Episode 27
Justin: Figuring out what, like what the tone and voice of the podcast is and, and what kind of people we want to have on and what kind of focus we want to to have on the podcast.
Andrew: It's not really about growth. It's not like we're not like going after the biggest names we can find only like we're, we're more than happy to have a person on who makes a tool that only has a few, a few people using it. Like that's totally, totally valid.
Andrew: Hello, welcome to the dev tools, FM podcast. This is a podcast about developer tools and the people who make them I'm Andrew, and here's my co-host Justin in real life.
Justin: Hi everyone.
Andrew: So this is a little bit of a special episode today. We aren't going to be talking with anybody else other than us. We're going to take a look back on where dev tools started and how we got here and what we plan to do in the future
Justin: Yeah, a nice retrospective episode. We've been doing this. A year, a little bit more than a year now.
Andrew: I think we, I think we started in April.
Justin: yeah. So getting close there and yeah, and it just felt like a good time to, to look back on everything that we've done and all the people we've talked about. And I don't know, get some history on the podcast and maybe even talk about where we want to take it in the future.
[00:01:23] Where It All Started
Andrew: Yeah. So I think what would be good to start out with talking with is how this podcast even started? It's kind of a funny story. I don't think either me or Justin really set out to make a podcast or really even ever thought of making a podcast,
Justin: It was more of a joke to start off with it. Yeah.
Andrew: Yeah, it's, it's very funny how little thought was put into all of this?
So around a year ago I decided to leave my job at Intuit and start seeking a job elsewhere. And the one company that really piqued my interest was a company called Descripts if you don't know what Descript is, Descript is a video audio editing tool that works based off of a transcript s and.
It is mainly used to, to edit podcasts. So as a joke, Justin was like, Hey, let's, let's start a podcast. What, what can go wrong?
Justin: Well, there's a little context here. So at that time I was working at a company called artsy and artsy had its own internal podcast. And we were going through the phase around that same time of like, oh, well, what sort of editing software should we use for the podcast?
And. I had seen Descripts and I thought like, Hey, this is well, first it's like an amazing use of AI. So like Descript as the ability to like, do over to voices, which we haven't really taken advantage of. But I was like, oh, this is awesome. I definitely want to use this. And then people aren't saying, we're like, ah, well, you know, this isn't really exactly what we want to use when you use this.
Often, I was like, oh, I want to, I want a reason to use it. So it just felt perfect. It's like, you're already working there. It's like, why don't we do a podcast?
Andrew: Yeah. And from there, like we just, we spit balled, maybe like one or two ideas back and forth. I checked, I was just checking domains and I'm like, okay. We like dev tools and we're going to make a podcast of tools dot, dot FM.
And it, and it was right there. And we were actually very surprised that it wasn't taken and it wasn't already a thing
Justin: Yeah, that, that pretty much solidified it. I think it's just like, if you have a really good domain, you've just got to do
Andrew: Yeah. The classic developer problem of starting a project by buying a domain. And that's definitely how we started this podcast too
Justin: It's funny. Like we've basically. We connected through open source a while back
like
Andrew: 20. Yeah. This is only our second time ever seeing each other in person
Justin: Yeah. The first time we ever saw each other was 29 to end of 2019 at Ts conf in Seattle. Yeah. That was a good.
Andrew: It was Yeah, it really does. It was a different world back then. And in many respects,
Justin: for sure, for sure, for sure. But yeah, it just kind of kicked off and then I think the thing that's like a little bit surprising about podcasts is like, there's a lot of tools that a podcast requires to get going. Cause you have to think about a lot of stuff.
It's like. You know, recording is one thing, editing another thing than like advertising your podcast and syndicating it. Like
Andrew: holdup hosting it, like getting it to all the different
platforms
Justin: Yeah. Yeah. It's it's a lot. Right now we don't do sponsorships or anything. This is totally, we pay for everything out of pocket.
I think I should have pulled up the budget sheet before we looked at this, but I think we can. Around like $300 a month and just costs yeah. Something like that. Yeah. Just in software subscriptions. So this is like scheduling. So we use savvy Cal for scheduling, which is great. Not necessarily cheapest option, but it is really, really good.
And then we use what later
Andrew: Yeah, we do use later that, that price goes up and down depending on how high, a quality video I want to put out.
But I think we're back on the free tier from that, for
Justin: Yeah. Then we have Buzzsprout for syndication versatile has graciously sponsored our sites. So they do site or hosting for a site and then Descript We have a sponsored account from them, which is, which is amazing. It's also been a really good opportunity for you to like dog food, the product.
Andrew: Yeah. Like, but before I went to study to Descript I was a large advocate for dogfooding your own code which for our listeners who might not know dogfooding is where you make a thing. So you use the thing, a place where I use that a lot was in my open source package. Auto auto uses itself to release itself and I was using it all the time.
So I feel by dogfooding our product, you can really Take the stance of a user and create a better product. And so I thought, why not? I'm, I'm at a job where we make podcasts. Like, why don't I make a podcast? How, how, how bad could that be? And it, it has been, it's been a great experience. Like, I, I know the product better than I could have ever possibly.
Like even fathomed like if I wasn't making a podcast and this is kind, kinda like an Intuit like line, but it's helped me develop that customer empathy. So like, I can really be in the, in the shoes of the customer going like, well, Descript's awesome. But like, what are these things that I can do better to make it better?
And it's, it's been a really fun experience.
Justin: Yeah. I mean, I, and I'm sure for a product as complex as Descript is, it's like having the opportunity to, to, you know, sit down with it and play with it.
It's not just like, oh, I play with it for a few minutes and I kind of get this. It was like, Hey, I'm continually editing podcasts. these are the pain points that I'm feeling the time.
Andrew: Yeah. I'd say without Descript we probably, would've never made this podcast just first because we would've never had the impetus to create the podcast. But second, like editing a podcast is a lot of fucking work. Like even with Descripts like sometimes it'll take me four hours to edit a podcast and like, that's, that's a lot of time.
Justin: Yeah. When we started this, it took longer and we were doing weekly episodes. We did what like 10 cent or so episodes. weekly.
Andrew: We weekly release cadence was a bit too much for us. I felt like I was always doing podcast things now with the biweekly cadence, I can feel like, oh, it's my week off. I don't have to do anything time to play video games.
Justin: Yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure. That's the, that's the thing that we've kind of got into. He was like, you do most of the editing and I know that it takes up a lot of time.
I try to pitch in when I can, but it's like something that like hiring an editor would be super nice. I mean Descript does make it shorter, but I mean, it's still a, still a huge commitment. So if you're out there thinking about starting a podcast, just know that especially in the early days, it is a huge time commitment at the very least and a bit of a financial commitment, depending on what functionality you want, like how you want to reach your audience, all that stuff.
Andrew: Okay. We, we D we did spend a good amount of time though at the start, just kind of having fun and like building the website, like before we even made an episode, we were like, okay, let's make a really pretty website.
Let's set up a repo with a lot of automation, so we don't have to care about any of this. And that was like a fun weekend project
Justin: two. Yeah. Yeah. So we used we use a library of Intuit, like the. The dev tools. DS so good. So it like, it reimplement what, it would look like a dev tools, like in Chrome or Firefox or whatever. And we have that, so it looks like an inspector panel on the website and he's like, get all the information and
Andrew: it's yeah. Another case of like, oh, I'm just going to make a website. I'll follow through with the actual content later.
Justin: yeah, yeah. It's, it's been good. It's been good though. I mean the website. And We haven't really changed that much since we started it.
Andrew: been chugging.
Justin: Yeah. I guess we did add a little bit of about our equipment. You have better equipment
Andrew: than
Justin: I do. I need to, I need to invest in my set up a little bit more, but
Andrew: Yeah. That's yeah, that's, that's something that we had to learn a lot, a lot about too, because like, while before this podcast I knew about like audio equipment, I guess. Now I really know about it.
Like, I, I had to buy a, a microphone amp for this nice shure sm7b So like, I really
know the ins and outs of audio now, for sure.
Justin: Yeah. And there's, there's like software to go along with that. So we use krisp a lot to filter out audio, unless you're trying to do two channel audio, like we're doing today and then
krisp treat somebody as background. So that's no good.
Andrew: So be doing it in post
[00:09:43] Producing a Podcast
Justin: A lot of post-work a lot of post-work. What do you find? What do you think is the hardest part of editing
Andrew: The, the hardest part, like when, when the transcript is good, like editing is a breeze, like, I'm just. like Composing what is already there.
But since descript is a transcript based editing tool and
Both me and Justin do have a passion for accessible experiences.
Having a transcript that is correct is like, it's a huge amount of work, but it's all super important to us. So people in other languages can come and enjoy the podcast too, just by maybe just translating a part of it. And when we have a person who is not of us decent the predominant AI algorithms to transcribe speech are not trained on non U S English speakers. So if an episode features someone that is not from the U S editing will typically take two to three times longer. Then a lot of people would say, well, you work at Descript Andrew, why don't you make that better? Tell someone to make that better. Well, Descript is actually not a transcription service.
We use a transcription service, which is something, a lot of people might not, not get one. Once they first look at Descript like me, even, I was like, oh, they, they make really good transcription AI. And some of that overdub API AI, but Nope, that's, that's all a third-party. So if you want to implement transcription and your service, a rev.ai is
pretty okay. But for us speakers
Justin: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, and this is a classic like bias and AI thing. Right? it, it's interesting that the. I mean, AI systems often just have the same biases that the people
implementing them
have, like for better or worse. worse
Andrew: even if you don't know about them, like the people implementing those. Probably, probably wasn't thinking about that.
They're just like, let's get a lot of data. That data will be good enough
Justin: and broadly, this is why diverse teams are important. Getting off on some big tangents here, but yeah 'cause, you know, you might not have the perspective to see all the things that's important.
Yeah. I mean, editing transcripts and getting those correct is important, but it's also hard and it's like easy to miss a lot of stuff because you have to think it's like, you could get it a hundred percent correct. You know, five, six hours on it, easy, but spending all that time.
Isn't, isn't always viable. So
Andrew: After transcription, I'd say the, the hardest part has just been marketing. Like it marketing is a constant worry. Like I do take the off weeks off of marketing usually now, just because I don't want to wake up every morning and create social clips, but getting our, our podcasts in front of new eyes is definitely a hard problem and a lot of work
Justin: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. For sure. And you've done great work on that though. It was like and services, like later, like definitely help to syndicate, syndicated out to like different platforms or whatever, but I mean, making the social clips and like grabbing something that's interesting is, is is important and tough. But yeah. Yeah. yeah.
Andrew: It's definitely been a workflow that I've had to like come into, like at first, like us, like, we didn't know what to grab for a clip. We didn't even know we were going to do clips. So now as part of the editing process, it's almost like even the main point. Correct, correct. The transcript. And then after that's done, be looking for one, one to two minute segments, that would be good for Twitter and it would be good for Tik TOK.
Justin: Yup. Yup.
Building off the tool tip that Steve left us. It's like, you know, those little little quick snippets on, Twitter to get people really excited. Yeah.
Andrew: It's hard with a podcast though. Cause like he, he can, he can speed up his UI and like show us a cool little interaction. Yeah. We can't speed you up. And typically we're not getting a point across anywhere closer than like 40 to 50 seconds.
Justin: Yeah, that's true. That's true. Yeah. Getting us good. Sound bites, hard something that's actually been, not as hard is just getting people in the door, just like talking to people. It turns out that most people are excited to talk to you. Unless they're. you know Extremely professional and extremely busy. There's some people that we would really love to talk to you that, you know, have a little bit hard time, but
Andrew: It's been surprising. Like we had like rich Harris on like episode 12. We had Evan you on episode 14. So like,
Justin: yeah. I mean, some of that's been made easier by the fact that we both know a lot of people.
Andrew: say you're you're more of the connection in machine than me.
Justin: Well, I I've lived in, I've lived in New York since 2017 and. Because I'm there. I get to meet a lot of people in the developer community. So I'd met view at some view meetups in New York, I met a rich same thing, just going to meet ups.
And yeah, you know, it's, it's being able to like tap into that network has been great, but also just developers generally just like talking, you know?
Andrew: Yeah.
Justin: you know,
Andrew: Like past us reaching out, it's been surprising and heartwarming.
How many people have reached out to us to want to come onto here? Like with, with like barely any, like, not even a year's worth of episodes out. People are already like people that we respect are already reaching out to us. Like, Hey, I'd like to come on and talk about this.
Justin: One of the tensions that we have to really kind of figure out is how much we balance, like who we invite on versus like, who like comes to us and is like, Hey, you know, I'd like to talk essentially my product, you know like working on this, this cool project, I think your listeners would enjoy it.
So when we started the podcast, it was really with emphasis is on like, we want to talk to people who build tools and like, who are really passionate about building tools, because we're really passionate about building tools. And that was like the kind of, you know, the personal connection behind the tooling is, is the thing that we're really going for.
And Podcasts are great marketing opportunities broadly. And like, if people want exposure for their tools, you know, like getting on podcasts is a great way to do that. So we have this tension of like, when someone reaches out to us and they're like, Hey, you know, we've got this product. We'd really like to talk about it on your channel.
We think your listeners would enjoy it. It's like, do we engage in that? You know, sometimes it's like an easy answer because like we've used the tool and I'm like, oh yeah, this is so cool. Yeah. We want to talk about it. But sometimes it's harder because it's like, oh, we haven't, we've never used this.
And we really don't. We really aren't super interested in using it directly. And, you know, it's like kind of a, a muddier thing. And I think that's a, that's a thing that we still have to work through figuring out, like, how do we approach that? You know?
Andrew: Yeah, definitely something we still, still haven't figured out. It's, it's, it's a, it's a weird line to walk because it's like, you have real people reaching out to you who are like small-time creators really that are just trying to monetize their product.
Whereas like, if they were just like an open source person with an open repo, we'd be like, oh yeah, come on.
Why not? Yeah.
Justin: Yeah. For sure. And, and saying, no, this is hard because it's like, we don't really want to say no. Right. But it's just like, I never imagined I have to say. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's, that's such a, it's such a privilege to have that problem. But you know, it's like, how do we be respectful about this? And I think that's still something we have to work through.
It's just like, you know, what does that look like? I mean, obviously if people come to us, we want to, I want to hear them out. We want to, you know, I don't know we want to share, but it's. Figuring out what, like what the tone and voice of the podcast is and, and what kind of people we want to have on and what kind of focus we want to to have on the podcast.
Andrew: It's not really about growth. It's not like we're not like going after the biggest names we can find only like we're, we're more than happy to have a person on who makes a tool that only has a few, a few people using it. Like that's totally, totally valid.
Justin: Yeah. A lot of times it's the person's passion for building stuff. That's like the funnest thing. Anytime you talked to someone who's just like really excited to build that.
Andrew: Yeah. The S the Steve Ruiz episode, it was just like 20 minutes of a man who is just nothing but excited for everything he's talking about. It was so fun.
Justin: Yeah. Yeah. That that's, that's amazing. And you know, that's, that's what really brings a lot of joy and like continuing to do this. So
Andrew: Yeah. And those episodes when we're off camera, you just see us like this, like in the footage. it's like, yes, yes.
Justin: Yeah. Yeah. And it's really interesting how that can vary from episode to episode. So it's just like, sometimes it's like, you know, it's like, this is, this is our stuff. This is like amazing. And then sometimes it's like a little bit harder because like somebody can still be passionate about something that you haven't used or like aren't you like don't know a whole lot about yeah.
Yeah. So that's a good thing to talk about. We do do a little bit of preparation before our episodes. So we try to put together a set of questions in a Google doc, which we're probably going to stop using Google doc because permissions are a pain in the butt. But that's been useful just as a organization mechanism, just to kind of collect our thoughts so that we have something to build the episode off of.
Andrew: Yeah. It w we say to all our guests, it's a framework for the episode. It's not like the only things we're going to say. It's, it's definitely nice to have, like, at least 10 points of things we want to go through.
Justin: Yeah.
Andrew: And it's, it's funny how, like, often we'll be going through this and then the guests, it just starts answering all our questions without even knowing about them. And it's like, oh, no, no, no.
Slow down.
Justin: Yeah, yeah, But that's good. And I also love it. We have such a great conversation that we just completely go off the rails and we start talking to get a lot of stuff. Cause that's, that's like the really fun episodes
Andrew: Yeah. We, we try to keep each like conversation with the creator about the tool to around 40 minutes. But if the conversation goes long, that's where you get those hour and a half episodes.
It's like, we blow past 40 minutes. We're like an hour and 10 and we're like, okay, we gotta get tool tips and let's wrap this up.
Justin: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And oftentimes they're like longer than what people see. Cause we edit them down. There's a lot of filler words that we took out. Just like stuff like that and like silences or whatever.
Andrew: A very contentious topic.
Justin: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. We've, we've had a lot of feedback that we, we do too many edits, but You know, you want it to, you want the pacing to be good. So we do put this up on YouTube too. And when you're an audio edit that like takes out some sound, it's fine.
But the video edit might, the people might jump around or something, you know, and it's like kind of jarring if you're watching the video, but you know, part of it
Andrew: Got it. I got to make the pie some way.
[00:20:25] Where We're At
Justin: Yay. Yeah. So why don't we talk a little bit about. Us where we're at, where we've been, where we're going. Yeah. Yeah. So when we started the podcast, it was when you just started Descript this is the smallest startup that you've ever worked out.
Andrew: It's the smallest company I've ever worked at professionally as a coder I've and even non-professionally as an intern, the only company I've ever worked at before Descript was Like, I, I did work at like a V a very small, like local software company SLO . But there's you couldn't, you couldn't paint me as a developer on that job. Like, they hired me as a software intern that had me do data entry and then their database analyst quit and they're like, oh, you can do that. Right. And then I was fired within a few weeks because I did not know how to be a database administrator and I fucked it up. Yeah.
Justin: Yes. DBA is hard.
Andrew: Yeah. Yeah. They had me shadow a guy for like two weeks and I'm like, yeah, this, this will be enough. You can run, run the operations for us. You, you college student with one year of experience. Yeah.
Justin: Getting what they asked for.
Andrew: Yeah. So I, yeah, I was, I was at Intuit. I was writing design system code and a lot of tools around that.
But. Oh a lot throughout my career. I was like, but, but look at that full stack over there, look at that hill to conquer. And I was just like, I wanted to get a. A resume item that said, I could at least do it because for years I had been interviewing to try to get like more into full stack. And every time people were like, ah, you, you, you don't have the experience.
And finally I was able to convince Descript to hire me as a full stack and finally wrote some backend code. Probably wasn't the best code, but now I know SQL a little more. And since going from a large company with a lot of time and a lot of money to get the accessibility and the details right. And then going to a small company where it's a completely different environment. I saw a lot of things I had to change. So as, as the year progressed, I. I harped on it more and more. I'm like design system design system design system. And that's what I've been working on for the past two months.
So that's probably why you've heard a bunch of different tool tips from me around Radix because I spend most of my day with my code at our open, and then Radix open to the side as I try to figure out what I'm doing wrong.
Justin: Yeah, Yeah, that's awesome. Design systems are a lot of fun. I've worked a lot in design systems too.
Andrew: Yeah. It's, it's a fun like tooling space. Cause like you're, you're really just making code for another developer to use. So you're really just making a tool, but you're having a huge, heavy influence on what the actual product becomes in the end.
Justin: Yeah, it's, it's all about like, it's all about constraints and making the constraints real building a system for those constraints is a fun thing because you have this conversation with design and it's like, Hey, here's our sort of base intent. And I think the thing that I really love about design systems is it, it connects you close to design and you have to give a lot of feedback on the design, you know?
So it's like you come up with a constraints and you have to ensure that the constraints are held to even on the design side, you were like, Hey, well actually, You know, having a link here is not normally a thing that we do. Cause like, if you look at these other examples and then like, sometimes it's like, you know, you have to have that back and forth to like change the design to be, you know, applied to the system or whatever. Yeah.
Andrew: Like what's actually a tool tip. That's, that's that's And a, if you read through the Radix issues, they know exactly what a tool tip is and they will tell you that that is not a tooltip.
Justin: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, figuring out what those constraints are and where to draw the boundaries are, is the fun part.
And, and you. A lot of micro decisions that people upstream don't have to worry about. Right. They have an API that it provided. They have all these primitives that they in use and it's good to go. Yeah. Which is amazing. That's that's a fun exercise. I mean it, in a way it's a tool, right? So it is, yeah. We're building tools for other developers to do stuff.
Andrew: And then once you're done building the tool, you build tools for the tools.
So like I built a snippet library. I built, I built design token IntelliSense. Like it goes further and
Justin: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's almost, it's almost a DX role kind of developer experience role where It's just a lot of like building tools, building utilities, building automations, making the sort of transition from design to sort of product smoother.
Andrew: Yeah, Yeah, yeah, And it centers around a lot around documentation, which has been like of. The, if you could summarize my career, it's just like write better docs. Like I I've written myself two different mark, maybe even three different markdown documentation generators. So it's it's a place I have a lot of passion for.
And design systems comes into that heavily because like, for example Intuit our design system documentation was supposed to serve developers and designers too. So. There's a lot of thinking that goes into that. And then yeah. Yeah. I love JS doc.
Justin: Yeah.
Andrew: Yeah.
Justin: That's pretty awesome. Yeah. So wow. Where was I when this podcast started?
I was still at artsy at the time. So I Was a full-stack at artsy, worked there for a few years, almost three years to a day. Really great time. Love the team. Things changed a little bit at the end of my tenure artsy. And I was definitely like feeling pretty burnt out because I was, I was a tech lead at the end of my tenure and mad respect for all you tech leads out there.
It's, it's a lot to juggle figuring out like how much day-to-day IC individual contributor work do you have to do versus. You know, planning, working with the PM, working with design, pairing with people, unblocking folks like doing all that stuff. It can be, it can be very thankless. Yeah. It's pretty challenging.
So I think artsy has a particularly strong challenge to work through where their tech lead roles is. Voluntary. It's like a volunteer position. It's not like a role. It's not like a no accolades, no salary. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's just like, Hey, would you like to try this? And you know, a lot of responsibility.
Anyway I was, was doing that and I'm getting really burned out. Cause this is like, you know, coming up on the pandemic and like going through all that stuff. And I just, I got to the point where I really couldn't cope. So I I left artsy and I just took some time off. I went to the Recurse center.
Like literally the next week after I left artsy and the Recurse center is this programming retreat out of New York city. It was not in person, it was remote, but it's a phenomenal community. If anybody's interested you can find it. I think it's recurse.com. But anyway, if you just search Recurse you'll, you'll come across the great unstructured community it's free program.
You have to do it. A little interview to get in, but like it's not too bad and super supportive community. So I hung out and did that for a bit. And then at the, or getting close to the year, I started the job that I'm working at now, which is that oxide computer systems, which is oxide is. It's an interesting journey.
So we're building custom servers. So hardware, software, the whole shebang.
it it's a bit different. Yeah. It's not ecommerce that's for sure. So I I'm, I'm loving the experience. I still work on web side. Do full stack stuff oxides all rust all the way down except for our front end, which is TypeScript.
So I do a little bit of rust here and there. Which has been, which has been fun and a huge learning experience too. But yeah, that's, that's what I've been up to. never a dull moment, I guess.
Andrew: yeah, yeah. It's it's, it's been a whirlwind the last year. A lot of, a lot of things have changed, but I think they're for the better,
Justin: yeah.
Yeah.
absolutely. Yeah. But I mean, I find myself working on design systems stuff too. I've been doing a lot of theming word recently, which has been a lot of fun. But it's, it's interesting that we're kind of both. Sort of naturally gravitate towards that space.
Andrew: I've just always loved front end, like making something blink on a screen is like my, my hobby basically
All new programmers like even though I know not everybody wants to code front end, I, I try to push them towards front end. Cause it's like, do you want instant gratification? Here
Justin: Yeah, it's a lot of fun. I went to school for computer engineering. So I was doing like C plus plus and stuff in school. But my first like UI development was there's this library called n curses, which lets you do texts, user interfaces.
And you can like draw boxes and stuff with the screen. So I made a solitair game that could run on the con and the terminal and, and that was like my first sort of like, oh, I built a UI thing.
And it's like starting to connect the dots between like code and like what people can actually interact with. Before that. I didn't know, like how could anybody build something like Microsoft
word understand. And like now you connect the dots. You
can see. Yeah,
Andrew: my, my first, my first UI that I developed was actually my very first quarter of school at Cal poly. We had a Android development class and we made an app called chow pals, which was fi find a pal to eat with in the dining hall. Yeah.
Justin: That's fine. Yeah.
Andrew: I didn't have too many other projects after that. Like, I, I spent a very long time in my first year of programming going like, okay, what, what's the project that I'm going to code?
It's
Justin: going to change everything. to start up, to kill it all.
Andrew: And I basically came up with a Chromecast, YouTube playlists, and then Chrome cast came out after that. And I'm like, okay, I'll shelve this idea.
Justin: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm still looking for that project. The one to change everything. It's not, that's not an easy thing nobody's ever going to use
Andrew: it.
Justin: I think that's one of the thing that we found just doing this whole thing is it's like marketing is everything, you know?
Yeah.
Andrew: And we're definitely not marketers. We are, we are programmers. We like to build the shiny thing and then move on to the next shiny
Justin: Yeah. Yeah. I think the, the, the interesting and important thing is like, it takes some consistency and dedication and. Without you, this podcast couldn't happen So I don't have the sort of consistency and dedication to, just sort of maintain the regular consistency. feel like
Andrew: I'm good with habits.
Justin: yeah, together though, it makes it a lot easier. it's fun, you know, it's fun to do it with someone else. So,
Andrew: Yeah. I definitely don't think I would have continued if I didn't have like a partner in this cause like, it's, it's nice to have someone to bounce ideas off of like nobody else in my life cares about my podcast, but this guy
Justin: says I do have a vested interest. Yes. Yeah, yeah. Maybe I wouldn't say nobody else cares, but nobody
Andrew: to listen.
Justin: Yeah.
Andrew: And I go, cool. You have a podcast?
Justin: My mom will tune in every now and
Andrew: Yeah.
Justin: I don't think she knows she doesn't know what we're talking about and she'll turn in. Yeah.
[00:31:49] Looking to the Future
Justin: So, so what about, what about the future? Where are we taking this? What are we doing?
Andrew: So we, we've been talking a lot about uh, different, different plans to where we want to take this. I think we definitely want to release more, but that is dependent upon us getting an editor because I like having a life too.
But yeah, so I, I think the, the biggest one we have right now is the Patreon idea. Like. Having a private community where you, the listeners can participate and influence where the podcast goes in various degrees. And then also we, as I said, we'd like to do more content. So that would be the place where you would get it.
We'd probably go. With the normal podcasting model where it's like you have your public free episode, and then you have a private episode just for your subscribers. So I, I think that's probably where we're going, head, how we get there and what it will look like in the end. Still very much up in the
Justin: Yeah. Yeah. We'll definitely work on the shape of that over time. I think a few things that are like, sort of obvious is like to make this sustainable. We don't have to, we're not here to make money.
That was never the goal, but like netting zero would be like ideal. And that also includes time. Right. You've invested a ton of time specifically in editing and you know, just me. Part of this. Like, I feel very strongly that I don't want you always having to have it. Cause it's like you know, I'm I get in there sometimes when I can, but you know, again, it's like, it's, it's a hard thing for me to maintain and like it's a lot of effort.
And then over time, you know, you just get, just get tired of it. You know,
Andrew: Like two, two years later from now, I'm going to be like, damn, I've done a lot of
Justin: Yay. Yeah. That time adds up. So, so hiring an editor super important. The thing that I like, I don't necessarily like about podcasts is just like. Product shilling, you know, it's like, Hey, here's this product, you know? Yeah. This week episode is brought to you by blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you know, it's like, I'm not, I'm not a huge fan of that. So if like, if people enjoy it and people would like to sort of help us, you know, fund it and like, you know, breakeven, that'd be great.
And you know, if we end up having or doing product sponsors or something, I think we'll. Try to find something that aligns with
Andrew: for us.
Justin: And then with the listeners, like something that's not like, oh God, this again, you know, it's like I don't know. That'd be an interesting thing to interesting path to walk, but we'll see.
Andrew: Yeah. Going back to what we were talking about earlier with like products based episodes we have thought about maybe like, instead of making those like unofficial sponsored episodes where we don't get any money, like maybe they are actual sponsored episodes where like, you are kind of paying for an advertisement with us.
We're still going to talk to the creator in a way that we would with anybody else. We're still like talking shop with the toolmaker. That toolmaker has a little more of a vested interest in. people listening to the podcast and like going and doing something.
Justin: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and, and that could be a potentially a great balance of just like, you know, we have product and bounds that come, you know, we can talk to the CEO or whoever's like, and bringing this to us.
And then, you know, it was like, yeah, Hey, well, you know, we can do a sponsored episode. And I think the thing that's important to me is like, we make it very explicit and very clear, like, Hey, this is a sponsored episode, you know? But yeah, I mean, that can be a great thing. You know, it all depends, but like keeping that the, the, the soul of the episode of the podcast, where we're just like really wanting to talk to people, like build things and enjoy building things. That's that's important.
Andrew: Yeah. And something like a patron will really help, help fuel that. Like, like in having like an active community, I think would be a very, very interesting. So like one of the ideas we were playing around with, and we kind of alluded to earlier is like we've currently been using Google docs to. To like, get all the questions together.
We share it with our guests, they put the tool tips on there. And then we use that for the episode. Idea that we've been toying with is using GitHub discussions for that instead. So if you were a member you might be able, you'd get access to this private repo. You could post issues in this private repo.
Hey, I want you to get this person on and talk about this topic. Cause I think it'd be interesting. And then using that, we can gauge your gut, all of your response to that. And whether you actually want that you can go up, vote it. And then once we got voted Justin came up with this interesting idea where we could use get hub discussions to host those episode docs.
And what that means is since it's a discussion, you guys could be part of that discussion. If you have a question that you've been dying to ask this creator that we're going to have on, you can easily ask it there. More likely than not. We'll try to integrate it into the episode.
Justin: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, just figuring out more points for people to get involved and you know, it it's, we have all these great connections we can, we can talk to all these wonderful people. And then, you know, there's a lot of people out there that don't have the same connections and, and, you know, maybe you can get some questions answered or whatever.
Andrew: Yeah, we, we, we tried merch for awhile. I think we'll come back with merch eventually. I w I wasn't happy with the quality of our merch once I got it. So once we get the quality up, that's definitely there, but. Hey, who's to say like maybe in the future, we have a lot of people that listen to the podcast we can do meetups
Justin: Like, yeah, that'd be great.
Andrew: be awesome. We could have some of the guests that we've had come, come talk.
Justin: Yeah. Do earn, we potentially think about doing a Twitter space.
Oxide does a regular Twitter space on Monday and it's been very popular and, you know, that'd be another way to, to sort of get a guest in the room with you know, a lot of the community. Yeah, a lot of ideas, a lot of things that we could do. I think the, the point is though it's like step one is sort of making it sustainable.
And then also means. Like tax stuff that we have to figure out and, you know, just figure out like, how do we even take money? And like, where does that go? And what does that mean? That's a, that's a big milestone to get through, but that's, that's something that we're planning on tackling soon, which will be exciting.
It'll be exciting. It's a little baby podcast growing up.
Yeah.
Andrew: It's a, it's amazing to see how far we've come in a year. I don't, I don't know what a normal podcast looks like in terms of growth, but I feel like we've been on a very steady uptick.
Like each episode grows a little bit more than the last we get more and more interactions on various social media platforms.
So it is going somewhere.
Justin: Yeah. It's exciting. It's exciting. Another thing that we've sort of discussed in the past, and I would still like to do is just like make all of our stats and everything very open. So especially once we start. You know, taking donations or getting sponsorships or whatever, making all of that very visible.
So people were like interested and making their own podcast can kind of like, come take a look at that sort of thing. It's like, oh, well, how does you know, how does this work? How do the finances work out? Whatever. And also just like, I mean, analytics and stuff like that. There's a lot of, there's a lot of things that we can share with the community, but like this whole process.
Andrew: It'd be really cool if like another person wanted to come along and start a tech podcast and just be like, okay, I'm forking, Def dev tools, FM.
Justin: yeah,
Andrew: Yeah.
Justin: Setting up a good model, just like to know, like what kind of equipment to get, like what kind of software to use all that stuff?
Andrew: Yeah, because it was not trivial. Like we, we, we spent probably a good month or two, just like thinking about all this. And then we iterated on it further, like a bunch of people in the comments said, Hey, Andrew, your background. It's always, always so messy. Why is your, why is your fiance working on a, on a kitchen table? Uh, that's what prompted this? I got, I got a better microphone. All these things are because of a user feedback.
Justin: Yeah, Yeah, So we appreciate your feedback.
And we do read it and some of you throw us a lot of shade about our editing and other things. We, we, we,
Andrew: We hear you. Yeah. We hear you. It's a hard, it's a hard balance to strike because we have a very informal podcasts. Like th our conversations are just conversations. Like nobody's performing, nobody's giving a talk, but we still want our guests to. To like put their best foot forward. So sometimes like we may take out some stutters, we may take out some false starts, maybe the, the connection drops and you guys don't even know and I have to stitch together the video.
So, yeah.
Justin: Yeah. I mean, honestly, that is such a huge part of it because it, it reduces a little bit of the pressure to like, get it right.
The first time we don't have to stop and rerecord, if, you know, if we mess up in the middle of it, it's fine.
Andrew: Yeah. I won't name names, but we had one episode where one of our guests first podcast they had ever been on, they were very nervous.
Multiple times while they were answering our questions, they would kind of get frazzled and be like, oh, sorry, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. So like, there are times where we need to like put in a little movie magic and then you guys are none the wiser, like, I'm sure you couldn't even point out which episode I'm talking
Justin: Yeah. And, and, and for good reason, right? Like that's not a thing that we sort of, we don't want a guest to sort of have to worry about that.
And we, we definitely don't substantially edit anything, like remove anything that that folks are talking about or whatever. And that's, that's an important point, but, but just getting through just to make it. Smooth and flow and like reducing pauses and all that stuff, which is just the background work that, that is important to, to the quality that that's hard to see
Andrew: but if you're interested in hearing that, that that's, you should subscribe because that's one of the things that we'll probably do is post more raw unedited footage to the Patrion. So if you really want to hear all those ums, like you can pay us $5 to hear that.
Justin: a privilege
Andrew: Yeah.
Justin: truly. Yeah. Yeah. It's been exciting, man. It's been going great. I'm, I'm excited for all the conversations that we have coming up. We've got one. Coming up really soon that I'm really excited.
Another Steve Steve's are good. And yeah, I don't know. We'll see where it goes.
Andrew: Yeah, sky's the limit,
Justin: But yeah, it's been a lot of fun and you know, obviously thanks for everybody for listening, for tuning in for giving your feedback. We're both pretty approachable. So if you reach out to us on Twitter or whatever platform you're on we're probably there and probably active.
So Feel free to say hi, you know, if you want to request something now, if you would really like a start to somebody, you can tweet our dev tools, FM accounts, and we'll, we'll definitely see that.
Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, it's been a lot of fun.
Andrew: Yeah. Since this is a special episode, we will not be doing tool tips this week, but you can get back to your regular regularly scheduled tool, tip programming with the next episode.
Justin: for sure. For sure.
[00:42:47] Thanks for Listening
Andrew: I just want to thank all the listeners that we've had so far. It's been, it's been a blast. Every time I get a message where somebody is like, I love your podcast. Thanks for the follow that, like, it warms my heart. I'd never thought I'd be a content creator. So having that experience is pretty novel and it just thanks for listening truly.
Justin: Yeah. Yeah. It really this is really just something that, again, we just started just because it felt like a fun idea and as we've done it, it's, it's been pretty valuable and, and, you know, seeing people pick up on it and like, I dunno comment about the episodes and, and stuff like that.
That's, it's been pretty gratifying. So yeah, we'd love to hear from more of you. If it's, if you're listening to the, the podcast and you're enjoying it, please just let us know just drop a line and always it always helps and we're always here to make new connections too. And you know, what, if you'd be interested on coming on the podcast, we would probably love to talk
Andrew: Yeah, just reach out. And if you're interested in becoming a member and like helping support the podcast, definitely reach out because we will have news on that soon.
We are, we are actively working on it.
Justin: Yep. Stay tuned.
Andrew: Yeah. So that's it for this week's episode of dev tools, FM, be sure to follow us on YouTube and wherever you consume your podcasts. Thanks for listening.
Justin: Thanks everyone.