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Justin and Jason discuss Jason’s struggle with juggling multiple projects, the latest on the crypto project, Justin’s predictions for his son Jack and a hard lesson for Jason’s son Colby, Justin’s new plans for Speak, Justin’s obsession with Occulus Quest and why he loves the Impossible Burger, an update on Operation Superhero, and the latest with Math Academy.
@all – I said this wrong in the show it was meant to be…
M – Minimum
U – Useful
P – Pragmatic
P – Product (with)
E – Earning
T – Trajectory
😉
Great to hear you guys again. I had just about given up 🙁
So hard to believe Jack is five already. I remember first hearing Justin announce they were having a child on the podcast.
@Jason – I was/am a huge fan of your “Operation Super Hero” idea. At 50+ and still an active volleyball player I understood wanting to jump higher. While I didn’t hurt myself nearly as severe (or often) as you, I had a series of setbacks in the gym. My answer… I made this the “year of not getting hurt” in the gym and it was awesome! While I still squat, dead lift and bench (incline as flats bother my shoulder) and some plyo, I stop when I feel like I’m starting to struggle. People at the gym would spot me and give me the usual, “you had a couple more” after a set. I just tell them that I’m tired of set backs and that I’m thinking longer term. Over the last year, my lifts have improved, though not as much as “they could have”. I suppose. But I haven’t been hurt and I’m down almost 20 pounds. I am jumping higher, sand and indoor, hitting the ball harder and feeling great on the court. Feels like a win to me.
Already tweeted it out! So glad to hear TZ again!
Great to hear you guys again, and as always I love the mix of topics 🙂
Thinking about Speak, I was chatting to Shai from right messages at microconf and he said they’d had to change how they sold the product. This was because people weren’t looking for personalisation software, but we’re looking for conversion optimization software. So they changed the focus and how they marketed the tool, which seems to be going well. Some details here https://rightmessage.com/blog/rightcta-announcement
I guess I was wondering if you’re risking making a similar mistake by inventing a new category of tool? Rather than trying to fit it into an existing use case people are looking for solutions for now.
@Robin – I know for sure it can really help with on-boarding and retention and that is an existing use case. That said I do want to explore different ideas to find out which is the best fit (hence the demo gallery).
The first real world deployment will be in the product I’m building for my day job (for their on-boarding) so that will hep me get a better sense of how useful it is in that domain. Also of note, all the people who will be going through that on-boarding experience will be CEO’s of large companies. So I may be able to start getting traction by connecting with those CEO’s who might like to implement it in their own site.
As an aside, it’s not the first time someone has brought up right message with regard to speak. I think there could well be a path for integration at some point.
> Jason: “Everything is a nightmare in C++”
🤣
This is exactly how I feel and part of why I’ve been getting really into Rust recently. It’s amazing and I love the ecosystem. The major downside is that it’s a pretty steep learning curve and unlike Elixir, which is my normal default for web dev, you pretty much have to learn all of Rust’s features before you can be productive.
> Jack: “Hi five!”
It sounds like this guy is gonna be the life of the party!
> “The Collective”
I’ve always wondered what kind of results you can expect for a $20/hr freelance dev and this was really enlightening!
Early into the story, I was wondering if maybe a framework with really strong conventions, e.g. Rails or Laravel, would have helped. Despite having far more experience with Node, I find other people’s code much more painful in Node projects because they vary so much in their organization!
The bit on ORMs was interesting. I didn’t think many people really wrote SQL directly anymore. I wonder how much of the issue was the tool vs how it was being used by Sivalad.
@Justin: I love the solution to the nontrepreneur dilemma!
Have you tried out Descript? It’s Andrew Mason’s new startup aimed at podcasts and speeds up my audio editing a ton. During the season long hiatus between this episode and the previous I was wondering how much editing time was slowing things down.
The other neat thing you get out of this kind of tool is that it spits out transcripts!
@Mark – Editing does not take too long since I only edit out toilet breaks, the mailman ringing on the door bell and such.
Let’s just say “other factors” are the reason we don’t put out too many shows. 😉
Justin & Jason,
A little late on the listen, but glad to hear about the progress on the Math Academy and Speak. as well as some of the goings on in life for both families I’m looking forward to the podcast to see what wasn’t able to fit in episode.
High five to Jack!
Thank you for another fun and interesting episode !
Laughed a lot, love you guys messing with each other. After more than three hundred episodes you still got that spark that makes us always wanting more from you 🙂
Good to hear news from your lives, health, coding etc. Good story about “the collective”.
Glad to hear about Jason’s arm healing and Jason’s overall physique improving with virtual reality games 🙂
Thanks guys, can’t wait for new episode !
Cheers!
Vladimir
@Mark Studebaker – Yeah, I’m also on the “year of not getting hurt”. I’m not sure if I mentioned it on the show, but I told my wife that I wanted to set a record for how long I can lift without injury, which for me is maybe … about 3 weeks. 😉 Sticking with 3 sets of 10-12 reps on mostly machines seems to be doing the trick for now.
It might be possible to accomplish that by going heavy and just leaving a few reps in the tank, but I’m not sure I trust myself. I’m so overly competiive that as soon as i start doing that my ego gets the better of me (as if anyone is even watching me or cares) and I end up doing too much.
Anyway, it’s great to hear that you’res still making progress at 50+. Not many people can say that.
@Mark – I know a few entrepreneurs who are really happy with their $15/hour developers from Eastern Europe and Russia, so I do believe it can work. You just have to do a lot of vetting and training, provide oversight, do code reviews, etc. just as you would if they were a developer you hired here in the states to work in your office. What you can’t do is be an absentee landload like I was and expect something magical to happen. Because it likley won’t.
I think using a “framework with really strong conventions” can help, but any codebase will turn into a mess if the developer isn’t high-caliber or at least held to account. In fact, a friend of mine was just complaining about the state of his Rails app, which he attributed to using inexpert peoiple and not staying on top of things.
In terrms of SQL, I’ve just found that simle queries with a few joins are easily handled by ORMs, but when you try to do something complex, they just become the wrong tool for the job. For me, complex queries in SQL are just a lot easier to test, debug, and optimize.
@Danilo Celic & Vladimir Jankovic – Thanks guys! It’s always nice to hear from you and know that you’re still around.