The Standup: Recent Episodes
Keith Thompson & Jamie Wright
A podcast that delves into the obstacles and successes involved in creating, running, and sustaining successful software side projects.
Basements, bicycles, and bags. A little divergence into some vacation and drugs before work stuff. Jamie talked about some work he has done on Tatsu over the last few weeks. He had a bit of the blues but worked a bit on the marketing efforts for Tatsu. He built out the changelog for the site as well as started the newsletter sign up. Then Keith talked about his useful strategy for building out content for Coder Journey. He built the daily steps into his schedule. Keith dives into his content creation schedule as well.
Keith and Jamie are back once again to chat about the weather, crankable machines, Keith's stupid keyboard configuration, being a bored developer, and accidentally transferring all of your apps to someone else. Links * Tatsu Next (eventually) (https://next.tatsu.io) * Atlassian Downtime Postmortem (https://www.atlassian.com/engineering/post-incident-review-april-2022-outage#timeline) * Playdate (https://play.date/) * Keith's escape room Airbnb (https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/6519049?source_impression_id=p3_1656340272_LzqCbpLrly1cckWd)
Keith got a new silly keyboard! We chat about that nerd stuff for a bit. Keith and Jamie talk about the Shopify experience at RailsConf, even though neither of us went. Jamie and Keith talk about plans for Coder Journey and how to get some momentum on his project. Jamie ends the discussion with Keith by talking about his experience with working with Stripe on a new application that launched on Stripe Apps.
Jamie and Keith start off with some catch up, probably want to fast-forward that. Keith's update is all about vacation. That kid is always on vacation. Jamie talks about his materialistic purchases and then gets down to brass tax. Jamie tallks about the progress he made with Tatsu's onboarding and starting a meeting. Jamie brings up several archiectural questions to Keith so they can discuss the pros/cons of some upcoming approaches to some future features. Nerd stuff.
After some boring chatting, Jamie discusses some more onboarding work he did on Tatsu Next. Keith talks about some new plans around a possible CoderJourney comeback on YouTube.
Jamie and Keith kick off a new season! Jamie discusses some onboarding work he did on Tatsu Next and Juvet. Keith discusses some of the projects and teams he is working with at Shopify. There is some olive oil involved.
Jamie and Keith sit down to chat after a long hiatus with the big goal being to figure out what to do with this podcast moving forward. Sorry for whatever happened to Jamie's mic at the 15 minute mark.
It’s a new season?!? Maybe but Keith wanted to chat about some new life changes and we decided to record it.
Keith starts off the podcast, sorry the pod off with some exciting news (real-world related). He then gets into what he was working on in the past two weeks with Juniper’s Lab. Keith has been busy bringing in pricing information into Juniper’s Lab. Jamie started off this week by discussing work he is doing on a client’s new Ruby on Rails app. He is using Hotwire for the high-fidelity interactions and loving it so far. He did manage to squeak out some work on Tatsu over the last two weeks as well. We end with a little announcement. ✌️
Keith starts off the episode talking about all the work he has done over the past few weeks and it's a lot. He did have to rework some of the authentication stuff for Juniper's Lab. Did he launch? Find out after a word from our sponsor...j/k, we don't have sponsors. Jamie talks about the onboarding work he has been doing with Juvet and Tatsu along with some Rails work he has been working on with another client. Jamie definately did not launch anything.
Jamie and Keith start off by discussing the controversial PETAL stack. Jamie then jumps into the work he has been doing on Tatsu and Juvet. Jamie and Keith discuss what the next plans should be for both Tatsu and Juvet as they discuss supporting multiple platforms. Keith talks about the work he has done around drawing deck lists on a canvas element for Juniper’s Lab. He also talks about some of the job processing stuff he built using Oban. Keith ends with the schedule on releasing 1.0 of Juniper’s Lab. Wheeeeeee!!!
Keith took control of this whole episode as he talks about all of the stuff he accomplished on Juniper’s Lab. He starts by explaining the items he accomplished over his holiday break. Keith worked a lot on the deck builder as well as a job that will generate images for user’s collections so they can easily share it. Keith continues discussing what is next for him to build after launch. Jamie and Keith end the discussion around Juniper’s Lab with some marketing ideas. The launch is getting close. Jamie and Keith end the show by reminiscing around Seed Coworking, which recently shutdown due to COVID.
Keith was tied up this last sprint with some personal stuff so Jamie started off the discussion with implementing a sprinkle of machine learning in the next version of Tatsu. He describes a test harness he built to allow for Tatsu to be able to generate summaries for users. Keith and Jamie then discuss Tatsu supporting other platforms like Microsoft Teams in the future. Keith chats up his Kubernetes YouTube video that he released on CoderJourney. This leads into a discussion where Keith talks about moving Juniper’s Lab off of Kubernetes and onto Digital Ocean’s app platform. Keith talks about his plans for the next two weeks which may include a launch!
Jamie starts off discussing the final issue around the Juvet process architecture. This leads to a discussion around meta-programming in Elixir. He then describes an email that he will send out to all the active Tatsu users around changes coming to the product in the near future. Keith and Jamie then discuss the future Juvet router in detail and how that will be implemented along with the idea of splitting out the project into multiple different packages. Keith chats about the release of his new Coder Journey Kubernetes video. This leads to a discussion around Imposter Syndrome which Keith feels he is suffering from because he has not released a new video in a few years. Keith ends with talking about his upcoming schedule as he tries to make time for healthy things.
Keith starts this episode off discussing making his first CoderJourney video back from a 3-year hiatus. He talks about his yearning for a morning routine to help him with his motivation, which leads to a discussion with Jamie around how to get out of that motivation rut. Jamie talks about his adventures around building the process architecture in Juvet and his plans for the next few weeks.
Keith starts off the discussion by dropping some big news, which is the reason he was behind during the last few weeks. He continues to work towards releasing some new Coder Journey content while working on Juniper's Lab during his morning streams. Jamie then talks about what he has accomplished over the last period with a major shift in the Breaktime project. He talks about some major plans for the Juvet release.
Jamie starts off the discussion this week by talking about the (lack of) progress on the revamped Brilliant Fantastic site. The work was there but the progress was not. He also got his first GitHub sponsor for Juvet from last week! Jamie shared how his involvement in another masterminds group helped spur on some feature exploration for Breaktime. This leads to a discussion with Keith on how he could structure his marketing page for Juniper’s Lab to how off features for his upcoming app. Keith missed his self-imposed deadline for launching the initial marketing page because he got stuck on implementing a feature instead. We chat about the next steps on how he can get back on track.
We skipped a week but we are back with a long podcast for your ears. Keith starts off explaining his progress on Juniper’s Lab (new name, who dis). Keith spent a lot of effort on searching for cards with Phoenix LiveView and Alpine JS. A discussion followed around Keith’s launch plan around getting new users on board. Keith and Jamie came up with an exciting plan for pre-launch. Jamie starts his week off recapping why he has been anxious and depressed over the past few months (not really news to anyone). Jamie unveils (sounds more important than it is) his new “3 point plan” around what he is going to work on going forward.
Keith starts off this weeks discussion around what he accomplished with Pokedecks. He started off putting the Pokémon data in the database and what was involved in modeling the data. Keith created an importer and discusses what was involved in getting the data correct in his app. This leads to a larger discussion around Ecto. Jamie starts off describing what he accomplished over the last few weeks which included a vacation he took with his family. His accomplishments included fixing some deployment issues and implementing the settings for sounds in the Chronic mobile app. He did not accomplish as much as he had hoped due to some stress he has been feeling over the past few weeks. We get into that and the future of Chronic.
Keith starts off the conversation with some business, man. He talks about his adventures of incorporating his new company, Coder Journey, LLC. on a budget. Since he didn’t get much done, Keith tries and analyze why he was not very productive. Jamie had a similar week in terms of productivity with all the bad stuff going on in the world. It was hard for him to concentrate. However, he was able to build some stuff for Chronic but ran into some deployment issues around the way. They end the conversation this week chatting about how they are relaxing in these COVID-times.
Keith starts us off this week discussing how he implemented auth in his Pokedecks application. He accomplished all of his goals over the last few weeks by implementing authorization as well as some design work using Tailwind UI. Jamie describes his week of building the Reverb service which builds up the sounds that Chronic will play when a timer is finished. He built it using events emitted to webhooks on the Reverb service. He then describes his upcoming efforts on the design side of Chronic as he is working with a design agency to build out the design bits. Keith and Jamie end the conversation talking about the actual filing for a business and what is involved in that as Keith looks to create an LLC for all his software business.
Keith got some work done on Pokedecks these last few weeks. He reached his deployment goal but then upgraded some things with Elixir and that caused the deployment to break. He describes the deployment architecture using Kubernetes he implemented for Pokedecks. Get ready to get weird. There may be a new stack to talk about. Jamie talks about the work he has done on Chronic. He worked a lot of server side integrations and hopes to get Chronic to play a sound via an integration in the near future. Jamie attended a Pomodoro Technique class and he explained what it was like and what he learned.
Keith starts with his updates around his deployment adventures with his learning of the Hashicorp tooling. He made plans to go all in with Kubernetes. He started moving his deployment processes over to Kubernetes. Jamie continued his work on moving Chronic over to Gigalixir. He created a video around how to perform hot code reloading with Gigalixir. He then talked about his plan to implement Reverb, the sound hosting service for Chronic. Then, Jamie talks about his new plans for releasing Chronic.
Jamie fixed a few bugs with Chronic and moved onto implementing workflow switching so users can switch workflow templates. Jamie found some issues when trying to deploy his changes to production. He talks about his move from Digital Ocean for deployment to Gigalixir. Jamie ends his standup by talking about the marketing efforts he is planning to execute for launching Chronic. Keith continues the conversation around deployment by talking about a tool he built for his last job that help share secrets within the deployment process.
Jamie and Keith are in lockdown and its been hard to focus on work. Keith starts off discussing his progress on Pokedecks. He is having a blasty working on the deployment of Pokedecks using some tools from Hashicorp. Jamie talks about how his productivity has suffered during this pandemic and how it affected him over the last few weeks along with what he is doing to combat the distractions. He talks about the changes he made over the past few weeks to support the ability to switch workflow templates in Chronic. They end the conversation chatting about what we are doing for fun and video games!
Jamie starts off this weeks conversation around his experience at the CodeBEAM conference which leads into a discussion around COVID-19 and the impact it will have around productivity. This was the beginning of the shutdowns here in the United States. Jamie worked on the menu for the iPhone application as well as documenting the deployments of all the Chronic apps. Keith talks about some of the issues he had with LiveView after working on his Pokemon Deck project. He talks about his ongoing love affair with the Tailwind CSS framework and how that has helped him when building UIs.
Jamie starts off this week's discussion describing his parkour athleticism. Keith then digs into some business and describes what he accomplished this week on his Pokemon Card Tracker. That leads to a description of a Chrome extension that Keith is working on at work. Jamie worked on fixing some bugs in Chronic and he describes what it took to fix some of those bugs. He joined the ongoing conversation around snake case vs. camel case with how the different APIs are returning their data.
Keith worked on moving his development environment over to Windows for personal development work. We discuss why he did such a crazy thing and what his environment looks like now. He continues the conversation talking about his new Elixir Phoenix project around Pokemon card collections which he will be using his new environment for. Jamie talks about his last two weeks working on Chronic. He learned some things implementing ActiveBackgrounds on the client side and he came up with a plan to run plugins like ActiveBackgrounds on the server.
Welp. It's almost Keith's birthday and on this special birthday episode, Jamie starts off talking about how he is the worst developer to ever exist. This Active Backgrounds feature has got him down and he talks about how he could of implemented the final feature in a half hour. Jamie moves on to discuss some of the marketing efforts he is going to try and tackle before the next episode. Birthday boy talks about some of the accessibility features he is implementing on the CMS he is building for work which leads into a discussion around teaching developers. Keith gets some nice feedback from previous students. For his birthday.
Keith starts off the podcast with some sad news about Chronic and then Jamie joins him to discuss the future of the podcast. Jamie then jumps in on the exciting progress he made on "ActiveBackgrounds". He talks about how the application he built doesn't work and how he intends to solve it. Keith and Jamie then finish off this episode discussing some of their goals and "resolutions" for the new year.
Jamie and Keith are fresh off their Thanksgiving hiatus and Jamie talks about some of the work he did on Chronic over Thanksgiving break. He worked on implementing the "ActiveBackgrounds" feature on Chronic using Elixir, GraphQL, Broadway, GenServers and how he is blurring images for the feature. Keith describes a new CMS he is implementing at work using Gatsby. Jamie and Keith chat about using Styled Components for his components. They chat about how they would like to use css in React with Styled Components and Tailwind CSS.
Keith starts off discussing the issues he found while debugging production configuration. He describes how he found and solved the issue which allows production devices to once again connect to the production web socket. Jamie talks about the initial work he is doing with the ActiveBackgrounds plugin and service. Keith and Jamie discuss what the plugin architecture may look like and the research Jamie found when looking at other platforms that provide plugins. Keith finishes by talking about what is required for building a menu UI for a Mac app.
Keith and Jamie discuss what is necessary for deploying a Mac application including signing it, what business papers are required, and we talk installers. Keith prepares the application for SwiftUI which required the Mac app to be updated as well as it's dependencies so it can be ready for the Mac menu app. Jamie talks about some of the changes he made to the Chronic ios application UI and an upgrade to expo he integrated. The upgrade required some deployment changes to the web deployment and build. Jamie ends the episode by talking about his work on ActiveBackgrounds.
Keith is preparing to submit a new talk idea to a conference and wanted to get some feedback from Jamie. We hit record for this bonus episode of The Standup. It's better than the Star Wars Holiday Special at least. We chat about some our conference talk ideas, how to pitch them effectively to conference committees, and how to deal with rejection.
Keith and Jamie are back and they discuss what's been going on around their long hiatus. Jamie talks about what he did during Keith's paternity leave and how they went about pitching a new feature they plan to build using Basecamp’s Shapeup process. They also discuss the work that went into the automated deployment of the iOS and Mac apps. Keith talks about the crappy cert experience he went through for deployment. Jamie goes through his plans for making time for Chronic in the coming months.
Links Brilliant Fantastic Blog Post (https://brilliantfantastic.com/blog/i-left-kinship) regarding what happened with Kinship (https://kinship.it) Cowboy WebSocket Handlers (https://ninenines.eu/docs/en/cowboy/2.1/guide/ws_handlers/) Picks Keith - Pokémon TCG (https://www.pokemon.com/us/pokemon-tcg/) Jamie -ReactNative Web (https://github.com/necolas/react-native-web)
Jamie - Completed Chronic Started working on GraphQL implementation around the current user Decided that we will require a sign up/registration on launch Talk I completed my talk around Chronic which is called “How to Build an WebSocket API in Elixir” (https://speakerdeck.com/jwright/building-a-realtime-websocket-api-with-phoenix) and gave it in Grand Rapids, Michigan I am working on a new bot framework called Juvet (https://github.com/juvet/juvet) for another talk I am giving on this new bot framework Jamie - Next Sprint Chronic Finish replacing current REST API with GraphQL Implement workflows Talk Giving the How to Build an WebSocket API in Elixir at KCDC (http://www.kcdc.info/) Give the Introducing Juvet talk at MiddevCon (https://www.middevcon.com/) Keith - Completed Chronic Bailed on trying to use Habitat for deployment. Not ideal for stateful applications with hot code reloading. Configured CircleCI for CI and soon continuous deployment Went down the rabbit hole that is deploying OTP applications Continued codifying our infrastructure since I didn’t do that when I first deployed our staging server. Keith - Next Sprint Chronic Finish configuration management, deploying OTP releases, and continuous deployment. Actually work on the application. Move into new house
Jamie - Completed Chronic Start/Pause/Resume implemented on web side Alert system implemented using redux Tatsu Flipper Cloud Implemented Basement office Drywall and framing is done Jamie - Next Sprint Chronic Clean up web side (add tests) Share base components/actions/reducers Implement GraphQL Tatsu Add more users to beta Talk Build beginnings of Juvet Basement Paint and move in! Keith - Completed Chronic Finalized Workflow backend. Not worked into API just yet. ChefConf Met a ton of people. The Chef community is awesome. Keith - Next Sprint Chronic Integrate Workflow into API. Potentially use Habitat (https://habitat.sh) to set up continuous deployment for Chronic.
Keith - Completed Only streamed once. Decided that it’s not valuable enough to do right now. Completed the initial implementation of a Workflow. Need to add tests around templates and work it into the web-socket API still. Keith - Next Sprint Going to be at ChefConf (https://chefconf.chef.io/) in Chicago for a week. Finalize Workflow PR Jamie - Completed Tatsu (http://tatsu.io) UI for asynchronous standups completed Flipper Cloud (http://featureflipper.com) almost implemented Chronic (http://chronic.io) Started start/stop of web timer Getting back up to speed sucks Finished Deep Work Went to Stir Trek (http://stirtrek.com) Jamie - Next Sprint Tatsu Add more people to asynchronous standup beta Small bugs/features Chronic Finish start/stop timer on web Links Bear Focus Timer (https://www.bearfocustimer.com/)
Jamie - Last Sprint Basement finally getting work done Chronic (http://chronic.io) Paired on workflow architecture and implementation Tatsu (http://tatsu.io) UI for asynchronous standups (complete not deployed) Working on some edge cases New Company Logo created Talk Finished API Reading Deep Work (http://calnewport.com/books/deep-work/) Jamie - Next Sprint Tatsu UI for asynchronous standups deployed and additional people using it Flipper changed to use Flipper Cloud Talk Website created Schedule local workshop Branding / mobile app update Chronic Start/stop timer on the web Keith - Last Sprint Didn’t stream as much as I had planned, been learning more elixir off-air Sat down with Jamie and hashed out our architecture plans for a “Workflow” Learning more and more Chef Keith - Next Sprint Finish initial Workflow implementation Stream at least twice a week for each week between recordings NOTES Books Deep Work (http://calnewport.com/books/deep-work/) Mindset (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345472322?ie=UTF8&tag=standup0b-20&camp=1789&linkCode=xm2&creativeASIN=0345472322) How to Win Friends and Influence People (https://amzn.to/2FDSZ0w) Drive (https://amzn.to/2Ky6Ed9) Keith's Elixir API Wrapper (https://github.com/keiththomps/wargaming)
Keith - Last 4 or 5 Weeks Lots of work stuff Started working on the "Workflow" portion of Chronic doing a little a day by live streaming (on Twitch (https://twitch.tv/coderjourney)). Going a little slow because he's a little rusty with Elixir. S2E6 became the first official "lost episode". Keith - Next 2 Weeks Get re-acquainted with Elixir to be productive again when working on Chronic. Get the first iteration of Chronic workflows into review. Pivot CoderJourney videos and hopefully release the first new "What is X and How Does It Work?" video. Jamie - Last 4 or 5 Weeks Launched beta of asynchronous standups for Tatsu (https://tatsu.io) New Company Name Agreed On LLC Created Logo will be presented this coming week Workshop (https://indycode.amegala.com/) No one signed up :( What can be done to get people to sign up? Will be conducting this workshop in Nashville Worked from iPad while his computer was being repaired ** Used Blink (http://blink.sh/) Love for Dropbox Paper (http://paper.dropbox.com/) is growing. Jamie - Next 2 Weeks Finish UI for asynchronous standups in Tatsu Finish Gotcha API (https://github.com/jwright/gotcha-api) Launch New Company Start/Stop time for Chronic (http://chronic.io) web UI.
Keith - Past * Absorbed working on Python 3 course (has since launched) * Took time off for family * Chronic * Deployed a chef server * Started working on cookbooks to manage elixir servers Keith - Future * Finish configuration management of Elixir servers. * Start getting back to the mobile application. * Workflow * Review styled-component PR Jamie * Landed huge new client project * Working on Workshop for IndyCode * Office renovations * Chronic * Finished initial layout for Chronic-web using styled-components (https://styled-components.com) * Started researching and learning Alexa Skill stuff * Taking Treehouse course (https://teamtreehouse.com/library/creating-the-alexa-skill)
Keith * Created a staging server for Chronic and figured out hot-code deploys * Started working on a "Resources" page for CoderJourney (https://coderjourney.com) * Accepted the diminished productivity that comes with Winter and has started having "winter hours" allowing for more sleep * Now does yoga. Jamie * Experienced his first migraine * Got accepted to give a workshop at Indy.Code() (https://indycode.amegala.com/) * Started working with Styled Components in React (not understanding the hype) * Lots of work on new, secret project
Keith * Finished Chronic mobile-app initial PR * Spent a lot of time working on his Linux Academy Python course Jamie * Created some designs for Chronic web and mobile * Got the Tatsu bot interactions for async standup ready for beta testing * Started digging into React for the Chronic web app Shoutout to Ryan Lanciaux (https://twitter.com/ryanlanciaux) for providing React guidance.
Keith (Non-Chronic) * Struggles with Python packaging * Bought a lot of PragProg books * Still haven't released a video announcing the move to Linux Academy Keith (Chronic) * More progress on the mobile app using React-Native * Pulled in Phoenix.js to make working with channels easier * Still enjoying Redux Jamie (Chronic) * Finished Timer Events and Websock API * Planning out next steps and product roadmap
Keith: Never shipped Submissions or Lectern (and lectern is dead) CoderJourney has changed because he is now a Course Author for Linux Academy (https://linuxacademy.com) Working on Chronic Digging into more and more ops related topics Back to working with Python (for his first course) Jamie: Working on Chronic with Keith. Tatsu direct message standups are finished and ready to go into beta. Callback is still a work in progress (switching back to React) Breaktime is a new application Working a lot with Elixir / Phoenix
Keith's last 2 * Switching from Firebase to a custom GraphQL backend for Lectern. Keith's upcoming (before the next season) * Launching Lectern on CoderJourney very soon. * Launching Lectern in a beta form for public sign up. Jamie's last 2 * Vacation break * Tatsu * More teams on Callback * Performance bottlenecks from being featured on Slack's App Directory * Guides * Started Asynchronous Standups Jamie's (before next season) * Tatsu * Asynchronous engine * Guides * Callback * Launch Links * How to GraphQL (https://www.howtographql.com)
Another episode and another two weeks that didn't go as expected. Keith decides to give a binge watching option to his tutorial views and shelves submissions for a few weeks. Jamie runs into the complications that come along with conversation UIs as he implements vacation mode into Tatsu. Keith’s Last 2: * Decided that when the time comes, I will use lead pages for my new product landing pages to save myself some time. * Didn’t finish the Form submission handling because I distracted myself with a new idea. * Made a good deal of progress on building a course catalog and sales platform for CoderJourney courses and early access tutorial series. Keith’s Next 2: * Finish course platform for CoderJourney and complete the move off of Teachable. * Launch the remainder of the React tutorial series in early access. Jamie's last 2 * Tatsu * Finished billing email * More teams on Callback * Vacation time * Guides * Moved into office Jamie's next 2 * Tatsu * Asynchronous engine * Launching early standup * Guides * Callback * Serializer
Conference speaking is over for now. Jamie gave talks at a few different conferences over the last few weeks, and Keith gave his first two conference talks at BeerCityCode. All of the talks went well, and now it's back to building up their businesses. Keith's Last 2: * Successfully delivered two conference talks * NPM sucks * Coderjourney.com redesign launched * Snagged some domains for the web apps I’m working on (submissions & lectern) * Didn’t quite finish form submissions but implemented user registration/account management + Form creation in about 2 hours. Keith's Next 2: * Put up landing pages for submissions and lectern to drive some traffic to and gauge interest * Finish Form submission handling to send emails * Start working on UI (currently using unstyled HTML) Jamie's Last 2: * Small Tatsu bug fixes * Tatsu billing email * Callback serializer Jamie's Next 2: * Callback 1. Finish serializer 1. Finish authenticated header (current user) 1. List job runs 1. Maybe launch in beta????? * Tatsu 1. Finish billing email 1. Participant Vacation 1. Synchronous engine 1. Maybe Alexia skill??? Links from this episode: * Beer City Code (http://beercitycode.com) * CodePalousa (http://codepalousa.com/) * Revolution Conf (http://revolutionconf.com) * CoderJourney (https://coderjourney.com) * Tatsu (http://tatsu.io) * Callback (http://callback.run)
Keith falls short again, but he and Jamie workshop the design of the https://coderjourney.com (https://coderjourney.com) landing page to try to get this redesign launched. Besides the redesign, Keith switches his web app challenge application from being Go to using Elixir. Our heroes have a pretty deep discussion about Elixir and Phoenix 1.3 (http://www.phoenixframework.org/v0.13.0). Both Jamie and Keith will be speaking at BeerCityCode (https://beercitycode.com) so there may or may not be some talk prep in progress. Jamie gets back into Ember while he uses it for the Callback (http://callback.run) dashboard. Convention over configuration isn't always great as Jamie battles not using JSON API for his API although Ember wants it. Based on how people will view callbacks a discussion breaks out about how to separate different environments out (staging, QA, etc). Tatsu's early standup feature is gradually rolling out to more and more customers, but the focus is on callback until it is released.
Another few weeks have passed and Keith is still struggling to get through the backlog of projects that he's working on. The coderjourney.com (https://coderjourney.com) still isn't finished, but it did lead to a conversation about BEM (http://getbem.com/) that was exciting. Jamie takes on more work with his job-job and limits his own availability to work on Tatsu (https://tatsu.io) and Callback (http://callback.run). Jamie is ramping back up with Emberjs and loving it. More users get brought on to using the early standup feature in Tatsu. Jamie brings up what might be the first "topic" to discuss this week: routines. Cutting out time to work on a side business is hard because you have to dedicate so much time to other things.
Jamie is back from Seattle and Deconstruct Conf ready to talk all about his codecation. Having not achieved quite as much as he wanted to that doesn't stop him from dropping a ton of knowledge about how he could have a more productive codecation next time. After wasting some time trying to use React for the callback frontend, Jamie has gone back to old faithful Ember and tells us a little bit about what bugged him. Keith explains how he built an entire Continuous Delivery pipeline for his application that currently doesn't do anything, trying to spin how it was a net win. The journey as a YouTuber continuous...
Jamies's Last Two Weeks Tatsu reached had it's two year anniversary! Conversations are ready to be launched to a subset of users. Jamies's been making a lot of progress on callback, using it for some client work. This real world use is giving him more insight into the features that will be needed by applications beyond Tatsu's use case. He's written his first client library in Ruby. Jamie's Next Two Weeks Jamie is going on a "codecation" with a fellow developer in conjunction with a conference he's going to. Originally planned on launching a completely new project, but he's doubling down on cleaning up Tatsu and Callback. He will be building in a vacation mode feature for Tatsu so that people can easily pause their automated standups. Ending his codecation with a soft launch of Callback. Keith's Last Two Weeks Keith was supposed to work on the redesign of the website and the promo video for the Docker course, but battling with some sickness set him back. The promo video is getting shelved. Keith's Next Two Weeks Really digging into his "web app challenge", Keith is going to be working on his form submission web service. The plan is to build the MVP in the next two weeks. Links: Lightstream (https://www.golightstream.com/) Callback (http://callback.run) Tatsu (https://tatsu.io)
Keith got accepted to talk at his first real conference and also got accepted to write for Digital Ocean. These opportunities will hopefully help him grow as a writer, speaker, and content creator. Doubling down on the YouTube side of CoderJourney, Keith launched his second piece of weekly recurring content in the form of "The Weekly Update" (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbG4OyfwIxjFNEryfAzenHzYmmWaGEbpk). Lastly, he's started working on the redesign and export of coderjourney.com from being on Wordpress. Jamie was reworked his conversation flow to use a more interactive feature of Slack that will also make it more useful. The battle against time zones is done for now. Having been accepted to speak at quite a few conferences, Jamie looks to figure out his travel schedule. What's one more SaaS product? Jamie will let us know as he preps to create something else while on his "codecation". A new segment of the show starts in the form of "Docker Rage"... Interesting Links: * Color Theory for People who Code (https://tallys.github.io/color-theory/) * BeerCityCode (http://beercitycode.com)
Over the previous 2 weeks, Keith finished the content for his Docker for Developers course and launched the CoderJourney Patreon campaign. Planning to focus on audience building he's going to double down on YouTube, making his channel the best it can be. Jamie finishes an implementation of conversations, but might just rip it out... In the meantime, he's got to worry about Daylight savings time :( . He will have early standups released by the next podcast and get the front end and analytics implemented for callback.run.
This week Keith & Jamie both actually make progress on things and neither of them is sick (first time for everything). Keith continues to learn about marketing & copywriting while he tries to spruce up the Developing with Docker (https://courses.coderjourney.com/p/developing-with-docker) sales flow (so that people actually buy). Acknowledging that his YouTube audience might not also be his course audience he considers launching a Patreon campaign (https://www.patreon.com/coderjourney) for CoderJourney. Keith digs into Kubernetes as he prepares his first Kubernetes video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-3dfURb2hA). Jamie starts tackling the implementation of individual conversations now that he's finished his conversation engine, converse (https://github.com/tatsuio/converse). More progress is made on callback (https://callback.run) even though it wasn't his main priority. Lastly, Jamie looks forward to being able to work on something other than conversations and tackling a lot of small features/improvements for Tatsu in the coming weeks. Be sure to follow us on Twitter: @standup_podcast (https://twitter.com/standup_podcast).
Jamie and Keith are back to discuss their side hustle progress. Jamie managed to get some of his customers over to using the callback API behind the scenes in Tatsu, but ran into a snag for doing multi-tenancy with jobs. They dig into how each of them think Callbacks will be used in practice and talk nerdy for a bit. Jamie get's a designer for Callback (http://callback.run). The conversation saga continues... Jamie started over (again). Keith failed to do the planning that he had wanted to do. Developing with Docker had it's first TWO sales (http://courses.coderjourney.com/p/developing-with-docker), but some direct traffic is showing that the sales copy is failing to convert. Jamie gives Keith some advice on how to talk to his customers and improve his conversions. "Always talk to your customers".
Keith and Jamie round out 2016! Keith realizes that he doesn't know how mics work and once again failed to finish his Docker course. Jamie takes steps to move off of Heroku by learning Docker (using CoderJourney!). The landing page for http://callback.run is up, and the API is coming along nicely. Work on conversations continues (onto the next two weeks). Our heroes discuss how hard estimation seems to be. Ending the episode with meta discussion about launching the podcast.
Digging into the excitement of 2017. Jamie talks about his conference experience going to CodeMash 2017. Keith digs back into playing drumset. Getting down to business, Keith launched "Developing with Docker" was launched (http://courses.coderjourney.com/p/developing-with-docker). Podcast accountability works as it was the first thing that came to Keith's mind in the last day before launching. Post launch work now sets in, where Keith thinks about improving his sales final. Jamie continued work on the callback API (http://callback.run) so that he can use it in Tatsu, but didn't quite finish it. Yet another callback API company has surfaced since the previous episode, but no big deal. Conversations have become a roadblock feature in Tatsu, and are bogging Jamie down.
Keith & Jamie dig into important topics. Illness, flu shots + ice cream, Ohio's weather all fit themselves into the intro. Neither Keith nor Jamie accomplishes much of anything, but they try to stay positive about it. Our heroes again discuss how conversations could work. Jamie starts yet another project (http://callback.run/). GoDaddy prevents Jamie from getting his dream domain. Keith didn't get his stuff done, but he's planning on getting his course finished during some vacation time. Burnout continues as a topic. Keith works through his issues: routine is important. User interfaces are hard, and Keith gets's distracted by javascript30.com and flexbox.io. Jamie talks about how to estimate making YouTube money through ads.
Jamie Wright (@jwright) and Keith Thompson (@keiththomps) kick off their first podcast episode, digging into the process of balancing a side business while having a normal income (consulting & day job).