add all 2022 transcripts

Helping Grafana set up their Big Tent with Tom Wilkie, Mat Ryer, & Matt Toback_transcript.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,1251 @@
+**Jerod Santo:** We are backstage. I'm Jerod, Adam's here...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Hey! What's up?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Not too much.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We have more people here than just you and I, Jerod...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's getting crowded.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It is getting crowded.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's actually a loveseat, we don't have a full couch, so with the five of us, it's getting really awkward. But anyways, here we are, sitting very closely to Tom, Mat and Matt. Hey, guys.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** How's it going?
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Hello!
+
+**Matt Toback:** Hi.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's going very well. How are you all doing?
+
+**Mat Ryer:** It's cramped.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, awkward.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You're rubbing my elbow. Get off, Mat.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** What's that? Whose is that? What is that...?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We need a bigger tent, actually... \[laughter\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** If we had a bigger tent, we would be doing much better. I should say, we're backstage at Changelog. We're also backstage at the Big Tent Podcast, because we're hanging out with the hosts of Grafana's Big Tent. How does that sound...?
+
+**Matt Toback:** I like to think that all the backstages are connected in one sort of universal open-the-door-through-the-cupboard and then you're backstage for every podcast in existence.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. Like Monsters Inc, you can just go through the door and there you are.
+
+**Matt Toback:** That's it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I like that, yeah.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** Does that make this the Scream Factory? \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, it's not the Scream Factory, now it's the Laugh Factory. Because laugh is actually the power that you've discovered.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** You've just ruined the film for me.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Sorry about that.
+
+**Matt Toback:** Spoiler alert...
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Tom hasn't seen 2
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Is this like Monsters Inc. part 3, or something?
+
+**Matt Toback:** The podcast... \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** The others were podcasts, I'm sure, as well...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Is there a podcast? There probably is...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Sulley's got a podcast, for sure...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** A rewatch? To go back to the old episodes...
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Monster University...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. But being backstage with y'all, with this show - I think it's cool, because it's been a journey to get to here. This didn't just begin yesterday; this has been legit a journey to think about, one, the philosophy that lives upon, but then also what it's like to have a podcast that embodies that philosophy, encapsulates it with some folks from Grafana, but also invites those in the community to share their voice around this big tent philosophy and what it might mean to observe software in production, and all that entails...
+
+Mat Ryer, I know you from Go Time and other places, that you're super-funny, and Tom Wilkie, I can't talk to you without you cracking a joke of some sort, so... There's laughter to be had, which is always fun.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** I promise I won't...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Take us back, guys. Take us back to the beginning, the inception of this idea. Why a podcast, why does Grafana wanna do a podcast, and then how come this podcast that we ended up producing?
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** I've known Mat for quite a long time. Actually, should we tell the story of how we met, Mat
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Shall we? Is it time?
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** Shall we? It's quite topical at the moment...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Is it a good story?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, that's really the question.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** Well, how long have you got? \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Just go ahead and talk. We'll cut you off if it's too long.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, we'll edit this out.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** I will just say, of all the people I've met in an airport, Tom is my favorite.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** You didn't really meet me in an airport, did you?
+
+**Mat Ryer:** We literally met in an airport, yeah.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** We met in an airport. We were on our way to Ukraine. Is that true?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** Yeah, to speak at a conference in Ukraine. And we missed the connecting flight through Vienna, or something like that. And you know, I'm going to rebook a flight, and I hear a thick British accent behind me... And the rest is history, really.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** You don't mean intelligence thick, do you? You mean it in the British way.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\]
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Actually, I remember being in line, because we had missed our connection, it was a nightmare, and I remember there was a gaggle of people behind me talking about tech... And I was like, "Oh, no..." You know, when there's just strangers around, and they talk tech...
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** It's like being in San Francisco.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. And I was just like, "Oh no, I hope I don't get dragged into this..." And I did, in the end, because... I think, Tom, you said something that I completely disagreed with about Go, or something. \[laughter\] You made a criticism about Go...
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** \[04:02\] Probably.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** ...and then I have a duty, don't I, to --
+
+**Matt Toback:** It's a sworn art.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** I think you were literally wearing the T-shirt.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, probably. I probably had my Go Time T-shirt on. And I turned around and...
+
+**Matt Toback:** Punched him.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** ...corrected him, obviously. \[laughter\]
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** Laid him out.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** A nice, thick correction.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Verbally punched him. Verbally.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** We settled our differences in the hotel bar, waiting for the next flight, and then the next flight, and the next flight... It was good, and I think the rest is history. Then Mat had me on Go Time. It must have been almost a year ago now, Mat. No, six months maybe.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Was this the microservices debate? Which show were you on, Tom?
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** Yes! I think it was probably microservices architecture... And that was a really good -- it was with the chap from Monzo.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** That was a really good one. I think that was the first time I met Go Time, and you two, and this whole kind of process... And afterwards, I think I said to Mat -- oh, no, no. Afterwards, it was Matt with two t's...
+
+**Matt Toback:** Oh, that's me.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** That's you, yeah. You started an internal podcast.
+
+**Matt Toback:** Oh, I did, yeah. I did. We were growing at a pretty good clip, and it just felt like there was so much Slack stuff going on, but not a lot of -- I wouldn't say not a lot of personality, but I think what was lost was just a little bit long-form conversation... And I thought "Oh, let's just do this." And cut it, threw it up there, I think I just pasted it in Slack maybe initially, or threw it online... For no other purpose than just letting other people talk.
+
+Then I think you reached out, Tom, and you were like "Why don't we do this for more people?" I was like, "Let's not do that. That's terrible. There's already enough out there."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** "That's a terrible idea!"
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** And it was just after being on Go Time with Mat, and seeing how the sausage is made. And listening to your podcast, Mat, I'm like "We should definitely do one."
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. You thought, "This looks way easy." \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So easy.
+
+**Matt Toback:** You can do it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's why it took so long to get this thing together.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** We had that Dunning-Kruger thing going on, right? \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Mat Ryer, did you work at Grafana yet then? Had Pace been acquired yet when this conversation happened? Or was it sort of behind the scenes? Maybe this is sharing too much about your personal entanglings, but what was the timeframe?
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** I think it was part of the terms sheet, that you had to host me on Go Time.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, but that was me insisting that. \[laughter\] I was only gonna accept the deal if... Yeah, well --
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Let's try and get into the details, but more try to figure out in terms of like if Tom shared the idea, was it like a "we" at that point, is what I'm trying to get at...
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** yeah.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** The internal podcast that Matt was doing was already underway.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right, of course.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Then I joined, and listened to one of those... And I'll tell you what - it's such a great way to start to talk about and share company culture, and things...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's a cool idea.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. So I do recommend it. When you do a public podcast, there's a lot more pressure to do that, to get it right and make it interesting. When you do an internal one, a bit like this, kind of backstage, it can be more informal and more relaxed, and you can talk openly about company things that you wouldn't wanna talk about publicly. So yeah, I thought that was a really nice way, and I felt like I knew Matt a little bit from listening to him.
+
+**Matt Toback:** And it's funny, because we didn't meet until - Jerod and Adam, when I met you, I had met Mat prior.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What?!
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, okay...
+
+**Matt Toback:** So I think we were on the same Google Meet
+
+**Mat Ryer:** It's pronounced Ryer... \[laughter\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Is that a nickname? Mat Prior.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. That's my comedy stand-up name. \[laughter\]
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** Have you two met in person yet?
+
+**Matt Toback:** No, we haven't. I have a whole sheet next to each podcast where I try to guess how tall Mat is, and--
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Oh, like a bedsheet.
+
+**Matt Toback:** Yeah.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** \[07:56\] You've got my outline.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Why do you guess every episode?
+
+**Matt Toback:** I have a different feeling every episode.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** His height is the same every time.
+
+**Matt Toback:** No, not in my mind. Sometimes he's a giant.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** His height is very surprising.
+
+**Matt Toback:** Is that true?
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. It depends how close I stand to the camera.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Surprisingly short or surprisingly tall?
+
+**Matt Toback:** Don't ruin this for me, please.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** I'm gonna leave it there, I don't wanna spoil it. \[laughter\]
+
+**Matt Toback:** The first Monsters Inc.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Can I put a guess in here then? Can I add maybe a guess onto your sheet, Matt?
+
+**Matt Toback:** Yes, please.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Or maybe I can concur, or maybe you can agree with one of my guesses...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Are you gonna do it in metric, or imperial?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm gonna guess Mat Ryer is 6'2.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I was gonna go 5'10.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** Yeah, I think that's a good guess.
+
+**Matt Toback:** 5'10 is my guess.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Tom, that laugh was good. I liked that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Is that your guess? Okay.
+
+**Matt Toback:** Yeah, 5'10 is my guess.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And I've never met Mat either. Nor do I want to.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** \[laughs\] None taken.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I hope someday never to have to.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** I thought we were gonna have a lunch one day.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Nah. It's not gonna happen.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I never agreed to that.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** 5'11 is the answer, unfortunately.
+
+**Matt Toback:** Unfortunately?
+
+**Mat Ryer:** And apparently, no one ever admits to that, because they always just round it to the nearest 6-foot --
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh. Well, Mat, I'm with you, man, because I'm 5'11 and a half... My whole life, pretty much.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** For our European listeners, what is that in non-freedom units?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, what is that in metric?
+
+**Matt Toback:** Is it T-shirt sizing?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** A medium amount of centimeters?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Let's ask Siri. "Hey Siri, what's 5'11,5 inches in metric?" \[Siri: "I've found this on the web.\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, gosh... \[laughter\] Can't even do basic maths? Come on, Siri...!
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Come on, Siri... Well, I jacked it kind of up, so... I'll use Google instead.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Honestly though, how long has Siri been alive? It's gotta be like eight years.
+
+**Matt Toback:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** She should be able to do basic math conversions at this phase of her development, but... I digress.
+
+**Matt Toback:** Do we judge how long since she's been inceived -- conceived, or the total breadth of information that she has?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well that's infinite I would bet.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** It could be Adam's accent that doesn't make any sense.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's true. It could be my Texan drawl. In centimeters it's 180 centimeters.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** 180 centimeters.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** That makes it sound tiny, for some reason. \[laughter\]
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** You can say 1,800 millimeters if you wanna be bigger.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Oh, thank you. There we go. Yeah, 1,800 millimeters.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** 1,800 millimeters does sound pretty good. I like that.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** I only use centimeters when it's little things. And millimeters when it's even littler.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. If it was in meters, it'd be 1.8.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Hey, you can say "I'm almost two meters tall."
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, exactly. That sounds big. Because a meter is big.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** What's it in miles? Hey Siri, what's 5'11 inches in miles? \[laughter\]
+
+**Matt Toback:** How many meters per hour are you?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Let's see what she can find on the web.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** She's not listening.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** I'm 0.001121 miles tall. Get used to it, baby! \[laughter\] That does sound tall there, doesn't it?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, it does. It sounds nice.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** There's lots of numbers in it as well. Very precise.
+
+**Matt Toback:** Do you use miles in the U.K. though?
+
+**Mat Ryer:** We do, yeah.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** Yeah, yeah.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** That's how we get places.
+
+**Matt Toback:** I thought you used kilometers.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** No, kilometers on the continent. Miles in the U.K.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's too confusing.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** We use a mix of imperial and metric because we're stuck halfway between the two.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Matt Toback:** Are there fancy coffee shops in the U.K. now? Or is everything still a fancy tea shop? \[laughter\]
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** I don't know where to start with this... I think we had coffee before you did, Matt. \[laughter\]
+
+**Matt Toback:** Oh.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Well, we invented America, didn't we?
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** Yeah. I think my house is older than your country. \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Zing...
+
+**Matt Toback:** With doorknobs falling off...
+
+**Mat Ryer:** That's why it's got glass doorknobs.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** So maybe we'll edit that bit out, because I expect some of our audience might be American. \[laughter\]
+
+**Matt Toback:** "Didn't we make you...?!"
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Or some of your co-panelists might be American...
+
+**Mat Ryer:** \[11:54\] We'll get letters, Tom, assuming they can write... \[laughter\] You can cut that one out as well.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** No, it's all staying in. No one is gonna listen to your guys' podcast.
+
+**Matt Toback:** This is backstage.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** Yeah, no one's listening...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** This is somewhat a preview... An unedited preview of Grafana's Big Tent.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** This is the kind of stuff they do on Big Tent, all the time. Well, I would like to know, on a more serious note, but yet still not that serious, how do you guys navigate on Big Tent having two Matts/Mats? It's quite cumbersome, logistically.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** Well, we're never allowed to have both Matts on at the same time. That develops a singularity and it envelops the whole podcast.
+
+**Matt Toback:** That was also in Mat's terms sheet. "Any meeting needs one Mat."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Simple solution, I guess, to a complex problem. I like it.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. It is actually quite awkward, isn't it?
+
+**Matt Toback:** Yeah. Well, I assume they're always talking to you. When they say "Mat, I have a good question", I just assume they're talking to you.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Is that why you just stay quiet and stare at the screen for several seconds before answering?
+
+**Matt Toback:** Yeah, I listen.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Oh, yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Common courtesy.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** He's being polite.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** We edit out the silences.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So you kind of described why a podcast, because you liked Matt's internal podcast, you liked Go Time quite a bit, and you thought this would be fun and interesting to do. But then why Big Tent, why work with us...? How did it all come out? Because there's lots of ways to make a podcast, and there's lots of different podcasts you can make, but you decided to work with us and you decided to make the Big Tent Podcast, which maybe you can also talk about what it's gonna be like.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** Yeah, so I think for me one of the things that makes Grafana Labs quite different is our approach to inclusivity of ideas, almost. We don't think -- you know, I'm one of the Prometheus maintainers, but Grafana Labs doesn't just work on Prometheus. It works on Graphite, it works on... You know, everything, basically. Every time series database out there can be visualized in Grafana. And we call this whole kind of philosophy of not picking favorites, not picking sides, the big tent Philosophy. The idea that -- I think the other way of saying it is like "The rising tide raises all ships." We want everything to work together, and we wanna not pick favorites.
+
+And for us it isn't just about data sources in Grafana. It pervades the company culture. We're always looking for ways to be more compatible, to work better with competing technologies and competing organizations. And what better way to kind of get that message out than a podcast? We actively invite on our friends from other organizations and other companies. It's not just the Grafana Podcast; you're not just gonna hear from people who work at Grafana, about projects they're working on. You're gonna hear from people who don't work at Grafana, but who maybe work with Grafana, or they maybe work in tangential spaces.
+
+**Matt Toback:** I also think it's a reflection of what our (we'll say) users, or even customers are dealing with. They don't have a single solution... So I think just acknowledging that and being able to bring these people on to talk about it I think is closer to the way that they're thinking about it and the problems that they're trying to solve. So to us, it just kind of feels easy, because we get to go and highlight different people. And if someone's doing something new and cool, in the same way that we would share it with the user or customer, like "Let's bring it on and let's talk about it. Let's figure out how it fits together", and then we could ask the questions that maybe some people are thinking... Or these dumb questions that we're thinking.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, and working with Changelog - that's you, people...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's us.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** I could say "working with you..."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Thank you. Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Either way.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. You know, when you look at the family of podcasts that you get from Changelog, and the quality of it... This was always the thing that struck me - with the transcripts, the little preview clips that go out on Twitter, the editing quality... In fact, we did a recent episode of Go Time with Ed Welch, who's actually from Grafana. And he was kind of really worried after that we'd just not produced anything; that we just had a conversation. He felt like there was a lot of stopping and starting, and he felt like there were big gaps, and he was a bit worried about that. And then he today told me he listened to the polished episode and it's amazing.
+
+\[16:23\] Honestly, that editing, cutting things down to the -- distilling it down to the bare essentials, that process, whatever goes on... You know, we don't talk over each other on the podcast; I mean, you do when you're recording it, because in real life you do. But it all gets sorted out for you in the edit. And I think the listening experience that that delivers is just really high, and it means you can listen to it on two times speed, which some people do... And I think that would be difficult if there was a lot more talking over each other, and things like that. So I think the quality was a big pull for doing it with you.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** I also hope it compliments your other podcasts. I listen to Go Time, I listen to Changelog, and I just think what we're trying to do with Big Tent is similar, but different. Complementary. And so I'm hoping that it fits with the catalog.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's why we felt good also about working with you all, because this is obviously not something we do every day for many different brands. I think we have a desire to do it in smaller swathes, not "Let's produce every possible Grafana-like brand's podcast for them." That's not really our desire at all. But we felt so strong about who you all are, and your beliefs in this big tent philosophy.
+
+We had Raj on Founders Talk a little while back, I got to know the deeper innards of the long history of his entrepreneurship journey, from the Vox Mafia to Grafana, the whole entire journey. And I really gained a great respect for that direction.
+
+And then also just getting the chance to help produce a good observability podcast out there. That's another thing I think you can answer - is there a gap/desire to be filled in the observability landscape with this podcast? It may not be a weekly show like traditional shows, or every two weeks, seasonal... But is there a gap there that is aimed to be filled?
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** I hope so. That's why we're doing it. You've heard the four, maybe five recordings... What do you think so far?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Amazing. When I listen to it, it's almost like what Mat Ryer just said... Because I can imagine -- I've been involved in many podcasts, and the process, because this journey has been long... It's not that it's been difficult by any means, but it's sometimes hard to see the fruit that will come out of a process. So when I first heard the very first episode, and the music, and the end, and the personalities, and all the details that come together from a beautifully produced podcast... Like, for me that's my passion, but it was like "Wow. This is an amazing show, and the community is gonna love this show." The music, and everything just comes together so perfectly. And I've gotta say, when I heard the very first episode, I was on cloud nine. I was super-giddy the rest of the day. It was a good day for me. I was like "This show is gonna rock."
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** I still haven't heard it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You still haven't heard it.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** Yeah, I wanna listen to it.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** We should play it now, and just listen to it, and then we can react.
+
+**Matt Toback:** Oh, like Mystery Science Theater?
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, exactly.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, just like a 45-minute break, and then we all come back and keep going.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, yeah. Just leave the gap in though. Actually - yeah, if you can leave the empty space, so that the listener can also go and listen in real time... That'd be good.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** In real time? \[laughs\]
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, yeah. Tom and I are -- you may have noticed... We're British. We're not very used to being --
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** Well, speak for yourself.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Oh, sorry. What are you? Which are you, mate?
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** I identify as European, actually.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, okay. That's nice.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I can't tell if he's joking. You just don't know.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** We're not very good at being nice to each other. So this has been a lot of us all being nice. Can we just have two minutes of hate?
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** \[20:14\] We're quite good friends in real life. We hang out outside of work, and everything... But yeah, the constant bickering might come across wrong.
+
+**Matt Toback:** It feels like an unfair advantage, particularly getting to record with you guys. You get to hang out, you get to go to the pub, have a relationship... I don't think this is gonna work.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah... A real connection, Mat, is what you're saying. Real meeting. IRL.
+
+**Matt Toback:** Real meeting. Tom knows the answer, or knew the answer as to how tall Mat was.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's true.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You were saying, Mat Ryer...? What were you saying? British...
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Yes, British... I was saying --
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Were you bragging?
+
+**Mat Ryer:** No, no, no.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I don't understand what the point is.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** Yeah, where were you going with this, Mat?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** We know you're British, guys.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, I was just gonna say - we aren't very good at being nice to each other, and we've all just spent ages being nice to each other. So could we now just have two minutes of hate to counter-balance it?
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** He's not really 5'10.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Yeah.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** 5'10 around...
+
+**Matt Toback:** I vote no. No vote.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** We can't all be winners... The other good thing about the editing that Changelog does is if you do have an idea and you take a little risk, and it doesn't pay off just then...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\]
+
+**Mat Ryer:** ...hopefully it'll get cut out.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** Yeah, but we're keeping that bit in for sure, right?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Or it gets left in and we just point the finger at you.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, first of all, Backstage is not edited, like our other shows.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** Uh-oh...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And that one's staying in for sure. And secondly, anytime Mat mentions the edit or the editor, our policy internally at Changelog is to leave it in. Because we'll make literally anybody else sound good on our shows except for Mat Ryer, because he constantly is asking to sound better. And it's just -- life is too short to take commands from a Brit who's over there just telling us what to do. We're not even in the room and he's giving us instructions. I mean... How presumptuous.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** He's too likable in real life, we need to take him down a peg.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Exactly.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** I'll tell you what though, Jerod... In the last episode of Go Time I just on-the-fly made up a segment, and --
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's true.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** ...in the edit it got its own little theme tune, which was brilliant...
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** \[laughs\]
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, seriously. And it was a whole little proper thing.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** What was the segment, Mat?
+
+**Mat Ryer:** It was Quiz Time...! \[laughs\] We could do it now. It's Quiz Time!
+
+**Jingle:** \[22:30\] to \[22:49\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I couldn't help myself; I have fun with that kind of stuff... And whenever you make up something ridiculous, I think "Well, let's just lean into this thing. Why not?" This is the kind of stuff that we like to do; make every episode have something that's different or special, or just like that little extra something where you don't know exactly what to expect. Sometimes we put Easter eggs in at the end, or ridiculous things, and try to keep people on their toes. Because the conversations are good, but if you can sprinkle in something extra in the post-production, it just shows that we really do care. And I love when people do that with their podcasts. I think it's so neat. So yeah, if you make up something on the spot, I'm gonna try to riff on it and see if I can make it even better.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, it's that "Yes, and..." attitude, which is great. And you can take risks too, which enables that. I love it, yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Well, we do appreciate y'all working with us, honestly. We've wanted to do this for a while, we've wanted to produce a brand's podcast, and help something like this come to life. Because I think given our journey to here, you can probably appreciate all the hurdles in front of producing a podcast. You can get the people together, you can give them good mics and give them things to say, but that's not a podcast. There's a lot more to it than that. And there's a lot of hurdles in front of producing a well-formed, well-produced podcast. I'm not saying it's impossible, by any means, but you really have to want it to get there. And I think we all came together in the right way to make this show possible.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** \[24:23\] Yeah. All warm and fuzzy.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So hopefully it doesn't suck. \[laughter\]
+
+**Matt Toback:** So now we've recorded five episodes, right?
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** The sixth is being recorded on Wednesday, yeah.
+
+**Matt Toback:** And then you've recorded how many, Adam and Jerod, in your lifetime? Hundreds, thousands?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Thousands...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah.
+
+**Matt Toback:** So what would you tell us as newborns?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Don't stop.
+
+**Matt Toback:** What do we do for the next little bit?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Have fun, don't stop, keep going, dig in... Get in the trenches...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. Diverse voices... Obviously, you have the core, but it is a big tent, so go out of your way to invite people in that you normally might not, or you don't know personally... And have that diverse voices. I think it's so enjoyable and necessary. Consistency, community, and...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Quality content.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's the three C's.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** Can we use this as an opportunity to invite people?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Sure.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** If anyone wants to be on Grafana's Big Tent, get in touch with mat@grafana...
+
+**Matt Toback:** Anyone?
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** Not anyone. Anyone that thinks they should be. \[laughter\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** "Literally, we'll take anybody."
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** What's your public email address, Mat?
+
+**Matt Toback:** Who, me?
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** Either one.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Which Matt?
+
+**Matt Toback:** Why do I get to be the --
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Just email matt@grafana.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** I don't want the spam.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Either one t or two t's. It should land at the right place.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** No, I get too much from recruiters. I've got recruiters filling my inbox.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, do you have a bigtent@grafana.com email address? Because that's what you could do. That's easy.
+
+**Matt Toback:** Oh, that's a good idea.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** If we don't, we'll have one by the time this podcast goes out.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, I think that's a really smart idea, because then you can tell anybody "Hey, if you've got questions, if you've got ideas, if you've got negative feedback, we wanna hear it."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** For sure.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I personally welcome negative feedback. It's such a humbling thing, one, to accept it... Which is not very humble, to accept it. But then two, to evolve because of it. So I would recommend that.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** That hat looks ridiculous, mate.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Thank you.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** \[laughs\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Does he have to evolve on the spot? Are you expecting him to just take the hat off immediately?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I have another over there... Should I put it on?
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, just quickly build it imagine that
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's my evolution, is just swap the hat. How about this hat, Mat? \[laughter\]
+
+**Matt Toback:** Wow, he meant that.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** No, I love that hat, really.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And I would say bigtent@grafana.com would be a good email... Because you can all share the inbox, too. If the team grows, then obviously it grows, people can manage the inbox and whatnot, but... Everybody has actually email, not a form on the internet... So there you go. But formalize that kind of stuff, like "Hey, reach out." Put the invitation out there.
+
+That's one thing we say here, is like -- we have had a community for a while, we have a community Slack, and we say "No matter where you're at on your hacker journey, you're welcome here. Come hang your hat here, it's free. Be a part of this community. You're welcome here." No matter where you're at; whether you're as smart, or not as smart.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Any hats are welcome.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right. White hats, black hats...
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** Oh, you know what? I've already created bigtent@grafana.com in November.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Look at that. See?
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** Yeah, look at that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Wow.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** I've used it, actually. I remember that.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You're already that smart, Tom.
+
+**Matt Toback:** Is there any feedback in there?
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** There is nothing in there. I think even I'd forgotten it existed.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** You're gonna get recruiters filling that up now... \[laughter\]
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** Yup.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Or PR people. That's usually what you get if your podcast is --
+
+**Matt Toback:** Or tent companies.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, imagine that... \[laughter\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Are they buying or selling? I mean, you have a big tent. Do you need more?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm gonna need a big tent from Grafana over here... We've got a ceremony happening...
+
+**Matt Toback:** Do you guys deliver?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's gotta be a big tent, okay...? We need a philosophy around this thing; it's gotta be a big tent.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** \[27:59\] One of the jokes we were gonna have on this was that we were gonna send everyone that appears one of those little tents that you get in the tent shops. Because the tent shops can't have the big tent, because it's too big, and the shop would be too big, so they make little model tents.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Are there tent shops, like all they sell is tents?
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** Yeah, sure.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Tom, I know exactly what you're talking about. I was recently in -- we have a store here called Academy, and it's like our sporting goods store, basically... And we were in there, and they have camping tents, and they're miniature...
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** Little mini models.
+
+**Matt Toback:** They're cute little tents.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** They're tiny, but they're legit tents. And I was like, "I can't believe this." First time I saw this, it was like two weeks ago. And I couldn't believe it.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** But I can't find a place to buy them.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, you need to know somebody on the in of those companies, and be like "Hey, can I buy one of these mini-tents?" They should really sell them. They're missing out on the opportunity, honestly.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** So if anyone listening to this podcast will send me a mini model tent...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Or maybe you have a nice pivot for Grafana. You could sell the tents.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. A side business.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** A little side business. I mean, if there's a need in the market, which there clearly is a need...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That could be at least 2% of your revenue.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** At least. Venture capitals would love that. Your next round could depend on these tents.
+
+**Matt Toback:** Playing a tent heist.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Tent heist now...? I thought you said you were gonna plant a tent hiest. I thought you were actually proposing to plant some tents. Because they'll start small, and then grow from there.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Matt Toback is suggesting we go to the store and steal the tents. Is that what you're saying, a tent heist?
+
+**Matt Toback:** No, I'm saying a heist.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** Get it unrecorded so no one knows it's us.
+
+**Matt Toback:** When you steal something, it is low-class. When you plan a heist, it is world-class. That's the difference. \[laughter\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I like it. Everything we wanna do is world-class around here.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** Yeah. We're gonna do it Ocean's Eleven style, right?
+
+**Matt Toback:** Yeah, exactly.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Matt Toback has been arrested because he planned a heist to steal mini tents from a sporting goods store. \[laughter\] What?!
+
+**Matt Toback:** Bit tent controversy... \[laughter\]
+
+**Mat Ryer:** I thought he was talking about he was gonna steal from a tent. Because I think that would be easier than stealing from a shop that's made out of bricks and wood and that.
+
+**Matt Toback:** \[laughs\] You just go and lift up the bottom of the...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Flap up the cover, yeah.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** I think that's where shoplifting came from, the term. We call it shoplifting, and I do think it comes from there.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** It's like moving house, right?
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. \[laughs\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's tentlifting, obviously.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Another idea - we could get just a normal-sized tend and just have it far away. If we can't find any little ones...
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** Put it in the wash, on a hot wash?
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, would it work in the wash?
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** If it's a woolen tent, it would.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Oh, those classic wool tents...
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** Yeah. \[laughs\] They're good in the winter.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, we can't let you guys leave without explaining and describing the Big Tent in excruciating detail. So what does this tent look like? In excruciating detail, please.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** I think it's a circus tent. I think it's that kind of big tent. And it's full of clowns.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's a three-ring circus...
+
+**Matt Toback:** Full of clouds?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** There are three of you.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** Clowns!
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, you don't need a big tent for clowns.
+
+**Matt Toback:** Same, same.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Because they can all just squeeze in.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Is it a magical tent, Tom?
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** Oh, what was that TV program with the tent that's bigger on the inside than the outside?
+
+**Mat Ryer:** There is in Harry Potter one of those...
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** Oh, was it in Harry Potter? Okay, there we go. That'll do.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** I was also thinking Dr. Who as well.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** Well, not a tent thought.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** No, this is not a tent.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You're painting the opposite picture though, Tom, because the tent, at least for the artwork's sake - which I think is amazing, by the way. Erik did a great job... It's more of a campfire tent.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Matt Toback:** So I could tell... Erik, who worked on that on our team, I think originally the first design was very circus-tenty. But the shape didn't really work, and then he came back and it was more of a camping tent. And it was like "Oh, it's right", and we kind of talked about the proportions... And his idea was that it was kind of somewhat of like a journey also, in that wherever you're going, you can provide shelter. And it wasn't a spectacle, it was this place for lots of people to commune while you're going somewhere. And I was like, "Oh! You got me!"
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. Which was a good idea. And then he had the campfire stories thing going, and you're outside the tent...
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** This is why he's good at what he does.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Tom's like, "It's a bunch of clowns!" \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[32:03\] That ain't gonna work. Erik's like "Scratch that idea. Here's a campfire tent, Tom..."
+
+**Matt Toback:** That's a great first idea, Tom. \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** "Let's iterate on that."
+
+**Mat Ryer:** But if we do ever do a live version of this - which we will do, probably, at some point - are we gonna be clowned up? Like, one of us could be a sad clown...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We could say yes, Mat, and then everybody else say no at the last minute, and you never get the memo, so you show up as the clown.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yes, but...
+
+**Matt Toback:** Yes, and...
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** Yes, and only you should do it.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** I'll do it. I won't check. If we agree to do it now, I won't check back in. I will just turn up in full clown garb.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** So you mentioned the live episode we're gonna record... What episode are you most looking forward to?
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Mine probably is the live one. If we can do one -- we may have the whole company together, circumstances permitting, at one point... And in a big room, and doing a podcast. We've done some with Go Time at conferences, and the energy and the atmosphere is...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's fun.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** It's amazing, yeah. And it does add, obviously, because it's live and there's actual humans there... You know, when you're doing the podcast, it's just like you're doing a Zoom call, really. It's quite intimate and private. But when you do it in front of real people, you really do see that everyone's there, they're looking at you and listening.
+
+**Matt Toback:** Hundreds of people, which is kind of crazy. It'll be a large room.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. Big tent.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So you're planning maybe a company gathering sometime soon, or that's the hope, is you can do it live at a company gathering?
+
+**Matt Toback:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That'd be cool.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That'd be cool.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** GrafanaFest is the name of the company gathering.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Ooh...!
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Nice.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** And it's gonna be in a big tent, isn't it? A big marquee.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** On-brand.
+
+**Matt Toback:** And Mat, we're gonna do the team song live, is that right?
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, I'll tell you what - I want to. I want to just get that, yeah. Just get everyone that can play bass, get them on stage... And just turn it up to a foul. Turn it all up to eleven and crack it out.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** Yeah. Sam plays bass, doesn't she? I think...
+
+**Matt Toback:** Yeah. And drums.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** And Mick probably plays guitar... He's got guitars in his background.
+
+**Matt Toback:** He does. He was in a touring band.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Yeah.
+
+**Matt Toback:** He has a Wikipedia page about him.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** Really?
+
+**Matt Toback:** He does.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** I did not know that.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, he's got proper -- I've heard his music. We can put it in the show notes.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** I'm googling him now.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, Jerod and I are on IMDb. We've just found this out recently. Jerod and I are famous.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** We are. We're on IMDb.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Oh, yeah? What film was it? One of the Marvel ones...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** The Changelog...?
+
+**Mat Ryer:** \[laughs\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. I don't know if they added podcasts, or what happened...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Podcasts on IMDb, and hosts of podcasts on IMDb. So I was like, "Okay..." Christopher Hiller (b0neskull) found that out for us. He's like, "I didn't know..." It was Chris, right?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, it was Chris.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Or was it Kevin Ball?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** No, it was Chris. He's like, "Hey, you're on IMDb." I'm like, "First of all, how did you find that out?"
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And secondly, "How do I get a cool picture of me put up there?" Because right now it's just that shadow face...
+
+**Matt Toback:** Oh... Are you gonna do it with like proper headshots?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I think we should probably do headshots... You know, like glamour shots at the local mall. \[laughter\]
+
+**Matt Toback:** Feathered, lasers in the background...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I think whatever David Hasselhoff would do, that's what I would probably do.
+
+**Matt Toback:** Yeah. WWDHD.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, that'd be cool.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, pretty much. It's gonna be in HD. Is that what you said?
+
+**Matt Toback:** WWDHD.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, I thought you said "You should do it in HD."
+
+**Mat Ryer:** No, I think you should do it low-res.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Which I immediately agreed with.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's a great idea, Matt. It's a great idea.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** I think low-res would be good.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Speaking of music though... So let's come back to this music. This is something I didn't expect as part of the process. Normally, for our podcasts, we work exclusively - and I guess, in your case, Mat, with Go Time, there's been a lot of crossover there, where it hasn't been solely Breakmaster Cylinder doing the production and the...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Mat even did a few jingles for JS Party.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[35:51\] Precisely, yeah. And I was not surprised, but very happy with the outcome. There was a Beatles song I believe Jerod, wasn't there? That this was kind of framed after. There was a certain idea for the way the track would come in, but Mat Ryer, you're the one who produced this music track.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, I like doing it. I used to be in bands, and stuff... Basically, a failed pop star, so I have to do --
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Do you have a MySpace?
+
+**Mat Ryer:** No, but I am on IMDb, because of Go Time. \[laughter\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Nice.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Touché.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** So I love doing it, and I said -- when we were discussing the idea, of course, people were saying "Oh, these are ideas for the music, and we'll get a proper person to do the music, and things..." And you know, some days you're just feeling confident. I must have been having one of those days, and I said "Well, I'd like to have a go at making something, and see what happens." And people were like, "Um, okay, sure... Yeah, you do that..." Which was really nice.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** People like Jerod and I, or who are these people you're speaking of?
+
+**Matt Toback:** Oh, I mean, I was in that first meeting that we had, and you were like Breakmaster Similar...Break-- Breakmaster Similar - we know what we'll call Mat.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** That's my name, yeah. \[laughter\] That's a tribute act to him.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** The tribute band. Very similar, but not the same.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Yeah.
+
+**Matt Toback:** But I was psyched, and I was like -- just a little fanboying. I was like, "That's cool. I never thought that my world would intersect with theirs." And then Mat's like, "I'll do it", and I was like, "Shut the f\*\*\* up, Mat!" \[laughter\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Tell us how you really feel, Mat...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Geez, Mat...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** "YOU WILL NOT DO ANYTHING!"
+
+**Matt Toback:** And then it felt like 45 minutes later Mat sent over the first version, and I was like, "This is awesome!" And it was pretty much all there at the beginning. And then there was little modifications and tweaks, but it came out kind of fully formed, and I was psyched. And I'm psyched every time I hear it now, so...
+
+**Jingle:** \[37:56\] to \[38:21\]
+
+**Mat Ryer:** I solicited claps for it on the internal Slack. I just said, in a random channel, "Who here--" And who hasn't, if we're honest...?
+
+**Matt Toback:** "Who here can clap?" \[laughs\]
+
+**Mat Ryer:** ...wants to contribute a clap?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** "Who has both hands?"
+
+**Mat Ryer:** "If you ever dreamed of having a clap on a song..." That's my opening line.
+
+**Matt Toback:** Dar to dream.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** "Because if so, I've got a proposition for you."
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. "Send me your claps." And people did, and I got loads of people who were just clapping... Some of them were terrible, which was amazing.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** How can you possibly be bad at clapping?
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Well, you know, if it's just too close -- somebody must have been in a church, because the amount of reverb on one of them was just phenomenal. It was like 12 seconds of reverb.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Do you wanna name names? Anybody in particular who's bad at clapping that you wanna call out?
+
+**Mat Ryer:** No, I don't want to do that.
+
+**Matt Toback:** Yeah, don't clap-shame.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, don't clap-shame. But I put them in a -- I just popped them all in a folder, and then shuffled them up. Because I didn't need all the ones I got. And then I picked a few randomly, so I don't even know whose they are. There's like an element of "Your clap could be in that song", as far as anyone knows
+
+**Matt Toback:** Would you recognize your own clap, if you heard it?
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Good question. Really good question. "Would you recognize your own clap...?"
+
+**Matt Toback:** These are the kind of questions that you'll hear on Big Tent. \[laughter\] These are the thoughts we ponder.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** We'll get to the bottom of it once and for all.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** This is the kind of high-quality content you can expect!
+
+**Mat Ryer:** \[39:53\] But that song - it did come out fully-formed, and that's how it happens. It's like, I need like a reason to do it, and then there's like a bit of pressure to do it, and then it'll happen. It either happens, or it's just nothing. It's one of those things - it's not like I know what I'm doing, so I can't think melodically or think methodically and sit down and write it and do it properly, using science and computer music theory and all that stuff. It's just, if it sounds good, it happens and we're like "Okay, yeah." And I have to check that it's original as well, so I have to play it to some people and be like "Is this a thing already and I've just copied it?"
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, so Adam had mentioned the Beatles song... So from our perspective, I was talking with Mat, and I had my idea of what I thought the music could be, and what I was gonna tell Breakmaster Cylinder - not Similar, but the real one - was I was gonna say "How about a glitched out homage to the Mr. Kites song off of Sgt. Peppers. I don't know the whole name of the song; it's longer than that. But it's Mr. Kite.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** "Being for the benefit of Mr. Kite."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, "Being for the benefit of Mr. Kite", which is like -- it's a very interesting song. That whole album has craziness going on. I like it quite a bit. And I told you that, Mat, and you were like, "Actually, I was just listening to that earlier today, or thinking about it as well", so we were at least on similar wavelengths with that. It has a circus feel to that song. It's about a show... So that was what I was gonna go with. But I loved the fact that you made the song for the show that is your guys' show. How cool is that? It's 100% homebrewed in that sense. It doesn't get any better.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** And every time you play it, the guest, or whoever we're with, everyone starts bouncing along. It's got a very kind of bouncy vibe to it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. And the claps are very necessary, too. It's the beat. It essentially replaces the snare. Or maybe there is a snare in addition to claps. But it's the snare part of the beat.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, it is.
+
+**Matt Toback:** I'm gonna be so disappointed when I find this on some sort of audio thing that you can buy, and Mat has just spent the last couple months --
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Audio Jungle?
+
+**Matt Toback:** Yeah... Telling us "It just poured out of me. It was just -- I channeled the Universe and it just felt exactly how it needed to be. And I played all instruments at once." \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right at the end though there is a little weird sound I hear... It's like, "By Audioriver." Something like that. \[laughter\]
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Like a watermark. We faded out before that bit.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, you faded right before the watermark.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, right at the end there. I wasn't sure...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I thought you were gonna say you're gonna find it on Audio Jungle because Mat's out there trying to sell it royalty-free... You know, just to get some extra side cash with this. I mean, he put all the work in...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What he's saying is it's so good that it could be a royalty-free song.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right. Well, that makes me think about you guys' live show, and how you could have everybody clapping. Like, the whole company clapping along as you--
+
+**Matt Toback:** Well, we already know that might not work so well...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, you'll have to ask a few people... Pull them aside and say, "Honestly if you could just -- we'd rather have you not, but..."
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Not passed the audition.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, if you sell tickets, you could say "If your ticket has this color on your ticket or badge, you must clap."
+
+**Matt Toback:** You're on the one and three.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And you'll sprinkle those folks throughout the crowd. So they're contractually obligated, otherwise they might get let go.
+
+**Matt Toback:** Yeah. It was in your terms sheet, Mat...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's right. \[laughter\]
+
+**Matt Toback:** It was a very long set of demands that are now coming to fruition.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** It looked weird at the time, but I'm glad I put it in there.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's more like a writer than a terms sheet.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** This is the mistake of having a terms sheet in Google Docs, that you can just edit anytime... \[laughter\] You just go and sneak some extra bits in there...
+
+**Matt Toback:** This is a question for us - should we have people find someone that's like an arms' length contributor to open source projects, as opposed to just the companies, the people that are doing it? Like, the random person that we don't even know, and say like "How did you start contributing to open source?" You guys must have done episodes on that, Adam and Jerod... Or no?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, sure. We have.
+
+**Matt Toback:** Is it interesting?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[43:55\] I mean, a lot of times it's people who end up being maintainers of projects. Now, we've done obscure projects where the person is therefore still not like a name in the industry, and asked them how they got into it... We had a series called Maintainer Spotlight, which is really like the life stories of maintainers. Really interesting stuff, especially I think even just users of open source software or observability tooling, and how they're solving their problems and what problems they have. Almost like you would have a conversation with somebody at a conference; really interesting things can come out of those, because they're like real-world, rubber hits the road situations that they can share, that you're not gonna get from like the library maintainers, or the people working for large companies, or whatever. The typical people you hear from.
+
+**Matt Toback:** Even at large companies, that wanna -- this is something I hope we can do an episode on, but... When we're talking to customers, potentials, that are Grafana users, they're like "How do people do this? What happened? Tell us the recipe." And really, more often than not - Tom, Mat, keep me honest, but the person who did it just did it, and just started doing it, and just created the thing, and then it gained some momentum. So when someone's like, "Well, how can I do this?", we're like, "Well, maybe you're not the right person to do it..." No. \[laughter\] But it does feel similar to that open source ethos. You just kind of go. You create value, and people start attaching to it.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, there's something about solving your own problem that's important with that...
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** The best open source is scratching your own itch, right? The skills to teach other people how to do it, and how to do it yourself, I've seldom found in the same person. I think it's more your point, Matt... I find it quite easy to scratch my own itch, but to teach someone else - that sounds really weird now. I'm not gonna continue that line of thought... Teach someone else to scratch it? Yeah, hm... \[laughter\]
+
+**Matt Toback:** I wanna do that episode, too. Tom teaches to scratch.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. Just turn your video off first.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's like nerdy podcasts versus dirty podcasts. You just can't do that, okay?
+
+**Matt Toback:** They're so close, but oh so different.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Save it for Backstage, and late.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, I get that - to be able to solve your problem is what you're saying. So you know how to solve your own problem, but to teach somebody else how to solve their own problems is challenging.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** Yeah. Or a different set of skills that honesty I'm not sure exist in the same people often.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I think it starts with being your own scientist though. If you can have a sense of awareness about the pain you're feeling, why you're feeling it, what an application is missing - that's some of the beginnings of solving our problems. It's like, just scraping up data.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right. I think listening to others and the way they've gone about things, even if it doesn't apply to you, that's one way I learned a lot in my career, through podcasts. I'm a podcast junkie, I listen to them, and I love to just listen and hear the way people do things, because it just broadens my potential possibilities when I have a problem. It's like, "You know what - I heard about somebody that did this thing..." And sometimes you can't even remember where it came from, but through osmosis you've been exposed to all these different ways of going about, all these different tools and perspectives, and then you can draw upon those when you need them... Wither consciously, and be like "I remember on this episode I learned this thing", or you're like "I can't remember why I know this, but I do."
+
+So I think the value of sharing those things, even if it's like a very specific problem that was solved, is gold. You just kind of accumulate it over time, for it to be worth something.
+
+**Matt Toback:** Even sometimes - as silly as it sounds - it's about just permission. You listen and you're like, "Oh, I can do that?" Or whatever my version is.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** Yeah. "Didn't know that was possible."
+
+**Matt Toback:** Yeah, "I didn't know that it was possible." Like, "That's allowed?" Like, "Yeah, nobody said no. They said thank you." And you're like, "Wow! Alright."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Especially if it's somebody that you respect, or that you look up to a little bit, and you're like, "Okay, that's the way they think about this." It really does give you permission to think outside the box, or try something a little more daring, or it gives you a little more courage when somebody else has gone in front of you and done the same thing.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** \[48:03\] Yeah, that's especially true if there's already something out there that's solving a similar problem. It's very easy to think, "Oh, what's the point? This has been out there for years..." But very often, a fresh approach, and from scratch - you have a lot of advantages over well-established projects. So it is worth doing.
+
+I think you're right, people need permission. Everyone should do it. Just do your thing, and talk about it, and do meetups, and write blogs about it, and tweet about it, go on Instagram, go on TikTok, do a podcast, go on IMDb... You never know, you might end up on IMDb.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Just get yourself on IMDb, yeah. You have permission.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Matt Toback, can I just say - if someone says something funny, and you've got like a quiet laugh...
+
+**Matt Toback:** I know... I knew, I knew it, I knew it... Because you said something funny and I didn't laugh, and then you gave me that look across the -- I saw it. I saw the daggers, and you're like --
+
+**Mat Ryer:** You do laugh, but it's silent laughing. It's like, "Come on, mate..."
+
+**Matt Toback:** I laugh inside my heart.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Someone tickle him.
+
+**Matt Toback:** You laugh at the audience, I laugh for me.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** You know, there's the Wilhelm Scream. Is there the Wilhelm Laugh, that we can just substitute in whenever Matt silent-laughs?
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, the Toback... That's a good idea.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Or maybe you could give Matt a button that he pushes anytime something's funny. So the button will make the sound for him.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** He can fake-laugh visually.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Actually, I could make that myself just by -- there must be a clip on one of the recordings, of Matt laughing. I can have that and --
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** You sub it in.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Probably. Or you could go to all your companions at Grafana and collect laughs, and then do your anonymous munging and create a collective Matt replacement laugh.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** That's a great idea. \[laughs\]
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** The surrogate Matt laugh, yeah.
+
+**Matt Toback:** Can we put it through a processor and figure out who are -- kind of like unstable? Because laughs, I feel like, tell a lot... Because if someone has a --
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Outlier detector.
+
+**Matt Toback:** Yeah. A laugh detector, a lie detector... You know, like a stability detector...
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You're going too far, Matt.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, that's a bit far.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You're going too far. Rein it in.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Way too far.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Rein it in.
+
+**Matt Toback:** These are the kind of questions you could expect to hear on Grafana's Big Tent. \[laughter\]
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Originally, we were thinking of doing -- when I wasn't involved, it was just gonna be Toback and the Wilk... \[laughter\] I really wanted to make the podcast for that one. "It's Toback and the Wilk..." You know, you could imagine it.
+
+**Matt Toback:** The morning show... \[laughs\]
+
+**Mat Ryer:** "I'm Toback." "And I'm the Wilk!" You know, loads of wacky, zany sound effects, and stuff.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, before I knew Tom was involved, I thought it was gonna be "Matt and Mat in the morning!" \[laughter\] You guys could be a morning show on AM radio.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. I'd love that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Except for you're in different timezones, so syncing up on that would be tough.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Well, while he's saying morning, I'll be saying afternoon. There'll just be that. We should try it now, Matt. Just say "Mat and Matt in the morning." Are you ready?
+
+**Matt Toback:** Good morning!
+
+**Mat Ryer:** No, you have to say "Mat and Matt in the morning."
+
+**Matt Toback:** On three?
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. Ready?
+
+**Matt Toback:** I'm not gonna do this... \[laughter\]
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Three, two, one... Mat and Matt in the --
+
+**Matt Toback:** I'm not gonna do this. \[laughter\]
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Nah, fair play to him.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** He's silent-laughing, for those who can't see. He's silent-laughing right now. Insert laugh track.
+
+**Matt Toback:** It wasn't silent-laughing, I was really laughing!
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, we have one minute, because Matt has a hard stop... Two t's Matt.
+
+**Matt Toback:** I do...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** But any final words, fellas? Check it out, BigTent.fm, obviously... It's in your podcast player, search for Grafana's Big Tent...
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** Do we know when we're putting it live?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It is live.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** By the time this goes out, it's live.
+
+**Matt Toback:** Yeah. Next week, Tom. Well, in the past, when people are listening, in the future to us...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Matt Toback:** But we're here in the present now.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** Oh.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Presently it's not launched... This is part of the launch, so... If you're listening to this, the show is out there, so check it out, BigTent.fm. Man, what a joy it has been producing this with you all. Behind the scenes it's been so much fun, just seeing it all come to fruition... And that's my favorite thing with podcasts. Same thing with Ship It, we've launched that show last year. All the years that went into producing that show, the same here... All the years of your careers, Grafana's journey, but then also the actual journey of producing the actual show... It didn't begin yesterday, it began last year, and it's been a bit of a journey to get here.
+
+\[52:15\] But I'm excited for the listeners to hear this, I'm excited for us to keep producing it, and you all having the fun you have. I think it's fun even being here and -- I feel like I'm behind the scenes of the actual Big Tent, because Jerod and I are just bolted on here; it's the three of you, and other casts of folks that come in and join you... But it's been fun seeing the chemistry behind the scenes as well.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** Thank you. It's been great working with you two as well.
+
+**Matt Toback:** And even just to add a little bit, I think knowing that you had everything on lock from the show perspective, I think it allowed us to figure out who we were going to be and what we were trying to do, as opposed to getting hung up on saying "Oh, what should this be, or that be?" or kind of in the weeds. We didn't have to do that, and we didn't get to do that. Instead, we had to look at each other and go "Oh, what are we gonna create, and who are we gonna have on?" And that felt really, really cool, because it wasn't what I expected.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's awesome.
+
+**Matt Toback:** So yeah, thank you, both.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's been a journey. Thank you for letting us play a role in it. We very much appreciate it. We're obviously big fans. Big fans of the production itself, and where you're going with it, so we appreciate you letting us be part of the journey.
+
+**Tom Wilkie:** Thank you.

Long-time listener, first-time code contributor featuring Simey de Klerk_transcript.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,619 @@
+**Jerod Santo:** So we are backstage with Simey de Klerk. I'm Jerod, and Adam's here as well... What's up, Adam?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What's up, Jerod? What's up, Simey?
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** Hi, guys.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Happy to have you with us, Simey.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** Thanks. I'm really happy to be here. I am a long-time listeners of the Changelog family of podcasts, so this is a special experience for me; pleasure chatting to you guys.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Happy to have you.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You're the one we're always giving shout-outs to on the show, we're like "Hey, if you're a long-time listener..." That's you, Simey.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, there you go.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** There we go.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You're a long-time listener, so thank you.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, you're a long-time listener, and now almost a long-time contributor. We've had some of your code contributing to our transcripts for a while now. It's been up and running, just smooth sailing. We thought we would chat about it, tell the story... I like your story, because you're not even a full-time coder, you're an actuary.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** That's right.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Give us a little bit of your background, and then we'll talk about how you came across this little project that I put up on our GitHub issues.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** Yeah. So like you said, I'm an actuary by day, and a hobby coder by night. My journey with coding and programming - it sort of started through work. My first exposure to coding was probably the unofficial world's biggest programming language i.e. Microsoft Excel...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yes.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** ...which I can tell you that the financial world runs on... And from there, doing an internship while I was studying, I got exposed to a Visual Basic for Applications, or VBA as it's also called... I started tinkering with scripts there, automating some processes... And I lived in that world for a long time. After I finished my studies, I had a general interest in programming; the bug sort of bit me through this exposure to VBA, and I started reading up a bit about programming.
+
+One of the first main ways how I got into it was podcasts, of which the Changelog family was one of the first that I got into; I really enjoyed it. And actually, a lot of how I got momentum came through Changelog. The main way how I learned web development in JavaScript was through FreeCodeCamp, which I'd heard about on the podcast. I went through some of their syllabus.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Awesome.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** And I've since just been tinkering in my free time, learning, building little hobby websites and projects. So now I've been going along, and whenever I meet someone and learn that they work in the trade, I'll sort of follow them and do my best to talk the talk of the industry. At this point, when my wife -- when we're going out with friends and we meet new people and she learns somebody's a programmer, she will just sort of push me that way and say like "Go talk." \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** My wife does something similar... She's like, "Oh, you'll like this husband." It's kind of weird... I almost brought up a Silicon Valley reference, Jerod, but I'm gonna skip that one.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Hold it back.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm not gonna bring it up this time.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Hold it back. So do you have desires to become a software engineer, or are you happy as an actuary with doing this as a hobby? Do you have an endgame?
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** It's a good question. I think if I had to start over now, I likely would have considered software engineering. Where I am now though - I'm happy enough where I am, and I'm trying to work in a combination of the two in my work. So there are some overlaps between actuarial science and data science, so I'm trying to get a bit of like the coding flavor in there, so Python at work, and stuff like that...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I don't know too much about actuaries, but what I do know - and you can correct if this is misinfo - is that they get paid pretty well, and that a lot of their work is calculating risk... And I can see where a data science overlap would be. Is it a good-paying job, and is that basically what you're doing, is for insurance purposes -- or maybe there's other reasons, but figuring out if certain moves are risky or not?
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** Yes.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Or people are risky? I don't know. There's risk involved.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** \[04:02\] That is just about right. We do have a reputation for being well-paid. We don't suffer. I'm not convinced that we are a cut above other professionals nowadays; I'm pretty sure some software engineers and lawyers and private accountants and the like earn similar, if not at times higher salaries. But we are well paid professionals, so that part is true.
+
+In terms of what we do, the sort of business slogan is that we are experts in managing long-term uncertainty and risk. The key application of that is life insurance, and pensions, and the like. There are various subfields in that, but the typical technical one that people think about is projections and calculations, typically around life risks. So forming a view of a person and how long we expect them to live, and if we sell them life insurance, how many premiums do we expect to get before we need to pay the claim, but sort of in a probabilistically-modeled way.
+
+A lot of that, on a practical level, comes down to effectively complex mathematical calculations, which nobody does by hand anymore, everybody does by computers... And so those calculations, on the high-level - there are similarities to the data science world. And a lot of it is interacting with our policy data that lives on systems, and getting those out of the core admin system and somewhere else where you can then perform these calculations on them.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** This is why gathering so much data is so important, right? Because the more data you have, the more you can have in your model, the more easily you can determine that long-term uncertainty, as you mentioned.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** Yes, for sure. Well, it's interesting - that analysis, like I said, has a lot of overlap with machine learning and AI applications. We also spend a lot of time thinking about how the future may or may not be different to the past... Which at the moment, during Covid, is very topical. Maybe I'm underselling Google, but if you think about how their \[unintelligible 00:06:12.26\] algorithms work, is they show people stuff, and if people click on it, it's a hit, and if people don't click on it, it's a miss, and then they just train that to optimize. But the implicit assumption in there is that that system is unknown, but stable. So you it's one stable puzzle that you can figure out, and there's an optimal algorithm to follow for Adam, and then they just find that config, and once they have that, they've got you locked in, and that's that. But something like mortality rates in times at which people tend to pass away - that is not static, and changes over time with medical advances or with pandemics... There's an xkcd which sums this up really well, with a list of experience of previous years with a little star next to 2020, and a little double star next to 2021. And that sort of will be our world, probably for the rest of my career, where you can no longer just take the past and assume the future will be the same, because you now have this anomaly in the middle that you need to allow for \[unintelligible 00:07:16.27\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I don't know what it was, but there was this thing I saw on LinkedIn today, as a matter of fact this morning... It was a satire, or at least comedy at best... And it was some sort of show, and it was talking about -- think of it like SNL, or some sort of skit style comedy. And there was this person conducting class in school - and this is like post-pandemic school. And it was essentially highlighting the PTSD that people have around the pandemic. And the teacher was talking about "What was notable things that happened in 2019?" and the class went around and said different things. He's like "Okay, great. What was notable things that happened in 2022?" And the class went around and was like "This, or that, or whatever." And the one student says "Teacher, what about 2020?" He's like "Get out. Just get out. Go to the principal's office now." It was just like "Just forget 2020 and 2021. That didn't happen. Go with me, class. What is it - 2018, 2019, 2022, 2023..." And that was like the way they were brainwashed. It was meant to be funny, of course, but it was that kind of thing; 2020 and 2021 just totally ravaged all known ways, basically.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** \[08:29\] Yeah. We don't talk about it. I still haven't watched the movie, but I feel like I almost know all the words to this song "We don't talk about Bruno" by this stage, by virtue of my wife playing it to our kids.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We don't talk about Bruno around here, okay? Oh, no, no, no.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So an actuary with coding skills sounds like a great combination in terms of -- like, you have super-powers, you're already in a well-paid field, you can probably be more effective, more productive hopefully, over time, as you can apply those things to your day-to-day work... Maybe you get together with some other actuaries/coders...
+
+I know we were written to by a lawyer who spoke of his coding prowess over the years; he did all this lawyering through Unix utilities. You know, because there's a lot of paper and words slicing and dicing... And he just said all these years he's just been a very productive lawyer because he was able to wield the Linux command line, and sed and awk, and Perl, or whatever, to basically make his job way easier. And he watches his colleagues, and they're just doing tons of things by hand, or still inside of -- I think in your case maybe everyone's still inside of Excel, but maybe you can pull things out of Excel and put them into more capable, more facile programming constructs. Is that something that you're doing in your day-to-day, like you're trying to automate, abstract and code? Or are you just starting to think about that as you go about your work?
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** Very much. Yeah, a lot of what we do, especially in my current role, is -- currently, at least part of my responsibility is financial reporting, which is cyclical in nature, and so we have \[unintelligible 00:10:13.02\] that we need to run every three or six months; so there is this repetitive nature and this clear opportunity to get those processes automated and as streamlined as possible.
+
+For me personally, I've got that sort of hacker/tinkering mentality where I like to spend time to learn the shortcuts in Excel, so that when I'm working there I can work as quickly as possible, or code a little extra shortcut \[unintelligible 00:10:38.25\]which I use, and around the work that I do.
+
+In my team we've got various other processes, and I find there's a kind of mindset there... I've actually encountered this problem earlier in the week where another member of my team - we get an extract of information from a system provider in one format, but now we need to provide it to another part of the company in a different format, and they wanted us to do that by re-typing it into an MS Forms form. And I feel like there's a mindset there to say like "No, that is not the answer. It's 2022, they must be a better way."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Like, "No, I'm not doing it." \[laughs\]
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** And yeah, I feel like that is part of something I think I bring to the table, just having that mindset, and an understanding of what computers can do... Which more or less should be possible, even if I can't do it myself, to say "Well, what should a good solution to this kind of problem look like, and how should we piece things together so that the flow works and we don't have unnecessary manual steps", because they are a) no fun, and b) just begging for problems and typos and the like.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[11:54\] Well, when it comes to automation, I'm also a fan... And when it comes to manual things that I don't want to do, or would be nice to have done, but we're not going to do them because there has to be a better way, I'm also a big fan... And it turns out we have such tasks around our episode transcripts.
+
+Now, back in October of 2020 I opened an issue on our transcripts repo called "A GitHub Action to auto-improve transcripts." And I labeled it "enhancement" and I labeled it "help wanted". Because while I thought this would be cool, it hadn't quite percolated to the point where I was actually going to write this, because there's other code that needs writing more than this needed writing. But I thought this was like a nice, small, encapsulated, easy for me to spec feature that I would love to exist. And I just kind of put that out there on the repo, and it sat dormant for a while. And I thought eventually I would just do it myself; that's kind of where it was. Like, "Note to self, but I'll put it on an open issue, and throw the 'help wanted' on there and see what happens." And then you came along. Do you wanna tell how did you find this issue? I think it was Hacktoberfest or something, but...
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** It was.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** How did you find it, what was intriguing to you, why you decided "I'm gonna dedicate hours of my life to writing this code that runs on somebody else's transcripts." Tell us that story.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** So as I mentioned, everything in life that I learned and know about code, I learned through Changelog, so... I think it was about 3-4 years ago you guys did a show about Hacktoberfest, and I learned about it. At that point I checked it out... I think the first year, back when I'd known some coding, but I was only just at the first job, I basically learned Git through Hacktoberfest, and then the following year I played along as well... It was before the spammy phase that I think was 2020, in Hacktoberfest, so there were still friendly repos so you could just commit your name, and things like that... So that year I did 2-3 of those, and I fixed some unintelligibles... I actually can't say that word; I'm so proud of myself for not fumbling it there.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That was nice. You landed it.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** I'm not gonna say it again for the rest of the podcast. So I fixed some of those...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What's funny is when we say unintelligible on an episode that's gonna be transcribed, we might be going into some sort of recursive state...
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** Oh, wow.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** ...where it's actually a proper uninitelligible. I don't know, I don't wanna say it too many times; it might break the repo.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** Well, the proper ones have square brackets around them, right?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's right. So you know very well the formatting of our transcripts. So for the audience's sake, our transcripts are written in Markdown format, they have some specific aspects to them. They are written by a human, his name is Alexandru, and he's probably just heard me say that, because he's gonna transcribe this eventually... And he has special software that helps him type real fast - I'm not sure exactly how he gets it done... But when he can't understand what we say, like maybe we say \*mvlumschlip\*, now instead of spelling that out, he's gonna put the word "unintelligible" in square brackets, and this is an easy way for us to go through and improve those transcripts and just find all the unintelligibles and fix them.
+
+So for a long time on Hacktoberfest this was something that we would offer as a very easy way for people to get involved in Hacktoberfest, get their T-shirt... Real easy PRs for us to review and merge, because we just look at it and if it's filling out what we think looks right, we just hit merge... And so a lot of people will come every October to our transcripts repo and will contribute just during October. Which is totally cool. Over the years, we've had 991 pull requests on that repo, so quite a few people doing that. You were one of these people.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** Yeah. So I think it was 2019 I was one of those people. I fixed some... Unintelligibles... In several episodes.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] Two for two.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** \[15:55\] I did that, and then did some other small random things, and sort of got my four or five pull requests, or whatever the hurdle was that year to get my T-shirt.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** And 2020 came, Hacktoberfest came, and I feel like on day one there was all this complaining on Twitter about people getting spammed with putting in period at the end of a sentence in random stuff. So as somebody who was not really that confident, that scared me off in trying...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's a bummer.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** But then last year, 2021, I came back again, and scoured around, found some -- I actually can't even remember what my other contributions were, but I found some other items... And then came to this transcripts repo, initially just to fix more unintelligibles... And I came across this issue that you made. And it felt a bit like the stars aligned for me in terms of that. I had done some code in Node, and some Python stuff at work, and I felt like I know enough to be able to piece together a script that would do this auto formatting.
+
+A couple of months before that I had played with GitHub Actions, I got some toy stuff going, like -- I made this small bot that connects to the Dad Jokes API on Twitter and just tweets a dad joke every hour through GitHub Actions...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Nice.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** That thing is actually still running. It gets more activity than my actual profile.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Ha-ha!
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What's the handle?
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** I should have checked that... I'm gonna find it and give it to you for the show notes.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** So I made that... So I had done some work with GitHub Actions, so I'd sort of -- that part was not completely unfamiliar; the idea of writing a script that does this wasn't completely unfamiliar, so I felt like I had the right combination of background to take this on. Yeah, and then I went for it.
+
+I guess the other thing that was nice about this is as you described, it's nice and self-contained; from the get-go, you could be fairly certain that it isn't too big... And the other thing is -- previously, when looking at items on Hacktoberfest, and as somebody who doesn't code for a living, it's actually pretty daunting to open a new codebase. You get an issue that's like two or three lines of English, and then figuring out "Okay, what does it mean? Where in the codebase would you do that? How does it all work? How do you get the thing to stand up?" So there's like a fairly big initial investment just to get going if you want to make a real contribution to a real repo. But this was nice, in that it's a started-from-scratch, pretty clearly defined goal, like you said... So it felt really achievable.
+
+And yeah, then I just started hacking away at it, building it bit by bit, checking it with you a couple of times just to get a sense, a little more detail about how you envision it working... And I eventually got it standing up.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. So just to give you a break for a minute, since you've been doing a lot of the heavy-lifting here... Adam, how cool is it that our FreeCodeCamp episode and our Hacktoberfest episodes -- so we don't actually think about people listening to these shows... \[laughs\] And we know they do.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I mean, we do, but we don't.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** We know that people listen. But when they actually have reactions, and then it changes their lives in subtle or large ways, it's just cool to hear, because we don't hear those stories very often. So that's pretty neat. A couple of episodes combined to lead you to actually contributing back to our stuff... It's so cool.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. My mind is kind of blown over here. It's like, found FreeCodeCamp, actually went through some syllabuses, got some courage to do more, \[unintelligible 00:19:35.19\] Hacktoberfest... Like, even that show was like years ago; a long time ago.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I think we did two of them.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. And it was even like an internal debate, "Should we do more of those? Should we do that every year?" kind of thing.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Maybe it has diminishing returns or whatever, but... It's just interesting how you put something out there, and you connect certain dots in the world, and people actually connect them too, and it changes their life in some small way or some large way. I think that's just -- and then it comes full circle. It's like, this feature is super-cool. I love this feature. There's so much more we could do with it, and it's cool that you contributed, Simey.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[20:16\] Yeah. So let me describe the feature as it stands today, and then maybe you can give a little bit of the story. We should say that Simey also wrote a blog post that y'all can read called "Auto-improved transcripts with GitHub Actions, or how I taught Logbot to change Changelog's logs like magic." Say that five times fast...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** No, thank you.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So the details of some of that can also be read if you're interested in that... But the way the feature stands today - so there is a GitHub Action on our transcripts repo that runs a script that ingests all of the transcripts and runs them through a series of transformations, and applies standardized formatting rules according to our desires to every single transcripts. Some examples of those rules are commonly multiple-spelled things such as -- well, JavaScript is the big one, because JavaScript technically has a capital J and a capital S, but it's very difficult to keep that consistent throughout iterations of transcripts. Some people will capitalize the J and not the S, and other times it'll be all lower-cased... And we just want that to be uniform throughout all of our transcripts, so that's an easy one.
+
+Then there's terms like MLOps, machine learning operations, which is a phrase in the industry and it has a specific way that the people that created that term use it - capital M, capital L, capital O, lower-case ps... And oftentimes it's like two words in our transcripts... So that kind of stuff. Inconsistencies. It's basically a linter for text, and just the way that we want things formatted.
+
+The other big one is our timestamps. So I've mentioned Alexandru - he has something that spits out a timestamp every so often... Every unintelligible is timestamped, so that you can click to it on our page and easily skip to that part of our episode... But then also, he'll just throw random timestamps in every so often; I asked him to do it often, but it's like every 3 to 5 minutes. And those just have a very computer-formatted, extra zeroes... They're just formatted as a computer program would output them, so another transformation that we do is we reduce those to a more simplistic form, because you're gonna read them on the website. So we pull out the leading zeroes, stuff like that. So that's a script that is triggered by a GitHub Action.
+
+Every time a push goes to the transcripts repo, it's going to go through -- and we went through a few iterations of this, how this works. Maybe you can talk to that part, Simey. It actually just commits the change. So we trust it enough that every time somebody pushes to the transcripts, the Logbot is gonna come in behind them, reformat that file, and push the changes. So it works all day, every day, even when we're sleeping. It just does its job, as faithful programs do, right?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** As a bot should do, yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Exactly. So that's the feature. How did we get here? So you mentioned you started off knowing a little bit about GitHub Actions, you knew a little bit of JavaScript and Node, and you also hopped into our Slack and said "Hey Jerod, I'm thinking about working on this." My spec was brief, apparently too brief, because it needed some more information... I think the main thing I wasn't sure was like how the whole GitHub Actions workflow was gonna work. Was it gonna commit, was it gonna open up a new pull request? etc. And then you got going on it. But I know there was more to the process than that. Was there any particular aspects, or decisions you made, or things you hit against that were problematic, or hurdles that you had to overcome?
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** \[24:10\] Right. So maybe to jump into the one at the end that you mentioned first maybe, around how we actually wanted to execute. We had gotten it going, and the first commit was actually a pretty big one, because now it's going through basically everything, and applying all the stylistic changes to every single episode. And while the other ones that you mentioned, the JavaScript and the MLOps and those things appear here and there, but aren't always as prevalent, the timestamps were everywhere. So basically every transcript there were multiple timestamps that needed to get fixed. So the first time we ran it by hand and I think we made a couple of big commits just to \[unintelligible 00:24:53.17\] the existing transcripts.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Mm-hm.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** And then from there we sat sort of idle. And again, this being one of my first real-world contributions, it was a little scary to just have it auto-commit immediately, just in case something breaks in unexpected ways, don't push to prod on Friday, and all of that... And so at first we decided to make a pull request... I was really hesitant, but I think you were pretty bullish with -- you were suggesting we just let it go immediately. And then I lost it all... \[laughs\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I was. \[laughs\] That's kind of how I roll.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** I like it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** We'll deal with the fall-out afterwards... But I was happy to go step by step, because you felt like we should.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** Yeah. And then I think after about a day we saw it was looking fine and we just decided to just have it auto-commit. And that actually makes it easier, because now you don't have the complexity of what happens if you run it after one episode, and it's got changes, but maybe you don't come around and merge that PR yet, and now another episode comes in... You get new complexities there. So it's actually simpler for it just to jump in immediately \[unintelligible 00:26:01.20\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yes.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** ...on a commit and follow it up immediately.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Plus, opening a new PR is actually creating work for us. I was okay with it at first, but it's like, ultimately, I don't want to have to merge a bunch of PRs from a bot. I'm already merging PRs from other people... I would love for it just to do its thing. And I thought that was going to be a lot harder than it was. I think you were also surprised, in terms of how the GitHub Actions works, to just make its commit. I mean, you can just make up an email address and -- I'm not sure if that's like a standard GitHub Actions account name or email, how that works... But you basically just commit it and push it, and it's like "Hey, everything's fine." Kind of surprising. I thought you had to have a token, or something.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** Yeah, that surprised me too, and I learned -- I don't know if I can still remember all of it, but I learned a little bit more about how Git works and how GitHub interacts with Git... But for me, basically what it comes down to is - well, GitHub has Solid Auth, and I can't act as you on GitHub. I can on my computer in the Git CLI type in any email address and the Git CLI doesn't verify that --
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Anything you want, yeah.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** ...that I own that. And how GitHub treats that, if I remember this correctly, is if I typed in any email address in the terminal and that GitHub user has made one verified commit to this repository before, then GitHub will attribute it to that person. I also tried to -- I think I actually tried to impersonate you, Jerod, and I couldn't do that. I tried to impersonate Linus Torvalds, they said I couldn't do that. But I could impersonate -- like we mentioned in the pre-chat, I don't think I'll ever be at that level, but that's okay... I've got other redeeming features.
+
+So because Logbot had made other commits to this repo, I could just use its username and email address in the Git CLI, effectively within this Action, and that part just worked.
+
+\[28:05\] I eventually got there and it was a pretty easy and simple solution after trying to get a token for another user and using that... But then there's weird, cyclical things in GitHub Actions where -- it's actually pretty cleverly designed, where in the default case a commit from an Action doesn't trigger another Action to run that should run on commits... But if it's coming from outside -- so basically, how the GitHub commit trigger works is if it's a commit from an outside profile, it will run. But if it's a commit from itself, it won't run, because otherwise it would create a circular reference. But now the other thing I was trying was making it look like it's coming from outside, and then it kept triggering itself, which is not what we wanted. So a couple of hours spent learning there, but we got it working eventually.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** I always find it interesting to have encountered these little areas of programming in computers, where in many other aspects there's a well-developed tasting paradigm, and the idea of writing testable code, and writing unit tests for your code; that's something else I try to build in. But then you have -- both around the script itself, around the important parts. But then you come to GitHub Actions and there's - at least to a novice like myself - no immediate way to test how this thing's gonna work other than to actually run it in the wild. So the \[unintelligible 00:29:31.04\] solution I came up with is to just on my fork of the repo, deploy it there and run it there, just to see that it's doing what I want it to do. Then when I was happy enough with that, then to bring it over onto the real transcripts repo.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, some of that speaks to Gary Bernhard's idea of functional core and imperative shells, where you want to push the imperative parts of your program - the commands structure, the parts that are doing io, that are accessing the database or some files on disk, or they're reaching out to the network, and you wanna push these to the outside areas of your program and have all of the pure, functional, clean, deterministic, reproducible, fast code inside like an M&M, like a thin candy shell. And inevitably, every project has those areas where it touches the real world, and you just can't do your nice little unit tests; you can't just run that tight, automated loop and get any sort of confidence that it's going to work. You're gonna actually have to go and do something like "Well, I'll create my own repo, and I'll fork it, and I'll have this thing over here, and I'll run it manually against this..." It reminds me of Gerhard, who just created his own Fastly endpoint inside of our Fastly account, called Lazu.ch or something, and he was just changing Fastly configs against his own domain in order to test before he changes them on our real domain... Because you wanna have something production, but not actually production.
+
+So these things always come up... It's kind of like the glue code and the nitty-gritty stuff of "I can't do this any sort of pure, awesome, excellent way, but I can do this in this cludgy, not awesome, but it-works kind of way."
+
+I kind of like that aspect of programming, where it gets really practical at a certain point, where you're like actually moving the bits around it, and making things change, and putting it into the real-world use. So I'd say that was a totally fine solution to that particularly hairy problem of like "How do I iterate on a GitHub Action without blowing these transcripts away on accident?"
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** Yeah, that made me think of something else that I heard on this podcast before, and the more I'm speaking, the more I realize everything I know about programming I learned here...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\]
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** \[31:58\] But there was one where you spoke to someone about functional programming. The way he explained it I thought was really awesome; he said "Functional programming is not about shunning side effects, it's just about being really explicit about them." And like you've just described, having your functional bits clean, having it be clear when \[unintelligible 00:32:17.07\] and when not. Because as much as this clean, functional code is awesome to nerd out on...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** ...code is only useful is there is some real-world side effect. So there needs to be some endgame, some email sent or some file changed, or something displayed on a screen somewhere... Otherwise it's just spinning in a void.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Exactly. Otherwise what's the point of all this thing...? Yeah, exactly. It's probably Eric Normand... Usually, if we're talking functional programming, it's with Eric Normand. We've talked about it with other people as well, but he comes to mind; I think on JS Party we had a great episode with him a couple years or 18 months back.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Eric Normand is awesome.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** For sure. So when it comes to the clean part though, here's what I like about this. So I am not a big code reviewer. I know I looked at the code, I understand what it does; I was not interested in refactoring or changing anything, but here's what I liked about the code that you wrote. So the actual JavaScript is probably like 50 lines. This is not a thousand, ten thousand -- this is not a large program. This script is probably 50 lines of code. There's two things that I like about it. Maybe three.
+
+The first one is all the replacements are held in the exact same place. So everything's a regular expression. You can talk about that as well, regular expressions, if you like. But it's all just like "Here is an array of regular expressions, and when it comes time to add a new rule, you're just gonna write a regular expression." There's one way to add new rules to the formatter. And that's nice, because I don't wanna have to go digging through for like "Here's the timestamp area. And here's the punctuation area. Here's this other." It's like, it's all right there, so that's pretty cool.
+
+And the other thing that makes that even cooler is that you do have unit tests around that. So I can very easily, as I'm writing new rules, as we do from time to time - I think I've added two or three since you've finished, and I probably will add more as I think of them - I can go in and add the rule and I can iterate on the rule, and I can go and add examples in the unit test area. And this is like pure functional stuff. This is the really clean, smooth, here's all my examples, here's the input, here's the output that I expect, and I can just tweak that rule until it matches for all six or seven or however many examples I can think of.
+
+So that makes it really extensible. I mean, we're not gonna change it all that much, but probably we're gonna add new rules over time. So this is really super-easy to get that done. I love that.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** Right. Thanks, yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Was that two or three? Yeah, you're welcome. I thought I had another point, but I've since lost it. That might have been three.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Two barely. What's interesting when you talk about the iterating, Jerod - is that why, to speak to current form, line 11, 12, 13 and I guess 14 are like open and close sourcing? Different versions of that. Are you saying that you might tweak a single rule, or a rule set, like multiples rules to sort of fine-tune the output?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So I did add those... That was actually my implementation of one thought applied to a couple different circumstances. So those are just like -- I could have written like one more complicated regular expression, or I thought "Well, why do that? Because the more complicated your regular expression, the harder it is for you to read later." I'll just create a few simpler ones to apply the same thought... And that thought is like how we handle the word "open source" and "open sourcing", and the words "closed source", "closed sourcing" in our transcripts.
+
+\[36:02\] So yeah, it was really easy -- I came up with those by going to the tests and adding all the examples I could think of, of ways that I'll see it in the transcripts, and then the output obviously that you wanna end up with. And then - that's like test-driven development style - I could create those rules until everything is green.
+
+And so yeah, that was really easy to add. Now, I could have just done one line, a very complicated one probably... But then I was like, "Well, I've got all this space right here... I'll just add more rules, and then have the same output." So it was flexible that way.
+
+And then I thought of the third that I like... It's that you can just run the thing locally against your own -- like, it doesn't always run in a context with something that's gonna commit and push... You can just run the script against your local clone of the repo. So you can go change a transcript and run it, you can do that kind of stuff. So it's really easy to play with it, just because of the implementation of how it works. So that was the third thing, I just remembered it. Go ahead.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** Thanks. Well, that basically stems from my comfort with Node and my fear of GitHub Actions. I try to keep as much off the implementation in Node, and just have, like you said \[unintelligible 00:37:16.10\]
+
+To your point around these four regular expressions that in theory could have been one - it's actually sort of a general principle that I feel like I applied a little bit in this whole thing, about like -- it just needs to work and it needs to be good enough. It doesn't have to be perfect. It's probably some linter framework out there that I could have used for this, but I don't know what it is, and I could have spent as much time as I did coding just finding that and figuring out how that works, but... This works, too. And just as you could have spent maybe 10 or 15 extra minutes to find that one regular expression that encapsulates these, you save that time and now I can glance at them and I can see what they're each doing. It probably could have been one, but then I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have been able to understand that one without \[unintelligible 00:38:14.20\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Actually, I remember I started off trying to write one. I remember this now, because I thought about a few different cases, and I'm like, "I'm just gonna write one reg ex", because that's \[unintelligible 00:38:23.12\] what we had done thus far... And it was just getting complicated, because like "Could it be open or closed?" and you have an optional deal there, this or that, and then the question mark on the d, because it might have a d or it might not have a d... But then open adds an ed, closed already has the e, so you're just adding the d, and I'm like "Don't think too hard about it, Jerod. Just make multiple rules. This thing's not gonna run a gazillion times a day and cost us more money if it has to run through more regular expressions. It's just gonna run super-fast anyways."
+
+So I remember just landing on that and being like, "Yup, good enough." Like, this is utility code, right? It doesn't need to be super-sleek, and like the most impressive thing ever. But it's just as easy to add another one later; it's not like it's so verbose that it's hard to read. It's not.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's actually better that it's verbose, because it is easier to read, because you can see the individual permutations of the word, "open source", "open source", "closed source", "close sourced", and then the -ing's that might come with it or not. You can really see what you're trying to do a bit more clearly because you weren't so clever, honestly.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And sometimes that's the case. The cleverest code isn't always the most readable code.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** Seldom.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And sometimes a little bit of verbosity goes a long way to understanding.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. In terms of adding to this, would we go then -- because there's other common brand names that I see not right, which is like GitHub and GitLab. They both have camel case.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's a good example.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[39:58\] Would you go then -- because those two brand names occur quite a bit, same thing with maybe Elasticsearch, sometimes it's camel case when it's actually two words... Could we/should we go then and just really do a lot more?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** There's no reason not to at this point. It's just so easy. It's too easy. Adam's favorite new favorite phrase, "It's just too easy."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's too easy.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, it's too easy to do that. So yeah, absolutely... And I'm happy to actually do the nuts and bolts - if you think of ones - for writing the reg ex, Adam. But yeah, we should have -- I mean, now that we have this, we can just utilize it all that we want.
+
+Now, there is one caveat which we've run up against and I still haven't actually fixed, which is - when you do a large batch on the Phoenix app side, so on changelog.com's side, what happens is our website via WebHooks gets updated when the transcripts repo gets updated. Which is pretty cool, because if somebody comes and fixes an unintelligible, well then GitHub sends a WebHook over to our Elixir app, our Elixir app says "Hey, the transcript's been updated", it sucks in the new version, and it re-renders. So it immediately is new on the website, which is what you want. You don't wanna have to do a thing.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** \[unintelligible 00:41:16.12\] when I did those fixes - that's pretty rewarding, because I can make a little change in GitHub, and then go back to the website and see a contribution that I might change, or \[unintelligible 00:41:26.19\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, totally. And that's what I say when I merge people's PRs, I'll say "Your change is already live on the website" as I'm merging. And I can say that with confidence, because it's worked very well for many years. However, here's when it doesn't work - when you change 600 transcripts at once, and we get maybe 600 WebHooks... I'm not sure how GitHub does their batching, but I think they don't; I think they're just gonna hit us 600 times. Somehow, some of those get lost, and they don't actually update on the website side. So what I still need to do and haven't done is have some sort of a -- even if it's just a mixed task, that'll go and say "Hey, just go ahead and go grab all the transcripts that have been updated", and will go catch those stragglers... Or have it run on a routine, or something.
+
+So if you went and said "Every time GitHub has misspelled or miscapitalized, fix all of those", and it happens in a whole bunch of transcripts, and you commit that all at once, that very first one might not 100% take on the website... But subsequent ones will. So there's a little bit of a -- I guess you would consider that an implementation bug, but not one that's worth dedicating a whole bunch of resources to at the time.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, I could see running a cron job twice a day...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, totally.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Pull the stragglers, essentially; once a day even is probably enough, or on the hour, if it's not too much traffic. I don't think on the hour it's necessary though, but...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'd say twice a day would be a good sequence.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yup, that'd be pretty easy to add. I'd basically just have to write a mixed task that actually just loops over all the episodes with transcripts and checks to see if they have new, and just whichever ones do, update. If that ran daily, and maybe a no-op for most things. It'll only be when we had a big batch on GitHub that it would actually even do anything, so... Definitely doable.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Meaning on the word "GitHub".
+
+**Jerod Santo:** No, on the GitHub side of the system. \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** Which would probably happen if you get the word GitHub in, too.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yes, exactly.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** One of the other things that I just could reaffirm through doing all of this is that reg exes are hard. And having these tests, both for where you expect it to change and when you don't expect it to change is... It at least gives you guardrails to make sure that this gnarly combination of slashes and brackets that you wrote is actually doing what you want it to do...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** \[44:03\] And I'll share the limits of my powers here... I did actually try to write the GitHub one, but I couldn't figure out how to not change URLs. So whenever there's like a github.com/ with stuff in front of it, that's when you don't want it to change, I'm assuming...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yup.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** And I haven't been --
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So there you're probably looking for word boundaries. So if you've found GitHub with word boundaries on either side, \[unintelligible 00:44:28.22\] there are cases where it might be GitHub with a period at the end, because it's the end of a sentence, and so yo have to catch for that case... But you would match on GitHub with -- I think it's is /b (I think is boundary), and so that ensures that it's not any non-word characters before or after. And then you have to do the special case for punctuation... Which I think I might have done for one of these.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So the zero reg ex, does it have an issue with opensource.com, Jerod?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** We'll see if that one's in the set of tests. If not, we should definitely work on it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Now that I think about the fact that there is an opensource.com. And we do link to them often, so that's why I'd suggest that one.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I'm looking at my tests, and my tests do not account for periods... Except for the `go fmt` one; I have a test that has a period. So we leave it in. We still detect it, but we leave it in. If I had to guess off the top of my head, I think probably opensource.com might break it at this point... But I'm confident at least in my skills to get that one done. I think word boundaries is the key there... But yeah, we could colab on that. It'd be easy to create the test inside the Jest file for github.com, and just make sure that it doesn't get futzed with.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, just a quick search on our transcripts repo, which I think we have linked to opensource.com... We may have not set it in the transcripts, but...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** For sure in the show notes, but maybe not in --
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** For sure in the show notes. So this may be an edge case, or it may be an indication of a potential issue... So searching for opensource.com does not find any matches. So it's possible that we may have changed opensource.com to open sourcing.com.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, you think we've said it before, but now we've changed it to --
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's quite possible. I just don't know. I can't say for sure, with any certainty.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, if you search for source.com, you'd match it there.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, that's true.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** Well, even if it wasn't in there, it's gonna be in like 20 times thanks to this conversation... And then we could do it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, exactly. This Backstage episode is like the ultimate test for this whole format thing, isn't it?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay, I have found it. Go Time \#59...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Somebody had mentioned - this post is called "The seven stages of becoming a Go programmer". And it's now https://opensource.com.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, so there you go.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So there's a bug in my reg ex. Of course! \[laughter\] I love that. I'd never thought about that, so that's great. Yeah, so all we've gotta do is add that to our list of tests, and then just modify that reg ex, and then re-run it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And so now that will become a fifth line of this --
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** And roll those back somehow...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And just re-run it, right?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Will that roll that back then?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Um... No, that's true, because now it won't match the check...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You'd probably manually fix it, right?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** If it's just the one, I'll manually fix it, yeah. If there were 733 of them, then we'd write some code for that.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. So now when we do certain words, like GitHub even, or GitLab even, or open source, we have to confirm or consider that we've said them as a URL somewhere, or have linked to them in -- that's part of actually Hacktober, too; a lot of contributions will be "Well, this actually makes sense to link up", or maybe it doesn't, and we'll allow that. It's not like we're going through and linking up every single thing. But if they say "This post is called The Seven Stages of Becoming a Go Programmer" and it has a link to somewhere... I actually don't even know why that's linked to opensource.com. Actually, I do know. It says "This post." So that's the reference. So it does make sense. Right. So in that case, this totally makes sense to link up the text in a transcript, where normally we just don't do that. Like, it's more or less meant to be readable, not clickable.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[48:38\] Yeah. Because the show notes are clickable, and the transcript is readable, generally speaking.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** But we have had people go back and add links to things that are referenced in a transcript... It's just not something that I actively do or think about. I know it's in our list of things in the readme, of like "Here's ways you could improve - you could link up things that are referenced." But it's few and far between. And I think it's the law of diminishing returns, because anything of real substance is gonna be in the show notes, linked up there.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. On December 7th Changelog Bot was the last update to that file, and it says "Apply standardized formatter to...", you know, all these different files. It was like 219 other files that were updated as a result of your great work... And then maybe this is the only case we actually had a .com in there, so it broke the one case.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's what we call an edge case right there. Yeah, I'd never even thought about that.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** I guess that's the other great advantage of using Logbot - it gets blamed, you don't get blamed.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's right. \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** This is Lobbot's problem.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Blame the bot.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's right.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So that reminds me - talking about our show note links, Simey... You also did some work on some show notes stuff that we never really quite landed, or got finished... But you've got some ideas around -- because we have our show notes linked up in the exact same way our transcripts are. It's all on GitHub, and that's actually a two-way sync, so when our app changes things on its side, it updates GitHub, and when GitHub changes on its side, it updates our app. Because once they're published, we can go in and edit them in our admin, and we want that to be synced. So that's actually a two-way sync, whereas the transcripts is a one-way sync. A little more complicated.
+
+But you had some cool ideas. I never even thought of this - you could go through your show notes and just check for dead links, and open up issues against dead links. The problem is there's a bunch of them; wasn't there like a bunch of them or something?
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** Yeah, I have a branch somewhere where I got that going... So I've got a proof of concept for that; I ran it through, I ran into some interesting questions there as well. One that I learned recently through something else - I learned that one can only make 65,000 requests at a time, but I learned that the hard way through this, so I had to write some code to rate-limit and just like batch the requests out a little bit... So it was sort of the same high-level scaffolding of "Get all the files, \[unintelligible 00:51:01.19\] one by one, parse them through..." \[unintelligible 00:51:05.08\] record them somewhere. But yeah, if there's like a working prototype somewhere that I push back up... And yeah, that creates the next interesting thing about like how do you expose that? Because like you said, there are a fair amount of them at the moment.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right. So our initial simplest idea is like each broken link gets its own GitHub issue on teh show notes repo, which could be thousands of issues, which maybe is too simplistic. Then we're like "Well, what if each episode gets one issue with its broken links in there, in the body of the comment?" or something like that.
+
+\[51:49\] And now you start managing basically issue state on subsequent runs of the script, because if there's already an issue for this episode, do I update the issue? Do I open a new one every time? It actually gets to be a hairier coding problem than this one was. And perhaps just open up a bunch of issues that never get closed, and we don't care enough... I don't know. I mean, it's the kind of thing that we could put somebody on, go out and find the right link and fix them, if it's manageable.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I think the issues ways is probably the most pragmatic way of doing it... Because the issues state does become an issue later on, if you haven't gone and fixed it. And the simplest thing probably would be an editorial kind of concern. So it'd probably require some sort of autonomy to move, but with some parameters, meaning like the most likely thing to happen is just delete it, and maybe remove the link, but leave the text. And with some sort of parentheses that says "Editor's note - it was linked, but the link is now dead", or something like that; I don't know, some sort of way to communicate that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** But at that point, it's like "Is that really super-valuable?" I guess it's unvaluable to have links that are dead and people are potentially clicking them and getting upset, or not finding the thing that should be found... But then there might be the thing of like "Well, there's a better resource now", and then that would take some time... So each one has its own sort of particulars around to actually solve the problem of fixing the link.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Exactly.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's not just "Oh, it's dead. Found a new one." It's a lot of different things.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** We have people email us all the time, telling us they've found a better resource for this link that we have on our website...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Such truth, man... My gosh.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And we're always like, "Yeah, delete..." "No, I'm not gonna link to your spammy blog." But I think the most common case is "This page no longer exists", and then the second most common page is you actually screwed up and you messed up the link the first time, and all it is is gonna be a quick fix, or something to actually get that link fixed.
+
+I don't know how much value there are in those show notes over time. I know people go back and listen to our old episodes... Do they go back and click on the old show note links? I suppose, from time to time... But it's like, you know, is it treasure in them hills, or is it just like you're cleaning up a junkyard?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What do you think, Simey? Since you've been a listener. Do you think there is some value in -- let's say episode \#200, for example. We're on like \#470-something. \#479 just shipped today, for example. So episode \#200, if we go back that far to a show notes list back then, and there's like 4-5 broken links - because internet happens, right? Which I think should actually be a shirt; I like that, "Internet happens..." \[laughter\] Um, what do you think? If you went back as a listener, you're like "I wanna go back to \#200." What was \#200, Jerod? Was that --
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, Richard Hipp was \#203, I know that one...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I wanna say Raquel... Was it Raquel?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I'm looking it up. JavaScript and Robots, with Raquel Vélez. Yeah, Rockbot.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's right, Raquel Vélez.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** It's impressive that you knew that.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, it's just \#200, for some reason I just remembered it. But that's a pretty notable episode. It may not be so greenfield, but maybe somebody goes back because they're a fan of her, and they're like "Oh, I wanna just figure out what she was talking about back in these days", or whatever. They read the show notes, there's some dead links... Maybe ones to her blog, maybe it's to something else. Would you find value, as a listener going to old-school shows, with broken links, and desiring them to be fixed?
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** Yeah, as you were talking about it now, I was thinking through it... The one plausible scenario where it could be valuable is a new listener going through the backlog - which is probably where I was when I started discovering the thing and then going back and listening to old episodes, learning about things for the first time and then wanting to find out more... I guess if it doesn't work, then you just google the thing and you get there anyway...
+
+I think one of the two things that the broken links that the script found was projects that are just dead and they don't exist on the internet anymore.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[55:56\] Yeah. It's probably a lot of dead GitHub links probably.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Wow... So I went back to Rockbot's episode \#200 while we were talking, and just started clicking on show notes. Four of the first five were 404's.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Four out of five.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** Yeah, the internet is more fragile than we realize.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And that's 2016, so we're talking six years ago.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, this is a big job ahead of us then, if we're gonna commit to fixing show note links...
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** So Hacktoberfest - just make that another thing that people can go to. It is gonna take more of your time probably to assess for each link where to go...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right. We've had less value in our show notes being open than we have our transcripts, because the contributions on the show notes repo are lower-quality, and a lot of times they're people who are adding links to things, and I'm like "Was it actually mentioned on the show, or do you just think this is related?" And it's always like -- I'd have to go back and listen to know if we actually referenced it... We tend not to just put things in that are related, unless they were talked about. But I can understand where it's like "Actually, here's the best reference on this piece of content. Why not have it in your show notes?" I get that as well. But it requires a whole bunch of mental overhead... Versus a transcript unintelligible fix where I can just look at it, and it looks right, and hit Merge.
+
+So we've had less contributions on show notes, and the ones that have come in have been just not the most high-quality contributions. And so I assume if we had a list of broken things, it'd be easier to judge for Hacktoberfest-like situations. Like, "Oh, this one was broken. Here's the fixed one." Or "Oh, I deleted a bunch, because they were broken."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And in some cases, the links there being broken is sort of nostalgic... So it's almost like a feature, not a bug even.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] Because internet happens, and this is an example.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I almost feel like they should be immutable.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** Maybe you then just add a "We know this is broken. Internet happens." Like a little \[unintelligible 00:57:58.13\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] Yeah, exactly. That's kind of where Adam went with it, with like take the link out, and in parentheses say "Broken link" or something.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** Yeah. The other thing I think -- you mentioned one when we were discussing, Jerod... It's the Wayback Machine links, which I think will happen at times, but not always.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right. Yup, that's another way of thinking about it as well. Because yeah, a lot of these -- it looks like her blog just no longer exists at rockbot.me, and so we linked to some of her blog posts and they're just gone... As well as npm camp, which apparently we talked about; npm.github.io, just gone... A couple of these are to Twitter, and those still work. There's a Google search, "You can't be it if you can't see it." I'm not sure what that Google search was about, but I think it was something that somebody said on the show... And that Google search just doesn't go anymore.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I don't know why that doesn't go either. I was trying to fix that...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Maybe it never did. \[laughs\] Who knows...? Anyways. So yeah, show notes... There's definitely room for improvements there, and room for automation. But it's a little bit trickier. Alright, Simey, anything else? Anything we left unsaid? Any aspect of this that's interesting that we haven't talked about, or things you're thinking about for your future in coding, or anything like that?
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** No, I think we've covered most of my little adventure here... About how it started, how we worked together to get it there, and some of the niggles along the way...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** And I guess from here --
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, I said it before via Slack, but I just wanna say it again audibly here... Thank you for doing this.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It was very fun for me. I enjoyed it, I love having something that exists now that didn't previously exist and going along... You and I kind of back-channeled throughout as you were working on this, and I enjoyed our interactions there. I just really appreciate that you did what you did, and you contributed this to our little part of the internet that's made it better. It's pretty awesome.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** \[01:00:00.07\] Thanks. I really enjoyed it, too. I learned a lot. I get a lot of joy from the fact that I now have a bit of real code that's adding to this real website and to the podcast that I am a long-time listener to, and that I really enjoy... So that gives me joy as well.
+
+If I knew Elixir, I maybe would have poked a bit more on the main side as well, but I haven't gotten this far. I think on one of the Ship It episodes you guys talk about the process to get the main site up and running for local development. It's something I thought about, should I try and learn just enough Docker to get that going, to at least make that story easier?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I think Gerhard's waiting for Codespaces and not Docker.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I was gonna say, I think there be dragons in that...
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** Is it? \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** We're trying to get a totally online setup, where it's just like click a button -- similar to the Deploy to Heroku button on your readme. Deploy to some cloud space and just be able to start coding. We want that, we don't have that, and I know that our dev setup has gone through multiple iterations, and none of it is -- I don't even think the readme is up to date. Adam had been poking through -- because he has to set it up every once in a while, and this is like "How do we do it now?" and I'm like "I don't know, man..."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I didn't even do it on this new machine, that's how scared I am of trying to do it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I have to tell you, brew-install Postgres, brew-install Elixir, and you're good to go. And that's pretty true, but not 100% true. And you're on Windows, so definitely not true. It had to be a Docker setup.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** Yeah, and your old slogan used to be like "Something-something open source", right? And I think I'm probably not the only one, there are probably other people... Sorry, I got it going, and then I realized I didn't actually know what it is.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's all good.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** There's probably a lot of people who are keen to contribute, like I am, but who don't know Elixir and/or don't know how to get it going.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah...
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** So I think there's probably value to you if you can make that on-ramp easier; you may get more contributions around October time, or other times of the year.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yes.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'd welcome a Docker image if we weren't planning to go to Codespaces, and there's just a possibility of more awesome around the corner...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So I think that's where I'm held up personally, of pushing that desire... Because I'm familiar with Docker enough to use Docker. I personally wouldn't mind using it. But if Codespaces is just around the corner for us... We have two initiatives happening in the next month or two, and then I think we'll have some time potentially to focus on a Codespace dev environment if we so desire... And I think we do.
+
+And I believe we also have a change to work with Cory and the team at GitHub to make it happen. I'm not sure how much they'll play a part in it, but they'll at least play some sort of role in guidance, or error support, something like that. So there's some sort of collaboration possible to happen there, we just have to have the bandwidth to do it.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** And you guys have a great platform, so I'm sure this will be good marketing for them if you're a case study. For interest for me though is that -- is it because you're ironically on a pro paid account that is not fully available? Because on my free GitHub account I have GitHub Codespaces, and I can use it on my repos.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Do we not have access, Jerod? I just figured that if we wanted it, we would just get it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I think we could get access to Codespaces. I don't think we have it set up to actually run with our infrastructure all in a groove.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And that might just be because we haven't even tried. Maybe it's just like a 1-2-3 kind of a thing. So it's possible, I just haven't honestly put a thought into it since that Ship It episode; it's just kind of been on hold. And because my dev environment works just great, I'm just making progress.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Moving along...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[01:03:50.26\] I haven't been the best steward of the changelog.com repo in terms of outside contributions, for multiple reasons. One's the dev setup, the other is there's no clear roadmap and like what are we actually working on and doing... A lot of that is because we work in fits and starts. I'm actually back on the codebase now, doing things, but I've spent months doing nothing... And then also, like you said, there's not a lot of Elixir people, and there's not a lot of -- it's difficult to work on somebody else's website without clear vision. And I don't think we always have the clearest vision, nor do we display that when we do have the clearest vision. A lot of that is because I'm not that great at communicating these things to the public. That transcripts repo issue was an example of how you ought to do so that it actually is actionable... And I don't do that very well or very often on Changelog.com, because honestly, by the time I get around to it, I'm just like "I'm gonna start working on it and coding on it."
+
+So I think there's a lot of things that played into that not being as well-contributed by outsiders, but certainly, the dev setup aspect of it has been limping along.
+
+And I know Alex Koutmos got it working for him, I know Lars Wikman got it working for him, but neither one of them enjoyed that process. So it's currently still work, but yeah, I think we could get it easier, I think we could get more contributors. Easier to do, and then also clear and present things to work on, and ideas. We've had contributions over the years, here and there, but it's hard to have a public roadmap and invite contributors to a website app. It's not like a library, it's not like a platform. It's like our website... But people use it, and we wanna have certain things -- you know, we've had requests, and people were like "Well, how about --" Again, we've just had somebody say there's no volume button on the player, you know?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, that could be a contribution, pretty easily...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, totally. So stuff like that could be, but...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And that's pretty vanilla JavaScript too, so...
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** Yeah, I guess it's a weird and almost uncanny valley of nice-to-have, so you create an issue for it, but not so essential that you fix it immediately. It can sort of sit there and wait for a contribution.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right. And there's like small things which sometimes you might just do it yourself, because it's small... And then there's like big, ambitious things where I'm not even sure how we're gonna go about it... So putting that out as an issue - I wouldn't want somebody to have to work on that, just because it's so vague right now in my own head...
+
+So yeah, I guess digestible chunks of work, that are big enough that I'm not just gonna do them myself, but are small enough to be like this. They're just few and far between. And I probably am not looking for those opportunities, and I could be.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** I feel like what I've learned from \[unintelligible 01:06:36.19\] at this point what I'm supposed to ask is "Have you considered rewriting it in Rust?"
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] I will take that into consideration, thank you.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** Yeah. So the Elixir choice is an interesting one. I get that it's something you enjoyed when you \[unintelligible 01:06:54.22\] But I think if it had been in something more common, that may have been --
+
+**Jerod Santo:** More mainstream?
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** ...more mainstream \[unintelligible 01:07:08.00\] to getting more contributions. But I guess, like you said, it's not always as clear. It's actually work to carve out specific pieces of work that are right for contribution, from that perspective.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** There are definitely not as many people who are familiar with Elixir as they would be if it was a Ruby on Rails application, for example, or if it was a JavaScript SPA or something, with a Node backend... But I guess I don't care all that much about those aspects. I feel like as we build out new areas -- I'm not sure I've teased it on the show or not, but... I've teased it to you, Simey - I'm thinking about doing an API and a Changelog command line, so you can play our shows from your command line, and stuff. And I wouldn't pick Elixir for those... And that is one of the reasons; I don't think it's the best tool for those particular jobs. Maybe for the API, if it's just part of the app. But for the command line tool, in terms of distribution and stuff, I think Go is a great choice...
+
+\[01:08:10.22\] And I think that as we have maybe smaller ancillary things, like our transcripts repo, if we had a command line repo that was its own separate project in Go - well, I could see more contributions coming into there, than whatever come against Changelog.com.
+
+Hopefully we open up new opportunities as we move along. I definitely think Elixir as a dependency has probably limited, to a certain degree, outside contributors, but I think more so it's the lack of vision and clear inroads to contributing that's done it.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** Yeah, and I guess what you've hinted there is I might have to learn Go now. \[laughter\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I'm also gonna have to learn Go... \[laughs\]
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** And around your question earlier, Adam, with fixing the show notes would be useful... That was another aspect of even this whole transcripts thing - is it essential? No. But it's cool, and it's fun, and it's a thing to do it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** So Jerod, your idea of having a podcast player on the command line is completely unnecessary, completely over the top, and I love it for exactly that reason. I think that's sort of fun.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So do I. Well, hopefully that becomes a thing, and not just a thing that I talk about... We will see as time progresses. But I'm getting more and more keen on the idea -- I did write a little web server for our survey game that we pay... We play like a Family Feud style game; I'm not sure if you listen to JS Party or Go Time, but those two shows both have a Family Feud style game show format, and we have like a UI for it, and a gameboard of scores, and stuff.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** And the sound effects.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And I built that with --
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** Is the sound effects in there as well, or is that separate?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** The sound effects are not in the web UI, although they are for the Jeopardy game. Nick Nisi built that board, and it has the sound effects built in. This game has the sound effects just separate in our soundboard. So everything but the sound effects are in there... But it has scoring, it has highlighting etc. and the backend of that is a Go-based web server. So I've dipped my toe back into Go. That's open source on our Changelog account. There's not much to it. It's probably shorter than your transcript formatter script... But it was fun to do a little Go project.
+
+I did one back when I was consulting, I did a Go-based API. Probably 7-8 years ago now. And this was my first time dipping back into the Go waters. So yeah, I'm also gonna be learning it if and when this Changelog command line thing starts to take shape.
+
+**Simey de Klerk:** You've got a Go podcast, right? Can't you get some of your hosts there to get us going?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, exactly. In fact, Mat Ryer has already looked at my code and given me some good feedback on the very little code that I wrote. Apparently, there were things I could have done better, so... \[laughs\] No surprise there.
+
+Cool. Well, let's call it a show, shall we? Again, Simey, thanks...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yes, big thanks.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, big thanks. Pretty cool stuff. To the listener out there - check out the blog post, all the links to all the things are in the show notes... Check out this transcript, because this will be the craziest Changelog transcript of all time; the most self-referential. And if we have any infinite loops going on our GitHub Actions, it's gonna be because this episode's transcripts, so stay tuned for that one as well.
+
+Speaking of transcripts - I have added a new feature to the website, just yesterday.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I saw this. I like this, a lot.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** This has been a long time coming on my to-do list, which is that you can be subscribed to be notified when a transcript goes live. So this episode of Backstage will come out when it comes out, and then the transcript won't be ready for a few days, sometimes five, sometimes if he falls behind it can be up to a week. And if you want to be notified when that transcript is actually published, you can now subscribe to be notified on the episode page. So scroll down to the transcript, click the button that says -- I don't know what it says; "Notify me when the transcript is published", and we will shoot you an email. So that's a new feature. So definitely maybe try out that feature as you're waiting for this crazy transcript to post. And we need for Changelog Bot to format said transcript and see how he does.

Reflecting on 500 episodes_transcript.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,481 @@
+**Jerod Santo:** 500...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What does the number 500 mean to you? It's 200 more than 300, and 300 is a movie...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** 300 more than 200.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, it's true. That's true. I had to do the real basic math in my brain.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What's it mean to me? It means if we're gonna celebrate a milestone, there won't be a bigger one until 1,000.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's true, yeah... Unless you're a real big fan of 600, for some reason...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, but whose -- Why...? When? Where? Why would you be a fan of 600? We could go binary; 512 would be cool...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, I guess 512... 511... 512...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** 512 would be cool, and then 1024.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's true, yeah. 512 is a good number.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. I had 512 megabytes of RAM in my laptop for a long time. And now I remember when I doubled that...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** We can't double our show count like we double our RAM.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Nope. It's not that swappable. It takes a bit.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It took us like 12 -- what was it, like 12 years?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Sadly, 12 years, yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** To get to 500. So if we wanna get to a thousand, that's another decade.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I think it'll be less than a decade though, considering -- we've got a couple years there where it was less consistent...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, let's just consider -- if we do 50 shows a year, that's ten years.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's true, yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** If we do more than 50, then yeah, less than a decade. If we do less than 50, it's more than a decade. So when we celebrate episode 1,000, assuming nothing changes, which is a huge assumption, it's gonna be -- I mean, we're gonna be in our 50's, man...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Gosh... \[laughter\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Can you still podcast in your 50's? Can you still be relevant in software and be in your 50's? A little bit tongue-in-cheek there, but...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You have to be influential, or have good opinions... Or just keep showing up.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Or a really, really impressive neckbeard.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's true, yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Which - I've never been a beard man myself.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And have not been canceled somehow, in some way, shape or form, you know?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right. There's lots of impediments for us to get to a thousand... So we'd better celebrate 500, man...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We'd better get it while we can. Like, gosh... 500 though. Wow. It is a milestone. We've definitely grown up. And I'm even going back through our older shows, looking for moments, really...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, you are?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You're doing that?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, not like -- you know, I did like the first 100 so far.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Are you doing it for the thing that we're talking about doing?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Kind of...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. I mean, that's the point... I'm finding some moments in there.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay... I didn't know you were working on that.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, I shared the Notion doc with you... Remember that?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** No.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** On Tuesday we talked about it. Did you miss that part of the conversation?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I don't remember even discussing.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. I said "In the sidebar, under workspace, the Changelog 500." See that?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** No.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm taking notes from 0 through 99.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You did not tell me that.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, we talked about this.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Or I did not listen to you. Did I acknowledge your sentence?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, because we were looking at Notion together, because we were complaining -- I was complaining about Notion.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right. You were just praising Notion I think the last time we had a Backstage... \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[04:01\] Hey, you know, I'm gonna praise it again; I'm gonna go zig-zag here, because I was just using it today, and it's just so fast.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Notion?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It really is just so speedy. Yeah, Notion is speedy.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I've never felt that in my life.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Really?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I'm happy to be wrong, but it's never felt speedy to me. It's always felt a little sluggish. But maybe it's getting faster. Maybe they're working on it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, I mean, maybe the things I'm doing seem faster. The animations and the motions on the screens might make it feel like it's fast.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Maybe they rewrote it in Tauri. Maybe it's a Tauri app now.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Maybe.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So okay...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Tiny and fast.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So okay, Notion sidebar... Oh, number 500. Boom.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Nice.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** This is me starting.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I even noted your first episode. Episode 85 was --
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That was my first episode?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Your very first episode, yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, man... I'm kind of nervous to hear from that one...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** This is The Changelog, and I'm your host, Adam Stacoviak. We're a member-supported blog and podcast that covers the intersection of software development and open source. We shine a spotlight on what's fresh and new in open source. You can tune into this show live every Tuesday at 3 PM Pacific, 6 PM Eastern at thechangelog.com/live. This is episode number 0.8.5, recorded April 16th, 2013.
+
+We're joined by myself, Andrew Thorp, Steve Klabnik, Kenneth Reitz and Jerod Santo. If you've found this show on iTunes, we're also on the web at thechangelog.com. If you're on Twitter, follow @thechangelog, because that is us. Enjoy the show.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's pretty funny though... It was a good one. We were supposed to do the show live...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I remember one of the very first things I said, which I've said since then as well... I was like, "It's good, I'm gonna say it again." I was praising GitHub for putting the source code in front... And I was talking about how on SourceForge the code was never first, but on GitHub it was like, source code, right there in your face.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yup.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** One of the things that really opened my eyes about GitHub was when you'd land on the homepage of a project and you'd see the code sitting right there... Because I was always a SourceForge user... A user as in I would download software from there, not that I'd use it for version control. But I'd never even realized that you could get at the code for a lot of those projects, because it's just not emphasized in the UI... And when I saw GitHub, and you'd land on the repo and you'd see the code right there, it was kind of eye-opening at the time, for me at least.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I remember saying that, because that was kind of the only thing I think I said on that episode... Because I was intimidated, of course. You had yourself, Steve Klabnik, Kenneth Reitz maybe... And I'd never been on the show before.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Andrew Thorp.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And Andrew Thorp. So I was coming into like a lions' den of cool dudes.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** A lions' den...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] You know, lions' den... What do you call it?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Um, lions' den, yeah. Intimidating folks, right? That's a lions' den.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Intimidating people. I can't remember how people responded to my SourceForge/GitHub comparison, but I felt pretty solid about it, because I still remember it. I don't remember saying anything else the whole episode. I wonder if I did.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I haven't gotten that far, I don't know, but I do recall that sentiment being shared... And it didn't land incorrectly. It was like, you know, GitHub puts it front and center, whereas SourceForge just didn't... So as a user of the code there, you never knew you can participate, really.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, exactly.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Whereas GitHub changed the game.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I thought it was a solid take.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. It's still a solid take. We should pull a quote from that just for fun.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] I should say it again... And I said it since then, I'm sure. I mean, we've done - what, 435? No, 415. 415 episodes since then.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Wow...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I'm sure I've said it since then.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You're probably been on as many episodes as me, because even in the first 85 episodes I wasn't on every single show.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, you'd come in on the intro, but... Wynn did a lot of the interviews.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, he did.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And maybe I have.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'd probably say of the 85, I was probably involved on the frontend for at least half. Maybe 40%. Behind the scenes, totally a part of... Which is just interesting how things work out. Early days, man... Early days.
+
+**Old Changelog Intro:** \[08:14\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** This is Changelog Spotlight 0.0.3. We spoke with Rob Pike of Google. He's one of the principal engineers at Google and also one of the leads behind their open source language called Go. I'm Adam Stacoviak...
+
+**Wynn Netherland:** And I'm Wynn Netherland.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, so we had a really awesome interview with Rob Pike, a very candid guy. It was a super-awesome interview.
+
+**Wynn Netherland:** Very passionate about this new language...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, he had a lot of good things to say about it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Even going back to episode in the hundreds... One I listened to the other day - I think it was the Chris McCord episode. I've been asked to do a talk at an Elixir meetup in San Francisco. I'm just gonna do it remotely... And that had me thinking about -- they asked me something about how I picked Elixir, and stuff... And I happened to be on the website when I was talking with them, and I have found the episode almost by happenstance. I think 147, maybe... When Chris McCord first came on. And I was just listening to the intro, and I'm like "Gosh..." Even that, which is like, you're 147 episodes in; I'm just like "It sounds so much better now." \[laughs\]
+
+**Old Changelog Intro:** \[09:38\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Welcome back, everyone. This is The Changelog and I'm your host, Adam Stacoviak. This is episode 147, and today Jerod and I are talking to Chris McCord, talking about Elixir on top of Erlang, Phoenix, the web framework... Definitely got me and Jerod thinking about concurrency in Elixir for an upcoming project... Phoenix sounds really cool. You're gonna love this conversation with Chris...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Just the overall production values, even from then, which - we were not like newbs at 147, you know?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, it's interesting... I think -- is it like production value changing, or is it also taste? Because it's kind of both, right?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I think it's definitely both... I mean, you had a worse mic back then, I'm pretty sure. Or your EQ settings were not as good. You sounded a little bit hollow...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, I do hear that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Like you didn't have the bass. It was just not right, or something. And a little bit like you're too far from the mic.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, in my old house... I think this is in -- let me see what the date was for this... If this is 2015...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, maybe this was the -- was this the wood floors? I remember we got called out for the wood floors... \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We won't say who called out, because... We can subtweet him though.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** No, we won't. So Adam got called out... "Are you on wood floors?"
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Unprofessional.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** "I can hear it." \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, exactly. And you could. I mean, there's no--
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** There was no getting around that. And I didn't really understand how to minimize that back then. I would use dereverb, and stuff like that... I thought you could do it all in plugins... I had a carpet in my office, too; a big shag carpet. But it wasn't all over the floor. There was a lot of the floor exposed... So yeah, that could have been a contributor to it.
+
+And I did not have any whatsoever sound baffling on the walls. I had hard walls, hard ceiling, hard floors... That was back in the day when we didn't make really much from this show, so buying gear was like "Whow..." If you spent $100 on something, it was like... You know, it could be the end, right then and there.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yup.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So over time we were able to improve because finances improved, and we were able to get the proper gear, and take the proper steps to make things good, all that good stuff. For example, where I live now, we built this house. So when we built this house, we put sound absorption in the walls too, to minimize outside noises coming into the room. And then on the inside of the room, you have sound absorption to minimize ricochets and whatnot. So, some treatment... And the room has carpeting, so it sounds good. Plus, fine-tuned the DBX 286s, and added the aural exciter as another device in the flow which adds that bass... Do you wanna hear something cool? Watch this...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[12:14\] Aural exciter...? It sounds weird.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's aural, a-u-r-a-l, I believe.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's exciting.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[unintelligible 00:12:19.04\] listen to this. This is me turning up the bass to really get the Howard Stern going on like that. Do you like this, Jerod? A little Howard Stern. Gonna getcha! Episode 500!
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'll take it back to a manageable level... So there you go.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's fun.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's how that works. It adds a little bottom end. A little bottom end. A little subtle \[unintelligible 00:12:39.25\] bottom end. Not like a bass, but just like a little subtle bottom end. I don't know how to call it anything besides bottom end, versus bass.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I'm liking a subtle bottom end.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's all about that bottom end, yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, man.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So we've fine-tuned things. And you sound great on these. I'm listening to the Changelog News podcast, and I'm like --
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Do you like it?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You sound good, man... Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Thank you.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You've got a great mic setup, it sounds good... You've got a decent voice... It's okay.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. It works.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You've got a good voice, I'm kidding with you. I'm just messing with you.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, I think it's mostly the mic, because... Nobody likes their own voice.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Nah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I've definitely learned to live with it, and I've learned to use it better, which is a weird thing to think about...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** But I can get nasally pretty easily... Actually, right there, when I said "easily", I sort of did... And I know how to retake that and cut the whiny part...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** The thing you hear in your voice no one else hears...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It still slips in... I'm like, whatever. It sucks, because when I say something good - I mean, good as in I think it's good, which may not be good anyways... But when I say something I like, in a way that I like, but then it has the nasal, I'm like "Dang it..."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Ah, yes...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's perfect, except for it's like a couple octaves too high, and I'm like "I'm not gonna be able to say it that cool again", but I wish I could say it like, but with my --
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, you can't tell on post. It seems like you do a really good job from the post-production process, hearing it as a listener...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It feels pretty natural, right?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Very intentional, well-paced. The extra effects and pop-cultural references that get pulled in...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, yeah. That's the fun stuff.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** They're the cherries on top, so to speak.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right. I always wonder -- like I said in one of them, I'm starting to put the links to the actual references in the transcript... It'll tell you who said it. Because I wonder how many of those land and how many of them fall flat. I mean, different people around the world, different ages... You know, probably more I'm landing on you, because we're kind of the same timeframe... But my references are like, you know, Futurama, The Office, The Simpsons, Star Wars stuff, movies like from the '90s and 2000's... And I did an Austin Powers one, I think, on this most recent...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** "Yeah, baby...!" Maybe it was that, I don't know.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, actually, I wanted -- maybe I actually dropped it. I couldn't find the right thing he said. Oh, I thought he said something like "I'm a cheeky monkey, baby. Yeah!" And I couldn't find it. Because I wanted to say something about this guy's list of -- he made a list of ways to lose your best engineers... And all the things are very cheeky, because it's like tongue-in-cheek, you know? And I wanted to have Austin Powers saying "Cheeky monkey", and it turns out -- I don't think he ever says that in the show.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Really?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I just thought he did. He says a lot of stuff, like "Do I make you randy?" "Do I make you horny?", of course, he says that... But I thought he said like "I'm a cheeky monkey, baby. Yeah!" And I spent like 20 minutes trying to find it, and I just never did.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So I did not have an Austin Powers, but I thought I did. Oh, I had the Jurassic Park reference. Did you pick that one up?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I don't know, I'll have to go back and scroll through... What was it exactly?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I was talking about the Hacker News post that had a whole bunch of comments, and I put in that part where Jeff Goldblum walks up to the dinosaur doodoo, and he says \[15:50\] "That is one great pile of s\*\*t."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, okay.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** But I cut it right as he says sh\*\*, and I just cut back to me.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I do recall that, because I liked how you transitioned from that right into... "There's good stuff in there, for sure. In fact..."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, "There's some good stuff in there, for sure." I always think about that quote when I see a big ol' Hacker News comment thread. I'm like "There's a big ol' pile of..." But I was first going to just bleep it, but then I'm like "What if I just cut it right as he starts to say, and then just like take over?"
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Keep the sh\*\* in there, yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, exactly. But I figure most people know Jurassic Park, you know?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's true.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** But then there's other ones where I'm like "I wonder if anybody remembers this..." And then I've put a Monty Python one in there... Anyways. I would love to have a stat of references acknowledged per episode. You know, like of all the listeners, what percentage got which references. You'd have to have like a Minority Report thing to know that.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It could be a geographical thing too, not just an age thing...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, that's what I was saying; all around the world, yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And I think you could have somebody translate this show and transplant, like movies do. They'll take cultural references out of like the U.S. version of it...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, replace it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** ...and put it into, say, the one that releases in China, or somewhere in Asia, or something like that. They'll put a more relevant cultural reference in, versus the one from America.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right. That would be cool. And scary... \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Scary...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's like the audio equivalent of the goatse, man... If you're gonna hot-swap in something you're not -- you're like "Wait, no! No, that wasn't it!" \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I think, to summarize though what we're saying, is that you can see when you stay consistent and dedicated long enough, the improvements when you look back.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Because you can look back... You know, episode 1 through 99, 100 through 199... Each hundred episodes you can tell there's differences. Even in the hundreds, per hundred episodes, for example.
+
+We didn't just arrive here being this good, I suppose. I mean, I'm not even trying to like boast, but we're pretty comfortable talking to pretty much anybody, I would say. There's nerves...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** From time to time...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** ...as there should be, but for the most part, it's never like --
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. And we wanna do well.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Like, I was nervous talking to Jack Dorsey, for example. But that had video aspects, and it was gonna go out to their developer conference. So it was more than just --
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That was high stake.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Once I was in the groove, it was like any other thing, ever.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[18:11\] I think it's more like less people -- I mean, I think I would also be nervous talking to Jack Dorsey, probably. I think it's less that people intimidate now, and it's more like lines of questioning... Similar to the WeWork one with On Freund. It's kind of like "How much is he willing to talk, and how comfortable is he?" and making that awesome, and not be weird... Those kind of things still make me a little bit anxious... You know, like, "Can I say this and not ruin it? I don't wanna ruin the show."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It turns out he was a totally cool guy, and we could pretty much talk about anything, so that was awesome.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. I love it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** But you never know that going into it. We did ask beforehand, "Hey, are you cool to talk about the WeWork stuff? Because we want to..." And his PR gal says he was cool with it, but you're never sure what that exactly means. It turns out he was. I thought he was a really cool guy.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I thought so, too. That was a really good -- that was a fun episode.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I actually haven't listened to that one back. I just finished the Tauri episode... I've just clipped the Tauri episode, so I've gotta do WeWork...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I was nervous about the title for the WeWork show, because I was like -- you know, I only added one word to the "title not final" title.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right, you added "upskilling".
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's it. Just upskilling.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I thought the title was pretty good... Because I wanted to reference both companies in there, so... It was kind of about two things. So from WeWork, to upskilling at Wilco... I thought it was a good title.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. I tried three or four different titles that was just way too wordy... I'm like "Nah... WeWork is a pretty good summary on its own. And what are they doing at Wilco? Upskilling."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right. And we talk about that as like a new --
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[unintelligible 00:19:45.13\] If you read the title and you click through, you're like "Ahh..." This has -- yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Not much of a reaction to that show. I wonder how many people watch WeCrashed... Because it is Apple TV+, so it's kind of exclusive... If it was on Netflix, maybe more people would have seen it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Hm...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I don't know. I think most of the people, most of my friends, I'm like "Have you seen WeCrash?" almost everybody says no. Because I wanna talk about it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. You've gotta really want to. It's probably like Silicon Valley. A very small audience.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Sort of. It's less of a buy-in, because it's like a mini-series...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, that's true... But I mean like in terms of its potential audience. You really have to be a geek, I think, or a nerd. Pick your favorite --
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Or just be a fan of Anne Hathaway or Jared Leto. I can't even remember why Rachel and I watched it. I think we were just kind of out of stuff to watch, and we have Apple TV+, so we're like "Oh..."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Neither ones of us were necessarily fans of those two. I knew of WeWork, and I was like "I think they had a bad IPO, or something." I didn't really know -- I'm like, "They're infamous for something... Yeah, let's give it a shot." And then it was well --
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** The crash, really. Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It was well acted, so we're like "Okay", and we got into it. But I think probably less people have seen that than Silicon Valley, just because you've got long-running --
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[20:59\] Yeah. I'm waiting... I still haven't watched all of WeCrash. I think I'm like halfway through episode two... And I want to, it's just I don't have the attention to give it right now. And I wanna give it enough attention where I can watch it all in like a few weeks... And I know I can't right now. I watched episode one on a plane.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We were flying to Sedona back in late April, first part of May... So I was like -- that was great for a plane ride. It got me in. I wanted to watch episode two, three and four, but...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You probably like it more now that we've talked to somebody who was there, and was part of it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You're probably more connected to it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, like I said yesterday, man, I'm thinking about WePod.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I know you said that.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[laughs\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** They probably had a business called WePod, because they had WeStar. There were tons of businesses that were subsidiaries of WeWork. Like WeLive... WeFit -- no, that was a video game, WeFit. I don't know them all. There's a bunch of We businesses that they were spinning off, and all had the same mission. You have to watch it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It would be an undertaking, though... I'm actually intimidated by all the tech required to just manage the buildings. Like On had said, all the security stuff \[unintelligible 00:22:11.25\] was semi-intimidating. Having to build that bespoke software just to run a business is sometimes quite daunting if you're not desiring to be a software company. And software creation is so expensive. It's just the absolute most expensive thing you can do today. Anyways... Well, episode 500...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, 500, man...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm not sure what this is, and where to land, but hey, it's been fun gabbing about the number 500 and what it means to us right now, because... 500. It's a lot.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's a lot.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's a lot of anything.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, if we added up all the shows we produced though, we're probably like 5x that.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Way more than 500, yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Probably thousands.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, I would say we're in the thousands. We're probably in like the 1,500-1,800 range roughly, I'd guess...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, something like that. We could easily figure that out with a SQL query... But I don't feel like it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. One keystroke away.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Not to mention our doing news, which is not going to be numbered... But those are episodes. They're not the same, but they're still chipping shows.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** They'll double the count, yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, we'd better go talk to Chris. This is the CSS-Tricks legacy, not the Changelog Legacy.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's true. Not yet... Not yet.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Not yet. Someday...

Should we get down with OP3？ featuring John Spurlock_transcript.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,571 @@
+**Jerod Santo:** We're backstage, so it's totally chill.
+
+**John Spurlock:** Alright.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** There's no rules here.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Loose and flex.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** No pressure.
+
+**John Spurlock:** Oh, so this is -- so we can do real podcasting talk here, and this is not... So I won't do any euphemisms; check me if I do any bromides, or anything like that...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, no bromides, man.
+
+**John Spurlock:** We'll keep -- we'll stay honest here, yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Keep it real.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Keep it real.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Keep it real real.
+
+**John Spurlock:** Well, let me ask you something there, since this is real...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay.
+
+**John Spurlock:** Real quick - how many downloads do you get on Backstage versus your main show?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Ooh...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Great question. This is something that we talk about often, because Adam says, "Why you've got to put this on Backstage, man? It's gonna get less listens." I'm "Well, because it's... It's different." So probably like -- well, okay, so Backstage gets between 3,000 to 6,000 probably.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's like a tenth. Our main show gets 20,000 to 40,000. It just depends on the episode.
+
+**John Spurlock:** Okay.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+
+**John Spurlock:** So it's not a separate show, but it looks like it's in a separate feed.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, so it is a separate show. So here's our Backstage philosophy, which is that it's for the superfans, the insiders, the people who care about us beyond as the interviewers, you know? So we figured that's less than our normal people. And so we put Backstage as its own podcast, it has its own name, it has its own webpage, all that, but it doesn't have its own feed. The feed is part of our Master feed, which is where you get it as kind of like a bonus when you get our Master feed, which is all of our shows. So if you like all of our shows, that means you're already a big-time listener, so we'll give you these Backstage episodes. And it doesn't go out in its own -- you can't just subscribe to Changelog Backstage. You have to just subscribe to the Master feed. But 5,000-ish people do that, so it's still a decent audience, I think...
+
+**John Spurlock:** These are the surprises. These are the good ones.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I feel like maybe -- is my internet connection bad? I feel like there's some latency up in here.
+
+**John Spurlock:** There's a little bit of lag, but I think we could probably deal with it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Do you wanna test the latency, Jerod?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I don't know, how do we test latency? What do you mean? just keep talking and hope it goes away? Is that how you might test it?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, it took you a little bit to answer me, so that's good enough right there... \[laughter\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It might be me. Let me turn my video off, and...
+
+**John Spurlock:** I have fiber here, so I usually don't have too much latency.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I wish I had fiber here...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I have fiber as well, but you know... Gosh. Alright, my cam is disabled. Maybe that'll help. I don't know.
+
+**John Spurlock:** Where are you at, Adam? Where are you located?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Dripping Springs.
+
+**John Spurlock:** Okay.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You should know that because it's really close to Austin.
+
+**John Spurlock:** I'm actually fairly new to Texas, so I don't know, I haven't been completely indoctrinated yet.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, is that right? You're in Texas?
+
+**John Spurlock:** Yeah, yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Where at?
+
+**John Spurlock:** North Texas. Dallas-Plano area, North Texas.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, I'm sorry to hear that.
+
+**John Spurlock:** Yeah... It was nice to go to the Podcast Movement Conference though, which happened to be in Dallas this year... So that was just a quick commute. I didn't have to travel anymore.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow, that must have been good for your, I guess, in quotes, the business, right? The business of what you're doing, not so much the business, the business, but...
+
+**John Spurlock:** Yeah, yeah. It's there's nothing better than meeting people in-person. you can do all these Zooms, but it's so much more useful to talk to people one-on-one, and you get a sense of what they're passionate about. So yeah, I thought it was great.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Hm... We question whether we should go there. I mean, we podcast, but are we part of the movement? Do we need to be part of the movement of the Podcast Movement?
+
+**John Spurlock:** You guys have been doing this for a while, so some of the tracks on how to grow your audience - you're probably less interested in.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We probably need that still. I mean, I think everybody could still grow their audience regardless, you know? But...
+
+**John Spurlock:** There were a lot of people there. Thousands of people now at a conference like this. So if you are interested in certain monetization areas, or just what the industry is doing... and there's some free parties, and stuff like that... But it's your standard conference. I think there was a little bit more interaction this time because of the pandemic. So this is the first one that came back after COVID, and so everyone is just like "Let's go!" \[laughs\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[04:23\] Right. Everyone's getting out. We spend most of our time at developer conferences, kind of being more with our people, with the audience, versus like with the other makers. I do keep up though. I read the news feeds, I've been tracking the podcasting 2.0 stuff, we've implemented some of the elements, some of the tags, and stuff...
+
+**John Spurlock:** Yeah, I saw that. That's awesome.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** ...that makes sense for us. Yeah. And just, you know, we want to be abreast of what's going on. I love that there's people trying to make technological moves; an otherwise very stagnant space... And I've been just seeing who's adopting what, and what can we adopt, and help promote things that are interesting... Because we're nerds, and when cool, nerdy things come out, it's "Well, let's promote this, let's maybe use this, let's at least think about it and talk about it, because we don't want to just be just given to the whims of Spotify." We don't want to just be serving at the pleasure of the king here the next few years... So yeah, we do try to keep up.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+
+**John Spurlock:** Yeah, yeah. What I like to say is there's no executive vice president of open podcasting. There's no manager that goes to some management conference, and then comes back and says, "This is what podcasting will be for the next three years." It's so many different players, and so they end up being very reactive. So if something happens that they don't they will try to react to that, or they'll react to competition... But for the most part, it's really up to individuals, or individual companies taking on the initiative of doing some of these kind of... I don't know, keeping the stack up to date, right? Because like you said, there's advantages to having an app like Spotify or YouTube, that has soup to nuts, the entire listener and hosting experience and monetization experience. They can create a lot by having all the pieces together, and having a central management... Whereas podcasting has to kind of do things through agreement, and through consensus, and through fear sometimes... So it's a lot more complicated.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right. Such is the world of decentralized collaboration, right?
+
+**John Spurlock:** Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But it's exciting in the other way, because there are thousands of people working on it, potentially. So that's one thing I think we have on the pro list, is that we have so many people who get up every day, and this is their job. And especially when you go to a conference like Podcast Movement, you see all the people that - this is their livelihood. And that's pretty interesting, from someone who's followed it from the very beginning, where you see just people throwing up RSS feeds on their Apache server.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Well, at one point we did -- we had a podcast where we literally edited the XML file, and I think we rsynced it,... Jerod, is that right? Go Time, originally, we rsynced the XML file...?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, so we were actually developing our current platform that we're using now... But we wanted to launch Go Time, which was our second show at the time, and we didn't want to wait for the actual app to be ready, so we launched it on SoundCloud. But we didn't want to use SoundCloud's other stuff. We just wanted them to host our mp3s for us for a little while, and so we manually hosted our own XML file, that just pointed at SoundCloud's mp3s, until our platform was able to write that file automatically for us. We were writing it by hand for probably like seven or eight episodes, Adam, wasn't it?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** A few, yeah. A small handful, I'm gonna say. It wasn't so many where it was like "Man, can we please get this?" It was maybe like less than ten, I'd say. Less than 10.
+
+**John Spurlock:** \[08:13\] So if you go to -- a small, shameless plug here, but I don't make any money from it... If you go to livewire.io, this is a site that I put together that kind of provides stats about new episodes that are coming out in the world... So I basically look at every single new episode from every podcast that comes out. There were about 1.7 million last month. I just did the stats for September. But one of those things has hosting companies. And the reason I bring it up is you'll see SoundCloud is actually still fairly high up there. So a lot of people that were using that technique are still doing it. A lot of musicians, obviously, so there are a bunch of music podcasts that DJs will put up there... But it's not only that. So technologies like this can hang around for quite some time.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's crazy, Buzzsprout is still there too, because they were the OG from way back...
+
+**John Spurlock:** Yeah. Libsyn is on there... I think they were one of the first.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, Libsyn was actually probably one of the very, very first.
+
+**John Spurlock:** Yeah, Buzzsprout's killing it. They do a lot of the podcast namespace tags as well. So they're really interested in all the new services coming out, and we've had some discussions about OP3, which I know we wanted to talk about at some point... They're really interested in that project, because it actually solves a bunch of problems at once. So it solves different problems for different constituencies in the podcast world.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. Well, that's the main reason why we reached out to you, John, because it's very interesting to us. We are open source people, we're software people, and we've been rolling our own everything since the 2015-2016 time range... And so that's left us a little bit wondering for a while, were our stats accurate? Were these people's stats accurate? How do we track what is a listen etc? All this stuff that has been going on.
+
+I've been watching with some chagrin the IAB stuff, and like this whole formalization of standards for downloads, and just kind of ignoring it, for the most part... But there was a time when Chartable first came out, that we saw what they were up to and we realized, "Okay, this is a cool way for us to validate our own stats package, our own internal package to see if it's working right." Because we could put Chartable in front of it, let them track our stats for a while, then look at our own stats and see if they're kind of at least correlated. And they were highly correlated. They were pretty close, which gave me some confidence. But then Chartable became kind of this somewhat Goliath for a little while; they were the only people that were doing it, and they started to get all this market share of - everyone started pointing their stuff through them, and then they got bought by Spotify, and that's when I just turned it off. I was like, "Well, I've gotten what I want out of this." But then up comes your deal, which is the Open Prefix Project. Is that the one that stands for OP3?
+
+**John Spurlock:** Open Podcast. I think Podcast is in there, too. Open Podcast Prefix Project.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** There you go, there's three P's.
+
+**John Spurlock:** That's right. I just call it OP3.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** OP3 is a cool, cool name, I think. I call it that as well, which is why I couldn't remember what the P's were...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I grew up in a different era, when there was only two P's.
+
+**John Spurlock:** Wait, is there? Wait, hold on...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, in my era -- this was back in the day, you know... Who's down with OPP?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Are you down with OPP?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, you know me.
+
+**John Spurlock:** Oh, right, right. You know me.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, you know me.
+
+**John Spurlock:** Yeah, a lot of those jokes are gonna... \[laughs\] Yup. I thought you were referring to the self-referential abbreviation of that. We used to have a building in college called the CAB building, which was like the Campus Administration Building, but they called it the CAB building. So it's like a recursive sort of deal...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right, yes...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. Good news it's not Unix.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I like OP3, though. OP3 is a good name.
+
+**John Spurlock:** Oh, cool. Yeah. It's stuck in my head at least, but I don't know if it's just because I'm working on it. But it's nice and short. And actually, several domains were available. I don't think there's any sort of prior company or brand that uses it, so it's worked out so far.
+
+\[12:02\] Is it worth going over how this works? Because I know everyone's listening to the podcast, and you guys are really familiar with how the podcasts are made... But I know not everyone especially knows what an analytic service is... I don't know. So maybe it makes sense to go over just super high-level... Like, there are podcast listening apps, like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, and then there's the podcast hosting side, which is usually someone like Buzzsprout, Libsyn, that the customer is the podcaster, and the podcaster, instead of doing what you guys are doing, and doing it all themselves, pays some money every month to have them hosted on WordPress, or something like WordPress.
+
+And then there are these analytic services that are affiliated with neither one, that their value is kind of being independent. And one of the services that they have is a prefix that you can use as the podcaster. So instead of all the URLs to your episodes being like cdn.changelog.com/episode-1, it's chartable.com/cdn/changelog.com/episode-1. So everyone that downloads your podcasts will first hit Chartable, which is one of these very famous analytics companies, and then they will redirect the listener app over to your CDN. So that gives them more or less the same info; actually, a little less info, but pretty much the same info that something was downloaded.
+
+And again, when we talk about podcasts, we're in a very non-scientific, non-ideal stats universe, because just because something was downloaded doesn't mean it was listened to. Lots of podcasts will download, hundreds of podcasts -- and we were talking about before the show, like, I think Changelog is in my list of a hundred of subscriptions that I subscribe to, but you guys don't know that I don't listen to everyone. And so what a lot of people do is they just apply these --
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, we know now, John. You just told us.
+
+**John Spurlock:** Yeah... Well, you know what - actually, when you said this was on Backstage, and that this would be for kind of really hardcore, I was like "Okay, so what are the very high-level topics that you guys normally discuss?" So I went to the last episode, and you guys were talking about ID3 tags. \[laughter\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, that's actually one of the reasons why he brought you Backstage... Yeah, we don't like to navel gaze very often. We just did, for a whole episode. It was one of the reasons why this was Backstage. But yeah, that was--
+
+**John Spurlock:** Let me tell you, I loved that episode. So that is something near and dear to my heart.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, good.
+
+**John Spurlock:** As part of this app that I was building, that does all the new episode calculations, I actually look at the ID3 tags of every single episode... And so I know all the details, I have my own parser, I know all these tags... You guys were talking about the encoder tag, I'm like, "Oh, it's \[unintelligible 00:14:49.21\] So I love that you have your own encoder, and are doing your own thing there... Because I think a lot of people use it behind the scenes, but it's not something that's widely talked about. There's definitely no conferences talking about ID3 tags. So I loved that discussion, that was really cool.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's such a core part of the whole way you deliver the mp3, like I said earlier on. This is the metadata that goes to the mp3. I don't understand why people don't scrutinize more to the file that's written. Like, we have wanted to for many years and have not been able to until now... So we've desired, but not have fulfilled. And now we're fulfilling. So I think it's like a --
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's hard, I guess.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** ...it's the deliverable. It's the promise that we give to our listeners. This is the \[unintelligible 00:15:34.26\] artifact.
+
+**John Spurlock:** I'm glad you're doing it, because there's a huge chicken and egg problem in podcasting, because let's say there's a new standard, or -- like, you were doing chapters. That's a great feature. But until all the listening apps implement chapters, it's hard to make the sell, right? It's hard to say -- you almost have to go first as being the publisher. So it is chicken and egg, but I like to say really hosts need to go first on a lot of these; and you are the host in this case.
+
+So I'm really glad that you guys are taking the opportunity to put this info in there, and hopefully, we'll pick up the ball and run with it and add new apps and stuff that light this kind of thing up. But you can't do it if the data isn't there.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[16:14\] What do you think about the actual chapters, John, on that episode? ...since you liked that episode. What did you think about the chapters?
+
+**John Spurlock:** Like the titles of the chapters?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, the fact that they were there...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] Did you use them? Did you use the chapters?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, I kind of mention it even in the episode, like, we get a chance to guide our listener through the episode; that isn't like some mechanic behind the scenes, or some sort of script that does it. It's me, or Jerod, or another human being we care about that's part of our team, that crafts that for the listener, to give that guideposts, to say "This is a good spot to start listening."
+
+**John Spurlock:** Yeah, there's some room for innovation there. Some people are thinking about putting animated GIFs in there, or doing kind of crazy titles... I mean, you have to remember, the \[unintelligible 00:16:59.11\] and this was my case, I was actually out walking during it; I had the phone in the pocket, and since I was actually interested the entire episode, I wasn't kind of looking for the chapter information to skip, and so forth. Usually it's most useful to kind of skip to the parts of shows that you're most interested in, and then come back to it. Or to find -- do you put URLs in there as well? I kind of like that, because then instead of having to try to read a URL in the show, you can just kind of click... But again, not all -- Apple Podcasts does, so that's actually really great. So if you put the embedded chapters in there, Apple will show them. So that's kind of an incentive for a lot of people to do it. But there's still not amazing tools, as it sounds like you've found out; there's not fantastic tools for doing that. But Apple has formally encouraged shows to do it, so actually, on that Livewire site, I just did an update of my -- I kind of keep track of how many shows use chapters, and it's a small percent; it's like a single digit percent. But it is growing. Even this year, it has grown, especially after Apple prompted everyone to do it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Tooling is required for the podcaster. That's for one. Like you said, even the host, or the podcaster.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It is. It's a high-context thing, too.
+
+**John Spurlock:** Yeah. And a lot of podcasters that I've talked to, they want to just get their audio out. So once they're done, that's the hard part, they kind of want it to go out. And if it's embedded, that basically means it's a step in between. So you have to have more work to do before the episode is even live. Now, the podcast namespace chapters are in a separate file. So a lot of their shows will actually put out like a stub file, and then fill it out later. So that's one advantage to having it external, is that you don't have to modify the actual mp3 to do it. There's some downsides to it as well, when it comes to dynamic content.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah... We support both for now.
+
+**John Spurlock:** Cool.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Just because I want to support the new stuff; why not do it in both places? The information is stored in the database, so we can write it multiple times, and that way we can update it. I think it makes a lot of sense for people who are non-technical going forward, once I hope it becomes somewhat table stakes, or at least for people who care about their podcasts to do this. I think having somebody who can edit it in a CMS after the file has been sent out is such a big win that I think that it makes a lot of sense.
+
+**John Spurlock:** Yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah... I can draw the conclusion, or the distinction between the podcasts and a YouTube video, for example. Like, I will pay attention to the video more if there's chapters for it, especially if it's five minutes or longer in time, because it's a guide to the episode. I don't always care about everything they're going to say, and in some cases, I'm going there for one piece of information. Even if it's a review; like, just give me -- can I just jump around? Give me the freedom to do so. And I feel like that's what podcasts need as well, for the same reasons. You may have the phone in your pocket, but if you don't, you may want to skip the sponsor read. And that's cool. That's your choice; it doesn't help us if you do that, but that's your opinion, and we give you that option.
+
+**John Spurlock:** \[20:11\] It's better than not subscribing, or you know, stopping listening to the show.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right, yeah.
+
+**John Spurlock:** and it's also - and I'll probably come back to this - it's open structured data. So you could have services that pull out chapter segments from shows as kind of a way to slice and dice and find new podcasts. It's more structured information you're providing as the person who knows about it, to innovate on top of. So I'm all for that. But again, someone has to do it; it's work. It's not something that can be automated.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. On that note, I think it's like a feedback loop. So you'd mentioned downloading, but not listening, and that lack of feedback loop in this sort of archaic mechanism, which is RSS feeds, and mp3s... Well, this is our ability to communicate to the clients, I suppose, to say "We're a more sophisticated podcast because we support more of the format in the mp3 and the ID3v2 spec" etc. So I feel like that gives us the chance to sort of -- in terms of a segment, maybe a chapter gets listened to more than any other. Maybe there's a certain chapter in an episode that has gotten way more attention than any other, if that aggregate comes out where they pull out certain chapters or segments. There might be some better feedback loop that can be in the process five years down the road, beyond today, where it's "We can now actually examine, at a chapter level, what is being listened to", versus, something else; the whole entire episode, for example.
+
+**John Spurlock:** So you guys are interested in the feedback. I know, after talking about OP3 a bunch, it's been -- some people actually think it's a negative. Like, you shouldn't gear your show completely towards audience feedback. You should do what you're passionate about; you're the expert, you're deciding the show... You shouldn't be all about optimizing completely based on who's listening to what, because it'll lead you down the wrong path. But what I hear you saying is that you actually do value that feedback as far as like, "Oh, they like this topic, maybe. And they didn't like this so much, and maybe we could tighten that up." And that makes sense to me, but I'm not a podcaster yet.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It makes sense to everybody.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's a melding of the two.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. It's back to like product development. If you make a product and you don't talk to a user, and you don't get their feedback in the thing you're making, are you making the thing they actually want to enjoy? Or are you just making it for your own ego, or whatever you feel like you're making the best of? I feel like if you don't have that feedback loop, you're sort of painting in the dark. What might you get?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right. That being said, we're not simply going to give exactly what's asked for, or exactly what's popular every time, because we have our own tastes, we have our own desires... We think we know what's good, and we have our listeners' best interests in mind. And so we meld the data with our own intuition, our own tastes, our own excitements, and hope that makes kind of the best of both worlds. We're not simply going to give people exactly what they ask us for every single time, because then you end up with a Homer Simpson car, you know? So it's both.
+
+**John Spurlock:** So I guess stats is a good jumping off point to talk about OP3... It's a little esoteric, and so you kind of have to know all the pieces. But I think we've talked about the various pieces at this point. So it solves basically three problems. The first problem is the problem that Jerodd, you talked about... It's that we actually have these nice third-party independent analytic services, but the incentive for them is to take the download data that they get, and immediately join it to other third-party IP address databases to enrich that data... Because they're interested in not only showing how many downloads a particular show has for an advertiser, but what the demographics of that audience is, and what the income of that audience is, and breakdowns by gender, and by ethnicity, and by political affiliation.
+
+\[24:08\] And I'm sure you guys know, it's just a matter of how much you want to spend to how kind of creepy the level of detail you can get, down to the neighborhood level, down to what apps they have installed, down to what they were yelling about... And they have an incentive to do it, because that makes their product more attractive. But they also have an incentive -- or even if they were not as interested in that, they also then become, if they're popular, like Chartable and some other companies, they become a very attractive acquisition target. So they can be joined by a yet larger company with their information, for strategic reasons.
+
+So that is kind of one problem that's out there. So even in -- you mentioned already that Chartable and Podsights, two of the largest of these analytic services got acquired in February. And you can imagine, I'm sure even some of your listeners might be thinking "Oh, this sounds like a great business, so I could probably write some Perl scripts to do this. I'll just be the next Chartable." And that doesn't really solve the problem, in my estimation, long-term; it just repeats the pattern. So they're gonna get popular, and they're gonna have the same incentives, they're gonna -- it's the same sort of pattern. So that's problem one.
+
+Problem two is that the hosting companies themselves, there's all of these hosting companies now; they are very mature, and they all offer very similar features. As you say, table stakes features. They all now have to have some sort of stats ability, so they have to task someone as part of their sprint every month, like "Oh, make sure the stats are clean, that we're filtering out all the bots, and making sure we're performing the calculations properly." And they're basically all showing very similar charts, similar charts and graphs. And it's even more ironic, because the larger shows then turn around and use a third-party service to they use their stats, because they don't trust the host stats.
+
+So it's table stakes, and it's a lot of work, and they're all doing it separately, right? So it's not really value-add anymore. It used to be. Maybe even five years ago, it was like a selling point; you could say, "Hey, we offer great stats." But now, most offer stats, and they don't really view -- they would love to get on and work on other things. So they kind of view stats as a -- I don't want to say a commodity, but you know, you specialize; when an industry gets mature, you specialize into functions.
+
+So that's problem two... Problem three is a little more esoteric, but it's the whole notion of -- we talked a little bit about kind of open podcasting before we started here. One of the cool things... I was around -- I'm old enough to know, like, before the internet was around at all. And when the internet came around, as somebody who likes to build things, you just have this limitless possibility of "Oh, how cool would it be if we did this? Or that?" and you're only limited by your ideas and the building blocks that are available. Obviously, there's some downsides that we've seen as well, but there's still so much opportunity there. And podcasting is one of those sort of interesting places where you, anyone can publish an audio file and have it pretty much distributed automatically to all these different venues while they sleep. So it's not that hard. However, there's some big chunks of the system that are not like that, even in open podcasting.
+
+So let's say you had a great idea for an app, you wanted to create the next big podcasting app. You can go out and scrape all the RSS feeds, you can get the show and episode level information, you put it all together... Hopefully, they have nice chapter information, and tags, and so forth. But think about what YouTube does - they have some things that you currently can do, like comments and monetization. But even a more core thing is recommendations. So what podcasts are people listening to? What podcasts are people listening to around you? People that subscribe to this, subscribe to that. Even if it's a very popular app, they know within their app stats like that, but they don't know across the whole industry, because it's so distributed. There's no place where that information resides. It resides basically in silos, at different levels; at hosts, and so forth.
+
+\[28:23\] The services, these third-party analytic services - they have it, actually a fairly broad sample, but they don't make it available. So that's kind of a third aspect, is it would be great, it would unlock all kind of more features that we could build on top of the open podcasting system, keep it competitive, if that data was available. But then, as a listener being available in a safe way, right? Because more people listen to podcasts than make podcasts; you kind of need to satisfy both concerns. And as a listener, I'm not sure I love the fact that my IP address is going everywhere, right? That's where these analytics services come in. And most apps don't disclose that this kind of stuff is happening, right? So you want services to kind of do right by the listener, even without an explicit agreement there.
+
+So OP3 is a system that I was putting together, I was like, "This is the internet, and I can build stuff... Let's try to build an ideal system that solves a bunch of these problems at once." So it is an analytic service in that is very similar to Chartable. You add a prefix, op3.dev/whatever to your episodes; it's completely free. It runs on a CDN platform, so it's up 100% of the time. It'll never be the bottleneck in getting to your content... But it's sort of radical in that it turns around and does all the minimization, and so forth. It throws away most of the requested information, and it stores it. But it turns around and makes all the participating shows data, the minimized data, the minimized request logs available to anyone. So it turns around and makes hashed IP addresses, what episode was downloaded, when it was downloaded, the user agent... Things that are not user-identifying necessarily - it turns around and makes that data available, so that now a startup can go and look at that data to say, "Oh, this is a signal of what podcasts are trending in Cleveland", that sort of thing. So that is radical, because none of these other services will -- you know, they are very against that. That's kind of the core mission, is not to do that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah... Don't do that.
+
+**John Spurlock:** It solves the stats problem for the hosting companies, because now they can sort of outsource. They can say -- even a new hosting company can come up and say, "We're gonna use OP3 for our stats. That solves the stats problem." And then they don't have to do it.
+
+And then it solves the independence problem. I am not kind of affiliated with any corporation. We haven't talked about why you should trust me to do this, but I'm basically an independent -- I do this full-time, I do podcast ecosystem development. And it is open source. So not only do I turn it on and make the data available, but the entire machine is auditable; not that it has a nice privacy policy, but you can look at the code, and you can say, "Oh, it's not actually doing what it's supposed to do." Or "Oh, I see that it is doing what it claims to do."
+
+So everything is out there on GitHub, even the deployment. So it deploys via GitHub Actions, so anyone can kind of see, flow through, and not have to take my word for it. And we'll have better docs at some point... But the idea is, I wouldn't trust a system myself if I didn't know or trust the people behind it. So this is one way to kind of jumpstart that process. Does that make sense? Now, it's very early days, but right now I've gotten a lot of positive feedback on "Hey, we want this thing to exist."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You're speaking my language. I want you to get to the part where you say what's in it for John.
+
+**John Spurlock:** So I'm mostly known right now as the data guy, right? So I have all these data reports that I do on the podcast industry. I'm interested in it from several angles, but one of it is the data aspect, right? You can't make a good app without knowing all this information. And I'm working on some apps and services to do that. But this particular OP3 project is not a get-rich-quick scheme. This is something that I plan on actually publishing the bill.
+
+\[32:14\] So I created a separate Cloudflare account for this, it all runs under that account... I am asking for sponsorship, so I imagine that this will take -- I'm a developer, so it'll probably take a couple of weeks, several weeks of initial development, and then some ongoing maintenance, and so forth. And then ongoing data costs. But all of that should be doable with sustaining sponsors. And again, I've talked to a lot of the big players in the system, but if you are someone that wants this to exist, it won't happen unless I get enough of those sponsorships.
+
+So right now I have kind of what I call pioneer sponsorship, where you can support monthly, just to kind of kickstart development. But that's the model. The model here is to always be an independent, non-IP brokering service, that kind of self-sustains itself. And all the information there is actually on the GitHub site. So if you go to the GitHub site, it kind of provides a roadmap, and then it provides some of the commitments around how we want this thing to work. And if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. But I've done a lot of projects like this, and I've gotten a lot of good feedback on this so far, even in such an early state. And again, I think it's because it's sort of zeitgeisty, and it solves some problems, like I said, for different constituents.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+
+**John Spurlock:** But it's serverless, right? So it'll run automatically. I don't need to poke around and upgrade the servers.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's interesting to have this as an independent thing though, because we've been part of certain organizations in the past with our podcasts that had inflated downloads, and we thought we had more listeners than we did at one point during our show... And then when we changed to our own platform, we were kind of bummed, weren't we, Jerod? I mean, if we're being honest, we were like, "Oh, actually our show isn't quite as popular as we thought it was." It was still popular, but it was not quite to the level we thought.
+
+So with many stats platforms, you have many possibilities for error, essentially. Conservative stats versus non-conservative stats, being like overly inflated, or whatever it might be. And then also the data problem, like the people's identity. Our desire, to be clear, John - and you may know this already, but it is not to circumvent our listeners' privacy. It's more so to understand how does our show perform out there at large, one, because we are a sponsored, primarily sponsored show. We do have Changelog++, which is bridging that gap, but we don't believe that our Plus-plus membership -- maybe one day it might, Jerod, I don't know... But I think we'd be crazy to say that it will dwarf the ability of money we can make as a business from sponsors. So our desire isn't to circumvent any of that system and remove our listeners' privacy. We want that stuff to be theirs. I mean, it's just not something we want at all. And then you've got all sorts of things in the mix there; you've got different platforms... And that's half the reason why we decided to go the route we did. One, we made an early bet that we can get Fastly to work with us. And so since the beginning of the platform we built, we have had Fastly as our primary CDN partner. And every bit of that bandwidth since 2016 when we launched this open source platform has been - thank you, big thank you to Fastly for taking that burden on for us. Because one, we're a small business, but two, we wanted to make sure that we can actually deliver globally.
+
+\[35:50\] When you're a global show by default, which we are - well, we don't want somebody in New Zealand to get the show later, or slower, or whatever, or have a lesser experience. Having that CDN in place for that part of it was a big deal for us. But just the independence of OP3 I think is an interesting aspect. I guess the concern is - and what you may not be able to guarantee now is how long can it remain independent? Will always be independent? How can we ensure that it is independent? If it needs to be in place for the listeners' sake and for the hosts' sake, and the one place to go to get stats done right, and keep it third-party, and keep it independent - how do we make sure that it remains independent?
+
+**John Spurlock:** I mean, the classic answer to that, or from some of the models that are out there for open source projects, is an organization of some sort. So some sort of umbrella organization that has its own tax ID, and that sort of thing... And honestly, I would love to do that. And I'm basically writing it in such a way so that that is an option in the future. But as you know, some of these projects - you don't want to do that upfront, because it's a lot of work, and then it goes nowhere. But I'm definitely -- again, it's a separate account. So you could easily hand those keys over to multiple people, and have it run seamlessly. And then same thing with GitHub; right now, it's on my kind of LLC account. But you could easily imagine that going to an open source approach if there are more people willing to sponsor it, and having more constituents. So that's something I'm definitely open to.
+
+Again, it's not something I want to necessarily -- I do have experience running these kinds of things, but I don't want to have this be my full-time job forever. I'd like to get back to writing some other things, too. But I see this as so strategically important that -- and I see the possibility that we could kind of do it wrong, that I do think it's important to kind of get it right, get it out there, and at least have existence proof, have people using it... And kind of do it the right way, to give it the most chance of succeeding. And then we'll see where that takes us later on. But yeah, I'm definitely open to \[unintelligible 00:37:50.05\] this, because that's something that really you want multiple owners. It's really owned by some of the larger players, and the people that use it, really.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Is there a chance for this thing to make money though? Like, could it be a "commercial open source" company? Could it be a cause company? Could it be an open source company, basically? Could you build something around this that turns it -- or does it remove the independence aspect of it?
+
+**John Spurlock:** Exactly. I don't think you ever want to charge podcasters directly, because then we'd have incentives to kind of bring in podcasters kind of the wrong way. You want them to -- well, first of all, the fact that it's open, kind of right now is a barrier. It's actually less of a barrier than it used to be, but the fact that their numbers are public is a barrier for many shows... And you kind of have to ask - and I've had these conversations... "So what is a concern about being open?" Again, if the data was handled properly and you get over that hurdle, what is the hurdle of "Why don't you want your numbers to be public?" And everyone has their own answers to that, but I think getting over that hump is one thing. I could see charging though, and I've already had discussions like this, because a lot of these new hosting companies want to basically do the outsource, "Hey, can you do our stats for us?" And in order to do that, they do need some of their shows to have that guarantee that it's not gonna be part of the public pool. And so that is something you definitely see, and they're willing to pay money for that, obviously. So that's something that could be a very --
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** To pay for privacy of those stats?
+
+**John Spurlock:** Pay for -- so they would be the primary customers of that, yeah. I mean, obviously, we'd probably try to make as many of those shows open, and I'm sure a lot of those shows would be open, but you'd need to have the checkbox that's like "Hey, keep this private." And since they would then be the only consumer of that info, I think it's fair to have them pay for it. So I can see that as a pretty easy way to make money.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What's the main pushback from podcasters on why they don't want their stats to be open? Is it just because they just don't want them to, or what are the concerns they generally share with you?
+
+**John Spurlock:** \[39:56\] Yeah, exactly. I try to keep the conversation very open, just kind of let it hang out there... Because if you think about it yourself - and you guys are very open with your download numbers - really, it comes down... It's all of the internet entrepreneur, you kind of want to fake it till you make it; you kind of want to put out the presence of, "Oh, this show is bigger than you think." And once you get the real numbers, then it's like "Oh." And it is negative if -- let's say your show numbers are public, and you're doing great; there's no problem there. But then your numbers start to trail off. And it's one thing if it's only the podcaster that knows this; maybe they get a little bit depressed, or they get energized to do a better job... But now it's a little bit worse if that's public, right? You can see that heading in bad directions, potentially. So it's really just making that \[unintelligible 00:40:40.10\] But Twitter - everyone sees your follower count.
+
+I feel like especially younger people, they're much more open and authentic from the beginning, so I think that's not as much of a problem. It's really more of people that are still in that old mindset of "I want to project that I'm this global show", whereas that may not reflect reality. But again, I think having everyone's stats in the same pool makes it a little less -- because as you say, there's actually a lot of difference between hosts, which is really tough right now. Even if they have the same IAB certification, the certification is such that the major inputs to that function can be variable. So which IPs you use to do different things are not specified. So even though you paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for these certifications, you don't get apples to apples comparisons out the other end. And so you move shows, and all of a sudden your show numbers move, and that can be -- some people actually use that as a selling point; they say "Actually, your numbers will be higher on our list, because we do a worse job."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Hah! "We can't promise you more listeners; we can promise you more downloads."
+
+**John Spurlock:** Right. And I don't know if you've been following the -- there was a big to-do in the podcast world last week. In Bloomberg there was an article about now that all these systems exist, they are gameable. So there's apps that will have a third-party library that will ingest podcasts, or download podcasts effectively to get coins in a particular game. So you can get 1,000 coins by listening to 30 seconds of a podcast. Why is it 30 seconds? Because that is the Certified IAB download that triggers all of the "Oh, this is an authentic download. All the ads were fired." And so that's problematic, obviously. And I'm not against ads either, and I think actually some of these channels are legitimate marketing channels, but if you don't know that going into an ad deal, let's say, and now all of a sudden you get all this very cut-rate traffic, then that becomes extremely problematic.
+
+So I think what OP3 is going to do is it's going to hopefully identify the traffic, so you can slice and dice and see, "Oh, this show actually 50% of it is so-called rewarded traffic. So that's interesting. We're not going to throw it out, but we'll show you... Maybe the CPMs for this should not be what they are."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** On that note, what about -- I mean, I've wanted to improve this for a while, which is essentially enable people with money to sponsor more shows in ways that actually benefit them. One of the things we say when we sit down with the sponsors, like "Can we actually help you? Can we actually help you reach the audience you think you want to? Do we actually talk to the audience you think you want to talk to? And can we help communicate your message effectively, in a way that gets attention?" And if the answer is no, then we don't work with them. We don't take their money. We value the relationship and the ability to help them, because we care about our audience. If our audience would not care about you, or would not be in your wheelhouse, why would we broadcast your message? It doesn't make any sense.
+
+But at the same time, for them to come to different shows and assume potential value, there has to be some sort of data, something from them to say "Okay, these are worthwhile shows." Is that something that OP3 will help with, to be able to provide more data or more awareness to -- maybe not to the geographics and the genders and stuff like that you'd mentioned, if this is all hashed IP addresses etc. But will it help them find better places to put their money, so that more businesses like ours, more podcasts like ours can actually flourish, because it's easier, and we're not the ones saying, "Hey, our shows are great. Come buy from us", which we don't say that necessarily. We do say our shows are great, but we don't say "Hey, come buy from us", necessarily like that. It's more like if we can help you, yes, please. But give them somewhere to start to investigate and say "Okay, these six shows speak to our audience."
+
+**John Spurlock:** \[44:40\] That's really interesting. I'm glad you said that, because that's something -- and one of the reasons I've made this project open, uncomfortably open from the beginning... Right now, just to be clear, it has no charts, or graphs, or fancy stats yet, because we're starting at the lower level. So right now it does reflect back out the minimized requests, but only if you're a programmer would you care about that. But one of the cool things of having it open from the beginning is you get feedback on these sorts of things, and that's really interesting, and you could use it as a discovery mechanism for new shows... And the fact that it's using the same function means it's an apples-to-apples comparison. You don't have to worry about --
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** They'll pay you. It's like a headhunter, right? It's like a headhunter. "Can I use my marketing dollars effectively?" "Yes, thank you, John. We'll pay you to help me do that effectively."
+
+**John Spurlock:** Yeah, that's a really good idea.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Because that might be a way that you can turn this into something that, like Jerod said, "What's in it for John?"
+
+**John Spurlock:** Mm-hm. It's not something that's completely representative, right? Because it's only those that participate. But it's free to participate, and it's for the shows that want to have the open system survive, right? And kind of have these services like this discovery service that I honestly wasn't thinking about it until just now. Someone could build that on top of it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'd share our data for those reasons; it's the exact reason why we say "Well, why do people say "I don't want my data to be open." Well, it would be because you want to inflate, or you have an ego to protect, or you want to have a certain perception or... And that's totally cool. I totally get that. Fake it till you make it; I love it. I have done it, maybe still do it a little bit here and there... But we've been around enough to be established, to feel, I would say, confident in our ability to gain an audience, capture an audience, and keep an audience. And it's cool when we start from zero. We're fine with that, because we know where we can go. Maybe that's because we have thicker skin and we've been there for a while. Those who may be new to the space might be less confident in those ways.
+
+So for us, I'm like, "I would love to give that kind of data out there", because if it attracts us brands that make sense to work with us on that front - cool. Don't think that I'm out here selling you, because I'm not. One of the main things I do when I sit down with people is like "I'm not here to sell you ads. I want to know what your business is trying to do, who you're trying to talk to, what you're trying to do in your trajectory, and can we help you connect with that audience in an meaningful way? Because that's what I want to do. I don't want to sell you an ad. Kind of that's what I do, that's what we do, but that's not what we really do."
+
+**John Spurlock:** And there's enough metadata in all these shows to provide, you know, categories. You don't have to be -- what are the most popular podcasts everywhere? You can target, basically, just on public information. So you can target based on the topics of the shows, now a lot of the shows have transcripts, you can envision targeting in based off that public information... Just the iTunes categories might be a good first pass filter, other tech shows, stuff like that. But all of that, to me, doesn't cross -- as a listener that's interested in privacy, that doesn't cross the creepy line. Because it's basically just a sense of activity on these various dimensions, without having to zoom in on what neighborhood you're in. So I really like that idea.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[48:01\] So how does it work -- you're at the lower layers right now, but how does it work in terms of the actual nuts and bolts of knowing what a download is, and who it is coming from, and are you IAB-certified? Tell us all that. Because you had to make these decisions, right? Just like everybody else had to. So how did you decide on what to track exactly?
+
+**John Spurlock:** Just lots and lots of Perl scripts.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\]
+
+**John Spurlock:** There are certain agreed upon ways... So there's a few things. I could talk about this for a long time, but let me try to keep it short. Basically, you need to identify the things that are common, like what the app is, right? So you have to know, is this a request coming in from an app that a user is using, versus Chrome, or a bot, or something like that? So that's one dimension, is like what the app is; you can get that from the user agent. The harder thing is IP address, right? So there are ranges where you know to expect some interesting data coming in from them, for various reasons. Some are VPNs, some are corporate networks, where you see thousands of requests coming in from the same IP, with different user agents, so they're legitimate... And then you see the bad actors, you see the bots... Any open system is open to all sorts of automated traffic that you have to identify. And they often use Overcast as their user agent, right? So you have to do some application of filtering at the IP level as well.
+
+That used to be easier, because you could kind of identify users versus servers, and just kind of block all servers. But now it's harder, because a lot of people use VPNs, and a lot of people use Amazon Web Services for listener apps. So a lot of traffic goes through Amazon that is actually representing a listener hitting Play on an episode. So it has to be sophisticated.
+
+There are shared -- obviously, Amazon publishes their ranges, there's some public server lists, and I plan on incorporating as much public info into the calculation as I can... But as I'm sure you know, there's like day-to-day things that you have to identify. Like, you kind of rate limit some things, and then certain ones pop up and you have to add exceptions for those... That will just be part of the operation of the site. But that's part of why sponsorship is needed, because there will be some aspect to this maintenance-wise going forward.
+
+There are certain -- and I've talked to certain people that are doing something similar. So they are doing their own for-pay analytic service. They have the same problems, they need to identify the app, so there's common ways of identifying user agents... And I've been having good conversations on sharing a lot of the even IP ranges as well, because that's something that -- it's not super-high-value-add, especially for identifying VPNs, Tor, that sort of thing.
+
+So I could see -- there's some existing server lists, but I could see kind of getting together and putting those in the public as well, specifically for podcasting user agents, because that traffic actually looks a little bit different than regular web traffic.
+
+So Cloudflare actually has really good bot detection, but it's really horrible for podcasts, because their bots look different. It's something that will have to be sort of domain-specific, but I do have -- it's not impossible, right? And it's something that you do the best you can. We haven't even talked about -- I guess we have a little bit, the downloads themselves are not listens. So it's already sort of like -- you already take a percentage and just say... You just pick a number and say -- so you really do the best you can and you identify certain anomalies as they come up... But anyone in accurate digital marketing has to deal with this.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[51:54\] Yeah. But this is an open platform though, and you've got indie developers like Marco Arment, or Overcast, or different folks that are building these clients... If you could provide them a mechanism, like, on-play, fire off to the indie thing, that's some sort of account, and then you sort of be able to munge the numbers together. "Okay, well, the downloads are this, but the play count seems to be this." I don't know, is there room for this -- I feel like this indie player that you can be could be a key to helping everybody talk, and not be siloed. You know what I mean? To give that feedback loop to everybody, really.
+
+**John Spurlock:** Yeah, that would be awesome. I mean, that would be great. And actually, this is a perfect time to do it, given that a lot of the hosting companies - and I don't want to disclose all of the people I'm talking to, but a lot of the big players are really mad about what has happened with downloads and the gaming of downloads. And so they are willing and ready for a solution that you just described, where yeah, we still have downloads - we'll probably always have downloads, because that's the mechanism that you get the content on the phone... But if you think about who has the actual play data, that's Apple. And Apple actually provides -- do you guys log into your Apple Connect and look at your listens numbers from there? Because they will show you --
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Here and there.
+
+**John Spurlock:** ...not only like what down-- but they will show you like a graph of like, over the particular episode "Oh, they dropped off starting at minute 50", and that sort of thing. That is something that if they are willing to - and we come up with a protocol to get that down to stat services in a privacy-protecting way, that could really shake things up. And so I think what you've just identified is one of the most interesting kind of conversations going on in the industry right now. So if you have any good ideas on how to make that happen, it's something that someone like Marco would actually do...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It seems like we have lots of good ideas, John... Lots of good ideas around here. We'll just keep talking, we'll just keep talking.
+
+**John Spurlock:** Because that as well is something that's resistant against fraud, because that's another huge -- like, if you can just generate requests, you have to make sure that it's signed, and that sort of thing. So I do think it's possible, and it's kind of fun to think about. And I think now is a really good time to do it, because in a couple months I think people will be on to other things, and worried about other things, so I think now's a really good time to capture this. So any sort of emerging standard that comes out, OP3 will definitely support.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It wouldn't make sense for anybody who's in our position to want to know that information. I can't imagine why you wouldn't want to know all that detail. Obviously, not to the level of like what neighborhood, or what gender, what political affiliations you mentioned before... Like, that's not of importance. But more like -- okay, sure, we get 40,000 downloads, 50,000 downloads, whatever that number is, but 35,000 play, or whatever the number is. Like, I would not want to operate on inflated ideas, I suppose, or awareness of what our episodes perform at. I want to be a bit more clear about that. Not so much that we're even looking at our stats every single day... I think for us it's more like "How do we trend? Was last year better than this year? Can we continue in this trajectory?" Not like "Oh, well, this episode did x, so we're upset." It's just more like "What was different about that show than this show, that outperformed?" We didn't even think that show would be great. Not so much that it would be bad, but more like "What stood out about that show that made it overly perform, while this one underperformed in comparison?" "Well, on this episode we did this, this or this", or you know, we could at least address some anomalies, or investigate, and try our best to either stop that if it's bad, or repeat it if it's good.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What works today? Like, what does it do today? Can we redirect? Can we start plugging our stuff in?
+
+**John Spurlock:** Oh, don't ask that. Don't ask that, don't ask that... \[laughs\] Yes, so that is the base level -- I basically put it out there in the minimum possible working version. So what happens today is it 100% will redirect your episode, and by sticking it in there -- and you guys could do this easily, because you own your RSS feed. Most hosting companies -- so if you're with Megaphone, or Libsyn, or whatever... Some actually have a UI in their CMS that you can specify a prefix, but all of them have a workflow now because of Chartable and these other companies. If you email them a prefix, they'll test it out and they'll add it for you. So that's always the backdoor to it.
+
+\[56:22\] But yeah, if anyone thinks this idea is great and wants to kind of play around with their own data, or just contribute data almost as a donation, just go ahead and add the prefix. It works great today; it's been running for a few weeks now. And we've put some really huge shows on it, and it's been really solid. I've been really thrilled with the way it's performed so far. Now, we'll see what the bill comes in at the end of the month... But from a stability point of view, and from a "Your users are going to get your episode" point of view, it's definitely there.
+
+We do have an API, and it has a Swagger definition, and everything like that... But right now, it's just a single endpoint, and it's "Give me the raw redirect log." So it's, again, very similar to the Apache logs that you get, except that you get only hashed IPs and the very few attributes that we currently capture, like what the URL was, what the user agent was. So if you wanted to, you could write - and people are actually doing this - just taking that data and performing their own downloads calculations for various things... And they're finding all sorts of things. So they're finding open source user agent identification libraries that weren't as robust as they thought they were. So they're already improving that, just by looking at data, now that it's available. And again, this is non-user-identifying data; this is just like user agents.
+
+So even that, it's kind of the interesting aspects of something being open, that you don't -- you can't predict all of the ways that it will be used, and it'll be useful. But that's really interesting. So if anyone has a huge show, I would say a medium to large audience, I would love it if you guys would be able to try the prefix out, almost as a way of saying "We want this to exist." And then I'm working really hard on rolling that all up in a high-quality way to show episodes, and then downloads. So that's what I'm going to be focusing on full-time for the next four weeks or so probably. But just to be clear, that's not available right now.
+
+So if you're a podcaster and you just kind of want to get a chart out of something, stick with your current providers. But if you want to start at least being a participant in this -- and we can always back-calculate the stats. So once we get the calculations done, we'll be able to light up any data that you've put in to date. I'd love that. So just the more, the merrier, because you always find things... You know, it's trending in this area of the world, and you didn't expect that; or they're sending weird-looking data in. So all of that is great.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Are there any existing Perl scripts? Like, are there stuff that people, the community have been writing, that are -- is there a collection of places where I could just point it at the API, at my data, and get some of these numbers in a hackery kind of way in the meantime?
+
+**John Spurlock:** From OP3, or from like Apache --
+
+**Jerod Santo:** From what you're providing at your API.
+
+**John Spurlock:** Yeah, I mean, again, this is super-early. So it's the early adopters. But if you go to the -- have you gone into the Podcast Social, the Podcast Namespace project Mastodon yet?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** No.
+
+**John Spurlock:** That might be the best place to find those kinds of things, because I know they are in development. I think it's just podcastindex.social, and you can sign up there. That's where everyone interested in the new podcast tags are kind of talking about. So that might be one place to look.
+
+As far as open downloads, I think it was Podsites... One of the existing companies, three years ago, introduced this notion of open downloads, which is basically a way of saying "For a given request log, let's come up with a deterministic calculation of downloads." And it's fairly simplistic, because they're a prefix. But I know some people are looking at that.
+
+\[59:54\] So if you search for ODL, or "open downloads" on GitHub, there's some code there that takes standard Apache logs, or it needs to be \[unintelligible 01:00:02.02\] or something like that. There's some actual code there. And I would imagine, when I do my download calculation, I'm going to basically use that as the first pass; not the code, but basically the approach. And then my own IP lists, and any sort of other clever things we have to do there.
+
+So that's an interesting -- if you want to contribute back to kind of a shared... Like, if you want to start your own project like this, check out ODL, because that's another sort of open project that wants to do kind of open code on this data, as well as the data.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay.
+
+**John Spurlock:** All these O-project names...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yes. OMG, so many ODLs... For ways to open downloads... I've not seen it at the time. Operator Discretization library... That doesn't look like it's it. Maybe you'll need to link us up, because my initial GitHub requests are failing, but...
+
+**John Spurlock:** It's fairly small, and it went nowhere, but it's one of those weird things where a lot of times the spec goes nowhere, and then it's found when it's needed.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**John Spurlock:** I know people are looking at breathing new life into that. And I definitely plan on using that approach, if not the code directly.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Dang, man, so this is super-early days. I knew it was early, but I thought you at least had some download numbers or something.
+
+**John Spurlock:** Oh, it's early.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Dang, man. You're hilarious, Jerod.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You're just funny, man, the way you come at him like that. It's funny. "Dang, man..."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I'm not mad at him. I'm just -- it's factual.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, I know. It's just funny.
+
+**John Spurlock:** It is early. And again, usually, this is not comfortable for me... I mean, I've worked in big tech, I've worked in --
+
+**Jerod Santo:** "This is not comfortable..." \[laughs\] Sorry to make you so uncomfortable, John.
+
+**John Spurlock:** No, not this, but the whole notion of putting things out early in public. Usually, I'm the type of person that really spends a long time polishing everything, and then the announcement blog post, right? That's the standard. But I'm sort of glad I did it in this case, because I'm getting fantastic ideas, and places to go in the future... And I'm so glad I did it. Because I would have gone heads down and did a particular thing, and then have to do a bunch of other additional work. It's great to have this feedback from the beginning, if a little uncomfortable in the beginning. So yeah, if you're looking for graphs, or download numbers right now, and that's all you want to get out of it, just hold on a few weeks, and then we will do a proper announcement blog post.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's not ALL I want to get out of it. I just would like to get that out of it at some point. Happy to throw one of our shows behind the prefix and see what happens... But it's always more satisfying to get some sort of numbers back.
+
+**John Spurlock:** Yeah. Well, you could do -- again, the documentation makes it fairly easy to filter on your URLs. So you could very easily - and this is what people are doing right off the bat, is writing little scripts that hit the API every so often for that URL; you could do that today fairly easily.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So that sounds cool. So this podcast social thing - so is this podcasting 2.0? Are we talking about podcasting 2.0? Or is this like a separate thing? Help us understand. Because there's like a \[unintelligible 01:02:56.20\]
+
+**John Spurlock:** Oh, we're changing topics.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** No, same topic. I'm talking about OP3. Like, are you podcasting 2.0 or not?
+
+**John Spurlock:** Oh, yeah. So which site did you hit? So the Mastodon for the podcasting 2.0 project is PodcastIndex.social.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I'm just asking, like, that deal, that group of people - are you one of them? Are you podcasting 2.0?
+
+**John Spurlock:** I'm in there. I'm in there quite a bit. What's interesting about all of these new tags is it's something that's not necessarily new to the industry... A lot of the existing players, like Blueberry and Buzzsprout, have wanted to do this for a long time... But as soon as they come up with a new standard, all their competitors are like "We're not going to implement the Blueberry standard."
+
+So what's nice about the Podcast Namespace Project, as interesting a cast of characters as it is, is that it's completely anti -- it's completely independent. It's anti-corporate, like punk rock. There's no question that all they care about is making podcasting better, and not helping one of the various companies.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[01:04:08.29\] Right.
+
+**John Spurlock:** So that's why I think a lot of people are interested. It's maybe not new from an idea point of view, but it's a fantastic way of standardizing a lot of competitors, ultimately.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, I guess what I'm trying to drive at, like OP3, is it punk rock?
+
+**John Spurlock:** Definitely. Definitely.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay. So you're right there. In essence, in spirit you are a podcasting 2.0 movement person. Maybe it's not part of the namespace; it's a different thing altogether. But OP3 is part of this group of miscreants or something, that are like doing cool, interesting things.
+
+**John Spurlock:** Well, again, there's no coordinator... So you need to have -- I don't know, you need to have some sort of loose idea of where people are going. Otherwise, it's just everyone running in different directions. So I do try to post in there, and if people have questions and that sort of thing, I do try to participate in those conversations.
+
+I was known for a while for being the comment-- so if anyone has questions on their commenting standard, they actually have a way of defining cross-application comments for podcasting. So think about Goodpods, but something that's open, that every app could participate in, using Activity Pub, if --
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Are people using that?
+
+**John Spurlock:** No.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I would love for that to be a thing, but no one's using it, right?
+
+**John Spurlock:** No.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It sucks.
+
+**John Spurlock:** And all these things are huge chicken and egg problems. And that more than most, because even if the apps and the host implemented it tomorrow, people have to comment. So it's like, that is the hardest one by far. If we ever crack that, then we'll know that there's been a lot of forward progress behind this initiative. But I'm not giving up. I think it's a good idea. Comments are one of those things -- when you go to YouTube, there's a lot of negative comments, obviously... But I don't know -- personally, I don't interact in the comments that much. But sometimes you do, and the comments are extremely funny, or helpful, or you rabbit hole on something. So it's something I'd love to have, at least it as a possibility for podcasters.
+
+And you mentioned before feedback... Stats are one way of knowing that people are out there, but I think new podcasters love to hear back from their listeners. So anything that makes that easier I think would be cool as well. But that's a complicated tag...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I glanced at it and I thought "Nope, not going there." We have comments just on site, and we get some comments...
+
+**John Spurlock:** Well, what do you use for your comments? What's the backend for the comments? What protocol do you use?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** We use an HTML form, like the form tag on HTML. So it's old-school, man. You just go to the website --
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And Postgres to store the data.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And we store the data in a database. There's no smarts there. It's all stupid.
+
+**John Spurlock:** And it's not even WordPress. Because WordPress, actually -- a lot of people that self-host use WordPress; they have their own comment model, and there is someone, not affiliated with podcasting 2.0, but that has an activity plugin that works great with these comments. So once that gets a little more finalized, I think that will be an easy way to light up, at least those self-hosters that use WordPress; because basically, then it's just a checkbox of making it available.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wasn't that like Disqus? Disqus was like -- isn't that just like commenting services out there?
+
+**John Spurlock:** Yeah, but you want to be able -- if it's an open protocol, you want to be able for each app to be able to pull the data into their app without shooting them off to a separate iFrame, without shooting them off to another app... So it basically supports any protocol that allows you to do that. Activitypub/fediverse/mastodon... That's, actually a great protocol for this problem, but there's not a lot of libraries out there; the spec is actually very loosely defined. It's really like what Mastodon does.
+
+And Twitter is actually another supported one. I think Twitter is actually not bad, because a lot of shows post to Twitter when they release a new episode, and all the protocol is for -- the tag itself is fairly easy to implement. You just say "podcast social interact" and point it to the Twitter URL. The hard part is having the apps take that URL, call the Twitter data API, integrate it nicely, integrate replies... So the tag itself is easy to implement, and a lot of people have done actually just that part. But the ecosystem needs to evolve quite a bit, especially on the player side, to take advantage of it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:08:22.03\] As somebody who's on the punk-rock/indie side of things, what do you say then whenever Instagram, or Tiktok, or YouTube seem to win the eyeballs or the attention, because they're the platform, they have this stuff baked in? There's no argument on like which spec, which protocol, which API should we pull in...? This is going to be a systemic problem long-term if we can't get somebody to win in this space, and get somebody to implement this and run with it?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Or some idea to win.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, the idea, but you've got clients... There's no unification in podcasting, which is like the good thing and the band thing. You know what I mean? Like, on YouTube, you can go be a YouTuber, and YouTube provides the platform, and the comments are there. And on TikTok, you can go be a TikTokker. I'm not saying I want to be that, but... And the comments are baked in. The creator doesn't care really at all, or think at all about the platform necessarily, except for that it's there to enable them to connect and create even more... Where I think podcasting is like self-made, indie, but then it's also like laggy, and doesn't have that cohesiveness across clients... Like, there's no one way to podcast. You ask anybody, you grab five people who actually listen to podcasts, and they all listen to them differently. Different clients, there's no one way... You know, do they comment? Is there comments? Are there chapters? Do they know what ID3 even means? Like, no. None of that stuff, because they just don't care. They're there to consume. And that's what worries me, I guess, about podcasting - it doesn't have its act together like a platform might. But then that's kind of like the good thing, because it's independent. I get that. But it's still the Achilles heel of where we thrive, and where we're investing all of our efforts.
+
+**John Spurlock:** I think we know what our target should be, at least in the short-term. We all have YouTube on our phones, we all have Spotify on our phones... I think we know the minimum bar of like what people expect now. We all have TikTok on our phones. The minimum bar of what people expect from an app that delivers high-quality media, audio/video. So that can keep us busy for quite some time. I do think a lot of the Podcast Namespace features are kind of going beyond that, actually, in some ways... There's some interesting things we're doing with cryptocurrencies, and that sort of thing... But we don't even have to get to that point yet, because we have something else, and this something else is something that I think is more top-of-mind to people, and people that listen to the podcasts that they like, and that is the platform aspect.
+
+So everyone now is kind of familiar - when you are on a platform, you're subject to their rules, and their capriciousness. And that used to be an extremely esoteric, interesting to only one or two -- a very handful of people. But now everyone knows of a YouTuber, or someone that either they are, or they know, or they listen to, that has strong opinions on this. And all of them would love to jump to something that was a little less centralized, like Instagram, or whatever. And people are using Substack for this now... So I think there's still a ways to go there. I think we'll always have that as kind of something that's better.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Potentially. But then you have sponsors... You'll have sponsors eventually, though... At some point though, the control can be wrangled back. If Cloudflare, for example, was -- you know, you use workers, or I think there's some details around your platform that's \[unintelligible 01:11:49.00\] you're on Cloudflare. But if they didn't like what you're doing, Cloudflare would pull their support from you, and you'd be infrastructureless. So there's still that aspect of indie...
+
+**John Spurlock:** Well, welcome to development in 2022... \[laughter\] But yeah, I agree.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[01:12:06.10\] Yeah. You go lower down the infrastructure and you can still have different plugs pulled. But at that level, it's been generally less onerous, or what do you call it; draconian. Whereas the powers that be at the social media networks have really put their thumb down on their creators.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Those have been exercised more so.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah.
+
+**John Spurlock:** And I think there's certain features that are more susceptible to that sort of thing. So OP3 is -- whether or not it succeeds or fails, it really doesn't affect making podcasting better. I mean, I would love it to succeed, but you know what I mean... That doesn't affect comments being added to the spec, or... Everyone else marching along just fine. Those types of things are less susceptible to something like that. A podcaster still controls their destiny, because they have a URL to their feed. And if they have a domain, they can move that feed wherever they want, and put whatever features they want in there. So to that extent, you never really lose as much control to a platform like that. And yes, you can rely on these services, but you can easily take them out and move to another service.
+
+So in that way, it does kind of survive who's up and who's down in the cloud wars going forward. But I could be naive on that... But, at some point, you have to -- as you say, you need to distribute via CDN, and there's no distributed CDN platform quite yet, right? There's IPFS, Tor, but there's no kind of like -- you have to use the tools that you have, and just kind of... As long as you own the URL, you're able to kind of move who's implementing those services, I think that's the best we can do.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** As close as you can get, yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** All road leads to blockchain there... You're like "Well, the last stretch is like, it has to go on an immutable ledger, so they can't take it off the ledger. Gosh..."
+
+**John Spurlock:** Is that where you're going? See, I don't know about that. See, to me that's still in the future...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I think he's joking, right? I think he's joking.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** No, I'm mostly saying -- well, as you get more and more extreme, eventually in your mind you're like "Well, I guess we've finally found out the reason for the blockchain. There it is right there."
+
+**John Spurlock:** Can't we just check everything into Git? We'll just check all the podcast episodes into Git and be done with it. Oh, Microsoft, though. Yeah, this is...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, exactly.
+
+**John Spurlock:** It's a tough problem.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Well, I think you have identified though the lowest barrier to independence, which is owning your own domain, which is why early on --
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Own your feeds, man.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Even with our platform, we -- this isn't really about us, but a short stint about it... We considered launching this platform that we built using SoundCloud, and SoundCloud API; we mentioned earlier that we handcrafted an XML file based upon SoundCloud while we built and launched... But when we thought about it, we thought "We want to own our own destiny. And if SoundCloud changes the game behind the scenes, or they get underfunded, or they don't get the next funding round, or something happens to their platform that doesn't suit us long-term, then we've at least, you know, state our flag, and we're going our direction." And it became even more clear when we got partners like Linode, and Fastly, and others to support us on the infrastructure side, to enable us to build freely, essentially, what we wanted to build.
+
+But yeah, I think that owning your own domain is kind of step one, really, in the process. And when you are on an Anchor or something else, I think you obviously forego that... Because who's gonna go out and build their own thing, like we have? It doesn't make sense for everyone. It just doesn't. But the independence does. And that's where I think an open source platform self-hosted could make sense. WordPress has made sense for many people; you own your own domain, you run your own WordPress, you control your own XML feeds... And if the future of the podcast prefix and spec etc. enables that, then that's the closest you can get to non-platform.
+
+**John Spurlock:** \[01:16:02.07\] Right. And I hope there's other services that pop as well that do special -- I like the idea of at least encoding a way for people not to have to do it themselves in order to implement all the specs. So yeah, you'd like to have open stats, you have a few options there; or you want to do live streaming, maybe you have a few options there. It's just when there's one option, I think, that things break down.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Agreed. Well, I've gotta hop off, guys. John, this has been awesome. We appreciate you sitting down with us for so long. I think OP3 is really cool. We're gonna throw a feed at it, we're gonna get some data in there for you. We'll pick a show, put it in there, start crunching some numbers, kick the tires... I definitely want to see it succeed. I think that having an open version of this is one piece of the puzzle. There's a lot of different pieces to this puzzle, and I wish you the best of luck on it, man, because there's lots of work left to do, and lots of decisions left to make. And I hope you get some serious sponsorship so that it can thrive, and not die on the vine, as so many things do... Like the comments, man. I want the comments. But you know, gotta get that chicken and egg figured out.
+
+**John Spurlock:** It'll get there.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What kind of sponsors are you looking for?
+
+**John Spurlock:** For OP3?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Mm-hm. What are ideal sponsors for you?
+
+**John Spurlock:** I think obviously people that use or have an interest in it succeeding. It's great to have benefactors, just like "I like the idea." But for something like this, I'd love the fact that they have some sort of skin in the game. So they either have shows that are on the platform, or they've done this before, or they -- I've already had some interest inbound from just random companies that need to verify downloads for one reason or another, because they provide some sort of service, for a whole variety of reasons. So they're actually really interested in having this succeed, and they would just have their clients implement it. So they're happy to sponsor stuff.
+
+So actually, I don't worry about the sponsorship so much, because if people use it enough, I think it's a fairly easy sell. And it's not going to cost thousands of dollars a month to run. And again, I'm not planning on making this my full-time job, so I don't need to go out and get rent money from this as far as sponsorship goes. It just needs to be substaining, which hopefully if we're clever about how we store things and do data retention, it's not going to break the bank.
+
+So the ideal sponsor would be either a big podcaster, or one of the existing players in the space. So one of the hosting companies, or a large network... Anyone that's interested in looking into this.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** A CDN?
+
+**John Spurlock:** Could be. Yeah, I know Cloudflare -- I actually am really tied into Cloudflare's developer network, so I could go that route... But I think for something like this, you actually want to maintain some level of independence. I don't want free money from them for this. So if they are fine with this use case, to me that's fine. It is written against their alien technology, so it's not very portable. So if we were going to port this to Fastly or whatever, there's no standard yet as far as how to write code on the CDN across all of these. Everyone does storage, and the services that they offer differently; so that would be harder.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I like your idea of a CDN. Maybe if there was like a CDN aggregate that actually was Fastly, Cloudflare, AWS... You don't even know where your stuff is at, but you're using them.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's somewhere... Somewhere out there.
+
+**John Spurlock:** Stick it in all three, and then you have redundancy.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's right.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, exactly.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** John, thanks so much for the guided tour, I suppose, through this stuff.
+
+**John Spurlock:** Yeah, it was fun. I love talking about this stuff.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Absolutely. We'd love to have you back.

The Oban Pro featuring Parker Selbert_transcript.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,615 @@
+**Jerod Santo:** Alright, we're backstage, and I'm Jerod. I'm joined by Parker Selbert of Oban fame. What's up, Parker?
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Hey! Nice to be here, Jerod.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Nice to be here as well. We're both here, we're both having a good Friday, I hope... I'm doing alright; I've got a little bit of a cough, but hanging in there... And excited to talk to you today about your project, because hey, we've been using it; we've been open source leeching off of it (as you do) for a couple of years now... And listeners of our Ship It podcast probably heard the story of you listening to Ship It, finding out that we were using Oban in some sort of incomplete fashion, and then slipping into our PRs, as it were, and fixing up and extending our use of Oban on our Changelog.com repo, which was pretty cool for us.
+
+It's cool to have somebody listening to the show be like "Hey, I wanna get involved and create a real valuable contribution", and it's just a beautiful thing. So again - I know we've thanked you for it already, but I'll thank you again here on Backstage for doing that... And really, for building this thing which we use for -- it ships our episodes, it runs our stats, it does comment notifications... It does all our background things, so thanks for it.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Yeah, you're welcome. And you're welcome for some great fodder for Ship It in the - was it Kaizen?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, the Kaizen episodes. Yeah, we always look -- I mean, one of the things why we open source, even back in the day, was obviously because we've built our careers on open source, so it felt weird to be closed source... Even though we didn't really think anybody really would care so much about our website being open source, but...
+
+**Parker Selbert:** No, people reference it all the time.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** They do. It's actually been pretty cool. It's probably the most well-known open source Phoenix app that's just like a simple CRUD web app that runs a production website. I think it's been useful for people for that reason, because it is almost copy-pastable at times, because it's just the kind of websites that most people build, right? There's not much actually going on there.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Yeah. There are a few other pretty notable, bigger open source Phoenix apps. Plausible is another one, for analytics people... And it's the only one I can think of at the moment, but I know there are a few others. And most of them tend to use Oban, which is cool...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yup.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** And I figure -- especially for the Changelog, I know people are looking at this all the time. So whatever is there should be at least somewhat idiomatic, because people are looking into it as a resource for learning. And it should be up to date, and pretty much by the book \[unintelligible 00:02:40.20\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. Not the way that we were doing it; the way that you would do it.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Well... It's not your fault. I think Alex Coutmos \[unintelligible 00:02:47.16\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] It was Alex's fault, yeah.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** I'm gonna blame Alex for all that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's what I try to do, at all times... You know, how many lines of code can I get Alex to write so I have someone else to blame when things go wrong...?
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** He did introduce it, because we worked with Alex to build our comment delay feature. Really, comment editing was the idea that he came in to do... You know, Twitter can't get it done, but we got it done much more quickly than Twitter could. Famously, they're working on it now. But you've got that problem of "Okay, if we're letting somebody edit their comment..." And really, our implementation is just for typos and stuff. Not going back later and addending, like you do on Reddit. I don't really like the edits on Reddit; like, you'll come back to the post and here's like three edits, and they decide to write a book because their comment gets popular. I think that's not so cool. But this is just for typos... And you always see it after you hit Submit.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Oh, sure.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[03:43\] And what that required us to do then was basically delay our comment notifications, because we don't wanna get those non-edited versions sent out and then they wanna change it right away. So before that, it would just send immediately -- it would background, but it would just use Elixir features to background it and send off the comments. And then once we added the Edit button, it's like "Well, we've gotta delay the actual notification by 5 minutes, or whatever we decided was the comment window." And that's when Alex was working on that feature, and that's when plain, old Elixir/Erlang features just weren't cutting it, and he's like "Hey, can I use Oban?" And I was like -- I had actually heard of it from... Is it Uku? I think it's Uku, at Plausible.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Him and I were doing a jam session, coding on a feature that I wanted for Plausible. We're plausible customers...
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Oh.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And him and I pair-programmed on a feature on a livestream a couple of years ago, to -- I can't remember what it is; I can't remember the feature. It was some sort of real-time thing... No, I know what it was; it was a notification in the case that your website gets spiked, like by Hacker News or something... And we were building that, and he was showing me how he was using Oban. I hadn't heard of it prior. And so I was like, "That's cool." And he really spoke well of it.
+
+Then when Alex wanted to use it, I was like, "Well, if it's good enough for Plausible, it's good enough for us. Sure, go ahead. And Alex thinks it's a good idea... Why not? Go ahead and use it." And so he was the one to blame. But it definitely served that purpose very well.
+
+He even asked me at the time, "Do you want me to go and convert all your other backgroundy things?" And I was just like "Nah..." Parker will do it eventually... \[laughs\]
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Eventually... It eventually came through.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** I think one of the other things that I had removed there was Quantum, which is still pretty popular and used in a lot of places to do cron, but it doesn't -- I don't wanna speak badly about things too much, but it just... When you have multiple instances, it doesn't tend to hold up very well.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yes. And I had felt that. So I was using Quantum for -- the main purpose of Quantum was to run our publishing queue. So the way that we log news, which - our episodes also go through this exact same flow, is we have this very simple queue that gets set up. You can schedule inside of the queue, but... You can basically just push things to the front, put them at the bottom... And the idea there is -- you know, we log the news, but we don't log it throughout the day oftentimes. Like, I'll hop in and just queue up 4-5 things. A lot like a buffer. But I don't want them to go out immediately; I'd like it to dole it out throughout the day, so it's more of like a thing that refreshes every hour, or something like that.
+
+So that queue basically has some rules in it for publishing, and the way that we run it is with Quantum; it just wakes up once a minute and decides if it's gonna publish anything that minute. And then there's logic around how to spread it out etc.
+
+So that was Quantum... So I definitely have felt that problem, because when I would connect to our server to futz with stuff, as I tend to do, I would open up IEX, the shell, inside of the context, and Quantum would start again, and it would try to publish news. So I'd have the production news publishing thing going on, and then my shell also trying to... So there were times -- there was a weird bug, which I never found, where every once in a while it would post one notification twice. It wouldn't actually publish twice, but it would notify twice... Specifically to Slack. So we have like a Slack notifier for new episodes, and it would publish the news item, and it would sent to Slack "New episode!" And once a quarter, it would double-post that. And I always thought it was because Quantum somewhere had two instances -- like, there's no singleton thing. Like, there was two of them at some point, somehow, and there's a race condition that I never checked... That's disappeared, by the way, with Oban. So I definitely felt that with Quantum, which is basically like a cron scheduling library. Cron-style.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** A cron scheduler, but it's not persistent. So the difference -- so Oban uses Postgres as the source of truth, and therefore it's pretty hard to have duplicates when you have a centralized place where you're putting things, with all the uniqueness constraints and checks.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** \[08:03\] And Quantum has to coordinate through distributed Erlang to figure out who is leader, and it's therefore subject to split-brain kind of setups. But signing into the IEX situation happens to people with Oban as well.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, it does?
+
+**Parker Selbert:** So there are particular -- well, not necessarily that you'll get duplicates of something, but you know... You don't really want your shell to start running jobs, usually.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** You put some checks in place...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. I haven't noticed it since. So I wonder if maybe the way Alex set it up, it doesn't do that... Or I wonder if it just doesn't -- maybe it's not chatty; maybe it's still doing things, but... I haven't noticed it since.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** I think there's a check, actually, that when it opens, it says "Am I in an IEX shell?" And if it is, then it just doesn't start running any queues, that kind of thing.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Smart. There you go. I like that. I had another train of thought that I just gapped on... So take me back to Oban creation time. It's been a while... I wanna talk about what you're trying to do with it, because it's interesting, and it seems like very much following after Mike Perham's footsteps, to a certain degree, with the Sidekiq stuff, which he had much success with... I wonder how that's going etc. But tell us about building Oban, maybe even your Elixir journey etc, in brief. How you got into it and why you built this thing.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Sure. So the Elixir journey - I don't know if it's that different that other people who used to be in the Ruby community, and kind of wanted to push out a little bit...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So you're one of us.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Yeah. But I started with Elixir back in 2013, so I've been exploring it for a long time... And then got into it and introduced it for professional work probably six years ago. So it had been a while there.
+
+And the company that I had contracted at for a long time, and which I'm an employee at now, dScout, was a Rails app, and he had run into lots of different load problems, as people do...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** ...and had pushed the boundaries of what Redis can do as a cache, and it wasn't working out. So I managed to convince the rest of the team and the people there that Elixir would be a good fit. And that actually worked out really well. The problem that that sort of introduced is that we did a lot of background work through Sidekiq in the Rails side of things, and we wanted to shift work over to the new Elixir side of things. And so I started making a port of Sidekiq called Kiq. And that went pretty well. We still have just a couple of things that run on that that haven't been moved over... But as part of that, we were using Sidekiq Enterprise on the Rails side, and there were features there that we just couldn't replicate, or didn't have. And as part of the license agreement, you're not allowed to reimplement them, so that kind of left us in a place where we needed those features, but there was no tool that had those features. So in free time, outside of work time, I started a new project.
+
+Redis, around Redis 5, introduced this notion of streams. Streams were kind of Kafka-esque. And I don't mean that in the way people usually say Kafka-esque, with like the whole metamorphosis thing, but really like inspired by Kafka.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** And the idea was that you just had a stream of jobs, or a stream of events, and then you could handle those events at any particular place, adn then augment them and kind of push them back through. And that's directly what led to Oban. So it was kind of the combination of Sidekiq style queues and jobs and workers, but then having them stick around and actually be persistent.
+
+So a lot of the stuff that makes Oban as powerful as it is for doing uniqueness and workflows, and the things that people really want to use it for, is because it's in Postgres, and it keeps the jobs around after they ran... Which means that for a cron job I can say "Did I run this job an hour ago?"
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[12:05\] Right.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** I don't rely on some side effect.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Like, built-in observability.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Yes, totally built-in observability. And that's what led to the open source version. And of course -- I don't know, people just keep asking for things...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] That's how it works, man...
+
+**Parker Selbert:** ...and the more adoption you have of an open source project, the more weight that's on you as a maintainer, because you want to help people, you want to fix bugs, you want to add features... And really, it's hard to make that sustainable. So we -- when I say "we", I mean Shannon, my wife and partner in our company, Soren, which we had ran for 11 years...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** We used to do consulting.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Now I get it, Sorentwo. Sorentwo...
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Sorentwo, yeah. There are two of us.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Because you and your wife are married, obviously, because that's how she's your wife, but also business partners in this Soren business, which was a consulting thing you guys did.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Yes.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I'm tracking.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** And we stopped with the consulting and then kind of pivoted to where we were productizing Oban to support the open source side, and also just hopefully make it into a sustainable business. So that's where the Oban Web and Pro stuff comes in later.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Cool, cool, cool. So that reminds me of what I was thinking before, that I lost - and this is the nice thing about Backstage, is we just let it fly... So we won't edit that out, we'll just loop it back in and make it part of the conversation. So we recently just switched to Fly. In fact, we haven't talked about it on Ship It yet; we're gonna do Ship It episode 50, because our Kaizens are every ten... So I think Gerhard is on like 47 right now... Anyways, we're recording soon, but we are now on Fly...
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Wow.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** ...and managed Postgres as well, so we've made that switch. Kubernetes - goodbye. I guess I'm breaking news here... Hopefully, Gerhard doesn't mind me scooping him...
+
+**Parker Selbert:** It's news to me. I'm excited for this.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, it's cool. And I'm excited as well, because it feels a lot like Heroku felt, and I was just like a Heroku lover for years, and still am in many ways... I just love that style of platform. And Fly has that feel, where it's like "Fly logs, Fly shell, Fly SSH shell." The SSH thing is new to me... Or Fly SSH console... Anyways, I'm still learning. But one thing that's cool about Fly - and you know, if you listen to Ship It, you know that on our Kubernetes setup we had so many problems with Postgres inside of Kubernetes... We ended up being like single-instance Kubernetes people, which is like - you know, it should be clusters, and stuff. But we were down to like one application instance, one database instance, and then of course we had local storage, which was also holding us back, so we switched over now to S3, and we can now easily switch to Fly, because there's no local disk there.
+
+Anyways, I say all that to say this - when we switched to Fly, Gerhard was like "Hey, do you wanna crank up the nodes?" Because that's the advantage, you can just scale it up. And I thought, "What could go wrong here?" And I was like, "Well, Oban is probably smart enough to handle that, right?" Because everything's in Postgres, so it shouldn't be a problem to have all these application instances running, because you have that single point of truth... And so I was like "Sure, man. Crank it up." And we cranked it up, and everything's been running just fine... And I think that's the advantage of having the architecture that Oban provides, is you have everything in Postgres, so you don't have to worry about duplication and those kinds of problems across your nodes.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Yeah. Scaling -- well, I guess there are different types of scaling. There's parallelism, and then there's sheer volume. And there have been improvements over the years for both... Because there are some companies that run 25-30 nodes, all running Oban jobs. But even at dScout we routinely autoscale up to (I think) 12, when we have surges of videos and things that we have to process...
+
+\[16:02\] And then there are also some companies that run 50 to 100 million jobs a day... So there's a volume happening there that amazingly Postgres hold up with pretty well. But it's awesome that you're on Fly. We've also -- so the Oban Pro site is hosted on Fly, and all of our private packages are hosted on Fly. And we actually do it as a multi-region thing. So we have nodes in Australia, and then one in Tokyo, and in Europe...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Nice.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** ...so that it's globally distributed. And it adds some extra complications to how you have to architect your app.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** At the application level even?
+
+**Parker Selbert:** At the application level.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** How so?
+
+**Parker Selbert:** If your database is in -- unless you're doing replicated databases, which...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's what I was wondering. If you had a single Postgres instance, are you like routing your writes, or...?
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Yes, pretty much. Yeah. We have a single instance in Chicago, which -- hey, when you live by Chicago, it's very snappy.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's nice, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** But you can't do roundtrip calls to Postgres from Sydney, Australia, or you're gonna be in a world of hurt. So we actually just route any requests that have to touch the database to Chicago... Which is a pretty minor part. Say fetching packages - we cache everything using an RPC call at the edge node, and then it does the license check from there, and then pulls stuff, and caches it locally for packages, that kind of thing.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It would be cool if Fly could provide that kind of a layer, where you could set that up... Because I think the 80/20 rule - I think 80% of us will have that kind of a setup eventually, where it's all these app instances in one database, and reads can go from anywhere, or anything that needs to hit, or especially write to the database should go through this specific route. And it seems like that wouldn't necessarily need to be an application-level concern. If there could be some sort of a mesh layer or routing layer at Fly's level or at the platform level. I don't know. How much of it is conditional on business logic, and stuff?
+
+**Parker Selbert:** They have this relay thing that you can do, so that when calls come in... I think their demo is partially -- they've kind of shown it in Rails, but there are also Elixir libraries specifically for it. Like, it knows if it's on the primary node, and if you're doing your write. But when it sees that you are, it switches that to an RPC call automatically, where it tries to bundle those... I think it's pretty actively worked on by some of the guys over at Fly, like Mark Ericksen and Chris McCord.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Cool. So it's pretty good, and probably getting better. I think that Fly's platform so far feels novel. It feels like it's new in many ways, in terms of user experience. You can tell there's a lot of rough corners, and yet you can see a lot of potential there. So it was kind of fun to be in somewhat early still... I mean, it just takes a while to build out a lot of the creature comforts of a platform, as a developer, as a user, and there's definitely areas where you're like "Okay, this could use some work." But it's fun to be there early...
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Oh, yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** ...and to be involved with some of the people who are working on it and provide feedback for those things. It's been fun. We're just getting started, but it's been cool.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** It's impressive how much they've built, and how much momentum and buzz they've managed to get. But I've experienced the rough corners... You mentioned Heroku before, and there are certain things that as a long-time Heroku user you just kind of expect.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah...
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Like, I get automated backups on my Postgres database, right?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Or I can just hook up a log drain, right? ...but they're not quite there yet for those things.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yup. I think there's a lot of low-hanging fruit there. I think they know they're not there on lots of things, so I expect massive improvements in certain ways as it gets going. And then eventually, it's again, the 80/20 rule, or it's like the polish rule. It's like, at a certain point, Heroku has been polishing for so long that it's hard to get that level of fit and finish... But at this point they can make huge gains in probably a short amount of time on those kinds of things.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** \[20:00\] Well, Heroku -- it's funny... So Oban has to work for pretty much anybody who can run an app. So if you have a Postgres instance and an Elixir app, you should be able to run Oban. But there are very different categories of that. You can have a clustered app where you're using distributed Erlang to send messages between nodes, which is how you would want to do a lot of pub/subby kind of stuff. Or you could be in a pretty vanilla situation where there's no PgBouncer kind of thing in front of Postgres, and then you can use Postgres for pub/sub. But because Oban has to work in any of those situations and you can't necessarily determine whether they are clustered, or whether they have PgBouncer, there's a lot of work to do, like lowest common denominator kind of coordination between things.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Hm... Yeah, that sounds like a lot of effort there. So how's the business side going? Are you getting there? Mike's Sidekiq fame kind of set the standard of like "This can be done", at least in Rubyverse you can get it done... In Elixir land - I don't know. I know there's lots of successful businesses operating on Elixir and Phoenix, and so there's money there, there's success there, there's apparently load and scale there; just talking a little bit about a few of your users... I wonder how much of it translates into Pro and Web.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Yeah, we didn't know at first either. I mean, the Elixir community compared to the size of the Ruby community is quite a bit smaller... And it's really hard to estimate the size. I mean, you can look at, say, stars on GitHub, or package downloads and things like that, but it's really hard to tell how many companies out there are using something in production.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** And I think it's actually gone surprisingly well...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Awesome.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** We're very pleased with it. It's not going away any time soon. It more than sustains the open source development side of things.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Can you quit your job?
+
+**Parker Selbert:** I can't say that here.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] Are you thinking about it?
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Yeah, we're not there... We're not there. But I think the Elixir community is healthier than I would have even guessed. So I can say that much.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Hm. I can definitely say that I've been pleasantly surprised by how many folks are using Elixir as well. I would say growth-wise it hasn't wowed me in terms of over the last five years, like how that goes... There's definitely more momentum behind a few other languages at the moment, but I think the quality of Elixir folks is super-high. Everybody I've met and spoken with and worked with in the community has been just stellar people. So definitely a solid community, and I'm sure there's people out there tracking \[unintelligible 00:22:56.18\] tracking businesses using which platforms and which languages.
+
+Now, most companies reach a certain level of scale and success - they don't have just a single thing going on. There's usually polyglot things happening across these larger companies, for sure.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** For sure.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** But I'm happy to hear that there's enough people using it and making money off of what they do in order to turn around and upgrade to the Pro and the Web deal. Do you wanna talk about the differences, so people understand where it breaks down?
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Sure. I wanted to say one thing real quickly... There are languages like Python and JavaScript that are of course just killing it; there's huge, huge communities...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, yeah, yeah.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** And every once in a while, for a while - my wife and I were discussing, "Why didn't we build it for JavaScript, or whatever it is?" But then you look, and - that's a massive community, with widely different experience levels... I don't know, there's something that's safe and tame about Elixir. Just the tightness of the community... Which actually has made it a little nicer. I mean, we have about ten open issues at most, ever. Not 100, not 200. So it's not this overwhelming swarm of problems.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[24:19\] Right. Well, I can speak to that a little bit from a podcaster's perspective, because we've also invested in communities... And we've been asked to create an Elixir podcast umpteen times. I've always been very pleasantly surprised - maybe not surprised, but I just feel like there's lots of good Elixir podcasts. I think for a small community, Elixir has podcasters.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Over-represented.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. There's good shows to listen to. We don't really have anything to add. So I've always just said "Nah, we can't really..." I had one idea for a show that I think would be a unique value to the Elixir community, but I never executed on it. But we're in the Go community, we're also in the JavaScript community, and I'll put air quotes around "JavaScript community", because it's so big and diverse that we've had a harder time curating and fostering what feels like community for JS Party than we have for Go Time... Because the Go community - which is large at this point, but there's a tight-knit factor with Gophers, which I also see in Elixir, where it's just been easier to create a community, or be part of the community. Feel like you are part of it.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Where JavaScript is like - you know, a person who writes backend Node APIs all day, and a person who's working solely in React, or maybe they're building full-stack websites and writing CSS and designing stuff, they don't have all that much in common. So it's been a little bit harder to feel like there's a community there, because it's so big.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Yeah. It's a highly fragmented community, and I can see -- I don't know, I'm die-hard Vue, I don't wanna hear anything about React, so I'm not gonna listen to this episode.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, exactly. \[laughs\] Yup. Well, Vue is well-served for podcasts as well. That's the other thing that's nice about JS, because the community is so large that there's sub-tribes; you can hang out with your little sub-tribe.
+
+We've always tried to pull everybody together, kind of "the more, the merrier" attitude, and I think that we're succeeding there. I think JS Party is serving the web development community at large, but it's just been harder to make it feel like -- it's almost like when there's less of us, it matters more. It's kind of like band of brothers. We're the Elixir folk, and nobody else is, so we're tight-knit.
+
+Anyways, I can see the draw of larger... Python - again, so diverse, in terms of opportunities for customers though... But happy to hear that you're having success. So break down Oban and where you drew the lines for paid versus free, and all that jazz.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** So the original plan was to only have Web. So Web is a live application, which was very early adopted \[unintelligible 00:27:03.03\] We went through all the growing pains associated with that. And that was pretty much always a thing - I mean, for three years - but it felt a little bit limiting. We kept adding certain features to open source that were definitely enterprisy side features, and then we'd get requests for things like workflows and batches, and the kind of things that seem obviously like nice additions, but you can't really bundle that with a web view, which is just a nice dashboard to control things...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right...
+
+**Parker Selbert:** So where do you put it? You can either put it in open source and then sort of lose the ability to monetize that, or kind of carve it out. So the reason that Oban is on 2.0 is there was a split from 1.0 to 2.0 where some things were carved out, and then a whole lot of fixes and features and changes went in there, and we split out a couple of those things into the Pro packages. And Pro has been a pretty big focus since then, and has grown quite a bit.
+
+\[28:08\] So web is the UI, and Pro adds things that you could do with Oban on your own, but it makes them a lot easier. So doing batches with callbacks, doing workflows, which is like a directed graph where there's dependencies between jobs, and they only execute at certain intervals... And dynamic cron, so you can define, say, a cron schedule per account or user... Things like that. Things that just build on whatever the open source version is.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So how does Pro work with regards to the logistics? Is it just a license? Is it a separate package that you have to have like auth to get at, or how do you actually handle distribution and protection of your Pro deal?
+
+**Parker Selbert:** So it's kind of both. So there's a license to -- well, we host our own Hex repository. So there's Hex.pm, and people publish their Elixir packages up there. We have our own host, which is just wrapped in our Elixir application, which actually sounds like a bigger deal than it is. It's a very small amount of code. And we publish packages that are identical to a Hex.pm package, but we put it in S3 as a secure location, and then when somebody signs up for a license, they get a key. Eventually, they can have multiple keys, and we can manually do that if people have a large team and they want to share them.
+
+But when you go to install -- so you add the repo as a known source, and you provide the license key, so when you go and fetch Oban Web or Oban Pro, it checks the license key. If you have access, it relays it back down. But it's distributed as just another package that you install along with everything else.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Gotcha.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Same thing for web. It's totally standalone, so it doesn't have to hook into the asset pipeline, it doesn't require you to install JS libraries or styles or anything like that. It's all self-contained.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay, so Web is running alongside your own infrastructure. It's like a web view of your Oban.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Yes.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's not like a hosted service where your Oban is hosted elsewhere, or sent anywhere. You're not hosting that.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** We're not in that business. We don't want access to anybody's data.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That sounds nice. Yeah, keep it off -- don't go into hosting. A lot of people go into the hosting side, where it's like "Okay, if you wanna host it yourself, cool. But if not, we'll host it for you." But I guess for a background job thing it doesn't really make as much sense to do that.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Yeah. And especially the fact that it integrates with your database. It's one of the nice parts. I want to do these things in a set of transactions, and I also want to insert my jobs as part of that same transaction.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** And I think when you look at other tools that are built on Redis or built on a standalone thing, like Factory, you don't have any of those guarantees, because you can't put it in the transaction. You don't get a logical backup with your Postgres database. You can't replicate it to, say, staging, to see what things were like in the past. So you get some benefits there too, just from the integration side.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Do you ever get any Postgres pushback? Like, "Hey, Oban looks sweet. We're using Elixir, but we like Mongo" or "We're actually backed by FaunaDB", or whatever. Is anybody ever like "Postgres is my blocker?"
+
+**Parker Selbert:** No. Not once.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's awesome.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** But I will say that if you go and just look at the download counts for Elixir packages and you look at Postgrex versus like the MariaDB or MySQL, it is like 100 to 1... I don't know, it dwarfs it. But the only two requests or kind of comments we've gotten are 1) around CockroachDB, like "Is this compatible with CockroachDB?" And I think so. I don't know. They have a Postgres wire protocol...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, they claim to have wire compatibility with Postgres, so...
+
+**Parker Selbert:** \[32:07\] It could be, but we haven't tried it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I guess maybe the onus is on them to be, sort of...
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Like, it wouldn't be because you tried to, right? You haven't tried to do any Cockroach things...
+
+**Parker Selbert:** No.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You're just saying like "Well, they allege to be wire compatible with Postgres, so it should work..."
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Yeah, it should work, but we haven't tested it. And the other one is SQLite. People asking about "Does it work with SQLite?" And I can say the answer is definitively no. But we've shifted so that there's an -- it's called an \[unintelligible 00:32:38.01\], but it's essentially the adapter. All of the database interaction stuff goes through that, and it is conceivably possible to write a SQLite Oban engine, and it should work.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So you're not using any Postgres-specific features that might limit that.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Oh, we use a ton of Postgres-specific features, but they're all encapsulated either through the engine, or plugins. And plugins do things like cron as a plugin. You can think of \[unintelligible 00:33:07.13\] as consuming jobs, and plugins modify or insert jobs. Aside from what people are just doing by themselves.
+
+So there are a lot of -- like, there are advisory locks, and there's use of use of SKIP LOCKED... There are definitely Postgres-specific stuff in there. But not much pushback.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's good... It makes sense, I think. All defaults account for a lot of it. It's like, "Well, this is the default, so use it."
+
+**Parker Selbert:** You get performance questions, for sure. People will say "What's the load going to be from this on my database?"
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Sure.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** And some people run a separate, dedicated database just for jobs...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's when you've got some scale right there. You've got a lot of jobs going on for that to matter.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Yes, for sure.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So Web is 39, Pro is 69, Web + Pro is 99... Dollars per month. I should be more explicit there.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What's the breakdown been? Do most people just go whole hog, or are there people that just want the WebUI? I'm just curious, because it's interesting to know, like, is it worth having these distinctions?
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Yeah, the majority go for the bundle. I would say 9 out of 10 go for the bundle. And then the other 1 out of 10 -- I think we probably have like 2 Pro alone, and everything else is either the bundle or just Web. So you do get people just using Web.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, I could see where the web by itself might be attractive, but then once you're looking at the Pro, you might as well just get them both, right?
+
+**Parker Selbert:** We used to do it where instead of selling the packages separately, we did sort of a "You tell us how large you are, and..."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** "We'll tell you what it costs." \[laughs\]
+
+**Parker Selbert:** And it was one or the either. It was either you're solo or you're a business.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Gotcha.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** But Oban doesn't phone home, and we have no way to tell how many servers people \[unintelligible 00:35:05.07\] and it's good for when you're getting started.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** And then business was you have two or more servers. And it was very clear that people's self-reporting didn't really match up with...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Reality.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** ...reality, yeah. So we thought "Well, the real value isn't in people just self-reporting what the size is. There's value in what the products are." So better to split them up.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. So do you have a freedom number calculated out on that bundle? How many bundles it's gonna take... Do you have a countdown on the wall, like "We're 75 bundles away from freedom"?
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Yeah, we've got a number.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] I love it. How far away is the number, percentage-wise? Are you 30% of the way there? 50%? 80%?
+
+**Parker Selbert:** See, it kind of depends on -- growth is just like anything; growth is not very predictable. So it's not like "Well, it's another week."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right, right, right. That's why I asked for percentages, like based on bundle count, or subscriber count.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** \[36:08\] Yeah. We're 60% of the way there.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** I'd say.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's hopeful, man. That's awesome.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Yeah. It's going well. You're getting me to spill secrets here.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well...
+
+**Parker Selbert:** They'll get me in trouble.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Nobody at work is gonna listen to this.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** That's true. I don't know if anybody at work is a Changelog++ subscriber, so...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's right. They'll need to start working on that subscription, and working on our own freedom number of Changelog++.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Which - okay, I'm gonna flip it and ask, how is Changelog++ working out compared to doing the ads with the regular published versions?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Not even close.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** No?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Nah. It's like 1%.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Wow, okay.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And that's just top of the head math. It's probably not exactly 1%. But I will say that podcast advertising is lucrative. So it's competing with a larger number. So we do very well, we're successful, we're happy... We already have freedom, so we don't really need a freedom number. But yeah, Changelog++ is awesome, and it's for our hardcore listeners, and we love to do it. We don't really push it very much; we're not relying upon it, and we don't expect it to ever overtake. I mean, maybe -- I think if Changelog++ overtook our advertising income, it's because the advertising industry collapsed. And not the other way around. \[laughs\] Which could happen, you know? Podcasting could stop being lucrative.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** A major disparity...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, there's a major disparity there. Obviously, I think in the case that we had a situation like that, like if our podcasts depended upon it, I think we'd have a lot more subscribers. And I think that the way that we throw Changelog++ out there, it's like "We would love for you to subscribe, it's cool, we love to have extras for people, and get rid of the ads and all that... We would love your support", but it's not going to make or break us. And I think if it was like "Hey, by the way, we lost all of our advertisers, because - whatever; market crash, or whatever happened... Spotify scooped everything up and aren't distributing the money, it's become a YouTube situation", I think we'd have a lot of our listeners at that point step up and support us. So I think it would change the calculus. But for now - no, it's not gonna overtake advertising revenue... Which is fine.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** I will admit, so I've listened to The Changelog since - I don't know... When Chris Wanstrath was on there in \[unintelligible 00:38:36.17\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Way back... Way back!
+
+**Parker Selbert:** ...and I don't do Changelog++. And I have no good reason for it. Actually, I support several Elixir podcasts, I donate a lot to open source...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** This is quite a confessional? What's wrong with you, man?! No... \[laughs\] Are you a Master feed listener at least?
+
+**Parker Selbert:** No.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, man... You're killing me, Parker...
+
+**Parker Selbert:** I've dabbled into various ones. I've listened -- I'll get the names wrong. I've listened to the JavaScript one, and I've listened to the Go one, and the AI one, and I listened to Ship It...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yup.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** ...but I don't do Master feed.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So Backstage, the show that you're on right now, is not just for Plus Plus. It's on the Master feeds. So it's hidden from the public insofar as it doesn't have its own feed. But you don't have to be Plus Plus to listen. You just have to be a Master feed listener, or obviously, visit the website. So this will not be just to our Plus Plus people, it will be to slightly more people; probably an order of magnitude more.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Oh. I conflated Plus Plus and Master feed.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Fair enough. Only you're not an insider here, Parker. Come on. You're a long-time listener, but not a long-time insider. So Backstage is a show -- I think this is episode 23; we would love to do it more often. It's a show that we do that is not just for Plus Plus people, but it's for people who have kind of like bought in and are more of the super-listeners. They subscribe to the Master feed, so they get every single show we publish...
+
+\[40:08\] And the reason we did it originally was to kind of be a carrot for the Master feed. Because obviously, we would love everybody to subscribe to all of our shows, and just pick and choose the ones to listen to each week... And so we thought if we had some unique content that's only on the Master feed, maybe that will get more people to subscribe to it, and that's why we put it there.
+
+Plus Plus gets obviously ad-free, they get higher bit rate mp3s... So if you're on like an audio file, you get slightly higher quality audio, although all of our stuff sounds pretty good, I think. And then they also get extended episodes. So we don't really do bonus episodes for Plus Plus, which is probably what you thought this was, but we'll do like another ten minutes that we cut for everybody else, throw it on at the end... Sometimes we have -- we've been doing lately, and we haven't published very many of these, but for the Changelog, Adam and I will actually come backstage for the half an hour leading up to the show, and talk about... Sometimes we talk about the show we're gonna have, sometimes we just BS, and then we record the actual Changelog with the guest, and then we'll take that Backstage and put it at the end for the Plus Plus people. So that's kind of what Plus Plus is, in terms of what you get.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** I have to say, I've never once thought "Man, the quality of this Changelog podcast is so low. I wish I had a higher quality recording."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] Well, I appreciate that. We want it to be awesome quality for everybody, but... Some of that was actually spurred on by Gerhard, because he's such a quality fiend that he's like "Hey, can you guys have flak, or whatever?"
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Oh, I can see that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And I'm just like, "Well, we have other concerns. We don't want our mp3's to be too large", because some people have bandwidth constraints, some people have pay-by-the-megabyte plans, other people listen on the website, and when you hit Play, we want it to start playing right away... So I can't just crank up the bitrate for everybody. But for Plus Plus people, which is way less distribution etc. and obviously, these are people that can afford to support us financially, so they're not financially constrained in that way, then we'll crank up the bitrate for them.
+
+But yeah, I think all of our stuff sounds good. I'm not much of an audio file in terms of -- at a certain point I can't tell the difference when you just keep cranking up the audio quality.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Not much of an audio file says the man with the microphone and \[unintelligible 00:42:20.21\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I have an ear for audio, but I'm not like a -- you know, certain people listen on our record players still, and they're like "Oh, the vinyl sounds better." Gerhard is more of that brand of human than I am, is my point.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Yeah. The thing with the record player, the thing that gets my wife and I for a record player is that --
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, you're a record player person. Okay.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Just sometimes. Just sometimes.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** But you have the record, and it's this large, and you've got --
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's cool. Yeah, I get the physicality angle for sure.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** And the minor notes, and the art, and the lyrics, or whatever else are there...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. I'm sold on that argument. It's the ones that say it sounds better than a CD... You know, CD quality is pretty much, objectively, mathematically the highest quality audio in terms of the original sound...
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And people claim that vinyl is... I think they're deceived. But if you're claiming you like the physicality, or... It does sound different. You can say, "Oh, it's warmer. I like that warm sound." I'm like, "That's cool. Do it. Just don't tell me it's better, or higher quality."
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Yeah. I think everybody should just be scientific and A/B test themselves at some point.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** They should.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** I actually did this years ago as part of like an mp3 training community before nobody did that anymore...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay...
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Because people would argue about "Should it be 0, or would 2 be okay?" and that kind of thing. And there's a huge size difference between them. So like "Alright, well, I'll just get some good headphones on and then just switch between these until I can't tell the different."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** And you just know for yourself whether your ears can even pick that up.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[44:00\] Well, for instance, the public version that we ship of all our shows is 128 kbps. And the Plus Plus version is 192. And for me, even with studio monitors on, I can just barely tell the difference. But Gerhard is like, "Oh, this is much better. I would love it to be 256." And I'm like, "Alright..." I just can't do it. So obviously, people's ears work differently, and some are more highly tuned to changes than others.
+
+So you're almost there on your Oban -- you're 60% of the way there on Oban for life... What are you doing to get the final 40%? Are you just working on the deal, making it better, serving your current customers? Does your wife get involved at marketing things that you guys try to do, or growth hacks? How are you growing it?
+
+**Parker Selbert:** No growth hacks. The best thing - and this is not gonna be a surprise to anybody - is writing. Writing about it, talking about it - that does way more than shipping features, which I think anybody who's tried a startup or whatever it is would tell you. There's that Plausible chart that they show every once in a while, about what was happening at Plausible when there was one engineer and he was coding, and then what happens when the partner came on, and then there was marketing.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yup.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** And that's where it starts going up. So the best thing for us to do would be to write more and teach more. And that's actually two of things that we're shifting the focus. So one is starting to do training... So at ElixirConf EU in June we're doing a full-day training session, and as part of that we're preparing a lot more written material and guides and that kind of thing. So that is the second part, is just making it easier for people to learn.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** So writing guides is not always the most fun thing to do, but really rewarding for people to actually learn how to do things and bring people in that way.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, those boring, high ROI things. It's actually a really good return, but it's just not cranking out a new feature, getting in a flow state and coding it up, which is what you probably wanna be doing.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** I was talking to Alex Coutmos yesterday about this -- not that, but about the notion that planning, like doing technical planning or technical writing is really important, and a long-term reward. But as a developer, as a programmer, you don't get that kind of dopamine at the end.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** You don't get the red/green "Oh, it worked. Look, I made that work" kind of buzz from it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** No, you don't.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** And I think that's what slows us down.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. And in fact, I think writing is one of the most painful of all endeavors, because it's like --
+
+**Parker Selbert:** \[unintelligible 00:46:44.21\] to work on instead.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, exactly. I'd rather just talk to somebody. It's so much easier. In fact, a lot of my half-written blog posts - I just say them out loud on a podcast, and that actually gives me the satisfaction I would have had from having to sit down and write it out; I'm like, "I'm never writing that blog post. Now I've just said it on the podcast, \[unintelligible 00:47:01.11\]"
+
+**Parker Selbert:** It will be transcribed, you're good.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, we do do that, actually. We turn back our transcripts sometimes and we pull them out and put them in a blog post... Because why not, right? Yeah, I've likened, much to my wife's chagrin, who she's birthed six children, and I always tell her that writing is like giving birth, and she's like "You have no idea what you're talking about." \[laughs\] I'm like, "You get it, but I'm still gonna use the analogy", because that's how painful it is for me. And I do enjoy -- I mean, there is some satisfaction at the end, especially if people appreciate it, but the process of writing prose is to me pure pain, and the process of coding is pure joy. And I don't know what the difference is.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Do you have any insight on what's the difference?
+
+**Parker Selbert:** I really think it's that little dopamine bit at the end, because you'll publish something --
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Like progress along the way, or...?
+
+**Parker Selbert:** \[47:57\] Yeah. The last big release or set of releases we had, which I think was in February - yeah, I know it was in February, because we made the horrible mistake of publishing it on Super Bowl Sunday. We used to release Friday; we would do the release, and do the announcements, and if there was a blog post, do that. And we were a little slow, so like "Well, we'll just do it on Sunday. People aren't doing anything on Sunday anyway." That was wrong. That was a very bad idea.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\]
+
+**Parker Selbert:** It launched to crickets. Okay...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Even Friday is not the best day to launch anything.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** No, Friday is terrible.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** So Oban has a Slack channel; it's just on the Elixir Slack, but there's the Oban channel there...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Sure.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** ...which has a pretty good number of people in there. And there are very obvious trends to the way that a week flows. People purchase things on Monday and Friday. Very few in between the week. People have a lot of questions on Tuesday and Wednesday, about things that they're working on... That's when people are getting stuff done. And almost nothing happens on the weekend.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right. Yeah, the only argument for - we're talking about technical publishing, right? Like publishing developer things.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** The only pro weekend argument is "Well, you have less competition for mind share on the weekend." So there's less people around on Twitter, on Hacker News, on Reddit, on Changelog News etc. There's less people around, but the people who are around have less to look at. So you might hang out in the mindosphere, in people's minds a little bit longer on the weekend, because there's just not much going on...
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** But other than that -- I mean, the other argument against it is like "Hey, no one's doing anything, so why are you publishing on a Friday or a Saturday for?"
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Yeah. Well, that's kind of what our thinking was. "They're not publishing on Friday or Sunday." Well, I feel like we learned a lesson on that one.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yup. Skip Super Bowl Sunday next time you're publishing. Now, you said "Well, it's Sunday... It's not Super Bowl Sunday, it's the Oscars. Nobody watches the Oscars... We'll publish on the Oscars." And then Will Smith comes and slaps that idea right on its face...
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Which was the best marketing that the Oscars could have had probably in the history. And Chris Rock drilled it, right? He said "Best moment in TV history", or something like that.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Yeah. And he sold out all of his shows on his subsequent comedy tour. So I think it worked out in Chris Rock's favor entirely.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, he came out looking pretty good through that whole deal, I think. Okay, Parker, what else? Anything else?
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Up to you. I mean, it's your show. If you have anything you want to ask, I'm here. Happy to help.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, how well do you know our application at this point? You probably just looked at it that one time and moved on...
+
+**Parker Selbert:** I've looked at it more than once.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** But how well do I know the application - not super-well.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, not super-well. Better or worse than our Plus Plus strategy... \[laughs\] Well, then my questions would be more like "How could we deploy Oban more, or better?" But you probably don't know what we're all trying to accomplish, so that's a hard question. My other question would be like "What might we get out of Web or Pro?" Because I'd love to support you, but I just don't even see much value for us, maybe because we're just the casualest of users. So those would kind of be the things that I'd be curious about, but it might require some domain expertise in what we do and what we're trying to do, which you may not have.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Yes, I don't know anything obviously. I mean, I'm familiar at least with what the app does. I've submitted news before, I've got an account, listened to podcasts, I get the weekly newsletter... So I'm familiar with all that, and I think a lot of that is already using different parts of Oban. But I don't know if you'd have much benefit from Pro. There are some subtle things, like if you happen to restart during a long-running job, it will use a lifeline plugin to rescue it. There are little things like that. But compared to a company, like dScout for example, where you have a large team of engineers and we're running hundreds of thousands of jobs per day, it's really important to go into the dashboard and then tweak things, maybe scale a queue up or down, maybe pause something, search, find out where errors are... Things like that.
+
+\[52:23\] If you're not sending that volume of jobs, or you are comfortable and everybody just has Postgres access, it's not quite as appealing. I hate to unsell the product, but \[unintelligible 00:52:33.29\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. Fair enough. Let me ask you a different question then, since you're in Elixir land. So we've worked with Lars Wickman, as I try to call him by his actual name...
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Yes. Lars was the one who was asking about the SQLite version.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, of course. He's always trying to make it as simple as possible. We've worked with Alex Coutmos, both busy people, with lots going on... If we were looking for more help, for an Elixir dev to come and work with me, or under me, so to speak, in terms of me directing, where do you turn for Elixir devs that would be freelance for hire, or consultants? Are there places, are there people you know? What do you think? Sorentwo? Can I get half of Sorentwo? \[laughs\]
+
+**Parker Selbert:** We're not in that business anymore, thankfully...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I know you're out of it. I know you're out of it.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Which is really, really nice. That's actually a harder thing to do than you would think. It's hard to find good contractors for anything, especially in the Elixir community, partially because there's such a crunch on jobs. There's a lot more demand than there are people to fill it... Which is a good place for all the contractors and freelancers to be in. But yeah, you have to see - are there any Elixir podcast hosts which you guys could contract with. And I think they're all employed...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, exactly.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Or product people, at this point.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, it seems like all the great Elixir devs have great Elixir jobs.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** I think so, yeah. We've actually just had this whole conversation about trying to find people. We at dScout use some contractors from Poland, because they have a very vibrant Elixir scene around Krakow... Which is great. But even they have only so many people that you can use. So where do you grow, where do you find more people? Where do you find people in the U.S. timezone?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** So I realize you've asked me a question and I've just said "Yes, it's hard."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Now you're asking me the same question. \[laughs\]
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Yes.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's one way to handle a question, is to ask it back. I don't know, that's why I asked. Yeah, it's tough... Also, people you can afford. I mean, we're a small business, and we can't employ at the same salaries as these larger tech companies who are making bookoo bucks. It doesn't mean we don't want to, it just means we just can't compete at a certain degree. Or we can hire at those rates, but we just do way less work, which ultimately can be unsatisfying for us... So it's difficult from that angle as well, because everybody's so well employed... Which we love, but it makes it harder to employ them, which we don't love as much.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** \[55:22\] Yeah. We would love to hire just a little bit of contract work, like "Oh, we wanna make these changes to the platform." So not necessary to like Oban, or Oban Pro, or something itself, but to the hosting platform. Right now there's a newsletter, so that we can give people email updates when there are gonna be account changes, but nobody can opt into it. That's a very small feature, but where do you prioritize that when you have all these other things going on? It's hard to find somebody to just plug into all that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, there is a call for our listeners... So if you are a Changelog Master feed junkie and you're listening to Backstage because you subscribed to Plus Plus or Master, and you're an Elixir dev, hit up -- well, hit up me first, but then maybe Parker also. We'll give him the leftovers... Talk to me, and if I don't think you're a good fit, maybe Parker can -- I'm just messing around.
+
+Yeah, let us know... Or if you know somebody who knows somebody who's available, we are definitely interested in speaking with Elixir devs about doing some work. And Parker is too, so let us know.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Somebody recommended to me recently -- somebody who has a lot of open source projects, I will say, said "Just watch for people that drop a big PR on you, and just reach out to them. Send them an email directly and say "I love what you did. Can I pay you to do some other work?" Apparently, that works out.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, that's what we're doing right here, Parker... \[laughter\] You dropped a great PR on us, I'm trying to hire you... You're not consulting anymore, so failed on one, but I'll keep trying with other people, and we'll see what happens.
+
+Cool, man. I appreciate you coming backstage, hanging out, I appreciate you building Oban and making it open source so we can use it, even if we don't get much value out of your Pro and Web accounts. I think the Web would be cool, just as a nice-to-have, so I can check out my stuff... But it just works, so it's kind of like "Do I need to look at it if it's just working, so far, so good, without looking at it?" But it's pretty cool that you're making a business out of it and thriving, to a certain extent, to the point where I hope you get that magic number in the not-too-distant future. If and when you do, definitely let us know; we'd love to celebrate with you.
+
+**Parker Selbert:** Thank you. Thanks for having me, and hopefully that does happen sometime in the future. I would love to celebrate with you.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Alright. Cheers.