Hammerstone · Sep 24, 2021
<div>Colleen listened to Aaron's solo episodes and it... raised some questions</div>
Aaron
Okay. Just Colleen and I today, Sean is I forget where Sean is, but Sean is not here. He is somewhere. He is he is he is not here, which is an improvement from last week. Because last week, y'all had a meeting without me because I was on I was on solo dad duty.
And so then I did solo podcasts. So we're plus 1 from where we were last week.
Colleen
Yes.
Aaron
So how's it been going?
Colleen
Good. So, Aaron, I listened. Uh-oh. So I listened to your podcast with Greg.
Aaron
Oh, really? Greg Skirman?
Colleen
Yes.
Aaron
Tell me.
Colleen
I would like to know more about you because Okay. I don't feel like
Aaron
It's a fraud. I'm I'm open book. So tell me.
Colleen
I feel like, you know, I'm listening to this podcast and you're like, yeah, I just spent a couple hours and I wrote this thing that like makes your Lambdas magically go to the cloud and I solve the world's problems. And, you know, I just did that in my afternoon.
Aaron
So, I realized That was very generous.
Colleen
It was a really great podcast. I really enjoyed listening to you. Oh, good. Even though I don't know what inertia or any of that stuff really is.
Aaron
Sure.
Colleen
Can you tell me more about you and your background? I would really like to know.
Aaron
I can. Yeah. Absolutely. So a lot of that, like okay. So I I'm an accountant.
Colleen
Right. That's what I thought.
Aaron
CPA. Yep. Graduated from Texas A&M, with a master's in accounting, went to Ernst and Young, spent 1 year as a tax accountant at a big four accounting firm. So I did, I like did the whole thing, here, here in Dallas. And after a year so while I was there, I was watching, the people ahead of me.
Like, your most recent Software Social episode, you said you were looking at the people ahead of you, and they were all depressed and miserable. Right? I
Colleen
did say that. Yes.
Aaron
So I was watching the people ahead of me and thinking kind of kind of the same deal. There's nowhere I wanna go.
Colleen
Like, all
Aaron
of all of those jobs, I don't want any of them. And then the thing that really set me off, not set me off, but caused me to leave was I watched a 4th year. So in, in it like in accounting and consulting, that's really like class driven, like your start class is, you know, the 2012 start class or whatever, because they just bring in a ton of people right out of school.
Colleen
Okay.
Aaron
So you kinda start with a cohort. And so I was watching this guy ahead of me who was just so smart. He was a great accountant, and he was really nice. And, you know, as far as we go, he was cool. And I watched him get passed over for a promotion because he wasn't in the right class year.
Right. So there was this, there was this manager job open and manager jobs usually go to 5th years and he was a 4th year and he really deserved to be moved up because he was a genius and he was the best in his class. And he got passed over because he was a 4th year and I realized, okay, like, it's not about how good you are. It's about like how long you stay and all they care about is class year. And you move up as a cohort and it gets smaller and smaller until they promote partners at the very end.
Colleen
Okay.
Aaron
And I wanted to get ahead by working really hard and being the best. Right. And I saw somebody above me working really hard and being the best and just getting totally passed over and it didn't matter at all. So I left,
Colleen
After a year? After a year?
Aaron
Okay. 1 year. Yeah. I started doing while I was still there nights and weekends, I started doing, like contracts software development on the side, which I learned to program when I was, like, super young, like, 10, 11, 12. And it was just always a hobby for me.
And so I just picked up some clients, started to do it on the side, was still living at home. I lived at home for, like, 6 months out of college until I moved in to a house with a friend. So I had, like, zero cost of living.
Colleen
Right.
Aaron
Then me and a friend moved into this dumpy house. So I had like zero cost of living again. And so I'm working 2 jobs, making all this money, not spending any of it, like eating Whataburger and living in basically a a shack. And so then I'd quit my accounting job and Okay. Never looked back.
I did a couple startups. I did a couple of freelance, like worked at a couple of startups, did a lot of freelance worked in for a California company for awhile while living in Dallas. So I'd fly to California for 2 weeks a month and be at home for 2 weeks a month. And that was insane and something you would only do at, you know, 23 years old,
Colleen
right?
Aaron
Because it was a lot. I'd lived in a hotel room for 2 weeks every month. So, yeah, I've kinda done a ton of stuff. And you know how, like, for Hammerstone, I'm doing, like, 6 different things at once?
Colleen
Right.
Aaron
That's that's basically been my whole life. And so with the sidecar thing, it's like, oh, okay. I've done a bunch of Lambda stuff before. Because at one point I had a product that would take an RSS feed from a podcast and turn it into video and publish it to YouTube. And, like, that never it never got off the ground.
Mike and I, kinda worked on it together, but I it never got off the ground. But I have all this knowledge in my head of, like, how to run Lambda's, like, at scale to generate hour and a half long videos. Right? And so then when something like when something like, sidecar comes along, I'm like, oh, I remember I remember some of that Lambda stuff, and I can pull all of these little bits together. And so it seems like, I think from the outside, it seems like, oh, man.
He's inventing stuff from whole cloth, and, really, I'm not. I'm inventing stuff from bits and pieces of my memory and, you know, dead code on my hard drive. And I think for me, I've been toiling away for, like, a long, long time, just kind of in obscurity. And now that I'm, like, starting to do stuff more in public, people are like, oh, wow. He's an overnight success.
He came out of nowhere. It's like, no. I've been working on stuff for a 1000 years, and just none of it's ever really worked. And so now I'm able to kind of like pull it all together and be like, Hey, look at this thing I did in 2 months that took me 10 years to do.
Colleen
Right.
Aaron
Does that make sense?
Colleen
Oh, yeah. That's very, like, James Clear atomic habits. Right? Like, you what is it? Overnight success takes, like, 10 years?
10 years. Yeah. Exactly. One one day kind of thing. Yeah.
That makes total sense. So those jobs you had after you left the accounting firm, were any of those, like, kind of traditional w two full time? Or were you always contract?
Aaron
The only thing I was contract until, I decided that I was gonna get married. And so when I met Jennifer and was like, I think I think I'm gonna propose, I started looking for full time jobs. Just because, like, for me, it's easy to, you know, live with my best friend and, you know, some 3rd roommate and eat pepperoni for dinner. But it's like, once I get married, I feel like I should be a little bit more stable, and so I got a full time job with a startup here in Dallas. And that was wild because I didn't have any, I guess, any pedigree or any credentials, really.
Colleen
Right.
Aaron
But at that point, I had been blogging and tweeting and talking about stuff that I was building, and so they didn't, like, they didn't even, like, really look at my resume. They, like, looked at my blog and were like, hey. Do you wanna, you know, do you wanna talk? We have job openings. I was, like, yeah.
That sounds great.
Colleen
Is this the company you're still with today?
Aaron
No. So today, I'm with, so I went from that company was called Traxo. It was a start up, a travel start up here in Dallas.
Colleen
Okay.
Aaron
And I loved working for them, but it was startup y. And so it was like, are they gonna, are they gonna raise money? Are they not?
Colleen
And
Aaron
I'll get so I, so I left. And from there I went to Veronis. So I worked at Veronis for like a year and a half or 2, and it was amazing and I loved it. And I did the data analyst stuff. So it was like, not really programming, but kind of programming, plus a lot of Excel, plus a lot of like data cleaning to figure out where all of our leads were coming from.
And then, well, so while I was at Veronis, my sister-in-law reached out to me. Jennifer's sister reached out to me and was like, Hey, I work at this property tax company and they're growing and they're barely holding it together. They were like staying up till 2 in the morning, filling out PDF forms
Colleen
and like
Aaron
stamping letters. They had so many clients that they couldn't invoice them all because they were creating invoices manually. And so they reached the point where it was like, we we can't we can't invoice everybody. We're we don't have enough there's not enough time in the world to invoice everyone with our current system. And so she reached out to me and was like, hey.
You do computers. Right? Do can you help them? And so my first my first, like, thing that I did with them was I wrote a bunch of Google app scripts, to automate, like, take the process they were doing currently and just automate it. So like it ran and that way it could run overnight and it could run a lot faster.
And so I generated, you know, these many, many thousands of PDFs for them, and then they would, you know, send them out to their clients and get paid. And at some point after like doing, you know, 4 or 5, 6 of these projects to help them like, automate things that they were already doing, but not really invent anything new. They're like, hey. Do you wanna come, Like be our every thing technology at the company. And it was like, you know, 8 or 10 people.
And I was like, I don't think so. I don't, I have a great job right now. I'm about to move to France for 3 years or 3 months. So Jennifer and I went to France for 3 months and just kind of lived over there. Yeah.
Because we were both remote. We're we're both remote and had no kids. And it was like, do you want to go to France? Yeah, let's do
Colleen
it. Yeah.
Aaron
And so I told him, I'm about to, you know, move to France for 3 months. You don't wanna hire me right now. And they're, like, oh, no. We already heard about that. That's great.
We just want you to come in house and build our CRM. And I was like, okay. Seems exciting. Seems like a lot of potential growth opportunities. And so that's where I am now is still at the property tax firm.
And at some point while I was there, it started by these 3 best friends. These guys who are like 1 year older than me, and this is the only job they've ever had is working for themselves. And so they they don't really have a ton of, like, what are other companies look like experience. And so at some point they were like, Hey, there are 3 of us and you can't really have 3 people steering a ship, because employees don't know who to come to and one will tell them something and the other will tell them something contradictory. And so they're like, what if we put you in charge of all of the people as well as the technology, and then you report to us?
And that way employees have like one face and one boss, basically. And so a couple years ago, they put me in charge of people as well as technology. And so that's kind of what I do now is I split my time between the COO side of like managing. Now we have like, I don't know, we have like 20, 25 people, something like that. So managing them and then we have 2 extra developers and I still do some code.
And so the 3 of us write our software together. So that's who you partnered with. That's that's who you're that's who you're in business.
Colleen
Well, I was listening to I listened to both your podcasts last last week. So the our the one with Greg about Sidecar and then the solo one you did, and it occurred to me that, like, I don't really know anything about you. I made some good life decisions based on very little information.
Aaron
Well, hopefully, you still feel good about it.
Colleen
So what so in terms of, like, the indie building, like, building Hammerstone and building out products Mhmm. I understand, of course, how you got started with it, but what are your goals?
Aaron
Colleen, my goals are to be happy. Right.
Colleen
So
Aaron
I think my goals I think my so my near term goals are I would like to cut my time at work. At Resolute. Cut it to 3 days a week and keep my healthcare. Healthcare is a big deal to me. My wife doesn't work outside the house.
We have 2 kids. I have type 1 diabetes. We need, like, we need real healthcare.
Colleen
Yeah.
Aaron
So ideally, I think I would cut my day job down to 3 days a week. And in that process, lose the management of people responsibility. So I can't, I can't go to 3 days a week and look employees in the eye and say, I'm still your boss. Like the the boss needs to be there. And so, ideally, I'd cut it to 3 days a week, manage technology only, and me and the other developers would build stuff.
I would keep healthcare, you know, have some kind of pay cut or whatever.
Colleen
Right.
Aaron
The other 2 days I would work on hammerstone stuff and, you know, anything else, you know, goof off, hang out with my kids, that kind of stuff.
Colleen
Right.
Aaron
And this is not news. The CEO already knows this, so I'm not, you know, I'm not surprising him. He actually came to me and was like, Hey, do you want to be the CEO someday? And I said, I really don't. Like, I just don't have a desire to do that.
And which felt weird and wrong to me. But then I think long term, it would be work on products strictly.
Colleen
Yeah.
Aaron
You know, Sean has talked about how he has this desire to, like he's talked publicly about, this desire to, like, have his this company and, like, manage employees and, like, do things differently, like, do things that he thinks need to be done in the world in terms of helping people grow and have a company. And I think I'm closer to what Adam Wavin has said, where he's like, I just wanna hang out with my friends and make cool stuff. Like, he just like, Adam Wavin just wants to jam with his friends in the garage. Like, he just wants to set up a jam space and, like, hang. And I think that's more where I am.
Like, I just wanna build really cool stuff and have fun with my friends. So Sean Sean can manage things. I can just hang out and jam, and then you can do everything else.
Colleen
That's awesome.
Aaron
What do you do you wanna jam, or do you wanna, like, be a company builder? Or what's your
Colleen
I don't know. I
Aaron
think it's
Colleen
it's hard to see I mean, through all these phases of my growth, it's hard to see the next step until you're actually approaching the next step. Right? I'm a big believer in, like you said, I mean, right? But ultimately, the goal is to be happy. Mhmm.
And and so I'm a big believer in reevaluating to make sure you are still on the path you thought you wanted to be on. So I don't know. Like, I also I'm with Sean, in that part of my vision is building a company of non assholes. Yay. Like, I've had so many right?
Good start. I've had so many bad work environments that, you know, providing like, just building that kind of company is really important to me. But who you know, I don't I don't have a lot of specificity in terms of what that looks like.
Aaron
Mhmm.
Colleen
So I don't know. I think it depends on, you know, how fast we grow and and how quickly we want to grow and
Aaron
Yeah.
Colleen
And all those things.
Aaron
It's it's hard to see that far out.
Colleen
Yeah. Totally. Right? Like, especially now.
Aaron
Yeah. Especially yeah. Especially now when almost every possibility is still on the table, like we haven't gotten down hardly any roads that eliminate any other roads. And so all paths are available to us still. And that that's difficult.
That's why I look, you know, a couple of years out and, or may, you know, maybe a year out or 2 and it's, I'm 3 days a week. That's that's about as far as I've gotten is I'd like to cut back at work someday.
Colleen
Yeah. I mean, I think my more immediate goal would be after I mean, that's the goal. Right?
Aaron
That would be amazing.
Colleen
I don't know if it's realistic or not, but
Aaron
I think it is.
Colleen
That's that's kind of that's kind of the goal. Like, I, like, my shorter term goal, I mean, that's a year. So we'll see.
Aaron
I think that's realistic because well, one, I think we're gonna start making, product money pretty soon. So we're making consulting money, and it's all going to you. I think soon we'll start making product money. Mhmm. And probably the 1st and only to be full full time hammerstone for a while.
Colleen
Yeah. Yeah. We'll see. But I I mean, you know and and part of that offering could be, like, if the product isn't bringing in enough money, we could do productized consulting that helps us continue to grow, kinda like what I'm doing now, almost, that helps us improve the product. It's good for everyone.
But, yeah.
Aaron
Yeah. And if I'm I don't know. If I'm if I have the time and I could do, like, basically productized consulting, but like the integrations. So you you buy the thing and then you get, you know, 3 days pairing to do the integrations. I was actually thinking about this the other day.
Like, getting refine and integrated into people's apps. I think a great a great offering there is a full day of pairing or 2 days of pairing or whatever. And that's different. That's different than us, like working on your app alone for 2 days, because with the day or 2 of pairing, you don't have the day or 2 or 3 or 5 of getting the environment, their environment set up on your computer, which is a living nightmare.
Colleen
Right.
Aaron
Right? So if you're like, hey, we'll do a pairing, then their environment's already set up, and you're just there working in their system.
Colleen
That's a great idea. And it helps us develop relationships, which is gonna help when we talk about word-of-mouth. Like, I really like that idea.
Aaron
Yeah. And that cuts out A lot. The worst part that you're dealing with is, like, environment. Like, getting the environment set up is not a trivial thing.
Colleen
Right. Yeah. I love it.
Aaron
I would like to explore that. That I think and I think it would be a lot of fun just to
Colleen
I think if well, I think I mean, I Jam. Both of us. Right? Like, you're jammed in the garage. Right?
Aaron
Like,
Colleen
let's just hang out and do some programming. I think that's a great idea. I really like that idea.
Aaron
So and I think we'll have to do it in the beginning. Not have to, I think it would be really good to do it in the beginning to just kind of watch people's experience and see where they get tripped up.
Colleen
Well, it's customer development. Right? It's like a customer interview, kind of.
Aaron
Yeah. Yeah. So, hopefully, we'll do that. Hopefully, that'll, you know, bring in some money. I think if somebody's gonna integrate this into their app, they'd be willing to to spend a little extra to, like, get it done almost immediately.
So
Colleen
Yeah.
Aaron
Yeah. That's the plan. Yeah. We'll see. We've got, what, it's the 22nd.
We've got a couple weeks until Laravel stuff should be done. And I watched the video that Sean sent us. It looks like the front end is amazing. Awesome. Yeah.
All of that, all of that, focus, trapping and tabbing in ARIA roles. That just seems miserable. I'm so glad he's doing I'm so glad he's doing that and not me.
Colleen
It's so funny you say that because I when we started this project, you know, what, a year ago now, our responsibilities were really split. And so now I have to take over all the front end stuff, and I'm just like, I should have paid closer attention. Oh, man.
Aaron
Yeah. That stuff. Oh, man. That stuff looks brutal. But Yeah.
That I think that's where he I think that's where he he is a he is just so technical on the front end, and he is so good at it. And so I'm glad that he's, like, picking it back up, and we're moving again. He was gone for so long with the hot wire stuff.
Colleen
Yeah.
Aaron
Okay. So what else? You wanna know anything else? You wanna tell me about the client? I've, you know, I've got 2 brothers and a sister.
I've got 2 parents. Wow. Yeah. I don't
Colleen
know that. Does anyone live in Dallas?
Aaron
No. Actually, one brother lives in Dallas, one lives in Galveston, and the sister lives in The Woodlands, which is Houston.
Colleen
Oh, but you're all there. Yeah. I used to live in Houston. I think I told you that.
Aaron
Oh, yeah.
Colleen
But you're all there in Texas.
Aaron
Yep. My parents do live in Dallas. So, they've been coming over all day since the babies have been born, which Oh, it's amazing.
Colleen
That's amazing.
Aaron
It's just so helpful. Good.
Colleen
Yeah. Cool. So work is good. Oh, I upgraded my I my OS. That's my big news.
I have this really complicated set. I have 2 computers. I don't know if anyone else does this or if I'm just weird. So I have 2 computers. I have my computer, which is my primary work computer, and then my backup computer.
What? And so yeah. So okay. Is that it?
Aaron
Yeah.
Colleen
Well, here's the thing. If I can't work, I don't get paid. Right?
Aaron
Well, that yeah. That's
Colleen
true. Like, for example, my primary computer, the battery is dead. It's a laptop, but the battery is dead. So it always has to be plugged in. And I took it to the Apple Store, and they were, like, oh, we can get it back to you in 7 to 10 days.
Aaron
And I'm
Colleen
like, no. So my backup computer, I let my husband use because I'm kind like that. So my backup computer is my husband's computer, but he doesn't really need a computer because he doesn't really compute things. And so Imagine
Aaron
imagine not needing a computer. That's crazy.
Colleen
It's so weird. Right? So weird.
Aaron
But you don't That's weirder than a backup computer. That's insane.
Colleen
Anyway, so every time I have to upgrade something, it's this whole song and dance. Like, I do a complete dump of my primary computer. I then load up the backup computer. I then upgrade the backup computer to the primary OS. Then I switch them out, and so then so now I'm on the backup computer with the new OS.
Today is my trial day, so I see if it works all day before I then upgrade the primary computer. I'm weird.
Aaron
Anyway, so today That's that's wacky. Yeah.
Colleen
Right? But but if you think about it, it's a perfect fallback system because
Aaron
the
Colleen
back of computer
Aaron
Okay. Well, pump the brakes a little bit. Yeah.
Colleen
The back up computer, right, has a full image, and then my primary computer, I don't touch. Then the back up computer gets upgraded. And so then if I have a problem with the new OS, which I always have a problem with the new OS. Like, I don't it's always something that's really annoying. So if I have a problem with the new OS and I'm working on something time sensitive, which it feels like I am always working on something time sensitive, I can just go back to the primary computer, which is still on the old OS.
And that's more information than anyone wanted to know about how I upgrade my computer.
Aaron
I think the lesson we learned here is you need to buy a new primary computer that has a functioning battery.
Colleen
Yes. Right. So now that I have solved this problem because I'm doing a lot of traveling the next 2 months. So today, I'm using the backup computer, which now has the new OS and the image of the old computer, and so far so good. So that's exciting.
Aaron
You're going, where are you going first? Where's the first you're going to some retreat with with Michelle and somebody else.
Colleen
Yeah. That's at the end of October. That's the founder's exhibit.
Aaron
So that's last.
Colleen
Yeah. So that's after our retreat. So our retreat's October early, and then that's 2 weeks later. And that's Founders Summit.
Aaron
What is that one? Who runs that?
Colleen
Calm Company Fund, which used to be Oh, cool. What's the
Aaron
biggest Ernest Capital?
Colleen
Yeah. It's Ernest Capital, Calm Company Fund now. So it should be really cool. I mean, it has a lot it's they keep the attendance really low and it's more of an unconference. Like there are no speakers.
There are somewhat curated workshops, I think. But the idea is just to meet other people who are founding companies in the space.
Aaron
Great.
Colleen
Yeah. And it seems like like I'm in their Slack now. So it seems like most of these people have very successful companies.
Aaron
Mhmm.
Colleen
And so it'll be it'll be interesting. I'm looking forward to it, though.
Aaron
Okay. So I think everybody's gonna be wondering, are you you don't have any investment connection with Calm Company. Right?
Colleen
Or I do not.
Aaron
Fund or whatever it is. Okay. So you're just going, you're just going as an attendee, I
Colleen
guess. Correct.
Aaron
So so we'll file upload is not backed by company. Okay. No. It could be. They'll that's crazy.
Colleen
I guess not. No.
Aaron
That's totally reasonable.
Colleen
Nope. Nope. So I'm just going because Michelle is an investor. So she Got it. Is an investor, and she's a mentor.
So, I wanted to go. So I asked her if she was going, and then and then that's kind of how that started. So we're going to go.
Aaron
Great. Yeah. That's gonna be fun.
Colleen
Yeah. It's gonna be amazing. I'm just excited to see people again. I'm so much better in real life than I am virtually. Like, just so much better.
I'm just weird on camera. Whatever.
Aaron
I don't I don't know about that.
Colleen
I just I can't figure it out. I don't know. And I get so much more energy from Yeah.
Aaron
I think you do.
Colleen
With people. Right? Like Yeah. I have a friend, and by friend, I mean random guy on Twitter that lives in San Diego that I now work with once a week because I'm that person
Aaron
who just
Colleen
shows up. He's like, you wanna come to my co working space? I was like, yes. And I'm gonna come every week until you tell me to stop coming.
Aaron
Yep. That's a good that's a great quality. We like to have people who are joiners. That's great.
Colleen
But my new friend, like, just spending a day with someone else in the self funded business space once a week, it's like an incredible energy burst for me. Like, I don't know. I like people in
Aaron
my life. Is Andrew anywhere nearby you?
Colleen
No. He's in LA, which is apparently kind of super far away.
Aaron
Okay. That's too bad.
Colleen
Yeah.
Aaron
Because you wanna you wanna talk about energy supernova, the 2 of you together? I know. Right? That would
Colleen
We're like, real excited.
Aaron
Be cataclysmic. Yeah. Real excited. Y'all get amped. We do.
We do. So, yeah. So, what's going on client world? Anything interesting?
Colleen
Nothing super exciting. I think maybe I didn't mention it. So I've been doing a lot of the front end stuff, and all of this work is leading up to the nested filters, which we talked about a little bit. But I have not implemented the nested filters yet because I kind of wanna get some of these little onesie twosies
Aaron
Sure.
Colleen
Annoyances done, like, out of the way. And it's been really good because there are things that, generally speaking, aren't that hard to implement, like inline errors on the form. Mhmm. But we're using turbo frames, and so it's been good. I haven't used turbo frames before.
So it's been really a good way for me to get, like, kind of a gentle introduction instead of, like, you have to implement this all from scratch. It's, like, it's mostly done. Like, it mostly works. You just need 1 or 2 little, little things to make it a little more user friendly. So that's been good.
So I've pretty much been, for the past 2 weeks, like, doing all this, like, little front end stuff, like the apply button, was waiting for a form submit. So just stuff that's not interesting to anyone but the user, and that's important.
Aaron
Is it feeling better? Like, the when you're driving it around, does it feel more user friendly and you're liking it?
Colleen
I think we're getting there. There's still some I mean, the turbo frame stuff, like, there's just still some stuff that's a little wonky. And Sean and I did, like, a couple hours of pairing, and we made some progress. But there's just some stuff that's weird, but that's like a turbo frame thing. It's not a hammer stone thing.
Aaron
Yeesh.
Colleen
Yeah. It's getting there. But I think I told you I was having some trouble I guess this was I talked to you 2 weeks ago. So all of the recursive querying stuff Yeah. I was I was running into an issue there.
So I fixed that. So that was really exciting. So now the 5 levels deep, should we want to do that, can be done. So that's good. Great.
Yeah.
Aaron
Is that 2 seconds. What was the problem?
Colleen
Oh, it was I don't even remember. It had something to do with with applying the pending relationship subqueries, like one of the like, when you popped off the last the last one, it wasn't properly popping off. Like, it wasn't properly popping off the pending relationship subquery array. So then when you sent it into the subset method, you had this extra, like, hanging data piece.
Aaron
Hanging, Chad. Yeah.
Colleen
I know if you're old enough to say you'd get the hanging
Aaron
Barely. Reference.
Colleen
Right? You're barely old.
Aaron
She's afraid. Yeah.
Colleen
I almost said hanging Chad, and I stopped. Because I was like, I I don't know if Aaron's gonna get that.
Aaron
Yep. So Cool. Well, I'm glad you got it. That's great.
Colleen
Yeah. It was good. It was, like I said, it was just something that I think it was. I think you were doing, like, a Laravel has, like, an array it wasn't a ray pop. I don't remember the details, but whatever it was in Laravel was modifying the pending relationship sub theory data structure.
Aaron
Got it.
Colleen
In Rails, as you recall, we don't often modify
Aaron
Modify in place.
Colleen
In in place that way. So and I had missed that, and curiously, it only revealed itself when you had these, like, nested children at different levels. And although we have an incredible test suite, we hadn't tested this particular weird case where you have a has many through and, like, it was like 3 belongs to and a has many through and it belongs to. And so we hadn't tested that complicated of a relationship. So it was making it through like 3 belongs to's.
Aaron
Mhmm.
Colleen
Then it was hitting the has many through, and it was exploding.
Aaron
Man.
Colleen
So yeah. Freaking love
Aaron
I love that crap. Help.
Colleen
Right? Like, you're like, yes. Let's talk about this. Yeah.
Aaron
It's all I wanna do.
Colleen
So it was something along those lines, like, that that's kind of what happened. So it was a good find because now, you know, we can we can handle infinite depth, which as it was designed to do. But my focus is the front end stuff, which I'll probably finish next week. And then it'll be I got the mock ups for what they want the filter within a filter to look like. So then it'll be trying to implement that, which will be which will be kind of fun and interesting.
And then we'll go from there and see where we are.
Aaron
Man, this is so awesome. Yeah.
Colleen
It's really cool.
Aaron
I'm so pumped about all of this. I mean, just the fact that you're spending all day every day working on this and thinking about this.
Colleen
Isn't it such
Aaron
We're getting so far.
Colleen
Time is such a luxury. Right?
Aaron
It is.
Colleen
Such a luxury to not feel like to not feel to feel like you can do something right, and you can take the time, and you can fully understand the problem instead of when you're just trying to get something out as quickly as possible. It feels awesome.
Aaron
Yeah. Got it. Totally rules. Cool. I love that.
That's an exciting update. That makes me so happy. And then our retreat is soon. Right? It's
Colleen
It's, like, 2 weeks.
Aaron
Or something?
Colleen
Oh, and we gotta set up a meeting for next week so we can knock some of this stuff out before we meet in person.
Aaron
That's right. I talked to my attorney friend, and he said he doesn't feel comfortable doing it, which I that was what I led with. He said, I that's not my area of expertise, and I wouldn't do it for people I don't know. And so he's gonna refer me to someone who does do operating agreements here in Texas. And so I'll get a name or a couple of names hopefully from him.
And then the 3 of us need to work through Dalia's LLC questionnaire that should surface all of all of the difficult questions.
Colleen
Right. Yep.
Aaron
So we'll do that next week. So we have that knocked out before
Colleen
Yeah. I think we wanna get that.
Aaron
Time. Yeah.
Colleen
Yeah. The retreat time is very limited. So I think we need to be focused while we're there.
Aaron
Yeah. I agree. Speaking of retreat time, are we going to prepare a group presentation? And if so, do we need do we need to work on that?
Colleen
Yes and yes. I'd say yes and yes. I think it's important I mean, one of the things I think that will be beneficial is having really really given it some thought. Like, we've been running at a 1000000 miles an hour since I've joined you guys, it feels like. Right?
Everything happened so quickly, and now things are happening quickly. And it's really awesome, but I don't know if we've taken a step back to, like, look at exactly where we are and what our goals are and how we wanna achieve those goals. So I personally think that's a good use of time. And I also think we should do it before the retreat. Again, so we're not not figuring it out while we're there, which I think is a total waste of our time.
Like
Aaron
Yes. Okay.
Colleen
We need to utilize the people that are there.
Aaron
Great. Okay. We should do that next week too then, because we should give the other people at least the opportunity to review our materials before we show up.
Colleen
I think so.
Aaron
Okay. Alright. Let's chat. Let's Slack and see when Sean has some time or all 3 of us have some time to do that. Perfect.
Next week, 1 week from yesterday, I'm doing my first live stream, live coding.
Colleen
I know.
Aaron
Which is terrifying.
Colleen
I'm excited for you. It's so great.
Aaron
I think it's gonna be a lot of fun. I'm super nervous about it. I think it's pretty low key. The guy running it, Frank said it's, like, between 10:40 minutes. So it doesn't sound like I've got to hit a certain time, like, on the button.
Otherwise, it's gonna be weird. So I can just kinda, like, you know, do whatever I'm gonna do and stop when it's over. So that's helpful. I don't have to, like rush to finish or stretch it out if I'm going short, but yeah, it's the Laravel worldwide meetup. So it's meetup.laravel.com.
And I'll be demoing sidecar. So I'll be not only live coding, but live deploying to AWS and hoping everything works on stream. So, yeah, I'm super pumped. So that's next week. And then other stuff on my side, God, I've gotten some really good and helpful feedback on Torchlight.
Lot of people are using it and coming back and saying, like, hey. I'd love to implement a copy code button. Like, have you thought about doing that? And so, like, you know, they want their code example, and then they want a button that's, like, copy, just like GitHub has.
Colleen
Oh, yeah.
Aaron
And so I'm adding that in so that there's a clean set of code that is hidden that they can copy from. Some people have had really good ideas on, like, how to integrate it into emails, that kind of stuff. So it's fun because it's it's like it's out there, and it's moving. And while it's in progress, like, I'm picking up more and more, you know, ideas and use cases. And that's one of those things that I've learned is, like, motion begets motion and like progress begets progress.
And like, the hardest thing is to be stationary. And like, come up with ideas about what you're going to build. Like that's super hard. Once you're moving, you can spot ideas all day, every single day, which is also hard because you're like, well, damn. Now I've got 50 ideas and I can't build them all at once.
But being in motion with Torchlight has been a lot of fun because, like, people are just giving me incredible ideas. People are putting in great open source work. There's a, I don't wanna talk about it too much because I haven't finished it yet, but there's a guy who's done some incredible work in combining the Laravel and Symphony packages so that both communities can use them. And he's just, like, spend a bunch of time on it and then send it to me. And I was like, here, what do you think?
You don't have to use it. And I'm looking at it. I'm like, this is amazing. How did you, like, do all of this? So that's been wonderful, and I'm pumped about that.
Colleen
That's awesome.
Aaron
Yeah. It's great. I'm I'm super pleased with how that's turning out. I'm trying to think. That's Oh, I had my first viral tweet.
You did? Robots.
Colleen
Oh, yeah.
Aaron
The robots. Yeah. That was crazy. So I did a tweet thread about building some handwriting robots and put it out there for the lulls. And I got like 800 retweets.
Colleen
Oh my goodness.
Aaron
And then I put it, I I had maybe 4 or 500, and then I put it on Hacker News as a show h n, because I was just, like, give me more pain. And and they delivered. They freaking hated it because it was marketing. They thought it was the worst thing in the world. Somebody called me, like, Moloch, but I don't really know what that is.
I think it's a literary character. But yeah, it was great. I went from like 2,200 followers to 2,900.
Colleen
So, wow,
Aaron
that's wild. If they're looking for more robot content, they'll be disappointed. But yeah, it was it was a wild weekend. A lot of fun, though.
Colleen
Yeah.
Aaron
So just trying to catch up to you and Sean. I think you're at like 35 and Sean's at like 45 or something.
Colleen
Yeah. I don't know.
Aaron
Something like that. Jim's just the weakest link here. Okay. I think that's it. Do you have anything else we need to talk about today?
Colleen
Nope. That's all I got.
Aaron
Okay. Well, we'll talk to you later.