Friction Log: Recent Episodes
Rick Blalock, Cesar Cavazos
Rick Blalock & Cesar Cavazos dive into technical Developer Experience (DX) and UX. This podcast analyzes the emotions, friction, delights using tech products.
In this episode, we review the AI Engineer World’s Fair, discussing key takeaways, future trends, and notable demos, including OpenAI’s impressive new capabilities. We also delve into AI economics, the role of LLMs as judges, and emerging technologies like GraphRAG and generative UIs.
In this episode, Cesar and Rick dive into the features of Cursor.sh, an innovative code editor based out of VS Code designed to enhance developer productivity powered by AI by using their Pro features or bring your own AI model.
Rick and Cesar kick off with lively banter about Apple's latest iPad event before diving into Cesar's experience of his day at POST/con 2024, the developer conference hosted by Postman. Talk about APIs, platforms, the now usual AI and pigeons!
Rick and Kincy delve into the intricacies of full stack development, exploring its pivotal role in crafting robust products from conception to launch. Tune in as they unravel the dynamic interplay between frontend and backend technologies, sharing insights and strategies to streamline the product development journey.
Follow along as Cesar shares his experience on migrating an old MySQL database to Supabase, with Rick by his side asking questions and offering insights. While they both praise Supabase for its capabilities, they diverge in their opinions on the clarity and helpfulness of the documentation.
In this week's episode, Rick & Kincy dive into the world of best practices and uncover some of the ways they can lead teams astray. From the pitfalls of autonomy, the misunderstood mantra of 'the customer is always right,' and the nuance of Don't Repeat Yourself, get ready for a discussion that challenges conventional wisdom!
Almost all businesses use online and email surveys to gauge customer experiences with their products and services. This week, Rick and Kincy discuss six well-intentioned surveys that end up frustrating customers and likely provide unreliable data.
Unkey is an open-source API authentication and authorization platform for scaling user facing APIs and this week Rick and Cesar have the pleasure to have James Perkins, CEO at Unkey, to talk about what they do, how they are building products and what's in the future for Unkey and their happy customers.
Cesar is joined by special guest Kincy Clark to talk about qualitative and quantitative research, building products, and a more details about OneStudy, the startup that he and Rick are working on.
What is Supabase? Why joining a hackathon? What's vector search and RAG? This and a lot more fun this week from Rick's experience back in December.
Friction Log is back in 2024 and we hit the ground running by talking about Cesar's experience while attending Microsoft's AI Tour in San Francisco.
We are back with a new friction log about Hex, a platform to build notebooks around data science and analytics.
We are back to talk about React Miami 2022, where Rick gave the talk: Faster and Better UX Helps Ocean Sustainability
In this episode we talk about why and how the Friction Log website code is now open source and available for anybody to use.
Whether is because of licensing or excessive memory consumption, some of us have looked for Docker alternatives and here is where Podman comes into place. This week Cesar shares his experience moving from Docker to Podman.
Transactional emails should be a problem of the past; however, there is still an opportunity for tools to solve the basic needs of developers. In this episode, Cesar and Rick to about MailPace, formerly known as OhMySMTP.
Cesar and Rick take a first-time experience run on Fig.io, a terminal plugin that does some pretty cool, magical auto-complete. They also talk about how Fish Rules is now part of Fish Brain and the journey that it took to get there.
The latest picks this week - Learning from people that scale, big Cloudflare features, Rust is taking over, and more.
A quick journey (because it came to a crashing halt) of Waldo.io, a mobile app testing SaaS
Fig.io promises to be the terminal experience we all want. It seemed promising but still has a ways to go
Checkly is a simple up-time monitor that was easy to setup and now I'm using it for everything.
Here's the hypothesis, It's possible for an experienced programmer to learn a new language with just Github Copilot. Is it possible? Let's find out!
Rockset is a database optimized for real-time analytics, super-fast queries, and more. Rick shares his impressions of Rockset with a particular use case at FishRules.
Rockset is a database optimized for real-time analytics, super-fast queries, and more. Rick Blalock takes it for a spin with an actual use case for his company, Fish Rules.
Special guest Jeff Haynie, from Pinpoint, joins us to share a first-time experience friction log using Firebase. Firebase is Google's platform that helps you quickly develop high-quality apps and scale your business.
Figma is the subject of our first friction log of 2021. Cesar, a developer, goes into the designer's world and discusses the UX from a developer's POV.
We have mentioned Figma since the beginning of Friction Log as the tool that we used to create assets for the webpage, interestingly enough I haven't used Figma before and decided to try it out.
This post has a smattering of random tools that I didn’t think was appropriate for a full friction log (at least not yet). This is more of a “first-time” impressions post.
Matt, Cesar, and Rick have a fireside chat about a hackathon entry, going over the tech details, the stack, and general hackathon thoughts.
Nova is the new code editor from Panic, the makers of software such as Coda and Transmit. Cesar dives in for a first-time experience using the editor. Find out how it went!
Nova is the latest app made by Panic and is a great native Mac app. I had a fairly great experience while trying it out but not without some of the frictions as every new app would have.
How does the Aesthetic Usability Effect play in to Github Codespaces or PlayJS? That and a few more topics in this week’s episode.
All of us technical people make strange associations and this is precisely what this article is about.
AWS Amplify’s value proposition is very attractive. In this episode, we talk about that promise and our first-time experience using it while also delving into the Zeigarnik effect and its contribution to this experience.
I don't recall how I came upon this app but it seemed really compelling. I decided to try it on a trip recently. It's a fun app with some promise but a lot of friction.
Github Codespaces (i.e. VSCode inside Github) is promising. It's remarkable just how portable they've made VSCode. This is a light, quick friction log on a first-time experience setting up Codespaces. More logs will surely come :-)
GraphCMS is a hot topic in the headless-CMS space. This log is a first-time experience study on this CMS. We also touch on the Peak-End Rule of UX.
In this episode, we have two brand new types of friction logs - "end-user" and "feature experience logs. We talk about the Principle of Least Astonishment (POLA) principle.
A fun side conversation on Epic's attack against the Apple App Store rules. In this episode, we share our experiences as mobile developers in an Apple world, ponder what Epic is thinking, and ask the question - "Should we do a friction log on this?".
Friction logs are also great for analyzing end-user platforms. In this log, Rick and Cesar have a fun conversation around Hey.com and it's usefulness.
We are back with another piece of the stack that powers the Friction Log website - NextJS. In this episode, Cesar interviews Rick’s Log, and they also discuss the speed of applications using the Doherty Threshold as a baseline.
In this episode, Rick interviews Cesar on his first time experience with Vercel (formerly known as Zeit). We also talk about the Visibility of System Status heuristic and why that's so important for a SaaS like Vercel.
In this episode, Cesar interviews Rick about his first-time experience using TailwindCSS. Also in this episode - Hick's Law and how it can be applied.
Welcome to the first episode of the Friction Log podcast! In this episode, we talk about what the Friction Log is all about and cover a brief introduction of Rick and Cesar. We hope you like it.