209: MVP Therapy
In this week's episode, Adam seeks support from Ben and Tim as he ventures into creating a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for a new app designed to digitize the operations of drop zones.
The discussion centers on the importance of developing a solid hypothesis, engaging potential users early on, and navigating the emotional hurdles associated with bringing a side project to market.
Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.
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With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.
Transcript
Spot an error? Send a pull request on GitHub.
[00:00:00] Highlight
[00:00:00] Adam: I'm using you guys as a support group, right? Like I, how do I, how do I get through that wall?
[00:00:04] Tim: Hi, my name is Adam.
[00:00:26] Intro
[00:00:26] Adam: Okay, here we go to show number 209 and on today's show, we're gonna talk about the emotions of sticking to the M in MVP, meaning minimum viable product, not a most valuable player. but first, as usual, we'll start with our triumphs and fails. Carol is out sick this week, and Tim, it looks like it's your turn to go first, my friend.
[00:00:44] Tim's Triumph: The Wild Game Dinner
[00:00:44] Tim: I'm going to go first and I'm going to go with a triumph.
[00:00:48] Adam: Okay.
[00:00:49] Tim: So we had our eighth annual wild game dinner, which I talk about I've talked about many times on the show. So the eighth annual Ed Martin Memorial wild game dinner dinner where we had exotic foods and I get to get to go to a country club and have a kitchen and I had, you know, two sous chefs working with me actually had a head chef under me, which is pretty cool.
[00:01:11] Tim: And,
[00:01:12] Adam: That's a lot of work for some testicles.
[00:01:14] Tim: Yeah. Hey, you know, testicles are a lot of work and then that three different servers and like 17 people that I was feeding 17 gentlemen who paid top dollar to get to come there and smoke cigars and bourbon and eat, the wild game. So this year we had turkey testicles, which I believe we actually had last year, but they were such a big hit.
[00:01:36] Tim: They wanted them again and, we couldn't get ostrich testicles because
[00:01:40] Ben: That was such a big hit.
[00:01:42] Tim: they actually are quite nice. They, they are. They are, they are quite nice, but we, we wanted ostrich testicles, but just could not get enough, to feed everyone. So we had to go back to the turkeys, which apparently they're pretty common to get,
[00:01:56] Adam: Now, you would think ostrich testicles would be bigger than turkey testicles, but you're making it sound like they're teeny tiny and so there's not enough to go around.
[00:02:03] Tim: but no, no, they're big. It's just, there were, we, we would need, we had like a two pound bag of turkey testicles, right? So I don't know how many were in there. There's probably a couple hundred, but, with ostrich, like you would probably need about. 10 of them, eight, nine of them to defeat everyone. And it's just, we couldn't order that many.
[00:02:23] Tim: There's just, there's a whole lot more turkeys in the world than there are ostriches in the United States.
[00:02:30] Adam: Yeah, that's fair. I mean, have you, have you handled ostrich testicles before?
[00:02:35] Ben: Only recreationally.
[00:02:38] Adam: was going to ask, like, you know, how does the, the size of a, an ostrich testicle that's been, you know, removed and prepared to be cooked compared to the size of like an ostrich egg?
[00:02:47] Tim: so I don't know about the egg, but I've seen an ostrich testicle. They're about the size of a, of a man's fist.
[00:02:53] Adam: Okay.
[00:02:54] Tim: So they're pretty good. They're pretty good size. And turkeys are surprisingly big. They're like the size of your thumb. The entire thumb.
[00:03:01] Adam: Okay.
[00:03:02] Tim: So, but that's like the appetizer. We had some other appetizers as well.
[00:03:05] Tim: Some deer sausages. and then the main course we had water buffalo tomahawk chops. So the chops are about as long as my arm. And a big, like Piece of meat at the end of it, which I sous vide them for two days. And then, and then finished them off on the grill with some butter and some pepper, and it's got a really super nice char and it, it was, it was really good.
[00:03:31] Tim: It was like, it's kind of a lean meat, but it was because I sous vide it, it didn't get tough and it was just, it was like a really, really excellent roast or steak. And so everyone absolutely adored that. I served those with you with some Yorkshire puddings. I don't know if you know what that is.
[00:03:48] Ben: Does that involve blood?
[00:03:50] Tim: No, no, no. So the English call everything puddings. It's basically bread. It's a pop. Have you heard of a pop over? So it's, it's a, it's a pop over from
[00:03:59] Ben: Freaking love popovers.
[00:04:00] Tim: So I made, I made a bunch of pop overs and then,
[00:04:03] Adam: I prefer dialogues, but go ahead.
[00:04:05] Tim: Okay, yeah, with, some demi glaze sauce, so I don't know if you know what demi glaze is, you, you boil, you roast a bunch of bones, typically it's, I did veal bones, I did, cow bones, and I did chicken bones, mostly chicken feet and wings, you make a sauce out of all that, it's super gelatinous, very, very, like, rich, so I did, so that was nice, you could use your, popover to soak up all that, basically a really rich, sauce.
[00:04:32] Tim: Buttery gravy, but tastes it super meaty and then the final was we did we want to do shark But they were out of shark because by the guy who orders he always waits the last minute He really needs like schedule it that way you can get exactly what we want But we wound up doing something called a parrotfish.
[00:04:48] Tim: So if you google
[00:04:48] Adam: Okay. Yeah, yeah. Mm
[00:04:49] Tim: it's a beautiful fish It's a tropical reef fish big big giant fish. Well, not giant. It's probably Probably about, it's probably three, two and a half feet long, bright colors, like bright blue, bright yellow. And it has a hard, like almost beak like mouth. And, so we, we, you know, it was a couple, several fish of those weeks.
[00:05:11] Tim: So we scaled those, filleted those, served it up fried with some bay scallops and some sauces, tartar sauces and everything. And then we had like a dessert. So it went over extremely well. I put out a survey to all the folks. They used to do the survey. They get the, Sean Callaghan on our discord channel had designed, I think I'd made a comment if we were having.
[00:05:31] Tim: Testicles at our dinner last time and I'm like, it's always testicle season and he created, uh, that, he took that little, little, little, little saying and created a little sticker. And I actually created that sticker on red bubble and I'm
[00:05:45] Ben: That's awesome.
[00:05:46] Tim: it to all the folks that, that came and Hey, if any listeners want, you know, what they can let me know.
[00:05:51] Tim: And I'll, I could,
[00:05:53] Adam: If you'd like to get your own, it's always testicle season sticker.
[00:05:56] Tim: Yeah, exactly. So yeah, it went really good. all the survey results were good. I don't wanna make, I, I was concerned that the steak maybe wasn't, some people don't like red steak, but, but everyone was super happy with it, so, yeah. We good. So it was fun.
[00:06:10] Adam: Do you mean a red velvet water buffalo? Is that what I'm
[00:06:12] Tim: Yeah. Yeah. Red. Yeah. I mean, it was really pink. It was, it was delicious though. Really was. I was surprised. So that was me. That was, it's always a fun thing to do. I'm, I'm looking forward to it. Next year I got some ideas. Oh, and one other thing I did was a, a potato pave. So it is, you create, you get a bunch of thin, super thin sheets of potato and then you, coat them in like clarified butter and then you press them into like a giant block and put it in the oven and let them cook, almost kind of steam a little bit and then you take them out and you chop them up and deep fry them and you have like this thousand layers of potatoes that are deep fried on the outside but nice and soft in the middle.
[00:06:50] Tim: It's like the most delicious, delicious. Tater tot you ever had in your life. So,
[00:06:58] Tim: it went
[00:06:59] Adam: Man, eating dinner with you has got to be like rolling the dice so hard, right? You could either get a testicle or, or something crazy like a potato pavé.
[00:07:08] Tim: yeah. I try to mix it up with, I mean, cause a lot of the, there's no recipe, there were hardly any recipes for water buffalo on, online, so I'm just like, you know what, I know sous vide works, it's a lean meat. It's going to make sure it's not tough. There were, I couldn't find hardly any recipes for parrotfish.
[00:07:25] Tim: so I was rolling the dice on that, but it's always been so far. I've been lucky. I don't think I've had any real fails. I've had some where people just complained. There wasn't enough.everybody really liked the iguana tacos last year. They were talking about that, but yeah, so I've gotten lucky. So I try to mix that with things that are like really super fancy because, you know, if the meat's not great, you're like, at least I had this potato pave that I've never had before.
[00:07:47] Tim: It's super delicious. Right. So you got something positive on the plate, but anyway, that was me. How about you, Adam?
[00:07:54] Adam's Triumph: SOC 2 Compliance
[00:07:54] Adam: Oh, I'm going to go with a triumph. it is, early March as we're recording today is March 11th. and. Actually, the, the day after we recorded last week, so six days ago. we received our finalized SOC 2 for calendar 2024. We are officially SOC 2 compliant for, for 2024. We've remained on the treadmill for, for this calendar year.
[00:08:16] Adam: So the ball's already rolling on that one, but, super excited. that was like a big thing on my, my goals for 2025 is like, let's get this knocked out. Keep it as low stress as possible. Stay, you know, on track for compliance this year. And, and like this, this new vendor has made a world of difference.
[00:08:37] Adam: I think we're a week or two behind schedule in terms of like getting the final deliverable. A couple of people had vacations. It was, you know, we, we finished the. the review at the end of calendar 2024 and you know, like the, basically the last full week of the year I was out of the office and then they had some people on vacation on their end and stuff.
[00:08:54] Adam: So I'm not surprised we ended up a couple of weeks behind schedule, all said and done, but still, super low stress and been very, pleased this updated process.
[00:09:05] Ben: do all the subsequent years now become incremental, or is it basically starting the process all over and maybe reusing some of the
[00:09:15] Adam: that's that's a really good question. So, I mean, basically it's like 50, 50 yes and no. Um,so the, you know, now that they understand our business and they have, you know, it's going to be at the same vendor, we signed a three year contract. So, you know, they, they have like basically a template for what to expect from us next year.
[00:09:33] Adam: And, you know, part of SOC 2 is like, okay, they, they collect a listing of all the things that happened this year, right? So we need a listing of everybody you hired this year. We need a listing of everybody you fired this year. We need a listing of all of the changes to your code this year. Because they're going to do like random samples of all of these different collections of data to make sure that the, those random samples remained compliant throughout the year.
[00:09:57] Adam: so, you know, those, those, Collections of data will be new and different, but then, and so that's like, I would say roughly half of the process is like collect those populations of data and random sample them. The other half of the process is like, okay, these are the things that are going to be the same every, every year.
[00:10:14] Adam: And unless, you know, there's, there's minor changes year to year, but like, you have to have policies. to cover all these bases and different things, you know, programs implemented, that sort of thing is to do internal penetration testing and external penetration testing and internal scanning and extra.
[00:10:30] Adam: It's a whole thing. The nice thing about having now signed like this three year contract with this particular vendor is like, Any gaps that they found in our processes along the way, they're like, okay, this is what you really need to be doing. And so that's what I've got. Like, I've got those processes all documented and like calendar reminders and stuff in our GRC software.
[00:10:51] Adam: That's like on a
[00:10:52] Ben: cool. So you're not playing catch up the whole time. Next, next audit.
[00:10:56] Adam: Yes. So it's, it's kind of on maintenance mode from here on out. It's a treadmill, like there's stuff, it's like, I have basically at least one calendar reminder every month to just like go look at our GRC software and, and it, what needs to be done this month and like make a plan and figure it out.
[00:11:14] Adam: But it's very rarely going to be anything more than like, oh yeah, that notion doc that documents, you know, our, our. staff, what staff has access to what system and, and what level do they have access, right? Who, Ben's an admin, Tim's a noob, whatever, um, you know, whatever that, that access level is. It just, the, the requirements are like, you have to have it documented and you have to document that you reviewed it on a schedule.
[00:11:39] Adam: So like now, one of my things is like, okay, it's time to go look at the document again. Is everything still kosher? Yep. Okay, good. Sign it, you know,
[00:11:47] Ben: so I started going to a dermatologist just now that I'm older and I need to get stuff looked at and, and, in the dermatology office. Aren't Right behind the door. They have what is titled like the daily cleaning schedule. And so people are supposed to, I guess, clean the office and then sign it.
[00:12:04] Ben: But if you look at the dates, it's like once every two weeks. I feel like, the title of this paper was misleading. It is not daily.
[00:12:14] Tim: And I hear you talk about how the work you have to, it's like, I'm so glad that we have a department that just handles that
[00:12:20] Ben: Yeah. Right. It sounds so
[00:12:22] Tim: they, they just remind us, you know, Hey, we need this, this, and this, like, okay, and you just send it to them that they, they throw it together.
[00:12:28] Ben: You know what Adam needs is another intern that can just do this stuff. When, when you get your next intern.
[00:12:34] Adam: That's a good question. I think the process would start soon, like in the next couple of months. it's like a six month process to go through to do the, it can't be six months, but it, it, it's a couple of months process to go through, to do the hiring portion, right? Cause you have to like create your listing and they want, you know, they gave everybody a month to do that.
[00:12:55] Adam: And then they all, they want them all on the same day. And then there's like a three. It's almost like doing draft picks, right? There's first round draft, second round draft. And so, you know, like there's, people apply, you can review their resumes, you can do interviews and then there's draft picks. and so, it, it's a whole process.
[00:13:12] Adam: It takes several months to get through the whole thing. and like on one hand, you're right. Like this is something that's important to us in terms of just like, for, like doing our part, you know, participating in our local community of growing software developers, helping people that are newer on the career path.
[00:13:30] Adam: Also, it's beneficial to us. there were things that we learned from the first one that we would love to implement in a, in a future one. The other side of this coin is it's a ton of work, you know, and, and
[00:13:43] Ben: free lunch.
[00:13:44] Adam: right. So it's tough. Like I, I really want to, but at the same time, it's like, but it's going to, it's going to cost me a lot of time that I could be spending, you know, like working on porting us over to SvelteKit or, or anything else that is, you know, maybe a little bit more in the discretionary portion of my, my, powers to choose what gets, done, right.
[00:14:05] Adam: Like that sort of stuff is what gets bumped off the list. And when we have something like the. a co op taking over or coming in and eating up a bunch of my time.
[00:14:15] Ben: Cool.
[00:14:16] Adam: But then again, you know, one of the things that we learned from that first process is like it ate up way more of my time than I expected and. If we were to do it again, we would make like a schedule and be like, okay, for two weeks, you're with me then with two weeks, you're with so and so and two weeks after that you're with so and so and it's like just kind of shadowing and working with that person directly on a project or something.
[00:14:35] Ben: Makes sense.
[00:14:37] Adam: anyway, so that's what I've got going on. I'm super excited to just be doing well on the compliance treadmill. Ben, what do you got going on?
[00:14:44] Ben's Triumphs: Digital Detox and Chat GPT Success
[00:14:44] Ben: I'll go with a couple of small triumphs. first being that, I have not had Facebook installed on my phone and in like a week or so. So I had, yeah, I had removed Twitter, weeks ago, maybe months ago. I don't remember when I removed it. and then I finally moved Facebook for a while and then I put Facebook back on.
[00:15:04] Ben: And then I just removed it again and, it, it's, it's one of these things where it's like, on one hand, I love the effect of not being able to just randomly scroll through Facebook. I'm one of these, I'm, I'm lucky to be a person who doesn't have a very addictive personality. And I think that's a byproduct of the fact that I'm very much an out of sight, out of mind kind of person.
[00:15:28] Ben: I've just been that way my whole life, much to the. chagrin of my friends and, and so when I don't have Facebook on my phone and it's not easy to just flip to, I like forget to check it. And if I don't get a notification on my phone that something happened, literally days will go by before I check Facebook.
[00:15:46] Ben: I'm not saying that that's a bad thing. I'm just saying it's, it's, it's like, I like that I'm not tethered to it, but I also start to feel a little disconnected from people.so, but I'm going to call it a triumph because I feel like maybe I'm going to be using my time just a tiny bit more effectively.other, triumph, I,
[00:16:03] Ben: so
[00:16:03] Tim: before you, before you move on. So the worst thing of those little pop up alert, what are those called? With the, it shows you to have two messages,
[00:16:10] Ben: like the badge or the notification.
[00:16:12] Tim: a little notification that pops up. You look at, you look at that and you'll see, Oh, I got notifications. For me, I have to get to notification zero.
[00:16:20] Tim: I don't even care. You know, it's like, I see there's six on Facebook. I'm like, okay, I got to go clear these. I'm not even looking at them, but that's, they, Facebook knows that about me. It's like, just pop up some notifications and Tim's going to check it.
[00:16:32] Ben: what's crazy though is, okay, so now that I'm not going and clearing my notifications as quickly as I used to, Facebook actually sends me emails now about activity in
[00:16:40] Tim: Oh, wow.
[00:16:41] Ben: but it's not just my activity. They'll send me some random email that's like Nolan Erk just left a comment on a band page. I'm like, why are you telling me that?
[00:16:52] Adam: Yeah.
[00:16:53] Tim: Because
[00:16:53] Ben: doesn't seem email worthy. I, you, Nolan's very cool, but it just seems like
[00:16:59] Ben: it's one thing if you get a notification like that in the app and you're like, Oh, okay, there's this rhythm, you know, there's a pulse of the system, but don't email me that. That's crazy.
[00:17:08] Adam: yeah. I get notifications all the time that are like, Tim Cunningham commented on this post by Scott Strohs. I'm like, okay. That's nice. Swipe.
[00:17:15] Tim: Hey, I'm sure it was quite funny.
[00:17:19] Ben: okay. So another small triumph that I've had is I've talked on the show previously about how my experience with chat GPT has been, let's say, very mixed. and I think. Part of that is because I tend to talk to chat GPT in very open ended, very philosophical terms. And it's very wishy washy in its answers.
[00:17:38] Ben: And I've always wanted to be more concrete. And I, some of the feedback that you all gave me last time was just ask it more concrete questions. And, you know, I've been wringing my hands over some of these naming conventions in my little side project. And finally, I just did a LS minus L R, which is like a recursive directory listing.
[00:17:59] Ben: And I copied and pasted into chat tbt. And I said, look, I'm just having trouble organizing this folder. There's a bunch of top level files. There's a bunch of sub folders, but it doesn't feel cohesive in any way. What would you suggest as a reorganization of this folder? And like, it actually gave me, I'd say an 80 percent good answer.
[00:18:18] Ben: They were, they were like, some of it made no sense at all. It was like, I understood why it made those mistakes.
[00:18:25] Tim: So it's like talking to me.
[00:18:29] Ben: But it was, so it was good enough where I'm like, you know what, I'm actually going to kind of take your advice and move some of this stuff around and then not take some of your advice and leave some of the stuff where it is. I, I think that was an important lesson for me that I really have to be more concrete at what I'm asking it to do.
[00:18:44] Tim: you could pay me 5. 95 a month and I'll give you halfway good answers.
[00:18:50] Adam: I feel like the, the, the way that AI shines the most for me, like where I get the most bang for my buck from it is when I have a very concrete thing that I want it to do that I could do. I just either don't feel like, or I know it'll be able to get it done faster than me, right? Like, I re, redesigned, I guess you could say, an interface that we have that looks a lot like a calendar.
[00:19:11] Adam: It actually was organized like a calendar, right? So it was, you know, days across the top and weeks were horizontal rows. And that just turned out to be too dense for the information that we were trying to pack into it. Right. So, you know, every little. Cause you're got seven, you have to have seven columns across.
[00:19:27] Adam: Plus there was like a sidebar. So like, there's just not a whole lot of horizontal screen real estate to work with per column. And then, and we were just trying to display in some of these days, there might be 15 blocks that each have five to 10 bits of information in them, which is way too dense. So I reorganized it so that it, instead of being, it's still a calendar, but it's more like list view, right?
[00:19:51] Adam: So you've just got every day. In the calendar is a row in a table and then, however, you know, like the blocks then become horizontal and they wrap, right? So a day might be two rows tall. And, you know, when you
[00:20:05] Ben: Right. Right. If it wraps once.
[00:20:07] Adam: right. but still, you know, whatever. And I gave that open up a ton of free space and, and just working through, the, okay, how do I want this to work?
[00:20:15] Adam: If it's the current month that you're displaying, like let's collapse all the days prior to today. Right. So today's March 11th. I would not display them first, the first or the 10th. Right. And so I had already all this code written to do, do the. Month display and I should say to like the server rendered part part of this page is like just the an empty div Basically, like it drops a div on the pages that put the calendar here And then there's a bunch of JavaScript that makes an API request to go get the data and then it renders the calendar And so the first part of that is like spit out a table That has, okay, you know, this, this row is for day number one, this row is for day number two, this row is for day number three, and so on.
[00:20:53] Adam: And, I was like, okay, I just, it was great because I just like highlighted that portion of the code and then in the,GitHub copilot, you can do like pound selection. And it's like, okay, just what I have selected is now context for this request and say, okay, now, I, I don't remember what the exact prompt was, but basically I said like, If this is the current, if we're currently looking at the current month, then hide all the days prior to today by default, right?
[00:21:20] Adam: And it figures it out. and, and, and, you know, I could have done that for sure. And it might've taken me 15 minutes,
[00:21:26] Ben: So, but this is your,
[00:21:27] Adam: in five minutes. Yeah.
[00:21:29] Ben: this is how is it doing it though? Is it, is it integrated into the, the page? Is it like a cursor kind of a thing or it's, it's the co pilot inside of visual studio code? Like what's
[00:21:41] Adam: Yeah, so I was using Copilot inside of VS Code. There's a couple of different modes you can use. One is more like chat, and it'll just answer you and suggest code in chat. The other is, I forget what they call it, but it's like an interactive editor. You're giving it permission to edit the files. and it gives it to you, like it makes changes.
[00:21:57] Adam: And then it looks very much like a diff, right? Any lines that are removed get a red background. Any lines that it adds get a green background. And there's like an accept or undo button. next to every change. and yeah, so like, you know, it's, for me, it's been great where it's like, okay, just, do this thing for me real quick.
[00:22:14] Adam: It's like having an assistant that, that understands what I mean. I don't have to spend 20 minutes teaching the assistant what I mean in order for it to do a five minute task. I can just be like, okay, go do this thing.
[00:22:24] Ben: Yeah, totally. And yeah, so that's, that, that's going to be something that I tried to underscore in my own thinking when I'm, when I'm dealing with it is, it's just being commanding it more than asking it, so to speak.
[00:22:38] Tim: couple good uses I saw this week. So for myself, I talked about, I created that red bubble, page for some stuff for the wild game party. And they require like a bio, you know, you have to like show that you're not a bot or whatever. So, but they want to like 500 characters on my bio. And I just went, so I went to Claude and I said,
[00:22:58] Adam: you used a bot to write
[00:23:00] Tim: Exactly.
[00:23:00] Tim: To prove, to prove I'm not a bot, as I generated a bio about Tim Cunningham loves to cook wild game and exotic animals, make it humorous and outrageous, like a Johnny Appleseed or Paul Bunyan tale. And it popped out, you know, and I just copied and pasted it. It was funny. It says, Tim Cunningham cooks wild game with a magical touch.
[00:23:17] Tim: His 40 pound meteorite skillet has prepared meals that wake hibernating bears and summon wildlife migrations. His spice collection spans seven continents, including a 12 year bloom. Cliff facing pepper, Tim once made buffalo chili so hot it melted snow for a quarter mile, and Sasquatches allegedly offer yearly tributes for his cooking lessons, dinner invitations to his cabin are priceless, where guests taste colors and hear flowers.
[00:23:46] Tim: I'm like, okay. that's
[00:23:47] Tim: pretty, that's pretty good. And then later the week I saw it. So one of our, people on our friends on discord here for, the podcast had created a encode help, put up a website that he'd created to do sort of, it's like a, what they call a bracket ranking where you have. The brackets where people play each other and the winner goes on.
[00:24:08] Tim: and he wanted us to test it. So I was just manually putting stuff in, but someone a lot smarter than me, Brian, AKA spiffy tech told Claude to basically create a playwright script. And so it creates a playwright script. It pops open a Chromium page for you and automatically just starts filling numbers in and that creates a, like basically a, a test case.
[00:24:27] Tim: I'm like, that is pretty cool. That's a good use for that to do some AI kind of QA testing. So. Yeah, but he had very spiced him because I tried to do it on my own and I couldn't really get it to work and I'm like, what was your prompt? And he gave it to me. It was, it was very specific, very concrete. Like we were saying to you, Ben, but, it, it worked well.
[00:24:47] Adam: hmm. I liked I so I read the I didn't read everything that I came up with but I definitely read the prompt and there Were some things that stood out about that to me so
[00:24:53] Tim: You talk about Brian's.
[00:24:55] Adam: Yeah hang on, let me go over there and pull it up because I want to, I want to make sure I'm being accurate in what I say here.
[00:25:01] Adam: so like, you know, he's saying, or I'll just read you the prompt. It says, minimal commands to init a Playwright project. No tests, just browser automation. TS, open a page, find all, input type equal number, class equal score dash input, fill in random value from 0 to 9 inclusive, do so by typing, not by changing the dot value.
[00:25:22] Ben: Super minimal instructions here, right? He didn't say, please use TypeScript. He just said T S period, new sentence. And like, that's, I really liked that. it's, it's almost, this is how we learned to Google search for a while. It's like, you know, if you, if you start your Google search with MDN and then your, and then your query. You know, chances are that the first result is going to be from the Mozilla developer network. And it's like, you just learn those tips over time.
[00:25:51] Ben: I mean, and, and I think this is, this is where abstractions, I think, start to fall down where we want to be conversational with something because it feels more human. But if you remember that it's just a machine and a statistical model under the hood. Then talking to it like a machine might actually yield better results.
[00:26:12] Adam: for sure.
[00:26:12] Ben: Alright, I have one more tiny triumph, which is that, I, over the weekend, me and the missus, we drove up to Albany to sit down and have Chinese food. And that's like an hour and ten minute drive each way. but we were just feeling super nostalgic. When I was a kid, I used to go to our local Chinese restaurant like every weekend and have a sit down meal with the fam.
[00:26:33] Ben: And I don't know if it's a regional thing, but sit down Chinese restaurants just don't seem to be a thing anymore in the Northeast. And I was just very excited to actually find one that's Not unreasonably far away if it's going to be kind of a fun lunch outing, but, I had a
[00:26:50] Tim: said hour and a half
[00:26:52] Ben: It was an hour and 15, like an hour and 10 minutes each way.
[00:26:55] Ben: It's, it's not, it's not awful. but it's, it's not, it's not, a pop over.
[00:27:00] Adam: Did okay. Well, here's the, here's what determines whether or not it was too far away. Did you have a dog sitter while you were
[00:27:06] Ben: Yes, I did.
[00:27:07] Adam: Okay, it
[00:27:07] Tim: Uh, yeah.
[00:27:11] Adam: Um, so you, you described going to a sit down Chinese restaurant. I agree. Like they just, it doesn't, it's not a thing that really exists that commonly anymore.
[00:27:20] Adam: All I can picture. Yeah. Yeah. But all I can picture is like National Lampoon's Christmas vacation where they go to the Chinese place and, get the, is it PF Chang's or, or no, they get a Peking duck.
[00:27:31] Adam: Um,
[00:27:31] Ben: I have no recollection of what you're talking about. I've seen that movie so many times.
[00:27:34] Tim: I thought that was, I thought, I thought that was Christmas story.
[00:27:37] Adam: is that what it is? Yeah,
[00:27:38] Tim: Where the, where, where the dogs eat. The, the dogs eat the Turkey and they have to go eat Chinese food and it still has the head on it. And they're, they're screaming. They cut it off. Yeah. Yeah. That, that was Christmas
[00:27:47] Tim: story. Yeah.
[00:27:48] Ben: okay. I've seen that, but not nearly as many times.
[00:27:50] Adam: got wires crossed.
[00:27:52] Ben: Which is funny because they have Japanese sit down restaurants, or I feel like are super common.
[00:27:57] Adam: Yeah There's a, there's a, I mean, this is super local, but I was in Swarthmore, PA, a couple of times a year, a couple of years back. and there's a Chinese restaurant I would go to all the time there. And it was a sit down, not a buffet, you know, just order off a menu and it was really good.
[00:28:14] Ben: Yeah, gotta bring it back. Gotta bring this stuff back. All right. That's it. Those are my triumphs.
[00:28:20] Tim: well, hold on. So, so I was going to say that I would think probably in your area, that probably should be so maybe you're just looking for the wrong thing. If you look for like a, cause you might not like this, but if a, a hot pot or shabu shabu style, style restaurant, there's a hot pot restaurant in China, you have to sit down, right?
[00:28:37] Tim: They can bring you a boiling pot of, of broth and you put different foods in it. And
[00:28:42] Ben: this is where you cook. Yeah. I've been to Korean places that are kind of like that.
[00:28:45] Tim: but that's like where you grill your own food. This
[00:28:47] Ben: No, no, no. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not there to work. I am there to eat.
[00:28:52] Tim: but I imagine they have like normal, like other food. You don't have to cook yourself if you don't want that.
[00:28:56] Tim: So I would imagine that'd be a sit down place
[00:28:58] Ben: Oh, I'll look it up.
[00:28:59] Adam: It's like, it's like a Japanese fondue, but instead
[00:29:03] Tim: or Chinese. Yeah,
[00:29:04] Tim: yeah,
[00:29:05] Tim: Hot pot. Those are fun.
[00:29:07] Ben: time.
[00:29:09] Adam: yeah, let's do it.
[00:29:10] Exploring the MVP for a Drop Zone App
[00:29:10] Adam: so this, this topic is, is sort of my idea. you know, I've talked on several recent episodes about this app that I've been working on. like everything else in my life, if I can make money from it, I probably am going to try to. Because I am broken and that is one of the many ways in which I am broken.
[00:29:26] Adam: So this is a, let me just go through like maybe the elevator pitch here, right? So small drop zones for years and years and years have managed this process basically on paper, right? My drop zone basically has a clipboard up on the wall with a piece of paper on it and it's got like boxes designated.
[00:29:41] Adam: So each box is a airplane lift and there's a certain number of slots in it. You can write your name in there and then that's how you organize and group yourselves into a load of jumpers. And then when it's your turn, then, then you get on the plane and you go, it's obviously way more complicated than that, but I'm, I'm simplifying as much as possible here.
[00:29:58] Adam: and my drop zone for a couple of years has wanted to digitize a little bit more like every now and then we have a larger event where it's just like that paper process is a little too cumbersome. for, for like one weekend or whatever, because we've got seven times as many people on site, right?
[00:30:15] Adam: We're doing a bigger plane than usual, more, more stuff going on. And it's just a pain in the butt. And also, you know, like as, as time passes, people just are starting to expect more digital interaction, right? They're, they're expecting an experience where they can just sign up on their phone sort of situation.
[00:30:32] Adam: and, and there's a bunch of other side benefits of making things digital too. But, that's the gist of it, right? And so I'm writing this application, and the motivation is to just make something that'll be useful for my drop zone. I am broken, I'm going to try to profit from this if I can. and so the idea is make it a SAS.
[00:30:49] Adam: and, basically, so it becomes then it's a multi tenant application, right? You have a drop zone signs up and they set up their drop zone. And then anybody like the jumpers can, it's, it's free to use for jumpers. You just, sign in, can sign up for a load and a bunch of other stuff there. and. That, that's basically it, right? The drop zone, I don't know if it'll just be like a monthly fee or like maybe a very low monthly fee to guarantee a minimum per month, but then also like potentially usage on top of that monthly fee. so if you're using a, using it a ton, you pay more. If you're not using it much, you pay very little sort of thing. So that's the idea for the application. And I've got the, so the, the motivation is help my drop zone out, maybe make some money. And then thirdly, and possibly most importantly of all of this is continue to hone my skills with SvelteKit, right? Like side projects for me tend to be a way to explore more deeply than I can on a one or two night basis, things that potentially could be useful for my career.
[00:31:48] Ben: So if I can interject for one moment, because. There's the, there's two types of side projects. There's the throwaway side project. Like I'm just going to build something strictly for myself or just for funsies. And I don't care if I ever ended up using it. And then there's a side project like this where it's, it's a side project, but yeah, I might want to make some money on it.
[00:32:07] Ben: And that has different constraints because it's one thing to throw away something that nobody uses. It's another thing to have to maintain something that now you have customers using. And I know when you were talking, I think this was last week, we were talking, we were talking about vibe coding and like just asking the AI to build something.
[00:32:28] Ben: And I, and I think this is that conversation where. I think, it kept trying to recommend super base or something like that as
[00:32:35] Ben: the backend
[00:32:35] Adam: but yeah.
[00:32:36] Ben: And, so, so then it becomes a question, like, do you want to build a SAS product that you have to maintain going forward as a way to learn super base or, you know, some new kind of data management system, or do you want to use.
[00:32:50] Ben: Postgres or whatever you happen to use an alumni queue, because it's not a part of the application. You want to have to think about it. You want to just worry about getting it done and maybe making some money.
[00:32:59] Adam: Yeah, and you're right, the, this is definitely not something that I am building with the intent of throwing it away, I'm trying to, that's part of, like, why I wanted to talk about MVP stuff, right? So, like, I'm building this thing, and if it doesn't work out, then I don't want to be so invested that it, like, breaks my heart.
[00:33:15] Adam: I want to, to have the, the willingness to throw it away. maybe a little sad. if, if, That is the path that it goes, then I think what I will still be glad about is that it gave me the opportunity to explore SvelteKit deeper, really, you know, get my, get, get my hands dirty with all the, the more nuanced and difficult parts of like the, the data modeling, and all that, you know, like the, the stuff that's not obvious from the, the five minute tutorial video that you see on YouTube or whatever, right?
[00:33:47] Adam: And so basically I see this train ahead of me on the tracks. It's coming at me. Um,and the, the train is that, like, I know myself. I know that the allure of building something is something I know how to do, right? I know how to sit on the couch and write code. And, and so as long as I can convince myself that that is a worthwhile way to spend my time, I probably will.
[00:34:14] Adam: And I'm not at that point yet, but I'm sure that it's not that far off that we'll come to the point where like, okay, it is time to stop coding, get some beta users. Get them in here and say like, what do you like about it? What don't you like about it? What would make it better? What would make it worth more to you in terms of like what you would pay for it?
[00:34:32] Adam: That sort of thing. And that's scary, right? To like put to stop coding and say, okay, this is maybe not done, but it's done enough. there's, there's very real emotional, like a wall there for me and to get past that, get over that wall or through it. it's not something I don't, it's something I don't think I've ever really done before.
[00:34:55] Adam: Like I've done side projects, but 99 percent of them are throwaway. Some of them, like Taffy started out that way and, and now like, yeah, it's got users and stuff, but I never had to sell it to anybody. Right. It's like, okay, it's on GitHub. Use it if you want. And, and that one was the one in a thousand things that I've done that actually managed to get some traction.
[00:35:13] Adam: Cool.I just wanted to talk about like. I'm using you guys as a support group, right? Like I, how do I, how do I get through that wall?
[00:35:20] Tim: Hi, my name is Adam.
[00:35:23] Ben: Let me, let me throw something out there because you have a, a drop zone that you go to regularly. It sounds like, right. Is there a way that you could have someone there buy in emotionally to the project without maybe having to pay for it? Like, could you get a someone who will help you create it in terms of helping you bounce ideas?
[00:35:46] Ben: Guide the product and then that way you, you have, I think you used the term years ago, accountability, you know, like get someone who has some skin in the game because they might want to use this product to help you guide it so that you are not just accountable to yourself, but you're accountable to them as well.
[00:36:03] Ben: Maybe that would be something to explore.
[00:36:05] Tim: That's good. I want to back up even like further out, right? So years ago, Constellation, they had a They brought in someone who worked for a company that was like, I think, ideate that anyway, they were like somehow related with Apple. And it was all about, it was all about MVPs. Basically they had a whole workshop on it.
[00:36:26] Tim: And one of the main things they said that you have to have first is a hypothesis.
[00:36:30] Adam: Okay.
[00:36:31] Tim: So the hypothesis basically is what you. specifically articulate that you think that you need to validate this hypothesis about your market or your solution.
[00:36:41] Adam: Okay.
[00:36:42] Tim: So you need to have a, so if you don't have a formal hypothesis, that's, and you don't have that clear written down, it's going to shift, right?
[00:36:50] Tim: One day it's going to be like, Oh, it's going to be the solve this problem or, Oh, it's about these people. No, it's not really about those people. Right? So you need to have a firm in your mind. Here's my hypothesis. I think. People in this type of market need a solution that does X because the worst thing you can do is just assume that just because you would really like an app and some, but someone else told you, Hey, I think that app would be cool.
[00:37:13] Tim: That that's the case. You might build the whole thing and then you get to like the drop zone manager. He's like, Oh no, we, we, you know, the clipboard is absolutely fine. You know what I mean? So have a hypothesis. I don't know what that is, but if you don't have one, it's maybe something you need to step back and think.
[00:37:29] Tim: That kind of helps build the framework for what is it that I'm trying to build. If it doesn't directly help support or deny that hypothesis, then maybe, maybe it's just me just feeling good writing something cool, feature wise.
[00:37:43] Adam: Yeah, for sure. I love that idea. I'm definitely going to spend some time to think about it, but just like, you know, off the cuff here, so like maybe my hypothesis could be drop zones that are currently doing the paper manifest would like to have it a more digital process and they're willing to pay.
[00:37:59] Adam: 5 a month for that.
[00:38:02] Ben: I like that.
[00:38:03] Tim: so you test that by, I mean, you don't even need to build anything to do that first. You just go into some drop zone people and said, Hey, if I had an app that did this, this, and this, it was digital, would you pay 5 a month for that? they're like, probably not.
[00:38:17] Identifying the Problem
[00:38:17] Tim: And he, you know, several people give you that feedback.
[00:38:19] Tim: You'd be like, well, okay. Well, you know, why
[00:38:22] Adam: right. Yeah. What's, what are some knobs we can tweak that would make it more
[00:38:27] Tim: it a pricing problem? Is it a logistics problem? Is it just, you don't have internet out here, wherever you're doing this drop zone. What's what's the, what's, what's the problem. And then that maybe helps you refine your hypothesis.
[00:38:39] Adam: right.
[00:38:39] Tim: But at least you didn't go down that whole road of building a bunch of stuff before you even
[00:38:43] Adam: Yeah, for sure. and the, absolutely. I think you're, you're definitely on to something there.
[00:38:49] Understanding Users
[00:38:49] Ben: the, the complexity with this type of a project is you have very different and I think very concrete personas. It's not just one person using the app. You have, you have the drop zone people who are using it in one very specific way. And then you have the jumpers who are using it in another way.
[00:39:06] Ben: And they're probably, you know, one is maybe much more likely to do it on a mobile device. One's likely to do it on a desktop device. And like. Is there anyone out in the field who has to know this kind of information? Like, I mean, I don't understand the mechanics of it all, but that's a, that's another part of the problem too, is, is not just what's easy for one people behind the desk, but what's easy for the other consumers as well.
[00:39:29] Adam: Right. Yeah. That's the other thing is like, so there is other software in this space and I guess part of my thinking is like to tear away or well, so some of my customers would be people who can't afford this other software, right? It is like, it's like the sales force of drop zone software. Like, obviously it's not as complicated as Salesforce itself, but it is the like big, you know, 800 pound gorilla in the room.
[00:39:56] Adam: It's got. A ton of different features. It is kind of expensive. And it's overkill for a lot of really small drop zones. So the thought is aim at that smaller drop zone where they definitely don't have the money to spend on software like that. and maybe, you know, 50 percent of them would just rather stay with paper because, you know, paper, there's a lot of problems that paper doesn't have, like you're talking about, you know.
[00:40:20] Adam: Potentially bad internet or whatever. yeah.
[00:40:22] Setting Realistic Goals
[00:40:22] Adam: And then, so the other side of this coin that I want to get to before I forget is like, I'm not trying to get this to a point where I can quit my job and like, live off of this app. I wouldn't, I wouldn't be mad if that happened. Right for sure because it would mean like this is like I could just maintain this app during the day and then go jump on The weekends or or you know evenings or whatever.
[00:40:41] Adam: That would be amazing I'm, not I wouldn't be mad about that, but i'm not aiming at that either Right, like for me the the whole money piece of it is like if it could cover my own jumping That would be awesome or even just like buy me a new helmet every other year. Like that would be great and and also help out my drop zone and so one of you guys mentioned, like, have somebody, that's willing to be my accountability buddy,so our, our current club president, it was kind of the one that kind of pushed me into this, right? So he, he knows I'm a computer programmer. I do
[00:41:10] Ben: okay. So you already have someone in your
[00:41:13] Adam: I do, and I think, I think that kind of paints actually a really good picture. I need to get this app to the point where it would be useful to him, right?
[00:41:20] Adam: So he can go in and like mock up a day, right? Like create some loads, put jumpers on them. and then like, once I get it to that point where he like, he could actually do something and see how this would be useful, then I can do like, if I'm, let's just hypothetically say, I'm working on it every night for an hour or two, then like at the end of the night, I can deploy my changes and send him an email.
[00:41:40] Adam: Like, okay, here's what changed today. And that way I'm having that like accountability buddy. Interaction. And I get an email back from him the next day or two days later. That's like, cool. You know, I really like this. Could you make that change? And this is dumb, useful, useless, whatever. Like take that back out.
[00:41:55] Adam: That would be awesome.
[00:41:57] Deployment and Technology Stack
[00:41:57] Ben: Have you thought about the actual deployment of this stuff? Like, do you, do you
[00:42:01] Adam: Oh yeah. It's already being deployed. This is, uh, uh,yeah. So. Part of, like, what got me excited about going down this road in the beginning is, like, the technology that I wanted to explore to make this happen, right? So, obviously, SvelteKit. Because, duh. And then, and then, I wanted to So, the other constraints that I put on myself is, I really don't want to spend A ton of money to, to test out the idea.
[00:42:27] Adam: I'm not afraid. Yeah. I'm not afraid to spend the money if it actually, like, if I start to get some customers and, and need to move up off of free tier things, but I, I definitely want to start as much as possible on free tier of everything. Right. So, I'm hosting it on Vercel, which is like Next. js and SvelteKit, sort of native ish hosting.
[00:42:47] Adam: and then, the database, I'm using a, a Postgres database. It's called Neon,
[00:42:53] Tim: our lord and
[00:42:53] Tim: savior.
[00:42:54] Adam: Yes.
[00:42:55] Ben: I've heard of it.
[00:42:56] Adam: and they have a free tier. I've got, I'm using Upstash for Redis. They have a free tier. And so, yes, like there's the puzzle pieces, but then also how they all click together was super interesting to me, right?
[00:43:06] Adam: So I've got it set up so that like, I, commit my code and I push it up to GitHub that triggers a build on Vercel, which creates a branch, well, for them, if I. Push to my main branch, then that's like a production deploy, right? And that, that builds that on the Vercel. If I am, if I do a branch in my get repo and push that up to get hub, then that also triggers a build on Vercel, but it creates a separate like preview site.
[00:43:32] Adam: So it's a branch of the website. It creates a branch of the database and any migration that's part of that branch gets run in that branch of the database. and so
[00:43:41] Adam: like, yeah, uh,
[00:43:43] Ben: Is this, uh, is,
[00:43:45] Tim: hold on, hold on, so I'll make a point here. So you made a good point. There's two things. You made a good point, but you also scared me the exact same time.
[00:43:53] Adam: okay.
[00:43:54] Tim: All right, so you didn't want to spend any money. That's good. Because with the MVP, your point is to try to validate your core hypothesis with minimal investment. And then you got super excited about all the, even though you're using free stuff, it's like, you can tell you're really excited about how you create this infrastructure and you're deploying is like how all the deployment works. It's like, I could tell that's, that's what gets your gears going. It's not just the fact that you're not shelling out money. Your time is, is an investment, right? So you got, it got affected that into, in
[00:44:27] Ben: why, that's why it's important to at the very minimum be practicing a skill that has transfer back to the day job. I mean, you use Svelte at work, at least in part. So if you can use Svelte in the newest ways in the site project. You know, all else fails, you still have stuff that you can probably pull back into work, which is, I think
[00:44:49] Tim: But I mean, he's taking time away from his
[00:44:51] Ben: a hundred percent, a hundred
[00:44:52] Tim: his, his, woodworking hobby and things like that. So you got to factor that into that's, that is an investment, even though it's, it might not be money out of your pocket.
[00:45:02] Adam: yeah, I mean, I would say the vast majority of the time that I've spent on this has been when I'm like doing the two screen thing in the evening, right, the kids are off doing their own thing between dinner and bed. Wife and I are sitting on the couch watching tv, and I'm either mostly focusing on the TV and a little bit on my laptop, or sometimes it's mostly focusing on my laptop, a little bit on the tv, but that's, that's where 90% and then like once, I think maybe there's only been one really.
[00:45:28] Adam: nearly full day, like I had a Saturday where, you know, the, the kids were out doing their own thing, the wife was out doing her own thing, I'm like all alone in the house like, well, okay, I'll do some woodworking for two hours and then I'll do website for another six hours.
[00:45:43] Measuring Impact and User Feedback
[00:45:43] Tim: So one of the things that we MVP workshop that we took, they talked about was about, and I thought this was, could kind of be considered extra, like the thing you wouldn't worry about, but about measuring its impact. So having a way to measure. The impact of your, so you're thinking, I think that for the minimum viable product, it has to have X feature, right?
[00:46:06] Tim: But X feature is quite involved. So you release maybe like an early version of it and you have a button, let's say it's some sort of reporting thing. You're like, I think that it really has to have this type of reporting, this kind of reports are going to be super important. So you have a section with button for reports and there's, you have this list of reports and they click on it to do them.
[00:46:26] Tim: But the only thing it does is goes, this feature is not available yet. And it logs
[00:46:31] Adam: Hmm.
[00:46:31] Tim: that they clicked it. Right.
[00:46:33] Adam: I like that.
[00:46:33] Tim: And so therefore, you know, you're like, okay, I have these, these different reports or whatever the feature is. And people, you know, barely ever clicked on it. Maybe it's not that important. Or it's like pretty much everyone who downloads this app, they go in, they click that thing, like within the first 10 minutes of playing with it.
[00:46:51] Tim: Right. So you're measuring, but you're not spending a whole lot of time building the thing. You're just promising that it will eventually be there, which is absolutely fine for a minimal viable product doesn't have to be fully featured fully working. it just needs to prove the hypothesis that, yeah, if I build this thing, I have to have this report because people, everyone who's downloaded it has clicked that button or ask for that, you know, trying to use that feature
[00:47:17] Adam: I like it.
[00:47:18] Ben: Does the, just to go back to the infrastructure for a second, I was just curious, does Vercell have a, like a neon integration so that you know that your data and your app are in the same data center kind of a thing.
[00:47:31] Adam: I don't know that it's that I'm pretty sure that Vercel is built on top of AWS. I'm pretty sure that neon is built on top of AWS, but it might be going out and back in, right, you know, out the left door
[00:47:41] Ben: Hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But not across the country or anything.
[00:47:45] Adam: Yeah. And, and, you know, load times have been pretty great so far. Anyway, I do, that's, that's one thing I did do, like, you know, I've made a data layer, you know, just a bunch of different services that have.
[00:47:57] Adam: Functions that query the database and being JavaScript. It was real easy to just like put console dot time at the start and console dot time end at the end of each of these methods. It's like, okay, you know, we're loading the jumper and it's jumper ID four. and it took, 18 milliseconds. Like, okay, cool.
[00:48:12] Ben: Nice.
[00:48:13] Adam: yeah. So I'm super happy with that. The other thing talking through this stuff with you guys, the other thing that's coming to mind is like, I should probably decide. What counts as successful enough to keep going, right? So like if I spend two months trying to get, beta users and I get enough to keep going.
[00:48:31] Adam: And then, when I'm trying to move out of the beta phase and like get initial paying customers, like I'll need, you know, X number of paying customers, or I'm just going to shut it down sort of thing.
[00:48:43] Ben: Yeah, that's a tough one. I mean,
[00:48:45] Community Engagement and Marketing
[00:48:45] Tim: and and some way to get, I mean, you know, your local community. Is there some way you can get your local community or, or how do you get it to other people outside your immediate reach? Right?
[00:48:57] Adam: The first thing that comes to mind is Reddit. So there's a skydiving subreddit and there's people from all over the country and all over the world there. And so, and I've had some discussions with people there in the past. I'm not much on Reddit anymore, but I've had some discussions in the past on their people in similar situations, small drop zones and asking, you know, what they do and they're like, yeah, you know, we still stick with the clipboard approach.
[00:49:18] Adam: But.
[00:49:19] Ben: and at what point in this journey is it the right time to design and 3d print a logo?
[00:49:25] Tim: heh. Mm
[00:49:26] Adam: Well, that's another thing, you know, I've got this like to do list of things that are like, okay, yeah, I definitely need to do that. And on that to do list is like to spend some time with AI, just be like, I got to come up with the right prompt, right? Like I need, I'll just have AI design a logo. Cause why not?
[00:49:40] Adam: Then I don't have to pay anybody again. You know, we're like, we're talking about keep it on the cheap for now. And then if I want to pay a real designer to do something better later than I can do that, but.
[00:49:50] Tim: Yeah. I did all the logos for our wild game thing in leonardo. ai that Sean recommended because that's how he created my testicle season sticker.
[00:49:59] Ben: Nice. When I was a kid, there were these little green figures. I think you get them in cereal boxes. Sometimes they're like little green army men, but some of them would have little parachutes attached to them. You throw them up in the air and they would parachute down.
[00:50:14] Ben: And I feel like there's gotta be an angle there.
[00:50:16] Ben: Could you get some sort of like 3d printed logo that has a parachute attached to it that you could throw up in the air and maybe I'm just enjoying that visual.
[00:50:26] Tim: Yeah, I
[00:50:26] Adam: was just thinking about that. Like, have a design that looks like, you know, a little green army dude under a little plastic parachute. That'd be funny.
[00:50:35] Adam: I have. So, as a joke, we had a Christmas party, our drop zone, and, one of the guys there like was giving away those, that toy, right? A parachute with a little guy hanging under it, but it was Santa was the thing underneath, right? Yeah. Okay. And I have two or three of these things that I managed to snag while I was there, and I've been waiting.
[00:50:53] Adam: I still have them, and I keep them in my gear. So like, waiting for the right opportunity where the wind is just right, you know, it's a nice light day, but like, coming from the right direction. Where I can like, drop it when I know I'm like, a hundred feet above the drop zone. And I try to aim it so it like, lands in the packing area, and nobody knows who dropped it.
[00:51:10] Ben: I love it. And
[00:51:11] Adam: We'll see, maybe one day,
[00:51:14] Ben: how are you, how does Vercel run locally when you're doing your development, is there like a CLI that runs a mock Vercel environment or something?
[00:51:23] Adam: I don't know if they have anything like that. I just run it as like, you know, NPM run start and it starts like SvelteKit has a, as like a local, development, you know, stand it up and run an application. It just gives you like, okay, it's running on localhost 45173 or whatever.
[00:51:39] Ben: Gotcha. So I don't know that much about for sale, but it doesn't, does it do like that, like file based routing stuff, or I
[00:51:46] Ben: don't
[00:51:47] Adam: Vercel is a, it's like a Netlify or, an AWS S3 sort of thing. It's like,
[00:51:53] Adam: it's just a
[00:51:53] Ben: they'll run a build and they'll put it somewhere.
[00:51:55] Adam: SvelteKit is like what's, so there's Svelte, which is like the, the component framework and SvelteKit is basically like a routing engine and some extra goodies that make it even better plus Svelte, to, to build like a whole, they call it a meta framework, right?
[00:52:12] Adam: Where like React is the, the component framework and Next. js is the meta framework.
[00:52:16] Ben: Right. That's cool.
[00:52:19] Adam: yeah, so SvelteKit, I, you know, I can just stand that up locally.
[00:52:22] Ben: Okay. I didn't know if Vercel itself had a magic sauce, like next JS.
[00:52:27] Adam: I wouldn't be surprised, they have everything else. They have a ton of money. So they, they, you know, if there's an interesting opportunity to explore, they're probably exploring it.
[00:52:36] Final Thoughts and Next Steps
[00:52:36] Ben: Well, this is very exciting.
[00:52:39] Adam: This has been helpful. I really appreciate it.and, and again, I still think even though you guys have helped me, you know, think, make things a little bit more concrete, the hard part is just going to be getting over the emotional part of like,
[00:52:49] Tim: Mm hmm.
[00:52:50] Adam: what it is, honestly, I think it's, it's going to come down to.
[00:52:54] Adam: That's where I could potentially fail. Right? Like it could, it could just be like, like everybody's like, nah, we'll stick with the clipboard and the paper. We're good. Thanks. And that would, part of that would suck for me.
[00:53:07] Adam: I just have to get over that emotion and just do it. And, and I think you're absolutely right.
[00:53:11] Adam: Like the sooner I get to that point, the better and that like, you know, minimal amount of time to get from here to there. So I really need to focus on like just the bits of like running manifest and people signing themselves up for manifest.
[00:53:26] Ben: Well, the, the guy that you said has sort of convinced you to, or was like the first person to talk you into doing this. I mean, is, does he have information? I mean, cause this is something that you could ask him like, Hey, like have him do the, what is it? Like the, like the steel man argument or whatever, where you could say like, why wouldn't people do this?
[00:53:43] Ben: Like, why, like, why would, why shouldn't people just stay with their clipboard? Like help me destroy my own idea so that I can come back and make it better.
[00:53:52] Adam: That's an, I can probably ask him to do that. Yeah. I mean, he's our club president and he's a friend of mine. I'm on the board of the club as well. So, you know, like I'm, it puts me in a little bit of a conflict of interest situation. I think like if it, if it, if it does come to that point where like I am selling software to my own drop zone, I'll probably recuse myself from the board or just not run for reelection.
[00:54:13] Adam: Do you not know what country we live in that is, that's like, that's not even a thing anymore.
[00:54:18] Tim: Yeah.
[00:54:19] Adam: just because my president doesn't have any morals or ethics doesn't mean that I don't,
[00:54:23] Adam: um, you feel there's a conflict, you recuse yourself. Just say that. That's all you have to do.
[00:54:28] Adam: Yeah, where while I wear my dark mega hat anyway, yeah, so, yeah but i'll probably i'm definitely gonna look into the steel man argument thing and I will probably be bugging you guys even more for for more tips and help along the way But thank you for your your input here. This has been really great
[00:54:45] Ben: Heck yeah.
[00:54:46] Tim: pretty sure our listeners will have some good advice for you on the discords.
[00:54:50] Adam: Which if they do, they can go to workingcode.dev/discord,
[00:54:53] Tim: There
[00:54:53] Adam: uh, and, and come hang out. I honestly, the thing that I love about our discord is that it's so active,
[00:54:58] Adam: right? Like it's more active than the syntax FM discord, which is great. I'm
[00:55:04] Tim: We, we found, we found our people.
[00:55:07] Adam: for sure.
[00:55:08] Patreon
[00:55:08] Adam: Alright, well then, this episode of Working Code was brought to you by therapy, the thing that's probably going to help me get over my emotions and talk to people, and listeners like you. If you're enjoying the show and you want to make sure that we can keep putting more of whatever this is out into the universe, then you should consider supporting us on Patreon.
[00:55:23] Adam: Our patrons cover our recording, editing, and transcription costs. And we couldn't do this every week without them. Special thanks to our top patrons, Monte and Giancarlo. You guys rock. I'm going to break from the script here because there was some stuff that I wrote down, to talk about at the top of the show that we totally glossed past.
[00:55:38] Adam: So I'm gonna, I'm gonna jump back in time here. one quick pro I'll save the second one for, for later. But a quick programming note since it's specific about, Patreon. if you are a patron of the show and you listen to the after show The way that you obtain the early access and after show episodes is going to be changing soon.
[00:55:56] Adam: we're currently using a product called ACAST to host that private podcast feed. Apparently that's going away. I just got an email about it yesterday. I tried to like go through their migration process. It didn't really work yet. Talking with support. I think we have like a month or maybe a month and a half to get it worked out.
[00:56:12] Adam: Actually, I think that was like the end of May. So we have, we have some time, but really the news here is stuff's going to change. Keep paying attention. we'll be trying to get in touch with you one way or another, just to make sure everybody's continues to get their, their episodes. And of course we'll continue to talk about it, on the after show.
[00:56:28] Adam: And as things become finalized, but there's your news update. Anyway, I mentioned the after show.
[00:56:33] Thanks For Listening!
[00:56:33] Adam: What are we gonna talk about on the after show? I'm gonna ask, Tim, what it's like to sous vide something for two days. I, you know, like, look, well, I'm not gonna get into it now, but I got, I have questions.
[00:56:42] Adam: so, there's that. but basically after show is, we're just gonna keep the mics on after the outro plays, and keep talking about stuff. and
[00:56:50] Tim: hot mic, if you will.
[00:56:54] Adam: like, it just came out of a two day long sous vide bath. Um,and, and yeah, that's what that is. If you want to get access to that and, and early access to new episodes as they're done being recorded and edited, then the way to do that is to go to patreon.com/workingcodepod, throw a few dollars our way.
[00:57:10] Adam: I think the minimum is 4 a month. So that's like, you know, less than you spend on coffee per week probably. and, we would really appreciate it. that's going to do it for us this week. . We'll catch you again next week. And until then,
[00:57:22] Tim: Hey, we may have a conflict of interest, but we're certain your heart matters.
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