, what does it feel like a sense of what it feels like to live in the Pacific Northwest because I've got a guy chainsawing right outside my window. They've got a wood chipper going. And it's an extremely Pacific Northwest thing. I've lived all over the country. And I've never lived in place for about a third of the time, you can hear a wood chipper in the background in a residential neighborhood.Josh:Yeah.Ben:I think part of that is due to the trend here that I haven't seen anywhere else, of allowing 90 foot cedar trees to grow right next to the houses, right? And so at some point, someone's like, "You know what? We probably should take that down." And repeat that over and over again in every neighborhood around here.Josh:Speaking of, I have some chainsaw work to do right after this podcast. So we do live in a grove of cedar trees. And one of them fell in my backyard and took out my fence the other week so I've been working on that-Starr:Oh that's good.Josh:Slowly.Starr:So I learned, a what?Ben:You are going to be all set for firewood this winter then.Josh:Yeah, for sure. I've been all set for firewood since we moved in here, trees fall every year, it seems.Starr:One thing I learned when I started the permitting process for my backyard office is that Seattle has a concept of, I forget what exactly it's called, but it's like there is s

Show Notes:Links:HeyaBen Curtis’ Mad Money DreamHost Affiliate Link Write for usFull Transcript:Ben:Thanks to Starr, we are now linked on the Honeybadger site.Josh:Nice.Starr:Oh, yeah. It only took two years to do that.Josh:I saw that on the "about" page.Ben:What made me think about it, I'm just, I don't know, surfing the site for something. I'm like, "You know what? We should probably link to the podcast from our site."Starr:Yeah, thanks for opening that issue.Josh:I thought we had it in the footer or something. Was it not even in the footer?Ben:No.Josh:Oh, man. We're good at marketing.Ben:We are so good at marketing.Starr:Totally.Ben:That was a good thing, so thank you.Starr:No problem. It was good. It's nice to have a tiny, concrete task that I know I can do that doesn't fractally expand into just caverns of uncertainty.Ben:For reals.Ben:Well, speaking of caverns of uncertainty, I was helping a friend with their website, which is a very old, old website, and I can't even admit while recording what versions of various software it's using, because that's how old it is. But basically it needed to make a move, and I was like, "You know, the last time I touched this, which was two years ago or something, even then everything was crusty and old. There's no way we're going to find a new hosting provider that's supporting all this old stuff anymore." So, what to do? What to do? I was just like, "You know what? Let me just run Wget on the site and just mirror the whole site to static pages, and then dump it up somewhere behind Apache and just leave it at that."Josh:Nice.Ben:So, I sent that over to her. I'm like, "Here, you should try this. How about this?" So, we'll see. The problem is there's no search now and the contact form and stuff like that won't work. I'm like, "You know what? Just let it go. Just embrace the simplicity."Starr:Oh my god, yeah.Josh:That's so weird. That is so weird, because yesterday I literally did that with the Heya sales site that was in Rails. I literally saved, I did the "save as webpage" thing, and then edited the CSS paths and just dumped into a GitHub pages branch on the public repository, because we decided not to sell Heya anymore and release it as open source, so we didn't need this fancy Rails app that we were paying to demo it. So, sometimes just "save as webpage" and deploy is the way to go.Starr:When you mentioned a search, that reminded me of this client I used to have. It was a freelancing client, it's a Rails app, it's a very, very old original Rails still. I guess technically they're still my client. I never actually dropped them, because they would get in contact with me once every two years and have me do two hours of work, so I was jus

Show Notes:Links:Amy Hoy - Wall Street BetsBloomberg - How Will the GameStop Game StopClayton Christensen - Theory of Disruptive InnovationArt of The Product Podcast - Does Tuple Ever [email protected] Write for HoneybadgerFull Transcript:Ben:Did y'all buy any GameStop this week?Josh:I thought about it yesterday while Robinhood was not allowing buy orders or whatever, because my brokerage, I mean, doesn't shut you out. And I mean, it probably would have been a pretty safe bet given the stock today. But I don't do that kind of shit.Ben:Yeah, yeah. I'm in the same boat. I want to, just for funsies, but at the same time, it's like, "Ah, that's really not a productive use of my time or money."Josh:Yeah. I deleted the Robinhood app after. Because I tried it out just because you got to see what the kids are up to these days. And the last straw with it was when they added this crypto trading interface that looked like a Tron ... Like some kind of arcade game. I was just like, "This is ... Yeah, I don't need a light cycle to buy cryptocurrency."Starr:Yeah, it's a little bit weird. My brother was like, "Hey, do you do stocks or crypto?" And I'm like, "Well, I've got mutual funds. But also, you don't have any money."Josh:This is how you know that the markets about to just evaporate, when your brother asks you if you trade stocks of crypto.Starr:For the past decade, I've just been like ... This is the last straw, global pandemic, 30% unemployment, last straw, market is going to tank. But I guess not.Josh:Yeah, this is new. Yeah, people won't let it fail, so let's just hold it or whatever the meme is. It's the new just thing to live by in general I think. Just hold, always just hold. Just never let go, never let go. Whatever it is, never let go.Ben:Diamond hands.Josh:Yeah.Starr:Explain the diamond hands thing to me, I don't understand that. I saw it, but ...Ben:You have to check out Amy Hoy's thread, Twitter thread, where she went and did a sale safari on Wall Street Bets. So sale safari is her and Alex Hillman's process where you go and discover ... You basically research a community, and you find out what the needs are, right. And so you can use that to help formulate some ideas for businesses or products that you might want to create. Instead of coming up with an idea and saying,

Show Notes:Links:Cobol On CogsSquare Hole TikTok VideoHook RelayUniversal Honeybadger.jsFounderQuest Accounts EpisodeWrite for Honeybadger's BlogFull Transcript:Ben:Did you see that tweet I posted in the channel, the TikTok video about the shape sorter?Josh:It was so good.Starr:So good.Josh:Laughed really hard.Ben:So good. I just loved the voice of the person doing the shapes.Josh:Yeah.Ben:"And where do you think this one goes?"Starr:So it's a shape sorting thing. And they've got all different color blocks, like a kid's toy and you're supposed to match the shape to the hole in the top of the bucket, but it turns out all of the shapes just fit inside the square hole. And so-Josh:That's why there's a hole in there.Starr:Yeah, so it's a reaction video. This woman's watching it and she's just getting more and more dismayed as he just puts everything. She's like, "No, put it in the triangle hole," and he's like, "No, this one goes in the square hole." So I think this is a metaphor for how users as well use Excel for every single task in their business.Ben:Yeah. So I'll have to put the tweet in the show notes, but that was funny that I found.Starr:Yeah, that's really good. I like-Ben:Well, I am... Go ahead.Starr:I was just going to say I like watching TikTok, but I'm like I'm too old to actually watch TikTok, so I just watch video compilations of TikTok that somebody shows me.Josh:Yeah, TikTok on YouTube.Ben:Saying, yeah, I watch TikTok on Twitter.Josh:Twitter. Yeah.Ben:So, yeah.Josh:Yeah. That's an interesting thing about TikTok, because it's like half the people who enjoy the videos aren't even on the platform or whatsoever.Starr:And that's just the internet.Josh:But these are everywhere. They're all over Instagram. I guess, yeah, it is.Starr:I just want to know like how much of... So there's got to be a number out there, like the total traffic on the internet per day, like total bandwidth use. How much of that is just sending around videos and screenshots of other parts of the internet?Josh:Yeah.Ben:Yeah.Josh:Well, I guess like the same thing happened with Vine.Ben:It's like marketing attribution. Right? You never know where your traffic is coming from. Like TikTok, they have no idea where th