TechZing

Justin and Jason discuss why Justin moved (yet again), the surprising success of Playstrong and why Jason thinks Justin should consider doubling down on it, an update on Math Academy and the plan for the next few months, the latest release of Colby's game and how his first quarter at college went, how Ben Boyter's Fediverse project went sideways, and the shows Andor and The Recruit. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8

Justin and Jason discuss how Justin is getting good at Twitter, yet another example of why emojis seem kinda necessary, what Justin learned from List's recent marketing launch, where he should be spending his time, and whether he should build in the open or not, recent Math Academy milestones, why Jason isn't currently focused on marketing, Jason's question-rendering problem, how the TZ Discord is like The Lone Gunmen from the X-Files, Jason's communication efforts or lack thereof, making decisions using data, the prospect of recent AI advancements, hitting approximate breakeven with Math Academy, why Sandy wants Jason to move the marketing site to Webflow, Justin's new MacBook Pro, why we don't need new technology, just less dust, how the M1 doesn't support multiple monitors, how Jason is forcing his daughter Izzy to watch old sci-fi movies with him - The Blob, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, King Kong, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and War of the Worlds, and finally how The Quatermass Experiment scared Justin to death when he was a kid (and probably still would).. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8

Justin and Jason discuss how Justin is preparing List for the next big launch, why he paid an editor to edit his blog post, and some upcoming development challenges, the Math Academy money-back guarantee, building features to reduce customer support, what Jason likes about Andor and why he finds so many of the recent superhero and science fiction movies and tv shows lacking, why Justin is offended by Elon Musk's meme habits, and Jason's Twitter bet.. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8

Justin and Jason discuss Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, why Justin thinks he's finally found the right project with List, and Math Academy's current growth trajectory. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8

Justin and Jason discuss Math Academy since the Washington Post article, Ben Boyter's code analysis tool, and Justin's failed attempt to onboard Jason to List. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8

Justin and Jason discuss Justin's progress on List (formerly known as TaskFlow), Jason's idea that List should be renamed to ListyMcListface, the Washington Post article about Math Academy, the subsequent traffic, and the emotional rollercoaster of it all. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8

Justin & Jason talk about TaskFlow's rebranding to List, Colby's TechZing interview, Jason's thoughts about Colby going to college, and Math Academy's surprise launch on Hacker News. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8

Justin talks with Colby Roberts about his game Galactic Conquerors, and asks various questions submitted by TechZing listeners. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8

Justin and Jason discuss the latest with Taskflow, Colby's game, and Math Academy, as well as the movies American Sniper, Wrath of Man, Crisis, the documentary House of Hammer, and the series Invincible. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8

Justin and Jason discuss the latest progress on TaskFlow, Math Academy, and Colby's video game. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8

Justin and Jason discuss how Justin's return to music after a long break and without proper equipment seems to have unleashed a new level of creativity, his recent challenges with TaskFlow and specifically the hand-to-hand combat he's been engaged in with contentEditable, how Colby's internship has been progressing and the YC-inspired project/venture that Jason has set up for him, the latest with Math Academy and how Jason resolved the Stripe custom-payments integration issue, and finally the movie The Gray Man and the streaming series The Terminal List.

Justin and Jason discuss why Justin had to take some time off from working on TaskFlow, the importance of momentum and the performance improvements that have resulted from the simplified FastNode data model, the latest with Math Academy, the problem with large updates, and the resulting communication problems they incur, how Colby's internship is working out, the problems with Jason's MacBook Pro and the how Jason and Sandy binged 10 episodes of The Offer.

Justin and Jason discuss Jason's recent trip to Belize, Jason's literature review of SEO and CRO, Justin's work on the TaskFlow DOM and how to make it work in a real-time collaborative context, the latest with Math Academy, Jason's sleepy feet, and a little bit about various tv shows.

Justin and Jason discuss the reasons why Justin feels his past startup efforts fell short, the user interface, data model and future use cases of TaskFlow, the new gamification model for Math Academy and how the system has been made more responsive and efficient, and the shows Stranger Things, The Boys, and Severance.

Justin and Jason discuss why Justin is having so much fun working on TaskFlow and some potential features and functionality, the importance of refining the inner loop of a product and making the experience customizable, Mark's top three frustrations with his Math Academy experience, how Jason is making the system more efficient and responsive, why Justin is simultaneously skeptical about whether Math Academy will ever be released and why he thinks it's going to be HUGE, why Justin thinks it should be debuted on Product Hunt (if it's ever done), Jason's idea for creating user-story videos, why he's held out so long on releasing Math Academy publicly, and why he prefers Stanger Things to Severance, and finally, why Justin doesn't watch anything anymore.

Justin and Jason discuss the TechZing Discord server, the rebirth of TaskFlow, why Justin loves Laravel, Jason's approach to designing UI, why he wants to grow Math Academy without hring a lot of people and the latest improvements to the software, the series WeCrashed and Severance, and the heatmap software HotJar.Episode Notes

Episode Notes Justin and Jason discuss Areli's push to be a division I gymnast, why Justin is moving back to London, what he's doing with Georgie's online course and how his trainer is too busy trading crypto to train him anymore, the latest with Math Academy, how Jason hacked together a math expression parser and evaluator, how to keep students motivated and making progress, the disaster that was this year's college admission's process, the shows Slow Burn, Fyre, We Crashed, Contact, Erin Brokovich, The Dropout, Super Pumped, and Severance, and why Jason STILL hasn't managed to set up his new MacBook Pro.

Jason talks with Brett Kennedy, head of robotics at JPL

Episode Notes Justin and Jason discuss the fire that burned down Joe's house, the death of Morning Brief, what killed AppIgnite, why Justin is leaving his mountain life behind, the latest with Math Academy, why Jason thinks Money Ball is the best startup movie ever made, Justin's desire to start recording music again, and why Jason still hasn't managed to set up the MacBook Pro he got for Christmas.es go here

Episode Notes Notes go heJustin and Jason discuss the possibility of Jason bringing on a new developer to Math Academy, how Jason is allergic to any kind of bureaucracy, formality or scheduling, the challenge of building newsletters for certain verticals, Justin's anticipated pivot towards customized newsletters and premium memberships, what colleges Colby is applying to, how difficult it is to get into a decent computer science program these days, and the TV show The Boys.

Episode Notes Notes go hereJustin, Jason and Joe discuss Morning Brief, Math Academy, and ... a lot of other stuff.

Episode Notes Justin and Jason discuss why Justin is reinvigorated about a premium version of Morning Brief and some of the new features that are on deck, how the first few weeks of the Math Academy beta launch have been going, and thoughts on how to structure and run a startup.

Justin and Jason discuss the launch of the Math Academy online learning system and the pivot of Morning Brief. Post comments here.

Justin and Jason discuss Jason's trip to the Pacific Northwest and Colby's first college tour, why kids are maturing more slowly these days, the launch of Morning Brief, initial feedback from users, pricing, and thoughts on the future, the implementation of the Math Academy knowledge-graph algorithm and preparing for the upcoming commercial launch, John Carmack's article on static analysis and the relationship between code size and code quality, Jason's recent efforts to remove old and unused code from the Math Academy codebase and thoughts on how to better modularize code in a large web application, using a job service like Amazon SQS to process non-real-time tasks, how Justin injured himself gardening, why Jason is teaching his 13-year-old daughter calculus over the summer, the first legitimate math research done by a Math Academy high-school student, and billionaires in space.

Justin and Jason discuss the Morning Brief launch strategy, brand concept, and development roles, the difficulties of launching the Math Academy diagnostic in time for the summer program, why Jason had to develop an animation studio for his content team, the underrated "fast zombie" series Black Summer, the sad reality that while everyone in the media seems to have an opinion on the Wuhan lab-leak hypothesis, few are familiar with the basic facts, and likewise for the UAP phenomenon.

Justin and Jason discuss why Jason isn't planning to use Twitter as a marketing channel, personalized learning and the future of education, how and why the SAT and ACT are useful for college admissions despite their flaws, the orthogonal nature of student aptitude vs. consciousness, semantic tagging and the difficulty of categorizing text, reasons behind the sudden rise in UFO coverage in the media, the downside of always playing the skeptic, the potential of crypto-social networks services like BitClout, binary vs. probabilistic thinking, the ongoing collateral damage caused by Elon Musk's tweeting, the challenge of building an efficient and accurate adaptive diagnostic math test and the prospect of adding coding exercises to Math Academy, why the Wuhan lab leak is the biggest story of our time, why the media screwed it up so badly and the dangers of gain-of-function research on human pathogens.

Justin and Jason discuss Justin's two-week kidney stone ordeal, why Jason thinks Twitter is probably more distraction than it's worth, the 6 levels of automated learning systems, how Justin and Joe plan to fund Morning Brief with a custom Kickstarter-like campaign, Brandon Sanderson's lectures on writing fantasy and science fiction, Superhuman's methodology for attaining product-market fit, how Jason is still paying off technical debt incurred over two years ago, the power and promise of Math Academy's dynamic diagnostic tool, California's boneheaded attempt to kill off gifted programs, accelerated academics and standardized college-entrance exams, the 60 Minutes story on UAP's, why the gain-of-function research performed at the Wuhan Institute of Virology is the likely origin of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, the TV series Invincible and Zack Snyder's Army of the Dead.

Justin and Jason discuss the radically accelerated computer-science course sequence that Jason created for his Math Academy students, why PHP is like the C of the web, the character Scotty Jackson is creating for Morning Brief, Justin's foray into crypto trading, thoughts on the future of NFT's, the story of how Jason was finally able to buy the domain mathacademy.com and why the .com TLD still rules the day, the hypothesis that the laws of physics are evolving, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Young Sheldon, and the Ken Burns documentary The Roosevelts: An Intimate History, Jason's upcoming interview on Donn Felker's podcast, why starting a podcast is an inefficient content development strategy for startups, how the Math Academy system's adaptive algorithms will create a personalized and optimal learning plan for each student, and how Jason is implementing a free-response evaluator for math problems.

Justin and Justin discuss how and why Jason is reviving his long-abandoned blog and Twitter account and how he's planning on building an audience for the launch of Math Academy, the First1000 newsletter, and some of the strategies utilized by the companies that have been profiled, the PDF Zero to Users, whether deferred tuition offered at boot camps like Lambda School is a good idea and the upside of buying and selling equity in individuals, the possibility of rebranding and relaunching the podcast, how the pandemic killed MV Code Club and the status of Jason's crypto-trading project, the massive content development project that is Math Academy, why Justin is obsessed with the thumbnail creation service he's building for Morning Brief, how to alter a large and highly active table in MySQL, how bad the series Travellers is and how good The Sinner is, and the upcoming TV sci-fi series Foundation.

Justin and Jason talk about their return after a 9-month hiatus, getting vaccinated and getting back into shape, Chris Schwarz's novel The Cache and the character inspired by Jason's son Colby, the origin and surprising spread of the luck surface area, why Justin has stopped working on TaskFlow, is saying goodbye to Nugget and his new foray into developing Roblox Games, how Jason's daughter is growing a following for her animated stories and fiction writing, the monster project that is Math Academy, and Justin's new project with Joe Stech called Morning Brief.

Justin talks with Adam Wathan creator of Tailwind CSS about distribution, the journey from 0 to $2m, and startup lessons learned playing in death metal bands.

Justin talks with Justin Jackson co-founder of transistor.fm about the importance of catching a good market wave.Also Mentioned: Justin Vincent's Indie Founder Bootcamp

Justin and Jason discuss their likely demise due to the pandemic, the advanced computer science course that Jason is implementing, the latest on Justin's startup course and the importance of taking action, the latest on Math Academy, and how Justin corned the carrot market in Roblox.

Justin and Jason discuss how Jason shorted the COVID-19 crash, the winners and losers of the new normal and what the post-pandemic future may look like, how the shutdown has affected the Math Academy program and the latest with the software, the progress on TaskFlow and the what's new with Nugget, the TV show Devs and Barry, and how closely the show Stranger Things mapped to Jason's childhood, Grimes and Elon Musk, Justin's new video-game addiction, and the Unreal 5 demo.

Justin and Jason discuss the novel coronavirus, how Justin is adapting to his new mountain lifestyle, Jason's crazy, high-risk portfolio, the latest on Math Academy, the challenge and importance of writing simple code, Justin's continuous glucose monitor, Grimes and her evil AI pun, Justin's strategy for creating three things that help each other, and his idea for a productivity app.

Justin and Jason discuss Justin's impending move to the mountains and what life will be like living there, how Justin is throwing off his mental chains, why you should take advice from successful people with a grain of salt, the importance of taking time off, working with the Web Audio API, the messy development process of the original iPhone, the General Magic documentary, how startups are responsible for most technology innovation, the history of Slack, Justin's new podcast, and predictions for the new decade.

Justin and Jason discuss the Cybertruck debacle, why Justin is moving to a mountain hideaway, Jason's plans for taking the Math Academy software to the next level, the importance of engaging in R&D even if most of what's developed is thrown away, the Avie Tevanian Oral History, the brilliance of John von Neumann and the potential of the human race, the Legion rap battle, the Shelby American documentary, how any design that's too radical is almost always rejected, the NeXT Computer story, how Jason uses emotion as a guide for context switching, and the modern technology that has eliminated a go-to plot device.   

Justin and Jason discuss Jason's struggle with juggling multiple projects, the latest on the crypto project, Justin's predictions for his son Jack and a hard lesson for Jason's son Colby, Justin's new plans for Speak, Justin's obsession with Occulus Quest and why he loves the Impossible Burger, an update on Operation Superhero, and the latest with Math Academy. 

Justin and Jason discuss Speak and Justin's thoughts on how to market it, why entrepreneurship isn't for most people, the latest on Jason's crypto-trading project and Math Academy, the motivations for mathematical proofs and why mathematician's do what they do, and the mythology of the 10X engineer.

Justin and Jason discuss filmmaking with an iPhone and the power of the Filmic Pro app, the latest with Justin's secret business widget, the Bob Lazar documentary on Netflix and his interview with Joe Rogan, Justin's love of The Orville and other streaming recommendations, the summer math course Jason is teaching and how he's tutoring his niece in calculus, the content and algorithms being developed for the Math Academy system, the importance of being challenged, the upcoming Washington Post article on Math Academy, what's happening with OMG, how Luck Surface Area showed up in Gabriel Weinberg's book Super Thinking, and why Justin likes the iPhone app Productive.

Justin and Jason discuss Peldi's success with Balsamiq, the site Indie Hackers, the book Crossing the Chasm, Justin's launch strategy for his secret project, how Justin got help with his "maths", the advantage of growing slowly and focusing on developing a product that your users love, the summer Math Academy course that Jason is teaching on proofs and group theory, Justin's desire to encourage entrepreneurship in any company he starts, and tradeoffs in database design.

Justin and Jason discuss Jason's elbow surgery, Justin's secret project, the deal he made with his wife, why he's patenting the technology, and how he ended up building it himself, Gabriel Weinberg's new book, a postmortem on SOLVE 2019, the growth of MV Code Club, the movie The Founder, and Jason's automated-trading project.

Justin and Jason discuss Jason's new puppy, when "quick and dirty" works and when it doesn't, the latest with Math Academy, the transition from a subject-based to a course-based approach to content development, how Jason works with his remote developer, "The Math Academy Way", fun and profit with 3D printing, Jason's frustrations with trying to capture real-time crypto data, how to automatically and instantaneously restart a crashed Linux process, and the frustration of having to continually relearn Linux administration.

Justin and Jason discuss Sean Murphy's extension to the Luck Surface Area, Gabriel Weinberg's mental models, Uber’s impending IPO, how Jason is adopting a dog, the book Justin is writing called Founder First, the endemic nature of overengineering, the latest with the Math Academy program and software, why Jason is dabbling with cryptocurrency HFT, Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead, and Justin's former life as a musician.

Justin and Jason discuss how injuries have derailed Operation Superhero and Jason's strategy for moving forward with the Math Academy online system. 

Justin talks with Bryan Helmig (CTO and co-founder of Zapier) about Zapier's genesis and how they won their first 10 customers.

Jason talks to NASA Research Scientist Laura Kerber.

Justin and Jason discuss the introduction of rolling batches in Nugget, signs that your startup project is about to fail, the book Blondie 24, Playing at the Edge of AI, how John Humphrey generously acquired MathAcademy.net for Jason, the impending arrival of Joe Stech's book Compelling Science Fiction, the importance of having a MacGuffin in your life, the benefits of working on a project, why most successful entrepreneurs started with something small and why you should start your company without the expectation of raising money, scaling the Math Academy program to the high school and to other school districts, recent progress on the Math Academy software platform, the latest on Operation Superhero, the importance of moving forward despite setbacks and disappointments, Jason's relative unsuccess at saying No to projects, the independent sci-fi movie Prospect, and how Jason and his daughters met Captain Marvel on Halloween.

Justin and Jason discuss the prerequisite viewer that Jason's building for Math Academy, Rob Walling's Tiny Seed, Chamath Palihapitiya's advice to grow slow and to grow real, why Jason's latest hire on Upwork didn't work out, Justin's Nugget webinar and why he's no longer going to employ squeeze marketing, how Jason is back writing code again and loving it, Math Academy's high-school curriculum and overall program, late bloomers, and nature vs. nurture as it relates to mathematics and mathematical talent.

Justin and Jason discuss Justin's tendency to argue with himself about code, the strategy board game that Jason and Colby are building together, the JS 13K Game challenge, Jason's advice on how to find inexpensive talent on Upwork and how Justin might include these ideas on Nugget, how parents think about after-school coding programs, the Hacker News post asking startup employees how much they made on an exit, the funded vs. the bootstrapped startup model and Jason's plans for Math Academy, the latest on Operation Superhero and the unreasonable effectiveness of strength training.