Aaron Francis

Ian & Aaron discuss Laravel Pulse, DHH's upcoming Slack competitor, Rails copying Laravel, & more. Sponsored by LaraJobs & Screencasting.com. Sent questions or feedback to mostlytechnicalpodcast@gmail.com.

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Transcript

Ian

00:00:02 – 00:00:08

Hello. Hello. La la la. I think I think we're both

Aaron

00:00:08 – 00:00:10

in a Seinfeld mood. It's we it just came out.

Ian

00:00:11 – 00:00:13

This is the timing's unbelievable on this.

Aaron

00:00:15 – 00:00:19

Man. So Justin Jackson, what a guy.

Ian

00:00:19 – 00:00:20

What a guy.

Aaron

00:00:20 – 00:00:25

Had to had to have spent hours clipping that together. Right?

Ian

00:00:25 – 00:00:41

Hours and hours and hours. Yeah. Crazy. Yeah. If you haven't seen, we'll post it up and everything, but Justin Jackson, friend of the show, friend of mine for many years, did a supercut of the podcast with Seinfeld, and it's it is

Aaron

00:00:42 – 00:00:42

It's uncanny.

Ian

00:00:43 – 00:00:47

It's uncanny. I was in tears laughing. It was It's

Aaron

00:00:47 – 00:00:49

so funny. Dying laughing.

Ian

00:00:50 – 00:00:56

So good. It's so well done. It's just spot on. So, yeah. Thank you, Justin, for that.

Ian

00:00:56 – 00:00:59

But, yeah, just wow, blew me away.

Aaron

00:00:59 – 00:01:11

I I just walked into the living room where, my wife and my mom and the au pair were and I was like, hey. Can I put this thing on the TV and show you this this video? Like, what's going on?

Ian

00:01:12 – 00:01:13

Like, what is this?

Aaron

00:01:13 – 00:01:16

So freaking funny. It

Ian

00:01:16 – 00:01:20

is. And, I mean, we've talked about that that it is kinda like that, but then when you see

Aaron

00:01:20 – 00:01:23

it. When you see it side by side. Yeah.

Ian

00:01:23 – 00:01:28

And I even posted this to Justin. I was like, now it now I'm questioning if I even have any of it.

Aaron

00:01:28 – 00:01:29

I'm just

Ian

00:01:29 – 00:01:37

like, maybe maybe we're just channeling, you know, millions of hours of Seinfeld into, into the show here. I don't know.

Aaron

00:01:37 – 00:01:52

Yeah. My I after I showed my mom, she was explaining Seinfeld to our au pair, and my mom was saying, like, we grew up on that. Like, our whole family, you know, me and my brother grew up watching so much Seinfeld, and I think it is like it's just been internalized.

Ian

00:01:53 – 00:02:01

Yeah. That's that's great. And it's funny because, like, you're probably a little young to have seen it live. Right? Or were you guys watching it the end of it's still live?

Aaron

00:02:02 – 00:02:06

Know if I was watching it live. What was the last season?

Ian

00:02:06 – 00:02:08

Oh, jeez. I think it was, like, 99.

Aaron

00:02:08 – 00:02:11

I think that's right. I think it was 98 or 9. Friends and sides

Ian

00:02:11 – 00:02:11

of the list are

Aaron

00:02:11 – 00:02:25

pretty close, but I think it was 98 or 9. Yeah. And I would have been, I think, 10 in in 99. So Yeah. I don't think we were watching it live, but I think we I think my brother and I watched, the reruns over and over and over.

Ian

00:02:25 – 00:02:42

Reruns, man. That's where, like, it just got into my brain from the room. Because, like, 11 so before it was streaming and all that, like 11 pm on WPIX in New York here anyway, like it would just be on every night and just obviously a random rerun and it's like, just watch that every night. Just Yep. Every single night.

Ian

00:02:42 – 00:02:43

It's so good.

Aaron

00:02:43 – 00:02:54

Yep. Somebody once asked on Twitter, like, how do I get better? They weren't asking me. They're just asking the void. And then the question was like, how do I get better at, like, low stakes casual small talk?

Aaron

00:02:54 – 00:03:07

And my, like, unironic answer was watch Seinfeld straight through. Like, watch it fully straight through, and you will start to internalize, like, the you can basically make a conversation out of anything.

Ian

00:03:07 – 00:03:08

Out of just a few words.

Aaron

00:03:08 – 00:03:09

Yes. Exactly.

Ian

00:03:10 – 00:03:15

So You're a big straight through guy. This is a theme. This is one of your themes. For sure. Straight through.

Aaron

00:03:15 – 00:03:17

Very much very much a completionist.

Ian

00:03:17 – 00:03:18

Seinfeld. Yes.

Aaron

00:03:18 – 00:03:24

Big time. Yep. Love love to have love to have the full set. Love to love to know the full canon.

Ian

00:03:25 – 00:03:51

Yeah. Yeah. Seinfeld, especially, I think is really good in that it pays off a lot. Like, a lot of sitcoms, you know, they're just, like, they're really isolated, like, every episode or maybe there's an arc of a couple episodes, but that's it. But like, especially from midpoint on like Seinfeld, like each season would have an arc and then, yeah, like there would be arcs that cut across even multiple seasons to some, you know, not full arcs, but like people would return and whatever there would be things they go back to and re reference.

Ian

00:03:51 – 00:03:55

So, yeah, like if you watch the whole thing through, you really do get a lot of payoff.

Aaron

00:03:55 – 00:04:13

Yeah. It does compound because then you start to get a catalog of, like, the close talker, the low talker, the loud talker. You get all like, oh, they're doing a they're doing a running bit here. And and, honestly, the the learning how to do a good callback joke, I feel like I learned a lot from Seinfeld. Yeah.

Aaron

00:04:13 – 00:04:20

Like, how do you make the joke? And then, you know, 21 minutes later, at the end of the episode, how do you make the joke again as a callback? And yeah.

Ian

00:04:20 – 00:04:37

And their character like, they stayed in character so well. I feel like that's, like, that's the only thing people can pick up on. Yeah. Whether it's on Twitter or a podcast or whatever, there is, like, this element of entertainment that you're doing, and it's like Seinfeld is just the master of that. Like, they're just so those characters are just so fully realized.

Ian

00:04:37 – 00:04:38

I feel like that they really

Aaron

00:04:38 – 00:04:44

And one of their tenants, one of their Jerry's core tenants on the show was no growth, no learning. And so that helps. Like Which

Ian

00:04:44 – 00:04:47

does help. Right? It helps a lot. The same people.

Aaron

00:04:47 – 00:04:49

You're not becoming a better person.

Aaron

00:04:49 – 00:04:49

Right.

Aaron

00:04:49 – 00:05:02

The last, you know, the last argument or the last observation of the series is the first observation of the series about the button being too high. Yeah. It's like, no. No growth. We're just who we are for 9 seasons straight.

Aaron

00:05:02 – 00:05:04

It's like, well, yeah, that that worked pretty well.

Ian

00:05:04 – 00:05:08

That did that did you when you got something that works, stick with it. Yep.

Aaron

00:05:08 – 00:05:09

Don't mess it

Ian

00:05:09 – 00:05:10

up. Oh, man.

Aaron

00:05:10 – 00:05:13

Thank you, Justin. Incredible, incredible work. I laughed so hard.

Ian

00:05:14 – 00:05:18

Wow. I was in that. It's just, like, almost scary now. It's like, oh, man. Why do it's like a pressure.

Ian

00:05:18 – 00:05:20

I'm like, I feel pressure. It's like, well,

Aaron

00:05:20 – 00:05:21

it's signs, though.

Ian

00:05:21 – 00:05:21

Apparently, it's

Aaron

00:05:21 – 00:05:23

signs, though. Out of our minds. But Yeah.

Ian

00:05:23 – 00:05:24

We gotta, like, create this thing.

Aaron

00:05:24 – 00:05:30

You're a little you're a little bit on the male body being grotesque. I just made me laugh

Aaron

00:05:30 – 00:05:30

so hard again when watching it. Oh, that's true, though. I definitely

Aaron

00:05:30 – 00:05:32

must have got that one.

Ian

00:05:33 – 00:05:36

True, though. I definitely must have got that from Seinfeld. Like, that's

Aaron

00:05:37 – 00:05:38

Must have. That was word for word. Yeah.

Ian

00:05:38 – 00:05:46

That was word for word. Like, he was just like, oh, here's the Seinfeld version of it. It's like, oh, the exact thing. Just me having watched that episode a 1000 times. Yeah.

Ian

00:05:46 – 00:05:49

I mean, I I think I believe it too, but who knows? Maybe I

Aaron

00:05:49 – 00:05:50

Who knows at this point? Yeah.

Ian

00:05:50 – 00:05:56

It doesn't know. I just might be regurgitating Elaine. But Yep. Alright. We got a couple of updates.

Ian

00:05:57 – 00:06:18

We could stay on that the whole time, but we'll do some updates and then topics topics and all kinds of stuff. But, 2 things from last week. I want to follow-up on our JSON talk that I actually know the guy who added, JSON to PHP, Omar Kolani. He's also a friend of mine who does, remember the milk. Yep.

Ian

00:06:18 – 00:06:24

The the the support until he added it. So he added JSON encode and JSON decode.

Aaron

00:06:24 – 00:06:25

Wow.

Ian

00:06:25 – 00:06:32

I don't know if they've been they've probably been rewritten since then or whatever, but, he did the original implementation. I don't remember. I think it was 2014.

Aaron

00:06:32 – 00:06:33

Aaron

00:06:33 – 00:06:36

Man, I remember remember the milk. That was that was big for

Ian

00:06:36 – 00:06:38

a while. They're still going. He's still out there.

Aaron

00:06:39 – 00:06:39

That's amazing.

Aaron

00:06:39 – 00:06:39

So they're

Ian

00:06:39 – 00:06:55

doing the to do list. And then a very small update on slippers. So I said only my middle kid was into the slippers and me and my wife are in the slippers. All of a sudden, just like it must be in the air, they come home from they had to go to the mall for something, and my daughter has nice L. L.

Ian

00:06:55 – 00:07:01

Bean slippers. No. So all 4 of the 5 of us are on the slipper bandwagon now.

Aaron

00:07:01 – 00:07:04

Wow. Okay. It's going around.

Ian

00:07:04 – 00:07:05

Yeah. So we gotta get you on.

Aaron

00:07:05 – 00:07:08

Yeah. It seems it seems like that is my least popular opinion.

Ian

00:07:09 – 00:07:18

Yeah. People didn't didn't care for your opinion there. I was kinda surprised. I thought there would be a lot more pushback, on people who are like, no way shoes in the house were all about it. I was I was pretty surprised.

Ian

00:07:18 – 00:07:21

It was quite universal on the no shoes in the house for the most part.

Aaron

00:07:21 – 00:07:25

For the most part, except for boss Holly, my boss at PlanetScale.

Ian

00:07:26 – 00:07:33

Yes. Your boss. Yes. Oh, you think, You think, you think she's being honest there? Maybe she just she was maybe she just wants to stand with you.

Ian

00:07:33 – 00:07:35

Is there any chance of that? She's just being loyal?

Aaron

00:07:36 – 00:07:39

No. Because she has all the power. She doesn't, you know, unless

Ian

00:07:39 – 00:07:40

she's like do that. But

Aaron

00:07:40 – 00:07:48

Yeah. Unless she's reaching down to the little man. I don't I think she really does she really does wear shoes in the house, I think. Hey. She lives she lives out in the country.

Aaron

00:07:48 – 00:07:56

She lives, you know, who knows where, like, out in the country, and she probably has, like, scorpions in her house or something, and so she doesn't wanna she doesn't wanna be taking her shoes off all day long. You know?

Ian

00:07:56 – 00:08:02

Yeah. Then the things get into the shoes. If you just put the shoes on all the time, you don't have to worry about stuff living in there.

Aaron

00:08:02 – 00:08:11

Yeah. And then I saw I saw, I saw people wearing their slippers outside on Twitter, and I'm like, you just that's just shoes.

Ian

00:08:11 – 00:08:12

That's just

Aaron

00:08:12 – 00:08:13

worse. That's worse shoes.

Ian

00:08:14 – 00:08:25

So I will wear the slippers, like, onto the driveway, but I try not to leave the driveway with the slippers. I'm definitely not leaving the house zone with the slippers ever for sure.

Aaron

00:08:25 – 00:08:29

Yeah. Walking outside with slippers on, you're just doing the same thing, but in reverse.

Ian

00:08:29 – 00:08:34

But I do think you want the slippers to have, like, some grip and the

Aaron

00:08:34 – 00:08:34

and the

Ian

00:08:34 – 00:08:43

actual bottom. So they are very shoe sneaker like. Yeah. You don't want those, like, it's just a cloth bottom. Those things are you know, then you're You know

Aaron

00:08:43 – 00:08:44

what I could you

Aaron

00:08:44 – 00:08:44

know what

Aaron

00:08:44 – 00:08:54

I could be sold on? And this may this may be, like, this may be a terminology you may think I'm insane. I could be sold on house shoes. I could be sold on that. Yeah.

Aaron

00:08:54 – 00:09:04

Like, a pair of maybe maybe they're not slippers, and maybe they are just shoes, but a pair of shoes that you wear in the house only.

Ian

00:09:04 – 00:09:05

Dedicated to the house.

Aaron

00:09:05 – 00:09:07

Yeah. I could I could be sold on that.

Ian

00:09:07 – 00:09:13

So I feel like if you're gonna go that route, then I wouldn't go sneakers. I would go like UGGs or like something like

Aaron

00:09:13 – 00:09:13

Yeah.

Ian

00:09:13 – 00:09:19

Something like that that's got a little slipper ness, but isn't all the way down to a slipper perhaps.

Aaron

00:09:19 – 00:09:28

You know, we don't need to retread the whole thing, but it just feels a little bit like giving up to put on some UGGs and, like, toot around the house. You know? I just I can't I don't think I can

Aaron

00:09:28 – 00:09:28

get there.

Ian

00:09:28 – 00:09:29

There. Yeah.

Aaron

00:09:29 – 00:09:30

I don't think I can get there. No.

Ian

00:09:30 – 00:09:32

You gotta clear 40. Maybe when you

Aaron

00:09:32 – 00:09:36

hit 40? Yeah. When I when I hit 40 and I have, you know

Ian

00:09:36 – 00:09:38

All your best days are behind you.

Aaron

00:09:38 – 00:09:39

Yeah. Exactly. I

Ian

00:09:39 – 00:09:41

understand. I understand. Yep.

Aaron

00:09:41 – 00:09:45

Maybe I'll maybe I'll give up. But until then, I'm gonna I'm gonna fight the good fight.

Ian

00:09:46 – 00:09:47

Alright. I'm with you. Alright.

Aaron

00:09:48 – 00:09:49

Alright. Alright. So Topic.

Ian

00:09:49 – 00:10:00

So I guess we'll do the big one first is the the Laravel people, crew, release pulse, and you have been pulse. Deep into it. So why don't you take us through?

Aaron

00:10:01 – 00:10:04

Pulse is very good. Yeah. Pulse is very, very good.

Ian

00:10:04 – 00:10:05

So Love the idea.

Aaron

00:10:05 – 00:10:31

They released Pulse first party package. It is it is interesting how it's being pitched and how it could be used. So it's being pitched as, you know, lightweight APM, basically. Vital signs in real time is is the h one on pulse.laravel.com. And there's, you know, an image of users making requests, queue backlog, cache hits, slow queries, etcetera.

Aaron

00:10:31 – 00:10:43

Right? So that's how it's being built as is, like, keep an eye keep an eye on your server at a high level, whatever whatever. It's all written in LiveWire. Very dashboard. Yeah.

Aaron

00:10:43 – 00:10:55

I know the year of LiveWire continues. The year of LiveWire. Very, very dashboard centric. Yeah. And the customization story is pretty good, in that you can create your own cards.

Aaron

00:10:56 – 00:11:26

And so I've dug in I've dug in quite a bit in, you know, 30 minute hour increments that I have. I've dug in quite a bit to look at how it works, and it's basically a dashboard framework. Like, yeah, you can use it to monitor vital signs in real time or whatever. You can also use it to do just about anything else, and that's kinda where I that's kinda what I've been working on is, making cards for a bunch of other providers. I'm gonna try to drop them all at once.

Aaron

00:11:27 – 00:11:28

But, like

Ian

00:11:28 – 00:11:28

I like that.

Aaron

00:11:28 – 00:11:59

More of like a more of like a social or business dashboard than a server dashboard. And it's kind of cool the way they've done it. They've separated it into, like, recorders and display. So, like, you have one thing that's responsible for recording data and the other thing that's responsible for displaying it. And the infrastructure for recording the data is really robust in that you can record time series data as aggregates only without storing all of the entries.

Ian

00:12:00 – 00:12:01

Right. The underlying

Aaron

00:12:01 – 00:12:27

got, you know, 5,000,000 requests an hour or whatever, you can just store that as, like, you know, 4 or 6 different rows instead of 5,000,000. And Pulse handles all of that. Like, it abstracts all of that away from you. So if you dig in deep enough and look at it and I need to do some videos and write about it because I don't think anybody's gonna dig in that far. But if you dig in deep enough, the way that they're doing automatic roll ups and aggregations is very, very good.

Aaron

00:12:27 – 00:12:34

So lot of potential here, and I think it's gonna be a little bit of, like, a a land grab to to build out some of these cards.

Ian

00:12:35 – 00:12:50

Well, I I mean, I've always wanted a dashboard, excuse me, like thing, and it's like I've tried some of those services, but Mhmm. I don't know. It's just never really stuck. And I just feel like, oh, you have. It's just, like, in your Laravel app already, and you're already using Pulse for, you know, what it's meant for.

Ian

00:12:50 – 00:13:12

But then you can also, if it's all abstracted nicely, which it sounds like, you know, I'm sure there'll be more stuff to do there, but that it's already is at a pretty good level for, being able to customize. And and the thing that I think I saw from you is that you can multiple dashboards. So that really opens it up. So it's not just like, well, here's my Stripe stuff mixed in with my slow queries and whatever.

Aaron

00:13:12 – 00:13:12

Yep.

Ian

00:13:12 – 00:13:26

Like, kind of annoying. It's like, no. I could just have, like, my finance one, and I could have my, you know, APM one, and I could have Yep. Maybe internal app stuff and whatever, and they can all just be in their own little zone, but in the same same place. So

Aaron

00:13:26 – 00:13:30

that Yep. So I so out of the box, you cannot have that with Pulse.

Aaron

00:13:30 – 00:13:30

Okay.

Aaron

00:13:30 – 00:13:32

But I have created a way You've

Ian

00:13:32 – 00:13:33

hacked it.

Aaron

00:13:33 – 00:13:34

I've hacked it.

Ian

00:13:34 – 00:13:35

Yes. Put that out

Aaron

00:13:35 – 00:13:48

of the package itself. Because I think I think, like and I don't know if it was a strategic decision for them to not say, like, universal dashboard builder. You know? Because it's like, who cares? So I don't even know what that means.

Aaron

00:13:49 – 00:13:59

But I think that's what it's going to turn into. I think this is going to sit a little bit in the middle of or on one side or the other of a filament or a nova, honestly.

Ian

00:14:00 – 00:14:01

It does have those vibes.

Aaron

00:14:02 – 00:14:11

Yeah. To the extent that it's monitoring and not necessarily fully wired crud, pulse makes way more sense than setting up one of those 2 things, I think. Right.

Ian

00:14:11 – 00:14:19

Yeah. If you don't need the forms and everything and you just want the display, like, yeah, it's gonna be a much nicer, cleaner way to do it, it seems like.

Aaron

00:14:19 – 00:14:32

Yep. And I'll I'll scoop myself because this probably won't come out until tomorrow, and I can probably get some of these done before tomorrow. But having cards for Fathom Analytics, for Transistor, for Lemon Squeezy,

Aaron

00:14:32 – 00:14:33

for

Aaron

00:14:33 – 00:15:01

Stripe, for YouTube, having cards to, like, monitor all of that, that's what I'm going for. Because I want, like, my own personal dashboard of alright. What's going on in the business of, you know, the Aaron Empire? And having those things would be great. And so I'm, like, working furiously to get those things finished enough because I think I have a really good handle on the data storage layer underneath because I worked with Jess a little bit before they transformed it into what it is now.

Aaron

00:15:02 – 00:15:05

She went away and just, like, drank a bunch of coffee. I don't know if she drinks coffee.

Aaron

00:15:05 – 00:15:06

She drank

Aaron

00:15:06 – 00:15:19

a bunch of coffee and stayed up for, like, 5 days straight and rewrote the whole thing, like a mad scientist. But, I wanna knock some of these cards out to to, like, kinda show, hey, this is this could be your business dashboard as well.

Ian

00:15:20 – 00:15:31

Yeah. That to me, that definitely the in the thing I thought of instantly. I think you're totally on the right track there, and people are gonna really love that Yeah. And and use that a lot. Hopefully, things like the multi dashboard could just get absorbed in.

Ian

00:15:31 – 00:15:46

You'd love to see that in the core. And then, obviously, then you can just have everybody the whole, you know, ecosystem of cards then come about around it. Exactly. Yep. All the big players and then down into the niches and everything.

Ian

00:15:47 – 00:15:56

Yeah. It's really exciting. I'm really excited to use that. I thought it's great too that they give you the option to, like, use a separate database. So if you don't wanna have it hitting your main database and all that kind of stuff.

Ian

00:15:58 – 00:16:00

So, yeah, I mean, it seems pretty straightforward. I

Aaron

00:16:00 – 00:16:40

have an also have an interesting intermediate layer between so on the recording side, you can decide to record everything in a separate database. You can also send all of your, like, to be written events through an ingest engine. So, like, you can just dump them into Redis and then run a command to more slowly or more methodically put them into whatever database you choose. And so if you're like, I don't really want any of my pulse stuff to be, you know, blocking or in in a critical path, you can just dump it all into Redis and then work it out later, which I think is pretty smart.

Ian

00:16:40 – 00:16:46

Yeah. That is. So, yeah, you can just have a log, and it'll then aggregate from the log. Yeah.

Aaron

00:16:46 – 00:16:58

I think it drains out the events from Redis in a in a command. It's like if you get a huge burst of requests, you're not trying to insert all of those into the pulse database. You just

Ian

00:16:58 – 00:16:58

put

Aaron

00:16:58 – 00:17:03

them in the Redis storage locker, and then it'll put them into the database in a little bit.

Ian

00:17:03 – 00:17:08

Yep. So Seems like a dynamo DB ish type of use case too. I'm sure they'll be able to Yeah.

Aaron

00:17:08 – 00:17:09

Don't bring that around here.

Ian

00:17:09 – 00:17:10

All the

Aaron

00:17:10 – 00:17:25

hood place. Wonder I do wonder the, the engine is pluggable, so you could write a dynamo engine and still have, like, your redis ingest, you know, buffer, but then go into Dynamo. And I wonder so I I bet somebody I bet somebody will will write that.

Ian

00:17:25 – 00:17:52

I would think so. There's all kinds of also, like, dedicated tools that people may already be dumping stuff into that then they wanna, dump more stuff into, but then use that so you don't have a whole separate setup for that. So, yeah, I think people I mean, it'll be interesting to see because I think people are gonna really push this, like, how it, how it performs when someone drops it in on, you know, one of these huge sites that's getting a lot of traffic and, and all that. And Mhmm. That was my pitch to Jess.

Ian

00:17:52 – 00:18:19

I was like, now we need to extract this into aggregate data functions into the Laravel database driver because that's really Cool. There's lots of use cases for that. Like, I mean, my own products, obviously, being fully selfish here. Yeah. We have all kinds of reporting and stuff where we do part of what I wanna do in new, version of things is to do more along these lines where you're not always especially for, like, really heavy things, like trying to query the database in real time, do millions and millions of rows, and that's always slow and so on.

Ian

00:18:19 – 00:18:26

It's like, yeah, you could just aggregate whatever. Help desk tickets. Right? Like, okay. You did millions of them over this year.

Ian

00:18:27 – 00:18:41

Certain types of reports are just like Yep. The counts of how many. And, yeah, it'd be cool if it was just, like, a nice way to aggregate that without, always hitting the database live every single time to count those millions of rows. So Yep. Yeah.

Ian

00:18:41 – 00:18:53

A lot of stuff like that. Yeah. I'll be cur it does seem like I mean, I I wonder what they I don't know. Taylor was just kinda like when I talked to him a little bit offline about it. It was just like, yeah, we'll release this thing.

Ian

00:18:53 – 00:19:03

You know, it's cool. And so I don't know. I'm I don't know how if you heard, like, what if they were expecting it to be so big, but I feel like it's I feel like people would really take

Aaron

00:19:03 – 00:19:03

the whole

Aaron

00:19:04 – 00:19:17

All I've heard is public information, but he has sounded so laissez faire about it on Right. On their podcast. He's like, yeah. You know, I wrote a few paragraphs to the initial pitch, and then Tim and Jess went off and build it. And, and it just yeah.

Aaron

00:19:17 – 00:19:37

When I talked to Tim and Jess, they were everyone has been so focused on the server monitoring story, which I think is a compelling story and a good, like, tip of the spear. But I don't know that I don't know that they or maybe they secretly did, but I don't know that they had the idea that everybody was gonna take it and be like, I'm gonna shove everything in here.

Aaron

00:19:37 – 00:19:37

This is

Aaron

00:19:37 – 00:19:41

now my business dashboard. I don't I don't know if that was, on their mind at all.

Ian

00:19:41 – 00:19:49

Yeah. I think that's what's gonna happen, though. I think that that use case. But I do agree. Like, I think that having, the set use case is sort of interesting.

Ian

00:19:49 – 00:20:05

It's like, oh, no. This is like the APM. And then that's just, like, what you can talk about, but then let everybody else then create the rest of that ecosystem without trying to do it all yourself or whatever. Whether they thought of it or not. It's, like, it's nice if that's flushed out by the the community, I think.

Aaron

00:20:05 – 00:20:07

Yeah. I think so.

Ian

00:20:08 – 00:20:12

Interesting. Alright. Along those lines, Christophe works at Laravel now.

Aaron

00:20:13 – 00:20:16

He does. Yeah. He's the new video guy at Laravel now.

Ian

00:20:17 – 00:20:22

Yeah. So that'll be cool. I've watched a few of his things. Seems like he's gonna be doing more there. So I don't think he's full time.

Ian

00:20:22 – 00:20:23

It's like top

Aaron

00:20:23 – 00:20:26

this year, man. Video. Gotta be on video.

Ian

00:20:26 – 00:20:37

The video is so huge. Even, like, with the podcast, like, just having this video, I feel like the video when you share audio snippets, it doesn't do anything. Nobody cares. Don't watch the whole pod. Some people do watch the podcast as, like, hey.

Ian

00:20:37 – 00:20:45

I'm watching an hour and a half of the podcast. But Yep. Even just having the video as a resource to then chunk up into interesting snippets is just, I think, gigantic for the podcast. Yes. I

Aaron

00:20:45 – 00:20:54

think so. I think it it it unlocks a lot more shareability than just audio. I mean, even the thing that Justin just did, he wouldn't have done that if it was just audio.

Ian

00:20:54 – 00:20:57

Yeah. I don't think so. Right? Like, it it would just wouldn't hit the same way to,

Aaron

00:20:57 – 00:20:58

like No.

Ian

00:20:58 – 00:21:10

Have the cuts, not to the actual Seinfeld videos and things. I think it just works so much better seeing that cut back and forth. So, yeah, opens up the virality, I guess. Yeah. So, yeah, I think that's really smart of Taylor as always.

Aaron

00:21:11 – 00:21:12

Time, Christophe?

Ian

00:21:12 – 00:21:13

No. I think he's part time

Aaron

00:21:13 – 00:21:21

Gotcha. Understanding. Yeah. I think he's started to do a little bit more of, like, what's new in Laravel, you know, 10 dot whatever.

Ian

00:21:21 – 00:21:23

Right. Formalizing some of that.

Aaron

00:21:23 – 00:21:44

Yeah. That seems that seems good. It's just, man, YouTube is just a distribution engine unto itself. You really, like if you can figure it out in your business, you got you gotta be on YouTube. And I feel like for for Laravel, you know, LLC, that just makes the most sense in the world to have a dedicated person working on that stuff.

Ian

00:21:45 – 00:22:03

I've been trying to figure this out for the help spot end of things, and I can't really, like it's so hard. Like, it doesn't have the, like, plan that scale had this nice, yeah, I can teach people about the database, like, and that's a thing people are confused by. Whatever. And, like, we could do soft things like that, like, whatever, be a better help desk agent or whatever, but it just feels like generic. You know?

Ian

00:22:03 – 00:22:10

Yeah. It's, like, super boring, super generic. So I don't know. I haven't cracked that code of what we could do there, but I do have

Aaron

00:22:10 – 00:22:29

my eyes out. Because you gotta be, like it's gotta be entertaining. I mean Right. Even to the extent that you're teaching, it has to be, like, entertaining. And so and I don't know how many, you know, developers hang out on YouTube, but do a lot of either people who buy help desk software or help desk people themselves hang out on YouTube?

Ian

00:22:29 – 00:22:39

Right. Well, and the thing is they do. Right? But it's that they aren't looking for things in the same way that like a developer's on there being like, what the hell's a foreign key? Right.

Ian

00:22:39 – 00:22:49

And like, then they might look on YouTube for that, and then they're gonna find your thing about foreign keys or whatever. Right? And but they're not going home from their job. Like, so devs are doing that. Like, they go home from their job, and then they're like, hey.

Ian

00:22:49 – 00:22:59

I'm doing this side project or I have this thought or whatever. The help desk agents and help desk managers are not necessarily like I go home from my job, and I'm, like, querying about how to, like, be

Aaron

00:22:59 – 00:23:00

on there. Too.

Ian

00:23:00 – 00:23:03

Yeah. Yeah. Like, I'm not sure.

Aaron

00:23:03 – 00:23:05

There's some farming or mister beast. Right.

Ian

00:23:05 – 00:23:11

They're just on there too. Yeah. They're on there as humans, but they're not necessarily looking for stuff for their job.

Aaron

00:23:11 – 00:23:11

Mhmm.

Ian

00:23:12 – 00:23:14

So I think that's a little bit trickier, but

Aaron

00:23:14 – 00:23:20

Must be nice. Sounds healthy to, like, just go home and watch videos about other stuff. No. I do your Yeah.

Aaron

00:23:21 – 00:23:21

Do 4 more

Ian

00:23:21 – 00:23:23

hours of your job. Yeah.

Aaron

00:23:24 – 00:23:24

So you're telling

Aaron

00:23:24 – 00:23:24

me I

Aaron

00:23:24 – 00:23:28

can just log off? That's an option? Go. That's interesting.

Ian

00:23:28 – 00:23:30

A hobby? Do do something else? Never heard

Aaron

00:23:30 – 00:23:30

of that.

Ian

00:23:30 – 00:23:32

Hobby? My job also.

Aaron

00:23:32 – 00:23:34

Makes makes no sense to me.

Ian

00:23:34 – 00:23:37

Yeah. So Yeah. I don't know what your strategy

Aaron

00:23:37 – 00:23:38

would be.

Ian

00:23:38 – 00:23:42

Yeah. I don't know. If you think of anything, let me know. If anybody out there has any ideas, I'm open to suggestions.

Aaron

00:23:42 – 00:23:43

But,

Ian

00:23:43 – 00:23:54

this is where, like, the SEO has always been pretty good for us because it's like people are just directly searching, like, best help desk software or whatever. You know? Like, they're like, I'm buying right now. This is the thing I'm bought. I need this tool.

Ian

00:23:54 – 00:24:06

It's not like a sexy tool. I'm not, like, super excited about it necessarily, but I'm searching for it right now. And that's not the way people really use YouTube as much. For certain areas, it is, but not in general. You know?

Ian

00:24:06 – 00:24:19

It's more like product reviews somewhat and things like that. But, again, b to b is not so much like that. I don't feel like there's that, yeah, kind of mindset there. So, I don't know. But alright.

Ian

00:24:19 – 00:24:23

So why don't you talk to us more about YouTube? Because you've had some big success with announcements and

Aaron

00:24:23 – 00:24:39

Making it work. Yeah. Let's see what the numbers are right now. So planet scale has officially hit switching accounts to planet scale. 27 1,372 subscribers.

Ian

00:24:39 – 00:24:43

And when you start doing these videos, they had, like, 1,000 subscribers?

Aaron

00:24:43 – 00:24:44

1 or 2. Yeah.

Ian

00:24:44 – 00:24:45

Yeah. Something like that. Small amount.

Aaron

00:24:46 – 00:25:01

Yeah. Wow. So it's been, you know, it's been let's see. I think Sam, the CEO, posted something, but, you know, it's been less fewer than 6 months that we've been doing these videos, and we're up, you know, 25,000 subscribers.

Ian

00:25:01 – 00:25:05

His post was I think it was August or something. Right? It was like Yeah.

Aaron

00:25:05 – 00:25:05

It's Yeah.

Ian

00:25:05 – 00:25:07

So it's, like, 3 months or

Aaron

00:25:07 – 00:25:07

Yeah.

Aaron

00:25:07 – 00:25:10

It's crazy. Yeah. So, like

Ian

00:25:11 – 00:25:14

And how long have you worked there, though? You haven't you worked there a little longer than that. Right? Because didn't

Aaron

00:25:14 – 00:25:14

you go

Ian

00:25:14 – 00:25:19

to start with that big prod okay. So you were doing other stuff first, or you were just working on that big course first?

Aaron

00:25:19 – 00:25:19

Aaron

00:25:19 – 00:25:25

I worked on the big course first. I did some other little stuff. Like, I was, you know, writing articles, and

Ian

00:25:25 – 00:25:26

Right.

Aaron

00:25:26 – 00:25:45

I built, like, a demo. I actually built it in LiveWire. I built a demo for, like, our boost plan, skill boost product for our sales people to use. And so then I launched the course in February and kinda that was, like, the big the first big public thing I did, and the course was, you know, big success. Great.

Aaron

00:25:45 – 00:26:03

Totally worked. And then kinda just, like, did content and did the, you know, did the stuff for a while. And then I think it was in, maybe June, I posted, like I was like, hey. What if I post a planet scale YouTube video? And I posted 1, and I was like, hey.

Aaron

00:26:03 – 00:26:17

This is kind of fun. I could do this. I could make more of these. So then I just kinda started, you know, playing around with it, and then it started to, like, it started to hit. And then I basically went to Holly and was like, what if I just make this my full time thing?

Ian

00:26:17 – 00:26:17

Right.

Aaron

00:26:17 – 00:26:27

Like, what if I am solely responsible for growing, you know, the the top of the funnel through YouTube? She's like, great. Let's do it. And after that, it's off to the races.

Ian

00:26:28 – 00:26:34

Because the big course, the big MySQL course wasn't, on YouTube. Right? Like, that's just on the website or whatever. Right.

Aaron

00:26:34 – 00:26:43

So So we get we get our, you know, whatever they're called. MQLs or marketing qualified leads. People come to the course, They, like, watch your videos, and we get their email, and then we follow-up with them. That sort of thing.

Ian

00:26:43 – 00:26:52

Right. Right. So that's amazing. So 3 or 4 months to go to, you know, have 20, whatever, 1000 I know. 25,000, new subscribers.

Ian

00:26:52 – 00:26:52

I must

Aaron

00:26:52 – 00:26:53

I'm getting that silver plug, but

Aaron

00:26:54 – 00:26:54

very happy.

Aaron

00:26:54 – 00:26:57

I don't know if that's too good. Yeah. They're very happy. We're all very happy.

Ian

00:26:58 – 00:27:02

So what's your personal channel at, though? Is is personal almost stripping you?

Aaron

00:27:02 – 00:27:05

Yeah. It is. Yeah. Because I'm able to put out more videos there.

Ian

00:27:05 – 00:27:06

Right.

Aaron

00:27:06 – 00:27:18

Because, you know, the main thing is that PlanetScale pays me money. So That is that is motivating. It is motivating. I think let's check the let's check the personal channel. I think so I'm at 14732.

Aaron

00:27:18 – 00:27:21

So from Okay. The beginning of this year, fewer than a100 to Wow.

Ian

00:27:21 – 00:27:21

15,000.

Aaron

00:27:21 – 00:27:26

That's pretty good. Man. And I have in the to Wow. 15,000. That's pretty good.

Aaron

00:27:26 – 00:27:38

Man. And I have in the last 28 days, I've earned $186 off of YouTube. So you can see where why why planets go 5400 x, you can make

Ian

00:27:38 – 00:27:40

a okay salary.

Aaron

00:27:40 – 00:27:48

Yeah. Making many tens of dollars for all of my efforts. But, yeah, this is growing this is growing very well. I'm very happy about it.

Ian

00:27:48 – 00:27:52

Yeah. That's amazing. Yeah. They must be super happy. I mean, I don't know.

Ian

00:27:52 – 00:28:04

I obviously can't share super details, but I guess just, like, ultra high level, like, it is it effective marketing? Like, do they feel like it's effective, the powers that be in the marketing?

Aaron

00:28:04 – 00:28:06

High level, everyone is very happy.

Ian

00:28:06 – 00:28:07

Okay. That's great.

Aaron

00:28:07 – 00:28:17

We have a long term strategy of, like, how it's going to work. Mhmm. And we're in phase 1 of the strategy, and everyone is very happy with the results of phase 1.

Ian

00:28:17 – 00:28:19

Awesome. Yep. So cool.

Aaron

00:28:19 – 00:28:26

Yeah. It's a good thing. It's a lot of fun. It's it's it's a whole lot of fun. And bringing on Steve the editor was a huge

Ian

00:28:26 – 00:28:27

Oh, yeah. That's great.

Aaron

00:28:27 – 00:28:41

Huge unlock for me. Yep. Because one, he's really, like, he's really talented. First of all, he just can make better stuff than I can. But 2, it, like, it releases a lot of the pressure of me having to edit everything personally.

Aaron

00:28:42 – 00:28:49

And so Is he And he can do, like, motion graphics and everything. I think he's still contract,

Aaron

00:28:50 – 00:28:50

but

Aaron

00:28:50 – 00:28:55

I think he works for us pretty much exclusively. But,

Ian

00:28:55 – 00:28:59

so do you have to give him a lot of notes, or how does that whole relationship work?

Aaron

00:28:59 – 00:29:29

That's the thing that is shocking is he's a developer. So he's one of those that's, like, building a sass on the side and, you know, is a Vue. I don't think he's Laravel, but he's a Vue developer and primarily has used Postgres historically, but is also a video editor. And so when, you know, we were interviewing him and he was like, yeah. I edited videos for bodybuilding.com and, you know, helped grow their channel to 4,000,000.

Aaron

00:29:29 – 00:29:40

Also, I saw that y'all use Table Plus in a lot of your videos. I use Table Plus. I'm, you know, developing my own SaaS, and I use Table Plus. And I'm like you're a video editor for bodybuilding.com, and you know what Table Plus

Ian

00:29:40 – 00:29:42

is? Right. How does It's like you're hired.

Aaron

00:29:42 – 00:29:42

People. Right.

Ian

00:29:42 – 00:29:44

Yeah. Tired on the spot.

Aaron

00:29:44 – 00:29:45

Yeah. Exactly.

Ian

00:29:45 – 00:29:47

Yeah. So Wow. That's great. Yeah. Oh,

Aaron

00:29:47 – 00:29:49

no. I don't give him a lot of notes. He, like, knows

Aaron

00:29:50 – 00:29:50

Right.

Aaron

00:29:50 – 00:29:51

He knows the content.

Ian

00:29:51 – 00:29:54

He gets what you'd wanna see there and whatever. Yeah.

Aaron

00:29:54 – 00:30:01

It's it's doubly helpful because he's like a he's like an odd he's the avatar of the audience because he's not a database expert.

Ian

00:30:02 – 00:30:02

Right.

Aaron

00:30:02 – 00:30:08

And so I can go to him and be like, hey. Is this, like, general topic interesting to you? And he's like, yeah. I would I would wanna know how that works. You're like, no.

Aaron

00:30:08 – 00:30:10

That's too in the weeds. I don't care about that.

Aaron

00:30:10 – 00:30:11

It's

Aaron

00:30:11 – 00:30:17

like, okay, cool. So he's a, you know, a smart person, but kind of a database normie. And it's like, that's who I need to target.

Ian

00:30:17 – 00:30:19

Right. Those are the people we're after.

Aaron

00:30:19 – 00:30:24

Yeah. Exactly. So That's crazy. It's working, man. Just gotta keep it going.

Ian

00:30:24 – 00:30:34

Well yeah. Well, that's the other thing. I mean, how has it been since you've been out? And I don't think I've have the has there been a video since you've been away? Okay.

Ian

00:30:34 – 00:30:34

They

Aaron

00:30:34 – 00:30:36

haven't been They've posted 2 since I've been out.

Ian

00:30:36 – 00:30:45

Because I know you had some of the key in there. So I guess I guess we haven't seen what it's like if you're not posting really, but it's like Yeah. Once you reach a certain level, you will still gain followers even

Aaron

00:30:45 – 00:30:46

Mhmm.

Ian

00:30:46 – 00:31:00

Without, obviously, new videos help, of course. But, once you're kinda in the algo and and the plant scale ones are so, you know, they're long term valuable there. They're not just, like, views for today. They're like, hey. This is how this thing works.

Ian

00:31:00 – 00:31:05

Right? And so that's gonna be good forever. So Yep. A long time anyway. So, yeah.

Aaron

00:31:05 – 00:31:08

They've posted it looks like they've posted 3 since I've been out.

Ian

00:31:08 – 00:31:08

Oh, wow.

Aaron

00:31:09 – 00:31:28

And one of them has 97,000 views just looking, you know, the only revealing public information. You could go to the PlanetScale page and see this, but it's Yep. 97,000 views, 23,000, 37,000. So it's crazy. Those are big numbers.

Ian

00:31:28 – 00:31:30

Yeah. And those are all your those are all you?

Aaron

00:31:30 – 00:31:32

Those are all through me. Yeah.

Ian

00:31:32 – 00:31:37

Yeah. And and then they have some more. Are you are you out of canned ones yet? Or they're still No.

Aaron

00:31:37 – 00:31:40

No. No. They're still yeah. They're still probably

Ian

00:31:40 – 00:31:41

You got it. You got it.

Aaron

00:31:41 – 00:31:43

There's still probably 4 or 5 more

Ian

00:31:43 – 00:31:44

that Beautiful.

Aaron

00:31:44 – 00:32:00

They have in the can. And I think Steve the Ed Steve the editor is working on one that's, like, a fully animated explainer video, which I think will be a really interesting, experiment. But I I don't, honestly, I don't even know what it is. So I'm excited to see it along with the rest of the world.

Ian

00:32:00 – 00:32:08

I saw you. I saw the boss Holly is also, up in her video game. So just, like, get get into the YouTube streets a little bit here at some point.

Aaron

00:32:08 – 00:32:22

I'm trying to, like, I'm trying to introduce more of the characters on YouTube. So I talk about Steve the editor. I talk about boss Holly and so that we can start bringing more people on the channel and it not be yeah. Kinda, like, maintain the consistency.

Ian

00:32:23 – 00:32:27

This is really interesting, though, because, like, I feel like I don't know if you you know who Doug Demeros?

Aaron

00:32:27 – 00:32:27

Like one

Ian

00:32:27 – 00:32:29

of the biggest car YouTube channels.

Aaron

00:32:31 – 00:32:31

Ian

00:32:31 – 00:32:46

it was just, you know, it was him doing YouTube videos about cars, new cars, old cars, whatever reviews. And, then he got, you know, really big. He has, like, millions of followers, blah, blah. He started this website called Cars and Bids, which is, like

Aaron

00:32:46 – 00:32:47

Oh, yeah. I know that.

Ian

00:32:47 – 00:32:50

Car auction website. Yep. So okay. So that's his thing.

Aaron

00:32:50 – 00:32:50

Okay.

Ian

00:32:50 – 00:33:13

And then he's gotten, you know, investment for that, and I think that that is profitable already anyway. And so that's all great, like the platform and blah blah, the the audience and everything. But then what he did recently is he likes to he got this investment of, like, a lot of money, like a 100 and something $1,000,000 or whatever. And so he added more people to the To the content side? To the content side.

Ian

00:33:13 – 00:33:21

Interesting. Oh, man. It's really I feel like it's very much hurt the channel. Like, I don't know if it's I don't know if it's actually hurt the channel. Like, maybe it's fine.

Ian

00:33:21 – 00:33:29

Right? The numbers might all be great. But for me as a viewer, like, I watch way less like the mirror. Because there's, like, all these mixed in ones now where, like, it's somebody else. I'm like, I love Doug.

Ian

00:33:29 – 00:33:31

I don't want this other random person,

Aaron

00:33:31 – 00:33:32

and they might be great.

Ian

00:33:32 – 00:33:34

I don't want that. I don't want that random person. That is

Aaron

00:33:34 – 00:33:35

a risk. You go

Aaron

00:33:35 – 00:33:35

grow and

Ian

00:33:35 – 00:33:43

balance. Yeah. It's a balance. I mean, I just 3rd. Characters is one thing, but then when they, like, take over, I feel like that's a different thing.

Ian

00:33:43 – 00:33:57

And it's like Yeah. Obviously, it's a corporate channel, so it's even totally different there for, like, a planet scale. But still, it is very interesting, the, like, personal relationship you get with the YouTuber and how that impacts what you can do and how it affects things.

Aaron

00:33:57 – 00:34:18

Yeah. Somebody was talking recently about some of these creators that have, like, leveled up and gone pro and how the content has suffered because of it. And I'm curious. Like, I think Ali Abdaal was one that was mentioned. Like, it just became so, like, polished and highbrow that people were just like, this isn't anymore.

Aaron

00:34:18 – 00:34:34

Right. And it isn't it it seems like there's, like, some sort of life cycle or arc to this kind of stuff. And if you can retain if you can retain what originally was compelling but scale it up, that's the ticket. But I see it seems like that might be hard to do.

Ian

00:34:34 – 00:34:46

I do think it is tricky. I don't know. It's it's hard to say. I mean, there are obviously other channels where it works too, where it is like a team or whatever Mhmm. People, but it is an interesting challenge.

Ian

00:34:46 – 00:35:06

Even for Mhmm. I think the business aspect of it is very interesting too of, like, investing in somebody. And from a business perspective, it's like if I make this person the face of my business, like, what that implies and, the the economics of that are very interesting. And so, like, there's a lot there, which are obviously I'm not gonna put you on the spot for,

Aaron

00:35:06 – 00:35:07

but Please don't put me on

Ian

00:35:07 – 00:35:24

the spot. But as a business owner, when I think about doing it, it's like, wow. If I hire somebody to do this, it's like yeah. Then and it's a huge success. Like, that's, like, a good problem, but it's it's a potentially tricky problem in many other ways and, you know, and that's whatever keeping them happy on one hand.

Ian

00:35:24 – 00:35:38

And when they go on, at some point, just do it something else. Like, now you've lost, like, the face of your YouTube channel, which is a big thing. So, but, I mean, it's all good. You'd much rather have that problem than not have that problem. Of course, it's like, oh, I've built this huge YouTube channel and whatever.

Ian

00:35:38 – 00:35:55

If, like, I have to find a new face, then I could do that. Like, that's a good problem. But, but still, it is is very interesting in this world of social media to Mhmm. Have a corporate face be a person, in that way, It's kind of a different thing than you really had in the past.

Aaron

00:35:55 – 00:35:57

Many interesting questions, Ian.

Ian

00:35:57 – 00:35:59

That's right. What else would

Aaron

00:35:59 – 00:36:00

you like to talk about?

Ian

00:36:00 – 00:36:09

So let's move on. Should we go should we go on to my sage advice? We'll do some sage advice

Aaron

00:36:09 – 00:36:10

section Yeah.

Aaron

00:36:10 – 00:36:11

You've been mixing it up, man.

Ian

00:36:11 – 00:36:14

D h h corner. Can we do d h h corner?

Aaron

00:36:14 – 00:36:21

You've been stoking you've been stoking the fires with some, with some reductive takes,

Ian

00:36:21 – 00:36:22

I think. Reductive.

Aaron

00:36:22 – 00:36:26

Reductive. You're reducing it. So tell us tell us your hot take.

Ian

00:36:27 – 00:36:42

Alright. So DHH was on the interview, which I actually think was really good on this interview. And, I didn't watch the entire thing yet, but, I agree with actually quite a bit of what he says. But, yeah. But, you know, he's talking about the new ones.com thing, which we've covered on here before.

Ian

00:36:42 – 00:36:49

In some ways, I don't even have that much to add. I feel like what we covered before is still my complete validate. But,

Aaron

00:36:50 – 00:36:55

and this was DHH on Jason Calacanis' this week in the startups. And we'll put a a link in the show notes.

Ian

00:36:55 – 00:37:11

Yeah. We'll get that linked up. But, but, yeah, he basically just revealed that the first product is a Slack competitor. Okay. Then there was not, like, a lot of other details around it, But, you know, he implied that it's gonna be, like, I guess, just an actual one time fee.

Ian

00:37:11 – 00:37:13

I mean, definitely, some of this thing asterisk here, maybe

Aaron

00:37:13 – 00:37:17

some domain, it seems like it's a they're caught leaning

Ian

00:37:17 – 00:37:39

in on the blank. Yeah. So and his example was, like, shop you know, he knows Toby of Shopify, and Shopify spends 1,000,000 of dollars a year on Slack and that he they'll be able to replace that with the Slack competitor for a $1,000 one time. And so I just think the whole thing is ridiculous. Like, that's just what it comes down to.

Ian

00:37:39 – 00:37:45

Like, it's just ridiculous. That's not an that's not an argument. Lot. Okay. Here's the thing.

Ian

00:37:45 – 00:37:46

So I have sold on premise software

Aaron

00:37:47 – 00:37:47

for

Ian

00:37:47 – 00:37:52

20 years. Yep. I know a lot about on premise software. Mhmm. Alright.

Ian

00:37:52 – 00:38:10

We sell a cloud version, and I I think I tweeted this out, but, like, we have had 100 and 100 of customers move from the on premise version to the cloud. In HelpSlots case, you can go both directions. You can also go cloud to on premise. Mhmm. I literally I can't even I think I we've I can only actually remember one customer actually doing it.

Ian

00:38:11 – 00:38:31

I think there's probably been a few others, so I said, like, less than 5. K. But this is just not a direction businesses wanna go, for many reasons, and those reasons are all tied into the why Shopify can't replace their Slack installation for $1,000 because you need support. You need updates on I mean, I guess they're gonna give updates forever. I'm assuming.

Ian

00:38:31 – 00:38:34

They're saying they're imagine they're doing support.

Aaron

00:38:34 – 00:38:35

No.

Ian

00:38:36 – 00:39:04

So this is gonna be a unsupported Slack product that my whole Shopify is gonna use this thing. Right? And the business critical application that's way beyond just like the geeks. Like, it's gonna be in marketing, and all these different departments are going to be in their slack and like, you're just going to have a huge group of people and servers and costs involved in running this $1,000 Slack installation. Right?

Ian

00:39:04 – 00:39:23

You're gonna have at least 1, probably multiple dedicated expensive engineers to it. Then you're gonna have 3 or 4 other ones that are, like, round the clock, you know, uptime because Shopify is not closed, you know, at 5 PM. I'm sure there's people working 24 hours a day there, and the Slack needs to be up 24 hours a day. So you're gonna have them. You're gonna have lots of servers.

Ian

00:39:23 – 00:39:35

Like, you're not gonna just run this on some digital ocean. This is an Aaron Francis dotcom where you a static site or or Ian landsman.com where you can throw it up on a digital ocean. Like, you're gonna have to have

Aaron

00:39:35 – 00:39:35

Or vapor

Aaron

00:39:35 – 00:39:36

or layer of elevator.

Ian

00:39:36 – 00:39:57

I mean, they could use vapor, but it's gonna be a big vapor install and they're gonna pay AWS a lot of money. I I think great use for vapor. You know, if, I don't know, vapor probably can't run the rails app or whatever. The idea being you're gonna have tons of costs and tons of responsibility, and you gotta secure it, and you gotta keep it from getting hacked and all this stuff that nobody wants to do anymore. They don't wanna do it.

Ian

00:39:57 – 00:40:13

And the people who want to do it are very particular use case people. It's like I'm a bank and I have I already have all this infrastructure. I already have all these people, and I have a certain set of regulations and different things that I have to deal with. I have no choice. Yes.

Ian

00:40:13 – 00:40:20

I want it on premise. Fine. Fine. But that's, like, not that's, like, 5% of the market. That's not

Aaron

00:40:21 – 00:40:23

That's enough of the market. Okay. So here's

Ian

00:40:23 – 00:40:27

here's what people here's why. Those people don't want an unsupported version of Slack either. They do not want unsupported Slack. They do not.

Aaron

00:40:27 – 00:40:28

I I don't know.

Ian

00:40:28 – 00:40:35

Okay. So here's here's here's why it's reductive, I think. Alright. Give it

Aaron

00:40:35 – 00:40:41

to me. Your tweet is something like I don't I don't even need to look it up. I'll make it up and and it'll still be I'll make it up and it'll still be right.

Ian

00:40:41 – 00:40:42

Make it up.

Aaron

00:40:42 – 00:40:48

No. Nobody should run their own Slack to save a $100 a year. That's Right. Basically your tweet.

Ian

00:40:48 – 00:40:49

I can write myself. Yeah.

Aaron

00:40:49 – 00:40:49

That's your tweet.

Ian

00:40:49 – 00:40:53

That's, like, amalgamation of 2 different tweets. But, yes, that's the the core idea.

Aaron

00:40:53 – 00:40:58

That's the reduction of your reductive test. So I agree. I agree with that.

Ian

00:40:58 – 00:40:59

Everyone should

Aaron

00:40:59 – 00:41:36

run their own Slack to save a $100 a year. The people I think the people that this would target would be would be people that are paying 100 of 1,000 of dollars a year to Slack. And so I think the reason I think the reason why Slack is a good starter for them is because Slack does become prohibitively expensive for very, very large companies. Even at PlanetScale, we only have a 100 people, and I think our Slack bill is very expensive if you want, like, message retention over, you know, whatever it is, 10,000 messages or user or

Aaron

00:41:36 – 00:41:36

something, I mean I don't know.

Ian

00:41:36 – 00:41:37

I don't know. Yeah. I don't know the pricing. But so

Aaron

00:41:45 – 00:41:50

take somebody take somebody like, Shopify, thousands of of users.

Ian

00:41:50 – 00:41:51

Right.

Aaron

00:41:52 – 00:42:02

Potentially, thousands of engineers. I don't know. I would imagine they've got at least several 100 engineers. And what is Shopify really good at? We're running a freaking Rails app.

Aaron

00:42:02 – 00:42:08

And if this, like, if this Slack thing is a Rails app, which Mhmm. It is I'm

Ian

00:42:08 – 00:42:09

sure it is. Right? Yeah.

Aaron

00:42:09 – 00:42:12

They have the operational expertise to, like

Aaron

00:42:12 – 00:42:12

Mhmm.

Aaron

00:42:12 – 00:42:44

You know, spin up a new Kubernetes cluster or whatever, and, like, that's pretty much their bread and butter at this point. And so they could throw some other service on it. Maybe they do hire 1, you know, individual to babysit, you know, the once Slack or whatever, they could still come out several $1,000 ahead. And, presumably, this isn't just like a one to one clone. Maybe DHH and at Al have some sort of, like, special thing where you can customize it for your org, and it's like, that makes it really cool, and that makes a lot better.

Aaron

00:42:44 – 00:43:11

And you can have single sign on for not, you know, amputating an arm and a leg, and it's like, oh, maybe maybe this is better. But I think people saying, like, hey. You're a bootstrap company of 5 or 10 or 30 people, and you should host your own Slack instance. That seems silly to me. But it's also it feels similar, almost kinda like to Vitesse, which is the open source, you know, database that PlanetScale runs.

Aaron

00:43:11 – 00:43:21

Like, HubSpot, for example, runs Vitesse. It's open source. They have 5 engineers that are, like, dedicated to running Vitess.

Ian

00:43:22 – 00:43:22

Right.

Aaron

00:43:22 – 00:43:40

And it's like, yeah, you don't really get any support at all with that because it's, you know, it's open source, but there's a whole community built around it or whatever. And you could make the same argument that, like, hey, HubSpot. You really shouldn't be in the database hosting game. Like, messaging is even more ancillary, of course, but

Ian

00:43:40 – 00:43:40

Right.

Aaron

00:43:41 – 00:43:49

I don't know. It just feels like there is a company or a size of company or some set of factors where it's like, this makes perfect sense to me.

Ian

00:43:49 – 00:44:06

I mean, I definitely think it makes sense for the, the free Slack communities where it's, like, free or semi free Slack cities. Right? Where it's like, yeah, you can't have over 1, whatever. There's all limits. Slack has, I don't even know what they are, but like people have these big communities and they have to pay something and they can't obviously, because it's like a free community or whatever.

Ian

00:44:07 – 00:44:24

So like instead of going to a forum or something like that, like, yes, here's this slack thing that you pay them a $1,000 one time, or maybe it's less if it's that kind of use case and totally makes sense. I think that's great. Works. Totally works. See, I don't think big companies think about it at all.

Ian

00:44:24 – 00:44:53

Like what you're describing is the issue is that, like, it's not first of all, like, even a $1,000,000 is not a lot of money to a big company. And like, so and the other and they're gonna want all the other stuff when the big company says, yeah, we wanna buy this tool That we're even when we're gonna host ourselves, like, they want support. Like, they are not gonna dedicate all these people to this thing and not have support unless they have no choice. So, like, yeah, like an open source Vitonist or whatever. Right?

Ian

00:44:53 – 00:45:02

Fine. Like, this is there's not a lot of ways to shard MySQL. Do you wanna use MySQL? You know, I'm sure there's some other options out there, but that's the biggest one I think or

Aaron

00:45:02 – 00:45:02

one of

Ian

00:45:02 – 00:45:18

the biggest ones. And so you do what you have to do to run your whole business, but the messaging, like, I could just buy Slack and never think about it again. Right? And even if it costs me $1,000,000, it's like, I don't have to worry about it. And I think people.

Ian

00:45:19 – 00:45:37

I don't know. I feel like they've even got kind of are thinking about it from the dev perspective, and I don't think that's the way businesses think about it. I think when I make this decision as a middle manager in a company. Right? And forget Shopify in the sense of, like, Shopify knows DHH super well.

Ian

00:45:37 – 00:45:41

So maybe Shopify really will do this. Right? Because whatever. They're best friends and whatever. Fine.

Ian

00:45:41 – 00:45:57

Great. But if you're just a generic company and you're just like, alright. We spend $500,000 a year on Slack. I'm the guy in charge of making this decision. This is not my money, and we have 1,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000 of dollars in revenue or 100 of 1,000,000 dollars.

Aaron

00:45:57 – 00:45:59

Be 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars.

Ian

00:46:00 – 00:46:07

Right. So what what if so if I have a $500,000 Slack bill, that implies I have 100 of $1,000,000 in revenue. Right? I can't really have a

Aaron

00:46:07 – 00:46:07

Slack bill that big without a lot of revenue. Your headcount has to be pretty big.

Ian

00:46:07 – 00:46:08

So it

Aaron

00:46:08 – 00:46:08

has to be huge, which means my which means my salaries.

Aaron

00:46:08 – 00:46:09

Right.

Ian

00:46:13 – 00:46:27

Exactly. It just implies that. So so then the downside for me is I get fired when I move us to this unsupported $1,000 one time payment thing. Right? That's the downside.

Ian

00:46:28 – 00:46:45

The upside is I saved us half a $1,000,000. That's not a good trade off. There's not a lot of managers who look at that trade off and they're like, man, that's an awesome trade off. Like the upside is I get a little win for 1 year. I saved us a few bucks and then everybody forgets it forever.

Ian

00:46:45 – 00:46:50

And the downside is I get fired if this thing ever goes wrong. When it gets down in the middle

Aaron

00:46:50 – 00:46:50

of the night. Yeah.

Ian

00:46:50 – 00:47:10

Yeah. And somebody's like, why the hell were we doing this when we could just be paying Slack and they manage the uptime and we don't have to think about it? We had to hire these 3 people to manage it, and now they're after 3 years, their salary has grown to where we're paying 700 $50,000 for these 3 people to run this Slack thing that was supposed to save us money. Like, it's just I I don't know. Like, now listen.

Ian

00:47:10 – 00:47:20

Maybe the actual offering is different. Maybe they're gonna have a big support thing, and they're gonna really go after it. Right? And and try to be enterprise y, but I that's no. He doesn't ever talk like that.

Ian

00:47:20 – 00:47:22

So I don't think that's the case.

Aaron

00:47:22 – 00:47:23

I don't think there's that.

Ian

00:47:23 – 00:47:24

I just don't know.

Aaron

00:47:24 – 00:47:25

I don't know.

Ian

00:47:25 – 00:47:26

I feel bad. I don't know.

Aaron

00:47:26 – 00:47:26

A lot

Ian

00:47:26 – 00:47:38

of people are gonna buy it because everybody wants to see DHHS code. Like, nobody's seen DHH's code. I think they're gonna sell 10,000 copies day 1 on people who wanna see a production DHH's product. Boom. That's for sure.

Ian

00:47:38 – 00:47:42

And they're gonna have fanboys. They're gonna have people who run their own stuff and are super into hosting

Aaron

00:47:43 – 00:47:45

Yeah. They're gonna they're gonna sell make they're gonna make They're

Ian

00:47:45 – 00:47:51

gonna make $10,000,000 off of this. I'm not saying they're not gonna make money. I'm not saying they're not gonna sell any. They will sell some. They will make some money.

Ian

00:47:52 – 00:48:10

But that's also because they just have a huge audience and they have a very devoted fan base and all those things. But I just don't think these big companies are gonna be like, yeah, let's use this Slack replacement. Like, to me, if anything, it's gonna be more than small companies because they're like, whatever. I'm the owner and I make the decision. I'm willing

Aaron

00:48:10 – 00:48:11

to take the risk.

Ian

00:48:11 – 00:48:21

Right? Like, I don't if it goes down, it's on me. I said to use this thing, and we're gonna use it and fine. But I don't know. Slack is just so much bigger than just messaging too.

Ian

00:48:21 – 00:48:26

Like, I mean, it has hundreds of integrations, thousands of integrations. I don't know. A lot a lot of integrations

Aaron

00:48:26 – 00:48:31

I don't think the once the once version of the of it will. And I think that's part of can't.

Ian

00:48:31 – 00:48:37

Right? Not day 1. Like, maybe it has a few core ones. Right? But it can't have 300 in integrations day 1.

Ian

00:48:37 – 00:48:39

I think that's very unlikely. So

Aaron

00:48:39 – 00:49:01

No. I don't I don't think so. And I think part of, I feel like part of what you're saying is, like, it's gonna be so operationally complex to run, and I don't I don't know if that's gonna be the case. Like, is this the kind of thing that you could just, like, push to Heroku and have a, you know, a Postgres database on Heroku and it just, like, it works? If so

Ian

00:49:01 – 00:49:06

For Userscape, yes. But for Shopify? Not for Shopify.

Aaron

00:49:06 – 00:49:07

Not maybe not for Shopify.

Ian

00:49:08 – 00:49:08

Right.

Aaron

00:49:08 – 00:49:14

But, again, Shopify has already got hundreds of engineers that know how to run and scale rails apps. Right?

Ian

00:49:14 – 00:49:16

But they all have other things to be doing too. Like, they're not

Aaron

00:49:16 – 00:49:21

Do they? Who does anything? Like, what they don't always nobody's doing they gotta do these. People are

Ian

00:49:21 – 00:49:23

siloed in those big companies.

Aaron

00:49:23 – 00:49:23

No. No. No. You know

Ian

00:49:23 – 00:49:24

what I mean?

Aaron

00:49:24 – 00:49:29

When you have that many people, everybody's got slack. They're Yeah. Down downtime. I mean, they're just hanging out.

Ian

00:49:30 – 00:49:37

Somebody's responsible when it goes down. You know? If it's down at 2 AM on Christmas, who who's in charge of that? I don't know. Like Yeah.

Ian

00:49:37 – 00:49:39

Somebody's gotta be in charge of it.

Aaron

00:49:39 – 00:49:51

I feel like they're they're simplifying my guess. My guess is they're gonna simplify the piece of software to where you don't have 100 of integrations. Maybe you receive webhooks and everything else you gotta figure out. Right? You don't have screen sharing.

Aaron

00:49:51 – 00:50:07

You don't have Huddles. You don't have themes. You don't have all this stuff that Slack continues to bloat up with. Mhmm. And it is, operationally ready for Heroku or Maersk, which I think is their deployment thing they've invented.

Ian

00:50:07 – 00:50:10

And so you can whatever thing Yeah. Whatever in there.

Aaron

00:50:10 – 00:50:17

Yeah. Presumably, you know, point it at a digital ocean box, and it'll self set up. That would be my guess. And I think

Ian

00:50:17 – 00:50:18

Not for Shopify.

Aaron

00:50:19 – 00:50:22

Well, no. You're you're saying Shopify is a big deal. Availability.

Aaron

00:50:22 – 00:50:22

You've got

Ian

00:50:22 – 00:50:23

some fine.

Aaron

00:50:23 – 00:50:23

Right? You need

Ian

00:50:23 – 00:50:25

to get all kinds of stuff to it.

Aaron

00:50:25 – 00:50:28

Let's talk small SMBs then. So you're talking 50 people.

Ian

00:50:28 – 00:50:30

Fine. Yeah. 50 people. Fine.

Aaron

00:50:30 – 00:50:55

And you throw it up on Heroku, and suddenly you own all of your data, which who cares about that? I don't care about that. You own all of your data, and you're not paying Slack these exorbitant fees. And I think the problem with doing Slack first is everybody's gonna have Slack open anyway. So now my company my company Slack is in, like, this once.com thing, and all my other Slacks are over in this other thing.

Aaron

00:50:55 – 00:50:58

Like, I feel like that's kinda that's gonna kinda suck a little bit.

Ian

00:50:58 – 00:51:00

You mean if, what do you mean?

Aaron

00:51:01 – 00:51:03

I mean, as a user, I'm logged into, like,

Ian

00:51:03 – 00:51:05

my friend's Slack, my open source

Aaron

00:51:05 – 00:51:07

Slack, and then I just switch over. Social

Ian

00:51:08 – 00:51:10

networky aspect to it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Aaron

00:51:10 – 00:51:10

Yeah.

Ian

00:51:10 – 00:51:19

Yeah. That's a big a big thing for sure. I mean, I don't know. The thing is a small, meaning business, like alright. 50 users at $12 a user a month on the top of that.

Aaron

00:51:19 – 00:51:21

What it is? Do we have do we have real numbers on that?

Ian

00:51:21 – 00:51:36

Yeah. I just looked at this the other day. I mean, there is, like, then an enterprise one that adds, like, really enterprise y, enterprise y stuff, but that presumably, if you're 20, 30, 50 users, you don't need that upper tier. So that one's a call me price, but the the highest

Aaron

00:51:37 – 00:51:39

12 to 15 months. For business.

Ian

00:51:41 – 00:51:43

So how do you get that $600 a month? I mean When

Aaron

00:51:43 – 00:51:47

paying once a year, so that's how they get you. So it's $15 a month, month to month.

Ian

00:51:47 – 00:52:02

Not expensive. I mean, I pay 8 a Hrefs a $100 a month, so I can go in there once a month if that and poke on our s e like, I have I have literally 20 apps. I pay a $100 a month, and half of them, I don't even use. So I don't know. And we're not that big.

Ian

00:52:02 – 00:52:08

So I just think that's not a lot of money. I I don't know. Everybody was like, it's so much money. It's not it's not much money.

Aaron

00:52:08 – 00:52:17

$15 a month times 12 months in a year. I knew that one. That one I had memories. Times 50 employees. $9,000 Yeah.

Ian

00:52:17 – 00:52:23

A year. Not even $10. I'm paying $10 per ton. That much money. 3 days to fix our database server.

Ian

00:52:23 – 00:52:27

Like, this is, like, for 50 users all year long to use Slack.

Aaron

00:52:27 – 00:52:28

Not that much money.

Ian

00:52:28 – 00:52:31

Never have to worry about down. I'll never forget that.

Aaron

00:52:31 – 00:52:35

A 100 users. 18,000. Wow. That got it doubled. Yeah.

Aaron

00:52:35 – 00:52:36

That's not that much money.

Ian

00:52:36 – 00:52:58

Just not that much money. Everybody's salary's a $100,000 plus. And, but this thing that is that everybody uses all day long, it costs me $18,000 a year. If I have a 100 people, That's not even one person's health care. But so I'm just not making big biggest business decisions like this to save one person's healthcare.

Ian

00:52:58 – 00:53:07

I don't think that math makes any sense at all. You know, again, unless you, you will be people with special use cases. Fine. Like, you're running some high security thing where you have your own. Mhmm.

Ian

00:53:07 – 00:53:13

You want security beyond Slack. Like, you want everything in house because you're some military contractor. Well, fine. Great.

Aaron

00:53:13 – 00:53:17

They have gov slack at the very bottom. If you're a government college, they have that. Yeah.

Ian

00:53:17 – 00:53:30

Exactly. So but fine. Whatever. You're you have a culture in house of of security and wanting things done your way. There are definitely those people out there, but you know, this is a very edge case type thing.

Ian

00:53:30 – 00:53:33

On premise is now an edge case situation.

Aaron

00:53:33 – 00:53:43

And So what is the main what is your main what what's your main argument? Other people shouldn't pursue this as a business strategy, or this isn't going to work?

Ian

00:53:43 – 00:53:52

I mean, I don't think it's you know, again, this is so, like, because everybody's gonna be like, oh, you're an idiot. Look. DHA just said they sold 10,000 copies. And I told you

Aaron

00:53:52 – 00:53:57

That was what I was I had that in my show notes for the next show. I'm ready to say that to you. Yeah.

Ian

00:53:57 – 00:54:04

They're gonna sell 10,000 copies or a 100 whatever. They're gonna sell plenty. I'm not even saying they won't sell it because they are them. Right?

Aaron

00:54:04 – 00:54:05

But Yes.

Ian

00:54:05 – 00:54:19

I just don't think you're going what he is portraying it as, what the ones.com website says and what he is portraying it as, I don't think is what's going to happen. And maybe they'll be able to roll out a few companies and, hey. Look. Shopify uses it fine. Whatever.

Aaron

00:54:20 – 00:54:24

I do not think You don't think the industry is swinging. You are thinking this has no effect at all.

Ian

00:54:24 – 00:54:33

Swing. I think that Slack is not even gonna notice this thing. I mean, some sales reps inside Slack is gonna be annoyed that, like, they lost a Shopify account. Fine. Whatever.

Ian

00:54:33 – 00:54:54

But I don't think that it's gonna be like, you're gonna see Slack. I I don't know. Even, I mean, Slack, even if they did, like, slack could crush them in a second and just be like, we're gonna have slack on premise and people will pay half a $1,000,000 a year for that, for those very edge case uses where people want some, for whatever reason, need it to be actually internal. But yeah. I don't know.

Ian

00:54:54 – 00:55:00

I mean, it'll be fine. Whatever. It's like, they're never gonna I feel like it's definitely not gonna be base camp. Right? Let's put it that way.

Ian

00:55:00 – 00:55:04

It's not gonna be base camp. It's probably not even gonna be hay. It's a cool thing you're

Aaron

00:55:04 – 00:55:06

doing to do something. Money.

Ian

00:55:06 – 00:55:12

That's hey. I don't know. That came up in the Twitter thread too. I wonder I'd be very curious about how much hey actually makes

Aaron

00:55:12 – 00:55:13

me makes a lot of money.

Ian

00:55:13 – 00:55:18

I think it does. What we would consider a lot of money, but I don't think it's, like, a tiny percentage of base camp.

Aaron

00:55:19 – 00:55:22

I think everything is a tiny percentage of of base camp.

Ian

00:55:22 – 00:55:24

Yeah. So by mistake, I'll get up in the morning.

Aaron

00:55:24 – 00:55:27

What does it make? A $100,000,000 a year? Yeah. More.

Ian

00:55:27 – 00:55:31

I think more. 100 of 1,000,000 a year. So

Aaron

00:55:32 – 00:55:33

It's project management.

Ian

00:55:33 – 00:55:42

I know. So, I mean, they're just doing a cool thing they wanna do. It's kinda like Laravel released Pulse. Right? Like, I mean, I think I would be cool for them to do is just, like, release it free.

Ian

00:55:42 – 00:55:54

I mean, they're kind of doing that. They've been copping a lot of the Laravel game. I that this isn't the thing that came up on Twitter, but they've really been copped a lot. Like, the new rails is having a bunch of stuff that's very Laravel ish. Yep.

Ian

00:55:54 – 00:56:10

This whole one thing, it's like they can't bring themselves to actually do it for free like Taylor does, but, like, this is essentially that. Like, it's like, hey. We're not gonna support it, and we can't bring ourselves to make it free, but we know you all pay us anyway. So whatever. We'll make it a $100 or whatever, and there you go.

Aaron

00:56:10 – 00:56:20

Yeah. That's that's funny. They're basically doing open source, but not calling it open source. Right? I mean, what does the $1,000 mean to them?

Ian

00:56:20 – 00:56:21

Right. Nothing. Yeah.

Aaron

00:56:21 – 00:56:26

But it's no support. It's source available. It's yeah. Right. That's interesting.

Ian

00:56:27 – 00:56:43

I think that I think the, the it's flipped a little bit here in the open source framework world. I feel like the Laravel is the big dog, and Rails is having to catch up a little bit, and this is Yes. Kind of that, part of that part of that, I guess. It's like, here's a here's a way we can ship our production app. Yeah.

Ian

00:56:45 – 00:56:50

You know, all all that kind of stuff. So look at the help desk eventually. We'll see that once all possible.

Aaron

00:56:50 – 00:57:00

If you're listening, and if if you're not listening, Ian, you should tell Taylor this when you guys hang out next. You, Taylor, should do this. You should make production apps.

Ian

00:57:00 – 00:57:01

Right. And

Aaron

00:57:01 – 00:57:04

then not not just not just sell the code. Just be like, yeah.

Ian

00:57:04 – 00:57:06

Yeah. Just the code. Yeah. I mean, Taylor could definitely do the same thing. Right?

Ian

00:57:06 – 00:57:11

You'd love to see a Taylor Otwell production app. Like, they would love to

Aaron

00:57:11 – 00:57:11

Yes.

Ian

00:57:11 – 00:57:17

Go through that code with a fine tooth comb and, see how he does things and everything. And so chirp

Aaron

00:57:17 – 00:57:19

supposed to be that? Wasn't that a thing at some point?

Ian

00:57:19 – 00:57:21

He he built it. It was, like, built a

Aaron

00:57:21 – 00:57:21

It was done.

Ian

00:57:21 – 00:57:28

Like, fully built. Yeah. But he didn't release it. But it was a I don't know. I don't think it was a what's it gonna be?

Ian

00:57:28 – 00:57:29

Self hosted?

Aaron

00:57:29 – 00:57:30

It was, like, a SaaS app.

Ian

00:57:30 – 00:57:31

Maybe a lot.

Aaron

00:57:31 – 00:57:38

Gonna, like he was not gonna host and host it as a SaaS. He was basically just gonna, like, use it as a, yeah, as a reference material.

Ian

00:57:39 – 00:57:44

Right. I think you're right. Yeah. They could I mean, there is, like, a costume.

Aaron

00:57:45 – 00:57:48

Can you imagine how much people would freak out if Taylor's sold code?

Aaron

00:57:49 – 00:57:49

People would be

Aaron

00:57:49 – 00:58:00

like, what are you doing? You're supposed to be open source ethos. Like, it's against the spirit. Stuff. Oh, this is really cool.

Aaron

00:58:00 – 00:58:01

I'm gonna buy this today.

Ian

00:58:01 – 00:58:05

I wanna see what he's doing. Yeah. I wanna see all the little helpers and little

Aaron

00:58:05 – 00:58:05

Yeah.

Ian

00:58:05 – 00:58:18

Makes it easy. He's built in. Although, I don't think I think Taylor's thing the thing with Taylor is I I think a lot of his stuff, it it really is just, like, very pure Laravel. Like, I mean, I'm sure he has his little things or whatever, but a lot of those little things just make their way into Laravel. So, like Yeah.

Ian

00:58:18 – 00:58:21

It's like, yeah. I I had to do this thing, so I put it into Laravel.

Aaron

00:58:23 – 00:58:23

But what

Ian

00:58:23 – 00:58:24

if you made, like, a Slack not as much

Aaron

00:58:24 – 00:58:25

money and sold it.

Ian

00:58:26 – 00:58:27

Like This is an idea.

Aaron

00:58:27 – 00:58:28

What if you made a Slack

Ian

00:58:28 – 00:58:29

clone do that.

Aaron

00:58:29 – 00:58:35

Back end. It had a native PHP, you know, desktop front end. And he was like, hey, man. I just you know, I made this.

Ian

00:58:36 – 00:58:42

A $1,000. I like it. It'd be awesome. Oh, man. I don't know.

Ian

00:58:42 – 00:58:46

I don't know, man. Are you gonna use this thing on any projects? How about that?

Aaron

00:58:46 – 00:58:47

Am I gonna use what?

Ian

00:58:47 – 00:58:50

1 the ones.com/ I don't know anything about Rails.

Aaron

00:58:50 – 00:58:52

I'm not gonna sign up to host that.

Ian

00:58:52 – 00:58:55

Okay. Yeah. Not that excited about it. Not gonna do it.

Aaron

00:58:55 – 00:59:16

That excited not that excited about it. I am excited I am excited to see how it does. I'm excited I'm excited to see, you know, rejuvenation in the rails ecosystem. I'm excited to see a return to simplicity. I feel like that is for all of his faults and foibles, DHH is very much like, y'all are making this too complicated.

Aaron

00:59:16 – 00:59:30

And I Yeah. I vibe with that for sure. Very much on board with that with that take from him. And I will say the the the rehabilitation of DHH has been strong. I mean, I don't know if you listened to that whole podcast with him and to his and Calcutta.

Ian

00:59:30 – 00:59:31

But yeah.

Aaron

00:59:31 – 00:59:31

But he

Aaron

00:59:31 – 00:59:45

did say, like, I used to be IDHH used to be a hardcore cynic and fighter, and I would just argue with everyone about everything. And I've just realized that's not what I wanna do with my life. And I'm like, hey. Cool. Good good for you,

Ian

00:59:45 – 00:59:46

man.

Aaron

00:59:47 – 00:59:50

So I I'm I'm here for the He's

Ian

00:59:50 – 00:59:51

on the comeback trail.

Aaron

00:59:51 – 00:59:58

Yeah. I'm here for the rehabilitation of DHH. I think that's great. Yeah. But not not gonna use it.

Ian

00:59:58 – 01:00:01

Weird character. Yeah. Yeah. I can't. I can't.

Ian

01:00:01 – 01:00:08

Yeah. I can't. Just the rails part of it, obviously. Like, every time I ever tried to do anything with rails, I'm like, this whole, like, getting it going stories. Getting it going.

Ian

01:00:08 – 01:00:11

Maybe it's tough. Now, but I don't know. I never liked the getting it going story. It's like

Aaron

01:00:12 – 01:00:14

No. They don't have a clean onboarding story.

Ian

01:00:14 – 01:00:18

Yeah. Yeah. When are they gonna get their herd? You know, herd herd for rails is coming at some

Aaron

01:00:18 – 01:00:34

point here. It's got to. Man, I have said so many times, if I knew the first thing about rails or wanted to, you know, find a niche in the in the industry, I would just copy everything that Laravel has done for rails. I really would.

Ian

01:00:34 – 01:00:36

I feel like that's, like, that's a solid game plan.

Aaron

01:00:37 – 01:00:44

Like, 4 or 5 friends together and start a little agency and be like, alright. What do we do? Pulse? They came out with something called Pulse. What is it?

Aaron

01:00:45 – 01:00:50

We're doing it. Like, you don't even have you don't even have to have an original thought.

Ian

01:00:50 – 01:00:58

No. It's so fun. Like, that's the way business has work forever, really. Right? Like, people would go overseas and, like, oh, we discovered this thing in Europe, and we brought it back here.

Ian

01:00:58 – 01:01:01

Now we do it here. Like, and nobody knows that

Aaron

01:01:01 – 01:01:05

it's like but smaller, and we call it espresso. It's like, oh, that's a great idea.

Ian

01:01:05 – 01:01:22

Exactly. Like, we'll just bring it here and make it a thing and brand it with a cool brand name. And now, like, people are all about it and mix it with whatever. And it's like, yeah, like, just take, this is a whole other conversation, but, like, repurposing ideas and remixing ideas. Like, this is the way you do things.

Ian

01:01:22 – 01:01:25

Like, if you're out there trying to start a business, that's how you start a business. Like,

Aaron

01:01:25 – 01:01:26

but Yes.

Ian

01:01:26 – 01:01:37

Tech ecosystem is so, like, you must invent AI. Agreed. Nothing short of that. But it's like, that's the dumbest thing ever. Like, just do something that already exists, but put your, you know, your sensibilities into it.

Ian

01:01:37 – 01:01:41

Not like not, like, straight copy it, but, you know, you just put your sensibilities.

Aaron

01:01:41 – 01:01:46

That restaurant down the street, it makes a lot of money. Maybe I'll make one I'll make a restaurant

Ian

01:01:46 – 01:01:46

top and over.

Aaron

01:01:46 – 01:01:49

It's like, wow. Who's not that hard?

Ian

01:01:49 – 01:01:49

Right. And

Aaron

01:01:49 – 01:01:50

it's, like, look at

Ian

01:01:50 – 01:01:51

5 recipes. But

Aaron

01:01:52 – 01:02:12

What do we have? We've got Horizon, Pulse, Nova, Envoyeur even. Like, if you wanna do full on SaaS, you could do something like Envoyeur. There's just so many things, Herd, native, PHP. There's so many things that we have that Rails does simply yeah.

Ian

01:02:12 – 01:02:16

Shift, I think. I mean, shift for Rails, like, that would be something that I think.

Aaron

01:02:16 – 01:02:17

I mean,

Ian

01:02:17 – 01:02:18

maybe some of this stuff exists. But

Aaron

01:02:19 – 01:02:31

Yeah. Like, passport, socialite, all of that stuff. You know, there's there's a question of, like, how do you get rich doing it? And I think, you know, reinventing socialite feels like a lot of work for just, like, an open source

Ian

01:02:32 – 01:02:32

product. Yeah.

Aaron

01:02:32 – 01:02:32

But if

Aaron

01:02:32 – 01:02:45

you were to reinvent pulse in Rails, you can see a hybrid model there for sure. Yeah. For sure. You do the open source thing, and you also have a hosted version where people can add cards and stuff like that. Like

Ian

01:02:45 – 01:02:56

Yeah. Or there's, like, ultra premium cards or something. Like, more complicated ones are are paid add ons or something like that. Like yeah. I don't know.

Ian

01:02:56 – 01:03:09

I I you don't see that as much as I think you should, for sure. I don't know why that is. Even like a Laracast. Like, I mean, there's lots of Ruby on Rails video courses and things, but I don't think there's, like, a Laracast that's, like

Aaron

01:03:10 – 01:03:11

There's a

Ian

01:03:11 – 01:03:12

the facto standard.

Aaron

01:03:13 – 01:03:17

There's Chris Oliver's thing. Yeah. Rails cast. Rails cast.

Ian

01:03:17 – 01:03:18

So maybe it is.

Aaron

01:03:18 – 01:03:19

Is that him or no?

Ian

01:03:19 – 01:03:23

I haven't looked at rails in so long. I I honestly don't know what's going on there in the last, like

Aaron

01:03:24 – 01:03:24

Go rails.

Aaron

01:03:24 – 01:03:24

Ian

01:03:24 – 01:03:26

years. Go rails. Okay.

Aaron

01:03:27 – 01:03:27

Yeah. So that's

Ian

01:03:27 – 01:03:44

the least out there. But, yeah. I I don't know. It does seem like you're you're always ahead when you start with an idea you know works and then build off that versus, like, trying to invent an idea that you don't know if it'll work. And then if you wanna do that, then that's when you definitely gotta have, like, VC money and all that.

Ian

01:03:44 – 01:03:44

That's

Aaron

01:03:44 – 01:03:45

why For sure.

Ian

01:03:45 – 01:03:48

You need to risk other people's money with those ideas you don't know are gonna work and

Aaron

01:03:48 – 01:03:48

Yeah.

Ian

01:03:49 – 01:03:50

You give up the equity. But

Aaron

01:03:51 – 01:03:51

but Yeah.

Aaron

01:03:51 – 01:03:56

So if you're listening and you know rails, everything we talk about, just steal it and build it.

Ian

01:03:56 – 01:03:59

Steal it. Steal it from Laravel. All this cool stuff. I've got this list. This is

Aaron

01:03:59 – 01:04:09

your stuff. Dotcom and just, like that. Just start copy and pasting. Just feed it into chat GPT and say, turn this from Ruby to or from PHP to Ruby.

Ian

01:04:09 – 01:04:27

The the next thing I want to take over in PHP slash Laravel land is it's super annoying to me that, like, all this AI stuff. I don't know if you've how much you've dug into account the AI ecosystem, but and a lot of other areas too. Like, it's all Python. Yeah. Oh, man.

Ian

01:04:27 – 01:04:32

I want PHP. I want PHP to be the default. Like, why gotta be Python? I don't wanna

Aaron

01:04:32 – 01:04:34

Nobody wants Python. Nobody likes Python.

Ian

01:04:35 – 01:04:45

Python actually is yeah. They've I have a whole Python story. But anyway, yes. I don't I'd I want PHP to be or like and tons of these sites also, like, they don't like to have all these SDKs. They don't have PHP.

Ian

01:04:45 – 01:04:47

I'm like, I don't have PHP.

Aaron

01:04:47 – 01:04:47

I know.

Ian

01:04:47 – 01:04:54

Why? You have all these esoteric languages. I didn't talk about this before, but anyway. Alright. What else is up there?

Ian

01:04:54 – 01:05:00

I don't think there's everybody should just go back and watch the original take if you want more on that because I feel like it's all the same. Like, the one time changes

Aaron

01:05:01 – 01:05:02

I think I think it's gonna work.

Ian

01:05:02 – 01:05:03

Everything and

Aaron

01:05:03 – 01:05:04

fabulously well for them.

Ian

01:05:04 – 01:05:06

And Yeah. I think they'll sell a lot

Aaron

01:05:06 – 01:05:07

because they're gonna sell a lot. And

Ian

01:05:08 – 01:05:27

That's what I saw on Twitter. He could do if you if there was a 37 signals toaster, people would buy that toaster. It's sell out of the toaster. People would be very excited about the toaster because it's CHH, and he put his thumb on a toaster, and, you know, it would have some cool button that did something or is a weird shape or whatever. You know, and it'd be awesome and people would buy it on.

Ian

01:05:27 – 01:05:31

But Yeah. Like, he could sell anything because he had a big audience. That's the that's one of the upsides when

Aaron

01:05:31 – 01:05:33

you get the audience. Meta takeaway there. You guys

Ian

01:05:33 – 01:05:43

I think big audience. You can sell anything. Yes. You could sell. You only need a few percent of a large audience to make it the dollars add up to a large number.

Ian

01:05:43 – 01:05:49

Yep. So, yeah, I don't know. We've had we're what is that? 105. I know.

Ian

01:05:49 – 01:05:53

We have one other card that we haven't got to. You wanna should we touch on this one quick?

Aaron

01:05:53 – 01:05:54

Oh, no. That's a long one.

Ian

01:05:54 – 01:05:55

That's a long one.

Aaron

01:05:55 – 01:05:59

I feel I feel like that's a yeah. That's a ranty one. We can't go there yet.

Ian

01:05:59 – 01:06:09

Alright. We'll keep this a nice short while we're giving the people a long ones. Next week's probably gonna be a long one. So, we will wrap it. Thanks everybody for joining us.

Ian

01:06:10 – 01:06:16

Definitely make sure you check out Justin's, video. Yeah. He's super good. We'll have it linked. So check that out.

Ian

01:06:16 – 01:06:27

Follow us on the Twitter, Mostly Tech Pod, Mostly Technical dotcom, and, email us at Mostly Technical Podcast at Gmail. Talk to you next week.

Aaron

01:06:27 – 01:06:28

See you.

Ian

01:06:28 – 01:06:29

See you.

Ecosystem of Cards

Transcript

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