Aaron Francis

Ever wondered how a backend developer can transition into a successful content creator while juggling a bustling family life? Join us as Aaron Francis, a prominent figure in the tech video content space, shares his incredible journey. From his early days working with Laravel to launching a comprehensive SQLite course, Aaron provides invaluable insights into balancing full-time commitments with side projects. He also opens up about his personal life, revealing how he and his wife, along with the help of an au pair, manage to raise four young children while maintaining productivity. Discover the niche Aaron found in intermediate database content, a passion rooted in his upbringing with a father who was a SQL Server DBA. We'll uncover how he and his partner, Steve, co-founded TryHard Studios to fill this gap by producing high-quality database courses on platforms like SQLite, Postgres, and MySQL. Our conversation also touches on their ambitious vision of evolving into a media company with diverse on-camera talent. Lastly, Aaron's love for building and creating comes to life as he talks about his unique office shed project and the joy he finds in construction and gardening. He explains his philosophy of being a builder rather than an influencer, focusing on the satisfaction of creation. Don't miss his reflections on reviving forums for meaningful discussions and where you can follow his work online. This episode promises a rich tapestry of insights, making it a must-listen for developers and content creators alike.

Learn more about this show →

Transcript

Drew Bragg

00:00:00 – 00:00:17

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Code and the Coding Coders Who Code It. I'm your host, Drew Bragg, and I'm joined today by a man who needs no introduction, but I'm gonna make him do one anyway, the one and only Aaron Francis. Aaron, for anyone who has not had the pleasure of meeting you yet, would you please introduce yourself to the listeners?

Aaron

00:00:17 – 00:00:29

Sure. I would be happy to. And thanks for having me. My name is Aaron Francis and I am a coding coder who codes. I traditionally have been a back end developer, mostly in Laravel.

Aaron

00:00:30 – 00:00:44

These days, I find myself doing a lot of database content and making a lot of videos, still programming in Laravel, but focusing a lot on creating a lot of content.

Drew Bragg

00:00:44 – 00:01:06

That is an understatement for sure. For anyone new to the show, the way this is gonna work is I'm gonna ask Aaron 3 questions. I'm gonna ask him what he's working on, which is sort of a bonkers question to be asking him since he's always working on a million things. We're gonna ask him anyway. We're gonna ask him what kind of blockers he has, and if he doesn't have a current blocker, what's a recent blocker he had, and how do you go about solving it?

Drew Bragg

00:01:06 – 00:01:23

And then we're gonna wrap up the show with what is something cool, new, or interesting that you've learned or discovered recently. I feel like that could be another bonkers question to be asking you. This episode is probably gonna have a lot of content to it, so let's just jump right into it. Aaron, what are you working on?

Aaron

00:01:23 – 00:01:30

I am working on parenting 4 kids under 3. Well, I guess, 3 and under now.

Drew Bragg

00:01:30 – 00:01:31

Two sets of twins. Right?

Aaron

00:01:31 – 00:02:09

Two sets of twins, 2 3 year olds, 2 8 month olds. I am trying to propagate a lot plants out there in the sunshine, but probably what people are mostly interested in is work stuff. So couple months ago, me and a friend set out on our own to start a video studio of all things focused solely on technical content, so making videos developers actually would care to watch. And we have just released our first course, which is a course on SQLite, the database, at high performance SQLite dot com. We're working on Postgres Next.

Aaron

00:02:09 – 00:02:30

And in the meantime, we're doing lots of YouTube videos, live streams, writing, being on podcasts, all kinds of stuff like that, and building out our own platform. So all the video hosting stuff that we've done, like the course hosting is all on a platform that we built ourselves. So staying extremely busy.

Drew Bragg

00:02:31 – 00:02:43

I feel like the most appropriate follow-up question to that is how in the world do you have time to start essentially your own company while producing all of this content and also raising 4 kids?

Aaron

00:02:44 – 00:03:07

Yeah. A lot of help, first of all. My wife works twice as hard as I do as a stay at home mom, so that helps a ton. We have an au pair that lives with us because at one point, we had 22a half year olds and 2 newborn babies. And so while Jennifer and I were, like, feeding newborn babies, there are still 2 two and a half year olds that exist.

Aaron

00:03:07 – 00:03:33

We needed another adult. So we have a nice young woman from Germany that lives with us, so that helps a lot. But then, of course, I'm there at home for breakfast, and then I'm back home at 6 o'clock for dinner. And so all of my, like, outside of work time is no longer I'll just hack on some stuff on the side. It's just fully walk in the door and just go straight into parent mode.

Aaron

00:03:34 – 00:04:08

But that happens to be okay now because I'm not trying to do stuff on the side. The stuff that was historically side stuff is now full time job stuff. And so there was a period before the second set of twins came where I had a full time job and I was able to do some stuff on the side just because it was a lot easier with 2 kids, go to bed at 7 o'clock, you find yourself with a lot of time. Right? But now things have definitely changed and none of this content stuff would be doable if I had a proper full time job that I was responsible for.

Drew Bragg

00:04:08 – 00:04:39

One of the coolest projects that I think I've seen you kind of, let's just call it build in public, is your office shed project. And so you work from home, but not in the home. You actually have a separate office. And that's fascinating to me because a lot of the recommendations, especially when the pandemic hit, we all went remote whether we wanted to or not, was, hey, how do we make that not a commute anymore, but how do we shift from work mode to home mode? And everyone said, pretend like you're going to work.

Drew Bragg

00:04:39 – 00:04:50

Do you find that that is in fact true when you can kind of help separate work, Aaron, and home life, Aaron, by physically going in and out of your shed?

Aaron

00:04:50 – 00:05:01

Yeah. Definitely. So I no longer own the shed, unfortunately. We used to live in a 2 bedroom house. When we found out we were having a second set of twins, we were like, oh, no.

Aaron

00:05:01 – 00:05:18

This is not gonna work. But in that house, I ordered a prebuilt shed. I live in Dallas, Texas, and there's tons of these shed companies out in the country. And so I ordered one from Central Texas. They brought it on the back of an 18 wheeler, put it in my backyard, and then I turned it into an office.

Aaron

00:05:19 – 00:05:56

I added cabinets and a desk and air conditioning, and it was a huge fun project. Even just walking across the back deck to go into the office, there's just something different about your work space being air gapped from the house where it's okay. It's 20 steps. But I know that when I'm on a call, I'm not having to worry like, am I keeping the kids awake or does my wife have to worry like, oh, I gotta keep the kids quiet because Erin's on a call. And then being able to leave that space and walk back inside either for lunch or at the end of the day, having the computer stay in a different spot.

Aaron

00:05:56 – 00:06:19

I think the worst would be if it's in your bedroom. Like, you work there all day, you go out for a minute to have the evening, and then you come back to your bedroom and it would just feel so sleepy. But now that I don't have the shed so we moved into this new house and it's just not a big enough house for me to have either an office or a backyard shed, unfortunately. So I did something even crazier. I rented a 1 bedroom apartment.

Aaron

00:06:20 – 00:06:44

So the place that I'm calling from right now, the place where I record all of my videos, this backdrop, this is a 1 bedroom apartment 3 minutes down the road from my house. Actually, Steven, my company pays for it now. If I were a normal person, this is the bedroom. And so I record in here because I've got the carpet. And then if you look behind me, you'll see that there's this beautiful wall behind me.

Aaron

00:06:44 – 00:07:15

In fact, that wall doesn't exist. Behind that are some windows. And so I built a fake 2 by 4 wall in front of the windows in this apartment bedroom to control the light and because this is the longest direction and I wanted to shoot directly that way. And so in here is my studio and then out in what is the living room, I have another desk and a couch where I just sit and work when I'm not recording. And it looks over the apartment swimming pool, and I've got my own kitchen and my own bathroom, and there's a gym downstairs.

Aaron

00:07:15 – 00:07:34

What if co working were amazing and it was just you? I don't know if we call that co working anymore, but it's awesome and I love it so much. I love that it's 3 minutes from the house, and I love that I can just come up here, and I've got my smoothies, and my soda waters, and my own private bathroom, and I just feel like this is truly living. It's quite awesome.

Drew Bragg

00:07:34 – 00:07:48

That does sound pretty awesome. So you were predominantly back end developer with Laravel. How did you get into screencasting in general? You've done a ton of content, but how did you get into all of that?

Aaron

00:07:48 – 00:08:15

In an unlikely turn of events, my first screencast I ever did was for sophomore accounting students at Texas A&M University. And so, that requires a little bit of unpacking. So I got my undergrad and master's in accounting at Texas A&M, and then went on to get my CPA license and be accountant for 1 year. And I did tax accounting, and it was awful. I worked at Ernst and Young, and it was terrible, and so I quit.

Aaron

00:08:16 – 00:08:29

But the thing is, I really, really, really enjoyed accounting in college. I just ate it up. It was so fun. Accounting is like programming, but for business. Everybody's like, Oh, I'm just so terrible at math.

Aaron

00:08:29 – 00:08:47

Accounting's not math. If you can do addition, subtraction, you can do accounting. Accounting is a big puzzle, and it's so fun. So after I took this class sophomore year of college, I'm already a programmer, and so accounting, like, clicks in some part of my brain in a similar way. I'm gonna start tutoring other students.

Aaron

00:08:47 – 00:09:10

And so from sophomore all the way through, like, master's year, I just tutored this accounting class for fun well, for pay, but because I enjoyed it. And I left college, didn't do any side stuff for a while, and I was just tinkering on some software products. And then I realized, hey, I'm really good at teaching accounting. Accounting never changes. If there's one thing that doesn't change, it's double entry accounting.

Aaron

00:09:11 – 00:09:46

And so I just started recording basically everything I knew about accounting and made it into, like, my first ever video course, and this had to be 2016 or 17 or something. Selling it to the worst possible market, which is college students in the smallest possible niche, which is sophomore business majors at Texas A&M University. From a business perspective, objectively, the worst thing that you could ever do, and all these years later, it's made over a $100,000. Oh, man. Maybe all this business advice is not totally applicable to everyone all the time.

Aaron

00:09:46 – 00:10:14

And so that's when I got the first taste of 1, the scalability of teaching online, but 2, like, sort of the mailbox money. If there's mailbox money, it is in accounting videos because, honestly, I haven't touched them since I first recorded them. I haven't really done anything. So that was my first video course ever. And then since then I have kind of leaned into the fact that I enjoy teaching and I'm good at it and so I've started to put more stuff on video.

Drew Bragg

00:10:15 – 00:10:23

It's great when you can make a living doing something that you enjoy and you're good at. You're living a bit of the dream. How did you get into Laravel then?

Aaron

00:10:24 – 00:10:52

I started programming when I was 10, 11, 12, something like that. And quickly after starting with asp.net, I switched to PHP just because it was a lot more popular and it was much more of a broad beginner language at that time. And so, at this point, I've been doing PHP for 20 years. And after college, one of the things I was hacking on was, who knows what it was, some product SaaS, whatever. And I picked up frameworks were starting to become a big deal.

Aaron

00:10:53 – 00:11:16

I read some books on Rails, and Ruby never really clicked in my mind because I had such a PHP background. And so then I heard about a framework called Yii, y I I, and I used that for a while. And then I was in the space and I kept hearing people talk about Laravel. And so I checked out the docs, and I think I picked up Laravel 4.234 or something like that. So it was many, many, many years ago.

Aaron

00:11:16 – 00:11:33

And it made sense. It made sense with the way that I thought about things, and it was quickly becoming the most popular PHP framework. And now I think it might as well be the only ones built on top of Symfony, but it's far and away the most popular PHP framework, and so I've just kinda stuck with it ever since.

Drew Bragg

00:11:34 – 00:11:55

You've also done a lot of database content. Is that just an artifact of, hey, I did a lot of back end work and was good at databases and wanted to to share what I'd learned? Or was it a, hey. I see a gap in the content out there for databases. How do you go from PHP and Laravel to databases?

Drew Bragg

00:11:56 – 00:11:57

Yeah. That's a good question.

Aaron

00:11:57 – 00:12:14

Both is the answer. So I come by it honestly because my dad was a DBA growing up. He was a SQL Server DBA. And so when I started messing around with PHP, the database du jour was MySQL and I think probably still is for PHP. And so I picked up PHP and MySQL together.

Aaron

00:12:15 – 00:12:37

Used to be, you'll remember that we just had to do everything. If you were gonna make an app, you had to know the database all the way through to the jQuery. I know I'm old and yelling at the cloud now, but that was good for me because I learned how to set up the LAMP stack and how to make sure that my SQL was running. Again, I feel like that database has just clicked in my mind. It was very logical and rational, and I was like, oh, this makes sense.

Aaron

00:12:37 – 00:13:12

And, of course, whenever I got stuck on SQL, which happened a lot when you're 13, you have one of the world's foremost experts in the house because there just aren't that many DBAs in the world, and he was a very good one. And so I could always ask. So I felt like I internalized SQL pretty early on. And the second option that you mentioned was that I noticed there was a gap in the market, and I think that is what spurred me to start creating content around it. I intrinsically really liked it and got it and happened to be very good at it.

Aaron

00:13:12 – 00:13:46

And I started having these conversations with friends where I would tell them how to fix their database stuff, and people kept saying, like, man, how do you know all this? You should be writing articles about this. That's the point where it occurred to me or I realized, man, maybe I do know more than the average developer about databases. And so that's when I started writing about it and doing some video stuff. And since then, I have more fully leaned into it because I do think there's a dearth of the middle content for databases.

Aaron

00:13:46 – 00:14:00

This is no shade, but just use Supabase and don't worry about the database. Hey, that's actually really convenient. Or the content is, Hey, you want to be a DBA? You want to live underground and work with the databases? Here's the content for you.

Aaron

00:14:00 – 00:14:48

And that's great, but I think there's a big missing middle of people that don't want to be a DBA, but would like to know how can I, for myself, determine what a good index is? And so there's that whole missing middle for people that wanna be really good drivers of a database, not creators of a database, but they wanna know how to use the thing. And so that's kind of the section of the market that I have carved out. I think my life would be super hard if I was teaching React or teaching Ruby on Rails or TypeScript or something where there are tons and tons and tons of really good teachers and a lot of great content, that would be really hard. I happen to think I'm a good teacher but I'm also playing on easy mode because I'm competing against basically nobody.

Aaron

00:14:48 – 00:15:01

Name another super popular database educator. You'll probably name Alex Debris, and he just sticks with Dynamo. Right? And then there's Tobias Petrie who knows almost everything about everything, but he doesn't do video. It's wide open.

Aaron

00:15:01 – 00:15:11

I can kind of do whatever I want. And so that's been really nice. So it was a lot intrinsic and then a little bit exploitative in a way that I'm exploiting an opportunity, not a person.

Drew Bragg

00:15:11 – 00:15:29

Try Hard Studios is the business that you've co founded and you guys have released SQLite first. You're doing Postgres next, you said? Yep. What else is on kind of the road map or vision for that studio? What do you hope that that business venture turns into?

Aaron

00:15:30 – 00:15:54

I hope it turns into $2,000,000 per year, one for me and one for Steve. That is my hope. So I think we can mine this vein for a long time. I think we can continue to make intermediate database content until I'm tired of making intermediate database content. I think I am going to be the limiting reagent, not the universe of content.

Aaron

00:15:54 – 00:16:08

So there are a few things. We wanna get a little empire going. And so across TryHard Studios, we wanna have SQLite, Postgres, and MySQL, obviously. Definitely, we gotta have those 3. And then there's a lot of fun stuff.

Aaron

00:16:08 – 00:16:13

Do we look at DuckDB? That seems fun. Is the market big? I don't know. Do we look at ClickHouse?

Aaron

00:16:13 – 00:16:36

That seems cool. I don't know what the market's like. But you can imagine we've got the 3 flagships, and then we throw in Maria because it's not that different than MySQL. And so we've got this whole stable full of courses, including stuff like SQL for beginners. So let's say we knock out the vendor specific stuff and drop it down a level and go super broad and say, this is a crash course on SQL.

Aaron

00:16:36 – 00:17:05

Heck, you can imagine that being pretty popular. I think beyond the obvious things that we need to just block and tackle, there are some more exciting things that maybe are dreaming a little bit bigger, and that's becoming more of a media company, which would include me not being the only person on camera. So the way that we're set up now is I am on camera. Steve does a lot of other stuff. He does do editing of the videos, but he's more like a producer or like a operations guy.

Aaron

00:17:05 – 00:17:23

And so he does the editing, but he also sets a lot of the taste and the style and the design, and he does the front end work, and he builds a lot of stuff as well. I would love to be in a spot where somebody comes in. So I don't know how to pronounce his last name, but he's in the rails community. Steven Marcheim? Marche Marcheim?

Aaron

00:17:23 – 00:17:23

Marcheim?

Drew Bragg

00:17:23 – 00:17:26

Marcheim? Something? Yep. I had him on not too long ago. Yeah.

Aaron

00:17:26 – 00:17:58

Yeah. So he's SQLite for rails. So I would love to have a model, and I'm actually talking to Steven about this. Love to have a model where TryHard Studios, which is me and Steve, TryHard Studios helps produce a course up to and including flying a person to Dallas and me sitting with them for 5 days while they record in this studio, perhaps. And then Steve does all the post production and the editing and the graphics and all of that, and then we host it within the try hard ecosystem.

Aaron

00:17:59 – 00:18:26

But it's Steven teaching, and it's Steven teaching about things that I can't speak to, which would be Ruby on Rails. I can learn enough database stuff where I can be a really good teacher about it. At this point, it's too late for me to learn enough Rails stuff for me to speak intelligently to an intermediate to senior Rails developer. And so you can imagine we've got flagship courses like SQLite, and then we've got SQLite for Rails, SQLite for Laravel, SQLite for Astro, or whatever it is. But those are all done by other instructors.

Aaron

00:18:27 – 00:18:48

And so that's kind of on the table. And then there's, of course, always the possibility that we stumble across some product in the nature of building a business. We stumble across a product that we think is viable, whether SaaS or one time software, whatever it is. And Steve is a proper software developer as well. So between me and him, we could build something like that out.

Aaron

00:18:48 – 00:19:02

But in the near term, we are trying really hard to focus on what is most obvious and that is Postgres. I think that's our biggest opportunity, and then MySQL is our second biggest opportunity. And so that's kind of the nearest term thing.

Drew Bragg

00:19:03 – 00:19:06

You also have a course on screencasting

Aaron

00:19:07 – 00:19:07

Mhmm.

Drew Bragg

00:19:07 – 00:19:38

Because you do so many things. I can't keep them all straight, but Me neither. You have screencasting.com which is just multiple hours of you teaching people how to make really good screencasts Yep. Which makes sense for your business too. But if someone was trying to start screencasting, what's the best advice or what do you think is the best way to make it go from, I wonder if I should do this in Catalyst and go, yep.

Drew Bragg

00:19:38 – 00:19:40

Now I'm recording screencasts.

Aaron

00:19:41 – 00:20:07

Yeah. I would say the best way to go from I wonder if I should do it to recording is for me to tell you that the downside is bounded and the upside is unbounded. You don't really need to know anything beyond that. Everyone that listens to this podcast is smart enough to figure out how to screencast. I think I have a lot of really helpful tips and a lot of really helpful philosophies and a lot of really practical tips in the course.

Aaron

00:20:07 – 00:20:19

I mean, I think the course is very good. If you're looking for how do I make my screencasts better, go buy the course. If you're thinking, should I start? The answer is yes. Don't buy the course.

Aaron

00:20:19 – 00:20:32

Just start. Just start. Put something bad out there. It'll be fine. But I think my way to spur people to action beyond wondering if they should do it is think about what's the worst that could happen.

Aaron

00:20:32 – 00:20:54

And I think in my estimation, one of the worst things that could happen when you put out a screen cast is that you get embarrassed. And I think that is a price worth paying because the best thing that could happen is it fundamentally changes your life forever. And so that's what I mean when I'm like the downside is bounded. You waste some time. You look like an idiot.

Aaron

00:20:55 – 00:21:00

You embarrass yourself. Those things are come backable. You can get out of that. That's fine. You embarrassed yourself.

Aaron

00:21:00 – 00:21:18

You made a stupid video and nobody watched it. Who cares? But you make a video and somebody at a company is like, hey, this person knows what they're talking about. We need somebody to come make videos, or we need somebody to come work here, not in dev rel, dev ed, or anything. We need somebody to come do the freaking work and this girl's making videos about it.

Aaron

00:21:18 – 00:21:38

Let's see if they wanna get a job. The number of times that has happened to me is a small handful, but to people, it happens all the time. There's this notion of what is fair and what is real. And what is fair is that everyone would be judged completely objectively on merits. That is fair.

Aaron

00:21:38 – 00:21:49

What is real is the people that put out the work get this unfair status ascribed to them. Oh, Drew has a podcast. He must be very smart. And you're like, I just have it because I did it. Right?

Aaron

00:21:49 – 00:21:49

Right.

Drew Bragg

00:21:49 – 00:21:50

Yeah.

Aaron

00:21:50 – 00:21:54

Oh, Aaron makes a lot of videos. He knows everything about everything. Nope. Nope. Nope.

Aaron

00:21:54 – 00:22:04

Nope. Nope. Nope. I just am out there and so you think that I'm something special, but I'm not. I'm just everyone else, but I decided to do the thing.

Aaron

00:22:04 – 00:22:23

Right? And so I think that is the reality of how the world works. I don't know that it's entirely fair that just because you write articles, people think you're smarter than people that don't write articles. That's a lot of world to change. And so instead of trying to change the entire world, I'm gonna ride that wave and write some articles.

Aaron

00:22:23 – 00:22:33

And then everybody's gonna think I'm super smart. And it's like, oh, dang. That was easy. So if you're thinking about doing it, do it. If you want to get better at it, keep doing it more.

Aaron

00:22:33 – 00:22:40

And if you want to have help getting better at it, then there is a course for you. But I think the only thing that matters is that you do the thing.

Drew Bragg

00:22:41 – 00:22:53

In all the things that you're doing, pick your favorite. I don't have a preference. What's a blocker that you have? And if you're, like, no, everything great right now, what was a blocker that you had, and how did you or you and Steve go about solving it?

Aaron

00:22:54 – 00:23:16

Yeah. I can tell you our philosophical blocker, and I can tell you a technical blocker that we have overcome. So the philosophical blocker is how do we make this a business? So we put out this course. To date, it sold a fantastic amount it's made of a fantastic amount of money objectively and with absolute reference.

Aaron

00:23:16 – 00:23:35

Gets a $115,000, which is just fantastic amount of money. However, that's a good amount of money unless you're 2 people working full time for a certain amount of time. Right? So if that's the only money we made this year, that'd be really bad news. We don't plan on that being the only money.

Aaron

00:23:35 – 00:24:10

However, we need to figure out how do we go from selling a course, one time big launches to Steve and I are able to have paychecks. And so that's the kind of thing that we're trying to navigate right now. And, honestly, we're trying not to think about it too much right now because we're not at the point where we need it to be every month sustainable because we still have a few giant spikes ahead of us. Right? So we still have Postgres, and at some point we still have MySQL, and we can ride those spikes into putting food on the table.

Aaron

00:24:10 – 00:24:28

But then the question is, alright. We've got SQLite, Postgres, MySQL. I'm starting to wanna slow down the course treadmill. How do we make those assets produce enough such that we can survive and not only survive, thrive. The whole point of doing this is for freedom, and a big part of that is money.

Aaron

00:24:28 – 00:24:45

And so that's the thing that we're trying to figure out. What is a repeatable marketing channel? Do we need to buy ads? If so, is it Google, or is it Reddit, or is it Carbon, and stuff like that. It's really squishy, but we're trying to go from product launches to sustainable business.

Drew Bragg

00:24:46 – 00:25:07

That's one of those blockers that I feel like can scare a lot of people from starting their own businesses. There's a lot in there and Yes. You could be one of the best coders out there and build an amazing product, but, well, how do I tell everyone about it and how do I turn it into something that puts, yeah, food on the table, especially when you have 4 kids that are going to inhale a lot of food? Exactly. Yeah.

Drew Bragg

00:25:07 – 00:25:09

So what's the more technical blocker?

Aaron

00:25:10 – 00:25:34

So Steve and I are we're in different cities, different states in fact, and we're working on this platform together to host our videos. And there's this one gnarly bug that only, of course, presents itself on Safari iOS. And it's like, come on, man. And so I'm trying to share my local site on my computer. So we're not gonna just push over and over and over to try to, like, debug, so it's gonna take a 1000 years.

Aaron

00:25:34 – 00:25:56

Trying to share my local site on my computer with Steve's iPhone. That's, oh, how do we get there? At first, I just spun up ngrok, and it kinda worked. I had to do, like, some header rewriting to map it to my local vanity domain, which is a dot test local domain. And it was kinda working, except when, of course, JavaScript comes into play.

Aaron

00:25:56 – 00:26:22

And so Laravel by default runs a Vite bundler, which is quite nice. Laravel's integration with it is really nice. I never really have to think about it. However, when you're running it locally, it opens up port 5173 or 74 or something. And so, like, ingrok is proxying all requests to my machine for the website, but then the website is requesting Vite server, which doesn't exist on Steve's iPhone, of course.

Aaron

00:26:23 – 00:27:08

And so what I ended up having to do was write my own little Laravel command that over takes it starts in grok itself and sets up 2 tunnels, one for the platform dot test and one for local host 5173. So it sets up 2 tunnels. And then I have to do a little bit of monkeying about in Laravel to rewrite the Vite port to be like my ngrok vanity domain. So even from local hosts, we're going out to ngrok and then coming all the way back to my computer to hit Vite. But what that means is when Steve loads it on his phone, it looks for assets at platform dash test dot ingrok dot app instead of local host 5173.

Aaron

00:27:08 – 00:27:29

So it ended up working. And one of the good things about making content is I made a video out of it. I actually solved a problem. And that's why I like to stay in the game because if you don't stay in the game, you end up just making, like, terrible content. This is one of those things where you only would ever know it if you were actually in the game having these problems.

Aaron

00:27:30 – 00:27:40

And I feel like that makes more compelling content, and so I made a full video about it. And it's great, and it was really frustrating. But at least we solved it, and we got some content out of it, which is always fun.

Drew Bragg

00:27:40 – 00:28:04

The solving it is always something that feels good, especially when it's a weird one. Like, how in the world am I gonna make this work? And then you get the added benefit. And I think that's where a lot of great talks at the various conferences come from is we had to do this thing at work or I've been beating my head on how do I solve x, y, or z in my side project, and I finally did it, and here's everything I learned over the next half hour. Those are really quick.

Aaron

00:28:04 – 00:28:06

I love war stories. That's all we want.

Drew Bragg

00:28:06 – 00:28:12

Yeah. The other person's passionate about it too. Like, they bring this level of look at what I solved. Finally. Yep.

Drew Bragg

00:28:12 – 00:28:18

This is amazing. So 2 good blockers. I'm sorry that you have the first one.

Aaron

00:28:18 – 00:28:19

Yeah. Sorry.

Drew Bragg

00:28:19 – 00:28:23

I definitely can't help you with that because it just sounds scary to me.

Aaron

00:28:23 – 00:28:28

Yep. You're not wrong. No. It's certainly scary. But, yeah, I think we'll get there.

Aaron

00:28:28 – 00:28:49

I think the good news is we still have much of the expected value lies in front of us. Once Postgres has launched and MySQL has launched and most of the expected value is behind us, then it's gonna be like, well, shoot. What do we do now? So right now, we're just warming ourselves up to feel terror in the future, or

Drew Bragg

00:28:49 – 00:28:51

you might have it figured out by then. Who knows?

Aaron

00:28:51 – 00:28:53

Hey. That'd be great.

Drew Bragg

00:28:53 – 00:29:18

So you are in a lot of different things. You work on some cool stuff. You post a ton on your site too of all the cool things that you do. But if you had to pick something in the here and now to say, here is something cool, new, interesting that I've recently learned or discovered or built, doesn't have to be coding related. But if you could have guessed by the name of the show, it absolutely can be.

Drew Bragg

00:29:18 – 00:29:31

But, yeah, I've had cloud whitening and endangered hobbies as my cool, new, or interesting thing that people brought on. So it doesn't have to be coding related. Absolutely can be. What is something cool, new, or interesting that you've recently learned or discovered?

Aaron

00:29:31 – 00:30:20

Coding related, I have been trying to build out a little bit of a life automation system because I do feel a little bit overwhelmed, and many of the things that overwhelm me are automatable. And it's just a matter of if I had something, some computer managing the process and then contacting me at the moment it needed human input, and then I can give it human input and it goes back and does its own thing, that'd be amazing. And so in the course of that, I've done a lot of browser automation. And one of the very neat things that I have discovered is the Chrome remote debugging tools. And what that does is that allows you to connect to a running instance of Chrome and control it, including clicking and typing into text fields, and it's all built into Chrome itself.

Aaron

00:30:20 – 00:30:41

And so what I can do now is I can automate a browser that's running either on my machine or on Fly. Io or anywhere, and it can be doing its thing. And then let's say it reaches a point where it needs a CAPTCHA solved or 2 factor. It wants my password, and I don't wanna, like, store those credentials anywhere. I just actually just wanna type it in.

Aaron

00:30:41 – 00:31:04

So this browser can run-in the moment it reaches a certain point, it can contact me and say, like, hey. I'm stuck at this spot in the code where you told me to wait. So do your thing and let me know when you're done. And I can basically connect to it wherever it may live, do the thing, and then the system can keep going and continue on. So I spent way, way, way too much time trying to figure it out.

Aaron

00:31:04 – 00:31:23

And this was a in Grok exploration as well because it expects to be like on port 9222 or something. And I'm like, nah. I'm gonna put you on a machine somewhere else and contact you over the Internet. But it turned out to be really cool. And so I think this has opened up a lot of possibilities, more human like browsing and for things that are pretty sensitive like Twitter.

Aaron

00:31:23 – 00:31:39

Like, I wanna pull all my bookmarks out and categorize them because I have a ton of great content in the bookmarks that I need to refer back to, and it just goes to die. And so stuff like that, or it's, well, my life would be easier if I could set up a system. I've done that. So that's the technical one.

Drew Bragg

00:31:39 – 00:31:45

I like that a lot. I have a question. When is high performance engrakh screencast series coming out?

Aaron

00:31:45 – 00:31:53

Oh my gosh. Because it sounds like I know. Everything is for ideas for everything else. I I really am. I know way more about Ingram Rock than I thought I ever would.

Aaron

00:31:54 – 00:32:14

There is a part of me that's, hey, browser automation scraping, like, that's a great course. Maybe that's a free course where I, like, teach. In a previous life, I've done a ton of scraping of publicly available county data here in Texas and have developed some pretty robust systems. And I think it's just that would be fun. And so that's the curse of making content.

Aaron

00:32:14 – 00:32:18

Everything I do, I'm like, wow. Shoot. Now I gotta make a 100 videos about this. No. No.

Aaron

00:32:18 – 00:32:40

You don't. No. You don't. On the nontechnical side, I have been working out in the living room area prototyping a desk plus plant sanctuary. And so I got a big piece of rigid foam from Home Depot and have cut it up to get a physical sense of how big and deep and where this desk should go.

Aaron

00:32:41 – 00:33:14

And so I've been doing a lot of foam work, but then I decided as a part of this desk setup, I wanna have an overhead shelf and have tons of trailing plants up there. So plants that will grow and kinda hang over and down, and so it makes it kinda like a little bit of a oasis or a paradise. And so I have been propagating pothos plants, which is a lot of fun. And so I used actually the same piece of rigid foam, and and I got a little foam cutter, and I cut a bunch of circles in it. And then I got a bunch of test tubes off of Amazon and did a bunch of clippings and put them in water in the test tubes.

Aaron

00:33:14 – 00:33:30

And now they're all out there in the sun. And pretty soon, I'll have a 100 plants, and hopefully, they'll start growing over and kind of enclosing my little desk area. It's gonna be my study desk. So I'll have a place to do course research and read and write and that sort of stuff. I mean, it'll feel nice and natural.

Aaron

00:33:30 – 00:33:31

So I'm super excited about that.

Drew Bragg

00:33:32 – 00:33:36

That sounds awesome. I love going out and being in the wilderness. And Yes.

Aaron

00:33:36 – 00:33:36

When I

Drew Bragg

00:33:36 – 00:33:47

can't, I miss all the green. And it sounds like you're gonna have a nice middle ground of I have to be inside and studying, but I can be in the green. Mhmm. That sounds awesome.

Aaron

00:33:47 – 00:33:48

Yeah. Thanks. Did you

Drew Bragg

00:33:48 – 00:34:05

do a lot of building or construction stuff as a kid, or did you just kinda get into it out of necessity, and now you just do it because you built a shed, now you've built a wall in your apartment for recording. You're building, like, a desk sanctuary area for plants. You do a lot of building. Where did that come from?

Aaron

00:34:05 – 00:34:19

It all comes from the same place. I like to build stuff. Okay. Sure. I think there's a contingent of people that are really, really, really aspiring to be a pure and excellent programmer, which I admire.

Aaron

00:34:19 – 00:34:40

I think that's very interesting and a nice pursuit. I would love to be a great programmer, but more than anything, I just wanna build stuff. And so sometimes that expresses itself through code. Sometimes that expresses itself through lumber. And so the end goal for me is to have the thing built.

Aaron

00:34:40 – 00:34:52

And so that's why I build so much physical stuff, but that's also why when it comes to software development, people will be like, hey, Aaron. Can you compare Golang to PHP? And I'm like, no. Can't. Don't know Go.

Aaron

00:34:52 – 00:35:15

Not really interested in learning it. It seems cool. I'm not that interested in learning it because my end desire is not to know everything about programming and be a 10x engineer or, like, have stuff to say about every programming language or every drama in every programming community. I don't wanna do that. I don't want to be what would traditionally be called an influencer.

Aaron

00:35:15 – 00:35:35

I want to be a builder. I want to be a maker. I want to be a creator. And whatever comes out of that, I'm happy to make content about, but that is not my desire to be this person that is an influencer. My desire is to be a person who builds a ton of stuff and throws off byproducts in the process.

Drew Bragg

00:35:36 – 00:35:44

That is an admirable thing to strive for, and I think you do it quite well so far because that's how I think of you in my head as someone who just

Aaron

00:35:44 – 00:35:44

Oh, good.

Drew Bragg

00:35:44 – 00:36:01

Builds things and creates things and puts it all out in the world for us to see. Oh, good. Is there anything else that you wanted to talk about or mention while I have you on the show? It's been a blast having you on. I feel like we could talk for hours, but I'd also you are a busy man, and I wanna respect your

Aaron

00:36:01 – 00:36:20

time. The one thing I will leave you with is I'm bringing the forum back. I miss forums. I know that makes me 35, but I miss forums. I miss slow, longer form discussions where it's not in Discord, it's not in Slack, it's not on Twitter, it's not siloed in email inboxes.

Aaron

00:36:20 – 00:36:39

And so I have a plan to add some forums to aaronfrancis.com and seed it. It'll start as, hey, all these people who took my courses come and join the screencasting 1 and the SQLite 1. But my ultimate evil plan is to have a nice corner of the Internet where nice people hang out and talk about all sorts of things. So I will see if I can pull that off.

Drew Bragg

00:36:40 – 00:36:43

Bringing back the form and populating it with nice people. I like

Aaron

00:36:43 – 00:36:45

it. Exactly. That is one 100% the goal.

Drew Bragg

00:36:45 – 00:36:52

Yeah. That is awesome. So, Aaron, where can folks find you and all of your content on the Internet?

Aaron

00:36:52 – 00:36:58

Best place is either aaronfrancis.comorarondfrancis on Twitter.

Drew Bragg

00:36:59 – 00:37:11

Aaronfrancis on Twitter and aaronfrances.com. Thank you for coming on the show, Aaron. It was an absolute blast and an honor to have you on, really. Looking forward to seeing everything you and TryHard Studios does.

Aaron

00:37:11 – 00:37:13

Awesome. Thanks for having me, Drew.

Developer to Business Owner

Transcript

Not enough emails?