FounderQuest

Show Notes:Links:DitheringStratecheryPromised LandShape UpNational TreasureFull Transcript:Ben:I was looking through our accounts this morning and just doing some database checking and looking at some accounts that had been in our database for like seven years. Like, "Oh yeah. I remember them." And they're like old friends basically. It's like, "Oh, the memories."Josh:Memories.Starr:Yeah. That's funny. Last week I remember, it just hit me in the middle of the week, I was making jokes about our customers and like squeezing blood from turnips. And I just feel like I should point out that those were jokes, specifically because it's kind of absurd that we would do that because we treat our customers maybe too well, I don't know. But I realized not everybody might know me personally and realize I'm joking.Josh:There are those who will too, yeah.Starr:Yeah, yeah. And they go on to run private equity firms.Josh:Right? My thoughts exactly.Ben:Oh dear.Josh:We won't say who.Ben:No names.Starr:Well, we'll name names for our Patreon supporters. They'll get the special feed where we just like dish on everybody.Ben:This is where we announce we're setting up our Patreon for a minimum contribution of $1000 a month.Josh:That's genius.Starr:Oh, my God. Can you imagine? That would be amazing, like all the secret insider backroom knowledge. We have enough to fill up about like 10 minutes of a show.Ben:Well, it could be the FounderQuest extended edition. Right? So in the normal edition we just cover the percentages, but in the extended edition you have real numbers, right?Starr:Oh, there you go.Josh:That's amazing, actually. Yeah. Yeah. I like that.Ben:Yeah. So I don't know if you know of Ben Thompson, he writes Stratechery. It's fantastic.Starr:Wait, say that again?Ben:Stratechery by Ben Thompson.Josh:I was just listening to the daily update today. Catching up on daily updates.Ben:So he started a paid newsletter back before paid newsletters were cool, fantastic writer, good stuff. Talks about tech and legal and all kinds of fun things that we care about. And he and Gruber of Daring Fireball fame recently started a paid podcast. Recently, I mean, it's been a few months, several months now, but it's still kind of new to me. So I subscribed to that as well, and I love their format. It's 15 minutes, no more, no less, three times a week. And they just talk about the stuff that's currently going on, the same kinds of things that you would find at Gruber's site or at Thompson's site. So tech and legal and society and stuff.Josh:Current events.Ben:Yeah. Paid podcasts, man, that's where it's at.Josh:Yeah. It's awesome. Yeah. They basically like just set a timer and then at the end of when it starts to run out, they play this little time running out stopwatch thing and then it just cuts it off. They have to wrap it up or I think it cuts them off mid sentence.Ben:Yeah. They have some tight editing going on.Josh:They're pretty good.Ben:It's fun.Starr:How much does it cost? I'm curious.Josh:$5 a month, I think.Ben:Yeah. I pay annually, so I don't even remember.Starr:Okay, so it's not like a luxury exclusive type product.Josh:No.Ben:It's not super premium like FounderQuest extended edition.Starr:Exactly.Josh:I imagine with their audience, $5 a month adds up.Ben:Yeah, I imagine it does.Starr:Yeah. But ours is SOC 2 compliant.Ben:Right, right. We've got compliance on our side.Josh:The other thing I found interesting about their format or about how they sell it is that they also bundle, like Ben for instance with Stratechery, you can buy Dithering with your Stratechery subscription. And I think it gives you maybe a bundle discount or something slight. And I don't know if Gruber does the same thing or what, but I think...Starr:Dithering? Is that the name of the...Josh:Yeah, Dithering is the name of the podcast.Starr:Oh, okay. I thought you meant like image dithering. I was really confused there for a second.Josh:Yeah. I guess it would help if we told people what the name is. But I thought that was interesting. So you can buy it through their, I don't know what their website is. Just search Dithering. But yeah, you can subscribe there or you can subscribe to both.Ben:Yeah. I have the bundle and it's so worth it. If you're into tech and you're into modern antitrust and things like that, it's totally worth it.Josh:Yeah. Tech and society.Ben:Yep.Josh:We should get him on the pod.Ben:Yeah. That'd be cool. Actually, it was kind of...Josh:That's what the kids say these days.Starr:You know who we should get on this podcast? I've been saying we should get this person on forever. Barack Hussein Obama.Ben:Oh, speaking of, I've been reading his book, his latest book.Starr:Yeah?Ben:That is an excellent book. You should definitely check it out.Starr:What's it called again?Ben:I don't know. I just read it. I don't look at the cover. But it's great. The writing is just top-notch, the man is a genius. Not that I know him or he owes me any favors or anything, it

Show Notes:Links:How Cheap a Product Can You Have And Still Have Salespeople?Profitwell Retain New RelicFull Transcript:Starr:Okay, so you are listening to FounderQuest. We're a bunch of founders, we're on a quest. Thank you for listening, we are back after a rather long absence. Basically, people were gone different days during the holidays, and it was just a weird scheduling situation, so we just decided to take, I guess, two months off? A month and a half?Ben:Something like that.Starr:Something like that, yeah.Josh:A little more than we normally do at Christmas.Starr:Yeah, a little bit more, but I've got to say, I feel a little bit refreshed, I'm ready to talk into a microphone again, I missed talking to y'all.Ben:Likewise.Josh:Yeah, same. I also missed the routine of just having this call every week.Ben:Yeah, and our listeners missed us. I had people reaching out to me saying, "Hey, is the podcast coming back?"Josh:Nice, well that's a good sign.Ben:Yeah.Starr:I know, that's so sweet. You've got to get all your business tips in before it's just a bloodbath. You've got to prepare for the anarcho-capitalist future.Josh:Well there's some hope on the horizon, right?Ben:Of course. Well I've got to say, I'm having a great day so far. I was able to upgrade one of our repositories from Tailwind 1 to Tailwind 2 without any snags or hiccups whatsoever. I'm pretty excited.Josh:Wow.Starr:Oh, nice.Josh:Nice Ben.Ben:It's not every day an upgrade goes off without a hitch.Josh:Yeah, for sure.Ben:It's kind of compensation, I think, from the universe, for how badly the upgrade that I'm trying to do with our Elasticsearch cluster is going. Because upgrading from Elasticsearch 6 to 7 apparently is not in the cards for me, so yin and yang.Josh:Yeah.Starr:Well that's a shame. So what are we actually talking about today? It took everything we had just to make it here at 10 am on a Friday together. I don't know if anybody had the energy to think beyond that, so...Josh:Yeah, I think that's a fair assumption.Ben:Well actually I had a thought on something that we could talk about, something that's been kind of on my mind for the past few days, and that is perhaps a slight recap of 2020. Because as I took the break, I was thinking goals for 2021, and things I wanted to see, and looking back at 2020, and looking at some numbers. And to be honest, I'm kind of disappointed with how 2020 went from our business standpoint. The growth was not great. We had growth, but it was definitely off from previous years. And obviously coronavirus was a factor no doubt, we saw our revenue take a hit in March-April. So there's that, but still, it just feels kind of eh to have the worst growth year... I don't know if it's the worst, I don't know, I'll have to go back and check previous years I guess. But it was not a fantastic growth year, and I'm just like, eh, what can I do during 2021 to make that a different story? So that's been on my mind.Josh:Yeah, I think I was telling you the other day, I've had the feeling that it just felt like a stagnant year, just in general. And I know a lot of that is because just of the conditions, and things that were out of our control. But then also, you can only sit and stare at the news for so many years in a row before we get back to work. We did a lot of work last year. Thinking back we did do a lot of work, but I also feel like... I don't know, I'm just looking forward to doing some new stuff, and getting back to innovating.Starr:Yeah. Well first of all, I have to say that it's not nothing. I also looked at our growth numbers, and it's not nothing that we grew, we had growth. We are making more money now in the midst of a global pandemic than we were when it started, so that's definitely something. That's definitely a blessing. Maybe we wish it was more, but it's still there. Ben:Yeah, I agree. Having some growth is certainly a blessing. We had customers, and obviously in the news there are a bunch of businesses going out of business, and they have nothing now.Josh:We have nothing to complain about.Ben:Yeah, for sure. I guess I was thinking of it in terms of... As being three developers who started this business, three technical people, it's always been a weakness of ours on the growth side, the getting customers in the door kind of side. Yeah, we've done some things, and we've stumbled on the way, but we're not experts. We're not sales experts, we're not marketing experts, we're just doing the best we can. And that's been great for us, we've got a nice comfortable business, things are good, growth has been good every year. But as I was thinking of these things and I was thinking about, well, growth last year wasn't great. And yes, there were extenuating circumstances, but looking forward, what can I do that's different than I've done in the past, right?Ben:So one of the things that I've been thinking about... I'm not a huge fan of New Year's resolutions, but I am a big fan of goals. Not that you need a new yea

Show notes:Links:Rollerblade Chair WheelsKung Fu PandaThe Emperor’s New GrooveJustin Jackson"The Fear" - Build Your SaaS podcastWrite For HoneybadgerFounderQuest TwitterFull transcript:Ben:So, I just moved back into my office after being away for six months, because COVID.Starr:I see that.Ben:And in the meantime, though, I had all my stuff at home. So I had my podcast setup, I had my monitor, my chair, everything. And while I was at home, I bought these new roller wheels for my chair, you know the ones that look like a roller blade wheels?Starr:The ball bearing ones.Ben:Yeah, yeah, yeah. And at home I have a normal carpet. It's not shag, it's just standard carpet. But here I have those plastic things you put down so you can roll easier.Starr:Yeah.Ben:And so at home I didn't really notice much difference on those wheels on my carpet, but here it's really slippery, so now I'm sliding back, and forth, and all around. It's kind of fun.Josh:Nice.Ben:So, if you want something to entertain yourself, get some of those roller blade wheels for your chair, and then make sure you're on a smooth surface. It's hilarious.Josh:Yeah, yeah that's still on my list. I totally want to do that. I mean, I have wheels on my chair now, but it would just be a smoother ride. I feel like I could do some... Have some fun with that.Starr:What are you doing? Are you riding in your chairs? What are you doing in your chairs?Josh:Oh yeah. You don't like-Ben:You got to do something while you're running all those tests.Starr:Yeah.Josh:Just you can do spins, and...Starr:Y'all must have much more space than I do.Josh:Bounce off the walls.Ben:Next month I'm going to install a half pipe.Josh:All right.Starr:Well, now I'm only moving my chair around and I'm wondering is it moving easy enough? Do I need a smoother action on that?Josh:You need a performance chair. That's right.Starr:All right, well before we get started I should make a little announcement. This will be our last episode for a little while. I know I just scared y'all.Josh:Yeah, are you trying to-Ben:That's scary.Josh:... put people on edge?Starr:Yeah, for a little while, because, yeah, a bunch of us have leave coming up, and it's just going to be impossible to make it all work. Yeah, and we don't record podcasts while we're on vacation, because that's just, that's bad.Josh:And breaks are nice.Starr:Breaks are important, yeah.Josh:It's good to take a break.Josh:Yeah.Starr:It'll let our listeners not be tired of us anymore. They'll forget all the things we repeat all the time.Josh:Yeah, yeah. I was going to say, yeah, when we come back you'll have forgotten everything we say, and we'll just start from the beginning.Starr:Yeah.Josh:I think our plan is to come back with some fresh topics, and-Starr:Some fresh topics-Josh:... fresh attitudes.Starr:Oh, really? Okay, well.Josh:We'll see. We'll see how the election goes.Ben:That's one of the benefits of going on vacation, right? Is get that fresh attitude.Josh:Well, I think we'll see. This will be after November 4th, or whatever.Ben:Right.Josh:It's 4th, right? Yeah so, we'll see how our attitudes are.Starr:That's not the reason for this little break.Josh:No.Starr:But it is a benefit that we just don't have to be on the record.Josh:Yeah, listening to own cynicism in 10 years.Starr:Yeah, live covering this terrible last month.Ben:So awful.Ben:Can I just chip in on that for a second.Josh:Get it in now.Ben:We've tried to avoid being overtly political and stuff, but that made me think again about the stay in your lane comment, that some people like to throw at other people. Like, "Oh, you're a tech guy you should stay in your lane." We talked about this before, but that's just hogwash. We're all people, right? And we all have opinions, and we should all be able to share them in ways that are helpful, and ways that are critical, but ways that are always kind. I don't know. I don't buy this whole stay in your lane, you should only talk about X thing. I think we all have opinions about stuff, and we should feel free to share them.Starr:For that to be true it's like the sum of your humanity would be tech guy, which would be pretty sad.Ben:It would be.Starr:Right?Josh:Yeah.Starr:It's like all of us are more than tech person. Anyway...Ben:Agreed.Josh:Mm-hmm (affirmative)Ben:Agreed. Sorry, soapbox.Josh:Well, I think what we're saying is vote. Please vote.Ben:Please vote.Starr:There you go. Yeah.Josh:I mean, we got to get it in, get our-Ben:Yes.Starr:We're all just terrified.Josh:We're just doing our part.Starr:We're literally spending the next, I don't know, six weeks just in our closets. Okay, well. So we just did our Q... What is this? Q4? Q4 Conclave?Ben:Mm-hmm (affirmative)Josh:Yeah. Final of the year.Starr:Yeah, normally, in normal times, we get together in an undisclosed location in a meeting room called the bunker. I'm being serious. And we have a big long all day meeting, in which we hash out what's going to happen with Honeybadger for the next q

Show notes:Links:CameoSarah CooperStiumulusReflex VideoJumpstart Whirly BoardFull Transcript:Ben:So we had a bit of an interesting COVID related thing in our household, so we have this grocery store that we love near us, it's called Haggen, it's a Northwest brand. So a lot of our listeners won't be familiar with it, but we love this place, it's a great little grocery store. My wife, who typically does the grocery shopping, hasn't been there in forever, because like, "I can just get stuff from Amazon Fresh." So we've been doing that, but finally, Amazon Fresh started running out of some of the things that we really want. So I think today was the first time in weeks, many, many weeks, that we've actually ventured out to the grocery store.Josh:Exciting.Starr:You went inside the grocery store?Ben:Inside the grocery store, yeah.Starr:Oh, my gosh.Ben:Just like the good old days.Starr:So you just love taking life in your own hands like that.Josh:I never took you for an adventurer.Starr:We're still doing the order online and then pick up outside the store thing.Ben:Yeah? I went and did a pick up for some teriyaki the other night, and there were actually people dining inside. It's like, "What? That's a thing?"Starr:I can't believe that. Florida just opened 100%, so I don't even know. I don't even know what's happening. So I did a little research over the weekend, like normally we record this podcast on Fridays, but we moved it to Monday, because I had a thing. So I had some time, I did a little research over the weekend, and I'm pretty sure that if we are willing to move the legal entity of Honeybadger Industries Incorporated, we can all move to Canada.Ben:Oh, yeah. I read something about that.Starr:Yeah, yeah. Get in on some of that sanity.Josh:Does Stripe have, like Stripe Atlas for moving your business out of the country?Ben:Great idea.Josh:Because it's a freebie.Starr:There you go.Ben:We should relocate the headquarters to Vernon, BC, then we can hang out with Justin.Starr:Oh, of course.Josh:There you go.Starr:Another place I know that does this is Scotland. I'm pretty sure that actually if you move a whole company, you can go anywhere you want.Josh:We've just got to get everyone, everyone has to be on board.Starr:Yeah, just like, "Yes, bring all your ..." Hire local people.Ben:Scotland versus Canada, that's a tossup, that's a hard one.Starr:Canada's a lot closer, it would be significantly less disruptive. Just mosey on over to Victoria or Vancouver.Ben:It would be kind of hard to drive that U-Haul over to Scotland.Starr:Yeah, that's true. But you get to hang out with Nessie, and that's always a bonus.Ben:Yeah, my kids are like, "Yeah, so when are we moving?" I'm like, "Well, first they have to let us in, then we can talk about the practicality of moving to Canada."Josh:Is that the bigger hurdle here?Starr:There you go, yeah. You can be like, "I've got a business. I have skills." What are you doing? Why are they going to let you in? You've got to prove your own worth.Ben:I did mention that, I'm like, "By the way, I'm the only person in this family that has a passport, so I can go, but what are you going to do?" Speaking of traveling though, we talked last time about the conference that I was going to, the Business of Software Conference, and that happened last week. It was the one that originally going to be in Boston, because that's where they hold it every year. I've got to say, while I loved the conference, it was great, even online, I did miss going to Boston. I've realized that I actually enjoy putting myself on a plane for six hours and having that trip.Josh:Yeah, it's nice to get out.Ben:It is. I miss traveling, I miss leaving.Josh:Can you imagine what the next time that we do go to a conference, how great that's going to be? Hopefully, hopefully it's good. I think for us, we probably will wait until we're sure it's not going to be a train wreck.Starr:I'm just going to bring my moon suit with my ... It's just a completely contained bubble and I just walk around inside.Ben:Yeah, I'm surprised that industry hasn't taken off in the past few months. Personal suits.Starr:Are those big transparent plastic balls that you just inflate with air and then you roll around?Josh:That would just be fun too.Starr:I haven't seen any of those.Josh:That's not a hard sell.Starr:I did see a guy with a beekeeper's mask on, like a beekeeper's helmet on. Beekeeper's helmets look weird, they look fedora-y, like milady. They look kind of milady-ish. It's this weird milady hat and then screen stuff coming down. I don't think that works, I don't think that works like you think it does, guy. The coronavirus is much smaller than a bee.Josh:He was wearing the screen too?Starr:Yeah, yeah. No, it was clearly a PPE measure just walking down the street.Ben:Those bees that carry that virus, they can't get through.Josh:That's true.Ben:So the big bubble thing though, Josh, reminded me of your whirly board or whatever it's called. How is that

Show notes:Links:The B-52's - RoamThe Intelligent Investor - Benjamin GrahamRoam ResearchTiddlyWikiArt of The Product Podcast - Networking ThoughtsScrivenerJosh's BlogWrite for HoneybadgerFull transcript:Ben:So I had the first session of a conference that's happening online next week. It's the Business of Software conference.Josh:Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mm-hmm (affirmative).Ben:And it's happening Monday through Wednesday. But on Wednesday this week, they had the replacement for the meet and greet, the night before kind of thing where you just go and socialize, and meet other people that are at the conference. And it was of course, it's all online this time, it's not in Boston where it has been in past years.Josh:Mm-hmm (affirmative).Ben:And so, the meet and greet was done on Zoom. And I was skeptical this was going to work out very well because big Zoom meetings, they're just not good. No one ever talks because everyone's afraid to talk over somebody else. But actually, it turned out really, really well. They did breakout rooms. So, they had at first everyone together, it was 50 people or whatever. And then, they did breakout rooms of five people, so you could actually just meet a couple of people at a time. And that was just great, and did a couple rounds of that. So, it really was the best ever type of meeting for conference like that. It's much better than yelling at people in a bar.Josh:Yeah. Well, you and I have always talked about the mixer events that they throw where the night progressively gets louder, and you eventually lose your voice.Ben:Right? Yep.Josh:Yeah. That's cool.Starr:And I mean, half the work for me in those events is creating my own breakout group anyway because the only way you actually get to talk to people is if you wrangle five or six people and get them away from the DJ, and just have a conversation with them.Josh:So, this does the work for you.Ben:Yep.Starr:Yeah.Josh:So, did you... How did they organize the breakout rooms? Was it in Slack or something, or did they have a list of them that you joined?Ben:No, Zoom apparently has this feature called Zoom Rooms.Josh:Oh.Ben:And you can just randomly assign segments of people into rooms.Josh:Oh, okay.Ben:And so, you just switch from main group-Josh:You hit a button?Ben:Yep. Yep.Josh:Huh.Ben:And in fact, you don't even... I didn't have to push a button. Whoever was running the show, pushed a button and all of a sudden, now I'm in a smaller room.Josh:Wow. That's cool.Ben:Yeah, it's pretty cool.Starr:Did they have moderation inside the breakout rooms, or was it a free for all in that small group?Ben:So, Mark who was running the show, he gave us some instructions for splitting off into the rooms. So, he wanted each of us to introduce ourselves, and come up with a question. And then, basically, once we got into the rooms it was like, "Okay. Go. Figure it out." And the first round was... Didn't work all that smoothly because no one knows what's going on, right? But then, we came back from that, we chatted a little bit about how it went, and so we came up with some new parameters like, "Okay, you should probably take just two minutes." Rather than the whole time because it was only a five minute window. So, the second round went a little bit better, smoother. But yeah, so there wasn't moderation. There was just like, "Hey, here's what you should go do. Go do that." And then, they corrected a little bit after there was some confusion. But yeah, it worked out really well.Josh:Nice. Were you already planning to go Business of Software before the pandemic, and they switched it?Ben:Yes. Yep.Josh:Okay.Ben:Yeah. So, I haven't signed up for any online conferences since the pandemic started because I just thought that they wouldn't be all that great.Josh:Yeah.Ben:But yeah, this one I had signed up for before. I even had the tickets purchased. And so, that's a thing where now I have a credit rather than a refund, and that kind of gets me.Josh:Right. They didn't refund any of the purchase price, I assume? They just switched it to online?Ben:Yep. Yep. That's right.Josh:Okay. Yeah, that's a pricey virtual event.Ben:It is a pricey event.Josh:Ben. Knowing... Yeah, if it's past rates.Ben:Yeah, it's the same as past rates. So, it is kind of a pricey conference. It's in the upper end of the ones we typically attend.Josh:Yeah.Ben:But it's a great conference to attend. If you're an entrepreneur, if you are involved with software in any shape or form, as a product manager, or as an engineering manager, it's a great conference to go to really take a break from your business, and hear from some great thought leaders, and get some good ideas. Each time, I've come... I've done this twice before I think, and each time I've come back with ideas for how to make Honeybadger better, and I think it's been really good. Really worth the investment.Josh:Yeah. The other attendees are like us I would assume too. Do most of them have established businesses, or are there a lot of

Show notes:Links:San Francisco Looking Like Blade RunnerThe Federalist: A Commentary on the Constitution of the United States Major Problems in the Era of the American Revolution, 1760-1791The Radicalism of the American RevolutionA People's History of the United StatesHitler: 1889-1936 HubrisThe DispossessedI, RobotThe Murderbot DiariesFoundationThe Unicorn ProjectOpen Yale Courses - The American RevolutionMy Brilliant FriendBona Fide MasksFull transcription:Starr:I got to tell you guys, this was just... I don't know. This makes up for the rest of 2020 for me personally but when I took all this equipment that I had bought for the fiber optic link between my house and the new office, and I hooked it up to the cable that had been buried by electricians who didn't really know what they were doing. Regarding fiber. And I hooked everything up. It just all worked the first time.Josh:Wow.Ben:Wow.Starr:That was the most... This is the most amazing thing. I think that's what I need to get me through the rest of this year.Josh:For real.Starr:I'm just going to think back to that golden moment.Josh:Yeah. I still can't get anything but Comcast here and on top of that, we can barely breathe now because of the smoke outside.Starr:Oh yeah. I see the window behind you. It looks kind of apocalyptic.Josh:Can you see that?Starr:I can see it, yeah.Josh:It is daytime right now.Starr:I know. I know.Josh:It is so dark.Starr:Oh my gosh.Ben:I read that yesterday, it was so bad in San Francisco that the birds didn't even realize it was daytime.Starr:Really?Ben:Yep.Starr:Well, poor birds.Josh:Yeah, none of the roosters are crowing either.Starr:Yeah. I've just got to say though, Coit Tower in San Francisco was made for these apocalyptic red sky pictures. It's that really pointy tower.Josh:Yeah. Did you see the drone footage that someone did with the... Was it Blade Runner?Ben:Uh-huh.Josh:Yeah, the soundtrack.Ben:Yep.Starr:Oh, I need to find that.Ben:The air quality's been frustrating for me this week because I got my new kayak, and I was on vacation. I was like, "Yes, I'm going to paddle everyday all day long." And no. I did not paddle everyday all day long.Starr:Oh, that's frustrating.Josh:Yeah. Well, I was thinking about you this week. How is it up there anyway? Because I was like, if you all are dealing with any of the stuff that we have done here, I wouldn't want to be out on a river right now.Ben:Yeah. Well, earlier in the week, we were getting Easterly winds. So, we were getting smoke from the fires in Eastern Washington. And so, our air quality index was hovering in the low 100s. So, 100 to 120-ish in my neck of the woods. And then, as of last night, now we're getting Southernly winds, so now we're getting the California, and Oregon smoke. So, now it's gone up... I think we're around the 200ish neighborhood. So, everyday I was hoping the next day would be a little bit better and everyday, it wasn't. So, finally on Thursday I'm like, "I'm just going." So, I just went and luckily, I didn't get overwhelmed by all the smoke. I was able to successfully complete the maiden voyage of the kayak.Josh:Did you enjoy it?Ben:Yeah. It was nice.Josh:Was it a good paddle?Ben:Yeah, it was great.Josh:Nice.Ben:Yeah.Josh:That's good.Starr:Yeah. It's hazy here and unpleasant to breathe the air but it's not... It doesn't have the same world is ending vibes that are in Oregon, and San Francisco.Josh:Yeah. Apparently, you know Mike Perum, he was telling me that the air quality index inside his house is over 300.Ben:Oh, wow.Josh:Yeah.Starr:How's he measuring that?Josh:Yeah. They are headed North. Yeah, he's got a little... I don't know. A little meter. Yeah.Starr:Oh, that's so cool.Josh:Yeah, I want one now.Ben:I found that you can buy them from Purple Air.Josh:Oh, really?Ben:Purpleair.com. Yes, they have both internal and external monitors. And they have a crowd sourced map of your local neighborhood air quality. Assuming, that someone in your neighborhood has one of their devices.Josh:Interesting. Okay. Oh, that's cool.Ben:Yeah.Starr:Oh, cool.Josh:Yeah. I didn't really know anything about air quality... Like majoring air quality before. We've never really... Our air has always been pristine.Ben:Yeah. When you live in Washington state, it's like, "Yeah, the air's good."Josh:Yeah.Ben:Pretty much always.Starr:Yeah. It just comes in from the ocean, and it's always fresh. But apparently, if the air, or the ocean is full of smoke, then you're just... Yeah.Starr:Yes.Josh:The worst part about this is it could not stop raining this Spring when we were all stuck quarantined inside. It just would not stop raining. And now, we're stuck inside due to the smoke and we just wish it could rain because it would dampen everything and it just won't rain. It's really doing the opposite.Starr:Yeah. Well, fortunately, I bought a bunch of... A resperator type mask, not the cloth masks, and they actually... If you wear one of those, you can't actually smell smoke in the air

Show Notes:Links:Horrorstör Tiny MBAGreat NutsAntiRSIMotivAiderPomodoro TechniqueFull Transcript:Starr:So, I've got to say, this is kind of a brag. It's completely off topic but I've got to tell somebody. I'm very proud of myself. You know how in any... I don't know. Whenever you watch movies or TV about prison, or weird situations, there's always somebody who's a genius at making booze, right?Josh:Mm-hmm (affirmative). Oh, yeah. Like the trash bag or whatever?Starr:Yeah. You take whatever's in your environment and you somehow make booze out of it. Well, I think I'm kind of like that with ice cream. I think I'm the same with ice cream.Josh:Some garbage bag ice cream?Starr:No, not garbage bag ice cream. But I was just like... Yesterday, I was like-Josh:Some bathtub ice cream?Starr:Yesterday I was like, "I really want ice cream but I don't have any cream."Josh:Gotcha. Okay.Starr:Yeah.Josh:Yeah.Starr:Yeah. So, I was like, "Okay. I need my fat source. I need my source of milk solids. I need a sugar source."Josh:Yeah, you're going all chemist on it.Starr:Oh yeah, yeah, totally. It does harken back into the chemistry stuff. But actually, it turns out, if you take a can of sweetened condensed milk, and a package of Philadelphia cream cheese, and you add a little bit of milk to dilute them, and then blend them in a blender, and then put them in an ice cream maker, it makes pretty serviceable ice cream. It's a little bit sweet for my taste but it worked out.Josh:It's good to know.Josh:Sounds like some sort of new form of gelatto or something.Starr:Yeah. Something like that.Josh:I don't know. You got to come up with a name for that.Starr:Yeah.Josh:Like your own name.Starr:I don't know.Josh:Yeah. We don't have to do it on the air. I'm not... Not to put you on the spot.Starr:No. No. I'm not going to give that way to... I'm not going to give that away. You got to pay for that.Starr:Yeah. So, on Monday, we had our all hands meeting and... Except Ben wasn't here because he was taking some sort of time of which is just amazing. It's unprecedented.Josh:Yeah. Can we say why, Ben?Ben:I suppose.Josh:It's because Monday was Ben's birthday. Happy birthday, Ben.Starr:Oh, happy birthday.Ben:Thank you. Thank you.Josh:I'm pretty sure he hates this. So, I'm sorry, this is not your birthday present.Starr:I'm sorry. We won't sing. We won't sing.Ben:There was no ice cream involved but there was cream cheese. My birthday dessert was cream cheese sopapilla. So tasty.Starr:Oh.Josh:Nice.Ben:Yes. Yes.Starr:Oh, nice.Josh:Sounds good.Starr:I'm really curious what that's like. But anyway, the thing that you missed, you missed our all hands meeting. It was lonely without you but we made do. And we had an interesting conversation I thought about the way that which we work, right? We're all working on computers all day. We all feel rushed. We're doing this stuff. It leads to surmounting pressure and tension. And I really enjoyed having a conversation with everybody about that. I learned that some people are into yoga in our office. I'm a little bit into yoga. I'm a baby yoga person. A baby yogee. We talked about balance boards, and how Josh is like... I don't know. It just seems like Back To The Future to me, you're on the hoverboard all day, just sitting there typing.Josh:It does kind of feel like a hoverboard, yeah.Starr:Yeah?Josh:I'm not on it right now.Starr:Well, unfortunately.Josh:Just because I... I don't know.Starr:You should do that more-Josh:I know If I always used it during the podcast, I know that at some point I'll probably wipe out.Starr:That's why I was saying you should do it. We should capture that.Starr:Yeah. Yeah. I discussed a little bit about how I found that just trying to do things quickly is kind of stressful. And so, things that are... Email checking that doesn't require a bunch of... It's not too thoughtful and I tend to just be like, "Delete. Delete. Delete." Just go through as quick as possible. I've been trying to purposely slow that down just a little bit. And we're talking about it adds an extra five minutes. So, not really that much longer, and that's helpful. I'm not saying I want to do the whole podcast about this, I just wanted to mention that because I just really enjoyed talking with everybody about that stuff. I think that's a good... It makes me happy that we're doing these bi-weekly check ins.Josh:Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, it was a good chat.Starr:Yeah.Josh:Yeah. That reminded me, I had to turn off my bell of mindfulness because I realized it was probably going to chime.Starr:Oh, you did? So, you go one?Josh:Well, I downloaded the app to check it out, and turn the thing on. So, every 15 minutes or whatever it dings.Starr:Oh yeah. I forgot I told y'all about that. So, that is-Josh:Yeah. I kind of like it actually. It's... Yeah, you have to say what it is but yeah, it's cool. It does bring you out of the moment and then lets you refocus.Starr:Yeah. So, it's just a really simple app. It's the plum village app

Show Notes:Links:NotionBasecampAmanuensisNeuralinkFull Transcript:Starr:Well, what's up in y'alls worlds?Ben:Went out kayaking yesterday, that was nice.Starr:Oh, nice.Josh:Cool.Starr:Did you get that foldable one you were talking about?Ben:I did order, but it is back-ordered, so I have not yet received it.Starr:Damn.Josh:It's like this was a bad time for everyone to wait to purchase these things they were putting off for their recreation time.Ben:Exactly.Josh:Till they have forced time on their hands.Ben:Yeah.Starr:Yeah, totally. We went canoeing on our little vacation a couple of weeks ago, and it was really nice. It was one of those things where I was kind of dreading it because we had Ida with us. But it actually turned out being really calm and peaceful, and all that. It was just very nice.Josh:Where did you go, Ben?Ben:Out on the Sammamish River, which is right near me.Ben:Yeah. We went from Redmond towards Lake Sammamish but there's a little area with a bit of turbulence, and we were in an inflatable kayak, so we were not able to proceed. Some people might call them rapids, but I mean, it's-Josh:Did you do some sick rapids?Ben:No. We turned around. But it was a nice little cruise.Josh:You're going to wait for the paper kayak-Ben:Right.Josh:... for the rapids? Part origami.Ben:Mm-hmm (affirmative).Starr:Yeah. We ordered an inflatable one.Ben:Yeah, I think they're fun.Starr:Yeah. It's-Josh:I should do that. We've got some rivers around here.Ben:The only trick is, like where we go is rocky, so every time we're done I have to inspect the bottom for new holes.Josh:Mm-hmm (affirmative).Ben:So ...Starr:Mm-hmm (affirmative).Ben:As long as I remember to do that it's okay. Because otherwise-Josh:Does the water get low in places.Ben:Yeah, it gets pretty low.Josh:Okay.Starr:How does that work when you're out there? Do you just look for bubbles-Ben:Yeah.Starr:... coming out from under you? You just keep an eye out for bubbles?Ben:Or you start to feel lower in the water, and you're like, "Oh, I think I've lost some air."Starr:I guess that would make sense. Yeah.Ben:Yeah. Do carry the patch kit with us whenever we go out.Ben:Good news is, it's pretty easy to patch.Starr:People have been saying the '90s are coming back, so low riders are in, so low rider canoes I imagine are the next step for that.Ben:For sure.Starr:Definitely. We have some good news. I don't know if this ... I'm just going to say it and then you can tell me if it's public or not. But we got our SOC 2 report done, right?Ben:Yeah.Starr:We got that in?Ben:Yeah. That's why I'm feeling a little tired today. I think it's like, finally got over the finish line and now I'm just collapsing. It's post-marathon, just dying.Josh:Yeah.Starr:I know.Josh:Time for a vacation.Ben:Yeah. Just scheduled it.Josh:Nice.Starr:Good.Ben:Yeah. It's not public yet, because I haven't written the blog post yet. But, yeah, that's on my to-do list.Starr:But it's not a secret?Ben:It's not a secret. We did get-Starr:Just between us and our listeners, we can share.Ben:We did get our type 1 report for our SOC 2 audit, so I'm pretty excited.Josh:Yeah. Congratulations.Ben:Thanks. It was a team effort.Starr:No, not really. A team of one, yeah.Josh:I mean, I'll take credit for reading some policies, and-Starr:Yeah. I read some policies, and I was like, I guess this makes sense. I don't really understand it. Okay. Yeah. But-Josh:I did learn a lot throughout.Ben:We talked about this briefly a couple weeks ago. I saw this idea of building a site ... some sort of resource for startups like us, to get more familiar with what the compliance process is, and just demystifying that whole thing. I think I know a lot more now than I did when I started, and I think there's a lot that could be explained in layman's terms to help entrepreneurs understand what the whole thing is about, and why you might want to go through the whole process, and why you might not want to go through the whole process. I know we talked about this ... When we got started down this road, we're like, "Do we really want to do this?"Josh:Yeah.Ben:We didn't really know how to answer that question. Like, "Oh, I guess."Josh:It's not for everyone.Ben:Yeah. It really isn't. Yeah.Josh:Yeah. We should totally do that.Starr:Because one of the reasons we didn't know if we should go down that road was because nobody would tell us what that road actually was. It was all just a bunch of vague ... it was this very vague thing. It's a road you go down, but you can see about a foot in front of you. At least that's what it felt like to me.Ben:Yeah. And people who have been down that road are like, "Well, I'm not going to tell you anything about it. I'll let you find out on your own."Starr:It depends. You can pay me a retainer.Ben:Yeah. Part of the problem is, there aren't many small startups like us who have done it. Most of the people who do that are larger organizations, and for them, it's not even a question. It's like, well, they have to b

Show Notes:Links:Snow CrashMicrosoft Flight Simulator glitchGoogle deprecation article by Steve YeggeSwiss ArmyBadass: Making Users Awesome by Kathy SierraHerokuFull Transcript:Josh:This is just why I know. I know that whatever happens in November, it's just going to get... It's going to get crazier. No matter what.Starr:I do feel like... More and more I feel like I'm inside of a cyber punk novel. Not really a William Gibson, Chiba City, going to get your bioware implanted or whatever but more of a Neil Stevenson Snow Crash type of situation where you have to... Everybody lives in gated communities, and the gated communities are owned by the different franchises. So, you live in the KFC gated community, and you worship the Colonel and all that.Josh:Or you live in a super PAC community.Starr:Yeah, exactly.Josh:Where they have your videos playing on billboards for everyone who drives by.Starr:Exactly. And the hero of the story is just this girl trying to deliver some pizzas through this wasteland of a country.Josh:Okay, this really is just Snow Crash, isn't it?Starr:Yeah. Pretty much. The only difference is the way the internet's played out is that we have a lot less sword fights.Josh:Right.Starr:I don't really just interact... I don't go online and just find myself in a seedy bar with my samurai sword.Josh:You got to give VR a chance to develop because you never... There might be more sword fights in the future.Ben:As long as you don't mind having a Facebook account since now, apparently that's a Facebook account for Oculus.Josh:Oh, Facebook sword?Ben:Well, you saw that news about Oculus. They're now-Josh:I did.Ben:Yeah. I had a friend of mine here in Seattle who said, "Okay. Well, I've got an Oculus for sale if anybody wants it."Josh:Really?Ben:Yep.Josh:Yeah. I never... I would not have bought an Oculus after Facebook acquired them. Maybe for that... Not necessarily for that specific reason but that's as good a reason as any.Josh:Obviously, they're going to do something with it in their interest.Ben:Obviously.Starr:Yeah, my house is too small too. I just break everything. It seems like you need a fair amount of free space to have some sort of VR set up.Josh:Yeah.Starr:Or you can gesticulate and not destroy priceless family artifacts.Josh:Yeah, I don't even know. I tried one of the very early ones and it was like that but I'm not sure how far they've come since then.Starr:I know. Eventually, they'll refine it to the point where instead of having to jester around, you just have this little device that you hold in your hand and you can just move your fingers small distances.Josh:Oh. Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. I see where you're going with that.Starr:Yeah.Ben:Well, in non-VR gaming news, Microsoft Flight Simulator was released this week.Josh:Is that what I... I saw something that looked a lot like that and then the page refreshed and it went away. For a split second, I was like, "Holy crap. Is that Flight Simulator?"Ben:It is. Yeah.Starr:Did y'all hear about the OpenStreetMap thing with that? Okay, this is great. I actually didn't realize that it was just released but I read about this glitch. So, somebody... So, there's an open street map, right? That's... I'm getting the name right, right?Ben:Mm-hmm (affirmative).Starr:Okay.Josh:Mm-hmm (affirmative).Starr:OpenStreetMap is people's open source version of Google Maps. So, you can go and get these maps and do whatever you want with them. So, it's maintained like Wikipedia by an army of volunteers. And I guess somebody in I think Melbourne, made a typo, and instead of... I don't know. Instead of listing a building as three stories, they listed as something like 3,000 stories. And so, Microsoft when they were developing the flight simulator, they went and got the OpenStreetMap data and they didn't scrub it or anything. And so, if you're flying in Melbourne, it's Melbourne and then this one really narrow building that goes up just like a giant monolith in the sky.Josh:That's amazing.Starr:And there's all these pictures on Twitter of people flying around it, going like, "What is this?"Ben:That's great.Josh:It's just a glitch in the data.Starr:Yeah.Josh:Wow. This is because Microsoft... I mean, this would never happen to Google Flight Simulator, I feel like. They don't use OpenStreetMap, do they? They've got their own... They've got Google cars.Ben:Yeah. But the problem with Google Flight Simulator would be that in three years, they would trash it. They would end it.Josh:Right. Because no one would play it. Or, not enough people would play it. Like 500,000 people would play but they'd be like, "We need 500,000,000 to play this."Ben:Exactly.Josh:"If it's going to be..."Ben:Exactly. Yeah, that's been in the news recently too. Google Cloud, and Steve... I don't know how you pronounce his last name. Yegge, maybe? Had this blog post about how Google deprecates so much all the time that... Why would you even build on it? And it's notable because Steve is an ex-Googler. An

Show NotesLinks:_whyRuby's Exceptional CreaturesWeinberg on Writing: The Fieldstone MethodAudience OpsPeter CooperDocsketchProofHubScribendiDeltaWalkerNotionHoneybadger Developer BlogFull Transcript:Starr:I wonder if any of our listeners are too young to know what SOAP is, like SOAP?Josh:I'm guessing so.Ben:Yeah.Starr:SOAP is what we have before REST APIs and JSON. It was interesting.Ben:It was hell.Starr:Yeah. I dipped my toes in that water a little bit and just gave up.Ben:Every time I hear SOAP I think of DHHs slide at that one RailsConf early on where he had the WS-Death Star. It was great.Josh:Yeah.Ben:Because all the... I guess I should explain that. It's all of the, I guess, it was schema domain or the name space, everything started with WS, and so they started referring to the different... Because there was, I don't know, 10 or 20 or whatever, there were a lot of them, and so they called them WS-Star, to represent all of his schemas that went into that whole SOAP definition. So DHH made fun of it by calling it the WS-Death Star.Josh:I see.Starr:Oh, I get it. I didn't get that joke to begin with. And the schemas are XML schemas.Ben:Right. Yeah, it's all... yes.Josh:It's all the good stuff.Starr:Yeah-Ben:All the fun java land things that you could ever want.Josh:I feel like I remember having at one point to take a SOAP endpoint and build a REST wrapper for it or something so that we could interface with... I don't know, I can't remember exactly, but I feel like that happened.Ben:That's a special level of pain.Josh:It was terrible.Starr:Did you use to do some freelance work for the mouse?Josh:Oh, yes. Mickey Mouse?Starr:Yeah, that mouse.Josh:Yeah, uh-huh (affirmative).Starr:That just sounds like something they would have had you do, I'm not sure though. I don't know.Josh:Yeah. We're not saying their name just in case they decide to sue us, right?Starr:Oh, yeah, yeah.Ben:At some point, we may want to monetize this podcast, and we can't have the copyright taking us down.Josh:We can't have the... Yeah.Starr:Well-Josh:That does sound like something that they would do.Ben:Yeah, it does, yeah.Josh:Yeah.Starr:Well, today, I don't know if we've had unanimous consensus on this, but I think we're going to talk about blogging and content and I've done a bunch of paid content acquisition recently, and y'all want to talk about that stuff?Ben:Oh, yeah.Josh:Sure.Starr:All right, I don't know, there was a time back when blogs were the thing. You started a company, then you need a blog. I'm thinking 2005-ish, 2007, and I remember getting started blogging, I didn't know what I was doing then at all. I produced some terrible content with no real purpose, and since then I've learned a lot, like you do when you, I guess, do something off and on for a decade. Even if you don't really try, I guess you learn some stuff. Y'all had blogs too, right? Your personal tech blogs.Ben:Yeah. And it's sad, they're pretty lonely these days, somewhat abandoned.Starr:Oh, yeah, me too. Me too. I think starrhorne.com is still up, but I don't know. Don't go there, don't go there anybody. Anyway when we started Honeybadger, obviously, we had to have a blog and we just took the approach that I think a lot of people do, which is you write a blog post about what you're working on, you write a blog post and you do a new feature and you want to talk about it, or when... I don't know, just something occurs and... That did fine for a while, the main problem I found with that approach though is that everybody just gets too busy to write blog posts.Starr:Yeah, I feel like back in the day there was this real feeling like, oh, everybody's having blogs, it's this community thing, you'd link to your-Josh:You've got to have one.Starr:... blogs... Yeah, yeah. And you're having discussions by writing blog articles back and forth, and people don't really do that anymore. Since then, it's become a lot more, I don't know... When I look at a lot of company blogs these days, I just see, pardon me French, garbage.Josh:The earlier days of blogging actually were kind of cool, because everything was still... there was no standardization, everything was unique and... Actually, I didn't even have blog, initially, I had a weblog, I'm pretty sure. Pretty sure it was a weblog.Starr:Oh. Yeah, I don't know, it seemed much more of a discussion, because I guess there was... people weren't just uniformly on Twitter or I guess, Reddit or whatever people use these days. I don't know. I don't know what the children are using.Josh:The were on all those things that we talked about last episode.Starr:Exactly.Josh:Or whatever, BBS'sStarr:Yeah, they fall in with just having everybody do a blog post when they feel like it, is that that nobody really feels like it kind of thing, because writing is hard and it's... I don't know. Plus when you're starting company, you have a billion things to do and a lot of them feel more important than writing some blog post, especially when you don't ha

Show Notes:Links:Whirly BoardOWASP Top TenDetectifyKolideWWIVTrade WarsSecurity Researcher Hall of FameFull Transcript:Josh:Yeah. It's called a Whirly Board and it's a local... Well, not local. It's a US small business apparently that makes them. I forget where they're located. Not in Washington. It's like a skateboard. There's I've seen other balance boards that are made for standing desks, but none of them have the... This has also side... You can balance on the edges of it as well so you can rock back and forth between the outer edges and balance.Starr:Oh, that's really cool.Josh:Apparently you can do a tricks. You can 360.Starr:Of course you can.Josh:And... Yeah. You can ollie.Starr:So I was imagining literally a skateboard on top of an exercise ball where if you lost your balance it would just fly out from underneath you.Josh:Yeah. This is not... One of the big exercise balls?Starr:Yeah. Yeah, exactly. One of the big ones.Josh:No.Starr:You probably wouldn't have enough ceiling in your room to... The ceiling wouldn't be high enough to-Josh:Yeah. It would not be. Yeah.Starr:Well, that's cool. So that's supposed to work out your core or something or give you a better balance?Josh:Yeah, I think all of the above. I more just got it to give myself something to do while I'm standing. It's kind of fun. It's a sport you can do while working at your desk.Starr:Oh, that's cool. Sometimes at my standing desk I find that I'm fine. I find that I'm standing, but I'm standing in this very rigid way. And I have to remind myself to not do that. So maybe that would help.Josh:This definitely stops you from doing that. You have to... And I think this one is very... It's not stable at all so it's probably on the more unstable end of the options out there.Starr:I was trying to work that into a sick burn against, I don't know, Node or something, but-Josh:Put it in there somewhere.Starr:... couldn't do it in time. I'm a little bit tired. Feeling a little bit tired. So on Thursday... Wait. Yeah, Thursday I took the day off and drove down to San Francisco. It was a 13 hour drive. And then I had a-Josh:Pretty good time?Starr:Yeah. I had appointment, came back the next day and another 13 hour drive. I didn't really sleep very well. I mean, honestly, it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. It was very long, but I've done that before. It's about the same distance from the bottom of Texas to Guadalajara, which I've driven several times.Josh:Yeah. It's not too bad.Starr:It's boring and you feel like mush. You feel like oatmeal after the end of it, but...Josh:Yeah. Get a good audio book or podcast or something.Starr:Yeah.Josh:I mean, our podcast doesn't work well for long road trips because our episodes are 30 minutes.Starr:I just binged our own podcast the whole way down there. I just binged it. It's so bingeable.Josh:So you binged on the way down, and then you binged it again on the way back?Starr:Yeah. So my biggest travel tip that I... Something I did different this time. It really probably only works. I mean, maybe you could swing this if you're flying. The reason I drove instead of just taking an easy one hour flight is that I don't want to die. And that seemed to be the less lethal option at this point. So I was able to take my yoga mat. I don't do really complex yoga, but just having this ability to stretch after I arrive at a place after driving many hours and, I feel much less pretzelified than I normally would after a trip like that.Josh:That's a good idea.Starr:Yeah.Josh:Did you go down by The Golden Gate Bridge and just out on the beach and stretch at dawn, do some yoga at dawn on the waterfront?Starr:I'll let you imagine that. Yeah. That's a great image. I'll let all of our listeners imagine that, that I have that kind of life.Josh:Yeah.Starr:That sounds wonderful.Josh:Yeah. I've done that drive more times than I probably should have.Starr:Do you all mind if I cross promote my Insta on here? I'm just kidding. I don't have an Insta.Josh:You're a lifestyle influencer?Starr:Yeah.Josh:Yeah.Starr:So yeah. What are we talking about today? Ben:I was just thinking about security in the context of our compliance work, which thankfully is just about wrapped up. I checked on the auditor portal this morning and all of the evidences have been accepted.Josh:Yay.Ben:So now I think it's just getting the final report written is the only thing left for them to do. So I'm pretty excited about that.Josh:You knocked those out fast, Ben.Ben:Well, it only took, what, several months of preparation to get to that point.Starr:Fast.Josh:Yeah, the last couple of weeks it seems like you're like, yeah, they gave me another list of 40 things that we have to do. And I'll maybe get to them over the next couple of months. And then a whole week of doing things, and then it's ready.Starr:You posted a screenshot and it was all gameified. It looked like Xbox achievements or something.Josh:Oh, right. Are you going for HIPAA now?Ben:Oh man. I so want to. You

Show notes:Links:Kathy SierraSeinfield – Vandalay IndustriesMinnesota FatsLemonade StandPhrack Honeybadger Developer BlogFull Transcript:Starr:We are on uncharted ground. We usually record on Fridays, but I was out on Friday, so we're recording on a Monday now. We just had our all hands meeting. I had a meeting before that, which means this is my third Zoom call of the day. I've got another Zoom call after this one.Josh:Wow, that's a lot of meetings.Ben:That's impressive.Starr:I figure if I have enough meetings on Zoom, I'll become a Zoomer and I'll like have found the fountain of youth.Josh:Is that how that works?Starr:That's how it works.Josh:Cool, okay.Starr:That was a terrible joke I'm sorry.Josh:We're all Zoomers now.Starr:I apologize to our listeners.Josh:I think no, the joke proves that we're Zoomers, I think. They're funny, right?Starr:It's fine. I'm going to learn Snapchat this evening. I have an hour booked into my schedule.Josh:Very cool.Ben:Speaking of Snapchat, so I don't know if you heard the news over the weekend, by Microsoft is in acquisition talks for TikTok.Josh:Yeah, which is just like, I did not see that coming.Ben:No, no. Not at all. But someone made a funny joke on Twitter, and I just had to share it, and it was basically, "Now Microsoft is going to have a cradle to grave experience. Social networks from birth until death." And so they had TikTok, and then there's Xbox, and GitHub, and then LinkedIn. Right? So, it'd have you covered, right? From cradle to grave.Josh:See, I thought the cradle to grave experience with Microsoft was what happens to the social networks after they acquire them.Ben:Oh, oh.Starr:Oh.Ben:Sick burn.Starr:Sick burn, yeah.Josh:Thanks, thanks.Starr:Does anyone still used LinkedIn?Ben:No.Starr:It just seems like, I don't know, I had to go on or... I don't know. I was there for some reason, probably not a good one. And it was just like, "This just looks like..." All social networks end up looking like a... I don't know, like a strip mall eventually.Josh:Mm-hmm (affirmative). That definitely describes LinkedIn.Ben:Yeah, that's an apt description. Yeah.Starr:It's just like, what random crappy wares are you hawking? Is it shitty articles about synergy, or is it conspiracy theories about masks and mind control?Josh:Although, I don't know. We looked at people's LinkedIns when we were hiring, in past hiring sessions, so I guess HR departments obviously still use it.Starr:What if you had no LinkedIn? Would that be a detriment?Josh:I don't know.Starr:I can't imagine I would hold that against anyone.Ben:No, I wouldn't, but I would expect there to be something out there, right?Starr:Yeah.Ben:A personal website or a GitHub profile that has some stuff in it, or something. I would expect that if you were into tech, that you would be doing something online. Somewhere.Josh:Right, but as far as... I mean, LinkedIn, having an active LinkedIn or a Twitter account or something. I would understand why people would not have those for a variety of reasons. Yeah, I regret both regularly, so.Starr:I mean, because if you wanted to hire Kathy Sierra, she's not going to have a Twitter account. Right?Josh:Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm sure there's plenty of people out there that would not want to put themselves into the environment that is Twitter.Starr:No doubt.Josh:Very similar reasons.Starr:Definitely.Ben:Exactly.Starr:That's me lately.Josh:Yeah, which is unfortunate, yeah. Really? Is it, Starr?Starr:Oh, yeah. I was just like, "This is just making my unhappy every time I look at this. Why am I looking at this?"Josh:Yeah, I stopped reading the newsfeed because that's the thing. If I stop with Twitter, it sucks you in and then it just makes you sad or mad or another negative emotion.Ben:Doomscrolling.Starr:Doomscrolling. Yeah, it's like, I know the world's ending. I don't need to be reminded of it every two minutes. Give me a couple hours in between. So, what should we talk about today? Ben:So, one of the topics on our list is a question Ben put together for us a while back was, "What sparked each of the founder's interest in computers?"Starr:Oh, a nostalgia episode. Ben:Yeah, yeah. And you talked about that person who was looking to get into tech, and I'm like, "Hey, we could do that. We could do some nostalgia.Starr:Yeah, cold, hard cash. In 25 years, I want to be making a typical engineer's salary.Ben:What I'm curious about though is what... Like Starr, you mentioned you had a non-traditional path, but I wanted to find out a little bit more about what y'all wanted to do when you were kids, before you ended up on the whole, "I'm going to be a developer/tech/person, whatever."Starr:Oh.Ben:Like for example, I wanted to be an architect. That's what I wanted to be.Starr:I can see that.Ben:At least one of the things when I was a kid. There were some other things in there, but one of the things I really wanted to do was to be an architect. I thought that was a super cool career.Starr:Wow.Jos

Show Notes:Links:TechCrunch Schrems IIFull Transcript:Ben:Speaking of town meetings though, we had a streamed event from our local school district last night in which they revealed that our school district will not be having school in person for the first semester of the year. They're going to do a wait and see approach and see if they can have school opening and the next semester, in I guess January, but for now, the kids are going to be at home.Starr:So how do you feel about that?Ben:I think that's the right decision and in the state of Washington and in King County, in which we live, the coronavirus cases are going higher than they were in the initial, back in March. So I don't see how it's a good idea to have a bunch of kids in an enclosed space for an extended period of time in those kind of conditions.Starr:The difference this time is that it's over.Ben:Yeah.Josh:It's-Starr:The hurricane's past us.Josh:It's a good thing that it fizzled out. You know, the flame was extinguished.Ben:My son is not too excited about the idea because he actually likes to leave the house and see his friends and things that we would do in normal world where we had good leadership that helped us keep things under control. But no. So that part's unfortunate, but at least we won't die.Josh:Silver linings.Starr:Yeah. We try and keep the podcasts pretty nonpolitical, but it's hard to contain the simmering rage sometimes. My new greeting for people when I'm just checking on them. It's like, "How's the apocalypse going?"Ben:So I saw a tweet talking about the resurgence in cases. And she said, "well, how am I supposed to open my emails now? Because now it's precedented times."Josh:That's good. Yeah.Starr:I know. It's kind of weird how, yeah. How precedented this is feeling because it's like, okay. Yeah. I have all this list of things I can't do. That's normal now. I've got all these precautions I take when I leave the house. That's normal now it's just daily life.Ben:Yeah. It's like back in March when they were talking about what the new normal is going to be they weren't thinking just March, it's like, Oh.Josh:Mm-hmm (affirmative).Starr:Yeah, just March, but you're a little more comfortable with all the PPE and I don't know, I stopped spraying down, like all the, the bags of chips with bleach. I've stopped doing that. Because apparently that's not very important to do.Ben:I've installed that UVC conveyor belt device in my front room so I can just pass all the groceries through there instead.Starr:Oh, that's a great idea.Josh:Should we send a precedented times email? Like should we finally get around to sending that COVID email?Ben:Yeah. Hope this email finds you well in this precidented time.Josh:Yeah. I've completely been ignoring our email marketing lately.Ben:Yeah. We should do some of that someday.Josh:Probably. I've also been enjoying getting work done.Star:So today I think we're going to talk about, about Safe Harbor. 2020 just really sucks. Right? 2020 it's like the pillars that you've built your life on, just sort of crumble out from underneath you. And one of these sort of milder pillars I guess, is Safe Harbor. So what is Safe Harbor-Ben:It's funny actually, because it's not Safe Harbor-Starr:It's not Safe Harbor.Ben:But that goes along well with precedented times because Safe Harbor was the thing that happened five years ago. And now we're dealing with it again because of Privacy Shield.Starr:Oh, Privacy Shield! I'm sorry.Josh:Was Privacy Shield the thing that was in response to Safe Harbor? I'm trying to remember.Ben:Yes.Josh:Yeah. Okay.Ben:Yeah. When Safe Harbor got torpedoed, then Privacy Shield came around. Yup.Starr:I can't keep my bullshit straight.Ben:So yes, precedented times, indeed.Josh:So yeah. So we're still shielding the Harbor though. Was that the idea? But I do know we no longer now, like the shield is, the shields are down. Is that? I'm losing track of this metaphor.Ben:Can't take much more of this captain.Starr:Well, they've sort of dropped it though, because it was... Well, which one came first? Safe Harbor?Ben:Yeah, Safe Harbor.Starr:And then Privacy Shield. And now it's standard contractual clauses or something like that?Josh:Right. Yeah.Ben:Right, today we're talking about data.Starr:Data, okay.Ben:And again, not Star Trek.Josh:And what to do with it.Starr:Ones and zeros.Josh:Yeah.Ben:So yeah. So a brief history is in order. So back in the olden days in pre 2015, so the whole thing is data transfer from the EU to the US that's what we're talking about. And that's why we care because we have customers in the EU and they want to send us data. In our case, in Honeybadger's case, we have customers who are sending potentially confidential data about their customers, right? Maybe an email address or an address or something that might show up at an exception report. And so they have to be concerned, our customers do, about what data they send us and how we protect that data because there are varying laws ar

Show Notes:Links:Ghost Octopress SquarespaceTailwindTyler Tringas Full Transcript:Josh:You're looking chipper, Ben.Ben:I'm feeling chipper, Josh.Josh:I'm glad.Starr:Yeah, there's kind of like ... you have kind of like a glow. Is this the new product glow?Ben:I think it is the new product glow, yes, yes.Starr:Okay.Ben:I pushed out a new feature this morning.Josh:Congratulations.Ben:Thank you, thank you. So, yeah, feeling pretty good. Had a good week, got some stuff built and deployed and things are working. I learned some things along the way, so yes, it's good.Starr:Awesome.Josh:You know, I had a pretty good week too, sleep aside. I even got enough sleep one day.Starr:Oh really? That's good.Josh:Yeah, yeah, that was a good day.Starr:Thank goodness, that's always terrible.Josh:I've been making progress on the JavaScript stuff so that's always good.Starr:On redoing our node client library?Josh:Yeah. Yeah, the universal rewrite. So it's combining the client side and the server side so that they can both function basically the same code running on the front-end and back-end with a few minor differences in how the platforms handle all the important things. So, it's a bit of a can of worms but it's what the kids demand these days, so got to give them what they want.Starr:Like your kids? Kids are pretty-Josh:Yes, all my kids are demanding universal NPM packages.Starr:My kid just demands pizza.Josh:Yeah. We've been making pizza lately and it's been pretty good.Starr:Oh, yeah, yeah. I've been doing it too. Have you been doing the dough where you let it rise for a day and all that?Josh:Yeah. Caitlyn does the dough and then I do the ... We got that ... Did I tell you? I told you all about the smoker with the ... It's a pellet smoker with the ... It has a pizza oven attachment that sits right directly in whatever the furnace part of the smoker, and so you get this ... It's like a wood fire pizza oven, and it can cook your pizza at 800 degrees or higher, so it's pretty intense.Starr:That would be really handy. We've scaled back our pizzas just because it's really hot and nobody has AC in Seattle and neither do we. We've got a unit that we can drag up from the basement and it's ridiculously obtrusive and everything, but yeah, we just try and avoid running the oven in this weather.Josh:That is one nice thing about this is that it's on the porch. I spend my time out there sweating on the porch baking pizzas, but everyone else doesn't have to be bothered by it.Starr:Yeah, we've been grilling a lot too and we've been trying to eat less meat, and so we've got this CSA farm box thing and they give us these weird ass vegetables, so I've just been grilling them all and it turns out pretty much every vegetable is good if you just put oil on it and you grill it.Josh:Nice.Starr:Did you know there's such a thing called garlic scapes? I didn't know this. Do y'all know what garlic scapes are?Ben:Nope.Starr:If you've ever seen a garlic plant growing, there's a garlic part that's in ... it's under the ground, right? But then there's the stem part that sticks out and it's kind of round. It has a little onion bulb on top and that is called the garlic scape. I guess you can cut them and grill them, and they're delicious. They're delicious.Josh:Have people always been eating these? What have we done with these for the last however long that we've been eating garlic? Because I've never heard of this before.Starr:I imagine that people who grow garlic have always eaten these.Josh:They must eat them all? Like they save the good part ... That's the good stuff probably and then we just get the-Starr:Yeah, it must be.Josh:... Yeah.Starr:We get the dregs.Starr:Yeah. I had a pretty good week too. I worked a bit on the static site for ... or the sales site for Hook Relay which is the new sort of product that Ben has been working on with Kevin, and Josh, have you been working on it too? I don't want to leave you out.Josh:No.Starr:Okay, okay.Josh:I've been rooting for them though.Starr:Okay, that's good. Everybody needs a cheerleader.Josh:I'm cheering hard over here.Starr:So yeah. Today we're going to be talking a little bit about sort of sales sites, the static site that you sort of put out into the world so people can see your app, and that's not necessarily the actual sort of app itself. So I guess we currently for this, we have our sales site hosted on a separate domain, but it wasn't always this way. When we first launched Honey Badger we had our main Rails app and the sales site was just some pages served by that app. We eventually changed that. So why did we eventually change that and move it into its own domain?Ben:There were a few reasons there. One of them was we got kind of tired of having to deploy the app every time we wanted to make a constant change to the website.Starr:I forgot about that.Ben:You know, because it has to go through all the test suite and everything. It's like, oh, five minutes to deploy a one word change to the site.Star

Show Notes:Links:Mighty CalHook RelayProfitwell RetainFloor Is LavaBen Curtis TwitterFull Transcript:Starr:So what were you all talking about before I jumped on the call?Ben:We were talking about Derrick's new startup Mighty Cal.Starr:Mighty Cal.Ben:Looking pretty nice. I was telling Josh how I like the virality of it. If you're using Mighty Cal and you share those links with someone, then they're going to be like, "Oh, that's cool. I should use that too." And it's just going to help the spread. I really like that kind of... I was reflecting on Honeybadger. It's like, well we just don't really have an opportunity to get the kind of-Josh:Wouldn't it be fun to have that aspect of it? They got that with Drip too. That was their big thing with the Drip widget, so I'm sure Derrick, he knows what he's doing.Starr:We tried to do that a bit when we did our... When there's an error on your website, Honeybadger can display a form for user feedback.Josh:The problem is... Yeah. And it's got to be a developer who is seeing it, and then... When developers try to do something, hits an error, and then is like, oh, I should add that to my app right now. Like I just got a fail whale or something.Ben:Yeah, I think the population of calendar users is probably a little bigger than the population of web developers.Starr:That's funny, because I thought that you were going to say that the thing you liked about the idea is... I'm assuming. I'm making assumptions here. But the relatively low ops burden.Ben:Well, yes. There's that too.Ben:The problem, Starr, with the whole ops burden thing is now we're good at the high ops burden thing, so now we're supposed to take on more apps like that, so that we can leverage those skills.Starr:Yeah.Josh:That's kind of our thing. Which we are. Right?Ben:Exactly. Our next one, Hook Relay, is going to be a pretty big ops burden too.Starr:It's like, what does your company specialize in? It's like, well we have a variety of products, all of which process a ton of traffic. That's just what we do. It's just traffic processing.Josh:Yeah.Ben:Our specialty is running services that you don't want to run yourself because it's a pain in the butt.Starr:That is pretty much every service. We should run a house cleaning service. I'm in dire need right now. So speaking of, I was late to the call, and I may actually... There's a chance I may have to run. There's a chance there may be a bunch of noise later on, because, well, a couple days ago my water heater just burst open. It was just like somebody blew the Hoover Dam in my little girl's room. Just been dealing with that, doing a lot of wet/dry vac-ing. Getting a lot of use out of that $30 investment.Ben:Have you been to the Hoover Dam?Starr:No, I haven't. I haven'tBen:You should totally go check it out. It is awesome.Starr:Well, now that I know what it would look like, what it's failure mode looks like, I'm not sure I want to go there. And yeah, so anyway I thought I vacuumed up everything, but it turns out there's... Your hot water pipes in your house have hot water in them. It's like when you have a straw in a drink and you hold one end of it, and then you pull it out and there's still drink in there. Well, I didn't think to go and open all the hot water faucets when I was draining the heater originally.Starr:And so as people were just sort of randomly accidentally turning them on, the water in the pipes would flush back into the hot water heater and then drain out again.Josh:Oh no.Starr:So I had to go take care of that. Oh, and I learned a few things I'll pass on to our listeners because I think one of the cool things about our podcast is the breadth. Some people may go deeper than we do, but we cover a pretty wide variety of topics.Josh:It really is the whole founder experience.Starr:Exactly. Exactly. Part of being a founder is dealing with your water heater bursting. And yeah, so I've got these friends. They're a couple. The husband is a maintenance man, and the wife is a forensic engineer. I was telling y'all about this yesterday, and that means that she goes in and whenever some building gets screwed and people get sued over it, she goes in and documents everything. It's like, who messed up here?Starr:And so I talked to them about it. Once water gets under laminate flooring, it's just a goner. You just have to pull it up. There's no way about it, because the water is never coming out. And so yesterday I pulled up half the laminate flooring, and then the guy I just mentioned, the maintenance guy helped me pull the rest of it up and did the baseboards and cut the drywall around the bottom where it soaked in there. Oh, my gosh. Yeah.Josh:Yeah. Fun times. You said this happened in your daughter's room? In Ida's room?Starr:Yeah. Yeah.Josh:Did she get a cool story out... like her bed is now a pirate ship or something, or an island.Starr:Well, she's really into the fact that she just has a concrete floor now that looks all gnarly. She's just going around being

Show Notes:Links:StripeHeyByeFull Transcript:Josh:I'm the co-pilot today, right?Ben:Co-pilot. Yeah, yeah. So today we're flying without Star. Star is not feeling well, so today is just the two of us.Josh:And I have been on vacation. Well, I am on vacation.Ben:Yeah.Josh:Sticking my head up.Ben:We are so into FounderQuest that we even come in on vacation to record an episode.Josh:Yeah. I don't know. It's nice to keep the schedule. I don't know. I've been trying to take a lot of vacations, so if we didn't record every time one of us was on vacation, then I feel like we wouldn't have a very consistent schedule.Ben:That's true. Yeah. So how is your vacation treating you?Josh:Alright. It's really a staycation so far.Ben:Right. I think all vacations are staycations for a while.Josh:Yeah. I've looked at bookings, to go to places. I don't want to go anywhere. I don't want to deal with any of the stuff that's going on right now.Ben:Certainly.Josh:Or take the risk. Then if we did go somewhere, we still have two toddlers. We're better equipped here at least to manage two toddlers who are bored, and there's only so much hiking you can do with a two year old.Ben:Yeah. So no trip to Disneyland this summer?Josh:Not so far, unless my in-laws decide that they want to watch the kids for a few days or something then we can get away. But so far, that's not looking too likely at the moment.Ben:Well, I'll tell you what. All you got to do is wait 10 to 15 years, and it will be great.Josh:Only 10 to 15 years. Yeah, yeah.Ben:Yeah.Josh:So, I don't know. I've been eyeing a bass guitar for a while, and I'm trying to talk myself into finally buying it right now. But I don't know, I'm still debating.Ben:Yeah.Josh:There's a chance I'll pick one up.Ben:Yeah, yeah. The pandemic is a great time to learn new things, right?Josh:Yeah. I think that a lot of people are thinking that way, and driving different parts of the economy.Ben:Now, you already played a keyboard, right?Josh:Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. I play piano and guitar, and I actually had a bass for a while. It was borrowed, but I liked it. I liked having it around just to funk around on it.Ben:Yeah.Josh:Yeah. But now I want to get a big stack from a garage because I don't have enough cool stuff in there already.Ben:You need to take out some extra insurance on the stuff that's in your garage now.Josh:I know. If that garage burns down, I'm done for.Ben:Yeah. You got to declare that stuff, man. Those insurance companies, they don't mess around.Josh:Yeah. Speaking of that how's your bathroom situation?Ben:Yeah. My bathroom is still not great. So it's amazing how unresponsive contractors can be. I really don't get it. I sent out a bunch of requests to people like, "Hey, here's my situation, and I want to hire someone to help me fix it." And I would say 70% of the people just didn't even respond. I don't know what their sales process is like or if they're super busy right now or what the deal is, but how do you stay afloat in the business-Josh:Really?Ben:... when you're not responding to leads? I don't know.Josh:Yeah. That's a good question.Ben:Yeah. So, I still haven't selected a contractor, so the chances of me of actually just doing it myself are increasing as the days go by. I've been watching the YouTube videos to learn how to-Josh:Really?Ben:... install a new tub, things like that. So my confidence is growing slowly, so I just might actually do it. We'll see.Josh:I've had the same thoughts a few times. I should really learn how to do stuff around my house if I'm going to be a homeowner, and then I've also had the thought that maybe I shouldn't own a house, and I should be renting in the first place. There's that whole camp that I don't think ... They're not wrong.Ben:So the whole economic theory of you should maximize your ... I don't know what the exact phrase is. I can't remember what the term is, but basically you should focus on what you're good it and pay people to focus on what they're good at, right?Josh:Mm-hmm (affirmative).Ben:So the economist in me is arguing for me not to do my bathroom myself because that doesn't make any sense, right?Josh:Yeah.Ben:Pay someone to do it. They can do a better job than I can.Josh:It's like comparative advantage or it's the whole specialization thing, and yeah. Same.Ben:But on the flip side, there's the whole ... It would be kind of cool like, "Hey, I did that." Right?Josh:Yeah.Ben:I put that in there, and there may be a mistake here and there, but that's my sweat and tears, and probably blood.Josh:It's also knowing how to at least do some of the smaller things would be useful because at some point, finding good contractors, and then managing them, and getting the work actually done, that's a whole job in itself.Ben:Wait, are we talking about bathrooms or are we talking about software development?Josh:Yeah. That applies everywhere. Yeah. The whole management aspect of any kind of contractor project.Ben:Yeah.Josh:At some point, it really does

Show Notes:Links:HeyWorldwide Developers ConferenceDavid Heinemeier HanssonJason FriedHerokuAndrey ButovConfiguring Fastmail to act like HeyFull Transcript:Starr:Okay. Now we can talk about how terrible the world is. No.Ben:So speaking of Apple. Yeah, it's been interesting. So I've been watching all the hubbub over the past few days about Hey and Apple.Starr:So what is Hey?Ben:So Hey is this new email service from our friends at Basecamp.Starr:I still call them 37signals, because we go back.Ben:Way back.Starr:They let me do that.Ben:And also an app. So of course, their web application comes with an IOS application, which has caused a bit of a kerfuffle in the Apple world over the past few days. Which is funny that the timing is such that it's right before their Worldwide Developers Conference. That's interesting. But I was thinking about it this morning-Josh:Yes, it's very interesting. Some would say it's a little more than a coincidence.Ben:I bet you that we will see Basecamp releasing the company version of Hey very, very soon. And when they do, I bet you that the IOS app will be cleared for takeoff. Because I-Josh:Ah, because then it will be a company app, right, in air quotes.Starr:Oh, yeah.Ben:Exactly.Josh:Y'all can't see my air quotes, listeners. But ...Starr:What is the kerfuffle, as you called it? What's going on?Ben:So Apple won't let Basecamp update their IOS app. And in fact, have somewhat threatened to removed the existing app from the store because-Starr:But the existing ... I'm sorry, the existing Basecamp app?Ben:No, the existing Hey app.Starr:Oh, the Hey app.Josh:Yeah, it's the new, their email client. Yeah.Starr:Yeah.Ben:Because they do not support in app purchases for the Hey subscription, which costs $100 a year. And of course, David and Jason are not willing to give Apple any cut. And Apple is saying, "Well, our rules are you got to do IAP if you want to have an app that does something that's tied to a subscription."Josh:They want 30% or something.Ben:30%. So I bet you, again, that company thing will come out real soon now. And as soon as they do, Apple will be like, "Okay, well since it's not an individual thing, then of course we'll let that app in." Just like a bunch of other apps that are currently in the App Store, like for example, Fastmail, right.Josh:The argument is consumer versus business, right.Ben:Right.Josh:The rules for consumer apps are different from the rules for business apps.Ben:And Basecamp, they're making quite a stink about this whole thing, saying it's highway robbery, and it's taxing the internet, and all this kind of stuff, right. But this is a thing of marketplaces, they charge you a fee for being on their storefront. That's just the way that these things work. It's not new, right. And we do the same thing with Heroku, right. We pay Heroku 30% of all the revenue that comes in through people using our service through Heroku. And that's just the cost of being on the platform.Starr:So let me ask you, I think I may have misunderstood this slightly. So in order to have any ... I guess, for new apps, Apple is saying that if you have any type of subscription service, it has to be purchasable through the app via Apple's payment purchasing thing that's equivalent to Apple's version of PayPal, or whatever.Ben:Yeah. If that app is a personal app.Starr:If it's a personal app.Ben:And not a reader kind of app, like Netflix falls into the thing of readers I think. So that's-Starr:Wait, what?Josh:Oh, I didn't know the reader distinction.Starr:I was just going to ask about this, because Netflix, yeah you can't sign up through the App Store for Netflix. So what's the difference?Josh:Oh, because it's read only. It's just content you're viewing or something.Ben:Yes. Yeah.Josh:Oh. So if Netflix let you upload videos like Vimeo or something, then they'd have to ...Ben:Well, imagine if you download the Netflix app, and there was nothing you could do unless you had a paid subscription, right.Josh:Oh, yeah.Ben:Then if there wasn't a special exclusion for Netflix, there obviously is, right, then Apple would say, "Well, the app doesn't do anything useful, we don't want that kind of app on our App Store." And that's the argument for Hey. It's an email app that can't load email from any other service except for Hey, and you can't use Hey unless you have a paid account, a paid personal account.Josh:Yeah, all you can do is log in.Ben:Right.Josh:Right. Yeah.Ben:Right. So I totally see Apple's stance on this. And a lot of people are thinking they're being jerks about it. But I mean, Apple is saying, "Hey, we have a big platform, and you are reaping the benefits of being on our big platform, so pay us."Josh:Yeah. Well, it seems like the bigger question is, is it a good idea to basically just build for one platform?Ben:That's definitely the question, yeah.Josh:If you're going to start a new company, is targeting solely ... Just building IOS apps for instance, is that a good idea?Starr:You want to

Show Notes:Links:Justin Jackson Twitter12 MonkeysKingkiller ChroniclesFull Transcript:Ben:As I was getting this morning and reading Twitter and just... Twitter. Something that's come up lately, and Justin Jackson has talked about this, and there's a couple other people who have talked about this. On Twitter this morning, it was being talked about. But that's the idea of staying in your lane.Ben:If you're a technologist, and typically your podcast is all about business or whatever. I'm just talking about us, right? Then you should stay in your lane and not talk about current events, whatever. People said that to Justin Jackson as he's been talking about equity and the environment. Some of the things that are concerns to him, and things that he likes to think about and talk about.Ben:I was thinking about that this morning, and I was like, "Well, we could talk about current events on our podcast. There's no reason why we couldn't." Then I thought, "Well, except that, you know what? Maybe this is just a nice break for people that just have too much news in their lives. They can turn to FounderQuest, reassured that they won't have to deal with all the garbage that's going on." We just talk about happy things here.Josh:This is the escape.Starr:I think we're probably not taking an official stance on the staying in your lane thing.Josh:No.Starr:Honestly, this is kind of my break, and I don't want to have arguments during it. I don't really want to debate serious topics right now, because everything is just on fire. I guess that's our way of saying that even though this seems to be the worst possible timeline. I read this morning that the monkeys stole the coronavirus samples from the lab and are running wild with them.Josh:Sounds legit.Starr:Which is the plot of a Terry Gillian movie. Yeah, yeah. If you haven't seen, what is it, 12 Monkeys, there you go-Ben:Oh, that's a good movie.Starr:Yeah, it is. I don't know. I guess this is to say, we're all affected by it, but we're not... I don't know.Josh:As much as we want to be.Starr:I see some people, and people are just plowing ahead with React is... Here's my hot take on React right now. It's like, nobody really wants to hear that right now. Maybe they do, I don't know. It's just hard.Josh:I've been blowing up our Twitter channel with hot takes lately.Ben:Yeah, yeah, Josh is all about the anti-React this week.Josh:Not really hot takes, but.Starr:Is that the anti-poke?Josh:Oh, yeah, you mean my blog? The blog thing?Ben:Yeah, the blog thing. That was pretty cool.Josh:Yeah, it's been... I don't know if you caught it, Starr, but I've been kind of just working on my blog a little bit. Playing around with things lately. I use Jekyll, but I hadn't updated it in a long time, so I migrated my assets and stuff to webpack and did some stuff to kind of modernize a little bit. I decided I didn't want to go too far with the modernization, and kind of see how far I could get.Josh:A lot of people are using their blogs, rebuilding their blogs in JAMstack to kind of play with Gatsby or some of these newer front-end frameworks. I thought it would be fun to do kind of the opposite. See how close I could get to the performance that you see with one of these more modern frameworks, with just old school technology. I'm using just Jekyll and Turbolinks, and I got this cool prefetch script that will do prefetching of links if you hover over them with your mouse for 400 milliseconds or whatever, which kind of speeds up.Starr:Oh, cool.Josh:Really, it kind of turns it into a... It feels like a single page app, but it's just a webpage.Starr:That's really cool. I actually, fun fact, we had that at Honeybadger before we moved to Jekyll, we had a little prefetch thing.Josh:Yeah, I'm actually, I've been planning on-Starr:Not Jekyll, I meant Turbolinks.Josh:Turbolinks.Starr:Before we went to TurbolinksJosh:We have the pjax setup. I remember that, it was a jQuery prefetch plugin or something.Starr:Yeah, no, I wrote it.Josh:Did you write it? Okay.Starr:It was Starr's prefetch blue plate special.Josh:Yeah, that was cool.Starr:I eventually disabled it because it was hard to get right. I really got tricky after a while and I don't know. I was being too tricky, and it turns out, the world doesn't really appreciate that.Josh:I think that's why it hasn't been officially added to Turbolinks. When I was digging through, trying to figure out how to do it, which is what led my to this gist that someone made. There's a bunch of issues on the Turbolink's GitHub repo, talking about it. It's not that it will never get added, but I'm assuming it's a difficult thing to implement or something like that, for everyone. I don't know.Starr:I forget what the issues were. For blog, it seems like it would be pretty straightforward though, because it's just webpages.Josh:Yeah, it's working pretty well on mine. It's fun. I've been meaning to move that stack-Starr:I saw that you-Josh:... over to our blog, too. Eventually I'll appl

Show notes:Links:Build Your SaaS by Justin JacksonBasecamp Hill ChartsScrooge McDuckDesign Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented SoftwareDarkpatterns.orgHoneybadger.ioFull Transcription:Starr:So, how have you all been doing this week? I've been on vacation.Ben:This week has been an interesting week in the Curtis household, we discovered a water leak in our house, in the bathroom.Starr:Oh, my gosh. So when you say interesting, you're using it in the sort of like British way?Ben:Exactly.Starr:You mean like terrible.Ben:Exactly.Josh:Because, yeah, when you're in the middle of a pandemic-induced lockdown, the thing you really want is a water leak.Ben:Exactly. Yes. So, that has turned into quite the adventure, again in the British way. Yeah, plumber came, found the leak. It was a pipe in the wall. So, pro-tip, don't put pipes in your walls. So, yeah. Then, the mitigation crew came and demolished a good chunk of the bathrooms because actually this wall is the separation between two bathrooms in my house. So, two bathrooms were affected, not just one. So, it's...Josh:Ouch.Ben:It's been a week that's for sure, and it's not over yet.Starr:Oh my gosh. I'm so sorry. You have any bathrooms left?Ben:No.Starr:Oh no. I was thinking all I have is two bathrooms too, so...Ben:Yeah, yeah. It's been... We got four people, two bathrooms... Well, kind of two bathrooms now. It's been interesting.Josh:And yeah. You said it's not going to be repaired until what June?Ben:Well, yeah. So, the mitigation guy was telling us that, "Yeah, we can do the demolition, and we can get you basically to a point where everything is safe. We'll put some sheeting on the walls where the holes are and things like that. But, we can't actually restore your bathrooms because we're under the lockdown right now with COVID." So...Josh:They can only do the essential part.Ben:Exactly, only the essential parts, not the cosmetic parts, which would be having an attached wall, right?Ben:So maybe I'll send a letter to the governor. I'll make a petition. Please, can I have a contractor come to my house and you know. If worse comes to worse.Josh:Are you going to be out with the demonstrators?Ben:I can just do it myself.Josh:Out with the demonstrators in Olympia? You got a big toilet-shaped picket sign or whatever?Ben:A plunger, yeah.Starr:I need my vanity!Ben:But, I'm happy to say that everyone that has come to my house has worn protective clothing, has had a mask on, and of course, we have masks on too because we don't want them to think that we're trying to get them sick, so. But, yeah, that's been nice calling them and saying, "Will you please be wearing a mask?" And "Oh, of course that's what we're doing these days." So, that's nice.Josh:Nice. Yeah, it's still kind of hit and miss on the masks around here. A lot of people are on it, and then there's a good number of people who aren't.Ben:Yeah, it just makes sense to me. I don't know, in a common sense kind of way. If you have something in front of your face that will trap droplets, that will help other people from getting sick in case you're sick. So, yeah, that's just a good idea. Let's do that.Starr:It's just what the deep state wants you to think then? You all are just sheep. You're sheep. I bet you even going for that 5G service on your phones... Okay, I'm not going to...Ben:Speaking of that, did you read the news about AT&T and the 5G this week?Starr:No, I didn't. I didn't. So, just skipping it and going straight to 6G?Ben:Well, the FCC, I think it was the FCC. I guess it might've been the FTC. But, anyway, one of the great federal organizations that we have came down on AT&T for advertising the 5G thing because it's not actually 5G. So, you can't actually tell people that it's 5G, slap on the wrist kind of stuff.Josh:I feel like they've gotten in trouble for that before with LTE and 4G.Ben:The funny part is AT&T is like okay, we'll take down the advertisements that say 5G. But, we're going to still show it on the phone. So, it's like okay, thanks AT&T. That's great, so... We won't lie to you on the billboard. We'll just lie to you on your phone.Josh:Yeah, but you've already bought the phone by that point. So, it's not false advertising.Ben:That's right, yeah.Starr:Oh, that's some universe-level thinking there, Josh.Starr:Well, so today I think we're going to talk about... Speaking about AT&T... Because when I was on AT&T, they always just raised prices on me. And so, we're talking about pricing. But, we're not raising prices on people. So, maybe I shouldn't have drawn that comparison. We're actually nothing like AT&T or-Josh:I thought you were going to talk about unlimited plans.Starr:Unlimited, yeah.Ben:Oh, yeah. Unlimited with an asterix.Starr:But, I'm out of the loop. I've been on vacation this week, which means that a time of COVID, when I am locked down with my family and I'm watching the kid half the time, that means I get to take an extra-long walk in the morning

Show Notes:Links:Mike PerhamFull United FlightSidekiqFaktoryHeyaPatrick McKenzieTechstarsTinySeedRoy/SACHoneybadgerFull Transcript:Starr:What's on your wall behind you? You've got like a autographed jersey like a hockey jersey.Mike:Yeah, I'm I'm a soccer fan.Starr:Oh, a soccer jersey. I'm sorry.Mike:It's the Portland Timbers. Yes.Josh:The timbers, yeah.Mike:And it's not looking good for us playing in 2020.Josh:Yeah.Starr:It's looking good for anybody?Mike:Some people more than others. Yeah.Josh:I never... I thought it'd be cool to make it to one of those games I've never been. I've never been to any sporting event in Portland, even though like...Mike:Well, I'm a season ticket holder. So Josh, if you ever want to come on down and we can go to a game together, I'm in.Josh:That would be awesome.Starr:Oh my gosh, this is great. I'm glad we're recording this. This is like networking. This is like stuff happening. This is like deals happening.Josh:This is actually like, when people are like seeing each other going to events.Mike:When you invite guests onto your show magic happens.Starr:I know, right?Josh:Yeah. Yeah, Ben and I have been talking about snowboarding too someday. And Mike and I have been talking about snowboarding as well. So that's another networking opportunity. Maybe for next winter.Mike:Yeah, in fact, I had a pass to meadows and they said that they're closed down so you can't use the pass and so people were freaking out.Josh:Yeah, they didn't refund any anything, did they?Mike:They say that you can use your punches in the first three weeks of next season.Josh:First three weeks.Mike:Yeah.Ben:Sounds kind of bogus. I mean, that's like the-Mike:So if it doesn't snow, well, your out of luck.Josh:Yeah.Ben:It sounds a lot like the airlines policy to get a credit rather than a refund.Josh:By the way the season is starting three weeks early.Ben:Starting the season in July.Mike:It starts in August.Ben:That reminds me of a tweet that I saw this week. I think it was and someone was they tweeted picture of themselves on an airplane and the airplane was full.Josh:Oh, I saw that one.Ben:Three by three.Josh:Where they're in the middle seat or something or?Ben:I don't remember but. But they were on a United flight. And I'm thinking what do you expect? Like it's United of course you're going to have every seat full on a United flight. They're not going to care about Coronavirus.Starr:Okay, so I feel like I should do like a record scratch now. And we should stop and actually say to our loyal listeners, I'm sure you're thinking, well, what's going on? There seems to be like one more person. And that's because there is. We have a special guest today, Mike Perham. And if you don't know Mike, he is very well known in the open source community for such projects as Sidekiq and Faktory. Are there any other projects?Mike:That's about it.Starr:That's about it?Mike:I've only got so many hours in the day Starr.Starr:What's the matter? I thought you hustled, I thought you knew how to hustle.Josh:That you're a hustler.Mike:I'm getting old. In my old age. I'm getting old so I'm slowing down.Starr:I mean, that's fair.Mike:Yeah.Josh:What is Sidekiq anyway, Mike?Mike:Sidekiq is the number one universal way of doing background jobs on Ruby. Except no competition.Starr:There you go.Josh:Nice.Mike:And Faktory is taking my background job knowledge and patterns and bringing it to every programming language. So you can use Faktory with JavaScript, with Python, PHP, Elixir, those sorts of languages.Ben:Yeah, naturally, we're big fans of Sidekiq here at Honeybadger, we use it quite a lot.Josh:Yes, Sidekiq since the beginning.Mike:Y'all were, yeah, one of my first pro customers along with TravisCI was also a very early pro customer. So thank you very much.Josh:Yeah.Starr:Yeah, so Mike is a... Mike knows a lot about making a living from open source. And so we're having him on to talk about that about little bootstrap life because he's a fellow bootstrapper. And, I don't know, we have palled around with Mike throughout the history of our company. And yes, we're just going to have an open discussion but vaguely generally centered around open source, bootstrappy stuff.Josh:And we're also just all losing our minds being stuck at home and it's nice to see another human face or three of them.Mike:Yeah, the listeners probably don't know, but I generally go up to Honeybadger HQ, well, in Vancouver, like once a quarter or so, I'll go out there and have lunch with you guys. So since we're about 20 miles apart, I'll generally go up there and say hi and hang out with the gang and have lunch together. But we had to cancel our last meeting because it happened right as the virus was picking up.Josh:Yeah, this was pre virus life.Mike:Right. So it's good to catch up remotely now.Starr:Mike I'm sure the question that all of our listeners are wanting to have answered is how do you manage to create an open source project that basically is a required piece of inf

Show Notes:Links:AmethystPopClipAlfred shortcutsHacker New Ubuntu 20.04 ThreadAnsibleJosh's dotfilesMathias Shell ScriptsUltraFineBartenderTranscript:Starr:I'm the type of tiling Window manager user that never changes any of their layout, basically. I'm the type of tiling Window manager that like has all applications open full screen except for like my terminals, which I have a vertical split. And so, I've got two of those open on a single screen. I actually don't know any shortcuts to any of the Window managers I've ever used. I have to look them up every single time.Josh:Yeah. Yeah, that's the great thing about Amethyst, it is the one that's based on ... It's has nothing to do with Haskell, but it's based on xmonad. But the key bindings are all like ... There's not really much way to change them, it's all pretty simple. It's a lot simpler to use the key bindings than it is to use the Haskell.Starr:I use Magnet for my Windows manager.Josh:Yeah, that's what I've been using too.Starr:Yeah, I really like that. The key combos are easy to remember to put stuff in the various places. I'm always like corner or half or top or bottom, it's super easy.Josh:Yeah, that's what I've been doing. It's a different approach. Amethyst, I've used it before and it is really nice because it automatically tiles, it's not like ... Magnet is kind of you just set up, basically, your halves or whatever.Starr:That's been around for a while, right?Josh:Yeah.Starr:Okay. Yeah, I just used to use that, I think.Josh:There's a bunch of them like that.Ben:We're talking about Mac tools today because-Josh:I guess we are. I could go forever on that.Starr:I've got a feature request for the makers of Amethyst who I know are dedicated listeners to FounderQuest. For the love of all things good in the world, can we please have a dropdown menu that lets you select different Window actions? Why do I have to use hotkeys, because maybe I want to do something that I do once every six months and I don't want to have to look up the hotkey for it and then try and make my fingers go into that weird chord position.Josh:Because it wouldn't be a pure tiling Window manager.Starr:I know, it's like come on, just give me a dropdown. It's not pure anyway, let's be honest. There's little bars at the top of the Windows, I can minimize things, I can drag things around, it's not pure anyway. It's already debased-Josh:It's not written in Haskell but you got to draw the line somewhere, and the line is dropdown menus.Starr:It's like a menu. It's like a GUI, okay. Okay, fine-Josh:You're totally making want ... I'm going to have to go try Amethyst again, you're making me want to go check it out. You might look ... There was like a configuration, I think it has a JSON configuration file or something that you can edit.Starr:Okay.Josh:Which is exactly what you were looking for if you were looking for a dropdown menu.Ben:Do either of you use PopClip?Starr:No, what's that?Josh:No.Ben:PopClip is a little extension thing ... I don't know how you describe it, what do they call it? I don't even know what they call it. I'm looking at their website and they don't really say. But basically, any time you select text, then this little popup pops up right above your cursor. And it's extendable, you can choose what kind of things appear in the little menu that pops up, but by default it does things like copy and paste, but also there's a little search icon. If there's a text you want to search on instead of having to right click, that's much too much work to do, so you can just hit that little search icon. Or there's a dictionary one so you can define something.Ben:But I use it a lot because it has an Alfred connection as well, so I will ... I have a bunch of Alfred shortcuts for things like jumping to one of our user records in our admin tool, and so, if I highlight let's say a user ID, then I can ... It'll give the popup, I can then choose Alfred and then I can type in my shortcut and boom, because it puts whatever's highlighted into that little Alfred box for you.Starr:Oh, that's really cool.Ben:It's super handy.Josh:That's cool.Starr:You know what's really amusing to me is that ... Because I've been working with you all for so long it's like we sort of like swap ... Okay, we kind of like swap places in weird ways. I remember a long time ago I'd be like, "Okay, I'm using Alfred, what you using, Ben?" And it's like, "Oh, I'm just using Spotlight." And now it's like reversed, it's like, "I just used Spotlight," and it's like, "Oh, Ben's using Alfred now."Ben:Yeah. Yeah, I love Alfred.Ben:I actually also use Spotlight. The reason why is Alfred I've never really gotten it to work the way I want it to work for looking up files and folders. If there's a file or a folder that I want, I use Spotlight. But anything else, basically, I use Alfred.Josh:Yeah, file search in Spotlight seems pretty advanced. It's got all the indexing and stuff built into it.Starr:Yeah. It seems like it'd be really har

Show Notes:Links:StripeSpam Nation by Brian KrebsBad To The Bone by George ThorogoodGrammarlyEgghead.ioUdemyChris OliverJumpstartHeyaLambyStimulusReflexAndrew MasonRemote Ruby podcastHoneybadgerFull Transcript:Josh:So I'm sitting in my chair with this laptop and the thing literally crashes in my lap. And when I turn it back on, it gives me that blinking folder. The blinking folder. I don't know if you've ever seen the blinking folder, Ben says he hasn't.Starr:I've never seen it.Josh:The blinking folder is what you get when there is no hard drive attached to the system.Starr:Oh, no. What's there? Is there a hard drive in it?Josh:There was. It's not finding it anymore.Starr:I mean, is there one physically in there?Josh:There is a physical hard drive in the system. Yes.Starr:Okay, that's good. That's good.Josh:However, the hard drive I suspect has finally croaked. So now I've had to... I've literally had like two laptops die on me in one week. I don't know if I'm cursed or something.Starr:Well that's what you get for using that cheap aftermarket hardware.Josh:Right, yes probably. Just, I probably should never have upgraded the hardware, the hard drive. Anyway fingers crossed because if this Mac mini kicks the bucket then it really is back to Linux.Ben:It's just the universe's way of telling you it's time to take a vacation.Josh:I think you're right Ben. I've been saying that I could use a vacation.Starr:You two were talking about taking vacations and then like the world ends, so-Josh:Well, yeah that's like, the world ends and then it seems like... I don't know I've just been feeling pressure to get stuff done. I don't know.Ben:Yeah getting stuff done is a good thing.Josh:Yeah, it... Actually making progress on something is one way to kind of combat anxiety too.Ben:Well, speaking of getting stuff done. So while you've been trying to actually get anything done this week, I've been working on the... I was going to go on vacation, I was thinking about taking time off but then you said, "Well, I could use your help on this task." And so I'm like, okay, I'll help you with that. And that was two weeks ago and I thought it was going to take two days but it didn't end up taking two days. So what I've been working on-Josh:Sorry.Ben:That's totally fine. You know like sometimes the thing that's great about being one of the few people at Honeybadger is that we get to decide what we do, right? We don't have deadlines that we have to meet, We don't have like deliverables that we promised. And so when you have a case like this, where I felt like, there's something I want to get done here, we can just do it. So the task you gave me was to get some new pricing support ready. So we have some new pricing that we want to deploy. It's going to require some changes in our app too, because we're changing how we're structuring the pricing.Ben:And I'm like, yeah, I can bust it out real quick. And so then I looked at doing that and the way that... So Stripe has changed how they arrange the products and the plans and how you do pricing, since we launched with Stripe, seven or eight years ago. And I decided I wanted to use this new approach that Stripe has but the trick there is that you have to use the new API version or a recent API version. And we were not using a recent API version. We were using an API version that we started using back eight years ago. Which happened to be an API version of Stripe's from like, 2011. So-Josh:2011.Ben:Yeah. So I decided, you know what-Starr:It was year, you know?Ben:Yeah, it was a good year.Josh:It's a good vintage of API, like-Starr:Yeah. Exactly.Josh:Got to hand it to it.Starr:Like some people call that legacy, I call it vintage.Ben:Well, either way, props to Stripe for how they do their API versioning. It is freaking awesome. Like, you can stay on that old version as long as you want, basically, they will support it until the end of the internet, looks like.Josh:Yeah.Ben:And they have a really awesome way to manage the upgrade process, when you decide you do an upgrade and their documentation is very clear about changes that have happened between the different API versions.Josh:Yeah, I don't want to like jump ahead of you too far. But I was going to say, I noticed when I was reviewing the pull request that you sent, it looks like we're supporting both versions of the API for now or something like that. Is that true or did I misread that?Ben:That is true. So yeah.Josh:Yeah.Ben:So I just decided to go ahead and bite the bullet and do the upgrade of the API. Because I'm like, you know what, this is an area of technical debt that we should probably just pay down on some. And so as I was looking at the different payload formats, they're not dramatically different. Which is nice but there are some key differences. And there're two aspects, right? There's the outbound API request that you make, like when we want to update a card. We have to make a request to update the customer record.Josh:Mm-hmm (affirma

Show Notes:Links:VoltronTransformersGobotsThundercatsAnimal CrossingStardw ValleyFactorioDependabotGumroadShopifyStripePinky and the BrainFull Transcript:Starr:Did you prefer Voltron over Transformers? Which team were you on?Ben:I guess I did, because I don't remember watching much in the way of Transformers, but I did watch a lot of Voltron, so.Starr:Oh really? That's a shame. Transformers were great.Ben:I'll take your word for...Josh:I like the name Voltron better. Voltron's a pretty good name.Starr:Well, can we all just agree the Gobots just suck? Let's just all agree to hate the Gobots.Ben:But I think perhaps Thundercats were better than both Voltron and...Starr:Oh, a hundred percent, a hundred percent. Thundercats for life.Josh:Are we the Thundercats of air trackers?Ben:Honey badgers go.Starr:I don't think a honey badger is technically a cat.Ben:I decided to try out Animal Crossing this morning.Josh:Oh really?Starr:Oh good. How do you like it? I've been playing in too.Ben:Well, it's not very exciting. It's a very slow pace kind of thing.Starr:Oh, yeah.Ben:That's the goal. That's the point, right? And I was like, "Yah, I'll check this out. Maybe it'll help me relax." And I'm like, "Now what do I do? Now what do I do? Now what do I do?" This is not helping me relax.Starr:Oh yeah. It is kind of a bunch of tasks.Josh:That's maybe not for everyone.Starr:But you do get to a point where you can kind of just goof around. I got it and then I played 20 minutes every three days or something for a couple of weeks just because I was like, "I don't know if I want to go gather this wood right now." But then you get over a hump and then it's more of an open world and you can kind of just sort of make it your own.Ben:I think part of my problem was my son's been playing it for a while now and he's got this nice house with all this cool stuff in it and I show up and I got a tent. I'm like, "Oh. I want a nice house."Josh:You've got to put the work in. Got to put the time in. He plays Minecraft too, doesn't he? Or did?Ben:He used to. Yeah.Josh:Okay. Do you ever play that with him?Ben:Yep. Yep. Yeah. And they totally eclipsed me. It was no contest. I had, "Hey, I got two blocks together", and they've got the Taj Mahal. I'm like, "Oh, all right."Starr:Yeah. Everybody's gives Tom Nook such a hard time for being such a capitalist, but you know, I'm just saying, I want, I want a house loan with no interest and no payback schedule and I can pay it off reasonably with, with a couple hours work gathering nuts and berries.Ben:So I started playing this morning because I read an article in the Atlantic about the game and I really enjoyed one of the angles. The article was like, "Maybe this is an indication of where we can take our society, where people are doing things they want to do but not under the pressure of having to pay back a serious mortgage", and all this kind of stuff.Ben:And I was like, "Hmm."Josh:Everyone has their own island where they live with a bunch of artificially intelligent NPCs and we can occasionally visit but it's rare.Starr:There you go. And if you save up your Nook Miles, you can buy a ticket to an island that's covered in spiders.Ben:Ooh.Ben:Well yeah I read that those spiders are actually, that's the way you make the real bucks. You collect those tarantulas, right?Starr:Well I mean there's the real spider island. So I looked into this. There's the real spider island, which is just a thing in the game and then for a while there was a bug in the game. Where you could force tarantulas to spawn infinitely. But they kind of did a patch that didn't get rid of it entirely, but it kind of made it less game-breaking.Josh:That's cool.Ben:Fun.Josh:So.Ben:So maybe I'll report back in a week or so and be like, "I love this game", and I won't be able to work for a month cause I'll be playing Animal Crossing. We'll see.Starr:Well I hope you. We all need some relaxation these days.Josh:Maybe Animal Crossing is really a metaphor for reality.Ben:It's the world they wish we lived in.Starr:Yeah, definitely.Josh:I wish I could spawn tarantulas at will. That would be a pretty cool defense mechanism.Ben:That would be pretty cool.Starr:Yeah. If that one doesn't work for you, I'm telling you Stardew Valley might be more your jam too.Josh:I've heard that one's really good. Yeah,Ben:I heard that I'm supposed to avoid Factorio at all costs.Starr:I don't even know what that is.Ben:Apparently it's a really addictive game. I don't know much about it because I've avoided it.Josh:My problem with these games is just...Starr:It's the one where you take one number and you multiply it by itself minus one and then you just keep doing that?Ben:The game goes really quickly.Josh:It's a pen and paper. Yeah. I don't have the attention span for, for these games anymore. That's why I just play first person shooters, just mayhem for 30 minutes to an hour and then I'm done.Ben:You want to get your Twitch on and then get back to real life?Josh:Yeah. It

This week Ben, Starr, and Josh break down Heya, their freshly shipped open source email campaign mailer for Rails developers. Learn how Heya works, how it can help with GDPR and Soc 2 compliance, and how it saves Honeybadger $$$ in Intercom and Segment costs. Plus, don't miss the hot thermometer takes!Show Notes:Links:HeyaRuby WeeklyAction MailerIntercomCustomer.ioSegmentGDPRMixpanelSoc 2Prosperity Public LicenseMailCatcherGinsu Flex TapeHoneybadgerFull Transcript:Starr:I saw some article about how some grocery stores like taking people's temperatures before they let them in.Ben:Yeah?Starr:And the one they showed actually projected, using a laser, the temperature reading on the person's forehead.Ben:Nice.Starr:And I thought that was so cool. And I was like, "I want one of those." And so I actually started searching for it. And I was like, "What if you want to take your own temperature?" Then you have to go to a mirror and-Ben:Shoot yourself in the head.Starr:Shoot yourself in the head. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I didn't even think about that imagery. That's kind of gross. Oh, Lord. There are all sorts of problems with that, now that I think about it. So, yeah. We just got an old fashioned digital thermometer.Josh:Every other morning. You just wake up and go into the mirror and you're just like.Starr:I don't know if you guys have this, but I realized that I have this thing sort of hung over from childhood, which was back when I was a kid, it was pretty common still for people to have mercury thermometers.Ben:I still have it.Starr:You still have one? Yeah.Ben:Yeah.Starr:Mercury thermometers are a... I mean, it might break. But-Ben:It's the gold standard, man.Josh:Yeah.Starr:It's the gold standard, yeah. That's what they use in chemistry labs, still use a mercury thermometer. But the one thing that I was always scared to do. They tell you when you're a kid, "Well if you bite down on it, and it breaks, then you're going to have mercury in your mouth." And that basically just means you're going to die immediately. I mean, not really. But that's the impression I got. And so even though our thermometer now is digital, I still have this anxiety. It's like, don't bite down on it. You know?Ben:Yeah. Honestly, I'd be more concerned about the broken glass in my mouth than I would about the mercury.Josh:The glass could be a problem. Yeah. Yeah.Starr:Yeah, I guess so.Josh:Yeah we have one of the forehead contact ones, and it works pretty good. Yeah.Ben:Yeah, the reason why we have four thermometers is we had the original, the glass one. That was our first one. And then we upgraded and got the digital one when the first kid was born. And then at some point later, we got one of those forehead ones. And that was great. And then when the older one went off to college, one of the recommendations from... They had the orientation for parents as well as orientation for the kids.Ben:And the orientation for parents, they said, the medical person got up and said, "If you don't send anything else with your student, send a thermometer." Because they get so many reports of kids not feeling well. They could have called the clinic and say, "Hey, I'm not feeling well." And I'm like, "Well do you have a fever?" And the kid's like, "I don't know." And they're like, "Well do you have a thermometer?" And the answer's always, "No." So they said, "So please send them with a thermometer." And so we got one. We got a thermometer and set him up. Now he's back at home, so now we have four. So that's how we have four thermometers in our household.Josh:Smart. Yeah, I can imagine not many college kids have a thermometer.Starr:All right. So today I think we're going to take a mild break from simply talking about the fact that everything outside of our little bubbles is on fire, and we're going to talk about some cool news that Josh actually shipped something, and we're going to talk about it. And that thing-Josh:Josh and Ben.Starr:Josh and Ben. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Ben.Ben:But mostly Josh.Josh:Ben did all the cool stuff.Starr:Yeah, I'm just saying I didn't do anything. That's all. That's why I'm announcing it. Yeah. So this week we released Heya, which is Josh's sort of email marketing gem Rails engine thing. So what does it mean to say that we released it? What's the state of it?Josh:Well it's been on our GitHub, if you went and looked for it, for a few months at least now. It's open source. It's just a GitHub repo. But this week we announced it and started talking a little bit about it. I posted on Reddit. And then it got picked up by Ruby Weekly this week too. So that kind of got it some attention, and more people know what it is now. Which is, it's basically a campaign mailer, like a sequenced mailer, for Rails. So it works kind of like, I don't know if you're familiar with Action Mailer? Sending you just vanilla emails in Rails. This basically feels just like Action Mailer, but it lets you send sequences of emails. And the emails within sequences can be s

Show Notes:Links:TupleGoogle HangoutsJitsiWebRTCNotionEpictetusSphere Andromeda StrainStillness is the KeyChopinHoneybadgerFull Transcript:Josh:I see we've got doom and gloom on the agenda today.Starr:Oh yeah. I put doom and gloom on the agenda.Ben:It's a good thing you had that reminder that there is doom and gloom, because otherwise we'd forget.Starr:I mean, we do tend to be a little bit flip. Or, by we, I mean me. So, you know-Josh:It's just my way, the jokes are my way of coping with the world.Starr:Yeah. Yeah. It's ... We're joking through the tears now. So in the past couple of episodes of FounderQuest, trademark, we kind of just were dealing with the fallout of having to be home, in quarantine, and all of that. Just sort of talking about how it's affected our work lives and stuff. We really hadn't, at that point, stopped to figure out exactly, okay, what does this mean in terms of our business? Because there is obviously an economic downturn in progress, and we don't really know how that's going to pan out. So yeah, that's what this podcast is going to be about. Since then, we sort of went into this seclusion, we had our first ever remote conclave. We'll talk a little bit about that, and the process we used for that, which actually turned out to be kind of awesome. Yeah. So we're still here, though, right? We're still shipping errors to people.Josh:We are.Ben:Yeah, we're still ...Josh:Yeah, well-Ben:Still catching errors.Josh:We missed a podcast last week for the first time in a while, I think.Ben:Yeah, I think the doom and gloom were hitting us, it was getting real.Josh:Yeah, it was hitting us last week. I don't know about you, you all, but I was just kind of too bummed out to really record.Ben:Yeah, I was kind of in the same boat. Since we had been talking about Covid the past couple of weeks, I was like, "You know what? I just don't want to record another podcast about Covid."Josh:Can we record another ... Yeah. Yeah.Starr:Yeah, I think everybody is kind of sick of it at this point. I know I am. I was ... Last night, I was sitting on the couch with my partner, and we were chatting. I was just like, I've got to think about something to talk about other than the state of the world, other than ... Like our kid, who we're with constantly now, because she's home from daycare. It was ... Food, like cooking was, I think, our savior then. We both like to cook, we've been actually eating very well, because who knows how long that's going to last, right? So you might as well enjoy life while you've got it.Josh:When you got all of this time on your hands.Starr:Yeah. Yeah. It's ...Josh:That's all you have to do.Starr:Yeah. It's weird. It's like there is certain tasks you can do with a kid. You can cook dinner with a kid, you know, underfoot. But you can't really record a podcast with a kid underfoot. You can't really write with a kid underfoot. I don't know. By underfoot, I mean climbing on top, and hitting you with the broom, and doing all that fun stuff that kids do.Josh:Yeah. You did, you recorded a ... Well, not recorded, but you all did a ... DIdn't you do a Zoom session with your daycare a few weeks back, or something like that?Starr:Oh my gosh, yes. We did.Josh:All the kids.Starr:It was cute. But let me tell you, I had a flipping panic attack doing IT support for that call. Because I had it all set up, the computer was hooked up to the TV, so that all the little kids would be big, so that it would be ... I don't know, I just though it would be nicer. I was like, "Okay, well, I'm just going to move this laptop up here," and in doing so, I jostled the HDMI cable, which caused the connection to the TV to go down. Then that, for some reason, that caused my computer to completely freeze up for like five minutes.Josh:Naturally.Starr:Yeah. Until it just magically popped back up like nothing had happened.Josh:Oh, did it come back, was everyone still there?Starr:No, they were gone.Josh:Oh, okay.Starr:Like, I don't know if it rebooted, I don't know if it just-Josh:Yeah, it dropped, and then, yeah, it just came back.Starr:I don't know if the screen just shut off. But I was trying to force power it down and everything. But it's just like, "Nope, sorry. We're on break."Ben:Speaking of Zoom, I guess we could mention that we've been playing with alternatives this week, right? We use Zoom with our podcast, but we decided this week, with all of the security craziness around Zoom, we decided, "Let's try some other stuff that's out there." We tried Hangouts, and we tried Jitsi, and they're just not as good as Zoom, unfortunately.Starr:Yeah.Josh:So, I mean, Zoom got one thing, at least, right, which might be the cause of their security concerns. But it's very easy to use. It works well. So there is very low friction. But apparently, there is also very low friction for randos to join your call, and yell at you.Starr:Well, the video conferencing just works better. I'm sorry, but it's like, that's ... It seems like all the w

Show Notes:This week on FounderQuest, it's a cutting room floor clips episode. Hear vintage, unreleased clips of episodes that you weren't supposed to hear. Discussions include: 90's software stores, Alan Turing, water heaters, buying top quality spyware dongles from China and even FounderQuest itself! Links:WishApple Arcade BearDay One Babbage’sUsenetSpencer’s GiftsCharles BabbageAlan TuringNaive BayesWhat The GolfNintendo SwitchFull Transcript:Ben Findley:Hello there. This is Ben Findley, the other Ben at Honeybadger. Don't worry, you don't have to hear my voice for very long. Before we begin, this is just a heads up that this episode will be a bit different. Josh, Ben and Starr were hunkered down this week and weren't able to record an episode.Ben Findley:We didn't want anyone to go through withdrawals, so I scoured the cutting room floor for old bits of Maxell UR90 and spliced them together to present you with this, FrankenQuest. As a warning, there are no tips on bootstrapping assess business. If you tuned in for that, you may want to see yourself out. However, if you can hear some random discussions held together with jarring transitions, then you've come to the right place. And now, back to the episode.Announcer:Three developers, one mission. Build a business to nurture personal fulfillment. It's not stupid. It's FounderQuest.Ben:Yeah, I was talking to someone just yesterday and he mentioned the podcast and enjoyed listening to it and he said, I really enjoy how short the episodes are and that you really get in there and dig into things. So maybe we have to cut all that so that they keep all that.Starr:Oh no, okay.Josh:But on to play devil's advocate, you know that the other, December was it? That we didn't really have an agenda and the podcasts just totally devolved into awkward pauses and jokes about holidays. Well, I mean that turned out great. I think it was fine.Ben:I haven't listened to it, so okay.Josh:No, you should, I mean, yeah, it wasn't bad at all. So it was, it was pretty funny and like a few people told me they thought it was hilarious, so.Starr:That's great.Ben:So let's dive in.Starr:You know how Amazon is mostly like Chinese knockoffs and junk now? It's all, it's all grossly overpriced. Like I've bought stuff from Amazon. It's like, this is kind of what I need it's okay, but I know this costs somebody like 30 cents to buy and I bought it for $10. Well, Wish is an app for your phone that cuts out the middleman and lets you buy cheap Chinese crap. Just sort of like directly. So, basically like it's, it's just like a bunch of super cheap stuff. A lot of which looks suspiciously like you can get some things that look suspiciously like.Josh:iPhones.Starr:Air Pods and iPhones for like $3.50. They're not really, they're not Air Pods but you know, if you want to maybe fool somebody.Josh:They're not even Bluetooth.Starr:Maybe. Maybe, maybe not.Josh:You have to wire them.Ben:They're just little pieces of plastic.Starr:Yeah. But for things like hats and little pieces of clothing and stuff and jewelry and all that, it's super, super cheap. And I haven't actually gotten anything from them yet. I ordered a bunch of stuff about a week ago and I've got another week to go before it gets here. And so I'll have to let you guys know how it is.Ben:Yeah. The only problem with ordering like clothes is that you can't really easily return them right?Starr:When they get shipped from China. But if it costs you like $3 for a jacket, who cares? Just give it to Goodwill.Ben:I suppose.Josh:That's a very Seattle way of.Starr:I guess, I guess. I mean, I guess I could go to like the boutique, some boutique store and try stuff on and then buy stuff for $100 and it fits. Sure. But it's like, why don't I just order every size it'll cost me like $12 in total.Josh:Yeah, just ship it on an oil tanker from China.Starr:You know those, I find those like I've had an oil fumes lend kind of a certain authenticity though.Josh:Yeah. Yeah. you can skip the cologne. I see where you're going.Starr:So anyway, yeah, I mean everything, everything you could imagine on there. And it's just like, I'm sure it's all flea market quality at, I mean, sometimes that's all you need. Right?Josh:So why one thing, why is it called Wish?Starr:I Wish? I wish that it would get here sooner.Josh:Nice. That's, I'm sure that's why that's, that's their tagline, right? Yeah. Yeah.Starr:No, honestly like compared with a lot, with some stuff that like even Amazon you buy it and it ships from China and compare with that. Like it's, I mean it's just, it's like a couple of weeks. It's no big deal. You can also have it shipped like to a store near you. And so I was like this is weird. They don't have stores near me. And so I looked it up, the nearest store near me and it's like some shady like iPhone, right, repair business.Josh:Really?Starr:Yeah. I was like I got to go to my device repair business and like pick up my headbands or whatever.Josh:Like one of those, o

Show Notes:The world is burning, yet we find ourselves settling into our weird new daily routines. This week Josh, Starr, and Ben discuss the importance of company transparency during a crisis, Tiger King, and, political trigger warning, separating health coverage from employment. Bring your marshmallows, chocolate and crackers!Links:The Witcher 3ScribendiThe Office - Micheal's casual jeansTiger KingDisney+Animal Crossing – Tom NookJustin Jackson – Good Businesses Have MarginObamacareFull Transcript:Starr:I was thinking this show we could talk about... I don't know just kind of getting settled into this sort of weird, new normal. Even though it's hopefully temporary. The last few shows I feel were-Josh:Wait, you're saying we actually have a topic this show? Because that actually, in itself, means that we must really be settling in if we actually have a topic this week.Starr:Yeah. I mean the last few weeks, it's like personally, I felt like I had no idea what was going on in the world, or my life, or anything. It was just everything got blown up. I'm starting to figure out how the pieces are going to fit together. So this week I feel personally like I kind of am getting a little bit of an idea of like how it's going to be. It's just a matter of keeping on doing it for two months? I don't know... how long? However long?Josh:Y'all getting a little bit of a routine dialed in now?Starr:Yeah. Exactly. The situation in my house is that my wife is also working from home. She also works in tech as a writer. So basically we switch off during the work day. I work mornings, she works the afternoons. And then we take turns watching the kid. And then we both try and steal scraps of time during naps, and in the evening, or whatever, to do things that we couldn't do during our lifetime. I feel like I'm at the point where I'm kind of able to sort of scrape by the stuff I need to do. It might be a little bit hard to do extra stuff, to start getting ahead, but as far as just making sure that the wheels stay on the car, and stuff like that? On the work I'm doing, at least, it's possible. What about you guys? I think y'all's work situations have changed less than mine.Josh:Yeah, mine hasn't changed a whole lot, to be honest. Because I was commuting to an office for a little while early last year, and over the course of... like late last year, I'd moved everything back home, including... I've got my home gym now. So pretty much my day was already spent at home. And we have young kids, but I was already home with them. My wife is a stay-at-home mom, and takes care of them and stuff. She's kind of going crazy right now because we had to tell our babysitter that she can't come because... but that's the thing, lock down. So yeah, we have a lot less help right now. I guess that's the big difference. I've been taking a little bit more time, in my work day, to stop and help with the kids and stuff. Like put them down for naps, or that sort of thing.Starr:My question for you is, what did you know that the rest of us didn't? You've obviously been prepping for this, Josh. You've got your home gym. You've been going on this for at least six months.Josh:Yeah. I'm just a hermit. I don't know. Usually my work week is pretty much the same as it's has been for the last six months. I usually will get up and do some reading. I ride my stationary bike that's in my office. I do some work. I work out. Do a little bit more work, and then it's family time. Before all of this happened, during the week, my major outings usually revolved around food, so just like getting lunch or something. I'm not doing that, but we replaced that with getting out. We still try to get out for walks and things. I even still have the occasional outing here and there as well. I don't know.Ben:Yeah, my schedule hasn't changed a whole lot either. I'm still getting that six hours or five hours of sleep every night. Waking up at 5:00 or whatever in the morning. Working. See, everyone else is asleep. My kids are older. They're teenagers, so they're sleeping till noon anyway, right? So I'm working from like 6:00 to noon-ish. Grab some lunch-Josh:Yeah, and then the play the Witcher for the other eight hours a day, before they go back to sleep.Starr:Wait, does the Witcher even work if you try and play it at like 4:00 AM? Isn't it down for maintenance every night?Josh:Yeah.Starr:Every night from like 4:00 to 6:00 AM?Ben:I don't know. Wouldn't know. Never tried. Yeah, and then like lunch. And then I'll do a little bit of work, maybe, in the afternoon sometimes, if I feel like it. I'll go for a walk, go for a run. I do miss going to the gym regularly, because I was still doing that. So that's kind of a bummer but, I've got the weights in my garage, and doing that.Josh:Got some stuff, yeah.Ben:It's not really that much of a difference, except that I don't go to my office every day now, even though, I'm really usually the only one here. Still, I felt like, "It's probably a good idea not

This week on PandemicQuest Josh, Starr and Ben share insider trading tips via the dark web, explain why aliens haven't attacked yet, and their thoughts around starting a SaaS company for hand sanitizer. The truth isn't out there, it's in here! Can you handle it?Links:Kodak CalendarJosh's Investing Blog PostDaddy DaycareKindergarten CopAnimal CrossingDoomJack BogleFull Transcript:Starr:What's today, March 20th?Josh:Yeah.Starr:It stays March 20th for the next two months.Josh:So the freeze as a solution to the economic crisis. Just pause everything until it blows over. Yeah.Starr:Yeah, and the thing where that falls down is at that... it's like, well that would also... You wouldn't have to be your mortgage and all that. It's like they wouldn't be able to evict people. But then also you wouldn't get paid, and you still have to eat, so... I don't know. If you have to have a-Josh:Well, but maybe that's where the tax stimulus comes in. We just... Future tax payers can... can pay for that.Starr:Oh, I guess so. I was thinking an amazing potluck. It's just what you want in a pandemic.Josh:Yeah. I don't know about that.Ben:I like the idea of changing our whole calendar system for the pandemic. You know? Let's-Josh:Yeah, that wouldn't cause any trouble.Ben:Yeah, yeah. Let's forget Gregorian, forget Julian. Let's just build a new one. I like it.Starr:The COVID?Ben:The Covian?Josh:The COVID.Ben:I think it was Kodak... Kodak built their own calendar and for the greater part of 20th century actually ran by it. It's pretty sweet actually.Josh:Are you serious?Ben:Yeah, yeah. We should switch to that.Starr:Oh my gosh. You know, that's so... I mean, I don't really think I'm ever going to be like founder of Kodak rich. I don't honestly want to be, but if I was, that's the kind of shit to pull. It's like, okay guys, I invented a new calendar. You all have to do it just because money. You know? Because I've got it, so here's my calendar, chip chop. You know?Josh:Yeah.Starr:I should probably clue in our listeners. Given the current, crazy state of the world with everything literally being on fire and... I'm expecting aliens to come next week and blow up the White House or something. We're sort of just going to be winging it for the next few weeks until things stabilize a little bit, because it feels kind of weird to go on and in the midst of all this stuff be like, all right, so we're going to do... we're going to talk about VC versus Bootstrap. Go. And it's like, who even knows if VCs will exist in two months. They might just... right? They might all be wiped out by the virus. You don't know.Josh:It's possible. I was going to say, I don't know about the aliens though, because I think the aliens are probably also self-isolating right now. I don't know if they'd want to actually come here.Starr:Oh my gosh. Yes. I mean, it's kind of like a spaceship. It's like, I wish I had a spaceship for my self-isolation.Josh:Maybe that's why the aliens haven't actually arrived, because they've been just self-isolating this entire time. The entire history of earth. You know? This is hitting us late, so...Ben:Yeah. They're all like, humanity is a virus.Starr:So the one thing I was thinking about in the past couple podcasts we've done is we go... We come on and we do a podcast and we're like, oh yeah, this is the state of the world. And then we come in a week later and everything's completely changed.Josh:We're lagging. Yeah, we're lagging by a week. So just keep that in mind.Starr:Yeah, we're lagging by a week. So it's just... it's just interesting to me to think about because last week I was... I was saying, well you know, maybe we might be... Like my daughter's daycare might be shutting down, something, whatever. Then by Sunday my wife and I were both like... we're like, we're pulling that girl out. She's not staying there anymore. And then an hour after we emailed them, they're like, we're closing anyway. Sorry. And now, basically, we're in our tiny little Seattle, city house. We've got two people working from home, or trying to. We've got... My four year old daughter's at home. And I've been working on this backyard shed for a long time, or it's an office. It's intended to be a backyard office.Josh:Well, it's a daycare now.Starr:Yeah, I spent most of yesterday picking up the razorblades off the floor, literally. Use a lot of razor blades in construction. Who knew? And vacuuming up all the carcinogenic dust and everything, and to make it into a big playroom because it's like our living room is getting a little tight.Josh:Starr, even if you did none of those things, it sounds like it was still a safer environment than the daycare.Ben:Josh, that reminds me of the movie Daddy Daycare.Josh:You know, I haven't seen... I don't think I've seen that one.Ben:You still haven't seen it?Josh:I still haven't seen it.Ben:I know we've talked about it before. You have to see it.Josh:Yeah.Ben:It's hilarious.Josh:All right, well-Starr:That's not the "It's not a

Glove up, mask on, and tune in to this week’s FounderQuest! Starr, Ben and Josh talk hot investing tips now that our 401(k)s are gone, plans for the “Honey Bunker,” pivoting away from remote and back to co-located working, Animal Crossing, hoarding Mucinex, and the Corona vs. Pacifico beer debate is finally settled. Show Notes:Links:Daniel KahnemanMucinexAnimal CrossingNintendo SwitchJeff Bezos' Regret Minimization FrameworkBasecampSplatoon SquadGround KontrolRailsConfNeroJim Kramer Honeybadger Developer BlogFull transcript:Starr:All right. So let's get back on topic. You all were talking about profiteering off of this terrible crisis by investing in the stock market. Honeybadger BlogJosh:That's a wonderful way to describe it.Ben:Seriously, I'm all about profiteering.Josh:Yeah. Yeah. So I've kind of, I don't know. I've been telling myself I've been waiting for this, so I'll really kick myself if I don't profiteer a little bit or at least try, I feel like, I don't know. There was an article, I forget, I'm trying... Who said this? Basically, Oh, I think it was Daniel Kahneman said one of the keys to investing at least to maintaining peace of mind is like knowing what your future regret will be. And then basically like taking like modifying your behavior to optimize for that versus like adapting to whatever your current fears or whatever is driving the market is driving you or whatever. So I decided that if I don't put a little bit of money into these bargains that I'll kick myself, I'll regret it more if it goes up and I didn't participate versus if I lose a little money.Starr:You know I haven't read that book, but I was using a similar strategy today. I was at target and I was like, well, should I get two boxes of Mucinex or three boxes of Mucinex.Josh:You would really regret.Starr:So I was imagining myself like in the future really needing some Mucinex. So I bought three, I thought four would be too much. I thought four would be like be tipping into... it's like nobody ever buys four boxes of Mucinex.Josh:And then-Starr:I could see somebody buying three just if they are a big fan.Ben:I think you get put on a list if you buy four at the same time.Starr:Oh yeah?Josh:Because this is like how, this is how like only a few people end up with all the Mucinex.Starr:Well you know what, it was the last thing available on the shelf, which was lucky because I actually went there for it. And it's like all the... what does it DayQuil NyQuil tabs all cleared out although there's still some bargains available on that. The liquid form, because nobody likes the liquid form of DayQuil or NyQuil because it tastes gross. Right. And so even in the apocalypse, I don't want to be drinking that stuff.Ben:So Josh what you talked about sounded to me like the regret minimization framework that Jeff Bezos-Josh:Yeah, that's right. That was, that was another one that kind of was a similar. Yeah, I really liked that. I think it makes sense.Ben:So Starrr is loading up on the Mucinex, you know my prepper thing?Starr:What's your prepper thing?Ben:I'm going to get a haircutStarr:Yeah. If you're going down, you want to look good doing it.Ben:Yeah.Starr:Why not?Ben:I'm thinking, if you see that chart, US vs. Italy and it shows that the US following the same exact pattern that Italy did but just a little different timeline so if you see that and go "Ok myabe everything will be shut down in a week right? and I won't be able to go get a haircut in a week so I'd better get a haircut today so that I can look good for the apolcolypse."Josh:And, yeah, and I mean like, you won't look handsome. Yeah. I mean, you, you won't look handsome on the on zoom calls and we can have that. We can have a shaggy Ben on zoom calls. Now I don't know if our listeners have ever seen me in person, but I don't have this problem. I never cut my hair. So like, well, I cut it a little bit more often than I used to a few years ago.Ben:You're like the Sampson of HoneybadgerStarr:That's all right. You know your Honeybadger's is nature boy.Josh:So Ben, did you go stock some stock shop shopping this morning you said?Ben:No we always have a backup supply, like we always have months of toilet paper and food and stuff in our garage. That's what we do, but, just this morning I thought "You know what? Maybe it's time to buy that freezer for my garage."Josh:Yeah. Nice. I have the freezer and I stocked it yesterday with a lot of chicken breasts from Costco. Not the organic chicken breasts because the organic was gone like long gone. So, apparently-Starr:Well, let's be honest. You want those preservatives, you want those preservatives now. You don't want that stuff to last as long as possible.Josh:Yeah. It's probably a, it's a net win for me probably to get the non-organic.Starr:Yeah. I'm just, I'm just saying Josh though, like when that electricity goes off because the zombies have like broken into the power plants and gnawed the wires like that, like all your chickens going to be rotti

Ben, Josh and Starr are transmitting...err...broadcasting from deep within the COVID-19 epicenter on this week's FounderQuest. They talk about life in our brave new COVID-19 World, Tailwind CSS, and reminisce about the old freelancing days in the time of Big Mouth Billy Bass! Show NotesLinks:The Social NetworkTailwind CSSThemeforestMorpheusRedditCovid 19BasecampRuby CentralComic-ConTornado AlleySecond LifeTeam Fortress 2Tobi at ShopifyStardew ValleyBill LumberghBig Mouth Billy BassJeff FoxworthyFull Transcript:Starr:What you were saying, Ben, about source maps reminds me of a long, long time ago, when I had this one freelancing client who ... so there was like ... right after that movie, The Social Network came out, which was about Mark Zuckerberg making Facebook, everybody who had $20-30000 laying around was like, I'm going to hire some cheap developer and have them make me some weird niche social network and I worked on several of these because I was freelancing at the time and one of them was for ...Josh:Those were the days.Starr:Yeah those were the days where you could get paid to write something that you knew in your heart nobody was ever going to use. So it was this one for nurses and so the guy was like very unresponsive to questions and so I eventually put something up. I was like, hey let's ... can you please start looking at this and tell me if you see anything wrong. Like you do in software and he was just like, it's broken, just make it work. It's like, give me the working site. And it's like, that's not how this whole process works sir. It's not like a car. You don't just go to the lot and you buy it, you've got to work the kinks out.Josh:Yeah, we all worked on ... well Ben and I worked on one of those too. Did Starr work on ...Ben:I don't remember if Starr was on that one ...Starr:I worked on one with y'all.Josh:It was fun.Starr:I think we're all taking pains not to name names because we don't want to shame anybody.Josh:We don't want to bash our past clients or anything.Starr:Yeah they were generally pretty typical.Josh:It was fun though, back when people thought that it was really just about the tech. You could just build the ... if you just built an activity feed there would be activity in it.Ben:And to be fair I think that was before Facebook groups so that basically killed any other type of social network that you wanted to build because everyone was like, oh we'll just make a group.Starr:Yeah that makes ... I never actually put that together but that totally makes sense.Ben:I sometimes miss those freelance days. I think though today if you're a freelancer there's so much cool stuff like the Tailwind UI was just released recently and that is just super awesome.Starr:What is that again?Ben:It gives you a bunch of components built on top of Tailwind CSS, which is a CSS framework that makes it really easy to build out designs. Anyway so Tailwind UI is built on top of that and gives you some premade components like, here's a list of users, or here's a marketing page with a pricing grid kind of stuff. So there's been templates around since forever like on Themeforest or whatever but this is the latest built on, reusable component framework idea and I love it. So I think as a freelancer today, if I was doing that today, I'd be all about that. I'd be like, oh let me just whip something up for you real quick from my UI since I'm a developer and I suck at UI.Starr:That's really cool. It's weird because I feel like there's been ... I don't really know what the historical progression has been because on the one hand it seems like we've gone from this world in around 2005 or whatever where one web developer with rails was basically for getting out a minimum bio of product that was pretty close to as good as you were going to get, and so you could just whip out these things, but now it seems like apps have to be so much full featured from the get-go, there's also so many more tools to do it. I don't know. I'm really ... I guess maybe it ... I'm just confused by it. I don't know what the lesson is here because on the one hand there's all these tools, but then on the other hand there's so many tools and people expect so much from new apps that it's like is it even possible for one person to do it?Ben:I think the moral of the story is the only constant in life is change.Starr:Oh that's good. You're like the Morpheus of Honeybadger. We need to get you one of those trench coats.Ben:Does that come with extra pay?Starr:Sure, yeah.Ben:Awesome.Starr:All the red and blue pills you want.Ben:Sweet.Josh:I wonder, do we even really need all these apps though? So many apps. Everyone wants a certain ... I think so many apps can exist together because there's so many people that want them. You can make an app and there's ... you have 100 users or something. You can probably find 100 people that want to use your whatever, your mobile ... your take on fitness tracking or something on iOS. But are we going to get to a poi

Join Ben, Starr, and Josh on this week's FounderQuest for a look at our dystopian future. Ben shares the most interesting questions he received while interviewing and the discussion results in the creation of an onboarding manual for time traveling job candidates. Also, Discover which host, like, bought a totally rad pager, like, this month. Beep Beep!Show NotesLinks:Pagersdirect.netPagerdutyO’Reilly SafariFull Transcription:Josh:So I think I mentioned a little while ago that I've been kind of experimenting with ways to disconnect from the internet and from my digital life. And being able to turn my phone off is a big part of that. But with the business and, especially if I'm on call or even when I'm not on call, I'm still a little, I want to be available for alerts, or major things that if you all need to get a hold of me for an emergency. So my thought was, if I want to just be able to shut my phone off and not ever worry about it, just know that there's always a way to get through to me, I could have a landline at home.Josh:But then I had a different idea and I want to see if I can show it to you. We have to, this is going to be very dramatic because we have to wait for it.Starr:I'm waiting.(pager beeping)Starr:Did you get a pager?Josh:Maybe.Ben:A raspberry pie with a breadboard. Just a little light that flashes.Starr:So awesome. Oh my gosh. You really got a pager.Josh:That's a pager.Starr:They still sell those?Josh:They still sell them.Starr:Where did you get that?Josh:I got this at pagersdirect.net.Starr:Oh my gosh. Okay. We're not even advertising pagersdirect.net. Your source for all paging supplies!Josh:Well I'm pretty sure I remember no, I'm serious. I'm pretty sure I remembered the brand name from radio commercials, in the early 2000s. Their website looks like it hasn't been updated since the 90s so I'm almost positive that I remember their commercials. But yeah, they're one of the options where you can still buy a pager. The networks are still all active and as far as I could tell, because I did, I went down a rabbit hole on pagers over the weekend and apparently doctors still use them, some other on-call people still use them, emergency on-call people use them, because the networks are still, they penetrate better than cellular networks apparently in some cases. So yeah, apparently it's still a thing.Starr:So that's a new pager. Does it have 5G?Josh:No, it's not a 5G pager. It is... They still run their own, the old school networks. I don't know what it is. I think it's like a much lower frequency though.Starr:Oh yeah? That's interesting. I actually, I think I remember a long time ago being like, I should get a pager, but then I just, I couldn't figure it out in 10 minutes and so I just forgot about it I guess.Josh:Yeah. So it's just, it's an experiment I'm messing with and I don't know if it's going to work forever, but I thought if it does, if it works, it's reliable and I mean it's at worst it's a backup, you know? It's just a backup alert and at best it's like, I can just leave it around the house and not worry about my phone or my computer or whatever. So.Ben:That's cool. I still have my pager from the 90s.Starr:Does it work?Ben:I don't know. I haven't used it in forever.Josh:You could reconnect it, Ben. If you have your own pager, they have it on the form, you can just put whatever the ID number is in.Ben:I should totally do that.Josh:Yeah. Yeah. You should.Ben:That's fun. That's great. Having a real pager for PagerDuty.Josh:By the way, PagerDuty supports pagers.Starr:Of course it does.Josh:It has an option for pagers.Starr:Yeah. Embarrassing if they didn't really.Ben:Because I can never turn off my phone. Right. Because I'm always the last line of defense for ops.Josh:Actually, they actually make modern, they make newer pagers. I actually went with this one, this is a refurb from 2003 but I went with this one because the modern one requires a USB charger, this requires a AA battery that you only have to change once a month. And I was like, this is actually selling me more on the old version than the new version.Ben:Yeah. Totally.Starr:2003. I'm trying to think what computer I ran in 2003. I think I may have actually had a pager in 2003 so that might've actually been my pager.Josh:That might've been your pager. Yeah. Yeah. So I'll let you know how it goes.Ben:Okay. Good. Because I'm unreasonably jealous about this now.Josh:Well we could all get one.Ben:Yeah, that's got to be standard issue now for Honeybadger. Anybody on ops gets a pager, right?Josh:I did have that thought. It's pretty cool.Starr:I mean that would be pretty cool. We could put that in our job listing. That'd probably get a couple sort of people who wanted to apply just to see what that was all about.Josh:It's also, I mean, this is an alphanumeric pager, I should also clarify, so it can send the actual alerts from PagerDuty, like what the issue is, and I can also hook it up. It has an email address, like the pager's number a

This week on FounderQuest, Josh, Starr, and Ben hypothesize how long Honeybadger could keep going if they went off the grid given the current pace of tech churn. They also discuss going all-in on COBOL and whether framework trends are actually any different than fashion trends. Get lost in this week's FounderQuest!Show NotesLinks:How to Build a Blog in 15 Minutes with RailsLindy EffectProgramming is a Pop CultureLaugh FactoryStar Trek Next GenerationBigelow TeaWallace and Gromit & Wensleydale CheeseCOBOLAngular 1 vs. Angular 2 ThoughtWorks Technology Radar Full Transcript:Starr:All right. I guess we're going to be talking about tech churn today, and by that, I guess we mean the sort of turnover, right? Like you have an app, you build an app, and it's not just done. I remember when I was freelance or like people ... I know these clients who weren't in technology and they would just expect that you build this app and you hand it to them and it works. Sort of like a house or something. It's like you built the house and you expect the house to sort of stay standing up.Starr:But with software, it seems like you build the house and then you have to sort of keep a crew of carpenters on hand to make sure it doesn't just fall down in a couple of weeks. Because dependencies are always changing. And I don't know. Standards are always changing, there's security issues, and stuff like that.Starr:So I guess this week we're going to be talking about that sort of stuff because at this point, it takes a fair amount of work keep Honeybadger ... I'm not talking about running, right. We can go away for a week and it's going to stay up. But if we went away for a year, we would come back and things ... I don't know. I feel like we couldn't just do that. Does that feel like a fair assessment?Josh:I think it's partially fair. There's some parts of our system that operate ... I mean that haven't changed for a long time. And there's some that are constantly changing or trends we have to keep up with. Ben:I think we couldn't go away for a year on the client libraries. Because every different language has its own schedule for releases. GO just had a release recently that changed error handling. And then on top of the languages, you have frameworks. React had some changes to their error handling recently. So that in particular I think we're affected by.Ben:But the core of Honeybadger, I think we could probably go away for ... I don't know. Two or three years before we had really have to change things. Because we picked a lot of boring technologies when we started. And those ... Like for example Postgres doesn't change a whole lot from year to year. I mean, yeah, it's good to upgrade to get new features that come down pipe, can you get better performance and bug fixes and things like that. But generally speaking, Postgres doesn't change a whole lot. And so you can stick with that for a few years.Josh:We host this meetup in town here in Vancouver, Washington called Vancouver Full Stack. And this last one, my brother, who's also named Ben, gave a talk on ... It was titled, I think, Building a Rails Blog 15 Years Later. And so it was kind doing the same thing that DHH did in the famous blog in 15 minutes video that got us all into Rails.Starr:Oh, yeah. That was like a huge deal back then because it was ... Nowadays, it's super common. It's like you done with some of your framework, you run some generator, and bam, you have some sort of working, basic web application like a blog. But back then, that was unheard of.Josh:Yeah, you basically either strung it together yourself out of a bunch of PHP or Perl or whatever files. Or you used WordPress or Typekit, maybe, as I recall. Was that the pro version?Ben:Oh, yeah.Josh:Yeah.Josh:So yeah, that was huge. Like being able to bootstrap your own relatively custom application.Ben:It was a movable type. That's what you're thinking about.Josh:Movable type, that's what it is.Josh:It was interesting, though, going through his talk, not a whole lot has changed in Rails as far as building a block in 15 minutes. I think the generators generate a little bit more code for you now. Actually, they're a little bit more explicit about ... So they put the code in your controller instead of just hiding it in the framework. But other than that, there was not a whole lot that has changed with Rails as far as the basics. Which I found really interesting because it's like how it's been 15 years. Because I think it was 2005 that that video came out, if I recall correctly.Josh:And of course, I mean, Rails has gotten a lot better since then. But also it has kind of just quietly done it's work for a lot of people, I think during that time. And they just had to upgrade it and ... You have to keep up on it. But compared to some of the other tech stacks that you could choose that aren't around anymore-Ben:The funny thing is that Rails itself, it's been around for long enough. But it's funny that you should say not much ha

This week Josh, Ben, and Starr talk vintage console games and announce details about Honeybadger's upcoming RailsConf blow out. The episode then pinballs over to dismissing FU money, insights on hiring and more. Hold on to your headphones!Show NotesLinks:RailsConfWazaRemus & RomulusSAMLDHHTableauCalendlyM Night SyamalanFull Transcription:Josh:It all started with Remus and Romulus, am I right, Ben?Ben:Oh, yes.Josh:Yeah.Starr:Oh my gosh, Remus and Romulus, those were the names of our first two servers.Ben:Our first database serversStarr:Our first database servers, I'm sorry.Josh:Was it Snickers was the ...Ben:Yes, Snickers was the first.Josh:Yeah, Snickers was the first.Ben:Yeah, so back in the day when we actually named our servers we named them after candy bars, so we had-Josh:First came Snickers, then came Remus and Romulus, and would you say that today Honeybadger is kind of in the late ... Like the decline of the empire stage?Ben:I hope not, no. We're still-Josh:I hope we didn't predestine ourselves ...Ben:Right.Josh:... with our server naming.Ben:We're still in the vigorous days of the republic.Starr:Yeah, I mean, we're referencing the Roman Empire, right? Remus and Romulus, they were ... You just said that they were like the, sort of like second servers that we set up, and before that was Snickers. I just wanted to say that you're implying that in the foundation of the Roman Republic before there was Remus and Romulus, like the official story, there was somebody named Snickers who really kicked it off?Josh:There was a Snickers, yeah.Starr:Little Snickers ...Josh:Snickers was the god that no one talks about.Starr:Yeah ... Maybe Snickers was the name of the wolf that raised Remus and Romulus, right?Ben:There you go.Josh:Right.Starr:Okay, that's a good name for a pet.Ben:I like it.Josh:Snickers the wolf.Starr:I love that so much! I love that so much, oh my gosh.Ben:Now we need some-Josh:I am totally going to name my next dog Snickers, by the way.Ben:That's awesome.Starr:That's a great name.Ben:I miss that server.Josh:Yeah, that was a good server.Ben:The good old days.Starr:Welcome to a special Valentine's Day episode of FounderQuest. We're talking about love. We take reader questions on romance, and how to ... I'm just kidding. We're going to be talking about ... Last episode we talked about, briefly towards the end we talked about how we were going to be doing the Honeybadger ... What's the official branding? What are we officially calling it? The Indie ...Josh:I think we're calling it the Honeybadger Indie Lounge.Starr:I like that. You know what would be even better than that?Josh:Tell me.Starr:The Honeybadger Indie Ultra Lounge.Ben:With sprinkles.Josh:Yeah, with sprinkles.Starr:Overstuffed furniture in there ... I don't know. I've never been to an ultra lounge-Josh:We should give out Snickers bars.Ben:I was thinking the same thing.Starr:Yeah, you should.Ben:You can have that party pack of Snickers in a bowl. Yep.Josh:In honor of our first server, yeah.Starr:That's a great idea. Actually, I've been legit hungry at conferences, so I feel like we'd get a lot of traction if we just had like a fruit bowl, just like bananas, just like free bananas.Ben:That's a good idea.Josh:We're going to have something really good there.Ben:We're working on getting a popcorn cart, actually.Starr:Oh, really?Ben:Yes.Starr:That's so cool.Ben:Yeah. Because who doesn't love popcorn?Josh:It's good to snack on, yeah.Starr:Maybe we should explain a little bit about what the heck we're talking about. We're talking about ... First of all we're talking about RailsConf. RailsConf is going to be when, like in May?Josh:Yeah, I think it's in early-Starr:It's in May, it's in Portland ...Josh:The first week.Starr:Portland is the Pacific Northwest, we're in the Pacific Northwest, so we're like, "Okay, we've got to really represent." If it was across the country, I mean, let's be honest, we just couldn't be bothered, but ...Josh:Also we have ... This is part of our origin story. We kind of launched at RailsConf, Pdx ...Starr:That's right!Josh:Was it RubyConf or was it RailsConf?Starr:It was RailsConf, yeah.Josh:It was RailsConf. Yeah, last time RailsConf was here ... I forget what year that was, it was ... I know it wasn't like 2012, but it was like a couple years after that, within that time span I think. Yeah, we went to RailsConf and we couldn't afford to sponsor, because RailsConf is a pretty hefty sponsorship price-Starr:Josh, we couldn't afford tickets.Josh:Yeah, you're right, we couldn't afford tickets, right?Starr:We didn't even get to go inside, we just sort of hung out in the hallway.Josh:We did the hallway, yeah, the hallway track. We basically bombed the hallway track, and put stickers on tables and things.Starr:Yeah, that was a lot of fun. That was one of the first times I've actually spent much time in Portland, so ...Josh:I totally forgot that we actually couldn't even afford tickets.Starr:Yeah, I remember sitting outside

The honeybadgers have been busy this week! Ben, Josh and Starr each have work that shipped this week that they want to brag on. This episode strides over vast expanses, covering issues like compliance, open-source marketing and content marketing. It all builds up to a big reveal at the end, where we finally announce a new Honeybadger effort: the RailsConf Indie Lounge. Full Transcript:Starr:Can I tell you the nerdiest thing that has ever happened to me, that I've ever done? The nerdiest, most embarrassing thing that I've ever done?Josh:Sure, as long as this isn't reciprocal.Starr:No, it's not reciprocal. It just reminded me of that. When I was in junior high, I was a super big computer nerd. It was the 90s, the mid 90s, so that wasn't cool back then. It wasn't seen as some sort of path to fame, riches, or anything. There was a song, it was really popular, I think it was by INXS and it was called More Than Words. It's this really sweet love song, something about my love can't be expressed by words and I was like "this is how I feel about my computer."Ben:Nice.Starr:See, I'm editing the show this week so I feel safe. I feel safe disclosing that because I can just edit it out if I want to.Josh:And you were listening to this on, what would it have been, CD probably?Starr:The radio.Josh:The radio? Wow.Starr:No, the radio. Yeah.Josh:When did we switch from cassette tapes to CDs? I don't remember.Starr:It was around that time. There were definitely still cassettes around. People still had cassette players.Josh:Yeah, but definitely wouldn't have been MP3 downloaded from anonymous FTP server or something. That feels like five years later.Starr:Yeah. I don't know what you're talking about. Are you from the future, Josh? Are you some spaceman from the future?Josh:I am, actually.Starr:Okay. So, we didn't fully discuss it but we discussed it in chat a little bit, talking about sort of what's been going on. It's been a pretty eventful week, we've shipped a lot of stuff, we've had some stuff happening on the job search front. Is that what you guys would like to do?Josh:Works for me, if that works for Ben.Ben:Sure.Starr:Okay. What should we start with?Ben:Let's start with the most boring part of the week.Starr:Oh, really?Ben:Yes. That was the most of my week, which was writing policies.Starr:Yeah?Ben:Yeah.Starr:I'm sorry. You seemed a little bit low energy too. That makes sense now.Josh:It's funny because the most boring part of my week was reading Ben's policies.Starr:Oh. Sick burn.Josh:Ouch. Sorry.Starr:So, what are these policies and why are you losing so much of your life force working on them?Ben:We are working on Site2 compliance. We have customers who would like to get our Site2 report and we don't currently have one. We'd like to have one because all the cool kids have one. The idea being that a Site2 audit gives you the stamp of approval that you're running your business in a way that's secure and does things that big boy businesses do, I guess. A lot of part of the compliance is, you have to define how you run your business through policies and then the auditor comes and checks that you're actually running your business like you say you are. We have a lot of things that we do at Honeybadger just because that's the way we've always done them, that's our MO, but this is actually documenting those processes like, how do we select a vendor? We actually do care that our vendors have security policies and we follow up on that. All these policies that I'm writing and getting done, basically just put into words exactly how we run our business.Josh:Yeah and we're mostly doing this so we can work with customers that require this, right? I think we've been finding that it has been a helpful process to actually go through and document these things just for the sake of having it. It makes us think about how we do things.Ben:It's a good feeling. It's a good corporate hygiene and it's nice to be able to say, yes this is what we believe at Honeybadger and we're putting our signature on the line saying this is actually what we're doing.Starr:I feel like in early years it would've been a much more simple policy document. It just would've been like, I do what I want.Josh:Just shrug.Starr:Yeah. Whatever.Josh:The shrug emoji didn't exist back then but it would've been the ascii version, or whatever.Starr:Yeah.Josh:The text one.Starr:Oh, that's too complicated. You have to use lots of characters to make that one.Josh:You can figure it out.Starr:No, I can't.Ben:Just use /shrug in Slack.Josh:Yeah, well. This is probably before Slack though. Campfire, maybe.Starr:Yeah, so...Josh:Sorry, Ben, I didn't mean to say that I was bored out of my mind with your documents.Ben:That's totally fine.Josh:To be honest, it's not your first choice in reading, I would imagine, for anyone but I think it has been enlightening in any case to learn some of these large business practices and terms that we're not typically exposed to. And if all the cool kids d

In this episode the Badgers talk about their predictions for the future of work. They also discuss some of the pros and cons to working remotely and how to prevent loneliness. Conveniently enough, Honeybadger is also hiring a JS developer. Learn the secrets of becoming a Honeybadger!Show Links:Job ListingCode[ish] PodcastBuddhism - No Mind Justserve.orgFull Transcription:Josh : Speaking of remote controls, I told you about the ridiculous garage door I put on my home gym.Ben: I am jealous of your garage door.Starr: Wait, You did? I never knew this.Josh : I did. Yeah.Starr: When was this?Josh : Let's see. Well, the whole thing took a while to install, but yeah, I finally gave, it was finally completed this week. But it's been in for a while.Starr: Okay.Josh : So it's this like, it's like one of those full, they call it a full view, but it's like, it's all glass for the most part. Like it's framed like glass panels with a metal frame.Starr: Oh nice. So you can look outside.Josh : Well, it's the glass, it's like opaque, like it's fogged or whatever. So you can't actually see through it. But it lets a lot of light in. So the light is awesome. It's the brightest room in my house now, I think, from the natural light. So, I might actually just move my office in there and then I just, never have to leave. But, so I got the garage door opener that goes with this system. It's like one of the top of the line. Residential ones, anyway. It's a LiftMaster and it has wifi built into it.Ben: Oh yeah. I have one of those too. So awesome.Josh : So do you have the... What did they call it?Ben: MyQ?Josh : Like the garage hub,though?Ben: Yes.Josh : It goes with?Ben: Yes.Josh : Okay, so you can open your garage door with Siri.Ben: Yeah. So awesome.Starr: So you all know garage doors opener, garage door openers don't have a stellar record of security?Josh : Security. Yeah, I do.Starr: At least the old style garage door openers, basically, it was like a four digit code. Like they transmitted like a four digit code so somebody built a device that just transmitted all the four digit codes and so you could just walk down the street and open everybody's garage doors.Josh : Yeah. And I've known people who've done, I never, I never did that, but I always wanted to. I never got my hands on one.Starr: I'm sure that since it's got wifi you can SSH in and use a private key on there.Josh : Right.Starr: Use a key pair for authentication.Josh : Just transmits a public key for authentication.Starr: Yeah, no, I mean, your little remote would transmit the public key and then the hub would like check it against the private key.Josh : Yeah. Well I'm sure Apple does something like that.Starr: Oh, probably. Yeah.Starr: I mean, it's Apple though. Nobody tries to break into Apple products cause they're just too cool.Josh : Yeah. Yeah. I mean if windows had a garage hub, I'd be extremely worried. Microsoft, Microsoft garage. But yeah, it's cool. And then, whenever it opens, I also get note of it. Cause through HomeKit, I guess. This is my first HomeKit device. So, I am officially a connected house, which I swore I would never do. But, I'm probably going to do more now.Ben: Of course, you are.Josh : Cause now I want to control my front lights. So that they're, put them on a timer or something.Ben: Oh yeah.Starr: Is HomeKit like the Apple home automation thing?Ben: Yep.Josh : It is. Yeah. So it's all integrated in a MacOS and iOS. And so, when my door, when the garage, if anyone opens the garage door at any time, I'll get a notification. The garage door just opened like on my computer.Starr: And then you'll see the garage door open.Josh : Or I'll be in there. But like if the kids open it. Yeah. But if my office is in there, I'll just see it.Starr: So, what are we talking about today? We were talking about maybe doing a sort of future of work thing where we're talking about remote working and all that. But then, also, Josh suggested that we, since we have a new job opening and we're a remote company, you could say that Honeybadger is the future of work. Do you think that's too bold?Ben: No, that's right on.Starr: That's just bold enough. Okay, we are the future of work and we have a new job position. So I think we're going to use that as like a lens to discuss the future of work. Is that correct?Starr: Yeah, that sounds good. And I don't even know. Yeah, I really don't think it's that bold, because we're one of the companies that are, I think, pushing the boundaries here.Starr: Okay. That's good. That's good. Listeners can't see this, but everyone's looking at me like I'm so full of crap. Right now.Ben: Maybe we need to ditch the whole remote thing though. We should all work from Josh's garage.Starr: That's a good idea.Josh : We're going to going to do the central office again. Yeah.Ben: In yo...

Ben and Starr have an informal fireside chat about recent tax changes and how to navigate them when running a SaaS company with nationwide sales. Learn about some of the surprising rules some states have around business classifications and why you might have to pay sales tax in one state but not another. Uncle Sam is crashing the internet party, listen and make sure you're prepared!Links:Justin JacksonSouth Dakota v. Wayfair, IncAvalaraStripeIan Landsman Write for HoneybadgerFull Transcript:Starr: Josh is not with us this week and I'm, I'm not actually sure, do we know what Josh is doing or is he just out?Ben: He's just out gallivanting, I suppose.Starr: That's all right. We, we respect people's privacy here at Honeybadger Industries LLC and yeah. So Ben and I are just going to do a little fireside chat episode. That's when there's only two of us around. We're only... we just sort of chat about whatever is going on and on our mind. And this week that is sales tax.Ben: Super fun topic.Starr: Yes. So is it okay if I set the stage a little bit?Ben: Please.Starr: Okay. So being an internet company and specifically being a software as a service company, Honeybadger Industries doesn't usually have to worry that much about sales tax. We are located in Washington state, which is actually one of the only places that sort of historically has had a sales tax on software as a service or services in general, I guess. And so it's really not been that big of a deal, but some things have changed, sort of... it, I don't know, I just feel like the party is, is coming to an end on the internet. We had all these great times and then now the government's coming in, the party's over and everything's owned by Google and now we're just having to sort of keep up a little bit. So. So what's been going on with the sales tax, Ben?Ben: So you mentioned that we're in Washington and that they do charge sales tax. So we do pay a sales tax and our accountant handles that for us, figuring out what that number is. We don't actually charge sales tax to our customers though. We just decided early on that we would just eat that cost. And so we, we charge the same amount to all our customers everywhere.Ben: But recently, the changes you've alluded to include a Supreme Court decision. So this is in 2018. Wayfair and South Dakota, and the state of South Dakota sued Wayfair because Wayfair wasn't paying sales taxes in South Dakota. And the Supreme Court overturned previous rulings, which said that basically if you were, if you didn't have nexus in a state, you didn't have to pay a sales tax in that state. So nexus being some sort of location, like a headquarters or an employee in that state. So, Wayfair is arguing, "Well, we don't have nexus in South Dakota, we don't have our offices there so we don't have to pay sales tax there." But, the Supreme Court decided that South Dakota had a point and that Wayfair should actually pay sales tax in South Dakota. And so that kind of changed everything for everyone who sells across state lines in the United States. That was kind of a big deal.Starr: Yeah, I felt, I remember feeling sort of, it kind of felt like a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. I felt some, some tingles happening. Yeah. Just because it's just so... You know, we're a tiny company, we're five people and we... possibly soon to be six. But you didn't hear that here... possibly. And yeah, and we're developers and we don't really have people on staff whose job it is to worry about sales tax and stuff like that. So, so yeah. So for me, hearing that, okay, suddenly internet people are going to have to pay sales tax sort of injected this bit of uncertainty into my life where it's like, "I don't really know what we're supposed to do." And so I actually... I emailed our accountant, which is what you do when you get anxious about sales stuff or tech stuff.Starr: I do this all the time, mostly with my personal accountant, but sometimes with the Honeybadger accountant and... so I was like, "Okay. What, what this? Please? I'm anxious. Please soothe me." This is the new law, right? Everyone's got pay sales tax, so it's law. So it has to be really... there's just an obvious way to do it. And she was like, "Oh... actually right now nobody really knows how to do that. All the regulations are kind of up in the air. Every state is doing it differently..." And all that. And this was a year, maybe ago, I don't know... six months to a year ago. And so I was just wondering, do you know if that's still the case?Ben: Yeah. So yeah, like I said, this happened in the summer of 2018 and we basically ignored it for a while, like most small companies did, I'm sure.Ben: And yeah, we started looking into it and there is some, some vagaries, some, some confusion. And when the new year rolled around... 2020 started, we started look at this again because our accountants like, "Oh, you should probably pay attention to this."Ben: And so I did a little bit of digging. And

History is made this week as FounderQuest welcomes its first ever guest, Justin Jackson, co-founder of Transistor.fm! A debate ensues around whether it's better to build a product for a niche market or target the larger market as a whole. Also, the next time Jeff Bezos corners you with unsolicited advice for your bootstrapped startup, just ignore him. Listen to find out why.Show Notes:Justin JacksonTransistor.fmMitch HedbergRightMessageProduct Journey podcast Kevin Kelly - 1,000 True FansJohn Gruber and Merlin Mann talk at SXSWJawaAdam WathanPeldi Guilizzoni Tyler TringasSuperhumanMicroConfJason FriedFull Transcript:Justin: You just wait for someone to say something funny?Josh: Yep. We just got to wait. We don't start until someone says something funny.Justin: That's so much pressure. That reminds me of the old Mitch Hedberg bit. Do you remember that bit?Josh: No, I don't.Justin: He's like, "My job is to sit around and wait and think up things that are funny, but sometimes I'm too far away from a pen. So then I just convince myself that what I thought up wasn't funny."Justin: Mitch Hedberg's my spirit animal. If you haven't... I think he's better on audio, but yeah, just look up some of his old stuff. It's just some comedians are... they'll get into a bit and the bit has stages, and they'll sometimes hit the same thing over and over again, and it'll be 30 minutes. Like Chris Rock, "Barack Obama." He'll just keep saying the same thing over and over again. But Mitch Hedberg is like fastball after fastball. It's just all one-liners. Yeah, he's so funny.Josh: Nice. We'll have to find some links for the show notes.Justin: Yeah. Definitely worth checking out.Josh: And speaking of, for our listeners, I was going to say if you think that Starr sounds a lot like Justin Jackson today, it's because Starr, unfortunately, couldn't make it. Her daughter's sick, and so she's home playing caretaker. But luckily Justin was available, and so we're going to... I guess this is the first guest episode of-Justin: Is this the first time ever?Ben: You're our first guest host.Josh: You're the first ever guest.Justin: I should've worn my Honeybadgers shirt today.Ben: Totally.Josh: Yeah.Justin: I love that shirt. I don't even know what I was thinking.Josh: To be fair, you should always wear your Honeybadgers shirt. But especially on FounderQuest.Ben: We should send you six more so you can wear them every day.Justin: Yeah, just so I wear them every single day. I've got the Godzilla one. It's so good. Is there multiple shirts, or is that the only one you guys have right now?Josh: There's two. Godzilla's the latest, and then the other one was like a badger ripping out of the chest of the shirt. We actually have a couple other designs that we should probably get going, get to the printers.Justin: I think folks could learn a lot from you just in terms of swag. You definitely have the best swag. I think you set the high bar, and everyone else is just trying to catch up to you.Josh: Well, thanks. We love our swag.Ben: It's been a lot of fun.Josh: It's fun. Yeah. And we like to have fun.Justin: My least favorite thing about going to conferences... I'm going to get into trouble for this. My least favorite thing about going to conferences is somebody comes up to me with a shirt that they made for their startup, and they're like, "Hey, take a shirt. What size are you?" I'm looking at the shirt, I'm going, "I'm never going to wear that." I'm not going to wear your shirt that's for... See, I can't even talk about it because some people will know.Josh: Hypothetical company incorporated.Ben: They make the great painting shirts.Justin: It's almost like people forget. They do all of this, well hopefully, they do all of this thinking about building something people want with their software product, and then they make a shirt that just like, their dumb logo or something with the .com in it or the .biz. And then-Josh: It's an afterthought.Justin: Although, actually, I will wear a .biz shirt. If you have a .biz domain, I will wear that shirt.Ben: How about a .ca shirt? Would you wear a .ca shirt?Josh: A .ca?Justin: I will definitely wear a .ca shirt. That's fair.Josh: You got to rep the CA.Justin: I've had a few Americans go, "What the hell is this .ca?" I'm like, "It's Canadian. It's .ca."Josh: .ca. That's good.Justin: Because the C in French is ca-Josh: Yeah. Yes. I caught that.Josh: We're a little bit cultured here.Ben: We are in the Pacific Northwest. We're close enough, right?Josh: Totally. Yeah. Well, if you... I know you're a Laravel guy for the most par...

This week Josh reveals his super secret project that he's been working on and it will...BLOW...YOU...AWAY!!! Just kidding, you and your surroundings are most likely safe but it's pretty darn cool! Want more? The Founders get contrarian and talk about why they sometimes go to the trouble of building tools instead of buying ones that are readily available. They also make a case for using separate apps rather than an all-in-one solution. Ancient viral video fans rejoice and get ready for some reminiscing about The Hamster Dance and The Badger Song.Show NotesLinks:Badger Badger BadgerHamster DanceIntercomHelp ScoutZohoUnixSegmentJosh Pigford BaremetricsHaskellKramer SoundsSQLPostgresSQLHey Ya (song)Write For UsFull Transcription:Josh: Should we have to all say 'Badgers when we clap instead of just you, like we all say it?Ben: Yes, but in different languages.Starr: Yeah, and it's all going to come back in slightly different line times. So it's just going to be like 'Badgers, 'Badgers, 'Badgers.Ben: Mushroom, mushroom, mushroom.Josh: Mushroom, mushroom. Nice.Starr: That was... What was that from? That was from an ancient meme, wasn't it?Ben: Yeah, it was a video.Josh: Badger, badger, badger-Ben: Badger, badger, badger, mushroom, mushroom.Starr: Oh! Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I got it. I was totally referencing that. I was totally referencing that, guys. So have you guys heard the song Raining Tacos?Ben: Nope.Josh: Mm-mm (negative).Starr: Because my little girl is super into it, and it's a song about it raining tacos. I think it's new, but it's a very old school internet type song.Josh: I haven't heard that one.Ben: Have you shown Ida hamster dance?Starr: No, I don't know what you're talking about. What's that?Ben: You've got to check it out. You've got to check it out.Starr: Hamster dance?Ben: I don't even want to spoil the surprise.Starr: Okay. I'll write it down.Josh: Everyone should check it out.Ben: It is like the original internet video meme song catchy thing.Josh: Viral video. Viral song.Starr: Okay, I probably seen it, but... Yeah, I probably seen it, but all the new viral content has pushed out the old viral content. It's like a stack that just overflows. It's like a stack overflow.Ben: Exactly.Starr: They should name a website that.Ben: So deep.Josh: My question is do we actually want to check out any of these videos, because it'll be stuck in our head and our kids won't shut up about them?Starr: No, probably not.Ben: Come on, Josh.Josh: Is this like the ultimate troll, Ben?Ben: You're spoiling the surprise.Josh: Is it like Baby Shark or whatever?Starr: Yeah, this is funny. So it was Ida's birthday the other day and-Josh: Nice. Happy Birthday, Ida.Starr: Yeah. So we did her birthday party, and we gave her her CD player, and I got her a couple CDs. She's got like four favorite songs, and they're all wildly eclectic. So we got her a Jewel CD, because she likes Jewel's rendition of Twinkle Twinkle. And we got her a Bob Marley CD, because she really likes a Bob Marley song, and some weird country western CD because it's got a Rudolph Red Nose Reindeer on it that she really liked. And what was the last one? Oh, yeah. The Wiggles, just for fun. Yeah, so yesterday... So I was very strategic about this, because kids birthday parties are chaos. So I was like, "Let's open the CD player first. You get one CD, the Jewel CD, which is super mellow." So I was like, "Why don't we just play this while we open the rest of your presents." So we had this super mellow acoustic music playing, and it made it a little bit more chill. I don't know.Josh: Did you have a lot of kids there or was it manageable number?Starr: There were no kids.Josh: Oh, okay. I was going to say.Starr: She had her party at daycare-Josh: Okay.Starr: -and then at home we just did it with... because all of her friends were at daycare, so at home we just did-Josh: That's genius, actually.Starr: -an adult thing. By adult, I mean her parents and her aunt, and that's it. And then 1000 phones on FaceTime. A complete camera crew.Josh: Well, good for you. I've never been... I don't know. The whole invite 50 parents to your house from school or whatever thing terrifies me.Starr: Yeah, that's why we were like no we're not going to...Josh: Yeah,...

In this episode Josh, Starr, and Ben talk about each of their results from taking the CliftonStrengths assessment and debate the validity of the results. They also discuss if having differing strengths and weaknesses has helped or hindered them working as a team.Show Notes:Links:Macklemore 5 Minute Dungeon Common Sense With Dan CarlinStrengthsFinderStrenghtsFinder 2.0 (book)Cliff ClavinComparative AdvantageMike Perham Fieldstone MethodMyers BriggsWhat Color is Your ParachuteHarry PotterWoo Strength Full Transcript:Ben: So, how's the vacation been everybody?Josh: Good. For the most part.Starr: Yeah. What have ya'll been doing?Josh: Well, so I've been a little cynical today maybe because my family has been sick for the past few ...Starr: Oh no.Josh: My wife specifically. She's not feeling well and I've been on kid duty and kids are cooped up and tired of dad.Starr: I'm so sorry, Josh. That sounds so rough.Josh: But we'll get through that. Well, it is what it is.Starr: Well, if you need to take a little break and go away, wrangle some kids.Josh: Oh. I am ready to get back to work.Ben: Just remember what Macklemore said, right? "These are the good ol' days."Josh: Yeah. It is true. I have been enjoying the time with the kids for sure, especially after they go to sleep and I have time to reflect on the day.Starr: Yeah. So, was Christmas great? Did your little ones just love it?Josh: They did.Starr: Did your little ones love it, Ben? Your slightly bigger ones.Ben: Well, if they both hadn't had the stomach flu, they would have loved it.Starr: Oh my God, everybody is sick this Christmas.Josh: Everyone is sick, yeah.Starr: Even when one of my friends back in Arkansas. I was like, "How was Christmas?" And she's like, "Oh, I got the flu." So, I don't know what's going on.Josh: Yeah, my brother's daughter got the flu over Christmas too. So, it seems to be going around.Ben: But we did get a new board game as a family thing?Starr: Which one?Ben: Five minute dungeon. If you haven't heard of that-Josh: I have it.Ben: ... it's a co-op card-based game. It's got a five minute time limit thing. So, you're rushing, you're playing cards to try and beat the monsters and obstacles to get through the dungeon. And it's pretty frantic and it's a lot of fun, so yeah check it out. It's three to five players. It's eight years old and above, I think. It's a lot of fun.Josh: Pretty cool. Can we link that up in the show notes?Ben: You betcha.Josh: With an Amazon affiliate link.Starr: It's so cool that you can just say that and somehow it'll happen. I'm not sure anymore how it happens. It just does.Josh: It doesn't have to be an affiliate link for the record, Ben. But if it is, you're totally covered because I've just disclosed ...Ben: Well, Ben will just slide his own affiliate link in there.Josh: Right.Starr: Yeah. So, I know for a long time, Josh, you listened to Dan Carlin's Common Sense podcast, which is now I think pretty much defunct. I listened to that too. He always talked to his producer ... I think his name is Ben, right?Josh: Yeah. His name is Ben yeah.Starr: And the joke is like you don't know if Ben is real, but he's just talking to Ben throughout the show. And so, I think maybe we should start doing that with our own Ben Findlay.Josh: He really is our ... he's our producer, so yeah. I love him.Starr: Yeah. Got our marketing expert, Ben Findlay, who is involved in the production of this podcast, so we should just start doing that and that would be really weird.Josh: The dynamic on Common Sense was great though because he's always making fun jabs at him. And then, like any intro's like the announcer voice is taking jabs at Dan because I'm assuming Ben is writing the scripts for those.Starr: Oh yeah. Fun fact. Our cheesy announcer voice was a direct ripoff of that show.Josh: Yeah.Starr: Cheesy announcer voice.Josh: We're fans.Starr: I don't have any original ideas, so what are we talking about today? We're talking about StrengthsFinder, right?Josh: StrengthsFinder, yeah.Starr: Should I set the scene?Ben: I'm looking at it right now and, Starr, your number one strength. I'm just looking at it right now. Is id...

The trio is morphing into a duo on this week's episode of FounderQuest, Fireside Chat edition. Ben and Josh talk about their 2020 resolutions, upping their serverless usage, side projects, and holiday plans. Ben also drops a major update from a previous episode. Links:Cliff Mass Weather BlogContinuous Integration (CI)Unicorn ProjectPhoenix Project DependabotJenkinsGitHub ActionsBuildkiteFull transcript:00:15 This is our first fireside chat with the two of us, right?00:18 So you're ready for Christmas?01:28 I think so.01:31 How about the kids, are they ready for Christmas?01:34 They're ready for Christmas. Everyone's been a little bit cooped up because of the winter weather, but I don't think we're going to get any relief there.01:47 No, I saw that they had this like, what is it called? The pineapple express. This weather pattern that we have where this big stream of moisture comes from Hawaii into the Pacific Northwest and that's what we're doing right now. We've got this big rain storm coming in and I was looking at the visuals from Cliff Mass blog and there was just like the moisture was indicated with colors, right? Like you usually see on a forecast, and it was deeply red. Like all the way from Hawaii to the Pacific Northwest and the end of it, as it passes the U.S. Coast, the kind of like a fist and so people were calling it the Hawaiian punch.02:36 Hawaiian punch. That's awesome.02:39 Yeah, we had a road shut down near us because all the rain caused the soil to get unstable and so there's a little bit of a mini land slide, I guess what happened, and some trees fell down and... yeah.02:56 Ouch and Hawaiian punch, that's like a weather reporter's dream, isn't it like?03:01 Yeah, basically.03:01 Getting a name like that you can say.03:04 I'm pretty excited for Christmas. There's not going to be any snow, but that's okay. It'll still be fun. Oh, it's follow up though, for like a couple weeks ago, I think it was just Starr and I who were having the chat. I don't think you were there for this one, we were talking about the Christmas lights and-03:26 No, I was there.03:27 Oh, you were there?03:28 Yeah.03:28 Okay. All right. I bought some Christmas lights for the outside of the house.03:32 Did you? Nice.03:33 So, now I have one string of lights draped over my garage door and it's-03:40 That's what I usually have, except I didn't put them out this year yet because I was waiting for my garage door to go in and so now Caitlin and the kids are kind of bummed that they're not up, so I might put them up this weekend just because it doesn't look like it's going to be here.03:55 Totally.03:57 Throw them up for a little while anyway.03:58 It's kind of fun and it is fun, like Starr said, to see them when you're coming home, get that holiday cheer.04:07 It does, it kind of changes the atmosphere, for sure. So I thought we could talk for a second about a work related thing. Just because I think people are going to be getting this. I mean, this episode's going to go out next week, which is a couple of days before New Year's and so I thought we could, or at least I could share a New Year's resolution, which I normally don't do because usually if you share your resolutions, they don't happen. But I'm just going to throw caution to the wind here, but anyway, I think I posted this in chat before, but one of my resolutions is not to wait on a CI unnecessarily.04:52 Oh, we got to do the Starr thing though. What is CI Josh?04:58 So, CI is Continuous Integration, but there's a bunch of services that do this for you. It's like an automation feature that runs build steps on your software basically every time you push into your code repository, like github.com or whatever.05:13 So we have a bunch of tests, test code for our application and the CI service runs all those tests for you and lets you know if they passed or failed, right?05:24 Exactly. Yes. Being around for a while, the badgers getting up there in age, we have a lot of code repositories laying around now that we have to maintain and a lot of those happen to belong to me and they all have CI, and so they all have test suites that are running on every code push and that's fine. We've used a bunch of different services in the past but I think we've been using like Travis and Circle for the most part.06:04 Normally it's fine, like, if I push code and I'm not doing like a ton of changes or I'm not working on a ton of repositories at once, but lately we've been using Dependabot, which is kind of a newer automation tool which automatically submits a dependency updates to your repositories. So it's a good way to keep like your dependencies up to date so you're not like having to go and do like this massive upgrade of all your things at once. What it does is it submits a more granular like, it submits one pull request for each dependency that has a new version that's come out. So on a lot of these repositories, a bunch of them anyway are NPM packages and as you know, NPM is a supe

This week Josh, Ben, and Starr look back at all of the things that Honeybadger shipped in the last 12 months. They also give Apple some free management advice and provide their thoughts on MicroConf's latest announcement. Lastly, will Honeybadger move away from error monitoring and bet its future on textbox applications? Tune in and find out!Links:Exponent PodcastJohny IveMicroConfHiring Process FounderQuest episodeFireside Chat FounderQuest episodeDundie AwardsFull Transcript:Ben: I was just thinking. Hey, Tim. Let's give you tips on how to organize Apple.Starr: That should be a show that we do. Yeah, we should do a special show where we just do something extremely full of hubris.Ben: Every week we could pick a large multinational enterprise and give them tips on how to improve their business.Starr: Yeah.Ben: How to Honeybadger-ize it.Josh: I think that's what the Exponent podcast does, which is-Ben: Beat us to the punch.Josh: Yeah. Is it Ben Thompson?Ben: Uh-huh (affirmative).Josh: Yeah. But I mean, he sounds like he's qualified to talk about that stuff.Ben: He actually knows what he's talking about.Josh: Yeah, but I have heard buzz just following... Because I've been having issues with some Apple services, and it seems like they are having some, like they have some growing issues, or they have had growing issues. There has been buzz about they might need to create some sort of clearer division or something. Because it's totally different, running services. Totally different from having a hardware, software company.Starr: Well, if they're having problems scaling maybe they should move to AWS.Josh: That is... yeah.Ben: Pretty sure they have quite a big AWS spend as it is.Starr: The whole Apple photos thing, I hear it's just run off a couple of Mac Minis in some guy's closet.Josh: It's just running on a disc. It's running in Tim's closet.Ben: Although, they have created Mac Pros now. They just released that. They don't have a rack mount yet for them.Josh: Oh, yeah. And you can get eight terabytes in the MacBook Pros now, so they could finally extend their iCloud storage.Starr: Yeah, do y'all think they actually run their services on Macs as servers?Ben: No. I don't think so. I mean, maybe some old, old services are still running on some of those Xserves, but no. I think-Josh: I'd be surprised.Starr: Yeah, that would take some dedication.Ben: I'm sure they're well invested in the public cloud.Starr: If Steve Jobs was still around, they would be, I think.Josh: Wait, you don't think-Starr: That just seems like the kind of line he'd draw in the sand.Josh: Did Jony Ive not design all their rack mounts?Starr: See, the problem with Apple computers, with Apple servers in the data center, is it just is insane to manage all the dongles.Josh: Just dongles between it.Starr: Yeah, they don't have ethernet jacks. You got to have a dongle that goes into your USB 3.Josh: Have you seen the fiber dongle, to connect the fiver to the Thunderbolt?Starr: I know. It's crazy. It's crazy. What are we talking about today? We're talking about lessons learned in 2019. It's 2019, isn't it, guys?Ben: Still, yes it is.Starr: Okay. That's great. Yeah, so lessons learned in 2019 at Honeybadger. It might be applicable to your huge multinational corporation that manufactures software and hardware. It's been a pretty big year today... Today. It's been a pretty big year. I've had days that feel like that. It's been a pretty big year this year. We have grown the team to five people, and we've just gotten a whole bunch done. I guess maybe we should start by... What do you think we should do? Should with start at the beginning or should we start by talking about big 10000 foot view of lessons and then sort of get into the details? How do y'all want to do it?Ben: I was thinking of this episode as the things we did this year episode, the recap, as opposed to things we learned.Starr: Oh, I'm sorry.Ben: I don't know.Josh: Well, there might be things we learned that we'll share along the way.Ben: Will come out of the things that we did. Hopefully, we learned some things along the way.Starr: Okay, that's cool. Things we did. That's a little bit more cut and dry too.Josh: I forgot we did a lot of this stuff, so I kind of learned what we did this year, today.Ben: Yeah, it's good to reflect and celebrate your successes, right?Josh: Yeah.Starr: So what we did this morning, or what, I guess, Josh did is asked Ben Findley to compile a list of all the things that we did. So we didn't have to... We're getting the hang of this enforcing thing, I think.Josh: I was like, "Hey, Ben Findley. What did we do this year, again?" And then he created a nice list in Notion, and here we are.Ben: I jumped i...

This week on FounderQuest Josh, Starr, and Ben talk about the quandary of not knowing how to build something until after you’ve already built it. Therefore, once it's built it can be hard to fight the urge to tear it down and build it again taking into account all of lessons that were learned along the way. The Badgers also imagine a rewrite of Honeybadger using the latest in 90s technology. Trigger warning for Perl developers! Links:Peanuts Christmas specialGarfield Christmas specialKonMariLiving Computer MuseumRewrite! by David Heinemeier Hanson (DHH) Jeff FoxworthyXennialsGeneration JonesELIZA Animated Star TrekFull Transcript:Ben: Oh wow. That's so amazing. Cause I love like the Christmas specials from like Garfield and Peanuts, you know? And so I'm just thinking of a Honeybadger animated Christmas special. That would be so awesome.Starr: Oh, that'd be fun, wouldn't it?Josh: That would be the best Christmas special.Ben: I don't know. The FounderQuest Christmas special might end up like the animated Star Trek series. Right? It might be a total bomb.Josh: We're all in character, but it's like bad cosplay. What were the moral of the Honeybadger Christmas specialty? Would it be that it's not about the errors you fix, it's about the friends you make along the way?Josh: Could be.Ben: I like that. Yeah.Starr: Okay. Well that's good. Speaking of cosplay, so I got a random package delivered to me to my name from Amazon and I order a lot of stuff from Amazon, so I assumed I just forgotten that I ordered something, so I checked and that's not it. And I opened it up and it's like, the name on the bag inside is like such and such cosplay and so, like, this is going in a very bad direction. I'm not sure I want to open this, but I think somebody had, like, one of, I don't know, one of our relatives or some family member had maybe sent a costume for my daughter or something and just, it's a time of year. The packages just randomly show up. And you're like, "Oh, I don't know who this is from, but it's got some kids' stuff in it."Ben: We had that same package problem, that Amazon thing because we do a lot of Amazon ordering and so you know, packages around this time of year starts showing up and you're like, "Oh well I guess that was the present I shouldn't have opened. Sorry."Starr: Yeah.Josh: You opened the Amazon presents that aren't addressed to you, Ben?Ben: No, not all the time, just every now and then.Josh: Just on Christmas, true. One year?Ben: Just on Christmas time.Josh: Just on Christmas.Starr: One year, we did Christmas in my in-laws and so we shipped everybody's packages there and we put their name on it cause it's where they live and everything. But I guess there was some miscommunication because my father-in-law was just starting to start opening everything and he assumed that it was all presents for him. He was, like, thanking us and it's like, "No, actually that's for my brother, that's not for you."Josh: I could totally see that happening.Ben: One of the benefits though of being in charge of the Honeybadger official post office box is that I get to also use that for my Christmas deliveries , so all my Amazon shopping shows up there. Yeah.Josh: That's sneaky.Ben: Yes.Starr: Oh my goodness. So what are we talking about today?Ben: Talking about a big rewrite.Starr: The big rewrite. I guess we should explain what a big rewrite is, unless, like, programmers know this, right? There's this idea that you build something. You build a product, an application and like you don't really know how to build it until you've already built it. Right? Until then you're just kind of learning along the way, like, what the best approach is to take on things and so then, once you get it done, you actually know how to build it. There's always this really big temptation. It's like, "Oh, I just want to like build it for real now. I'm learning all the lessons," you know, taking into account all the lessons I already learned. And so, yeah, I mean that's my take on the big rig. Right. What does a big rewrite mean to you all?Ben: Well, you know, that actually made me think of, you know, there's actually a development approach called, you know, you build one to throw it away where people, you know, in the early stages we'll build just a prototype, right? And we are with the intent that we're going to throw it away. But that's not the same as a big rewrite. I think the big rewrite happens when you know you've built this thing over time and it works and it's been working and it's making money but now you look back you're like, ah, I really wish we could redo that whole thing.Josh: Yeah. You start noticing all the things that you could have done better or you could go back, you make decisions throughout the process of writing it that lock you into certain things or past decisions lock you into things now and pretty soon you find yourself basically architecting for this legacy system where, like, that happened to me this week when I was w

The guys throw the show notes out the window and kick it freestyle on this special Thanksgiving episode. All of today’s hard-hitting questions are answered: Dark meat or light meat? Turkey or duck? The warm glow of a fireplace or the warm glow of a database upgrade progress bar? Plus, the guys talk about when to start holiday feature freezes and what Honeybadger is working on/not working on this December. Links:Build Your SaaS podcast capitalism episode Transcript:Ben: For some reason that reminded me of the presence method that I use from time to time with our Ruby and Rails work.Josh: Ruby? Yeah.Ben: I didn't really actually know about that until like, I don't know a year ago. I never paid attention because I always use the present a and then do something or something else.Josh: Yeah.Ben: But that presence method, that is pretty dang slick. I love that. That's one of the reasons I always love Ruby, do stuff like that.Josh: It's a very nice ... yeah, I like how it works.Starr: I don't think I've used that one. So what does that do again?Ben: So if you have a string that might be nil-Starr: Okay.Ben: So you have a variable that contains a string, it could be nil and you want to display something other than blank if it happens to be nil. So like username, right? You want to, you want to spit that out into a template. What you can say "username.presence" or whatever text you want as a fallback.Ben: Then what it'll do is if the string is present, if it's not nil, not blank, it will display the user name. But if it is now, then it'll display the alternative. Whatever your fallback is. So you don't have to use a ternary operator to like say, "Oh, if it's new, then do this or that," you know?Starr: Oh, that's nice.Ben: Yeah.Starr: That's pretty handy.Ben: Yeah, it's fun. One of those little things that make Ruby such a delight to use.Starr: Yeah. I think this week's podcast is going to be freestyle. Okay. No, it's going to be a little bit looser because we're coming up on the holidays. So this is our special holiday episode, I guess where we talk about like what are we doing in December? Last year we did a hackathon. Are we going to do a hackathon this year? What are we doing about time off?Starr: I would just like to know about some of this stuff because ...Ben: I think, I think the first we have to talk about what are we having for Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow.Starr: Oh that's right. Okay, so this is going to come out like a week after Thanksgiving there, right?Ben: Oh right.Josh: Yeah.Josh: Well that's okay.Starr: What good did we have for Thanksgiving? Looking back on that, I just have fond memories of it.Josh: We're getting on a dangerous it's a slippery slope here because then the next week we're going to have to pretend like it's the week after the week after Thanksgiving-Starr: We have to keep up for the rest of our lives.Josh: We're going to keep up this charade for the entirety of this podcast.Starr: I don't know Josh, I just got such a great deal on a flat screen TV on Black Friday that I just can't not talk about it.Josh: This is going to be like podcast inception.Ben: Well the the Curtis household always has traditional Thanksgiving dinner. We have turkey, we have a green bean casserole, we have some mashed potatoes and of course the sweet potato casserole. You cannot have Thanksgiving without the sweet potato casserole.Josh: Oh yeah.Ben: Yeah.Josh: Do you guys do like the marshmallows on top?Ben: No. Man, that's evil.Starr: That's the best part.Josh: Strong opinions on Founder Quest.Ben: Cannot abide the marshmallows, no.Starr: that's all right. What's a food that you have a strong opinion about Josh?Josh: Turkey, I like my turkey.Starr: Oh really?Josh: Well, I'm very adamant that you have to ... turkey has to be included. There are elements within our family that believe otherwise. So that's one of our disputes. Yeah.Starr: Well I'm having duck this year. I hate to break it to you so don't come to my house because there's not going to be that many of us, so why? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know why I should make a turkey for that. That many people.Josh: Well, ducks ... at least it's not like a fish or something like that.Starr: Oh my God. Who would do that?Josh: Some people. I won't name names. I want to, I want to enjoy my Thanksgiving this year.Starr: Oh, I love Thanksgiving because it's all about cooking and large, extravagant cooking projects. Which is like my favorite thing to do. I posted the picture in Slack. I made some cultured butter, which started by you buy some cream and you mix it with some bacteria and you let it sit out for a couple of days. Then-Ben: I thought you just took it to an art gallery. Now you're cultured butter.Starr: Oh yeah. That would probably be quicker.Starr: Let's see, we got the duck in the fridge. It's sort of air drying because you have to wait until the skin is like parchment, which is what they say. Then what else? I made a panna cotta with the leftover butter

This week on FounderQuest, the guys talk about their decision to offer a free plan alongside the paid plans for Honeybadger and how it impacted the overall business. Josh is also back shares the hottest of takes from his recent trip to Nashville to attend RubyConf. As usual, the show goes off the rails and talks about flying, Ben’s Eye of Sauron approach to fiscal management and an acquisition strategy based around companies named after honey badgers.Full Transcript:Josh: Oh yeah, I got first-class back from RubyConf. I forget what it cost, but it was like too cheap to pass up, so I splurged a little bit.Ben: Yeah, I love me first-class, especially on the way back.Josh: It was nice. Yeah.Ben: Yeah. You're wiped out. You're tired. You just need to crash.Josh: Yeah. I was hungry and they had food. It wasn't a lot of food granted, but it was better than no food.Ben: So I've read on travel blogs that the guideline is, if it's less than a dollar per minute of flight time, then it's worth it to spend the extra. So you get a deal like that.Starr: That's interesting.Ben: Go for it.Josh: Yeah. I need to start making that calculation more and make sure I'm getting the most out of my Honeybadger expense card for real.Starr: Whoa.Josh: That the handbook-Ben: Yes.Josh: ...grants me.Starr: Wait, what's this? I must have glossed over that part of our new company handbook that Ben wrote?Ben: Yeah, our handbook says that every employee in the US gets a company issued credit card and you can use it at your discretion.Starr: Oh my goodness. Cha ching.Ben: Yeah, totally.Starr: That's what that is. I wondered what that thing in my wallet was.Ben: Of course-Josh: Well, it doesn't have to be burning a hole anymore.Ben: Of course, you also have to deal with the part of our code of conduct policy that talks about how we do financial reviews of all of our credit card statements, or in other words, Ben, looks at every line item of every credit card statement like, "Hey, did you really need to spend it?"Josh: I already know that Ben is like, I already assumed that Ben is watching, like, actively watching the credit card statement in real time. Don't you get notifications or something Ben?Ben: I have, yes, I have Amex configured to alert me whenever a purchase happens that's over $500.Starr: Oh my goodness. You know who you are, Ben?Ben: What?Starr: You're probably not going to like this. I've been reading the Lord of the Rings for the first time, finally. It's like the Eye of Sauron, right. But for credit card, for financial-Josh: The eye of Amex.Ben: Do you think Sauron was a micro manager or did he delegate?Starr: He was definitely a micro manager. He was directly controlling everybody in the army.Josh: Right, yeah.Starr: As soon as he died or whatever, like his armies just dissipated.Ben: Right.Starr: So yeah, I also have got the first-class upgrades a couple of times. I'm sorry Ben. I hope I didn't hurt your feelings. I don't really think you're like Sauron. I just thought it was too funny to not say.Ben: I don't know. Being compared to Sauron, that's actually kind of cool.Josh: Bad ass.Starr: I mean he's very, very capable manager that person.Ben: That's true. He didn't do a lot of management.Josh: Yeah, very successful right up until the end.Ben: Up until the end yeah.Starr: Yeah. He just took on too much VC cash.Starr: So how was the actual conference, Josh? You went to RubyConf. You decided to go old school and you took a bunch of tee shirts with you, I think, right?Josh: Yeah, it was good. I took a duffle bag of tee shirts this time. Not something I had to check. It was carry on. It was kind of fun. We'd moved to just like taking virtual, you know, we take our business cards that have little links to get tee shirts on them most of the time, but it's fun to have the actual swag at the conference and hand them out and stuff. Yeah, it felt like old times.Starr: How'd you feel like the conference was in terms of attendance and the talks and all that?Josh: It was great. It was, obviously it was sold out. Lots of people there. The talks that I saw were good. Honestly, I did mostly the hallway track while I was there. I think I probably only attended six talks or so, maybe five or six, but I got to catch up-Ben: How was the game night?Josh: Game night was great. I forget how many people actually showed up, but it was a full room. I think they had like eight to 10 tables or something and they were all filled at one point. So yeah, full house. We had a little swag table, so I got to put my shirts out with the other sponsors. Ruby Together and BackerKit were both sponsors.Starr: Oh, so we sponsored the game night?Josh: And Sidekiq yeah, we did.Starr: Was that an official conference thing or is that a side thing?Josh: It was official this time. Normally it's, I think we did it at RailsConf I think earlier this year.Ben: &nbs...

This week Ben and Starr talk about Honeybadger's efforts using marketplaces to get new business and whether it's worth the development time needed to set them up. They also discuss Honeybadger's participation in the GitHub Student Developer Pack, creating a code of conduct that still allows for free swag, and tease out a special announcement for RailsConf 2020!Links:GitHub Student Developer PackSeth GodenAWS MarketplaceHeroku MarketplaceGitHub MarketplaceMicroconfRailsConfHoneybadger BlogFull Transcription:Ben: Speaking of Macs and stuff, software kind of being weird, my son, my younger son over this week has been playing with Raspberry Pi again.Starr: Oh, that's cool.Ben: Yeah, he wanted to do some funky USB stuff, and he's like, "I think I'll try it with the Pi." And so he's getting all into that, and then he's coming to me with questions like, "okay, how do I start up something on system boot?" And I'm like, "Oh, well let me introduce you to System D."Starr: Oh my goodness, Ben. You've been waiting for this day, haven't you?Ben: Yes, it's pretty awesome.Starr: Oh, that's so great. That's so great. I'm so glad. Starr: Did you buy your kayak yet? You said you were buying a kayak.Ben: No, I didn't buy the kayak yet. I almost bought the kayak, but I decided against it because we had the expenses for working on the house and sending Addison off to college and so on. So yeah, hesitated. I'm going to wait. Maybe this summer. Maybe in the summer I'll get that kayak finally.Starr: Yeah, that's the reason I was thinking about it. I was thinking about... I was like, "Oh, has Ben got his kayak yet?" And then I was like, "It's really cold to be kayaking." Do people kayak in this weather? I mean, probably, because it's Seattle and people are crazy, but-Ben: Yeah. Well, just this week some dude crashed his plane in a lake nearby and a kayaker rescued him. So yes, kayakers apparently do paddle out this time of year.Starr: Oh, well thank goodness for these kayakers who want to be freezing, I guess.Ben: I know.Starr: They saved that guy's bacon. All right. Today I think... Well, our astute listeners will know that Josh is not with us. He's had a bad cold and yeah, we just haven't been able to... He hasn't gotten well in time to make this happen. So we're having another one of our Honeybadger fireside chats, which is our branded marketing effort for when one of us is gone. And so it's just two of us kind of chatting, and-Ben: It's like everything is better when it's a branded marketing effort. You know?Starr: Exactly. Exactly. That little trademark, like that little TM sign. That's like the salt. The salt in your cooking, you know?Ben: That's when you know you're getting a high-quality podcast.Starr: Exactly. We looked up the Unicode character for that and everything.Ben: Nice.Starr: Today we're going to be talking about a number of things. They're all sort of loosely related. First we're going to be talking about GitHub Student Developer Pack, which is this sort of marketing effort that I don't really know about, and so I'm going to use this as a chance to sort of ask Ben lots of probing questions and figure out what's going on. And since that's kind of like a referral marketing-type effort, I don't really know what the official type name is for it. We're maybe going to talk about other things that we've done in the past. What is the GitHub Student Developer Pack, and why have we done that?Ben: Yeah. So GitHub started this a while back where they offer a variety of products and services to students as part of a outreach thing. And we just recently started being involved in that, because I think it's a good idea to get students familiar with our product. It's the Microsoft strategy that they did way, way back in the day. Well, even Apple before them, right?Starr: Oh yeah.Ben: You get students using your product, and then as they grow up, they eventually buy your products. Right? I think Apple has been very successful in that in the education market. And then Microsoft came and did the same thing, and then Google did that too with Chromebooks now. Anywho, yeah, the GitHub Student Developer Pack is all about helping students get access to a variety of services and products to help them in their development. So GitHub's like, "You know what? We should make students better at developing stuff and give them tools to help them do so." And so you can go to their website and get all kinds of goodies if you happen to be a student.Starr: I study the Blade. Does that count?Ben: Hmm. Well, maybe, but only if you happen to have an email that will certify you as an actual student.Starr: Okay. An email. Really?Ben: Yeah, yeah. If you have a .edu.Starr: Oh, an email address. Okay.Ben: Yes, yes.Starr: I'm sorry. I was like, so they think... Anybody who can use GitHub can forge an email. Like, come on.Ben: No, they actually do some verification to make sure you're a legit student, but once you can verify that you are... And if you don't hav

On this week's episode of FounderQuest Josh, Ben, and Starr talk about their Soc 2 and GDPR compliance efforts. They go over the different strategies to handle compliance, the potential costs involved, and discuss if it's worth the time and money.When embarking on their compliance research, the guys also stumbled across some surprising claims companies are using to stretch the truth on actually being compliant. Learn a few of the 50 shades of compliance* that they found.Links: KolideSoc 2GDPRElasticsearchRedisSlackBitDefenderSaul GoodmanArthur AndersenHoneybadger - Write For UsFull Transcript:Starr: Did y'all go trick or treating?Josh: Yeah, we did. We went to a neighborhood with some friends of ours and it was a good suburban trick or treating neighborhood. Most of the houses were all participating. The kids had a blast.Starr: Oh, great.Josh: We were a family of bats.Starr: Oh, cool.Josh: Yeah, I wasn't the Batman. I was just ...Starr: You were just a bat.Josh: Just a bat.Starr: That's okay. There's nothing wrong with just a bat.Josh: Yeah.Starr: Yeah, we did the neighborhood thing too. This was Ida's first year of really understanding what was going on and not being just terrified of strangers. So she was just all over this. She was like, "We're going to go get more candy. Mom and dad, you stay right here. You leave me alone and let me do this myself. I'm going to go knock on their door and say trick or treat. She's not even four yet, so it was super cute.Josh: Nice.Starr: Yeah. I can't even imagine when she gets to be like 13, she's just going to be like, "You stand over here dad, you park a mile away from school and I'll walk."Josh: Yeah, she's going to be choosing colleges across the country or something or ...Starr: Yeah, she likes us nearby, but she just wanted to do it herself. She's very big on that.Josh: It makes sense. Yeah, Tatum was doing ... she was going up to doors by herself too. I'm pretty sure I saw her hit houses multiple times. Like I should go up, come back to the street and then I think I saw her go back up at the same house.Starr: That's so funny.Josh: Yeah.Starr: Yeah. I ate so much candy last night that this morning I literally feel like hung over or something. My brain isn't working, I'm just exhausted. That's how you know you're getting old, I guess.Josh: Yeah, we did the same thing.Starr: Yeah. Today, we're going to be discussing ... what are we going to be discussing? We're going to be compliance GDPR, SOC 2, all those big things.Ben: Yeah. All that fun stuff.Starr: Where should we get started on? Is anybody want to give us sort of an intro? This isn't really my forte.Ben: In talking about compliance, we're a small company, and I think a lot of times people in our position, entrepreneurs in our position ignore the whole compliance issue because they're just too small to handle that, and like, "Oh, I don't have a compliance department because it's just me." I think we spent most of our existence in the same boat, like, we'll just ignore that and we'll just whistle and move along our way, but really came to a head with GDPR because we had customers who are international and who themselves had to deal with it. So, we had to deal with it because they had to deal with it. So I think that's the reason why we really felt like we had to get up to speed on what all this compliance stuff means and couldn't just ignore it, put our head in the sand.Starr: What do we mean when we say compliance? What are we talking about?Ben: Yeah, really, all the compliance regimes are about, generally speaking, like security. A good security practice is making sure that you are operating your business in a way that protects the data, which you're entrusted. GDPR was very much about personal data and making sure that companies treat that responsibly, that is not going out to everybody and their brother, that you're not doing things with it, that your customers wouldn't agree with you doing. For them, it was about, you want to be sure that you're not sharing this information willingly and unwillingly. Either through marketing partnerships or through breaches, that would be basically a breach of trust with your customer, or your employee, like they have a special case for HR data.Ben: If you're employed by a company, they have your social security number and they might have other information about you and your address, your, maybe some health insurance information, whatever. You don't necessarily want that information going out to everybody and their brother. Basically, GDPR came about, and compliance, more generally, is all about doing what you're supposed to do, being ethical with the data that you have in your possession.Starr: A lot of the companies are sort of ... If you're a company in the European Union or you're selling to people in the EU, you are sort of legally required to follow a GDPR, this sort of list of rules. Right?Ben: Right. If you're a company in the EU and you have to comply with this re

This week on FounderQuest the guys weigh in on a recent debate sparked by Jason Fried at Basecamp around the value of backlogs. In short, Fried proports that backlogs cause unnecessary stress and that if an idea will be forgotten about if it isn’t written down, then it probably isn’t important in the first place. Honeybadger does have a pretty significant backlog and some on the team find it more useful than others. Each of the guys discusses how they deal with the backlog, whether they ignore it, stress out about it, embrace it as a useful part of the business, or actively plot to burn it down and rebuild Honeybadger V2 from the ashes.Links:Justin JacksonIntercomHelp ScoutTrelloClubhouseJiraGitHub Jason Fried Local Editor VS CodeSublimeFull Transcript:Starr: So how was your trip, Ben?Ben: My trip was good. Yeah. I went down to Mobile, visited my parents for a few days, and I actually went over to Louisiana as well and saw my brother and sister. So, good time. Got a lot of reading in. It's a kind of a long trip and so I got some books done. You know Kindle, makes everything wonderful.Ben: So yeah. Had a good relaxing few days. Nice little vacation.Starr: Good. Did you eat some crawfish?Ben: No, but I did have some fried catfish.Starr: Okay. That counts.Ben: Yeah, that counts.Josh: I love fried catfish.Starr: Yeah. It's the only way to eat catfish.Ben: It's been a long time since I had some.Josh: That is true.Josh: Do people eat catfish any other way?Ben: Oh, of course.Starr: Really?Ben: It's kind of like Forrest Gump. Boiled shrimp, fried shrimp.Josh: Oh, yeah, yeah. Boiled catfish, though. I don't know. I think I'll stick with fried.Ben: Yeah. It's the best way. For sure.Starr: Yeah. So today we're going to be talking about backlogs. We're kind of late to the party. This was on Twitter a long time ago, and then we all went on vacation.Josh: A long time ago.Starr: And then I think we're trying to hit the sort of rebound cycle where everything old becomes new again, and people are sort of into vintage tweets. So yeah. So we're going to talk about this. So could somebody explain to me this whole thing about backlogs and why everybody was talking about it?Ben: Yeah, I think there was... Well the issue of backlogs is when you have a whole bunch of stuff that you've thought about doing at some point. And so you kind of log it, right? We use get GitHub for that. But you can use whatever like Trello or Clubhouse or something. Basically, any idea that you have, people like to throw those in a big bucket and say, yeah, we'll get to that someday. Right? And so you create this big backlog of work that you want to do, or that you think at some point was worth doing. And the conversation on Twitter was, there was some anxiety about this issue, oh I've got this big backlog and I feel like, oh, I've got all this work to do and I'll never get it all done. And woe is me kind of thing.Ben: And then someone said, "Oh I'll start a service, I will charge you $10,000 and I'll come in and just delete your backlog, and you'll feel so much better." So we've got a request from Justin. He said, "Yeah, the FounderQuest guys should definitely talk about this." Because opinions, and of course we have opinion. So here we are.Josh: So remind me, did we hire that guy to come in?Ben: No. And because my opinion is I like backlogs. We can talk about that.Starr: Well, can I read the quote? There's a quote and it's sweet, and it's from Jason Fried, who seems like a decent guy. I don't know, I'm not going to go into a big tangent about hero worship and the sort of small bootstrap, whatever. But yeah. So he says, "We don't believe in backlogs. Backlogs and make you feel guilty." So I don't like feeling guilty.Ben: I would say backlogs give you the opportunity to choose to feel guilty. They don't make you feel guilty. Right? But maybe that's splitting semantic care.Starr: I like it, it's a very stoic quote from you.Josh: That's what I was going to say. Yeah. It's like I'm-Josh: Everything is in your perception, right Ben?Ben: Exactly.Starr: Well, I mean, yeah, a backlog can't make me feel a certain way. I'm the owner of my emotions.Ben: Exactly.Starr: Right? I say that so much. That's my little mantra throughout the day. It's like I'm the owner of my emotions.Josh: Yeah, say it through my tears.Starr: Yeah.Ben: I could see how you might want to say that pretty frequently when you have a three year old in the house.Starr: Oh yeah. Yeah. Well she is... Ah, I don't know. Maybe I'm the owner of my emotions, but I feel like she's definitely subletting them, to a certain degree. So.Ben: We could start a new acronym. OME. Owner of My Emotions.Starr: Oh yeah. And have little yellow wristbands that we sew on.Ben: There you go.Starr: Yeah.Starr: Great idea.Starr: &n...

The guys talk about creating content for Honeybadger and the difficulties switching back and forth from writing prose to writing code. Starr channels his inner Anna Wintour and describes his latest initiative recruiting developers to write guest posts on the blog. Josh talks about his process for writing evergreen content for the newsletter. Links:Leveling UpThe Devil Wears PradaSeth GodinIndie HackersMastering Ruby Exceptions eBookFull Transcript:Announcer: Hands off that dial. Business is about to get a whole a nerdier. You're tuned in to FounderQuest.Starr: I'm blaming a lot on the internet these days, Josh. So one more thing, we'll just throw it on that pile and we'll get a volume discount on that.Josh: I love it. Yeah.Starr: Take that to town.Josh: Internet's pretty much responsible for all the ills in the world. I think.Starr: Yeah. Yeah. I mean there's a few goods. A few goods. It allows me to ride out the ills in relative comfort, but ...Josh: Right. You never have to leave your house.Starr: No, I never have to leave my house. Yeah. So I guess we should explain. So if the astute listeners haven't noticed, Ben is not with us today. And the reason for this is very convoluted. We had originally planned to record this episode on a Friday and we had been ... We had Josh and everybody ready to go and then this truck pulls up outside my house and starts sawing down this gigantic tree, chipping it. And there was just no way that was going to happen. So we canceled. But then Ben has all sorts of travel plans because he's an international Ben of mystery. And so yeah, so it's me and Josh this week.Starr: So we're going to be talking about something that Ben usually doesn't get involved too much in, which is content creation, like blog posts and email newsletters and all that stuff and ...Josh: Something that you happen to be actually working on lately.Starr: I am working on it. Yeah. Right now. I don't know if our readers remember or listeners remember, but a couple of weeks ago I put out a call for writers for people to contribute to our blog. And we actually had a lot of people respond to that. It was very successful. The only issue is now I have to go through all of them and kind of manage that process and chat with them about what they want to write.Starr: And I think it's all going to turn out really well. But this whole having coordinating things with 15 different people over email and having all of them at a different stage in the process, that's the type of thing that is designed to make my brain just fall apart. It's just something I'm apparently not good at.Josh: It sounds like you're a kind of like a magazine producer or something now or editor.Starr: It is, yeah. I'm kind of like an editor in chief. It's pretty cool.Josh: We could give you a title of editor if you want, business cards or something. Or desk, one of those little desk nameplates.Starr: That would be nice. I'll take it. I'll take whatever form of recognition I can get.Starr: So Evie and I watched The Devil Wears Prada a couple of days ago. So I'm all ready, I'm ready for my role as a big time magazine editor. If you haven't seen that ... Have you seen it, Josh?Josh: I have. Yeah. It's been awhile, but I think, yeah, I saw it a while back.Starr: Yeah, so it was all about, what is it? A thinly disguise fixing fictionalization of like Anna Wintour's Vogue or something. Anyway, this lady who ran Vogue and was very mean to her subordinates or something and imperious. That's what I'm working towards.Josh: And then in the end though, doesn't she have a change of heart in the end or something? I don't want to .... Spoiler alert.Starr: No, there's no change. It was very confusing.Josh: Oh, okay. I thought there was. That's too bad.Starr: Yeah. So at the end, it's like the movie simultaneously celebrated this woman, this young woman who sort of rejected it all and went off to do her own thing, while at the same time sort of glorifying the sort of people who stayed in the magazine and devoted their lives to it even though their lives were falling apart.Starr: It's like, I have no idea what the moral of this is. Pick one.Josh: I have faith in you in as the editor of the Honeybadger blog that you will see the light in the end.Starr: I'm not sure how many divorces I'm willing to have to make the Honeybadger blog a success though.Josh: Right.Starr: So, yeah, I was honestly super pleased with the quality of people who applied. Just like some really good writing going on out there. I consider myself a pretty good writer. I'm like, "Oh man, these people might be better than me so I've got to get them on my team."Josh: Yeah, they must be pretty good. That's cool. I can't wait to read what they come up with. Are you kind of directing the topics or what's your process for kind of figuring out what each person is going to work on?Starr: Well, like most things I do in life, I'm just kind of making it up as I go along. Basically my plan was to sort of see wha

The guys talk about how they are scaling up their awesome customer service without adding headcount and their journey from email customer support, to chat support, and back to email support. They also discuss how to deal with informational silos and if they should transition Honeybadger to an invite-only luxury brand.Links:IntercomHelp ScoutHoneybadgerFull Transcript:Announcer: Never forget that you have the tools to build a life on your own terms. Forget the haters. This is Founder Quest. Josh: So our topic is customer support. Starr: And how how it was maybe murdering us- Josh: Eating us alive. Starr: Eating us alive, devouring our souls. Maybe we might be doing to fix that. Our old system, the system we've had for years and years. We've been using Intercom. And Intercom put this little widget on your website. It looks a lot like a live chat widget, and just encourages people to enter in whatever problems they have and then you reply to them and they can see it right in the website, or they can get an email or whatever. And we really liked this when we set it up. Years ago, we thought it was really cool because we got a ton more interaction with our customers and were really enjoying that and everything. So why are we looking to change this? What was going on? Josh: The way Intercom works in the in-app widget is it really is a chat system. So it's basically live chat, right? From a user's perspective, you assume that someone's going to reply immediately if they're there. And I think it'll say when people are offline or something then it'll let you email. But really for in our day to day it was kind of like whenever a support request comes in, we're thinking, okay, there's someone sitting there waiting for a response so we need to drop everything and answer it right now. Starr: Yeah. We would get people just saying, "Hey, what's up?" Josh: Yeah, "Hi." Starr: And it's six hours later, "Hello. Hello, customer." Josh: Yeah, actually, the one offs were kind of ... I might actually miss those a little bit just because someone just says, "Hey." And then I'd often just reply with some emoji waving symbol or, "Yo." In the beginning, like you said, that was really good because it put us ... When we were first figuring out a lot of things, we were first figuring out who our customers are. I think one of the reasons we really liked it was that it put us in much closer contact with people on a real time basis so we could chat back and forth and just be ... Josh: It was a little bit more informal and we could just talk to people. And I think we talked about that in the past on this show. How that was good for getting customer feedback and getting to know people. But what we found lately as we've grown and scaled is that it's begun to cause a lot of interruptions, and I guess I would say anxiety in our day to day support process. The way our support process works alongside all the other things we do. And that's probably, we're going to go into that. But basically we didn't have a support process really, which doesn't help. Starr: Yeah, because when you know that somebody thinks your support system just being this live chat thing. Then there's a lot of pressure for you to respond to things super quickly. And that can be good sometimes. Sometimes you get some really awesome wins because you're able to fix somebody's problem right away and all that. But sometimes you get bogged down in these super intense support questions, and it's really distracting to, at any moment you could be pulled into one of these lengthy discussions of a thing. And it may or may not actually be honestly. Our system works pretty well. Right? So it's honestly, a lot of times it's just some mis-configuration or something, but there's something weird going on that's preventing people from just seeing that there's some obvious mis-configuration problem. And so, yeah, so you just ended up going down this rabbit hole for half a day. Josh: Yeah. And those more of your typical customer support things. That's kind of what customer support is for. Right? But the way we handle support at Honeybadger is again, we're small, small team. We're a technical product, so we like to give high quality support and that usually involves supporting developers. So we are developers on support. We don't have any dedicated support operator or anything like that at Honeybadger, which would normally be able to buffer between some of the more technical questions and the less technical questions. What happens is if you're a developer and you're trying to actually get development done, you're in the middle of whatever your project is, some deep thought or something. And then a support requests comes in, and if everyone's on call for that, you're basically constantly just expecting to be interrupted throughout your day. Starr: Yeah, it's like one of those psychology experiments where they watch you as you go about your day and then somebody administers random shots to you. Josh:

Season Two of FounderQuest is upon you! The guys discuss what they did while on summer break, releasing breadcrumbs on Honeybadger and why they help when debugging, launching the new blog, Amazon RDS, and Airwolf!Links:Write for our blog.Full Transcription:Josh: We can't all be book-learned like you star.Starr: Yeah, I'm book smart.Josh: Yeah.Starr: You guys are just the street smart ones.Josh: We just read what's ever on the front page of Amazon.Starr: No, y'all know how the streets work, you know how to get stuff done, you know, outside of formal channels if you know what I mean?Announcer: Never forget that you have the tools to build a life on your terms. Forget the haters. This is Founder Quest.Starr: We were going to talk about I mean we've been gone for a couple of weeks, several weeks, and I think we're just going to talk about what we're going to do. I've decided, we shouldn't say that we had a vacation because that's not the appropriate...Josh: How I had multiple vacations and I did some work.Starr: No, hush, hush, hush.Josh: Okay.Starr: I think we shouldn't call it a vacation. I think we should say that this is season two of Founder Quest.Josh: Oh, I see where you're going. Okay, so season two go.Starr: Yeah, nobody says like serial had a vacation.Josh: Right.Starr: There just on, you know, they had a new season.Josh: So are we going to be a serial podcast now?Starr: Well, we come serially so yeah sure.Josh: Okay, cool.Starr: Yeah, sure, it's just whenever we want to go on vacation we'll just say there's a new season.Josh: Nice.Starr: so people have to say tuned.Ben: I can't wait for season three.Starr: I hope we don't get canceled. That would suck.Josh: Yeah.Ben: So how were your vacations, Josh?Starr: Yeah. How many vacations did you take?Josh: I think I took two. The first one was a kind of a, I mean I was planning to take some time off, but it was not as planned as this last one. Yeah, in August I took a couple of weeks off just to kind of recuperate and just connect and stuff. This last week, I just got back from visiting my kids grandparents, my parents in Arizona. That was a fine. It wasn't, I don't know, it was still a lot of work because the kids. Taking two little toddlers on an airplane that was the first time we'd done that. Yeah, it was fine. Got some sun, they have a pool. We spent a lot of time by the pool.Ben: Nice.Starr: I see a little bit of a thousand-yardstare in your eyes.Josh: Yeah, I think.Starr: The children on the airplane thing.Ben: Oh, Starr you did that too, right? You just got back?Starr: Yeah, I got back from also a grandparent vacation, but this time the grandparents, my partner's parents were like, Hey, we've got this timeshare in Mexico in Puerto Vallarta and so you should come down and I've got to tell you, boys. I was skeptical because it seemed like we were doing all the work right because normally like paying for accommodations is not the most daunting part of an international vacation with a three-year-old. I was skeptical, but it turned out to be super nice and relaxing because they have the timeshare they have, it was very nice. It was a sort of like an all-inclusive resort. They had this giant like a four-bedroom suite with balconies and a hot tub on a balcony and like I got to sit during the day for several hours for multiple days in a row and just like read by myself. I haven't gotten to do this unless I just like skip work and do it or something.Josh: That's what I did by the way.Starr: It's not the same. Right, because you feel like you need to get back. Yeah, it was just great. I mean it wasn't a cultural trip. I lived in Mexico for a year. I feel like I have a good appreciation of the Mexican people, country and culture already. A little bit of a resort vacation. It was kind of welcome I think.Josh: I also got to spend some time reading by the pool while the kids were napping and that was very nice. What about you Ben?Ben: I did not take any vacations with toddlers, but I did drop off my older son at college. He just started college this fall. That was a pretty wild experience. Let me tell ya. And I got some house work done, like had contractors doing work on my house, so I'm flat broke now because between college and, Oh and then my car broke down. I had to replace a bunch of stuff on it.Josh: Oh man.Ben: One here actually another, it's been, it's been crazy, but you know, it was a good Summer I got to relax a bit and yeah, I didn't go anywhere. I didn't do anything but read some books and you know, I hit the trail with my bike several times, which is nice. We had a good summer here in Kirkland. So yeah, checking out of work at, at lunch time and going riding is a good thing.Josh: You're going to take some time off later this year?Ben: Yeah. And go weeks. I'll be heading to visit. My parents haven't seen him at their house in quite a while, so that'll be fun.Starr: Yeah, that's great. That's like a big life milestone when you think about it. It's a l