Aaron Francis

Our first Nova user has it installed and is trying it out. Aaron is prepping for Laracon and running out of steam.

Refine: https://hammerstone.dev/refine/laravel/docs/main
Refine Nova: https://github.com/hammerstonedev/refine-nova
Torchlight: https://torchlight.dev
Aaron: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis
Colleen: https://twitter.com/leenyburger
Sean: https://twitter.com/sfioritto

Learn more →

Transcript

Aaron

00:00:00 – 00:00:22

Okay. We're back. I think I have a lot to catch y'all up on, between Laracon and Nova and some other stuff. But, Sean, you hit me with a thread this morning on marketing stuff. So it seems like you've been working on slash thinking about that.

Aaron

00:00:22 – 00:00:24

So you wanna catch us up on that?

Sean

00:00:24 – 00:00:37

Yeah. Okay. So real quick, we we I'm working on new homepage, landing pages, getting us set up to do marketing stuff. That does not exist yet. Laracon is coming up on 9th.

Sean

00:00:37 – 00:00:54

We it will exist by then. Something that you know, enough of something to to be useful for that event will will exist. So I'm just trying to go through okay. What do I what what do I need for this? And so I just went through with BUCKBY, and we just came up with, like, a punch list of, like, the small things.

Sean

00:00:54 – 00:01:23

And Kevin Kevin Griffin helped me out too because he does he has conferences and talks a lot and kinda knew some stuff that we should do. So I just had that little mini punch list of tiny things we could do, before then and then also have make sure we'll have some kind of landing page. It will not be, you know, it will be like the first thing, the first landing page, basically. So set expectations accordingly. Our illustrator got COVID in the middle of working on stuff, so we won't have that by Laracon most likely.

Sean

00:01:23 – 00:01:37

And then so we'll have a landing page with like much clearer call to action and, like, more refined focused. That's that's what will happen. Like, it'll do the job that we need it to do for Laracon, basically.

Aaron

00:01:37 – 00:02:04

If you wanna use the existing, hosting setup, deployment pipeline, and everything to do that, we can I can we can do that? I mean, what we have now is just HTML CSS, so it's not a super, like, sophisticated setup. It's just a blade template, which is Laravel's templating engine. So if that takes something off your plate, if you can just get me the, like, HTML, I can just plop it in and deploy it.

Sean

00:02:05 – 00:02:10

Yeah. Perfect. So that'll be my plan b, you know, if I don't if I don't get a Okay. A website up.

Aaron

00:02:11 – 00:02:11

Cool.

Sean

00:02:11 – 00:02:19

But I think that's probably 5050. I might end up doing that. And then in a week or 2 after that, we roll over to the new site, but

Aaron

00:02:19 – 00:02:19

figure

Sean

00:02:19 – 00:02:20

out that.

Aaron

00:02:20 – 00:02:27

Cool. And what is your what is your illustrator illustrating? Icons for all of our packages, our logo, or what?

Sean

00:02:27 – 00:02:29

Yeah. So he's going to do Hammerstone refine.

Sean

00:02:30 – 00:02:30

And I

Sean

00:02:30 – 00:02:48

forget what else we talked about. But eventually, like, right now it will just be it will just be logos. And then eventually there could be other things to add more personality to the to the landing page. But that's like TBD down the road, you know. Cool.

Sean

00:02:48 – 00:03:10

Like, having custom illustrations, I found just like a very cost effective way to make something look really, really professional and designed. And I usually can, when I work with Dennis, I can usually borrow from his colors. I gave him some like mood boards basically. But, you know, he's professional. So then he does his thing, and then I just borrow his color palette and just use that.

Sean

00:03:10 – 00:03:24

Can I say how totally awesome it is to have to be on a team? Having already tried to do this by myself, it is, like, so amazing to hear you talking about landing pages and illustrators and mood boards, because then I don't have to do it.

Aaron

00:03:24 – 00:03:26

And you didn't have to do it.

Sean

00:03:26 – 00:03:31

It's like just filling me with so much joy. Like it's awesome. So thank you.

Sean

00:03:32 – 00:03:42

Yeah, no problem. I'm excited to work on it. It'll be, you know, iterative and never finished and etcetera. But yeah, I mean, I like working on it. It's important stuff.

Aaron

00:03:42 – 00:04:14

I'm excited for that because we have a few packages with very, like, kind of descriptive, illustrative names, like Sidecar, AirDrop. Yep. And having an illustrator take all of those ideas and give them kind of like a unified theme with their, you know, disparate images is gonna be really cool to see. It's gonna make it feel much more like a portfolio of products rather than 4 things that Aaron did and put on GitHub. So I'm excited for

Sean

00:04:16 – 00:04:39

that. Yeah. I guess the other thing I'm doing is so so, like, I'm the I'm the head of product at my day job. And so there, I'm going through and creating our product strategy, and I'm kinda rolling through that process. I'm I've probably done each piece of this at some point or another, you know, in my career, but never like for an organization put together like an end to end strategy.

Sean

00:04:40 – 00:05:04

So that's new for me. So but the cool thing is, like, I'm doing it there, and then that'll just roll over into into our stuff, you know, so we could start thinking more strategically about our product work and what we're doing and how to prioritize and all that stuff. So I'm I'm I'm actually having a lot of fun learning about that for the day job. So I'm I'm pretty excited to bring some of that over to here when I'm done. Great.

Sean

00:05:04 – 00:05:12

And then the only other thing is okay. View 2, view 3. Yeah. That's definitely gonna work. It's crazy, but, like, I got it I got it working.

Sean

00:05:12 – 00:05:25

So For real? Yeah. Yeah. I don't have the test working, but it was just like a couple things where I'm like, okay, can I, can I iron out these little wrinkles and what worked? And yeah, you can run, can run Vue 2 and Vue 3 with the same library.

Sean

00:05:25 – 00:05:49

We build 2 different versions, 1 for Vue 2 and 1 for Vue 3, but then, so there'll be a few things to test out. Like, it's got a when they go to install it, there's like a post install script, which will choose depending on which version of Vue they're running, which library they will run. So, you know, I'm like, this is a thing I've seen people do. I've never done it myself. I definitely wanna test it and see how it goes.

Sean

00:05:49 – 00:05:58

So, hopefully, Neil, you know, if you're listening to man, you'll be willing to be our guinea pig on that. We can, I can at least try it out on his, repo and see if it all works?

Aaron

00:06:00 – 00:06:13

Thanks, Neil. Neil tries out everything for us. Well, that's huge. That's, I mean, that's an entirely new front end that we didn't know that we were gonna be able to have right away. So that's pretty

Sean

00:06:14 – 00:06:22

exciting. Yeah. It's awesome. And the build processes, I understand way more what the hell is going on and the trade offs and everything that we're doing. So

Aaron

00:06:22 – 00:06:31

Are we fully in the, monorepo setup that Dave was working on? Like, is that where this Vue 2, Vue 3 is coming from?

Sean

00:06:32 – 00:06:47

Yeah. Like his anything that he does will be in this Vue 2, Vue 3, like, branch, which I will be merging in soon, as soon as I can. That's the reason we don't have the marketing stuff done because, like, this is a major bottleneck because it's difficult to make changes

Aaron

00:06:48 – 00:06:48

Sure.

Sean

00:06:48 – 00:07:07

To the main branch right now because this is so such a divergent branch. And I I just needed to prove it out. And I literally, like, 2 days ago, got to the point where I was like, yeah. This I feel this is gonna work. So, so I just needed to get there so that way I could merge it in and then we could then we can go.

Sean

00:07:07 – 00:07:09

Alright. So that's my update. Fantastic. You got

Sean

00:07:09 – 00:07:09

a lot

Sean

00:07:09 – 00:07:11

of stuff, so I'll stop there.

Aaron

00:07:11 – 00:07:25

I do I do have one question though. Where does, Dave stand on React stuff? So I know that he's been spending time getting monorepo and everything set up. Has that, derailed him from React, or is that still moving forward pretty good?

Sean

00:07:25 – 00:07:37

I don't I don't think that derailed him. There's not much to that. It was just like moving kinda moving files around. So I think he's he's not working on that to my knowledge. Yeah.

Sean

00:07:37 – 00:07:38

And I haven't really checked in with him lately.

Aaron

00:07:39 – 00:07:39

Okay.

Sean

00:07:39 – 00:07:39

So I

Sean

00:07:39 – 00:07:40

don't know.

Aaron

00:07:40 – 00:07:48

And then Jeff told us he was gonna be out for a little while, so he's not picked up anything Right. Yet either. Okay. Okay. Cool.

Aaron

00:07:48 – 00:07:56

Well, that's exciting. View 3 is ready. Didn't see that one come in so quickly. I'm stoked to hear that. Way to go, VueDIMI.

Aaron

00:07:56 – 00:07:59

Is that what it's called? VueDIMI? Mhmm. Nice.

Sean

00:07:59 – 00:08:05

Yeah. And, like, the choice to use composition API. Yeah. Those two things, yeah, made it possible.

Aaron

00:08:05 – 00:08:11

Yeah. That paid off big time. Okay. Cool. Colleen, do you have any updates?

Sean

00:08:12 – 00:08:30

No huge updates. We had a great kinda check-in call with the client yesterday, and made some timeline decisions, which is great because I like schedules and timeline decisions. So the plan is to have the the code fully extracted into a private gem within the next 6 weeks.

Aaron

00:08:31 – 00:08:31

Cool.

Sean

00:08:31 – 00:08:42

And then work from that. So that's really great. Super pumped about that. And not client related, but more hammerstone related. I've the RailsConf CFP is out.

Sean

00:08:42 – 00:08:43

And so I I

Aaron

00:08:43 – 00:08:44

saw you tweet about that.

Sean

00:08:44 – 00:08:56

Yeah. Super excited about that. It's been, you know, 2 years because of COVID. So it's gonna be in person. And so I've been thinking about what kind of talks I can submit that are hammer stone adjacent.

Aaron

00:08:57 – 00:08:58

Yeah. For sure.

Sean

00:08:58 – 00:09:12

You know, because you you obviously cannot go up there and talk about your product. That'll never get accepted. So I'm thinking of submitting a workshop, which is like a huge lift. Compared to a 30 minute talk, a 2 hour workshop is kind of a game. I know.

Sean

00:09:12 – 00:09:19

But it would be so cool to do, like, advanced active record querying if I can build that up into a workshop.

Aaron

00:09:19 – 00:09:20

You know, that would be amazing.

Sean

00:09:20 – 00:09:38

It'd be amazing. Right? Because that is such a now this is a again, a huge lift. And usually, the people who give workshops are either book authors or professional workshop people. So I don't know if I even have a shot of getting accepted as, like, the random person who's effective rep.

Sean

00:09:38 – 00:09:39

You're a professional workshop person.

Sean

00:09:40 – 00:09:55

No. I mean, these people, like, literally, they're DevRel people and they just go from conference to conference and gives the same Yeah. I mean, it's super

Aaron

00:09:56 – 00:09:58

We all need a Sean in our lives. Don't we, Holly?

Sean

00:09:58 – 00:10:15

Well, you know, okay. So this is funny. So I, of course, came. I was under the weather last week, and I came up with this idea while I'm, like, high on DayQuil. And, but you know, my best ideas tend to come when I'm, like, having a glass of wine or haven't I didn't have too much of DayQuil just for the listeners.

Sean

00:10:15 – 00:10:23

But, and because you know why your best ideas come in that all somewhat altered state? Because the fear is gone.

Aaron

00:10:23 – 00:10:24

Mhmm.

Sean

00:10:24 – 00:10:31

Like that or at least for me, I find that I'm such a caught like, I don't wanna say I'm such a cautious person, but I'm like a perfectionist, I guess.

Sean

00:10:31 – 00:10:31

Mhmm.

Sean

00:10:31 – 00:10:41

And so taking those big chances, I usually only, like, think those things are good ideas when I'm like, I don't know. It's so terrible when I'm drinking or, you know, take

Aaron

00:10:41 – 00:10:48

a lot of coffee. So you drink a bunch of day quell and decided you're never gonna die, and now you're submitting a talk to rails comp.

Sean

00:10:48 – 00:11:24

Anyway, first, what I've been what I'm trying to say with all of this is I have been trying to figure out how to better position myself as a rails person who is an active record expert. Because that's so I don't wanna say it's so far out of my aperture, but it's it's on the the Twitter audience I interact with is more SaaS building people. Mhmm. I I don't really have a good cross section with people in the rails community who are pro high profile. So I've just been trying to think about what I can do, kind of, like, for our DevRelish perspective to become more ingratiated with people in the rails community and active record.

Sean

00:11:24 – 00:11:28

So this is my great idea. So I will report back and let it know let you know how it turns out. But

Aaron

00:11:28 – 00:11:31

I think it's a great idea. Are you taking thoughts at this moment?

Sean

00:11:31 – 00:11:33

Yes. I'm definitely taking thoughts.

Aaron

00:11:34 – 00:11:51

What I haven't been to RailsConf, obviously. What is the, I guess, what's the format difference between a talk and a workshop in terms of audience? So with a workshop, you're teaching to how many people for 2 hours?

Sean

00:11:51 – 00:12:05

I think you can set the size, like you can cap it at whatever you wanna cap it. Usually, it's a room. So typically so what'll happen is I won't do it by myself. I'll get I'll get a friend and maybe 2 friends. We'll see.

Sean

00:12:06 – 00:12:19

But typically, you know, you get, like, a big comp not like a ballroom, but, like, a big conference room. Sure. 20 to 50 people. Everyone brings their computers. You have some kind of GitHub repo they pull down, and, you know, you have some kind of lesson.

Sean

00:12:19 – 00:12:20

Right? It's almost like

Aaron

00:12:20 – 00:12:22

So it's very much a breakout session

Sean

00:12:22 – 00:12:23

Yes. That's a good way.

Aaron

00:12:23 – 00:12:24

With a tiny portion

Sean

00:12:25 – 00:12:31

Yeah. Of the audience. So on one hand so on the negative side, you know, they're not recorded like talks are.

Aaron

00:12:31 – 00:12:31

Right.

Sean

00:12:32 – 00:12:47

So you can't put them all over the Internet like you could if you gave a talk on active record, but I don't know. It just sounds cool. Like like I said, a workshop is pretty ambitious, but I think the opportunity for, like, a deep knowledge base is better with the workshop.

Aaron

00:12:47 – 00:13:03

I agree. I wonder. So with RailsConf, is it single track or are there multiple tracks? So if you so if you were to give a talk, would it be to about the same size audience or would it be, like, to a much, much larger audience than a breakout session?

Sean

00:13:03 – 00:13:10

So they typically do 5 to 8 talks concurrently. So it just Holy moly. Yeah. Like, it's it's big. And so I have found

Aaron

00:13:10 – 00:13:11

That's amazing.

Sean

00:13:11 – 00:13:19

The number of people that come to your talks depends on what talks you're going up against. So, like, if you're talking at the same time as, like, an Aaron Patterson, you're screwed.

Aaron

00:13:19 – 00:13:20

Yeah. But,

Sean

00:13:21 – 00:13:29

but or and the topic. So typically, talks will get a bigger audience, but not super much, like, not way, way, way bigger.

Aaron

00:13:29 – 00:13:30

Okay.

Sean

00:13:30 – 00:13:30

Because they're

Aaron

00:13:30 – 00:13:47

Well, you can you can see where I was going because if Yeah. If a workshop is 5 times the lift for 1 5th of the audience, then doing a talk for 1 5th of the effort and 5 times the audience makes a lot of sense. But that doesn't sound like it's totally as clear cut. Yeah. Yeah.

Aaron

00:13:47 – 00:13:49

So, yeah, you should submit a bunch of stuff.

Sean

00:13:49 – 00:13:51

Yeah. I think that's the answer. I think,

Sean

00:13:51 – 00:14:42

is doing it. I think there's very little downside. And in terms of opportunity cost, this is I can't think of many many other things that would be, like, higher leverage things for us to work on because it like, if you're if you're willing or if this is something you're interested in, taking the workshop and then pulling it under the Hammerstone brand umbrella and making it a standalone product is something that would be it will equal, as you go, lots of quality content that we can create and upload to the site and get all the SEO juice out of and also the, like, email addresses, things like that. So lots of lots of stuff there. But then also, we get the course, which we could sell for cheap, which gets us people into our product.

Sean

00:14:43 – 00:14:46

People follow different things to, like, product universe or whatever.

Sean

00:14:46 – 00:14:47

Yeah.

Sean

00:14:47 – 00:15:05

Now they've bought something from us. And then, you know, consider, to make it like we're working with we're building a query builder, and that's how we're learning about ActiveRecord, something like that

Sean

00:15:05 – 00:15:06

That's a great idea.

Sean

00:15:07 – 00:15:15

Yeah. It means that we're all sort of, like, firing at all cylinders with this thing, so nothing's wasted. So we get as much bang for our buck out of your time on that.

Sean

00:15:15 – 00:15:19

Yeah. Well, I'll report back, but I that's kinda the direction I wanna go.

Aaron

00:15:19 – 00:15:42

The repurposing it as public content on the hammer stone site is that's pretty key. I think that's a fantastic idea. And the idea to, like, make your workshop, let's build a query builder and spend, you know, 2 hours doing it. And at the end, you're, you know, you're 50% of the way there. And you're like, well, the next 50 percent is gonna take you another 3 months.

Aaron

00:15:42 – 00:15:51

I mean, that's also kind of amazing. So, yeah, do it. Drink some day quill and submit some proposals, man. That rules.

Sean

00:15:52 – 00:15:58

Okay. Can I just tell you though, the so they so RailsConf does tracks? I don't know if Laracon does tracks,

Aaron

00:15:58 – 00:15:58

but

Sean

00:15:58 – 00:16:14

we have, like, 6 or 7 different tracks, and they suggest slash recommend that if you give talks, they fit in with one of the tracks. So one of the tracks this year is, like, how to be happy at work, and I was, like, dude, that was clearly new for me. That's, like, my life. So

Aaron

00:16:15 – 00:16:16

That's totally you.

Sean

00:16:17 – 00:16:22

Anyway, so fun stuff. I'm excited to get back into conferences. I think it's gonna be great.

Aaron

00:16:22 – 00:16:24

When would that be? When would Rails come?

Sean

00:16:24 – 00:16:26

May. Oh, wow. Yes. Soon.

Aaron

00:16:27 – 00:16:27

That's soon.

Sean

00:16:28 – 00:16:35

So if I get if it gets accepted and I, you know, I'm up every night trying to build a course crying to you Yep. Just remind me of this moment.

Aaron

00:16:36 – 00:16:41

Yes. I will. So you should talk to my friend, Colleen. She's always happy at work. She can give you some good advice.

Sean

00:16:42 – 00:16:46

So I feel like that's a good segue into conferences into LaraCon. Conferences.

Aaron

00:16:47 – 00:17:04

Wow. Look at that. We're, like, professional podcasters. So LaraCon is in 8 days, which is not very many days. One of the things that they're doing this year that they've never done before is it's now completely free.

Aaron

00:17:05 – 00:17:33

So, yeah, so it's an online conference. And historically, I think tickets were like, I don't know, 60, 70, $80 a ticket. And, you know, I would buy tickets for the people on our team at work, and we would all take the whole day and watch. And there were usually, I don't know, a couple thousand people, you know, filtering in and out, I feel like. And now for the first time ever, they've made it completely free and streaming on YouTube.

Aaron

00:17:34 – 00:18:13

And so I feel like that is just going to explode the number of people watching it because there's absolutely no barrier to entry anymore. And so that's amazing for us, because, you know, where historically we would have gotten a couple thousand people watching, I I can't even I I don't even know. Maybe 5000, 10000 people are gonna watch over the course of the day. So when they announced that I was, you know, equal parts thrilled to death and terrified. You know, fortunately, it's not like they're they're moving to a bigger auditorium.

Aaron

00:18:14 – 00:18:34

I'm still gonna be sitting in my shed by myself talking to myself. So it doesn't feel that different, but I do know that it it's gonna be a much, much larger audience. So that is exciting. That is very good for us. I've been thinking about how to how to best optimize or take advantage of this opportunity.

Aaron

00:18:35 – 00:19:07

And I think and we talked a little bit about this on Slack. I think the the the primary goal is to bring people into my personal universe, because the talk I'm giving is not refine related in any way. And so to go from, you know, this talk on serverless stuff to refine could be a jarring transition. Like, if I just pitched at the end, people are gonna be like, what the hell are you talking about? So I'm not gonna do a hard pitch on that.

Aaron

00:19:07 – 00:19:38

I'm just gonna try to get people to follow me on Twitter. And so as they're following me, then we have opportunities to, you know, get at them again. So I think I think that's my primary goal from all of this, is to, you know, grow my personal network such that we can use it later. So that's kinda what I'm thinking now on in terms of how does this help Hammerstone. Any thoughts to the positive or to the contrary?

Sean

00:19:38 – 00:20:12

Yeah. That sounds right to me because, especially with no filter on who's showing up anymore, the signal to noise ratio on interest is, you know, gonna be not to our liking, I think. So I think that making it just sort of broadly, like, pulling them into your Aaron universe over there is a good is a good plan. And we can like, long term, I think that makes the most sense too. Like, just thinking long term, start at the beginning, and the beginning is, you know, Aaron's Twitter feed.

Sean

00:20:12 – 00:20:30

And once once this is all over and you've, you know, seen, like, how what happens, then you can sort of, like, kinda bring up your there's all kinds of things. You could bring up your best of Aaron Francis tweets and kinda replay some stuff and start pulling people back in in that way. I think I think it makes sense.

Aaron

00:20:30 – 00:20:39

Okay. Cool. Getting nods from Colleen, so I'll just take that as a yes. Okay. So that is most of the Lyricon update I have.

Aaron

00:20:40 – 00:21:07

So I'm speaking on sidecar. Sidecar's a Lambda thing. There are I have some potentially pretty big breakthroughs on sidecar. I had some potentially big breakthroughs, like, not this past weekend, but the one before where I realized that sidecar doesn't have to be specifically a Lambda thing. Sidecar can be a Lambda thing or a, some other cloud provider thing.

Aaron

00:21:08 – 00:21:56

And so in that process, I was able to get the entire pro I was able to get the entire, sidecar flow working with a second cloud provider. So now if you don't wanna be in the AWS world and you wanna be in this other provider's world, which I'm not naming quite yet, you can use Sidecar to do that as well. So I think that's going to even make the make the audience even broader and make the use cases even larger for Sidecar, which is gonna be, I think a lot of people are going to be very excited by that because this other provider is a lot easier to use than AWS. So somebody DMed me and was like, Hey, could sidecar work with this? And I was like, I don't think so.

Aaron

00:21:56 – 00:22:19

And then I started looking at their API docs and realized, oh, yeah, totally could. And so I managed to get that done. So I'm I'm not sure if I'm gonna reveal that at the end of my Lyricon talk. I probably will just reveal that, like, this is what's coming. But either way, I'm extremely, like, enthused about the future of sidecar.

Aaron

00:22:19 – 00:22:27

And somebody actually, is giving they're giving a talk on it at a Laravel meetup in the next couple of days. And I was like

Sean

00:22:27 – 00:22:28

Do you know about that? No.

Aaron

00:22:28 – 00:22:46

I had no idea. So I was, I was, I was at the car dealership, get my car fixed, which I'll explain later. And I get, I got a Twitter notification that said Laravel Austin meetup is back. We're going to be talking about Aaron Francis's sidecar. And I'm I responded.

Aaron

00:22:46 – 00:23:04

I was like, dude, that's cool. You should let me know because I live in Dallas. Like I could, I could have come down and just hung out with y'all, but it's on, it's on Thursday and we're getting a winter storm and I'm just, I'm not doing it. So I thought that was so cool. I was like, man, I didn't something I built someone else was talking about.

Aaron

00:23:05 – 00:23:17

So I was pretty pumped about that. Okay. That's it for Lyricon. I've got 8 days to get that squared away. And I have been I've been last night was till midnight night.

Aaron

00:23:17 – 00:23:46

This weekend was 2 10 to 12 hour days. It's I'm burning the candle at both ends, and I'm running out of steam pretty hard. So if I can if I can, you know, go over the finish line before I burst into flames, that would be ideal, but we're getting close to bursting into flames. But we're almost there. The other thing I wanna talk about is Nova, and that's part of part of the part of what I'm working on so much.

Aaron

00:23:46 – 00:24:20

I mean, this past weekend, all day Saturday, all day Sunday, I was working on Nova stuff. I had a call, I guess, last Tuesday with a guy who has a Nova app, and they need to be able to filter, like, I think you said something like 10,000 products. And when he said that, I just it's just a just a wave of relief washed over me, because we've been dealing with 1,000,000,000, and he's like, man, we've got these 10,000. I'm like, yes. I can help you.

Aaron

00:24:20 – 00:24:39

This will be so easy. So he we talked about it and I gave him a demo. So I gave him and one of his coworkers a demo of Nova last week, or the the refined Nova combo. And when I was done, I was like, okay. So that's kinda what it does.

Aaron

00:24:39 – 00:24:48

Do y'all have any questions or any thoughts or anything like that? And she said, yeah. My question is when's it available? And I was like, right now. It's it's available.

Aaron

00:24:48 – 00:25:12

Let me, you know, let me polish up the package, get it published, and then y'all can use it. And so I did that, this weekend, got it all published. And this morning, actually, he started using it. And so he installed it into his app today and we're we have a shared channel with them in Slack. Now he installed it into his app and he sent me a couple messages.

Aaron

00:25:13 – 00:25:26

So there was one thing that I forgot to document. And then after that, he said, that fixed it. Very cool. Now we can start building. And he sent me a screenshot and it just, it just works.

Aaron

00:25:26 – 00:25:55

Like he I'm seeing his data with one of our filters and it just worked. And so totally thrilled to death by that, because I feel like this is such a traction channel potential traction channel for us is getting these Nova integrations done. And Neil also has a Nova app, and I sent him the stuff, earlier on how to use that. So we'll see if we get any feedback from him. But yeah.

Aaron

00:25:55 – 00:26:16

So I sent so I got him up and running, and then I sent out an email to our early access list and, you know, told him Nova was ready if anybody wants to try Nova. One person so I think I got 3 or 4 replies. One reply said, sounds great. I'd love to. And I responded with, great.

Aaron

00:26:16 – 00:26:27

Let's set up a call. It's free for early access, and then if you actually do end up liking it, it's $1,000. And he said, okay. Well, this is a this is a hobby app that I don't make money off of, so it doesn't make sense. Great.

Aaron

00:26:27 – 00:26:43

Totally get it. Somebody else responded. I replied with the same thing. No response back. And then somebody a third person responded and said, we've got, like, a 100 Nova apps because we're a, like, a PR company, and I would love to, you know, give this a try.

Aaron

00:26:43 – 00:27:14

And so I set up I'm setting up a call with him because, you know, regardless of what he wants to pay, if he's got a 100 apps, we could figure we could figure something out. And I think I sent that to y'all and asked about, like, what are we gonna do for bulk pricing, which I don't I don't know yet, but that was that was good. I honestly was a little bummed. I thought more people would have Nova. More people on our mailing list would have Nova stuff and would wanna try it.

Aaron

00:27:15 – 00:27:37

But I didn't get, I didn't get as many responses as I had hoped, but if we get, you know, if we get one agency and then one PR agency that has a 100 apps like that, that moves the needle. So we'll see. But I, you know, expected 10 people to be like, yeah, I want to try it. So a little bit bummed there, but I think that's probably to be expected. Any thoughts on any of that?

Sean

00:27:38 – 00:27:42

Yeah. That's great. It's working so well with this first client customer.

Aaron

00:27:42 – 00:27:43

I know.

Sean

00:27:43 – 00:27:47

That's wonderful news. I think you're right. I think it's gonna be a great traction channel.

Aaron

00:27:47 – 00:27:55

Yeah. I just gotta figure out how to mine it. Like, how do we mine this Nova vein? Yeah. And I I don't really know.

Aaron

00:27:55 – 00:28:24

There's nova packages.com, which is just kinda like a directory of Nova packages, but I don't know how to get to all the Nova people. But it's still, it's still super early, but I think if we can find those people, the slots in so well that it's gonna make sense to them. So, Sean, you had mentioned doing discounted pricing for Nova because of its potentially lower support burdens. Do you have further thoughts on that?

Sean

00:28:24 – 00:28:44

No. That's it. Like, we can justify a price that pays for the maintenance of it. Like that's our margins dictate what the price is and our margins are basically like how much, like, how much does it cost us to support it. So if Nova is much lower support like we think it will be, then we can lower the price and still have good margins.

Sean

00:28:44 – 00:28:51

That's all. I don't know what the answer is on how much, cause we don't know really like truly how low maintenance it will be.

Sean

00:28:51 – 00:28:55

Yeah. Is the agency guy gonna get back to you? What, what was his plan?

Aaron

00:28:56 – 00:29:02

So the 100 app agency guy, sent me some times that work and we're gonna set up a time to talk.

Sean

00:29:03 – 00:29:04

So yeah. So

Aaron

00:29:04 – 00:29:20

that's still moving. The person that's trying it right now, I told them when I was giving them the demo, I gave them the demo, told them the price, and they're like, yeah. That seems great. We'll have to figure out how to pay you because we just got acquired, but that seems great. And I was like, okay.

Aaron

00:29:20 – 00:29:31

Well, that's a good sign. So and, you know, they wanted to move forward immediately despite hearing it was a $1,000, so I feel like they're they're great with it.

Sean

00:29:31 – 00:29:40

Yeah. I I think the price is great. I mean, I it'll be interesting to see what the agency says and thinks, because if they're like, hey, 50% of our apps, this would be tremendous.

Sean

00:29:41 – 00:29:41

Mhmm.

Sean

00:29:41 – 00:29:43

Then we should probably have the discussion again.

Aaron

00:29:44 – 00:29:51

Right. Yeah. I'm super willing to if they wanna buy 50 licenses, I'm willing to go down pretty far. Yeah. We'll see.

Aaron

00:29:51 – 00:30:18

And then there we still have the other guy from, the Laravel agency in in the Slack, and he's still I don't think he's had much of a chance to try it out, but he's he's still, he's still going to. And so I think that's another good channel because I know they do a lot of nova stuff. So we'll see. Overall, I think good, like, objectively good things. I just thought maybe they would be better and or faster.

Aaron

00:30:19 – 00:30:23

So my excitement is tempered a little bit, but not feeling bad.

Sean

00:30:23 – 00:30:25

Yeah. I feel like it's moving pretty fast.

Aaron

00:30:25 – 00:30:26

You think so?

Sean

00:30:27 – 00:30:28

Yeah. I do.

Aaron

00:30:28 – 00:30:30

That's good. That's good. Maybe it's because Why

Sean

00:30:30 – 00:30:35

does it need to move fast? I mean, that feels like it's moving fast to me, but also why does it need to move fast?

Aaron

00:30:36 – 00:30:58

Emotional reasons. Because I feel like it's yeah. I feel like it's been so long in the making that now that it's now that it's like, now that we're ready, I want it to be moving fast because I've built up all of this back pressure in being ready, and now it's ready. And it's like, alright. Let's go.

Aaron

00:30:58 – 00:31:03

And I think I'm being met with the reality of, oh, it's just gonna take a while.

Sean

00:31:03 – 00:31:03

Makes

Aaron

00:31:04 – 00:31:07

Colleen, you look flabbergasted. What is on your mind?

Sean

00:31:07 – 00:31:18

Laugh because having launched a side project that didn't move fat, this feels like a freaking, like, rush of water compared to my other project. Oh,

Sean

00:31:19 – 00:31:22

yeah. And, Kavi, your your revenue went up faster than

Sean

00:31:22 – 00:31:23

Everyone else's.

Sean

00:31:23 – 00:31:28

Yes. That's what Your your project went up very fast. Very fast.

Aaron

00:31:28 – 00:31:28

Yeah.

Sean

00:31:28 – 00:31:34

People tell me that. And so this feels so different compared to that. I mean, so

Aaron

00:31:34 – 00:31:54

I will say we do have different perspectives because you're able to look from the outside on all the Nova stuff and all the Laravel stuff and be like, wow. That's really going fast. Or I'm in there, like, manually shoveling the dirt and be like, man, this is going really slow. So Guys, I gotta

Sean

00:31:54 – 00:31:56

I gotta go. Okay. You keep going. Alright.

Sean

00:31:56 – 00:31:58

See you. Okay. Alright. Bye. Bye.

Aaron

00:31:58 – 00:32:00

It's good to hear that perspective

Sean

00:32:00 – 00:32:04

because That's funny. I can't leave. I'll just mute it and let you get I

Aaron

00:32:04 – 00:32:06

think you can hit leave in the top corner.

Sean

00:32:06 – 00:32:07

Nope. Can't.

Aaron

00:32:07 – 00:32:09

Oh, okay. Well, I'll just mute and

Sean

00:32:09 – 00:32:09

we'll see

Aaron

00:32:09 – 00:32:10

you later.

Sean

00:32:10 – 00:32:10

See you.

Aaron

00:32:11 – 00:32:22

It's good for me to hear that perspective because as I'm, you know, shoveling dirt every single day, it feels slow. But to hear that it seems like it's going fast is encouraging to me.

Sean

00:32:23 – 00:32:35

Yeah. It certainly seems that way. Although, I so wanted to make a joke now that you're, like, Twitter famous about you being an overnight success. I've Yeah. Asked myself that everyone's, like, Aaron's an overnight success.

Sean

00:32:35 – 00:32:36

I'll be, like, guys,

Aaron

00:32:36 – 00:32:37

that's

Sean

00:32:37 – 00:32:38

not how it works.

Aaron

00:32:38 – 00:32:56

Yeah. Yeah. Super not how it works and definitely don't feel like one. I feel like I've been slogging away for 10 years. But, yeah, the growth has happened fast, but it's, you know, been 10 years.

Aaron

00:32:56 – 00:33:09

So, okay. The other let's see. The other thing okay. That was Nova. I have unformed thoughts on Torchlight.

Aaron

00:33:10 – 00:33:38

So I want to just bounce them off of you real fast, And then unformed thoughts on sidecar as well. Unformed thought on Torchlight is I'm thinking I may make it completely free and open for everyone always. The thought being we got a payout from Stripe recently for Torchlight. I don't know if you get those emails. People you get you get the Mercury emails.

Sean

00:33:38 – 00:33:38

Yeah.

Aaron

00:33:39 – 00:33:50

And it was like, that's nice. But it wasn't it's not it's not worth like, it's not worth the money. Right? And so Okay. Go

Sean

00:33:50 – 00:33:56

ahead. What's not worth the money? Your time, torchlight, the overhead to charge people?

Aaron

00:33:57 – 00:34:25

Mostly, honestly, mostly the third one. It's not, it's not worth. Okay. So if there, if there's a, if there's a balance between, charging money and staying narrow in terms of attention and, mind share, if that's on one side. And the other side is it's totally free, and we can go as wide as possible and get as much attention and mind share as possible.

Aaron

00:34:26 – 00:34:49

I think the thing that is more valuable for Hammerstone is to make it free. I mean, we pay $20 a month to Vercel to run this thing for us. So make it free and go as wide as possible into all kinds of markets, you know, Laravel, JavaScript, Ruby, everything. Because we highlight everything. We'll we'll need clients for other stuff.

Aaron

00:34:50 – 00:35:11

But making it free and open source, I feel like is going to explode the amount of attention that is drawn to it. And by function, explode the amount of attention that is drawn to Hammerstone. Even if it's 1 tenth of what gets to Torchlight, it's still gonna be way, way more than where we're at now from Torchlight. Thoughts?

Sean

00:35:12 – 00:35:26

I think that makes sense. I'm open to discussing that more. My only concern, of course, is if we are gonna have packages out there in the world, we have to make sure they are properly maintained.

Aaron

00:35:27 – 00:35:27

Mhmm.

Sean

00:35:27 – 00:35:59

And I'm a little worried about the support burden of maintaining this open source package that now everyone in the world is gonna use. But generally speaking, I think the I think the hypothesis is correct that if we can you know, dev 2 is a Rails shop and they use what we all use, which I forget which which highlighter it is, and it does I know because my simple file upload stuff is off it. It does not work, and it's maddening. Mhmm. And so yeah.

Sean

00:35:59 – 00:36:05

If if we could open source something and get some kind of huge customer like them, like, that would be great for

Aaron

00:36:06 – 00:36:06

us. Right.

Sean

00:36:07 – 00:36:15

But again, right. But again, there are only 3 of us and we all kind of have well defined roles. We just talked about how you're about to explode in a ball of fire.

Aaron

00:36:16 – 00:36:17

Oh, yeah. We did.

Sean

00:36:17 – 00:36:26

Not not but 20 minutes ago. So I think maybe I guess my short answer is that's probably a good idea, but maybe not a good idea right now.

Aaron

00:36:26 – 00:37:20

I see your point, and I raise you a counterpoint. My counterpoint is if we were to make it totally free and open source, then, I would feel a little bit more like the community could own it, versus where we're at now. It's quasi like, all the all the libraries are are open source and free, but the API itself is a, you know, quasi because if it's free if you're an open source project, and it's paid if you're a commercial project. Right? So I feel like that limits the amount that we can ask of the community to maintain stuff because then they're maintaining stuff that supports our paid like, I'm asking people, hey, why don't you write a client for Ruby, and then I'm just gonna benefit from it when people sign up to pay and use the Ruby client.

Aaron

00:37:20 – 00:37:21

You know what I mean?

Sean

00:37:21 – 00:37:28

Yes. I do know what you mean. And the way you access it right now is just an API. Right? So anyone could write a client for anything.

Aaron

00:37:29 – 00:38:00

Correct. And so that the I think the let's say there are 2 burdens. 1 is the clients, which I have JavaScript, Laravel, Markdown, Jigsaw, a couple of them that I've written all myself. The other one is the API engine itself that does the actual rendering and stuff. The burdens, I think, from as it as they relate to the clients goes way down because the community can like, if somebody wants to write a Ruby client for it, go ye with God.

Aaron

00:38:00 – 00:38:24

Like, I don't have to do it. That's great. Go for it. And then the burden for the API engine itself is unknown to me because maybe a lot of people like, well, maybe some people will help maintain it, but maybe a bunch of people are gonna throw these pull requests that suck at me and I'm gonna have to like babysit this other repo. And so that's a that's an open question to me.

Sean

00:38:25 – 00:38:33

So but really all you are if we did this, all you are half all you have to maintain is the API.

Aaron

00:38:33 – 00:38:39

This is exactly what I maintain right now, but Right. It would be open to other people helping. Yeah.

Sean

00:38:39 – 00:38:47

Right. But by that, I mean, like, if someone writes a Ruby client, that's their own open source. That's their deal. That's their deal. They're the main painter of that.

Sean

00:38:47 – 00:38:54

So it's not like you are, you know, point of failure for everyone's individual clients. It's just the API.

Aaron

00:38:55 – 00:38:55

Exactly.

Sean

00:38:56 – 00:39:09

I I mean, I'm open to this to your point. At the price point of Torchlight, it's not our primary product. Mhmm. I'm definitely open to this. I think we should talk more about it after Laracon, when you've had some time to to power down.

Aaron

00:39:09 – 00:39:10

Noodle noodle on that.

Sean

00:39:10 – 00:39:12

Yeah. It's an interesting idea.

Aaron

00:39:12 – 00:39:30

I think my takeaway is make it free, go super wide. That's my takeaway. Make it free, get as many eyeballs as possible. Okay. Other unformed thought related to sidecar is sidecar has been exceptionally good for me in terms of disability.

Aaron

00:39:32 – 00:39:37

Have you ever considered riding sidecar for Ruby? Rather riding sidecar for rails?

Sean

00:39:38 – 00:39:39

I have not.

Aaron

00:39:39 – 00:39:44

That might be, obviously, not right now, but that might be worth considering.

Sean

00:39:45 – 00:39:48

Did I send you the Lambda thing that Ken Collins wrote

Aaron

00:39:48 – 00:39:48

Yeah.

Sean

00:39:49 – 00:39:49

Years ago?

Sean

00:39:50 – 00:39:50

Mhmm.

Sean

00:39:51 – 00:39:52

Conceptually similar. Right?

Aaron

00:39:54 – 00:40:20

In that, it uses Lambda. It is conceptually similar. Beyond that is entirely different. So lamb Lambi is more conceptually similar to Laravel Vapor, whereas Lambi provides some glue to let you run your Rails app on Lambda, Vapor provides a bunch of stuff to let you run your Laravel app on Vapor. Right?

Aaron

00:40:20 – 00:40:50

Those 2 are almost the exact same thing. The thing that sidecar is, is it allows you to add a microservice to your monolith. Right? So if you want to deploy a JavaScript function, like if you want to deploy a JavaScript function from your Rails app and then execute it from your Rails app, that's what Sidecar does. So Sidecar packages, configures, distributes, and executes Lambda's.

Aaron

00:40:51 – 00:41:30

So that when I'm writing PHP, if for some reason I need a Python function or a node function or whatever, I can do that within my PHP app, and I don't have to then spin up microservice architecture everywhere. Right? So for Ruby, it would be or for Rails, it would be the same thing. Like, if you needed to run some sort of node library, but you didn't wanna maintain the DevOps to do it, you would put it on a Lambda through Sidecar, and then you would execute it through your Rails app, not, like, by setting up all this complicated DNS. Does that make sense?

Sean

00:41:30 – 00:41:47

It makes sense. I can't think of a use case right now, but I am totally open to exploring this more with to to see where people might need this kind of functionality. Why would you yeah. I guess I just don't really

Aaron

00:41:47 – 00:41:53

What does sidecar do? I think What's the question?

Sean

00:41:53 – 00:41:59

Understand why I would need to run something that wasn't Rails in my Rails app.

Aaron

00:42:00 – 00:42:21

Okay. So you've come to the right guy. So, a couple of use cases that people are using Sidecar for now. 1 is server side rendering, and I know all of Rails is moving away from anything complicated on the JavaScript stack. So that's maybe not as compelling for y'all, but, so we'll leave that one aside.

Aaron

00:42:21 – 00:42:57

Let's say, running headless Chrome to generate screenshots from or generate PDFs from something or generate screenshots or do, you know, maybe even web scraping or something. So to run headless Chrome, you need, well, you need headless Chrome, then you need something like puppeteer, and then you need a place to run it. So you need node. Right? And so you can, if you're if you have Docker or if you have access to the server and you wanna do all the DevOps stuff, you can install all of that and maintain all of that yourself.

Aaron

00:42:58 – 00:43:19

Right? Or you could have a Lambda that comes prebuilt with Node and headless Chrome. And then you just deploy that alongside your rails app. And then anytime you need to access headless Chrome, you just execute your sidecar instead of having to maintain the DevOps side of all of that.

Sean

00:43:19 – 00:43:21

Okay. What's another use case?

Aaron

00:43:23 – 00:43:53

So server side rendering, generating images, Filo is doing, that doesn't really apply because so Filo is generating Ruby gems manifests, for unlock dot sh, and to do that, he needs access to Ruby, and so he put Ruby in a sidecar. So Ruby runs on Lambda, generates the, gym manifest, and then ships it back to him where he distributes it. So

Sean

00:43:54 – 00:43:57

It can Oh, okay. I have a use case, I think.

Aaron

00:43:57 – 00:43:58

Tell me.

Sean

00:43:58 – 00:44:02

So I have a for simple file upload, I have a different server

Aaron

00:44:03 – 00:44:03

Mhmm.

Sean

00:44:03 – 00:44:10

That does file resizing. So instead of running that server, I run that server. It's also deployed to Heroku right now.

Aaron

00:44:10 – 00:44:11

Bingo. Mhmm.

Sean

00:44:11 – 00:44:17

I could run that server in a sidecar on AWS on Lambda.

Aaron

00:44:17 – 00:44:57

So you could write a function that you could write a JavaScript function that takes advantage of a bunch of node libraries for image resizing, for image optimization, image compression, all of that. Those libraries exist in the node world. Right? You could write a handler function that compresses, resizes, you know, makes it sepia or black and white, whatever you wanna do. And then instead of maintaining a separate server for that, requests would come into your rails server, you would go out to the sidecar, execute the function, and then get the response back and send it back out.

Aaron

00:44:57 – 00:45:04

So you're not maintaining another server. Sidecar is keeping that Lambda configured and ready to go for you.

Sean

00:45:05 – 00:45:05

Okay.

Aaron

00:45:05 – 00:45:06

Does that make sense?

Sean

00:45:06 – 00:45:07

Yeah, that makes sense.

Aaron

00:45:07 – 00:45:35

To learn more about this on February 9th, I'll be giving a talk at Laracon online. But, yeah, something that just something to think about because we do own this space, obviously, in in Laravel, and we own this concept. But I don't know I don't know enough about rails, but, again, I just I didn't think this was gonna be as big of a deal as it is now. And so Yeah. It's it's worth it's worth considering.

Sean

00:45:36 – 00:45:44

Yeah. I think I mean, I think it would be exciting, and it's new, and it would be I I definitely think it's it has a high potential upside.

Aaron

00:45:44 – 00:46:01

Yeah. And especially with the new tagline that I've stolen from a friend. It used to be all about, you know, Lambda, and now it's more focused on adding a microservice to your monolith. And I know Rails is all about being a monolith. Yep.

Aaron

00:46:01 – 00:46:14

And so this doesn't break that, but it just it gives you an escape hatch for when you do need, for whatever reason, you do need to run some node or some Python or some, you know, Java for whatever reason. So

Sean

00:46:15 – 00:46:24

Yeah. No. I have I I can think of a few use cases right now now that I'm thinking about it. So, yeah, that's cool. I am, I'm definitely open to open to that.

Aaron

00:46:24 – 00:46:31

Okay. Two things to noodle on. We don't need to decide anything now. Okay. I think that, Oh, can I tell you a story real fast?

Sean

00:46:31 – 00:46:32

Yes. I love stories.

Aaron

00:46:33 – 00:46:38

My freaking car got hit while it was parked in front of my house

Sean

00:46:39 – 00:46:39

What?

Aaron

00:46:40 – 00:46:50

Overnight. Yeah. So goodness. I woke up last week and got had a mess a message from my neighbor that was like, hey, man. I think your car got hit.

Aaron

00:46:50 – 00:47:01

I was like, well, probably because this has happened before I park on the street in front of my house, came outside, somebody had hit my car and then just driven off. And so

Sean

00:47:02 – 00:47:02

That's awful.

Aaron

00:47:03 – 00:47:23

Yeah. It's infuriating. So they hit, like, my driver's side tire. They hit me head on, hit my driver's side tire. The whole driver's side, corner fender area totally demolished, and now the alignment is all wonky, so I have to, like, hold the steering wheel at like a 30 degree angle to drive straight.

Sean

00:47:24 – 00:47:25

Oh my gosh.

Aaron

00:47:25 – 00:47:39

Yeah. This is two times. My side mirror has been taken off one time. A kid rear ended me on the way to school, all, all, all while parked, Totally all while parked in front of my house. And this is the 4th time.

Aaron

00:47:39 – 00:47:59

And I think I think I've realized now that I'm the idiot and I need to stop parking on the street. We live we live on a on a slow not slow. We live on a small street that just happens to be the cut through for the neighborhood. And so people just fly, it's a 30 mile an hour street and they go like 50 down the street and just drives me freaking insane.

Sean

00:48:00 – 00:48:00

Yeah. I'm sorry.

Aaron

00:48:01 – 00:48:18

Yeah. So stress on top of stress. Yeah. And I've decided that I'm going to somehow set up a raspberry PI with a camera and I'm going to start, I'm not really gonna do this, but maybe I am. I'm gonna start, I'm gonna set up my own speed trap.

Aaron

00:48:18 – 00:48:32

And when people see, take a picture of their license plate, send them an unofficial ticket and ask them to pay online with a disclaimer that this is not, you know, not official ticket. Yeah. See how much money I can make from, from sending fake tickets in the mail.

Sean

00:48:33 – 00:48:34

So, Oh man.

Aaron

00:48:34 – 00:48:36

Yeah. Okay. Anything else?

Sean

00:48:37 – 00:48:38

I'm good.

Aaron

00:48:38 – 00:48:40

Okay. We'll talk to you later.

First Nova Install 🎉 and Prepping for Laracon

Transcript

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